Orpheus_Unlimited Reviews

Underground (I) (2011)

All copies of this movie should be buried underground

[1/10 · 12 May 2018]

I'll make this very short & easy: don't waste your precious time watching this atrocity. It's a complete insult to the senses.

Photography in this film is horrible. Acting is laughable. Music is bad. FX are mostly C grade, especially makeup & CGI (practical ones are kinda OK though). There's way better editing on an average YouTube video. And the acting is bad, bad, bad. Oh, did I already said that? Well...that's how bad it is.

But by far the worst offender here is the script. Some truly ghastly experiments created some really nasty creatures. So the movie starts with a really lame "search & destroy" military operation going bad. 2 years later the site is home of a rave party (!) and a group of friends end up trapped underground. 2 yrs? 2 yrs!? That's it? So the government sends a black ops team to an underground military bunker and everyone dies. So naturally that's it. Game over. Let's just forget everything about that place and keep going. No "hey, maybe we should go and check if someone got out of there alive" or something? Nah. The creatures we wanted dead will probably die of old age. Why bother, right? And that's only the beginning. I'm not going to say anything else because I don't wanna spoil "the fun" for any masochist out there, willing to waste 80+ minutes watching this thing. But you have characters doing the most dumb and unreasonable things. A couple of veteran soldiers that display no real knowledge of military tactics or anything useful whatsoever, other than telling sad war stories. Characters pulling "facts" and knowledge out of thin air, knowing things there's no way they could possibly know. Things happening one minute and other things contradicting the first ones happening on the next minute without any sort of rational explanation. There's even a scene where a guy takes off his shirt and do almost nothing for 3+ minutes just to show his abs (seriously, there's no real reason for it, not even in the scene's context that demands quickness and taking off your clothes will waste very valuable time). And I'm not even going to mention the dreadful & incoherent ending. I've seen bad movies with bad scripts. But this is one of the worst ones. The story here is like something a teenager wrote for a high school essay. I can't believe a professional writer did such an awful job.

This movie has zero redeeming qualities. Not even a couple of one liners or some cool jokes here & there. It's just plain bad. With emphasis on the plain aspect. There's really no reason to watch it. Not even to make fun of it. -1/10

American Gothic (2017)

Dreadful

[1/10 · 23 January 2018]

I'll be brief, because no one wants to lose more time than needed here, right?

American Gothic has it all. It starts with a coma-inducing opening sequence. Seriously, you better be well rested while watching it or you'll fall asleep in no time. It's long, confusing, tedious and very boring. OMG! I've just realized it's like the perfect prelude to this movie. Because that basically sums up the whole thing.

Nick & Guy are 2 inmates that just had a break: the van transporting them back to the prison just had an accident and now they're on the run. A short time after they found themselves at the door of a secluded farm house run by an ordinary looking couple. Things quickly go to hell and suddenly they get more than they bargained for.

Everything in this movie is bad. And I mean EVERYTHING. The script is an insult to the viewer's IQ. Editing is a joke. The acting is awful. Seriously, it's very very very bad. I've never seen a movie before where no one can act even if their lives depended on it. Believe me, I can handle bad acting but this movie is something else. It has main actors giving some of the most lifeless performances I have ever seen. It's sad! Photography? Bad. FX? Bad. Music? Bad. And the camera? Jesus! Amateurish doesn't even begin to describe it.

The worst part is that the movie tries to "be smart" by introducing a lot of plot twists here & there...but it miserably fails in that too as a result of how many plot holes it manages to create while doing so.

And one final (pathetic) note: since they have zero reasons to attract an audience by its own merits, the makers of this atrocity decided to lure in unsuspecting victims by saying that it's "based on true events". Well I did my research. Surprise, surprise: it is not. Best case scenario, there's no evidence to back their claims. Worst case, they're outright cheating & lying.

So take my humble advice and stay away from this. It's not even worth a watch for free.

XX (2017)

Some potential...without anything else

[3/10 · 19 April 2017]

Let me begin by saying I had such high hopes for this film.

I love Anthologies and I love horror. So this had to be a dream come true, right? Wrong. It was more like a nightmare. A really lame and boring one.

