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544,136 | 562,732 | 110,978 | 1 | No stars . | The third sequel in the Texas Chainsaw series is now more famous for starring Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger , neither of whom , at the time the film was made , knew better than to accept such trashy roles . The film begins by asking us to care about a group of teens who leave their prom due to a couple having a fight and end up lost in the woods . This mere minutes after having driven away from their high school , which presumably resides in their hometown . Clearly they have not learned their way around much , but no matter . Before too long , they very soon find themselves running for their lives away from the famous freaky family , not only lost in their home town but , before long , also without their car . One of the biggest gripes that people have with this film ( which is saying a lot , because there is nothing but stuff to gripe about ) is that Leatherface seems to have become a transvestite . You can almost watch the transformation in the film , which seems to me to be sort of the result of trying to make Leatherface too complex . There is a point in the film where the trapped Jenny ( Zellweger ) tries to get Leatherface to help her escape , talking to him exactly like a psychiatrist would talk to a disturbed child . Come on , we know Leatherface is disturbed ; I just don't understand why cross-dressing had to be added to his impressive list of deviations from the pattern of behaviors generally associated with reasonably well-adjusted people . On the other hand , Kim Henkel did co-write the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Tobe Hooper , and has thus been granted at least some right to tamper with the character . What you see in the movie , however , is a lot of tampering gone horribly , horribly wrong . If it ain't broken , as they say , don't fix it . You may end up making it worse . What is amazing to me is how far McConaughey and Zellweger have both come in spite of this film . As I was watching the film , I couldn't believe I was watching the same actor who had turned in such wonderful performances in movies like Bridget Jones ' Diary and Cold Mountain , as well as another actor who displayed strong acting presence in movies like EdTV and U-571 . Why the focus on Leatherface being a transvestite ? Leatherface is a side character anyway , it is Vilmer ( McConaughey ) who is the star , which is sad because he plays such a belligerent , disgusting character . If you don't believe me that he's more the star than Leatherface , count how many people Leatherface , or anyone else , kills with a chainsaw in the movie ( hint : none ) . Vilmer is the new head of household in the backwoods family , working as a tow-truck driver / reckless murderer and who has the fascinating addition of an electric leg that is operated by remote control . At one point , a high school kid pleads for help , then when he realizes Vilmer's one of the bad guys , he runs away from the truck ( running straight down the street rather than into the woods to relative safety , of course ) , Vilmer gleefully chases him down , laughing and hooting and hollering all the while , and then runs him over five or six times before stashing his body on the back of the truck to later taunt one of his little friends with . As is to be expected , there is never any motive given behind any of the random killings , this is all just the sickening actions of an insane family in the woods , evidently comfortably separate from any sort of law enforcement or even the most tenuous interaction with greater civilization , waiting for unsuspecting teenagers to stumble into their midst . Interesting that the movie starts out as such a gigantic horror movie cliché , and still manages to go downhill from there . Horror movie sequels are first faced with the usually daunting task of justifying themselves . A horror movie sequel has to have a premise that gives it a reason for having been made , otherwise it is clearly a cash cow made to cash in on the success of the original film . Texas Chainsaw 4 , instead , simply passes itself off as something of a remake of the original , rather than another sequel , and turns from the more plodding and slow-moving original to the mindless , completely over-the-top belligerence that you see here . The scenes at the house are peppered with stupid violence , at one point Vilmer throws Darla to the ground and steps on her neck with his powerful leg , nearly killing her by suffocation or by breaking her neck , clearly not caring which . Naturally , she gets up and complains that she could easily leave him and go back to her husband . Charming . Add cannibalism to the mix and you have a hilariously bad movie . Jenny spends much of the latter half of the movie trying to escape from the hungry hungry hicks , as we are constantly bombarded with the stupid , stupid characters and plot twists that the movie makes as it ineptly tries to combine the horror and comedy that even the most mildly competent horror film can display . This is exactly the kind of thing that really makes me wonder why , every time a new movie comes out in a certain series , I always go back and watch the whole series before watching it . I'm still working on The Friday the 13th movies , the Nightmares on Elm Street , and the Child's Play films , which are decidedly more fun than the Texas Chainsaws . And to make matters worse , I have heard nothing but bad things about the 2003 Texas Chainsaw . And given how right all the bad reviews of this movie are , that is certainly a sinking feeling . |
543,735 | 562,732 | 147,972 | 1 | Jesus with fangs . | This stupid , stupid religious horror film starts out with an arbitrary premise and goes precipitously downhill from there . Evidently there is some sort of demon that has been held captive for thousands of years , and for some unexplained reason it is set loose every thousand years . To stretch its legs , I suppose . One girl gathers together a bunch of devout college age believers to witness the demon and prevent its escape , and what we get is a ludicrous mess of a movie that does no justice to the enticing cover box , which should qualify as false advertisement . Let me tell you a little secret about that demon on the cover box , by the way . It is by leaps and bounds the most interesting thing that the movie has going for it , and it is literally on screen for less than one second . That should give you an idea of the intelligence level of the movie . I made the mistake of watching this disaster two days after watching The Passion of the Christ , arguably one of the most powerful religious films ever made , so when I saw Jesus with fangs in this movie I almost fell over backwards at the sheer , overwhelming dumbness of it all . Even without the fangs the guy who plays Jesus looked like some slob that got up off his couch just long enough to put on some sheets and make a pathetic attempt to play Jesus . This guy blew it that badly and he was only playing Jesus in some girl's nightmare . Then again , he fits right in with the rest of the actors , who deliver some staggeringly bad performances . One IMDb user makes the astounding claim that this movie is beautiful , then goes on to suggest that the acting is not as bad as other reviewers claim . Well , in that regard he's right . It's worse . |
544,028 | 562,732 | 486,020 | 1 | Unbelievably bad ? | I had never heard of Dead Man's Bounty when I saw it at the DVD store a few weeks ago , and I thought I had stumbled upon an unrecognized gem , since it had Val Kilmer in it in a truly unique role . Sadly , it wasn't more than ten or fifteen minutes into the movie that I realized that this is a disaster of epic proportions . The first clue you will see of how genuinely awful this movie is comes near the beginning , when you have a bunch of dirtbags in an old saloon laughing like a bunch of hyenas in a scene that goes on about five times too long . It's unbelievable how bad it is . And sadly , it doesn't get any better . Val Kilmer is featured prominently on the movie's cover box , maybe to trick you into thinking that he has a role in the film , but unfortunately his bizarre role as a dead man is overlooked in favor of focusing on a bunch of half-wit crooks and the most inept conceptualization of a unique town sheriff that I've ever seen in a movie . He's played by Boguslaw Linda , who is unable to or uninterested in covering his Polish accent , immediately making it impossible that the movie is meant to take place in the American old west . Does Poland have this type of frontier past ? I don't know . My knowledge of Polish history is not my strong point , but I can tell you this , The Sheriff , as he is known in the movie , is the worst representation of law enforcement that I can ever remember seeing in a movie . He is introduced in a truly ridiculous scene where he is wearing some kind of blindfold and a roomful of men take turns punching him in the face . Before they start hitting him , he explains that they can each hit him once , and then , after the first round , they will each hit him again , and if he can identify who is throwing the punches , they lose . What the hell is this crap ? I am completely at a loss to explain why a scene like this would ever be put into any movie . Throughout the movie , the Sheriff continues to appear more and more beaten and bruised and drunk and battered , until ultimately he does nothing but show up occasionally , stumbling on screen and mumbling " not ? without . . . the law ? " You see , there is a lot of talk and preparation for a hanging , the details of which are as meaningless as the rest of the movie . It takes place , by the way , in a town that consists of nothing more than two ramshackle wooden buildings facing each other across a flattened bit of dirt that is more of a path than a road . My understanding is that it is a part of Poland that is supposed to look acceptably enough like the American southwest , where none of the characters , except maybe the dead guy , could possibly have come from . I have heard that Val Kilmer accepted the role because he was intrigued by his unique role , and also by director Uklanski's minimal use of dialogue in favor of a reliance on cleverly timed juxtaposition of images in unique visual montages . Yeah , whatever . Seems to me that Kilimer was unable to overcome what must have been the truly satisfying feeling that he must have gotten when he was offered the role . Personally , I would really feel that I had reached quite some level of success if someone approached me and offered me probably a few hundred thousand dollars to come and lay still for a while . I like to think that he didn't even read the script for this mess , because if he did I am at a total loss to understand why he accepted the role . At any rate , the movie opens with a man bringing in the corpse of a man , played by Kilmer , seeking the reward . Soon he finds himself embroiled in a ludicrous love story involving the town prostitute , the alcoholic Sheriff , and lots of mayhem involving a series of stupid , stupid characters . There is also a extensive and preposterous lack of understanding of American rituals . In one scene , a man cuts a cherry tomato in half and squishes the halves into Kilmer's eyes ( for what reason , I can't imagine ) , and then later , a man makes a short speech over Kilmer's corpse , in which he explains that he was " one of the finest men we ever had , " and then he proceeds to lop his head off with a shovel . What the HELL ? ? Not convinced yet ? Here are some more reasons not to watch it . In one scene the Sheriff appears to be covered with ash , except for the perfectly clean areas around his eyes and what can only possibly be described as bright red lipstick . A man gets a head wound that drenches his head and body in blood . In a daze , he cauterizes it with gunpowder . Smart . Near the end , the Sheriff appears to have a broken arm . Sitting at the bar , he puts a rope around his neck and connects it to his injured arm , and uses his good arm to pull on the rope , lifting his shaking beer glass in his bad arm to his mouth , rather than using his good arm to drink . Also smart . Why doesn't he just use his good arm ? I have no idea . That , like everything else in the movie , makes no sense whatsoever , like the title . Summer Love ? Are you kidding me ? Avoid this mess at all costs . In the meantime , here's something for the IMDb Goofs page ? Errors made by characters ( possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers ) : This movie got made . HA ! |
544,458 | 562,732 | 1,233,427 | 1 | You might enjoy this if you enjoy garbage television and have never seen a Japanese game show . | I think the title " I Survived an Idiotic Americanized Version of a Japanese Game Show " might be more appropriate . I had high hopes for this show , having recently been enjoying several episodes of one of my favorite game shows of all time , Most Extreme Challenge . Sadly , this is stupid , stupid American television of the lowest order . " Survived " is really a sad joke , because the only thing that is survived is the voting off of your fellow contestants , since the show is just another who-will-get-voted-off-next crapfest just like the hundreds that have been secreting from your TV set for the last ten years or so . The actual stunts and physical challenges , the nonstop fun of a real Japanese game show like MXC , make up maybe 15 % of the show , the rest of it being ridiculous bickering among the contestants , who are composed of the most ludicrous American caricatures you can imagine . Britney Spears would fit right in with this cast . It would be nice if the networks didn't insist on broadcasting meaningless and thoughtless sludge and passing it off as American culture . No stars . Avoid . |
543,789 | 562,732 | 84,695 | 1 | Wait ! I think I hear someone ! I better go play the piano ? | The above is not a direct quote , but a quote of the action . At one point , one of the girls is home alone , talking on the phone , and tells the person on the phone that she has to go because she thinks she hears someone . She hangs up the phone and walks immediately over to the piano and starts playing . Now , I normally reserve my votes of for movies that are absolutely incomprehensible on any level . Slumber Party Massacre has a definitely decipherable plot , but the plot is nothing but a flimsy clothesline along which are staged a lot of cheap thrills and boring murder scenes . And , ironically enough , even in the case of a movie that is obviously driven by nudity ( of which the film features remarkably little ) , I don't mean cheap thrills as far as shower scenes or lingerie scenes or any weak trash like that . You have the screeching cat scare , half a dozen or so friends sneaking up on people and viciously grabbing their shoulder from behind or something , only to throw up their hands like , What ? What ? I scared you ? Each successive one making this movie more and more of an endurance test than the weak horror , awful acting , or abysmal script-writing could ever do . And who's the killer ? No one . Some tool in cowboy boots and a lot of denim . Evidently he's an escaped mass murderer who went on a killing spree in the late 60s , which I guess would explain why he appears to be nothing but a middle-aged man with graying hair and a three foot drill . It's like they picked some jerk off the street and said Hey , hold this drill and let us film you running around this locker room for a little while . That should be good enough for this movie . I love all of the attempts to impose some deep women's lib meaning into this movie by commenting on the obviously phallic drill that this jean-jacket-clad maniac chases these women around with . Not that there's anything wrong with the women's liberation movement or implying that a film like this has any meaning in regards to the plight of women , I just think it's really funny to inject meaning into a film as meaningless as this one . ( spoilers ) There's one scene at the end of the film where there is a weak attempt to suggest the insanity of the killer as he mumbles his total of I think 21 spoken words ( not including the gibberish he screams after he gets his hand cut off ) , the first few of which are , " You're all so pretty , " and , shockingly enough , " I love you . " Very cute , it's too bad this sudden moment of character depth comes so far out of left field that it is memorable simply because of its separation with the rest of the film than any meaning it might carry . Joseph Ulibas ( my neighbor right over in Sacramento ) makes an interesting comment that Freud would have loved to psychoanalyze the killer in this movie . Sure , this last scene definitely implies some serious sexual anxiety , as this is apparently a man who gets his thrills by killing pretty women that he loves , but to be perfectly honest , I think Freud would have more of a field day analyzing the writers and , at least as much , whoever it was that read the script and decided that this would be a good movie . |
544,393 | 562,732 | 78,935 | 1 | Ruggero Deodato has truly achieved a milestone new level of depravity and meaningless violence ? | What you have in Cannibal Holocaust is a story about a group of people from NYU that go to document a culture of cannibals and never come back . Not that the story matters . Having watched I think three cannibal movies now ( this is three more than the average healthy adult's lifetime recommended dosage ) , it has become clear to me that they are nothing more than exhibitions of movie violence and sickness . And in that area , the movie succeeds brilliantly . It is so tasteless and so disgusting that it's amazing that things like this ever get made . And not just for the animal mutilations or the feces flinging ( yeah that really happens in this movie . It's not just a t-shirt for smartass teenagers ) or the orgies of misogynistic violence , but of course there are tons of naked natives in the movie , many of them obviously underage . But I guess that is just not a concern in whatever country the movie was distributed from . I am guessing we are meant to be impressed by the feeding scenes , since logic would lead you to believe that that is what a cannibal film centers on . If so , maybe that explains why all the natives must smear their food all over their faces before they eat it , although I am at a loss to explain why women are regularly mutilated , dismembered , fornicated with and THEN eaten . It becomes clear early on that surely someone in the group of NYU people must snap , unable to take what they're seeing anymore , and of course it does happen . One guy , since the natives ' distrust ' them ( maybe it was all that shooting ? ) decides to strip naked to " become like them . " Evidently this man has never seen the whiteness of his naked self before , but the island girls don't seem to mind . As soon as this awkward white guy strips off his khakis a whole group of naked girls run up to him and start grab-assing for a little while . Hey , maybe cannibals aren't so bad after all ? Oh , but minutes later , the group are forced to eat human , as is to be expected . The natives gleefully shove entrails in their faces as they inexplicably turn into savages for the purpose of this bizarre plot . Why the instant and total descent into barbarism ? I have no idea , the movie isn't intelligent enough to explain such a thing , all it knows how to do is show you something that you would be much better off never seeing . A giant turtle is torn apart alive with bare hands while the cameraman zooms in for an extreme close-up so as not to miss a single revolting detail , a monkey gets its face cut off , a backwoods amputation is cauterized with a hot machete and , when the poor amputee immediately dies , the rest of the crew forget seconds later , laughing and joking in the subsequent footage . This is , of course , all documentary footage that they're watching of a past film crew . It seems that these mental giants went into the village and started screaming and shooting their guns and burning the village , and then wondered why they were massacred . It is not exactly a massive intellectual surge when one of the new crew says " these people probably think WE'RE the savages ! " Yeah , what tipped you off ? The burning of their village or the fornicating in the ashes ? Clearly this is meant to be the movie's thinly disguised message . White people are savages at least as much as the people that we think of as savages . Oh and in case you didn't happen to catch that message when it smacked you in the head numerous times like a ton of bricks , at one point the " civilized " people grab one of the native girls and rape her , trying to show her the errors of her ways . Clever . These people are nothing like any manner of civilized people , they are absolute degenerates and should be imprisoned . They even shout for joy when they find a woman impaled on a pole . What the hell is this garbage ? But in watching a movie like this , it seems to me that it is the people that would make and distribute something like this that are the savages . At least horror movies are FUN , even bad ones . And this is not a bad horror movie . It's not a horror movie at all , I don't know what you would call it , but it is truly horrible . A mother gives birth to an infant in the movie , for example . The baby is taken away from it's mother , drenched in blood and then buried in the mud while the mother is beaten to death with rocks . There is a point in the movie where the utterly talentless writer , evidently unaware of how breathtakingly obvious his story is , has one of his characters spoon-feed you the real meaning of the movie : " Today people want sensationalism . The more you rape their senses , the happier they are . " This sentence betrays a staggering lack of understanding of film-going audiences , but at least it is a flawless description of the thought behind the movie . Too bad you have to watch it to learn that you should never have watched it ? |
543,882 | 562,732 | 257,106 | 1 | I normally reserve my votes of for those extremely few films that are absolutely incomprehensible . I made an exception for this disaster . | Doesn't it seem like just days ago that we were flogged with the FIRST Scary Movie ? What a pile of crap this movie was . There's just no other way to describe it . I hated the original , for obvious reasons , so I was shocked that this ridiculous sequel managed to sneak beneath the abysmal level to which the original sank less than a year ago . The Wayans brothers have returned to the spotlight to remind the world of their immaturity , their sickening sense of humor , and their absolute lack of any type of film-making talent . This is drivel of the lowest order and is completely devoid of redeeming values of any kind . On the other hand , there is a place for a film like this , even among educated people . For example , if you are a professional film critic , or even an average movie-goer who writes reviews for the IMDb ( a group of people with whom I proudly associate ) , then a movie like Scary Movie 2 is worth watching just because it is so much fun to shoot it down afterwards in a review . There's something morbidly satisfying about watching a dumbass movie like this and then tearing it up in a review , even if you already know that not too many people will bother to read it . I can't even begin to satisfactorily convey to you the absolute idiocy of this film , I can only say that there is a total absence of any kind of talent or thought behind it , and it results as nothing more than an hour and a half of blabbering nonsense . Did you ever wonder how many perfectly good careers are ended , some even before they've really began , by hideous movies like this ? Tori Spelling's flailing and altogether unenviable career is officially over , Tim Curry is too good an actor to be completely destroyed by movie like this , but this was clearly his version of Travolta starring Battlefield Earth . There can be no doubt about Anna Faris's talent as an actress , and she's beautiful , too , but she'll never be able to overcome the awful reputation that she has established for herself in the Scary Movies . Marlon and Shawn Wayans are the lucky ones here , because neither had anything to lose when they took on these crapfests . This kind of movie is a metaphorical handgun with which various actors can voluntarily commit career suicide . For shame . And one more thing , if any of the people behind the Scary Movies are reading this , I'd like to ask a huge favor for the greater good of mankind - " FOR GOD'S SAKE , NO MORE ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! " |
544,608 | 562,732 | 81,112 | 1 | Worse than every single one of the two other cannibal movies that I have ever seen . | One IMDb reviewer calls Eaten Alive a passable film for the " cannibal connoisseur . " Are there such people ? I didn't know . But if you are one of them , hey , have a ball . The rest of you might find this tripe a bit hard to swallow ( pun intended ) , even if , like me , you consider yourself a horror film connoisseur . I have been an avid horror fan for about 15 years now , although I never got around to the cannibal subgenre until a few weeks ago , and I guess I owe my short-lived interest in these groan-inducing movies , strangely enough , to China's total disregard for copyright laws . You see , I bought a two-disc DVD collection of all of Wesley Snipes ' films for 20 yuan ( about $2 . 75 ) , which turned out to include Last Cannibal World , Mountain of the Cannibal God , Eaten Alive , Cannibal Holocaust , Next , with Nicholas Cage , and something called Voodoo Lagoon , along with Blade 1-3 , in Chinese . Nice . Being a second sequel , I immediately got a sinking feeling when the movie opened with a cannibal in street clothes wandering around major American cities , shooting unsuspecting Americans with poison darts and then scrambling away at full speed . Having run out of ways to keep movie cannibals scary , it seems that now they have made their way to the mainland . Later , you may be shocked to learn that this guy is on a " training exercise . " Lock up your daughters ! Before long the movie settles into the old missing sister routine , as a young blonde woman named Sheila begins her own investigation of the disappearance of her sister , who looks nothing like her in any way , but she's willing to spend most of the movie naked so I guess that doesn't matter . It seems that , after shooting one of his victims , the hapless cannibal we met early in the movie , not used to big city life , ran into the road and was struck dead by a moving van . The brilliant police force find a mysterious bit of film on him showing Sheila's sister involved in some bizarre ritual behavior , but other than the film , the guy is a complete mystery . As the piteous police chief laments , " we know nothing about him except that he's dead ! " Poor guy , he must be getting a headache from all this . I recommend a nap . Luckily , Sheila is the kind of girl who can throw around tens of thousands of dollars like it's nothing in the search for her sister . Perfect for hiring a plucky backwoods guide caricature , since the police are clearly going to be no help . Obviously , nothing new is added to this miniscule sub-genre . Quite the contrary , cannibalism almost seems like a background to a completely different kind of bad movie , about the rescue of a missing person from the dangerous elements . Thickening the plot of that clothesline is not difficult , all you have to do is add in a cartoonish jungle cult of people who follow some guy who calls himself Jonas , who believes in using pain as a way to reunite man with nature , a process they call " purification . " Personally , I prefer just peeing outside occasionally . One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Sheila is caught by one of the cult members - an overweight guy who looks like he took a three-day weekend from the office to appear in this movie . As he pulls out his trusty medical kit to give her an injection , he warns her , " If you don't believe in Jonas and purification ( through pain ) , God help you . " He then gives her a shot and , when she winces from the tiny pinch , he politely apologizes to her . I sense a true believer in this guy ! As far as the gore , there are plenty of nasty sound effects over random shots of animals getting slaughtered and more than enough disgusting footage of women being cut up and eaten alive , so I guess right there the movie lives up to its name . The acting is astonishingly bad , as can be expected , and interestingly enough , the editing is also spectacularly botched but still strangely effective . Unfortunately , I think you have to be able to relate to people who believe in utterly insane cults in order to relate to anyone in the movie . There are plenty of outlandish religious ceremonies that take place , which make it more and more difficult to understand why Sheila's sister decided to turn her back on normal society . I'm all for individualism and doing your own thing , but come ON . After a while the movie descends even further into your basic , run of the mill escape movie , just before we witness the most wildly inappropriate rendition of Glory , Glory Hallelujah in film history . WOW . Note : in this movie , a woman is raped with a severed snake . If you need any more reason never to watch it , seek professional help . Avoid this mess at all costs . |
544,786 | 562,732 | 46,248 | 1 | Yawn . | This is supposed to be one of the greatest " bad " movies ever made . I don't see anything great about it . If ' great ' means that it is appreciable that a film was made that makes a complete mockery of the cinematic medium , then yes , it was wonderful . Everything about this movie was awful . They just did every little thing wrong , and it is understandable to me why the director reportedly attempted suicide after hearing the critics demolish this film when it was released . He had to have expected that , though , don't you think he watched the finished product before releasing it ? How could he have missed the impending annihilation by critics and audiences that he was inevitably going to be subjected to ? ! If you've never seen this film , you're way ahead of the game . If you have seen it , I respectfully offer my condolences . |
544,504 | 562,732 | 1,073,498 | 1 | I have not seen this movie . | If you look through my reviews , you'll notice that I've reviewed three Scary Movies , along with Epic Movie ( with which this movie deservedly shares a spot on the IMDb Bottom 100 ) not long ago , and in most of them I berate myself for being stupid enough to waste my time watching them . This is the first time I've ever written a review of a movie I haven't seen , and I do it only because I've thrown away so many hours watching the ridiculous tripe that these idiots continue to defecate into theaters . In this case , thankfully , the trailer alone was enough to show me that it was going to be more of the idiotic , nonsensical garbage we have come to expect from Friedberg and Seltzer . I'm willing to bet that their parents tell people that they haven't heard from their kids in years and don't know what they are up to because they don't know how to get a hold of them . Aren't they making those movies , though ? No , no , no , no , no , that's not my son . Definitely not . My son is , ah , anyone else . Have you seen those yellow warning signs that say " Caution : This is Sparta " ? THAT is funny . You don't even have to watch it to know that this movie is not . There are a lot of times when you can ignore the nay-sayers and watch a badly reviewed movie anyway and make up your own mind . This is not one of those times . No stars . |
544,891 | 562,732 | 450,278 | 1 | Liberate tute me , es en ferris . | Now , if my repeated viewings of Event Horizon have taught me correctly , the above statement , translated from Latin , means " Save yourself from Hell . " By " Hell , " of course , I mean the horrendous experience of watching this unbelievably bad movie , and by " save yourself , " of course , I mean for GOD'S sake don't watch it . is about ten times too high . Dear Mr . Roth , Listen , keep my $9 , you prick , just give me back my 95 minutes , my dignity , and my respect for horror movies . You have stolen from me . I happen to believe in the theory that whenever you see someone tied to a chair in a movie , you have a screenwriter that ran out of ideas . Following that logic , this movie never had a thought in its head from the very beginning . I have to admit that in the first act , I was positively beaming at the screen I was so interested in where the film was going ( because of the sexual element and an accompanying feeling that the movie was not going to cop out and go where every other horror movie involving sex went ) . Had I taken two seconds to see that this movie was directed by the same jerkoff who defecated Cabin Fever into theaters a couple of years ago I would have known not to watch it in the first place , but sadly I just checked the movie times and went out and paid $9 to be tortured through my eyes for an hour and a half . This movie seems to have been hugely popular at the Toronto International Film Festival , I can only theorize that the people who wrote glowing reviews on the IMDb are either closet sociopaths or were simply starstruck that the director was there talking about this film , pretending it wasn't the revolting sludge that it is . I promise you , this is one of the absolute worst films of any kind that I have ever seen . Some Americans go to Amsterdam for drugs and sex as Americans are wont to do , like it or not , and are advised to go to a certain hostel in Slovakia where beautiful women will just pounce on them . They find this to be startlingly true , until the girls drug them , big guys come and take them down into the dungeon and strap them to chairs in separate rooms , and for $25 , 000 , rich people can come in and torture and kill them in any way they can think of ( could it be for revenge against those dirty Americans for coming into our countries and dirtying the place up ? ) . Directed by an American , by the way . Of course , you can't really claim that the movie is racist against Americans , because you can buy access to other ethnicities as well ( for a substantially lower price ) . One creative individual decides to save some money and just go for a Japanese girl rather than an expensive American , and he proceeds to blowtorch her face until one of her eyes bulges out of its socket and hangs down on her cheek . Our " hero " has managed to escape his own torture and shoot and kill his tormentor , and goes into the room and shoots the guy torturing her , then displays a massive surge of brilliant intelligence by apologetically cutting off her eyeball , sending white pus running down her cheek , and THEN tries to get her out of there . Do you mean to tell me that you find this trash entertaining ? My GOD ! ! When the movie thankfully ended , I have never in my life felt the urge so strongly to find the manager and demand my money back , the film is that sick and that twisted and utterly without redeeming value . I am absolutely baffled at the people who praise this movie on the IMDb . This thing is so disgusting and so cheap and so stupid and so sick that it blows my mind that there are people who really think there is some social value to a movie that makes you wonder how you would torture someone . And to make matters worse , nothing is resolved at the end . We are handed this cardboard resolution that solves nothing at all , the fire is dimmed by dousing a flame here and there , leaving the smoldering source of the torturous blaze firmly burning . I don't even want to give this staggeringly pathetic mass of congealed stupidity and perversion the pleasure of a spoiler alert , so I'll just give you an analogy . The main character , Paxton , is a man lost in the woods , when suddenly he's attacked by a bear . Ultimately , he is faced with the possibility of picking up a gun and shooting the bear , but instead decides to stomp on the bear's foot , and the movie ends as he runs cowering into the woods . This film is absolute drivel of the lowest order , a pitiful attempt to do something new in the horror genre by removing all elements of story , character , reason , creativity , tension , depth , thought , and meaning , and reducing itself to nothing but a lot of people strapped to chairs and being mutilated alive . If this is entertainment to you , you have some real problems . This movie strikes me as the kind of thing that would be enjoyed by someone who gets a real kick out of those disgusting videos that have been coming out of Iraq . I feel violated just because I've seen this movie . |
544,287 | 562,732 | 799,949 | 1 | Total crap just like the rest of them . | Here's something revealing about Epic Movie . From a purely technical point of view , it has some truly impressive make-up and production values at many points . Some of the set designs and character re-creations from real movies are done in great detail and are actually pretty good . For this reason , the movie wins extra points , and yet it still deserves less than a . Like the other garbage regularly let loose from this group of talentless buffoons , Epic Movie is yet another barely decipherable shoestring of a plot draped carelessly over a bizarre series of idiotic skits lampooning current popular movies ( notice " popular " and not " good " ) , resulting in another romp through the asinine sense of humor of writers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer . By the way , these guys remind me of strippers or porn stars . I always wonder what these people say to their parents about their " careers . " Likewise , how can Friedberg's and Seltzer's parents not be horribly humiliated by what their sons do for a living ? How difficult is it for them to keep secret what their kids are currently doing to the world ? I mean , can they really possibly watch a movie like this and think , " That's my boy ! " I should think not . I would wonder about them , too . But hey , these guys are laughing all the way to the bank . They spend all summer at the movies and then go home and rip off as many films as they can and throw in as many disgusting jokes as possible and they are making millions of dollars every time . My only consolation is that I live in China and , since everything is pirated here , those jerks didn't make a dime off of me because I watched it on a pirated DVD . Yeah , that's right . I bought a pirated copy of Epic Movie and I own it . I paid 10 yuan ( about $1 . 35 ) for it , which is about ten times what it's worth . What a ripoff . Actually I take that back . My other consolation is that they are running out of generic genres . What's next , Children's Movie ? |
543,827 | 562,732 | 54,240 | 1 | Orgy of the Dead ? Orgy of the DEAD ? ? What's dead in this movie ? NOTHING ! | Except for the obvious , of course , like the acting , directing , the script , the tremendously awful set , startlingly bad editing , etc . This massively bad film is supposedly based on a novel , although there is about enough going on in the film to fill a paragraph at most . It amazes me that this mess was actually at some point stretched out into an entire novel . So some guy named Bob takes his nervous girlfriend out to a cemetery in the middle of the night , sure that the trip will provide him with the necessary inspiration to come up with his next great horror story . I am reminded of just about every interview of Stephen King that I've ever seen or read as Bob explains to his girlfriend why he writes about that stuff instead of something happier and more joyful . As Bob explains , horror sells better than flowers and daisies . Maybe Ed Wood should have taken his own advice . Obviously written under a severe writer's block , Orgy of the Dead starts off with literally the worst editing that I have ever seen in a film of any kind ( student films included ) . At the beginning of the film , Bob's girlfriend is complaining to him that she's nervous to be out in the mountains driving around when it's pitch black outside , except they keep cutting to exterior shots of the car driving down mountain roads in BROAD DAYLIGHT . They didn't even bother to use day for night photography even a LITTLE bit . This may as well have been two in the afternoon in July , yet whenever we see a close-up of them , it's inky blackness outside . Outstanding ! The rest of the film is nothing but a variety of women dancing to awful , awful music , and in most cases performing awful , awful dances , while ' The Emperor ' looks on and decides their ultimate fate based on how pleased he is with their performances ( which please him regardless of how terrible they are ) . There is absolutely nothing here that even slightly resembles a horror film , except for a couple of total idiots in ridiculous K-Mart costumes , and a lot of terrible acting . And terrible , by the way , is an enormous understatement . At one point , while they're tied up and forced to watch the ladies do their dances ( ahh ! ! The torture ! ! ! ) , Bob's girlfriend closes her eyes and grows silent , to which Bob responds , ' Don't panic ! ' Every single shot must have been the first take , I guarantee the film was filmed and edited in less than a day . What a total waste of an afternoon that must have been . |
544,692 | 562,732 | 384,533 | 2 | Will the real Spike Lee please stand up . . . | So the anti-Bush campaign that makes up the first 45 minutes or so of the movie are pretty clear . Even the attack on Bush's anti-gay tendencies are pretty clear . What's not clear is what the movie's trying to do . Jack is a corporate employee with serious potential who finds himself unemployed because of his refusal to ignore the massive corporate corruption with which he suddenly finds himself surrounded . So then he goes home to his fancy apartment , which he can no longer afford to maintain , and then has to deal with the torturous proposal of impregnating lesbians at $10 , 000 a piece . The most difficult endeavor that the movie takes on is in trying to make us believe that Jack was actually conflicted about all of this , and it fails miserably . There a nonsensical subplot about him still being upset about his ex-girlfriend , the lesbian who is bringing all of her lesbian friends to be impregnated by Jack , but only after her . Keep in mind that their breakup happened FOUR YEARS EARLIER , and not only was he belligerently furious to come home and find his sexy girlfriend having sex with another sexy woman , but he hasn't gotten over it four years later . They actually get into screaming arguments in the movie about this ancient history between themselves . I'm reminded of one of Julia Roberts ' many great lines from Closer ? " What are you , 12 ? " So while he's not busy acting like a junior high school kid who's heartbroken about some girl who cheated on him , he's having sex with whole lines of lesbians and trying to act like it's just hell to him . Please . At the risk of sounding like some typical jerk , for such a thing to be torturous to a man we need to have a real , real good reason for him to hate doing it , and still being upset about a relationship that ended nearly half a decade earlier isn't even close to reason enough . I can accept that the movie wants to suggest that this guy genuinely loved his girlfriend and truly feels like he has lost the love of his life , but let me tell you one thing . Showing a guy suffer through Every Man's Fantasy is not the way to do it . At all . Unless , of course , you have some ulterior political motive , but that's just not Spike Lee's style , right ? Right ? I won't spend much time talking about the ludicrous premise about the lesbians . Whether you've seen the movie or not , you probably already know all about it . The problem is that you also come into the movie already knowing what a socially and politically conscious filmmaker Spike Lee is . We know that he is going to be making political statements in the film , and some of them are clear while others are not , unless Spike has completely lost all sense of balance . There are scenes where it is increasingly obvious what social ills are being dealt with , such as the terrible scene where Jack has some wooden and massively unrealistic conversation with his friend , who is trying to make money donating sperm . It's a god-awful scene , but it's relatively clear what is being said . I could , of course , come up with some pretty solid theories about what is being said about the homosexual content of the film , how Jack the black man is forced to descend to that level , but it is such a gigantic portion of the film that it even overshadows that picture of Bush on the $3 bill at the end of the opening credits , and that's a difficult image to overshadow . Lee puts so much stock into the lesbians in this movie that it borders on low - grade soft porn . At one point in the movie , while bike riding together , Jack's brother gives him a bright , sparkling gem of advice ? get a vasectomy and call it a day . Now , there are two things that could lead a man to give such advice to his brother . First , it could be because he's been having too much sex , or second , it could be because he's making ten thousand dollars at a time doing it . Either way , it's a good reason never to take advice from your brother again . Jack , of course , reacts by throwing a temper tantrum like an 8 year old kid , resulting in one of the great many scenes that made me want to put a pot over my head and start beating on it with a serving ladle . One of the biggest problems with the movie is that not only does it bore and irritate but it deliberately insults the audience . Granted , I didn't know a lot of the details about some of the homages that are made in the film , such as the XFL player that inspired the title of the film and the security guard who exposed the Watergate break-in and ruined his own life in the process . I can understand if Lee wants us to be aware of what he's talking about , but he literally stops his movie to put these stories up on billboards and then hits us over the head with them . By the end of the movie I was literally standing up , pacing back and forth I was so irritated and desperate for it to end . There are times when I wish I didn't have this determination to finish watching movies , even the abysmally terrible ones . The really sad thing about She Hate Me is that it isn't even not very good for a Spike Lee film , this is just a bad movie overall . It's almost weird to think that it was directed by the same man that directed true classics like Do The Right Thing , one of my all time favorite films . She Hate Me is Spike Lee's version of Spielberg's 1941 , but worse . Much worse . |
544,916 | 562,732 | 68,282 | 2 | You would think that a women in prison movie would be an automatic disaster ? | And you'd be right . Black Mama , White Mama , also known as ' Women in Chains , ' is exactly the kind of trashy and crappy b-movie that the premise suggests . Pam Grier has been thrown into a prison on a small island with a lot of other women , and this place seriously makes the summer camp where Martha Stewart is locked up right now look like a maximum-security prison . It's not five minutes into the movie that one of the hottie guards utters the line ' Strip ' em and get ' em wet , ' and then we are introduced to a prison life that resembles some college freshman's fantasy of what the inside of a sorority house is like . The prisoners soap and rub and wrestle with each other in the shower like it's a Girls Gone Wild shoot , then they all hang out together in their dorm , openly smoking pot and discussing in a big group what would be the best ways to escape . I've never been to prison myself , but I have a feeling that escape plans are the kind of thing that you want as few people as possible to know about , prisoners or guards or otherwise . The biggest difference between this prison life and some fantasy sorority life is that the women in this movie all wear orange cardigans ( and no pants . Go figure ) that say PRISON on the back . Must be those generic prison outfits for prisons that can't afford pricey accessories like their prison name or prisoner numbers for their uniforms . And as is to be expected , a prison that can't afford to put prisoner identification on the backs of the uniforms can obviously not expect to be able to find guards that are interested in guarding the prisoners as much as they are in having sex with the prisoners and each other . The conflict of the movie's title refers to the fact that Lee Daniels ( Pam Grier ) spends much of the time handcuffed to a blonde prisoner named Karen as they are on the run from the cops after escaping from the prison . I won't go into details about how they escape except to say that you might have seen something like it in The Fugitive had they been unable to afford to stage a train wreck , and it leads into the muddled story of the conflicting interests also chasing these two women for different reasons . Karen and Lee both have their own gangs of people each hoping to rescue their respective escaped prisoner , and the cops are after both of them all the while . ( spoilers ) So Karen is involved with a bunch of hippies that want to Revolutionize Life As They Know It . Meanwhile , Karen just wants to get off the island , something she's been trying to do for years , and isn't it just perfect that they each need to go to completely opposite sides of the island in order to fulfill their goals . So we get this odd couple pairing and , since they are an odd couple , it's not hard to predict that they will hate each other for the vast majority of the film but grow fond of each other by the end . In a movie with so many conflicting interests , especially when those conflicting interests not only propel the two main characters in opposite directions as they pursue their goals , it is not unreasonable to expect that there will be a climactic moment involving the rival gangs at some point in the movie . Not about to leave anyone unsatisfied , they throw in a stupid gang standoff at the end of the movie , where everyone shoots machine guns at each other , killing each other en masse while the two women paddle safely and calmly across the river in a little boat . Nice . Even better , at the end of the movie , after a huge massacre in which lots of people get shot and spurt bright red paint all over the place , the Captain of the police looks over the masses of dead criminals covered in awful , awful special effects , and we learn that he will be a Major before dinner . Not a bad way to end the movie , the criminals all kill each other off and the cops get all the credit , but here is the last line in the film ? ' It's better to win , isn't it ? ' Is THAT why the Captain is going to get promoted to Major ? Because he figured that out ? ? ? |
