Gen-Y Cops (aka Metal Mayhem) (aka Gen-X Cops 2) (2000)

A Robocop style robot. Industrial espionage. Undercover cops with crazy hair. Cute girls in leather and mesh. Dodgy FBI agents flaunting their supposed power. Cool fighting. Dubious dubbing (especially the “Rastafarian”). All these elements should make this Hong Kong action film better than it is.

Monsters Vs Aliens (2009)

The good thing about children’s movies is they keep moving and don’t have many dull spots, otherwise children become bored and fidgety. The bad thing is that, besides a few knowing references, there is not much to hold the attention of adults, so they become bored and fidgety. Monsters Vs Aliens at least had variations on Mothra, The Blob, the Fly, Creature From The Black Lagoon, and Attack of The 50 Foot Woman to amuse me. It’s interesting that, in a children’s movie, it is okay to show Aliens being killed but not humans (or American and allied monsters).

Hell Ride (2008)

It has been a long time since I have seen a biker film that is worthy of the classics, rather than the usual debacle like Wild Hogs. I am not talking classics like the meandering borefest that is Easy Rider. I’m talking about Born Losers, Wild Angels, Stone, and maybe even Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town. Hell Ride is not to be confused with the Adam West Hell Riders from 1984.

Larry Bishop writes, directs, and stars in a tale of two warring biker gangs and a mysterious box of money. Larry’s gang, the Pistoleros, includes a Las Vegas suit wearing Michael Madsen as The Gent. The other gang, the brilliantly named Six Six Sixers, is led by Vinnie Jones (whose attempt to not sound British is bizarre). Vinnie is a “pill popping c*nt eating dope smoking mother f*cker, but in a nice way”. The essentials for a biker movie (bikes, beer, and booty) are here in large doses, as is the violence, and they even manage to squeeze in Dennis Hopper and David Carradine. Hell Ride makes no sense, is surely not meant to be taken seriously, and is great fun.

Shoot Em Up (2007)

Clive Owen, fresh from Sin City, makes the best video game movie ever, even if it is not based on a video game. Clive racks up an amazing body count with guns and carrots while the bad guys are unable to hit him from point blank range with automatic weapons. This film is beyond unbelievable, but the action and laughs never stop. James Bond wishes he was this cool.

The Boat That Rocked... sort of...

Die Hard 4.0 (aka Live Free or Die Hard) (2007)

Ludicrous, unbelievable, implausible, laughable. Exactly what you want in a Bruce Willis movie.

Video Games as Movies

The new millennium has seen a passing interest in turning video games in to movies into an obsession, even if they don’t work. What was a novel idea once (The Last Starfighter, Super Mario Bros) has become more common place than turning comics in to moves, or remaking an old television series, and the finished products are usually not worth watching. Tomb Raider survives on little more than the power of Angelina Jolie’s spectacular pulchritude, while Resident Evil survives predominantly on Milla Jovovich’s zombie killing sexiness. But what the hell was Silent Hill about? And Cube? It was nothing like Q*bert.

Max Payne (2008)
Mark Wahlberg is Max Payne, a cop looking for the killer of his wife and child, in this cliched video game adaptation. A dull script, dreary direction, and Mark Wahlberg (unbelievable in any role where he is not playing an idiot) result in a very bad copy of Sin City.

Postal (2008)
Uwe Boll’s films are like drinking alcohol or dating a surprise transsexual. At the start they seem okay, but eventually you pass out and wake up with a bad taste in your mouth, swearing to never go near one again. Postal (one of Boll's many movies based on a video game) is deliberately gross and politically incorrect. It starts out like it is going to be quite clever but, of course, it isn’t. It's bolls.

OneChanbara (aka Chanbara Beauty) (2008)
A bikini wearing, sword wielding cowgirl teams with a leather clad, gun toting hottie to stop a demented schoolgirl, an evil scientist, and their marauding zombies. The story and acting are minimal, but the action and blood is plentiful (just like the video game it is based on), and the finished product is gloriously likeable. Those wacky Japanese.

Doom (2005)
Even the greatest video game ever does not guarantee a great film. Doom the movie is carried by the charisma of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, some video game referencing camera work, and the BFG9000. A pity.

Super Mario Brothers (1993)
Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, and John Leguizamo make this film much more lunatic than the game ever was. And the game had plumbers on mushrooms.

Hamlet 2 (2008)

Steve Coogan destroys his credibility by playing an American high school drama teacher that decides to create a musical sequel to Hamlet. Horrible in every way (both the musical and the movie).

Watch Summer Heights High instead and see Chris Lilley’s character Mr G do something similar a whole lot better.

My Name Is Bruce (2008)

Bruce Campbell stars as Bruce Campbell (albeit an exceptionally lazy, sleazy, narcissistic version of himself). Bruce also directs and co-produces, while Mark Verheiden (Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville) does the writing.

Bruce is kidnapped by townsfolk, who think he is a real hero, to save them from a resurrected Chinese war god. But who can save us from this amazingly dreadful movie? Certainly not Bruce’s usual charm and sarcasm which is sadly missing in this film. Nowhere near as good as the classic, They Call Me Bruce.

Tooth And Nail (2007)

In the very near future, petroleum resources are depleted and the world is thrown in to anarchy. A small group of survivors known as Foragers, led by the Professor (Robert Carradine), are holed up in a hospital in Philadelphia. On the outside are a group of cannibals, known as Rovers, that includes Michael Madsen (looking like a member of heavy metal band Manowar) and Vinnie Jones (looking like Brian Eno in Roxy Music). When the Rovers decide the hospital looks like a good place to eat, the Foragers have to stop fighting amongst themselves if they want to survive.

