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mckracken
Reviews
Knowing (2009)
the whole world burns... but take the bunny rabbits?
the movie Knowing... well the trailer pretty much sums up all the parts that make sense and the rest of the movie lets just say didn't flow well (for me) I left wondering if maybe Nic Cage's character would have been better played by Dennis Quaid... or ANYBODY else for that matter. Nic Cage's acting talent is extremely wooden and limited... see Ghost Rider for a detailed look at his stiff acting abilities.
It's not that knowing the numbers equal various dates and death tolls of worldwide tragedies was that hard to figure out, no, apparently you can figure it out over the course of one long 6 hour sleepless night. What makes less sense is that Nic Cage's kid Caleb keeps being visited by "the blonde people who whisper" and apparently these people leave little black stones (the adults all think the stones are scary) It was here that I lost it because the blonde people are actually an alien race (of alien angels?) coming to abduct the children in their spaceship... uh Kay. These alien/angels allow the children to come with them but without their parents (in one scene they ATTACK the father with light and a shriek emitting out of their mouth...but they get to bring along little white rabbits instead? The girl that originally wrote down all these end of days numbers is Lucinda, and she's nuts. She stares off into the stars wondering WTF is going on (although the real movie hasn't started yet so what is she wondering about???) later on in the movie, Nic Cage's son Caleb also begins to write down numbers in the EXACT same nutty psychotic manner that Lucinda did (now remember when she did it in the 1950's, it was important and drove the plot forward) when Caleb does the exact same thing, the father realizes that Lucinda's final longitude/Latitude numbers were written on the back of a gym door back in the '50's and completely ignores all the numbers that Caleb was writing... uh Kay. (oh OK so the world is about to end and they are panicking left and right but still...) in the end the world is destroyed by a sun flare but not before the blonde whispering people forcefully kidnap the two children and herd them into their spaceship to "reseed" another greener peaceful planet, anyway... the earth burned up good and Nic Cage burns with it... why even give him the numbers at all if there's nothing he can do to stop it from happening? Apparently the whole point was for Nic Cage to deliver his child to the aliens to be whisked away to a far off planet with a tree (is this the Biblical Garden of Eden?)and rabbits, while he burns to a flaming crisp with EE (EE =Everyone Else according to Lucinda).
Some people in our theater started to clap.. until they realized nobody else was clapping.. the boy's father and the girl's mother were both dead along with the entire planet Earth and the children were abducted by space aliens to reseed another alien planet...with bunnies.
The End.
Sunshine (2007)
a brief summary of Danny Boyle's Sunshine
this review contains spoilers....read with caution:
Danny Boyle's Sunshine while it was fun, I found that it contained many of the same clichés found in other space/water disaster epics such as Armageddon, Leviathan, Mission to Mars, Red Planet, Deep Star Six, Deep Impact, The Core, Abyss and mainly Event Horizon...its all there, I mean when a spaceship's crew's ultimate goal is to drop off a big-ass bomb payload directly into the sun and/or get the heck out of dodge or die trying, (it is a suicide mission) you know things cant end well for anybody...
Like Event Horizon and some o' the other movies listed above, they also find a distress beacon from another ship ( the Icarus 1) sent 7 years earlier (its mission failed horrible, everybody died), and they also go towards the ship in the hopes of nabbing their bomb payload. how this is even possible is beyond me, since the bomb IS the umbrella portion of the spaceship.
The spaceships look like giant umbrellas which is great if you stay on a fixed path directly into the sun, you stay in the shade, but not so great if you decide to TURN the ship to the left or right, as evident, parts of the ships taller antenna towers get burned to a crisp making a return nearly impossible. As with all space disaster flicks, I'm still wondering how well educated crews that can pilot these ships and do all these really complex maneuvers manage to always seem to screw up the mission royally or go so totally crazy they royally screw up everybody ELSE'S mission and kill everybody else until the last unfortunate crew member is forced to put them down like a mad dog.
Flash Gordon (2007)
Flash Gordon Pilot ...huh?
Flash Gordon 90 minute Pilot: OK so the story so far is that when Flash is 10 years old, his father gets sucked into a vortex never to be seen or heard from again, the cover story is that Flash's father died in a fire but there was no body found.
Now, fifteen years later, Flash is 25 and there's a hint that his father didn't die in a fire, that he was "lost" in one of his experiments gone haywire.
through a series of events, Flash opens a portal to Mongo and jumps head first with Dale Arden to try to rescue his father from Ming the Merciless... OK.
Dale fights with Ming's daughter, who's fighting with a bounty hunter chick, who's fighting with Flash... OK.
Ming's daughter wants "the Imex" a secret thing that Flash's father had. OK.
"the Imex" is the Timex watch that Flashes father gave to him at age 10. It unlocks the secrets of Mongo or the universe... we're not quite sure.
1) why would Flash's father give Flash the Timex watch that contains all the secrets of the universe when he was 10? Apparently he's a pretty responsible youngster and has never lost anything...ever, because 15 years later Flash is STILL wearing the Timex watch that his father gave him... uh.. OK.
