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Old 16th July 2021, 06:42 PM
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Vampires: Los Muertos (2002)

Jon Bon Jovi plays a vampire hunter called Derek in this direct to dvd sequel to John Carpenter's Vampires (1998).

Set in Mexican desert towns this isn't actually as bad as you might think. I've seen it a couple of times and it's passable fun. Bon Jovi does okay in carrying the film, he has vulnerabilities and isn't an unstoppable vampire killing machine, whilst Spanish actress Arly Jover is fine as some sort of vampire princess. Director Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween: Season of the Witch) stages the action nicely and there's plenty of gory killings.

Ravenswood Asylum (2017)

The usual stuff where four American twenty somethings on holiday in Australia take a ghost tour round the deserted and supposedly haunted Ravenswood Asylum. This starts off fine, or as fine as low budget horror gets with reasonable characters. Until they arrive at the tour and one guy acts like a complete knob throughout. Not because he's possessed but because they obviously decided to write him like that after a while.

Sadly it gets worse as it goes along and what could have been an interesting riff on the remake of House on Haunted Hill and it's DTV sequel featuring the perils of mad doctors and shock therapy basically goes nowhere due to lack of budget.

Baby Driver (2017)

After about ten minutes of Baby Driver i turned it off. I thought Baby (Ansel Elgort) was a dick prancing around with his ear phones in all the time and had decided the opening car chase was CGI bollocks.

Thankfully i looked at the special features, in particular how they did the driving scenes and they weren't CGI (Mostly) but staged driving on what amounted to cars inside camera rigs which although might not be The French Connection, The Driver or Ronin quality meant it wasn't quite as fake as i imagined.

Going back to the film knowing this improved matters greatly. I became used to Baby - I wasn't the only one he annoyed, Jon Bernthal's character thought he was a dick too - and the film improved no end. True it had weird shifts of tone making it feel slightly uneven but the story line (A kid enrolled by boss Kevin Spacey to be a getaway driver) was straightforward enough and together with some terrific (none CGI) driving sequences meant i actually rather enjoyed this in the end.

Oh yeah, finally. The music used isn't as awesome as director / creator Edgar Wright thinks it is.
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