The Chase

A small town in Texas is in upheaval because Bubber Reeves escaped from jail. He was sitting in for one of a string of felonies. On the run, the prisoner he broke out of jail with kills someone and takes of with their car. So now the authorities also want Bubber for a murder he did not commit.

A handful of people in his hometown want to help him. There are Anna, his wife, and Jake Rogers, son of the rich man that practically owns the town. The two have been lovers for a long time (and everyone except old man Rogers knows) and now want to help Bubber by providing him money and a means to make a run for it.

The local Sheriff, who doesn't quite believe that Bubber had anything to do with the murder does his best to try and return him safely to jail because quite a few of the town's inhabitants have been drinking through most of the night and are out for blood. Sheriff Calder takes a beating from an especially anxious trio.

Eventually, a lot of the town folk make it out to Lester Johnson's junk yard by the wharf, where Bubber is said to be hiding out. Various drunken parties have relocated there and the people start throwing Molotov cocktails into the yard and singing songs asking Bubber to come out. It all gets out of hand and an explosion severely injures Jake. He dies some time later.

Bubber finally surrenders to the Sheriff, who takes him calmly to jail but on the steps, the idiotic trio cause one last ruckus and one of them guns Bubber down.

Good film with a fiery finale and a great cast.

7/10

World War Z

Let me sum this up:
(1) We do not know what happened.
(2) We do not know how it started.
(3) We do not know where it started.
(4) This is not over.

Gerry Lane, formerly of the UN, is called back to duty when a zombie outbreak overruns the earth. He is sent off to assist one young, bright doctor to learn more about the new threat where they first heard of it - in South Korea. Unfortunately, the young, bright doctor panics, trips, and shoots himself falling down before he even got off the plane. So Gerry gathers all information he can get and moves on to Israel, who finished its big wall surrounding Jerusalem a week before it all began.

Unfortunately, in Jerusalem the inhabitants and newly arrived refugees are so happy about having found safe haven that they celebrate by singing and changing into microphones. We know that zombies react to and run towards sounds. This jubilation now is so loud that the creatures outside the city walls find a way of getting inside. It looks pretty impressive, too.

So Gerry has to move on. He boards a plane from Belarus that was destined for Jerusalem, as well, but immediately takes off again when they realize what is going on outside. On the plane, hidden away in a closet is one single zombie (of course), but one zombie is all it takes to start and epidemic. Gerry causes the plane to crash before he and his new found friend, an Israeli female soldier, get infected.

Luckily, they crash within walking distance of where they wanted to go anyway - a WHO research facility in Cardiff. It is there that Gerry realizes (through flashbacks) that the zombies avoid terminally ill people like the pest (pardon the pun). To test the theory he injects himself with some deadly disease or other. It works. The word spreads. The day is saved.

Yes, it has plot holes and relies on coincidences more often than it should. But it is very entertaining and the zombies in close-up really look pretty awesome. And the sound they make individually is great - in a very creepy way.

The 3D was yet again totally unnecessary, though.

7/10

Village of the Damned

A blackout hits the people of one small town. They all pass out for a while. When they come to, all the women of child bearing age are pregnant. They all deliver the babies on the same day.

The children are intelligent beyond their ages and have 'special powers', meaning they can make the adults do what they collectively want them to. The ultimate plan is to form a colony and multiply. Presumably to take over the world, eventually.

Similar events have happened in different remote parts of the world. But, wherever they children survived, the communities have been wiped out by their respective governments in surprise bombings...nobody in those towns was informed because the children can read minds (unless you block them out effectively by thinking of unrelated things rather intensely say, an ocean, for example).

Creepy kids. Creepy, creepy kids.

6/10

The Russia House

I'm confused. But this is a John le Carré story, so that was to be expected.

What I gather is this: Barley, a British publisher, is recruited by the Secret Service to spy on the Russians, as he has been contacted by a Russian publisher, Katya, regarding a scientific book by one Dante (not his real name).

From then on, he wears wires seemingly everywhere he goes in Moscow and Leningrad. He meets with Katya, later with Dante and some sort of deal is struck, that would have him hand over what everyone refers to as 'the shopping list' (written in invisible ink, no less).

By now, the Brits have teamed up with the US Secret Service as well and people from both sides wearing more or less appealing suits sit in a room together listening in with headphones. Then the British liaison to Barley, Ned, gets suspicious and wants to call the final handover off. But the Americans push on (of course). Words are exchanged, the go ahead as planned and of course Ned was right all along.

