Frank Darabont (of Shawshank Redemption fame) earned his directorial chops on this superior TV movie. Small town boy made good Clint Goodman (Tim Matheson) builds a dream house in the sticks for his pouting wife Joanna (Jennifer Jason Leigh). But she yearns for the big city and takes up with Cortland van Owen (William Atherton), a slimy doctor. He persuades Joanna to poison Clint, so they can sell the house, cash in his business and head off for a better life.

Too busy fishing and whittling to pick up on Joanna’s murderous vibes, Clint washes down his T-bone steak with a glass of poisoned wine, only to wake up a few days later in his coffin. This isn’t, though, the claustrophobic tale the title might lead you to expect, because he’s soon clawing his way out and seeking vengeance.

The result is a pleasant, civilized thriller that hides its implausibilities under solid, old-fashioned, TV movie values. It should be said that those implausibilities are considerable. When Clint drops dead in the prime of his redneck life, his best buddy the sheriff (a mumbling, sleepy performance by cult country and western crooner Hoyt Axton) vaguely toys with the idea of an autopsy, but lets Cortland talk him out of it. Later, when Clint’s gouged-open grave is discovered, the same incredibly incompetent lawman instructs the undertaker, for no good reason, to fill in the grave and tell no one.

While you’re watching it, though, the story doesn’t feel as stupid as it actually is. A lot of the credit for this goes to Mark Patrick Carducci’s engagingly catty script, while Darabont’s calm and measured approach to the material is another asset. The film also boasts fine performances from a trio of actors who weren’t always lucky enough to get such plum roles. The sturdy Matheson keeps on top of a character arc than has more than a few unlikely kinks. Atherton – in the Eighties, the go-to guy for slime – revels in his role as the Machievellian Cortland, his beady eyes ever-watchful for the next opportunity to stab someone in the back. Best of all, though, is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who shoehorns surprisingly well into the role of femme fatale. Darabont manages to smooth out her usual twitches and mannerisms and win a performance from her that has some of the cool perversity of Carroll Baker. Together, she and Atherton have all the best moments and it’s their plotting and sparring which is the spine of the movie.

Although made in 1990, Buried Alive has the feel of the TV movies on which Spielberg cut his teeth almost two decades earlier. Like the best of those movies, it makes a virtue of an absence of 18-certificate nudity and gore to deliver a cozily tasteful diversion, leavened with intriguing characterization and the odd subversive touch (the title refers literally to Clint but metaphorically to Joanna, suffocating in small town purgatory). If you’re a fan of vintage American TV movies or EC comic-style tall tales, you could to far worse than give this DVD a spin.

Buried Alive is finally released in the UK on DVD October 17th 

Director Catherine Hardwicke once had a promising career ahead of her. Debuting with the acclaimed film Thirteen she then went on to direct the underrated Lords of Dogtown, then the under seen The Nativity Story before she moved on to the first instalment in the Twilight franchise. Twilight was a massive success; it also set the template for that series po-faced and humourless direction for future sequels. Sadly the talent that made Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown seems to have been pigeonholed into making mass appeal teen romances and she is completely the wrong choice for this re-telling of Red Riding Hood. As a result this film is a mess that collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

Some time in the 1300’s we meet Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) in the small town of Daggerhorn. Valerie is deeply in love with Peter (Shiloh Fernandez – awful) and has been since childhood much to the disapproval of her mother Suzette (Virginia Madsen) who would prefer she marry rich blacksmith Henry (Max Irons – even worse). This love triangle takes place against the backdrop of a town under constant threat from a werewolf, who attacks every now and then. The werewolf’s latest attack ends in the death of Valerie’s sister and brings to the fore some secrets that Suzette has been keeping from Valerie and her father. Gary Oldman’s wonderfully over the top Solomon rolls into town with his band of werewolf hunters and sets the town further on edge with his suspicions cast on everyone and his extreme methods. Around this time Valerie’s grandma (Julie Christie) gives Valerie the titular red cape and starts to act suspicious (what big eyes you have etc). Despite many opportunities the werewolf seems reluctant to kill Valerie and has some kind of psychic connection to her, revealing itself to be someone that Valerie knows well. This then leads Solomon to proclaim Valerie is a witch.

