Prom Night

Prom Night is a remake of, well, Prom Night, a post-Halloween and pre-Halloween 2 Jamie Lee Curtis shocker featuring sundry deaths at the hands of an axe-wielding maniac. During a school prom. You’ve probably seen it; not in reality, but just then, in your mind’s eye. How difficult can it be to imagine?

In the flesh, as you’d expect, it’s a pretty poor film and I was more than a little surprised that it was slated to get the remake treatment. But then, everything is managing the, ahem, ‘re-imagining’ treatment these days.

On the plus side it’s certainly quite polished, and competently filmed. There are no boom shots in frame, for one thing, so it scores over The Happening for that, at least; the actors presumably have remembered all their lines in the right order; and no-one bumps into the scenery unless scripted to. Beyond that it’s really quite difficult to work out why they bothered.

Admittedly, it allows us to view a taste of Brittany Snow’s considerable talent (although that remains sadly corseted at all times):

Snow is the teen scream queen who’s being pursued by the local nut job, who managed to hold it together, despite his obvious psychological disadvantages, long enough to escape from the local high security mental facility. He then eludes police surveillance for three days and cleverly infiltrates the swanky hotel where Brittany and her pals are having their, yes, their prom night. Said loony has been obsessed with the young lass for years (he used to be her science teacher) and really that’s more than enough plot from me. Actually, wait up, that is the plot.

Despite being stonkingly chicken oriental, our killer is remarkably neat and tidy, for the murders are the most bloodless, sanitised offings you could hope for. A bit like that controversial Tracey Beaker episode where Roxy slices up Duke and Elaine the Pain with the artroom spatula; some foot-wobbling muscle spasm, but no claret. You know the thing. Very pre-watershed. This is almost 12 certificate material, to be fair, and other than one extremely mild reference to a bout of teenage jiggy-jiggy, there is nothing here that wouldn’t stop it from becoming the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association’s favourite teenagers in peril cautionary tale.

An ironic buddy act between The Wire’s Stringer Bell and Ziggy Sobotka as two frantic and not really very good cops is the only distraction of note, and just about kept me interested until the predictable finale.

But there is a serious side to all this. Prom Night performed fairly solidly at the US box office and for a couple of weeks pissed all over opposition like Keanu Reeves’s Street Kings and the Jodie Foster vehicle Nim’s Island. While good returns continue, who knows when the remake treadmill will falter. Clearly it has some way to go before it fizzles out. In fact, after Rob Zombie’s pointless Halloween remake last year we’ve still got new versions of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left, The Birds, Near Dark and Hellraiser to look forward to. Well, I say ‘look forward’.

But is it what we want? Is it what we deserve?

, for Snow’s aesthetic appeal and the Wire alumni

The Incredible Hulk

I only saw brief sections of Ang Lee’s mostly-derided Hulk, and although I wouldn’t be able to write most of what I thought about it up into a review of any great length, it seemed…well…slow. I guess you have to take your hat off to someone trying to do something different in the Super Hero market, but hey, bad choice fella. Big green monsters mixed in with feelings and character? It was never gong to be loved, was it?

Just a few short years later, and we have a new interpretation of the Stan Lee penned comic book phenomenon, and this time it’s very specifically called The Incredible Hulk, because this movie is taking us back to basics. Heck, it even has Lee in it for a few seconds.

I was trying, believe me, to go into this with an open mind. Having been pleasantly impressed by Nolan’s reworking of the Batman franchise, it seemed possible that something similar might, with a bit of luck, happen here. Think again. This hope is dashed immediately the Marvel Studios ident fades to black. There is no pre-credit sequence, because a mountain of back story is thrown at the audience over the opening titles. Drowning in a laughably portentous orchestral anthem, Bruce Banner’s scientific experiments into gamma radiation, some shadowy militaristic involvement, disaster, poisoning, the taking on of super powers, escape and exile are all crammed into a minute of near-subliminally brief images and crazy pantomime acting that cleverly reduces your expectations for the next two hours to a comforting, fat, spongy, zero. But, OK, so Ang Lee this ain’t. Maybe it’ll just be a rollicking good adventure ride, a rollercoaster of fun and frolics?

Nah. Having set you down in your chair and told you this is going to be mindless fun, it then proceeds to deliver just that. Only, minus the fun part.

