The Cutprice Guignol

It’s late and the night has not be good to me thus far.  I can’t close my window the whole way, my light is playing up and I’ve been cursed with the most pathetic little cough in the whole world (I sound like a mouse with the first stages of lung cancer). So, it’s time for A Good Film marathon. And those good films? The Final Destination series.

First off, anyone who’s spoken to me for more than, say, ten minutes will know I love horror films. And not in the same way that people love their My Chemical Romance albums, or their dogs, or their wives. I would kick a leprous seal in the face to spend a minute in the company of John Carpenter; I would cut my index fingers off with a smile on my face to hug Robert Englund. I’d even consider first-degree murder to have a good sit-down chat with Rob Zombie.  I really, really love horror films.

I am a huge fan of the FD series. After the first film (by far the weakest) the makers seemed to rub their hands together with glee and decide to have a bit of fun. In a universe where fences are lethal and everyone is a bag of jelly waiting to be disseminated into pieces, the level of creativity is frankly astounding; death by everything is possible, even amateur gymnastics and Thai massage. I blame my general paranoia and antisocial activity on the fact that  I once spent a month watching these films on repeat; the world becomes a deeply suspicious place when you face death at least eight times by walking to the shop for some crisps.

I couldn’t choose my favorite  if pushed, I’d have to say the fifth or the third. The third has the added bonus of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a piece of eye-candy so delicious that she makes even Deathproof (Why, Tarantino, why?) watchable. The plot is the same as the other films; after a brief set-up in which one of the characters has a vision of people dying, people don’t die, then death comes after them. And, apparently, so does Tony Todd, in his star-making role as a local undertaker in regular correspondence with death.

One of the most commendable things about the films is their use of models as opposed to special effects; for the most part, the filmakers actually built replicas of the actors, filled them with a comedy amount of squirty strawberry sauce and ketchup, then actually demolished them in a variety of increasingly hilarious ways; my top FD moment has to be a scene in which someone is launched backwards through a fence and diced up into manageable, diamond-shaped chunks. It does take a particular mindset to really get into the films (and, once found, you can never return from it), but the fact that the villain is actually death itself lends a fantastic air of “OH GOD, WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?!”to the series, as literally anything can happen at any time, leading to fantastically self-aware scenes such as this one (I wouldn’t reccomend watching it if you plan on eating soon)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LODv11y59I in which the filmmakers  gleefully toy with the audience before a fantastic and ludicrous payoff.

But my light has finally given up the ghost and I’m being treated to a frankly astonishingly bad rendition of Que Sera, Sera, and it feels time to settle down and point and laugh while people  I don’t know die. Just like watching BBC News then, really.

The title of gimmicky reality show Don’t Tell the Bride doesn’t just refer to the wedding the groom has to organise with no communication with his wife-to-be. It also refers to the presumable gag  friends and family must take in order to let the groom make huge, blundering, errors, and let the bride throw the inevitable strop while merrily stoking the fires of their discontent.

The couple this week are made up of a nice-but-dim metalhead whose name is irrelevant, and his rock-chick girlfriend Terri, a heavily tattooed and pierced, flame-haired enigma whose voice-over also claims to love pink, girly, sparkly bits, over shots of her positioning gems on an iPhone. The best man is an extraordinarily camp, bald man who, within seconds of appearing on-screen, has become by far my favorite member of the party this week. But what’s this? Here’s Man saying he wants a metal, rock, hardcore wedding, and a cut shot of Terri implying she won’t marry her finace unless she gets “a princess wedding”.  Conflict? Surely not?

And here the production team begins to twist the knife.  Dragging in family, there are endless shots of the groom and entourage driving around talking about venues. At one point, on the disappointment of a venue being closed on the Sabbath, the groom turns his heavily tattooed, pierced face to the camera and announces “Sundays suck”, which I can see being made into some sort of gif for the next Conservative election campaign. Obviously staged fights take place to indie soundtracks, but things only really start spraying blood when the bride finds out what the wedding’s going to be like.

Fustratingly, he actually does a reasonable job of picking a dress. I’ve never got the appeal of a wedding dress myself, not having had my ovaries put where my brain used to be, but even I have to admit she looks all frothy and booby. Then the wedding happens. The bride walks up the sort of stage-aisle while some sort of bland metal band chugs away distressingly on stage. After endless vox pops of Terri telling the camera emphatically that if Groom #14 made a metal wedding she would not be best impressed. But it seems this week that the selection process has failed dismally. Most weeks, the couple will be so volatile anyway, that any sort of deviation  from the Bride’s vision will end in storming out and bawling. But this week, although she looks a little perturbed at the men howling into microphones, Terri and her husband actually seem pretty happy and content.

