Easter Treats

A short visit from my daughter and her young man over the Easter holidays gave me an excuse to revisit some of my DVD collection (visitors get to choose the films) I reprint as follows:

By what criteria do you pass judgment on a film like Donkey Punch? One would assume purely on its entertainment value, but that would of course depend on what you find entertaining? Oliver Blackburn’s film tells the story of three northern girls on holiday in Mallorca, who befriend three male deck hands who invite them back to a luxury yacht to extend a party started earlier in a nightclub. The movie sells itself as a potent mix of sex, drugs and escalating violence. Yes there’s sex and yes there’s drugs and there’s certainly is violence, some of which is quite graphic. But it all leaves you quite cold as the film does not allow affinity with any of the character; you really don’t care who lives and who dies! Moderately entertaining and it does give Jaime Winstone a chance to show her assets.

Why did Michael Haneke recreate Funny Games as a shot by shot remake of the original, in English, ten years after the German language version? Haneke is on record that he always considered Funny Games to be an American story as he regarded the use of violence as a form of entertainment to be specifically American phenomenon! (That could form the subject of a good debate) Haneke invites the viewing audience to become accomplices and bear witness to the acts of terror performed by the pair of young, well spoken, white gloved serial killers. The film is unsettling and disturbing but un-miss able. Watch either version.

French new wave horror has become the edgiest and most brutal produced around the world. Now from the makers of Switchblade Romance comes this 2007 shocker from writer/director Xavier Gens Frontiers(s). During a not to distant French presidential election a gang of small time crooks goes on the run after a failed robbery. Seeking refuge in a seedy hostel deep in the middle of nowhere, their hoists turn out to be a family of degenerate neo-Nazi cannibals! Here they are subjected to all kinds of extreme mutilation and torture. I hate to admit that I loved every blood thirsty minute of this brutally shocking masterpiece.