SIMON REAMES: Piranha 3D – Review

When I first heard of Piranha 3D I thought it was an 80s B-movie being re-released and gave it no further attention. I then saw the trailer and thinking it was a remake, again gave it no further attention. Then, having nothing else to watch, I gave it some attention.

The plot (if you can call it that!) is a simple and straightforward one. After a minor earthquake opens up an underwater cave on Lake Victoria, scientists dive down to explore this new cavern. But when they are attacked by a pack of piranha (finally being released from the cave) the local sheriff has no option but to shut down the lake. However, it is also American Spring Break with thousands of college students all looking for fun on and in the water.

Right from the start you can tell this is not going to be a cinematic great but rather a tongue-in-cheek homage to monster and B-movies of the 70s and 80s. Any attempt at seriousness is left well and truly alone with the main aim being to create a fun film. This is done brilliantly and you can’t help but smile when you see the little in-jokes and references that come up on screen. The film starts out well and introduces you to all the main characters, back stories and plot quickly so it can get on and show you as much piranha-induced gore as possible in 88 fairly fast-paced minutes. The acting is decent (given that the only emotions needed are scared, terrified and dead) and when the film gets going the action scenes are gory with a touch of humour added to lighten the mood. The special effects are pretty good throughout (all relying on CGI) and the plot does its best to keep you entertained. Having seen this only in good old-fashioned two dimensions, I cannot comment on the 3D; however, I have heard that some of the scenes do (try to) jump out at you. My one criticism is that any tension that could be used is forsaken for humour and over-the-top gore. This is a shame as there are some moments when, had things been done differently, this would have been a tense and decent horror film.

At a time when monster movies seem to be about trying to scare or disgust you with gore, Piranha 3D goes down a different route and tries to provide a modern day equivalent of the old-style monster films from the 70s and 80s; and I think that it has done just that. It is definitely not a contender for best film but it is lighthearted and fun. If you are looking for a true horror film you will be disappointed. However, if you take it as it is meant you will get a fairly entertaining way to spend an hour and a half.

Watch the trailer here!
7/10

REVIEWS: Simon Reames reviews 'The Thing' (2011)

The Thing (2011) – Review

When I first heard a new version of The Thing was being considered I began to despair as this was right in the middle of Hollywood’s current trend to remake everything they can as badly as possible (A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th to name a recent few). Then rumours began to circulate that this was actually going to be a prequel centred on what occurred at the Norwegian Base and be pretty faithful to the original. My interest went up a notch but I still had my doubts. After waiting over a year, The Thing (2011) has been released, and all I can say is it has been worth the wait and my sincerest apologies for the doubts!

The plot centres around a group of scientists at a Norwegian Antarctic Base who stumble across a monumental discovery: an extraterrestrial spacecraft buried in the ice with its owner lying frozen not too far away. After bringing in a specialist graduate student to help with the discovery, the team manage to retrieve the extraterrestrial from the ice and take it back to their base for analysis. Little do they know that the alien organism is still very much alive and able to mimic the things it comes into contact with….

The original 1982 John Carpenter film by the same name (although a box office flop) is now a cult classic and so any film associated with this original masterpiece would have to equal or better it. Thankfully, director Mattijs van Heijningen Jr did just that!

Being a prequel, the film is limited on where it can go and what it can do without breaking any of the rules that are established in the original but this is done to perfection. The set pieces are stunning (and tie in with the original perfectly) and the acting is just as good. The plot allows you to see things go from bad to worse without losing any momentum, and the atmosphere created is just as good as in the original with a few jumpy moments thrown in as well. From the start of the film, you get the feeling that the director and screenwriters are fans of the original. They have done everything they can to tie this film in with the original to create a seamless link between the two (everything from the bloodied axe in the wall to the how the two-faced Thing came about is created) to such an extent that the end credits are the start of the original.

My only (minor) negative about the film is the use of CGI instead of animatronics. Although this does add another dimension to the film, allowing the Thing to be seen in all its gruesome glory, the original was so special to me because you could see there was something there for the characters to interact with rather than them responding to something that will be digitally added later on. However, this is only a minor point and doesn’t detract from the film in any way.

