Victor Frankenstein

#StokerScore 1/10

I have been reading horror stories ever since I can remember. My Nan and Pop (Grandparents, in the Geordie dialect) had a little book of northern tales that I came across during a stay at their house outside Durham and it contained the grisly story of "The Lambton Worm". This, along with having the surname of Stoker, was like a gateway into all that was fantastical and horrific in fiction and I devoured every piece of pulp horror I could find and, with the invention of VHS, did the same with movies too. No movie was too Z-grade for me. 

In novel and novella form I was a big fan of Stephen King, Shaun Hutson, Guy N. Smith, Clive Barker and Brian Lumley, as well as the compendiums you could buy too. I never forgot the classics either, the ones that provided all of the inspiration. As well as dear old Bram there was Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and of course, Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley.

a doctor's worst nightmare that took a lot more than wire wool to get rid of

I was always aware of Frankenstein, even before reading the book. As a kid growing up in the 70's, the BBC would show occasional, late-night summer double-bills where they would pair a classic black-and-white horror from the 1930's with a contempory Hammer Horror. Such was Hammer's love for the classics, you could watch Boris Karloff, with the iconic square head and bolts, and then be blown away by the more visceral (Hammer movies were in colour) Christopher Lee.

I assume that because of the iconic nature of the visuals, Frankenstein eventually became the victim of parody, similar to other equally dark characters. 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein' was the end of the run for the character as something to make you squirm and cinemagoers would have to wait nine years for Hammer to revitalise the character and return him to something of his former glory.

The ensuing years saw Frankenstein's monster appear many times, but it wasn't until 1994 that we saw Shelley's character truly come to life through the eyes of Kenneth Brannagh and in the form of Robert de Niro. 

So how does this latest movie compare? Is it a new look at an old character? Well, it has certainly tried to take a different point of view, that of the maligned assistant Igor. But for all of that it is still lacking. The story of the monster, his creation and what it means to the worlds of science and theology, these are lost under overwhelming subplots of unfathomable revenge and unrequited love. It's a mess that even when pared back to the basics seems to lack a sense of direction, instead stumbling from one hackneyed scene to another.

Was the world ready for another Frankenstein movie? Well considering Universal's attempts to design a "Monster Universe" akin to marvel's superhero one, I have a feeling that it won't be too long before we get another one, whether we like it or not. Whether yet another telling of this tale can wash away the memory of Victor Frankenstein,  we'll have to wait and see. But if Dracula Untold and it's tacked-on ending are anything to go by, I won't be holding my breath.

I'll leave you with my favourite version of Frankenstein's assistant and the hopes that no-one ever tries to remake this

Spectre

#StokerScore 9/10

The much anticipated culmination(?) to the current run of Daniel Craig -starring Bond movies finally arrived in cinemas last week and I was blown away by it. Well, most of it anyway.

I should point out that I'm a massive fan of Bond movies and I've seen every one at least 3 times, so it's fair to say that I'm biased. I even love the bad ones. The ones that seem to get less love for numerous reasons. 

Where the question of "who's the best Bond?" is concerned, I have always listed them; Connery, Dalton, Lazenby, Brosnan, Moore, Allen! But on seeing Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall, Craig went straight to the top.

In an interview I saw recently, Craig was asked for the main difficulty with making Bond movies and he cited Mike Myers' creation of Dr Evil. He suggested that so all encompassing was the character, so many of the absurdities of being a Bond villain did he mock, that creating a worthy villain was the biggest task. In that respect I think this run of movies has done so well. They've continued to get top-drawer acting talent and generally left Bond's gadgets out and so with good scripts they've been able to look at the wear and tear of being the ultimate secret agent.

Skyfall left us with lots of broken pieces. M's death but Mallory waiting to take over, the potential effect those would have on Bond, are just some. Spectre starts with none of those things, instead we're treated to another exceptional, action-packed start which seems to show Bond right back where he belongs, on task.

That Spectre is able to still find new twists and turns, to outdo it's masterful predecessor is a credit to the writers, director and actors. As a viewer, you can't help but be influenced by the sheer frustration of an enemy who appears to be so many steps ahead and all-pervasive in terms of just how many pies they have fingers in.

Yet it is also the writing of Bond's love interest in Spectre that I found the most unbelieveable. There is a moment where we seem to go from one extreme to another without ever explaining the steps needed or the characters motivation. Small thing as it is, it's the reason why I'm knocking a point off.

If you love Bond movies, you won't be able to help yourself from enjoying this one. I just hope that when the character returns, with or without Daniel Craig, that they continue in the same vein, although how they're going to top this is hard to imagine......

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

#StokerScore 4/10

There was a time when the numbers after a movie meant the sequence order for a movie franchise. You know, like Evil Dead 2 or the parodistic Naked Gun 33 1/3. Obviously that was only if the movie didn't come with some sort of a pithy subtitle as with the Friday the 13th movies who soon got fed up with numbers: Part 2, Part III, and went with The Final Chapter for number four in the series before the flogging-of-a-dead-horse that was part five's The New Beginning. No, these days, the number after the movie is more likely to tell you which remake, relaunch or reboot you're watching, such is Hollywoods seeming lack of imagination. 

