Howard The Duck (1986)

When I discovered the allure of DVDs in the 1990's, I made a short list of films I just had to own in that format.

One was a definitive cut of Blade Runner and the other was Howard The Duck which, to be honest, I thought might never see the light of day.

I'm a massive fan of the late Steve Gerber's original Howard The Duck comic book run - which I discovered as an impressionable youngster through black and white reprints in the back of some humour magazine in the style of Mad - but not so much of the newer stuff (where he looks more like an emaciated human in a duck mask rather than an anthropomorphic duck).

Many a duck appeared in my early games of Dungeons & Dragons (including more than a few "masters of quack-fu"), although normally as non-player characters, and so imagine my excitement as I turned 20 and a film was made about Howard... by the guy who did Star Wars!

I saw it at the cinema, loved it, read the novelization, bought the soundtrack and... and... nothing. It just seemed to vanish, buried under an avalanche of unfair criticism (much fuelled, I am sure, by a backlash against Lucas for his Star Wars success).

I eagerly snatched up the VHS release when it came out, but as the years went on and technologies changed it looked as though Howard The Duck would not be making an appearance in the 21st Century.

Then in February, 2008, I caught sight of a briefly snarky preview in some film magazine and I realised my wait was over.

Viewed from a contemporary perspective, I reckon the film stands the test of time; the only elements that really look dated are the horrendous 1980s street fashions which appear to be wardrobe rejects from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

ILM's special effects - particularly those surrounding Jeffrey Jones' Dr Jenning and his gradual transformation into the Dark Overlord of The Universe are still pretty neat (although the Dark Overlord himself looks like he wouldn't have been out of place on the set of Men In Black... but then again I said that about the monster in Cloverfield!).

The script is genuinely quite chucklesome, Lea Thompson is as yummy as 'love interest' Beverly as I remember her and I still enjoy Chip Zien's voice for Howard himself, although Tim Robbins is more than a bit annoying as nerdy lab assistant Phil.

Where the film has issues is its inability to judge its target audience, the script has the leaps of logic you'd expect from a kids' film, but throws in some distinctly adult themes and ideas (from Howard's part-time job in a bath house/brothel to his cross-species relationship with Beverly; funny in the comics, but slightly uncomfortable in live action!).

There's also the rather preposterous and overlong microlite chase that segues the second act into the third, and just smacks of the kind of silliness that George Lucas seems to love (see the Ewok movies, various 'comedy' moments in the Star Wars Prequels, the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom etc for further evidence of this). 

But the '80s music in Howard The Duck still rocks!

Cloverfield (2008)

My expectations were low going into Cloverfield. Could a monster movie shot entirely from the point-of-view of the people on the ground, on a handheld digital camera, really hold my interest for 85-minutes without giving me motion sickness from all the shaky camera work... and would it really be that good?

Well, for the first three-quarters of the film, it lived up to its hype.

The story kicks off at the leaving party for yuppie Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and unfolds, for about the first 10 or 15 minutes, like a soap opera episode as characters are sketched out and emotional sub-plots revealed amidst the banter and camaraderie.

Then suddenly the monster arrives in Manhattan and things start blowing up, people panic and mayhem ensues.

The combination of Drew Goddard's naturalistic script, Matt Reeves' fine direction and totally convincing performances from the cast of unknowns give Cloverfield an incredible verisimilitude that you really believe this is how ordinary people would behave if a monster attacked New York!

There are no scenes of military commanders spouting exposition or the President reacting to the emergency; we are given no explanations and only fleeting glimpses of the giant, mutant-Godzilla monster itself... we, the audience, only ever know as much as the man holding the camera.

The important thing to remember about Rob and his pals as protagonists is that are nothing special - the monster isn't targeting them specifically and they play no role in the possible downfall of of the creature either - they are just the everyman-on-the-street... who happens to have a camcorder.

Sure, it's a YouTube version of The Blair Witch Project on a big budget, but, here the action is more visceral and less psychological, here you know there's really a big damn monster because its knocked the head off the Statue of Liberty and is stomping its way round the city... dropping off little skittering critters along the way!

Then, with about 20 minutes left, and coming on the heels of incredible sequences in the darkened subway tunnels under the city and in an emergency military hospital, the film goes all Hollywood blockbuster.

The protagonists find themselves scrambling around inside collapsing tower blocks and surviving helicopter crashes; the believability factor is stretched a bit too much and our total immersion in the story wavers.

Also, seeing the monster in daylight, as we do towards the climax, however, briefly, still shows it to be a big CGI creature that wouldn't have looked out of place in Men In Black.

As an experiment in making a different sort of monster movie, Cloverfield is a roaring success, a mix of thrills and chills that just went too far at the end, possibly - and ironically - giving the audience too much of what they were used to and not sticking to its original conceit.

The Last Exorcism (2010)

The Last Exorcism comes tantalisingly close to being one of those rare, perfect horror movies, an intelligent blend of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project (two of the most unnerving, pure horror movies ever made, in my opinion), until it derails into silliness for the final sequence.

