DVD Weekend

Knowing I would be quite the worst-for-wear on Saturday I had visited Blockbusters in advance and got out a ton of movies to keep me occupied.


Assault on Precinct 13 was a rather dull remake of one of my favourite John Carpenter movies. The replacing of the bad guys being gang members with cops diminished the film quite a lot. The original saw lots of gang members pouring through the doors and windows of the station for a good half an hour. The remake has cops as the bad guys and the siege involves swat teams and helicopter troops which takes the film to an over complex level. Also the humour seemed to be lacking this time round. Anyone that has seen the original will be disappointed to know the "one potato, two potato" scene isn't in this version.


Harold and Kumar get the Munchies is a renaming of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle needed in the UK because we don't have White Castle here. The film tries to take the drug humour of Cheech and Chong and mix it with Road Trip and whilst some of the jokes hit home, most don't. The funniest are so close to the politically correctness line and a few do cross it. Accurate Police sketches of the two guys being perhaps the joke that made me laugh the loudest. There are some hideous continuity errors though. A whole hang gliding scene seems to change from night to day in seconds.


The London Underground prides itself in only allowing stations and trains to be shown in a positive light, so I have no idea how Creep got the go-ahead. It tells the story of a woman who misses the last train home and is locked in the station with a weird guy called Craig who kills men and gives women abortions regardless of whether or not they're pregnant. It isn't very good to be honest and as someone who knows Charing Cross station quite well I can see the corners that have been cut to keep the story in some sort of coherent form.


Finally I saw The Machinist, one that I had wanted to see at the cinema but it didn't get a long enough run and I missed it. Christian Bale takes method acting to a whole new level as a guy who hasn't slept in over a year and is ridiculously gaunt. Strange things start to happen to him when he meets a guy called Ivan. The film is one of those films that has as twist but it's not a "lead you one way when it's actually the other" kind of twist but just an ending that explains what has been going on, and does it well. It is very well put together, if you liked Memento you'd probably enjoy this.