House at the End of the Street (2012)

House at the End of the Street. It reads like a placeholder title, doesn't it? Something lame and basic that gets replaced when they get round to thinking up a better title. Except, they didn't. In a way, it's appropriate because this really is a placeholder of a film. It serves no purpose other than to waste time. It doesn't shock or scare; it doesn't excite or intrigue and it certainly doesn't entertain or inspire emotions of any kind for that matter. It's the most formulaic, derivative, by-the-numbers, clichéd film I've seen in a very long time. But then again, with a title like House at the End of the Street, how could it not be?

Jennifer Lawrence is Elissa Cassidy, a seventeen-year-old girl who moves from Chicago to the back end of nowhere with her mom Sarah (Elisabeth Shue). They're renting a house that was only in their price range because of what happened in the house next door a few years ago: a disturbed young girl, Carrie-Ann, murdered her parents and disappeared. She is believed to have drowned in the lake but the resentful locals, angry that the incident drove down their property prices, mutter that she may be living out in the woods. The house is presently occupied by Ryan Jacobson (Max Theriot), Carrie-Ann's older brother, who was staying with his grandparents when the murders happened. The local parents hate him and the local kids mock and bully him. Enter Elissa, who takes a liking to him because seemingly the only other guy in the area is Tyler Reynolds (Nolan Gerard Funk), who's not just a dick but a dickhole (yes, that is an actual line of dialogue). Her mother doesn't like her being around Ryan, he acts weird, blah blah blah. Can we just get to the interesting bit, please?

Well, no. Most of the film is spent on this mind-numbing, often cringe-worthy story that's like something lifted from a made-for-TV romantic drama. Interspersed with occasional efforts to make the viewer jump, it makes for a very disjointed film and incredibly jarring watching. Said attempted scares are sloppily handled and lack any tension whatsoever. The only half-decent jump in the entire film is, naturally, a false one. Does this film have nothing going for it?

Yes. It has Jennifer Lawrence. House at the End of the Street was made way back in the middle of 2010, but when Lawrence was cast in X-Men: First Class and then The Hunger Games, the producers decided to stick this film on a shelf for two years and then release it shortly after those two came out, so as to cash in on her new-found star power as much as possible. In fact, I remember seeing trailers for the film that advertised it as starring "The Hunger Games' Jennifer Lawrence". So, given that it was made over two years before it was released, you can't really question Lawrence's motivation for appearing in it. Winter's Bone had only come out a few months before it was shot and her Oscar nomination, yet alone her future global superstardom, was a long way off yet. She was a (very) young actress, it was a role and she took it. Despite that, she gives nothing less than a full-throated performance. She is easily the best thing about this film and even if there's no joy to be found in the rest of the film, it's fun to watch her get put through her paces. Oh, and the last half hour, when she runs around in a white tank top, is pretty fun too. But that's it.

Without Jennifer Lawrence, there would be nothing to recommend here. As it is, there's just very little to recommend here. Replace her with some random actress and it'd probably get a 2. She earns the film another point all by herself.

A very bad film with a very good actress stuck in the middle of it.

3 out of 10.

Silent Night (2012)

Jaime King might not be the reigning Queen of horror (that honour goes to Danielle Harris, of course) but she's certainly the Queen of holiday-themed horror films: first with My Bloody Valentine 3D, then Mother's Day and now Silent Night. All she has to do next is Halloween 3D and a remake of April Fool's Day and she'll have covered all of the major holidays. If someone ever decides to make an Easter-themed slasher, you can bet that she'll be the director's first choice to play the final girl.

As for Silent Night, it's a semi-remake of the infamous 1984 film Silent Night, Deadly Night, which attracted massive controversy, spawned four sequels and attracted a sizeable cult following. In reality, the only thing that connects Silent Night to its predecessor is that it's about a man in a Father Christmas costume who goes round killing people. In the original, disturbed Billy Chapman is the main character and we follow his journey from traumatised young boy to serial killer. In this offering, Deputy Aubrey Bradimore (King) is the protagonist and the identity of the murderous Santa Claus is a mystery, as is his motivation for the killings. To be honest, it's an improvement. Far too many horror films these days (remakes or otherwise) give us endless flashbacks to something that happened in the murderer's childhood that turned them into a sadistic killer. It makes for such a nice change to see a killer whose identity and motivation are unknown. I'm not saying that the killer's identity and motivation are never revealed, just that for most of the film, we're as clueless as everyone else in the film is.

Instead, we follow Aubrey and Sheriff James Cooper (Malcolm McDowell) as they try and track down the bearded maniac. Finding a man in a Santa suit in a small Wisconsin town? No problem! Except that it's Christmas Eve and there's no chance of backup arriving. Oh, and the town's hosting an annual "best Santa" competition, so there are 499 other bearded men in red suits walking around the place.

Things get off to a promising start, with Santa electrocuting a man with Christmas lights and then paying a visit to a bitchy little girl. In a scene that nods at My Bloody Valentine 3D, he also drops in on a local pornographer. After dispatching the camerawoman and the director, the model, Maria (Cortney Palm), runs away and he gives pursuit. Did I mention she was topless? Yes, it's clearly influenced by Betty Rue's very memorable scene in the earlier film, although Palm does at least keep her underwear on (booooo!).

While it may only be a loose remake, there are a few nods to the original films. The catatonic Grandfather is present, but it's not the killer who visits him. Rather, the skeezy boyfriend of the mayor's slutty daughter (Courtney-Jane White). Later on, Santa visits the two of them and fans of the original will be pleased to see that the most memorable kill from the original is also present here. Finally, in a throwaway moment that will probably pass quite a few people by, Sheriff Cooper asks Deputy Jordan (Brendan Fehr) to take out the trash. "What is this, garbage day?" he asks.

Belying the film's undoubtedly small budget, it's well made, nicely shot and the acting varies only between good and competent. King is her usual resilient self, bringing depth and sympathy to her character and McDowell looks like he had great fun playing Sheriff Cooper. A parody of small town sheriffs, he has some of the best lines of the film. The kills are also very well done and include, in addition to those mentioned above, a very, very good head-splitting, someone getting their face punched in with knuckle dusters embossed with the words "ho ho ho", and death by woodchipper. 

It's not a perfect film by any means. There are a few plot holes and logical inconsistencies (a little girl is murdered in the morning and her mother doesn't report it until the evening?); the final confrontation isn't quite up to scratch; and the ending feels hurried. But, on the whole, a good slasher film. More importantly, perfect seasonal viewing!

7 out of 10.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

If you had just three weeks to live, what would you do? Try and see long-lost friends and relatives before the time came? Make an effort to re-connect with an old love? Finally get round to reading War and Peace? Travel as much as you could? Go on a crime spree? With an asteroid called Matilda hurtling towards the planet, that's the very conundrum facing Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell). Within moments of the car radio telling them that a last-ditch attempt to stop Matilda has failed, Dodge watches on as his wife Linda (Nancy Carell) gets out of the car and runs away from him and their life together. It's probably for the best anyway: she was having an affair and he only married her because he was scared of dying alone. Some people try and flee, as his wife did. Others join orgies and parties and some get things over with and take their own lives. Dodge reacts altogether differently, carrying on his humdrum life as normal. He goes to work, checks his empty letterbox and tries to tell his cleaning lady that with the apocalypse approaching, she doesn't have to come to work anymore. She thinks he's trying to fire her, so he relents and lets her carry on.

Dodge's friends aren't interested in business as usual, not in the slightest. Warren (Rob Corddry) and Diane (Connie Britton) invite him to a dinner party and try and set him up with their enthusiastic friend Karen (Melanie Lynskey), reasoning that no-one should die alone. They've hit the nail on the head - he doesn't want to die alone, but other than that, he doesn't know what he wants. He does know however that he's not interested in Karen or Diane's sexual advances, nor does he fancy taking heroin. So, he leaves the party and goes home. As he reminisces about Olivia, his old high school sweetheart, he sees his neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) crying outside his window. She's missed the last flight back to England to see her family so he consoles her and invites her in. She falls asleep on his sofa and the next morning, gives him a pile of letters that the postman had wrongly delivered to her apartment over the years. They've never spoken before despite being neighbours for a long time so she has no idea that the man she assumed was his "roommate's boyfriend" was in fact his wife's lover. After trying to kill himself, Dodge reads the letters and finds one from Olivia where she tells him that she's divorced with a son and that he was the love of her life. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose and with a crowd of looters approaching their apartment block, he rescues Penny and tells her that if she helps him track down Olivia, he will hook her up with his friend who has a private plane that can take her back home to Surrey.

