DVD Round-up: The Boat That Rocked, Dollhouse and Dead Snow
A cheerful pirate radio movie, Joss Whedon’s odd Buffy follow-up and zombie Nazis. We watch them so you don’t have to...
7 September 2009
The Boat That Rocked
Richard Curtis’s tribute to pirate radio is a cheerful but cheesy attempt to recreate the flailing, free-spirited 60s. Bill Nighy is off-the-peg dandy Quentin, heading a vigorous cast of eccentrics aboard the good ship Radio Rock, illicitly broadcasting pop music to the wireless-owning masses bored by their government-sanctioned curriculum of Elgar and Mantovani. Curtis nails the character quirks and the Hipsters vs Squares theme is easy to warm to, but it’s light on actual gags, heavy on sentimentality.
Dollhouse
Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer follow-up packs a juicy, dystopian premise (shady megacorp uses “dolls” – humans who’ve had their minds “wiped” – to do their foul bidding). But the emerging backstory feels way too similar to Heroes, and Eliza Dushku, as recurring “doll” Echo, just doesn’t have the chops to make us care about who’s pulling her strings. Instead of trying to cook up a convoluted, Lost-style mythology, Whedon should have focused on the bloody-minded fun that he patented in Buffy.
Dead Snow
A gaggle of (knowing) horror-flick stereotypes (bimbo, nerd, jock, fat guy) have their Norwegian holiday interrupted by a gang of zombie Nazis. It’s the Nazi zombie film we’ve been waiting for! Director Tommy Wirkola is aware of the story’s absurdity but he plays it with a mostly straight face, laying on a satisfyingly squelchy spread of genre gore that’s ideal for a switch-your-brain-off sofa-flop.
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