For those who have seen the original, you know how this film is going to end right from the start and this may seem like a negative point, but it’s the journey of how you get to the start of the original that makes this film as good as the 1982 film. This is definitely a film to see on the big screen and one to add to your collection when it is released next year.

Watch the trailer here!
9.5/10

SIMON REAMES, FILM REVIEW, 11-11-11

11-11-11 Review

From director Darren Lynn Bousman; the director of Saw II, III and IV; I was expecting his latest film to be on a similar line as his previous films with masses of shock, gore and images of people getting their deserved or undeserved comeuppance in plenitude. It was a welcome surprise to find that was about as far from expectations as possible. Unfortunately, that was where the surprises stopped.

The basic premise of the film is that Joseph Crone (our ‘hero’ Timothy Gibbs) is mourning the death of his wife and child when he starts to discover that ‘strange’ things are happening to him in conjuncture with the numbers 11-11. At the same time as discovering this he is called back to Barcelona from America to be with his dying and estranged father and religious brother. As you would expect, these ‘strange’ occurrences continue to plague him as the date 11-11-(20)11 gets closer.

At the start you do wonder what the title has to do with the film and as it progresses, there is a tiny bit of interest to find out exactly what happens. While watching the film you cannot but help see that this is a lacklustre effort that looks to be cobbled together quickly. Although the original story is intriguing, it is let down by poor acting, basic special effects, predictable and droning dialogue and some suspect editing (continuity does not appear to be important in some scenes).

While trying to keep within the horror genre, the film tries to keep you on the back foot by only knowing what the main character knows (which is not much to be fair) and there are plenty of night scenes with shadowy figures and some attempts to make you jump but all fail to hit their intended marks. As the story progresses, you immediately know that there is going to be a surprise twist ending but this becomes evident halfway through and you just end up waiting to see how right you were.

It is a shame as the film has an interesting and somewhat original plot at its centre; it just struggles to come through. Apart from noticing the glaringly obvious continuity errors, 11-11-11 plods on and you start losing interest in what could’ve been a different and enjoyable film.

4/10

RICHARD REVIEWS: Boggy Creek (2010)

BOGGY CREEK (2010) DIR: Bryan T Jaynes, Studio 3 Entertainment
Way back in 1972 Charles E. Pierce directed the cult classic The Legend of Boggy Creek, a docu-drama based on sightings of skunk apes in Boggy Creek, Arkansas. Though filmed on a very limited budget, the film was remarkably good. It was moody, creepily realistic and subtle in its menace. The shadowy man-thing of the swamps was never clearly seen. Instead it was a lurking, nocturnal presence, and all the more effective for it.

The film spawned two sequels, neither of which were as good as the original. Then news broke of a modern remake. I’d always thought that the original could work as a remake if done with care. Sadly it was not. Jaynes’s film lacks all the soul and heart of Pierce’s. It is merely another slasher movie dressed up in cryptozoological garb.

The action, for no good reason I can see, is moved to Texas from Arkansas and revolved around a young woman, Jennifer Dupree (Melissa Carnell), returning to her remote childhood home. Years before her father had died under strange circumstances that had been written off as a hit and run. She brings an entourage of annoying ‘friends’ to stay for a weekend at the lakeside house. A gun-toting neighbour warns them about creatures in the swamp that kill and mutilate men, and drag off women to breed with. They all laugh off his stories but guess what: there are killer ape-men in the swamp!

The rest is achingly predictable. One by one the men are ripped apart and the girls hauled off for some rough monkey love. The creatures, what little is seen of them, are truly dire. They look like no description of the Boggy Creek creature, instead resembling a cross between an acne-riddled Neanderthal and a moth-eaten version of Chewbacca from Star Wars. In fact the film is more like a remake of James C. Wasson’s 1980 video nasty Night of the Demon (not to be confused with the 1957 classic), wherein mullet-haired students are graphically and pointlessly ripped apart by a laughably unconvincing sasquatch (with voodoo rituals thrown in for good measure). But whereas Night of the Demon has a kitsch entertainment value, Boggy Creek lacks even this.

