Super 8

Super 8 poses as an homage to the Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s. It’s based in a small town, focuses on a group of precocious children and the military are bogeymen not to be trusted. But in the end, the film goes its own way.

There was always a clarity about those early Spielberg films. We knew who the heroes and villains were. But Super 8 is a little bit muddier. And not in a complex, thought-provoking way. Sometimes it’s just needlessly violent and cruel.

The main problem is the alien life form at the center of the film. Tortured and abused by the military, it turns homicidal in its attempt to return home. Very rarely do we actually see any bloodletting but innocent people get thrown around like rag dolls and at one point someone gets eaten. Despite this, we’re still meant to sympathise with this being.

Yes it must be horrible to be incarcerated and to be tortured and to be prevented from returning home, like so much Guantanamo Bay, but that doesn’t mean you should go around collecting people to eat. This shows that you’re an intergalatic dick.

Because of this, the ending to the film falls completely flat. Our hero, Joe, is about to be munched on by this massive alien but the child establishes a telepathic connection with the creature and talks it out of killing him or harming any other people. The boy says that you can still live on after painful events. Wise words, but horribly executed by J.J. Abrams. The alien in this film is seen so seldom and has so little personality or complexity that I didn’t give a damn about his fate. Seriously, after having it lurk in the shadows for the entire running time and have it behave like a psychopath, you’re going to try and invest it with some feeling in the last few minutes? Too little, too late.

It doesn’t help that the creature looks like warmed up leftovers from Cloverfield. How am I meant to feel for a gigantic space spider? Oh, I know how. Right at the last second Abrams’ will suddenly give the creature big, round human-like eyes. Sorry J.J., your creature is still a poorly conceived, barely-adequately-rendered jerk.

With the alien being such a bust, it’s a shame that the rest of Super 8 is pretty good. The relationships between the child characters have a lot of warmth and colour, and the movie is impressively shot.

Super 8 deliberately steals a lot of its visuals from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The lens flares, the colours and the compositions are very reminiscent of Spielberg’s film.

Some of the action is also lifted from Spielberg. The scene where an electrician gets snatched by the alien feels like something out of Jurassic Park. But even though it feels like an homage, it’s still well executed.

A much more fanciful sequence is the train crash near the beginning of the film. The accident seems to last for several minutes and the CGI isn’t always convincing. Plus there’s some supreme silliness at the end when a man in a truck - a man who drove headfirst into the massive train - survives the crash. Only the back of the truck is destroyed and the man is still well enough to wave a gun around. In a film that has a massive spider alien, this is the element that stretches credibility the furthest.

The only reason that the film recovers from this nonsense is that it has genuine affection for its human characters. The kids have great chemistry and there’s that feeling of innocence and playfulness that you got from those old Spielberg movies. It seems like something special might happen. But then the alien story kicks in and everything unravels. It seemed to me that Abrams didn’t know how to tie everything together. He has the skill to create a wonderful looking film and he has the skill to create likeable characters, but he can’t knit it into one piece.

Later in the film, the violence seems incredibly brutal for what is essentially a family film. Our young heroes get to witness an alien violently ripping military men to shreds. Is the fact that the military men are murderers enough to justify the verocity of the scene? Supposedly it is, but if this were real life, I’m sure these kids would be scarred for decades.

But it’s just strange that such violence co-exists in a film which is essentially about children slowly shedding their innocence. One could argue that the violence is real life creeping in and turning these young people into adults, but some of it is pretty extreme for a PG-13.

I also hated the way that the lead character lets go of his necklace at the end. The necklace contains a locket with a picture of himself as a baby with his dead mother (she dies in an industrial accident when the film begins). It’s meant to symbolise the boy letting go of the past but it didn’t work for me. We shouldn’t let the past rule our lives but at the same time we should honour the memory of those we love. The boy letting the bracelet go made it seem like he’d gotten over his mother’s death too easily. It almost felt uncaring. This is certainly not how the scene was intended, but there was no arc to the boy’s grief. He was sad and then he got over it - there was no progression. If it were me in the same situation, the picture would have to be ripped from my hands, even if I’d had it for decades.

And this is why the movie failed. It didn’t earn the sentiment. Spielberg earned it, but Abrams most certainly didn’t.

Hanna

Ever wondered what a British arthouse action film would feel like? Wait no more, for we have Hanna, possibly one of the most peculiar action films ever made.

There’s nothing particularly original in this movie. Thrown in some Bourne Identity, add some La Femme Nikita and sprinkle with everything from Leon to A Clockwork Orange to Mission: Impossible to Batman Begins to the James Bond movies to Grimms’ fairytales. This is a film with lots of influences.

Sadly, Hanna doesn’t rise beyond its ambitions. It desperately wants to be an arthouse actioner. It wants to shake the genre up and defy its tired conventions by making a quasi fairytale thriller. But although its beautiful to look at and although its reasonably well acted, it’s also a messy, shallow, cold, sterile, mean-spirited film. I’ve seen a great many movies that are more hard-edged than this but few have felt so grubby.

Violence in films rarely bothers me but here it’s particularly manipulative and pointless. It doesn’t advance the story and it doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters. People are tortured and stabbed and shot just to keep us on our toes and to show that the characters committing the acts are badasses that aren’t to be messed with. Cate Blanchett shoots a defenceless old lady, Tom Hollander stabs an Arab in the neck, Eric Bana kills a couple of cops etc. etc.

