25/08/15

Happy birthday, Smalls!

24/08/15 7lives (2011)

If Hollywood is the western world's city of films, then London must be a small, distant village. Every village needs an idiot.

Anyway, this is a Danny Dyer film.

I'm trying to picture his face, but all I'm seeing is A pint of lager wearing a West Ham shirt, with twenty Bensons floating in it as it swaggers around telling people to 'Leeev it aaaaht, Shirley' and other such rubbish.

I dunno, the film's actually got an interesting idea going on and I'd be lying if I said it didn't hold my attention. So, yeah, not bad.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1558246/

5.7/10

Perkin.

24/08/15 Broken Horses (2015)

Some, critics have bigged this film up as a bit of a masterpiece.

Here's why it's not:

The plot. Two brothers grow up in a small town, the younger one is sensitive and upon reaching adulthood, goes of to live in the big city. The other, a rather lesser-witted fellow, stays behind and makes a living as a goon for the local crime boss.

Younger brother returns and infiltrates the gang in an attempt to extract dummo from its clutches. Along the way there's the occasional shooting and beating.

The main activity of the gang of bad guys appears to be, well, just that, 'Grrr, we're baddies! Be careful around us!'

Is there anything in that plot which isn't straight out of some piss-poor Stevan Seagal bollocks? This doesn't even have the comedy value of that mumbling, tubby pensioner pretending to beat up people much younger than him.

The acting. I think Anton Yelchin has been very good in everything I've seen him in, certainly the ONLY thing of merit in Terminator Salvation. However in this he spends most of the film squeaking a few lines of dialogue and looking like he's about to cry. The guy playing his brother is less like a realistic portrayal of someone with a limited IQ, and more like someone doing a prolonged playground 'spazz' impression. Vincent Donofrio's gang leader lacks any real sense of menace and seems rather portly and camp, like a redneck version of Uncle Monty from Withnail And I.

I think the relationship between the brothers is meant to be akin to Steinbeck's Lenny and George, including the sense of trying to avoid inevitable disaster, but instead... Fuck all this, the film's shit.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2503954/

3/10

Perkin.

22/08/15 Wrong Turn 3 (2009)

The first Wrong Turn film is the best. When I saw that again recently, I thought it was shit. Therefore...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1261978/
1/10

Perkin.

21/08/15 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

Played much straighter than you'd think. It mostly works. I mean it's shit, obviously, but fun enough in an undemanding way.

Abraham Lincoln is very nearly an anagram of Colin In A Ham Bra. Thank you.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1611224/

6.5/10

Perkin.

21/08/15 The Detective (1968)

The trivia about this film is that it was based on a book, the sequel to the book was the one that Die Hard was an adaptation of. Due to some contract law or something, Frank Sinatra, the star of this, had to be given first refusal to play John McClaine when Die Hard went into production.

I was going to say how different a film that would be, but thinking about it, seeing a septuagenarian in a vest leap off a skyscraper using a firehose bungee might actually have been magnificent.

Hans Gruber "Go and get McClaine!"

Henchman "How do we find him?"

Hans Gruber "Follow the trail of Werther's Originals wrappers. And piss."

Henchman "He's stealthy, Hans. Those carpet slippers make him almost silent!"

Hans Gruber "The creak of his hip will always give him away if he's close. Or place a bus stop somewhere in the building, people of his age seem to be magnitised to them."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, when the film's doing the investigative, policey stuff, it's pretty good, when it's droning on about Sinatra's marriage, it's boring. Also, it's possibly the only time you'll ever hear Ol' Blue Eyes say the words 'semen stains'.*

*Apart from his little known 1958 album 'The Mrs Is At Bingo, Break Out The Blast-Sock'.

Fucking hell, you've read this far? Well done, I would've given up ages ago. Such a load of twaddle.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062883/

6.4/10

Perkin.

20/08/15 Poltergeist Activity (2015)

A recently widowed chap and his daughter move into a haunted cottage.

Not on purpose of course, that'd be bloody silly, wouldn't it. Unless you were a hauntologist or something, then you might choose to move there. Although you'd also probably want to keep your hauntolgy to office hours.

Anyway, point is they didn't know it was haunted. They do by the end of the film due to ghost things happening.

It's a pretty formulaic low budget, spooky house (cottage) film, but the performances from Pops and daughter are actually pretty decent and they were enough to forgive some of the more patchy moments.

The post-credits sequence is silly bibbins though.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3231734/

6.2/10

Perkin.