Babylon A.D.
Dir: Mathieu Kassovitz
2008
***
Mathieu Kassovitz's adaption of Maurice Georges Dantec's 1999 novel Babylon Babies is an odd, disjointed and puzzling production that is now famous for the various problems it encountered in getting to the screen and unfortunately, many of those issues are obvious when watching the film. However, I think that's what I liked about it. The script doesn't really work, the editing is irritating and it's not always a comfortable watch but there is something irresistible about it. It's got 'cult' written all over it with a healthy measure of 'guilty pleasure' thrown in for good measure. I can't believe they cut 70 minutes out of the finished film, although I can believe 70 minutes was cut out of it, as it clearly has something missing. Maybe one day we'll see an uncut version, although no one other than me thought the film had any merit. Personally I was full of intrigue, it was just short of a decent script and a couple of stand out scenes. Unfairly overlooked in my opinion, I do wonder if people will look at it differently in 20 years time.

Gothika
Dir: Mathieu Kassovitz
2003
**
There are frustrations aplenty with Mathieu Kassovitz's 2003 Gothika, what does Gothika actually mean for starters? It has the same visual flare you come to expect from Kassovitz - who I believe is a truly brilliant director who has yet made a truly brilliant film, but he seems to have succumbed to what he believed the audience wanted rather than be true to his own creativity. The high-speed wobbly head thing had been done to death in horror film by 2003 and many of the eerie scene seemed reminiscent of every thriller made in the 1990s. So it's not quite a horror, not quite a thriller and not much of a murder mystery. Mixing pop-psychology and the paranormal hardly ever works, only the stupidly superstitious are ever convinced by it and even then they need some kind of back story to be interested. The performances are also best forgotten.