I prefer Laurel and Hardy to the Marx Brothers (“A Night In Casablanca”, “A Day At The Races”) but I certainly prefer them to Abbot and Costello. For me, Groucho Marx is the only funny one, Chico is okay but Harpo and Zeppo aren’t funny in the slightest. The Marx Brothers dish out the kind of slapstick that isn’t half as good as Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.

In “Duck Soup”, Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) becomes the dictator of Freedonia, a country in bankruptcy. After squabbles with Zander (Edmund Breese) over who will marry Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), Firefly wages war on the neighbouring country Sylvania.

Groucho Marx is one of comedy’s most famous faces, with his grease painted moustache, his thick eyebrows, his glasses and his overly large cigar. To me Groucho is the only funny Marx; armed with a quick wit and a hilarious voice I can’t help but giggle at him. Chico Marx isn’t half bad but he isn’t particularly funny in fact he’s more just pleasant. Harpo Marx is woefully unfunny with his mediocre slapstick’s attempt at humour. Zeppo Marx doesn’t have much of a role in this film. The rest of the cast are okay.

Groucho Marx saves this film from falling apart with his hilarity. I’m always surprised how highly this movie is regarded as to me without Groucho, the Marx Brothers would be fairly disappointing. When I watch Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin I can’t help but enjoy myself but unless Groucho is onscreen, I don’t really enjoy the Marx Brothers. A prime example of this is their last movie “Love Happy” where Groucho makes little more than a cameo appearance (and with a real moustache instead of his usual grease painted one). That film suffered as it basically became just a Harpo film despite having some okay slapstick. “Duck Soup” however is a decent film that although it isn’t great with slapstick, it does feature the wit of the comedic genius Groucho Marx, whose face has since become a great novelty item.

2010’s “A Nightmare On Elm Street” is as uninspired as 2009’s remake of “Friday The 13th”. If you are a fan of the older instalments in the “Nightmare” series then maybe you’ll want to see more Freddy action with a new coat of paint. However, I always found the earlier movies tedious so I found this a real chore to sit through.

A group of teens begin experiencing horrific nightmares where they are pursued by a vicious maniac. It turns out he’s Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley “Watchmen”), a deceased child molester that abused them years earlier. Now, he has supernatural powers and seems unstoppable.

This is another film with dull teens getting slashed. If you have sat through any of the previous “Nightmare” (or “Friday The 13th”, “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, “Texas Chainsaw” etc…) movies then you know exactly what I am on about. To the credit of the older movies, the make-up on Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger always looked rather good and Englund always gave a lively performance. In this version, the make-up on Jackie Earle Haley looks awful and his performance is rather stale. I just did not care about any of the characters so I had no reaction to seeing them cut up into pieces.

If you were a fan of the “Friday The 13th” remake then the chance of you liking this are quite high. The first “Nightmare” movie back in 1984 had some original ideas in it but after so many sequels and now a remake, the franchise is just completely worn out. There is no charm to this remake, it’s as soulless as Freddy Krueger himself. Hollywood will no doubt churn out more horror remakes and I would imagine that another “Nightmare” film (a sequel, remake or reboot) will one day be released but I don’t care.

“D-Tox” (or “Eye See You” as it is also known) stars Sylvester Stallone (“Cobra”, “Cliffhanger”) and it’s a film that is not really talked about. It’s certainly an unusual film for Stallone as it seems to mix elements from “Se7en” and bizarrely “The Thing” but somehow it works. This is an effective thriller about a cop after a serial killer.

F.B.I. agent Jake Malloy (Stallone) is left traumatised when his girlfriend is murdered by the serial killer he has been assigned to catch. He turns to drink and he even tries to kill himself so his superior has him check in at a former-military asylum in snowy Wyoming. The place is now being used to treat law enforcers that are on the edge. However, when some of the patients end up dead, it appears the serial killer has tracked Malloy down.

During the first act, I did really feel that Stallone was an appropriate choice for this type of film. This felt more like “Se7en”, “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Bone Collector” than anything else so having Rambo in there seemed an odd choice. However, I changed my mind as I got further into the movie. Kris Kristofferson (“A Star Is Born”) plays the guy running the facility as he’s okay. Robert Patrick (“Terminator 2: Judgement Day”) plays a particularly aggressive inmate and he’s really good. Polly Walker (“John Carter”) is really good as Jenny.

I never imagined that a Stallone film would make me think of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” but the way in the characters become isolated, surrounded by a hostile icy environment and unsure of who among them is a killer really did make me think of that film. This is a really underrated film from Stallone and that is a shame. This is a disturbing film due to the fact it focuses on serial killers so expect the same brand of violence as the serial killer movie I mentioned earlier.

“Drop Zone” is the kind of movie that is the kind of film that is so preposterous you should laugh at it but the weak script hammers it down until it becomes a bland experience and that is a real a shame.

In “Drop Zone”, a group of skydiving crooks led by an ex-D.E.A. agent (Gary Busey “Lethal Weapon”, “Under Siege”) board a 747 commercial flight and kidnap a computer genius, make the whole thing look like a hijack and parachute to safety from 30,000 ft. (without any form of coat). Everybody is fooled except for U.S. marshal Pete Nessip (Wesley Snipes “Demolition Man”, “Blade”), who was on that flight and now must enlist the help of some skydivers to catch the bad guys.