543,927 | 562,732 | 852,713 | 2 | Actual quote deemed appropriate for kids 13 and up - " Eyes are the nipples of the face ! " | There's a scene in The House Bunny where a key character inquires as to whether Shelley is , in fact , " that dumb . " One of her fellow sorority sisters immediately stands up and says , indignantly , " She's not dumb ! " This is an important scene , and my immediate assumption was that we , the audience , were meant to shake our fists at the screen and say , " Yeah ! " But then I remembered that for well over an hour by then , the movie had been scrambling frantically to get us to laugh at how genuinely and spectacularly dumb she is . This is a contradiction that permeates the entire movie , with strange results . When I saw that scene , I was immediately relieved that I had found the movie up to that point so completely unamusing , otherwise I would have felt guilty for laughing at this girl , who , I understand , is " not dumb . " So , in order to flaunt my superiority , I turned around in my chair and shook my fist at the drunk , cackling teenagers at the back of the theater and yelled , " Yeah ! She's not dumb ! See ? You little punks ! " Strangely , this only brought more laughter . The House Bunny , by the way , is PG-13 , which should cause the majority of the male audience to lose interest entirely and confuse anyone over 17 as to why anyone would find such a movie interesting . The story is centered around the life of a Playboy bunny who is ousted from the Playboy mansion . Playboy's founder himself , Hugh Hefner , plays a sizable supporting role . Would one be out of line to expect a little gratuitous nudity ? In this case , yes , because this is a soft porn movie for kids age 13 and up . Nice . The story is basically Legally Blonde in a sorority house , so it's obvious that the movie's message must have something to do with superficiality and obsessions over appearance and other such nonsense . Shelly , played by Anna Faris , is booted out of the Playboy mansion and finds herself homeless , so she decides to shack up with a sorority of uncool girls and teach them how to turn themselves into male fantasies . It's sad that the movie fails so completely because there is so much potential there , but , unfortunately , they just don't know where to stop with the cartoonishly overblown outcasts . These are not your typical college nerds , these are girls that don't know better than to walk up to some guys in a bar and say , " Hey , where's the crapper ? I gotta drop off some timber . " Timber ! ! ! I feel like , in order for the comedy in a movie like this to be successful , we need to be able to point to a few characters and say , " Hey I know someone like that ! " Not in this movie . You don't know anyone like anyone in this movie . But you have , however , seen people like the people in this movie . Remember that goofy teen comedy She's All That ? One of the cool kids takes a bet that he can take the ugliest , most uncool girl in school and turn her into the prom queen . So we meet little Laney Boggs , the weird art student always covered in paint and unable to get a date to save her life . Zach , the cool guy choosing to accept the mission impossible , has his work cut out for him . But ? surprise ! ? she takes off her glasses and combs her hair and she's hot ! What a relief that the transformation was so easy ! When we meet the girls of Zeta Alpha Zeta , they are genuinely frightening social outcasts . Bitter , confused by social interaction , and more clueless about fashion than your average homeless person , they are quite a spectacle to behold . But , surprise ! Wouldn't you know it ? With the addition of the right , ahem , outfits , a little hip hop bumping in the background , and just the right amount of slow motion , they're all crazy hot ! Who would have guessed ? Interestingly , it isn't until the very , very end of the film that you will truly realize how purely and incredibly meaningless it is . The movie is about Shelley's efforts to turn a group of social outcasts into frat party favors , but then it tries to feed us this message about not worrying about what other people think and just being yourself . What the hell ? Beginning with the story about a Playboy bunny that just happens to be rated PG-13 , everything in the movie cancels out everything else . There's a scene at the end that is meant to tie everything together and make it all make sense , but it is one of the biggest forehead slappers I've seen in recent memory . I've noticed lately , particularly with movies like Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder , that there are a lot of new things being done in the comedy world . The House Bunny is unsurprisingly unaware of these new ideas and experiments and is merely feeding us the same childish tripe we've seen countless times before . One can only hope that , since they are now resorting to a PG-13 Playboy theme , they must surely be running out of ideas ? . |
544,158 | 562,732 | 208,003 | 2 | Yawn . | Last time I saw Martin Lawrence in a movie , he was a criminal trying to be a cop , now he's a cop trying to be an old fat woman . This was an absolutely terrible film . The laughs were sparse and unconvincing , the plot was dropped into a blender and then reassembled in any random order , and the vast majority of the film itself consisted of scenes completely unrelated to the story which seemed to be thrown in just to take up time . If these scenes had been simply left out altogether ( the basketball scene , for one among many examples ) , the entire film would have been maybe 15 minutes long . Big Momma's House was so tedious that I probably spent more time looking at my watch during the film than I did looking at the screen . I can think of no redeeming values at all to mention about this film . I feel that it was a complete waste of my time , and I am shocked that Martin Lawrence agreed to act in such garbage . |
544,340 | 562,732 | 91,344 | 2 | This movie made my brain hurt . | Okay , before I say anything else , every time an ape smiled in this movie I wanted to put a pot over my head and beat on it with a serving ladle . But no matter . The Kongs have become a family of epic grinners , you just have to deal with it . The scariest thing is that that's not even the worst part of this movie . It is dangerous ground to make a sequel that involves a movie monster getting romantically involved . They did it with Child's Play and it transformed the early camp horror films into pure comedy . Child's Play was no longer even in the same genre as it started out in . King Kong Lives doesn't even deserve to be in the same GENRE , even of the 1976 film , which was very well made , much less the 1933 classic . The movie opens with the ending of the 1976 film , with Kong climbing and being shot down from the World Trade Center . This movie ( surprise ) takes place ten years later . I guess Kong has been in some sort of coma for ten years , and as the movie starts a lot of scientists are in the process of performing a heart transplant on him . Next thing you know , he's ripping electrodes off and jumping up for the windows in the roof , then lifting himself up bodily by the bars on those windows despite just having had his rib cage sawn open and a plastic heart the size of a Volkswagen installed . Now , this was hard , but I managed to accept that he was able to do that . I know virtually nothing about primates , much less 50 foot tall primates . Who am I to judge his healing speed ? But given that I had accepted his remarkable ability to recover from a barrage of anti-aircraft gunshot wounds from helicopters on all sides , then a fall that would have reduced all of his organs to mush , then a historic heart transplant , and THEN display a miraculous mending of the sternum , I found it more than a little odd how easily he was undone when he bumped his head on a rock later in the movie . One clever individual in the film tries to convince Amy ( Linda Hamilton ) to just forget about him because " outside his environment , he would not be able to acquire enough protein to survive . " PROTEIN ! ! Nevermind the fact that there's a 10 , 000-pound gorilla corpse floating downriver , let's just go home because he won't be able to find enough protein to survive ! That's OUTSTANDING science , my friend ! Then again , the Kongs have not only found love , but they have mastered the art of invisibility , so it's not surprising that he didn't want to be bothered with a search . The Kongs are like freaking ninjas ! At the beginning , Hank , the big game hunter that some nutcase refers to as Indiana Jones , lays down on some foliage to take a nap , not noticing that there is a 50 foot gorilla less than 20 feet away from him until she tries to pick him up . This guy is no Indiana Jones . Later in the film , some golfer hits King Kong in the face with a golf ball before he notices that there's a gigantic gorilla standing on the course . I'm guessing he wasn't looking where he was hitting the ball . Yes . It's true . King Kong . Gets hit . With a golf ball . It is odd indeed that it necessitates an entire army of troops , tanks , and helicopters to find King Kong and Mrs . Kong , who one guy in a helicopter with a searchlight could easily find since they tower over the trees . And you guessed it , Kong manages to sneak up on the entire Army , too . While they're standing watch . Looking for King Kong . Nice work , soldiers . These guys are dumber than the law enforcement in First Blood . At one point a lot of rednecks get into boats to go hunt down Kong , and some military jerk goes , " What is this , Deliverance ? " No , sir . The rednecks were in the woods in Deliverance , not the boats . This is far worse , this is Gator Bait ! And Hank , the golfers , and the military are not the only people suffering from vision loss in the movie . At one point Amy nearly falls over a waterfall while she and Hank are walking across a rickety wooden bridge ( in a sad , sad homage to the Temple of Doom ) , and when she gets back up she frantically asks , " Where's the heart rate monitor ? ? " Apparently unable to see its bulky mass sitting two feet away from her . Somebody get this woman some binoculars ! The movie almost gets meaningful when Kong is frantic to get out of captivity and get to the female that he can smell nearby . Forget about any stupid sex jokes , any ape is going to want to mate after being held in captivity . Then it turns out that they just want to go lounge in the woods grabassing and massaging each other . At one point Mighty Jane Young starts licking a wound Kong has somehow gotten on his knee , and he puts his arm around her and grins . The only thing missing is a barrel of beer in his other hand . Ultimately , of course , we are forced to meet Son of Kong , a human-sized ape which , having come from Mrs . Kong , makes about as much sense as a human woman giving birth to a child the size of like , a grape . In the movie's defense , we do get to see Linda Hamilton topless for exactly two fifteenths of a second , but director John Guillermin , who also directed the massively superior 1976 remake , has not even managed to produce a grape . He's given birth to a raisin . A rotten one . |
544,827 | 562,732 | 93,300 | 2 | No flash photography , please ? | After enough horrible shark attacks to fill three movies , it seems that the shark has decided it's going to go after the descendents of the man who killed its ancestors all those years ago . They were its ancestors , right ? Or is this the same shark that was killed in the older movies ? That would certainly explain why it swims lolling back and forth like its going to roll belly-up . And here I thought that was just jaw-droppingly bad special effects . Normally this would be pretty hard to believe , but the humans in this movie are so monumentally stupid that it's not so bad that they decide to add some extra cognitive ability to the shark . Lorraine Gary plays Ellen Brody , who was the wife of Martin Brody in Jaws 1 and 2 . She loses her husband and then her son to the shark , and swears that she'll never have another member of her family going in the water . She heads to the Bahamas and much fighting erupts between her and her son Michael because he happens to be a marine biologist . He loves his job and doesn't want to leave it , but his mother can't have him working on the water anymore . Clearly , it is quite understandable that she would not want members of her family going near the water , since they have been getting eaten by sharks for generations . Which begs the question , of course , of why she gladly allowed her granddaughter to go get towed around behind a boat with her friend . Oh , the girl's mother will be there , so it must be all okay . To make matters worse , after yet another Brody barely escaped being shark food , Ellen decides she better get onto a huge sailboat and go out in search of the shark alone , dressed in street clothes and completely unarmed . What did she plan to do ? Scold the shark to death ? Maybe smack it around for a little while with those gigantic , gigantic sunglasses ? ( spoilers ) Mario van Peebles , who you might remember from such crapfests as Solo and Sweet Sweetback's Ridiculous Mess , here giving a performance with a ludicrous fake accent that is not even closely rivaled by Don Cheadle in Ocean's 11 . The movie is packed with extreme close-ups of the shark , since the one they had to use as a prop was so badly made . This thing is not for a second convincing , and the ending is clearly no exception . It's bad enough that this is a shark that likes to hold its prey above the surface of the water while it eats , but asking us to believe that it will respond to electronic stimulation in the form of flashing lights by standing up vertically and waiting to be stabbed with a boat is entirely too much . Michael Caine does what he can with his terribly written role , which includes the beginnings of a romance with Ellen that disappears from the movie as fast as it was introduced . Maybe they figured people would forget about it anyway when he brilliantly decides to crash land his plane at sea when Ellen's boat is being attacked by the shark . In keeping with the logic with which the rest of the movie is completely devoid , the question that arises is this - why should Ellen sacrifice herself unarmed to the shark when three more people could also sacrifice themselves unarmed to the shark ? |
544,799 | 562,732 | 988,849 | 2 | # 1 Movie To Avoid This Week ( . . . and every week ) . . . | Holy crap . It's not often that a movie comes along that is so morally vacuous that it approaches a level of violent stupidity so intricately bad that it is absolutely not enjoyable on any level . But when it does happen , and it has happened with this movie , it makes my job seem incredibly difficult because I have to sit here and try to write a professional film review when I know without a shadow of a doubt that three simple words would suffice - DON'T WATCH IT . But if you would like to know why , please continue reading . First of all , let's brainstorm about what makes a violent thriller entertaining , shall we ? You need to have an engaging story , something that moves at a brisk pace and maintains interest without relying on the violence to push it along . You need to have not only believable characters but characters that we care enough about to invest our emotions in their well - being , and you need to have a catalyst operating beneath the surface that drives the characters on screen to commit whatever violent acts take place in the movie . Donkey Punch has none of these . Not even a little bit . There is , of course , a lot to be said about violence in the movies . Some say there's too much , some say movies are movies and no movie violence is going to change who people are or entice people to commit violent acts , and some people are just violent movie-hounds and can never get enough . Whatever your personal opinion , I tend to think that we can all agree that at the very least , movie violence should have a point , right ? Not this movie . Donkey Punch gives us a film populated with morons , perverts , rapists and idiot college girls , not a single character worth a scrap of thought or interest , and then asks us to care when they start killing each other off . A group of college-girls meet a group of college-age guys at a European resort and , hungry for some adventure stories to take home from their European vacation , immediately accept a shady offer to come touring the Mediterranean Sea on a luxurious yacht to which one of them happens to have access . Anyone with two brain cells working at the same time would have hesitated for at least a few seconds before accepting such an offer from a bunch of crusty guys like these , but no matter . If nothing else , the immediacy of the acceptance will pretty quickly and thoroughly paint the picture of what the rest of the movie is going to be like . Everyone wants to have sex with everyone else , and while taking turns with the blonde not far into the movie in a drug-crazed orgy , when one guy convinces another guy to try out a little sex move called the " donkey punch . " I won't waste your time explaining what it is . It doesn't matter , it's just a plot device needed to supply the cast with a dead body so that they can spend the rest of the movie killing each other off as they struggle to figure out who can be trusted and who should just be killed . There is not a scrap of realism in the movie , not an iota of clever dialogue or impressive acting , and the by-the-numbers ending does nothing to boost the mood of genuine depression that permeates the entire movie . This thing is a waste in pretty much every way imaginable . Avoid it . |
544,171 | 562,732 | 297,162 | 2 | The Rock has become a tourist attraction ? ! ? | Yeah , a long time ago it turned into a tourist attraction . Now it's a prison again . Kind of . Well , it's more like an airport mixed together with a junior high school but there are lots of guys running around wearing orange jumpsuits , so I guess in that way it's like a prison . Not really though . When Sasha , Steven Seagal's character , is being admitted into prison , he's standing shackled in line and wanders over to a different line so he can talk to his friend , like he's in line for the security check at the airport . Then before too long he and his friend are throwing punches , smacking around a couple of security guards . Let me tell you something . You assault a corrections officer in a federal prison , they'll shoot you on the spot . Ja Rule would have been shot about 30 times before he threw his second punch . Oh , and there are guys wearing beanies and bandanas and whatnot . In prison . Federal prison . You can't dress like that at most high schools in America . Speaking of Ja Rule , I have to say that the person who probably enjoyed his performance more than anyone else on earth , including Ja Rule himself , had to have been 50 Cent . Just before I watched this movie I saw one of those shows on TV about the greatest celebrity feuds ever , and like number 7 or 8 was this rivalry between 50 Cent , who had lived the thug life for real , and Ja Rule . Who had not . Every time I saw Ja Rule on screen the only thing I could picture was 50 Cent laughing his ass off . Ja Rule looks like a rowdy 9-year-old every time he appears on screen . Anyway , getting back to the plot . It's funny . Sasha is an FBI agent working undercover and he agrees to let himself be sentenced to prison so he can get behind the criminal organization . He's sentenced to five years , and that old line between determination and stupidity instantly vanishes . Nothing else in the movie matters after that , it becomes a meaningless string of action sequences , most of which aren't even well choreographed . Oh , how about this , a helicopter crashes through the roof of " New Alcatraz " at one point , accidentally freeing all of the inmates . And what do they do ? They all run out of their cells and play basketball in the middle of the cell block . Without so much as a basket . They had a ball , but it doesn't matter . The scene is so stupid they might as well have been playing hopscotch . So some guy is being sentenced to be the first person ever to be executed in Alcatraz's state of the art execution chamber , evidently not for stealing $200 million dollars in gold , but for not telling where it was hidden once he was caught . Hey , good thinking , people . If you can't get information out of someone , kill them . That's a great way to learn the truth ! So some gang breaks into the prison planning to stop the execution and get the location of the $200 million for themselves . Oh and the $200 million is in gold bricks . I doubt they thought ahead to how difficult it would be to turn that into exchangeable currency . There's also the issue of the warden at the prison . He's some tough-talking vato who thinks he's a hardcore chollo from the barrio , which reminds me of a joke . I saw this comedian once talking about people in California who talk all tough calling each other ese and homes and all kinds of other such nonsense . These people go to Mexico , the comedian says , and they're like , " Oh my god ! People LIVE there ? That's like , a total shack ! " The best is when the United States Supreme Court Justice arrives and this guy tells her that her men can't carry their guns inside his prison , " I don't care if she IS a United States Supreme Court Justice ! " This woman could squish him like a grape and he thinks he's in charge . Ha . And by the way , the Supreme Court Justice that gets taken as a hostage in the movie tells the bad guy that she is 53 . That's a year younger than Steven Seagal . I just thought that was funny . The only good scene in the movie is the one in the prison where Ja Rule is getting slapped around the prison like a sack of cotton balls by this little Asian woman . That was the funniest thing I've seen in a movie in a long , long time . You know , I work for the company that produced this film ( which I why I watched it ) , and I still don't have a single positive thing to say about it , except , of course , for that one scene with Ja Rule getting spanked by that Asian woman . So read my review of Malena and you will see how strongly I sometimes disagree with professional film critics like Roger Ebert , but in his review of this movie Ebert wrote something that I agreed with as much as anything else he's ever written : " I imagine the flywheels at the MPAA congratulating each other on a good day's work as they rated ' Half Past Dead ' PG-13 , after giving the anti-gun movie ' Bowling for Columbine ' an R . " Way to go , guys . |
544,906 | 562,732 | 1,198,138 | 2 | f . | Remember that movie Wild Wild West ? Will Smith has said that that movie is one of his biggest regrets , because it opened at # 1 even though it sucked , and he said he hated knowing that so many people were spending their money to watch a movie that wasn't good . At the time I'm writing this , Obsessed is the # 1 movie in the American box office , and I'm wondering if , for example , Beyonce feels as guilty as Will Smith did , because Wild Wild West is about ten times better than this snoozefest . Personally I doubt she has the acting chops to even realize how god-awful this thing is . I've seen some backwards thrillers in my time but THIS ? I care hardly think of where to start . My first question is for Beyonce . I'm wondering if , when she signed on to play the wife of a man stalked by a psychotic blonde , if she knew that her character would ultimately turn out to be just as psychotic as the psychotic one . I'm guessing yes , because here's a direct quote from her character late in the movie ? " You think you're crazy ? I'll show you crazy ! " Wow . If you want to watch Ali Larter squeezing her limited talents into the form of a badly written blonde with some relationship issues and Beyonce talking all tough to her ( and to her husband ) , you might enjoy this movie . Every once in a while a movie comes along that is so flawlessly terrible that the perfection of the way the badness fits together becomes a fascinating area of study . This is one of those times . Sharon is married to Derek who has a new employee at his work , a crazy hot blonde named Lisa who was recently hired on from a temp agency . She falls in love with Derek and forms a fantasy in her head that she and Derek are together , blah blah blah blah . The movie is called Obsessed and stars two women and one man . You don't really need to know anything else in order to know everything there is to know about the movie , except how bad it is . Sadly , you have to watch it to find that out . One of my favorite things was that the movie is as suspenseless as any movie I've ever seen , and yet the suspense music kicks up constantly and I guess we're supposed to scoot forward to the edge of our seats and get all worried and whatnot . There's a scene when Lisa e-mails a picture of herself to Derek which opens itself in a dozen windows as soon as he opens the e-mail , and the orchestra kicks in frantically as Derek slowly clicks them each closed , his wife only seconds away . Did anyone else laugh at this ? First of all , why would you slowly click them closed one by one ? Does he know nothing about computers ? ALT-F4 , man ! ! Or if it's a Mac , Command-W ! ! But of course , if he knew how to close windows like that then we would have missed out on the sheer tension of watching this guy about to suffer the wrath of Beyonce . They actually tried to generate TENSION by having a guy struggling to close windows on his computer before his wife sees it ! ! HAHAHAHAHAHAAA ! ! ! Then again , with a wife as horrific as Beyonce's character , maybe it's a good idea to fear her hysterical wrath . She does , after all , kick him out of HIS OWN HOUSE for three months because she thinks . Not KNOWS , mind you . She SUSPECTS that he had an affair . And when I say his own house , I mean the beautiful , multi-million dollar mansion that they live in , with the sleek new Escalade parked out front . This woman , ladies and gentlemen , is a COLLEGE STUDENT . I have trouble relating to a man who would suffer so much ridiculous punishment at the hands of an insecure and violently suspicious woman , and still beg on his hands an knees for her to take him back . In order for a movie like this to work , you have to care about the characters , that's obvious , but it's impossible here . Obsessed has nothing going for it . It's a movie about one poor guy with two psychotic women around him and I'm going to go ahead and suggest that it's just not possible to make a good movie when your basic premise is so overflowing with the yawn-inducing clichés of cheap , no-rent thrillers . It is informative that Obsessed comes from David Loughery , the same screenwriter who gave us the highly disappointing thriller Lakeview Terrace last year . Obsessed is pretty much exactly the same story , except Lakeview Terrace was about a black neighbor angry at his interracial neighbors . Now we have a black wife going crazy at her black husband's white stalker . Set your watch to beep every ten minutes or so to make sure you can stay awake . It was a struggle for me ! Even worse , I'm not sure who the target is . Angry black women who hate skinny , smart-ass blondes ? Maybe . Word has it that the original title was " Oh No She Didn't , " which would at least have been amusing and advertised right away that the whole movie is a joke . If they had made this a parody , I really think it could have been good , but it takes itself super - seriously , even when challenging us not to laugh at Beyonce flinging Ali Larter all over her house , or not to cringe when she viciously berates her boyfriend , for whom she has not the wispiest scrap of trust but who has committed no crime . The most effective thing that the movie does is convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I ever find myself dating Beyonce I will throw myself in front of the nearest train . |
543,759 | 562,732 | 110,857 | 2 | The first time in my life I've ever consciously missed Bobcat Goldthwaite ? | Ah , so here we are . Rock bottom . The Police Academy series has been through a lot of ups and downs over the years . They seem to have been hugely popular during their times of release , and really , if you look at the numbers , it's not hard to see why such a prodigious stream of sequels was made . The first movie was made for a budget of around $4 . 5 million and brought in a stupendous $81 million at the box office . The second movie brought in $55 million , part 3 brought $43 . 5 million , part 4 $28 million , part 5 almost $20 million , part 6 a meager $5 million , and Mission to Moscow proudly raked in a whopping $126 , 000 . If nothing else , the Police Academy franchise stands as a perfect example of a film series that was played out until it was officially a very , very dead horse . The awesomely moronic plot this time involves a Russian mafia boss named Konstantine Konali ( played by none other than Ron Perlman , now better known as Hellboy ) , who is marketing a video game that he plans to use to secretly distribute a computer virus that will allow him to hack into government security systems and like , take over the world or something . The movie opens with a scene that is meant to show us how purely addicting this game is . We see a news report where a woman is giving her news report , and her co-anchor , a man in maybe his 50s or so , is sitting next to her oblivious what's going on because he's so entranced by the Game Boy he's playing . I imagine we weren't supposed to notice that there was no cartridge in the machine he's playing , but no matter . I'm willing to let that go in order to enjoy the avalanche of stupidity that was to follow . So why are the members of our beloved Police Academy in Moscow in the first place ? Well , it seems that the Russians need help in dealing with the Russian mafia , so they have recruited the help of the most famous police academy in America . And mostly the gang is all here except for Mahoney and Zed , both of whom I am sad to say are missed . Lassard , of course , is his usual self , so he has gotten himself lost and ends up at a Russian funeral within a few hours of touching down in Moscow , so the rest of the team occupies themselves with trying to compile evidence against Konali while Harris follows along two steps behind waiting to jump in at just the right moment and claim credit for everything . As usual this provides plenty of opportunities for bonehead comedy , but they just pulled out all the stops with the low brow humor this time . Harris and Tackleberry end up dancing in full make-up and costume in a Russian ballet in one of the movie's most embarrassing scenes , Harris attempts to spy on Konali and instead gets a dog peeing in his eye through a periscope , and Jones has developed the ability to open safes with his noise effects . Sigh . In the movie's defense , it does have it's moments . Well , it has it's moment , anyway . There is a scene where Tackleberry jumps at the opportunity to give a speech to the Russian authorities about American law enforcement tactics , and he launches into a vicious beratement of the piddly " excessive force " policies that are tying his hands back in the states . Yeah , the movie is spectacularly stupid , but this might have been one of Tackleberry's two or three best scorns in the entire series . If you ever find yourself watching this thing on DVD , make sure to watch the short supplemental video that's included ! I have to admit that I have found it particularly interesting and amusing to watch these videos for each installment in the series , where much of the original cast come back together and discuss the movies . I especially love G . W . Bailey ( who played Captain Harris ) , who clearly has grown weary of having ever had anything to do with the series . In the video for part 5 , he sarcastically mentioned people who would approach him years later and ask if he still had " Dork " tanned across his chest . For this one , it is noticeably difficult for him to conceal his resentment as he talks about his past in performing Shakespeare on stage , and now he's remembered for a dog peeing in his eye . Don't worry , Mr . Bailey , haven't you seen the box office for this movie ? No one's seen it ! |
544,454 | 562,732 | 39,383 | 2 | There can't be much debate about why Kenneth Anger never became a famous filmmaker . | Granted , Fireworks is not the kind of movie that is going to lead to a very promising filmmaking career . In fact , it's more likely to END a promising filmmaking career than anything else . It is a perversely brutal depiction of the attack and rape of a young man , played by Anger himself , but you have to take Anger's purpose into account when you watch and judge this film . At a mere 15-20 minute running time , it is not entirely doubtful that Anger may not have made the film for profit at all , but possibly for his own sexual gratification . The question that remains , it seems , is whether he meant to derive that satisfaction during its making or during its viewing . Either way , it is clear that the film's distribution pertains much more to the latter and , assuming that Anger realized this , it can also be assumed that he did not have the hugest aspirations for tremendous commercial success for Fireworks . One of the first things that you learn in the study of Gay and Lesbian film is that films pertaining exclusively to the homosexual community generally do not have much commercial success , if only because of the relatively small size of its target audience . Even under those circumstances , however , I have to admit that I don't feel that the film would have had much of a chance even if it was directed at a more general audience . It is a hugely uncomfortable and un-enjoyable cinematic experience to a much greater extent even than films that are purposely meant to be unattractive and ugly , like Buffalo ' 66 . I spent about the first minute of Fireworks waiting to see something that would justify the fact that I was watching it at a screening for a film class at the University level , and then I spent about the next 19 minutes or so waiting for it to end . I did not enjoy a second of the film , but it is clear that there is a message to be derived from it , maybe about the plight of the young homosexual male in the late 40s or the fact that men get raped , too ( although , of course , also be men ) . In any case , the films of Kenneth Anger seem to have been relegated mainly to below even the status of bottom shelf oblivion , and quite frankly , I can't say so far that it's any huge loss . |
543,867 | 562,732 | 448,965 | 2 | Wow , this is incredibly bad . | Knowing that several of the actors in this movie have turned in remarkable roles in other films and television shows , I have come to suspect that the massive performance deficiencies displayed in this film are the result of what appears to be nonexistent direction . When I look at the performances given here , I can only picture director Russell Mulcahy standing behind the camera giving the same direction that Bob MacKenzie ( Rick Moranis ) was given by his brother Doug in Strange Brew ( " PSST ! ! Act ! Act ! ! " ) . I am familiar with a good portion of the work of Jules Verne , as well as the astonishing and disappointing creative liberties that are so often taken with his work ( it still blows my mind completely that they added a DUCK to the 1959 adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth ) , but I have not read Mysterious Island so I don't know how faithful the film is to the original story . In any case , there is not a single passable performance in the movie , the direction is completely witless , and the special effects are deplorable . A 15-year-old with an outdated copy of After Effects could do better than this . Besides all that , I will be perfectly happy to live out the rest of my life and never again see a movie in which someone washes up onto a beach , sleeping soundly , and then coughs once or twice before getting up to go exploring . Are the giant insects not enough reason for suspension of disbelief ? And don't even get me started on the pirates , my god what a joke . First of all , not only do our heroes react with hostility and violence when they finally encounter other normal human beings of the non - gigantic - man - eating - insect variety on the island , but after inviting them over to their humble Robinson Crusoe home , complete with dinner table , place settings for ten , goblets , eating utensils , candles , and the like , but once convinced of the defected pirates ' trustworthiness , they give one of them - a caveman looking sort from years surviving on the island ? a total celebrity makeover , shave , haircut , gel , new clothes , etc . I guess they forgot that they are surviving , too . The worst thing that the movie does , besides the deplorable performances and ridiculous screenplay ( I can even forgive awful direction as long as the effort is there ) , is that it tries to create dramatic and intense situations when there is no reason for it . The captain jumps maybe 15 feet into the water to lighten the load on the hot air balloon , and everyone freaks out as though he jumped out of a plane . Other humans are greeted with suspicion as though anyone has any reason to be afraid for their lives . At one point , the eagle-eyed Neb , played by Omar Gooding , uses a telescope to spot a massive , four-masted pirate ship maybe a hundred yards off shore . He calls to the captain and explains that he has spotted a pirate ship and hands him the telescope , somehow intuitively knowing that the captain will not be able to see Old Ironsides blotting out the horizon without it . I'll go right ahead and admit that I had extremely low expectations for the show , it's made-for-TV , first of all , and I've yet to see a single competently made Jules Verne film adaptation , but I've seen better acting in an elementary school drama class , and the script could not possibly be dumber . Who thought it would be a good idea to have the good guys sneak up on the pirate ship behind a floating log , for God's sake ? ? Come on guys , let's just swim right out to the ship , no one will notice ! Wow . Miss this one . |
544,420 | 562,732 | 100,917 | 2 | A terrible forgery of Duel , one of Steven Spielberg's earliest films . | Wheels of Terror is exactly what it sounds like . A cheesy after school thriller special that is meant to be laughed at . At least I HOPE it's meant to be laughed at . You have a scary looking car that seems to be terrorizing kids at their school , so one of the staff members decides that , instead of calling the police , she'll take matters into her own hands and chase the man down herself . It's good to see a woman taking the initiative like that in the movies , but then what do they do ? They have the chase scenes take place with her in the ' short bus . ' A laughable story , routine direction , no acting , and an absolutely pathetic ending all come together to make Wheels of Terror a perfect movie to never watch . |
544,737 | 562,732 | 217,630 | 2 | When is this over ? ! | How long was this movie ? 10 hours ? 12 hours ? That's what it felt like . What a terrible waste of time this was . First of all , this was an obvious and awful attempt to rekindle some of the inexplicable American Pie hype with Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari . Suvari knows how to act , as she proved in American Beauty , she just didn't do it here . Jason Biggs is the biggest mystery in the film industry right now . How did this idiot get on screen ? As far as the story , nobody gets treated like that in college . I don't care how small the town is that you're from . There are not as many college students with the mentality of a 9 year old that would be necessary to pull all of the stunts that were pulled in this movie . They were real creative with Biggs ' character , too . Dress him up like a geek and put a few obscure words into his vocabulary . And yes , they did manage to squeeze in a falling-down-the-stairs scene for him , what fun . Besides that , what about the housing ? Biggs gets kicked out of the dorms by his dumbass roommates and then what , he talks his way into turning one room in a veterinary hospital into his personal lodgings ? Are you kidding me ? ! Biggs and Suvari have no chemistry on screen , and she can't play the part of a reject like she tried to in Loser , it doesn't fit with her iconography . Terrible acting , a terrible story , and a director who did little more than point and shoot , all adds up to a ridiculous film whose stupidity borders on being offensive . |
544,019 | 562,732 | 200,550 | 2 | Unfortunately , the Internet Movie Database only allows 1 , 000 words , which is not nearly enough to sufficiently communicate how horrible this movie is . | The drawback of watching the huge amount of movies that I watch is that you find yourself watching the same previews over and over again . I saw the preview for Coyote Ugly so many times that I was sick and tired of the movie before it was even released . I was unable to decipher any kind of plot from the preview , and the reason is simple . If the producers had allowed the preview to reveal the extensively recycled and re-done and re-made and used up plot , no one would have bothered to watch the movie . From a business point of view , that's very understandable , and I respect the decision not to reveal how shallow this movie is too early on . However , after seeing the entire film , I have realized that Coyote Ugly is packed full of every cliche ever created by every unoriginal and boring film ever made in cinematic history . ( spoilers ) Young kid decides to leave home to pursue wild dreams in the big city . Encounters difficulties , gets robbed , decides to go home , father encourages her to keep trying , success is inevitably and laughably attained . I accurately predicted at least 80 % of everything that happened in this film . Did anyone not know that there would be a robbery at her new apartment in New York ? Was anyone surprised that she would have some sort of superficial problem getting her music heard ? Is it that hard to predict she would succeed at the end ? Okay , I'll admit that if she failed , the movie probably would never have been made ( what a relief that would have been ) . You can't put a Fight Club ending or an Arlington Road ending on a movie like this . But look at the way the entire movie panned out . Violet was completely isolated from reality during the entire film . Think about the logic here . Violet goes to New York to become a star , but obviously has trouble getting a record executive to listen to her music . She goes home one day to find her apartment robbed . This is the pathetic attempt to make it seem like the real world , but even if it did do that , this is where it stopped . For the rest of the film , everything worked out perfectly . The first guy she meets becomes her wonderful new boyfriend . The first group of girls she overhears in a diner are talking about the lucrative jobs they have , and how one is leaving and there will soon be a difficult effort to replace her . This very same bar happens to be the hottest bar in town , and when Violet inquires about the opening , she is hired within minutes . You gotta be kidding me . Besides all that , everything that happened in the plot is just recycled garbage that has been seen dozens of times before . Violet finds a cute new boyfriend . They get in the usual fight somewhere in the middle of the film , and when she tries to call thinking she wants to apologize or something , she hangs up a split second before he grabs up his receiver , anxiously saying " Hello ? Hello ? " to the usual dialtone . She goes to his house to make things right , and just as she shows up , he's got some girl walking into his apartment ( THAT was the most predictable element of all ) . But wait ! He's not sleeping with her , he's showing her the apartment to see if she might want to move in ! He's a sweetheart after all ! How about Violet's job ? Obviously some problem has to come up ( the suddenly lonely parent , as always , winding up in the hospital ) , and she has to get fired at least once . When she does , she decides to get a job at a quiet little restaurant ( which , for some reason , doesn't seem to have electricity ) , but eventually goes back to her old job . The bar scenes were both laughable and ridiculously exaggerated . No bar in the world looks like that , and even if one did , there would not be scantily clad female bartenders dancing on the bar every few minutes , and even if there were , there would be about 50 bouncers , not just one . You would think a policy or two would change when the airheaded blonde Cammie was pulled into the crowd and fondled by a bunch of drunks . I guess nothing came of that because she didn't seem upset about it at all . Every bar scene in this film was the result not of skillful filmmaking , but of audience manipulation . What a pathetic waste of time . Everything in this movie has been done before , and it has never been done worse than it was done here . Even though New York City is portrayed terribly , at least they thought to throw in an acute bit of stage fright for Violet so she would have a problem that coincides slightly with reality , even though this was also ridiculously unoriginal ( ever see Runaway Bride ? EXACTLY the same thing ) . Coyote Ugly is an awful movie . It follows a formula that is more easily decipherable than the script , and it is the kind of film that will probably be hugely entertaining to you if you have never seen a movie . If you don't like being jerked around at the movie theater , avoid this garbage . |
543,756 | 562,732 | 1,220,557 | 2 | There is something genuinely sad going on here . . . . | I am a big believer that quite often the supplemental documentaries included with DVDs can show you some things about the movie that you didn't realize , and even turn around your entire experience about the movie . In the best cases , these little featurettes can make even bad movies a little better , but such is not to be the case with Handmade Music , which is about the efforts involved in making the music for Dan in Real Life . Unfortunately I don't have anything nice to say about the movie , which was a depressing failure , and this little documentary is little more than a lot of people congratulating each other on a job well done on a project that just flopped spectacularly . I can appreciate the effort that everyone put into making the music just right and how strongly they believed in the movie , but there is something truly sad about watching so many artistically professional people talk about their undying devotion to what turned out to be such a bad movie . |