Red Riding Hood is one of those frustrating films that could have been good in the hands of another director with experience in this sort of thing. The script also needed a bit of a polish before they went into production. The elements were there to tell a cracking gothic yarn but Hardwicke seems unable to commit to making the film go in any of the directions it seems to be pulling in. It’s not violent or twisted enough to be a bold re-telling of a fairy tale and it’s not childish enough to appeal to the masses. The romantic aspect of the film is perhaps the worst part of all, never convincing with the love triangle played out by three planks of wood. It feels oddly raunchy for a 12A film and it seems like Hardwicke really wants to film some steamy scenes but these get stopped just as they get good. The early scenes in this film play out like some kind of medieval soap opera, with someone revealing someone else is not someone’s father and the contrived romance. The acting is woeful from pretty much everyone. Shiloh Fernandez is your basic hot poor kid with a smouldering broodiness but that is about it. Max Irons as his love rival will probably never work again, his performance here is amongst the worst I have ever seen in a mainstream film. He comes across like a kid who has suddenly been shoved on to the school stage in the spotlight and struggles to remember his lines. Even quality thespians like Virginia Madsen, Michael Hogan and Lukas Haas give lacklustre pantomime level performances. It’s basically like Hollyoaks with werewolves. Thank god then for Gary Oldman who seems to be the only one who knows how ridiculous this all is and gets his teeth into his role as witch finder general. There is a pretty good drinking game here somewhere where you have to down your drink every time he reminds us that he killed his werewolf wife. All of these elements work against the film because they don’t seem to be in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing when they could have been turned into strengths.

Maybe I have been spoiled at a young age from watching An American Werewolf in London because I have always had the opinion that the best way to do a werewolf is through practical effects. So I was genuinely surprised that the wolf effects here are quite decent. Yeah the creature is obviously CGI but it works better than the wolves in the Twilight or Underworld films. I would have loved to have seen the wolf cause more carnage than it does though, for all the fear that the townsfolk have of attacks it doesn’t seem to do much damage. Another issue is the setting of this film, set in a small village in the middle of a forest; the production designers seem to want to imitate Tim Burton but again don’t go far enough. Most of the time it’s completely obvious that the whole set is on a sound stage where it’s supposed to be mid winter in the wilderness.

Now by reading the above you may think that I didn’t enjoy this film. I have to give it credit for being so bad it’s good though, and I was entertained the entire time. Part of the fun was trying to figure out who the werewolf is and spotting all the stupid mistakes that they made when making this thing. The film may yet become a camp classic because of this or it may well be remembered as the point where the Twilight bubble burst and studios stopped trying to make shallow rubbish with pretty talentless black holes.

If you are 14 and your hormones are going crazy then watch this film by all means. If you are over 20 and looking for something more skillfully done then avoid this one like the Black Death unless you are having some friends over for drinks.

Extras: Alternate Cut and Theatrical Cut, Casting featurettes, Making of, Interviews, Rehearsal footage, Trailer, Music video and Deleted Scenes.

Red Riding Hood is out now on DVD/Blu-ray

Hey kids, don’t you just hate it when you go off for a weekend break with your bessie mates – all the buff hunky guys and the moody pouty girls – and you get home to find your country’s been invaded by pesky foreigners? Total bummer. This is the frankly-unlikely scenario of clunkily-titled teen appeal Aussie action flick ‘Tomorrow When the War Began’ apparently based on a beloved series of novels by John Marsden and starring squeaky clean up-and-comers Rachel Hurd-Wood (‘Dorian Grey’, ‘Peter Pan’), Caitlin Stasey (‘Neighbours’) and Lincoln Lewis (‘Home and Away‘). Trust me, I’ve never heard of any of ‘em either but Press releases are handy animals…

Anyway, if you can get your head around what seems like a fairly ludicrous concept, ‘Tomorrow…’, which slunk quietly into UK cinemas earlier this year before slinking off again (despite being the biggest grosser in Australian cinemas in 2010), is a half decent action flick, albeit one aimed at a ‘Twilight’ generation who aren’t much into pouting vampires and who prefer something a little gutsier. Returning from an idyllic weekend in the middle of nowhere in Australia, our eight teen High School dreams find a promisingly post-apocalyptic environment; everyone’s disappeared, phones, TV and even t’internet are down. The truth’s a bit more prosaic and considerably more far-fetched than the end of the world as we know it. It seems that, of all places, Australia has been invaded by, of all countries, China (the script doesn’t make this clear; everyone’s of the view that it doesn’t really matter who’s invaded them but most of the troops we see are distinctly Oriental). The population’s been rounded up and kept in an internment camp and our young heroes set about trying to stop the invading forces progressing further inland armed with nothing much more than their wits and a dog.

Taken at face value there’s much to recommend in this throwaway little movie. Writer/director Stuart Beattie has an eye for light action sequences (plenty of explosions), his script is workmanlike if perfunctory and he teases decent performances from his enthusiastic young cast. The problem is the movie falls apart if you just stop and think about it. There’s no discernible reason why China would invade Australia (unless this is explored in later books in the series and maybe in the next film – two sequels are on the way), we’re not told how the outside world has reacted to this act of war (at the end of the film several weeks have passed and our heroes still seem to be the only resistance movement and there’s been no word from the rest of the world) and the invading force are just that – a force, a mass of black-clad soldiers trundling about in jeeps and tanks shooting people and blowing houses up for no readily-obvious reason.

