Category: Films

We interrupt our holiday snaps to give a short review of a new film. We rarely do reviews, but felt motivated for once.

Cast your mind back to 1995. The company Pixar had 3D rendering software to sell. John Lasseter had created a number of well-received shorts using the software, including Tin Toy, but they needed a full length film with a complicated story and characters. Thus was Toy Story born.

There was so much right about TS. It appealed to adults and children, it was serious and funny, and it was technologically wonderful.

It also set a predictable pattern for following films: bit of story in the first half then long chase. All the TS films, Up!, the Incredibles films and more do this.

TS was highly praised irrespective of the tech and it made a lot of money. Thus came TS2.

As ever, when you run out of ideas, add new characters to disguise the fact. So we get Jessie and the horse. Many people cite the Jessie song as a highlight.

So, in a money grabbing exercise, TS3 came. If TS2 was worse than the original, then TS3 was even worser. but it made money and brought the franchise to a close. They all lived happily ever after. This was 2010.

There is a category of film called “biopic”. To hear people talk about them, it’s annoying to hear “bi opic”. There’s nothing two about it, and goodness knows what “opic” is supposed to be. No, it’s “bio” as in biography and “pic” as in picture.

We generally hate bio-pics. They start with “Based on true events” which usually means it’s made up. Take the recentish film about Laurel and Hardy. True? Well, no, they did come to the UK for live shows, their shows were never unattended, they were very popular (that’s why they came back), there was never any friction between L & H over Hardy’s solo ventures. As there were contract negotiations for Laurel, he had actually encouraged Hardy to do other work. Hardy was a big gambler and needed the money.

We have a huge number of dvds, blurays and 4k discs. Nearly all have been watched, some many times. But there is a small number we just have not got to, and we are trying to catch up. One of those was The Human Centipede, from 2009.

If you are interested in movies, you will know this film and its controversies. If you don’t, here is a plot summary (no spoilers);

We meet two American girls on the grand European trip. They are going to an obscure place in Germany for some all-night party. They get lost, the hire car gets a flat tyre and it pours.

Finally, they find a house where a strange man lets them in. He drugs them, and they wake, tied to beds in the basement in some kind of hospital or laboratory. There is a third bed with a man who is killed and replaced with a Japanese man who speaks no English.

The house owner explains that he is going to perform an experiment. He will start with the man, attach permanently one of the girls with her mouth to his anus, attach the second girl to the middle girl similarly to create a new twelve limbed creature. Food will go in one end of the first, pass through them all and out the opposite end of the last..

Realising he is a mad scientist, the girls try to escape, but fail. The scientist does the operation, and the centipede is created. Then the police arrive, and the threesome try to escape.