Slow moving, not as clever as A Boy And His Dog, or as entertaining as Doomsday. A couple of strong female characters is all this film has going for it, and that is not enough.

Forager - People don’t eat other people.
Rover - We do.

Dead Snow (aka Dod sno) (2009)

High in the mountains, a group of medical students head to a cabin for a relaxing vacation. It’s not so relaxing when zombie Nazi’s (not to be confused with Nazi zombies – Nazi’s turned in to zombies not zombies turning Nazi) turn up and start slaughtering them.

This Norwegian movie starts of with some jokes about American horror movies before adding its own twist on the zombie genre and playing out well right to the end. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, there is no better villain than Germany’s Nazis (except maybe the Vatican) and it is even better when they are undead. Another quality European horror film (Dog Soldiers, Outpost, etc) putting the Americans to shame.

This just in from Mister J -
Just watched "Dead Snow". Subtitles for the "arty" crowd, and Nazi zombies fighting guys with chainsaws and axes for the less discerning amongst us.

Perkins’ 14 (2009)

Dwayne Hopper is a cop who never recovered from his son’s disappearance 10 years ago. When Hopper arrests and interrogates Ronald Perkins, it becomes clear this suspect may be connected to the son’s disappearance, and maybe the disappearance of 13 other children. Events lead to Perkins' 14 captives, alive and completely deranged, escaping and reeking havoc on the town’s inhabitants. Amidst the carnage, Hopper thinks he can save his son. Slow to start, not very interesting when it does, but a pretty nice ending.

Bad Biology (2008)

Jennifer has seven clitorises and an insatiable appetite for sex. This leads to a series of one night stands resulting in murder and pregnancy. Things look hopeless for Jennifer until she discovers a man with a ravenous, self aware penis who she thinks could be her salvation. Frank Henenlotter gave us Basket Case, Brain Damage and Frankenhooker and, after more than a decade without a film, I was hoping he would deliver something fresh, but he didn’t. Frank delivered a lesser version of his eighties shlock. There is plenty of sex and violence and crassness and weirdness, and even some hip hop, but it all seems forced and too deliberately bad taste.

Against the Dark (2009)

A virus is sweeping across America turning people in to zombies / vampires / cannibals / something very similar to the victims in 28 Days Later. A group of survivors try to find a way out of a hospital, a very large hospital that has apparently been constructed as a labyrinth to prevent people form leaving. The military are doing their bit to sanitise the country of the infected while groups of civilians do their own cleansing. One such group is led by Steven “We're not here to decide who's right or wrong, we're just here to decide who lives and dies” Seagal (who is described on the DVD case as a katana master). Seagal’s team dress in leather and have a variety of bladed weapons for killing, which seems much more likely to lead to infection than shooting the undead. Most of the story focuses on the people inside the hospital and Seagal has little screen time (which is either due to the script or his ever expanding stomach and inability to move). It’s nice to see him branching out in to horror, but the film is derivative and boring.

X-Men The Last Stand (aka X-Men 3) (2006)

The befuddled X-Men history worked best in the second film. The first movie was too slow and pnderous while this, the third movie, is too convoluted and ridiculous. Still, it is always a joy to watch Patrick Stewart (Professor Xavier) and Ian McKellan (Magneto) on screen together.

Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

The Tokyo police force has been privatised, and the new police “show no mercy to criminals”. This means they enforce law like Judge Dredd and gun down perps in the street. "Mankind's newest enemy" are the Engineers, criminals who have transformed their bodies in to efficient killing machines (and making David Cronenberg’s bodily alterations seem tame in comparison). Ruka is beautiful, dangerous, depressed, and a Hunter, she tracks down the Engineers and brutally ends their illegal ways.

Tokyo Gore Police is completely over the top in the best Japanese tradition, and is punctuated with demented advertisements. Robocop meets Meatball Machine in a story oozing with betrayal, killing, weapons growing out of bodies, a gun that fires fists, a severed penis, a woman whose lower half is a giant mouth, a woman with her nipples removed, dismembered bodies in boxes, and blood, lots of blood. It’s even crazier than you imagine (and a bit too long at 110 minutes).

Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer (aka Fantastic Four 2) (2007)

In a search to find a character lamer than Julian McMahon as Doctor Doom (not to be confused with the menacing comic book Doctor Doom), the hippy era created Silver Surfer is resurrected. The movies may be an insult to the comic, but I still enjoy the family friendly portrayal of the FF. Maybe it’s because Michael Chiklis is the Thing.

Terminators (2009)

This project from The Asylum starts promisingly enough, with some reasonable (although very cheap) spaceship effects and a scenario setting scene in a secret research facility, but everything goes downhill when the “action” moves to an industrial site and a forest (and everything becomes even cheaper). Terminators (flesh covered robots who all like identical) arrive on Earth and start killing people. A small band of humans do what they can to stop them, including using a large, but incredibly light gun, and finding the big “off” switch on the terminators’ base ship. There are no memorable scenes (besides the ridiculous “off” switch).

Body Of Lies (2008)

Leonardo DiCaprio is the CIA’s man in the Middle East and he is personally, as well as professionally, involved in what goes on. His boss is Russell Crowe, and he is detached, disinterested, and hostile to everyone. Director Ridley Scott does his bit to highlight the problem with the USA’s foreign policy - the people in Washington (represented by Crowe) don’t care or understand what goes on outside their borders. Leonardo does care. Drama, action, and a little romance combine well, if a little obviously, in this political thriller with a message.