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Reviews
Transformers (2007)
Does the entertainment outweigh the neural damage?
I'm a person who likes bad movies. I like good movies, too, but I often like the bad ones better. Why is that, silly me? Because they're entertaining. Self-building truck-shaped giant robots from outer space? Searching for some cuboid McGuffin to save the world? Fighting robots, exploding robots, cursing robots, robots urinating motor oil on people? Bring 'em on. But please make sure that I will have a good time with them.
Which is exactly what I didn't have with "Transformers". Maybe I'm getting too old for the kids' stuff, or I need to adjust my Ritalin level. But watching this was very much unlike watching a popcorn movie, it was more like having my brain replaced by popcorn, by people who happily assume that I don't have much of a brain to begin with.
The major problem is not that the movie is so heartbreakingly dumb. (Dumb in a way that makes you slap your head at times). Indeed, some scenes are so inane that the next "Scary Movie" film will have a hard time spoofing them (the scene where the two photos are compared -- indescribable; and the Camaro has its own in-built car wash?). The major problem for me was that it was all so annoying. The action pieces were visually uninterpretable, the robots were moving too fast for my poor visual cortex, the explosions didn't stop before the next ones started. It was simply too much for that 35-year-old brain of mine.
So even as an audiovisual trip, is it even entertaining? At least not for me. There was no story except for the absolute necessary, the bleached-out skeleton of a plot. There were endless military clichés. There were Jon Voight and John Turturro embarrassing themselves. There was no humor except the unintentional sort (the other one didn't work). The action scenes were undramatic and uninvolving. The love story was generic and flat. Worst: There's real and present danger of a sequel.
Looking at the professional reviews on "Rotten Tomatoes", I'm surprised that many critics treat this cinematic bomb so tenderly. Maybe it was too expensive to have an independent press?
Blood Trails (2006)
Strong slasher movie with great lead, underrated here
I didn't expect much from this movie, but "Blood Trails" turned out as a very pleasant surprise. It's a gritty, unpleasant slasher movie, not timid, but effective by suspense rather than splatter. Even though the final confrontation is inevitable, the actual outcome remains unpredictable until (literally!) the last split-second.
Cinematography and editing are beautiful, often relying on extreme close-ups that reflect the tunnel-vision panic of the leading character. Thereby, the movie creates a dense, believable atmosphere. The bicycle theme is an interesting variation, lending both independence and vulnerability to the heroine. The lead actress is probably the strongest asset of the movie: Rebecca Palmer is absolutely great here.
Highly recommended!
Crawlspace (1986)
Beautiful little film, strongly underrated
I saw this one back to back with "Cobra Verde" and, surprisingly, actually liked it better. It's an inexpensive little serial killer film, rather low on violence on the contemporary "Saw" scale, but with excellent camera-work and music (composer Pino Donaggio worked with Brian de Palma and Dario Argento, and cinematographer Sergio Salvati shot some of Lucio Fulci's best movies). Kinski gives a very beautiful performance here: He's in almost every scene, and his characterization of the evil nazi/doctor/landlord is restrained, faceted and balanced, meandering between the light-hearted and ugly. I didn't know that his acting in the mid-eighties still had such quality. If you get a chance, watch director David Schmoeller's (he wrote all the Puppet Master movies and directed the first one) hilarious short movie about his collaboration with Kinski, aptly titled "Please kill Mr. Kinski" (1999). Making the movie must have been hell for the poor guy, but the result is quite rewarding.
Hunting Creatures (2001)
Amateurish and annoying
"Hunting Creatures" is one of several projects by a loose collection of German amateur filmmakers, the most prolific of which is Timo Rose. Here, the directing credits are shared by Andreas Pape and Oliver Kellisch, who all seem loosely associated with one of the most horrible "professional" horror directors around, Olaf Ittenbach. The nicest thing I can say about "Hunting Creatures" is that it's not the worst effort from the group, even though it's still completely worthless.
