Features

What is it about sports films that can turn even the hardest of men into blubbering idiots? Tragic tales of unspeakable hardship or unrequited love will pass by without so much as a whimper.

But show them a story of how a crappy team somehow rises from the ashes to become the best in the league and it won’t be long before they’re crying like newborn babies. Maybe it’s something in the male genes. Crying and sport seem to go hand in hand.

Films about sport can have the same reaction. OK, so they don’t replace the thrill of scoring a late goal, hitting a match-winning home run or scoring the touchdown that wins your team the Super Bowl, but they come close – the good ones that is.

Sure, some sports films can make you cry without being any good at all. The Fan made us want to weep for Robert De Niro’s career, for example. However, sometimes directors get it right; sometimes they capture why sport is such a global obsession.

Here are Hecklerspray’s perfect 10…

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Why are we so ashamed of the Eighties? Don’t believe us? OK, why then do we always associate it with greed and excess? Why do we laugh at the fashion mistakes? Why do we find ourselves hiding the 80s tracks we’ve downloaded into our iPods?

It’s true. In the Decades family, the 1980s is like the brash middle brother no one talks to at functions because he’s obsessed with money, carries a phone the size of a house brick and has a really bad perm. Well, hecklerspray is not standing for it any more. We’re loud and proud. We are children of the Eighties and we’re not ashamed to say it.

And to prove it wasn’t all New Romantics, Rubik’s Cubes and yuppies, we’ve compiled 14 reasons why the 1980s kicked ass.

Now, we could go on for hours about the great music and movies of the period, but we’re going to focus purely on the lovely ladies of the era. And, if you can forgive the big hair and shoulder pads, it really was a golden one.

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Welcome one and all to Movies From Beyond where we discuss all things a little edgy you might find on DVD and brand new shiny high definition Blu-Ray.

We love nothing more than watching forgotten gems, B-movies and blood & guts cult classics as well as the occasional new release that quenches our collective thirst for the occult, like the newly released Halloween as remade by Rob Zombie. Also this week: Death Wish…

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The top and the bottom.

Folded:

• The sun (hello old friend)

• Firing two off The Apprentice (and righty so, though if Alan could hurry up and sack that fat dump truck bird who bitches about everybody that would be fine too)

• Pjanoo by Pryda (dance like it’s 1992)

• Mila Kunis (fugly as Meg in Family Guy, lightening bolt stunning as Rachel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall)

• Iron Man (what were we expecting? Something better? Perhaps, but it still pushes most of the right buttons until Indy)

Creased:

• Cadbury’s ‘Trucks’ ad (they look like toys, but they’re actually real vehicles – quick, give us some chocolate now!!!)

• Face cake (apparently popular in America. Here we just call it cake)

• Estelle dancing (watch the video with Kanye West, because she really can’t)

• Raiders of the Lost Ark on BBC1 last week in pan & scan (not even some tiny black bars? It’s not like we don’t all own big TVs now anyway)

• “Spider Pig, Spider Pig, does whatever a Spider Pig does” (eight months on and it still isn’t funny)

If ever you needed convincing how much movies do not reflect real life look no further than cop movies. We love films about the police – we think they’re great!

If we were to believe Hollywood, we’d think cops are tough, wise-cracking, crazy bastards who would risk life and pension just to keep the streets safe from filthy criminals. If we were to believe Hollywood, we’d think cops are actually cool people. If we were to believe Hollywood, we would have faith in them to get the job done.

But this is not Hollywood, dammit! And cops are far from cool people who get the job done. In fact, in hecklerspray’s limited experience of dealing with the police, we generally find them obnoxious, pedantic, donut-munching, lazy, fat, pompous, pain-in-the arse, stupid, docile, boring motherfuckers. And that’s just the good ones.

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Welcome again to Movies From Beyond, the weekly jumble sale of forgotten B-movie classics, blood-stained horror mayhem and the just plain odd.

This week we have been delving back to the 80s again with a couple of real classics. However, it is worth bringing your attention to some of the bargains we have seen in the high street that no self-respecting gorehound should be without - get yourself out and pick up the seminal Tim Burton / Michael Keaton classic Beetlejuice as well as the darkly funny The Man With Two Brains starring Steve Martin when he used to be funny, and don’t miss the surprisingly not terrible House Of Wax remake, all of which are under a fiver and ideal for a rainy bank holiday weekend.

We are very excited about the upcoming release of Lost Boys: The Tribe coming straight to DVD later this year and so decided to check out the original all the back from 1987 this week, along with Day Of The Dead…

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We like this, we don’t like that.

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• The return of The Music (but where have they been?)

