Death Nurse 2 (1988)

Exactly the same as the first Death Nurse movie and with the same "plot", cast, flashbacks etc but with a little communism thrown in for some reason. To be honest, I didn't pay it much attention as a Twitch stream of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was far more interesting. At a push, I'd say that it's slightly better than the first... maybe... sort of?

Death Nurse review here

Letterboxd Review

Death Nurse (1987)

Just for Helen_S, here's a brief review.

A damning indictment of US Medicaid or a fucking awful SOV slasher film with zero plot, flashbacks that are edits from the director's previous film, loads of padding including ice cream eating and cat chasing, god-awful special effects and a cast of the oldest and ugliest people available (you'll be longing for the vapid, pretty, young things from modern films)? I'll leave that for you to decide. Never has an hour felt so long!

Death Nurse 2 review here

Letterboxd Review

The Painting of Horror (1994)

An ultra-low-budget SOV short, less than 20 minutes long.

In a grotty apartment, a woman dresses in sexy undies. The same woman starts to remove sexy undies for a customer. Another woman, in a completely different location, dances on a table. The first woman takes a shower. I think I can see a theme here! A box is delivered. First woman lets her towel fall. Back to the second woman dancing on a table, this time with a fat man watching. First woman gets dressed again. There's definately a theme here! Well, that's well over half the film gone and all I've seen is a box and someone getting dressed and undressed a few times. More table dancing. Another woman enters the apartment. Now, either woman two is wearing a wig or this is woman three... I'm pretty sure this is woman two. They discuss the box, open it and pull out a painting. At last! They then move another painting to a different position, discuss which way to hang the new painting and at long last hang the fucking thing. Five minutes to go. Woman one leaves the apartment to take over the job of dancing but this time not on a table but on a very small stage. Woman two (remember, she's in the apartment) is strangely drawn towards the painting... well she stares blankly at it and gets up off the sofa. The painting bulges towards her hand in a cheap Videodrome, hand poking from the other-side sort of way. A rubber dick pops out of a gash in the painting which then grows, grabs the woman around the neck and pulls her into the painting! The painting burps. Two minutes to go. Woman one is now dancing behind a parasol while stripping. The film then just ends. I'm sure something must have been cut at the end but it was probably more dancing, dressing or undressing.

If you think that because of the multiple dressing/undressing and table dancing, that this is a sexy little short, you couldn't be more wrong. It's not. At all. Nope.

If you really want to watch it you can find it here.

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The Shallows (2016)

Hilariously terrible! The slo-mo surfing scenes! Starving so much after a couple of hours she eats a wee crab! Why did she risk her life for a fucking GoPro! The seagull! The drunk Mexican stealing a surfboard! The Swiss Army necklace! A shark not liking jellyfish stings! How long did that fucking tourniquet stay on? What the hell is a buoy doing that close to a beach? Explosive whale oil? Did everyone see the same film as me? My quota of exclamation and question marks has run out. Just awful.

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iBoy (2017)

iBOLLOCKS

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Midwinter of the Spirit (2015)

Slightly spooky. Equal parts irritating, hysterical, obvious and silly with a lacklustre ending.

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What Women Want (2000)

Did Adam Sandler turn this piece of shit down or something?

Letterboxd Review

As Above, So Below (2014)

AKA How to bring down a wall that has stood for hundreds of years with a toffee hammer and a toothpick.

Come spend an hour and a half in the Parisien catacombs with some extremely noisy and unlikeable twats in this sub-Dan Brown (yes some things are even worse than Dan Brown) shit-fest. So crappy that I was easily distracted by Ed Balls on 'Strictly Come Dancing' and the 'Antiques Roadshow' (and I really hate 'The Antiques Roadshow') on the main TV.

The film picks up a little during the last 30 minutes once it gets past most of the alchemical and Dantean flim-flam and descends into some cheap jump-scares and a foghorn soundtrack. So, a lot of pain for very little payoff.

One thing that amazed me is how easily Aramaic can be translated, on-the-fly, into English rhyming couplets.

Not good.

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White Settlers (2014)

If we take the title "White Settlers" as I assume, it's intended then this film is the equivalent of a pre-revisionist, c-grade, 1940s western. A couple of pioneering English city-types move to rural Scotland and are terrorised by the natives. Happens all the time down here as well.

