(Note from the editor: I know I know, this came out like, aaaaages ago man. I expect the kidz have moved on to…well, let’s face it, they haven’t moved on at all have they? It’s been a perpetual round of Zombie/Vampire/Werewolf/Ninja interspersed with sporadic Chuck Norris sightings since 1996, which in my opinion proves that most people are a bunch of fucking dicktards who graze nonchalently on mass distributed culture without the wit or forethought to try discovering something new on their own. Fuck you. Ahem…anyway I wasn’t about to sit through a third helping of this toss, but luckily STS aren’t without resources, and have managed to recruit an actual real-live lady with hair and a nice voice and everything to go check this out – and apparently it was much better this time around! Huzzah! The excellent Jazz James investigates…)

Behold every neurotic 14 year-old girl’s dream: The latest installment of the Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Teenage angst is rife, Bella gets the horn and her battle between bestiality and necrophilia rages on. However, wishing to avenge her mate’s death, (proper) vampire Victoria begins to create an army of “newborn” vampires to challenge the Cullens and exterminate her.

I’m not going to lie; as a fully-certified member of the fairer sex, I may or may not have secretly enjoyed the – perhaps one-too-many – gratuitous shots of naked torsos that would flash on to the screen approximately every 1.54 seconds.

It’s enough to give any image-conscious man a bit of a complex.

Please don’t give up on this review already, I promise to keep shameless fangirling to a minimum and there will be no further sycophantic rambling about R-Patz’s sparkly body. Speaking of sparkles, it appeared that Slde had managed to restrain himself enough to keep them to a minimum There were times when Slade even allowed Eclipse to broach the dark horizons of traditional Gothic genre. Eclipse didn’t come without the odd toe-curlingly cringey scene, but thankfully avoids the melodramatic narrative of the first two installments and Slade attempts to branch out past its original fans to appeal to a wider audience.

Overall, Stewart, Pattinson and Launtner appear to have grown as actors and their roles seem much more established. Stewart manages to blink at the pace of a normal human being and Pattinson manages not to look in pain through the entirety of the film. Through the multi-species love triangle that dominates a large part of the film’s running time, Slade surprisingly manages to inject a lot of humour. I can’t help but think that this would have been a different story if it were Hardwicke.

My main criticism, would most definitely be of the portrayal of the newborn vampires. Although Samuel seems perfect for the role of vampire, with his chiseled features, the rest of the army is much less convincing. Instead of adopting the spectral-like movements of the Cullens, they were comparable to rabid tramps upon discovering a fresh McDonalds. They emanated no sense of real threat and it was glaringly obvious that Bella’s Eddy-Weddy and his coven would be there to save the day.

Eclipse will certainly keep manic fans squirming with pleasure; but fear not, husbands, boyfriends and potential boyfriends. There is lots more fast-paced action to keep you from falling asleep and the film even pokes fun at all of the semi-nakedness. However, I fear the Twilight franchise will never be dark or transgressive enough for vampire and Gothic purists.

Proof, if ever it were needed, that reading Twilight: New Moon and watching the subsequent movie adaptation is EXTREMELY BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH.

Proof also that, if you want to kill a youth movement, all you have to do is have a local news team affectionately cover it.

There were never any wolf packs for me to join at school. No wonder I turned out so neurotic and idiotic. Video below

Tattoos! An ancient rite stretching back to the dawn of history, tattoos should represent something unique and personal that deserves permanent recognition.

Or if you’re an idiot…

Yes, there are people out there getting Twilight tattoos. Imagine having a picture of a teenage Taylor Lautner across your butt when your 87 years old. Future generations will mock you to the grave – a grave you won’t be returning from in vampire form…because you are an idiot and no one would want to spend eternity with you.

Anyway, there’s a huge gallery of these inky odes to low IQ’s here – enjoy!

After spending New Years Day cleaning what, for argument’s sake, we’ll assume was mud mixed with chewing gum off the office floor, we finally had time to carry on checking out all the new movies crawling out of the toilet to infect your eyeballs like refugees from an early Cronenberg movie in the new year. Yep, it’s part two of our craptabulous round up of the biggest, worstest flicks of 2010!

