Landmine goes click (2015)

Not really what I'd normally call a horror film but more of a thriller than anything else. It is a good film in my opinion. The setting is somewhere in Europe and 3 friends are off on a camping holiday. The attractive blonde girl of the three is loved by one of the men but not the one who she is in a relationship with. I think the man in love with her had sex with her but hasn't told his friend. This forms part of the twist later on. It's a hard film to describe without going into the exact detail of it all.
Most of the film is taken up with the problem that one of the guys happens to have stepped on an old landmine that hadn't been cleared up from the war several years ago (in Serbia?). I'm not sure why it wouldn't just automatically blow him up but I'm not a landmine expert. His male friend abandons them, leaving him with the girl he loves. Now, all seems redeemable when a stranger comes along. However, this stranger is an absolute bastard. He strings them along, promising to help but infact does everything but help. He humiliates the girl and eventually rapes and murders her. All while the guy stands on the landmine. You might assume the film ends there but no. There is an ending. I would have wanted the guy who abandoned them to get his just rewards but no, that wasn't part of the ending, instead it was passing stranger who gets it. I won't spoil it but lets just say it ends quite darkly.
A strange little film that is well made and well scripted. It's difficult to watch at times but I can tell there was good craft on display in making it. The acting is superb. Well worth a watch if you can stomach it.

Stir of Echoes 2: The Homecoming (2007)

The star of this film is Rob Lowe, who I have to admit is not one of my favourite actors, however he doesn't do a bad job in this film. He just has to look surprised a lot!
The film is the second in the franchise, the original starred Kevin Bacon I believe, which was released straight to DVD unlike the first film. I can see why really. It's a story about a returning captain from some war in the Middle East I think (I wasn't paying too much attention). He was guarding a checkpoint with a group of soldiers and a van approaches at speed and they panic. It turns out that the van wasn't full of the enemy but they opened fire because it didn't slow down. A young girl steps out of the bullet ridden vehicle and then it blows up and she catches fire. Quite a horrible scene. The van it turns out was an ambush opportunity and the checkpoint is attacked by a rocket grenade. So skip forward several weeks and the captain is back home in the states and seems to be suffering with PTSD as he gets flashbacks. The flashbacks become more and more real and he doesn't understand what they are and why they are so horrific. The story builds from there and doesn't do a bad job. It's watchable but there are few real surprises until the end is revealed. As I say, not a terrible film but one that is not going to impress you with its originality either.

John Wick (2014)

If you like guns and headshots and fighting then this film will be right up your street. John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves is an anti-hero. He is a professional killer forced out of retirement due to the death of his wife and a chance encounter at a garage where his car is admired by the son of a gang lord. The film follows John Wick as he takes revenge on the gang for what happens next.
There are plenty of inconsequential deaths. Just a horrendous number of killings. It was entertaining and quite a decent film but it is a very simple formula being worked here. If you fancy Keanu then you'll probably love this film. I like the character of the gangster's son, I think that the revenge could have been stretched out a bit longer than it was though. I did like Willam Dafoe's character Marcus in it and would have been happy for more of that to be in the film.
John Wick 2 has recently been released, I wonder what that is like?

The Unfolding (2016)

This was an intriguing little film. Set in England, Dartmoor I think. It follows a guy and his girlfriend for a few days against the backdrop of a world crisis where a nuclear war seems a very real threat.
The guy turns out to be a student of the paranormal, they are staying at an old mansion house but its not a holiday it is a place the guy wants to investigate. We see the story unfold through a multitude of cameras he has set up. the cameras never seem set up in the right place though. During the film the sense of something unfolding is very cleverly built up. It is perhaps a little slow paced but nevertheless the growing sense of fear is well captured. It's a quirky film and won't be to everyone's taste. I don't think it is perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it's not rubbish and deserves a watch at some point. Just don't put it too high on the list!

Alien Covenant (2017)

I saw this film last week.  My expectations were quite high considering it is one of my favourite film franchises and it was directed by the original director of Alien, Ridley Scott. It is set after the events of Prometheus and before Alien.
There are plenty of scenes similar to the other Alien movies and if this is what you like then you will not be disappointed. However, if you want something a bit deeper, like a coherent story with threat and menace involving mankind, corporate corruption, cryogenics and genetic engineering then you can pretty much forget it other than at anything but a superficial level.
My experience of the film was very mixed, I enjoyed the thrill ride while I was watching it. Some of the photography was amazing. But afterwards I just felt that it didn't make any sense at all. I liked Katherine Waterston's character Daniels. She made a good replacement for Sigourney Weaver's Ripley.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 (2017)

(D'Oh! After posting this I saw I had already blogged about this film directly after seeing it, I should have realised!)

I took my son to see this film and was very entertained the whole time. I enjoyed the first film a lot. This wasn't up to the same standard but it was a lot closer than I was expecting it to be. Certainly I'd say fans of the first film will not be disappointed. If you are new to the franchise then I think you will still find this a great film. Plenty of action and excitement. If you know the backstory of the characters you will get more from the film.

Urban Legend (1998)

This slasher film is almost 20 years old now. That's quite astonishing. I don't remember the film coming out at all. It is an American slasher set on campus of a college. The students affected are murdered according to a series of different urban legends about gruesome killers. I don't know if they are genuine urban legends or fictional ones made up for the film. Urban legends are not something I know much about and I'm certainly not that interested either. The film is completely forgettable, I am witness to that because not more than a week after seeing the film I read the title in my list of films I've watched but I had no recollection of it and had to look it up to remind myself of it. If you want to indulge a desire to watch a campus set slasher then it does the job. Otherwise, there are much better films to watch.

