The Book Of Boba Fett

Duel Of The Fetts

The Book Of Boba Fett
Airdate: 29th Dec 2021 - 9th Feb 2022
Lucasfilm

Warning: Spoilers in this one.

After two seasons of The Mandalorian (reviewed here and here), some of which was enjoyable and some of which dragged considerably, I was pretty sure Disney has managed to dilute the Star Wars brand which they’d bought from George Lucas so much that, they really couldn't even get a halfway decent TV show out of it. I still believe that and I think the franchise stopped being special somewhere around the release of the first season of The Mandalorian and the cinematic release of Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (my review of that 'not so special' movie can be found here). However, I have to say that their latest series, The Book Of Boba Fett almost changed my mind on that... almost.

This one opened really strongly for the first four episodes and then... well it felt like it suddenly changed its brief somewhat and only regained some of what made those four episodes so good around about the seventh and final installment. One of the strengths of those first four is that they take place in two separate time zones... the first takes place not long after the sail barge battle in Star Wars Episode VI - Return Of The Jedi (reviewed here) and once again stars Temuera Morrison as Boba Fett. Which is a nice bit of symmetry as, in addition to making the role his own in his guest appearances in series two of The Mandalorian, he also of course, played Boba’s father, Djanga Fett, way back in Star Wars Episode II - Attack Of The Clones (reviewed by me here).

This finally shows us how Boba stopped himself from being digested by the Sarlac in Return Of The Jedi, how he gets taken prisoner by a tribe of Tusken Raiders and then earns their trust, respect and over time, becomes the honourary human member of the tribe, negotiating for their rights on Tatooine before seeing them slaughtered. He then goes searching for his armour (which we don't see him finding as, I think it was already a told part of the tale in The Mandalorian?). The other time sequence, crosscut with these flashbacks via Boba’s dreams as he floats in a Bacta tank in numerous sessions, recovering from his wounds, follows on directly from the post credits sequence from the last series of The Mandalorian, where he kills Bib Fortuna and takes over Jabba The Hutt’s palace. However, with the city of Mos Espa under his protection for their tributes, this inadvertently brings war from those who would use the city for running spice. So it’s down to Boba to try and hire some muscle to get some ‘back up’ for the final showdown.

And it’s all great... except, in episode five, The Return Of The Mandalorian, it all stops dead and we just get a continuation of that show and, yeah, that episode really drags. And it’s pretty much the same for episode six, where The Mandalorian (played again by Pedro Pascale) goes off to visit Grogu and Luke Skywalker before going back to Tatooine to help Fett in his private war. So, yeah, we get to see Grogu again, the far from convincing ‘younged up’ version of Mark Hamil’s Luke Skywalker and also Rosario Dawson returning as ‘that other Jedi’ but, yeah, it’s all a bit saccharine and full of myth building, which really doesn’t seem all that important and, honestly, pretty dull. We all agreed in this household that we could really have done without those two episodes.

When we finally get to the finale, the characters we grew to know, including Ming-Na Wen (from Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D, reviewed by me here) continuing on from her time in The Mandalorian as Boba’s personal bodyguard, are all back in it again properly and it’s an hour of shoot outs and giant beast punch ups (Boba has trained a new Rancor to replace the one Luke Skywalker killed in Jabba’s palace in Return Of The Jedi... it even gets its own King Kong moment) which are mostly satisfying and gives a nice dramatic ending to the series, although it does get a bit Mandalorian-centric in specific deus ex machina moments you just know are going to happen.

Overall, apart from those two clunkier episodes I talked about, it was pretty great. I especially thought the various Tusken Raider scenes were something special and, frankly, if it had been seven episodes of just Boba among the sand people, I would have been much happier. There are lots of famous guest directors and a fair few guest actors too such as Robert Rodriguez, Danny Trejo and Bryce Dallas Howard but, there are also a few guest spots for legacy characters too, including one from The Clone Wars cartoon show which I haven’t seen (and don’t know if I’ll ever bother to getting around to).

