Tag Archives: Marked For Justice

Give ‘Em The (Re)Boot

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Whilst the occurrence of the movie reboot isn’t anything close to new, I feel that just lately, it’s everywhere I look.

Heathers is on telly (don’t watch it), Tomb Raider at the flicks (probably won’t watch it), Death Wish (sorry but I will watch it), Flatliners, Lethal Weapon, IT, Robocop, Judge Dredd, Overboard, Total Recall, the 30 different Spider Man films no one asked for, DYNASTY for fucks sake. Training Day is a TV series (I’m sorry, Bill Paxton), MacGuyver, Lost In Space (maybe I’ll try), From Dusk Til Dawn (I watched it all, don’t be stupid like me). Mates, they are bringing back THE FUCKING MUPPET BABIES. The Grudge. Again. Masters of the Universe. Sister Act. These are all real by the way, it’s not just me listing literally any old film.

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Hackers – This is the end, thank you for calling

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The year is 1995. The only internet you have access to comes complete with screeching dial up tone, and pictures that load in 3 colours, one row of pixels at a time. The most technologically advanced thing in my house at the time that I was allowed to touch was probably our waffle maker. And then I put my chin directly on to the hot plate waiting for them to cook and it became the most hi-tech thing in our house that I was no longer allowed to touch.

When I finally was allowed access to our computer, it wasn’t anything like Hackers had promised me. MS-DOS was just green gibberish, no one tried to talk to me, much less start an argument with me, animated by HTML flames, and I didn’t descend into a pixelated cyberspace every time I turned it on. Also it took like 5 full minutes to warm up. The closest I got to an ambiguous and sinister online identity, was using a thunder and lightning emoticon in my MSN name. It was heartbreaking.

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Friday The 13th Part VIII – Mama, Just Killed A Man

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I’ll be honest with you – I wasn’t supposed to watch this film this week. In honour of the glorious Hallmark festival where you all get given a heart shaped pizza or whatever and I get a nice text off my mum, I was going to watch My Bloody Valentine, cos I saw it when I was small by accident and threw a teddy with a heart on it away after because it stressed me out. What I ACTUALLY wanted to watch was Valentine, the wanky teen slasher starring Angel off Buffy as a handsome lunatic, stalking girls who made fun of his thick specs at school, but it came out in 2001, and that puts it largely outside of our calendar catchment area. I’ll obviously still watch that when I’m done here.

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The Abyss – James and The Giant Nah Cheers

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Hi, hello, happy new year! We made it. Nothing exploded or melted at midnight on the 31st (unfortunately?), and we’re seemingly all here for another year of Tr*mp, vaping, beard oil, and all manner of other horror that makes it difficult for me to look at the internet in the morning. On the bright side, the Emoji Movie came out last year, so that’s at least one thing we don’t need to fear. Hopefully you used your time wisely over the festive season. By wisely I mean that you used it to consume meats, cheeses, any fake version of the aforementioned, and enjoyed repeated viewings of Die Hard, as well as ITV showings of teen movies such as the Maze Runner series, facsimile Shrek Kung Fu Panda, twee garbage The Princess Diaries, and Battleship. Despite what you’ve come to know of me, I don’t enjoy any of those things, but I definitely sat and watched them, and a load more cinematic compost, with a baked Camembert, some part baked rolls, and a posh pear M&S chutney. In fact I enjoyed Battleship so little I’m almost sad it’s out of our time frame for a review. The film was 2 and a half hours long and seemed to involve mostly the plot from Independence Day, but written by teenage drama students and located on a boat. Also Rihanna wearing a Hoods tshirt – the hardcore scandal everyone forgot because no one listens to Hoods really anymore, not even in the gym. All this is just proof of what you can get me to shut up and sit through if you offer me a nice cheese. Anyway.

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80s and 90s Cartoons: The Bad Babysitter

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Ahhh, cartoons. The nostalgic comfort blanket, the technicolor dreamweaver, the idiot box babysitter. I wanted to say “I miss good cartoons”, but I don’t, because I watch them all the time. I watch Transformers, I watch Thundercats, I watch Doug, and sometimes I watch Recess, although I was already too old to watch that when it came out and don’t really know why I enjoy it so much, so that doesn’t need discussing here to be honest. What I’m saying is that, in 2017, as a grown up lady, I not only care very little about what people might think of me spending my Saturday mornings watching old cartoons, but that everything I ever want is right at my fingertips.

As youngbloods likely of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I imagine you’re more than happy to stand behind me as I turn my grizzled grey mug up to the sky, and shake my fist yelling about how “KIDS TODAY DON’T KNOW THEY’RE BORN”. At last count, there are about 300 cartoon channels available to today’s youth. Nickleodeon, 6 different incantations of Cartoon Network, Disney, endless dreck available immediately on Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV. You couldn’t get through it all if you paused the clock for 6 months and never slept. It’s insane. Naked bears, pokemons, yu-gi-ohs, CGI chipmunks, nu-school Manga looking My Little Pony. I could go on, but I won’t.

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Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat: Annihilation – The Old Switcheroo

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After the abominable trip down memory lane led by the Street Fighter review, and a lot of time spent recently cranking up old consoles and listening to the Streets of Rage soundtrack whilst running on a treadmill (as well as the Kid Chameleon soundtrack, which was hard to find and is shit, but also now haunts my dreams), I thought it might be time to tackle another Blockbuster special based on a video game.

Mortal Kombat, if you know me, seems like a very obvious choice, so in the interest of repressed memories and enjoying something I couldn’t recite back to you as a one woman show, I thought I’d have a look at some other options. You can guess how that worked out for us all, since you are sitting here reading a Mortal Kombat review…

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Bad Boys: And some Skittles

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Join me, if you will, in 1995. I’m 11. Our household is quite heavily into basketball, Fresh Prince (even though we don’t understand half the sexy jokes), and beating each other up. Still.