The scene with the old lady is particularly baffling. You see, Hanna was part of a CIA plan to create genetically altered super soldiers. The plan was a failure and everyone involved was killed. The only people to escape were Hanna and her surrogate father, Erik, played by Eric Bana. Turns out that the old lady is Hanna’s grandmother and she knows all about the secret plan. Quite why she wasn’t rubbed out beforehand, I’m not sure. But killing her now seems particularly stupid. Keep her under surveillance and she might unwittingly lead you to the girl. But no, she’s shot in the head to give the audience a jolt.

Part of the reason that everything is so broad and over the top is that it obviously wants to be a modern day fairytale. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is the wicked witch/big bad wolf while Hanna is a demented Snow White/Red Riding Hood, living relatively peacefully in her ridiculously idyllic cabin in the woods. But there are no layers to this film. I never really felt that Hanna grew as a character. She started off as a functional psychopath and ended the film slightly less psycho. Indeed, it’s actually annoying that when she eventually says that she no longer wants to kill people - it’s when Cate Blanchett is pointing a gun at her. Now is not the time to find the peace and love in you.

The mid-section of Hanna certainly doesn’t help the film. Hanna gets taken in by a hippie family that seem more dysfunctional than Hanna and her surrogate father (note: Hanna and her father randomly fight in the middle of night to test Hanna’s combat readiness). These hippies argue and twitter on about a load of nonsense. Joe Wright is trying to make them seem like a believably complex family unit, but they come over as cliches. These are the type of people that you would cross the street to avoid if you were holidaying in Europe. And the family’s daughter is repellent. She’s a spoilt little princess who loves to discuss fake boobs and designer bags. Of course there’s meant to be more to her than this - she’s meant to have hidden depths - but I didn’t want Hanna to learn anything from her; I think she’s better off remaining as the Fuhrer’s wet dream (a blonde, Germanic, genetically-enhanced assassin).

And this kills the heart of the film. Through experience and exposure to the beauties of the outside world, Hanna is meant to find her humanity. But what’s out there? Squabbling hippies and posh chavs? Get back to that cabin, Hanna!

I was also disappointed at the failure to flesh out Eric Bana’s character. Effectively, he’s training Hanna to exert revenge on Marissa - Marissa attempted to kill Erik and successfully killed Hanna’s mother. But the character is two dimensional. Plus he’s a key part in two of the film’s hokiest moments.

Hokey Moment Number One: As Hanna’s psycho-Yoda trainer/protector, he decides that the girl is ‘ready’. He then brings out a great big transmitter that will alert the world to their presence. This is really the best way of doing things? Rather than just track down Marissa and quietly rub her out, you’re going to send your ‘daughter’ into the lion’s den? And is it really wise to keep a big transmitter like that lying around? Say you accidentally sat on it in the middle of the night, or Hanna found it and pressed it, or one of your wolf cubs set it off?

Hokey Moment Number Two: Erik is being tracked by government agents. They confront him in a subway station. It’s only Erik against four people. Rather than shoot him in the kneecaps with a silenced pistol or just outright shoot him in the head, they decide to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, even though these guys are well trained, he manages to kill all of them. Idiots.

On the flipside of this, I really enjoyed the flashback where we see Marissa try and assassinate Erik and Hanna’s mother. It has a weird, dreamlike quality to it. It also shows how inept Blanchett’s character is. She tries to stop a car with a Walther PPK! By some miracle she manages to do this and she shoots Hanna’s mum in the head. But even though it’s slightly ridiculous, it works. You get the feeling that this a woman out of her depth but ruthlessly committed to what she’s doing. There’s purpose behind it, which is the polar opposite of the scene with the grandmother.

But although Blanchett is excellent in this scene, she’s pretty lacklustre in the movie as a whole. She chews the scenery like crazy, obviously enjoying the opportunity to play the part of the wicked witch. But there’s nothing subtle about it. There’s even one bit, towards the end, where we see her scowling through the window like she’s literally the Big Bad Wolf. And her American accent is terrible.

However, one detail about Blanchett’s character that I liked: at one point we see a row of dental equipment and then we see Marissa manically cleaning her teeth. She’s cleaning them so hard that her teeth are bleeding. She’s fighting hard to keep her exterior perfect and clean while the inside of her is diseased and rotten. She must remain the fairest of them all, no matter what.

All the Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel with guns nonsense concludes with Hanna, an expert assassin, being chased through through a fairytale land by an inept Scary Witch. Really, Hanna should be able to kill her in two seconds, but this would be an anti-climax, so we have a ridiculous face-off where Hanna and Marissa shoot each other (although, to try and make things more creative, Hanna somehow shoots an arrow out of her elbow like she’s MacGuyver). The film ends with a massive whimper.

The one bright spot in this massive folly is Tom Hollander. He’s wonderfully creepy as Isaac, a German killer who has the hair and clothes (although not stature) of a deranged Ken doll. Yes the script doesn’t give his character any depth or complexity, but at least it affords Hollander the chance to show another side of himself. He’s the one positive note in a movie that rings completely hollow.

Drive

A cheesy, synth-heavy song plays over the credits at the end of Drive. With dreamy, hushed sincerity, it proclaims that the central character of the film has proved himself to be a ‘real human being’ and a ‘real hero’. This after we’ve seen him smash heads to smithereens, slap women across the face and blow people away with firearms. He’s neither of these things.

I’m not sure whether the director is taking the piss with this song or whether he’s sincere. Either way it doesn’t really affect my opinion of the film. Whether its a sincere revenge thriller or a snarky, tongue in cheek shoot-’em-up, Drive is gloriously entertaining.

Who’d have thought that a hipster could make such a ruthless killing machine? Because, yes, that’s what Ryan Gosling’s character is. With his vacant eyes, a smile that barely registers on his lips and a toothpick in his mouth, he seems too cool for school. It’s hard to believe that he could muster up enthusiasm for anything. But eventually a few cracks appear.

