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Original title: El Laberinto del Fauno
Mexico/Spain/USA: Guillermo del Toro, 2006

I finally sat down and watched Pan's Labyrinth, and I'm exceedingly glad I did, as it's probably the best new horror movie I've seen since The Descent... although perhaps "horror" isn't the best way to describe it as, contrary to what the marketing campaign would have you believe, only small portions of it take place in the world of make-believe. The rest of it is all unsettlingly real, taking place in Spain in 1944, with the country under the grip of General Franco's fascists, and the military stopping at nothing to root out and destroy the resistance forces. The film is absolutely beautiful to behold, and the designs and effects work on the various creatures that the protagonist meets are astounding. In some ways, it reminded me of a twisted live action Spirited Away: a dark fairytale for adults.

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USA: Greg Beeman, 1995

Me and Lyris steeled ourselves and popped in Problem Child 3, as prepared as was humanly possible for the horrors that this made for TV sequel, with the key roles recast, could inflict on us. And it was... surprisingly bearable. Don't get me wrong, it's a load of crap (not that the first two Problem Child films were ever going to win anything, of course - not even a Razzie), but it made us laugh, and the shift in tone wasn't as dramatic as in, say, a Disney cheapquel. It's a hell of a lot more surreal, even going so far as to include a couple of physical gags that wouldn't seem out of place in a Tex Avery cartoon, and the guy playing Ben Healy (William Katt) is about as poor a match for John Ritter as you could ever hope to find, but the scenes with the three returning cast members - Jack Warden, Gilbert Gottfried and Eric Edwards - provide much merriment. There is also some rather sly humour, some of it surprisingly twisted by network TV standards. Am I suggesting that everybody rushes out to see it? No - like I said, the film (if you can even call it that) is garbage by anyone's standards, but it was a painless enough way to kill an hour and a half.

IMDB reference

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