Horrible Horrors – “Curse of the Scarecrow”

A vengeful scarecrow returns to life once every twenty years to kill anyone who happens to be in very, very close proximity to it. Never before has a horror movie antagonist been so fucking lazy.

Twenty years ago, June (Kate Lister) witnessed her parents being murdered in their family home. She’s still receiving therapy for it, from Karen (Cassandra French), the most condescending and arsey therapist ever to pick up a notepad and dispense chill pills. Karen’s therapeutic techniques appear to consist of pulling faces at June, implying that she’s a mental case, and drinking all of her wine. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

June no longer believes that a scarecrow killed her parents, reasoning that the trauma of what she witnessed created a false narrative designed to insulate her from the idea that a real, flesh-and-blood person could have done something so heinous. Karen senses that June is almost completely recovered, so comes up with a great idea: “Hey, why don’t you go back to your family home in time for the twentieth anniversary of your parents’ brutal murder? Tell you what, I’ll come with you. Hey, your brother lives there, doesn’t he? … He’ll have wine, right?”

Karen the therapist: the Karen-est of all Karens

That’s not the real dialogue, which is somehow actually worse than anything I could have come up with in jest. This is the sort of movie where everyone talks in exposition.

“Is that the coffee cup that holds enormous emotional resonance for you?”

“Yeah, it’s the cup I was drinking out of when my parents were murdered.”

“Wasn’t that 20 years ago?”

“Yes, to the day.”

“It’s funny I should be bringing all of this up given that we’ve been friends since we were kids.”

“That’s okay, Alice Jones of Number 35 Acacia Avenue, whom I met at the roller-skating rink on a windy Thursday in October when we were both seven.”

The doomed June. Kate Lister is actually a decent actress, doing her best with abysmal material.

The director, Louisa Warren (who also has a starring role as one of June’s friends), doesn’t like to innovate or interrogate a sequence, preferring instead – during indoor scenes, at least – to leave the camera static and cut between whomever is talking. This gives the movie the feel of a corporate training video, which I suppose is horrifying enough in its own right. It’s obvious, though, from the handful of aerial shots peppered throughout the movie that she’s got a mate with a helicopter.

By the time June and co. roll into town, June’s brother is already dead, killed by the scarecrow whose macabre legend with which he was so obsessed. Why he turned his back on the creature long enough for it to kill him when he believed wholeheartedly in its supernatural powers is anyone’s guess, but this decision is just one of many dumb decisions that come to taint the entire movie, decisions made by the characters, the production ‘team’ and the director.

Chanel (Tiffany-Ellen Robinson), a soon-to-be-doomed piece of scarecrow-fodder, chats with the duo of wine-drinking misery-hunters by the side of the road, and warns them not to go back to that farmhouse: June’s farmhouse. On a more affluent production the farmhouse would probably have looked suitably run-down, rustic and terrifying, but here it looks very expensive, with a brightly-lit, tastefully decorated interior. “Ooooh, I wouldn’t go prowling around that modern-looking, very spacious and immaculately kept building in a desirably affluent rural area if I were you! You’re asking for trouble, so you are!” Of course, many horror stories – I’m particularly thinking of MR James’ stories – have successfully subverted the safety of daytime to produce some of the most spine-tingling, sun-lit scares of the genre, but that isn’t the route this movie goes down. It more seems to be a case of, “This is my/my mother’s/my friend’s house. Fuck it, this’ll do.”

It’s here that I start to feel a little guilty for doing a hatchet job on the movie. This is a passion project that’s been conceived, executed and distributed on a tight budget, with only a small team behind and in-front of the camera. Why am I being such a dick about this? Well, there’s a simple answer to that:

I am a dick.

My favourite parts of the movie are, without question, Chanel’s death scene and Karen’s hypno-therapy session. In the former, Chanel is chased across a field by the scarecrow after it kills her boyfriend post-coitus (he was having sex with Chanel, obviously, not being pumped by the scarecrow), when she climbs over a small fence and cuts her knee. She proceeds to rock and writhe on the ground like a landmine victim. As the scarecrow closes in on her she holds a hysterical cry-face for literally twenty-five seconds, during which I laughed like a jolly, bearded lumberjack. Robinson’s performance was so unrestrained it made Moira Rose look like John Wick.

