Reviews

If you've ever seen a Hallmark or Netflix Christmas Rom Com, you already know the entire plot of the movie. Beat by beat, the plot of this tired Hallmark wannabe just goes through the motions. There is a beautiful female lead about to get married to somebody you don't like. But by the end of the movie she will wind up with the nicer guy who has "the true spirit of Christmas".

There will always be a market for this exact movie, so Netflix and Hallmark will keep churning them out. And you can tell the writers on this movie weren't interested in the assignment the algorithm gave them, because they put nothing new or interesting in the plot.

Every character is one-dimensional and trite. You will experience no challenges with the plot.

I have some good things to say: the movie was beautifully shot. The sets, costumes, and photography were all wonderful. The acting wasn't bad, but the actors were given so little to work with it doesn't really matter.

This movie was made in the last 1960s, but has all the hallmarks of the classic 1950s "alien invasion" horror movie. The aliens make bleeping noises. The men are all WAY too hansom. The women are hysterical and helpless.

This is such a time capsule, it really does belong in a different era. Most of it I think is quite fun for a time capsule: the aliens, the sci-fi mystery of it all. The hilariously abrupt ending. Great stuff. The gender politics is pretty awful, so that will be a bit distracting.

Still, this movie is a solid head above the rest for it's era.

This is so melodramatic and over the top it's hard to take seriously.

And this is about as historically accurate as the Lord of the Rings. I thought that wouldn't bother me; it's just fiction, after all. But they keep using real words (England, Rome, Saxon) and then completely missing the point.

I had real trouble sitting through the whole movie; how dull.

There is a scene where a raptor cries.

And the entire last hour of the movie serves no purpose but to set up possible future sequels.

The movie is a little fun, if you turn your vrain off. Then you will immediately forget it.

The original Hobbit book was a cute little 200-page kids story about being brave. It had songs and poems and talking bears.

The studio wanted another Lord of the Rings cash cow, so they produced this 3-movie, 7.5-hour monstrosity. They simply didn't have enough story for more than a single 2-hour movie.

The original Lord of the Rings was famous for it's use of New Zealand's scenery and real world artisan crafting for costumes. This movie just uses a ton of CG.

There are numerous, boring, terrible add-on scenes meant only to bloat the run time and try to make "Lord of the Rings 2: Now with More Dwarves".

This movie tries its hardest to avoid the true love cliche, it really does. But in the end, there it is. This movie was so close to being something fresh and original and great. But it was still just a little trite. Perhaps some studio exec got hold of it, I don't know.

It was still fun. I still liked the characters.

Insulting to people who like horror movies: This movie has two kinds of scary things happening: jump scares, and fake-out scares. It was intensely boring and predictable.

Insulting to people who commit suicide: Also, just to be clear, this forest is a real place in the real world. And it is where a lot of people go to commit suicide. This movie makes a joke out of all of those real people who killed themselves. At no point does it try to even pretend to give that real world material due respect.

No spoilers, but the *big twist* at the end is possibly the stupidest concept ever put to film.

From the actor choices, to the inane dialogue, to the complete lack of tonal consistency; every choice that could have been made on the part of the production team was just brainless.

The first Piranha movie was just been a stupid monster movie where Spring Breakers get eaten by giant piranhas. I mean, perhaps you're not into that sort of thing. Fine. But if you are, the first Piranha movie was made with a lot of care and attention and it was fun.

This sequel was just awful though. None of the original main cast came back for this movie and you can't help but think that's because they read the script. Where the first movie had a tense, claustrophobic scene of cave spelunkers stuck underwater trying to deal with their oxygen tanks in tight spaces, this movie has poop jokes.

The plot makes no sense. No one involved in creating this movie cared at all about the script or even, it seems, liked the first movie.

This movie fails hard to level up to the original. And, let's be clear, the original was a movie where some guy's junk gets eaten by a fish and the camera holds on that scene for an entire minute. It's not like... high brow or great cinema.

This movie isn't bad. I didn't walk out of the theaters. But this is movie four in the "Conjuring Cinematic Universe" and it is definitely the weakest entry.

The acting, cinemaphotography, and production value were all where you'd want them to be. It's just the titular monster doesn't do anything new that we haven't seen before. The whole opening act the writers just copy all the original scares from the first Conjuring movie.

The end result was just like watching a recap from the earlier movie. It was just too repetitive to be scary.

This was a really fresh and scary psychological horror movie. The threats are completely novel and everything that, say, the Conjuring movies with they had.

Just enough gore for *serious horror fans*, but it's really not enough the gore. It's about the terror. And it all works.

Was this as good as the original? No. But it wasn't far off. And considering how bland horror movie sequels get, this was surprisingly good.