It is actually difficult to give this film a fair rating. Judging from the technical quality alone, it is puzzling how these "movies" find their way into actual video stores. The problem is just that the filmmakers don't know anything about film-making. The films are shot on (digital?) video without any attempt to set up suitable lighting conditions, so that the camera is blinded every time it is turned towards a window or doorframe. To be fair, the camera angles chosen are often quite nice, but there's just more to camera-work than just pointing the camera in the right direction. No set pieces or props are used; the movies are simply shot in the actors' private homes (or better, their parents' homes) -- and it shows that the zombies are stomping through their own old romper rooms. The acting is abysmal throughout. Obviously, most of the work goes into the splatter and gore effects (which are sometimes, but not this time, provided by Ittenbach).
The overall effect could have been unintentionally funny, but is actually strongly annoying. Don't get me wrong: I sometimes have a lot of fun with amateur productions because I like to see people use their creativity. What keeps annoying me about these present productions is that they are so uncreative. Every image, every storyline, every bit of dialog is lifted from other films just as it is, without the slightest attempt at originality. It's as if these guys think about a scene, decide that "that's how they do it in the real movies", and then miserably fail at attempting the same.
Be warned: There's more like this out there, and worse. You may also want to avoid "Space Wolf", "Kettensägen-Zombies" and the repulsive "Rigor Mortis".
Chain Reaction (2006)
In Uwe Boll's shadow...
When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised about some rather nice camera work. This pleasure lasted exactly until one of the actors started to speak.
This movie proves that basic technical skills do not make good directing: Apart from moving the camera in the right way, a director also has to make decisions concerning things that do or don't work. Ittenbach's movie fails miserably in the attempt to get some acting out of the amateur cast.
I sometimes enjoy amateur actors, but here we have a disastrous collision between the lack of acting skills and the inane things the poor people are supposed to say. The plot revolves around some convicts stranded in a forest hut with a family that obviously lived secluded from civilization for some centuries. When these people speak, they use what writers Ittenbach and Thomas Reitmair assume to be an ancient English dialect. This idea may have looked nice on paper, but the result is absolutely hilarious. Because the writers believe that old English simply consists of attaching a "th" to every verb, everybody is phonetically challenged and has to speak very slowly. When the doctor asks the protagonist girl (horrifically played by Ittenbach's wife Martina) whether she has some hot water, her unwieldy reply is "Aye, haveth I". (For the reader: What do you think is the translation of "no" into old English? Right: "Nay, haveth I not".) Almost as funny as this is the grandiose overacting by Dan van Husen, who tries to play the chief convict. If somebody told him that he is not Anthony Hopkins, would he believe it? Inexplicably, Jürgen Prochnow also has a small part, unfortunately a talking role. He's as terrible as in all of his English speaking roles. I thought his career had hit rock bottom when he appeared in "House of the Dead", but it's strange how things can always get worse.
The only thing that Ittenbach is known to do really well is over-the-top splatter and gore effects. The movie is rather tame in this respect, even compared to Ittenbach's work in Uwe Boll's "BloodRayne" (where the two formed an unholy alliance). The effects did a lot to make this the first of Boll's movies that was comparatively bearable. As a director, however, Olaf Ittenbach is a much more terrible than Boll and would deserve an appropriate level of notoriety.
BloodRayne (2005)
Going from bad to average will cost Boll a living
It is director Uwe Boll's fate that EACH of his productions enters the bottom 100 of this revered website within the first week of screening, which means that a lot of people consider it one of the few worst pictures ever made.
This is actually quite a feat and, considered closely, unlikely to be based on the films' actual merits. Boll's movies are bad, very bad -- but not spectacularly so. Actually, they are quite on par with most straight-to-video films, say, slightly below the average of that population. They don't belong on the big screen, but they are all more or less bearable. I would even give Boll some credit for the visual gimmickry he sometimes uses; at least he tries something, even if it has never worked out so far.
