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Reviews
Dark Moon Rising (2015)
Utter Amateurish Drivel
The film had promise what with the suspiciously high score on IMDb. Unfortunately anyone giving this abysmal film a high score obviously works for the production company which is borne out by the similar vocabulary and content of the early reviews. What can I say about this awful movie that other's haven't said already. It has terrible CGI that may have been just acceptable on a PC game 20 years ago. The rendering software they used must have come from a cover disk freebie from the 90's such was the basic and unprofessional finish of the 'creatures' and the awful way they tried to move. At one point I laughed such was the poor execution of the CGI as an overlay. It was God awful and absolutely amateurish. The dialogue is trite,contrived,melodramatic and downright hokey. There were protracted and unnecessary monologues as if they were thinking this was a Shakespearean play. Also pointless internal monologues that had absolutely nothing to do with the progression of the film. I was absolutely confused with the choppy and nonsensical scenes as whoever edited this looked like they cut massive chunks out for each scene so the following one never made sense. It went from night to day,location to location and seemed to look like you've missed an important plot line such was the lack of fluidity or sense. To be honest this movie was all over the place and was terribly put together. The director obviously thought they were trying to be arty and clever when in fact they made a complete hash of it. What would have been a low end and barely passable movie ended up looking like a high school project. Please give this terrible film a miss. I watched it so you didn't have to!
Shi cheng (2014)
All Over The Place
I agree with another reviewer on this movie. This really is all over the place. The director seems to have no direction ironically enough. It can't seem to decide what genre it wants to be, a horror, a martial arts or a dystopian post apocalypse but fails really in all areas. There is a fair amount of illogic in it which makes it very disjointed and nonsensical. It was empathized in the first part of the movie that the storm clouds in the sky were strange, alluding to this being the cause of the oncoming zombie outbreak but this was a pointless exercise as it had nothing to do with it. Also the dialogue kept being intertwined between English and Mandarin for no reason at all. Conversations would take place where both languages were mashed together when they were all obviously native Asians and there was no need to speak dual languages in the same conversation. Why was there a car half way up a high-rise and why did they drive it along a corridor and nose dive it off the building? These were all just plain daft scenarios that should never have been put into the movie. The second part of the movie was kind of tacked on and didn't flow at all. It's almost as if the director just ran too short on the first half so padded it out with this bullsh*t section. I hardly think a timid school teacher from the first part of the film would be a gangland boss in the second half. This was a totally preposterous idea and just spoilt the movie. I just think the director wanted to cram too many ideas into the movie or wanted to make many movies but only had a budget for one. Either way it didn't work and what could have been a perfectly adequate zombie-fest in a block of flats turned out to be a confused, illogical and shabby mish-mash.
Get Santa (2014)
Very Disappointing
Despite having read some of the below par reviews of Get Santa I decided to watch this anyway but sadly the reviewers were right. This movie hits very wrong notes with the spirit and nature of the man that is Santa Claus and the overall feeling of this movie is rather unsavoury and not particularly child friendly in some of it's content.For the first hour of the movie it was rather a bleak gritty affair and even when the CGI kicked in and the 'magic' happened it was very underwhelming and so out of place with the vibe of the film so far. I kept wondering when the tone would become more upbeat instead of this grey, negative affair. Imagine Father Christmas landing in Albert Square of Eastenders and you will get an idea of the general downtrodden nature of the film. The ending in particular annoyed me for it's suddenness with so many loose ends just hanging.Out of all the fantasy Christmas movies I've seen this is by far the most unappealing one to date. Jim Broadbent plays a good Santa but sadly he is lost in this ill conceived movie. It fails primarily as a magical Christmas movie but also as a family movie. A waste of some talented actors and a missed opportunity for potentially a great Christmas movie. The reviewer stating this movie as "Funny and moving in equal measure" were either part of the production company or someone who watched a completely different film. "Hilariously funny" really, when? You see, Elf was a funny movie but comparing this to Elf is like comparing under 9's Sunday soccer to the Premier League.