If you’re going to do a film where you get two famous characters from different franchises to battle out then I guess this how you do it, it’s just a shame the characters are from some of the most nauseating horror film franchises. Perhaps it was inevitable that the antagonists of “A Nightmare On Elm Street” and “Friday The 13th” would fight one another and at least it’s more entertaining than the “Alien vs. Predator” pictures.

In this film, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund “A Nightmare On Elm Street”) is sick of the fact that the teens he loves to terrorise, are no longer afraid so he enlists the help of Jason Voorhees to help him out. As the two are hacking away teen after teen, Freddy suddenly realises that Jason is stealing his business so the two engage in combat. Who wins? Who cares? You know they’ll bring them both back for a sequel or remake or whatever.

Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are not scary and never have been but it is fun to watch them fight one another. They fight by burning, stabbing, slicing, cutting, punching and pretty much anything of a similar nature. The teenagers are as dull as ever.

If you wanted to watch Freddy and Jason batter one another into submission, this film offers just that; if you wanted anything more than that, you were being too optimistic. For a film designed to just show two characters from rival franchises hitting one another then it succeeds, it does what the “Alien vs. Predator” films failed to do. I still prefer “Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man” for my favourite film of this type but maybe you’re a fan of slasher films from the 80s and 90s rather than the 30s and 40s so maybe this will be more of your kind-of thing.

“Freaky Friday” is an awful lot like “The Parent Trap” in its style of jokes and set-ups; the difference is that this film is actually pretty darn amusing. This movie takes a premise I’ve seen done countless times but does it with a real nice comedic touch without making it seem really tacky or vulgar.

In “Freaky Friday”, schoolgirl Annabelle (Jodie Foster “Silence of the Lambs”, “Flightplan”) and her mother Ellen (Barbara Harris “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) mysteriously swap bodies one Friday the 13th after both say they’d like to be one another for a day. What follows is silly but so very enjoyable as the film utilises just about every gag you could want.

Foster and Harris do a good job both before and after the switch and the writers have really nailed the different personas, except for when Foster is still playing the kid as some of the dialog seemed a little too sophisticated for your average girl of 13. The only other real shame is that there are not lots of interesting side characters and most of them do just fade into the background as the carnage involving exploding typewriters and a cars splitting in half during pursuit takes control.

“Freaky Friday” kept me entertained because I like the fact that it just went with it for lots of the gags and did just stick to lots and lots of conversation. The funniest moment is either the hockey match or the water-skiing, I can’t decide but they are both very cleverly done. As a body-swapping movie, I think the reason why this works is because they’re both female as I find most body-swapping between characters of different genders tends to lead to predictable and generally undesirable jokes. While this certainly isn’t an amazing film or any comedic classic, I really did like “Freaky Friday” and I think you will to.

Co-directed by and starring Alex Winter (“The Lost Boys”, “Death Wish 3”), “Freaked” is a truly outrageously bizarre comedy film that seems to blend “The Island Of Dr. Moreau” with “The Toxic Avenger” and “Monty Python”. It was a massive flop when it was released and the studio hated it because it was so ‘weird’.

Ricky Coogan (Winter) is a famous actor that is travelling to the fictious South American country of San Flan to promote a dangerous fertiliser. However, he ends up at a freak show run by a mad man (Randy Quaid “Independence Day”) that likes to turn visitors into strange monsters. Now Ricky and his fellow mutants must find a way to escape.

Alex Winter was clearly involved in a lot of aspects of this film and he is okay as the star. He spends a lot of the time with a lot of his body mutated into a gruesome sight. Randy Quaid is quite good as the villain. I also like William Sadler (“Die Hard 2: Die Harder”) as the head of Everything Except Shoes, an evil corporation. The other mutants include a sock puppet man (Bobcat Goldthwait “Scrooged”) and Mr. T from “The A-Team” plays a bearded lady. Keanu Reeves (“The Matrix”) has an uncredited role as Ortiz the Dog Boy and he apparently got a million dollars. Brooke Shields (“The Blue Lagoon”) is quite funny. There also some giant Rastafarian eyeballs with guns that chase the mutants. The special effects are phenomenal for the different characters.

