Despite the presence of a likeable Tom Hanks, a magnetic Audrey Tautou and an EEEEEVIL Paul Bettany (playing yet another religious figure), not nearly enough happens to justify its near three-hour running time.
A marked improvement over The Da Vinci Code, but still loses its way when Hanks and co stop solving puzzles and get led around the Vatican on a wild goose chase.
This backwoods horror has got the makings of something different. But Jug Face doesn’t have the suspense, the directorial skill or the budget to pull it off.
Early Peter Jackson meets Neighbours (quite literally – even Harold Bishop shows up) in this mess of a film from avant musician Philip Brophy. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be a nutzoid riff on body horror à la Street Trash, a send-up of Ozploitation tropes, or a post-modern satire of Australian mores, so it goes for all three, with demented but confused results. At least it’s an interesting failure, I’ll give it that much.
Shoddy performances and an unfocused plot detract from the fittingly sleazy, Agatha-Christie-on-psychoactives atmosphere Mario Bava captures in one of his more celebrated films, which also happens to be the foundation of the slasher horror — Friday the 13th being a direct lift in all but its story, and its wicked twist of an ending.