Twilight Drinking Game

Tonight is the night. It is finally happening. Twilight: The Hideously Long Saga is ending. Right now millions of prepubescent teens are rushing towards multiplexes up and down the country to see Bella Swan finally achieve a sparkly orgasm. We are sure there is probably more too it than that, but since we had to watch Robert Pattinson EAT A BABY OUT OF BELLA'S WOMB we have quite frankly given up. So grab some beers, grab the DVDs and drink so hard you forget Twilight ever existed at all...

We have wondered for quite some time now if the world is just completely drunk. It makes no sense otherwise that a completely crappy book pushing Mormonism down people’s throats has achieved such superstar status. Then again, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party managed to brainwash Germany quite well with no booze needed. We’re not really comparing Stephenie Meyer to Hitler…ok, maybe just a little. Anyway, get ready for the last time you have to watch Robert Pattinson try hard to emote! My, Edward, what topaz eyes you have. Almost exactly the colour of… lager…

Take one sip

Every time Bella mumblesHave you ever heard Kristen Stewart try to talk? Mumble, mumble, mumble, I’m so edgy. Mumble, mumble, mumble, I didn’t cheat on you Rob. Oh wait, yes I did. Mumble, mumble.

Each time you see man tits on screenTrying desperately hard to stop Bella from running off with one of the living dead, Jacob (a great big ruddy wolf…yeah that’s better than a vampire) repeatedly struts around with his top off. They live in a cold and rainy part of the world. Nipple erections and a hot torso will never not make us see this as anything other than bestiality. For the love of God, put a shirt on man!

Whenever someone says VampireWe know that this is likely to happen a lot. Trust us though, liver disease is a whole lot less painful than sitting through all five films.

Take two sips

Whenever Edward says he is ‘dangerous’Have vampires never heard that women like dangerous men? Although most of us will settle for a guy whose uppermost danger level is crossing the road before the green man appears, Edward just takes it to new heights. Sometimes literally with all of that tree climbing. Stop messing with her Cullen and just take her out for a bite! Not that kind of bite…

Each time there is an unnecessary close up of someone’s faceIt’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s lazy film making. Please just stop it.

Take three sips

Each time someone looks sad/is sad
For a story about love there sure is a whole lotta whinging in these films. ‘Oh no, I love him too much.’ ‘Oh no, he’s dead’. ‘Oh no, I don’t know if I’m into necrophilia or shagging animals.’There are so many hard decisions in a girl’s life these days no wonder Bella permanently has a face like a slapped arse. Take a leaf out of Fifty Shades of Grey. Slapped arses don’t seem quite so sad in that format…

Every time someone sparkles
You would think if you were over two hundred years old then maybe Head and Shoulders would have eventually made itself known to you. No matter how many times Bella says it’s beautiful we all know that a healthy scalp is the first step to a healthy head.

Whenever Bella touches her hair 
Keeping with the good hair health thing here. Bella, chill the fuck out, your locks aren’t going anywhere…

Suck it you vampire!

Neck your drink each time Stephenie Meyer hits you in the face with the Book of Mormon
Hey kids, you may feel these strange urges deep down in your loins. Whatever you do… don’t act on them! No sex for you, Bella. Not before you get married. Just make sure you marry a controlling, sparkly twat who wants to eat you out in a ridiculous fashion and nibble your neck till you bleed and die. Jesus, it’s all so awful we’re off down t’pub right bloody now.

Drink film fans, drink until you remember a sweeter pre-Twilight time… 

Top 10 improvised lines in cinema

Some days it feels like every ruddy actor out there is getting on set and making shit up. With all of the apocryphal stories about improvised lines and made up scenes you begin to wonder why Hollywood still needs screenwriters at all. Normally these tales are 100% bull. And no matter how many times Dustin Hoffman says he made up the "I'm walking here!" line we all know that he really didn't. Every now and then though something comes along that just feels real. So here are the best, non-surgically enhanced wowza lines in cinema history. (Hello Boys! Yeah, they're real.)

