“North” is truly one of the strangest children’s movies ever made. It was directed by Rob Reiner (“This Is Spinal Tap”) and has an all-star cast. There are some funny ideas in here but there are also so moments that are so deeply uncomfortable that I question the motives of those involved in this picture.

North (Elijah Wood “Forever Young”) is a talented young boy that feels underappreciated by his parents (Jason Alexander “Pretty Woman”, Julia Louis-Dreyfus “Enough Said”). He takes them to court where it is ruled that North may travel the world in search of new parents. Along the way, he is guided by a mysterious man (Bruce Willis “Die Hard”).

Let me start off by saying that Elijah Wood is actually pretty good here. Unfortunately, the material is just not consistent. Bruce Willis is just awful here; he looks so bored. We first see him in an Easter Bunny costume. There are so many famous faces in here including Jon Lovitz (“Rat Race”), Dan Aykroyd (“Ghostbusters”), Kathy Bates (“Titanic”), John Ritter (“Problem Child”), Abe Vigoda (“The Godfather”) and Ben Stein (“The Mask”) but my favourite has to be Alan Arkin (“Rocketeer”) as a crazy judge that is clearly inspired by Groucho Marx. Also, keep an eye out for a very young Scarlett Johansson (“Lost In Translation”).

My big problem with this film comes with some of the humour. There is a lengthy conversation about Elijah Wood’s bare behind. He was a mere child at the time, why would anybody write this stuff? Parts of this movie just seem cruel and inappropriate. I won’t deny that parts of it put a smile on my face. However, I also can’t hide from the fact that other parts of this movie made me feel deeply uncomfortable. “North” could have been entertaining but as it is, it’s an awkward film.

“Funny Farm” is another mediocre comedy starring Chevy Chase (“National Lampoon’s Vacation”, “Under The Rainbow”). There are moments in here where it looks like something genuinely funny could happen but sadly, it continues to aim fairly low throughout.

Andy (Chase) and Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith “2010: The Year We Make Contact”, “Urban Cowboy”) are a couple that decide to leave the city behind so they can have a quiet life in the country. Andy has his sights set on writing a novel but he’s having problems. The whacky inhabitants of the small town don’t exactly make things the idyllic life the couple were hoping for.

The biggest problem with this whole movie is Chevy Chase. He just has the ability to play everything in such a way that the comedy gets sucked out of the situation. Madolyn Smith is okay here. Unfortunately, she’s not given enough to do. The two really don’t have much onscreen chemistry. The townsfolk are sadly not as whacky as they should be. In fact, they don’t even really play a significant role until the last act. Keep an eye out for Alice Drummond as Mrs. Dinges as you may recognise Drummond from both “Ghostbusters” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”. Also, Mike Starr from “Dumb And Dumber” shows up.

“Funny Farm” reminded me a lot of the “Vacation” movies. It’s that same level of comedy where you politely smile in the hope that something actually funny may happen but it never quite succeeds. Some folks cite this as Chase’s best movie. It’s definitely a lot funnier than “Fletch” but I certainly prefer “Caddyshack” to this. There are certainly worse comedies out there than “Funny Farm”. However, everything is just so darn predictable that you can guess virtually every punchline. If you are a big Chevy Chase fan than check it out but otherwise, there is no reason to see it.

You know a horror film is desperate when it sends its killer into space. We’ve already had “Jason X”, “Hellraiser: Bloodline”, “Leprechaun 4: In Space” and “Critters 4: They’re Invading Your Space” so now it’s Dracula’s turn to leave the planet. This is a lame, cheap and totally forgettable sci-fi/horror flick.

Set in the far future, Captain Abraham Van Helsing (Casper Van Dien “Starship Troopers”, “Sleepy Hollow”) and his crew find an abandoned ship. They eventually learn that the ship’s crew were decimated by the evil Count Dracula. Van Helsing also discovers that he’s a descendant of the creature’s greatest opponent. Now, the villainous Dracula must be destroyed… in space.

Casper Van Dien may have been entertaining in “Starship Troopers” but that was because he had a good script. The makers of “Starship Troopers” knew how ridiculous a lot of the material was but the makers of “Dracula 3000” wouldn’t know entertainment if it hit them in the face. This movie also features Erika Eleniak (“Under Siege”), Coolio (“Batman & Robin”), Udo Kier (“Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”) and Tiny Lister (“Friday”). Dracula barely appears in the movie and looks pretty terrible. Various characters get turned into vampires and the closest thing we have to highlight is seeing Coolio become a vampire.

“Dracula 3000” reminded me a lot of the “Doom” movie, which came out the following year. I can safely say that “Doom” was significantly more entertaining than this. “Dracula 3000” is one of the worst vampire movies I have watched. It’s probably even worse than “Against The Dark” with Steven Seagal. Just go and watch one of the many better films with Dracula. You can watch the 1931 version with Béla Lugosi, the 90s one with Gary Oldman, “Nosferatu” with Max Schreck or one of the many Hammer “Dracula” films with Christopher Lee. Just don’t waste your time with this mess.

