The second part of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy – after Totally F***ed Up and before Nowhere – The Doom Generation holds a special place as one of the few films that truly helps define mid-90s indie cinema. It’s a movie that feeds off Generation X nihilism and the anger of post-punk youth to create a road trip film that feels both meaningful and pointless at the same time.

Amy (Rose McGowan) and her slightly dim boyfriend Jordan (James Duval) are out one night when their paths cross that of drifter Xavier (Johnathan Schaech). While Amy at first wants nothing to do with him, a strange bond develops after Xavier saves her life by literally shooting a gun-toting shop owner’s head off. The trio end up heading off on a trip together, with Xavier having an unnerving tendency to kill people, and Amy being constantly mistaken for the love of peoples’ lives, with violent results.

Things get ever stranger and soon Xavier is having sex with Amy, but with Jordan’s knowledge and tacit approval. And why does everything cost $6.66?

As with several other of Gregg Araki’s films, The Doom Generation lives on the edge between meandering pointlessness and surreal significance. With plenty of sex and extreme violence, one moment it seems like it’s going nowhere, before adding a neat little satirical point. For example, just as OTT blood, guts and gore reaches the point of becoming tedious, the film stops for a few minutes so the characters can mourn the death of a random dog, highlighting the daftness of how desensitised we can get to violence against humans but animals will get us every time.

Many have compared it to Natural Born Killers, but while Oliver Stone’s movie has always struck me as rather contrived, The Doom Generation has a far better sense of humour and a stronger authenticity to the grunge generation. It’s very rough around the edges, but it works. Indeed, it’s worth a look just for Amy’s incredible use of profanity, who manages to turn cursing into an art form.

Araki is well known for his queer sensibility, but The Doom Generation is billed as his ‘heterosexual movie’, although as he acknowledges in the new interview on the disc, that’s a bit of a misnomer. Although there’s no actual gay content, the sexual tension between Jordan and Xavier is deliberate and palpable, with the only question being whether Jordan is oblivious to it or not. It’s not a coincidence either that the dark and wince-inducing ending comes just as the duo are about to act on their attraction.

Overall Verdict: A strange movie that puts post-punk grunge nihilism on screen, with a dark sense of humour as well as plenty of sex and violence.

Special Features:
Interview with Director Gregg Araki
Audio Commentary

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

When Romantics Anonymous opened with a scene featuring lead character Angelique (Isabelle Carre) falling into a dead faint at the eponymous support group for the overly quixotic, I almost switched the DVD off. It wasn’t because there was anything wrong with this particular sequence, but I wasn’t sure I could physically take yet another film where a quirky yet loveable misfit manages to find an equally out of place love interest to complement them. It seems to be the plot for every other indie or foreign movie out there at the moment, and to be frank, I didn’t think I could take another one!

However I had to write a review and so I persevered, and I’m glad I did.

Angelique is a reserved young woman who largely lives inside her own head and has an absolute passion for chocolate. While she’s technically a renowned chocolate maker, the fact she falls to bits whenever she’s challenged means she hides this from all around her. When the seller she works with dies, she thinks her secret chocolate making life is over, and so she goes out and becomes a salesperson for a confectionary firm that’s on the edge of bankruptcy.

Angelique comes to realise that if she can get past her fear of being challenged, her consummate chocolate making skill could save the business. There’s also a chance of romance with the factory owner (Benoit Poelvoorde) – if he can get over his own quirks, that is.

With shades of Chocolat and Amelie, there’s nothing desperately original about Romantics Anonymous, but what it does it does well, with plenty of charm and sweetness. From early on it’s clear where the film is going and it sets out its simple agenda to put a smile on your face. There’s no grand social statements, portentous subplots or anything that might get in the way of letting the audience have a heart-warming time.

One of the main reasons I was having quirky character fatigue is that in order to keep people feeling like the small-scale film world hasn’t run out of ideas, they keep making the characters increasingly extreme, until they stop feeling real and the whole thing feels contrived and calculated. However here the quirkiness is very human and while it’s difficult not to think Angelique is a tad contradictory at times, it’s easy to empathise with her shyness and fears.

It’s not a coincidence this film is about chocolate, something that’s purely there to make you a bit happier and which does it without too much fuss.

Overall Verdict: It may be yet another small-scale film about misfit characters finding love, Romantics Anonymous has enough charm and heart to make it succeed.

Special Features:
None

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Not many movies open with a man standing in a hotel car park in the pouring rain, absolutely butt naked. However the opening shots of Acts Of Godfrey are a hint right from the beginning that this isn’t the sort of movie that’s going to do things by the book.

However what really marks it out isn’t its penchant for car park nudity but that the whole thing is written and performed in rhyming couplets. Indeed you get the impression that it was the chance to make a film in modern verse that attracted the likes of Simon Callow, Harry Enfield, Celia Imrie and Doon Mackichan.

