fedor8

The movie starts very well: intriguing, to say the least. For a short while there it appeared as if this would be another winner for the Moorehead/Benson team.

Unfortunately, what follows is a script of diminishing returns. It just devolves, and into a drama, no less. Too much backstory about the two paramedics and the guy's dull family. Why do we need so many scenes and so much soap-opera detail - when we can jump into the fantasy sci-fi horror aspects of the premise? Were they catering for a wider audience - a female audience? So much boring relationship stuff.

After the first 15 or so minutes I gradually started losing interest, and by the halfway mark I was getting fidgety. After an hour I almost completely lost interest.

After the medic finally realizes that he has a drug that induces time-travel, what does he do? He tells his buddy, right? No. The cops? No. Does he tell ANYBODY? No. Instead of telling his friend about the fact he found a way to get his daughter back, he instead wastes our time - and the very limited supply of these magic pills - on a series of experiments. (The pill maker conveniently kills himself later. The way he and this guy meet is pretty ludicrous.)

Sure, these experiments are useful, but if the point is to look for Brianna (the colleague's lost-in-time daughter) then WHY not immediately head to the house where she disappeared and use the pills THERE instead? Isn't that the obvious thing to do? Sure it is. He predictably does this later, but it takes him too long to start, while wasting many pills.

But this script isn't that big on sense, or in a big rush. I'm not saying the story is utter nonsense, but I don't understand why the medic tells NOTHING to his friend: doesn't tell him he's mortally ill, doesn't tell him that he solved the mystery of the drug, doesn't tell him that he has a way to save his daughter. This lack of communication eventually grows tiresome, because it becomes a running joke. It is anyway a laughable, unconvincing plot-device used by bad writers, which is why it's disappointing that it was used here as well.

Some more problems. Apparently, the drug keeps you in a different era only 7 minutes. Yet so many Synchronic users managed to get killed (or even bitten by a snake) in that brief period?! Gimme a break... This movie would have us believe that practically every time you go back in time 500 or 5000 or 50000 years, totally randomly, the likelihood of getting killed or seriously hurt in the first 5 minutes is extremely high. Snakes, the weather, people... everyone and everything is out to get you, and at great speed. The hell? That's pretty far-fetched, almost a premise for a parody.

Still, I do very much like the line "One thing I've learned: the past sucks big-time!"

This line encapsulates everything that's wrong with the modern age i.e. A total lack of appreciation for how incredibly tough our ancestors had it compared to our fairly cozy existence. Yeah, a pet-peeve of mine. The medic needed to go back in time PHYSICALLY in order to realize this self-evident fact! Unfortunately, most people are this way, which is why we have so many whiners: spoiled losers who claim that "the poor have never been poorer". You have to be fairly clueless to actually believe that.

The stupid scene when he beams over to early 20th-century America really takes the cake. Not only was the medic foolish enough to bring along his incredibly dumb dog but there's also the film-makers being all-of-a-sudden so PC as to inject some of that incessant race-based stuff - which really annoyed me.

Can't we have ONE movie these days without race and/or gender issues being discussed in that typically preachy and utterly idiotic way? At this point I'd lost all interest. This was the final straw. It appears that Benson and Moorehead had made their first preparations to sell out to America's corporate Establishment, because why else play this predictable corny game of injecting C. M. into your movies? Does this plot require a race-based theme? No. Does the film have anything to gain in terms of excitement or intelligence by including this nonsense (or any other type of generic crap)? No. The only reason you place that kind of stuff these days - as a film-maker - is to cow-tow to the deranged elites who control the media and the entertainment industry. I've noticed this time and time again. This is why I am convinced that the next films Benson and Moorehead make will be awash with horrible nepotists, dumbed-down scripts, and just general devolution. I've noticed this often, as well: nowadays, if you don't play along with the ideology of Hollywood's elites, you don't get to play their game at all. If you dare promote right-wing ideas, you get blacklisted. And the worst part of all of this - liberal cinema-goers are perfectly OK with this New Way. They preach diversity and freedom but promote the exact opposite. "WE decide which free opinions you can have!"

When the medic finally decides to use the pills wisely - at the location of Brianna's disappearance as oppose to his flat - he experiences yet another asinine past episode, this time involving French-speaking voodoo cultists or some other nonsense. A totally confusing, messy, pointless scene.

Naturally, how would he find her when he doesn't even have a precise location of her disappearance? This failure was obvious and predictable well in advance, though apparently not to the medic who insisted on doing everything himself - without the help of his friend.

He finally tells him everything when he's down to just two pills. But by that point I anyway stopped caring, not for the script or Brianna. Because anybody dumb enough to pop random pills deserves whatever happens to them. I have zero tolerance for drug users, especially bored young idiots seeking thrills this way. So what if Brianna is lost? One clown less. We must pity the 19th century for having gained an idiot from our era, as if they din't have enough already!

Then there's that utterly daft scene at the Civil War battleground, with some random Confederate soldier, coming out of nowhere, just raring to kill a person despite all the bombs falling all over the place... just because... it serves the script. So dumb, having the medic go back to yet another dangerous point in time. Sure, the past was ugly and violent but not every single minute and place in it was this dangerous. If it were, humanity would have been killed off eons ago. As I mentioned: a premise more suitable for a comedy.

Don't you love that "poetic" ending though? Who couldn't predict that.

A few years after the movie's events, Brianna can remind her parents: "hey, guys, remember when my irresponsible dabbling in dangerous drugs resulted in that friend of yours disappearing forever? Wasn't that fun?"

OK, enough of the "what ifs" and "could it be thats". I've got a question of my own, but a real question (and one of many):

How is it that these alleged aliens with alleged "superior intelligence" allowed themselves to get caught and then stored like objects and animals in various bunkers and hangars by "inferior" humans?

So they are STUPID aliens then, aren't they?

Yet, if they're so stupid how did they manage to fly all the way here? So they're not stupid?...

I'm confused.

This is just one of numerous contradictions these goofy UFOlogists try to get away with, and get away they do (unlike the easily catchable aliens) because their audiences are so astoundingly... "smart".

Google "Vjetropev UFO" for a very detailed explanation of this phenomenon - and by that I don't mean the easily explainable UFOs but its fanatical adherents.

Quite a feat, huh? Casting Matthau and still bombing. But really that is what happens when you have two lame sitcom writers and a director who are far more concerned with being "socially conscious" (read: subservient to their Overlords) than funny. This is why we have a hooded Caucasian robber who imitates a blac$ man, then later says "we always blame the bla$k guys for everything anyway". Which is in hindsight the dumbest line of all times, considering that since this movie had been made literally every societal ill has been pinned on the other side, the scapegoats. Wealthy Caucasian people... such as Ritchie? Nah, of course not him: he's a do-gooder. He doesn't count: it's all those evil Christ-fearing gun-totting Reps we need to smear and make pariahs out of, scapegoats. $oviets had taught Hollywood the ropes, and since then it's been cop-paste ad nauseam, plus a few imaginative touches by the West's own loony fringe.

That robber character makes zero sense. He chooses to impersonate a bl**k man... why exactly? (I mean, other than to satisfy Ritchie's need for political posturing.) If he is wearing a mask nobody will recognize him anyway so who CARES which race he belongs to? It's not as if him NOT impersonating someone else would drastically increase the chances of the police finding him, what with tens of millions of adult white men roaming the States... (most of them "evil raci$ts" by definition).

Much dumber though is that the robber is a high-end hit man who is "forced to rob diners because of the economy". What? First rule of comedy: "if it isn't based in reality, it isn't funny". Absurdist comedy is a whole other story, but we're talking about a regular formula satire, like this one here, which is supposedly rooted in reality. Especially one that wants to tackle social issues.

Except that it isn't rooted in reality. The way the cop station is portrayed... complete and utter nonsense. Or the fact that a hardened career criminal from a "famous armed robbery" gets out on bail - AFTER robbing a store at gunpoint, wounding a man, and AFTER doing home invasion in order to execute a witness.

In what America was Ritchie residing? Beverly Hills, probably... That explains a lot, why he was so out of touch.

How is any of this even remotely rooted in reality? And that's why most of the humor bombs. The reason why Matthau is actually less funny than Williams (which is another anti-feat) is because Williams is reacting to the situations with anger - logically and naturally, whereas Matthau is behaving basically like Gandhi. I mean, Ritchie may as well have given a shirt for Matthau to wear, saying "I'm a pacifist: peace and love, y'all". That's how subtle all of this is.

Of course, as always, whenever Reds preach they contradict themselves; they get entangled in the webs of nonsense of their own laughably illogical ideology. They want to mock the gun users, yet by allowing the killer to get out on bail - isn't that only confirming the need of civilians to bear arms? When the killer hunts down Matthau for the THIRD time (including the robbery), the movie is basically saying "yes, we all need to carry guns because the state is too soft on crime", and yet we know this can't be Ritchie's stance. Instead, the message is "guns never brought anything good, let's ban them".

That's why Reds should never mix comedy and politics, because they invariably get confused: the gags bomb and the "message" becomes contradictory hence stupid.

From beginning to end the film is full of absurd plot-devices that make it impossible to laugh at anything. One of many such examples is Williams mentioning Matthau's full name on TV, as if he could be such a total plankton that he wouldn't know this would endanger Matthau. Or the way he burns down Matthau's gas station, just like that. Or the way Williams aims the gun at Matthau and another car driver, by mistake, as if he were a total child, literally dumb. Yet he worked in upper management of a company, and has a pretty fiancée and a nice home, so how can he be such a plankton?

It gets dumber. After that third encounter, the killer actually lets Matthau go. Why? Makes zero sense, and that's why none of this is funny. Besides, the script doesn't even make a sufficient number of attempts to be funny, because the situations aren't exploited for their comedic potential as much as for opportunities to preach. Which is why Matthau rarely gets anything funny to say or do; he is a boring character. Why would anyone hire Matthau, in a comedy, then give him so few funny things to say or do?

The first half is interesting, but eventually the plot starts giving us hints that it will reduce the film to a completely idiotic cannibalistic conclusion that simply makes no sense.

The kid's mother shows genuine love for her child so why would she want to kill and butcher him? If she was planning to kill him all along, which she was, WHY insist on her boyfriend to be nice to her son and hang out with him? And just days before the murder! That absolutely crushes all logic. "Come on, bond with him, even though that's totally pointless coz we gonna kill him in a few days anyway..."

