The Bone Collector (1999)

If there has never been a porn parody, I'm on it.

Before a household movie night at the weekend, I hadn't watched The Bone Collector in perhaps ten years. Though I know it well, as it was one of the first movies I caught on TV that my mum actually allowed me to buy on VHS, even though I was several years younger than the rating demanded.  A thirteen-year-old me thought it was a pretty cool movie with a good crime mystery to it. A withered and haggard twenty-eight-year-old me thought it was a silly, nonsensical and hilariously '90s movie that was moth-eaten in so many places, I couldn't believe I never noticed its threadbare appearance before.

I didn't become an NYC cop to monitor
glory holes.

The movie opens (after the flashy and entirely too-long credit sequence) to an able-bodied Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) on assignment to retrieve the corpse of a fellow police officer who has died on the job. Some big heavy object comes hurtling at Washington out of nowhere and we cut to him waking up, in his luxurious apartment, being stared at by a falcon on the windowsill. If it sounds like this falcon, who appears numerous times, will have any relevance, you are already giving this movie far too much credit. Rhyme, it transpires, is a top forensic mind who continues on full pay as a detective from the confines of his home hospital bed, which is linked up to all the best and bulkiest gadgets that the '90s could muster. His friend/nurse is Thelma, played endearingly by Queen Latifah, and she is there to CPR him out of seizures and tell meddling police officers to fuck off.

We then meet Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie), who a nicely succinct scene tells us suffers insomnia and cannot bring herself to commit to a relationship. It seems the only thing that drives her in life is her job as an NYPD cop. Now lemme just stop it right there and say, "Kid -- does this seem familiar to you?" If it's not already ringing bells, the rest of the movie will beat you over the head with how much it wants to be Silence of the Lambs. This may be too early to outline the entire thing, but bear with me. The Bone Collector, in a nutshell, involves a young female law enforcer with trauma in her past, who somehow hooks up with a restrained genius that will help her catch a serial killer, and perhaps alleviate her past horrors by saving the lives of innocent strangers. There is also a sexual undertone to the relationship between the cop and the genius. When rewatching this movie, I took the director for some naive newcomer whose ambitiousness was commendable, but was let down by material not even fit to polish Silence's good bag and cheap shoes. It was only upon researching that I realised Phillip Noyce was at the helm: by 1999 he was a veteran filmmaker, and had turned out some decent thrillers, including Dead Calm, which I really enjoyed. Perhaps Noyce was feeling lazy, or just taking easy jobs.

Amelia takes a call on the job one day, to be met at the shabby railway tracks by a young street kid, who alerts her to the half-buried body of a man. She spots what appears to be neatly laid-out clues from the perp, and has the balls to run at an oncoming train with her flashlight in an attempt to preserve the evidence. Now don't ask me how the hell it happens, but this incident somehow results in her showing up with colleagues at Rhyme's apartment in no time, and suddenly she is on the case. Rhyme apparently takes a liking to Amelia's tenacity and constantly teary eyes, and begins to read her for filth in the fashion of the 'magical negro' stereotype; note that this is also how he solves crimes. Throughout the movie, he spouts out random words and numbers in a way that clearly make sense to him, but the visuals present it as utterly random, and there is no way the audience can follow Rhyme with his logic like they should, and like other, better productions would allow them to. We are never sure where his instincts or logic come from, and by the time all the loose ends have been supposedly tied up, the way Rhyme arrives at what turn out to be correct conclusions never makes any goddamn sense. 

Their initial reaction to the script.

And that's not through lack of trying to help the audience make sense of it all. It's just that the writer and director clearly thought that their audience would be entirely braindead and unable to understand the basics, let alone the more integral plot points. A sequence towards the end demonstrates this, in which Jolie comes across the final clue and adopts the methods of thinking that Rhyme has impressed upon her throughout the story. She stares fixedly at the number of an abandoned train carriage, while muttering, "Help me Rhyme, help me!" and the visuals do some silly sepia montage of different places she might have seen the number. Now these visuals (let's just forget the stupid dialogue ever happened) could have worked in a far less cheesy way had the director established this visual theme earlier on. As I mentioned, the camera often just sits, looking at Rhyme along with his colleagues, waiting for him to spout his random wisdom, and when he does, everyone springs into action. The earlier scenes of his thinking and deducing could have also had these sepia montages, and then the whole thread of Rhyme teaching Donaghy to be a good detective could have felt fluent and deserved. Instead, it just jumps out of nowhere and seems laughable. It is topped when she finally figures the clue out, and exclaims, "He's going to kill Rhyme!", as if the visuals hadn't just given us that information on a silver platter. 