• The Gourmet Chocolate Pizza Company (they make tasty chocolate pizzas for those who already have beef ice cream and orange flavoured brie)

• Planet of the Apes DVD collection for £10 at HMV (£10 would be worth it for one of the films)

• Stella Artois’ Pass It On advert (For the music really, a beautiful original composed score by Jim Copperthwaite)

• Finally playing Grand Theft Auto IV (it’s not much of a departure from the previous games, but is that a bad thing? It is not)

Creased:

• Forgetting Sarah Marshall (not as awful as shutting your fingers in a car door, but nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is)

• Leica M8 camera - £3000 (for a still camera’s body? We wouldn’t pay that for Scarlett Johansson’s body)

• Teen-aimed comedy (there sure is a lot of it on TV at the moment. Teenagers should be taking paracetamols and shoplifting in H&M, not wasting time in front of the box. Save that for the rest of us)

• Tesco no longer stopped selling Robinson’s Grape and Melon High Juice (so, we riot…)

• Scarlett Johansson’s singing (this she isn’t good at. Body stuff, fine. Singing, no)

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

In WW II German submarines were sinking lots of allied ships - boat loads, if you will. It was because the warships were slow and clunky. The U-boats slipped in underwater, fired some torpedoes - sinking almost whatever they wanted. The US government needed a way to avoid all this. A common man might think a better rudder, or boat-side rocket boosters might work.

The US, however, would prefer to try bending light to cause invisibility. According to some - they succeeded.

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In our normal humdrum lives we abhor thieves and bank robbers, but a quick glance at the list of films below tells quite a different story.

Indeed, some of the movies mentioned would not be out of place on most people’s all-time top 10 films, never mind heist films. So what is it that makes us so fascinated by them? Is it that we wish we had the balls to do it ourselves? Most of the criminals involved get some kind of comeuppance and usually we’re desperate to get out of banks rather than the other way around. So it is because they look cool while doing it?

But they are not all cool. Look at Al Pacino’s hapless bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon. So what is it? Well, we don’t know. What do you mean you want answers? We’re an entertainment site for God’s sake, not Sigmund Freud! Actually, it’s probably the guns. That and the fact there are so many of them they were bound to get a few right.

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Why do we love robots so much?

Well, we all love machines, right? Especially the ones which make our lives easier. Let’s face it, most of us can’t be separated from our iPods, laptops and iPhones these days. But how about when they turn against us? The time when our TV and cinema screens were full of clunky dustbins and oversized toasters just happy to help has long gone.

Now robots look more like supermodels and want to wipe us out. In fact, some of them are more hard-on than hard disc. Well, that’s progress for you. But we still love them, right? Despite the fact they want to kill us.

Anyway, hecklerspray has decided to come up with the 20 models from TV and cinema that are a cut above. Enjoy!

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Welcome to Movies From Beyond and this week we are very excited. Not only has Mario Kart finally come out on the Nintendo Wii but one of the best recent vampire movies, 30 Days Of Night has just been released on Blu-Ray.

It is not often that we talk about new releases but this is well worth a mention, starring Josh Hartnett (Sin City) and produced by Mr. Evil Dead Sam Raimi, this is a really good adaptation of a graphic novel set in Alaska where they actually have a month of darkness - and who loves darkness more than vampires? No-one, that’s who, and these ones aren’t fruity crushed-velvet cloak-wearing ones. Remember what 28 Days Later did for zombies? Well this does it for vamps, making them super fast and strong as you like.

There are some pretty gut-wrenching scenes of violence and blood-play as well as a high level of blood and guts which always gets our vote.

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Just us sharing a few things we like and a few things we don’t.

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• Bender’s back in Bender’s Big Score (he’s funny, that Bender, with all his sexism and alcohol jokes. He’s a robot from Futurama)

• Grand Theft Auto IV next week (if you have anything more powerful than a Megadrive you’ll be buying this. Or you will never have anything to add to a conversation ever again)

• In Bruges (hadn’t heard the phrase ‘gay beer’ for ages. We’ll be using it all the time again now)

• Doc Hollywood (saw this on TV again a couple of weeks ago. It’s obviously shit, but the great Michael J.Fox is still a mini-marvel)

• Cities of Gold DVD boxset (finally a cartoon as good as you remember. Ready at the back “…Maybe we will find, Cities of Gold”.

Creased:

• Jamie Oliver’s Sainsbury’s ads – the BBQ one in particular (we know they’re all going to be actors anyway, but at least make an effort to get people we won’t recognise from The Bill or Doctor Who)

• The screechy twins on Dirty Sexy Money (no, the creepy twins. We meant creepy)

• Muppet t-shirts at Topman (so, you go into a bar and there’s another guy in there with a ‘Vote Ernie’ one on. You’re lovers)

• That bit in the oil refinery in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (when did terrorists become so sneaky and good at hiding behind transit vans? It used to be so much easier to kill people)

• Whoever cancelled Arrested Development (never mind the upcoming movie, we want another series. You know who you are, you prat. Hope you’ve got severe breathing difficulties or scabies or something)