The Ain’t Rights are a struggling punk rock band made up of singer Tiger (Callum Turner), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole) who are living out of their van, which they siphon petrol for and live on favours and handouts so they take a gig from a friend of a friend in middle of nowhere roadhouse type venue populated by Skinheads and some white supremacists. True to their roots they antagonise the crowd with a rendition of the Dead Kennedys Nazi Punks F*ck Off and this peaks the tension all the way up to nine. Once they get through the set they want to beat a hasty retreat and are on the way out when they come across a situation where one of the supremacists has killed a young girl and together with the girls best friend Amber (Imogen Poots) they are locked up backstage until the situation can be sorted, and of course by sorted it’s in a ‘leave no witnesses alive’ way.

With nods to John Carpenters Assault on Precinct 13 and Sam Peckinpahs Straw Dogs, Green Room pulls no punches. The action is intense and bloody, the violence levels are extreme and it’s all played out to a soundtrack of loud, thrash metal and punk. As the situation escalates so do the extremes that the band needs to go to survive and it is this build from relative innocent musicians to killers which is the best facet in the movie as it shows just how some people are more than willing, some less so but all are emotionally tested in different ways and react to varying disturbing levels.

There is not much time given to the back story of the band members or the skinhead group but standing out are both Poots who is an apathetic badass and Patrick Stewart as Darcy, the owner of the establishment and leader of the group who play against type as cold, meticulous and evil but all done without barely a raised voice so it’s makes the performance even more chilling.

On the downside the final third of the movie is a little weaker, almost as if they were struggling to find a suitable ending but while it does diffuse the tension and mayhem of the earlier part of the movie a little it does not detract from what is a very enjoyable thriller excellently done on a reasonably small budget by director Jeremy Saulnier and as a whole the film is well worth a look. If it’s any indication of what this movie is all about, I can only say that it’s the first time in a long while where I have been in the cinema and one scene in particular gained a collective and very audible wince from the audience.

DJ Speaks Rating: 6.5 Out Of 10

The 1991 Point Break movie is one of those that is so bad it’s good and has many moments which remain features of pop culture so expectations for a remake were that we would get something similar however, instead of giving us an entertaining movie we get two hours of X-games footage that should have been sponsored by Red Bull.

Starting with a scene which can only be described as a parody of the opening of the movie Cliffhanger we see Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) doing some extreme motor biking when Johnnys best friend Jeff misjudges a jump and falls to his death despite Johnnys best attempts to save him. For some reason this incident motivates Johnny to sign up to become an FBI agent and for his first case he is tasked with investigating some robberies where the criminals seem to be pulling off the heists using various wild stunts. In a moment of genius Johnny realises that these criminals are extreme athletes who are carrying out a series of events called the Ozaki Eight, a set of challenges across the globe which are linked to the power of mother nature. He then decides the best way to catch these criminals it to infiltrate the gang however at the same time it seem that the gang decides to become the worst criminals ever as botched crime after botched crime leads to the interchangeable gang members being killed during each heist.

Edgar Ramirez can act, as he was excellent in the movie Joy, but his Bodhi is a zen chanting guru character who has no depth and seems to swing from caring about everybody to leaving ‘friends’ of his to die, Braceys performance as Johnny Utah is from the Brian Bosworth school of acting and Teresa Palmer is thrown in as eye candy but is given nothing to work with and as for why either Delroy Lindo or Ray Winstone got involved is baffling, I hope that their accountants were happy!

In the end we are left with terrible acting, no chemistry between any of the actors (but I will cut them some slack as the material and script don’t give them much to work with) and a plot which makes no real sense as is it overtaken by stunt after stunt that detracts from any chance the movie has to develop characters outside of their ‘Radical Dude’ take on life, so what we get is a big stinking pile of crap.

While the scenery looks spectacular and the extreme acts themselves look great, you can see this kind of thing anytime on the internet so whoever decided that they could pad this movie out to two hours without adding a decent plot or premise needs their head examined.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10

The witch is a throwback to the classic horror movies of the 1970’s where atmosphere, tension and a sense of impending doom are the factors that get under your skin. It may be sold as a New England folktale but this is one which has a very dark and disturbing theme and first time director Robert Eggers has put together one of the more chilling movies of recent years.

Colonial settler William (Ralph Ineson) is not pleased with his village elders religious beliefs and he is of the opinion that they are not correctly following the world of God so he and his family are banished from their village and need to start a home for themselves on nearby land beside a forest. At first things are going okay, it’s tough but they are getting by, although the cracks are already beginning to appear when their baby disappears while in the care of their eldest daughter Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), they believe it was taken by a wolf into the nearby forest.

This is the catalyst for things to really take a turn for the worse as Williams wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) becomes inconsolable and spends most of her time in bed crying, leaving the running of the household to Tomasin who is becoming more and more resentful of the addition burden and chores which are being pushed her way. While her twin siblings are constantly goading her with taunts that the black goat on the farm, Black Phillip, that they seem to have an eerie bond with keeps telling them that she is a witch and it was she who took their baby brother.

William and his eldest son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), try to distance themselves from the growing drama on the farm by burying themselves in chores and take to the forest, laying traps to try and catch both the wolf and any other game as the crops on the farm are failing and food is becoming sparse. All the while the atmosphere on the farm is building into an impeding crescendo of doom, it’s just a matter of seeing who will snap first. All the while William and his family try to stay true in their faith that God will put things right once they believe, pray and stay free from sin.

