Honey, I Shrunk The Marvel Universe.

Ant Man

Ant Man

Ant-Man

Marvel's Ant-Man

Do you remember those 'Fathers 4 Justice' guys that used to dress up as superheroes and stay on rooftops for days in order to protest the injustice of access rights? Those guys are going to love Ant-Man which is about a guy sent to prison for doing the right thing, a guy who reluctantly dresses up as a superhero, an estranged husband whose ex-wife is now dating a cop and a guy who only wants to see his cutesy gap-toothed daughter more often.  He just wants to be a hero to his little girl but the only thing he is good at is stealing stuff, which is just as well, because instead of a plot we basically just have scenes of people stealing stuff from other people.

Ant-Man is a minor Marvel character given a minor Marvel treatment. It's a strangely old-fashioned film, like it's a couple of decades out of time. It takes ages to shift into gear, it's full of safe decisions and plays like a 'Mission Impossible' knock-off. There's the usual stuff of people breaking in to secure facilities, dropping stealthily from cables, being pursued down corridors etc... whilst hackers in a van watch a progress bar  reach 99.9% even as the doors are being kicked in. It's probably very exciting if you've never seen a Mission Impossible film, or a spy film....or any film ever.

Bland comedy chancer Paul Rudd is Ant-Man. He's this generation's Steve Guttenberg.

Notorious sex addict Michael Douglas is in this too. He must have been very confused to appear in scenes with Evangeline Lilly looking exactly like Catherine Zeta Jones in her 'Chicago' days. I bet Michael couldn't keep his hands off her, the dirty old git. They must have distracted him by giving him that same "you don't know what chaos you'll unleash" speech to do in every scene he appears in. Surely they could have made better use of him? Maybe they could have made him the villain. He'd have done a much better job than Corey Stoll who gives us the blandest villain yet in the Marvel universe.

The trouble with 'Ant-Man' is that it is not a bad film but that it needs more of everything. It needs more action, it needs more laughs, more SFX (or at least some impressive ones), it certainly needs more plotting and more energy. It's very sluggish for a Marvel film. Every time it hits on a good idea it just drops the ball. Breaking into The Avengers headquarters, great idea. What happens? Ant-Man has a silly fight with Marvel's (other) least interesting hero and somebody gets punched through a shutter. That's it. Ant-Man reduced to the sub-atomic/quantum level, great idea. What happens? Some lame attempt at pixelated trippy imagery and that's it. Ant-Man has to fight the villain on a toy train set, great idea. What happens? A piss poor sub-Wallace and Gromit routine.

It feels like it was made by committee. It feels like it was made just to keep the Marvel universe rolling without adding anything to it. It feels like a stop-gap. It feels like all the eccentricities and life and joy of the project have been bleached out of it. Marvel have set the bar with every film. Here they can barely be arsed to step over it.

I get that it's supposed to be a "fun" movie, I get that it is  the action-comedy aspects are the focus this time ....but I saw it in a cinema full of kids who seemed barely engaged with it. They laughed twice. Once at the word "shit!" and once at Thomas The Tank Engine's face. That's your review right there. That's the highlights.

Most kids were more interested in jumping down the auditorium steps. I've got to admit, they had a point.

Charlie Says....Build My Gallows High.

Another week another found footage movie.

The good news is that 'The Gallows' delivers plenty of effective jump scares, has a strong sense of atmosphere and enough technical competence to hold your attention for its running time.

The bad news is that it's dumb as a bag of spanners, has terrible dialogue, a plot no more developed than your average 'Scooby Doo' episode and we're asked to identify with a bunch of arsehole jocks and bullies for much longer than is necessary.

In other words it delivers exactly what you'd expect from this sort of film, no more and no less. It's not going to scare you if you've seen a lot horror films, and won't convert you if you haven't,  but it will make you jump in a satisfactorily prescribed manner.

The simple set up is as follows: A small time high school theatre production of 'The Gallows' (which seems to be a Poundland hybrid of 'The Crucible' and 'The Scarlet Letter') goes horribly awry when lead actor Charlie actually gets hung during a freak accident (or basic lack of a risk assessment).
Cut to twenty years later and how has the school and the local community moved on from this tragic event? By staging another performance of the same play. Of course they have. What a sensitive thing to do. It's a production still lacking basic health and safety precautions, basic security, basic respect for the dead and basic moral responsibility. Add in a mysterious woman who sits through all the rehearsals, a football jock with a crush on the lead actress, his prick of a best mate who films everything and a cheerleader girlfriend. Mix it all up with a plan to sabotage the set before opening night and you can pretty much join the dots yourself.