The movie consists of 4 short stories intertwined by an awesome abstract stop-motion animation. And let me tell you: the tiny pieces of it are wonderful. It's by far the best thing on this ill- conceived "horror" film. It has nothing to do with any of the stories though.

And since we're in the subject...the stories are just a bunch of hit-and-miss disconnected shorts ranging from the supernatural to the absurd. Well, OK...they're more like a miss-and-miss kind of deal.

Don't get me wrong. One of the stories (the first one) has A LOT of potential for greatness as a full featured film. The second and the fourth one are "alright" as little quirky tales (although unoriginal and poorly acted). The third one is just pure run-of-the-mill garbage.

The problem with all of them is that they're not good. At all.

They're boring, uninspiring and full (and I mean F-U-L-L) of clichés and plot holes. Oh, and NONE of the stories is scary. Not even a little bit. Even the first one, by far the best of them all, has enough problems to push true horror fans right into madness.

This movie not only asks you to suspend your disbelief. It asks for you to be lobotomized and shut every single functioning brain cell down.

There's simply no other way to "enjoy" it because at some points it's absolute nonsense.

The cinematography and editing are meh.

The FX are C-grade.

The acting goes from average to utterly awful.

The music & sound are OK. At best.

And the writing is amateurish and lazy.

The only redeeming quality in this almost empty movie is the very brief aforementioned stop-motion animation. Other than that...avoid this insulting atrocity at all costs.

Ratter (2015)

Awful movie made by ignorant people

[1/10 · 9 May 2016]

OK, so the premise of this movie is very simple: Emma (Ashley Benson) goes to college and has a new apartment in New York, away from her family. She lives a simple life doing every day stuff but here's the twist: she has a stalker. But wait, there's more! Her stalker has hacked into every piece of technology with a camera in it and now watches everything she does 24/7.

The story unfolds before our eyes, while we watch everything through the different cameras in Emma's possession (cellphone, laptop, Xbox's Kinect) as if we were the stalker.

If up until this point you thought "hey, sounds interesting"...think again.

It's very clear that Writer/Director Branden Kramer doesn't know a thing about technology. The things we see "the stalker" doing with the cameras and different devices are simply impossible to do in real life. And no, I'm not exaggerating: some of those things are literally impossible to accomplish...even if you're the NSA, much less if you're "only a hacker".

But...wait! This guy is not only Bill Gates + Steve Jobs + Edward Snowden + Hollywood Hacker...he also has the field experience of a trained CIA operative. Yup, I'm not kidding.

In this junk-of-a-movie's defense I have to say that the script is so clumsy and so lazy that it never actually says anything about this guy. He may be a former CIA operative with an extensive training in Hacking that also works for an international sex trafficking cartel...and maybe that way we could explain how & why he's doing everything we're seeing on screen. But, to be honest, I don't think Mr. Kramer has that level of cleverness.

So the idea that the things we hold really close to us in our every day life could be hacked and that "someone" may watch everything we do is a terrifying one, no doubt about it. Sadly, this movie took that very sensitive & dangerous subject...and created an abomination with it that is absolutely useless, as a source of information and/or as a tool for entertainment.

Is it possible that someone may be able to hack into our devices? Yes, absolutely. Is it possible that someone may be able to do the kind of things depicted in this movie with them? No, you can sleep like a baby tonight...because they can't. A joint task force of the NSA + the FBI + the CIA may be able to...otherwise forget it. There's a lot of technological reasons that explain why the things in Ratter couldn't be done in real life...but this is not the time nor the place for those kind of explanations.

So bottom line: if you have a "tech-savvy" movie...that is actually all lies and fabrications...you have a bad movie. But if you add to the mix the fact that the acting is terrible, the pace moves like a snail, the photography is mediocre, the story is almost non-existent and the characters are made of paper...you may have one of the worst movies of all time. So kudos on that?

Do yourself a favor: don't watch this piece of crap. You will lose 74 minutes of your precious little time on this Earth that you will never get back. Do something better instead, like watching the stars for 74 minutes...or call someone you love and talk to him/her for 74 minutes. Trust me: there's "bad movies"...and then there's "Ratter-bad", something much much worse.

