To be honest we bipassed most of the hype surrounding Quentin Dupieux’s killer-tyre adventure on its release, partly because we’re lazy bastard and partly because… well, because it’s a film about a killer tyre.
Seriously, it’s the cinematic equivalent of hanging round Camden tube station in new rock boots. The premise screams “Look at me! Am i blowing your mainstream mind with my weirdness?! I bet I am yeah?!”
And that kind of thing can.. well, fuck off in general. No one cares.

So, seeing as the movie has now burst onto home screens as well (get it? Tyre.. burst… you see… sigh….) we thought it was well worth a revisit, judged entirely on it’s own charms rather than any surrounding hyperbole.
Surprisingly, there are a few Mitchelin stars to be had here…
Part of the fun comes from the meta-meta framing devices. From the off we have sheriff Stephen Spinella revealing that he knows it’s all just a movie, while we get lots of fourth wall bothering dialogue (The cops wondering what the audience is thinking work wonderfully), and the director isn’t averse to telling us about some of the challenges he faced making the film (Well – you try giving character to a Dunlop).

Surprisingly, it’s these challenges that are overcome most successfully. ‘Robert’ amazingly becomes a character to root for, and there’s tons of fun to be had watching the weirdest take on a superhero origin story you’re likely to see this decade.

There’s also some fun character elements as we see the titular tyre peeking in on girls and having some very black humoured fun with his powers -cue tons of exploding heads and mutilated cops. Luckily they know that “Hey, it’s not real life…”.

Overall there’s a lot of positive things to say for Rubber. it’s funny, and there’s actually some rather lovely landscape photography going on from time to time, the tyre rolling endlessly down deserted desert roads gives the whole thing a surreal ‘Mad Max by Wim Wenders’ aesthetic.

Unfortunately there’s only so long a nice sunset can sustain your attention. There’s clunky dialogue to deal with and things start to become repetitive halfway through (although maybe that’s the point in a film about a wheel). Released as a short, this would be a fantastic calling card, but it’s a little too trying even for hardened midnight movie-goers.

Worth catching on cable, but not shelling out for yet, it definitly points out Dupieux as one to watch.

Once all the Imax-induced vertigo had passed, the common consensus round these here parts was that mega-blockbuster Avatar was..well, yeah, it was all right I suppose, if you like Dances With wolves and exploding helicopter gunships.

With that in mind it’s fair to say that the upcoming DVD extended cut had better be going some if it wants to stop audiences topping themselves half way through, especially given the three hour-plus running time and feature spread across three seperate disks. Amazingly though, this sounds like it might actually be worth getting.

Not only is it (of course) a piece of cinematic history (whether it’s a good or a bad one remains to be seen), but the film itself has some pretty groovy additions, including a screwed-up future planet Earth (looking an awful lot like Las Vegas for some reason) full of neon and breath masks, which gives a good insight into exactly a marine might prefer the deadly jungles of Pandora to returning home.

Anyhho, Big Jimbo’s latest is out on November 16th in the US, and will be available to steal on Pirate Bay four hours later.

As the cult of ass-to-mouth surrounding vile but slightly boring schocker The Human Centipede continues to grow, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make it even more fucked up and off putting than it already was, and hey, while the original was pretty diabolical, it was also pretty, well boring really.

Luckily if there’s one thing garuanteed to spice up a party, it’s a huge pair of hooters, so take a bow The Human Sexipede!

Yep, it’s a porn parody that gives doggy style a whole new meaning if this trailer is anything to go by.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m actually a bit weirded out by this. Enjoy perverts, enjoy…

Remember the 1980’s? They were well skill weren’t they? With your high-top trainers and body warmer you were probably pretty cool as you skateboarded down to the awesome new multi-screen cinema that opened in your town, hoping you could scope out some well wicked flicks and maybe score with some bodacious babes along the way.

So, you pay your £1.50 entrance fee and find that Tim Burton’s Batman is playing on 7 screens, and Back to the Future 2 is on the remaining 6 – woah; totally heinous dude! How’s a hard-core gorehound like you going to get his grue-filled kicks when every decent horror movie has been banned by Maggie Thatcher: Milk Snatcher?!

