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Slender Man (2018)
as sludgy as it gets
Creepy Pasta, FYI, is a mash-up of 'creepy' and 'cut and paste', from other horrors tories. And oh, does it rely on copying for it's story. How many cliches can you spot? Bunch of high school friends summon hold a seance to summon the boogie-man, it all goes a bit wrong, they don't tell the parents, shots of trees at night eerm let's try and banish him etc.etc. Lots of shots of girls holding each other and screaming, and at the end someone walks through a gate. The end. Of a movie you have already seen before.
Annabelle Comes Home (2019)
So we've got a house of dopey teenagers to scare tonight...
Ghost #1 I get to play hide and seek!
Ghost #2 I get to play peek-a-boo with the cameraman!
Ghost #3 I'll knock on doors then run away!
Ghost #4 I'll trash the room, and as soon as my victim turns away I'll tidy up again!
Ghost #5 I'll just stare at them
Ghost #6 (running out of ideas) eer... I'll be a werewolf.
Ghost #5,6,7,...100... Eer... we'll stand still gormlessly.
The Nun (2018)
Boo! The movie
Half way though this movie I got the impression that the writers just ran out of plot and filled out the rest of the run-time with horror movie cliches. There's only so much creeping-about in the shadows or slow camera movements around a room while an apparition patiently waits off-screen to jump in on cue that should fit into one movie. By the end I expected the entire building to vanish.
Skeleton Man (2004)
After the credits rolled, I immediately re-watched it
Because I couldn't keep up with the onslaught of stupid coming from this movie. Big mistake, as I noticed a whole lot more stupid that I missed the first time around. Why is the team of 'experts' (including an underwater demolitions expert) looking in one part of the forest when the guy they're hunting clearly in a completely different forest? (reads end credits) ah half the movie was shot in Eastern Europe. Maybe someone shot half the movie, got sick of it and outsourced the rest.
Still, a house blows up seconds after a lamp falls-over in it, and someone flees into a tiny guard house that opens up into an underground complex with also blows up, all within the first 5 minutes makes for compelling viewing. You can play, 'spot the continuity errors' with friends. Did you spot the character's face becoming instantly clean the moment he puts down the binoculars?
If you want to watch this, brace yourself and remember: beans is good.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Rubbish pacing mangles an average sci-fi flic
Take the original Empire Strikes Back, then strip away pacing, character growth, sense of good vs evil, proper, flowing story development and, most important of all, originality, and we're left with what is effectively a sequence of Star-Wars cliches without a reason to give a damn about any of it. There just wasn't any sense of menace at all in this, Kylo Ren being reduced to more of a side character with moments of telepathy. All this leaves an emotionless hole for 2 and a half hours full of countdowns to being obliterated by yet another powerful weapon while the good guys hastily cobble a plan together to escape again (usually involving one small ship evading all the bad guys. You've seen it before).
For the record I enjoyed The Force Awakens.
Deadly Prey (1987)
Utterly fantastic
Although the plot of kidnapping humans for target practice has been done a million times before (and still is), no movie comes as close to the entertainment value of this. Here, bad army guys inadvertently kidnap Mike (unofficial middle name : Dramatic Casio Chord) Danton, a Vietnam vet played by male model Ted Prior. And after letting him loose in the forest armed with only a sawn-off pair of levi's and a particularly offensive mullet, Mike turns the tables on the most inept bunch of soldiers.
You will laugh! You will laugh again! You can feel the tension gripping you to the couch as the next bad guy positions himself into an easily ambush-able place. You will see Cameron Mitchell deliver his best speech ever. You will see tiny grenade explosions hurl people several feet through the air. You will never see a more lethal twig in your entire life or more effective camouflage from a handful of leaves. The one-man army action movies from the 80's (think along the lines of Commando/Rambo) may have been awesome at the time and despite aging, entertain today in the same way a piece of well-matured piece of cheese tastes more delectable than something eaten fresh from the dairy. Deadly Prey is no exception, the only difference being budget. And acting. And direction. But it's still something to relish. Most films like this are best enjoyed over a few beers. Here I would recommend a few crackers and a nice bottle of chardonnay to truly honour this cheesy experience. Cheers!
Prometheus (2012)
So much promise, so little delivered.
Prometheus doesn't have the suspense of Alien. Nor does it have the action of Aliens. Everything after that smells of Hollywood milking the cash cow dry. I hoped that Ridley Scott's return would have helped steer the franchise back on course to what made the first two movies so great, but no. After watching Prometheus I can only guess that this was an attempt at the thinking man's Alien but the whole idea of the movie just seems fixated on getting as many people killed off as possible while leaving an abundance of unanswered questions behind.
