So, while ‘Action Comics’ (launched in the late 1930s) staggers towards #900, ‘2000AD’ ( born in the late 1970s) clocks up issue (‘Prog’, in the comic’s own private language) 1700.

As an anthology title ‘2000AD’ tends to use these big numbers for ‘jumping-on’ issues where each strip is the beginning of a new story (as with #1500, which I reviewed  a few years back). So, with ‘CLiNT’ debuting this week in a flurry of wild claims about reviving the British comics market, it’s worth looking again at what Tharg considers a ‘new-reader-friendly’ issue. Is it likely to make any new converts?

In terms of first impressions, this is a very nice looking issue. The tweaked logo and new contents page are clean and crisp, with an eye-friendly white background that’s a lot less ’90s videogames magazine’ than the old, cluttered layout. An anniversary issue means alien editor Tharg on the cover rather than a showcase for a particular strip, but Jon Davis-Hunt takes a potentially restrictive brief and delivers a striking cover that’s the sharpest art I’ve seen from him yet. With a very strong line-up of artists within, this is certainly a good looking issue.

Lead strip is, of course, ‘Judge Dredd’ in the first part of ‘The Skinning Room’. Dredd’s creator/lead writer John Wagner scripts, and there’s a bit of business involving ongoing story threads to take account of in the first couple of pages, but Wagner skillfully restates Dredd’s character and his current position within the Mega-City One hierarchy in the process. The villain introduced is suitably macabre, and while there’s no great surprises here it’s a promising enough set-up for a straightforward Dredd story. Ben Willsher’s art has the right balance of garish futurism and dystopian gloom, and are well served by Chris Blythe’s vivid colours.

Next up is ‘Defoe’ with ‘A Murder of Angels’, the most immediately appealing strip here. While it’s a very talky first installment, this series about zombie hunters in an alternative 17th century Britain is writer Pat Mills finest creation of recent years, an outrageous combination of mock-historical dialogue, body horror and action with a great central character in . Leigh Gallagher’s black and white art is atmospheric, horrific and insanely detailed, although that detail and a penchant for dynamic angles can make the action a little hard to follow at times. While this episode restates the series premise well enough, I highly recommend ‘1666‘, the first collected volume of the series.

‘Age of the Wolf’ is the only entirely new series in this issue, and is scripted by Alec Worley with art by cover artist Davis-Hunt. The premise is instantly intriguing: a few years in the future, the Full Moon persists for nights on end, creating a growing apocalyptic panic. I can’t recall seeing werewolves used as the vehicle for an apocalyptic scenario before – zombies or vampires, yes, but not werewolves – so colour me intrigued. The first installment is mainly set-up, but throws in plenty of interesting clues.

‘Low Life’ is set in the same world as ‘Judge Dredd’, but concentrates on undercover Judges. Over the last few years writer Rob Williams has taken a fairly straightforward premise (all the usual ‘Donnie Brasco’ cops undercover stuff: ‘Am I a cop pretending to be a criminal or a criminal pretending to be a cop’, angst angst etc) and twisted it into something pleasingly barking, with insane Judge/tramp Dirty Frank and an overarching story with biblical overtones. This first episode of ‘Hostile Takeover’ jumps around in locations and time periods, setting up the scope of the story rather than easing the reader in. Baffling, but promising big things. Mono art by D’Israeli, who remains one of British comics most distinct stylists. Good stuff.

Finally, ‘Nikolai Dante’ in ‘City of the Damned’. This may sound like Stockholm Syndrome, but I’ve become more favourable towards ‘Dante’ in the last few years. I think it’s that, perversely, as the strip has become bleaker, abandoning the joyless attempts at swashbuckling cheekiness in favour of epic melodrama, I’ve enjoyed it more. It remains, however, the least accessible series running in ‘2000AD’, with a vast cast of characters whose relationships are rarely explained. The latest twist involves the resurrection of a character I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been reading this series for years. This episode is all prologue, but at least the overwhelmingly dour mood reassured me there’s no return to sub-’Flashman’ larks any day soon. Phew.

I’m unsure about how well Prog 1700 works as a jumping-on point for new readers. It’s about as accessible as ‘2000AD’ gets, but with the caveat that it’s a long-running comic with a dedicated audience and a number of storylines that have been going for years: it doesn’t really do accessibility.

To be honest, I’m not sure whether it should. It’s very possible that a harder relaunch – more entirely new stories, less ongoing plot threads carried over in the continuing strips, and introductory episodes that steadily explained the set-up of each strip – would be more of a jumping-off point than new-reader magnet, alienating more loyalists than attracting newcomers.

As it stands, if you’re the kind of person who would consider reading ‘2000AD’ then chances are you know what an archetypal ‘2000AD’ story is like  – dark SF or fantasy, with a lot of violence and a mildly subversive, humorous edge – and just want to know whether the current strips fit that template well.

