It’s like Kidulthood meets Alien, in all the best possible ways, you get me fam?
Aliens are cool right? It’s been a while since aliens have come to Britain, let alone London (unless you count Doctor Who), and I was looking forward to what Joe Cornish, in his debut feature length film, had in mind for this urban invasion, I was hoping for high octane action and rich London slang; Attack the Block supplies both by the bucket load.
Mutant-zombie Sheep? Perhaps there’s a good reason why nobody had tried this concept before, and after Black Sheep, no one ever will again.
I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to any film that is attempting to try something new and different, and surely nobody has attempted to frame sheep as the main antagonist within a horror film. Obviously those behind Black Sheep couldn’t do this without wandering into comedy-horror territory – which is fine, but such territory is already highly congested with other, certainly better, titles, and ultimately, Black Sheep’s crazy premise can’t rise above crippling flaws.
Dumb with a capital D, but in all the best ways; If you like your films fast, gory and ridiculous, don’t look any further than Machete.
Machete has strange origins, originating as a 2 minute fake trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s Quentin Tarentino’s film, Grindhouse. If you’ve seen the trailer in all its generic ridiculous action movie-ness, you may well doubt the possibly of turning the idea of a machete wielding Mexican into something resembling a full length feature. Well Rodriguez not only manages this, but he manages this with some style.
Ninja's fighting Cowboys is always good, right? ...WRONG!
The trailer for Warrior’s Way lied to you. It promised pedal-to-the-metal guns blazing craziness and little else. Sadly, for every ridiculous fight sequence, there are a hundred truly awful moments, mainly due to an over use of CGI and some terrible acting, dialogue and plotting.
Nicolas Cage: the first crusader with an American accent. Oh and Hell Boy is there too.
Not many films deal effectively with the medieval period, most normally distorting it out of context horribly by relying upon worn out historical stereotypes to get them along – witches, the Black Death, the Crusades, Mud filled towns, Rain – all that jazz. Well Season of the Witch is pretty much precisely one of those films. Boy are there historical inaccuracies (don’t even get me started! – as someone who likes the crusades...I think I nearly cried) and these probably can be forgiven, I mean it never promises to be the next Braveheart, but the lack of exciting action, rather poor pacing and more often than not silly and dull dialogue, means it doesn’t even really deliver on the whole ‘fun’ part of dumb historical (ish) action movies of this type either.
The Hangover Part 2 is pretty funny and rather enjoyable; that said, it is at its core almost a carbon copy of its predecessor, a predecessor which outstrips it in terms of laughs and especially in terms of originality in almost every way.
It is understandable why there is a second Hangover film. The first, released in 2009, was the highest grossing film in the US for that year and in the top 10 for the world and is credited as being the highest grossing R rated comedy of all time. Obviously this is not the first time that film studios had attempted to capitalise upon a successful film by throwing out a sequel to films that don't really seem to warrant them (actually its probably more surprising when this doesn’t happen) and many of these such films are generally poorer in quality and originality. In some ways, this is the path of this Second Hangover film.
Jack is back! but sadly not with much of a bang. With the emergence of the character of Jack Sparrow as the somewhat unlikely star of the first film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the second and third film in the oddly mangled ‘trilogy’ saw Orlando Bloom somewhat sidelined, with Jack taking a more central role as Disney affected the slogan ‘Jack Is Back’. Now 8 years after the original and 4 years after the previous film, Disney have taken this to its fullest, removing those previously central characters entirely and turning the pirates of the Caribbean franchise into one solely dominated by the be-loved Jack Sparrow in a hope to save the now floundering series; Sadly though, it is clear that even the Jack Sparrow cannot alone save this sinking ship alone.
