Eat the Rich … left-wing politics is definitely back, Lenin is gone, but not forgotten, to quote a classic novel (title)
Monday: Community (Ford, 2012)
So there I was, browsing my Twitter feed, when I spy the above DVD cover, posted by a blog site called Found Footage Critic. “Hey,” I said, nudging the wife. “Does that look like Craylands to you?”
“Ha! Yes, I think it does,” says she. And I was right. It is Craylands.
Craylands, see, is a run-down and fairly notorious housing estate in Basildon, Essex, located less than ten minute’s walk from my doorstep. My wife grew up there as a child, I’ve been a regular visitor there for nigh on twenty years, we both have friends and relatives who lived there and our closest handful of friends live there still. It’s had a partial face-lift now - the street depicted on the poster above (Norwich Walk) no longer exists - but it was a pretty f*cking desperate place, still is in many ways, and people familiar with the estate will be entirely unsurprised to learn that it has its own horror film.
But is it any good? Alas, no. It’s a “hoodie horror” like Eden Lake (Watkins, 2008) or Ils (aka Them) (Moreau/Palud, 2006) and it aims to mix the content of those pictures with a dollop of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) but it simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to make it work. Essentially: A pair of students seek to make a documentary about this terrifying estate (given the fictional “Draymen Estate” name here) to find out why it’s been abandoned by the wider community (including the law), why its children are becoming almost feral, and why the adults on the estate have passively ceded control of their lives to a cadre of vicious scumbags in exchange for the mind-numbing bliss of a particularly potent strain of marijuana. It’s of course a bit “Daily Mail” of director Jason Ford to posit the idea that run-down 1970’s conurbations equal murderous scumbags, mindless zombified stoners and feral little bastards, but at the same time I also know for a fact that all of the above exist on that estate in real life (and of course, it is a horror movie after all). However it should go without saying - although I’d like to say it anyway - that there are many, many thoroughly decent people living there too.
Grim and dour plot aside: With only one or two exceptions, the acting is uneven and often jarringly poor, and clumsy, heavy-handed editing left what should’ve been some effective scares disappointing and flat. In its favour however, Community refuses to rely solely upon cheap nasty splatter gore, which it could so easily have done; and the sound design is very good indeed, with lots of creepy noises and screams blending well with a minimalist score. And, for the wife and I at least, Community provided a fun little game of “Recognise the Location” (in addition to the Craylands estate, a disused play centre in Vange, Basildon, is heavily featured, and Pitsea town centre and train station receive cameos).
Turkey Shoot (aka Escape 2000, Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1982)
Extra points for this turkey for “so-bad-it-is-good” and very amusing and brutally honest accompanying interviews with director Brian Trenchard-Smith and (some of) the cast that put the movie in the right perspective.
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I just survived a whole bunch of ridiculous trash
THE LAST SHARK (Castellari)
Had it on the shelf so had to watch it now. This is not a bad movie. It may be an over the top action movies with some fanciful killings but bad? I found it extremely entertaining 
Tuesday: This is the End (Rogen/Goldberg, 2013)
I’m not even sure why I suddenly decided to give this a try, having swerved it without a flicker of interest for the better part of four years. Seth Rogen and the little crew who seem to orbit around him tend to be fairly inconsistent; they’re often funny in small doses but almost never for the length of an entire movie. Rogen himself is likeable enough when he takes a minute to stop a)smoking weed, b)talking about smoking weed or c)laughing about the effects of weed on something or other; those minutes appear to be increasingly few and far between, however.
Still, This is the End was really rather good, I thought, giving Rogen and his chums an opportunity to play exaggerated versions of themselves at a house party being hosted by James Franco while The Rapture takes place all around them, taking all of the decent people but leaving the vacuous and shallow actors behind with the demons who have claimed the Earth. Rogen presents as a chortling stoner having his head turned by the glitz of Hollywood, his considerably less famous friend Jay Baruchel is the closest thing we have to an everyman here but he’s envious of the success of his peers, James Franco is pretentious and needy, Craig Robinson is a little too sure of his place in the pecking order, the implausibly nice Jonah Hill is about as phony as can be and party crasher Danny McBride plays completely to his Kenny Powers typecast (ah! That’s why I wanted to watch This is the End, I remember now; the wife and I had been watching Eastbound & Down all last week and I fancied watching some more McBride). Good cameos abound too, notably from Michael Cera presenting himself as a groping, sex-addicted cokehead, from Emma Watson, determined as she is not to get raped by Rogen and Co., and from Chaning Tatum in a late appearance about which I’ll say nothing (it’s probably funnier to just stumble upon it). The picture gets bogged down a few times as these big-studio comedies tend to do, and it’s probably all a bit too lightweight to hold up to multiple viewings but it was funnier than I thought it would be and, aside from a couple of monsters which seemed strictly out of the Ghostbusters playbook, the apocalypse itself is played pretty straight.