If you’re in the mood for some fairly brainless and largely-bloodless action fun, ’Tomorrow When the War Began’, a sort of under age ‘Red Dawn’, is an agreeable way of wasting ninety-odd minutes. Although the film misses the brio and chutzpah the big Hollywood bucks bring to high concept stuff like this, it’s good to see a competent explosive action movie hailing from the other side of the world and while the sequel isn’t exactly at the top of my ‘can’t wait to see’ list, it’s refreshing to see a new teen franchise with a bit more guts than the insipid and never-ending ‘Twilight’ stories.

Special features: Commentaries, making of, character profiles, alternative ending, FX featurette, interview with book series author John Marsden.

Tomorrow When the War Began is out now on DVD/Blu-ray

Over the last few years the Australian film industry has undergone something of a revival. We have had great drama (Animal Kingdom) great action (Tomorrow, When the War Began) and great horror (The Loved Ones, Wolf Creek). So it’s a shame to report that Uninhabited represents something of a step back for Australian film. It seems to have a lot of the right elements; it just can’t make them work as a whole and represents a bit of a missed opportunity.

The film starts with young lovers Beth (Geraldine Hakewill) and Harry (James Franco look-alike Henry James) making their way to a deserted island off the coast of North East Australia. The island is surrounded by a coral reef hiding lots of deadly creatures and the man on the boat has a look that says he knows more than he is letting on, so you know this won’t end well. Beth and Harry are happy with just each other for company at first and spend their time relaxing and fishing. Then they start to notice strange footprints around them when they awake and someone has filmed them on their video camera whilst they slept in their tent. To make matters worse a couple of low lives show up with machine guns which they use to fish and they seem to have very unpleasant intentions towards Beth. The young lovers discover an abandoned cabin in the jungle and learn of a slave girl who was raped and tortured by seven men and then has taken revenge on anyone who stayed on the island too long in years past. It seems that the woman’s spirit is still a part of the island and Beth and Harry could be next.

There isn’t a problem with the setting; in fact it’s kind of unique. How many horror films in recent years can you mention that take place in full blue sky and no shade daylight? The vengeful ghost is not a new idea, it’s been done before and better in The Ring and any other Japanese film you care to mention from recent years. There is still room to bring something new to this genre as the Spanish keep proving this each year with superb ghost stories. The problem with this film is a woeful script backed up by two of the most shockingly bad performances I have seen in recent years. Geraldine Hakewill and Henry James are bad bad actors. From the minute they step off the boat and start twirling around, amazed they are in paradise like some kind of bipolar patient on a manic high, it’s just dead eyed delivery of some of the worst dialogue ever written. Writer/Director Bill Bennett clearly has no clue how a young couple behaves, either that or he has been surrounded by an invading race of pod people his whole life. It’s almost like he is ticking boxes as he goes, young couple get naked, go for a swim, make love etc. You get no sense that these two have any kind of romantic history at all; it seems like two catalogue models got shoved in front of the cameras for some kind of reality TV show.

So much of the script is by the numbers it’s like the first draft from an end of year screenwriting student. It hits all the predictable beats that it should, an event in the last five minutes is telegraphed by a scene near the start that sticks out like a sore thumb and it just plods along to the inevitable conclusion. Things get sort of interesting when a couple of pirates show up and look like they are going to torture our heroes (and by the time they do you’ll be begging them to kill them off). This is then proved completely pointless and tossed away as a device to pad out the completely superfluous middle act of the film. The behaviour of the male lead character is completely retarded as well; when stuff starts to get creepy, Beth wants to immediately leave. Harry makes her stay because she is somehow overworked back in the real world as a marine biologist. So why do they spend so much time fishing? Beth doesn’t seem like she can divide four by two let alone be some kind of specialist in anything except pointing out how pretty everything is. Harry also makes her stay not after the first creepy event but after about five, where any logical human being would be building a raft and heading for the horizon.

Uninhabited is not a total waste. The setting is very pretty and it may well inspire you to go on holiday somewhere similar. It’s also a good reminder to struggling screenwriters everywhere that even your most brain dead basic script will have someone somewhere who wants to finance it. If someone somewhere put their money behind them and made this piece of rubbish, there is hope for all of us.

Extras: Interviews, Making Of, Trailer

Uninhabited is out now on DVD

So the found footage bandwagon rolls on, but its back wheels are looking pretty wobbly and twitching corpses are falling out the back as it trundles down its well worn road. Atrocious is the latest in a long line of found footage horrors out this year and not the last if the schedule for the rest of the year is to be believed. This adds very little to the genre and despite a very tense ten or so minutes is pretty much a seen it all before affair.

