For the exhaustive ninth entry into the Friday the 13th franchise, the creative's behind the scenes made the huge mistake of believing that what this franchise needed was something fresh, something out of the left field. After all, we've had eight of what were basically the same film, with only the embarrassing Jason Takes Manhattan managing to move the action away from Crystal Lake. What this franchise needed was to simply stop, but while there are teenagers eager to hand over their cash for 90 minutes of undemanding trash, there's always more juice to be squeezed. So, with Jason as a supernatural being already established, he now has the ability to transfer his soul into different bodies.
With Jason (Kane Hodder) melted in toxic waste at the climax of the previous film, the machete-wielding psychopath is inexplicably back at Camp Crystal Lake stalking a woman taking a shower. When she escapes her log cabin, Jason pursues, but is trapped by a small army of FBI agents who routinely blow him to pieces. Yet somehow his heart survives unscathed, and his remains are taken to the morgue for further investigation. His soul passes into the coroner (Richard Gant), who butchers the hospital guards and heads back to Crystal Lake, where a group of partying teens await him. Jason turns into a media sensation, and infamous bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), who claims to be the only one who knows how to truly kill Jason, is employed to take the demon down once and for all.
Along with the aforementioned Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell is the most hated of all the entries by fans of the series. Worst of all, the film leaves their biggest draw - Jason himself - in the background for the majority of the film, while B-movie actors stumble around like zombies doing the killing instead. But aside from the fact that this is particularly terrible entry into a beloved franchise, this is simply a badly made movie, and worst of all, a poorly executed horror. The acting, script, cinematography and score are offensively drab, and there are gaping holes in the story that are simply not explained. Why is Creighton suddenly in prison when he was free in his previous scene? Why does he break the fingers of the man who ultimately has the same goal? Why is Jason suddenly a spirit who can puke his black, putrid soul into other people? If the film at least offered one or two decent set-pieces or memorable murders these factors could have been forgiven. But Jason Goes to Hell is simply a waste of time and celluloid.
Now immortalised as one of cinema's all-time greatest lines, American expatriate Paul's demand for his one-off lover Jeanne to "go, get the butter," has since defined Last Tango in Paris. It's legacy is not it's quality, but in it's gratuitous sex scenes, which are shocking even by today's standards and were the cause of a huge scandal in its day. The scene in which Marlon Brando's character has rough anal sex with the young, wide-eyed Maria Schneider is all that seems to be discussed about the film, even by people who have yet to see it. It's reputation overshadows what is an occasionally tender, thought-provoking, and admittedly ridiculous film, that strives to depict a different kind of love story, and one that manifests itself through violence, animalistic desire, and sheer loneliness.
Paul and Jeanne are two wandering souls in Paris. Paul runs a flea-pit hotel following the suicide of his wife, who we come to learn was sleeping with another man, seemingly with Paul's approval. Jeanne is on the cusp of marrying an aspiring film director in the Jean-Luc Godard mould, Tom (Jeanne-Piere Leaud), who arrives in Paris to shoot an avant garde piece called Portrait of a Woman. They encounter each other by chance when they both view an apartment up for rent. Their brief meeting results in sex, and afterwards Paul insists that it become a regular meeting place, where the two meet to forget about the world outside and exist solely for each other's pleasure. They are not to even tell each other their name, let alone anything about their family, history or their life in the real world.
Originally intended by director Bernardo Bertolucci to focus on the sexual relationship between two males, Last Tango in Paris is a not a film simply about a dirty old man and his sexually curious mistress, but raises questions about morality, love and death. Paul and Jeanne are two lost souls channelling their worldly problems into sexual pleasure (or perhaps vice versa), but they find it difficult to ignore their emotions as the two begin to slowly learn more about each other. The Brando of 1972 still retained some of his handsomeness (rather than the shadow of his former self he became), and here demands your attention with every improvised line or burst of energy. It's also extremely brooding, intensified by Brando and only intermittently cheered up by the presence of Leaud, and it is long. It's just shy of being a great film, but will no doubt inspire extreme reactions from both ends of the spectrum by anyone who happens to view it.
