pyx

The first one was tolerably silly; this one is insultingly ridiculous, and where did all the little dinosaurs suddenly come from? They weren't trapped under the thermocline - suddenly, we live in a world that has dinosaurs again.

They literally threw every ridiculous idea at this - dinosaurs, packs of megs, giant octopuses, exploding ships, swimming around at 25,000 feet without a suit, endless stupid comic book villains, and lots of ideas ripped off from other movies.

I like action as much as the next guy, but the sequence of events was insulting.

They dumbed it down for a 12 year rating, took all the gore out, took all the sense of tension out, and replaced it with one dimensional comic book enemies and villains, invincible heroes, and people too dumb to get away from the beach when it's being ravaged by killer sea monsters.

And where the hell did all those little dinosaurs come from?!

This movie is complete garbage. It's in the vein of John Wick where you just have to suspend all disbelief and try to immerse yourself in the fantasy, but it punishes and insults you for doing so.

A bunch of moronically rookie cops is led on a suicide mission to take down the most deadly gang that ever existed. Things go badly wrong, most of the cops die in insultingly pathetic fashion. 5 minutes playing Call of Duty would give you more tactical sense than they had.

Thereafter, the entire population of a building supposedly filled with junkies comes after them. Every one of them has heavy guns except the ones that inscrutably bring machetes to a gun fight.

Every bad guy is beaten to total pulp only to leap up again and continue fighting, the hero seems to think that every fight needs to be prolonged to the max, and he never EVER runs out of stamina. Falling 3 stories from a window and landing on his back is a mere inconvenience to him.

I'm amazed that this trash was recommended by martial artist friends who thought I might enjoy it, and I'm insulted that the director put this utter crap out.

EVERY single character behaves with pathetic illogic, at every opportunity making the choice that is least likely to accomplish their supposed goals.

A pathetic movie. I only give it 2 because fighters were such competent martial artists.

Another movie like John Wick where we's supposed to root for and like utterly repugnant characters. John Wick is a man who will murder close friends for convenience, but in this, an utterly repugnant family who overreacts psychopathically to everything, Dad - Former mob boss who has savagely murdered numerous people for minor sleights everywhere he goes, and puts his own feelings ahead of everything and who doesn't have the sense to even control his temper to protect his own family, and who constantly does his best to thwart the very people doing their best to keep him alive. Mom - Prudish woman who will go crazy over a profanity but will destroy an entire business for a minor backhand comment Daughter - Pretty little girl who gleefully destroys people's faces simply for being snarky, pushes herself onto a boy then tries to commit suicide when he rebuffs her Son - Forger, criminal, wiseguy, smart mouth, thief. At least his violence is self defence Main cop - Useless, negligent, confrontational Cop guards - laughably inept Townsfolk - Universally snarky and unlikable Mafia - Ridiculously excessively cartoonishly murderous and hateful - outwitted by two untrained kids.

I kept waiting for the redemption arc for any of these vile characters, and it never came for a single one of them.

Who the hell wrote this garbage?

I had such high hopes for this movie and it DOES faithfully hit many of the key moments and lines of dialogue in the original, but it tries to wrap it in a hip new, modern setting, with oh so sexy stars, painfully OTT caricatures, and a tedious love interest. It was brave to re-imagine the death scenes, and the new CGI fog itself is far better realised, but the new plot elements are just lame, lame, lame.

SPOILERS: The hitcher, who is the male lead's girlfriend is also the daughter/girlfriend of the ghost captain. What the hell?! How does that even make sense?! And how does it then make sense for the dead captain and girl to appear in photos ON THE ISLAND when they never actually reached it?

And when the stars are driving to safety, the lead says "Better slow down, I can't see" then accelerates to dangerous speeds and plows straight into the side of a pleasure boat for some reason parked in the middle of the street.

Then when they return to town, there are multiple burning cars and the place looks like Beirut for some unexplained reason.

Gone is the sinister slow burn build up and the engaging, likable characters, replaced instead with stupid, pointless teen-movie stereotypes. Gone are the gorgeous locations that were as much a part of the movie as the characters.

The Fog is a feeble tribute to glitz over substance.