Our film begins with siblings Cristian and July Quintanilla packing up in their college dorm and returning to the family home in Sitges, Spain. Both of them seem keen on the use of a camcorder although it’s never made clear if this is because they are film students or not. The family home is surrounded by forests and has in its gardens a large overgrown maze. There is apparently a local legend surrounding a ghostly girl that lives in the woods and Cristian and July film everything hoping to catch something on camera. Predictably things start going bump in the night, their parents act suspicious every time the ghostly girl is mentioned and something horrible is lurking in the grounds around their home. When the family dog disappears things start to get really eerie. The film takes the format of hours of edited video uncovered by police following the climax of the story and does that occasional fast forward and rewind thing that worked in Paranormal Activity.

If you have seen The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity you really don’t need to see this, it’s a mash up of the two and much like those films you don’t see much. I have to admit though that in the middle of the film there is a sequence where everyone runs into the grounds outside looking for the lost younger sibling that was unbearably tense. There are endless shots from cameras being carted around the woods in the dark which go on for a really long time. It shows you nothing but forest and all you hear is the panting of the character carrying the camera. You keep expecting something to jump out and it’s almost unbearable how dragged out this is. Sadly it’s a bit of a case of the emperors new clothes because once the menace is revealed, it’s not all that special.

The problem with a lot of these sorts of films is that they don’t really take time to develop character or story anymore and think that their found footage gimmick is enough. Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield work because they have well drawn characters at the start of the movie who are developed just enough so that you care when the terror starts to happen. Atrocious launches full on into the scares almost immediately and you barely know the family portrayed on screen. Worse still is that the characters motivations for carrying cameras around with them constantly defy logic or sense. There is a scene where a major event occurs and the actors almost comically grab their cameras first and then react to the situation, it’s borderline laughable. In the aforementioned Paranormal Activity the fast forwarding of some of the footage made sense in the context of the film, here it serves no purpose. It seems to just be there because the producers want as many comparisons as possible so they can cash in.

Although Atrocious doesn’t quite live up to its title, the bottom line is that this has been done better recently in Spain in films like Rec and done better in the west in almost any found footage film you care to mention. It’s not a complete waste of time as it does have a scary ten minutes in the middle. If you have to rent something Spanish go for Julia’s Eyes, Rec or The Orphanage instead.

Extras: None 

Atrocious is out now on DVD

What do you do for an encore when you’re responsible for The Exorcist (1973,) a stark confrontation with evil that terrifies audiences and wins plaudits from the Vatican for its authenticity? Director William Friedkin’s answer to this question was to wait nearly twenty years and then make The Guardian (1990,) a film about a demonic nanny who feeds babies to a flesh-eating tree.

Young couple Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) settle down in LA, have a baby and do what any modern young couple would do – hire a live-in nanny to take the little brat off their hands. Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) is well-spoken and ever-helpful. To cap it all, when she’s not changing nappies, cooking, cleaning, or pouring drinks for the couple’s guests, she likes to wander around in the nude and sit in the tub with the bathroom door open. If male readers think that sounds too good to be true, how right you are, because it soon emerges that she has plans to snatch the baby and spill its blood upon the roots of an ancient and maleficent tree lurking in the woods.

Friedkin handles this Gothic fluff as though he were making The Exorcist all over again, and ladles doomy portent and gruesome gore (exploding heads, people impaled on roots springing from the forest floor) upon a story that calls for a certain archness and whimsy. When you throw in all that titillating naked flesh courtesy of Seagrove and glossy cinematography by John A. Alonzo, the result has the sort of overblown vulgarity commonly associated with Ken Russell. (The Guardian would be a perfect double bill partner for The Lair of the White Worm or Altered States.)

Prowling around in her green, barky birthday suit, Seagrove is certainly eye-catching. But when things get heavy and Phil starts shouting “Get your hands off my baby”, she’s a bit lacking in moves compared to the kind of karate-kicking villainous totty we’re used to today.

Another glaring absence, from a modern standpoint, is the lack of an ecological subtext. A revenge of nature theme is implicit in the story, with its concrete and plate-glass houses built up around a piece of ancient forest, but Friedkin seems totally oblivious to it.  Instead, the tree is just a ghoul that drinks baby blood because baby blood happens to be its cup of tea.

Despite these flaws, The Guardian is a lovable oddity, full of bizarre and incongruous moments, such as the scene where a Peeping Tom sees Seagrove in an amorous embrace that gives new meaning to the term “tree hugging.” Say what you like about the movie as a whole, there’s undeniable curiosity value in the sight of this usually reserved British actress being pleasured by animatronic twigs. The extras include a wonderfully entertaining interview with scriptwriter Stephen Volk, whose experience working with Friedkin led him to seek therapy.

The Guardian is released on DVD October 17th

Sometimes, not often but sometimes a filmmaker will get a very personal vision intact up on the screen with no compromise and no studio to interfere with their vision. Examples I can think of recently include Darren Aronofsky with The Fountain (although somewhat scaled back from the 90 million Brad Pitt epic it started as) and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. When these films appear inevitably people are divided as to its merits. One man’s masterpiece is another man’s self indulgent tripe. Mr Nobody is a film that there is no doubt in my mind was the singular vision and musings of a middle aged man looking back at his life thus far and the decisions he made, that man is writer/director Jaco Van Dormael. The fact that this film got made and manages to be both small and heartfelt as well as having epic, brilliantly conceived science fiction scenes is astounding. It’s a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to the end result but, like all good art, is still a film well worth discussing.

