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Takeshi666
Reviews
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
A mirror to the soul
Reviewing traditional narrative films is easy, because they all hold certain objective values that always hold true. Is the script any good? Do the actors do a good job portraying the characters?
Koyaanisqatsi instead echews all of these traditional narrative elements. There are no actors, no script, no dialogue, not even an omnipresent narrator that explains the audience what is going on. Instead, it is much more like visual poetry; a work of art, perhaps a somewhat abstract one, as any meaning of themes the film might have are those placed upon it by the person observing it, therefore they reflect more on the person making those claims than the film itself. It is like holding up a mirror to a person, except they do not realize it is a mirror, and the individual they comment upon is actually themselves. Therefore it is quite interesting to listen people's takes on it, particularly those of a more sociopolitical nature.
Then what is it actually about? The closest thing I can say with some sort of objective eye is that it is about humanity, the planet and our place in it. The title translates to "life out of balance", but director Godfrey Reggio deliberately chose a word that would mean nothing to most people, so perhaps that is entirely coincidental, but a translation of the hopi language song in the movie does reveal some clue as well; that perhaps modern life isn't entirely natural. All of this is ultimately just guessing. However, I can't say that this movie didn't get me thinking. Free from the constraints of a narrative forced upon the audience, we're exposed to the footage we see without any context telling us how we should feel about it. The famous Grid sequence in particular shows up people going about their daily lives; we see a river of light, created by shots of highways in fast motion. We see people standing in lines, and I realize that these aren't just faceless crowds. These are all individuals, who are all there for their own reasons. Many of those reasons may be mutual, but none completely identical. The scenes of people working in assembly lines have a somewhat bittersweet tone as well, viewed through the lens of a modern viewer; although they may appear, and indeed may have been repetitive and menial, this is how they made their living, and it's hard not to feel something knowing that many of them probably lost even that little work they had, due to either outsourcing or automatization.
This freedom of interpretation is only one half of the reason I love this movie so much. The other half is the fact that I've always been a very visual person; I'm the kind of a guy who listens to a movie soundtrack and can play the scenes they're used over in the actual movie near-perfectly in my head, entirely by following the beats and cues of the music. Koyaanisqatsi feels almost tailor-made to that end; the soundtrack by Philip Glass is somewhat minimalistic, repetitive and simple, making it for ideal earworm material; I find myself playing the music on my head, then actually playing it, and finally asking myself "why aren't I just watching the movie again?" which I eventually end up doing. A lot of people seem to quickly become bored by it, whereas I continue to remain engrossed by it.
The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972)
Too long
I know that's an odd criticism to make, but that's just one of the many problems with the New Scooby-Doo Movies. About a year or so ago I decided to sit through all the Scooby-Doo cartoons up to the present day, but I haven't even reached the Scrappy episodes yet and my interest is already wearing thin. Unfortunately I'm too stubborn to simply give up either.
The biggest problem with the series is the episode length. They call them "movies" but they're only about 40 minutes long - but they could still stand to be a great bit shorter. The actual stories themselves - the mystery - feel like an afterthought, playing second fiddle to the non-stop hijinks of Shaggy, Scooby and whoever the guest star happens to be this week. Fred, Daphne and Velma seem to be there just to provide us with a running commentary. The mysteries, such as they are, are considerably less well-thought out as the original, where the monster would somehow fit into the local mythos. Here you get the ghost of a German WW1 pilot haunting an American airfield for some reason.
The other major problem is the guest stars. More often than not, the celebrity guest stars are voiced by somebody else, making me wonder why they're included at all if we're just gonna get some impersonators. It feels very much like the kind of horrid 70's variety show that is very dated now, where we're introduced a "celebrity guest" as if they were the real deal, but instead we get a lousy lookalike act. It's especially noticeable with the likes of Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges, most of whom were dead at the time this series was made. When the celebrity guest is a fictional character themselves, like Batman or the Addams Family, it works a lot better since it becomes just a crossover cartoon.
When I watched the original series, I inadvertedly watched some episodes from the late 70's which were labeled under a third season, and they definitely feel like this series but considerably cut down in length and without the unnecessary guest stars hogging up all the screentime.