But these are typical examples of audience manipulation, whereby you lie and cheat them by using plot-devices intended to mislead. It's acceptable to mislead the audience, but this must not involve lies - or scenes that are rendered nonsensical once the plot-twist is revealed.

The way the fat girl escapes and kills the two cannibals is rather unconvincing too. It's way too easy.

Nor do we even get tiny clues what the couple's plan was for AFTER the murder. Nor does it make any sense whatsoever for them to accept a guest into their home - whom they barely even know - just days before the murder. This is complete and utter BS writing detached from realty, from real human behaviour and logic.

A good story could have been developed from the initial set-up, but instead this European film decided to ape American thriller garbage by playing it dumb.

Even this kind of shoddy script deserves someone better than Forte.

The first 10-15 minutes appear to be reasonably promising but at the latest when the very mediocre Will Forte makes his very mediocre appearance do things start devolving at great speed towards the very mediocre - and the very boring. By the 30-minute mark I had very little interest in continuing with this pedestrian "comedy". It took me some real powers of self-persuasion and discipline to actually finish this dull nonsense. But it's not just Will's fault, the script stinks.

The way Maeve killed her father is unconvincing, unfunny, and utterly illogical. Three people are standing on a tiny and very flat road, a truck approaches at a speed of 30 km/h, yet it fails to break on time - because the driver was absent? Shooting heroin? Talking to UFO aliens?

Maeve not suspecting Forte is also illogical. Why would he call her for driving classes, right after she met him at the place where the "virgin" works, just a day before she becomes possessed/levitational? She supposedly has "the talent" yet completely fails to add 2 and 2, completely fails to "feel" there's something wrong with him. This makes her out to be not only not "gifted" but daft as well.

Forte's powers seem to be so extensive that I wondered why he'd even bother with such an intricate sacrifice when he could rule all of Ireland with the spells he already has - nevermind have another no 1 hit. In short: he is far too powerful for some bumbling hobby satanist. He was written that way because the writers (all 4 of them) couldn't come up with a cleverer plot. The motive for Forte to carry out the sacrifice seems trivial, considering what a powerful sorcerer he is. It'd be like Qaddafi hiring 50 terrorist bombers to kill a person who owns a pair of sneakers that he badly wants, despite the fact that he can afford to buy and get whatever he wants - including a new pair.

Villain's motive. 101 Writing. Very important. If the villain makes little sense the plot falls apart. Don't make the villain too powerful if it makes no sense, or too incompetent. Basic writing. 101. Even a comedy needs a halfway logical villain, especially one as unfunny as this. Forte goes against his character when he spontaneously kills his wife/girlfriend - to whom he had been subservient the entire time. That's the typical kind of random plot-twist that one encounters in badly conceived films.

But it's the overly "cute" humour that sinks the film. This kind of dumb banter is for millennials, for teens, for people who'll laugh at just about anything. Certainly not for me. Whoever considers this "clever" must have been watching Teletubbies well into their 20s. The last 20-30 minutes in particular feature some rather cringy juvenile humour.

Maeve being the love-interest is rather far-fetched, quite unacceptable, and would be so even if this were an absurdist comedy. Too absurd even for a ZAZ film. I know that some guys are so insecure that their standards have fallen to rock-bottom, but this is nevertheless too ridiculous for me. If you're gonna cast someone like Maeve (an even weaker version of Ons Jabeur) as the female lead - a romantic lead even - then you'd better make sure she is nothing short of hilarious. Not even remotely close...

So lemme get this right: tornadoes move at high speeds across the landscape - except when they locate the main characters which is when they decide to sit around for a while, take a break? So they HUNT humans?

The most laughable thing about movies like these aren't even the dumb scripts: it's the fact that barely anyone even notices how (un)subtly they're being brainwashed with climate change exaggerations. Nobody addressed this.

"It's only a matter of time until these tornadoes become a normal occurrence in L. A, Chicago, even London." Greenland also? Siberia? The Moon too? The Horsehead Nebula? Will we ruin neutron stars too with our "rampant capitalism"? No pollution and factories in $ocialist countries?

Hilarious. This movie was made, what... in 2014. 9 years on yet still no tornadoes anywhere near London. But this is a big-budget film, and where there's a lot of money involved the Red Establishment is never far, with its obedient lapdog Hollywood helping it every step of the way, helping promote dumbing down, anti-science and other nonsense.

Nope, we cannot have any movies these days devoid of political posturing: sometimes subtler, sometimes extremely obvious, but it's always there.

1. Rednecks so dumb it defies all belief. Hollywood would have us believe that these people are even dumber than your average Beverly Hills yentas, which as we all know simply isn't possible. Laughable. The way two of them get sucked by a tornado is like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

2. The young cameraman had been weary and anxious about his job the entire time - but suddenly and inexplicably he goes out of his way to film a burning vehicle within an extreme tornado, a situation that no person on this planet would agree to do. Beyond idiotic.

3. Not one but two mega-cheesy, very boring romantic sub-plots.

4. The "progressiveness" is as subtle as a hammer. The high school principal literally looks like Obama. (You remember Obama? That President that could do no wrong, the morally impeccable President who, because of his origins, never made a wrong decision during his 8-year tenure.) Very probably a former Obama impersonator.

5. The cheesy and awfully dumb teen who is trying to do a report about some polluting factory... Because, "environmentally aware and stuff".

6. A group of 6-7 people running/walking/waltzing through a tornado, while millions of bits of debris are flying at high speeds - yet none of them sustain any injuries.

7. The meteorologist endangering everyone's lives in the truck by insisting on helping two drunk rednecks.

8. Even dumber, when they notice a tornado nearby, these "experts" don't rush to their special vehicle but instead just stand there filming it, as if this tornado would disappear completely in the 5 seconds it takes them to get into the tank.

9. The unbearably soppy dialog. Admittedly, sometimes it's not soppy but only plain boring. AI-generated characters saying AI-generated lines.

10. How can anyone get close to drowning while standing in the ruins of a tornado-destroyed factory?! How does that work... Is there a recorded case anywhere of a person drowning in the ruins of a post-tornado building? They threw in everything but the (flying) kitchen sink.

11. Love it how these tornadoes behave as if they're alive: always being millimeter-precise about going into buildings and places that would endanger the friends and relatives of the main characters. The most plot-friendly tornadoes ever.

12. I had to laugh during the very dramatic situation when the tornado-chaser got out of the shelter during "the biggest tornado in history", and somehow avoided being sucked up into the air. After all, didn't they just show several airplanes and trucks flying way up? Utter hooey.

One of the silliest things I kept hearing is how "this is so much worse than Twister" as if that moronic movie didn't also suffer from a hack script, and stupid cliches.

Firstly, he didn't know how to throw a wedge into the rather idyllic relationship between Farrell and Ondine. In order to create "drama" writers thrive on "conflict" (a word that gives them $tiffie$ - even female writers), but since there was no conflict here, the writer decided to get Farrell drunk and get him to actually dump Ondine somewhere then scurry away like a frightened loser. The ensuing conversation with priest Rea was then intended to somehow convince us that Farrell got rid of Ondine because "he doesn't believe in luck" or some such far-fetched cockamamie rationalization that only the biggest pushovers in the audience might fall for.

In reality, a down-on-his-luck divorced recovering alcoholic fisherman would APPRECIATE great fortune coming his way, especially in the shape and form of a pleasant, attractive and willing mermaid... or a selkie, or a Romanian drug dealer, whatever she may be. He'd defend her against the "husband" with fists flying. (Which he does eventually in the rather silly conclusion.) But no, Farrell is portrayed as such a meek failure that he is suspicious of his good luck. He is behaving like an uber-neurotic, even worse than a Woody Allen character or a millennial beta. Writers and their bloody "conflict", they never tire of that nonsense. "Conflict" is all well and fine (although I prefer to call it "plot"), but as long as it's grounded in reality and logic, not when it's as shambolic as this.

Secondly, the daughter. The girl is well cast and likable, but far too informed, intelligent, articulate and far too superior intellectually to literally all of the (mostly childish) adults featured here. Even Rea, the only mature grown-up character here, can't seem to match her wit, sass, intelligence and class. Smart-alecy super-intelligent Einstein-like kids have always been a horrible plot-device and a terribly annoying obsession of many delusional screen-writers, who portray these mega-idealized kids as if they'd never spoken to or even met a real child before. Have these clueless writers never HEARD a 10 year-old girl speak? They don't speak this way; none of them do. Not even remotely close. In fact, even a real "selkie" would have been a far more realistic character than the girl!

But the drop that really spilled over the exaggerated glass of the girl's adolescent supremacy is when she mentioned Sigur Ros, and in such a casual off-hand way, the way a mindless, pompous 18 year-old American hipster might. That Neil Jordan has a hipster mentality wasn't anything I was aware of (nor cared about, to be frank), but I am surprised given his age. (Or maybe one of his kids or nephews suggested he mention them in the script.) He portrays the ex's drunken ginger boyfriend as a moron - who listens to metal. On the other hand, the 260-IQ 10 year-old girl likes her lame, whiny Icelandic hipster pop. What's Jordan trying to say? Whatever it is, it's not very intelligent, let alone remotely accurate. (He has as much knowledge about metalheads as he has about 10 year-old girls, apparently.) Besides, it's rather embarrassing for a Baby Boomer to be a hipster. Hippies, yes; hipsters, no. (Being a hippie is embarrassing too, but at least to be expected amongst Baby Boomers.) Generally, the oldest hipsters are in their 30s, the vast majority are in their late teens and 20s, because by their 30s most of them smell the glove and mature, i.e. Evolve from the inferior hipster-larva stage they had degraded themselves with while they were young: i.e. Confused, self-absorbed, gullible and foolish.

Thirdly, Jordan actually allowed the movie to degenerate into a stupid, generic thriller, with cardboard criminals and stupid, unconvincing crime-related situations. I hate thriller situations even in thrillers, let alone in "fantasy" dramas. There is nothing easier than to inject some lame-brained drug-mule-with-the-heart-of-gold thug-gangster bash-up/mix-up to wrap up a movie; it's corny and not what a demanding viewer wants from his fantasy drama. Film-makers these days are so hell-bent on providing plot-twists (at any cost) that they throw logic and substance by the side, sacrificing the entire movie just to "surprise" the viewer with some lame twist. That horror films and thrillers do this obsessively, I can even understand (though not support), but for a romantic drama this is ridiculous.

