How’d it go? – December 2021

Posted on January 4, 2022 by jaycluitt

Happy New Year! Here are the films I watched in December:

Top 10… Movie Spiders

Posted on October 4, 2013 by jaycluitt

So apparently all I’ve got time to write at the moment is my weekly top 10 lists. Sorry about that, I’ll get back onto the reviews in good time. I’m especially annoyed because this year I was planning on celebrating Hitchcoctober, which of course would have been dedicated to reviewing as many Hitchcock films as possible, but as I still haven’t moved yet and my girlfriend probably doesn’t want to be subjected to lots of old and/or scary films, that will have to wait until next year, I suppose. But I’ll be doing at least something a little topical with a few horror-themed Top 10s.
First up, spiders. Now, I’m not scared of spiders, I just fucking hate the little shits. The way they skitter about, can seemingly climb anything (other than bathtubs, suckers) and just have far too many legs than any living creature should. So many joints! If I could select one species to be wiped clean from the Earth, I’d pick spiders in a heartbeat. Actually, I’d pick daddy-longlegs (otherwise known as crane flies) because they’re just as horrifyingly hateful as spiders, except they can fly, and have seemingly no real purpose or knowledge of their surroundings. They just float around, this way and that, not giving two shits about where you are and how many rolled up socks you’re throwing at them. Fuck crane flies. Sorry, I got a little side-tracked there.
Spiders are evil, hateful demons from the dusty, unswept corners of Hell, who purposefully leave cobwebs across doors or alleyways, just for me to walk through and become semi-cocooned in. And I’m not the kind of guy to trap it under a glass and release it back into the wild. No, those spiders came into the house for a reason; they like it in here. And if you let them outside, they’re just gonna come straight back in again. Therefore, the only resort is arachnicide, preferably via flip-flop. There’s no need to be unnecessarily cruel here – I’m not the kid from Chronicle – I get it over with quickly, and hope that all the other spiders get the message. I think I’ve rambled on long enough now. Proof of just how horrible spiders are can be clearly seen in how often they appear in films as monsters. As such, here’s my top 10 movie spiders. Oh, and I’ve immediately disqualified Eight Legged Freaks and Arachnophobia, because there’s nothing but spiders in those films, and I can barely remember them. Continue reading →

Top 10… Movie Franchises

Posted on June 1, 2013 by jaycluitt

I’ve recently gone on record about two movie franchises, Star Trek and The Fast & The Furious, one of which I greatly preferred to the other. This got me thinking, and was the inspiration for this week’s list, my Top 10 Movie Franchises. Now, as always I’ve set myself some limitations. Firstly, I must have seen every film within the franchise. This immediately rules out the likes of Die Hard (haven’t seen number 5), Alien/Predator (haven’t seen Predator 2, can’t remember Alien 3 or Resurrection), Bourne (Legacy), Hannibal (Rising) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (remake and New Nightmare). I also didn’t include the looser franchises that simply take place in the same universe, for example the Avengers film, Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse, George Romero’s Blank of the Dead series or the Muppets films. I also took into account every film within each franchise, so just because a film happened to feature some true classics, if there were some stinkers in there too then that didn’t help its case for inclusion. The franchise also had to have a minimum of four films, as I’ve made a list of my top trilogies before. So, without further ado, here’s my top 10 movie franchises:

