What I did in March: Watched three unreleased gems from across the Atlantic….

Weird month this one. I watched a lot on DVD but nothing in the cinema apart from one film, and that was on an Orange Wednesday! Seriously though there really wasn't much that appealed at the pictures this month, and to be honest there isn't really much else coming out until May that really makes me want to rush to the flicks. April will be a quiet one too perhaps.

Don't worry though, May will bring Iron Man, Speed Racer and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with the summer silly season kicking off proper

Perhaps because of the lack of options I sought out some films from the states that haven't come out in the UK for one reason or another. I wasn't disappointed as they were all great and one in particular is my favorite film for quite a while.

Oh and another thing, In my review I said that when I watched Southland Tales again I could hate it or love it, Guess what? I loved it!. Now its out on DVD and will hopefully get a larger audience I can't wait to hear from people who also love it or despised it. Its that kind of film.

KM 31: Going somewhat unnoticed in the current Spanish language horror boom is Km 31. The story is about a bend in the road which seems to be cursed in Mexico. People drive down it and see phantoms in the road which causes them to crash. This happens to a nice lady who is maimed in the most horrific way and lays in a coma in hospital. The lady's sister starts to investigate this and it leads her to a strange lady that lives in a house in the woods beyond the bend in the road. Although its somewhat in debt to J-Horror with its urban legend supposedly based on a true story, due to its Mexican origins it feels fresh. Its also really well shot and looks far more expensive than it really was.The scares are very well orchestrated too. For a film which is Mexico's biggest ever homegrown box office hit this has been overlooked by the rest of the world. ***

Resident Evil-Extinction: The Resident Evil franchise is perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity in recent times. When you play the games (especially the first one) its a very tense creepy experience and if you play it alone in the house in the dark at 17 then it will likely scar you for life. To this day I have to play it with the sound off, ahem. Anyway I always thought they would make good films and not be too hard to get right with someone like George Romero at the helm. Sadly it was not to be and Paul WS Anderson ruined the whole enterprise by turning the whole concept into an action flick with half-arsed king fu scenes. The second one was really bad but seems great at 11pm when you are drunk. The third one redresses the balance somewhat with some genuinely cool visuals and well crafted action scenes. And guess what!! it has actual hordes of zombies in it. Sadly the story is still confusing and the acting a bit stiff. At this rate Resident Evil 4 should be a four star movie! ***

Michael Clayton: This is a great legal thriller reminiscent of those John Grisham adaptations that we never see anymore.This had me gripped from the start. George Clooney fully deserved his Oscar nomination for a performance where he seems on the verge of a breakdown for most of the film as the down on his luck title character. I actually think he should have won over Daniel Day-Lewis now, who lets face it basically played Bill the butcher in the oil industry. Its a film that also makes you think about the legal system and how big business can still defend itself despite the most heinous practices in the name of profit. How do the people involved in defending these people sleep at night? Very badly so it seems. The story plays out in non linear fashion so that when we see what Clayton does to redeem himself at the end of the movie the impact is that much more moving. This is a promising directorial debut from Bourne script writer Tony Gilroy. ****

Vantage Point: I really liked Vantage Point, it was great. I especially liked all the multiple viewpoints of the same event being re-told so that you see some new clue each time this happens. Every time the film would rewind to the beginning though the audience would groan, that's the Orange Wednesday crowd for you, I mean surely they got the idea from the trailer. Once all the characters are introduced and we see what's going on the film becomes a breakneck action film with a great car chase and shoot outs in the last twenty minutes. All the characters are well thought out with Dennis Quaid being great as a hard ass secret service agent, Forest Whittaker also really likeable as a tourist escaping from his troubled marriage and Matthew Fox playing a character who is a world away from nice Dr Jack Sheppard suggesting he may have a career once Lost comes to an end. I can't understand why this movie isn't getting more love. Fans of The Bourne movies and In The Line of Fire would do well to check it out.****

