WATCHMEN

The first thing to say about Watchmen, is that if you have not already done so, I would beg you to read the book first.  Your first experience of Watchmen should without a doubt be the book. Then approach the film without pre-judging it.

A few years ago, when Paul Greengrass’s Watchmen movie had just been kyboshed, and it seemed destined to never happen, I met Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons at a comic convention. Having bided my time, whilst sweaty ebay enthusiasts got him to autograph every single comic book they could conceivably carry, I got him to sign my well thumbed copy of Watchmen, and as he did so I asked him what his opinions on a Watchmen movie were. He said he was fine with it, because at the end of the day the book is the book. That is the work. So if it was great he could enjoy it, and if it was rubbish it still would not tarnish Watchmen in his eyes. I thought this was a good attitude, and a much more open minded one than fusty old Alan Moore's (although in fairness to Alan Moore, the previous cinematic treatment of his work gives him more than reason enough to tell Hollywood to go fuck itself). Incidentally, not only did Dave Gibbons good naturedly sign everything put in front of him, but he sketched a quick version of Rorschach in my book! It remains one of my most prized possessions to this day.

So on to the Watchmen movie then. I am reviewing the theatrical cut as we Euros are still awaiting a release of a non blu ray directors cut (and now Ultimate Edition) that Region One got a fair few months ago. In the first instance I think the movie is very good. Whilst it is flawed by some measures, it is also spot on perfect in others. I understand that the Directors Cut is to address some of the problems, and as such when I finally get to see it I will expand upon this review accordingly.

During a cracking opening sequence we are treated to an alternate history of the World where masked superheroes/vigilantes exist and fight crime. Set up in an alternate 1985, against the backdrop of a USA where Nixon never lost office, and in turn escalated the Cold War as he played nuclear brinkmanship with his opposite number in the (still existent) Soviet Union.

With masked vigilantism now outlawed, the many threaded plot begins with the investigations into the murder of former crime fighter The Comedian (who’s blood stained smiley badge gives both book and film it’s most iconic image), and it’s trail of clues leading to a much bigger and overwhelming threat. We follow the gone to seed Night Owl, the new Silk Spectre, the self made rich and powerful Ozymandias, the godlike and truly superpowered Dr Manhatten, and the dangerously unstable and unremittingly violent Rorschach.

The point of Watchmen is that they aren’t really superheroes in the conventional sense. Apart from Dr Manhatten, they are all just costumed vigilantes. So it kind of lends a ‘reality’ to the superhero genre. As reaction to the marvel and DC superhero books it’s more along the lines of what it would actually be like if these people existed. They’re in the Batman side of things. Tough and hard, but not superpowered.

As far as the things that didn’t work go, in part I don't know if that's because they weren't properly handled, or if it was just a symptom of the fact I knew what was coming. But for starters, I felt there wasn’t much of sense of peril or nuclear fear. This would have been far better conveyed from showing the man on the street – newspaper seller and young kid from the book – rather than Nixon and his cronies.

Conversely, and on the plus side, they made Night Owl and the Owl ship seem a lot cooler than in the comic, and much of the film is devotedly faithful to the source material.

Ultimately what makes and saves the movie for me is Rorschach. He was so perfect it blew my mind. Jackie Earle Hayley even LOOKS like Dave Gibbons drawing! I can forgive most of the things that weren't right about this film simply because he was so utterly fantastic.

To the uninitiated the presence of a nude Dr Manhatten, with his blue dork dangling all over the shop, was the source of titillation and amusement. But what it gives more of an indication of is Zak Snyder's dogged pursuit of putting every authentic detail up on the screen.

Spoilers:

But it is this determination to be so faithful that initially makes the direction of the ending so alarming. To those who know and love the book it is indeed a shock. I certainly felt indignant to start off with. How could they do this?

But after a while, with the time to reflect and to actually think about it, I felt it really wasn't too bad. With the film weighing in at 2 1/2 hours already, a further subplot about the squid and its invention would have just bogged it down. And hey, Bubastis was still in it!

