Tag Archive for 'Gore'

Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Published on May 24, 2010 in Review. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

This movie was just sad, and quite possibly the worst movie Michael Bay has ever had his name attached to. Yes, okay Pearl Harbour sucked. This one just sucked out loud. Amidst corny jokes and a myriad of references to the original so blatant that it actually slowed the progression of the movie, it really wasn’t worth anyone’s time. Sure it got some screams from the ladies in the audience, but that isn’t really an accomplished feat.

What I liked:

In all honesty, the thing I liked best about this movie was that it had the new Old Spice commercial showing in advance of it appearing in TV. It literally had everyone in the theatre laughing their asses off, and considering everyone was in there to see a horror movie it was literally a seating arrangement of guy next to girl in every seat. I could have walked out at that point and it would have been the $11 well spent.

Freddy Krueger is virtually the only bad guy in mainstream horror films that either A) isn’t a vampire/werewolf/tentacle monster, or B) wasn’t once-upon-a-time a good guy. He’s the only bad guy you enjoy seeing die.

What I disliked:

Aside from a few elements that were okay, a bit more brevity in the story than the original, I disliked it all. The only way I could have had more corn and cheese in this movie would have been if I’d picked up a bag of white cheddar popcorn. The unadulterated campness was an injustice to all things good and camp. Really, I wholly disagree with the rating agencies for film, but I would fully back an organization to limit the quantity of campness that can be placed in a movie – because, “won’t somebody please think of the children!”

Overall: 5/10

I likely wouldn’t have done anything more productive with my time, but I can list a lot of things that would have been more worth my time. However, I did enjoy laughing my ass off at various parts of the movie that were clearly intended to be scary, and by the sounds of it the majority of the men in the audience we’re right there with me.

Judgement: Free on TV, anything more is an insult to the cash in your wallet.

Review: Kick Ass

Published on May 16, 2010 in Review. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Not only seeing this movie, but finding the time to write this review has been a difficult task. It took almost two weeks for us to actually get to go see Kick Ass, but once we had our pet hedgehog managed to escape. No one, nowhere had pre-informed us that hedgehogs are escape artists, had we known we would have probably kept with the original idea for his name of Harry, instead we have Henry, apparently Houdini reincarnate.

We also had a fun visit from my wife’s cousin, and spent this weekend attending another one of her cousins weddings, all amongst a regular schedule that doesn’t usually include time for review writing. We also saw the Nightmare on Elm Street during this time, which will be receiving a dutifully short review (for better or worse), and I will be keeping this review as succinct as possible. Anyway, onto the movie.

What I liked:

Well pretty much everything. Matthew Vaughn is one of my favorite directors and despite a very short directing list, I’m anticipating his future works (another by the writer of the Kick Ass and Wanted comics). He has a great ability to make scripts Hollywood-acceptable, without making the content Hollywood. An eleven-year-old girl kills, maims and dismembers people and people showed greater concern over her characters potty mouth.

I’m sorry, I’d have more problem with my children being mass murderers before hitting pubity than hearing them use ‘cunt’ in an insult. Perhaps my moral values are off from society, but I generally rate vulgarity below violence on the ranking of character vices to avoid. I would have thought the religious right would be with me on this, Blasphemy is not as big a sin as Murder, and vulgarity isn’t explicitly a sin in and of itself. It’s also worth noting the 3rd commandment isn’t a proclivity against swearing as in vulgarity, but against oath swearing under the name of the lord.

The action scenes were awesome, especially Hit Girl’s main scene. The choreography was great, and the first-person view through her night-vision goggles is possibly the only fan-play to FPS gamers that was executed in a good way, usually any first-person perspective in a film is horrific even when it’s not done artistically as fan-play.

What I disliked:

Was honestly virtually nothing. I would have preferred Mark Millar’s ending to the story, however that ending isn’t well suited to film. I can understand why Vaughn would use a more commercial ending, after all he does need to earn a living and he’s selling to an American market, not the British market where unfortunate endings are more accepted.

