SamYotix Reviews

Near Dark (1987)

Great film with just one flaw...

[17 January 2002]

An almost perfect vampire/western horror movie: atmospheric, cynical, funny.

Unfortunately, one gets the impression that the ending of the movie was, as in so many cases, completely ruined by US test audiences. ("Merkins", especially the mid-western country bumpkin test audiences, love happy endings and usually do not understand sad films. Apparently, this caused production companies to stick an artificial happy end onto Blade Runner and several other films.)

The extremely cheesy, unlogical and badly acted ending of "Near Dark" (spoiler: it's got to do with a vet who can cure human vampirism...) just about ruins this film every time I see it. Suggestion: Leave the cinema, or turn off the DVD player, just before the vampire guy returns home.

Kanak Attack (2000)

Insider view of criminal subculture

[9/10 · 5 December 2001]

Their parents came to Germany as guest workers - and stayed. They opened Kebab stands and shops, had cars and families. Of course, many "guest workers" didn't want to go back to Turkey. They stayed.

Their children grew up in Germany - speaking Turkish at home, with their friends, stuck outside "normal" society. This film examines a small part of the german-turkish counterculture, the part most suitable to a feature film: Its dirty, heroin-abusing, violent underside, the steet "kanaksters" (kanak gangsters).

Ertan (Luk Piyes), the main character, is a charming (if brutal) small-time criminal: Heroin dealer, grocery robber, not-quite pimp. The film is told in a series of interlinked vignettes, structured as if they were memories or stories told by Ertan, conveniently in chronological order. Kanak Attack has a fast pace, uses various editing trick to good effect and shows a form of counterculture that few people ever experience from the inside - unless they are from the german-turkish working-class ghettos.

DoppelPack (2000)

Weird buddy movie about Ruhrpott losers in love

[8/10 · 25 July 2001]

Doppelpack was one of the more pleasant surprises in german cinemas recently: Most german films nowadays have plots that attempt (but frequently fail) to be funny, like most of Til Schweiger's oeuvre.

Doppelpack, refreshingly, does not pretend to have more plot than "two buddies go out drinking together, go to a boring family party, meet two girls and go to a punk concert". Still, the film captures the attitude of the two nice "losers": They've withdrawn from the hectic mobile-phone-world of modern Germany into their own underworld, boozing in a park, trying to meet girls ("You know what our problem is? The sort of girl we'd like to meet doesn't often take a stroll round the park with a bottle opener in her handbag"), listening to old-fashioned music (with electric guitars in it)... A great film if you get the joke, which is that a lot can happen even if, on the surface, very little actually does happen. For film lovers.

Texas - Doc Snyder hält die Welt in Atem (1993)

Doesn't even work as parody

[1/10 · 22 June 2001]

For a short time, utter trash was pure gold in Germany: The rather unfunny german comedian Helge Schneider created several abysmal movies and songs. All of which sold fairly well for a while, then were forgotten. Thank God.

What happens? Bumbling Schneider stumbles onto the stage, does a routine comedy job (the oh-so-incompetent hero), and celebrates his lack of acting ability. If you don't laugh in the first 5 minutes of the movie, walk out. The film stays the same: one tired semi-joke after the other.

Hoodlum (1997)

Predictable, but entertaining

[24 May 2001]

How great this film could have been! It uses the real history of New York's Gangsters as a background and seems reasonably well researched. At times.

Personally, however, I have several gripes with this movie:

The irritatingly predictable script and much too clean-polished setting seem to come straight out of a "screenwriting-for-housewives" class.

The "messages" in the film (such as its anti-racist and pro-religious scenes) are horribly blatant. The romantic scenes and musical interludes are much too long and boring; the violent scenes too short and clean. Johnson is portrayed as a good gangster at first, which almost works out. His "internal struggle" theme doesn't work at all.

The supposedly elegant Gangster Luciano has to shlep a horrible dog around with him throughout the film. Bumpy Johnson's friend ist forced to do a horrible "funny negro singer" routine, offsetting the supposedly antiracist messages. And that Bumpy Johnson, at the end of the film, finds Gawd and turns away from the evil gangster life is a) predictable and b) idiotic.

"Hoodlum" could've been a great film. As it is, it's merely mediocre.