The music is not so great in terms of fitting in with the Star Wars movies... although I did like the primitive opening theme tune. The shout backs to The Force Theme (well, Ben’s Theme in actual fact... let's get it right) and Yoda’s Theme felt a little out of place within the rest of the musical sound scape, to tell the truth... like they were plugged in rather than feeling like themes that could have grown from the whole... which I think says something about the style of the music being used. Star Wars has always been about trying to sound like John Williams and, while I understand the absolute necessity of getting away from that to keep the future of the franchise ticking over, I think abandoning that sound in the way they have here and in The Mandalorian... just further dilutes the brand, as far as I’m concerned anyway.

All in all, though, I quite liked The Book Of Boba Fett, much to my surprise and, yeah, I’d much rather see a second series of this one rather than going on another trip with The Mandalorian but, I don’t know what the plans are at the moment... everything seems to be in a state of flux over at Disney, at least on the public facing side, where the Star Wars franchise is concerned. But count me in for another series of this one, for sure.

Hope Lost

Lost Girls

Hope Lost
Italy 2015
Directed by David Petrucci
Bulldog Film Distribution Region 2

Hope Lost is one of eleven films given away as freebies at the 2016 Frightfest weekend. It wasn’t a film I was particularly interested in seeing, or had even heard of to tell the truth but I figured these free films were either hidden, under marketed gems or just bad movies nobody wanted to see. Well, this one is certainly no hidden gem but it would be wrong to call it a truly bad movie, I think. To be fair though, I’m not sure I’d want to sit through it again and I can’t really understand the appeal of it myself.

As I said, I’d not heard of the film so I looked it up on YouTube and watched the trailer... which in some ways made me want to watch it even less. From the promo it looked like a really terrible 1980s style grubby American sex thriller which should never have been made... which is not quite accurate to the content and style of the movie. It did nothing to endear me to the idea of watching the film but it did have a cast of known actors in it... Mischa Barton, Danny Trejo, Michael Madsen and Danny Baldwin are perhaps the best known here... and as my regular readers may have figured out by now, I can’t resist watching free stuff.

So, I sat down to watch it and instead found myself watching a really beautifully shot simulacrum of... a grubby American 1980s sexploitation flick... minus any real sex or nudity to speak of and with a very edgy look at the world of human sex trafficking which teases extreme violence and degradation without actually delivering any.

Francesca Agostini plays Sofia, a young girl who is tricked by an Italian film producer into a life of prostitution midst threats of mutilation, death and blackmail until she’s paid back his debt to Michael Madsen’s pimp/druglord/snuff film producer Manol. The film follows her somewhat repetitive and dull exploits as she tries to work off the ‘debt’ or secure freedom for her and her friend Alina, played by Mischa Barton. It’s a grim trajectory and the film is, frankly, a bit flat and boring apart from in the moments where it teases into getting really nasty or explores the back story of Sofia’s lesbian client Eva, played by Alessia Navarro, who slowly falls in love with Sofia while trying to work through her own acute mental problems brought on by her former life of being a torturer/interrogator in the army.

The film plays out in this kind of pattern... Sofia goes with a client. Sofia gets tricked by a fake client to see she is doing her job right and gets herself in trouble. Repeat this pattern a few times and you eventually get to a set piece where the two girls are taking a starring role in a snuff movie while ex-soldier lesbian Eva tries to track them down and rescue them... with not all that expected consequences, as it turns out.

Now, bearing in mind this is a UK release and the British Board of Film Classification (Censors) hate sexualised violence, the clue as to whether this film goes far enough to tell its story is in the rating. It’s got an 18 rating (personally I think a 15 would have been plenty because, you really don’t see much of anything going on) and it even says there is 'sexual violence' as a warning. However, sexual violence is almost always sliced out of any feature films or TV here and the fact that, according to the BBFC website, the film was passed with 'no cuts made', says everything about the extremes that this film doesn’t go to. Not that I would really have wanted to see it come to that especially but one of the main problems in this film, which is filled with good actors and a fairly mediocre script, is that it teases stuff it absolutely refuses to show. Everything seems tastefully done and it feels like it’s been self censored to the point where the writers should maybe think about trying to do something else other than what they seem to be trying to achieve here... which is to paint an effectively grim portrayal of the illegal sex trafficking trade. However, ‘effectively’ is not a word I’d use in the case of this film.

