John Hurt1940-2017

"I feel dead."

- Gilbert Kane, Alien

Happy Easter From The Incredible Suit!

Hope you find something delightful inside your eggs.

See you next Tuesday, as potty-mouth Hit Girl might say!

To comment on this post, click here

Last Exit To Nowhere

I can't believe I've been writing this sack of sprouts for eight months now and I still haven't plugged Last Exit To Nowhere.

Some of you will be living in a wonderful, happy place where you already know about LETN and their galactically humungous range of geeksplasmic t-shirts, hoodies and caps, in which case carry on as normal and go and buy some more.

For those poor, pitiful souls sploshing about in a filthy, squalid pit of ignorance and hopelessness, Last Exit To Nowhere make the greatest clothes known to geekkind, and you should have already stopped reading this in order to go and buy at least four t-shirts.

Each design is based on a different film, but not in a "look at me, I'm wearing a Back To The Future poster on my flabby guts" kind of way. The shirts are based on subtle elements from within the films; so subtle that only your fellow geek will know what you're saying with your sartorial choices. So if you know that Hill Valley High School is where Marty McFly consistently turned up late because he was blowing up Doc Brown's gaff with a comically tiny guitar, you'll spot your fellow BTTF-freak a mile off when you see them in this baby:

The Incredible Suit has purchased no less than five t-shirts from these agents of awe-inspiring apparel, and suggests you do the same. It's like having a secret handshake only without all that unhygienic handshaking business. I look forward to the day when it's possible to buy a pair of Universal Exports underpants, but until then, may Last Exit To Nowhere keep up the good work and may you click here now and dress yourselves properly for a change you scruffy buggers.

***STOP INTERNET EQUIVALENT OF PRESS***

Last Exit To Nowhere have just announced this as their next masterwork, in case you wondered what to buy me to thank me for all the free entertainment I've given you:

To comment on this post, click here

Inglourious Basterds

Well I went to see Inglourious Basterds, and immediately wished I hadn’t. If you like your films filled with vast tracts of dialogue about absolutely nothing, occasionally sprinkled with eruptions of ferocious violence shot with the care and attention of a tender love scene (which is essentially every Quentin Tarantino film), this is for you. It's a bit like sitting through a two and a half hour geography lesson in which the teacher pauses briefly every 30 minutes to lovingly but very noisily stick a fork into a student's eye in a slow motion close up.

Tarantino is clearly at the point where he believes his own press and nobody dares tell him that, you know, perhaps that one scene didn't need to last 20 minutes, and in fact the whole story could have been told in half an hour. Yes, you need time to build tension, but we're only tense because we know it's a Tarantino film and any minute now somebody's going to get their tongue pinned to the bar with a white hot poker and have their stool kicked from under them so they turn themselves inside out before they hit the floor in a quivering pile of viscera. Or something like that.

Inglourious Basterds is only slightly better than Tarantino's last film, Death Proof, because the actors are better. Christoph Waltz stands out as a terrifying SS colonel, although even Shia LaBeouf would be better than enduring Zoe Bell's portrayal of Woody the Woodpecker on top of a wooden shed full of wood in the middle of a wood in Death Proof*. As an actress she makes an excellent stuntwoman. Oh hang on, she is a stuntwoman. Keep your trap shut then and get back on the bonnet of that speeding car!

In other, entirely unrelated news (i.e. it’s about some good films made by a good director), you people have voted for both Alien (correctly) and Thelma & Louise (incorrectly) in equal numbers as the greatest Ridley Scott films, like, ever. Nobody voted for American Gangster, which is a) surprising, as it scored 8 out of 10 on IMDb, and b) unsurprising, because finding anyone who’s actually seen it is harder than finding a good film in a Shia LaBeouf filmography.

This week, go on, tell me what The Greatest Quentin Tarantino Film, Like, Ever is. I was going to throw a Shyamalan and make it What’s The Most Overrated Tarantino Film, Like, Ever, but the answer would be all of them.


The Itchy & Scratchy Show and Quentin Tarantino - The best bloopers are here

*I’m suggesting that she’s wooden

To comment on this post, click here

Trouser-Browning Terror

Glorified Hovis salesman Ridley Scott is apparently preparing a prequel to his masterpiece, Alien. As you know, Alien is a completely perfect film, which clamped itself to the face of moviedom, shoved a tentacle down its throat and left a little something in its belly, which burst forth from the very ribcage of cinema in the shape of Aliens, another completely perfect film.

Aliens then went on to do a big sloppy poo on the lounge carpet, which appeared to be called Alien Cubed, and that poo had a little worm living in it which became Alien Resurrection, but we do not speak of such things here at The Incredible Suit.

Having put you off your lunch, let me get on with this prequel nonsense. Much as I love Alien, Ridley Scott is one of those directors – like Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese – whose films I blindly look forward to and hope will be fantastic, despite knowing full well that they frequently turn out to be a bit cack. Blade Runner? Not bad, but hardly the second coming it’s made out to be. Gladiator? Overrated. Hannibal? I’d rather eat my own brains.