Last night, I introduced my 13 yr-old son (well, he’ll be 13 in a fortnight) to An American Werewolf in London (Landis, 1981), which was my favourite movie back when I was roughly that age. As old as it is now, it still made him jump when Jack appears behind David in the bathroom mirror.
Over 35 years on, and there are still few - if any - better werewolf films. Dog Soldiers (Marshall, 2002) maybe. I can’t think of any others. Wer (Bell, 2013) was good but not in the same league as the aforementioned films. The Underworld films? The Twilight films?? Ha, forget it.
Oh, and in the interest of trying to log all my films this year, I also watched X-Men: First Class (Vaughan, 2011) last night too, just because it happened to be on E4+1 and I stumbled across it whilst channel-hopping. Easily the best X-Men pic of the nine so far (including Wolverine and Deadpool spin-offs).
The Walking Dead Season 7.1.
This episode belongs to the most terrorizing things I have ever watched.
Haven’t seen one single episode yet, will take me another life to get to this one, so hopefully reincarnation is more than just a silly idea
Well, when you start watching you come probably quick to the “I can’t stop it watching” point. If not it is not worth watching anyway. The series has a clever and strong cliffhanger dramaturgy, mixed with some quite intelligent and with some pretty dumb stuff.
I enjoy it …
A typical episode of The Walking Dead:
Min 1 - 3: Great introduction. Narratively complicated, often a flashback or a flashforward.
Min 4: Intelligent credit sequence
Min 5 - 25: Nothing Happens
Min 26: Someone does something incredibly stupid
Min 27 - 29: Holy Shit! Zombies!
Min 30 - 40: Why do I continue to watch these show?
Min 41: Some crazy ass cliff-hanger ending, I immediately must watch the next episode
I stopped watching after season 5 finale, it wasn’t working for me anymore. It just got too repetitive, boring and going no where.
Of course it does become often repetitive, but I enjoy it to go with the characters no where, I like them, and I like following them while becoming worse and worse in every season. It should logically end with Rick becoming a human monster around season 20 or so.
I think Rick’s son Carl would be the logical choice.
That’s season 30
Anyways, talking about Zombies. I think i’ll go watch ‘The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)’ now.
Not a movie but I just finished The Man in the High Castle. Interesting until the last minute even though it wasn’t what I expected/hoped.
Forushande (The Salesman)
the director hasn’t moved on since A Separation. Excellent and emotional chamber piece, but this isn’t cinema, this is theater. So maybe stick to the stage. Still worth watching though, especially if you like his style.
I’m not sure if anybody has any interest in Japanese horror movies (let alone seen one), but the movie Noroi, directed by Koji Shiraishi, is actually one of my favorite horror movies I’ve seen in the past few years. I re-watched it today and it’s still just as good as I remember it. It’s a documentary style film featuring an author and his camera man investigating a young girl with telekinetic abilites, and unraveling the supernatural web of mysteries surrounding her.
Also if you’re actually inclined to watch it, you might possibly find it for free on a certain large video hosting site. 
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I have a measure of interest in Japanese/East Asian horror inasmuch as I’ve seen most of the more prominent titles in the field, particularly from its early/mid 00’s heyday: Ring, Pulse, The Grudge/The Curse, Premonition, Audition, Dark Water, The Eye, Three… Extremes (did you know that Three Extremes 2 is actually the first movie in that sequence, and Three… Extremes is the sequel?), Infection, and most of the associated sequels, prequels and English-language remakes. I’m going to have to give Noroi: The Curse another look though because I’ve definitely seen it but I had to check your IMDb link and even have a look at a trailer to confirm to myself that I had. I barely remember a thing about it.
I’m very much a Ju-on guy. I bought Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi, 2002) blind, and I thought it was staggering. Even the DVD menu screen scared me! Of course, the sequels/remakes begin to suffer from the law of diminishing returns but there is a lot of good stuff throughout the franchise.*
*full disclosure: I haven’t seen Ju-on: The Final Curse (Ochiai, 2015) or the Ring/Grudge mashup picture Sadako Vs. Kayako (2016) which, to bring things full circle, was written and directed by Kōji Shiraishi who also wrote/directed Noroi:The Curse. In fact, I think I might lead up to Sadako Vs. Kayako by watching/rewatching all of the Ju-on and Ring movies to date, which will get me nicely up to speed in time for Rings (Gutiérrez, 2017).