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jjack929
Reviews
Skinamarink (2022)
Finally, a great horror movie for blind people.
Why do I say that? Because blind people would get just as much out of watching this film as those with sight. This is an hour and forty minutes of staring at walls, ceilings, black screens, rugs, toys, and the occasional old cartoon.
The cast is virtually unseen in this movie, and when they appear on screen, it's usually just from the knees down. The sound is so bad you have to watch it with subtitles on just to have a clue of what's being said or what the sounds are.
Nothing happens in this movie. You get some brief shots near the end that suggest something bad happened but the rest can only be inferred, as you hardly see any of the characters, much less anything else. Oh no, they're somehow on the ceiling... this is supposed to be scary? People compared this to Poltergeist? Where is the horror here? It's just voices whispering - and almost unintelligibly if you don't have subtitles on.
I've watched tons of horror movies and this is by far the worst. It's a total waste of time. Forget a 20 minute short, this couldn't fill a 5 minute short. It's empty... it lacks plot, it lacks characters, it lacks tension, scares, or anything of the sort.
Invitation to a Murder (2023)
This couldn't carry Christie's pen.
We watched this the other night. It claims to be an homage to Agatha Christie, but other than the main character reading Agatha Christie books, there's not a lot to suggest as much.
Aside from the main character being borderline prophetic, there's none of the intricate characters, dialogue, clues, hints, or plain old detective work you'd find in a Christie story. Instead, the MC simply looks at people and things and makes instant - and I mean INSTANT leaps to the correct conclusion. But worse than that, the ending just comes completely out of left field, makes very little sense overall, and just serves to be yet another "I knew it all along" moment for the obnoxious lead.
This is a stinker. If you want to watch an Agatha Christie, watch an Agatha Christie - and I mean one made a decade or more ago, not the modern "reimaginings." This is dreck.
Don't Look at the Demon (2022)
Actors and Effects people did well with a weak story.
It's not the worst horror movie I've seen by a long shot, but it just doesn't work. 4/10
This is what happens when you try to make a movie about demon possession based around religious beliefs that don't account for the existence of demons. It just doesn't make sense. You can't have a demon possession without a demon, can you? Well they try to in this movie.
First off, we have a Buddhist monk proclaim, "There is no evil, only ignorance." Wow. I could write a thesis on the stupidity of this statement, but it's unnecessary for this. The movie centers around the spirit of an evil person lingering on and committing more evil. But I guess he's not evil, just ignorant? Nah. The monk's ignorant.
Second, because it's a bait and switch, you have logical disconnects between what's happened in the past and what's happening in the present. If it's a demon, the two can be related; if it's not, and it's just an evil man lingering on, the two being related makes zero sense. Oh, and again, he's not evil, just ignorant! That must be why he can kill and torture people from beyond the grave.
Finally, if you're going to use a non-Judeo-Christian faith to be the basis of your movie, and your plan is to sell it to a Western audience, you need to explain a bit of the belief system the movie is built around. Declaring, "There is no evil, only ignorance" does not sum up Buddhism, and even if it did, it doesn't make any sense in the context of what happens in this movie.
All that is to say nothing of the utter grossness of desiccated stillborn children being used as a focus for evil - oh, sorry, ignorant power.
Honestly some real wasted potential here, because it did some things really well and had some cool concepts. But the story doesn't make sense in the context of the "Buddhist philosophy" it's built around, and it ultimately falls flat (while proving the monk's line utterly false).
Cryptid (2022)
Good buildup, lame climax
The climax of this movie is a major letdown, and makes the sequel bait ending a wet noodle. The buildup is done really well except for a few character-related points, like Max being too whiny and Harriet talking like a guy in his early 20s instead of a woman. She's unnecessarily foul-mouthed and I just found the expressions she used to be... not very woman-like. It's not much of a mystery, she was obviously supposed to out-man the man in the movie, but it didn't work for either. Interesting creature, but didn't get to see enough of it, and like I said... the ending was meh. Wasted potential.
I would've liked to see more focus on the research instead of just "I looked through 75 years of records and found exactly the thing I was looking for." Yeah, because that happens when you search old newspapers at the library. For a two-hour movie, it felt like there was more focus on the characters' unimportant backgrounds than necessary, when that time could've better been used to build up the monster, the legend, and giving us a satisfying climax.
