Watch The Hallow Now Please

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The Hallow is the debut feature from director Corin Hardy and tells the story of a young family; Adam, Claire, and baby Finn, as they move to Ireland and into a house near an ancient forest. I can only presume that the estate agent selling them that creepy fucking place got a bonus that week. I mean the house literally has bars on the outside of the windows to protect anyone that might be living inside. I know tensions can be a little high between the English and Irish but I'd be a bit weary of anywhere in which I needed fucking bars to stay safe. Not that I blame the locals of course. I literally only know English people and I want to hurl things at us all the fucking time too. “Not to worry”, the couple think as they rip down the metal from their windows, “at least we can go for a walk in this terrifying fucking forest”. Whilst out strolling in it, Adam, a conservationist, notices an unusual and slimy substance on several of the trees. Obviously this is suspicious because creepily there doesn't seem to be the usual accompanying beer and cheap porn in the bushes near by. He returns home to inspect his findings and looking under a microscope he finds something even more terrifying than the expected massive solitary jizz with a shamrock in its mouth.

The Fantastic Five

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Fourteen years after The Incredibles hit theatres we finally get the wittily titled Incredibles 2. Each member of the family has a different super-power whilst the franchise as a whole displays the amazing skill of having not being sued by Marvel for ripping of the Fantastic Four. Mr Incredible is super-strong, his son and daughter are super-fast and posses the power of invisibility. Meanwhile Elastigirl, the family matriarch, has the kind of power that makes her super flexible and therefore able to easily achieve the kind of positions that we men would usually have to have a rib removed to achieve. As her name suggests her body also appears to be made of elastic with her limbs and torso able to stretch much further than my patience when at the cinema with a bunch of screaming fucking brats. At this point in the story, all superheroes have been made illegal because, at the end of the day, I guess they're just a bunch of fucking do-gooders with too much time on their hands and a latex fetish. In which case it's even more admirable of Elastigirl that, when forced to give up her job as a hero she chose to live a quite domestic life, when she could be making a fucking fortune in Amsterdam.

I mention Elastigirl more than the other members of her family because this sequel is very much belonging to her. Despite the decade and a half gap since the original film was released, this second part to the franchise only takes place a mere minute or two after we left off. For live-action, this would of course be impossible due to an actors insistence on ageing as humans do, or attempting to dodge the aging process by turning into whatever the fuck Mickey Rourke is. However one of the little joys of the film is in how it starts with the gang still facing off against that mole-man villain that's also a rip-off of a Fantastic Four villain. The family quickly decide to deal with him only to find themselves in even more trouble due to the destruction that the ensuing battle ends up causing to the city. Although if I was a member of that family I'd simply show them the end of Man Of Steel in which Superman leaves Metropolis in such a state that you could filter it through a fucking sieve and tell them to count their lucky fucking stars. As such, Elastigirl finds herself being picked up by an influential brother and sister who claim that they can change the super-hero image around and have her profession re-legalised by winning public favour. All she has to do is a few missions that will show her in a more positive light. Although the way the world seems to be going right now, she could save herself the bother by just mentioning some “shithole countries”, locking a few kids up at the border, and then watching her fuckwit followers grow by the day. 

Throwing a small spanner in her works however is the arrival of a new super-villain known as the Screenslaver who essentially acts like an evil Derren Brown and dresses like Tom Hardy's Bane in a gimp-suit. I won't give too much away here except to say that any twists revolving this character are about as obvious as a mans cock in a pair of speedos and you've have to be pretty dense not to see them coming. At the same time as all of this, Mr Incredible is forced to stay at home with the children and seems to be having such a miserable time with it that I began to understand why wrestlers go mad and kill their families. Originally oblivious to his baby Jack-Jack's super-powers, we watch and laugh as he struggles to keep track of the infant as it reveals more and more of its gifts. There's at least one particularly hilarious sequence in which the father attempts to control his baby as it fights a racoon that really does hammer home how much Louise Woodward over-reacted when all hers did was cry a bit too much. If there's any criticism of the stuff with Mr Incredible it's that, although the funniest part of the movie, his section has almost nothing to do with the main story at all. Where Elastigirl is really pushing the narrative forward we simply seem to cut back to the rest of her family whenever it's time to lighten things up with a funny scene. If a perfect film is like a clock with everything ticking over then this is like a sundial in which you're allowed to tug one out every twenty minutes. Both essentially get the job done it's just one is a little messier. 