Dante apparently is already dead at the time he was supposed to meet with Barley, who has worked out that something is wrong thanks to Katya. He then makes his own plan to double cross his home country. All for the love of Katya.

Or something like that.

6/10

Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter)

Max works the night shift on the front desk of a hotel in Vienna (my beautiful city!) where he one day recognizes one of the guests. Lucia is in the city with her conductor husband.

Lucia and Max met in a concentration camp, where she was an inmate while was in the SS. Some kinky stuff went on in the camp. Not only were the two having a sado-masochistic relationship, but some of the inmates entertained the staff, sometimes half naked.

Now, 13 years later, the pair picks up right where they left off, much to the chagrin of Max' friends from back then, one of which recognizes 'a female witness' to the entertainment evenings they all participated in. Lucia and Max hole up in his small apartment while Lucia's husband is looking for her and Max' friends try to get their hands on Lucia to do away with her (one presumes).

The pair is played by the always wonderful Dirk Bogarde and a young and pretty Charlotte Rampling (where did the time go?).

Disturbing.

7/10

The Awakening

Florence Cathcart exposes hoaxes dealing with ghosts and writes books about it. One day she is asked to come to a school for boys haunted by one little boy, that appears to some of the children there with twisted face, scaring the boys. So much so that one died from an asthma attack.

She sets up all sorts of machines and means of proving that the 'ghost' is only boys playing pranks. When the school closes down for a week, only a few personnel and one boy, Thomas, stay behind with Florence. That is when things get really creepy. Florence starts seeing the ghost and at the same time remember all sorts of things, like a broken statue or a single shoe.

Turns out she is the most traumatized of them all, having grown up in the house the school is in, where - as a young girl - witnessed her father shooting her mother, who couldn't give him a son, and then coming after the little girl but in the end killing his bastard son, instead. That son turns out to be Thomas.

Florence's visit had been orchestrated by Tom's mother who worked for Florence's family back in the day and stayed in the house to work for the school, as well. Her idea was for Florence and Thomas to be together again, so the boy won't be so lonely.

Creepy with a gothic look to it. Too bad I don't like Rebecca Hall, which made the viewing experience less enjoyable. Luckily, this features also Dominic West, Imelda Staunton and the wonderful but underrated Shaun Dooley. Thomas is played by Isaac Hempstead Wright (of Game of Thrones fame).

5/10

That Evening Sun

Old Mr Meecham bails from the old folks' home to return to his farm. When he gets there he finds the Choat family has rented the place off of his son. What's worse, it is a family Meecham considers to be white trash, and he tells the father so frequently.

Refusing to leave he decides to stay in the tenant's house and wait for them to leave because he believes that it still is his place and he wants to live out his days there. Lonzo Choat drinks to much and is trying to make ends meet and scrape together the money for their payments to buy the farm.

The two men come to blows more than once. One night, his teenage daughter Pamela goes on a date with a young man her father does not approve of. When he drops her off at the farm, Lonzo starts going at them with a gardening hose before Meecham interferes. And in the middle of it all is Meecham's son Paul, who tries to convince his father to return to the home. There does not appear to be a solution that any of them can live with.

Hal Holbrook is wonderful as old Meecham.

8/10

Riddle

Two high school seniors decide one day that it would be fun to take poor, timid, mentally challenged Nathan out for a joy ride and scaring the hell out of him by playing 'chicken'. After Nathan peed himself as a result (and really, what were they expecting) they stop at a gas station and send him to the bathroom to clean himself up. And then the boy vanishes into thin air.

Jump to three years later. Nathan's sister Holly is now a college student but goes home for the week to help out at the local farmer's market. When an apple drops to the floor and she goes down to retrieve it she catches a glimpse of a pair of shoes that are obviously her little brother's. She follows the man wearing them all the way to nearby Riddle.

It is obvious from the get-go that some of the inhabitants of the all-but-dead town know something about Nathan's disappearance and possibly whereabouts but are not willing to talk. Holly reconnects with a former high school colleague (who just happens to be the Sheriff's daughter and OMG didn't Val Kilmer used to look good whatthehellhappenedthere) and eventually the two idiots that were involved in Nathan's disappearance. (Side note: if you hire actors in their thirties to play kids of 21 years, make sure all of them can pull off that age...it is irritating if a 30 year old looks her age *cough* Diora Baird *cough* but is supposed to be of just-out-of-high-school age.)