We rediscover Banner (Edward Norton, doing earnest and sincere and deep) sitting cross-legged and going ‘Omm’ a lot, doing that mystical self-control thing. Obviously, in realising that he’s hosting a 14ft embodiment of pure rage, that he expands to an anabolically enhanced hypertrophic size when his pulse gets above 200bpm, he’s decided that the most sensible place to pass his time would be one of Brazil’s infamous favelas, working in a sweat shop, and living in crowded, antagonistic conditions. But of course. I mean, let’s eschew some Tibetan mountainside hermit life, for goodness’ sake.

Anyhoo, the US Army find him and attempt to drop a team of mean Special Ops types in there, to open a can of whup-ass or similar, presumably, and bring the creature home. Seconded to this unit is Tim Roth, as lead meanie. Roth has a special place in Hollywood; his character is immediately unsurpassable in the evilness stakes. As he walks purposefully into the army base from which he’s about to lead the mission, we’re told his nationality is Russian/English. Now, come on! How nasty is that, exactly? The Tinsel Town stereotype-shortcut venn diagram of moody bastardness intersects at Russian and English, and Tim Roth stands solely in the middle. Good man! He is, we’re expected to believe, seconded via the Royal Marines, but it seems he’s allowed to wear US Army uniform (not really sure how that works), and, more importantly, and perhaps critically, he has the least amount of military bearing I have ever seen in a major character asked to play a soldier. Private Pyle crossed with Rodney Trotter would have filled the uniform with more menace. Roth just looks like a joke, and it’s at this point that the 12A cert really begins to bite. Perhaps if Roth had been able to really let his invective fly, I might have believed that he was a fighter (not a very principled fighter, obviously, more like one of those weasley little shits who carries a stanley and blames other people, but certainly he’d have come across a bit tougher). Here, he’s a slightly paunchy, drop-shouldered, greasy (long-)haired, pastey nothing. It’s a joke, and you become embarrassed for him. Not as much as you do for William Hurt, though, who has to do the white-haired cigar-chomping US General thing, and not swear. Hurt and Roth have both done really good work, and are two people I’ve always enjoyed watching, but this is a serious low point.

Not as much as it is for Norton, though, who seems determined to nail his once promising career firmly into the dirt. All the excitement and élan that carried him through Fight Club and American History X is gurgling away down the plug of each passing Red Dragon, or Italian Job, or Illusionist. It’s sad, and this may be the saddest point of all. Or, possibly, it’s disappearing up his arse, as it seems that Norton cheerfully rewrote chunks of the script each day on set, and also spent hours discussing his character’s life before the gamma experiments. “I don’t think,” he said, “that in great literature/films explaining the story’s roots means it comes in the beginning. Audiences know the story, so we’re dealing with it artfully.”

Christ.

The problem, though, that the film carries around with it from the start, and which burdens it beyond endurance, has nothing to do with the actors, although it is an issue concerning the main protagonist. The main difficulty is entirely due to the plain and simple unbelievability of the Hulk as an entity. Smartly shot in shadow for the first main stand-off, when the creature finally comes out into the light it’s, well, is rubbish too strong a word? The Hulk is simply too CGI-y; he just looks like a creature made on a PC, or just stepped out of a videogame. I understand that the cinematic Hulk and the franchised multi-platformed game Hulk, are built on the same model, and that would fit, because whereas the physical CGI-d stuff (crashing helicopters and spinning cars and broken buildings) all look solid and perfect, the real living thing may as well have a ripped “I’m a CGI construct” logo down the side of his ludicrously expandable kecks. It looks terrible. Not scary, not angry, not believable.

Sigh. The film lumbers predictably on - via an increasingly tiring series of nods to the old TV series - towards a mundane and too-loud showdown, which the Hulk wins and everyone goes home, trying not to look at all the busted up buildings dotted around New York City, and the remarkable lack of bodies (like the A Team, the body count is absurdly low). It is impossible to care for any of these people, and so we are left in a vacuum of zero development and involvement. At the end, going ‘Omm’ again, this time sensibly snuck away in the Canadian wilderness, Banner looks at the camera, smiles a smile and his eyes go green. Whoop-di-fucking-do. The screen goes black and you expect the credits, but wait…this movie finally has something good up its sleeve. Good on the Planet Cynical, I mean, obviously.