I can understand and see what the filmmakers were trying to do in these closing scenes because, in all honesty, up until that point, no matter how good the film was, it wasn't really saying anything new, but it was such a sudden lurch in focus that it didn't quite work.

The film - shot on hand-held camera as a documentary - follows the charismatic and charming Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a former child minister grown into a performing preacher, disillusioned with the idea of exorcisms, who agrees to bring a film crew along on his last exorcism to expose the practice as fakery.

Rev. Marcus and the camera crew travel to an isolated farm in rural Louisiana, where widower Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) believes his teenage daughter, Nell (Ashley Bell), is possessed by a demon and is slaughtering his cattle at night.

For the first half-hour of this comparatively short (83 minute) movie nothing out of the ordinary happens as we get to know Cotton, his family, his motivations and his beliefs and the groundwork is laid for future events. But after his 'phony' exorcism things start to get creepy and then escalate in wonderfully unpredictable ways as it becomes clear there is a real demon at work (one disappointment is that the scene on the cover of the DVD doesn't appear anywhere in the movie!)

In this era of Grand Guignol torture-porn it makes a refreshing change to see a horror film that uses intelligence, magician's misdirection and subtly to unnerve it audience. I was completely taken in by the fact that I couldn't guess what was going to happen next during the core of the movie and believed in the actors one hundred per cent.

All the performances are spot-on, but particularly powerful are Patrick Fabian as the 'con man' forced to re-examine his cynicism and Ashley Bell as the unnerving innocent victim, twisting her demon-wracked body in all sorts of contortions  (without the aid of special effects, I am led to believe).

Compared to, say, Cloverfield the shaking, hand-held camera isn't too intrusive and there are moments (mainly when Nell steals the camera in the night) that the film couldn't have worked any other way.

This isn't a film that relies on sudden shocks to get it scares - although there are a couple - rather it relies on suggestion and psychological manipulation, dropping hints along the way as to what's really going on, although the chances are you won't piece everything together until the credits are rolling.

For the most part, The Last Exorcism relies on subtle, edge-of-the-seat tension (in the style of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project, as I've already said, which is why it was a shame that the ending veered off into pseudo-Lovecraftian territory with a set-up that sadly reminded me of both Hot Fuzz and K-9 And Company: A Girl's Best Friend, neither of which exactly rank as the pinnacle of horror cinema.

Stylistically, the shaky-cam/faux documentary approach certainly carries the movie, adding an air of Truth that helped sell the discrete horror, but it also rather undermined the ending - not that we needed to see everything that was going on, but frankly it made the audience all the more aware of how ridiculous the scenario was and somehow managed to undo the carefully stitched verisimilitude that director Daniel Stamm had created.

It's as though the ending actually showed too much and was almost unnecessary, which is a massive shame because, although produced by Eli Roth (and it was his name used to, rather misleadingly, sell the film), The Last Exorcism is the total antithesis of the gore-splattered horror - in the vein of Saw and Hostel - one usually associates with Roth's work.

[REC] (2007)

It must be a nightmare trying to conjure up an entirely new idea for a horror film these days, but the Spanish writer/directors of [REC], Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, took a good stab at it.

A TV reporter (the amazingly cute Manuela Velasco) and her camerman are filming a "day in the life" documentary about a local fire crew, when the call comes in to rescue a woman trapped in her apartment.

Unfortunately this routine job turns out to be anything but when the old woman suddenly attacks and bites one of her saviours.

Things spiral out of control from there, when the people in the apartment block find they have been sealed in by the police and special forces - because of a "possible infectious outbreak".

As with Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project, Man Bites Dog, Diary Of The Dead and probably several others I've missed, the film is entirely seen from the point-of-view of the unseen TV cameraman, making the audience very much a part of the action, limiting our knowledge of what's going on to what the reporter sees and hears.

It's superbly paced from the get-go, with events almost happening in 'real time', with thrills and spills snowballing as the 'outbreak' in the apartment block gets increasingly out of control.

Manuela Velasco

As TV journalist Ángela, Manuela Velasco is amazingly easy on the eye, and a convincing actress to boot, while the rest of the cast were clearly chosen for their 'non-film star' looks, which adds to the authenticity of the piece.

[REC] drip feeds the clues as to what's really going on, but it doesn't long for a savvy audience to grasp the fact that we're seeing a zombie outbreak up close and personal, which is why it's mystifying - and intriguing - when the plot takes a sudden and unexpected left turn into Exorcist territory towards the end.

I love films that let me figure out what's going on for myself, but this sudden shift from scientific reasoning to supernatural weirdness caught me totally off balance.

There had been mutterings from an elderly couple earlier, that hinted at there being more to this than meets the eye, but this was a major leap of faith by the film-makers that I wish had been developed slightly earlier.

Nevertheless, [REC] is a brilliant zombie flick, and a major change of pace from the usual Romero fare (not that there's anything wrong with that), so is well worth checking out if you're into zombie action horror... or just want to watch a really cute Spanish woman running around in a vest top for the better part of 75 minutes.

[REC] was remade in the States, for audiences who can't handle sub-titles, as Quarantine.