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Reviews
Empire of the Dark (1990)
Awesome in its awfulness
Let's be clear: this is NOT a good movie. At all. But if you are looking for an involuntary comedy with lots of fun to offer, then look no further.
Empire of the dark is the second production of self-made auteur Steve Barkett, an overweight, self styled "action hero" who also directs, edits, scripts, produces and choreographs the fights in this...thing. His son -his spitting image, although with 30 kg of fat less- co-stars as...his adoptive son. Talk about imagination! What makes these kind of movies fun is not only the incompetent acting, effects and cinematography, but the astounding ambition of Barkett, who wrote a convoluted script with a lot of stuff he certainly should have known he didn't have the money nor the talent to pull off. As a result, the flick is ambitious well beyond his means, and each disastrous scene tops the next one, without giving any room for boredom.
The "plot" is a bit more ambitious of what you expect from this kind of flick. Cop Barkett receives a call and goes to the rescue of an old flame. She happens to be trapped in some kind of alternate, hellish dimension where she is to be sacrificed by some devil-worshipers. While there, he fights the cult, but at the last moment he is forced to choose between saving the girl, or saving her baby, who was also going to be killed. He chooses the latter, rescues the kid, and leaves the alternate dimension just in time.
20 years later, aside from his mustache Barkett looks remarkably similar to his "younger" self two decades prior. He has been training in sword-fighting as to be prepared in case the cult reappears, and, guess what, that's exactly what happens.
I won't spoil the rest of the movie, but it's INSANE. Just when you think you have seen it all, the last ten minutes blow your head off. And even in the last seconds of the movie, we are treated with a death scene so stupid, so convoluted and forced, you won't believe it until you see it.
Credit where it's due, I've read that many guys who worked in this film managed to to great in blockbusters like Avatar and such, mainly in the technical areas. So limitations aside, Barkett seems to have had a great eye for talent.
Run to see this flick with your friends. You are going to have a blast.
The Zohar Secret (2016)
Very weak! Do not believe the positive reviews
I've not seen such a blatant attempt to artificially boost a movie for a long time. Especially considering this movie is a small independent project. The guys/gals behind this "strategy" should consider for a second that giving a pretty flawed movie overwhelmingly positive reviews produces a negative effect, since the viewer's expectations are higher, and as a result he ends up being more disappointed.
About the movie, and being as objective as I can, it starts pretty good and interesting, following an unknown guy going through different time periods carrying some kind of manuscript. That part of the movie is nice, flowing quickly, and making good use of an obviously limited budget. To some extent, it reminded me of the original "Highlander".
However, the movie stops at one of said time periods, and mostly grinds to a halt, to introduce a confusing romance subplot. Worse of all, it introduces the main character's alter ego, who appears in every time period to exposit the flick's questionable and confusing philosophy.
The rest of the movie follows exactly the same pattern: main character ends in a low-budget version of a time period, his alter ego appears, they talk, etc. There is no action, no drama, no suspense, no spectacle. The last third of the movie takes place in a dilapidated insane asylum, and ANYONE who has ever seen a movie can predict the outcome. Worse of all, the flick is almost two hours long, easily half an hour longer than it needed to be.
I didn't like the movie at all, although I respect the effort made by the filmmakers delivering such an ambitious project with very little money. However, the end result is a very flawed, boring and confusing movie.
A for the effort, D for the result, F for the attempt to con the viewers into watching the movie with fake reviews.
Road Wars (2015)
Not even entertainingly bad
Slow, boring, stupid. I understand the filmmakers didn't have a huge budget to work with, but they could still come with something better than this. Yeah, it's a Mad Max ripoff, but there has been a bunch of those, and at least some of them are entertaining! This one has nothing going for it, with the exception maybe of the cars, which look nice (the "hero" car is horrible, though), but what's the point of a Mad Max clone where NONE of the cars get trashed? There are no car stunts, either!
