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laedawson
Reviews
The Ice Road (2021)
An amazing confused mess about everything in the world.
I could wax lyrical about everything that's wrong with this film: the ludicrous plot, the ridiculous twists, the fact that it seemed like it was never going to end. But in the end I'd like to congratulate everyone involved for just deciding to throw the kitchen sink in there and make it nearly impossible to know or care what's going on. They cover racism, the appalling treatment of Army Veterans, a collapsed mine, how to defy logic, nature and physics and tie it all together in an ad for very big trucks. And there's a mouse. Or it might be a rat.
A Field Full of Secrets (2014)
Going Round In Circles.
I stand on a very neutral platform on the subject of crop circles, I've no spiritual feelings about them but think that they are both spectacular and very special things. I also know people who have a completely opposite opinion to my own and I also know of people that this documentary names as 'hoaxers'. So I watched this from the stand point that these circles are art and that the humans (yes, humans) that make them are talented and capable people who never claim ownership. This is not just because what they do can be classed as criminal damage but because the joy they get from watching people's reactions to the masterpieces they have created and that is enough for them.
Sadly the 'secrets' promised in the title of this documentary never materialise. They treat Peter Sorensen (the only maker they could get to actually talk to because no one else involved would even want to broach the subject on camera) as a silly, sad old man. Stick on some comedy music and show footage of him pulling faces all you like, the truth is that he came to Wiltshire to research the subject as a 'believer' but actually found out on his own terms that the patterns are made by people, deciding not to take the road of discarding evidence and blocking out anything that he didn't want to hear.
The resultant film never comes to any any conclusions, spends endless tracts of time padding out their footage with night watches in random fields, uses the phrase '... which was a decision we would later regret' way too much for no good reason and ends with the film makers basically saying 'we've wrung all we could out of it and have come to absolutely no conclusion whatsoever'.
A vanity project that didn't have enough material to fill it's 1hr 22 min runtime.
Don't bother watching it. You'll learn nothing.
Six Bend Trap (2007)
Seriously, I can't believe I sat through this.
I've decided, for my sins, to watch a few of these low budget gangster films, I'm not proud of this decision but there you go. I've seen Full English Breakfast and last week I watched Geezers, Gangsters and Gamblers. Tonight it was Six Bend Trap a.k.a. Thugs, Mugs and Dogs (doesn't work, should've been Dougs).
Now, I heard that The Room is meant to be the best worst movie of all time, but that's because although it's bad it's compellingly so. This is just bad. Bad. Bad. There's meant to be a plot about a greyhound race, some deeds to a bit of concrete where there's some oil or something, a wedding band, blah, blah, blah... It makes no difference what it's about, it's someone's poorly conceived vanity project, there is no sense to it, it's not even mildly amusing or clever.
It seems that these low budget films are just retirement homes for actors whose careers have nosedived, this one has the omnipresent Dave Courtney playing a plastic gangster (not a stretch for him really), along with that bloke Paul Usher who used to be in Brookside (and actually this rubbish is far beneath him) and Lisa 'You've Been Framed and Mandy Dingle' Riley.
Badly edited. Badly written. Bad soundtrack. Bad acting. Bad dancing. Bad characters. Goes on for hours. Relentless. Boring. Dreadful. I could go on.
You know, you're better spending your evening trimming your nose hair or cleaning the oven. Everyone involved should be embarrassed. I'm embarrassed to have watched it.
Gangsters Gamblers Geezers (2016)
Words cannot express....
...how utterly terrible this is. The two 'stars' of this parade of juvenile, incoherent excrement also wrote and directed it, oh, and they co-produced it too. Of course this wasn't some sort of vanity project.
When they were sat, probably blind drunk, in the living room of the shared house that they live in they obviously thought that this was hilarious. They were wrong.
They managed to get Dave Courtney, Richard Blackwood, Jodie Marsh and that one out of Atomic Kitten (who isn't Kerry Katona) to star in it, but most of them would go to the opening of a crisp packet nowadays.
Other than that (if that wasn't bad enough) not a single moment of this works on any level. It's an attempt to crowbar in as many scenes which feature large breasts being flashed at the very unattractive 'lead actors', it makes no sense, there are fart noises on the sound track at one point and there is a scene which features a phone being dropped in to a toilet which went on for several weeks, or at least seemed to.
Watch this if only to make you realise that some people have way too much confidence in their own abilities. YOU could write a better screenplay, seriously, you really could.
Full English Breakfast (2014)
Photocopies of £50 notes, yeah, that sums up the budget.
This film is hilarious. Everything about it is dreadful. From the young gangster's wife who, despite being filthy rich and living in Dover, seems to be unable to make it to her dreamland of France (oooo, I wonder what the people are like over there? What, about an hour away from your house?) to the post production dubbing and disturbingly wooden acting. There isn't a plot. There isn't a soundtrack as they seem to only have the rights to one song. The comedy value sort of makes it worth watching but actually it isn't worth watching, I don't want to take the blame for subjecting you to it. It's also mildly racist, but the waterboarding scene is much funnier than anything I've seen for a long while. The one thing that could make it worse would be the presence of Danny Dyer. But not much.