Reviews

Boring/10.

Lifeless action without much action. There's a fall, a car flip and some interaction between the stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, there's no spark or chemistry there and it's padded out with jokes that seem to be aimed at tweens.

Hollywood's dying - and maybe that's the joke here, but it's not a very good joke and the timing's off. Whoever wrote this deserves a day out at Microsoft/chatGPT/whatever. I've always been mystified by Gosling's "lead man" status, he did United States of Leland and Half Nelson which were both pretty good, but I've found him wooden and uninteresting in pretty much everything else since and that lack of interest gets further cemented here. Still, enjoy the money Ryan, it's looking to be a future of straight to video on demand... Speaking of which, this film may well have been better used on Tubi and may at least have come with a director that has a sense of humour.

Yeah, 20 minutes, not worth the time investment to finish, if you're watching this on Netflix, there's almost certainly something better on Amazon or vice/versa.

Glaser demonstrates her cutting edge comedy by doing material from ~20 years ago.

Speaks like she's done meth, would rather listen to her after she'd done 50+ xanax and a few bottles of wine to wash them down - because she's the "cool aunt", you know - the one you avoid.

I'd be super interested to know the production details of this special, credit to the technician dubbing in laughter and cgi-ing the backs of audience heads. I suppose it's cheaper if you hire a theatre just for the day time. On the subject of economics, save yourself some time. Don't bother, you only have laughter to gain. Oh, she talks about her genitalia as well.

...with horrible camera work.

If you wereone of the Directors' parents, you'd probably be reallly proud of them. If you've sat through this, you will probably actively choose not to watch their next film.

There's no suspense, barely more of a plot than "there's monsters" and not even Cage is likable in this. Fortunately for Cage, he gets to spend most of the film pretending to be unconscious whilst a few tweens don't really do much.

The monsters are bad, they look like Jim Henson puppets that have been dragged through a muddy ditch, not at all scary, but kinda dirty, but weirdly have some kinda Power Rangers ability to combine into a, meh who cares?

The camera work is truly awful, it's like they've tried to go for a docu-drama feel, but it just looks amateurish and it's jarring.

Don't waste your time.

...of ~fresh air. At least amongst the seemingly neverending slew of Blumhouse products this is one of a few standouts in the horror genre of late.

Here we get an almost docu-drama - the setup is well detailed, if you've made it here, you already know what that is.

To its strength, this isn't an out and out horror, there's elements and scenes with gore, but they're underplayed - in this context, I think that makes the film stronger, it's more a personal story of the characters and conflicts in the film and they're easily relatable.

I always enjoy Fessenden on screen, he's certainly on a good upwards curve behind the camera and I'll be keen to see the next project.

Blackout's a "comfy" film, I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it more when I watch it again. Solid 6-7/10.

That's why I watched this, expecting some stupid laughs.

Nah.

It just grates, it's potty humour for tweens that struggle with Family Guy or South Park because they're too wordy.

The humour works better with the characters in suits - you can't see their faces and the animations of a question marks, exclamation points etcetera are more comedic. When you've got an actual "actor" attempting to emote something you can see where the budget for this was... I can take a couple of days off work to pretend to be an actor - which is the biggest shame of the film that it's close to being good, but really let down by the human-visual element. Largely the mix of animation and reality is the most impressive element.

Hypothetically if there was a mid-upper tier physical comedian as the main role, this could have been excellent, I'm not a Carrey fan, but that sort of physicality would have worked wonders, especially versus local-theatre/amateur dramatics guy.

I'd probably watch the next film from the director, hopefully there'll be a budget for cast.

Lily Rabe is excellent, more than capable of holding her own as a lead and nice understated comedic performance. She's not the problem with the film.

It definitely feels like the Directors first attempt at a feature, there's a fair amount of moments in here where you think "that could have been better". The semi-realist, wandering lens moments are particularly clumsily done and feel anachronistic - certainly could have been done in that style, it just seems as if the director had a "that'll do" attitude and a checklist of cultural beats to hit.

Which leads me to the soundtrack, trust-fund bands doing covers of songs that would be pertinent to the film if the originals were used, but they were - so you just get the sacharine "new" version with the rough edges sanded to a cookie-cutter banality. Particularly egregious was the opening track, the worst cover of "Pump it up" ever - not a great intro and put me in the mindset of instant dislike.

Again, Lily Rabe does all the heavy lifting here, this could have been an 8/10 film if the director did it again.

It feels like it was written by a child, so that's kind of an apt description.

The action's alright - this is being promoted as an action film. Dev Patel as a fighter? That's where my suspension of disbelief went out the window - although that was also hindered by watching Dev's promo appearances and he's definitely not coming across as an action hero in those.

The story is an overly simplistic tale of goodies versus baddies, with any luck the script writer will move on to joined up writing in the next few years and step up to do a Fast and Furious movie. A weird representation of India showing "ultra rich" areas and seemingly pretending to show "poor" areas - now, if you've been to India you'll know this is an ultra-sanitised version of what you'd actually see - the only element of truth I saw in that was that everyone seems to chain smoke. Streets like open running sewers? Can't show that. Sexual assault as if it were an Olympic competition? Can't show that either.