Guys, those cars were supposed to be ruins on themselves, don't tell me you couldn't destroy at least one or two for your "epic" movie! I guess the cars were rented from real-life fans who built their own "Fury Road"-like vehicles, since most of them have working tail-lights (a necessity when you are driving through the wasteland, I suppose) which suggest that the cars were street-legit, which wouldn't make sense for this kind of vehicles.
I have seen other Asylum titles just for the fun of watching an unintentional bad movie. This one is just bad, not funny. Avoid like the plague. If you really want to see a Mad Max movie, grab the old ones or go see Fury Road.
Exists (2014)
I know what you did last summer, Bigfoot style
A pretty good flick, hampered by the overused POV-style. As a result, there aren't many surprises. While well done, everything is predictable, including -especially- the setup with the characters driving in the middle of the night and "crashing" into something unknown, which unleashes the rest of the events of the movie.
The characters are completely forgettable, but this isn't a perk of "this" particular movie, and there are also a couple of exceptions, like the black guy who manages to give at least some fight. Kudos, also to the filmmakers to actually spend some money and SHOW Bigfoot, which was pretty well done despite being a rather basic monster (no more than an ape-man).
There are a number of plot holes and problems with the movie, starting with - SPOILERS - why an ape-man, who only saw the car at night killing his kid, would go after the car's occupants after destroying the vehicle. I don't think that a creature with a mind just a couple of notches above an ape would be able to understand how a car works, much less the idea that the humans on board were responsible for the death.
In the end, the movie is well done, has tension, some interesting scenarios, and a number of nice scares, but this kind of movies have been done to death. It's still good to watch on video, and the director deserves credit for trying to improve a genre that has been done to death.
Battlestar Galactica (2004)
Pretentious and ponderous, but ultimately very weak
After watching the whole series, I must say this was a total disappointment, and the ultimate proof about how things are done in Hollywood: good contacts, speaking loud, and making the audience believe they are smarter than they really are because the series it's "intelligent".
From the very beginning there were lots of things that didn't add up, but we let them pass, such as full-election process in a refugee fleet, including public debates and such, as if anyone of the 48.000 survivors could care about politicians after their worlds, friends and family had just been killed. Boomer's sabotages to the fleet didn't make much sense, but they were interesting. Cain's "reimagining" was just a one-dimensional creation, a square warmonger who -as always happens with writers who dislike the military- is ultimately proved wrong in almost everything she does. Things got gradually worse, starting with the one-year jump, and the introduction of the "final five", a concept that most likely was spurned by fans who were asking themselves who were the remaining "models", instead of writers who actually had anything planned for those characters.
While the show garnered critical acclaim, viewers left in droves. Those who remained could be ultimately divided into two groups: the fanatics, for whom anything with the brand "Galactica" (excluding the old show) was God turned into television, and regular viewers who were giving the show the benefit of the doubt, hoping that things could be salvaged at the end with a plausible explanation.
The show's decline, however, became even more pronounced in the last seasons. Instead of fixing the glaring problems of the previous seasons, they introduced new ones, contradicting a lot of stuff, and creating whole story lines -the aforementioned "final five", for example- that in the end turned out to be just a big red herring. Even worse, they committed the worse sin for a show supposedly grounded in reality, even being sci-fi: they resorted to "divine intervention" to explain the whole plot and most of the central story lines. Two characters, one barely seen, suddenly became "angels", while another was turned into a "divine creature", without even the most basic explanation. The whole epilogue for the characters was a disaster, pulling the "emotional strings" while throwing logic out of the window.
To add insult to injury, the show's lack of appeal forced a number of obvious budget cuts, but at the same time, the number of episodes per season was increased from 13 to 20. As a result, we ended up with a sci-fi show with little sci-fi at all, with almost no action to speak of (space or otherwise), and tons of episodes to the top with filler. Of course, that filler was filmed as if it were "relevant" and "dramatic", with hand held cameras and dramatic lighting, no matter if it was just two guys speaking about nothing in a corridor.