Deadcon (2019)
Has the potential, but is too vague overall.
SPOILER WARNING
This movie has the bones of a good story, something between Asian horror, The Shining, and The Haunting of Hill House. Unfortunately, they left too much to be inferred by the audience in an attempt to be vague and not spell everything out too easily.
"Bobby" is either a ghost or a demon stuck in the hotel room. He contacted Larry through his LinkRabBIT program and convinced (or forced) him to kill children so Bobby would have friends to play with. Long story short, everyone that dies in that room gets stuck there as a ghost. That's what Bobby asked for when he first contacted Larry through the computer.
The better part of this film, really, is showing how pretentious and asinine social media and its stars are, and yet manages to portray one of them as sympathetic. AKAshley's loneliness was the most striking thing in the film. She has 28 million followers and a 24/7 Personal Assistant, but not one real friend.
That's the real horror of the film, not the ghosts or the killings.
Eli (2019)
First 85% was really well done. Then it faceplanted.
The buildup of this movie is really well done. Good semi-slow burn, but once he gets into the "house", it ramps up fast. The problem is that the payoff and explanation come completely out of left field and really don't make a lot of sense. Much like how all the later Paranormal Activities kept looping back to ending up at some house full of witches, the end just let down all the work to get it to that point. A shame, because if the story had proceeded the way we expected, this would've been a solid 8 or 9 as a horror movie. Instead it gets a middling 5; good setup, terrible ending.
The Green Inferno (2013)
I've seen this movie before.
This is very, very similar to a movie from the 80s called "Make Them Die Slowly". Only real difference is where that was about journalists actually looking for evidence of cannibalistic tribes, this was about college protesters getting themselves mixed up with a vicious tribe while protesting a company bulldozing the rainforest.
Overall the story and acting are fine, and the gore is pretty extreme. It doesn't pull many punches, but at the same time, the punches don't all land. If you want "realistic" type horror and a lot of blood and gore, this will do it for you. And again, the story's not bad.
Don't Breathe (2016)
Utter trash
This movie is nothing but a collection of tropes and cliches. There is nothing new here, nothing interested, nothing exciting. It's eye-rollingly predictable, with only one plot point of any interest whatsoever. Teleporting bad guys, people who can shrug off concussions in seconds, and characters willing to kill people but not dogs round out the stupidity.
Oh, and this is not a horror movie. It's a suspense thriller, and barely qualifies as that.
Stop giving Sam Raimi movies good ratings because it's Sam Raimi. This is appallingly bad.
Avatar (2009)
Unbelievable (Long review, one minor "spoiler")
It was hard to believe that two hours and forty minutes had passed by the time this movie ended. This movie takes off right from the get-go, grabs a hold of you and drags you on a spectacular ride that leaves you breathless by the end. You've probably seen a few people say "it's Dances With Wolves on an alien planet," or "the storyline is too archetypal/predictable," but those don't scratch the surface. There's so much going on in this movie, and even the shortest of scenes can carry so much weight if you're paying honest attention to it.
One of my biggest concerns going into this movie was that there would be 45 minutes or more of buildup before you really reached paydirt. There wasn't, and I don't know what it was about the trailers that made me think otherwise. You barely get 10-15 minutes of introduction to the characters before Jake is logged into his Avatar and testing it out. Like you could see in the trailer, he's simply thrilled to have working legs under him again, and Cameron did an absolutely phenomenal job of capturing what might have been a minor fact were this anyone else's film. Just the look on Jake's avatar's face when he starts wiggling his toes is brilliant.
Nothing about this movie is simple; even when a scene appears to have little importance, the way Cameron has brought them all together makes each only a piece of what turns into a beautiful puzzle. The death and burial of an old Na'vi woman whose name is never revealed lasts all of maybe 8-10 seconds, and yet Sam Worthington's voice-over during the part makes it have such a huge impact. It's like the first time you see the creature in Alien: it's only 6 frames but it sticks with you throughout the movie and beyond. And that's the point here: people are going to talk about the visuals and your first instinct will be to think they mean the CGI, but that's not the case. The visuals are stunning in every way imaginable; each small scene is important, every facet of Na'vi life that is shown carries some weight - particularly to Jake - and the amount of work put into their tails, ears, eyes, and the motion-capture used for their facial expressions was worth every penny.
