bad_badger Reviews

Mountain Goats: Pilot: Miller's Mountain (2014) Season 1, Episode 0

Is there a bone sticking out?

[10/10 · 6 May 2014]

Just watched Miller's Mountain on the Comedy Playhouse and tore something important from laughing.

Crude, irreverent and utterly devoid of pretension. A fantastic example of red-blooded Scottish comedy that should not be missed at any cost, even if just to catch a glimpse of Elkie the Boss-Eyed Stag.

Jimmy Chisholm's alcoholic mountain rescue/ice cream van driver staggers ineptly from one set piece to the next while being harried by Sharon Rooney's withering one-liners, but both are in danger of being up-staged by David Ireland's eerie and socially inept dog handler 'Bill'.

Kevin Guthrie plays the excellent (and increasingly exasperated) novice mountaineer "Conor", and an appearance from Only an Excuse's Jonathan Watson delivers one of the funniest lines in the show in the closing moments while reflecting on a harrowing day in the mountains.

If you missed it, check it out on BBC I-Player. You can thank me later.

Prometheus (I) (2012)

I'm sorry...what??

[5/10 · 2 June 2012]

I'd have loved this film when I was fifteen. I would have soaked it up unquestioningly and raved about the visuals and the space craft and the settings and the frights. Because when you're fifteen that's all that's really important.

Now that I'm old and crotchety, I look for a little bit more. Not an awful lot, it has to be said, but a little bit. And that little bit is a coherent plot. Sadly, Prometheus falls well short.

You can't fault the movie for sets and visual effects and score and sound - all of that is just as you'd expect for $200 million. There's nothing wrong with the acting either, although I imagine a lot of people would agree that Michael Fassbender's android David steals every scene he's in. Where this movie ultimately disintegrates is in the unravelling of the plot, quite literally in this case.

It just doesn't make any sense.

The principal narrative drive of the movie is various ancient human civilisations leaving engravings and cave paintings of the same constellation suggesting that our origins are extra-terrestrial. Humanity sends a ship out there to investigate. With me so far? This is plausible enough in the world of sci-fi, right up to the point where we find out that the location of these star-maps (presumably provided by the 'engineers' themselves, as referred to in the movie), is not their home planet or even a welcome sign but is in fact their equivalent of a weapons manufacturing plant that has been set up on a remote planet.

Eh? If you try hard enough, you could argue a case for this: perhaps the most obvious being that if our civilisation ever became advanced enough to follow the star-map and find this place, that we'd do ourselves in in the process. If that's the case, then WHY bother setting up our civilisation in the first place? We then find in the climactic third of the movie that these engineers were just about to set off in a ship BACK to earth to deliver lots of their nasty bio-goo to kill us all off or transform us into genetic weapons or whatever it does (again, left a bit nebulous in the movie), but their plan went pear-shaped and they never got off the ground.

Why they want to kill us now after taking all the time to seed the planet, no one seems to know. Am I missing something really obvious, here? There's lots of other strange things like the squid-creature that Rapace's character has removed from her womb and why a strange penguin-goblin thing is born from one of the engineers at the very end of the movie. If their genetic blue-print is almost identical to ours (again as suggested earlier in the movie), wouldn't a more typical Geiger alien be the product? Who knows...

Ultimately, a movie that looks and sounds great but just leaves the audience (or at least ME) very confused and ultimately wondering what just happened.

Skyline (2010)

Mediocrity, ineptitude and greed

[1/10 · 30 November 2010]

A few IMDb reviewers have lauded this movie's brave stance on its bleak apocalyptic outcome and a refusal to conform to a tried-and-trusted formula, but frankly they just strike me as contrary individuals who are seeing patterns that aren't there. Far more people have identified this as a bad movie devoid of originality, narrative drive or emotional content and I would agree.

A lot of attention has already been brought to the seemingly endless parade of illogical and counter-intuitive events that go on in this movie (my personal favourite being the localised nuclear warhead). Other films have encouraged viewers to swallow equally preposterous events but they did so with more charisma or humour. 'Skyline' seems devoid of either.

Which brings me to the question of why this movie was made. Some have commented and many more have wondered how this seemingly-impossible turn of events came to pass, but if you think about it the whole thing makes perfect business sense.

A couple of special effects guys have an idea for a movie. They don't have much background in script writing, but they've seen a whole bunch of movies and have an idea how it works. They come to a producer who tells them they'll have to get it done in under $10 million and they shrug and say, 'ok'. Some actors and directors are wheeled in, the special effects guys do their thing and BANG - out pops 'Skyline'.

