Not Worth Cancelling The Apocalypse For

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Pacific Rim: Uprising begins with director Guillermo Del Toro being strapped into a metal cage above a fiery pit by a creepy (and racially problematic) Temple Of Doom-style Thuggee Priest. Not literally of course, although that at least would have been a momentary detour from the two hours of mind-numbing predictability that we actually got. Del Toro directed the original 2013 Pacific Rim which has only become an increasingly better movie on the extensive re-viewings that I've given it. His was a film of colour and majesty that had both hidden depth and a message of unity that our shitty species has so far failed to understand. Every frame of Pacific Rim was laced with Del Toro's passion for art, whether it be his love of classic paintings, old Jerry Anderson shows, or simply the sub-genre of seeing huge monsters being twatted in the face by giant robots. For various reasons, he failed to sign on to this sequel having instead decided to win an Oscar for his latest fish-fucking masterpiece The Shape Of Water. Quite right too as for me, Del Toro is an artistic genius that we've been blessed to live at the same time as. His films will one day be remembered in the same way that we remember Hitchcock's or Kubrick's and if I was a director I'd want to follow in his footsteps as keenly as I'd want to be pegged by a psychopath with a cactus for a strap-on. Del Toro's heart went into his Pacific Rim film and as this sequel began I saw that Thuggee Priest rip it out and set it on fire as though showing it off to Indiana Jones, a screaming woman, and a small Asian stereotype. 

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A Total Eclipse Of The Heart

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We live in a weird time in which it seems that quite a lot of movie icons are having children that look suspiciously like clones of them. Have you seen Danny DeVito's daughter Lucy? I know this doesn't make any sense, but imagine if Danny DeVito was an attractive young woman and that's pretty much exactly what she looks like. If the internet ever went down and all I had for a power wank was the poster for Batman Returns then thanks to having seen her I reckon I could probably manage. Perhaps the most famous right now though is Scott Eastwood who has spent most of his career being cast as various white boys with the word 'jock' in their character description. He's okay but if his father hadn't made history with a cowboy hat and a cracked scowl then I'm not sure that young Scott would have even managed to crack the film industry as an out of focus extra in a low budget porno. Although if he did then I bet it'd be a porno called A Fistful Of Cock. If somebody had told me that he was a cheap 1960's Clint Eastwood action figure that had been possessed by the soul of Paul Walker then I'd probably believe them. But right now I've just seen a film called Midnight Sun which features Patrick Schwarzenegger, the clone son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and I was excited to see quite how far the apple had fallen from the old Austrian Oaktree. I'm not entirely sure who Patrick Schwarzenegger's mother is, if you're interested, although at this point I suspect that Arnie would probably have to fucking Google it too.

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A Disappointing Shaft?

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So I watched a Shaft film for the first time ever the other night. As in, the blaxploitation franchise, obviously. That's not just what I call pornos. If that was the case then I'd have to say that I'd spent my teenage years attempting to find the limit of how many shaft films that a single brain could take. I suppose that I should clarify further too that I didn't actually watch Shaft, the 1971 film featuring Richard Roundtree as Shaft, or even Shaft the 2000 film featuring Samuel L Jackson as Shaft. But rather I watched Shaft the 2019 film with Richard Roundtree, Samuel L Jackson and some young dweeb called Jessie Usher as Shaft, Shaft, and just one more Shaft. Essentially this film works on the same principle of a gangbang in that it assumes that the more Shafts there are, the more fun things will be. Roundtree is the oldest Shaft and father to Jackson's Shaft II, who in turn is the father of Usher's Shaft Jr. I also guess that the characters of Shaft are about as imaginative at naming their children as the filmmakers are with this franchise. There are only five Shaft films with three of them being called Shaft. Where's the fun in that? Has anybody even told them that the shaft is also what we call the bit of a dick that isn't the tip? It'd be ironic if not because I spent this movie hating these characters so much that where I was supposed to see three Shafts I could only really see three bellends.

