Reviews

Mildly entertaining but predictable. Characters are fairly flat and not terribly likable. But if an island cycles between periods of being above water and submerged, how do the animals come back? Plants I understand, but not those types of animals. Also, the logic behind that mechanism doesn't work. Not at all.

My low rating on this is probably due to the fact I started watching it on Netflix where it is listed as Investigative T.V. and in with documentaries. While well crafted I suspected it was a huge fake out in episode one. By Episode two I knew it was. Vietnam Vets do not look younger than me. And the under developed brain of an absorbed twin is not going to take a person over. It was like the writer of that episode watched too much Venture Brothers. I could accept this show as fiction and find it amusing and entertaining, but there are no disclaimers that it is fiction and I think that is lying and cheating its audience. Unless the point is to prove that the average person is more gullible than we normally thing the masses already are. Or maybe I should just be happy that my suspicions starting with episode one prove I'm smarter than the masses.

Lisa Renee Irwin went missing almost two years ago after her mom put her to bed and then had a few drinks. She would be almost three now. Half a year later, someone attempts to use a debit card stolen that same night on a website for buying false birth certificates. FBI thinks the baby is still alive.

So do I. Kidnapping babies to sell for illegal adoptions has been around for a long time. It is not as common as it once was. Now days, you are more likely to hear about people who kidnapped babies to raise as their own.

Still, after watching The Tall Man or The Tallman on Saturday, I can't help but wonder. The thriller was well acted and I've seen worse acting and writing hit the big screen while this went straight to DVD, as far as I know. I never heard of it until it came up on my Netflix feed. I've revealing the ultimate plot twist when I tell you that it ends up being about a woman who helps kidnap abused children and gets them to safety. It might not have been so objectionable except it wasn't just abused children. It was children of poor family's or single parents struggling to get by as well. It equated losing your job because the business closed to child abuse, as if you can control something like that.

Now think about it. There were a couple sittings of a man with a baby that night. Once I think was caught on video but maybe I'm thinking about a different case. Someone probably watched the family to get the pattern of behaviors down to know the best opportunity to take the baby. Imagine someone seeing a family where dad works the night shift and mom has a couple of drinks alone, after the kids are put to bed. Imagine the person thinking it was the perfect baby to take because the parents didn't have an ideal, 8 - 9 lifestyle, and a June Cleaver mom. In fact, the person probably thought he or she was doing the baby a favor.

The movie came out after the kidnapping. But it glorified kidnapping children to save them. Even if the only thing they were saving the child from was poverty or less than perfect families rather than any real physical or emotional abuse. The reason it is an irresponsible movie is because this kind of kidnapping is still going on and should NOT be glorified.

Originally, I just wanted to look up any latest developments on the Lisa Irwin case. (I couldn't find any) and complain about how the case just seemed to stop. I didn't mean to turn it into a longer rant about the movie I watched a couple days ago.

I probably shouldn't mention it until the end, but this movie is a HUGE fail in my book. The think had so many plot screw ups I lost count.

My friend liked it because if you were one of the main characters, you might never know all the answers and all the information. So it is more realistic.

I don't care for realism in my movies. I want the movie to follow the physics and rules of the world it establishes. But I want things tidied up. I want answers, I guess.

If you have read 1984, this movie is like that. Deadly boring bits interspersed with really interesting bits. Aside from that, here is what I didn't like about it. Sorry for the spoilers.

Luke and Claire 1. If you own a small hotel and it is going out of business for good, would you really take a trip to Barbados and leave only two staff members to man it 24 hours for the final weekend? It seemed all wrong to me, but I've worked at some jobs that were closing up when in college. Made for great summer jobs when you have to go back to college again in fall. This made no sense.