I LOVE this movie. I can watch it, leave it a couple of days at most, then watch it all over again. Since it came out on Bluray, I've never gone more than a few months without watching it, and I ALWAYS enjoy the experience.

I've spent many hours questioning why I love this movie more than any other. I think it comes from a golden age of horror when movies such as Poltergeist, Jaws, Prince of Darkness, and others were made. When they lacked slick CGI effects and were not made to satisfy demographics and focus groups, but they just tried to make good movies.

It has only one mild jump scare, but is mostly about meticulously building the atmosphere and telling the story. From the first scene on the beach to the last scene in the church, there's barely a wasted frame. There's no sex scenes shoehorned in to appeal to young males, and the very low key boy/girl interest that DOES exist is there purely to facilitate progression of the ghost story, and never descends into gratuitous sex or cheesy romanticism.

The actors are all flawless. There are no larger-than-life characters, stealing the show or drawing focus. Every character has equal weight in the scenes they are in; priest, DJ, hitchhiker, small town mayor, young boy, housekeeper, fishermen, coroner, policeman, PA - each fulfils their role but is never cast to overshadow any other scene, working perfectly as an ensemble, enabling the story to smoulder through.

But for me, the real stars of this story, are the locations and the camerawork used to show them. Set on the coast of California, the beautifully bleak roads, the windswept coast, the barren light house, the weathered beach-houses, the church up in the woods, the fictional town of Antonio Bay, and the breath-taking ocean views all work to create the impression of a town far from modern life without actually being backwards. Of course it was made in the early 80's so it has that sense of period as Jaws does, and that also gives it appeal.

For me, the greatest scene in the entire movie, is the passage from day to night that follows the coroner's scene. The short series of ocean, coastal and countryside scenes guide us more gracefully than any clever dialogue or video transitions. The sense of growing isolation and claustrophobie in that single minute of scenes is masterpiece cinema.

The script is fantastic. The dialogue natural, the plot progression purposeful without feeling rushed, and there's not a single wasted scene, a single pointless shot, a single extraneous word.

Compared to the ultra-realistic CGI glitz of modern horror, which admittedly can get right inside your head and leave you traumatised for years (I'm speaking to you Ring, Paranormal Activity and Sinister), The Fog is a movie that you can watch alone at 2am then quite happily go to bed after. Like the opening ghost story told so masterfully to the children by John Houseman, it comes from the tradition of classic ghost stories to be enjoyed for the story, rather than to be endured then hopefully purged from your memory.

Just whatever you do, please never watch the appalling and intensely disappointing 2005 remake, which personifies every single thing wrong with making movies soullessly to appeal to a demographic.

How on earth this movie has a score of 8.0 at the time of writing I just do not know. The plot is paper thin, followed by a slow-motion 90 minute chase scene, with a revenge climax.

Here's the movie in four lines: Trappers attacked by indians and survivors run DeCaprio gets mauled by a bear and the man left to tend to him predicatably betrays him and kills man's son. DeCaprio grunts agonisingly across the snowy landscape for 90 minutes Kills man.

The movie was drab from start to finish. All the flashback attempts at injecting depth were cliched and lacking in any depth whatsoever. I literally didn't care from start to finish if DeCaprio's character lived or died. We were supposed to care about the plight of the indians, but any chance of that was ruined by the fact that other indians were also vicious psychos. The only two remotely sympathetic chaaracters were the two youngsters, and arguably the one who survived.

I think people confuse fantastic camerawork and incredible landscape for a good movie, but almost everything about this movie was ridiculous, and nothing more so, than the fact that in a sub-zero snow terrain, every single character seems to spend hours wading through icy swamps, stream and rivers wearing leather and furs, without so much as a shiver.

Crappy, crappy piece of rubbish. Finally a DeCapio film I didn't like.

The basic premise of this movie is that Wick is a retired assassin on a revenge rampage. We're supposed to empathise with a man who was and is a ruthless, amoral killer whose former employer included a Russian mafia boss.

Then we're supposed to believe that this man is so well known that the entire city knows him, yet he lives alone in a literal glass house with zero security.

The local town has an assassin's hotel and hangout big enough to house the population of Yankee Stadium, and luxurious enough to have the budget of a small country. And this is not played for laughs or weirdness - it's just a thing.

