ADRIFT/OPEN WATER 2 - Wank, wank, wank, part Deux

OPEN WATER 2 is a bloody awful movie. It has been marketed in the UK as ADRIFT as if to separate it from the trauma that was the piss-poor original. But let's be clear, a turd by any other name smells as foul. The MO is the usual. Six preppie Americans sail out to sea. They are moderately attractive in that bland, day-time TV kind of way. Doofus-like they all go for a swim without letting down the ladder. For the next hour we watch them flail around in the water. The audience is occasionally teased with the promise of nudity or sharks but the movie fails to deliver on every level. To quote the guy sitting behind me as the credits rolled: "That was shite". He is not wrong.

ADRIFT/OPEN WATER 2 is on release in Greece, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Argentina and the UK. It opens in the Netherlands on September 5th 2006.

THE WICKER MAN (2006) - like sending a three-toed sloth out to sieze turf from a wolverine

Significant plot spoilers follow......

At times of trouble I turn to the good Doctor. Hunter S. Thompson, that is. I quote from FEAR & LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL - his record of the 1972 Presidential election: "The mood of the nation in 1972 was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded Typical Voters of the fear and anxiety they'd felt during the constant sexual upheavals of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon." In that weird time - when the giant post-hallucinatory downer hit the free love generation - we got a movie for the times: THE WICKER MAN. Now, thirty-three years later, when one half of America thinks abortion should be outlawed and the other half is cheerfully celebrating gay marriages, THE WICKER MAN once more appears on our screens. But how the mighty are fallen.

The 1973 version of THE WICKER MAN is a bizarre British (oc)cult thriller, directed by Robin Hardy using a quality screenplay by Anthony Shaffer. Shaffer wanted to write a horror story without blood and he did that by messing with our heads rather than our spleens and by using the structure of a whodunnit. In the Hardy/Shaffer film, a virginal, fervently Christian copper called Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) is mysteriously summoned to an island off the Scottish coast. He is appalled by the licentious locals. At first, we like the locals more than Howie. After all, they're just having a good time, right? But soon the atmosphere turns nasty. The cute "rosemary and thyme" folksy songs cover up a more profound and sinister pagan cult, involving child abuse and human sacrifice. It's all presided over by Christopher Lee, who plays Lord Summerisle. The mood is sombre, sinister and slow-burning, and by the end we are presented with a provocative confrontation between dogmatic Christianty and pagan zealoutry. I have always read the ending as the cinematic equivalent of T.S.Eliot's THE HOLLOW MAN, but its greatness lies in its ambiguity. It could also be seen as powerful warning against moral extremism in all its forms.

THE WICKER MAN (1973) is truly a fascinating film, which is not to say that it's flawless. The folksy dancing and singing can be camp, and the sequence where the beautiful inn-keeper's daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland with an appalling dubbed Scottish accent and a body double) dances and rubs up against a bedroom wall, trying to seduce Howie is irredeemably kitsch. Still, the original movie is a really great film.

I had pretty high hopes for THE WICKER MAN (2006) too. It is written and adapted by Neil LaBute, who famously brought us IN THE COMPANY OF MEN - a movie so brutal it is rarely available on DVD. If anyone would be able to bring us a WICKER MAN for our times, surely it was LaBute? The thing is, this new movie is a 100% studio production. Think of it as a Nic Cage vehicle and nothing more.

To be sure, LaBute has kept the mechanical workings of the original plot. There is still a copper, played by Nic Cage, who is called to a mysterious island to find a little lost girl. But he is no religious virgin - rather a nice, if introverted, guy. Indeed, the 2006 copper, rather than being aggressively seduced by Willow, was actually engaged to her, and comes at her request. And what a sappy, pathetic Willow Woodward (geddit?!) we are given - all hippy hair and pouty lips and about as sexless as a crash test dummy. Nic Cage's character doesn't seem morally outraged by the goings-on the island. He is not asked to question his beliefs or hold onto them against all odds. He ends the movie the same man as when he started - a decent, if introverted guy, who gets straightforwardly freaked out that some nutters might be about to torch a little girl just to ensure their organic honey harvest works out. The other bit of studio cyncism involves supplanting the Christopher Lee/Lord Summerisle character with a woman: horror icon Ellen Burstyn playing Sister Summerisle. I suppose that in a post-DA VINCI CODE world, everything has to be about the repression of the feminine.

Without the philosophical provocation and the slighly mad kistch element, THE WICKER MAN remake becomes a rather dull whodunnit. Except we know the ending. Which makes this movie nothing more than an embarrasing coda in the mythic history of the original movie.

THE WICKER MAN (2006) was released today in the Netherlands and in the UK. It opens in the US tomorrow and plays Venice on the 4th September 2006. It opens in the Philippines, Israel, Italy and the Ivory Coast on the 9th, and in Greece and Iceland on the 22nd. THE WICKER MAN opens in Belgium, Brazil and Spain in October and in Germany and Denmark in November.

