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andrew-757
Reviews
Judd Apatow: The Return (2017)
Not that funny
It was fairly bland (though he kept a good rhythm) until he made it into a big Trump/political statement thing about halfway through it. Then it was actively bad.
Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010)
Loved it
Had the pleasure of watching this in the private screening at San Diego ComiCon 2010... just awesome, perfect. Exactly what Part 2 should have been. Obviously there is decidedly a lot more Corey Feldman content... but I don't think people are prepared for how much heart this movie has. There are several flashbacks that feature Corey Haim that are really heartbreaking in light of what you and I know in reality.
A little undecided about the ending, and what "future direction" that portends, but things are suitably bookended thus far for the existing trilogy.
Good times.
AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem (2007)
Far from perfect, but much better than AVP
I guess I could best sum things up with: It's far from perfect, but it's noticeably better than AVP and has a hundred times the balls.
It's not like any Alien or Predator movie before it, or even bares much more of a similarity to AVP other than the obvious... ensemble hodgepodge group of humans becoming tangled in an Aliens and Predators plot. Except it's nothing like it. You try to stack this against Ridley's Alien or Cameron's Aliens or even McTiernan's Predator, it's not quite comparing apples to apples -- not because those are better films (but they are, obviously), but because they're telling entirely different kinds of stories from an entirely different perspective. So don't expect to find any kind of "inner message" in the movie beyond some kind of vague "man destroys man" thing.
It's like several characters' stories eventually intertwining together, and then there's the Predator (yes, just one, but they get just as much mileage out of him as all the Predators combined in the last AVP) sort of doing his own thing out there, his path occasionally intersecting with the humans. The violence and death often comes sudden, brutally, and without warning... I like it.
Plenty of homage-type stuff, not that it ever really becomes too distracting and not that I necessarily give the movie extra points for including them. One sequence bares more than a little similarity to the APC rescue scene from Aliens (you'll know it when you see it). Other little odds and ends here and there, and if you're looking you'll see the Aliens doing things from all 4 Aliens movies (swimming, scampering over ceilings, blood-spitting, tail-impaling, etc. etc.). The Predator, too, and more (the directors call him a "cleaner" in a recent interview with good reason... though when you see him doing it in the movie, you're kind of left seeing the futility of it when there's all these dozens and dozens of Aliens propagating all over the forest/town/sewers). Lots of musical cues you'll pick up on, often at familiar sort of times.
Gore? Plenty. Chestbusters burst and you see it, even with ribs cracking open and out. One scene is particularly disturbing... perhaps more disturbing than anything else in the previous movies. It has to do with a hospital and the PredAlien's unique reproductive cycle...
Oh, and remember we met Weyland in the last one? Well... guess who we meet in this one.
The bad: It does seem that it noticeably has a lower budget. Often times you'll only see an Alien from the neck up, or knees down, and only extremely close up. And it looks like the Aliens' secondary jaw is mostly all CGI here, and when it's being used -- repeatedly -- into a skull, it doesn't look very convincing at all. Also the fighting itself with the Predator... it seems like they took a page from "Batman Begins" and shoot all the action very close-up, quick/smash cut... unfortunately, when the only source of illumination is dim blue light off-camera and things are moving extremely fast, you can't see what the **** is going on at times. Sometimes all I could see is like a flurry of dreadlocks... and I couldn't always even tell if it was the Predalien's or the Predator's, to say the least. Also, and I'm sad to say some of my biggest fears were true: the previews? The clips and spots we've seen so far on the internet? Yeah, they pretty much do show the best, most SFX-pleasing sequences in the movie, and also do give away a very, very large aspect of the ending (*cough*ROTLD*cough*). And also I'm not sure why they even bothered to give the Aliens the ridged heads when I'm not even sure there's a single sequence in the entire movie where you can say with any certainty that you see them.
I don't want to, but I can't help but look at AVP 1 for the following observation. Worthless Sh*t Anderson filmed a sissified movie a couple of years ago, but one thing I can't fault him for is the way he did succeed in keeping the audience's eye on the ball. A Cameronian approach of, "Let's keep the ball moving, fast, fast, one thing to the next, boom boom" and even if there's plot holes the audience isn't apt to notice or care because they get swept up in the momentum of the movie.
Here, in AVP2, it starts off a little slow and a little awkwardly, and you don't really get a good sense of the movie really coming together until about 30-40 minutes into it... but by that point it's all mostly good times and you probably won't dwell too much on those first 30-40 minutes. But yeah... no nonsense bullet-time facehuggers or any MTV rubbish that I can speak of.
My ranking of the films now:
Aliens Alien Predator AVP:R Predator 2 Alien: Resurrection AVP Alien 3
Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000)
Not bad, but far from greatness
Some things...
1) Dracula's first wife (whose name has never been historically documented other than known to be a Transylvanian noblewoman) committed suicide in 1462, not 1464, when Dracula was already imprisoned by the King of Hungary anyway. Not sure why the film changed this, really.
2) The impalings... aren't accurate. The oiled stake is put in the buttocks and slowly moves out through the mouth. This takes days, the impalee dying a slow death. We don't see any actual impalings during the movie save one, and the guy slides down the stake like it's a flag pole.