544,677 | 562,732 | 988,595 | 2 | Spectacularly bad . | So I was unlucky enough to catch this mess while on a 13-hour flight from Shanghai to Chicago , along with Fool's Gold and Jumper . Remind me never to fly United again . After the first hour I was ready to throw myself out of the plane somewhere over the Arctic circle . I'm not sure where exactly we were at that moment , but I looked out the window and the ocean below was frozen , and landing on top of the ice after a 35 , 000-foot freefall sounded more appealing than another 45 minutes of this tripe . It's yet another bonehead romantic comedy about weddings , where the protagonist is always a bridesmaid but never a bride , etc etc etc . She's great at doing things for other people but not so great at going after what she really wants or needs for herself . She has a collection of bridesmaids dresses filling one closet in her apartment to capacity ( no points for guessing how many she has ) , until one day her collection is witnessed by columnist Kevin Doyle , who sees this story about a wedding addict as his key to upward movement at his magazine . Charged with coming up with something fresh and interesting , he shocks his editor ( but not the audience ) when he gets too involved in the story and realizes that maybe there's something more to it , since she , his editor , feels that it's probably just some throwaway garbage that no one is really going to pay much attention to anyway . Sadly , the people who made the movie never realized that that is true of the movie as well . Anyway , Katherine Heigl stars as Jane Nichols , who attracted the attention of Kevin Doyle on a night when she was on a wedding marathon , shuttling between weddings at such at rate as to win the attention of the media . A lot of people complain about her performance , but I had no problem with her acting , or with James Marsden's , or really with anyone else in the cast . The problem is that the movie feels like a child's coloring book where someone just filled in the blanks and gave it a title and sent it to theaters . The formula here is so obvious that the laughs generated by its presence are the most effective part of the movie . James Marsden plays the part of Kevin Doyle . This is a remarkably versatile actor . He is still best known , I should think , as Cyclops from the X-Men films , but has also turned in effective performances in romantic comedies , including his satisfactory performance as a Mr . Right in this idiot movie , as well as his role as Mr . Wrong in the indescribably superior film The Notebook . Kevin is a young professional with movie-star good looks and is impossibly charming , while Jane , unfortunately , doesn't notice or appreciate his charm because she is too deeply in love with her dirtbag of a boss George , played with effective repulsiveness by Edward Burns . Later , Jane's little sister shows up , a bouncy , Barbie-ish blonde without a thought in her head who comes along and charms George off his feet , and we are asked to care when this jerk and this bimbo fall in love and ask Jane to plan their wedding . Oh , that really pulls the heartstrings , doesn't it ? These two shallow , superficial people getting together , leaving poor Jane with nothing but this stunningly handsome man with a good job and bright future constantly professing his true love to her . It is safe to say you can leave the tissue at home for this one . I suppose I don't have to explain how obvious the conclusion of the movie is . Probably the most difficult thing that a good romantic comedy has to overcome is that they are all so predictable , except for the really good ones ( The Notebook , as an example ) . In 27 Dresses , it is blatantly obvious from the first frame how the movie is going to turn out , except for the instant transformations that George and Tess , Jane's little sister , make in the last few minutes of the movie for the sake of the Hollywood ending . Everyone involved in the movie has done much , much better than this . If you want to see James Marsden in something worth seeing , please check out The Notebook . Edward Burns has an extensive list of credits and has had some hits and misses ( if , for example , you ever get a chance to see him in a movie called A Sound of Thunder , don't ) , and as for Katherine Heigl , she has done nothing but better films than this . Under Siege 2 is better than this , and that should really be all you need to know ? |
544,647 | 562,732 | 134,847 | 2 | This movie had so much potential , but it wound up being just another boring bad guy hero movie with cheesy special effects . | There was just too much corny tough guy stuff in this movie for it to be regarded as anything more than something to keep your eyes busy for a couple hours ( " He didn't know who he was fkin ' with " ) . Way to go Vin , you sure showed that alien who is boss . But who cares ? The special effects in this movie were a terrible attempt to make up for lousy acting , and they weren't even very good . The best effect they probably had was the extremely high-key lighting to give the effect of multiple suns . But the acting and even the story were definitely mediocre . If you find yourself sitting in the theater and Pitch Black is about to start , you might as well sit through it . It's worth that much . Just make sure you didn't pay real money to get in . |
544,179 | 562,732 | 67,810 | 2 | Maybe I'm too old , maybe I'm not old enough . Maybe I just can't dig it , baby . I can't get down with the funk . | Whatever the case , Sweet Sweetback's Baad Assssssss Song came off to me as a vibrant exercise in bad taste , bad acting , a barely discernible plot , VERY bad editing , and lots of stupid , stupid white people . The opening feeding scene , the one with the whole crowd of women inexplicably overflowing with lust from watching a dirty kid shovel food into his mouth , is reminiscent of The Hairdresser's Husband , the vastly superior French film that uses similar low-cut necklines revealing massive breasts to illustrate the formation of sexual taboos later in life . Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss song has no time for that . Nope . Next scene , that same dirty kid is naked and reluctantly ravishing someone that I assume is a prostitute , but who could just as easily be his babysitter , his teacher , his mother , or his sister . Doesn't matter which one , really . Even if it was his mother it wouldn't be as tasteless as the fact that what we're looking at is a 13-year-old kid completely naked between the legs of some woman who is equally naked . I have no problem with sex scenes , of course . It just strikes me as weird to see a movie that literally shows a 13-year-old kid having sex and then the movie ( Shocked ! Shocked ! ! ) gives itself a tagline like ' Rated X by an all white jury . ' What the hell ? I'm reminded of a classic Saturday Night Live skit in which Jim Carrey , Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan go to a nightclub and viciously gang-hump every woman on the dance floor and then when the security guards drag them to the exit they're all screaming ' What ? ? ! What ? ! ? ! What ? ? ! ? ? ! ' How do they imply that an all black jury might have rated a movie with a naked 13-year-old kid in it ? PG-13 ? That being said , the movie is basically about a lot of incompetent white cops constantly pursuing someone named Sweetback , who has enough connections on the streets to afford him a good deal of protection and , of course , who is generally too cool for spoken dialogue . We're brought into the dismal world of the inner cities , a plight for which the white man is endlessly blamed and , to whatever extent , this may be true , but for the most part this movie celebrates the condemnation of the white man for causing the black man to live such a terrible life , while at the same time celebrating the black man's inability or unwillingness to do anything about that life beyond blaming the white man for it . It's a controversial theory that the black community is more interested in blaming white people for their lot in life than they are in doing something to better their situation , but this movie does absolutely nothing to refute it , which is also the case in a disturbing number of ' blaxploitation ' movies . Blaxploitation itself , as a term , is wildly misleading . I suppose it means that black people are blaxploited by greedy white men , hence their dismal urban lifestyle , while white people are whitesploited by black people , hence their constant appearance as greedy , racist , and complete drooling morons in ' blaxploitation ' films . Pam Grier must be rolling in her grave . I've heard the editing described as quick to disorient the viewer , which is not the case at all . What you have here is obtrusive editing without reason , cuts simply for the sake of cutting . Like many 1970s blaxploitation films , the movie halts in its tracks half a dozen times or so to turn into a music video for a little while , but the rough and awkward editing does not disorient the viewer , it stops the movie completely because it is totally devoid of meaning . It takes your attention away from what is happening on screen and puts it into the weird colors and shapes dancing across the screen , which have nothing to do with whatever the meaning of the movie is . This is not how you infuse a deep meaning or directorial significance onto a cheesy sexy movie , this is how you make a feature length film when you don't have enough story or material to fill that much screen time . Sometimes lines of dialogue are literally played over more than once . The need for such things escapes me . In the movie's defense , it is very good at capturing the urban atmosphere in which the story takes place . When you watch the movie , you are there on the streets with the characters , you just have a hard time trying to follow what they're doing , what they're talking about , who's chasing who and why a black man is dancing on a stool while some idiot white guy stands directly behind him , staring at his backside and laughing hysterically . Wow . The street life is portrayed very effectively , you see how bad it is to live in these areas , but then you have to wonder about the suffering when you see scenes like the one where Sweetback is forced by a gang of hysterical bikers to endure the unending torture of making love to a white woman while they all sit around laughing . What the hell is going on here ? ( spoilers ) Maybe I just made the mistake of watching Dirty Pretty Things just before seeing this , so I came into this movie having just watched a movie that squeezes in the sex and violence because they are necessary elements of the massive plot , while this movie stretches out the sex scenes and throws in random bits of plot here and there just to fill out the rest of the screen time . There literally is a point in the movie where Sweetback is running from the cops through the desert , becomes so decimated that he kills and eats a lizard , and then when he reaches civilization he stops to have sex with a prostitute in the dirt and have a couple of white cops stop by to giggle at him . And not only that , if you make it through the movie you are not rewarded with the delivery of some message or cinematic meaning , you are literally rewarded with a series of shots showing a couple of dead dogs floating in a river . This normally is a figure of speech , but this is some of the stupidest st I've ever seen . Here's something to consider ? at one point in the movie the white cops chase and capture Sweetback , but wait ! He turns out to be just some guy , not Sweetback at all ! The guy gleefully explains that he was paid $5 by some guy to run from whoever chased him , and it just happened to be the police but hey ! It's five DOLLARS ! So the cops don't do a thing at all to this guy , even though he willfully evaded the police . I guess if you're paid to run then it's okay ? The thing that really gets me is that white people are portrayed as so stupid and incompetent and endlessly idiotic in these movies , and yet at the same time they are the people who's power and influence black people simply cannot escape . Given that , here's my question for you - Who do blaxploitation films really make look foolish in the end ? Oh , and yes I realize that Pam Grier is alive and well . Thanks for reading all the way to the end of my review . . . |
544,567 | 562,732 | 295,700 | 2 | Yes , that's exactly right . VERY wrong turn . | I am referring , of course , to the script , not necessarily to any choices the characters on screen made , although it would apply in that case as well . Wrong Turn is the latest in the ongoing stream of abysmal teen horror films cranked out by Hollywood since the mid-90s or so . The odd thing is that they chose to focus their plot this time around a man studying to be a doctor , as if there's a single solitary person in their target audience who could relate to this person . Anyone who knew anything about medicine would have a field day with the ridiculously exaggerated rednecks in this movie . Okay , so I realize that we live in the times of massive special effects and the wonders of Stan Winston and other things that lead to the Hulk being cartoonishly exaggerated to the point that the highly anticipated Hulk remake is rendered a camp comedy , but it's not hard to see how much better Wrong Turn could have been if only they had made the villains at least the TINIEST bit believable . It was rather disturbing for me to read through some of the reviews and posts on the IMDb and see how many people out there were considering what it would take for someone to be inbred to the point where they would look like the people in this movie . ' Are there really people like that ? ' And other such nonsense . Let me tell you what it would take for people to get like that - about five hours of make-up every morning before shooting . Take a movie like Deliverance . Granted , Wrong Turn never had a chance in the world to even approach the quality of a serious thriller , even one far below the status of Deliverance . But the point is that the suspense in Deliverance FAR surpassed anything that Wrong Turn ever even gets close to , because the mountain men in Deliverance were just a lot of backwards rednecks , they weren't monsters as they were in this movie . Deliverance went for scares through avenues of twisted , demented people , mysterious and dark woods , and the knowledge of impending violence in a mysterious setting . Wrong Turn takes the wrong turn of going for nothing more than the weak gross-outs . When Chris Finn finds himself in a rush and faced with a tremendous traffic jam , he turns around and decides to pull off and ask a gas station attendant if there's another way . The gas station attendant , by the way , provided some promise for the rest of the film , as he sits in front of rust pile of a gas station drinking Pepto Bismol with his three teeth and staring into the dust . There ARE people like THIS in the world . But here is the point where the movie does take its wrong turn . Finn decides to take a route that he notices on a map on the wall , and as he drives off , we get a close-up of this charming businessman muttering under his breath about the mistake that he was making . Because he's entering the badlands , as Stephen King might say . This is when the thriller halts and the goofy horror begins . The guy might as well have said something like , ' That ain't no good ah-dear , cityboy . We MOUN-tain foke . We ain't liven out here by yall's RULES and all . ' I sigh resignedly as my eyes glaze over for the rest of the film . What follows is the typical jigsaw puzzle of a modern horror film . Everything works JUST right for two people and completely wrong for everyone else . Finn slows to about 5mph to look at a dead deer on the side of the dirt road that he's decided to take around the traffic , and within the of one second between that shot and the next shot , he has sped up to about 50 , fast enough to slam into a big SUV parked right in the middle of the road , completely destroying both vehicles . Sigh . Anyway , the remarkably polite owners of the vehicle , obviously aware that cars could come FLYING THROUGH this particular section of this particular dirt road , are out of the car and in the underbrush , pondering the mystery of the spike strip that they just ran over . So there you have it . A lot of people ( two couples , one single girl and now , one single guy ) are in the middle of the woods with no phone , no idea where they are , and no idea that there are creations of Stan Winston waiting in the woods to devour them . Speaking of which , let's consider those creations , as they can be described in no other way . What you have are a lot of examples of evolution in reverse . Sure , inbreeding can do some serious damage to both the phenotype and the genotype of anyone odd enough to mate with their family , but generations upon generations of such inbreeding would create nothing even remotely like what you see here . But whatever , this is a horror movie and it's all in fun . The reason I point out these monsters is that their cartoonishly exaggerated nepotism ( I'm only about 60 % sure that's the right word , by the way , but you get the point ) prevented the movie from ever generating any real suspense , although there are plenty of scenes that will challenge your ability to finish your popcorn . It's too bad that they screwed these guys up so badly , because while the movie was going to be pretty bad from the outset , it could have at least been suspenseful . At any rate , my favorite of the monsters in this movie was the little guy , I don't know what his name was but he looked like a question mark with skin . That's some serious inbreeding . I won't go into the various forehead slapping scenes ( although I'd love to ) , but I really liked how the movie stops in its tracks long enough to shove the impending romance down our throats , as if there was a split second since all the characters were introduced that we didn't already know it was coming . And when I say the movie stopped in its tracks , I mean it very literally . Finn and Jessie , the obligatory love interest , pause under a WATERFALL long enough for her to forget that there are mutants chasing them and tell him about how she and her boyfriend broke up . This is ham-handed screenwriting at it's best . Or worst . Whichever is dumber . ( spoilers ) The rest of the movie , like all that which preceded this ludicrous scene , is an exercise in bringing about the very ending that you knew was coming all along the way . I will admit that there were some death scenes in the movie that were pretty creative ( I was going to say pretty GOOD , but that's hardly the right word to describe a depiction of a girl getting beheaded against a tree with an axe through her mouth ) , although such things are hardly enough to carry the entire film , which has little else to carry it . |
544,492 | 562,732 | 1,298,716 | 2 | Why Cheap Political Statements and Movies Don't Mix ? | Road of No Return is notable more than anything else for having signs of a great cast despite a pathetically awful script . The movie poster has some promise , with Michael Madsen and David Carradine posing opposite each other in a picture that seems to promise a gritty and powerful action drama , but such is not to be the case . This thing is so bad that it's amazing that it ever got made at all , much less that stars of such caliber as Madsen and Carradine signed on . The story concerns a group of hit men who have been hired by a group of shady businessmen . The hit men are all interchangeable caricatures , paper-thin stereotypes that are thrown together and spend the majority of the movie in close quarters getting to know each other and sharing their feelings . Soon it is revealed that the men that hired them are government officials who are forced to fly under the radar to take out some major drug dealers because those pesky liberal laws prevent them from really being able to do their jobs . The fact that the movie is based on a government agency that has to hide their dealings from Washington in order to avoid getting in trouble for doing their jobs does not speak well for the coherence of the script , since at one point David Carradine's character explains that Washington has authorized them to use " extreme measures " against drug traffickers . Complicating matters is the fact that the hired hit men noted one of their license plates during the hiring process and are looking into the backgrounds of their employers . A bunch of nonsense follows and ultimately everyone is put into a position where the hit men want to get paid and the men that hired them decide that the only way they can safely get out of the whole thing is to kill all of them . Clean the cleaners , as it were . Oh , and did I mention the kids ? Early in the film , two of the hit men pull off a multiple homicide which leaves two young girls stranded and with nowhere to go , so the hit men take them in and take turns being bizarre father figures for them . I love the thought that went into this . The girls were at one point about to be sold into sexual slavery by the bad guys , but the good bad guys take them in . One of the girls is killed ( or taken away or something , I can't remember and don't care to go back and find out ) , leaving only one of them , a young girl of about ten years old . Here's a little exchange that should reveal something about the kind of script that this movie comes from . One day , she's relaxing in a hotel room with two of the hit men , and one of them leans over and starts doing lines of cocaine off the bedside table . When the girl gets upset , he sits up , concerned , and asks , " What's the matter ? " He seems genuinely confused . The end credits of Road of No Return inform us that the movie is written and directed by " Dr . " Parviz Saghizadeh . I have no idea what kind of doctor this person is , but I can tell you that it is not a doctor of philosophy , otherwise he would have noticed the pathetic shallowness of the political nonsense that this movie tries to pass on . David Carradine's character ham-handedly delivers it in this charming bit of dialogue : " How the hell did we get into this mess anyhow ? It's those damn liberals . If we had tough laws and tough judges with balls enough to put these drug traffickers behind bars and throw away the keys ? " So you see , it's all the liberals ' fault that they were forced to hire hit men and that those poor kids got blown up in that car bomb and that the girls had no parents and were going to be sold into child prostitution and the whole world is just coming apart . I have a question though , who's fault is it that this mess of a movie got made ? |
544,561 | 562,732 | 89,173 | 2 | The worst one yet . | Contains Spoilers ! The movie starts out with a nightmare that Tommy Jarvis is having . You remember Tommy , played by Corey Feldman in Part 4 , evidently he's grown up to a fabulous future as a mental patient . Thankfully , this was a dream , since it features two nutcases whooping and hollering as they dig Jason out of his grave , where he is buried under about 3-4 inches of soft dirt , and apparently buried wearing his hockey mask and with a stabbing weapon in each hand . Brilliant . Tommy awakens on the way to the mental hospital , around which most of the rest of the movies revolves . In the movie's defense , at least it wasn't yet another slopfest about a lot of teenagers going up to the lake to be rebellious and end up getting killed just like we already knew they would . They are running out of inventive ways to cut up young people for that to drive yet another Friday the 13th installment . Unfortunately , they seem to have decided that since they added a few new gimmicks to the movies , like a mental hospital , a Jason impersonator , and some shockingly dirty rednecks , they didn't need to come up with any new death scenes . Not exactly the most intellectual necessity , but creative deaths are about 85 % of what has always driven this series , and in this one we get more of the same boring killings - a machete pushed through the stomach ( on two separate occasions in this movie , I think ) , slashes across the chest / face , etc . In one scene , Jason plunges a pair on hedge-clippers through some poor girls eyes , but then they screwed it up because we get a shot upwards of his hands holding the clippers and roughly pushing them together , indicating that he had beheaded her . Then we see her and she was just stabbed through the eyes . Why include that shot if it's completely wrong as far as what he did to her ? At any rate , the nutty people who inform the cast that they're all doomed are rather interesting as the above-mentioned dirty rednecks , except they run up to the cast when they're at the mental hospital surrounded by police ( to find out why you have to watch the movie yourself ) , and they run up screaming threats , upset that there is a mental hospital filled with punk teenagers so close to their home . Pretty funny scene , except the woman threatens to kill the next person who comes near their house , then she expands her threat to include the police officers , then she informs the lot of them that she is currently strapped with dynamite and would blow them all to hell if they don't watch their step . Just so you know , if you threaten to even punch someone and there is a police officer within earshot , consider yourself arrested . A verbal threat is assault , and can land you in jail . This woman threatened to kill the kids , the police officer , and then to blow herself up , killing everyone in sight , and the cops just smile as she jumps on the motorcycle with her nutcase son and rides off with him , taking with her the dynamite and any respect I might have had for these cops . Later on , we see these rednecks at home as she is chopping up a chicken , screeching all the while , to feed to her idiot son , and they are approached by a man who knocks on the door , asking if they have any work he can do for some food ( he hasn't eaten in two days ) , so she puts him to work cleaning out the chicken coop and then he can come back and get his stomach filled . Why was this guy in the movie at all ? He literally serves absolutely no purpose other than to inform the audience that these people have a chicken coop that needs cleaning and so that he can be another person for Jason to kill . If they didn't think they had a large enough cast of teenagers for Jason to plow through , I would have suggested just adding a few more characters rather than adding in some wandering oddball in a wife-beater looking for a meal . Instead we have this guy with no part in the movie except that of a hungry victim . ( spoilers ) One of the two most ridiculous scenes in the film concerns her son , who gets beat up down at the mental hospital by Tommy , so he rides home on his motorcycle , screaming that those damn kids made him mad . Rather than going inside to express his anger to his mother , this ridiculous moron rides around the yard on his bike , spinning doughnuts and doing wheelies and screaming at the top of his lungs all the while , flying recklessly around the yard until he either slams into a tree , killing himself , or gets beheaded by a butcher knife that pops out of the bushes . We get the latter , but either would have been satisfying enough , as long as it shut that idiot up . The second of the two most ridiculous scenes in the film is the one where Demon , the older brother of one of the younger but more prominent characters in the movie , takes turns singing ' Hey baby baby ' over and over to his girlfriend on the other side of the craphouse wall . VERY romantic . On the other hand , what the hell else would you expect from someone with a name like Demon ? I guess this was the only thing they could come up with I order to make Demon get concerned when his girlfriend stopped singing back to him . His death , however , was among the more interesting of all of the ones in the movie . Thus brings up a rather important plot point about this movie , that the killer in the hockey mask is not even Jason , but Jason being impersonated by someone , whose identity and motives are revealed at the end of the film after his pretty impressive death scene . Fans might be disappointed that it's not even Jason in this movie , since he was killed in Part 4 , but that doesn't really matter for the most part , because even though it's really just some guy doing all the killing , he is still just as relentless , stolid , and basically impervious to damage as the original . He makes no sounds , doesn't run , and of course can't be killed until enough people have been killed to fulfill an hour and a half running time . This should have opened up a lot of possibilities for the movie , since the last time there was any element of mystery was in Part 1 when the real killer was not Jason Voorhees but his mother , seeking revenge against the kids who brought about the death of her son . But nope , the only mystery is that the killer is not really Jason , who the films makers decided to leave dead for this installment ( viewers at the time of its release were probably expected to expect some sort of ' Evil Never Dies ' resurrection very soon to follow ) , but the ham-handed hints leave all but the most dense viewers very aware of the killer's real identity long before his mask ever comes off . This is surely one of the most hated of the Friday installments among the series ' fans , most likely because the real Jason does not appear , but only in name , almost . For the entire film except for the scenes that hint at the killer's identity and the scene where his mask comes off at the end , he is the real Jason . He acts and moves exactly like him , so the basic attraction of the movie is there , I suppose , but it reminds me of the popular failure of Halloween III , the one which completely departed from the premise of the first two films , having absolutely nothing to do with Michael Meyers or Laurie Strode . They wisely returned to the original story in part IV , even going so far as to attach the subtitle ' The Return of Michael Meyers ' and put a big picture of his mask on the movie's poster . The next Friday film does exactly the same thing , adding on the subtitle ' Jason lives , ' as though to say , ' Sorry about that last movie ! He's alive in this one ! ' I love the subtlety of these movies . So this movie is probably considered by many people , such as myself , to be the worst installment in the series , but not only because it wasn't really Jason as the killer . That's probably only about 90 % of the reason . The other 10 % is things like the ones mentioned above . Logic is abandoned even more than in the other movies ( Tommy , for example , is admitted to a mental hospital that not only exists in the exact location of the cause of his mental instability , but also allows him to keep such things as the horror movie masks that he made as a kid and , shockingly enough , a four-inch pocket-knife ) , a guy is introduced who has no part in the movie or the series other than to get killed , etc . But I think it remains a curiosity piece , in that it is so clearly an experiment by the filmmakers to try something a little different , have it fail miserably , and then promptly return to the general formula in the next movie . |
543,928 | 562,732 | 1,031,969 | 2 | If you need a good nap , check out The Rocker . | I think we've all been spoiled by good music movies , like Almost Famous ( which , incidentally , Rainn Wilson was actually in ) and School of Rock , or at least funny ones , if not necessarily good , like Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny . From the trailer you can quickly gather that The Rocker is not a serious movie ; it's about as serious as Step Brothers . What you can't gather from the trailer is that The Rocker is also as dumb as Step Brothers . Probably dumber . It immediately starts out with intolerable goofiness , as Robert Fishman is kicked out of his 80s caricature band and turns into a movie monster . He chases his terrified bandmates down the street on foot at 60mph , jumping on top of the van and clawing his way across the roof using his drumsticks as hooks to pull himself along . When they slam on the brakes and send him flying into the street , first he appears to be dead but soon sits up like a zombie and turns his head like he's possessed . Thus is the tone set and your eyes can safely glaze over for the rest of the movie . Cut to 20 years later , where he is working a dead-end job sitting in front of a computer ( I'm just now realizing the irony of me sitting here writing that last sentence ) , while his former bandmates have gone on to massive superstardom . Luckily , he soon finds his calling when a bunch of whiny high school kids ask him to play with their band as the drummer for their senior prom . All of the typical scenes are thrown in , the auditions for the new drummer where you get a whole stream of bizarre lunatics doing something ridiculous on the drums or the electric keyboard , the drummerless bandmates whining and lamenting their terrible luck when their idiot drummer boy gets grounded for bringing hash brownies to a Spanish convention at school , the caricature characters , etc . The Rocker is a bland , flavorless combination of things like Youtube , MySpace , cheesy 80s rock , mind-numbing product-placement and , say , some kind of cardboard breakfast cereal . It is so uninteresting and so unfunny that it's amazing to me that the thing was ever made . I get the feeling that it is purely because of the success of other rock comedies that this one was even considered . What happens is , through his lack of understanding of modern technology ( despite having a 40-hour a week job working in front of a computer ) , " Fish " does a virtual rehearsal one day with his band completely nude , thinking the webcam is a microphone . The video winds up on Youtube and it's an instant hit . Record labels come knocking on the door , and the gigs start lining up . What follows is an exercise in coming up with scenes where Fish can act as inappropriately as possible , showing that he not only failed as a musician , but fails as a human being in understanding even the simplest things about interacting with other people . Does rock really corrupt the mind like that ? Almost without exception the jokes fall completely flat , like dominoes . Do you ever do that thing with dominoes where you stand them up all in a big line all over the house and then push one over and watch them all fall down and then you laugh and cheer and then immediately start looking dejectedly at the big mess you now have to clean up ? Well , I haven't done that for quite some time now , but I remember enjoying it much more than I enjoyed The Rocker . Of course the good looking but perpetually depressed lead singer in the high school band is going to eventually start to notice the brooding and perpetually depressed girl in the band in ways that he hadn't noticed her before . At a key moment in the film , he asks her if she'd like to have dinner with him , and he has to ask twice before she gets what he's saying . In response , she smiles for the first time in the movie , and I slap my forehead in disgust for about the 200th time . The development of their little crush is so goofy and so childish that it's almost weird . And no , I'm not going to apologize for ruining the kiddie romance at the end of the movie . If you don't watch The Rocker because you read this review , you should thank me ! As is to be expected , there comes a time when Fish and his new high school band must open for Vesuvius , the band that Fish was booted out of 20 years before . Incidentally , Vesuvius is headed by lead singer Lex , a Bret Michaels lookalike played by Will Arnett , who should have had the lead role in the movie . I'm sorry , but Rainn Wilson is just not funny . The superstar band has what their jerkoff manager calls an " Ashley Simpson situation , " and they're booed off stage . The subsequent chanting of " A . D . D . " ( the high school band's name , possibly the most creative thing in the entire movie ) over and over again is currently topping my list of Most Predictable Scenes of 2008 . Oddly enough , the only thing that wasn't flat-out stupid about The Rocker is Christina Applegate's character , who is well-written and performed , at least until late in the movie when she begins to adjust her behavior in order to adhere to the necessary Hollywood ending . She has clearly come a long way as an actress , but as is the case for just about everyone else involved , The Rocker is a huge step backwards . |
544,392 | 562,732 | 60,536 | 2 | Zzzzzzzzz ? | The story of In the Year 2889 is your standard bad b-movie plot about the end of the world , except there is not a single thing done to make the world look futuristic . I would grant that they managed to pull off a thick , muggy version of the early 70s , so I guess they achieved a few years of a futuristic look , but it's more likely that I just can't tell the difference between 1967 and , say , 1972 or so . The movie is an exercise in ham-handed and clunky story-telling . The sound dubbing is amazingly bad and doesn't even begin to match the action on screen , but no matter . Clearly this is a no-budget production so things like this must be forgiven . Or at least excused . The characters are in a fallout shelter , and wouldn't you just know it , it comes complete with a detailed miniature model of the house and surrounding area so that the inhabitants , mostly people who live in the area , can be informed about how the surrounding mountains will protect them from the radioactive fallout . You see , the mountains are filled with lead , so any radioactivity will pass harmlessly over their heads like radio waves . Pretty convenient , although there is some concern because rain would swiftly deliver nuclear death . There is meant to be some tension about the rising radioactivity in the air , except that any exterior scenes never look like anything other than a beautiful sunny day . So there is this thing about the radioactivity passing overhead and totally changing the world around them , but soon enough they are just fraternizing and grab-assing in the bomb shelter , and before you know it , the old man is instructing all the women , including his own daughter , that they must all bear children ASAP ! What a guy ! Overall this is basically zero-budget nonsense . There is a title that says " The Beginning " when the movie ends , and this might be the most clever thing in the movie , so I'll let you do the math . It might have been fun had it been made as a student film or something , but the amazingly bad costumes and performances just don't belong in a commercial film meant for public viewing . |
544,083 | 562,732 | 175,142 | 2 | All the gross-out warnings that I heard before watching Scary Movie gave me very high hopes about the movie . Maybe some put-to-sleep warnings would have been more accurate . | I saw Scary Movie expecting to see some better gross-out jokes than in both There's Something About Mary and American Pie . After seeing the preview , I expected that I was going to leave the theater holding my sides , and with my cheeks aching from laughing so hard . What I got was an hour and a half of the exact same jokes that I had already seen in the previews , with a few disgusting and boring sex jokes . The spoofs were put in almost verbatim from such films as the Scream trilogy ( obviously ) , Urban Legend , I Know What You Did Last Summer , the Matrix , and even the Usual Suspects for some odd reason . Because of that , what you get is not a film that stands on its own , but a conglomeration of skits based on the above horror films . Watching Scary Movie is almost like watching a sick version of a Saturday Night Live-type TV show . While I was watching Scary Movie , I found myself laughing at the jokes almost entirely because I WANTED it to be funny , but then I found myself feeling stupid for laughing out loud at something that was not even remotely amusing . This truly is a terrible film , and I can't say that I recommend it to ANYONE . |
544,643 | 562,732 | 185,183 | 2 | This film has no scope . It can really only be enjoyed by hardcore science fiction fans . | The previews made this movie look so good ! I guess most previews do , but Battlefield Earth was particularly disappointing . Most of the special effects and camera-work were fairly effective , and the character make-up was also very well-done , except for the tired concept of colored contact lenses . Those were getting old 1000 years before the film took place ! You'd think a superior race such as the Psychlos would be able to come up with something a little more creative than that . Although the acting was all very good , it was a mistake to put John Travolta in this film . This is a complaint that I have about numerous films like this , John Travolta is just too well known to suddenly play such an intensely evil character as he did in this film . One of the main problems with this film comes mainly from discrepancies in the believability of the plot . ( possible spoiler ahead ! ! ) The one that jumps immediately to mind is the fact that the ' man-animals ' managed to conquer a superior race like the Psychlos using primitive Harrier jets , which they learned to fly in a matter of days using a flight simulator which , along with the jets , they found to be in perfect working order after sitting for 1000 years ! ! The downfall of Battelfield Earth stems from this blatant disrespect for reality . True , this is characteristic of science fiction , but L . Ron Hubbard must realize that our current military is unable to build jets that could be left sitting until the year 3000 and still be made to work . You'd think at least the TIRES would have rotted away , if nothing else . Battlefield Earth is entertaining , but also ultimately disappointing . |
544,496 | 562,732 | 813,715 | 2 | What a joke . | The reviews of Heroes on the IMDb make perfect sense . Reviews written at the beginning of season 1 are absolutely glowing , people couldn't stop talking about how great the show was . Then as the season dragged on , the truth started to come out . You begin to notice that everyone has these super-powers but are all reluctant to use them , and for the dumbest imaginable reasons . One guy wants to pretend he can't fly because he's afraid it will hurt his political career . And it doesn't help that he is one of the most dislikable characters in the series . After only a few episodes you will begin to notice that the vast majority of the show is composed of one cheesy scene after another , all strung together along a flimsy clothesline of a plot , which serves as little more than a vague direction along which to bombard us with a horizonless barrage of pseudo-revelations that constantly lead nowhere . After ten episodes , you don't know any more about what is going on than you did when you first saw previews for the series , it's a classic example of always promising that in the next episode you will learn something , but you never do . This is some of the worst writing I have ever seen on broadcast television . The problem is that you have one single problem that the show needs to solve ? a bomb that supposedly blows up New York City ? a catastrophe dreamed up by a graphic artist who can paint the future if he happens to have enough heroin flowing through his veins ( I know , I know , this is great stuff to be piping into American homes but wait , it gets funnier ) . In order to stop this , a Japanese software engineer must use his ability to stop time to do something . Also , a young man who can absorb the powers of other must use his gift to do something . And an up-and-coming politician must ignore his power to fly so that instead of making use of his superhuman ability he can do something . Also , a cheerleader who can't be injured must also ignore her power to instantly heal even the most catastrophic injuries so that instead of using her power she can do something . Anything ? Nothing ? Save the cheerleader , save the world ? Am I really hearing this ? Well , get ready , because that is the whole series . One of the biggest problems is that there are no rules established . There are no parameters within which these people can use their powers . Their powers either work or they don't work , and there is no reason given . We are just as clueless as the characters , which makes it impossible for the show to generate any tension or even drama . In an atmosphere where anything can happen for any ( or no ) reason , it is impossible to know how to react or to react at all . The writers try to break all the rules with this show , only to learn that the rules are there for a reason . The part of Hiro Nakamura , the Japanese man who can stop time , is a breath of fresh air in what is otherwise a plodding and intolerably cheesy soap opera with an occasional special effect . It's like the show wants to attract the science fiction crowd and the daytime TV crowd , but not only doesn't realize that these two audiences are about as polarly opposite as audiences get . Not that they would know how to please either one individually anyway . What a mess . Every episode is book-ended with goofy , melodramatic monologues which serve only as vain attempts to impose meaning onto material which not only has none but couldn't possibly support any even if the writers weren't no-talent hacks . These rants are read by Mohinder Suresh , one of the show's goofiest characters , wildly overacted from start to finish and with an intolerable fake accent by Sendhil Ramamurthy . And don't try to tell me that accent is real , the guy is a frat boy from Massachussetts who was born in Chicago . I wonder if he has ever set foot in India . Couldn't they find an actor with a real Indian accent who couldn't act , rather than an actor with a fake Indian accent who can't act ? And it doesn't help that Suresh spends much of his time on feverish missions , desperately trying to " find these people . . . and warn them ! " He breathlessly seeks out a little boy who has been making appearances in his dreams , only to find him and hear , " You already have the answers you seek . " What a great way to string along your audience and then laugh in their faces . As an interesting note , Hiro is played by Masi Oka , a digital effects artist with Industrial Light and Magic who has an astonishing resume . He is great in this show , it's just too bad that nothing else is . |
544,214 | 562,732 | 425,743 | 2 | April 2004 - American casualties at their highest since the war officially ENDED . | This shocking statement ( shocking because now , four years later , the war is still clearly not over ) promisingly begins what turns out to be an astonishingly bad film about the ongoing Iraq war . I am always wary when I read extreme reviews of movies on the IMDb ( This is the best movie ever made , This is the worst movie ever made , etc ) , but in this case they are all true . This movie is so unbelievably bad that it's amazing it ever got released . Before I say anything else , I should admit that I bought the movie thinking it was some kind of documentary . I live in China so I bought a pirated copy that only had Chinese writing on it , so all I could read was American Soldiers : A Day in Iraq , which led me to believe that it was going to be something meant to inform the public about the reality of the situation on the ground , as they say . The reality of the movie , needless to say , was a tremendous disappointment . First of all , nothing is even remotely realistic . You don't have to be a battle-weary veteran to understand that war is not about occasional gunfights punctuated with casual breaks perfect for cheesy , D-movie bravado and beat-box dance sessions ( I almost fell off the sofa when I saw that scene ) , and don't even get me started on the " Iraqis " in the movie . The accents are so bad and the delivery so talentless that it is impossible not to laugh ( My home . . . is . . . your . . . home . It is . . . not . . . much . . . . but it . . . . . is . . . . ours . " ) , even when you think of the dismayed families of the fallen soldiers on whom the film is based , who must be shocked and insulted to see that their loved ones are being remembered with this ridiculous mess of a film . And by the way , did anyone else notice that all of the soldiers had backwards American flag patches on their shoulders ? This is patriotic sacrilege and any real life soldier in Iraq with such a thing on his uniform would be viciously berated by his fellow soldiers and I imagine severely reprimanded by his superiors . Didn't anyone involved in making the movie think that such blatant defamation of the American flag might not be such a good idea in a war film , even as consistently bad as this one ? Nothing is taken seriously in the movie at all ( " Nobody likes being occupied , it's like living with your parents ! " ) . The men all take turns with this idiotic schoolboy bravery ( " I would give my life for the sarge ! " " No I'M giving my life for the sarge ! " " No , ME ! " " No we'll ALL give our lives for the sarge ! " " YEAH ! ! " ) , meanwhile the sarge seems to have sustained a mortal injury that renders him sleepy and a little bit sweaty for the majority of the film , but seems to just kind of go away toward the end . The " sets " are also ridiculous in the extreme . Iraq is re-created so badly and so unconvincingly that it may as well have been filmed in Canada ( note : it was ) . There is some effort made to call attention to the fact that many soldiers joined the military because of September 11th and WMDs , but Iraq has nothing to do with either of them . This unjust inconsistency has cost thousand and thousands of lives and is even more disturbing when the film ends with this quote : " The greatest treasure our nation has is our enlisted men and women . When we put them in harm's way , it had better count for something . Their loss is a national tragedy . " Sean Penn , in All the King's Men , said " Time brings all things to light . " One can only hope this is also true about the reality of why we are in Iraq and who the real criminals are in the Bush administration . The only question is how high and how deep the corruption goes . In the meantime , let's stop making pathetic movies like this about the Iraq war . The news is depressing enough . . . |
