Movie blog & reviews

The idea of a dog pound suggests that you are in there simply for the crime of being a dog. There is no possibility of changing that basic fact, nor any hope of redemption. Dog Pound, Kim Chapiron’s new drama, follows the story of three young offenders who wind up in Enola Vale Youth Correctional Facility in Montana – except that there is nothing correctional about this facility.

The inmates don’t seem to be on any particular track whilst incarcerated. They are there more or less just to endure the time they have been sentenced to, rather than to achieve any particular transformation or rehabilitation. At the end of it all, one assumes, they will be released, but will come out the same dogs as when they went in.

In order to mirror the lives of the inmates, Chapiron has decided that the movie itself doesn’t deserve any particular plot as such. It is just an aimless succession of violent events within the walls of Enola Vale, which ultimately benefit no one, giving a sense of the frustrating inability of the youth correctional system in America to help these youngsters progress with their rehabilitation.

Seventeen-year-old Butch (Adam Butcher), sixteen-year Davis (Shane Kippel), and fifteen-year-old Angel (Mateo Morales) enter Enola Vale together, and as the newest inmates, are picked on by resident bully, Banks (Taylor Poulin – a real young offender who was released from a juvenile detention centre just days before shooting began). Pushed to his limit, Butch violently assaults Banks and his pals, emerging as the alpha male in the facility and taking the other two under his wing. Being the strongest, Butch seems to be victimised most by the system, with no way out of his own capacity for violence, which he is continually forced to use. The movie is filled with tragedies, but perhaps the biggest tragedy of all is that Butch, sadly, just seems to belong.

Poulin is positively terrifying, and both Butcher and Kippel give very strong performances. Also worth a mention is Lawrence Bayne, who plays Officer Goodyear, the warden in charge of the boys. He soon turns out to be just as tormented and victimised by the system, becoming frustrated at his own inability to help these kids when the institution he works for has no intention of rehabilitating these ‘dogs’.

Dog Pound is a film about a total lack of hope, and a country that has cut its losses and given up on its young outcasts. Obscenely violent, deliberately frustrating, and gripping throughout.

Lisbeth is back! Hot on the heels of the first instalment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, comes part two in the franchise, The Girl Who Played With Fire. I went along to an exclusive preview, courtesy of Momentum Pictures, to see what strife Lisbeth and Mikael have gotten themselves into second time around.

Fire – as we’ll call it for short – kicks off with an incognito Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) in sunnier climes. After a year away from home and the death of her mother, she is organising her finances and purchasing an apartment for her imminent return to Sweden. In her absence, Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) has returned to Millennium and is working on a sex trafficking story, in conjunction with a newly recruited journalist, which will expose many senior politicians and businessmen, not to mention incur the wrath of the professional criminals responsible.

When Lisbeth arrives back in Sweden her first port of call is to visit her court appointed guardian (and rapist) Nils Bjurman. She has discovered that he intends to have the tattoo she gave him removed (a deservedly grotesque forget-me-not from the first film), and of course is not happy with his intentions. Upon breaking into the house and terrifying him with her midnight visit, she threatens to tattoo his face should he remove the one on his stomach. So far, deliciously vengeful.

However, things don’t go as planned for long. When the journalist investigating Millennium’s expose is murdered, along with his girlfriend, Lisbeth becomes the police’s prime suspect, forcing her into hiding. Mikael is unconvinced by the allegations, and suspecting a link between his investigations and the murders, resolves to help Lisbeth. Together they endeavour to solve the case themselves and expose the perpetrators, as it’s the only way to clear her name.

Fire is every bit as taunt, tense, and thrilling as Tattoo, and certainly does not disappoint. Indeed, most people I have spoken to actually prefer the second film. We get to delve a little more into Lisbeth’s childhood with revelations about her father, which of course informed the character she is now, and a little more exploration of her personal/non vengeance related life.

The best bews for fans is that the story continues apace with part three of the trilogy – The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest – released in November this year!

The Girl Who Played With Fire is in cinemas now.

Piranha 3-D has got to be the most fun movie of the summer. Presented by Eli Roth – who also has a cameo as a wet t-shirt competition host – it has the two most important ingredients for a trashy night out at the cinema, killer fish and boobies! Yeah, it sounds crap, but it’s supposed to be. Be warned though. If you are not in possession of a sense of humour, an appreciation of movie pastiche, or indeed, a fondness for scantily clad ladies, then this is probably not a film for you!