#10 The Necklace Scene – Pretty Woman

Ok, so whilst it isn’t strictly a spoken line, it is still an iconic moment. When Richard Gere’s not casually putting gerbils up his rectum (this is apparently a thing. Look it up) he is busy giving Julia Roberts expensive necklaces and making single, middle-aged women’s hearts sigh. This little moment in the film was a snap (see what I did there) decision made by Gere whilst shooting, and Robert’s reaction is one hundred percent real. Now everyone say aaaah… Unless your mind is still on the gerbils, in which case say eurghh…

#9 ‘Why male models?’ – Zoolander

So, this improvised gem doesn’t really show Ben Stiller off in the best light as the truth of the matter is… he forgot his real line. Whilst trying to show how dumb models are, Stiller may not have done the actor image any favours either. But then again it is a masterclass of quick thinking, comic timing and sheer spur of the moment brilliance. Kudos too to David Duchovny whose response is entirely made up as well. It stayed in the final film. Clearly it works.

#8 The Line up – The Usual Suspects

Oh Keyser Söze you naughty scamp, too busy killing people to remember your lines? This glorious scene from the even more glorious The Usual Suspects shows just how good Kevin Spacey, Benicio Del Toro, Stephen Baldwin and Gabriel Byrne really are. Initially intended to be a very serious moment in the film, director Bryan Singer spent so long faffing about getting ready to shoot that the actors decided to go nuts with it. Each of them improvised the line ‘hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker’ in their own individual way and the laughter that emerges is genuine as none of them knew what the other was about to do. Man, how much do you wish you were Kevin Spacey?

#7 ‘Take the cannoli’ – The Godfather

Cannoli. A Sicilian dessert that is somewhere between brandy snap and a pastry. They’re good. So good in fact they are worth robbing murdered men for. The line in the script for The Godfather actually just reads ‘Leave the gun.’ This little beauty comes from the inspired mind and hungry tummy of Richard S. Castellano. In case you want some cannoli I’m sure Mary Berry has a recipe. It’s probably a lot easier to do than commit first degree murder…

#6 Gun vs Sword – Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Now, I didn’t actually want to include this moment here. I was instead going to put in Sean Connery’s ‘she talks in her sleep’ ad lib from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Alas no proof exists to show that was a real improvised moment (only the belief in my heart). Instead there is this. Apparently Harrison Ford had the shits on the day of filming and instead of doing a long action scene asked Spielberg instead if he could just casually shoot the douche with the sword to prevent himself from exploding. Just a nice little image there for you all.

#5 ‘Here’s looking at you kid’ – Casablanca

Such a great line that it is hard to imagine that it was made up on the spur of the moment with the cameras rolling. An amazing line for a mundane film (sorry, but it is). The story goes that Bogie between takes would teach Bergman how to play poker and this line was something he used to say to her then. Either way it does not appear in the actual script and brings the house down every single time. Interestingly the line ‘play it again, Sam’ doesn’t appear either. It is a misquotation of Bergman’s line: ‘play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake’.But you all probably knew that anyway.

#4 ‘You talkin’ to me?’ – Taxi Driver

‘Bickle speaks to himself in the mirror’. That is all that appears in Paul Schrader’s brilliant script for Taxi Driver. This moment shows not only how good Robert De Niro is as a improvisational actor, but how good a director Scorsese is too. Allowing De Niro the space and creative freedom to do what he wanted with this inconsequential line of scene direction, De Niro came up with one of the best and probing looks into the mind of a psycho killer. Genius. I doff my hat to you both.

#3 ‘Hisssssssss’ – The Silence of the Lambs

There seems to be a bit of a rule in Hollywood that if you only appear in a movie for a very short period of time you tend to win an Oscar. Judi Dench is only briefly in Shakespeare in Love and Penelope Cruz only has forty minutes in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins only gets just under twenty five minutes of screen time. Hard to believe eh? His performance is so strong his presence seems to ooze its way through every scene. Hopkins has actually admitted that when he did the ridiculously freaky ‘hissss’ he didn’t realise just how frightening it was. No one even thought it would make the final cut. Thank god it did.