“Clown” is a movie that began life as a fake trailer on the internet. It purported to have the involvement of Eli Roth (“Hostel”, “Cabin Fever”). The trailer eventually caught the attention of Roth, who loved it and helped to produce this actual movie inspired by the trailer. This is a movie with some scary ideas in it but ultimately, just isn’t as entertaining as it could be.

A kid’s birthday party looks like it’s going to be ruined when the party clown doesn’t show up. Fortunately, the boy’s father, Kent (Andy Powers “In Her Shoes”), manages to find a clown costume to entertain the children. When he tries to remove the suit, it just will not come off. He soon learns that this is no costume, this is the skin of a demon.

The characters in “Clown” are disappointing. Kent is just not an interesting character and the performance from Andy Powers is pretty lame. By far the best performance in the whole movie comes from Peter Stormare (“Fargo”, “The Big Lebowski”) as a man that once suffered from the same curse. Stormare works well with the material. I was disappointed by the look of the demon. It doesn’t look enough like a clown or interesting enough in its own right. I think Pennywise looks better in both mini-series and films of “It”.

There are some disturbing sequences and concepts here and I think overall, it’s much scarier than “It”. That being said, I think a lot of “Clown” is quite underwhelming. The film also feels needlessly long considering how little actually happens. If you are somebody that is easily scared, you will probably be quite shocked at some of the moments in this film because they can be rather unsettling. By the end of it, I just didn’t feel it reached the level it should have done.

The Asylum strike again with “Titanic II”. This is not a sequel to the 1997 James Cameron film “Titanic” but rather a mockbuster set in the present day. This is such a lazy and pathetic film from start to finish. The movie was directed by, written by and stars Shane Van Dyke, who is the grandson of Dick Van Dyke (“Mary Poppins”). A significant amount of blame for this disaster must be placed the young Van Dyke.

A hundred years after the Titanic sank, the new Titanic II is to set sail. However, history is about to repeat itself as a terrible storm sends an iceberg crashing into the new vessel. The passengers struggle to survive this terrible ordeal.

The acting in this movie is just horrendous. We have some seriously boring characters here but this is a movie from The Asylum so I wouldn’t expect anything better. The characters here are just as boring as the characters in “Transmorphers”, “The Day The Earth Stopped” and their other mockbusters. I guess in a film about a shipping disaster, the ship itself is practically a character and the ship here looks terrible at times. The C.G.I. is as unprofessional and cheap as usual with films from The Asylum.

“Titanic II” should have sunk at the script stage. This is a pathetic attempt to cash-in on the continuing popularity of the James Cameron “Titanic” movie. I’ll repeat that this is not a sequel to the 1997 movie. This is a classic case of The Asylum trying to con naïve folks into seeing this stinker. Watching “Titanic II” is like watching “The Room” but without the comedic value. Whatever you do, please ensure that you don’t hand over any money to The Asylum because they’ll just keep making low-budget shlock like this until we’re all destroyed by a solar flare.

I do not normally like films about sadistic killers (“Se7en”, “The Cell”, “Hannibal”, “The Bone Collector” etc…) so I went into “Saw” with relatively low expectations. Parts of the movie do work rather effectively but lots of it feels unnecessary.

Adam Faulkner-Stanheight (Leigh Whannell) and Doctor Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes “The Princess Bride”, “Robin Hood: Men In Tights”) wake up chained to a pipe at opposite ends of a bathroom. They soon realise they have been selected for punishment by the notorious ‘Jigsaw’ serial killer. They will need to work together and also against one another if they want to survive.

Leigh Whannell is not a professional actor and you can tell. The man helped write this thing and was used as Adam due to the constraints of the low budget. However, the Adam characters is okay. Cary Elwes is fine as Lawrence despite a few instances where his accent seems to change for no real reason. The scenes with these two are interesting and intense as they struggle to make sense of their situation. There are other scenes involving other characters such as Detective Tapp (Danny Glover “Lethal Weapon”) but these characters and their situations just seem to distract from Adam and Lawrence’s struggle.

Most people think of “Saw” as a complete gore fest but there are surprisingly few graphic moments in this one. Apparently, the sequels put much more emphasis on the gore. The violence that is in here is still disgusting. The bathroom scenes work well and the final twist is actually pretty good but the flashback scenes, the scenes with Tapp and the lengthy sequence involving a girl with a reverse beartrap just ruined it for me. They only seem to exist to make the movie longer and they add little to nothing to the experience. It’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been but it makes some choices that prevented me from being legitimately entertained.

You remember how we revisited the events of the first “Back To The Future” in “Back To The Future Part II”? Well, “Saw V” felt like it was doing the same type of thing (just without the time travel element). This is a total disaster from beginning to end as the plot gets even more ludicrous and the traps get so bland that it’s obvious the filmmakers have just stopped caring.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more confusing, “Saw V” throws a load more absurd plot threads at us to try and stitch all the films together. With Jigsaw (Tobin Bell “The Firm”) now dead, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor “Virtuosity”) is hailed as hero but is he hiding something? More people are facing the deadly ‘games’ so get ready for more blood to be spilled.

