The Disappointments Room (2016)

"A mother and her young son release unimaginable horrors from the attic of their rural dream home."

I'm going to address the elephant in the room straight away: "The Disappointments Room" is aptly named. Everyone can now sit back smugly and chuckle, because saying that is about as obvious and predictable as everything else in this ghostie movie.

It's such a shame when a movie like this fails to deliver, especially as everything was in place for it to be good. The North Carolina location is fantastic, Kate Beckinsale in a blonde wig is still as beautiful as ever, and there's even a cat in the story. Unfortunately, "The Disappointments Room" contains nothing which hasn't been done before, or more importantly, done better.

If you can't guess how "The Disappointments Room" is going to go after the first ten minutes, either you haven't seen enough horror movies (which is possibly a good thing) or you haven't realised the formulaic nature of just about every "ghosts and hauntings" movie ever made. You can be sure that director D.J. Caruso and his co-writer Wentworth Miller have seen everything though, and they've thrown as many tropes as they could into this in arguably not the best manner. Having said that, there are some good moments among the unoriginality, but even then, they aren't great.

Acting-wise, it's okay. Kate Beckinsale seems to have become the Belén Rueda of American horror, and will probably continue in the same vein for years to come. She's always technically been a MILF, but now she's playing one as part of the plot, and there's nothing wrong with that. Her supporting cast, because let's keep it real here, don't have much to do or very much screen time, but they are perfectly acceptable. The storytelling is a bit rushed, and it's that element more than any other which makes "The Disappointments Room" into more of a generic product than something you would want in your collection.

Gerald McRaney's role is woefully small but important, but hey, it's not the size but what you do with it, right? Fortunately, a potentially annoying child in the form of Duncan Joiner playing Lucas is also nipped in the bud early on. The latter has an encounter which is so obviously cribbed from "The Shining" that of course it works, and he's not such an irritating little piss afterwards.

"Bones" fans will spot Michaela Conlin for a few seconds with no discernable lines of dialogue, but who cares? She's in it, it's another IMDb credit, and the point of her character is made. For those who might blink and miss it, Lucas Till's character Ben pretty much nails why the rich, middle-aged "yuppies" have moved to the countryside anyway in a buzzkill, quasi "meta-cinema" line which isn't wasted at all. Some slight socio-political commentary there, maybe? On the plus side, maybe not.

If you want to see more original (although still highly formulaic) stories in the "ghosts/haunted house with a mystery" subgenre, you can choose from "The Uninvited" (1944), "The Haunted" (1963), "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" (1973), "Burnt Offerings" (1976), "The Haunting Passion" (1983), "The Haunting of Seacliff Inn" (1994), "House of the Damned" (1996), "The Others" (2001), "Penny Dreadful" (2005), "The Orphanage" (2007), "The Abandoned" (2015), and literally hundreds if not thousands more. There's even enough of the "architects renovating a building and setting ghosts loose" movies that they have become yet another subgenre in their own right. One that springs to mind from only a couple of years ago, "Altar" (2014), was almost the same story as this but set in a windswept manor in Northern England.

If you're a Kate Beckinsale fan, you'll love her in "The Disappointments Room". If you're a ghost story fan, you'll watch this anyway for completeness. But if you're looking for originality, something like this (or anything recent in the whole horror genre) is not for you.

Dredd 3D (2012)

"In a violent, futuristic city where the police have the authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, a cop teams with a trainee to take down a gang that deals the reality-altering drug, SLO-MO."

Since Sunday is the most boring day of the week, I have decided to move my irregular "Sci-Fi Saturday" feature to the day which complements it the best. Sci-fi bores me to tears and "Dredd 3D" was no exception.

The thing is, although I was a regular reader of the 2000 A.D. comic right from the first issue with the free "Space Spinner", I was never a fan of Judge Dredd. When he appeared in the second issue, I didn't really understand what the story was about or care much for the character. I always preferred "Tharg's Future Shocks" and "Flesh" so I always skipped the messy artwork of the three or four "Judge Dredd" pages to get to the good stuff. It wasn't until Forbidden Planet started selling the Dredd stories as graphic novels in the early '80s that I started to get into them and then it was only for "The Cursed Earth" and "Judge Caligula". I always wanted the "Judge Death" editions, but I'd grown out of it all by the time they appeared.

Back in the day, everyone expected that there would be a Judge Dredd film starring Clint Eastwood, but of course, it never happened. When the 1995 movie came out starring Sylvester Stallone, I wasn't too impressed as I already had an idea in my mind about how Judge Dredd should be and, quite frankly, Stallone wasn't it.

