I like Sam Raimi. Despite the abominations of the Spiderman trilogy (with the third making me question my fondness for him in an almost vocal manner) I have hung in there and awaited a return to making silly scrungy horror. My wait seemed to be in vain, but is now over with the release of Drag Me To Hell, the cheesily named return of Mr Raimi to the horror fold. Unless you include Spiderman 3, which was pretty horrible! BDUM-TISH. I’ll get my coat.

The plot is simple – girl crosses gypsy woman, girl gets cursed, shit happens, girl tries to get rid of curse, antics occur – but it is, as ever, beside the point. What you want from this kind of film is shocks, jumps, laughs and scrungy bits, and this has them all. It’s not a particularly consistent film, starting out (after the initial setup) with some fairly shock laden material, with menace pouring from the soundtrack and misdirection in the action getting you to jump at the times when you don’t necessarily expect it. This is all cut slightly with the Evil Dead style of humour, with goo galore and scenes of a ‘ewwww’ nature, as well as some flashes of dark comedy that inspired “Oh you can’t”s from the crowd in equal measure with laugs. However, as the film progresses towards the endgame the shocks start to fall off and the tension starts to ease. I don’t know if that’s because I got used to the adrenaline pumping around or if it did just start to lose its edge and descend too far into the ridiculous, but either way the end didn’t hold up to the intensity of the beginning. The seance scene in particular didn’t get much from me apart from laughs (and occasional jumps, although that is not achievement where I am involved). From then onwards it throws up a couple of moments, but nothing that compares to the rather high bar of the films opening.

The acting is fine, with the straight man being straight, the screamy girl screaming, the mystics being mystical and the scary lady being scary (as you would hope), but they aren’t going to set the world on fire. There are occasional attempts at fleshing out back story, but these generally help to setup jokes or push characters further into the cliche mould, removing the need for any further exposition. The effects are in general good, with the occasional bit of dodgy compositing, and the shadows seemed to work especially well, adding a chunk of inevitability to some of the earlier scenes. However I especially liked the score, which carried things along even when what’s on screen may not have been as good as it could have beeen. It has the loud quiet contrast down pat, with false build ups and sudden jumps that add to the action to grab the audience properly by the throat.

So, overall a nice piece of work. It may trail off as the film goes on, but the starting bar is high and the ending is still pretty good. You don’t go into this kind of film hoping to have your life changed, and you won’t, but the crowd left the cinema grinning and chatting, happy to have seen the film, which is what you want from a fun horror movie.

It’s strange when a film as seemingly thoughtless as Crank 2 inspires so much thought. For someone who hasn’t seen anything from the franchise they probably appear to be big dumb action movies, with Jason Statham put in increasing situations of ridiculousness which he gets out of in increasingly violent ways, however I think there might be more to them than that. Any film which leads to me sitting in a pub afterwards trying to work out what genre I would put it into (Experimental Extreme Arthouse Exploitation was the best my slightly inebriated brain could come up with) is either doing something right or quite wrong.

To start out, Crank 2 continues in the same vein as the first – Jason Statham, as Chev ‘Fuck you’ Chelios, has his heart switched for an artificial one (in the last film he was poisoned) and must zap himself with electricity to keep the battery charged (previously he had to keep his heart rate high to stop the poison from killing him) while searching for his real heart (instead of looking for a cure). That’s about it. It’s a rather good premise for a dumb action movie, in my opinion, and simply as a dumb action movie it succeeds, but there is another way to look at it – as a self aware parody of dumb action movies, including itself.

From beginning to end the film is entirely morally objectionable. It is offensive to every group of people seen in the film – women, the chinese, people with tourettes, hispanic people…the list goes on – and everything that happens does so seemingly to shock, with porn star strikes, anally inserted shotguns, strippers with exploding boobs, the now obligatory public shagging and more. However, everything is pushed beyond the normal limits of this kind of film and combined with a wide streak of surrealism that permeates the aftermaths of Chelios’s increasingly large electric shocks it turns into something much more than it at first seems.

