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Well, I know its February now, but here's a little review of my best and worst films and books of 2012. Note that most of, if not all, these titles weren't released in 2012, but I just watched or read them.So its not a review of 2012 as such, but a review of my 2012. It might be interesting or it might not, but it should give you an idea of the crap films I am watching and the silly books I read.
Films: I watched 222 films last year. I try to watch a film early on a morning if poss, either a DVD or something I've taped off the telly. Some mornings I don't have time for a film, and sometimes, if my wife is away for instance, I might watch more, or I might be watching a TV series or something [more of which later].
Anyway, here are the ten best films I watched last year;
1) AVATAR (2009) [great hard tech epic sci-fi, rewatched on TV]
2) THE EVIL DEAD (1982) [watched this on Horror Channel; its been ten years or so since I last saw it and it seemed like almost a different film. Perhaps in the past, I had been watching a cut version. Brilliant, gory, amusing horror fun.There is a remake in the works, I believe. Hope its not crap!]
3) THE PEARL OF DEATH (1944) - I rewatched most of these old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films this year, and I've loved them for ages. THE PEARL OF DEATH is my personal pick, I think, based on Doyle's story THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONS. Mesmerising, brilliant stuff.
4) RAWHEAD REX (1986) based on the very good [but different] short story by Clive Barker, this is basically a silly monster romp set in Ireland. But I loved it when I was 12, and I love it today. So there. -->
5) THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (2005) is a very well made film mixing exorcismic horror themes with a gripping courtroom case. Very highly reccomended indeedy.
6) TIMECRIMES (2007) - The very first film I watched this year, just after midnight had struck and the chinese lanterns were blowing about in the wind. TIMECRIMES is an excellent Spanish film about time-travel, and how an ordinary man, by being curious, gets himself in a bit of a pickle. Don't let the subtitles put you off; this is brilliant small-scale science fiction.
7) THE LAST EXORCISM (2010) - You might be thinking I'm a huge fan of exorcism pictures, but, no, not particularly. Most of them are terrible. This film, in a documentary BLAIR WITCH found footage style asks many fascinating questions about the reality or otherwise of exorcisms, and is a thrilling watch, apart from a slightly silly ending.
8) DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE (1959) - is a charming Disney-ish film [it might be Disney, I can't remember] set in Ireland, exploring the rural myths and legends of Irish mythology; things such as leprechauns, the banshee, and the death coach [in a very atmospheric and scary climax]. It has Sean Connery in an early role and is a wonderful family film. I've seen this half a dozen times or so since I was a kid, and this year I introduced it to my wife. Excellent stuff. [As an aside, I once talked to an old guy in the pub where I live who swore blind that when he was a young 'un in Ireland, he experienced the Banshee wail. I always mean to ask him more about it sometime, but I'm worried he'll think I'm taking the piss.]
9) TAKEN (2008) - I saw this for the first time this year after remembering lots of good talk about it. Yeah, it's an exciting action movie, made Liam Neeson into an action hero, and cheered up my morning.
10) BLACK WATER (2007) I bet you thought I'd forgotten about giant crocodile films, didn't you?
To be fair to it, this is simply a larger than usual crocodile film, hence much more believable. It's supposedly based on a true story, and sees some tourists take a ride up an isolated backwater in Australia. The croc strikes, the boat sinks, their guide eaten, and the family take to the trees with the hungry aggressive croc playing games with them down below. This is very tense, very enjoyable, and my wife was watching through her fingers. [Although, saying that, she watches Postman Pat through her fingers.] Highly enjoyable, a proper thriller, and I promise that the croc never once jumps up and eats a plane or destroys a nuclear submarine or nothing silly like that.
Right, that's it for now. Duty calls. I'll go through my worst films I watched in 2012 next time, then try and do the books. It'll take me all year to get this bugger done.
WORST FILMS I HAVE SEEN IN 2012
Right, I've got a list of ten here that I've spent too much down narrowing down. I'm going to go backwards, so that the top one here, number 10), is marginallly better than the poor film at number 1). Hey ho, here we go; the worst 10 out of 222.
10) BLACK FOREST (2012) - One of the most modern films I've seen this year and its on the 'crap' list. This has a group off odd tourists being led on a tour into a forest, where characters from classic fairytales live. It's wierd and strange, and I think I've blocked it from my memory.
