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.

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.

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.

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.

In Time (2011)

Sometimes, I watch a film even though I know it will be rubbish. You've done it too, I'm sure. We all have. I've seen the mediocre romantic comedy Bride Wars three times for goodness sake! Why? It's not bad, it's comfortingly average and sometimes that's just what we're looking for. In that spirit, I decided to watch In Time. I'd read the reviews but still I was drawn to it, like a moth to a shit-stained light bulb.

The story's pretty similar to Logan's Run. The year is 2161 and thanks to genetic modifications, people stop ageing at 25. Instead, on their 25th birthday, a bar code on their arm is activated and begins counting down from 1 year. Time has become the new currency, paying for everything from coffee to travel through the "time zones", barriers that separate the ghetto-like Dayton from the futuristic and serene paradise of New Greenwich. Time can be gained by working or by betting, stealing or fighting with other people. When your time runs out, you die instantly. Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in Dayton with his mother Rachel (Olivia Wilde). When his mother's time runs out and he saves 105 year-old Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) from the vigilante gang the Minutemen and their leader Fortis (Alex Pettyfer), Henry gives Will his remaining 116 years and dies, telling him that he is tired of living. Unburdened by ties to Dayton, Will travels to New Greenwich and gambles with the uber-wealthy Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), besting him and earning an invitation to a party at his house. There, he meets his daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), and is confronted by the Timekeepers (Collins Pennie and Cillian Murphy) who suspect him of murdering Henry. He takes Sylvia hostage and goes on the run.

From then on, it's standard action film fare: car chases, gun fights and romantic interludes between Will and Sylvia. Unfortunately, the film suffers from two major flaws: it's very badly written and both Timberlake and Seyfried are awful. Timberlake struggles when given minor supporting roles where he's playing himself (The Social Network, Bad Teacher) and I don't know what possessed the makers of this film to think he could carry it. He can't. He wonders around absent-mindedly, talking like he's reading his script for the first time. As for Seyfried, she has a permanent glassy-eyed, vacant look on her face. A lump of plywood would have been more convincing as the bored and frustrated spoilt little rich girl yearning for excitement and freedom. About the only time she does anything is when she sprints (not runs, sprints) in her tottering six-inch high heels. I'm really frustrated with her. She's a very good young actress but in her last two roles, this and Red Riding Hood, she looks like she doesn't give a shit, like she's just there for the paycheck. The idea itself isn't bad but it's badly executed. Given a re-write and with a competent leading man and a leading woman who looks like she actually wants to be there, this could have been an intriguing science fiction film.

A wasted opportunity. Don't spend an hour and fifty minutes of your life on it.

3 out of 10.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of the classic fairy tale is a lot like her preceding film, Twilight: it's a load of tween nonsense. I don't know how, but she took a dark, gothic fairy tale about a wolf who eats people and stalks a girl in a red hood and turned it into boring, bland, clichéd rubbish.

The film begins as it means to go on: Red Riding Hood, here named Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), is spying on some shirtless lumberjacks in the middle of a forest. It's very badly lit, with ridiculous soft focus shafts of light falling through the trees, which for some reason, all have toothpicks coming out of them. The toothpick-trees are only half as wooden as Seyfried and Shiloh Fernandez, who plays Peter, the lumberjack Valerie is "in love with". They have no chemistry. At all. They spend the entire film looking at each other like they've just met. Apparently the two had met before they made the film and didn't like each other and Seyfried only took the role after Hardwicke persuaded her. It shows.

Valerie might be "in love with" Peter, but she's engaged to another man, Henry (Max Irons, Jeremy's son). Oh, what will Valerie do? What will Peter do? "If you love her", Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) says to Peter, "You'll let her go", I finished for her. Silly, clichéd dialogue aside, we quickly move onto the action. Valerie is told her sister has been killed by a werewolf and we're shown her dead body, which hardly has a scratch on it. She's been mauled to death by a giant fucking werewolf and she looks like she tripped over something. Brilliant, we won't even get some gory deaths to make up for the rest of the film. A band of villagers decide to kill the wolf, setting off straight away so as to ambush it during the day because apparently werewolves burst into flames in sunlight. Just how obsessed with vampires is Hardwicke? Anyway, they set off straight away, and get to its cave in the middle of the night. That makes complete sense. Henry's father is killed and the rest of them come back with it's head just as Gary Oldman turns up.