It’s stylish, with the look and feel combining elements of eastern extreme cinema with the canonical western action movie. Filmed in high contrast with closeup hand held cameras and wide lenses it is a sensory assault well suited for viewing in the cinema. The story sort-of holds together, as much as this level of ridiculousness can, and surprisingly does require the viewer to have seen the first film to get the most out of it. However even with prior knowledge you’ll probably spend most of the film looking confused. It’s funny on a number of levels, with stupid humour mixed with vaguely complicated self-referential and general parody, with a small pile of cameos to spot, from the obvious to the random, many of them being humorous specifically due to the cameoing person. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed myself, although felt guilty every time I grinned. Which was a lot.

In the end my opinion of the film comes down to how well I think it fulfilled its intention. If it was just meant to be a silly action movie then it succeeded but is wholly morally objectionable. However, if it was meant to be a film that says “Look at me! Look at how ridiculous this all is! Can we actually get any more offensive?!” then it succeeds and the objectionableness is seemingly blunted by that awareness. I’m still trying to work out why it becomes more acceptable to me if I think, as I do, that it was all intentional, but in the meantime I am very tempted to go and see it again.

It almost seems to be a companion piece to Michael Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’ (neither version of which I have yet managed to see) – in those the violent premise hides a stern looking Haneke pointing at the audience saying ‘This is your fault. If you were not watching then these horrible things would not happen. You are complicit. You are to blame”. In Crank 2 the filmmakers are saying pretty much the same, but they’re grinning as they do.

This weekend I done made a film. Not one of my ’special’ movies that the restraining order says I can’t send to Belinda Carlisle any more, but an entry for the SCI-FI-LONDON 48hour Film Challenge.

I didn’t really mean to enter, it just sort of happened. After taking some piccies of the cinema full of eager faces ready to run away and make MOVIES! for a weekend I sat down with some of the other volunteers and accidentally grabbed a title, prop idea and line of script from the bags – in order to ensure that the films were made over the weekend we provide those three pieces of information to be used in each film. It was rather an interesting combination with a throw-away title (XY & Zed) but a prop and line that worked naturally together:

• Prop – A box of 5 ring doughnuts
• Line – At some point you have to just stop, give it up.

I spy with my little eye a film about me eating doughnuts. In space. Jokes were made, I vowed to make it, handed out a script editing credit and promptly forgot about it. I then wandered off to the Prince Charles Cinema for an afternoon of dodgy sci-fi – Push. I think I can blame Push for my considering the idea of a 48 hour film further, as its plot was so nonsensical and internally inconsistent that after a while I stopped trying to keep up with what was going on (although, I think it’d make a great Heroes style TV series) and started pondering what I could do with my title. Unfortunately a grain of a thin and not great idea started growing, and by the end of the film I decided to have a go at making one myself.

So, after a ’script writing’ session on the tube, the purchasing of eight doughnuts (they come in boxes of 4 or 12…) and a bit of script editing due to not being able to use iMovie’08 very well, I ended up with a ‘film’. It has 3 shots, 4 people credited and lasts almost exactly 5 minutes. I ended up reshooting the middle shot this morning, allowing a small amount of beard growth and also a slightly better (but still not all that great) take, and I now have (thanks to the POWER OF APPLE!) a DVD of ‘XY & Z – A Team Billy Production’ sitting on my coffee table ready for submitting.

I can’t win anything and I’m not even eligible to be entered into the judging, the peril of being a festival volunteer, but it’s been a rather fun thing to do of a weekend. Next year I’ll have to join a proper group (although my being tainted by touch of SFL volunteerdom will probably nix that idea) rather than shoot three short video blogs about a slightly Nic Cage inspired theme, and have already had interest from someone to help out. I like making movies, no matter how rubbish they probably are, so I think I should start doing this more often. I’m still not sure whether I should submit my low-res, me on screen babbling attempt at a short film to the festival, but it has at least made me think a bit.