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Putting Its Behind In Its Past

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Was Scar called Scar before or after he first got his scar? Because if he got his scar first then that seems pretty shitty to make it his nickname. A scar is a form of disfigurement, right? That'd be like calling some poor deformed soul Burnie after they'd had their skin melted off in a horrific fire. Do you think that person is going to want to be your friend after you've made the worst moment of their life a cute little nickname? I know that Hitler's actions can never be justified but if he'd spent his life being called One Bollock by literally every single person he knew then you'd at least understand his bitterness a little bit better. Or did they call him Scar before he had the scar because that seems just as bad doesn't it? Who looks down at a newborn baby and decides to name them after a skin blemish? Especially after his brother Mufasa had already received such a cool name by comparison. Imagine having two children and naming one little baby Brad and the other little baby Cock-wart. Which of those two do you think might grow up to be a little bit anti-social? It's imposing a self-fulfilling prophecy onto somebody from birth and then blaming them when they didn't turn out entirely perfect. If you named your newborn baby Tubby McThickshit then I don't think that you'd have that much of a right to wonder why they grew up to be a fat fucking idiot. I'm not trying to make excuses for Scar, it's simply that I've just seen Disney's latest remake of The Lion King and, because it's so completely lacking in any fucking originality at all, it gave me time to think about things.

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I Dare You To Stay Awake During This Film

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The 'truth' option of the game 'Truth or Dare' is only ever to find out something rude about a person or to discover what they really think about you. In which case I'll save you some time by admitting that I definitely did do that thing and no I can't fucking stand you. Obviously I'm not going to pick 'dare' because I really don't want to know which of my friends is going to use the game as an excuse to have me show them my cock. Last time I was forced to play, a friend of mine was dared to give me a back massage which seemed a bit unfair. It wasn't me being dared to do anything so why do I have to be a part of this? On the flip side I was quite in need of a massage so I figured I'd protest enough to show I wasn't up for it but not so much that it didn't actually not happen. No harm in a free massage after all is there? Well, I didn't think so either, until my friend accidentally got an erection whilst doing it. I mean.. what the fuck. Even at one of those dodgy massage places it's meant to be the client that ends up getting off and not the prick that works there. Anyway the long and short of it is that I do hate the game but at the very least I suppose it's not quite as fucking boring as the film Truth Or Dare.

I Felt Two Emotions... Silence And Rage

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Watching The Hitman's Bodyguard was like watching a remake of Midnight Run but if it was from the writer of Mr Bean's fucking Holiday. Beat for beat this film followed the DeNiro/Grodin classic but if all the jokes and charm of the original had been replaced by somebody that had only heard of the concept of 'wit' after having had a child explain it to them through the expressive art of dance. Ryan Reynolds is a bodyguard; Samuel L Jackson a hitman. The former must escort the latter from prison to court as the two avoid ambushes from other interested parties and bicker their way from A to B. Hilarity ensues.. is presumably what the writer wrote into the script with every intention of eventually going back and adding that hilarity.. before something got in the way and prevented them. I'm assuming death. Or at the very least I hope it was death because if they see the film that's finally hit the screen then they will likely end up dying of fucking shame regardless.

Jumping The Zombie Shark

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The first thing that the latest Pirates Of The Caribbean film gets wrong is its presumption that anybody gives one solitary fuck about any one of its characters. You could quite literally kick any one of these people in the bollocks until your feet hurt and I still wouldn't give two shits about them. Near the end of the film a character experiences what I shall refer to as 'an emotional moment'. Except, for the moment to work it requires you to both care about the people involved and have bought into the plot contrivance that was revealed only a mere few minutes earlier. Sadly this didn't work because of the film's second mistake.. that it thinks it has any characters in it whatsoever. Because it doesn't. Because to call the walking lumps of boned-flesh in this story 'characters' is an exaggeration on par with me claiming that my cock is the size of the fucking moon. I mean, it's big, but it's not quite the size of the moon. Swipe right on me for further details.

A Turd On The Waves

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Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl, was released in 2003 and was a direct result of two great rides. The first was of course the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disney of which the film is based, and the second was that special romance-ride that Mr and Mrs Depp once had with each other that led to the conception of little baby Johnny. What was originally going to be an average movie about the ongoing battle between some floating sea scum and a load of posh, land-based twats instantly became a million times more fun thanks to Depp's now-iconic performance as Captain Jack Sparrow. Things took a turn when it came to the sequels however, as it was decided to replace all the fun of the first movie with a convoluted plot, elongated running length, and a focus on some of the most boring characters of all time. Show me Elizabeth Swan and Will Turner's dull romance and I'll show you two rotting manakins that have more passion in their moth-infested heads. The second film was obviously crap, but it admittedly had just enough watchable moments to keep me mildly numb to the world. The third film however has to be one of the biggest pieces of shit I've ever seen in my life. By the time of the credits of that one, not only had I not had any fun but I was actively looking for a rusty fucking nail to plunge into my eye socket in order to help scrape out the memories.