As always, a number of fanatics claimed, as they will always claim, that the show was about the characters, about "drama", and never about space battles and such. They are wrong. Battlestar Galactica was sold as a sci-fi drama, not just "drama", and that's the reason it was green lit in the first place. Those who claim that Galactica was always what it turned out to be in the last disastrous seasons should take a look at what it was in the beginning.
In the end, the problem was one person -Ron Moore- with too much power and ego to make "just" a sci-fi series. He had the means, and ultimately proved his detractors right exactly about what they were trying to say from the beginning: that Moore, and Galactica, were all show and no substance, with soap-operish drama, weak actors -with a few exceptions in Olmos, McDonnell and a couple more-. Not only that, but by trying to write himself out of his corner, Moore's writing turned most of the events in the earlier seasons totally unnecessary, ruining the series as a whole.
So farewell, BSG 2004. You went the way of the do-do at the end, and just like the X-Files, managed to survive as long as you could avoid giving answers. I doubt anyone would want to re-watch the series knowing how useless everything turns out to be.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Adventure HAS a name, and it IS Indiana Jones
The first ten minutes of this movie show us why Steven Spielberg is regarded as a great director, and why Lucas, despite some moronic decisions, was able to make a fortune and build an empire upon two franchises. The answer is creativity and talent, two commodities frequently lost in modern cinema, drown in camera work and gimmicks.
Harrison Ford was an excellent decision for the role from the first minute he was chosen. 27 years later he is still showing he was the only choice. He owns the character, and has great fun playing it. It's unbelievable that the guy is 64 years old. The action scenes are plenty of imagination and quite dynamic. Sure, there are parts that work better than others. The movie starts with a bang, slows down after half an hour -more or less-, when the characters arrive to South America to allow some exposition and plot development. But after that, it picks up once again until the end.
Are there bad things? Sure. No movie is perfect. John Hurt is wasted in a role too small for his talents. Karen Allen shines again as Marion, but she, too, has too few scenes. I'd have loved to see a longer scene between her and Indiana. Cate Blanchett is not that compelling a villain, but to be fair, neither were Walter Donovan or Nazi commander Vogel in Last Crusade. The CGI is too obvious in some parts, and I think it could have been avoided completely in a couple of ocasions. The slow middle feels TOO slow, and some parts feel rushed. And the main crystal skull plot -and the ending- may be too far fetched for some viewers, despite being based on a theory as widely known as the legend of the Holy Grail.
However, in the end the general experience is a great one, and it's clear why Indiana Jones has never been surpassed or even equated as an adventure icon, and why those who try are frequently labeled as "Indy-clones". There is only one Indiana Jones, and has just came back from a 19-year hiatus. He is older but in full form, as is Steven Spielberg. By the way, Spielberg shines in small details that other directors would miss. The very last shot of the movie is brilliant, and it's easy to see Mr. Spielberg's hand behind it.
I have read a lot of hate against this movie, but aside from a few valid points -most of which I have addressed already- I was amazed at how inane were some of them. I have read people complaining about the shots of gophers in the movie (three of them, I think), that don't even reach thirty seconds combined. Or criticizing the excellent opening, saying the race at the beginning was "pointless". A "race" that didn't take more than two or three minutes of screen time, and during the opening credits. In sum, there are some valid points in the criticism, but mostly seems to come from people whose real problem is not against anything particular in the movie, but against the idea of THIS movie as a whole. I don't know why. Perhaps they represent the newer generations, who hate traditional film-making or can't stand the idea of an older man being the center of the action. In any case, while some of the criticism is valid, mostly it is not. If you want to have an honest opinion, go watch yourself.
This is probably Indy's last ride with the visage of Harrison Ford, so do yourself a favor, and don't miss the chance of watching this on a big screen. You won't be disappointed.