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beej44
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Hereditary (2018)
Pretentious twaddle
So bad it's almost beyond belief. I can only write that over and over again to fulfil IMDB requirements.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
So bad it's almost beyond belief.
Demon House (2019)
Complete and utter rubbish
Anyone suckered into believing this nonsense must have chewing gum for a brain. It's just one reenactment of hearsay evidence after another.
Don't you think the family who supposedly fled the house would have some credible mobile phone footage or something? It's just pathetic than anyone could believe that these bunch of charlatans are doing anything more than exploiting the weak minded.
I'm sure Trump voters will love it, but if you have a brain the only reason to watch it is to have a good laugh.
Batman vs. Two-Face (2017)
Pure nostalgia
Anyone old enough to remember the original 60's Batman TV series will love this. It's great that this movie mirrors the 60's show i.e. it has the old batmobile and even better the voices of Adam West, Burt Ward and Julie Newmar as Catwoman. Another former Catwoman Lee Meriwether also has a small part. William Shatner does an excellent job as Dent/Two face and the whole movie embraces the tongue in cheek wackiness of the original series. This must've been one of the last projects Adam West was involved in prior to his death. All I can say is that he went out on a high.
The Great Wall (2016)
Lord Of The Wings or Wangs if you prefer
Yup
That about sums it up. It's Tolkien meets a Chinese creature feature. Preposterous from start to finish, but I guess it's an OK way to take your mind off of the chaos of a Trump presidency for an hour or so.
Still trying to figure out what accent Matt Damon thought he was using. It appears to be a cross between Irish and Klingon.
The Revenant (2015)
Faster than a speeding bullet, leaping tall buildings in a single bound !!
Imagine a cross between Jeremiah Johnson, Get Carter and Superman and you have The Revenant (sounds pretty good). This is basically an old fashioned revenge saga. Now I know it's a remake of the superior Man In The Wilderness starring the late great Richard Harris but it really did get a bit carried away with itself.
The filming is great and the huge landscapes are the real stars of the show. The problem, as in so many movies these days, is one of plausibility. Without giving too much away our hero (DiCaprio) survives not one, not two, not three but about 7 brushes with CERTAIN death.
Colossal loss of blood, wet clothes in a sub zero environment, strangling, smothering, , falling off a cliff, drowning, knives, guns, Indians, baddies, gangrene..................the list goes on and on and all that was really missing was a red cape, a kiss curl and a cameo performance from Stan Lee.
Awards should go to the technical folk and it must've been a tough shoot for the cast but when you boil it all down there's a lot more gravy than meat and potatoes.
The Oxford Murders (2008)
Not John Hurt's greatest hour
I say that with all affection as I love John Hurt's acting and always make a point of watching his films.............this however was absolutely dreadful.
The whole thing came across as incredibly amateur, a bit like a student film that you expect to be a bit clunky. The dialogue and plot exposition was almost robotic and gave the impression that those in charge just decided to go with the first draft of the script rather than inject any subtlety or depth in a rewriting process.
Whether it was done in a rush for some reason I have no idea but suffice to say the only things that got 'murdered' here were credibility and plausibility (and maybe Elijah Wood's career).
Now You See Me (2013)
Stop the ride I want to get off
If you're the kind of person who is entertained by having your intelligence insulted non-stop for 115 minutes, then this is the film for you.
Scene after scene after scene adds further insult to injury. You can actually see the fear in the casts eyes as they realise that jumping aboard this clapped out bandwagon has been a colossally bad career move.
Michael Caine once famously said "You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one", and that has always been his professional ethos so for him this is par for the course. But I can't imagine where the normally sound judgement of Mark Ruffalo and Morgan Freeman was when they signed up for this dreck.
The implausibilities pile up one on top of the other like the collective product of a faecal incontinent donkey and then, just as you thought you'd suffered enough, the big reveal at the end is the final cock a snook to the demoralised viewer.
I won't give the end away. Suffice to say that although it is intended to make the audience gasp in shock, by the time you reach this point you have already had to suspend disbelief to such an extreme you'll think that maybe Donald Trump WOULD make a good President.
Yes, the ending is THAT ridiculous.