The story starts in the year 2092 and an old man named Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto)  is the last mortal man on earth at age 118. All other humans have now become immortal through advances in medical technology. Nemo’s last moments are being televised to the rest of the world and during these last moments he is interviewed by an eager journalist (Daniel Mays). Nemo recounts a story about his life at ages 9, 15 and 34. In each of these time zones Nemo is presented with more than one option of a life of love and happiness and Nemo’s tale splits off in two directions each telling of a life he would have had had he chosen one path over the other. At age 9 he is presented with the option of staying with either his mother or father and in flashbacks we see what life would have been like in each of these alternate timelines. At age 15 in both timelines he meets a different girl and falls in love and at age 34 we see he is married in two different timelines to these two very different women. The journalist is understandably confused and we as an audience are left wondering what is happening, which reality is real? And what does the elaborate story of a man spending a vacation on Mars have to do with the whole thing? Does the oldest man alive have a point when he predicts a reverse ‘big bang’ where time will start to run backwards?

From that synopsis you can probably gather if you are likely to love or hate this film. It’s a film that does not explain things for you and asks you to make your own mind up. It’s wonderfully surreal in some scenes and if you get into it after a confusing first half hour then it’s quite the rewarding experience. If you fight it though and don’t go with the sense of nostalgic whimsy then there will be nothing but pain for you. The film deals with some weighty themes such as life, death, love and fate and does so in a pleasingly floaty way that feels like a trip down memory lane with a friend. At each split occurring in Nemo’s garbled recounting of his memories we see consequences and triumphs. At age 15 in one timeline he meets his half sister Anna in New York and falls in love. These scenes have a wonderfully hazy summer feel about them like a treasured memory and there is chemistry between the two young actors that is very rare in actors of their age. Anna then grows up into the delightful Diane Kruger and Nemo is young Jared Leto and their love affair of sorts continues as they meet each other again through chance encounters and fate regularly steps in to keep the lovers apart. In the other timeline Nemo meets a damaged girl whilst living in the UK as a teenager, she then grows up into a manic depressive Sarah Polley and this sad timeline makes you pine for the other better life with Anna. Sarah Polley is still a vastly underrated actress and her performance here as a woman quite literally out of her mind with mental anguish is amazing. Jared Leto steps up to this performance as a man who is deeply in love despite the character’s very deep flaws. Leto has built a pretty good CV as far as acting jobs goes and this was his last film before he went full time with his band 30 Second To Mars. I hope he goes back to acting soon because he is a gifted character actor with leading man looks and those are the ones that stick around longest in the memory.

The future scenes in the year 2092 are very well realised for a film of this type. They are far better conceived than many of the supposedly futuristic visions of films with three times the budget. We see a large sprawling New York metropolis which reminded me of the interior of the huge starship that is mankind’s refuge in Wall-E. The fantasy sequences depicting a hypersleep vessel heading to Mars are also very impressive. The ship looks like the spaceship from Kubrick’s 2001 and I am sure this was intentional as this suggests that the scenes are a fabrication again based on Nemo’s fractured memories. Each frame of the film is wonderfully shot by Christopher Beaucarne giving each timeline and scene a particular feel from melancholy to nostalgia and love. There are some brilliant dream sequences that don’t take place anywhere except inside Nemo’s head. Some have young Nemo dressed in a certain patterned pullover that matches the decoration of everywhere around him following clues to unlock an answer and are simple yet brilliant visual puzzles with a paranoid Truman Show style feel to them.

The ending of the film is no doubt the point where it all comes to a triumphant head or falls apart under its own pretentiousness depending on which side of the fence you sit. For me I found the ending to be very fitting with what had come before and is definitely the cry of a man trying to say something about not regretting the decisions you make and living the best way you can with what you have. Nemo has been so racked with thoughts of what might have been that his memories are fractured and jumbled because he was not focusing on what was right in front of him. It’s a very noble thing to aim for on a 47 million budget and the ending, well all I can say about it is that it is an ending. It’s a shame though because the film doesn’t have much of an emotional pay off in the end. Considering all the good performances that have come before, you can’t help thinking it doesn’t amount to an awful lot.

Mr Nobody is a film that is remarkable by its very existence and that in itself is something to be happy about. You may love it you may hate it, but you can bet that you will never forget it.

Extras: Making of with Jared Leto interview, trailer.

Mr Nobody is out now on DVD and Blu-ray

When the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film was released earlier this summer it was met with a unanimous howl of critical derision. Further proof that Johnny Depp is a license to print money was confirmed when it made a billion dollars worldwide. So should we weep for the species or does it deserve a critical re-appraisal? Well although its not quite as bad as you have heard, it does suffer from very lazy screenwriting and huge lapses in logic and character motivation.