The answer to that is a very big ‘yes’. Within its own very specific niche ‘2000AD’ has been thriving for a while, and this is another very strong line-up: Wagner is on fine form writing ‘Dredd’, ‘Defoe’ is great, ‘Low Life’ is well worth getting into and ‘Age of the Wolf’ looks promising.

While it’s unlikely to lure huge numbers of new readers out of the ether (and, frankly, what print publication can do that these days?), Prog 1700 will keep regular readers happy, and should hold the attention of irregular or lapsed readers who give this issue a spin.

Former and casual squaxx, along with the genuinely thrill-curious, should give it a try.

He’s one of those actors who promises so much but often delivers so little. Luckily, ‘Bent’ is that rare Owen performance: a good one.

This 1997 film, remastered and released on DVD on 6 September, captures a 1979 West End play of the same name. The original stage star, Sir Ian McKellen, guests as Uncle Freddie in the film with Owen taking his role of Max, a gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. The film opens in 1934, as Max brings home a stormtrooper from a decadent party. The next day, Max and has to flee as the Night of the Long Knives starts. Eventually, caught and sent to Dachau, Max claims to only be Jewish, not homosexual. He meets Horst, who does wear the pink triangle, and is forced to look again at the decisions he’s made in order to survive.

The film stays very true to its theatrical roots, to the extent that you could imagine it being played out on a single stark set with a cast of around ten, or as a play staged in an abandoned warehouse somewhere. There is no attempt made to portray the real Dachau or to produce a realist film. This is much more Jarmanesque. At times, as the entire focus of the screen is two men standing side by side and talking, you’re reminded of ‘Waiting for Godot’. Everything rests on the performances, which is why it’s a relief that Owen actually delivers.

Initially, Max is just the kind of cynical, self-interested character that you expect from Owen but as his identity is shorn from him, Owen is left nothing but his face to act with and he suggests vulnerability and hardness equally through his eyes.

Lothaire Bluteau, as Horst, equally carries the film. Horst is a survivor, which Bluteau suggests through a certain ratlike scurrying. His slumped shoulders convey resignation but his voice suggests defiance.
The rest of the cast are fleeting in their screen time. McKellen is a delight as fussy Uncle Freddie, whereas Mick Jagger is better as Greta once s/he stops being a drag queen after the Night of the Long Knives. I don’t even remember Jude Law’s appearance.

The music, by Philip Glass, is limited so that you’re occasionally drawn out of the film by thinking “not that bloody piano piece again”. There’s an odd montage of stock footage of trains to indicate Max is being transported to a concentration camp. This is oddly jarring, as the rest of the film doesn’t pretend to be realistic and you can tell from the set and sounds that they are in a train.

This isn’t a great film – the staginess reminds you too often that they could have locked off a camera at the back of the stalls – but it does capture a good and significant play.

‘Bent’ is released in a Dual Format Edition containing both Blu-ray and DVD versions on 6 September 2010. You can pre-order it here.

However, this was as much from a sense of disbelief at what I’d witnessed as to enjoy the story.

That said, the basic plot elements are both simple and classic. Army of skeletons protect vast cache of cursed gold, which young, bland-faced college friends stumble across after their Professor uses their desert-based driving holiday to recover it.

To explain the backplot, the film opens with the disappearance of 10,000 (four) Conquistadors, as they discover the gold, and the skeletons rise up to kill them. The use of shadows for the awakening skeletons is nicely done, even if you can spot some of the skeletons are already wearing Conquistador helmets.

Back in the present day, our two fresh-faced leads are off on an adventure. Amy and John are in their car, and there is a moment when you think the film is going off in a whole other direction:

‘What’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to do, but the one thing I’ll never let you do?’ she asks him.

Turns out, she means racing VW bugs in the desert with some of their friends from college.

I was as surprised as you are.

So our cast meet up, and tell rather than show their relevant character points.

The girl we know is bad because she wears black eyeliner is John’s ex. But it’s OK, because ‘that’s been over for a year’, and ‘You’re with me now,’ as her new beau puts it.

My conflict/sexual tension senses immediately started tingling.

There’s another couple who, ominously for them, have no notable quirks or role, their Professor, who has a beard, and the trip leaders, who are less useless than everyone else at being in the desert. Apparently.

There is then some driving in the desert, (‘Cellphones off, helmets on!’  – no one puts on a helmet at any point, or seems to have a phone) with lots of shots getting their money’s worth from the stunt drivers. Indeed, I timed one long scene of cars and dunes, and it went on for over a minute. That’s sixty whole seconds that could be spent on undead skeleton warriors, for goodness sake!