Eggers has stated that The Shining was inspirational to him and the similarities between the demise of William in this movie and Jack Torrance in The Shining are in plain view. Without giving too much away it is with eventual reluctance that William and his family have no choice but to accept that something unnatural is occurring on the farm and the movie then shifts to a plethora of finger pointing, deceit and lies as the families original pious nature is torn apart by self preservation.

The authenticity feel of the dialogue and the bleak setting all add to the atmosphere of the movie. It’s a slow burner but with the use of some jarring music and lots of foreboding it’s far more of a psychological horror than most of the modern movies of it’s genre and this is what elevates it above the rest. Couple that with the fact that it’s also a peek into the human psyche, how faith can be blind, how decision making gets warped under undue pressure and how the family unit, no matter how close it may seem on the outside can be ripped apart by traumatic circumstances.

DJ Speaks Rating: 7.5 Out Of 10

While the first Ted movie was a novel idea and gave us a couple of laughs this re-hash misses much more than it hits. Ted is now getting married while John (Mark Wahlberg) is now divorced and is even more of a slacker than he was in the first movie. While Ted and his new wife are trying to adopt a baby it come to the fore that Ted is not actually registered as a person and thus has no rights so Ted and John look for the best legal representation in town but instead end up with Sam (Amanda Seyfried) an novice, idealistic young stoner lawyer (insert joke here) who’s full name is Samantha L Jackson (insert joke here) that agrees to take the case.

I can’t doubt Seth MacFarlanes comedic talent and as a big lover of Family Guy I have high expectations for projects he gets involved in but for all the giggling the first may have conjured there’s very little here to warrant a laugh. Instead we get the expected list of fart, weed, race and sex jokes, interspersed with celebrity cameos and re-workings of the first movie with both Flash Gordon (Sam Jones) making a return and the same Giovanni Ribisi kidnapping premise being re-used. We also get Ted dance routines and musical numbers which may work well in short snippets during a short TV show but offer nothing in a feature film about a talking bear. It just felt like the movie was developed around the jokes that were on the table and then the first movie was used as filler to pad out the story for the remaining running time and the fact that they got actors like Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman involved is criminal. Although to give him credit, Neesons’ scene is probably the funniest one in the whole movie.

One of the other few vaguely humorous sections of the movie is where Ted finds an enormous amount of pornography on Johns laptop and instead of wiping it off (insert joke here) they take to smashing the laptop to pieces and burying it at the bottom of the river. This is probably the best course of action that I could have took with this film as well, I hope they leave well enough alone and don’t have us endure a Ted 3.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10

Director Adam McKay steps away from the Will Ferrell comedy genre to tackle a more serious topic but you can still see from the humourous moments in this movie that he hasn’t fully let go just yet. He has taken a movie which is essentially financial experts discussing mortgages, credit defaulting and sub prime loans for two hours and turned each character into interesting individuals brought together by the prospect of making profit out of a crisis. Each man has his morals tested, most of them don’t take the high ground, and have to deal with this in their own way as the realisation creeps closer that the gamble they took was the correct one and they are going to be very rich but that the country is going belly up, the most interesting of which I found to be Steve Carells excellent, and underrated, performance as Mark Baum who becomes the films moral center point.

Given the subject matter it was never going to be the most riveting of plots so keeping some level of balance between the comedy, the seriousness of the situation and the interest of the viewer must have been difficult but McKay has done well in finding middle ground. The fourth wall breaks and exposition given by some celebrities all add to the absurdity of the tale (Margot Robbie in a babble bath? I’m not complaining, but why?) which, while true to life, sounds like it couldn’t be put together by the best of Hollywood script writers. Where the movie falls a bit short (excuse the pun) is that it seems to be unsure if it’s a slap on the wrists to the fraudsters or whether it’s a black comedy about rebels in the Wall Street set up. So while part of you is siding with these guys in hoping they succeed another part want them to fail for taking advantage of others in a desperate situation. Either way it still falls far short of the brilliant Wolf Of Wall Street but that being said if you are looking for a cleverly told (if a little sobering from time to time) story, it’s a well directed, well acted and entertaining movie.

DJ Speaks Rating: 6.5 out of 10

The latest offering from Adam Sandler and his Happy Madison production house has earth under attack from aliens who after misinterpreting a signal sent back in 1982 decide to respond to the challenge and send various characters and ships from 1980’s arcade games to attack the planet. Now, if you think that has promise then let me tell you, that’s as good as it gets as the plot involves Kevin James as US president and Adam Sandler as his best friend, an ex arcade video game prodigy, who now installs home theatres systems, who have to save the day. It’s a pity as the premise if good it’s just that the story is awful.

I remember the days of pumping money into arcade machines so this should have been right up my alley but it’s a long, long time since Adam Sandler released good comedy movies so while I did find myself giggling from time to time, this was mainly for nostalgic reasons (like paperboy hurling newspapers at people during a city attack) rather than for any comedic reason. Peter Dinklage is the one bright spark in this movie as he lays the cheese on to the max and if Best Supporting Mullet was an Oscar category he’d have won this years award hands down.

It’s better than some of the more recent Sandler efforts but that’s not really any praise to receive so I can’t recommend this at all, not even in a ‘It’s so bad, it’s good way’ because your kids won’t get most of the references for the jokes, and I’m hoping this movie was aimed at kids because there’s nothing here for any adult apart from a little time spent reminiscing of long hours battling on screen with these characters in your youth but if you remember back that far I don’t think you’d be in the target audience age range for most Adam Sandler movies. Now pass this old man his pipe and slippers, it’s time for my nap and you kids these days don’t know how good you have it with your online walkthroughs and save points!

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 out of 10