Robot-hipster Gosling’s world of detached brooding is infiltrated by a pretty neighbour in his apartment building. She has a young son and Gosling immediately takes to them. Pretty soon he’s hanging out in their flat and fixing their car (Gosling plays a mechanic who moonlights as a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals). He even manages to produce a smile that shows a couple of teeth.

What I found pleasing about the beginning of the film is that it takes its time. While the atmosphere of the movie is very 80s, the pace in the opening half is very 70s. For a film about driving, no one is in a rush - this movie is going to take the scenic route and try and develop the characters a little bit. Not that there’s really any amazing dialogue in this movie. This is a film more about looks, gestures and atmosphere. Quite often it’s the music that does the talking. And this suits me fine.

What works for me, though, doesn’t work for everyone. In the row ahead of me, I could sense impatience. Indeed, there was even outright mockery. By the time Gosling had coyly grinned for the thirty second time, I could hear sniggers. But then when the second half of the film hit and all hell broke loose, those people quickly shut the fuck up.

But let’s wind back to the beginning of the film. The opening is amazing. Gosling’s character is hired as the getaway driver for an armed robbery. He sets out his terms and then we see him in action. You kind of expect a regular car chase, full of frenzied action. Instead you have a wonderfully tense game of cat and mouse. Gosling doesn’t just hit the accelerator and try and outrun the cops, he uses other cars and underpasses to hide out and he uses his smarts to avoid getting caught. One of the best moments is when he’s face to face with some cops at a traffic light. He has a radio receiver and he knows that he’s been identified. But the cops don’t know that he knows. So Gosling doesn’t crack and only speeds away once the light turns green. It’s really amazing how tense and how thrilling such a minimalist sequence can be.

The only other car chase is more traditional. It’s flat out with screeching tires and twisted metal. But before it can really develop, it’s violently over. It’s a good sequence but it pales beside the opener.

Let’s get back to what it was that shocked people so much. First of all, there was the fact that Christina Hendricks gets shot at point blank range by a shotgun. But the scene that produced audible gasps was the one where Gosling smashes a crook’s hand with a hammer and then threatens to hammer a bullet into his head. At this point all the muttering and snickering was gone. ‘But I thought he was a harmless, borderline retarded hipster!’ you could almost hear them think.

It’s quite an amazing U-turn that the film makes. The film transforms from a sappy indie flick into extreme grindhouse. I mean, in the opening half you’re watching Ryan Gosling seducing Carey Mulligan by driving through storm drains as retro music plays and the sun flares on the camera lens. We’re in 80s romantic movie territory. And then thirty or forty minutes later you’re watching Ryan Gosling literally smashing someone’s head to pieces.

This scene is the most extreme in the movie. But it’s preceded by a long, drippy kiss. You see, some mob guys are after Gosling and one of them gets into the same elevator as Gosling and Mulligan. As a distraction, Gosling kisses Mulligan. The kiss, in slow-motion naturally, goes on for ages. But then when its over, Gosling beats the heavy to death and smashes his face in. By the time he’s stamped on the guy’s head for the tenth time, you think he’s being more than a bit excessive. But then he continues doing it...while his girl backs into the corner. It’s like Dirty Dancing turns into Irreversible. And it’s probably the one scene that doesn’t really work. I kept on thinking that this was a stupid distraction. The mob guy should have just shot him in the back of the head as he was playing tonsil hockey with his wee delicate flower. And what about poor Mulligan? The most romantic moment of her life turns into a horror scene. It’s one thing for a man to protect his woman, but something else to turn a man’s head into pate. You’re going to think twice before you go out on twinkly afternoon drives with autistic hipsters, aren’t you?

But again, it’s hard to know how to take the scene. Is it being played straight or does it have another intent? Is Gosling being portrayed as a real human being and a real hero, or is he being portrayed as a stone cold psycho? I like the fact that you don’t really know for sure.

A more successful sequence is the hit that Gosling makes on Ron Perlman’s small time crime boss. Perlman has been trying to take Gosling out, so Gosling exacts revenge. Bizarrely scored to an operatic ballad, Perlman parties in his crappy pizzeria with some fellow crooks. Through the glass in the door you see Gosling approach...wearing a rubber mask - the type of mask that stunt drivers wear to look more like the actor they’re doubling for and which also (I think) protect them from fire. It’s a weird, eerie image (he looks like part Octavio the clown in Scarface and part Michael Myers) and I immediately thought that Gosling was going to torch the building with all the crooks in it. Colour me slightly disappointed then when he doesn’t do this.

But then, still wearing the mask, Gosling follows Perlman’s car. He rams into it and then disappears from the scene. Perlman is angry and confused but before he can do anything, Gosling comes back and rams the car off the side of an embankment. Somehow Perlman survives the crash and staggers towards a beach. We then have the eerie image of the masked driver stalking his prey and silently drowning him. It’s like something out of a horror film and it works magnificently.

Have I mentioned yet that the main villain is played by Albert Brooks? This piece of casting works tremendously as you’re certainly not expecting him to stab people to death with forks or bleed people dry with cutthroat razors. But Brooks causes carnage and creates a villain you’re eager to see become the victim of hipstercide. Gosling accommodates him on this point but not before he takes a knife to the gut.

One of the final images of the film is the shadow of the two men stabbing one another. Gosling is perhaps the righteous reflection of this psychopath? This may or may not be true, as both men are almost equally nuts, but the final song certainly wants to point out Gosling’s heroism. ‘You’ve proved yourself to be a real human being and a real hero.’