Events progress as you might expect. They spend the evening around the camp fire and the Professor tells the spooky tale of his earlier desert trip, featuring the mysterious disappearance of a friend who found an ancient gold coin, and the legend of the lost, cursed gold. Next day, the Professor meets up with the stock bad guy and his useless henchmen, who have the missing half of his Secret Treasure Map for sale. They find the gold, the skeletons wake up, and all manner of carnage ensues.

Well, I say carnage. I actually mean bad CGI and plot-holes. The skeletons themselves are alright, but everything else was obviously bought as a job lot at a CGI jumble sale. If you can’t afford really good CG blood splatter, then get some cheap blood packs for your cast to wear, and do it properly.

In fact, all the blood effects are awful, and whilst I realise this isn’t a big budget film, the flames and explosions are inexcusably poor, too, and would have been bad ten years ago. Even the crackling fire sound effect is far too obviously the same short loop every time it’s used.

There are some unexpected plot twists: the fact that there is a nearby artillery range with loads of ‘live ammo kicking around’ is mentioned once then never again; the Professor is shot in the back by a flaming arrow quite early on, but quickly recovers and this is never mentioned again; the gold is supposed to be in the legendary, quite interesting city of El Dorado, but this is never mentioned at all; you can shoot or hack apart the undead skeletons to absolutely no detriment, but they do burn, and small explosions destroy lots and lots of them. And, as for electricity…

I especially liked that our heroes break down in the middle of a vast desert, but just happen to be within a torch beam’s range of a disused radio tower – yet at no point do they try to use the radio. Or switch their cellphones back on.

This is a frankly awful film; acting, plot, script, and effects. It does, however cross the line into potential late night drinking game, and would be a lot of fun to mock with friends.

In conclusion, rubbish. But quite fun rubbish, and you really do gain more from repeat viewings. Even if what you ultimately gain is amazement that this was released at all.

‘Army of the Dead’ is released on DVD on 13 September 2010. If pre-ordering it is something you would like to do, you can do so here.

I’m happy to report that actually The Last Exorcism is the best horror film I’ve seen this year and even with its tweenage rating, still extremely creepy and shocking. Like The Exorcist (1973), this film is about a priest who has lost his faith and is involved in the exorcism of a young girl; the girl in particular, Nell played by Ashley Bell amongst a uniformly excellent cast drawn from TV backgrounds, is another vulnerable ingénue very similar to Linda Blair in the original film. The manifestations of demonic possession in Nell’s character are also fairly similar, albeit without the 18 certificate language and genital mutilation, including manipulation of her limbs and body that would probably lead to paralysis or death in most people.

However, the film takes advantage of many viewers’ familiarity with the original film and subverts our expectations. Here the god fearing father is convinced the girl is possessed while the ‘priest’ is depicted as a charlatan / magician, who only undertakes the exorcism because he’d rather do it himself than see her hurt by someone with less experience (presumably he expects the ceremony to have some kind of beneficial psychological effect on her) and because he is being followed by a film crew.

The film also follows in the footsteps of other ‘handycam’ / found footage horror films from the last decade or so which began with The Last Broadcast (1998) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) and has become popular again in recent years with the likes of [Rec] (2007), Cloverfield (2008) and Paranormal Activity (2009). Luckily this is also an aspect of the film that is not only done well, but in fact didn’t put me off watching it, as some ‘handycam’ films including The Blair Witch Project have such violent and frequent camera movements that I actually find them difficult to watch from start to finish without feeling nauseous!

The film obviously covers some familiar ground and goes on to prove similar to devil worship films such as The Devil Rides Out (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and To The Devil A Daughter (1976) – which, given these examples, seems a peculiarly British genre – and the film still seems surprisingly fresh. Perhaps this is because the initial setup – as the strangely likeable fake priest shows us not only his irreverence in sermons, including use of card tricks, but also the tools he uses in a fake exorcism including a hollow cross that emits smoke at the touch of a button – is comedic and makes you increasingly aware of the sense of impending doom as we meet the supposedly possessed girl and her family for the first time.

The original Exorcist made the demonic possession seem even stranger by setting it in a modern city with access to medical technology and diagnosis away from rural superstition; conversely by returning the exorcism to that setting and bringing a know-it-all ‘exorcist’ into that location, you can see a tragedy waiting to happen.

I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot, suffice to say that the film cleverly anticipates your expectations and subverts them on at least a couple of occasions, leading to several unsettling and genuinely scary scenes. More impressive still is a trope that seems common in a handful of this year’s movies – the ambiguous ending – as this film, ‘Inception’ and another imminent horror film, ‘After.Life’ all leave the audience wondering about the nature of the nature / reality of what they’ve just been watching plot-wise and in each case have managed to leave the film open to interpretation in a way that is more satisfying than frustrating. For a film that pretends to be a documentary, this seems a suitable approach to the footage, as for all the viral marketing in the world, you’ve got to be fairly dim to not realise it’s fiction – Ghostwatch notwithstanding!

