St. Trinian's (2007)

 St. Trinian's has attitude oozing from every cinematic and dramatic pore. It typifies the last peak of real comedy, before fear of offending people became such a central social construct. It perfectly ties the visual wackiness of Ronald Searle's cartoons, the very kinky camp of the newly liberated '60s movies, and the wider spectrum of weirdness that was the nova of the 2000s. It achieved all this before the scene imploded into the comically-emasculated era we are now stuck in. Drag, drugs and innuendo are the heart of this picture, in perfect keeping with the infamous reputation that St. Trinian's has held for decades. I saw this movie in the cinema upon its initial release, and as a fifteen-year-old, really enjoyed the rebellion and overall craziness; but it has proven to be one of those movies like Beetlejuice or Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, that I realise, upon each subsequent viewing, contains lots of clever and well-masked adult jokes. This is your perfect 'family' movie, the kind that is all but dead now, but was still staggering on during my own teenage years.

Don't worry - they are all of age.

Annabel Fritton (Talulah Riley) is marooned at St. Trinian's school by her rich, neglectful father (Rupert Everett), where her estranged aunt Camilla (also Rupert Everett) is the flirtatious and boundless headmistress. Her new classmates put Annabel through the ringer, testing her ability to be one of them, while the school's chaotic educational and financial habits put it into foreclosure. In a staunch effort to avoid being sent to 'normal schools', the girls plan a heist in which they will steal a priceless piece of art and sell it on the black market to bring their beloved sanctuary back into the black. Helming this mission are Flash Harry (Russell Brand in his mid-'00s heyday) and head girl Kelly (Gemma Arterton). 

It's hard to make a movie that really speaks to young people. Teenagers were a newly-discovered breed in the 1950s, and music and book genres scrambled to keep up with the fresh demand. But real young adult cinema has always been a rare underdog of a genre, and any picture that dared to walk the line generally fell on either the terrible side, or the fantastic side. Roger Ebert once said of Richard Linklater's School of Rock, "[it] is about as serious as it can be about its comic subject, and never condescends to its characters or its audience. The kids aren't turned into cloying little clones, but remain stubborn, uncertain, insecure and kidlike." His take on School of Rock ran through my head for the entire running time of St. Trinian's. This movie is aligned entirely with its young characters, completely understanding their emotions and motives; meanwhile, adult figures of authority are also rounded people, whose vices form a common ground between child and grownup. 

Love story of the century

Miss Fritton carries on the grand tradition of the headmistress of St. Trinian's being a man in drag. Rupert Everett, a veteran of campy comedy, is the jewel in this crown. His performance is affected just on the verge of silliness, always taking itself only as seriously as it can be. He accommodates a big white flipper with a poncy sort of lisp, dresses like the Queen on her downtime, and leans fully into his romantic interest in Colin Firth, who lends the second appendage in this spicy little two-hander. Firth is a government minister of education, and plans to rehabilitate Britain's schools by starting from the bottom: St. Trinian's. When he rocks up to "the gates of hell", he discovers not only an underground vodka distillery, a crucified student and a tropical zoo, but that the captain of this ghostly ship is his former university lover. Firth and Everett enjoy a stiffly flirtatious relationship, before she finally gets him drunk one night, and he wakes up in far fewer clothes than he remembers having on.

Heh. Didn't recognise her without
her brother's dick in her

The British film industry has experienced a lot of peaks and troughs over the years. When the original St. Trinian's movies were made in the '50s and '60s, films were on the decline due to the sharp rise of TV in the home. However, what you couldn't get on TV was sex and violence, which in turn led to a boom in small-budget horrors and sexy comedies, like the Carry On and Hammer movies. Aside from the odd worldwide sensations like the Harry Potter or James Bond franchises, the British film scene rarely eeks out into the wider audience, especially now that Disney and other such soulless corporations are buying up any property worth having. It is only fitting that the reboot of St. Trinian's would be a bombastic, utterly British picture, absolutely bursting at the seams with both new and experienced British talent. Firth and Everett are alongside the likes of Celia Imrie, Toby Jones and Lena Headey, while the student population consists of Gemma Arterton, Lily Cole, Juno Temple and Paloma Faith, among others. It's an absolute smorgasbord of UK names.

It takes a really keen director and/or writer to make a truly enjoyable movie for young people. Stephen Spielberg directing Hook, or any John Hughes project, or Rob Reiner on Stand By Me: these guys absolutely understood being young, and what fun and fear and frolics were. St. Trinian's is directed by Barnaby Thompson (producer of the Kevin and Perry movies) and Oliver Parker (who started out in classic literature movies and merged into comedy), and their backgrounds play so nicely into their management of this project. They both understand playful kiddish humour, but can structure a decent narrative and appreciate old source material. They prove to have been the perfect choices for this picture, which could have gone so far awry. Revivals of beloved old properties usually have a hard time reintroducing themselves and gaining traction, and for one reason or another, they are often quite awful. St. Trinian's is such an entertaining experience, that treads the path of its predecessors without it being dated. It is a modern Carry On, the likes of which could have spawned others of its ilk, much to the joy of the British audience. 

School of Rock (2003)

Would you tell Hendrix to sell his guitar?!

And we shall teach rock...to the world.

If you answered 'yes' to this question, then getchow ass outta my neighborhood! School of Rock holds at least one record in my life: it is the only movie I ever watched twice in the cinema... in one day! My sister and I went, then went again - it was that good of a movie. And most of all, it inspired us to get more into music. My siblings and I were heavily influenced by our mother to make music, and to this day, I play eight instruments and sing. Although I didn't get into a serious band until I was 15, I spent years pursuing music because of this amazing movie.

Jack Black plays Dewey Finn, your typical pub-singing rock musician, whose "rock'n'roll authority" is deemed too much for the band that he founded. The band kicks him out, and he declares that he will find an awesome new group to kick their asses. Dewey lives with his friend and former bandmate Ned Schneebly (Mike White) and his pain-in-the-ass girlfriend Patty (Sarah Silverman), who constantly pressure him for the rent he owes them but can't give them, thanks to his unstable professional habits.

STEP OWWFFF!

When Dewey answers the phone relating to a teaching job offer for Ned, he sees his opportunity to pay off his debts and maybe get fucking Patty off his back for a while. He easily lands Ned's job at a posh prep school, naively headed by Principal Mullins (the hilarious Joan Cusack), and quickly hijacks the class as the next upcoming rock band and their extensive crew to play at the upcoming Battle of the Bands. While Dewey find his professional and spiritual calling, the kids feel liberated from their strict middle-class upbringings, and everybody embraces their skill and happiness. It is a shared turf of happiness for people of every age and background.

So what makes School of Rock so fucking awesome? Well Jack Black has to be awarded a considerable amount of credit. He is the kind of character that most people had in their school class at some time; someone charismatic and funny and annoying and enviable. I certainly remember a girl called Lotte who was my class's Jack Black. He, like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey before him, improvs so much of his performance, and is as engaging and loveable as both of the guys aforementioned. I imagine that even without the amazing script by Mr Schnaaayblaaay himself Mike White, Jack Black's improvisation skills would have carried the movie.