What I really *got* from this movie was the sense that everyone making it had as much fun in this movie as they did in the first one. And that is a rare and wonderful thing.

The script of this movie reads like your typical throw-away B-movie, but the production value is absolutely top shelf. The end result is a reasonably fun movie, with good pacing, solid effects, good sets, and decent enough acting. But at no point does the movie stop being stupid. It's relentlessly stupid. But not slow or boring.

This movie seems to take itself seriously, but it prime fodder for a 'bad movie night' party.

The plot of this movie is more of an evolution than a sequel to the original. It is a re-telling. The budget is higher, for certain. The camera work, writing, directing, and acting are all a big step up. The plot is more involved and goes somewhere.

For years I thought the original was better. It was definitely scarier, and well, more original. But this sequel has a sense of humor. The first movie was only unintentionally funny. This one gets a laugh, and does it on purpose.

This is the movie where Ash becomes the wise-cracking, well-armed hero that he remains for later movies.

If you can imagine yourself enjoying a gore comedy, you will probably enjoy this slap stick slasher flick.

In the first Evil Dead movie, Ash was just an average guy. He was cocky and egotistical. He wasn't stupid. He wasn't brave. In fact, he was the Beta male to his friend Scott. Hell, throughout the opening of the movie, people are calling him "Ashley", not the much cooler "Ash" he gets in later movies.

A lot of what fans have come to expect from Bruce Campbell and Ash weren't in this movie. Bruce Campbell himself said on Reddit that the problem was that he couldn't act in this movie. But that's not the whole story. This movie didn't have campy humor or a strong hero. This movie was scary. You were thrown into the movie with no sense of humor, just dread.

The movie had a $50k budget, which was spent over a few years that the film was thrown together by two friends. Every expense was spared. But it has still had a lasting impact on the modern horror genre.

And, while I find most modern horror movies to be forgettable, I find myself coming back to Evil Dead every year around Halloween. It is scary and gory and unique in some way I find fun and endearing.

Who is the target audience? You might be tempted to think it is the bookish type who like Lovecraft's work of suspense and psychological horror. But this movie is not for geeks or readers. The main character says "bro" in nearly every sentence. There is no suspense, no thrills, and the only "nerds" in the movie are the butt of the jokes, not the heros.

The pacing. The movie is only 78 minutes long (thankfully) and about 50 minutes of that is introduction. By the time the premise has been set up, and the action starts, the movie is two-thirds over.

The humor. The humor seems aimed at the kinds of teenage boys who post homophobic comments on YouTube. The lame, unfunny "jokes" poke fun at rape and gay men, and that's about it.

There are no female characters. The only two women in this wonderful piece of cinema are sexy tramps who have one line each.

The lead actor. The two supporting characters are affable dorks who make bad jokes. Fine. But the main character has no charisma. At the start of the movie they present him as bland and boring. But the movie forgets to evolve him. Every second he was on the screen I found myself looking at my phone. Not a talented actor, either.

I was bored. The movie suffered from a complete lack of direction; in the terrible script and in the sluggish pace. It is too slow and boring for a Bad Movie Night, so don't even bother.

This movie is hilarious. I mean, not on purpose, but still hilarious. It was totally bank-rolled by some guy that owned a hockey stadium and wanted to break into Hollywood. So his wife whipped him up a standard action movie script, they hired a 90s action hero, and shot the entire movie in his hockey stadium.

The plot is paper thin and makes very little sense. The main hero is a simple fireman who appears to be a world-class martial artist. No explanation is given for his magical fighting powers. But the Vice President is in danger at the Stanley Cup and our hapless hero basically stumbles into the bad guys by accident.

Pick an action movie trope from the 1990s and it is in there.

At one point our hero fights a terrorist dressed in a giant penguin costume. And there isn't even a wink at the camera. It is deadly-serious mortal combat that get strangely dark and ends pretty gruesomely.

Do not be fooled. This movie was not supposed to be funny, it is 100% serious about itself. I laughed myself stupid, and I hope you will too.

This movie received some bad reviews because people were expecting a summer blockbuster and instead they got a quiet, character-driven piece of science fiction. Too often people think science fiction is all laser guns and space ship battles. But this is a story about people and what it means to be a human.

What Passengers succeeded in doing was building two thoroughly real and flawed people and creating the movies tension through their interactions.

To be fair to the critics, the ending of this movie was weak and uninspiring. Perhaps no one could see what made the first 90 minutes so original because the last 25 minutes were so drool.

This movie was boring.

The "good guys" are so invincible there is no tension in the action scenes. There are dozens of main characters, so none of them are motivated well enough that you would even care if they died. And the plot was gibberish, spewed out by the studio to beg a little more money from an aging audience.

