Operation Endgame (aka Rogues Gallery): Truly a bizarre film, a bunch of actors best known for comedy play a 
team of assassins named after tarot cards that gather in the basement of some government agency building and proceed to violently kill each other after their boss is murdered. The building is locked down and rigged to explode and one of them is not who they appear to be. Thats basically as deep as the story gets, the rest is concerned with violence in the most hilarious way possible. Rob Corrdry from Hot Tub Time Machine is in it doing his manic frustration thing that he seems to have perfected but here with the added bonus of spraying tons of blood all over the place. Zach Galifianakis also pops up as some kind of ultimate assassin wandering around in a decontamination suit mumbling to himself. Ving Rhames is also in it along with Brandon T.Jackson from Tropic Thunder. Odette Yustman, Maggie Q, Ellen Barkin and Emilie De Ravin provide the eye candy. With a cast like this you would expect that there would be something in the script that would have attracted the talent but you would be wrong. There isn’t any great twist or anything special about this script so the pitch must have originally been for something that didn’t quite work in the final product. As a result its impossible to hate this movie because its just so damn unusual and truth be told its an entertaining 80 odd minutes of nonsense. This is produced by Richard Kelly’s Darko Entertainment, which along with Worlds Greatest Dad and I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, seems to be carving quite a nice little niche for itself with straight to DVD experiments. ***
Mirrors 2: I seem to be one of the few who actually enjoyed Alexandre Aja’s 2008 remake of Korean horror Into the Mirror. 
It was not perfect but it had some nasty moments, a surprise ending and Kiefer Sutherland on shouty growling Jack Bauer mode but in a horror setting. It didnt exactly set the world alight when released but must have done okay as there is now a straight to DVD sequel. Underrated actor Nick Stahl takes the lead as a young man recovering from a personal tragedy and subsequent addiction problems who takes a job at his rich father’s new shopping mall. We meet the usual stock characters who make up the staff of the mall, the stuck up but attractive PA, the sleazy assistant manager, the shy haunted former guard etc. Its not long before our hero is seeing things in the mirrors as his fellow staff members appear to die horribly and then are found dead in real life. Is our hero delusional? or is there something more sinister at work? You don’t need a masters degree in advance screenwriting to know where this story is going. Yes its the tried and tested ‘girl who was murdered is taking revenge from beyond the grave’. Apart from a couple of nasty death scenes which are almost worth the rental alone, this is formulaic stuff to be sure. I would have loved a direct sequel to the first movie exploring the nuts ending of that movie in more depth. Sadly we have to settle for less here which will only appeal to the most rabid of gorefiends **
Altitude: Just stop for a moment and look at that cover, just look at it…..still here? okay. Now if you are looking at that and 
thinking you want some of that tentacles-from-the-sky-lovecraftian-action, think again. Imagine Christopher Smith’s Triangle without the visual flair, great performances and wit and chuck in a random flying octopus and thats Altitude. At the start of the movie we meet our five douchebag protagonists. The young female pilot taking her first big trip, her creepy possessive semi-boyfriend, their jock asshole mate, his musician best friend and the jock’s slutty girlfriend. Never in a million years would these characters be friends but we must accept that for this type of film and move on. Anyway they are flying (!?) to a music festival in Canada and run into some kind of apocalyptic storm clouds. The plane suddenly keeps climbing and climbing but instead of getting into outer space they just stay in the clouds and some giant tentacled thing keeps popping out and then disappearing again, freaking everyone's shit out. Tensions mount, secrets are revealed and there is some kind of time paradox at play come the finale, except by that point you don’t care. Director Kaare Andrews deserves some credit for creating a unique scenario with some good ideas, he deserves scorn however for his inability to create likeable characters or give them credible motivations. For reasons unknown the heroic musician at one point ties himself into the inside of the plane and then goes outside to fix something or other, leaving himself hanging out the back of the plane like a poor mans Keanu Reeves under the bus in Speed. Not only is this unbelievably stupid even for a teenager but I’m pretty sure the physics of such an act would never work. The guy would be sucked right out into one of the engines for sure. Despite working with a low budget, the creature effects are impressive and there is never an obvious use of green screen. Maybe if Andrews can get a better class of writer to collaborate with he might create something decent next time out. **
The Loved Ones:This Australian movie is a real throwback to the ozploitation movies of old and is a tense and unnerving 
