Very Cool!!!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

CITADEL is another grim and gloomy slice of British urban horror shot with that cheap and depressing digital look, all greys and blues and no life anywhere. Despite the predictability of the visuals, the film turns out to be not too bad, and certainly better than the similarly-themed F. Aneurin Barnard plays a young father grieving his wife's death at the hands of a group of feral children who roam his local council estate causing mischief. The story that plays out is dingy and dark, enlivened only by the presence of the reliably great James Cosmo as a foul-mouthed priest who vows to help our lead tackle the kids responsible. It's a pretty predictable little outing, but there's enough incident here to keep you watching.

I had heard a lot about Citadel, so perhaps I went into this movie expecting too much. I also think that if I hadn't already seen 'Ils' ('Them') that I would have thought this flic was a lot better.The one thing that I liked about both Citadel and Ils is that both are intelligent horror films which are metaphors for something deeper than what is on the surface. Ils deals with Xenophobia (or rather, it could be argued is a piece of Xenophobic propaganda lol), and Citadel, which has a similar plot, is a metaphor about the fear of becoming a parent.On an intellectual level I thought that Citadel had a lot going for it. Unfortuntately, it just reminded me too much of Ils in the stylistic department, and even worse, it just couldn't measure up.Don't get me wrong, this one is light years ahead of most horror movies, but there are also a lot better ones out there.

Have you ever seen the synopsis for a movie and thought to yourself, "Oh yea, this is gonna be great!" only to be let down within the first 30 minutes? Well, this happened to me this week. I checked out a film called Citadel. No, it was not about a college in Charleston, SC for military kids, it is an Irish film written and directed by Ciaran Foy. Citadel is about a father who teams up with what I call an insane priest to save his daughter from a gang of violent, demented kids. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, here are my thoughts: I will start by saying that I really wanted to like this movie...I did. The first few minutes you get a little action and then you're like "Okay, here we go." I spent the next 15 minutes of boredom only trying to convince myself that the main character was not played by John Mayer because if I didn't find something to keep me interested, I would have fallen asleep. Listen, this movie is not a total poop fest, it isn't. I think the problem is, it just was not MY cup of tea. I have spoken with people who liked it, and I did not immediately want to hurl things at their faces...I understood.

Although this film was made thanks to sponsorship from the Irish film board, it is far from a piece of Catholic dogma. The character who plays the priest renounces religion entirely and the film's horror is an original and recent addition to the genre. It's full of good ideas and can be related to relatively recent phenomena; the urban sprawl and the creation of enormous flatblocks outside city centres, prevalent across the United Kingdom. Most frighteningly perhaps it represents the disaffected youth who hide themselves from the enormous collection of security cameras which dictate their life. Spawns of drug selling youth hide their identity behind hoodies; who'd have guessed 20 years ago that being approached by a group of youth wearing tracksuits would be such a menacing phenomenon. In this film creative use is made of this fear. The film is far from perfect, but most important is its originality, fear is created the way it should be, as suspense, and the implication of the horror created by its themes don't require an enormous spilling of blood or disgusting special effects to disquiet and disturb you. I'm glad I saw this film; it proves again that truly good additions to the genre, don't originate from Hollywood and don't require its approval to be made.