In case you’re worried that I’m implying this film ends with a murky, indistinct glimpse of something off camera in the style of other horror mockumentaries, it doesn’t, this is a film that clearly shows you all the footage you need to see, but still leaves it open to interpretation.

As I left the cinema, a couple of other audience members were debating their interpretation regarding elements of the film’s plot and the theory I left with was different again (and somewhat more radical). In fact the poster which you may have seen advertising the film actually mis-markets the movie as it depicts a shot that doesn’t actually take place on screen (or rather it does, but the poster removes a very important element of the mise-en-scene, without which you might expect something this film doesn’t actually include). The same applies to the very clever viral marketing of the movie via chatroulette.com which again showed a more ‘Hollywood’ kind of possession compared to the one you see in the film.

That said I don’t think anyone who is a fan of the possession genre is going to be disappointed by this film and any criticism I might have of the film in general – the use of non diagetic sound, for example – is dependent on how you read the meaning of the film. En route to its disturbing conclusion, the film also raises the idea of how a vulnerable person might believe they have become possessed due to abuse and a closeted lifestyle which, even allowing for its occasional flippancy, makes the film more grounded than other examples of the genre, especially other recent po-faced possession movies like Shelter.

Suitably for a film about faith, I can only recommend this movie based on my own convictions. I believe it’s an entertaining, unnerving and in some respects, challenging film. However the aspects I admired about the film may also be qualities that put other people off from watching it, the revelations (in every sense of the word) in the final reel in particular. This is certainly a film that will inspire debate – feel free to leave comments below / on twitter (perhaps DM me if you want to discuss spoilers) – and if nothing else should be highly commended for proving you can still make a good horror film without filling the screen with gore or overtly controversial elements…

It is, to come up with the least fatuous modern comparison that I can, essentially as if, only a few years from now, ‘Star Wars’ were reduced to something only watched by chin-stroking film historians, with George Lucas admired for his technical achievements even as the fact that his film(s) made lots of money and entertain millions for decades is comprehensively ignored. (This is something which is not going to happen in so many different ways that I’ve lost count of them while typing this parenthetical section. But it’s at least four.)

That this situation exists with Chaplin is, quite frankly, a crying shame. Chaplin was a marvellous technical innovator, yes, but he was also a great communicator – as an actor and as a director. His films are moving, complex, poignant, funny and worthwhile; loaded with subtext, character, politics and ideas.  At his best he can, to put it simply, *point a camera at stuff* in a way that other directors have since surpassed but which no one has ever contained. We do ourselves, and this medium, a terrible injustice if we neglect Chaplin as an entertainer.

All this preamble is designed to get us to this point, where I can say that it is, therefore, marvellous that new combined DVD/Blu-ray editions of many of Chaplin’s films find their way into shops this week, where they have at least a chance of being discovered and rediscovered by the public.  Now,  I obviously can’t review them all, partially because that would require a book rather than an article, and partially because screeners aren’t available for all the titles as I’m writing this.  This is why I’m concentrating on ’The Gold Rush’. This 1925 film was by all accounts, the picture that Chaplin himself wished to be remembered for. It is also, to return briefly to the topic of Chaplin’s vanished popularity, the single highest grossing comic picture of the silent film era and the fifth highest grossing silent film ever made. A sublime tragicomedy, it takes Chaplin’s tramp character out into the Alaskan gold rush of the 1890s, where he encounters cold and starvation, is nearly eaten by a fellow prospector and eventually finds redemption and love with ingénue Georgia Hale. The legendary, seminal ‘rolls dance’ sequence originates in this picture, but it is far from its only pleasure.   Technical delights include  the amazing way Chaplin cuts from beautifully constructed modelwork to location shooting undertaken in Alaska to the vast ice floe set that was constructed in the baking heat of California with such skill that a continuous sense of place is retained. (The cinematography of the location scenes is genuinely astounding, nevermore so than now, when we can see it in high definition.) Perhaps the best scene in the picture is the sequence in which the Tramp attempts to escape from Trapper Jim’s cabin but is prevented from doing so by the constant wind. This is all the more remarkable because it’s impossible to work out exactly how it was achieved. There is a wind machine, but not one strong enough to actually cause what’s onscreen. Chaplin seems to have soap on his soles, but it may be that the floor is tilted one way and the camera the other.  If this is so, then how is Mack Swain’s Big Jim staying as still as he is? It’s perhaps the archetypal Chaplin moment; a magnificent technical achievement from Chaplin the director that combines with the amazing physical prowess of Chaplin the actor to create something which is funny, unsettling, dense and rich.  (The tramp is, in theory, trying to escape from being cannibalised in a scene that references real historical horrors.)

