salviolog

It's a really engaging drama about a family falling apart because of the mother's death. 3 girls who attend a Catholic school have to deal with their father's depressed mental state, worsened by his growing religious obsession with a televangelist cult which he joins as a last ditch attempt at fixing things. The feeling of everything falling apart is prevailing throughout the entire movie. I didn't quite get the ending, it was all built on implications, but it was clear enough to make assumptions. I felt engaged in what's happening to the characters and felt their emotions. It's a nice, if only pretty depressing, movie.

The movie is not only a cheap knockoff of the Blaire Witch Project, it almost directly copies scenes from it... and, for some strange reason, from 2001 A Space Odyssey. And yet it still manages to be monotonous and boring, combining the worst of both worlds: the convoluted back story from 2001 with slow pacing of the Blair Witch. Slow and overexplained is not a good combination.

A story of a girl who had suffered severe eyesight damage with a completely unnecessary supernatural element in it. A young girl loses eyesight early on in life and she has to cope with this shattering event that changes her life... and oh, she can also talk to ghosts. Surprisingly, the real life portion of the movie is much more engaging than the ghost part. The movie also has a mystery element to it, but it is left with an unsatisfying resolve, under-explained and all around sloppily thrown together. The movie has some good acting and some good story elements to it, but it's stretched way too thinly.

The movie focuses itself not so much on the killings of young people, as on the detective drama that took place around the last months of Gacy's freedom. The feeling of unveiling dread that the detectives face while realizing the magnitude of Gacy's evil, and, on the other hand, Gacy's tumble into despair and paranoia during the intense cat-and-mouse game with the police will keep the viewer on the edge of the seat in this all in all wholesome yet gruesome TV mystery. The movie masters the art of giving you chills while actually not showing any gore and staying very classy, keeping itself respectful towards the victims and not exploiting their sufferings.

The premise of the movie is pretty interesting and uncommon, and most jokes land well, but it all feels just... ok. There's nothing hilarious or what would make you roll laughing, a chuckle here and there. The plot goes exactly where you'd expect it to, almost no surprises. The acting is well, but all in all it's a very safe movie, although it does take some risks with a few gross and vulgar jokes, but they're all pretty tame and the risk seems pointless. A good film to kill a boring evening with, but nothing to write home about.

If you through this movie is like the Wicker Man - then yes, you were right. It is exactly like the Wicker Man, only with prettier cinematography and a weaker script.

The story is allover the place, as if the movie is trying to tell us something using too many unnecessary details. The characters, at least the main ones, are interesting and they are portrayed very realistically by the actors playing them, as in they feel like real people with real goals and motives, but their goals and motives are just left there hanging, not really explored or concluded in any way, shape or form.

Thus one cannot escape the feeling that the movie is being disturbing just for the sake of being disturbing, without much substance to it, putting this motion picture firmly into the exploitation category. Yes, it is bright, trippy, perverted and beautifully shot in best visual traditions of Kubrick, but it's an empty shell of a Faberge egg: it's pretty to look at and it's very expensive, but it's not nutritious, it cannot provide sustenance.

The other weak point of the movie is that for such a long film, it paradoxically lacks patience. Instead of building suspense slowly and gradually, the movie practically spoils the ending right away with one of the earlier scenes. It's as if we would have seen Norman Bates casually strolling in drag about 15 minutes into the movie, and then trying to act normally again until the big reveal.

If you wanted a movie like the Wicker Man - you're better off just watching the Wicker Man instead, either the original or the unintentionally comedic remake with Nick "Not The Bees" Cage.

It's real easy - all you have to do is noisily and obviously suck liberal Hollywood's johnson, so much that it kinda looks like a parody, but not really, and you can still make your joints and farts movie. Without much joints or farts. Whenever the teen cast was on screen, the movie slows down for awhile and becomes unwatchable, I think these were meant to be breaks for people to step out of the theater and smoke a joint.

The movie is incredibly fair when it comes to historical representation of events. It walks away from the standard Helter Skelter formula constructed by Vincent Bugliosi and tries to depict the events as they most likely unrolled in reality. It is, however, heavily watered down with the side-story which was obviously added under studio demand because the studio wanted a standard horror flick, not a historical movie.

The movie is a nice mystery but that plot point just doesn't sit well. If Johnny was dosed with LSD in this gargantuan amount he'd seen much more than just a guy in a cow skull suit. If you suspend your disbelief at that one point, the movie might work, but otherwise it's just pure fantasy.

