Dinocroc vs. Supergator

Last week, friend and fellow blogger Richard (of I Liked That Film) produced a DVD from his bag and passed it to me. He told me to watch it and said it’s rubbish. Over the last year or so, a succession of films has passed between the two of us with each attempting to increase the other’s cineliteracy. This time though, I thought he was taking the piss as the film he presented me with was called Dinocroc vs. Supergator. I was briefly told about one or two terrible scenes and like you do when you receive socks for Christmas, I smiled politely, said thank you and tucked the film into my own bag. Despite having just bought Rome Open City and Breathless the day before, it was this that found its way into my DVD player first. Perhaps it was curiosity or maybe it was similar to how you eat the vegetables before saving the steak until last but I watched it first. And it’s awful. I’ve seen some bad films before but this is up there with the worst.

The plot is very simple. An unscrupulous biotech company is developing super crops on a Hawaiian Island. Secretly they are also using the methods they’ve discovered to grow animals. For some reason a Dinocroc and Supergator escape and eat most of the scientists. Then they eat random idiots on various parts of the island before being contained and forced to fight each other by a ramshackle group of local heroes and assorted hangers on.

The Challenger

On January 28^th 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up 73 seconds after the twenty-fifth Space Shuttle launch, killing all seven of its crew members. The disaster was, at the time, the most catastrophic loss in NASA history and is still remembered as one of the most disastrous and heartbreaking days in human space exploration. Following the tragedy a Commission was set up to get to the bottom of the disaster and uncover the cause of shuttle failure. The Commission contained former and current astronauts including the first American woman in space and the first man on the moon. It also contained a former Secretary of State, Air Force generals and physicists. One of these physicists was perhaps the most famous of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman. Feynman was crucial to the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 on the back of numerous papers and discoveries.

The Challenger (formerly titled Feynman and the Challenger) is a made for TV movie which first aired on the BBC on March 18^th 2013. The film focuses on the role Richard Feynman (William Hurt) played in the Commission and the lengths that he went to; to prove what was really behind the Shuttle’s failure that January morning. The film intersperses real footage, including that of the actual event with dramatisations of Feynman’s quest for answers which are taken from Feynman’s autobiographical book What Do You Care What Other People Think? The movie is well researched and generally very well made and features a terrific central performance and compelling story.

The Girl

The Girl is a TV movie about the three year working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and his two time leading lady Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) star of TheBirds and Marnie. The plot, which has been widely criticised by people who knew the great Director, focuses on his attraction towards his starlet and her rebuff of his advances. Much like a great Hitchcock thriller the film takes a dark turn as Hitch forces Hedren to go through arduous scenes over and over again and puts her in compromising positions sexually.

I’m a fairly new convert to Hitchcock having seen seven of his films in the last year, all for the first time. The Birds is one of the few Hitchcock movies I had seen before I began blogging but not for a long time. It’s been on my list to watch for a few months but I hadn’t got around to it yet and this put me in a quandary; what to watch first? I decided to watch The Girl before re-watching The Birds but now I’m slightly fearful that its portrayal of the Director may put me off the film and perhaps Hitchcock in general.