The Hobbit: A one line review

An hour of CGI washing up was not worth the dilution of New Zealand's labour laws.

A Finnish Sensibility?

I didn't know James Raggi had made a Christmas movie...

Well, he hasn't. But Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale seemed to have a very similar vibe to a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure. Basically, the wholesome is subverted, ordinary enough people face off against a powerful, inhuman evil, and all for the sake of a few gold pieces. 

Perhaps not as good a Gremlins for Christmas horror, but certainly worth watching.

Dredd Trailer

I am a massive 2000AD fan. It has fed my imagination for a quarter of a century or so. Am a fan? Was a fan? I've let my subscription lapse in recent years. Nothing to do with the quality, which, when I stopped reading, was pretty high, and more to do with time and space. In fact, I need to sell my hundreds and hundreds of old progs and replace with collected editions that I will actually read, and lend. Before that there will be a similar purge of my US comics. And then I'll fill whatever space that leaves with more boardgames and RPG books and... I need a bigger house (fat chance of that).

Anyway, Rebellion have finally got their Dredd movie off the ground, which, thinking cynically, might give me a nice market in which to sell all those progs printed on bog paper from the mid 1980s (as well a boxes full of Megazines, Best of 2000ADs, Complete Judge Dredds, etc.). But as for the film itself, I'll go against the majority opinion here and say that I don't like the look of it. I'll even go so far as to say that, with warming effect of rose-tinted glasses, I'm worried that I'll prefer the Stallone version. Why? For the evidence of the trailer, the new film is humourless. I associate Judge Dredd, even when it has taken a darker turn, with satire, even spoof, of contemporary society. It has to be satire, else you're left simply to cheer on a fascist! And it has to be slightly spoofy, else you're playing the ridiculous with a straight face (and a massive chin).

Aside from that, it seems that the drug on the streets of MC-1 stimulates Shatner's Basoon.

And, just before Dredd says, "We'll have to go through them", I really hope he says, "We can't go over them, we can't go under them".

Trailer via Old School Heretic.