If we take for granted that everything else about the movie was pretty great, from the animation to the action, then I'd like to point out that one of the things that I enjoyed about it was its message. Screenslaver's power is that he can hypnotise you to do his bidding but only if you stare at a monitor which is something that we obviously all do these days. Whether it be the television, your phone, or a computer, I'm at the point now where I consider reality my loading screen and I can't wait to get back to staring at my precious pixels. As such I suppose the villain of the movie is a subtle warning about the powers of manipulation that these screens can have on you which, in an online world of Russian bots, is something remarkably current. Just look at adverts alone which can have a remarkable effect on our behaviour and you might see this film as a cautionary tale of giving in to the demands of the screen. Essentially the film used trailers to get you to come and stare at it on the big screen and then gave you a lecture about having given in to these demands. Although watching Elastigirl discovering the source of the villains power and seeing her run about manically attempting to stop people staring at the monitors, I was reminded of my own Mum during my childhood. Except with Elastigirl I understood that it was to the benefit of everybody's health to turn the televisions and computers off and she wasn't just being a fucking kill joy. 

The other thing that the film does pretty brilliantly is take a look at the correlation between legality and morality. Is something bad simply because it's illegal? And is breaking the law justified if it's an unjust law in the first place? As I take a drag from an outlawed but ultimately relaxing substance, I have to admit that I'm not sure where I stand on this. But it's also interesting to see a family film deal with a subject so interesting, when only a mere few weeks after the James Corden-voiced Peter Rabbit made us ponder how far we can kick a fucking rabbit. It was also interesting to see Elastigirl justify her own hypocrisy of believing the law to be absolute and then setting about breaking that law in order to have it changed. Essentially she has to be a superhero to prove that being a superhero is a good thing in order for the law prohibiting super-heroics to be abolished. I guess she's of a similar mind to the members of MI6 inCasino Royale who only give out a licence to kill to agents like Bond once he's proven that he can kill at least two people first. Incredibles 2 doesn't delve as hugely into this issue as perhaps I would have liked it to, but it's still a pretty lofty and impressive subject for it to touch on. Toy Story is obviously a great movie but the only real idea that it has is that you should have your action figures facing away from you when you want to knock one out... unless you're a perv. 

So overall I'd say that this sequel is a completely worthy follow-up to the original movie, if never quite being as brilliant as it. If the first movie was Kurt Russell then this one is his son Wyatt in that they look the same, are both great, but I've spent longer loving the original to be able to consider them equal. If you want a film that you can take everybody to see and don't mind the widespread sexual harassment and deeply worrying misogyny from the studio behind it then Incredibles 2 is the film for you. I have no idea if they'll make a sequel to this movie but if they do I'll certainly be first in line to watch it. And then I'll be boarding up the fucking doors when I get in because I hate children and it pisses me off that I have to endure their noise just because I want to see a film in which they're the target audience. At two hours long I suppose this movie might test the youngest of children's patients but it's also rated PG. Which means if you're taking your very young child to see this movie then you're probably a terrible parent anyway and so may as well go one fucking further and show them it on a double feature with The fucking First Purge.Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.

Don't Look Back In Anger

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From the title, The First Purge, you could be forgiven for assuming that this movie might be a gritty drama about a young girl that discovers the joys of ramming her fingers down the back of her throat. But in actual fact it is of course the fourth instalment of The Purge series which began as a silly dystopian horror movie but at this point feels only a few weeks away from becoming a genuine national holiday. Within the world of the film, Purge Night is the one night every year in which all crime becomes legal and the American public decide to all go out on a killing spree. So kind of like America now but where the kids don't have to specifically be in school if they want to be shot at. Interestingly, the series has only ever really focused on the night being used for murder which is strange because it's not that killing people is tolerated for that one night but that literally every crime is. I know it makes for a more dramatic movie if everybody wants to murder each other but I honestly think that if Purge Night happened where I live then everybody would just start building a conservatory without planning permission, fly-tipping, and burning unwanted leaves in their stupid fucking gardens. 

Having A Gay Old Time

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I think I was about sixteen when my Mum worked out that I was gay. According to her, the thing that gave me away was the fact that I had a huge picture of a man on my bedroom wall and that I'd spent the last week banging on about another one that I liked. As a result I obviously never had to make the decision to come out as gay to her which would have probably been a huge relief if it wasn't for one small thing.. I'm not fucking gay. The poster on my wall was of Raiders Of The Lost Ark featuring Harrison Ford and the man I was banging on about was Bill Murray having just discovered the films of Wes Anderson. I mean even if I was gay I'd like to think that I'd fancy at least one person below the age of fucking sixty. Love, Simon begins with the main character of Simon informing us that he has a “big ass secret”. “Do you have a big ass secret?” I asked my friend who I'm fully aware is sensitive about the fact that he has a big ass. In the case of Simon, his secret is that he's actually gay but being in his final year of school, he is yet to come out to anybody. My friend took offence because he thought I was making fun of his fat arse which is unfair because really I was simply implying that I think he's gay too.