Thus begins the movie proper and from this point onwards it's a strange romantic drama-cum-black comedy-cum-apocalyptic science fiction film. Some parts work really well. For example, Dodge maintaining the semblance of a normal life as the sky falls around him (literally); the dinner party at Warren and Diane's; almost joining in an orgy at a diner and attending a mass baptism at a beach. It's just a pity that so many scenes fall flat on their face. Dodge's attempt to commit suicide was either supposed to be poignant or funny and it couldn't decide which. Dodge and Penny's encounter with an unusually vigilant policeman sees the film swerve completely off course and delivers easily the most boring and frustrating five minutes of the film. Their meeting with survivalists had promise but it was completely lacking any satirical edge and just felt like it had been shoehorned in. The only joke had at their expense came when they walked in on one of them on the toilet. Martin Sheen's character likewise feels tacked on and doesn't serve much purpose other than to provide a plot device. Finally, the ending. I can see some people really liking it, but I didn't really. I won't spoil it but of the three main ways I thought it could have ended as I was watching it - abrupt black comedy, tearful reunion and unhappy resolution - they picked the weakest of the three. After it finishes I wondered if there was an alternate ending but there is not.

Strange and unholy mash-up it might be but fortunately, there is glue holding the whole ramshackle structure together and it is the performances of Carell and Knightley. He deadpans his way through the film, his occasional outbursts of emotion and playful flirting making for a confidently understated performance. She is full of spunky energy, another excellent performance to add to the already long list. Together they make a likeable and believable pairing, often providing the only high points in scenes that otherwise drag along under the weight of their own superfluousness.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a bit of a strange film and has as many hits as it does misses. It would all come unstuck were it not for Steve Carell and Keira Knightley. She in particular is superb and without their winning performances, the whole thing would come crashing down.

6 out of 10.

The Mist (2007)

"People are basically good, decent. My god, we're a civilised society."

"Sure, as long as the machines are workin' and you can dial 911, but you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them, no more rules, you'll see how primitive they get."

"You scare people badly enough, you can get 'em to do anything. They'll turn to whoever promises a solution, or whatever."

"As a species, we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?"

And thus is summed up The Mist in 109 words. What happens when a few dozen terrified Americans are crammed together in a supermarket and hemmed in by a thick, otherworldly mist that brings death to all who step into it? They turn on each other, in horrible, inhuman ways.

When a powerful storm hits the small town of Bridgton, Maine, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) head into town to pick up some supplies and materials to repair the storm damage to their house. David's wife Stephanie (Kelly Lintz) stays at home but he gives a lift to their neighbour, Brent (Andre Braugher). A lawyer from New York with a holiday home in the town, Brent has previously sued the Draytons over a property dispute, which he lost. This, combined with his intransigence in the face of David's politeness and his belief that the townspeople see him as an out-of-towner who doesn't belong means the two have an uneasy relationship at best. At the supermarket, they shop and run into fellow townspeople, among them Amanda (Laurie Holden), a teacher and friend of the family; Ollie (Toby Jones), the shop's assistant manager; Dan (Jeffrey DeMunn), a friend of David's; Irene (Frances Sternhagen), an elderly retired teacher; Jim (William Sadler), a mechanic; Sally (Alexa Davalos), Billy's babysitter and an assistant at the shop; and Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), an infamous and softly-spoken townswoman whose fanatical right-wing Christian views make Rick Santorum look like a godless socialist.

As they shop, the mist, which had been rolling down from the hills, sweeps into the town and engulfs it, swallowing up the supermarket and everything in sight of it. As the townspeople gawp out of the shop's large front windows at the impenetrable mist, people run in from the car park and when Dan bursts in with a bleeding nose and tales of something in the mist attacking people, panic sets in. Some decide to run for it, trying to make it to their cars before whatever is in the mist can get to them. They don't make it, their screams carrying back to the large majority who remained inside. Trapped and terrified, rifts begin to appear between the townspeople. David quickly realises the enormity of what they're facing but Brent and some of the others refuse to believe what's really outside, even when it's right in front of them. But, most insidious of all is Mrs. Carmody. She begins her sermons of hate and no-one listens to her, but when the things outside break through the windows and panic sets in, more and more people listen to her. She spews forth messages about the end of the world and judgement for those who refuse to repent. Slowly and surely, she and her followers become just as dangerous as the creatures that lurk outside in the mist.

What makes this film really special isn't just the otherworldly monsters but the human monsters, whether they begin that way or are scared and bullied into doing the horrific deeds they go on to commit. With the townspeople splitting between the rational, logical group led by David and the fundamentalist, fire and brimstone group led by Mrs. Carmody, the real divide that exists in America is sharply illustrated. Clearly the film is made from the point of view of the former and David and his friends are the protagonists but given a few tweaks here and there, it's easy to see how one could present Mrs. Carmody as a dedicated, devoted Christian woman just trying to do what she knows to be right. Fortunately, Marcia Gay Harden plays her perfectly. She's understated enough to be creepy and passionate enough to be persuasive, without ever crossing the line into parody. In fact, the performances are superb all round. Many of the actors are regular collaborators with director Frank Darabont so he knows exactly how to get the best out of them.

With the human monsters so effectively portrayed, and given that the film is only five years old, it's disappointing to note that the CGI for the creatures is slightly unconvincing. It's not so much the case for the larger creatures, but for the smaller and more numerous creatures, it's sometimes no better than average. Furthermore, the designs are surprisingly unimaginative. Fortunately, the mist often shrouds the creatures so it doesn't detract too much from their impact, but it is the only downside to this otherwise fine feature.

All in all though, it's still a very good film. The performances are terrific, the characters are believable and the ending is absolutely superb. Not only is it a great monster movie but as a mini-essay on the dangers of irrationality and religious fundamentalism, it simply can't be beaten.

8 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.12 - The Dance

Mirroring the last episode of the first series of the British original, it's the end of year dance. As usual, all the funny moments have been sucked out and replaced with... well, nothing.

Instead of Will calling Mr. Gilbert "Phil" and being humiliated in front of the rest of his year, he asks to be chairman of the committee and is told "yes". That's it. Thanks to it reminding me of the brilliant moment in the original series, it was the only part that made me chuckle in an otherwise painful and laugh-free twenty-one minutes. The rest of it is the usual bag of annoying characters, bad acting and pathetic attempts at "humour".

What a waste of time this piece of shit series was. Everything that made the original series so fantastic has been completely stripped away. To even give it the same name is to piss all over the brilliance of the original series. Watered-down, badly-written, childish and incredibly unfunny, the only remarkable thing about this monstrosity is how they managed to fuck up a winning formula so badly. Everyone who was in the slightest bit responsible for this shockingly bad rip-off should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

0 out of 10.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

Guillermo del Toro is a big fan of the original TV movie Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. He apparently loved the film so much as a child that it inspired him to create his own horror films. After years of making his own excellent, original films, he decided to go back to the beginning and co-write and co-produce a remake of the film that started his love affair with horror and fantasy. The director's chair is filled by first-timer Troy Nixey, who was hired by del Toro on the basis of a short film he sent in to him.

Very similar to the original, the remake has two main differences. Firstly, there is an opening scene set in the house in the 1800s that sees painter Emerson Blackwood (Garry McDonald) attempt to get his child back from the creatures, only to be dragged down into the fireplace by them. Secondly, there is a new character: a young girl, who becomes the focus of the creature's attention. Ten-year-old Sally is played by Bailee Madison and moves into the large mansion with her father Alex (Guy Pearce) and her father's partner, Kim (Katie Holmes). Sally is the one who opens the grate of the fireplace in the basement and unwittingly sets the creatures loose and is the one they try and take.

Having a child become the focus of the creature's attention is an interesting move. It's a pity that it doesn't work. For starters, the metaphor from the previous film could have been turned into one about parents not believing children and making us wonder whether she really was seeing the creatures or if they're the product of her imagination, driven to despair after being sent away by her mother to live with her distant father and his girlfriend. Instead, we're told right up front that the creatures are real. There's no subtlety or hint of delusion: she's sane, they're real and the adults are morons. There's the usual cranky old caretaker who warns them not to open the fireplace but he's ignored. Secondly, we know all along that she's in no real danger. She's a little girl in a horror film. When was the last time something bad happened to a little girl? Anyone?

In contrast to the original, the creatures are not actors in laughably bad masks, they're all CGI. They're not laughably silly but they aren't in the slightest bit scary either. They're like rats crossed with goblins and about as scary as toast popping up from a toaster. If you don't like rodents, you might find them unnerving. Otherwise, you'll just wonder why people don't stamp on them or pick them up and throw them away.

Just like the original, there are irrelevant characters, namely the psychiatrist (Nicholas Bell) and Charles Jacoby (Alan Dale), and pointless scenes. In particular, the dinner party. The dinner party in the first film was a small gathering of friends before the half-way point. In the remake, it's greatly expanded and moved to the final act. Alex and Kim entertain Charles, in the hope that he will be impressed by their restoration work on the house which will lead to them being featured on the cover of a magazine which means they can sell the place for a big profit and recoup Alex's losses and avoid bankruptcy. Got all that? Good. As Alex wines and dines Charles and a dozen other nameless people, Sally pursues a creature to the library, determined to get photographic evidence of it with an old Polaroid camera. Once inside the room, the creatures lock the door and attack her. She takes lots of pictures but none of them look like they will come out clearly and all her efforts seem to have been in vain. That is, until she squashes one of them between two bookcases and its arm falls off. Success! She has incontrovertible proof! Not just its lifeless body, trapped between the two pieces of furniture, but also its newly detached limb. So, when the library door bursts open and her father and his guests come rushing in, full of concern for little Sally, do they see the body of the creature? Well, no. Does she at least show them its severed arm? Uh.... no. She just gives her father one of the pictures, which is far too blurry to see anything. Then the guests leave and she's put to bed, her father still refusing to believe her. Seriously, that's exactly what happens and it's completely fucking stupid. She has proof of the creatures' existence less than ten feet behind her but no-one notices and she doesn't tell anyone either! It's not even like she accidentally kills the creature, she deliberately squashes it and looks at it as it's arm falls off and lands on the floor. We even get a close-up of the bloody thing hitting the ground!

