The Bad Education Movie (15A)
The Bad Education Movie is a funny spin-off from the BBC 3 TV series of the same name in which the talented British stand-up comic Jack Whitehall stars as a well-meaning but inept schoolteacher who is generally out-smarted by his worldly pupils.
The film, which was co-written by Whitehall, follows the formula of TV spin-off movies in that it takes the main cast on a journey – students and staff travel to Cornwall on a holiday after they have completed their GCSEs.
Combining some of the eccentric characters they meet along the way, a string of genuinely inventive sight gags and some buoyant dialogue, The Bad Education Movie is a significant improvement on the Carry-On type outing that we usually get from this kind of film.
Whitehall is a likeable and human focus for much of the comedy and the supporting cast includes such reliables as Iain Glen, Jeremy Irvine, Joanna Scanlon, Clarke Peters and Harry Enfield.
Sinister 2 (16)
Sinister 2 is an unusual horror sequel in that it feels deeper, more dense and – as a genre film – more challenging than the impressive original. Shannyn Sossomon, who is currently starring in the TV series Wayward Pines, plays an estranged wife and mother who is on the run from her brutal former partner and the demon spirit who is determined to possess her two sons.
The movie develops both storylines to complement each other, using one to feed off the other and lending tension, credibility and atmosphere to the overall enterprise. Irish director Ciaran Foy, who displayed an innate talent for directing tight storylines in confined spaces in his first feature Citadel, shows the same sort of command here. And, once again, he proves particularly adept at getting strong, well defined performances from child actors.
Ciaran Foy is in the rare position – for an Irish filmmaker – of seeing his first Hollywood movie released on thousands of screen around the world this weekend. Sinister 2 will open on 3,000 screens in the US and it will also be widely seen in 'foreign' markets, which will likely determine whether there is scope for a Sinister 3.
Foy was given the job when writer/director Scott Derrickson saw his first film, Citadel, and contacted him on Twitter. Sinister 2, is the sequel to the 2012 Derrickson horror that grossed almost $80m (€72m) on a budget of $3m (€2.7m).
Foy has already committed to his next film with horror studio Blumhouse Productions. The Shee, a story set in Ireland in the early 1960s in which a young woman has to confront her violent and tragic past when she travels to a remote island.
Vacation (15A)
Part remake and part sequel, Vacation follows Rusty Griswald – the son in the original National Lampoon’s Vacation in 1983 – as a dull pilot on a low-fares airline who takes his family on a cross-country journey from Chicago to Wally World in Santa Monica in order to breathe new life into their relationships.
Misadventure ensues, beginning with the family’s rented car, a cheap lunch-box-on-wheels imported from Albania with a navigation system that speaks only Korean. The writers of Vacation seem to think that the angry-sounding Korean language is inherently funny. It’s not, and neither are the jokes about rape, paedophilia and suicide.
Vacation is a sad cynical rip-off of John Hughes’ original, which tries to make itself different by imposing the R-rated formula of crude dialogue and gross-out visual humour on its predictable road-movie set ups. It doesn’t work.
Also showing...
Also out this weekend are Gemma Bovery (15A), an ironic modern, variation on Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Paper Towns (12A), a coming of age story based on a young-adult novel about a boy who goes looking for the mysterious girl next door when she disappears; the thriller Good People (16), with Kate Hudson and James Franco and the documentary, and the fascinating The Wolfpack (15A) – about a family of seven children – who were home schooled and confined to their lower Manhattan apartment by their father throughout their youth.
