First off I have got to knock seeing films in 3D on the head. The damned things give me such a freaking headache. My brain just doesn’t do optical illusions. I guess that explains why I never got the hang of Magic Eye pictures. But I digress, as per usual. I haven’t even got a paragraph into my review and I am already rambling off on a tangent. Did you miss me while I was gone?

This film has no shame and that is where it strength lies. It gives us exactly what we expect and isn’t ashamed of it. What do we want from this kind of film? Lots of people dying horribly gruesome and bloody deaths for our amusement, interspersed with plenty of tits and fanny. I use fanny in the the British sense by the way. Its not the usual hidden-behind-a-merkin-to-save the-actresses-blushes fanny either, shaved don’t ya know. Porn stars just don’t give a damn, obviously. An extended all girl nude synchronised swimming scene that borders on the surreal being the culmination of this films utter disregard for the rule about pointless nudity. It really does harken back to the 70s in that regard. You get to see Kelly Brook in the nude (its the only way she can get parts in films after all). Which is nice because I consider Miss Brook to be the personification of female physical perfection. Even if Playboy feel her breasts need reducing. I have no idea what they were thinking but comparing the Playboy picks to the Arena ones and they have done a real virtual hatchet job on her boobs. The Piranha were far kinder. See how I got that tangent back on topic?

This is a seriously bloody film. I mean really gruesome but its comic book gruesome. People not only get graphically eaten by the titular (hur hur) beasties but in the big scene that makes up most of the trailer people die in many many horrible ways. Serves themselves right for being attractive and having fun. Some of deaths I am pretty sure aren’t very plausible. My favourite being the poor gal getting sliced in two by a snapping steel cable. Anyway the vast majority of the films budget has gone on make up and other physical effects shots. All the chewed bodies and limbs look disturbingly realistic and the most have spent a small fortune on red dye. Naturally the the CGI budget makes up the next big chunk of the money. The script was clearly way down the priority list but they have done a decent job of it. It is genuinely funny and has its tongue firmly in cheek.

Despite having a cast of big names fallen on hard times the acting isn’t anything to write home about. Most real actors in the film phone in the few scenes they get, no doubt they are just glad for the pay cheque. Accept, of course, Jerry O’Connell who really hams it up. His best performance since Scream 2 I don’t doubt, at least he doesn’t sing. The climax of his performance is him lying half eaten on the deck of a boat howling the fantastic line “They took my penis”.  The plot is stolen from Jaws and watered down just like the 1978 original. The film has so much parody that it almost feels like a spoof at times. Any film that starts with Richard Dreyfuss sitting on a boat singing ‘Show me the way to go home’ has some moxy. It also has Christopher Lloyd doing his mad scientist bit. The film ends with the best bit of genre blindness from a character I have seen in years.

The film is a 3D conversation as it was filmed in 2D. The conversion is frankly shit which is probably what gave me the headaches. Landscapes frequently have distant objects not properly distanced and some times heads feel weird in close up shots. According to wikipedia the 3D conversion process has been well received. This may be the case all the other 3D films I have seen have been produced with 3D in mind and not converted. I still think they did a poor job. Still 3D boobies and it does get props for having the best use of 3D when a character vomits on to the camera.

I really enjoyed the film. Sad that I have sunk that low. Its not going to win awards or set the world on fire and like the original it re-imagines it is destined to late night TV slots in the future. It is entertaining, funny and has boobs in it. It made the sparsely populated theatre I was in react frequently. People where laughing, jumping and being grossed out at all the right times. Though the most frequent sound was women tutting and snorting every time a attractive young woman got her clothes off. This film is dying for a drinking game for the DVD release. Piranha is the kind of film that ‘Snakes on a Plane’ would of been if the the people making that film had any balls.

I have been reading other reviews of Piranha 3D and they make me chuckle. As ever “The Critics” (professional and wannabe amateurs) just don’t get films like this. To complain about the lack of character development in a film that has Ving Rhames using a boat motor to chop up a shoal of prehistoric piranha seems somewhat ridiculous. But then some of these same reviewers also think Inception is a complex and deep thriller rather than just a rather straightforward film with some cool action sequences and a purposely ambiguous ending.  You know what? I have a separate rant on that subject brewing in the depths of my mind.

I’ll give it 4/5. It would have got 3/5 but Kelly Brook in the nude is worth a point. A guilty pleasure movie if ever there was one. Just enjoy rather than analyse it.