Karen shines again in the hypnosis scene, where she carries the tone of the woman in the TV studio on a treasure-hunt style TV game-show, whose job it is to berate the contestant for being so shite. Again I laughed. A lot. That my favourite parts of this horror movie are the two most unintentionally hilarious probably signals that the project has fallen rather short of its aim. Most of the dialogue in this movie feels ad-libbed – very badly, I may add – and is characterised by the kind of infuriating repetition your parents fall prey to in their twilight years.

And the scarecrow himself? It’s hard to work up a cold sweat of dread about a baddie whose presence is signalled by the sound of a bell on a little girl’s bike. Plus, he’s about as scary as a lumpy, middle-aged man crammed into a bargain-bin scarecrow costume, which is exactly what he is. I again defy you not to laugh when he finishes off a victim by shoving straw into her mouth.

The most terrifying thing about this movie comes in the final few seconds, where things are clearly being set up for a sequel. People of the UK, I implore you: hide, ideally burn, all of the scarecrow costumes. If you have a helicopter, do NOT lend it to the director. Let’s pray this particular cursed scarecrow never makes a comeback. Not in twenty years. Not in a hundred years.

Still, if you’re looking for a few daft laughs as you’re working your way through a batch of herbal, I suppose you could do worse than Sleepers Creepers here.

Year: 2018

Run-time: 84 mins

Studio: Proportion Productions

Director: Louisa Warren

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit: Good Bad Shit (sub-category: Funny Bad Shit)

Horrible Horrors – “Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill”

Like westerns? Like zombie movies? Like slashers? Well, you’re going to absolutely hate this. Even if you like zombie-western-slashers you’ll probably hate this.

It’s like a succession of shlock-horror vignettes alternating with mini music-videos, with the only real consistency in the movie being the panto-esque acting and excruciating (though occasionally unintentionally hilarious) dialogue.

The movie begins in the desert with a drug dealer being pursued in a low octane car chase by a police woman, who of course breaks off pursuit when the dealer hurls a mound of coke from his car and it bursts all over her windscreen.  A little tip for you killers out there: this also works with murder weapons. Just throw your bloody knife or smoking gun at the pursuing law enforcement vehicle and, BINGO, you’ve got away with it. Most of the movie’s landscapes are bleached, much like the atmospheric Mexican vistas in the movie Traffic, while the movie itself is about as entertaining as being stuck in actual traffic.

The dealer’s car breaks down and he finds himself at Sunset Valley, a mysterious ghost town that, unfortunately for Mr No-Blow Escobar, is filled to the gunnels with zombies, who waste no time in, well, wasting him. Their leader is the vengeful Bloody Bill, a Confederate soldier consumed with eternal wrath following his long-ago execution.

A little later, a mini-bus containing a debate team is hijacked by Earl, the earlier drug dealer’s pissed-off partner. They, too, end up in Sunset Valley, and proceed to be picked off by the undead. Beyond the principals’ broad character types – hick; screaming beauty; bad-ass babe; mouthy smart arse; preachy do-gooder; angry black drug dealer – there isn’t much to commend them as actual people that you might bring yourself to give a single, solitary shit about: Earl, the dealer, shouts about drugs, money and killing people; and the debate team spend a fair amount of time actually debating things, which doesn’t make for a particularly arresting zombie-slasher flick.

‘So you’re saying the beliefs of the world’s three major religions are invalid?’ asks one of the unfortunates, seeming genuinely upset.

‘No, I’m saying they’re unsubstantiated. There’s a difference.’

The writers obviously thought to themselves: ‘Well, we’ve made these guys debate champions. We’d better have them randomly debate things every once in a while.’ I guess we can be thankful that they weren’t written as champion Morris Dancers, although at least that would’ve been funny.

The not-quite-yet-fully-zombified dealer from the start of the movie shows up at one point, screaming at the doomed congregation: ‘Bloody Bill! He’ll find you!’ Of course he’ll find you, I thought to myself. The town’s only got about seven buildings in it. It wouldn’t exactly take a hide-and-seek champion.

