Zardoz

In the future, Brutal Zed lives a life of rape and murder in his post apocalyptic world. His only real concerns are dealing death and mayhem, and using slave labour to produce the food sacrifice demanded by his God - the giant stone floating head Zardoz. But when the curious Zed sneaks into Zardoz with the food, he finds himself transported to the home of the Eternals - a colony that survived the loss of civilization thanks to their amazing technological and spiritual development. But Zed and the Eternals will come into conflict in ways that just might change the whole world...

Notoriously weird film, very much a product of the 1970s. There are actually some fairly deep and interesting ideas here, and at least one good twist towards the end. But there's a lot of nonsense to see through to get to that, and honestly you find yourself more amused and bemused than anything. That side of the film can be summed up in one phrase : Sean Connery in a wedding dress!

Crazy Stupid Love

Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore) have the perfect life together living the suburban American dream... until one day Emily asks for a divorce. Now Cal alone, has to learn to re-enter the singles bar scene with a little help from uber pickup artist Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling). Can Cal succeed at his new life... and does he really want to?

Decent little romantic comedy, this. Never great, but always good.

Jennfier's Body

Nerdy reserved bookworm Needy (Amanda Seyfried), and arrogant, conceited cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox) are close friends, though they share little in common. They share even less in common when Jennifer mysteriously gains an appetite for evil and murder after a disastrous fire at a local bar. As Needy's male classmates are steadily killed off in gruesome attacks, the young girl must uncover the truth behind her friend's transformation and find a way to stop the bloodthirsty rampage before it reaches her own boyfriend Chip.

A strictly by the numbers horror. Really the only selling point is that it has Megan Fox being all sexy and stuff, which is okay but not nearly enough to carry a bad film.

Larry Crowne

Larry Crowne (Hanks) is a manager at the big-box store where he's worked since leaving the Navy. However, all is not well in his life - he's fired for not having a good enough education to progress further in the company, finding himself suddenly struggling with his mortgage and lacking direction in his life. He heads to the local college to get himself some education and start his life over. Along the way he takes a public-speaking class and develops a bond with his teacher, Mercedes Tainot (Roberts).

Bog standard romantic comedy... only it's neither all that romantic nor all that comedic. Everyone does their part well enough, but the only real high point is George Takei as the economics professor... he seems to be playing a version of himself, but George Takei appears to be a man who has tremendous pleasure in being himself, and it comes across on screen.

Our Idiot Brother

Ned lived a happy life growing organic vegetables on a farm with his hippie girlfriend and his dog named Willie Nelson, but an unadvised incident with marijuana at a farmer's market lands him in jail. When he gets out of jail, he is off to live with his sisters. While Ned is still happy, his sisters are much less so after he manages to screw up one marriage, one job opportunity, one budding relationship and one domestic partnership. He sees those problems as breakdowns in communication, but his sisters see him as an idiot.

Okay film, this. There's some fun to be had watching Ned bumbling his way through life, and the troubles and strifes it causes. Worth a watch.

Monsters

Six years ago NASA discovered alien life in space. A probe was launched to collect samples, upon re-entry it crashed over central America. Soon after, new life forms began to appear and overrun the land periodically, destroying everything sent against them. Years on the battle continues, but the alien infestation appears to be a fact of life for much of Mexico. When a US journalist doing a story in the area is hired to escort a shaken tourist through the infected zone back to America, both embark on a journey that will bring them into contact with the effects of the invasion - and with one another.

This is a really good film. Don't be misled into thinking that it's a "Monster movie", though, because it really isn't. It's a romance movie that just happens to take place against the backdrop of a land overrun by monsters. And truthfully the monsters aren't even monsters - they're huge, they're powerful beyond belief, they cause massive disruption and damage... but for all that, they're really just animals and dealing with them is pest control on an epic scale. Which just makes that side of things more interesting, too.

The Sixth Extinction

This may be one of the worst films I've ever seen. I talked about how bad Jurassic Shark was? Jurassic Shark is Citizen Kane next to this.

