“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass! And I’m all outta bubblegum…”

Hmm… this, yet again, is a movie that’s been on my “to watch” list for far too long. I’m not sure I’d call myself a John Carpenter fan but I’ve liked a lot of his work, and this one had a lot of good things said about it. I’m not sure if I’d agree with them but I still enjoyed it a lot. The movie kind of plods along for a while like a standard thriller but really got interesting for me when Roddy Piper (yes, the wrestler) finds a pair of sunglasses that allows him to see the aliens that live among us. I mean you can’t get much more 80s than that lol.

What I really loved about this segment of the movie was the surprising touch that not only can Piper see aliens around him but it also “translates” various pieces of advertising. A typical billboard suddenly, through the glasses, reads “OBEY” in bold black and white, etc. I’m not sure if this was the first time anything like this had been done, but it’s about as succinct as it gets in damning our media-driven culture and it’s ridiculously bold to find in a movie like this. I don’t know if it stretches well over a feature running time, I kind of got over the wow factor quickly following that absurd line I quoted above, lol… but it’s certainly worth a look.

I didn’t really have the option to watch this one a second time before reviewing it – it’d been sitting on the Sky+ for quite a while and I watched it in the end simply to free up some space, so it was deleted right after – and though it might’ve helped, I don’t think I could’ve brought myself to watch it again so soon anyway. This is a bizarre, sprawling, ugly movie that you can’t deny is slightly fascinating, but I wouldn’t really wish upon anybody.

The movie comes in three distinct acts, three generations of one family, the taxidermy of the title really only coming into play in the final third (though I’m sure there’s some clever way in which the title applies to the whole movie – I really haven’t been able to think about it that much lol). The first segment has a soldier escaping from his drab existence into perverse fantasies which ultimately cross over to reality where he impregnates his superior’s wife, leading to his execution. In the second, we see the child of this strange beginning as a champion speed eater in what feels like an origins story for Augustus Gloop of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, lol, only again it’s repellently filmed. The third segment has this man’s child, a scrawny taxidermist reluctantly taking care of his enormous (seriously… enormous) father and feeding up equally enormous caged cats with butter until he accidentally leaves the cage open… as always, I’ll leave off the even more bizarre final turns of the story summary.

If the movie’s trying to say anything, it does so with unwavering pretension. The ending of the movie has a sort of cutting comment to make about art, the final image being (trying to avoid spoilers) a work considered as art, over-elevated as such, which through the course of the movie we have learned enough to know better. Or something. I’m not gonna pretend to have made up my mind about this one, lol. I think it’s the first Hungarian movie I’ve ever seen, it’s certainly unique, it certainly got a reaction out of me, and it’s certainly very well made technically (I don’t think I’ve ever seen such horrifyingly realistic cinematic vomit). If like me you appreciate anything different and can stomach almost anything, this is absolutely worth the time.

“Avoid the English language. Please do not translate this message.”

Here’s another movie that pretty much had me from the moment I first heard about it in Mark Kermode’s cryptic review on Five Live. He described it as a zombie movie but not a zombie movie, set entirely within a radio station, where the epidemic has something to do with language… and I’m not sure if I can do any better than that. It’s one of those movies you feel desperate to avoid spoilers on, the kind that makes me just want to write here “just see it,” lol.

What I will say is something about the cast. I’ve never seen any of the three main actors in anything before* (there’s a couple of other roles, but as I said, it’s mostly combined to a single radio studio) but it is simply one of the most perfect ensembles I’ve ever seen. This threesome feels so genuine, and that is about the most important element you can have at the start of a movie like this. Stephen McHattie absolutely revels in his role as the wannabe shock-jock lumbered with a smalltown morning show, just as Lisa Houle relishes being the straighthead reigning him in, just as Georgina Reilly channels early Anna Faris as the sacrificial assistant.

The movie at first, because of McHattie’s character, reminded me most of movies like Talk Radio, and it is simply a joy to sit with these characters on a regular morning for them, some great monologue, gentle ribbing etc – but soon enough stuff starts to get strange, then stranger, then slightly frightening, and finally, without warning, actually kind of hilarious. I think some people will have problems – if they don’t have problems from the start, lol – with the final absurd turn of this movie, but I absolutely loved it. I do think there’s more to be made of what it seems to think it has to say about the nature of words, the dispersal of information etc, but if all you’re expecting from this is a little Canadian horror, then there is so much more here you’ll be in heaven if you’ve got a head.

^*okay, looking at the IMDb, it turns out I have in a few little things, but I didn’t recognise any of them lol – point is they’re not exactly stars.

“The darker it gets the more you see, but it’s got to get a lot darker before you see me.”

I had to watch this again in the end before I felt remotely able to write about it and I’m still unsure of what to say beyond simply knowing this is an incredible movie. This is my first experience of Philip Ridley’s work but on the strength of it I’ll certainly be looking back over his back catalogue, which I’ve heard even more good things about than I did this latest production. When they talked about this movie on the Five Live movie podcast I knew I had to see it because it sounded fascinating… it turned out to be even more so than I even expected.