It’s clear that the director, Byron Werner, wants to show off the toolkit of techniques he learned in film school – bleaching, colour filters, jerky cuts – without ever marrying them to mood or effect. The zombies appearances are mostly scored to goth rock, which really helps capture that old timey, Civil War feel. I should have felt dread at the zombies’ arrival, not get the sense that my six-year-old son had just accidentally flicked the channel to a 24-hour station specialising in German heavy-metal music. In fairness, Werner shows himself to be a very capable and inventive cinematographer, and adept at crafting effective sequences, he just doesn’t appear to care much about threading it all together to achieve consistency of tone or vision. It wasn’t much of a surprise to discover that Byron Werner has indeed gone on to enjoy a lucrative career directing the music videos of some very well known artists. So, in a way, this movie was his audition reel. And good luck to the guy. He’s obviously got talent.

Not so the editor or the people in charge of continuity. Not only do we see a two-lane track suddenly become a one-track lane during a crucial (almost) collision, but at one point Earl is caught mouthing the line of one of the other characters as they’re speaking it (that’s probably my favourite bit of the movie).

Earl’s death is also my favourite, for reasons both good and bad. Good, because he goes to his reasonably noble death with a face-full of crack daubed on his face like war-paint, and live grenades in his clutches. And bad, because the special effects budget couldn’t supply Earl with a worthy, flashy enough send-off. We should’ve seen a slow-mo blow-out, as a fireball smashed through the building and engulfed the first floor, sending fiery debris and shards of glass shooting after the screaming women. What we saw was, em, sort of close to that: a wee puff of black smoke slowly drifting out of a window, like a freshly-released genie just couldn’t be arsed making a grand entrance.

Bloody Bill himself doesn’t look too bad, as far as straight-to-video villains go. He’s like a low-budget Leatherface, or the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, but without much of the creepiness, or indeed jeeperiness. I won’t tell you how the film’s lone survivor manages to bring down Bloody Bill. Not because I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s just that I don’t really care enough to tell you.

Some of the gore is commendable, some of the film’s sequences undeniably are well shot, and there are a few unmeant but magical laughs, but even if you’re a connoisseur of shit movies like me you might still want to give this one a miss.

Year: 2004

Run-time: 88 Minutes

Studio: The Asylum

Director: Byron Werner

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit? Bad Bad Shit.

Movie Review – Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love (2019, Gravitas Pictures)

Released Blu-Ray/VoD: November 12th

Director: Tyler Cole

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love follows Damian Booster (Aaron Burt), a popular LA podcaster and perennial playboy, as he wrestles with his true feelings in the wake of an ultimatum from his non-Bechdel-test-passing girlfriend, Danielle (Emily Pearse): Come meet my mother for brunch in a few days to demonstrate your commitment to commitment, she tells him, or kiss our conjoined, couple-shaped ass goodbye.

One man’s tragedy is another man’s comedy, after all; and one man’s love story is another man’s horror. So why not blend them all together? Damian spends the duration of the movie dealing with a mounting crisis of mind and soul, his fear of falling in love manifesting itself through a succession of scary movie tropes.

Accompanying Damian into this hinterland of horror, hopelessness, har-de-hars and horniness is his visiting friend Alan (David Lengel, who resembles a sort-of elongated David Schwimmer) and a nightmarish assortment of neighbours and nutty, night-time denizens of the town.

First-time film-makers Tyler Cole (the movie’s director and co-producer) and Aaron Burt (the movie’s writer, co-producer and star) also know a little something about suffering for love, having gone through extraordinary struggles to commit their vision to the screen. Between them they’ve sacrificed jobs, homes, savings and sanity. Tyler even sacrificed bodily autonomy by following through on a promise to have his wrist tattooed with the logo of a hire company if they agreed to lend him audio-visual equipment for the movie.

So was the struggle worth it? Will Tyler smile wistfully each time he looks down at his branded wrist, or will he find himself wishing that his inked limb could join the discarded hands of Luke Skywalker and Ash Williams in some fleshy, rotten pile or pit somewhere?

Mercifully, Tyler’s self-vandalism wasn’t in vain. There’s much to enjoy in Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love: it’s fun, inventive, ambitious, creepy, consistently surprising, rarely dull (with the possible exception of a clunky scene in which Damien invites Alan to be a guest on his absolutely abysmal podcast) and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny. Burt is a down-to-earth lead; a great straight-man who gives generously to his fellow performers, both on the page and on the screen. With his help, and Cole’s, the cast brings a naturalistic, quasi-improvised feel to the movie that really fits its style.