That's just the most egregious example of several gaping plot holes. Combine them with the pointless characters and scenes that should have ended on the cutting room floor and it sounds like this film's worse than the first one. Not quite. It still feels entirely pointless but there's no denying that the film looks absolutely superb. For starters, everything's bigger - the CGI, the house, the performances, particularly from Bailee Madison. It's just a pity that it's all wasted. It doesn't even have any good scares, something you'd expect from a horror film written and produced by Guillermo del Toro. In fact, the biggest (and probably only) jump in the film was given away in the trailer!

So, what do we have? A pointless remake of a laughably bad 1970s horror film. It's bigger, full of lavish sets and a wonderful, grand old house. The performances are much better and it's directed competently. Unfortunately, it's not in the slightest bit scary or even unnerving and the chance to make us wonder if what Sally's seeing is real or just a fantasy is wasted. It's riddled with plot holes and groaning under the weight of pointless characters and scenes that should have appeared only in the special features. It's an improvement on the original, but just barely.

4 out of 10.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

Some horror films don't age well and boy is this one of them. Almost forty years old, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark was made for television and first broadcast in early October of 1973. Directed by John Newland, who worked on a large number of TV series in the 60s and 70s, it stars Kim Darby and Jim Hutton as married couple Sally and Alex Farnham. Darby is probably best known for her role as Mattie in the John Wayne version of True Grit and Hutton appeared in a variety of films and TV series until his untimely death six years after the film was broadcast.

Sally has recently inherited a large house from her deceased grandmother so she and her husband move in and set about doing up the place. She is fascinated by the old fireplace in the basement and wants to open it up and get it working again. The house's repairman-cum-caretaker, Mr. Harris (William Demarest), tells her to forget about it, explaining that when Sally's grandfather died, her grandmother ordered him to brick the fireplace up and bolt the ash door shut, which he did. Her curiosity gets the better of her and so she opens the ash door and peers inside. It turns out that the fireplace is covering a tunnel which goes down deep into the Earth. Closing it, she goes to leave and hears voices calling to her from inside the fireplace. It turns out that small, goblin-like creatures live down beneath the house and have been set free. They terrorise and harass her, intent on dragging her down to their subterranean home and making her one of them.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is best summed up as seventy-four minutes of bad acting, uninspired direction and absolutely terrible "monster" design. Imagine the worst alien costume from old and cheaply-made episodes of Doctor Who on creatures that are six inches tall and you're still nowhere near imagining just how bad these things look. We catch our first glimpse of them as one steals Sally's napkin from her lap at a dinner party and I laughed so hard I had a coughing fit. We see them again a few minutes later while she's having a shower and they decide to "scare" her. We get a look at more of them (well, three of them. Clearly the budget was so low it would only stretch to three of these appalling costumes). They look even more ridiculous: actors in black feathery suits with ludicrous rubber masks that look like wrinkly bell ends and don't even have slits for mouths. When they talk, they bob their head up and down so you can tell which one is speaking. Otherwise, you'd have no way of knowing.

To a ten-year-old child watching this film in 1973, it would probably have been quite scary. Watching it now, it's dire. It's not just the creatures, it's the complete lack of any tension whatsoever. It seems at times that director John Newland couldn't decide whether to go for screams or laughs so he half-heartedly tries to do both. It's interesting in one respect, in that it is a decent metaphor for how women are so often ignored, their fears dismissed as nerves or unhappiness. Sally's doting husband insists that all is well and good, refusing to believe her until the shit really hits the fan. That aside, the rest of the film is really very silly and it's a strange thing to say when the film's under an hour-and-a-quarter long but so much of it is completely irrelevant. Sally's friend Joan (Barbara Anderson) and the doctor (Robert Cleaves) as well as several scenes (particularly Sally and Joan going shopping) clearly only exist to pad the film out.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark has not aged well. The interesting story and underlying metaphor are unfortunately swamped by bad acting, lazy direction and poor creature design. Only recommended for the those old enough to remember seeing it back in the early 1970s. Even then, re-watching it will probably ruin your memory of how good you thought it was. I can't even see younger viewers getting a kick out of it as they will most likely be bored by the extensive padding and totally unconvinced by the creatures.

3 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.11 - Spa Time

At the school's car wash, Simon moves in on Carli by stepping up to give her a lift when her boyfriend claims to be too busy and Samantha tells Will she'll sleep with him after he loses his virginity. Then, they go to a spa. Jay spends his time looking for the spa whore for Will, Simon takes Carli home and ruins her surprise party and Will meets another girl who tells him she'll sleep with him if he loses his virginity first. As usual, the other one does nothing of consequence.

Painfully, embarrassingly bad. Whether it's Simon's pathetic fawning over Carli and panicking over whether he's late to pick her up or Will's excruciating demonstration of "clinginess", it's not an enjoyable experience on any level. It's easy to see what they're going for: humiliate the boys and make us laugh at their expenses. Swing and a miss. It's not crude enough to be funny like the original series and it's not clever enough to be funny like The Office. They go for "gross-out" jokes and then bleep every swear word. They go for physical humour and the best they can manage is wrapping up Simon like a tortilla. They try and copy the original series and fuck it up. They try something new and all they can manage is, Neil thinks he's died and gone to heaven. I'm honestly surprised they didn't make any racist jokes when Simon was covered in mud from head to toe. Remove the bikini car wash and this episode would get a zero.

2 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.10 - Reading Gives You Wings

Will meets another girl, Samantha (Marie Avgeropoulos), the library is turned into a Red Bull bar and it turns out that Simon's girlfriend likes stealing things. She gets caught stealing and dumps Simon and Will's plan to protest the "library" goes up in smoke when he decides that he likes Samantha more than reading.

How ironic, the library is sponsored by Red Bull and becomes a hollow shell of its former self, stripped of all its contents and replaced by a mockery of what it once was that exists only to peddle fizzy, sugary pigswill. It's a perfect analogy for the way the original series has been treated.

I watch it so you don't have to.

0 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.9 - Fire!

For some reason, Will is both blamed for starting a fire and credited with putting it out. Given a week to clear his name or... he'll get a medal, he questions everyone. It's boring. Meanwhile, the lads go to a party. On the way, they pick up Lauren (Avery Camp), Simon's new girlfriend, and the 12-year-old that Jay obsessed over in the last episode. With Simon's parents away for the night, it turns out that the party is at... Simon's house and hosted by Simon's younger brother. Going to a party with a load of twelve-year-olds is as funny as it sounds.

If they were going to make jokes about paedophilia, they could at least have told funny ones. It's the story of the series, nothing they do or say is funny. Why should it change now? Even Hulk Hogan's cameo at the end is lame.

0 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.8 - The Field Trip

The remaking of random episodes continues as the first episode of the second series is re-told this week as the lads go to a budget school trip to an American Civil War site. Keeping up the tradition of ruining the supporting characters, there's no Mr. "Paedo" Kennedy. Instead, there's a couple of Southern hicks trying to sell stuff from their gift shop. Will and Simon pursue the same girl, Lauren (Avery Camp) and Neil learns about the Civil War.

Well, this was really, really, really boring. It's strange to say that a twenty-one minute show dragged but this episode really did. Nothing was even mildly amusing. Not Jay's pursuit of a twelve-year-old girl, not Neil learning that Abraham Lincoln died at the end of the Civil War, not Will throwing up on himself in the toilet and emerging naked but for his pants and especially not the boring Civil War re-enactment scenes.

Yawn, yawn, yawn.

0 out of 10.

Looper (2012)

Hype can be a dangerous thing. The posters and trailers for Looper were covered in lashings of quotes about how brilliant it is and studded with stars in clusters of four and five. One critic's hyperbolic review even suggested that it was "the new Matrix". With a build-up like that, how could the film possibly disappoint me!

In hindsight, perhaps it was always going to disappoint me. That's not to say that the film's bad, it's certainly not. It's good. But that's all it is: good.

Joe (Joseph-Gordon-Levitt) is an eponymous Looper: an assassin hired by criminals living in the future to kill people they send back in time and then dispose of their bodies. He lives in Kansas in 2044. They live in 2074 when time travel has been invented and, according to his boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), who has moved permanently from the future to run the looper operation, it is apparently advantageous to know Mandarin. Loopers are paid in silver bars strapped to the people that are sent back in time for them to kill, except for when they are released from their service and gold bars are strapped to their future selves. After killing themselves, they have a few decades to live as they please before their future self is abducted and sent back in time for their past self to kill. Failure to kill your future self is punishable by death and is brutally enforced. Everything's going fine until a mysterious figure in the future called "the Rainman" decides to start having all of the loopers kill themselves off. After Joe fails to kill his future self (Bruce Willis), the two go on the run from Abe's goons whilst trying to solve the mystery of who the Rainmaker is and why he is shutting the looper programme down.

