Tim851

I thought the basic idea to remake Moby Dick in a slightly steam-punk version with dragons was intriguing enough. Sure, this is probably not gonna be a film for the ages, but it could be entertaining for ninety minutes.

But it's just horrible. Oh so horrible. The acting is some of the worst I have ever seen, if I account for the fact that they did indeed use professional actors. Danny Glover and Vinnie Jones have never been praised for their craft when playing the shallow roles they've played before. Here now, they are cast in character roles and that is a disaster. Jones tries to summon some gravitas by constantly suckling on this wee pipe of his and it looked ridiculous. The other male actors are underwhelming at best. They seem to have been selected because they all resemble other (more talented) actors.

The female lead was clearly cast based on "Who was the hottest chick that showed up?" Her acting is the worst.

The screenplay is just clown shoes. But the real highlight of this thing is the "ship". It looks like a carrack without sails, but wheels instead. It moves forward by means of ... erm, nobody knows. At the very least, they should have lamp-shaded it. But no.

This thing is only a 2/10 because the dragon special effects are somewhat decent. Somewhat. Otherwise it would be a 1/10.

A movie like this, you'd expect there to be a lot of philosophical discussion. About the nature of evil, the devil, man.

But this one instead tries to be some sort of scary flick. There were probably some people scared by it (after all, there were people thinking Paranormal Activity is scary...), but by and large it has to be counted as one big failure.

Way too much focus on the people outside the elevator. Without ever getting close to actually fleshing out any character. NOTHING going on inside the elevator. There are people dying and the survivor's seem to take it pretty well. Once again, you'd expect some sort of discussion forming, after all, they'd have to be assuming there's a killer amongst them. But no.

This was just 90 wasted minutes. 4/10

I kinda enjoyed it.

But it's a rehash of the original and will as such always suffer. You have certain problems, like the original only showed the Predator later in the film in all its cloaky glory. But since then we've all seen Predators, lots of them. So should a movie still try to make the eventual revealing of them climactic? I don't know. 'Predators' didn't and it worked for me.

The Gang had little chemistry. There were too many of them. I correctly predicted the succession in which they would die though - except for the first one. They also took their situation surprisingly calm. I didn't expect Wangst and philosophical debate, but when they realized the first twist, I did expect more than a few looks of disbelief.

Adrian Brody was fine. Don't know what everybody has against him. He looks 1000 times more Black Ops than Schwarzenegger, who due to his muscles-for-looks would be too slow, too bulky and too quickly out of breath. His character was a bit to omniscient.

Lawrence Fishburne's character was a nice surprise. So sad they didn't go anywhere with him. He also looked a bit chubby for his situation.

Topher Grace is continuing to not have a career. His character was weird. Nobody questioned his nature, not even Mr. Know-it-all Brody. His last five minutes on screen were kinda stupid.

Hm. I don't know, I gave it a 5/10 when I started this review. But the more I think about it, the more stars I have to subtract.

I did feel entertained for the most part. But now I can't remember a single memorable scene.

Man. I saw it coming from a mile away. The bad ending, everyone who's seen a couple of surprise endings can figure this one out after about 40 minutes. But it got a 6.8 on IMDb, it must be good, right? So I stuck with it. Maybe it would surprise me after all. Well, it didn't.

This film has 2 scare scenes (in words: two) and everyone raves about them when they're just about as mediocre as it gets. Around these two scenes a whole lot of nothing is created. We learn way too much about the workday of some dudes and everything is underscored by some creepy music while nothing actually happens.

But this seems to be the new trend. Horror films without Horror. It's like "Paranormal Activity". A bunch of what I can only imagine are Catholic Schoolgirls are spooked by a dark hallway and a sound effect and then come on to IMDb and uprate this as the greatest experience ever. And the rest are Anti-Mainstream people who pretend like every movie that is slow paced must be good. Because it's slow paced.

