VICE Movie Club 2nd March

This week's most era-defining new films, defined by this era's weakest film writers.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED
Paramount Pictures - In cinemas now

I thought romantic-comedies were supposed to have romance and comedy. This has neither. The only light entertainment to be gained from watching this is the couple of WTF?! WHY moments, such as Ashton Kutcher making Natalie 'definitely gonna dress her baby in Crocs' Portman a PERIOD MIXTAPE featuring songs like "Life on a String" and "Sunday, Bloody, Sunday". Note to writers: You can't recycle shitty in-jokes you had with your friends and call it a screenplay. There is also no justification possible for a scene where two of the most dislikeable actors on the planet play-fight to "Bleeding Love". I hate you.
0
ED HARDY

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2
Paramount Pictures - Out now on DVD

There were so many scary things about Paranormal Activity 1: The rude girl with impetigo who kept hurling pic n' mix at me at the Holloway Odeon, the $193,000,000 it made at the box office, and the idea that anyone might fall for the same 'found footage' gimmick that horror directors have been peddling since Cannibal Holocaust dropped in 1980. Maybe most spine-tingling of all was the fact that the director's previous credits consisted of literally nothing but a bit of programming on Mortal Kombat 3. The PC version.

Anyway, Paranormal Activity 2 repeats the same handy cam/poltergeist shtick of the first movie, and throws a dog, a baby, a teenage daughter, a swimming pool, a basement and a superstitious Hispanic nanny into the mix. All of which genuinely improve things. Despite most of the scares playing out like the "It's behind you!" segments of a seaside panto, it succeeds in creating an atmosphere at least as disturbing as Leslie Grantham in a soiled Captain Hook costume. Completely watchable stuff, but unless you're one of the four friends who told me the first one was "fucking scary man!", opt for Rec or Rec 2 instead. That's fifteen less letters you'll have to type into The Pirate Bay.
7
MICHAEL PARAMORE

BABIES
Optimum Home Entertainment - Out now on DVD

OK, I know that this movie is called Babies, but I just assumed that, with this being a whole movie and everything, it might have something more than that going for it. You know, like how Scream isn't just 90 minutes of Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox standing there screaming? But nope. It's just a billion hours of babies doing things. And not even interesting Baby's Day Out-ish things either. Just totally bog-standard baby stuff like eating and crawling and crying and shitting.

This is the world's most expensive home movie. And you know what the only thing worse than watching a home movie is? Watching the home movies of a person you don't even know. I guess this might be interesting to you if you really like babies, but only if you don't have one of your own and you don't know anyone who has one either and you don't wanna freak people out by going to the park and looking at strangers' babies and you've never heard of YouTube. If you don't fall into this category: Avoid.
1
ROY CHUBBY BROWN JR

STONEHENGE APOCALYPSE
SyFy – Out now on DVD

Such is the film industry's desire to constantly dress rehearse The End Of The World that most elements of this made-for-TV doomsday flick are entirely predictable. Like every sci-fi apocadoc, it stars a guy who loiters around the margins of society because he can't go into the centre of town without people laughing at him and telling him he's crazy. It has another guy who starts off as a cynic, but who is eventually won over by the margin-dweller's madcap theory on how to rescue existence. It has A Woman. What most other sci-fi apocadocs don't have is the line "General, I have to be honest. Nuking Stonehenge… there's a chance it may backfire on us."

So this is the plot: A cheap CGI approximation of Stonehenge has gone mad and thrown out a cheap CGI approximation of an electromagnetic pulse that has made some tourists burst into purple fire (see above). Our central character in this film about saving the world is Jacob Glaser, a conspiracy theorist DJ on American late night talk radio, (this is akin to making the male lead in a film about saving rock n' roll a music journalist). Glaser's in the studio when a caller tells him about the shit that's gone down at Stonehenge, so he jumps in a plane and shows up in Wiltshire a couple of scenes later in a black London cab. A complicated plot involving exploding pyramids and a post-human repopulation cult ensues, sped along by a man from America who arrives and decides to bomb Stonehenge to fuck. The enemy is, after all, a stone. How else do you fight a stone?
3
NIALL IHZM