Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson is a man hopelessly stuck in time. He’s a man living on past glories, unable to forge a future of any kind. As a result he’s doomed to live a life of poverty and doomed to debase himself in an effort to try and recapture some of the old magic. He’s a dinosaur who knows he’s a dinosaur, but he’s quite happy with that fact – it’s the world that changed and fucked itself up.

In one scene we see Randy playing a video game with a neighbourhood kid. But they don’t play a Wii or a Playstation 3. Instead they play on an NES. The reason for this is because this system has a wrestling game that has Randy on it. Because of his ego and his quiet narcissism, Randy couldn’t contemplate playing a more recent game. When he stopped being part of the mainstream, everything became irrelevant.

This attitude is echoed in a scene where Randy has a drink with Cassidy, a stripper who he’s hoping to start a relationship with. They talk about music and about how great Motley Crue and Guns ‘n’ Roses were. And then they discuss how awful the 90s were and how Kurt Cobain was a giant pussy. Now whether that’s the truth or not doesn’t matter. What matters is Randy’s inability to evolve as a person. Most people’s tastes change as they age. They discover new things and re-evaluate the things they used to like. But because the 90s coincided with a slump in Randy’s career, the decade, and everything in it, automatically sucks. Nostalgia constantly clouds Randy’s head.

Illustrating how dangerous this sort of nostalgia is, is a scene where Randy goes to a mini wrestling convention. It’s a terribly depressing affair. There are a bunch of old grapplers begging for scraps from their loyal fans – this is their pension fund. And everywhere Randy is reminded of the degeneration and decay that follows them around. One guy has an ankle bag connected to a catheter and another is in a wheelchair. Randy knows what could lie in wait for him, but seeing as he lives hand to mouth, and seeing as he’s not really qualified to do anything else, he knows that he must continue punishing his body.

However, Randy does try and make a living elsewhere. He has a job in a supermarket. And here we have some of the funniest and some of the most depressing moments. It’s fun to see Randy getting into his job (he works on the deli counter and begins to joke about with his customers) but it’s excruciating to see him get bullied by his dweeb of a boss – the guy mocks his wrestling career, saying that all he does is sit on other men’s faces. Wrestling is hardly a noble profession, and yes it’s ridiculous, but it’s also an incredibly tough way to make a living. And knowing this, and knowing how easily he could cripple his arsehole boss, you constantly want Randy to beat the guy up. You want him to do an Iron Sheik and break his back and make him humble. So it’s a crowd pleasing moment when Randy finally has enough and quits his crappy job.

But the scenes at the deli counter are also interesting for the way that we see Randy interact with people. What Randy lives for is approval. He wants to hear the crowd roar and he wants them to chant his name. So his job on the deli counter begins as a sort of performance. He’s trying to replace the thrill of a wrestling audience with something on a smaller scale. It works for a little while. Well, until the customers begin being a pain in the arse.

There’s also an excellent bit of filming before Randy makes his first appearance on the deli counter. We see him getting dressed and then we follow him through the building. For anyone who’s grown up on wrestling shows, this will immediately remind them of Raw or Smackdown or Nitro. And then to further highlight the similarities, just before Randy goes through the ‘curtain’, we hear the cheer of a crowd. Randy is trying to replace the irreplaceable – nothing will ever equal the thrill of going before a massive crowd. After entertaining thousands of people, everything else is destined to be an anti-climax.

The wrestling scenes themselves are disappointingly few, but they’re expertly filmed. They begin with a rather ordinary match but then we have a crazy hardcore bout. Here we have Randy, who doesn’t seem to be the hardcore type, debasing himself for a few extra dollars. We see him and his opponent get thrown through glass, get tied up in barbed wire and even have staples shot into their chests. It’s barbaric stuff.

But the way that all of this is deconstructed is excellent. We see Randy’s injuries and then we see the sections of the match that caused them. You quickly begin to wonder how a human being can sustain this. And then when you realise that men do this night after night for nothing more than gas money, you begin to question your complicity in it. Yes I love wrestling – I love the silliness of it, the theatricality and, yes, the bloody violence – but the toll that it has on the human body is amazing. We’re basically paying to see men get slowly crippled. Because even though wrestling matches are pre-determined, they’re still incredibly violent. I mean, a chair shot on the head is a chair shot on the head. And when you consider the fact that these men wrestle full schedules, you wonder how they manage to get through it.

The answer to that is they use drugs. And in one scene we see Randy buy a whole cocktail of what the Iron Sheik would call medicine. It’s nice to see that the film doesn’t pussyfoot around the ugly side of the business.

Unfortunately, though, the film has some hokey melodrama at the centre of the plot. You see, Randy, after the hardcore match, has a heart attack and is ordered not to wrestle. If he wrestles again, he could have another heart attack and die. So that’s why he tries to make an honest living in the supermarket. But although something like this is actually a good possibility for a wrestler – far too many have died of heart disease because of all the drugs they take – it still feels like a contrived plot device. It feels like it’s trying too hard to add pathos.

