This is going to be one of my most difficult reviews as even now I’m still having issues working out exactly what I watched but I’ll do my best. Set in what seems to be Imperial China we see Lei (Jacky Heung) who is part of a former tribe of winged people but who has lost his powers through a traumatic experience where his family was killed, along with his squad of warriors infiltrating the palace of King Zhou (Tony Leung Ka Fai) who has entered a pact with The Black Dragon and evil empress Daji (Fan Bingbing), to rescue the Children Of The Invisible Tribe who are being held prisoner. They are assisted along the way by a sorcerer, Jiang Ziya (Jet Li) who seems to have teleportation like powers. King Zhou also has a prisoner who is a grand elder that holds the secret to defeating the Black Dragon and while the mission is a success the grand elder is killed but not before Jiang Ziya manages to steal one of his eyes which gives information as to the location of a golden sword which can defeat the demon.

If that sounds confusing then it get better as when Lei sets off on the quest he is joined by a talking plant with a human eye, a baby with six arms, who transforms into a man and back again who’s power include riding a jet stream of his own urine and explosive flatulence power and a butterfly/mannequin cross who brings a love interest to the tale. There’s also flying cities, reverse aging spells, underwater kingdom and many magical artifacts.

Perhaps there was something a little lost in the cultural translation of the script but while the movie is full of action sequences and special effects (and works quite well during those sequences) the whole movie just seemed bizarre. Given the success of the film in Asia I can only assume I just didn’t get it through my lack of knowledge of Asian film but for me if you put this against something like Oldboy or The Raid it’s like comparing Blade Runner with Battlefield Earth. The best description I can come up with is a fantasy action comedy caper, think the 1970’s TV show Monkey and mix in some elements of Big Trouble In Little China. Also, I assume this will form part of a series of films as the movie ended very abruptly and openly in a way that reminded me of the finale to The Fellowship Of The Ring. I can only hope that if I get to see the sequels my knowledge of this first movie will help me enjoy any subsequent movies.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10

Colleen (Claudia Lee) is a young woman who is being pestered by somebody leaving photographs at her grocery store which seem to depict images of dead girls but without being able to prove that they are dead and with no body count to speak of the local sheriff is unwilling to take action. Meanwhile in Los Angeles photographer and former Spearfish, South Dakota, resident Peter Hemmings (Kal Penn) is reading about the ongoing trend of the ‘Dead Model’ look, which he believes could give him a lucrative edge in the industry so he decides to head back to Spearfish to find out more with his assistant and entourage in tow.

When they bump into Colleen and Peter realises she is receiving the photographs he has seen online he decides to invite her to his holiday house for a party he is throwing which causes friction with her stifling boyfriend Ben (Toby Hemingway) but she decides to go anyway and finds herself warming to Peter’s assistant Chris (Kenny Wormald), when Peter offers her a job as a model she decides to throw off her small town shackles, chase fame and fortune and joins Peters group in his house for their final night before they head back to California but that is when Colleens stalker steps up the stakes.

Horror genius Wes Craven is listed as a producer on this film so with a beginning echoing back to the start of the original Scream movie, albeit not as dramatically and you can see his influences all through this movie, from the naive small town sheriff, through the stalker feel of the killer interactions with the main character and the clever use of camera work to show us hints of what is to come, whether we realise it or not but unfortunately all these elements are done to a lesser standard so his name that seems to be as far as the influence went as the other fascets of the movie just feel all over the place and it felt like the continuity was all wrong so perhaps some pieces were left on the cutting room floor that possibly should have stayed in.

I don’t normally talk specifics in movies but there are two particular moments in the movie, which won’t spoil it, that I noticed as being particularly bad and feel the need to point out as, unless I missed something they make no sense and add to my point above. One is when Chris first meets Coleen in the store and calls her by name, now while it is possible that he spotted her name tag she never reacts to the fact that this stranger calls her by name. Coincidence, maybe? But given this girl feels like she is being stalked I’d have expected some reaction to the event . The second is a text conversation where Coleen is texting a friend but the person on the other end is not who she thinks tit is and during the conversation Coleen mentions the party and meeting up to go, to which the reply comes that ‘I’ll see you there’ or something to that effect but Colleen never mentioned a time or place for the party that I spotted.

