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Reviews
War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008)
suckfest
For some sick reason, I liked the War of the Worlds that they wrote. Not so with this movie. The CGI is so-so. The latex monster rooms are pretty terrible, and the acting is quite honestly the worst I've ever seen. That says a lot, since I revel in shitty movies.
Frankly, the only thing about watching this movie that I found enjoyable was the repeated refrain in my mind which said "I could totally do what this company does!" I might actually be wrong about that, but the movie itself sucks, and sucks in a way that I really cannot endorse for anyone even if I do enjoy it's badness.
C. Thomas Howwel, the bad news is that you suck. The good news is that I respect you deeply for sucking the way you do. Keep at it, but maybe focus more on the acting than on the directing.
Deadgirl (2008)
It could be better. I don't know if it could be worse.
If you've found your way to this web page, chances are you intend to watch Deadgirl some time in the near future. In that case, I am sorry... Sorry that I cannot slap you.
The movie deserves one star for it's ability to depict female nudity. If you're watching it for the nudity though... Well, I hope that you'll be seeing someone who means something to you, because there are better skinny movies, often with better plot, dialog, and presentation of the female form.
The acting is nothing special, the dialog is... swear words without much connecting them. The special effects... Well, I guess the blood is reasonably realistic. All around though, there isn't anything driving the movie.
The Strangers (2008)
Pretty good, but...
"So why are you named lucky?" "Oh, my mother was struck by lightning when I was a child, so my dad put my weight and length on a lotto ticket and we won." "Really, wow! Hey, look out behind you!" Most horror movies introduce us to the characters with crap lines like this. The strangers, thankfully, does not sink to this level. Indeed, as far as horror movies go, it's pretty good. Four hours later, I'm still wishing I could lock things up better around here. Good solid scares, and some decent work on the characters. That goes well beyond the usual Hollywood tripe.
But let's not kid ourselves. It's still just a scary throwaway movie, and there are things about it that are done very poorly. Like all scary movies, it divides the world into two groups: good guys and bad guys. It also assigns to these groups a certain set of qualities. One group is for magic super lucky geniuses. The other group is for fumbling hapless morons. In this movie, the good guys happen to be the morons.
Our super genius bad guys are endowed with the ability to artificially produce silence in the ears of their victims, and freeze time in order to do things extra fast without being seen. They can move a hundred feet in the time it takes someone to turn around. They can unlock doors and windows from the outside. They also are very good at destroying phones, and have no fear of firearms.
Our fumbling good guys are cursed with cell phones that cannot hold a charge for more than 15 minutes, cell phones which cannot be turned on while charging, land lines which cut out for no apparent reason radios that do not work. They cannot lock or unlock doors or windows, and they suffer from an inability to shoot anything but their best friend.
So yeah, maybe I would be thinking like a moron if it happened to me, but they make all the cliché horror movie mistakes. There's someone pounding on the door with an axe. Oh, I'd better forget my phone. My girlfriend's in trouble in a scary cabin in the woods. Oh, I'd better park a mile away and leave my phone in the car. Someone just shot a hole through my window, and my best friend's car is totalled. Oh, I'd better park two miles away, and go into the cabin with a stick to silently investigate without ever turning around. Someone's chasing me. Oh, I'd better trip and sprain my ankle. Good, I'm in the barn, I'd better leave the door unlocked in case I want to get out fast. Excuse me, but most people have seen enough horror movies to make a whole different set of mistakes.
So maybe the bad guys are criminal master minds who do this sort of thing all the time, and have been scoping this place out for a long time. Maybe so, but if that's the case, they would know that they could trash the radio, and steal the gun ahead of time, because these people aren't going to look for them until they're in trouble anyway. Even supposing they are criminal masterminds who don't fear guns, and know just the right moment to smash radios... Eh yeah, so it's just a movie.
Death Train (2003)
Irredemably bad, awful, horrible, lousy, no-good, worthless, evil...
No words can describe the utter wrongness of this film. I bought this film for exactly 99 cents, for the simple reason that my father is obsessed with trains. Otherwise, I would have not even touched the cover.
Like all Hollywood train movies, this one suffers from several common failings which even an uncritical eye can perceive. Old style steam locomotives mix with state of the art diesel locomotives. Freight cars get plunked into the middle of a train with passenger cars on either side, flat cars get loaded up in such a way that they will be perfectly organized to film a fight scene on them, the trains change the number, and order of the cars on them so many times that nobody can say for certain which train is which...
The movie also has the common failings of any bad budget movie: Model scenes that look faker than my dad's undecorated model train layout, bad acting, scantily clad women milling about in unrealistic locations, male movie stars that do nothing but stare at scantily clad women in the most obvious possible ways, just in case the viewer didn't notice them. There are also fight scenes that look exactly like grown men reenacting showdown scenes from "The Karate Kid." The acting is stupendously bad. People shake, and drool for no apparent reason. The dialog is as bad as the acting. No, I stand corrected, the dialog worse. I envy the gentleman who saw it with the Spanish voice overs, because they at least did not have to hear how bad the dialog is.
