WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Tucker and Dale Vs Evil

A group of college kids, travelling through hillbilly country on vacation, stop off at a gas station for fuel and beer. Two dungaree-clad good ol’ boys regard them with silent suspicion. Shortly afterwards, one of them approaches the kids. He’s carrying a scythe and grins as he asks them, “You kids goin’ campin’?”, following up the query with an edgy laugh.Later, under the impression that these selfsame individuals have kidnapped one of their number...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hatchet

Genius. Pure genius.I refer, of course, to the marketing of the film. (Of the film itself … well, all in due course.) “Old school American horror” snarls the DVD sleeve, following up this assertion with “it’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel and it’s not based on a Japanese” – a not particularly literate but certainly effective stiff middle finger to a decade or more’s worth of mainstream genre flicks.Effective, that is, until you look at the two...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle

A veritable epic compared to its predecessor, ‘Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle’ clocks in, staggeringly, at almost an hour and a quarter. Okay, one hour ten allowing for an opening credits sequence that basically recaps the earlier film. ‘HRM: BB’ takes place an unspecified time after ‘HRM’ – long enough, it would seem, for Milly (Miki Mizuno) to develop enough of a reputation that Hura (Nao Nagasawa), a woman mourning the brutal death of her lover,...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hard Revenge Milly

A note on the title: both IMDb and the subtitles on the print I watched have it as ‘Hard Revenge, Milly’; likewise the indigenous title (‘Hâdo ribenji, Mirî’) retains the comma. Which makes it sound like a comment, addressed to the eponymous Milly, regarding the nature of hard revenge. Rendering it, however, as ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ attributes the vengeful business to the protagonist – which makes a lot more sense to me. After all, you wouldn’t refer...

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'Tis the season to be jolly ...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Island of Death

I’m taking a wild guess here, but I very much doubt that Nico Mastorakis’s ‘Island of Death’ was bankrolled by the Greek Tourist Board.Unless, of course, they wanted a 102-minute advert that basically says: “Come to the island of Mykonos, where the locals are friendly, sexually promiscuous and easy to kill if you decide their loose morals are an affront to the Lord God. Mykonos teams with wildlife, so if rampant goat-fucking before breakfast is the...

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Agitation of Arabia

In December 1919, while changing trains at Reading station, T.E. Lawrence mislaid the thousand-page manuscript of ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. His reaction? He re-wrote the whole thing from memory.In December 2011, while sitting at a computer desk in Nottingham, Neil Fulwood kissed goodbye to a half-written review of ‘Island of Death’ when his laptop crashed and the auto-recovery function decided not to work because the file was corrupt. His reaction? Swear, open another beer and start rewriting. Expect review at some point in the next few hou...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

As I mentioned in my review of ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’ a couple of weeks ago, those bastions of public morality and censorial hyberbole the BBFC and the DPP drew up their “video nasties” hit list based on little more than dodgy-sounding titles and lurid VHS cover artwork; therefore anything from the terminally dull and chronically inept (the aforementioned ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’) to challenging arthouse oddities (‘Possession’) found themselves rubbing...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Man, this one started unpromisingly! Imagine you’re the writer of a ridiculously successive pair of novels featuring an iconic, kick-ass heroine. You sit down to start work on volume three. What do you do: have your iconic, kick-ass heroine taking the fight to the various individuals who have conspired against her throughout her life, or have her laid up in a hospital bed while a rumpled middle-aged reporter pursues the same kind of plodding investigation...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Girl who Played with Fire

The only instalment of the trilogy whose English title is anywhere near an accurate translation from the Swedish, ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’ is even more disappointing than its predecessor in backgrounding the fascinating Lisbeth Salander (played to perfection by Noomi Rapace) in favour of a plodding journalistic investigation undertaken by the hangdog Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist). It also disappoints in that Daniel Alfredson’s direction...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I have an inverse-ratio reaction to hype. The more the masses are clamouring to read something or watch something, the less my inclination to approach that work. Mainly it’s because I recognize my own capacity for disappointment, partly because I’d rather wait till all the fuss is died down, and not a little bit because I’m because a contrary old bugger. I steered clear of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ trilogy while it was pitching its tripartite...

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At the touch of a button, my arse

When my internet connection decides to run at a speed slightly sprightlier than a snail with an anvil strapped to it, therefore enabling Blogger to upload a mere three screengrabs in significantly less time than it takes for a new planet to come into existence, terraform itself and support life, normal service will be resumed.I'm hoping tomorrow, but I'm not putting any money on ...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Rubber

Imagine two scenarios, both involving a writer/director and a producer discussing ideas for a movie project. In the first scenario, both individuals are out to make a quick buck from a down ‘n’ dirty exploitationer. They’re drinking beer at 10am while they discuss the project and smoking dope. In the second, at least one of these gentlemen is of European extraction, they’re discussing the project over lunch at a pavement café and drinking mineral...

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Christina Lindberg

Exploitation icon and star of the gruellingly unforgettable 'Thriller - A Cruel Picture', the stunning Christina Lindberg celebrates her 61st birthday today....

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Deadgirl

In this charming romantic comedy, our affable heroes Ricky (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) – two fine upstanding college lads – make an intriguing discovery during a field trip and learn value life lessons about the value of friendship, the innocence of youth and how the love of a good woman just plain clinches the deal.Meanwhile, back in reality and here on The Agitation of the Mind, Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s thorny and cynical ‘Deadgirl’...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Bloodrayne

Has anything good ever come out of the movies-based-on-videogames subgenre? Is Uwe Boll’s reputation as the man who does for cinema what Jack the Ripper did for escort agencies actually deserved? To try to answer these two questions, I watched ‘Bloodrayne’.Fuck my life.The answer I’ve arrived at regarding the first question is: only if you’re a thirteen year old boy and the idea of Lara Croft being incarnated by Angelina Jolie, Alice from the ‘Resident...

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Amanda Seyfried

The very glamorous Amanda Seyfried - on whose account I could actually consider watching 'Mamma Mia' - is 26 today. She shares a birthday with Julianne Moore. There's a scurrilous joke about a certain Atom Egoyan movie in there somewhere, but I'll simply lift a glass to the lady in question and not lower myself ...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Switchblade Sisters

Meet the Dagger Debs, a girl-gang who are the de facto consorts of the Silver Daggers, a leather jacketed crew of high-school greasers. The Debs are led – rather implausibly – by Lace (Robbie Lee), a whiny pipsqueak with a lot of attitude but the kind of physicality that would see her defeated by your average Women’s Institute Committee member. Her right hand man woman is Patch (Monica Gayle), so named after her eye-patch, which she wears for no...

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