Author: gffreviews

Fucking hilarious!

Went to see this with my diehard vegan sister and we both laughed all the way through. It’s about a couple who run a butcher shop, who take to killing and selling the flesh of vegans.

I think what made this work so well was the core characters and their relationship. The plot has obvious comedy value, but it wouldn’t stretch over a movie’s run time if it weren’t for the sparky central couple.

Vincent had a real passion for his work as a butcher, and took real pride in it. As the movement towards a plant-based diet has caused sales to drop, he has become despondent, lacklustre and impotent. The business is failing and his marriage is failing.

Sophie is sick of being sex-starved and broke. She splits her time between envying her god-awful friends, and sitting up at night, binging serial killer documentaries. I massively identified with the way she can bring up any killer’s name and stats in any random conversation. I do this constantly, as do many of my podcast-addicted female friends.

One day, into their stagnation, comes an attack on the shop by vegan activists. Vincent pursues them and fights one in the street. It’s the first rush of fire in him in a long time, and Sophie is eager to encourage it, despite its violent expression. A chance encounter means Vincent spots the activist on his bike while he and Sophie are driving, and on impulse he hits the guy. When Sophie find out he is dead, she’s almost pleased to finally be able to put all her true crime knowledge to good use. Soon they have the body dismembered, and the meat is being sold off slice by slice.

As daft as this sounds, cannibal serial killers selling human meat out a butchers is a thing. What Vincent and Sophie don’t expect is for it to be so delicious. Soon the whole town is at their door, paying hand over first for the new flavour “pork”. A few more days like that and the butcher’s shop will be out the red. Plus, with the killing and cannibalisation, Vincent seems to be getting back his joie de vivre.

Can you save a business and a marriage by killing your enemies? Apparently so.

I was a bit worried before I saw this, that it might just be the same one joke that’s told about vegans over and over, which is, “Christ, they’re annoying”. But this is a comedy horror splatstick first and foremost, with a bickering problem couple at its heart, and playing off the vegan stereotype in such a over-the-top and ludicrous way that it just gets funnier and more preposterous.

Thoroughly enjoyed. Carnist comedy at its finest.

As bad as theatre.

Short horror film, it seems to be about a young woman regrowing her placenta from her back, which then generates into a new body for her. Or it could have been something else entirely, it was not clear.

Speaking of cartoon villains.

Four escapees from an 80s frat movie are going mountain climbing when they run into two lassies. The lassies have heavy Women Laughing With Salad energy, and after a fireside swapping of homophobic jokes, the lead frat boy tries to rape one of the lassies. When he fails, he punches her off a rock ledge, seriously injuring her. He then gets his mates to help kill her and chuck her off the mountain. Alas for them, the other lassie sees them and films it. Because if you are going mountaineering, you obviously take a hand-held camera for that free time your hands’ll be empty.

This film is unintentionally hilarious. The main lassie is like a Xanax commercial, doing a sad face, then remembering her dead fiance, and doing a resolved looking-towards-the-future face. The flashbacks to the dead husband are so funny. He looks like a model, staring into the camera and saying shit like, “You got this”. He has this Italian, but also kinda English sounding accent, he has that muddled sound that whats-his-chops has in Black Swan. Anyway, he’s constantly purring encouragements in reverb over the wind, which is a total rofl.

The whole movie is cheesy af. This is just some of the daftest dialogue. My favourite line was, “How do you think Jessica got so good at blowjobs?” The chest thumping machismo is laughable and so lame.

The whole tension of setting the action on a mountainside is lost, coz you never feel like you’re on a mountain. Because they are clearly on a set with the rocks from Star Trek, they can’t do any wide shots. So you never get a sense of where they are on the mountain, where she is in relation to the top or bottom, or how far off the ground they are. I mean, they do sometimes look down, but it’s at a green screen, so it looks flat and has no depth. There are a couple of shots of a real mountainside, but not many.

It’s not quite in the category of so bad it’s good, but it’s certainly past the point of being bad and swinging back towards being entertaining.

That was bloody great!

Witch tale from Ireland. Mary Laidlaw, known as Bloody Mary, is released on parole from her sentence for killing her husband. Her parole officer, Cathy, doesn’t want the media hype about her devil worship and human sacrifice to colour her view of her new charge. But Mary is super fucking creepy.