So the plot... well, the man buried by the train tracks turns out to be a man who we earlier saw hailing a cab with his wife from an airport, but being accosted by the driver. His wife is still missing. Later one or two totally unimportant and unestablished characters are pounced upon by some dude in a balaclava, and each time, he leaves ridiculous clues for the police to find. I guess the conspicuousness of the clues doesn't matter though, as the clues themselves make no fucking sense anyhow, and if it weren't for Rhyme's magical omniscience, they would never be solved by anyone.

Long story short, some dickhead is recreating murders from some old crime novel, which Amelia finds, and thankfully doesn't have to read, as all the important points are illustrated -- how convenient. Given the standard of dialogue, I'm almost surprised she doesn't blurt out, "The killer is copying this book!" in the style of "It's goblin spelled backwards!" The movie tries weakly to imply that one of Rhyme's many professional associates is the culprit, focusing mainly on the flamboyant Latino who makes the odd joke.

I'm your number one fan!

Since we're here, we may as well talk about the conclusion of this stupid movie. No, the killer isn't Manny or whatever his stereotypical Mexican name was; it's Richard, the geek who hovers in the background, tuning up Rhyme's heart monitors or some shit. Richard gives the silliest fucking 'culprit spills the tea' scene I have ever seen. It would seem that two or three brief flashes in this movie are meant to imply that at some point, a few cops were put away for some sort of corrupt act, although it is never elaborated upon. Turns out - and you can thank the clunky dialogue for me knowing this - that Richard was one of the cops incriminated by some paper or other that Rhyme wrote, and so after being donut-punched in federal for six years, he spent another two learning how to tweak crappy late-'90s PC monitors in order to get to kill Lincoln Rhyme. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a monumental waste of time and energy.

And if you thought that was crazy, you ought to hear the rest. Rhyme's nearest and dearest know that he fears a seizure that would vegetate him, and so has suicide plans in place. Knowing that what he dreads most is becoming a "vegetable", Richard sets upon him, asking him what sort of vegetable he wants to be. A carrot or a zucchini. Christ, way to take the seriousness out of a scene! Well thankfully, Rhyme's state of the art hospital bed just happens to have an emergency collapse mode -- cos why wouldn't that be useful in a medical situation? -- and he traps Richard's fingers in the frame, before biting his neck and dragging him along like a limp-limbed hyena. It is truly funny, and takes all the wind out of the drama's sails. 

Nothing makes sense in this picture. The killer's motives are stupid, the clues are ludicrous, and the implications of unfinished plot threads are worse. What of Amelia's boyfriend? Does she learn through her struggles to commit to a relationship? I dunno, but she certainly became more comfortable with molesting comatose cripples. Does Lincoln learn to value life more? Apparently, but it's only so that the movie can end on the cheesiest, stupidest Christmas ending I ever fucking saw. Amelia's depression and old traumas are only ever alluded to, yet her whole character seems to hang on them. Is she now at peace with her father's suicide, and can she go forward in life? God knows, but she looks hot in a slinky black dress while putting presents under Rhyme's tree. 

So glad we got over our individual traumas,
thanks to the magic of crime-solving
 and Christmas.

And if all of this didn't seem vapid and tone-deaf enough, guess what song they chose for the closing credits? Don't Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush! The musical tone and the themes of the song only fit this movie in the loosest sense, and it reminds me of those god-awful slow, belting versions of songs that Celine Dion or whoever would sing at the end of '90s Disney movies. There is an old TV movie from about the same time called Perfect Body, starring former Power Ranger Amy Jo Johnson, about a gymnast training to Olympic standard, who develops an eating disorder. After all the trouble and trauma this causes her, the final scene is of the girl in a dimly-lit gym, once again mounting the horse, while Don't Give Up plays softly in the background. That movie uses the song perfectly, but The Bone Collector left me baffled with this choice.

Roger Ebert once said that the cast of The Bone Collector was too good for the material, and now I absolutely get what he was saying. I watched this with five or six people, all of whom recognised some of the character actors. This movie strikes me as a strictly Paycheck Picture. I'm sure it was largely forgotten six months after its release, and if not for the odd TV rerun, it would be a footnote on many successful actors' resumes.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

The second instalment of the Jumanji reboot turned out to be more enjoyable than I anticipated, and makes for a really nifty little family adventure movie during the winter holidays. Only weeks ago, I declared that the first chapter was 'giving me cancer' while my daughter watched on eagerly, and my main grievances were the waffer-theen stereotypes of characters that were defined by no more than two traits apiece, and the pacing of both narrative and comedy. I wasn't hyped to see this movie, and ended up having a lot more fun this time around.

So my first observation before watching was how and more importantly why the characters would play the game again. The setup had the advantage of the real-life characters being embodied by avatars that could remain consistent, so perhaps Jumanji would be found and unwittingly stumbled into by another group of kids. However, despite the same quartet landing in the jungles of Jumanji for a second time, the movie at least cares to give it some prompting: Spencer (Alex Wolff) has broken up with Martha (Morgan Turner) during their first year at separate colleges, and has hit that part of young adult life where he doesn't know who he is or what he is doing. What he does know is that living in the body of Dwayne Johnson for a brief period won him the girl the first time around, and even gave him a little sense of purpose. When he doesn't show up for the group's reunion brunch, they grow worried and go to his house, where they find he has rewired the game and started again.