The extras on this set are from the previous 2003 edition of the film (in fact, I think the DVD is simple a repressing of the same disc). They include an edition of the ‘Chaplin Today’ series focusing on this movie  and its production (and which incorporates a lengthy interview with Idrissa Ouedraogo where he talks about the influence of Chaplin’s work on his own work in African cinema) and a nice visual essay by David Robinson that talks you through the film’s history and afterlife.

That afterlife is of particular interest because of the fact that twenty years after the hugely successful release of ‘The Gold Rush’ Chaplin recut the film, adding new elements designed to take advantage of new technology, cut some scenes, substituted others, re-scored it and altered a couple of shots in ways that some would argue change the narrative substantially. It was then re-released.  The Blu-ray/DVD edition takes Chaplin’s 1942 recut of ‘The Gold Rush’ as its high definition centre-piece and relegates the original, silent version to the position of a DVD extra. (As with all of themany and frequent recuts of Chaplin’s work the final version signed off by Charles himself remains, in my view absolutely correctly, the standard approved edition to this day. There’s another ‘Star Wars’ comparison there, actually, should you want to make it.)

‘The Gold Rush’ is, in either of its cuts, a magnificent motion picture and this is an excellent edition. If you’ve never seen any Chaplin and think that maybe you should, this is  a very good place to start.

In his review Roger Ebert refused to give ‘The Human Centipede’ any stars (out of five) because he thought the “star rating system is unsuited to this film” – I wouldn’t go that far, but this is certainly a film where the idea that the movie presents overwhelms the viewer so much that it makes the film hard to experience in a traditional way.

Over the last year and a half I’ve seen more newly released films that have disgusted or disturbed me than I’ve seen in a period twice or three times as long over the previous thirty years. This is not to say that there hasn’t been a shortage of disgusting or disturbing films I could have sought out on DVD or in the cinema, rather that I haven’t had the urge to watch say any of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ back catalogue or more recently any of the ‘Saw’ sequels.

The increasing number of films that are being released in UK cinemas which feature incredibly shocking elements seems to have multiplied over the last couple of years which seems to be an unusual trend. I’m not a sociohistorian, so can’t say whether the public’s appetite for extreme entertainment is a result of say ‘the war on terror’ or the recession, in the same way George Romero made ‘Night of the Living Dead’ in response to coverage of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. However, similar to today’s appetite for ‘Gorenography’ it’s hard to say whether the creation of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in mid third republic France was a reaction to the military and political scandals rocking the recently formed constitutional republic.

Perhaps it’s just a generational thing, setbacks in the supposedly increasing civility of humanity; after all it’s only been a couple of hundred years since Tyburn was a popular picnic spot for people who wanted to see a nice hanging while they ate their sandwiches.

Until recently, fans of gore and extreme horror films from around the world would have to get their entertainment from video and DVD rental shops outside of specialist festivals like Frightfest, but the success of ‘Torture porn’ films such as ‘Hostel’ and the ‘Saw’ franchise has shown there’s money to be made in those blood soaked hills, so underground entertainment has become mainstream, influencing the work of art house directors as well as more traditional box office fare.

Admittedly both Michael Winterbottom (in the form of films like ‘9 Songs’) and Lars Von Trier (actually every film he made since ‘Breaking the waves’ in 1996) are no strangers to provocative cinema, but their most recent films ‘The killer inside me’ and ‘Antichrist’ have included scenes so disgusting and visceral, that it’s hard to watch the screen without feeling nauseous. Having seen (and regretted seeing) both those films on the big screen and also having endured ‘2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams’ in order to get an interview with star Bill Moseley – a film billed as a horror comedy, but is neither funny or scary, just gory – it was with some trepidation I finally summoned the courage to watch ‘The Human Centipede’.

I think it’s safe to say that no one going into see the film doesn’t know what it’s about, what with Human Centipede jewellery hitting the streets (!) plus a retro computer game online, so the opening scene is played for laughs as the villain of the piece – Dr. Heiter played by Dieter Laser – lovingly strokes a photo of his favourite pet, a ‘Drei-Hund’ made from three rottweilers stitched together (nicknamed Cerberus, perhaps) in his own inimitable way. He’s busy waiting in a lay-by for people he can shoot with a tranquiliser dart when they nip into the woods for a call of nature. Laser’s performance is a master class in mad scientist overacting, challenging Graham Crowden’s status as top lunatic, veering from intense and creepy to ludicrous eye rolling screeching and this reflects the film as a whole, which ranges from being genuinely unsettling and disturbing to comedic where the laughs are either intentional due to the ludicrous plot or unintentional due to bad acting.