Hurt’s General, drinking himself silly in a bar somewhere, finds himself standing next to Robert Downey Jr, in full Tony Stark from Iron Man character mode. “I’m building a team,” he says. And then the credits. As an advert, it’s exceptional. 112 minutes of preamble, and then the killer punchline. Ladies and Gentlemen, you’ve been franchised.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Happening

My mate Nick has, for a couple of years now, been running a 6-weekly event called the Monster Night. It’s an entertaining, high concept evening where a bunch of pals watch three, mostly horror, movies that we haven’t seen before, or at least not for many years. The remit is simple. The very good need not be considered: here we want 1950s Japanese sci-fi (usually starring one American actor who may have had a speaking part in a film you’ve heard about); 1970s full-on Italian carnivals of gore; 1980s slasher movies that never had a cinematic release; crappy 1990s UK horror films that even Xtro would look down on with justified contempt. This is a celebration of all that’s not even good enough to be mediocre, and we love it. Who can forget the classic moment at the end of Twitch of the Death Nerve when two children we’ve not been told about turn up out of the blue and kill the main actors, and then start laughing uncontrollably? Who doesn’t look back fondly on Rhona Cameron’s cruel demise in the dismal Funny Man? Who can even remember the absurd ending to the soporific Demons of Ludlow? I can’t, I was asleep, along with everyone else.

All we ask is bad acting, a bit of nubile running and screaming from some long-gone Page 3 stunna, a splash of gore and lots of pizza and beer. Quality is not essential, or even desired. And that’s why, in ten years or so, M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening will probably make an appearance somewhere between Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Inseminoid Girl.

The Happening has a lot in common with many of the movies we’ve giggled over recently, not least an on-the-back of a beer mat simple plot, an awful and pretentious script several drafts short of comprehensible, woeful acting, and a dispiriting final sense of Is That It?

What it doesn’t share with these entertaining slices of rubbish is that they don’t make you physically violent with rage and fury as you sit through them.

Shyamalan’s films have relied on twist endings ever since The Sixth Sense turned its audience upside down with ghoulish glee almost ten years ago. Unbreakable has arguably a better and more satisfying switch-around, but nevertheless, it seemed that the director had painted himself into a corner, creating a Twist genre all his own. The Happening, I can only conclude, is his attempt to break away from that concept in the most ironic way possible, by turning the whole idea on its head and having The Best Part in the first three minutes. The rest just ambling away into dull exposition and self-reverential hooey.

The opening sequence is remarkable. It’s 8.33 on a fine New York morning, and we’re in Central Park. The good people of the Big Apple are busying themselves with keep fit regimes, school runs, or getting to work. And then they all stop, a scream is heard in the distance and, inexplicably, they all begin to die by their own hand. It’s terrifically well done and extraordinarily creepy, which may go part way to explaining why the same scene is, shamefully, repeated almost identically not once, but twice, later on.

From that opening moment, and I don’t feel at all mean in saying this, and will explain why later, it is immediately down hill. Immediately. Get that? Immediately. For, following a well-executed creepy and disorienting slice of proper theatre, we are introduced to Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) who will be our hero for the evening. Elliot, and this needs to be hammered home repeatedly, is a Science Teacher (capital ‘T’ there). If Jim Royle were watching this, he’d no doubt opine ‘Science Teacher My Arse’, and I’d be forced to agree with him. Elliot is a Science Teacher in the same sense that Robert Mugabe is a human being. They might look like they’re made of the correct genetic material (Wahlberg even wears a tank top, and at one point says ‘whom’, how teacher-y is that?), but beyond looks they’re nowhere near accomplished enough to convince.

In the second scene, Elliot is holding a Natural History class that is so infuriatingly anti-science, waffly and woolly that it makes you want to thump him very hard between the eyes. The essence of this irritation is a discussion where Elliot suggests that science can only ever provide theories for why things happen, but that ultimately we just have to accept that ’stuff’ occurs because it’s an unknowable act of nature. Really. He says that. Shyamalan then almost does the hitting for you with the lens; there are innumerable super close-ups of Elliot’s inquisitive mush (and who wouldn’t remain baffled when ‘just because’ is your mantra?), his brow furrowed and his little piggy eyes peering inquisitively out of his screwed up potato-y face. His wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), suffers from the same affliction, her first scene being an ultra close examination of her puzzled features. These occur throughout and I guess that Shyamalan is trying to tell us that these people are seriously confused.

