Reckoning Day (2002)

[Movie 238 / Day 253]


An ultra-low budget movie by the director of Rise of the Footsoldier.

The basic plot involves an international assassin-turned-drug runner, Charles Toll; who is hunted in North America and left for dead by a maverick cop, Ed. When Toll resurfaces in the UK and kills something like 38 armed response police escaping a hotel with his girlfriend, the British send for Ed. Ed then chases Toll down and kills lots of people on the way.

Pretty simple plot, but it would still be entertaining if handled well.

Unfortunately, it's not handled well. The actors are wooden. The dialogue is stilted and unnatural (there are a few gems, although I'm not sure they were meant to be). The continuity is absolutely terrible. Every so often, some wierd subliminal-style shots are overlaid or cut-in, but there are hardly any of them and they seem to come at no set points and end up just being plain odd and a little confusing. New characters are introduced and killed before you even work out who they are or what they're doing (the 'party' scene is particularly bad for this). There's far too much fake blood flying around (it seems the director's mantra was 'when in doubt, throw more fake blood on screen').

So, overall, it's pretty rubbish. Then you find out it was made for around £50,000 and featured the director's friends and family and their homes as sets. It then seems more of a case of them having fun and shooting a movie for no reason, with no care given to how it turned out. It feels like an amateur movie, apart from it's length. So, suddenly, most of it's problems seem forgivable. But, then you discover that Primer only cost $7,000 to make, and suddenly those problems are back and adding up to a poor movie.

+ 2 for low budget effort.
- 1 for Primer having a far lower budget and being brilliant.

My rating: 2.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.2 / 10
Running time: 105 mins
IMDB link

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

[Movie 227 / Day 240]


Boasting more cameos than you can shake a dirty stick at, not to mention more than the average number of Star Wars references, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is one of Kevin Smith's sillier films. The plot, such as it is, involves Jay and Silent Bob attempting to get to Hollywood in order to stop a movie based on their fictional counterparts, Bluntman and Chronic, from being made.

It's silly, it references all of Smith's previous movies heavily, but it's pretty funny. I like.

My rating: 6.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.8 / 10
Running time: 104 mins
IMDB link

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)

[Movie 226 / Day 239]


200 year old vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) tells a young reporter (Christian Slater) his life story so far through a series of flashbacks. An interesting take on the vampire story, well acted and pretty good.

My rating: 6.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.4 / 10
Running time: 123 mins
IMDB link

Just Cause (1995)

[Movie 225 / Day 238]


Sean Connery is a lawyer that hasn't tried a case in years, now spending his time as a college professor. Until he is coaxed out of retirement by the case of a young black man that is thrown onto death row after confessing (under duress) to brutally murdering a young girl.

It's clear what the twist is going to be two thirds of the way through the movie, but it's very watchable nonetheless.

Ed Harris is brilliant as another death row inmate, Blair Sullivan.

My rating: 6.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.1 / 10
Running time: 102 mins
IMDB link

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

[Movie 224 / Day 238]


Eddie Valiant is a washed up private eye who has been at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey since his brother (and partner) was killed during an investigation.

He has had a severe dislike of Toons since then and won't take on any of their business, until he is hired by a studio boss to take some incriminating photos of Jessica Rabbit cheating on her husband Roger.

Brilliant fun and still holds up well.

My rating: 7.4 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.6 / 10
Running time: 104 mins
IMDB link

Hard Boiled (1992)

[Movie 223 / Day 237]


John Woo actioner featuring Chow Yun Fat as Tequila, the titular 'hard boiled' cop, trying to track down a weapons smuggling ring that killed his partner. The body count is high, the violence is pretty hard core and the story is pretty good. Plenty of dual pistol, jumping through the air action, as you'd expect from Woo.

The terrible, terrible, terrible dubbing marred it for me though - the DVD I watched had no original language/subtitle option, so I was stuck with Chow Yun Fat sounding like an Oxbridge graduate crossed with a New Yorker.

My rating: 7.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.9 / 10
Running time: 126 mins
IMDB link

Flubber (1997)

[Movie 222 / Day 237]


Robin Williams plays Philip Brainard, an absent minded professor who forgets to attend his wedding. Three times. His fiancee, understandably, is a tad upset and leaves him. An academic rival swoops in to steal her away and it's down to Brainard to use his latest invention, Flubber, to save both his fiancee and the college they both work at.

It's silly but amusing in places - and the kids loved it.