The assassin himself roller coasters between supposed awesome displays of lethal skill, and breathtaking, showboating ineptitude, such as simply getting back into the vehicle that was stolen from him and returned, without checking if it's bugged or booby trapped, recovering from his failed hit in a hotel known for homing assassins without drawing the curtains or securing the door, or taking on the boss and his most deadly henchmen in a carpark without remotely securing the area.

The number of times Wick just blasely strolled, without so much as a pair of sunglasses or a cap to disguise his identity, into situations with dozens of trained killers waiting for him was downright insulting.

The gunplay was stupidly showy, the martial arts was stupidly ineffective and flashy, and every actual hand to hand fight was in the dark.

I liked the movie at the time but hated it in retrospect. Every scene was a massive insult to my intelligence. It lacked the comic book hyper reality of Sin City yet it was far too silly to consider as a serious attempt at the genre. Fal, fail, fail.

I admit from outset that Ian McKellen can do almost no wrong in my book, but even given the nuance and character that made his Gandalf so utterly likable in Lord of the Rings, he managed to surpass himself in this deeply moving movie.

The movie touches upon themes of isolation, regret, and the fear of a life concluded with important things left undone.

The movie is set on three interwoven stages. The predominant one is a very elderly Mr Holmes spending what will be his last years, in his country cottage, attended by his housekeeper and her young son. The boy views Holmes as a mentor, and a surrogate father/grandfather. Holmes views the boy with affection, but his relationship with the lad is complicated by the emotions of his mother who wants to spare the boy the pain of Holmes eventual demise, whilst planning for her future after his passing.

The second stage regards Holmes last case, and one which evokes very strong feelings in him. As this thread comprises the main mystery element, I'll say no more, except to remark that this part of the story reflects the overall tone of the movie, which is to say that you'll find no chases or sword fights. Rather it deals with the nature of loss and regret.

The third stage is trivial compared to the other two, yet it's used to highlight Holmes' increasing frailty and to highlight the extent of his humanity.

The last 15 minutes picks up in intensity wonderfully whilst never straying from the gentle humanity that characterises the rest of the story. I went from the verge of tears to elation in the space of 5 minutes, and at the end, I found the entire story deeply satisfying.

The story felt very much like a shadowing of McKellen's own mortality, but I very much hope he has many more years left to him yet.

All of the acting was uniformly superb, without ever being obtrusive or charicaturish. Very happy I finally got around to watching this.

I don't like to give 10s (never given one yet) but I can't think of a single reason to withhold points.

Massive fan of the original, but like the remake of Carpenter's The Fog, Poltergeist is utterly lacking in heart. Instead it's a series of almost disconnected, utterly illogical set pieces.

The script is abysmal, and whereas the original was genuinely suspenseful and engrossing, this pallid remake substitutes bangs, loud noises and sudden camera moves for what the original had.

The characters are all irrational within the bounds of normal human behaviour. For example:

1. A little boy fearful of everything in a new neighbourhood is placed in the most remote and unwelcoming room in the house 2. Little boy freaks out over major supernatural trauma and is utterly ignored by family. 3. Little boy attacked by tree (and teen daughter attacked by hands through floor)is IMMEDIATELY abandoned whilst the family searches for missing girl. 4. Teenage girl attacked from the underworld then spends the rest of the movie casually and unconcernedly lounging around on the couch. 5. Paranormal researcher having seen chairs THAT HE IS ABOUT TO SIT ON hurled across the room yet is still sceptical that the whole thing is a hoax, then when a terrifying major paranormal event occurs to him, he tells no one.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that this movie is such a pathetic piece of dross that the scriptwriter and directors should hang their heads in shame.

With a movie like this, where the monster AND plot are revealed in the movie poster, there can be only two things that make it worth watching: the quality of the effects, or the quality of the story leading to the monster parts.

Let's start with the first: if you thought that the rubber creature in the old 1960s swamp creature was a low that was 50 years in the past, think again - the fish in this movie is as unrealistic as it's possible to be. Not even animatronic. Just a crappy crappy crappy lump of rubber with a mouth that opens and shuts - and none of the nuances that might give it life: flexible skin, realistic eyes, variable swimming motion, a sense of aggression - no. Instead, just this big dumb lump of rubber that floats around the lake like a submarine with all the menace of an inflatable lilo.

