Film: Baby Driver

FILM OF THE YEAR!

Edgar Wright has become one of my favourite directors. I loved the Cornetto Trilogy and despite a lot of negative reviews I thought Scott Pilgrim was superb. This is a film that Edgar has wanted to make for 20 years, you need to look at his video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" which features a get away driver singing along to a song, and this was back in 2011.

Anyway the film is best described as a musical action film with one of the guys from Divergent playing Baby, the get away driver doing a number of jobs to repay a debt to Kevin Spacey. The action is superb with hardly any CGI and it's a credit to the vision and editing prowess that the film is synchronised to an incredible soundtrack that plays through most of the film. Baby is sort of autistic and is always listening to his iphone.  

A film that deserves more than a single viewing.

Film: 80s Summer Camp Slash-a-thon @ Prince Charles Cinema

The wonderful guys at Arrow Video got to host an all-nighter of 80's slasher movies. We got 5 films, none of which I'd seen before. 

The Burning is a rival to Friday 13th and has a very similar story with a murder loving creature killing teenagers in a summer camp. Instead of Jason who Cropsy, the camp janitor who we seen burned in an accident at the start of the film. It launched the career of the Weinsteins; this was their first film and it apparently did really well in Japan.

I liked this one, it was a suitable cheesy start to the evening.

Madman was originally going to be a version of the Cropsy tale until The Burning came out at which point it was rewritten to have an old woodsman attacking the camp counsellors. This one was cheesier with some really hammy accent that had us in stitches but there was plenty of graphic violence too.

This was the most entertaining film of the night by a long way.

Blood Rage was a convoluted tale of twin brothers; one living a normal existence and the other committed to an asylum after a killing spree as a child. He escapes and visits his brother to kill more. The acting from their mother was atrocious and spoiled the film.

This one was the most complex.

The Mutilator tells the tale of a college kid who is asked to house-sit his father's apartment and takes some of his friends along for a party, but there's a killer on the loose. This one was OK, much better than the previous. 

The Slayer was a really tough film to get through. It was too slow for a film showing at this time in the morning.

So, an enjoyable night and a chance to see new films, which is always good.

Gig: Avalanches @ The Forum

Avalanches were a band that I thought would be destined for great things on the back of their first album "Since I Left You" back in 2000, which was an incredible hip hop, mashup scratch piece of art. However they went quiet and probably split up. They reappeared in 2016 with a revised line up and released a second album "Wildflower" which is nowhere near as good but still interesting. Around the same time they did an Essential Mix which is one of the craziest displays of crate digging for samples I've ever come across. 

The band is now touring with musicians and a couple of rappers; Spank Rock and Eliza Wolfgramm who appeared to be voicing the samples, which was a little odd but it worked. 

The show had a great energy and the visuals were excellent despite having taken the record for most trademark infringements per minute. I went in sceptical but I was taken in and had a great time...and hearing the standout tracks from the first album "Frontier Psychiatrist" and "Since I Left You" was enough of a reason to have gone along.

Film: The Mummy

The first film in Universal's "Dark Universal", their attempt to create an MCU style collection of films using their old horror characters. This one introduces The Mummy with a cameo from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Tom Cruise kills his best mate and is stalked by a tattooed goth chick who takes a fancy to him. He doesn't fancy her, deciding instead to prefer a blonde woman with no tattoos that he threw out a plane earlier in the film. Russel Crowe is shoe-horned into the film terribly. The only positive is that there are some good zombie fights and the cgi doesn't give us anything as terrible as The Rock Scorpion King.

The Brendan Fraser / Rachel Weisz were tongue in cheek and enjoyable. This tried too hard and failed. I doubt we'll see a sequel.

Fair: The Hoppings