My rating: 5.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.6 / 10
Running time: 93 mins
IMDB link

Eastern Promises (2007)

[Movie 221 / Day 236]


Directed by David Kronenburg, Eastern Promises follows Anna, a midwife in a London hospital who helps deliver the baby of a Russian prostitute who dies during childbirth. Unwilling to let her be buried as a Jane Doe, Anna takes the girls diary and tries to get it translated in the hope of discovering who she was.

Unfortunately, that diary leads her into the middle of a Russian mafia dispute.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like it, but it turned out to be an excellent movie - Viggo Mortensen was very good in particular.

My rating: 7.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.8 / 10
Running time: 100 mins
IMDB link

Space Chimps (2008)

[Movie 221 / Day 236]


I was expecting this CGI cartoon to be terrible. It exceeded my expectations, but not by a huge margin. Essentially a space probe gets pulled into a wormhole and lands on an alien planet, complete with alien life. So, a trio of chimps are sent into the wormhole to see if humans would be able to survive the trip. Obviously, the chimps are all intelligent and end up helping the aliens fight against a nasty tyrant who wants to kill them all.

My rating: 5.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.4 / 10
Running time: 81 mins
IMDB link

Ong-bak (2003)

[Movie 220 / Day 235]


When the head of the village deity is stolen, a young martial artist (Tony Jaa) is sent to the city to retreive it. There, he inadvertantly ends up taking on the underworld and kicks ass.

Brilliant action, simple plot. Very enjoyable.

My rating: 7.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.2 / 10
Running time: 105 mins
IMDB link

No Retreat, No Surrender (1986)

[Movie 217 / Day 233]


No Retreat, No Surrender is mostly about the mob trying to take over several karate dojo's in order to use them as a legitimate front. They go about the taking over by intimidation, in usual mob style - although the heavies they bring along are both karate experts. One of those heavies is Van Damme. I'm not sure why he's working for the mob though, as, presumably to cover his accent up a bit, he's billed as 'Ivan the Russian'.

Anyway, once a teenager's dojo owning father leaves town to avoid a confrontation, the teenager goes to Bruce Lee's grave and asks him for help. Oddly enough, the spirit of Bruce Lee (who doesn't really look anything like him) appears in an abandoned house and trains the kid.

Then he has a fight with Van Damme, who should have been able to destroy him with his eyes glued shut. After the fight, the credits roll, but I imagine all the kids he gets into scrapes with during the movie looking at him with newfound admiration and subtly hinted homosexual overtones. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see that scene in one of the longer cuts available.

It's bad it's good. Straight from the Joey Tribiani school of 'smell the fart' acting, No Retreat features a terrible plot, terrible camera work and terrible acting. However, it's gone past being simply bad and has become funny.

If you enjoy crappy 80s action movies in a comedy kind of way, you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did. If you want an action movie, this ain't it.

It also has the distinction of having the worst picture quality I've ever seen on DVD. It looks like someone has transferred it from VHS; but not a new, pristine VHS, rather one that has been rewound and recorded over a few thousand times before being used to tape the movie off Channel 4.

Amazingly, it's spawned a whole bunch of sequels! I may just have to check them out next time I want a laugh.

My rating: 4.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.6 / 10
Running time: 79 mins
IMDB link

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008)

[Movie 214 / Day 229]


Pretty rubbish musical about several hideously pretty teenagers and how hard their perfect little lives are.

My rating: 3.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 3.7 / 10
Running time: 112 mins
IMDB link

Crank: High Voltage (2009)

[Movie 210 / Day 222]


The original Crank was a brilliantly fun action movie. It was ridiculous, it was over the top, it was low budget, but it was novel. All of those things added up and it worked.

High Voltage tries to repeat the trick and, for the most part, succeeds. Obviously it's not such a novel concept this time around, so the film-makers have opted to add all sorts of bizarre interludes (from a flashback to Chev's youth to an odd Godzilla-style fight scene). I found it detracted from the movie. If they'd just stuck to more of the same, it would have been better.

As it is, it's pretty good, but nowhere near as much fun as the original. They did leave it open for a third though - if they make one, let's hope they go back to the original style.

My rating: 6.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.8 / 10
Running time: 96 mins
IMDB link

Mr Deeds (2002)

[Movie 205 / Day 218]


A comic reworking of the 1950s classic Mr Deeds Goes To Town, Adam Sandler plays Deeds, a ordinary man that runs a pizza parlour in small town America. His great-uncle (that he didn't even know existed) dies and leaves him a $40 billion fortune.

The film is spent with Deeds falling in love with an undercover reporter while the head of the company he has just inherited schemes to remove him from the picture.

It's a fairly average comedy, lifted mainly by the usual Happy Madison cameo of Steve Buscemi as Crazy Eyes and by John Turturro playing the incredibly sneaky sneaky butler. If you like Adam Sandler though, there's a fair chance you'll like this.