Even though I wasn't blown away by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's directorial debut, In Bruges (2008), the film contained enough memorable one-liners and great performances to have me anticipating his next feature. In the four years that elapsed between In Bruges and his follow-up Seven Psychopaths, Martin's brother John Michael wrote and directed the offensively hilarious The Guard (2011), and in 2014 gave us Calvary, one of the truly great films of that year. Martin's limelight has been stolen somewhat, and Seven Psychopaths is a slight let-down. It's a movie about movies, or rather a movie within a movie, or even a movie without a movie - either way, it's a bit of a mess.
Script-writer Marty (Colin Farrell) has writer's block. He knows what his next movie is going to be called - Seven Psychopaths - but the title is all he has. Struggling with alcoholism, he tries to keep his girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish) happy while his unhinged best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) tries to worm his way into a writing credit. Looking to avoid creating yet another movie glamorising violence, he wants his psychopaths to retain some humanity and have the message of his movie be about peace and love. Billy suggests he takes inspiration from the 'Jack of Diamonds' killer, who only kills high-ranking mobsters and is currently on a killing spree in Los Angeles, and they take an ad out in the local paper asking for real-life psychopaths to come and tell their story.
Billy also kidnaps dogs from rich folk for a living along with his partner-in-crime Hans (Christopher Walken), but they have just stolen a Shih Tzu from the wrong man - gangster and madman Charlie (Woody Harrelson) - a man we first meet trying to fix his gun so he can shoot the young girl who had the dog in her care in the face. Marty has the vaguest of ideas about his other psychopaths - one being a Vietnamese war veteran (Long Nguyen) dressed as a priest looking to avenge his family's murder during the war, and another a quaker (Harry Dean Stanton) who stalks his daughter's killer for decades - but no way of connecting them and one story possibly accidentally stolen. With Charlie on their tail, Marty, Billy and Hans flee to the desert to contemplate their fate and finish the script once and for all.
This is an odd film from start to finish. The opening scene depicts two gangster (Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt) discussing famous murders of people being shot through the eyeball, before being blown away themselves by the masked Jack of Diamonds killer, It's reminiscent of the Tarantino-inspired wave of self-aware crime flicks of the 1990's, where pop-culture references and quirky humour trumped anything dark and serious. The use of freeze-frames to introduce it's collection of psychopaths also reminded me of the 1990's, when Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996) opened the floodgates for countless inferior imitators in Britain to do the very same. Are these the kinds of movies McDonagh was offered in the wake of a successful debut and is now satirising them? Or did he just run out of ideas and resort to emulating a now-dated era?
I found this the main problem with Seven Psychopaths, and I felt like I could never be sure if McDonagh was being smart, lazy, or both in an ironic clever-clever way. At the half-way point, the film begins to drag and meander as if McDonagh had genuine writer's block (there's a reason the main character is Irish and called Marty) but kept writing in the hope that it would eventually work itself out. But Seven Psychopaths does have moments of inspiration. As Hans, Christopher Walken makes the welcome return to the large roles that seem to have evaded him of late, and delivers a performance of real humanity. The dialogue too, is as quotable and vicious as you would expect from the man who penned In Bruges, with the humour providing a welcome distraction from the barrage of exhaustive violence - and maybe that's the point. But whatever the point, this will more likely leave you scratching your head trying to figure it out.
I never saw the 1989 film adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book The BFG when I was growing up, and I don't know whether or not that's a good thing. On one hand, I could have enjoyed the film as a nostalgic trip down memory lane, yet I could have also been horrified at just how badly the film has aged. I did, however, read the book as a young nipper, along with other Dahl classics such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda, so I'm familiar with just how good a word-smith Dahl was, and how he managed to forge these often creepy and macabre tales into something that children could enjoy without being too terrified.
