Image, comment, score

The Invasion - (2007)

No:

No point. 5/10

Transformers - (2007)

Fuck you Michael Bay. (3/10)


Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2009)

Everywhere I look is a darkness. 4/10

Cabin Fever - (2002)

A man, a banjo, a turd. Fuck off. (0/10)

The Fourth Kind (2009)

Directed by: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and REAL PEOPLE BECAUSE THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED (Not)
Plot: THIS REALLY HAPPENED! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! No it fucking didn't, and no amount of whining at the beginning and end will make it real. Nor will more post-film "What happned next" notes than a TRUE FUCKING STORY will make this film truer than those. But basically this is Close Encounters of the Third Kind plus one channeled through Paranormal Activity and Northern Exposure.

Rule 1 for a film trying to make you believe it is a dramatisation of real events: Don't have the lead fucking star stand there almost practically superimposed and introduce the fucking film. That's so fucking TV it hurts. It's a quicker disconnect than the Church of Scientology have ever acheived. It is possibly acting as a caveat for the fucking stupid.

It's in that group of films of "Actual/Found" Footage, like Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project and Passion of the Christ, but it runs a dramatisation next to the "actual" footage to try and make you think that it's based on something that actually happened. Framed on a level up from this is the central character (now actually looking like your "classic" grey and a husk of her former self and speaking like Julie Hagerty in Airplane!) in an interview with the director in a glib attempt to add gravitas to the story being true. Or something.

I'll say it right now, you never see the fucking aliens. IF THEY EVEN EXISTED AT ALL. So you never get to find out if they look like David Morse, you never see if they're tall or short, grey or green. And you certainly never get to see if they look anything like fucking owls. Yes, I said owls. Why? Because when the film is doing the WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I SLEEP AT NIGHT? psychoanalysis bit early on, it turns out that every single one of them remembers seeing an owl just before their sleeping/anal probe troubles.

Now, apparently there are 10 species of owl native to Alaska. This is 9 more species than there are of humans in Alaska. I'm assuming that seeing an owl at night when your house is surrounded by fucking trees in an area where owls are as common as whining children is not a rare occurence. I'm also assuming that owls are still nocturnal in Alaska....so using owls as a plot device for linking cases just seems like a idea born out of idiocy when they could have used something like a wolf, a kodiak bear or Al Pacino. An owl is just an invitation to make your case load bigger than it could be. "Oh I couldn't sleep last night because there was an owl outside. It was hooting all fucking night." "Are you sure it was sticking a cold steel rod up your backside?"

And on it goes, and boy does it drag towards the end. Over the course of the film you've seen a couple of Milla's patients go bathshit mental during hypnosis - one that is so frightened by the experience that he goes home and murders his family before committing suicide, and the other that ends up levitating on his bed with his mouth wide opening speaking ancient Sumerian. Everything then focuses on Milla and her two children (her daughter has gone blind due to the trauma of her father's death) - still coming to terms with the death of her husband that you saw stabbed at the start of the film (and whose killer has yet to be caught).

After she's put under house arrest for "causing" three broken vertebrae in the levitating patient, things are starting to come to an end. Her daughter goes missing, supposedly kidnapped by the aliens and she is accused by the local sheriff of causing all this and takes her son into custody. Only one way to try and get her daughter back - go under hypnosis. This is probably the most effective scene of the film, and due to the 24 style double framing - the "actual" footage alongside the "dramatisation" before the fragmented Sumerian translation appears on screen. This is where it should have ended - the fallen camera and the air of WTF? mystery like at the end of Blair Witch.

Problem is, there's just no mystery. You find out that her husband actually shot himself and that she's been in denial all along. She's not to blame for her daughter's disappearence and she is now paraylzed from the neck down. Whilst intermittently effective, the film doesn't have a clue what it wants to be - it would have been far better choosing early on which path to go down - "actual/found" footage OR dramatisation. It dances between the two like a drunken Grandparent at a wedding - carefree and with no fucking regard to what is going on around it.  And hammering home the "THIS IS REAL" point really made me want to punch something hard. It's an insult to the intelligence of everyone that watches it (though no doubt some people will actually believe it is real). What they should have done was lop off 25 minutes and gone down the "Actual" footage route, or just made it a straight up film about a mystery surrounding a remote town in Alaska.

