Apollo 18

There's a reason we never went back to the moon... that reason being the Something Nasty awaits us! The found footage from the forgotten Apollo 18 lunar mission shows just what that is.

A mixed bag, this film. The flaws are pretty glaring - the very idea that an Apollo launch, something that would be seen by tens of thousands of people, could be "hushed up" to the extent that it is completely forgotten to history is absolutely absurd. Nor does the movie make any effort to explain how such a thing could happen, so the very premise of the film is left hanging in the air.

You are equally left to wonder just how this footage could be found, given that (spoiler!) the astronauts never return to Earth but killed by a crash in Lunar orbit. The footage should be long gone, so how can we be watching it? The movie never says.

That said, Apollo 18 does manage to create a creepy atmosphere and get the watcher quite involved. I rather like the found footage genre, so I had no issues on that score. It's a much better film than I expected it would be going in, and if not a classic it is at least worth a watch.

The Debt

Mossad agents Rachel Singer, Stefan Gold and David Perez have long lived high in Israel on the fame from their daring mission into the Soviet Union to capture Vogel in 1965. Although the mission went wrong when Vogel tried to escape, Rachel shot him dead before the agents made their escape - or so they said. But the three have lived for years with a shameful secret, and now that secret may have returned to haunt them...

Great movie, a good story well told.

Fright Night

Charlie Brewster lives a standard suburban lifestyle with his single mom - until, that is, a vampire moves in next door. Can Charlie take up arms against the creature of the night and survive?

Decent enough story, not exactly subtle but it does the job well enough.

The Help

Skeeter Phelan is a modern woman in the 1950s deep south, resisting pressure to find a husband and start shooting out kids as she tries to fulfil her dream of being a writer. She hits on the idea of interviewing the black nannies, women who have raised generations of children for white women whilst remaining firmly on the very bottom rung of society themselves. But Skeeter's interviews will shine a light on an aspect of the south that many don't want known.

The subject of the black experience of the South has been explored many times before, but The Help does it well. It avoids the overt violence and great upheavals that, whilst they happened, were not a feature of most people's lives and instead seeks to tell a smaller, very personal story. Great little character piece.

The Change Up

Dave is a man with a wife, two kids and a demanding high pressure job; his best friend Mitch is a wannabe actor who drifts through life concerned with nothing but having fun. but when the two men wish they could live one another's lives whilst peeing in a magic fountain, the wish is granted. Now Mitch must close a business deal worth hundreds of millions whilst Dave enjoys the bachelor lifestyle again.

An old idea, and there's really nothing terribly innovative here. Still, there's more than a few laughs along the way and the film is good solid entertainment. Well worth seeing.

Frozen

Friends Parker, Joe and Dan go for a day's skiing, bribing the chair lift operator to let them ride up the mountain rather than buying an expensive pass. But their plan backfires when being off the official list means they are missed at the end of the day; the whole resort shuts down, leaving them sitting on a bench forty feet in the air. With no prospect of help arriving the three must battle the elements and one another to find a way down.

Bad, bad movie. The idea has potential, but the film constantly has the characters do idiotic things - like the girl who loses her glove. She has a pocket right there in her coat, but instead of putting her hand in it she just sits there slowly freezing, until she puts it on a metal railing in her sleep and loses half the skin pulling it off again. This kind of thing happens again and again, until you're just wishing for them to die. Then wolves turn up to inject a bit more danger, despite the fact that wolves simply don't attack human beings. It's all preposterous and very bad indeed.

Conan

Conan is a young barbarian boy growing up in an isolated village; when warlord Zym rides in and slaughters the entire population in his quest for a piece of a magic mask, Conan sees his father die. He sets out on a journey to track Zym down and gain revenge.

What a truly terrible movie this is. The story is woeful - indeed it's not really a story at all, it's just a series of fights Conan has with different people. The bad guy wants his magic mask to achieve godlike powers, and rule the world, but when he actually gets it working it's a horrible letdown. Sure it has a power, but for the life of me I can't see how that power would actually help him take over anything at all. Ultimately the whole thing comes across as a pointless waste of time.

Rise of The Planet of The Apes

Will Rodman is a scientist who is working on a cure for Alzheimer's disease. They are testing it on animals, and having some success, but when an experimental chimp goes berserk the whole program is shut down and the animals killed. Will saves the chimp's baby, Caesar, and takes it home, where it grows up smart enough to help his Alzheimer's-stricken father around the house. But as Caesar grows up he finds himself caught between the human and animal world. Then Will tries a new and even more potent strain of his cure, and things begin to go wrong...

Perhaps not a great movie, this, but it is pretty solid and works quite well as a prequel to the original Planet of the Apes. Caesar feels like a real character for the most part, rather than a CGI image. Worth seeing.