Brian Cosgrove's adaptation, for all its sporadic charm, has faded into obscurity since its 1989 release with good reason. Beginning at an orphanage run by the nasty Mrs. Clonkers (Myfanwy Talog), young girl Sophie (Amanda Root) sees the outline of a gigantic figure blowing a trumpet through the window of a house down the road. Before she has a chance to scream, she is grabbed by a huge fist and whisked away to another land inhabited by grotesque giants who feed on children. Lucky for her, she was taken by the Big Friendly Giant (David Jason), who is the only vegetarian giant in his world, and whose day job it is to blow happy dreams into the minds of sleeping children. But with the knowledge of the rest of the giants gobbling up scores of children, Sophie hatches a plan with the BFG to notify the Queen of England (Angela Thorne) and put a stop to the evil giants for good.
The first twenty minutes or so of The BFG is actually quite delightful, as we meet the lovable lunk and learn of his diet of the disgusting snozzcumbers, and he is wonderfully voiced by national treasure David Jason. The song 'Whizzpopping' isn't particularly good or catchy, but there is a giddy delight to be had with watching the BFG and Sophie farting with glee. Yet, without Dahl's written narrative, the film quickly becomes tedious and the story grinds to a near-halt. Cosgrove Hall - set up by director Cosgrove and his friend Mark Hall - animated countless children's TV adaptations from the 1970's up until its demise is 2009, but the animation here is stodgy. There were obvious budget constraints and this shows in the backgrounds, which are often so bland ad static it drains the film visually. It has its charms, especially if you grew up in Britain, but I would stick with the beloved book.
When Jules Dassin was placed on the Hollywood Blacklist in 1950 during the making of Night and the City, the director was on a roll. Along with Night and the City, which he filmed before being banned from the production studio, bringing his flourishing career to an immediate halt, Dassin also made The Naked City (1948) and Thieves' Highway (1949), now classics of the noir genre, and Brute Force, possibly the weakest of his noir quartet but a thrilling, insightful film nonetheless. Although set entirely inside prison walls - with a few flashback cutaways - Brute Force is pure pulp noir, featuring a towering lead performance from Burt Lancaster and a tour de force by Hume Conyn as the film's main antagonist.
Joe Collins (Lancaster) has just done a stint in solitary. Being lead back to his cell by chief of security Captain Munsey (Conyn), Joe maintains his innocence and that the knife he was found with was planted on him. It turns out that Joe is indeed innocent of his alleged crime, and along with his friends from cell R17, knows who the culprit is. Their own brand of justice involves guiding the offender with flame-throwers onto a huge plate press while the guards are distracted by a brawl. With so much violence occurring inside the prison walls, Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) is put under pressure to control the inmates through strict discipline and the guards enforcing their authority. This catches the attention of the ambitious Munsey, and the likeable Dr. Walter (Art Smith), who although constantly inebriated, can see the bubbling tensions and inevitable explosions of violence that are due to come.
The film's title is suitably apt for the attitudes of the two opposing factions. Joe and his crew plan their escape by taking the prison with an arsenal of weapons at their disposal, while Munsey, using the warden's wavering support as an opportunity to rise through the ranks, starts to manipulate the prisoners into becoming informers and gleefully beating upon a prisoner when he refuses to talk. It's about the ugliness of brute force, and disastrous results that come from employing it. Munsey is a small man, but delights in imposing his authority on the weak and the restrained like a bullying victim getting revenge on the big boys who stole his lunch money. It's riveting throughout, but could have done without the flashback scenes, where it is revealed that the gang are all locked up as a result of some femme fatale or other. It builds to a ferocious climax, where the inmates fight the guards, ending on a note as suitably grim as it's portrayal of the durability of the prison system.
The idea of a thriller/murder mystery set in the 1950's Soviet Union, where to be accused is to be found guilty and the majority of the population live in state of constant paranoia, starring such acting powerhouses as Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Jason Clarke, who have all starred in some damn fine movies over the past few years, would make one assume they were in for a guaranteed masterpiece. Based on Tom Rob Smith's 2008 novel, the first of a trilogy, Child 44 the film is overstuffed with disconnected sub-plots, mud-brown grimness, rushed storytelling. and a smorgasbord of thick Russian accents delivered by a mostly European from a variety of countries apart from Russia.