This movie had all the potential to be a really dreary retread of its predecessor, and it pulls out several stops to avoid this, the first of which being the additional characters of Milo (Danny Glover), Grampa Eddie (Danny DeVito) and Ming (Awkwafina), the second of which being more body-swapping than you can shake a stick at. What I really loved about this movie was how much fun and freedom the actors were allowed by the script. Due to the game console being smashed, the kids don't get assigned their former avatars, and Eddie and Milo accidentally get sucked into playing too. Later, pools of glowing water are found to have crazy swapping powers, meaning that each actor gets to embody at least two of their costars over the course of the narrative. My personal favourite among these was Ming acting as DeVito: her voice and mannerisms are spot on, and every second was a joy to watch.

Of course, the real original '90s Jumanji fell into the fantasy narrative trope in which characters have to navigate a series of deadly encounters to reach safety, and the reboots are no different. This movie drops its momentum at one point with a few skits that only slow the progress, but generally has a decent flow and is largely exciting. A particular scene involving a maze of rope bridges that move like the staircases at Hogwarts stands out in terms of action and imagination, and the picture generally looks vibrant and fun.

One issue that the film carries on from its predecessor is a lack of game-oriented cinematography. The narratives make great use of the video game environment, with dialogue that reflects the tropes of non-player characters, but in many cases adopt a fairly standard action camera setup with quick cuts and conventional angles. It could have been fun to use more third-person angles that show characters from above and behind like video games tend to do, or perhaps oddities in the developing backdrops as the camera pans. Thinking in more gameish terms with the cinematography could really pull the other elements together and create a truly immersive gaming movie experience. 

The original set of kid and adult actors reprise their roles very nicely, with the particular zest that we have come to expect from Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black. Some great additions include Rory 'the Hound' McCann as the latest evil overlord threatening Jumanji's safety, and the aforementioned Awkwafina as Ming, who was truly entertaining. DeVito and Glover's characters bring a sense of sentimentality that the Williams Jumanji used to humanise an otherwise wacky story, and offer plenty of prime meat for the actors impersonating them to chew on. 

Jumanji: The Next Level delivers more than one might expect from a movie of its sort, and has a relentless sense of fun to it. Director and co-writer Jake Kasdan creates a really cool atmosphere and, aside from the odd slip-up here and there, knows exactly what kind of movie he's making. It's far from a perfect or artistically intriguing movie, but it never takes itself too seriously, ticks all the boxes and leaves its audience feeling exhilarated and thoroughly entertained.

The Lion King (2019)

The Lion King may have just scooped the medal for the Disney remake I have hated the most to date. It doesn't seem to have any relation with how much I loved its original, or even the level of effort put in by the many hardworking artists who produced the retread. This movie has undoubtedly achieved something monumental, and that is photorealism, but this is its Achilles heel.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, the problem that stuck out at me was the impossibility of expressing emotion through the look of the animals. We all remember the original sequence that follows Mufasa's death, in which Scar tells Simba to run away. The traumatised little cub gives one last glimpse of fear, turns on his heels and runs. But all that this situation gives us this time around is a lion cub running, and this is how the entire show plays out. All emotion has to be conveyed either in dialogue or in narrative, and because this is not pulled off, the entire movie lacks any sense of urgency, momentum or feeling. Even the speech feels detached from the animals, often coming off as more of a voiceover than characters talking diegetically.

Simba's excited face

The opening sequence is a shot for shot remake of the original's, and serves splendidly as a showcase of the talent and progress that the Disney company consists of. It looks entirely authentic, with beautiful use of lighting and texture, and oddly for a special effects movie, it consistently peaks during its scenes of bright daylight. The actual look, movement and texture of the picture is second to none, and should be recognised, but every other element is weak and drags the whole product down.

Disney's biggest achievement to date

Despite the narrative being copied and pasted from the '90s, the dough has been slammed down on that countertop and stretched to near transparency. The journey of Simba's fur (not a burst of dust that spells out 'sex' in the night sky) to Rafiki's hands goes on for a couple of minutes, allowing us to witness its progress through the wind, the water, and the digestive tract of a giraffe. Trouble is that we gain nothing from this expansion, and such attempts to fill an extended run time causes the film to drag a lot more than it should. Disney Classics were almost always succinct, neatly crafted narratives that start and end exactly where they should, but the live action counterparts seem to think that it's not a movie if it's less than two hours long.