All I’ve got to do now is learn how to write scripts, shoot and act…

I’m sure I’ll stick it up online sometime. Contains unshavenness, silly hair, a knife, a pink doughnut and one scene of mild hand flappiness. Certificate U – Unsuitable for viewing by anybody

I started the drain spiralling after Saturday’s Picocon with Barb Wire, the ill-advised vehicle for Pamela Anderson’s unsuccessful transition from television to cinema screens. As history has shown, it didn’t work. It’s stupid, campy and post-apocalyptic and it keeps almost being self-aware enough to bring in an element of humour, but every time you think it’s about to redeem itself the dialogue falls flat and you shake your head in wonder that it made it into cinemas at all. It does have two good points though – an overly developed explosives budget, leading to large numbers of fireballs that distract from the horror, and an all-star cast, for values of ‘all-star’ that include the girl from Diagnosis Murder, the guy who got radiation poisoning in 24, Jango Fett and Udo Kier. I so very wanted to like it, but in the end just went to bed feeling depressed.

Sunday was meant to be a turn around for me – I was going to leave the house and go and watch a double bill of Che parts 1 and 2, starring Benicio del Toro’s unkempt facial hair and beret. However, the prospect of sitting in the Odeon Covent Garden, despite it being my favourite cinema, for 4.5 hours, watching a worthy movie about the development of the most famous and iconic revolutionary leader in modern history in the end did not appeal as much as doing half an hour of Wii fit and working out clues for next weekend’s London Transport Museum scavenger hunt. I scanned through the DVDs on offer in the rental machine that sits in the corner of my local Tesco (£1.50 a night and automated, so no embarassing handing a bad movie to the person behind the counter in Blockbuster only to see them make a face and look at you unbelieving) and even there found nothing that jumped out at me. If only I’d caved and chosen Pineapple Express – it may have made me want to cry due to my dislike of it (or so I predict from talking to people about it), but that would have been better than my actual fate. I did almost buy the Emilio Estevez/Lou Diamond Phillips vehicle Renegades from Oxfam, but didn’t in the end, although this was more to do with thinking I’d already seen it rather than a sudden jump in film taste.

After last weeks surprising crop of decent films that I wanted to watch on Sunday evening I turned to the TV guide and looked to see what I could watch for ‘free’. Here is the final mark of my downfall – I chose Batman and Robin.

Now, to most people this seems to be a foolish choice, with no reason behind it at all. Indeed, the good people of Twitter took me to task for my choice, unanimously advising me against such a course of action, but I ignored their, in hindsight excellent, advice and soldiered on. Now, I am a Batman fan – I do have a signed picture of Adam West in costume on my wall (although those who claim that he watches over me as I sleep are reading more than I would like to admit into its positioning of looking down on me as I sleep) and a bubble bath containing statuette modelled on Val Kilmer sitting on the side, as well as a not inconsiderable pile of comics and books related to the Dark Knight – and it felt like a duty to add Joel Schumacher’s take on The Detective to my list of sources, however, as was predicted, it’s two hours of my life that I will never get back, no matter how much I claw at my soul.

I have no problem with ridiculous campness. I rather like puns that would make the average person fall to their knees and cry to the heavens ‘WHY‽’. I even like Uma Thurman when she’s wearing a green swimsuit and acting badly. However, this was just plain awful. From technically, with its horrendous CGI, bad filming (when I can notice that things aren’t in focus you’ve definitely got problems) and shocking editing, to acting that struck me dumb at its terribleness on occasion, I was thankful for the advert breaks that Film 4 inserted, as they gave me time to leave the room and recuperate before going back for another round. I have never wished that a television channel could put in more adverts before, but as it got to the end I had to walk out between breaks as well, ostensibly to finish cooking my dinner, and it was only a dedication to the strange sense of ‘duty’ that watching the film inspired that dragged me back to the sofa. From his first appearance onwards you can see a look of unease in Clooney’s eyes, and you can tell that he is questioning his agent’s advice every time he has to deliver yet another terrible line straight faced to camera. The only saving grace is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stamps his way through the role of Dr Freeze without a hint of irony as he delivers toe-curling pun after toe-curling pun in a way that I can only admire. When it finished I felt only relieved and at the same time quite proud, as I suspect many others fell by the wayside, dropped by the film’s awesome power for evil. I now see why Joel Schumacher still gets death threats and neither Lost Boys nor Tigerland can stop the powerful urge to punch him in the face and steal his wallet that now imbues every fibre of my being.