And now the story. There's no level on which this crappy waste of 90 minutes is plausible. Clearly all of the major characters hate each other except slut and native American style flower child, so why the hell would any of them choose to spend the day together?

And then there's the fact that they ARE all just painfully uninspired stereotypes:

Spoiled jock Irritating nerd Treacherous slut Evil ruthless brother Beautiful silent type flower child Mysterious brooding old guy who lives by lake

But just put the uninspired characterisation to one side, if you can do so, and try to work out the logic of the movie.

Big dangerous fish in lake and we have no oars because we dumb nyuck nyuck. we sacrifice someone create distraction. Then take no advantage of distraction, once, twice, three, four times, repeating the same pathetically unbelievable little melodrama until the entire party is in the water getting eaten by super slow rubberfish, until finally, forced to swim, dumb jock makes a break for it.

If I had written this pile of crap, I'd be ashamed to be credited. From start to predictably feeble finish, there is not a single saving grace.

Acting -nope Plot - nope Originality - nope B movie schlocky entertainment - nope Creature effects - definitely nope

Do yourself a massive favour - swim on by this piece of garbage.

The basic premise of the movie is an interesting one, and like Gravity, there's lots of spectacular camera work and effects, but once you get beyond that, you realise how little substance there is to the movie.

Rather than skilfully building a movie by developing the plot and taking the characters on a journey, each character comes fully completed in his/her final form from the first second you see them on the screen. From start to finish, the movie is nothing but a series of feel-good snapshots, rather than a well developed story.

The movie is nothing more than one stereotype after another, bound together by the most ridiculous logic from start to finish.

The frustrating thing is, it had so much potential and the characters were mostly tremendously likable - not that they had much chance to be anything but.

The movie feels like nothing but a series of set pieces, but lacks any meat. But for all that, thanks to spectacular use of technology, Ender's Game does manage to be extremely watchable, even if it leaves you feeling utterly cheated at the end.

To be honest, it's a movie that had me asking WTF from start to finish, so to have a ridiculous, unrealistic ending in which the main character acts in a way (and allowed to act that way by his superiors) that defeats the entire purpose of the rest of the movie, is no less lazy than the rest of the film.

An outstanding cast could have been given so much more to chew on.

I'd like to read the book to see if Card did better, but since I discovered he's a bigot, I don't want to let him have any of my money.

Gravity is one of those movies that is a great watch, but when you get to the end, you realise how utterly contrived and lacking in substance it was. I was particularly irritated but the perfect timing and convenience of the disasters. One, even two would have been plausible, but seven was just stretching credibility (3 debris hits, the suit air supply, Clooney's thruster fuel, the fire on the Russian station, and the Russian shuttle's lack of fuel).

The very opening premise seemed to me to be flawed - after all, it seems extremely unlikely that of the millions of square miles of potential orbital trajectories, the debris would happen share the exact same flight path as all three international space missions. After all, who places geo-stationary objects in the orbital path of a satellite (and if they weren't geo-stationary, how did the debris catch them)? As a piece of switch your brain off story-telling, Gravity was masterful - it had pacing, pathos, emotion, and in spite of the fact that most of the movie features a single actress not interacting with anyone, it never felt laboured or boring. However, you must understand that this movie is all style and no substance.

Ignore the incongruity of a medical doctor working on a space telescope - ignore the incongruity of navigating an escape vehicle a hundred miles on landing jets only, ignore all of the many plot holes, and you are left with a movie that is still implausible on every conceivable level.

Yet for all that, damn it, I still liked it. I think it's because humans have an innate love of the concept of space, and weightlessness, which this movie brought to life superbly.

I see people calling this best space movie ever. It wasn't. Sunshine, Mission to Mars, Event Horizon, Outland, even Alien, did space better than this, but Gravity is certainly supremely polished and tightly edited, although the entire Indian lullaby scene left me cold.

Overall, worth the watch solely for the quality of the space re-creation - everything else is a bonus.