Well I'm not up for this non-sense. If you like your Horror scary, or gory or even slow but well done like "The 6th Sense" then stay away from this one.

If you like you Horror to be not scary, not gory and predictable like porn, just go for it, 'cause this one's a bona fide 2/10.

I haven't read the book, so I'm just gonna judge the movie.

This one to me is like a bag of wasted opportunity. It starts out nicely, more fairytale than fantasy. The first hour is everything that Harry Potter could never be.

And then someone stepped in and put the Lord of the Rings in Lewis' head. So all the magical atmosphere is tossed aside and this film just rushes through the motions.

With a lack of visual feedback hinting otherwise, I have to assume that all of this grand epic story takes places over the course of two days. Two days in which the four brats are declared long prophesied saviors, have their fair share of uncertainty and doubt, step up to challenge, meet new "people" who become family after 10 minutes and then lead their army into battle.

Because after all, this is no fairytale, this is quickly becoming a bad LOTR wannabe. The battle is ridiculous, but who cares.

And it feels totally weird throughout. These are four middle-class kids, who become noble generals. There is one scene that shows them train with weapons, but there is no conveying the sense that they are actually getting prepared. There's no explanation as to why the army would follow them, there is this prophecy thing but it never really transpires.

I was seriously considering giving it a 9, and then it slips badly to become everything the Lord of the Ring never wanted to be. Giving it a 5 is mighty flattering of me. But so am I, a grand ol' flatterer.

Knowing is as subtle as '80s Hard Rock.

From the first scene you know it. There's the little Cassandra character who is a pale, nearly autistic creepy little girl with the ominous stare all the time who writes down a chaos of numbers while in trance. The movie continues along these lines.

Nic Cage's character is basically Mel Gibson's (not too great) character from Signs. He's a broody widower, who lives with his half-deaf son in a creepy horror mansion somewhere outside of Boston. His son gets the number chaos from a time capsule at school and Cage somehow finds the date of 09/11/01 in there. The pale standing-around-people from Dark City are back as well.

All in all this movie is just a collage of two dozens movies, most of them not really classics to begin with. Not a single figment of it is original.

And Nicolas Cage must finally be considered to be amongst the worst actors that are A-list in Hollywood. His performance in this is astonishingly bad at times and barely adequate at best. It doesn't help, that his character is clownshoes. Only trumped by the female sidekick character who got some of the worst writing since the 1950s.

There is a lot of CGI in there. Every single scene has been visually enhanced. Some of it looks better, some worse. All looks fake. There are two CGI disaster sequences that are done pretty well. You see they're 100% computer generated, but they look very convincing indeed.

3/10, without the disaster scenes it'd be 2/10.

Seriously, what's up with this movie? Right from the beginning, you know that you're at. The first scene is just lead Lena Heady dressing up - underscored by the creepiest music a 15-year-old can think of on his brand new keyboard. So you know the movie tries to be scary. Sadly, it remains at trying.

There is about two dozen shots of things - architecture, furniture, ordinary stuff - accompanied by this teenager's music. The worst scene of the movie is a shot of a hallway. After an actress walks into a bathroom, the camera stays out in the hallway for 9 seconds. Doesn't sound like a lot but it's just a boring set of walls and doors, I could really feel myself aging there. Then, the camera starts to pan to the kitchen at the pace of continents drifting. I'm not kidding, the pan spans about 15 ft. max and it takes, I timed it, 24 seconds! When we finally arrive at the kitchen, I can confirm that the retro fridge is by Smeg and that's it. All in all, the scene is 35 seconds of exciting London middle-class interior design.

Aside from still lifes, the movie also has the generic premise (horror with mirrors, whee!) and the seen before twist ending, that most people figure out 10 seconds after the first plot point.