My other problem with it was that the flow of the film died a little bit with the sequel setup, which I know was in the original material, but could have really been cut out for the film. Although, story wise, I can understand the inclusion because it’s an illustrating point that’s often discussed in comic works that the existence of Super Heroes/Villains will cause need for the rise of the other.

Overall: 9/10

This is one of the greatest movies I’ll see all year, and I don’t even need to know what else is coming out to claim this. However, it certainly isn’t going to be the greatest movie I’ll see this decade, although I don’t preclude Vaughn taking that title.

Judgement: Buy it, rent it, watch it in theaters, whichever you choose, it’ll be worth it.

Review: Repo Men

Published on April 2, 2010 in Review. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This was a strange one, not because of the whole sci-fi artificial organ repossession deal, which I can buy into. This was strange because of a random mixture of sex, gore and an odd twist for the end. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker made this an interesting action movie, but it was really little more than a good action movie.

What I liked (caveat edition):

Law and Whitaker made this fun, and funny, to watch. They played their parts well and were passable as life-long friends, which is what made the twist at the end believable – not worthwhile, just believable.

The story overall was good, however it seemed like there was a lot of avenues the story could have gone down that would have been potentially better, but didn’t. The story kept hitting intersections, but it never seemed apparent why it never took a left or a right. It had a plot similar to ‘The Island’ with Ewan McGregor, however it had neither Ewan McGregor nor a meaningful ending, just a bizarre twist that left me wondering why I’d bothered to sit through the last forty-minutes of action.

The action scenes were a Matrix part 2/3 affair with choreography spewing from every knife hole, which consumed a lot of time that could have been used for either more comedy or more story.

What I disliked (unfortunately without caveats):

A hallmark of a bad writer is the reliance on a Deus Ex Machina to resolve a plot problem. We’re not talking Lord of the Flies usage where the entire novel revolves around them trying to get rescued and right at the crucial time they do, I don’t have a problem with that – if anything it’s less of a plot twist because it’s now frequently expected and can in fact be a rewarding end. No, I’m talking this is a War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise movie) ending where there’s no mention of disease and suddenly all the aliens die from influenza like they’re a bunch of Red Indians dragged into a Pox House, it was sheer irrelevance. Aside from a pre-mention or two of the literal ‘machina’ the twist comes out of nowhere.

I suppose the writer didn’t want a happy ending to the movie, which I can give kudos for but his form of a tragic ending was as irrelevant to the story of the movie as if the movie Bambi had ended with the faun taking a shell of buckshot to the chest. As many can probably assume, the twist was so horrendous that I’m actually taking personal offence to it because not only I could have done better, but anyone reading this could have done better and a monkey hammering away gibberish on a typewriter would have produced a more sensible ending.

Another thing that bugged me was the random sex scenes that appeared to have been contrived solely for the purpose of upping the rating. Yes we get it the bible thumping rednecks at the MPAA can’t stand to see sex and violence in the same movie let alone the same scene, and a sure fire way to get the highest rating is to put sex and violence in the same scene. Of course instead of killing someone and harvesting their organs while they’re rolling around with a hooker in the sack to offend the MPAA, the writer and director for Repo Men decided it would be excellent to have the main characters have a sadomasochistic sex scene while they cut each other open for no apparent reason other than one of the many plot adventures of “well we can’t think of anything else” that this movie frequently took.

The plot is akin to The Lord of the Rings without the ring, they just travel to Mordor to say “fuck you viewer!” It’s good until you realize Frodo left the ring at home because he just wanted some alone time with Sam in a scary place to see if the whole fear-of-death aspect would help get them to share a sleeping bag like it seems to every woman in any Hollywood movie.

Overall: 6/10

This is my lowest review score so far for two reasons. One is because I usually can tell if a movie is going to suck out loud, and this one didn’t suck out loud per se, it just sucks in hindsight. The other reason is that while it was an entertaining romp with multiple action scenes that were enjoying to watch and Whitaker’s believability is the only reason this didn’t get a 4/10 for pissing me off.

