ElWormo

SUIT #1: Hey guys... let's take an adrenaline-soaked cartoony slice of high octane, wryly satirical and funny ultraviolent 80s action, and re-imagine it as a slick, soulless, irony- free, pretentious, odiously self important emo fest that goes on for too long. Great idea yes?

SUIT #2: You sir, are a genius.

I rarely check out newer (post 2000) horrors cause they all seem pretty bland and samey. However the DVD box artwork and ridiculous title attracted me to The Windmill Massacre, plus the fact that it stars Patrick Baladi whose brilliantly understated performance as smarmy Neil in The Office is one of the many reasons that show was so much more than just a comedy. Every scene involving him and David Brent was amazing.

But as for this, it's just a run of the *wind*mill (hahahah) nu-skool slasher. You may not have seen the windmills but you've seen the film. Victims A B C D and E are thrown together in random location F where they're gradually picked off by scary baddie G, because of reason H... At the end you'll probably be wondering Y.

It isn't terrible. The gore fx are good if a bit overdone, the cast are bearable, and there wasn't too much endless screaming and shouting involved for once (also any film containing the line "I used to be the face of a Japanese toothpaste, I'm big in Japan" must have something going for it), but the replay value is about zero.

In 80s slasher terms The Slayer starts off well...and by 'well' I mean it has some really dodgy acting, some really dumb lines of dialogue, and also has some classic genre clichés like "the weird guy who warns everyone of impending doom", and scenes where characters are alone but can't help describing out loud what they're doing/thinking. I love that stuff. That's basically the first 20 minutes or so of The Slayer. So far, so craptastic.

Once the story gets going however, the whole thing shifts into minus gears. I don't think I've ever seen a movie with so many protracted scenes of nothingness. I fell asleep three times. Some of the gore fx are good but in the realm of early 80s slashers this was nowhere near Graduation Day, Pieces, Mutilator, Hospital Massacre etc etc... Nice effort but needed more focus and not so much aimless meandering.

Umberto Lenzi is a director I have loads of respect for, but his hit-rate is erratic to say the least. He's responsible for one of the most enjoyably bonkers giallos I've ever seen in SPASMO, one of the most enjoyably bonkers cannibal flicks I've ever seen in EATEN ALIVE, and one of the most (wait for it) enjoyably bonkers 80s slashers I've ever seen in WELCOME TO SPRING BREAK. But he also directed some right loads of boring old tosh - case in point IRONMASTER.

This movie is just 90 minutes of random loincloths and bludgeoning, with a boneheaded excuse for a plot attached. The whole thing could quite easily be condensed into 60 seconds, perhaps even 30. The dialogue and acting is as bad as I expected, but didn't give me any laughs. The whole prehistoric caveman thing is not my bag anyway but the complete lack of variation in setting and tone from start to finish made it a snoozefest. Any old director and bunch of actors could've made this thing... it's not offensively bad, but Lenzi has done so much more entertaining work.

What self-respecting movie director doesn't dream of making a film that is basically The 6 Million Dollar Man meets Roadhouse meets Over The Top meets Airwolf meets Terminator meets Deadly Prey meets The A-Team? Well, probably most of them. Most directors would rather make 'Leonardo DiCaprio Doing Very Serious Things And Looking Concerned'. However Mr. Sergio Martino is not most directors, because Hands Of Steel.

Hands Of Steel is a traditional story of one man's quest to get revenge on someone for something or other. It follows the classic storyline structure of a beginning (office shootout), middle (arm wrestling tournament), and end (helicopter chase), but also shifts into hyperdrive with some groundbreakingly sizzling dialogue between the main guy (forgot his name) and that woman who was also in Eaten Alive. Ice Hot baby... I could go on and on and on, but to summarise: A film so 80s you will grow a mullet while watching it. - unless you already have a mullet, in which case your mullet will give itself a hi 5.