That being said, there are good remakes out there; John Carpenter's "The Thing"? was a grerat remake of a terrible B-Movie from the early 1950's. But of course for each of those there are also bad movies such as Matthijs van Heijningen's "The Thing (2011)"? Here is a movie that scores 35% at Rotten Tomatoes and which is, in my opinion, a pale imitation of a copy. 

Of course it all depends on your personal taste and first of all you have to come to terms with if you even think a movie should ever be remade because the first one is just too damn good, Sir! I hear friends who like movies often suggesting that even thinking of remaking a film such as Apocalypse Now or The Godfather is worthy of the death penalty for all involved, and maybe Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho would validate that argument. As I said, personal taste.

So it was with zero trepidation that I approached Guy Ritchie's movie version of the 1960's tv show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015). Here is a director who continues to write great dialogue, choose great casts and make great movies (I've deliberately forgotten Swept Away for the benefit of those last statements). Ritchie's recent success with the Sherlock Holmes movies assured me that I would be blown away by his style and penchant for cartoon violence mixed with great dialogue.

Leaving the cinema I could only think "a swing and a miss" and a few days to digest it and consider it further hasn't changed that initial thought. The 60's tv show had a suave, debonair lead in Robert Vaughn's Napoleon Solo and seemingly youthful exuberance in the form of David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin, even though they were both virtually the same age when they made the show. Vaughn was coming off the back of macho roles in movies such as The Magnificent Seven, and McCallum from a significant role in The Great Escape. The casting in this new movie is equally as iconic with Superman playing against The Lone Ranger, the problem is that there just seemed, in comparison with the tv show, to be so little understanding of the roles or chemistry between the two men. That the dialogue wasn't as punchy as is Ritchie's norm definitely didn't help either. The two leads were mainly wooden with only some brief glimpses of anything approaching fun. The villains certainly came across better and it was only with the introduction of Hugh Grant's character that the whole thing warmed up.

It's an ok movie and I've certainly seen worse this year, but I guess I just expected too much....

Fantastic Four (2015)

#StokerScore 3/10

I can only imagine that someone at 20th CENTURY FOX, you know who I mean, it says it right there on the poster, the studio who brought us X-Men: Days of Future Past, I can only imagine that their executive said in a meeting "...but just imagine the marketing opportunities if we can get this right!! We could have the rock guy built back in pieces,  and maybe the Human Torch could actually be a torch, and the stretch guy would finally replace Stretch Armstrong and, and, well we're still struggling for how we can make a toy out of the Invisible Girl, but hey, three out of four ain't bad, is it?" I genuinely believe this cash-in was more about the marketing opportunities than it ever was about making a movie. 

For example, Fox are the same film studio who were responsible for this...

and this...

and, lest we forget, this...

Yes I know this is the studio who made Castaway and even True Lies, but my point is that where the current craving for superhero movies meant that even Sony realised they were onto a good thing when Disney agreed to partner them on the next Spider-man movie, so bad was the response to the direction in which they were trying to take that character, for Fox to march blindly forward, desperately hoping to unite the FF's to the X's at some unknown point in the future is just sad to see.

In fact if you look at just how much Fox have been messing about with the X-Men, trying to get that right, and that they thought that people might believe this new Fantastic Four movie more if they reminded people about it on the poster, it reeks of desperation. I mean forget the fact that you've got Josh Trank as director, who created a superhero movie out of a shoestring when he made Chronicle, or the kid from Whiplash starring in the damn thing. To quote Lock Stock's Winston the horticulturalist. "Alarm bells are ringing, Willie"

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. Having only recently seen Ant Man, another example of the incredible things the people at Marvel/Disney can do, I really hoped that this movie was going to be more than the horror stories that were coming from behind the scenes. 

I'm glad I saw this on the big screen rather than wait for the dvd and there are things to like in this movie, there just aren't enough of them to outweigh the things that there are to dislike. And the biggest problem of all? It just wasn't Fantastic.

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation

#StokerScore 8.5/10

As a kid growing up I used to watch a lot of tv in the summer holidays. English Summers are not just rainy, the amount of water can be of Biblical proportions. So if you woke up to a rainy day and there being no internet or Minecraft available to play in the 70's, you watched TV.

Back then there were also only three channels. You had a choice between BBC1, BBC2 and ITV and the programming was limited to a few, quick, morning kids' shows as there was just so much to pack in to the schedules.

So it was that afternoons would see re-runs of certain tv shows from the 60's, including Mission: Impossible with the debonair Peter Graves in the lead role. 1996 comes along and we're introduced to Tom Cruise as big-screen IMF agent Ethan Hunt and, nearly 20 years later, the franchise is still going strong.