If everyone else in the film is as wooden as the toothpick-trees, Oldman's as hammy as the pigs they sacrifice to try and appease the wolf. He plays the mad Father Solomon, a man with silver fingernails (remember that) who rants about the wolf and the red moon until the wolf turns up. And it's awful. It's all CGI and it's neither convincing nor scary. It kills some people and telepathically tells Valerie to come away with it. I'm sure someone could have made a good film here. Give any aspiring director the job and tell them that if they make it anything like Twilight you'll stick them inside Father Solomon's giant metal elephant and you'd end up with a better, darker film than this.

Anyway, for the next hour or so the wolf kills people very cleanly and people are accused and suspected of being the wolf. Then, Solomon decides to duel it. Unfortunately, he duels like a little girl and the wolf bites his arm off. The wolf tells Valerie to come with it, she refuses and goes to her grandma's house. Once there, she finds that her grandma (Julie Christie) is dead and her father (Billy Burke) is revealed as the werewolf, like anyone cares. He shares some boring dialogue with Valerie until Peter attacks him with the world's smallest axe and Valerie stabs him in the chest with Solomon's severed arm, killing him with the SILVER FUCKING FINGERNAILS. I'd say it's an anti-climactic end to the film, but that would imply that the film had been building towards something. Either way, it's the stupidest death since Mr. Big swallowed a bullet of compressed air and floated away like a balloon in Octopussy. During the fight with Valerie's father, Henry was bitten, meaning he will become a werewolf, but not before he and Valerie have sex and make werebabies. "If Amanda Seyfried goes topless, would that be enough to save this film?", I mused to myself as the couple started kissing. It wouldn't have been, even if she had done.

Skip Red Riding Hood and watch The Company of Wolves or An American Werewolf in London instead. Gary Oldman's ham can't save this rubbish, although it does at least trundle along despite its runtime of one hour and forty minutes. If it dragged, it would have gotten even fewer points.

3 out of 10.

30 Minutes or Less (2011)

I loved Zombieland. LOVED it. It's not only one of my favourite zombie comedies of all time, it's one of my favourite FILMS of all time. To say that I was looking forward to Ruben Fleischer and Jesse Eisenberg's second film together is an understatement. I saw the trailer and I was convinced that it would be great.

Then I saw it. What can I say? Well, at least it was short. It has pretty much no other redeeming qualities (except for Bianca Kajlich getting her boobs out). Somehow, a story about a pizza delivery guy having a bomb strapped to his chest and being made to rob a bank is boring. Really boring. Thank god it was only 83 minutes long. Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) and his "best friend" Chet (Aziz Ansari) have no chemistry at all, the bad guys (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) aren't scary or even funny, they're just one-dimensional and silly. The film has no rhythm, the "jokes" fall flat and no-one looks like they want to be there, Eisenberg least of all. I can see why.

Zombieland was a smart, hilarious, well-acted film with brilliant, razor-sharp wit. This god-awful mess is apparently based on a true story: in 2003, a pizza delivery man in Pennsylvania was killed by a bomb that was strapped to his chest as he attempted to rob a bank. Neither story is funny.

3 out of 10.

The House Bunny (2008)

I didn't exactly go into this film with high hopes. I decided to watch it mostly because I wanted to see Emma Stone in it and I'm a fan of Anna Faris. "It can't be that bad", I thought to myself as I settled down to watch it.

It really is. Anna Faris has been in plenty of awful films - Scary Movie 2, Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 to name just three - but she's always been the best thing about them. She has a natural comic talent and she always gives it her all, no matter how terrible the film and how lazy and uninterested the other actors are. She tries really, really hard and gives a great performance as Shelley Darlington, the wannabe Playboy Playmate who wakes up one morning to find her life has been turned upside down as she has been evicted from the Playboy Mansion. Shelley, homeless and with nowhere to go, stumbles upon the girls of the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority. They're awkward, unstylish and generally offensive caricatures of anyone who isn't Little Miss Popular or Little Miss Slut.

The main problem with the film is that it just isn't funny. There are plenty of comedies that aren't funny but are completely watchable because of an interesting storyline or loveable characters. This isn't one of them. It's boring, full of ridiculous caricatures and so absolutely bloody awful I found myself counting down the minutes until the damn thing had finished. I tried to disengage my brain, but even if I'd performed a frontal lobotomy on myself I still would have found it spectacularly awful. Throw in a few decent jokes and turn the film's message from one of "be the best hot girl you can be" into one of "be yourself, whether your beauty is on the outside or the inside" and you'd have an average comedy. Instead, you have this sexist piece of garbage. That it was written by Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, the screenwriting pair behind 10 Things I Hate About You and Legally Blonde, is unbelievable.

Anna Faris gives this film absolutely everything she has and Emma Stone does the best she can with what she's provided with. Take away Faris' energetic performance and I'd give it a single point. As it is, she earns two points all by herself.

3 out of 10.