Film Reviews by LW

All three seasons of this show have been fantastic schlock comedy. The whole cast are great and the characters are well defined, the dialogue sparkles with in jokes and nobody is entirely unsympathetic. The centre of the show is obviously the voice of Brad Dourif as the gleefully lethal doll and he's matched by Jennifer Tilly doing deranged dialled up to ten in heels. Each season has done a different set of genre tropes, first the high school slasher, second the 'boarding school full of special children' and lastly 'Action movies about US Presidents'. Chucky burns the US government to the ground, finally meets his dark voodoo god and nukes Santa. Sadly the show got axed on a cliffhanger twist, so we'll have to hope Don Mancini gets funding for another big screen outing!

This is a slice of lunatic satire and sorority slasher that has a feel like one of the better Troma classics. The joke that sloths are just pretending to be slow and adorable is suitably bonkers and it starts from there. Even by the standards of the genre the sorority girls are unspeakable caricatures heading for fluffy annihilation. The satire element being that the pursuit of social media fame drives the girls to get an illegal sloth and that, in turn, the sloth learns to emulate them, eventually getting an online following with #killersloth as it posts its kills. The moral being that social media can turn even a cuddly jungle creature into a monster. The sloth is an adorable puppet, the action slapstick daftness and it breezes by at a nice pace. Highly entertaining as a gore comedy.

Saying this is a straight forward Western plot with no frills doesn't do it justice. The cast breathe new life into old archetypes and Nicholas Cage perfectly pitches the doomed and world weary demeanour of the gunslinger out for revenge. Ryan Kiera Armstrong is a watchable foil as Cage's young daughter and the storytelling catches the character's autism without any jarring exposition that disrupts the lean plot. There is a good nutty villain and assorted henchmen and a doughty Marshal on hand to see that Justice gets a look in. The other thing is that the costume department have some excellent natural fabrics and hand made clothing that makes for a touch of extra immersion. It feels like watching a low budget 1950s Western, but in a good way. The Old Way is simple, uncomplicated fun that holds your attention through the 90 minutes. This really is a lot better than the Rotten Tomatoes critics score suggests and the audience scores seem to have been rightly more sympathetic.

This is not the whole film let alone the 2007 remaster! It is one side of an old 2 sided disc. Really disappointed.