Together they break into the Sheriff's office to retrieve the files on Nathan from 3 years back. It is then that they (and we) learn that both, Nathan and Holly, were adopted and their real father stabbed their mothe rto death. As a consequence, the kids were adopted and daddy ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane in, yes, Riddle. It is at this point at the latest that we know who took the boy. After losing the two former high school idiots (death by ax), Holly gets chased by daddy to the insane asylum (yes, sure, crawl into a locked and deserted building when you have all the woods to hide in, or, Idon'tknow, you could run back into town or something) where he tells her that the boy stays with him and she belongs with her mother. Why he doesn't kill her when he has the chance (he did stab the woman, remember) I couldn't say. He chooses to torture her with electric shocks instead, giving Holly the chance to set him on fire.

Yeah, it's crap.

1/10

Pretty Maids All in a Row

This film about a high school football coach sleeping with and killing female students starts off with a

DEAD CHEERLEADER ALERT!

Murder victim number one is apparently best remembered for being such a 'terrific little cheerleader'. She is found in a boy's toilet with a note stuck to her butt by fellow student Ponce de Leon Harper (yes!).

But that is the least of Ponce's problems. What really troubles this young man are his constant erections. When he confides in the coach (who is also vice principal, English teacher and some sort of counselor) he misunderstands and thinks he actually suffers from erectile dysfunction. Coach then asks sexy substitute teacher Miss Smith to take it upon herself to help the boy. This then leads to Ponce and Miss Smith having an affair (of course). It is also Ponce that discovers a vital piece of evidence in Coach's room - a recording of a 'session' he has with one of the female students.

For all the murder going on, the film is actually funny at times. If you get around to ever seeing it watch out for the principal's secretary. She is hilarious!

I love 1970's films! The clothes! The pornstaches! Telly Savalas! Rock Hudson!

7/10

Mean Girls

Finally watched this gem of high school films.

This was before Lindsay Lohan went off the rails and she was still the sweetheart actress with freckles. It was also before anyone knew who Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried are.

The story is pretty simple. New girl comes to high school after having lived in Africa for over a decade and having been home schooled. She is just about to learn the basic rules of high school life when she gets adopted into the group referred to as the 'plastics' (which is exactly what it sounds like). She is supposed to pretend to be friends with them and report back to a couple of students on the margins of high school life but bit by bit becomes just like the pretty air heads.

Of course, everything comes to blows eventually but she makes amends and gives a pretty speech and gets the boy in the end.

Funny and full of quotable lines.

6/10

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Slacker Jeff lives in his mother's basement, waiting for a sign. He imagines the signs to appear and tell him what to do, because he has watched the film Signs. Repeatedly.

So, on one particular day, when someone calls the house looking for a Kevin, Jeff believes that this is what he has been waiting for. He is supposed to get glue to fix his mother's shutters but gets distracted by a guy in a basketball jersey with the name Kevin on it. From there he follows the Kevins he sees (on a candy deliver truck, say) while at the same time, together with his brother Pat, trying to find out whether Pat's wife Linda is having an affair.

Their mother has her own awkward day in the office when a 'secret admirer' contacts her via instant message. After lots of confusion Jeff and Pat are in a cab following Linda's car and end up in the same traffic jam as the mother, who is about to go to New Orleans on a whim with the admirer. While they are all waiting for an accident to be cleared up, Jeff has an epiphany and runs to the sight of the accident and jumps in the water to help a family whose car has gone over the side of the bridge. He saves two little girls and their father named - wait for it - Kevin.

Nice little movie, even for someone (like myself) who does not get the infatuation with Jason Segel.

6/10

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS

How do I...? Where do I...?

Ilsa is a doctor in a concentration camp. She set it upon herself to prove to the male dominated Nazi regime that women have a much higher tolerance for pain than men and - as a consequence - should be fighting at the front for the Third Reich.

To prove this she needs documentation gathered through extensive torture. She also likes to sleep her way through the men in the camp and if they prove to not meet her standards (and mind you, she expects that they don't), she has them dismembered and the unsatisfactory body part is sent to a colleague who studies such things. In sweeps an American inmate who can satisfy her and so earns his place and stays in one piece for the time being.