Maybe this statement is true for Brie Larson whose been operating in two modes - smirking and whiny - ever since Kong, but for most of us, we can't just complain until we get what we want. This movie is like watching a Zooey Deschanel project, only if Zooey was completely deprived of what little quirky likability she has, and had it all replaced with pure repulsion. The colors are pretty tho.

Look, what did you expect? Les Visiteurs (1993) is one of the most successful, funniest French films of the 20th century, it couldn't be topped with a sequel, especially if it's part 3, 25 years later. At least it:

a) Stayed loyal to the timeline, giving us some closure on what happened after the end credits of the second movie; b) Brought something new to the mix; c) Some jokes were actually pretty funny;

It probably could have been done better if done with younger, more energetic actors, but then all the "familiar faces" gags go to crap, unless the movie's gonna spend a good portion of it establishing new actors in the roles of familiar characters.

It ended on another great chapter in French history, an interesting crossover, and it's fun to speculate what would happen to Godefroy and Jacquouille next.

All in all, I'm glad they made something with that cliffhanger they left us with back in 1998. They didn't mess it up too hard, it's part 3 for god's sake, for a part 3 it's ok.

So if we learn how to communicate in coffee cup marks we can see into the future. Great gift, but maybe some advanced tools could be an option? You know, if we're gonna solve the problems of interstellar squid in 3000 maybe we could start with eliminating some of our own? Hunger, poverty, wars... No, just the cup stain language? Well that's just super, thank you a lot, advanced race. Oh, and the message of unification - very innovative, never since the Beatles have I heard such a compelling message to Come Together. I mean, it's great that to aliens the concept of time is circular, but to us it's still linear, and generations upon generations will have to live and suffer as they did before, with no help from the oh so advanced aliens, whom we have to help in 3000 years. It's like with that daughter who dies from cancer - the heroine knows she's gonna die, but decides to have a child anyway, well isn't it nice to knowingly give life to a person who won't get to experience it fully and end in suffering just to satisfy some personal ambitions and "experience love". Don't get me wrong, the movie is shot and acted greatly, but it's just so dumb!

Two bland characters with zero personality or backstory randomly hook up and decide to go hiking together for no reason at all. Then they spend several hours running through bushes and getting lost (even though there are clearly visible roads), and that is pretty much the whole body of the movie. Nothing scary or even interesting happens: people walk around, talk, walk, talk, walk and talk, get lost, get paranoid, run away, go in circles etc. The bad guys who are after the main characters also have absolutely no reason behind their actions and give zero explanation to why they do what they do. The movie blatantly steals, or rather clumsily tries to steal from the Blair Witch Project, Into The Woods, the VVitch and somehow Eyes Wide Shut(?) yet doesn't really understand what did make those films actually work. The actors are wooden and can't emote, and I've heard that the original version of the film had to be re-dubbed since the actors couldn't deliver their lines properly. But the final nail in the coffin is that the director has absolutely no idea how to show the passing of time in the film, so he has to - get this - show what time it is in the movie's universe with captions. After a while (or should I say "A few moments later") you begin to feel as if you're watching a Sponge Bob episode. And near the end it's like somebody told him how to do a montage, so there's a short montage which compresses the events of an entire year in about 20 seconds. From what I understand this is the guy's first film, so I'd cut him some slack for that in form of one extra point, no more tho. Oh, and one jump scare out of a dozen desperate ones did kinda work.

To understand this movie, you have to ignore all the juicy details used as framing. The stalkers, the mushrooms, the aliens - these are just things brought into the movie to make it a bit more interesting, but they mostly lead to no conclusion. It's like watching a movie about the life of an NPC character in Stalker games, some side quest character that lives its own little life while some great stuff is happening out there. The main theme of this movie is about the struggle of Ukrainian people between an uncaring government and impoverished infrastructure left behind from the Soviet times, but if this was done with no mysticism and sci-fi, it wouldn't have been as much fun as it was. The main character, old lady Paraska, is a lot of fun to watch, but the cgi and makeup are on the cheap side.

When you create a... conceptual void, no pun intended, around the main mystery of the movie, leaving it to the viewer's imagination - that's one thing. But when you straight out just don't tell us anything, and leave an entire movie up to the viewer's interpretation, why not just let us stare at the blank screen, and imagine our own movie entirely, the one that's better hopefully. The visuals are very interesting and creepy, there's a great practical effects work done here, but they alone can't hold the movie! We don't know anything about the characters at the beginning, and we know next to nothing at the end. The characters themselves have no personality and are reduced to a single characteristic by which they can be recognized - the cop, the nurse, the old guy, the pregnant lady, the angry guy, the young guy, the bad guy. They're all boring and unlikable. I guess this movie is OK if you're stoned and just want some heady visuals, but that's about it.