Jigsaw is dead yet the makers somehow keep finding ways to incorporate Tobin Bell in the movies with flashbacks, audio recordings and just about every other trick in the book. It’s like they’re trying to keep him on life-support when he literally has no life left. The way this film tries to make us believe that other characters were present during the events of the previous films is just stupid and feels so forced. We just know that they can repeat this trick for all eternity.

The “Saw” franchise should have died a long time ago but it keeps coming back and it keeps getting dumber and lazier. If you are into seeing people mutilated in lots of horrible ways then there are numerous traps that we see used on the killer’s victims but the traps themselves are not remotely creative. If you love the “Saw” films and you get sucked into all the whacky ways that the filmmakers keep bending the plot around then you’ll like “Saw V”. However, I just hated this movie.

“Saw III” shows that the “Saw” franchise was already getting stale. It has an unnecessarily convoluted plot that tries to tie together all the previous films as well as violence that is more graphic than ever. It just becomes a complete mess.

Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh “Crash”) is a doctor that finds herself abducted by Jigsaw (Tobin Bell “The Firm”) and Amanda (Shawnee Smith “The Blob”). They want her to use her skills to keep Jigsaw alive while a man (Angus Macfadyen “Equilibrium”, “Braveheart”) is put through a brutal series of tests. It will be a chance for vengeance yet there is even more going on and only Jigsaw knows all the tricks.

The Jigsaw character was legitimately interesting in the first movie but the sequels give us too much information. I disliked what they did with him in “Saw II” but this one just completely ruins the character for me. I didn’t care for any of the other characters. Most of them just seem to be there to be tortured. We see people stripped naked, burned by acid, blasted with shotguns and strapped to ridiculous devices that seem like rejects from the works of Edgar Allen Poe. There are just too many characters for us to ever get invested in any of them.

“Saw III” is even more violent than the previous two films. We see a graphic depiction of brain surgery with a power drill repeatedly going into a man’s head, a woman gets her skin ripped off by some whacky contraption and so many other disgusting acts happen. The way that the film jumps around, trying to connect everything to the events of the previous films just doesn’t work at all. The attempts to make everything deep and philosophical just comes across as desperate. This a film about slicing and dicing people; don’t pretend it’s anything more than that.

I was not exactly a fan of the original “Saw” but I did recognise that it had some merits. “Saw II” has a larger budget, more characters, more deadly traps and more revelations than the first film but it’s the excess that makes it feel cluttered. I felt that there was too much going on in the first movie but here, the problem is exacerbated.

Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg “Ransom”, “Dreamcatcher”) has located and arrested Jigsaw (Tobin Bell “The Firm”), an infamous serial killer that like to play ‘games’ with his victims. However, Jigsaw reveals that he has captured a group of people (including Detective Matthew’s son). The police discover that they have only a few hours to rescue the hostages.

The first “Saw” movie kept Jigsaw rather mysterious while “Saw II” decides to give him a lot more screen time and explain more about his backstory. Like Michael Myers from “Halloween”, sometimes the less you know about the killer, the more interesting they are. We are just given way too much info for Jigsaw to be as intriguing as he was the first time around. The hostage characters are all pretty stupid and do not really work together all that well. The characters in the first “Saw” were substantially smarter.

Prepare to see people stabbed in the face by spikes, slice their own skin off, get shot in the face and savagely beat other people. This is a very violent movie although the idiocy of the characters makes some of it less disturbing than it should be. The twist in the first movie was pretty darn good but the big one at the end in this movie is a little lame by comparison. If you really liked the first “Saw” movie then this one is more of the same.

“Saw 3D” (also known as “Saw: The Final Chapter”) is the seventh entry in the abysmal “Saw” franchise. For several years, it was the last “Saw” movie but of course, there was money to be made and plenty of cinemagoing suckers out there. By this point, the “Saw” films had become farcical with traps that seem more like something out of cheesy gameshow.

Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery “The Boondock Saints”) has made a career by selling his story of surviving torture at the hands of the sadistic Jigsaw (Tobin Bell “The Firm”). However, he’s a fraud and now he is going to pay for his sins by being at the centre of the latest series of traps by Jigsaw.

This one was shot in 3D so get ready to see the characters get ripped up in even more gory detail than the previous films in the series. We know that most of the characters can’t possibly survive because then we wouldn’t get to see their blood fly towards the camera. I didn’t care about the characters and the way these films just keep contorting to throw in new mysteries about the characters from the earlier instalments is just laughable. Linkin Parker singer Chester Bennington has a cameo role.

“Saw 3D” allowed the “Saw” franchise to join “Friday The 13th”, “Amityville Horror” and “Jaws” in having a 3D instalment. This was intended to be the conclusion of the “Saw” saga and the plot was just such a mess by this point that this movie just had no hope because how do you redeem the irredeemable? I guess you can’t and that interestingly parallels the way the films show terrible people often still failing to learn from their mistakes as they are subjected to the sadistic traps of Jigsaw and his followers. “Saw 3D” may entertain the franchise’s devotees but I did nothing for me.