The special effects guys no doubt had a great time, the actors and directors turned up because it was a paying job and one more notch on their resumes, and the producer got the green light because he knew it would make enough money to turn a profit. 'Skyline' made, what, $17 million on its opening weekend, from a budget of $10 million? That seems like sound economic sense to me. And does it really matter if the movie was actually any good? The special effects guys made sure there were enough eye-popping moments to put together a great trailer to reel us in and once we paid our money...who cares if we liked it or not?

Hollywood runs a business. If they can make a profit from it, they'll film it.

Night Wolf (2010)

Decent horror romp hamstrung by budget limitations

[6/10 · 2 September 2010]

I saw this at FrightFest in London and was engaged right up to the final reel where things came a bit unglued.

The film deals with an estranged daughter coming home to visit her father and step-family at their ancestral manor. A building storm cuts off the power and an aborted party in the hay-barn is moved to the house, where the family discover that something *else* has crept into the house ahead of them.

There follows a horror genre cat-and-mouse chase around the house interior where the group of youths are steadily picked off by the monstrous invader during their efforts to contact the authorities and call for help.

Much of this section of the film is quite tense and well-played and this second reel is where I found most enjoyment. The creature responsible for the mounting chaos is never shown (other than a clever Gollum-style silhouette in one shot) and works for the film rather than against, leaving imagination to fill in the blanks.

Only in the final act of the movie do we learn the origin of the creature (although this particular twist is not difficult to see coming much earlier in the movie) and see it in more detail, which is where things fall down a bit.

When budgets are tight, prosthetics and animatronics typically suffer - the visual effects for the creature are a bit wobbly (which shouldn't really matter that much if the editing is tight or evasive) and although the body count is high and the corpses are suitably eviscerated and mangled (with probably the best effects of the movie) somehow the revelation of the responsible party left me feeling flat. Many of the actual murders also happen off-screen or in cut-away, which was another source of frustration for a horror fan.

Ultimately, this is a decent movie and the second act is where all the tension is rooted, but I found the ending lacking something. At the festival, the director explained they only had something like 18 days to shoot which would certainly impact on the final film.

If you like monster movies and have a free hour and a half, you could do a lot worse than watch 13Hrs.

Wild Target (2010)

Entertaining, but desperately predictable

[6/10 · 13 July 2010]

I haven't seen 'Cible Emouvante' so I don't know how close this is to the original, but the story just didn't seem to gel for me.

Bill Nighy plays his part well, although I feel he could probably have cruised through this with his eyes shut. Emily Blunt is also very good, but I found her character maddeningly infuriating and was rooting for Nighy to shoot her right from the outset. Perhaps this instant loathing made it difficult for me to swallow the burgeoning romance between them - as the likelihood of her being assassinated dwindled, so did my interest in the proceedings.

I think Rupert Everett and Gregor Fisher were criminally underused; they play the central antagonists in the first and second acts of the movie and then are conveniently forgotten about with the introduction of Nighy's rival assassin Martin Freeman (with hilarious fake teeth).

The ending is pretty ham-fisted, too. It goes through some very predictable paces to a very generic and convenient conclusion - so much so that you could leave with thirty minutes of running time left and be confident that 'things turn out all right in the end'.

Despite these grumbles the film is ultimately good fun; the humour is quite gentle and the moments of violence are always portrayed behind a safety net of pathos or comedy. If it's entertainment you're after, you could do a lot worse than watch 'Wild Target'.

Predators (2010)

A good effort at recapturing the original

[7/10 · 9 July 2010]

++Contains Spoilers, probably++ Just back from the cinema and I found this a very acceptable sequel. Keeping the original score (or at least a very similar version) and setting virtually everything in jungle and forest went a long way towards making fans of the Schwarzenegger original comfortable within the first 5-10 minutes.

There wasn't too much messing around with the Predator mythos other than the injection of some sort of caste or clan system (much of which went over my head), but I admit to being a bit disappointed at the range of lethal gadgets the Predators employ (not much more than the wrist blades and 'parrot guns'). I was always a fan of the hardware sported by the hunter in Predator II and felt its absence in this film.

All of the principal cast did a good job, in particular Walton Goggins injecting some much-needed comic relief in an otherwise rather starchy we're-all-badasses script. A bit of a pity they didn't use Danny Trejo more than they did. The movie could have done with some louder charismatic presence, though - none of the cast quite measured up to the Schwarzeneggers, Venturas and Weathers from the original (and who can blame them?).

The momentum of the movie sags a bit in the middle when the characters briefly hole up with survivor Laurence Fishburn (although Fishburn puts in a good turn as a crazy veteran), but otherwise sets a reasonably engaging pace throughout.

No real surprises in the plot and what few twists there are are easily spotted, but that doesn't harm the film in any way - action genre movies are allowed to be predictable and often benefit from it.