Dishonest film making.

I'll watch a film with people of different ethnicities to mine, that's no big deal, it doesn't trigger me.

Boredom triggers me.

The ~bearable points - Common, Jennifer Hudson, Milla Jojovovich and Sam Worthington too... that's it, 4 BEARABLE points in amongst a stagnant pool of turds.

"Writer" Doug Simon is the person that needs singling out for specific criticism - in between eating the crayons they "wrote" this with Simon did a picture of a flower and his mummy told him it was "bad". In an angry reaction to this they did this egregious piece of hatred towards cinema.

The writers strike was partially poor writers taking action to highlight just what worthless entitled filth they are, powerless in the face of EVIL A. I. Nurses and Doctors worldwide shrugged in solidarity.

Thing is, I'm pretty sure A. I. was used in the making of this, some of the exterior shots (every single one that doesn't have an actor in) seem to just be A. I. art + an intern doing the Pan+Zoom edit.

Anyway, Simon might have heard of science, but didn't bother with an research beyond "having heard of science", nor any into writing, script writing and clearly has no discerning palette as they ate all the crayons regardless of flavour.

Like almost all of us at this point I've played round with A. I. and give me parity of paycheck and timeframe, I'll cook up a film better and less stupid than this using A. I. or not, I saw a film a couple of months ago that was written and directed by a guy with Down's Syndrome that was markedly better than this, "The Puppet Asylum" - more entertaining, competent, poignant and just all round better.

Literally, the only thing that would have made this film anywhere near enjoyable would have been Alec Baldwin Directing and a "production mishap" - preferably in the writers' room, which for this was probably the writers' bedroom at their parents house and Dad needs to have a word because you need to get a proper job and start paying rent.

I for one welcome the future unemployment of "writers" and our new A. I. overlords. Hollywood's burning, each new "blockbuster" seems to stall and audience's just don't care. Good.

Only a little bit though.

Freya Allen's not bad, but doesn't have much to work with - saying that, she's not "good" either. Peter Mullen - hope he enjoys the money. Jeremy Irvine's been in a fair few films, he should consider going into a career in fast food service. I was going to say "acting" but, that's clearly beyond him.

The most horrific thing about this is the CGI, which is frankly terrible and looks to have been given over to a Primary School kid with access to stable diffusion A. I.

No tension, I think there were supposed to be some "jump scares" in as much as hearing fireworks going off a town over then remembering it's November the 5th is scary.

Can I have my money back please?

The mind-numbing vapidity or the main character lead me to ponder whether or not this was some attempt at a pitch black satire.

It doesn't seem that was the case.

Povitsky sleep-walks through this like someone that's been awake for 3 days on a mollly bender and is in the final hours where she's chugged half a bottle of Ambien and is slowly drifiting off. A vapid anti-comedy, you can spot where the jokes are meant to be, they're just not funny, it's like watching a feature length, 20-something version of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Sadly the film doesn't end with a half hour of the main character being attacked with a screwdriver, so I didn't laugh at all.

Finally, a film, cast, Director and studio ready to nail the coffin shut on the superhero-cash-cow "genre" and they tackle the challenge with gusto.

There was possibly a director, although you might not know it if you've watched the film and could easily just assume this was al AI-algorithm, apparently that directors done other film that I would try to avoid, but I can't remember their name.

There's nepo-baby Johnson and absolute personality vacuum - but she's perfected her acting chops since 50 Shades... so, completely wooden and forgettable. Token black girl and token latin girl and Sidney Sweeney - she's the eye-candy, sadly not an actress too though, she'd probably be a great promo-girl for an owl-sounding food chain, but she's out of her depth in everything I've seen her in.

CGI which... should have been better even if it came out a decade ago.

There's a villain - Ezekiel, at least poignant timing for the etymology of that name and that's it really.

There's some explosions and other loud noises, but whilst being the best thing about this stinker, they're also "retro"/would have been "ok" a decade ago.

I for one welcome our new AI overlords, at least it can't make films worse than this.

Not often a fan of musical productions but, I am a horror fan so gave this a punt.

It's certainly done a disservice by the "storyline" on here, but then again, it's also done a disservice by the musical element, the songs are really poor and make it feel like a local amateur theatre group performance.

The cast are mostly alright Paul Kaye's the clear scene stealer, athough worth mentioning Adheel Akhtar as the narrator too. The rest of the cast are a bit hit and miss, but I found MyAnna Buring quite a let down and the most amateurish element of the whole thing.

Short and sweet, I watch the next thing the director puts out - IF it's not a musical.

I'd been quite looking forwards to this - although, if I'd bothered to look up the directors' previous work, I may have skipped it entirely and saved myself the runtime for some high-quality napping.

Instead I watched it and got some low-quality napping.

First the good - Ralph Inneson earned some money for this and hopefully he can maybe avoid doing the next bad film that comes up off the back of that.