Last night had the pilot of BBC3′s new show Pulse. Sci-fi geek websites and TV critics led me to believe Pulse would be awesome. It was to be an intelligent, shocking and gory science fiction horror tour de force. It fucking wasn’t. Either someone paid them to promote this trash or certain critics shouldn’t be allowed to watch TV ever again, ever.

Pulse was boring and tediously predictable. Slow, plodding and unimpressive. An episode of Causality is more riveting. I actually took to reading Fark.com half way through it was that dull. Thankfully I had my iPad to hand. There is nothing remotely surprising let alone shocking in Pulse at all. Nothing. Even the final reveal was telegraphed to high heaven. I’ve seen gorier cartoons too. Call me cynical but I don’t consider people being squirted with a turkey-baster full of fake blood to be that gory. Supposedly this was a tense and dark show. It was certainly dark (the lights kept going out) but it was about as tense as my pectoral muscles.

And the characters? I wanted to reach into the screen and slap the characters senseless. Now I like a cast of unlike-able characters that do dumb stuff, I watch ‘Stargate: Universe’ after all but this was beyond the pail. For Doctors they all seemed to behave like the idiotic teens you see in 80s slasher flicks. Naturally everyone is gorgeous and is sleeping with everyone else. Is my annoyance of this a sign I am getting old or something? If you spot inconsistency in a patients chart and witness unrecorded treatments do you give the culprit time to fake the paperwork and corresponding computer data before you try to do anything? Really? Can junior doctors not use photocopiers? Naturally the somewhat petite female lead decides to investigate the goings on all by herself. And, oh my god, how funny is a trainee doctor with a blood phobia? Hilarious! Oh, how I laughed. Believable characters my sweaty arse.

It completely lacked any subtly at all. A section from my thought processes last night: Into the morgue we go. That medical circular saw seems conveniently placed on that table, doesn’t it? Oh no! A zombie! And he is attacking handsome-male-doctor-number-1. Oh no! Look an extreme close up of that medical saw and a mallet to the back of my head in case I missed it. Gee I wonder what it is going to happen when the whiny was-much-better-in-going-postal-on-sky doctor stops screaming…

This whole episode would have been the bit before the opening titles of a Fringe episode. But of then it would have had better acting, a more eventful plot, tension and some nice intro credits after it. Fringe would probably also have special effects that went beyond splashing red paint around, someone poking the underside of some stretched skin coloured latex and the occasional use of a butchers leftovers.

The cast is an inexplicably pretty bunch, as if this was some kind of US TV show. Why the pointless female nudity? Now I’m not usually one to complain about pointless female nudity and the actress involved was worth seeing in the buff but come on! Why the sex scene at all? Because it is BBC3 and we have to be edgy? Christ I hate it when people force me to take the same side as feminists and the Daily Mail. Not only that I would rather have seen Claire Foy in the nude (or that black dress from Going Postal mmmmm)  anyway. I guess she is a proper actress and above flashing her norks for my amusement. A flaw I find prevalent in so many women. Well I guess that takes care of any accusations that I’m not a chauvinist.

This is one of those TV shows that has been deemed good before anyone has seen it and this promptly exclaimed to be so once the critics got hold of it. It ain’t. Not unlike everyone decided Avatar was awesome before they even saw it. They should have spent the money on more ‘Being Human’ instead.

Twas utter crap. You will notice I didn’t cover the plot much. Well it is basically somebody is using a hospital to do unapproved medical testing. That about sums it up. I refuse to even give it the customary out of 5 rating. This is the last time I watch anything based on the opinions of TV critics and the last episode of Pulse I will watch. The fuckers made me waste time I could have used playing Red Dead Redemption.

The “Sword of Truth” is a series of fantasy novels made up of 11 books by Terry Goodkind. Thats quite a lot of books and as you would expect it makes for quite an in-depth story. I just finished it in about 3 months so I thought I would right about it. It recently got made into a TV series (Legend of the Seeker) that started off well but descended into dully formulaic in the second series. Still it does have these lovely ladies as main characters so it is pretty easy to forgive it for that:

It is quite sad that after the first book the story goes down a path the TV series cannot follow. The TV series is fine with the whole plucky band of heroes out to defeat the evil empire. When it gets into the stories where the main character is leading an empire and the scenes move from pretty New Zealand countryside to vast palaces and fantasy cities it can’t keep up. As they don’t have the budget for either the sets, special effects and the volume of characters required they don’t even bother and just deviate from the books plot almost completely. Instead it becomes too much of a modern version of Xena Warrior Princess. Which considering who produces the show is to be expected. Also Craig Horner has way too many abs for my liking, damn him.

