Count To Dumb

Personally, I blame it on the mangy-looking mother schlepping around the supermarket, routinely feeding her wailing brat Jaffa Cakes as she hacked some lethal strain of virus up and down the aisles. Of course she may have been perfectly blameless, but either way something had me shuffling around the apartment in my dressing gown, feeling utterly retched all weekend.

I should have repaired to bed with some hot lemon and a none-too-taxing book to read (or even colour in). Instead I slumped onto the sofa, hauled a duvet over me, and reached for the remote, deciding that a day or two of none-too-taxing television would suffice. Picking a DVD boxset off the shelf and utilizing the PLAY ALL button probably would have been the best bet in these circumstances. Instead, discovering Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers was on ITV I plumped for that instead, leading me down a path that would go from brilliant to bad to worse.

Come the evening, I had planned on watching Morgan Matthews’ documentary The Fallen, commemorating every British serviceman and woman who had died during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. Given that it was three hours long and I’d already been zoning in and out during the day, I figured it would be best to catch it on iPlayer later in the week when all my synapses had at least some clue as to what they should be doing. Instead I watched The Transporter 2, which probably gives a fair indication of how unwell was feeling.

I’m sure there were a good many dumb movies released when I was a kid, but nowadays it seems to be a totally different kind of dumb, spurred on by wire work and computer generated imagery rather than a wobbly story and even wobblier special effects. Although I was an avid moviegoer in my teens, after we had moved from deep in the countryside to the south coast of Devon and the cinemas were easily accessible, I would still pick and choose as best I could rather than see any old twaddle. This was, after all, when stories were the key ingredient. Now that’s something of a novelty.

Back in the 1970s there was a great Walter Hill film called The Driver with Ryan O’Neal as a getaway driver, supposedly the best in the business, and Bruce Dern as the cop on his tail. It always stuck in my mind at the time, not only because it was one of the great modern day film noirs, but the characters were simply called The Driver and The Detective. It’s a shame Channel 4 hadn’t screened that instead because The Transporter 2 was complete nonsense.


Obviously I expected nothing less than nonsense, but this really went above and beyond the call. The whole thing was ludicrous, but then I suppose that was the point. Outrageous fight scenes, a hard-bitten bitch stripping down to her underwear before firing machine guns at everything in sight, mental car chases and a wafer thin plot that cobbled together sequences from earlier movies... I suppose this is what teenagers brought up on computer games rather than books want. Well before the credits rolled I felt old. Still, worse was to come.

Not every filmmaker wants to make Lawrence of Arabia or The English Patient, the same way that not everyone wants to see Lawrence of Arabia or The English Patient, or, for that matter, other movies that don’t involve a lot of sand. But there must be instances when, after the filming, editing and sound mixing, some directors look at the finished product and think: I spent all that time, money and effort on this? Then again, I spent the better part of a decade working on animated cat food, breakfast cereal and whatever else commercials, so I guess I’m not a fine one to talk.

Remember how if a kid fucked up somehow at school the teacher would say: “You’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let the school down!”? It came to mind when, come Sunday night and still slumped on the sofa, I watched AVP: Alien vs Predator for the first time. I said in the last post that numerous horror movie franchises have worn thin. AVP is the result of grabbing hold of a pretty well respected movie franchise and taking a massive shit in its mouth. It looked like it was based on a video game but apparently it was a comic book, not that it makes it any better.


If I start in on this film we’re going to be here all night, suffice it to say that AVP was obviously intended for an audience still recovering from a massive brain trauma. I don’t think it was the aliens or even the predators that the characters should have been fearful of but the effects of global warming. After all, there they were, down in the Antarctic, where one character wandered around the abandoned whaling station without gloves off. After everything was blown to shit, the one survivor was back on the surface in a tee-shirt and cardigan. And at no point did you see misted breath.

Obviously there was also no point with any kind of characterization because everyone was simply there to be monster fodder, but I did like how the script valiantly struggled and spectacularly failed to give them some kind of quirk or personality rather than a bulls-eye on the forehead and a number on their jacket. Then again, I suppose this film was made for an audience that would be rocking back in their seats squealing: “Aliens duffing up predators and predators duffing up aliens!” before soiling their underwear with a sticky emission.

I did like how the woman hired to guide the team down to the mysterious pyramid under the ice was shown to have some sort of digital compass on her wrist. Given how it was flashed at the camera, and with all the various levels of the pyramid, rearranging themselves as walls and floors opened and closed, I expected it to be vital for finding away out. No such luck. In fact it only highlighted what an idiot she was.

When the team are in the “sacrificial chamber”, well before they get split up and picked off, one of the characters cracks a green cyalume stick and drops it down the central grate to the floor below. The guide checks there position and then half the team head off to investigate. When they get down to the lower level and start poking around, she checks her compass again and declares that they are directly below the chamber. Of course having that cyalume stick on the ground directly in front of her might have been a clue. Silly woman.

I suppose I shouldn’t too critical of this nonsense. After all, things like AVP are just the science fiction B-movies I watched as a kid but for a very different, more idiot-filled, generation. Catching these films, as well as the monumentally pointless remake of The Omen scheduled late on Saturday night, can be seen as a learning experience at the very least. I certainly know now that the next time I’m feeling under the weather, I’m heading straight for bed.