Chris At The Pictures

The Best 10 Films of 2014 (Ascending order)

10. Noah – Conquered all my issues with the original Biblical story with incredible spectacle, visual grace and powerhouse performances.

9. Pride – Wonderful historical drama with more than enough laughs and a cast so enjoyable you’ll want to hug them all…twice.

8. Gone Girl – Delicately crafted and gorgeously mounted ‘who-dunnit’ which brings David Fincher back to his A-game.

7. Lone Survivor – Brutal, nihilistic and avoids flag-waving throughout. Career performances from all involved and a well-handled tribute to those who lost their lives is the blood-soaked icing on the cake.

6. The LEGO Movie – Funny, flashy and sumptuously creative. Other toy-based franchises could learn an awful lot from this…I’m looking at you, Transformers.

5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – State-of-the-art special effects genre picture meets political and philosophical drama. The director risks placing the simians over the human characters and the film is all the better for it.

4. X-Men: Days of Future Past – Simultaneously paves a new path for the franchise and effectively erases the worst parts of it. Bryan Singer’s return is more than a cause to celebrate.

3. The Raid 2 – Flawlessly executed martial arts picture that fuses the thematic structure of The Departed with the one-man army of The Dark Knight (minus rubber suit).

2. The Guest – Helmed by people who know exactly what they’re doing and how to get the best reaction from an audience. It’s gorgeous, gory and an absolute ball from start to finish.

1. Interstellar – As much as I hate to sound like a stuck record, there’s really no competition here: Nolan has crafted a monumental sci-fi drama that brings the works of Lucas, Spielberg and Kubrick into a glorious melange of brains and heart.

The Worst 10 Films of 2014 (Descending order)

10. Divergent – Another dystopian teen franchise that feels dead on arrival. Key features are bland leads and a void-like abyss of humour and wit.

9. If I Stay – Chloe Grace Moretz bats her eyelashes and swishes her hair at the camera for 90 minutes while everyone around her sobs rather annoyingly.

8. A Million Ways to Die in the West – Witless, done-to-death comedy tropes fall flat while Charlize Theron and co. look on in horror. Go back to TV, Seth.

7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Heroes in a half-assed shell of a movie: ugly to look at, irritating to listen to, it’s a chore from start to finish.

6. Annabelle – A prequel no-one wanted that has a total lack of visual flair, good scares and interesting characters, making it either painful to sit through or bliss to sleep through.

5. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones – Painfully slow, not scary in the slightest, and all over the place. Paramount, please stop funding these; you’re only making it worse.

4. Devil’s Due – Vomit-inducing garbage to which the label ‘horror’ only applies once you’ve seen the box-office takings.

3. Transformers: Age of Extinction – Michael Bay continues in his quest to burn the nostalgia of the 80’s to the ground and modern action cinema along with it.

2. Tarzan – Childhood-destroying rubbish that looks like the Postman Pat movie trying to mate with the corpse of Avatar.

1. The Other Woman – A handbag full of sick.

‘Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones’ is awful; there are no two ways about it. It is the fifth instalment in a franchise that begun as a tiny, horror film festival favourite and is now past even the death throe stage. We are now at the point where each new sequel has the exact same premise at the previous one: a fairly average person (in this case a teenager and his best friend) starts waving a camera around in a fairly innocuous fashion and notice creepy events (an odd symbol on the boy’s arm, a murder in the house next door) or strange movements around them when re-watching the footage. The events become more and more frequent and disturbing, leading to some kind of climax involving horrific discoveries or acts and a sudden ending designed to be a cliff-hanger for the next film.

The problems with this instalment far outweigh those of previous outings: the lead(s) are incessantly annoying, unlikeable and loud in that kind of frat-boy, laddy teenage stereotype. The supposed scares range from ridiculous to simply laugh out loud funny (I won’t spoil it, but all I’ll say is ‘Chihuahua’…you’ll know it when you see it). I jumped once, which for a ‘horror’ film with elements that – if executed well – could be potentially scary is just depressing. It’s not even the case that the film-makers are trying to make a horror movie anymore; they just cottoned on to the fact that the name itself will attract an audience regardless of the quality of the film and will make a shed-load of money.

The found footage element ran out of steam three films ago so is now just another unwelcome addition to an already tiresome film. It looks like the sort of thing a couple of ‘lads’ might make as a cheap gag video and put on YouTube, complete with poor special effects, ‘scary’ scenes that don’t scare and pointless two scenes of female nudity/partial nudity that only exist to attract a male audience…or at least I think there were two, by the time the second one came around I was irritated and exasperated, silently screaming for something interesting or scary to happen before I went mad with boredom. 

Towards the end, the film tries to make some connection with the original in a similar fashion to 2013’s ‘Insidious Chapter 2’, but falls completely apart, leaving me confused for about five seconds before I realised that I just didn’t care. The characters are so boring, the set pieces are so completely nonsensical and rushed in favour of jump-scare after jump-scare, the story has utterly lost any sense of narrative cohesion, especially in the last act, and it all piles up into one great big stinker of a film. I would make the ‘Parasnoremal’ joke but it’s already been done to death and to be quite honest, I never want to talk about this ‘film’ again if I can help it. I feel genuinely guilty for contributing to its box office takings.

1 Star