Devil Seed (2012)

You need to be possessed to like this movie

[1/10 · 5 April 2016]

Plain & simple: a horrible movie.

It tries to rip-off better movies, like The Exorcist or The Entity and fails miserably.

The opening credits are something straight out of YouTube. Wait, no, that's unfair...I've seen better opening credits in YouTube.

This was Greg A. Sager's first attempt at making professional movies...and I have an advice for him: please Mr. Sager, don't quit your day job yet. He is the Director, Writer & Editor of this abomination. At least he did an "ok" job in the editing dept.

The script is awful and completely ridiculous. It's filled with plot holes and full of ludicrous situations.

The acting is simply atrociously bad. There's not 1 good actor in the whole movie. I'm serious: sometimes it feels like a homemade movie, as if some friends just grabbed one camera and said "let's make a scary movie, you guys!".

Photography is a mess and I'm starting to feel like they didn't do the catering right.

The FX are complete trash. And most of them are just CGI. Bad CGI.

The only "redeeming factor" of the whole movie is that they took one of YouTube's most infamous "scary clips" and remade it almost exactly. So yeah, it's that unoriginal. But hey, at least they've proved that the YouTube video was a hoax...right?

Seriously...don't watch this poorly made and very badly acted piece of garbage. Remember that life is finite. You've been warned.

Last Girl Standing (2015)

Predictable & Full of clichés

[3/10 · 5 April 2016]

The movie starts with a brutal massacre a-la-Jason-Voorhees courtesy of a masked man called "The Hunter". In this sequence we receive the first batch of slasher movies clichés, last "heroine" and all. Of course, she kills the bad guy (obviously) and from there we jump 4-5 years into that last survivor's life.

Camryn is just a typical girl struggling with all the aftermath of that horrible experience. But, unlike what we see in most of these girls in other movies (the last survivor trying to go on with her life), she is a very shy and almost obnoxious kind of girl. No new friends, no nothing...except for her job.

Aside for the daily nightmares, everything is OK in her life until one day Nick arrives to her job, as the new cashier. And then, all of a sudden and without any sort of rational explanation, weird things start to happen and Camryn's life goes to hell.

At that point, we receive a new batch of clichés: now for a "is it real or not?" type of thriller.

And then...13 minutes before the movie ends we need to endure the beginning of one of the worst endings I have ever seen.

The only "redeeming value" of this movie are the practical FX for the killings. They're pretty good, especially for an indie flick.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is complete garbage. The movie is predictable as hell, so much that there's simply no way that anyone will not know how it will end. It's just a matter of "expertise" at these kind of movies: if you've seen a lot of them you can predict that lame ending more than an hour before it arrives. If this is the first time you see one of these then you'll see the ending coming 15-20 minutes before. And if no matter who the viewer is he/she can predict the ending from miles away...you have a very very bad movie in your hands.

Other than the aforementioned FX dept. Writer/Director Benjamin R. Moody can't seem to do anything "right": photography is bad, the script is awful, acting is weak and it doesn't have one shred of originality. Anywhere.

The concept of "What happens to the final girl after the credits roll?" is very interesting and has the potential for greatness. Unfortunately this movie does it in an uninteresting and very dull way. Suffice to say that if you've seen a lot of slasher movies in your life then you've basically seen this one. Because although it may seem like an original idea, the way Mr. Moody did it is just...well the opposite of that.

And if you were thinking "well, at least it's a scary movie"...well no, it has nothing actually scary in it, except for maybe 60-90 seconds of mildly "scary" stuff.

Don't waste your time with this movie. It's boring as hell, as derivative as a high school project and has almost nothing to offer.

Scream at the Devil (2015)

Good idea...bad everything else

[1/10 · 4 April 2016]

"A beautiful schizophrenic woman is pushed over the edge by her husband's illicit affairs, and when her hallucinations become reality the Devil comes to take his due."

Nothing in that description is actually true. The woman is not "beautiful" and "her husband's illicit affairs" didn't pushed her "over the edge" nor "her hallucinations become reality".