Of course, when we find out that this is NOT a fantasy film, i.e. That the woman is just a Romanian criminal on the run, suddenly the car-crash and her finding the drugs in the water appear extremely cheesy and absurdly far-fetched events, plot-devices that reek of writer's block. The odds of those two events happening involve a long line of zeroes. You can get away with that in a fantasy movie (which implies higher powers, destiny and such), but not in a non-fantasy drama/thriller. You can't have it both ways.

Then there's that dumb minor plot-twist with the little girl secretly moving the drugs! That was so stupid. This wasn't just writer's block, this was post-traumatic writer's block! PTWB. Surely there must be centers at Beverly Hills that treat it. Jordan, the next time he doesn't know how to finish a (good) story, should check himself into such a center. They might teach him a thing or two about why plot-twists-at-any-cost screen-writing is lame.

The writer, despite being Irish, seems to know less about Irish immigration laws than I do. Ondine doesn't go to jail, which is absurd. Also, the question of her deportation is a bit iffy considering that she belongs to an EU country. Or did Jordan think Romania is a mid-East nation? No wonder he listens to Sigur Ros.

The movie has a very good first half but then things (predictably) start going South with corny car-crashes, idiotic relationship drama based on nothing, cheesy criminals, and of course - Sigur Ros.

Speaking of which, that whiny little clown high-pitch-singing the movie's "siren song" sounds like a ca$trated mule right after an alcoholic binge. Irony or intent? Because, I mean, Farrell got drunk, so...

Jordan manipulates his audience into believing that Ondine has powers. It's one thing to manipulate subtly, but something entirely different to cheat and lie to the viewer. The Romanian thug's behavior was completely in keeping with the legend of a selkie husband searching for his wife. At no point did he behave as if he was primarily after the drugs - as he suddenly does at the end when we find out who he is. This is just plain bad writing.

Great Irish scenery, competent performances, and an original story nevertheless can't be entirely crushed by clumsy and unconvincing third-act plot-devices i.e. Forced drama and stupid twists, and can't be totally obliterated just because the writer is a tone-deaf Sugar-Ross-hugging hipster. Maybe in another universe this writer would have not become a hipster hence would have had a greater movie career, and more success in closing out well-conceived stories.

Even worse, the name CARSON gets shouted out about 550 times, which makes that name triply annoying. Or not triply but 550thly annoying.

I vowed I wouldn't choose any more of these possession flicks, because they bore me so much, but decided to watch this because the premise wasn't stereotypical, and there was no over-the-top priest chanting gibberish - which I find particularly tedious.

I was right that the movie features no corny priests doing corny exorcistical things - but I didn't know that the cameraman character would be fulfilling that role at the end of the movie. In other words, I was naive and optimistic in my belief that there can be a demonic-possession film without yet another silly, generic exorcism.

I was willing to put up with the bad acting, the slow pace, the feeble direction and the overall air of semi-amateurishness, because I liked the notion of a junkie using heroin in order to keep a demon at bay, and the fact that the plot was set in a rehab, which is unusual for a horror film.

However, the movie suddenly, unexpectedly and bafflingly moved out of rehab after an hour, which was the first stupid decision. Then the 2nd stupid decision: giving us that wholly idiotic backstory how she got possessed in the first place. That college-kids conspiracy-prank Satanic ritual shtick was not only absurd and totally unconvincing, it was badly shot and amateur.

And of course the 3rd bad decision, which as I mentioned is the cliche exorcism ritual. Can't these bozo film-makers come up with a new way of casting out demons? Jesus, surely there must be a 100 new ways these "creative" writers can come up with something that doesn't involve holding a Bible and reading bits of random nonsense from it. Or as in this case, not necessarily a Bible but a book on demonology. Instead of being suspenseful, the big finale was very dull. Totally flat. And idiotic.

The acting isn't all bad. It varies from decent to awful, but it's mostly on the crap end of the spectrum. The girl's parents are unconvincing as are some of the rehab inmates, while the doctor and the female lead are OK.

A rather mediocre ghost flick during the 1st hour, with many horror cliches and a weak atmosphere, plus the usual tidbits of nonsense, but then the drivel drastically increases, featuring one of the dumbest, most illogical, preposterous endings in years.

When Delroy finally arrives to investigate, the Math professor husband gets agitated when Delroy points out to a box as the source of the trouble. But why would he be so adamantly skeptical?

Firstly, his wife had mysteriously had an accident, lost her baby. Secondly, he had witnessed his sister-in-law (a hot actress) having sex with a student, in front of the house, at night, which seemed absurd, and then he saw and heard her when she entered the room - just a few seconds later, which is of course physically impossible. Didn't that raise any alarm-bells? "Hey, why is she shtooping my student outside like some deranged animal-ho? And how did she get up all the way here in a second? And how did she know I was watching her?" Nor is the student-shtooping scene explained at all. Nor did the husband ever even address this incident to his wife, or her sister. It just happened, period. On to the next scene... Unacceptably sloppy writing.

Thirdly, he had visions of her while having sex with his wife, which should have spooked the hell out of him.

How did all of this not strike him as "odd", or put in plainer English - as supernaturally horrifying? Which is why his anger at Delroy just doesn't make sense. This "forced skepticism" is a cliche plot-device, and in this case defies logic, to boot.

I'm also mystified by the sister's reaction upon having her head SMASHED against the mirror - by her mirror image self. She just leaves the house without telling her sister what happened! Duh. Generally speaking, her role in this movie is very poorly conceived. Her behavior is confusing, her sudden pregnancy is confusing, and her brief appearance in the "grand finale" is baffling too. Was that her or a ghost impersonator?

After he gets stabbed with a very long, large knife by his possessed wife, he drops to the floor - then somehow gets up again and fights ghosts as if he had just a minor bruise. What the hell... Then he unknowingly stabs his wife and starts apologizing to her - despite the fact she'd stabbed him minutes earlier. What the...

The guy doing prison time for murder of his own wife... How did he know that the only solution was to kill his wife? I mean, he was there to tell the new couple about this - but who was it that told him, when he was in trouble with these ghosts? Was it just a wild guess? "Hey, perhaps if I kill my wife ALL the demons will disappear? Oh why not, it's worth a try, I got nothing to lose... except my lovely wife and my freedom."

And that final scene... was that cretinous or what. Despite suffering a deep stab wound, the protagonist not only managed to successfully fight of ghosts and kill his demonic wife - but he then ACTUALLY somehow managed to send the evil box - all neatly wrapped up as a gift - to his sister-in-law! Why was he so angry with her? She didn't know the box had an evil spirit when she gave it to them. More importantly, how the hell did he manage to crawl all the way to the post office (which presumably isn't even open at night...?) with the wound that he had, and how did he get the evil box wrapped up nicely AND hand it over to the post-office clerk - while all bloodied and in agony? Did this clerk not notice all of his guts and blood spilling over the post-office floor?

The very notion of him going to the post office all bloody and badly wounded is in itself comedy material...

It is a hilarious bit of inane writing, this gift. Not to mention that his sister-in-law was SUDDENLY heavily pregnant, which is also a rather absurd plot-device inserted at a whim, rather stupidly. It's supposed to be a revenge twist, but it makes zero sense on all fronts. Doesn't make sense that he wanted revenge, doesn't make sense how he sent the box all bloody and in pain, and it doesn't make sense WHY he'd want to unleash this evil onto the world. Totally inept script.

The premise is better than the typical haunted house film, but the way it was handled could have been far better, for example fix lots of the nonsense in the script - which would admittedly have meant a major re-write, maybe a total overhaul of the story. And hire a better male lead, because the guy playing the husband is pretty bad and miscast.

Sitting through 95 minutes of this rubbish was a chore comparable only to the mind-numbing school-years tedium of having to survive 6-7 classes a day without voluntarily smashing my head against the desk.

1. Predictability. The plot goes exactly as it's "supposed" to, which kills 99% of the "potential" suspense. The writing is so pi$$-poor, it allows even the most dim-witted viewer to figure out things in advance, let alone intellectual giants like myself.

2. Stupidity & Lack of Logic. Despite there being tons of footage proving the existence of weird phenomena, the teens barely show any of it to the adults, nothing to the police, or to anyone else. This absurdity especially applies to the 2nd half, when this becomes a huge logic hole, like an elephant in the room, an unintentional running joke that crushes this dumb film like a cow stepping on a tiny sea-shell.

3. Downer Ending, a foregone conclusion. If you know not only the plot in advance, but also the ending, what is the actual point of the movie? Certainly not to immerse oneself in its visual brilliance - because this junk has the same ugly "realistic" photography as all the other found-footage flicks.

Nor is there a soundtrack to enjoy. There is literally no point in following the plot because it is laid out at the beginning, and in previous films of this dumb franchise.

4. Characters. The blonde actress is the only good thing about the movie, though her character fails to inform anyone but her useless Emo-hair boyfriend of the plethora of stuff that's going on. She's got all this amazing footage, tons of it, enough to make headline news across the world - let alone convince people she's in danger - yet during almost a fortnight none of it is shown to anyone but her beta orbiter loser.

The kids. They are way too similar hence can't even be distinguished during the long shots. The "evil kid" is totally boring, unscary, abysmal. Crap acting, utter joke of a character. Even kids used to be better actors, once upon a time when movies sucked much less.

The adults. Knives falling out of nowhere and a 15 year-old almost getting suffocated in a garage mysteriously full of fumes - these are just some of the bizarre/extreme events that these people just don't seem to give a damn about. If they don't then why should the audience?

5. Direction. It's abysmal. Everything is about SMASH, BANG and BOOM, dumb loud noises, because these "film-makers" have zero creativity or sense of what makes horror work and what doesn't. This crappy phoned-in sequel is full of overlong non-motion shots that are meant to increase tension but end up being totally ineffectual, partially due to extreme repetition, partially because we know that every such scene will end in a loud thud. Whether that thud is a book falling or a chair hitting a wall becomes irrelevant.

6. Absolutely pathetic ending. Nothing's explained, demons just kill, we don't know why, what they want, who they are, and everything goes as "planned", hence zero tension, no surprises. In fact, I typed out this review during the last 15 minutes of the "movie". I was that bored.

Heavy on mood, but also ultra-heavy on stupid. Plus a political message that in a normal era (unlike the current one) would have been considered too hateful and morally repulsive, insane even. Which is exactly what it is.