But the worst thing is that NOTHING is explained. There are antagonists here, who's presence, existence or motivation are not explored at all. Some pretent... I mean, insightful people want to sell this as Anti-Hollywood, inspiring us to think for ourselves. But no, screw that. There's a difference between 'leaving some mystery' or 'reading between the lines' and just no telling half the story. If I wanted to use my imagination that much, I wouldn't be watching TV in the first place, I'd be gathering people at my feet, telling them fairy tales of dragons & princes while smoking my hookah.

I like the remakes of Texas Chainsaw (the first, not the prequel), Dawn of the Dead and Halloween, so I'm not somebody hung up on nostalgia or anything.

But his movie is just plain bad. It has NO story. Strike that. All horror flicks have no story, but this one doesn't even have a narrative or whatever you wanna call it. It's just two dozen people getting split from the herd and killed. Usually slasher flicks have a couple of people fighting for survival, but this one just disposes of them quickly. Really quickly. And not even terribly gory.

And that Jason feller is a ninja. He is EVERYWHERE. He never makes a sound, although he is a 8'0" tall guy, weighing about 240 lbs. and wearing army boots, but he sneaks like a cat - unless he wants to scare people with noises. And he's pretty agile too, appearing in places the protagonists looked in just 2 seconds ago. He's so sneaky and stealthy, I bet he's a master lockpicker at level 10 or higher.

To save the movie, there's nudity. Three girls put out. Two aren't all that pretty and have fake boobs, but the last one is awesome. Then again, if I'm after tits, I'll just get me some porn.

I'm just glad I gave that "The Forgotten Ones" disaster 3/10 stars, so I can give this one here 2/10 (and reserve the 1/10 for Uwe Boll)...

I've only recently gotten around to watching "Firefly" on Blu-Ray. It's not the eight wonder of the world, that the fan-people make it out to be, but it's a very entertaining TV show, I found it quite similar to Farscape, a show I also like very much.

And just like Farscape, the follow up movie just sucks bad. For different reasons though. In Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, they tried to force 22 episodes of a never produced 5th season into what amounts to 4 episodes and that had to fail.

In Serenity, it's pretty much the opposite. There wasn't apparently anything in particular, they wanted to do or tell. They finally reveal the 3 minutes worth of back-story to that erratically told and attached feeling X-Files-sideplot featuring River and the Men in Black and it's every bit as disappointingly mediocre as one would expect.

After that, they just filled it with wholly uninspired generic Sci-Fi-Action, that had absolutely nothing to do with the TV-show. The movie loses almost all of the trademark humor of Whedon-productions, totally neglects all of the established characters (Captain: humorous, Kaylee: light-hearted, Jayne: mean), invents a new villain, a Deus ex machina and one laughably Star Trek/Gate like story of origin. And of course kills a few regulars, 'cause that adds depth.

The show I'd give 8/10, but this movie is glad to get away with 4/10.

Just yesterday, I bashed a horror film called "The Forgotten Ones" for being just a rehash of cliché horror sequences.

Deja vu. "The Uninvited" too is just that. A rehash. A story like you've seen dozens before, just usually not in a horror film. That's probably why the "scary" scenes feel a bit superfluous. Oh, we've got a weak-a$$ psycho-thriller here, maybe we should spice it up with some make-up effects.

The acting is a bit underwhelming, Elizabeth Banks in particular struck me as miscast. BTW, why is that woman constantly paired up with men who play at least 2 leagues below her? Anyway, the pride of every psycho-thriller / Horror film these days is the end twist.

Oh well. The ending is great, my girlfriend said, but she doesn't watch a lot of movies. Those of us that do will recognize our good ol' friend, the #1 twist of the past decade. You have to admire the writers for being such gutsy daredevils and think: no, I think the public can take one more of these.

Still, I give it 5/10, if you don't watch a lot of these, it's probably entertaining enough.

The best way to describe the movie is: redundant. Not a single frame of it is original. Everything has been done before and better. The group of victims, their dynamic, the setting, the monsters, the killings. Everything is just a rehash of a cliché of a stereotype.