Honourable Mentions
There’s a lot of franchises out there! Seriously, there’s tons, more than I’d heard of, and I was shocked to discover some of the more longer-lasting movie sagas. Did you know there’s 30 Django films? I knew there were a lot of Carry Ons, but I didn’t think it was as many as 31, which is also the same number of Barbie films in existence (I’m guessing this doesn’t include Hotel Terminus). I’m most blown away, however, by the fact that there’s a Chinese series known as Wong Fei Hung, which includes a staggering 89 movies. 89! That, my friends, is insane. Anyway, I’ve barely seen any of these films (Django Unchained, Carry On Doctor) so obviously these can’t be in my Top 10.
No, this week’s two honourable mentions are the Final Destination franchise, and Police Academy. They beat out stiff competition from the likes of Shrek, Home Alone, Pirates of the Caribbean, Saw and the National Lampoon’s Vacation series, but if I had to pick my favourites then these two are them. Final Destination is one of the few horror series I pay much attention too – I’ve only seen the original Halloween, and have yet to see any Friday the 13th films – and I think this is due to the initially original concept of people cheating death, and being hunted down one by one to fix reality. It’s such a brilliant idea, and it means there’s no iconic killer who’ll end up as a parody of himself by the fifth film. Part four is easily the worst in the series – the premonitions don’t make sense and there’s some truly terrible CGI – but all the rest are at least decent, with number 2 being my personal favourite. I had a screenshot from the death of Rory as my background for a little while after seeing that film.
Police Academy is an entirely different yet still occasionally just as ridiculous franchise, following the antics of a police training school that’s just dropped any requirements for entrants, meaning anyone of any gender, race, weight and ability can sign up and be trained. Yes, the sequels got a bit terrible after Steve Guttenberg dropped out, and the less said about Mission to Moscow the better, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had with the earlier films, the first one is a true 80s classic.
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Top 10 Worst Movie Mothers

Posted on March 9, 2013 by jaycluitt

The movie of the week over at Film Vituperatum this week is Psycho, hence why I posted a review of it yesterday, and seeing as it is Mother’s Day this Sunday the two events seemed to coincide far too perfectly for me to not create a Top 10 list in celebration. I was a little unsure of which direction to take this in, but then I considered that the mother in Psycho probably wouldn’t have sat too well on a list of the all time greatest movie mothers, so forgive me but this is a more negative view of cinematic matriarchs. So here is my run down of the movie mothers that make me oh so very grateful for the one I ended up with, as opposed to any of these raving bags of lunacy.Now as it turned out Psycho‘s Mrs. Bates didn’t make an appearance on this list, as all she was really guilty of parenting-wise was maybe loving her son a little too much – something which a member of this list attempted to take a bit further. Also, any US readers who may have gotten terrified of the mention of it being Mother’s Day this Sunday should not be overly concerned; we celebrate it a couple of months earlier than you guys, so you’ve still got until May to buy those flowers. So, without further ado, here’s my list of mothers who would at best deserve a hastily purchased card from a petrol station, if that.

Honourable mention

Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

On the surface, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) doesn’t seem to be too bad of a mother. She doesn’t do much wrong other than get herself kidnapped and wear the same forced, frozen smile on her face for the entirety of this intolerable movie. In fact, she’s done a fairly reasonable job of raising a son almost single-handedly, whilst maintaining a career along the way. Yes, that son has turned out to be Shia LaBeouf pretending to be Marlon Brando, but it could have been worse. Shia LaBeouf pretending to be Shia LaBeouf, for example. No, Marion’s crime is in denying her child, Mutt Williams, of the knowledge of his father’s true identity, that of [REALLY OBVIOUS SPOILER] Indiana Jones. What boy growing up wouldn’t want Indy to be his father? He’s possibly the coolest man in existence, and even with the lack of stability and large periods of time spent travelling the globe in search of historic artifacts and sexy historians, he’d still have been one hell of a father figure to look up to for any growing boy. Plus, she let her son go around with the nickname Mutt.

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Violence is Funny

Posted on January 1, 2013 by jaycluitt

Everybody has their own favourite Christmas films, and more often than not they tend to be those watched every year during your childhood. The ones you can quote line for line, and aren’t ashamed to admit you love. That’s the beauty of the Christmas film, by their very nature they almost have to be sappy, family-friendly, it’ll-all-be-OK-in-the-end schmaltz, and some are so much the better for it. Whilst A Christmas Story may not be my personal favourite, I can absolutely see why others may adore it, and you give me National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, The Muppet Christmas Carol or Elf every day of December and you’ll find it a difficult task to prise me from the sofa. But this post isn’t about any of those film, it’s about a series of films, all set over the holiday period, which I feel I should write about, because I love them so much. That’s right, it’s Home Alone.