Well if you were resourceful, you popped down to your local video store/ice cream van, slipped them a tenner and got a dodgy third-hand VHS copy of Evil Dead, and possibly some crap German porn as a bonus. Or you could take the more circuitous route followed by director Ti West; Wait 25 years, then score some ancient filming equipment and film your very own hoary 80’s scarefest – with seriously scary results!

That House of the Devil works at all is testament to the resilience of the themes it explores, using the 80’s ‘Satanic Panic’ epidemic as a backdrop, the film may rely on clichés, but it ignores the crutch of irony completely, instead delivering a sharp shocker that will grumble away in the back of your head, replete with jouissiant ending for true 80’s compatibility.

Plot-wise we’re on familiar if skewed ground, following all-American teen Sophie Hughes (an excellent, fluff-permed Jocalyne Donahue) as she follows up the offer of a baby-sitting gig at a c-c- cer-eeeepy old mansion.

From here on in it’s stock-horror character stupidity all the way, Sophie agreeing to stay on even after the oddball couple who own the place admit they don’t have kids, just a largely unseen elderly relative parked in the attic, and acquiring clues to a darker secret as strange happenings go bump in the night around her.

Fortunately West keeps a firm hand on the tiller, never letting things slip into parody. The whole thing comes off as a superbly thought out pastiche that shows both glowing affection for B-level 80’s crud alongside a brave decision to follow in the footsteps of 70’s classics like Rosemary’s Baby.

Slow-burn dread with the occasional shocker squirrelled away, House of the Devil offers a genuine return to a genre that Hollywood remakes have all but forgotten how to do. This is taught and fun, the ideal date horror movie.

Major studios currently have one rule when it comes to horror – remake, remake, and remake again. Slasher flicks are the norm, usually with a tired, post-Scream makeover for the ironic/not-ironic-but-don’t-actually-know-any-better audience. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise to find STS championing a remake, especially one that doesn’t even have the benefit of decent source material. Be under no illusions, She-Creature contains all the ingredients for a crap-fest of epic proportions.

Taking a bloody awful 1956 Samual Arkoff movie as source, She-Creature thankfully plays fast and loose with it, originally billing itself as ‘the mermaid chronicles part 1’ it seems they couldn’t be bothered to make any follow-ups. Either that or they had so much fun with this that they knew it couldn’t be topped.

Let’s have a look at the mix: First off, your script requires a roisty-toisty, rollicking Oirishman of the highest order. Who do you choose? Why, Rufus Sewell seems an ideal fit! A strange choice after his almost-breakout in A Knight’s Tale, Sewell never the less has a fine ‘ol time begorrah, swaggering around the screen and spouting blarney about making it big in America to his ‘some sort of generic cockerney ought to do it’ girlfriend, a pre silk spectre Carla Gugino, who seems to be enjoying the chance to show a bit of cleavage, and comes off as game and sexy.

Travelling carnies already have a bad rep, and it’s no surprise if they behave like these two. Playing off the punters with fake zombies and mermaids the two come across a mad old wino at a show, and on finding out he has a cannibalistic, low-level telepath mermaid chained up in his living room –as you do- decide to nick it and head to America, where Sewell is convinced he’ll make it big – What could go wrong?

Of course, once on board ship, things go pear shaped pretty quickly. The previously ex-playmate faced mermaid sprouting odd fins and webs, invading the dreams of young Carla – and playing havoc with her menstrual cycle- and eventually roaming the decks and chowing down on hapless crewmen. Meanwhile the ship is hopelessly lost in a huge storm, and headed toward Mermaid Island!

Mermaid Island!!

