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Cats (2019) – No, not that one.

Released: 24th October
Seen: 28th October

Later on this year, we’re all going to get to experience the wonder and majesty that is Cats. Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Weber monstrosity, is turning into a live-action film where everyone looks like they were born directly in the centre of the uncanny valley and everything about it both horrifies and delights me. Like, we’re all aware that Cats is basically a suicide musical right? It’s literally a musical about which cat gets to kill themselves in order to come back as another cat and someone gave Tom Hooper millions of dollars and several major celebrities in order to make the film version of the suicidal cat musical. It’s going to be nuts, I can’t wait… I apparently couldn’t wait so much that the second my local cinema said it was showing a movie called Cats I had to see it, I need to be the person who saw two different Cats movies in cinemas… because I’m a sad person, please give me pity.

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Dolemite Is My Name (2019) – Brilliant

Released: 25th October
Seen: 26th October

The 1970s was the era of the blaxploitation film. If you look up a list of blaxploitation movies they will list every year of the 70s with milestone movies like Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song and Coffy. While these movies often featured racial stereotypes that might be termed problematic today, they’re also a subgenre of film that features an entirely black cast and often featured black directors and writers trying to make films for black audiences of the day. It was also a genre that made worldwide stars out of people like Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and the subject of the newest Netflix biopic Rudy Ray White.

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Wounds (2019) – It Hurts

Released: 18th October
Seen: 26th October

The end of October is a great time to put out every horror movie, no matter what the content or style is. It’s a time when the slashers, the zombies, the vampires and just the flat out weird as hell horror films have their time in the sun. You could release pretty much anything horror related during October and it’d be appropriate. You can release great horror films and even awful horror films, bad movie nights are a thing and a bad horror movie around Halloween is a gift for people wanting something gloriously stupid to laugh at… and then there’s Wounds, a bland horror movie that tries its hardest to be creepy and weird and never fully gets there, though not for a lack of trying.

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Ready Or Not (2019) – Here I Come

Released: 24th October
Seen: 25th October

One great trick Horror movies can pull out to create an engaging story is to take a mundane game of some kind and introduce the element of death. There have been horror movies about video games that will kill the player should they lose, films that took video poker and added murder victims and last year we even got a film that took Truth or Dare and made it deadly… granted, it didn’t make it good, but it sure did make it deadly. Well, now we have another addition to this little group in the form of Ready or Not, which takes the childhood game of hide and seek and flavours it with a little bit of The Most Dangerous Game for good measure.

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Downton Abbey (2019) – Royally Sweet

Released: 12th September
Seen: 20th October

Downton Abbey hit TV screens in 2010 and from the moment that it started it was a monster hit, racking up between 9 million and 12 million viewers an episode over the course of its six year run. It took home Emmys like they were on sale. Fifteen Emmys over six years is insanely impressive for a show that wasn’t made explicitly for American audiences. It starred some of the best actors in the UK, including the icon Dame Maggie Smith in probably one of her most beloved performances. The show ended in 2015 with a Christmas special and… I’ve never seen a single episode. I just never got around to it, despite my absolute adoration of Maggie Smith, so I walked into this film with no knowledge of anything beyond “It’s about fancy rich people and the servants who keep them from dying of starvation” so we’re going to talk about if this movie works without having seen the source material, which is often going to happen with movie adaptations of TV series. Short answer? Yeah, kind of works… for the most part

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Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil (2019) – Thankyou Mistress

Released: 16th October
Seen: 18th October

In 2014, Disney (the dark overlord of entertainment that will one day consume us all) released Maleficent. Maleficent was their version of a “What If” story that featured one of their most iconic villains of all time and asked the question “What if the Mistress of all evil was good?” Asking that question netted them over $750 million worldwide and an Oscar nomination, though it received mixed critical praise. This was a film I saw long before I started reviewing so here is a short version of my thoughts of the original film… I hate it with every fibre of my being and cast it into the fiery pits of hell where it belongs. 

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El Camino (2019) – Breaking Moderately OK

Released: 11th October
Seen: 13th October

Adapting a TV series into a film is not easy. The two mediums, though similar in many ways, are substantially different when it comes to storytelling. Going from a 22-42 minute long episode of TV to a two-hour long movie can change what kind of story you’ll focus on. They’re also made for a variety of reasons, either to provide commentary on the series (21 Jump Street or The Brady Bunch Movie), act as a long episode that couldn’t have been done in the normal series runtime (The Simpsons Movie or DuckTales The Movie: Treasure Of The Lost Lamp) or take on the form of a finale and give the series some much needed closure (Serenity or The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!). There are other reasons to make the leap, like brand name recognition or the increased quality of cocaine, but these three seem to be the biggest reasons. El Camino seems to be going for the “much-needed closure” reasoning but forgot that we didn’t actually need that closure.

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Fractured (2019) – Broken

Released: 11th October
Seen: 12th October

Sometimes all a film needs is a great concept and that can do most of the work. Sharknado is a great example, the idea is so out there (It’s sharks… in a tornado) that no matter what those films do I can enjoy it because the idea itself is so perfect that I’ll buy it. This can also work with good films, “Killer who kills you in your dreams” gave us Freddy Krueger, “Plant that eats people” gave us Little Shop of Horrors, a good concept can make a film easy to enjoy. So when a concept as perfect and as effective as “Guy checks his daughter into a hospital, hospital pretends she never checked in” comes across I was ready to love it because that idea has so much potential… shame Fractured wasted so much of it.

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Hustlers (2019) – The Hustle Is Deep

Released: 10th October
Seen: 11th October

You’d think that there’d be a lot more films about exotic dancers. After all, it’s a job that can contain the three things that people love more than anything. Sex, drugs, and dancing to remixes of Britney Spears songs. Still, it feels like there aren’t that many major hit films about exotic dancers. There’s the infamous Showgirls, maybe some people remember the 1996 film Striptease and there are, of course, the two recent Magic Mike movies (the second one is better, I will not be accepting arguments on this), I know of Zombie Strippers and Full Monty but that’s about all I could name off the top of my head. There are others but not many that are giant mainstream hits and certainly none that would really get any kind of buzz as being more than just a fun movie to enjoy on a night out with friends… well, then Hustlers came along and said “Fine, I guess we’ll have to give you everything you ever wanted” and just ran away with every bit of my heart.

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Sleepaway Camp (1983) – Oh I’m a Happy Camper

The slasher boom of the 80s is one of the most fascinating moments in cinema. Starting a little before the decade began with Halloween and exploding with Friday the 13th, slasher films were this strange little thing that could be filmed on budgets that most studio pictures would spend on catering and were almost always critically maligned. Great shockers like Happy Birthday to Me, The Prowler, My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train and so many other fun little gore fests would be regularly destroyed by critics, but go on to be box office hits or have a cult following that continues to this day. They’ve always been the ugly stepchild of the horror genre, but I genuinely adore them in all their cheesiness and since it’s October, it only seems right that all the throwbacks be horror related. With that in mind, I had another look at an old film I enjoyed but never quite understood… I still don’t, but I get that’s part of the charm.

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