Piranha stars a perfectly hammy cast of elders including Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future) and Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws), alongside Jerry O’Connell (Can’t Hardly Wait), Elisabeth Shue (Hide & Seek), and hot new talent Steven R. McQueen (The Vampire Diaries), Jessica Szohr (Gossip Girl), and Kelly Brook (yes, Kelly Brook!). Ok, so no huge names attached – the killer fish are the stars!

The story is as ridiculous as you would hope. Thousands of prehistoric man-eating piranhas are released from a subterranean river under Lake Victoria when a tremor splits the lake bed. Let their reign of terror and bloodshed commence!

Richard Dreyfuss is the first to fall victim falling into the post-tremor whirlpool of teeth. The appearance of his piranha-mangled corpse a few days later coincides with the Spring Break influx of thousands of drunken horny teenagers to the town – not to mention Kelly Brook and her ‘Wild Wild Girls’ film crew – and gets the town sheriff in a panic. She calls in a group of aquatic scientists who quickly get underwater to discover just what is down there, of course, the expedition doesn’t last long!

After a few isolated incidents around the lake, the chaos quickly spreads as the piranha edge closer to the shore, culminating in an attack on the crowded beach and some very comical, gory, and inventive death scenes. As the piranha are quickly devouring the population, it falls to our misfit group of beautiful teenagers, a lecherous porn director and his buxom stars, crazy scientist Christopher Lloyd, and the small town police force to save the town, nay, humanity (!) from the toothsome, gilled, butchers. Genius.

My only negative point to make is that some of the underwater 3D shots are not very clear. For a few seconds you can’t really tell what is going on other than frenzied fish eats human, human screams, sea turns red. That aside, I enjoyed every minute of it, laughing my ass off while cheering the ever inventive fish vs. human mutilation. Just remember to switch your brain off before it starts, and keep your eyes peeled for the floating eye ball!

To sum this movie up in three words, I would have to go for ‘nerdy yet cool’. A complete paradox, perhaps, but it’s become the fashion these days: nerd culture is officially cool. It’s all down to the ‘Street Fighter’ generation – of which I am proudly a member – who grew up in the nerdy nineties surrounded by Gameboys, sci-fi comics and Tamagotchis, and who are now at full (im)maturity and driving the creative industries.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opens with a retro, pixelated version of the Universal logo, accompanied by old-school computer-game style music. Thinking this was still one of the trailers, I excitedly turned to my friend and said ‘whatever this is – yes’. It’s just so nerdy, that it’s cool!

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a 22-year old lazy-bones who describes himself as ‘between jobs’, while playing bass guitar for mediocre unsigned band Sex Bob-omb. He starts off dating a 17-year-old high school student named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), before leaving her for ‘the girl of his dreams’, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). It soon transpires that in order to date Ramona, he is going to have to defeat her ’seven evil exes’, who are sent one by one to kill Scott. Essentially it’s a movie about battling the baggage we carry with us from the past, before learning to just… be cool with it.

So the film is a kind of tribute to the nerdy baggage of a generation, with Scott’s life being played out like a nineties-style computer game. The fight scenes are presented like an old Sega beat-em up, where the winner gains points and the loser crumbles into a heap of coins. It’s an original and inventive take on retro concept, which makes it damn cool. Not to mention very funny.

For those who don’t subscribe to the culture of this generation, the endless computer game references might seem a bit tedious and something of an annoyance, like Ramona’s exes – some baggage from the past. In truth the film overdoes it with the quirky retro effects. Cera’s performance has been quite roundly criticised for not really coming alive enough, and not rising to the role of the hero, which some viewers will find frustrating. However, the fact is that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a satire of the whole comic-book superhero genre, as the nerdy generation looks to redefine its hero. So a subtle geekiness rather than a classic heroic energy is really what’s needed, and that’s where Cera’s charm lies. Basically he has to be a bit rubbish, and in my opinion Cera nails the role.

The movie follows on perfectly from Kick-Ass, which first began to blow the superhero genre apart earlier this year. So how does it compare? Well, the storyline isn’t quite as charming as Kick-Ass, but it takes the style that step further, in terms of the humour in the dialogue and the overall effects. In some ways, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is slightly over-cooked, coming across as more style than substance and perhaps even desperate to be cool, but personally I loved it.

Overall the story may be slightly naff, but if you’re of the right generation (and cool enough to be a nerd) it will definitely strike a chord.

