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Reviews
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Top quality zombie gore-fest fun!
This film is bloody brilliant!!! A great British film and a perfect homage to Romero's work as well.
The 'Spaced' gang got everything dead-on right (excuse the pun). Let's start with the zombie film checklist shall we -
1) Is it gory? Oh yes! Fantastically so. The effects and make-up work is doubly phenomenal.
2) Is it scary? Yes it is. It's definitely comedy-horror in both meanings of the term. The tension builds more towards the end of the film. By this point you've invested in the main characters enough that there's a heavy amount of dread that we may lose any of them. And there are a number of well-earned 'jumps' along the way.
3) Does it have social commentary? Yep. The original 'Dawn' is still tops at this I feel, but 'Shaun' gets some nice satirical swipes in. These aimed at the 'zombification' of our society as a whole, and if the dead did start walking around a city like London you might not notice it immediately.
I think those are the key elements that a good zombie flick needs. And this film passes all of them with style. But then of course it also has the added bonus of being a total scream (in the ha-ha sense). It's really insanely funny. I haven't laughed at the piccies as much in a long long time. And it's not like you just remember a few main funny bits, which happens with some comedies. 'Shaun' is continuously funny all the way through. Be it with some ace visual gag, or the more smarter stuff. I'm sure I missed some of it's subtle material but I'll try to spot it when I go see it again next week.
I'm also going to try to spot more joke references to zombie films of the past, and other non-zombie ones, that are scattered throughout. Horror film aficionados are going to love playing this game. There are references all over the shop. Some of them are shops in fact.
The cast is cool bananas. Take various actors out of all the best recent Brit comedy shows, add in Bill Nighy, and this is what you end up with. It's unbeatable imho. Simon Pegg takes the lead exceptionally well, and yet still has the film stolen from him by Nick Frost as Shaun's best friend Ed. The character of Ed is such a loser, but the way Nick Frost plays him you just HAVE to love the bloke. Kate Ashfield, Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis all do great jobs too.
What else can I write about? The direction? Fantastic! The music? Fantastic! The ending? Oh lordy the ending is solid gold!
An absolute must-see.
The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
Start the Revolutions without me
When I saw Reloaded back in May I wasn't overly impressed with it, but I excused a lot of it's poorness by saying it'll be made better by the third installment. I naively thought that all the shoddy half-developed ideas in the second part would be settled in Revolutions. What kind of fool am I?
Revolutions has just the same problems as Reloaded. Ok there's not as much middling philosophy but there's still a lot of very awkward dialogue. I'm talking Star Wars prequel bad here. And there seems to be too much stuff going on that just doesn't fit in. The way I see it, they could have made one great Matrix sequel with all the good ideas that they had. Instead they spread these out over two films and padded them with obvious filler material.
I'll give you the best example of this I can without landing in heavy spoiler territory. Do you remember how Reloaded ended? The supposed cliffhanger. Where you see Bane, the guy 'possessed' by Agent Smith, lying on board the ship with Keanu and gang. Which wasn't really anything close to being a twist cliffhanger, since we'd seen him twice already in the film earlier, and he didn't seem very threatening then anyway. ('Right I'm going to kill Neo with this knife. Ah no he's turned around. I won't do it now.') Sorry I digress. I'm supposed to be writing about Revolutions. Right, so that plot-line is carried on a bit and I was stunned at how crap it's played out. Plus the unfortunate actor is forced into trying to be Hugo Weaving cool. I'll credit him for really trying. He can't manage it though.
But hey, at least it has good action scenes to counter-balance all this rubbish, right? Well.......... no. There's a shoot-out that's just like the lobby shootout from the first Matrix, only not as good. There's the bit that the trailers always showed, with the big robot thingys shooting the thousands of sentinels. Which from an effects viewpoint is very impressive. However this becomes numbingly repetitive and drags on far too long. Leaving just the fight between Neo and Smith as the only really good action bit. One out of three is not a very admirable score.
And to make matters worse they take everything WAY too seriously. You might argue that they're trying to make a serious story, but Lord of the Rings is a dark serious story and yet Peter Jackson understands that you need to have lightness now and again. It makes the darker scenes stand out more. Oh and I'm not even going to get started on all the Messiah overtones otherwise I'll be here all blinking day.
But hmm, after all of that, I have to add there is still *some* good stuff to see. The aforementioned Hugo Weaving. He doesn't have a large amount of screen time but that which he does have is quality. And Bruce Spence is nothing short of a shining star.
In the end though I'm tempted just to be content watching the original Matrix now and again, and blocking out the existence of both sequels from my mind forever.
Curse of the Talisman (2001)
The BEST film about gargoyles from Yorkshire I've ever seen!!!
Ok this film is bad. It's terrible if we're being honest.
But in it's favour I did watch it all the way through, which puts it above numerous others that I could mention.
You see, it has that 'so bad it's funny' quality than can be greatly entertaining if you're in that kind of mood. For example, when the monster first emerges from a statue, the lead character's initial response is to say 'Cool!' and then go and get his best friend to come and take a look. This is later explained away by them saying they thought it was a hibernating bat, because as we all know bats regularly hibernate inside statues. He soon realises that it wasn't a bat, after reading a book entitled 'The beginner's guide to what bats look like, and it's NOT that!'. Or something.
As for the monster, I was disappointed that there was just one for a start. The plot that I'd read said 'a town is over-run by demonic gargoyles', and this was a low-down lie. There are more eventually, but for the majority of the film it's just one of the critters flying about in search of the Talisman so that it can bring the others back to life. Suffice to say the monster looked rubbish. The kind that whenever there was a close-up of it it opens it's mouth wide and goes 'WRAAAK!!!' in an oh so scary fashion.
Trying to stop it are the Australian Scooby Doo gang. A few schoolkids who all used to be in Australian soap operas. Oh and a priest from 'Yorkshire, England'. Every time he told someone he was from 'Yorkshire, England' I burst out laughing. This would be the 'Yorkshire, England' that's just next to Australia I think.
Everything else that happens is of similar high quality. The trap that they set up to catch the creature, taken directly from an episode of Scooby Doo. The parent's Halloween costumes (Bill Gates and the Queen, no kidding). The bizarre funny climax.
It's all great. Or at least it would be if it weren't so very very poor.
The Apartment Complex (1999)
Kooky, off-kilter thriller
I came across this film by accident on tv tonight, and knew nothing at all about it beforehand. So my expectations of it were totally non-existent. Always a great state of mind to have when watching a film.
I enjoyed it a lot. It had a fair amount of groovy unexpectedness to it, and some smart moments of humour. Yes, it is a COMIC thriller (something which I was surprised to find missing on these hallowed pages). If you didn't see humour in this film then you just couldn't have been paying attention. Even the title is a psychology pun.
I don't know much of what Chad Lowe had done before this, but I thought he played a fine part. As did Amanda Plummer and R Lee Ermey (seemingly destined to play 'military guy' forever but he does it so well).
Tobe Hooper's direction was pretty smart for the most part. I did think the comparison between the people in the complex and rats in a maze was a bit overplayed. But that be a minor quibble.
Overall it's well worth watching.