“Hang on – this is just bloody stupid” you’ll be thinking, and it is! That’s why it’s great. The set design is high-school play quality, and everyone performs like they’re in a 17th century morality play. Which they are. Weirdly, it’s the whole shouty, badly-put-on-play nature of the thing that lifts it out of the doldrums. If they’d had cash for a CGI beastie, it would just be another piece of SDVD crapola filling up the bargain bin or bottoming out the netflix lists of bored teenage boys. As it is, there’s a nightmarish, hypereal quality about things, with fever-dream Giallo colouring. The whole thing shot in the style of Hammer, lots of slow pans and dodgy handheld shaky-cam, and it’s fantastic. Dry Ice swarms around, yapping cannibal eel-maids await in inky black waters, and at the end, we finally see the name of the ship.

Yep, it’s The Marie Celeste.

She-Creature is brilliant, dazzling rubbish that’s born out of time. This tale spins out like a carnival hawkers cries. Brash, overcooked garbage with enough strange turns, grains of truth and half remembered elements from childhood stories to make it stick with you – well worth £2 of anyone’s money!

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, Let The Right One In, finally limps on to British and American screens…just in time for the DVD release. That said, this is definitely a film that deserves a big screen, and a night-walk home through the park afterwards.

This is stunning, catching the ethereal beauty of a Scandinavian winter and juxtaposing it with the modern, concrete grimness of the cold war. Despite being firmly rooted in the 80s, the film spends a lot of time building an atmosphere that is both timeless and ageless.

Following the struggles of Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), as his new friend, the enigmatic and mournful Eli (a revelatory Lina Leandersson) urges him to fight back against the bullies who torment him. The film is multi-layered, at once brutal and fragile, with stunning, complex performances from the young actors that hint at the emotional depths inherent in adolescence and old age.

At its heart, this is a love story. Vampirism is a tool dusted with disease allegory, rotting both the body and soul of the sufferer. In the novel, Eli’s relationship with her strange ‘keeper’ is more explicitly about pedophilia, here the lines are blurred, his punishment more obscure, and wonderfully creepy because of it. Eli’s home life speaks of untold horrors, bringing a thin strand of Lovecraftian terror to proceedings that never quite leaves.

Likewise, the blood and guts are kept to a minimum, particularly the mesmerising climax. In the hands of a lesser talent, it could have been merely disgusting; here it is transcendent; witty and horrifying.

A literary, verbose and understated film, never flashy in its subtle knowledge of the Vampire’s film and folklore heritage; demands to be seen before it falls victim to an entirely unneeded Hollywood makeover next year.

Despite rumours that this is his final acting gig, Clint manages to stay nicely understated in Gran Torino and it’s to his credit that despite Academy disdain, Gran Torino has gone on to become his most succesful film. Just as Unforgiven put The Man With No Name neatly to bed, this plays out like a resolution to the Dirty Harry films – and a far better one than The Dead Pool at that.

The film is a nice deconstruction of the right wing values those films espoused, with newly-widowed Walt Kowalski bemoaning the collapse of America, unable to get over the prejudice he picked up in Vietnam and only letting his feelings show when a family of Hmong immigrants move in next door. In the background, there’s an uncaring family led by two self-obsessed sons who want him in a care home. Unable to express himself or connect, Kowalski spends his time at home with his dog and a rifle for company and the car of the title sitting gathering dust in the garage.

Until, that is, neighbour’s son Thao gets involved with a local gang and tries to steal that self-same car as an initiation prank. When things go pear-shaped, he’s forced to help Kowalski out and it’s cue the violins as the old man thaws and begins to relate to his new community and, as the gang situation escalates, finally finds something else worth fighting for.

This is all territory that’s covered on a thousand TV movies a year, so it’s testament to Clint’s continued talent that it rises far above these melodramatic roots and often poorly sketched characters – something the writing for the gang members is particularly guilty of – to become a lean, compelling story that has the power to both excite and move.

Clint’s portrayal is note perfect, unashamedly playing his age to the point that, despite the sneering tough-guy whisper, we often worry whether he’ll make it through the third act. Playing up to, and subverting his image may have become a stock-in-trade for Eastwood in recent years, but that doesn’t make it any less compelling. Here we want him to kick ass and we feel bad when the creaking joints and bad back turn our hero into just another grumpy old man. This is audience manipulation on the meta scale of course, but that doesn’t undermine it’s effectiveness.

