In recent years John Landis' frat-boy farce has had much to answer for, its legacy spawning a glut of imitations with twice the gross-out factor but half the humour. The original, now 25 years old but still rampantly immature, has real comic gusto, and allowed the late, great John Belushi to belch out a memorably madcap performance.
Set in 1962, it asks us to root for the scruffy, skiving outsiders (the term "slackers" still hadn't been coined) on a campus ruled by the monied, suave elite.
Horrible in theory, actually pretty funny in fact. Carrey and Daniels wouldn't do a sequel, so two lookalikes were contracted for a slung-together, conceptually tasteless prequel to the Farrelly brothers' hit farce. So they're at school, being heroically stupid, totting up comic misunderstandings and unwittingly doing good deeds. Sweet and titter-worthy, despite itself.
Entertaining thriller from James Mangold, only slightly marred by a dodgy psycho-babble explanatory twist. A terrific cast of John Cusack, Ray Liotta, John C McGinley and Amanda Peet are among or around those bumped off one by one in a desolate motel in a rainstorm. Who's the killer, and why does Cusack look so ambivalent about stopping him?
As the franchise gets ever more desperate, any wit is sacrificed for diminishing returns of grosser grossness and louder loudness. If you want to see Jason Biggs' pubic hair find its way into the wedding cake while he does his 'embarrassed' face for the thousandth time, this is the movie for you. Directed by Bob Dylan's son, for Christ's sakes.
There's only one real Robin Hood, and that's Errol Flynn, now buckling his swash in this lovingly restored version of the 1938 classic. "You speak treason," observes cowardly King John (Claude Rains). "Fluently," Errol proudly admits, before crossing blades with Olympic duellist Basil Rathbone, rescuing the blushing Olivia de Havilland and feeding the poor of Sherwood. Hurrah!
Alex Cox's gory update of Thomas Middleton's 1607 play about anarcho-nutter royal assassins. The ghost of Derek Jarman clearly lurks behind Cox's ambitious vision of Liverpool as a post-punk, retro-futurist city state. Christopher Eccleston spits nails as the hard-bastard anti-hero, but not even Eddie Izzard, Derek Jacobi and Sophie Dahl can lift the drama above flawed curio level.
There was genuine suspense and intelligence in Michael Winner's original 1974 thriller, which addressed some of the same debates about rising crime and liberal impotence as Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs. But this 1982 sequel, relocating Charles Bronson's wounded architect to LA and forcing him to endure another double rape/murder episode, veers dangerously close to shabby exploitation.
To say this ultraviolent 1983 flick is Chuck Norris'best movie might smack of faint praise, but what's good is mostly down to David Carradine as his strutting, butt-kicking, cigar-sucking nemesis. It's a modern-day western, heavy on the spaghetti, with Norris'Texas ranger taking on Carradine's gun-runner and his army of disposable borderland Mexicans. Did Walter Hill watch this before making Extreme Prejudice?
A kind of Australian answer to Lock, Stock...without the masturbatory middle-class fascination with lowlife machismo, David Caesar's exuberant yarn about slot machine wars in 1960s Sydney is a riot of garish hues and lurid trouser suits. Toni Collette rises above a routine plot and meaty cast (Bryan Brown, Sam Neill) with her sassy gangster's moll routine.
