Review: The Acid House (1998)

acid house
A scene from A Soft Touch

A very funny and interesting Scottish film which tells three loosely connected stories.

In story number one Boab is having a bad day. He gets kicked out of his football team, his parents ask him to move out, he loses his job and his girlfriend dumps him for another bloke. Suffering from his bad day Boab sits in a pub drowning his sorrows and runs into god complete with Scottish accent and colourful swearing. God decides he’s had enough of him just letting everything go bad for him without trying to stop it and turns Boab into a fly. Boab uses his new fly-guise to wreck havoc and revenge.

In story number two we meet A soft touch and follow his marriage falling apart due to his  unfaithful wife. In the end he of course just gets back with her, despite her having him beaten up and variously humiliated.

Story Number three is by far the weirdest: in a bolt of lightning a LSD addled young man swaps places with a new born baby and wakes up in the mothers arms. After keeping his peace for some time he finally speaks up (the baby is a very cute puppet) and tells his new mother he’d like to go to the pub instead of going to the park!

Review: Skinwalker Ranch (2013)

When I first received this review title I thought it was some sort of weird Stars Wars porn flick (ie.skinwalker_ranch_still_a_l Skywalker ranch)! But then I discovered it was something quite different.

I don’t know..are we sick of these “found Footage” films yet? This was not a bad film, maintained tension well, turned out quite interesting, but I don’t know..I’ve seen it all before.

When such films were first being made (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Gamera..I mean Cloverfield etc.) it was a way of generating extra tension and making us watch the screen intently as tapes dropped in and out. I am slowly starting to just find it cheap and irritating, almost like the film maker was too lazy to make a film properly.

Not a bad plot and the final discovery will have you clutching your chair and all that of course, just wish they’d made the same movie in a traditional narrative style.

Review: Riddick (2013)

Riddick
Looks good..too bad it stunk!

If you are a fan of the original two movies Pitch Black and Riddick, you will like me find this movie to be the complete load of rubbish it is. Ok so the craze these days is to build a franchise and milk an idea for every dollar its worth, but you do at least have to make decent sequels for this to work!

Using a CGI landscape reminiscent almost of Amiga graphics, Vin Diesel grunts his way (on a green screen) through a few hours that seem to not make much sense. For some very obscure reason he wakes up on a planet left for dead then has to fight his way off it..

Along the way he kills various people and fights alien monsters. That’s about it. This film lacked most of the originality or interest of the previous movies and the Riddick character should have been left on DVD. Of course having said that, I know like me you’ll watch it just because you enjoyed the original films. This one is the Highlander II of the series I’m afraid!

Review: Possession (2009)

possessionBuffy (Sarah Michelle) stars in this psycho thriller which presents itself as something of a supernatural horror flick. For most of the film it lives up to these expectations. Only in the end do we realise its just a plain old stalker film.

I don’t think it was a very notable film, in fact in most places I found it very slow and dull. It was however a remotely interesting idea so probably worth putting at the bottom of the pile for a maybe watch at some point.

Essentially two brothers have a car smash and supposedly switch personalities. The wife thinks the brother she used to hate is now the husband. As you might have guessed (as its a remotely interesting idea) this is a remake of the Korean Horror film Addicted. If your up for a few subtitles, I’d go for the original as it was much better though.

Review: Hard Candy (2005)

hard candy
You just had to know something is wrong when these two hook up..

Sweet little Ellen Page of Juno fame is decidedly not sweet in this man-hating symphony of violence and excruciating excess. I should have known that it would not be exactly very nice when I read this was a revenge flick before watching it..

Page hooks up with a man twice her age over the internet (she plays a 14 years old) and agrees to meet him. Now already I was beginning to wonder if this movie was not somewhere amiss at this precise point. Then they go back to his house and alarm bells are still going off for me.

