(Beyond Entertainment)

Like a moronic pub conversation with a travel budget.

You’re all aware of Nick Frost right? He was the fat and dumb one in the brilliant Shaun Of The Dead. Alternately, he was also the fat and dumb one in the genius Hot Fuzz. You may see a pattern forming here, and it’s one that continues with Danger! 50,000 Volts. The basic premise is that Frost takes the audience through numerous survival situations and advises them on the best path to ensure further living. Pitched somewhere halfway between being comedic and educational (or at the very least, informative), the show fails to achieve either objective, instead becoming quickly unlikeable, as do so many British comedies aimed at the lowest common denominator. Without the laugh track or xenophobic or homophobic jokes of course, but this DVD only contains the first series, so who knows how badly this could spiral out of control? The DVD extras are equally lackluster, with the audio commentary containing nervous giggles and non sequiturs in between incomprehensible mutterings. In both movies mentioned above, Frost’s characters possess the oafish charm of the blissfully ignorant, brimming with fart, mother and dick jokes that generally offset Simon Pegg’s tightly wound neurosis. Leave him to his own devices, however, and his dialogue isn’t snappy enough to be clever and not intelligent enough to be helpful. Wanna know how to escape a bar fight with a bat-wielding maniac? You either pull a silly face or try to disarm the assailant to impress chicks. Despite Frost’s best efforts, I don’t think he’ll be the spokesperson for government safety initiatives any time soon.

**½

MITCH ALEXANDER

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(Sony BMG)

Dave Grohl and merry crew captured at their beaming peak

In his band’s new DVD Live At Wembley Stadium, Dave Grohl often resembles an athlete in an ‘80s movie who suddenly ‘overcomes the odds’ and enjoys a euphoric, slow motion victory. He even weeps in ecstatic disbelief at the end of the performance, overcome by his band’s rise into stadium rock status. Live At Wembley Stadium is a document of the Foo Fighters throwing off the post-grunge shackles – tellingly, nothing from the first album is played (though the one concession to the old days comes in the form of Grohl’s Nirvana B-side Marigold). The film showcases the Foo Fighters displaying their sleek FM rock chops, as radio hit after radio hit is performed with sweaty abandon. Taylor Hawkins resembles a surfer dude version of manic Muppets drummer Animal, and Grohl is a black t-shirted beardy rocker, hollering at the crowd to sing along and stalking up and down a U2-style catwalk, as air punch standards The Pretender, Times Like These, Learn To Fly and Monkey Wrench are unleashed on an adoring audience. It even has the ‘sensitive’ acoustic bit in the middle, which is not without highlights, such as My Hero reimagined as a terrace pop anthem, somewhere between Elton John and Tears For Fears. Childhood heroes Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones are on board for a spirited Ramble On and, best of all, a Hawkins-sung barnstorm through Rock And Roll. All in all, this is a particularly potent and vivid portrait of a band visibly relishing the heights of success.

****

MATT THROWER

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(Madman)

No ‘tastes like chicken’ jokes please

The story of the football team who resorted to desperate means of survival after crashing in the Andes in the early ‘70s is one of the great tales of human endurance, stacking up easily beside James Scott’s 1991 fight against the odds in the Himalayas, or Stuart Diver in Thredbo. But for the first time since the airlift that brought the last living souls out of the Chilean Andes, a documentary has been made that conclusively investigates the drastic measures taken by these young men to save themselves.

The rugby team – made up of young medical students – along with some of their family and support staff, were only meant to have a short flight from Uruguay to Chile; but a drastic change in weather slammed the plane into the Andes mountain range. After shaking off the shock and dragging the dead away from the plane, the more than two dozen survivors settled back to wait for their rescue. As conditions worsened, and their meagre food rations dwindled, the survivors despaired at the news that the rescue was being abandoned.

The medical students eventually realised that their only hope lay in helping themselves to the flesh frozen on the corpses buried in the snow not far from the plane; while at home, some of their families fought for the rescue efforts to be renewed.