#2 ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’ – Jaws

Steven Spielberg had a big problem whilst shooting Jaws – the script was too severe. Yes, it is right to say that maybe people being nibbled to death by sharks isn’t a joke-a-minute affair, but Spielberg knew that in order for the film to be a success it needed to be a bit lighter in tone. Cue Roy Scheider (not Rob Schneider) who, along with all of the cast, was given permission to ad lib as many lines as possible. The beauty of this creation is that it manages to be funny whilst making you wet yourself out of fear simultaneously. A legend was born and this is one of those immortal lines that just seems to crop up all the time in everyday life.

#1 ‘Here’s Johnny!’ – The Shining

Well it just had to be the number one spot, didn’t it? Like the Jaws line this is probably one of the most quoted lines in cinema ever. After a day doing take, after take, after take smashing through that bloody door, Nicholson eventually stuck his head through and uttered two momentous words. Apparently Kubrick was a bit or a brute to poor Shelley Duvall on set to get her terrified performance just right and it is rumoured that she cried so many times in retakes that Duvall had to keep a bottle of water to drink nearby to stay hydrated and ensure the tears kept flowing. Stephen King must be royally pissed off. The best line of all time… and it wasn’t even one of his.

Flying Swords at Dragon Gate review

Here is the formula for coming up with a successful title for a Chinese action movie: use the word dragon, make something else fly and shove in some references to weapons and you're done. Sadly there isn't a good formula for coming up with the plot of the film.Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is bonkers. Maybe if any of the characters stood still for long enough you'd have a better change at figuring out what the heck is going on...

Crouching Dragon, Hidden Dagger. The House of Flying Tigers. It really doesn’t matter what you call them. Really you could change the title of this particular film to Flying Dragons of Sword Gate and nothing would change. The plot makes zero sense, the characters whizz past in a blur of fists and flapping cloaks and all of the names blur into one. To give them some credit, they can kick. My, can they ever kick…

The trailer makes it seem as though there is a plot to this film. Believe me when I tell you that there isn’t, unless you consider people swirling around like turds in a U-bend for over two and a half hours ‘a plot’. To give you some kind of idea of how confusing Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is, here is an attempt at describing the action. A bunch of Eunuchs that work for the emperor have gained a lot of power and decide to create an East and West Bureau. I’m not quite sure what this means but it seems to be a bad thing and they spend most of their time drinking a lot of ‘pickled wine flesh’. The hero (Li) is a bit like Robin Hood. He goes around sorting out bad ass perpetrators. Meanwhile some baby-faced evil prince is going about killing his pregnant concubines.

However, one of then manages to escape and is helped out by a female ninja pretending to be Li. She helps to take Preggers to Dragon Gate where they hide out at the Inn there before trying to escape across the border. Suddenly everyone is rocking up at the inn’s door like it’s flipping Christmas, including some Tartars, the prince’s evil hordes, another female warrior and her accomplice, Blade in the Wind, who coincidentally is a total lookalike of the evil prince. Obviously this makes for a volatile mix and they all try to kill each other. Bad news is there is a sandstorm on the way that will rip the inn apart… but also the storm will uncover a city under the sand full of gold. Ninja girl, prince lookalike, Preggers and the others team up against the real prince and his evil friends. Then Jet Li turns up and it just gets even harder to follow.

It’s all a big mess and not helped in any way by the action and hideous CGI. All of the characters can fly (obviously) and most of them also have telekinetic powers (standard). By far though, the biggest problem is that the first hour of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate has nothing at all to do with the rest of the film. Wine-flesh-drinking emperor never appears again and the Eunuchs seems to vanish into thin air. Just as you think you are getting it, Preggers turns up and upsets everything.