544,169 | 562,732 | 377,744 | 2 | Since it is such the polar opposite of enlightening , I wish I could at least call it interesting . | I had heard so much about A Day Without A Mexican before its release , but I never got a chance to watch it in the theaters . Now that I've seen it on video , I get an idea of why it was gone from theaters so fast . They took a great idea and went nowhere with it . In fact , the movie is so unambitious that in retrospect I'm amazed I ever thought it was an interesting idea at all . It is no secret that the immigrant workforce in California and indeed of much of America is the foundation of our economy , which is why it should have been so obvious of how little there was to do with the premise of Mexicans disappearing and leaving all of the poor , helpless Americans to pick their own lettuce and tomatoes . The result that we get is a preachy joke of a mockumentary that takes America's tendency to look down at immigrants and turns it around , augmenting the snobbish tone that this places on Americans so much that it removes any sense of realism from the story and turns it into a schoolyard lecture peppered with stupid jokes and shallow stereotypes . Maybe it's because I live in California , but I like to think that the vast majority of Americans with two brain cells working at the same time already knew everything that this movie had to say . The only way you could not know the importance of the migrant workforce in this country is if you've lived on Mars for your entire life . In a cave . With your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears . It's clear how strongly the people behind the film felt about how overlooked migrant workers are in America and especially in California . I completely agree with them , but it doesn't change the fact that the movie is an absolute mess . It's badly written , badly shot , and full of cheesy caricatures of Americans , each one designed around a single common prejudicial view that so many Americans tend to have towards Mexicans , like that everyone who speaks Spanish is Mexican or that anyone who refers to themselves as " latino " is Mexican . The people behind the film feel so strongly about the points that they're trying to make that they can't help scrawling little factoids across the screen like this is an informational film or an educational film or one of those Pop-Up Videos on VH-1 . Remember those ? The problem is that this extra effort to slap the audience over the head with individual facts that point to a larger truth that the vast majority of the audience already knows causes the film to fall on its face . I've always said that I'm amazed at how the migrant workers are forced to work brutal , manual labor for wages that barely allow them to survive , while people like lawyers and actors are paid millions and millions of dollars . It's not that I think actors are overpaid , on the contrary , really , I think their salaries reflect the amount of money that they personally are able to generate , but if every actor in the world went on strike or if every lawyer went on strike , the vast majority of us would be unaffected . But if migrant workers all went on strike or all decided to go to their home countries ( like so many bigots in America stupidly wish they would ) , the country would almost immediately fall apart . Look at it this way , if truck drivers stopped driving , Los Angeles would be out of food in six days . Maybe that would have made an interesting movie , to have all of the migrant workers band together and decide to do something active to benefit themselves and each other . To leave the country that so misuses them and leave us to figure out how to fill the jobs that , ah , what was it Bush said ? " The jobs that Americans won't take . " Instead we get this stupid , stupid premise about all of the Mexicans simply disappear without a trace , only to magically reappear at the end unaware that they were ever even gone . It's a ridiculous way to bookend what could have been a valuable , introspective film . And don't get me started on The Fog That Surrounded California . No phones or Internet or even short wave radios could penetrate it , so Californians were left completely on their own . What about cars ? Could those penetrate the fog ? How about airplanes ? Oh wait , the talking heads on TV told us not to approach the fog , so I guess that was out of the question . The movie places that little warning in there just as conveniently as it forgets about how many millions of people are entering and leaving the state of California at any given moment by countless methods of transportation . Sadly , the movie has a great point to make , but it is a point that needs to be made in a way that can't be so easily written off as a stupid , childish joke . And a mysterious fog and the mysterious disappearance of millions of Mexicans is a stupid , childish joke . The only good part was how the movie showed that if millions of people disappeared all at once , those jerks in the little toy carts would still be driving around putting parking tickets on the windshields of the mysteriously disappeared . Evidently the filmmakers had a bone to pick with meter maids , too . |
544,255 | 562,732 | 283,015 | 2 | Well , at least they were nice enough to point out on the back of the cover box , by name , the very movies that Stranded shamelessly rips off . | The summary on the back of the movie box contains a sentence that says something like , ' a group of astronauts on a mission to mars get stranded on the red planet ? ' I can't remember what it was that made me rent this movie , but I got pretty much what I expected . Stranded displays a collection of actors famous from relatively obscure parts or films , such as Maria de Medeiros , who played Butch's whiny French girlfriend in Pulp Fiction , Joaquim de Almeida , who was Bucho in Desperado , and of course , Vincent Gallo who , despite an extensive filmography , is probably best known as Billy from the ugly but enormously well-made Buffalo ' 66 . Unfortunately , Gallo's talents as a hugely sarcastic and dislikable character are pretty much the only redeeming qualities of this film . The inexperience of the other actors , particularly the guy with the bleached hair and eyebrows , is all too obvious , as they deliver some of the worst acting I've seen in YEARS . The beginning of the movie plays like one of those bad educational videos I used to see in seventh grade , as the astronauts discuss the properties of Mars ' terrain and atmosphere , as though they are teaching it to people who are hearing of the planet for the first time . I realize that certain information needs to be delivered to the audience who , for the most part , are not familiar with all of this information about the red planet , but these people are ON THE SURFACE OF MARS . You just don't get that far without knowing the exact reasons for why Mars ' atmosphere is inhospitable to humans . So these people go to Mars and crash land ( sound familiar ? ) , the older astronaut obligatorily dies on impact , leaving the remaining five to figure out a way to survive . Needless to say , they find that they only have enough supplies remaining on the capsule to support two of the five astronauts ( sound familiar ? ) , so three have to walk out onto the planet and face death . It's a pretty emotional scene when they decide who lives and who dies , and the three who wander onto the surface of Mars to see what they can see as death rapidly approaches pack up some oxygen tanks and head outside ( sound familiar ? ) . Unfortunately , the educational video that is the first 25 minutes or so of the film is not the extent of the bad screenwriting . When one of the characters who left to die begins to run out of oxygen , he stumbles to the ground , panting for breath , while another of them runs to him and says , ' What's the matter ? ' Oh , I stepped on a sharp rock , genius . WHAT DO YOU THINK ? ? ! ? ! I'm knocking on heaven's door ! Not only is he asked what's wrong , but then he even responds by saying , ' I'd like to go with you , I swear ! ' As though they need convincing that he's not laying down because he'd just prefer to lay down and die than keep walking . Sigh . ( spoilers ) The red filter over the lens creates a pretty effective Martian landscape , except for the mildly cloudy day , which should have been enough to reveal to any thinking astronauts that there was something peculiar about the atmosphere on Mars on that particular day . There is the revelation of some sort of ancient Martian culture , with dead bodies laying around and buildings carved out of the rocky cliffs , and yet this seems to have been put into the movie for no other reason than because the astronauts would not have been able to survive long enough for a rescue mission otherwise . They find that there is breathable oxygen in the atmosphere and simply set up camp while the camera pulls out to show the whole planet and close the narrative , I suppose , with the suggestion that they're simply going to stay there and live happily ever after . But like I said , you get about what you expect . Granted , more emphasis is placed on the human and dramatic aspects of the film , but at the great expense of every other aspect . And when the setting and plot are not believable AND badly acted , any drama has a hard time getting noticed . |
544,889 | 562,732 | 88,967 | 2 | This movie is so bad it's almost weird . | I recently read Bruce Campbell's highly entertaining and informative first book , If Chins Could Kill , which served to instill within me a heightened interest in seeing his more obscure roles over the years , other than his role as Ash in the Evil Dead films , some of my favorite horror films of all time ( as well as some of my favorite horror performances ) . In attempting to check out some of those movies that I had never seen , I watched Crimewave which , being the honest man that he is , Campbell came right out in his book and said that no matter how you slice it , the film is a dog and everyone involved should line up for their forty whacks . And he wasn't kidding . Wow . One flaw that permeates the entire film is a nonstop barrage of stupid , badly dubbed sound effects that don't belong and don't work . They are the kind of sound effects that belong in Bugs Bunny cartoons , like gunshot sounds when someone makes a witty remark . Bruce plays the role of Renaldo the Heel who , given the feeble plot , need not be described as anything more than some jerk . The villains in this film are absolutely ludicrous , they are some of the worst bad movie performances I've ever seen . Remember that bully that roughed up Charlie Chaplin in Easy Street ? He was completely overblown and exaggerated in every way because he was acting in a silent film in 1917 , which explained his bizarre mannerisms and movements and behavior . In this movie , they took that exact villain and gave him a voice . Just as overblown and exaggerated , except now he talks like he acts and just comes off as goofy . His sidekick is even worse . The weirdest thing about this movie is the talent that was involved in it's production . It was written by the Coen brothers and directed by Sam Raimi , and starred , to some extent , Bruce Campbell who , b-movie virus or not , has a huge cult following . Unfortunately he was right , this movie is just a disaster , and I can understand why Bruce described this as their first taste of real failure . Keep your eye out for two jerks in the ballroom scene smugly sipping martinis . During production of the film , these two guys all but extorted $30 , 000 from the production team for the use of the ballroom , and demanded as an added bonus that they get to appear in the movie . Can you imagine that someone spent $30 , 000 just for a location for this movie ? ? Before I go , let me just say that I have all the respect in the world for the people involved in making the movie . Some things just don't work out , and this was one of them . Some of the performances are just unforgivable , but I actually think that Bruce performed well , the problem is that his character is badly written . He was asked to act stupidly , but at least he did a good job of it ! Too bad the story is virtually unintelligible ? |
544,423 | 562,732 | 119,345 | 2 | Another in a long line of inexplicably successful teen slasher movies that would fall flat if people would realize what they were watching . | I have to admit that I enjoyed this movie when I first saw it . I got a lot of good thrills out of it and basically just had a good time . However , when I watched it on video , the larger than life quality was entirely removed and I noticed a lot of things that hadn't occurred to me when I saw it in the theater . The acting , for example , was absolutely awful from everyone involved except for Anne Heche in the few scenes that she was in . And what is the big deal about Jennifer Love Hewitt ? ! She may be moderately attractive but she is one of the worst actresses I've ever seen , and I've seen some horrible acting ( see " Nightmare Weekend " ) . Sarah Michelle Gellar is totally unconvincing and Ryan Phillippe delivers the worst performance of his career . And don't even get me started on Freddie Prinze Jr . His eyebrows say it all every time . Besides that , the story , although theoretically possible , was terribly presented . A bunch of teenagers are partying and driving out in the hills late at night , they accidentally hit a man and , thinking he's dead , dump his body into a river to avoid having their lives needlessly ruined . Did anybody notice that just before the man in question had a little underwater tug-of-war with Barry ( Ryan Phillippe ) for Helen's ( Sarah Michelle Gellar ) princess crown , the man opened his eyes and Barry actually screamed in terror ? Given that , I hope I wasn't the only one laughing every time these morons speculated that " maybe he wasn't really dead . . . " HE GRABBED THE CROWN , HELD IT FIRMLY WHILE IT WAS WRENCHED FROM HIS FINGERS , AND OPENED HIS EYES , YOU IDIOTS ! ! ! How could they have been so stupid ? Of COURSE he wasn't dead . Besides that , why did he torment these poor kids ? They did him a favor ! Because of ' what they did last summer , ' he is now able to perform superhuman acts . Not only can he survive tremendous bodily harm ( in true Michael Myers form ) , but he can also perform menial tasks like loading and unloading a trunk full of crabs ( dead human body optional ) in a matter of seconds , and that includes flawless cleaning ! Think of the market value of a skill like that ! If I were him , I wouldn't be trying to kill anyone , I'd be getting rich ! He can also move with superhuman speed , the lucky guy . Oh wait , you gotta hear about another of my favorite parts . Just after the accident , Barry suggests that they dump the body because it won't do any good for them all to take the fall . Julie then reciprocates by saying that if there is some of the man on the car , then there's some of the car on him and when he's found the police will be able to find out whose car it was . How's that again ? They can do that ? I know that BMWs are nice cars . My uncle owns one , it's an amazing machine . But do they cover those cars with paint which can be used to identify each individual car ? Is that what they are suggesting in this scene ? Or are they just quickly establishing Julie James as a complete moron as early in the film as possible ? She sure was dumb in her cutesy love scene with Ray ( Freddie Prinze Jr . ) at the closing of the film . I never thought I'd say this , but this movie had a love story that was even more clumsily thrown in than your average Jerry Bruckheimer film ( even more than the ridiculous Coyote Ugly , which made an entire film out of one of these goofy romance flops ) . " I wanted you back , Julie . I couldn't lose you again . " " I feel your pain , Ray . " SHUT UP ! ! BOTH OF YOU ! ! I have never seen worse cheese than that in all my life . And yes , she really did say " I feel your pain . " As is obviously the case , I was ultimately not at all impressed by this movie . I liked it when I was in high school and didn't know any better , but now that my head in on straight , I can see that it is clearly a pathetic attempt to cash in on the seemingly endless stream of teen " scream " movies with which the unsuspecting public was bombarded in the late 1990s . If you liked Scream , good for you . It was a good movie . If you want more , stay away from I Know What You Did Last Summer ( as well as its equally awful sequel , I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago ) , and also try to avoid the mediocre Scream sequels . Watch something that is at least moderately entertaining , like Urban Legend ( I said entertaining , not original ) or The Blair Witch Project . I Know What you Did Last Summer is an honest attempt , but it is also a dismal failure . |
543,899 | 562,732 | 249,840 | 2 | Eventually proves to be a slightly interesting story , but it is ridiculously presented in every respect . | If you can manage to sit through the first 60 to 70 minutes of this movie without turning it off in disgust , you will be presented with something that vaguely resembles an interesting story . However , despite the fact that Nightfall eventually begins to almost start to kind of possibly redeem itself a little tiny bit , every bit of the rest of the film is just a belligerent mess . Everything , even down to the smallest details , was awful . In the beginning , the two girls want to look in the mysterious hole , and the big beefy guard sounds just like a little kid as he pathetically pleads them not to . You almost expect him to start to say that they're mean for not listening to him . That dumbass guard even held their lantern for them while they began to dig deeper in the hole . Illyra finds ? artifacts ' in the hole that bear ridiculous resemblance to mirrored balls shaped like tin cans ( ' ? it appears to be some kind of alloy ? ' ) . She pokes around in the cave for quite some time before noticing that it is packed with snakes . And did anyone stop to think about what exactly those snakes might find to eat down there in this lifeless hole ? Sheerin suggested that Beta ( I guess that would be the biggest of the six suns ) was going to be eclipsed by an INVISIBLE planet . Some of the characters are fighting with ridiculous tin foil swords , yet Illyra has a freakin ' laser gun . What is this , The Gods Must Be Crazy meets Star Wars ? Besides that , the editor must have slept through the scene where one of the evil watchers was on fire and wandered on camera with his great big space helmet in plain view . What a joke . What was the deal with the planet Aeon ? Was this just Earth in disguise ? Illyra referred to her race as ' mankind , ' there is talk about ' God's will ' as well as the Book of Revelations ( not Earth , but they have the same Bible ? ) , and these bonehead girls even buy a CAMERA from a street vendor ( ' Wow ! A camera ! I've never seen one so advanced ! It's got some kind of filter on it ! ' ) . You can tell that these girls were real geniuses . At least they TRIED to portray the females as intelligent people ( even though they failed miserably ) . Metron was pretty ridiculous as the poor guy who finds himself among the bad guys as he modestly makes use of his laughable powers ( firestarting , mind control , HEALING for crying out loud ) . All of the acting in the entire film was pathetic , and so was the script . However , I loved the efforts of Sheerin to keep her promise to Illyra . That was probably the funniest part of the whole movie . ' Where is she ? ' ' I promised I wouldn't tell ! She went into the desert with a watcher named Metron ! They left yesterday ! ' Oops . What an idiot . Once the point of the movie eventually rolled around , it got interesting for a few seconds in a row , surprisingly enough . Aeon has never experienced nighttime , and every 1000 years , a gigantic planet eclipses her largest sun and plunges the planet into darkness . Maybe it wasn't so much that they were all afraid of the dark as much as they were just mystified about what happened to their other five suns . Besides that , did these people not have darkness in their houses ? Had they never escaped the sunlight even for a minute in all of their lives ? It seems that without darkness , they wouldn't even know to be afraid of the dark . Oh well , I guess it's a mass response to set fire to their own houses and then giggle hysterically as they watch them burn . Also , never mind the fact that a planet that size ( the one that caused the eclipse ) , with a 1000 year orbit , would probably have eclipsed Aeon for WEEKS , not minutes , as you saw in the movie . It is truly a shame that Isaac Asimov's name was associated with this horrendous insult to the cinematic medium . There is not a single good thing to be said about this movie . ' The Greatest Science Fiction Story of All Time ' should qualify as false advertising . Even hard-core science fiction fans would be hard pressed to find something interesting about this garbage . Avoid at all costs . |
543,911 | 562,732 | 127,045 | 2 | Wow . | Very rarely do you seriously come across a movie with no redeeming values whatsoever . I mean , there are tons of movies these days that are so bad that you say something like that about them , but it's a rare occurrence when you can apply that statement literally . Neon Maniacs is the story of a lot of creepy monsters that live under the Golden Gate Bridge , evidently for no other reason than to make people wonder why a lot of monsters who can be killed by water would choose to live so close to it . In thinking back on the movie , is there really any reason at all why they live under the Golden Gate Bridge ? Is it just so they can include a couple shots of the bridge at the opening of the movie ? Not only do we never find out why these creatures live to close to the one thing that can destroy them on contact , but we also never know where they came from or why they are killing people . Maybe they're upset because they're different . This is definitely an 80s horror film , so obviously you expect the acting to be just as bad as it is , and I think that Neon Maniacs really tests your levels of belief by trying to get you to believe that teenagers in the 80s thought it was the cool thing to do late at night to park their van in the middle of some park and play football and make out in the woods . Oddly enough , as dumb as that sounds , it looks even dumber on screen . I will not waste your time describing what kind of creatures these are , because they are little more than some make-up artists weak effort to make some disgusting monsters for a meaningless horror film and their exact descriptions are beside the point . There is everything from an alien to an ape-man , so you can just imagine for yourself what's in between , if you're lucky enough not to have seen this movie . If you've read any of the other reviews of this movie on the IMDb , you already know that the movie sets up for a sequel that was never made ( my good friend and colleague Christopher Brown makes a good point in his review , that the sequel may have never been made because Lightning Video went out of business , but he also makes a shocking miscalculation of the quality of the movie itself ? sorry Chris ! ) . It's true that the movie leaves the possibility of a sequel so open that it calls too much attention to the fact that one was never made , but this is not an uncommon way to end movies like this . Little Shop of Horrors , for example , had a very similar ending , with the grinning plant showing up in the cute garden at the end of the film . Personally , I am more concerned with the sheer lack of quality of any kind from top to bottom in this movie ( there's a scene at the end , during the ' climax ' of the film , where the hero and heroine are hiding from the approaching demons , and decide to lay down on the floor and make-out and just not worry about the monsters that are closing in , I guess hoping that they will just disappear ? as it turns out , they were right ) , and besides that , even if someone wrote a sequel to this mess , who in their right mind would want to direct it ? |
544,288 | 562,732 | 333,780 | 2 | Bruiser's Bill ? Are you kidding me ? ! ? | Legally Blonde started out as a half-way clever attempt at putting the super-serious law profession in perspective by suggesting that even the most cartoonish bimbo could get in , literally on looks alone ( along with the help of a significant amount of sheer , morbid curiosity on the part of the overwhelmingly male admissions board ) . The first film ended with Elle Woods , the ultimate sorority caricature , making her way through Harvard Law School and then wowing the audience by winning a huge case using nothing but her basic beauty salon know-how . Pretty sad way to conclude a film that must have been meant at least in some part to empower girly college girls , but at least they didn't pretend that Ms . Woods could giggle her way through one of the most prestigious law schools in America and come out on the other side as a serious attorney . Indeed , she graduates as exactly the same girly college girl that she always was , except now she has a license to practice law . Scary . The question is , what was good about the first movie ? Granted , it was definitely entertaining and certainly had its charming and amusing moments . I might even say that it was only the conclusion that was a major let-down . I always thought that one of the goals of a good story was to show character change , and there was none in Legally Blonde , from the beginning of the first movie to the end of the second . Oh wait , she dumped her boyfriend , that's right . Any human girl with two brain cells operating at the same time would have done that the second he told her that he was going to college and now needed to " be serious , " basically calling his relationship with her a big joke , but hey , at least there's something . . . Now , Elle is a law school grad and a real-life lawyer who has won her first case , so now it's off to the real world . And by that , of course , I mean it's off to a highly demanded private investigator to FIND HER DOG'S PARENTS . Yes , it's true . This movie exists because of Ms . Woods ' mission to find her dog's parents so they can come to her wedding . Good God man , when she said she wanted everyone that mattered to be at her wedding and her dog barked at her , I thought it was going to be a quick joke and then they would move on with the movie . Nope . The story comes to a grinding halt ( it wasn't moving much anyway ) , jumps the rails , and goes bouncing and jostling across the desert into the desolate horizon . Elle discovers with a shock that the people she works for are dirtbags , so goes to Washington with the mission of saving Bruiser's ( her purse dog ) mother from animal testing at the secret Versace testing facility . My guess is that Versace didn't pay for this name placement . . . In the first film , there was some half-hearted attempt at presenting the reality of law school , but all of that goes out the window here . Elle is seen as a joke when she first gets to Washington ( because she is a joke , of course ) , but wins credibility at the most bizarre circus of a Congressional hearing you can imagine . Indeed , the ridiculous skits that take place in this movie are outdone for absurdity only in the way that crowds of government officials , senators , and House representatives burst into tears or burst out laughing or clamor over each other in their belligerent rush to sign their names to whatever bill this group of childish lunatics was trying to push through . The one thing that we have to be thankful for is that the movie is short . At about 90 minutes it still feels a lot longer because it is something of an endurance test , but it could definitely be a lot worse . The real reason the movie is so bad is because of the entire premise of searching out Bruiser's parents ( no mention is ever made of Bruiser's father , incidentally - maybe he took off when he learned his son was gay ) , which might be one of the dumbest plot devices in film history . This is even worse than that computer in Lost where they have to type in some code every 108 minutes to prevent some unknown disaster ( or nothing ) from happening . Clever . ( spoilers ) The film turns a little bit scary at the end when Elle and her endlessly tolerant new husband are driving away from Washington . He asks her where she wants to live , and the film ends with Elle glancing mischievously at the White House as they pass by . Don't even think about it , Elle . You've already made a complete mockery of the American legal system , already fraught with corruption and crooks , and now you've made a complete mockery of the American government , a bloated , bureaucratic mess which is also already fraught with corruption and crooks . Let it stop now . . . |
543,975 | 562,732 | 419,358 | 2 | See the spectacular Poseidon do a spectacular belly flop . | Now , neither The Poseidon Adventure from 1972 nor Wolfgang's Peterson's 2006 version had any understanding of the physics of a large ocean liner sinking , but this version takes that lack of knowledge and places it under a microscope , seemingly in order to obliterate any sense of logic or physical understanding of our universe completely . As the first of many fatal errors , they decided for this goofy remake to change the catastrophe from a rogue wave , an event of sheer natural force actually capable of delivering enough power to capsize a full sized ocean liner into a terrorist bomb , probably the dumbest thing imaginable to have placed into a movie and expect the audience to believe that it could flip the ship over . Consider , if you will , the Lusitania , which was shot by a German torpedo in almost the exact same spot that the terrorist bomb exploded in this movie . A hole was torn in the hull very similar to the one torn in the Poseidon here , and despite having been much better built than the Titanic , which took hours to sink despite having been perforated all along one side by the iceberg , the Lusitania sank in less than fifteen minutes . When a ship experiences a breach in the hull like that , needless to say , it tends to sink because water flows in , making the bottom of the ship too heavy to stay afloat . This movie wants you to believe that the part of the ship suddenly pulling the ship underwater has miraculously decided to spin up into the air , submerging its lightest side . The logic here is the same that will allow a bowl made of solid lead and filled with marshmallows to suddenly flip upside down . Sigh . The groan inducing performances are equaled only by the astonishingly bad special effects , particularly the exterior shots . I'd rather they had gone with miniatures rather than such god awful CGI . Also , if you happen to get this from Netflix , pay no attention to the 2 hr . label . It's in two parts and each is 90 minutes long . Torturous . |
544,202 | 562,732 | 861,689 | 2 | Don't watch it ! It's a trick ! ! | In the first Film Studies class I ever took back in 1998 , one of the first lessons that the instructor gave us was that , when composing film criticism , one of the worst things you could ever do was try to impose meaning onto material that doesn't have it . Evidently this is something that young film students did when they didn't really understand a movie , or missed the point . And be advised , by the way , that the people who are imposing meaning onto this one are going to be the ones who accuse everyone who was properly bored to tears of " not being intelligent enough to understand it . " Yeah , whatever . I don't need to be punched in the face to understand that there's violence around me . In perusing some professional film opinions of Blindness , by the way , I immediately got the feeling that there were professionals all over the country imposing meaning onto this thing left and right . But then I realized that they weren't imposing meaning , they were just pointing out a meaning that the film carries that is all at once stupid , repetitive , obvious , pointless , and ultimately offensive . At least offensive in lost time , although there is plenty of nonsense in this mess to offend in all sorts of other ways . Take your pick . So here's the story , should you care . During a routine traffic jam , a Japanese man panics in his car , having gone suddenly blind . But not real blindness , you see , instead his vision is just flooded with white . Anyway , a car thief happens by , drives him home , cases his fancy apartment , and then takes off with his car . The next day he goes to his eye doctor , who is completely baffled and promises a follow-up appointment where they will get to the bottom of what's going on . Soon , the car thief and the doctor are both blind as well , and it is determined that the disease is contagious and the best course of action will be to quarantine the afflicted in an old mental hospital . Nothing is known or understood about the disease , you understand . They don't know how it's spread , they don't know what causes it , if it's permanent , no one has ever seen anything like it . Nevertheless , it seems like a bad enough problem to break that unspoken American rule about internment camps that seems to have been in pretty good effects since the early 1940's . As with any disaster movie , Blindness focuses on a handful of people who have been quarantined in one particular mental hospital , and we are meant to take them as an example of how any cross-section of modern humanity would react in the same situation . The problem with this , of course , is that there's not a single character in the movie who is the slightest bit believable . And the least believable ones are the ones that are most crucial to driving the film's conflict . Gael Garcia Bernal , a veteran of brilliant films , plays a cartoonish movie villain pretty much on the level with Matthew McConaughey's head-smackingly stupid character in Texas Chainsaw IV . You haven't seen that movie ( or if you have hopefully you've managed to block it out of your memory by now ) , but trust me , the comparison is apt and I have the feeling that Texas Chainsaw IV is not exactly the kind of thing that director Fernando Meirelles wanted popping into peoples ' minds while they were watching his adaptation of Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago's novel . What the hell is this thing about , you ask ? That's a very good question . Maybe it's about Man's Propensity Toward Evil ? Man's tendency to revert to primal instincts when cornered ? The importance of having a " leader with vision ? " Human selfishness in times of crisis ? Women's place in society ? Take your pick , there are arguments for all of these clichés . The propensity toward violence one seems to be the most widely accepted , which is not exactly a good thin , because it's a dead horse that's older than the hills , something so obvious that it's the same as making a movie that spends two hours describing which direction is up and which direction is down and then thinks it's smart because it never mentions the word gravity . No thanks ! About the first 30 minutes of the movie are genuinely interesting , if not exactly pleasant . There's not a pleasant or enjoyable frame in the entire film , but it doesn't get offensively ridiculous until past the hour mark , so at least there's that . The conflict of one Ward violently taking control of their tiny society is so witless and unbelievable that it doesn't give the impression that these are man's natural instincts , it gives the impression that the Ward just happened to be filled with criminals . This is not a cross-section of modern society , it's a cross-section of the cast of a bad thriller . Oh , I forgot to mention that Julianne Moore's character is the only person in the world who is completely unaffected by the disease . No reason is given for her immunity , but no reason is given for the entire disaster anyway . Sort of like the phenomenally bad A Day Without A Mexican . Remember that train wreck ? All the Mexicans in California disappear for no reason , and we're meant to ignore that and focus on the aftermath to learn a valuable , meaningful , and long , long-since already understood lesson . Save yourself the time . Please . Blindness will assault your senses with a simplistic and repetitive cinematic style that anyone with an exposure knob will find immediately boring , it will torture you through violence and rape , and it will teach you nothing new . I love being a film critic , but there are times when I really feel like it's unpleasant work . |
544,248 | 562,732 | 267,379 | 2 | Feature length educational video with atrocious production values . | Now , when I say that this is an educational video , I mean that it resembles those god-awful videos that they make kids watch in sex education or in the classroom portion of driver's training , where everything is packaged and contrived in order to illustrate a specific point . Nobody cares if you signal 100 feet or 120 feet or 80 feet before a turn , as long as you do it safely . Nor is any police officer on earth going to pull you over because you turned your brights off 447 feet away from an oncoming car rather than the required 500 . Similarly , no kid on earth is going to be at a party with his high school buddies and respond with , " No , I'd better not . It's bad for my health , and I don't want to get involved in any kind of trouble , " when his friends say to him , " Say , Jim , wouldn't it just be swell if we passed around a marijuana cigarette or two ? " Unfortunately , this movie doesn't know any of that , and it's horribly misguided cast and crew think that they can string together a horizonless array of similar claptrap and pass it off as a lesson on family values and proper child-rearing . Every single scene is ridiculously manufactured , so the movie falls flat on its face because it doesn't ever display the flimsiest scrap of realism . Consider one scene in the film where Jenny and her friends are lounging around on the benches in a local shopping mall , and just before her father walks up to the group and demands to know what is going on , Jenny stonily says , " I am sooo stoned . . . " When I was in high school , I was a troubled kid , too . I ditched school and drank and smoked and got arrested a bunch of times and hung out with exactly the kinds of kids that are portrayed in this movie . I don't say that because it's cool , just because it happened . And let me tell you this if nothing else , those kinds of kids would not be caught dead in a shopping mall , that's exactly the kind of conformity that they think they are cleverly and originally rebelling against , and is a perfect illustration of how much about troubled kids this movie simply doesn't know . There are countless realistic films that deal with exactly the same subject matter and succeed brilliantly , because the people involved in their productions have lived those kinds of lives and learned the lessons that the accompanying trouble and mistakes carry ( see SLC Punk ) . Consider this , no matter how screwed up your teenage daughter is , she will never ever ever ever fall asleep with potato chips spread all over her face , but this happened in this movie , I suppose in order to illustrate a deepening sense of disconnection and lack of interest in responsibility , not to mention personal hygiene . I point out these specific scenes because they exemplify how every single scene is artificially put on , designed with the heavy and obvious hand of grown adults who see strange behavior in kids and immediately assume the worst . In the false world in which this movie lives , any kid who gets caught with cigarettes or fights with their parents is also having orgies with their drugged out friends , who go on to stash tens of thousands of dollars in heroin in their purse before getting stabbed by some junkie in an alleyway , continuing a chain of events that will lead to attempted suicide . This is exactly the kind of thinking that makes parents and teenagers unable to communicate , because the parents are stupid , just like both of Jenny's are . All of Jenny's mothers lines in the film can be interchanged with " Stop being exactly like me ! " and the movie would start making more sense . Secondly , Jenny's behavior is unbelievably erratic . It's not the behavior of a troubled teenager , but a psychotic one . And I don't mean uncontrollable - rebellious - teen psychotic , I mean schizophrenic psychotic . Her behavior changes back and forth so fast from polar extremes that the multiple personalities are clear as day . I have studied abnormal psychology , and I've seen this exact behavior in videos of schizophrenic patients . If you were to take the time to watch the several short video clips that are included on the DVD , you will witness Jenny Lee giving an interview in which she cheerfully reveals that she knows nothing about the lifestyle that she portrayed . She did , in fact , " try beer " in preparation for her role , because she " didn't even know what it was like to be buzzed . " Now , if you were to wonder how someone so completely and utterly unqualified for this role managed to be cast , you need only learn that the film was directed by her father , who also horribly miscast his other daughter in the film as Jenny's counselor , and also involved other talentless family members , such as the writer , the equally oblivious Jimmy Lee . That being said , consider the scene where Jenny and her friend decide out of the blue that they like each other's t-shirts , so they decide , in another spectacularly phony display , to strip them off and trade right in front of a bunch of boys in a crowded club , I suppose of the variety that let's in 16 - year-old girls , as long as they go topless at some point during their stay . Realistic , right ? Or consider the scene where she and her friend ( or friends , I forget how many there were ) have a sweaty orgy with a bunch of boys ( Jenny's line in this scene ? " Come on , let's rape these guys ! ! " ) . Or how about the one where her counselor ( her real life sister , you remember ) tells her what an " asian hottie " she is , and that maybe she might do a little porn . Yeah , that's her father behind the camera . The man trying to teach you about family values . |
543,995 | 562,732 | 431,153 | 3 | If you can't say anything nice , write a lot of books about it . | I'll tell you my problem with Ann Coulter . It's not so much that she disagrees politically with me or even that she condemns so many things that I believe in or just the way I see the world , it is that she cannot disagree with people like me in a civil way . So much of her platform is about how liberals are so childish and can't disagree with people on the right without reducing their argument to some goofy religious nonsense , they can't be friends with people on the right , they can't over look their differences with people on the right and just act like adults . Has she read any of her own books ? People like Susan Estrich and especially Bill Maher appear in this documentary to talk about how great Ann Coulter is because she has different views than they do but they are still friends with her . Interesting , because while this does speak highly of Estrich and Maher , the liberals in the situation , incidentally , the rest of the film is composed of footage of Coulter spouting hatred and prejudicial nonsense about liberals as though they were all copies of the same person . Odd that she would accuse liberals of being intolerant and childish , and then so incontestably describe herself through interviews and speeches as being exactly that herself . The amount of prejudice and blanket observations made about liberals is an interesting illustration of Coulter's massive hypocrisy , which might be rivaled only by that of her colleague , Rush Limbaugh , who has for years yammered on about how we need to clean up our streets , throw drug addicts in prison and throw away the key and whatnot . In her defense , at least she stays somewhat away from the naked , unapologetic racism of people like Michael Savage . Somewhat . I will say this in favor of Ann Coulter , she certainly knows what she believes and she will not alter her beliefs for anyone or for any reason . I actually do respect that a lot , because I have definitely been put off by the flip flopping that I have seen in politicians on both sides . Coulter doesn't however , plan on ever running for office , and thank god . That would be like Michael Moore running for elected office , an equally frightening prospect . Maybe I can put my thoughts in perspective in this way . Michael Moore is a left wing lunatic , and Ann Coulter is a right wing lunatic . They are essentially playing the same role on different teams . But I'll tell you the difference between them , and it's an important one . Michael Moore finds corruptions and lies and hypocrisies and other problems among Republicans , and he blows them wildly out of proportion and takes them out of context in order to further his own agenda . Ann Coulter , on the other hand , INVENTS lies and hypocrisies and other problems among Democrats and liberals , and blows them wildly out of proportion and takes them out of context to further her own agenda . Now , that's kind of a loose statement when I say further her agenda , because her agenda is really nothing more than getting attention . She is a shock jock exactly like Howard Stern , who openly admits that she comes up with the most shocking thing she can think of and then pushes the envelope even further . What validates her , frighteningly enough , is that she really believes all of this stuff she says , which she just admitted is the most extreme thing she can come up with . The problem is that she structures her arguments in a way that is impossible to take seriously on any intellectual level . Her arguments all too often take the form of stupid jokes aimed at getting a laugh and cheap approval from her audience , who just want to hear someone say something mean about the other side into a microphone . " Some illegal aliens were detained after September 11 . Some were detained so long they had to drop out of flight school altogether . " This quote comments on her utter disdain of illegal aliens in a pretty disturbing way , because she is showing her contempt for them as human beings , not as illegal citizens . She disregards them as though they don't exist because they don't have passports , and then gets a good laugh by suggesting that all illegal aliens are terrorists . And the laugh that she gets in response speaks volumes about her fans . It's really sad that Coulter is so over-flowing with hatred , it's kind of depressing to see someone like her pretend that she enjoys her criticism , because if you watch her reactions as she is faced with fans who ask her to sign their TRAITOR t-shirts or their copy of Mein Kampf , it becomes increasingly clear that she doesn't enjoy it . I guess because my views are so different , on some deep level I find it hilarious that she tries so hard to pass it off like she enjoys and is even amused by the negative reactions that she generates . It is truly pathetic , why say something like that in the same documentary that so clearly shows otherwise ? At any rate , my biggest problem with her is that she makes that idiotic claim that so many on both sides have made , " so-and-so hates America . " And it's not even just Michael Moore , it's LIBERALS . She literally states that half of America hates America . This might be the dumbest political statement ever made . Note : Coulter signs a liberal college student's t-shirt with the charming phrase " Have fun in Guantanamo . " A STUDENT . Ann Coulter doesn't hate America . She hates Americans . |