In the end, all trace of the camp's existence will be wiped out.

Lots of torture scenes and lots of sex. Trash of the highest order.

3/10

Oh, and for the record: "Dewachtung" is not a word. I'm guessing this should have been "Bewachung"...?

Gone

Two years ago, Jill was kidnapped from her home and dumped into a hole in the middle of a huge forest near Portland, OR. Law enforcement tried for all of two weeks to find said hole where, according to Jill, several skeletons are buried. They start suspecting that the girl made it all up and have her institutionalized.

Jill now lives with her sister Molly, the only family she has anymore. When she comes home one morning after a night shift at the restaurant she works in Molly is gone and Jill becomes immediately convinced that her kidnapper has come back to finish her off.

When she goes to the police to alert them, the do not believe her yet again and don't move a finger to find Molly, who is a recovering alcoholic and they are convinced she will turn up on her own account. Jill sets out to find her and their kidnapper by herself.

At the same time, she is being hunted because she carries a gun, and having been a mental patient she lost the right to do so (even in gun crazy Merica), and has threatened someone with it to gather information. So the film is the police hunting Jill hunting the kidnapper and recovering her sister.

Actually quite entertaining.

6/10

Feast

This was fun!

A group of people are stranded in a bar when they are attacked by monsters. There is no explanation where those creatures came from and how they ended up in the middle of nowhere. The collection of bar maids, travelers and local weirdos have to work together to survive (not many do).

At first, we are introduced to the characters in the film through humorous inserts. Nobody has a name, they are referred to as "Hero" or "Bozo" or "Grandma" etc. and the entire spectrum of humanity is pretty much covered. There is blood and puke and a popped-out eye.

There is also Henry Rollins in pink ladies' sweats (the monsters will eventually use him as a battering ram to break their way into the bar).

I hear there is a part II. (Yes!)

7/10

California Suite

The film follows four different story lines set in the same hotel, all of people either sparring off with each other verbally or - in one case - going at each other with everything they have.

My favorite coupling is played by the wonderful Maggie Smith and the equally wonderful Michael Caine. Smith plays actress Diana Barrie, who is in Hollywood because she was nominated for her first Oscar. Incidentally, Maggie Smith herself won the Best Supporting Actress award for this role.

Also out west is Jane Fonda, who flew in to meet with her ex-husband (played by Alan Alda) because their teenage daughter ran off. The pair has to settle the question of where their daughter will spend the year before going off to college.

Then there is Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau), who is in town for his nephew's bar mitzvah. He spends a night out with his brother, who is something of a womanizer and - as a favor to Michael - hires a hooker for him. The hooker gets drunk on Tequila and Michael is unable to raise her in the morning in time before his wife arrives.

Lastly, two couples spend a vacation together, but they don't appear to have any fun at all. They trash the rental car, one room reservation got lost and it all dissolves when they spend the morning playing a mixed double of tennis. Then one of the wives hurts her ankle, a bottle of perfume breaks and the glass gets stepped in, a head is hit on the cabinet door, fainting spells, a few swings with a tennis racket and a brawl between the husbands concludes the trip.

Funny.

7/10

Blitz

Jason Statham is a one-trick pony. This time around he plays a cop (a rogue one, obviously) and does what he always does, no matter what side of the law he may be on in any particular role. He beats people up with a hurling stick, he bends the law at his pleasure, he releases angry dogs at someone he doesn't like, he chases after the baddie on foot and he even smokes in non smoking areas (imagine!)..."What are you gonna do? Shoot me?"

However, if you put Jason Statham in a cop movie and surround him with real actors you might actually get a decent film out of it. Decent enough, this is. Thanks to the likes of Paddy Considine, Aiden Gillen and David Morrissey.

The story...there is a guy going around killing cops (or "pigs" as he likes to call him) and law enforcement just can't nail him for it. Oh, they know who it is and they do get him into custody but have nothing concrete to hold him on. What is more, the guy is a total asshole and attention whore. So much so that he contacts a journalist to give him exclusives on the killings, probably just so that he can read about himself in the papers. And the name "Blitz" (as in Blitzkrieg)? He coined that himself.

But the local cops will get him eventually. If they cannot make any charges stick they will just have to take him out and put the blame on - wait for it - the cop killer that they cannot prove he is.