And so are we. What exactly is this Happening that we’re all stuck in the movie auditorium to see? Why are people killing themselves? Why is everyone dying in increasingly silly ways? Why does Elliot talk like that? What is the point of John Leguizamo’s character? Didn’t he, surely, have a much bigger part but for some sensible studio exec blue-pencilling it because people simply wouldn’t put up with more than 90 minutes of this shit? Why am I here? Why have I wasted £7.50 on some meandering, preachy, pompous bullshit that’s determined to give me the most self-damaging ecological down-talking lesson I’ve ever heard?

The reason for the Happening is easily gleaned from the briefest of forays into the film. Read a review, and there it is, go to the movie’s official site, and there it is. When the theory (although, hey, right? right?) is posited about 30 minutes in, as people flee the city and head into the countryside, that’s the end of any development plot-wise, and the Happening as it stands becomes a non-event. Wait for a twist and you’ll be sadly disappointed, wait for a moment of clarity and you’ll be seriously disappointed; all that we have here is a rapidly diminishing cast of characters - although how you kill yourself in an open field with no weapons or instruments of any kind is never really shown - and a speedily rising level of patronising guff.

Two jarring gear changes almost provide the promise of salvation, but they are no more than sad set-pieces placed before us to ‘make us think’. In one, Elliot leads his gang into a model Dream Home where everything is made out of plastic, and the billboard shouts “You Deserve This!” Geddit? I’ll be charitable and suggest that clear boomshot is intended as further proof that we’re all living in an artificial world and we’ve brought this on ourselves. In the second, clunky, sequence, the group impose themselves on a paranoid old lady who is convinced they mean to murder her. At this point I almost expected her to be The Answer for all the ills that have befallen these ‘normal’ folk up until now (we are, we’re told, in the very epicentre of the mass disturbances and deaths) but this is not explored at all and is left to fizzle out pointlessly.

No, there is nothing Happening here. As we reach the end, and our small company of hopeless idiots sit pathetically in a basement waiting for the end, we drift into a coda of such breathtaking pointlessness that the only thing that is left for us to do is to stare at the screen and think, “is that really it?” More heartfelt and robust messages of irritation were levelled at the screen than that, however, as I left, I can assure you. As I got up, I thought of that old Buffalo Springfield song, “Something’s Happening Here ….What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear”. Well, it’s clear all right, it’s a man trying to mesmerise us, and falling short.

Poorly acted, poorly executed and incompetent at almost every point, bar that opening sequence, this is Une Grande Idée with nothing extra to add, nothing behind it but a beermat’s worth of thoughts, and no considered follow-up. It just doesn’t work. None of the pieces click. It’s empty and vacuous and all the worse for that, because it thinks it’s important and meaningful.

You know what? Maybe The Happening won’t be on a future Monster Night agenda. I just don’t think it’s up to our usual standard.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Settling into my seat to watch IJ&tKotCS (what a mouthful) I told myself that writing up a review later would be a mixture of a doddle and somewhat pointless. You know what you’re getting, right? It’s an Indiana Jones movie, yeah?

Well, sure, it is and it isn’t, but - sheesh - that doesn’t really make sense. So, let’s just start at the beginning.

When the movie opens, it is the mid 1950s and there’s an immediate sensation that this is a paranoid period of time, that there are reds under the bed and everyone is suspicious of everyone else. Not helping this charged atmosphere is Cate Blanchett, sporting a terrific Louise Brookes bob, as a member of the Russian military eager to get into Area 51 to steal the prized mummified remains of something secret. The warehouse where this is being housed is none other than the same place where the Ark from movie number one was so famously and cleverly ‘lost’, and I imagine it may be a more than just a humourous aside that this is so heavily referenced. The distraction that we may see the Ark, and have a cosy reminiscent glow about how great that first film was, cannot alter the fact that we all know what you go into Area 51 to find. And when you get that, you get the story, all there on a plate for you.

And what does that leave? Noise and movement, of course. This is provided via a series of deafening and startling set-pieces, a couple of which are as good as anything - rolling boulders aside - from the entire series. The first, in the warehouse, takes up the opening sequence baton with considerable aplomb. Another, a chase through Indy’s University campus, is just wonderful and packed with humour and thrills to the very brim. It also introduces the Shia LaBeouf character, Mutt, who is like a grown up and significantly less irritating Short Round and does very well in fleshing out a role that could easily have remained two-dimensional and unmemorable.