Wesley Snipes is a good actor and a good action star but here is just ruined by the script which never enables the characters to say things that match the silliness level of what they are doing. Gary Busey, who is not a particularly great actor but he is always a good bit of fun playing totally insane people. Lots of the film involves skydiving and some of the shots look about as plausible as a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

“Drop Zone” has a good premise and some good casting choices for a decent action film but it never gets the script sorted out. This film contains two stupid death scenes that defy any laws of physics known to mankind, the first has a skydiving crook electrocuted to death and the last will leave you saying “No way could that truck have been travelling fast enough”. The film should be filled with cheesy one-liners but instead we just get an astounding level of blandness in the dialog, also this film is in desperate need of fight while skydiving because just showing basic skydiving can get boring quite quickly.

I remember hearing rave reviews when “Drive” first came out. People were referring to it as one of the best films of 2011 and one of the best car chase films of the millennium. I expected something exciting but what I got was an artsy crime drama that made me want to yawn more than anything else. It’s not awful but it’s just unnecessarily violent and anti-climactic.

An unnamed mechanic (Ryan Gosling “The Nice Guys”, “Only God Forgives”) makes extra money by doing stunts for the movies and working as a getaway driver for armed robbers. When he tries to help out his neighbour (Carey Mulligan “Suffragette”, “Shame”) and her family, he ends up in the sights of local mobsters.

Ryan Gosling is very disappointing in this movie but then again, he does get all that much to do. He usually just stands around staring into space. The poor guy only gets to speak about as much as Dolph Lundgren did in “Rocky IV”. Carey Mulligan also has to spend a lot of time just staring into space. There’s absolutely zero chemistry between them. Bryan Cranston (“Argo”, “Trumbo”), Albert Brooks (“Broadcast News”) and Ron Perlman (“Hellboy”) are all in here but none of them get to do anything very interesting.

The violence in the movie is appalling as one scene has Gosling’s character stamp on a man’s face until there is no face left to stamp on. The driving scenes are way too short and none of them are entertaining. I think we only get to see two getaway drives in the whole movie. Seriously, how lame is that? I do not mind that this movie is trying to be slow and more of an arthouse type of thing but it’s not done very well. There are a few parts of it that seem promising but when you get to the end, you realise that it wasn’t building to all that much.

You may remember a cheesy sci-fi/comic-book movie from the 1990s named “Judge Dredd” starring Sylvester Stallone (“Rocky”) and “Dredd” is its ultra-violent and dark remake. The screen will constantly be filled with gloomy hallways, dismembered bodies, people being skinned alive and a lot of blood.

In “Dredd”, we see a dystopian future where the only people offering a glimpse of law and order are the ‘judges’, who are judge, jury and executioner rolled into one. The most feared named Judge Dredd (Karl Urban “Star Trek”, “Doom”) is taking a rookie named Anderson (Olivia Thirlby “Juno”) out along with him as the duo find themselves trapped in a massive domestic complex run by a violent drug gang. They must battle to save themselves and to uphold the law.

Judge Dredd is like Harry Callahan but without any charisma and Karl Urban is no fun to watch. The gang members are all sick and twisted so it becomes boring very quickly. The vast majority are just there to be shot to pieces or burned alive or whatever. The only remotely interesting character is Anderson, who is played well by Thirlby but unfortunately she can’t put up much a fight against the rest of the film’s awfulness.

Although it was hardly a good film, the old “Judge Dredd” movie had some sort of entertaining moments in it but “Dredd” is an exercise in ugliness. Many scenes feature slow-motion so you have to endure gross-out shots of people’s faces being torn up and other lovely things. The plot is mediocre, the characters are dull and the shootouts aren’t very exciting so there is no justification for the intense violence. I’m amazed by the good reviews this film has received; maybe some people think it’s stylish yet I think it’s a bland string of gun battles smothered in violence, bad language and drug abuse.

Over the course of a very long career, Akira Kurosawa (“Ikiru”, “Seven Samurai”) won the respect of audiences across the world and inspired many other great filmmakers such as George Lucas (“Star Wars”) and Steven Spielberg (“Jaws”). “Dreams” is arguably Kurosawa’s most personal film as it gives us a greater insight into his mind by representing some of his dreams. It was initially met with mixed reviews and I can understand why.

“Dreams” provides us with a collection of eight tales based upon the dreams of Kurosawa. The stories deal with the themes of life, death, nature, science, war and art.

This is such an unusual film so the characters are quite unusual. Some of the stories are clearly meant to show Kurosawa himself. As the dreams are taken from different points in his life, some have him depicted as a child. It’s really interesting to see him at different points in his life. Some of the characters we are introduced to are quite imaginative as we see fox people and horned demons. Also, director Martin Scorsese (“Taxi Driver”, “Goodfellas”) has a small role as Vincent Van Gogh during the “Crows” segment. Although his appearance is incredibly brief, he does a really good job.

