LegionAvalon

Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff.

Slow starter, Gillan (Dr Who, Guardians of the Galaxy), makes a pretty good stab at a mid-American accent, I did keep expecting a blue box to turn-up however. Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica) is underused. Nice vehicle for, to me, the less well-known Thwaites.

Spooky mirror movies go way back to silent film but after an hour I found I really wanted to watch to the end. Liked the use of sound but having said that there are some spoken parts I found difficult to hear. Nicely suspenseful but nothing that special.

5/10

There is a marginally original idea here in the surrounding premise but that's it.

Okay, there are two female leads which is the oncoming fashion, but the rest of the film is so derivative of horror from decades ago that it might just have come packaged from a factory. At least they didn't have the girls running around scantily clad in the rain. Small mercies.

I liked the soundtrack but even that reminded me of Cronenberg.

The acting is fine, Greene and Bennett acquit themselves well. Plot-wise I thought the boyfriend might have been more prepared when he was attacked, a few other loose details bothered me, but my overall feeling was just plain boredom.

No surprises.

Boobs, check.

Gore, check.

Thrash soundtrack, whatever.

Plot, wow check, we're on a roll!

Attractive actors, well each to their own.

Snappy script, I've seen worse.

Effects, again, I've seen worse.

... and yet... I just didn't care about these guys, character development? More like lack-of-character development, these guys aren't even bad enough to hate, they're just a waste of human form.

... and the 'evil' voice-over. It sounds like he had a cold.

Maybe could have been a short comedy horror but in this format it just did nothing for me. Sorry guys 2/10.

On the face of it, this movie is about a young boy's fantasies as he falls in love with the image of an older woman. I say 'image' because he doesn't know her at all to begin with, but as he watches, her increasingly sad truth is seen through his eyes.

It's also about Sicily during the war, but deeper than that, to me, it seems to be about the mob mind, jealousy and hatred and about how people tend to become what is expected of them, or don't.

Monica Bellucci is undeniably among the sexiest women alive and her near wordless performance is mesmerising. My only criticism is the somewhat stereotypical way that the 'men' are portrayed. Perhaps there's some truth that we are all driven from an area below the waist, but I'd like to think it's not true of all of us.

8/10.

I think I'm right in saying that this is director/writer Andrew Paquin's first major outing and I'm sad to say, he's in the wrong job.

There are some good to great performances here, but it's only the acting that really saves it.

The characters are shallowly written, I really didn't care too much about any of them.

Anna Paquin hardly gets a line, but Brian Geraghty is suitably 'disturbed'.

The film is carried very much by the evil Tricia Helfer, who alone might swing the male vote in tight and revealing costumes.

The plot sways from predictable to juvenile and never really raises it's game at all.

The 'gore' is of a strawberry-jam level, with coy cut-aways that don't even put it in the 'Slasher' genre.

The last ten minutes were interesting but by then I was looking for a knife myself....

What were the producers thinking?

3/10.