The end provokes more thought in you as to who and what Dr Manhatten is. He is the only person in the whole film with superpowers. Rendered omnipotent by a Hulk styled laboratory accident. Unlike Superman who was empowered not only by the Earth's yellow sun, but also by an unwavering desire to help, Manhatten doesn't want to help. He doesn't care. The convention of the benevolent superhero bestowed with fabulous powers, working to save humanity, is flipped on its head. Unlike Spiderman's mantra of "with great power comes great responsibility", for Manhatten, with great power comes no responsibility. He is the complete opposite of the conventional superhero. Humanity is of no consequence to him any more. He has such power that the human race has become insignificant. Although Dr Manhatten had no part in engineering Veidts masterplan, he was wholly complicit in perpetuating its lies. For the greater good or not, Manhatten could as much be considered a supervillain as he could a superhero. His loss of compassion and humanity would make him a monster in any other story. You almost wonder why Veidt simply did not ask him to do it in the first place.

For all intents and purposes the Dr Manhatten ending was the same as the book. As humanity is united against a common enemy, all their previous conflicts pale in comparison. Petty and inconsequential in the cold blue light of this new threat. For all the complaints, the spirit and objective is the same. It is the one thing in this movie that has taken a liberty with the book. And it IS a big liberty. But it’s not a disaster by any means. I think it works.

At the end of the day Dave Gibbons was right. The book is the book, and the film is the film, but it's a pretty great one at that.

IMDB: WATCHMEN

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

Going into this film I was, as I suspect a lot of people will be, more familiar with Bettie Page the icon than Bettie Page the person. I was largely unaware of her interesting life story and I would assume that was the reason this film was made. It’s an interesting and enjoyable biopic of a person whose iconic image looms larger than life!

The film charts the story from Betties early days in Nashville, through to her move to New York, burgeoning modelling career and subsequent retirement following a governmental crackdown on lusty material!

On occasion I felt it could have done with a ted more exposition. For example, I was unclear as to whether the times she was in Miami were all a flashback, or took place in the timeframe of the film where she was becoming well known. I also felt that tonally, some of the incidents in her early life (including some disturbing sexual abuse), did not sit well within the context of a film aiming for the same light-hearted naïveté that Bettie herself seemed to possess. Still, this was not to the detriment of the film overall.

Gretchen Mol was totally convincing as Bettie, and it was also good to see the excellent Chris Bauer (aka Frank Sobotka from The Wire) and dependably brilliant Lilli Taylor playing Betty’s employers / photography entrepreneurs.

Shot in black and white, but flicking back and forth with colour, it was an entertaining, well made biopic. It was interesting to see the outrage that Betties pictures caused at the time in the light of their relative tameness by today’s standards. But of course it would be ridiculous to judge it by today’s values.

This film is worth checking out.

IMDB: THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

TEETH

Saturday was Halloween. For some unknown reason, I decided it would be a good idea to abandon my plan to watch THE THING (one of the greatest movies of all time, and a worthy All Hallows Eve alternative to Carpenter’s Halloween which is always on telly). I favoured instead, to watch a movie I had not already seen, and thus I found myself watching Teeth.

The premise is interesting. A God fearing, celibate teen discovers she happens to have a second set of gnashers inconveniently located in her genitalia! Unfortunately this is where the term ‘interesting’ begins and ends as far as this movie is concerned. It’s badly acted, and criminally boring. There are a couple of amusing set pieces in the middle of the film, but it’s mostly just a tedious bloody chore.

The first hour or so is boring and annoying. Even when the ‘action’ starts up, the plot clumsily jerks to the end of the film with no real coherence or sanity. A sub plot with a policeman abruptly crops up and looks like it might actually go somewhere, but then disappears never to be seen again. It gives the impression that they came up with a good idea, a couple of set pieces, and then realised they had to build a film around it. They did not do a good job.