What could have been a really interesting portrayal of the disintegration of a relationship because of paranoia, isolation and distrust is quickly shat down the drain in favour of one of the most obvious storylines I've seen in recent years (the identity of the "natives" is given out in the first ten minutes).

Animal masks... again? Really?

Deadpool (2016)

If there was an award for wiseassery this film would win it hands down. I fucking hated it with every fibre of my being. After 10 minutes my daughter was on her DS, after 15 I was on my Kindle, after 30 minutes my wife admitted she hated it as well (not noticing that I'd been reading for 15 minutes). Maybe one day I may finish it but it's highly unlikely.

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Creep (2014)

Sorry, I just don't get it.
 

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Finders Keepers (2014)

Finders keepers, viewer weeper.

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47 Ronin (2013)

I'm only 8 minutes in and I feel I've seen enough to be able to rate the film. If it gets any better than half a star, I'll eat my dog.

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The Diabolical (2015)

diabolical adjective
2) BRITISH informal
disgracefully bad or unpleasant.

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Nurse 3-D (2013)

I don't think I've ever frowned quite as much during a film.

Letterbox Review

Things (1989)

This review is for the Intervision DVD.

"WARNING! HORROR and BRUTAL VIOLENCE in FULL COLOR"

Remember the old days when Plan 9 from Outer Space was considered the worst film ever made? These days it seems that milestone is being passed on an almost daily basis. We've had Manos: The Hands of Fate, Troll 2, The Room and more recently, the nil-budget, monster-movie exploitation of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. The appetite for shit is apparently still very healthy in an age of masturbatory, Spandex and cape-wearing explodavision.

I wasn't sure how to review Things, so I thought I'd try a method I had already used for Demons in My Head and pretty much list everything that happens in a low-rent, stream-of-consciousness type way. This seems to work well with these "what the fuck is happening" type films and to be honest I wasn't too bothered with plot spoilers in a film as notoriously disjointed as Things. So, let's get started...

Picture the following with 8-bit midi-synth and some nasty Casio-style backbeat playing in the background... well, when I say playing, it's more like start, stop, start, louder, rewind, stop, ff, stop, quieter, start. You get the idea.

A nuclear bomb goes off and we get the title screen. A man, Doug, asks a devil-masked woman to have his baby... but wait, the baby has already been born and bites his hand! Doug then wakes up... it was all a dream! He gets up and moves into the kitchen for some pills for his girlfriend. A door closes on its own. The title screen is displayed again along with the some disjointed credits...wait...freeze-frame...Amber Lynn is in this? Then she appears in all her hair-lacquered-within-an-inch-of-its-life, shoulder-padded glory as a newsreader with the name Amber Lynn! This is like some weird parallel universe where instead of being a world famous porn star she became a Fox News anchor with no idea of what her dialogue is, let along the camera! Two men (we'll call them Beardy and Mullet) knock at at Doug's door and get no answer. They let themselves in and pull a book and tape deck from the freezer... yes, the freezer. Beardy then describes the plot of the Evil Dead whilst they play the tape. Mullet then takes off his jacket and puts it in the freezer, because... well, just because. Doug appears, shouts, turns the tape off and disappears again. Beardy searches the kitchen cupboards, turns some taps on and off, and then flicks a plastic fish for no reason whatsoever. Amber Lynn is back! Then a shot of a man and a woman poking another man's decomposing hand. Then it just gets weird.

That's the first ten minutes or so and at this point I have to give up with my "stream-of-conciousness" idea as I'm spending to much time typing and not enough watching. So back to the standard review format.

There's a Robert Heinlein story called "And He Built a Crooked House" about a house built in an unfolded tesseract configuration which then collapses in on itself, becoming a weird quantum-mechanical, architectural conundrum. A house where you can climb the stairs only to find yourself at the bottom again and where you can walk into the kitchen and end up in the bedroom. Things is a little like that - you have entered a very strange dimension where even Rod Serling would fear to tread.

