Daybreakers

'This isn't like that Twilight bullshit' says one reviewer on YouTube. True says team dave. Another film packed full of vampires but in this one instead of co-existing with humans, they have all but wiped them out.

Plenty of gore, plenty of bits flying round. Loads of vampires, loads of dead people. Should be the recipe for excellence. Yet, Daybreakers has a few problems...

In the near future, a virus has swept the world turning humans into vampires and the world now operates only at night. The few remaining humans are now farmed Matrix stylee for their blood but there isn't enough to go round so blood quotas are introduced and vampires are forced to have just 5% in their regular coffee intake.

Our hero, Edward (Ethan Hawke) is a vampire working on a blood substitute that will lessen the vampire's dependency on human blood. Sympathetic to humans (he never wanted to be a vampire, having been turned against his will by his lunatic brother), he works as hard as possible to produce a cure. Meanwhile less and less humans are around to feed on and all out chaos starts to break out. Vampires starved of blood mutate into freaky bat things that even regular vampires are afraid of.

Sounds ok you say. Well, the bizarre bit of this movie is the fact that vampires are so easy to kill. Point a stick at them - they die. Shine a light at them - they die. Fire a dart at them - they die. Shout boo at them - they die...well not quite but you get the idea. Vampires die all over the place. They are about as scary as your grandma. In fact so unscary are they that you wonder how on earth the humans let themselves be overrun by them in the first place. In the end a gang of about 10 poorly equipped humans are able to overthrow the entire vampire populace. Errr...what?

Anyway, if you ignore that fact, the rest of the film is ok. Willem Defoe throws a campy hand in as 'Elvis' the leader of the renegade humans and Sam Neill plays a threatening, if somewhat toothless baddy. Ethan Hawke is mostly pathetic in his role - looking confused and pasty throughout. The whole thing is shot in a blueish tinge probably to make it feel like night-time and there are some nice gadget type things chucked in for good effect (groovy self-inflating tyres so vampires don't have to go outside in the daytime to change them). The gore adds to the nightmare feel of a future that has gone wrong - in this case not due to a mechanical threat (eg. Matrix, Terminator) but due to a biological one.

Team Dave says, "Vampires are pussies - I could take them with a solar powered torch. This is OK for a rental but you wouldn't really want it cluttering your shelves. 6/10"

For those that like to watch - Kaley Cuoco

She's the hottest lady nerd friend in the world...Kaley Cuoco from The Big Bang Theory.





She makes me go all gooey - here she is with a pink computer, chatting to Wolowitz, when she got addicted to playing Age of Conan online.

If only all lady peoples liked to hang out with us chaps from geekdom...ha!

If you haven't seen the program, it's genius. Click the video to watch Leonard and the gang mess about with their eBay purchase, an original HG Wells Time Machine.




Lastly, if you like the t-shirts the guys wear in the show, plenty of them are pictured on this blog - Sheldon's Shirts.

Joss Stone - woof!

For those who like to watch, previously unknown to me soul singer Joss Stone presented an award at the Brits on Wednesday to the winner of the dullest man award 2007.

Joss is very exciting to look at, doesn't wear much and has the longest legs in the world. I imagine she has an awesome career in front of her.

Disappointing that she chose to wear her mum's kaftan though.

Top 99 Women 2007

For those that like to watch, ask.men have a ranking of their top 99 women for this year. Similar to FHM's list, ask.men also attempt to give the ladies scores based on their abilities other than just being eye candy.

Good rankings for some of my faves Sienna Miller, Keeley Hazell, Elisha Cuthbert and Scarlett Johansson.

AskMen.com - Top 99 Women 2007

Film Review - Pan's Labyrinth

In space no one can hear you scream...

Yet they can in your living room. Screaming from boredom.

This movie, shot in a new style which I like to call 'almost complete blackness', suffers from dullness in wholely new levels of unimaginable. The plot involves a girl moving to a forest where her mother has moved to shack up with some Spanish army officer near the end of WWII. The girl falls in with a bunch of forest fairy creatures including some Pan looking bloke who stutters, sniffles and shuffles through his scenes asking the girl to do three tasks. The tasks involve being bored. No, well they do, but that isn't quite it. they involve going to see monsters and stuff. And being bored.

There are some pretty horrendous, unnecessarily violent scenes which serve to do nothing other than put you off watching it even more. I'm sure the director only put them in to try to do the opposite though - hoping you'd watch to see somebody get hurt in a bit of blood and guts. It doesn't.

This movie was so dull, I was forced to read the free copy of 'The Spectator' (the world's worst magazine) I was given this week. I'd love to tell you how the movie ended and say it was all for the best, it was worth watching this crap, but I can't. I turned it off several hours into it, and nowhere near close to the finish.

And before you say 'Hey Dave, you're just being xenophobic and not giving foreign language films a chance'. 'Dude, ' I reply, 'I saw Battle Royal I and II and those rocked. I saw Delicatessen and Calvaire and they were pieces of genius. This Pan's nonsense sucked balls.'