As I said, though, the actors are all fine and there’s some truly great cinematography in the film. Starting off during the credits sequence we see a slice of Sofia’s day at a busy clothing factory which is then juxtaposed with shots of the rural outdoors as she walks home. As we see her go to pick up her younger brother from school, a nice shot of vertical railing bars is blurred out so we can concentrate on her progress. It’s all very nice and it feels somewhat Italian in the devotion to giving the audience nicely composed shots throughout the film. It just seems somewhat too good for a film about this particular subject matter... at least with the script it has here.

And I’m sorry this is such a short review but there’s really not much more I can think to say about this one. It’s a bit like looking at a band wagon ‘torture porn’ genre movie, you know the kind which were so popular at the cinema about ten or so years ago? Not really my cup of tea and I’m not exactly an expert in this genre but shouldn’t a torture porn movie at least have some torture and porn in it? There are attempts here but everything is glossed over so lightly it’s like token scenes to just join the dots of a less than interesting screenplay, in all honesty. So, yes, Hope Lost is not for me and I certainly won’t be recommending it to anyone I know. However, I am grateful to have watched this one because, as the saying goes, you can’t appreciate the really good films if you haven’t seen some not so good ones too.

Madness In The Method

Methadone Actor

Madness In The Method
2019 USA Directed by Jason Mewes
screening at FrightFest 24th August 2019.

Okay, so my second feature at this year’s Arrow Fright Fest (now in its 20th year) was a much more positive experience for me than Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary (which I reviewed here).

Madness In The Method is the directorial debut of actor Jason Mewes, who most people would best know as Jay to director Kevin Smith’s Silent Bob. This one was a blast and though I was initially skeptical of this guys ability to helm something like this, given his on and off screen personae and how easy it is to be fooled into thinking the character created by Kevin Smith based on Mewes,,, and Mewes himself... are one and the same, I found myself very pleasantly surprised at how good this was. Of course, since I am already an admirer of the duo in all their big screen appearances (I even forced myself to watch Scream 3 just to catch their cameo), I am part, of a ready made target audience and, although this movie wasn’t written by Jason himself (I suspect he had a fair amount of input in that process, credited or not), it’s actually a kind of mockumentary fantasy written about him.

Right from the outset, fact is blended with fiction as Mewes fills us in on just who he is and charts both his career path with Kevin Smith (done with some nice animated Jay and Silent Bob inserts) and his various trouble with substance abuse in one form or another. We learn about his former trade as a roofer and how tough it was for him growing up etc. And... I suspect it’s one of those films which Hollywood loves where fact and fiction are blended. The film is full of cameos, some as major roles such as Vinnie Jones and others falling somewhere in between that and what is, in this movie, Stan Lee’s final cameo performance. So, for example, both Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher, the two title character actors from TV’s Lois And Clark - The New Adventures Of Superman, have recurring roles in this.

It’s a bit like Fellini’s great masterpiece Eight And A Half, only filtered through a young Hollywood vibe.... in terms of the central character, Mewes playing a fictional version of himself who very consciously wants to crawl out from his stoner typecasting in which he finds himself trapped and reading a not so mythical book about Method Acting before ‘really’ getting into the ‘killer’ mindset of his latest role. I should probably also mention Paul Mazursky’s 1970 movie Alex In Wonderland as a kindred spirit to this film also... but I haven’t seen it myself (or I have and it's been so long I've forgotten it) so I’ll just drop that here in passing.