Grave Encounters

TV show Grave Encounters sends a small team into haunted locations to spend the night filming in hopes of catching some paranormal goings on. We are treated to the footage of their last job - an old asylum for the insane, reportedly the site of horrific medical experiments. Naturally things began to happen...

Essentially a Paranormal Activity clone, Grave Encounters doesn't really have anything new to add. The first half of the film is the most effective, relying on tension and a low key approach. In the second half the spooky goings on are ramped up to such an extent that they really lose any touch with reality. Fans of the genre should check it out, but it's very much the poor relation to much better films.

Hyenas

We all know that werewolves prowl the night to pick off the unwary. But did you know that there are also werehyenas out there? Well there are! They chomp on anything in sight, leaving a bloody trail of carnage in their wake!

Unfortunately, this film takes an interesting premise and turns it into the worst piece of dreck you have ever seen. This film is bad... it's so bad that it's not even "comedy bad", it's so bad that you just sit there hoping against hope that it will just hurry up and end. The story is horribly contrived and stupid. The characters are absurd cliches. And I've literally never seen acting this bad in any film, ever. I can only imagine parts were given to friends of the director, relatives, random people dragged off the street - whatever, the acting is just awful. Do not watch this film!

Horrible Bosses

Nick, Dale and Kurt all have horrible bosses that seem dedicated to making their lives miserable. They make a pact to murder all three, and hilarity ensues as their plans to horribly wrong.

Not a bad film at all. There are laughs to be had, especially from Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Spacey who ham it up gloriously. The whole thing could have gone rather more over the top than it did, but it's just farcical enough to be funny whilst maintaining a degree of plausibility.

The Tunnel

An intrepid Australian reporter is investigating the story of a government plan to use disused tunnels beneath Sydney as a water storage and recycling system. She finds stories of homeless who live in the tunnels vanishing mysteriously, or emerging traumatised and screaming in fear. Intrigued, she tricks a small team of colleagues into going down into the tunnels to do some filming. Soon it becomes clear that there is something nasty hiding in the dark...

This movie works best once they get down into the dark; unfortunately it takes a good while to get there, and up until then things move pretty slowly. Given that it's only 90 minutes long it is quite an achievement to make the pace drag, but somehow they manage it. The choice of telling the story in part through interviews with the survivors is also odd, as it means that we know for certain who will survive and who will not, which somewhat undercuts the tension. Still, there are some effective moments scattered about the place. Worth a watch.

The Howling Reborn

Will is growing up a sad and somewhat isolated teenager whose life is overshadowed by the death of his mother Catherine in a fire. He spends his school days pining for Eliana, a schoolmate he has loved for years but never spoken to. His life is thrown into turmoil when he finds himself attacked at a party - and suddenly Will is finding a whole new attitude to life.

A reboot of the Howling franchise, this comes across as shallow, meaningless pap. It's ironic that perhaps the single most notable achievement of the original Howling movie was that it featured a transformation scene regarded as one of the better ones filmed (second only to An American Werewolf in London), yet here the budget is so poor that we barely see Werewolves at all, and when we do they are terribly unconvincing. The plot is also rather nonsensical and the whole thing comes across as a rather poor TV movie of the week.

Stake Land

America is suffering in the aftermath of a Vampire plague which has all but destroyed civilization; when Martin's entire family are wiped out he falls in with "Mister", a veteran Vamp killer who is travelling north in search of the possibly mythical "New Eden". The two bond, forming a little surrogate family as they tackle Vamps whilst trying to avoid the many fanatical religious cults which have sprung up in the aftermath of the collapse. Many of these welcome the Vampires as God's judgement on a sinful world, to the extent that they are deliberately trying to spread the infection. Can Martin and Mister survive and reach safety?

On the surface, this is a simple remake of the much more successful and widely known "Zombieland", only with Vampires rather than Zombies. in actuality, Stake Land is a very different movie. It makes little attempt at humour; one of the first things we see is a Vampire greedily sucking blood from the body of a dead baby, which it then tosses casually aside before attacking the hero - that sets the tone for a movie which is rather grim and sorrowful throughout. Whilst perhaps not a great movie, I quite enjoyed this one. Definitely worth a watch.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Emily Rose is dead, her body a wreck showing signs of what appear to be extreme mistreatment. Her priest, Father Moore, performed an exorcism on her - but did she die as a result of his mistreatment of normal physical and psychiatric illnesses, or was Emily Rose actually possessed? Lawyer Erin Bruner defends the priest in court... but, just possibly, is slowly coming under demonic attack herself.

Competently made movie, but it really just retreads territory we've seen done better before. Not terribly impressive.