Eurovision 2017

Here is a heads-up that next Saturday will be the date of the finals for the Eurovision Song Context 2017 being held in the Ukraine in the city of Kiev. I enjoy watching the Eurovision every year, as anyone who has read this blog for some time will know.
I can't say I know who the UK entry will be this year but I guarantee that the votes cast will be very low indeed. It will be amusing to see how the UK does actually. "United Kingdom, nil points" might be the chorus ringing out next week!

Robocop 3 (1993)

I had to see the third film in the series after seeing number 2. Unfortunately, number 3 is a much bigger fail than number 2. There isn't much of anything positive to say about this film. Peter Weller is no longer playing Robocop, probably a wise decision. Officer Lewis is still in it though, but (spoiler alert) in this film she gets shot and killed. I was kind of expecting Officer Lewis to be turned into a cyborg police officer as well but that never materialised more to the pity.
The film again uses a child to play a significant role. The violence is toned down a lot compared to the first two films. There is less of a sense of threat about this one. OCP are still the big corporate bad guys and they want to develop a new city in Detroit but they first have to demolish the old and turf out the current residents. The regular police eventually side with the resident activists, as does Robocop after Officer Lewis is gunned down.
No real sense of menace and a strange and confused sub-plot about a warrior from the Japanese company taking over OCP spoil this. The Japanese connection could have been an interesting direction. The new CEO of OCP was disastrously awful as a bad guy.
It just wasn't good and has little to recommend. I'd say this was for die hard Robocop fans only.

Robocop 2 (1990)

A friend recently leant me the Robocop trilogy on Blu Ray and I caught up with films 2 and 3, finally, after many years of seeing the first film. I really enjoyed the first film and would rate it very highly in my all time favourite movies. So I found it interesting where they took the story in Robocop 2.
Some of the themes were the same: big corrupt corporations only looking out for themselves and their profits, no compassion for human feelings, using Alex Murphy like a tool and the regular police being the only ones looking out for each other like family. Murphy's police partner Lewis is still in this one and Peter Weller the original actor who played Robocop in the first film.
This film was better than I was expecting but my expectations were not high, I have to admit. I have seen some pretty bad sequels. This wasn't one of them. On the other hand I thought it could have been a lot better. I didn't like the child actor in it, I thought he played it too much like a Bugsy Malone character. I liked the part played by Belinda Bauer (Dr Juliette Faxx) but I felt that more could have been made of that character's part.
The technology is definitely showing its age now. The movement of Robocop and the swishing noise when he turn his head jerkily just seem a bit silly now. There are some TV commercials and news reports like there are in the original but they are just not as entertaining as in the original.

The Loved Ones (2009)

I loved this film. It has a great soundtrack and very cool characters. It is a horror film but also has elements of black humour in it too. It has some strong young female characters in it.
It starts with a couple of guys in a car. Turns out they are father and son. I think the son is a relatively new driver. They are driving along chatting away when the driver is distracted a moment. When he looks again at the road someone is standing in the way and he swerves the car and runs off the road and hits a tree. Months later we see the son again with his girlfriend, she drives him home and we learn that the boy's father was killed in the accident. The boy feels his mother blames him.
Later at school, the boy is asked out to the prom by a girl called Lola Stone. He declines the offer politely, saying his girlfriend is taking him. The actress playing the Lola character is awesome, she does a great job of being unhinged. On the afternoon before the prom the boy goes climbing and after a near death experience on a rock face, he lies on the floor exhausted. Suddenly he is grabbed by a stranger (Lola's father as it turns out) and knocked out with a facecloth soaked in some kind of drug. The day gets worse for him as he is later tortured by Lola and her father at their remote home.
Meanwhile there is another story. A friend of the boy is trying to get hitched with a girl who looks like a beautiful vamp, uninterested in everything. He asks her to the prom and she said yes. She is not going to get excited about the prom though, at least not until she gets some alcohol and weed.
I don't quite know why the sub-story was in the film but it was entertaining.
This was written and directed by Sean Byrne and I thought it was an excellent film. Very entertaining and humorous at the same time.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 (2017)

I went to the cinema to see this film with my son on Saturday and we enjoyed it. I enjoyed the first film and the introduction to the characters of that. This time the characters start out together but instead of large old Groot there is Baby Groot, a young sapling. The start credits are cool with E.L.O.'s Mr Blue Sky playing on a stereo as Baby Groot dances and the remaining Guardians are fighting an alien space monster. The pacing was good and it never felt too long for me. There were comedic moments through it all as well as some sad moments but they didn't get too sad or depressing. There was a surprise to see Sylvester Stallone in a small role and even David Hasselhoff. Stan Lee also made an obligatory appearance as a spaceman marooned by three robe wearing strangers. There were some funny moments with Drax and his inability to be anything other than directly literal. Some of the best moments were interplays between Drax and the other characters. Easy to recommend this film to Marvel fans and comedy fans. It's a film that will have replay value on Blu-Ray or DVD.

Estranged (2015)

I watched this film this week. I was very pleasantly surprised to find it was a well made film with a great story to tell. The story concerned a young woman, called January, who is loving life traveling with her boyfriend. However, it all goes wrong when they have a road accident on his scooter.
Injured seriously enough to be confined to a wheelchair with brain damage, January can't remember much of anything before the accident.
She and her boyfriend return to her family home for her recuperation, which turns out to be a stately home that still maintains a servant butler. The family however are not so happy to see her boyfriend. He wants to stay with her but eventually leaves, or is he got rid off? January starts to question why she left the family home to go traveling in the first place. She was gone 6 years, which is an awfully long time. Things are not as they first seem and indeed they get very dark very soon.
The suspense build excellently and the actors do a great job. I thought this was a very intelligent and well made horror and could be something of a classic in the future. Very easy to recommend this to fans of thrillers and horror.

Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex

I've been slowly building a collection of DVDs for this series, so far I have found volumes 1, 2 and 5. At the weekend I watched volumes 1 and 2 and have to say I was impressed. It is about a crack anti-crime unit called Section 9 who seem to have some kind of government funding. It is set in Japan and the unit is led by a guy with white hair that sticks out around by his ears, sort of like a mad professor. He seems to be the strategic lead but the action based leader seems to be a female they call the Major. She has had most of her body replaced with cybernetic enhancements. She is the character on the box cover with the impressive breasts. I don't know why she wears the costume she does but she runs around half naked when she isn't inside a spider/tank thing. The series has episodes that link a larger story together and these are interspersed with standalone episodes, hence the stand alone complex. I enjoyed watching them and hope to find the other volumes sometime. All the volumes I've picked up so far have been from charity shops. I don't know what relation this anime series has with the Scarlett Johansson film just recently released, I think the female lead is supposed to be the same Major. I hope to go and see the film this week, so will find out.

Savaged (2013)

My hopes were not high as I put this film on however my low expectations proved to be somewhat misplaced as I did actually enjoy this movie. It starts out reasonably tame as a pretty, deaf lady inherits a lovely old GTO touring car and says goodbye to her sister (I think) before setting off on a road trip. She has a fiancée and is travelling to the West of America to start a new life out there.
On the way she takes several stops and sends the boyfriend selfies from various locations. All is going well until she nearly runs over a native American Indian who staggers out into the road in the middle of the New Mexico desert and collapses.
She pulls over sharply and sees that coming a dirt road off the highway is a pickup and its heading for another native American Indian running. Surprisingly it carries on and runs the guy over, killing him. She screams and backs her car up to try and rescue the guy who made it to the road. Well, she doesn't manage to get away before the pickup pulls up and the guys get out. They are a pretty nasty bunch and kill the other native American Indian and then capture her. She is taken back to their farm and raped as she lies on a filthy bed with barbed wire around her wrists and legs. Very unpleasant.
The remaining part of the film is sort of a revenge slasher. But the twist is that she gets away but is murdered before escaping. However, her body is found and another native American Indian performs a ritual on her and her body becomes possessed by the spirit of an old native Indian chief. This imbues her with the killing skills he had and she sets about getting her revenge on the rapists and murderers.
It was much more of a brutal film than I was expecting. I thought the pacing was excellent and the story was pretty interesting, it kept me interested all the way through as I didn't know what was going to happen next. I can recommend this to horror fans but not to people who don't like to watch violence against women. It's not too graphically visual in that sense but some scenes are not so easy to watch.

13 Eerie

I saw this last night, it is about a group of 6 forensic science students who are attending an island facility with mortuary cadavers in staged situations around the facility to do a practical exam. The examiner and a pot smoking chef are also on site with them.
Things start to go bad when the chef loses two of his chickens from the barbecue. It's all a bit laughable as a zombie film, the island turns out to have once been a bio-research facility housing death-sentence murderers. The zombies mill about wearing the remains of orange boiler suits. They look a bit charred for some reason, possibly due to the chemicals? The students are attacked and some turn into zombies themselves. They are killed in various ways but usually only die with attacks to the head. The examiner strangely enough had a pistol on him and that is used to kill a few off until the magazine runs out.
The ending is left open for a sequel should one ever be funded. I think the film is Canadian and it's the director Lowell Dean's first film. As a film it is all competently directed, the cinematography is decent. It is let down by not being very original and playing safe with the genre. I could recommend it to zombie fans and fans who want a tame midweek horror.

Hostel part 3 (2011)

I saw this film this week, it was handy that Hostel part 2 was still fresh in my mind. This film wasn't written or directed by Eli Roth like previous ones in the series. It also went straight to DVD upon release. Once you get a series of films you can usually expect the quality to go down and this isn't really an exception to that but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be.
I can't say I enjoy the Hostel films because they are all pretty depraved and quite gruesome, this one being no exception. The story concerns a group of young men going on a Batchelor weekend to Las Vegas I think. It's all been set up by the Best Man, he arranges a party somewhere out of town with a couple of prostitutes. The next morning when they get back together one of them is missing. One of the prostitutes is also missing. You guessed it. They have become inhabitants of the Hostel. The hostel this time isn't set in Eastern Europe, disappointingly. It is instead set somewhere close to Las Vegas. The plot is very thin to be honest and it doesn't get much better, however the film is well paced and doesn't go on for any longer than it needs to. If you "enjoyed" others in the series, this one shares a number of the familiar tropes but it has slightly less quality than the others in the series. The first film is still the best.

Devil in the woods (2012) (also known as The Barrens)

I watched this film this week. It felt like it was a made for TV movie. The story was about a family going on a camping vacation to heal itself from a trauma of a natural mother dying and being replaced with a new woman. An older teenage daughter interested in smoking and boys and a much young brother who is sad about the loss of his dog who has gone missing. It's a bit of a long drawn out film with the father's behaviour becoming an increasing cause for concern. This is meshed with a story about a devil in the woods. The father thinks the story is real and everyone else doesn't, except one of the forest rangers.
Well, things don't start out vey well and then they get worse. It seems the father was bitten by the family dog and he may have contacted rabies. You'll have to watch the film to decide if he did or not. I thought the acting was good but there just wasn't enough in it to make me scared.

Storm Doris

Storm Doris hit the UK on Thursday 23rd February. One of the reasons I haven't been posting much in this blog has been that ever since then I've been busy with arranging repairs to the garden fence and roof of my house. We also had to postpone the delivery of a dishwasher (which has now gladly arrived and been installed). Getting the garden fences done has given me renewed interest in the garden though. So on Sunday I spent most of the day putting down a new logroll fence in the corner where the cats crap. Instead of it being a zigzag of wonky little fences it is now a semi-circle of loveliness. Storm Doris did cost me a lot of money on getting my main garden fences replaced though and I also couldn't get home when it hit, as I was working away at the time and all the trains were cancelled.