Apparently this year Dustin Ferguson directed The Legacy of Boggy Creek, another docu-drama based on the Arkansas events and sightings in the four decades since it first appeared. I’ve yet to see this film but I hope it is a worthy successor to The Legend of Boggy Creek because the wretched, imagination-lacking disaster Jaynes has offered up certainly isn’t.

0/10

RICHARD FREEMAN SHOULD TELL US WHAT HE REALLY THINKS

ATTACK THE BLOCK
Dir Joe Cornish


Big Talk Productions 2011

Call me old-fashioned but any film that seeks to make heroes out of gangs of chav, hoodie criminal scum is never going to sit right with me. At the start of the film a bunch of cowardly, knife-wielding thugs mug a lone woman for her mobile phone. Then we are expected to except them as the heroes of the film. I think not.

Also the film has a nasty anti-intellectual streak running through it. A clever youth is sneered at simply for knowing zoological terms. The message this cinematic turd is sending out is that it’s fine to be a rap-obsessed, violent, yellow-bellied, thieving piece of filth but it’s laughable to be intelligent. I’ve seen this growing in UK society for years.

The patois spoken by the gang involved is so impenetrable that it makes Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange look like the Queen’s English. The films glorification of drug ‘culture’ is exceptionally unpleasant as well.

The plot line could be written on the back of a fag packet. For what it’s worth, here it is. Fresh from mugging a single girl the band of teenaged thugs are attacked by a small alien that drops from the sky into a car. They manage to kill the baboon-sized beast. Unknown to them it is a small female and now the gang leader has alien pheromone all over him. Larger male aliens fall to earth in meteors and start to persue the gang leader, killing everyone in their path.

Attack the Block fails as science fiction, fails as drama and fails as comedy. The aliens themselves look great: like a cross between black shuck and a gorilla with spiky fur so dark it stands out against pitch black and jaws filed with rows of luminous turquoise teeth. They would look marvellous in an episode of Dr Who, but here they are just wasted. Also there are no adequate explanations as to why the creatures come to Earth in the first place.

Not even Nick Frost can save this one. God knows how they roped him into this flick but they give him no decent lines and his character doesn’t really get to do anything.

A sloppy, lazy plot with incomprehensible script and a truly vile sound track (I loathe rap ‘music’ - you might as well listen to road works and call that music) are the icing on the crappy cake that is this film. I once spent a night drinking with a Hollywood producer and a Hollywood director in a remote bar in rural north Devon. I asked them how god-awful scripts and ideas are turned into films. They told me that it’s all a matter of knowing someone on the inside or being an insider yourself. Like TV, the film world revolves around nepotism. If this script had not been written by one half of Adam and Joe but by your average Joe then it would never have seen the light of day.

Avoid this utter discharge at all costs. Don’t waste time watching it at the pictures. Don’t bother buying the DVD when it comes out. Don’t even bother watching it when it turns up on some crappy cable channel at one in the morning.
0/10

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OLL LEWIS: Film Review - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt1

The Harry Potter saga will, I'm sure, need little introduction to readers of this blog. What started off as a children's book gradually became more complex and mature as the series progressed, to the extent that by the end of the series it probably had more adult fans than kids.

In filming the final book of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the film-makers made the decision to tell the story over two films. This may well be a cynical ploy to milk as much money as possible from the franchise but from a film adaptation stand-point it works really well and I wish they had thought of doing this with earlier films in the series, the weakest of the film adaptations, Order of the Phoenix, would have benefited from this approach immensely as being based on a huge tome, it had to cut out so many scenes and characters from the film it ended up feeling rushed and making little sense unless you had read the book beforehand. The extended overall running time allows DHpt1 to bring in characters from the books that have not made it to the big screen before like Mudugus Fletcher and Bill Weasley. Based on this it is also a possibility that Hogwart's poltergeist, Peeves, might at long last make an appearance in part 2 as well.