3) While not necessarily portrayed as a nice guy, I was expecting a bit more brutality. Much of Vlad Tepes' acts are brushed aside in the framing story of Dracula being interrogated by the priests in 1476 as "stories" by Dracula himself and this just seems like a kind of cop-out. I realize we don't need to see Dracula cutting the breasts off of women and such, but there was PLENTY of more hard-hitting material that could have been put in there. Example: instead of Dracula just closing the doors and executing the boyars like he does in the film, wouldn't it be far more effective cinematically to follow what *really* happened and show Dracula and his men dragging the boyars to go and build (by themselves) Castle Dracula, which took years and basically worked the lot of them to death? Also would have been effective to show the scene of Dracula rounding up all the homeless and beggars into the grand hall, then having his men burn it to the ground. The only real story of Dracula that was included was the one with the golden goblet that wasn't touched by anyone... that's about it.
4) I realize it was done for dramatic purposes, but the film kept sticking Dracula's broth Radu in places/times he simply wasn't. Dracula was killed in 1476 by a man (a Turk) disguised as one of his own guards... in a MARSH somewhat near Snagov, not inside Snagov Chapel.
5) The ending is neither here or there... I'd rather they didn't go that route, but then the end of Vlad's life is a bit anti-climactic.
The 13th Warrior (1999)
Had potential to be great
This film had the potential to be great. Seemingly a budgetary issue, none of the sets or visuals were really breathtaking... and in a movie like this in an age before CGI really took off that could have gone a long way. I mean, it literally looks like some guys just went out in some random forest in Canada or something and started shooting, and the buildings and structures... well... we don't even get to see them really.
It also suffers from a weak first act... it seems hard to follow, dialogue very disjointed from scene to scene.
Lastly, I love his work, but Antonio Banderas is distractingly miscast as an Arab. It just doesn't work... the look or the voice, sorry.
Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes (1989)
Could have been much worse, folks
From everything I'd read here and elsewhere, I'd expected Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes to be a horrid, made-for-TV movie that looked like it. I found a copy on the internet and indulged it.
Hey, not bad.
The sheer horror of The Possession and the slick suspense of 3-D isn't really there... I guess it's more like the first movie, but in a different house. You see, the Amityville house is now vacant (presumably after the people from the first movie left it with something of an urgency) and everything in it goes up for a yard sale. A lamp gets sold to an old lady who then sends it to her sister (I think) in California. Wouldn't you know, this lamp has the DEVIL inside.
Sounds like a tacky plot device to teleport the Amityville evil to another house, but it actually kind of works. Not on the scale of the first one (OK, what's scarier - a house built on Satanic witch ground with dead bodies buried there of Satanists that's perpetually haunted, or just a normal house with an EVIL lamp?), but not too far from it. You'd have to see it to understand. As far as effects, they're there. The flies from the first movie are back, flies flies everywhere (even the black tar too). Also scary demon imagery here and there, neat lighting effects, etc.. It holds up well.
Strange, though, that the movie is packaged sternly as "Amityville 4," yet totally disregards the ending of Amityville 3-D, where the Amityville house was completely destroyed and burnt to cinders. In the beginning of Amityville 4, a gang of priests do gangbusters in the house, which is mysteriously still standing. Though ... if you look at Amityville 3-D's credits on the DVD from MGM, it says "THIS MOVIE IS NOT A SEQUEL TO THE AMITYVILLE HORROR OR AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION"... but yet Amityville: The Evil Escapes gets a "4"? What was 3 then, if not 3-D? Ah well, things to muse...
Note: This entry also began the tradition in the series of different items from the Amityville house being brought to other houses to haunt them. i.e., the clock in Amityville 1992, the doll house in Amityville: doll house, etc.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
Absolutely horrible
I didn't care much for the original Resident Evil movie, yet it did manage to work here and there as a trendy horror movie enough that it earned a spot on my DVD shelf. This one, as I feared, is all style, no substance, very much like AVP, Walking Tall, and all of these new generation actioners with slick-looking trailers but no teeth.
Basically, it's 90 some minutes of a few people strutting around striking cool poses, always trying to look cool in blurry action sequences that defy physics. That may sound good to action fans, but believe me, the whole movie is a hollow experience. There's no character development, nothing to make any of us care about any one of the cast of characters within it. As in the first movie, the universe apparently revolves around Paul W.S. Anderson's wife, Milla "ALICE" Jovovich, who now has mutant abilities.
The zombies in this movie, which is why a lot of people like me would come to see a movie like this for, are perhaps the greatest crime in this film. If they could have just gotten the zombies right, I could forgive a lot of the quick-cut garbage. The very few sequences zombies are seen, *you can't even see them!* I have no idea what they were doing, but it seems whenever a zombie(s) is on-screen, the camera begins shaking terribly and the screen gets blurry and in slow-mo, then begins showing you a hard-to-see montage of zombies (again blurry cam employed), so you can literally see nothing but vague outlines of the zombies marching around. And I may not be 100% up on my Resident Evil game lore (I've beaten Zero and 1 for Gamecube), but most zombies I'm aware of in film don't die when you break their neck. But egads, if you're making a zombie movie, just make a zombie movie. It's like the director or cinematographer Also, like Resident Evil before it (and this may be a budgetary issue), it seemed like the people making the movie forgot they were making an R-rated movie. Violence is MTV quick-cut to the point where you can't tell what's going on in any scene with anything other than two people talking to each other, and the gore is minimal. There's a couple of scenes with nudity... admittedly, quite good nudity, but they seem to serve the only reminder to the audience that they're watching an R movie.
Watching the movie and dabbling in the Resident Evil games, RE:A seems more video game-like than the damn video game series, which at least were imbued with a healthy dosage of effective Japanese horror ala Parasite Eve, Ringu, etc..
One thing... RE:A does make a zombie fan very appreciative that George Romero is finally able to do his 4th zombie movie, Land of the Dead, and that should be out in June.