Casting choices for this picture have drawn some attention, and it has its strengths and weaknesses. Prominently, James Earl Jones becomes possibly the first person ever to play the same role in an original film and its remake by returning to voice Mufasa, which is fun, but too many times I found myself thinking I preferred the way he did it 20 years ago. Donald Glover gives perhaps the best performance as Simba, although his younger singing counterpart surprisingly struggles. Chiwetel Ejiofor is forgettable as Scar, John Oliver's Zazu is nowhere near as entertaining as Rowan Atkinson's, Seth Rogen is amusing as Pumbaa. The choice that really got under my skin was Beyonce, whose participation as Nala was stretched with the addition of lots of pointless lines, and was outstandingly poor. Beyonce is not an actress, and her delivery feels totally without direction and mismatched to the action. What really slaps me in the face, though, is the fact that she sings as Nala in Can You Feel the Love Tonight? (incidentally, I couldn't), and minutes later sings as a regular soundtrack contributor, which is nonsensical and sycophantic. They clearly went out of their way to give Mrs Carter a bigger role than she is capable of.

You may or may not have noticed a pattern emerging. Disney's glaring sense of political correctness is evident in the casting choices. I get the impression that the company was proactive about the inevitable SJW force that would stamp their feet at the prospect of westerners telling a story set in Africa, and decided to cushion that fall by hiring a predominantly black cast. After all, the Disney Store pulled Maui costumes from their stock because crybabies whined that they were appropriating other people's cultures.

Simba's scared face

After the opening number, the action begins to step out periodically in its own direction, but this leads to poorly staged musical numbers. Another strength of the Disney Classic is the arrangement and choreography of musical numbers, which are always so polished in their presentation. This movie all but erases Be Prepared, which certainly contributes to Scar's apparent lack of character and motive, and I Just Can't Wait to Be King consists almost entirely of the lion cubs running. No flair, no backup dancing from the other animals. Also missing, much to my dismay was Timon's hula dance, replaced with a weird meta performance of the first few bars of Be Our Guest. This moment felt so entirely out of left field, and is just one example of Timon and Pumbaa's sometimes odd comic relief.

My feelings are far from original, but I hate what Disney has become - a lazy money machine. All creativity seems to have been drained from the company, which dictates to the  passionate and talented artists who ultimately make the picture. The sequels and remakes have left me wrung down, brung down, hung up and all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things. Despite its many ups and downs, Disney's origins are full of heart and passion, but its modern self has abandoned all principles. The Lion King remake is a prime example of its debauchery.

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

The Rage: Carrie 2 was probably one of the first sequels I ever saw to a classic horror movie. Carrie, as I have documented before but have yet to formally review, was a conquest of my early adolescence that bordered on obsession, and it remains one of my favourite horrors of all time. My stepsister showed me this sequel when I was about 14, and strangely, I have grown to love it. Years ago, it was a movie I would watch in deepest secrecy, for fear of word getting out that I actually enjoyed such an obviously inferior product; nowadays I adhere to the Dave Gorman school of thought when it comes to the concept of ‘guilty pleasures’ (look this up if you don’t catch my meaning – it’s most amusing and true). I used to love to ride this movie’s ass and say how dreadful it was, but my understanding of film grew at twice the rate of my every other form of maturation, hence my now differing opinion .

How do filmmakers usually achieve a sequel when the lead characters have already been killed off? They resurrect the characters; they repeat the events of the first movie with a new bunch of characters; they continue the story of those who may still be living. Enter Amy Irving, who wisely or not decided to reprise her role of Sue Snell, who is now a middle-aged woman, working as a high school counsellor, somewhat haunted by her involvement in the whole Carrie White debacle some twenty years earlier. That’s fine, but she wasn’t the one with a special power, and it wouldn’t be Carrie if it didn’t have telekinesis. Enter Emily Bergl as Rachel, an unusual looking grunge kid who lives with gnarly trucker foster parents thanks to her own mother’s incarceration at the local asylum. She embodies the ‘90s Nirvana mood – listening to Marilyn Manson and Billie Holliday, passing her evenings working in a photo hut, sneaking her beloved dog Walter into the house at night. She is so befitting the revival of the tormented high school girl.

Boy, didn't think the critics would hate it
this much!

It wouldn’t be a modern high school flick without cliques, which is the engine of this movie’s climax. Rachel is the usual grungy outcast, and her only friend Lisa (Mena Suvari) promptly kills herself in a spectacular effects sequence, having been dumped by a jock she questionably gave her virginity to the night before. The jocks keep a crass system, awarding points to each other according to the girls they sleep with, and Lisa is the game’s latest victim. When the jocks realise they could be in deep shit - having played around with underage girls, prompting one to commit suicide - they decide that ‘damage control’ is the way to go, and they set about making sure Lisa’s only friend won’t squeal on them.

