Shameless Self Expression

Six mates (including Zoe Tuckwell-Smith as a girl with some emotional and psychological baggage) head out to outback Australia to check out some apparently rare indigenous cave paintings. However, one of the gang (a slutty blonde played by Krew Boylan) goes skinny-dipping and gets infected with something ancient and evil that sees her transform into some kind of weird piranha/human hybrid, picking off her friends one-by-one. Ever see a movie where you probably would’ve liked it if it got rid of the 70% crap and instead replaced it with more of the 30% that was kinda cool? This 2010 film from writer-director Josh Reed is one such film, and a frustrating experience. This is better than a lot of crap American genre films of late I could name, but by recent Aussie genre film standards, it’s a disappointment. I just couldn’t get around to having any interest whatsoever in these horrible characters. Aside from the lead character, these are terrible people who treat her shockingly...

Set in 2003, James Franco is Aron Ralston, an experienced climber and hiker out on his own in Utah, having not even told his parents (Treat Williams and Kate Burton) of his whereabouts. After guiding (and flirting with) a couple of lost chicks (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn), Ralston overestimates his own abilities and within a fraction of a second it all goes to hell. His little climbing expedition ends when a momentary lapse of footing sees him take a tumble down a shaft and his arm gets crushed between a falling boulder and a rock wall. He’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to help, and barely enough food or water to last more than a few days. With the possibility of death becoming increasingly certain, and his mind starting to frazzle (he even hallucinates an appearance by Scooby-Doo!), he starts to think about his parents, his girlfriend, and what he sees as the only possible way of getting out alive. A very gruesome, desperate, but necessary measure. It’s har...

Jose Mojica Marins plays a fully nude stranger who seems to have come out of nowhere (well, OK, out of the sea to be exact), and a buzz starts around the local town about him. Before long the townsfolk are divided as to whether he is menace or Messiah, with Marins performing what they believe to be minor miracles, as he becomes involved in their lives. The local hippies, for instance, seem to worship him. But is he just a naughty boy, perhaps? Or, like the alien Klaatu from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” , could he be from another world set to teach humanity a lesson? Moving away from his once-controversial ‘Coffin Joe’ (AKA Ze do Caixao) character, fringe Brazilian auteur Jose Mojica Marins offers up this weird 1971 oddity about a man who perhaps fell to earth. The result is lesser, but it’s watchable and weird enough for a curio. The entire thing is just too predictable, despite Marins definite screen presence, distinctive style, and some good intentions. Still worth a l...

The 1930s Hollywood romance between columnist Sheilah Graham (Deborah Kerr) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gregory Peck), the intelligent, and once well-respected, but now sloshed writer whose career (and life) she attempts to rescue. However, his alcoholic struggle and unhappy time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, make this one very tumultuous relationship. Two genuinely talented stars cast to their disadvantage help derail this frankly disappointing and unconvincing Henry King ( “The Song of Bernadette” , “Twelve O’Clock High” ) film from 1959. They actually have good romantic chemistry with one another (and these are the film’s best scenes), but Peck (who is one of the all-time greats as far as I’m concerned) is out of his depth playing a drunk in largely caricatured fashion, perhaps to suggest a loss of dignity, but it’s poorly conveyed and actually rather sanitised, even for the time. The equally well-regarded Kerr is simply too prim and proper to convince as a rather blunt gossip...