The script and direction is reminiscent of John Hughes, with a childish naivete in adults that turns out a miraculously compassionate coming-of-age film. It doesn't pull a "how do you do, fellow kids", or make every child character a brainless brat with no second (letalone third) dimension. The kids have their own struggles, from weight issues to overbearing parents, and they are really relatable - Tomika's line "cos I'm fat" breaks my heart every time. These were not experienced kid actors (except perhaps for Miranda Cosgrove), they were young and enthusiastic musicians who brought their own spark to this amazing ensemble movie. And God knows that in the company of Jack Black, they were clearly made to feel like a million dollars in their own selves, and each one of them shines.

"Bubblegum!"

Jack Black is a really special dude. To many adults, he probably comes across as a maddening man-child who has never 'grown up'. He presents a real Peter Pan sitch. He clearly lives every day in joy and fun and fulfilment, and it doesn't hurt anyone. In fact, it seems to do so many people so much good: from his fans, to his kids, to his colleagues, to his own self. His personality is infectious and has such a liberating quality. I don't care how few people admit to it, many folks would love to feel so comfortable as to be a Jack Black of this world. I sure know I would. It's the kind of feeling adults only get on drugs or at festivals.

The adult creators have never lost their roots, and totally get what it is to have adolescent angst, and manage to channel them into creative arts. It is so rare for a movie that truly understands kids to be released, and God knows, at that stressful and crazy point in life, kids need a couple of movies that speak to them. School of Rock can be that to pretty much anyone. I still haven't played in a hardcore rock band that people love, but this movie makes me feel like I still can.

Hostel (2005)

The 00s was an era of reimagining horror. 9/11 had a profound effect on almost every facet of modern life, and movies were far from immune. Not unlike the way the Vietnam war influenced a new chapter of horror in the early '70s, 9/11 brought real-life terror and gore to the forefront of the public conscience, and changed what viewers looked for in entertainment. Although action movies and TV serials scrambled to rearrange into a less close-to-home format, the horror genre leaned into it, and a new wave, later dubbed Torture Porn, was born.

The two key figures in the Torture Porn movement were Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), each of which divided audiences in their ultra-visceral depictions of violence. Nobody around in the '00s can forget people asking "Did you see Saw?" before chuckling at their own comic brilliance, and talk of Hostel was hot on its heels. As a younger teenager during this period, I had to wallow in hearsay until each of the movies was released on DVD, and I clearly recall my first viewing of each. Hostel I acquired by taking advantage of my older boyfriend, and we watched it at his house with my sister. At the time I deduced it to be one half softcore porn and one half slasher gore with a nice memorable eyeball schtick, and have gone on since to develop a real fondness for it.

Each Eli Roth movie is a real character; some people can't stand his sophomoric blend of blood and humour, while others revel in his silly, in-your-face approach to making films. My sister and I have always been firm fixtures in the latter group, and share a particular fondness for the most divisive aspect of any Roth movie: the dialogue. If your patience is stretched by Roth's style, Hostel will be far from your cuppa soup, but those who enjoy a bit of silly humour in place of the pointless ramblings that usually open up earlier slashers find his style refreshing. Of course, Roth is also fond of elaborate practical effects, with which he likes to have a lot of gory fun. Anti-TorturePorners point out that violence doesn't equate to scare, which is certainly true, and that a good movie wouldn't have to resort to explicit violence, which I don't believe is true.

Beanie hat! 

Now what I do think is that violence and other forms of cruelty can be absolutely necessary to properly tell a story. Hostel doesn't deliver much real narrative to 'justify' its gore, as we are ultimately not really supposed to like or relate to any of the characters (another Roth trademark), but this doesn't mean there is no thought or perspective to it. Even if the audience doesn't explicitly notice that the movie's style is deliberate in its depictions of violence, they notice the effects.

Roth is far from a tactless filmmaker, and I think that his childlike enthusiasm for every single frame he shoots is his real strength. His work is always more than competent on a technical level, and all gore considered, he makes really good-looking and engaging movies. He is not looking to win any prestigious awards or merge his way into the Hollywood elite, but simply wants to have a really good time making the sorts of movies he would watch himself, and for other people to have fun watching them. For sheer entertainment value, Roth is always a safe bet for me.

World's most trustworthy travel agent

There is not a lot to say about the plot of Hostel, as the fun is in the experience as a whole, but let's give it a try. Paxton (Jay Hernandez) is backpacking across Europe with his meek friend Josh (Derek Richardson), and other tourist Oli (Eyþór Guðjónsson) has been picked up at some point in their travels. We meet them in Amsterdam, where they are busy doing what all good Roth characters do: partying. They get thrown out of clubs, dip in and out of whorehouses, and of course, refer to many things pejoratively as "gay". They come across a seriously weird-looking fella named Alexei, played by Lubomir Bukovy, who tells them that if they want the pure shit from source, they need to trek through the Slovakian wilderness to a village that is populated entirely by Page 3 girls and child thugs. The guys are all pretty stupid, so do they consider this trip a good idea? Of coursh, ma horsh.

While on the train to Slovakia, they are buttonholed by some geeky old dude (Jan Vlasák) whose defining characteristic is eating chicken salad with his twitchy fingers. When said fingers get a little too close to Josh's junk for comfort, the guys throw an all-American freak-out at the gayness of it all, and the Salad guy skulks away apologetically. In response to the sexual assault of their buddy, Paxton and Oli throw a few more homo jokes out for good measure. They arrive in the whore village and stay at a...*dun-dun-duuuuun* hostel, where they lament the lack of English dubbing on local television and how very gay it is that they have to share a room at a hostel. It soon becomes clear that the situation isn't quite so guy-on-guy as they had anticipated, when two hot women in their room invite them over to the spa.

The only time Paxton hated having balls in his mouth

So the partying is in full swing, but after the first night, Oli has disappeared. Paxton insists that this shouldn't spoil their fun, so they do some more partying, and the next day Josh is gone too. Curiouser and curiouser! All the locals are kinda shady, and a gang of kids mug people for such riches as bubblegum, but hey, it's probably just be because they're European.  In the course of trying to find the friend that actually matters enough to rouse his suspicions, Paxton is also set upon, revealing that this quaint little village not only has hot women and kid thugs, it also has millionaires who pay to torture foreigners in an abandoned building. And what's worse... they're all in on it! Ooh, faced!

What got under people's skin about Hostel and Saw was that they were more than just corn syrup and condoms full of sausage meat - they were presented in a vivid and immersive way that felt inescapable. Scores of slasher movies from yesteryear would throw lots of blood around, but rarely focused so hard on the suffering of those being minced. Hostel lingers on the victims of the situation, emphasising the experience of being tortured, tears and blood and vomit. None of the characters is a big badass who just tells their assailant what a "sick fuck" they are while having their limbs removed with table cutlery. They behave like real people, and show violence for what it really is - long, slow suffering.

It's the gayest movie in the fucking world!

Roth's tongue-in-cheek style does require a somewhat turbulent tone that may not make for comfortable viewing by all, but it functions as his charming little take on the genre that I can never help but enjoy and watch repeatedly.

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.

Grave Encounters (2011)

Found Footage is often snubbed by a certain faction of the movie-going world, considered dull, unoriginal and unwatchable due to the 'shakey camera' cliche; I maintain that it is the same as basically any other subgenre, in that there are a few really good examples and many bad ones, but the subgenre itself does not inherently make a movie bad - or good, for that matter. I have quite a few post-Blair Witch favourites of FF, which include Crowsnest, Apollo 18 and the Grave Encounters movies. The duology is unprecedented proof of that rare wonder: the sequel that lives up to its original. Writers/directors The Vicious Brothers are very much my kind of filmmakers: my generation, grungy as fuck, and worshippers of all good horror. They are the sort of dedicated and learned auteurs that you would be happy to see succeed, and they did exactly that with the Grave Encounters films.