2) why would Ming send a flying probe though the portal? this seemed rather lame and pointless. It was quickly decimated by a local Mexican immigrant wielding a double barrel shotgun from his truck cab. I'm also fairly certain there are laws against weapons and firearms being hidden in cars and trucks... right? I'm also fairly certain that if **I** were Ming the Merciless, my Probe Scanning Flying things wouldn't be so easily decimated by some idiot wielding a double barrel shotgun. (see robot, later on) 3) why would Ming send a single robot through the portal to get the Imex instead of launching a full or semi-full scale invasion of Earth? 4) why is the robot carrying Flash's father's drivers Licence, which is discovered in the remains of the charred exploded robot? Why would Ming the Merciless intentionally do this at all? If Flash's father planted it there (and from the show's final scene, he didn't) how would he have known that Flash would be the one to discover it? 5) why are there only four eye witnesses in a packed crowded bowling alley that report seeing an alien robot blow stuff up? The bowling alley had people at every lane... yet only four eye-witnesses saw the robot? Why did the robot blow up a bowling ball? 6) Flash believes his father died in a fire, but he didn't, he was sucked through a portal to Mongo yet when we finally see a flashback of this "fire" it only occupies about 5% of their lab and is quickly extinguished with a fire extinguisher, its clearly not a big enough fire to cause major damage yet this is the cover story that Flash's father burned to a crisp and no body was ever found? what? 7) while Dale and Flash argue outside his fathers old lab, which is now Zarkov's Lab, the door suddenly explodes outward... why? Aside from these gaps in logic, and more, it was interesting to watch and even more interesting to pick apart the show.
The portal and the device that opens the portal reminded me an Awful LOT of the FOX show Sliders
Lords of the Deep (1989)
horrible... absolutely abysmal
This soggy underwater "epic" just doesn't fall flat, it reaches new lows of horror movie depths and keeps submerging itself into its own murky abyss. Originally, it was made to compete with DeepStar Six and Leviathan, and even those movies were quickly forgotten after James Cameron's The Abyss. But ouch... this movie is REALLY REALLY bad.
This movie has ZERO redeeming qualities. Just a wet mess with some actors nobody cares about, a rubber suit that substitutes for a monster and FX so bad, they were outlawed in the 70s. The acting is atrocious, the directing is a joke, the editing is a mess. Actually this movie looks a lot like something from the 1950-60's rather than updated FX from 1989. It is indeed deserving of the classic "Direct-to-video" moniker that describes many sci/fi movies as flat Velveeta cheese.
Wrong Turn (2003)
IT JUST PLAIN SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!
yes folks, I, McKracken, took one for the team tonight... I went and experienced Wrong Turn.
Let me tell you a few things about our experience FIRST: the start of the movie was 8pm... by 8:35pm I was checking my watch to see how long we had to go... again at 8:45 and again at 9:00pm then the credits rolled at exactly 9:15pm and we immediately left...we couldnt WAIT to leave... this movie was...STUPID. My co-worker was so bored by this movie that he went so far as to look up the review of this DURING the movie... what we got wasnt a review though, it was a plot synopsis, so during the movie... I'm reading the plot synopsis and I'm keeping up with the movie... I'm like "ok we just saw that happen... ok we witnessed that... oh we havent seen that... oh wait we just saw it." (I was having Spaceballs flashbacks!!!!!!) after I got bored reading the plot synopsis, my bud looked for reviews on the Hulk... I am not kidding... it was THAT lame. A few years back, there was a horror movie called Scream. After that movie, all those unwritten horror movie rules were written...they were common knowledge, ok? Wrong Turn uses EVERY SINGLE BAD HORROR MOVIE cliché and uses EVERY SINGLE HORROR MOVIE RULE known to man, it doesnt try inventing new ones... it literally recycles ALL of the stereotypical clichés in order, starting with devide and conquer! Separate and kill. My Co-worker looks at me within the first half hour of the movie and says "this isnt going to be a rip-off of Home is it?" (being an avid X-Files guy, I knew exactly what Home was... its one of the better episodes about a family of inbreeding freaks) Home survived based on David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson as the stars...you CARE about them. Wrong Turn survives on Eliza Dusku (Buffy's Faith) and thats it...I dont care about ANYBODY in this flick.. I never did... so entertain me AT LEASE with some creative death scenes ok? (except for the Sheriff's death, they really didnt) Show me some GORE...attempt to gross me out.. AT THE VERY LEASE SHOW ME SOME WET T-SHIRTS!!!!! (they never did that either!) at least when this movie came out 20 years ago (when it was titled Friday the Thirteenth) they showed nudity. When it was called Texas Chainsaw Massacre at least Leatherface had a chainsaw... he had a PERSONALITY, he was... well... fun to watch on screen killing teens with a chainsaw... The inbreeding freaks in Wrong Turn never pick up a chainsaw, one has a shotgun, one a bow and arrow, one just giggles like a wild hyena and chases the people around with an axe. The people (who are supposed to be SMART, one is a med student) well one always decides he'll place himself in harms way and be bait to lure the freaks away while the others escape... ok, if thats the plan, then DECIDE thats the plan.. dont go running off into the frigging woods with two lit flares drawing attention to yourself, make yourself a target and the group he's trying to SAVE does ...NOTHING!!! they sit there hiding in the bushes and watch this guy draw the attention off them and when he gets shot... then they run!!! (good plan) the inbreeding freak with the bow and arrow apparantly couldnt shoot the broad side of a barn EVER... (cept when he 86's the Sheriff!) The freak with the axe does connect... but lets face it... if you're making a horror movie like this... lets have the body count around 12-15 people...at least thats entertaining!!! Here we have (at the start) 6 bodies.. err...people, then within 15-20 minutes we lose two bodies so we're left with 4 bodies (kills) over 60 minutes, tragic that I was keeping track of this durring the movie.
The only Wrong Turn we made was turning into the theater... at least I only paid $3.50 to see it. It was horrible, predictable, stupid, old, packed with one cliché after another and utterly lame...its a good tequila movie but not much more than that!!! NO STARS!!! rated worst horror movie of 2003.. possibly of the new millenium. -McK