The plot and most of the acting are awful and the characters are all throw away, even the main ones. There was no sense of empathy towards Colleen as she didn’t seem to show any over concern for her missing friends and her reactions were very emotionless all through the movie, even Kal Penn couldn’t save some face and seemed to be phoning it in as the sarcastic photographer. I hope his stuff was ad-libbed as it certainly felt that way. Save for the excellent cinematography by Dean Cundey who brought all his experience from his work on the original Halloween and The Fog to liven this disaster up and a couple of good death scenes, which I would expect anyway in a horror film this is not good and unless you are really a die-hard fan of the genre I would recommend you give this one a miss.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10

It has been a while since we have heard from director Garry Marshall but after his last helpings of Valentine’s Day and New Years Eve he once again brings to the screen a movie based around a calendar Holiday in Mother’s Day and once again we get an ensemble cast of characters with multi plot lines which start to click in together as the movie progresses.

This time we see Kristin (Britt Robertson) who is planning to get married to Zack (Jack Whitehall) but the fact that she was given up for adoption at birth is holding her back. She is encouraged by her friend Jesse (Kate Hudson) to track down her mother. However, Kristen has already done so but is scared to take the next step as her mother is successful TV personality Miranda Collins (Julia Roberts). Miranda is all business but in her search for a new assistant she is drawn towards divorced mother of two Sandy (Jennifer Hudson) as she feels her own guilt over giving her child up. Sandy is struggling since her ex-husband Henry (Timothy Olyphant) is re-marrying a much younger woman. The aforementioned Jessie is also trying to build bridges with her own mother who she rarely sees but this is proving difficult as her mother is unaware that she has married a man of Indian heritage Russell (Aasif Mandyi) and her sister, Gabi (Sarah Chalke) is gay and has married her partner without telling her mother, plus there are two grandchildren to throw into the mix. Bradley Barton (Jason Sudekis) a widow who is successful from a business point of view but is struggling as a lone parent, whom Sandy is taking an interest in.

So, you have a cauldron of people and personalities who all vie for screen time but because there is so much going on you never get a chance to really take a liking to any of the characters unlike some of Marshalls earlier movies such as Pretty Woman, Beaches or Frankie And Johnny.

Somehow all these people seem to be intertwined yet it’s never really explained why. How is Jesse seemingly friends with both Kristin and Sandy despite them being three different generations in age? How does Zack win a stand up comedy competition despite not telling single joke in the final? Why is Sandy such a nice person even though she is essentially being replaced as a mother by a younger woman? I know its Hollywood but give us some credit for having a certain level of intelligence and having at least one foot set in the real world. I can switch my brain off to a degree when I need to but to accept or enjoy this script it felt like I’d have needed a lobotomy. There is just too much crammed into the two hour run time for any real moments of drama, compassion or even joy and if there had have been a focus on one of two of the characters instead there might have been something decent on screen.

So how exactly would I describe this movie in simple terms? Like a two hour bus journey where the best course of action you can take is to zone out and switch off until you reach the end, yes it is that bad.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 Out Of 10

Starting with a family trip to the Grand Canyon we are introduced to the Taylor family. While exploring with his sister Stephanie (Lucy Fry) their autistic son Michael (David Mazouz) falls through the ground into a cave and discovers some mysterious stones and here starts the problems with this movie. Nobody comes to see where the autistic child is gone or even seems to realise he has gone missing and that’s just not normal.

We then cut to the families home life and Peter (Kevin Bacon) and his wife Bronny (Radha Mitchell) are shown to be struggling to keep things together. Peter has previously had an affair and Bronny is struggling as a former alcoholic also Stephanie is Bulimic so this is not a happy home and the family is already on the edge.