The most recognisable aspect of the story is the Faust-like “deal with the devil” idea – best done in cinema so far, perhaps, in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart – but to make comparisons between this movie and that is barely touching the surface of the painful depths it goes into with the main character Jamie, played terrifically by Jim Sturgess. Where Parker’s movie blended Faust with film noir, Heartless – with the rest of its cast including the likes of Ruth Sheen and Timothy Spall as Jamie’s parents – feels more like Mike Leigh‘s Faust by way of the recent Harry Brown …and still that doesn’t begin to cover it.

Jamie’s a young man born with a large birthmark on his face that makes him feel like he’ll never be loved as others around him, living in a terror-stricken city that he feels completely unable to deal with. We see scars on his wrists. His father is dead, and in a shocking early scene his mother, too, is taken from him (slight spoiler, sorry; but this is a movie I believe can’t even be spoiled if you’ve seen it 10 times). There seems to be something supernatural afoot, and Jamie in his desperation and sheer loss with the world (Sturgess plays much of his role with an almost bemused expression on his face even at the most horrendous scenarios) finds it all too easy to believe, so when a man steps in claiming he can fix it all with a molotov cocktail, he kinda figures what has he got to lose?

It’s at this point when I first watched the movie that it really and truly grabbed me. For reasons that will be clearer the better you know me, I’m something of a sucker for stories where wishes are granted by supernatural means, and the way Jamie’s “wish” is “granted” here, it’s hard to describe but I believed in it completely. If you hadn’t guessed, his wish entails the good riddance of his birthmark, and the love of an Eastern European girl he met earlier in the movie. If you hadn’t guessed, too, all is still far from as it seems. He gets all that, more, and bizarrely the strange man’s young Indian helper as a daughter… which makes this strange man just a little upset.

This is where I lose my train of thought as to where this review is going, lol. This movie just has so much in it that I won’t even feel like I can adequately sum up my thoughts about it after 5 or 10 viewings. I just know that I will watch it that many times. While the movie is assuredly of the horror genre, and has many spooky, grisly, indeed in places outrightly B-movie outrageous moments, it is also far from – as the title might suggest – heartless. The theme of the movie is torn between the beautiful lyric (from a song sung by Sturgess on the glorious soundtrack) above and the sentiment expressed by Jamie’s new and shortlived neighbour AJ, played by Noel Clarke: “That’s the real bravery. To know nothing means anything and still wanna get out of f**king bed.” The last half hour of the movie changes everything you feel beforehand, and that’s why I needed to watch it again, and I’m still wanting to go back for more. For what it is, it’s a stunning movie, heartfelt, dangerous, and willing to be a little strange. Sturgess is fantastic, and the soundtrack beautiful. You really have to see this movie.

I got wind of this one after someone compared it to one of my faves from last year, Orphan but, like the last few movies reviewed (lol this is turning into a theme), it sat in my collection for what in retrospect was simply way too long considering how much I got out of it when I finally gave it a chance.

What really struck me most about this movie was the atmosphere. As I often do, I tweeted about it while watching, and looking back one of my most succinct comments was that it felt so chilling that a Dementor (those soul-sucking ghouls from Harry Potter) could’ve made it. The movie opens on a young couple relocating somewhere in Ireland, the wife pregnant with child… they should be happy, you’d think, but melancholy hangs like a cloud over every move they make. You can’t help but wonder what darkness lies in their past, nor hope for the best of them in this new life (coupled of course, with the awful knowledge that you’re watching them begin that new life in what you know is to be a horror movie).

The reason they’re so sad is, they’ve lost a child before, but the sadness seems to spread beyond that. It feels utmostly raw in a truly British sense, that these are people kind of living in fear, struggling with life itself, even before any cinematic horror steps in. In other words, it’s the best kind of horror movie. Morton’s character spots a strange child living nearby, and a reclusive old man who damn near physically abuses her. The next thing you know, this girl’s home burns down, and she’s suspected by the community because they believe her to be a fairy changeling…

Morton and husband adopt her, and I think that’s probably as far as I need to go with any kind of plot description, lol. Though I’d agree with the recommendation of this as “a British Orphan”, it’s so much more than that. In Orphan, there’s that element of being slightly on the side of the evil child – at least there was for me, lol, and I don’t think I was alone… there’s something a little knowing, almost trashy there in that movie that brings out your own dark side. Here, the situation is so much heavier atmospherically and the situation that much more doubtful and real. One really doesn’t know what to think of the child here until more is revealed, at which point you feel too desperately for Morton to even question siding against her.

There’s a whole theme that runs right through to the end that makes you long to believe that Daisy is simply different, and victim herself to plain narrowmindedness, which is one the greatest and most common themes in horror itself, but it’s pretty hard to believe as the movie wears on. The climax of this movie is one of the closest things to making me physically look away from the screen that I’ve seen in ages, it’s really that tense. I admit the ending left me slightly disappointed… it’s not so much open as simply unfinished. But I’ll certainly watch this again in the future, and it’s easily one of the better British (ok, Irish, whatever…) movies I’ve seen in the past few years.

