This reminds me of my teen years, when I was so captivated by the movies I would literally watch anything that was on in order to bump up my numbers. There's a day from 1981, when I was 16, that always sticks in my mind because that entire day's diary entry is taken up with three film reviews. It was a Sunday, so I'm assuming I was catching up on stuff I'd recorded on video in the week (1981 was the Year We Got A Video). I think the list proves that I really would watch anything, as long as it was a film: Raid On Entebbe (1976 - I always put the year afterwards!), The Four Feathers (1978) and The Class Of Miss MacMichael (1978). I would republish my teenage reviews but they're mainly cast lists ("Peter Finch is a good actor. Charles Bronson is so rugged etc.", "Rob Powell, Jane Seymour, Simon Ward (of course!), Harry Andrews grunting etc.","Is Oliver Reed in every Glenda Jackson film?"), and each has a sweet little caricature to accompany. Yes, quite the little film critic. The reason I mention all this is that today, due to it being too hot to work, and due to me being in the house on my own from dawn till dusk, I decided to watch some films. Hey, why the hell not? I also took the broken lawnmower to a place in Epsom where they fix lawnmowers and re-nosed a radio script I have to record tomorrow, although why I feel the need to defend myself for goofing off and doing "research and development" I don't know ...


Cabin Fever (2004) Inspired, obviously, by seeing Eli Roth's Hostel two days ago. I just had to check out his debut, and it was reduced to 6.99 in HMV. First things first: it's only a 15 certificate, so the claims that it's "terrifying" on the box are somewhat diluted. It is pretty creepy though, and, like Hostel, influenced by 1970s horror, with a big dose of Evil Dead thrown in. Five friends, including two nubile girls, head out to some unspecified bit of rural America to stay in a cabin; in panicky self-defence, they kill a man infected with a flesh-eating virus, and catch it themselves, one by one. There are plenty of gross-out scenes, including one involving the most nubile girl shaving her legs, and one that takes places during some foreplay, that will make you feel slightly ill. Beyond that, it turns into a fight against the local hillbillies. It's funnier than Hostel - it even ends on a gag - but whether it's saying anything about the ostracisation of the diseased, I don't rightly know. It's not a bad little film - Roth does a lot with $1.5 million, and the build-up, once again, is handled like someone who's seen a lot of horror movies.


V For Vendetta (2006) This is out on DVD next week I think, and I'm reviewing it for RT. Based on the Alan Moore graphic novel, although the old grump's had his name taken off it, and quite faithful to artist David Lloyd's drawings, this was originally a dystopian future based by Moore on a kind of Thatcher's Britain gone even more wrong, with a big debt to 1984, as per all dystopian futures. It's been smartly updated - by the Wachowski Brothers - to present a Britain run on the fear of terrorism (hey, that could never happen), with Natalie Portman kidnapped by V, the masked Guy Fawkes freedom fighter who intends to blow up Parliament. As John Hurt's Big Brother-type crypto-fascist leader appears all big on screens, and his suited stormtroopers go about their clean-up business, it's down to Stephen Rea's detective-with-a-conscience to uncover what really happened when that bio-attack killed 100,000 people and swept John Hurt to power. Hmmmmm. I wonder. It's sixth-form stuff in this reduced form, and yet taken far too seriously. There's little sense of camp here, even with V swooshing around in mask and cape and cooking fried eggs in his gloves. It's a little too earnest for my tastes. I've seen too many doors being kicked down by jackbooted futurepoliceman and innocent citizens being rubbed out for subversive acts. Brazil owns the patent on that. And Stephen Fry's Benny Hill-esque chat show host/comedian didn't work at all. Not his fault; badly-sketched character. (I'm pretty sure he wasn't a celebrity in the novel.) Considering how much talking there is in it, it's all spelled out in huge letters. Another problem, it's frustrating when a major character is in an unmoving, solid mask throughout; it's as if his voice is dubbed on and this creates a real disconnect for the audience.


Weekend (1967) "What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people." I was inspired to plug this gap in my collection by a conversation with Robin Ince. It's one of those films I've just never got round to seeing, and I certainly feel richer for having finally experienced it. Jean Luc Godard was really cooking in the 60s, just taking film apart and slinging it back together again, all the while making revolutionary polemical points about borgeois society as he saw it. In this, a frightful middle-class couple drive to the French countryside to muscle their way into her dying father's will (I think - they spend an awful lot of time at the beginning of the film talking about a detailed sexual fantasy while he smokes Gitanes). Along the way, if that's not too conventional a concept, they end up in a multiple car pile-up (one of many glimpsed througout the film) and wander, lost, until they are captured by armed revolutionaries, who also turn out to be cannibals. It's all honking horns, pulling people out of cars, firing off guns and the uncouth brutality and selfishness of modern folk. Deeply allegorical, it's also very funny and very disturbing. You spend all this time trying to work out if Eli Roth is saying something about society, when in fact, it's all Godard is doing. I have no idea what he's saying most of the time, but it's bracing nonetheless. I love his brash intertitles, and the way the music just cuts in and out. And I love the metatextual gags - at one point, one of the revolutionaries is on a radio and the call-signs he uses are "The Searchers" and "Battleship Potemkin". He's a funny guy. And the famous ten-minute tracking shot along an endless traffic jam on a country lane is inspired. Yes, Godard fucks about, but he's like Les Dawson, he knows how to do it properly too. He's earned the right.

Incidentally, I saw a total of 121 films in 1981. I was rather pleased with that at the time. I managed 144 in 1982.