6/10

Absence of Malice

Investigator Rosen and his team get nowhere with the disappearance of a union figure. Realizing they are stuck they manipulate journalist Megan into making a connection between the case and liquor importer Michael Gallagher, who just happens to be from a not quite clean family background.

In reality, there is nothing that suggests that Michael himself has anything to do with anything but law enforcement's idea is that he could get them some information on the case in exchange for being left alone. Michael Gallagher is rightly pissed off and tries to find his way out of his troubles.

He does actually have a solid alibi for the time of the disappearance, as well, that he does not wish to share. He was in Atlanta with a friend to support her after she had had an abortion. After Megan talks to said friend and - despite being asked not to - uses the abortion story in a news story, the woman commits suicide.

DA Quinn gets involved in the story as well, offering Gallagher that he makes a statement clearing that their investigation in his business brought no result and Gallagher is cleared of any wrongdoing. In exchange, he too expects information on the union figure.

In the end, it all comes to blows with both Rosen and Quinn losing their jobs.

6/10

Stoker

Um...?

I really wanted to like this one. After all, Chan-wook Park made Oldboy (aka one of the greatest films ever made that did not need a remake). But is was mostly just beautiful shots of stoic people.

The story is that of India Stoker and her weird mother Evelyn, trying to deal with the sudden loss of father and husband Richard. On the day of his funeral his younger brother Charlie shows up and just hangs around, creepily looking at them both and first killing the housekeeper and then his visiting aunt.

Both, Evelyn and India become infatuated with him and he plays along. After India and Charlie team up in killing India's high school friend Whip (his name is Whip?) who is about to rape young India, the girl learns that her uncle Charlie was in fact in a mental institution for the last twenty or so years for killing his and Richard's little brother Jonathan. Little Charlie was jealous of all the attention the baby got from his older brother, so he dug a hole for the boy (literally).

What's more, on India's 18th birthday not only did Richard die in a car accident but it was also the day Charlie got released from the institution. Learning that Richard did not, in fact, want him in his family but rather got him a car and an apartment in far away New York, Charlie snaps (yet again) and beats his brother to death before staging a car accident.

Now, does this make India shy away from her uncle. No it does not. Rather she decides to leave with him for New York. But then the mother gets in the way. She sees the pair get overly friendly and as Charlie is in the process of committing yet another murder, India shoots him instead. And then takes off alone. And then kills a cop that stops her for speeding.

Somewhat disappointing - to me, anyway.

5/10

The Lost World

This BBC mini series is based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. A group of would be adventurers sets out to find a plateau in Amazon, where Professor Challenger believes to find dinosaurs.

The first travel to a missionary base, run by Reverend Theo Kerr, where the hire a group of natives to carry their belongings and join them on their trip. The Reverend's niece, Agnes, sets off together with the team of explorers. The natives soon get spooked off. As soon as they disappear, Reverend Kerr joins the group, but for rather sinister reasons. As soon as they reach the plateau he blocks what they believe is their only way back down.

The professor and his team do find dinosaurs. First they encounter the friendly, plant eating ones but soon after they are faced with the more deadly variety. But the dangers of the region do not stop there. They are attacked by a group of ape men and in in the middle of their conundrum they are joined by some natives that live on the plateau.

The explorers then stay with the natives and together they face the daily perils of life among wild creatures until one day, Professor Summerlee manages to mix an explosive together, blasting a way through a blocked off tunnel.

They triumphantly return to England, but at the very last moment, in the middle of an event celebrating their discoveries, they change their minds about exposing the people and creatures living on the plateau to the so-called civilized world. They declare the stories and rumors of the dinosaur encounters a hoax.

I don't know how close this is to the actual text, but it was thoroughly entertaining and well cast.

7/10

'Spinal Tap are talking about something for next year'

There is an interview in the Guardian with Christopher Guest aka Nigel Tufnel.

50 Scariest Movie Animals

Total film has an article about the animals in horror films that scare the hell out of us. Read it here.

Ha! Forgot about Night of the Lepus. Awesomely trashy, that.

The Lady Vanishes

A group of travelers get stranded in a small guest house in the (ficitional) European country of Mandrika because of an avalanche. While the train tracks are being cleared over night some new acquaintences are formed, one of them between a young woman, Iris Henderson, on her way to meet with her future husband and an elderly governess, Miss Froy.

