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arcturus9
Reviews
Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)
Not spectacular, but better than its predecessors
This was another Wrong Turn movie, but it displayed occasional sparks of brilliance that came as a welcome surprise. The initial scene grabbed my attention with a psychiatrist's reversal of fortune - when she is electroshocked to vegetable status, the scene ends with splatters of a liquid, which one realizes after a moment must be urine, pouring down from the chair. Somehow this last, gratuitous detail sticks out in my mind when other such scenes would be forgotten. The overall sequence, a well done instance of patients taking over an asylum, has some kind of weird Kingdom of Heaven resonance, a Dantean vision of misrule.
A later scene is even more memorable - when one of the unhappy campers yells desperately for help, the others enact a perfect replica of the United Nations in miniature. The juxtaposition of their deliberations and voting against the scene of their friend being first terrorized, then slowly chopped up as a "fondue", screaming for help, is breathtaking.
That said, the movie relies greatly on the stupidity of its participants, which however common in cheap horror is still wearying. Many scenes are cheaply made and not very satisfying. I wouldn't recommend this as a uniquely good movie; but these occasional high points put it head and shoulders above its peers.
Roadkill (2011)
Anatomy of a racial indoctrination
I find this film to be remarkable in its ability to arouse a racist response in viewing it, to the degree that it is to some extent worth studying to see what techniques make this possible. From my perspective, as someone in the U.S., the anti-Gypsy sentiment in Europe is something alien; here, Gypsies may be presented as something of a fairy-tale concept, but I've never encountered any real sense of animosity toward them. But this presentation makes it feel very real - my feeling is, if you're not feeling by the end that those poor victims should shout out at their persecutors that the next time the Nazies are going to finish the job, you're not getting into the film. And of course, that's disturbing.
Some of the techniques are obvious - the freaky appearance of some of the characters, the lovely white woman tied up as a sacrifice, the constant cheating. The way the Gypsies always and automatically side with each other, and above all, the sense that the innocent non-Gypsy bystander, and by extension, yourself, merely riding in the RV, becomes the victim of their murderous and unnatural wrath, and has no choice but to take up arms against them in a war of extermination which, one feels, should and must proceed until the last spawn of their clan has been strangled in its cradle. But I think for every technique I understand, there must be two I haven't apprehended.
As a movie, it is not much, but as a sort of "Birth of a Nation" style propaganda, it is dangerously outstanding.
Quantum of Solace (2008)
The best Bond film I've seen
Instead of moralistic adultness ratings, films should come with a difficulty rating. And it's true, this one is rated Hard. I tend to think that 75% of films are too slow-paced, but this one was hard to keep up with. The action scenes especially were impressionistic, giving the sense of the snatches of vision one might actually see in a frantic struggle rather than a strategic view from afar. But that still means it's a film packed with images with never a dull moment.
What's more important is that this is a Bond film with a plot --- not just action sequences and fantastic gadgets, but a genuine spy plot. The pointless trials of Dr. No and the vast underground and undersea empires of Spectre are replaced by an all too believable geopolitical plot to economically and politically subjugate the people of a nation. The populist tone of the film, though it's not nominally about this, seems to imply political support for Evo Morales rather than the plotters of the 2002 Venezuelan coup. Films like this give me real hope that the post-McCarthy era of film making may finally be coming to an end, bringing back an intelligence, relevance, and empathy for the common person.
It is possible to see this as a vengeful Bond, quick to resort to violence. But this is also a Bond who doesn't just do what he's told by higher authority, but pursues what is right at great personal risk. In all the previous films, Bond was a hero only because he happened to be ordered to do so, but here it is a matter of choice.
The Steam Experiment (2009)
Do NOT hire this writer to do your kid's term paper
This was a truly wretched excuse for a film, which can be watched only with the assistance of a video game or something to keep your mind off of it. You've heard the premise that Bozo has six people locked in a steam room as hostages. However, it becomes clear that there's no actual connection. You'll never find out IF it happened, let alone why.
The reactions of the hostages are idiotic even by survival scenario standards. After seeming years of morons emo-ing themselves and one another, one guy gets the notion to rip out the steam pipe. We chuckle as we await the rapid parboiling of the crew in steam from the ruptured pipe, but alas, it doesn't happen. But as soon as he thinks to use the heavy pipe to try to break out, the other hostages kill him for it. Eventually they get the notion to use the pipe to crack the window, great, but only so that they can drop it out of the room. It only gets worse from there. A five year old child would do better at an escape. It would make a good theater of the absurd except it's just too slow and stupid and there's no very good metaphorical point to be made, except that Americans are too darn dumb to worry about global warming, because they won't live that long except if they're lucky enough to be sold into slavery to wealthy PRC businessmen.
The one and only redeeming feature of the film is that some of the actors and bare-breasted actresses are fairly pretty; though the director tried his best to make them look drab, greasy, with truly terrible personalities and generally undesirable. Those of us who delighted in Willow and at least admired in Fake Identity won't be dreaming about the Kilmer from this film.
Zardoz (1974)
One of a kind
This is not a realistic film with awesome digital special effects. If that's what you're looking for in sci-fi, you'll be disappointed. But if you allow that theater can use props and scenery chosen for art rather than realism, the undimmed essence amazes.
I'll second all other comments that the "we will touch-teach you, and you will give us your seed" scene was most remarkable indeed.
I think there's more truth to the bizarre technology than you'd first imagine. I once suffered a creepy little vision of how the "mark of the beast" functions, the neural Internet, and the technology shown here depicts a portion of the process. Communications via far-IR lasers arrayed on microchips. More of the basic components are discovered every year... when sci-fi mirrors the far future, it becomes more relevant all the time.
Escape Velocity (1999)
Comically poor writing
Getting lost in space frozen for 15 years, that's unlikely. Falling into a star... improbable. Falling into it the day it goes supernova and explodes... ludicrous. Getting rescued by a ship just then... priceless.
No, it's not Zaphod Beeblebrox's Heart of Gold to the rescue. It's also not the Parent of the Year awardees. After sentencing her daughter to two years' solitary confinement on an abandoned spaceship, the mother encourages her to get drunk and wander off alone with the strange man they've picked up. This foreshadows their prowess in hand to hand combat, which makes up most of the film's action. Combat highlights include for example the psycho talking close up face to face with one woman while blindly pointing the gun behind him at the other about six inches away, who obligingly simpers in the line of fire.
In the end, the family of three abandons the metropolis-sized ship they were planning to use to observe the supernova until the last instant because it is too slow to escape the blast wave, instead using the psycho's fighter ship which they've refueled in one minute with 1600 pounds of gas propellant from a 0.7-kiloton missile. You have to love those hard sci-fi statistics!
As long as Hollywood treats writing as an irrelevant frill, they'll continue making movies not fit to run at 3 am on the Sci fi channel.