Beginning in a war-town Ukraine where starvation has wiped out a bulk of the population, young Leo Demidov (Hardy) escapes an orphanage and into the arms of a sympathetic soldier, who adopts him and gives him a home. Years later, and Leo is a war hero, having his picture taken raising the flag of the U.S.S.R. over Berlin, and has a beautiful wife in Raisa (Rapace). While the country lives in fear, Leo and his comrades dine in fine restaurants. He is an obedient soldier, hunting down and capturing suspected traitor Anatoly (Clarke), but also shows restraint and empathy in his work, trying to convince Anatoly to confess to escape his inevitable torture and execution, and dressing down fellow soldier Vasili (Joel Kinnaman), a known coward from the war, when he executes a peasant couple in cold blood.
Vasili, who rises through the ranks to become understudy to Major Kuzmin (Vincent Cassel), becomes Leo's nemesis. When Leo is called in to investigate a gang of citizens suspected of working against the state, Raisa is implicated, possibly by Vasili as a grudge against the man who humiliated him in the field. Leo must face a choice of giving up the woman he genuinely loves, or handing her over and maintaining his social position. Meanwhile, the child of one of Leo's friends is murdered, and may possibly be connected to other murders that have happened in the vicinity. But the higher-ups fails to acknowledge the murders, as serial killers can only be the product of capitalism, and there are no murders in paradise. Leo, refusing to hand his wife over, is sent to take a demeaning position in Volsk, operating under the command of General Nesterov (Oldman), where more bodies are found.
Child 44 has all the ingredients for an intense whodunit and character study from a time and place rarely depicted by mainstream cinema. I haven't read Smith's book, but judging from the critical praise and awards lavished upon it, director Daniel Espinosa, best known for action fare Easy Money (2010) and Safe House (2012), seems to have only skimmed the back cover, forgetting to add anything resembling tension or believable character development. 2006's German masterpiece The Lives of Others created an overwhelming sense of fear and paranoia within its characters, but Espinosa seems to be more invested in rushing his way through the plot to get to an end that is in no way satisfying. The performances, despite being burdened with thick Russian accents (though the cast generally stay on the right side of those Compare the Meerkat adverts), are solid, although Oldman and Considine are wasted. At 137 minutes, the film feels long when it should feel short, and you get the idea that this may have worked better as a mini-series, where better care could have been taken to tell the story with the patience it deserved.
Boasting one of the most outlandish titles of the giallo genre, Sergio Martino's Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is yet another loose adaptation of one of Edgar Allen Poe's most famous titles, The Black Cat. Like most Poe adaptations, the film shares little with its source material, apart from the presence of the titular black cat, here named Satan. While it is chocked full of narrative stumbles and frustrating red herrings, Martino's refusal to bend to the genre rules of the giallo makes Your Vice an extremely interesting entry into the genre, avoiding being bogged down with drawn-out set pieces and mind-bending visuals, and instead focusing on the psychological - and physical - interplay between its two leads.
Bored writer Oliviero (Luigi Pistilli) spends the majority of his time throwing drug and alcohol-fuelled parties for the local hippies, and enjoys mentally and physically abusing his long-suffering wife Irina (Anita Strindberg) in front of them. When a young student is brutally murdered on the night she had arranged to meet Oliviero, the wife-beating pig naturally becomes the prime suspect and withdraws into a state of deep paranoia at his labyrinthine mansion. When their maid also shows up dead, Oliviero and Irina hide the body just before the arrival of his niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech). Floriana is a confident and wise young woman, and hatches a plan with Irina to deal with her abusive husband. But not all is as it seems, and just who is the handsome grey-haired man lurking behind every corner?