The next morning, before boarding, the young woman gets hit on the head with a falling flower pot - obviously pushed to land on Miss Froy, who helps Iris onto the train and shares a compartment with her and an Italian family. The two women spend most of their time together, talking and having tea in the restaurant cart.

Iris falls asleep and after she wakes Miss Froy is nowhere to be found. What's more, everyone else on the train denies she was ever even their. One doctor aboard concludes that the hit on the head may have caused a concussion and seeing Miss Froy is merely a consequence of it. But Iris insists that she is not imagining this and a young musician, Gilbert, comes to her aid (yes, yes he fancies her). Together they try to piece together what has happened and round up witnesses that have seen the missing governess.

An array of people becomes involved in what soon starts to appear like a conspiracy. Gilbert and Iris eventually do find Miss Froy, who has been disguised as an injured woman with a badly burned face. They free her and replace her with one of the conspirators, a lady that entered the train as a decoy on the very stretcher Miss Froy is supposed to leave on and, quite possibly, carried to her death.

Eventually, part of the train gets disconnected and the group of characters together on the remaining cart are stopped in a wooded area where Mandrikan army men (one assumes) try to retrieve Miss Froy, who turns out to be a British spy with some important information for the government.

A gunfight errupts, with the Englishmen shooting in the most gentlemanly manner, of course. They manage to get the cart going again and move it across the border out of Mandrikan territory and, hence, to safety.

Miss Froy delivers the message. Gilbert and Iris live happily ever after, one supposes.

Hooray!

6/10

The Evil Dead

Poor timid Ash. Here he thought he was going on a nice road trip with his girl, his sister and a couple of friends. And then it turns into this horror trip.

First, they hear weird sounds and the basement door flies open. When they investigate they find a nasty looking book and an audio tape. Feeling adventurous, the friends listen to the tape that unfortunately releases demons onto the little cabin they are in.

Then the sister investigates noises in the woods (like you do) and gets attacked by same woods (so far, so normal). The group soon realizes that all is not well and they will be stuck at least for the night.

But soon sis starts turning into this...thing that attacks and after she injures the girlfriend, she turns as well. So the demons take one after the other with only Ash remaining to fend for himself. And boy does he give it his all. He makes a full transformation from scream queen to bad ass in the course of this one night. He lives to tell the tale.

Cult horror that pulls out all the stops and sometimes, interestingly, slows down to show, say, bodies decaying before delivering another blow.

Quite awesome, this.

8/10

5 best, worst Stephen King film adaptations

The Toronto Sun has an article about films based on Stephen King books and/or short stories.

5 best, worst Stephen King adaptations

Surrogates

In a story set in the future, instead of leaving their comfortable chairs people move about via surrogates. You know, much like today they do online. This means that you could be the grossest slob in person, but cut the dashing figure out in the world.

This has gravely lowered the crime rate, but things are starting to come apart at the seams when a weapon that kills not only the surrogates but also the people operating them appears and is being used on humans. The first victim is the son of the original inventor of the surrogates who has long been disgraced and kicked out of his own company and now works against the use of surrogates.

The killer was actually sent to take him out, but his son used one of daddy's surrogates. Out to find the mysterious weapon and trying to uncover the people involved in its use is FBI agent Greer, who is beginning to become uncomfortable with the use of his artificial self and goes rogue (this is Bruce Willis, so of course he would).

A bit confusing and the artificial visuals are not at all charming.

4/10

A View to a Kill

What starts out on an estate dedicated to breeding horses takes us to Sillicon Valley, that obviously needs to be wiped out. All this courtesy of one Mr. Zorin, formally part of a Soviet (of course it's the Soviets) experiment on children. They were treated with steroid to make them stronger and smarter.

Bond is undercover as a potential buyer of horses. He gets found out, knocked unconscious and pushed into a lake by Zorin's sidekick May Day (yes, May Day). Do you know how in films car doors never open underwater? James Bond does not have that problem at all. The door pops right open.

This is not the only occasion he spends under water in this film, he ends up there much later again - this time with May Day, whom he has previously bedded (obviously) and who is at this point pissed off at Zorin because she thought 'that creep loved me'! Zorin is willing to sacrifice everyone from his posse for his ultimate goal, which has to do with microchips (not that anyone cares). May Day and Bond team up to get out of their shared conundrum with May Day sacrificing herself to get back at Zorin.

There is a zeppelin and a blond woman stumbling through scenery, also one overly long unnecessary car chase with San Francisco law enforcement.