That way I wouldn't have been playing a 90 minute game of eye marble over a film that is suffering from Multiple Film Disorder.

Overall: 5/10 - generous, perhaps, but it was done with enough style at times and the "chills" were effective enough.

Wanted (2008)

Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: James McAvoy, Mrs. Pitt and Morgan Freeman

I watched this a couple of weeks ago, but I've only just been hit by the curved turd bullet of "Holy Fucking Shit! What the convoluted fuck was that?" that this monstrous pile of utter rubbish propelled at me from an unspecified location made up of what I can only assume to be infinite pile of primordial gunk yet to have the catalytic spark that would turn it into something good.

That's not to say that I was aghast to the atrocity that I had just witnessed when, through sleepy eyes and practically haemorrhaging ears, I heard Morgan Freeman utter "Oh shit" (or was it Oh fuck? *apathetic shrug*) before having a bullet exit his forhead to cue the end credits.

Don't get me wrong, I like my balls to the wall action films. I just don't like them stamped into said wall and force fed to me through the guise of Mrs. Pitt's naked ass. I can imagine that from start to finish that this was some sort of mastubatory fantasy for a select group of people. However, I fall into this category and am not ashamed to say it, but I'm not one to be conned by a bunch of disengaging scenes with a fucking knitting factory at the middle of it.

Okay, so the "curving the bullet" and shooting the wings off a fly bits are a bit screwy, but it's a decent enough quirk for a film of this ilk. But for fucks sake, knitting death warrants into some fucking cloth, jesus? I know it's from a comic book and they like their stuff whacky and if you change too much then you're going to be burning letters from angry fanboys for the rest of your life, BUT COME THE FUCK ON! It would have made far more sense if you'd got a "Stich'n'Bitch" group in to sort out the murdering contracts.

Plot? Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off.

The plot for Wanted is somewhere in this jumper.

With the guy that directed Daywatch and Nightwatch this should have been good. But he fell into that "foreign director's first Hollywood film" trap and pandering to tastes. It's not gritty and the moments that it would try and claim are brutal would be beaten into submission by the interrogation of Chunk in The Goonies. 

And despite all that, it is big, dumb and fucking annoying fun, though the law of dimishing returns would have me gnawing off my own leg if I ever had to suffer it again. But I might just watch it again to see if I can get the knitting pattern.

Overall: 3/10

Note: I am aware it wasn't knitting, but I don't fucking care.

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

Directed by: F. Gary Gray (or is it F. Gray Gary? or F. Gary Graybraham?)
Starring: SPARTA!, Ray Charles and Chief O'Brien


I'd already heard that this was a very bad film, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It was far fucking worse than that. Imagine, if you will, a story cobbled together with shit and semen, hammered through a collander with a big fucking mallet when the convex head of a spoon would have sufficed, processed with offal and stale piss, covered with pastry, baked for two hours and then retrofitted with vomit and then muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.

Well, that's more appetising than this. Seriously, this film spends nearly two hours believing that is something it was never going to be. It quickly shot it's own moral load over its self-righteous face screaming "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!! There's a message here, a serious message about the American justice system...." and then quickly forgets that message while wiping its cock down in your face and secretly laughing at you.

Basically, Sparta is a family man that one night gets attacked by some petty crooks (not wearing balaclavas I might add) - one of these petty crooks decides that rather than just make off with some valuables that it would be a good idea to murder Sparta's wife and young daughter and leave Sparta for dead. As you do. Okay, so there's no film if this doesn't happen so I'm prepared to roll with it....

....and roll is what one of the crooks does when caught. Ray Charles is the prosecutor who has to break the news to Sparta that because of some fuck up with evidence and the fact that Sparta had passed out that his statement wasn't valid - the guy that did the killing is rolling over on the other guy to get a plea bargain whilst the other poor schmuck gets sent to death row. Sparta is mortified, but Ray tells him it's the only way they are guaranteed to get them both in jail as the case would probably collapse otherwise.