You know what would've been nice to see in a movie about an expedition to an alien world?

Some aliens.

If I wanted to watch people doing space stuff in a space ship for one and a half hours, I would watch Apollo 13.

But when I am watching Europa Report, I expect to see a little more of Europa than one measly 10 step surface walk and 3 seconds of an alien.

And after waiting for 120 minutes for our red shirt crew to die off, what do we get as a reward for our patience?

A goddamn giant octopus! There, I saved you 1,5 hours. There's a giant glowing octopus on Europa.

I mean, seriously? SERIOUSLY? 100 years since Herbert Welles War of the Worlds, and you still couldn't come up with anything more original than a giant octopus?

Bloody hell!

The movie doesn't work as a horror movie and it doesn't work as drama.

It's just a bland propaganda vignette that rips off the Exorcist a bit, but not too much - so that the Christian crowd who for some reason came to see this "horror" flick wouldn't be freaked out too much, so none of that satanic puke and definitely no mothers sucking cocks in Hell.

This movie is 1,5 hours of pandering to the American Baptist prosecution complex. The movie leaves no suspense, no place for doubt, it just states straight away: yes, this is supernatural, no question about it, these guys are right, these are wrong.

And portraying lawyers only in the cocktail party setting... my god, could this be any more cringe worthy?

If silly horror clichés, stereotypical characters and cheap jump scares that we have seen a million times already aren't enough to make you sympathize with people who actually do go into the Suicide Forest, then you probably are the most cheerful person in the world, and nothing can break you down.

The movie Forest should have come out 15 years earlier, when the Ring was out, and studios started popping the Americanized versions of Japanese horror films like hot cakes. Back then their lack of understanding of the Japanese culture managed to pass as the culture itself, because the audience for the most part didn't understand it either.

These days it seems that the viewers are catching up to that arrogance, and the use of the same schlock that the film makers were getting away with back in the 2000's can't slide as smooth in 2016.

This movie is probably the most accurate depiction of a sociopath ever created on the big screen.

Miranda Wells, ingeniously depicted by the famous "Gone Girl" star Rosamund Pike, a nurse in a local hospital, who is a bit odd, but an all around nice person, gets horribly raped by a no good small time criminal William Finn. But, surprisingly enough, instead of hating on Finn, Miranda visits him in prison, and even hires him to fix her porch... then she drugs him, locks him in her basement, tortures him and probably kills him, revealing previously to that that she have let her mother die, and that she enjoys hospital work because it allows her to inflict pain on patients while treating them (much in a fashion of a dentist in "The Little Shop of Horrors" musical).

Miranda Wells is probably the most accurate depiction of a sociopath ever created on film. Her Oscar-worthy acting in Return to Sender very well answers the question of why people almost never suspect a sociopath serial killer until the body count goes up way too high. With no offense to Anthony Hopkins performance in the series about the psychologist gone murderer, real psychopathic serial killers rarely act like Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs in real life - they are much more likely to look like Miranda: likable, charming, a bit odd, but nothing more.

The movie portrays all these qualities in a very subtle, very cinematic fashion, which works very well: it allows the viewer to profile Miranda, like a detective, which makes "Return to Sender" that much more great of a thriller. We know something is coming, but we would never see it. This is why sociopaths are so dangerous, and "Return to Sender" does a grade A job at explaining it.

There is very little that can be done in a new way with a Manson Family movie at this point. There has been made at least a dozen movies about that case since 1971, one of which came out while the trial was still going on.

The formula is always the same, and anyone who at least read through the Wikipedia page about the Tate/La Bianca case would know exactly what's about to happen: first Charlie is loving and philosophical, then he becomes gradually more crazy, building up to the point of Helter Skelter and, ultimately, the climax.

So it's at least refreshing to see a new sort of Manson, sort of timid and meek, just a misguided ex-con who created a situation that got out of control. It's a little provocative, probably appealing to the pro-Manson crowd, but nevertheless, it is something new.

Problem is, this performance by Ryan Kiser comes off as bleak and dispassionate, and the change in Manson's behavior does not make sense, the character doesn't change gradually - in fact, he almost doesn't change at all, he sleepwalks through the movie up till the end, and there is zero of real Manson's energy put into this performance. I never seen Charles Manson outside his prison interviews and rare footage available on the Internet, but I am sure that he was never this boring in real life. People have always described him as wild and energetic, and Ryan's Manson is anything but these.