First of all it's very difficult to feel any kind of emotional bond with the characters when their biggest discovery in the history of mankind - discovery of an alien civilization, is just shrugged off just like that. No champagne corks, no parties, not even a group photograph. Archimedes had his "Eureka" moment, Watson and Crick went down to the pub to announce they had discovered the structure of DNA. The USA cheered when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The crew of Prometheus land on a planet, discover the first ever proof of extra-terrestrial life and the only excitement and celebration felt is because it's Christmas, and someone has put up a rather weedy Christmas tree in the ship. It is that underwhelming. No build-up, nothing. If it's that exciting to the characters, how would that excite the audience?
After that it becomes clichéd horror movie material. Despite advanced mapping technology, the guys in charge of mapping the area still manage to get lost, lose radio contact and get killed in easily avoidable circumstances. Then the whole plot just forces events on characters to make sure everyone and everything gets killed and throw in a plot twist to ensure they don't have time to simply pack up and leave.
Prometheus is a very pretty film to watch. But I didn't come out scared, excited, relieved or thinking, "Wasn't it awesome when ..." or "Wasn't it scary when ...". I came out thinking I should have watched Resident Evil instead.
The Visitants (1986)
So this is what euthanasia feels like
Rick Sloane may well be remembered for MST3Ks bashing of Hobgoblins, but this movie, The Visitants is... worse. In Hobgoblins, at least things happen. In The Visitants, all that happens is your brain antrophies. I should elaborate - nothing happens. Almost the entire plot revolves some characterless high school guy nicking a gun (from the dollar-bin at wall-mart) from his next door neighbours who are aliens, and them wanting it back. The only time someone fires is, someone off-camera holds a red filter in front of the light-bulb. Acting? Hah! The school science teacher is played by the same old guy who played the security guard in hobgoblins out-acts the rest of the cast put together. The only other thing I can say about this movie is during once scene in the locker rooms, passers-by in the background try to gatecrash the set and a fight breaks out with the security guard. God... I need to go out an get air. This movie stinks....
Surf School (2006)
A complete wet fart of a movie
*Yawn* another underdog movie. This one goes nowhere. Apart from Costa Rica, which looks nice.
Once the novelty of stereotyping of the main characters has worn off, that's about it as far as the plot goes. After which nothing happens. Goth girl says nothing, geeky guy gets sexually wound-up by local girl, then nothing happens. Random characters constantly appear, say a few lines and vanish, their 'joke' exhausted, never to be seen again. Just when everything grinds to a halt, show a few bikini-clad girls for everyone to drool over.
Hang on... these guys are supposedly learning to surf within a week. A few day/night sequences later and no surfing. I check the time - what...half way through the film and nothing has happened. Then there's the gratuitous topless scene. Snore, boring, eject.
Oddly enough there's more fun to be had in laughing at all the lame 10* reviews of this movie, which do nothing to shift the fact that Surf School is well embedded in the IMDb bottom 100 and not likely to budge for a very long time.
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972)
A work of art
Oh I've seen a lot of bad movies before this: Monster a Go-Go, Manos, Leonard part 6, even Ben and Arthur. But all those movies had effort put into them to make them bad, a combination of the ropey script, non-existent acting, stupid plots and all-round awfulness. Santa and the Ice-cream Bunny is worse them all of them. And it does this with almost no effort at all. I'd even go as far as saying that if I were to write down all the mistakes in this movie while watching it, the movie would end before I would.
Take the basic plot, a short narration that Santa's sleigh is stuck on the beach because his reindeer have left, and a single frame from the movie to illustrate this (eer, a scene of the sleigh on a beach and very little else). Straight away there are unanswered questions:
-Why is Santa's sleigh so small? There is no space for any presents. - or the reindeer. -How did the reindeer escape? -What is Santa doing on the beach in the first place? -How did it get trapped? -How can such a tiny amount of sand trap his sleigh? Simply farting on it would blow it away. -Even if/when he does dig it out, how can he get home without any reindeer?
All that, dear reader, from mere seconds of the movie. Now just imagine that for the entire duration. That's why I think it's a work of art; I can't think of anything ever that provokes so much thought in the viewer. Submit this movie to the Turner Prize and the judges' heads will explode.
This movie hit rock-bottom so fast it left a crater at the bottom of the scale. Watch it, and wake up the next day reassured that no other movie can be this bad.