The story picks up some time after the events of the third film with Jack Sparrow (Depp) in London trying to free his imprisoned first mate Gibbs. Things do not go well and a pointless action scene later Sparrow finds himself at the mercy of the king who has forged an alliance with the now maimed and peg legged Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to search for the fountain of youth. Sparrow was questing for the fountain himself before Gibbs was captured so has an interest but manages to escape. On the streets he finds out that someone has been impersonating him and putting together a crew of motley pirates. Sparrow finds that this is his old flame Angelica (Penelope Cruz) who is trying to save the damned soul of her father Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, a pirate with strange voodoo powers. Sparrow finds his lot thrown in with Blackbeard in the search for the fountain of youth which is also being looked for by the Spanish Armada as well as Barbossa and his crew. All must pass through the treacherous white caps which are plagued by beautiful but deadly mermaids. Sparrow faces conflicted feelings over his ‘stirrings’ for Angelica and his desire to obtain the fountain of youth.

The main problem with On Stranger Tides is that (and I never thought I would say this) I miss Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. By putting Jack Sparrow front and centre as the main character you have a narrative that is very conflicted and incoherent. Sparrow is a buffoon, a buffoon who is likeable for sure but a fool nonetheless who will do anything to save his own skin. In previous instalments Sparrow was there to push the plot forward and to complicate matters with his desire to save only himself. He was not above putting another character’s life in danger if it benefited him in some way. Suddenly thrust into the hero role his selfishness remains and as an audience you never feel like he is going to do the right thing and at some points it feels like he will do something very wrong to save himself. It’s very confusing and as Sparrow is in every scene gradually you start to care less and less. The writers attempt to plug the hole with a very ham fisted romance sub plot between Sam Claflin’s religious crew member and Astrid Berges-Frisbey’s captured mermaid, but it’s woefully underwritten. Attractive as the two of them may be they never really sell that this is some kind of epic romance that the makers seem to be pushing and they seem to be pandering to a certain section of the audience who like pale sparkly vampires. When it reaches its conclusion you are actually pleased with the outcome which I won’t spoil, but it never feels like a love affair with a back story and history the way that Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann’s story felt. Hopefully it’s the last we will see of these two in a Pirates movie.

The script is also very contrived and by the numbers. This is what annoys me about summer blockbusters, the tendency to pad out the running time and the budget with unnecessary actions scenes. In this there are three action scenes in the first half hour. None of them serve the plot at all and you could have saved time and money had they been excised completely and you wouldn’t have missed anything. The action scenes are impressively choreographed and shot by director Rob Marshall but whilst they are going on you keep asking yourself ‘why’? There is a scene when the crew are surrounded by mermaids whom characters have built up as being deadly and they react like illogical boneheads where common sense would have said that they should have been making for their cutlasses. Again it seems to be a case of stupid character motivation just so we can get an admittedly impressive effects heavy scene of the mermaids swarming on the crew. Rob Marshall seems to not have a grasp of effects in service of a story and its surprising to me how much I missed original series director Gore Verbinski. Verbinski seems to have a masterful hand when it came to these epic scenes of carnage and monsters and they served a purpose too, he managed to make important events happen within the action scenes he was crafting. There is nothing as impressive as the previous three films here and I was of the understanding that as sequels went on they were supposed to get bigger and better.

Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush are both fine as the characters they have created and will be remembered for. A series built solely around these two is not necessarily a bad idea and I hope that the producers learn this and we can have a film with more of a focus next time out. The new characters we are introduced to are also a huge problem in this film. Apart from the previously mentioned youngsters in love right out of the Twilight playbook we get Penelope Cruz’s Angelica character. Fair enough she seems like the sort of fiery slattern Sparrow would go for but Cruz is completely unconvincing as a buxom and dangerous pirate and looks like a strong wind would blow her overboard. Ian Mcshane as Blackbeard, her father, fares little better. The character is built up into this most dangerous man on the seas character and then does very little. He has some sort of telekinetic power and is a fan of voodoo but this is never really explained or developed. The relationship he has with Angelica is also a bit confusing, it’s suggested that they are not related at all and Angelica is on some sort of religious crusade to save his soul anyway but it’s never fully explained despite being potentially fascinating. Again it’s down to the poor writing and both performers deserve better.

Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides has nothing that made us like the first three outside of two familiar characters. That’s not enough in these days of great summer entertainment like Super 8 and Inception. It’s a plodding, underwritten and badly conceived mess. Hopefully the fifth instalment (which is inevitable considering the buckets of cash this made) will address some of the shortcomings of this one and turn out well.

Extras: Bloopers of the Caribbean, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean shorts, discover Blu-ray 3D with Timon and Pumbaa (??!) Audio Commentary (Blu-ray only).

