Film reviews: Looking For Eric | Last House On the Left | Red Cliff | Doghouse

Published on Friday 5 June 2009 16:10

LOOKING FOR ERIC (15) **

Ken Loach doing whimsy is rather like your grandad doing a pole dance – you appreciate the effort and the novelty but the execution isn't all it could be. A Manchester postman (Steve Evets) goes postal after seeing the woman (Stephanie Bishop) he walked out on 30 years ago, but pulls himself together by taking advice from Eric Cantona, the Descartes of the penalty box. Cantona plays himself and, true to his reputation, speaks almost entirely in gnomic proverbs. Naturally he also delivers bon mots in French, which Evets doesn't understand, even though Laverty's script makes it clear that their conversations are entirely the product of the postman's imagination.

There are a lot of logical holes in Eric, but if the film was more engaging, you wouldn't notice them. As it stands, however, it is an awkward conflation of Last Of The Summer Wine farce and underclass melodrama that never really scores.

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (18)

*

In 1972, Wes Craven released The Last House On The Left (inset left), a blunt instrument of a film, where two teenage girls (Sara Paxton and Martha MacIsaac) go looking to score dope and wind up tortured by a couple of escaped convicts and their accomplices. The cons take refuge at a Connecticut home that happens to be owned by the parents of one of the girls, who put two and two together and exact a grisly revenge.

Tortuous in every sense, the refurbished House retains many of the original features whilst updating the bloodletting to include microwaves and waste disposal units.

RED CLIFF (15)

**

After 16 years directing Hollywood movies such as Mission: Impossible II, Paycheck and Windtalkers, John Woo returns to Chinese filmmaking with an ambitious historical epic set in Han Dynasty China in 208 AD when the Chinese emperor authorises a campaign to crush his enemies in the south of the country. The result is gorgeous to look at, but the military engagements and strategies can be somewhat baffling. And despite the fact that this version (below) has been whittled down from the original Chinese four-hour version, at two-and-a-half hours it feels as long as the war itself.

DOGHOUSE (15)

*

Danny Dyer stars in this comedy horror as part of a group of men who holiday in a remote village to help one of their friends get over his divorce. There they discover that all the women have been infected with a virus that turns them into man-hating cannibals. Not as bad as Lesbian Vampire Killers, but still best left in the kennel.

• All on general release from Friday