Incredibly, the survivors lasted more than two months in astonishing adversity. Arijon’s access to the men, along with his compassionate treatment of the subject, make this a compelling and affecting story.

*****

TIM MILFULL

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(Big Sky Video/Beyond)

Savage ferret fantasy

The Beastmaster follows the generic fantasy movie plot – the son of a king whose throne has been stolen comes back for revenge, rescuing a girl and forming a small army of buddies along the way – with a single twist. Dar (Marc Singer), the hero, can talk to animals. He does everything your typical fantasy hero does, but he does it with a panther, an eagle and a couple of cute ferret-looking things by his side. Unlike certain other movies of its type, The Beastmaster was at least put together professionally. It’s well-shot and dramatic, some of the stunts are impressive and they’ve built a convincing little world out in the Californian desert where it was shot. Rip Torn, fondly remembered as Artie from The Larry Sanders Show, is amusing as an evil high priest with a ludicrous fake nose and the other actors are competent. It may be clichéd and lazy, casually forgetting characters when they stop being important – there’s a scene where our heroes rescue a group of slaves, all of whom bar the love interest mysteriously vanish between shots because they’ve become redundant – but it’s put together well enough to be watchable. Plus, it has Rip Torn being attacked by a ferret.

**½

JODY MACGREGOR

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(Big Sky Video/Beyond)

As bad as reading The Wheel Of Time in one sitting

After the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films everyone expected a glut of fantasy movies that never quite happened. Instead we just got loads more epics. Maybe the film-makers were still doing penance for the fantasy movies of the ’80s, which produced only a handful of decent films (The Princess Bride, most notably) and a whole lot of rubbish. The Sword And The Sorcerer is a perfect example of the latter, unfortunately. The predictable and paper-thin plot has Talon (Lee Horsley), the son of a murdered king, returning for revenge against his family’s killer, the evil Cromwell (Richard Lynch). Many of the characters have pseudo-historical names to clue you in on their one-note personalities; along with Cromwell there’s the good King Richard and the Machiavellian double-dealer Machelli. Talon himself is a creepy hero who extorts sex out of a princess (Kathleen Beller) in return for joining her rebellion. He leers and swaggers his way through scenes greasily, punching legions of comically inept guards even when carrying a sword because the budget doesn’t cover more than a handful of duels. The thin budget also means we only see battlefields after the battles, the special effects are laughable and the costumes are barely there (especially the women’s). Between the cheap effects and the profusion of neckbeards and porn moustaches among the cast there’s enough to laugh at on bad movie night, but only if you’re patient.

*

JODY MACGREGOR

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(Adult Swim/Madman)

Better than whichever prequel you liked the least

Robot Chicken is the TV show where Oz from Buffy and his friends create comedy sketches using their toy collections; Star Wars is the cultural phenomenon that needs no explanation. Bringing them together for a half-hour special makes a kind of sense – Star Wars is exactly the kind of geeky subject Robot Chicken and its fans simultaneously love and hate, perfect for both recreating and parodying. The recreations are madly meticulous and even though done with action figures the details still look surprisingly like the originals. These are the funniest sketches, showing what happened to a character who gets his arm cut off by a lightsaber before he stumbled into the plot or the guy who has to clean up the bodies after Jedis fight. Although skits like these and the parody of Jar-Jar Binks are funny a lot of the rest is self-indulgent – the musical finale presenting The Empire Strikes Back On Ice in particular – and just as much will be impenetrable to those who’ve seen the movies but aren’t intimately familiar with every detail of all things Star Wars. The multiple sets of commentaries with everyone involved, right down to George Lucas’s kids, are likewise only there for the hardcore nerds. Watching a toy George W. Bush discover he’s a Jedi and engage Abraham Lincoln in a lightsaber battle is pretty damn hilarious all the same.

***     

JODY MACGREGOR

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