The Photography Show 2017

For 4 days starting last weekend the NEC is host to The Photography Show 2017. It is the first time I've been to the event and I enjoyed it. The only down side to my day was that MCM Comicon was on in the same venue and I didn't see any advertising before I bought my ticket, otherwise I would have bought my son a ticket for MCM while I attended the Photography Show. Next time I will know better. There were a few crossover moments though, with a procession of stormtroopers and other Star Wars characters walking through the show. I missed those as well!
It was my first visit to the show and I didn't spend vast sums of money fortunately. I did buy what I set out to get though, which was a reflector for portraits and a studio tent for product photography. I had a look at a few other stalls and during the morning I attended a Beginner's Masterclass, which had some good talks.

Catacombs 2007

I watched this film recently. I started watching it rather half-heartedly as I was doing something else. The film did not grip me very much and it was over a week later when I felt like returning to it, to finish it off. The story is set in Paris' underground catacombs. Some kind of party event is going on down there illegally and a group of friends decide to explore the catacombs on there own. One member of the group is an American who has only just arrived in Paris.
Much of the film is focused on this one girl as she runs through dark tunnels screaming. It's not particularly original or interesting. Neither is it scary. I didn't like this film very much and felt it was a chore to sit through the whole thing.

 

Gantz (anime) 2004

So this week I have been mainly watching the complete anime collection of Gantz, which I recently purchased from CEX down in Brighton during the half term holidays. I had previously bought 3 volumes of the manga Gantz because they were cheap at the time being second hand but all in good condition. I really like the characters and the story of Gantz. It features a collection of people who are about to die under various circumstances who are transferred to a room that has a view of the Tokyo skyline and a large black ball. Inside the ball are suits and weapons and a bald guy who wears an oxygen mask and who never opens his eyes or communicates. Nobody knows what Gantz is and it is not explained. Through the course of the series and transferring knowledge from one group of people - or I should say survivors - to the next we learn a little more each time.
The suits offer protection and give strength but they can be damaged and can fail. Gantz tells the people that their lives are now his and that they have to kill aliens in combat in order to be allowed to return to their lives. They return home after each round but are called back for successive rounds. They have an hour to kill the aliens and those who survive score points and the ones who earn 100 points will be allowed to leave. The weapons they are given are of different types: there is an X-Ray gun, a sniper rifle, shotguns, pistols and a trap gun. They fire light and have a delayed response. The main characters at the start are Kei Kurono, Kato Matsuri and Kei Kishimoto: two young men and a young woman. There is a love triangle between the three of them: Kurono is immediately attracted to Kishimoto but she is infatuated with Kato. In another plot twist, Kishimoto moves in with Kurono and this only serves to further confuse him.
It is an interesting storyline because it's not clear what is going to happen next and how it will end. I understand that the anime goes a different direction than the manga, so I look forward to the manga written by Hiroya Oku. The manga finished in 2013, after starting in 2000.

Husk (2011)

I saw Husk this week. It's a story about a group of friends driving somewhere across America to have a holiday I think. They are in the middle of nowhere when they have a car accident. On either side of the road are tall corn stalks so they can't see very much. One of the guys is missing when they awake after the car crash. It's the usual horror fair, instead of sticking together they split up or form factions that turn against each other. There are scarecrow/zombie characters as one by one the friends are murdered and in turn become zombies themselves. I didn't think it was scary at all and the story was fairly bland. The movie was professionally shot and put together though so they made an effort, I think it's standard TV film fodder rather than anything worth watching again, so on that basis I can only recommend it as worthy of a single watch.

Sexy Killer (2008)

I saw this Italian film this week, it is a comedy-horror: two genres that don't really go very well together despite many attempts. In this same genre I like the Simon Pegg films like the zombie one made (Sean of the Dead).
The main character is a female serial killer who earns the nickname the Campus Killer because she seems to kill where she lives on campus. This film is an outrageous romp, there are lots of murders, lots of blood spurting body parts and a little bit of sex thrown in. To be honest though, it is not very sexy. I also had trouble reading the subtitles because they were white and against some scenes they were unreadable - not the problem of the director though.
The killer thinks she has found a soulmate who enjoys the killing as much as she does but it turns out he was talking about his job as a police pathologist. She thinks he is killing a man in the toilet of a restaurant when infact he is convincing the man to swap clothes and to do this he explains he will get laid with a hot girl. The man looks unconvinced until the pathologist appeals to the nerd qualities of the man, the both exchange a Star Trek salute. The pathologist is not some ordinary guy though, he is also an inventor and has built a device that can display the thoughts of a person or an animal. He has a liquid that can keep the brain of something dead alive a bit longer and he uses both on a fresh victim of the serial killer. This victim was the police detective and although the memory machine doesn't show who the killer is, the liquid somehow turns the police detective into a zombie. He makes the pathologist inject the same liquid into all of the serial killers victims and they then go to a fancy dress house party. The people in fancy dress think that the zombies are other party guests. You can guess the rest.
It didn't live up to the promise of the title but was fast paced and entertaining while it lasted.

