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Vvardenfell_Man
Reviews
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Pretty good?
The world is full of terrible holiday musicals, good holiday musicals, and failed holiday hybrid musicals. Most of them are lazy and the ones that come out nowadays tend to be artificial-sounding and miserable affairs. This one does a whole lot of worldbuilding to justify the connection of 2 holidays and character establishment to make us care about the invented Halloween characters. The music is functional, but the styles are varied in the way that supports the story and moves it along while allowing for showcases of the animation department's incredible skill. This is one of the best-animated films of all time. In the age of AI, watching this movie is a reminder of the work that used to be required for any creative work to get off the ground.
Cromwell (1970)
The most boring historical epic I've ever seen
This is the second-worst historical epic I've ever seen. It's boring, it's flat, and it's not really at all an accurate or relevant portrayal of Cromwell. I have never watched a more boring movie about such a violent person. At least Ridley Scott's Napoleon was brash in its obstinate stupidity; this film cloaks Cromwell in the trappings of glory, making him out to be a culture hero and minimizing (if it even bothers to mention) the horrible things done by him and his peers. Not worth watching. I have to fit another 100 characters into this review, but it's not worth wasting the space. Fine. Here. Skip this.
Titanic - La leggenda continua (2000)
Maybe it's better in Italian?
This movie is just awful. It's Cinderella as told by someone who has no respect for fairy tales, Titanic as told by someone who doesn't think human life has value, comedy as conceived by a moron, tragedy as practiced by bad stand-up comics. The musical numbers make me wish I didn't have ears.
When the dog starts rapping at about 10 minutes in, my jaw dropped. Somehow this wasn't the worst part of the movie. This story is so overloaded with characters and failed bits of plot that it really isn't easy to summarize, although in every way it is just Cinderella on the Titanic. It's AWFUL. Don't watch it unless you want to experience a terrible animated musical comedy.
Deliria (1987)
Style=Substance
This movie builds to a fever pitch of claustrophobic insanity and visual intensity. About halfway through, what has been a relatively controlled piece about a bad rehearsal process becomes a film about an escaped mental patient hacking his way through beautiful bodies under highly stylistic lighting.
About halfway though the movie takes a drastic turn which, if you're familiar with the giallo genre, you probably expected. Still, when the change comes, it's not only the sudden commitment to violence on the part of the filmmaker that's shocking: the staging of at least one kill scene makes the other characters complicit in the act of murder as audience members, implicitly incriminating the film's audience, as well, in a shocking interrogation of the role of the viewer in this sort of production.
It veers off the rails in a big and excellent way and ends up being one of the most unique (and also easy to follow) giallos I've ever seen. The unrelenting score, alternating between hectic string sections and blasts of pure synthetic '80s keyboard crunchiness, is strong and effective. The editing is excellent. The mise-en-scene is fantastic. I love this movie and I wish there were more like it.
Subspecies (1991)
Halfway between Twilight and Francis "Megalopolis" Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula
This film made the most of its location. Shooting in Romania gave the production team the option of just filming whatever was happening around them and forced the casting to be bizarre and awkward, which adds to the creepy tone of the movie.
I'll be honest: the second act is so boring that I didn't pay attention to it at all. The climax is one of the best action scenes I've ever encountered in a Full Moon movie--they either really dropped a chandelier on someone or put a lot of budget into one dummy shot. This happens as a woman swings a flaming torch at another lady in a nightgown as a swordfightunfolds almost entirely offscreen. Just when the torch-fight ends and you've stopped worrying about somebody catching on fire, we cut to the swordfight, which looks like it actually involves two guys swinging greatswords (or bastard swords or whatever you call big 2-handed Romanian swords) that are visibly chipping and wearing during the fight. Then one guy climbs up a staircase that the other guy lights on fire by cutting a rope that's holding another torch in a wall-sconce. I was very impressed not only by the detailed fight choreography but also by its effective execution, filming, and editing--it's a very well done sequence.