The end is almost like something out of the TV series of The Incredible Hulk. Carey Mulligan’s world has been turned upside down by a man with no name and then he leaves town to continue his nomadic existence. However, Gosling is too cool to thumb a lift as tearful piano music plays. Instead he roams the lonely highways as some obscure band does a Giorgio Moroder impression. Whose town and whose life will he turn upside down next?

PS - The film deserves extra points for the coolest aerial shots of LA’s skyline and highways since The Rock’s entrance video at No Way Out. (Fuck me, I’m a nerd.)

Mysteries of Lisbon

Last year my wife and I were supposed to see a film called Mysteries of Lisbon at the New York Film Festival. At just over four hours, it’s not surprising that we didn’t make it. A film of this length is a heavy commitment to say the least, especially when you’re surrounded by jumped-up festival goers.

[Cut to a couple of weeks ago]

My wife and I are in Fnac in Portugal. For a while I peruse the CDs and then I decide to look at the movies. Being the stunning intellectual that I am, I decide to try and see what strange titles English-language films have acquired in Portuguese. At the same time, my wife and her cousin are looking at some native films. They stumble upon Mysteries of Lisbon.

The Gorgeous Spouse
Oh, this is the film we were going to see? You remember, at the festival?

Your Fabulous Author
The five hour one?

The Gorgeous Spouse
Yeah. Shall we get it?

Your Fabulous Author
Sure.

[Cut to our living room, a week or so later]

Your Fabulous Author respires gently on the living room sofa. It’s only 10pm, and only twenty minutes of the film have elapsed, but already his lifeforce is seeping from him.

Your Fabulous Author
(Waking from his brief slumber)
Can we watch the rest of this tomorrow?

The Gorgeous Spouse
(Half-asleep herself)
Okay.

Let me put a question to you first. How would you feel if you spent over four hours watching a film and it turned out to be dream or a confused, delirious, untrustworthy remembrance that someone has on the brink of death? Ordinarily, you might have the right to be pissed off, as this is usually one of the least satisfying ways to wrap up a story, but here it actually works. The film is so confused, so incoherent and so self-indulgent that it only makes sense as a dream. If it had ended any other way, I might have hunted down Raul Ruiz so that I could slap him in the face with some bacalhau.

Your Fabulous Author here is talking complete bullshit. He wouldn’t hunt down a 70-year-old cancer survivor so that he could slap him in the face with some bacalhau. He’s not heartless. Besides, he doesn’t have the money for the air fare...

I can think of another four hour plus film, though, that possibly ends with a dream - Once Upon a Time in America. But the difference between the two films is night and day. One of them is a multi-layered, breathtaking meditation on love and time and the other is, well...Mysteries of Lisbon tries hard to be that but it doesn’t succeed.

Ruiz here weaves a tale that goes off in many strange tangents and directions. Stories open within stories and soon this initially simplistic tale leads us into a murky labyrinth. But while it’s an excellent idea (the concept of unravelling the web that leads to a person’s existence), none of the intrigues are especially interesting. A lot of the time the film feels like an expensive soap opera, what with the overwrought emotions, the laughable twists and turns, and the penchant for characters to slap on horribly fake facial hair. Mysteries of Lisbon might have the veneer of an important film, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s not much there.

Your Fabulous Author is watching Mysteries of Lisbon. The second half of the film has just begun. He’s hoping that it’ll be an improvement on the first half - that the film will establish a confident rhythm. Father Dinis is talking to a monk. They chat a little about food and alcohol and...the Monk interrupts the scene to tell his story, marking the umpteenth time that this has happened; that a character has shifted the course of the movie to tell his or her tale.

Your Fabulous Author tugs on his beard and puffs his cheeks, realising that he still has two and a half hours of this nonsense left to go.

One of the most disappointing things about Mysteries of Lisbon is how overwhelmingly bland it is. For a film that is full of so many elegant costumes and sumptuous palaces you never get a real feel for the time or place. This is perhaps partly because all the exteriors feel like they were filmed in one or two places. There’s one piece of forest that I swear is used every time there’s a horse drawn carriage. It becomes almost like Hanna-Barbera - you’re seeing the same tree over and over again. This ends up making such an epic film feel much smaller than it should - it ends up betraying the movie’s TV-mini-series roots.

Again, this wouldn’t really matter if the human drama were up to scratch, but it most certainly isn’t. Whether it’s Father Dinis fighting for Napoleon, or the orphan at the centre of the film finally meeting his mother, or the reemergence of Knife Eater as a wealthy nobleman, it feels contrived and artificial. It’s a movie that’s meant to engage on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one, but it fails in this respect because it just ends up feeling like an art-house version of EastEnders. I mean, a gypsy with really unconvincing facial shrubbery reinvents himself as a priest? Oh, and another geezer with really bad facial hair reinvents himself as a nobleman? There are all kinds of shifting identities in the film but it doesn’t add to the movie in any way - at best it feels like a soap opera; at worst it’s just confusing.

Your Fabulous Author, tired and weary, stretches as the end titles crawl along the screen.

Your Fabulous Author
Well, at least that’s the last that we’ll hear of that piece of crap.

[One week later]

Your Fabulous Author opens ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and sees that Mysteries of Lisbon receives a ‘A’ grade.

Your Fabulous Author
Fuck off!

Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘Slant’ and sees a rave.

Your Fabulous Author
Fuck off!!

Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘The New York Times’ and sees a glowing review.

Your Fabulous Author
FUCK OFF!!!

Fearing that this is going to be another Russian Ark, a film that everyone seems to jizz themselves over except him, Your Fabulous Author crawls into bed.