"It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"

In a throwback to the format of the very first FF movie Cannibal Holocaust, the footage that constitutes the main narrative of the movie is set to a realistic framework, in which a TV producer explains to a documentary camera that the following picture was compiled from 76 hours of footage found after the disappearance of his crew on a job at an abandoned and supposedly haunted asylum. The show is Grave Encounters, and it is basically Ghost Hunters, as depicted by South Park ("It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"). Host Lance Preston and his colleagues pout at the camera, desperately try to look hard, and contrive non-existant ghostly experience, while we see their many outtakes in which their disbelief in the paranormal and generally unprofessional attitude is made evident.

They have arranged to spend the night - eight hours - locked in Collingwood Asylum, with the cooperation of the building's caretaker, who chains the door from the outside, and promises to return for them in the morning (how is this very notion somehow unsettling?). For a while they go about their media-whore jobs, but they inevitably soon come to realise that the ghosts they have spent five previous episodes simulating do actually exist, and they are none too satisfied with this revelation.

If you can't figure what happens in the next two seconds, you
have not seen a movie this side of the millennium.

I have yet to investigate any special features on my DVD, but have previously watched behind-the-scenes featurettes on the sequel, and it is very insightful. One of the main objectives that the Vicious Brothers had was that the many old horror tropes would be null and void in their line of narrative.

Like a souped up 1408, the asylum is an entity in itself, and shifts its shape to fuck with its captives. Every supposed escape and exit leads to another dark corridor. When 'rules' no longer apply, we the audience are unable to judge the characters' choices, because there is basically no way out and no way to fight. It is an inescapable nightmare, and this makes for a brilliantly tense viewing experience.

Wrong Turn 2 (2007)

Star of the show, Mr Wayne Robson

Wrong Turn has got to be one of my favourite post-millennium horrors. I don’t think it has anything to do with my longtime love of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of its contemporaries, but don’t mutated hillbillies make excellent villains? When Roger Ebert reviewed the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, he humorously and very knowingly detailed his concept of the Wrong Gas Station, which has applied to horror movies for decades, and applies to Wrong Turn: a ramshackle arrangement of cracked wooden planks that looks torn straight out of the ‘40s, with a crackly old hick in denim dungarees as its proprietor, who is always trusted despite his ominous nature and deliberate attempts to have his customers picked off by hick associates. You’d think the only gas station for miles around would make the most of its meagre custom – fat cigar stumps don’t pay for themselves, you know!

Ain't nobody got time for that!

The first Wrong Turn is a fun, tense, creepy movie with some great effects and good actors (Jeremy Sisto’s hair, anyone?). It’s one of those movie series, rather like Final Destination, at which you can look and wonder exactly when the makers decided they were not making a serious movie anymore. The first one can pass for pretty much straight horror slasher; the second decides to take it from a more wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach, both in theme and in specifics. The central disdain for the curse that is reality TV allows us all to share a laugh about the ludicrousness of modern media, while the hideously inventive death sequences allow us to share a laugh about the ludicrousness of modern splatter.

Wrong Turn 2, I assume, takes place in a location close to the first one, and is centred on a group of (mostly) dickheads who are taking part in a survivalist reality show. Among them is the slut, the horny pest punching way above his weight, the mousy girl and the moronic male – classic lineup. Tokens include a black guy who survives and a hot lesbian who doesn’t. Heading the gang is the Colonel (Henry Rollins), a retired Marine who plays to the camera but fights like a champ. The first fantastic kill has taken place before the opening credits, and kicks things straight off with over-the-top deaths constructed with amazing effects and buckets of corn syrup blood. One thing you can always count on Wrong Turn for is memorable death sequences.

Before long, the local family of mutated hillbillies (which now extends beyond the original’s freaky fraternal trio to include…girl hillbillies!) are wreaking havoc and pulling contestants apart with their unnatural strength and durability, but certainly not missing out on any opportunities to fuck each other and birth worm-like babies. These are, after all, no ordinary hillbillies like the banjo kid in Deliverance; these are genetically-mutated cannibal hillbillies who have an unhealthily iron-rich diet and could definitely do with some vegetables. And that means that brothers fuck sisters in public places and sisters birth incest babies that consume toxic waste from a bottle. Although this family of hillbillies seems to have actually learned to speak a few words, they do still do a lot of their stupid manic laughter and hollering.

What can I say? Wrong Turn 2 just gives and keeps on giving for any good horror fan. Tons of splatter, lots of unexpected moments and an outstandingly good performance from Wayne Robson as Old Timer, the shrill patriarch of the family. There are characters you root for, and others whose untimely deaths you anticipate with bated breath. It’s fun, fast-paced, well filmed and done with enthusiasm as a directorial debut from Joe Lynch, and a very worthy successor of the original Wrong Turn.

Spring Breakers (2012)

Advertising is a cynical business, isn't it? Whether they're using specific words like "appears" to protect themselves against lawsuits, or downright lying about there being "liquid calcium" in toothpaste, nothing is ever as it seems. Several times over the past few years, I have been completely rocked back on my heels by a movie whose trailer painted it in a completely different light. Summer in February and My Old Lady are a few devious examples. Spring Breakers is another...

When all the movie and its promo stills are so electrically coloured with neon blues and pinks and yellows, and feature the grinning faces upon the bikinied bodies of several young beauties, Disney girls Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez among them, we are set up for an American Pie-like scenario, where hot college girls have a few weeks of crazy, loud, booze-fuelled fun that's likely to end up on YouTube. Even with the knowledge that the girls hold up a restaurant to fund their trip, I figured that this would be played out comically, and that nothing would require being taken too seriously.

But several things really disturbed me about Spring Breakers, the first starting very early on in the picture, and others taking a little longer to show themselves. The girls are Candy (Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine) and Brit (Ashley Benson), who are trouble-seeking party girls and for some reason hang out with church-going resident-downer Faith (Gomez). They decide to bugger off for spring break, as sexy American teens with inexplicably infinite cash sources tend to do. But these girls are broke, so plot to rob a diner, do it, and run off to the beach for a fortnight of fun. The kind of fun they end up having, whether it is really fun or not, and what kind of fun the audience are supposed to be having are all up for question. In particular our part as the audience.

Only a few minutes into the movie, all four girls are fooling around in a darkened corridor, only wearing their underwear. They do handstands against the walls, and eventually fall about on the floor, wiggling their asses in the air as the camera grooms them like an overly-forceful cat lady. I felt uncomfortably voyeuristic watching this, not even voyeuristic, more predatory. Because never in a thousand years would a stranger pass by, happen to peek into the window of this corridor, and have a scene like this playing out by coincidence. The girls aren't doing all this gyrating for their own amusement -- they're doing it for the audience, and it's contrived as hell. The weirdest thing is, as a female of about the same age as the actresses and the girls they are portraying, I still felt wrong watching them. There was just something so obviously wrong with the scene. And from there, it continued down the route of 'Male Fantasy'.