Almost Invisible (2010)
One of the worst things I've ever seen
It's a cacophonous mess that's ugly to look at and even uglier to think about. The opening scene does nothing to elucidate the plot, but it certainly sets the tone for the movie: ugly and stupid. The women all walk around in swimsuits or underwear the whole time while the men treat them like pieces of meat--I'm not talking about the acting, either; this is one of those terrible exploitation movies where it feels like everybody got coerced or tricked into being there and all the actors look uncomfortable on set. None of the sexuality or violence is presented in a context that makes any sense at all. Do not watch this unless you want to be confused and irritated.
Party Monster (2003)
A lot of very committed acting here
Macaulay Culkin, best known for co-starring with superstar Rich Evans in several RedLetterMedia videos, and Seth Green (best known for his appearance in an X-Files episode) turn in stellar performances here. I dunno, there's just a lot of impressive nuance and dedication here. It's a very gay movie featuring performances by actors who generally aren't associated with that genre, young actors who were best known for their performances as even younger actors, and it works. I could watch these two act like spaced-out imbeciles with delusions of grandeur for...about as long as this movie is. I'm pleasantly surprised (which is enough for me to give it 10 stars).
Teenage Space Vampires (1999)
Vampires or aliens--pick one, please
Classic Full Moon trash. It's like Lifeforce meets Independence Day meets Dazed and Confused. Vampire aliens want to shut off the sun, or something, and it's up to our band of worthless high schoolers who look like they're in their early 30s to stop this nefarious scheme. I'm only giving it 6 stars for audacity. The production quality is exactly what it deserves to be (mediocre) and it doesn't really accomplish anything over the course of the plot. The alien/vampire monsters looked...OK? I dunno. They had decent makeup and costumes, so that's good. This may have been one of the last classic Full Moon movies. I had a hard time finding this because the version I watched was under the title Darkness, for some reason.
Bleed (2002)
Surprisingly Effective Sub-Par Trash
For what is apparently a distributor-mandated cash-grab made by a desperate man to help his failing business survive in a market that was shifting underneath his feat, this is pretty damn good. It's a decent B-slasher in the vein of Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. I honestly enjoyed this more than any of the last 3 Scream films. The Full Moon brand isn't really at its finest here but you get plenty of tits and ass (male ass, specifically) and the writing rises above the level of the acting and budget in a really interesting way. This is a fun way to kill an hour and 20 minutes if you're into this sort of schlock.
Prey of the Chameleon (1992)
"No Country For Young Women"
I was inspired to write this review by an amazing sequence in which we cut to a coyote unearthing a human arm in the desert, followed by a man on horseback coming across the scene...only for the coyote to be absent entirely. No signs of the coyote's presence are anywhere to be found. This is the most narratively expedient animal in the history of cinema. It gets in, does its job (unearthing a body) and gets out very efficiently. The guy on horseback doesn't even have to fire a shot from his pistol (I assume he has one--we're in a state full of chameleons, after all) to scare the pest-predator away from the body.
Whose body is it? I don't know. I don't care, either. Maybe if they'd put some effort into telling the story, that would be different. There's a token plot but it's like Roadhouse meets mid-season 2 Twin Peaks: nothing really happens, but there's a lot of horny barfights.
Honorable Men (2004)
Gross!
-Looks like it was shot for TV in the '70s
-Characters that suck
-Horrible performances
-Man who made a movie just to be around young women that he found attractive
-Lack of plot
-Awful editing
-Intrusive score
-Lets you know the Mary-Sue protagonist goes to church and is therefore a good man (although he's a cop, so, by the movie's logic, we should already understand this implicitly)
This movie has everything! Apparently I still have *checks counter* 321 characters left before I can post this review. What more is there to say, though? I seriously am having a hard time justifying the rest of this review, which needs to have another 133 characters in it. Don't watch this movie. Just avoid it. It's awful.
Insecticidal (2005)
Wonderful Canuxploitation
This movie sucks. It's only enjoyable as a bad movie, a shlockfest of epic proportions. It's 80% T&A, 10% bad CGI and plastic bugs, and 10% bad acting, which adds up to 100% cheese. Nothing can possibly go wrong for you, the astute viewer and consumer of B-movies, if you choose to watch this.
