A Sexy Blog

I went into Alarum thinking, perhaps out of misplaced optimism, or just that basic human longing for improvement, that it has to be better than Armor, the last shitty Randal Emmett movie with Stallone. But you know what? It's not! If cinema is meant to offer us hope and reinvention, here is a sequel in spirit, though not in name, that squanders even that. To its defence, Alarum brings a few new weak spots to the autopsy table, but much of the decay is depressingly familiar.

There is a kind of filmic purgatory, a cinema of stalled ambition and aesthetic vacancy, where the only thing more oppressive than the endless hours of tedium is the lingering sense of money misspent. Armor is not just another addition to the b-movie landfill, it’s the sound of late-career legacy clanging hollowly on the asphalt of a bridge, the celluloid equivalent of watching Sylvester Stallone doze in real time, bracketed by echoes of his own mythos and, faintly, the dying whinny of a studio accountant’s last desperate crackle.

I began to wonder if I had inadvertently selected a dull guilty pleasure disguised as a serious exploration of societal themes as the film moved from one sleazy party scene to the next. What unfolded was, unfortunately, a mediocre experience filled with endless sexual encounters that overshadowed any glimmer of genuine storytelling.

"Absolution," directed by a vision that eludes me, features the formidable Liam Neeson alongside a cast that includes Frankie Shaw, Ron Perlman, and Daniel Diemer. It attempts to take us on an emotional journey of an aging gangster trying to reconnect with his children while the criminal underworld supposedly seeks to thwart his efforts.

Animal Factory, directed by Steve Buscemi and released in 2000, tries to present itself as a gritty exploration of life behind bars. Featuring actors like Edward Furlong, Willem Dafoe, and Danny Trejo, this film aims to delve into the harsh realities of incarceration.

For a decade and a half, Scott Adkins action movies have felt like the amuse-bouches of the genre: you don’t go for the movie itself, you go for that single, exquisite fight—brutal, fast, clean, then back to whatever sorry goulash the plot is serving up. But with Avengement, someone, glory of glories, has seen sense and decided to cook the entire meal out of pure, red-blooded Adkins. It’s as if The Raid was adopted by Guy Ritchie’s least photogenic cousins and stranded in the back room of a decrepit British pub. The miracle? It works, start to finish—genuine, knuckle-bruising working-class catharsis.