Horror scripts don't get any more inept than this. A movie for the Beeeh Generation and the mentally mismanaged, hence another great litmus test for common sense and intellect. You've got a fiancee and want to make sure she's not the wrong one? Play her this trash, and if she likes it and agrees with it then you are saved - from a marriage in Hell.

So thank Corinne for making this junk. The irony of incompetence actually being helpful should not be lost on you, but you should nevertheless thank her, even though she very probably hates you if you're a white male, and probably blames you for at least 15 se$ual assaults that never happened.

She must be bundles of fun at family gatherings, huh? Pointing fingers at all the men, demanding they repent for all the crimes they'd committed. I kid you not, Corinne is really out there. Susan Sontag is like an obedient, meek nun compared to her.

Kind of like the idiotic central character in this pile of junk.

It's a political film, because why would a female writer-director do straight horror? They have to play up to the Establishment, they want to make sure their Overlords (white men, ironically) know that she is obsequious, in line with the current political doctrines: never questioning, only following them. I'm not saying all female directors are like this, but many feel compelled to push the ultra-femini$t agendas, as if having a punani gives them some kind of moral superiority over men. As if being female and a director is somehow interpreted by them as a sign from God (well, no, they're atheists by default, so a sign from Lenin), a mission to "liberate women from the oppressive devious hands of the vile white male." Their delusion is staggering, and their latent narcissism immense. Too few female directors these days avoid this trap which is a shame because some of them have potential. Very few are only concerned with transporting a good story to their audience. We live in politically corrupted times, very similar to Europe of the late 20s and 30s, just before $talin and that other demon went into overdrive, ransacking the world in ways that had never been done before. We live in a world so insane that all forms of lefty radicalism are considered righteous and morally untouchable. It is a recipe for disaster and this disaster is right around the corner... To say the obvious.

This turkey is the gender equivalent to that of any movie ejected out by Jordan Peele, one of the most insidious and inept A-list film-makers in recent years, if not decades. White men are to be despised, is the degenerate message here, once again, and it is hammered with the usual lack of subtlety and total lack of intelligence, i.e. Very primitively and fanatically, as one might expect from a person consumed by hatred and with little to no savvy about the world.

"You're lucky to be alive, but you might wish you weren't."

In what kind of a hospital do nurses speak that way to heavily traumatized patients! One of the many ridiculous lines.

What kind of a place did this young new nurse Rose walk into anyway? A London hospital from 1974, or an insane asylum from 1679? (Admittedly, this bogus "70s England" looks much more like 30s or 40s UK, but hey, what would a Millennial director know - about anything.) The negativity towards Rose is so relentlessly piled up, I was half-expecting Kutscher to spring out of a corner, shouting "you've been punked!" in that annoying, overbearing way of his. None of this stuff seems realistic at all, yet it's a movie with socio-political ambitions. What better genre to do that in than a ghost story!

First, Rose is interviewed by a Matron who is some bombastic evil character right out of a Dickens novel. (Is this really 1974 London?) She speaks to the nurse as if Rose had just arrived to a prison, and for slaughtering 15 children. Then Rose has to deal with a former acquaintance who hates her guts. Then this blonde dances like a clown while on the job (in ICU no less), along with a very shady maintenance man who resembles Tim Roth but behaves more like a tipsy serial-killer. Or serial molester. (All white men are se$ual predators in Corinne's deranged world.)

And to top it all off, she's being haunted by ghosts! Really?... Corinne threw in everything but the kitchen sink. I'm surprised an alien didn't a-probe Rose, too, then a dragon appears and burns all of her hair off. And of course molests her, because this movie is really just another Red anti-male junk-pile that portrays women as slaves, as the oppressed, as perpetual victims. A laughable fairy-tale in other words.

Rose was molested as a child, then (inexplicably) haunted by ghosts (and fondled by them too), then after barely surviving that night... the doctor she fancies also wants her. So only psychopaths worked in London's 70s hospitals? He couldn't wait for a few days until he groped her? Gets her straight out of her hospital bed after a night in which several nurses died - and drags her still injured to the basement to attack her? Is this a joke, Corinne? It's as if a daft 11 year-old wrote this.

Wouldn't there be evidence of assault? Was it legal in 70s Britain? Did 99% of the male British population consist of sexual deviants? (According to Corinne, it's probably 100%, and according to her 100% of all rape claims are true, because women never lie.) Why is this clueless writer-director treating 1974 London like Caligula's Rome? Who wrote those textbooks she read about 70s London? Chomsky?

Yes, the movie hates Rose, just as Corinne hates the opposite sex. Rose is the corny, utterly pure, 100% morally impeccable innocent stereotype victim ripe for exploitation by male sadists: we get it, Corinne. Subtlety goes a long(er) way, Corinne. (Obviously, all sadists have to be men, because "if women ruled the world"...) But can't you keep it at least a BIT realistic, Corrine? This isn't 25th-century London, you know, some hypothetical time and place that you can inject with random traits. There are numerous people who lived through London's 70s who can laugh at this dumb film, because they won't even recognize this time and place. The hospital isn't located in the netherworld, either. So why all the bombast?

Why so much random violence? Those bloody silly movie ghosts are so often irrational and dumb, nothing new, but this movie takes that shtick to a whole new level. For almost an hour random nonsense just... happens. No rhyme or reason. Silly chaos that would be comedic if the mood wasn't so bleak. The kind of script only a hack could green-light. That only a dilettante can write.

One of the many key questions beg themselves: WHY is the hospital haunting only her? And on her first work day? Isn't that a bit silly?

Corinne might answer this way: "But she is an assault victim, and the ghosts were themselves molested! That's why!"

To this I would reply: "Yes, Corinne, but considering how you portray all men as deviants or at least non-opponents of assault, then how come this ghost was triggered so late into action? If ALL men are rapists then nearly ALL women must be rape victims... right? In other words, the molested ghost(s) should have gone berserk ages ago, triggered by the arrival of ANY other female worker. No need to wait for Rose."

That's a contradiction right there. Not that Corinne would ever detect any bad logic even if it landed on her...

Nevermind Rose's relative calm given the circumstances... She gets shoved to the ground by a ghost, she hears whispers in the dark, things move on their own - yet she STILL isn't searching for the Exit?! Bloody hell, is there no limit anymore to the ineptitude of these wannabe "auteurs"? Yet another director who thinks they can write. Except that she can't: Corinne is just as inept a writer as a myriad of her director colleagues who can't bring themselves to delegate: to find a proper writer for their (dumb) movies. Corinne is a capable director but of what use is that when she writes garbage scripts... There is nothing even the most brilliant director can do with a dumb script, and Corinne is anyway hardly brilliant.

Never in a million years would any sane person on this planet NOT try to run away from a building after what had just happened to her, especially since this place is completely new to her. Sillier still, it turns out she has a phobia of the dark. Extremely stupid, unrealistic script, on so many levels.

What's with the blonde witch nurse? She has more mood swings than Hillary C on a broken-down roller-coaster. She dances with the maintenance man (the blonde, not Hellary), then utters three completely non-sequitur sentences, totally unrelated statements, in a row, to Rose. The 34th minute. Rubbish writing, yet again.

The finale is the dictionary definition of "imbecile". I expect the average of this trash to plummet over the next years, as more and more sane people vote for it...

By far the worst in that sense is the "gangster priest". Dunno what else to call him. If you know the Monty Python sketch with the mafia bishops, you will have an immediate sense of what I'm talking about. This guy behaves completely like a mobster. You wanna portray the Church as corrupt? Fine. But do it in a half-way reasonable, sensible manner, not like this. The bishop starts playing pool while issuing his many threats, then SUDDENLY is used as a jump-scare device, when he for no apparent reasons shouts and smacks a billiard ball with a stick (or something like that). What a dumb, overblown scene.

Much worse than his mobster-like persona is his complete lack of motive. WHY does he so insist on keeping the woman and her child in a house that is haunted? What vested interest does he even have in what happens with these three? There is some half-baked "explanation" he gives to the woman, about an hour into the movie, but it clarifies nothing, hence we're none the wiser. He seems to exist purely as a plot-device - to keep the three people from abandoning the house.

In the end, there's a nonsensical scene with the bishop meeting some National-Socialists and discussing the house. But that point I was utterly disinterested, so perhaps I missed a key detail. Maybe it all makes sense, but I doubt it. I very much doubt they managed to logically connect the National-Socialists to the house, and why the bishop would want to have tenants in it.

The "occultist" mumbles so much you need subtitles for every single scene he is in. It's as if he's doing modern theater or something, just seems eccentric for the sake of it. A Brando fan?

The priest's depiction is typical of a writer detached from reality, who "knows" about the Church only what he'd seen in movies. This priest is reluctant to copulate with his new wife, because... why? Because he is uptight about sex? Because sex is "impure"? If this writer actually thinks that any priests EVER - from any denomination - were repelled by sex and reluctant to stick their you-know-whats into women, think again: that is utter nonsense. Those guys and gals (nuns) hoompa-loompa like rabbits.

Ghosts are, once again, completely illogical, as well as cretinous...

"The woman was tortured and mutilated by Minassian Order monks many years ago, and now she holds your daughter captive as revenge."

The kid is not the priest's daughter, she barely even knows him. Besides, even if she were, the priest himself didn't torture the ghost woman, so why take it all out on the little girl? Why not kill the bishop instead?

Yeah, movie ghosts and their nearly always brazen lack of logical motives for being hostile... I wonder why writers think they can get away with this. Why they think ghosts are allowed to be so stupid. It makes the writing easier but it only piles on more nonsense.

"Her own unborn was ripped out by monks, and now she now holds your daughter captive, as her own."

So which is it then? The occultist gave us two different motives for why the ghost snatched the girl.

I didn't appreciate the subtle pro-Republican Spanish Civil War sub-sub-plot. If the director wanted to kiss the Establishment's rear end he should have done it in a more obvious way. You know, the usual obvious, in-your-face, Red-propaganda kind of way. I mean, why be shy with your Red leanings? Everyone in the film industry is a Red now. Might as well let it all hang: be open with your political extremi$m. It's hip to be an extremi$t these days. Not to mention PC hence profitable.

Ditto "The Shining" rip-off. Might as well name the priest Jack Nicholson, and the wife Overlook Hotel.

There are some interesting scenes on occasion, but too many things here are just plain average, or worse.

