Reviews

Lo-Fi Sci-Fi indie flick orbiting the uneasy alliance between a young orphaned girl, Cee, and cut-throat gold digger, Ezra, as they seek good fortune on a perilous alien moon.

The sci-fi trappings - rusty space-suits, cranky spaceships etc - are authentically rendered, and the unchartered terrain, a sort of Ewok-free Moon of Endor, breathes with atmosphere thicker than a Frank Herbert Dune doorstop. But they're merely cosmetic ticks papering over a slight tale that would play out exactly the same with buckskins and horses in the wild west.

The story's repetitive narrative and episodic structure quickly reveal the script's shortcomings leaving one with the aftertaste of an all-dressed-up-with-no-place-to-go non-starter.

So PROPSECT could almost be written off as another style-over-content space adventure then? Not quite. Thanks to the performances and to-die-for chemistry of the two lead leads - Sophie Thatcher and the super charismatic Pedro Pascal - writer/directors Christopher Caldwell & Zeek Earl's debut feature star-surfs to safety via muscular character engagement.

Cee and Ezra deserve a better story than this, but despite my reservations, PROSPECT does have a lingering effect and I'd love to see these two astro-cowboys again. Maybe next time?

In the year 2020 the last remnants of the human race (in this case, an attractive nuclear family who say grace before supper) fight for their lives against blind, violent, indestructible creatures that sniff out their victims via sound. In short, keep your gob shut or you'll wind up monster munch.

It's a decent concept with a promising prologue that occasionally delivers some deafeningly silent moments of tension. But a strong concept does not a good movie make - especially if it doesn't have a robust story with compelling characters to drive it along - and inside the first 20 minutes AQP proves its pedigree as high-concept minus the courage of its convictions.

Co-writer, director and leading man John Krasinski (playing the kind of post apocalyptic Dad who, when not figuring out how to thwart generic looking monsters from nowhere in particular, somehow manages to find the time to maintain his hair and beard in the style of a G*p model) blows the central conceit by way of placing a sappy, cliched music score in all the places crying out for solitary creepy sound design. A spectacular own goal if ever there was one!

What else did I hate? - let me see...oh yeah: the syrupy sentimental family drama, the soul-crushing jump-scares, the jaw-dropping plot holes you could fly a Death Star through, toe-curling Shakespeare quotes hanging unironically on living room walls, a criminally wasted Emily Blunt as pregnant Mom (exactly what you plan for when surrounded by cannibalistic monsters sensitive to noise: a screaming baby!) and a script of pitifully meagre substance and content that's wholly derivative of M Night Charlatan's woeful 2002 misfire, 'Signs'.

AQP will, more likely than not, be loved by those whose broadsheet told them it's a 'rare' horror worth shelling out for. Anyone else who wants to see this kind of thing done correctly should watch 'Metalheads' from the last season of Black Mirror instead, and not waste their money on a movie that'll be forgotten a couple of hours after watching it. Hugely disappointing.

I had high hopes for this one. The ad campaign and pedigree of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett look set to dash the dismal aftertaste left by the lamentable 2000 BWP (Blair Witch Project) sequel that was BOS (Book Of Shadows) and finally give us the kick-ass, scare-you-sh*tless follow-up we'd all been craving.

Wingard & Barrett's previous outings such as A Horrible Way To Die, VHS, You're Next and the truly awesome The Guest, pointed to the promise of a distinctive genre piece crafted by two sterling talents that truly understand the medium. What could possibly go wrong?

Despite a few cosmetic high-tech ticks re contemporary camera equipment, the deployment of the original's 'Found Footage' template proves to be the REAL bad omen here as the younger sibling of BWP's Heather sets off with his chums into the forest of Burkittsville to find his long lost sister.