6: The A-Team

The group ‘convicted of a crime they didn’t commit’ have been updated from Vietnam to the far less interesting Iraq War, but otherwise everything from Hannibal’s cigar to Murdoch’s hat is present and correct – look at this picture, Liam Neeson looks aces doesn’t he? Unfortunately, like everything ever made in the 80s, the A-Team was a load of crap, so expect to see whatsisface from The Hangover driving a cabbage-firing tank at some terrorists intent on taking over a suspiciously attractive girl’s farm in Wyoming and tell me that you think it’ll be cool. You idiot.

7: Twilight: Eclipse

To be honest I only stuck this piece of shit in here so that extra teenage girls would check out the site. Unfortunately they’ll all be chaste Mormons so it won’t do me any good. Not satisfied with pumping out two steaming loaves of vampiarrhoea, the studio money-sharks couldn’t resist farting out yet more of Stephanie Meyer’s absolute crap into your eyeballs. Expect a weird, borderline paedophilia love triangle and strong anti-feminist messages. Also expect girls with IQ’s lower than their pet Chihuahuas to love it, and for it to be a big pile of pigtarded claptrap.

8:The Expendables

Sly and the boys hide their bus-passes and stagger about in the jungle blowing shit up. Fuck yeah!

9:The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Both preceding Narnia films were badly put together shambles that not many people bothered to see, and those that did bother – didn’t like. So, sounds like a good idea to make another one doesnt it? Siblings Lucy, Edmund, Rudolph, Prancer, Frankenstein and Dopey head back to the slightly boring mystical land to fanny about on a ship with big bad brooding Ben Barnes, Eddie Izzard is oh-so-hilarious as an annoying mouse that would make Willy Wonka vomit, and Fox happily flush their cash down the Dawn Treader’s bilges for no apparent reason. Heaven’s Gate!

10: The Three Stooges

Probably not one for the ladies, as the Farrely brothers give Benicio Del Toro a bowl cut and provide plenty of wish fulfillment by pushing Sean Penn down a flight of stairs and smacking Jim Carrey in the face with a plank. With hilarious consequences.

Well, we have hangovers to re-enforce, so we’ll take a short break, but join us again shortly for part three, where we might even slip in a couple of films worth seeing (don’t count on it though)!

The first Twilight movie was a vaguely faithful adaptation of Ms.Meyer’s work, with overly florid prose translating as an overly long movie that just scraped past our twee sensors into the ’sort of ok’ category thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke nailing an atmosphere of repressed teenage sexuality that lent just the right amount of tension to proceedings. Unfortunately Golden Compass helmer Chris Weitz takes no such risks, slavishly following the purple passages to produce an uneven film that would benefit from healthy dash of irony.

The mopey, very teenage scenario is played to the hilt throughout, with new characters barely introduced and far too much time spent on wistful staring out of windows, resulting in a film that continually slows to a crawl. While it’s perhaps admirable that there are no concessions made to newcomers, it’s also unprofessional to assume that every viewer will be completely versed in this particular Vampire lore. Make no mistake, this is squarely targeted at girls of a certain age with rampant R-Patz lust at the forefront of their minds.

Plot wise, heartbreak is high on the agenda, as Edward’s family decide they’d rather scarf Bella down with ketchup than bond with her. To avoid a repeat performance, Edward leaves her,entrusting her care – as you do – to jailbait werewolf Jacob (a heroically brooding Taylor Lautner). We’re already into the realm of the preposterous McGuffin, and there’s precious little to help you take things seriously. Edward struts around, taking on some unfortunately bargain basement Werewolves as the misery heightens to operatic levels, only broken up by a variety of young men ripping their shirts off, occasionally in slow motion. Dialogue is portentous in the extreme, the supposedly dramatic pauses deployed regularly enough to induce a bizarre, Shatner-like cadence throughout.

Despite the frothing bile it induced in sections of the audience, it’s unprofessional to moan about the..erm…moaning. Overwrought suffering is as central to the mythos as a killer robot is the The Terminator. This is a film about the compelling totality of first love – judged from a distance it’s melodramatic and ridiculous, but for devotees it’s all-important. Judged on its own merits, New Moon contains exactly as much Pattison cod-heroics and oiled body flexing as the book and for fans that’s surely all that matters.