LITTLE MAN - wank, wank, wank

LITTLE MAN is a godawful gross-out comedy that is destined to take shit-loads of cash at the box office despite this fact, pace the execrable DATE MOVIE. It is brought to us by the miraculously in-work Wayans brothers - those cinematic prodigies that gave us SCARY MOVIE and WHITE CHICKS. The alleged comedy revolves around a CGI-Wayans-brother-dwarf who pretends to be a baby so that he can steal a diamond from a cute couple who find the baby on the doorstep. Obviously. The humour consists in people getting hit in the crotch.

LITTLE MAN has been released in Australia, the US, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Turkey. It goes on release in Germany, Iceland and the UK this weekend and in Portugal and Singapore next weekend. It opens in Spain on September 15th 2006, Egypt on September 20th, Brazil on September 22nd and in Argentina on November 9th.

SEVERANCE - oustanding Brit horror/comedy

The concept of this movie is simplicity itself. A bunch of people who work for a nasty military defence contractor go on a team-building paint-balling exercise in Hungary. But they end up in an ex-mental institution where a bunch of crazed ex-Soviet soldiers are after them. Cue lots of running through woods, torture scenes and Hungarian strippers with machine guns. I don't know how newbie director Chris Smith pulled it off, but SEVERANCE is both very funny and very scary (in a sort of sub J-horror way.) And, no, this isn't a parody of horror in the manner of the SCARY MOVIE series. It's a genuine balls-cut slasher movie horror that makes HARD CANDY look like a walk in the park. And it's proper comedy too, anchored by great comic actors like Tim 'Lord Percy' McInnerny and Danny Dyer. Go check it out!

SEVERANCE is on release in the UK. It opens in France on October 18th 2006 and in Germany on November 30th.

YOU, ME & DUPREE is unfunny

YOU, ME AND DUPREE is a deeply disappointing romantic-comedy. It's all about high production values and good casting but low on actual laughs. Every bit of quirkiness from the Russo brothers' previous flick, WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD has been bleached out of this blander than blander date flick. But, just to go through the motions, (much like the movie) here's a plot synopsis. Molly (Kate Hudson) is a cute, primary school teacher (movie code for All Round Nice Gal) who happens to be the daughter of a property developer played by Michael Douglas (movie code for mean, greedy, scheming bastard.) Molly marries Carl (Matt Dillon) who is also a nice guy. But Carl is under pressure from the mean father-in-law and also from his best man, Dupree. Dupree is the kind of sad-assed loser who still lives for sports and has no job well into his thirties. He's the kind of guy who moves into your house and sets the couch on fire. But, here's the twist: Dupree is played by Owen Wilson, which means he will be a Love-able Loser. Dupree is sort of responsible for splitting Molly and Carl up (roughly sixty minutes) and then sort of gets them back together (forty minutes.) And then we all go home! Okay, so maybe that was a major plot spoiler, but seriously, I doubt you wouldn't have seen it coming a mile off. All in all, this is a pretty lame-ass excuse for a date movie and a real disappointment. You would do better by renting THE WENDELL BAKER STORY instead. It has basically the same central plot premise (Owen Wilson putting a fork in the path of true love) and also features a cameo from Harry Dean Stanton. Plus, it's really, really funny!

YOU, ME AND DUPREE is already on release in the US, Puerto Rico, Australia, the Netherlands, Thailand, Russia, Iceland and the UK. It opens in Argentina and Mexico on September 1st, Hungary on September 7th, Greece, Israel and Brazil on September 15th and in Germany and Latvia on September 22nd and in Finland on September 29th. YOU, ME AND DUPREE opens in Spain on October 11th, Turkey on October 13th, France on October 18th and Belgium on November 1st.

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE - weak teen chick flick

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE is a rather nasty teen chick flick in which three airheads con a cheating heart-throb into falling for a geek they made-over, just to break his heart. It's pretty formulaic and the marketing is especially cynical - heavily using Myspace. But, in it's favour, the tween market get to see Ashanti as the HEAD cheer-leader and Jesse Metcalfe (the buff gardener from DEPSERATE HOUSEWIVES) wearing nothing but a thong. There are a couple of weak laughs and of course a Moral (Be Yourself and Don't Lie to Sleep with Girls or Boys.) But on the whole, this is definitely one of the lamer offerings of the summer, and no way near as funny or feel-good as SHE'S THE MAN. Oh yes, and if you have a problem with your off-spring hearing jokes about STDs and oral sex, you should stage an intervention.

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE is currently on release in Puerto Rico, the US, Sweden and the UK. It opens in Germany on September 14th, Hungary, Brazil and Finland on October 20th. It opens in France on November 15th and Germany on December 7th. JTMD finally rolls into the Netherlands and Norway in January 2006 and Belgium in February 2007.