Doubling up on characters, Wingard & Barrett lead their shreddies down a very familiar path to a very familiar destination upping the jump- scares and loud-bangs-in-the-night ante all the way up to 11 along the way. A smattering of new elements are intriguingly brought to the table only to be frustratingly swept away when it becomes blindingly apparent that neither writer nor director have much of a Scooby-Doo what to do with them.

The introduction of a Twilight Zone style riff starts going somewhere and looks set to top the movie off with a mind-bending final reveal. But no. Nothing doing. BW settles for the same old same old seeing us off with a coda flatter than the flattest flat at a flattest flat in the world convention.

BW also breaks a rule set by the original even the ill-fated BOS didn't dare go near let alone touch. It may appease the unimaginative spell-it-all-out-for-me-please naysayers of the 1999 classic but, despite its effectiveness, I'm still on the fence as to whether it should have been included or not. We've possibly been given a little too much information that I fear may have cheapened BWP's stellar ambiguity for good.

I don't doubt Wingard & Barrett's affection for the original, or their sincerity & commitment to this belated sequel, but they've set themselves up for a hiding to nowhere by trying to please too many people with too many disparate threads, thus leaving us with a wildly unfocused witch-hunt that annoyingly slams the hand-printed door in your face the moment it starts to do anything interesting.

Despite its undeniable watchability, cracking pace and thrilling, heart-racing third act, BW comes off as nothing more than a hollow, artificial retread of the mean & lean original's greatest hits. BWP's hand-knitted low-key dynamics sang through lungs filled with organic, naturalistic fresh-air. BW is nothing more than a shrill, shouty, concession sprinkled remake that ultimately derails itself via a slew of ill- advised more-is-more, Hollywood-polish aesthetics.

Not a terrible film by any stretch – a few standout moments will get right under your skin - but I do feel Wingard & Barrett lost their nerve early on and opted to play safe instead of giving us what could have been a real humdinger of a sequel. If they'd cut two of the characters, dumped the found footage tract and ran-like-hell with that 'mind-bender' thang, then you'd most likely be reading a very different review to the one you're indulging now. The potential for uncovering hidden gold nuggets via a re-watch may yet prove a case for reassessment. But for now, I'm placing BW in the filing cabinet marked: Missed Opportunity. 6/10

Where the hell did this one come from?? –The best, as they often say, is saved 'til last and that certainly proved to be the case when I caught Sunday night closer The Invitation at the 2015 Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham UK six months ago. It was one of those rare occasions when a movie proves to be so creepily flesh crawlingly disturbing, that your levels of stress rise to the degree where you want to climb into the screen and scream "Make it stop! Make it stop!" It certainly did for me!

Opening with a turbulent car journey, the story introduces us to invitees Will (Logan Marshall Green) and his partner Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), arriving at his former home in the Hollywood hills. He is gathered with a group of old chums for an evening of fine cuisine and claret on tap hosted by his ex-wife, Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her slimy new beau, David (Michiel Huisman). Anxiety prevails and the atmosphere is still thick with fallout from the 'event' that drove Will and Eden apart.

The hosts' have a couple of freaky new friends in attendance too, both of whom add ill-fitting girth to a conversation of new-age enlightenment born from Eden and David's explanation for their two year absence. Tremors of discomfort occur, not least from Will, who strongly begins to suspect his ex-Mrs and her creepy new fancy bit might be up to no good, harbouring sinister intentions for their guests. But as there is evidence to suggest Will may not have his mental faculties in order, his questionable grip on reality may be inducing paranoid delusions of the worst kind...

Directing from a faultlessly constructed screenplay by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, helmer Karyn Kusama's very modern day Californian horror yarn plays like a riff on Brian Yuzna's Society gate crashing The Big Chill (albeit with a better soundtrack), locking the audience into a swirling, dreamy toxic whirlpool of wobbly social etiquette versus let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here stigma that will keep you guessing which way it will fall from the first to last.