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)

I saw this film this week. I was looking forward to it because I remembered it was a film I enjoyed as a teenager. I liked the idea of a horror film about a vampire hunter at the time. It was quite different to many vampire films where the female is the victim. Near the start of the film he rescues a woman stuck in the stocks. She is a really beautiful woman (actually, it's Caroline Munro) and she ends up staying with him for a while. Captain Kronos is a war hero but I'm not sure which war he fought in. He has a hunchback professor as a sidekick, he seems to be the brains of the operation and Kronos is the skilled swordsman. They are the perfect match and I'm a bit surprised that they didn't make any more films with these characters. I wonder if they appear in anything else? Such as a comic or a book?
Kronos has been requested to visit a doctor friend who is troubled by the occurence of several young girls from the village who have been found dead but with their blood drained and their faces terribly aged. What I liked about the film as a teenager was that it wasn't just the run of the mill vampire tale. Here there were elements such as the ageing, the professor's knowledge about different kinds of vampire and the dead frog in a box vampire detector (life is restored to the frog if a vampire crosses its path).
The film wasn't quite as exciting as I remembered it as a teenager but I do still enjoy watching it.

Altitude (2010)

This film was one of those featuring annoying American teenagers who find themselves in a situation that means they have to work out their personality differences under extreme stress. The film it reminds me of is Frozen where the characters are stuck on a ski-lift in a closed ski resort with a pack of hungry wolves pacing around below them. This film is improbably set in a small plane piloted by a female student (played by the beautiful Jessica Lowndes) who happens to be the daughter of a general. Actually the detail about the daughter's father seemed a little unnecessary in the end as it didn't have much significance to the plot. There are five of them: the pilot, her boyfriend, a single guy, another female and her boyfriend who plays being an annoying drunk teenager very well. SPOILER ALERT: it turns out that the pilots boyfriend is a sole survivor of a light plane crash that killed both his parents and the female pilot's mother. How the female pilot didn't know this before getting on to the plane is very strange. It does explain his unease, I wouldn't even consider it and I probably wouldn't have chosen her for a girlfriend. He seems to be a bit clingy. She doesn't seem to want him to follow him to college wherever she is going but he has a bus ticket to the place in his rucksack. She finds this out through a tussle later in the film.
The disaster in this film is that a loose bolt in the plane's tailfin elevator
gets under the mechanism jamming it up. they fly in to a storm and then experience a supernatural being in the air that is out to kill them. This entity seems to be in the imagination of the pilot's boyfriend. They discover this because she bought him a copy of a comic where the whole plot is drawn out. I know, it is bizarre. I was totally confused during the film. It mixes so many elements and doesn't really do any story element justice. There is some hint of love between the single guy and the drunk's girlfriend. But he drops from the plane in an attempt to fix the elevator.
I can't really recommend this film.

Hostel: Part II (2007)

I saw the first Hostel film on TV some years ago and it surprised me at just how gruesome it was. Having seen the first film, I was prepared for this one. I think actually that the worst scenes in the film were cut from the version I saw but without seeing it all I can't really tell.
Rich people bid for the "privilege" of torturing and killing tourists in Slovakia abducted from a hostel there. The facility where the killings are done is an old factory. This film sees a group of female college students on holiday get abducted. I liked the way that the two American men are depicted, one of the characters seems really intent on having a great time in his torture and killing. He is really vocal about it and the other man seems really unsure and just there because his friend is interested. Things don't quite turn out that way but I won't spoil the plot.
It is certainly well made and acted but the subject matter is pretty awful and dark. Not a family film, as they say! It's a film I can recommend to those who can watch it without taking it seriously. There is some dark humour in the film but you have to have the stomach for it, to catch it.

From The Dark (2014)

I watched this film this week and feel this wasn't a bad effort. It starts in the peat bog fields somewhere in Ireland and a man digging out peat logs from a ditch. He hits something hard that looks like a spike. In the ground is a creature of some kind, like a vampire or something. The man reaches into a hole and is pulled into the water in a deep trench. He manages to drag himself out but is injured and has a tear in his neck.
Earlier that same day a young Irish couple are in a car going somewhere they haven't been before. They are lost and end up getting stuck in mud driving along near a field. It turns out that they are close to the peat bog. The man leaves the women alone while he sees if he can find a house to get or ring for help from. He finds a farmhouse and also finds the man with the tear in his neck. He returns to the car and they leave it to go back to the farmhouse.
The man with the tear in his neck has become some kind of flesh eating monster who is sensitive to light. So the rest of the film is about the young couple and their attempts to save themselves from being eaten by the man and the monster from the bog.
The pace is good and the story, while fairly predictable, has a good strong female character and an interesting take on the genre by using sources of light as their defence. It's a good thing that mobiles have torches on them these days is all I can say. On the whole, I can recommend this film to fans of the more traditional horror film.

Scary Or Die (2012)

I watched this film this week and while it had some interesting scenes at times overall I was a little disappointed. It is a series of 5 separate short stories in the style of the films from the 1970s such as those from Amicus Productions (e.g. Tales from the crypt).
The stories are as follows:
1. The Crossing
2. TaeJung's Lament
3. Re-Membered
4. Clowned
5. Lover Come Back
The most interesting of these for me was probably TaeJung's Lament. It seemed to be set in Japan and told the story of a man who had lost his wife. He is lonely and looks longingly at women who remind him of his wife in various bars and locations we see him. In one of these he is sitting on a bench when a group of attractive young women walk past. One of them seems to notice him and smiles. He watches them for a while and is shocked when the one who smiled is taken out by a man who carries her away without the others noticing. He follows the man and interrupts an attempted murder. The woman is grateful and he takes her back to her apartment, she gives him her card and asks him to visit in a week. He returns to the apartment the following week to find it full of the attractive young women who turn out to be vampires. The murderer returns and we discover his name is Van Helsing.
I also liked The Crossing to a degree, the concept is about two low intelligence men who are returning to the Mexico border to send a message to Mexicans attempting to cross illegally into America. They are driving a truck and have kidnapped two men of Mexican origin (however one just had Mexican ancestors), unknown to the female partner of the men who has also come along for the trip. They get the men out of the back of the truck when they arrive at the place. There are already some graves and luggage littered around. They have brough guns with them and are ready to kill the men. The women doesn't agree with this and fights them, during the ensuing struggle the previous murder victims begin raising from the dead. The two men are eaten alive by the zombies and the woman, although injured, gets away. At the end of the story she is seen by two cops stumbling over the ground and one of them with a sniper rifle kills her, believing she is a zombie too.
Clowned was interesting up to a point but very laboured and was much too long.