So, on we go. 10 years later, the day of the execution and Ray is there to watch it. Ad then something goes horribly wrong - instead of killing the guy easily it seriously fucks him up painfully before killing him. Oh I wonder who arranged that? Sparta then proceeds to help the other crook (who is now a free man snorting coke and screwing cheap hookers) escape the "three strikes you're out" rule as the cops come to his apartment. Well, help escape so he can torture him to death whilst filming it whilst speaking in Latin and doing a Cossack dance.

Anyway, they have no difficulty finding Sparta, who decides to strip naked prior to his arrest for some reason (six-pack quotient?). And then the "fun" begins. In the 10 years since the initial incident it seems that Sparta! has become an expert on law, bought shit loads of property and learnt how to make a perfect meringue in his mouth. Basically, he wanted to be caught so he could then orchestrate his masterplan.

And what is his masterplan? Well, here goes:

• Get a mattress for a confession
• Says the title of the film
• Get a steak for a second confession of where the defence attorney for the crooks is buried alive
• Oops, steak arrived too late and the guy is dead....
• Kills cellmate
• Gets sent to solitary
• Watch as everyone is helpless whilst anyone that had anything to do with the apparent injustice 10 years ago is picked off one by one. Except Ray Charles. Maybe because he's a family man.

No one knows how this shit is happening, but right out of the fucking middle of nowhere it turns out via a CIA type that Sparta is actually some really fucking brilliant assassin type guy that can kill people without being anywhere near them. Like being in the basement of a prison somehow arranging a bullet through the head of a judge, four car bombs and directing a performance of South Pacific by the cast of Cheers WHO AREN'T EVEN IN THE FUCKING FILM!!

And then they throw in a red herring accomplice - not once, but fucking twice. Once by making you think that perhaps he is the mysterious "Chester" the boyfriend of the a girl working for Ray Charles that no one has ever met. That one is put to bed when he blows up her car. And then the black gloved accomplice that massacres more people at the funeral for the bomb victims.

Of course, the accomplice back door would be too weird now as everyone is seemingly accounted for or fucking dead by this point so they'd have to invent a person out of thin air to fill that role. I think I would have preferred this route, especially if they'd recruited Rutger Hauer or Malcolm McDowell. Or Paul Reubens. Now that would have been awesome. In fact, everything else would have been awesome.

Turns out that in the 10 years between the trial and execution that he bought a warehouse next to the prison and FUCKING TUNNELED INTO THE PRISON! Or every solitary cell to be precise. He's stocked up the tunnel with all manner of uniforms and equipment and right at the moment that Ray Charles and Chief O'Brien find this little treasure trove of potential destruction, Sparta is at City Hall planting a bomb that is going to wipe out the mayor and all the chiefs of police.....THAT PROBABLY WEREN'T EVEN IN THOSE POSITIONS WHEN HE GOT HIS REVENGE BONER 10 YEARS AGO!!! Well, he's basically trying to cripple the city in revenge for the sins against justice. That's the message.

Of course, Ray and Chief O'Brien play the old switcheroo and plant the bomb in Sparta's cell before he gets back....and he falls into their trap and makes the phonecall triggering the device....and that's it, Sparta is dead and we're no better off. We've learnt nothing we don't already know from watching Law & Order, CSI and Inspector Gadget. It could easily have made a statement about criminal injustice and flaws in the legal system but it takes the torture porn route. But in reality, we're the ones being tortured by this utter piece of crap....and it's crap that you've stood in and walked into your house.

And then to have the end credits roll and to find out that Sparta was a fucking robot and the real Sparta is about to torch Ray Charles house....well, that just takes the fucking piss.

This is possibly the worst mainstream American film made by people who have made decent films in the past - F. Gary Gray was responsible for "The Negotiator", and writer Kurt Wimmer has written some enjoyable fluff like "Equilibrium". But here they just invite themselves to a wank party and get jizz everywhere they weren't supposed to.

Overall 1/10

Note: Some parts of the story description have been added after the review was written to keep in spirit with what the filmmakers did.

Addendum 1: I've just figured it out - it's a reverse "Shawshank Redemption"!!! FFS!!