The foundations of the story are built solidly on tragic events of the past and how the different paths people take to cope with personal trauma can lead to not necessarily opting for the best route home. There's also room for subtly humorous social commentary too, bravely poking fun at the money laundering spiritually guided pursuits of rich & gullible desperados residing in CA's tackiest resort. We see a landscape still terrorised by the odious spectres of Manson Family home invasions and Applewhite charlatan mantras casting long dark shadows across the backyard swimming pools and sun-bed patios. All of this is backdrop gravy however, and Kusama is sure never to let it drown out the supper's baton passing queasy mystery-drama into full blown thriller/horror trajectory.

Cast iron control is wielded on the twelve strong cast too: the actors may get varying degrees of screen time, but every single character will, at some point, have your full undivided attention. Standouts John Carroll Lynch and Lindsay Burdge as Eden & David's brand new besties, Pruitt and Sadie respectively, will have you writhing in your chair with profound uneasiness, and Corinealdi as 'trophy wife' Kira, blows expectation out of the water when, with immaculate timing, Kusama finally lets her bolt from the stable.

But it's Logan Green as Will who really gets under your skin. After vapid fare such as Devil and the disappointing Prometheus, he momentarily looked cursed with a 'We couldn't get Tom Hardy' millstone round his neck, doomed to a career clearing up in third rate fodder passed over by his thespian 'twin'. Not a chance. Coiffured in a 70's style Jesus locks & beard combo, he resembles a young, lean incarnation of The Big Lebowksi's Dude, going the whole distance with a performance worthy of Bridges at his haunted, brilliantly despondent best.

And then there's Kusama. Up until now her slim CV - consisting of the acclaimed but forgotten Girlfight, and the unfairly maligned Aeon Flux and Jennifer's Body - had hardly set the world on fire. But she finally delivers on her initial promise with a muscular, mature and expertly nuanced piece of work that, if there's any justice in this sorry little world, will rightly escalate her profile into the ranks of the A- List.

Her draw of influences is to be highly commended too where a recent interview had the director citing 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers as being at the forefront. The nervy edginess & unearthly autumnal lighting of Phillip Kaufman's remake is perfectly recaptured in texture & tone, not least with Will's explorations of his old residence (courtesy of production designer Almitra Corey's trippy & treacherous interiors) as he spies through door cracks and windows to be frustratingly denied the incriminating evidence he so desperately seeks. This beautifully mirrors Brooke Adams' similar detective antics in IOTBS as she surveys the in clandestine activities of her duplicated pod person fiancée.

And just like Kaufman's undervalued masterpiece, Kusama reveals her Ace trump mere moments before the end credits roll with a final reveal outrageous and terrifying enough to freeze the blood, savvily hitting the satirical, lunatic heights of Network and Fight Club's most Iconic beats on its way. This one's a night to remember.

Thought-provoking and powerful, The Invitation is a modern day master class in the art of suspense building and an instant classic that deserves to be seen in the cinema on a big screen. Seek it out whilst you can.

Nina Forever is the blackly comic debut feature from the writer/director team of Ben & Chris Blaine which begins very promisingly with supermarket drone Holly (Abigail Hardingham) wooing her work colleague Rob, (Cian Barry), into a romantic relationship. Rob is game but still grieving with suicidal tendencies from the death of his previous lover, Nina, who was killed in a motoring accident. This opening segment is well set up with offbeat humour, convincing performances and a disquieting atmosphere thanks to Oliver Russell's sullen cinematography.

Once Rob and Holly hop into the sack however, the brothers Blaine hit premature ejaculation and out pops the bloody apparition that is Nina, spawned from the hereafter for a sabotage mission. Her bizarre and shocking introduction from the inside beyond of Rob's mattress is as impressive as it is gruesome, and quite understandably deflates the newly acquainted couple's appetite for love making. But almost as quickly as Nina's arrival comes the realisation that this is as good as it gets and the story has reached its final destination in stalled county.