For instance, at the end, we have Randy returning to the ring to fight a match. You’re asked to question whether he’s going to survive it. Is he going to drop down and die? But the film doesn’t need this. Because of his desire to get back in the ring and feed some more on the adulation of an adoring wrestling crowd, Randy squanders two real relationships. He squanders the chance to make up with his daughter and he loses the chance to have a meaningful relationship with Cassidy, the stripper he befriends. Randy prefers to live a life of make believe. He doesn’t really want a real relationship with all the confusion and heartache that comes with it. He wants the simple, illusory relationship he has with his audience. He hits a move and they cheer. It’s joyously uncomplicated – for him, it makes sense.

So therefore, knowing that he’s fucked up his life by being such a knuckle-head, we don’t really need the added melodrama of ‘will he live or will he die?’ But regardless, the film gives it to us anyway. And it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t resolve the issue. The film ends with Randy struggling to the top rope so that he can hit his finishing move. It’s most definitely curtains for him (if he doesn’t die, he’s probably never going to be able to wrestle again), but because the set-up is a little hackneyed, it’s not as moving as it should have been. The ending would have had more weight if this was simply a man unable to relinquish a past life with the hopes of a meaningful future shattered. But instead the film has a kind of soap opera ending. And although, yes, wrestling is soap opera, the real lives behind them are far more strange and bewildering.

I also wasn’t particularly taken with the scenes with Randy’s daughter. Evan Rachel Wood was a little bland and everything felt a little overly familiar. But thankfully you have Mickey Rourke to pull you through these scenes. He’s marvellous in the film. His Randy ‘The Ram’ is a pathetic, loveable, frustrating waster. As he says, he’s an old piece of meat. All he can do, much like the stripper he befriends, is sell his body to an eager public. He doesn’t know anything else. And rather miserably, he loves the people that are destroying him. The relationship with the crowd becomes almost sado-masochistic – as he prepares to perhaps dive to his death, he tearfully relishes the cheers. It’s a wonderfully bleak portrait of a man crashing and burning, and Rourke gives it the humanity it needs.

After the dizzying heights of Zodiac, David Fincher comes crashing back to earth with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here’s a film with a marvellous premise – a man being born old and gradually growing younger – that never takes flight. It’s a bafflingly empty experience.

The key problem is the passivity of the main character. Do we ever get to know him? Do we ever get inside his head? No we don’t. And there’s such scope for human emotion. Here’s a man who’s unlike any other. Here’s a man destined to become more youthful and beautiful as those around him decay and wither. But we never get any sense of sadness, or confusion, or anger. Benjamin Button never asks ‘why me?’ He just glides through life, seemingly all too happy to have been thrown this curveball.

But just think of what could have been done with this character. Denied youth for almost 60 years, and forced to become humble before his time, he could have given into brashness and arrogance later in life. Instead he just sleeps with a couple of women (or three). Or he could have even suffered the ignominy of having a youthful body but an old mind. He could have suffered the onset of dementia while looking like James Dean. But no, as a young man (even though he’s apparently old inside) he seems to have a young mind, too. So therefore I didn’t feel anything for him because he didn’t seem to feel anything himself. The only time the character seems to have some real sense of self-awareness is when he leaves his beloved Daisy because she’s pregnant and he doesn’t want her to have to bring up two children. But this is done is a completely half-assed manner. They have a stilted conversation and he goes. Instead of coming over as a doomed individual, he just seems flaky, and where’s the tragedy in that?

The only time I really felt anything for Benjamin was when he becomes a child and he can’t remember anything. At one point he sits on the roof and thinks he can fly. To have lived a full life and to lose all those memories to the passage of time is truly sad, but the film just suddenly comes to this. There’s no progression. You never get the feeling that things are slipping away from Button. One minute he’s a beautiful teenager with his memory and character intact, and the next he’s a helpless child. I wanted to feel time slipping away from him. I wanted to feel the terror that he’d feel, knowing that he was shrinking into himself. But instead the ending kind of feels like an afterthought. It’s there to tie everything up.

Despite this, at the end, you have the film’s most beautiful and heartbreaking image – a long shot of two old lovers walking down the street, but one of those people is an elderly lady and the other is a child. It has a strangeness that makes it striking and touching – the devotion of Daisy to see things through to the end finally makes you feel something for these people.

Unfortunately, though, there’s no chemistry between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Therefore most of the film is a dead loss. How are you supposed to invest in characters when the passion between them is non-existent?

And Fincher’s idea of romance is more than a little adolescent. What do Benjamin and Daisy do when they finally become an item? Why they go sailing into the sunset on a beautiful yacht, of course. Pur-lease. I’d expect this from someone like Richard Curtis, not the man who made Zodiac and Seven.

And the scene where a teenage Benjamin turns up to woo an elderly Daisy one last time just doesn’t work. It’s meant to be the emotional highlight, but it’s just a little weird. And it’s weird because the teenage Button seems to have completely black, lifeless eyes. It really put me off. And it also doesn’t work because it all feels more than a little cold. This is meant to be their last hurrah, but it feels like either of them could take it or leave it. I never got the feeling that this was some great romance.