The film, to its credit, doesn't get into complex metaphysical discussions of the inner workings of time travel and give us a conversation we've already seen and had many times before. In a scene in a diner, Future Joe tells Present Joe that it makes his head hurt and the younger man drops the subject. It also presents an interesting argument: that if your future self came back in time and told you to change your actions, you'd probably carry on and do what you thought was right anyway. Still, for pleasing moments like those, there are some very dumb ones as well. Particularly, the fact that in the future time travel has been banned and is operated only by crime lords who use it to dispose of their victims. Joe gives us some reason about people in the future being "chipped" and the film brushes it off, but it's not a satisfying explanation and makes you really wonder what's going on with these gangs that possess incredibly complex and illegal technology like time travel, but haven't mastered the art of surgically removing tracking chips or throwing bodies in the ocean à la Dexter Morgan. Furthermore, requiring loopers to kill themselves presents myriad problems and results in both Joe and a looper friend of his (Paul Dano) failing to kill themselves. The much simpler idea of loopers at the end of their contract receiving a pile of gold bars and their future self being sent to a different looper to be killed apparently went over the heads of the criminals from the future.

After the two Joes meet, the younger man fails to kill himself. They later meet in a diner and Future Joe tells Present Joe that someone called "the Rainmaker" is killing off the loopers and he's going to find out who he is and kill him as a child. After the diner they're meeting at is attacked by Abe's men, Present Joe nearly gets caught and ends up hiding at a farm owned by Sara (Emily Blunt), who lives with her young son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon).

Some parts of the film may feel superfluous but turn out to play a necessary part in the film, namely Joe's stripper friend and lover Suzie (Piper Perabo) and the mutation that affects one tenth of the world's population and gives them the power to make small objects like coins and cigarette lighters levitate. Both of these feel like pointless plot additions when they come up but don't pass them off as such. Instead, there are plenty of other pointless characters - Kid Blue (Noah Segan), an incompetent employee of Abe who more than outstays his welcome and Future Joe's wife (Xu Qing), who serves only to highlight that the film has serious problems with plot holes. Additionally, the main problem is that the film pretty much comes to a grinding halt just over half way through. When Present Joe arrives at Sara's farm, he decides to hide there while Future Joe does his thing and spends most of the rest of the film hiding and talking to Sara and her son and, quite frankly, it's a bit boring.

In contrast with a fantastic first act full of action, great visuals and effective storytelling, the second act sees the film going round in circles, like Present Joe lost in Sara's corn field. It apes The Terminator as Future Joe tries to change the world and Present Joe hides out with a woman and develops feelings for her. If you've seen that film, you should be able to see the "twist" that arrives in this one. When the third act rolls around, director Rian Johnson throws in a couple of shootouts and tries to cobble things together but the damage has already been done. The resolution is different but still feels unsatisfying. I'd like to see if there's an alternate ending provided with the DVD release.

Plot holes, logical inconsistencies and a rambling middle section detract from interesting ideas and good performances. Jeff Bridges in particular is very good and Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a decent Bruce Willis impression. It's just a pity the two share so little screen time after their meeting in the diner.

It's not the new Matrix but it's better than both of that film's sequels put together. An infuriating case of what might have been.

7 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.7 - Crystal Springs

So, we're back to shamelessly ripping off original episodes. This time, it's the fifth episode of the first series, when the lads go to a Caravan Club. It's all pretty much the same: Jay lies about pulling loads of girls there and sets Simon up with someone, Will decides to slide across the floor instead of making out with a hot girl and Neil gets with her instead.

Jokes-wise, the "highlights" are Jay and Neil adding "with my dong" to the end of everything and Neil squirting a ketchup bottle as Jay's dad squirts out a runny shit on the toilet while they're eating. Jay's dad still puts down his son but it's not funny. In the original series, we feel for Jay. Yeah, he makes shit up but he doesn't deserve the ribbing his dad gives him. We sympathise with him because he's a character with depth. In the remake, none of it feels genuine: not Jay's dad's teasing, not Jay's reaction, not any of it. Will's turning down of the hot girl in the original series is borne from his nerves about his lack of experience. In this series... who knows? Will's not relatable in any way, he's just a twat in a sweater vest. Think Rick Santorum without the charm and charisma.

When Jay getting hit in the face by a condom is the most original thing all episode, you know things are bad. Although, it did at least draw the first genuine laugh from me. Congrats guys, it's only taken you seven episodes.

2 out of 10.

Hostel: Part III (2011)

Some sequels are what you might call "SINOs" or "Sequels in Name Only". It happens quite frequently in the horror genre - a successful film or series of films have low-budget follow ups with none of the original characters or settings (ie: Halloween III: Season of the Witch) and for the most part are churned out to go straight-to-DVD. That's pretty much the case here with Hostel: Part III, as it was for that other sequel to a successful Eli Roth film, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. As with the sequel to Cabin Fever, Roth has no involvement here. Instead, the reins are handed over to Scott Spiegel, who co-produced the first two films. The only thing that makes this film recognisable as a Hostel film is the presence of the "Elite Hunting" club. And even then, the link is pretty tenuous. In the first two films Elite Hunting were based in mysterious Eastern European countries, where no-one notices you go missing and the authorities look the other way. Unsuspecting American tourists are abducted and then sold off to be tortured, eaten, killed and subject to whatever else the customer can think of. The idea plays on that fear of travelling to the unknown, particularly to an area such as the former Soviet Bloc. What made it really scary was just how plausible it was and it was a decent commentary on both the situation in said countries and of the paranoia of tourists. The third film transports the action away from strange foreign lands. In fact, Hostel: Part III is set in... Las Vegas. It's about as far removed from the first two films as you can imagine.

The story centres around four friends: Scott (Brian Hallisay), Carter (Kip Pardue), Justin (John Hensley, a.k.a. Matt from Nip/Tuck) and Mike (Skyler Stone, who looks a lot like Alan Tudyk). The four are on Scott's stag do in Vegas and everything's going fine until Mike disappears. So basically it's Hostel meets The Hangover. After half an hour of the four of them gambling, drinking and travelling to a club in a deserted backwater, Mike is kidnapped. Thank god because he's the annoying one. Well, they're all annoying really but Mike's the really annoying, obnoxious one. Groom-to-be Scott is the bland one, best man Carter is the douchebag and Justin is the "sympathetic" one, although that's played up so much and he's such a buzz kill that he just comes across as patronising. They even give him a walking stick to try and make him even more sympathetic for goodness sake!

Anyway, Mike is kidnapped and taken to a room and strapped to a chair to be played with. Then the film deals its Joker - instead of him being tortured in private, he's put on display and tortured in front of other customers who proceed to bet on things like what weapon the torturer will use and how he will beg for his life. It's an interesting take on things but it doesn't really work. Turning the killing into a spectator sport drains the scenes of any tension. Watching onlookers cheer and enjoy drinks served by scantily-clad (and I mean really scantily-clad) women makes it less like peering through the window as a sadistic killer toys with his victim and more like watching some extreme reality show. Secondly, above all else, the Hostel films are best known for their realistic and extremely bloody torture scenes. Unfortunately, the budget is so low for this film that there's hardly any blood whatsoever. Someone has their face cut off but there's less blood than when Sean and Christian give someone breast implants on Nip/Tuck. Other death scenes include: choking on cockroaches (what is this, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here?) and being shot with a crossbow. Yeah, seriously. It's as lame as it sounds. Combine these two factors and the end result is that the film sucks. The death scenes aren't gory enough to be enjoyable when an annoying character dies and they're not dramatic enough to make you care when a less annoying character dies.

The stupidest moment comes late on in the film. As one character is about to be tortured, management decides to release the victim from his bonds. This begs the question: just how do the viewing customers feel about this? The member has paid handsomely for the privilege of this person being kidnapped so they can torture and kill them and now, despite their membership and their money (this person is a top-tier customer), the club decides to give their victim a sporting chance. Bizarrely, rather than being worried and disturbed by this, concerned that they too could be betrayed for the pleasure of other watching customers, the live audience laps it up. Had I been there, knowing that the club can turn on its paying members just as quickly as it can unsuspecting members of the public, I'd have made my excuses and left! Seriously, how do they expect to sustain this business model when they quite willingly use their own members for sport?!?

Logical inconsistencies, the lack of tension, annoying characters, silly deaths and the general lack of blood and gore aside, this is really just a low-budget thriller. And not a very good one at that. It's not all bad, though. There are a couple of good moments, including the opening scene and Playboy playmate Cassie Keller, who serves drinks in barely more than two pieces of ribbon, but it's not enough to dredge it out of the stinking swamp of mediocrity. If you're looking for torture porn, you'll be disappointed. If you're wondering what happened to Beth after the events of the previous film, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for a competent thriller, you'll be disappointed. Honestly, I can't see who this appeals to other than completists who want to see all the Hostel films. Even then, you'll still be disappointed.

Not awful but with nothing to recommend it and nothing outstanding about it, Hostel: Part III is a pretty pointless film.