A very specifically targeted, bloody ridiculous mess that will either put you into paroxysms of angsty lust or have you rolling your eyes as our hero skips in slow motion through the enchanted forests of the Pacific Northwest (backed up by – it has to be said – a pitch-perfect indie soundtrack that’s really far too good for this sort of thing). It isn’t a great film, but it is a future guilty pleasure that efficiently sets up characters and events for next year’s ‘Eclipse’.

Generally, we watch any old crap round here – in the interest of being a representative, even-handed site obviously – from Marley & Me to Apocalypse Now,it’s all fair grist to the review grinder-yep,we even sat through Troll 2 once.

But just occasionally there are some movie crimes so cynical and heinous in their deployment that we’re robbed of even the enjoyment bought by bright shapes moving around a large screen.
Twilight: New Moon is one of them…

The Twilight Saga’s advance guard of posters and promos have been doing the rounds for a few weeks now, it’s gangsta/Calvin Klein ad Werewolves looking like the world’s worst boy band as they balefully bring to life everything awful about post-Rowling fiction in one sanitised, imaginatively stultified package

The reasons for the unerring – and to most people over 30,completely mystifying – popularity of the Virginity-embracing Goth-a-thon are manifold and as ancient as the vampire myth itself, but the main one?

Boredom.

To contextualise; it’s probably worth remembering at this point that tabloid fodder Cradle of Filth are from a small country village, the interminable ennui of small-town existence producing gratuitous, theatrical stabs at an inescapable conformity that have absolutely nothing to do with the isolationist work of their contemporaries

Twilight has risen from the endless malaise of the American Midwest. Despite the stunning scenery, for many growing up there it’s an endless vista of mini-malls and soccer meets, a land robbed of endless opportunity that retains a general snobbishness for any authentic ‘old-world’ culture (”What do you eat in Britain?” Is a standard enquiry I received while travelling), and while this is a gross oversimplification; in terms of romance, Utah is up there with Chernobyl.

It’s no wonder then that the Disneyfied, stripey-sock Goth peddled by Hot topic is grasped so ravenously by teenagers in a locale where dying your hair or missing church is a rebellious act, and although tweens the world over go through endless recycling of these tropes the constant marketing of them as a substitute for genuine invention is a troubling one. Potter and his ilk are the spawn of daytime TV and half-remembered nursery tales, rather than any familiarity with actual fantastical literature. It may be churlish to suggest, but I’d be sorely surprised if J.K’s library included anything by Lord Dunsany. Tapping into a culturally bereft society doesn’t gift a work with any greater kudos.

Likewise Twilight is born of a warped, half developed sexuality, a flirting with defiance in the face of the US religious machine, and the deeply unsatisfied and unrealised yearnings of its author. Vampires are the ultimate asexual – the bite representing a non-threatening penetration – that means they are non-threatening romantic partners, perfect grist for the mill of the unsettlingly carried out (if well-intentioned) Chastity movement the books encourage. While virginity and chastity are both admirable qualities, they are very personal ones that shouldn’t be enforced by mass-media or religion; to do so is a backwards step, rather than a liberating one. Here non-sensationalist information is the key, not mass hypnosis.

Most movies try to sell you a tie-in computer game and a McDonald’s happy meal. Twilight tries to sell you morality.

Twilight (And Buffy beforehand, although Weedon at least realised this and had fun with it) is in effect Mills and Boone without the edge. Here there’s no sex, and while there’s haemoglobin aplenty even death is robbed of it’s power.

Author Stephanie Meyer claims the novel is about ‘losing true love’, but has aimed it squarely at a population so cut off from genuine interaction the word becomes meaningless, a substitute for parental affection and an excuse to pretend at the rebellious. In one of the most telling scenes Bella’s ability to commune with Edward is enhanced when she pursues ‘The Dangerous’. In this case, riding a motorcycle – that ever present symbol of disaffection for American youth. Meyer has crafted a work where motorcycles and leather jackets stand-in for danger, where Italy represents the entire planet outside the Midwestern bowl, and where dreaming of wider horizons inevitably leads to terror and sadness-or at least a simulation of it.

New Moon offers an endless curse – one of morbid, flatulent commercialism infecting its victims with a warped feminine ideal where the answer to everything is a good man who doesn’t want to have sex. It has more in common with Mona the Vampire than Dracula – this is sex and death without the sex and death played out by blandly attractive mannequins whose only supernatural power is the height of their hair.

Excited yet?