Pocket Ninjas (1997)
This movie confuses itself
Let's start with an irrelevant montage of karate training that consists entirely of fresh-air punches and kicks. The cover on the DVD bears no resemblance to the movie, which is much worse, but let's cut to a montage of the same karate training with crappy music. Plot? Ha! There's 3 annoying kids who who communicate entirely in sarcasm talking about a white-dragon character/crime fighter but it's difficult to know if he's real or not because we've just cut to a montage of fresh-air karate training again (really the same 3 kids just wearing masks). Now Just when you think the plot gets going somewhere, there's another cut to the bad guy (presumably the bad guy, he's really a scrawny kid) with his henchmen dropping nun-chucks on their feet and weather he's real or not isn't entirely clear as we cut once again to the 3 main characters and another training montage that is entirely identical to all the others before it. The music sounds like a theme to some crappy kids TV show and just makes you want to bury your fist through the TV speakers after hearing it for the 1000th time.
And apart from a truly bizarre fight sequence in a carnival tent involving Robert Z'Dar and a lot of balloons, that really is the entire movie. But just to finish off, cut to a training montage of fresh-air punches and kicks. I gave up counting after the 6th repeat.
Robo-geisha (2009)
Trailer says it all really
Noboru Iguchi's films have a reputation. You know people are going to die in them, but you are never entirely sure who will be next. Or what the weapon will be. Or from what orifice the weapon protrudes from. Robogeisha carries on this fine tradition, but as a teensy-weensy spoiler, there's more use of CGI blood this time around. I guess it saves on the cleaning bills.
So two sisters, one a geisha, the other the attendant, get invited to perform at a dinner for the big bad guy, and end up being recruited into his army of highly-trained female killers masquerading as more geisha. Oh and there's a few cybernetic upgrades on the way as well.
I can't really say much more to this movie that you can't already tell from the trailer. So I'll just say that I, and practically everyone else in a tiny cinema in the backstreets of Shibuya, was in fits of giggles throughout this movie as we were regularly surprised at what Iguchi's imagination would throw at us. Think of Wacky Racers with cast-iron Shimadas, comedy instead of splatter and only a slight feeling of disappointment when some of the set pieces are cut too short then there's still laughs to be had. Anyone for fried shrimp?
Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009)
Feeble
Opening night at the cinema, 2 dozen people at most in it. The writers must have relied entirely on the humorous title and the fact that the two male leads are from a moderately successful British sit-com to bring the crouds in. Their character development is minimal, Try to think of "Shaun of the Dead" or "Withnail and I" with all the humour taken out. Lesbianism that is just a bit of kissing and some boobie shots, and there's a bit of blood and biting for the vampire scenes. None of the characters are really likable though. Why cheer for Jimmy if all he does is stand there looking gormless all the time? Hang on, he's pretending to be Ash from the Evil Dead series.... maybe not. Fletch's character is someone who thinks 4 letter words are funny.
There's a strange feeling of unbalance in this film. One of my gripes was the sound. it's way over-produced, every single spooky noise going through the whole surround system in sequence to the point where it's not spooky at all. The effects and scenes are top notch, so are the costumes and make-up on the vampire girls, so why wasn't more effort put into the script and the filming? There's barely enough material to fill half an hour here, and sometimes the action feel clumsy and awkward as if neither the actors nor the film crew really knew what's going on.
Put it this way, if you want to watch vampires being killed, watch Blade or Dusk till dawn. If you want to watch lesbians, search the internet. And it you can't find a teen comedy, you need to get out more.
Postal (2007)
Whaddya mean, a Boll movie that's good?
I know only too well that Uwe Boll has a reputaion for bad movies. I've watched (or at least, tried to) House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne and it's as if Boll deliberately set out to make the most unwatchable movies ever. However, Postal is different...
-It has a plot. -Boll had help writing the script. -The actors have a sense of direction. -The camera isn't controlled by drunkard about to pass out. -It isn't edited by a paraplegic on crystal meth. -The whole movie looks like it was made by people who know what they are doing.
All this, of course, makes this nothing more than an average movie. So why watch it? Because it's tasteless and it's funny. I lent this to someone who had never heard of Boll before, and he enjoyed it. The basic story is, average bloke gets pushed to breaking point by the lowest dregs of society in his trailer park, and goes nuts. Oh, there's an al-qaeda terrorist cell there for good measure, and there's a lot of fun being poked at 9/11. Did I mention it was tasteless?
Pledge This! (2006)
Might be useful on long haul flights when you need to slip into a coma for a few hours.