But this meant to be about the books not the TV series! Even if the TV series is prettier to look at.  Read the rest of this entry »

Simply put this film is really really good. As an additional bonus The Daily Mail and its self-righteous readership will fucking hate it.

The plot is pretty simple. Teenager wonders what it would be like to be a superhero and why nobody has done it before. He decides to give it a go and finds out that it is a quick way to get killed. His first outing as a superhero leaves him with a skeleton reinforced with lots of titanium and duff nervous system. Thus giving his only true superhero ability. Kick-Ass can take a licking and keep on ticking. Which is lucky as he can’t fight worth a damn. As he progresses with his career he meets up with the real deal in the form of Big Daddy and Hit Girl and decides to quit. Treachery rears its ugly head and he and his allies face off against the villain. Naturally he learns what it really means to be a superhero. Most everyone who deserves it gets a happy(ish) ending and the good guys still win even if they have to earn it. It is after all a Superhero film. Read the rest of this entry »

Well I have just played through my first whirlwind run of Mass Effect 2 and overall I am impressed. Bioware really listened to the fans of the first game and cleaned up some of the minor issues that tended to niggle away at you while playing the original Mass Effect. Combat has been tightened up, tedious running all over the shop has been eliminated as much as possible and the very samey side missions have been done away with. Like the original it is like being in control of a Science Fiction film, scenes have a that feel of being directed by someone who knows what they are doing rather than being simply functional and everything just feels high quality. As you would expect after playing the original the game has an awesome plot and is well scripted and acted. The voice cast is enough to make a geek cry with delight.  Yvonne Strahovski, Tricia Helfer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Michael Hogan, Seth Green, Martin Sheen, Claudia Black and Adam Baldwin just to name a few. The full list is here. And the character Yvonne Strahovski plays take its looks directly from the actress too, though they have inflated her bosom somewhat for the character. Shame the characters never interact the same way as they do in Dragon Age though. Read the rest of this entry »

That was like some kind of weird anti-RTD episode of Doctor Who. Instead of getting a good first part and then getting a big pile of poop of a let down in part 2 RTD did it the other way around.He also skipped most of his usually end of series sillyness and gave us one of better ends he has done. Perhaps he used up all his quota of silly in the first part shown on Xmas day. Though he did reuse the old ‘planet in the sky’ idea from the end of last series. Everything just seemed toned down and the actors seemed to be left alone to tell the story. Which is good because the cast is made up of some really fine actors. We also got to find out why The Doctor was okay with sealing up the Timelords along with the Daleks, they had become just as bad as their enemy. Their final solution to a war they couldn’t win was to destroy all of time which they seemed to have borrowed from Davros in the last finale of the last series.

I love who it was who knocked four times.

The build up to the regeneration was fantastic. I liked how even as he was effectively dying he searched out his companions and gave them each that a little bit of help one last time. I didn’t even mind that he went to see Rose either. I really felt for the Doctor as he struggled against his regeneration because he didn’t want to go. Who would? Regeneration is not quite dying but it isn’t far off really. Most of the Doctor’s incarnations have simple accepted it or not had time to think about. This incarnation didn’t want to go. Which is the 10th Doctor all over, lovable, friendly, helpful, courageous but ultimately selfish. Even his self-sacrifice for Wilf wasn’t without a tantrum. This Doctor learn’t to love what he did again after his previous incarnation had struggled to come to terms with what he did in the Time War. Probably ended up loving it a little too much, which is why everything went a little caca. Ah mixing my time travel show terminology will get me in trouble one day.

It looks like holding back his regeneration has dire consequences for the Tardis and he still isn’t ginger! I liked the sly dig that the PC meddling brigade as he checked he wasn’t a woman after discovering he had long hair. Watch the regeneration:

No doubt the various Doctor Who internet discussion forums are already sharpening their knives to stick into Matt Smith’s back. They have already do doubt labelled him the worst Doctor ever based on his few seconds in this special. And when they see him punch a guy in the advert for the new series they will have a damned fit. Still onwards into the Moffat era and here’s to new catchphrases!

Geronimo!