Your Fabulous Author
(Voiceover)
Maybe when I wake up, I’ll have turned into my cat Oscar. Then I’ll be incapable of reading any of these deluded reviews. Yeah, that’ll be nice...

Hobo With a Shotgun

Welcome to Hope Town! Or to give it its more appropriate name...Scum Town. This is a city that makes the Old Detroit of RoboCop look like Princeton. A city that makes Mogadishu look like an attractive place to spend your retirement. Hope Town is probably as bad as it gets.

Despite this, an elderly hobo, played by Rutger Hauer, takes up residence in this cesspool. He’s on the streets for no longer than a few minutes when he encounters The Drake (the city’s mob boss) and his two sons, Slick and Ivan, pursuing The Drake’s brother. By using a specially rigged sewer grate, they decapitate The Drake’s brother by pulling his head clean off with a car. Oh, and then an Asian woman in very little clothing dances rhythmically in the fountain of blood that gushes from the freshly made man-geyser. If this doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.

Even though he witnesses this atrocity, the Hobo still harbours dreams of a better life. In a pawn shop window he looks misty eyed at some black and white footage of a 1950s man mowing his lawn. This seems to represent a lost innocence that the Hobo wants to regain and he dreams of purchasing the lawnmower that sits near the TV in the shop window. He only needs $50.

In order to accumulate this money, the Hobo takes to begging on the streets. There’s an amusing scene where he’s trying to write a sign. On the first couple, he lies. He then gives up on this and we see him sitting on the street with a sign that simply says he needs the money so that he can buy a lawnmower. Such sentimentality is completely at odds with this hellish backdrop.

As nasty as the violence is in Hobo With a Shotgun, it’s also incredibly cartoonish. Hammers make feet shatter into bloody pieces and bumper cars make heads explode like they’re watermelons. It isn’t in the least bit realistic. But despite this, the film does have a pervasive grime and grubbiness to it. As ludicrously far-fetched as this world is, it still gets to you. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film greatly, rocking back and forth in my seat with pleasure as I guzzled the Colt 45 that my friend and I had smuggled into the screening. But the characters are so despicable and the backdrop so depressing that I felt like I needed a bath afterwards.

The ruthlessness of the villains on display here, though, does make the Hobo’s revenge extra enjoyable. I mean, take The Drake. Here’s a guy that decapitates his own brother. He’s also a man who holds torture parties - there’s a scene where some scantily clad women are using a man as a pinata; The Drake, however, brings this to an end with the immortal line ‘When life gives you razor blades...you make a bat, covered in razor blades’ and disembowels the man as the women jump up and down with glee.

Probably worse then The Drake, though, is Slick, The Drake’s son. With a narcissistic smile, slicked back hair and Wayfarers, he’s kind of like a psychotic Tom Cruise. In one hilarious scene, when the Hobo has become a shotgun wielding vigilante, he boards a school bus with his Cristiano Ronaldo lookalie brother Ivan. ‘Disco Inferno’ pumps from a boombox and Slick begins asking the kids questions like he’s Scorpio from Dirty Harry. He asks them if they like ice cream, he asks them if they like school, he asks them if they like bicycles and he asks them if they like hobos. They give each question a resounding yes. We then have a close-up of Slick’s Wayfarers and he says that he hates hobos. He then torches the entire school bus with his flamethrower as ‘Burn, baby, burn’ pounds from the soundtrack, his brother nodding with approval.

Now yes, you might be thinking that I’m a sick bastard for finding amusement in a scene where lots of children are incinerated, but it just flies in the face of what usually happens in films. Children never get hurt. So to see such cartoonish carnage and to see it so gleefully rendered, I couldn’t help but guffaw.

I also have to give Slick credit for referencing the Who song, ‘See Me, Feel Me’ while intimidating a woman. And also for defaming Mother Teresa: ‘Tell it to Mother Teresa while she’s fingerbanging you in hell!’

So what can the Hobo possibly hope to do in the face of such evil? Well, the Hobo holds out for as long as he can. He even debases himself to a Bum Fights-style filmmaker. The guy in question gleefully makes the Hobo eat glass for a few bucks and makes him take the money with his mouth. And Hauer’s acting in this scene is great. Everything is in the eyes - the confusion, the anger and the resignation; he manages to look just like a dog.

Once the Hobo gets to the pawn shop to pick up his lawnmower, it’s overrun by a gang of robbers. They threaten to shoot a baby and the quivering shopkeeper hands over his cash. But its not enough and the criminals become even more desperate. It’s here, with the lawnmower in his hands, that the Hobo sees a shotgun on the wall. Luckily it also costs $50 (and seems to be miraculously full of ammo) and the Hobo blows the thieves away. The choice has been made: the sentimental dreams have been exchanged in favour of grim reality. The Hobo is going to make these criminals pay.

The Hobo works his way through town, killing pimps and scumbags with reckless abandon. Perhaps my favourite slaying is his killing of a paedophile Santa Claus. Santa’s head almost completely explodes. But the Hobo saves the best for Slick. The Hobo kills him by blowing his penis off. A very apt death for a sex-obsessed psychopath who at one point literally saws into the heroine’s neck. This is maybe the Slick’s idea of penetration - to be hacking away at a woman’s flesh.

But it’s both a joyous and a disappointing moment to see Slick get killed. It’s joyous because he’s a fucking punk, but it’s disappointing because he’s such a great antagonist. Every time he’s on the screen, the film is even more despicably entertaining. But in a surreal moment, we get to see Slick carted off to hell in the back of the school bus where he incinerated lots of children.