The metal dude older brother character is especially nauseating. Every word uttered is almost drowned out by an irritating Nu Metal soundtrack. As if some 18 year old kerrang reader is in the next room trying to drown the telly out with his latest Slipknot CD. As an aside, an easy way to avoid watching a shitty horror movie is just to look at the soundtrack. Any horror film that opts for an over reliance of Nu Metal is going to be shit because clearly the director is completely missing the point of metal, and thusly will miss the point of the horror genre in precisely the same way. This is an almost solid gold rule!

So yeah this film is a total waste of time. It says nothing and it does nothing other than irritate the piss out of me. It baffles me how an entire film can be made solely on a mildly interesting premise and nothing else. It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody somewhere is watching that shitty Simpsons episode with Kim Basinger and Ron Howard, and is about to rip off the idea of a film about a talking pie.

There is nothing of any merit here. Teeth is toothless.

IMDB: TEETH

[REC]

I had been wanting to see REC ever since it was on the cinema, but courtesy of an annoyingly limited run I didn’t get the chance. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of home deev, it lived up to my expectations as a tense, exciting, fast paced horror movie.

Set in Barcelona (judging by the fire-fighters jackets) it follows via hand held cameras, a magazine show news reporter and her cameraman, filming a neighbourhood  interest piece on the night shift at the local fire station. It is here we are introduced to two fire-fighters, Manu and Alex.

After sitting round twiddling their thumbs for most of the night, a seemingly mundane call comes in, and they set off on a routine job of breaking into a flat in which a woman is trapped. From the moment the hammer breaks the door the movie takes off at a lightning fast pace. We discover the inhabitants of the building have become infected with an unknown disease, turning them into rage fuelled 'zombies', similar to what happened in 28 days later actually.

Filmed handheld, it obviously conjures up comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which is no problem as both rely on almost unbearable levels of tension and stumbling through the dark with no idea of what is stalking them. However the pace is relentless, and it serves up some great, genuine scares! The start was brilliant and there are some truly startling set pieces. The tension is wound up snare tight, and it pretty much scared the bejeezuz out of me on a Sunday afternoon, so if watched late at night I'd have probably leapt out of my skin!

There are a couple of sticking points. Such as why the infection rate is so much quicker as the film goes on?  And disappointingly, it does cull somewhat too heavily from The Blair Witch in places. For a film that is pretty damn inventive and scary within the ridiculously stagnant Zombie genre, it was a shame they didn't quite manage to keep it up until the end.

Still, this is all small potatoes really, as overall I thought this film was REC-cellent!

IMDB: REC

DOOMSDAY

Doomsday is the third film from Neil Marshall, who has previously served up the rather good DESCENT, and the rather overrated DOG SOLDIERS. Doomsday was not so hot. The plot being that England has erected a kind of futuristic Hadrian’s Wall in order to keep the rabid Scotch at bay, having become infected with a deadly plague. It’s essentially stealing ideas left, right and centre from 28 Days Later.

The first half an hour or so was excellent fun. No lie. Really hokey, violent, badly acted sci fi. But in a good way. Owed a HUGE debt to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK - the heroine even had an EYEPATCH for Christ’s sake – in my book, if you’re gonna rip something off you can’t get much better than Escape From New York. 

Speaking of Escape From New York, the upcoming remake is frankly an idea based upon gargantuan idiocy. What are they hoping to achieve?  With their very best, most superhuman effort, they may be able to manage a movie ON PAR with the original. But it is impossible to surpass it. In fact, if it is as bad as I suspect, I shall have to travel to the Americas with the express purpose of kicking John Carpenter in the junk.

But I digress back to DOOMSDAY. Even Bob Hoskins playing Mr Cockney Stereotype couldn’t foul up the start. The only thing missing from his portrayal was a suit covered in buttons and a comment about how the ‘Krays sorted out London’. Otherwise every cockney box was ticked.

Unfortunately after such a promising start it couldn’t decide what film it was trying to be, and rapidly went downhill after it decided to go a bit primitive and medieval, only to later change its mind AGAIN and backtrack into cod Mad Max territory. NOTE: First two Mad Max films are perfect. If you try and rip them off you’re just going to end up looking like a right plum. This film is a case in point.