This isn't a movie as such, more of an extended filming of "I am Paris Hilton and I must be idolized". Or soft porn for the brain dead. Wafer thin plot has something to do with a bunch of sorority girls trying to be on the cover of FHM magazine. The only attempts to advance the plot are in the form of voice-overs whenever she's on screen. Seems like weaving a story into the script was too difficult for the writers, and it's not even her voice you hear. No likable characters either. At one time a toilet explodes and covers all the girls in crap, but an old lady gets covered too, so the girls all laugh despite being covered themselves. What fun.
I gave up on this when a scene involving a Hilton and her boyfriend holding a hammer didn't have the ending I was rooting for.
Ben & Arthur (2002)
Unfeasably bad
There is absolutely nothing in this movie that shows even the tiniest scrap of talent. Nobody in it has ever tried acting before, even the extras in the coffee shop look as if they've been glued in place. Nothing looks rehearsed.The film quality is terrible. Most of the 'action' takes place in narrow corridors or apartments with the cameraman crammed in as an afterthought, swinging some cheapo camera backwards and forwards between 'actors' as they deliver their lines. No tripod and no proper microphone either, there sound quality is terrible. Even 'Manos' fares better than this, at least they had proper equipment. What plot there is simply gets lost in the production mess.
Stick to home videos, preferably made by some 5 year kid trying out the video feature on daddy's new camera phone. You will be in for a long search to find a movie more inept than this.
Monster a Go-Go (1965)
Trying to stay awake through this is painful
When a 7 foot spaceman comes back to Earth in a 4 foot space capsule, you know the movie makers didn't set about this with much thought. The general plot centers on this spaceman-turned-monster who generally terrorizes the place, and the bunch of scientists who may or may not have done something to him to cause this effect.
This movie desperately doesn't want to be watched. much screen time is wasted by people walking around doing or saying nothing? Scientist walks around in field for an eternity in deafening silence then gets killed. Watch firemen spend an eternity setting up equipment. watch scientists sitting around motionless speculating over what might have happened. Watch gratuitous amounts of stock footage pasted in to desperately pad out the story. But just as you are about to drop off to sleep out of boredom, the narrator's voice blares out of the speaker with some doom-and-gloom claptrap (Remember Criswell from Plan 9?) jarring you out of a blissful slumber.
The monster's on-screen time probably amounts to less than 10 seconds. A perfect opportunity to show him trashing a science lab was not included in the film, as this would be considered, 'intersting' and out of ethos with the rest of the plot. All we see is the wreckage. And your reward for sitting to the end? Worst ending ever. This is absolutely awful. Avoid at all costs.
Robot Holocaust (1987)
The feeling of boredom hangs everywhere
What a despairing film. Dress actors in furry rags, place in suburban wasteland, set cameras rolling and hope for the best. One can only imagine e the thanks the cast gave when their characters were killed off by sockpuppets, thus sparing them further humiliation in this dullfest. This rivals Monster a go-go as the best cure for insomnia ever made. Oh God - how can I fill up 10 lines explaining how overwhelmingly bored everybody looks in this movie? Whiney crappy plastic bungling robot who annoys everybody both on and off screen, Giant spider reduced to a single giant hairy leg pulled by string, actors desperately trying not to look at the camera while mumbling off dialogs...
L'uomo puma (1980)
The spirit of Ed Wood lives on!
A bunch of Aztec aliens make a tremendous navigation error in a giant flying humbug, in a deep north American accent, deposit a mind-controlling mask on what appears to be Stonehenge, England, now with a nice coastal view. To look after this, the fabled "Puma man" (constantly miss-pronounced, rather aptly, as "poo-ma man" ) is entrusted to prevent it from falling into evil hands. Alas, a team of archaeologists in bondage gear find the mask and set off on world domination.
Need I go on? Nothing in this movie makes sense. Who cares if the hero's sidekick pushed a bunch of Americans to their deaths for no obvious reason! Poo-ma man's powers include dangling in front of London's skyline, posing like a squirrel and leaping around with 80's synthesized "boing" noises, and walking through walls - all the abilities you would expect from your average south-American feral wildcat.
Oh what's the point of going on. This movie is so bad, it bounces off the bottom depths of the chasm of suckness back up into the realms of inadvertent hysteria. Cue 80's disco music and, "Poo- ma man, he flies like a mor-on!"