3 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.6 - Class Clown

This week, Will is "tortured" by Donovan. What does he do? He eats Will's hummus. Yeah, it's fucking stupid. When they ruin such a simple idea like that, you know this series has no hope. In the original, Donovan genuinely terrorised Will. In this one, who cares? Simon has Carli over for a sleepover, Jay worries about his chances of being voted class clown and Neil does fuck all (as usual).

It's Jay's storyline that has the potential for laughs this week but once again it passes them up entirely. When Jay decides to give up trying to be voted class clown, he decides to go for class badass instead. What does he do? He decides to ride a motorcycle across campus. Yes, this is the point where they decide to copy the infamous "Jay rides a motorcycle" scene. One of the best moments from all three series, they surely can't fuck this one up like they fucked "bus wankers" up, can they? Yes, they can. In the original series, it's brilliant. Cocky Jay brags about his skills and is brought down to Earth with a wobble and a pathetic crash. It's so funny I had tears streaming down my face and my sides hurt from laughing so much. The remake has a weird moment with his dad beforehand and then has a voiceover on top of it. To top it all off, the punch line is ruined by bad editing, cutting away to a crowd of onlookers. Their awkward fake laughter only ruins it further.

A hideously bad episode that completely ruined one of the ten best moments from the original series.

0 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.5 - The Masters

This episode is sort of based on the fourth episode of the first series of the original series, where Charlotte humiliates Will at the charity Blind Date. The US version is slightly different, with people bidding for "slaves" who must work for them for a day. Will's plan to buy Charlotte goes wrong when they decide to bid on a guy first to make it less obvious that Will is just interested in Charlotte. Unfortunately, Will places the only bid on a black student. If that wasn't bad enough, they then take him to the country club that Simon's father is a member of. The attempts at "not racist" humour completely fails. Oh look, there's a black man at the country club, let's dress him up just like the staff who work there! Hahaha! I said last week that the series plays like it was written by Mitt Romney and that only rings more true this week. Imagine if Mitt Romney had written jokes about a black guy coming to his country club. That's this episode, only even more boring.

Other attempts at humour involve watching Jay get his penis stuck in the nozzle of a Jacuzzi, Neil drinking lots of cocktails and Simon's dad being very angry when he plays golf. Hilarious.

When it's not offensive or boring, it's just pointless.

0 out of 10.

Weeds 8.12 & 8.13 - My Time

After seven years and eight series, Weeds is finally ending. They've teased us for a while now, but this really is the end. Will it go out with a bang or a whimper? Only one way to find out.

In Connecticut, at a PTA meeting, Nancy is arguing against mandatory helmets for kids playing football ("soccer"). The series has jumped forwards an unspecified number of years, around eight, and Nancy is a widower. Again. She married Rabbi Dave but he died when he went over a cliff in his car whilst swerving to avoid a bear. How ironic. Nancy loses the vote and breaks the bad news to Stevie (Mateus Ward), who loves football but hates the idea of playing in a helmet and wants to move to a boarding school in Minnesota. She refuses to talk about it before his upcoming bar mitzvah.

Silas and Megan (Shoshannah Stern) are married with a daughter and living in Florida. They've come up for Stevie's bar mitzvah but Megan still doesn't like Nancy. Silas tells her to try to get along with his mother for the sake of Stevie. Back in California, Nancy is in one of her successful weed cafes, meeting with her business manager, Tim Scottson (Daryl Sabara). Yes, really. She wants to know if Andy is coming to the bar mitzvah but Tim doesn't know. He leaves and she gets a visit from Crick Montgomery (Patch Darragh), which sets up some exposition revealing that in most states, weed is legal. Oh, and she's had an offer for her business from Starbucks. Everyone else is on board but she owns 51% and refuses to sell.

Shane, his girlfriend Tiffany (Natasha Lyonne), Mitch (Michael Harney) and Mitch's girlfriend Beatrice (Nancy Youngblut) arrive at Nancy's house to find Silas and Megan but no Nancy. As expected, Shane's life has gone down the toilet and he's basically a younger version of Mitch - a crooked cop with a drinking problem.

Nancy picks up her dry cleaning and Stevie worries that no-one will come to his bar mitzvah. One person who has come is Doug. Along with several concubines and a massive bus with his face on the side. Looks like his cult idea worked out well for him. And for Nancy too, his followers work at her cafes for minimum wage. Nancy comes back and has an awkward moment with Megan. She tells Nancy to go away while she's trying to breast feed and then ignores her as Nancy says that she doesn't know what she did to annoy her.

At the pre-bar mitzvah party that evening, we meet a load of old characters. Sanjay Patel (Maulik Pancholy) is married to Clinique (Julanne Chidi Hill) and has kids. He's still gay though, as he tells Marvin (Fatso-Fasano). Jill's living in India and Dean (Andy Miller) reveals that Isabelle has had a sex change. Nancy worries that Andy will be a no-show and shoots down Dean. Again. Guillermo (Guillermo Diaz) tells Doug that he has ten kids, calling them his "legacy" and Doug feels guilty for neglecting his gay son, Josh (Justin Chatwin). Josh is now a lawyer, married to a painter and living in Brooklyn. What does Doug do? He has his followers kidnap him. Then, Guillermo talks to Stevie. Turns out Stevie thinks his dad was a politician who was framed by the cartels so Guillermo sets him straight. This is only going to end well...

Doug has his son brought to his bus, where he tells him "still gay, still hate you". Doug tells him he wants to re-connect but Josh isn't interested and leaves. He catches up with Nancy whilst he's waiting for a taxi and she asks him how he turned out so well. He credits luck, therapy and his mom. With still no sign of Andy, Nancy wakes Silas up and quizzes him. Turns out they don't speak much recently but Silas knows he owns a restaurant in Ren Mar. Lenny died so he named his daughter Leni. Nancy had no idea about any of it but Silas tells her that he's happy and she accepts that he's not coming.

The next morning, Nancy goes downstairs to find Andy in the kitchen but he sends her to get goats milk for Megan. At the bar mitzvah, Stevie throws away his speech and tells everyone about his father, that he's not Jewish and that he doesn't care, promising to tell them "where I land" on whether he's even religious. He calls his bar mitzvah a load of shit and says that he doesn't know who he is and wants to go to boarding school. Back at home, Nancy talks to him about his dad and tells him that he can go to boarding school.

Shane's hungover but Nancy drags him out of bed to go and pick up Stevie's cake. At the bakery, she tells him that she wants to get him some help because he's not doing well. He says he's doing fine, then proceeds to shoot the cake when the woman behind the counter tells them they'll have to pay extra to have a message written on it.

Doug, moved by the party, has his followers kidnap Josh again. Nancy tells Shane that she's worried about him and he promises to get some help. She suggests they find him a place in Pittsburgh and he smiles. Back on his bus, Doug confesses to giving a guy a blowjob and tells his son that he messed up. Megan still hates Nancy and she has no idea why. Silas tells her that she wasn't a perfect mother but he doesn't resent her and he never wonders what might have been because his wife, his daughter and his life, doing what he loves, makes him feel lucky. Doug and Josh come out of his bus and hug. Josh calls his husband and tells him they've made up. "Holy shit", he replies.

Back inside, Nancy runs into Andy and starts crying. He sits her down and they talk. She tells him to come back and even offers him 50% of the company. He says that he doesn't need the money so she tells him to use it to start a new restaurant in town, but Andy says no. "I have a life I like and I'm not leaving it", he says. She offers to move in with him but he tells her to stop. Her husband's dead (again) and her kids are all gone but he tells her she'll be fine. "You did your job. Now it's done. No-one there to answer to. No-one to hold you back from becoming the person you always want to be, doing only what you want to." He tells her that he's grateful she let him in and he'll always love her but he can't be around her. He tells her she'll be fine, kisses her and leaves. Nancy calls Crick and tells him to sell the business. "And then there were none", she says. The party is ending and a montage of Stevie's life is playing on a projector. He thanks everyone and tells his mom that he loves her.

It's gently snowing and Nancy is sat outside, alone, on the steps. Doug comes out and sits with her. Silas, Shane and Andy join them and they sit in silence, passing round a joint and smiling.

Not the ending we quite deserved but better than the rest of the series suggested it would be. Things between Nancy and Andy wrap up quite nicely but she doesn't learn anything or achieve redemption for her past discretions. At the start of the series, she said she wanted to make up for the bad things she's done but that idea just petered out as the series meandered along. She did a good job raising Stevie but the jump forward meant we never got to see or appreciate that. Silas had a decent (if predictable) conclusion to his story but Shane's was a bit of a let-down. The idea of him becoming a crooked cop had legs but it was never really used to its full potential. Again, I blame a series' worth of pointless storylines in Connecticut. Aside from Andy, Doug was probably the only main character to have a satisfying conclusion: the guru of his own cult. Brilliant!

Then there were the past characters who made come backs. It was nice to see Dean again but I was disappointed that Celia didn't show up, even for a brief cameo. She was in the series for five years for goodness sake so even if Elizabeth Perkins was unavailable, they could have made a throwaway comment about what she was up to. They brought back Sanjay and Marvin but not her?!? Madness.