What is it with Leo DiCaprio and dreams about fictional dead wives? Fresh out of the cinema after watching Inception (amazing!), I toddled home to watch the latest Scorsese/DiCaprio, Shutter Island. After having my mind fried for 2 hours with Inception, I was hoping Shutter Island would be a little less challenging, but no, there’s Leo, dreaming of his dead wife, and a bunch of crazy people trying to do him in!

After the huge success of their recent collaborations (The Departed, The Aviator), a Scorsese/DiCaprio team up now has a great deal of expectation on it. So, I was pleased to hear that the latest, Shutter Island, based on Dennis Lehane’s bestselling novel, was getting great reviews from critics, and was similarly impressing the movie going public – at $290m+ it’s Scorsese’s biggest box office hit!

The movie is set in 1950’s USA, Boston Harbor Islands, to be exact, at a mental institution on isolated Shutter Island. Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo play US Marshalls Daniels (Leo) and Aule (Ruffalo) who are assigned to investigate an escaped patient, Rachel, who was detained after killing her three children. Under the watchful expertise of Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), Shutter Island is more of a treatment facility than a prison, for people society has deemed beyond help. Bearing in mind this is the 50s, treatment for mental illness is in its infancy, and a little on the barbaric side, with transorbital lobotomies more common that, say, psycoanalytic psychotherapy. However, Cawley is of the new school of thought, and is progressing less invasive and drug dependant treatments (used to merely placate the patients), in favour of actual psychological help and recovery. Of course, his new methods are not popular with all his colleagues, amongst them Dr. Jeremiah Naehring, who Daniels – a former allied soldier in WW2 – is convinced is an exiled Nazi continuing his barbaric scientific tests on the incarcerated US citizens. Daniel often has vivid (and gloriously presented) flashbacks to WW2, where he was one of the liberating soldiers at Dachau. These, along with many flashbacks of his manic depressive dead wife, reveal Daniel’s back story.

Battling the internal resistance to their presence, and the island itself – the weather has taken a sinister turn for the worse – Daniels and Aude set about investigating Rachel’s disappearance, encountering all the crazy the inmates have to offer. All the while Daniels himself seems to be on the verge of a breakdown with increasingly violent and revealing dreams besetting his wellbeing and capacity to differentiate what is real, or not.

Initially positioning the film as part psychological thriller/part horror seems an odd choice for Scorsese. At times the score seems a touch heavy handed (although perfectly unsettling), particularly when the boys first arrive on the island, and there are a few almost cheap jumps and scares, which would indicate the work of a much less experienced filmmaker. But by the end, this all becomes clear, and Scorsese’s masterful touch is evident (trying not to give away any spoilers here). As always, Scorsese brings out excellent performances from his cast; DiCaprio on fine form as Daniels, as is the hugely underrated Mark Ruffalo. My favourite turn in this movie has to be Max Von Sydow, perfectly cast as the menacing Dr. Naehring, a chilling character performance. The ‘guessing game’ that runs throughout will have you gripped from its thunderous start to its elegant end, and begs repeat viewing.

As today is Friday 13th, it’s only fitting that I bring you up to date with some spooky news, this time from Louisiana…

The Last Exorcism is a documentary style horror – in the vein of Paranormal Activity – brought to the big screen by horror maestro Eli Roth (Inglourious Basterds / Hostel). It tells the story of a desperate family in turmoil.

Louis Sweetzer is a rural farm owner who has become concerned about the wellbeing of his teenage daughter Nell. In fact, Sweetzer is convinced she is possessed by a demon! As these things go in rural southern stated, Sweetzer is fundamentally religious so, of course, places all hope and belief in an exorcism ritual. All he needs is a helpful Reverend… cue Rev. Cotton Marcus. After a lifetime of helping believers through prayer, Rev. Cotton Marcus is nearing the end of his career, tiring of fraudulent exorcisms – after performing over 50 you would be! At the behest of Sweetzer, he decides to take up the challenge one last time, and invites a documentary film crew to capture him in his fraudulent glory. However, the good Reverend is in for a horrific surprise during his supernatural swan song; he soon finds himself confronted not only by the desperate pleas of Papa Sweetzer, but with evil itself, testing his faith, and forcing the viewer to consider: do you believe in him?

Following the hugely successful pairing of Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass in the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum, anticipation for Green Zone, the pair’s latest outing, was high. Set in and around the Green Zone in Baghdad, a heavily guarded city within a city where the occupation headquarters and some of the post-bombing reconstruction contractors were based, the movie follows Matt Damon’s character in search of the elusive WMD in the early stages of the invasion. Sounds like a winner, but with the Iraq war occurring in very recent history and still fresh in the public’s mind, are the movie going public ready for a film that dismantles the pretext for war?