The scenario is served up again and again and again as, rather than screaming her lungs out and running for her life, Holly perseveres and messes in (pun intended) with replacing the gore stained bed sheets every time naughty Nina appears from the afterlife to spanner the would-be blossoming romance with the supposedly acerbic diatribes spewed forth from the bowels of her gob.

Add in Rob's continuing and, it has to be said, occasionally hilarious affiliation with his undead girlfriend's parents, and you've pretty much got everything Nina Forever has to offer. There is little more here than a much laboured conceit about not being able to move on with one's life and being tied to the past blah blah blah, with little variation or story progression to hold the interest.

And then there is the problem of Nina herself: in place of a sympathetic and menacing entity from beyond the grave, we have an irritant bore with the voice of a child and the charismatic black hole demeanour of a refugee from Made-In-Chelsea. Whatever it was about this tiresome It-Girl wannabe Rob found so enchanting and beautiful one can only guess at, as any charm and personality plus points she may have once possessed must have been wheeled off to the knackers yard for crushing along with the vehicle she perished in.

Once again, the writing can take a lot of the blame, but this is shared by the miscasting of Fiona O'Shaughnessy in the title role. She looks physically too long in the tooth for young Rob, yet (ironically) lacks the mature thespian chops required to flesh out the complexities this, admittedly difficult role demands, resulting in a double whammy fail.

Some compensation arrives late in the shape of Rob's moving confrontation in a restaurant with Nina's Mum and Dad and the torch passing fate afforded Holly in the closing scenes. Both are well delivered and move things forward slightly. But it's too little too late.

The brothers Blaine have over reached themselves with a half baked story that, despite its allusions to surrealism and the macabre, is far too well behaved & normal for the tropes contained within. Either an off-the-wall, avant-garde, art-house telling or a straight, hell-for-leather, horror roller-coaster would have been preferable treatment to the underwhelming elegance this non-starter has to offer. Better luck next time boys.

Below par addition to the horror-mockumentary sub-genre, chronicling the tale of the Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), an Evangelical minister with a sideline in performing exorcisms. When his faith goes south, he instigates a documentary expose on the fraudulent and harmful nature of his work and sets off with a two-headed film-crew to the remote property of farmer Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum), who believes his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is implicated in a spate of cattle mutilations by way of demonic possession. Marcus promptly 'frees' the troubled girl from the Hell spawned grip of Abalan (for it is he) and, with the Farmer's blessings and payment, is swiftly on his way to retirement, unaware his troubles (and ours) are about to begin...

For the first hour or so, director Daniel Stamm does an efficient, if none too imaginative job of sustaining moderate intrigue and interest in a so-so story and is well served by an able cast and the moody, naturalistic lighting of Zoltan Hont's crisp camera-work.

Unfortunately, his grasp on what makes a good pseudo-documentary ('Blair Witch Project', 'Paranormal Activity') and what makes a bad ('Cloverfield', 'Diary of the Dead') is left considerably wanting as it gradually becomes apparent that, despite the odd scare and Nell's moments of Satanic body-popping contortions, the rear-end of this particular wannabe is of the feathery kind and is planted firmly in 'pretender-country'.

The moc-doc format is seriously undermined with the continuous use of cutaways in what we're supposed to believe is the spontaneous work of a film-unit operating with a single camera. Add to this the mystifying 'scary' incidental music on the soundtrack, and Stamm fully exposes himself as a helmsman minus the courage of his convictions. A derivative 'Blair Witch' style 'Vox-Pop' segment early on doesn't help either and is further evidence that inspiration and originality are in very short supply.

All these creative misdemeanours might have been forgivable had Huck Botko's and Andrew Gurland's script arrived at a suitably shocking, and satisfying conclusion. But that's wishful thinking I'm afraid as the last third declines at warp factor speed into a laughably nonsensical (and quite frankly, embarrassing) mash-up of 'Rosemary's Baby' 'Race With the Devil' and 'The Wicker Man', drowning any evidence of credibility and subtlety in a full-on shower of steaming Fire & Brimstone cowpats, making it a strong contender for Worst Ending of 2010. In that respect alone, 'The Last Exorcism' is 'outstanding'.