There were some good moments in this episode and viewed by itself, it's pretty good but when you consider that it's the last ever episode of Weeds, it feels a bit disappointing. Most of this series has been pointless and the last three episodes have tried to rectify this by rushing to wrap everything up. The result is that it's too hurried and feels slapdash. Still, it's better than most of what we've been offered this season.

7 out of 10.

Haywire (2011)

I'd never really heard of Gina Carano before she was cast in Haywire. She's quite a famous mixed martial artist and I reasoned that her skills in the ring should translate well into an action film. Director Steven Soderbergh, perhaps conscious of her lack of acting experience, surrounded her with A-list talent: Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas and Bill Paxton.

The story's simple enough: covert operative Mallory Kane (Gina Caruso) works for Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) and his private company. US government official Coblenz (Michael Douglas) and his Spanish contact Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas) hire them to rescue a man being held captive in Barcelona. She and Aaron (Channing Tatum) do so and she is sent to Dublin on another mission with Paul (Michael Fassbender). When the man she rescued turns up dead, she is framed for his murder and must go on the run, seeking to clear her name, protect her father (Bill Paxton) and take revenge on those who blah, blah, blah. It's your typical action movie plot and it's not too taxing.

The film opens in a diner. Mallory meets Aaron and beats the shit out of him, with the assistance of some bystander called Scott (Michael Angarano). They flee in his car and she then proceeds to tell him what's happened to her and how she was framed for murder. The film unfolds mostly through flashbacks: the initial mission in Barcelona, her trip to Dublin with Paul, how she worked out Kenneth had set her up and her return to the United States where she anticipated meeting Kenneth in the diner they just left. She and Scott are eventually captured by the police but manage to escape as Kenneth's men attempt to ambush them. She sends Scott on his way and makes her way to her father's house for the final showdown with those who betrayed her.

This film utterly baffled me. It has an ass-kicking martial artist beating people up, a stellar cast and a simple premise and yet it still managed to be mind-numbingly boring. It doesn't help that the soundtrack is awful. It completely kills the atmosphere as it alternates between total silence for long stretches and loud, thoroughly inappropriate music during others. As Mallory and Paul get ready to go to a party, they do so in total silence. Soderbergh was clearly trying to build some tension here. Sexual? Dramatic? Either way, it comes off as stilted and awkward. When Mallory's being chased through the streets of Dublin, nothing happens as she just wanders around for several minutes in complete silence. She finally starts running and this peppy, upbeat jingle starts playing. I burst out laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it. The ten minutes she spends aimlessly running around and jumping across rooftops to avoid the Irish police are completely infuriating. Soderbergh obviously blew the budget on the A-listers so he can't afford to have more than two SWAT police on screen at any one time and it's clearly always the same two. We're almost an hour into the film at this point and there have been three fight scenes, one of them in Barcelona that laughably finished when she threw a flimsy metal platter at the guy's back. The other two, against Aaron and Paul, weren't bad but they suffer for being mostly in silence, but for Carano's loud grunts of "oosh" every time she hits someone. It brings to mind professional wrestlers making loud noises to cover up the fact that they aren't really hitting each other and it just cheapens everything. Soderbergh went for toned down and naturalistic, hoping for something akin to the Bourne films. Well, Bourne it ain't. The three fight scenes aside, the first hour is surprisingly free of action. She spends more time hanging around her apartment and at a party in a nice dress than she does doing anything else and it only serves to make the film drag.

Ultimately, she escapes from the police in Dublin by putting her hood up. No, I'm not joking. Fleeing to London, she makes her way to New York and the diner where she runs into Scott. All caught up on the backstory, the film plods onwards. Unfortunately, it doesn't get much better. They're caught by the police when they have the most laughable collision with a deer I've ever seen in my life. I won't spoil it because it's so bad it really has to be seen to be believed. Mallory escapes from the police and Kenneth's goons and heads to New Mexico to protect her father from her former employer. It should get interesting but it doesn't. It's still painfully boring. There's half an hour left but instead of cramming it full of action to make up for the action-free first hour, Ewan McGregor spends half of it talking to Bill Paxton about god only knows what, Michael Douglas, who spends most of the film sat behind a desk, speaks to practically every other character on the phone and the final fight between Kenneth and Mallory lasts half as long as his infuriatingly dull exposition detailing why she was set up.

The only reason to watch this film is if you're a fan of Ms. Carano. She's nice to look at and does all her own stunts but her fight scenes are surprisingly dull and she can't really do much else. She methodically reads her lines like they're in front of her on a teleprompter and her facial expressions were clearly prompted by Soderbergh calling out things to her from off-camera. Watch for the moment in the diner when she suddenly becomes resolved. With such an array of acting talent at his disposal and Carano's ass-kicking skills clearly evident, why Soderbergh chooses to waste both is a complete mystery. Fassbender's in the film for ten minutes, Banderas fifteen and Paxton and Tatum get about the same. Ewan McGregor, normally dependable, is obviously going through the motions. It doesn't help that his antagonist is called "Kenneth". Perhaps if Soderbergh hadn't spent so much money bringing the supporting cast in to try and paper over Carano's limitations as an actress, he could have afforded to stage some more action scenes which would have actually shown off her talents!

Recommended only for the chronically sleep-deprived, this film will have you yawning your head off and counting the seconds until the credits roll. Boring, boring, boring.

2 out of 10.

The Descendants (2011)

We Bought a Zoo and The Descendants, two films about a father having to come to terms with the loss of his wife and reconnect with his children. Whilst Matt Damon's character moved to the countryside, bought a zoo and met Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney doesn't have such an easy time of things.

Lawyer and property owner Matt King (George Clooney) is told that his wife Elizabeth, in a coma after a boating accident, will never wake up and has a living will requesting that her care be withdrawn. Ahead of her life support machine being turned off, Matt must reconnect with his daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), and inform friends and family that she is about to die so they can pay their last respects. In the process, he finds out that Elizabeth had been having an affair and was planning on leaving him. If that weren't enough, he has to juggle the selling of his family's land to a real estate developer.

After churning out four films in eight years, director Alexander Payne took seven years to get around to number five. Was it worth the wait? He's certainly had long enough to work on it and I loved Sideways so he had quite a lot to live up to. The numerous awards it won, including the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globes for Best Film and Best Actor, meant that my hopes were high. Fortunately, it met them. Well, sort of. I mean, it's a very good film: funny, moving, well written and very well acted but it's just lacking something. It doesn't feel like one of the ten best films of the year, as so many critics named it. More than anything, it feels too linear. The story unfolds but it does so in a straight line, never really deviating from its inexorable march towards the ending that simply happens. The only surprise is that there aren't any. Matt finds out his wife was cheating on him, so he goes looking for the man (Matthew Lillard). We all know he's going to confront the man eventually, so when it happens, no matter how good the scene is (and it is), it's lacking any kind of punch. Even the negotiations over the sale of his land result in a predictable conclusion.

It might not venture far off the beaten track but at least it does it well. Matt's attempts to reconnect with his daughters, with whom he had a distant relationship, provide easily the best scenes in the film. Other highlights include the very realistic way the film deals with the impending death of a loved one; the seemingly endless parade of cousins Matt has to endure, among them Cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges); and the often hilariously non-sequitur Sid (Nick Krause). There isn't any scene or any character that doesn't really work and it's just a pity that the whole thing comes off as lacking any sense of direction or a meaningful message other than "stuff happens".

Straightforward? Yes, but it's still a very, very good film. George Clooney and Shailene Woodley in particular are superb, it's deftly made and Alexander Payne strikes a nice balance between heartfelt and funny.

8 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.4 - The Wrong Box

After the semi-original idea last week, The Inbetweeners has a genuinely original idea this week. It's only taken them four episodes but credit where it's due. What's the idea? That the lads decide they need something unique about them and resolve to join a school club. Will goes to see the boring Mr. Gilbert for club ideas and meets this series' Charlotte Hinchcliffe - Charlotte Allen (Kirby Bliss Blanton). He adds her on Facebook and finds out that she likes cooking so decides to set up a cookery club. Carli finds out and thinks it's a great idea so everything seems to be going to plan... until Charlotte tells Will that her profile is old and she doesn't care about cooking any more. She goes to update her profile and finds that Will has updated his status about a thousand times, each time saying simply "Charlotte Allen". It's not funny but, well, points for effort, I suppose. The lads try and back out of their new club but are unable to, so they have to give a presentation on cookery club. Simon sings a song. It's painful. How does the actual cookery club meeting go? Well, Carli's boyfriend cooks a great meal, embarrassing Simon before the outdoor event inexplicably turns into a water fight. It's done in one of those terrible American-style montages with everyone laughing and pretending they're having a great time. They usually come across as stilted and unconvincing and that's exactly the case here. Oh and it's not funny either.

In fact, the side story that Jay gives up masturbating because he has never had a wet dream before provides the only semi-amusing line of the episode, when Mr. Gilbert suggests that he try masturbation.

Points for the original idea, no points at all for the lack of jokes and the painful attempts at "humour". Imagine a sitcom written by Mitt Romney: awkward, unconvincing and totally devoid of any funny moments. That's exactly what this mess is.