The less said of the plot, the better. It's a vehicle for overwrought Canadian performances in a house where they were all able to run around naked for a few days. Compare this to Infested, another early 2000s bug-horror movie, if you're looking for a good companion piece. Both are totally inexplicable--you'll find yourself wondering why these people agreed to be in both movies, for totally different reasons.
Dragonslayer (1981)
Way better than Krull
For some reason I thought that I'd seen this movie before. I had it mixed up with Braveheart and Reign of Fire--which, now that I've seen it, I think is almost fair, but it also reminds me of Lord of the Rings, Army of Darkness, and David Lynch's Dune at various points, although it anticipated every single one of those movies.
This is almost a perfect movie. I detract one star because of the lack of diversity in the cast and the uniformity of performance. Everyone is white and everyone (excluding our D&D party protagonists, to a certain extent) gives a performance based more on their social role than on their character. Then again, maybe that's the point; this isn't Tolkien or D&D, it's supposed to be a medieval reality in which Christians serve their lords and fight dragons. Still, these characters are hard to tell apart, and that comes down to directorial choices which could have been avoided.
Dirty Tricks (1980)
Zero Stars
I watched this for the famous McNamara brothers and found myself astounded by the terrible production quality, performances, script, and animal handling. Whoever allowed or directed Elliott Gould to feed pizza to a dog should have been blacklisted right away--one can only imagine the gas that the cast and crew must have had to deal with on set after *that* little incident, all for a gag that had a greater impact on the poor animal's digestive tract than it possibly could on the audience. For that alone it deserves 0 stars; the rest of the movie, though, is actually worse and more tasteless than the cardboard-like pizza that our boorish drunken homophobe of an Ivy League professor shares with his dog. Awful, awful movie. The McNamaras shine here, though, thanks to artless ADR of every line of the dialogue that must have been incomprehensible through their Canadian accents. I don't know or care what the actual plot is, and neither should you.
Civil War (2024)
Nothing to see here
I would say "style > substance" but the style is "photo-journalistic realism," and the script is not smart enough to justify the many failures of direction here. Garland chooses the worst possible lens through which to examine the complexities of civil war and modern American political violence. Our neutral observers and audience surrogates see the end of the war, but we (the audience form whom surrogates are necessary) never see the day after the end, nor do we know what caused the conflict; therefore, it's hard to care about the whole thing. Bodies pile up, but the emotions don't land; our protagonist's jaded perspective prevents them from having any weight. There's a lot of heavyhanded (literal) framing of the relationship between our protagonist and her young unwitting ward, which actually makes it less interesting.
This is not an examination of what causes wars. Somehow, it's basically just Nightcrawler, except Nightcrawler managed to say interesting things about journalism without sacrificing style. Funny how that works.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Perfect
This is one of the movies that made me love movies. Daniel Day-Lewis' performance stuns on every viewing, but Paul Dano's has stuck with me for a long time, as well. Hell, every minor character, every extra, feels like a lived-in human being or a husk of something that was once human. The words 'shot composition' and 'cinematography' don't do justice to the captured images here. This is an inspired film from top to bottom.
And the sound! This is one of the great soundtracks and one of the best examples of good sound editing and design. Every squeak and whisper is perfectly constructed. I love this film.
The Lost World (1992)
B-movie trash
It looks like a Jurassic Park ripoff ("Michael Crichton meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!"), and presumably it eventually becomes one. But it takes its sweet time getting there. The first act is BORING, BORING, BORING. It's a bunch of stuffy British people sitting around in board rooms and lecture halls talking about an expedition. Presumably, this is because building interesting sets or shooting on location was prohibitively expensive. It's SO boring--shamelessly, annoyingly dull. John Rhys-Davies is the Nicolas Cage of the 1990s. He commits 100% to every role and you can't stop him. He doesn't care how bad the movie is. He's giving it his all-even when everything else sucks.
Dinotopia (2002)
I would have canceled it, too
This show is not very good. I say this as someone for whom Dinotopia was the first book to introduce the concept of utopia. I remember finding a copy of the book in a library as a child and being enthralled by the artwork, then watching the miniseries (at least once, possibly repeatedly on VHS or as a rerun TV movie on ABC Family or something). The idea of humans and dinosaurs living together in harmony was interesting then and the series hints at a direction that could have kept it from being trite to an adult.