Thing is, this isn't a real movie. It's shot on a camcorder. The lighting, the ambient sound, etc are simply whatever the camcorder happened to catch at the time - though the dialogue is overdubbed by studio recordings that are incredibly, horribly at odds with the rest of the soundtrack. The acting is awful. I lasted 8 minutes, and at that point I just had to turn it off. This is so bad we have actually invented a new "flaming plug of doom" to categorise it, because frankly zero plugs just wasn't bad enough.

Area Q

Reporter Thomas Matthews has spent a year searching desperately for his son, who was apparently abducted by a suspicious man. Needing money, he accepts a job doing a story on UFO sightings in Brazil. He finds himself involved in all kinds of strange goings on as a result...

This is a bad, bad film. The acting is poor, the special effects are poor, the story is dull, dull, DULL. There's about enough of a story here for an X Files episode, but it's stretched out over two whole hours. As a result, you find yourself sitting there just wishing they would get ON with it already!

And perhaps it's just the copy I had, but stretches of the film are in Portuguese with no subtitles. Some of this is important stuff - for example, when Matthews finally meets the alien and has their plans and the reason they are on Earth explained to him... Matthews talks English, and the alien speaks Portuguese. Matthews even comments on it in a "wow, how is it that I can understand you!" kind of way, implying that this is done on purpose. But the result is, we get no resolution to the film. We the audience are never told what the hell is going on, so the whole thing ends up being a waste of time. Plus, there's a "twist" ending that makes no sense whatsoever. Rubbish film.

Prometheus

The long-awaited "it's a prequel only not" to Alien has arrived... and boy, what a mess it is.

On the upside, Prometheus is one of the best looking films I've ever seen. Ridley Scott has a real talent for creating worlds that look practical, workable, yet beautiful and provocative, and in this respect Prometheus equals if not tops Alien itself. Everything about it is gorgeous.

There are also some great performances - most notably by Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron, who are just working on a whole other level to the rest of the cast.

But beyond that, the film is a mess. Virtually every single thing every character does in it is stupid and pointless. For instance - and this is a minor spoiler - the Prometheus mission has been paid for by the Weyland corporation, under the orders of Mr Weyland himself. We are shown that there is a secret member of the crew hidden away... who is eventually revealed to be Weyland, who decided to sneak on board and actually come along himself.

Only... why sneak on board? He's paid for the whole mission, it's his ship! The crew are his employees, it's not like they could stop him going if he wanted to! Nor does the secrecy actually accomplish anything for him. It doesn't advance his agenda in the slightest, nothing in the plot turns on his hiding himself away. It's a plot element that's just kind of... there.

And almost everything in the film is like that. Critics praise the film for raising deep questions of who we are and how we would react to and interact with our creator. But raising questions is not impressive unless you actually answer those questions. The great flaw of Prometheus is that it never really does anything with the issues it raises. It just kind of throws them out there and then leaves them lying like a wet fish.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned the "monsters". There's a reason for that; the monsters are, for the most part, boring. Remember how freaked you were when the Alien lunged out of the dark at Dallas? Or when it stretched out it's hand towards Ripley? There's exactly one scene where you really feel something like that in this film (the medical pod scene). Beyond that, the monsters are just kind of bland and generic. They don't even advance the plot - seriously, if the crew had never found the black goo and never had to deal with any monsters, the film would have ended exactly the same.

There's a lot of hate floating around for this film, and whilst it might seem from the above that I'm joining in with it, honestly Prometheus doesn't deserve hate. It looks amazing, there are some amazing performances; on that basis it would get four plugs. But for the actual plot it would get zero. So... we average it out at two.

Snow White and the Huntsman

By far the superior of the two Snow White adaptations, this film goes for a more gritty, Lord of the Rings feel. Highlights include Charlize Theron's Ravenna, a Queen so evil that I actually wanted her to win! Also the Troll is beautiful and the dwarfs are so well done that you only know their small size is achieved with special effects because you know the actors are full size from other films. Low points include Kirsten Stewart, who has her trademark "I don't quite get what's going on" look throughout the proceedings.