To say something good about this film, there is a pretty decent twist. I didn’t see it coming. But then as I had no idea what the crap was going on 98% of the time, it isn’t all that surprising. Kun Chen who (besides having the most flawless skin in the world) also does a pretty decent job at playing both the evil prince and his dorky lookalike. A much better job than say, Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask… Chen makes it nice and clear when he is playing evil (normally stabbing someone with a dagger wielded by his eyes) and playing goofy (dressed in white and pulling funny faces). All I can say is thank god someone was there to try and give some meaning to it all.

I found out later that Flying Swords of Dragon Gate might be a sequel to an earlier film… I am dubious if watching the first one will shed any light on the action here. If you are in the mood for twirling ninjas and a sand storm that sounds like a new Ben and Jerry’s flavour (‘The Flying Swirl Dragon’ – yum) then maybe give this film a watch. Just fast forward the first hour… or perhaps slightly more.

Smashed review

Alcoholism on film is a difficult subject and more often than not we are presented with characters whose lives feel million miles away from our own. Smashed is a film that presents you with something more refreshing, a hard look at how easy it is to go from being a Friday night drinker to a hopeless drunk. With some lively dialogue and great performances somehow Smashed manages to drunkenly stumble pass the emotional connection and leaves you feeling a tad hungover by the end.

Alcohol is everywhere. Adverts on TV and billboards tell us all to get out there, drink up, do some shots and be more fun than you really are. As long as we are all drinking “sensibly” then the manufacturers are happy. But what happens when sensible begins to get redefined every time you go out on a bender? This is exactly what happens inSmashed, and soon the lines get blurred, the boundaries all become a little out of focus and sensible is taken to mean lying to your colleagues, smoking crack and watching your world fall apart.

Katie (Winstead) adores her husband Charlie (Paul) and together they have night after night of wild hedonistic fun. Charlie is a trust fund baby who pretends to work in the music industry whilst Katie works hard everyday teaching a kindergarten class of feisty kids. There is just a slight problem. They are both raging alcoholics. Katie frequently gets so drunk she wets their bed in the night and has nips from a hip flask in the car on the way to work to help ease her shakes. One day whilst suffering from a particularly bad hangover, Katie vomits in front of her class forcing her to pretend to them that she is pregnant and is given the rest of the day off work. That night heading out for another stint at the local bar, Katie smokes crack with a homeless woman and realises that things need to change in her life before it is too late. Enrolling in A.A however is the easy part. Katie soon discovers that her addiction was hiding a whole host of problems and tackling these head on means that her relationships and lies begin to break down.

Initially Smashed looks like it will follow the path of conventional tales about alcoholic main characters with the decision to change coming right at the end. However things take an interesting turn early on with the main bulk of the film focusing on Katie attending A.A meetings and finding her down to earth sponsor (Spencer) to help guide her. It all feels like arty independent cinema. The camera work is shaky all the way through helping you feel as drunk and wobbly as the alcoholics and the music and costumes are all overtly quirky. This is the film’s biggest problem, it tries far to hard to make everything fun and alternative throughout and in doing so completely bypasses the emotional pull the characters should have over you. Katie is a strange character being both quite loathsome whilst oddly lovable. Her struggle to get sober though feels about as dry as a Mormon party. Mary Elizabeth Winstead does a brilliant job as Katie, but there are moments when it all feels forced. It seems as though Winstead knows this is the type of role that will catapult her towards some serious award nominations, and therefore at times feels somewhat clinical.

Smashed does have some brilliant moments of comedy in it and tries to keep a sense of fun to the proceedings rather than sounding like a twelve step program of pretentious cinema. All of the cast play their parts very well with Nick Offerman (looking just like a fatter Eddie Izzard) stealing a lot of the scenes as Katie’s colleague and fellow member of A.A. Sadly the plot of Smashed feels a little bit formulaic and you know that eventually the inevitable end of act two relapse will come storming along, which it does, with what again should have been an emotional massacre but is more like a drive by shooting. Quick and painless.