Growing up, I must have watched Home Alone and its sequel, Lost in New York, every Christmas since about 1995, but for some reason or another I hadn’t seen either of them for a good few years, so earlier this year I spotted the 4-disc boxset in my local second-hand DVD store for far less money than I would have been willing to pay, so I made a swift purchase and shelved them aside, looking ahead to Christmas when numbers 1 and 2 would be watched for the umpteenth time, and parts 3 and 4would be seen for the first. Well on the weekend before Christmas the time finally came, and was made all the more special by it being my girlfriend’s first viewing of all of them (quickly followed by her first viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol, although I’ve yet to sit her down for Christmas Vacation).

Before watching, I was slightly apprehensive as to whether the first two films would live up to my memories, but I can attest that they are still amazing. There’s something about spending a considerable amount of time setting up the premise – Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is, through a series of coincidences and mishaps, left alone at his family’s palatial home over Christmas whilst they are holidaying in Paris. After coming to terms with his situation and learning how to take care of himself and the house, his troubles are deemed far from over when two bumbling crooks, Harry and Marv (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), pick the McCallister’s apparently empty house as the perfect target for a little festive theft, so Kevin must use every trick at his disposal to stop them.

This is the very definition of a film of two halves. The first half outlines Kevin’s predicament – his family waking up late after a downed power line, confusion at the taxi head count and rushing through the boarding gates – and introduces our hero’s nemeses, gradually setting up the life lessons that Kevin will have learned by the end of the film – the importance of both independence and family, ingenuity and friendship – whilst the second half is a monumental payoff, with the two crooks getting absolutely everything they deserve in a masterpiece milieu of slapstick, gurning and cringing (the nail through the foot, always the nail through the foot!).

The sequel manages to recreate the same sense of wonder and excitement at the prospect of being allowed to run amok with no adult supervision, but this time gives Kevin not just his home town to play with, but the entirety of New York City, complete with a grand hotel and a magnificent toy store to muck about in. Although the structure is almost exactly identical – Kevin argues with his family, is separated from them, thrives on his own, befriends an apparently scary local loner, runs into difficulties, thwarts the plans of Harry and Marv, rigs a house full of wince-inducing booby traps, uses the aforementioned friend to catch the thieves before being reunited with his family – it remains fresh by approaching each aspect in a new and interesting way. And it features Daniel Stern being hit in the face with a brick, four times. Stern’s subsequent defiant yell of “Suck brick, kid” when he is presented with the opportunity to retaliate is one of my favourite moments in festive cinema, up there with Jimmy Stewart’s life-affirmed canter through Bedford Falls and Andrew Lincoln’s title card confession to Keira Knightley. And Buddy the Elf being hit by a car.

The real universal joy of these first two films lies partly with the heartwarming morals and happy endings, colourful characters and the triumph over adversity of not just a child alone at Christmas, but his parents’ desperate attempts to reunite the family, but personally I believe the true unique quality that sets this duo apart from other festive fare is the violence, of which almost the entirety is directed towards Harry and Marv. Throughout the films they endure enough torment and torture to kill them many, many times, be it from five-storey falls onto concrete, toilet bowl explosions (after an impressive handstand from Harry), being crushed by numerous heavy objects (the nose-bending tool chest down the stairs is a personal highlight) or just being conked on the back of a head with a snow shovel. The beauty is, no matter how much the pair are put through, they can always get back up again and continue their chase of the kid at the other end of the string those paint cans are tied to. It’s a live-action cartoon, and made all the better by the expressions Pesci and Stern are able to contort their faces into. Pesci’s acting decision to channel Muttley in the second film does tend to throw me a little, but it fits the feel.