4/10

Tales from the Crypt: Spoiled

There were some really crappy episodes on Tales From The Crypt. Case in point: Spoiled, the penultimate episode of season 3.

A neglected doctor's wife takes a few cues from a bad TV show and tries to seduce her husband. When she fails to succeed she gets cable TV (to better receive her favorite show) and starts and affair with the cable guy (another great actor that paid his dues, Anthony LaPaglia). They do it in the living room while her husband is pouring himself into his research downstairs.

However, he does catch them in the act one day (they don't even notice) and he immediately starts plotting his revenge on the lovers. He uses them to step up his research from rabbits to humans.

2/10

City Island

Ok, now. This is the kind of comedy I like.

The Rizzo family live on City Island in the middle of the Bronx. They are your typical family, in which everyone has their little secrets and lies about them.

Vince, the father who works as a prison guard, claims to be going to poker nights when he is really taking acting classes. His wife Joyce obviously suspects him to have an affair. One day he brings home young Tony, who he took out of jail because he is his son but he never told anybody of his existence.

Vince and Joyce have two children. The daughter Vivian (played by Andy Garcia's real daughter) is expected home from college for spring break. What she failed to mention to her parents is that she was suspended and lost her scholarship and now works as a stripper (boob job and all) to earn money so that she can go back to school the next year. Vince jr. is in high school and obsessed with obese women.

The situations get more strained and at the same time more ridiculous until the end when all their secrets finally come out.

Made me laugh throughout.

9/10

The Ward

Kristen is put into a mental facility after she burned down a farm house and can't quite remember doing it or why she did it.

She shares the ward with a handful of other young women who are different kinds of crazy. Collectively they are being haunted by one Alice Hudson, who appears to be a ghost or apparition. Alice kills off the girls one by one while the remaining few try to get away from the hospital.

In the end, Kirsten slays the ghost (with an axe, you know....like you do) only to learn that she was all the inmates all along. She came in as Alice and to deal with a childhood trauma she developed multiple personalities.

The whole thing was kind of meh! and the conclusion is stupid if you want my opinion.

3/10

My Brother the Devil

Mo idolizes his big brother Rashid (played by the ridiculously handsome James Floyd), who is in a local gang called DMG (drugs, money, guns) and smuggles drug money into their mother's purse to help the family get by.

But when their friend Izzy gets killed in a run-in with another gang, Rashid starts to reconsider his actions and wants to get out. Mo, on the other hand, wants to get in on the action and doesn't understand his brother's change of heart. What's more, he one day realizes that Rashid is gay. This he also does not know how to handle. When he is pressed by his friends to tell them what's on his mind, he tells them his older brother is involved in some terrorist stuff. He would rather have a brother who is a bomber than a 'homo'.

Rashid, who always tried to protect his little brother from the gang culture and wants to use the money he made to put him through college finds out that Mo is involved with the drug business. To get him out again he is even willing to kill Izzy's murderer as a means to buy him out of the business.

The other gang members, who also do not want to associate with a homosexual, try to set him up. When their first attempt to kill Rashid fails they try to use Mo to locate him at his lover's apartment. On the way there it Mo realizes what their plan is and he saves his brother's life, taking a bullet instead of Rashid.

A bleak portrait of gang culture in the outskirts of London, beautifully shot.

9/10

Tales from the Crypt: The Sacrifice

Insurance salesman James sells life insurance to rich asshole Sebastian Fleming. Soon after he starts an affair with his wife Gloria and together they hatch a plan to kill Sebastian. They do so by throwing him off the balcony.

Since Sebastian had not yet signed the papers the police have no reason to suspect murder and file the case away as an accident. So far so good. Unfortunately, as soon as the police has left, old family friend Jasper shows up to commiserate the new widow.

He also shares the information that - since he has been in love with Gloria for a long time - he had rented a place right across the street to at least see her every once in a while. Also, he takes the occasional picture with a long lens camera and he just happened to snap a few of James throwing Sebastian to his death.

Jasper threatens to give the pictures to the police unless he is allowed to "share" Gloria with James. They agree, but James has a hard time dealing with the situation and eventually kills himself. Which was the plan all along. Gloria and Jasper ride off into the sunset together.

3/10

The Quiet Earth

Scientist Zac Hobson wakes up one day to find that everybody has disappeared. He believes that this is due to a project he and his team have been working on with (or for) the US.