experience. It also could be labeled as ‘torture porn’ if you were into throwing out labels and such so if the Saw and Hostel movies didn’t float your boat then stay away. The Loved Ones is hardcore in a way I haven’t seen for a while and I found it far more shocking than anything in Eli Roth’s films. The premise is very simple, the tortured high school stud gets asked to the school prom by weird loner Lola, he turns her down, she kidnaps him and Lola and her weird father proceed to torture , humiliate and mock the poor boy so that Lola can have her perfect prom. There is a hilarious sub plot about high school stud’s inept best friend taking the hot goth chick to the prom whilst in the background the studs real girlfriend searches for him frantically. If Wolf Creek showed you the secret deadly side of the Australian outback then The Loved Ones exposes the seedy underbelly of the suburbs with hints of incest and secret dungeons full of previous victims, barely alive and living in filth ridden captivity. I was not expecting much from this movie but it was exciting, inventive and darkly funny. Writer and director Sean Byrne knows how to push all of the right buttons. None of the torture here feels gratuitous and all goes a long way to building the tension and progressing the plot. Its also very stylish,shot with a hazy summer evening feel by cinematographer Simon Chapman. Although the market is flooded with promising horror directors, Sean Byrne could be a name to watch. ****
Rubber: A film about a psychokinetic spare tyre that kills people is going to be a film that divides people. Even if you do not 
travel in the film geek website circles that I do, you probably have heard of Quentin Dupieux’s directorial debut. I’m still on the fence about it two weeks after watching it, its either genius or a pretentious piece of crap. Its very reminiscent of a lot of Alex Cox’s early work, particularly Repo Man and Straight To Hell in that as we are repeatedly told at the beginning by the sheriff ‘things happen for no reason’. Thats how the movie starts, Stephen Spinella’s Sheriff character drives up to the screen knocking over chairs and then addresses the audience to give them examples of random occurrences in many well known and loved movies. We then pull back to see that the Sheriff is actually addressing an audience of onlookers in the desert armed with binoculars who will watch the story unfold. We then see a rubber tyre shuffle out of the sand and roll along the desert, stopping every now and then to shake and explode a bottle or a rabbit. The tyre comes across a girl at a motel, decides it likes her and then follows her, all the while graphically exploding the heads of any humans that get in the way. During the action the audience in the desert comments on the absurdity of the whole thing until they are disposed of for asking too many questions as well. Rubber is probably a film you want to watch twice just to make sure that what you saw on screen actually happened and nobody has fed you some LSD. The film looks incredible, especially on blu-ray where the desert locations really pop out at you. Towards the end it may be takes a step too far into fancy music video territory but this is a minor complaint. The only other complaint I would have is there isn’t really anyone to root for in the movie, we never get to know the girl who is being stalked and the only other significant characters we spend time with are certifiably insane and do too many random things for us to identify with them. As a directorial debut Rubber does its job, Quentin Dupieux displays a Spike Jonze style love of the weird in the every day and surreal comedy and we could be talking about both of them as masters of cinema in the future. Rubber then, you may love it, you may hate it but you’ll never forget it. ***
Love Ranch: It seems strange that a film directed by Taylor Hackford starring his wife Helen Mirren and featuring the comeback of Joe Pesci should be relegated straight to DVD but so it is. Love Ranch is the based on real life story of a Nevada based ‘legal’ brothel run by sleazy wannabe Charlie Bontempo (Pesci) and his stricken wife Grace (Mirren). Grace dreams of a way out and a day where she won’t have to manage the bitchiness and ego’s of the hookers who make up the staff. Charlie carries on affairs with most of his staff at one time or another and dreams of expanding into property development as well as the world of Boxing. Charlie takes on former Argentine champion boxer Armando Bruza and lets him train at the ranch for apparently upcoming big title fights. Grace reluctantly agrees to become Bruza’s manager and becomes drawn to Bruza and he to her. Its not long before a love triangle is in play that threatens the future of the ranch. Truth be told you can see why this skipped cinema’s, its not very cinematic and wouldn’t be out of place as a Hallmark channel original movie. The problem is it doesn't go far enough in either direction. Its not sleazy or violent enough to be considered in the same league as something like Boogie Nights and its not campy enough to be a cult item, it just floats neither here nor there. Joe Pesci and Helen Mirren deserved better than the sub par film around them but its good to see Pesci on screen again doing his ball of volatile menace thing and Mirren is good value as a downtrodden woman finally coming into her own. Its just a shame that all the elements here couldn’t gel into something that was more than the sum of its parts. **
by Chris Holt
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