The special effects are really great and there are plenty of hilarious moments throughout the movie. However, there is no denying that it remains a confusing mess. There are so many jokes in this film and a lot of them do sadly fall flat. The plot is rather weak and it just seems to be little more than an excuse for lots of crazy monster effects.

“Four Rooms” is a collection of short films set in a fading Hollywood hotel directed by four different independent filmmakers with the main link being that they all feature Ted the Bellhop played by Tim Roth (“Reservoir Dogs”, “The Incredible Hulk”). The shorts, which are all meant to be comedies in some form or another, vary in quality with one being decent, one being near unwatchable and two that are in the middle.

The Missing Ingredient – 1 star

The first is directed by Allison Anders (“Grace of My Heart”) and really isn’t a film in any usual sense of the word and is it relies solely on the presence of nudity to sell you the product and completely abandons any attempt at creating remotely good characters and/or dialog.

In “The Missing Ingredient” a coven of witches including one played by Madonna (“Evita”, “A League of Their Own”) have all gathered in a hotel room to revive a witch goddess that has been turned to stone as they each bring gifts. One witch however admits she does not have the seamen from a man required to break the curse and thus is given one hour to collect some, thus Ted the Bellhop becomes their target.

The witches in this film are beyond boring and have nothing interesting to say. Some wear revealing clothes such as Madonna in a tight, leather outfit and others are completely naked as they stand around moaning and chanting; it doesn’t matter if you’re straight or not as you can’t sit there and defend a film that bases itself on so little because really it is just an excuse for women to be undressed. Tim Roth comes across as severely weak here but the material is very poor.

“The Missing Ingredient” is by far the worst segment in this entire experience as it seems like some poor sitcom merged with a sexually explicit film. It also technically is the worst film in the package as there are no clever camera-angles or anything of that nature. For a movie that is intended to make you laugh it would serve much better at getting people aroused, that is if they haven’t turned it off after a few dreary minutes; thankfully though the other shorts here are a lot better than this.

The Wrong Man – 3 ½ stars

If you managed to stomach or just skip the first section of the film then you’ll find yourself sitting through “The Wrong Man” directed by Alexandre Rockwell (“In The Soup”) and I think it is the best part of this film. It’s confusing but done with such an intense and bizarre energy that I actually enjoyed it.

In this segment, Ted the Bellhop, whose self-despised full name is revealed to be Theodore, walks into a room where a man named Sigfried (David Proval “Mean Streets”) is holding his tied up wife Angela (Jennifer Beals “Flashdance”) at gunpoint. Ted gets accused of sleeping with Angela, just about every single nickname for male genitals is said and there is a good twist.

Tim Roth proves to be much better here as he’s given more to do and actually delivers a few laughs here and there. David Proval and Jennifer Beals are both good as the couple and everybody here is just really on edge and throughout the short the pressure on all of them just keeps building until it just explodes. It’s intriguing to see so few people carry the whole event but I’m glad it was a short as this isn’t a situation that could have been dragged out for much longer.

“The Wrong Man” features a truly excellent shot as we see Ted hanging out of a window but we see both his lower body on the inside and his upper on the outside simultaneously; it’s very creative. The performances are good because they work despite not having the best of dialog, there are a few laughs thrown in and I have to say the twist is decent as well so I’d definitely say this is the best volume out of the four, which is a bit of a shame as it isn’t amazing or anything like that.

The Misbehavers – 2 stars

The third item “Four Rooms” has to offer is “The Misbehavers” directed by Robert Rodriguez (“Machete”, “Sin City”). It isn’t particularly funny as the children in it are so young and the things that happen to them are so cruel that I’d at least find something heavily wrong with me for enjoying this one and that’s a bit of a shame as there is some potential here with the adult performers.