Smashed is touching in parts and it is enjoyable to watch too. Sadly it just needed an extra shot to help it really come to life. Ultimately Smashed winds up being just like trying to remember a wild night out. It must have been enjoyable at the time, but the next morning you can’t recall anything at all.

Berberian Sound Studio review

British horror films. The very mention of the genre is enough to strike fear into the heart of many a film goer, although not necessarily for the right reasons. If a bunch of half naked, shiny haired teenagers being decapitated just doesn't do it for you, then perhaps the horrific and bizarre Berberian Sound Studio is right up your street. However if the main read in your life is The Daily Mail it might be best to stick to the slutty teens...

There are a lot of very clever people out there in the world. Sadly most of them don’t work in the horror filmmaking business. Every wannabe director with a half-decent video camera can call themselves an auteur (Oren Peli, I mean you). Not so however with Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. With true visionary style and flair, Strickland creates a hellish nightmare world for you, and then leaves you trapped there with no way out. Wacky, weird and perversely wonderful, Berberian Sound Studio deserves all of the praise it gets. Just remember, “this is not a horror film, this is a Santini film”.

Set in Italy in the 1970s, the film follows the story of Gilderoy (Jones), a twee and reserved British sound engineer who is brought over from the South Downs to work ongiallo slasher film Equestrian Vortex, which has been made by the experimental director Santini (Mancino). Gilderoy’s job is to create the foley sounds for the film and armed with a multitude of vegetables he sets about his work. From the moment he steps inside the characterless hallways and the gloom of the recording studios though things turn from bad to worse. Soon the darkness begins to take over and Gilderoy’s grasp on reality begins to fade as he suffers mercilessly at the hands of the film’s brutish producer before being sucked into a world of sickening horror that he is just not suited to.

Using only sound to create the horror, Berberian Sound Studio manages to become one of the most terrifying and disturbing films that has been made for a very long time. We never actually see what is happening in Equestrian Vortex, but your imagination is more than able to fill in the gaps. Marrows being smashed on the ground are used to accompany the body of a woman falling out of a window, radishes being twisted and torn make the sound of a priest ripping a witch’s hair out, and there is something to do with a pan of sizzling hot oil that you just don’t want to know about… However you begin to morbidly want to see what exactly is happening on screen, whilst simultaneously thanking your lucky stars that you are not.

Unsurprisingly, Toby Jones is marvellous as Gilderoy, a part he was born to play. Gilderoy receives frequent letters from his mother who he lives with back in England, reminding us constantly that he does not belong in this bizarre and dangerous world. You pray that nothing bad will happen to such a lovable character, but know as soon as the sound recordings for the “dangerously aroused goblin” begin there is very little chance of him making it out unscathed. You soon find yourself as lost as Gilderoy is as the film starts to turn into a Lynchian nightmare.

Strickland’s film is essentially an homage to horror films from the 70s, drawing on inspiration from Bray Studios where the Hammer Horror films were made and even throwing in a Roger Corman-esque dream sequence which leaves you feeling completely disorientated. There are also very heavy influences drawn from the films of David Lynch that put you on edge as the film twists and turns in directions you never expected it to take. This is a lot smarter than your average horror and one that at times comes across as being a bit too clever for its own good. However the overall lasting impression that the film makes is enough to terrify and upset even if you are not up to scratch with your classic horror film references (shame on you).

The friend who accompanied me to the cinema perhaps summed up this film in the best possible way: “it’s like watching your mother being punched in the face and not being able to stop it.” Now I don’t think that anyone has ever come out of a British horror like Truth or Dare (where you bay for teenage blood) and declared anything other than “that was rubbish, let’s go for pizza.” Berberian Sound Studio is the film of the year so far…with absolutely no shaky found footage in sight.

