Saturday 28 June 2014

Freeview films of the day : saturday 28th of June

Hard Candy (2005 99min.) [BBC2 1.30am sunday]

Psychological thriller starring Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page. A 32-year-old paedophile meets up with the 14-year-old girl he's been grooming on the internet and discovers that she has a secret agenda.

Before the wonderful Juno (2007) Ellen Page starred in this taut little two-hander with the versatile but always engaging Patrick Wilson.

Director David Slade has a background in low-budget horror films and he brings that sense of the gritty and realistic to this vigilante Little Red Riding Hood story of a meeting between a teenage girl and an older man that starts off as one thing and quickly develops into something else. Page is spectacularly good as the Lolita from hell and Slade keeps the action shifting along at a breakneck pace.


May be a little too intense for those of a sensitive nature and male viewers will feel a specific discomfort during one especially visceral scene.


Don't look Now (1973 105min.) [Film4 1.45am sunday &+1]
Film of the day

Nicolas Roeg's supernatural thriller, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's short story, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Following the tragic drowning of their young daughter, John and Laura Baxter go to Venice - he to work, she to recuperate. There they meet two sisters, one of whom claims to be able to communicate with the dead child. Caught up in the bizarre events that follow, the Baxters are drawn inexorably toward a mysterious and forbidding fate.

Nicolas Roeg's near-masterpiece ; one of the five hundred best films ever made.


The Troll Hunter (2010 99min.) [Film4 11.40pm &+1]

Horror thriller starring Otto Jespersen. Present-day Norway: a student film crew sets out to investigate who's responsible for a series of bear killings. But when they track down Hans, the grizzled loner who they believe to be the culprit, they discover he's actually hunting creatures that belong in the realm of local folklore.

Oh! How much fun is this film? – the whole thing is predicated on the idea that trolls are real and that they aren’t small grumpy types who live under bridges but enormous tree pulling-up monsters that roam the forests inside the Arctic circle.

The Norweigan government is involved in an enormous cover-up in order to prevent the world discovering the exsistence of these beats and employ a squad of troll hunters to keep them from coming into contact with the population.

Hans the Troll Hunter is a wonderfully downbeat character, the Scooby Gang he falls in with are perfectly written and the CGI monsters are very well realised.

Terrific, daft, thrilling and funny.

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