Also both principal hero and villain didn’t really have the chops for it. Rhona Mitra, whilst happening to be more beautiful than God, was something of the charisma vacuum. If she was a colour, she would be beige. Nobody gets offended by beige, yet it makes no impact either. Beige is the colour you choose in order to please the most number of people, despite the fact you would be hard pushed to find anyone who actively likes it or rates it as a favourite. There’s no beige crayon is there?

It doesn’t stop there either.  The main villain looked like a member of an Exploited tribute band. This is an exceedingly bad thing. Having no menace or presence at all is a bit of a stumbling block when it’s your raison d'être in a film like this, to exude both. For comparisons sake, Escape From New York had Isaac fucking Hayes as it’s main villain for crying out loud!

Conversely it had the ruddy brilliant Alexander Siddig in it, and underused him to the point of criminality. Hardly seen him in anything since Deep Space Nine, except from getting blowed up in an early episode of Spooks, and being the only reason to sit through 3 tedious hours of Kingdom Of Heaven. He should get more work. What on Earth is his agent up to?

Finally it had the WORST song and dance number (yes, you read that correctly – SONG & DANCE NUMBER!) in the history of moving pictures. It makes that awful bit in the second Matrix movie look like Singing In The Rain. It is so criminally awful that Neil Marshall ought to have served actual jail time for devising it. If John Logie Baird had forseen what horror this dance number would provide, he would surely have hurled his new fangled television machine into a ravine, content to let humankind lumber forward without accessible moving picture technology. And who amongst us could blame him?

To conclude my long winded rumination: it whiled away 2 hours, but after the first half hour or so, it’s pretty much bollocks!

IMDB: DOOMSDAY

VACANCY

Vacancy is a great thriller/horror which I really enjoyed. The fairly average reviews it got upon release did it a great disservice, as it was a far, far better film than they would have you believe.

The premise is that couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) get lost off the interstate, break down, and have to spend the night in a grotty run down motel in the middle of nowhere. In Hills Have Eyes style, it turns out they are out of cell phone range too. They bed down in their motel room, watching the tv to distract from having to converse with each other, when it suddenly becomes apparent that the horror film they are watching on tv is in actual fact an extremely real snuff movie that has taken place in their very room!

From that point on, the tension rachets up to unbearable levels, providing some genuine scares, with the fear coming from what would ordinarily be the mundane - phone ringing, door knocking, face at the window and so on. Director Nimrod Antal (soon to be directing Rodriguez’s new PREDATORS movie apparently) stated in the dvd extras that he was going for more of a Hitchcockian thriller than a horror movie, and I think he certainly nailed it for the most part. He sets his stall out with an excellent Hitchcock style title sequence with lots of discombobulating text. The story itself, with its creepy motel setting, obviously yanks the old memory chords in favour of PSYCHO.

It works because when the couple are trapped in the room, it is terrifying because of both the ludicrousness of the situation and the fact it remains very believable. It’s not giving too much away to say when they leave the room, and start running around the complex the scares are less effective because it becomes more of a chase / pursuit slasher flick.

My minor quibble is with the snuff films. I think they were a little too disturbing for the tone of the film. They were unpleasant to watch - even on the screen within a screen – and they ended up making the film stray too close to the kind of dreck Eli Roth excretes, and which this movie coasts loftily above. On the other hand they certainly helped invoke the fear of the couple trapped in the room. I just think I could have stood to have seen less of the footage. The wisdom of including them as dvd extras is most definitely lost on me though!

The other thing that sort of amused me was that one of the villans masks made him look like a grey William H. Macy!

I suppose, some parts of Vacancy were pretty predictable, but there's nothing wrong with predictability if done well, and this movie is a comfortably better than average horror thriller. It’s a good fun scare that will probably, undeservedly, slip under most peoples radar. Wilson and Beckinsale were both great and I would say this is perfect viewing for upcoming Halloween movie fests!

IMDB: VACANCY

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION

Having previously liked neither the Resident Evil films nor ANYTHING uber chump Paul WS Anderson has ever done, EVER.  In his entire life (thankfully he only produced this one). I went to this solely cause I was intrigued by the ‘zombies in the desert’ concept.