Lord of the Rings trilogy extended editions

I picked up a bit of a post-Christmas bargain today from a charity shop. They were selling the extended editions of the three films for £1.99 each. They are selling for a lot less now than they were when they first came out but even so, I think it was a bargain. I do have the films anyway but to have the extended editions is still very cool.

Raze (2013)

I watched Raze the other night and without knowing what to expect I was pleasantly surprised. It turned out to be a subversive little film in ways I wasn't expecting. The film was very simply about a group of kidnapped women who are forced to fight to the death in hand to hand combat for the amusement of an odd husband and wife and some wealthy guests. If the women refuse to fight, there are cameras in the homes of people they love and they are told that their loved ones will be killed if they refuse to fight or they lose a fight. It's a very odd film in respect to the story.
There is a lot of violence in the fight scenes but I didn't feel it was ever excessive. It could have been a lot more graphic than it was and the women  keep their clothes on as they fight, I was pleasantly surprised that they weren't sexualised. It's not a film that's going to win awards based on its script because there isn't that much dialogue but what there is is enough to portray the story and keep it moving along. The film isn't over-long and it never lags, so it feels like a nice, compact little movie. I don't know what audience it would appeal to, perhaps one that likes to watch women fight in a ring, fans of Mixed Martial Arts I guess.

Pernicious (2014)

I watched this film this week and was kind of disappointed by it. It features 3 very beautiful women in Thailand who are there to teach English but as soon as they reach their accommodation in the middle of nowhere they come under the spell of an evil spirit. The supernatural element of the film actually misses the horror spot entirely in my view. There is a visit to a witch, which is the least spookiest witch scene I have ever seen. There are some scenes of gore when the women bring some British guys back to their house but even these are a disappointment. Overall, it's largely a missed opportunity to do something original. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it was an American remake of a genuinely scary Japanese horror film. I can't recommend Pernicious to audiences of either gore films or supernatural films.

Texas Chainsaw (2013)

I watched this film last night and was thoroughly disappointed. The premise might have been interesting, picking up from the end of the original Tobe Hooper film. There were a lot of things to go wrong when picking up such a story beloved by many fans and yup, practically everything went wrong with this.
The family at the farmhouse seemed much larger than I remember and they are shot and burned by a lynch mob led by a man who years later becomes the town mayor. The sheriff is black and seems to have no authority of his own, despite seemingly to have his own strong views it appears that the police department have just three staff - the sheriff, an officer who is there for cannon fodder and a deputy who turns out to be the mayor's son.
The film tries to blend different styles of horror film rather than sticking to the original film's bleak and terrifying style.
I can't recommend this film because it does such as bad job. The actors can't be blamed, the performances are not terrible. The effects are respectable too. It isn't scary though and it tries to soften Leatherface's character, which is a cardinal sin and is ultimately the film's biggest fail. I watched the film in 2D but I understand there is a 3D version. I can't think that a 3D version of the film I just watched would be any better though.

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Directed by Lucio Fulci who is apparently a respected name amongst gore film fans. I watched this film with increasing confusion as it made less and less sense. There are moments of extreme gore, so if you like skin tearing and blood spurting then you'll like this film. The gore that you see is quite excessive but also obviously fake, so it never feels unwatchable. The dubbing from Italian to English is quite laughable, I assume it is dubbing just because the voice acting is so stilted and wooden. It's not a film worth watching for the plot because the story is really terrible. I don't know if this film is a standalone or part of a genuine story trilogy, if it is it might explain some of the back story I just wasn't getting.
This film seems to suffer terrible translation difficulties. There are lots of funny looks and close-up eyes-only shots. They might have meant something but to me they were laughable. There is a creepy librarian character who is just plain weird but, apart from being weird, seems to play no part in the story. I don't know if this version is a version that has been cut or not, it was a film that originally suffered heavy cutting by the BBFC. It may explain some of the incoherence.
I can't really recommend this to anyone apart from fans of gore films.

Dark Circles (2013)

I watched this film this week and thought it was ok but nothing very unique about it, the jump scares were quite effective. It concerns a young couple who have busy lives in the city, the man is a musician that is about to leave a regular band to go solo. He has a demo to finish and it seems as though success as a solo artist is just around the bend. His partner wants her next project to be a baby and a house in the country where the two of them can enjoy his success, him by composing in his own space and her by renovating the house. Nice plan.
Things don't get off to a good start. He misses the birth and arrives to see the baby in her arms at the hospital, at least her friend was there though. Aside from that, nothing unusual happens until they take the keys and move in to the new house. They find a half-burned and blackened child's doll under the lid of a barbecue in the garden. They don't seem to be able to get rid of it because after putting it in the skip it turns up somewhere else. There are a few of these sort of incidents but neither partner mentions them to the other, frustratingly!
The dark circles relates to their physical degeneration. The baby doesn't sleep. They don't sleep. They have less and less energy to do anything apart from look after baby. This part is done quite well, you do feel for them. The man is always patient but it does drive a stake between them as the resentment builds and he can't compose because he falls asleep. All the time this is happening, both of them feels they are having hallucinations because they think they see a woman in the house or the garden.
Towards the end of the film, after wandering around the local grocery store, at the checkout the man impulsively asks the 19 year old cashier if she can babysit one night to allow him and his wife to sleep. She agrees.
The film is well-crafted and builds but with such a limited story while it does this well, I felt the ending was a bit of an anti-climax. There is a great, chilling moment when the babysitter opens a cupboard in the kitchen but I won't spoil it by revealing what happens. I can recommend this film for a watch but it will resonate more with parents than others.