I probably don’t need to say how brilliant newcomer Mhairi Anderson is as the eponymous Daisy because in a movie like this I simply wouldn’t sound enthusiastic as this at all if the child actor weren’t perfect… but just for the record, she’s perfect, as are Morton, Mackintosh, and all the rest of the cast. I watched the movie a second time before finishing this review and it was just as compelling, so I feel more than confident in recommending it.

I guess I was on a roll with “movies I’d intended to watch for ages” by the time I got to this one, lol. I was kinda crazy for Penn and Teller when I was a teenager and they were first becoming popular on UK television. I even bought their book, I seem to recall, but then they seemed to vanish for years until their recent newfound popularity with the “Bullsh*t” series and now back to doing stage magic around the world.

The reviews I’d read for this were overall so-so, even those coming from apparent fellow fans of the duo, and despite there being a decent director at the helm (Arthur Penn, of Alice’s Restaurant, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Miracle Worker, albethey years before this) I guess this is why I’d passed on it for so long (in addition to its being widely unavailable outside of pricey imports).

So to the movie, and I have to start with the brilliant tagline (as seen on this poster)… “What more do you want?” with which I couldn’t agree more. This movie within minutes took me back to my excitement as a teenager whenever these guys were on TV. It opens with them on a late night talk show doing their “upside down” gravity-defying table trick, after which Penn idly comments to the host that he wishes someone were trying to kill him. In the scenes that follow it is entertainingly set up that Penn and Teller are fond of pranking one another (and not just small pranks either; early in the game Teller sets Penn up at airport security getting through the metal scanner). The stakes get higher as the movie progresses, the pranks escalating to the point where the line between fake and real begins to blur, and, without trying to spoil anything too much, let’s just say this movie really does deliver what it promises, lol.

The final scenes had me laughing so much, actually out of shock I think more than anything, that I really couldn’t believe my eyes when I read so many disappointed opinions on the IMDb message board and comments. As the tagline suggests, I really don’t know what more anybody could expect from a Penn and Teller movie. It’s brisk at 90 minutes, it has a few magic tricks, a lot of fake blood, a healthy lesson in skepticism, and finally an all-out f**k you in its finale. It really is worth checking out.

Hmm, I coulda sworn I had some semblance of a review sketched out to come back to for this, but it seems I don’t. I didn’t have a lot to say about it anyway. Contrary to the last two reviews where the movies had been in my must-see queue far too long and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t seen them sooner, this one (though also in that queue and, until it appeared on MGM HD, seemingly even harder-to-find) was mostly a disappointment, because I really was quite excited to finally see it.

As with Charlotte Gainsbourg in Charlotte For Ever, there’s a pure-aesthetic-ness that accompanied Brooke Shields almost everywhere she went in the mid-to-late 70s, and here is no exception. When she winds up on horseback towards the end of the movie, I’ll admit I personally couldn’t have been happier no matter how pointless the rest of the movie really was.

Like I said I was kinda stuck over what to write about this one but then I found the perfect one line on an IMDb comment, which simply says “too cute to be bad” and that’s really this movie in a nutshell. To continue the connection with the past couple of reviewed movies, like Sundays and Cybele it’s a sweet-natured Lolita story of sorts too, though it really harks back more to the likes of Little Miss Marker…

Peter Fonda wins Brooke Shields in a poker game then carts her across the country and they get involved in a treasure hunt. If there’s anything controversial it’s only at the end when he appears to sweep her away from the orphanage in a convertible. Still, overall, it’s really more fun than anything else, and for me just the pure shots of Brooke at that age in jeans on a horse are more than worth the watching for.

I actually didn’t even realise this was like a full length movie until I got ahold of it some time in the past year… I might’ve been more anxious/excited about finding it had I known this, but to be honest, even then I was more excited when I got hold of the “soundtrack” to the movie, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s debut CD “Lemon Incest”, which despite being strange, tacky and cheesy, I still think is oddly addictive and I’d even go so far as to say has more to recommend on it than Gainsbourg’s latest album IRM (though her album 5:55, I rush to add, is aeons above anything I’ll mention here…)

The plot, if you can call it that, is simple… Serge Gainsbourg plays an heavily alcoholic (we see him throwing up in the sink – apparently Gainsbourg genuinely doing this for the camera – and pissing blood – it’s not for the squeamish) screenwriter, sole guardian of his daughter, his wife/her mother having died in a car crash which may or may not have been caused by him. Big Gainsbourg is suicidal, Little Gainsbourg apathetic and a teenager. There are arguments, nudity, it’s all very French. That’s… about it lol.

I kinda feel compelled, even though I respect all involved in the movie, to say, it really is pretentious twaddle. But like “Lemon Incest”, there’s just something about it… and maybe it is simply that Charlotte is just such a joy to look at, clothed or not; or that Serge has that non-acting way of acting brilliantly, his face so worn down by a life truly lived. There’s pure aesthetics here that need no human hands to turn into art, and it’s something I’ll come back to likely again and again.