georgewilliamnoble

Oh how sorry I am that I missed this Hammer gem back in the day. I did see One Million Years BC and She when they first came to my local movie house in the mid-sixties. What was not to like as a young lad just finding out about the opposite sex and discovering Hammer films as a brand. I have been a Hammer fan ever since, on low budgets, Hammer films entertained then and still do. Seven decades later, a Hammer movie like Prehistoric Women might not thrill like it did back then when times were a-changing. But, looking back through the decades, I would rather watch a hundred Hammer fantasy movies than any pretentious, serious, arty, groovy epic from that era of which there were a great many. This movie delights simply because it is cheap and penny dreadful and absurd, but the eye candy cannot be refused.

Only yesterday, this extremely long snorefest was voted best picture for 2025 by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, the fabled Oscar for the best of the best. For years now, the Oscar has been going to ever more obscure and largely uncommercial art house pictures, usually meaning that if it is boring it must be art. The latest wildly overrated best picture winner, Anora runs for a grindingly dull 139 minutes, at around 90 minutes, I could feel my interest wane, and the eventual non-ending ending yet another recent film which does not come to any point simply closes with a black screen fade, this being cinema as art you see nothingless would do. This Oscar winner hides little in its neo pornographic in in-your-face excess and holds the tone over and over and over again. There is humour here, at least I assume some of the over-the-top elements of sex, drugs, and limitless indulgent behavior, is meant to be satire. With such screen time given to repellent characters, none of whom seem to have any redeeming features, the movie simply did not interest, much less entertain. Hollywood is in a mire, we have all known this for years, as long-term movie fans have known this for years.

Where has all the film making talent gone?

And the taste of the Oscar voters' long dubious has fallen off a cliff with this choice.

I am not calling for mindless entertainment, but Hollywood has simply forgotten about how to entertain. This art has been lost. I paid good money to see this film in a cinema, and films as graphic and ugly as this will not bring back the patrons, most of whom will give this dire picture a click to something brighter elsewhere on a streamer. I cannot see Anora lasting long in the memory.

This must give Christmas Turkey a new meaning who ever thought this gastly horrible reimagining of the Agatha Christie masterpiece was a good idea as a Christmas evening treat must of been brought up only on humbug for this movie was a travesty not only of Agatha Christies much loved book but also distroys the memory of 20 years of hughly enjoyable TV entertainment in which David Suchet made Poirot his own. Here this reinvention is simply a horrible person it was all I could do to keep the TV set on to watch out this Christmas Special edition and I found myself seething at what this production had done to one of the very best TV shows of all time. The worst of the series by a epic mile and I just fear I may never be able to watch Suchet as Poirot ever again.