Although I loved the book, it was not without its flaws, the worst being a camping sequence in the middle that dragged on and on, wasting a big section of the book without much happening until #SPOILERS# Ron destroys a horocrux containing part of Lord Voldemort's soul. The film-makers have wisely reduced this section in the movie and livened it up a bit too. As a result of this and the quite frankly marvellously executed action set pieces the film feels a lot slicker and tighter than the book.

Speaking of the action set pieces the one that stands out the most is when Harry, Ron and Hermione sneak into the ministry of magic, which has been turned into a nazi-style propaganda operation to emphasise the superiority of wizards over 'muggles' run by the antagonist of Order of the Phoenix Deloris Umbridge. The film ends with the death of Dobby and Voldemort breaking open Dumbledore's grave to obtain his wand, which is part of a trio of powerful magical items known as the deathly hallows, after which the book and film are named. This leaves on a cliffhanger, which makes you all the more eager to see the second part when it is released later this year. The acting, as one might expect from such an accomplished cast including some of the most renowned actors currently working in cinema and theatre, is superb and over the years the film's child stars Radcliffe, Grint and Watson have received a master-class in acting from a variety of respected directors and their adult co-stars, which has fashioned them into great actors as well.

It is honestly impossible to fault the film and for any fan of the books this is the adaptation you've been waiting for.

10/10

LIZ CLANCY: Vipers! film review

In a nutshell: pharmaceutical company creates GM snakes because their venom has been found to cure cancer but the ordinary snakes aren't producing the stuff quickly enough. The snakes escape (admittedly I don't know how as I was making cuppasoup) and terrorise a nearby island called Eden Cove - cue plenty of eye-rolling.

Eden Cove is idyllic till the killer vipers arrive: their first victims had been enjoying their honeymoon and reluctant to return home and "leave that view." They were eaten alive in their tent while doing what newlyweds do....

Then the man who left his wife for his secretary finds the secretary eaten alive in their bed after she thinks the snake crawling up her leg is her lover's caresses! I began to wonder if there was some kind of trend developing because the ex-wife of said lover is, along with her own new lover, next on the menu. I half-expected there to be characters called Eve, Adam and God, but apparently the filmmakers didn't want to be too biblical.

Having said that, one of the surviving main characters did own a garden centre. By the end she had fallen in love with the island's saviour, a former US army marine and doctor to boot; big surprise.

Needless to say, it wasn't all that good a film, though if you just want a little background noise for whatever reason, I reckon it would do the job well.

OLL LEWIS: CFZ REVIEW - The Men Who Stare At Goats

In 2004 friend of the CFZ Jon Ronson, aided by John Sergeant, wrote a book called The Men Who Stare at Goats and made a documentary of the same name about a secret campaign by the American military to investigate the possible training of psychic spies and unconventional techniques that could be applied in conflicts during the height of the cold war. Many people in these post-cold-war times are now aware that there was no real danger of actual all-out war between the Americans and their allies, and the USSR, and that it was mostly just posturing to justify the positions of the two superpowers, and also used as a tool by governments to keep their citizens in check and provide convenient hate figures safely outside domestic politics, but a lot of people were drawn into this war of ideals at the time with many living in fear of the day the bombs would drop, and many lives were lost in satellite conflicts.

There was a constant fear among the military establishment of both sides that the other might develop some ultimate weapon without the obvious drawbacks of an atom bomb with which they could hold the other side to ransom, or spying techniques that could not be detected. So when the USSR heard reports that America had been developing psychic spies they started a program of their own to look into the possibility. The original reports had been a hoax but now that the USSR were looking into the prospect seriously the Americans had to follow suit or risk being defenceless in the slim chance there was something in all this. With that the American military started their own research into unconventional warfare techniques, the most leftfield of which was the new age ‘First Earth Battalion,’ which hoped to create a squad of warrior monks capable of resolving conflicts through non, or minimal violence. These warrior monks, sometimes referred to as Jedi, would be capable of changing the enemies' opinions by psychic will, phasing through solid objects, invisibility and remote viewing. Along with this program the US went on to develop psychic weaponry techniques, one such technique being the ability to stop a person's heart by staring at them. This was tried out on goats with very limited success - one goat died but this may have just been pure chance.