543,914 | 562,732 | 295,178 | 3 | AAAAHHHH no frickin ' way ! ! ! | Just in case you missed it in the last movie , the Austin Powers series has completely fallen off a cliff . The third installment in the Austin Powers series accomplishes little more than proving that the first sequel was not the full depth to which the series planned on sinking . The second movie fed completely off of the success and original comedy of the first movie , recycling the same jokes and trying vainly to get people to laugh at the same things , with a few new tasteless and downright bad jokes thrown in between . MiniMe and Fat Bastard ( who , combined , provided about 20 seconds of amusement in the first sequel ) are both back here and neither provides anything new or even anything amusing . There are sporadic moments in the film that are funny ( even two scenes that made me laugh out loud ) , but they are so hidden in a slog of garbage that they are not worth the rest of the movie , and they're both only briefly funny anyway . There is a scene where Dr . Evil gets hit in the groin by a swinging object and screams out what you can find in the summary line of this review and , even better , Austin has a touching and lengthy flashback remembering his flaky father and how he was never there for him to see his accomplishments , and when he comes out of the memory and we see his emotion-stricken face , Dr . Evil ( locked up in a glass cage like Dr . Lecter ) says , ' Oh , boo-frickety-hoo ! ' That's funny , isn't it ? Well , I laughed at it . But then you have to deal with the rest of the movie . The old scene with Dr . Evil and his son Scott arguing at the table is brought back from the dead , this time so overdone and so tired that it literally dissolves to the point where Dr . Evil is simply grunting and groaning and making strange noises , which I assume are meant to be funny . They're not . If you haven't , in fact , gotten to the point where you're raising your eyebrows and looking around at the people next to you to see if they're as mystified as you are about how this has gotten so bad , you definitely will here . Beyoncé Knowles plays the part of Foxxy Cleopatra , coming off as one of the most nerve-gratingly aggravating characters ever to set foot in this doomed series , and vainly trying to fill the tiny shoes of Heather Graham from the first sequel , who provided probably the first thoroughly boring character in the Austin Powers movies . Her wooden acting and total incongruity to the character she was playing made me think that they would have simply taken out the heroine completely for any third movie that they might be greedy enough to make , but instead they throw in the exact same thing . Both are characters put into the movies for no other reason than to have a popular face playing a tasteless character in an Austin Powers film . I think that the trilogy is such a common occurrence in movies that it's safe to say that this will be the last installment made in the Austin Powers series , but I think it's also worth mentioning that this is the first time I have ever made a specific effort to hypothesize about whether or not they will ever bombard us with another crapfest from a series of movies that is so obviously dead and gone ( and I'm still terrified that someone is going to come up with the fool idea that they should make a third Scary Movie - I could stand about 25 more Austin Powers ' movies before another one of those ) . The second movie should never have been made in the first place , and the third one is more than overkill . And by the way , I saw this movie at Leicester Square in London when I was in England doing a study abroad program through the University of California , Davis , studying Shakespeare in the summer of 2002 . PLEASE believe that you have not the slightest idea of what I missed out on when I went to see this movie . |
544,527 | 562,732 | 177,789 | 3 | A relatively good science fiction movie , but of a different sort | Galaxy Quest is a film which is sure to be appreciated most by hard-core science fiction fans . I think that the overall meaning is likely to be overlooked by people who are not familiar with the likes of William Shatner and Leonard Nemoy . In many ways it was a spoof of serious science fiction films , namely the Star Trek series , and this is very likely to be overlooked as low budget or " cheesy " filmmaking . I have to admit that I was surprised by the positive reviews that I have seen people give Galaxy Quest . I think that the first half-hour or so of the film ruined it for me personally . As in real life , it is difficult to enjoy watching distraught actors pitying themselves and the ridiculous parodies that they have become . Because of that , I think I did not give the rest of the film a fair chance . I also found the leader of the " Termites " extremely difficult to endure , the voice was a little too much for me . I think that the casting could have been better . All of the actors involved did a great job , but some roles seemed a little bit disrespectful . Sigourney Weaver was reduced to a large-breasted woman whose only job was to talk to the computer , which is a terrible thing after her spectacular history in the Alien series . Although Tim Allen was by far the most amusing character , I kept expecting him to say " Welcome to Tool Time , " or even better , " Buzz Lightyear to Star Command , come in Star Command ! ! " The movie did have redeeming qualities , but as a result of my own lack of tolerance for the acting , even for good measure , I give this film 2 stars . |
544,696 | 562,732 | 277,371 | 3 | Yeah exactly . Not another one . | Not Another Teen Movie tricks you into thinking you're going to get a movie that makes fun of those idiotic teen movies because of it's title and because it's a spoof of them , but all it is is another teen movie , just like it calls itself , but at least it has the sense to make fun of itself . It's a spoof film about movies that desperately need to be spoofed , which should have led to a much better movie . That's why the first Austin Powers was so good ( the other two sucked , as you all know ) , because the James Bond films so badly needed to be spoofed . Unfortunately , there was not enough emphasis on making fun of teen movies as there was on making another one . Yes , the movie makes fun of all the standard teen movie clichés , but only enough to give it an excuse for having them all . Just like in Jeepers Creepers where the sister tells her brother as he crawls down the mysterious hole on the freaky guy's property , " This is the part of horror movies where someone does something incredibly stupid and the whole audience hates him for it ! " Needless to say , he crawls in anyway , and presumably the scriptwriters sit back and grin contentedly , another day's work done . Sadly , as is the case in Not Another Teen Movie , the direct admission of stupidity is neither an excuse nor the justification for it . That being said , the movie is at least entertaining in the way that all spoofs , even the really bad ones , are , you get a test of your movie knowledge by how many of the movies being spoofed you can name along the way . I have no interest in listing them , as I am sure you have no interest in reading a list of the movies I recognized . Most of them are stupid movies anyway . I have to say I enjoyed the scene at the end where Molly Ringwald showed up , for the same reason I liked the scene at Preston's party where the black guy from Save the Last Dance appeared . As Stephen King pointed out in Bag of Bones , people love seeing characters that they recognize from other stories make appearances in new ones . It's almost like seeing family again . Stephen King does this more than any other author I've ever read , and if you're going to make a movie making fun of a whole genre , it's certainly a good idea to get a couple of the major stars from that genre to come in and make fun of themselves . But sadly , other than that the movie is an almost complete waste . Even Jamie Pressly , who is hardly known for her respectable and powerful performances , is completely wasted here , forced to do such ridiculous scenes ( ridiculous even for a teen movie spoof ) like the cheer recruiting scene in which she talks about how she's the cheer captain and so she makes all the cheer-cisions and how she's all cheer-cited about getting a new cheergirl since they're one short and are in something of a cheer-mergency . It is certainly telling about the rest of the movie that this is meant to be funny . But like the rest of the movie , Not Another Teen Movie is an exercise in making fun of teen movies in ways that are generally so bad or so tasteless or simply so unamusing that they make you feel more uncomfortable than anything else . Oh , and how's this for a telling little factoid , the funniest scenes in the whole movie are the ones in which the main character cries . Go figure . |
544,546 | 562,732 | 307,987 | 3 | Yes . VERY bad . | First of all , I am a HUGE fan of Billy Bob Thornton . He is without a doubt one of my favorite actors working today , but with Bad Santa he illustrates , unfortunately , that even he is capable of providing a wonderful performance in an awful , awful movie . The abysmal script for Bad Santa calls for a relentlessly unlikable , distasteful person , and Billy Bob does more than necessary to fill that requirement . He is a remarkably versatile actor , I can't help being reminded of the diversity of such roles as the government official in Armageddon , the greasy mechanic in U-Turn , the intense racist in Monster's Ball , the rather slow brother in the shocking film A Simple Plan , and the peculiar character that he played in Sling Blade . Unfortunately , the fact that Billy Bob is among the most powerful actors acting today is not enough to add something to the empty script of Bad Santa , which scarcely has any more reason for existence than do the ridiculous Scary Movies , which are abysmally awful films which I am notorious for repeatedly badmouthing - and for good reason - in dozens of my other reviews . ( spoilers ) Billy Bob Thornton plays the part of a dedicated drunk named Willie ( who deserves no last name and so is given none ) who plays the part of the shopping mall Santa Claus once a year , with his sidekick Marcus ( Tony Cox who cleverly gets upset at being called " you people , " something which he hasn't done since Me , Myself , and Irene . These writers are so creative ! ! ! ) . Marcus and Willie do not do the job because they enjoy it or because they are interested in earning a little extra cash for the holidays , they do it because being employees at the mall gains them access to the mall after closing . Marcus hides somewhere , then jumps out of hiding as the last security guard arms the alarm and walks out of the mall . Marcus jumps out and disarms the alarm before it can arm completely ( thus eliminating the annoying need for a code or password ) , and he then lets Willie in from where he has been waiting somewhere outside . The two proceed to rob the mall blind . Thus enters the premise which allows room for the comedic content , if you can call it that , of the film . Willie's an alcoholic who apparently survives the rest of the year on the money that he steals from one mall after another on his nationwide bad Santa sprees . Since he makes all of his money from stealing from the malls , it's not hard to see that he's not going to really enjoy being surrounded by slobbering kids all day since he is not interested in the hourly wage in the first place . Thus follows lots of groan-inducing streams of profanity sprayed at unsuspecting kids and their equally unsuspecting parents . Now , the profanity is one thing . It got real old real quick , but it's still , as they say , just one thing . Then you have the fact that Willie is constantly falling over drunk , smashing empty booze bottles against fancy SUVs in the parking lot on his way into the mall , and a whole array of other hideous infractions of basic decency . When I think about the character of Willie from this movie , I'm reminded of Melvin Udall from As Good As It Gets whose communication with the world , as Roger Ebert noted , was ' limited to insults intended to harm . ' But Jack Nicholson provided a charm to the character that I believe Billy Bob could also have provided Willie , had this ridiculous script called for it even in the most distant way . I'm also reminded of Billy from Buffalo ' 66 , another hideously unattractive and straight-forwardly mean person who displayed the social skills I expect must have been common sometime around the Cretaceous Period , but Billy was an ugly person in a movie that was also deliberately ugly . It was a compilation of cinematic skill that made Buffalo ' 66 ( and Billy ) look and act the way it / he did . Bad Santa is ugly and mean because the humor is simply bad . If I were to summarize , I would just say that if you are entertained by seeing an aging drunk screaming streams of profanity at a preteen boy for a HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE MINUTES , then PLEASE watch this movie , you are sure to enjoy it . Personally , I think that there are some things that simply have no place in modern mainstream entertainment . Mostly all of them can be found conveniently compiled in the Scary Movies ( which collectively play like a ' What Not To Do ' list for aspiring filmmakers ) , but there are plenty more examples found here in Bad Santa . While I didn't HATE the movie , I can't help automatic feelings of surprise and disbelief whenever I hear anyone say that they enjoyed it , even on a basal level . The movie is so callous and so ugly and so uncomfortable that even the good elements , like the fact that Willie supposedly is ' changed ' for the better ( really , could he possibly have been changed for the WORSE ? ) by the little boy who inexplicably falls in love with him , are not enough to counter the intense ugliness of the character of Willie himself . Ugly movies can be successful and impressive ( epitomized most recently , I think , in the case of Buffalo ' 66 ) , but violence , alcohol , extensive criminal activities , and mass quantities of profanity mixed with the almost constant presence of young children is the absolute extent to which an ugly film can go horribly , horribly wrong . Personally , I always find it a little bit sad that filmmakers think that modern American audiences would be entertained by something like this . Even more than that , I find it sad that , a lot of times , they're right . |
544,149 | 562,732 | 74,084 | 3 | Communism is a disease . It can destroy the world ! | Powerful words for me to hear , having bought and watched this movie here in China . . . It is unusually interesting to read the reviews of professional film critics about Bernardo Bertolucci's wildly ambitious " 1900 , " which in my opinion stumbles in no small part because it resembles too much some of Bertolucci's other films , notably of the bizarre European sex drama variety . I have a secret theory that any legitimate film that portrays graphic sexual acts has sort of a glass ceiling , a level of quality that it can't surpass , no matter how spectacular the rest of the film is . That , like the graphic pig-slaughtering scene , is simply bad taste . 1900 is no exception , and the saddest thing is that the rest of the film is not even very good , it's just really long . In fact , at just over five hours , it's one of the longest films I've ever seen , second only to Stephen King's 6-hour The Stand , which was made for TV anyway . In all of the professional reviews I've read , I've noticed some unusually interesting examinations of what went wrong with Bertolucci's much anticipated epic film , and yet not one of them seems to have the nerve to come out and say what is so obviously the problem . And unfortunately , the horrendously bad taste doesn't end at the literally pornographic nudity . I can't think of any legitimate reason why we should have to watch a pig being butchered and then sliced in half , or ( and this one truly blew my mind ) see a man massage a horse's anus with his bare hands and then gleefully catch the steaming excrement in his hands . And to make matters worse , Bertolucci , in one of the short documentaries on the DVD re-release of the film , made the shocking claim that " I thought it was very innocent at the time . " It could very easily be said that he had no grip on reality when he made the film . Much of it is truly sickening . And the characterization is no different . Donald Sutherland is one of my favorite actors , and Bertolucci managed to coax a ridiculously cartoonish and offensive performance out of him . He is , of course , a Fascist blackshirt ( a bad guy ) , and we are most certainly not allowed to forget that . He has frightening , devilishly toothy grin , a cold , killers stare , and he wears a skull and crossbones on his shirt . He also , by the way , wantonly kills kittens and children . I only wish I could say that I was just being dramatic when I say that . . . The film tells the story of an era , not of its main characters , but it tells that story through the lives of the characters . DeNiro plays Alfredo Berlighieri , the son of a wealthy landowner , and best friend of Olmo Dalco ( Gerard Depardieu ) , a the son of a peasant who works for Alfredo's father . The scenes of their childhood are alternately fascinating and revolting , as we learn of their friendship despite their different backgrounds and yet are forced to sit through scenes of them as 12 or 13 year old boys examining and comparing their penises . There is no need for something like this in any film in any country at any time . Ever . From here on , respectable members of the audience may find it difficult to forgive this perverse nonsense and objectively enjoy the rest of the film . I also love the weakness of the characterization in the film . There is a scene early in the film where Olmo's father gives him a rousing speech about going off to join the military and maybe even learn to obey and take a wife but never forget that he comes from peasants , and just to make sure everyone in the audience has figured out that this is not a family of nobility , Olmo walks his dirty bare feet across a lengthy and crowded dinner table as his father gives him the speech . No one seems to mind . From a technical standpoint the film is a total , belligerent disaster . Everything is dubbed over , so no one's voice matches their facial movements , which are in turn exaggerated by the actors so they can try to more easily match up the dialogue later . It rarely ever works , and so their voices and the ambient sound is totally off from beginning to end . The photography , on the other hand , is brilliant , but as Ebert suggested , it comes across almost like an apology for the narrative mess of the rest of the film . Most interesting is that Bertolucci managed to make such an incompetent film with such stupendously talented actors as Gerard Depardieu , Robert DeNiro , and Donald Sutherland . Sutherland's character is so cartoonish that it's nearly impossible to take anything about his performance seriously , but DeNiro and Depardieu are both outstanding in their roles , which are mirror images of each other in more ways than one . Unfortunately , as becomes completely obvious in the film's closing scene , Bertolucci just had no idea what to do with them . 1900 is not a complete failure , but it is as close as I've ever seen a film this big come to being one . It is not a successful or even a respectable effort , but it is definitely an ARDUOUS effort , kind of like sitting through the whole movie . . . |
544,469 | 562,732 | 219,653 | 3 | I'm starting to wonder about movies like this . | Movies big enough for wide theatrical release are made by professionals . Whatever their motives in making movies , be it purely for financial gain as in the case of Jerry Bruckheimer or for artistic value as always in the case of directors of less popular films but far superior films like Christopher Nolan of Memento , these people have money and training enough to produce films with at least a vague idea of how they will turn out and how the viewing audience will react to them . Given that , I begin to wonder more and more with every modern horror film that's made . The horror genre has been reduced in recent years to idiot excursions by idiot characters into places that they should obviously not go into , and not because they're not allowed ( that would make for an interesting story ) , but because going there would be an exercise in pure stupidity . Dracula 2000 takes the old Dracula story and puts it in the modern day and throws in a few dumbass teenagers as in the case of The House on Haunted Hill and The Haunting of Hill House ( to a lesser extent ) , and we get to witness the ensuing routine madness . This time they even threw in the little addition that the movie takes place at Mardi Gras and is obviously funded by Virgin Records . At this point , the yawns that this formula induces are more satisfying than the movie itself . There's a scene around the middle of the movie ( when Dracula has made several of his first attacks and made vampires out of the people who stole his coffin in the opening of the film ) in which Simon ( Johnny Lee Miller ) and Matthew Van Helsing ( Christopher Plummer ) have just left an attack of these new vampires , and Simon asks Van Helsing ( the keeper of Dracula's coffin ) what the hell just happened back there . As soon as Van Helsing explains that it's Dracula , Simon moves to get out of the car right then and there , as we would like to do at this point , but he is pulled back into the car and forced to listen . It's good that we're able to relate to Simon's character in our own wish to escape , but not that great that we are just as uncomfortable as he is about staying with this thing to the end . ( spoilers ) We soon learn in direct dialogue that Van Helsing is a vampire himself who uses leeches to take blood from Dracula's corpse to satisfy his own bloodlust , which disgusts him and reminds us of the exact same thing that we saw in Blade . Now , the first thing that pops into my head after realizing that the movie is stealing directly from the premise of Blade is why the hell would anyone want to steal from that movie ? We have also just learned that Van Helsing has been searching for most of his life for a way to kill Dracula for good , but so far has had no success . Kind of like Michael Meyers . Or Jason Voorhees . We're getting , in other words , a very watered-down version of the old evil-can't-be-killed excuse for making another horror movie out of a successful classic . We just saw the exact same thing happen with the Friday the 13th series in the pathetic Jason X , we've seen it happen in the Halloween series with Halloween H20 ( and are about to see it again , by the way , in Halloween Resurrection ) , and now we're seeing it with Dracula . The evil that can't be killed , it seems , has moved from the movie screen and into the offices of Hollywood producers . The evil is their greed , and evidently it really can't be killed ! I love how the movie completely halts in its tracks long enough to show a Linkin Park video with the Virgin Records logo in the lower corner of the screen , and then we see Dracula 2000 himself walk into a Virgin Records store while all the women in the store start drooling and rubbing themselves . During the course of the movie , we are treated to a lot of color-filtered , talky nonsense punctuated with the occasional cheap scare , basically exactly the same thing you get in every other crappy horror movie that's released every few months these days . Every character in the film is instantly forgettable , you can almost forget about a character in between scenes , so obviously there's no way you could ever care what happens to any of them . Christopher Plummer presents the only character of at least remote interest , but the rest of the cast are on auto-pilot , delivering routine performances of characters that even they don't seem to connect with . One girl in the film comments just after being turned into a vampire that it's ' better than chocolate , ' illustrating the modern depths to which the Dracula story has been forced to sink . There are entirely too many scantily clad female vampires in this movie , reminding me of the awful Tales From the Crypt film , Bordello of Blood , and the closing scenes of the movie don't do much for it , either . There are extensive ties to religion in the story of Dracula at the end of the film , which do nothing but make us sit and endure it for a little longer , and we get the usual two heroes holding each other and breathing heavily , covered in blood and looking on at the destruction of their enemy . This is just a basic , basic horror movie that doesn't get scary or even tense at any time , but rather tries to cash in on an age-old tale by retelling it with modern characters and themes . Nothing new here , and really nothing much to see . I would suggest that you feel free to skip this one . |
544,540 | 562,732 | 285,823 | 3 | Note to everyone who saw this movie ( yeah you too , Mr . Rodriguez ) ? there is more to Mexico and Mexicans than blood , crime , murder , suffering , and death . Just so you know . | Once upon a time in Mexico , there was born a person named Robert Rodriguez , who later moved to the United States and began making movies . He became famous for making an ultra-low budget but high profit cult classic , which he later followed with a fairly higher-budget , fairly less relative profit , fairly less quality film about the same gunslinger , which he now follows up with a massive budget , low-profit , almost nonexistent quality film based on and in Mexico , the country in which he was born , and is yet a film that is about as Mexican as Taco Bell . Note : Robert Rodriguez was born and raised in Texas , and so presumably was not born in Mexico and never moved to the United States . Everything else up there is true , though . I was really saddened by the ridiculous spectacle that Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi movies have become . El Mariachi was a classic Mexican western that became famous because of its deceptively tiny budget and it's resulting dedicated cult fan base , Desperado was a lot of fun , even though the action and shootout scenes were so outlandish that they were funnier than they were exciting , but the story , the acting , the script , the characters , and the FEEL of the movie made it entertaining . Now we have this . Once Upon A Time In Mexico is Rodriguez's version of John Woo's Windtalkers , an awful action film that belittles the Japanese World War II soldiers by treating them like mindless pop-up targets , running onscreen and into oncoming fire seemingly just so they can get shot . They hold their rifles like batons , not making the slightest attempts to cover themselves before being blown away by Nicholas Cage , who is standing in a fixed position and spraying machine-gun fire at all the bad guys jumping out of the bushes . In Once Upon A Time In Mexico , while there are not massive amounts of violent Mexican deaths ( note : there are ) , at least the majority of them are not there just to get killed . Several of the bloody deaths apparently mean something . The problem is the way that Mexicans are presented ( I know , I know , gag you , right ? ) . Maybe I sound like a grumpy old lady , but being Hispanic myself , I tend to have a problem with a movie that presents nothing but Mexicans and seemingly the only person who never kills anyone is the 9-year-old kid that gets the bubble-gum he's trying to sell knocked out of his hand so he can help a characters new to the films curiously named Sands ( recently blinded by the bad guys ) to locate and kill his pursuer . The overall plot of the movie , much like the two that preceded it , is not all that important . There are times when the movie pauses between frantic shootouts to drop in a note about how the story is moving along , and then we get another frantic shootout . The essential points are clear enough ? El Mariachi is mourning ( often violently ) the shooting deaths of his wife and daughter , and Sands ( Johnny Depp ) , evidently a C . I . A . agent ( who uses irony to cover his identity , wearing t-shirts that say C . I . A . in great big letters ) , wants him to help stop a plot to assassinate the Mexican president by a drug lord named Barrillo ( performed by a horribly miscast Willem Dafoe ) . These little pauses for breath are overshadowed by such things as gunshots that result in clownish pyrotechnics , sending the unfortunate bullet recipients flying backwards as though hit by a truck , a remake of the famous scene in El Mariachi where Antonio and Salma ride a cable across a street and onto a moving bus ( this one obviously more expensive , given the scene's outcome ) , and genuinely laughable scenes like Antonio and Salma repelling down the side of a building , chained together at the wrist , while one person swings down , then the other person above lets go and swings down to the next level . Creative , but I generally tend to prefer at least the TINIEST bit of believability in the movies , whatever their genre . It's interesting to watch the way El Mariachi , Desperado , and Once Upon A Time In Mexico have evolved as their respective budgets have skyrocketed . Unfortunately , they seem to have changed more in the direction of explosive , bizarre action sequences that find themselves more and more removed from reality with each passing movie . The latest installment is an insult to the country in which is takes place , but at least there are lots of explosions and killing and torture . The El Mariachi saga is , unfortunately , heading downhill pretty quick . |
544,585 | 562,732 | 97,388 | 3 | Better than Titanic ! | What's up with all these high schools in the movies having these insane senior trips ? The kids in Final Destination flew to Europe , and these kids go on a freaking cruise ? I went to Magic Mountain for my senior trip ! Oh , well , I guess the payback is that in the movies they all get killed . Magic Mountain sounds a lot better in that sense . By this point in the lengthy Friday the 13th saga , it's clear that even the writers of these movies ( generally the last people to catch on when they come up with idiotic ideas ) have noticed that a lot of teenagers going up to Camp Crystal Lake to be rebellious and get slashed all up is getting a little bit old , so in this installment they decided it would be a good idea to have the movie take place on a whole ship full of high school students . Moving someone like Jason Voorhees from his home on Camp Crystal Lake to an unfamiliar setting is actually a really good idea for generating more interest in the series , because although it's a given in a series like this , I think audiences always like to see familiar characters come back from other stories . So while you already know Jason is going to be in the movie because it's a Friday the 13th , you at least see him in an unfamiliar atmosphere , which removes a lot of the automatic cynicism that is now being generated toward the teenagers who are still stupid enough to go out to the lake . Now we see Jason killing all kinds of kids unsuspectingly on their school trip and then more people on the streets of New York . Amazing the things we find entertaining these days , isn't it ? There are a lot of fairly innovative deaths aboard the ship in the first half of the film , such as a guy relaxing in the sauna getting one of the hot rocks shoved through his stomach , a guy getting impaled on the communication antenna on the boat , and throat slit by a machete , an amazingly botched scene . You would think that since it was so obvious the knife didn't even touch that poor guy , they would at least not have done it in such a close-up . Ironically enough , the part that I was anticipating to be the most interesting was the least creatively done . After realizing what is going on on the boat ( meaning , after just about all of them had been killed ) , the surviving students on board get the life raft and escape , rowing out into the dark ocean in hopes of hitting land . Eventually , they see the New York City skyline and jump for joy . I was anticipating a creative and fun romp through the streets of New York , maybe with Jason confused at his surroundings and therefore going even more nuts , which would create havoc among the population . I mean , LOOK at the guy . He spent the time between the last movie and this one rotting on the bottom of the lake , and he certainly looks like it through this entire movie . Unfortunately , the filmmakers not only revealed the modesty of their budget through the lack of anything really interesting happening , they also displayed a massive lack of understanding of the geography of the city of New York . I've never even been there myself , but it seems like pretty much basic logic that they would not design the city so that the dirtiest slums had the finest waterfront property . Meaning , I doubt you could row up to New York from the ocean , right alongside the Statue of Liberty , and climb up onto land , finding yourself surrounded by endless alleyways full of things like gun-toting rapists and standing barrels of toxic waste . New York is a big city , and all cities throughout the world pretty much have to have things like this somewhere , but generally not right on the water and right next to major monuments . I happen to know , for example , that if you go to San Francisco , you won't find the crime-ridden slums right under the Golden Gate Bridge , and I doubt that you would find open barrels of toxic waste ANYWHERE . But anyway , they certainly find some room for effective comic relief ( although notably less than other films in the series ) , my favorite example of which is the scene where Jason looks curiously at a picture of a hockey player on a billboard wearing exactly the same mask that he has on , a sort of self-realization that has since been overshadowed by the T-1000 pausing to look at a metallic mannequin in Terminator 2 . I love that stuff , it gives even the most two-dimensional bad guys a sort of self-consciousness , so that they're not just mindless killing machines but have some semblance of actual thought in their heads , seeing and analyzing their surroundings and pausing when they see something that they don't understand . Makes the inhuman killers more human , you know ? Speaking of which , there was also a scene that was really funny for much the same reason , and feel free to make fun of me for seeing it this way . There's a scene pretty near the end of the film where Jason is pursuing the few remaining kids through the streets of Manhattan , and he passes by some street punks hanging out and smoking on the sidewalk and listening to some ridiculous 80s music ( ' Livin ' inna city ain't no big deal , livin ' inna city ain't no big deal . If the drugs don't getcha then the hooka's will ? . ' And so forth ? ) , and as Jason walks by , he kicks their boom-box across the sidewalk . Being tough gutterpunks , of course , they stand up and pull out their switchblades , informing Jason that he just dug his own grave . Jason's response is to turn and face them and lift up his mask so they can see his face . I liked that scene , because like the one above , it shows a self-consciousness . Jason KNOWS that he looks terrifying . He always has , and rotting on the bottom of the lake made it even worse . It also shows that he can deal with people in a way other than cutting them all up and still have it be pretty satisfying to the audience . The climax of the film is bogged down pretty badly by some heavily botched logic and another massive lack of understanding of the underbelly operations of a major city . First of all , none of the passersby up on the streets take a second look at this gigantic , wet , rotting man walking down the street with a hockey mask . I know New Yorkers can be cold and indifferent , but even THEY would not take something like THAT as normal . But even worse , as the kids escape into the underground sewage system ( which does not run through wide walkways beneath the sidewalks in ANY city that doesn't want to smell like it's own waste ) , they run into a sewage worker who informs them that the sewers ( in which they are currently standing ) fill with toxic waste every night at midnight ( ' Exactly ten minutes from now ! ' ) , and is then killed by Jason before being able to show them how to get out . I won't get into the fact that there is no imaginable reason for any underground pipe system to fill with toxic waste every night at a certain time other than to create false suspense for a movie like this , although that is most of the reason that this climax falls so completely flat . We do get something for the kids to run away from and a time-limit for them to get out of the sewer , and we do get a glimpse of Jason's hideous face as he melts into the waste , but it is a completely contrived setting that has no basis in reality , which is the one thing that always makes horror films ( or films of almost any genre , for that matter ) more effective . Friday the 13th VIII , obviously , is not very concerned with that , which makes it one of the less interesting installments in the saga , although at least it takes place in a different setting so we have a reason to slap our foreheads other than because there is yet ANOTHER group of morons going up to Camp Crystal Lake to taunt the legend of Jason Voorhees . |
544,733 | 562,732 | 124,102 | 3 | Dee Snider seems to be desperately trying to hold onto the weird persona that he developed as the singer for Twisted Sister . | Strangeland is a terrible horror / technological thriller . Dee Snider plays Carleton Hendricks , a disgusting computer freak who prays on young girls through the chat rooms . His ridiculous philosophies on pain and suffering are both misguided and totally unfounded . There is no tie to reality with the ideas that are presented in this film , it is more like Dee Snider sat down and tried to think up the weirdest stuff possible to impress horror fans and maybe some of his old fans , but the end result is just awful . Unfortunately for me , as a horror fan , the cover of this movie looks very good and it immediately caught my interest , which is the main reason that I was tricked into watching it . I assure you that this is not a quality horror movie . It is a disturbing yet boring attempt to suggest what might go on in the minds of people who treat themselves the way the Carleton Hendricks did in this film . The sad part is that NO one does this stuff to themselves . Marilyn freakin ' Manson doesn't even go that far , and the fact that he had a song on the soundtrack makes it clear that the film wasn't meant to poke fun at his type of music ( that would be a stab at Snider himself ) , it is more like Dee Snider was trying to raise himself from the career-dead and present himself as a sick-minded individual once more . Dee , it seems that the time has come to let it all die . . . |
544,372 | 562,732 | 250,687 | 3 | Just bad . | Rat Race is structured as a series of bad and tasteless jokes strung together by a flimsy clothesline of a plot dealing with a race of a bunch of random people trying to reach the same destination in order to obtain a huge stash of money that may or may not even really be there . Rat Race is disappointing from the very beginning , because it starts off by showing four or five of the exact scenes that we already saw in the preview and that have therefore lost all effectiveness . This is not a movie based on reality ? there can really be no question that even the most eccentric of casino owners would never seriously consider picking a bunch of random gamblers out of their casinos and sending them off on this all-expenses-paid excursion to find a duffle bag containing two million dollars . Sure , these casino guys are all ridiculously rich , but Rat Race doesn't acknowledge the fact that rich people didn't get rich by giving money away . There is no financial return at all in the rat race portrayed here , or even any publicity ! ( spoilers ? but does it really matter ? ) Rat Race is filled with actors who delivered goofy performances that are far below both their iconography and their reputations as actors . Cuba Gooding Jr . - after great performances in infinitely superior films like As Good As It Gets , Jerry Maguire , Outbreak , and A Few Good Men ? performs several idiotic and humiliating skits throughout the course of this horribly disappointing movie . John Cleese manages to deliver some of the only funny lines in the entire film through his comical dentures , but still sinks far below his talent in this borefest . Other bad career choices were made by Seth Green , Amy Smart , and even the more negligible actors , such as Whoopi Goldberg , Rowan Atkinson , and Jon Lovitz . Seth Green , actually , is mostly in a bad role by association . His brother in the film is one of the dumbest characters I've ever seen in a movie , and his disgusting tongue piercing only serves to enhance his tremendous stupidity . I've had my tongue double-pierced since early 1997 , have made little to no changes in my oral hygiene , and have never had an infection . If his tongue was that infected , it is entirely a result of his own idiocy ( as we soon learn , with the realization that his piercing is self-inflicted ) , and therefore commands no sympathy or respect . If he wants sympathy , Major Payne can explain to him where to find it . Incidentally , the way he met a girl on the freeway ( who shows up later at the Smash Mouth concert ) was a shocking move to an even lower level . The movie goes wrong at the very beginning . It's clear that a mass travel to a single location is not the foundation of a good comedy , so they decided to throw in this ludicrous scene where Duane Cody ( Seth Green ) and his idiot brother get their jeep dragged up the sonar station at the airport in an attempt to ground all flights so that their opponents will not be able to fly to the location of the money ( and if they had caught their flight in the first place , the movie would have been over in minutes and we would all have been spared ) . So at the expense of their remaining means of travel , they have successfully drowned out radio airwaves and grounded all flights . It's too bad the movie was released so soon , because if they had waited until after the September 11 terrorist attacks , the scene would almost certainly have been changed , and the movie could only have been better . This is one of the most moronic scenes in the entire movie , which makes you wonder why they didn't just have Cleese's character add in a stipulation that all transportation must be done on the ground . If the movie had been set for release after the catastrophic terrorist attacks , and they had decided to remove the scene , such a stipulation is almost certainly the thing that they would have decided on , both because it would be the fastest and cheapest replacement , but also because such a tragic event would surely make them realize how foolish the scene was to begin with . While Rat Race manages to avoid sinking to the abysmal level of other ludicrous comedies like the Scary Movies , it is clearly a mindless film that does not quite manage to redeem itself by having at least one or two things in it that can be taken seriously enough for it to be funny . The movie is bad enough even without the appearance of Smash Mouth at the end of the film , who are playing a concert for the poor . The way that all of the contestants in the movie stumble on stage with their newfound wealth at the end of the flim ( I typed that accidentally just now , but it strikes me as a better word ? ) , ultimately deciding to donate it to the poor , is both insulting and disappointing . Sure , it would be a bad idea to make a movie that did nothing but promote greed , but all that time and effort by the characters as well as the audience is completely wasted ( this is also one of the many things that ruined Titanic ) . It certainly is a good cause , but it is entirely uninteresting . You'd think that the virtually endless possibilities of the cinema would have inspired the film's writer ( or writers , could there possibly have been more than one ? ) to come up with something more creative than this . In reality , donating to the poor , especially such a huge amount of money , is truly honorable and earns you a well-deserved interview and article in the newspaper . In the movies , it is a cheap way to get out of being accused of advertising greed , and winds up as little more than a boring end to a bad movie . |
544,803 | 562,732 | 795,421 | 3 | Hollywire's Film Critic Suffers Terribly Through Intolerably Sappy Musical ? ' Mamma Mia ' Review ? | It was a very unique and specific kind of torture for me to sit through Mamma Mia , one of the most unendurable pieces of cinematic confection that I can remember ever having experienced ever since I was about ten years old and my mother used to punish my brother and I by making us watch Peggy Sue Got Married . I haven't seen that movie in nearly 20 years and there's a good chance I might enjoy it today , but as a kid it became synonymous with the worst movie ever made . Mamma Mia is not the worst movie ever made . It's not even a bad movie , it's actually pretty good , for what it is . But in order to enjoy it you have to be a fan of the musical and by God , you had better be an ABBA fan . Myself , I can't stand ABBA and I am notorious for hating musicals . There is nothing more distracting than an emotional love scene that is suddenly disrupted as the characters break into song . YAWN . There are a lot of people that will love Mamma Mia , and it is a well-presented adaptation of the successful Broadway play . The locations are stunningly beautiful , the story is well-told and the performances , despite an over-abundance of cartoonish over-acting ( mostly on the part of Amanda Seyfried as the afflicted Sophie ) , are wonderful in their own way . Unfortunately , I happen to agree unequivocally on the subject of musicals with the late Pauline Kael , who wondered about even The Sound of Music , one of the most enduring of musical classics ( and the Best Picture of 1965 ) if there wasn't at least one Von Trapp child who didn't feel like bursting into song and singing his head off along with everyone else . My thoughts exactly about Mamma Mia , and any other musical in which the characters break into song at no other provocation than the gradual rise of the orchestra . It just makes no sense to me . According to Kael , musicals are about " a freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises , the already soft focus blurs and melts , and , upon the instant , you can hear all those noses blowing in the theater . " " Whom could this operetta offend , " Kael asks ? " Only those of us who , despite the fact that we may respond , loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready - made are the responses we are made to feel . We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly , goody-goody songs . " Amen to that ! The story of Mamma Mia , despite being shrouded in ridiculous sing-a-longs , is about a young lady who has never known her father . She discovers her mother's diary that names three possible , ah , suitors , and she secretly invites them to her wedding in Grece , believing that she will instantly know her real father on sight and can finally bring him into her life . Meryl Streep plays the part of the mother , now living a comfortable single life in an astonishingly beautiful little Greek villa overlooking the Aegean Sea , who has long since moved on from what can only be described as her flagrantly promiscuous youth . Through a series of misunderstandings , the three men who arrive at the wedding all simultaneously come to believe that they are Sophie's father , and each confides in Sophie , before she has a chance to argue , mind you , that it will remain their little secret until they can make the big announcement at the wedding ceremony . If you're wondering how she could manage to get three different men to think that they are her father and those three different men to engage in such one-way conversations with her that they could make exactly the same plans before she could argue with them , then you are wondering about one of the great many preposterous absurdities of the movie's plot . I will admit that I feel like a stick in the mud criticizing what is obviously a popular movie , but it seems pretty accurate to say that you can assume your opinion of the movie will hinge entirely on your opinion of ABBA's sing-writing repertoire , which I find insufferably cheesy and cloying . And the convenience of the ending , in which all loose ends miraculously fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces , doesn't help . Note : I understand that this review is a bit of a rant , but please understand that this is a movie with a very specific audience in mind , and there won't be many fans of it outside that audience . I'm outside it . Also , I watched the movie with one of my gay friends , and he gleefully sang every song word-for-word in my ear throughout the entire movie . This also did not enhance the experience ? |