Spring break is fun, and they drink, and snort coke off of other girls' boobs, and get off with slobs. Brit finds herself in a really gross situation, in which she is high as hell, in a bathroom full of guys, sluggishly ripping her bra off and teasing that "you'll never get this pussy." Then the action cuts back to what the other girls are doing. I rather feel that it's because if it'd hung around any longer, it may have subjected us to a gang rape scene. It was upsetting to watch a girl degrade herself in such a dangerous way, especially knowing that this sort of behaviour is really quite commonplace among my generation. I get that this is an adult film, with an 18 certificate, and that there are many movies I have praised that have contained similar incidents, but it's just not what I was up for. It felt cheap and fantasised.

Just when I was starting to wonder how teens managed to rip buildings apart, cause more mayhem than Martin and Charlie Sheen at a father-son picnic, and ingest a steady current of substances without attracting outside attention, the girls are arrested, and stand in a courtroom in their bikinis (honestly, I don't think any of them wear anything more than that at any point). There, they are eyed-up and eventually bailed out by the slimiest geezer I've come across in film since the Duke in Moulin Rouge. In place of a nasally sneer from behind a perfectly waxed moustache, we have cornrows and gang tattoos on a white guy played by James Franco. This dude has named himself Alien, as a result of a lifetime of egotistical self-philosophy that Kanye West holds the record for.

The girls go back to his skeevy place and repay him for his kind bailing. And yep, it is exactly as creepy as it sounds. Only Faith has a problem with weirdo crackheads drooling over her shoulder and groping her. The other girls, in a completely whacked state of mind, it would seem, totally get off on the underground superstar lifestyle that Alien leads, which involves being constantly surrounded by pale, skinheaded gangsters, swaggering around with guns wearing only underwear (which naturally works for the girls) and having sex. Faith is the first of the girls to realise that something seriously dreadful is going to come of this situation, and hops on the next bus home, never to be heard of again. Weird.

The rest of the movie documents the remaining girls' moral and personal deterioration as Bikini Bitches of a questionably-successful white gangster. Lots more sex, drugs and abuse. They get dragged into a violent rivalry with another, far less white, gangster. It is an unsettling, dark underworld story, with not a speck of the comparative joy that the earlier days of their trip involved. Franco, punctuating his frequent stoner collaborations with Seth Rogen, reminds us of his often dormant ability, creating a sinister facade that deemed him unrecognisable to me for several minutes. His cited inspiration from rapper Riff Raff helped him to become a silly wannabe hardman who never matured past the age of sixteen, but whose subsequent years have instilled in him a dark idiocy, and a masked neediness.

The entirety of Spring Breakers plays out in an almost pornographic way; not in the sense that anything explicitly and unsimulatedly sexual is shown, but in the sense that its whole being is played strictly to a male fantasy. Young, slim girls in bikinis, complete exhibitionists, who are putting on a constant stripper act for their unacknowledged audience. It plays out with intention to titillate -- the main factor that can see art house movies such as 9 Songs and Antichrist separated from mainstream pornography. Not only does it titillate the audience with gratuitous young flesh, it also teases its less mature viewers with the idea of the lifestyles of drug-ring prostitutes being the dream life. Eighteen year olds are still perfectly corruptible with stupid ideas, and so I really would question what creator Harmony Korine (surprisingly, not a female) meant by this movie. It doesn't really present any good ideas, but doesn't present itself as a cautionary tale either. The girls who do decide to get out are completely forgotten once they're gone. Faith, and later Cotty, are never seen again, and this seems indicative of the entire attitude of the film. In this sort of crazy lifestyle, not a thing matters.

Crossroads (2002)

Uh...this is legal, right?

Road trip movies may be the most misleading subgenre ever...well, perhaps those and rom-coms. But for every road trip movie I watch, and for every standard requirement box each one ticks off, I find myself asking the same questions, as if what I were watching bore any resemblance to reality. I have come to the educated conclusion that the USA as a whole has no regulations against driving someone else's vehicle uninsured or carrying passengers on the trunk of a convertible. If it weren't for regular doses of Judge Judy, movies like this would convince me entirely that the Great Nation are inexplicably lenient with their legal system.

As a child of the '90s, I was supposedly the exact target audience for Britney's movie Crossroads when it was released in 2002. I was ten. I remember seeing it in the cinema with my dad and younger sister, who would have been eight. We were both massive Britney fans (gimme a break, it was a different time!) and if anyone can be sold an inane package with a famous character's face on it, it's eight- to ten-year-olds. I loved the movie as a child, and don't remember even wondering about the meaning of the surprisingly adult content within. I wasn't particularly alarmed by a pregnant eighteen year old, but the concepts of drink, rape, abandonment, miscarriage and the loss of one's virginity were lost upon my infant mind. Watching it in my 20s, I was sort of surprised at the age range this movie really was aimed at. It's sort of like the Parental Advisory announcement before the Jerry Springer show. Kids could watch it, but is it really a good idea?

Britney Spears plays Lucy, a cute (duh!), hard-working student who's ready to go off to med school and become a doctor, much to the delight of her equally hard-working but slightly abrasive dad Pete (Dan Ackroyd). The use of Ackroyd is a diluted form of his work as Harry Sultenfuss in the My Girl movies, where he had very well-written scripts and a character with more involvement than the statutory duties of the stern but loving father. He's still endearing, but Pete's opinions and actions merely serve the plot; there is no substance to them.


Years ago, Lucy buried a time capsule box with her two friends Mimi and Kitt, promising that they'd be friends forever (oh boy, we all know where this one's going). But on the day of their high school graduation, Mimi (Taryn Manning) is a pregnant trailer chick with dozens of gold hoop earrings and a scowl on her face, and Kitt (Zoe Saldana) is the stuck-up rich girl who has a fiancé over in LA. God knows how long it's been since they all hung out, but as often happens during adolescence, they drifted apart. They all reluctantly return to dig up the box on prom night, and an unconvincing, contrived form of a rediscovered relationship appears.

Mimi is off to audition for a recording contract in LA, hitching a ride with her shady friend Ben (Anson Mount), and invites the others to come along, for whatever reason. The trip is of the strictly-professional type at first: Mimi is auditioning, Kitt is making a surprise drop-in on her fiancé, and Lucy is getting off in Arizona for a surprise drop-in on her long-lost mother. Mimi is streetsmart, hence, the only one who doesn't think that surprise drop-ins on very absent figures is a good move, but who is she to convince her peers? They have their own inevitable fuck ups to serve that purpose.

The movie goes through the classic relationship motions of former friends/lovers/family brought together: initial wonder at the spectacle of being reunited, sudden realisation of why they are no longer friends, the primary threads of repair to the relationship, and ultimately the 'stronger than ever' crap. As with so many formulaic movies, we know what will happen in the end, and can make some pretty decent guesses about the middle. But that leaves us only to wonder about what they will do on the road. Will they have any deeply moving or thought-provoking conversations which really reveal their characters? Only at a 101 level. Will they pick up an interesting stranger who goes on to make or break them? No. Will at least one of them take up a questionable romantic attachment to the only male cast member who isn't the father? Of course, but it has to be the cute, exploitable one. (We're ready for you, Miss Spears!)

