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crimeofpassion
Reviews
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Worth seeing it once just to say that you had.
While The Passion wasn't exactly horrible, it wasn't that great, either. If you'll look at it as JUST a movie and ignore the content, it was absolutely horrible. It was nothing more than a non-stop gore fest. And, as one of my friends has said before, it's something that never should have been made into a movie.
There were few things that I actually liked about the movie. The first would be the fact that all of the actors looked Hebrew. Jesus actually looked the way Jesus would have looked. He wasn't black and he wasn't some pale, frail little blonde man. He looked Hebrew and he looked strong, and that's what the real Jesus would have looked like.
Though I know some people hated it, I also liked the subtitles. In that time, they didn't speak English, so why have them speak it in the movie? I liked the fact that the "thirty-nine lashes" were far more than thirty-nine. Though I've never read it for myself, I can still remember my mother explaining to me that "thirty-nine lashes" was the Jewish law, and the Roman law had no limit. Christ was convicted under Roman law, and therefore he would have received far more than thirty-nine lashes. I like that Mel Gibson showed this.
I also really liked Mel Gibson's portrayal of Satan. Angels (even fallen ones) are supposed to be very beautiful and very androgynous. Shaving her head and eyebrows, then dubbing her voice with a man's was ingenious, really. That's all the good I can actually say for this movie, though.
My world history teacher told us that this movie was historically accurate, and if we went to see it and brought back our ticket stub as proof, we would get an extra credit grade. So why not? I'd been planning to see it, anyway, after all. And so came two hours of brutal beating and torture. An hour of which was spent by me flinching and looking away from the screen, glancing back from time to time to see if this newest piece of violence was finished yet. Two hours of wasted time for a grade I really didn't need.
It's nice to be able to say that I've seen the movie, now. But it really wasn't worth it. This should have never been made into a movie. All it brought was people becoming even more fanatical about Christ just because they saw a movie. It brought a new wave of people claiming that the movie promotes anti-Semitism. Was it really necessary? If people really wanted to learn about "the passion of the Christ," they could have just read the Bible.
Scarred (2005)
Worth it just for the laughs.
A friend rented this for us to watch, saying that it was an independent horror film and should be hilarious. And boy, was he ever right. I was expecting a bad horror film, but not this bad.
It had the typical elements of any bad horror movie. Family goes camping out in the middle of nowhere. A park ranger tells them about a clichéd and completely impossible "legend around these parts." There's some drinking and then the son and two girls set up their own camps away from the unattractive father and pretty, young step-mother. And there you have it: the stage is set for, quite possibly, the worst horror film ever.
Naturally, there's plenty of "You stay here while I go {insert action that requires speaker to wander off alone into the forest}" and "There's a psycho killer out there, so let's split up!" And, as usual for most horror films, good or bad, the victims barely fight back once attacked, even though it's obvious that it would be rather easy to knock the knife away from the killer, whom my friend and I dubbed "The Skilled Huntress," due to the fact that her "sneaking up on people" involves being very obvious and making a lot of noise.
Horror films like these get their scares from the killer randomly leaping out at the helpless victims, but there was no leaping here. None. Nothing scary at all about this film. No shock value of any sort. Of course, the reason it didn't frighten my friend and me could have been because of the fact that we were laughing too hard about it to even think about being frightened.
I'd still recommend it to anyone just for the laughs, though.