A helmet without a chin strap is just a hat.

The new Dredd, played by Karl Urban, doesn't really improve things all that much. He is too robotic in a lot of ways and even delivers a line like Robocop at one point, "You have 20 seconds to comply!" In fact, I think Stallone had more charisma and was a lot more entertaining in the role. Like I said, I never really liked Judge Dredd in the comics anyway, so maybe I just didn't get it and the performance was spot on. I'm willing to be wrong about this as it's been nearly 30 years since I last read any kind of comic, 2000 A.D. or otherwise.

One thing which I really hated was the look of the new Dredd who could have just been any cop in body armour and a badly-designed motorcycle helmet. I'd guess that the director, Pete Travis, was trying to copy Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films to some extent by making things look more realistic rather than comicbook-like. Even with $50,000,000, "Dredd 3D" still didn't have a big enough budget to be larger than life so I can see why it was done the way it was. Some of that approach works and some of it doesn't, but I'll say more about that later.

Aren't you a little short for a Judge?

Teaming Dredd up with a rookie, in the form of Olivia Thirlby as Cassandra Anderson, was a nice idea but a wasted opportunity by not going with the "Judge Death" story which she first appeared in. Dredd could have been partnered with any number of non-psychic female judges and the film would still have the same overall effect. Her specialist powers are used a couple of times, but I really don't think they add anything much.

What is far more interesting (in another negative way) is the tower block that nearly all the action takes place in. The megablocks were envisioned as small self-contained cities in their own right due to Mega City One having 800 million inhabitants. The one in this, "Peach Trees", is strangely sparse in the hustle and bustle that I would have expected. I know the budget probably didn't stretch to it, but it should have been like an out of control mental asylum inside with all kinds of bizarre-looking characters and robots running around. Instead, it's just rather grubby and ordinary.

Bang bang bang... bang bang!

I won't say that rookie-judge Anderson is grubby-looking or ordinary since she was the only reason why I wanted to watch "Dredd 3D" in the first place. Having seen the trailer and Olivia Thirlby's previous performance in "The Darkest Hour" (2011), I was intrigued by how she would look as a blonde. Call me shallow if you want, but really that's all there was to it. I misjudged (no pun intended) that she had a Sharon Stone quality to her in the trailer which turned out to be non-existent in the film itself. Her comicbook character, incidentally, was based on Debbie Harry from "Blondie". I think she pulled that look off well enough.

The action scenes are what this film is supposed to be all about so I need to say something about them. Although the gun battles and explosions are decent enough, I actually got a bit bored around the 45 minute mark and, apart from one very nice head shot, I felt that things didn't really pick up again until the final 10 minutes. There wasn't enough characterisation to keep me all that interested in either Judge Dredd or Anderson, and I started to hope, albeit vainly, that the bad guys would win.

Why so serious?

Even though Lena Headey, as Ma-Ma, is made-up to be quite ugly with all her scars and skanky tattoos, I was still more on her side than on the side of the judges. I've never been all that keen on the police anyway nor, in case you wondered, have I ever been into gangs and drug culture, so I was forced to choose the lesser of two evils. It's kind of an annoying trope that the bad guy (or gal) has to be disfigured while the hero (or heroine) had to be all blonde and "apple pie", but that's the way with the movies. Stuff like that is as predictable as disposable black characters, and there are quite a few of those in this film too.

The biggest problem with "Dredd 3D" (other than the fact that I didn't actually watch it in 3D) is its predictability. There is never any chance that the title character is ever going to be in any real danger and his blonde, super-powered sidekick isn't exactly likely to be raped, skinned, thrown over a balcony or eaten either, more's the pity. I wish that Mega City One's cannibalism problem had been mentioned, but maybe, if there's ever a sequel, that will be dealt with next time.

For a non-horror movie, there are some nicely done gory bits and, due to my problems with vertigo, a few too many aerial shots with people falling from great heights (à la Christopher Nolan) made it a source of future nightmares for me. I had weeks of plummeting to my death just as I started to drift off to sleep thanks to "The Dark Knight Rises" and cheese sandwiches before bedtime.

Because "Dredd 3D" doesn't belong to my favourite genre and isn't exactly brilliant as an action movie either, I'm going to rate it as slightly below average. There are some good bits, but it's just another mindless and clichéd cop movie overall.

As a reboot (or re-imagining) rather than a sequel to "Judge Dredd" (1995), "Dredd 3D" felt like an expensive pilot for a TV series rather than a theatrical movie to me, and by trying to be too realistic rather than futuristic, it isn't all that memorable.