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.

I first heard of David Peace a couple of months back. Knowing none of his work to date I grabbed an eBook of Tokyo Year Zero because it a) had an okay cover b) tickled my bimonthly obsession with Japan and c) was available as an eBook. It was okay – stylishly written, by which I mean occasionally incoherent and hard to follow, and a slightly different look at post-war Tokyo that tied in with the Kurosawa movies I’d been watching around the time.

So, it came as a bit of a shock to me when all of a sudden he’s thrust (back?) into the limelight as the writer of the Red Riding quartet and Michael Sheen’s latest impression-vehicle, The Damned Utd. Startled that this author I’d never heard of seemed to be a lauded crime (and football) writer, I decided to seek out the Red Riding books and see what the fuss was about.

In classic Billy organisational fashion I missed the TV films of the stories and only just got round to grabbing 1974, the first book, chivvied into action by a 3for2 book offer that only had 2 other books that piqued my fickle interest. I decided to have a start on 1974 shortly after I got home and propped myself up in bed on Monday night to get a few pages read before sleep. I finished it last night, about 24 hours later.

I don’t read all that quickly any more, and generally restrict my book perusal (excepting comics) to my daily commuting along with a quick glance before bed, but 1974 grabbed me a little more than anything else recently, and I had to knock it on the head last night. It’s far from a nice book, being involved with the grubbier side of journalism, police brutality, murder and general human nature, and it’s far from conventionally written, with chunks of flashback and stream of consciousness that add a layer of atmosphere and confusion to the story. However, it works and works well. It’s a much easier read than Tokyo year Zero, although that is damning with faint praise, and I couldn’t wait to get to the end and see what, why, who and why?

Anyways, I went for a wander at lunchtime and am now loaded down with the next three in the series. I don’t think I’ll be running for The Damned United or the next book in his Tokyo series, but my pile of Bob Shaw and Ballard books will sit quietly beside my bed until this stack is done. There’s not been many series that have done that to me recently.

One of the lovely things about LoveFilm is that they have an almighty pile of random DVDs that I have never heard of. What is also lovely about them is that former flatmates Dave’n'Let also have an account, rent the random DVDs that I’ve never heard of and then lend them to me with recommendations such as ‘This one is REALLY fucked up’. Which is nice.

So last week, in return for a lend of Jason ‘Not The Gay’ Statham’s Death Race, I was handed a copy of low budget horror movie Botched. I received a number of text messages from Dave during his viewing of it commenting on both its messed-up-ness and how much he reckoned I’d like it. Rather than taking this as the insult it could have been I decided to intepret it as a compliment to my varied taste in movies and asked for a borrow. The next day it fell into my greasy little hand and I got round to watching the other night.

The film is about a heist that inevitably goes wrong, with Stephen Dorff and a couple of unconvincing russians doing some robbing for slightly less unconvincing russian boss Sean Pertwee. As the final line of the IMDB synopsis states – “…which leads to dismemberment and romance”.

It has gore, corpses, an obligatory romantic subplot, a fart joke (singular), a former spetznaz soldier, a religious cult, an attempt at a deeper plot than the film needs and enough fake blood to keep suppliers of corn syrup and red food colouring dancing for an hour and a half.

While I didn’t recognise the names of the cast other than Pertwee and Dorff I recognised pretty much all the faces, from a varied bunch of previous work from Hustle to The Phantom Menace. They quiet easily roll their way through the film, obviously having fun with the ridiculousness of the script and set pieces. There’s a lot of running around in the same two corridors and rooms (using the Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5 trick of moving the camera around a bit to make it look like they have a slightly bigger amount of set to work with) and the occasional bit of dodgy camera work, but it is otherwise quite a slick looking movie. The effects work especially well, with decapitation, bisection, stabbings, ricochets and generally violent gore spraying across the screen in a way that is over the top and amusing.

The film keeps its tone as light as you can for a story about killing people in interesting ways, with flashes of surreality and silliness that keep things fun all the way to the predictable and unclimatic ending, and a hopeful set-up for Botched 2.

All-in-all a fun piece of comedy horror, more polished than you’d expect from its low-key release, with a solid cast, generally great visual effects, and enough to keep you grinning through the occasional wince until it ends.

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.

Coming to it without a lot of the baggage that most watchers might, I was expecting to be disappointed with the film – their formulaic structure, the fact that Sly Stallone is the lead actor (and writer and director) and the fact that they are generally billed as “sports films” has turned me off them and led me to expect little. However, to preempt this review a bit, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not perfect, by any means, but I stopped looking at Twitter and focused myself on a film for the first time in ages. It’s quite unbalanced, barely touching on Paulie and his redudancy, while flashing up pictures of Adrian at every opportunity, but it follows the formula – Rocky exists, something happens, there is some adversity, Rocky trains, Rocky fights, the film ends. There’s no Eye of The Tiger, but there’s a training montage and a boxing match, and as much as I may have dissed Stallone in the past, and also not have many memories of the other films, the hairs on my arms still rose as he ran up the museum steps.

The plot is simple and most of the elements aren’t particularly expanded. There’s the girl Rocky escorted home in one of the other films, her son, her dog, Paulie and the failing career of Mason “The Line” Dixon (in real life i think that anyone naming their son Mason Dixon needs to be slapped for the good of mankind) and they are all briefly touched on, just enough to make the audience fill in the blanks. Then we get to the fight, which is what this is all about, and it’s what we wanted – Sly certainly does know how to put together a fight sequence. Every review I’ve read and heard has kept quiet about the ending, suffice to say what I will say now – it’s the way the series is meant to end.

So, I recommend it, despite being a year behind everyone else, and now feel a need to reexamine some of Sly’s other movies. I was thinking about watching his Get Carter remake, but after a small interlude of beating myself in the face and head I got over that, so think I’ll go with Cop Land for now, another film I half watched years ago – I suspect Mr Stallone deserves a second chance from me.

As I tweeted when I got home last night, I’m unsure about this film. It’s about Iraq’s ‘Only Heavy Metal Band’, Acrassicauda, and while it gives a rather scarily frank view of life on the ground in Baghad, on occasion it had a strange feeling of unreality to it. From the two music journalists who went to visit the band and didn’t seem to understand what they were getting themselves into, to the occasional shit that came out of the mouth of Firas, the most talkative band member, which sounded very much like the rubbish that other metal band members often come out with, it seemed to be what they people thought they wanted an audience to hear, rather than what they thought. When Dave and I walked out of the tiny box room that is ICA cinema 1, he turned to me and said something along the lines of “It just goes to show that in the end we are all brothers in metal”. While that is a sentiment I share on many occasions with people all over the world, I didn’t quite feel it with the guys from Accrasicauda. The story of the film was great, but all the way through I felt myself questioning the reality of the events – not the greater events in Iraq, but those surrounding the progress of the band, which had a strangely scripted feel to them. It could well just be that the documentary was edited to push a story, but it just felt unreal to me and stopped me from being as invested in the film as I thought I would.

The film was really quite good still, even with my strange reaction to it, and the band themselves weren’t bad when the film was being made and are now even better that they’ve reached Turkey and got some proper practise and recording time in. It’s worth a watch, and is on at the Prince Charles Cinema this Sunday and Tuesday next week. I might even go and see it again to try and find out why I didn’t like it as much as I think I should have.