This movie is supposedly inspired by actual events - in the same way that Robin Hood Men in Tights is inspired by the life of Robin of Locksley! In actual fact, it's a turgid piece of dross that plagiarises every bad camcorder-perspective movie out there.

It can't decide if it wants to be The Ring, Blair Witch, Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity - it has elements of all, but manages to be so much worse than the sum of its underwhelming parts.

MANY SPOILERS INCLUDING THE IMMENSELY YAWNSOME ENDING BELOW!!!!

Skinwalker ranch is a real place, steeped with the silly superstitions of many a plains region, but the movie makers have taken the basic idea and thrown literally every stupid cliché possible at it; ghosts, alien abduction, giant monsters, possession, black ops, and more. To make things worse, almost every time anything happens, it's from the security monitor view, which shows interference to show that "an event" is occurring, and of course, making it hard to see what is actually happening. All other paranormal events either happen in the dark, or with super fast action so that it's impossible to get your teeth into anything substantive.

Random "clues" are thrown at you throughout, but as the little boy literally vanishes in a flash of light in the opening scene, the alien connection is established from the start, so the disjointed and utterly arbitrary clues are all but pointless.

The basic concept is reminiscent of the infinitely superior Gibson flick Signs, but unlike that movie which reached a satisfying, if nauseatingly treacly Christian conclusion, this one heavy-handedly rushes to a frantic but unsatisfying crescendo, culminating in a Cloverfield-type reveal of an alien space craft without bothering to offer even the vaguest hint of an explanation. It's like the director just shouted "nasty aliens" then yawned out of the studio in disinterest.

Ignore marais-Alexander's review - this person is a clear plant, and I'm suspicious about erraticchevy's review too. I scare easily, but this was pathetic. Expect to see the current 5.3 score plummet as more genuine viewers dilute the high scores given by the people connected to this movie.

I'd love to give this movie a much higher score, but it lacked the skillful crafting that could have transformed it from fascinating to incredible.

In the same way that small budget sci fis like Dark Star or even the early seasons of Red Dwarf manage to be both compelling and believable in spite of their limited scope, Europa Report, didn't need a million locations or space ships pew pew pewing across the screen.

There have been a slew of slow-burn sci fi exploration movies over the past 10 years, where a large portion of the action is set in the claustrophobic, yet plausible confines of the ship - Sunshine, Mission to Mars, Red Planet, and others. This was not as good as any of them, nor as slick, but the concept was far more intellectually appealing; namely the search for life on the most likely body in our solar system to actually hold it.

In some senses, this movie seemed to be designed to appeal to scientists, and astronomers not movie goers. The "dramas" such as they were, were really understated and clumsily contrived, and that is where this movie fails in relation to the others I mentioned.

Nevertheless, its inexorable, tip-toe towards the final reveal is believable and ultimately as profound as it is satisfying.

This is a movie that will appeal if the mere THOUGHT of a black hole is enough to fill you with wonder, and set your mind pondering for half an hour.

Whilst the actual pacing and dynamics of the movie left an awful lot to be desired, I shall doubtless watch the final ten minutes dozens of times.

This movie transplants Die Hard 1 from Nakatoma Plaza to the White House, but other than that, all the major plot elements are near identical - super-genius villain, personal interest (this time played by the President's son rather than Maclane's wife), unbelievable hacking skills, idiotic rescue forces, superhuman man on the inside who knows best, and more besides.

The movie insults you at every turn, starting with the ease with which the white house is captured, and the gross stupidity of the special forces, and the secret service agents. But by far the most egregious, and most idiotic plot premise, is the idea that nukes that haven't been launched or even armed yet, can now be ordered to self destruct in their own silos.

Then there's the premise that South Korea would be left defenceless simply to save the life of the President. And of course, the other unbelievable premise is that not only are the only three people with the codes to disarm the nukes all EVER in the same place at the same time, but that such a vital function would even depend upon such a fallible failsafe in the first place. So once the nukes have been accidentally launched, if just one of the three civilians entrusted with their self destruct codes is incapacitated or unavailable, that's it - no way of cancelling?!

The entire premise that Butler's character has shamed himself, is nonsense. An unavoidable disaster occurs - he takes exactly the right action, when the president is messing around wasting time, and saves the president's life. If the president had complied quicker, his wife could also have been saved.