On Stranger Tides is out now on DVD and Blu-ray

It’s 1972 and, after an absence of five years, the Daleks are back in ‘Doctor Who’ – on TV in colour for the first time and pitted against dandified third Doctor Jon Pertwee! Anticipation is, if not at the sort of fever pitch generated by the publicity machine behind today’s version of the series, pretty high. But whilst ’Day of the Daleks’ turns out to be the sort of clever, exciting time-travel paradox story the show, oddly, hadn’t really traded much in before (but which Mr Moffat throws away in a one-liner in a twenty-first century episode) the metal meanies from Skaro were themselves a bit of a disappointment; they looked much as they’d always looked but their voices weren’t quite right and the show made little effort to disguise the fact that the BBC’s Dalek stocks had run down to just three casings. Oddly, ‘Day of the Daleks’ is a brilliant ‘Doctor Who’ story… if only it wasn’t for the Daleks themselves…  If any classic ‘Doctor Who’ deserved a CGI wash-and-brush-up ‘special edition’ it’s this one and here, at last, is ‘Day of the Daleks’ with many of its warts removed, its Dalek voices improved, new special effects and even a handful of new scenes seamlessly integrated into the original footage.

Purists may shiver and shake at the very idea of tampering with sacred ‘Doctor Who’ but they can content themselves with the original four-part 1972 edition nestling safely on the first disc of this two-disc DVD set. They’ll also find the usual ‘making of’ documentary reuniting many of the surviving cast and crew (but alarming how many of them – Brigadier star Nicholas Courtenay and Producer Barry Letts in particular – have passed away since the featurette was shot). An amusing clip from a contemporary edition of the BBC magazine show ‘Nationwide’ in which a school kid explains how she gets frightened when the Daleks “desterminate” people, a ‘Blue Peter’ extract where presenter Peter Purves reveals that he used to be in  ‘Doctor Who’ “a long time ago – six years ago” before the Daleks invade the studio, ‘View from the Gallery’ where the late Letts and vision mixer Mike Catherwood return to the BBC in Wood Lane and reminisce about making the show in the 1970s, the usual production subtitles, photo gallery and commentary round out disc one. But it’s disc two which the more open-minded will be loading, fumble-fingered, into their DVD players because this is where ‘Day of the Daleks’ really comes alive…

‘Day of the Daleks’, of course, famously pre-dates James Cameron and his ‘Terminator’ by well over a decade; here future terrorists travel back to the present to assassinate the man they believe was responsible for a terrible war which left the Earth weak and defenceless and ultimately vulnerable to Dalek invasion. The beautiful paradox is that it’s the terrorists who caused the war by travelling back in time to prevent it. This is clever stuff, revealed in a slightly-clumsy if unavoidable info-dump in the final episode, but these four episodes, even before their visual updating, are full of action, incident and atmosphere. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, now in his third year, is in his prime, surrounded by his little UNIT family of feisty assistant Jo Grant (Katy Manning), the doubtable Brigadier (Courtenay) and Captain Yates (Richard Franklin) and Sergeant Benton (John Levene). Comfortable in the role, Pertwee sails through the story with elegance, eloquence and charm aplenty, indulging in spirited fisticuffs with Ogrons and rebels alike and happy to indulge in a bit of high-minded moralism with the Daleks’ human Controller (Aubrey Woods). There are a handful of ambitious set pieces, from the Ogron attack in part two, an amusing chase sequence with the Doctor and Jo bouncing around on a trike with dim-witted Ogrons lumbering after them, and the notorious leisurely attack on the country house by three Daleks. Disappointing as some of these might have been at the time (although I seem to have been reasonably pleased just to see the Daleks again in 1972) there’s a naïve charm about it all and there’s no doubt that the storyline is sophisticated and thought-provoking and some of the more casual violence and brutality quite striking. The CGI upgrades on the ‘special edition’ go a long way towards ironing out the creases though and the four cleaned-up episodes on disc two tighten up the story and make it look a bit more presentable to a modern audience without losing any of the ‘period piece’ charm of the original.