In “The Misbehavers”, Antonio Banderas, who worked with the director on “Desperado”, stars as a guy credited similar as ‘Man’; he gets Ted to babysit for his two unruly children while he takes his wife out on the town. While Banderas creates some light chuckles and Roth provides a kind-of creepiness, the children get up to things that they just shouldn’t.

Banderas is pretty good when he holds his wife in his arms and kicks the button in a lift to send it down to the ground floor; I also like his macho attitude throughout. Ted comes across as sympathetic in the first two segments but in this one he showcases a nasty side that proves to be entertaining. The children are quite young, one is definitely younger than ten, and they show-off a sick foot fetish (similar to the one in Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn”), find a drug-taker’s needle, swear, are threatened with violence, smoke, drink, watch inappropriate dancers and find a corpse; it’s all too much for it to be amusing.

“The Misbehavers” has some good parts, courtesy of the grown-ups, but the kids, who really are the heart of the short, don’t provide any laughs as they are stuck in a situation that is far too mature for them. I wish Rodriguez could have toned things down and made something more family-friendly because then it would have worked and would have handed us a more enjoyable experience that would have felt even more different from the other segments, making it truly unique.

The Man From Hollywood – 2 ½ stars

The final short we get is “The Man From Hollywood” directed by and starring Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”, “Jackie Brown”), who is easily the most famous of the four directors. This section is a disappointing finale in a lot of respects and that is because I had such high expectations of Tarantino and while it does feel like his other work, it just never reaches the same sort of level.

In this one, Ted’s final endurance challenge of the night as it seems is to tend to eccentric moviemaker Chester (Tarantino). Everybody in the room gets drinking and talking about old movies when we find out there is dare taken from a Alfred Hitchcock tv show episode where a man is going to try and light his lighter ten times in a row, if he wins he gets a retro car but if he loses then he gets his little finger sliced off.

Tarantino stars as basically what I imagine the real-life Tarantino to be like: he swears like no tomorrow, goes on about obscure old movies, gets drunk and makes dumb dares. Ted the Bellhop is very bland here, almost as bland as in “The Missing Ingredient”, which I found to be a real shame after the last two pieces made him a reasonably good character. Bruce Willis (“Die Hard”) is in it and he’s awful.

I like how this one is filmed very much and I think the Tarantino performance is good but everything else is a bit sloppy such as it contains lots of fast dialog but isn’t as interesting as in many of the man’s other pictures. It’s not a bad effort but feels like the opening scenes of Tarantino movie and not a full experience and thus is disposable. It’s pretty funny to think that Tarantino is such a controversial filmmaker and his contribution to “Four Rooms” is arguably the tamest.

“Four Rooms” is a mixed bag as I liked the second part, the final was mediocre, the third was disappointing and the starter should be avoided. I like the cartoon intro that has a funny “Reservoir Dogs” joke and is not too dissimilar to the animated sequences in the “Pink Panther” movies, the shame is that this is one of the best additions to the whole film. In conclusion it is a messy time, especially with the inconsistency of the quality of Ted the Bellhop character.

If you thought “The Infidel” or “Team America” was daring in mockery of terrorists then “Four Lions” will exceed the bar for you. It’s a very shocking, very dark yet very funny movie that really tears apart any of the righteousness jihadists try to give themselves.

In “Four Lions”, four British Muslims want to become jihadists but they turn out to be more Mr. Bean than Bin Laden. They talk about the evil capitalism and imperialism of the West yet then discuss their fondness of Alton Towers and sing along to “Dancing In The Moonlight”. Blow up a mosque to cause an uprising or blow up Boots? They can’t decide.

Riz Ahmed (“Nightcrawler”), Nigel Lindsay (“Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa”) and the others are all really good. They are all real idiots in different ways. One of them buys bleach for the explosives and uses a different voice every time he buys 12 bottles, one of his voices is an IRA voice and it’s the kind-of idiocy that is seen throughout the film. Another one of them tries to convince his son of jihadi by re-telling the story of "The Lion King”, making it about Simba’s jihad. The other characters are alright.