1 out of 10.

Weeds 8.11 - God Willing and the Creek Don't Rise

Well, the old title sequence is back and so is Agrestic. Or, Regrestic, as it's now called. Oh and Nancy's back too. Her first stop: visiting Conrad (Romany Malco). Andy and Silas, meanwhile, are at the Agrestic/Majestic/Regrestic Museum. Silas says he should have gone with her and asks if there's anyone she hasn't slept with, adding "sorry" after he glances at Andy. Andy brushes it off and dismisses Joanna too. He's back to find Yael and speculates that Silas has unfinished business here too. Just like that, Silas bumps into Megan (Shoshannah Stern). Nancy shows Conrad some pictures of Stevie and asks for some MILF seeds to start the new business. Conrad insists that he's out of the game. He has nothing. In fact, he's moved into health foods now. Nancy doesn't believe him and the two bicker until a scream rents the air and Pam (Becky Thyre) rushes to hug her. Just like that, we find out that Conrad's getting married. Oh, Lupita (Renee Victor) is working for him too.

Shane is in an interview with a couple of detectives. They're shaking him down and give him 48 hours to spill the beans on Mitch. They tell Shane he's a scumbag who doesn't care about him and that if he doesn't co-operate, he's going to prison. Andy, meanwhile, has found Yael (Meital Dohan). The only problem is, she doesn't remember him. Silas is having more luck with Megan and the two reminisce. He confesses to puncturing her condoms to try and keep her with him and tells her she's the only girl he's ever loved... and still does. She's pissed but admits that she might still love him too. They kiss.

Doug, still back in Connecticut, complains that the Botwins, his "real" family, don't care about him. The homeless man who claims to be from the future tells him to forget about them because soon he will become a very great man. Nancy and Conrad are at a dancing class. She's bought a plot of land in the valley and wants to grow MILF there. Conrad tells her that it's all owned by a gang and that she should leave town before they find out who's back. I think we can all guess who's the leader of that gang...

Yep, it's Guillermo (Guillermo Diaz). He's really not happy to see her. He tells her she shouldn't have come back. Last time we saw him he was being arrested, but he got off. "This is business", she tells him. "No, blanca, this is personal", he replies. Shane drops in on Mitch and tells him the police want him to talk. Mitch pretends to know nothing, tells him he saved him and advises him to do the right thing. Andy hasn't taken the rejection by Yael well. He gets on the roof of the school and shouts to no-one in particular.

Guillermo tells Nancy that she assumed things would go back to the way they were and pulls a gun. Conrad comes out and draws his gun too. Nancy offers to make Guillermo a shareholder in their business and he drops his gun. Doug, meanwhile, has a plan. What's the only better tax shelter than charity? Religion. He claims that he was touched by god when the Mexicans didn't kill him and that "this is gonna be the most awesomest fucking cult, I mean, religion, in the world". The homeless man tells Doug he's not really from the future but Doug tells him to sit down and shut up. Back at the police station, Shane hands over his badge and refuses to talk. Mitch walks in and tells Shane that it was all a set-up to see if he could trust him. He passed and he's given his badge back.

At Conrad's wedding party, Silas re-introduces Nancy to Megan and Nancy gives him some MILF seeds. Conrad asks Nancy if things will really work out and she tells him "maybe we get lucky this time". Andy's sitting, drinking by himself. Nancy asks him if he wants to leave and they do... to go to the spot where Judah died. Andy tells her that she's kept him in the wilderness, that she's bad for him. He tells her that he's done, adding that he always wanted her but she never wanted him. He's leaving, saying that this is how it ends. She asks him not to leave and kisses him. The two fall to the grass and finally, after eight series, have sex. When they finish, he kisses her and leaves, jogging down the pavement. She screams and calls out to him but he doesn't stop going.

Now that's more like it! Finally, some actual plot development after weeks of going nowhere. It looks like they're going to re-introduce every single major character from the first few series as Nancy sets about building her new business. You know, if they'd gotten round to doing this much sooner, we could have had more good times reminiscing and her conflict and eventual reuniting with Conrad and Guillermo could have been stretched out. As it was, it felt rushed. Nancy all but sends Guillermo to prison and he forgets about it at the drop of a hat. Cut out some of the bullshit in Connecticut (Andy coaching the twins' derby team, Silas being approached by a tobacco company, Nancy getting together with the boring Rabbi David) and we could have had more episodes like this. After dawdling and kicking their heels with pointless storylines (Andy getting married for ten minutes, Nancy trying to get Stevie into a football club), they're suddenly trying to cram as much into the last three episodes as they possibly can. Don't get me wrong, this is a good episode but it reeks of "what might have been" and it's a shame.

As for the ending, well, at least they didn't fuck that up. After almost ten years of pining and pawing after Nancy, Andy gets what he's always wanted and he treats her exactly how she deserves. She's kept him on a leash this entire time and when he's about to leave, she resorts to the only pull she has left over him and sleeps with him. Andy doesn't stick around, hoping that this means she has feelings for him, he just sees it for what it is: another attempt by her to manipulate him. And for once, he doesn't fall for it. Good for him. I don't like to say it, but she got what she deserved. She thought she could keep on using him and she got burned.

They say you should never go back but clearly the lesson here is don't leave it so long before going back. Moving to Agrestic/Regrestic a few episodes ago would have been a much, much better idea. This episode was a real pick-me-up and hopefully the show can go out on a real high now after weeks of ambling along. Oh and I can't wait to see what's going to happen to Doug!

The best episode of the series so far. (Mostly) happy reunions and Nancy finally gets her comeuppance.

8 out of 10.

We Bought a Zoo (2011)

After watching Battleship, I remarked to a friend that "I should have watched We Bought a Zoo instead". She replied, "so why don't you watch it now?" So I did.

Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) is a recently widowed single parent with two children: teenage son Dylan (Colin Ford) and younger daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones). Unhappy, with everything in the city reminding him of his late wife and Dylan expelled from school after he acts out, Benjamin quits his job, rebuffs the advances of the attractive single moms at his kids' school and tells his brother Duncan (Thomas Haden Church) that he's moving into the countryside. He and Rosie find the perfect place, their dream home. There's just one problem: it's a zoo. The place badly needs owners who care and have the time, money and effort to bring the place up to scratch in time for its next inspection. If it fails, the animals will be sent elsewhere and the zookeepers will lose their jobs. Fortunately, this is Hollywood so the issue of money is brushed over as Benjamin conveniently finds that his wife left him thousands of dollars. He cashes the cheque and everyone gets to work. In struggling to turn the place around in time, Ben finds himself falling for beautiful zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson) and Kelly's younger cousin Lily (Elle Fanning) flirts with the seemingly oblivious Dylan. As the family work to save the zoo's future, they examine their relationships with each other and how the loss of their mother has affected them.

If only every widower could quit his job, drop everything, buy a dream house in the sunny California countryside and spend his days quietly tending to a small zoo with Scarlett Johansson for company. It's a lovely fantasy and it could have made for a silly, hokey film but thanks to a combination of a good screenplay and warm, genuine performances, it works. Matt Damon's convincing and sympathetic as the grieving widower and Scarlett Johansson is very good, both witty and compassionate with an underlying steely determination. The child actors are uniformly good and I loved J. B. Smoove's cameo as the estate agent, although it was a bit strange to see him playing someone other than Leon from Curb. As for the inevitable life lessons about love, loss and so on that the family must go through, they're not preachy and they weren't so sickly sweet that they made me roll my eyes.

Sure, it's not groundbreaking and the ending's not exactly a surprise but it's a good, honest piece of family entertainment. It's funny, well acted and just darn enjoyable. How anyone could possibly dislike this film is utterly beyond me. Oh, and it's a damn sight better than Battleship.

7 out of 10.

Battleship (2012)

Meet our plucky hero. He doesn't always get on with his family, he's a bit of a bum, struggling to find his place in the world and he doesn't have a job. Despite all this, he has a gorgeous supermodel for a girlfriend. When aliens land on planet Earth, he and his friends are all that stand between us and them, our last line of defence, humanity's only hope. No, I'm not reviewing Transformers 3, this is Battleship, the film based on the board game of the same name.

Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is the eponymous hero, impressed into the U.S. Navy in 2005 by his elder brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), after he is arrested trying to impress the beautiful Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), who just happens to be the daughter of Admiral Terrence Shane (Liam Neeson). Meanwhile, NASA has begun transmitting signals from Hawaii to an Earth-like planet in a habitable zone orbiting a nearby star. Seven years later, Alex is a lieutenant with an attitude problem and Stone has command of his own ship. As the brothers prepare to take part in that year's RIMPAC at Pearl Harbour under Admiral Shane, scientist Cal Zapata (Hamish Linklater) and his assistant Danny (Christopher McGahan) intercept a strange signal. I'm not saying it's aliens. But it's aliens.