So when a movie says "the story is about unicorns" and it's actually about horses...you have a serious problem at hand.

The movie tells the story of Mirium Jones, a woman suffering from schizophrenia that decides to "leave it all behind" when her husband cheats on her with a younger woman. She also lost her unborn children due to a miscarriage. See? And you thought your life was bad.

So she decides to take a trip to Venice and goes to a Basilica (a very old and magnificent church) basically to pray to the Devil (?) for a chance of getting pregnant again. Because everyone knows that if you need to make a Pact with Satan...the obvious place to go is a church.

Then without any kind of explanation the emotionally scarred woman decides to go back with her husband, who buys a huge house in the mountains and builds a "studio" for her and her paintings.

But then...everything goes to hell when all of a sudden all the characters become like corrupted versions of themselves. Again, without any sort of real explanation.

Strange things start to happen all around Mirium and the obvious question Writer/Director Joseph P. Stachura wants you to ask is "is it all real or not?" "are all these due to the schizophrenia or is the Devil's work?". A very interesting idea (albeit not an original one at this point) that Stachura completely ruins with his awful directing job and a worse script.

The acting in this movie is an insult to the senses and not even Tony Todd is able to deliver a worthy performance. Shari Shattuck as Mirium is a complete mess and most of her performance just jumps from overacting to plain pathetic acting. The rest of the cast is just...well...let's just say "bad".

Photography is forgettable, except for the Venice portion of the movie (the first 7-8 minutes of it).

The SFX are something straight out of a B Movie. The Syfy original movies' FX are almost something out of Industrial Light & Magic compared to these ones.

Oh...and the ending completely disregards everything you see just minutes prior to it.

Seriously, this movie couldn't be any more worse even if it were 90 minutes of still pictures of grass.

Just do yourself a favor and skip it. This is probably one of the worst movies released in 2015.

#Horror (2015)

Clumsy and Boring

[1/10 · 4 April 2016]

Let me start by saying that this movie doesn't have anything to do with horror. Nothing. At all.

Do me a favor: think about the worst horror movie you've ever seen. Done? OK...that movie is "the scariest thing ever" compared to #Horror.

The movie has some killings...but they're all so mild that it's as if there were none.

The "social commentary" underneath the truly dumb and poorly written script of this movie is Cyberbullying. A very serious matter. And maybe too important to be buried under an absolutely awful movie.

The movie tells the story of 1 day in the life of 6 12-yo girls dealing with different "issues" while having a sleepover and the underlying subjects of technology as a way of ignoring others and bad parenting in general.

The acting is as bad as it gets. Even Timothy Hutton delivers an overacted performance that will make you cry in disgust. 1981 seems so long ago for Mr. Hutton. The other "renowned" cast member is Chloë Sevigny, possibly giving her worst performance of her professional career.

I already said the script was bad. And trust me: it's a complete abomination. Oh, and you can "predict" who "the killer" is around 50 minutes before the movie ends. And the ending is almost pure garbage. Great, huh?

The photography has some "interesting" aspects here and there.

And since the movie uses some kind of Facebook-esque video game as an ever present "entity" you're forced to watch some truly annoying montage of social media photos with a lot of bright colors and obnoxious sounds throughout the whole movie.

This is NOT a horror movie nor a drama about Cyberbullying.

This is just an awful awful movie that will test the limit of boredom a human being can withstand. Stay away from this atrocity!

Cell 213 (2011)

Bad idea, poor execution, worthless movie

[2/10 · 4 April 2016]

Maninder Chana writes a story about a cocky and somewhat unethical ambitious young lawyer that finds himself thrown into a complete Hell when one of his clients unexpectedly kills himself while on a private meeting only days prior to his release from jail.

Stephen T. Kay sits in the Director chair trying to build some tension around the story in a by-the-numbers horror movie.

And when the only thing that comes to your mind when you see the Writer & Director of a movie is "who?" then you know things are not stacking on the right side. Sure, sometimes unknown Writers can create wonderful scripts and unknown Directors can make masterpieces...sadly neither of those is the case with this movie.