The dialogue can occasionally feel clunky, but when it works, it works brilliantly, especially in those segments when the movie activates the ‘com’ portion of the horr-rom-com triangle. Its greatest assets in the laughter stakes are Nancy (Carly Reeves), a nutty, stream-of-consciousness-spouting wild child from the neighbourhood, and Travis (Darren Keefe Reiher), Aaron’s boozing, belligerent next-door neighbour. Nancy and Travis may be broad characters, bordering on caricature, but they’re so well played, and outrageously funny, that you won’t care a jot.

Burt and Cole have achieved so much in this movie with such limited resources. Visually, some of its finer flourishes wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget, studio-funded project. Never-the-less, while the film has lofty ambitions, and an undeniably unique and fascinating conceit, it never quite manages to live up to its full potential.

Experimentation with form and content in cinema is to be lauded. Sometimes the weirdest of gambles can push the boundaries of what’s possible, or even re-invent cinema itself. But melding such a disparate trinity of genres into a coherent, meaningful shape is a tall order. Horror and comedy make great bedfellows, as do romance and comedy: it’s the threesome that’s the tricky part.

Ultimately, Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love never quite coalesces into something that fully justifies its Frankensteinian approach to film-making. Instead, we get a very entertaining, mutant mish-mash of The Shining, The Hangover, Swingers and every generic slasher and romance flick of the 80s; well-crafted vignettes that work well in isolation, but rest uneasily when sitting next to each other.

The responsibility for the movie’s structural problems lies more with the composer than the conductor. After all, the success or failure of the movie’s central, genre-busting conceit rests solely upon the shoulders of Damien’s character, and, alas, he hasn’t quite the weight or the heft to carry the burden. He feels more like a cipher than a real guy; a blank-faced agent of plot. As a consequence his breakdown, and subsequent breakthrough, feels hollow and unearned.

It perhaps would’ve served the story better had Damien’s sense of horror been wedded to some disturbing pattern from his or his family’s past, or had sprung from some long-buried guilt or shame. As it stands Damien is nothing more than a mildly narcissistic man-child who’s reluctant to grow up and sheath his shaft, like most of LA’s aspiring entertainers, and, I’d wager, a significant portion of the planet’s male population. His journey, like him, is shallow, whatever he appears to have learned about love by the end of the movie.

Tyler Cole makes up for the short-fall in tone and theme by really throwing himself into his role as director, clearly relishing the opportunity here to flex his creative muscles. He must’ve felt like an actor whose agent had secured him every single role in a movie, the chance to run free and do, and be, everything at once.

As Cole deftly jiggles, juggles and muddles the aesthetics of three distinct genres, it’s hard not to see the finished movie as an extended demo reel for his extensive talents. This could well be Tyler Cole’s ‘Scott Derrickson’ moment (a director whose path led him from Hellraiser: Inferno to Doctor Strange).

Cole’s use of light, and lighting, is particularly strong – bathing the dingy rooms and corridors of Aaron’s apartment complex in the red and blue hues of his shifting moods – as is his understanding of how to build and release tension, all of which serves the eerier moments well. He also knows how to get under your skin with a good jump-scare.

It’s just a pity that the movie makes you feel terror more effectively than it does relief and happiness for the protagonist’s plight.

Who knows? Maybe that’s an apt description for love in the real world, too.

THE VERDICT

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love might not inspire you to tattoo yourself with its logo, but you won’t come away feeling short-changed.

It begs repeating that this is a first-time movie whose creators should be celebrated for their tenacity and dedication; whose vision and ambition should be applauded. Just because I judge it to have failed in some of its loftier aims, doesn’t mean that I consider it a failure. Far from it. It’s raw. Brave. Bold. Original. Haunting in places, hysterical in others.

It’s clear that Burt and Cole are both going places. Don’t be frightened to join them on the first leg of their journey.

You might very well end up falling in love with their work.

Watch the trailer here

Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

You can’t beat a good cross-over. You can’t beat a bad one, either. There’s something about two or more superheroes or systems or creatures existing together in a space they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) normally occupy  that excites our inner movie directors and statisticians. We love it when the Marvel and DC superheroes get together for a jolly good team-up, or when two or more Doctor Whos band together to fend off evil, but we especially love it when there’s cross-pollination between brands.