In terms of gore, ‘The Human Centipede’ is relatively tame – a couple of brief shots here and there of scalpels going into flesh and a bit of slimy pus coming out of an inappropriate suture – but even at it its most daft, the concept of the film worms its way into your head and of course sitting in a cinema watching a film about that concept, makes it impossible to escape the idea in your thoughts. At the risk of sounding like a wuss, I actually had a cold sweat at one point watching the film…

As mentioned above, I also had the misfortune of sitting through ‘2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams’ (but could pause the DVD at least) and there’s one shot in particular in that film that goes beyond the limits of bad taste – a rotary saw slicing a conscious woman in half from groin upwards – in this is shown in gruesome close-up. However, as deeply offensive as this is, it’s relatively brief and you can disassociate yourself from having seen it by thinking of how it might have been made (slicing a pig in half perhaps when they cut from a medium shot of the actress to a close-up).

With ‘The Human Centipede’ the idea of stitching three people together along their gastrointestinal tract is just insufferable, but the success of the film suggests it has hit some kind of nerve in the zeitgeist. The only other film I’ve had to endure that included coprophagia / philia was ‘Salò or the 120 Days Of Sodom’ and that is revered as a cult classic.

Luckily I didn’t have to repeat another aspect of watching ‘Salò’ when I saw ‘The Human Centipede’, as I saw the former film at the dear departed Lux centre in Hoxton Square and the air conditioning had broken down on that day, something which had also plagued my previous two visits to the screening room where I saw ‘The Human Centipede’. Watching this film in a sauna would have been too much to take and would have led to me leaving half way through.

At the risk of providing a quote that could be taken out of context for hysterical marketing, in some respects ‘The Human Centipede’ is ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ of the early twenty first century. They both feature unspeakable crimes, both based on some kind of ‘truth’ (the newer film has the ridiculous tagline: “100 percent medically accurate” and the former was based on the crimes of Ed Gein), both show considerably less gore on screen than you might expect, both suffer from bad acting on the part of some of the victims (in each film this at first makes you want them to be captured and tortured)…

The viral interest in ‘The Human Centipede’ also shows that in the short term, at least, it has also become a cult classic in the same way the earlier film has, however I suspect (and hope) its reputation fades as the years go by as while ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ will always be a classic due to the terrific editing, sound design and cinematography, ‘The Human Centipede’ really only has its crazy premise and Laser’s over acting to separate it from other modern gore films.

When the film is at its most effective, director Tom Six handles horror film clichés with aplomb as the centipede and its constituent parts try to escape from various scenarios Dr Heiter has trapped it / them in, and the final scenes where the ‘head’ of the creature bemoans its fate in untranslated Japanese and the final shot of it in the movie – which leaves you wondering if anyone survives – are also actually pretty good.
However without the central concept, this film would have sunk without a trace amongst a sea of undistinguished slasher movies and so it is the plot that justifies the film and one could argue the plot shouldn’t have justified the film being made at all. Also, according to fans of manga by Junji Ito (‘Uzumaki’), it’s not even the director’s original idea.

As a horror film in its own right, I’ve seen much worse (such as ‘2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams’) and so can recommend it for being a reasonably well directed and unsettling movie. As a film that should have been made and that I can recommend to other people, well, I can sympathise with Roger Ebert’s dilemma; suffice to say that ‘The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)’ is being released in 2011, so if nothing else, the box office has certainly given it two thumbs up.

It’s difficult to pin down the precise problem with ‘FAQ…’, largely because there are quite a few contenders, but the task is made even trickier by a degree of downtrodden charm. This is a puppy of a movie – it feels downright mean to be nasty to it. That said it’s also the sort of film that chews your slippers and craps on your rug.

For a start there’s the cardinal sin: it’s not very funny. The whole movie pivots on the central relationship between three losers  getting caught up in a roller-coaster ride through time (there’s a “time leak” in the gent’s toilets of their local boozer) and bantering in the generally accepted post – ‘Spaced’ way about films, drink and other ephemera. The three core performances (Chris O’Dowd, Marc Wootton and Dean Lennox Kelly) are genially engaging in this fairly undemanding capacity (and it is their solid performances that make criticism seem harsh) but they’re simply not given the ammunition.

By contrast ‘Shaun…’ has a script that is both funny and tight. The jokes roll off the screen relentlessly with an effortlessness that belies the obvious painstaking craft going into their creation. ‘FAQ…’ stumbles from bland set-piece to set-piece. The few good gags here (and there are some) simply show up the lack of quality elsewhere. There simply aren’t enough laughs to carry the film through its meagre 83 minutes.

‘Shaun…’ has something else that ‘FAQ…’ does not – a point. More than just a set of gags it’s a coming of age story, speaking of the need to set aside youthful irresponsibility and leave the parental nest to become a truly independent adult. Zombies are an important means to this end, but are not the end in themselves. ‘FAQ..’. makes weak moves in this direction. Chris O’Dowd’s Ray is a similarly directionless slacker who gets the girl and finds a greater purpose but it is in pale and watery imitation of some of ‘Shaun…’, a film with some genuinely powerful emotional moments (think of the scenes with his mother in the final reel).

