Sugar and Spice (2001)

When cheerleading captain Diane falls pregnant and is disowned by her parents, the rest of the squad vow to help give her baby a good start in life ... by putting their cheer skills to use to rob a bank.

Your reaction to that premise is probably a fairly good guide to whether you'll like this movie.  If you think it sounds like a goofy bit of fun, like I did, then you should check it out.  If you don't, I doubt there is anything in the movie itself that will change your mind.

Anyway, Diane is cheer captain, dating the cutest boy in school, and is BFFs with all the other members of the cheerleading squad.  "These are the best days of your life." she tells herself in the mirror. "For now."

Alas, the sunshine and roses come to an end when Diane tells her parents she's pregnant.  She and her boyfriend find themselves disowned, and while they manage to find an apartment and get part-time jobs, they'll never be able to stay afloat once she can't work any longer.

And that's where the bank robbery plan comes in.

This is not a movie that takes itself too seriously.  The characters are very exaggerated and over the top, and the film's events are far-fetched.  But in my opinion, that's a feature, not a bug.  This is not a premise that would work with nuanced characters and realistic plans.

I do like that the film is almost entirely driven by female characters.  There are men in the movie, but they're mostly plot devices or window dressing.  Which is a nice inversion of how the gender roles in too many films play out.

A fun bit of nonsense.

Teen Titans Season 1 (2003)

A friend of mine is a big fan of the Teen Titans cartoon, so when I saw season 1 for a good price, I picked it up to take a look.  I can see why my friend recommends it: there is a lot to like.  That's not to say I didn't have some quibbles (at least with this season).  But let's start with the positives.

I like the art.  That's actually a fairly important thing for me in an animated show, though I am quite flexible in tastes.  I think the art and animation in The Simpsons is fine, for instance, and I don't mind the anime-esque elements included in this show, though some comics fans were upset by them.

I want to call out the character designs as a strong point.  They're clean and uncluttered.  I especially appreciate the fact that Starfire isn't sexualised (though they do drift that way with Raven, sometimes).

I also like the rogue's gallery they use: there are few 'signature' villains, but plenty of goofily off-beat ones, which fits with the show's intended younger demographic (yes, I am a 40-year old man watching a kids' cartoon.  I'm OK with that).

The voice-acting is also excellent, with the whole cast doing a good job.  The show also does a good job of giving the characters their own voices; different patterns of speech and behaviour.  Sure, they're pretty broad archetypes, but that can be very useful when you're packing five leads and a bunch of story into every 20 minute episode.

Where this season falls down a little, at least for me, is in its structure.  The opening episode is perhaps the weakest of the season, which is never a good idea.  It's also in the wrong place for another reason: it uses the old 'someone quits the team' superhero schtick, but you can't have a character quit two minutes into the first episode and expect anyone to really care.  We need to have engaged with the team as a team before that.  It's further let down by having the quitter just turn up again at the end of the episode to help, without doing anything to set up that return in-character.

The other structural flaw is in the season arc: it's featured in three of the first four episodes, and then only reappears in episodes 9, 12 and 13.  It should have been pretty spread out across the season, to my mind, as that would have created a better sense of continuity and payoff.

Overall, however?  This is a fun bit of light-hearted superhero frippery.  It's not got the substance of a Young Justice, but it's not aiming to be that kind of show.  If you just want some costumed hijinks, Teen Titans has you covered.

The Iron Giant (1999)

Five years before he made the excellent and hugely successful The Incredibles, Brad Bird made this excellent but sadly unsuccessful film, which just goes to show that sometimes good films simply fail to find an audience.

And make no mistake, this is a very good film, with all the heart and humour that makes The Incredibles such a joy to watch.

It's the height of the Cold War in 1950s America, and youngster Hogarth Hughes lives with his widowed mother in the small town of Maine.  A bright kid with a love of science fiction, Hogarth isn't popular with his peers, and spends a lot of time wrapped up in comics or movies or other lonely pursuits.  That is, until a strange object plummets to Earth.

That object is the titular character of the film, a gigantic iron robot of unknown origin and purpose, whom Hogarth comes to befriend.