Some drugs in the drinkie poo later and the man is tied to a chair ready to face Page’s vengeance against anyone she deems to be a paedophile.  Alright I will not ruin it for you anymore if you haven’t seen it, but strong stomachs are called for and don’t expect to be left feeling uplifted or improved in anyway – unless you believe paedophile’s deserve to be tortured, in which case you’ll probably love it! Personally its one of those movies I wish I could just un-watch like The Human Centipede and other unnecessary hate-fests.

 

Review: Dracula The Dark Prince (2013)

dracula
A sort of elf who helps protect the magic stick.

Ok for a telemovie this was not nearly as awful as I thought it would be. We follow the fairly standard story as laid out by Bram Stoker with a few interesting variations thrown in for good measure.

Van Helsing makes an appearance with a magic stick that is the only magic stick that can kill Dracula (and theres me thinking any old stake through the heart would do it). We follow the journeys of the stick and the people around it trying to kill Dracula.

Not bad special effects and production values for a TV jobbie, nothing greatly original, but not exactly a waste of a couple of hours.

Review: Donkey Punch (2008)

donkey punch
Bright happy smiles..but not for long!

A rather interesting British film about a group of party-going young Brit girls in Majorca who meet up with a group of equally young guys and go off on a private yacht for some fun.

Lots of drugs and graphic sex takes place until something goes horribly wrong..then Donkey Punch turns into something of a slasher flick with one tense moment after another.

Some very impressive performances by the young cast, in particular Ray Winstone’s daughter Jaime of kidulthood fame for whom this would have been a very early role.

Review: Dead in Tombstone (2013)

Danny-Trejo-in-Dead-in-Tombstone-2013-Movie-Image
Yes he does look pissed off!

If you like westerns with a bit of horror thrown in you’ll like Dead in Tombstone. Mickey Rouke plays a very rotund Devil collecting souls of dead outlaws as they descend to hell, the rest of the cast are fairly inconsequential except for Danny Trejo who gives a reasonable performance.

Essentially a bank robbing gang turn on one of their own and kill him. He makes a deal with the devil and returns to try and kill them all in revenge in one day in exchange for his own soul.

Lots of the usual sort of gunfights ensue and blood and guts fly through the air. The film reminded me somewhat of the 1999 film Purgatory without it quite being as good.

 

Review: Abducted (2013)

abducted-2013-hdrip-xvid-aqosscreen_1Abducted is a very strange film that looks to have been made on a fairly restrictive budget. The plot sort of goes: young couples are being abducted from a particular park and find themselves in dark cells with strange medical experiments being performed on them.

As if this is not bad enough the plot unravels into implications for the very planet earth itself…no not some sex-crazed psychopath collecting them as you might think!

Not exactly the best movie ever made, but then not the worst either.

COUNTRY ARTISTS UNITE FOR NSW BUSHFIRE APPEAL LEE KERNAGHAN RE-RELEASES SPIRIT OF THE BUSH ON I-TUNES

Lee Kernaghan is re-releasing the fund raising hit Spirit Of The Bush on iTunes to support the NSW Bushfire Appeal. The song features vocal performances from Lee, Adam Brand and Steve Forde supported by an all-star lineup of artists featuring  The McClymonts, Sunny Cowgirls, Tania Kernaghan, Nick Kingswell, Travis Collins, Kirsty Lee Akers, Shae Fisher, The Davidson Brothers, Dianna Corcoran, Aleyce Simmonds and Jake Nikolia.

“The song was originally written to raise the hopes of drought stricken communities across Australia during one of the worst droughts in our recent history,” Lee said. “At the time of recording all the artists and the songwriters involved agreed that the song should remain as a fundraiser for rural and regional Australia in perpetuity. Right now there is probably no greater cause than assisting those people in NSW who have lost homes and property in the NSW Bushfires.”

It was agreed by all involved that 100% of the artist royalties, record company income and all music publishing income and royalties would be donated to the cause. The song is available on iTunes. It is $2.19 and the idea is to give people a way to donate that is not expensive, but hopefully large numbers will participate.

Please help promote this great fundraising cause by sharing this information. Spirit Of The Bush is available from the following link:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/spirit-of-the-bush-single/id731858107