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Every now and again, a debate rears its head about the most mangled Irish accent to ever be deployed in a movie. Many would make the case that  Tom Cruise's Joseph "You're A Corker, Shannon" Donnelly  in Ron Howard's 'Far and Away' galloped away with the title in 1992. However arguments can be made for other terrible accents by other graduates of the Kelloggs' Lucky Charms School of Dodgy Irish Acting. Does anyone remember Tommy Lee Jones'  U2 loving IRA bomb maker in 'Blown Away' ? Lloyd Bridges, though, in the same film  gave him a run for his money. What about Mickey Rourke's  morally conflicted Irish republican in 'A Prayer for the Dying'  or Brad Pitt's  paramilitary laying low in the US in 'The Devil's Own' ? How could we forget  Richard Gere's pixie headed accent in the remake of 'The Day of the Jackal'? Then there's Fred Astaire and Petula Clark butchering the brogue  in 'Finian's

It's not very often you'll find this blog referencing Macaulay Culkin's most popular movie 'Home Alone'. However one quote from his character Kevin McCallister springs to mind after watching the relentless gore of the rather irritating ' Fear Street, Part I: 1994 '. "You guys give up? Or are you thirsty for more?"  Leigh Janiaks 'Fear Street Part II: 1978,' is the second instalment of a supernatural slasher trilogy for Netflix. The prequel begins with sister and brother, Kiana Madeira and Benjamin Flores Jr's Deena and Josh tracking down Gillian Jacobs' twitchy recluse C Berman who survived a teen summer camp massacre. Both of them hope to glean from her how they can defeat the malevolent spirit of the 17th Century witch Sarah Fier who has been terrorising their town, Shadyside over the decades. C Berman duly delivers an account of how she survived the infamous 1978 slaughter by an axe murderer in Camp Nightwing. She does this with

The problem with a lot of horror movies these days is that they invite you to spend too much time trying to work out what classics the filmmaker is paying homage to. This compulsion of some directors to pay their dues can get in the way of emotional engagement with the characters. At its worst, it's just a pain in the arse. Take Leigh Janiak's 'Fear Street, Part I: 1994', for example. Part of a gory horror movie trilogy for Netflix, it shamelessly plunders Wes Craven's 'Scream' and other horror classics with all the grace, decorum and guile of a football hooligan. Based on the RL Stine series of novels, the trilogy tells the story of a cursed town called Shadyside. Over the course of the three Netflix movies, we go back in time to the origins of a supernatural force that keeps unleashing murder and mayhem on the streets of the unfortunately named town. In its first instalment directed by Leigh Janiak from a script co-written with Phil Graziadi from a story t

When I was a kid, I used to love reading a book for children by the Anglo French writer and satirist Hilaire Belloc. 'Cautionary Tales for Children' was a series of humourous poems for kids about kids with various character traits. As the title implies, many of the rhymes had grisly stings in the tail (or should that be tale?) They included rhymes entitled 'Jim who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion,' 'Matilda who told lies and was burned to death' or 'Henry King who chewed bits of string and was early cut off in dreadful agonies'. As grisly as these poems were, they appealed in much the same way as 'Horrible Histories' appeals to children today. They were humourously macabre but they also had a very pointed moral. If Belloc were alive today, it would be interesting to see what he would have made of the story of Michaella McCollum. If he were to craft a poem about it, it would probably be entitled 'Michaella: who partied too hard

  In normal circumstances, Disney Pixar's Italian animated tale 'Luca' would be swimming for box office gold in cinemas. Yet here it is on Disney+ instead of movie houses, thanks to an about turn by the studio - although not because executives feared it wasn't good enough. No. Disney Pixar pulled plans to release it in US and European multiplexes in June because of the Covid-19 pandemic, only releasing it in cinemas in territories where Disney+ is not available. The feature length debut of Italy's Enrico Casarosa, who gave us the charming Oscar nominated short 'La Luna' in 2012, it is a tale rooted in Italian folklore about the existence of sea dragons. But it is also a highly cine literate family film, with Casarosa drawing inspiration from the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, the stop motion work of Wes Anderson, the great Italian director Federico Fellini and Disney Pixar's 'Finding Nemo'. 'Luca' begins like 'La Luna' with a m