I say that even though I wasn't a real fan of numbers two and three in the series of movies, but 2011's Ghost Protocol really brought it back with some style and that over-the-top action has returned with a vengeance with stunts and a plot of equal complexity.

This movie was actually a solid 9 for me all the way to the end, the extra half mark that I've deducted is because of my personal opinion about the movie's ending. I'm determined to keep these reviews spoiler free, just in case people haven't seen it, but feel free to message me on twitter or facebook to talk about the ending some more.

Cruise is looking older, hell he's no Dorian Gray, yet he still manages to make the action look as realistic as it can given the fact that the missions are technically impossible. That he does a lot of his own stunts, such as the one in the picture above, helps me to accept alot of what his character does too.

I sometimes get a nagging feeling that I've seen some of the set pieces before, there is one scene that reminded me of 'Goldeneye', but with the resurgence of spy movies I guess it's only to be expected.

I thought the bad guy in the movie was particularly good, there are enough red herrings to keep you guessing all the way to the end and it is a rip roaring ride all the way. That being said, when you come off a motorbike, at speed, without a helmet, you do tend to usually wind up at the very least in hospital, if not the morgue.

Ant-Man

StokerScore 9/10

Picture the scene. A dark, cloud-filled sky seems to pour forth rainwater of biblical proportions. Sombre, foreboding music, coupled with our hero's facial expression, that depicts so much angst and inner turmoil, allows us an insight to impending DOOM for someone. 

This is not Ant-Man. 

The difference between Marvel and DC characters being portrayed on screen at the moment would appear to be the amount of fun that it s possible to have. I understand the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing, ironically a line from a Marvel character, but just imagine that you've been given superpowers, or at the very least tech that could lead people to believe that you have superpowers, what would you do? That question is somewhat answered in Ant-Man, Marvel's latest step down the road to bringing all of my childhood (and adult, I admit) comic purchases to life.

It's had a rough-ish ride towards the big screen, in comparison to the rest of the MCU movies. An earlier, much-publicised but never fully explained falling out with original director Edgar Wright was cause for some initial trepidation. That Wright's and Joe Cornish's names appear on the screenplay and story credits went a long way towards removing that, especially with Marvel's Kevin Feige assuring people that much of their initial story remained. It has also been saddled with being the film expected to burst Marvel's bubble in their run towards cinematic domination.

I mention these things for the simple reason that Peyton Reed, the film's final director, and Edgar Wright could not be more different in terms of their cinematic output to date. Maybe Reed was more manageable in delivering Marvel's vision of the character, who knows, but the outcome was, for me at least, a really fun superhero movie that allowed you to enjoy the characters, feel for them when things got tough, and ultimately leave the cinema with a smile on your face and with key images flooding your mind on some sort of loop. So as for the second concern, sure, it's no Avengers with action from the first minute, how could it be? We need to get to know the characters involved first and the film does that from the outset. I can only begin to imagine that the way to make Michael Douglas look as young as he did in The Streets of San Francisco was to have taken images from that show and cut them into the movie. But Karl Malden is no Howard Stark and the 1970's police procedural was never that bothered about technological advancements.

This movie was a lot of Fun with a capital 'F'. It contained no existential message other than the good vs evil thing, the action set pieces were excellent, especially when juxtaposing the size difference between regular Ant-Man and shrunken Ant-Man.The Indonesian audience with whom I saw the movie audibly appreciated the visual humour as well as the drama and I'm really looking forward to watching this again.

Jurassic World

StokerScore 7/10

40 years ago this year, the template for Summer blockbusters hit our screens. Jaws is as revered enough now as it was then and is getting a cinematic re-release in honour of the fact. It's part of the reason that I chose this fan art poster from the internet rather than Universal's own poster.

But is Jurassic World bigger than Jaws, as the poster might suggest? Hell, is it even bigger than the first Jurassic Park?

For me the answer is no and no. But that doesn't make it a bad movie. 

From the outset, a clever opening scene slow reveal sets the tone for a movie which tries hard to be original but ends up following the course of the first movie just a tad too much. The action and scale are huge, the trailer hasn't given away all of the movie's good stuff and the lighter tones, there's a great put-down that made me really laugh, detract sufficiently from the full scale slaughter on the screen (c'mon, this was shown in the trailer so it's not a spoiler). 

When we finally see the dinosaurs I felt equally as awed as when I watched the first JP. But the underlying message of the film, that we're always in need of something newer and shinier, isn't really adhered to by the screenwriters who rehashed a little too much from JP1.

That being said, the actors are spot on, with the disappointing exception of Vincent D'Onofrio's villain who doesn't really seem to do too much and whose motives are never really fleshed out, the new additions to the park are excellent and I'm sure John Hammond would have relished seeing his dream become reality.

Finally, is there an opportunity for a sequel? Well, considering the numbers for its opening weekend I guess the accountants will demand one even if no-one else does but I can't help thinking it'll have to be better written if I'm going to enjoy it more.