Olympus artlessly manipulates your emotions at every turn, but for all that, it did have some good moments. Butler makes a far more compassionate and likable hero than Bruce Willis. If you can leave every trace of your intelligence at the door, it's not bad for its action content, but its cerebral content is non-existent.

I'm always up for a good post-apocalyptic drama, and this one sounded good on paper, but wasted no time in disappointing.

An unimaginative mixture between Ghosts of Mars, I am Legend, and The Day After Tomorrow, this movie was a dreadful waste of the acting talents of many actors who deserved better.

There were two basic themes in this movie: the power struggle between the prosaic but ruthless Mason, played by Bill Paxton, and the humane, idealistic people lead by Zegers. However, Paxton's character was developed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face.

The other theme was the descent of humanity into barbarism, as represented by the cannibals, lead by Dru Viergever. His character was a literal rip off of the feral in Ghosts of Mars, complete with filed teeth, and he was equally unrealistically superhuman. At least the one in Ghosts was possessed by an alien spirit!

There were so many unrealistic choices made by the characters at every turn, culminating with the most stupid of all - the expedition into the snow of a deep ice age - the very snow that nearly killed the hero just one day earlier, but now, rather than wearing arctic gear and carrying copious supplies, women and a child intend to walk a huge distance totally unprepared and wearing light anoraks. And this is supposed to be the bright new beginning...

Lazy scripting from start to finish. If your expectations are low enough, this is vaguely entertaining.

The premise of this movie is perfectly sound: cynical paranormal researchers get to investigate the most haunted place ever in order to prove to a dying man who has lived an evil life that there is no afterlife. However, to balance them out (and give the plot some tension), they are teamed with a rival Christian team who believes in everything. The only problem is, within 5 minutes in the asylum, the sceptics seem to believe in all supernatural events as much as their Christian rivals.

As the two teams do their stuff, they are stalked and toyed with by various apparitions, leading them to an unbelievably cheesy confrontation with a demon at the end.

The director gives away far too much too early, and instead of framing everything in a context whereby the phenomena are less certain to the sceptical team, he blows his load in the first quarter of the movie, leaving you without suspense, tension, or horror.

The reality show idea had a lot of promise, but instead this entire movie ended up becoming nothing more than a tedious Christian tract with a tedious and blatant morality punchline.

This movie opened by illustrating in a very compelling way, why redistribution of wealth might not be the unquestioned good thing that it at first appears. It did this using animated 3D political figures in a classroom setting and quite frankly, from the very off, the animation got in the way of the message. Ten stupid animated segments later, and I was as often left scratching my head and asking what the hell they were meant to be illustrating, as I was left irritated by this pandering to the Jackass generation.

Clearly this was not a remotely impartial piece, and whilst it desperately tried to demonstrate that allowing the rich to keep more of their taxes as a means of stimulating growth, it completely ignored the fact that many of the rich, such as bankers, already use their wealth to get tax breaks that the rest of us do not, to say nothing of the fact those same wealthiest few, are then the ones that the rest of the country gives YET MORE MONEY to in bailout when their out-of-control avarice manages to destroy the global economy.

No doubt the American economy is desperately broken, but a one-sided piece of disinformation like this, which looks the other way when the failings of the system it espouses are mentioned, is never going to help.

To climb out of the pit that the nation has slid into, everyone needs ALL of the information, not just self-serving selections of it.

Oh, if I see any more christians talking about "God given this", and "thanks to god that", I think I'm gonna puke. Anyone who still believes in bronze age sky daddies should not be trusted with grown up decisions.

As the saying goes, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics". This movie demonstartes how easy it is to use one-sided statistics to prove black is white if you present them right.

All of that being said, it does seem fairly obvious to even the youngest child that borrowing at a rate beyond your absolute wildest hopes of repayment is a path to nowhere. No household with proportionally the same debt as the US, would ever be able to get a loan, and they'd be called crazily irresponsible for continuing to do so. So what deal with the devil is being done to lend money to the US?