Okay, so this is a film which never gets dull and explores Mewes’ ‘descent into the method’ as he turns from accidental murderer to, by the end of the film, something else entirely. This is not a horror movie rather than a comedy thriller with the emphasis firmly on the comedic (so I don’t know why it’s playing at FrightFest but I’m certainly not complaining) but it is quite impressive and I especially liked the way the film is edited. Mewes calls some nice cuts here and, although it annoyed me at first, there’s good use made of a little, rotating, ball of Mewes’ head bouncing off the sides of his computer on a screensaver which shouts his catchphrase ‘Snootchy Bootchies’ every time it hits a side of the screen, used to punctuate the structure of the film and to show time and location shifts in the narrative... which is, by its nature, quite freestyle.

I also loved the idea that Brian O’ Halloran, who played Dante Hicks in three of the Jay And Silent Bob movies to date, plays himself as a director who is about to direct a large budget, major Hollywood production of Homer’s The Odyssey. It was genuinely nice to see this guy again although he is in a somewhat darker story here. And like I said, this film is full of cameos from the likes of Danny Trejo, Judd Nelson and even Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith. There’s also an interesting performance by a modern character actor (future Elisha Cook Jr in the making?) called Mickey Gooch Jr, who plays a handle-barred moustached detective obsessed by his suspicion that it is, indeed, Mewes who is behind the killings in the movie. He’s pretty good in the movie but he was even better in the Q and A before the movie, regaling the audience with his tales of the production, which is obviously set in LA but had its shooting locations split between LA and Derbyshire, here in the UK. A very entertaining fellow, despite his choice of head gear.

Oddly, Kevin Smith himself comes off as a little of a darker version of what I perceive to be his true life persona here. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of a few deliberate deviations from real life, especially when Mewes and Moobs (Smith) do the lion face, lemon face routine from Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Also, it’s kind of a dead giveaway that this is definitely portraying a heavily fictionalised scenario bearing in mind the final fate of Vinnie Jones in the movie, which is actually pretty funny, I thought.

So there you have it. Turns out Mr. Mewes can actually direct pretty well, as well as act and, cannily, put together a movie which, in spite of its free form narrative style, holds together very well as a coherent, linear story. Whether it will actually get any kind of physical home media release over here in the UK is anybody’s guess but, if it does, I’ll certainly be shelling out to have another look at Madness In The Method, for sure. So now looking forward to the next film in my 2019 FrightFest experience, The Banana Splits Movie. Review to follow in a couple of days.

Machete Kills

Machete Junction Kills

Machete Kills
2013 USA/Russia
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’s gonna be some fairly big spoilers here.

The original Machete movie was a spin-off movie of a fake trailer used in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse project (released separately as Planet Terror and Deathproof over here in the UK). Like other projects made from the fake trailers in Grindhouse, such as Hobo With A Shotgun, Machete was a modern movie masquerading as a 1970s exploitation picture but made with a dash of self-conscious nostalgia for the sub-genre.

Both Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again were put up at the end of the original Machete as two films in which the title character ... um... Machete (played by Danny Trejo), would return. And now he has, in the promised Machete Kills. This was a film I’d really been looking forward to.

The film opens with a new fake trailer, that for the third movie in the Machete trilogy which has had something of a title revision since the last movie. Now the next Machete movie after this one, if the series gets that far, is Machete Kills Again... In Space. And indeed, the trailer looks wildly silly, it has to be said. Laser beams, Buck Rogers robots, light-sabres, light-machetes and a host of other things referencing the boom to plunge a character into the sci-fi milieu left in the wake of the original Star Wars movie’s cinematic success. Although this trailer is quickly referenced again at the end of Machete Kills (amongst other pre and post-credits chunks of “Machete movie moments”), I think that this should maybe have been left completely to the end of the movie because, this opening trailer tells us some important and spoilery things... one very quickly and then a bunch of stuff when you get into the last third of the movie.