Unfortunately, the abundant unfunny in this series ruins any goodwill built up by the nostalgia glasses. Zipeau (or Zippeau, or as the Freevee subtitles insisted for at least a little while, Zippo) is worse than Jar Jar Binks as far as CGI comic relief aimed at children goes. The acting is...acting. I mean, the must have gotten paid, and they're definitely emoting. No fault to the cast, really--the trite writing, boring shot composition and dated CGI are what bring this down. Just watch Samurai Cop instead.
The Dark Knight (2008)
I wanted to give it a 9, then realized it's actually as good as people make it out to be
Heath Ledger is the thing people remember about this movie, but everything else about it is also perfect. Locations, style, and visual design are all elevated here in a way that made people appreciate the superhero as a cinematic subject like they never had before upon its release. Here is a serious movie about serious people. One of them runs around dressed up like a bat, though. He's still super serious-but he's a bat. And the guy who keeps asking people why they're so serious and attempting to make a joke out of society? He's incredibly serious. It's not afraid to make bold statements about morality and the relationship between action and truth. It's a bold movie and it's a great movie.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Eldest (2024)
Guh?
Tom Bombadil finally makes an appearance in a big-budget Lord of the Rings picture! And...the portrayal is completely wrong. Old Man Willow makes a triumphant return and...does exactly what he did in the deleted scene from Fellowship of the Ring. Literally the exact same thing. Easter eggs abound! And...none of them add anything to the story. Awkward comedy continues! And...it never stops being awkward.
It even seems like they gave up on the trick photography here. I have nothing good to say about this show. Something this expensive shouldn't have been green-lit without a much stronger script and an actually original creative vision.
Edit: I guess I was wrong--it's Old Man Ironwood, not Old Man Willow-not that it matters when they lifted the sequence shot for shot from the extended edition of Fellowship, which is the point I wanted to make. This show makes me angry.
The Beekeeper (2024)
Action schlock like they don't make anymore
I'm astounded by some of the reviews for this film that have been posted on here. Apparently, action heroes need to have John Wick-style backstories with cinematic universes waiting in the wings in order for one-off movies about revenge to be good.
Schlock is a style and tone that is hard to hit. David Ayer seems to have been moving in that direction ever since Fury. Bright was not schlock because it didn't commit fully to a tone. Suicide Squad was not schlock because DC wouldn't let their precious IP be treated with the levity it deserved (the remake, though, not directed by Ayer, approaches schlock territory).
This movie nails schlock. Committed performances that elevate stock characters, commitment to a tone that would be utterly lost if it let up for even a second, dialogue that drives a point (and only one) home while letting the action unfolding onscreen speak for itself--this movie has everything.
This film strips away the things that have made John Wick into a bloated franchise over the past few years while using that franchise's tried and true formula: pit a sympathetic action hero, demonstrably capable of feeling human emotions (or at least an unusually powerful superego), against the inhuman forces of greed, stupidity, and corruption, as well as their corporeal forms.
None of this is to mention the shot composition, editing, and sound, which are all exquisite. Visually, there are strong John Wick influences, with crazy characters having choreographed gunfights and hipster assassins working for a shadowy international organization. It's like a tonal companion to that series. One appreciates the first two Wick films more when one is reminded of the simplicity of action movies in their purest form. This is up there with Cobra for me as far as visually striking variations on themes by Cannon Films go.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)
Totally Unnecessary, Offensively Banal
Since more noteworthy critics will give final word on a season of television months before it airs based entirely on the quality of a 3-episode screening, I don't feel bad judging this show's second season harshly and preemptively. I have watched one episode on the day of its release and am less than impressed.
The Tolkien estate should be ashamed of itself. So should Amazon, but the greatest fault lies with the people who allowed the mammoth corporation to go forward with this abomination. You can pump all the money in the world into making beautiful sets and costumes while hiring the best VFX people you can find, but there's a lot more to storytelling than these basic affectations of worldbuilding.