This is more common occurrence in comics and graphic novels, where the 11th Doctor has boarded the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk has found himself on the planet of the apes, Judge Dredd and Batman have battled Aliens (yes, those ones) and Predators and each other, and Superman has faced down Muhammad Ali.

It’s better, and much more fun, of course, when forces come together to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other, which is why I’ve assembled the fan-made videos below, to share a little of that exquisite, child-like glee with you.

I wonder if soap opera fans fantasise about Pat Butcher beating down Vera Duckworth, or JR Ewing vs Cthulhu…

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

This is one of the earliest examples of the fan-made mash-up genre you’ll find on-line, and it’s arguably much better than the largely execrable big-screen attempts to mesh the worlds of Alien and Predator.

Batman vs Darth Vader

There’s a whole award-winning series of these shorts now, very professionally produced, showing titanic – sometimes surprisingly brutal – battles like Spiderman vs Darth Maul, Iron Man vs Optimus Prime, Wolverine vs Predator, and Homer Simpson vs The Punisher (OK, I made the last one up). This one’s pretty darn good, though.

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

And this one, too. What’s not to like?

Super-Hero Bowl

A very bloody cartoon of every popular genre figure you can think of from the last 60 or 70 years being brought together and violently killing each other.

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

If spaceships, Star Wars, Halo and Star Trek are your thing, get your tissues and a hot bucket of lard at the ready. You’re about to cum.

Icons of Horror – Part 1

What if all of the supernatural villains from the 70s, 80s and 90s got together for a bit of a rammy?

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…

Movie Reboots – 28 JAMES MAYS LATER

The BBC Top Gear boys get to grapple with rabid monsters in this novel re-imagining of Danny Boyle’s gory zombie thriller.

It begins innocently enough. James May is depressed because he is unable to keep up with Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson: the duo are currently appearing in every single television show broadcast in Britain. So, with the help of an unhinged BBC executive, James May decides to clone himself. Unfortunately, things, as they always do in these sorts of movies, go horrifically wrong.

The cloning machine turns out to be faulty. ‘Because it was manufactured in Germany…’ Clarkson later tells us, ‘by French engineers… you think they would have learned… about teaming up… after they collaborated on the Vichy government.’

The clones are all evil, and quickly dismiss the reason for which they were created. They certainly prove to enjoy the taste of brains more than the taste of fame, ably demonstrated when they crack open the head of the original James May like it was an egg, and eat the goo within. And, because they’re James Mays, they even use the correct cutlery.

It’s not long before the James Mays are chomping their way across the country. Each bite turns its victim into a drooling, savage, and psychopathically famished James May, adding to their terrifying numbers. The only words they can speak are ‘Would you mind awfully if I just killed you?’ Within hours, Britain is literally swarming with James Mays, and there are only two men who can stop them: Hammond and Clarkson.

‘Well, if there’s one thing of which we can be sure,’ drawls Clarkson, ‘…it’s that May’s about as quick… as a Fiat Panda… that’s been engineered in Poland… by a one-armed Serbian goat herder… with AIDS…’

Their sluggishness makes them easy to deflect and herd into a giant vineyard, a feat the twosome accomplish through a combination of Hammond’s dazzlingly white teeth, and Clarkson’s increasingly loud and unhelpful comments about foreigners.

‘I’ve not been involved in many post-apocalyptic scenarios… except if you count my recent trip to Belgium…’ Clarkson says, ‘but I’ve got to say… that this must be… one of the greatest threats that mankind has ever faced… in the world.’

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: It’ll Be Alright on the Night of the Living Dead. Dennis Norden (who has been dead for thirty years) takes us through the most side-splitting (literally, in some cases) zombie mishaps and outtakes. See also: I am Legless. Will Smith fights his way through New York, beating people up, talking to dummies, shooting zoo animals, playing golf off the top of skyscrapers, and sleeping in his bath, until somebody points out that he’s just had a bit too much to drink. Out later this year, the terrifying House of Ruby Wax.

Movie Reboots – WHITE VAN MAN HELSING

Dracula: nonce.