RoboCop: Prime Directives (2001)
Interesting premise that crumbles under the weight of it's promises
After the abysmal critical and popular performance of Robocop 3 and the watered down TV series, it seemed like poor old Robo was out of breath which is probably why a Canadian production company was able to get the rights and made big promises to return the character to it's serious, satirical, blood-soaked roots.
On paper, this should've been good; it's now been over ten years since the original film and Robocop is aging, both in his organic and mechanical components. Not only that, but Alex Murphy's son, Jimmy, is now a junior executive on OCP. Delta City is no longer just a dream, but OCP has committed serious managerial errors, imposing a non-lethal crimefighting policy, just in time for a new, very much lethal supervillain named Bone Machine to make his appearance, all while a sinister cabal named Trust is formed within the ranks of the OCP.
Problem is that the production falls flat straight out of the gate as Page Fletcher is far too small of stature to fill the Robocop shoes. Or the rest of his costume, because he looks like the suit was made for someone far bigger than himself. The new, second Robocop's costume fits slightly better on the person wearing it, but still doesn't look quite right, thanks to his lips practically bursting through the prosthetics. The production values in general are so poor that the earlier TV series looked like a Hollywood production in comparison.
While they technically succeeded in delivering on their promise, it certainly feels like the use of the adult elements is somewhat misguided. Graphic violence, the little there is, doesn't really serve much in the way of purpose the way it did in the original. Somebody gets shot, a squib goes off. It's nowhere as over the top as the first two films. The trademark satire feels somewhat toothless, largely thanks to the extremely cheap look of the in-universe TV broadcasts, which never convince you for a second these were produced by a multi-million dollar megacorporation.
And then there's the story. There's nowhere near enough of it to pad out the six hour runtime, and it feels like there was a huge change in production staff midway through because the sudden change in direction comes almost out of nowhere. Suddenly there's a new villain with a new plan, the cabal within the OCP is almost completely sidelined, and the only plot thread carried through all four mini-movies to the end to any kind of a satisfying conclusion is the James Murphy subplot.
I never saw this series on it's broadcast, largely because I don't think it was ever actually broadcast here. It also never really seems to come up when discussing the character; at most people mention the third movie or the TV series saying "oh yeah that was bad", but this never seems to crop up. I bought the DVD many years ago and despite having watched it then, I realized I remembered almost nothing about it on my re-watch, but I can now see why that was the case; the story is such a mess and the production values so bad, that to be quite honest, if I had to recommend anybody either this or the earlier TV series, I'd probably go with the latter. Bloodless as it may be, it's positives far outweigh the negatives compared to Prime Directives.
The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
Star Wars Ho-hum Special
With the Holiday Special turning 40 this month, I decided to give it a re-watch since I hadn't seen it for at least 13 years. A lot of youtube comedians have performed terrible comedies disguised as scathing reviews of it, but very few of them do a particularly good job at providing a concise reason as to exactly what makes it so terrible. I also could make several jokes about it, like the fact that Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are definitely not the only people taking drugs when making this, but drugs must've been involved when it was pitched and approved in the first place.
None of this really convey exactly what makes it so bad. The truth is simple; the story, such as it is, isn't very good to begin with, Han Solo and Chewbacca being slightly delayed on their trip to the latter's family for the holidays, but there's barely enough of it to cover a single 25 minute TV episode, much less a two hour special. Instead we spend most of this time with Chewie's family whose howls and grunts are untranslated. The story is constantly ground to a complete halt so the characters can watch yet another musical dance number of some kind, or worse, some kind of a "comedy" act, all for the sake of padding out the runtime, because "comedy" or even "entertaining" are most certainly not the words I would use to describe them. Pretty much the only such interludes that actually stand out as having any sort of value, entertainment or otherwise, are the Boba Fett cartoon that everyone remembers, and the Mos Eisley canteen sequence disguised as Imperial propaganda, and even the former is mostly remembered because it was the character's first appearance; nobody is giving high accolades to the Droids cartoon despite featuring him as well.
None of this is helped by the style of writing that make the whole affair feel horribly outdated, even for 1978, feeling more like it came from a decade earlier. The Empire in particular is portrayed as cartoonishly evil, performing moustache-twirling panto with Stormtroopers smashing childrens' toys, compared to the far more understated performance given by Peter Cushing in the original film.
