RUBBER - REVIEW


Looking back, two things bother me about Rubber:

1/ It's a movie about a tyre.

2/ I was genuinely excited about watching a movie about a tyre.

Both suggest that not only is the film a slight effort to say the least but that my life is well and truly empty. I mean, the movie's playful marketing was hinting at Grindhouse-style mayhem complete with tons of gore and fun tongue-in-cheek self awareness. Sadly, the latter proved more right than I could have ever imagined. Hell, the film spends a good hour and a half referencing itself, joking about its own rubbish and not only breaking the fourth wall but penetrating it with its own tyre-shaped penis.

I'll leave it to you guys to picture that.

I like lols as much as the next guy and I loved the likes of Planet Terror and Hobo With A Shotgun, films which, though self-aware, actually really entertaining, funny and cool movies in their own right. But Rubber goes for an almost arty, indie-type vibe and jokes about itself so obnoxiously that you wonder if Fellini's ass didn't direct it. You've got the cop who talks about the movie itself facing the camera while... in the movie, you've got a bunch of people looking at the movie through binoculars, commenting on it constantly, and when you have no plot to hold everything together what you're left with is a structure resembling:

Tyre

lol

Tyre

lol

Tyre

lol

FINE!!! It's a tyre! LOL

NOW can I go?

To give the film credit, it's got some decent gore effects but that's really all the positive stuff I can say about it. Occasionally, the tyre makes someone’s head explode and your body starts working on a boner, a boner sadly doomed to a lifetime of incompletion. Hobo With A Shotgun might have sounded like a one-joke movie but really it wasn’t in that it was chock-full of genius hoboey goodness. Rubber actually IS a one-joke movie, one we get really early  on and one that’s frankly not very funny. This a slow, kinda dull, repetitive, weirdly pretentious movie and just fails not only as a Grindhouse-style B movie but as a comedy and a horror film.

Really not worth it.

If this is Rubber, then call me glue.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT - REVIEW

Image
Finally free from the clutches of the iconic Original Series , Picard and co. finally got their own movie to play with and delivered this much better, much darker, much less gimmicky outing. This time, we're introduced to the Borgs, a race of soulless, zombie-like drones capable of assimilating people completely. A popular race of bad guys in the series, their Hellraiser -style S&M look certainly begged for a movie! First Contact opens with Picard having a nightmare about the time he almost became a Borg forever and little by little, as the current Borg threat increases, he starts to crack up, feeling a responsibility to sort that problem out himself as he still has a slight connection to them but also wanting a kind of revenge, closure if you will, for what they did to him the first time around. The plot sees the crew of the Enterprise witness the Earth get completely assimilated by the Borgs so they go back in time before Earth made its "first contact" with al
Read more

24: SEASON 1 - REVIEW

Image
I know, I'm like 100 years late. But I'm The "Retro" Critic! :P I remember catching a glimpse of this iconic show back in the day and actually finding it pretty entertaining. Sadly, I hadn't followed the thread from the very beginning so it felt like catching the season about halfway through would be a bit of a waste. I decided to wait until I could check it out on DVD. 10 years later... Well I finally made it, that's the main thing, right? So was it worth the wait? What do I make of this very first season? It's good. I thought it would be quite good and it was. Basically I'm rarely taken by a cop-themed series unless you've got a mad scientist in there ( Fringe ), evil twins ( Alias ) or... Columbo ( Columbo ). But 24 did a hell of a good job keeping me entertained throughout and making me care about MOST of what was going on. Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer is a hard one to dislike and is pretty much the glue holding the whole sho
Read more

THE ADDAMS FAMILY MUSICAL - REVIEW

Image
 Looks like every Broadway comedy musical these days is trying to be The Producers ... Mel Brooks' hugely successful show now being the basic template for shows based on movies (with the exception of the admittedly *ahem* unique Spiderman musical), after Dirty Rotten Scoundrels we're treated to Broadway's The Addams Family. An odd release but probably an inevitable one. Not based on any of the movies, the story actually follows up from past adaptations and sees a now grown-up Wednesday falling in love with a "normal" dude and having to face her unconventional family. It's essentially Addams Family Values with Wednesday taking on the Fester role. A good idea which should please both fans of the films and those looking to see something new. But what works for The Producers just doesn't work for everything. Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams? So much for the tall, suave, maniacal Gomez we all know and love! Don't get me wrong, I love Nathan Lane but list
Read more