This love in the first films of all things potentially disabling and dismembering was surely the reason for my high hopes for parts three and four. I had of course heard that these films were sub-par at worst, and disappointing at best, but I had assumed this would be because the film-makers hadn’t understood that you need to have that balance of the gentler, expositionary first half, before the riotous free-for-all of a conclusion. I’d anticipated the directors (The Smurfs’ Raja Gosnell and Teen Wolf’s Rod Daniel, rather than Chris Columbus) would have settled for the most basic of premises before unleashing a never ending torrent of flamethrowers, anvils and rocket-packs, but it turns out I could not have been more wrong. Instead of the expected violence-fest, there was a seemingly endless amount of set-up with so little pay-off I almost missed it completely. Home Alone 3 at least puts a little effort in, but the traps set are far less ingenious and incapacitating than in the previous installments, with at one point of the crooks (four this time, none of whom have done enough to remove Home Alone 3 from their top four films on IMDb) being forcibly restrained by nothing more than a weak hose pipe going off in his face, and they all go through a lot worse than what ultimately immobilizes each of them. Also, where in the first two films Kevin’s isolation was accidental, here Alex (Alex D. Linz) is left home alone on purpose, and only for a few hours at a time, when he’s home sick, his parents are at work and his siblings (including a young Scarlett Johansson) are at school. The fact that at the end of every day the rest of his family comes home to surround him with safety kind of ruins most of the tension. My main issue though, other than the lack of Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci, or a John Candy/Tim Curry-style comedic actor in a supporting role, is that the villains are international terrorists on the trail of a misplaced microchip hidden inside a remote control car Alex has recently acquired. The first times around the crooks were a pair of bumbling ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t find a bag of cement if it fell on their heads, so their being bested by a bratty kid is almost plausible, but this time the crooks come equipped with enough plans and gadgetry that it just becomes silly, and not in the way it’s supposed to.

All of this is fine, however, in comparison to Home Alone 4, a film which justifiably was only released as a TV movie. It tries to bring back the character of Kevin McCallister (Mike Weinberg, hands down the worst child actor I’ve seen) and Marv (French Stewart), but this time Kevin’s parents are separated, and Kevin runs away to spend Christmas with his Dad (Jason Beghe) and his mega-rich new girlfriend (and potential fiancé) Natalie (Joanna Going). Natalie lives in an ultra-modern, remote controlled house complete with a butler and maid, and the British royal family are coming to stay for the festive period. Marv and his girlfriend Vera (Missi Pyle) plan to kidnap the young prince, but weren’t expecting the young Kevin to be around and get in the way. I have four main problems with this film, other than the aforementioned acting talent on display. The predominant one is that, in a film series called Home Alone, and in which the previous three installments have all featured a child being abandoned and left to fend for himself; at no point in this film is Kevin actually alone. The maid and butler are always there somewhere, and if they are ever both unavailable for assistance, this isn’t made clear until after the events have taken place, so you spend the entire time just waiting for help to arrive. Secondly, there’s a twist signposted early on that so obviously wants you to think one thing that the only possible alternative becomes abundantly clear, yet is portrayed as a dramatic surprise when it is eventually spelled out. Thirdly, this is a film in the Home Alone series, yet there’s barely any traps laid out for the crooks to fall into. I’m going to spoil it a little now, but I strongly advise you not to watch this film, which makes it OK in my book. The whole point of the Home Alone films is for a kid to find novel ways to injure trespassers using household objects and toys, but this is almost entirely ignored. The only trap Kevin actually sets is a large frying pan rigged behind a door to bash someone in the head, and he even has to stand next to it to release it. Granted, seeing French Stewart being smacked in the face with a swinging pan is still pretty damn funny, but I really wanted more. A stereo playing one of the crook’s voices doesn’t make sense, and setting up a revolving bookcase to spin faster when there’s people trapped inside is nowhere near what could have been achieved with so much gadgetry to hand. Oh, and the elevator that can’t go up so gets stuck between floors? Well why not just go down or force the doors open? Ridiculous. Anyway. My fourth and final problem is the film’s final shot, when Kevin looks into the camera and instructs his voice-activated remote-control, that apparently only controls the house, to alter the weather patterns and make it snow. I hate this kind of thing, and this may well have just replaced Sex and the City 2 as the worst film I’ve ever seen.

So, other than one smirk-inducing frying pan to the face, there is absolutely no reason to watch Home Alone 4, and don’t bother with part 3 either, just watch 1and 2, every Christmas, forever.

Home Alone: Choose Film 8/10

Home Alone 2: Choose Film 8/10

Home Alone 3: Choose Life 3/10

Home Alone 4: Choose Life 1/10