This moment, however, seems positively normal to what comes later. Enraged by his son’s death, The Drake calls for ‘The Plague’. I can remember at the time asking myself what The Plague was. Well, turns out it’s a pair of armour-clad demons. These guys, dressed like steam-punk assassins on steroids, slaughter an entire hospital-full of people to get to the Hobo. Once they have him, they stick him in a metal coffin and drag him to The Drake on the back of their motorcycles. Oh, and in one scene, we see The Plague fighting a massive pet octopus?!?? Yes, for me, this only adds to the enjoyment of this crazy film.

But just when you think that The Plague is some sort of unbeatable, undead Legion of Doom duo from hell, one of them gets slaughtered by The Hobo’s partner, an armour-clad prostitute called Abby who has a weaponised lawn-mower motor. She uses the motor to kill one half of the duo and then the other half, who kind of resembles a low-rent Doctor Doom, asks her to join him. The Hobo gets involved and says no and the second half of The Plague just walks off. Yep, it’s a weird sequence.

In the same scene, Abby also gets her arm cut off by The Drake and she then begins stabbing him with the exposed bone. How the hell can this film possibly end, you think? Well, the Hobo kills The Drake and then the cops kill the Hobo. But then the cops end up getting slaughtered by the general populace. The final shot is of the shotgun on the floor.

What to take from this film? I’m not sure how much political or social commentary there is here. It’s certainly not on par with RoboCop. But maybe its a criticism of a society that has become so desensitised that it is literally amusing itself to death.

Maybe it’s also playing on our fear of the poor. Part of the story involves The Drake forcing the general populace to kill every hobo in town, otherwise he’ll make everyone suffer. The people are easily intimidated and do The Drake’s biding. Unfortunately, this is pretty close to reality. Politicians and media outlets are always playing on the people’s fears and the poor are an especially easy target. People certainly hate the poor more they should and hate the rich less - the rich deserve far more contempt than they receive.

But the greater, albeit more shallow, joy to take from Hobo is in how well filmed it is. For such a cheap film, it’s looks wonderful. There are some great shots and the use of colour in some scenes kind of reminded me of Dick Tracy. And in a couple of moments the film succeeds in actually being a little creepy. There’s a scene where the Hobo is in a police station talking to the Chief of Police and you cut to a shot of Ivan’s grinning mug as he slowly slinks into the room. The colour, the composition and Ivan’s smug smile make it a weirdly memorable visual.

In such a brutal film the two protagonists are also pleasingly sympathetic and likeable. Yes the Hobo is clearly bonkers, going on as he does about bears and talking to his brain, and yes Abby is a cliched hooker with a heart of gold, but they’re two bright sparks in a sea of shit. And with their silly dream of opening a lawnmower business (‘You grow it, we cut it!’) they remind you that mankind isn’t totally fucked. While we still have the power to have sentimental dreams, while we still have the ability to empathise with other people and while we can still summon an appropriate level of outrage at the degradation of those weaker than us, we’re still human...even if we need a huge shotgun to express it.

Directed by Jason Eisener
Written by John Davies
Produced by Rob Cotterill, Niv Fichman, Paul Gross and Frank Siracusa
Original Music by Adam Burke, Darius Holbert and Russ Howard III
Cinematography by Karim Hussain
Starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith and Molly Dunsworth

Running Time: 86 mins

Frozen

What a great concept for a movie. We’ll take three obnoxious bozos, stick them on a ski lift and then have them get stuck on there with no one to help. We’ll even have a storm...and maybe some wolves. Yeah, that’ll be great!

It’s part of my peculiar nature to find a premise like this intriguing. How the hell do you generate drama with three people stuck on a ski lift?. I have no idea, but if it involves pain, degradation and broken limbs, I’m up for it.

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to sympathize with the grabass-tic amphibian shit on display here, but I despised them from the get-go. We have an airhead girl, her annoying, sleazebag boyfriend and their equally sleazy friend. They’re the kind of over-privileged, cheap-ass people that won’t pay full price for a ski ticket but at the same time are so out of touch with reality that they think that minimum wage is called minimal wage. These dickheads have led lives that are far too comfortable.

You know that these people have never done a real day’s work in their lives or ever struggled for anything. How do I know this? Because one of the guys, Dan, spends all of his time wearing a ridiculous white woolly hat. He even wears it indoors when he’s eating. Yeah, anyone who brazenly wears a tea cosy on their head all day long, a tea cosy that makes their head look four times the size it really is, has never experienced any true pain. The only conflict they experience is deciding what porno video they should masturbate to or what shitty-ass band they should cram into their fucking iphone 4 (hmm, Drowning Pool or Rev Theory?). These people need a harsh dose of reality.

Reality rears its ugly head when they decide to do some night skiing. It’s pitch black but they somehow manage to talk their way onto the ski lift. No one else is being taken to the top but this doesn’t dissuade them. They continue to talk inane, asinine bullshit. Little do they know, though, that down below there are staffing issues. The lift operator is called away to talk to his boss and his replacement doesn’t realize that there are three people heading for the top. So the lift’s turned off.

The three hateful turds are stuck on the lift for no longer than, ooh, ten seconds before they start discussing the worst way to die. Tea cosy twat-face Dan thinks that it would be especially bad to be eaten by a shark. His idiotic friend, meanwhile, thinks that the girl on the Jaws poster is hot. ‘Naked chicks are hot.’ Why didn’t they just have a scene where the tosser pulled his shrivelled little member out and talked with it? ‘Naked chicks are hot. Blah, blah, blah! Tits, tits, tits! I never get any. I’m so sad! What did I do to deserve being stuck with this douchebag for eternity?’