544,672 | 562,732 | 770,752 | 3 | Just looking around the plane was more interesting ? | Recently I have been studying a lot about ancient Chinese history , particularly their astonishing oceanic achievements in the early 15th century , when their great ocean fleets sailed around the world's ocean's and charted the entire planet decades and centuries before the great European explorers . In doing that they have left 600-year-old shipwrecks all over the world , many of which have yet to be discovered . The subject is endlessly fascinating to me , so I was hoping a story about a Spanish galleon sunk in 1715 ( which I caught on a flight from Shanghai to Chicago last week ) would be more entertaining , but unfortunately this little adventure is badly dumbed down by trying to cater to the lowest common denominator . Matthew McConaughey ( who probably has the most difficult name to spell in all of Hollywood ) has certainly done worse films , but unfortunately the only one that pops into my mind at the moment is Texas Chainsaw III , which has to be one of the worst and most tasteless films ever made , even for a chainsaw film . I have never been a big fan of Kate Hudson , ever since I was disappointed by the hugely overrated Almost Famous , but interestingly enough , she and McConaughey have chemistry enough here , it's just too bad that it's so obvious that the director has them running around half naked for the majority of the movie . Have to keep the audience interested somehow , and since the story isn't going to do it ? McConaughey and Hudson play Tess and Finn , a married couple whose marriage is long since broken or about to be broken or something . It doesn't matter , they are still madly in love with each other , they just need a sunken treasure adventure and a captive audience to bring them back together again . Finn is sure that he has found the location of the wreck of the ancient treasure ship , but has to convince Tess and the super-rich Nigel ( a bored Donald Sutherland ) that he's right , which is no easy task , given his history as more than a bit of a loser . As a group of rival treasure hunters closes in on the treasure ship at the same time , you have your routine , by-the-numbers movie treasure hunt , and your eyes can safely glaze over for much of the rest of the movie . Incidentally , Nigel has a daughter , Gemma . This is obviously the most outrageously pointless and idiotic role in the entire movie . Her job seems to be to pop up every once in a while wearing a tiny bikini and making another idiot remark . This girl doesn't have a thought in her head and looks like she's 13 years old . She is a pedophile's dream , and I can not for the life of me imagine why she would be put in this movie . What a waste . The last portion of the movie is composed of a bizarre climax , a series of descents into a real rock formation in southern California that shoots water up into the air like a cannon . When I used to go there in high school we called it the " toilet bowl , " but no one I know was ever brave or dumb enough to jump into it . ( spoilers ) For the purpose of the movie , there is a shipwreck that has manages to wriggle its way underneath the rocks , and now sits at the base of the toilet bowl , needing only a little jiggle from our heroine ( after having been tossed in by the bad guys ) to unleash a shower of gold every time a wave comes through . Right . This is the kind of nonsense that we get in the conclusion of an already disappointing movie , and believe it or not , it gets even dumber . Lately there seems to have been a nonstop onslaught of treasure hunt movies , no doubt started or at least boosted by National Treasure , which was also disappointing but at least entertaining , as was The Da Vinci Code . Fool's Gold , on the other hand , is just a little too self-descriptive . |
544,024 | 562,732 | 83,767 | 3 | Stephen King and George Romero team up to make a spectacular cinematic horror event , and instead they come up with this . | Although very faithful to the comic book series from which it was adapted , Creepshow delivers five mediocre stories of goofy horror . All five of these stories are transferred from the comic book to the screen virtually scene for scene , but the end result is nothing more than disappointing . If you were ever wondering why Leslie Nielsen became a terrific comedy actor rather than a horror move actor , watch Creepshow and you'll know . Stephen King , in a weird tale called " The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill , " displays good reason why his professional acting career never took off . Ted Danson delivers yet another all around pathetic performance in a story called " Something to Tide You Over " that simply should never have been removed from its happy home in the pages of a Stephen King comic book . Probably the biggest problem with Creepshow ( besides the ridiculous acting offered up by everyone involved ) is that it should not have been made into a motion picture . It was good as a comic book , but suffered badly in the transition to the screen . The fact that it is associated with Stephen King and George Romero probably made it worse , ironically enough , because people just expect so much from them that a flop like Creepshow seems to be that much more disappointing . They should have left it alone . King and Romero wasted their talent on this one . |
544,415 | 562,732 | 120,611 | 3 | Wesley Snipes returns to let the world know that Demolition Man was not the last ridiculously awful movie that he planned to make in his career , which seems to be headed precipitously downhill . | There's nothing worse that a well-known film actor or actress can do than star in a film where they deliberately and obviously alter their voice . Wesley Snipes not only does this ( terribly ) in Blade , but he also wears false teeth and BROWN colored contact lenses . Are his eyes just not the right shade of brown ? They had to be changed ? And what was the deal with the teeth ? There was never a single shot in the film in which he had fangs . Besides that , listening to Wesley Snipes talk like he's trying to scare a six-year-old kid gets real old real fast , and some of his lines were so pseudo-tough guy that they ruined the movie nearly single-handed , for the same reason that the idiotic Pitch Black was ruined ( ' There are worse things out tonight than vampires . ' ' Like what ? ' ' Like me . ' ) . Way to go , Wesley . That was so impressive that for a second I was almost fully awake . The kind of awful acting that this movie is full of belongs in cheesy action B-movies . I have barely even begun , and it's bad enough with just what I have mentioned so far , without having to watch the laughable efforts of Blade and his goofy female sidekick to periodically pop each other's shoulders back into their sockets ( ' It's dislocated ! ' POP ! ! ! ' Ahh , better . ' Are you kidding me ? ) . I won't mention the fact that when Blade popped hers back into her socket after having casually tossed her from rooftop to rooftop , he actually YANKED on her arm . Excuse me , Dr . Blade , but don't you think you ought to apply pressure in the other direction ? This may seem trivial , and I'll admit that it is , but keep in mind that it is a pure example of sheer stupidity , and I have an extremely low tolerance for stupidity in movies . These kinds of things about Blade make it clear that it is pulled along entirely by the special effects and the star power of Wesley Snipes as an action film hero . Besides , he looked cool , didn't he ? I sure as hell wouldn't mess with a man that big dressed like that , but don't you think that if a huge , tattooed black man wearing a trenchcoat , a bullet-proof vest and carrying a sword were to smack a police officer's head against the trunk of his own car on a crowded street in broad daylight , at least one or two passers-by would notice ? That would qualify as suspicious behavior , in my opinion . There were so many things thrown into this movie for no apparent reason other than to hold the audience's attention that it really took away from the movie as a whole . For example , what was this globular , vampire version of Jabba the Hutt ? Where did he come from ? How did he get like that ? All other vampires were in human form , and this guy hardly even resembled a human at all . Was there some reason that he was so tremendously fat ? It's amazing he was alive at all . Granted , I don't expect his life story . Frankly , I'd rather not hear it . But there was obviously no other reason for him to be in the movie other than to stimulate the gag response from unsuspecting audiences . But that's not all , remember what Blade said to Karen ( his goofy female sidekick ) as he went to check the nearby vault door ? He said , referring to the use of the UV ray gun with which she had been roasting his vampire skin , ' If he moves , fry him . ' Where the hell is he going to go , Blade ? ! He can hardly move ! ! What's he gonna do , run away ? If he stood up he'd probably crush himself with his own weight . Am I being too hard on this movie ? Good , because this is what it deserves . I'll admit that it had a few redeeming qualities ( by ' a few , ' by the way , I mean more than one but less than four ) . For example , it was cool how Blade exploded the two martial artists by the elevators by the hallway , and the BLOODBATH sign at the rave in the beginning was also pretty good . Aside from these minute moments of forced entertainment , everything about the film was terrible . The ' climactic ' fight scene between Blade and Frost was like watching a little white kid in a fight against a huge black bodybuilder , resulting in the utter absence of any excitement whatsoever . How about that Blood God ? Was he to convert the whole planet into vampires ( ' Anyone caught in his path will be instantly turned ? ' ) ? You'd think that if this vampire community had thought ahead at least a little bit , they'd realize that maybe it would be better if they tried to MINIMIZE the number of humans turned into vampires , because the more vampires , the less humans . And the less humans , the less FOOD . Thus , in taking over the world , they would inadvertently and idiotically bring about their own starvation and extinction . That's just another example of the stupidity with which Blade is filled . And of course , they couldn't have left out Blade in some other country ( the bitter cold of Russia ) speaking in Russian to a vampire in Moscow . How nice . What a tough guy . He killed all the vampires in the U . S . so now he's going global . What a piece of garbage this movie was . Granted , you probably won't be extremely bored throughout the entire movie ( even though I was ) , but keep in mind that this is the type of film that you really have to try hard to enjoy , particularly if you are no longer in junior high school . This is a brainless , pointless movie , with little to no forethought put into it , and the end result is pathetic . |
544,903 | 562,732 | 1,042,497 | 3 | Another movie about the lunatics that populate the Texas countryside ? | Exit Speed opens with a female AWOL Army soldier being caught up with by Sergeant Archie Sparks ( an underused Fred Ward , star of Tremors , one of my favorite b - movies ever ) , whose job it is to go after errant soldiers . It seems that this particular soldier , Meredith Cole , has a history of going AWOL , and that the Army has some pretty lax punishment procedures involving unexcused absences . I always thought this was a fairly serious offense , but maybe not . Back in the good old days of Mao Tse-tung's Red Army , they would just execute defecting soldiers on the spot . Sometimes in advance , for effect . But wouldn't you know it , as soon as Sparks turns his head , that darn Private Cole is off and running again , hopping onto a Greyhound bus on its way across Texas . Unaware of the dangers of such a trip because of lessons not learned from everything from the Texas Chainsaws to the moronic Jeepers Creepers ( or The Fast and the Furious , as it turns out ) , the bus is soon surrounded by a group of lunatic street bikers , who do wheelies all around the bus at freeway speeds and offer the passengers a series of alarming scowls . Before long , one of the idiot bikers makes a mistake and ends up under the wheels of the bus , and the rest of them take it personally . I'm reminded of the fascinating contents of that passenger airliner that crashed at the beginning of Lost . Man , they had everything , didn't they ? The same thing is going on here . There's the AWOL soldier , a girl who once dated a biker and so is an encyclopedia of knowledge about everything they all need to know about their new enemies , a girl who is rated a " Dark Elf " in archery , for crying out loud , a football coach with anger issues , even a bus driver who once drove the six miles into Baghdad airport , reportedly the most dangerous stretch of road in the world . With my luck , I would have been in a bus full of Japanese tourists and adventurous grandparents were we to be ambushed by a biker gang . Luckily at some point we are informed that bikers such as these guys have a history of being loaded to the eyeballs on crystal meth , because there is no explanation whatsoever of where they come from or why they attacked the bus in the first place . They are faceless villains with no motivation , and so are nothing but fodder for our heroes to dig deep inside themselves to summon up the courage needed to off them in spectacular fashion . And the movie does have that going for it , at least . It is awesomely stupid , but those of you looking for an action movie that makes up for the total absence of cleverness with an few extra levels of violence , this is your movie . But those of you who might be driven to smack your forehead when you hear a girl say she can't shoot an arrow at one of the men trying to kill her and all the other passengers because she's VEGAN , then you might be better advised to run for the hills , bikers or not . But at least there's some comedy is outlandishly bad characterization , right ? I don't know why this girl thought she might have to eat the man that she killed , but even better was the guy who mentioned that he once tried to get a job singing in a wedding chapel but was afraid he might screw it up . My thoughts are that if you can screw up a job like that then you had plenty of problems even before the bikers attacked your tour bus . But now you present a bigger problem for your female co-passengers , who can expect little to no help from you in avoiding a violent death at the hands of a bunch of meth-heads . There is something to be enjoyed here for people who really aren't looking for much , but the truth is that the biker that got run over is all we're ever given as far as a reason for why the whole movie is happening in the first place , which makes it feel like a pointless exercise in showing random people killing random bikers . If there was something real driving the movie it could easily have been much better , or at least if the protagonists weren't facing a group of faceless villains . As it is , it comes across like a tour bus barreling across the Texas countryside with no driver , and us stuck in the front seat looking through the windshield . |
544,880 | 562,732 | 451,197 | 3 | Okay , but why the title ? Because " The Orphanage " was already taken ? | A few years ago I saw a movie called Madhouse that was pretty good . Not as good as another similar one called Session 9 , but still a fairly entertaining horror thriller about a mental institution . I expected something of the same with The Sickhouse , but I suppose it is meant to describe an orphanage from the late 17th Century that had been infected with the Bubonic Plague . We get a brief history lesson at the beginning of the movie about how the Plague swept through London in 1665 , killing 15 % of the city's population in a single summer . An American archaeologist thinks she has uncovered an ancient black cult involving priests and the plague victims , but she is brushed off by a British colleague , who is indifferent to her interest despite frightening revelatory evidence that she has uncovered . Public health , she says , sometimes has to be put before archaeology . Enter a car full of British punks , screaming through the streets in a stolen car and filming themselves using a stolen video camera . Before long , midnight strikes , they run over someone or something in the street and come skidding to a stop , and we cut back to Anna , the American archaeologist , who has somehow stumbled upon a buried 17th Century street . This is where I got lost , and I stayed lost for pretty much the rest of the movie . We see clocks striking midnight a lot , so clearly something happens at midnight , but it's never really very clear what it is . And what is the deal with the buried street ? I guess the Plague was so traumatic that that just paved over the old streets and built modern London on top of it ? I have no idea . Anna is a huge problem in the movie . She claims to have this huge historical knowledge ( and also does that intolerable thing late in the movie where everyone is fearful for their lives and she is frantically giving history lessons ) , but is astonishingly clueless about how to handle the Plague . At one point , one of the characters is supposedly infected with the plague , so they put him in a wire cage and then Anna suggests that they all go wash their hands . Wow , all those primitive Londoners had to do was wash their hands ! Think of all the lives that could have been saved ! The movie soon leaves any story behind and descends into a shabby special effects display that reminded me of old Nightmare on Elm Street movies . And if the special effects weren't bad enough , they also throw in the " I don't think any of this is real " thing , so none of it matters anyway . The story , rather than having much of anything to do with a mental institution OR the plague , is about an orphanage in which a series of terrible thing happened to five of the orphans . Surprise , there are five characters in the movie and , as Anna explains , history " seems to be repeating itself . " No reason is given but none is needed . This is standard , 9th grade creative writing . Now we have the catalyst that introduces " death's design " which was kicked to death with three Final Destinations and provides a weak drive for the rest of the movie . There is a romantic moment at the very end of the film that is spectacularly out of place and dissolves immediately any character development that might have come before , and like much of the rest of the movie , it ends with a small child whispering some utter nonsense to us . We are told that the plague doctor will live on forever , " and you being a malignant host , an infant herald of doom . " What ? ! ? Well , let me give you a little chronology . The Sixth Sense - 9-year-old boy sees dead people . Ghost Town - annoyed British dentist sees dead people . The Sickhouse - American archaeologist sees dead British people . That would be really interesting if the movies were released in that order . . . |
544,093 | 562,732 | 252,866 | 3 | Hey , at least it wasn't WORSE than the first one . | American Pie 2 starts off its rehash of the first film with the ever-present trailer gag . The trailer gag , of course , is one of the many gags that was played and played and replayed in the film's trailer ( s ) and is therefore completely without effect when seen in the theaters . The barrage of teen sex films / thrillers of the last decade or so are plagued with trailer gags , and some of those movies ( Sorority Boys ) contain little else . Here , we see Jim's ( the unbearable Jason Biggs ) father walk in as he and his girlfriend ( if she could be called that , since they evidently have not even had ' friendly hello sex ' ) are having sex . This intrusion is followed by that of Jim's mother , who has the obligatory fit , and then , mysteriously , both of Natalie's ( Jim's ' girlfriend ' ) parents . So within the first minutes of the film , we are given a stolidly unamusing scene involving the exact same sexual awkwardness that was present in every scene that Eugene Levy ( Jim's father ) and Jim shared in the first movie , and we're left wondering why Natalie's parents walked into the room at all . The rest of the movie is more of the same . In the movie's defense , however , I must say that Seann William Scott was just as hilarious in every scene that he was in as he was in the first movie . The characters in both movies are hugely stereotypical caricatures of what , according to Hollywood producers , the typical college kid looks and acts like , and Stifler is the only one in either film that turns out even slightly amusing . It's no secret that films of this type tend to feed relentlessly off their original films in order to provide most of the laughs ( Austin Powers 2 ) , or lack thereof ( Scary Movie 2 ) , but it can at least be said that that was done at a minimum in the case of American Pie 2 . There is , thankfully , no ' pie , ' for example . On the other hand , the film does manage to feed off of other successful comedies . We see , for example , the introduction of Stifler's Mini-Me , as Stifler's younger brother enters the film , and is literally a miniature version of Stifler . For the entire film that doesn't contain Stifler , however , just about every single comedic scene falls completely flat , as was also the case with several of the scenes that Stifler WAS in ( anything involving urine or , theoretically , lesbians , for example ) . Jim is once again cruelly thrown into every kind of awkward and embarrassing situation imaginable , leaving the audience not laughing , but also feeling awkward and embarrassed . There is , for example , the completely tasteless scene in which he is mistaken for a retarded trombone player - did NOBODY at that damn band camp know what this Petey looked like ? ! And the statement that Jim utters at the abrupt end of his performance ( branding him by far the most moronic character in the film for the rest of the movie ) , will have your jaw on the floor in disgusted shock before you can say , ' Oh my good God , you're KIDDING . ' And all of the characters are back , too . Oz is back with his sickeningly sweet relationship with his insufferable girlfriend Heather , Finch is back in one of the more amusing roles in the film , having become so obsessed with his reunion with Stifler's mom that he meditates almost constantly , and Kevin is back again , having long since broken up with Vicky ( Tara Reid ) . There is a curious interaction between Kevin and Vicky throughout the film . It's obvious that there's a lot of sexual tension and weirdness between them , but it's impossible to care whether they get back together or not . There's a scene early in the film in which they almost kiss , and Vicky is put off , reminding him that they're just friends in what I hope to no end is the worst scene that Tara Reid has ever acted . If it gets worse that THAT . There is an interesting paradox that comes with movies like the American Pies and the Scary Movies and Road Trip and Sorority Boys that , logically , should reduce the films to complete failure almost immediately upon release . They are clearly jam-packed with the kind of humor that amuses 4th grade children ( and even THEM for no other reason than because they know their parents would hate it ) , yet they appear to be aimed at a late high school or ( gulp ) early college age audience . I was going to say that films like this can be watched just for a little fun , but then I wondered how much fun it is to watch a film in which a girl like Nadia falls completely in love with idiot after idiot , and I began to wonder what it is that made the film's producers and writers develop such an abysmally low opinion of their audience . Is it because we made their first film such a huge success ? Could it be that they are sending a message with this movie ? If they are , it's probably something like this , ' You LIKED that garbage ? ! Well , take THIS ! ! ' There is a clear lesson to be learned here , people , and I hope that everyone has been taking note of it . If we all keep paying to see this trash that is constantly cranked out by Hollywood , then we are only asking for more trash to be put on the menu . I think I said in my review of Scary Movie 2 that it's a lot of fun even to watch films that are so bad that they are virtually un-enjoyable , if only to tear them down later in my review . I won't say that American Pie delves to the unspeakably awful level that the Scary Movies both sunk to , but even writing reviews of the best bad movies gets old . A second sequel in this series is something that I would be more than happy to never see . |
543,870 | 562,732 | 405,296 | 3 | Interesting for the animation and almost nothing else . | Now , I have no idea how the animation was done in this movie , but the effect is so realistic that I have a feeling that it was filmed live and then an effect was layered onto the footage either while filming or during post production . At any rate , the effect gives the movie and entirely unique look that has never been done before , unfortunately as far as the story , there's just flat out nothing there . Keanu Reeves plays a super-secret agent for the Los Angeles Police Department , so super-secret , in fact , that his superiors don't even realize that they are assigning him to spy on himself . You see , not only does he work for the LAPD , but he is also an unemployed drug addict who associates himself with other addicts such as those played by Woody Harrelson , Winona Ryder , and Robert Downey Jr . Not a very challenging assignment for any of them , they basically play themselves in the movie . In the near future , there is a drug out on the streets called Substance D that is extremely addictive and performs bizarre abuses on the human mind , abuses which would make for some clever animation ideas were it to ever be featured on a half-assed , semi-animated , semi-intoxicated black comedy . I've heard it said that this is destined to become a cult classic . I guess . There are some conversations which are entertaining enough in their marked pointlessness , but a few clever bits of dialogue hidden within a 90 minute , convoluted mess do not a classic make . Not even a cult one . The film is based on the Philip K . Dick novel of the same name , which in turn is based on Dick's personal drug experiences . I can't imagine why you would need any more reason than that not to bother watching it . |
544,915 | 562,732 | 109,552 | 3 | A different villain may very well have made this worth making . | Darkman II is yet another example of how easy it is for a sequel to completely miss the mark , even when following up such a great comic book action movie . Darkman II starts out with the ludicrous request that we all believe Durant could have survived that massive helicopter crash at the end of the first film . Incredible . Anyway , so it starts out bad and is all downhill from there . We get an early performance from Arnold Vosloo who comes off of a ten-year film-acting career which had produced a series of forgettable films , this one among them . Now known almost entirely as High Priest Imhotep from the Mummy movies , Vosloo has certainly proved his ability to act with much of his face missing . So here was my problem with Darkman II ? first of all there's no way that Durant could have survived the crash and come out of it with nothing more than some scars on his face and neck . That crash destroyed and then incinerated his body . Larry Drake is a tremendously talented villain actor , but if anything they should have created another villain . That , after all , was Westlake's reason for living at the end of the first film , to fight crime . Another villain would have been a perfect excuse for another Darkman . Resurrecting Durant is not . That being said , another major problem is that Durant's casual smugness is no longer amusing or entertaining . It's not fun or interesting anymore to see him constantly talking to people that he's about to kill as though he thinks it's the funniest thing in the world . His whole sarcastic demeanor gets real old real quick . ( spoilers ) Westlake meets another scientist , David Brinkman , working on the same formula for synthetic skin that he has been trying to figure out , and Brinkman has made huge improvements , turning the 99 minute barrier into I think the 138 minute barrier , a huge step in their studies . Brinkman proposes a partnership , which Westlake eagerly accepts . Sadly , Brinkman happens to live in a huge warehouse that Durant wants to buy in order to set up the headquarters in which to pursue his endeavors for developing a nuclear handgun , but Brinkman doesn't want to sell . The expected ' convincing ' ends in Brinkman's death , and Westlake has to suffer through the loss of another partner . So not only do they resurrect the same villain from the first movie , they even cut and pasted the plot . Yawn . There's another subplot involving the death of a stupid , stupid TV reporter , eager to have a hit story to help her career but oblivious or indifferent to the dangers that it would put on her ability to remain alive . She doesn't believe at first that Durant is really alive , but when evidence seems to suggest that he is , she wants to be the first to break the story . My favorite little trick was how Durant managed to get a bomb into her car literally minutes after she breaks the story about him on live TV . She talks to the camera , then walks outside and explodes . A criminal who can work THAT fast DESERVES to monopolize all crime in the city . The movie is plagued with horrific acting , particularly on the part of Durant's idiot sidekicks , who act just as dumb as their characters are supposed to be . There is nothing new covered here other than the same villain pursuing a different avenue of high level crime , and Vosloo delivers a respectable performance taking over for Liam Neeson , but Neeson owns this character just like Sam Raimi owns the picture itself . His work is far too recognizable to be taken over without losing a lot of the original feel of the film , and it's too bad that Durant exploded at the end of the first movie but apparently survived unscathed , while Darkman suffered no injury other than that at the very beginning , and yet it's him that is an entirely different person . Given the extensive level of disappointment that this movie delivers , I'm curious as to why they bothered with a Darkman III . I guess SOMEONE must have liked it ? |
544,670 | 562,732 | 422,295 | 3 | Have a book handy ? | I bought a collection of movies somewhere in China , and otherwise may never have bothered with Fur , which seems to have been included for no real reason . It's another of the bizarre artsy films that Nicole Kidman seems to attach herself to , also for no discernible reason , which reminded me of the enormously bizarre and disappointing Dogville back in 2003 . What was that ? Sadly , I had the same question in mind after I finished half-dozing through Fur . It's about the wife of a professional photographer who is happily married until , one day during a particularly harsh bout of seemingly friendly questioning from a lot of uppity yuppy snobs , she realizes the reality of her low class life-style , and soon finds herself inexplicably falling in love with a man who just moved in upstairs , who suffers from a disease that causes extremely overactive hair-growth over his entire body . The one thing that I appreciate about the movie is that , even though it fails , it attempts to present Lionel Sweeney , the afflicted man , as a real person with thoughts and feelings rather than the freak that society has made him out to be . The movie tries to illustrate society's unfortunate tendency ( and need ) to relegate people who are different to the very edges of our communities , fixing them with neat labels and then constructing walls around them to remind them ( and us ) that we are " normal " while they are , ah , something else . Lionel's brooding demeanor and soft spoken mannerisms are meant to give the impression of someone who has suffered at the hands of the world around him because of a physical disease over which he has no control , but unfortunately , because the encounters he has with Diane Arbus ( a real woman whose life is completely and mysteriously changed for the purpose of the movie ) are so wildly unrealistic , he comes off as nothing more than a fantasy movie monster , like that giant teddy bear in Labyrinth and why isn't that movie on the top 250 list ? Labyrinth is one of the most spectacular fantasy films ever made , while Fur , I imagine , is not meant to be a fantasy film , but more an exploration of various parts of the human psyche , particularly those involving things like love , devotion , and societal acceptance . These are very serious topics and I always welcome a movie version of some kind of philosophical discourse on the real meaning of it all , but it's hard to concentrate on the significance of a movie like this as it applies to real life when we're watching an ass-shaving scene . Nicole Kidman is an enormously talented actor , all I can say is that sometimes I just don't get her choices . Dogville had its merits ( although entertainment value was certainly not one of them ) , The Stepford Wives was totally inaccurate and hugely disappointing , and I just don't get this movie at all . If you are looking for something off the wall and bizarrely artsy , you may enjoy Fur . Otherwise this will be one of Kidman's and Robert Downey Jr . ' s movies that you can safely ignore . |
543,764 | 562,732 | 1,220,563 | 3 | A little something slapped together for the DVD . . . | It's extremely rare that you will see any of these supplemental documentaries that are really anything other than short films where the main cast and crew get on camera and talk about how everyone was the greatest people that any of them ever met and they were like a family and they felt like they knew each other for their whole lives and they'll be friends forever and blah blah blah blah . In a good documentary , somewhere along the way there will be some insights revealed into the meaning of the movie or interesting stories about the making of the movie ( there are tons of these on , say , The Exorcist , for example ) or , in the most shining cases , things can be revealed about the intentions in making the movie that can make a bad movie seem a lot better than you thought after you finished watching it . The 2003 Willard remake and Texas Chainsaw III , believe it or not , come to mind . Unfortunately , in this one all we have is everyone getting on camera and talking about how great everyone else was , and there is also tons of talk about the extensive preparations that were done to make sure that everyone felt like a family around each other in this huge Rhode Island house . Not that there's anything wrong with that , except that Dan in Real Life is just such a drab , uninteresting movie with characters who have absolutely no chemistry with each other , so it was a little sad to see all of these talented actors get on camera and talk about how brilliant everything was . I'm sure they had a great time making the movie , but they just don't add anything to it with this short video , and in the case of this movie , a lot needed to be added . . . |
543,999 | 562,732 | 454,841 | 3 | Ah , the evolution of the movie monster ? | I admit first off that it is s surprise to me that the new Hills Have Eyes has a higher rating on the IMDb than Wes Craven's original film , a democratic oddity that I chalk up to more and more young people watching the IMDb , not only interested more in newer horror movies than older ones , but interested less in watching original , or even classic , films . I really hope the young people of today are not losing sight of the great films that have come in years past , because that would have a dire effect on the kinds of films that we can expect in the future . On the other hand , I could just be losing interest more and more with disturbing horror movies , although I still love the old ones , so I doubt it . In this remake of The Hills Have Eyes , the murderous people that come out of the hills are not just cut off from society and displaying the effects of generations of inbreeding , but are instead horrific examples of the effects of nuclear testing in the American deserts of the southwest . So everything needs to be bigger and faster and scarier than the original movie , which may be why the quality always seems to suffer so badly in modern remakes . The traveling family can't just break down , they have to crash , they can't just be on a vacation , they have to be suffering from almost universal internal strife ( no one can communicate with each other in a civilized manner ) , and of course , we can't just have dirty , depraved villains , they have to be cartoonish movie monsters that are barely human . It's sad the effect it takes to shock people these days because filmmakers have lost sight of what is scary and are just going for something grosser than the last movie . Here's another thing , there's a rape scene in the movie . I hate that . I'm adding rape scenes to my list of things I would be perfectly happy to never see in a movie again , right along with beheadings and anything involving any of the Wayans brothers . Anyway , as with just about every other wrong turn movie ( including the god-awful Wrong Turn ) , a group of morons take the advice of a degenerate gas station attendant and take a dirt road off of the paved road in the middle of the desert , idiotically believing that it is some kind of short cut . The sad thing is that the mutants ' indignation at having been subjected to " your " radioactive poisoning is eventually displayed , as the family is blamed for these peoples ' deformities and thus their massacre supposedly justified . Yeah , I have all the sympathy in the world for the people that suffered radioactive poisoning from nuclear testing back in the 1950s and 1960s , but I will go ahead and say right now that the people that are eligible for my sympathy did not think it best to set up residence in the fake town built by the government ( and intended to be destroyed ) at the bottom of one of the craters created by the bombs and then proceed for generations to mate with each other . We are then led off on a boring journey of the owners of the eyes doing the eating and the idiot family being eaten . There is no depth to a single character so it's impossible to care about a single one of them ( it also doesn't help that not a single one of them made one smart decision in the movie from beginning to end ) and we get to see some gore and some heavily made up movie monsters . Yawn . ( spoilers ) Oh here's something , why is it okay that a little girl dies in this movie ? Is it because she's saving one of the normal people from being killed or because she's deformed ? I'm curious as to the assumptions that can be made about modern moviegoers where that didn't kill the movie with controversy , because I can pretty much guarantee that this movie would not have been released if that girl's eyes were even . |
543,786 | 562,732 | 295,725 | 3 | Don't these people realize that time travel IS playing God ? | I have this undying love of movies that have anything to do with time travel , which is why I picked up this rather obscure film that I had heard of from the video store . The problem here is that the movie's intentions are too obvious . Time travel can never work , that much is a given , and it follows then that time travel movies take advantage of a human fascination in the concept , and have an overwhelming tendency , therefore , to be made almost entirely for entertainment purposes . Enter Time Changer , an ultra-religious film whose very title implies that one of it's characters will have the God-like capability of traveling through time . So the movie is pretty straightforward religious propaganda , by definition . That much is pretty obvious , regardless of your own or my own personal religious beliefs . It is a film made to promote a certain religious viewpoint , and I think that this is something to keep in mind before watching it . I certainly didn't expect it , and I can't say that I was very pleasantly surprised . The film starts out in the late 1800s , at a table of men discussing the publication of a new book , which deals with the benefits of adhering to the morals of Christianity , but without an attachment to the names of God or Jesus . The men sit around the table thrilled at the idea , hopeful that it should be able to collectively improve the lives of people who would like to lead moral lives but are not inclined toward believing in Jesus or God . The younger audience are particularly targeted by this idea . There are six or seven or so of these men , all excited to publish the book as soon as possible , but one of them shows up late , vehemently denouncing the novel and fighting against its publication . He says that this belief in the morals of God but without FEAR of God is dangerous , and just so happens to have a time machine that has allowed him to travel 100 years into the future so that he can prove himself right . He urges the author of the book , Russell Carlisle ( an abysmal performance from D . David Morin ) , to use the time machine himself so that he can travel to modern times and see the results of the ideas put forth in his proposed book . He eventually does , and comes face to face with normal modern society , and finds himself appalled at what has become of the church . Personally , I don't believe that someone living a moral life but without the fear of God is doing a thing in the world wrong . The addition of fear , of any kind , into an already moral life in needless and even detrimental . From a technical standpoint , the film is a low-tech mess , coherent but with basal production standards . The acting is absolutely awful across the board , and the idea of a time machine invented in the 1890s ( even if only because the idea of time travel , more than a century later , is so astronomical that it is not even attempted by serious modern scientists ) is childish , at best . I'm willing to accept the premise of a time machine being invented and used in the 1890s in order to travel into the future and see what kind of world a book like the one presented would help to create , but only from a pure entertainment standpoint . I would love to see a movie about Einstein inventing a time machine and traveling to the future and seeing what he thinks of space travel and the Back to the Future movies and whatnot , but Time Changer is trying to take itself and be taken more seriously than it deserves . I will grant credit to the fact that society at large may hold religious beliefs that are certain to be horrifying to the religious community of 110 years ago , but I am not willing to admit that someone who lives a moral life but does not connect their morals with Jesus is living in sin or , even more ludicrous , has any chance of spending an eternity in Hell . I know far too many people who live happily , have wonderful families , and are good and civil to their fellow man to have the ability to believe or ever be convinced that they will spend eternity burning in a lake of fire because they do not attend church regularly or make Jesus or God a significant portion of their lives , and I do not feel obliged to believe in a God who is so self righteous that He would damn people like that . If you do , more power to you . To each his own , I say . But picture this , just hypothetically ? man is living in harmony . There are no gangs , no murders , no wars , no hatred , racism , robberies , or weapons of mass destruction . All of the humans on earth are living happily with themselves and with each other . But none of them attach the morals by which they live their lives to Jesus . Granted , this is a purely hypothetical situation that I don't believe is humanly possible , but just pretend that was how life on earth was at this moment . Do you think that God would condemn every human on earth , the humans described above , because they did not attribute their achievements and morals to Jesus ? I realize that Jesus died for our sins , if that's your belief . But it just seems to me that , if God created humanity and the earth and the heavens , a whole planet full of benevolent humans living in peace might be viewed as something of a success , rather than something to condemn . But hey , if you think all those people's souls should spend eternity in a lake of fire , Time Changer is the movie for you . And ONLY you . |
544,589 | 562,732 | 72,128 | 3 | Why the title ? Maybe all the good ones were taken ? | Anyway , the overlying problem with The Scream of the Wolf is that it hints in a certain direction and then goes exactly in that direction , rendering the entire movie a tired exercise in horror movie making which takes you where you knew all along it was going to go . The film starts with a brutal murder , and the cops investigating dance around the solution , which the audience has been yelling at the screen and which would be ridiculously obvious to them if they knew they were in a horror film . The movie is not scary even for a second , but that doesn't really matter because there's exactly a single movie made in the 1970s that's still scary . What matters is that there is a character named Byron , the prime suspect through most of the movie , who does not serve the purpose that it is imperative his character serve . ( spoilers ) Byron is what you might call the obvious answer . The suspect who simply can't be guilty just because of the fact that his guilt is so obvious . That would be like if Shephard was the real killer in Twisted . Byron's purpose in this movie is to distract the audience and , more importantly , the cops , from the real solution by acting cocky and guilty ( which he does every second he's onscreen ) in order to throw us , and the cops , off the right track . What Byron is NOT supposed to do is run around acting guilty because he is . Not only is there no twist whatsoever in this movie ( an absolutely essential element in a horror mystery ) , but the real killer is not even a werewolf , which the title implies , but nothing more than a dog trained to kill by an obsessed hunter . Was THAT the twist ? ? I really hope it wasn't , because it's not the kind of twist that leaves you slapping your forehead because you hadn't already guessed it , it's the kind of twist that leaves you slapping your forehead because you just spent 80 minutes watching this movie . |
544,875 | 562,732 | 165,831 | 3 | Mindless comedy . Not worth watching if you are looking for anything other than a cheesy and pointless story about a man's extremely unlikely bad luck . | Jamie Foxx comes forth with another dumbass comedy , but at least in this one he pretends that he can possibly portray a respectable person . Trapped in a tiny town full of rednecks , Michael ( Foxx ) tries to recover from his fiancee ( Nia Long , whose talent was even more wasted than it was in Big Momma's House ) leaving him just after his beloved car was stolen , when he finds himself stuck in the middle of a botched robbery . Yes , this is your stereotypical hick town . They have to have a tremendously fat guy ( remember Billy Bob from Varsity Blues ? ) , the police force winds up running around in their boxer shorts , and the sheriff seems to care more about the local sporting events than he does about saving the hostages in the gas station . This movie may not have been so awful had it not been for the fact that the writers were clearly trying to grab for laughs every second of the way , while ignoring the necessary elements ( even in a slapstick comedy ) of reality and credibility . ( spoilers ) The robbers become likeable , so of course the film has to have a happy ending . That's fine , but what happened ? They got on the bus , rode off into the sunset , and evidently the idiot police force went back to their baseball game , because they ignored the fact that the attempted robbers just drove away . ' Oh well , let's just all go home ! ' Even country police forces aren't that stupid . Held Up is slow paced , it's often boring , and it takes a serious situation and tries to get stupid laughs by making ridiculous efforts to make it all funny . It tries to force a smile on unhappy material , and was therefore doomed from the beginning . Hardcore Jamie Foxx fans may enjoy his cornball antics in this movie , but anyone looking for even the smallest hint of quality in their cinematic entertainment would be best advised to ignore this garbage . |