The thing it ruins straight from the start is the fact that it reminds audiences the original Machete started off with a scene where he lost his partner. As you know from the previous movie, Machete’s new partner was also his new girlfriend, as played by Jessica Alba, a role this actress reprises here. However, since she isn’t in the trailer for Machete Kills Again... In Space, it doesn’t take much to figure out her character probably won’t make it until the end of this movie. Remembering that last film’s opening sequence on top of that, it’s not hard to realise she probably won’t even make it through the pre-credits sequence of this one before coming to a nasty end and... alas.... this is indeed what happens.

The other stuff you’ll realise, as you go through the movie, is that things are all pointing towards this one dovetailing straight into the next one. When Mel Gibson’s villanous Voz is shown to have a Star Wars fetish and intends to colonise the moon with his hand picked people and super-clones, much in the same way as the “off course” Bond film Moonraker did in the late seventies, you start to figure out where this is all going and, when he shows the silver mask worn in the Machete Kills Again... In Space trailer, you realise that this whole film is leading up to some kind of cliffhanger ending which takes Machete and the main villain careening into more mayhem in space... and that is also the correct conclusion.

For while Machete is clearly playing a more Bondian role in this one (he has his gadgets and knows how to use them... and is clearly a parallel here for “the many lives of John Shaft”... specifically the Shaft of Shaft In Africa) and the movie is quite blatant in its Moonraker references towards the end (with even some of the underscore sounding particularly late 70s Barryish at certain points)... it’s obvious that Machete Kills is Rodriguez saying to his Grindhouse audience... “Okay, so this is Machete’s version of The Empire Strikes Back.” And that is quite literal too... some parts of the sets are modelled on corridors and textures from Cloud City, Gibson has his own landspeeder and, after one of the regular Machete characters is blinded, Voz freezes her, encases her in carbonite and absconds with her in his spaceship.

Okay... so, this is all good and it certainly demonstrates the way films were getting high-jacked mid-production and turned into hastily changed science-fiction vehicles in the late 1970s. However, one of the things it has done, perhaps, is dilute down the already parodic Machete character into something else. It’s certainly a valid thing to do and it was very entertaining, but it was a bit more epic in scope than I wanted and a bit less punchy, I felt, than the first movie in the series.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fast paced as hell and the actors were all firmly committed to their tongue-in-cheek seventies roles, but I just didn’t have quite as much fun with it. That being said, however, there’s still a lot of laughs to go around and it brought a smile to this face on more than one occasion. It even had a follow up to the gory intestine joke of the previous film, which wasn’t quite as funny as the first but had a lot of people laughing. It’s very much a rip roaring time at the cinema and, what it lacks in the rawness of the first movie, it certainly makes up for in the sheer stupidity of its ideas... which includes flick knife smart phones, gatling gun bras, a miniature “strap-on” bazooka which shoots when you twerk, a helicopter blade ride with a difference and a 3D sex scene that will definitely leave you wanting more... especially as the print isn’t even in 3D, if you catch my drift.

Machete Kills is not quite the grimly humoured gore fest of the previous movie (although it certainly has its moments) but this shouldn’t stop the same audiences who liked the first movie from getting into this one... and with actors and actresses like Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, Lady Gaga, Michelle Rodrigues, Amber Heard, Cuba Gooding Jr, Antonio Banderas, Charlie Sheen and even gory make-up legend Tom Savini, reprising the character he played in the first movie (but with a twist) going along for the ride... you’ll probably find something you’ll enjoy if you liked the first one. Definitely glad I saw this one and certainly looking forward to Machete Kills Again... In Space.

Fanboys

The Fandom Menace

Fanboys
USA 2009
Directed by Kyle Newman
Anchor Bay Region 2

Well this is probably going to be a short review but maybe my expectations were too high.

14 years ago I saw what amounted to a UK TV premiere of a new movie which didn’t get a cinema release over here, as far as I’m aware, called Free Enterprise. It was a comedy, which is a genre I rarely like outside a few select artists, but this one was actually quite funny and spoke volumes to me. I very quickly upgraded to a DVD copy and showed it to all my mates because, basically, this was a movie about me and my friends.

