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Meathook Massacre 4 (2018)
Inconsistent and terrible in just about every aspect
Oh my, where to start.
First off, this film BARELY constitutes being called a feature film. It's very apparent that the ONLY reason that the multitude of drawn out, single angle, useless dialogue scenes were left in the final cut was because it was needed in order to get over the "feature length" time mark.
Within the first 30-40 minutes of the film, we have only 3 scenes.
1: cold open, (and ironically the only cold graded scene in the entire film, the rest of it is some ridiculous pink hue, which I'll get back to)
2: what feels like 20 Minutes alone of a woman rambling in the middle of a road, hit by a car, and then rambling while dying for 5 more minutes
And then 3: a group of friends sitting around talking for another 10 minutes where literally the only information worth while the audience receives is that one of them is vegan (never comes up again) one of them has never been to vegas (never comes up again) and one of them "used" to hunt (never comes up again).
If the dialogue was clever or even marginally entertaining I could let this go, but it isn't, so I won't. Which leads me to:
Dialogue/writing: One of the most boring and worst written films I've ever seen. I was half expecting it to be revealed to be a cheesy meta narrative halfway through, and BOY was I wrong. This film takes itself
Totally seriously and that makes it terrible to proportions only reached by the likes of The Room. But at least The Room was laughably bad.
This is just bad. Characters are introduced and gone for no reason, random happenings with no context or explanation (from stuff being cut, obviously) and a convoluted plot that can't be followed even though 90% of it is spoon fed to the audience from one character introduced in the last 15 minutes of the film.
Acting: ALMOST as bad as the dialogue. The only actors worth a damn in this thing were Drew Marvick, Mindy Gilkerson, and Mark justice. At least those actors took a god awful script and had fun with it without taking it too seriously. The rest ranged from "meh" to "please stop" not Much to say here other than that because you can only act to a certain degree when you have a terrible script.
Cinematography/coloring
One shot in this entire film was pretty. ONE. The rest were either totally over exposed, color graded to make the Nevada desert PINK, and long takes from one angle with nothing happening but talking. Imagine a scene where a character exits a car and walks to a bar. Sounds fine right? Ok now imagine that scene except 3 MINUTES LONG WITH 5 CUTS.
If you're gonna make that scene THAT long and show an entire walk, at LEAST do it with a super wide shot that shows the expanse of the desert and helps the audience feel the character is small, insignificant, and nervous. Then you have the fact that there are only 4 shots in this film with literally any depth. For how overexposed this film is you'd think that they would've at least kept the Aperture wide open to get some nice DOF shots but NOPE Totally flat images. The film is disgusting and jarring to look at and ignores just about every single basic film making rule. This is elementary crap people, get on it and get a better DOP.
Editing: UGH. I can't fault the editor too much because it's clear that the morons behind the cameras didn't have a hot damn what they were doing, but jumping between gradings like a hot potato makes you seem daft and just as guilty. Deserts aren't pink, and if they're gonna be pink then 1: don't show a beautiful orange B-Roll shot before hand (which was obviously from a B-Roll site or something, def not done by this crew) and 2: KEEP IT CONSISTENT
If your desert shots are going from pink to brown to pink again within 5 minutes there's a freaking problem!
Sound: I don't know why there was even a sound crew Credited. The sound was terrible. An amazon mic and a little 60 dollar zoom gets better audio quality than this. In one shot, the audio is straight up out of sync with one of the actors voices. Another editing problem, either way no excuse.
And finally, the film called "meathook massacre" has TWO deaths caused by a meathook. Unacceptable
#falseadvertising
P.S: foam pieces in a bucket painted red don't look like human meat. Wtf are you doing, come on.
The Immortal Wars (2017)
Great concept, TERRIBLE execution.
I really tried to like this film. I really did. It had a few positives that were shining points, But in the end there were so many blatant missteps that couldn't save it. First, the good: Visuals (encompassing VFX, cinematography, etc); The film was beautiful. That's probably the most positive thing it had going for it. The visual effects were great for what the budget was, the camera work was good, although I feel like shots were thrown in just to look cool rather than visually tell a story, the aesthetic of the world was great. The film was a pleasure to look at.
Sound: the sound design was another high point. The different sounds that powers made was enthralling and reeled you in, The music was beautiful and made sense where it did. Something constantly overlooked in indie film but this one did it right.
Concept: The concept is something I could really be interested in if it was done right. A film that's basically set in the X-men universe with a Mortal Kombat meets hunger games competition? Sign me up!
Now for the bad: Script (dialogue/pacing): By far the most glaring issue right away. This was OBVIOUSLY "adapted" from a comic book, and I use the word "adapted" loosely because it feels like the exposition laced dialogue was just ripped from A comic book and not changed to make it more natural or realistic in spoken word. You can tell the actors were struggling to do what they could. As for pacing the film felt, somehow, dragging and rushed all at once. Way too much time spent on things that weren't necessary, way too little time to focus on actual interesting happenings.
Fight scenes: By far some of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen put to film that wasn't done in a pre teen backyard fighting choreography YouTube video. Every single fight with the exception of the fight between the only human characters was sloppy, painfully executed AND choreographed, stiff as drywall, and consistently interrupted LITERALLY mid-fight (as in in the middle of an attack) to exposit just a little more.
Performances: a few of the lead characters did fine with what they were given but some of the people that I've noticed are constantly used in this directors films just shouldn't be. There is an extreme lack of talent among people that seem to have the most lines which is kind of mind blowing. The fact that easily the best performance of the film is given by a character that has less than 4 lines should give you all you need.
Conclusion: I REALLY hope that the production of this film was just a case of no one having the stones to tell the director that some of this stuff just doesn't work out of fear of getting canned rather than everyone involved just being terrible, but the film has very little high points. It's a slog to get through that makes its relatively short length surprising and I hope to whatever higher power there is that the next film addressed the issues of this one, namely getting someone on board to refine the script and take it out of the comic book panel dialogue it's locked into. If not, at least let it have some entertaining fights that don't look like 5 year olds are the ones designing them.