In short: really bad.

After that I felt that it was time to return to the fold and reraise my game. I turned to my Lovefilm rental to bring things back to speed – a film seemingly from the IMDB top 250 list that I hadn’t seen, Robert Mitchum’s Night of the Hunter. However, on closer examination it seems that I had actually chosen Richard Chamblerlain’s Night of the Hunter, the critically panned television remake. FILM FAIL, a moment to sum up my weekend’s movie choices. I turned to a background of Qi before losing the will to pour images into my brain and went to bed. The weekend was done. Hooray.

So, tonight I try to jump back into some form of quality movie with a double bill of Frost/Nixon and Milk at the Prince Charles Cinema. Festivities start at 6:05 in the pricy upstairs screen, but £15 is a small price to pay (for members) to watch a couple of movies that I’ve heard should at least go some way in restoring my faith in the film industry. However, I am in a deep pit and I think it’s going to take more than a scary take on Nixon and a camp Sean Penn to drag me out of it. I live in hope.

Now, I’ve heard of the cartoon of Speed Racer (which I keep typoing as Speed Raver, which is a very different concept) but I’m fairly certain it’s something that has entered my consciousness in more recent times, as the various dribs and drabs of unshared US to UK cultural reference have slowly leeched into my brain. In particular I think my first actual awareness came about after hearing the Presidents of the United States of America’s song “Mach 5“, referencing Speed’s car. However, From the moment the over the top Smarties-like colours of the film (we’re talking old-skool Smarties, not the new “healthy” ones. The ones that were coloured with crushed animals and industrial waste. The ones that made me the man I am today) I was hooked. Now, some would say that it was the combination of prescription medication and rather excellent coffee coursing through my veins that turned my normally cynical mind from its normal path of disrespectful film destruction, but I think that I’d disagree.

The film is as predictable as you would expect a toy endorsement friendly summer blockbuster to be and the main criticism I heard levelled at it stands – it’s almost two hours long and focuses a lot of that time on a discussion of the corruption of the racing industry and the dilution of sport as it becomes a business. That would not necessarily be a criticism, apart from the fact that it’s blatantly targetted at children of an age that take bright flashing colours and the flinging of poo as the heights of artistic endeavour (under 8s and me). It’s just a bit too much of the content of the film to be classed as “something for the adults” and I can imagine the average kid getting bored waiting for the next physically impossible, sideways drift heavy racing scene. However, as a film aimed at me – a cynical thirty and three quarters year old with a love of monkeys, poo flinging, bright colours, interesting film making and Christina Ricci – it worked excellently.

To talk of the plot would be spoilerish and unnecessary, so I’ll do it anyway – Speed Racer has a silly name and in “Mr Bun the Baker”-like nominative determinism likes driving racing cars. He gets embroiled in the politics of the racing industry, does a bunch of races and has to win a big race to save his family and save the world of motor racing from corruption. The End. On the way to the credits (during which a monkey drives a selection of vehicles – could this film be more aimed towards me? Note to self: obtain Every Which Way But Loose, we need some Clyde love) we get a few races (veering on the edge of not quite enough racing action), some exposition, flash backs, an interesting style of shooting (with lots of floating heads criss-crossing the screen…watch the trailer, you’ll see what I mean), Christina Ricci’s legs and a worryingly large amount of fun. There’s an obligatory annoying kid, there’s a slightly inept australian and the bad guys are all british, but the film is entirely aware of what it is and just gets on with it.

Anyways, it’s not a deep and meaningful film and it has a plot and “politics” that are shallow enough that it’s almost rude to refer to them as such, but at the same time probably has too much of both to appeal to the younger, less attentive members of the audience. However, if you want an excuse to sit in front of a TV screen and watch something fun and colourful there are many worse ways to spend an evening.

All in all, I think I summed it up in my tweeted 140 char review: Well that was actually totally marvellous. Thought I’d not like Speed Racer much, but now I feel the urge to go find and watch the cartoon.