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Risto_H
Reviews
Gourmet Club (2004)
Original finnish comedy with some foreign backup!
This came out on finnish TV channel last night, but unfortunately I saw only last half of this and missed the first 20-30 mins... Well, maybe I'll have another chance to watch this. The part I saw was surprisingly good in many ways. The reason for the film-like visual look was simply because that this really was shot on S16 film, which was beautiful to watch.
The story was very original and absurd. It was an odd experience to see Michael Badalucco in a finnish film. He was great as a foreign chef, but the finnish cast had nothing to shame of. The cinematography of Mika Orasmaa was amazingly good. The filming locations, lightning set ups and editing style had nothing to complain about. You can see that the writers of this film must had spent many hours of intense brainwork on script and dialogue. The scenes were planned very well.
Simply I just liked everything I saw and heard and just hope there's going to be more finnish productions like this. Compared to the usual crap that is produced in Finland these days this is one of the refreshing exceptions. This is the right direction where finnish movies should evolve from now on.
Donnie Darko (2001)
Reminds me of Harvey
This is a great film in many ways, it really makes you think and awakes many feelings inside. I don't know if someone had noticed and mentioned this before (there was over 1000 comments made so I didn't read ALL of them!), but Frank the rabbit reminded me immediately of the film "Harvey" (1950) starring James Stewart. The rabbit must be some kind of a tribute to that film. In Harvey the rabbit was invisible for others than the person Stewart was acting. In Harvey the rabbit was never shown, but it was told to be 6-foot tall human-like creature, just like in Donnie D. The name of the rabbit (Frank) has a weird link to James Stewart too, because Frank Capra directed maybe the most well known Stewart-film ever, "It's A Wonderful World".
Donnie Darko is an original, intelligent and beautiful masterpiece compared to many other modern films. The actors were awesome, shooting was artistic and creative, the script was very good and original... We even got to see clips from Evil Dead, which is another great movie. I highly recommend this film! 10 out of 10.
Zärtliche Chaoten (1987)
German sense of humor...
I got interested of this cheaply-done trash-spectacle just because of Michael Winslow. I expected to hear he making those crazy noises, just like in Police Academy films. Unfortunately there was just a couple of his scenes to make me laugh. The rest of the cast was unknown for me. The script is so bad and stupid that it seems to be put together very fast while drinking German "bier" in local pub. I think this film is supposed to watch while drinking beer, too... Many scenes were very awkward and obvious or tried too much to be funny. The scene where Winslow is trying to clean a hotel room and ends up just demolishing everything in the room... well - it is NOT funny. Just stupid. Overall, you can easily watch this film through if you have nothing else to do, but you will not watch it again.
Sudden Death (1977)
Great hard-boiled action in 70's style!
I found this film on VHS tape yesterday from a flea market. I had never heard of this before. I watched it today and liked it very much! The film is located in the Philippines, which I found very interesting. Usually these kind of movies take place in the east coast (New York) or west coast (San Francisco or Los Angeles) in the USA. This film is a rare exception of this.
The movie begins with some gangsters killing a family, a scene which reminds me of similar scene in Once Upon A Time In The West. The father of the family survives. After a while two long-time friends got to fight against the bad guys in many ways and several different places. The story is very confusing, mainly because the characters got very little introducing. But that's not so important in action movies...
The fighting and shooting scenes are very cool with a lot of shot-gun action and slow-motion camera. The actors are good, the dialogue is wonderfully explicit, editing works fine and the scenes are set up almost perfectly. I really enjoyed this and recommend it to anyone interested of good old action, instead of wire tricks and computer effects in modern actionfilms. The music made a great atmosphere with all those wah-wah guitar and minimoog sounds.
Endgame - Bronx lotta finale (1983)
confusing post-apocalyptic italo-spectacle!
This was not as bad I expected...
The first half of this film is very boring and it is suitable to use the fast forwarding on your remote, because the last half is so much better. You can see easily that the budget for this film has been very low, but the action scenes actually work rather well. The post-WW3 vehicles are creatively constructed from existing cars and motorbikes. The car with no doors is my favorite. I wonder where they get all the gas and spare parts for those things in a destroyed world?
The acting isn't so bad. The telepath girl looks good and carries her role very well. The only scene of her I laughed out loud was that where a telepath makes a big stone floating up. You can easily spot the wire holding the styrofoam-stone in the air, it's just so goofy.
I gave this 5/10.
S.A.S. à San Salvador (1982)
Slow action, bad acting, lots of tits shown!
Well, I found this (f)artwork on VHS for 50 cents... Even that's too much for this piece of crap. It has the same kind of stupid plot and acting as you might see in some porn films between the sex acts, but this film has not even soft-core sex acts, just the bad plot and actors. The so called "hero", a stereotypical slick-looking agent guy meets many, many girls on his way. Every time we see a new chick, you can be sure she's gonna show at least her boobs after a while... There are also "car chases" in this spectacular feature film, but where's the speed? You could easily pass those cars driving a bike. The scene where our hero is going to make a "surprise" attack to the bad guy's house, is totally ridiculous with the agent walking very, very slowly towards the house and don't even try to be hiding himself anywhere...
1/10 - and that 1 is for the tits!
Zoning (1986)
Amazingly bad film, 1 of 10 points from me
I borrowed this tape from a friend of mine. He said this is an awful film and well, he was right... Only reason I was interested of this piece of crap was the music, it was made by Tangerine Dream. The music was a disappointment, it sounded like there was just one or two tunes (not even close to the best Tangerine Dream) repeated on and on and on... The acting was bad, filming was bad, editing was bad and the dialog was dubbed from German to English, which just added a one more bad thing. I just couldn't watch this without fast forwarding half of it.
Best laughs I got from the ultimately bad action-scene where the bad guys were running away from the good guys on a narrow corridor and everything in that scene was so cheesy... The acting was just ridiculous, the filming and editing were bad and the whole scene just didn't work - not at all. And of course, this is one of those films where EVERY sound of footstep were added afterwards... So the walking and running are always a funny concert of multiple TAP-TAP-TIPPETY-TAP footsteps. Every shoe HAD to have a tap-sound. You can hear the same effect in 70's kungfu-flicks too.
So... I don't have anything good to say about this. I tried but... no. =)
Agentti 000 ja kuoleman kurvit (1983)
Get your DVD now!
I saw this film on TV many years ago. Many years later I was checking out the video store for anything to buy and realized the fact that this classic is now available on DVD! So, I bought it, watched it and enjoyed it. This movie includes all typical elements of James Bond-films. Stupid plot, evil villain, carchases, helicopters, beautiful women. Everything is made on a very low budget, and it looks very cheap, but it doesn't really matter. I think the effort to make an action-parody like this in Finland is something that I have to respect. Unfortunately there's no english subtitles on the DVD release.