A review is supposed to be impartial, and I am. I don’t judge on film makers past works, their reputation or anything I judge a movie solely on its merits and I believe I’d have been less annoyed if you’d have strung every pun against the British from every Simpson’s and Family Guy episode together – in fact I can see myself giving it a far higher review than this movie. Standing on its own merits, if they’d have followed their non-sense policy of ignoring all the crossroads available to them in plot development and followed it to its logical conclusion it would have probably hit around a 7.5/10, but after skipping many logical plot alternatives they decide to take a completely illogical plot twist at the end in a Douche Ex Machina move by the writer and director.

If I can recommend anything to anyone on this movie is that it likely isn’t worth the price to rent it from blockbuster, and probably isn’t worth wasting one of your Netflix discs on when you could get an actual good movie.

Judgement: Wait till it hits TV or a movie channel.

Review: District 9

Published on February 10, 2010 in Review. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This was another sort of sci-fi movie. With a severe lack of clichés and filled with new and original ideas, it was extremely difficult to dislike this movie. It was action packed, it had a great story and, quite necessarily, had great animation.

Here’s what I liked:

The interviews in the beginning provided immense amounts of story, while only being a minor drain on the initial pacing. Midway through the interviews we start getting a lot of action and hints at the story. When the interviews end, the action really begins.

There was an unexpected third party in this movie that added immense amounts of action; the gangs. As the story goes Nigerian gangs moved into District 9 to get protection from the police, it became a sort of free-zone as only MNU could enter and by the time the movie happens the gangs were powerful. However they’ve spent much of their time acquiring alien weaponry, which is biologically encrypted to the aliens (like the Ancient technology in the Stargate series). So we don’t venture into spoiler land, we’ll end that there. Simply put, the story was great.

Special effects were simply amazing, but then for a mix of Peter Jackson, and Neill Blomkamp who worked for almost a decade in 3D effects (including Stargate and Smallville), this isn’t really surprising. The ‘prawns’ were perfectly made, but what really sold them was the uniqueness of everyone we saw.

As a credit to Neill Blomkamp, I wasn’t expecting to feel empathy and sympathy for the aliens from the beginning, but he sure managed it. I can’t say much without spoiling, however the ending was quite touching and made a great setup for a sequel.

What I disliked:

Not much honestly, the worst part in the whole movie was the slow opening. However, it was necessary. This movie wouldn’t have worked in the ‘Alien Invasion’ that didn’t happen when over a million starving aliens were transported to District 9. The fast-forwarded story given during the interviews was everything essential to the story that made this $30 million piece one of the best movies of last year.

Overall: 9/10

I would genuinely recommend this movie to anyone. It would have been nice to see a bit better pacing in the first 15-minutes, but virtually every Hollywood movie can butcher the first half-hour with boredom, so I’d say Blomkamp ended up ahead of the curve on that front.

This seriously isn’t a movie for pre-teens, but the R-rating given by the US is wholly laughable. It holds important messages in it that 13-16 year olds should be getting exposed to. However when the MPAA rated Billy Elliot (about a boy doing ballet) an R, I hope most American parents started ignoring the ratings and judged the films by their own criteria for their children.

With greatness across the board from the acting to the visuals, this is one everyone should watch. With an anti-apartheid message behind it that isn’t thrown in your face, it’s a good movie for a family with teens.

Judgement: Buy it.

Game Review: Borderlands

Published on January 26, 2010 in Review. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I have hard feelings on this game, because I personally liked it very much, however despite being a great game and fun to play, it pissed me off beyond acceptability.

Here’s what I liked:

The game was fun to play. The graphics had a cartoonized edge that helped with the humour in the game. The non-serious environment really made it a delight to play the game, despite its flaws.

However, this is a game exclusively about its weapons. Most FPS games have, possibly, a dozen weapons, maybe you’ll get a thirty or so and a handful of mods thrown in if you’re lucky. The last I heard, Borderlands has over 17 million unique weapons, and likely counting with DLC. My favourite pistol in the game, for instance, managed a quad-shot. It may sound somewhat pointless to some that the game features so many weapons, or why people would care. However, it’s sort of like Pokemon, where the last iteration I played (Diamond) had almost five-hundred.