Baring more than a passing resemblance to Anthony Balch's 1973 Brit Schlocker 'Horror Hospital', this weird and grotesquely funny outing from the Netherlands starts deceptively in familiar scary-movie terrain with the introduction of Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C.Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), two bimbo American tourists stranded on a road trip in the German woodlands following the breakdown of their vehicle during a rain storm.

Finding what they believe to be solace in the isolated lodgings of a retired Siamese-twin specialist surgeon - the suspiciously monikered Dr Heiter (Deiter Laser) – things take a turn for the worse when they wind up drugged and bound in the loopy host's operating theatre. A framed photograph of an earlier experiment at the Doctor's bedside - the dead and buried '3-Hound' - is a big clue as to what is in store for our hapless heroines.

After wrong-footing us with a wave of ropey acting, hokey dialogue and genre clichés, writer/director Tom Six's freak show starts to do exactly what its title threatens and, via a dread-inducing diagram demo, it's not too long before our damsels in distress find themselves down on all fours, gastrically conjoined face-to-bum-crack x 2, with a third captive, Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), leading the way.

Surprisingly, THC is a far more palatable affair than this grisly synopsis might suggest, with the slick visuals, black humour and admirable restraint on the ketchup bottle gamely shaping it into a car-crash spectacle you cannot tear your eyes away from. The resistance to turn the graphics all the way up to 11 makes Katsuro's inevitable 'call of nature' moment far more – ahem - digestible too, allowing its 'finer' details to exist only within the viewers' mind.

At the centre of this glorious pile-up is Laser's all-consuming, all conquering performance as the uber-mad surgeon. His bug-eyd skeletal features and uncontrollable tantrums are an ugly, compulsive joy to behold, offsetting sharply as they do against the sterile artifacts and antiseptic interiors of his sanctum sanctorum. Heiter's fire and ice mood-swings and refusal to interact with his stitched-up prisoners as human beings, heightens our sympathies and grief for the whimpering girls and the raging Katsuro too.

It's no coincidence that a man from the east figures in the Doctor's ghastly equation as Six himself has commented in recent interviews that the characters – German, American and Japanese – represent the main players of World War II, and Heiter's experiment mirrors that of the more heinous and sinister crimes committed by Nazi scientists behind closed doors.

One enlightened, and very insightful IMDb reviewer pointed out that Katsuro's involvement is also symbolic of Hollywood's depressingly in-exhaustive practice of remaking Japanese horror films for the US teen-market. As a literal illustration of the West being force fed the regurgitations of the East, it takes some beating.

Another metaphor THC brings home to roost, is the horror of becoming part of something you have no control over; the terror and helplessness of wanting to escape from your body, and the realisation that you have been cemented into a faceless chain of servitude from which there is no escape. Even a breakdown in the system (suicide/sudden death) , or intervention from external forces (incompetent, shaggy-haired policemen) will fail to save your bacon and leave you stuck between a rock and a very hard place indeed, as is the case with the horror-upon-horror ending.

Certain detractors (including a few critics that really should know better) have taken THC at face value and written it off as "the sickest film ever made", adding the usual "Degrading to all those that choose to watch it!" film flam along with a few (completely unfounded) accusations of misogyny. B*ll*cks say I! - Six's movie is certainly outrageous and disturbing, but it's also socially aware, darkly humorous and well made enough to be thoroughly deserving of its forthcoming sequel – 'The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence' - which is currently being shot in London and due for a 2011 release. I.Cant.Wait.

Considering the length and weight of his oeuvre, my exposure to the cinema of Wim Wenders is a limited one to say the least. This inexperience stems not from a lack of viewing opportunities, but an apprehension instilled in me after a succession of run-ins with some of his lesser achievements, such as the patience testing 'Until The End Of The World' and 'Faraway, So Close'.

