I can’t really write a full review of Battleship as I didn’t bother to watch the whole film. Someone else in my house was watching it, and I sat down and started paying attention once all the awful standard exposition and boring character introductions (by which I mean both the characters and the introductions were boring) were over. I still saw the bulk of the movie, that is to say, the ridiculous schlock action and feel confident that I can pronounce Battleship to be godawful.

It’s a movie based on a boardgame so I seriously doubt anyone ever had expectations that it would be good. Even still, Hollywood really seems to be going out of its way to make the big budget trash it puts out worse than ever. Of course the boardgame was an abstract simulation of naval war and standard naval war just isn’t enough of a spectacle, so Battleship makes the antagonists aliens. I would credit it for creativity except it isn’t creative, it’s cheap and lazy. At least some thought went into the design work, the alien ships do look fascinating as they hop through the water like demented metal insects. It seems to be a theme this week that I defend extremely violent films like New York Ripper while taking family entertainment like Captain America to task for brutality, and Battleship continues that trend. The sheer amount of casual horrific destruction for the sake of spectacle is frankly stomach-churning. The same thing could be said of almost anything Roland Emmerich has ever directed but Battleship‘s unbearable stupidity, combined with the fact that it’s based on a fucking boardgame seem to push it right over the edge for me. In one scene an entire military base is torn apart by a pair of giant shredding spinner balls, blowing up helicopters and mincing groups of people as they try to run away. In another a massive Hong Kong skyscraper is ripped open and collapses as screaming workers try to run from the devastation. In a movie where the alien missiles are designed to look like pegs, hey! like the ones from the boardgame!, it just feels unpleasant to be fed this kind of mass destruction as cheap entertainment. In many ways it’s no different from blockbusters past, but the verisimilitude and detail of modern special effects demolish the abstraction that makes stuff like, say, Godzilla palatable.

Most of the actors aren’t even worth mentioning. Liam Neeson shows up here to cash a check and continue the seemingly inexorable decline of his career. Rihanna plays the only woman in the entire Navy. Everyone else is either boring, bored, or simply inert. The script is terrible when it isn’t busy being incomprehensible. There’s some genuine suspense towards the beginning, the alien ships being so absurdly over-powered that one wonders how on earth they could possibly be defeated. Then it turns out the answer is standard naval artillery. So much for that, though I suppose I should have expected it.  Battleship is the worst kind of lazy, boring trash and I don’t even want to refer to it as a film. It’s a product, a generic thing designed to deliver a modicum of entertainment to any awful dead-eyed cretin who wants to be passively fed stimuli without the fear of having to engage in any way.

(Watched via. I don’t know and don’t really care.)

I feel like most of the questions I’m going to bring up here are already being tackled in some form by the Captain America comics, so I resign myself to looking something like an idiot. Anyway, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is significantly better than its predecessor. I’d go so far as to say it’s pretty damn great. While the first film played down the gung-ho patriotism that one would expect to define a character like Captain America, The Winter Soldier functions essentially as an all-out attack on the character and governance of the United States since the end of WWII, with particular attention paid to the evolution of US domestic and foreign policy in the new millennium. It’s a heck of a route for a mega-budget Hollywood blockbuster to take, though I still have plenty of criticisms to levy at it, so let’s get on with that shall we?

*SPOILERS GALORE*

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I should preface this by saying that I am totally unfamiliar with the comic book incarnation of Captain America, so some of the things I complain about here will have their roots deeply buried in the original material, rather than directly being the fault of the film. Still, given the movie had plenty of chances to muck around with the source material I don’t feel too bad about criticising it for the faults that remain. All in all, Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t great. It’s reasonably good, and manages to sustain itself better than any 2 hour long movie about a bloke bashing pseudo-Nazis with a shield has a right to. Still, entertaining as it was it left me feeling rather uneasy, and the source of that discomfort is those pseudo-Nazis I mentioned just now.