So what do you think happened when we found out that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence were gonna be in an action movie, with guns, bad guys, guns, swearing, fast cars, and guns? You guessed it. Meet me on the corner by the video shop, guys. Friday, 6pm, bring your Skeleton warriors glow in the dark pyjamas (so we can match, natch) and your special fried rice.

In a bizarre ritual of which I never understood the licensing loopholes, before you were able to purchase the videos for real, wrapped in cellophane, with a bunch of leaflets inside beckoning you to purchase a crappy tshirt (“IF YOU SEE THE POLICE – WARNER BROTHER!”) or some orthopaedic shoes, you were able to procur the VHS tapes as ex-rentals. Not much difference in quality, I’m not sure how many other people who lived in Abington, Northampton were renting the Ewoks cartoon, but they came in a different box. The massive, weird, heavy, and, as we discovered exercising some of our bottomless sibling-based rage, quite dangerous rental box. The questions surrounding this were endless. Where are the real boxes? Whose job is it to swap the covers out? What are they made of that doesn’t break when you throw them off the roof at your brother? None of this was ever answered, but it didn’t matter. I loved Bad Boys so much, that once again, to save herself money, my long suffering mother purchased this movie for us ex-rental, such was the cost of keeping us in bubblicious Friday nights. And once again, I watched it every Monday before school until the next big favourite came along/the tape was worn down to a macroscopically thin band, probably snapping in the machine.

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The Eclipse – True Past Death

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“Then she knew. She knew that she was seeing a ghost, and she realized for perhaps the first time in her life, that she too would die. That her husband would die. And that her children would die. She knew in that moment, that she was looking at reality”

Is it a scarier prospect that ghosts are real, or just inventions of the mind? This is one of the fundamental questions wrestled with in the little watched Irish film “The Eclipse.” It is a film that focuses on loss, and how the people we love fill spaces in our world that don’t close easily when they’re gone. It is about holding onto whatever is left, even pain, in order to avoid forgetting, and how that can turn toxic and limiting. The film is a hybrid of a slow paced character study, relationship drama and horror. It borrows all sorts of tricks from the latter to ramp up tension and even provides a few jump scares and ghost sightings. Using voyeuristic camera angles, shots from inside darkened rooms and just behind railings or bushes, it gives the whole film a feeling of dread lurking just outside the frame. But this dread isn’t usually of the typical horror manner, it isn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or vengeful spirit manifesting itself to expel intruders. The dread is of a more human kind. When someone loses a wife, a mother, a child or anyone really, what do they hold onto ultimately to keep their life from spinning out of control?

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Thirty Five Years* of Lycanthrope Love – An American Werewolf in London

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“A naked American man stole my balloons”

Backpacking and travelling around the world with nothing but the clothes on your back and the stuff in your rucksack used to be all the rage. This is almost certainly why Jack and David, two clean cut all American youths and the main players in John Landis’ tale of hirsute supernatural monstrosities find themselves rambling through the wind-blasted moors of the North of England in the middle of winter. I don’t know which tourist guide told them that this was the hip and happening pace to be in the early eighties, but whichever one it was should be ripped into pieces, set on fire and buried in a deep hole.  Anyway, it starts to rain so they seek shelter in a local pub called The Slaughtered Lamb, which is a proper local watering hole for locals only and Landis makes this abundantly clear when the strangers walk in by ensuring that everyone in the crowded establishment shuts the fuck up as soon as they walk in and then stare at the poor innocents abroad as though they were a posh red wine from somewhere like Tuscany. Which, anywhere north of Watford in the early eighties, was a big no-no and in some places was enough to get you run out of town.

Soon enough though, it’s all laughs and banter as the teacher from Kes, Rick from The Young Ones and a whole host of other bit players accept their new comrades into their drinking club and all is going swimmingly until our clueless heroes start asking questions about the Pentagram on the wall, at which point they’re kicked to the curb, thrown out in the rain and warned in no uncertain terms to stay off the moors. As they walk out of the pub and the locals’ lives, there’s a lot of hand wringing and chatter in the pub about how they shouldn’t have let the lads leave while in the background there’s a Lon Chaney style howl, which despite being louder than an old lady’s telly, isn’t heard by that bloke from Kes who obviously needs a hearing aid. Cut back to the young Americans chatting about girls and what not, who being young and out in the world for the first time, venture off the path and onto the moors. The opposite of they were told to do by the more local than local locals in the Slaughtered Lamb.

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Scream: LIVER ALONE, she’s pregnant

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October 1996. Scream isn’t here yet, but it’s on it’s way. And as a slash hungry 12 year old, I have never been more hungry for anything. No video shop for this one. I forwent the sweet and sour chicken balls and the comfort of my own home, such was the level of importance. Written by the executive producer of Dawson’s Creek, and directed by the man responsible for everyone’s favourite melted kiddie fiddler Freddie Kruger, Just 17 favourite Skeet Ulrich, California Man’s Rose McGowan, and Matthew Lillard off Serial Mom were going to be in a high school horror film with blood, guts, gore, and a killer in a ridiculous mask. You’ll notice I didn’t mention Neve Campbell, well that’s because she’s terrible and Party of Five was a very difficult watch, thank you. I know you all have a soft spot for her since she snogged up Denise Richards in the swimming pool in whatever that film was you all found your dick on, but she’s rubbish. Regardless, hi, you looking for your demographic? Well you found her. Even though she’s 6 years away from being allowed to watch your film…

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