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greg-gillet
Reviews
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Before you spend your hard-earned cash...
We occasionally use IMDB to judge whether a film is worth watching at our local Odeon. Generally, that works well but a score of 8.9 for this film (currently) is hugely misleading IMHO.
This is clearly a film that polarizes audiences - those who have bought into the Marvel franchise and have watched every previous film (31 apparently) mostly love it; those (like us) who have watched a few here and there seem to be disappointed / puzzled / bored.
For a non-fan there are a couple of major issues: Too many characters and too much back story that we can't remember or never knew. The fights seemed rather perfunctory and, I know it's the fashion these days, but the shortness of each shot (a second? half a second between cuts?) makes them impossible to follow.
One positive reviewer has criticised low scorers saying it's like watching the last 2 minutes of an hour-long drama and expecting to understand it. I think that's unfair. Surely a film should make sense in and of itself - I wasn't charged less to watch this one, so surely I should be able to enjoy it on some level? For the record, we recently went to see Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther and enjoyed them both (particularly the last one).
Which I guess brings us back to where we started... redressing the balance of that crazy 8.9 score. No, this film is NOT better than Apocalypse Now (8.5) or The Terminator (8.0) or Citizen Kane (8.4) or Taxi Driver (8.3) or Raging Bull (8.2)... that's just crazy! My honest advice: If you like Marvel, you'll probably love this; if you're not a big fan, save your money for something else.
Blood Moon (2014)
Great atmosphere and sense of period
I saw this at my local film society (its first public showing in Kent, where it was made). I thought it was pretty good by any standards (and not just "pretty good for a film that only cost £520,000").
If you're expecting state of the art special effects and CGI and an extended gore-fest, you'll be disappointed, but it's highly watchable, engaging, sometimes funny and made me jump more than once!
In a Q+A afterwards, the director and the director of photography admitted they had had the same problem that a lot of creature feature makers have - the creature never looks as convincing on screen as you had hoped (we all remember the rubber-looking shark in Jaws!). As a result, their creature is only briefly on screen but its presence and menace are still felt.
All the actors give a good performance but I'd maybe highlight Shaun Dooley as Calhoun, looking like a slightly younger Russell Crowe, and Corey Johnson as Hank.
I'm not a big horror genre fan myself - if you are, you might find yourself insufficiently scared - but Blood Moon still stands as a well-made indie film. It benefits from having been shot in Laredo, a Western town in the UK recreated by a group of re-enactors - the period detail throughout is much more than skin deep and it's a convincing enough location to have fooled many people into believing it was shot State-side.
It's done pretty well on the festival circuit and, as the first British-made Western since "Carry on Cowboy" in 1965 (reputedly), I think it deserves watching.