9) THEM [ILS] (2006) - This French film is basic hoodie-horror, and appeared to do well in Europe and film festivals. I found it boring, which is the worst thing a film or book can possibly be. The subtitles aren't the problem; just the rest of the film.
8) BELOW (2002) is another film that perhaps doesn't deserve to be here, as maybe its just my personal opinion as to its crapness. BELOW is maritime horror; spooky goings-on in the cramped and stressful confines of a submarine. It just didn't work for me; once again, boring.
7) BIKINI GIRLS ON ICE (2009) could have been a guilty pleasure, a boys film, an antidote to rom-coms. Instead it was flat, dissapointing, moronic, dull, cliched tripe. The problem is that from a film like BIKINI GIRLS ON ICE, the viewer doesn't really expect much anyway, but even those low expectations are not met. This film left me cold [see what i did there!].
6) MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953) is a crazy B-movie starring Jackie Coogan who became famous as Uncle Fester in THE ADDAMS FAMILY TV series. This odd film features a mad scientist attempting to create super-spider-women by mixing up pituatary stuff from spiders and loose women. Or something. It sounds great, but just, regrettably, isn't. The giant spider is fun, but looks like it has fallen out of an oversized cornflake box. If you really must, you can watch this film in a number of places online, but it's actually quite boring, so I'll just post a few pics from the film here, and thus save you an hour. How kind am I? [As you can see from the picture above, the lady and the spider are doing their syncronized press-up routine, before posing the picture below, their entry into the 'Bizzare Giant Spider Porn' monthly competition. ]
5) POLICE ACADEMY 6: CITY UNDER SEIGE (1989) - Well, when I was young a youngster I used to quite like these POLICE ACADEMY films. I have fond memories of my dad getting them on video in the mid-to-late eighties. They were funny, ha-ha, and sometimes even a little bit rude. I watched the first POLICE ACADEMY a few years ago and was a bit disappointed it had lost most of its charm. POLICE ACADEMY 6, however, is certainly the nadir of these films, although I have yet to see number 7, MISSION TO MOSCOW. PA6 is a travesty of the PA films. It has the same tired characters doing the same tired plot with the same tired jokes. The film made me tired, and I had just gotten up. Another piece of childhood destroyed.
4) PARANORMAL ASCENDANCY {AKA 3 A.M.} (2008) - Oh dear, now we're getting to the really crap ones. PARANORMAL ASCENDANCY [which, creepily, has the same initials as POLICE ACADEMY] is just that; really crap. It is made like a TV home movie, but with the flair, adeptship and quality control as an old diahroetic camel. This, truly, is among the most badly-produced films I have ever seen. The sound is baffling, the effects are baffling, the story confused me almost from the start and then later baffled me. Just for posterity, here's my entire review from Amazon;
1.0 out of 5 stars AKA Paranormal Craptivity, 3 Dec 2012
By
Quetzalcoatl78 (Durham, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Paranormal Ascendancy [DVD] (DVD)
Ok, first of all, bear in mind that I have a very high tolerance for really crap films. I'm not talking about your under-par Hollywood blockbuster like WILD WILD WEST or LOST IN SPACE; I'm talking really rubbish films that are at the bottom of the 'Rubbish' pile. Well, when I noticed the terrible reviews on Amazon for PARANORMAL ASCENDANCY, I remembered it was in my ever-increasing pile of unwatched DVD's {I think I got it at a Pound Shop]. Thinking, well, it can't be that bad, after all, I've watched THE CAVERN, I hunted down the DVD and sat down to watch with my beer.All of the comments in the one-star reviews are valid; the film is very cheap, the sound is terrible, mumbly, one toned, unhearable stuff; one minute the microphone seems to be attached to the actors face, the next scene it could be up their bottom, for all you can hear of the dialogue. The production values are so cheap and careless that they could have been betterred had the film been made, for example, by an intelligent bunch of crayfish. The whole package is cheap, shoddy, embarrassing stuff that you would cringe at if you'd made yourself when you were 12 and drunk. And, yes, of course, it's all just a ploy to cash in on the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY bandwagon. In fact, I bet this is just a very amateur home movie, spotted by an enterprising movie-bloke, given a trendy new title and dashed out to make a few quid.