"BloodRayne" (observe the sophisticated capitalization on display in this review!) is better than the previous two movies -- in fact, slightly better than the average straight-to-video fare (this is the appropriate reference frame, and that's how I rated it a 6).
At least half of the rating is due to Olaf Ittenbach's brilliant make-up effects. (By the way, he, not Boll, is the worst director I'm currently aware of, his recent "Chain Reaction" being much worse than any of Boll's movies). The only thing that really offended me about this movie is the extremely poor work by most of the well-known actors involved. While Kristanna Loken merely lacks charisma in the role (she was so great in Terminator 3, maybe she's just a good robot impersonator), Michael Madsen and especially Ben Kingsley seem to be stuck in stage-4 sleep. Kinsley's performance here is actually a shame. Maybe he had a wager going that he could turn out a performance worse than Jeremy Iron's in "Dungeons & Dragons" (a movie much worse than this one) and still get his paycheck.
All in all, maybe it's time that people stop ridiculing Uwe Boll for doing wrong what most directors cannot do right. The joke is getting old. The man will not be around for much longer, anyway: chances are that going from bad to average will eventually cost him his means of subsistence.
Elementarteilchen (2006)
Shares all flaws with the novel, then adds some more
Sometimes the ultimate disappointment is when a movie turns out exactly as expected. My expectation had been that given the ensemble of well-established German movie stars, this adaptation of Michel Houellebeques micro-scandalous "Elements particulaires" would be heavy on the contrived plot but fail to provide the sleaze and grime that was the sole reason to read the original novel. Just how scandalous can a movie become that stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Franka Potente, and Martina Gedeck? You name it.
Not that sleaze could have saved this movie; it surely couldn't save the novel. Both collapse under the weight of a story that is ridiculous in its contrivance. (SPOILERS AHEAD). There are two half-brothers. One is a suicidal sex maniac who fabricates racist pamphlets, masturbates on his pupils' homework essays, and falls in love with a swinger-club co-swinger. Unfortunately, this love of his life first becomes quadroplegic, then commits suicide. The second brother is a scientist disinterested in sex, but he also meets a woman who also lands in hospital (at least they both stay alive). Her former lover became a mass murderer in a satanic sect, by the way; not that it matters. Two more women die, in fact, providing the movie with an acceptable body count.
So that's how much plot is needed to lament how sex spoils our lives. If all this sounds ridiculous, wait to see how the two brothers solve their problems. One lands in a psychiatric ward where he can hallucinate about his deceased lover. You figure he will never write nazi prose or set foot in a swinger club again, so we can be happy for him. The other guy finds out how to clone humans so that sex is no longer needed in the first place; as a result, world peace ensues. I don't make this up.
Houellebecqs novel sort of worked for two reasons. First, because of the sheer exploitation value of the book, the sleaze factor. Second, because of a certain frankness and urgency that Houellebecq brought to this work (his subsequent books became more and more formulaic, right down to the unaccepatable "Platform"). Director/Screenwriter Oskar Roehler grossly underestimated these factors when he tried to adapt this stuff for his all-star cast. As a result, his movie is not only undaring and boring but fundamentally lifeless. The crap that Houellebecq wrote was heartfelt at least; the crap that Roehler shot was just the crap it was.
The four stars I am willing to throw at this movie are all for the adorable Nina Hoss in the role of the brother's hippie mom. All for you, Nina, and don't you share them with the other kids!
Amoklauf (1994)
Worth checking out, but derivative
This little production reveals what Boll was trying to be when he was still trying anything: another Michael Haneke. The movie feels a lot like this directors' works from the Eighties, e.g., "Benny's Video". The most distinguishing feature of Bolls recent movies, the overemployment of annoying visual style elements, is already present here, as the entire finale of the movie is shot from two intercut camera angles, and presented entirely in slow-motion. While I was quite happy with the dual-perspective idea, I could have done without all the slomo.
