B-movies rule!

This week's slate is chockful of dumb, cheesy movies. But not all of them are bad. In fact, the two best movies of the week revel in their supreme absurdities, coming out the better for it.

There is Land of the Lost, a laugh-out-loud Will Ferrell comedy that takes the term "a good bad movie" to a whole new level. As Will douses himself in dinosaur urine and sings a number from The Chorus Line to help baby dinosaurs sleep, you can help but grin and groan at the same time.

There is also Drag Me To Hell, a terrific B-grade horror flick that mixes black magic, mediums, mannas and maggots to delirious effect. Director Sam Raimi makes a welcome return to the gore and ghouls of his earlier Evil Dead flicks - made before he got famous for helming the Spider-Man pictures.

The other two films opening this week, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, are also B-grade, but they're not entertainingly so.

So if you're planning to watch any of the new movies this week, we suggest that you leave your brain at home. Otherwise, be prepared for two hours of assault on your intellect.

Drag Me To Hell

Long before director Sam Raimi made it to the big-time with his Spider-Man movies, he was directing a series of B-grade horror flicks called The Evil Dead. They mixed ghosts, gore and goofy humour to delirious effect, and were initially banned in several countries for their extreme images. Now, Sam has chosen to return to gutbucket-horror genre with the cheesy but chilling Drag Me To Hell. And as horror fans, we couldn't be more pleased.

Alison Lohman (from Big Fish and White Oleander) plays a bank officer who turns down a request for a loan extension from a gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) who wears a glass eye and false teeth. Mad at Alison, the gypsy promptly puts a curse on her, transforming her life into a living hell. Soon, Alison is taunted by a terrifying creature that upends her house, career and relationships. How can she stop the curse?

Mixing maggots, mediums, mannas and all sorts of mumbo jumbo, Drag Me To Hell is a satisfying spookfest that will have you covering your eyes one minute, and then laughing at cheesy scares the next. You'll flinch as demons come charging at you, gypsies gnash their filthy fangs, and spectres spring out to surprise you. And you'll chuckle at the silly one-liners that the script throws up as if to remind you that "it's just a movie".

This is B-grade horror at its most baroque and blithe. Whether you're into horror or not, Drag Me To Hell should keep you at the edge of hysteria - and hysterical laughter.

Land of the Lost

If you like B-grade movies, you'd enjoy a trip to the Land of the Lost. It's a totally dumb and wacky film set in a universe where the past, the present and the future co-exist. So you'll find dinosaurs eating ice-cream, aliens making out, and an apeman getting high on drugs. And with Will Ferrell as the tour guide, you can bet it'll always be fun.

Will plays a mad scientist who is dismissed by the scientific community for his "quantum paleontology" theory which posits - now let's see if we got it correctly - that all the things that ever existed or will exist on Earth can come together in a time-warped alternate universe. By accident, Will and his acquantainces - pretty scientist Anna Friel and rowdy redneck Danny McBride - find themselves transported to this universe.

All manner of absurd scenes can now take place: Will drenches himself in dinosaur urine, Anna gets kidnapped by lizard zombie aliens, and an apeman sings a number from The Chorus Line. It's all dumb, tasteless and meaningless - and yet frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

If you think you'd enjoy 100 minutes of pure idiocy - we know we did - then take a romp in the Land of the Lost. Dumb rarely looks this good.

Can Matthew McConaughey go through one movie without taking his shirt off? Because frankly, we're getting sick of him play this same role over and over again - a "sexy" womaniser who, after hundreds of flings, comes to realise that love is the only thing worth living for.

In this variation of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, Matthew plays a successful photographer who beds hundreds of models, flight attendants and other attractive women - until the ghost of his uncle (Michael Douglas) appears one night and takes him through his past, his present and his future. It is only after Matthew witnesses his grim and lonely future does he realise that life without love is meaningless...

Ghost of Girlfriends Past is crude, predictable and unfunny, with Matthew delivering a typically smug, swaggering performance. The worst thing about it is its depiction of women as shameless, sex-starved and stupid, as they fall helplessly in love with Matthew the rake. Real-life women would certainly know better.

Sigh... if only we had a Ghost of Films Futureto warn us of how bad this movie was going to be.

Denzel Washington, John Travolta, John Turturro, Luis Guzman, Michael Rispoli, James Gandolfini
Action director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley) may have a sterling resume that includes Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2 and Crimson Tide.But recent misfires like Domino, Deja Vu and now The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 seem to indicate that he may have lost his touch.

Sleek but uninvolving, Pelham stars Denzel Washington as an ordinary subway dispatcher whose day is thrown into chaos when a criminal mastermind (John Travolta) hijacks a subway train full of passengers. The hijacker demands a ransom of US$10million within one hour, or else one passenger gets killed every minute. It is up to Denzel, who knows the ins-and-outs of the subway system, to stop him...

Despite strong performances from the typically reliable Denzel Washington and John Travolta, Pelham suffers from a curious pacing that sees the action slow down in the third and most important act. Director Tony Scott clearly wants Pelham to be a good action movie, but he tries too hard to couple it with a social conscience.

The result? The movie fails on both counts.