In any event, ‘FAQ…’s primary interest seems to be less in making a big point than in the  “wibbly, wobbly, timey, wimey” convoluted nature of time-travel narratives . We see the same events from different angles at subsequent points in the narrative with the same characters cropping up at different points in their time-lines. When done right (‘Back to the Future’ or the recent run of ‘Doctor Who’) this is engaging and enjoyable and often very clever. However, once again ‘FAQ…’ fails to go the distance. It totally loses steam in its third act, and chucks any sense of internal logic out the window. It’s movie-making 101 – people can suspend disbelief to an extraordinary degree as long as a narrative plays by it’s own rules. Given the whole point of this film is to mess around with the ideas of time-travel, it’s a pretty fundamental flaw that it fails to do this.

‘FAQ…’ lacks jokes, doesn’t make a point and fails even to abide by it’s own internal logic. It shows how appealing the ‘Shaun…’ model is to British comedy filmmakers but also how difficult a model it is to replicate.

What’s also remarkable about Ennis’ War Comics is the variety of stories he, as a single writer, has told against the backdrop of the Second World War. He’s written stories about the Eastern and Western fronts and the Pacific War. They’ve featured, off the top of my head, protagonists from America, Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Singapore and France. They’ve been pilots, soldiers, sailors and nurses. Some of them have, to paraphrase Fry from ‘Futurama’, even been female.

‘Motherland’ is a sequel to last year’s ‘Night Witches’, which concerned the exploits (and near destruction) of an all female Soviet fighter squadron of a kind that really did exist. It was the best of the initial run of Ennis’ ‘Battlefields’ series from Dynamite and both deserved and had scope for a sequel. (The other real triumph of that run, ‘Dear Billy’, was unsequelable for reasons that will be obvious if you’ve read it and which I constitute spoilers if you haven’t.)

Two issues in, it’s a worthy follow on.  Our skilled but troublesome heroine Lieutenant Anna Kharkova has been transferred to a new squadron as a consequence of her own insubordination rendering her unsuitable for her old one now it’s become an elite guards unit, rather than sky-fodder.  She’s quickly proving her worth and finding herself caught up in the machinations of the local NKVD (party officer), a smirking political fanatic with no experience of the realities of life under enemy fire. The NKVD officer is one of several new characters who are sketched in over the course of these issues. The others include a sad, widowed senior officer and a nervous female aeroplane engineer who hero worships Anna due to her record as an aviatrix. As with a lot of Ennis’ war comics the character interactions are both brutal and tender, but never fall to sentimentality or schmaltz. There are extreme emotions expressed, as befits this story’s setting, but the work is never trite. (There are also some very cool dogfights, should you be wondering.)

If you’re one of those thirtysomething British adults that read war comics back in the seventies, you should be reading ‘Battlefields’ and its ilk. This series is a refinement of what was good about the stories in ‘Action’ and ‘Battle’ and is as good as you remember them being but which, with the exception of those written by Pat Mills, they very rarely were. Dynamite should be supported in their continuing commitment to doing these kind of books and allowing Ennis to continue to do diverse work in a subgenre that he is very close to being able to call entirely his own.

You can buy several of Garth Ennis’ earlier ‘Battlefields’ series, including ‘Night Witches’, on amazon.

Perhaps I’m the wrong audience for this film; apart from Bruce Willis’ feats of everyman daring do in the ‘Die Hard’ series, I could only really stomach the early output of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger when they were starring in Sci-Fi / Fantasy films. As while I could accept their larger than life antics in scenarios that already required me to suspend my disbelief, the action films they made which were set in ‘the real world’ were always too tacky, dumb and violent for my palate.

However if you enjoy tacky, dumb, violent action films starring Sylvester Stallone, ‘The Expendables’ may be your cup of tea.

Personally, I have to admit I needed the various wrestling and UFC stars in the film pointing out to me as I thought Steve Austin was the lead character in the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’, but even with the star studded cast that this movie professes, it would take an audience with no discrimination whatsoever not to realise the film is absolute drivel.

Starting off with a reasonably entertaining rescue mission performed by the titular (but ultimately misnamed) ‘Expendables’ – Stallone, Jet Li, Jason Stratham, Dolph Lungren and the Ultimate Fighting guy – the film unfortunately goes downhill from there.

Bodies are blown apart in the style of an unrealistic computer game as the ‘heroes’ destroy bad guys with the kind of heavy artillery you would use on a tank rather than the human body, while the terrorists are subtitled (even though they’re speaking English) and the female love interests for Stallone and Stratham stay resolutely two dimensional.

Actually I’m being kind, Charisma Carpenter’s blink and you’ll miss it role is so underwritten she barely covers one dimension, existing purely to be beaten up by Stratham’s rival, so he can prove his worth as a boyfriend by rescuing her.