In the beginning, he is going a little crazy, wearing a woman's nightgown and holding speeches to cut-out figures of famous personalities. Gradually, his senses come back and one day he chances upon another human being, Joanne. Together the set out to check the surrounding towns for any other survivors.

That is how they meet Api. After a while they figure out that the disappearance of the world population happened through some 'effect' caused by the project Zac was a part of. The reason the three of them are still alive is that at the precise moment the effect took place, they were about to die. Hence, their deaths kept them alive.

Zac calculates that the effect is about to repeat itself and figure out a plan to influence the outcome. The plan involves a truckload full of explosives. Of course, them being a group of two men and one women, eventually their relationship gets strained.

Whereas the character Zac is somewhat amusing and likable, I strongly disliked both, Joanna and Api.

6/10

Floating

Speaking of Norman Reedus...

I clicked around the internet for a bit and ended up watching a stream of the first film he was ever in, Floating. He plays Van, whose plans of going to college are shattered after his father loses both legs in a car accident and his mother took off with all the money and valuables she could get her hands on. Now he is stuck in a small house by the lake without a plan for the future.

Both, father and son, cannot adjust to their new situation and the only diversion Van finds is hanging around with a couple of friends, smoking joints and raiding houses. When Doug moves in across the lake, he and Van become friends. Doug has what looks from the outside like a 'good' family, but suffers under the pressure from his father, who is not willing to accept that his son is gay and puts him down any chance he gets. Doug is on the college swim team but the whole concept of going to college to get away from your family gets defeated by the fact that his father is also his swim coach.

The four friends continue to steal anything they believe they can make into money from the lakeside houses until one of their raids ends tragically.

In the end, there is a glimpse of hope that Van and his dad may just be alright.

A sad and desperate story, but there is a lot of shirtless Reedus to lift our spirits.

6/10

The Messengers

The Solomon family moves to a farm in North Dakota to plant sun flowers, after they have had a rough time of it in Chicago for the last two years. The father lost his job and the daughter got into trouble back there.

The house they bought with their last money is, unsurprisingly, haunted by the ghosts of a family that died there. There are ominous shadows in the background and the daughter and her toddler brother seem to be the only ones seeing them - the teenage girl terrified by them, the boy having a blast.

When a mysterious stranger shows up and stays on to work on the farm, nothing much seems to happen for months, however. Then suddenly the visions come back with a vengeance. Nobody believes the teenager, however, as she is a known troublemaker.

In the end, it turns out that the farm hand was involved in causing all of the trouble back in the day, he was actually the father that did away with his entire family and loses it one day, after he has been attacked by the ever present crows. He suddenly cannot tell the new and old family in the house apart and tries to kill his all over again.

There are a lot of eye-rolling moments in this, mostly about the philosophizing of the farm hand and a local teenage boy. The scares are kind of interesting. The film also gives Kirsten Stewart an opportunity to show off the entire range of her acting.

Yes, I was being sarcastic just then.

Why the ghosts would be called "messengers" is not ever addressed. They don't appear to be giving any messages to anybody, unless you interpret their weird behavior in trying to scare the hell out of people and possibly trying to kill them as warnings. Come to think of it, though, the  crows on the farm are the probably the messengers.

Maybe we get confirmation in the sequel. Yes, there is a sequel! Part two at least bears the promise of some serious eye candy in the form of Norman Reedus. The only saving grace in part one was William B. Davis (the cigarette smoking men from The X Files).

4/10

Dog Day Afternoon

This is brilliant!

Sonny and two cohorts try to rob a bank. Everything that can possibly go wrong does. First, one of the accomplices chickens out. Money has just been picked up the day before so the vaults are empty. To top it all off, the police swarm the place.

Whenever Sonny comes out, waving a white flag, to negotiate an escape for him and his friend Sal, he gets cheered by the crowd. And he loves it. He yells out paroles, throws money into the crowd and screams "Attica! Attica!" referring to a riot at Attica prison facility some time earlier.

He is more concerned about keeping his hostages safe (bathroom breaks and pizza) and leaving money in his will to both his wife. The second wife is actually a man named Leon and is sort of the reason Sonny got himself into this mess, he was going to steal the money to pay for Leon's sex change.

The film is based on true events (according to the actual culprit, only loosely so) and is one of Al Pacino's finest performances.

9/10