As far as horror films go, this is one of the lamest. The group of people is amongst the dullest, least developed bunch of morons without chemistry ever. The plot is something you and your friends come up with in 5 alcohol infested minutes when joking about bad horror plots. The setting is more like "Let's get paid to go to a Paradise Island!" The killings all follow the horror formula and are less gory than I've come to expect.

All in all, this was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It wasn't as bad as classic early Boll, but that just made it worse. "The Tribe" is bad in a totally unfunny and unentertaining way, it's just plain and simple a waste of lifetime.

This movie is just awful.

The title gives away the "twist", which isn't that big a deal, 'cause it ain't much of a twist.

The movie itself is the most uninspired crap I've seen in a long time. Most of it is just loooooong shots of people looking scared at something or walking scared towards something. And that is before the threat is fully established, so you wonder, why they are so hesitant. But all those endless shots end in cutaways or machine-gun-montages. Some of it is utterly confusing.

The lack of atmosphere, character development, a real story or talent anywhere is compensated by eerie music playing all the time. I totally dig this, it's nice when the movie tells me when to feel scared.

And then there's absolutely sub-standard audio, the voice dubbing is so bad, maybe they used their Macbook's build-in microphone and the rest of the sound effects too often sounds just overboard.

I have never before given a movie a 1/10, and admittedly, this is not the worst movie ever, but I still felt the lowest possible rating was in order to avenge the 90 minutes of my life that were wasted!

Sure, it's cheap to just copy a movie shot-by-shot.

But hey, how many American movies/TV shows/songs/*insert random cultural item here* got ripped off in other countries. I mean, seriously, "Rec" itself was just Blair Witch meets Dawn of the Dead. So all the fancy pantsy art-house film lovers who think Hollywood kills culture and cite "Rec" - of all things - are probably just misinformed.

It might be a matter of personal taste (and isn't art always), but I thought the acting in "Quarantine" was way better than in "Rec". Especially Jennifer Carpenter. I have rarely seen somebody freak out that credibly. On the downside, half of the cast is of minor TV fame, which made me go "Hey, isn't that the guy/gal from ..." all the time.

The special effects were also done a bit more professional and I thought the directing was a bit more subtle. Some genre-typical scenes that put me off in "Rec" were more subdued or slightly altered here.

To sum it up: 8/10.

PS: Thank you Hollywood! I live in Germany and our Movies suck. If it weren't for you ... well, I'd probably have hobbies and appreciate nature more. Still, thank you.

This movie started okay. I mean, it's a horror film about mirrors, so you know it's not gonna challenge you with innovative ideas. Still, the first 30 minutes were solid, albeit a bit wasteful with the "loud noise scare".

But then it loses its ways. Suddenly, bottoms of things need to be gotten to, big chunks of back story want to be revealed. Sometimes, it's done well, like with The Ring. And although Mirrors takes more than a few cues from that movie, it doesn't work.

So after half an hour it became boring. It didn't help that the story was more like "The Ring"'s ugly sister. And the climax (with huge air quotes) was video game'ish.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It has a few too many gore scenes for the mainstream crowd and way too much bad, superfluous story for the hardcore fans.

I didn't care much for The Incredibles, Cars or Ratatouille but Wall-E is just precious.

The first half hour or so is near perfect. There is no plot line, there is nothing really happening, it's just Wall-E. And it's just too cute. This movie is connecting emotionally. Some people complain about that and the lack of, let's call it, "solid stuff" but hey, this is an animation film, if you expected "The Deer Hunter" with robots you are probably just stupid.

Unfortunately (for me) Pixar too felt they needed to squeeze in a real story somewhere and they did. It's not really bad (although a bit too contemporary) and it's rather well executed but it totally contrasts the first half hour and I feel it would've done much better without it.