The last half-hour is an even bigger letdown. Instead of being more interesting and exciting, it consists of random scenes, inane speeches and a rather bad soundtrack.

A noble message indeed. And a practical one.

It's a sexploitation flick, so can we forgive its many idiocies and incompetencies? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I forgive every B-movie's incompetence, because that's what makes them fun. What's there to forgive? I love the fact that fools and hacks made so many low-budgies in the 50s and 60s. But that doesn't mean I am willing (or able) to ignore their stupidity.

After all, NOTM starts with a whopping 25-minute introduction, during which it's absolutely no different than any other sci-fi flick of the era. During this rather slow, breast-free section NOTM gives us lots of scientific gobbledygook; the movie attempts to be at least somewhat serious. Otherwise why bore the audiences with budgets, schedules and temperature shifts on the Moon? We learn that the young scientist is completely oblivious to women, most importantly to his secretary, who is smitten with him.

Plenty of nonsense, no way of including it all in one review. The usual space sci-fi cheese about getting the rocket ready for a historic mission (in this case a task as easy as organizing a picnic), and then the usual easy-as-punch lift-off. No stray passengers this time though! Which is odd... Perhaps the "writers" weren't aware of the unwritten rule that every Moon or Mars mission MUST have a stowaway...? Then the awesome landing: the astronuts doze off, yet perfectly land! This is where B-movie cosmonuts show total supremacy compared to overrated hacks such as Armstrong and Aldrin.

In Florida. They land in Florida. Not the Moon. Sorry to disappoint, but the movie uses some rather blatant false advertising.

The two astro-nuts marvel loudly at the amazing scenery, it's just a pity that the director wouldn't show us any of it. Still, I'd rather be a viewer than an astro-nut because these two are forced to wear rather gay costume-ball outfits that even the most eccentric and fey of superheroes might adamantly refuse to put on. They find gold, bicker about it, then they get briefly "kidnapped" and zapped(?) by the Moon Queen, played by none other than the love-interest secretary! Though why not? It's not like they'd gone THAT far: they're in bloody Florida!

And yet, they wear helmets. Well, "helmets" which don't cover their heads entirely - but they do have some sort of completely unnecessary breathing devices. Why the visors though? They lift them up occasionally, to have a closer look (at breasts, for example), then shut them down again! Why not just take them off, you clowns! We never ever find out why... Then again, we also never find out what two morons are doing in Florida exploring the "Moon" while dressed as dandy futuristic hairdressers, either. Couldn't they have simply bought train or plane tickets like everyone else?

After discovering a "civilization" (well, 11 naked people standing around sun-bathing), they don't seem to for a moment show either shock or even at least surprise. In fact, they find the flora much more interesting than the boobage! Sort of like "oh, some nude women... we'll get to them later, we must first examine these fascinating plants".

After being zapped, for no discernible reason, and vaguely "imprisoned" (a "jail" from which they could have waltzed out any time they wished), they are "released" (well, sort of, vaguely "escorted" out), and are now free to do the usual Florida tourist thingy. The writer is such an utter nitwit that the elder scientist/tourist tells his young colleague TWICE about gold being needed to finance future missions. The writing is so dumb we even have a role-reversal whereby the young astro-moron loses interest in the "scientific aspects" of the mission (whatever those may be in a Florida park) and has to be admonished by the elder one. Just minutes earlier the younger one had to admonish the elder one that "we're here for scientific purposes"!

Needless to say, it's as if a 12 year-old wrote this script... for his Soft-Core Pawn class. (Don't laugh. They probably have those in "progressive" Sweden.) The sort of script that would probably fail him in any half-way demanding Goteborg Pown School.

And directed by a 5 year-old. The editing, the same shots being used over and over, unrelated scenes being glued together stupidly, day-and-night transitions, ultra-awful anti-continuity...

Unfortunately, NOF (Nude In Florida) overstays its breasty welcome by a half-hour. At least. By the 50-minute mark, at the latest, NOF shoots off all of its load/ammunition, and after that there's nothing left but senseless, dull repetition. Sure, nine naked women are featured over and over (the kind of repetition I really don't mind), but whenever they're not part of a scene it is pure drudgery.

Still... there's that awesome ending, with its poetic, noble, righteous, feminist message. The young astronaut unwillingly goes back to Earth, depressed because he is leaving behind the Moon/Florida Queen/Earth-Secretary. But!... Upon returning to work, the dope finally realizes that his secretary and the "alien" floozie are the same woman. And so man once again proves that love for a woman cannot properly blossom until and unless she takes her clothes off.

So he can inspect the goods. Of course. Makes perfect sense. I'm not being sarcastic.

One of those slow-paced horror films that have zombies pulling their hair out. This is the polar opposite of what the torture-po$n crowd wants from a movie. They don't want mystery, a story, good dialog, proper characterization - and a total lack of gore.

No splatter-butchering tore-limbs rivers of blood whatsoever here. This is every torture-po$n fan's worst nightmare: real people in unusual situations. (They prefer absurd people in totally contrived situations.) The only "unusual" situations a torture-po$n dweeb wants and understands is when an innocent tourist family find themselves in the middle of a huge shredder, observing their legs get cut into tiny pieces - while the torture fan finishes in their pants, stuff dripping down on his Coke cans lying around on the floor. A LACK of extreme violence repulses them. They don't want to be forced to use their unusable grey cells, they want pure unadulterated deprivation and sadism. As simple as possible, with a plot that even a lower-tier plankton can comprehend. When other people experience great pain - is their joy. The screams of a murdering hillbilly's victims is like a ballad to their monkey ears.

This is no such film.

Granted, there are many slow-paced horror films that absolutely stink, but those are the ones with a boring premise, and/or a lack of style, and/or lacking a proper soundtrack and camerawork required for such a film. Building a mood isn't easy, it requires effort and skill. Money, too.

A psychological drama is what this is, with strong horror overtones. The build-up is interesting, the score is very good (especially the tunes in the 6th and 86th minutes), the cast is competent, the dialog very solid, and the setting nice. A pretty, charismatic blonde helps a lot too, I admit. Niamh Algar (the brunette lead in "Censor") is the one I'm referring to. Yeah, being called "Niamh" is a bummer for her, but if she plays her cards right (and by that I don't mean weinsteining her way through) she could have a very good career. Of course, that also depends on luck, plus whether there are enough non-morons in the film industry to recognize her potential.

Did I understand the ending? No. But that's OK, because the movie never bored me, nor annoyed me, nor did I particularly expect to get answers, because I surmised that this wasn't that kind of film. There is a (small) possibility that Eric had split up into two: the part of him that joined the plant-life, and the physical part of him that ended up in a loony bin, along with his predecessor who had the same fate. This would explain him watching his family, friends and cops lead a searching party in the woods. I don't believe he was literally hiding, but that he was already assimilated into the forest. This is, perhaps, why there are two of them at the same time: one in the forest, "hiding" from the people, the other in the house, a shell of his former self.

Does he seem happy? Not really. This isn't some tree-hugging fable of a "man who becomes one with nature", a glorious state of bliss and contentment that hippies have been fantasizing about ever since the first joint was rolled. Eric appears distraught in the final scene, i.e. Perhaps the forest did a number on him, as a way to defend itself from being turned into a tourist resort, a factory, or whatever it was this land surveyor was sent for.

Very possibly the worst anthology horror film I'd come across until now. It consists of contributions from various countries. About as international as the United Nations - and just as effective and useful.

The 1st story "Sinful Women of Hollfall" is very well shot, full of colour, original, interesting - but then that baffling ending... I have no idea what it means, absolutely no clue. It'd be silly to even venture a guess: some random BS intended as a substitute for a proper conclusion.

Two Austrian girls from the 18th or 19th century get lesbian with each other, which results in a demon that acts as Sin Police starting to punish the "seduced one" (we don't find out whether the pregnant seductress is getting punished by Trud the demon too, which by all logic should be the case, yet the story pretty much ignores the blonde). There's also that weird scene when the seductress (the pregnant blonde) smashes her face in with a rock... twice, for no apparent reason. With no noticeable injuries, which is preposterous. But I was willing to let it slide, provided the rest made sense. It didn't... 5/10.

"The Childbirth Djinn" is some Turkish nonsense. I always stay away from movies from that part of the world, and this just confirms my decision. I hope that poor goat wasn't really killed, for the movie, otherwise a heavy curse (doesn't have to be a djinn, anything demonic) would be in order for the director. 2/10

"The Kindler & the Virgin" is a lousy Polish story. If one can even refer to this mess as a story. More like several scenes thrown together on a pile. Fortunately, it's the shortest one at just 10 minutes. So far EVERYTHING I'd come across from Polish cinema has been garbage. 1/10

"Beware the Melonheads" should be "Beware of Dumb Kids and Their Even Dumber Millennial Parents." The kid meets a faceless older boy in the woods, yet fails to report this meeting to his parents right away. That was already strike 1 against this crap. Then the silly peeing incident. Strike 2. Then Strike 3: the"imaginary friend" malarkey, a cheesy plot-device to turn the boy's testimony null-and-void "because hey he's a boy and all children make up everything". Now, after 3 strikes the story should have been abandoned, right? Well, I am forgiving, especially since this is the American entry hence I knew it'd be very dumb hence my very low expectations. Strike 4: the 6 year-old boy says that William is "a little boy like me" when in fact William the Cannibal is clearly an older teen. At this point I was rooting for the cannibals, to have a nice meal: a family of three (dumb Americans). Strike 5: the Melonheads are more like aliens (Coneheads) than cannibal degenerates with "large heads". Laughable. Strike 6: the guy doesn't hear his wife's incredibly piercing scream. He couldn't have been more than 10 meters away, and in a quiet forest environment. I shall spare you the other 11 strikes which involve horrific acting, ridiculous make-up, idiotic dialogue and a stupid predictable "twist"... 0/10.

"Panagas the Pagan" is the 1st time I've ever watched any Greek stuff, and judging from this drivel I'm going to always give a wide berth around anything filmo-Greekish. On a side-note, isn't Greek supposed to sound like Spanish? Sounded more like Finnish. 1/10

"The Palace of Horrors" is cheap-looking B-nonsense not helped by being shot in b&w. The Indian entry, rather boring. 2/10

"A Nocturnal Breath" is the German entry. Finally something watchable after a string of stinkers. The only scary thing about this non-scary anthology is that Germans and Austrians win this "competition" hands down, despite both nations being infamous for their very mediocre cinema. 5/10.