Far from your average giallo, Your Vice... doesn't subvert the genre but frequently surprises. The plot and ludicrous climax, like most gialli, seem not be taken from the yellow-covered pulp fiction they are normally adapted from, but something akin to an episode of Scooby-Doo. While that may seem like a criticism, it really isn't - it's the type of insanity that makes these movies so much fun to watch. Bolstered by a fantastic score by Bruno Nicolai and lavish cinematography by Giancarlo Ferrando, they are nonetheless overshadowed by Fenech, surely one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen. Floriana is a no-nonsense, well-travelled lady, and just when you think you have her worked out, the film throws in a surprising, if in no way believable, twist. It may not be remembered as Martino's best entry into the genre (1973's Torso is certainly up there), but Your Vice... throws in enough twists and turns to keep it consistently entertaining and occasionally disturbing.
When Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus took over The Cannon Group in 1979, cinema had little idea what it was in for. With the company in a dyer financial situation, Golan and Globus began churning out pictures of questionable quality at an unnerving rate, making a small profit with the odd micro-hit that quickly added up. Soon enough, the exploitation pioneers were buying up cinema chains, paying movie stars ludicrous amounts of money, taking over Cannes, and releasing some of the most diabolical and insane movies of 1980's. Electric Boogaloo tells the rapid rise and even faster implosion of the notorious studio, with the people both in front of and behind the camera telling their own anecdotes of the madcap antics that seemed to engulf their every production.
Director Mark Hartley has made a career in documenting exploitation cinema with Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010), and Electric Boogaloo is undoubtedly his most fun. Packed with clips of such cinematic disasters as Enter the Ninja (1981), Hercules (1983), Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), the film lambastes Cannon as much as it adores their persistence, levelling the field by also showing us their more interesting efforts - the likes of Lifeforce (1985) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), both directed by Tobe Hooper - and the films that were surprisingly great, such as Runaway Train (1985) and Barfly (1987). But this isn't just a collection of clips from some of the most outlandish films ever made, Hartley ensures that the film is highly informative about the 'creative' minds behind the company and the reasons for its inevitable fall from grace.
Amongst the interviewees are John G. Avildsen, Franco Nero, Dolph Lundgren, Robert Forster, Bo Derek and Alex Winter, all telling stories that will have you laughing as well as questioning just how the Israeli's got away with it for so long. Some of it is brutal, with Golan especially coming across as an ego-maniacal tyrant with little care for the safety of his crew and no understanding of the American audience he was targeting. Yet it's all told with a nostalgic fondness, celebrating the fact that these were little guys who actually made it, and doing it all on their own terms. They were, after all, responsible for Chuck Norris's career and the prolonging of Charles Bronson's (although it's questionable as to whether or not that's a good thing), and were eager to give great but fading directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Franco Zeffirelli another shot with complete artistic control. It's a strange story - Golan and Globus clearly adored cinema but didn't seem to understand it - but this is a success story like no other, and insomniacs with little to do at night but watch TV have a lot to thank them for.
Attempting to piece together the chronology of Max Rockatansky's four-movie journey between 1979 and 2015 would be to miss the point of the series altogether. Max Max (1979) was a raw slice of grindhouse that just happened to be financially successful and genuinely brilliant, and has since evolved into something so wildly imaginative and increasingly insane that to try and piece together how many years have elapsed since Mel Gibson's youthful Main Force Patrol officer watch his family murdered and how he has suddenly shrunk and become Tom Hardy would be as deranged as the franchise's latest instalment, Fury Road.
Whether it's a re-boot or a continuation of the story we haven't seen since 1985's Beyond Thunderdome, we are plunged back into the familiar, post-apocalyptic Australian plains (although it was shot in Namibia) inhabited by obscene punks, raging warlords and ragged rebels. Following a nuclear holocaust, fuel and water is scarce, and the residents of the Citadel are ruled over by the ageing Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a hulking monster of a man with a breathing apparatus strapped to his face. Max (Hardy) is captured and is used as a 'blood bag' for War Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult), and when Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), one of Joe's lieutenants, goes AWOL with an armoured truck full of Joe's many wives, Nux and a small army pursue with Max strapped to the front of his vehicle.
