July

1. The Green Hornet (2011) - well that was a piece of shit.
   
   
2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - with my mum.
   
   
3. C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) - a lot of people love this film. The IMDb pages for it are full of gushy gush gush love. It's a Canadian coming of age piece about a young man coming to terms with the fact that he's gay. There's some good stuff in here but it's so bloody slow. After about an hour I flipped on the DVD player's on screen display to find only 36 minutes had passed.... Three or four hours later, after some suitably soap operatic twists, father and son are united for a moment in mutual grief and acceptance. At this point and I should have been weeping buckets because that is where the director had spent ages trying to get the audience but I was actually thinking was, "Hurrah! It's finally fucking finished!"
   
   
4. Kiki's Delivery Service
   
   
5. Tokyo Raiders
   
   
6. Living in Oblivion - for the umpteenth time.
   
   
7. Radioactive Dreams (1985) - even worse than I remember it. Two kids locked in a fall out shelter as the bombs drop have nothing to read but hard boiled detective fiction.
   
   
8. Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) - bland Mad Maxy stuff which really never gets going and sort of limps about for a bit not being much of anything and then just sort of stops.
   
   
9. Epic (2013) - kids' animated adventure which, after tediously, explaining the 'We have to get the Maguffin to here by then' nature of the Quest to the audience THREE TIMES! settled down to be a bit better than it looked like it was going to. Doubt if I'll remember seeing it in a week's time.
   
   
10. Ator the Invincible (aka Ator the Invincible 2, The Blade Master, Ator, the Blade Master, Cave Dwellers, and The Return - 1984) - another in the small but significant number of films featuring hang-gliding barbarians. An Italian sword and sorcery flick so stupendously tedious that at times I doubted I'd remember watching it before the end credits rolled. In 2012 it was listed by Total Film magazine as one of the 66 worst films of all time. (Why 66?)
    
    
11. Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009) Back in January I watched a crappy horror flick about a killer clown called Hellbreeder and wrote: "Amazing. Three movies in and I may have just watched the crappiest movie I will watch all year." I was wrong. Hellbreeder had an excuse ie 'No Money'. but there was no excuse for this.
    
    Having tried to settle my brain into the target audience mindset (laddish FHM and Maxim reader - "oooh! shiny women!") I really did give it my best shot. If it wasn't for the sheer geeky hotness of lead MyAnna Buring (and the vague hope she would be naked by the end of the show - or at least getting a good dose of lipsticky lesbian snoggage - I doubt if I would have bothered past the first act.
    
    
    

    (MyAnna Buring is the one in the middle.)

    
    
12. The Dive (1989) - another winner from the buy any big box VHS tape I'd never heard of (if it it's cheap enough) policy. A routine dive from a Norwegian oil industry support vessel goes wrong. Terrificly tense film which, rather unusually and interestingly, assumes the audience knows enough about the technicalities and dangers of deep sea diving to dispense with having an audience proxy to whom everything has to be explained. I know bugger all about the dangers of deep sea diving and decompression but the characters were convinced they knew what was going on and carried me with them.
    
    
13. Naked Space (aka The Creature That Wasn't Nice 1983 ) - an amazingly unfunny space spoof comedy. The most interesting thing on screen after a while was spotting the number of times you could see the studio ceiling over the top of the set. If I was being generous I would say it was slightly more watchable than Lesie Nelson's other career low point SF 'spoof', 2001: a Space Travesty. But that is doing with faint praise. 90 minutes of earthworms drying out on a hot pavement would be more watchable than that.
    
    
14. Duck Soup (1933) - funnier than the last time I watched it. This time we watched it as a family and both of my younger kids laughed more than I have heard them laugh at a film for ages.
    
    
15. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) - I have come to the realisation that I really don't like the Indiana Jones films. They're over-long, and sadistic films. This was the first time I had seen this one and there was nothing in it I hadn't seen before in the other two. Coincidentally a character in it referenced the Marx Brothers and another couple reused the, "Tanks!", "You're welcome." joke from Duck Soup.
    
    
16. Born Invincible ( 1978 ) - 90+ minutes of old school chop-socky. "You bastard! Listen! Now I am going to kill you. And you will die!" "Hahaha! No - I will kill you!" "We will see who is going to die." Whack! Ugh! Crack! "Hoo yaa! "Whack Whack whack!" "Hahahahaha!" "You have killed him!" Yes! Hahahahaha!" Now I will kill you...!" with more zoom shots per square minute than any five Jess Franco films combined.
    
    I think the good guys won.
    
    
17. Beastmaster (1982) - which I had never seen before and surprisingly enjoyed. I had been lead to believe it was a pile of drek. But it's a masterpiece compared with Ator the Invincible. Oh wow! There's a sequel... no two! Apparently they ARE dreadful. Number three has Leslie-Anne Down and David Warner in it! Argh! Fight it! Fight the temptation... must... not.. go... to... eBay.... Oh! I don't have to... they're on Youtube! .
    
    .
    
    Huzzah!
    
    
18. Batman and Robin (1997) Which I have never seen before and was even worse than I had been lead to believe Jeso! What a stinky mess! (Alicia Silverstone's shiny, leather-clad boobs aside. Not worth the pain of the rest of it though.)