I gotta say it was rather enjoyable all round. It stole a tad from Day Of The Dead (military stronghold surrounded by zombies, plus attempts to domesticate the fiends) and also Slither (in it’s monster design), and had an almost identical end-of-level-boss style ending to the other two films. However the villan was a great b-movie English ‘basterd’ and it was surprisingly good - a lot of post apocalyptic fun! Far better than recent zombie garbage like Diary Of The Dead, and it was directed by Russell Mulcahy who is responsible for RAZORBACK, and is therefore a winner in my book.

IMDB: RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION

TAKEN

Liam Neeson plays a character crossed between Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne and Horatio off CSI Miami. It is morally and politically suspect – one huge, throbbing right wing boner of a movie, but it turned out to be something of a guilty pleasure.

Neeson has to track down his kidnapped daughter using as much ultraviolence as possible. Essentially the plot (wafer thin as it is) was pretty much lifted wholesale from Commando except without the jokes. It should have been filmed on a much lesser budget and turned up on Channel Five on a Friday night in about a years time. In fact I can’t help but think that Liam Neeson must live on the same street as Steven Seagal and that a rookie postman delivered the script to the wrong house. This resulted in Neeson stomping around Paris being exceptionally po faced, and kicking all kinds of miscellaneous euro ass.  Whilst perhaps in return, Steven Seagal will turn up soon in a tense political thriller?

For a film so utterly preposterous it takes itself WAAAAY too seriously. So all signs point toward this being terrible, and by rights it should be. But as I say, it’s quite the guilty pleasure, and if you don’t enjoy Neeson calmly telling a  terrorist about his ‘certain set of skills’, then you just can’t enjoy anything!

IMDB: TAKEN

DØD SNØ (DEAD SNOW)

On paper this should have been excellent. All you need to say to a horror nerd is "Nazi Zombies" and their eyes light up. Combine that with a tagline of such unbeatable genius as - "Ein, Zwei, Die" - and how can you go wrong?

A group of friends on a ski trip generally muck about, quote Indiana Jones and go on a beano to the hut from The Evil Dead. They then encounter a bunch of rather nasty undead with a bent for national socialism.

The trailer for DEAD SNOW made it look brilliant, and that's where the films problems lie. The trailer made it look TOO good, and the film itself does not have the chops to live up to that promise. Don't get me wrong, it's decent enough. Fun, even. But unfortunately it nods its head, tips its hat and wryly winks toward such classic flicks as The Evil Dead and Dawn Of The Dead so much, that it forgets to do anything original for itself. The difference between affectionate homage and being completely derivative is a fine line. It's doesn't plumb the depths of such dismal, rehashed dreck like DEAD SET, but it can't quite live up to the idea of what it SHOULD have been.

IMDB: DØD SNØ (DEAD SNOW)

INTRODUCTORY POST

So this is my introductory post! I have pondered doing this blog for while now, as I enjoyed reviewing a bunch of films I’d seen and posting them up on the various messageboards I seem to find myself frequenting. The logical conclusion seemed to be to turn this pass-time into a blog – and lo and behold here it is. If you’ve ever read my fanzine REMAINS OF A CAVEMAN then you will know what to expect. Reviews will take 2 forms:

1) The rage filled rant, whereby I get personally insulted by how bad a particular film is, AND

2) The superlative laden, fanboy obsessed love-in.

So with that in mind, over the next few days I intend to upload my existing recent reviews, and then once that is done I shall review whatever I see fit, as and when I watch it. It will pretty much follow whatever I decide would be good to watch – hence the subtitle ‘my life in movies’.

Hope you enjoy it – but if not, don’t sweat it. This is mostly for my own benefit anyhow.

THE RULES

The Indiana Jones movies exist as a trilogy. We do not recognise the existence of a fourth movie.

This blog bestows a high approval rating for early John Carpenter, the Coen Brothers, Raimi, Alexandre Aja, Mike Judge, Wes Anderson.

George Lucas is a dick.