The CGI is beyond phenomenal, and what Cameron has done here is kill any excuse by future movie-makers for having shoddy CGI. It's seamless, and it's hard to tell where live action ends and CGI begins much of the time - in fact, you won't even realize you're going from one to the other even when you go from the Na'vi to the humans and back. Even in those scenes where you have both humans and Na'vi on the screen together or even touching, it's clean and beautiful and only multiplies the effect. I was fortunate to see this movie at the IMAX-3D theatre, and it was worth the extra money: all that talk about birds and insects and whatnot flying through scenes wasn't just talk - it's incredible to behold.
This movie may require the more faint of heart to bring a box of tissues with them. This is not the type of movie where someone dies and the main and supporting characters just go all crazy with rage and become ten times more fierce. Again Cameron has captured the grief surrounding the deaths of friends and loved ones with a deep intensity that is, at times, crushing (some of the scenes still bring tears to my eyes twelve hours later, and I don't cry at movies). Referring back to the scene I mentioned earlier with the burial of the Na'vi woman - it's very intense, powerful stuff, especially considering that the scene is seconds long and she's never named; if you're not getting an emotional jolt out of this movie then you're truly missing out on half of its power.
On the way out of the theatre there were a few people complaining that it was predictable, even though they really liked it; the ultimate point is that Cameron has told a beautiful story, and despite the times when you go "Oh, I know what he's going to do now," it's very easy to become attached to the characters, and care what happens to them. When people die, it hurts; Cameron has established all of the major characters to a point where you don't look at them and think "This guy's cannon fodder." All of them are integral to the story, and even during the epic battle toward the end of the movie, it's hard not to be moved by the casualties of even nameless Na'vi.
Cameron is very proud of this movie and he should be; considering his history of Aliens, Terminator, Terminator2, and Titanic, it's hard to just look at something like this and say it's his best - but I truly feel this is. As much as I loved Aliens (formerly my favorite movie of all time), it did not move me the way Avatar did. I doubt any other movie ever will.
DO NOT wait to see this on DVD or Blue-Ray; get to the theatre and watch this jewel of cinematography. If you can, see it on the IMAX-3D screen. You won't regret it, and I guarantee that.
To parents wondering how children might handle this, the PG-13 rating is mostly due to language and the violence of the epic battle. There's no sex in the movie, though it is mentioned and there is a sort of fade-to-black that's confirmed later on. Last but not least, you do see Na'vi breasts from time to time but it's done tastefully, rarely, and in such a way that it's not throwing it in your face - if you're not looking at the right part of the screen you likely won't even notice.
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Don't let sentimentality override good judgment.
No spoilers here, just some general points. This movie is a poor attempt at recreating something like The Evil Dead, but if the fact that I laughed through this entire flick tells you anything, it should be that it's not a horror movie. Not by a longshot. It's more like a disgusting comedy, with a lot of things that are so badly done that they make you laugh instead of scaring you, and a lot of really gross stuff thrown in to try to make you stop laughing.
The movie didn't really look interesting from the advertisements but I gave it a chance because it's Sam Raimi. In terms of quality, think less "Spider-Man" and more "Evil Dead 2" with a bigger budget. And then even if you liked The Evil Dead 2, think of this as an even less-scary version of the same basic idea. (To be fair, I did enjoy TED and TED2, and particularly TED3: Army of Darkness, but they weren't very scary unless maybe you were 12 when you saw them.) Then again, any time they refer to a movie as having a "cult following" it usually means it sucked but some people liked it anyway.
Compounding the facts that this movie wasn't scary, overly interesting, or particularly well-done is the fact that at its root, it's an 1:39 Mac commercial. Yes, it stars Justin Long, the infamous "Hello, I'm a Mac" tool who already owns your television for a good portion of the day by virtue of his employer's bloated advertising budget. The man should stick to Mac commercials because his acting is appallingly bad, so much so that my wife said he could easily be Keanu Reeves' son. Everyone in the movie has an iphone, and uses a Mac, because Macs are great computers. Oh wait, no, it's because Justin Long works for Apple, and Apple blows ridiculous amounts of money on "subliminal" advertising. Say, how come those "I'm a Mac" commercials never mention that Apple would've gone out of business if PC, er, Bill Gates hadn't bailed them out? Ooops.