Secondly, Tuppence - yes that's her real name is quite convincing in the role of a medicore pedophile.

That's it. Those are the two upsides to the tiresome Wicker Man knock off.

It's a somewhat dismal state of affairs to see the film industry self-destructing due to banality across the board, but these are the times we live in I suppose.

This film was shockingly enjoyable. In the past year, Hollywood's painted itself into the obsolete corner, this takes a confident step out.

What we have here is a diamond in the rough - it's a bit hyperbolic of me, but then I refer you to a lot of film released last year to dismal response.

We've got a moderately gory film in the vein of Evil Dead 2 or perhaps a lower-budget The Frighteners with a bit more blood.

We do get a film with some heart to it. William Brown is a neurotic, but nice enough guy failing through life, but trying to achieve some music success with his love of prog-rock. He goes through a series of mishaps and hijinks ensue - I'm not spoiling, but it's fun, the soundtrack's pretty on point, which is generally the biggest let-down in music-centric films. There's some really neat music industry related jokes - again no spoilers, it's a smarter film than it immediately seems - also eyes and ears open for the Phil Collins joke.

It also knows its genre, there's a lots of cool easter-egg nods to other films.

Oh, it's got one of the dudes from Super Troopers being fun - if you like Super Troopers, you'll dig this AND also Alex Winters of Bill and Ted's, the rest of the cast are solid and give solid perfomances and it looks like they probably had fun making it.

It's great late night tv a solid horror comedy and kinda feel good at the end, plus the music didn't make me angry.

It loses points for not having any King Crimson jokes.

It'.

Probably too hard. There's a lot of Lynch in here, but this goes way beyond a respectful nod to an influence and veers into often clumsy pastiche a lot of the visual presentation is like a checklist of Lynch films, although I didn't spot anything reminiscent of A Straight Story, there's ample representation of most everything else - at least done in a competent enough way that you can name that film, but without enough of its voice that it overrides the "borrowing".

The lead actor's weirdly miscast, I couldn't tell if he was meant to be in his 20s or 50s, it's like his features are too old for his face and ultimately there's not enough actual acting in the performance to carry it.

The soundtrack's probably the best feature, well - the music's probably the best feature, there's some nice jazz in there that gives things a creepy-sleaze vibe, but again, this gets into Lynch pastiche-territory and aside from the jazz there's a bland indie band or two? In there layering on the reverb for that dream-pop vibe that was current (maybe) when Chromatics were doing it. Again, soundtrack - sound design... the buzzing of neon, electrical humming - I wonder where else I've heard that before? Oh, right... It's a competent enough film. If the director gets to make another I'd give it a watch, but wouldn't rush to do so. Probably worth a view if it's part of your streaming/piracy package.

Damn, this is mind blowing.

Violating the human rights of the "sentinelese" by not introducing them to jesus?

Right, whilst the missionary's hawking product tie-ins on their social media - I'm sure that's what jesus had in mind when throwing the money lenders out the temple. In fact, I think that part of jesus' life was sponsored by Mountain Dew.

Nevermind the Human Right of the Sentinese to have hidden cameras placed on their island so the missionary could study them or potentially have illness/disease introduced to them that they have no immunity to.

I remember 9/11 and the New York lady that was circulated in the media "why do they hate us"?

It's up to you to decide, but personally I found no redeeming features in any of the social group of the missionary, who I could best desribe as well-intentioned, but ultimately dangerous proto-fascists "for christ".

I've had the misfortune of being around evangelicals - if you're not one of them "converting" you seems to be how they measure their own worth - not living as christ, but bullying, cajoling, threatening, bribing - all whilst failing to observe the beam in their own eyes.

Nothing of value was lost here other than the time the Sentinelese took to dispose of this "person" that they no doubt could have spent not being disturbed.

Well, this was certainly better than expected. It's low budget, but uses that effectively. Visually and script-wise that side of things is utilised very well, creating an interesting, enigmatic atmosphere that gives "the horror" some room to build and breathe.

If there's a weakness in here, it's the main lead - which isn't to say that he's "bad", but... for me, he just didn't have the right look. He's competent, but - frankly "too well fed", whereas I think a gaunt, more haggard looking lead would have served the film better.

I think the soundtrack whilst not "stand out" was again, used effectively, but perhaps from an "effects" pov could have leaned harder into the "weird".

It's probably worth keeping an eye out for the director, I'd be interested in seeing what they do next.

I agree with both of the other reviews of this, but would rate it higher, a decent 6 bordering on a 7/10.

What I did enjoy the most, after a slew of generic Blumhouse films that essentially amount to "the scary... phone/swimming pool/cupboard/basement/whatever". This at least felt believable and seemed to have care and attention put into it. Niamh Carolan played a nicely understated lead, underscored with some nice visual touches from John Barnard Directing.

It's cetainly better than expected, the metaphors felt natural and not trying to hammer a political point, so you could probably comfortably watch this as a Covid-conspiracist or from understanding the sociological impact of that event (and ongoing fallout).

Again, worth a watch and a nice contrast to a lot of the over-saturated horror fare of late.