You also have to get over the fact that the two characters first meet when one looks very old and when one looks very young. Does this ever enter their minds? Does Daisy fantasise about the wrinkly old man and does Benjamin fantasise about the perky, little girl? Who knows…

Another relationship that doesn’t work is the one between Benjamin and his father. You see, Benjamin’s father is dismayed when he sees that his son is ugly as sin. Therefore he goes through town and dumps him on the steps of an old person’s home. You’d think this abandonment might piss Benjamin off. But it doesn’t really. When he finally finds out who his father is he seems nonplussed. He doesn’t really go searching for answers to who he is – he just politely listens. This crushing passivity suffocates drama at every turn.

The only really enjoyable element of the film is the visuals. The film is gorgeous to look at. In particular, I love the first scene where Thomas Button runs through town as fireworks burst in the air (it’s the end of the Great War). The photography is gorgeous and the period detail is impeccable. But pretty early on you realise this is all the film has to offer – a beautiful exterior without a heart. Honestly, I ended up using the film as a kind of clothes catalogue. I’ve already noted that I should get a white t-shirt and leather jacket (although I guess I’ll do without the Triumph motorcycle). But aside from that, I got nothing from this movie.

And it’s quite sad when the trailer for the film is so much better than the film itself. Just watch the first teaser. It literally shows the whole film from beginning to end, only minus the lifeless filler in-between. It got me really excited for this film – it looked like it had something magical to offer. But along the way someone forgot that a film doesn’t exist on beautiful visuals alone – you need a human drama to anchor it, something that is sorely lacking here.

I Am Legend is one of those annoying ‘might have been’ films. It could have been great, but instead, because of either studio pressure or poor decisions made by the production, it falls short of its potential – the first part of the film is magnificent, but it falls apart towards the end.

I can put my finger on the bit where the film begins to nosedive. It’s great up until Robert Neville (Will Smith) has to kill his dog. Up until this point, the film is tense and tightly directed. But after the dog’s death, we’re introduced to another couple of survivors and we have to suffer some last minute attempts to find some ‘meaning’ behind the movie. Talk of god is introduced and the lean survival movie kind of gives way to blindingly obvious talk about tolerance and love.

We also have the female survivor say that god must have spared Neville, to which Neville rightly berates her, pointing out the fact that billions of people have died – the very idea that there might have been a ‘plan’ for this reflects badly on everyone. It demeans the plight of the survivors and says only bad things about the ‘creator’ that would have set this disaster in motion.

The end also suffers because we’re confronted with the appalling CGI for the infected people (or the ‘dark seekers’ as they’re called) – at the beginning we only get glimpses. Quite why they didn’t use people with make up, I don’t know. They surely would have looked better. But no, in a desperate attempt to create lots of kewl action, the filmmakers decided to make the enemy poorly rendered CG creations. Yes, freed from the constraints of live performers, you can have your bad guys climb walls and headbutt the pavement, but what’s the point when they never look real? Every time you see the dark seekers you’re taken out of the film. When they climb they look weightless, when they scream they look like a cartoon and all the other times there’s just an air of unreality. Just get real actors and cut back on the crazy shit. I’m sure people won’t spontaneously fall asleep if the bad guys aren’t constantly climbing lampposts like monkeys. There are other ways of making them threatening. You know, a bit of subtlety can work a charm.

The film also suffers from its tendency to indulge in cheap shots. There’s a bit where Robert Neville captures one of the dark seekers and tries to cure her of her disease. You’re just counting down the moments until she sits up and lets off a piercing scream, and like clockwork, she does. Then there’s the bit where Neville and his family, during a flashback, are escaping Manhattan when the outbreak first occurs. With the way it’s filmed, and with news of the crisis developing, you’re just waiting for the moment when an infected person slams against the car. And sure enough, they do. I surely can’t be the only one praying for some chills rather than laboured attempt at thrills.

But to be fair to the film, there are some nice creepy moments. An excellent example occurs when Neville’s dog is chasing a deer. The startled deer runs into a dark building and suddenly Neville has to possibly confront the dark seekers. He wants to turn back, knowing that they’re probably in the building, but he doesn’t want to leave his dog behind. So he has to wander the dark rooms with only a torch on the end of the gun to shine some light. It’s a very tense sequence, and it’s well constructed. And there’s an excellent moment when Neville shines his light into a room and we get a brief glimpse of lots of dark seekers huddled around in a circle, feeding. It’s a very creepy shot. And then the jump moment that soon follows once Neville finds his dog is actually well timed – unlike the other attempts to get a reaction, it’s not laboured.

Another favourite scene is when Neville is driving the streets and sees a mannequin in the middle of the road. You see, Neville, in order to still have some sort of human connection, talks to some mannequins in a video store. So to suddenly see one of them in the street is disconcerting to say the least. And Neville ends up losing the plot and shoots ‘Fred’ (the name he gave the inanimate object). He then begins to think he’s being watched and shoots at the windows. I wish that there was more of this. I wish that there was more of this confusion. But then Neville gets caught up in a trap and dangles from a rope and we quickly find out that this trap has been set by the dark seekers. The hunter has become the hunted.

