Film Reviews by LW

It is hard to believe that there has been a quarter of a century of Bad Boys. Only Michael Bay could have said the original film belonged to his earlier restrained period. This latest installment exudes the same explosive daftness, the same preposterous drug cartel fighting antics and the frantic caricature performances of Lawrence and Smith. The two heroes are showing their age and focus on the profanity laden back and forth bickering that makes the films so watchable. The more physical action is left to the younger cast. This is slick action comedy and, when Bay runs out of new things to blow up he sends in a giant albino alligator.

The first film was an entertaining creature feature and the sequel amped up the action. This prequel has no clear idea of what it is about. It doesn't offer any clues as to what the monsters are or why modern firepower couldn't stop them. We get a street level view in the style of Cloverfield in the form of a terminally ill poet who gets stranded in New York and goes looking for pizza. This character is insipid and meets some equally wet blankets along the way. Luckily she has her cat in tow or there would be nobody to root for. The set pieces are few and formulaic and tension never builds. The central character doesn't get her pizza and decides that life isn't worth living. Much like the audience. It wants to be evocative and poignant but it feels forced and trite with the whole thing an excuse for some cgi cityscapes. The monsters remain as elusive as the point of this snooze fest

This murky offbeat thriller is halfway grim, halfway tongue in cheek and won't be everyone's taste. The basic premise sees a junior FBI Agent assigned to help an investigation into a 25 year old series of murder suicides linked by coded notes. The puzzle is who or what is the connection? This is certainly a tale of the demonic but, unlike a lot of the genre, it isn't American fan fiction for the bible or a straight up monster. Longlegs is a moody retro thriller set in the late 90s with a focus on events in the 1970s, the latter an excuse to use T-Rex on the soundtrack. The disconcertingly wide angle camera work, eerie landscapes, darkened searches of barns and autumnal season set the mood. The whole thing makes you nostalgic for The X-Files and has hints of Silence of the Lambs and 90s David Lynch. There are no jump scares, just a deep sense of unease at the unexplained and some nervous laughter at Nicholas Cage's demented titular killer. Cage is kept in the background until the final third of the film and he leaves the audience with more questions than answers. The film ends with predictably mean twist and an ambiguous cut to credits. This feels very like if Nicholas Cage had been the monster of the week in a classic X-Files episode and it is excellent fun if that appeals to you. Hail Satan!

All three seasons of this show have been fantastic schlock comedy. The whole cast are great and the characters are well defined, the dialogue sparkles with in jokes and nobody is entirely unsympathetic. The centre of the show is obviously the voice of Brad Dourif as the gleefully lethal doll and he's matched by Jennifer Tilly doing deranged dialled up to ten in heels. Each season has done a different set of genre tropes, first the high school slasher, second the 'boarding school full of special children' and lastly 'Action movies about US Presidents'. Chucky burns the US government to the ground, finally meets his dark voodoo god and nukes Santa. Sadly the show got axed on a cliffhanger twist, so we'll have to hope Don Mancini gets funding for another big screen outing!

This is a slice of lunatic satire and sorority slasher that has a feel like one of the better Troma classics. The joke that sloths are just pretending to be slow and adorable is suitably bonkers and it starts from there. Even by the standards of the genre the sorority girls are unspeakable caricatures heading for fluffy annihilation. The satire element being that the pursuit of social media fame drives the girls to get an illegal sloth and that, in turn, the sloth learns to emulate them, eventually getting an online following with #killersloth as it posts its kills. The moral being that social media can turn even a cuddly jungle creature into a monster. The sloth is an adorable puppet, the action slapstick daftness and it breezes by at a nice pace. Highly entertaining as a gore comedy.

Saying this is a straight forward Western plot with no frills doesn't do it justice. The cast breathe new life into old archetypes and Nicholas Cage perfectly pitches the doomed and world weary demeanour of the gunslinger out for revenge. Ryan Kiera Armstrong is a watchable foil as Cage's young daughter and the storytelling catches the character's autism without any jarring exposition that disrupts the lean plot. There is a good nutty villain and assorted henchmen and a doughty Marshal on hand to see that Justice gets a look in. The other thing is that the costume department have some excellent natural fabrics and hand made clothing that makes for a touch of extra immersion. It feels like watching a low budget 1950s Western, but in a good way. The Old Way is simple, uncomplicated fun that holds your attention through the 90 minutes. This really is a lot better than the Rotten Tomatoes critics score suggests and the audience scores seem to have been rightly more sympathetic.

This is not the whole film let alone the 2007 remaster! It is one side of an old 2 sided disc. Really disappointed.