Now what I disliked:

I’m a man who when he says no, he means no. Borderlands however has no ability to understand the ‘no’ button included in its mission selection menus. When you get prompted with a new story mission, you have the option of choosing to take it or refusing, however if you refuse it you’re given the mission anyway. Not only is this frustrating, but it also introduces all the mission orientated bad guys to the level, most of which are way overpowered.

The games inability to recognize no only enhances another problem, which is that every boss is wholly overpowered. By the time side missions are introduced you’re fighting tooth and nail to win a fight. One mission I had to climb a rock where the enemy couldn’t reach me, jump up and down so their snipers couldn’t target me and pick them off. I was a sniper-orientated character, with the best sniper available and a damage bonus and I had to hit my opponents with several head shots to kill.

This wouldn’t have been such a problem if you could say no to the story and take some of the side missions. However you can’t, you have the choice of superpowered story bad guys running amok, or story bad guys and side-mission bad guys.

It seriously hurts the games experience when you can’t beat a single mission without retrying it a half-dozen times to whittle down the enemies, because thankfully most of your opponents don’t respawn. Most.

Overall: 7/10

This game had major potential, and as an avid gamer I can play it. However, most people won’t be able to play this game past the 10th mission without hitting the frustration wall. I’m a Strategy and RPG fan, the frustration wall is usually so far behind me when playing a game that I’ve ceased noticing it. However, I can’t in all good faith recommend a game that’s bat-shit crazy and takes no’s as yes’ so it can pit you against demonic bosses with ridiculous health, shields and a superior weapon. It also seriously doesn’t help that the grenades aren’t particularly useful compared to other games.

The good can outweigh the bad, however when you have so many noticeable flaws it might be worth reconsidering some parts. I’m unsure if Borderlands had some publisher pressure to release or what, but someone dropped the ball and released a game with great potential marred by so many flaws.

Judgement: Rent it, if you must.

Review: Daybreakers

Published on January 22, 2010 in Review. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I went into this movie with some hesitation. Vampire movies have been hitting heights recently, and the literature market is being flooded with vampiric effluence, so it’s really only a short time before a flood of poorly made vampire movies flood the market. Having seen the trailers, I saw that clichés were abounding.

I was pleasantly surprised that I actually enjoyed this movie, here’s why:

Horror movies are inevitably funny, usually due to their low budgets and the fact they usually take themselves overly serious certainly doesn’t help. Daybreakers feels like it was doomed to this track, however the Spierig brothers appear to have realized somewhere along the way that their script for a serious vampire-sci-fi movie (yes, a very bad combination to begin with) was hilarious. All credit must go to Willem Dafoe who made this movie entertaining. He arrives roughly halfway through, and the seriousness slowly converts to humour, just in time for most of the actual action.

Surprisingly the duality in the picture works well. The seriousness in the beginning aids in making the scenes jumpy and tense, while the relaxed-humour towards the end makes the inevitable gore festival of an 18A a laugh-fest.

Here are the reasons why I didn’t like the movie:

Clichés abounded throughout, and to name a few: No reflections in mirrors, seriously? Sadly yes. Vampires set on fire in sunlight, but I’ll forgive this one as it is actually used for an interesting and unique plot point. Vampires explode when they die, but apparently not when they burn to death.

The ending isn’t a cliff hanger, it isn’t even an ending. Nothing is resolved, there’s no feel of accomplishment for watching through an epic-adventure. I suppose this is to leave it open for a sequel, however it could have been done much better. It was a very ungratifying end.

Overall: 7/10

For fans of Willem Dafoe or comedy-horrors, this movie is worth watching. For the rest of the general public, it certainly isn’t worth the ticket price in the theatres. If you like seeing things on the big screen, perhaps look to see if your local theatre has a slow-day deal, like popcorn and drink included in the ticket price as at least you’re getting a little more for your money.

This is definitely a movie to rent, it’s an enjoyable watch and doesn’t feel like you wasted an unrecoverable 98 minutes. The ending is a bit weak, but the rest of the movie is definitely strong, and doesn’t suffer from a killer slow-period in the middle, in fact the movie as a whole is very well paced.

Judgement: Rent it

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