"Cobbler's Lot" is "artsy" and presented in a silent-film way, but is better than most of the other crap here. Still, I'll never understand why the princess killed herself before the arrival of her spy-bird. Why send a bird to find out what happens at the lake when you can't even bother to wait for its report? The Hungarian entry. Good soundtrack. 4/10.

If Hitchcock had ever done a haunted house flick, this is how he'd do it - by endlessly playing around with his favorite dumb gimmick of nobody-believes-me which is basically the same as his thriller innocent-man-accused-of-a-crime shtick.

THOPS spends way too much screen time milking that cow; after a while it becomes very tiresome and annoying, not to mention repetitive: 1. Woman gets harassed by ghost, 2. Woman complains to husband, 3. He says she's crazy, 4. Go back to 1. Over and over, for 80 MINUTES! That's how much of the movie is stuck in a rut, playing like a broken record. You can use that shtick for only so long before you're forced to stretch logic and go into far-fetched territory - which is why Hitchcock loved that gimmick, because he didn't give a hoot that his movies were illogical and absurd.

I prefer films in which a plot develops rather than stagnates, hits a wall. Enough already! Get on with the bloody story! And that's why the film lasts two hours, which is way too long for horror films, because it's stuck in a daft loop. Stupider still, the conclusion offers zero explanation: who is the ghost? Why did he kill and harass? Nope, sorry, the lazy film-makers copped out. There are some good, eerie scenes which save the movie from uselessness.

And let's have an actress with actual cleavage. This female character is supposedly in her last trimester and yet the actress is as flat as a board. Perhaps that's why the ghost is so angry.

There is a brief nude scene (one hour into the movie) showing Demi fully pregnant. I checked her bio and it turns out she gave birth to Rumer Willis the same year this movie was released. However, the movie came out in April, whereas Rumer was born in August, so the stomach has to be fake.

As for the breasts? Who knows. Her natural breasts are small, B size at the very most, yet here they seem larger. When did she get her awful implants?

Not nearly as relevant as the Apocalypse, I know, but still: we the audiences have the right to know these crucial things.

A weird sub-plot shows up early on involving a Down Syndrome kid who faces execution because he killed his parents "in the name of God". Utter rubbish, of course: no 80s California that I know of would have sentenced to death such a kid, regardless whom he killed. No other U. S. state either. Compounding this nonsense is the fairly far-fetched notion of a Down Syndrome person killing anyone. In fact, has such a case ever even been recorded?

The conversation between him and his lawyer is ludicrous too. Biehn is using legalese terminology and this kid understands it! The writer wanted a Down Syndrome character (just for kicks) but one who isn't mentally impaired. So stupid. The guy who wrote this script clearly knows less about Down Syndrome than I know about building Mars rockets. I get it: the 5th seal was this innocent being executed by a "corrupt world" or whatever, but this sub-plot could have been handled differently, and far less idiotically. For a movie that wants to be taken seriously as an apocalyptic horror film - as opposed to a comedy - they sure risked a lot with this needless nonsense. The last 3rd of the movie suffers for it. For someone who has worked with Down Syndrome people, I find this whole thing utterly dumb.

I struggle to understand why the immortal Roman soldier (the murderer) felt the need to approach Demi. What was his motive? To warn her? Why warn her? It makes no sense.

A very good 1st half is followed by a sudden drop (once the big reveal occurs) in the flawed, unconvincing 2nd half. The sense of mystery gone, the movie proceeds to resolve things in a somewhat clumsy way.

Hazel's escape from the demon goes against all logic and odds. Nevertheless, it was predictable all along despite not being plausible in the slightest, because it was so obvious that she was the central figure who might survive the carnage. (Why many horror movies make this so obvious, I do not know.) The demon had her caught on several occasions, yet somehow let her slip away. Inexplicably, the three demons wasted minutes flailing about with their tongues as if unsure what to do next, or as if drunk. It's not even clear how she escapes in the van scene: because they WAITED for her to finally reach her gun so she can shoot them? Laughable writing.

Then suddenly the ghost of Hazel's mother comes to the rescue, which goes against all the unwritten "ghost rules". Nor do we understand how a mere human ghost is so much more powerful than two demon-possessed humans. But OK, that's not a major point. Considering that the demon "increases his power greatly with every additional soul", he should have easily defeated Hazel (an understatement), by which point he'd gone from one soul to three - and he was mighty powerful with just the one to begin with. An incompetent demon isn't a scary demon.

The self-sacrificing nature of these low-life kidnappers is another issue. Not one but THREE of these four people sacrifice themselves for the others, or try to, throughout the chaos. Hazel even at one point actually WORRIES about demonic Katherine, despite the fact that she'd just seen the tapes of how she slaughtered 4 people with ease. Later on, the technician-guy offered his life to save Hazel and her boyfriend - despite the fact that he'd agreed to sell them to the demon in exchange for seeing his dead daughter just a few minutes earlier. And then, the boyfriend sacrificed himself to the demon so that Hazel could leave, in what was a very unconvincing, absurd scene. "Only one can leave" he stupidly says while shutting the hatch behind her. Huh? Why just one? Where was this rule written and by whom? At no point did the demon ever suggest that ANYONE could leave, let alone gave a number. Hence he could have easily joined her. It's not as if he bought her any extra time by killing himself either, considering that she stayed there the whole time; she started running only after he was dead, which made his sacrifice completely unnecessary. Silly writing.

Hazel not shooting at the demon earlier on was also a ridiculous moment. Her hesitation makes zero sense, in light of everything that had occurred before. This is not some mild-mannered housewife forced to shoot at a demon, but a criminal.

This notion of a kidnapper-with-the-heart-of-gold and this "honour among thieves" BS really sinks the 2nd half, making it unrealistic. The characterization is off. If the writer actually expects us to root for the kidnappers then he must be rather confused about not just characterization, but also morality in general. The fact that the gang is lead by a skinny fashion model also rings about as true as a shark saving a toddler on the beach instead of attacking it.

The high average must be due to nostalgia. Some of the people who upvoted TG must have been no older than the two protagonists here when they first saw the movie, hence must have been scared $hitle$$ by this tame, non-scary tale of a demonic gateway.

The movie fritters away its first half on barely anything much horror-related at all, preferring to keep us occupied listening to inconsequential dialog between the various kids.

Most of these kids' reactions make little sense. The teens all experience Dorff's levitation, yet nobody aside from him is impressed at all. Later, Dorff is SKEPTICAL about the "heavy metal band" Sacrifice and its Satanic lyrics about levitation! Duh.

No, not the Canadian band Sacrifice, who - interestingly - released their best album in the same year as this movie was made. This movie didn't have the class to feature real metal or any real bands, much less something as extreme as Sacrifice was back then. It's a kiddie horror after all. Not that I support metal music in horror movies (it almost never works), but since this is a menial little monster movie, then they might as well have. It's not as if TG oozes with atmosphere that any kind of unsuitable music could ruin.

When the demons finally start their big attack campaign, Dorff's friend seems hardly impressed and is acting blase about it, even joking. Duh. The fact that he was the only one who believed in all this supernatural stuff does NOT mean that he'd be calm about it when it starts happening. He is after all just a kid. An adult would react with fear, let alone a kid.

The way he falls into the hole is pretty damn stupid too. The writer needed someone to fall in there but couldn't think of ANY better way for him to fall than out of clumsiness. So dumb. There are a 100 ways you can make a character fall into a demonic pit, especially a dumb kid. Banana peels and the like aren't necessary.

When the trio initially gets rid of the pit and goes back into the house, they actually LAUGH at the two girls for hiding in a closet, as though the demons never existed. A few minutes later, the closet girls welcome some guys as a surprise, then behave as if NOTHING supernatural had ever transpired just 10 minutes earlier! Unbe-lievable.

Bizarre writing decisions, for sure, hence the asinine reactions.

Still, TG looks a lot better than most movies from the late 80s, the visually and quality-wise lousiest era of American movies, between the late 60s and early 00s. Also, the special effects are far better than what one might expect from an 80s horror film. The little demons are pretty good. The final 15 minutes are a bit of a redemption for the earlier tedium, and much better than this movie deserved.

Shouldn't it be called "Dave Found A Way To Beat All the Known Laws Of Physics"? The fact that he made a complex labyrinth is kinda trumped by this fact.

Borderline not horror, but I decided to include it anyway, because it does have elements of it, plus (at least) 5 people do get "butchered", after all.

Speaking of which, I know that it's an absurdist comedy, but I felt something was off about the ending in which the main couple seemed very happy despite having lost 4 of their friends to the maze. Dave seemed to show more concern about the movie title than his dead friends whom he never once mentions after the escape. In fact, only the sleazy movie producer mentions them. And what happened to the Flemish tourists?

A lower budget comedic version of movies like "Cube", with a good deal of imagination, but never truly hilarious. Interesting rather than funny, although it can get occasionally tedious due to its bland appearance and mild-tempered approach.

The female lead is very attractive, she just needs a nose job to look great.

The whole movie is basically a sister blaming her brother for things he isn't guilty of. A vapid family drama instead of a thrilling supernatural story. Oprah goes horror. Or horror goes to Oprah.

Still, it's worth perhaps for the idiotic "Giiirlllll!" scene. That's funny, though it isn't intended to be.

Starts off nicely enough though, building up mystery, but after the first third you start realizing that the supernatural aspect of the plot is going to be stuck in a rut for at least another 40-50 minutes while the focus shifts then stays on friggin' family drama tedium.

It's similar to one of those annoying "nobody believes me" movies, kind of like a more ambitious hence less cliche version of "Invaders From Mars", in which nobody believes a child that Martians are up to no good - because he is just a kid. Like the drunk hobo nobody believes, in some other cheesy UFO film. Harry has had something done to him by the ocean, a creature, aliens... whatever: just like to his father who was killed by it a little earlier. Yet nobody, not even Harry, knows that he's a victim.

Yet, he is the victim, but everyone else considers him irresponsible, volatile, needlessly hostile...

Needlessly? To give you an idea how contrived this molest-the-innocent-victim shtick gets, consider the fact that his sister ("the nice one") blames HIM for instigating a brawl at their father's funeral, when in fact Harry was provoked by a sociopath who blamed him loudly in front of everyone for killing his father. Yet, Harry gets arrested, nothing happens to the psycho. And Harry is blamed for the incident.