But although the film references Jaws, it more closely resembles Open Water. However, Open Water was a pretty decent film. This, though, is atrocious. Sure there’s joy to be found in it. Mainly the joy of watching smug twenty-somethings getting eaten by wolves. But it’s a pretty feeble piece of writing and filmmaking.

To illustrate the level of writing on display here, there’s a scene where the girl starts telling everyone how much she needs to pee. Okay, this is a real concern if you’re trapped somewhere for a length of time. But the girl sounds so pathetic - so babyish and whinny. Plus she also actually says the following line: ‘I need to pee...wicked bad.’ That line probably got the biggest laugh out of me in the entire film. More even than the bit where tea cosy guy gets eaten by wolves.

Yeah, you heard me right, tea cosy guy gets eaten. He decides to be a hero and jumps off the ski lift. Only problem is that he’s a long way from the ground and breaks both of his legs. We see the bone sticking through his twisted limbs and he screams his head off. But the fucking tea cosy on his head remains stubbornly in place.

The effects for this horrible injury are pretty terrible. There’s a bit where he’s lying there in the snow and it looks like his head is poking through a trapdoor and that the body and legs are cheap prosthetics. The crunching of broken bones and squelching noises are also incredibly phony. Plus this injury does a very strange thing and actually makes Dan sound retarded. I know that pain can do lots of things to people, but there’s a moment where it actually sounds like his brain has been stabbed. ‘Mmmsdfsdf sdffsdfs legggssss huuurrrrtttt!’

The reward of all this is getting to watch Dan get eaten. Eventually he attracts the attention of a pack of wolves. At first the wolves are easily scared away but after a while they’re not so easily deterred. And there’s a brilliant moment, right before he gets devoured, where Dan draws his tea cosy over his face. Yeah, cover your bulbous bonce with that fucking thing. Make sure that the wolves don’t have to look at your annoying face when they’re tearing into your flesh. Although, having said this, I do wish that one of the wolves would have removed the hat with its paw and slapped him in the face with it...

Of course, Dan’s girlfriend and their toolish friend Lynch get to hear Dan’s screams. And Dan even manages to order his girlfriend not to look at the wolves when they’re having their elevenses. ‘Don’t let her look!’ he screams to Lynch. Oh, what a great guy! What a hero!

The range of emotions that follow this are both cringe-worthy and hilarious. Lynch and the girlfriend argue at first and then they console each other with hugs. Aww, bless. But Lynch is such a sleazebag that I was half-expecting him to ask her for a hand-job or something. ‘Go on, just a little one.’ Thankfully, this doesn’t happen, but then in an arse-puckering attempt to generate sympathy or emotion, the girl says how she has a puppy at home. But if she’s not home to take care of the puppy, the puppy is going to starve to death. But worse than this, the puppy is going to think it was abandoned. Really, you go to a ski slope to spend all day snowboarding and you don’t tell a neighbour or a friend to look after your dog for the day? It’s not a fucking cat - isn’t it going to just piss and shit everywhere and eat your sofa? Maybe if you told someone where you were going, you wouldn’t have to worry about your puppy eating its paws while crying its eyes out and whimpering, ‘I thought she loved me.’

Other humiliations follow. The girl falls asleep and gets her hand stuck to the ski lift rail and then later she pisses herself. This latter moment is especially mirthful because the flow of urine is immediately followed by a swelling orchestra. Is this meant to be a grand, emotional moment? Is this her nadir? This is worse than her boyfriend getting eaten by wolves?

More poorly conceived character development takes place and Lynch tells the girl how he once thought he’d met ‘the one’. Like him, she was also into Aerosmith! Please, wolves eat this bastard!

Thankfully, the wolves comply. You see, Lynch manages to pull some James Bond shit and climbs the ski lift wire hand over hand until he gets to a support pole - a pole that has a ladder on it. But no sooner has Lynch reached terra firma than some wolves have jumped on him and are having another snack.

This leaves just the girl. By some quirk of fate, the ski lift come crashing to the ground and she makes a bid for freedom. However, before she reaches the bottom of the slope, she stumbles upon the wolves feasting on Lynch. She backs away and eventually manages to reach the road. Brilliant! Her puppy now is not going to eat its own head! And everyone lives happily ever after...

...Except the girl then hears the voice of her boyfriend echo in her head. ‘You’re going to be okay, baby.’ And then hilariously, even though it appeared at the beginning of the film, the title ‘Frozen’ snaps onto the screen in huge letters. It’s meant to be a final punch in the face. ‘Take that - take my heavy-hitting film and try and digest it and then shit yourself because it was so traumatizing.’ But Frozen isn’t traumatizing. It’s a walk in the park.

Directed and Written by Adam Green
Produced by Peter Block and Cory Neal
Original Music by Andy Garfield
Cinematography by Will Barratt
Starring Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers

Running Time: 93 mins

Rated R for some disturbing images, including men beating eaten by wolves and a fucktard wearing a tea cosy

Cliffhanger

The opening to Cliffhanger is meant to be a harrowing experience. We're meant to feel enormous sorrow and pity as an innocent woman plunges to her horrible death. But how can we experience any kind of horror when Frank, a helicopter pilot played by Ralph Waite out of The Waltons, is in the background cackling with laughter? Just watch him. His eyes sparkle when Stallone tells the distressed woman that she's not doing to die. And he collapses in near hysterics when she falls but a few seconds later, obviously finding some kind of sick humour at the thought of the girl being smashed to pieces on the rocks, thousands of feet below. Contrast this with Michael Rooker's overacting – he almost faints as if he’s in a Jane Austen novel when he sees the girl plummet – and you have a scene that is tailor-made for chortles rather than gasps.