There must have been a very tight budget, and it shows: I'm pretty sure that the amok victims are all Uwe's buddies from movie school, and the long sequences where you don't see anything except videocopied episodes from a German TV show suggests that they had to try anything just to bring the movie over the rounds. Again, this reminded me a lot of Haneke's style.
In sum, it's surprisingly good for what it is, even though being a derivate of better directors' stuff.
Cursed (2005)
Embarrassing
Even though I know that Craven does not always deliver, watching "Cursed" was a huge letdown for me. The movie fails on all levels. Most obvious is the fact that the film is completely devoid of originality. This is all the more embarrassing because the "werewolf" genre is full of successful attempts at originality: The long list includes "American Werewolf in London" (with its latex/stop motion transformation scene so much more effective and visceral than the lame and undramatic CGI we have here), "Ginger Snaps", "Dog Soldiers", the Nicholson/Pfeiffer vehicle "Wolf", and even "Teen Wolf". All these were more or less entertaining variations of a classical theme. There's no variation in "Cursed"; actually, there is hardly a shred of intelligence visible. How disappointing considering this writer/director team.
For me, the movie even fails on a purely technical level. Camera and direction are completely generic, but this was (sadly) always the case in Wes Craven's movies. The cheap "boo" effects and CGI monsters are simply annoying. Strong central characters, like those in "Scream" and "Nightmare", are absent; let alone any of the supporting cast. And a movie that fails to draw any effect from the miraculous beauty of Christina Ricci must be dumb indeed.
This is the type of fair that has killed the American horror movie. Coming, of all people, from one of its former master directors.
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993)
Worst attempt at biography I have ever seen
When the DVD started with the off-screen voice of Bruce Lee's widow, Linda Lee Catwell, explaining just how she wants her husband to be remembered, I became afraid that she might have exerted some control over the production of "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story". When the opening credits finally started and I saw that the script was based on her own biography of Lee and actually co-written by her, I should have been wiser and spent the evening with something else. But some people never learn. At least, I am now able to warn everybody. Don't ever watch this thing.
And here is why. If you hold political elections, you don't want anyone to manipulate the count. If you want to make a scientific discovery, you try to safeguard against your own prejudices. And if you want to write a biography of a legendary movie and martial arts star, YOU DON'T WANT HIS WIFE TO EXERT CENSORSHIP.
Have I made myself clear? This movie is, in all honesty, the worst attempt at biography that I have ever seen. Its portrayal of Lee is so soft-focused, so white-washed, so sticky-sweet that it had me cringing in my seat.
As judged from this movie, Bruce Lee was the cutest, most amiable, friendly, sensitive... (insert any positive adjective you like) person that ever walked the earth. There is not the slightest hint that this man might have had some inner troubles, some dark sides, some nasty habits, some human faults. Well, he MIGHT have been a nice person, I don't mind that. Very well. But he was probably no saint. (Besides, most saints aren't nice persons, anyway).
I'm no expert for the life of Bruce Lee, but from the documentary material I have seen over the years, I perceived Lee as a slightly arrogant and even unintentionally comic person, e.g., when winding off his fortune-cookie philosophy in TV interviews. A person that was in the focus of public interest to such an extent MUST have been troubled by that. What about the constant strain of being a celebrity? What about the serious illness and overwork that led to his untimely death? Except for a ridiculously allegoric series of nightmare sequences whose visual style is shamelessly lifted from the then-recent "Chinese Ghost Story", the movie obviously avoids so many questions that it evokes totally unnecessary suspicions. Why have the scriptwriters made the bizarre decision to relegate the most interesting part of his life (his filmwork, most people would think) to the last twenty minutes of the movie? His tragic death, with all the questions it raises, is even spared completely.
