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Reviews
Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury (2011)
Sarcastic mockumentary, in the style of Garth Merenghi's Darkplace
Poolboy 2 is a sarcastic mockumentary, in the style of Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (cue blood).
The premise is this: a rich, eccentric heir of ten years old gets to write, direct and produce his own movie.
The end result is a hodge-podge affair, littered with obvious gaffes: support crew visible in shots, smoking uncut cigars, camera crew visible in reflections, telephones still ringing after they've been picked up. The whole movie is a joke, which is precisely as it was meant to be (clueless reviewers take note).
While not as smart as Darkplace, it is certainly as silly. The random voice overs (the censors were adamant all references to witchcraft were removed) in particular were often hilarious.
For the people that still don't get it: this is a movie that was made to look bad. In fact it was made to look absolutely terrible _on purpose_. Please don't review this movie with silly comments like 'the acting was awful', of course the acting was awful, it was supposedly directed, written and produced by a 10 year old! This is all obvious to the majority of people with a sense of humour but I will state it here for the few that still don't understand: the terrible editing, the ridiculous plot, the never ending stream of racist vitriol: these were all deliberate.
TLDR; Ridiculous movie based on a ridiculous premise. Lovers of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace will see obvious similarities here and will most likely have a fun time. If you don't like or understand comedy or sarcasm then don't bother. If you are overly sensitive to racist comments, you will also want to give this a miss.
Alien Agent (2007)
A good sci-fi movie, without big Hollywood special effects
Alient Agent sits somewhere between a good B grade and an average A grade movie.
The story goes as follows: An ancient, highly evolved alien race are searching for a new home planet. Being both intelligent and highly evolved they have made a decree not to settle any inhabited planets, which is good for us as Earth is only one of two planets that they have a hope of settling before their race dies out.
Defying the decree, a rebel faction on the alien home planet attempt to invade earth. They send in scouts (via some kind of heavenly projectiles) who have the ability to reanimate human bodies with their life force (once the human has died of course) thus taking over their humanly appearance and conveniently making all the aliens appear as humans for the duration of the movie.
These aliens are stronger than humans and have other neat abilities, like regeneration and psychic awareness, their aim is to build a portal to their own world, enabling them to send in their armies and take over the earth - presumably sending everyone by meteorite is too difficult.
All is not lost! Some good guys get wind of the evil factions plans and send their best agent, the 'lone ranger' named Ryker (Mark Dacascos) to stop them.
All in all the movie is fairly enjoyable. There are a few inconsistencies, but for the most part its fairly well put together. There are plenty of fight scenes, most of them being fun to watch even if slightly predictable. The one notable exception being marred by poor speed editing - director please note: Mark Dacascos is fast enough! Marc Dacascas plays the lone crusader well and his unlikely sidekick Emma Lahana (Julie) did almost too good a job at times, switching demeanors so fast it was hard to keep up.
Its lack of big CGI animations and special effects works in its favor for the most part, the movie seems better for it. In fact some of the worse parts in the movie are when the utterly unconvincing CGI effects are used to heal Ryker (don't worry - there aren't many), I can't help but think it would have been better left to the viewers imagination.
I personally wouldn't buy this movie but it would be a good one to watch on TV or rent, especially for sci-fi fans.