But this scene kind of proves that Neville is wrong when he asserts that the dark seekers are no longer human. They’re still able to set up a trap for him and one of them even briefly braves the sunlight in order to voice his displeasure at Neville capturing one of his kind. Neville puts this down to hunger and social de-evolution, but maybe the guy is just pissed off that Neville bundled his girl into a sack. The alternative ending certainly suggests this. So for once we have a massive Hollywood blockbuster where the hero isn’t right all the time, which is pleasing indeed.

It also pleases me that a big action film like this can have a left of centre scene where the hero shyly eyes a female mannequin. It could be queasy in the extreme, but Smith manages to make it seem kind of sweet. His hero is pleasing mixture of incredible self-certainty and extreme vulnerability. I mean, if your family had been killed in a helicopter crash and you’d seen people get fed on by dark seekers and if you’d been in New York on your own for years, how long would it be before you started flirting with mannequins? I don’t think it would take long.

And Smith manages to put a lump in your throat when he has to kill his dog. And in the scenes that immediately follow. He says hello to the mannequin in the most pathetic way possible and then begs her to say hello to him, now that he’s all alone in the world. He just wants to hear a human voice speak to him. Smith is marvellous in the scene.

But unfortunately this high point signals the moment when Neville gets his wish and the film takes a turn for the worse. Smith begs for some human contact and then has to content himself with someone who doesn’t know who Bob Marley is. Be careful what you wish for.

Oh, and don’t think I didn’t notice the fact that Emma Thompson was responsible for this virus. Damn Limeys. They’ll destroy us all!

Like a lot of Kubrick films, Eyes Wide Shut suffered because of raised expectations. Here you have a film with the world’s most famous director and the world’s most famous actor, and it’s all about sex. Therefore it must be an amazing two hour bonk-a-thon, right? But instead Kubrick delivered a quieter, more sombre film. It wasn’t the perverted fuck fest that everyone expected.

I can’t say that Eyes Wide Shut is one of my favourite Kubrick films. Some of the acting is poor, the writing occasionally is clunky and it runs out of steam with about thirty minutes of film left, but despite this, it doesn’t deserve the flack that it received from some of the critics – some consider it a piece of shit. It’s not the masterpiece that everyone hoped for, but it’s a mature look at marriage and sexual jealousy – it’s an adult film, but without the capital ‘A’.

The film’s central scene is the one where Alice (Kidman) and Dr Bill (Cruise) smoke a bit of weed together in their bedroom. They begin talking about a party they attended the night before and the members of the opposite sex they were flirting with. Bill was being hit on by some models and Alice was being seduced by a rich Hungarian. They both want to know what happened. But although it begins as a light-hearted discussion, things suddenly become more serious when Bill fails to show any jealousy over the Hungarian. His explanation that Alice is the mother of his child and that he knows she’d never fuck another man, is far too confident and far too smug. So Alice decides to cut him down to size and show how wrong he is. She tells him about a Naval Officer she wanted to fuck. And she wanted to fuck him so bad that she would have given up her husband and her child for him. Suddenly Bill’s happy, comfortable life comes falling around him. He realises that he doesn’t really know what goes on in his wife’s head and that his marriage isn’t anywhere near as solid as he thought it was. He gets smacked in the face with a heavy does of reality – women have just the same sexual hunger as men and they’re just as likely to be unfaithful.

This scene is one of the best in the film. Kidman is excellent in the way that she blasts a hole through Cruise’s smug self-certainty, and Cruise, while listening to Kidman’s story, radiates suppressed rage. For the first time he’s beginning to understand his wife – if he takes her for granted, everything will be over. And he also understands that he can no longer coast along like he used to. He might have a nice apartment with all the trappings of success, but if he neglects to work on his marriage, if he fails to take any notice of his wife and thinks that he’s indestructible, the most important thing will be lost.

To illustrate how clueless Bill is, there’s a scene where Alice and Bill make out in front of a mirror. Bill comfortably and smugly thinks that his wife is thinking about him, but we can tell that her mind is straying – it’s not only men who fantasise about fucking everything in sight.

After Alice’s confession, the film turns into a bad dream. Bill wanders the streets, consumed with jealousy at the thought of Alice being with another man. All he can think about is her cheating on him.

It’s here, as Bill goes from one strange encounter to another, that the film becomes uneven. First of all you have a scene with a bereaved woman who then declares her love for Dr Bill. The scene doesn’t work particularly well because the actress is so bad. She rolls her eyes and stares wildly, but it’s far too over the top. Then Bill bumps into a prostitute who offers her services to him. This doesn’t really work that well for multiple reasons. First of all, the prostitute is far too good looking. Since when have you ever seen a street whore who looks that cute? Then you have the fact that she seems quite clean, that she’s too shy to talk about sex and that she tenderly kisses Bill. It’s strange to say this for a Kubrick film, but it’s far too sentimentalised. I know the film is basically a dream, but even in your dreams a whore wouldn’t be this sweet and innocent.

