Shameless Self Expression

Set in Northern Australia, five friends go for a weekend of cave exploring. There’s two couples (Jess McNamee and Luke Mitchell, Amali Golden and Benjamin Hoetjes) and their single mate (Anthony J. Sharpe). With a freak storm outside, the cave becomes flooded. Worse, there also lurks a crocodile. Meanwhile, tensions arise among the tight group, with new revelations revealed as they fight to stay alive.   Director Andrew Traucki’s “Black Water” from 2007 was one of the best creature feature flicks of the modern era in my view. Low-budget and with a small cast (three people, a croc, murky water, and a tree), it was tense as hell and utterly convincing. I was on edge for every second of its length. Traucki   returned with this 2020 genre film that pits a different set of characters in fairly similar circumstances. Amazingly the quality of the follow-up isn’t that noticeably lesser than the first film, to be honest which is a rarity. I didn’t like Traucki’s shark movie “The ...

Real-life black belt Ken Po karate expert Jeff Speakman stars as Jeff, a rebellious sort who left home as a teenager in anger at his father. Years later, his brother (John Dye) is a cop, whilst their father (Beau Starr) is the police captain and there has been no contact between Jeff and his dad since. He comes back home to his mentor/sensei and father figure Mako, a Korean-American who is killed by Korean mobsters when store owner Mako refuses to keep paying them protection money. This crime reunites the estranged brothers, though Dye warns Jeff to stay away from the case. Yeah, Jeff’s not good with that. Backed up by a plucky young orphan (Dante Basco), he aims to seek revenge on those who have wronged him and his sensei. James Hong plays a powerful Korean gangster, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Prof. Toru Tanaka play henchmen, and Clyde Kusatsu plays a cop.   In the 80s and 90s, you had Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and to an extent Mel Gibson sitting atop the blockbuster action movi...

Several years after the events of the previous “Godzilla II: King of the Monsters” , Kong is being monitored by Monarch, who keep him happy in an artificial rendering of Skull Island. Kaylee Hottle plays the deaf adopted daughter of Monarch employee Rebecca Hall, and the young girl seems to have a special connection with Kong through sign language. Meanwhile, Godzilla attacks a cybernetics plant where part-time conspiracy theorist Brian Tyree Henry works. Millie Bobby Brown is back as Madison Russell, who along with her Kiwi friend (Julian Dennison) avidly follow Henry’s monster-obsessed podcast and are concerned by his latest rants about Godzilla suddenly turning heel. Then there’s Apex Cybernetics CEO Demian Bichir, who brings in former Monarch scientist and Hollow Earth theorist Alexander Skarsgård to lead a team to travel to the entrance of the Hollow Earth. In order to get there, Skarsgård persuades Hall to let Kong guide them to the entrance, hoping that he will have ancestral me...

Boone (Craig Sheffer) is troubled by vivid nightmares of a place called Midian that seem to be calling to him, a place filled with demonic creatures. His psychiatrist Dr. Decker (David Cronenberg) assures Boone that Midian isn’t real and that Boone is the one responsible for a series of serial killings. After being committed to an asylum, Boone escapes and goes in search of Midian, ‘where the monsters live’, but before long the local law have taken up arms and headed in search of Midian too, putting its inhabitants at serious risk. Anne Bobby plays Boone’s worried main squeeze, Hugh Quarshie and Charles Haid are the gun-happy local law, and the inhabitants of Midian are played under heavy make-up by the likes of Hugh Ross, Oliver Parker, Nicholas Vince, and as their resident sage Doug Bradley.   I can admire “Hellraiser” but I’ve always found it a touch too chilly for my horror/fantasy tastes and much prefer this imaginative 1990 horror/fantasy from writer-director-author Cliv...

Drunken fool named Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-shik) wakes up after a night of drunken idiocy to find himself locked up in a room/prison, for reasons and by persons unknown. Fifteen years later he is released, and spends every waking moment trying to work out who the sonofabitch behind this is, and why. Kang Hye-Jeong plays the pretty Mido, a young chef who takes Oh Dae-Su in.   Overrated, but occasionally exciting and confronting 2003 Park Chan-Wook ( “Joint Security Area” , “Thirst” , “The Handmaiden” ) crime-revenge story from South Korea is too slow and uninvolving to work entirely, though the twist is one of the most morbid and disturbing things I’ve ever seen. As for the live octopus consumption…I didn’t see what the fuss was about. Yeah, it seemed unappetising with all the crawling about, and no one should be consuming a live ‘anything’ in my view, but it was a pretty darn small octopus and not that gross. Based on reputation I was thinking he was going to be forcibly fed the oc...