The unusual program and its successors, which were put to use in the recent Iraq conflict, form the basis for the comedy film The Men Who Stare At Goats staring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. Unlike the book the film follows a straight narrative told through events in ‘the present’ as McGregor’s naïve journalist character follows Clooney’s character, an ex-psychic warrior who now owns a dance studio, into Iraq on a top secret mission. The story of the psychic spy/warrior monk/Jedi program, headed by Jeff Bridges’s character, with Spacey’s character throwing several spanners into the works, is told as a concurrent storyline using flashbacks. Overall, the film works quite well and this is largely due to the fantastic cast. Not since the classic days of Hollywood has there been a film with so many actors at the top of their game staring in the same film, McGregor plays his role perfectly without a trace of any previous characters he has played (Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Connery would do well to take note) and Clooney’s time spent on Coen brothers’ films has paid off vastly as his portrayal of a confident man who may be either possessed of super powers or completely insane is completely without fault and will have you guessing throughout. Maybe after his portrayal of the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland Johnny Depp should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch this movie 50 times as a lesson in how to portray madness properly without just resorting to a Scottish accent and doing anachronistic dances. Kevin Spacey also impressed as a ‘not very’ psychic spy consumed by jealousy for Clooney’s character’s abilities, a highlight of which was a Shirley-Ghostman-like scene when Spacey channelled his spirit guide to look at a picture in a locked draw, got the answer completely wrong and had a tantrum. For me, though, the star of the film was Bridges. I’m of the opinion it is damn near impossible to have a bad film with Bridges as one of the actors; two Bridges films make my all time top 5, The Big Lebowski and Tron and had the last half hour of this film managed to keep up the momentum of the first hour then The Men Who Stare At Goats really could have joined them.

The last half hour of the film really is where cracks begin to show: with the Bridges's heavy flashback storyline all but finished, the film turns its focus on the present day story in Iraq and most of the fun feels like it has been taken out of the film by this point, leaving only the rather stark realities of modern warfare, torture and the ultimate moral that the media would rather peddle a funny news story than look at the uncomfortable truth behind it. Somehow the pay-off at the end of the film doesn’t seem quite as satisfying as it could have been, but at least the very last scene of the movie will bring a smile to your face and provides a good juxtaposition to the first.

All in all, the first two thirds of the film provided an hour of impressive entertainment but after that, it started to flag and went downhill. That is not to say that the final half hour was bad; it just couldn’t compare to what had gone before and ended up as an anticlimax, but the film is still worth a watch, particularly if you need a good Jeff Bridges performance to keep you going until True Grit and Tron Legacy are released later this year.

7.5/10

FILM REVIEW (Oll Lewis) Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

OLL LEWIS'S FILM REVIEW: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

Last Friday evening I was wasting time on Facebook when I noticed some exciting news on the Tron Legacy fanpage. A new and exclusive trailer for the film would be played in three glorious dimensions in cinemas before Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film.

Being already pathetically and childishly excited about the forthcoming sequel to one of my favourite films of all time I obviously would have to see this new trailer as soon as possible, so I made plans to get up at stupid o’clock the next day so I could feed all the animals before catching a bus for the lunchtime showing of the film. However, in their ‘wisdom’ the local cinema decided that rather than seeing the new and exclusive trailer for one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the last 10 years people would much rather see an outdated trailer for Alvin and the Chipmunks 2. I fully intend to write a letter not only to my local MP but also to the Queen about this, so great is my disappointment! But anyway, Tim Burton films are usually pretty fun to watch so my money would not be wasted, I thought.


How wrong I was.

I had been in two minds about seeing Alice in Wonderland before I was whipped into a light cycle-related frenzy because alarm bells had already been rung when I had found out that far from being a true adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland this would be an ‘original’ story set several years on. What transpired before my eyes was badly written fan-fiction that bore very little resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s stories. The plot is very much event- rather than character-driven, it feels as though some Disney executive decided that there should be a film where a Jabberwocky gets killed in the most anti-climactic way possible for no good reason, then came up with the idea of shoehorning a few more of Lewis Carroll’s creations into the film just in case the Jabberwocky didn’t get enough bums on seats.