So, it's badly written. What about the rest? As to the actors, Jason Scott Lee is completely miscast. He does not bear the slightest resemblance to Bruce Lee -- he is baby-faced, utterly incapable of the violent menace Lee could convey in his movies. Needless to say, his attempts at imitating the master's martial arts are also quite lame. Much, much worse is Lauren Holly, who plays Lee's wife. The wife is portrayed as such a cute, wide-eyed little spouse that it gets downright sickening, considered that she is playing the co-scriptwriter. Scriptwriters should never be allowed to write their own biography.
Technically, the movie is pedestrian and completely uninspired. At some points, I tried to predict the next movement direction of the camera and was never wrong.
To conclude, this is brain-washed Hollywood grease of the lowest type, rose-tinted, unhistorical, dishonest, and boring to the extreme. Avoid it at any cost. Rent a Bruce Lee movie instead!
Still 2/10, because at least nobody looked directly into the camera.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
The horror! The horror!
The titleline refers to the fact that I would rather spend the rest of my life in Colonel Kurtz's jungle camp, drinking my own pee every morning, than watch this movie ever again.
START OF SPOILERS:
It's stupid. No, it's beyond stupid. A "supreme race" called the "Psychlos" have conquered earth and are tyrannizing the last few human beings, who have fallen back into stone age culture. One of the humans is revolting. Therefore, Psychlo leader John Travolta (the horror! the horror!) puts him into his learning machine that teaches him all of Psychlo science and technology in a few minutes. (Bulls***, you say - that should make him even more dangerous, right? Wait till I'm finished).
Travolta sends the cavemen to dig for gold in the mines. But instead they get the gold from Fort Knox, claiming they have molten it into bars(!) for the Psychlos' convenience. Instead of digging for gold, the cavemen break into an ancient military depot. After several thousand years, all the equipment is still working, all the aircraft is still fueled up, and the Psychlos are attacked with bombers and jets. Finally, one of the humans beams to their homeworld and blows it up with a nuclear bomb. Now, do you still think this learning machine thing was kind of stupid?
:END OF SPOILERS
Extremely moronic movies from Hollywood are nothing new (the indescribable "LXG" comes to mind), but normally they are not as expensive as "Battlefield Earth". There must have been some gross mismanagement here, because the movie looks decidedly low-budget, with really cheesy CGI effects that are clearly below the standard of TV shows like "Star Trek", let alone state-of-the-art sci-fi cinema. I could guess where all the money actually went, but I don't want to be sued by Scientology, so I won't do it. The cinematography is ridiculous: virtually every scene is shot from a tilted angle with a different color filter, and they keep changing the tilt of the camera from shot to shot. Must be nauseating when watched on a big screen, but perhaps less so than the mercilessly overacting John Travolta. There was an evil star shining on Forrest Whittaker when he agreed to appear in this impertinent mess.
And how stupid must THEY think WE are?
1/10
Friday the 13th (1980)
classical in hindsight
First of all, it's nice to see the good old "Friday the 13th" as IMDb "Movie of the Day".
How good is it really? Hand on heart, I think it's a classic only in hindsight. No matter how bad a movie is, if it is copied often enough to become a cliché, it will end up historically important as the movie that INVENTED the cliché. How else could KISS become a classic rock band?
However, of course it delivers what we all like in a Teeny Horror film. I just doubt that so very much creativity was needed to invent this genre in the first place... Be that as it may, the movie is effectively scary, has a good atmosphere, and a nice shocking twist ending. So, that's what it takes to become a camp classic.
8/10
Stranded (2001)
Very, very boring.
Now, this is a boring movie. Man, is it boring. Of course, I would never object to the basic idea of trading action/sfx for emotional drama and dialogue if only there were some.
Someone here praised the "realism" of this movie. Imagine what it would REALLY be like to be stranded on Mars without enough air supply. First, you would be confined to the claustrophobic world of your capsule or even your spacesuit, trapped with some people you may or may not like. Second, there would be the uncertain prospect of ever being rescued. Third, if you were all drawing straws as to who is to live and who is to die, there would probably be a bit of drama and conflict, wouldn't it?