Why is it that some 80s slashers are so bad they're great, and some are so bad they're bad? Where is that mysterious dividing line? I don't know. But to draw a comparison, when it comes to 'teens- locked-in-shopping-areas-overnight' slashers, whatever it was that made Chopping Mall such an enjoyable treat is completely absent in Intruder, despite the fact that (killer robots aside) both are fundamentally the same and both are completely crap. Chopping Mall is somehow a lot of fun, but Intruder completely drags from the start. Despite the bright colours and snappy camera angles, the whole thing feels enveloped by an invisible vacuum of dullness. It limps from one boring scene to the next and by the time the kills come I'd already lost interest. Even the actors seem bored. It's pointless being too critical because 80s slashers are like the Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards of the movie world anyway, but Intruder is just dull.

I try and remove as much external context from any movie I watch as possible. If a movie was controversial or groundbreaking in some way at the time of release, then fine, but the more important factor to me will always be the 'is it actually any good though?' factor. In the case of Straw Dogs I don't see much more than an earnest yet somewhat creaky and slow-paced tale of rural torment, that ultimately ends up looking like a 70s western with added sex + violence. It didn't strike me as anything that original or re- watchable, and I can't imagine sitting through it again.

Without giving any spoilers (to a 45 yr old film that everyone's seen) there were moments here that apparently shock to this day which I found to be fairly routine, rather than shocking. And it's not because I'm some hardened cinema tough guy whose seen it all (for example the stick-fight between Keith and Finger in Mike Leigh's Nuts In May gives me a nervous breakdown every time I watch it), but there just wasn't enough zing here to make anything jump out of the screen. The characters were well acted but barely beyond two-dimensional, the script was okayish but nothing spectacular, the incidental music was alright but sometimes clumsily applied.

Ultimately Straw Dogs is a film that takes itself very seriously and as such everything that happens has a kind of morose inevitability about it (similar to a lot of old westerns, hence the earlier comparison). It's not a -bad- movie, but I can't help thinking the notoriety factor seems to have impacted on how a lot of people perceive the film on its own terms. I can't give it more than a 5/10.

How did 4 big name rap superstars end up in a film like this? It reminds me of an old Adam & Joe sketch where they auditioned for genuine actors, cast the worst ones on purpose, and then deliberately made the most badly shot, rubbishly scripted 'hard hitting' gangsta film ever. For a joke. Well Urban Menace - is- that film, except in reality. A bunch of guys messing around and trying to act tough in a big poorly lit warehouse for an hour.

The highlight of this bizarre calamity is Big Pun, who might have a posthumous claim for Worst Actor Ever. He is so bad it's surreal. Can anyone even understand a word he says? One of his lines that I'm guessing was supposed to be "so she had a change of heart" came out as "saaaa shaa shaaaa saaaaaaa". Skilled rapper yes, skilled line deliverer in bad film when attempting to act, not so much.

To make matters weirder the whole movie is bathed in a trippy blue/gray light that makes it resemble some kind of boring dream. In fact maybe this was a dream? Yeah I'll go with that.

How on earth does anyone make a sequel bearing the 'Omen' name and come up with something as chronically unscary as this? I've seen creepier and more suspenseful episodes of TJ Hooker than this cardboard cut-out wet weekend of a kids' TV movie. The incidental music is comical, sounding like it was lifted from a particularly jaunty episode of Harry Potter:The Cartoon (if that even exists). But how and why? This is supposed to be The Omen...At least try and make it vaguely chilling. Did anyone even know what they were making? Ho hum, too many pointless questions...

The original remains an utterly badass slice of full-on 70s horror, and the first 2 sequels (although flawed) at least took it somewhere still worth watching, but Omen IV is right up there with Jaws 3 and Jason Goes To Hell on the bad sequel naughty step.

I decided to very belatedly give this series a whirl because (a) I remember it getting some great reviews at the time, (b) it's produced by Steve Coogan's company Baby Cow, and (c) although I'm not too familiar with her work I have found Nighty Night creator Julia Davis funny in a few things i.e. as the co- presenter in the notorious BrassEye Special, and in the excellent Amicus spoofing episode 'And Now The Fearing' from the otherwise patchy Dr Terrible's House Of Horrible.