So we have some fun practical effects (I've seen much worse - I'm looking at you Cannibal Terror). The sound is all over the place with variable levels (just wait until you hear the paper-towels!), muffling, background hiss and some of the worst ADR outside of Hong Kong. The editing, and I use the word extremely loosely, is insane and completely incoherent. There is no shot composition at all and the picture quality is really, really bad - fuzzy, out of focus, blurry, pick an adjective. Then we come to the lighting! We have lighting, then no lighting, then red lighting, then yellow, then none, all within a single scene. Plot wise, so many things happen which have absolutely no bearing on the plot, character development or anything at all - they just happen! I'm sure there must be a plot in there somewhere, but I'm buggered if I can find it. The performances are bad but not the worst I've seen. In fact the doctor is up there with Torgo from Manos as one of my most favourite ever characters.

If there's one phrase that sums up Things it's "shit happens". It's almost like the director took the title a little too literally and took a big bucket full of "Things", threw them against a wall and filmed what stuck... and also what fell off into a gloopy mess on the floor.

I know all this makes the film sound terrible - and it is, it really is - but you can tell the film-makers really love horror and Things has a lot of heart. One to watch with friends and a large quantity of beer.

A masterpiece of incompetence.

Amber Lynn... why?

Letterboxd Review

Dark Power (1985)

The film starts with a young boy, aged about ten, walking through the woods with his toy bow and sucker-tipped arrows being chased by a pack of dogs. What! A boy aged ten in the 1980s should have made his own bow and nail tipped arrows and also had a belt full of pipe bombs! To be honest the dogs look more cuddly than vicious and I'd have been more afraid of being licked to death than mauled. Anyway, the snivelling and ill equipped boy is saved from his canine fate by an old beardy boy scout with a bull whip... Ladies and gentlemen I give you Lash Larue. Get used to the whip because he sure likes to use it! It was like party time at Madam Cyn's house during Parliament recess!

So the story is that an old man who kept some Toltec evil buried under his house dies and it's up to Lash Larue to put that genie back in the proverbial bottle. Unfortunately the house is soon let to four nubile young women and a creepy, racist brother. After that we just have to wait for the rather ridiculous killing to start.

The first half of the film almost like a show-reel for Lash Larue and that damned whip of his. Enough with the fucking whip! Plus his wise old man shtick gets a little tiring after a while.

There's a fair amount of "everyday racism" and a few n-bombs and I was hoping that the perpetrators were to be quickly dispatched as punishment. No, it took far too long. In fact it took way too long for any of them to die. Every one of these little bastards seemed to have stepped straight out of a shitty Porkies rip-off. At one point one of them flosses her teeth! Why do that on camera? Why not have a shit as well? Please stop it!

The four Toltec zombies are terrible with some of the worst masks and outfits I've seen in a horror film. Their bows seem to have strings made from underwear elastic, most of the killing scenes are pretty disappointing, and the comedic zombie routines were utterly misplaced. And that fucking xylophone that played when ever they were on screen drove me nuts! Plus that house must have the best sound insulation ever to stop the girls inside from hearing the zombie shenanigans going on outside.

Then, at long last Lash Larue and that fucking whip turns up to save the day. What do we get? Fucking "cavalry charge" music! That's right, a bearded white man turns up to save the poor women from the Native Americans with a trumpeted charge and a whip! Oh dear. A little while later, during a very, very, very dull bull-whip duel, he even calls one of the zombies "boy". As far as saving the day goes I don't think you could get any more racist unless there were a few burning crosses on the lawn.

Dark Power's biggest problem though is that its nearly 50 minutes until you see any blood! Simply inexcusable!

Unfortunately the picture on my Dead of Night DVD was bright and clear with reasonably clean audio, although the soundtrack does tend to drown out the dialogue a little.

Rubbish. Do yourself a favour and pass this one by. Anyone want to buy a DVD?

Letterboxd Review

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

At the moment Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is on TV. I've seen it before and, therefore know how crap it is. Therefore I'm watching Once Upon a Time on my laptop, whilst, out if the corner of my eye, I see Shia Labeouf try and play Marlon Brando for the Tweens who have no idea who Brando was. Shia is not Brando. Actually Spielberg gets it completely wrong; Brando's character in The Wild One wasn't even the bad-ass, that would be Lee Marvin in his stripped jumper. Marvin would grill and eat Labeouf for breakfast. I fucking hate this film and I really fucking hate Mr. "Paper Bag" Labeouf.

