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Corbin Nash (2018)
Difficult to watch
It was difficult to watch this film. There are very few redeeming qualities to this movie. The acting is often cringeworthy. The editing jumpy. The music is too loud and takes over a few scenes. The characters feel thin. Their motivations shallow. The plot nonsensical.
The evil duo of Vampire drag queen and tough guy is perhaps the worst area in the movie. Corey Feldman, as the drag queen, is over acted, and the tough guy is under acted. I wanted to see them perish just so I didn't have to sit through their scenes anymore.
Corbin Nash has a single emotion; anger. He is angry throughout the entire movie without enough backstory for us to feel for him. His main motivation, avenging his parents, disappears for stretches at a time, as he dabbles in side quests. He gets angry and avenges characters who had very little to do with the plot.
The entire Vampire fight club midsection of the film feels like a whole new movie. One with less sense than rest of the film. The pitch black setting of the ring drives home the budget of this movie. At one point during this segment, a character turns to Nash and says something like "You may ask yourself, why go on". It feels like the character is asking you regarding why you are still watching.
The music steals a few of the scenes, and not in a good way. The music comes across as too loud and distracting. The entire scene becomes melodramatic.
The action itself is neither good nor bad. The scenes are alright but nothing special. Certainly not enough to save the movie.
I usually like movies set in dark city dystopias. I feel there is a good story in there but it gets lost in the story-telling process. The only reason I give this 2 stars instead of 1, is the very last scene. Which, after I slept on it, I made some plot connections that could tie it together. But it's a connection that I am giving myself more credit for than the director of this film.
If they cutdown the fight club section of this film and worked more on motivations and character connections, then this could have been a nice gem.
I could go on as to why certain scenes or decisions made by characters are jarring WTF?? moments as opposed to advancing the plot in sensible way, but instead I will just suggest you avoid this movie. There are too many moments that you are pulled out of the movie by bad acting, overpowering music, confusing editing, and WTF moments.
Gehenna: Where Death Lives (2016)
Lovecraftian Bunker
I have to temper my rating of this movie since I had such low expectations of this flick which I found on Netflix. It was clearly low budget and that usually means a fairly crappy movie. With such low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised.
I am also a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and I feel this movie had a lot of elements of an Lovecraftian horror.
The basic premise is a group of developers checking out land in Saipan, on a part of the island that is believed to be sacred by the natives. On this land they find an old WWII bunker, in which they decide to investigate. Inside they discover a number of dead bodies and eventually a really old withered old man, or maybe it's a zombie. Either way, it dies and there is an earthquake and everybody passes out and wakes up in the bunker, but now all the lights are on and everything looks new.
Why and how this happens is never explained. And it's not the last unexplained event, as the group ventures through the bunker attempting to escape the bunker, and eventually from each other.
Part psychological, part-super natural, the plot moves along in typical B-movie fashion, holes included. In fact, everything is B-movie grade, from acting to sets to special effects.
Personally, I am a big HP Lovecraft fan and while this lacks his Mythos, the film has the typical Lovecraftian Horror elements. Being a fan of such, I found this movie to be surprisingly entertaining and was willing to accept the unexplained portions of the plot.
River Runs Red (2018)
If you have your mind up before you watch, you'll enjoy
This movie is about an African-American judge whose young son gets shot, and framed, by police. The judge attempts to get justice through the system before going vigilante.
The movie started off interesting enough. A mixed couple, African-American and a Asian-American have an African-American son with zero Asian-American traits, who on his way to his first day of Police Academy, gives a patrol car a what's up hand gesture which is misconstrued as an F you hand gesture. Cops thinks kid has gun, cops shoot kid, cops plant gun.
The rest of the story is about the Judge attempting to find justice. First through the legal system, to no avail. Secondly by killing the cops involved. Along the way he finds another parent whose kid was shot by the same cops. A Latino, who originally wants nothing to do with the judge, until the Judge shows him a police video that clearly shows his son being wrongly shot by the cops. Then the judge is like, lets ride and be gangsters and kill some cops, and the Latino, is like yeah, lets do that. And then I get off the couch and play on the computer while the movie continues.
Like seriously, you have clear footage of the cops wrongly shooting the Latino kid, why don't you show it to the media. Get Black Life Matters involved and bring these people down without using violence, like you tried to do for the first 2/3rds of the movie. Suddenly this drama movie turns into an action flick for the sake of action. It made zero sense to me.
The other major issue with this movie is the Asian wife. For some odd reason, she speaks most of her lines in mandarin, or whatever language, and they add subtitles. And he responds to her in English. What was the point of that? Perhaps its due to her poor acting while speaking English. Her character was also very unlikable. She turns all her anger towards the husband, and even starts questioning his manhood. All this after a romantic Chinese dinner and dancing. Perhaps that's reason the judge was willing to sacrifice himself in the end. Who would want to go back to dealing with her?
Or maybe the cops wife would be worse. After he admits that the kid didn't have a gun, she wants him to confess and give himself up. She doesn't care about him, or their child. She is alright with him going to jail, since it's morally the correct thing to do. This just after she is playing sympathetic and wants to talk about feelings. A complete 180 turn. Perhaps the director is reaching out to the wives of killer cops everywhere hoping they will turn their husbands in for the cause.
You may notice I am not using their names. I didn't connect with any of the characters. They all seemed too black or white (pun intended) and no shades of grey. Any characters that showed any inner turmoil became light switches, easily turned on/off quickly when the plot required it. The main character, the judge, is best developed but as mentioned above, him going vigilante while he had sensational video evidence in hand didn't fit his character. I quickly went for empathizing with him to not caring. This was going to be an action movie from here on.
The ending of the movie, which should have illicit sadness from the viewer, instead I found myself relieved that the movie was over. I did like that they paid a great sacrifice. The ending helped this from being a one star. It's too bad I didn't really care for any of the characters.
This movie felt like a propaganda film against cops and the justice system. I have no issues with a movie dealing with bad cops shooting innocents, but this movie was too focused on driving home a point. This type of movie should be grey, making viewers questioning both sides, or at the very least, creating empathy for both sides, and create some sort of conflict within the viewer. This movie was one sided from the start to finish. if you wanted to watch a dramaction flick in which some cops get their comeuppance, then this is the film for you. If you check the other reviews, all the good reviews praise the message of the movie. If you are pro-cop, then you should avoid this movie completely. If you have an open-mind, then you should still look elsewhere. A good premise that is ruined by bad acting and not-so-subtle agenda,
Rescued by Rover (1905)
Trend Setter
I'd like to correct the first user comment saying that DW Griffith's influences are easily seen in Rescued by Rover. DW Griffith's first film was in 1908, 4 years after Rescued by Rover. Rescued by Rover shows how directors showed spatial continuity to audiences who were used to seeing overlapping shots. Audiences were very simple during that time and this film helped shape the way an audience watches a film.
Rescued by Rover is really only worth watching for its influence on film. The story is extremely basic and certainly not as suspenseful as it would have been in the early 1900s