Parts of the film are very slow, some of the segments feel very abstract and the whole thing feels incredibly self-indulgent so I can totally understand why some people do not care for this film. However, I think it creates some very impressive imagery and has some interesting ideas. My favourite segments were “Sunshine Through The Rain” and “Village of the Watermills” with my least favourite one being “The Blizzard”. Interestingly, some of the segments were directed by an uncredited Ishirô Honda (“Godzilla”). “Dreams” is not as great as “Seven Samurai”, “Ikiru”, “Yojimbo”, “Sanjuro”, “Ran” or “Rashomon” but it’s still worth seeing. Just make sure you prepare yourself for a very unique type of film.

“Dream House” is another mystery thriller with lots of twists and turns. While some of the ideas are interesting, I found myself disappointed at the mediocrity of the film in general and I did not care for the conclusion. It reminded me a lot of “The Number 23”, a vastly superior mystery flick.

Will Atenton (Daniel Craig “Casino Royale”, “The Golden Compass”), his wife (Rachel Weisz “The Mummy”) and children move to a seemingly idyllic house in the suburbs. They soon discover that a terrible crime was committed in the house and somebody appears to be stalking them. As Will tries to find the person tormenting him and his family, his sense of reality begins to fade away.

Daniel Craig does an okay job as Will but he’s nothing special here. The role becomes more complex as the film continues and you really need somebody that can make the most of the material and unfortunately, Craig just does not seem up to the task. Rachel Weisz is pretty good as Libby. The two have some real onscreen chemistry, which is appropriate seen as how they are married in reality. Naomi Watts (“The Ring”, “King Kong”) plays Ann, Will’s neighbour. She’s pretty forgettable. The other characters are not very impressive.

“Dream House” does feel an awful lot like many other films out there. It felt like a mixture of “The Number 23”, “The Others”, “Shutter Island” and “The Machinist”. “Dream House” starts off as a rather dull film but it did spark my interest during the second act. However, the third act felt very weak and the last few twists just feel as though they were thrown in there without much thought. It’s definitely not a terrible movie but it could have been a lot better. A smarter script and a star more suited to the role may have helped make “Dream House” one to look out for but as it stands, I cannot recommend it.

“Dragons Forever” stars Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung, who previously collaborated on films such as “Project A” and “Wheels On Meals”. The film features absolutely terrific action sequences but it also features a poor story and some really bizarre comedy moments that I think ultimately make the film a little underwhelming.

A slick lawyer (Chan), an arms dealer (Hung) and an inventor (Biao) find themselves at the heart of a rather confusing mess involving a mysterious chemical plant and a fish farm. At first, they’re aiding the chemical plant but when the secrets of the chemical plant are revealed, the friends do battle in a magnificent showdown full of slow-motion kicks and endless shots of glass shattering.

Jackie Chan’s character is a little more sly than usual but he doesn’t a decent job and he of course does an excellent job during the fight sequences. Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao are also pretty good during the fight scenes. The real problem is the comedic interactions between the trio really aren’t that funny. There are several scenes that are clearly played for laughs that just come across as awkward. Benny Urquidez, who joined the main cast in “Wheels On Meals”, does a decent job but gets very little screen time as the main henchman.

Fans of Jackie Chan will not doubt be amazed at the fight sequences and they should seek this film out but I can see a lot of people struggling with this film because aside from the fight scenes, the movie does not offer a great deal. I definitely preferred “Dragons Forever” over “Wheels On Meals” but I think “Project A” was a much better collaboration between Chan, Biao and Hung. I think there are a number of Jackie Chan’s films that suffer from the same problems that “Dragons Forever” does, which is a real shame because he’s a truly talented individual and doesn’t always get what he deserves.

Despite being set predominantly in the United States and having a cast that mainly consists of Americans, “Dragon Wars: D-War” is actually a South Korean giant monster movie. It’s like watching the Michael Bay “Transformers”, the “Godzilla” franchise and “Reign Of Fire” all rolled into one. It’s ridiculously cheesy with poor acting but somehow, I just could not resist this goofy film.

A legend from the Korean peninsula warns that giant snakes creatures will return in a bid to become transformed into a celestial dragon. Ethan (Jason Behr “The Grudge”) and Sarah (Amanda Brooks “Flightplan”) are reincarnated lovers living in Los Angeles that get brought together when a giant snake appears in search of Sarah. The plot is nonsensical and just an excuse for lots of monster mayhem.

The characters in “Dragon Wars: D-War” are pretty darn terrible. There is no chemistry between Ethan and Sarah so I was unconvinced about them being star-crossed lovers in anytime or place. However, you are not here for the humans, you are here for the monsters. The title is a little misleading because not many dragons show up but there is a nice variety of creatures. The effects for the creatures are not amazing but they are pretty good and we get to see a lot of them. It’s clear that the computer technology has come a long way from the unimpressive brief glimpses of the snake in “Anaconda” only a decade earlier.

If you want to see giant snakes scaling buildings and battling helicopters then this is the film for you. There is no denying that a lot of it feels amateurish but the action is very satisfying. I feared that this would by like one of those films made for the small screen where the monsters scarcely appear but we get to see a lot of the creatures here.