Logic is not the film's strong point. Nothing makes much sense when you scrutinise it in the light of day. There's a twist ending that confirms you've been wasting your time if expecting some intelligence behind this shambles.  A key motif of the slasher film is that the sins of the past return to wreak vengeance on the present, but even this is fudged here. The hooded Charlie figure seems a particularly spiteful entity considering that it was an accident and anyway, surely he shares some responsibility for sticking his head through a noose without checking for a safety harness first. Charlie is no Freddy or Jason. Charlie is just some dickhead ghost, whinging about how he wasn't even supposed to be there on that day. Let it go mate, let it go.

Where the film does play an ace card is in its exploration of the backstage area and school corridors after dark. This is a really creepy environment of rickety catwalks, dank basements, pipes, cables and spiralling corridors rendered in green (night-vision) and red (theatre safety lights). There didn't seem to be much logic to the geography of the place but this actually strengthens the horror logic of the piece and makes the whole setting quite disorientating.

A problem the film does have, and one that will probably become more apparent should there be any sequels, is that there are only so many times a noose dropping into frame can be scary and only so much damage a man with a rope can do. Which is basically me saying that it isn't gory enough. But it does have big jump scares and plenty of them. In that respect the film gives you more thrills for your money than highly trumpeted bigger productions such as 'Annabelle'.

It Was Not A Dream. 'Knock Knock'.

Oh Keanu, Keanu, what have you gone and done now? You magnificent, glorious, daft bastard!

...but we'll get to him in a moment.

First let's try and make some kind of sense of 'Knock Knock'.

According to my Cineworld app, 'Knock Knock' is "a tense horror-thriller" full of "nerve-shredding horror" and I should go and see it if I liked 'Funny Games' and 'Hostel'. The BBFC warns me that it contains "strong sustained and sadistic threat" along with "sex, sex references and nudity". It is an '18' certificate in an era where that badge of honour has lost meaning, as everything passes as a '15' anyway. It sounds hardcore in every sense, which is odd because I found it laugh out loud funny, gloriously silly and enjoyably twisted. Maybe I'm just a sicko, but I don't think I'm alone because the whole cinema was rocking with laughter....apart from the couple who didn't find it funny at all and walked out because it was all getting a bit too much. It's that sort of film.

But here's the thing. I don't think we were laughing because it was bad and I don't think we were laughing because it was "so bad it's good"...although there are elements of that. I think we were laughing because we were supposed to be laughing....no matter how uncomfortable that might feel. This is blacker than black comedy which flip flops all over the place but is so deliriously fun you can't help yourself. It's proper big belly laughs time, proper crying with laughter time. How much of this "humour" was intentional is open for debate (I'd say 90% intended) but let's just say I'm giving director Eli Roth and actor Keanu Reeves the benefit of the doubt because this was the most fun I've had at the cinema in a long time.

Keanu Reeves (for it is he) plays Evan, an architect living the perfect life. He lives in a perfect designer house, has a perfect beautiful artist wife and beautiful loving children. You kind of hate him already.

Unfortunately he has a shoulder injury which means he is celebrating Father's day weekend alone in the house whilst the rest of the family are on vacation. Left to his own devices he cranks up his hipster vinyl music collection really loud and ponders whether to partake in some recreational drugs. Suddenly there is a knock at the door.

Two gorgeous, rain-soaked, scantily-clad lovelies are on his doorstep and they're all lost...poor things. What's a man to do? Before you can say "shut the door on the Manson family psycho bitches" they have ingratiated themselves into his house and are coming on strong to him. He calls them a cab but by the time it arrives he's already giving in to their siren call. There's a threesome in the shower and the cab leaves without its passengers. A night of lust follows...and you just know Evan is going to end up paying a big price for the transgression.

Come the morning, the girls are still there, having breakfast, making a right old mess and feeding the family dog bad food. That's right, Keanu has a dog (called 'Monkey') just like in 'John Wick' and you're pretty sure that it will come to a bad end, provoking action-movie badass Keanu to take over and seek his bloody revenge. But this is not John Wick and this is not the way things pan out here.

