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Reviews
Santos (2007)
One of the worst Mexican movies all time
Harmless fun that should be commended for its untrammeled imagination and interesting panoply of ideas, cheaply implemented, that don't quite fulfill their potential but entertain you along their way for their sense of invention.
The fire scene at start of film is... embarrassingly shot and edited. But this may well, nay, hopefully, be the directors intention. Haphazard and as cheesy as any sequence shot on a set not on a gimbal, it's either a masterful nod to low budget invention or an object lesson in lazy film-making. The mix-and-match-in-Post attitude to VFX indicates, again another run at the Is-It-BMovie-Masterpiece-Or-Isn't-It fence, either a self-referential commentary on how bad some cheap, generic suite effects can be, or it's the work of some graduates mucking about in Strata3D.
Before they pass a current through this fence I'm sitting on, I'll say there are a lot worse green screen 3-D films out there. A lot. Spy Kids 3-D and Sharkboy and Lavagirl anyone?
Shorts (2009)
Shorts (2009)
Shorts is another of Robert Rodriguez's kid's films. It operates with a slim premise - kids find a magical stone that allows their wishes to come true. There are a great many films and stories that have been based around the granting of wishes and the unforeseen consequences of them coming true or what happens when the wisher gets what they wish for a little too literally. Shorts does nothing particularly innovative with the concept. The premise is largely a set-up to allow Robert Rodriguez to have fun - as with many children's films, the appeal is to the idea of fun and chaos unleashed, wreaking havoc upon the adult world and then everything being safely put back in the box and the status quo restored at the end. The film also ends with the cliched moral that humanity is too irresponsible to be able to handle powers such as these.
Jimmy Bennett wishes up a booger monster in Shorts (2009)
Jimmy Bennett wishes up a booger monster
While on a script level Shorts is unremarkable, all the fun comes in Robert Rodriguez's on screen antics. The fun of the film is the same one that infects the first two Spy Kids films and to a lesser extent Red Eye or Sharkboy and Lavagirl for the appealingly absurd. Be it images of two kids (Campbell Westmoreland and Zoe Webb) engaged in a staring competition that continues throughout most of the film; Jolie Vanier demonstrating the capacity to eat with her feet after being waylaid with broken arms; Trevor Gagnon spouting a telephone out of his head after malapropistically wishing for 'telephone-esis'; a talking baby that is the most intelligent person in the film (voiced by Rodriguez's wife Elizabeth Avellan); the sight of Trevor Gagnon and his brothers being pursued by crocodiles that have wished that they could walk bipedally (this is a film where it is perfectly acceptable for a kid to offer up the excuse that a crocodile ate his homework and it not be out of place); a monster that is a giant booger come to life, which Jake Short drives away by picking his nose and threatening to eat its kin; and a collection of mischievous miniature UFOs that befriend Jimmy Bennett, which have clearly been modelled on the UFOs in Batteries Not Included (1987) and even Disney's Cat from Outer Space (1978).
Shorts is a fun film. It is not groundbreaking children's entertainment, or even a work where Robert Rodriguez seems to be trying to set the world alight. However, the visual gags are fun. Rodriguez ropes in cameos from well-known faces including William H. Macy, James Spader, Leslie Mann and Jon Cryer. The children all play capably, with the film largely being stolen by a stony-faced Jolie Vanier who could almost be a clone sister of Christina Ricci around the period of the The Addams Family (1991) and sequel.
Robert Rodriguez's other films of genre interest are the vampire/getaway thriller From Dusk Till Dawn (1996); the witty teen body snatchers film The Faculty (1998); the juvenile spy adventure Spy Kids (2001) and sequels Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002), Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003) and Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011); the graphic novel adaptation/film noir pastiche Sin City (2005) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014); the children's film The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005); the zombie film Planet Terror (2007), half of the Quentin Tarantino collaboration Grindhouse (2007); Machete Kills (2013), a sequel to his earlier Mexican-themed action film that frequently enters into science-fiction territory; the manga adaptation Alita: Battle Angel (2019); and the kid superheroes film We Can Be Heroes (2020). Rodriguez has also produced From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999), From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (2000) and Predators (2010), as well as developed the tv series From Dusk Till Dawn (2014-6).