In the other hand, the latter in particular makes this special a fascinating time capsule to the late 70's television and especially the culture Star Wars was permeating into. I'm just not sure if it's worth wasting two hours of your life into, when you could just go find a vintage article from the same time period.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Episode IX: No Hope
The Force Awakens was a somewhat divisive film, but apart from the common complaint that it was essentially just a remake of The New Hope, most people seemed to have liked it. It did not kill my interest in going forward to see this film; unfortunately, I cannot speak as favourably of The Last Jedi.
When I saw this movie in theaters for the first (and only) time, I immediately picked upon a major problem; it is incredibly self-indulgent in it's subversiveness, which is essentially just a nice way of saying it's unpredictable. While that's not a bad thing in itself, but when you do it at the expense of all else, including character development and storytelling, what you get is a series of twists for the sake of having them, regardless of whether they actually make any sense or not, resulting in a good chunk of the entire movie being rendered almost entirely unnecessary in retrospect. The Last Jedi feels like it just repeatedly pulls the rug from under the viewer just so it can say "gotcha!", but you know what they say; fool me once...
On hindsight, another major issue with the film is it's complete disregard to it's own legacy. I'm not even talking it's introduction of some serious issues in the rules of the entire Star Wars universe as a whole, or about turning Luke into an old, decrepit, miserable hermit (and I'm not even going to talk about what I see as blatant character assassination), but it fails to even develop the characters introduced in The Force Awakens. In fact, that's something of an understatement; the characters either don't develop at all, or they're essentially reduced to two-dimensional parodies of themselves who plod their way through the film in displays of massive incompetence and/or foolishness. I know making characters act stupid is a common storytelling device to keep the story going forward, but The Last Jedi abuses it to a nauseating degree.
Much has been said about the new characters as well, they're really not that much better off. Rose Tico in particular almost feels like a parody of a typical college liberal. Her dialogue reveals her naivety, and her actions reveal her failure to consider possible long-term harmful effects in favour of short-term "feel-good" benefits, and in one instance in particular the former kicks in almost immediately on the background after she makes some adage about it, which in any other film would come off as a biting satire - I only say she almost feels like a parody, because I'm positive it was not intentional. It merely demonstrates utter cluelessness on the behalf of Rian Johnson.
The film may be impressive visually, but the inside rings hollow. With all the characters worth caring about either dead, flat or reduced to stereotypes, there's just nothing left for me to care about in Episode IX. The franchise is clearly in the hands of people who do not care about it. I guess Rian Johnson does get the last laugh with his biggest subversion of all; the expectation that this movie might've been even remotely decent. Needless to say, I'm not going to see it. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Polly Gone (1988)
Some say it's the worst CGI short ever made
But I really quite like this one. Rather than settling for being just another industrial demo or commercial, Polly Gone sets out quite gleefully to do it's own thing; disregarding any attempts at realism and ignoring conventions, this bizarre cartoon displays...I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to portray? The day in the life of a computer program? There's some verisimlitude to real life (cleaning house, getting the mail) but does it in the most absurd manner possible. The way the short goes out of it's way to commit what would otherwise be considered animation mistakes, it insted employs graphics glitches such as objects clipping through the camera to create it's own unique look. In a way, it almost predicts the kind of video game glitches we now make fun of.
MASK (1985)
Wasted potential - if it ever had any
You could probably make some kind of an argument about the sensibility of having vehicles that just transform into other, different vehicles, but I'm not going to make that argument because that'd be silly. Even I think the toys were kind of cool.
Instead, I'm going to argue from the perspective of an adult who didn't grow up with this cartoon as a child and therefore can see it for what it is, without rose-tinted glasses. No, it's not going to be complaining about being a weekly 30 minute toy commercial; on that regard, I can be incredibly forgiving. In fact, I tend to be quite forgiving towards most cartoons of the period. Out of all the ones that I have watched as an adult, regardless of whether I actually saw them as a child myself, there really only have been a select few that I can without a doubt say that I did not enjoy.
