The Ugly Duckling and Me, Arctic Tale and The Water Horse Reviews

No its not the longest weirdest titled film in the world its just me being slightly lazy and compiling the three films into one review segment. In fairness to me, for we must always be fair to me, its half term holidays and these are kids films. So therefore I'm not exactly their target audience. Plus I'm still feeling bad about saying nasty things about something as lovely as Be Kind Rewind. For me to start beating up on some fairly light hearted romps whose sole design is to make the wee ones smile would push me even closer to the hell in which I'm almost certainly bound.

Saying that though Arctic Tale is fucking gash. Cashing in on March of the Penguins seemed pretty much on the cards from the moment it made a staggering $80 million. But where we had Morgan Freeman before we now have Queen Latifah, where we had a journey of incredible danger and duty we now have farting walrus (walrus's? walri?) to the pop soundtrack of We Are Family. It would have been a nice idea to show what life was like 10, or even 20, years ago and compare the effects of global warming. Instead, as an afterthought in the end credits, we get preached to by a bunch of middle class school kids telling us to plant a million trees, everywhere!! Well what about planning permission you little shits.

Next The Ugly Ducking and Me. A film so under the radar it could be a low flying swan. In fact if you Google Ugly Ducking and Me film review this lame website that nobody reads may be one of the top 10 hits. I'm looking forward to trying that in about 5 mins. First I'll tell you that this film is a pretty run of the mill take on the Hans Christian Andersen fable. Its got a little going for it with lines such as "Deep down everybodys..." "Beautiful" "...No, everybodys Ugly" but sadly the sixth rate CGI lets it down. The swans even have arms with little hands. Probably because feathery wings take a fuckload longer to animate.

Last up is The Waterhorse. Now I actually enjoyed this. Its quite dark, it doesn't shy away from themes such as sex and death (both topics are hinted at rather than shown graphically) and the camerawork seems to be inspired by Sam Raimi. The film is yet another take on The Loch Ness Monster but seems the most faithful in that its actually set in Scotland. The accents are all good too which is a rarity. The special effects hold up well in the first half but do deteriorate once the beastie starts filling the screen. And its based on a Dick King Smith book. I used to love him as a kid, I wanted to be a vet you see and help all the wittle poorwy animals. Now I'm a bitter, twisted 'critic' that rants to no-one in particular about how rubbish films with polar bears in them are.