I hate pretentious movies that try so hard to be art that they forget to be entertaining. This movie falls into that category. I'm not really a fan of abstract surrealism at the best of times, but bleak self-loathing surrealism can just go take a jump in the lake! The trouble with symbolism is that if it needs a guide book to tell you what's going on (especially symbolism in movies where the viewer doesn't have the time to dissect every nuance), I think it fails. It just becomes a series of directorial in-jokes. I don't mind challenging film. I can stomach dark movies. But this simply failed to reward the effort.

Furthermore, none of the non-surreal relationships (Nicholas and Bobby, Nicholas and his mother, mother and boyfriend) were remotely credible, so my mind was constantly tussling with the disbelief about their relationships, long before the actual surreal stuff started happening.

This movie had the potential to be really worthwhile, with some mature performances from the young leads forging the way, but instead it disappeared right up its own self-indulgent rectum.

Read traymasters' review above, then save yourself the time of actually watching the movie. His review is far more meaningful and lucid than the actual movie!

I'll try to be kind - an American with an attitude and no sense of humour. What a surprise. Don't give Jay Harris' review any credence whatsoever. Sophisticated cerebral humour just seems to elude some people. Audiences don't give elated standing ovations for nothing, so you decide who to trust - 5000 lucky spectators at the Royal Albert Hall, or poor humourless Jay Harris...

When I first saw that this had been produced, I feared that it would be one more try to exploit the Monty Python legacy that reached its pinnacle with The Life of Brian movie. Instead, it turned out to be a triumph, that soared, and incredibly managed to exceed the movie itself, although it could never have done so without the ground breaking, risk taking humour of the original movie.

The idea of a Life of Brian opera certainly sounds stodgy and ill-advised, and the first few numbers were perhaps a bit too low-burn, really doing nothing to set the scene or re-acquaint fans of the movie.

After that, highlights from the movie are performed magnificently, with the scoring and the lyrics working in hilarious and perfect harmony. Whilst the oratorio covers a wide range of styles, from Dob Dylan folk mumble to Mexican cantina band, it is primarily classical and operatic. Don't let that put you off though, it's not performed in pretentious style, and in fact the juxtaposition actually enhances the piece. At no time is this more brilliantly demonstrated than when Brian and Judith have sex, operatically. If that doesn't bring tears of laughter to your face, then I have serious doubts about the presence of your sense of humour. It's incredible that it can be puerile and high-brow at the same time, and that is the oratorio's incredible magic.

The piece is littered from start to finish with in jokes that Life of Brian fans will enjoy, but many pay homage to the greater Python body of work. The audience was particularly appreciative of the repeated intrusion of the lumberjack song.

Some of the key moments played out musically include:

Popular People's Front Popped by? Swarmed by more like! Brian and Judith Biggus Dickus Bwian You lucky bastard Crucifixion Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

When the original movie came out, it caused a religious outrageous amongst stuffy Christians the world over, and hopefully, this fantastic show will stick a cracker up their butts again. On the one hand, it's not actually disrespectful of the whole Jesus story, yet it manages to point out the hypocrisy of religion. My favourite lines come at the end of the piece called Hail to the Shoe, where the singers have decided that the shoe is a sign of Brian's divinity:

Hail to the Shoe. Death to those who Have different views Concerning his Shoes And while we kill him let us all pray

I'm not fortunate enough to be as well versed in classical music as Adam Wilde, so there may be even more sophisticated jokes lurking for some of you, but I know this, there has not been a movie in two decades that I watched three or four times in two days, as I have with He's not the messiah. If you're a Python fan, treat yourself to the treat of two decades!

One commentator has noted that this movie is a direct remake of The cabinet of Dr Caligari from the 1920's, but more recently the even more abysmal "For Sale by Owner" took the identical premise - investigator turns out to be the mental one, and butchered it. With such recent failure, one would hope that the script-writers could do something more imaginative.

Setting this movie in a mental home is such a cop-out because it means that nothing you see has to be real, or make sense.

The excessively overbearing soundtrack is as unsubtle as the rest of the movie, which is to say that even to numb-skull like me, the ending glared out from 15 minutes into the movie, and it was only the precise details that remained to be filled in.

Everyone's acting is first rate, but that does nothing to make up for the lack of satisfaction that this weak movie provides.