So I’m afraid I can’t get excited about an Alien prequel. If it absolutely must be made (it mustn’t) then I suppose Scott’s the man to do it (or James Cameron), but I can’t see how it’ll work. Alien and Aliens succeed because we identify with the humans and share their trouser-browning terror at the prospect of an unsolicited trepanning at the hands of a vicious space beastie. But for a prequel to work it would have to show how the Aliens got involved with the ‘Space Jockey’, the fossilized, horribly violated creature we see near the beginning of Alien in the derelict spacecraft. Personally I’d rather not know; I can make up my own backstory for him. Maybe he was an intergalactic pizza delivery boy who turned up at the Aliens’ house 45 minutes late with the wrong topping and forgot the garlic bread, in which case he got everything he deserved.

My point is, the story would require the complete absence of humans to remain plausible, and the only successful movies not to feature any actual, genuine, living, breathing people are the High School Musical films.

There are dozens more obstacles in the way of this project, so if Ridders pulls it off it’ll be a minor miracle. In which case I’ll be only too happy to blog about it and say, “I told you it would be brilliant”, and that’ll be the poster quote you’ll see at bus stops and train stations the world over.

The Incredible Suit's Top 5 Ridley Scott films:
1. Alien
2. Blade Runner
3. Thelma & Louise
4. Er…
5. Hmm.

Of course what I really want to know is: What’s your greatest Ridley Scott film, like, ever? I know, let’s do a poll! Which reminds me, The Breakfast Club was your favourite John Hughes film. You’re wrong. Weird Science is tiptops.

To comment on this post, click here

Dead Poo, More Like

Another day, another super-hero film on the way. Today it’s Green Lantern, and the news that’s just parped out is that Ryan Reynolds is to be cast in the title role.

Reynolds does not feature in my book of Bad Actors, but he does appear in my much smaller book of Actors Who’ve Played Characters With Atypical Names. Ryan’s entry in this book includes such gems as Jay ‘Boom’ DeBoom, Bobby Rupp, Paul Nodel, Henry Lipschitz, Captain Excellent, and Kevin. Could it be that Ryan’s choice of characters is based on the fact that his middle name is Rodney? Ryan, I know you’re reading this, let me know.

But I digress. This post is not about Ryan Rodney Reynolds’ daft character monikers, nor is it about the Green Lantern movie, although it’s worth looking forward to because it’s a DC Comics property and it’s directed by Martin Campbell (GoldenEye, Casino Royale). I know precious little about Green Lantern as a character so I’ll leave all that business to sites run by those who know their mustard and are already getting their grundies in a twizzle over the casting of Triple R.

No, this post is about my hope that, because of Reynolds’ new job, the mooted Deadpool movie he was due to star in will be unceremoniously shunted to the arse end of the list of movies to be made in the next century.

For those in the dark, Deadpool was a character in the crapmungous X-Men spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and was due his own spin-off for no obvious reason, least of all that anybody actually wants to see a Deadpool movie. So this spin-off of a spin-off has hopefully spun off into the spin-dryer of bad ideas, never to spin anywhere again.

I mean really, why bother in the first place? Let’s take a cursory glance at a random selection of all-time classic films featuring characters from other, almost universally better, movies. For the sake of impartiality I’ll include each film’s rating out of 10 according to readers of the Internet Movie Database, my personal bible.

Alien (and Predator) gave us Alien vs. Predator (5.4). Return Of The Jedi gave us Caravan Of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (5.2). Daredevil (which was rubbish enough itself) gave us Elektra (4.9). Batman Returns gave us Catwoman (3.2. Yes, THREE POINT TWO). Furthermore, none of these cinematic turds made nearly as much money as the movie bottoms from whence they came, which is what seems to count far more than mere public opinion.

So, having studied these figures carefully, the powers that be decided that what the world really needs is a spin-off of a spin-off, which brings us back to Deadpool. Let’s hope that it remains unmade because the only benefit to mankind I can envisage would be my capsule review, which would be: “Dead Poo, more like”.

A Big, Cheesed Off Fish-Man

Good news, everyone! Not only has this week’s poll seen a record-breaking TEN votes, but the winner is a film of which The Incredible Suit heartily approves!

Yes, you, The People, have voted in numbers to rival viewers of The X Factor, and by crikey it was close. The search for The Greatest Remake / Reboot / Re-imagining, Like, Ever has seen Moulin Rouge!, Casino Royale and Something Else I Hadn’t Thought Of come an excruciatingly close joint second place to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s unspeakably good update of the Batman franchise which was left twitching in a puddle of its own liquid faeces by master job-botcher Joel Schumacher in 1997’s Batman And Robin.

This was a difficult vote because, as Satine pointed out in her comment, I failed to specify whether you should be voting for your favourite film from the list or the film which most successfully updated the original / previous version, and in the end I just left you to it. You’re big boys and girls after all.

And while I believe that Moulin Rouge! is a better film overall than Batman Begins, I do think that Nolan’s film performed a near miracle in resurrecting a franchise so devastatingly rogered into oblivion that nobody expected to take it seriously until some time in the 2030s.

So well done Bats, and on a personal note I should like to open myself up (not literally you understand, that would be horrible) and tell the world that the scene in which a young Bruce Wayne tells Alfred that it’s his own fault his parents died, my vision goes a bit misty and I feel a sudden urge to breathe in sharply through my nose. Make of that what you will.

With my recent witterings about aliens in the movies fresh in your minds, this week’s poll is: What’s the greatest movie about aliens, like, ever? The Incredible Suit’s Top 5 (and therefore the only five that matter) are:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Alien
3. Aliens
4. E.T.
5. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

I would have put Cloverfield in there but there’s some debate over whether or not the monster is of alien origin or just, you know, a big, cheesed off fish-man.

Happy voting!