This Film Blew

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I'm currently 28 years old and is it just me or are most of the generations above mine not quite as rude? I don't mean rude in the sense that my generation slams doors into old people's faces. That's not because of rudeness.. that's because they keep voting for things that end up fucking us over and there's more of them. I mean 'rude' as in that they say things that sound sexual without any obvious clue as to what they're doing. For example I was in work the other day and a member of the generation above mine said, “Is anybody going to come with me?” She then looked out of the window to see it was raining and added, “Or am I going to be getting wet all by myself?” Nobody even smiled! I was even talking to my own Mum after that about her partner who was told he couldn't go running any more because his knee was basically buggered. After discovering he'd gone out running regardless, I asked “I didn't think he was able to run any more because of his knee?” To which my Mum obliviously responded with, “Well, I just told him to get a strap on and now he can”. I mean how did she not hear that? How is a strap-on going to help somebody run? Is that to hand to somebody faster to wear and then have them fucking chase you?

Some Trash Potato

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XXX: Return Of Xander Cage is an interesting title because it implies that people give one solitary fuck about Xander Cage. That's about the only thing interesting about the movie really. If it wasn't for the fact that XXX was in the title and that the poster featured the giant chicken nugget-like head of Vin Diesel, then I really wouldn't have a clue who Xander fucking Cage was. The film begins fairly promisingly with a Donnie Yen fight and then Diesel himself skateboarding down a hill. Sadly I hadn't realised that as Diesel was going down hill, the film would manage to beat him to the bottom. In fact, I've quite literally seen two people banging each other in an Amsterdam titty booth and yet I've never seen anything going down faster than the quality of XXX: Return Of Xander Cage. As Donnie Yen lay the smackdown on a bunch of goons, I stupidly thought I might actually enjoy this film too. I love the Fast And The Furious movies from the fifth instalment onwards, so maybe this would be in a similar vein to those? Well, if Fast Five, Six, and Seven are the film equivalent of a steroid-addled super-freak, then XXX: Return Of Xander Cage is both tedious and predictable- the film equivalent of watching a bodybuilder lift too much and accidentally rupture his anus.

Bored Of The Rings

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The Ring is a film in which a video cassette exists that will send shivers down the spine of anybody that watches it. No, not that homemade sex tape in which Screech from Saved By The Bell supposedly gets a bit of poo on his finger and rubs it above his girlfriend's lip.. something much, much worse. Actually, if we're being honest, I don't think many videos can get much fucking worse than Screech's sex tape, and certainly not the one in The fucking Ring. It features shitty footage of some vaguely surreal and supposedly nightmarish imagery that looks like it was handed in on a lazy day by a particularly pretentious visual arts student. However once this footage has been viewed, things do get scary because soon you'll receive a phone call in which a girls voice simply says “Seven days”. Of course I'd just assume that this is the fucking take-away shop finally calling me back to tell me how much longer my pizza is delayed until delivery. However in the world of the film, it means that you have a week left to live... which if you eat at the same shitty take-away shop I constantly do is probably fucking true all the same.

An Infernal Waste Of Time

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The cinema I go to is near the sea and so when the wind picks up, it really fucking picks up. The other day I went to see a showing of the new Ron Howard film Inferno and, as the wind got stronger, it managed to find its way into the screen through a vent which could be heard throughout the entire movie as a high-pitched whistling. Or at least I think that's what that noise was?! Because in all honesty from about five minutes in I can't be sure that the sound wasn't actually the dying screams of my brain as the film spent two full hours mercilessly smothering it with a mouldy pillow of dumbness. Apparently this film is the third in the Dan Brown trilogy following on from The Da Vinci Code and Angels And Demons, which I'll admit I haven't actually seen. However from what I hear, Dan Brown is both Brown in name and brown in quality with his series being as shit as Tom Hanks's Da Vinci Code mullet. If that's true then I guess I'm here to report that Inferno hasn't broken that run of bollocks. Imagine the already crap Mission:Impossible 2 if they replaced Ethan Hunt with the boring version of Marcus Brody from Raiders Of The Lost Ark and you're not a million miles away from what this film is. But it's shitter than that... Somehow...

Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone

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Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone- What the fuck is it about? (Spoilers)

I wonder if the entire success of this franchise is down to simple wish fulfilment? Harry Potter is an eleven year old child when he finds out that not only is he famous for having saved the world but he's also as rich as fuck. You find me an eleven year old child and I'll show you a superficial little bastard that'd give his right nut for all of that. Send me to a mixed-gender boarding school and throw an invisibility cloak into the mix and fuck it- I'm sold. So Harry finds out that he's a wizard and on his way to magic school, which is lucky because his complete cluelessness makes spoon feeding the audience exposition pretty fucking easy. It's just a shame that they then go on to repeat everything about a million times. So Harry'll say, “You told me they died in a car crash” and just to emphasis this important point, Hagrid will then repeat “A Car Crash!!”. “You're a Wizard Harry”, says Hagrid. “I'm a Wizard” Harry repeats to make sure that all the thick people in the audience got the point.

A Boring Journey

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In the way that my bitch of a step-mother is missing any sense of empathy, compassion, kindness, and even some of her teeth, The Girl On The Train also lacks a fundamental ingredient that it requires to be complete. It's an edge of the seat thriller that seems to have forgotten to be in any way fucking thrilling. I've heard the book it's based on referred to as an 'airport book', which I'd assumed meant it was an enjoyably trashy page turner that you might pick up at the airport for an easy read on your holidays. However having seen the film I can only now assume that it's called an 'airport book' because it's so predictable and boring that once you start reading it you'll want to drop it off in the furthest bin you can find from your house. If you haven't read or heard of the book then perhaps you'll have heard of this movie thanks to the bombardment of trailers that have been trying to sell it as an edge of the seat experience. I agree with this too I suppose, in that I did spend a lot of the movie on the edge of my seat. However this was less to do with how gripped I was and more to do with the fact that as soon as the credits were rolling and I could leave, I'd decided I wanted a sprinting start.

It's Just Really, Really Bad

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Don't you hate it when you lie on your C.V., get the job, realise you have no idea how to actually be a brain surgeon, and suddenly now you're a murderer?! Well, it seems that's pretty much what's happened to Suicide Squad which is so structurally fucked and tonally inconsistent that I feel like I should go back to it with a doll so that it can point to exactly where the studio interfered with it. Just look at the very first trailer which used a haunting version of 'I Started A Joke' by everybody's favourite wailing eunuchs, The Bee Gees. It looked pretty creepy, I thought. Then trailer two used 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and the world shat its collective arse out with excitement because the movie looked like it'd be so much damn fun. Perhaps I'm wrong, but when you do watch the final film, it comes across as though they were making trailer one and then changed the product to fit it closer to the more popular aesthetic of trailer two. Imagine if you organised a wake for the death of your sister's husband but it gets on Facebook that it's actually a party, and so you have to put balloons everywhere to try and fake an atmosphere of fun. Meanwhile your sister is killing that atmosphere by crying her eyes out and blaming you for the death of her husband by “pretending to be his fucking brain surgeon”.

Why You Should See Gods Of Egypt

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As an agnostic I was always open-minded to the possibility of an afterlife, and miracles, and all of that other religious bollocks. I just needed proof. Well after almost three decades of existence I have finally been given the definitive answer as to where that truth lies. There is a God and I can only assume that he's a very fucking angry one. Previously we'd be subject to plagues and famines if we pissed our unprovable overlords off, however our modern deity has a new form of punishment. Although we might expect to see our rivers turning red with blood, we instead now find our cinemas polluted with shit. Because Gods Of Egypt was so truly terrible, I refuse to believe that a mere human was capable of making it. It's one of those movies that's actually so confusingly awful that you genuinely run the risk of losing your grasp on reality whilst watching it. I mean, we went to see this at the cinema and subsequently burst out two hours later completely confused that it was still the same day that we'd gone in. It was as if that screening was the wardrobe that led to Narnia and we all thought we'd lived a lifetime in there before being blinded by that same day's sun as though we were staring up at the fucking mothership from Close Encounters. Gods Of Egypt was like a bad night out drinking in that you don't remember what happened but you're certain that you didn't have fun and you know that your IQ has dropped as a result.