Surrealism doesn't automatically make a good movie, any more than a "twist" ending. It would have been a far greater twist if DiCaprio's character had gotten away and proved that there WAS a conspiracy...

I had such high hopes for this looking at the people involved with it, but now another great director is struck off my "always trust" list.

Has Hollywood's desire for safety tainted even this great director?

Surely the whole point of an action movie is to let you see the action, not simply wobble the camera and play loud music whilst showing you nothing? There ought to be a law that says that classic movies cannot be sequel-butchered by "directors" who had not even entered puberty when the first movie came out.

Alien has got successively worse since part 3, but the original two were so strong that we keep watching in the hope of that former glory. This woeful dross proves that not only is it never gonna happen, but Fox couldn't give a damn if they crap all over the original legacy.

A great classic has been mercilessly slaughtered. If you can't do it right, don't do it at all.

If you thought Day after tomorrow was implausible, wait till you see this.

Okay so the premise of most disaster films is usually a 1 in billion event occurring, compounded by other circumstances. In this case, the even is the joining of two huge storm systems. Fair enough so far. Oh but hold up, no, the "event" is the sabotage and subsequent destruction of the power grid.

Next throw in loads of human interest elements - in this case a cheating husband, a psychotic gun-wielding boyfriend, a rebellious daughter, a hacker with a point to prove, a senator trying to push an agenda, a reporter trying to stand up against "the man", and a pregnant women stuck in an elevator.

Finally add a handful of taster events to add excitement.

Jeez if the director tried to fit in any more meaningless plot lines, there would have been no time less for the actual disaster, which, given the pitiful state of the computer graphics, was almost certainly the intention.

Jeez, if you can't even model a truck convincingly, you really should not be taking on twisters, exploding power stations, Las Vegas getting ripped apart, or destroyed oil stations.

In case you didn't already gather how appalling this movie is, let me just add that all three bad guys get killed in separate, and wholly ungratifying, implausible manners, that stunk more of moralising that good film-making.

I'm have no problem with first month film students writing jaded, hackneyed, cliché-soaked scripts, but for god's sake, that doesn't mean anyone has to make them into movies!

It manages to make the abysmally implausible 10.0 Apocalypse look not quite so dreadful. Avoid them both.

I thought that the days of ending a horror film with, "And then he woke up to find it was all a bad dream" had died 20 years ago, but here comes this appalling drivel to prove that there's always some feeble writer that thinks this unbelievably weak get-out of jail free card is clever. I can only assume that the writer himself has spent the last two decades otherwise engaged.

Okay, in this case, all of the horror pieces are simply elements of real life, woven into a schizo's psychotic fantasy, but what an unbelievable cheap shot. Because by making everything part of a delusion, none of the mysterious threads ever need to be logically resolved; and not a single one of them is resolved. Dead kids in rocking chairs, ghost child's voices at night, ghostly house sellers, murdered settlers, ancient burial grounds, disappearing real estate salesmen, and forgetful handymen are just random events that need no explanation, nor does the film even bother. The director has essentially thrown together half dozen mildly intriguing ghost mystery clichés, then rather than answer any, the protagonist simply wakes up in a straight jacket, and that's supposed to provide a satisfactory explanation. I can barely express the contempt I feel for the laziness of the script-writing that brought about this conclusion.

The really sad thing is, the movie had an interesting atmosphere, and was worth providing a sensible, logical ending. Yet another example of how 90 minutes can be ruined in the last 60 seconds. Like doing a 100 metre sprint and tripping just before the line.

If you can't afford decent effects, at least have a decent script. If you can't have a decent script, have people who know how to act. If you can't have people who know how to act, you end up with The Crypt.

To say that this movie was uninspired would be a massive overstatement.

So poorly crafted and lacking in quality, that it's not even in the so-bad-it's-good category.

The movie starts with a stupid, over-acting, over-emoting, boggle-eyed grave robber doing his thing and paying the price. This is meant to be the hook that catches our interest, but all I felt was a sense of foreboding at how tedious the scene was.

Sadly, the movie went downhill from there. I'm not even going to waste time on further analysis.

Appalling. Don't waste 5 seconds on it.