There have been mixed fortunes for films dealing with the Iraq war so far; The Hurt Locker has been a huge critical success, similarly HBO’s excellent Generation Kill, while other films, such as Kimberley Peirce’s Stop Loss, have faltered at the box office (although I think Paramount’s marketing of that particular film is to blame – the posters looked like Dawson’s Creek in Baghdad). Well, if anyone can make it work, it’s the Bourne team, right…? Well, the answer is ‘yes’, kind of. A box office haul around $100m is not to be sniffed at, but compared to the last Bourne’s $440m+, you can see a gulf of difference of the Iraq war which is accesible to the mainstream.

Green Zone begins with the massive ’shock and awe’ bombing campaign which took out key sites in Baghdad in the first hours of the war. While citizens cower in terror in their homes, key officials in the Iraqi regime are making plans for a quick getaway, amongst them one of Saddam’s trusted Generals Al Rawi.

Cut to four weeks later, Damon’s Chief Miller is charged with locating various suspected WMD sites, which requires navigating the chaos on the streets where looting is widespread (suspected WMD sites included). The population are, understandibly, in shock, and suffering due to water and electricity supplies being cut off. ‘Shock in awe’ in full effect. Coming up empty handed after investigating the top sites intelligent officials have targeted, Miller quickly starts to question the orders and intelligence he is receiving.

At his next briefing at Saddam airport where US intelligence-friendly Iraqi exiles are welcomed home, Miller meets with key military officials, amongst them Republican Clark Pundstone (Greg Kinnear) of the Pentagon’s Special Intelligence Office. He makes an unpopular figure of himself when he raises his doubts regarding the credibility of the intelligence and is quickly put in his place by the senior officials. He does, however, catch the attention of the CIA’s resident man in the Middle East Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) who collars him after the briefing to confirm that he also suspects something is amiss, instructing Miller to get in touch if the next WMD sites are empty. Of course, this is exactly what happens, and Miller and Brown covertly begin their own investigations. When Poundstone gets wind of it, he quickly shuts down Brown’s operations and gets Miller reassigned. At this point their investigation has to go rogue, but with the aid of information from disillusioned journalist Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) from the Wall Street Journal, the pieces slowly start to come together as unlikely connections begin to appear between Poundstone and Al Rawi…

To say anymore on this on the plot would be unfair, but you get the impression of where it’s heading.

I was absorbed in Green Zone from start to finish. The action is taut, partly due to story, partly due to Greengrass’s direction. He employs his trademark handheld filming, used to great effect in Bourne and a greater effect here, to get across the urgency and claustrophobia of a war zone. Matt Damon is on form as Chief Miller, looking surprisingly comfortable amongst his cast of vet soldiers, most of whom had completed tours in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Movies based on the Iraq war have taken quite a bi-partisan position to date. A few lesser known documentaries aside, major films such as The Hurt Locker – on the surface at least – were not really concerned with the legality of the coalition invasion/occupation or assigning responsibility for the disastrous aftermath. There is no such ambiguity in Green Zone. Green Zone’s biggest success, besides being genuinely thrilling entertainment, is that it lays bare the dichotomy of an elite group making vital decisions behind secure walls in the Green Zone, while the Iraqi citizens and coalition troops are fighting the bloody battles in the streets. If you take yourself out of the barrage of video game style media coverage of the war(s) for long enough, a movie like this will chill you with a reminder of its true terror. Well done team Bourne.

Stieg Larsson’s hugely successful ‘Millennium’ Trilogy has become a literary phenomenon with over 30 million books sold worldwide – 3 million of those in the UK alone. Apparently, I was in the minority, as I had never read them and held very little interest in doing so, pouring scorn on the ‘trash novel’ reading public on my way to work. All that has changed since watching the first movie based on the books, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I can now be found irritating people by walking at a snail’s pace through the tube station with my nose buried in book two.

The movie begins with elderly businessman Henrik Vanger opening a parcel from Hong Kong. It’s a dried flower, and he cries as he adds it to his collection and looks at a picture of a young girl, maybe he was hoping for something else? It transpires (later) that the photograph is of his niece Harriet who has been missing for 40 years, and Henrik has received one such flower from around the globe on the same date every year since her disappearance, a ‘gift’, he suspects, from her killer.

