This is England '90 (2015)

This whole sequence has been like looking at my life, my friends, my music, my politics, my misdemeanours, fuckups and triumphs. In turns, hilarious and deeply moving. Ken Loach for Generation-X. Woody is a legend!

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Demonic (2015)

Yet another horror-lite featuring annoying young shits in a haunted house told with flashbacks and found-footage. You're left counting the minutes until their inevitable and not very scary demise. The good stuff: the police parts with Detective Frank Grillo and Maria Bello as a Doctor of Stuff. The worst: Bryan the arsehole and that bloody psychic girl.

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Iron Man 3 (2013)

Loved Ben Kingsley as Trevor the drug-addled Mandarin.

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iBoy (2017)

iBOLLOCKS

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Lucy (2014)

The Fifth Element, Part 2: Packed with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo but a fun ride, nonetheless. I liked the homage to The Time Machine and book-ending the story with Australopithecus Lucy.

Anyway, who cares as Denis Villeneuve is set to direct the new Dune adaptation. Nothing at all to do with Lucy, but yay!

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Criminal (2016)

It passed the time. I can see they really wanted a franchise out of this and it has a decent premise to work with but the execution ultimately failed. It would have worked quite nicely as a TV show.

WARNING: Piers Twatface makes a brief appearance :(

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The Equalizer (2014)

There's one thing missing, and that's the mythology; the Equaliser appearing out of the shadows like a trench-coated angel of vengeance (a bloody Michael Landon, if you will), only to disappear again afterwards. This is played more like a by-the-numbers revenge thriller with a bit of an origin story tacked on. Not as bad as I thought it would be.

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London Has Fallen (2016)

They've only gone and bloody blown London up, ain't they!

Really, really, really stupid but just what I needed on a Friday afternoon. Oh, and Charlotte Riley's in it.

At the end, did I really hear that right? Prime Minister Clarkson? I think I'd rather be blown up!

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London Spy (2015)

I don't know what I loved more; Ben Whishaw, Edward Holcroft, Jim Broadbent or Jim Broadbent's beautiful house and car. Bloody good stuff! Minus a star for Adrian Lester, who I've never been fond of and the crappy, elegiac pop music in the final and slightly corny scene.

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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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The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

More chopsocky than you can shake a Qi Mei Gun at!

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Phase IV (1974)

Aggression vs. intelligence vs. ants with the lovely Lynne Frederick. I, for one, welcome our formic acid spraying overlords!

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Sennentuntschi (2010)

A Swiss, neo-giallo fairytale? Sennentuntschi reminded me a great deal of Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling with its themes of religion, superstition and mob-rule but adds misogyny to the mix.

The flashback within a flashback structure is handled extremely well and keeps you guessing whether the Sennentuntschi is supernatural or mundane right up until the end.

Pretty chilling stuff if a little overlong.

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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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Z for Zachariah (2015)

Apparently, science is northern, black, aggressive, immoral and destructive whereas religion is southern, white, moral, natural, tolerant and wholesome.

Obvious, more than a little obnoxious and dull.

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Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Possibly the most boring title sequence ever!

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Afraid of the Dark (1991)

My wife is partially blind. It's a neurological blindness rather than ocular, so her eyes work perfectly well but her brain only interprets the signals for her left field of vision, leaving her completely blind on her right-hand side. Anyway, a few years back I thought that I would try a simple task whilst completely blind. I tightly closed my eyes, got up from the sofa and walked into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. I have rarely felt so afraid and confused. Is that the coffee jar or the sugar jar? How do I know when the spoon has coffee in it? How do I know when the spoon full of coffee in over the mug? How do I know when the kettle spout is above the mug and how do I know when the mug is full and not overflowing? Somehow I managed without burning myself, walked back to the sofa and drank the coffee with my eyes still closed. 20 minutes of blindness. 20 minutes of fear. Try it sometime, it'll really open your eyes. This film perfectly captures that feeling.

Afraid of the Dark features a top-notch list of British actors (James Fox, Paul McGann, David Thewlis, Rosalind Knight, Hilary Mason, Sheila Burrell, Robert Stephens, and ...drum roll... Catriona MacColl!). Terrific!

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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?

Holidays (2016)

1 (Valentine's Day): Terrible, appalling, total shit. 0.5 out of 5
 
2 (St Patrick's Day): I'm guessing this was supposed to be funny and surreal? It wasn't. 1 out of 5
 
3 (Easter): A tale of how Easter's crazy mix of Christian and Pagan resurrection/rebirth myths can fuck with a kid's head, especially one whose dad has recently died. 3.5 out of 5
 
4 (Mother's Day): Watching new-age hippies cavort in the desert for no payoff was not how I wanted to spend 12 minutes of my life. 1 out of 5
 
5 (Father's Day): An interesting story about grief and the resurfacing of lost memories. The poor ending lets the whole thing down though. 2.5 out of 5
 
6 (Halloween): Dull rape-revenge stuff that has fuck all to do with Halloween. 1 out of 5
 
7 (Christmas): A bit of a turkey! 2 out of 5
 
8 (New Year's Eve): I could see the twist coming but it was fun nonetheless. I still fucking hate New Year's eve, though. 3 out of 5

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Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

The only sequel to come close to the fun of the original (I still need to see IV)? Good to see Michelle Rodriguez and the Red Queen make a reappearance. Good level design, nice end-of-level baddies, lots of Milla goodness but the supporting cast, with a couple of exceptions, still suck.

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