Like its predecessors, Fury Road has little in way of a plot. Similar in many ways to Max Max 2, the film is little more than one huge chase with precious few quiet moments in between. Hardy is as reserved a Max as Gibson was, but strangely lacks the charisma that has propelled Hardy to recent superstardom. Yet Max is more in the background, playing second fiddle to the battering ram that is Furiosa. One-armed, shaven-headed and raccoon-eyed, Theron is in equal measures extremely sexy and utterly intimidating, offering glimpses of vulnerability as her trust in Max becomes more cemented. Furiosa's drive is that she wants to get back to her homeland, which is now little more than a distant memory from her childhood, and Max just happens to be along for the ride. But character development is left in the dust of what is ultimately one humongous chase set-piece.
Although he is now 70 and his recent work has consisted of Happy Feet (2006), Happy Feet 2 (2011) and Babe: Pig in the City (1998), director, writer and producer George Miler shows no signs of losing his touch. Fury Road is the most aggressive Max Max yet, complete with acrobats on huge wires who bend into other vehicle's to attack from above, War Boys getting themselves pumped for violence by spraying a powerful drug called Night Fume onto their lips, and an electric guitar player who sprays flame from his instrument and is backed by a hoard of drummers. Everyone involved in creating the stunts should be extremely proud, as what could have been repetitive turns into a two-hour adrenaline rush. It's not the masterpiece that it has been heralded by critics and audiences alike, but it has breathed life back into a genre stuffed with CGI and former wrestlers.
In the wake of the recent shootings in Virginia by a masked gunman live on air and the seemingly endless mass killings in America taking place in schools, movie theatres and churches, it seemed like the perfect time to re-visit Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's breakthrough documentary on gun violence in America. It has been 16 years since the massacre of 12 students and 1 teacher at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, and 13 years since Michael Moore won the Best Documentary Oscar for his extremely provocative and shocking film. The main question is has anything changed? The answer is a resounding no. In fact, gun violence seems more out of control than ever.
Starting out tongue-in-cheek, Bowling for Columbine begins by telling a few amusing, almost too-ridiculous-to-be-true anecdotes highlighting America's love of guns. Moore opens an account in a bank, only to be rewarded with a rifle for doing so. and begging the question of just how sensible it is to be handing out guns in a bank. We then learn of a couple of men who thought it would be funny to dress up their dog in hunting gear with a rifle strapped to it's back, only for the gun to fall off and shoot one of them in the leg. These early moments are hilarious as Moore interviews the type of crazy-haired lunatics who should have their own soundtrack of twanging banjos, but serve to set up the audience for something more serious and all the more troubling.
Is America's violent history to blame for the amount of gun deaths that occur every year? Most large countries, such as Britain, Germany and Japan, were built on bloodshed and have committed recent atrocities. Is America's love of guns as a way of life the reason for so much violence? Canada is also a gun-loving nation of hunters, but Canadian's leave their doors unlocked when they leave their home. Is it the poverty and mass unemployment? Nope - check out almost any other country with the same social issues but without the same levels of crime. It's when Moore takes a trip across the water to Canada that he seems to have the revelation. He catches a clip of the news, where the breaking story is the introduction of speed bumps. These people weren't being drilled with fear 24/7. Switch on the news in America, and you see young black males being chased down, arrested, and thrown into the back of a police car, or as interviewee Marilyn Manson points out, there are adverts telling you that if you don't brush with Colgate, you'll have bad breath and no-one with come near you.
For the majority of Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore raises some terrifying questions and makes many very good points, all delivered with powerful, ironic montage's, insightful interviews, and a wry humour. But the last quarter descends into a Moore vanity piece, as he puts himself in front of the camera when he should remain behind it. Moore takes a couple of Columbine's survivors to Walmart to campaign against their sale of bullets and brings the press with him. Although it gets the job done, Moore's ever-presence as a kind of working man's hero makes it come across as a cheap publicity stunt. There's also the climactic interview with NRA president Charlton Heston, who Moore lures in under false pretences and then ambushes with questions of gun-control, a tactic that crosses any journalistic boundaries into sheer rudeness and left me uncomfortable. However, Bowling for Columbine is still an extremely powerful film, and is still shockingly relevant over a decade later. Every week, the news seems to deliver a story about yet another massacre and yet a lot of American's still argue that guns are important for self-defence, which is an extremely depressing thought indeed.