Next we are introduced to the tattooed girl herself, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) as she attends a high profile court case where journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is being sued for libel after accusing mega financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom of gun running and fraud in an expose in Blomkvist’s ‘Millenium’ magazine. He is convicted, fined, and sentenced to 3 months in prison. Blomkvist heads off to see his mates for a commiseration/Christmas drink where they implore him to appeal the decision, but he decides to leave the paper until the media furore blows over, leaving him with a couple of free months before he serves his sentence.

In the meanwhile, Lisbeth is following him around taking pictures from a distance like some pierced pestering paparazzo. It becomes clear that her interest in his case was not casual, and after a meeting at her work (she’s a researcher) it’s revealed that she has been investigating him for a mystery client.

Henrik Vanger is the mystery client, and with Lisbeth’s Blomkvist file now in his hands, he calls Blomkvist for a meeting and asks him to spend his pre-jail holiday investigating his niece’s mysterious disappearance all those years ago. Henrik suspects a family member is responsible, and with Vanger clan’s influx to Henrik’s estate for the annual conference on the day she disappeared, that’s a lot of snooping and opening of old wounds to be done before Blomkvist’s incarceration. Lisbeth gets involved in the investigation when she anonymously emails him after solving a key clue early in the case (she continues to hack into Blomkvist’s laptop after her research has ended). Grateful for the first lead in this 40 year old cold case, Blomkvist invites Lisbeth to join the investigation, which quickly turns murkier than they could have anticipated…

There were many elements to both the story and the film that I loved. While it might sound cliched – and a bit Angels & Demons – while I’m writing this, the religious and fascist elements of the story where thrilling to watch, and somehow felt completely original, maybe due to the setting. There always appears something quite sinister about a winter night in Scandinavia. I don’t know if it’s the visible freeze that gives an unnerving atmosphere (I’m thinking of Let The Right One In here too), but nothing good ever seems to happen at night (except aurora borealis), and both our characters are given ample opportunities to learn this in their investigatory exploits as they slowly uncover the gruesome truth behind Harriet’s disappearance and the Vanger family history.

The cast are fantastic, including all the supporting characters of Vangers. Noomi Rapace as chain smoking Lisbeth is as enchanting as she is disturbed. But it is the writing that keeps you riveted for two and a half hours. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is easily one of the most exciting movies I have seen this year, and I’m desperate to see the second movie The Girl Who Played With Fire, thankfully we have a trailer on blinkbox already to tide us over until its August release…

Southland seems to be one of those great shows that has never really found a huge audience, like Friday Night Lights or Dollhouse, but it’s had a change of network in the US (they’re on Season 3), and now season 1 finally finds its way to the UK, and to blinkbox.

Created by Ann Biderman, who scripted Michael Mann’s excellent Public Enemies, Southland follows a group of detectives and officers from the LAPD ‘driving through the sewers in a glass bottom boat’ as Officer Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) puts it. The aim of the show is to deliver a raw and authentic view of the police work undertaken by the 9,800 officers in Los Angeles whilst delivering quality drama, of course (think The Wire, rather than Law & Order).

Episode 1 sees Officer Cooper charged with taking new recruit Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie – The OC, 88 Minutes) under his wing giving him a ‘front seat to the greatest show on Earth’. Sherman is fresh out of the academy and Cooper wastes no time in telling him that following everything the academy has taught him will only get him killed, especially in downtown LA where the first episode kicks off.

The episode begins with a flash forward to the end of day 1 and finds a bewildered Sherman loitering above the body of a teenage shotgun victim, the rest of the episode tells us how he gets to that point, beginning with an introduction to his new partner (Cooper) and a few awkward jokes in the patrol car as Cooper tries to suss out the new kid, and lay down the law, so to speak.

We are quickly introduced to the four other main characters as each of them, in pairs, investigate a different case. Detectives Bryant (Shawn Hatosy – Bad Lieutenant) and Moretta (Kevin Alejandro – True Blood) are investigating a motiveless gang killing which has resulted in an innocent teenager being on life support, while detectives Adams (Regina King – Ray) and Clarke (Tom Everett Scott) are investigating the disappearance of a young girl. Unlike other cop/detective/crime fighting shows that have plagued the airwaves in recent years, these multiple complex cases are not ‘dumbed down’ for the audience, and are paced frenetically with the action seamlessly switching between each case as the investigations develop.