MASK is unfortunately one of them. The biggest issue with the series is not immediately obvious; if you were to watch maybe two or three random episodes then yes, it might be perfectly watchable. But having watched every single episode has made it painfully clear to me that this cartoon is without a doubt the most repetitive friggin' thing I have ever seen. Out of the 65 episodes of the first season, there are less than five that don't follow the exact same formula; VENOM is somewhere around the world on some kind of a treasure hunt, Matt Trakker just happens to be there at the same time (I think only in one episode they actually bother establishing why), he summons the Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, they fight, good guys win, the end. And in the middle of it all, Scott and T-Bob get in trouble and make some puns.
You could argue that a lot of 80's cartoons are repetitive, but none of them have been quite as shamelessly plot-recycling as MASK. There is absolutely no backstory episode, no character-building, nothing. It's just the same exact story, repeated ad nauseum, just with a different location every time. And the lack of backstory is the worst part; if you know anything about these characters at all, I guarantee you that information did NOT come from the cartoon series. Even the whole aspect of VENOM being mercenaries barely, if ever, comes up. Hell, several times it seems the writers even forgot T-Bob's supposed to be a robot; in one episode he almost drowns (he doesn't breathe!) and in an end-of-episode PSA about not putting plastic bags on your head, HE is the one doing it (HE DOESN'T BREATHE!)
The worst part is that with the second season's racing-themed overhaul, you'd think the series would get some fresh ideas, but the treasure hunts don't even stop there - instead it just happens to be somewhere down the race track! The only thing that really struck out with the second season was that VENOM now got to do PSAs as well, which was absolutely hilarious because in the episodes they are constantly insulting each other and bickering, and suddenly they're demonstrating uncharacteristic concern for each others' wellbeing.
As I wrote this review, I found myself knocking more and more stars off my already low rating, but I don't think I can in good conscience take it all the way down to one; if there is one thing going on for this show that's actually good, it's the animation quality being pretty consistent. Unlike many other cartoons of the era which were animated by a large variety of animation studios, leading to significant differences in animation quality and even character models across episodes, MASK was produced by DiC who appears to have used only one so there isn't any of the usual off-model shenanigans you might find in something like Transformers.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Jurassic Park III was better than this
A lot of people love to criticize JP3 for a number of reasons, like repeating the last movie or hyping up the Spinosaur so much but in my personal opinion, I think JP3 captures that "theme park movie" feel much better than The Lost World does.
For one thing, this is a much darker film. I don't just mean how most of the movie takes place at night, but the while the body-count in the original was merely implied, we never really got to see the carnage - in fact, I think there were only three people we saw dying on screen, and not only that, but there were only four confirmed kills in the whole movie. Meanwhile there are dozens of people slaughtered in this film quite explicitly - not necessarily bloody, but it's quite obvious those guys didn't make it. The deaths in the original film, when they did happen on-screen, were relatively quick and didn't linger; meanwhile, some of the deaths in this film are rather drawn-out and even taunt the viewer with the possibility that the character might actually make it, only for them to die horribly. There's also the aspect of the "cold corporate greed" which reduces John Hammond to a bit part, and makes InGen far more villainous than Dennis Nedry could ever dream of being. I suppose there is some conservationist argument that could be made that makes so many of the victims supposedly less sympathetic, but outside of like one guy who faces a very ironic fate, most of them just struck me as guys doing a job and most certainly didn't deserve their fates.
Then there's a couple of really gaping plot holes without any good explanation for them that really strike as deliberately done just so the plot could proceed in a specific way, such as a character who gets a whole establishing scene to show us he knows his profession, ignoring a pretty massive Chekhov's gun - and you can't even just pretend he missed it, because he's the one who draws attention to it! So after a lot of plot contrivances and characters acting like idiots, the only scene I actually liked in the whole film was the animal control department vehicle speeding away from the scene, which is still funny to this day. A glimmer light in this terribly mediocre sequel, I suppose.
Street Sharks (1994)
It's kind of bad
I'm not saying it's really bad, just plain bad. And I'm not even comparing it to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of which this is one of the many ripoffs made in the 90's.