The best designs are lifted from Peter Jackson's trilogy, which holds up better today than this series will in 20 years' time. Awkward misfirings of comedy that make the Star Wars prequels look like Macbeth ruin every scene involving the Harfoots and Gandalf--and I genuinely pity anyone who hasn't figured out that it's Gandalf by now.
The lush soundscapes of Peter Jackson's trilogies are here replaced by Game of Thrones-style "realistic" sounds accompanied by music that just doesn't meet the task at hand: whoever OK'd Annatar's theme should never be allowed to compose music for film ever again. It's the most boring villain theme ever written. By the time you notice it's playing, the scene is already almost over and you're left wondering why you had to listen to whinnying horses and pulleys instead of an actual song written to accompany the character and actions appearing onscreen. This goes for most of the music. It is basically functional, but it almost feels like temp music in many places.
Bad casting choices and odd dialect coaching have ruined Harfoots and Dwarves in this series. The heavy accents are awful: every word out of every member of these races' mouths sounds like a joke. Dwarves are funny in The Hobbit because it's for children, and Gimli is comic relief in the old Rings trilogy because John Rhys-Davies was able to pull off a difficult balancing act. Maybe I'm just more of an Elf fan (although every single Elf also seems miscast), but these Dwarves do nothing for me.
The absolute waste of money and time on display here should disgust anyone with a sense of taste. Of all the ridiculous things to throw resources at, Amazon chose...this. And the Tolkien estate let them go through with it. It's gross.
The choice to treat key moments from the Legendarium as token plot points is bizarre, as well. We know what's beneath Moria before the Dwarves do, but the show doesn't seem to care about dramatic irony in this part of its plotting: a sharp contrast to the bizarre choice to try and hide Sauron's and Gandalf's identities from the audience for most of season 1. This is fundamentally not how tension works. You have to establish narratively that there is a threat to the Dwarven kingdom, or else all the bad things that keep happening to them just seem like a series of disconnected happenings. The series leans far too much on established lore without paying it the deference due to the most influential fantasy setting of all time.
This is the death of storytelling.
Metamorphosis (1990)
I was only saying "what?" every 2 minutes
Poor editing contributes to the failure of this The Fly ripoff. It's amazing what a bit of Italian studio involvement can do to an American cast and filming location: this is like a giallo gone sideways, with flashes of horrific violence interspersed at seemingly random intervals, punctuating a "mad scientist in lust" story that was done much better in the source material. The reveal that he's been blacking out and going on killing sprees would almost be interesting if it weren't for the fact that we've been seeing him murder a woman in a flashback that is interspersed in segments over the course of several minutes prior to the dialogical "revelation."
Jeff Goldblum's performance is key to making The Fly work. He's a sympathetic character with sex appeal, which is why his relationship with the love interest makes sense. Here, we have an angry-looking milquetoast man with memory problems horning in on a single mom and her kid while he tries to perfect his serum.
Lycan Colony (2006)
Even worse than you expect
This movie is insane. The people involved must have been driven mad by the process of making the "film." Rob Roy is clearly a deeply delusional man. How else could he have cobbled this together without giving up? The sound design is a nightmare. The special effects are terrible.
The lighting, though, is where it really shines. There are numerous day-for-night scenes. I was expecting an indoor day-for-night sequence from having seen reviews of the film, but I wasn't expecting it to come in the first 10 minutes. This is an embarrassing, terrible movie that cannot be believed until you've seen it.
Dungeons & Dragons (2000)
Terrible, terrible, terrible acting (with a few exceptions)
This movie sucks on every level. The special effects look terrible. The props look like they came from Spirit Halloween's clearance section. 90% of the performances are just atrocious.
Jeremy Irons clearly wanted to have a good time and didn't care if he was overacting. It's fun watching someone have that much fun being pure evil. Richard O'Brien has definitely done better work. Worst of the worst goes to Thora Birch (in what may be a precursor to Florence Pugh's costume in Dune Part 2), who simply sucks in this.
Many scenes take place in the outdoors, shot near old castles or cliff faces that serve as backdrops to the action. Then they teleport to a more visually interesting location, where they stop fighting to watch Jeremy Irons admire his dragons. At least they didn't try to go day for night in the climactic action scene, which is primarily set in a bunch of bushes.