In short, if you are interested in Manson Family, check out this movie, but don't expect anything radically new, the story has been told a dozen times, and there's little that can be added to it but speculations and interpretations.

The movie Devil's Chair is a decent low budget horror flick which, though suffering from several plot holes here and there and seemingly inescapable Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels type clichés, is nevertheless worth your while.

This picture is good in creating atmosphere, and has top notch special effects, especially considering its budget. Some scenes can seem cheesy, and some plainly should've been left out for the plot to make sense as a whole, but the finale of the movie compensates for it greatly, guaranteed to send chills down your spine at least a couple of times, or maybe even make you laugh out of its sheer absurd, considering several serious problems the movie has within its plot.

In short, if you can be forgivable to low budget horror flicks for working with what they have, and if you dig gore genre, this flick can honestly deliver several good chills down your spine, mainly by working with practical effects and cinematography, unlike the jump- scare-dependent films of recent years.

The movie goes a bit beyond simple B-movie and tries to be smarter than your average low budget horror, so it's got that on its side, and it's just fun to watch if you haven't got anything better.

The Curse of Downers Grove would probably have been an OK by-the-book revenge/payback thriller with elements of home invasion in line with I Spit On Your Grave and An Eye For An Eye... if it wasn't for the absolutely out of nowhere W.T.F. ending, which just leaves you wondering what the hell that was all about. Without giving out any spoilers, the general feeling The Curse of Downer Grove leaves you with is as if you were reading a decent Stephen King book which for some reason ended with a sentence "And then they all got naked and started farting on each other". You might have enjoyed the rest of the text, but the way it ends would just leave you wondering just what exactly went wrong there.

Made to hitch a free ride on the success of Michael Dougherty's movie Krampus, this rushed lost X-files episode offers no scares, unlike Dougherty's previous holiday classic, Trick'r'Treat, but a ton load of cringes instead.

Krampus: the Reckoning has all the elements of a god awful fake- buster (a movie made to be confused with a popular blockbuster and capitalize on its success): it has the worst CGI you have ever seen, an over-complicated plot with too many elements that go nowhere, wooden actors, obvious post-production dubbing and so much other signs of a cheap shill of a movie that you can't help but expect a boom Mic to appear in the shot at some point.

But the worst thing about this movie has got to be the main child actor. It does make me feel like the world's biggest a-hole to pick on a little girl like that, but man is Amelia Haberman awful in this movie. I don't know if it's bad direction or was there no direction at all, but her character does not come off as sinister, or intimidating, or scary, as it's obviously supposed to be - no, throughout the whole thing she acts like an annoying over the top little brat who tries so hard to act like Hannibal Lecter that you just want to slap her in the face and say "Enough, no TV for a month!"

The least you can say is that she's memorable enough to probably get better parts in the future, though I do hope she tries better in more serious roles in the future.

I am mad at this movie for tricking me and I am mad at the shysters who make such films. It's garbage.

Aside from a horribly rushed plot, the irritating know-it-all unnatural teenage genius who doesn't ever say anything smart or what would at least sound like her own thoughts, aside from the rape of Isaac Asimov's story - as if someone had read just the beginning and the end of it without getting the message - as a Ukrainian, I am highly offended that the movie had used the actual footage from the mass protests which took place in Kiev in 2014. Many people had died that day at the Independence Square in Kiev, defending their freedom of assembly and democracy in Ukraine. Many police officers who had been thrown by the illegitimate government to battle their own people at the streets had fallen that day too. Our country is still torn because of the tragic events of 2013/2014, the community is an open wound. When I have seen these events crammed into a sappy disaster montage, I was not only shocked, I almost felt like I have had a flashback to a year before, which had left me with a sour taste for the rest of the movie. And then the creators of this schlock have the nerve to tell us that the reason for all human violence is a sci-fi techno babble antennae, that "projects bad vibes"?! This movie is heinous.

This is one of the most inaccurate attempts to make a dramatization of the real life events. The movie takes so much liberty with the story, it just comes off as a lie. The main villain looks nothing like Ed Gein, and his actions are nowhere near to what Ed Gein had done in reality. The way the movie was done, he might have as well pop out a chainsaw and wield it around. There is a much better independent movie called Ed Gein (2001), so I'd recommend to all who are interested in the gruesome case of Ed Gein to watch that one instead - this one is just a bad attempt to make a slasher movie out of real life. And it appears that my review is too short, because I really have nothing else to say about this movie, so I'll just write this down at the end. In the words of The Critic, Jay Sherman, "It stinks!".