My rating: 5.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 5.5 / 10
Running time: 96 mins
IMDB link

Hook (1991)

[Movie 204 / Day 218]


In a twist on JM Barrie's classic play Peter Pan, Hook imagines what if Pan left Neverneverland and did grow up after all? Williams plays Peter, who is a high flying lawyer until he visits his childhood foster home in London and discovers that he is really Peter Pan - when Captain Hook (a marvelous Dustin Hoffman) kidnaps Peter's children and holds them to ransom pending the war he is craving.

Fun and imaginative, Hook is a nice little fantasy movie that my kids loved. It is a little on the long side though!

My rating: 5.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.2 / 10
Running time: 144 mins
IMDB link

The Krays (1990)

[Movie 203 / Day 217]


Based on the story of Britain's infamous criminal brothers, the Kray twins, the film follows their lives from birth through their rise as the kings of London's underworld. Unfortunately, it spends far more time examining their early life and their personal relationships than it does their firm and how they came to rule London's East End.

It's OK, and the Kemps are very good in it, but it could have been so much better. I do love the scene where their mother has a roomful of gangsters checking their shoes for dog muck though.

My rating: 6.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.6 / 10
Running time: 119 mins
IMDB link

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

[Movie 201 / Day 213]


The original AVP was bad. The plot was OKish, but all of the suspense and violence was taken out of the franchise in order to obtain a ridiculously low rating (I think it was rated 12 in the UK). This was the movie in which two of Hollywoods baddest of bad-ass baddies met for the first time. It should have been a bloodbath. Instead, it was a gayfest. The Predator even had compassion for humans; he should have been skinning them alive and hanging them upside down in trees, not scanning them for terminal illnesses then leaving them alone.

Watching the trailer for the sequel, it seemed that they may have righted some wrongs. Instead of trying to fit the movie into the Alien/Predator universe, it looked like they might have made a stand-alone movie, with some of the violence of old reinstated. There are no recognisable actors in it, so you just don't know who was going to make it to the end. That's where the good stuff ends. Unfortunately, although the plot isn't too bad (essentially a Predator ship crashlands on Earth, unleashing a bunch of face-huggers and a "Predalien" on the unsuspecting small US town it inevitably landed next to, prompting another Predator to come and clean up the mess), the film throughout seems to be extremely dark and over-contrasted. So much so that it's difficult to make out what's actually happening (I'm assuming it's the movie and not my projector going wrong). This is made much, much worse by the editing, which features lots of fast cuts and super-close-ups on the Aliens and Predator fighting. Consequently, you can barely tell who is attacking who.

The resulting movie is a mess and we spent the majority of it trying to piece together what was happening. It's about time someone made a GOOD Alien vs Predator movie, because the source material is awesome.

My rating: 4.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.9 / 10
Running time: 94 mins
IMDB link

Thunderpants (2002)

[Movie 198 / Day 211]


Smash has a problem. He was born with two stomachs, which apparently makes it impossible to stop farting. I'm not sure why having two stomachs would give rise to that problem, but there you go. Consequently, his dad leaves their family and he is constantly bullied at school. He befriends Alan, a boy genius with no sense of smell and together, they try to achieve Smash's dream of becoming an astronaut by harnessing the power of flatulence.

It's a ridiculous premise, but one that most kids would find amusing - except it's filmed in such a style that it's difficult for kids to get into it. It has a very muted palette and lots of repetition (ie, the characters only have one outfit each, every car is a green Mini, etc). For adults, the jokes are all pretty lame.

It's not terrible, but it also has very few redeeming features.

My rating: 2.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 2.9 / 10
Running time: 87 mins
IMDB link

Spy Kids 3: Game Over (2003)

[Movie 194 / Day 209]


The third and, mercifully, final installment of the Spy Kids trilogy is less a film, more an excuse to cram as many dodgy CGI 3D shots as possible into 90 minutes. The effects are bad, the plot is worse.

My rating: 3.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.1 / 10
Running time: 84 mins
IMDB link

Gattaca (1997)

[Movie 193 / Day 208]


Set in a future where genetically modified (valid) babies are the norm and naturally conceived (invalid) babies are seen and treated as second class citizens, Gattaca tells the story of one such invalid who cheats the system to realise his dreams and travel into space.

Extremely well acted, especially by Jude Law (who plays a crippled 'valid' who sells his DNA to Ethan Hawke's 'invalid') and Alan Arkin.

Sci-fi with a brain. It's brilliant.

My rating: 8.0 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.8 / 10
Running time: 106 mins
IMDB link