“Four Lions” works so well because although it may seem offensive and at times poor taste, this is exactly the kind-of films that need to be made about jihadists. It’s an entertaining film that really backs a punch because it isn’t afraid to show that some of the most terrible events that happen in the world are carried out by some of the most pathetic people. It’s a biting comedy that is perhaps even funnier and even more poignant than something such as “The Infidel”. “Four Lions” is an entertaining movie but it’s also arguably a very powerful movie.

“Four Brothers” is a real mess of a movie because it simply cannot decide whether it is thriller, a drama or an action film. If the filmmakers aren’t even sure about what they are doing, how are we meant to understand it?

In this film, Bobby (Mark Wahlberg “The Happening”, “Three Kings”), Angel (Tyrese Gibson “2 Fast 2 Furious”), Jeremiah (André Benjamin “Be Cool”) and Jack (Garret Hedlund “Tron: Legacy”) return home when their adopted mother (Fionnula Flanagan “The Others”) is shot dead during a robbery. The brothers soon learn that it was no accident that she died that day as they seek to hunt down the men responsible.

The film cannot decide what it wants its characters to be. Are they just after bad guys as though this was a regular revenge film? Are they going to use their heads to try and solve a mystery? Are they going to try and bond together? Are they there to make jokes at each other’s expense? The script is all over the place and therefore none of the actors really seem to know what they are doing. The movie is also indecisive when it comes to the villain because it doesn’t know whether to make him dark or funny.

“Four Brothers” features a big shootout scene that makes it seem like an action movie but then it there are many other scenes where it seems like this is a mystery movie. It doesn’t work because the script isn’t smart enough to make it a good mystery movie. The movie dabbles in being an action film, a mystery movie, a drama and a comedy so we leave very confused. It’s a shame because there was potential here for a good revenge flick but very quickly, it all gets muddled up. Clarity is very important in the movie industry and “Four Brothers” proves that.

“Fortress” is a sci-fi/action movie that works because unlike movies such as “The One” and “Demolition Man” it features a plausible future, the kind I saw in “Blade Runner”, “Metropolis” and the “Mad Max” films; this film isn’t as well as executed as them but it is good.

In the future, you can only have one child but after their baby dies at birth John Brennick (Christopher Lambert “Highlander”, “Mortal Kombat”) and his wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) have another but get caught at the Mexican border and are both sentenced to time in the ‘Fortress’, which is a privately-owned maximum-security prison that is 30 floors underneath a desert, but John has no intention of staying. A daring escape is afoot.

Christopher Lambert is tolerable as John Brennick. Lambert has never really ranked high in my eyes as a good action star as he lacks charisma but here the film is enjoyable enough for his performance to be overlooked. His wife is also played tolerably by Loryn Locklin. I like the voice of the computer system in this movie as it tries to capture the menacing feel of H.A.L. 9000 in the masterpiece that is “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I also really liked Jeffery Combs as the technology whiz D-Day.

“Fortress” has routine action scenes and some routine prison movie scenes that are enjoyable but nothing special but it is the intriguing sci-fi of a corporate run prison that really caught my attention. Sure the film is a little too dark to see what’s going on exactly at some points and some of it is a little bit too gory for my taste but the sets are great and some of the ideas are also good. It’s got nothing on “Blade Runner” or “Metropolis” but I think it’s not so far behind the “Mad Max” pictures so if you enjoyed them or any of these kinds of movies then see “Fortress”.

“Forrest Gump” is one of the most charming films in cinematic history. It features child abuse and heavy use of drugs but somehow the whole film is a very uplifting experience which is safe and as refreshing as an hour in the park during the summer.

Tom Hanks (“Toy Story”, “Saving Private Ryan”) stars as Forrest Gump, who tells the story of his life to the people sat on the bench with him. While not an intelligent man Forrest Gump has accidentally found himself present at lots of historic events but they are the kind of events that are huge but someone could easily be at every single one of them without anyone really noticing.