Eagle Vs Shark: Its taken me ages to watch this on DVD for reasons I've already mentioned in previous blogs but I'm glad that I have finally seen it. Its a really quirky and weird comedy from New Zealand all about love and being a nerd and all the confusion that this may bring. Jermaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords plays Jarrod who is a seriously bitter and twisted geek and probably a hard man to love. Even his own family seem to distance themselves from him. He meets Lily and they fall in love, trouble is Jarrod is too busy being a nerd bent on revenge against his old school bully to make it work and he generally treats her like dirt. This is a great little independent comedy and has more laugh out loud moments than Napoleon Dynamite and better characters. Jermaine Clement does a good job with the main character who is always on the verge of becoming unlikable but somehow manages to do the right thing eventually. No doubt this will be on Film 4 fairly soon where more people can see it and its audience will grow. Now when do we get season 2 of Flight of the Conchords? ****

Weirdsville: I rented this thinking it would be a stoner comedy and would tide me over until Pineapple Express comes out (seriously have you seen that trailer? what's going on there? wow). Anyway turns out Weirdsville is about bumbling heroin addicts which as anyone who has seen Requiem for a Dream knows is comedy gold! Apart from a few amusing moments the film lacks serious focus as the two leads Wes Bentley (Hmmm) and Scott Speedman (likeable) blunder in and out of dark scenes which seem to be from a different film,giving performances which mostly consist of mumbling and looking vacant. This was especially disappointing as it was directed by Allan Moyle who once made Pump up the Volume. **

SAW 4:The first Saw was a genuinely suspenseful and well done horror with the major queasy moment not happening until the end and even then was not seen in graphic close up. The second movie was also well done but upped the gore content. The third was an all out sick fest which made sense given the nature of the story and the climax especially. The fourth Saw movie opens with a 4 minute autopsy scene which is revolting and serves only the purpose of revealing a tape inside the dead body of Jigsaw. From there the film gets worse with a confusing plot which makes little sense. Seriously this should be the last one, torture porn had its day and its day is over. I think after all this grue we will see a move back to spooky movies like The Others and the Sixth Sense and I can't wait. *

The Heartbreak Kid: Ben Stiller re-unites with the Farrelly Brothers for The Heartbreak Kid, more of a rom-com than There's Something about Mary this still has some gross out moments along with the sweetness that you usually find beneath the barf inducing gags in Farrelly Bro's movies. Trouble is it all seems too familiar, its entertaining enough with great comedic performances all round its just a bit seen it all before. Ben Stiller plays the usual good guy who gets shat on that he has done a thousand times. Worth a watch if you aren't expecting much,but I wish the Farrelly's could get back to the heights of Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin.***

Rendition:I don't really have a lot to say about this movie. Its all about the bad way that suspected terrorists are treated and tortured without any access to the normal rights a suspected criminal has. Okay yes, we all know this is wrong. I'm sure the makers of this film thought the subject matter would make them a shoe in come award season. Its got some fairly decent acting but man is it dull. One to catch on TV one day.  **1/2

Breach:In a major newspaper recently I read possibly the dumbest review I have ever read for a movie. The reviewer basically bemoaned the fact that Breach is not like Point Break, what? I mean there really isn't much of a connection apart from being set around FBI agents and an undercover plot thread. Its not a valid comparison at all, Its like complaining that the Bourne trilogy isn't like the live action Street Fighter movie. This is based on a true story of an FBI agent that sold secrets to Russia for twenty years, Ryan Philippe plays the eager young agent sent to spy on him. There isn't a lot of action its a fairly slow burn movie but its very compelling and I was gripped. There are a lot of scenes of someone planting a bug whilst the bad agent is out getting a coffee and then racing to get it finished before he finds them in his office or find his car missing from the car park. Its that kind of movie, so if you are the type who prefers your spy movies with explosions then give it a miss. ***1/2