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Continuing my spree of re-watching films whose soundtracks I’ve recently acquired, I took in another Lucio Fulci film: The New York Ripper. Probably his most unpleasantly violent and controversial movie, it’s a bit of a tough watch after the gooey gothic splendour of City of the Living Dead. Following a grizzled cop as he tracks down a vicious slasher, it feels like something of a return to Fulci’s earlier giallo works, though it lacks the more fantastical and stylised aspects that made the brutality of those more palatable.

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I’m currently going through a phase of re-watching movies whose soundtracks I’ve been rediscovering (mostly thanks to music label Death Waltz). First up is Lucio Fulci’s classic City of the Living Dead, his first horror film after the enormous success of Zombi 2 and the first part of a loose thematic trilogy that would be finished the following year with The Beyond and House by the Cemetery. Detouring from the stylised horror of his earlier giallo films and the dusty, scorched Caribbean terror of Zombi 2, City of the Living Dead represents what is perhaps Fulci’s first dive into full-on gothic dread, the style that would come to define his career in the eyes of many horror fans.

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Bruno Mattei has never made a good movie. One of the great deluded masters of exploitation cinema, his films slavishly rip off trends and images from others without ever coming close to understanding how or why they work. It’s that awkward, alien nature to his work that makes it either hilariously brilliant or utterly unwatchable. Among all the astounding trash he’s churned out over the years, I’d probably rate his batshit insane Salon Kitty-ripoff SS Girls as my favourite.

Standard Nazisploitation plot: SS officer trains a crack team of prostitutes to get high ranking Nazi officials to confess to treasonous thoughts and plans. The real joy is in the execution. A veritable banquet of terrible dialogue, odd cinematography, bizarre cutting, unbelievable overacting, and failed eroticism, all topped off with the most jaw-dropping montage sequence ever committed to celluloid. Yes, I’m making that claim and I stand by it. If you’re going to train a team of cheap whores to be the greatest prostitutes the world has ever known, what better way to show that than with a montage? Shots of women in spandex doing stretches and somersaults in a calm, pastoral garden intercut with the same women performing ever more strange sexual acts in a black room while a scientist with a clipboard looks on approvingly; it’s one of the most beautifully stupid things I’ve ever seen, and that before you get to the shoddy martial arts and the bit with the German Shepherd!

The icing on the cake is the lead performance by Gabriele Carrara, without doubt one of the hammiest actors in history. The vocal histrionics of whoever dubbed him into English only serve to make him seem even more unhinged. Within the first ten minutes he’s already eaten every bit of scenery in sight, the film itself sustaining on his manic energy alone. A pity his only other documented role is in Mattei other Nazi film from the period, Women’s Camp 119 (along with an obscure ’80s doco I’ve never been able to confirm he was actually in). The rest of the film is vintage Mattei, right down to the superfluous stock footage stolen from another war movie, this time because he either couldn’t afford or couldn’t be bothered to shoot his own battle scenes. If the movie you’re watching ever shoves five whole minutes of stock footage in the middle for no good reason, you can make a pretty sound guess as to who directed it.

(Watched via OOP Media Blasters DVD.)

The first sound heard in A Labor of Love is the whining whirr of a camera motor, the sort of noise that automatically sets your teeth on edge. It’s a canny move by directors Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman, serving to both to familiarise the audience with the sound and portend the role it will play in the film. By the time A Labor of Love is over, you’ll probably never hear that sound again without cringing in sympathy. The story of a group of amateurs attempting to make an X-rated movie, A Labor of Love is an astonishing documentary about the lengths people will go to for art, and the ways they negotiate their sexuality in situations they aren’t entirely comfortable with.

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A deeply uncomfortable psychological horror, Voice Over is the tale of ‘Fats’ Bannerman (Ian McNeice), writer of a popular radio drama that bears a heavy resemblance to the work of Jane Austen. After learning his audience only enjoys the show ironically, for its kitsch value, he has an abusive and humiliating experience with two young women he meets in a club and his life begins to spiral out of control. One evening he discovers one of the women who taunted him lying catatonic on the side of the road after a horrific assault. Rather than calling for help, he drags her back to his grubby flat to help her recuperate, and her presence further fuels his downward spiral.

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