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

I watched this film this week and enjoyed it quite a lot. I wasn't really sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised. It is a thriller set on an island of Hawaii. There are some couples on holiday who learn of another honeymoon couple who have been murdered via police reports. The story is cleverly told, the viewer is never given all the facts. We seem to learn as the characters learn. There are some great actors in the film, Milla Jovovich for example plays a great part in a very different kind of film than her usual sci-fi ones. The twist at the end is a good one so I won't spoil it. I'd recommend this film to anyone really, especially if you like thrillers.

To The Devil A Daughter (1976)

I watched this film this week and it was an interesting effort from Hammer but ultimately not a vey satisfying one. The story's central character is a nun called Catherine, played by Natasha Kinski, who has been raised by an excommunicated Catholic order in Bavaria I think. The order is led by a priest played by Christopher Lee who is using black magic to bring Asteroth to life, which I understand to be the devil. Catherine's father last name of Beddows, played by Denholm Elliot, has arranged for her to be picked up by a character, last name Verney, played by Richard Widmark. He seems to be a good guy and knows about black magic. In his care, he recognises that Catherine's behaviour is troublesome and begins to understand why Beddows asked him to look after her. In some back story scenes we understand that there was a pact made between the priest and Beddows' wife. The priest and his disciples travel to England with an incubator that we presume contains a baby demon. The point of Catherine is that she is needed to perform some black magic ritual on her 18th birthday, which is why the priest and his disciples have come to England. It transpires that Catherine is under the spell of the priest and he performs some kind of mind control when she is alone. Verney leaves Catherine with friends while he goes to look up some important black magic information that he thinks the priest is aware of but while he's out the spell Catherine is under makes her kill one of his friends and she escapes. So Catherine falls into the priests hands and he can perform the ceremony. One of the priests disciples is seen donating blood, all of her blood infact for the ritual. The ritual is performed in a ruined church and the priest uses the blood to create a protective circle. The ritual starts and Catherine is briefly seen naked. It seems to be that the baby demon climbs inside her through her vagina however I'm not too sure about that. Verney manages to kill a disciple guarding the ritual by cracking him on the skull with a stone he picks up. But the priest thinks he is safe and powerful inside the circle of blood and standing on stone ground made from flint. What he doesn't know though is that Verney learned that he can enter the circle if he carries a flint rock with the blood of the priests disciple on it. Verney attacks the priest with the rock and the film ends with Verney carrying a limp Catherine away to safety outside the circle.
It is a strange, downer of an ending because the viewer is left with the impression that actually Catherine has not really been saved. It is an odd film and one that doesn't leave me feeling like I understood everything in it - I probably have some of the above wrong. It is based on a book by Dennis Wheatley, who apparently didn't like the film because it didn't follow the book and he didn't want Hammer to use any further novels of his in further films.

Happy New Year, 2017 is here

A wet and cloudy 2017 greeted us today, so its been a rather dark and inauspicious start to the new year. I return to work the day after tomorrow, which will arrive soon enough. I saw the new year in watching the final Harry Potter film in the series Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows part 2.
Today I have been mostly playing videogames and watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
On New year's eve we visited a restaurant that was new to us for a meal and then we went to see a film, Singing in the Rain - a sad reminder of how beautiful Debbie Reynolds was in her prime but also a classic film. My son and I took our cameras and took some shots, here are a few of mine.
 I wanted to record the Christmas lights before they are taken down and the high streets return to their usual presentation.

Julia X (2011)

This film begins in a way I expected, a woman (Julia, I guess) gets chatted up in a café by a date she met online. He turns out to be a serial killer and abducts her. She tries to get away but is re-captured. She is then driven out to an old oil well where he disposes of the body of a dead naked woman that she shared the van with.
She gets away and starts to fight back. Eventually she turns the tables and captures him. It gets weird after that. She has a sister. There are flashbacks to her child abuse. I can't really go on without spoiling the story but I was intrigued as to where the film was eventually going. It confused the hell out of me, not necessarily in a good way either, I found the sister's behaviour extremely odd. At one point she also entices a neighbour into the house and restrains him blindfolded in a chair directly opposite the serial killer. She does this for no apparent reason. In a later part, she also puts a pair of wire cutters in the serial killers hands, allowing him to free himself.
This is a strange film. It's another film that has a bit of an identity crisis due to a confused script. Not exactly rubbish and not good either, somewhere middling for this attempt. I think there was some attempt at humour but with the child abuse elements, you could hardly laugh at this.

Don't Look Up (2009)

This was a bit of an odd film. It told the story of a film maker making a film that was unfinished from many years ago. It isn't a documentary film or anything like that. I thought it was a bit of mix of different films blurred together to tell a story that wasn't very interesting. The not looking up of the title relates to some stills of the original movie that show a woman holding a candle and looking up. The part where the main character visits an ex-girlfriend just feels slightly like its in the wrong film and it's not clear sometimes whether he is just having a seizure and is dreaming or not. The effects are mainly just CGI and are pretty bad but probably just a reflection of the type of effects possible in 2009. I don't think the scares were very creative in this film, so were mainly based around the special effects. I was dissatisfied with this film, I can't say I was disappointed though because I didn't have any expectations to begin with,

Crawl or Die (2014)