The last few years have been somewhat kind to the cinema meat-head. Channing Tatum has found his niche bringing sweetness and humanity to the square-jawed jock with roles in 21 Jump Street (2012) and Foxcatcher (2014), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon managing to find a heart beneath it's slick-haired, vest-wearing and gym-obsessed protagonist. Pain & Gain attempts to take a satirical swipe at the type of people who take pictures of themselves after a workout session and plaster their achievements all over social media, as three idiotic and steroid-pumped opportunists decide to take what they feel is owed to them in life. It claims to be based on a shocking true story, although the plot takes extreme liberties with the real-life events.
Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is sculptured to perfection. He works at the gym where he feels he can help give anybody the body they want, and has helped his boss John Mese (Rob Corddry) turn the place around with a few smart business decisions. But his efforts have not given him the lifestyle he wants - a grand mansion, a top-of-the-range sports car, babes hanging off his massive arms, and every other materialistic pleasure life has to offer. He begins to lust after the kind of life lived by Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), and so hatches a plan to extort the man for every penny he has after being inspired by motivational speaker Jonny Wu (Ken Jeong).
Along with the steroid-addled and impotency-stricken Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), Daniel recruits enormous ex-convict and cocaine addict Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to assist him in kidnapping and torturing Kershaw until he signs over all of his assets to them. The plan works, but they fail to kill Kershaw after attempting to run him over numerous times. However, nobody believes his story of three imbeciles pulling off such a crime, choosing instead to believe it to be the result of dodgy dealings with criminal organisations. So Daniel, Paul and Adrian are allowed to live the lifestyle they have fantasised about, until they decide it isn't enough and plan to shake down smut peddler Frank Griga (Michael Rispoli), while Kershaw hires private investigator Ed DuBois (Ed Harris) to help him take back his property.
It's quite a change of genre for director Michael Bay, who has spent the last few years making billions at the box-office with huge explosions and CGI robots. While Pain & Gain does demonstrate a previously unseen knack for black comedy, Bay does not possess the necessary skills to tell a story of murder and greed with the required intelligence or satire. When we should be laughing at these preening narcissists, Bay films them with his usual sickly sheen as if to admire them, obscuring the point the film is, I think, trying to make. The decision to play the film mainly for laughs is also in somewhat bad taste. While watching a coked-up Johnson remove a victim's fingerprints by grilling their dismembered hands on a barbecue is the stuff of black comedy gold, you have to remember that there were real victims in this story, and it all happened quite recently.
The main positive is that the performances are all spot-on. Wahlberg is perfect as a man who values his self-worth by his possessions, and Johnson restrains himself enough in a role that could have spilled over into complete farce. A lot of the film is in fact farcical, and not in a good way. Bay insists of filling the screen with fancy wide-angled shots and outdated screen text, when a little dose of subtlety would have worked better. Yet despite its flaws and a bloated sub-plot involving Doorbal's relationship with the doctor who is injecting his penis with the necessary drugs to make it work properly (Rebel Wilson), Pain & Gain is pretty entertaining, and amusing enough to hope that Bay may think about taking a different direction to his usual blockbuster drivel (although he did make the appalling Transformers: Age of Extinction after this).
Ever since I saw Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) as a child after burrowing into my brother's VHS collection, I've loved spaghetti westerns. It was only in my teenage years that I realised just how many of these films were made - some excellent, some terrible, and some just outright bizarre - and it's been fun tracking down some of the more obscure titles. While not strictly a 'spaghetti' western due to being French (a 'baguette' western as Alex Cox puts it), Cemetery Without Crosses is a stoic curiosity. Clearly influenced by the work of Leone, the film is an existential, near-silent work that is in equal parts hypnotic and plodding.
