Reviews

This film is dreadful. Badly shot, badly acted, with stupid off-the-cuff dialogue... there are a couple of decent scenes which come close to disturbing, but for the most part this is just like a weird episode of Rainbow.

On the plus side, everyone seems to be having fun, especially the nurse. With a decent script and a competent director (Russell clearly was in it for the fun of it) it could have been an average film. Sadly, it is tamer than an episode of the X Files, features terrible special effects (even Albert F. Pyun would laugh at this!) and is just plain ugly to look at.

A dreadful film, badly directed. Don't spend more than a quid on it. I bought it for a fiver and I'm bloody annoyed!!

Bangkok Dangerous is the story of a lonely mute who becomes a hit-man, partly to avenge himself upon the world that has alienated him. Only when he finds happiness does he realize the full horror of his life.

The film boasts some great performances, particularly by Pawalit Mongkolpisit as Kong, the main protagonist. His face is beautiful yet impassive, and his large eyes convey all the strangled emotions of a person unable to communicate with those around him.

There are many excellent moments to savour in this film, but the contrived way in which Kong's partner is forced out of retirement is ridiculous. However, despite the generic plot - which at times has a square-peg-round-hole forced feel to it - and the thoroughly predictable narrative progression, the film is actually pretty rewarding. It has a tender humanism at the centre, which gives the film real depth, and there are many moments worth savouring.

Score 7/10 (6 is too low, but 7's maybe a little too high)

The general concensus is that this is a terrible film - and the general concensus is right. Imagine Independence Day (a slice of crud livened up by several charismatic actors) without the occasional wit and operatic drama. Imagine the TV show Falcon's Crest, with aliens. Imagine if Ray Liotta's character in HANNIBAL, after having his brains fed to him by Doctor Lecter, decided to adapt a generic sci-fi novel for the screen. This is the sort of dross he'd probably have created.

Let's start with the plot, because it's a real hoot. Aliens have taken over the earth, and enslaved mankind. Originally they enslave dogs, but are surprised to find out that they are ill-suited to manual labour. Uh-huh. Despite their awesome technology, the aliens are about as intelligent as - hey, whose idea was it to adapt an L Ron Hubbard novel again?

The film is deeply illogical. We humans (called "man animals" by the aliens, which in itself is both stupid and illogical) made a last stand, using fighter jets and tanks, before the Psychlos conquered our puny armies. However, the aliens are baffled when a human gets hold of one of their weapons and manages to work out how to use it against them. Hello! We had tanks and planes, remember? It's not rocket science to pull a trigger.

The one thing worth praising about this film is that it is free from Star Trek TNG hokum. There are no proton torpedos that can be reconfigured to solve any possible problem, no matter how absurd, nor are there any cringe-worthy nosedives into soap-opera territory that so plague the Star Trek spin-offs. However, this is a small blessing. Battlefield Earth is certainly not the saviour of contemporary sci-fi. It is a stupid film, riddled with rubbish that should have been abandoned in the rough-draft stages.

Shame on you, Johnny T. Here's one film that certainly won't stay alive.

Although this was his first hit, this is not Miike's best. It lacks the humanity of Blues Harp and the Shinjuku Triad Society trilogy, but is squeezed full of imaginative violence and wicked slaughter.

This is the closest Miike has ever got to making a Fukasaku film, which is not in itself a good thing - Miike is, in terms of strings to his bow, a superior director to Fukasaku, whose films are shallow and hectic marathons of murder.

FUDOH is an enjoyable romp, but offers little more than a quick blast of action and horror. It is as wooden and cartoon-like as The City of Lost Souls - an arguably superior picture - and as blackly vicious (as well as less confused and one-dimensional) as Battle Royale. An ideal film if you're looking for some no-holds-barred carnage, and you're bored of John Woo's endless slo-mo.

7/10

I want to like Adam Sandler. Maybe I do like Adam Sandler. After all, he was charming in The Wedding Singer, which only just stood up to a second viewing. Then again, for every Wedding Singer, there's a Waterboy - the comedic equivalent of what Jim Caviezel endures in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Happy Gilmore is unusual because it is one of the few bad films I've actually sat through until the end. So how bad is it? Well, I would be exaggerating if I said that it was bordering on a crime against humanity, but it would be a mild exaggeration. I am unreliably informed that the US dropped copies of the DVD on Falluja to destroy the spirit of the rebels there. It is the sort of comedy that produces a sort of existential pain, a shiver in the soul. It is about as funny as bowel cancer.

The main character is irritating and unpleasant and impossible to feel sympathy for. It isn't enough that we have to root for this idiot, we also have to turn all of his opponents into overblown villains. Quite why a champion golfer would need to descend into villainy to defeat an erratic novice is beyond me, but then, we wouldn't root for Sandler if his opponents were nice guys, now would we?

Then there's the love story, although to call it that is a crime against romance. Basically, Sandler's character bumps into the only female character that isn't his mother, and the two fall in love - because a) he's the hero, and b) she's the only female that isn't his mother. It's enough to make you ram your private parts into a blender.