Well I needn't have bothered. Despite being billed as dark, edgy, risqué, dark, twisted, perverse, and dark, Nighty Night is deeply unfunny in exactly the same way that happy-clappy innocuous fluff like Not Going Out and Benidorm are deeply unfunny. Okay the themes and subject matter might be refreshingly uncomfortable for a sitcom, but the humour is laboured at best and patronisingly obvious at worst. The opening scene says it all. "Why me???!!!" squeals wife after doctor reveals cancer diagnosis. But wait. Husband turns to her... "It's *me* that's got cancer!". Get it? Did you get that amazingly dark hilarious twist and see what they did there? It basically carries on with that level of comedy, rinse and repeat. How other reviews are comparing this to a masterpiece like The Office is beyond me, I lasted less than 2 episodes and that was a struggle.

I took a chance on this as it was (a) billed as an 80s slasher, and (b) in a shop display with other Arrow blu-ray releases such as Argento's brutal classic TENEBRAE, and the awesomely inept bucket of winning failure that is CONTAMINATION.

White Of The Eye is a completely different sort of 80s slasher though - in fact not really a slasher at all, more like a very laid back, slow paced drama. The acting's good, the direction is solid, the script is fine - but so what. The atmosphere of vaguely quirky characters in small-town Americana almost made it feel like a Coen Bros film, but with zero laughs. It was too low-key, slow paced and talky to actually maintain my interest, and I gave up after about an hour. Not a 'bad' film, just not my particular cup of cinema...

I hate to give this such a low mark, because there were at least half a dozen times in the first half hour when I thought The Editor was about to blossom into a note-perfect giallo homage. A few brief scenes mimicked exactly the kind of bad dubbing/dialogue/acting/lighting/fashion etc of the original 70s Italian giallo horrors it's clearly inspired by. Frustratingly however these were just teases, and the film seemed more interested in being some kind of hip underground indie-flick slasher that didn't remind me much of anything giallo based, and it started to *seriously* drag. The lead character's virtually comatose performance didn't help much, and the plot soon got impossible to follow. After 45 mins I didn't really know or care what I was watching any more.

Overall The Editor is nowhere near as bad as the absurdly boring Berberian Sound Studio (the closest modern-day comparison I can think of), but I wish they'd concentrated more on paying tribute to the classic giallo clichés instead of becoming a directionless and rather average slasher.

Really enjoyed this psychedelic, campy oldskool horror. A trippy and almost art-house first 15 minutes or so then settles into a Scooby Doo-esque mystery romp of early 70s proportions. Some of the dialogue is priceless (I was dying at the pointless exchange about seagulls) and the whole 'free love baby, yeah let's smoke some pot...oh hang on we're on an evil island with a killer loose!!' vibe was entertaining. For a pre slasher, pre giallo era film it actually has some surprisingly nasty sequences. If anything lets it down, it's that the initial premise involving the lone survivor seems to get abandoned somewhere along the way. Apart from that, very good fun.

A record producer with the improbably epic name 'Bono Zorro' has wired his groovy bachelor pad up to a voice- activated computer which can do things like turn lights on and run a bath at his command. "It's a Central Environment Control System, " he tells one budding young pop starlet, "or S.E.X.Y. for short....get it?". Let's just say what Bono Zorro lacks in acronym skills he more than makes up for with his ability to coax hot young vixens back to his lair and into his jacuzzi. However, S.E.X.Y. (which is basically an Amstrad computer with a TV and a box of random lights attached) soon gets jealous of Bono and his female friends, and starts to spoil the fun.

This is a truly mesmerizing slice of hilariously crap 1980s cheese. Wonky dubbing, ludicrous script, almost zombie-like acting... Everyone involved comes off like the worst actor ever. It's a Garth Marenghi's Darkplace episode, but for real. From what I've read the film had a troubled history and possibly never even came out, but seems to have now been given some form of release under the title 'Urge To Kill', but its other title 'Attack Of The Killer Computer' makes more sense. The pic of a dark haired woman holding an axe which is currently displayed on the IMDb thumbnail seems to be artwork from the DVD release, but has nothing to do with the movie at all.