I felt totally cheated. Sentimental bastards.

It’s late, I’m tired, I’m miserable and the usual parade of drunks are chattering away outside my window with no forseeable intentions of shutting up.  Yes, it’s time for The Great British Bake Off again, a show which combines stodgy puddings with heart-stopping trials-by-cooking, like a Saw trap designed by Delia Smith.

I grew up with a clutch of Mary Berry cookery books as a child, enthusiastically baking to her kind, slow, matronly recipes. To see her here, then, a great, sweeping, almost avian matriarch, is somewhat of a shock. By far the judge with the most gravitas, she brings a layer of haughty, slightly sulky, expertise to the show. The other judges-Paul Hollywood,who both sounds and looks like an ageing male stripper, Mel Giedroyc, and Sue Perkins, all seem quite extra-requirements as the contestants are so astonishingly knowledgeable about what they cook. It’s gratifying to watch for much of the time, cooking is a science as opposed to an art, which is surely where some if this so-called “Britishness” comes from.

The food looks so good I tried at regular intervals to crawl through the screen to eat it. And there’s something quite relaxing about listening to the cool narration describing the catastrophic effects of steam on pastry. And the competitions are genuinely nail-biting- everything looks such an incredible improvement on something I, a sufficient cook, could make. These people are the sort of people who have families, kids, a full-time job, and can still whip up what appears to be a stag beetle fighting a dove out of crisp bread on the hop? Now that’s something I can buy into.

The whole programme would be perhaps more truthful if it were renamed “The Great British Pastry Fetishists Club”, as everyone is focused on pastry. There are countless crash-zooms of pastry going into ovens, coming out of ovens, being kneaded, being rolled out. Frantic vox-pop interviews with exhausted competitors  on their hopes and their fears for their pastry. And the narration which I’m certain had hours of outtakes in which she descended into “Your pastry better turn out all right, you bitch, otherwise you’re totally fucked. Yes, God help you if you don’t use lard to get a crisp pastry. Who knows what they’ll all say. They’ll all laugh. Mary. And Paul. And Mel. And the other one. Yes. You’ve got to rotatae it while squeezing the pastry into the doily…..”

Well, I like to think so.

“A musical by Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman? Ha!” I cried in derision. I snorted with despair as I found out Paris Hilton was one of the leads. I wept for how the mighty had fallen as I discovered Paul Sorvino was playing an grumpy Italian-American dad. Then I actually watched the film.

Now, Repo! is really an opera. Most of the exposition and dialogue is sung. The history of the world it is set in- a future where an epidemic of organ failures has left GeneCo, a company that manufactures organs, with an almost monarchic power over the rest of the world- is told through the medium of cartoon. The visuals clash an industrial background with wild costuming, a mix of art deco, gothic, super-violence, cyberpunk and quite extraordinary hair to create Darick Robertson’s wet dream.

But this is, comfortingly, just background for the plot. Focused on Shilo (Alexa Vega), her father, Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head) and their relationships with the head of GeneCo, Rotti Largo (Sorvino). Now, I’ll be honest- without the songs, the plot would struggle to maintain any sort of hold. Anthony Stewart Head would just be a man mourning for his dead wife, Bill Moseley (as one of the Largo clan) would be an unnerving psycopath, and Paris Hilton an inanimate, spoiled heiress riddled with unfortunate surgery. But the music- as well as the sheer vocal talent of all involved- gives them all another, fantastically operatic dimension. Every character is an unrepetent caricature, but accompanied with the brilliant rock numbers provided, they become layered with meaning that would have been lost without it. Even smaller characters, like Amber Sweet (Hilton), a spokeswoman for addiction to Zydrate, a new, powerful painkiller, are given a bit of nuance in their musical performances.

Although the film isn’t perfect-the direction wavers at points, and the cinematography is admitted flat in some scenes- it’s fun. It’s blackly funny, and the powerhouse tunes do heighten ones tolerance for the gore gun being turned on full. And- although I’m sure this will interest no-one, and merely mention it as an aside- there’s a bit where Paris Hilton is writhing up against a wall in some rather scanty black leather wisp, accompanied by two deeply buff topless men. And so, even if the drugs and Rock and Roll weren’t enough, we’ve got sex too. No excuses.