That said, Gran Torino isn’t a great film. Its plot is too hackneyed and heart-string-tugging too obvious to cement classic status. But the central performance and straightforward direction make it well worth a watch. If this is Eastwood’s final screen appearance, then it’s a solid if faintly ridiculous final bow.

Going by title alone, you’d be forgiven for expecting a set-piece-filled video game spin off. In fact this is a slow burning and underplayed version of real life events, as Norwegian resistance member Max takes on dastardly invading Nazis, in a WWII film that’s a wobbly mix of two-fisted action and true-life consequence.

Askel Hennie makes an impression in the title role, managing to carry off slightly glib scripting with a straight face and grounding what could otherwise be a lightweight boys’ own adventure. Scenes of Max’s early career, engaged in some brutal combat with the Russians, have a wonderfully straightforward edge to them and the Norwegians initial reluctance to adopt Guerilla tactics against occupying Nazi forces, leading to their initial meetings failing miserably, carry some genuine emotional heft.

In fact, the film’s biggest asset is also it’s greatest weakness. At one point, Manus leaps through a window to escape, but rather than escaping Jason Bourne style, he winds up in intensive care for his efforts. This realism is laudable, and the gravity of events certainly shouldn’t be treated lightly but unfortunately the characterisation is more Die Hard than Schindler’s List. All the patriotic shouting makes it hard to identify with the resistance men, but the ambiguous choices they make makes them come off as human and often deeply flawed for all this bravery.

Doing the best they can with a limited budget, Directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg utilise some tasteful CGI use that makes the small staged battles suitably epic while the photography is effectively chilly, if a little too enamoured of Saving Private Ryan for it’s own good.

An interesting and very human tale, the film is unbalanced at times but compelling nonetheless and worth dedicating a couple of hours to on a Sunday afternoon.

Sometimes you can be forgiven for suspecting the movie you’re about to sit through is going to be woeful claptrap. Cemetery Man seems, from the cover, to satisfy every criteria for this kind of low expectation. It stars Rupert Everett, for Christ’s sake. But then, through sheer insanity and stupidity, it three-sixties into one of the most wonderfully over-the-top showcases for madness you’re ever going to see. When a film goes so far out of its way to make you look at the screen aghast, it has to have something going for it. And it’s this kind of care-free idiocy that marks Cemetery Man as a cut above other overlooked zombie flicks. It simply doesn’t seem to care what you think of it. It’s a bloody-minded lunatic of a film.

For starters, this Italian production mentions Berlusconi in a production capacity as the credits roll. And after they’ve rolled, you realise the sound mix is so creakily dubbed that you’re going to be spending the next hour or so watching mouths move just out of synch with what you’re hearing. Add to this Everett’s overpowering voiceover, his usual plummy tones overridden by a strange attempt at a mockney-ish drawl, and you’re in very dodgy territory indeed. But then the premise is explained and, with Everett as resident zombie-killer at a cemetery where the dead suddenly walk again, seven days after burial, the first killing brings the fun to the fore fantastically quickly.

Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte and his comic foil is his chubby gravedigging co-worker, Gnaghi – an irritatingly stupid, semi-mute tit. Gnaghi is responsible for a great deal of the trouble Francesco finds himself in, though most of his woes stem from the libido he’s rumoured not have. He’s an impotent outcast as far as the townsfolk are concerned, and the scenes whenever Francesco leaves the cemetery for town are unintentionally hilarious, with extras who are clearly Italian – with scooters, greased ponytails etc… – speaking in obviously dubbed Dick Van Dyke accents. The dialogue is terrible whenever there are more than two people onscreen, and even then it’s shaky. But your forgive it because you know another glorious set piece is right around the corner. The frantic tone is set from the off.

By the final third, things go from fast to frenetic and it begins to feel like the wilful insanity of Evil Dead II has been reborn in an Italian movie version of The Bold & The Beautiful. With hilarious action juxtaposed with brilliantly bad dialogue and one-liners, it can’t fail to be the an almost completely improbable winner. Who’d have thought it?