The Omega Man (1971)

Germ warfare in a Sino-Russian war turns everyone into Paul Bettany's character in The Da Vinci Code and it is up to an often shirtless Charlton Heston, the only person in the world not yet an eloquent albino with problematic life philosophies, to find a cure before this unrewarding scifi thriller, in which nothing much actually happens, ends up even longer than it already is.

★★☆☆☆

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Cobra (1986)

Switch the roman numeral for another and 'Cobra'' is an anagram of Rambo', my mind discovered, desperate for something to think about during this especially vacant action thriller from the 80s about a cop so slick, so smooth, so self-assured, so nonchalant in his delivery of zero-tolerance violent justice, he's an unmitigated wanker, working on a case to product-place as much as possible while he takes down a murderous cult called New Order; fortunately for Cobra and the witness he is protecting (played by Brigitte Nielsen), the so-bad-it's-good action ends everyone up at a murderous-cult-member-dispatching factory replete with lava baths, furnaces and hooks.

★★☆☆☆

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Compulsion (aka Sadie) (2016)

Orgies in movies are usually not grubby suburban affairs involving bogan swingers but are instead more often hypnotic masquerades held in castles with everyone sashaying about in slow-mo wearing masks - Venetian and sequinned, not gimp - and resplendent in tuxedoes and ballgowns, not chaps, and the party always proves so tedious that by movie's end, sex and death, pleasure and pain must become synonymous; of course, our heroine here ends up running, but might she just be afraid of experiencing the vice-like grip (around her neck) of simply too much pleasure, yawn?

★★☆☆☆

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Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

I'm not alarmed by stories of intergalactic wars, nor do I 100% accept that this is in fact the genesis story of the Scientology faith - could it possibly be? - and the abuses of power alleged here and in every other Scientology documentary ever made are concerning and warrant investigation but until proven do not induce in me the level of outrage and dismay that, say, the abuses of another secretive, closed church regularly in the media have caused me - no, the thing that most shocks me about this documentary, one a lot more illuminating, a lot more interesting than many especially given the gormless Louis Theroux hasn't thrust himself smack in the middle of it, is so many people's readiness to believe and their willingness to commit wholeheartedly and whole-financially to the thinnest, flimsiest of premises or promises - I must be too stingy with my time and money.

★★★☆☆

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The Endless (2017)

Many people, just like this scifi fantasy's writer-, director- and wooden actor-team of Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead, want to be able to go back in history and re-experience Lost from the start without the Hollywood writer's strike and with a different, less dismaying end, but this, with its scene-changing thuds, namesake characters, mysterious cabins in the wood, rikka-tikka black smoke monster, out of place wildlife, bearded Jack hero, and amateur writing that has characters exhibiting magical shared knowledge, is like entering into a painful time loop to relive the same Lost mistakes all over again and leaves you desperate for the rising of the three moons to mark the Ascension, by which I mean the turning on of the cinema lights and the freedom at last to get up and leave.

★☆☆☆☆

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Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie (2015)

Thanks to the likes of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, documentaries are now the stuff of major cinema releases and major release documentaries are made about anything these days (sushi master chefs (Jiro Dreams of Sushi); peculiar shared-interest groups ("Tickle"); daring feats ("Man On Wire"), personal stories from around the world ("The Eagle Huntress"), etc..), so surely The Church of Scientology wasn't surprised when yet another documentary maker, this time the irritating man-boy reporter, Louis Theroux, knocked on the door wanting to apply his dopey (and I've always found patronising and not very penetrating) drawl to the task of finding out about the famously secretive organisation, but the church does seem surprised and even enraged, defensive from the get-go, and the resulting documentary is equal parts disturbing (for showing there to exist yet more factions of people in the world that remain committed to never seeing eye-to-eye), bewildering (it presents a long string of disturbing but disputed facts via reenactment, much of it rehashed from other more forensic sources, with Theroux unable to uncover much exact, undisputed information except for, say, whether a particular stretch of road is public or private) and stupefying (it beggars belief how members of a driven, supposedly super-media-savvy church can't see beyond its outrage to at least check its behaviour in front of Theroux's cameras - its representatives on camera are childish, bullish, and outright peculiar to the point you wonder if they are just more of Theroux's actor stand-ins).