Thankfully, though, just when you’re despairing, you have the orgy sequence. It’s not particularly sexy, but that’s missing the point. It’s a nightmare. It’s a vision of how despairing ‘free’ sex would be. There’s no passion to it. Everyone has a wall up – everyone’s masked. Therefore the sex is bleak and cold and depressing. This is what Bill thinks he wants. He thinks he wants an easy fuck. But unfortunately there’s no such thing. Everything has a price.

The orgy sequence is a showcase for Kubrick’s mastery of cinematic language. One of the best shots in the film is when Bill looks up to a balcony and we cut to a slow zoom onto a couple of masked figures. Here the film feels like a horror movie – the shot has a quiet dread that few directors could conjure. And then you have Bill’s tour of the mansion. The music, the camerawork and the lighting are all perfect.

The only negative in the orgy sequence is some of the dialogue. At one point a woman comes up to Bill and asks him if he’s enjoying himself. He says that he’s had an interesting look around. It’s banal in the extreme.

But then much of the dialogue is clunky. For instance, throughout the whole of the film, Bill has the habit of repeating what other people say to him. He does it so often that you begin to anticipate it and begin tearing your hair out when he does it for fiftieth time. ‘Would you like to come inside with me?’ ‘Come inside with you?’ Argh!

And like I say, some of the acting is atrocious. I’ve already mentioned the eye-rolling woman, but then there’s Alan Cumming. He’s supposed to be a hotel clerk that flirts with Bill. But Cumming’s accent slips a handful of times and he seems to think he’s in a remake of Are You Being Served? He’s so overwhelmingly camp that I’m surprised that he didn’t just reach over the desk and wank Bill off right there and then. It’s a buffoonish, tic-ridden performance – a complete caricature of a homosexual.

But worse than this are the two models at the beginning of the movie. There’s an English one who sounds plumier than Elizabeth Hurley and who natters endlessly about what a great guy Bill is because he got some crud out of her eye with a handkerchief (more crushingly banal dialogue), and then there’s another one with a silly name who genuinely seems handicapped. Her attempts at flirting seem like the wild flailings of someone with Parkinson’s.

Oh, and have I mentioned that the Hungarian Count is played by someone who resembles an Eastern European Roger Moore? Yes, in a way this is strangely cool, but for a serious film it’s a bit of distraction. The smarm made me almost keel over.

Another annoyance is the piece of music that seems to play every ten seconds. You know, the piano one. The one that sounds like it’s played by a chimp trying to learn to play a musical instrument. He’s so confused by the strange contraption that sits before him that he can only hit a key every five seconds. But yeah, although most of the music is great, this one piece appears over and over again when something ‘important’ is meant to be happening (like when someone is very slowly delivering a letter). A bit more variety was called for, Stanley.

So with all of these distractions it’s sometimes easy to overlook all the great stuff in the film.

Other wonderful bits are the scene when Alice tells Bill about a dream she had, one where she fucked other men and mocked her husband. And then there’s the scene where Bill watches his wife do homework with his daughter. He pretends to look lovingly at her but he can only think about the dream she told him about, and so this idyllic sight has been corrupted for him. And I also love the moments where Bill is stalked through the streets of New York by a strange man. No one can do quiet horror like Kubrick.

And there’s a pleasingly adult message to the film. That we shouldn’t take each other for granted. That we shouldn’t coast along in our lives and assume that everything will be okay. We need to work constantly on our relationships. We need to put the effort in. Because it’s easy to give in to temptation. But what’s more difficult and ultimately more fulfilling, is to maintain a deep connection with one’s partner. I mean, all through the film, almost every character responds sexually to Bill. But what would be the point of any of the liaisons? How would they make anything better? They wouldn’t. So people need to wake up and realise the importance of what they have. They need to stop drifting blinding through life, hoping that everything will turn out for the best in the end, because it probably won’t.

But still, that damn piano music and Alan Cumming and the models and the repetitive dialogue. You almost had another great film Stanley.

When I first watched it as a teenager, I didn’t enjoy The Thing. I can't really recall what it was I didn't like about it, but I seem to remember finding it a little confusing and I can remember not being a fan of the special effects (some would consider that last statement heresy). But since then, I’ve come to like it a great deal. I wouldn't place it at the top of the genre like some people would, but it wouldn't be far off.

First things first, I appreciate the special effects a lot more now. I think the problem when I first watched it was just how bizarre it all was. Tentacles? Bloody flower guts? Giant snapping mouths? Maybe I found it hard to suspend my disbelief, or perhaps I found it repulsive – I don't mind gore in horror films, but I'm not a fan of what I'd call 'gloop'. For some reason I can happily watch limbs get blown and sawn off, or see people get shot, stabbed and eaten, but my sick trigger is sensitive to 'gloopy' film monsters. For instance, I love David Cronenberg's version of The Fly, but I do actually come close to gagging when watching it.