The world of wonderland is poorly realised by Burton too; the English whimsy of the place has been lost, replaced by zanyness perhaps best typified by the Mad Hatter's cringe-worthy and anachronistic break-dancing near the end. Zanyness has its place in films and can be entertaining if used correctly, like in The Mask, but Alice in Wonderland is not that place and it just goes to show how poorly Burton and the scriptwriters understood the work they were trying to adapt. The only time I have seen a film miss the point more than this was when I saw a low-budget animated film of Titanic, released to cash in on Cameron’s Titanic film, that contained a song and dance number by a ‘gangsta’ rapping dog about it being ‘Party Time’ not long before the iceberg hit and hundreds of people drowned.

(No, honestly, I didn’t make that up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxHNztg0X3s ).

The characters are pancake-flat and impossible to care about as a result, and in some cases, like the dodo, are literally forgotten about halfway through the film. Some of the casting, however, was rather good. Barbara Windsor makes a good dormouse, Stephen Fry a ‘purr’-fect Cheshire cat and Matt Lucus was born to play the rather underused Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Good casting like that does highlight the bad casting decisions like Depp and HBC. Depp is a good actor but he can’t play true madness very well. You get the impression that he is not playing the Mad Hatter but rather Captain Jack Sparrow in disguise and without the charisma; in some scenes it’s almost as if he is straining at the leash not to say “Savvy?” or “Where’s the rum?”

Another problem I have with Depp’s performance is that whenever he wants to sound really mad/whacky he puts on a Scottish accent. Now, I know quite a few Scots and most of them are quite sane. I find this playing to untrue stereotypes quite lazy on Depp’s part and it shows he is either out of his depth in this part or honestly couldn’t give two figs about this role. HBC is another permanent fixture in Burton’s movies and is also badly cast as the Red Queen. I got the impression that almost every scene she was it was some kind of in-joke between her and Burton that the rest of us were not privy to and she was not particularly convincing in the role.

The visual effects of the film are a mixed bag. Some, like the Cheshire cat and Tweedledum and Tweedledee, are rather convincing and impossible to fault but others, like the red queen’s unconvincing over-sized head and the really unimpressive 3D, are lamentable. The lack-lustre 3D was in part due to the movie having been filmed in 2D and later converted into 3D in post-production. This was not Burton’s fault but rather that of the executives who thought that this would be a cheap way round the cost of renting 3D cameras. The trouble is this leaves things looking a bit flat. Upon hearing this, James Cameron, who had just finished filming Avatar, said "It doesn't make any sense to shoot in 2-D and convert to 3-D" and being a stereoscopic nerd myself, I agree with him.

Burton has used this method before for converting The Nightmare Before Christmas into 3D and as the film had been made before the resurgence of 3D brought about by IMEX cinemas and the shedload of money generated by the 3D version of The Polar Express for that film it was perfectly justifiable. However, if you run a 2D live-action film through the same process the effect on viewing is comparable to say watching the colourised version of a black and white film. For example, if you watch the colourised version of Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West you enjoy it well enough but you are left with a sort of nagging feeling that something isn’t quite well with Stan and Ollie.

I could probably go on to write pages on what was wrong with Burton’s Alice in Wonderland including how Alice and the Mad Hatter become best of friends automatically to the extent where she risks her life to save him from the Red Queen about a day after meeting him, or how Burton clearly mistook the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass for the Queen of Hearts in ‘Wonderland’ to the extent where rather than using chess pieces for her army, she uses cards and has somewhat of a decapitation fetish. Overall, the film doesn’t really work and even though I was able to suspend my sense of disbelief for the Wonderland (or ‘Underland’ as it’s called in Burton’s fanfic) scenes the ending in the real world seems rushed, lazy and senseless.

Perhaps it will be enough to entertain young children who care a lot less about plot than they do about something looking colourful and probably won’t pick up on the liberties Burton took with the source material, but as far as an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland goes, you’d be better off steering clear.

Rating: 2/10