The script is a complete mess, and there's a reason for that: this was Chana's first attempt at a "full" story, since his whole career was built over short stories. And you can see that "limitation" permeating into this movie's script.

We have the main character Michael Grey (played by Eric Balfour) as a ruthless young lawyer trying to win cases at all costs whose ambition pushes him to do some really questionable things in order to "secure" a win in Court. And then when everything seems to go "according to plans" suddenly everything goes into "Chaos Mode".

And that's when everything goes awry: almost everything in the story is just completely ridiculous without any sort of verisimilitude whatsoever. Plot elements come and go without any sort of actual explanation. Characters are introduced without any idea of "what to do with them", sometimes even introducing totally pointless characters into an already confusing plot. It seems as if the Writer just doesn't know how to tell a detailed tale and just purposely keeps everything vague as a way of not bothering explaining anything.

In Kay's case, his best work has been the 2000 flick Get Carter, with Sly Stallone. So...yeah, he's no Martin Scorsese.

In the acting department Eric Balfour does a somewhat acceptable job as the lead character, followed by Michael Rooker, in one of his usual roles: a despicable and twisted prison-officer-with-a-moral- standard-of-his-own. Bruce Greenwood does an awful job as South River State Penitentiary's Warden, with a dull and uninspired performance. And Deborah Valente plays Audrey Davis, a Correctional Dept. officer best described as "forgettable".

Bottom line:

-Confusing, convoluted and sloppy script

-Average directing job

-Average-to-Mediocre acting

-Standard photography

-Bad FX

-Not scary

-Not "profound"

-No jump scares

-Awful as a Thriller

-Awful as a Horror movie

-Awful as a Supernatural story

-An all-around weak movie

If you're into masochism there's better things to do to achieve your goal. This movie is 109 minutes of pure boredom from start to finish. Stay far away from it.

Wolf Creek 2 (2013)

A complete waste of time

[3/10 · 25 March 2016]

Wolf Creek 2 is the sequel (duh) to 2005's Wolf Creek, and writer/director Greg McLean is once again at the helm.

Let me start by saying that I think the first one (WC1) was not an out-of-this-world kind of picture...it wasn't even "scary" to be honest. But it had 1 "redeeming factor" going for it: it was entertaining as hell! And sometimes that's the only thing that matters. Even if a movie isn't "Grade A" material, if it accomplishes the not-so-easy task of "giving you a good time" while watching it...it deserves to be recommended.

Also the fact that a movie may not be "mainstream Hollywood" doesn't make it "an instantly bad movie".

I just want to establish those grounds so that people can understand that I'm not basing this review on one of those dumb reasons.

OK, I'll be brief: Wolf Creek 2 is a REALLY BAD movie. Don't watch it.

Well...that's it. Thank you for reading my review. Bye bye!

I'm just kidding!

"Why is it so bad", you ask? Here's why: while the first movie had some kinda ridiculous moments here and there...it also had some eerie sense of "realism" that pulled you into the action, mainly because you were seeing things, thinking "this definitely could happen...for real!". And that's one of the most powerful things a movie can do, especially a horror one. If the acting and the story has "some" ground where you can latch onto, things can go from "this is cool" to "OMG, this feels so real! I can't watch it anymore! It's disturbing!". And let me tell you: that's a GOOD thing for a horror movie. ;)

The acting is not atrocious...but it's not as good as WC1's cast. The only redeeming factor, of course, is John Jarratt, repeating as Mick Taylor, the star of the whole show. The rest of the cast goes from "acceptable" to "mediocre".

But the main problem with this movie is the fact that everything is just a huge mess. Aside from 1 or 2 things...nothing has any sort of "plausibility" whatsoever. Almost all the things that happen in this movie are complete and utter NONSENSE.

I know, I know...Suspension of disbelief, right? Yeah...no. When you're seeing sequences and behavior that have zero chances of happening in real life it's almost impossible to "suspend" anything.

Remember what I said about the first movie earlier? Well this one does almost the opposite of all that.

Every couple of minutes you just watch the action unfold while thinking "seriously? You gotta be freakin' kidding me!".