Rumour has it that Ben is fresh out of prison for murder (given his youthful appearance, we'd have to guess he was one of those Michael Myers child-convict types to have gotten out by now), and even sensible, would-be doctor Lucy is remarkably undeterred. She gets pissed and calls her father when their car breaks down, but when it is revealed the man driving them is a potential murderer, she just gives him the silent treatment. Of course, rumours are never true, and the reason for Ben's incarceration is very unexciting, giving him free reign to wiggle in as the cute virgin's First. And boy, is he willing. Throughout, he insists that nobody else drive his classic Buick convertible (fair enough), but as soon as the pussy's on the pedestal, he throws the keys to a couple of over-excited eighteen-year-olds in order to get rid of them. This guy's got his priorities in gear!

Is this really a screenshot from a kids' movie?

The more mature themes of the movie are questionable for me. I suppose given the embarrassing, manufactured 'icons' of today like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and the age ranges they cater to, it's a tough one. No young adult trying to mold a career wants to pander to small children; they want some level of maturity and seriousness to their act. Spears repeatedly prances around in her underwear, the treatment of College Virgins is called up for discussion, the girls drink underage, and learn that performing an abysmally weak cover of a classic rock track and grinding on a pole will leave local hicks clambering to drop dollar bills in the hat. To be honest, the material is diluted, and if it could have broken out into a more adolescent picture worthy of a 15 rating, it could perhaps have performed to its full potential.

This is not to say that the movie would ever have been a masterpiece, but there is a feeling of family-oriented restraint to the whole thing. If a couple of swear words could have been thrown in, and if the scriptwriters could have fully developed the plotlines of rape, pregnancy etc. to adequately demonstrate the consequences, it could have been something. There is an inherent nonchalance to every issue. Mimi may have been raped, but it happens all the time. She may be a pregnant teenager, but she loses the baby, so there's no need to deal with the reality of teenage parenthood. And the ultimate message is definitely questionable: Lucy has worked very hard throughout her school years to build a strong career for herself and move her family up the social ladder. But what is academia worth when you can be a popstar? Encouraging children to abandon serious achievable ambitions in favour of the oldest honeytrap in existence is not the thing to do. And when you look at the fame-hungry Western societies that we live in today, it's hard to feel unconvinced that these sorts of influences over our generation have tainted our views of life, the world, and our self-worth.


The poorly-written caricature for Dan Ackroyd to play sort of seals Lucy's fate as a girl who once had huge potential but will almost certainly end up like the real Britney - used up, spat out and irreparably damaged by the whole experience, with little hope for any longevity. While Pete is required to scorn Lucy about the money he has lost, the professional relationships with her future employers she has destroyed and the general emotional distress her shenanigans have put him through, all she has to do is flutter her eyes and breathily whisper "I'm sorry" and it's all forgotten. What sort of ideas does this give to Lucy, and by extension, to the children who witness her story? These are serious issues in a real-life situation, but hey, money grows on trees and there'll always be some sucker to bail you out.

When dissected, many of Crossroads' elements are detrimental and amateur. Not to say there are no saving graces: Ackroyd is as wonderful as he can be, Taryn Manning is utterly convincing as a tough-skinned trailer park girl, and Zoe Saldana is quite possibly the highlight, with her sterling comic timing and delivery. She really made me laugh. It's deserving that of the trio, she went on to the biggest and best things. And if I'm really honest, Britney takes the few lines that really require any acting and gives them her all. She is no actress, but she's not as bad as people like to make out, and had the role been given to any other young blonde, it probably would have turned out no better. It's not a demanding role in the slightest, so it fits her quite well.

In terms of the Britney machine, the film played an interesting role. Made in 2001, when her image was still squeaky clean, before the likes of Toxic and its transparent bodysuits launched Britney's Madonna-brand sex appeal, it is amusing to see her dressed in frilly pink cardigans that go up to her neck, and insisting, "I have seen one, y'all!" (They're referring to the male sex organ, incidentally). Most of all, it's nice to see her the way she was. My God, she was a pretty girl. She just exuded vitality and bubbliness, and it makes the process of her mid-noughties downfall all the more painful to remember. The industry really did break this girl, and it's nice to see that nowadays her much-improved family life and Vegas residency have given her the happy medium that she could have done with years ago.

People have questioned for years why Crossroads has such a cult following, despite being publicly hated by anyone with the opportunity to voice it. Is it pure nostalgia, for all of us who want to remember a time when our biggest problems were deciding which pair of glitter jeans to wear to the school dance, or which member of Boyzone we wanted to marry? Is it that on the surface, Crossroads is a good-natured, sunny movie which is catchily optimistic? A film for children, I honestly think it is not. It never scarred me or turned me into an inconsiderate, denim skirt-wearing, man-punching potato-chip muncher, but I'm not sure I'd be in a hurry to show it to my daughter at any age prior to, perhaps, eleven or twelve. The transition into high school around this age inevitably catapults kids into a world full of nasties, like rape and teenage pregnancy, as well as a couple of secret joys, like sex and drugs. Kids of this age could really appreciate the movie for what it is, I believe. As long as their parents are still telling them to go be a doctor by the end of it.

Crowsnest (2012)

One might wonder if there is a bigger 'thing' in the horror genre of recent years than Found Footage. From the dawn, with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, through Blair Witch Project throwing it to the mainstream in 1999, Found Footage has become a highly exploited medium. Recent offerings have included [REC], Paranormal Activity, Grave Encounters, and their copious sequels and prequels. Some of these have been very effective, where others have been nauseating in their efforts. Crowsnest stood out to me for some reason. Everybody on the web seemed to hate it, but it left me thinking enough to watch two subsequent times. And the more I think, I'm still not sure why. Stupid, unlikable characters who make dumbass moves time after freakin' time... crappy and repetitive dialogue with lots of forced emotions...

We open with a douchebag whose girlfriend got him a video camera for his birthday - it's his birthday - and he's filming out of his window, spying and making asshole comments about the people he zooms in on in the apartment building opposite. Good time to mention to your girlfriend that this camera has night vision. We'd assume that she already knows because she bought the fucking thing, but how else would we, the audience, know this otherwise? Well, yes, OK, we could have just observed the change in camera setting as it occurred, but this sort of movie assumes that we are as dumb as it is. Anyway, we already don't like this guy. He is Justin (Victor Zinck Jr.), she is Brooke (Mittita Barber), and the friends who arrive at their apartment for the birthday get-together are Amanda (Chelsea Reist) and Kirk (Aslam Husain). It quickly becomes apparent from listening to their mind-numbing conversation that they are all morons to varying degrees.

The next day they are off to Kirk's parents' cabin in Kirk's parents' shiny red Jeep (bearing in mind that these douches are grown-up and well-off enough to be drinking scotch the night before, but none of them seem to own a car). Amanda's even-douchier emo sister Danielle (Christie Burke, from Twilight, apparently)is tagging along for whatever reason, and seems to have made it her personal mission to kill the buzz her sister's friends are indulging in all kinds of substances to achieve. Justin is doing one of those douchebag 'record everything' things which serves merely to give the film a medium and to emphasise his douchebaggery. You'll notice that word, in various forms, pops up a lot when describing these people. They are monumental morons throughout, which is possibly one of its draws. Stupid people facing life threatening situations surely calls for results that you just couldn't make up!