I can't say whether this is the worst comedy I've ever seen - usually I turn a film off if it makes me want to climb into the oven with a box of matches and a copy of Finnegans Wake - but it is bad. How bad? Toothache on a first date is bad; finding out that every one of your male ancestors had a penchant for little drummer boys is bad (I would imagine); Happy Gilmore is, dare I say it, much, much worse. Only the Marquis de Sade would enjoy watching such a painful film... but even he would feel dirty afterwards.

Score: 2/10 (OK, it should really be 1 out of 10, but since making a comedy about golf is very, very brave indeed, I gave it an extra pip)

I've been a huge Coen Bros. fan since I saw Barton Fink on BBC2 - you know, back when BBC2 showed decent movies. Almost a decade has passed and I have done my damnedest to watch every single one of their films. I adored some of them so much that I watched them dozens of times over. Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing - these films were absolutely perfect, certainly the work of genius. Sadly, this particular film was a real ordeal.

The Film That Wasn't There - sorry, did I get the title right? - struck me as a turgid, meandering, soullessly flat and contrived work. It felt like somebody was playing a cruel joke on me. The film seemed to drag on interminably, and my interest in the characters waned to nothing within about 30 minutes. Billy Bob Thornton's narration, conveyed in a dreadful Monsieur Waldemar-style death-croak, really started to grate, and I started to think: this is really, really ball-achingly awful.

Several people I know have watched this film and loved it. They called it beautiful and funny. I didn't think that it was either of these things. If you take a bad film, with an unprepossessing script, a flimsy and derivative plot, and as boring and weightless a central character as you can imagine and top it off with a horrible death-rattle voice-over, shooting in in black and white to make it look like a classic is like putting icing on a Brian Bosworth movie. I felt extremely cynical after the film; yes, people smoking cigarettes in black and white looks lovely, but we've seen Schindler's List already.

As I said, some people loved this film. People whose judgment I trust, even. It's one of those movies you have to see for yourself - you might think it's the best film for ages. Or you might, like me, want to take your ex-rental copy back to Blockbusters and try to get your £2.95 back.

Takashi Miike's entry in Halliwell's dubbed him a cult director of sex and violence movies. That they missed out the fact that he's a better director than both John Woo and Tarantino, and produces films that defy genre classification and feature inventive flourishes worthy of Almodovar is a real shame.

Although not all of his films are worth tracking down, there are some real gems in his back catalogue. Films like Blues Harp and Rainy Dog are as tender as they are tough, real humanist odes to the silent suffering of the outsider. Other Miike films, like the notorious (and excellent) Ichi the Killer, veer close enough to art-house to escape being lumped in with repulsive, misogynist trash like Last House on the Left.

Miike's Dead or Alive is a classic example of the restless creativity and experimentalism that makes Japanese cinema so admirable. Like many of his peers, Miike takes a standard tale - that of a bitter, dutiful Cop destined to clash with a ruthless, tortured Villain - and distorts it, playing with conventions and, from time to time, 'stepping out' of reality without breaking the narrative.

The story itself is a simple tale of an honest cop (played by brilliant Miike regular Sho Aikawa) who is unable to get enough money together to pay for his daughter's operation. He is frustrated, emasculated and silently furious about his predicament - he sleeps on the couch, despite his wife's protestations, and spends his free time stalking the city, eating noodles in the pleasure districts of Tokyo. When a local gang murders a yakuza, the hero is set on collision course with his alter-ego, played by Riki Takeuchi. Takeuchi's gang are hell-bent on taking over the district, and their leader doesn't care how many of his friends have to be sacrificed along the way.

The first ten minutes of DOA consist of a rapid-fire succession of jump-cuts: A naked woman clutching a bag of cocaine falls from a window. A gangster collects an automatic weapon from a market freezer. Riki Takeuchi jumps onto the roof of a car and, in plain sight of about 1000 people, blasts to death a prominent yakuza. A drug dealer is stabbed in the throat while having intimate relations with a rent boy in a squalid public toilet. A yakuza is executed by a shotgun blast to the back, sending his meal out of the exit wound in his stomach, to splatter comically over the camera-lens.... the cop identifies the dead man by the type of noodles sprayed around the crime scene.

It is hard to describe the sheer visceral energy of this opening sequence. It is superior to anything you might find in Natural Born Killers, or even Pulp Fiction. It is quite possibly the most awesome opening scene in modern film.

After this jaw-dropping high-speed spectacle, the film settles down into standard-thriller mode. There are some gruesome deaths - the fate of a stripper at the hands of a demented gangster is deliriously appalling - and a few playful denouements. It is not until the grand finale when Miike, with staggering audacity, creates another sequence to rival the opening scenes - the conclusion simply defies description.

DOA is not as mature and perfect a thriller as Takashi Ishii's GONIN, but it deserves to be hailed as a work of erratic genius. Colourful, vivid, vicious and surprising, it should go down well with any fans of Scarface, Kill Bill or Reservoir Dogs. A great introduction to Miike.

[warning: DOA2 and DOA3 are not sequels - they simply feature the same lead actors and explore similar themes]