I watched this film this week, I started it about 3 times without being sure I was actually watching it from the start, the premise is explained a few minutes into the film. Not that there is much premise to it. It is set in the future sometime, a "package" must be delivered safely by a crack team of special forces operatives. It sort if gives a nod to Aliens or a multitude of other films like this. Probably Aliens is the closest though.
Amongst the special forces is a blonde with a partly shaved head, her name is Tank. Don't know why and it's never explained. The package is the last fertile woman alive, the team are to deliver the package to a lab on Earth 2. earth 2 turns out to be inhabited by a predator and it starts to kill off the team of special forces. The remainder of the team enter a series of narrow tunnels with the predator pursing them and killing them one by one as they protect the package.
The film uses very confined sets and abridged storytelling, the action is largely just grunts and noises as they squeeze through tunnels. I don't know why the tunnels are there, I think they are going through the tunnels to get somewhere but I wasn't sure where that was.
I wasn't surprised, horrified or terrorised by the film. Infact if anything, I was a little bored I've got to be honest. I watched it until the end and despite feeling uncomfortably claustrophobic during most of the last half, I can't say I was sorry it ended.
Probably not a film I would watch again, not awful but not much happens and the ending isn't anything special either. I can't even tell if the acting was any good, there was so little dialogue. I imagine the actors faces were not faking the effort it took to get through the tunnels.

Dark Summer (2015)

I watched this film on Friday night, start of the weekend. It's set in the US and is mainly about the house arrest of a teenager who seems to have been guilty of stalking a fellow pupil, a girl. It is a slow film generally, set mainly in the house. The boy somehow is able to circumvent the Internet prohibition and gains access to the net. He has a couple of friends who visit him, one of whom is clearly in love with him. I don't know why, I found the lead actor rather annoying. There is no explanation of why he was infatuated with the girl he stalked and rather unbelievably she skype calls him and proceeds to commit suicide while he watches. She then seems to haunt him in his house. Or is it his mother's house? Why was he alone and she not there? So much was left unexplained in this film. I just got the sense of this selfish boy who was self-absorbed and didn't really need the friends he had got. I just don't get why they were his friends and what they got out of the situation. I found this quite a frustrating film in the end and was glad when it finished. There were probably only two jump scares in the film. The ending wasn't that surprising either. No recommendation from me for this one.

Wolf Creek 2

I enjoyed this return to Wolf Creek and the crazy Australian who likes to chop up bodies and torture backpacking tourists. Now I'm familiar with the character I didn't find this as disturbing as the first film. I did feel sorry for the German couple at the beginning and I thought that they would be the central victims in the story but instead it was the Englishman and history graduate. That was a surprise, I enjoyed that part. If "enjoyed" is the right word! Sorry to everyone, if that's a spoiler!
This film belongs to the same genre as Hostel and Saw, about some evil whacko who kills because he enjoys it. Like a butcher, humans are just meat to be carved up. No sense of conscience about them. It's hard to imagine someone like that but they must exist because you read stories like it in the newspaper. The story of poor Becky Watts from Bristol in 2015, for example, in which her step brother and his girlfriend murdered her and chopped her up. An awful and harrowing story but one that was true. So these things do happen in real life.

Phone upgrades

Well, it's been two years since our last phone. It has gone relatively quick but I must say I am glad to move on from my old phone. I had a Moto E. It has been a good phone but suffered from a lack of internal memory (8GB was once a massive amount of storage space but today it doesn't cut it). I have no doubt that I will feel the same about the phone I just got and that has 16GB. Other than the space, I thought it performed quick even though it was 3G and was good for phone calls.
My new phone is a model up from the Moto E, infact in reality it is probably several steps up from the phone I have because the Moto E is now on the 3rd generation.

Other members of my family are on the same contract and they got different phones to meet their specific needs. My daughter got the iPhone she has been hankering for over a year. My wife got a phone with a good camera, the Sony Xperia E5. My son's eyes lit up when he saw the Alcatel Pixi 4 6" but he was blinded by it having such a big screen. The shop assistant was helpful in explaining that the phone had a big screen but the processor was underpowered. Eventually, he decided to go back to the phone he thought he'd be happy with, the same Sony as my wife.

Dr Strange (2016)

I watched this film at the cinema with my son. Just the 2D showing. It was enjoyable and typically well produced as you would expect from a Marvel film. Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a good performance in the title role. He is an arrogant surgeon who thinks he knows it all. Until he has a car crash and looses control and sensitivity in his fingers. He felt that only experimental surgery would save him but the only person who perform the procedure turns him down. So in desperation, Dr Strange turns to oriental medicine but he is very sceptical. He has to have his mind opened to new impossible possibilities. His has to forget all of his training and education and begin learning everything from scratch again. It is a challenge that doesn't daunt him and after a rocky start he begins his new education and starts to progress.
The film has some really impressive visuals effects. Buildings are turned on their sides and collapse into each other, in a similar way to they did in the film Inception. I think some sequences were very trippy. Overall, anyone who enjoys Marvel films will like this one. I think we shall see more of Dr Strange in other Marvel films, as an origin story, this film is a good one.

Orc Wars (2013)

I watched this film but I can't work out why I recorded it. It's not a horror film and I'm not usually interested in fantasy films. So, anyway the film has a different title in America as there it is called Dragonfyre: the Worldgate Sentinel. It's a bit of a blend of orc verses military commando. There are lots of things that go unexplained that the viewer is just supposed to accept, like the fact that the estate agent just joins in and kills orcs with a sniper rifle. Like the princess. Like the gang of hooligans in the car. Like how White Feather escapes to fight another day. Like they ask a blind man to drive an armored car. Like why the real estate company didn't notice all the weapons in the basement of a farmhouse they were selling. To be honest, the acting in the film is quite poor and the script is awful. They orc makeup looks like it was borrowed from the Lord of the Rings, copied I should say. Just awful, don't bother watching it.