Chronicle

Andrew is a chronic loser - his mother's health is failing fast, his father is a drunk who pours his frustrations and aggressions out on Andrew, he's not popular at school... but when he and a couple of friends leave a party to wander into the woods, they stumble across an unearthly artifact - and subsequently, all three begin to develop telekinetic powers...

An interesting movie, this. At heart it's the story of a boy whose frustrations with the unfairness of his life are beginning to manifest as anger - ultimately pure rage - and the whole superpowers thing really exists only as a way to explore that by giving him a way to vent that anger on others. It's good that they never really explain the artifact that the boys find - is it alien, supernatural, a government experiment, or something different? We never find out, and that's good because it's really beside the point.

There's a sense of sadness watching Andrew using his powers to acquire popularity, only to have his own feelings of worthlessness pull him back down. His story is involving, and ultimately quite tragic.

Avengers

Joss Whedon's Avengers is the culmination of years worth of build up - the Iron Man movies, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America, all of them have been leading up to this point. With so much build up, there must surely have been a danger that the Avengers movie itself would turn out to be anticlimactic... but it doesn't. Instead, Joss has taken the whole Superhero genre and ramped it up to a whole new level.

This movie is not, perhaps, a terribly deep one. It doesn't have the realism or grittiness of something like the Dark Knight. But these aren't failings; it doesn't aspire to those things, it's not trying to be that kind of film. It's a romp, a spectacular, and judged on that level... wow. Just... wow. This film is amazing to look at, perhaps one of the best "popcorn" movies ever made.

Importantly, though, it doesn't make the mistakes of similar films. It's the same kind of film as the Transformers movies or Battleship... but whilst it outdoes those handsomely on the level of pure eye candy, it also gives you actual characters, played by real actors who are putting a genuine effort into their work and having obvious fun in the process.

And there are so many touches of humour, funny moments, sparkling dialogue... in short, this is a film that simply does everything it's trying to do, just about perfectly.

Battleship

Humans have sent a radio message off to "Planet G", hoping for contact with an alien intelligence - unfortunately, when the aliens come looking for us they turn out to be less than friendly! The aliens land in the ocean, enclosing a large area around Hawaii under a forcefield, so it's up to the Navy to take them on.

Silly, silly film. It's all spectacle and action, which is fair enough, but unfortunately that's about all it is. The characters are paper thin, the plot makes no real sense, there are logic holes you could drive a warship through. About the only thing to say about it is that it looks pretty, and it at least makes more sense than the transformers movies.

Gone

Jill Conway is a young woman who lives with her sister. A year ago, so she says, she was kidnapped by a serial killer and imprisoned in a large hole out in the woods. She managed to escape, but was unable to provide the police with any evidence that it had actually happened - and as she has something of a history of mental problems, eventually they left the case open and moved on.

When Jill comes home to find her sister missing she suspects that the killer has returned to target her. But with the police still refusing to believe her, can Jill track the man down and deal with him herself?

A decent little thriller, this. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but all in all it works together well.

Jurassic Shark

So this company is drilling for oil in a lake, and apparently their actions release a giant shark into the lake. A common problem for lake oil drillers, I'm sure. So the shark sets out to kill everybody who goes anywhere near the lake and chomp them up. Unfortunately, a group of criminals transporting a priceless painting which they stole. The shark attack drops the painting to the bottom of the lake, and now the criminals are looking for a way to get it back.

This is, without a doubt, the worst film I've seen in a long, long time. The likes of Super Shark and Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus are professional masterpieces in comparison. The plot is awful, virtually nothing about it makes sense. The acting is terrible. Fair enough, that's all par for the course for a film like this.

But perhaps even worse, the production values are so awful! This honestly looks like a student film, or perhaps something some kids made with a camcorder. Just the way it's shot stands out as childish. For example, at one point the criminals are holding some girls hostage, and they run off to try and escape. After a few seconds the criminals notice. But rather than have the camera cut between different points of view to show the girls running, then back to the criminals, etc, the camera simply stays on the criminals as they point off screen and yell "Look! They're escaping!"

Stuff like this happens constantly in this film. It really does come across as having been made by people who decided that they might be able to cash in on the recent trend for deliberately bad monster movies, but they were so inexperienced and incompetent that they couldn't even manage that.