As a matter of fact, the horrible, truly awful, wretched dialog is so bad that it can almost be appreciated for its own merit in the field of "campiness." I believe the first word in the film is a shouted "FUCK!" The other line of dialog that stands out in my mind is "It's a Choo-choo." a statement which is uttered by a thoroughly serious police detective character. Quite possibly the best character in the movie is a drunk Mexican train operator, who spends all of five minutes in the film listening to music while holding a bottle of tequila on his shoulder. He has no lines, and does nothing else but look up in surprise.
The Reckoning (2003)
Bizarre, Stunning
This movie certainly isn't for everybody. It's a dark, rough-hewn art house style movie with virtually zero action. If you're looking for cheap thrills, big battles, and steamy romance, look elsewhere. It's a small budget, small scale medieval movie, without the best of direction. Some scenes seem unnecessary, the pacing is a little off, and the budget rears it's ugly head quite obviously in a few spots, especially near the end.
All told though this movie delivers quite a bang. The actors all give solid performances, with a lot of emotion. The visuals are stunning, with colors that reinforce the mood at every turn. The suspense, and raw emotion of the film has a killing power.
The dialog has several pointed references to modern times, which I found to be delightful. Apparently this is not to everyone's taste though.
Many people are likely to compare this to "The Name of the Rose." The plot and mood have strong similarities, and the medieval realism shines through equally well in both, but "The Reconing" seems to be faster paced, and the actors have a humility that is refreshing.
In my mind, this movie is a real gem, an unpolished beauty. I'm sad for the people that made the movie, because without advertisement, it was sheer luck that I even found it. However, I'm happy for myself that it didn't get that treatment, because it let me buy the movie for cheap, and I definitely got the better end of the bargain.
If you can find it, grab it up! Good medieval movies are hard to come by, and this should be one of the best.
The High Crusade (1994)
Good fun for most of the family
Poul Anderson's book "The High Crusade" is an enormous milestone in the rare genre of historic alien invasions, a true work of fine penmanship, and this movie doesn't hold a candle to it.
In all honesty though, alien invasion movies, and historical realism movies generally require huge budgets to be done "right" by Hollywood standards, and combining the two sounds to me like a movie maker's nightmare. While it would be great to see the original book done justice, the budget needed for an epic battle between knights and aliens isn't likely to be forthcoming.
The movie version of the high crusade sticks with the original premise, but due to the restrictions of a very tight budget, it was necessary to scale everything back. The special effects are sparing, the sets are repetitive, the script is a little worn around the edges, and the actors are, for the most part, not huge names.
All things considered, the movie does especially well for what it has. The slick, smart humor of Poul Anderson is cut out to make room for a lot of silly European humor, but thankfully, it all works great. Certainly, there are not a lot of surprises, but the gist remains funny, and it is the first movie I've seen my boorish father laugh at in over five years, which has to say something.
Also, the movie is pretty clean. The worst language is the repetitive use of "bloody," "bastards," "Hell," and "Devil's." The bloodiest wound in the movie is a bump on the head. Two battle scenes, and a severed leg don't spill a drop though. A certain amount of reproductive humor adds a bit of spice to the movie, but this is done in as tasteful a manner as the matterial can be done.
Certainly, a lot was lost from the book, but the movie that is left makes for several good laughs, and memorable one-liners.
Anchoress (1993)
Not bad... just not good.
A while back, there was a glowing review about this movie, saying that the choice of a soundtrack was brilliant, and every time whoever wrote the review watched the movie, he, or she learned something new.
Well, I'll admit that it does have a sort of addicting pull about it, but I haven't learned anything new really. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I think the real reason is that the movie is not as great as that particular post made it out to be.
I like the film, but mainly, I like it for it's peculiar sexual themes. The acting is pretty good, but without much soundtrack, there's a lot of dead air where you expect something fantastically important to happen... Then the actors do something totally inexplicable, like move a bunch of rocks, or apples, or kiss a statue.
All said, it looks more like a work in progress than a movie, but there's something about that unfinished quality that really catches my attention, and sucks me in, whether I like it or not.
Red Planet (2000)
Fun times...
Top notch actors, and good special effects make this film exciting. The major drawbacks is that the scientific ideas behind it all were developed by Hollywood screen writers, which of course, is bad.
Someone thought it would be a good idea to have living humans land on Mars with an airbag capsule like robotic NASA missions land.
Someone also thought nobody would have a problem believing that somehow the atmosphere on Mars has changed enough that humans can breathe the air.
And someone decided that a "Nematode" was a glassy Martian cockroach that could make all this believable... (Biology tip for Hollywood: Nematodes are a type of worm)
These problems aside, the scenery for Mars is perhaps the most convincing of all Mars movies yet made, and there's a nice little visit to the Sojourner rover, and a scathing insult to Russian technology, which has traditionally suffered from the challenges of Mars.