Dumber still, his second sister, Jen (the egotistical, evil one) keeps provoking him yet when he lashes out (and not even in a big way) the "nice sister" blames HIM for provoking Jen. So yes, this writer is laying it on a little too thick. He is basically doing a Hitchcock: the overrated chubster loved to inject his dumb overrated thrillers with this kind of "innocent guy being crushed to the ground" nonsense. Newsflash: that kind of drivel is neither original, nor interesting, nor fun, nor realistic. It's just plain fake, far-fetched.

For a moment there I thought he was going to be blamed for the tons of dead fish, too. "Yeah, Harry must've done it! He is so VIOLENT, killed his father, he is up to no good, I bet HE killed 1000s of those poor fish too!" Well, if this were a Hitchcock film that would have likely followed next, literally. There would have been a lynching mob chasing Harry. So no, it's not as bad as a Hitchcock film but it's still annoying.

Of course, very conveniently this thing is happening only to Harry! There are thousands of fish getting washed up the shore, all victims of the mysterious menace just as Harry is, yet somehow only Harry of all human islanders has this problem. Was the writer more interested in the mediocre drama aspect of this story than the interesting side, the supernatural side? You bet. Why did he think that family drama can be more interesting - in a HORROR film - than the fantasy stuff? Because he is clueless.

So, knowing that I was going to have to sit through at least another half-hour of this kind of repetitive, unrealistic rubbish, I lost interest in the film.

Plus, I could just TELL that this was going to be one of those films that don't try to explain anything. "2001" didn't explain much, because it didn't need to. It's a cerebral movie about ideas. This premise, however, is too specific and banal (as opposed to vague and profound) to not owe us some kind of more concrete explanation. Basically, some "power" in the ocean has turned Harry into a zombie who brings him food from the land. Yes, it's that dumb. May be original, but it's silly, especially without any explanation. We don't even know whether it's an animal, an alien, the ocean itself.

Seriously, the way this super-powerful "creature"/alien feeds is hilarious: it hypnotizes a random fisherman, gets him to bring "exotic" food (deer, dogs and little girls are like oysters and octopus to us), then he LIFTS everything into the air, and the food drops... into the water and... into its mouth? This should have been a comedy. A Lovecraftian comedy. Maybe it's just about a huge Octopus God too lazy to get its own food so it uses its talent at hypnosis to get some free exotic grub. Or maybe it's just the Roman god Neptune pranking a whole island, for MTV.

Speaking of falling from a large height back onto the deck of a boat, it isn't clear at all how Harry managed to survive such a fall. Nor do we understand the "nice" sister's boundless stupidity, when she gets agitated by the reclusive guy asking her whether Harry is killing and transporting animals. Literally that day she'd found out he abducted a dog, and she knew about the deer. So she's an imbecile?

Instead of focusing on the ocean - where the answer must lie - we get brain-scans, sibling drama, a cop angrily shouting at Harry, and other filmic debris more suitable for an Oprah bomb.

There's also the stupid thing his nice sister says, before the problems started. "He tends to get paranoid." This makes little sense, in light of how he was introduced to us in his very first scene: he was shown being annoyed and bored by his conspiracy-theory friend, which a paranoid person would not do. Sloppy writing much? Don't define a character right off the bat as anti-paranoid - but then get a character who is the "voice of reason" (his nice sister) to claim the total opposite just 10 minutes later. Sometimes I wonder how writers can miss out on such gaping holes of logic in their own scripts...

In the end, instead of giving us a viable explanation, the film throws at us a really dumb plot-twist - that Harry and the others were like specimen taken for "study" by... whatever, whoever. An alien? Maybe a really lazy alien that can't be bothered to just pick up its own damn specimen.

No, it's not a profound analogy (between fish and humans as specimen for study), it's Pythonesque. And no amount of "eerie music" can change this.

There's no explanation whatsoever for how the 1000s of dead fish are connected to the "sea creature". Is "the monster" studying fish too? It needs thousands of fish of the same species to analyze - but only one or two humans? Besides, being a sea creature (?) he should already know enough about fish...

On the positive side, I was intrigued and interested most of the time, and the movie is professionally shot, it isn't B-movie amateurism. The mystery is unusual - certainly far more original than what we get from tons of mindless thrillers that are all about invincible, time/space-bending psycho-killers who seem to have more power than Beelzebub and his pals Baphomet and Belial.

No such BS here. It's not about blood, guts and wounded cops running through abandoned factories. It's not about an omniscient serial-killer who easily predicts the actions of 50 cops, 7 detectives and 115 screaming victims, as if he were a demon from Hell's loins. It's a genuine mystery...

Except that it has no resolution. Zero. The big negative is the ending, which is random, meaningless, incomplete, lazy and "artsy". I can't stand films with sudden endings, they always smell of desperation.

There's the obvious possibility, or at least theory, that the protagonist, James, is the killer. Certainly that would explain the dubious, extraordinarily huge "coincidence" of him getting involved in an urban-legend-like mystery that may lead to his wife's murderer. Or the fact that he finds the elusive 3rd tape in his flat, marked by his own writing - which would 100% mean James killed her. Or the fact that in a very early scene he has a vision of his wife wearing that mask - and that's before he even saw one of those mysterious tapes. Unless there was supernatural involvement, of which there is no real evidence, James would appear to have to be the killer.

But there are so many problems with that explanation - which is, sadly, the only half-way viable explanation, because everything else that happens is random nonsense, disconnected. Interesting nonsense, but from a logical standpoint utter hooey, none of which ties up with anything else. I don't mean that it doesn't tie in neatly, I mean that all of those characters and events don't connect at all, in any way shape or form. They can't. They are random dead-ends devised either to annoy us, fascinate (then disappoint) us, or because the writer was completely lost.

Yes, a lost and confused witter tearing the hair off his head in frustration as he sits over his laptop trying to write something good. Cinema-goers trust writers and directors way too implicitly, hence so often end up making excuse for the film's failings, not realizing that most writers are struggling semi-hacks or total dilettantes, not at all the "(mis)understood geniuses" that fans fantasize about. Cinema-goers overrate film-makers' intellects far too often and too much. They idealize them because cinema-goers live in a fantasy world, they are more disconnected (on average) than people who watch films only sporadically. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of film fanatics are Reds: delusion and confusion are part-and-parcel of their beings. They are pushovers for propaganda, they are naive, they are child-like, yet often pretentious. But that's another story...

Going back to why the "James the killer" theory doesn't work... Firstly, he seems genuinely upset about the death of his wife and/or her disappearance. (The details of her disappearance aren't clarified, which is a bit pathetic. We don't know anything abut how she disappeared, whether her body was found, nothing.) Unless he is a textbook case of a mega-schizophrenic, there is no way he could be her killer, and the killer of the two other women. There is no way he'd go through all that trouble just to miraculously "forget" that he killed them all, to "fix them". Did he have amnesia? If so, we should have been told when and how he lost his memory. He names "fixing phones" as his only hobby, which might be a hint that he is the "fixer" i.e. Women-killer, that he needs to "fix" women. Though why kill two random women at such large intervals (years in-between) then end with the murder of his own wife? Serial-killers don't murder their own wives. It's certainly extremely rare.

Then there's that guy he accuses of being the killer. His behaviour is not that of an innocent person, especially not with that semi-evil smirk he gives while tied and sitting in "the room". Besides, if he wasn't the killer how would he know where the clips were filmed? Unless this guy is a figment of James's schizo imagination? Or maybe he exists but James sees him as James chooses to? In this case the director would be not only manipulating the viewer, he'd be toying with us, giving us nothing. Which would be garbage writing.

And that's when we run into the next problem... If James is schizo and the entire film is shown through his mind, then NOTHING that appears on screen has any meaning whatsoever. If James is the killer then the director completely failed to help us distinguish between the real world and James's fantasy world - something a competent, wise director would have to do for such a "split-reality" or "alternating reality" script. If he is the killer then NONE of the other characters might be real. Not to mention all the other problems I already listed about this theory...

Besides, this protagonist-is-real-killer-and-he's-insane-too twist is nothing new. It's been done before. Protagonist's insanity has been worked to death in thrillers and horror films, even dramas. If it is true that James is the killer that would not only be far-fetched, it would be unoriginal too. A cop-out even. Because "how do I solve this mess I created?" the writer might have asked himself as he started planning to write the last few pages. "Where do I go from here, how do I conclude this maze? Oh, I know, James is the killer! That way I don't have to explain the numerous loose ends and weird all-knowing characters that keep showing up out of literally nowhere". Or a computer that speaks directly to James... Or the clip addressing James by his name (which is more "proof" that he's crazy).

James being the killer would imply that the director had LIED all along, totally deceived the audience, which is a terrible way to "entertain" and to forge a story. Lying is easy, any moron can do it. Try telling the truth to the audience yet still manage to surprise them: that is the trick. Not many can do that, of course... It requires very clever and disciplined writing.

Still, because I had no idea that the story had no ending and that it was random drivel all along, I got a chance to be immersed in it to an extent. That's much better than being bored out of my skull, which is what most movies do...

The beginning is pretty much the only part where you'll find anyone walking, on their two legs, at least for the next 70-80 minutes. (They're mostly sitting, but that's beside the point.) That's a warning.

After that, the film goes to a crawl, literally and figuratively, as the next 70 minutes is basically Weiss crawling through narrow corridors, trying to evade deadly traps. I can't say I was particularly impressed: this is neither an original idea nor does it create much suspense because the pace slows down ridiculously.

Yet, despite all these sadistic traps and obvious intent to torture, in her first encounter with an alien she utters these fascinating words:

"I know you don't want me to die."

Really? After she'd come across two corpses and after she'd witnesses the murder of the serial-killer, she still believes the aliens like her?

So she's either insane or stupid - or both.

Which makes sense. She was in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, so clearly she could be both. Plus, she'd just undergone stress and abuse the kind that can kill people. Yet, she somehow has the energy to plow on, to crawl on and on like an energizer caterpillar, with as much stamina as 48 Olympic swimmers. Try crawling for "just" 2-3 minutes: if you can - especially at a fast pace. Anyone who did military service knows how extremely tiring it is. We have big apes as our ancestors, not slugs. Unless Weiss is related to a mole or a worm, I really don't know how she could have done all this crawling without passing out at least 30 times, plus all the stress, panic, anxiety, fear and with just a bit of water and from what I can tell no food at all.