No question.

It’s lke the writer and director of Free Enterprise followed me and my mates around and absolutely captured our spirits, our behaviour, our way of communicating through sentences constructed from film quotes... and spat it back up on screen for all to see. It was amazing and as I’m typing this I realise it’s almost become a forgotten classic and so I need to start telling people about it again. So I’ll save that for a review next year maybe.

Anyway... what this meant was that when I finally got caught up to Fanboys the other month, I was expecting the same degree of wit and sophistication that was on show in Free Enterprise to somehow shine between the frames and make me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, what I got was something with a half clever script that didn’t come anywhere close to giving me either the sense of identification naturally inherent in the earlier film or, for that matter, anything I felt I could laugh at.

But like I said... maybe I was expecting too much from the premise of the movie.

Set in 1999, Fanboys tells the story of five friends who grew up on Star Wars reuniting to go on a road trip because one of them has terminal cancer and they want to break into George Lucas’ ranch and screen the work print of the upcoming Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (reviewed here) so he can see it before he dies. And, of course, they have ludicrous adventures on the way, two of the friends who were estranged re-bond with each other and lots of Star Wars, Star Trek and various other franchise references abound.

With a warm hearted tale like this, I was really gagging at the bit to see this one and, truth be told, some of the cameos by people like Danny Trejo, Ray Park, Carrie Fisher, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and William Shatner, coupled with some fairly tongue in cheek references to various bits of genre culture mixed in with some fairly sophisticated homage in some parts, is not a totally unpleasant way to spend the lengtth of a feature film. It’s not badly shot, the editing and pacing are all fine... but for me it wasn’t quite working.

For me,  think, the main problems I had with it were:

a) I could only really sympathise with one or two of the five friends, to a certain extent, in this... and even then not fully. This movie was nowhere near any of my life experiences.

b) It really wasn’t funny. At least not to me anyway.

There was some stuff that should have made me laugh, for sure. Like Ethan Suplee playing the part of Aint-It-Cool-News founder Harry Knowles and beating up our heroes before subjecting them to a nerdy Star Wars quiz. Or Kevin Smith pimping out Jason Mewes to the guy who played the donkey-shagger in Clerks 2... but strangely, I felt nothing. Sounds better as I write it now than it was actually experiencing it, truth be told. But I really can’t find anything too much at fault here either. The acting was all great and everything seemed set to be a fine collection of Star Wars themed shenanigans and it should have been just great.

There were two moments that made me sit up and take notice. One was a bit which genuinely made me laugh and was a tiny sequence where, after the Fanboys have smashed up a statue of Captain Kirk fighting Khan, one of the trekkies in the movie picks up Khan’s head and does the famous... Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan yell! Halfway through the yell, however, he stops to take a puff of his inhaler before continuing. That one gag just tickled me for some reason. I thought the film was about to kick into high gear... it didn’t.

The other thing was right near the end when, after the adventure has been more or less concluded, the dying friend sits on a rock in the distance and watches his friends interacting with each other around a camp fire at night. This little scene genuinely had some heart in it and made me feel some emotion, finally.

At the end of the day, I can’t honestly give a good recomendation to this movie as, although I’m glad I saw it, I really wasn’t happy about purchasing it (even for the very cheap price I got it for) and expected a lot more from it. However, neither can I, in all fairness, tell people not to watch this. I’m sure there will be loads of people out there who would find this a really funny movie. Personally I prefer Kevin Smith, Woody Allen and The Marx Brothers for my main suppliers of cinematic laughing gas, but this is just a taste thing and probably has no place in this review. So can’t really say there’s no point in trying his one out either.

View or view not, there is no try.

Machete Junction

Machete 2010 US

Directed by

Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez

Screening at UK cinemas

Travel in your mind with me to the dim and distant past... back to those heady and pre-recession days of 2007 when life was good. That year, stateside only, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino decided to unleash on the, fairly, suspecting public their new combined movie with trailers... Grindhouse!

