Spoiler (1998)

There’s an excellent sci-fi idea at the heart of Spoiler but it’s utterly wasted on a bad film with bad acting. The idea involves a Gilliam-esque society with a developed judicial system that punishes repeat offenders by placing them in suspended animation. When they’re released their loved ones have aged or died but they haven’t, so the punishment seems instant (for the convict) but the resulting anguish lasts a lifetime. There’s so much potential there that opens up so many doors, but when Spoiler lurches toward one of the more attractive ones it trips over its own shoelace (that it was too stupid to learn to tie) and shamefully crawls through.

1 cold one out of 5

City Hunter (1993)

Watching a Wong Jing film is almost like gambling. You’ll either turn up something great and feel like a winner, or end up with a hand of crap like City Hunter. Chingmy and Joey are as beautiful and talented as always, and Jackie, a Private Investigator with his own theme tune, is his usual kinetic self, but the shit-fest, slap stick (shit-stick?) comedy had me cringing every few minutes. It’s packed with interesting characters but they’re watered down into comedy clichés that'll leave anyone over the age of five feeling short-changed.

1½ hadoukens that didn't hit out of 5

FIST OF THE NORTH STAR [1995]

Hellraiser II director, Tony Randel brings the popular manga Fist Of The North Star to the screen and it stinks.

With some hokey but fun gory effects and some low-budget yet interesting sets, Fist was obviously made with some genuine love for the source material but that love got lost somewhere during the production. The painfully annoying characters spurt out loads of flat dialogue, the editing is completely nonsensical and the story is so predictable you'd think it was a Saturday morning cartoon.

Christ. *shakes head*

1 "mullets...so many mullets" out of 5