In the midst of all this, one particularly upstanding jock, Jesse (Jason London) decides that what they are doing is wrong (several girls into his scoresheet, of course), and happens to grow close to Rachel. This attracts the cattiness of Tracy, the girl he has blown off, who also becomes determined to take revenge on Rachel. In a mere week, Rachel has gone from invisible virgin outcast with one living friend, to deflowered public enemy #1 with no living friends. High school, eh?

No way the chicks can resist our wet-look
hair gel and sweater vests, man!

Was there a part of you that ever felt like Chris and Billy got off easy in that spinning firey blaze of a car, or that Norma’s assumed unconscious death by smoke inhalation could have been more brutal? Fear not, friends, for this is a late ‘90s movie, and more blood must be spilled than from that suspended metal bucket. That means exploding eyeballs sharded with glass, and testicles ripped off with harpoons, and even a fatal stabbing by CD (guess the format knew it was doomed, wanted to take a bitch out with it!) The finale of the film is a thoroughly enjo

yable flaming bloodbath, and doesn’t it always suck that little bit more when the location being torched is a multi-million dollar mansion of a house, rather than a crappy old school gym?

So what’s the catch? What makes this Carrie 2? The big revelation is that after Carrie’s Daddy Ralph ran away (this is much more detailed in the novella than the 1976 film), one of the hussies he gave a damn-good Bible lesson to was Rachel’s mom, impregnating her with a telekinetic spawn ready to wreak havoc on her high school in later years. That Ralph! 

Ohhh no ya don't! If we have to endure Jason
London's horrible delivery, you do too!

This movie is by no means perfect, and there are still some parts that make me chuckle. Jason London’s delivery, having arrived at the finale party late and found nothing short of a mass teenage grave in flames, runs to Rachel saying, ‘They’re all dead – we gotta get outta here, let’s go’. As if he were a secretary announcing the name of the next patient the doctor was ready to see; totally casual. The asylum is staffed by the most incompetent nurses ever, who fail to notice a patient escaping, but grab another patient who was right next to the door at the same time and drag them off in a backwards-run. I mean, no need to soothe a mental patient dude, just grab them from behind unannounced and literally run with them. No biggy. It’s the small things that make the movie unintentionally funny, and the big things that make it unintentionally good.

Me, pretending to be outraged by this movie

For a number of years – ever since I grew to not hate myself for enjoying this film – I have been firm in my opinion that this would be a good movie, were it not the sequel to Carrie. If this could have just been The Rage, without any links to Brian DePalma’s movie or even Stephen King’s book, and been your average teen angst horror, it would have been great. But by adding that little subtitle, and insisting on trying to milk the bosom of a twenty-five year old movie, it throws away any such credibility.

Artistically, the movie is fairly sound. Some fun is had with black-and-white visuals, and distorted angles and frame speed, while the aforementioned suicide sequence still blows my mind to this day, and I wish the DVD had some kind of documentary that would explain their technique. Because I’m still not quite sure how they did it, and that is the kind of movie I admire. The music is a major strength, with a beautiful haunting theme melody that is performed alternately on piano, keyboard and electric guitar. It is grimy, atmospheric and so well suited. It is perhaps the best thing about this film. The script is nothing special, but it is surprisingly well acted – particularly by the younger members of the cast – and looking back, it fits very nicely into the young late ‘90s horror landscape. It’s very much worth an hour and forty of your time. Just try to forget the whole ‘it’s the sequel to Carrie’ thing.

Killer Barbys (1996)

This was a cheap indulgence of a movie in several ways. It cost me two quid, and it looks like they paid the graphic designer of the cover art about the same wage, so the poor little Quasimodo of a DVD was waiting for someone like me to come pick it up, like Toy Story but with home media: they have hopes and dreams, and the forgotten clones of celluloid B look at the moon through the window of the DVD store each night and dream of a horror freak who will love them as they are. Killer Barbys (or Vampire Killer Barbys according to the cover) was that little outcast, and I was the horror freak.

I took a chance, took a ch-ck-ch-chance chance on it because it had Jess Franco's name on it. I've reviewed several Francos, both for UKHS and my own blogs, and his iconic status in European horror makes any little fantasy of his worth my time. Bloody Moon was highly amusing '80s kitch, while Female Vampire was far more typical of Franco's love for gothic naked vampiresses and had an X-Rated cut available. Killer Barbys fits somewhere in between, following the ordeal of mid-'90s punk band The Killer Barbies (a real band in a sort of semi-autobiographical Jagger-type movie portrayal), whose van breaks down in the misty woods on their way to a gig. The three guys and two gals spend most of their time fucking and smoking joints (my kind of people), and do the classic split thing when a creepy old sage in a nice suit invites them to take refuge at the castle of Countess von Fledermaus nearby. The horniest couple stay behind to alleviate some of their horniness, while the others head up to the castle.