Of course, there wouldn't be much to the film without some conflict, and that soon arrives in the form of Kent Mansley, an ambitious and borderline paranoid government agent sent to investigate strange reports from the area.  Mansley doesn't initially place much stock in the tales, until his car gets eaten.

That would probably change your outlook on things.

Anyway, with the tensions of the Cold War driving him, Mansley is determined to find and destroy the metal monolith, which he assumes must be of Communist origin, and he's willing to go to pretty much any lengths to achieve his goal.

The film has a likeable protagonist, a hissable villain, and a story that's packed with great little moments.  It's also lovely to look at: I really like the character designs and visual feel of the movie.

I heartily recommend this: it sets out to be a good movie on every level, not just a 'good film for kids' and it achieves that goal.

The Thing (1982)

An Antarctic Research station is infiltrated by a alien lifeform which is able to absorb and then mimic other creatures.  The 12-man crew must find a way to prevent the creature from replacing them all and making it to the outside world.

Short version of this review: unless you're completely disinterested by the concept above, you should see this film.

There you go.  Done.  You don't need to read any more.

What?  You want the longer version?  Fine.

Films that try to build tension and dread often falter on one of two flaws.  The first is that they assume that tension ends when you deliver on the threat.  They're probably remembering Hitchcock in this, when he talked about a bomb exploding being only a moment of excitement, whereas showing two characters talking, then showing the bomb beneath them, and cutting back and forth, could draw out that experience much better.  The problem with this, of course, is that they often turn into movies where nothing really happens for a long, long time.  And it's very easy for that to tip over into tedium. Yesterday's review is a good example of a movie that fell into this trap.  Not so The Thing: the script kicks off at a strong pace and keeps the shocks and thrills coming, without ever quite letting things boil over.  Good stuff.

The second common flaw is the 'idiot ball': elements of the plot that require the characters to act in grossly stupid ways in order for the threat to continue.  Again, The Thing successfully navigates this danger.  The actions of the characters generally feel organic and natural given the situation in which they find themselves.  They make mistakes, but they're believable ones in the circumstances.

The skilled artisanry of this film extects to the technical aspects, as well.  The effects still stand up well today, and show a ghoulish inventiveness I really enjoyed.  The acting is all good, too.  Kurt Russell is the lead, and he shows that he can tone things back from the almost goofily badass Snake Plissken of Escape from New York, really conveying the sense of a man just doing his best in a situation he really can't control.

This is good stuff from top to bottom.

Legend of Hell House (1973)

This film begins with a text card, attributed to "Tom Corbett – Clairvoyant and Psychic Consultant to European Royalty", solemnly informing us that while the movie is fiction, all the psychic phenomena lie within the bounds of possibility, and that it could be true. This perked my interest, because I hoped it meant that the rest of the film would be similarly crazy.

Alas, it is not.

Adapted from his own novel by Richard Matheson (who also wrote I Am Legend), the film covers the efforts of three investigators to uncover the truth of life after death by spending five days in a notoriously haunted house. One of the three was part of an earlier investigation of the abode where eight people died. I guess in 1973 the £100,000 each of them is getting was a big enough deal to risk your life again.

The three investigators are a physicist who denies the idea of consciousness beyond death, but does believe some sort of electromagnetic force may endure, and two psychics. The physicist also brings along his wife, which seems ill-advised given the apparent lethality of staying there.

In any case, the four of them settle in and begin their explanations. The physicist and the young female medium clash over just about everything, while the second medium - the survivor of the previous investigation - spends his time warning everyone else that they're doomed if they stay.

Soon enough, various scary phenomena occur, but they're interspersed with an awful lot of talking and theorising about what might be behind the falling chandeliers (yes, there is one) and other such weirdnesses. That works to the movie's detriment, I think, because any momentum it is building keeps getting blocked off. It also means that very little actually happens in the first hour or so.

The last act ratchets up the pace a lot, but it has one of the silliest weaknesses for an evil spirit that I've ever encountered, which makes the final confrontation more amusing than epic. I'll not spoil it here, but you can find plenty of reviews online that will.

Solid performances from the cast can't save this from being on the dull side. I think it would be a more enjoyable film if it were as gonzo as that opening text suggested.