En route to the cabin (we may think it's gonna be another of those Cabin in the Woods horrors, but these guys are so dumb they don't even make it as far as the cabin), Kirk says that he knows of a place called Crowsnest, where you can get half price beer. He saw it online. So, he suggests, they should make a detour that seems to span for at least 20 or 30 miles - and that's just one-way - and incur the cost of the extra fuel to get there, in order to save 50% on beer, which is cheaper that gas. Take a deep breath, and behold the fine idiocy! Of course, Crowsnest is like the rotting set of some old spaghetti western in MGM's storage locker, and there seems to be no life there, let alone half-price beer salesmen.

The guys go off in search of half-price beer, which at this rate is pretty much guaranteed to be carbonated bottled piss, and Brooke (taking the one camera which narrates the whole story) wanders while Amanda loudly announces her imminent public urination. The camerawoman soon comes across the statutory creepy little girl in long white nightgown with dark hair shielding her face, but when she turns to inform Amanda, the kid's disappeared. We didn't see that one coming - creepy ghost children make a real habit of sticking around for sane witnesses to verify. The guys then come yelling and screaming for everyone to get in the car and get outta here now, and once they're speeding off outta there, they tell the girls about the creepy beer salesman who gave them the statutory "You kids better turn around and go back right now, or y'all's gon' diiiieee" line.

Apparently Brooke doesn't think to shut off recording for a sec to show her friends the footage of the creepy kid, so they continue on their way, drinking and smoking doobs behind the wheel. Little sis Danielle, when not busy scowling and telling people "this was a bad idea", is suffering the adverse affects of alcohol consumption. The douches then start to demonstrate a compulsion to pull over unnecessarily. You'd think they didn't actually have a destination. On the first pit stop after Crowsnest, they have no phone signal (duh) but pick up one of those cult religious radio stations, with a dark-voiced preacher talking about flames and hell and sin and all that. Super-emo Danielle takes this as an opportunity to force unwanted information on unwilling participants repeatedly. She lists off the many things that the Bible supposedly condemns people to death for, and each time one of the friends interjects to get her to shut the fuck up, she starts talking again to the point of desperation. She summarises that if this were the Bible, they would all be fucked. Not that this movie contains any religious connotations or morals beyond that.

That's the other thing. This movie contains more uses of the word 'fuck' than most. It seems to be down to poor screenwriting (improv?) and/or the characters' (actors'?) lack of intellect. And then the cheeky motherfuckers have the nerve to feel like the wronged party when Amanda obnoxiously wanders into the middle of the road and is almost (damn) creamed by a massive RV. Next thing you know, there's shit loads of screaming going on, and the guys are doing that typical "I'm gonna get that fucker's plates, you don't mess with me, fucker!" stuff and are speeding up a mountain road after the RV. The point of filming everything now becomes "for insurance". The girls scream, the boys grunt and growl, and the RV suddenly stops dead, then does a miraculous 180 turn on the narrow mountain and comes speeding back at them. And to be honest, can we help but laugh? Even though it would be impossible for a vehicle of that size to turn so quickly on that road without getting ditched, it's hilarious to see the douchebags suddenly screaming for a different reason.

They get through this episode, but haven't learned their lesson. Whilst speeding away, Danielle succumbs to drunkenness, and insists they stop the car so she can vomit. Bitch, haven't you ever heard of the window?! Having just seriously pissed off a bunch of hicks in a vehicle far bigger than theirs and only just gotten away, and not even gotten a mile up the road yet, the last thing they need to be doing is stopping. But you know what horror movie girls get like with the "Stop the Car" thing: throw a couple of "fucking"s into the mix and slap the back of the driver's seat, and they get what they want. Danielle does her chundering and everybody's about ready to go, but then suddenly she must hop out of the car again, and BAM! The RV, which they would've heard and seen thundering down the road, comes out of nowhere and totally wipes her out.

In typical horror fashion, now that they have to get a mangled emo to a hospital, the car won't start (for whatever reason) and there's still no cell phone service. These being dumb fuckers, they scream at each other a whole bunch, before deciding to hike through the woods up to the top of the mountain, where they think they can get a signal and call a helicopter. Danielle promptly dies, but Amanda stupidly decides to stay with her sister's body at the car, despite having been the original source of annoyance to the RV hicks, whilst the others bugger off up the mountain. Chelsea Reist's performance is a weird one. In the earlier scenes, her delivery is very contrived, and particularly her laughter is painfully forced. The area she does strongly in is hysteria, which I guess to a mediocre horror maker seemed to outweigh her terrible speaking.

One semi-potent element of the storytelling is that there is only one camera, which is pretty unusual to this subgenre, as the camerapeople in the stories are usually professional to some capacity, warranting multiple perspectives. This means that for the duration of the group being separated in whatever combinations, we only know what is happening to one party, which does produce a sort of tense worry for the unseen characters, despite how idiotic they are. The woodsy Justin-Brooke-Kirk gang head on into the woods with the camera, and it doesn't take long for them to bitch up a storm among themselves, culminating in the revelation of Brooke having cheated on her asshole boyfriend with Kirk, and Justin storming off in response, camera in hand. Just prior to this they heard Amanda screaming in the distance, so Brooke and Kirk try to head back to the car, where she will obviously still be!


Meanwhile, Justin gets himself full-on, flat-out lost in the woods, as dickheads who storm off in a tantrum in the middle of nowhere tend to do, and it's not long before he's giving his snotty-nosed Blair Witch confessional to Mom and Pop, detailing very simplistically how scared he is, how cold he is, how much he loves them all etc. etc. But after his mini-breakdown, he sensibly (don't hold your breath - this is where his sensibility ends) decides to carry on, and soon *gasp* stumbles across the RV parked in a bald spot on the mountain. Problem is, by the time he spots it, he is about as central to this bald spot as the vehicle is, and seems to think that crouching on the upper edge of the pit is a completely inconspicuous move. He sneaks up, snoops around, checks the fucker's plates, but there are none, and then decides to investigate the blood running out of the door.

This is one of the film's strongest sequences, and even then it's certainly not exceptional. But thankfully, the concept of the camera containing night-vision had been gracelessly handed to us on a verbal plate by Justin at the beginning, so he flicks it on, and takes in all the black-and-green gore he's standing in. Lots of blood, ambiguous giblets and plastic sheets lay about the place, and on a slab lies Amanda, with her foot sawed off. We, the audience, plead guilty to lack of sympathy. She was loud and annoying - but wait, she ain't finished wailin' yet! Justin wakes her up, to which she starts screaming hysterically. He tells her "Sshh! It's me, Justin!" several times, and yet the dumb bitch doesn't quieten. The RV's sinister and as yet unseen occupants are currently absent for whatever reason, but chances are they're nearby. So now would be a really fucking good time for Amanda to shut her hole. For her own good.

But did we really expect her not to die? The dumb blonde always dies. Shoulda stuck in school, Amanda, things woulda worked out diff'rent. As Justin takes the opportunity to stoop to her level of idiocy and explore the vehicle's interiors, where of course he should just been grabbing the annoying bitch and getting the hell out, he ventures to the bedroom compartment, where Danielle's body is having its finger chewed by that creepy kid from earlier. Except is it her? Earlier, that was definitely a kid, and a female one at that. We get a brief 'menacing' glimpse at this creepy kid's face, and it's quite obviously a male uh--- little person. Now is this meant to be a different kid, or are we meant to be startled because originally she looked a little sweet, and now she looks minging, or is it either in addition to the typical 'creepy midget' stereotype that horror almost forgot?