Vintage Franco

The old guy, we know, is the lover/secretary of the Countess, who at first is a sinewy corpse gasping on silk bedsheets, starved of the young blood that sustains her vitality. One or two of the band get picked off and used to rejuvenate the Countess enough to show herself to her guests, one of whom she seduces very swiftly over dinner and fucks to death. This, naturally, involves a lengthy sequence of the Countess writhing on the naked body of her doomed lover, covered in his blood.

The movie is thrown off terribly by the presence of an unhumorously comic trio, a freak and two dwarfs he keeps as 'children', who don't kill the horny couple in the woods as we so obviously expect them to, but wank over the sight of them boning, and swap all the punk Barbie dolls decorating the band van with animal skeletons. They are a bad joke to the end, and actively detract from the steam of the movie's engine, in a fashion darkly reminiscent of my beloved bumbling cops in Craven's Last House on the Left.

As a Franco, the movie operates on about a quarter of the production budget that US movies would, and it shows from beginning to end. Highlights include poor visual angles as we watch the Countess 'stab' her lover's 'body' and totally not the mattress right next to him; and the obvious mannequin being thrown out of the window in lieu of a stunt double is movie gold (see The Sinful Dwarf). Franco's style is firmly burrowed in the early '80s, and refuses to update, except for funky '90s clothing. The girls spend the majority of the movie in a t-shirt and panties at the most and just silver go-go boots at the least. The Countess is a fucking stunning 'older' woman who we get to see writhe around naked. A Francophile will be in their fucking element with Killer Barbys.

The music is another strength: although the title song by The Killer Barbies is overused, the early-'90s grunge-punk music is invigorating, and ironic enough to contrast the screen action to good effect. So far, all the Franco movies I've seen have been very distinct, despite Jess's reputation for a couple of favourite subgenre themes. Killer Barbys is a fun, poorly dubbed and unique viewing experience that is 90 minutes well spent, and a pretty cool introduction to the real life Killer Barbies discography.

The Craft (1996)

The Craft has something of a notorious place within my existence. As I have written before, my parents were hippies and Wiccans, and I was raised within the Pagan community for the first eight-or-so years of my life. When my Mum's Catholic piano teacher died of cancer around that time, my mother, for whatever reason, had some metanoia and suddenly became a Catholic and insisted on taking me and my younger siblings with me - causing much turmoil between Mum and me in my early adolescence. My dad continued as a privately practicing Pagan, telling my sister Relly and me every night and every time we said goodbye 'Goddess bless you'. He continues to do so to this day.


When I was 12, my awesome stepsister was 'babysitting' me and Rell one night, and showed us the movie The Craft. I started making mental connections, and one day confronted my mother, 'Were we Wiccans?' and she was very quick to shut down the conversation. A year later, I was well-studied in Wicca and had had many informative discussions with my old man, and considered myself a practicing Wiccan. One day I made the mistake of mentioning The Craft to my Mum and she went ballistic, and confiscated my video of the movie. Upon my fifteenth birthday (the movie is a 15 certificate in the UK), I rebelliously flaunted my very own DVD copy, with the knowledge that legally my mother couldn't stop me!

Of all old favourite movies, The Craft remains mostly unchanged in my estimations over the years: it is not a great movie, but it's a bloody good teen movie that many millions hold dear as a cult favourite. Sarah (Robin Tunney) has moved to some town from San Francisco with her father and stepmother. Their house is the perfect modern witch house, and on the rainy day they move in, Sarah is confronted by a local bum carrying a snake. Her father chases him off the property. When she starts at the local Catholic school - where the kids have to wear uniform - she attracts the attention of Wiccan trio Nancy (the gorgeous Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell in the midst of her '90s peak) and Rochelle (Rachel True), who sense that Sarah is the 'fourth' that they have been seeking to complete their ritualistic circle.

Although the girls get off to a bumpy start after introducing Sarah to their shoplifting habits at a local occult store, they quickly become close friends and develop their cumulative powers. Meanwhile, jock Chris (Skeet Ulrich, also of Scream), has expressed an interest in Sarah, but spreads vicious rumours about her the day after she turns down his invitation to go back to his house. Chris, having previously done something similar to Nancy, draws both the contempt of the circle and the infatuation of Sarah, and his subjectivity to their powers is ultimately his undoing.

The girls each pursue their individual angsts with their newly developed powers: they are good characters in their own contexts, and played well by their respective actors, and they have a fabulous chemistry as an ensemble, which we all know is of high importance to any good teen movie. Although the actors were all into their 20s at the least (Rachel True was actually 30, and has aged incredibly in the years since!), they really invoke that high school feeling that any adolescent can identify with, and as a teenager, I loved that I saw parallels between the girls and myself. There is rage, and jealousy, and rivalry, and social frustration, and who hasn't been there, and felt that it was the end of the world?

