Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption review

Now, one of my guilty pleasures (well, not guilty- there’s nothing guilty about it!) is the original Scorpion King movie. The Rock is cool, there’s just no getting around that fact. And this is coming from someone who never watched any of that wrestling stuff in his life!

I was surprised to see there was a third instalment of the story, as I wasn’t even aware that there had been a second one.

Anyway, this one seems to pick up right at the end of the second movie- we get a quick synopsis of what has went before, and are then plunged straight into the action.

Victor Webster plays warrior Mathayus with gusto but no matter how hard he tries, he is not the White Dwarf of charisma that The Rock is. Horus, king of Egypt and sometime Hellboy Ron Pearlman hires him for a job, but things go complicated and there’s a load of double crossing and stuff. And something about a magic necklace and the Book of the Dead from the original Mummy movie. To be honest, it lost me a bit, but luckily there are characters who helpfully explain the plot every few scenes.

Also in the mix is a wildly overacting Billy Zane who, to his credit, is putting a lot of effort into his role as the evil brother of Pearlman’s character.

The special effects are not quite up to the standard of the huge budget original, and neither is the acting (which isn’t, I admit, saying much!).

This is very much one of those movies you watch with your brain in neutral. It is perfect Saturday night beer and pizza fodder.

Oh, and there are elephants. And ninjas. And ninjas riding elephants. That has to be a good thing, right?

Scorpion King 3 is released on DVD by Universal on 27^th February and is available to pre-order now.

Johnny English Reborn review

Now, I have never seen the first Johnny English movie. And being as it was released in 2003, this sequel seems a bit out of the blue.

Did we really need a follow-up to a comedy spoof from almost ten years ago, albeit one that was a box office success?

The honest answer to this is, of course, No. We didn’t need this sequel.

The bigger question is: is it any good?

Ah, well, now we get into another territory altogether.

I’ll tell you what I thought of this movie.

I thought it was okay.

There are some very good things about it. First off, the cast is astounding. Atkinson is a fantastic actor, and is surrounded here by some equally incredible talent. Dominic West manages to hold in the swears as a fellow agent and he’s also joined by Gillian Anderson and Rosamund Pike.

Story-wise it is not actually half bad. Yes, the villain is obvious from the beginning, but it a well told and well directed tale with some very good direction and exciting action sequences.

But... there are a number of problems with it. While there are plenty of jokes in there, most of them, for me at least, didn’t quite work. I could not help but think while watching that a comedian and actor with the skill set that Atkinson possesses could probably have come up with better lines himself. And there is also the character of Johnny English himself. The writers can’t seem to decide what to make of him. He is in turn a bumbling fool who can’t see what’s going on right in front of him and a suave, capable, super-spy. Yes, you’ll say I’m overthinking it, but I’m a writer and that’s what I do.

Now, having said all that, I should point out that I watched this movie with my two boys. They both laughed like drains the whole way though and proclaimed it was brilliant, even pointing out the occasions where I laughed out loud.

So, perhaps I’m saying that cynical 40-something writers may not be the target audience of what was an admittedly fun movie, so perhaps you should bear that in mind when considering my opinion!

Johnny English: Reborn is released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Universal on 13^th Februay and is available for pre-order now. 

The Clinic review

The first shock in this movie comes at the very beginning, and it has nothing to do with the movie itself. No, it is the sight of the wonderful Andy Whitfield in the male lead role that was a bit of a jolt, and just served to bring how much he’ll be missed in the role of Spartacus.
Anyway, on with the movie!
The story starts on Christmas Eve 1979 in the Australian desert, which is another jolt for those of us used to freezing cold snow and bitter winds at that time of year. So we join a young couple as they head across country for the holidays. Stopping off at a cheap motel for the night, things start to go bad when Cameron (Whitfield) finds his pregnant fiancée Beth (Tabrett Bethell) has gone missing.

So far so horror movie. But this movie quickly sends the viewer in a different direction than the one the viewer may be expecting from the set-up. While we see some of Whitfield doing the strong husband act and trying to find out what has happened to his wife (really Australians – do you really dislike your country cousins that much? Or is every remote Australian town inhabited exclusively by sinister weirdoes?), this is very much Bethell’s movie. 

And, I should warn you, it is a grim one. She wakes up in a bath full of ice to find that her baby has been removed and we follow her as she and a group of other women who have had the same thing happen to them try to find out just what the hell has happened to them while they are being staked through the clinic by a mysterious figure...

The story itself has a nice (nice is not the word really, but you know what I mean!) old school horror story feel to it. To me it has the atmosphere of one of the novels of Richard Laymon. If you are unfamiliar with his work, I suggest you check him out, he really is one of the unsung masters of the horror genre.
To me true horror, as I am sure I have said here before, is where people are doing bad things to other people. I find supernatural horror to be much less scary than ‘real’ horror. And that is not to say that movies like Hostel, Saw 58 and the like are scary. They are not. There is a difference between meanness and gore and scaring people.
And there are scares in this. There is a touch of the Saws about it in places, but this is not a torture-porn gorefest, although there is some gore in there.
No, there is an actual story going on here, and while I was a bit annoyed at a brief flirtation with a possible supernatural element, this was explained well in a rather nice twist. Yes, the twist does require the viewer to swallow a gigantic coincidence or two, but that’s okay.

And pleasingly for a modern horror movie, after all the darkness and death and misery, it was nice to have a genre movie that ends on a note that could be interpreted as hope for a change!

The Clinic is released on DVD by Universal on 17^th October.

War Games review

No, this is not a remake of the early 1980s John Badham movie, so rest easy!

The war games in the title of this movie are altogether more literal.

So, we have a group of young people (I’m not sure of their ages, everyone between about fifteen and thirty years old looks the same to me) head off for a weekend of paint balling, when they encounter another group of folks who prefer to use real bullets…

Things begin in a way familiar to the horror movie viewer, as we are introduced to our adventurers. There’s the nice one, the rude one, the cynical one, the one who doesn’t want to be there, and so on…

Meanwhile, the Bad Guys are much more fun. How bad are they? Well, when we first meet them, we witness one of them doing something that will leave you in no doubt they are Very Bad Indeed.

Things progress exactly as one would expect them to for a while, but when the first killing comes, it is well done and even though we know it is coming, it still manages to shock.

After that we enter a game of cat and mouse as our team get picked off one by one and, armed only with a pistol with a few bullets and a load of paint balls, they go up against a team of insane gun totting crazies.

And yes, it does sound familiar. We’re firmly in Deliverance/ Southern Comfort territory here, with a dollop of The Hills have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wolf Creek thrown in.

Still, this familiarity helps on the occasions that the narrative steps outside the expected lines and delivers a genuine shock or twist, which it manages to do a number of times.

The cast of unknowns (to me at least) are, for the most part, pretty good and it’s good to see them not being afraid of getting dirty, wet and downright uncomfortable for the part.

The best thing though, and the thing that impressed me about this movie, is the sound design. I suspect it may not be for everyone, but the use of feedback and white noise was very effective in communicating the isolation and desperation of the characters.

All in all, this is an entertaining piece of horror. Yes, we know more or less who is the one who will survive at the end, but as I mentioned earlier, the times where they manage to subvert the genre tropes make this worth watching.

I was going to say that War Games is good fun, but I don’t think that is the word… it’s maybe better to think of it as being like Wolf Creek with all the hope and feel good scenes removed…

War Games is released on DVD by Universal Pictures.