“The Mountain and the Viper” is a reminder that in George R.R. Martin’s unforgiving Game of Thrones universe, some things are inevitable… …bloodshed, for example. Or that whenever there’s a cursory shot of buff, shirtless men… …there’ll be a series of leering close-ups on naked women shortly afterwards. (Not that I’m especially complaining about getting…
You know what you’re getting into when you watch a film with a title like Cheerleader Massacre. Bad acting is par for the course: the actors might look like the Days of Our Lives type, but their thespian ability falls short of even that mark. There’s no reason to be surprised by home-video quality cinematography…
X-Men: First Class is a breezy slice of blockbuster. It’s fun while dabbling in the conventional superhero stuff – origin stories and brief banter, all interspersed with the mandatory action – but stumbles when it tries to be something more than disposable entertainment. There’s a lot to like here. Matthew Vaughan frolics through the sixties…
Late in After May (Après Mai or Something in the Air elsewhere) one of its teenage protagonists is informed that the assault charges that had loomed over these young wannabe-revolutionaries have been dropped. You see, in an ill-advised protest, these leftist French students (in tumultuous 1971) seriously injured a security guard, causing them to spend…
The term “guilty pleasure” is overused. I’m not of the belief that the concept doesn’t exist; of course it does! Guilt and pleasure are so closely related it’s absurd to dismiss the validity of experiencing shame and enjoyment simultaneously. But a trashy horror film with subpar special effects, a cheesy eighties pop song, a lurid…
For a supposed “chick flick,” The Other Woman doesn’t demonstrate an especially high opinion of women. The hook – a wronged wife (Leslie Mann) and a pair of mistresses (Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton) team up to get revenge on their smarmy lover (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) – seems to be an empowerment-of-women-type-deal on the surface. And…
Yesterday was Friday the 13th, and I took the opportunity to maximise my school holidays by sitting down with a few beers to watch the entirety of the Friday the 13th slasher series. Well, the first eight films at least: I left out Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, Freddy vs Jason and the execrable…
Story: Hatchet II retells and reconfigures Victor Crowley’s origin story, which seems fitting given the recasting of MaryBeth (the first film’s Final Girl) and the way its chief inspiration, the Friday the 13th series, would reinvent Jason Voorhees with each sequel. The main plotline is a double-edged revenge story (for MaryBeth and Victor) which is…
“Human life was cheap. Film was cheap. It was a great place to make a picture.” Machete Maidens Unleashed! is Mark Hartley’s follow-up to his debut, Not Quite Hollywood, which was an oral history of Australian exploitation (“Ozploitation”) films. Similarly, Machete Maidens is an entertaining romp through B-movie history, now focusing on films made in…
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