Then the typical horror movie clichés begin. Noises in the attic, moving chandeliers, shadows on the wall, constantly barking dog next door, the son speaking with a new invisible friend. The only sense of originality is the black hand marks that are appearing around the house that Michael gets blamed on. Despite all of this there is no real sense of dread as it’s all background noise to the main story of the family breakdown. The first sign that there may be something more serious amiss is when Michael seemingly sets fire to the wall in his room but of course this is only another step to the introduction of the native American spirits that are linked to the stones that Michael took from the cave.

It takes so long for the family to realise something is amiss that the movie is already nearly over by that stage and they feel so incompetent leaving the autistic kid constantly unsupervised that I’ve never hoped that a family gets possessed in a movie more than this.

Director Greg McLean burst onto the scene with the classic Wolf Creek but has flattered to deceive since and this movie feels like a rip off of so many others that to have actors of the quality of Bacon & Mitchell on board would suggest that somewhere along the line the script or even the movie itself was changed from the initial vision. It’s a ninety minute movie that feels twice as long, where nothing really happens, there are no real jump scares and there is no real sense of terror, it’s that bad. The only credit I can give is to Mazouz who’s efforts to play an autistic character is deserving of a mention in a movie where his character would have probably been better off if he had been taken away by the spirits in the first place.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 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

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

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

Two American girls go on vacation to Israel and end up bumping into a wannabe archaeologist whom they accompany to Jerusalem but their holiday is cut short when they are caught in the middle of a biblical apocalypse. Sounds like a regular B-movie horror film? You would be correct.

It’s good to see a horror coming from beyond the mainstream with this film being made by the Israeli directors Yoav & Doran Paz and the use of the city of Jerusalem as a setting gives some beautiful imagery in the first half of the movie but unfortunately once the ‘action’ kicks off it’s a lot of back alleys and dark buildings which look like they could have been shot anywhere.

With the movie being shot from the Google glass perspective the movie has a first person view which, while original, leads to some extreme shaky cam when the main character is running and this leads to a lot of ‘off screen’ action however this novelty is probably the best feature of the movie and could have been a great premise if done correctly. (Check out the trailer for Hardcore Henry to see what I’m talking about)

The wannabe archaeologist, who turns out to be the expert on the scenario, has only studied the ‘Darknet’ and has sourced all his knowledge from classified websites and blogs, but he turns out to be the link between the girls and outbreak that they are caught up in. However, other than the fact that there is a gate to hell in the city of Jerusalem, as mentioned in the bible, and the fact that the movie is set around Yom Kippur, there seems to be no reason as to why this event occurs at that particular time and while the city is in a state of lock-down there’s never any real sense of mass panic as you would expect from a city being ravaged by demons with little chance of escape.

So the demons suddenly appear and they do look quite look so credit to the make up department where it’s due and there a few shots a shot of a giant, Cloverfield like, monster that is never explored further and Cloverfield is probably a good example of what this movie is trying to achieve but it never quite reaches the same heights so in essence it’s a cliched ‘wrong place, wrong time’ movie with a few jump scares and lots of idiotic decision making by the supposed protagonists.

There’s nothing here to keep your interest unless you’re a die hard horror fan. If you want a good foreign horror movie check out the superb Spanish movie Rec instead, otherwise just watch Cloverfield for a better rounded movie with slightly less shaky cam.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 out of 10

Interesting concept based around alleged found footage of the Apollo 18 moon landing which NASA claim never occurred. I hadn’t read up on this particular conspiracy theory before and having done so it seems like it’s a bit far fetched to believe, but then again aren’t most of them. As for the movie it tries to be part Blair Witch, part Alien and part Apollo 13 and ends up as a complete mess. Here’s a hint for movie makers, if you’re doing a found footage movie then make it feel like the quality of picture is from technology of the era….i.e. 1974 and not modern camera equipment!!

If you have an interest in this potential cover up then you may find this movie interesting otherwise don’t bother wasting 90 minutes of your life on this.

DJ Speaks Rating: 3.5 out of 10