Over the last week we have had a bit of a Farnham Close Film Festival, catching up on some recent films courtesy of Blockbuster and the 3-for-£20-type offers in some of the shops. A bit of a mixed selection, including:

Stealth

Run-of-the-mill action film. OK up to a point if you can turn off your brain, but the ending is far too obvious. Too implausible for my liking really. Got a big laugh from me at the start when the titles said how a special US Navy stealth fighter squadron was set up “in response to the war on terror”.  Not very handy for targeting inner-city terraced houses in London.

Doom

Far better than I expected it to be. From a purely personal and nostalgic perspective I would have preferred it to have the look & feel of Doom 2 rather than Doom 3 but it did a good job of replicating the Doom atmosphere. Loved the 5-minute first person shooter scene towards the end. Nice extras on the DVD about the making of the FPS sequence and a documentary about ID Software and the original games.

Hostel

Gory. I liked it. A strange film which started like a variation of Euro Trip – US teenagers treating Europe like a sexual playground, or trying to. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Amsterdam I had to try and ignore the fact that the Prague streets they were filming in looked nothing like Amsterdam at all. Halfway through the film started to get darker and then just exploded with violence and torture.

Apparently the idea was based on a supposedly similar set-up in Thailand, and the premise is a bit similar to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s film Hard Target.

Much has been made of the extreme violence of the film, but actually a lot of it is implied and happens off-camera, which may be why it is so effective.

V for Vendetta

Brilliant film. I can certainly see why the original release date was put back from last July. The best depiction of a totalitarian state’s manipulation of the public since 1984. I particularly liked the line about how a government should be afraid of the population rather than the population being afraid of the government.

I thought it was a very brave film to be putting out in these paranoid times, with its whole concept of terrorism being in the eye of the beholder.

Scary Movie 4

The first one was pretty weak and the others were worse. This one is more of the same. It did make me laugh in parts, but not enough. Basically it is the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds given the Airplane treatment with a few other films thrown in.

I still can’t believe they managed to get Bill Pullman, Charlie Sheen, Michael Madsen and Leslie Nielsen to sign up for it, and the bad news is that there is a Scary Movie 5 in production.