543,904 | 562,732 | 78,767 | 3 | Why the hell were there so many sequels ? | Did you hear that The Amityville Horror is a horror classic ? You heard wrong . The Amityville Horror actually starts off pretty good , with a fairly well done murder scene at the famous house with eyes . However , this is probably the scene ( perfectly placed right at the beginning ) that put so many people off , particularly the critics . I think that this is a film meant for a younger audience , because most people with families of their own are likely to be disgusted by the carnage that is presented in the opening moments of this movie . This effectively disturbing murder scene is soon followed by a scene where the prospective tenants ( some time later ) are given a tour of the house by the real estate lady , which makes for a good and well placed way to show the audience around the increasingly creepy house . On the other hand , this was evidently also taken as another opportunity to offend the more mature audience by editing some grisly scenes from the brutal murders into the tour , although it was a fairly effective technique . ( spoilers ) Once the family has moved in , the strange events begin almost immediately . When the priest , a friend of the family , comes over , he walks into the house , not knowing that the whole family is outside . As he calls out to see if anyone is home , he hears children laughing upstairs . The audience knows that everyone is outside , and this is probably one of the more chilling moments of the film . Why are the ghosts of children so much more unnerving than those of adults ? I can never figure that out exactly , but it gets me every time . This was one of the things that made for the scariest moments in countless other films , such as the more recent Blair Witch Project . Unfortunately , after that scene with the children's voices , the film seems to go precipitously downhill , and the ending is the nearly audible crash landing . There are so many cliched scares that were thrown randomly into this film with no forethought that they nearly ruined the entire movie single-handedly . You have the Waking Up Screaming scare , you have the inexplicable Screeching Cat scare , the slamming doors , the mysteriously locked windows and doors , the bumps in the night , the cold rooms , the empty rocking chair , the constantly sweaty father , the list goes on and on . And the things that were actually original made little to no sense at all . For example , we never get any explanation for why that one room upstairs is occasionally filled with hundreds and hundreds of flies . Are we to assume that the rotting corpses of the murdered family are somehow returning to the house ? At one point , the toilets in the house spout some sort of tar-like substance , which is also never explained . In another scene , it seems that the house steals $1500 from the oldest son , which he had planned to use to pay the caterer at his wedding ( that better have been a damn good caterer ) . Was this a crime of profit ? Committed by the evil house ? ! Then we have the one scene where the house viciously yells at the priest to " Get Out ! " This wouldn't have been so ineffective had it not been such a completely isolated event . And what exactly was that thing that George , the sweaty father , saw in the upstairs window near the end of the film , some kind of gigantic ghost-pig with glowing eyes ? Was that thing supposed to have been superimposed into a different film , and got into The Amityville Horror by accident ? I admit that most of this stuff can just fit into the category of the house itself , which is clearly alive in some way , trying everything possible to scare the people away . But on the other hand , why does it want some people gone and others to stay ? It tells the priest to get out , but then burns his hand and cuts the connection when he tries to call and warn the family about what happened while he was there . Maybe it wanted George there , because he looks exactly like the guy who killed his family in the house in the opening of the film . Or maybe that similar resemblance is just the first of many ideas that were taken directly from The Shining . The Amityville Horror is strikingly similar in many ways ( including the vast majority of the storyline ) to The Shining , which leads me to suspect some sort of plagiarism . Kind of makes you wonder . . . And not only that , but most if not all of the sound effects during scary scenes seem to have been taken directly from the Psycho soundtrack . The impression that The Amityville Horror gives is that of a movie that presents a good story that appears to have been taken from someone else and badly presented in a slightly altered form . Some scenes were unnecessary at best , if not completely exploitative . Did we really need to see the nun loudly vomiting in the middle of the road ? George is made to look like some sort of mountain man with no time to respect helmet laws , the guy looks like a freakin ' grizzly bear . Who cares that he nearly axed his wife to death in a fit of temporary insanity , he went back and heroically saved the dog at the end , so he's a good guy again , right ? That's crap . And how about that ending ? Was the script-writer hit by a truck ? They may as well have just said " They got away . " I'll admit that The Amityville Horror is not an utter failure . There were a few scenes ( emphasis on " few " ) that actually delivered chills , but unless you are absolutely determined to see this movie , you may be best advised to watch The Shining instead . |
544,212 | 562,732 | 96,119 | 3 | Teenage crapfest . . . | I think I'm starting to lose my taste for horror movies . For about the last ten years , horror has been a favorite genre for me , especially the old 80s slasher movies . I even enjoyed watching the bad ones , because it is so entertaining to see what kinds of new and interesting ways they come up with for killing promiscuous teenagers . But the whole Sleepaway Camp series struck me as so witless and boring that my only conclusion is that it must either be a prodigious disaster six movies long or I am just not into this crap anymore . The second sequel is not even as good as the first sequel , which in its entirety is not even as good as the last shot of the original film . Once again , the acting is astonishingly bad from beginning to end , and they knew this too . Notice , after all , that there is a teenage girl wearing nothing but panties less than a minute after the film starts ( with " Milk Shake " tattooed across her breasts , if you can believe that ) , then another one 15 minutes later , and rarely do you have to wait that long for the rest of the movie to see some bare breasted girl trying to act like it's perfectly normal for her to be hanging around half naked at camp . Maybe it's because I worked at a summer camp a couple years ago and so I know how ridiculous the idea of Camp New Horizons is . The big idea this time is to take a lot of poor kids and put them in camp with a bunch of rich kids for an " experience in sharing . " The result is a lot of ridiculous caricatures the likes of which would never survive in the real world , rich or poor ( Snowboy ? ? ? ) . As far as the motives behind the killings , one of the things that I first appreciated about good slasher movies ( even the good ' bad ' slasher movies ) was that there was always a reason the people were killed . It almost always had something to do with promiscuity or drugs or alcohol or something , but the audience was allowed some opportunity to figure it out . Not here . All subtlety is removed and replaced with a completely mechanical removal of undesirables ( " Are you a cheerleader ? " " Yes . " " Are you a virgin ? " " No . " " Have you ever done drugs ? " " Yes . " " Strike three . . . " ) . Admittedly , some of the death scenes are certainly original , like the kid who gets his arms pulled off by the jeep and the girl who gets pulled up the flagpole and then dropped . I hadn't seen that before . But then you have ones that are creative but that just don't work , like the kid who doesn't wake up as a lit firecracker is pushed up his nose . All in all , the first film is worth watching just for that ending , which is thematically disturbing but highly effective . Part 2 and 3 , however , both have yawn-inducing endings , and personally I have no interest in finding out about parts 4 , 5 , or 6 . . . . |
543,945 | 562,732 | 96,118 | 3 | I'm completely cured ! If I wasn't they wouldn't have let me out ! | So Angela has grown up and gotten therapy and an operation to turn her into a real life daughter , rather than the son that she was born , and now holds a job as - wait for it - a camp counselor ! How appropriate , right ? I know , I love it . Anyway , the first sequel to the Sleepaway Camp franchise obeys all the rules of horror sequels - more blood , more imaginative killings ( which aren't imaginative , but still more so than the original ) , more nudity , a more elaborate plot , and generally worse than the original . It is entertaining in the same way as the original was , in that the characters and wardrobes are so goofy and so authentically 80's that you can't help getting a good laugh . At one point , a guy asks Angela out , and she says " I'll call you , " and then quickly walks away . The guy says to himself , " How is she gonna call me ? I don't have a phone ! " and then he sniffs his armpits , wondering what turned her off ( it's the hair , dude ! ! ) . It is a well-known fact that in 80s slasher movies , the murdered teenagers were more often than not being punished by their killer for some kind of bad behavior , usually for being too promiscuous . When I first started getting into horror movies and saw the Friday the 13th movies for the first time in the mid 90s , I didn't realize this . I learned it in a film class a year or two later and was amazed that their was some method to the madness . I was pretty impressed , not only that the movies were passing on some kind of message , albeit a morbid one , but that there was actually some thought put into it . But not in this movie ! At one point just before Angela kills one of her victims , she says " Let this be a lesson to you . Say no to drugs ! " Real subtle screen writing there , guys . Then again , the dialogue is the most entertaining thing in the movie . Angela ( who , by the way , went through all that therapy and those operations and all that trouble to clean up her past and reinvent herself as a normal and well-developed person and then changed her name from Angela to , umm , Angela ) , says at one point , " I don't like being the wicked witch of the west , but I know what happens when things get out of control . " ( People start getting killed . . . by me ! HA ! ) Then later , she demands that one of the counselors , Mare , make an apology , to which the girl replies , " I'd rather die ! " Sorry , Mare , but you really walked into that one . . . Two years ago I was a camp counselor at a sleepaway camp similar to the one portrayed in this movie ( except the camp that I taught at had more than three kids to the 15 or 20 counselors and it also had rules , which the one in the movie doesn't ) . This made me notice the myriad of discrepancies in the movie from what camp life is really like . That's okay though , you can hardly make a movie like this with a lot of 9 year olds running around , although there were some 10 or 11 year old kids killed in this movie . I hadn't seen that kind of thing much before . Definitely bad taste , even for a cheesy 80s slasher movie . . . . |
544,913 | 562,732 | 92,076 | 3 | Dog will hunt ! | Disclaimer : Do NOT try to remove your hemorrhoids with a chainsaw . It will NOT save you a trip to the hospital . ( spoilers ) OK , let me tell you why the Texas Chainsaw sequels don't work . The original film is slightly exempt from this , but when you have someone who is screaming and wiggling so much that you wish she would just get killed so she'll shut the hell up , you have lost your ability to scare . Doesn't matter how good the sets or costumes or actors are , if the audience is holding their ears , you have a problem . The first sequel in the Texas Chainsaw series is meant to be nothing other than a bigger version of the original , this time fictionalized , and beefed up with the star power of Dennis Hopper . Not that the original was non-fiction . As you know , it was really based , very loosely , as it were , on the inhuman antics of Ed Gein in the 1950s , the same demented nutcase that inspired Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs . Sounds like a fun guy . Unfortunately , as is all too often the case with horror movies , this one comes off more as a sick comedy than a scary movie . Granted , there are horror movies that purposely come out like that , such as most of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies , but the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a movie that caught people off guard because of its simplicity , its unknown cast , and its rough , documentary feel . In Texas Chainsaw 2 , every single little bit of that is lost . The set , once we eventually get underground , looks like they rented the Indiana Jones set , festooned it with randomly placed naked light bulbs , furniture made out of human bones , and meat hooks , and had Leatherface run around swinging a chainsaw . The atmosphere of the movie has completely lost the claustrophobic feel of the original by vastly expanding the size of the set , much of which looks like a Christmas tree crossed with an esophagus , and there is just too much hooting and hollering for it to be scary . The only thing more irritating than the killers is their victim , ' Stretch . ' The movie starts off with a couple of high school caricatures zooming down a desert highway , screaming at each other at the tops of their lungs about the sheer magnitude of the party that they are on their way to . They decide to swing into oncoming traffic to play chicken with someone driving a pickup truck , instantly making me eager to see them get killed . Doesn't matter that Leatherface is in that truck , anyone who plays chicken with a random driver because they're driving around drunk deserves to get killed . And if it takes place in a movie , they deserve to get killed with a chainsaw . So not only do we have to endure the hooting and hollering of these two jerks , but they call a radio station and we are asked to believe that this station's phones get completely tied up if someone calling in refuses to hang up . Sure , this is rural Texas and 1986 , but are we to believe that even out there and back then , there were radio stations with a single phone line and without the ability to cut off the callers ? At one point the clueless tech guy is frantically pushing buttons and pulling levers , trying to figure out how to clear the line . Given something so stupid , however , you know it was there for a reason , so that they could record the phone call as the kids get chainsawed on the other end . Speaking of which , the same kid that swerved into oncoming traffic at full speed finds himself stopped on a bridge as that same pickup truck sits blocking both lanes , and he frantically screams ' Are you crazy ? ! ? ' out the windshield while his idiot friend in the passenger seat offers such heroic tips as ' Just keep driving ! ' and ' Get outta here ! ' Good thinking ' ! Speaking of driving , not only can they not outrun a pickup truck traveling in reverse while supposedly holding the pedal to the floor in their Mercedes , but in the shots that show Leatherface standing and swinging his chainsaw , they are literally traveling all of 5mph . Dennis Hopper plays the uncle of the kids who were killed in the original movie , sort of a rogue detective out of his jurisdiction and showing up at the scene of the two kids ' murder . The police refuse to jump to conclusions , but Lefty ( Hopper ) is sure that it's the same people who killed his nieces and nephews . Hopper makes a GREAT redneck . I generally am truly disappointed when actors take on fake accents , but Hopper does this one so well that you would swear he's lived in the south his entire life , it's just too bad that he's saddled with this idiot character . At one point , Stretch , the radio station DJ , shows up at his apartment , which , needless to say , is flooded with drunken rednecks wandering the halls with their arms around each other , and tells him that she has an audiotape of the murder because the kids called in just before they were attacked , and he sends her away ! What the hell is that ? Later he has a change of heart , but only wants to hear it if she'll play it on the air . The logic of the characters ' actions in this movie is not starting off on the right foot . Then later , as Stretch hangs in a pit about to fall into the demons ' lair , you might say , he tries to save her with a brittle , dried out arm bone . Clever . There is a lengthy horror scene inside the radio station , which looks like it doesn't know if it's supposed to be a radio station or a horror movie set , so better just be a little bit of both . It's got its vast storage of records stored safely behind an open door , with a heavy steel door guarding the cleaning supplies . A burglar's dream , you might say . We get a scene where Leatherface is assigned to kill Stretch , but when he finally gets through that steel door , he starts chainsawing a tub of soda cans sitting in ice , which have no reason for being there or for being chainsawed , until finally Stretch screams , ' Are you mad at me ? ? ' and my eyes glaze over for the remainder of the film . There's an effective scene where Leatherface puts Stretch's friend's freshly removed face over hers , supposedly to help her escape , but for the most part the underground portion of the film is a tired rehash of the original . Sure , it's bigger , there are more Christmas lights and more chainsaws , but essentially it's exactly the same thing , just without the surprise . They even replay exactly the same dinner scene from the end of the last movie , the most unpleasant scene in the entire movie . Lefty decides that he is so intent on delivering swift poetic justice that , rather than stock up on as many guns as he can carry , he buys three huge chainsaws and straps them to his body , and then runs screaming into the house , yelling and cutting down wooden supports as the family tortures Stretch . In Commando Arnold bulldozes into a weapons store and loads up on boatloads of guns and knives and explosives . In The Terminator he does the same thing , with the added bonus of killing off the proprietor before leaving . Lefty could have paid homage to both of those films , establishing Lefty as a good guy since he actually paid for his . But why saws and not guns ? The grandparents , as is to be expected , are a hideous , hideous spectacle . Grandpa's 137 years old and still likes to hammer young girls on the head , and grandma spends her time in a wheelchair upstairs with a chainsaw on her lap . We are treated to a finale atop a huge rock outcropping that is so fake that it almost turns the movie into a comedy all by itself . There is at least one or two shots where the underlying chicken wire is nakedly visible . We get some sort of variation on the ending of the original , since the conclusion is almost a mirror image , in that the girl becomes the chainsaw wielding maniac rather than looking at him out the back window of a passing motorist , but I'm not sure what line of discussion led to the conclusion that this would be a cool way to end the film . Is this supposed to be the setup for a sequel ? The family's dead , but now there's this girl who has caught chainsaw fever and will now carry on the legacy ? |
543,851 | 562,732 | 60,463 | 3 | Seemingly air-headed romantic comedy eventually reveals itself to be wiser than its years . | I say eventually because it takes about three quarters of the film before it appears to have a thought in its head , and even then it's not by much and only briefly . My problem with the movie is that for the vast majority of it , Doris Day's character Jenny is the typical stupid blonde , cheerfully grinning like a moron and twirling her hair , clueless to what is going on around her . I have a hard time getting over this kind of thing when I see it in the movies because I dated one or two girls that acted like that because they thought it was cute and it drives me out of my mind . It's incredible to me that the romance between Jenny and Mr . Templeton was ever considered romantic , it's so contrived and pretentious . The slapstick situations are shallowly manufactured , badly acted and thus not funny , but the heavy hand of the sixties is all over the movie , so at least it is a slightly interesting look at a different time as well as the kind of thing that was considered entertaining and romantic forty years ago . The movie takes a turn for the better when Jenny figures out what's going on by listening in on a phone call between Templeton and his military buddies and then decides to turn the tables on them , although it should be noted that during that phone call he insists that Jenny simply can't be a spy , she hasn't got the brains . She's offended and so are we , until we remember that he's right . Afterwards , she begins to display an intellect which had been largely absent thus far , but unfortunately , everyone else in the movie turns stupid in order to lead to a lot more goofy slapstick . It is telling that one of the first things that brings suspicion onto Jenny is a series of misunderstandings stemming from the fact that her dog's name is Vladimir . Strangely enough , the reason I watched the movie is because I took my girlfriend to Catalina Island recently for her birthday , and we took a tour in the exact same glass bottom boat which was used in this movie , and I thought it would be interesting to see the film shot in the boat I was sitting in , as well as to see what the astonishingly beautiful Avalon ( the tiny town on Catalina Island ) looked like in the mid 1960s . Needless to say , I was surprised to see that Avalon looks almost exactly the same , and that the glass bottom boat appears in the first five minutes or so of the movie and is never seen again . Odd that they would name the film after such an irrelevant plot device . Also don't miss the extra features on the DVD , one of which is a short video in which MGM claims that every girl's dream is to visit the MGM Studios in Culver City . |
543,997 | 562,732 | 52,948 | 3 | Ladies and gentlemen , I kid you not , they added a DUCK . | The addition of a duck to the journey to the center of the earth simply has to go down as one of the dumbest creative ideas that has ever made it to the big screen . I must say that I had high hopes for this version of Jules Verne's story , because the older versions , in my experience , tend to have healthier respect for the source material that they are based on , and they are less likely to succumb to the temptations of trying to push along a bad script and awful acting with special effects , which all too often are themselves not very impressive . The lack of technical capabilities in older films demanded better quality in acting , story , script , directing , editing , pretty much everywhere , which is why so many of today's films are sad , pathetic messes . Unfortunately , as was also the case in the 1999 version , a terrible little is paid attention to the original story in making this movie . Now , in this movie's defense , it at least tries to stick closely to the story itself , but all of the characters are changed completely , especially Hans , who is unrecognizable to his character in the novel . A pet duck , are you serious ? Granted , there are scenes in the book which would prove tremendously difficult to film convincingly , even by today's standards ( the sea battle , the storm , and the ultimate fate of the ocean and the escape back to the surface , for example , take place in a nearly unfilmable fashion in the novel ) . I also had a problem with the musical scenes . I expect that the sets are going to be bad , and they are , but I have always had a problem with characters bursting into song at random times , it's so hard to make it work right . Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a rare exception . But in this case , when there is no reason whatsoever to have musical numbers in the movie , it is just distracting and calls attention to the lack of ability to bring the whole story to the screen . |
543,925 | 562,732 | 364,970 | 3 | Could have been good until the studio destroyed it . . . | My first reaction to Babylon A . D . was that it's not nearly as bad as its own director , Matthieu Kassovitz , has been claiming it is , although that reaction came to me before I got to the end of the movie . The movie has a cool set-up and a few good action sequences , although they suffer from that all too modern symptom of having been put together by editors who must have been on some kind of amphetamines . Like so many other recent action films ( Death Race , for example ) , the fight scenes and chase scenes and whatnot are cut together so fast that they fly by with dizzying speed , and you move on with the rest of the movie with only a vague impression of what just happened . Vin Diesel stars as Toorop , a hardened loner of a mercenary whose latest mission is to escort a mysterious young woman from a convent in Russia to America ( where he is listed as a terrorist ) , although like so much of the rest of the movie , we never learn why . Michelle Yeoh comes across as a bizarre casting decision for a bizarre character . She plays Sister Rebekah , Aurora's guardian . This woman I just don't get . She's Chinese and plays a kung-fu fighting nun in Russia . She and Toorop have an immediate power struggle , and then during the mission Aurora exhibits more and more strange powers and abilities . She can feel other people's pain , she can operate old submarines , and can predict the future . The rest of the movie is basically Toorop's mission to get her to New York alive , avoiding the mysterious figures pursuing her for their own agenda , and figure out what's wrong with her along the way . The movie moves along from one on-location set piece to the next , with action scenes and fights popping up out of nowhere and then wrapping up nicely as our heroes rush off screen to the next set . But I would argue that at least most of the action is fun along the way . Unfortunately , I happened to have learned before watching the movie that a 160-minute version would be released in Europe , compared to the 90-minute version I just saw , and let me tell you , you can really feel the blank spots . There is , for example , a major , major plot development revealed in the third act of the movie that is so bizarre that it's almost like someone slipped in a page from a completely different movie . It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere , and adds nothing to the movie except provides a spot to slide in the ending , which leaves you with the feeling that the writer was hit by a truck or they ran out of money or just lost interest . The end is so sudden and so witless that the movie immediately transformed in my mind into an endless maze of loose ends and confusion . There is a brief scene in the movie where Sister Rebekah explains hers and Aurora's history to Toorop , but it doesn't explain anything and doesn't really matter anyway , because the story is so clearly just a backdrop to the futuristic landscapes and the cookie cutter fight scenes , many of which are hilarious in their badness . There is one scene , for example , where the trio outrun not only a couple of what look like futuristic Stealth bombers , but also their missiles , and they do it on snowmobiles ! I don't think we ever learn the exact time period , but the futuristic element of the film is badly incoherent . New York City is jam-packed with neon advertisement , fold-out road maps are like Google Maps on paper and touch sensitive , and taxis have scrolling message boards on their sides , but Coke Zero is still around and advertising on passenger jets and the bad guys drive vintage , mint-condition 2008 Range Rovers . They must really like classic cars . I have to say that Babylon A . D . left me with the feeling that it could have and should have been so much better than it was , and I'm guessing that was the money-hungry hand of the studio that swept away all of the good parts of the movie . I'm hoping that when Babylon DVD comes along it will include the uncut , 160-minute version that the Europeans saw , along with an explanation of why it was so badly butchered before released to American audiences . At any rate , any Director's Cut is sure to be a different movie entirely . I recommend waiting for it . |
544,089 | 562,732 | 115,624 | 3 | Babe . . . Babe ? BABE BABE BABE BABE BABE ! ! ! ! ! ! | Ah , nothing . Just like I thought . Let's face it , Pamela Anderson can NOT act . Barb Wire is so obviously nothing other than an excuse to get the most famous blonde on the planet into a bunch of chesty outfits and occasionally not even that much that that fact alone provides much of the film's comic relief . This movie reminds me of a similar crapfest that Anna Nicole Smith put out the year before , called Skyscraper , which was basically a remake of Die Hard but without the acting , the budget , the script , or the brains . Similarly , Barb Wire does not do much to cover up how extensively it borrows from Casablanca . And also similarly , this time without the acting , the budget , the script , or the brains . Whenever you have a film that stars someone like Pamela Anderson , who is famous more for getting naked than anything else , it's not hard to predict that at some point during the film , she will pose as a stripper or a prostitute or something in order for the film to get her out of her clothes , and I'm pretty Pam does both here . There's a thin storyline involving politics and secret weapons and Canadian money , of all things , and this , along with just about everything else in the film , is set on the back burner in favor of the emphasis on Pam's breasts , which are clearly more famous than she is . With movies like Barb Wire , I always try to look for a point where the film admits that it is not trying to be taken seriously . Bad movies can be highly entertaining when they come off as campy ( see any of the three Evil Dead movies , the funniest and most entertaining horror films ever made ) , but not when they pretend to be something that they're not . I think that the biggest problem in this area about Barb Wire is that Pam seems to take her role too seriously ( her reaction to the term ' Babe ' is a case in point ) . And I say ' seems ' because there is always the possibility that she is over-acting just for the overall fun of it . However , it's just hilarious how serious she appears and how she makes such an effort to sound threatening , when in reality it's totally obvious that it's all a joke . In this sense , it's difficult to judge this film because it's hard to know how it feels about itself . Personally , I think that the film has grossly overlooked the fact that the vast majority of itself as a whole is going to come off in theaters ( or , in this case , on video , seeing how this movie had been booed out of theaters before many people even knew it was there yet ) as comic relief . Barb Wire is not really an action movie that makes every excuse possible excuse to get Pamela Anderson out of her clothes , but rather a comedy that amusingly poses as an action film , and the strange thing is that the nude or semi-nude scenes don't lead to sex scenes or anything like that , but usually to violence . This , I guess , is in bad taste depending on your personal views , but it's interesting to consider how many people consider BOTH of these to be in bad taste . Okay , I have to add something here . I just re-visited the Barb Wire home page on the IMDb , and the tagline for the film , which I never noticed , is based on one of the dumbest things about the entire movie . ' Don't call me babe . ' Sigh ? |
544,892 | 562,732 | 432,291 | 3 | The original film was pretty weak , and this one is a bad remake of it ? | You will know almost immediately that this movie is going to be a flop , because it opens with a trendy rock song , and anytime a horror film starts off with a KROQ song you know you're in trouble . The original film was John Carpenter's first film after Halloween and a couple of television projects , and had to have been a massive disappointment . What made someone decide to remake it is beyond me , and in retrospect , what made me decide to watch yet another goofy teenage horror remake is also distantly beyond me . Directed by the director of such gems as Stigmata , Blank Check , and various M . C . Hammer movies , the remake of The Fog makes no effort to cover up or improve upon even the most obvious weaknesses in the original film . The odd character of " Stevie Wayne , " for example , remains about unwatchable , and the rest of the movie is not much better . On the other hand , I recently watched Hostel , Eli Roth's latest excrement , so this really looks like Shakespeare in comparison . It deserves its spot on the bottom 100 ( although I'd have to see Hostel rated as the worst movie ever made in order to really believe in any bottom 100 list ? ) . |
544,578 | 562,732 | 82,495 | 3 | Why did they have to change the music ? It was already perfect ! | I guess I can understand , you have the first sequel to one of the most successful horror movies ever made , maybe using the same music would have come off as trying too hard to cash in on the success of the original . This is , on the other hand , a sequel , and an inherent quality of any sequel is cashing in on the success of the original . It's during the movie itself that it has to earn itself the right to exist , to show that it can stand on its own and not just in the shadow of its predecessor . So Halloween II tries right off the bat to try something new , it just wasn't done right . It's like they had the original simple but effective theme song played on a grand piano and then played the sequel's song on some cheap K-Mart electric piano with some goofy effects added on . Too bad . That being said , at least the rest of the movie was awful . Wait , I shouldn't say that . Not awful , just not good . It wastes not time at all , replaying the very last scene in the original film and then literally picking up the minute the previous film left off , as though the first sequel is not so much a sequel as much as simply a continuation , like Kill Bill . I'm guessing that it was a desired impression that the two movies want to look like one long movie that has been cut into two parts . Dr . Loomis shot Michael Meyers at the end of the previous movie ( famously seven times and then runs around yelling about how he shot him six times ) , pushing him off the second floor balcony with his hail of bullets , then walked to the edge of the balcony and saw that Michael had disappears . The first sequel in the series details the relentless quest to stop Meyers before he can kill again . Needless to say , he wastes no time . Of the three most famous slashers in horror history , Michael Meyers , Jason Voorhees , and Freddy Krueger , Meyers is by far the most relentless . Granted , they're all relentless , but Meyers ' tendency to move slowly but deliberately gives me the impression that he is the least stoppable . Krueger can only attack in dreams , and Jason at least takes time to go back to his cabin and regroup , you might say . Get his bearings and plan out his next attack , however much planning he is capable of , anyway . Michael just gets up , and as soon as he has his target in sight he's like the T-1000 . He just keeps moving toward his target , falling over when he gets shot a bunch of times and killing the odd teenager unfortunate enough to get in front of him , but never , ever stopping . Once the movie gets going , it's not long before we wind up in a Darkened And Deserted Hospital and the movie devolves into a series of creative death scenes . As you well know , much of the success of horror movies relies on the creativeness and originality of the death scenes . Kill enough people in enough interesting and new ways , and you have a good movie , in general . Halloween II has some creative scenes , but very few that are believable , and the cardinal sin of the creative death scene , many that make you slap your forehead at how stupid people can be . I'll tell you who I have no sympathy for , for example . At one point a hospital orderly named Jimmy comes across a nurse who has an IV needle in her arm , which Michael probably put there since it's just there to allow all the blood to run from her body and onto the floor . So this guy walks into the room , and doesn't notice that she has been bled to death until he kneels beside her and runs his hand along the tube from the needle in her arm to the end dripping all her blood onto the floor , and then he doesn't notice that he has been standing in a huge puddle of blood since the second he walked in the door until he stands up and slips on it , falling over backward and cracking his head on the floor . Let me just tell you this , I'll leave it up to Major Payne to inform him where he can go to look for sympathy . Then he shows up later , dazed and confused , to get into the car in which Laurie is hiding , act all dazed and confused , and then suddenly die . Here's another problem I had with the movie . It makes perfect sense that it takes place in the hospital , since that was where Laurie was taken after her encounter with Michael at the end of the last movie , it's the hospital itself that really bothered me . It is truly a cheap , cheap trick in a horror movie to have something like a dark and deserted hospital , which is something that simply does not exist . No hospital is EVER darkened or deserted as it was in this movie . The lights are never dimmed like that for any reason , at least in the halls , and there are always nurses and orderlies and the occasional doctor wandering the halls and seeing to patients . Hospitals are understandably not the kind of establishments that close for business at the end of the day . I guess I just wish someone could come along and make a good horror movie in a hospital without having to resort to things like no one being around and everything being dark all the time . I have great confidence that it can be done . I think that one of the main reasons that Halloween doesn't work nearly as well as its predecessor , even though it presents itself as merely the second half of it , is because it was guaranteed to be a box office success . The original film was a tremendous smash financially , and the filmmakers knew that just about anything called Halloween II was going to generate a huge amount of interest , so the movie comes off as having been slapped together and cheapened just to get something into the theaters . Michael Meyers was a brooding force in the original film , always near the edge of the screen or just out of sight , never seen very clearly . Now he's front and center and well lit , even in the hospital . We can even see his very eyes , and after Laurie has shot both of them out , if you can believe that . It's like the movie was made just so we could get closer and more personal with Michael Meyers , but that only serves to diminish his image . On the other hand , it's good that they didn't try to keep Meyers in the shadows , or , even worse , try to make him even more of a distant and dark character . Had they done that they might have lost sight of him completely , and as we all know , that kind of thinking will leave you with Halloween III ! |
544,563 | 562,732 | 317,676 | 3 | Wow . | Okay , so I'm not a big video game buff , but was the game House of the Dead really famous enough to make a movie from ? Sure , they went as far as to actually put in quick video game clips throughout the movie , as though justifying any particular scene of violence , but there are dozens and dozens of games that look exactly the same , with the hand in the bottom on the screen , supposedly your own , holding whatever weapon and goo-ing all kinds of aliens or walking dead or snipers or whatever the case may be . It's an interesting premise in House of the Dead , with a lot of college kids ( LOADED college kids , as it were , kids who are able to pay some fisherman something like $1 , 500 just for a ride after they miss their boat ) trying to get out to this island for what is supposed to be the rave of the year . The first thing that comes to mind about House of the Dead after watching it is that it has become increasingly clear that modern horror movies have become nothing more than an exercise in coming up with creative ways to get a lot of scantily clad teenagers into exactly the same situations . At least in this case , the fact that they were on their way to a rave excuses the way the girls are dressed . They look badly out of place running around the woods in cute little halter-tops , but at least they THOUGHT they were dressed for the occasion . Clint Howard , tellingly the most interesting character in the film by far , delivers an absolutely awful performance , the greatness of which overshadows every other actor in the movie . I can't stand it when well-known actors change their accents in movies , it is so rarely effective , and Howard here shows that it is equally flat to have an well-known actor pretend that he's this hardened fisherman with a raspy voice from years of breathing salty air . He didn't even rasp well . It sounded like he was eating a cinnamon roll before shooting and accidentally inhaled some powdered sugar or something . Real tough there , Clint ! I expected more from him , but then again , he did agree to a part in this mess . Once we get to the island , the movie temporarily turns into any one of the Friday the 13th movies that took place at Camp Crystal Lake . Lots of teenagers played by actors who were way too old for their parts getting naked and then killed . The nudity was impressive , I guess , but let's consider something for a minute . These kids pay almost two grand to get out to this island to go to the Rave Of The Year , find NO ONE , and say , well , who wants a beer ! Even the guy who pulled that stack of hundreds out of his wallet to get them all over there didn't think anything of it that they found a full bar and not a single solitary person in sight . Here you have the input from director Uwe Boll - There's alcohol ! They won't notice that the party they came for consists of no one but themselves ! So not only do they start drinking , not minding the fact that the whole party seems to have vacated the island , but when one of the girls goes off into the dark woods to find out where everyone is ( dragging one other girl and one of the guys reluctantly along ) , the guy and the girl who stay behind to get smashed decide that it would be a great idea to strip down for a quickie now that they're alone . It's like they expected to find the island empty , and now that they rest of the people that they came over with were gone for a little while , they would have some privacy since there's no one else around . Brilliant ! Now for the things that everyone hated , judging by the reviews that I've read about the movie . Yes , intersplicing shots from the video game into the movie , mostly in order to show that , yes , the movie was being faithful to / directly copying the video game . Sure , it was a stupid idea . I can't imagine who thought up that little nugget , but worse than that is the Matrix-style bullet time scenes that were thrown in over and over and over and over . After the first time ( at which point I found it pretentious and cheesy for a movie like this to have a shot like that as though it was something original ) it is noticeable more for the technique of the shot itself rather than any dramatic meaning or creation of any kind of tension for the film . One of the things that makes a zombie film scary and gets you on the edge of your seat is to have them slowly but relentlessly coming after the living humans , who are much faster but getting tired , running out of places to run , and with a terrifying shortage of things with which to fight the zombies off with . The first two are done right in the movie , the kids are terrified and don't have a lot of places to run since they're on an island , but since they caught a ride over with a smuggler , they find themselves heavily armed . And I mean that very strongly . I mean , these people have everything from machine guns to hand grenades , which removes most of the tension of the impending walking dead . Then you have what I call the techno-slasher scene . Since the rave never happened , and I guess since Uwe Boll thought people were going to be disappointed at not hearing any techno music in the movie , there's one scene right in the middle where all the humans are fighting off the living dead , and amazingly enough it turns into something of a music video . There's techno music blasting as the shots are edited together faster and faster until it's nothing but a blur of gory shot , mostly only about 5 frames long ( which is about of a second ) flashing across the screen in time with the speed techno music . Clever , I guess , but it has no place in a horror movie because it completely removes any sense of scariness or tension of even the gross-out effect because you can't see any one thing for long enough to react to it . You're just watching these shots fly across the screen and wondering what the hell the director was thinking when he decided that it would be a good idea to put something like this in the movie . I've seen a lot of people compare this movie to Resident Evil , mostly claiming that it copies the premise of it , and they're exactly right . I appreciate that at least here , as was not the case in Resident Evil , it wasn't some man-made virus that turned people into walking dead that were able to infect other people , changing them the way vampires turn others into vampires . 28 Days Later was also clearly an inspiration for this movie , it's just too bad that House of the Dead didn't do a single original thing , except for the somewhat moronic idea of putting in quick shots of the video game on which it is based , just in case you forget . I really think that this should have been a much better movie . While obviously I can't say that I know much about the game it's based on , just the title and the movie poster deserve a much better movie , but unfortunately I think that's more often the case than not with horror movies . It's really kind of sad when a movie comes out that is so obviously advertised as a no-holds-barred horror film , and the scariest thing in the entire movie is the closing shot , which suggests the possibility of a sequel . |
544,665 | 562,732 | 94,588 | 3 | Doesn't even live up to the awful standards of the original . | ? Gator Bait 2 picks up ten years after part one left off , and the little boy from the original movie has grown up and is marrying a girl from the city named Angelique . The wedding is a particularly amusing part of the film , because not only do the bride and groom inexplicably wear dollar bills on their outfits , but the fancy wedding feast consists of a huge pile of some kind of crustacean , poured carelessly onto a folding table out of a garbage can , for crying out loud . And then for their honeymoon , this true romantic takes Angelique out into the swampy woods and teaches her how to be a redneck . But then again , this kind of thing would be expected , because on one side of the aluminum boat that took the place of the post-wedding limo is painted the old saying , ' Just Married , ' while the other side bears the charming phrase , ' Pop that cherry ! ! ' ( spoilers ) As was the case in the first film , the script is absolutely horrendous , but here , the performances were pathetic as well . It's strange that Big T's ( the little boy form part one ) new bride would have an exotic sounding name like Angelique , because this guy can hardly speak intelligibly . And how did he meet a city girl , anyway ? This guy could not possibly have been out of the woods for more than a day of his entire life , and even then only to discover that he could never survive in the civilized world . It's weird that all of the evil rednecks in this film come off as more intelligent than the supposed hero . And , as was also the case in the first film , these are some SERIOUS rednecks . Again , these people are so ugly and dumb that it's difficult to believe that they're real humans . Yes , these are the true bottom feeders of the human race , a group of men so idiotic that the leader of them , Leroy , states that ' the only way to reckon with these people is to kill them . ' They are once again the brainless , horny rednecks that we saw in part one , and evidently their goal is to murder Big T and take his city wife out into the woods and rape her ? spurred on by the fact that it was Big T's sister , Desiree , that killed Leroy's brother in part one , and also left Leroy himself out in the woods to die . So they shoot Big T and , in true James Bond form , leave him alive for some unlikely force to finish him off . It's fine that we know he won't die , but all that happens is we see him thanking some witch-doctor looking man ' for saving my life , ' as he borrows the 80-something year old man's shotgun and heads back into the woods , paddling around in circles one-handedly in another aluminum boat . The chase scenes were entertaining enough , especially given the incessant banjo soundtrack , and Angelique's nudity is still exploitative but not as much as in the original film . At least here , she's half naked because the rednecks interrupted her while she was dressing and she was forced to run wearing what she had on . Also , the way that she killed one of the rednecks with a bag full of rattlesnakes ( by far the most inbred one of the whole bunch ? except maybe for Big T ) was pretty creative , but it's strange how heartbroken Leroy was about that , seeing how he had just ruthlessly cut the throat of one of his own men . With ? Gator Bait 2 , you pretty much get what you expect . Part one actually had several redeeming values , but this one had virtually none . Everything about the relationship between Big T and Angelique is totally unconvincing , and the sheer idiocy of every single character in the film , good or bad , prevents the development of any feelings for anyone , leaving you not caring about what happens to any of them , and even more disappointed at the ending . |