Of course, The Craft is somewhat exaggerated in the realities of Pagan practice. I have never known of a Pagan who could carry out the tricks that these girls do, because that's not how magick works. It's about the use of energies and the powers of nature, it's not about levitation and metamorphosis and casting hallucinations. But the fantastical quality that the fictionally 'witchy' theme brings is a brilliant way to tie the whole picture together, and to visually manifest the raging hormones and firey emotions of a group of teenagers. The Craft is no masterpiece, but it is exactly what it sets out to be: a highly relatable and entertaining teen movie, and it is very dear to me.

The Haunting (1999)

I wanna tell y'all, my dear readers, about a little town nestled among the Lincolnshire hills and fields. An old market town full to the rafters with chavs and scum, it has aptly served as the base of my mother's career as a prosecutor for the last fifteen years. With more boarded up shops than open ones and an active disdain for the young, it is the worst place I have ever had the misfortune of spending an extended period of time in. Hell, it is the hometown of none other than the Milk Snatcher Herself, and I went to the same high school that she did. There is absolutely no redeeming quality of this town, except perhaps one... Not five miles outside of this shitheap, is a miniscule green village called Harlaxton, that is home to not much more than an old manor house that now is a campus for US university students. This manor house served as location for Jan de Bont's 1998 'remake' of the classic horror tale, here titled 'The Haunting'.

It is perhaps the most spectacular place you could imagine. Open only a few days a year to the public, my sister and I were once dragged along to the Manor for a string quartet recital. Naturally, we snuck out of the recital room and began to roam the expansive halls of the house, and it was unlike anything we had ever seen. While at this concert, Mum's friends asked her if we had seen 'The Haunting' yet, and she duly obliged maybe a week later with a VHS copy. At 12, it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen, and I was far from a stranger to horror at that point.

OK guys, if you could approach this awful script with only 10%
 of your talent....and ACTION!

I watched it again the other day, having read on forums for years how terrible people thought it was. I had long wondered what I was seeing that they weren't, and I now opine that they were able to get past the relatively few visually-haunting sequences and look at all the primary factors that came together to create this really silly movie. As a film buff, I can now say that director Jan de Bont is one of the culprits. He is another I would classify with Renny Harlin, in that through big and not-so-big budget, they have proven time and time again that they can sustain a respectable movie career without ever really making good movies. They are also both in the habit of starting strong and ending flaccid.

This kid needs a sound beating

Consider de Bont's probably best known picture as director, Speed. We all know and love that movie. But can you show me anyone who doesn't think the whole tacked-on ending with the subway train was the most festering form of overkill to what had been, until that point, a good movie? Harlin often does the same - and often overestimates his genius for good measure - and Th
e Haunting is caught red-handed committing this sin. However, rather like with Harlin's cult classic Deep Blue Sea, de Bont's fate is sealed by his overall directive technique, and his shameless misuse of decent actors.

Yeeeaaahh... if I could get a room with "less to dust", so to
speak... that'd be great!

I like Lili Taylor, and would later go on to appreciate her in such roles as Paula Klaw in The Notorious Bettie Page, but when faced with both her acceptance of this role and her performance in it, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry for her. Many a good actor has faltered under shoddy direction over the years, and she is one of them. Even the likes of Liam Neeson and the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones are not enough to save this picture, and the goofy addition of Owen Wilson just takes the cake.

Nell (Taylor) has spent the last decade or so caring for her invalid mother, and struggles with insomnia because of her constant need to attend to the old woman, even now she's dead. She receives a mysterious phone call advising her to look in the paper, where she finds an advert for a paid sleep study conducted by one Dr David Marrow (Neeson). Marrow, we see meanwhile, is in fact studying fear, and is luring bad sleepers to this "Addams Family mansion" under false pretense in order to do so. What Marrow doesn't seem to have counted upon is there being some vague familial link between Nell and the builder of the house Hugh Crane, whose horrifying portrait hangs in the foyer of the manor and gradually decays.

Cool portrait bro... paint it again.

One assertion I maintain is that there are still a handful of creepy-ass sequences that shit me up, even now. However, the movie goes waaaaay overboard with the crappy late-90s CGI, turning the third act into one long and ridiculous merry-go-round. As much as they may think otherwise, characters largely neglect to do any real thinking about their situation, and they serve as mere vehicles for a rather perplexing and weak script, so by the end of it, however creeped out (or not) we may be as viewers, we still don't give a toss about any of the characters either way. The patchy backstory of Hugh Crane and what is causing the haunting is fed us throughout, but it never really adds up, and even now, I don't think I really get it all. So either I'm getting stupider, or this is just a bad script. Tough call.