‘Bloody place is crawlin’ with fakkin’ vampires,’ says White Van Man Helsing in the film’s first scene. ‘Why can’t they all just fakk off back to Romania?’

Helsing, played by Ray Winstone, snarls these words as he pulls up outside Castle Dracula in his dodgy white van. The action takes place not in Transylvania, but Hackney, where Dracula has built his castle using taxpayers’ money and PFI subsidies. Armed only with a lifetime’s worth of knowledge amassed from The Sun, and fingers of steel thanks to thirty-five years of arse scratching, Van Man Helsing has his work cut out for him. Especially since he refuses to use traditional methods to take down his nemesis. ‘Garlic? Bloody Frog cunts would love it if I used garlic, wouldn’t they? Not until those European nonces let us have our fakkin’ bendy bananas back!’

'Ooooy! You causin' bubble, you pointy-toothed slag?'

‘The Wolfman is alright,’ Helsing tells his apprentice, Danny Dyer, played by TV’s Danny Dyer, ‘at least ee can look after ’imself in a scrap. But that muppet up there, readin’ his bloody books, ’avin bloody orgies and suckin’ ar bloody British blood without liftin‘ a finger to pay tax? Makes my bloody British blood boil, so it does!’

Helsing manages to take out Dracula by force-feeding him a bag of Greggs’ pies until the count succumbs to a massive coronary. ‘Steak-and-kidney pie froo the ‘art,’ he quips, ‘Bloody mug.’

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: DSS Interview With the Vampire. Tom Cruise has a tough time convincing the council that his disability benefits are kosher. Especially since they’ve got a video of him draining a virgin while he’s been claiming for a bad back.

Movie Reboots – ALLAN VS PREDATOR

'Please demonstrate how you would lift this human safely, taking care not to hurt your back.'

It’s fair to say that the two AVP films didn’t exactly get the pulses of fans or critics racing. In fact they were shite.

But this time, the Predators face their greatest nemesis of all: Allan.

Allan is an officer with the Health and Safety Executive who objects very strongly to the flagrant disregard the Predators show towards meeting safety standards in the workplace. Although filming is still underway, we managed to obtain a few excerpts of dialogue from a scene in which Allan has a white-knuckle showdown with the head Predator.

'That's it, Tentacle Face. I'm shutting this mother-fucker down.'

ALLAN: Do you think it’s safe to have your staff piloting a large spacecraft through a potentially very busy region of space where there may be elderly space users, when clearly their vision is limited to detecting thermal signatures from warm-blooded creatures? Can I see a copy of your risk assessment forms, please?

HEAD PREDATOR: Graaahhraaahhragraaahhh.

ALLAN: And has the thermo nuclear device attached to your arm been PAT tested yet?

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter-Field. It’s kind of like Cloverfield, but you won’t be able to tell the difference. See also: Alien vs Creditor. Phillip the creditor doesn’t care how many mouths they’ve got to feed. He’s still repossessing their eggs.

Movie Reboots – COME SHINE WITH ME

Jack tries to keep cool after his croquettes burn in the oven.

Dinner parties can be stressful at the best of times, but this Film Four production takes social awkwardness to a chilling new level. Reuniting the original cast of The Shining, Come Shine With Me sees writer Jack Torrance returning to the Overlook Hotel to cook for Danny, Wendy, Scatman Crothers, and his mental son’s imaginary friend Tony – all for a crack at the £1000 prize money. It’s not as easy as it sounds, though. Tony used to haunt the finger of a famous French food critic, and so Danny’s index digit is always on the waggle: ‘This food makes me glad I’m only a finger with no mouth, Mr Torrance.’

Add to that the constant pressure on Jack to chop up his family into so much spotted dick, and you know there’s going to be a lot more tension in store before you hear the words: ‘Heeeeerrreeeee’s dessert!’

Dave Lamb’s acerbic commentary is a delight. ‘Good luck slicing the garlic with that axe, Jack. I think there’s a sledgehammer around here somewhere if you can find yourself a walnut.’

Look out for more of your favourite catchphrases in the movie, like: ‘All wok and no sautee make Jack a full boy,’ and ‘Watch out for that fucking axe, Scatman!’ We particularly liked the ending, which sees Jack freezing to death as he tries to retrieve his black forest gateaux from the hedge maze.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: Stephen King’s ShIT. One of the writer’s turds is buried in ‘Pat’ Cemetary. It returns to possess a teenage girl, from Maine obviously, who takes a misanthropic writer hostage and breaks his legs with a mallet. Also look out for: Tommy’s Knockers.  

