50/50

Last week I attended a preview screening of the movie 50/50 at Vue Cinema, Festival Place, Basingstoke.

The movie is about Adam Lerner, a 25 year old man who has a simple life with a beautiful girlfriend and works for a radio station with his best friend who complicates his life in humorous ways.

Adam gets diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, and the movie shows how he and the people around hime deal with what is happening....he tells his friend, and he uses it it pick up girls (although he hides how scared he is for his friend), his girlfriend uses this as a way out of the relationship, and his mom wants to pretty much smother him (despite having her hands full with Adam's dad suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Adam starts seeing a cute student doctor to help him with the psychological effects of the chemotherapy he undertakes....and they start falling for each other.

The movie, despite the sad circumstances is quite feel good...although there are the roller-coaster ups and downs everything does turn out fairly well in the end.

50/50 is rated 15 and in UK cinemas now.

Suck

Last night I watched the movie Suck on DVD.

The movie is about The Winners, a down and out band, who would be willing to do absolutely anything to get themselves a record deal.  When their manager tells them they are getting long in the tooth, he never realized how prophetic his words truly were.
During a road trip, The Winners radically change when bassist Jennifer goes off with someone one night (who turns out to be a vampire) and when she returns she is almost a different person with a sexually charged charisma that drives the fans wild.
One by one, the band succumbs to the blood lust and their "gimmick" and an incident with a radio DJ propels them to superstardom.
When an aging record producers calls them on being vampires, they realise that being vampires is not all that it's cracked up to be.

This is not the greatest of movies, featuring Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins and Moby (as a rocker called Beef!!) and features music from Rolling Stones, David Bowie and more...in fact the soundtrack is actually a lot better than the movie itself.

It's an ok movie I guess, it doesn't really take itself too seriously.

Suck is rated 15 and available on DVD now.

The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)

Today I watched The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence).

The follow-up to the "shocking" movie The Human Centipede, and centers on Martin, a night time security guard who is a big fan of the original movie and fetishizes the incredible skills of Dr Heiter...and wants to make a 12 person "full sequence" human centipede.  After kidnapping the people he wants for his project, then then goes about making his creation, but with the lack of medical equipment uses kitchen utensils and household tools instead.

Although the movie was shot in color, the movie is in black and white, Tom Six said that while he was editing it he thought black and white was much scarier.  It does kind of add an atmosphere to it, but I'm not sure it makes it scarier....after all, you would have to make it more scary and less boring first.

An interesting thing of note was that Ashlynn Yennie played herself in the movie and is part of the human centipede Martin makes.

The movie was initially banned in the UK by the BBFC in June, but was granted an 18 rating in October after 32 cuts to the movie totaling 2 minutes and 37 seconds....I'm not sure what the cuts were, although I viewed the uncut version and to be honest, I really don't understand what all the fuss was about....sure this movie is "worse" than the original (on many levels including quality) but I have seen movies with worse in that haven't been banned.

If you liked the first movie (which I do not, I also found that movie boring) you may like this...it does try to ramp up the ramp a little more but to be honest it really isn't that good, there was no real story to it and it just felt like it was made for the sake of being made.

Not a great movie... 4/10

The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is rated 18 and in UK cinemas now and available for download in the US.