The continuity is really sketchy - I mean restoring status quo is/was a popular thing to do in these cartoons, but considering the series kind of established itself as continuity actually mattering at all early on, it's really jarring when Piranoid finally gets arrested with the President of all characters giving a full expose on his activities, and he's shown trying to escape from prison at the end...and then in the next episode, he's hosting some trade symposium as if nothing had happened.
And the animation is really bad, with the framerate frequently dropping way below the television animation standard of 12 frames a second, leading to characters moving in a very choppy manner, and the characters' body parts occasionally miscolored or left uncolored entirely, like Ripster's jaw disappearing in one frame but the outlines are still there (and considering the low framerate, all the errors are very easy to spot). The show does a lousy job at conveying action on-screen sometimes, making it confusing to figure out what exactly is going on - such as when Piranoid is about to crash the van he's driving in, he's shown screaming, and it cuts to a backdrop painting which doesn't give you a faintest idea about what he's supposed to be crashing into...and then it cuts back to him, screaming again, and a brief pause, and he screams AGAIN as if to inhale between screaming, all before finally actually crashing, it's like the steam roller scene from Austin Powers except I'm not entirely convinced they did it deliberately since it's the kind of meta humor the series rarely dwells in.
And don't get me started on the weird montages that replace action scenes where they just play clips in split screen not only from earlier in the episode but even after the montage, while some second-rate song plays in the background - and once the montage is over, it rarely has made any difference, clearly existing only to pad out the episodes.
Uchû senkan Yamato: Kanketsuhen (1983)
A beautiful movie with a lame excuse of a story
I'll just get this straight out of the way; Final Yamato is a beautiful movie to look and listen to. There's some really pretty animation here and the orchestral score is a major tour de force, particularly the tracks "Aquarius, Planet of Water" and "Symphony of Aquarius". The ending of the film, likewise, is considerably more satisfying than that of "Farewell Space Battleship Yamato" which, after several fake endings, ended the film with a whistle than a bang.
But I'm not here to talk about the good aspects of this film. As pretty as it is, the story is extremely weak and most certainly not enough to carry the film through it's 165 minute runtime - while the rest of the film is at least above mediocre, the terrible beginning and the new villains' rather dodgy plan overshadows the entire movie.
The movie begins with a red galaxy, coming from another dimension, crashing into our own and destroying the Galman-Gamilas and Bolar empires almost completely. Nevermind the questionable cosmology of this event, but it is then completely ignored in favour of an entirely new plot and feels like a rather lame excuse to keep Desslok out of the picture. After this a far too convenient string of lucky coincidences takes place; after escaping the destruction with a random warp, Yamato winds up near a planet being ravaged by Aquarius, a planet made entirely of water, causing floods and what amounts to a near extinction event for it's population - and Yamato manages to save no one else apart from a small boy, at a considerable loss of several of Yamato's own crewmen, too. On the way back home, Yamato is attacked by a new enemy - who just *happen* to be inhabitants of the destroyed planet - for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, other survivors hatch a new plan; they will use a massive space shift device to warp Aquarius to earth to flood it, to eradicate humanity and colonize earth! Wait, what? Meanwhile, Susumu Kodai, who feels his erroneous judgement caused the deaths of so many crew members, resigns, while the earth defense force learns of the villains' plan...somehow; this is never explained either. Nor is how flooding another planet going to help them; if they're just going to wait for the floods to subside, why can't they just wait for it on their own home planet? Okay, so we're implied to that the aliens' entire culture is based on egotism and social Darwinism, but it serves as a rather lame excuse for the stupidity of their plan.
So the EDF decides to launch Yamato anyway to hopefully stop this plan, with a new captain; Juzo Okita, who died in the first series, is brought back to life with some more dodgy retconning, reducing Kodai to being subordinate once again. And the reason for all this is...I've no idea.
You've probably already noticed that I've used the words "weak" and "dodgy" a lot in this review; that is because those words describe the plot of this film remarkably well. As good as the second half of the movie may be, it is not going to fix the horribly flawed premise. "Farewell", despite it's lackluster ending, would have been a much better conclusion to the Yamato saga.
Doctor Who: The End of Time: Part Two (2010)
Russell T Davies really exceeded himself this time...