Kids (1995)

Utter Trash - The Nineties' version of "Reefer Madness"

[1/10 · 6 April 2001]

The characters in this film feel two-dimensional, never acting believably like teenagers. With its weird mix of underage sexuality, HIV, drugs and social collapse, the movie was sure to receive lots of press. But "Kids" merely portrays ghetto life without asking any questions: How come the US has a huge part of its population living way beyond the poverty line? Do ghettos, unemployment and a complete lack of perspectives make drug abuse more likely, as studies have shown? Rather than an intelligent study, "Kids" is paranoid "social porn".

S.A.S. San Salvador (1982)

Incredible Trash

[1/10 · 10 October 2000]

Miles O'Keefe painfully fails to look like an elegant, womanizing Secret Agent. The ageing ex-models who use every chance they get to rid themselves of their bikini tops are not exactly phenomenal. Neither are the gunfights with maniacally laughing bad guys (har-har!) or the seemingly slow-motion car chases...

Barbarella (1968)

Swingin' Sixties Sci-Fi Satire

[10/10 · 25 September 2000]

The great european film stars of the Sixties team up in this medium-budget sci-fi satire: Jane Fonda is the cutest superheroine ever to save the galaxy from evil! From the very first strip over her many amorous encounters right down to the cheesy finale: With its psychedelic special effects, the incredibly sexy costumes and many downright weird visual ideas, "Barbarella" can only be classified as a must-have, cult sci-fi comedy.

Straight to Hell (1987)

Weird but wonderful

[12 July 2000]

This film is a rarity, usually to be found at art-house film festivals. It's hilarious, confusing, and brutal. It looks cheap, but it contains many little gems: From guest appearances by famous people from all over the film and music industry to the excellent sound-track (Pogues! Zander Schloss! Elvis Costello! A vicious little Ennio Morricone parody!). The content: Bankrobbers run out of gas in the desert... and land in a hell-hole of a tiny village, where everyone has guns, where all the cars have animal skulls tied to the grille, and where an elegant waiter constantly offers everyone fresh coffee...

Velocity Trap (1999)

Bearable: Fairly good action & fx, but plot holes the size of a supernova

[13 December 1999]

Raymond Stokes is the only cop in the colony who cannot be bought - and that costs him dearly: He is separated from his lover and placed aboard a freighter. The separation dialogue, by the way, is only bearable on Fast Forward.

Penal duty: For 9 months, the ship will travel through space, in order to bring 40 billion dollars in used notes to Earth. But - how original and innovative a plot element! - pirates arrive to try and steal the money. They have not counted on finding - you guessed it - Stokes.

Well: Actors that are at best mediocre, trying hard to produce dialogue that will lend credibility to plot holes the size of a galaxy. Some of it's fun though - the occasional action sequence and ship effects aren't half bad.

Stringer (1999)

Dark, melancholy look at the worst side of "stringer" journalism

[3 December 1999]

Filo (E. Semoun), fresh from the film academy, is looking for a job. He does find one: Working as a stringer for the cynical Wolko (B. Reynolds), his job is to be at the sites of accidents, fires, rapes and robberies before the police. And to film raped women, burning firemen, dying supermarket guards and car crash victim, no helping allowed, no mercy given: The camera must stay on its victim no matter what. Slowly, he is becoming crazier, caught in the maelstrom of voyeurism and the lure of quick cash. As his girlfriend struggles to keep their relationship intact, his boss Wolko demands ever more sensational images... A bitter examination of the worst side of so-called journalism, created by a very good (though largely unknown) team.

Kids (1995)

Social pornography: Oh my, look at...

[1/10 · 18 June 1999]

What am I to think of a film which pretends to be a problem film about today's youth - while at the same time indulging in stupid clichés, lacking in true street credibility and exploiting sure "seller" topics like (sub-)teen sex, the oh so great danger of dope-smoking, and HIV.

A terrible film to see if you want to know anything about today's youth.

A great film to see if you want to know how to make money off squares who think that the young generation of today consists only of sex-starved, drug-addicted, HIV-infected fools without brains or forethought.

As a film which seems designed to make money off showing a "perverted" young generation to concerned middle-agers, it seems to have worked. It made money. Apart from that? Zero out of ten. Missable.