It was with a thick air of trepidation then, that I slipped the German auteur's 1976 opus 'Kings of the Road' into the DVD tray and positioned myself nervously on the couch in preparation for a potential 176 minute assault of self-indulgent monotony. I watched the first hour beneath a cloud of ambivalence as the monochrome images and sparse dialogue crawled by at tortoise speed with any blip of a detectable plot yet to appear on the radar.

The longer it went on however, the more snugly it began to slip under my skin, and the saga of Bruno Winter (Rudiger Vogler) - a truck-driving mechanic travelling across Germany to fix broken down projectors in dusty old picture houses - and Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler) - a depressed hitchhiker with a failed marriage behind him - began to gracefully reel me in from the waters of uncertainty and onto the shores for a warm embrace. At journey's end, my mood was a gleeful mix of satisfaction and gratification: the best part of three hours in these charming men's company had proved very rewarding indeed.

Bruno and Robert's paths cross via the latter's soggy, blackly comic suicide attempt, leading them down the long & winding road of decaying movie theatres, lonely hearts, unforgettable black & white images and a stunning soundtrack. And without really trying too hard, KOTR ends up as a far more worthy lament to the good old days of film-making than anything to be found in the pre-digested pap of 'Cinema Paradiso'.

This is beautifully illustrated both in the prologue (where Bruno bends his ear to an elder statesman bemoaning the passing of cinema's golden age) and a sequence in which our heroes manfully attempt to restore a matinée viewing gone awry whilst silhouetted behind the movie screen of a theatre full of impatient school children. The two men spontaneously burst into a Chaplinesque slapstick routine to the delight of their captive audience and end their performance in a laughing, gasping heap on the floor. They're rudely awakened by a hangman's style noose swinging ominously between them. For better or worse, things will change. A very poignant moment considering today's climate of declining bums-on-seats in the cinema.

Another thing that jumped out at me, were the separate occasions in which Bruno and Robert cast their eyes over the front-page headlines of the daily newspapers; "Terror attack in Jerusalem" and "1 million unemployed" are the type-faces that flash momentarily on the screen, giving both men a firm tap on the shoulder as a reminder of the big-bad-world they've left behind. Blank facial expressions give nothing away as to what either man is thinking and Wenders cuts to the next scene before there's any time to ponder the effects these news stories might have on the decisions concerning their chosen lifestyle. Whatever the case, it resonates loudly with the state of our own current affairs demonstrating at once, that nothing really changes, and what a fascinating, timeless work of art KOTR truly is.

All of these things might sound portentous and heavy handed, but Wenders never forces the issues, takes sides, or labours the point, instead opting for a relaxed narrative where everything unravels in its own time in a hands off, matter-of-fact fashion, leaving us with an elegiac, me-dative affair blessed from top to bottom with great, understated writing and performances.

Fans and critics alike seem to agree that the spare dialogue interaction between the protagonists signifies the difficulty of communication and self-expression that can lead to the breakup of a relationship, resulting in physical violence. This reading of the subtext is certainly not without merit, but as far as the central characters are concerned, I'd have to say I think it's a much lighter movie than that.

Bruno & Robert's nods, smiles and casual shrugs are all part of a silent language and mutual understanding that highlights their free-spiriting nature and genuine feel and affection for each other. There is no need for them to spout endless superlatives re the might of the road, or posture existentially on the magnitude of the landscapes, when they know (more likely than not) that they're both thinking the same thing. Oh sure, they might bicker now and again, endure sadness and have the occasional strop, but so does everyone else on the planet. Everyone else likes to laugh from time to time too, so when the buck finally does stop (after an insipid, mirth-inducing 'punch-up') they go their separate ways with a smile and cheer of goodwill for each other. What could be sweeter than that?