Yes, this is sci-fi, but SHE isn't the alien here. She is a human hence I need her to behave like a human, not like a Crawl Champion emperor-worm. It's way too far-fetched.

Then, when she meets more aliens, she actually SMILES at these ugly deviants who are putting her through this torture, as if she does this sort of thing every day, and as if she'd met aliens before. This was by far the stupidest scene. No human, unless they were some kind of uniquely masochistic and schizophrenic specimen, would behave the way she does. She is friendly, cheerful and trusting with the aliens - none of which makes any sense at all. Any normal person would either want to punch them in the face or flee. Or both.

And how the hell does she constantly keep outrunning (outcrawling) the monster? His only job is to hunt down humans, that's literally his job description, yet somehow grrl power always wins over him.

Who couldn't predict that she'd end up back where she started? Raise yer hands all ye fools who had seen "Cube" yet couldn't figure out that obvious "plot twist". After she finds herself there, somehow she figures out what the symbols denote! That'd be like a person running a marathon while juggling 5 balls being able to do complicated calculus at the same time. There's no way in hell anyone in this kind of extreme, completely bizarre situation would be able to think halfway clearly, let alone analyze these symbols which are as vague as can be. Besides, what the hell do directions such as "left right right left left" mean in a complex 3D maze where even gravity changes!

Nor can she be that smart. After all, check out her dumb daughter, how she died. At the age of 9 any halfway intelligent, normal child should know not to walk out of open windows. I mean, duh. So silly. Weiss blames herself for this incident, yet she isn't at fault. One should be able to leave a 9 year-old alone without having to worry that the dummie will fall out of a window! It's so stupid... That was natural selection at work right there!

Still, after Weiss goes to Heaven (or a remote planet) she gets a new-and-improved daughter, who appears to have made a huge evolution from a window-falling brat all the way to a planetary guide working for the sadistic aliens. It isn't even clear whether this replace-daughter will keep her company or not. Where is Weiss supposed to live? There were no accommodations, perhaps at best a cave, in that barren landscape. That's her reward??? Being stuck on a distant planet, all alone, with just one weird dress? Don't these aliens know that a French woman has a fashion sense? She's not gonna be too happy wearing the same thing every day. Where will she shop? Whom will she share gossip with? (And which gossip? There's nobody else there.) She will likely stay there alone forever, because for sure no other humans will manage to pass that ultra-difficult crawly marathon thingy in the tunnels. This is supposed to be her "Heaven" after she died "many times over" (as she's informed). That is a depressing ending, not a positive one - as this film may (or may not) suggest. All that struggle - just to get more punishment?

So lemme get this right... Aliens abduct random humans and put them through extreme physical, emotional and mental torture - and only the survivors get to "enjoy" the scenery of some barren crap planet? This is not a premise nor a concept, this is goofy nonsense. These aliens must be weird at best, extremely malicious at worst.

Still, the French have a good aesthetic sense and the interiors are nice, the movie is slickly done, it's professional not amateur - although the acting can be iffy at times. Especially the girl-alien comes off flat. I just wish there were more of a plot, less crawling, and a tiny little bit more logic to it all.

One of my bigger ratings mess-ups. It's embarrassing that I left this mediocrity sitting in the top of my "100 Best Horror Films" list for so many years.

This is one of the more extreme examples of why I can't always trust my old ratings (and reviews). I had this nonsense at 8/10, but now I know better than to have this anywhere near the top 100. This happens relatively rarely, this amount of misjudgment.

I've never done any drugs (believe it or not), but I must have been on a potent cocktail-soup of Bolivian mushrooms when I gave this a high rating, almost 20 years ago. It does get exciting at times and most of it is not boring, but the far-fetchedness of it and the sheer stupidity do their bit in destroying the film.

A U. S. sub downs a British ship BY MISTAKE, and as a result THREE of its top officers try to cover up their error by spontaneously deciding to ASSASSINATE the captain, who is trying to save the survivors.

Translation: the American Navy was awash with psychopaths who'd sacrifice 100s of innocent lives - on their own side - at the drop of a hat. Additionally, like some feral barbarians they had zero loyalty to the chain of command, would actually resort to drastic measures such as murder, as if an error of this magnitude could actually be covered up anyway, as if it were some minor typo. Not one but THREE in the crew agree with this psychotic decision. One crew member, OK, that'd be acceptable, but three, and all at once, in unison, agreeing to kill a captain - instead of trying to somewhat rectify a very bad situation by helping him pick up the survivors?

I suppose the writer must have assumed that the military's recruitment used to take place in loony bins, deathrows, and the mafia. Yes, that must be it: the military used to recruit its staff among the $cum of the Earth, then hand out promotions based on who has the lowest IQ and the highest levels of psychopathy. What other explanation could there be?

Frankly, this is why America needs another war on their own home soil. 150 years is way too long. They've gone too soft in the head. We've had tons of liberal crappolas about serial-killer cops, about cynical genocidal army generals out to destroy American civilians (often just for fun), but now they'd gone too far ("now" being 2002 admittedly) when even WW2 personnel aren't sacred to these spoiled, clueless, "progressive", dweebs.

The premise in itself is not only an insult to all of the poor shlucks who died at sea during WW2, it is also an insult to our intelligence, because if the U. S. Navy had been this incompetent, this disloyal, this stupid, and this monstrous, we'd all be speaking German and Japanese now, without a shadow of a doubt.

The movie fails despite generating some excitement, simply based on this mega-stupid twist. Not to mention the daft ending, with the new captain going totally over-the-top, becoming a ridiculous character out of a bad John Woo movie.

Then there's further malarkey regarding how the murdered captain "takes revenge" on his three assassins by killing nearly his ENTIRE submarine crew! Laughable. Why kill all the wrong people first? Why not start with the three guilty ones and end it there? Just because the captain turned into a vengeful ghost doesn't mean he should have turned into an imbecile too. Very lame, lazy writing.

Besides, why do movie ghosts so often behave like complete and utter dolts? Does the afterlife hand out free lobotomies to everyone? There is some major contradiction here, too: why does a ghost get to be clever in terms of his traps, attacks and "spooky pranks" - yet totally stupid when it comes to the basics - such as whom to kill? He is a clever enough ghost to snidely torture the submarine's occupants - yet he never realizes that what he SHOULD be doing is killing of the three guys who murdered him. Very simple! Even a plankton would understand this ultra-basic concept. A military plankton is murdered by three sneaky, evil plankton, so the murdered plankton exacts revenge as a ghost on his murderers. It's that simple.

But logic is never an easy thing for inept, lazy writers.

The last 20-30 minutes is garbage.

The special-effects are pretty poor too, but that's not even a complaint, especially compared to the daft plot.

"The way he and the two of you (girls) danced, it was a scandal, he should have male friends not you girls, so Sydney was right, praise the Lord, for kicking him out before the boy turns into a communi$t!... Sydney and me are upstanding, good, Bible-believing Christians!"

As subtle as a sledgehammer crushing tiny defenseless hamsters. This anti-Christian, anti-conservative nonsense is what Altman considered "clever intelligent satire" of the Bible Belt, a region which pompous Reds have hated since the dawn of cinema. The boy in question is a gay character - and of course conservatives are all nasty, hateful, anti-gay lunatics who obsess over Reds and who draw these kinds of ridiculous conclusions, in their usual - very common - attacks of political hysteria.

Ain't that the pot and the kettle. Anti$a screamers, anyone? Nobody is more overemotional, intolerant or zealous than ess-jay-w snow flakes.

To make things even more pathetically obvious - which actually insults the audience - this Bible-thumping Juanita character is defined early on as a devious miser who recycles leftover drinks by pouring them back into the juice can. Because obviously right-wingers do that kind of evil, sneaky stuff - whereas Libs are all very refined, wonderful people.

That's how propaganda works: it reduces everything to banal demonization and glorification, and of course peppers everything with fallacies and lies.

It is a mark of very poor writing whenever "satire" is carried out by such black-and-white, bludgeoning bouts of uninspired simplification and extreme bias. By exposing such vitriolic hatred for the Bible Belt (or whoever happens to be your target) the writer cheapens his message, because the message is being relayed from the perspective of a zealot, not a rational observer of society. Altman was very far from an "intellectual" director as many consider him to be, he was in fact far from it: his strengths were in stylish directorial decisions: a great sense of aesthetics, not intellectual content. The proof is in so many bad and even downright horrible scripts that he'd given his thumbs up to. He actually received this trash of a script one day, and not only liked it - but decided to film it!

Of course, this movie has neither aesthetics nor intellectual content, it is completely devoid of anything redeemable. It isn't about fan-clubs nor is it about James Dean either. It's a thinly-veiled attack on Middle America, yet again, because Altman despised them with a passion that rivaled the Kremlin.

But on to a lighter subject... When Altman tries to convince us that Karen Black is really a man! This notoriously cretinous twist is one of THE dumbest moments in all of 80s cinema, and one of the most ridiculous B-movie scenes in any Hollywood studio film of any era.

Must I spell it out, all ye "progressives"?

The very notion that a man can be transformed into a woman looking like Karen Black is preposterous, having literally zero connection with reality. Ever hear of a "male fantasy"? Well, this must be a "tran$ fantasy". Or rather, "transci-fi". Perhaps in 50000 years this sort of conversion will be doable, but until then it will remain a very goofy fantasy. I've seen many of this new species (hard to avoid them these days: we're bombarded with this agenda) and not one of them was even remotely convincing. Certainly even the "least obvious" cases are nothing close to aesthetically successful.

Don't get me wrong, Black is no beauty, but she looked fairly decent back then, certainly not in the least masculine, and in fact I am amazed that she wasn't INSULTED to be offered this absurd role. After all, Kathy Bates - who is in this movie playing a woman - would have been a much more convincing choice.

Kathy gets to play a woman, yet Black plays a man! What Bolivian veggies was Bobby sniffing?

Another unsuccessful aspect of this terrible flick are the many past-to-present transitions. None of these women appear to have aged, despite the 20 years difference. But hey: Karen Black used to be a man, so how bad is that error? Comparatively tiny.

You'd think a bunch of James Dean fanatics would have reacted more dramatically to the news of his accident. Instead, that scene is very flat, unrealistic and decidedly undramatic.

And then there's Cher's fake, very corny-sounding southern drawl. I don't buy it for a second.