I just adore the horror film genre.

What I love about it is its ability to produce fear and adrenaline within the person who is watching it, even though they aren’t taking part in the horror themselves.

Take ‘SAW’, for example.  A girl is thrown into a pit full of used hypodermic needles.  She claws around desperately trying to reach the edge of the pit to escape, and becomes impaled horribly by these needles, screaming in agony.  As horrifying as this seems, I can watch this with a big smile on my face, knowing that what I’m seeing is just the product of a screenwriter’s deranged mind.  It’s all just prosthetics and tomato ketchup, after all.  When the film is over, I can let go of the horror, and this is healthy.

‘I am Legend’ is different.  It’s horror is entirely more realistic.  It re-defines the term ‘edge-of-your-seat’, and left me with a complete inability to think about anything else but the film for the rest of the evening.  I also had a very hard time stemming tears at several points during the flick, and I’m not the sort to blub during films at all (nope, not even during E.T.).  Will Smith plays an entirely new sort of character, one with depth and a desert-island mentality that beats the pants off Mr. Hank’s ‘Cast Away’.  His acting is supreme in this film, he is now the almighty master of the pregnant pause in my book.

So what’s it about? 

Emma Thompson appears at the start of the film in a cameo role.  She is being interviewed, and tells the world that she has discovered a cure for cancer, by mutating virus activity.

The film then skips forward a few years.  We are shown a dead New York City.  The buildings are surrounded by grassland and deer wander amongst abandoned cars.  It soon becomes obvious that there is something evil now lurking on the streets – that something horribly wrong happened with the cancer cure that turned the world into sunlight hating zombies.  (Zombies?  Hurrah!!!)  Smith and his faithful doggy seem to be immune to this virus, and choose to stay on ‘Ground Zero’ to continue work on a cure.

As the film progresses, you’ll find with delight that most of the cliches involved with Zombie films have been discarded and replaced with a real look into the human mind and its attempt to preserve sanity amid chaos.  Think of ’28 days’, but multiply the suspense and loneliness by ten, and divide the hope by twenty.  Naturally, there is not much dialogue in the first half of the film, but this is replaced by a Bob Marley track which Smith repeatedly plays for himself in a desperate attempt to keep his candle burning, or as he puts it; ‘To light up the dark’.

That’s all I’m saying, apart from a sincere statement that this could possibly be my new favourite film of all time.  Yes, I’m building it up and feeding the hype, because this time it’s deserved.  (Okay, okay, I’ll admit maybe that perhaps the zombies were a little reminiscent of ‘The Mummy’ CGI abominations, but it’s a very weak critiscism indeed.)  Go on the legend: 9/10.

The Accidental Terrorist has this metrosexual friend who on the surface seems well ‘ard, until he opens his mouth or confesses his favourite film.  He loaned the latter to us last week, and told TAT to ignore the blurb and promise to watch the whole thing in its entirety.  TAT seemed unimpressed but resolved to try.

The film was ‘Bitter Moon’, a film from 1992, directed by Roman Polanski (Name sounds familiar?  He also directed The Pianist, Ninth Gate and Rosemary’s Baby *oh right, him!*), starring Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski’s missus!) and Peter Coyote (the mean scientist guy from E.T.).

What do you mean you can’t believe I haven’t seen this yet?!  Shut up.

Whoa.  What a film.  It almost fell victim to the halfway-through *lets just turn this shite off and watch something else* syndrome, had it not been for TAT’s promise to his friend, for the story build-up was looking decidedly chick-flickish.

It is, however, not necessarily chickflickish at all, unless you are a woman who likes to watch YOP being licked from a pair of diddies over breakfast.  It is full-on sexual exploration down every alley you could think of (‘scuse the pun) without being a pornographic flick. 

Do. Not. Watch. This. Film. With. Your. Parents.

(Or with a new boyfriend, or a prim cousin, or a neighbour with a beard.)

A prim English couple (Grant and Scott-Thomas) are trying to put the zing back into their static love life on a romantic cruise.  Grant meets Coyote, who plays a disturbingly creepy man in a wheelchair, a writer with an apparent love for both the sound of his own voice, and the bounds of the sexual imagination.  He is accompanied by a very intriguing but distant French wife.  Their story unfolds, a story which is wild with passion and experimentation at first – as is the case with most new couples – then develops into a story of manipulation, cruelty and poetic come-uppance.

This film will make you cringe.  It will make you want to throw yoghurt at the t.v.  It will make you want to throw your hands in the air and shout “BUT WHY?!?!?”  It will make bile rise in your throat and it will give you a stiffy, all at the same time.  You will not have seen everything until you’ve seen this film.

Just remember what I told you about not watching it with your parents.