Forrest Gump seems to be a little overdone but as the film goes on Hank’s performance works perfectly. He’s a great character as due to his mental difficulties people treat him differently but because of his problems he’s been able to achieve things many of us only dreams of. Forrest Gump is not a man who has read books, listened to the radio or watched the tv (it’s on in a few scenes but he’s never looking at it) and as a result has very pure way of looking at life, which is all based on real people and real experiences. Forrest Gump is truly one of the most memorable characters in a film. As far as the other characters are concerned you’ll be so fixated on Gump they may as well not be there.

“Forrest Gump” may have a few flaws but they are so minute they don’t harm the film in any way. It’s a great experience that changes our perception both of history and of life. The way Mr. Gump is incorporated into famous historical footage is great (I especially like the bit about Watergate). It’s a fascinating experience which is magical in its own special way.

Mel Gibson (“Lethal Weapon”, “Mad Max”) stars in this so and so movie about time travel. The film doesn’t bring us anything new and/or anything exceptionally well-done and that’s a real shame as it isn’t a bad movie by any means.

In “Forever Young”, we meet a test pilot named Daniel McCormick (Gibson) in the year 1939. After his girlfriend is injured in a car accident, Daniel becomes part of a freezing experiment as he wishes to be woken when she is better. However, he finds himself in the year 1992, over 50 years after being frozen. He meets two young boys named Nat (Elijah Wood “The Good Son”, “North”) and his best buddy Felix (Robert Hy Gorman) as well as Nat’s mother Claire (Jamie Lee Curtis “Halloween”, “True Lies”). Daniel finds himself going through age spurts and at the end as he goes to find the woman who he has being waiting to see the F.B.I are after him to do some scientific research.

Mel Gibson is reasonably good as Daniel McCormick but the make-up for when he’s old is horrible. Elijah Wood is pathetic as Nat but then again, I think that’s down to the script. Jamie Lee Curtis is okay I guess as Claire but certainly nothing special.

The ending of the film starts with a reasonably good car chase with some great music but then it turns into a goofy mess before having an alright attempt at redeeming himself. The premise of the film is sadly nothing new; I can name quite a few movies that feature this idea of man being frozen, for example “Sleeper” with Woody Allen and the 1990 version of “Captain America”. Even the idea of a man in a world different to the one he knows has been used in other films such as “Total Recall” and “Back to the Future”. If there had been excellent execution, I would have had nothing wrong with the fact that it’s very unoriginal.

Why do films concerning magical beings protecting forests (“FernGully: The Last Rainforest” and “The Lorax”) always make people cutting them down out to be evil people and become overly preachy? Forests are great and films can showcase that but this film and the two others I mentioned just become more about attacking logging companies than anything else, let’s face the fact that we need wood for things (pencils, toilet paper etc…).

Several unremarkable children find out that their local forest is destined for destruction and try to stop the bad guys using tactics clearly taken out of the “Home Alone” series; however that won’t be enough so they get the help of ‘Forest Warrior’ McKenna (Chuck Norris “Code of Silence”, “The Expendables 2”).

Chuck Norris isn’t a good actor but here is the only one that is manages to amount to half-decent. He’s obviously skilled in karate but the film tries to keep this from us by editing the fight scenes so badly (probably in an attempt to downgrade the violence) that it becomes unwatchable. I have nothing wrong with cutting out blood and things like that but editing things this poorly just makes it awful. I like how Mr. Norris stops a chainsaw with his bare hand, a very funny moment. The other characters are very two-dimensional indeed.

“Forest Warrior” features very bland action scenes, some weak characters and an overly preachy nature; it’s another ego trip for Chuck Norris and while it isn’t as bad as his film “Sidekicks” (arguably one of the worst films ever made) it is just plain bad. The footage of the wildlife is so insanely boring that you’re a million times better off watching a random documentary off tv or just going into the woods yourself. The film looks like it was made on a very small budget (I’m not convinced it looks suited for anything more than a television film) and all-round is boring.