Cockneys vs Zombies review

Watch out Abercrombies! Pussy Galore's got a gun and she knows how to use it! Taking a leaf out of Simon Pegg's book, Cockneys vs Zombies is a very British look at how a zombie plague would pan out. Sadly it lacks enough content to provide real bite. WhilstCockneys has a lot of heart...and brains...and limbs, it is missing a lot of the humour that the title hints at to make it a classic Brit horror.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that The Expendables 2 would be the OAP blockbuster for the summer. Whilst the cast for that film clock up a pretty serious amount of years between them, the four older cast members alone in Cockneys vs Zombies collectively come to an impressive 388 years old. Sadly it is only the cast members who have freedom passes that save Cockneys, and what should have been a hilarious joke-a-second romp through Bow actually winds up feeling rather…dead.

Cockneys vs Zombies begins promisingly enough. In London’s East End, a pair of dim workmen discover a tomb from the 17th Century buried beneath a site where they are building new luxury homes. Paying no heed to health and safety (pretty unbelievable considering this is England) the duo smash their way in to have a poke around. Unfortunately they are attacked by a zombie skeleton which spreads a plague across the capital. Meanwhile, bumbling brothers Terry (Hardiker) and Andy (Treadaway) are planning to rob a bank in order to get enough money to save their granddad’s care home from closing. Assisted by their kick-ass cousin Katy (Ryan), Mental Mickey (Ashley ‘Bashy’ Thomas) and deadbeat friend Davey (Jack Doolan) their plans soon go awry as the zombie plague catches up with them and they are forced to the care home to save their granddad (Ford) and his pensioner pals from certain, bloody death.

Cockneys has a really great, comic book style opening credit sequence, which leaves you in no doubt as to what the tone of the film will be; gory, over the top and very funny. Sadly, the rest of the film pays little attention to this set up and isn’t able to come up with enough jokes that work. Whilst there are moments that shine in Cockneys many of the laughs feel repetitive, with pensioners rattling off reels of cockney rhyming slang, exploding zombie heads and the geezer brothers trying their hardest to get their comic timing moving faster than a snail. At one point whilst looking at one of the zombies trying to stagger along slowly, someone asks if that is as fast as they go. Unfortunately the zombie in question moves a lot faster than the plot of the film which is essentially just scenes with our heroes trapped first inside a bank, then a warehouse and a care home.

This is the biggest problem with the film. The plot feels so incredibly thin you wonder when it will all get going before suddenly realising that it is over. The writers shove in subplot after subplot with hostage stories and also a very unnecessary detour to find someone’s sister halfway through. At times it feels like they really struggled to get this quirky idea to feature length. The pacing throughout is very odd and although Cockneysbegins unbelievably quickly, with the workmen having their faces eaten off quicker than you can say ‘brains’, it gets held up a million times whilst the script also attempts to shove some characters into the story. Even this is not done with the most amazing amount care, and the characters, whilst likeable, are cliched. You know from all of their first sentences who will live and who will end up as zombie food.

The one thing that saves Cockneys from just being a straight to DVD, Shaun of the Deadrip off is the glorious performances from the older members of the cast. It perhaps would have been better if the whole film just focused on them and left out all of the trite younger generation entirely. Whilst Alan Ford does a great turn as aging hellraiser Ray, it is Richard Brier who steals the whole show with his gloriously geriatric performance as Hamish. It is Hamish and co who deliver all of the laughs in the film, with Brier doing the most amazingly tense and hilarious zimmer frame vs zombie chase scene. Playing on the how-slow-can-a-zombie-go idea with the old people is brilliant and something that could undoubtedly have been spun out for longer. Honor Blackman shows that she still has the Bond girl instinct in her toting an Uzi like a pro and making it look far cooler than dull Michelle Ryan ever could.

It is probably worth seeing Cockneys vs Zombies purely for the pensioners alone. Whilst there are some cute and funny moments throughout, Cockneys somehow manages to feel rushed whilst simultaneously move ridiculously slowly…not much unlike an OAP trying to outrun the undead.