Oh, now I realise that I said Justin's sensibility ended with his decision to keep walking, but I was forgetting this bit. Upon coming across said finger-chewing midget, he keeps quiet and still and attempts to make a swift exit, for he is as yet unseen. But we also have a dumb bitch on board, who is yelling "Justin! Justin, where are you?!" over and over again, so of course the finger-muncher looks up, gives us the scary face, and makes a dive for Justin. But he manages to beat the thing to death. OK, despite his douchiness, Justin gives it a fair go in this five-minute window. He then tries to saw through Amanda's chain, fails, and decides to leave her there and come back (yeah, right), which as you can imagine, goes down like a sack of shit. So she yells even more, even louder, and the hicks come a-runnin'. Justin makes a dive under the RV while they tumble inside and Amanda starts screaming even louder still. Wow, anybody else developing tinnitus?

Now that we have finally seen at least the feet of the two recreationally vehicular hicks, the remaining characters start doing that annoying horror thing that dead teenagers always do: wait literally two seconds from the bad guy disappearing from sight before coming out of their hiding place. I mean, seriously, they barely give him a chance to turn his back. He is still right there, they need to wait until he's a safe distance away, for Christ's sake! So two seconds after the RV door closes, Justin hops out and runs back up...to the edge of the pit, which he doesn't seem to realise acts more as a podium than a shelter. And he turns back again to face the vehicle. Does he honestly not know he's totally visible? They're gonna come out aft---they're coming out after him!! He's screwed! I really do like the way they capture these 'hick assailant bumbling towards victim' shots. I'm not sure what it is, but they are really quite menacing. With the help of the classic 'camera fallen in front of doomed victim' trick, the audience, and later Brooke and Kirk, get to witness his demise, which is actually a fairly impressive special effect. We also get to learn that these hicks aren't too smart. Murderers usually take the victim's camera (evidence!) with them, but these guys just leave it for others to find.


Here we have it folks, the imminent horror situation: two left - one guy, one girl. We never know, will one get out, or both, or neither? Brooke and Kirk find the camera, suddenly realise what they're up against, and freak out. Whilst walking back to the car, they find a road again, and duck down as the RV trundles past. It stops briefly and then carries on, having dumped some bloody remains of one of their friends on the road. They freak out some more. The point of the camera now becomes "for the police". After a bit more walking, the RV passes again. Have they been seen? They must've been. Oh, OK, I guess maybe they haven't-- OH MY GOD, THEY'VE BEEN SEEN! Out come bursting the hicks once more in an even more menacing shot than the last one, and they leg it. Kirk has his hand sliced up but they get away. God knows what they actually do to his hand (finally, no one really cares about angles, they just want to get out alive) but it must've been something pretty gnarly, as Kirk is soon rendered incapacitated, turning pale and cold and tired from apparent blood loss, with Brooke having to coax him up off the ground. And eventually he screams that his hand has fallen off! Pretty freakin' gnarly!

After a lot of hobbling about in woodland, they finally make it back to the car, which of course won't start, and Kirk pops the camera on the dashboard, facing them. So while he babbles a bunch of romantic crap about how he's always loved Brooke, we can just feel that at the end of that long mountain road we see behind them, a big ol' monster is gonna come rumbling at any moment. It does, and they carry on chatting shit and turning the key, and funnily enough, it gives them the jump start they needed, and soon gets run off the road. Wow, things are starting to look up for the two survivors of the original five-man party. They even get a cell phone signal, and get a call through to the police, and are just telling that they're in Crowsnest when HHHOOOOONNNNKKK! Rumble, smash, etc. It seems the hicks specialise in un-ditching massive vehicles at record-speed. Maybe they have their own reality show like the Storage Hunters and the Lizard Lick Towers.

"I told you this was a bad idea, guys. Fuck."

So that's Crowsnest. Having dissected it in a sarcastic humour, I still find myself unsure as to why it's so enjoyable. Maybe cos DTMs are always more satisfying the stupider the characters are. If we don't like them, don't sympathise them, and don't root for them, then we root against them, just like whichever Slasher pursues them. It makes it pretty damn exciting at times. And it's safe to say that this gang's lack of chemistry, camaraderie and loyalty to one another - along with their constant flaunting of their collective 5 brain cells - sticks them firmly in VIP lounge at the National Douchebag Awards. Fuck me, fucking congratulations, guys. Shit!

Donkey Punch (2008)

It took me some five years to finish watching Donkey Punch. Way back when, I rented it from a Blockbuster (remember those?!) but in a sterling example of why the company is still so affluent today, the DVD started skipping 40 minutes in and ruined my viewing pleasure. Today, I saw it, decided that its first 40 minutes had shown promise, and decided to rewatch from the start. I'm actually pretty glad I did. This movie's an interesting one. For one thing, it's odd and somewhat refreshing to not have to listen to 90 minutes of Californian-accented screeches from big-tittied blondes in lingerie. True, English accents are not always the most attractive things (as a kid I always longed to swap my English accent to an American one) but again, it's a little more tolerable to hear girls call each other "babes" instead of "sweetie". Accents are funny things: just as an American picture would have some hick with a Southern drawl be the 'shady' fella, for us Brits, give us a chav and we're terrified. We have a monumental chav in Donkey Punch, whose speech is dismally common in England, and always looks and sounds as if the speaker is swirling a mouthful of toffee.

The chav in question is Bluey (Tom Burke), who is swaggery and mouthy, and has a dormant menace about him, enhanced by a hairlip. Burke's performance, and dare I say it his general non-enhanced appearance, are painfully realistic, to the point where I'd be unsurprised if he'd been raised in some dodgy council estate by a family of criminals, and managed to break out into something better. He's really got the look about him. Anyway, Bluey is one of four guys - the other three are far less distinguishable - who befriend three girls on holiday in Ibiza. The girls are there for the dreaded reason that compels me to cringe so dreadfully: "a girly weekend away". Blllleeeuurrrgghh! We have Lisa (Sian Breckin), Kim (Jaime Winstone, daughter of Ray) and Tammi (Nichola Burley), the two former being the loud, reckless ones who shout "whooo" a lot, and the latter being the shy good girl who's there to get over a breakup. They are spoilt for choice, with Marcus (Jay Taylor), Sean (Robert Boulter) and Josh (Julian Morris) also part of Bluey's crew, and when they're invited on board the yacht the boys work on, the only one who thinks that this is a bad idea is of course Tammi.

The boys are frustratingly difficult to tell apart. I hate it when they do this in films. I'm no simpleton, but when you have three male characters, all with very different personalities and actions, who are of the same body type and colouring, I really struggle to keep on top of it. I found myself distracted by their shirts instead of the movie, just in an attempt to keep track of who was who. Bluey, like I said, speaks for himself, Josh is the mouse, this movie's version of Matthew from I Spit On Your Grave, the simple-minded one who doesn't take much goading to do others' bidding. One of the others is Josh's brother, and the other is the acting Skipper of the yacht while the actual owner is away. When the guys suggest that they "take this party on the high seas", ie leave the marina, Tammi is once again proven to be the sensible one, but not sensible enough to voice her concerns.