But nonetheless, it's still a 9/10. It's safe to say that people who thought "Boo" was the best thing about Monters Inc. will love Wall-E, everybody who thought that movie had a great and enticing plot probably won't.

Man, this was fun. It is very predictable, but still hilarious. I would hardly call this horror, since it never really tries to be scary. For the most part, it tries to be weird and funny.

With a couple of other recent French flicks in mind I'm beginning to think that French people living in cities have even worse an image of their country folk than American metropolitans have of theirs.

The predictability is stupid though. Same as with "Haute Tension" the film basically tells you how it's gonna end. HT tells you right in the beginning, Sheitan tells you half-way through. French movie makers seem to wanna create the Anti-Twist-Ending.

This really is the French Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Only less massacre.

I don't know if people just don't know or stopped caring along the way, but until a few years ago, films like this were labeled: PSYCHO-THRILLER. A film that compares quite good would be "Misery".

Now it seems all the rage to call it horror.

And for the love of Pete stop calling Calvaire gory! Anybody claiming so should be forced by law to watch some recent slasher flicks to get a clue what passes as gory these days.

I'm not saying Calvaire was bad because it wasn't gory. It was bad, because after the plot point midway, it just got boring. Once the suspense was gone, nothing happened anymore. There were no confrontations between the protagonists. The Marc guy just wimped all the way through. There were no more revelations either. It became pointless. Like Jagger leaving in the middle of a concert and the rest of the Stones just keep playing for another hour.

Right up until the climatic twist in the middle the film's an 8. After this, it's a 3 (including 2 points for weirdness).

Never before have I given a movie a 1/10.

This movie has the worst acting I've seen in my entire life. And I'm neither kidding nor exaggerating here. I've seen a whole bunch of just-for-fun student flicks and still, nowhere near as bad. It was insulting.

At times I was wondering if this movie was a hoax. But then I come here to find it has a following. What the f***? The cinematography is okay for an amateur film, the music is vintage 80s score. But the acting, oh dear Lord the acting...

The end twist was nice.

I liked most of "The Descent". It's a good horror film to pick up!

The all-female cast was refreshing. Although they could have chosen more distinctive looking actresses, the three blondes kept on confusing me for most of the first half. The performances were decent.

The build-up was something too. Like "Wolf Creek" or "Rogue" this movie takes its time, which is a nice departure from the standard horror formula.

I was a bit disappointed with the creatures. When they didn't instantly attack, I hoped, they would make them not just the killing evil. Well they were. And not too good at it. While I certainly welcome non-invincible antagonists unlike the Leatherfaces, Vorheeses and Krugers of the genre, it was kinda stupid how they died in packs.

And the beginning was stupid too. Not to ***SPOILER*** too much, but surprise car crashes are like bullet-time: cool the first time I've seen it, lame a$$ copies ever since.

What exactly was the point of this movie?

The Beginning? Wow, 15 Minutes of the lamest, most clichéd beginning imaginable. They could have tried to add a little tragic to the characters, but no sir, turns out they're just freaks.

After 15 minutes, it's just like 2005's Remake. Only worse, because this time, you know how it's gonna end, since it would be kinda stupid for a prequel to surprise you that way. Would be like Darth Vader not choosing the Dark Side in Episode 3.

The Gore is alright, but then again I haven't seen a slasher flick disappoint me in that regard in a long time. Special Effects have come a long way since Evil Dead. But where's the originality. Haven't seen people die so predictably lately.

And where is the horror? It's like Saw 3 - instead of routing for some screaming teens and getting entangled in their desperate escape from doom, we just get a potpourri of torture scenes. And lots of screen time by the freaks. Which didn't work for the Hellraiser Series either. The more screen time Pinhead got, the less fascinating he became. Same here. I mean, I kinda knew the Sheriff was a jerk, I didn't need 60 Minutes of dialog to prove it.

4/10.

I liked this! Cloverfield is basically Godzilla for the 21st century. There is no plot except for: Alien monster destroys New York and people freak out.

