Movie Ramblings: Feast

Feast is a gloriously gory and blackly funny horror movie. On the face of it it is just your run of the mill strangers trapped in [remote location] fighting against [monster] type movie. But the way that it mixes dark comedy with violence, death and blood works really well for me. There is a lot of self reference in the film which is sometimes jarring, reminding you that you are watching a movie just when you were immersing yourself in the story. But it is funny and one of the things that sets the film apart from many other low budget splatter movies.

Movie Ramblings: Comedown

Comedown is a British horror movie set in a dilapidated London tower block. It is similar in many ways to Tower Block, Citadel and Attack the Block. It has the gritty grimy horror of Citadel and the gang violence and mentality of Tower Block and Attack. That said this is its own film with its own vibe and you don’t often feel like you are watching a copy of another movie.

Movie Ramblings: Underworld Evolution

Evolution is Kate Beckinsale’s second outing in the Underworld vampires vs werewolves franchise. This film picks up immediately following the events of the first movie and carries on in very much the same vein. Confusingly however, the first 10 minutes or so is backstory from hundreds of years ago which slightly ruins the flow from one film to the next. We find out a lot more history to the characters and their individual vendettas but this is somewhat laboured and often feels like back story for its own sake rather than because it adds to the story.

Movie Ramblings: Some Guy Who Kills People

Some Guy who Kills People on the face of it is a horror comedy film about revenge and it does this quite well. But it is also a sort of coming of age story about a man recently released from a psychiatric hospital coming to terms with his traumatic past and attempting to re-integrate into society and his dysfunctional family life. It is this story of adjustment that takes the fore and the gruesome murders that gradually dispose of all his old enemies form an absurdist background. The story is often touching and funny with the gruesome murders nicely done and presenting a nice counterpoint.

Movie Ramblings: Alien Raiders

Alien Raiders is my favourite kind of movie, it starts out looking like one thing and then becomes something else. Unfortunately, with the title “Alien Raiders” and the category Sci-Fi, it isn’t exactly a surprise when it switches from a robbery/hostage story to alien invasion story. Still, the film itself doesn’t hang around too long in the first genre so it isn’t much of a spoiler.

The direction that the story takes once the aliens are introduced is more interesting than the standard ordinary people stumbling across an alien invasion plot. I really liked the claustrophobic feel of the film with almost all of the action going on in one small supermarket and most of it in only a couple of small rooms.

Movie Ramblings: Bane

This film was definitely not what I expected. After reading the canned description that comes with the disc, I was prepared for the usual old story of a lone psycho kidnapping girls and torturing them to death for whatever twisted reasons the writers have come up with to justify the particular shock tactics that they want to employ to sell their movie. While there are elements of that kind of film in Bane, it is actually refreshingly different.

Although in places badly acted and suffering from very stilted dialogue and direction, the main story is pretty good and well told. Unfortunately the whole is somewhat let down by the ending. I like the ending in terms of story, it is reasonably original and interesting but it is really poorly told and, to be brutally honest doesn’t actually make any sense. If feels almost as if it was cut out and then put back in at the last minute either out of some feeling of needing to provide closure to the audience or from a desire not to leave out story and scenes that people had worked hard on.