Unseen in the UK #1- Feast:I talk about classic horror films in one of the reviews below but I am all for a bit of fun. Films like Slither, From Dusk Til Dawn, Braindead and Bride of Chucky are hardly the finest the genre has to offer but they are damn entertaining. Feast is cut from a similar cloth. For some bizarre reason this film has not been released in the UK even on DVD. Its a low budget movie that was the subject of a TV series called Project Greenlight stateside, kind of like Project Catwalk but for budding filmmakers. Anyway it came out stateside a while back and disappeared fairly quickly despite some good buzz on the net. Basically like From Dusk Til Dawn it revolves around a bar which is under siege from some evil mutant types out in the desert. Starts out pretty funny as we are introduced to all the patrons of the bar and given their likely chances for surviving the night and then a muscular hero type turns up only to have his head ripped off through a window. From there its an out and out gore fest with limbs torn off, sexual organs pulled off and maggots infecting ripped out eye sockets. Cool thing is the camera work keeps the cheap monster effects carefully hidden without being annoying.Its great what you can do for no money. As far as I know Project Greenlight was never shown in the UK which is a shame as after watching Feast I would love to see the series that led to it. ****

Unseen in the UK #2- The King of Kong: One of the things I love about life is the different sub-cultures that I find out about and had no idea that even existed. This documentary is not about fifties housewife fetishists unfortunately, its about ageing geek's who play the earliest type of video game like Q-Bert, Asteroids and in this case Donkey Kong and all try and outdo each other to obtain the all time high score. Specifically it focuses on the rivalry between the two greatest Kong players who ever lived. Billy Mitchell: a somewhat creepy guy with a Chuck Norris beard and a mullet has made a good living as a salesman, in a secret life he is the highest Donkey Kong scorer of all time. Steve Weibe: all round good egg married with kids and a school teacher, his mother thinks he is borderline autistic. One day in his garage Steve scores over a million points on Donkey Kong and records his game on video. He sends this to the official record keeper who disputes it as it was not seen live. Billy gets wind of this and the scene is set for a showdown of epic proportions. I won't spoil it for you as it doesn't turn out as you would expect. The great thing about The King of Kong is that it has that great Office type sense of humor which makes you cringe even as you laugh and its all for real!! This one is destined for cult greatness and is worth importing on DVD to get ahead of the game so to speak. Perhaps one of the most entertaining documentaries ever made. So good in fact that a fictionalized comedy version is in the works. If they cast Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell then it should be huge. ****

Unseen in the UK #3- The Mist: In 1994 Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption quietly snuck out into theatres and quickly disappeared and although nominated for a few awards it took a few years for it to be rightly regarded as one of the best films ever made. Darabont's latest movie, The Mist is another Stephen King adaptation of a short story and met the same fate when it came out in theatres in the US at the end of last year. Now there is no release date scheduled for this in the UK as yet but its just come out on Region 1 DVD. If you like Horror films like Dawn of the Dead, The Thing, Alien, 28 days later and Se7en (come on folks Se7en is a horror film) then you owe it to yourself to spend £15 importing the DVD from the states. Put simply The Mist is one of the best horror movies to be released in quite some time. The genius of The Mist is not in the creatures and the gore, although there is enough to keep gorehounds. Its the reaction of the people who are faced with the horror that there may be something in the mist that isn't human and this may well be the end of times. Some start to try and become leaders through aggression and fail, some previously thought to be meek become strong and most frighteningly of all some start to believe the ranting's of a mad woman who says the answer lies in human sacrifice in the name of God. All this is told in the claustrophobia of a supermarket and filmed with hand held camera's mostly in close up which lends an immediate raw energy to everything. The important thing is the film remembers to include that which Cloverfield forgot about, characters you care about. The final 30 minutes of this film are some of the most gripping and finally devastating since Se7en. The fact that this has no UK release is a crime as it deserves to be seen on the big screen by as many people as possible. Then if its a hit we will get more intelligent horror that makes you think as well as thrills instead of the mindless gore pissing contests that pass for horror these days. Along with 1408 this represents a new era for Stephen King's work on screen. Lets just hope they get Cell right and someone has the balls to do either The Stand or The Dark Tower series properly. *****

 Run Fat Boy Run: When I watched this I was really down in the dumps and it cheered me up exactly as I hoped. This isn't the film geek nirvana that Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were. Run Fatboy Run is a lightweight feel good piece of fluff for a rainy Monday night. No more no less. David Schwimmer directs and proves himself to be a fairly decent director, Simon Pegg also plays the Everyman to perfection. Good movie. ***

FILM OF THE MONTH: THE MIST

RUNNER UP: The King of Kong