As each pair makes progress in their investigation, aspects of their personalities and personal lives are carefully revealed, so that by the end of the episode we already have a great insight into each of them. Indeed, the stories are driven by the characterisation, rather than the mechanical plotting of case solving, which is unusual in the current crop of TV shows. Each character is well cast, particularly Regina King, I’m already looking forward to watching how detective Adams develops.

Catch episode one here.

Every so often I’m reminded that I love my job. Not only do I get paid to write about movies, but sometimes I get invites to great parties and premieres, and the recent UK premiere of Eclipse was one such occasion. I’m a sucker for hype and – as you’ll know if you’ve read my previous blogs – supernatural love triangles, so I hopped down to Leicester Square quicker than a ‘new-born’ and fought my way through the throngs of screaming twi-hards to arrive on the red carpet. I promptly scurried past the somersaulting wolf pack, dodged the TV crews filming their interviews with the cast, got my popcorn, and settled in for episode 3 of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse.

After a brief introduction from director David Slade and the attending cast members – Kellan Lutz, Ashley Green, Nikki Reid, Xavier Samuel, Alex Meraz, and BooBoo Stewart – the screaming children quietened down, and it was time to get to the action. For my money, Eclipse is the darkest of the novels (Breaking Dawn is a bit too ridiculous), and with Mr. Slade (30 Days Of Night) at the helm, Eclipse promised to kick the action into the next gear, and it doesn’t disappoint.

So, quick New Moon recap, then we move on… Bella went to Italy to prevent Edward invoking a retaliation from the Volturi (which would see him killed) when he threatened to expose Vampire-kind by glittering topless into the daylight on Volturi turf. They escape to Forks after promising the Volturi that Bella would be ‘turned’, thereby ensuring their secret society would not be exposed by a human, and order would be kept in the Vampire hierarchy. Clearly this wasn’t enough drama for them, so after Bella breaks the heart of her werewolf suitor, Jacob, Edward asks her to marry him… and this is where Eclipse picks up.

Eclipse begins in a dark Seattle alley where Forks native Riley (Xavier Samuel) is being chased by a mysterious assailant. Running through the rain to the docks, he stops at the river’s edge and calls out the pursuant. A flash passes before him and he grabs his hand, turning it to reveal a bloody bite mark. Looks like the ‘veggie vamp’ Cullens are not the only claret drinkers in town.

Cut back to Forks where Edward and Bella are once again in the famous meadow, declaring their love for each other (just in case you needed reminding), foreshadowing the relationship plot for the movie – Edward repeats his marriage proposal, Bella refuses asking him to make her a vampire first.

The local press are reporting on Riley’s recent dissapearance in nearby Seattle, and also covering the mysterious killing spree that is sweeping the city. Could the two be related? It doesn’t remain a mystery for very long. A tense meeting at Forks High between Jacob, Edward and Bella, sees Jacob reveal that Victoria has returned and is stalking the wolves’ territory of an evening. Of course, Edward has kept this a secret from Bella, for her protection, but now that the cat is out of the bag, it’s clear to all that the killing spree is not the work of a lone psycopath, but an army of new born vampires under Victoria’s rule, quenching their blood thirst and preparing an attack.

With no apparent help on offer from the Volturi to stop Victoria and her army, the Cullens get ready to fight, and in partnership with the wolf pack, set up a security detail for Bella and her father Charlie, and start planning how to take out Victoria and the new borns.

Of course, I’m not giving away anymore than that. I will say that I enjoyed Eclipse more than New Moon. It’s a more developed story and, with a healthy injection of 12A action, makes for exciting viewing after the somewhat slow paced New Moon – there’s no time for moping around in this one. The new additions to the cast are great, Xavier Samuel makes a great Riley, and fans of the book will not be dissapointed with his casting. Bryce Dallas Howard fares less well as the recast Victoria. I have to say, I thought Rachelle Lefevre was perfect in New Moon, but Bryce Dallas Howard doesn’t seem to capture any of her wicked menace which is a real loss for Eclipse. We also, finally, see some character development for Jasper and Rosalie, with flashbacks of how they became vampires; Jasper as an officer in the American civil war, and Rosalie beaten and raped by her fiance and his mates. Overall, David Slade has done a great job in carrying the story forward into its darker areas (while maintaining a friendly certificate), shame we have to wait over a year for the next instalment.

Oh yeah, and the after-party was amazing… Wolves and vamps serving cocktails while we mingled with the cast. Love it!

Eclipse is on general release now.