Hannibal Rising (2007)
Hannibal Sinking
You can't keep a good franchise down. Thankfully, I watched the movie version of "Hannibal" before I read the book, because quite simply, the book sucked. Too many ridiculous characters and a stupid sub-plot which was thankfully omitted from the movie adaptation and left to Scott's cinematography to bring life to an otherwise embarrassing story. This sub-plot - of Lectur's infancy and why he became who he is is the subject of this movie. So how is the audience expected to react? Hannibal Lecter, one of the greatest baddies ever conceived and gifted Hopkins his Oscar, is now, "ooh - he was just a victim of circumstance". Thomas Harris obviously couldn't think of a sequel so this prequel was the only choice for a quick buck. Turn the unfilmed stuff into another book and let the movie makers do the rest as the royalties flood in.
What is left is a woefully 1-dimensional revenge-killing story. No sub-plots, no reason why everyone across several nations in battle-torn Europe speaks fluent English, no obvious continuity between this story and the next, the embarrassment of using a Chinese actress of playing a Japanese woman (Has nobody learnt anything from the Geisha movie Sayuri?) and a movie where just about everybody is the bad guy, so nobody cares who lives or dies. Gaspard Ulliel (French, an obvious choice for an Eastern European later to be portrayed as a Welshman living in America) spends most of his time head forward and skulking around on the brink of turning into a bat and flapping away. The rest of the characters just don't have enough of character to develop or to care about. It doesn't matter how nicely it's filmed: like "The Village", if the story is lame then no amount of cinematography can give it life. Think of when the successful "Alien" series became "Another dead horse gets flogged". An utter waste of time.
Epic Movie (2007)
There are more jokes in Schindler's list
When the movie is promoted with as from 2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie, then you would expect 2/6 of the jokes, which is unfortunate because after watching 15 minutes, I couldn't find any. Oh dear, there is a difference between spoofing a movie and blatantly ripping it off. If you think the way to spoof "Snakes on a Plane" is to have a plane with snakes on it, then this is pretty much the level of originality to expect here. "Nacho Libre" - hey, a Mexican Jack-Black clone wrester in an identical costume... with nachos! Woo! No-body will ever think of that gag, right viewers? And we're only a few minutes in to the movie!!!
It's as if the directors just decided to re-film sequences of other movies and throw the odd knob or fart joke in. The movie is less than an hour and a half. One feels sure the script took less time to write. Honestly, the whole film crew should be rounded up humanely gassed after producing this pile of celluloid nausea, and every print should be burnt. The makers of the original movies should sue 7 shades of the proverbial out of this to ensure it never happens again. Try watching paint dry, it's more entertaining.
The Final Sacrifice (1990)
In search of Canada's lost film-making civilization
Nope, still haven't found it after watching this. Most of the budget seems to have gone on the lead bad-guy's attire. This movie is lots of shots of dorkish hero (Troy) in dire need of major dental corrective treatment running away from balaclava-clad thugs who, despite most of them carrying rifles, never think of shooting him. Seems like he's following his father's footsteps of finding a lost civilization in Canada (!). Hopelessly silly plot best summed up when Troy and friend Zap enter a cave. Bag guy follows and captures Zap. Back outside, the dialog is something like: Bad guy: "The boy. He went into the cave with you. Where is he?" Henchmen then go off and start searching the forest. Duh. Naturally, this movie is prime MST3K fodder so best watch that version instead if I were you.
Son of the Mask (2005)
Well, if you ever need a cure for insomnia...
...then this is it. This is forced comedy at it's worst, as for 90 minutes, many things that are not funny happen. There is absolutely no sign of the gag-fest of the original Mask, which rightly put Carrey into mainstream cinema. Jamie Kennedy as main character has no charisma whatsoever and simply looks depressed when he becomes the Mask. Cumming (Loki) just looks a poof throughout.
The ending is nothing that anyone with the IQ of the average 3 year old can figure out. Instead, the real story is the battle between Cumming and Kennedy to bore as many people as possible, both on and off the screen. Carrey grinned like a maniac as the Mask; Kennedy just gimmaces. Just look at the expression on everybody's faces in his vicinity both as Avery and as the Mask. Utter boredom. Cumming has the best part (not that there's much competition - he should have played Avery) but in his opening scene he simply uses his mighty powers of boredom to outwit his foe. His magnum opus for boredom takes place in a busy street in broad daylight where he's flexing his mighty computer-generated powers and is ignored by everyone.
Good bits? Well, I gave this two stars as I think this movie is unique in that most of the budget went on the splendid spangily cheery props and scenery than on the cheap, bland and wooden actors. But despite all the flashy effects, I imagine that anybody watching this dull-fest masquerading as entertainment to the end will be left feeling depressed, thoroughly miserable, heartless, soul-less and sickly-green with nausea. Give them an orange plastic wig to wear and it will be Son of the Mask all over again. Avoid.