But to be fair to Stallone and the girl, they carry themselves pretty well in the scene. The girl pleads and pleads, and Stallone gamely hangs on. And the situation itself is excellent – huge drop, cracked harness, burly, lazy-mouthed actor trying to hang on to a hysterical woman who won’t shut the fuck up. But whenever I watch it, I can only see Frank's huge grin, his glowing eyes and him hooting in the background as Michael Rooker’s world falls apart. What exactly does Frank find so funny? Is he an evil old buzzard or has senility stalked its way into his spongy old brain? In his advanced years, does he think that the woman will be caught by kittens and rocketed to Valhalla in a chariot driven by mohawked-squirrels wearing diamond-encrusted strap-ons that spurt single-malt whisky? Or does he just not give a shit? Who the fuck knows...

However, as inappropriate as it is, Frank’s laughter isn’t entirely out of place. Nope, laughter is a common reaction when watching Cliffhanger. This isn’t to say that I dislike the film. It's a very enjoyable B-grade action movie. But it can't transcend the clichés of the genre.

One of the clichés the film adheres to is that the villain must be English. Well, at least I think he is. John Lithgow plays the main baddie and puts on an accent of some sort. But it's an amusing performance. His best bit has to be when he gets Stallone to climb up a rockface to get his money. "You, stay,” he says to the dribbling Rooker. And then to Stallone: “You, fetch." The joy is in his exaggerated enunciation. ‘Fetch’ somehow seems to have acquired an additional five syllables. Another funny bit is when Stallone throws Lithgow's money into the helicopter's rotors. "Damn you, Walker!" he screams like he's split a fingernail.

But there are other English villains. The first is Caroline Goodall who comes across as a low-rent Emma Thompson. But much more amusing is Craig Fairbrass (Dan out of EastEnders). His performance is atrocious. All he does is shout and swear. And he does it in a thick Cockney accent. “Fack this! Fack that!”

Fairbrass is immortalised in the scene where the drooling Michael Rooker goads him into beating him up. The Cockney is about as bright as a puddle of oil and forgoes a quick kill in favour of a prolonged pummeling. It turns out that Fairbrass' character is an ex-footballer. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising when his dialogue consists of lines like: "Yeah? And you're a loudmouth punk slag who's about to die." The only people I know who talk like that are West Ham fans.

But Fairbrass proceeds to give Rooker a surreal football-themed kicking, complete with running commentary – he even runs up to take a penalty. Is this how Hollywood sees the English? We're either effete brigands or beer-swilling hooligans. Actually, thinking about it, it's quite an accurate observation. Well done Renny Harlin. In your world of back-swimming sharks and flying Indy cars, you managed to find a single truth.

However, my favourite villain of all is played by Leon (he's so cool he doesn't even have a surname). He’s a tough Lennox Lewis-looking-like-motherfucker who eschews Fairbrass' shouty brand of villainy and instead tries to be quietly intimidating. This would be great but his line delivery is atrocious. He has no timing and seems incapable of emphasizing the right words. Where Lithgow can stretch and bend and slather layers of wonderful ham on his dialogue, Leon can only make his words sound like leaden mouth farts.

But to give the guy his dues, it is noticeable that, unlike Fairbrass, he does excel once he gives in to his urge to shout. He has a great scene in a cave where he actually seems like a genuine threat - he stalks Stallone and his girl with menace, taunting impotent old whitey with his ultimate fear; his girl having a black dick thrust upon her (and her liking it!). But before Stallone’s girlfriend Jessie has to suffer this outrage, Stallone grabs Leon by the balls and gorilla presses him through a spike. It's a WWE sort of death…which unsurprisingly I dig a great deal. (Although the filmmakers did miss a trick by not having Stallone yell, ‘You get the point!’ before shish-kebabing the scary black man.)

Speaking of Stallone, how does he fair in this film? Well, I've never really had much of a problem with Sly as an actor. Yeah, technically he’s not too great and yes he sounds like a man who was born with his brain upside down, but he is capable of a good performance here and there - just watch Copland or Rocky Balboa. Sadly, Cliffhanger is not one of those films. He’s okay at the beginning, showing humour and charm, but after the accident it all goes downhill. His idea of being haunted is to mope about like a thirteen-year-old that's been told to stop using his father's credit card to download porn. It's so amateurish.

Thank Christ then for Stallone’s bulging biceps! It’s these puppies that are given the opportunity to shine. I mean, just take the scene where the villains order Stallone to climb the mountain to retrieve their money. They make him remove his jacket. I can't help but feel that this wasn't done to prove how evil the villains are, but to allow Sly to climb while flaunting his thick, muscular arms. We don't want those babies covered up, no sirree!

However, Stallone and his biceps look like Marlon Brando compared to the "Whoa, dude!" extreme sports enthusiasts that pop up. They're sort of like Bill and Ted but without the charm. In fact, I wasn't distraught that one of them died; I was distraught that one survived. But at least the death of the Kurt Cobain lookalike gives us a hilarious silent "No!" moment from the gurning Michael Rooker, who once again amazes me with his sincere cheese. But then later on we get to relive the hilarity, because Frank's death elicits another rib-tickling "No!" moment.

Hey, what can I say, the old buzzard had it coming. You ain't laughing now, are you?

Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Michael France and Sylvester Stallone
Produced by Renny Harlin and Alan Marshall
Original Music by Trevor Jones
Cinematography by Alex Thomson
Starring Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow and Michael Rooker

Running Time: 112 mins

Rated R for language, violence against both humans and animals, and horrible Cock-er-nee stereotypes