Shameless Self Expression

Wheelchair-bound Fiona Dourif lives with her mother, and one day a delivery package comes. Opening it, they find a Chucky doll, and are somewhat confused but put the doll aside and get on with their lives. That night, Dourif finds her mother dead, obvious to us that she was killed by Chucky. Cut to some time later and Dourif is visited by her sister (Danielle Bisutti) and family, as well as the hot young family nanny. Apparently Bisutti wants to sell the family house and get Dourif into a care facility. Meanwhile, the murderous Chucky who killed Dourif’s mother sets about bumping off everyone in the house. A. Martinez plays a visiting priest.   Writer-director Don Mancini, the man who wrote the first and brilliant “Child’s Play” (one of my all-time favourite horror films) and helmed the disappointing comedic “Seed of Chucky” is back with this more serious sequel from 2013. Unfortunately, the results may be even worse than “Seed” and Mancini may have gone too far in the othe...

Ryan Kwanten is a city cop who relocates to the small country town of the title, with his pregnant wife (Claire van der Bloom). Unfortunately, any plans of easing his way into his new life are immediately cast aside when local top cop Steve Bisley (all gruff and steely-eyed gravitas) requires all hands on deck to locate an escaped murderer (a facially-scarred aboriginal played by Tom E. Lewis) apparently on his way to Red Hill. With the man armed, dangerous, and an expert tracker to boot, the orders are ‘shoot to kill’. That isn’t mild-mannered and somewhat naive Kwanten’s usual way of dealing with things (much to the annoyance of man’s man Bisley). A close personal encounter with the escaped convict sees Kwanten take a slightly more forceful approach, but aboriginal Lewis leaves him largely unharmed. It seems he’s more focused on the other cops for reasons only gradually revealed. It would appear that this town and its lawmen have a dark secret that is about to come back and bite them...

In the late 1930s, a drifter (played by Bradley Cooper) gets a gig as a labourer at a circus working for carny Willem Dafoe. He makes fast friends with resident clairvoyant act Toni Collette and her alcoholic husband David Strathairn, and is soon promoted to an assistant for them. Strathairn informs Cooper of a particular mentalist act he has devised employing certain verbal clues, and the ambitious Cooper sees dollar signs in the trickery of the act. He also strikes up a romance with Rooney Mara, who has an ‘electrical girl’ act in the circus. Eventually they leave the circus together and strike out on their own, with Cooper hoping to find fame and fortune with Strathairn’s notebook on cues for the mentalist act. Two years later they’re in New York and making a good living with the act. That is until vampy psychologist Cate Blanchett turns up to throw Cooper’s rhythm off with his act (which involves Cooper claiming to contact dead people). He meets up with her afterwards and Cooper ma...