There are smaller cameos still, belonging to Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger – approx three mins and one min respectively – and while there is a certain frisson seeing them and Stallone on screen together, as the audience holds their breath to see if they’ll open a theme restaurant, very little is made of this opportunity and neither return in the twist ending I was desperately hoping for.

While the opening suggests this might turn into an enjoyable comedy in the vein of a live action ‘Team America’ (no such luck), it just results in a film that’s not funny enough to be a parody or exciting enough to hold its own with modern examples of the action genre.

I can only imagine that Stallone having seen the fun that the likes of George Clooney and Matt Damon had on the ‘Ocean’s 11’ trilogy, thought that he’d call his mates and see if they could all make a film together.
The Expendables isn’t a bad movie per se, but certainly miles away from being a good one. It’s just desperately, overwhelmingly average from start to finish. With nothing new to offer to fans of the genre, the film seems pretty much a waste of time for everyone involved.

There’s little wit, imagination or energy at any level of the production but a decent script rewrite would have made it at least watchable (why wasn’t Kevin Smith or Shane Black asked to polish this movie?), but we neither care for any of the characters or have any decent one liners to quote after the end credits…

While Stallone, Lungren and Mickey Rourke mumble through their hackneyed dialogue (which ironically often did need subtitling in order to be understandable), the second tier cast – Li, Stratham and David Zayas are at least engaging and watchable and a diverting short film could be made from the material by just cutting around their scenes.

The action set pieces are passable but interminably long to the extent of being boring, with obvious CGI blood being added to gunshot wounds making much of the enterprise feel like you’re watching someone playing a dull first person shooter.

Jet Li comes off best (as you might expect) when he’s given a change to let his fists fly with his regular action choreographer along for the ride, but no fight scene has any genuine gravitas and you never believe any of the main characters are in any actual danger.

That said, I find myself grudgingly suggesting that people should go and see this film. The reason for this is no merits as far as the production is concerned but rather because the film has been weirdly associated with the Force Select Foundation, which was recently set up to raise funds for military charities in the United Kingdom.

When the film’s association with the charity is properly ratified, you might as well go and watch the movie if you were planning to anyway – forewarned by how rubbish it is – to raise a little cash for a good cause.

Also, allegedly some of the crew and production team were underpaid – to the cost of $2 million – so if the poor Brazilians that were exploited by the film (in ironic contrast to the movie’s plot of saving an island nation from a dictator) are going to be paid, this sorry exercise needs to make a slight profit.

Overall, this is ‘adult’ entertainment resolutely aimed at teenagers with no experience of decent film making, and at fans of Stallone’s movies from the 1980s who should be old enough by now to know better.

Any spoilers kick in pretty early for this film, so a neutral synopsis is by necessity brief: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole human operator of an energy-mining station on the dark side of the moon. His only companion s a sentient computer assistant GERTY . Bell is in the last two weeks of a three year mission, for the duration of which faulty equipment has kept him isolated from Earth save for occasional recorded broadcasts. Jumpy with cabin fever, Sam ticks down the days until his journey back to his wife and baby daughter.

The tone, both in a visual and narrative sense is purest retro  - the intent is a harkening back to the school of minimalist working-man’s sci-fi predominant in the 70s and early 80s. This is the world of ‘Silent Running’, ‘Dark Star’ and both the first two ‘Aliens’. There are visual cues to ‘2001′, and the basic design cues of such sci-fi is to take the gleaming white surfaces of Kubrick’s epic and imagining what they would be like after being lived in and used by a bunch of slobby, blue-collar space workers.

If you are a fan of this approach, ‘Moon’ is note-perfect homage. Sam slouches around in t-shirts (with a raggedy beard for the first reel), the hi-tech A.I. robot is plastered with post-it notes, the minimalist living quarters is awash with rubbish and covered with photos of family left behind: the soulless gleam of ’science’ and ‘technology’ sullied with the messy irregularities of humanity. This, perhaps, might be the theme of the movie itself – to say any more would certainly ruin it.

Also note-perfect is the central performance of Sam Rockwell. Rockwell has long been one of the most enjoyably understated actors in contemporary Hollywood. His milieu is that of the slightly odd, slightly alienated loner which he has portrayed in a body of work ranging from ‘Lawn Dogs’ to ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ via ‘Charlie’s Angels’. No-one does hurt and vulnerable hang-dog like Rockwell, but he also has a manic edge (see his turn as Zaphod Beeblebrox in ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’). Here he gets the chance to essay both, and the result holds the whole film together. Pretty much his only support in this comes from a Kevin Spacey cameo, channelling Hal-9000 as GERTY.

It’s impossible to say any more about a film that is so easily spoiled. Do yo like low-key but very good science fiction? Good, now buy or rent ‘Moon’. You won’t regret it.