And the reason for that is a poorly written script. McLean takes not only the premise of the first movie...but basically everything else too! There's not a single "new" element on this thing. It's like if he simply changed some names here & there, added a lot of nonsense...and said "done". And I'll give you a good example: remember watching the Droopy the dog cartoons while growing up? Remember how he had the "ability" to appear anywhere in a blink? No matter what? Well now apply that cartoonish approach to a human being and tell me: is it still funny?

And you know why they did that on the cartoon? Because that was an easy way to simply not care about any situation: if the dog can appear anywhere no matter what, you can write any nonsense and everything will be fine at the end. And that's exactly what McLean did on his script. Some truly lazy way of not having to care about what happens on screen...because the main character can do basically impossible things, allowing him to get away with anything.

Bottom line: if you're able to completely shutdown your brain while watching a movie maybe this one will be "almost bad" for you. Otherwise there's no way a smart person will be able to withstand so many ridiculous plot holes and nonsensical "twists" without trying to crush the TV in the process.

This is an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of Wolf Creek while not caring about trying to develop new things and/or telling a coherent story. This is as bad as sequels can go.

Save yourself of wasting almost 2 hours on this one...and just watch the first movie.

A Serbian Film (2010)

This may not be the "Most Disturbing Film Ever"...but it's a piece of garbage anyway

[1/10 · 13 April 2015]

I could give this...thing...zero stars. Or better yet, -10 stars. Unfortunately I can only go down to 1, so...

First off, let me start by saying that I'm not a "faint of heart" kind of guy...and I can actually enjoy "disgusting" films. Take for example, Martyrs: it's a disturbing film, but has some weird mysticism to it that makes it good and enjoyable. Or The Human Centipede: awful movie, but it has such a twisted sense of humor that by the end you're thinking "gross!" and at the same time "hilarious!".

But this...this...whatever they want to call it... this is some "you-should-be-in-Arkham-Asylum" type of "film".

Yeah, I know that there's a lot of pseudo-philosophical criticism out there trying to explain that the underlying theme of society's moral decay and human corruption is somewhere around this thing...but I'm NOT one of those "critics".

I think this is garbage. Pure and utter TRASH. I think this does NOT have any "social commentary" and it's only an insult to any sane person. This is one of the worst things I have ever seen. And I've seen some really twisted things in my life. This isn't "art". It's disgusting, revolting, nauseating, stomach-turning, appalling, abominable, vile, nasty, foul, loathsome, offensive, distasteful, putrid, ghastly and horrid...and I'm being nice.

I'm not gonna mention any particular scene, but just let me tell you that as a man, husband, father and human being...there's just NO EXCUSE to do some of the seriously objectionable things they did in this atrocity. And I'm not blaming the actors. I'm just saying that the writer/director Aleksandar Radivojevic should be in a mental institution. This guy only made 2 movies (well, 3...but the other one was produced by Luc Besson, so he couldn't "move freely" in that one. Thank God): this sickening piece of crap...and another one about a guy that gets hired to film A SNUFF FILM. See the resemblance? It's obvious that Radivojevic has a "snuff fetish". He makes "movies" trying to sell them as "artistic work"...but deep down he's only a very sick puppy, just trying to satisfy his hunger for extreme violence and unacceptable behavior.

If you have any amount of "good taste" you should stay away from A Serbian Film like I hope you would stay away from child pornography or an execution video. And yes, this "film" has comparable features with those two aberrant things. It's not that graphic...but it doesn't need to be. If I show you a dog and then I go to the next room and you hear banging sounds and 10 minutes of the most awful howling and animal cries and see blood splattering all over it...I'm almost as guilty as a psychopath showing you the actual torture and killing of a dog. That's not the same as showing you the dog and then going next door...hearing BAM! and then seeing me coming out of it all bloody. Get the picture yet?

Do yourself a favor...and don't watch this. There's no "redeemable factor" in it. Nothing "memorable". No "well, at least "x" was good".

If you're trying to waste your time, go watch some of the "Porky's" movies instead. They are Academy-Award pieces compared to this one.

There's just no way you can enjoy something as hideous as this "film"...and some of its content will haunt you for a long time.