28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

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I Saw The Devil (악마를 보았다) (Ang-ma-reul bo-at'da) (2010)

I don't mind ultra violence in movies when revenge is being meted out to those especially deserving of it, like in Harry Brown or Bedevilled, The Brave One or a zillion other bloody revenge fests, and for the first hour or so, that's what's on offer here when a secret service agent goes beserk, seeking revenge on a Korean Max Cady serial killer who has horribly killed rhe agent's pregnant girlfriend, but by film's end, when the secret service agent's very short-sighted plan for revenge has resulted in pain, suffering and death for myriad extraneous others and when so much depravity is on show - so much that the serial killer becomes just one part of a greater universal serial killer problem - the thrill of revenge becomes more than absurd: From Dusk Til Dawn presents a more reasonable, grounded world.

★★★☆☆

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Bullet Train (2022)

It is supposed to be a bit of Tarantino-esque fun, this adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's book about five assassins aboard the same fast train in Japan, but there's something sad about it: not even Tarantino does Tarantino very well, lately; Brad Pitt in the lead role certainly doesn't manage a young and edgy "Tyler Durden" anymore; and by casting him and other non-Japanese actors in an American adaptation of the Japanese story set in Japan, the action movie inadvertently becomes a message film, with the message - the destructive influence of foreigners upon Japanese society - front and centre, an inescapable part of every crescendoing action scene, yet completely ignored.

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

.

★★☆☆☆

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Don't Breathe 2 (2021)

Well, they've certainly fulfilled the brief, taking all that ugliness of the first movie (remember when things turned unexpectedly nasty in the basement?) and fashioning a really equally vile sequel in which that blind ex-Navy Seal kidnapper, rapist and murderer in number one returns, the victim of another home invasion but this time a kind of antihero as he resists the efforts of a group of men trying to kidnap his daughter, a crime that starts out mega-gory and ends with sickening "who thinks up this stuff?" gothic horror involving, wait for it, involuntary organ donation, some Grande Dame Guignol psycho-biddy grotesquery, hacked off arms and popped eyeballs.

★★★☆☆

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Saw (2004)

Given the fact there is a serial killer, Jigsaw, playing philosophically-motivated torture games, that comic actor Carly Elwes plays a rubber-faced Ash-like doctor whom it is sometimes hard to take seriously, and that Ken Leung's Steven Singh is a David Mills replica, it is entirely possible this original movie of director James Wan's Saw series was intended as a parody of Se7en, but whether that is true or not, the story of two men waking up in a puzzle box was taken seriously enough to spawn a long-running series of gruesome horror thrillers, and this original movie is possibly even responsible for the birth of the Escape Room craze that took over the world in the year of Saw's release, 2004.

★★★☆☆

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The Purge (2013)

The funny thing about The Purge, this original movie that gave rise to a series of sequels and a two-season tv series, is that the elaborate concept - that the US Government holds an annual event called "The Purge" in which a twelve-hour moratorium is placed upon all crimes (including the crime of hacking your neighbours to pieces) - has no great bearing on what is essentially a messy, repetitive b-grade home invasion thriller - like being told that in the world beyond the brownstone in David Fincher's Panic Room or outside the house in Haneke's Funny Games there is a politics.

★★☆☆☆

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John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

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The Equalizer 2 (2018)

McCall is back dishing out vigilante justice in not one but five concurrent missions that so overfill this sequel there's no room for any plot details - the reason people are being killed in the main storyline is because their names are on a list (and that is literally all there is to learn about the matter), and similarly there's no time for elaboration in the "Not Without My Daughter" opening scenes nor any detail offered in the overly-ambitious Woman In Gold side story that keeps interrupting the action; there's nothing much to know in the Dangerous Minds character-building side story involving McCall keeping a young man from falling in with gangbangers, and no detail (nor sense) in the Twister denouement in which a storm event conveniently evacuates McCall's hometown just in time for a bad-guy showdown, and finally, don't expect any elaboration of any kind in yet another episode, a kind of Promising Young Woman sequence involving gang rapists.

★★★☆☆

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The Hunt (2020)

The Most Dangerous Game, the classic 1924 short story and its 1932 film adaptation about humans being hunted for sport, is not really embellished or improved upon or developed here, just retold with 1. more gore, 2. wet Tarantinoism, 3. modern weapons that mean the twelve victims who wake up in an elaborately constructed fake Arkansas are dispatched remotely and en masse - there's no hunt required; and, 4. weak political satire - the nebulous joke here, about increasingly partisan American politics, seems to be that the hunters are woke lefties coolly slicing and dicing Trump supporters while demonstrating an uber political correctness in conversations with each other. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Bloodshot (2020)

Leigh Whannell's Upgrade took the done-to-death Robocop/Venom story (a killed cop or war hero or aggrieved boyfriend is resurrected with super-enhancements) and brought it back to high-octane life, so it's possible, but Bloodshot, this big screen launch of a Valiant extended universe, tries to tell the same story, throwing in some memory manipulation stuff, but this turns Vin Diesel's Bloodshot into a hard-to-care-about automaton and turns the villain into a kind of Kermit the Frog, a beset "memory" theatre show producer - in a movie that feels more dated than 1987's Robocop with a seen-it-all-before male notion of cool (slow-motion swaggering and Blue Steel pouts as the superhumans disperse smoke grenades and slam fists into concrete), delivered with scenes of tired universe-building exposition, some not very Marvel-lous attempts at humour, in cheap-looking studio lots or against lifeless cgi backdrops.

★★☆☆☆

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Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

The horribly wronged Count of Monte Cristo has you on side all the way through his revenge plot in Dumas' thousand-odd pages, but after his wife and child are brutally killed by home invaders in this film's opening scenes, Gerard Butler's horribly wronged Law Abiding Citizen only momentarily has your sympathy when suddenly the movie pulls the revenge-thriller rug out from under you and makes him the Batman technology-enhanced, street-smart Jason Bournish villain of the film and it is up to Jamie Foxx's prosecutor Nick Rice to stop him enacting his cold dish of extremely gruesome revenge on everyone that failed him.

★★☆☆☆

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A Walk Among The Tombstones (2014)

There are references to Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade in this neo-noir mystery starring Liam Neeson, but there are also touches of Sherlock Holmes in Neeson's recovering substance abuser and dogged sleuth, Matthew Scudder — especially given the presence at his side of a Baker Street Boy, TJ, who helps the Luddite gumshoe with tech matters — but while Scudder is like a gritty contemporary Sherlock Holmes, the crimes he investigates are Thomas Harris Silence of the Lambs ones and this is where the problem lies in a movie that is two disparate halves — one half investigation procedural, the other half unbearably sick torture porn.

★★★☆☆

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Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003)

Quentin Tarantino abandons narrative conventions and any concerns other writer-directors might have regarding style, taste and decorum, and has a blast introducing his Nameless Bride and setting her on her four-hour murderous path of revenge that was only at the last minute before its cinema release sliced into two halves as if by the swoosh of Hattori Hanzo steel; as it turns out, this first half is concluded in an even better second half, Kill Bill Volume 2.

★★★★☆

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