Four alien ships crash down into the pacific ocean near Hawaii and three destroyers close in and investigate. One of the alien ships erects a force field and the three others engage the destroyers. Two of the destroyers are sunk, killing Stone. After several officers are killed on Alex's ship, he assumes command. Meanwhile, Admiral Shane and the rest of the fleet are trapped outside the force field; Samantha, an army physiotherapist, is hiking with double amputee Mick Canales (Gregory D. Gadson) and the aliens land on Hawaii and commandeer the NASA transmitters to summon reinforcements from their home planet. Alex bands together with friends from his ship and survivors from the others, including gunner Cora Raikes (Rihanna), Japanese Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) and crewmen Walter Lynch (John Tiu) and Jimmy Ord (Jesse Plemons).

As night falls, Alex and his ship literally play Battleship by judging the position of the alien ships based on readings from buoys, sinking two of them. On the island, Cal flees from the aliens and runs into Samantha and Mick. Together, they resolve to destroy the facility and stop more aliens from arriving. When the sun rises, Alex and his crew destroy the third alien ship, leaving only the force field and the ship guarding it. With their destroyer badly damaged, they decide to re-activate the battleship USS Missouri for the final showdown.

Films that give actors top billing and then kill them off quickly or feature them in barely more than cameos annoy me. Battleship does it twice. Alexander Skarsgard is killed off after forty-five minutes and Liam Neeson gets barely ten minutes on screen. Instead, the painfully wooden Taylor Kitsch leads the proceedings, "supported" by the dreadful Rhianna, who should clearly stick to her day job. I had expected supermodel Brooklyn Decker to be almost as woeful as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was in Transformers 3 but she's actually not bad.

Dreadful acting aside, the film takes forever to get going. Fifteen minutes is wasted on a pointless scene showing how Alex and Samantha met back in 2005 and another in the present day as the brothers play a football game against a Japanese team in the build-up to the naval exercises. After that, it's another fifteen minutes of Alex being an asshole and getting himself into trouble before the aliens even appear on the radar. When they finally land, battle is not joined for about ten minutes as we have to endure a standoff as everyone looks through their binoculars and wonders what to do. Of course, it's the humans who fire first. What better way to welcome some intergalactic visitors than to fire a warning shot at them! After sinking two of the destroyers, the alien ships launch "shredders", giant spinning balls that bounce along the ground and destroy the air base on Hawaii. If they look familiar, it's because they bear a striking resemblance to the flaming balls that the Trojans attack the Greeks with in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. The film as a whole is basically Transformers at sea but other influences are clearly visible, from Independence Day to Pearl Harbour and even The Final Countdown. Whilst Battleship compares poorly to all those films, it is at least better than Transformers 3. It may struggle with pacing and take ages to get going but mercifully it clocks in at twenty-three minutes shorter than T3.

Some ruthless editing and better casting would have helped but even that wouldn't have covered up for the lack of ideas and poor script. When they're reduced to actually playing Battleship, you know they're struggling for ideas to fill the time. When the USS Missouri is re-activated, that does at least present some nice footage of the venerable old battleship. Alex's crew are assisted by World War Two veterans who currently look after the ship in its current capacity as a floating museum but when you put the visual to one side it leaves a rather baffling question: why not recruit more recent veterans instead? Having octogenarians crew the ship is a silly idea. The Missouri was re-activated in the 1980s and served during the First Gulf War so the old men would not be familiar with the upgrades installed some forty years after they last crewed her. But hey, why let a silly thing like common sense get in the way of some good old-fashioned American flag-waving? Speaking of common sense, the moment when the forty-five thousand ton battleship turns at a right-angle because Taylor Kitsch drops the anchor is one of the most egregious examples of the laws of physics being shit on in a Hollywood blockbuster since the whole of Armageddon.

Acting, pacing, the script and moments of sheer idiocy aside, there's still very little to recommend here. There are some fancy explosions but when most of them are preceded by someone saying "boom" or "welcome to Earth, motherf...." (yes, it's cut off, a la Die Hard 4), the enjoyment is quickly sapped. Still, at least the aliens are cool, right? No, I'm afraid not. They spend most of their time clonking around in giant suits and even though they regularly punch characters with enough force to break bones, our heroes just get back up and carry on fighting. As for what they look like without their helmets on, think of the vampires from I Am Legend with toothpicks on their chins. Oh and they have the same sensitivity to light too.

"It's better than Transformers 3" is really the only positive thing I can think of to say about this film. When blockbusters are getting so bad that the only good thing you can say about them is "well, at least it's not the worst one I've ever seen", you know that standards are slipping. Poorly acted, badly written, with plotting and pacing problems aplenty, Battleship is a dismal, boring film. That's two hours and eleven minutes of my life gone that I'm never getting back.

In summary: Battleship is battleshit.

3 out of 10.

Weeds 8.10 - Threshold

Silas and Nancy are at the bank, checking to see if Crick's money has been paid into the account for their new business, "LaPlante Industries". It has. All $350,000 of it. Andy brings his new wife (Aubrey Dollar) back to the house and wants to "make things official" and she agrees... by which she means changing her Facebook relationship status and dragging him off to meet her roommates.

Nancy and David (David Julian Hirsh) are having a picnic at the park and she describes herself as his "girlfriend". He tells her he really likes her and invites her to a dinner party at his house to meet his friends. Doug, meanwhile, has taken the homeless people from his shelter to a hotel, where he has rented them a couple of rooms. When one of them says he doesn't like porn, Doug remarks that they have issues and should go to therapy as a light bulb above his head switches on. Shane and Angela (Daniele Watts) find the missing car but the two guys who stole it from them are inside, blowing each other. Shane's solution? Taze them.

Silas has made plans for spending the money but Nancy, unsurprisingly, has other ideas. She doesn't want to spend it... yet. Shane and Angela have the two guys out of the car but the arrival of their friend's ex-girlfriend leads to hear throwing a brick at the car's windshield. Andy meets with Joanna's friends, regaling them with his amusing life stories but they seem more interested in what's happening on Twitter. He wants to have some alone time with her but instead they plan to go to a crappy 80s party.

The dinner party is going well and David's friends seem to like Nancy but things get awkward when they invite the two of them to a cottage. David says no but Nancy says yes and things get very quiet so Nancy goes to the kitchen for more wine. One of David's friends joins her and she finds out that his wife died fifteen months ago and she's his first girlfriend since it happened. Silas is busy robbing the lab but is caught in the act by Zachary (Ben Tolpin) and Terry (Kevin Sussman). Terry doesn't call the police but does fire Silas. Shane and Angela are driving the car back to the impound when they're pulled over.

Back in the kitchen, Nancy tells David that he's not ready yet. David replies that he's done with mourning. She admits to him that she's a not-Jewish pot dealer and leaves. His friends, listening from the dining room, hear every word. Andy finds out that Joanna wants kids in eight or ten years and that she married him because she "thought it would be fun" and he reminds her of his dad. What a surprise, it's not working out. At the hotel, Doug is leading the homeless people in a therapy session. A hotel employee, Monica (Allyn Rachel), tries to get them to leave but Doug convinces her to join them.

That evening, Silas tells Andy that he got fired and Andy replies that he got married. Nancy, meanwhile, walks in on Joanna having a bath. She goes out to join Silas and Andy and Andy confesses that he got carried away, saying he's much further down the line than Joanna is. Nancy thinks she may have broken up with David and admits to telling him that she sells pot. Silas replies that she doesn't sell pot anymore. "F that", Nancy says, walking off. Andy detects purpose in her walk. I think we all know what she's thinking. Later, Andy goes on Google and looks up Yael.

The next morning, Nancy quits her job. Silas comes downstairs and she tells him her plan: she wants to open a dispensary, but a different type of dispensary. Only one brand, grown by Silas and in an attractive and welcoming setting. Silas judges her plan "not terrible".

Speaking of "not terrible", that's how I'd sum this episode up. Better than last week's pointless affair (I told you Silas wouldn't end up working for a tobacco company), the whole point of which was to find a way to give Nancy a shitload of money. Seriously, they couldn't think of a better way to finance her idea? Having her win the lottery would have been more plausible. Ugh, whatever. Anyway, Andy's marriage is falling apart. Shock, I know. Still, he did have some funny moments with his new bride. Shane was barely in this episode too, although hopefully Angela will break up with him now and she can leave. David and Nancy are going to end up together, we all know it. As for Doug, who knows what the fuck's going to happen to him?

Better than last week's. Overall not bad.

6 out of 10.

The Inbetweeners USA 1.3 - Club Code

Ah, finally an original idea! The lads go bowling! Well, sort of. Their inability to buy alcohol and their run-in with an older patron who buys alcohol for them, are of course lifted from the original series. I'll give them a point for the effort it took to move the action from a pub to the bar of a bowling alley.

The rest of the episode is based on the fourth episode of the second series, when the lads go clubbing in London. It's all there, from Simon's shoes to Neil's cut penis and Jay's cry of "bus wankers!". One of the most memorable moments from all three series, I waited with trepidation to see how the remake would deal with it. Would they even include it? Would it be "bus *bleep*"? Simons' car drove by the bus stop, Jay stuck his head out of the window and cried... "bus turds!" Bus turds. Bus turds?!? I actually laughed it was that bad. The rest of the episode was instantly forgettable, paling in comparison to the original it so badly tries to copy.

Still awful but it gets a point for the original idea and for making me laugh for the first time in three episodes.

1 out of 10.