...he actually managed to write a story even *worse* than Last of the Timelords! Where should I even begin? Firstly, the resolution to the entire cliffhanger from the first episode is stupid. If I didn't know that RTD was completely incapable of any kind of subtlety, I could've assumed that the double-cop-out was a parody of itself. Secondly, the Master's entire back-story is retconned into something completely idiotic involving the drumming in his head (which I thought was a load of bull when it was first introduced anyway). Lastly, there's loads of the Doctor bawling and the whole thing feels like a send-off pandering more to the Tennant fan girls than all Doctor Who fans in general.
I wish the time-traveling astronaut had gone back in time to shoot HIM instead! I must admit though, this episode is definitely an appropriate send-off for RTD himself; just like his entire tenure as the producer, it is dumb, badly written and infuriatingly melodramatic.
Ginga Tetsudo 999 (1978)
Some childhood memories are best left unvisited
Galaxy Express 999 will always hold a special place in my heart, on the benefit of quite possibly being the first anime I ever saw when I was a child. Back then, all I had was a handful of videotapes to choose from, which provided a nice window into this universe envisioned by Leiji Matsumoto.
Roll two decades later, I finally have an oppoturnity to watch the entire series, an oppoturnity I would surely not miss. Finally, I would be able to witness the entire journey of Tetsuro to acquiring his mechanical body, with the assistance of a mysterious woman named Maetel, an odyssey that would slowly teach him that maybe eternal life isn't all it's cracked out to be.
However, as time passed and I dove deeper into this universe, I began to discover how deeply flawed it was. While I was prepared for the series eschewing any kind of scientific accuracy and realism in favour of delivering a story, I wasn't quite expecting it to cheat. Let me elaborate; in the early episodes, an auxiliary character attempting to steal Tetsuro's ticket is a very common plot device. However, as the series progresses, we are introduced to an increasing amount of the railroad company's rules and regulations which eventually amount to such theft never having been really possible in the first place. What's worse, these rules are sometimes introduced and then promptly forgotten or altered. For example, a passenger may be let onboard in an emergency, however what exactly constitutes an "emergency" varies wildly and nonsensically; an abusive husband counts as such, while having your entire home planet about to explode doesn't. The most jarring example is an episode where Tetsuro and Maetel are kidnapped (this also happens frequently) and we are told of a regulation that entitles the railroad company to send an armored train to free them. Not only has this rule never been brought up on previous occasions, it is never brought up again in subsequent episodes! For those who do not understand the implications of this; this kind of blatant cheating in terms of storytelling spoils the drama completely as it comes across as a cheap method of introducing unpredictability into the series. What's worse, despite the series' relatively long run, there seems to be absolutely no character development in regards to Tetsuro, leading me to believe that there was very little communication or planning between the several writers; the lack of a story bible is obvious.
It's really difficult to give this show any kind of score. The numerous failings of this series don't really become obvious until about a third or a quarter into it's run, so I guess I could be generous.
Uchû senkan Yamato III (1980)
Underrated chapter of the saga
Space Battleship Yamato III gets frequently overlooked in favour of it's predecessors - I believe a major contributor to this may be the fact that it's English-dubbed version, Bolar Wars, was released years later after Star Blazers and sporting an entirely new voice cast and a slipshod translation which didn't win it any favours.
The original version is, in my opinion, not merely as good as the previous two series but *better*. While the basic premise is pretty much the same, earth is in danger, Yamato heads out to get help...but that's where the similarities end. This time around, earth is in the same predicament as Gamilus was in the first series, and most of the series, Yamato (with several other unnamed ships which are implied to be upon the same task) seeks for another planet for humanity to migrate to. Somewhere deep in space, Desslok is engaging in a war against another superpower, the Bolar Federation, and soon Musumu Kodai and his friends are in the middle of this armed conflict. While Yamato spends much of the first half in battle, the story takes a turn into something far more interesting when Desslok discovers that Yamato is now involved in his campaign, and the story does not let go until the end.
Why does Yamato III rate better than it's predecessors in my opinion? It falls victim far less frequently the kind of stupidity series 1, 2 and especially New Voyage and Be Forever suffered from; namely characters foolishly getting themselves killed or acting just downright stupid for no reason and getting *others* killed instead (looking at you, Mamoru and Starsha).