 

Movie Reboots – NEXT FRIDAY THE 13TH

"Oooooh, helloooo ducky!"

To what fresh ground can you take Jason Vorhees once he’s been cryogenically re-awakened in deep space in the far-distant future? Producers and writers have faced this problem for the last eighteen Friday the 13th films. Some would rather forget the critical failure that was Freaky Friday the 13th. Others rather liked Very Camp Crystal Lake, one of the more recent reboots, which saw Jason stalking his prey whilst wearing tight bicycle shorts and a cravat.

Though commercially successful, the film’s ending raised a few eyebrows among diehard Friday the 13th fans. They argued it wasn’t exactly in the spirit of the saga to have Jason settling down in the suburbs with an uptight human-resources manager called Gerald.

Which is probably why Next Friday the 13th sees Jason Vorhees kicking back in the hood with Ice Cube and Chris Rock. Watch out for the increasingly inventive kills: especially Jason taking out a whole crew of Hispanic drug dealers using only a yo-yo and a bottle of Gatorade. Our favourite scene is where Jason rips out a man’s lower intenstines, prompting Chris Rock to quip: “Cos it’s Friday the 13th, you aint got no jobby, you aint got a shit to do.”

Although seemingly impervious to any form of physical pain, Jason is not immune to the social problems that are rife in the hood. By the end of the film he’s been shot fifty-six times, is the father of three illegitimate children, and starts selling weed.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: Knightmare on Elm Street. At long last the two worlds of 80s ITV kids’ show Knightmare and Freddy Krueger’s Elm Street are brought together. Also, look out for: Rod, Jane and Freddy Vs Jason and the hotly anticipated John Craven’s New Nightmare.

 

Movie Reboots – JOHN CANDYMAN

"Heeeeeeeeeeeeereeeeee's John Candy!!"

Say his name five times into the mirror, and you summon the angry ghost of John Candyman. Does he flay you with his hook? Disembowel you? Lop your head off? Worse. He casts you in a Steve Martin film.

John Candy had several reservations about appearing in this film – top of the list being that he’s dead. However, Hollywood trade magazine Variety reported that a seven figure sum soon convinced Candy to come back to life. Actors’ unions are now up in arms over what they perceive as a grave case of ‘positive discrimination’.

‘Already we have Rex Harrison resurrecting himself to star alongside a recently re-animated Dudley Moore in Under Siege 26,’ said an angry Jamieson Girthrocket, of Roles Taken From the Living (ROTFL), ‘What next? Die Hard 12 with Clark Gable?’

In the original Candyman, the eponymous villain opened his jacket to reveal a stomach crawling with bees, an echo of his brutal death. In the new film, John Candyman will unbutton his shirt to reveal a fully-grown bull charging from his colon, as a consequence of dying during a violent steak-eating contest against Dan Akroyd.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: The House on Notting Hill. Foppish Hugh Grant throws a posh dinner party to impress Julia Roberts. His soul quickly gets torn in half by an angry army of ghosts, who are sick fed-up of his humming, hawing, ooo-ing, ah-ing, and fringe-tossing. ‘If you’re not going to shag her,’ say the ghosts, ‘you might as well die.’ Die Hard 12 with Clark Gable starts shooting next April.

 

In the End, There Was the Beginning

Films are like fashion. Remember that film with the terrible special effects you laughed at in the 70s? Remember that film you loved so dearly you watched it fifty times a day and only communicated with other human beings through chunks of its dialogue? Well, they’re coming back… sort of.

Now that the cinema world has come of age, its going full circle. Over the last few years we’ve witnessed countless reboots, reimaginings, remakes and far-apart sequels; some of them good, some of them great, and many of them grating.

Star Trek, Batman, Terminator, Psycho, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Indiana Jones, Lost in Space, Alfie, the Italian Job: just a small sample of films and sagas that have had the treatment, with many more to follow.

I’m going to be posting tasters of the celluloid remodellings and regurgitations we’ve got to look forward to from the maestros of horror and science-fiction in 2012.