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★★★½ (out of five)
Sam Raimi's THE EVIL DEAD is a horror touchstone and infamous piece of '80s cinema (partly down to its 'video nasty' reputation), and led to two jokier sequels that made a cult hero of Bruce Campbell as wisecracking, resourceful demon-slayer Ash. There's been talk of a fourth movie for many years, which I don't see happening now Raimi's in the upper echelons of Hollywood, so it makes perfect sense to let another new director take a crack at rebooting the whole shebang. Enter Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez, who made an alien invasion short called PANIC ATTACK! that went viral in 2009, who also co-writes the remake and finds a number of ways to subtly improve Raimi's formula...
Perhaps the best decision EVIL DEAD makes is to avoid having its own variant of Ash, and to remember the original was never overtly comedic. The premise remains largely the same (a group of friends travel to a remote woodland cabin and accidentally summon Evil forces after reading a cursed book they find in the basement), but Alvarez's reboot approaches the material in a more interesting way. This time the gang are there to support Mia (Jane Levy), a young woman trying to beat a drug addiction by going 'cold turkey'. This is immediately more interesting and original as 'spam in a cabin' set-ups go, but also means the film's craziness works as a warped realisation of Mia's mental state as she suffers withdrawals. Even better, when Mia starts trying to convince her friends about what's happening, for once it feels plausible how dismissive they are of her disturbed warnings.
The great thing about a sitcom in a school is that everyone has first-hand experience of that setting; in later life, one can start seeing things from the teacher's perspective. However, audiences are so attuned to this environment it's hard to do much that feels fresh and different. There are so many clichés in education-set programmes that they're hard to avoid, mostly because they're oddly alluring. Big School, BBC1's new Friday night sitcom, fell into a number of traps in terms of lazily-written characters: the obstinate headmistress, the nerdy science teacher (a virgin, at that), the "games teacher" with an eye for the ladies. All your favourite stereotypes are present, although that in itself lent a feeling of comic strip-style nostalgia.
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One of the great television injustices has been Breaking Bad's treatment by UK broadcasters, with Fox (formerly FX) and 5USA doing a poor job publicising it when the series aired here years ago. It's quite simply one of the best TV shows of the past decade, and arguably one of the all-time greats. More accessible than The Wire and more riveting than The Sopranos, Breaking Bad has at least achieved cult status on British shores (thanks to the online community's adoration), and I'm overjoyed Netflix and Blinkbox secured deals to stream the last episodes so close to US transmission. What's more, it has blasted its way back on to AMC, its US cable network home, with record ratings of nearly 6m viewers.
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The 'Cornetto Trilogy' that began with SHAUN OF THE DEAD and continued with HOT FUZZ reaches a ribald conclusion with Edgar Wright's THE WORLD'S END, again starring 'double-act' Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. This time Pegg plays fortysomething wastrel Gary King, whose adult life stagnated following a 1990 pub crawl with four mates—Peter (Eddie Marsan), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine) and Andrew (Nick Frost). 23 years after their failed attempt to complete the infamous "golden mile" of twelve pubs, Gary returns to reunite his grown-up pals and relive the best night of his life.
In many ways, it's harder to live up to expectations with the third entry in a body of work. HOT FUZZ wasn't as strong as SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but it was bigger and wisely tackled a very different genre, while maintaining the Trilogy's loose theme of male friendships and the fight against conformity. First it was suburban zombies, then a village cult, now a small town infested with doppelgängers from outer space. I'd ordinarily be mindful of spoilers, but none of THE WORLD'S END trailers have shied away from revealing the twist that the pub crawl takes place during an INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS-style scenario. It's a twist that reminded me of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN in terms of how it'll give some viewers cognitive whiplash when it happens. You'll either squeal with inner joy when a straightforward comedy-drama suddenly involves blue-mouthed robots, or you'll wonder why the SHAUN triumvirate have made a film about learning to grow-up that bows to an adolescent love of sci-fi aliens.
Screenwriter Tony Grisoni was behind Channel 4's award-winning Red Riding trilogy, and Southcliffe brings the same beauteous bleakness back to our TV screens -- this time courtesy of US director Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene). His tale of a lonely fantasist with a gun obsession who snaps thanks to a combination of stress (nursing his bedridden mother) and humiliation (his fantasy of being ex-SAS is exposed by a friend's army vet uncle), has clearly taken a few cues from real-life tragedies.
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Guillermo del Toro's name is attached to so many projects that it's just nice to see something escape development hell. PACIFIC RIM is his love letter to the decidedly Japanese Kaiju genre of giant monsters and the Mecha genre of robots. At heart it's a patently absurd and simple-minded monster movie, set in a future where gargantuan amphibious monsters emerged through an inter-dimensional portal beneath the ocean and began terrorizing the titular Pacific Rim environs. To defeat them, humanity created 'Jaegers'; similarly enormous robots controlled by two pilots whose brains are linked to overcome the troublesome mental burden.
One such pilot is Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), whose co-pilot brother was killed during a skirmish with a Kaiju. Having subsequently quit the program, he's hand-picked by Jaeger commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) five years later to end the ongoing attacks before the Jaegers are decommissioned in favour of a gigantic coastline wall, by closing the underwater portal once and for all.
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