If you enjoyed Yamato and Yamato II, you're going to enjoy Yamato III as well.
Uchû senkan Yamato (1977)
Save yourself the trouble, watch the TV series
So basically, the first Yamato movie covers the entire Iscandar adventure.
Fair enough, allowing theatre-goers to experience the tale in time for the sequel which was released year later...only this is just really badly executed.
The single biggest problem with this movie is the pacing. Even knowing it recycles footage from the TV series cannot prepare you for the fact that they did absolutely no additional work whatsoever apart from new narration, meaning they didn't even record any new dialogue - this means that much of the first half of the film races through several key events in a manner that makes it look like the writers of the film really just didn't care. Reducing Yamato's visit to Mars to a mere mention in the fashion of the narrator going "Yamato visits Mars to make repairs" isn't even half as bad as the first test of the wave motion gun and the battle at Pluto receiving almost similar treatment, killing the dramatic tension - and I swear, I've never seen a movie narrate itself through an action scene! Sometimes, they even use the "cliffhanger" narration from the end of an episode! The faster pacing also makes the one-year voyage feel much less epic than it actually was in the TV series, and that in turn draws attention to the awkward fact that Yamato receives grave damage in one battle and is mysteriously repaired by the next scene. How many times does the third bridge get destroyed anyway? With no new animation and a really bizarre priority on what plot elements should be carried over from the TV series at that, the first Yamato movie does not feel like a theatrical feature at all, but a feature-length clip show for television.
Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987)
I can't believe this was released...
Ah, the good old days of VHS, when just about any cinematic turd could find a distributor - why else do you think so many of the movies shown on MST3K were released on VHS *before* that show was even aired? Tho I guess they had some standards; a direct to video release like Tales From the Quadead Zone probably would have never even qualified. And certainly not for a cinematic release, as the whole thing was shot on video. And it shows.
The second movie of Chester Novell Turner, who only made two films before forever disappearing into relative obscurity, shows that Chester Novell Turner is to writing what Chester Novell Turner is to directing. After a whole three minutes of lousy drawings and even lousier Casio keyboard music that makes up the movie's opening, we're introduced to the same ugly lady with the hideous hairdo that starred in the previous movie, The Black Devil Doll From Hell, who speaks to her crappy video effect of a dead son and reads him stories.
Obviously this movie is supposed to be a horror anthology like Tales from the Crypt, what with the premise and all, but for one thing, this film never even begins to work as a horror film; despite the title of the movie, there's only THREE stories in the entire film - and the third isn't even from the stupid book she reads! I don't think I need to even get into the storyline to tell you how awful this film is. Let's just say that both stories are neither interesting or terrifying, the audio mix is so bad that the awful and unfitting Casio music drowns out the already inaudible dialog.
This film really is best viewed with a group of friends while MST3K'ing the hell out of it.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Overrated.
While LotR indeed is beautiful in every way, the camera work, visual effects, acting, filming locations and even wardrobing, I think it's severely overrated. Even if people think it should be on top of the top250 list, I think it should be far away from it - It just isn't all THAT good. But still, it's a good movie. 8 out of 10.
The Evil Dead (1981)
A masterpiece.
While not as good as The Shining, or horrible as all the sequels of Nightmare on Elm Street, the values of Evil Dead come from somewhere else. Just like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead was made on extremely low budget, but Evil Dead is a good proof that a movie with tiny budget can be great - Evil Dead was shot on a budget of only about $100'000, and yet they managed to make one of the biggest cult hits since TCM. It never got a cinematic success, but when it hit on video, the cult slowly formed up. Evil Dead was extremely succesful on video, and thanks to several releases it has survived to this day. Isn't it ironic how they have spent more money on releasing it on video than in making the thing? Evil Dead will always be popular, there is no question about it. 9 out of 10.
Les Pantless Menace (1999)
French?
SPOILER WARNING
I watched this movie, and found out that it was quite good. Especially the Austin Powers reference.
Ok, let's look at the story. It seems to be a parody of "Attack to Naboo"-scene from phantom menace. Except with Naked barbies, Lando Calrissian and most importantly, the death of Jar Jar Binks. Lando is a professional wrestler(!) and he must save the city...alone.