So perhaps I didn't appreciate the special effects for those reasons. But they're actually pretty great. One of the best bits has to be when an imitation human head sprouts a tentacle from its mouth and pulls itself along – and earlier on when the head begins to detach itself from its body. It's nasty and unpleasant and great to watch. And then there's the bit when Palmer's face rips apart and a giant alien mouth sprouts and bites a guy in the head. Sweet. (And to make it even better, the man who's getting bitten is shaken from side to side like a rag doll.)

But not all the special effects work great. Although I love the head being ripped off and I love it when it shoots a tentacle from its mouth, it does look silly rather than disturbing when it sprouts antennae and spidery legs. There's a fine line between great and crap. And the bit at the end isn't particularly impressive either – the bit where we see huge tentacles and a massive monster. It's overkill and the effects don't match what has come before.

Much better are the little bits. Right at the end, right before the silly tentacle business and the unconvincing alien dog, is a bit where Garry encounters an assimilated Blair and Blair sticks his hand in his head. It's brilliantly done. And then after that you see Blair dragging Garry along by his face like he’s sack. Again it's sick and nasty, but in a much more believable way.

However, it's not the monster that makes The Thing such an enjoyable film. It's the confusion and the paranoia that its presence generates in the humans (I guess when I first watched it as a kid, I didn't realise that confusion was the point – it’s kind of a take on the AIDS crisis). After all, seeing as The Thing is a shape-shifter, and it can take on any form, everyone's a suspect – anyone could be a carrier.

This climate of paranoia and suspicion is best illustrated in the scene where MacReady (Kurt Russell) ties the surviving scientists and workers to chairs so that he can check their blood to see who's human and who's not (it’s like a homemade AIDS test). The scene really is tense, as you haven't got a clue who's been assimilated and who hasn't. You're not even sure if MacReady is who he says he is, as even he's been built up as a suspect. But it literally could be anybody and the scene's a powder keg.

Another great scene is when MacReady declares that he knows for certain he's human and the camera slowly pans across the rest of the group. Do we believe him, and who among the group isn't what he says he is?

As well as these nail-biting scenes, I love the creepy moments too (they're often a lot better than the 'scary' bits). My favourite is when a half assimilated Bennings is caught trying to escape the camp – he's almost a perfect copy but his hands are deformed – and he lets off an eerie howl before he's burnt to a crisp (there are a lot of torchings in this film, which, needless to say, I love – and one brilliant torching is immediately followed by an exploding). And there's also the bit where MacReady visits Blair, who's been locked in the tool shed. MacReady opens a slit and Blair's sitting there by a noose while eating cans of food. He then begs to be let out. He insists that he's much better. It's a superb scene. And as simple as they are, I love all the lingering shots of the dog. It's a creepy mutt. It's got a thousand yard stare.

Also rather creepy is the ending. After all the pyrotechnics, MacReady thinks he's the sole survivor. But then Childs shows up. Childs’ explanation is that he got lost in the snow. There's a bit of an awkward conversation, and even though Mac kind of knows that it isn't the real Childs, he's become resigned to his fate and shares a smoke. It's an ending that, in the best way, keeps you wondering.

And on a final note, I must say how much I enjoy Mac's snow-sombrero and his bad geography. "Hey Sweden!" he shouts when he visits a Norwegian camp. There aren’t many laughs in the film, but the ones that are there do the trick.

Choppy, choppy your pee-pee - words that would strike fear into the heart of any man, but words that are made even more terrifying when the chopping comes from gnashers that are in some young girl’s cooter.

I guess most teenagers are a little afraid of sex. You know, what with the weird organs, the smelly bodily fluids and the female fear of having one’s hymen pierced by a throbbing shaft of man meat and the male fear of busting a nut before contact with the hairy love cave has been established. Sex is fraught with danger.

Some adolescents respond by excessively masturbating, others conquer the fear of their first sexual encounters by turning to booze and drugs, and some just fuck everything in sight. A few, though, decide to ignore sex all together.

Dawn is one of these people. In order not to deal with her burgeoning sexuality, she decides to suppress it by committing herself to a life of chastity. She won’t have sex until her wedding night. She’s going to remain ‘pure’.

Now this might sounds like madness to some. You might marry someone with a micropenis, or someone with a cunt-splittingly huge dong. Or they might not be able to get it up or they might need you to dress as a Cardinal in order to achieve orgasm. Surely you should try before you buy. But no, Dawn lectures children on the benefits of purity. Apparently virginity is a special gift and you shouldn’t give it to anyone. That’s true enough, but building sex up to giant proportions is enough to drive someone mad. It’s not something to be frightened of. After all, it’s not like you’ve got teeth in your twat.

Oh wait, Dawn does. Not that she knows it, though. Hell, she doesn’t even know what a vagina looks like.

There’s a scene early in the film where the kids are learning about sexual reproductive organs. The teacher has no problem talking about the penis, but he recoils at talking about the vagina. And the pictures of the vagina in the textbooks are censored by a foil sticker. The very notion that we’re protecting children by keeping them ignorant is suitably mocked in Teeth. The best protection is education – teenagers should know all the facts.

But alas Dawn doesn’t know anything about sex and even admonishes herself for fantasising about a boy and for being tempted to masturbate. ‘Purity, purity,’ she mutters to herself. Doesn’t she know that there’s a beast between her legs?