★★★☆☆

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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Their daughter is kidnapped when a clay pigeon shooter and her husband in Switzerland learn from a dying man the details of an international intrigue, in this 1934 Alfred Hitchcock thriller with memorable scenes involving a sun-worshipping cult and a heart-pounding dentist appointment.

★★★★☆

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The Wicker Man (2006)

This dreadful remake of the original mystery thriller of 1973 - a sinister movie about a policeman investigating a child's disappearance from a creepy, cultish remote island community - updates the story by wheeling out a big, hollow wooden figure at the start the movie, too: Nicolas Cage in Edward Woodward's police officer role.

☆☆☆☆☆

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The Family (2016)

Thrown together, I'm sure, to cash-in on other recent cult-themed documentary releases, this one about Anne Hamilton-Byrne who in the 80s took advantage of Australia's lax adoption laws to steal, raise, and generally mess-up as many as 28 children, is a boring and unfocused mess of information that leaves viewers nonethewiser about how much of what happened was masterminded by Hamilton-Byrne and how much simply grew out of circumstance, and ultimately you are left with the impression the documentary makers themselves didn't know what story they were telling.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Doctor Strange (2016)

Marvel's latest superhero origin story is a grown-up version of Harry Potter - Hogwarts is a Kathmandu cult, Dumbledore is Tilda Swinton reprising her roles from The Beach and Vanilla Sky, Voldemort is a barely seen cosmic darksider called Dormammu, the spells are "coding", the cloak of invisibility is a cloak of levitation of unexplained sentience, and the special effects are repetitive Inception-style city-shifting ones.

★★★☆☆

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The Wicker Man (1973)

A policeman heads to a Scottish island to investigate a young girl's disappearance and discovers a veritable Pitcairn of pagan craziness, but the most troubling thing by far is the sight of Christopher Lee in a series of mustard-coloured skivvies.

★★★★☆

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Hot Fuzz (2007)

This is a hilarious genre-mashing comedy - part Lethal Weapon buddy cop action flick, part Miss Marple English village mystery, and part The Wicker Man - about a very earnest, high-achieving city cop posted to a small English village where the beat is particularly quiet but after a hilarious sequence showing the policeman exerting his zero tolerance on bemused villagers, schoolchildren and geese, a sinister criminal network with creepy ritualistic practices rears its head.

★★★★☆

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The East (2013)

Probably created with an Alias/12 Monkeys tv series in mind, this drama is about an uncharismatic ecoterrorist group whose daft eating habits, awkward bathing rituals, dullard Charles Manson lookalike leader and soapbox politics are supposedly so intoxicating they cause the undercover agent infiltrating the group (Brit Marling) to question her loyalties.

★☆☆☆☆

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Sound Of My Voice (2011)

As a pilot episode for a tv series about a couple who infiltrate a cult to expose a sham guru, this is an intriguing two hours that raises interesting ideas for further exploration, but as a freestanding feature film it is badly lacking, with too little running time and too many story threads that are left hardly resolved, and it isn't surprising to read that this was originally intended as a trilogy.

★★☆☆☆

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Secret Sunshine (밀양) (2007)

In this harrowing but enthralling drama with something to say about religious belief, a woman, Shin-ae copes badly (but perhaps as badly as one would expect) following the death of her husband and (after relocating to a small town) the kidnap and murder of her son.

★★★★☆

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Not Forgotten (忘れられぬ人々) (Wasurerarenu hitobito) (2000)

When a sinister cult encroaches, taking advantage of one of their group, a number of Japanese war veterans find the feelings they have long harboured of having been left behind and taken advantage of by modern Japanese society physically manifest and no longer possible to ignore!

★★★★☆

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Based on a short story, Traumnovelle by 'the literary Sigmund Freud' Albert Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick's last film is a slow-burn psychological suspense drama about adult sexual relations and monogamy, pondering whether a wife's erotic fantasy about an American Naval officer constitutes a betrayal of some kind against her husband.

★★★★☆

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The Master (2012)

A peculiar little slip of a story about a traumatised drunkard's encounter with a guru, given grand treatment by Director Paul Thomas Anderson who, for no obvious reason, has steeped the movie with references to Scientology.

★★★☆☆

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