543,930 | 562,732 | 1,185,834 | 3 | Taking this stuff seriously anymore , George Lucas isn't . . . | Okay , so Star Wars is now officially a kid's movie . George Lucas ' newest cash-in on the Star Wars saga is a wholly unnecessary cartoon which caters to a much younger audience , but one that will find the majority of the story entirely incomprehensible . The Star Wars films made a sharp turn to the digital realm starting with the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999 , and they now have made the full transition to being fully animated . And by the way , I noticed that The Clone Wars is being advertised as the " first " fully animated Star Wars film . If they go nuts with the sequels , I sure hope they get better ! The story takes place between Episode II and Episode III . The Republic is at war with the Separatists and its access to the Galactic Rim is being threatened . Complicating the problem is that diplomatic relationships are strained to the extreme because Jabba the Hutt's son ( yes , he has a son now ) has been kidnapped , and due to some carefully orchestrated misinformation , he suspects the Jedi . Confused yet ? Imagine how the kids feel ! But it doesn't matter because everything else in the movie is there just for them . There's a cutesy little teenie bopper apprentice named Ashoka assigned to tag along with Anakin and learn all she can from him about the Jedi ways . Lending her voice to the character is Ashley Eckstein , who , get this , is probably best known as Muffy from " That's So Raven . " What the hell is happening here ? That's So Raven ? ! I have no problem with child stars moving on from their kiddie roles and into more serious acting , but the problem is that Eckstein takes that step in The Clone Wars , but doesn't do anything different . Her character is like a little kid running around through a story that is attempting to be a Star Wars movie , but it can't because she keeps re-naming things and people ( Skyguy ? ? ) , and ( barring the occasional bout of astonishing light saber moves and tricks with using ' The Force ' ) generally behaving as if she's still acting in a show made for girls under age 10 . For example , most of her role in the movie is not as a Jedi apprentice , but a babysitter of Jabba's offspring , the " Huttlet , " as he is affectionately called throughout the movie . A few years ago I saw a documentary about the history of the adult film industry , in which Ron Jeremy presented his hairy , pot-bellied self as proof that any guy in the world can get laid . Now , it seems that more recent evidence of this theory has come to light . Jabba the Hutt , in all his slithery , gelatinous glory , has managed to seduce himself a ' Hottie the Hutt ' and partake in that great wonder of procreation . It's strange to consider that if ' Mama the Hutt ' had been included in the movie , it probably would have made the entire film a complete joke . But not to let an opportunity to slip something asinine into the movie , Jabba refers to his beloved son ( during a serious negotiation meeting ) through a translator as his " little punkey muffin . " But fear not , the Huttlet is more than enough of a spectacle . He looks like a sperm the size and color of a watermelon with orange eyes and a mouth . Punkey muffin , indeed . And therein lies the problem with the entire movie . Everything in it is a stupid joke , like Lucas is just laughing at himself and the world he created . It's all just a story to him now and he's just goofing off . Here's a sample of dialogue between two of his idiot droids during a heated battle : Droid # 1 : " Concentrate fire on sector 11374465 ! " Droid # 2 : " Uh , 117 , um , 3 uh . . what ? " Droid # 1 : " Just shoot right there ! " I had been under the impression that droids were manufactured and therefore programmed . Do you mean to tell me that they are equipped with vague understandings of their battle commands and shoddy short term memories ? That's just poor planning ! But sadly , this interaction is representative of the rest of the movie . All serious story-telling is sacrificed for dumb laughs . Little effort is put into doing anything interesting with the animation , which isn't even very impressive , and the real Star Wars story is a distant backdrop to this goofy babysitting / kidnapping story about Jabba's babbling son . Oh and one more thing . The final nail in the coffin of The Clone Wars is Jabba the Hutt's uncle who , judging mostly by his voice , can only be described as a gay black nightclub owner with phosphorescent blacklight tattoos all over his purple body . What the hell ? ! I was unimpressed with The Phantom Menace when it was released almost ten years ago , but it was still a serious installment in the Star Wars series . The Clone Wars , on the other hand , never takes itself seriously , and is too obviously an advertisement for the television series and , possibly even more , the inevitable video game . Most of the battle sequences are so video game-like that my thumbs started twitching for want of a controller . Skip this one . Go see Tropic Thunder or Pineapple Express instead . |
544,822 | 562,732 | 410,650 | 3 | And Species hits direct to video quality ? | Many would argue that with part II the Species films had already reached a sufficiently abysmal quality level as to deserve to go straight to video . There was , however , too much money spent on the first sequel and too much interest in the series still left over from the 1st film for this to be an option , but with part III there are no theatrical shenanigans in sight . Species III is a direct to video mess from start to finish . It was hard enough to believe in Species II that they made a clone of Sil , but I suppose it can be believed since the scientists wanted to study her for weaknesses that could be used in case another outbreak of aliens occurred . So in the original film , Sil was created , escaped promptly and went looking for a mate . She was a vicious enemy throughout , and her pursuers were desperate to capture and kill her , knowing at least vaguely what she was capable of . In part II they make a clone and keep her in a huge glass cage , which is more like a living room surrounded by thick glass , and complete with everything from a treadmill to a television set . Dr . Baker , the lead scientist , even routinely went inside the cage with her and the two had civilized conversations . In part III there is a male scientist that seems to think that the new Eve , this time named Sara , is his daughter . He even tells her stories as he tucks her into a bed in his house . Part III starts where part II left off , with the fatally wounded Eve being transferred by military ambulance to be disposed of . I like that two low level guys are sent off alone with Eve's body , with not a single other vehicle along to make sure that the transport gets safely to its destination . Needless to say , all hell breaks loose in the form of two babies born from Eve's dead - then - alive - then - dead - again body , after which the movie has no idea where it's supposed to go . At least I assume they were both born in the ambulance , One of them was just kind of there . There is so little effort put into maintaining any linearity to the aliens in this film , since they grow and change so fast , that pretty soon you'll find yourself just accepting that there are a lot of aliens running around trying to mate , as well as lots of half breeds complicating matters further . Our hero may be the dumbest thing about the entire movie , and not by any fault of Robin Dunne , the actor who played him . It seems that Dean is working on a fission reactor , giving a tour of his team's progress at the beginning of the movie , only to rush out and arrive late to class , at which point he is scolded by his idiot professor as if he were in 3rd grade . His professor soon starts fantasizing about viruses , soon becoming furious that someone would be so inconsiderate to plan the destruction of the only remaining smallpox virus still in existence , which is kept contained for studying purposes . Not only does he almost get emotional about a virus , but when Dean points out some of the imperfections of viruses , his professor becomes furious with him once again , and then a student pushes past him outside of class , angrily calling him a " specist . " I had no idea that viruses had interest groups . It was nice that Natasha Henstridge made a notable guest appearance at the beginning of the film , although she only served to remind the viewer that no one else but her can play the alien in a Species film . The combined alien and human DNA has once again cooked up some more staggering hotties . Not only does this genetic combination consistently cook up hot blondes , but now breast implants have been added to the blonde and a brunette is thrown in for good measure . Yes , Sunny Mabrey is nice enough to bare her plastic breasts for much of her screen time . The brunette alien , who appears in the film out of nowhere , has a quick and wildly unsexy sex scene with a gas station attendant before speeding off in her $140 , 000 Ferrari , leaving a skewered carcass and the rest of the gas station employees just as clueless as us in the audience . Amelia Cooke , who plays the brunette alien , does offer a shining moment of interest well into the fourth half hour of this film and after an hour and a half of slogging through a lot of pus-filled , gooey sci-fi crap . This movie is so bad and so unforgivably long , however , that even her relatively shining performance has a hard time rising above the slop in which it is mired . |
544,614 | 562,732 | 298,296 | 3 | Terrible fun ! | I have read that Van Damme has since admitted to being embarrassed by Derailed , which I can understand but at the same time I find to be a little sad . True , the movie is something of a disaster , but I wish people would have a bit of an open mind about movies like this . The movie is almost cartoonishly bad , so I really wonder what the tone was in the air when they were making it ( surely they had to know that they were making a terrible movie ) , but I will venture to say that the badness of a movie like this doesn't at all make it unwatchable . On the contrary , I think it makes it more fun , the way a wildly over-the-top movie like Shoot ' Em Up is more fun than something that is just a little too much , like some of Seagal's movies . As they say , for some reason people often forgive extreme excesses more than mild excess . The Grindhouse team certainly understands this . Also , just like it should have been clear to the production team that they were making a classic bad movie , it is also clear from the minute you see the cover box ( which has one of those direct-to-video appearances that is so thorough that the DVD case itself has an appearance of hollowness ? I almost expected to see a DVD-R in there ) what kind of movie this is . But many people , myself included , are such dedicated Van Damme fans that we will watch anything he makes , even if we are fully aware that the movie is a ? ahem ? train wreck . From the very opening we get an almost home-movie feel , like the kind of weekend video that some kids would make with their friends using their parents video camera and cutting it with something like iMovie . A woman breaks into a highly secured bunker to steal a biological weapon with astonishing capabilities to kill enormous numbers of people , and has so little trouble doing it it's almost funny . She is able to casually beat the crap out of some security guards , maybe because she has some cool yellow sunglasses on . Before long she finds herself being escorted across the border by Jacques Kristoff ( Van Damme ) , an international agent who doesn't know anything about what she's carrying and who's job is so secretive that his own wife and family don't even know the truth about what he does . It's because of this that he soon finds himself suspected by his family of having an affair and soon everyone is against him as he sets out to save the world . The supporting cast of baddies is so bad that it literally is the funniest thing in the entire movie . There is one scene early in the film where a few of the bad guys are filing into one of the train cars full of terrified passengers , and one of them ( the black guy ) looks almost directly at the camera as he passes it , and the expression on his face is so outlandishly goofy that that moment alone made me think that the whole movie is something of an inside joke , like they watched the dailies and laughed hysterically when they saw things like this ( like I did ) , and said " Yeah , put that in ! CLASSIC ! ! " I have to admit that on a certain level I did enjoy the movie . Yes , it's a bad movie and there is no denying that , but it is still enjoyable on a level that truly bad movies are not . Still , I'm trying to come up with something specific that I enjoyed , and it's not an easy task . The performances are horrendous , the writing is worse , and the special effects and the stunts might be the most famously bad parts of the movie . But in that , I think is where you can still enjoy it . When things are so bad that it is almost fascinating to watch the movie unfold before you , it becomes entertaining to see what other failed experiments they managed to come up with , and in that sense they were pretty creative when making this movie . The motorcycling on top of the train , the people being killed and then coming back later , the super-powerful biological weapon that looks like a couple test tubes full of Chem-light fluid , and the ridiculous villain all come together and make something that is morbidly fun to wonder about . I love how the villain is characterized , by the way . It's not enough that he has taken an entire train hostage and is trying to get his hands on a weapon of mass destruction , they have to really let us know how evil he is , so out of absolutely nowhere , he picks up a passenger's violin and curiously muses that it's a French model from around the 1800s and then smashes it on the table . Biological weapons are one thing , but a man who would casually smash a 200-year-old French violin ? Oh , the humanity ! ! Obviously , there have been a lot of comparisons to Under Siege 2 , which also took place on a train , but mostly I think people make this comparison try to really get the point across about how bad this movie it . Yes , it's a bad movie , one of Van Damme's worst , but with the right frame of mind it is still enjoyable on some sad level . But if you can't thoroughly enjoy bad movies , you'll do well to avoid this one ! |
543,771 | 562,732 | 107,969 | 3 | One of the weakest action thrillers I've seen in years . | Rising Sun is an exercise in bad screenwriting . It presents a story about big bad Japanese businessmen / gangsters and the crooked sale of a massive corporation called Microcon . The movie starts off with a goofball karaoke scene where Eddie Sakamura , the lead bad guy in another absolutely awful performance by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa , singing a country song called Don't Fence Me In , in a scene that's probably one of the most pathetic attempts to develop a three dimensional character in cinematic history . Ted Danson ' Peter Lowenstein in Body Heat ( 1981 ) was three dimensional because he had an interest in dancing that went beyond his character's obligatory role in the film . Here , this scene is thrown in at random just so we can try to pretend that this is a real person and not the facelss , stereotypical bad guy that we see for the rest of the film . Just after this terrible scene ends , we are taken to the meeting about the sale of Microcon , and the movie again trips over itself by trying in pathetic vain to create suspense during nearly silent deliberations over this sale in a conference room , and if you manage to stay awake long enough , a seedy murder soon follows , the solution of which the rest of the movies tries to present . The worst of the screenplay writing comes in about when Sean Connery's John Connor ( real creative name , guys ) is introduced , and continues pretty much until the end of the film . Welsey Snipes embarrasses himself by taking on a role in which he serves no other purpose than to be Wesley Snipes so that his name can go on the cover of the movie and trick action fans into thinking this might be another fast paced Snipes film ( he's not the best action hero in the world , but he has certainly come out with better stuff than THIS ) , and to stand around and ask questions like a confused child . From the moment that Connor comes into the story , just about every time any character says anything , it is immediately followed by another character explaining what the hell is going on . There are two lengthy scenes that come almost one right after another where Web Smith ( Snipes ) and Connor are driving in the car , and Connor is explaining what is going on to the baffled Smith . LAPD nothing , this guy is more clueless than a dropout from Right Hand Roger's 24 Hour Junior Police Academy . The plot continues to jump through clichéd thriller hoops , with Connor all the while wowing Smith with his tactics and vainly trying to wow the audience as well , but it is somehow very difficult to be entertained by a movie that spends the majority of its running time explaining itself , and sometimes even badly . There is a scene early in the film at the murder investigation where Connor steps into the conversation ( because Smith , as he predicted , got himself into trouble ) and makes an unpredictable move , and then later when he's explaining to Smith what just happened , he ends by saying , ' Now Mr . Yoshida owes me a favor ? Deep , isn't it ! ' Well , since you asked , no , it's not deep . Not even a little bit . And neither is the rest of the movie . |
544,715 | 562,732 | 324,216 | 3 | Bigger , gorier , louder , faster ? and worse . | The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre , which is something of a remake but not in the same vein as simply colorizing the film , as they foolishly did with Psycho in 1998 , is another look into how audiences have changed since the early 1970s . The original Texas Chainsaw film was an instant success because so many people immediately condemned it as a grotesquely violent film that celebrated some of the most vile human behaviors imaginable . They were right about what it was , but as has for centuries been the case with literature , the fastest way for a movie to become a success is to be banned . Texas Chainsaw was never banned in America that I know of , but its reputation clearly generated much of the interest in the film . Today's audiences are obviously not as easily shocked . The film starts out great , with archive footage of a police walkthrough of the crime scene although all we really get is a look at a crime scene investigator walking down the stairs to the basement , noting things like fingernails and hair embedded in the walls . The movie then cuts to a group of kids driving across the Texas desert in the summer of 1973 to go to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert , all the while rocking out to Sweet Home Alabama , which was released in 1974 . Not that that matters . This is not , after all , The Alabama Chainsaw Massacre , and I haven't heard it , but I doubt that Sweet Home Texas is able to create the tone and mood as well . Besides , it's one of the greatest American songs ever written , although having that song in a movie like this is about as logical as putting $2 , 000 chrome rims on an antique tractor . ( spoilers ) The first turn that this movie takes from the original is that instead of a freaky hitchhiker joining the kids on their drive and giving the audience an idea for why these people are so messed up , there is a girl who has barely escaped from the family that these kids are about to meet . Kind of like what happened in Texas Chainsaw III . This girl has been so tormented by what she has been through that she is incoherent and ultimately tells the startled kids in the van that they're all going to die , then she pulls out a gun and kills herself . Speaking of which , here's an interesting thing to consider . She gets in the van wearing this little sundress , which has no pockets . After a while , she opens her legs , reaches into her crotch , and pulls out a standard issue police handgun . Just out of curiosity , where exactly are we to assume that she pulled the gun from ? I doubt that she had a holster strapped to her inner thigh , and it's even less likely that she pulled it out of some hole in the seat of the van . Maybe they hoped people would forget about this logical oddity immediately , which would explain why we next get a view of the kids ' shocked faces through the newly formed hole in the poor girl's head . The fact that the deranged hitchhiker was replaced by a victim does even more immediate damage to the film than the colorization of Psycho , and given the fact that Hitchcock preceded the original by not one but two films in color , I should have thought it would have been obvious that it was black and white for a reason . There is a duality to everything in that film , including the lack of color . Here , the removal of the hitchhiker shows how eager the film is to get to the blood and guts and skip over bothersome things like an explanation for the cause of the carnage that is to follow . It removes the story completely from any attachment to anything that might once have actually happened , and turns it immediately into a stupid teen slasher movie . The teens involved are gradually introduced to the infamous family as they search for a police officer who is interested enough in the girl's death to come out and check out the situation . The first member of the infamous family that they meet is an invention for this version of the film - a dirty little boy wearing Austin Powers teeth . The teeth are , by the way , so fake and so obviously bought at a cheap Halloween store that I'm still not sure whether they are supposed to be the kid's real teeth or if he just likes wearing them , like how some kids keep wearing their vampire fangs after Halloween's over . I'm not sure if this is in the film's defense or just another sign of its vain attempt to shock like the original did , but it does contain the most horrendous chainsaw death of any of the five Texas Chainsaws so far . I'm referring in this case to the kid who gets hung from the chandelier , although the movie also goes to great length to bring back some of the classic torture methods from the original , reminding me that I just don't like meat hooks . Since I don't work in a slaughterhouse and never will , I would be perfectly happy to live the rest of my life and never set eyes on another meat hook . In the movies or otherwise . By far the worst crime that the movie commits is that it turns Leatherface from a truly disturbed individual and into your basic movie monster . Consider the very end , for example , when we get a close up of his face as Erin is escaping , and not only is he growling , but his eyes have changed color . Earlier he took off his mask and we saw that he has no nose , then we saw him again later with a nose and with brown eyes , now he's got fluorescent blue eyes . I have one thing to say about this and most of this movie . What the hell ? |
544,759 | 562,732 | 411,008 | 3 | Most overrated TV show since ? ah ? I don't know . Maybe ever . | When I first heard of " Prison Break , " I was a little apprehensive because I didn't understand how they could stretch out an escape from prison into a fully developed television series . Then I watched it and I was blown away completely . It is very easy , on the other hand , to understand how they could fill a television series with entertaining and fresh material with the concept of a lot of people stranded on a mysterious island after a plane crash . " Lost , " therefore , comes out of the gate at a gallop . The pilot episode , after all is certainly thrilling . But like " Heroes , " the show very soon falls off a cliff . I am truly amazed at how many glowing reviews I've read of " Lost " on the IMDb , and while I hesitate to criticize a show that so many people clearly love , I can at least try to clear up some misunderstandings . One user , for example , bob _ jones , complains about people who say the show is clichéd because the cast is diverse . No , we don't want to see an all-white cast , but it is truly undeniable that all of the characters are types . You have the people who can't speak English ( or can they ? ) , the token black guy and his son , the angry surfer dude , the young doctor whose training and movie-star good looks will surely be invaluable ( especially to the writers ) , the fun , relaxed fat guy , the silent , grieving wife , the drug addicted musician , the extremely pregnant blonde , even the brooding middle eastern guy who turns out to have been an Iraqi interrogator ! 3 years after September 11th ! ! I didn't know we were letting former Republican Guard interrogators fly into our country quite yet . How could you NOT complain about that cast ! ! ! Hey you want to know what I did notice though ? Despite the fact that this was a flight from Sydney , Australia to New York , I think , there was NOT ONE Australian in the cast . Go figure . Bob _ jones then says that it's only the people who " have a hernia " if every single detail in the pilot episode isn't exactly correct . Personally I could care less about every detail . Your average television series is a little too long for me to pay attention to goofs like in a regular film . The problem with the show is that there are no rules . A lot of people stuck on a desert island is a scenario that allows for countless different possibilities . I mean , the longer they are trapped on the island , the more you could tell about their lives . But instead , on " Lost " they create this bizarre world that has absolutely no connection with reality . It is therefore impossible to generate any real tension , because they are not on an island , they exist only in the writers ' unruly imaginations . The show never goes for any realism , so instead it comes off as just watching to see what kind of cockamamie situation they can dream up next . Consider , for example , the discovery of The Hatch , which provides some hope that there are other inhabitants of the island , or at least a fascinating mystery as to the origin of the hatch . Sadly , what they discover is a computer where you have to enter a series of numbers every 108 minutes or else , ah , something , um , might happen . This HAS to be a joke . When I saw that , the only thing I could think about was the writers conducting a little psychological experiment of their own , seeing how long they could keep people interested in such a witless concept . I think you can file that 108-minute thing away with the dumbest plot devices in film or television history . Near the top . Every single character is a cookie-cutter caricature , and the only one who is remotely likable is Hurley , because he seems to be just a likable guy in real life and , most importantly , he's just playing himself . Every single other character comes across as an over-rehearsed actor pretending to be someone else who , in most cases , is also in turn pretending to be yet someone ELSE . Contrived and boring , yes . Mysterious and fascinating ? Not in the least . The major conflicts on the show are that the cast are stuck on a desert island after surviving , for God's sake , a full-sized passenger airliner crash , after which NOT ONE SURVIVOR suffered any real injury , including the pregnant woman ( except for the cleverly named John Locke , who seems to have suffered a spinal injury which restored his ability to walk . Poor guy ) . There is a , ahem , " monster " on the island with astonishing strength but which is nice enough to keep to itself until the plot needs it . Even as full seasons go by . And then , worst of all , there is the discovery of a small population of shockingly vicious people living on the island . They pretend they are living in their own little utopia , which just doesn't explain their immediate hatred and anger at any other people on their island . The more you learn about these people , the more ludicrous the story becomes . It is clear that they are continuing the show because it's making tons of money . The result , obviously , is that they are throwing stuff up on the screen just because people are sitting in their houses watching it , thinking something good is going to happen . I wonder how long it will be before people figure out that the creators of the show are just as clueless as the audience ? . |
543,787 | 562,732 | 311,429 | 3 | When did this movie take place again ? | Okay , I'm not going to waste your time blabbering on and on about twelve-story ocean liners being made in the 19th Century , because I don't think it's something that needs to be pointed out . We all know that suggesting the existence of a cruise liner like that in 1899 is absolutely ridiculous , although it speaks volumes about the movie that such a massive break with reality needs not even be mentioned because it's already so obvious . The automatic suspension of disbelief can only be expected to go so far . On the other hand , The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is not a movie that presents itself as intending to be taken all that seriously . It's clearly an adventure film made purely for entertainment purposes ( and not in the slightest way meant for any kind of cognitive or logical appreciation ) , so there are some goofball things in it that are certainly expected to be taken in good fun . Like , for example , the fact that absolutely nothing in the film makes any sense . Let's assume that you can overlook the fact that not only does an ocean liner of that sheer magnitude exist in the late 1800s , but it is also able to cruise casually through those miniscule canals in downtown Venice . You know , the ones that are spider-webbed with tiny pedestrian bridges every block or so . I hate to say this , but I've never even been to Venice and I still knew enough to slap my forehead when I saw that . If you're able to swallow THAT , you're probably not going to be ready for many more breaches of reality , in which case you better stop watching the movie . So this ocean liner , hundreds of years ahead of its time ( if it will ever have its time ) , zooms through the ocean ' like a sword , ' and we are later forced to watch as an escape pod , probably 75-100 feet across , pops out of the side of it and starts zooming away on its side , propelled by hundreds of huge blades that ring its circumference . Clearly , much of the technology in this film was produced by the same mysterious company ( and with the same intentions of distracting your attention away from the astronomical liberties taken by the films ) that must have been operating in the late 1800s and that made the 80 foot tarantula that we saw in Wild Wild West . So if there's an ocean liner like this in the movie , obviously no one will complain that a futuristic car is able to zoom through the streets in Venice ( note : there are no streets in Venice , as in many other major European cities which were also primarily built before cars existed ) . At least it's not amphibious like the ocean liner / submarine . Okay , sorry . I told you I wouldn't go on about the ship . I'll stop . The thing that really bothered me about this movie , besides the inability to apply even the slightest amount of logic to it , is that it is a Hollywood film that seems to deliver to the world the idea that the mainstream American audience would get a big kick out of watching the massive destruction of European cities that are many times older the nation of America itself . I liked that some band of villains start off by inflicting massive damage with this gigantic tank and robbing banks with it and whatnot in order to turn countries in Europe against each other ( since they each think the other is responsible ) , eventually driving all of Europe to the brink of continent-wide war . A fantastic movie could have been made with this premise . But then you have the entry of all of these characters from old movies and , mostly , classic literature , such as the invisible man , a vampire , the man who can't be killed ( not sure exactly where he comes from ) , Captain Nemo , Dr . Jekyll / Mr . Hyde ( the latter of which is magnified to almost the same cartoonish scale as the Hulk ) , etc . Sure , it was fun to see updated versions of these old characters . As Stephen King would say , people love to see characters from other stories return . It's almost like seeing family again . Sadly , computer generated special effects have made filmmaker's greedy , drunk on the theory that Mr . Hyde can simply be made into a gigantic monster to please the audience . No thought need be applied , just size . Oops . I would just like to say to those of you not in America that Americans do not think it's funny or entertaining to see the massive destruction of faraway cities . I know it's a movie , but the fact that major historical landmarks are defiled and destroyed , even only in computer generated images , speaks badly of our respect for the rest of the world . Oh and can I just say one more thing ? There's a scene near the beginning of the movie in which Sean Connery's character , Allan Quartermain , gets shot at by bad guys with machine guns . Still in 1899 . So he responds by exclaiming , ' Who in the world has automatic weapons ? ' I'd just like to point out that the idea of placing directly into the dialogue ( and using modern terms ) a line that points out a prop that has not yet been invented is just as bad as the scene in Jeepers Creepers where the idiot main character's sister is pointing out that what he's doing is the scene in scary movies where someone does something stupid and the whole audience hates them for it . Direct admission of stupidity is not an excuse for it . |
544,037 | 562,732 | 890,870 | 3 | Yes , they're still making them . | Saw 4 opens with John , the Jigsaw killer , dead on a coroner's worktable . As soon as the movie started , I saw a man about to perform an autopsy on the first movie , hoping that somewhere within its lifeless corpse he might find something , anything , with which to fill up another movie . And can you guess it ? He found it . Apparently John swallowed one of those little tapes sometime during part 3 , and the games , unfortunately for us , are not quite over . Maybe he owed the producers a favor . Saw 3 had no reason for being made , so we know that the series is as dead as a doornail by now , so unfortunately I have to say that anyone who sits through this thing can't really complain . Yes , the movie is pathetically bad , but you can hardly feel tricked . Personally , I was just curious to see how they would continue a series that is now so clearly being done only for the profit . There is still the same tired formula of this guy putting people in horrendous situations to punish them for certain moral crimes , generally for not " appreciating their lives . " It was easier to overlook the ridiculous irony inherent in that premise during the first two movies , which were original and fresh , if a little disturbing , but now we are two movies later , the guy is dead , and still there is nothing new . I don't expect to see something new and innovative in every single movie I ever see , but anytime someone makes a good movie , if they make threes sequels they had better be doing something new , and Saw 4 definitely is not . The first big torture scenario involves two men chained together . One man's eyes are sewn shut , the other man's mouth is sewn shut . The man who can see notices that in the middle of their chain is a machine which will slowly reel them in , ultimately tightening the chain and , I suppose , beheading them . He can also see that there is a key attached to the back of the other guy's neck , which he knows without being told will open the padlock around his own neck . He must have seen the previous movies . Immediately , they start fighting with each other with various metal implements lying around . Why do they start fighting ? I don't know , maybe they're evil by nature and respond to confusion with violence . It's their undoing though , all they had to do was twist their chains and the machine would have snapped it like thread . Then again , this would not have resulted in enough footage of two guys doing horrible things to each other , and the producers would have been unsatisfied . Are you catching on to who the real sadists are here ? Soon we see Karen , whose ribs were torn off in part 3 . It's a terrible sight to see her hanging there with all of her organs exposed , and I am frightened to consider the fate of the soul of the person who came up with that idea . Granted , all she had to do was pour out the acid and take the key out of the bottom of the beaker with minimal acid burns . Maybe she was too scared to think straight . Then again , I would have been more concerned about how the machine was attached to my ribs than how to get the key , which was a pretty simple riddle if I've ever seen one . I'll admit that I had no problem watching the fat guy in part 4 get his eyes put out and then get quartered . If anything new is done in part 4 , it's that it has one guy getting punished for a crime for which he deserves brutal punishment . He violently raped however many women and collected the bloody pictures of them . I didn't catch whether or not he killed them , but it doesn't matter . Seeing someone deserve their punishment was a unique experience in the Saw movies . Then again , later we see an abused wife tied together with four foot rods pierced through their bodies , holding them together . Punishing an abusive husband AND his wife ? Come on . All the wife has to do is pulls out the rods , which will leave her relatively unharmed but which are piercing crucial arteries and organs in her husband's body . Yes , abused wives often have a terribly hard time leaving abusive husbands . Making it this painful is not going to make it any easier . Maybe it's a message to abused wives in the audience , but I doubt there are many . The biggest problem with the movie is that at the end , instead of giving us a good twist like the first two movies did , the story folds back on itself and , in the space of about three seconds , the timeline of the story completely unravels and makes no sense whatsoever . You will be thoroughly confused by the time the end credits start , but the upshot is that you won't care , at least it's over ? |
544,389 | 562,732 | 443,450 | 3 | Wait a minute , you're not a doctor - - ! | So Seagal is Jonathan Cold , a high-level ex-CIA agent who is now a " freelance operative , " which sounds like nothing more than a title invented for cheesy action movies for a hero who takes matters into his own hands . " Operative " literally means secret agent , and freelance basically means someone who works for themselves , or someone who occasionally works for other people and organizations but is overall self-employed . Oh , and they all thought that Cold was dead . And in case you forget , notice the incessant repetition of the line " I thought you were dead ! " Anyway , you get the idea . Cold is a marksman and an expert in martial arts and nuclear weapons . What a resume ! Marksman doesn't really come into play much , but an expert in martial arts and nuclear weapons is just too perfect ! One for the action and one for the story , right ? This is Action Movie-making 101 . The story involves a group of bad guys which , like far too many of Seagal's recent movies , are stupid , boring action baddie clichés , who want to basically destroy the world and start " a new global economy . " Yeah , whatever . Black Dawn reveals to the world that there is a nuclear test facility in Pasadena , California . I didn't know that , but then again , I also always thought you had to wear some kind of foil suit to handle raw plutonium , but I guess that's not really true . In this movie , one of the bad guys handles it wearing no safety equipment other than a pair of gloves , and he's even smoking a cigarette . This guy is hardcore ! Seagal , unfortunately , just looks like he's not trying anymore . The goal is to get a nuclear weapon away from the bad guys and then away from the populace before it detonates and kills millions of people . We're asked to believe that it would take less than four minutes to get into a helicopter , start it up , take off , and fly out over the ocean and drop the bomb into the ocean and have it sink deep enough to explode without doing any damage . This is a hell of a stretch and is fraught with amazingly bad blue-screen work , but strangely it's the girl's shocked reaction ( " What ? ? " ) when Cold tells her to throw the bomb out the window into the action that seems the most ridiculous . Maybe she wanted to keep it ? We expect very little from a Seagal movie , especially recent ones . He started his career in gritty , hardcore action movies , peaking with Under Siege , but lately his movies go for more story than they can sustain , resulting in cheesy , talky action schlock with too much bad acting and not enough fighting , which is what Seagal's fans really want to see ? |
544,701 | 562,732 | 95,179 | 3 | I don't know if it is the single worst of the series , but it's down there ? | Friday the 13th Part VII starts off with a quick summary montage of the last few films , in case you've forgotten anything . It's always good to make sure you're up to speed . I actually appreciate it when sequels do that , to some extent , especially when there is such a long line of films that came previously . In this case , however , we get this montage of what we had seen before and then a whole movie of things that we had already seen before . There is literally not a scrap of originality in this entire movie , which is not a good thing in a series based almost solely on creative ways to kill people . Tina , the main character , gets mad at the beginning of the film because her dad hits her mother during a fight , so she gets into a boat and all sorts of weird things start happening . The lake starts to boil , for one thing , but more importantly , the dock that her father is standing on collapses into the lake , killing him . This is , of course , totally unique and invented for this movie , and doesn't remind me of Carrie or Firestarter at all . The movie is similar to its massively superior predecessor , Part VI , in that it starts off with characters returning to the scene of previous trauma , in this case Tina returns to the lake where her father died because , as her accompanying therapist claims , there is nothing left that they can do for her at the hospital . It just so happens that her father died at exactly the same spot as where Jason was " drowned " at the end of Part VI . At any rate , an undisclosed amount of time has passed , and ultimately Tina's riled emotions cause the water around Jason's body to start boiling , his eyes snap open , and the chain just falls off of him . It definitely rusted through pretty fast , given that it was in fresh water . But no matter , the movie wastes no time in piling on the horror clichés . The interesting characters from the last movie are replaced with more idiot kids who literally do absolutely nothing in this movie but have sex and get killed . YAWN . One genius opens a can of beer upside down over his face , then acts surprised when he starts choking . I couldn't wait to see this jerk get killed , but the characters are such cookie-cutter clichés that by the time he was killed I had lost track of who was who . And no points for guessing that the doctor is not really there to help Tina . It becomes quite obvious very soon in the film that he's not really going to help her much if he keeps insisting to her face that she's insane . But listen to this setup ? a guy is making out with his girlfriend in the woods ( people always found ways to end up in the woods alone at night in this movie ) . She says she's cold and will he go get some firewood . Why don't we just get in a sleeping bag , he says . Ultimately , he agrees to go get wood , gives a bad Terminator line and then , get this , he walks out into the woods WITH A MACHETE , leaving his girlfriend alone . She promptly crawls inside the tent , closes the flap , gets into the sleeping bag , and waits to get killed . Is this the best they could offer ? The sad thing is that the entire movie is filled with enormously clichéd horror movie setups exactly like this one . Later in the film , some blonde girl tells some geek to come skinny dipping with her in the middle of the night , to which he reluctantly agrees . Needless to say he not only doesn't make it into the water , he doesn't even manage to get undressed . Is there going to be a scrap of originality in this entire movie ? I can tell you right now , the answer is no . I just saved you an hour and a half . The most original thing that this movie does is that , after the Screeching Cat scare ( I'm willing to believe that the production team made it a point to put that dinosaur egg into the movie ) , they threw in some thunder and lightning , just in case the cat wasn't enough . In the movie's third act , Jason pulls the power out as he goes to enter the building where the remainder of the kids are . No one cares . Maybe because the lights didn't go out , they just changed color . There are , by the way , no camp counselors in this movie , just teens making out and having sex . No time for plot , character , or story . The movie is nothing more than a series of murder scenes , which also happens to be a description of all of the bad Friday the 13th films . At one point in the movie , some jerk goes to get some food after having sex with some girl , and then barely even pauses before reaching for the refrigerator when he starts slipping around in the blood all over the floor , and at this point all we have to look forward to is the ending , which is drivel of the lowest order . When Tina was flinging things around with her mind , I was waiting for her to twinkle her nose at things or maybe flip her ponytail . That would at least have fit with the level of originality in the rest of the movie . Avoid this one . |
544,876 | 562,732 | 120,836 | 3 | David Spade gets a beautiful French girl to fall in love with him . It seems that none of the filmmakers really stopped to think about that part . | David Spade is a very funny man , but his brand of comedy gets real old real quick . He admittedly relies largely on his weaknesses to be funny . You know , the sarcasm , the blow-dried hair , the all-around geekiness . Unfortunately , it seems that he never really tried to develop his acting skills . I have laughed myself to tears because of David Spade in his two best movies , Black Sheep and Tommy Boy ( in both of which he played virtually that exact same character ) , but Lost & Found just wasn't amusing to me . Too much reliance on fourth grade humor and not enough of anything new for anything really good to be said of the film . And what was Sophie Marceau thinking ? ! She went from playing a significant ( although relatively small ) role in the spectacular 1995 epic Braveheart to this garbage ? She must have been pretty desperate . Sure , she looked good in the movie , but the film itself is totally inconsequential and immediately forgettable . David Spade revealed in interviews just before the theatrical release of Lost & Found that he was worried about how the public would react to an actor with his iconography actually getting the girl , and frankly , I think he should have thought about that a long time ago . Watching David Spade kiss someone as stunningly beautiful as Sophie Marceau is like watching a junior high school kid make out with a 30 year old woman . Disturbing , to say the least . The entire film was a jumbled mess of goofy and pointless jokes and bonehead antics , mainly on the part of Spade , as he tries to keep his idiot dog-napping scheme a secret . The gay jokes , the making fun of the foreign guy ( whether he deserved it or not ) , the fact that Spade spends any amount of on-screen time at all running around naked all come together to form a boring comedy that should be blissfully ignored by everyone . Just look at the cover of the movie . David Spade is naked and covering himself with a small dog . This is not something that you want to purposely subject yourself to . |
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