The plot sees a man called Vic (Iain Robertson) heading to a hotel for a course that’s supposedly going to help him ‘Win! Only Win!’, as his boss feels his moral compass is standing in the way of making profits. Once there he meets up with a varied group of characters, ranging from a couple of underworld heavies to a middle-aged confidence man (Harry Enfiels). Also at the hotel is Simon Callow as Godfrey, a god/fate figure who decides to step in and push the characters in particular directions. Most notably he wants the upright and moral Vic to get together with the unprincipled and predatory Mary (Mifanwy Waring).

Making a movie in rhyming couplets is a fascinating idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t completely work. A lot of it is admittedly clever, but in order to get things to rhyme it has a tendency towards tortuous sentences and making people say unnecessary things. Many have suggested Acts Of Godfrey is like modern day Shakespeare, but the script could perhaps have done with paying a little more attention to the bard, who didn’t feel the need to constantly rhyme and realised that the verse should help give the story rhythm without overpowering it. While Acts Of Godfrey’s verse works extremely well about 80% of the time, because it’s a rather contrived form, when a rhyme is ugly or a sentence twisted, it has a tendency to overwhelm everything else.

However with a fun plot, lots of neat little vignettes looking into the background of the characters and a visual style that’s bright and bold, Acts Of Godfrey is generally quite entertaining. It’s certainly unusual and even the things that don’t quite work get an A for effort. That said, it’s slightly difficult to escape the sense that this is as much a calling card for first time writer/director Johnny Daukes as an enjoyable film in its own right. He certainly shows that he’s a talent to look out for but as with the rhyming couplets, there are moments where his attempts to show off some filmic skill and an unusual take on its subject overpower the movie. There’s also a slight tendency towards pessimism for its own sake, where ultimately everyone and everything is flawed and corrupt, including God.

The performances are good though, with Harry Enfield having great fun as a villainous cad and Iain Robertson providing a great central core to the film as the down-to-Earth Vic, around whose simple attempts to be a decent person swirl the film’s more outlandish characters. And having Simon Callow as God is an extremely smart idea, as he’s one of the few people who can talk in rhyming verse while sound the same as when he’s just talking completely naturally.

Overall Verdict: Acts Of Godfrey is a film that ultimately succeeds as much as it fails – often simultaneously. For example the rhyming couplets are both a great strength and an occasional Achilles heel, but it’s still fun and entertaining, and a fascinating debut for a filmmaker who could go on to great things.

Special Features:
‘The Making Of Acts Of Godfrey’ Featurette
Cast Interviews

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

If you read a lot of the reviews of Dream House on its cinema release, you might be expecting the film to be an absolute stinker. Pretty much disowned by its cast and director, and pilloried by the critics, the film’s not had a lot of luck. However, while it’s certainly not a great thriller, it’s a lot better than you might expect.

Daniel Craig plays Will Atenton, who moves into a seemingly idyllic small-town home with his wife (Rachel Weisz) and two daughters. However their apparently perfect new life begins to fracture when they discover their house was the site of a family massacre five years before. Teens hold séances in the basement and there are rumours that the killer may have returned. And then there’s the next door neighbour, Ann (Naomi Watts), who appears to know more than she’s letting on to.

Many of the criticisms levelled at Dream House have validity to them, not least that it would have been better if the trailer hadn’t revealed a couple of the movie’s key twists. Much of the plot is also pretty much implausible and some of the writing is overly convoluted and murky – indeed there are simple ways it could have made more sense but that it doesn’t bother with for some reason. However some of the criticism seems to be down to the film not living up to what people thought it should be, rather than what it is. For example, the twist the trailer gives away isn’t from right at the end of the film, but about a third of the way through, as this isn’t really a movie about the twists and turns and more about how the characters deal with these problems.

It doesn’t 100% work, as there are too many loose ends and each major plot turn is too obvious. Even if you haven’t seen the aforementioned twist in the trailer, you’ll probably have worked it out before the reveal, and the way it’s structured means that if you’re aware of the grammar of thrillers, you’ll know pretty much every step what’s going to happen and to whome by the time we get to the end. It may be about the characters, but signposting everything so clumsily doesn’t help.

What keeps it above water are the performances and the fact that underneath the convoluted surface, it actually has a few interesting ideas. You can see what attracted the likes of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz to the movie, even if the results aren’t exactly what they were planning. While Watts is rather wasted, Craig and Weisz do a good job playing with the subtleties of their characters, which sadly get a bit lost under the OTT storyline.

The film has more than a whiff of studio interference about it, which is likely why six-time Oscar nominated director Jim Sheridan pretty much disowned it. Many had wondered why the director of My Left Foot and In America went for a genre thriller in the first place, but it’s tough to know whether the film’s flaws can be levelled at him, or if some heavy studio re-editing has resulted in a film that’s pared down to the bare bones in the hope speed will help the audience ignore the movie’s problems.

Dream House is certainly not as bad as it’s been billed and as a thriller a lot of it is actually quite fun. It may be utterly unbelievable and silly, but thanks to Craig and Weisz, it’s very watchable. Look at it as a thriller about the characters and not the twists and it’s a decent 90 minutes.

Overall Verdict: Bashed far more than it deserves, Dream House is flawed and silly, but still worth a look, even if only for Craig and Weisz.

Special Features:
Making Of Featurette

Reviewer: Tim Isaac