Prisoners of the Lost Universe (1983)

My name is Adam, and I have been a Hawk the Slayer fan since I was 7 years old.

I mention this because Prisoners of the Lost Universe is written and directed by Terry Marcel, who gave the world the awesomely naff Hawk, and I am therefore pretty much incapable of being objective about the movie.  But for the next paragraph, I'm going to try.

This is not a good film.  The script's hokey, the acting's poor, the costumes and "effects" are dreadful, and the characters are a lot less likable than Marcel probably intended.  Unless you're a tragic Hawk fan like me, you should steer clear.  And that's why it got a "Not Recommended".

Phew.  Made it.  Now for the rest of the review.

OH MY GOD GUYS IT'S ALMOST LIKE HAWK 2 ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

The premise is admittedly a little different, at least at first.  Through a hysterically contrived set of circumstances, a TV presenter, the scientist she is interviewing, and some random guy she nearly had a traffic accident with earlier in the day end up being transported to an alternate reality.  In case that contrivance wasn't enough, the random guy is also a kendo master.

Anyway, time passes more swiftly in the alternate realm, so the TV presenter, who is the last to come through, finds herself alone when she does so.  She does eventually meet up with Random Guy, though. No, I don't remember his character's name.  Let's just call him Apollo, because he's played by Richard Hatch of Battlestar Galactica "fame".

And this is when the distraction of the original premise is jettisoned and we can get down to being "totally not Hawk the Slayer 2, honest".  Because there's a murderously evil overlord who pretends that he's a reasonable man.  And he and Apollo want the same woman.  So Apollo assembles a crack team to aid him in his struggle against the guy.  That team?  A giant, an elf and a dwarf.  Just like Hawk.  I mean sure, they call the elf a 'greenman', but if it walks like an elf and talks like an elf ...

Just in case the parallels weren't obvious enough, there's also the fact that the dwarf in this film is played by the same guy who was the dwarf in Hawk the Slayer.  And there are plenty more eerily familiar plot beats, too.

Sadly however, the music is much less cheesetastic than Hawk's.

So yeah: I had a blast watching this.

City of Lost Children (1995)

There's a sequence, about 75 minutes into this film, with a wonderfully over the top sequence of coincidental events that rescue the heroes from a very sticky situation.  That was pretty much the moment when I decided that I really liked the film, rather than just quite liking it.

Of course, that was about 15 years ago, the first time I saw the film.  So I approached this with some trepidation, as more than once a film I enjoyed in my 20s has turned out to be not terribly good.

However, I'm pleased to say I still quite enjoyed this, though probably not as much as back then.  For one thing, I knew the convoluted sequence of happenstance was coming, which meant it didn't have the same "Oh!  That's cool!" impact.  For another, the hints of romantic interest from an 11 year old girl toward a grown adult were more pronounced than I remembered, which was a little icky.  At least I didn't see any sign he had a similar interest in her, because that would be really icky.

The plot is that a (probably mad) genius created a series of flawed clones and other test-tube grown humans, then vanished.  The most intelligent of these creations cannot dream, and is aging rapidly because of it.  In order to combat this, he has his henchmen kidnap children in the hope he can steal their dreams.  Unsurprisingly, the children tend to have nightmares after being dragged off by this freakish collection of steampunkish goons, which doesn't do our villainous not-so-mastermind much good.

The film really kicks off, though, when the goons grab the three-year old brother of circus strongman 'One', who sets off to recover his brother and is soon joined in his quest by Miette, the 11-year old girl I mentioned above.  One's not the brightest tool in the shed, whereas Miette is an Artful Dodger type, so she's more or less the brains of the operation as they tangle with the cyclopean henchmen of the villain, run from a nefarious conjoined twin, and fall afoul of a man with a magic flea.

This is a somewhat surreal film, in case you hadn't guessed.  Most characters are deformed in some way, and the sets are quite highly stylised.  There's also a considerable amount of scatalogical humour.  It seems the film-makers think poop is quite amusing.

If you don't mind the film's occasional forays into toilet humour, and the fact you'll need to read subtitles (unless you speak French, at least), then this is a pretty good steampunkish science fantasy; not a bad achievement given that it predates the term 'steampunk'.