But wait a minute; this film has a plot, I think, at least the bits I could hear did, and it goes roughly like this; a bloke tells his mate his flat is haunted so his mate goes to have a look, and a 'ghost' [a funny light] tells him something bad is going to happen to his girlfriend. Next thing I knew everything went strange by a lake and a water-demon [a funny light again] is trying to kill people. There's a bit of a twist in the story at the end, but by this time I was thinking the twist was that I'd actually watched it to the end.
To try to be fair to the film, it has an ember of an idea in there somewhere, but there's not much PARANORMAL anything in the film, and the truly incompetent film-making makes the idea almost impossible to sift out. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, the first film at least, is by no means a great film, but is far far superior to this knock-off that you'll just want to knock off.
I was going to give it two stars, because I did watch it to the end, and it had an idea in there, but to be honest, I don't want to any more. '
So there you go. Incidentally, on Amazon the film has had 13 reviews and has a fantastic average of 1.2 stars. Fantastic!
3) CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961) -
I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "But what can be worse than PARANORMAL ASCENDANCY?"
This is an early Roger Corman film about drug dealers coming across a lendary sea monster. Look at the monster; it is a man covered in fluff with ping pong balls sellotaped in his eye holes. The CREATURE is in the film for about two minutes, and the rest of the flick is very dreary, sleepy stuff. But what a great monster!
2) THE RIG (2011) ; Again, an Amazon review of mine, for your perusal;
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Wow! THE RIG. Just look at the cover and the story writes itself. Brilliant, I thought; I love this sort of crap, was this film made especially for me.Some oil-riggers who think they're the ones in ARMAGEDDON get trapped on a [surprise!] oil rig. Drilling for [surprise!] oil, they disturb a nasty creature-feature. Someone goes missing, the creature starts [surprise!] killing them off. There's lots of mumbling then it's finished!
Surprise! I hated it.
I didn't hate it for its predictable plot, or its slow start. I don't hate it for its ripping-off of many previous monster flicks, or for its dodgy acting by the extended family of the director. I didn't hate it because the DVD cover indicates a huge sea-monster type beast, and all we get is an underfed-bloke in a CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON-type costume jumping up and pirouetting across the screen in the dark. I didn't hate it for its poorly-concieved multi-tiered ending. I hated it because any enjoyment I may have got from an under-par B-movie [which I love], was sucked away like a whirlpool by the fact that half the time I couldn't hear what the hell was bloody going on.
Acting means acting; why do they mumble their lines? Why bother having any character development at all when all the dialogue might as well be delivered by the flowerpot men. Often, films have subtitles for the hard of hearing. Here we required Subtitles for the Hard Of Speaking! I watch and enjoy loads of micro-budget horror and sf [and really applaud low-budget film-making] but I always believe there are two cardinal rules for film-makers; Don't make it boring, and don't make it sound like its been filmed underwater.
If you have super Spiderman hearing skills, perhaps add another star if you like this sort of thing. Otherwise read "NICOR!", a trashy 80's so-so horror novel by Peter Tremayne that is eerily similar to this. It's equally not amazing, but at least you can hear all the dialogue!
1) THE CAVERN (2007) - I must have seen hundreds of pretty bad films in my time but THE CAVERN seriously is among the worst. A moronic attempt to copy the success of GOOD films like THE DESCENT or THE CAVE, I bought this, cheaply, to see if it was really as bad as other reviewers said it was, 'cos thats the sort of idiot I am. Guess what; its terrible.
The story may have worked, but I wasn't sure what the story was; everything was far too dark, the actors are great at mumbling, seriously a deaf blind unfortunate could have enjoyed this film as much as I did, and the ending just confused me even more. Of the 222 films I watched in 2012 THE CAVERN was by far the worst. On Amazon, the film has around 20 reviews with a well-deserved average of 1.2 stars. On one of the reviews on IMDB, someone has praised it for being a realistic caving film, and, having caved myself, [I fancied caving myself while watching this!], I can also agree that watching the film was like sitting in a damp, dark, smelly, muffled, freezing cave for an hour and a half. Very realistic indeed.
My Books, Best and Worst of 2012 will follow in another post, 'cos to be honest, I've wasted all afternoon doing this and my eyes have gone funny.
I nearly choked on my coffee while reading the review of Paranormal Ascendancy. I do find reading bad reviews often more fun than reading the good ones.
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