SPOILER WARNING: Even more boring than the lush character interactions in the face of certain death is the storyline itself. Honestly, I could tell that the astronauts would finally find a monument with alien artifacts and an ample supply of air, and I was absolutely sure of that as soon as I had read the text on the video cover. The only issue left was whether something else of interest might happen, like actual living aliens, some mind-bending psycho-space-trip a la "Mission to Mars" or "Contact", or some essential conflict between the characters. Nope, none of that. Just people wandering around and looking at the stones all the time. Will there ever be a good movie about a Mars mission? As good as "Outland", for example?
P.S.: One minor point, because science fiction has something to do with science. Spaceships in movies have rotating sections to create the illusion of gravity via centrifugal/centripetal forces. To have that illusion, you must be at one of the outer ends of the rotating section. It therefore makes little sense to connect the outer ends to the rest of the ship by thin wires without any kind of tube or tunnel to reach them. Are these astronauts supposed to take a space walk every time they want to enter the gravity zone?
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
total lack of visual taste
George Lucas has come a long way from the original 1977 "Star Wars" (now called "Episode 4" by some people, as if we had to take Lucas' megalomania seriously). "Star Wars" was a wonderful movie, while "The Phantom Menace" is just as awful as its title.
Lucas' directing style is probably lost forever. Remember the brilliant use of montage, music and color codes in "Star Wars"? Except for the trademark editing style, which is still sort of beautiful, it's all gone. Instead of the use of color (black, white and red for the bad guys, earth-tones for the good ones), we are bombarded with kitschy pastel colors like it all was an ad for LSD-flavored chewing gum. Instead of the ground-breaking, fascinating and still mostly convincing special effects, we have cheesy CGI monsters squeezed into every scene, fitting or not. Indeed, the one distinguishing feature of this movie as well as its sequel is the total lack of visual taste.
La vita è bella (1997)
Comedic melodrama in concentration camp? Impossible, obviously.
I was very surprised that this film drew so much critical acclaim. It is noteworthy for trying to view the holocaust from a different angle, but fails miserably in the attempt. I can understand why people liked this film, but I believe these people have kept themselves blissfully ignorant about the reality of the holocaust.
The movie is, roughly, in two parts. The first half is a rather beautiful love story taking place in some world of fantastic realism. It's nicely poetic, but spoiled for me by the frequent appearance of a hyperactive Robin Williams imitator overdosed on speed: unfortunately, the lead actor.
The second half is, obviously, more problematic. After Benigni and his "princessa" have created a model Italian core family with a cute little son, and after a gradual and skillful build-up of the antisemitism theme, the three of them are suddenly deported to a concentration camp. The mother is separated from them, and the father tries to protect his son by telling him that it all is a big game and that the winner will win an actual tank. I do not object to this idea; it's a good premise for a movie.
The problem is the depiction of the concentration camp. The barracks are tidy; everybody has a bunk for himself; the prisoners are reasonable friendly; it's only that there is little to eat and that everybody has to work very hard. There are some references making clear that people are murdered and cremated, so we understand that this is supposed to be a death camp. But the movie painfully avoids really conveying these horrors to the audience. It has to do so, of course. You can't have comedic melodrama between piled-up corpses, people sleeping on top of each other, and sick people left to die without treatment.
There is a reason why almost nobody ever really tried to depict a death camp. (In case you wonder, the camp shown in detail in "Schindler's List" is just an "ordinary" KZ, no actual death camp. In Spielberg's film, Auschwitz is only depicted from narrow angles in subjective perspective, so that you never really see anything; which might be the only appropriate way to show anything at all.) I understand what the filmmakers tried to do here, but what they have accomplished is the belittlement and playing down of the holocaust.
In my view, the film's critical reception only goes to show how little is known today about the atrocities of the Third Reich, and how many people have spared themselves opening their minds and imaginations to what really happened. I grant the movie three stars because I don't doubt the good intentions, but I felt decidedly appalled by it.