I really liked Mary, played beautifully by Derbhle Crotty, because she’s more like the witches that you grew up with on your street. You know how there’s always a witch on every street? And you run past their house when you’re a kid. Then you grow up, and feel a bit guilty, coz you were just running past an old woman, or a woman with a skelly eye, or arthritis in her hands. She was actually just a poor soul, and you were actually a wee dick.

Mary in the film, her abusive husband beat the shit out of her, set her on fire and left her for dead in the forest. But she didn’t die, and when she came home, she chopped him up with an axe. For this she was sentenced to 30 years in prison. So, before you meet her, you kinda think she’s a bit of a soul.

Then you meet her, and you’re like, “Oh! You’re totally a witch”. And maybe her husband burned her because she was a witch. Or maybe she became a witch because he was so violent. It’s all very open to possibilities.

Certainly now, she’s a bampot. But again, not just for the sake of being the villain. She wants what Cathy wants. She’s just, you know, willing to be a total bastard to get it.

Mary is like Cathy’s shadow. Cathy’s husband left her for another woman, and now she’s pregnant, and they’re a happy little family, and Cathy’s son even calls this new woman Mum. Cathy had terrible post-partum depression after what was a difficult birth that left her unable to have any more children. So she feels totally alone, like her entire family, the only one she’ll ever have, has been taken from her. Cathy is impotent in the face of this onslaught, she’s meant to just suck it up.

Mary wouldn’t suck it up. Mary would know what to do to take what was hers.

I really liked this film. It’s a clear villain, without needing to make her a cartoon, and a hero, who is really trying to pull away from her own darkness. Good film.

Tales from the world of Wyrmwood. Wyrmwood: Apocalypse is a sequel to the 2014 Aussie zombie action thriller Wyrmwood. We are back with our fuel-burping undead and the homemade armoured vehicles. Wyrmwood is basically like Mad Max with zombies.

Reunite with Barry and Brooke, with Luke McKenzie returning as the baddie Captain’s twin brother, set on getting revenge for his brother’s death. Maxi and Grace join us as two survivors who are travelling with our heroes, but have grown wary of Brooke’s increasingly out of control zombie berserker rages. They decide to split and go their own way.

This is a mistake. They run afoul of Rhys, the aforementioned twin of the last film’s baddie, and entanglement with the deranged soldier/scientist combo returns as the main peril.

Wyrmwood: Apocalypse delivers on exactly what it sets out to do. Pounding action, exploding heads, disembowelment and fights to the death. Let the mayhem commence!

You Are Not My Mother is an Irish folk horror, in the same vein of mental illness or supernatural happening. Char’s mum is manic depressive and she goes missing at the start of the film. And when she comes back, she’s… different.

Really good, well acted film. The main character Char is really well performed by Hazel Doupe, who has to straddle a creepy horror and a serious family drama and be 100% convincing the whole time. Carolyn Bracken is also amazing as the malevolent mother, her movement style is really unsettling. The makeup for the scares is excellent, really nails it.

One day we’ll get a movie where a manic depressive is a good parent, fingers crossed. But until then revel in the spooks of You Are Not My Mother!

A new bride is taken to meet her husband’s kids in his large country house, in a story that reeks of Bluebeard’s Castle from the outset.

All the weans are creepy and she’s just constantly going, “Eh, something’s off”, and having her man gaslight her. He starts off as the good-time da, laughing and playing, but very soon he’s drinking constantly and going Jack Torrance.

Nice set and scenery, good lighting, liked the colour palate, visually good. Because it’s a BBC horror film, it’s pure PG-13, but still a good watch.

This film is a mess. A story about a serial killer who is the son of a retired cop (yeah, I know), it is shot partly as a Netflix-style documentary, partly as a drama, then also incorporates first-person narration of the inner monologue of the killer, all the while there is an experimental soundscape running as the audio.

Even if everything was really well done, this mish-mash was enough to tank any film. And it’s not, it’s not really well done. The acting is porn level of quality. Almost all the dialogue has reverb behind it. Sooo much of it is in slooowww motion. It takes so long when it has no substance, and you just wonder what is taking up all this time.

Mince.