I've just turned the radio on and switched the TV off to get rid of his smug little face. I really, really hope Labeouf isn't famous any more and Spielberg, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Back to Once Upon a Time.

Letterboxd Review

Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

I did see Insidious, and no I didn't like it very much at all. Like the majority of viewers I quite enjoyed the first half then burst into laughter when "Darth Maul" made his, rather silly, appearance. So let's hope Maul gets binned for Chapter 2.

A good horror film works in the same way as a pressure release valve. The pressure builds until the valve opens and steam is vented in a high pressure jet. The valve closes and the pressure starts to build again. The problem with Insidious Chapter 2 (IC2) is that it cranks the valve open and closed so quickly and so often that: 1) the pressure doesn't build and 2) in the end the valve breaks. This is what happens when you rely on jump scares rather than a nice steady increase of tension and fear. That's not to say that IC2 only uses this technique, but it is used so often that you end up inured to it, and as they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

The film starts with a spooky house shot at a Dutch angle. So far so predictable. Unfortunately this predictability leads to clichés and they start to come thick and fast.

A chandelier moving slightly for no reason; wardrobe doors suddenly opening; spooky radio voices; spooky children's drawings; slow tracking shots down hallways; overly loud clocks; creaky doors; pianos that play themselves; radios that turn themselves on; toys that turn themselves on; spooky woman in white; a person crossing a corridor in the distance beyond the character in focus; spooky character in a mirror; a scary father straight out of The Amityville Horror; plenty of Dutch angles; a spooky nursery rhyme; doors that lock themselves; a spooky seance. All this and I've still an hour to go! Spooky deserted hospital; spooky doll; scary lady in black; scary old man; haunted elevator; spooky doll-house; spooky kids; haunted telephone (well, tin-can phone); spooky wardrobe; a chandelier that unscrews itself; banging; dry ice. There was so much spooky shit that I was waiting for a fucking clown to appear! It's like a tick list for horror idiots.

The dialogue is atrocious and lines that should be sinister come off as plain silly. Here's a couple of my favourites: a medium during a seance "I suppose I should have explained this isn't an exact science". A little later he also says "No! Do not break the circle!". Quality stuff. The soundtrack is just as bad and abuses the intelligence and emotional empathy of the audience by constantly shouting "Be scared... now!". Speaking of insulting the audience's intelligence; at one point a character, seeing a door mysteriously open says "So that's what that was about", referring to the same door mysteriously opening 30 minutes earlier in the film. Look Wan, we're not all morons with the memory of a goldfish!

The performances are fine apart from the evil witch, the thing under your bed, the big bad. Well you know Creedence Leonore Gielgud from Troll 2? It seems that James Wan managed to track her down and give her this pivotal role; just awful. Then there's the two paranormal investigators that are ripped straight from a Seth Rogen film. The "humour" they provide is completely misplaced and does nothing except kill what little tension there is.

Hopefully I don't come over as pompous here but IC2 is a horror film for people that don't like horror films or have never seen a proper horror film. There is nothing in it that is even remotely scary and the film relies on overused jump-scares to shock rather than engender a feeling of dread and, dare I say, horror.

Insidious Chapter 2 is lazy, cynical and cliché ridden with a distinct lack of subtlety. It's full of supposition, irrationality, giant leaps of logic and contrivance. It is a giant ball-bag of shite.

At least Barbara Hershey was in it, but if you want to see a truly scary film staring Ms. Hershey try Outer Space; an amazing horror short re-edited from footage from the 1982 film The Entity.

Letterboxd Review

Backdraft (1991)

According to Ron Howard firefighters are uber-macho arseholes that belong to some weird circle jerk of a boys club and, if they were on fire, I wouldn't waste piss on.

The real star of this film is fire which really does seem to live and breathe; the rest of the cast can burn as far as I'm concerned.

My daughter wants to be a firefighter (one of the real ones that I truly admire) and I'm going to do my best to make sure she never watches this shitty film.

I couldn't finish this re-watch.

Original letterboxd review