This movie is clearly aimed at old, white American men with serious revenge fantasies and a desperate lust for their youth. But I have to hope they underestimated the target audience.

There are a lot of cameos from action movie heros from the 1980s and 1990s. They are all doughy and awkward on stage, trying to look like much younger men.

Julia Roberts is dangerously insane in this classic 90's rom-com. Replete with sassy gay friend and spontaneous group song numbers, you already know if you will like this movie.

At the start of the story you may be inclined to see the actions of the main character as humorous antics. But as the story wears on it will become apparent that her self-centered mania seriously hurts everyone around her. Prepare to be disappointed by the male lead, whose open-mouthed stares were the height of fashion at a time when Keanu Reeves ruled the big screen. The movie ends with the antagonist laughing and dancing. Maybe because she's so pretty, no one holds her responsible for all the pain she caused or even the felonies she committed.

I went into this movie expecting mindless action but was so bored I turned it off 10 minutes before the end.

The main character is Frankenstein's monster. The movie starts under the premise that you've already heard that story, so they gloss over the character's inner turmoil and hundreds of years of lonely life in like 60 seconds. That is all of the character development in the entire movie. Over and done with; one minute in.

The rest of the movie is non-stop action. But it's just boring. Every single time the main hero hits a demon it just explodes in a video game-like explosion of red fireworks. The end result is that every action scene is like 3 seconds long. You don't even have time to get excited about a fight, it's just suddenly over. And there is zero risk for the main character, who kills a hundred bad guys on screen during the movie. One bad guy, one hit, one explosion of CG fireworks.

I bet the original premise/plot/script for this movie had some cool ideas in it. You can kind of see that. But it ended up just terrible on the screen. A lot of the dialog is so awful that you feel bad for the actors. And the poor actors; so many famous names and faces. The production value of this movie was all right. But the writing and the directing were so bad I'm surprised the studio released the movie.

All I wanted was mindless violence with some cool monsters. I didn't even get that. Instead I got a case study in bad film making. I wouldn't even watch this movie again on a Bad Movie Night, it's too boring.

There are so many things trying to control you: religion, corporations, other people. Free yourself from them, understand that life has no meaning, and you'll be happy. At least, that's the Zero Theorem will have you believe.

The Plot: The movie revolves around a programmer, Q, whose quest for meaning has led him to a terribly mental unstable life style. He is wasting his life literally waiting for someone to call him on the phone and tell him the purpose of his life. But he's brilliant and useful to the people at work, so they take advantage of him. At the onset of the movie he is totally lost. As the movie progresses, he tries to find himself. But he has some awful emotional break downs on screen.

The Metaphors: Q's belief in this ultimate phone call is clearly a delusion, and everyone tells him that repeatedly. This "belief" is a stand-in for religion, as the movie keeps pointing out. Q even lives in a burned-out abbey. Throughout the movie, Q is being controlled and hurt by: his job, his beliefs, and even a prostitute that uses her sexual wiles against him. And he desperately wants his life to have meaning. The Zero Theorem is a sort-of mathematical proof that life has no meaning.

My Opinion: The movie is at times beautiful. The acting is good. The directing is, of course, amazing. But the movie is so heavily allegorical that the plot hardly seems to matter. And if you ignore the allegory, the movie doesn't even have an ending. You don't even know if Q is alive or dead. For me, the movie was better than most, but it could have been Great if: (a) the plot had been more cohesive, or cohesive ending, or (b) it had been less allegorical. I Really enjoyed the first half of the movie, but was left hanging at the end. And I'm a little worried about the movie's treatment of women.

I will never watch this movie again.

The acting was good. The directing was good. The script, the set design, the costumes, and the cinematography were all good, but I'm still giving Tideland one star.

The movie is horrifying, and not in a fun way. The entire movie you're worried a four-year-old girl is about to be raped to death by heroine addicts, or worse. The best thing that happens in the entire movie is a gritty, realistic train wreck.

Gilliam says he set out to make people uncomfortable by putting a little girl in peril. He did a bang up job. Don't trust anyone that likes this movie.

Fans of the book are particularly divided over this movie. As usual, the haters will tell you how the movie "got the books all wrong". The thing to remember here is that Douglas Adams wrote most of the screenplay and was on set while the movie was being filmed. He actually moved from England to LA just to make sure this movie was done right.

If he hadn't died when the movie was being filmed, the original author of the book(s) would have had pretty decent control over the movie from start to finish.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that most of my review of this movie is fending off internet trolls. But this is surrealist sci-fi comedy. If you think that sounds like something you would love, this movie is probably for you.