Up to this point the film has been played straight, a real slow burn of tension, but it now starts to make you feel uncomfortable. The film really sticks a fork into those modern pressure points of how to deal with unwelcome guests, how to deal with confrontation and, in this instance, how to deal with women who might have an agenda beyond just being a porn fantasy. He asks them to leave. They don't. They make fun of him. They start trashing the place, including defacing his wife's (admittedly bloody awful) art and pretty soon he's all for strangling one of them. He says he's going to call the police. They say they'll cry rape. Matters escalate and when his nasty misogynist side comes out they agree to leave and he drives them to a house in the suburbs and speeds away.

Later that same day there is another knock on the door.....

All of which has primed you for a really nasty, really intense home invasion thriller. Which it is. But it also takes a U-turn and becomes....whatever it is that 'Knock Knock' becomes, which is part black comedy, part satire, part twisted sit-com and plays out like a sort of 'Home Alone' for adults. It becomes sicker and sicker and funnier and funnier. It is mad genius I tell you. Just wonderful, perverse, bonkers fun.

And then there is Keanu. We need to talk about Keanu. We might need to reassess Keanu.

Remember Keanu of a few decades ago? The tortured, misunderstood artist who just wanted to play Hamlet or be in a rock 'n'roll band but had the misfortune to keep getting cast in some of the most successful films of the day. What happened to that Keanu? Post 'The Matrix' films he struggled to find his feet and struggled to find another big hit ('Constantine', 'A Scanner Darkly, 'The Day The Earth Stood Still') but he now seems happy and contented to appear in any old genre shit that comes his way: '47 Ronin', 'John Wick' and now this. All of which means he's making some really odd choices, some really odd films and it has to be said some really interesting ones. I can't imagine any of his more bankable leading-man peers taking on the same role in 'Knock Knock' and having such a fun time with it. As Evan, Keanu spends most of the second half of the movie being humiliated, strapped to a chair and tortured. He's incompetent, un-heroic and pretty much a total tool throughout. He has panties stuffed in his mouth, is forced into incest role-playing games and has to say lines like  "no, please don't tell my wife you both sucked my cock!" It's hard to imagine many A-listers subjecting themselves to that and hoping to walk away unscathed. But somehow Keanu manages it. Maybe it's because it's just impossible to look at him without imagining he's going to exclaim "whoah!" at any given moment.

In 'Knock Knock' Reeves seems to be deliberately playing with his screen persona like never before. I think. He could just be bad. Or having a mental breakdown or something. But I choose to believe that Keanu is fully aware of what he's doing and having a ball with it because nobody can be that wooden, that blank and that bad at swearing after thirty years in the business without some level of self awareness can they? I mean, I've seen good Keanu acting ('Point Blank', 'Speed', 'Parenthood', 'River's Edge' etc) and I've seen bad Keanu acting ('Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula', 'Johnny Mnemonic' etc) but I've never seen anything as jaw dropping as his performance in this. This is something to behold. We are blessed to be alive in such times.

Imagine Keanu doing a really bad impersonation of somebody doing a really bad impersonation of Keanu and you're still not even close. I've never seen anybody unable to even swear convincingly before. I have now. Keanu has a sweary angry rant at his attackers whilst strapped to a chair...for like a minute or something. It is the funniest thing I have seen in years. I think I'm now a little bit in love with Keanu. The daft bastard.

You're just never sure where you are with this film. Are you laughing at it or laughing with it? Is it laughing at you? All of these things apply. You've got to hand it to director Eli Roth for blurring the lines and messing with expectations and for coaxing Keanu into this madness.  He's a director who divides opinion but I liked the 'Hostel' films and "get" their black humour. All of his films tend to build to an elaborate joke ending and 'Knock Knock' is no exception. There is a "knock knock" joke payoff but there is an even better joke at the climax. It's hilarious and a bang up to date comment on our obsession with, and our fears about social media. *Like*.

It's also interesting that the film gets to have its cake and eat it too in that it is a morality fable but it also doesn't let Evan off the hook. This is not "Fatal Attraction'. There is no conservative reassurance and return to normality here. You get the sense that Roth enjoys baiting highbrow critics and this certainly plays around with on-trend debates about sexual politics in film.  None of it gets in the way of your enjoyment.

I've not seen 'Ted 2'. I'm never going to see 'Ted 2' but I can tell you that 'Knock Knock' is a funnier, more relevant, more satirical film than 'Ted 2' could ever hope to be. It's a glorious, surprising, confusing mess of a movie; a WTF? movie that I already want to see again and almost certainly my B-movie fave of the year. It was not a dream.

Go see it if you're brave enough.