Teeth isn’t a particularly coherent film, but if it does have a point it’s that bad things happen when teenagers either rush into sex or if they don’t educate themselves. For instance, Dawn’s half-brother seems to spend all day banging his girlfriend, and he prefers to do it up the arse. This kind of rampant sexuality has all kinds of negative consequences. But at the same time, Dawn’s head in the sand mentality isn’t healthy either. It means that when she finally meets a boy she likes, she isn’t able to deal with the situation and bad things happen.

Of course, Teeth takes things to an extreme. Dawn doesn’t just find a boy and then gets a little pissed off when he tries to look down her knickers. No, she finds a boy who decides to attack her. She’s attracted a rapist. But as dark as the scene sounds, it’s played for laughs. ‘I haven’t jerked off since Easter!’ yells the boy as he forces himself on her in a cave. You see what happens when you bottle things up? Tsk, tsk. But although the boy’s reaction to her plea for self-control is a little over the top, so is her response to his illegal entry. She bites his cock off…with her vagina. And then we have a hilarious moment where the two scream at each one – the girl because she didn’t realise she had teeth and the boy because, well, his cock has left his body.

Following this encounter, Dawn goes home, not really sure of what happened. But upon her return there’s a brilliant one-liner. ‘There’s dinner if you want a bite,’ says one of her parents. ‘I ate,’ is Dawn’s reply. That made me chuckle like only a brilliant one-liner can.

And there’s also a wonderful visual gag. Dawn still isn’t really sure what happened and goes back to the cave to see if she really did castrate her boyfriend. At first she doesn’t see anything, but then she finds a piece of her boyfriend’s cock being eaten by crabs. Got crabs? Yeah, unprotected sex is murder.

Another hilarious scene is when Dawn goes to see her gynaecologist. He’s a right sleazy bastard and states that, seeing as this is her first visit, she probably doesn’t know what to expect. Taking advantage of this, he sees her without a female nurse present and he even begins fingering her without gloves on. Cue some amusingly skeezy dialogue where he tells her to breath through the pain and where he comments on how tight she is. But my favourite bit is when he tells her to relax. It’s the way he says it. It’s like the word is split into two: ‘Re-lax’. It has the coldly condescending tone that only men can manage.

But Dawn gets her own back on the man and bites the doctor’s fingers off. But not before he drags her around the room for a bit, unable to free himself from her nether regions. And then once he’s free and his fingers are on the floor, he repeatedly shouts, ‘Vagina dentata!’ Oh my god, it’s true! Women do have teeth!

We’re told that vagina dentata is a common myth and that it’s up to a male hero to come in and break the female’s power. But there isn’t such a hero here. We just have pathetic, sleazy man after pathetic, sleazy man, and when Dawn finally meets a seemingly decent guy and safely has sex with him, he turns out to be a scumbag and she snips his knob off. Finding a decent man is hell these days!

But the dick-snipping hilarity peaks when Dawn fucks her half-brother. You see, he’s had the hots for her since they were children and Dawn gets a little mad at him when he fails to give a shit about their mother dying. So to get revenge, she has sex with him and then castrates him. And this leads to many wonderful images. The first is the image of Dawn releasing the hacked cock out of her vagina – it goes ‘plonk’ on the floor. And then after this we have the shot of the boy’s dog picking up the severed penis in its mouth. The boy gasps and tells him to drop it, but instead the dog gobbles the dick up, leaving just the head on the floor. And this leads to the final wonderful image – the shot of a sad head lying on the floor with a bolt running through it – damn Prince Albert made that part inedible.

So unfortunately no one gets to break this girl’s power. But then that’s kind of the point. None of these men are worthy of Dawn. They’re all just trying to use her. And so therefore they can hardly complain when she bites.

And so while the film rightly mocks the trend for young people to devote themselves to a life of chastity, it also rallies against misogyny. You don’t have to wait until you get married before you give yourself to someone, but you have to make sure that the person is worthy of your affections.

Beware the trees, the bushes, the blades of grass and the shrubbery for they shall wreak a terrible vengeance. Beware the wind, too, for it shall be the vegetation’s chariot and shall spread death all over the land.

The Happening features many lingering shots of trees and bushes. It also has a high frequency of scenes where people run from gusts of wind. Thrilling the film isn’t, but silly it is.

In his latest film, M. Night Shyamalan tries to tap into our fear of an ecological disaster, but his movie is so ham-fisted, so badly written and so woodenly acted that it ends up being an unintentional comedic tour de force. M. Night has really outdone himself this time.

The film begins with a couple of women in Central Park. They talk amongst themselves and then suddenly everyone around them stops. Then one of the women begins to look confused. ‘What page was I on?’ she says like she’s summoning the spirit of Captain Kirk. And then she stabs herself in the neck. Hmm. Awful acting and ‘ominous’ shots of trees as someone…absolutely…must…kill…themselves. Yeah, it’s not scary.