There are also quite a few situational or musical cues that are almost identical to the original movie that makes me wonder whether Predators would have been better to try and stand on its own two feet rather than invoke constant nostalgia in the viewer (or perhaps that's just me).

At any rate, it is an enjoyable movie. The CG is effective, the deaths suitably brutal, the Predator suits aren't too bulky or rubbery and the conjuring-mime antics of the aliens are kept to a reasonable level (have never enjoyed the excessive contorting and gesturing of guy-in-a-suit creatures - if the suit looks cool, let it do the work. As Mr Walken said, "don't just do something - stand there.").

Avatar (2009)

A technical triumph, but worth the wait?

[7/10 · 17 December 2009]

I saw a preview of Avatar last night in Glasgow and came out with the impression that I'd somehow seen this movie before. And I have. And so have you, in one guise or another.

If you have an interest in movies then that shouldn't come as a surprise, and this isn't a complaint about lack of originality or clichéd plot devices (although there are arguments for both in this movie). There are after all only a finite number of themes on which to base a story.

What I'm trying to say is that the entire movie felt like a re-tread of something that had come before - and not just in passing, or in specific moments, but the ENTIRE movie.

There are very strong thematic similarities to movies like Dances With Wolves and Last Of The Mohicans that bob up to the surface in every Na'Vi scene (nomatter how much blue paint and exotic horse-things you disguise them with). Most of the human-orientated scenes unfold in the "Company" facilities that are clearly how the sets of Aliens would have looked had Cameron the budget and technology first time around, even down to the design of the VTOL craft and the power-loader battle suits.

Most of the exploration and action sequences feel like levels from any xeno-based Xbox 360 or Playstation game of the last ten years. Even the strange connective tissue the Na'Vi use to link to the natural world around them feels awfully like a deliberate design for the licensed game adaptation.

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but Cameron set the bar pretty high with his previous decade of movie making and I think I have a right to expect something a bit less generic.

Where the movie excels is in the visual effects and the colour palette - I watched the preview in 3D and was really really impressed. There's nothing like it in terms of CG rendering and seamless motion capture. Avatar represents the next step up in cinematic effects, in the same way that Weta Digital showed the world how to do it with the animation of Gollum in The Two Towers.

Weighing in at the best part of three hours, it felt like longer (something I never thought I'd say about a sci-fi movie) and could probably have used a few judicial cuts. There was just a touch of Tarantinism about it - i.e. self-indulgent and over-confident.

Overall, I did enjoy this movie and when you watch it yourself (if you haven't already), I'm sure you'll enjoy it too.

Despite all the incredible visuals, alien worlds, exotic flora and fauna and so forth, it's the strangest thing that I should leave the cinema wondering why it felt so unoriginal.

Sweet Charity (2002 TV Movie)

An outstanding effort

[10/10 · 24 November 2005]

What's wrong with the world today? I'll never understand how a sitcom featuring old women, clockwork monkeys and fountains of excrement can be overshadowed by endless, homogenised 'reality' TV shows that have been clogging the airwaves for more than long enough. Some real moments of comedy brilliance are contained herein; a transvestite police sergeant and the legendary 'cardigan stick' being particular favourites of mine. Little of this will make sense if you haven't see Sweet Charity, and if you haven't its unlikely you ever will. But I'm not here to make sense; I'm here to fight the good (if slightly belated) fight against the faceless corporate vampires in their BBC coffins, too old and too calcified in their opinions to recognise fresh talent when it knocks on their door.

Revenge of Billy the Kid (1991)

Compellingly awful

[7/10 · 24 November 2005]

I first saw this movie at a Black Sunday convention in Edinburgh and enjoyed it immensely. While not speaking for everyone, I attended the horror film festivals to see some gratuitous consequence-free violence and the occasional explosion, but consistently came away with a belly-full of pretentious ghost-stories and inscrutable Italian gibberish. Oh, and Revenge of Billy the Kid. Despite its suspect production values, it had absolutely everything a horror fan needs after six hours of disappointment and frustration. Violence, bestiality and sparkling moments of profanity and revulsion - so excruciatingly blunt at times it was a joy to behold, appealing to every rebellious instinct in my body. The most telling thing for me was the audience's reaction - after hours of polite coughing and rustling of sweetie wrappers, people finally came alive. They laughed uproariously at the depraved antics of the MacDonalds, perhaps as much in relief as amusement. My personal favourite moments are the expiration and consequent 'burial' of the granddad, ma's potato peeling and more or less any sequence involving the dreadful sock puppet infant Billy. I went to the effort of tracking this movie down on DVD and recommend that you do the same. You're not a complete person until you've seen it.