I'm not the first (and will surely not be the last) to say that one could go on longer than the film itself hammering out endless analysis on its incidental delights, sensitivity, craftsmanship etc , so I'll sign off by saying that Wenders' masterful epic will certainly not be for everyone, but was most definitely for me. It's quite possible I'll still be on my guard when it comes to checking out his other titles (although I'm super-keen to see the first two parts of this trilogy – 'Alice in the Cities' & 'The Wrong Move'), but when the mood takes me again, I'll be more than happy to hitch another ride on board The Winter & Lander Express. When it comes to KOTR, Wim Wenders is the REAL 'King of the World'!

The icy locations of the Canadian landscape enhance the chilly atmosphere no end in this intelligent and sardonically witty spin on Mary Shelley's famous monster yarn. 'Cube' director Vincenzo Natali's latest creep-show is a refreshing throwback to the smart, body-shock prosthetics of 1980's David Cronenberg , and in particular, his remake of 'The Fly'.

Named after two actors in James Whale's 1935 classic 'Bride of Frankenstein', cool-geeks Clive & Elsa (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) are bedfellow 'mad' scientists who secretly splice together human and animal DNA to create a new species. The resulting creature - Dren (Delphine Chaneac) - evolves at an alarming rate into a chrome-domed woman with wings, gills and a very nasty sting at the end of her tail.

After being moved from her laboratory birthplace to the derelict farmhouse of Elsa's childhood, Dren ups the ambiguity stakes with increasingly unpredictable and dangerous behaviour, signalling that things might not end too well.

Rather impressively, 'Splice' covers a lot of ground in its 103 minutes, successfully placing issues of ethical boundaries, motherhood, 'teenage-angst' and bureaucratic hampering under the microscope, whilst still finding plenty of room for eye-opening set-pieces, such as a botched and bloody demonstration involving two phallic abominations named 'Fred & Ginger', and a truly alarming sexual liaison in a dusty barn between the creator and their creation. Very naughty.

The shift from sci-fi thriller to full-on horror movie is a relatively successful one, although it must be said that the climax could have been a lot tighter and eventful, suffering as it does from some slack pacing and muted dynamics. A tad more grue and gore wouldn't have gone amiss.

On the whole though, this is a thoughtful, well acted, genre piece with enough nifty moves and latex-stretching gross-outs to make it well worth your time.

Get Shorty' & 'Out of Sight' scribe Scott Frank's directorial debut (which he also penned) starts out promisingly with a former high school ice-hockey star, Chris Pratt (Joseph Gorden Levitt), trying to adjust to life after being left mentally retarded by a car crash he caused four years earlier. He's fit only for a menial job as night cleaner in a local bank and fills the rest of his time daydreaming about running a sandwich bar with blind flatmate Lewis (the ever reliable Jeff Daniels).

Levitt copes very well conveying the tics & traits of someone who's suffered a serious head trauma, instilling a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment as he repeatedly struggles with etiquette & articulation during social interaction. Unfortunately, it isn't too long before the wheels start to wobble and we take a sharp, wrong turn into predictable street.

Alarm bells first start to ring when he crosses paths with school friend Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode), who's initial generosity and chumminess are really an insidious smokescreen to lure Pratt into assisting him in a bank robbery. Not just any bank robbery mind: Spargo and his evil henchmen need him to rob (and you might be ahead of me here) THE BANK AT WHICH HE IS EMPLOYED!

From here on in, everything you think will happen, happens exactly when you thought it would and exactly as you anticipated. Every box is ticked and every bean is counted as it races frustratingly towards the finishing line of happy-ever-after heaven, leaving no cliché unturned on the way.

I really thought 'The Lookout' might go somewhere unexpected and make a few moves I didn't see coming, as during the first forty minutes all the right noises were being made for a character-driven drama that looked difficult to second guess. But it quickly loses altitude and switches to autopilot for a safe, formulaic landing instead.