Less than 30 minutes into this self-absorbed slugfest of a movie I felt like I'd been pumped full of valium and zombified. Why make a movie this lacklustre? Perhaps I'm missing the point. Maybe Inherent Vice is actually some kind of subtlety-laced masterpiece of understated nuance and restraint, but to me it was unforgivably boring. I lasted until the scene at the massage parlour reception desk, which I can only describe as the most uncomfortably vacuous 3 minutes of cinema in living memory. How could anyone script that scene without immediately wanting to rip up and burn everything they've ever written? Terrible.

As it happens, the recreation of 1970s post-hippie fallout America looked pretty spot on to me, but that counts for zero when you lend it to a movie that's about as entertaining as watching stick insects do tai chi. Awful.

A 2 hour long mess that looks like a big collection of deleted scenes from a movie that was never finished, and then scrapped.

Aside from being all over the place, the whole thing comes off like too much of a generic macho gunz-drugz-n-babez type cop flick to carve out any kind of original niche for itself - but at the same time it tries to break the mould with some totally ill advised stabs at 'wacky' humour that absolutely don't work. You never know if you're watching a serious film here or a comedy, and ultimately neither style succeeds.

Too many problems to mention, but the cringe inducing dialogue and line delivery (not just from Cage, although he's definitely Mr. Ham Sandwich here), plus some pretty blatant racial character stereotyping, all help to push this into the bad zone. It's just about un-awful enough to stick with though. There's worse out there in this genre...

Firstly I should say that none of the blame for this movie should be with the child actors here. They all did a good job, especially the kid in the main role. Hopefully he'll end up in something better than this in future.

Krampus...Anyone saying this is a great film or proclaiming that it'll be a future cult movie needs to be slapped in the face with a wet turkey. This is an utterly run of the mill, clichéd attempt at a family-friendly 'horror', with cardboard characters (the adults that is, as I mentioned the kids are fairly believable) and hackneyed script and storyline. It gets very boring very quickly as you realise the film will never improve, and in fact gets drastically worse when the power goes out. Loads of screaming, wailing, and shouting with stuff whirling about, and snow. Some of the special FX are decent. That's it. This film has been made a million times before, and it will carry on being made.

(1) hire out your local family swimming baths for the day

(2) hire a bunch of pretend weapons, some balaclavas, and a bank of CCTV monitors

(3) get 30 random people off the street and divide them into 3 groups. Tell one group they'll be the terrorists, one group they'll be the swimmers/victims, and one group they'll be the cops.

(4) randomly walk among the groups and film them doing whatever they want for a couple of hours, then edit the footage down to about 90 mins

(5) find Rutger Hauer, put him in a small dark room and film him mumbling to himself for a while. Add that to the footage you got in step (4)

(6) get some generic 'important' sounding backing music with plenty of orchestral creschendos and marching drums, and play it non-stop over the whole thing.

et voila, your very own Blast. Enjoy!

Right genres, wrong melting pot. This giallo-ish, hammer horror-y hybrid starts out like it might be worth watching, but before long in come endless drawn out sequences of scared characters wailing about in poorly lit corridors and basements with an overbearing soundtrack that gets more annoying by the minute playing over everything too loudly. Soon I couldn't figure out what was going on any more, and didn't care any more either. There are a couple of decent bits including a nicely eerie dream sequence, but it's not enough to save it from also-ran 70's cut price b-movie mediocrity.

The following year Anton Diffring would also star in the vaguely similar but vastly more entertaining werewolf/blaxploitation campfest The Beast Must Die.

You know a movie has failed to connect when you only discover the lead character's name as the end credits roll. Apparently Nic Cage's character here was called 'Mike'. It could've been Dave, Jeff or Pete. How about Tony?

And that highlights the main problem with Pay The Ghost. I know a lot of people will have invested a lot of time and effort both on and off screen to make this movie into a finished product, but no aspect of it has sticking power at all. It feels hastily cobbled together, two dimensional and - despite having more witchy wizardy occulty evil hocus pocus magic than you can shake a dead newt at - it's ultimately dull. Where's the chill factor? As other reviews have pointed out it's just so routine you can virtually describe what's about to happen around every corner.