Deadgirl (2008)
Darkest side of peer pressure
Thought a while before watching this film as I am not a great lover of gratuitous gore. The subject matter is of course shocking but it shines a light on a very real phenomenon i.e. peer pressure amongst young men.
Whilst I don't believe for a moment that so many lads would suffer from the colossal lack of empathy shown in this film it does play into the 'I dare you' mentality culture shared by adolescent males all around the world.
Putting any sentiment or morality aside it's actually a well made movie albeit clearly on a tight budget. It's very insular, by that I mean what is going on outside the group involved (police investigations re missing people etc) is not even mentioned and in this instance nor should it be.
The film is like a tidal pool of 'what ifs' left behind after the ocean of the unthinkable has receded.
Spectre (2015)
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
OK I'll start with the Pros.
Ben Whishaw is in it and he's a great actor who elevates everything he appears in.
Now the Cons.
Undoubtedly the dullest Bond villain ever.
Incredibly lacklustre Bond Girls.
A plot that is both transparent and yet somehow ludicrous at the same time.
The reveal near the end was as unsurprising as it gets.
No thought seems to have been invested in ensuring the gloriously contrived deaths of the baddies.
I guess if you want a Bond that's just nuts and bolts and no finesse this is for you, but if you like a bit of humour and razzmatazz steer well clear.
Love (2015)
Dangerous Liaisons it ain't !
I think the director is really a frustrated porn aficionado but hasn't got the guts to ply his trade in the San Fernando Valley. Instead he wants to dress it up as a deep, introspective art form but he's a not a good enough director to pull that off.
This is porn for all those who think they're above that sort of thing.
The sheer length of the sex scenes (way beyond what is necessary to establish the feeble gist of what scant plot there is) tells you all you need to know.
A CCTV camera in a college dormitory would produce a better film.
Having said that, the filming and lighting is good for the most part so kudos to the technical team.
Godzilla (2014)
By the numbers, tepid tosh
If only Seth McFarlane or the Zucker brothers would have a go at a movie like this. At least there'd be a giggle or two.
So much wrong with this movie it's hard to know where to start so I'll make an orderly list.
SPOILER ALERT
1) The two Muto creatures looked more metallic than flesh and blood. whoever designed the creatures needs to take a course in basic entomology as I assume they were supposed to be insect based. A 5 year old with some plasticine and a crocodile clip could have created a more convincing monster. Godzilla too was farcical, I mean a gigantic dinosaur with the head the size of a pea.
2) Towards the end Godzilla was losing the fight against the two Muto's but they were distracted by the burning of their egg chamber (nice steal from Aliens) and they left Godzilla alive. A little later a recovered Godzilla suddenly remembers that he can breathe fire and so quite easily kills his two monstrous enemies in their next encounters. Why not use the fire breathing weapon in the earlier fight?
3) People are sat in homes and bars watching 24/7 news coverage of these three enormous monsters rampaging over their cities but then seem shocked and horrified when the roof of their building collapses under the weight of a Mutu. How did they not know that the monster was just down the road? They were watching it all on live TV for god's sake.
4) Our hero is left in charge of a little Japanese boy who gets separated from his parents in the panic. Later they arrive at an area full of tens of thousands of displaced people and the little boy wanders off and finds his parents straight away. Yeah right.
5) People walk around unprotected in areas that would be so highly radioactive your skin would melt from your skin (and I'm not talking about the earlier scene where Brian Cranstone returned to where his wife had died).
I could say so much more. Suffice to say this version of Godzilla was a witless, artless, clueless insult to the intelligence. If it had included any wit at all or adopted a tongue-in-cheek attitude it might have been an OK popcorn movie. However it is so po-faced and earnest in the handling of this preposterous nonsense that you just end up laughing all the way through it anyway.
I can only imagine that Brian Cranstone and Juliet Binoche begged to be killed off early so they could escape the stigma of being too closely connected to this dogs breakfast of a movie. The great David Strathhairn too should've known better.
Gravity (2013)
Could of been a classic....................but it's not.
