BA_Harrison

There's more than a bit of The Substance about this dark, twisted take on Cinderella, in which ugly stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren) does whatever it takes to make herself attractive so that she can bag herself a rich husband, preferably Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), who is holding a ball to find himself a virginal young wife.

Like The Substance, the film drives home the dangers that women face when driven to meet beauty standards, forcing themselves to endure risky procedures that can leave them worse off than when they started. Encouraged by her pushy mother (Ane Dahl Torp), Elvira undergoes painful surgical procedures, endures weeks of training at a finishing school, and even swallows a tapeworm egg so that she can lose weight, something that has terrible consequences. Even after all of this body modification, Prince Julian takes a shine to Elvira's stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), who flees the ball in a hurry, leaving behind one of her shoes. When Julian declares that whomever the shoe fits will become his wife, the now deranged Elvira takes even more drastic measures...

The Ugly Stepsister not only shares a similar central theme to The Substance, it is also as visually impressive and every bit as disturbing as Coralie Fargeat's film, director Emilie Blichfeldt filling the screen with shocking yet artistically shot imagery, from the chisel to the schnozz nose-job, to the extreme close-ups of sewing on false eyelashes, to the removal of the tapeworm, to the decaying corpse of Agnes's father. Blichfeldt even throws in some graphic naughtiness to further surprise the viewer.

If body horror is your bag, definitely give this one a go: directorial debuts are rarely as accomplished as this thoroughly demented fairytale.

My son told me that there was a lot of exposition in this latest instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise, and he wasn't wrong: the first hour was nearly all exposition, including a hilariously bad opening scene in which Ethan Hunt watches a video tape from the president that explains the plot so far, despite Hunt already knowing everything that has happened. He was there!

However, even with all of the clumsy exposition, I still found myself completely lost for much of the time, such is the confusing, badly-written techno-babble tosh that passes for a script on this occasion. I guess this mightn't have been so bad had there been plenty of well-choreographed thrills and spills along the way, but The Final Reckoning is also light on edge-of-the-seat action in comparison with earlier entries in the series - for a three hour film, the number of exciting scenes is very disappointing: we get a brief fight in a wooden cabin, a protracted sequence inside a flooded, wrecked Russian submarine that is surprisingly lacking in tension, and then it's a long slog to the airborne finalé, which is impressively handled but utterly preposterous.

I realise that ridiculous plot twists, incomprehensible high-tech twaddle and crazy stunts have always been a part of the franchise, but in this particular outing, everything is so far-fetched and improbable (Hunt survives hypothermia and the bends with no ill effect and everyone seems to know how to defuse a nuclear bomb) that it almost feels like a parody, right down to the relieved character at the end saying 'He made it... he actually made it!', or some such clichéd garbage.

3.5/10 generously rounded up to 4 for IMDb. If this is the end of the franchise, it's not a great way to go out.

Oh. My. God. I've seen bad horror movies. I've seen very bad horror movies. And I've seen Woodchipper Massacre. And now I've seen Contamination .7, which surely ranks as one of the worst horrors ever made. There's a reason why this one is also known as Troll III: it's every bit as bad as infamous crapfest Troll 2 - but it's far less entertaining.

Someone clearly saw the tree attack scene in Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and thought to themselves, 'I can make an entire movie out of that idea', and so they did, with a cast even more wooden than the trees in the film. Not that better acting would have made much difference: the script is pure garbage and the direction is torpid, making the film a real challenge to sit through to the end.

To be fair, the premise isn't without potential: living tree roots, mutated through radioactivity, could have been a whole load of trashy fun, especially if there had been plenty of gore; unfortunately, barring one scene in which a root enters a man's mouth and exits via his eye socket, the film is completely bloodless, the trees preferring to throttle their victims to death.

With lots of dull dialogue, atrocious acting, a really bad exploding helicopter, and rubbery tree roots galore, Contamination .7 will test the patience of even the most hardened fan of trash cinema. You have been warned.

My rating: 1.5/10, generously rounded up to 2 for the one splattery scene. If only there had been more gore.