It must be said that Frank does display some talent in the director's chair and juggles the visuals and performances of his cast very nicely indicating, that in time, he might be a force to be reckoned with. Its ironic then that, after knocking up such an impressive CV as one of the best screenwriter's around, he scuppers his first go behind the camera by placing all his bets on such a second-rate script. Disappointing.

I first saw this cruddy little cheapie back in the late 70's when it played on a double bill with 'The Savage Bees' at my local flea-pit.

Being an impressionable teenager, I was 'blown away' by all the blood, guts and goo on show, and left the cinema believing i'd just witnessed a sci-fi horror masterpiece.

Thirty years later, I purchased the DVD and sat down to watch it with my partner. Thirty minutes later, we realised this particular 'Melting Man' should have been left dead and buried in the 1977 trashcan he winds up in along with my rose-tinted memory.

For what it's worth, an astronaut on a space mission flies his craft too close to the sun (or something) and returns to earth to embark on a rampaging trail of mutilation and murder whilst layer after layer of skin melts off his bones. And that's it.

Production values are rock bottom, the direction corpselike, the editing looks like the work of a visually impaired person using their teeth and the acting is uniformly awful which, when all is said and done, at least gives it some consistency.

Rick Baker's Melting Man make-up fx seemed awesome at the time, but now the title character just resembles someone that looks like they fell into a vat of Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice-cream.

And even though it's still the best thing in the movie, the scene with a severed head bursting open at the bottom of a waterfall, is nowhere near as graphic as I remember. But hey, that's memories for ya.

From the visionary director of Manual Labor and Catching Kringle comes the ultimate in bloodless terror!

If anaemic shocks fused with telegraphed twists and sub Scream shenanigans is your idea of horror movie heaven, then Cry Wolf will drive you into a frenzy!

Set in a boarding school for bratty rich-kids, the storyline deals with the fabrication of a Serial-Killer-On-Campus scare-story by a group of dopey students. After passing it off to the rest of the school as the never-ending-truth via e-mail, they come a cropper when a real mad knife-man comes-a-knocking. Doh!

Following some weak-kneed thrills and wishy-washy attempts at horror, we arrive at a super-unshocking, super-silly denouement with some hypocritical moralising thrown in for good measure.

In all fairness, the material does have a whiff of potential and in more capable, creative hands it could have been a good piece of trashy fun. But with butterfingers Jeff Wadlow behind the wheel, it never stood a chance and he ploughs this particular vehicle headfirst into a sewage-tank.

Spearheading the cast of teen-androids is the stunning non-entity that is Julian Morris, an actor so lacking in distinction, charisma and screen presence, that he makes Orlando Bloom look like a modern-day reincarnation of Spencer Tracey. His balsa-wood like delivery and rigor-mortis-from-the-neck-up expressionism, hasn't made me laugh so much since Madonna made an ass of herself (yet again) in Swept Away.

This young 'thesp' must have friends in very high places to keep getting the rate of work evident on his CV. Why producers and directors are still casting him in leading-man roles is a mystery bigger to me than that of UFO's, Jack the Ripper and the Loch-Ness Monster.

Morris' ineptitude in front of the camera is matched wholesale by Wadlow's behind it. With an insistent use of bleached into oblivion film stock, his visuals are washed out to sea taking any blood & guts (real or metaphorical) with it and damning every inch of celluloid with an aesthetic so bland and vapid, that it makes the colour palette of your average Hollyoaks episode look like it was blueprinted from the Wachowski brothers' SpeedRacer.

The Uzi-fire editing (no doubt deployed by the front office after viewing the finished product) cuts everything up so aggressively, and into such sloppy small pieces, that nothing on show gets more than a split nano-second of screen time to breathe before it wilts and dies in a hotbed of arrested non-development.

A laughably miscast Jon Bon Jovi in the role of a school teacher, and an accent-wandering walk-on part by Gary Cole as Morris' father (you can do better than this sir), bang the final nine-inch-nails into the coffin of a stiff that is yet to see a sequel. Phew.