Showgirls (1995)

Showgirls is surely the best bad movie ever made. It doesn’t matter which way you look at it, it’s a really shit movie, but it is sooooo shit that it is humiliatingly enjoyable. I advise from experience that anybody watching Showgirls with a partner or group do so from the outset: I have been driven mad by the many idiot friends I had squatting in my house in the past, who would wander in halfway through and say, ‘What’s this fucking porn you’re watching?’ I guess writers Verhoeven and Eszterhas would be thrilled at the prospect, but it wore my patience thin.
Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley from Saved by the Bell) hitches her way to Las Vegas to be a ‘dancer’, and gets her suitcase stolen. Somehow, by vandalising a car and almost getting mowed down by another car, she attracts the affection of seamstress Molly, even when she is breathing vomit breath like….right into her fucking face. Molly’s a good friend. A few weeks later, the girls are best friends. Molly works on the show Goddess sewing costumes, while Nomi has found gainful employment at the gentlemen’s club The Cheetah (ref: Roger Ebert’s definition of a gentlemen’s club). Nomi dances like a hot epileptic on amphetamines. But she gets naked and I guess that’s what the johns pay to see, so she somehow makes a living this way.

Gross

Meanwhile, she naturally dreams of rising to the top, and becoming the headline star of Goddess. Obnoxious glamorous redneck Crystal Connors (Gina Gerschon) is top of the bill, in the bosses’ high esteem, and the squeeze of sleazy hotel promoter Zach (Kyle MacLachlan). Nomi’s sociopathic attitude makes her a perfect fit in Vegas and a perfect match for the slimeballs she has to audition for to wiggle her way to the top. But her outrageous behaviour, which must surely place her somewhere high on the autistic spectrum, is good for laugh-a-minute comedy. Consider the fate of the poor French fries, having found their way into Nomi’s cardboard tray outside a diner. She is angry at being questioned by Molly, and having practically disembowelled a bottle of ketchup with a single thrust, she sets about the poor innocent fries and shoves them all over the table in a frustrated jerk. This must be some new trendy kind of eating disorder. Everything she orders hits the deck before she even unwraps it!

Showgirls is bad, like I’m bad, chamone, you know it. And almost every line makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons. When it’s not dialogue that’s making you bite your tongue, it’s usually one or another factor of Berkley’s frenetic physical delivery. The infamous pool sex scene between Nomi and Zack leaves us all wondering how she escaped the debacle without either a broken back or water on the lungs; while her licking the strip pole of the Cheetah club leaves us all wondering if she escaped the debacle without several venereal diseases.

I have long wondered to what extent Showgirls portrays the true Vegas underground. I mean, who could resist auditioning for a guy whose opening line is ‘A lot of people say that I’m a prick – I AM a prick!’? What fat slobbery male in the rabid audience of the Cheetah could fail to spunk his pants over the riddle ‘Ya know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!’? That is apparently meant to be a joke, but quite frankly, I have heard funnier things during biopsies. At some point you have to ask yourself how Ezsterhas ended up being the highest paid writer in Hollywood in the mid-‘90s, when his most rousing one-liners were the likes of ‘Dancing ain’t fucking’ and ‘You ain’t just a pain in my head and a pain in my dick, you also a pain in my ass!’ I am of the educated assumption that his status has slipped somewhat in the years since.

However, some of the characters and their whole beings are caricatures created entirely for the LOLs. Al, the slimy cigar-chewing manager of the Cheetah club was born to be in the business, and beautifully describes his profession to new girl Penny in the elevator pitch of the century. ‘He pays, you take him in the back. You can touch him, he cannot touch you. Unless he gives ya a big tip. If he cums, it’s OK. If he takes it out and cums all over ya, call the bouncer. Unless he pays ya. You wanna last a week, you gimme a blow job. First I get ya used to the money, then I make ya swallow.’ Don’t call us Al, we’ll call you.

Nomi, bless her dumb liplined little heart, is an unwitting source of comedy in her idiocy. From her now-legendary mispronunciation of Versace, to her hideously OTT reactions to most situations, she is comedy gold. Of course, in real life, she would have no friends and considerably more mutilations. She talks to people like shit, throws and smashes things continually, and is in the habit of making men feel instantly uncomfortable by talking about her period. Take that Al – your misogynist shit is no match for period talk!

She also has the oddest ideas about what turns people on. Her dance routines are absurd, her boning technique probably the cause of many a fractured penis over the years, and her stripteases are more like paid face-rapings. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Zach having been humped to within an inch of his life in a strip club, who now had to try and enjoy the rest of his night out with cum in his pants. I mean, is that what his girlfriend paid $500 for? The logistics of this could have been better planned, methinks.

Showgirls has to be seen to be believed, and loved. It stands as a favourite of many cult figures such as Elvira and Michelle Visage, and enjoys the same sort of midnight cult following that Rocky has embodied for decades. It is the sort of movie that should be enjoyed responsibly with a crate of beer and some pizza – while you sit back and secretly thank your stars for Nomi not being there… that pizza would be under the wheels of the nearest pick-up truck before the box was even opened.