Many of the improvements to ‘Day of the Daleks’ are hugely sympathetic to the original images and some rather shoddy 1970s effects are replaced by glitzy modern CGI. Gun battles have added flash and bang, Dalek extermination effects now feature the ‘skeleton’ negative of the modern series and, deliciously, gunfire which had previously just ‘vaporised’ its target now literally explodes it with a satisfying ‘splattering’ sound effect as disintegrated flesh hits the ground. Perhaps best of all is the removal of the feeble Daleks voices of the original (provided by Oliver Gilbert and Peter Messaline) where it appeared that the BBC had totally forgotten what the Daleks are supposed to sound like, replaced by dialogue revoiced by Nicholas Briggs who provides Dalek voices for the new version of the show. Briggs hasn’t just recreated the guttural madness of the modern Daleks, though; he’s given his replacement dialogue a bit of an echo and it manages to beautifully evoke the controlled hysteria of the original 1960’s Daleks whilst still sounding recognisably like the Daleks as we hear them today. The troublesome final ‘battle’ sequence as a handful of UNIT soldiers languidly fight three Daleks and six Ogrons, moving unhurriedly towards Auderly House, was always going to be a difficult one to rectify as the pace of the original footage is so slow, but it’s amazing what a few more explosions, a bit of flying turf and a few additional CGI Daleks can do. Cheekily, the DVD team even went back to the original location with a Dalek and a handful of extras, used 1970s camera technology, and filmed some new scenes which have been artfully threaded into the original footage. Perhaps the only CGI enhancement which doesn’t really work is the too-artificial futurescape which shows three towers jutting into the sky and a few Dalek saucers whizzing about. To these eyes it looks just a bit too much like something from a cheap 1980s video game but fortunately the rest of the new FX sequences are so well done it’s easy to forgive this couple of shots which don’t quite work.

‘Day of the Daleks’ is great, pretty much essential ‘Doctor Who’ whether you’re a Luddite and just want to see the show the way it was or whether you’re happy to embrace the shock of the new and see the story sizzle, it’s a thrilling, fast-paced adventure with never a dull moment, a few arch performances and, of course, the urbane Jon Pertwee at the peak of his powers and his popularity. With the classic ‘Doctor Who’ DVD releases winding down now, there’s probably not much left in the Archives which could deserve a visual reconsideration like ‘Day of the Daleks’ (save perhaps, ropey 1974 yarn ‘Death to the Daleks’) and after a run of releases which have been a little less than essential (‘Paradise Towers’? Do me a favour…), ‘Day of the Daleks’ really has got ‘must see’ written all over it as is quite possibly the best ‘Doctor Who’ DVD release to date.

Other special features: As well as the obligatory ‘making of’ for the ‘special edition’, cast and crew recall the 1970s in the second part of ‘the UNIT family’ (only the hardest heart won’t be moved by the sight of Benton actor John Levene close to tears as he recalls hearing the news of the death of Master actor Roger Delgado in 1973), a brief feature which tries to unravel the contentious issue of just when 1970s Earthbound ‘Doctor Who’ stories were set, a ‘now and then’ feature which revisits the story’s locations to find many of them largely un changed and ‘the memory cheats’ tries to explain why we remember ‘Doctor Who’ in different ways.

‘Day of the Daleks – Special Edition’ is out now on DVD 

Remember when you were a kid and those wonderful independent TV stations offered programs such as Kung Fu Theater where they would show memorable films such as the One Armed Box and Master of the Flying Guillotine packed with images and scenes that stayed with you years later?

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame falls into that same category of being a kid again, with the wonderment and joy of a good story and plenty of action.

It’s a fresh and fun blend of wild fantasy, the supernatural, suspense, mystery and martial arts mayhem that inhabit Detective Dee’s world. He’s a Chinese Sherlock Holmes who believes in science more than superstition as director Tsui Hark masterfully takes us on  Detective Dee’s fantastic adventure.

Based on Robert Van Gulik’s Detective Dee novels, the story begins as key members of the royal court spontaneously combust during the construction of a 66 story statue commemorating China’s first and only female emperor, Empress Wu of the Tang Dynasty in 690 A.D.

When a night visit to the Empress in her domain by the all seeing, yet never seen mysterious Chaplain who speaks in the form of a Magic Deer warns her of impending death and destruction at her coronation, she frees Detective Dee, the only man she knows that will solve the case, whom she imprisoned eight years earlier for opposing her right to the throne.

With his detective status fully restored and an uneasy alliance formed with Empress Wu,  Detective Dee takes on two “Watson’s” to join him on his quest. Jing’r, portrayed by Li BingBing, the empresses whip-weilding body guard and former lover of Detective Dee and Chao Deng as Detective Pei Donglai; a young, headstrong and partial albino with blond hair who always has a lot of tricks up his sleeves (and an unorthodox way of dealing with criminals). The game is afoot!

Clues lead them to the Phantom Bazaar; a creepy, atmospheric ghost market built underneath a 1,000 year old city where the trio journey on a boat ride manned by a creature that looks like the grim reaper as they encounter cannibals, a six armed Chinese mandolin player and a key witness named Donkey Wang (Don’t ask!) that may know the secret to the strange deaths as their quest leads them closer to solving the mystery.

Tsui Hark does indeed deliver the goods in this film from a screenplay adaptation by Chang Chia-lu, but the major credit must go to Sammo Hung’s incredibly stylish choreographed action, wire acrobatics and fight screens that fill the screen. They are fast paced and breathtaking.

Detective Dee is a must see, fun filled movie that has to be seen on the big screen to be appreciated. Don’t miss it!

Detective Dee is available on DVD/Blu-ray in the UK