However, you’re expecting a but.

And butts don’t get much bigger than George Lucas, who wrote the thing. The story is easily, and overwhelmingly, the least satisfying element in the whole enterprise; dumb and simple and insultingly linear, it’s pretty obvious from the first ten minutes where all this is leading, so to liven things up we have to put up with a few needless double-crosses, a whiff of xenophobia and an ending that may test some viewers to the limit. One of the things that Raiders did so well was hit you between the eyes with a supernatural ending that, despite the gear change, fitted beautifully and smoothly into the whole. The same trick didn’t work nearly so well in Temple, and was just plain silly in Crusade, but here it ruins the good-will built up with the audience along the way. As I said earlier, you expect certain nonsenses and incredulities from an Indy flick, but part of the pay-off with that must be that you expect not to be treated to any old tut, and that’s precisely what you get here. George has clearly read some von Däniken, or had a minion read it for him, and the finale to Skull is not only plain stupid and tortuously loooooong, but more importantly it’s eye-rollingly bland for anyone with even the most nodding of acquaintances with conspiracy theories. Apparently, Spielberg and Ford initially disagreed over Lucas’s choice of the skull as the plot device, and would that they had dug their heels in. Ho hum hokum.

I feel churlish even criticising it this much, for it is filled with fun and excitement, and even has a touching sequence of reverential nods towards the great Denholm Elliott’s Marcus Brody character…I feel like someone finding fault with a child’s finger painting, but if you’re paying over your hard-earned you want something a little more considered than this.

Doomsday

SCENE: It is the near-future, a darkened recording studio in Dean Street. Neil Marshall, Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell and the bloke that plays the punky Scottish bloke, are sitting in the semi-dark, looking at a big plasma TV screen, sipping frappuccinos from cardboard cups, waiting for Doomsday to flicker and whirl into action. Each fingers a sheaf of notes on which are written pointers and factoids and marks they must hit to give the upcoming DVD commentary a rounded and well thought-out feel. Eventually, the Universal logo, trumpeted with blaring pomposity, glides into view.

Neil Marshall: Good morning, everybody, I’m Neil Marshall, the director of Doomsday. To my right, we have, er…

Scottish bloke: I’m [rustling of paper] …Craig Conway.

Marshall: That’s right. And then, Malcom McDowell.

Malcolm McDowell: Hello.

Marshall: Bob Hoskins.

Bob Hoskins: Awright.

Marshall: And the lovely Rhona Mitra.

Rhona Mitra: Hi.

Marshall: And we’re here to provide the cast commentary for my film, Doomsday. Here we are, then, the start of the movie.

Conway: Yay!

Marshall: Thank you, and immediately we go in to the credit sequence which you overvoiced for us, Malcom.

[In the background, McDowell's character, Kane, is explaining the plot: "Like so many epidemics before, the loss of so many lives began with a single microscopic organism. It's human nature to seek even the smallest comfort in reason, or logic for events as catastrophic as these. But a virus doesn't choose a time or place. It doesn't hate or even care. It just happens."]

Hoskins: Jesus.

McDowell: Hmmm.

Marshall: Obviously heavy exposition isn’t always a good idea. And yes, as a student of film, I’d concur with the view that when the presentation of exposition becomes awkward or wordy, it is sometimes referred to by the perjorative expressions ‘plot dump’ and ‘info dump’. In written fiction, the term is additionally used to indicate giving information by exposition rather than revelation through action and dialogue; if such passages are well-written and intriguing, they may be described as “info-dumping” with no pejorative intent. This method has long been used in classic drama and modern productions where the plot is the consequence of preceding events that would either weigh down the production or would reveal too much, spoiling the mystery. Exposition is also necessary in some dramas since it can be from the point of view and perception of a character, and may or may not accurately reveal the facts. Examples of such well done exposition include Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.

Conway: Cool!

Hoskins: Are you reading that out?

Marshall: No.

McDowell: You are, that’s from Wikipedia.

Marshall: It’s not. It’s what I think.

Hoskins: Right.

Marshall: Oh, now, here we go. The ship shoot-out. Sets the tone, I think. Lots of steel and chrome shine, like Walter Hill, referenced later of course with tribal figures, as a timely homage to The Warriors. And this boat shoot-out is certainly a nod to the famous Usual Suspects set-piece.