The concept was simple... to make two trashy movies (one each) in the style of the old 70s American exploitation films of the 70s and in between their would be some equally retro-trailers (made specifically for the movie) by other guest directors. The idea being that a knowing post-modernistic audience would lap it up!

Unfortunately the reality of the situation was that Grindhouse did badly... really badly. So badly, in fact, that it didn’t get a proper release here in the UK! Instead, Miramax decided to just release the two separate movies with a few additional scenes and only leave on a couple of the trailers. Tarantino’s second half, Death Proof, was released first as he is a bigger name to tag your marketing on. Rodriguez half, Planet Terror, was released a month or two later to much less fanfare. Unfortunately, I don’t think the producers realised what they had in these two films. I was lucky enough to see the full version of Grindhouse on DVD way before it even got a release in cinemas in the US... hey, the offer was there and I took it since there was umming and ahhing over any release at all at the time.

Rodriguez' half was brilliant and that’s because he kinda exceeded his brief, in my opinion. He didn’t make a Grindhouse movie, he made a movie that tipped its hat to the Grindhouse style while at the same time playing with it and looking back on it with affectionate nostalgia... and it really worked as a fun experience at the movies. The normally wonderful Tarantino fulfilled his brief perfectly. He made a perfect, fake US exploitation movie exactly as it would have been made at the time. Unfortunately, what people failed to remember is that a lot of these movies were just plain dull affairs with an unsatisfying conclusion. And, in my humble opinion, on this occasion this is exactly what Tarantino made... a dull movie with an unsatisfying conclusion.

However, a silver lining to join the brilliance that was Planet Terror. One of the trailers on Grindhouse was for Machete... a made up film starring Danny Trejo as a machete wielding avenger of justice to help the Mexican people and free them from the oppression of the government. Three years on, Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez have made that movie... again in the retro-rose-tinted, nostalgic Grindhouse style and... frankly... it’s a really great time at the cinema.

Trejo’s ex-cop Machete is deadpan, supermacho and funny all at the same time “Machete Don’t Text!”. The movie contains unparalleled levels of goriness and mayhem and deserves to be seen by anyone who has an inkling of the kind of movies that this film is trying to ape. And that powerful cocktail of humour and violence makes you kind of giddy while you’re watching it. For example, a deliberately obvious set up line about a man's intestines being 60ft long gets a wonderful pay off a few minutes later in a spectacular escape from a hospital where Danny Trejo... well, I don’t want to give too much away... let’s just say that if you combine internal organs with Douglas Fairbanks style stunts you get a guaranteed laugh!

This film has a lot on offer too: a topless Lindsay Lohan who has sex with the title character and her own mother at the same time for her web page and then gets into a whole shotgun wielding nun kick. A gun toting priest played by Cheech Marin (this film offers you the crucifixion of Cheech people) and the likes of Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba and Steven Seagal all sharing considerable amounts of screentime together. And then, to top it off, Michelle Rodriguez as the leader of an underground Mexican resistance, SHE! As opposed to Che I guess.

All I can say is... if you liked what Rodriguez did on Planet Terror, Machete ups the ante somewhat and frenetically delivers the kind of thrills and chills that people would very much have liked to see as the second half of the Grindhouse experience from 2007. If you’re going to go and take a look at this bloody eye candy, do it quick as it already seems to be on its way out at the cinema. Oh, and if you do, make sure you stay for the announcement of the next two movies in the series after the “rides off into the sunset” shot has faded.

This reviewer will review these movies too in Machete Junction Kills and Machete Junction Kills Again!

One last thing... make sure you check out @filmforagers art piece inspired by the movie. You can also buy it on etsy right here... http://www.etsy.com/listing/55936591/michelle-rodriguez-as-she-drawing?ref=v1_other_1!

Also... check out @filmforagers own review of Machete here... http://www.filmforager.com/2010/09/machete-2010.html