She is taken with Josh's brother (I think that's Sean and the Skipper is Marcus - I think) and they get innocently chatting about their failed relationships, while the other girls and boys take the party downstairs to the cabin, having taken hits on a crackpipe and whipped out a video camera. Now just before this, whilst taking a swim, the young vulgarians were discussing various crude sexual acts which no one with any respect for themselves or their partner would perform. Bluey regales the legend of the Donkey Punch, in which the guy takes the girl from behind and smacks her in the back of the neck when he cums, apparently producing an involuntary muscle spasm which is awesome for the guy. "What's in it for the girl?" one of them asks. "I don't understand the question," Bluey retorts.


Josh, being the dimwit that he obviously is from his sheepish cowering, can't believe his luck when he finds himself in the midst of a below-deck camera orgy, and Bluey hops off Lisa to give him a go. He mounts her, and has a whale of a time, until system-overload becomes imminent, and Bluey unwisely eggs him on, "Remember what to do? Do it! Do it!" Thwack! Woman down. Oh shit. Now it looked like a bit of a jab, but apparently poor Joshy don't know his own strength. He has just killed a girl mid-fuck. It's not quite Of Mice and Men.

It's cool to see a horror movie (I guess this just about qualifies) with no masked man or evil genius or crazed loon scouring the seas for dead young flesh. As we can imagine, these 20-somethings are never going to decide calmly that they must go to the police and explain exactly what happened. They are going to play the Blame Game, and turn on one another. And of course, Bluey caught the whole incident on tape (and it's not below him to later suggest earning 'a pound a pop' for it on the net). The rivalries and differences of opinion are what drive the rest of the movie, which gets a little slow towards the end, but it's actually an interesting journey, with intriguing power shifts. For example, the sex scene at first may seem a little female-driven, if you catch me (I hate to say misogynist just because a woman is nude onscreen), but just after Lisa's been killed, all three of the guys in the room are seen full-frontally naked, tackle and all, where the girls never bare so much at any point. We see the guys at their most vulnerable - naked, and covered in the juices of a girl they just killed - and it really works.

Later, one of the girls has managed to obtain the onboard rifle that's changed hands several times, and the raw anger in her voice (and flinching from her assailant) as she threatens him at gunpoint feel very genuine. Power levels fluctuate wildly throughout, with each character having different theories as to who will get off, who will go down, and what the authorities will make of their situations, and these theories are what motivates each character. No one is really on the same level, and eventually the characters seem to lose sight of everything as things spiral further out of control. Crazy thing is, all the shit that happens is down to stupidity and absent-mindedness. I'm of the opinion that without the crazy sexual ideas and crackpipe, these guys could've had a pretty decent time together and all gotten home intact. But then fear and rivalry can do weird things to people.

Although most of the acting is better than expected, the one shining star of the picture is Tom Burke as Bluey, who throughout manages to inject absolute truth into his performance, and he obviously has a good understanding of pain. Do you ever notice in movies that when characters are in physical pain, their reactions never seem quite on par with what you can see being done to them. Anybody who's ever experienced real indescribable pain will know that everything loses structure: your consciousness, your thought patterns, and your will for any form of control. Screams of real pain are distinctive, and quite disturbing because they're just not something you hear often (I guess unless you're a medic or a murderer). Burke is one who understands. His first scream when he's stabbed in the chest is more like a hysterical laugh, as he comes to terms with what has just been done to him. When one of his mates starts pushing on the knife, his screams are bloodcurdling. It feels so utterly genuine.

I wonder if Donkey Punch should have been subtitled "A Cautionary Tale". Even in the six or seven years that have passed since this movie was made, the sexual activities of my contemporaries seem to know no inhibitions. It is perfectly commonplace for people to have sex having only known each other a few hours. Of course, highly-efficient sexual health services make this possible to do safely, but the morality behind it has disturbed me for years. My sister went on holiday to Magaluf a few years back, and I was actually moved to nausea by photos she showed me of a crowd of young holidaymakers, circled around a teenage girl and boy having sex in broad daylight on an outdoor patio, apparently because they had been promised free booze by the reps if they did it. Just writing that out made me feel queasy all over again. I cannot fathom the kind of person who would even consider this offer. It's low, it's dirty, it's disgusting in every way. I hate to sound like a frump, but it is just wrong. This kind of shit is so common that the English media spew similar stories on a regular basis, and reality shows on TV.

The first time I saw this movie, I was just a teenager. Now, I am an adult and mother of a daughter, and it crossed my mind to show her this movie one day, when she's older. I want her to understand that if you have no respect for yourself and your dignity, then no one's going to have it for you. Men and women are as bad as each other. Do you think Lisa (and subsequently Bluey, Josh, Kim, Sean and Marcus) would have survived if she hadn't thought an unprotected orgy with absolute strangers was a good thing? As one of the boys points out to Lisa's friends, "Do you really think her parents want to know what she was doing when she died? That she was fucking strangers?!" Bluey already established earlier that he had no comprehension of a partner's feelings, and yet she deemed him a wise choice. And then had no problem with Bluey suggesting that Josh have a go with her too. She allows herself to be objectified, and then they're surprised when things go wrong. Granted, a girl allowing herself to be objectified may not always result in death (check the labels) but it's a shitty place to put oneself in willingly.

Although it's disputed as to just how lethal Josh's rookie moves are in reality, I think this movie contains some truths about human behaviour and cause and effect. There's the aforementioned respect for lovers, but then, of course, when shit goes down, who is your real friend? Apparently the girls were trusting enough to allow these strangers access to their vaginas, yet once these same fellas have fucked their friend to death and carried out a "burial at sea" (in the same graceful tradition of Bin Laden), all feelings of amity have vanished. I'd hope that the girls, at this point, started scorning themselves for their poor judgement of character, and utter lack of common sense. But if either of these things is true about them, then they probably didn't. Eventually even the original friendship groups (boys v girls) turn against each other. You'd think that really good friends, and decent, mature human beings, would have materialised the following scenario:

[JOSH SMACKS LISA'S NECK. WE HEAR A SNAP AND SHE FALLS DOWN DEAD. JOSH GASPS, SHAKES HER, CHECKS HER VITALS. SHE IS DEAD. HE FLOPS DOWN ON BED AND CRIES]

BLUEY:     Oh my God, man! Oh Christ, it's OK, don't worry. It was an accident, I know it was. Let's call in an ambulance and the police and tell them what happened. And show them, look, I have the camera. They'll know it was an accident, man. You didn't mean to hurt her, it was innocent!

JOSH:         Oh my God, we'll have to. I can't believe what I've done! Oh, I'm so sorry Lisa! [HE SOBS OVER HER BODY] I didn't mean to hurt you! It was an accident.

BLUEY:      Look man, I'll go and tell the others, and make the calls. Everything's gonna be OK... [EXIT BLUEY]

You know, something sensible like that. From there, everybody instead starts trying to shift the blame, and incriminate each other, eventually pretty much everybody on board is down for at least an assault charge, if not worse. But at this early stage, Josh would have been the only 'guilty' party, and even then, with the video footage, it would be manslaughter at the worst. We didn't think he was a bad guy at this point, just a bit of a stupid and gullible and unlucky one. But because of the gang-up he is eventually the subject of, he goes a bit crazy, and by the end of it, has done far worse than the mistake that set this whole shitball rolling. They'd definitely all have been better off had they chosen a sensible course of action, But they're dumb, selfish and all (but one) end up dead as a result. It seems Donkey Punch has more thought and moral behind it than you'd first think.