Back to the movie - overall the characters were very caricature-ish, hardly believable, the story was weak, the acting was bad, it wasn't scary, and the special effects - well, they were Sam Raimi-ish, if that means anything to you; again, think Evil Dead 2 with a bigger budget. All in all, a total failure of a movie, and don't let the people who are still pining over The Evil Dead and its sequel convince you otherwise. This movie is BAD.
The Devil's Tomb (2009)
Insultingly Bad
This movie is so bad it's insulting, doubly so because of the cast it has. It wins the waste-of-film decathlon, from a horrible plot to terrible dialogue to cliché acting and plot devices to "action scenes" that are just baffling.
First off, whoever wrote this movie is either a pseudo-Christian or they're not a Christian at all, and rather than do anything remotely like researching the topic of their script, they just kind of assumed everything. This movie lost me from the moment it was "revealed" that the first crazy guy they ran into was "quoting Scripture....Old Testament...Hebrews 9:22." Hebrews is in the Old Testament, huh? Since when? It just gets progressively worse from there. The person writing this knows nothing about Christian mythology or the angelic conflict. They just assume things:
1. "Nephilim are fallen angels" - incorrect. There are no views of the term which say they were the fallen angels, the closest thing to it is the belief that they were the children of angels and men (Gen 6:1-4), whose souls became demons after they were killed.
2. Apparently, angels fell to the earth 2000 years ago - nope, no angels were busy falling to the earth when Christ walked it. The fall happened LONG before human history began. Sheesh, even Milton knew that.
3. God imprisoned angels in ice under remote parts of Iraq where He didn't foresee Americans digging for WMDs - oh this is comical. Gotta love it when God doesn't foresee something happening. The demons are imprisoned in the Abyss, the entrance to which was said to be beneath the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - not just under the sand in Iraq.
And on and on it goes. If you know anything about Christianity you'll be fuming by the end of this turd of a movie. Makes me wonder how they got Cuba Gooding jr. to do this film; Ron Perlman doesn't surprise me so much because he's a little like Samuel L. Jackson and will do just about any film presented to him.
Apart from the glaring Christian mythology mixups, there's also the fact that this movie is one bad cliché after another. They're told the complex collapsed because of seismic activity, yet when they go inside, no one is alarmed at the fact that not one thing is out of place. Usually when there's an earthquake, the place settings at the tables and all the stuff on the shelves won't be in perfect order afterwards. People who have abortions shouldn't wander off alone looking for their aborted fetus when they hear a girl calling "Mommy" (not once, but twice). The action scenes were pathetic, the dialogue was vomitous, and the entire movie was punctuated by some sort of memory Cuba's character kept having that had almost nothing to do with the story itself.
Do yourself a favor and skip this movie at all costs. About the only thing it managed to do well was be disgusting. It's that bad - and I gave Delgo a good review, for reference's sake.
By the way, to the editor who reads this before posting - your spellchecker doesn't know how to spell DIALOGUE.
Delgo (2008)
Enjoyable if you remember it's a kids' movie.
The real awful thing about this movie is that it was barely (if even) advertised, which is the only real reason I can see for it having bombed in the theatres. If you keep in mind that this is a kids' movie, you'll enjoy it; if you go in expecting a complicated plot, lots of graphic violence, swearing, or whatever else, you'll think it was lame.
The story is simple and typical of adventure movies for kids, but what did you expect? It's got a superb cast of voices, the graphics style is fresh and innovative, and perhaps with the exception of the comic relief character Filo, the characters are likable (Filo goes way beyond overboard, but again, he's there to keep kids watching and laughing). The animation is well done, only getting weird in bits where they seemed to be trying to make comic-relief characters funnier - which was obviously done to keep the attention of its younger audience. Finally, the world it's set in is beautiful, making one wish the movie were perhaps longer and more in-depth, but again, it's a kids' movie.
The people writing reviews trashing this movie have serious issues. I imagine the majority of them will find what they are looking for in James Cameron's "Avatar" when that gets released. But if you're looking for something to show your kids, or because you want to see something fantasy-adventurish, give this a try. As long as you keep the title of this review in mind, you'll enjoy it. It's not terrible by a long shot.
The only thing spoilerish that I will write in this review is that a few characters do die in this movie, so the PG-rating is appropriate.