OK so this movie should quite rightly sweep all the awards in the special effects and cinematography categories in the forthcoming awards season. However, it falls flat on its face when it comes to plausibility, but it needn't have. They make a point of letting us know that Sandra Bullock's character is not am astronaut as such and is up there to repair a satellite. She even admits to crashing the shuttle every time whilst doing some brief training in a flight simulator back on earth. Without wishing to give too much away Bullock has to board not one but two foreign space vehicles to get home, one Russian one Chinese. Considering she was incompetent in piloting a more familiar vehicle in a simulator we are expected to believe that she is capable of doing this under stress. Adding insult to injury she achieved all of this without any help from NASA people on earth due to the communications being down. At one point she actually says 'Eeny meeny miny moe' to select what button to press in a foreign space craft. When she splashes down on earth it has conveniently landed in a small lake allowing her to get to shore relatively easily.
If Bullock had been a highly qualified shuttle pilot this would have been more plausible but I guess plausibility is not good box office.
Chewing gum for the brain.
Mama (2013)
Could of been a great movie
This movie had a good back story (about as plausible as movies of this genre get) and was handled very well pretty much throughout. There was a genuinely spooky spectre looming in the background in the first three quarters of the movie but when it came to the pay off i.e. when we got a good look at the phantom, it looked liked a cartoon character. If a bit more money had been spent on the CGI (or what ever effect was used) and the spook had looked more 3 dimensional this movie would have got a 9 from me. However, I found it more unsettling than the laughable 'The Conjuring' and 'Insidious' and it has that rare quality which leaves you feeling a little sympathy for the ghost.
Immortals (2011)
Ye gods !!
I'm a big fan of the whole mythological movie genre. The original Clash Of The Titans is still the best one of it's kind (the remake was a missed opportunity) and Beowulf had a curious charm but The Immortals is a hope sapingly awful dogs breakfast of a film. When I saw the likes of John Hurt in the cast I had high hopes but it became obvious very early on that the director had his own bizarre take on the classic myths of ancient Greece. I'll try not to spoil the movie for others but here goes.
1) Theseus (the lead character) was famed for killing the half man half bull creature The Minotaur in the Labyrinth. In this version the Minotaur was not a huge snorting refugee from the Island of Dr Moreau (like it should have been)it was just a big bloke wearing a metallic bulls head shaped helmet. 2) The plot of the film is that the bad guy Hyperion (played by a scenery chewing Mickey Rourke) is pursuing a magic bow that fires arrows with the power of a trident missile. His aim is to free the titans that were imprisoned under Mount Tartarus by the gods of Olympus after losing a war with them and only this magic bow can do that. He achieves his aim but once again the Director drops the ball. In the Greek myths the Titans were huge (the clue's in the name) and so were the gods they fought but in this version the Titans are a bunch of small mud splattered monkey like creatures wearing matching helmets and the gods that come down to earth to fight them are little more than gold clad Power Rangers. The fight scenes are hilarious with the Director continually slowing down the action so we can sate our blood lust. 3)The film is called The Immortals and yet no one in the movie is immortal. Gods and Titans alike are flesh and blood beings and there were multiple deaths on both sides.
Maybe the project ran out of money or had very little to begin with but scrimping by having a man in a bulls head mask and Titans that looked more like Munchkins on Acid ensured a merely awful movie became simply laughable.
If you love your Greek myths and want to see a movie that pays homage to those wonderful tales give this tripe a wide berth. However, if you're a fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or just like looking at ripped male bodies cast in a sepia glow, you may derive some pleasure from it.
The Omen (2006)
They say imitation is the sincerest from of flattery.
What was the point in making this film? A remake should offer something knew but this is practically a carbon copy of the immensely superior 1976 original. Scene by scene rolls by in exactly the same order as the original and 95% of the dialogue also seems to be exactly the same. The only variation came in some of the showcase death scenes. Bafflingly the Director chose a rather more bland demise for the bed ridden wife. Where as Lee Remick was sent flying out of a Hospital window to her death in the original in this version it's just a routine bed side poisoning. In the original the photographer is decapitated by a sheet of glass flying off the back of a runaway lorry, far fetched yes but a sheet of glass will decapitate a man under the right circumstances. In this version the method is so elaborate it reminded me of the old board game Mousetrap, and ultimately what was used to deliver the final blow would in reality only have maybe broken his neck (no sharp edge).
I imagine the Director is the kind of person who'd go to the Louvre and take a photograph of the Mona Lisa and then frame it and put it on his wall at home. It looks the same but it has none of the texture or genius of the original.