EXTRAORDINARY TALES [2013]

Director Raul Garcia, known mostly for his animation work on Disney's The Lion King & Aladdin, brings us Extraordinary Tales, a gorgeously animated anthology of five Edgar Allan Poe stories.
Stitched together by a ho-hum original framing story of Poe, in the form of a crow (shouldn't it be a raven?), in a deep conversation with Death about his destiny or whatever it maybe.  Apart from some interesting looking visuals, which wears out pretty fast, the framing story is pretty lifeless and very unnecessary.  Thankfully the five animated shorts are all gorgeous to look at, wonderfully narrated by horror heavy-weights like Christopher Lee and Guillermo del Toro and beautifully brought to creepy life by Sergio de la Puente's magnificent score.  The adaptations aren't always faithful, and occasionally threaten to derail but the stylish visuals and very evident enthusiasm make up for it's mildly frustrating shortcomings.

3½ filmy vulture eyes out of 5

NAKED LUNCH [1991]

Director David Cronenberg gets really feckin' weird with Naked Lunch, a hallucinatory erotic comedy(?) inspired by the life & works of post-modern author William S. Burroughs.
Peter Weller is perfect as a man trying to get his life together, only everything that surrounds him will have none of it thus sending him drifting in and out of a drug-induced Kafka-esque miasma that is simultaneously hilarious, wondrous, terrifying and most of all: really really creepy.  Fans expecting an adaptation of the novel, the film takes it's name from, obviously never read the book, as Cronenberg takes from all sorts of sources and creates something all his own.  The wild imagination is what stands out but after the shock of that wears off, you've got a hypnotizing story that dissects the social mechanisms that follow Weller's character into his hallucinated version of Tangier.  It's definitely not for everybody but for those that bite, they will find something fantastic.

4 drips of mugwamp jism out of 5

Warlock: The Armageddon (1993)

Julian Sands returns as a warlock with a similar agenda as before, but he’s not the same warlock and it’s not a sequel. Why? Because then they’d either have to do some hasty ret-conning or go for the lame memory loss plot device and that wouldn't fool anyone. Instead, they throw some modern-day Druids and a pair of young lovers into the path of destruction and hope we don’t notice that the result is like a flaccid cheese stick compared to the previous film’s brightly coloured chalk sticks.

2 old rune stones out of 5

Warlock (1989)

I don’t know whether to label it as supernatural or just plain fantasy, but it sure is good fun. Julian Sands is well-cast as the titular Warlock hunting for a Satanic Bible so that he can fuck everybody’s shit up. Richard E. Grant is a kind of Van Helsing/Kyle Reese/Dr Who hybrid witch-hunter out to prevent those kind of shenanigans from happening by doing his own acceptable brand of witchcraft on the side. It's all very silly, but it's self-aware silliness that knows when to play for laughs and when not to.

3 times hither and thither out of 5

Gothic (1986)

The meeting of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and his lover Mary Godwin has passed into legend as the night the seeds of Frankenstein (1818) were born.
Ken Russell creates his own hysterical imbued fiction around those events, in his unique debauched style. With a carnival ride through the themes of abortion, adultery, blasphemy, incest, self-mutilation and vampirism it’s business as usual for the British pervert. It starts great and ends great, but it’s flabby in the middle. Special kudos to Natasha Richardson as Mary.

3 poets, like schizos, are never alone out of 5