[a head splatters on screen, a naked woman starts shooting a shotgun from her bath]

McDowell: Just like it, yes.

Marshall: Now, Bob, here’s your first scene, the world-weary cop explaining to Rhona what she has to do, leading her SWAT-style team into the forbidden zone. Bob. Bob?

Hoskins: …

Marshall: Bob?

Hoskins: I was in The Long Good Friday, you know.

Marshall: I know, but here we see y-

Hoskins: And Mona Lisa. Neil Jordan! Jesus.

Marshall: Sure, but here your charac-

Hoskins: Nixon, 24:7, Enemy at the Gates, Last Orders…

Conway: Outlaw?

Hoskins: Fuck off.

[silence]

Marshall: OK, OK. Ah, we’re at the bit where the team go into the ruins of Glasgow now, looking for the cure. Here the armoured cars are pulling up outside the hospital. This is my homage to-

Hoskins: Aliens.

Marshall: Well done, Bob.

Hoskins: Well done? It’s a direct steal. Even the dialogue is nicked.

Marshall: It’s an homage.

Hoskins: It’s nicked.

McDowell: Crikey, isn’t it, though? I mean, precisely.

Conway: Oooh! Look! Akakakakakakakak!

Marshall: And now the crew are captured, and it’s your scene, er [rustling of paper] …Craig.

Conway: It’s me! It’s me!

Marshall: As you can see, we’re going for that Mad Max, post apocalyptic, Warriors look, with the mohicans and all the motorbikes and cars covered in shields and plating and spikes and so on.

Conway: Spikes.

Marshall: Spikes, yes. The jets of flame in the cannibalism scene add a sense of urgency and I think that the Can-Can with the blokes in kilts dancing to Bad Manners adds a touch of the macarbrely humourous.

McDowell and Hoskins: Really?

Marshall: Really. Absolutely. And similarly, the use of Good Thing and Spellbound in this sequence is an ironic take on the soundtracks of 1980s action films. Like when we use Two Tribes later on during the car chase.

[silence]

Marshall: Honestly.

[silence]

Hoskins: Bloody hell.

Marshall: Bob, I-

Hoskins: You know what, Neil, I really quite liked The Descent. I thought it was a smart, attractive, well-paced horror movie, way way above any of the other sort of dreck you get these days. It starts off nice, with a good evocation of loss and recovery, then moves carefully and intelligently through the gears, never once treating us like idiots. And it looks good, too, some of the outdoors scenes and caving sections were absolutely gorgeous. When my agent called, I thought “this’ll be a good one Bob, do this one”.

McDowell: Me, too.

Hoskins: But fuck me, what’s this? This is shit! It goes at a million miles an hour and Rhona looks fabulous but, and no offence, love, she acts about as well as my last fart. Sorry, sweetheart, but you do. Me and Malcolm are doing our best here, you know. OK, my accent goes from East End Bob to Posh Bob a little too much, but we’re still the best things up there. Poor old Sean Pertwee’s not bad either, but you only give him a dozen lines before he gets offed. Jesus, man!

Conway: Ooer.

Hoskins: And what’s this lad’s role in all this? All that shouting and gurning and screaming bollocks? It’s a fucking pantomime. Fuck it, I’m out of here. Malc, beer? Groucho in two minutes? I just need to get some cash out.

McDowell: Good idea. Let’s go.

Marshall: Bob! Malcolm! I put that money in your pockets.

Hoskins: And we gave you what you wanted. You then twisted it up into a right kebab of a movie, all mixed up rubbish covered in chili sauce so you can’t taste anything but the blood and diesel.

Marshall: It’s fun.

McDowell: For thirteen year old boys. See you. Hold up, Bob!

Marshall: Bob! Bob! Malcom! Come back! O bollocks to ya! I’ve got Hugh Jackman on my next movie, you know? Yeah, Hugh Jackman, that’s right!

[a door slams. Silence falls again. On screen a Bentley is crashing spectacularly through a bus. Neil Marshall looks at Mitra and Conway]

Marshall: You two are quiet. Cat got your fucking tongues?

Conway: Oooh, I’m telling.

Mitra: What’s this again?

[Dull thudding as Marshall hits his head repeatedly on the desk]