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punchbear
Reviews
Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)
Absolutely Abysmal - Avoid
I don't know where to start. It's an absolute car crash of cringe. When it's not fawning over this obnoxious, spoilt manchild, it's schizophrenicly telegraphing how petulant and awful he is as a human. I felt at times equally as repulsed by the documentarys subject as I felt sorry for him. A fair share of the audio is unintelligible and indecipherable meandering and coupled with the uneven, confused edit, it makes for a very disappointing watch. The plethora of ten star reviews above also raise flags with their tonal similarity.
The Last Stand (2013)
A Waltzing Mathilda. That's a Good Thing.
They say you should never eat your heroes.
But that's what this film does. Chews a multitude of hero archetypes up, grinds them through the post-Tarantino jock-and-paw of the past 20 years, cheekily realising that it's okay to please a crowd with knowing humour, predictable black comedy and the most gratuitous post-Predator use of a rotating, rapid-fire gun since... well, Predator. It's become a trope, a gleeful, indulgent one that, much like this film, works.
And that's what makes the film likable and watchable. It's indulgence of the obvious. There are sidesteps and nods. It wouldn't be a suitably post-post-modern return for the Nero of formulaic actioners if it didn't signpost itself and genuflect beyond the realms of the meta. Its predictability is it's charm. You can lay the film out like a road map for a student at a party. Sitting room. Kitchen. Explosively interesting discourse. Payoff. Triumphant return in head. It doesn't make sense immediately, but there is a lot of instant pay-off that satisfies the desire for intellectual suspension.
I write that like it's a bad thing. It's not. It is not wrong to enjoy an Arnie re-boot that is not The Sixth Day, without being aware that it itself is aware of its lineage and updated sense of 80s heroic-ism that is just as charmed by itself as its aging exponents were of themselves. Back in the day. Back when they were oiled, muscly and preternaturally prepared to meet the perils of the day with a humongous gun and a script that reads like a cheese grater in Braille. Red Sonja not included.
But what does the genre that became a wormhole of meta-parody expect us to expect? "Entertainment" say the producers. "Some of us remember it the first time around" cry the older. "These guys are cultural tropes, memes for something we weren't alive to experience the first time around but can see why they are what they are, because they are" cries anyone under 25. Allegedly.
"Yes" we, the broader "we", cried to these pop-violent, reductivist fables, essentially gatecrashed by Hercules and his stable-mates.
"Not so much" said some of us to the likes of the Evil Dead remake. "Charm" we clammered. "Charm and a little bit of that palpable desire to build on the old to create something familiar but fresh - that does us well good". And we took a breath, and continued "Give us what we want - just let there be some nodding humour and a Gatling gun. Of some description - they're always cool".
What did that Mock Turtle say? Oh yeah.
"We called him Tortoise because he taught us.".
Arnie. I'm just glad you weren't kack.
Santos (2007)
B-Movie be's a B-Movie.
Harmless fun that should be commended for its untrammeled imagination and interesting panoply of ideas, cheaply implemented, that don't quite fulfill their potential but entertain you along their way for their sense of invention.
The fire scene at start of film is... embarrassingly shot and edited. But this may well, nay, hopefully, be the directors intention. Haphazard and as cheesy as any sequence shot on a set not on a gimbal, it's either a masterful nod to low budget invention or an object lesson in lazy film-making. The mix-and-match-in-Post attitude to VFX indicates, again another run at the Is-It-BMovie-Masterpiece-Or-Isn't-It fence, either a self-referential commentary on how bad some cheap, generic suite effects can be, or it's the work of some graduates mucking about in Strata3D.
Before they pass a current through this fence I'm sitting on, I'll say there are a lot worse films out there. A lot. Sharktopus anyone?
Caught in the Act (2004)
Erin Brockovich for Rednecks?
I know, that's just provocative. But that's essentially what the film is. Instead of polluting big-time corporations, you have good-time boys cheating on their wives, bucking and circumventing the system of marriage and decency.
Nevertheless, the film provides some diverting enough entertainment in an odd I know it's made for TV but I can't quite look away because it might get entertainingly worse before it gets better kind of way.
The good Lord doth love a trier and a compound sentence. I liked the manner in which Lauren Holly chose to play the main character, half serious, half giggly investigative novice. And the fact that the film was made in Belgium was another interesting factor for me.
I enjoyed it.
Wolfen (1981)
A conscious attempt to move the goalposts for horror films
Wolfen is one of those great soiled gems of early 80s cinema, a gritty, genuinely suspenseful journey through New Yorks grimy underbelly. Wadleigh uses super-saturation and video treatment to describe the world through the eyes of the Wolfen. A very effective technique , that would be imitated and refined six years later in John McTiernans "Predator", right down to the sound effect when the film shifts to the creatures perspective. Gregory Hines ascent to his sniper position is one of the creepiest moments in the movie - just wait until he spots the mirror. It gets a wee bit disappointing towards the end, when the eco-lecturing forces an abrupt sea-change in the films character, thus weakening its impact. But on balance, Wolfen remains a superior horror film, providing equal measures of gore and what's-that-in-the-dark suspense.