Humble farmer Ben Caine (Guido Lollobrigida) is chased and gunned down by members of the Rogers family, who are scooping up all the livestock business from the surrounding areas through fear and violence. Ben is gunned down and hanged in front of his wife Maria (Michele Mercier). With her livelihood destroyed and Ben's brothers Thomas (Guido Lollobrigida) and Eli (Michel Lemoine) opting to flee across the border, Maria turns to old friend Manuel (Robert Hossein), a brooding gunslinger residing in a nearby ghost town, for help. Manuel soon infiltrates the Rogers family and joins them on their ranch, where he sets Maria's revenge in motion.
Though more of a homage to spaghetti westerns, Cemetery Without Crosses certainly looks and feels like it was born and reared in Italy. There are a couple of glimpses of brilliance - a familiar scene of intense stare-downs at the dinner table quickly flips into a moment of outright comedy, and the scene in which a character lights a candle to reveal that they are not alone is truly nerve-shredding. But the plot is wafer-thin, so the camera is often left lingering while the characters do little or nothing at all, and the dialogue is especially sparse, even for a spaghetti western. Hossein, who also directed and co-wrote the film with the credited Dario Argento and Claude Desailly (though in reality Argento had no involvement), simply doesn't possess the magnetic presence of Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson. Exhilarating in bursts but meandering in places, Cemetery Without Crosses is still worth checking out.
From the opening shot of wandering nomad and mulleted anti-hero Max Rockantansky (Mel Gibson), travelling along the endless Australian plains in a makeshift vehicle put together from spare auto-parts and whatever junk he came across on the road and pulled along by camels, we know that the world George Miller created back in 1979 has descended even further into apocalyptic turmoil, and we are now even further from civilised society than ever before. Max has his vehicle and supplies stolen by Jebediah the Pilot (Bruce Spence), so he is forced to wander barefoot through the desert until he comes across a community dubbed Bartertown, a place where you can trade anything or anyone.
Like the vehicles in the world of Mad Max, Bartertown is hammered together from spare parts. It is ruled by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), who is locked in a constant power-struggle with Master Blaster, a grotesque tag-team who overlooks the pits below the town where pigs are farmed and harvested for methane gas. Master is a dwarf played by Angelo Rossitto who rides on the back of Blaster, a giant of a man who wears a huge concealing helmet, and is played by Paul Larsson. Master Blaster may be George Miller's most interesting creation, and as Max inevitably faces Blaster is the arena known as the Thunderdome - where all quarrels are concluded as two men enter but only one leaves - one of the most inventive scraps in cinema history plays out, as they bounce at each other on huge elastic bands and hack at each other with all manners of weapons.
Yet that is only half of the film. Miller resigned himself to just directing the action scenes following the tragic death of his friend and location scout Byron Kennedy, so the rest of the film was put in the hands of George Ogilvie. Narrowly escaping Bartertown with his life, Max discovers the young survivors of a plane crash who has developed their own little tribal society, and it's here that the film goes a bit Peter Pan. Whether this was down to Miller's absence or not - Beyond Thunderdome lacks the edge of its predecessors, occasionally dipping into traditional mainstream fantasy fare and losing focus of its antagonists motivation. Still, the film delivers where expected - the action scenes. Again we get a tanker being chased down by an army of baddies in doomsday vehicle's, and again we are treated to some awe-inspiring stunts that hold up even today. It's the weakest of the original trilogy but hugely entertaining stuff.
With Jason (Kane Hodder) melted in toxic waste at the climax of the previous film, the machete-wielding psychopath is inexplicably back at Camp Crystal Lake stalking a woman taking a shower. When she escapes her log cabin, Jason pursues, but is trapped by a small army of FBI agents who routinely blow him to pieces. Yet somehow his heart survives unscathed, and his remains are taken to the morgue for further investigation. His soul passes into the coroner (Richard Gant), who butchers the hospital guards and heads back to Crystal Lake, where a group of partying teens await him. Jason turns into a media sensation, and infamous bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), who claims to be the only one who knows how to truly kill Jason, is employed to take the demon down once and for all.