Immediately following this scene is a sequence where people throw themselves off a building. We start with a bunch of construction workers and then bodies begin to fall around them. It tries its best to tie itself to the terror of 9/11 but the horror is constantly undermined by the ridiculous acting. The head construction guy, rather than go through any sort of disbelief, which I guess would be the normal reaction, seems to cry almost immediately. And then as he looks up and bodies rain on him, he says in hushed tones, ‘God in heaven.’ Who talks like that? Only people in Shyamalanland. For some reason he tries to make every piece of dialogue seem incredibly profound - instead it comes over as corny.

However, there are greater moments of silliness. One of the best features a man who lies down before a massive lawnmower and lets it run over him, splattering lots of blood all over a beautifully manicured lawn. Yeah, did no one think that this might look ridiculous? Oh no, not a giant lawnmower lumbering very slowly towards an incapacitated man! Such visions haunt my dreams. That and the thought of breaking my spine in a flower-watering incident and having malicious squirrels stuff nuts up my anus until I explode.

But even more sniggersome is the scene where a man gets his arm ripped off by a lion. Okay, so this has a more believable bend to it, as many a crazy bastard has tried to make ‘friends’ with the wild animals before. But here the horror is immediately diluted by the way the scene is filmed. Alright, so we have Mark Wahlberg talking to the young daughter of a friend of his and he does his best to cheer her up. He even succeeds. But then some stranger next to Markie Mark taps him on the shoulder and shows him a video on her iphone. We then see grisly footage of a lion ripping a man’s arm off. Yeah, don’t worry kid, everything will be alright. You’ll just either stab yourself in the head, javelin into a minefield, crucify yourself with a nail gun or rip your belly open and have vultures feast on your innards. Nothing bad is going to happen. Smile that smile again!

Another death scene that had me guffawing was the one where John Leguizamo dies. He’s trying to rescue his wife, and he drives off with some strangers in a Jeep, but then everyone succumbs to the toxins the plants have released. We see the Jeep stop and then it speeds towards a tree and people go flying through the windshield. However, Leguizamo survives the crash and slashes his wrists. Again, any potential horror is undermined by the way the crash is filmed. It’s speeded up! It looks like something out of The Cannonball Run. And because Leguizamo’s character is such an idiot, I found myself beaming when he cut through his cables.

However, I think the pièce de résistance comes near the end. Wahlberg and his idiot wife hide in the house of a mad old woman. She spouts nonsense and behaves irrationally and then she gets infected by the toxin. We then see her enter a trance and start circling the house from the outside. Okay, so this is the one unsettling moment in the film. It actually has a bit of tension. But then the woman appears at the window and headbutts it, a shard of glass sticking out of her eye. But this doesn’t kill her so she walks to the next window and headbutts that one. The wind then rushes into the room and Markie Mark has to run for his life. The scene, like most of the film, is insane, and unintentionally hilarious at the same time. Never mind Shyamalan’s heavy handed attempts to preach to us (our self destructive instincts are going to kill us and our planet!) – just watch the nonsense that is a mad old lady committing suicide by trying to destroy her glazing.

But just to show out of synch Shyamalan is with his audience, take the scenes where he tries to generate real laughs. There’s one scene where Wahlberg is in a room with a plant. He almost shits himself and then begins talking to it, saying that he only wants to use the toilet and that he’s trying to send out good vibes. He then touches it and realises that it’s plastic. I almost wanted to cry, so inane was the laboured attempt at humour and so amateurish the acting.

And Wahlberg is horribly miscast in this film. He’s meant to be a Science teacher. Fair enough, Wahlberg is okay when he’s cast properly (basically he has to either play a moron or a thug). But a Science teacher? Every time he talks scientifically he gazes into the distance, like someone on the far horizon is holding a massive idiot board. Either that or he’s trying to concentrate and he needs to somehow relax his facial muscles so that he can reach inside his mind, scratch his brain and remember his dialogue.

But then at other times he changes his inflections. Normal statements suddenly become questions. It’s like Shyamalan accidentally italicised his dialogue when he sent it to the printers.

However, Zooey Deschanel, who plays Wahlberg’s wife, turns in an even more embarrassing performance. Her character is a complete airhead and demands a horrid death – maybe she could take her mobile phone, connect it to a charger, stick it in her vagina and pee herself so that she dies of electrocution. But no, she bumbles her way through the film and gets through unscathed. She doesn’t even lose bladder control. And to add insult to injury, these horrifying events solidify their marriage. Once again traumatic events strengthen a rocky union. What a load of bollocks.

The end leaves the two main characters remarkably content. Never mind the fact that they saw many people commit suicide. Never mind the fact that one of their best friends slashed his wrists. Never mind the fact that two children they befriended got their heads blown off with a shotgun. No, that means nothing. These events made them grow as people. The Happening was a good thing.

But of course, this wouldn’t be a Shyamalan film if it didn’t have a sting in the tail. At the very, very end, after the crisis is over in America, France gets attacked. The film ends with a bunch of Frenchies about to kill themselves. Can we look forward to a sequel where men in striped shirts, riding bicycles with onions around their necks, ride in unison into the Seine? One can only hope.