As for the police detective on the case and the shades-wearing guy in the underground cave, they were both so unconvincing it was comical. A few other characters seemed to arrive then leave for no reason. There was some blonde foreign woman investigator towards the end who was doing something or other...what was that about? To be honest I don't care.

This isn't terrible but it just didn't work as either a horror or a supernatural thriller.

Not the kind of thing I would usually give the time of day to, but was given the box set of season 1-3 as a gift.

Verdict? Predictably shallow, cosy, unrepentantly middle class and totally implausible self-satisfied claptrap which obviously assumes that as a viewer I'm so dumb I need "WRITING" to appear on the "SCREEN" to tell me what Cumberdict Bendibatch is actually "THINKING" when he's solving crimes. What the hell? That has to be the most patronising gimmick I have ever seen on a TV show. That wildly offensive faux pas combined with the smart assed yet also bland script and BC's aloof, arrogant approach to the role of Holmes meant I was more than happy to bail out after the first episode. Apart from that I thought it was great!

I love send-ups of inept old movies and TV shows when they're done right (i.e. 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace') so I wanted to have a good time with this. But unfortunately, despite the makers obviously having a healthy appreciation of the kind of movies they were aiming to parody, every aspect of Lost Skeleton seemed heavy handed. The whole approach was too obvious and knowingly dumb, and I felt like I was constantly waiting for the actors to start nudging each other and winking at the camera. This kind of stuff needs to be done deadpan with the deadest of pans, but the pans here were too alive. The result is an awkwardly self-conscious attempt at making a bad movie - ironically it is bad, but not in the way they intended. The more recent 70s blaxploitation send-up 'Black Dynamite' suffered from similar pitfalls, but was more entertaining.

This movie is so slow it could put a hyperactive gerbil on speed into a coma. It starts slowly, slow burns through the middle, and ends on a decidedly low key note. You could call it 'atmospheric', but I'd probably go for 'snoozefest..'. It's not terribly made, and it's not an embarrassing clunker that anyone involved should be ashamed of, but it just fails to excite or entertain on any level. If you're looking for some so-bad-it's-good oldskool sci-fi cheese then look elsewhere.

OK I need 10 lines of text. How about that clumsy tag line, then:

"In Alien no one could hear you scream. In the Shadowzone that's all you can hear"

a more accurate tag line would be: "In the Shadowzone nothing much really happens, and then it just randomly ends"

I'm no Dustin Hoffman expert but I really enjoy his performances in The Graduate and Rain Man. Diverse and talented actor, no doubt. I found Tootise however to be low grade, patronising garbage on just about every level. I'm aware it's a comedy (well, duh) but the whole tone of the film is as mercilessly shallow and inane as the average Adam Sandler movie. It just isn't funny. All the characters squawk around like wind-up dummies, oblivious to the obvious, and react to utterly implausible situations like hypnotised zombies. The whole thing gets repetitive and boring too early, and lost me well before the end. Even a fine musical score by soundtrack king Dave Grusin can't save this pretentious, hammy mess from its own campy stupidity. I know I'm in a minority here but, considering its near legendary reputation I was disappointed by just about every aspect of Tootsie.

Scanners 3 could just be the most unrelentingly ludicrous film in movie history, no exaggeration. I'm actually surprised it doesn't seem to have built up a retro cult fanbase the way movies like Troll 2, The Room or Samurai Cop have. I think it could easily reach those giddy heights of 'so-bad-it's-ridiculous' acclaim if enough of the right audience saw it. It veers like a drunk on steroids from one totally demented set piece to another, never pausing long enough to ask itself wtf is going on. The acting is gloriously OTT, especially from the female lead who comes across like the ultimate pantomime baddie, cackling sneering and roaring her way through the film with a luminous green flashing circle stuck behind her ear (don't ask).

It seems pointless describing much more. If you're a fan of the bizarre, the absurd, the bad, the twisted, the preposterous, the uncanny and the warped, then enter this way and bring a crash helmet. It's years since I saw Cronenburg's original and I can't even remember if I saw the first sequel, but Scanners 3 must surely stand alone as probably the most bonkers piece of cinema, of the 1990s at least, but possibly ever?