Four For The Weekend...

A busy time here at HeroPress Towers, what with Clare and Nick's wedding yesterday and my holiday earlier in the week, so here's a brief overview of four movies I've seen recently (two on DVD and two at the cinema):

RAZOR BLADE SMILE (1998, DVD): A sultry vampire, Lilith Silver (Eileen Daly), works as a top-flight assassin, bumping off members of a secret organisation called The Illuminati, for a mysterious client.

Written and directed by Jake West, who made Doghouse this year, the film is saved only by a reasonably clever twist right at the end - up until that point it's a very strong contender for the dubious title of "worst film ever".

The cinematography is basic, the script is appalling, the acting even worse - watch with your expectations at rock bottom (and several bottles of beer to hand) and you might survive with your psyche intact.

There's an arty lesbian sex scene quite early on, but overall Razor Blade Smile is one of those bargain basement horrors that is only worth watching "because it's so bad that it's good".

SICK NURSES (2007, DVD): A gaggle of sexy nurses help a doctor make cash from corpses in a Thai hospital, until one of them - engaged to the doctor - threatens to turn them into the authorities and they kill her. However, because her body is not given a proper funeral within seven days she returns as a vengeful spirit seeking brutal - and bizarre - vengeance.

Bloody and confusing, shocking and sexy, mashing-up dark comedy with twisted violence, this is another film that benefits from a leftfield twist towards it climax.

While most of the ghastliness is very run-of-the-mill 'Asian-ghost-with-long-dark-hair' fodder that we know so well from The Ring, The Grudge etc etc there's a level of inspired, free-wheeling insanity that carries Sick Nurses along.

The film is also helped by only being about 75 minutes long, with a climactic "emergence" scene that knocks The Ring's infamous "ghost climbing out of TV" into a cocked hat.

2012 (2009, cinema): Roland Emmerich is on familiar ground with his latest disaster flick, but this time it's not aliens or global warming threatening the end of civilization, but massive tectonic plate movements and the rising temperature of the Earth's core "as predicted by the Mayan calendar".

Full of bogus mysticism and bad science, 2012 isn't a film to be taken seriously. It starts slowly, but once things really begin to blow up and fall over, the large-scale excitement comes alive on the big screen - with the involvement of human beings being almost incidental to the eye candy of mass destruction.

There's some nice, if heavy-handed, social satire with the Earth's rich finding a way to save themselves, but the two-and-a-half hour movie outstays its welcome in the final act with 'yet another' problem besetting the central characters as they try to get onto the "arks" that will become mankind's salvation.

The problem is that the final catastrophe is all self-inflicted, the characters we are supposedly rooting for are the very ones that create the potentially fatal situation that could have sunk all hopes of humanity surviving. This issue is further complicated by the fact that a more sensible resolution was put forward by another character that, had our so-called heroes just waited a few minutes longer, could have wrapped up the film with everyone safe and sound (and the audience free to go home 30 minutes sooner).

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2009, cinema): It says something that a film that barely breaks the 90-minute mark feels terribly padded, but The Men Who Stare At Goats is effectively two intertwined movies... one of which is almost totally redundant.

Ewan McGregor is a journalist during the Iraq war looking for his "big story", when he comes across Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney), who claims to be a "psychic soldier" on a mysterious mission. The Iraq war story is intercut with flashbacks to the story of Lyn's induction into the American military's "First Earth Battalion" - a genuine attempt by the American army to experiment with "psychic warfare".

It's these flashbacks, based on investigative journalist John Ronson's book and his excellent TV documentary series on Channel 4 (Crazy Rulers Of The World), that make up the interesting and engaging aspects of the movie, while the Iraq sequences seem 'tacked-on' to give what is essentially a mockumetary some semblance of a traditional Hollywood story.

And this is a shame, because these ramblings distract from the truly fascinating parts of the movie. Of all the films I've seen this week, this is the one that I had highest expectations of, and was therefore most disappointed with. With such great - and largely true - material to work with, and a cast to die for, you would have expected something a bit more creative.

And just how many times could they belabour the joke about Ewan McGregor's character becoming a "jedi knight"?