Heroes In A Half Film

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Having been born during the arse end of the 80's, I spent my toddling years being shunted around a variety of Ninja Turtle-themed childrens' birthday parties. Although, don't ask me what made that franchise so popular at the time. I suppose with both their mutated green skin and the hardened shell-like tumours on their back, the Ninja Turtles were simply a great way to prepare us for the possibility of a nuclear attack. Anyway, a close chum of mine experienced a similarly green social life at that age with him even being lucky enough to have an actual cake made for him which featured one of the titular heroes in its design. The problem was that the food colouring required to make the cake bright green fucked with his body and unintentionally turned his shit the same colour. To be fair, if my cold war theory is correct then nothing is going to prepare a young child more for the reality of living in a nuclear wasteland than discovering that they've just shat out a glowing green turd. Sadly, as much as I'd like to say that that was the biggest Ninja Turtle related shit to be released into the world, I can't. Not now that I've seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows, anyway.

Why I liked X-Men: Apocalypse

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Right now it seems that most of the reviews have treated X-Men: Apocalypse as though they're Scum's Ray Winstone by casually walking up to it, clobbering it in the face with a sock full of snooker balls and screaming “I'm the daddy now!” This was obviously both a surprise and a shame because up until now all of Bryan Singer's X-Men movies had been brilliant. Before he turned up with his fuck-off adrenaline needle, comic-book movies were essentially just lying on the floor like a dying crack-head with blood pouring out of its nose. With both X-Men and X-Men 2, he delivered the shot to the heart that's ultimately lead to comic book movies being conceived and shat out at a faster rate than Mickey Rourke can go through new faces. As a huge fan of this series I went into the screening with a combination of both hesitation and optimism. Although it was those same two feelings that I went into Batman V Superman with before leaving three hours later with a deadness to my eyes that suggested I'd just done a tour of fucking 'Nam.

Gerard Butler Is Secretly Evil

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Here's a piece of trivia that not many of you might know about Gerard Butler... Even though he seems to be biologically similar to a medieval cave-dweller, before becoming an actor he was, in fact, almost a lawyer. Despite the fact that on film he might come across like a lobotomised Scottish troll, he was President of the Law Society at the University Of Glasgow where he graduated with Honours before going on to become a trainee civil lawyer. However he sadly stumbled at the last hurdle when one week before receiving his full certification he was fired for excelling in his national sport of alcoholism. It seems that no matter how much education you put into a man's head, you just can't seem take the Scottish out of it. Although initially wanting to make a living from upholding the law, he has subsequently turned to a life of evil with his latest film London Has Fallen being the most recent of his many atrocities. I suppose you could point out that Olympus Has Fallen was pretty terrible in that it was essentially a shitty remake of Die Hard as filtered through the mind of a feverishly patriotic American moron. In which case how bad can this sequel really be? I mean if Olympus Has Fallen was a disease then it'd be spinal cancer and what could possibly be worse than spinal cancer? The answer... London Has Fallen.

A Terrible Vision

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People rightly moan that there aren't enough female directors working in Hollywood which seems to be a problem that the Wachowskis are single-handedly trying to solve themselves. A few weeks ago, and before it was announced that Andy had transitioned into Lilly, a friend asked if it was me who'd told him that one of the Coen Brothers had had a sex change. I thought for a second before responding that it wasn't, but I may have told him that one of the Wachowski's had. “Oh” he said, “that makes more sense”. I asked why he was asking to which he answered “Because I was watching an interview with the Coens the other day and I was trying to work out which one of them it was”. He then paused before concluding “I wondered why they both had fucking beards”. Well, to quote The Kinks, “it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world”. If turning into Martha from Arthur will make a person happy, but doesn't involve somebody then having to drag a fat girl out of a lake and remove a moth from her throat, then who are we to judge? However, as acceptable as it is for a person to surgically alter their sexual organs, I draw the line at video-games that attempt to become films and films that attempt to become video-games. This all leads me to Hardcore Henry which now joins The Boy and Daddy's Home as films I've seen this year that definitely sound like they're going to be gay pornos.