The movie lives of the way it's shot. The hand-held camera IS the movie. We've seen the carnage before, the monsters, the battles, the turmoil ... just never from this perspective. It works great! (Although it's not the reinvention of the wheel that J.J.Abrams wants us to believe - Blair Witch Project ... hello?) There is nothing much to judge "objectively". The camera-work inherently belittles any acting performance, since there's rarely a steady shot of any actor. The same goes for the special effects or the directing of crowd sequences, etc. But at the end of it all, experienced through the shaky first person perspective, the movie feels sufficiently realistic.

The only thing that I didn't like was the voice of the camera man Hud. He annoyed me. His comments were off and people mostly ignored him (rightfully so).

I'm giving it 8/10.

I really liked this flick. Tarantino achieved what he set out for - a cheesy vintage B-Movie.

Starting with the silly story. The characters are totally fitting, as is the casting. Praise goes to the dry performance of Kurt Russel. The directing is vintage too, but QT's always been old-school. And while it's nowhere near as ingenious as Pulp Fiction, the movie has so much going for it, I'd easily consider it to be an 8...

...if it weren't for the lamest car chase EVER!!! Sure, 70s chases weren't all that exciting if you compare them to more contemporary action scenes, but this one is not only totally lame, it's 20 minutes long! 20 minutes without much in the way of, say, events. Next time I'll see "Death Proof", I'm gonna stop it when Ugly Stuntgirl straps herself to the bonnet. It's not gonna make for a good ending, but a quick one.

I haven't seen Rambo 3 in a while, so I can't be entirely sure if this is the Rambo film with the least amount of Plot. Rambo takes a couple of missionaries into Burma, they get abducted, he gets 'em back. That is really all that's happening. It's not that I expected a classical drama, but this one was supposed to bring the series back to its roots.

Also, aside from porn, I've possible never seen a flick with that little dialog. Which is probably a good thing, since all characters are cartoonishly stereotyped.

The only thing this movie has that stands out are shockingly realistic splatter scenes. The fighting itself is bullsh*t as always, with Rambo sporting the usual superhuman abilities. But anytime some projectile hits a body, oh my... It brings a level of realism to this clownfest of movie that feels totally inappropriate. As does the spray-tan war weariness of the protagonist. Looking unhappy while killing the sh*t out of Burma and showing lots of cruelty against women and children doesn't make a drama. Neither does all the effort from the special effects department. Unless you're of minor age, than you'll probably be so geared up by all the bleeding, you'll consider this a masterpiece.

Lastly, the message of the film is essentially: humanitarians are idiot dreamers. If you really want to change the world, you simply have to kill all the evil people. Questionable, to say the least.

Now here is a movie that thinks it is so much smarter than it really is.

It is awfully splintered, the entire first half hour is more a collage of events than it is a film. Very confusing to figure out what all is about. And the last 40 Minutes are spend in flashbacks telling us the ingenious scheme of the movie and how clever it is, but it's not, seen it all before. Highly predictable and therefore very unsatisfying. I really disliked this disruptive storytelling throughout the film.

There is some comedy, although it eventually is a rather dark movie about vengeance. Josh Hartnett delivers a good performance, Freeman and Kingsley are more routine than inspired and Bruce Willis has a very thankless role that could (should) have been filled by someone else. Lucy Liu is very charming as usual.

'Blood Diamond' is a very well done movie. There's a good script, good directing and touching acting. Although I do feel that the mini flood of African themed movies in the past couple of years is a bit lop-sided, with most people these days probably thinking of trucks carrying stoned child soldiers when they think about Africa.

Anyways, 'Blood Diamond' is political and dramatic. Maybe at times a little bit to action/entertainment oriented in expense of the political framework. Leonardo DiCaprio reinforces his position as the leading actor of his generation.

The only thing that bugged me was how they had to squeeze in the obligatory love story. But still: 8/10