2. The guy (Luke) working there, who was supposed to be all about the ghost hunting, managed a page about the haunting of the inn, and supposedly saw the ghost of the lady (Madeline O'Malley) who died there (after her fiancé stood her up) was a total fake. I saw that right off the bat. He seemed to have no real interest or enthusiasm for ghost hunting. I suspected he was lying about seeing the ghost and it turned out I was right. (I was certain that when I was watching it that the movie said she was stood up but other sites say she was hanged on her wedding night.) 3. The older actress (Lee) turned New Age healing guru says there are three ghosts there and not Madeline O'Malley. She said they tried to warn her (Madeline). Who they are is never mentioned. And the female lead (Claire) only ever sees Madeline.

4. This brings up the issue, is it really just Claire's over active imagination. But what about the piano music she heard and the keys she saw depress themselves? Still her imagination. Luke went to repeat her EVP experiment and he heard the piano too. But he was drunk then. Maybe it was his imagination too.

5. An old man shows up and wants a particular room on the floor that was already stripped and mostly emptied. Only the beds remain. Claire decided they might as well let him stay there. It is the last night after all. She takes up sheets and he mentions that he spent his honeymoon there. The implication was that perhaps he was Madeline's fiancé. But he wasn't quiet old enough based on the legend. By the photo of Madeline, he would have had to have been well over 80. What was going to happen to happen to him was terribly obvious. Old man, small bag, willing to take the honeymoon suite even those all that is left in it is a bed, all alone. Of course he was going to kill himself. How much more obvious could they make it.

6. Claire is so freaked out, she goes to leave but can't find Lee. She looks for the older woman in the basement. She totally freaks out, thinking the ghost of the old man is coming after her. She races to the storm cellar doors in the alley and locks herself in that room, screaming for her coworker. The day before she had chained and locked the alley access to the basement. She can't get out.

7. Through the entire movie, Claire was puffing on an inhaler. Lee kept telling her the basement was a very bad place for her and she needed to get out of there. Well, Claire thinks it the ghost banging on the door and after her. It is really her coworker answering her cries for help and trying to get her to unlock the door. She has an asthma attack and her inhaler is on the other side of the door, having been dropped in her mad flight to get to the room and secure herself inside.

I still want to know why there was ever mention of three ghosts who were not Madeline being in the hotel. Why they were trying to warn Madeline? Why was she and accident? What was the accident, because the girl kept seeing a Madeline who had been hanged in her wedding dress and yet had blood all on her face. Why did she keep seeing Madeline when the spiritualist said Madeline was not one of the ghosts there? That reinforces my idea that all of this was Madeline's over active imagination and her many times of spooking herself and over reacting.

All in all, I hated it.

If only the ending were different. The first 7 minutes were not great. But once you get the 9 into the closed room and they have to put the puzzle together and solve the mystery, I loved it - until the end.

Some people say it was a Saw copycat. I have not seen the Saw movies. I do not like slasher films and that seems to be all the saw movies are. This was far more cerebral.

I didn't think the acting was as bad as some people said. Perhaps because they hated the movie they were more critical of the actors than perhaps the actors deserved.

It was the ending that ruined the movie for me. The puzzle was solved. All the pieces finally fall together. For people who love mystery novels this is the greatest moment. But then the person who is the 'most' guilty in the whole mess takes out the other survivors to save her career. That just made me really mad. The person who carries the most blame escapes the room and escapes justice.

Makes me want to scream in frustration.

I didn't realize this was based on a Stephen King novel when I started watching it. I suppose that if I had, I wouldn't have been so disappointed with the direction it eventually went.

I got very interested in the first half hour or so of the movie. The abilities of the friends, the flash backs where they rescue a handicapped kid from much older bullies. I expected the film to go in a completely different direction. Instead it turns into a rather boring alien/monster movie that really has nothing new to offer the genre.

Since they start seeing visions (or at least one of them does) of the young boy they rescued before they even go back for their annual hunting trip, I don't understand the point of them. Because they had yet to come into the area of influence of the alien.

I also never did figure out the connection to dreamcatchers and why it was titled that. Of course, I was so disappointed in the movie that I gave up on it and never finished it.

If you know what you are going to get before you sit down to it, the movie may not be so bad. But if you start watching it with no expectations, then you get presented with one kind of movie that later completely changes on you, it is a major let down. I want that hour of my life back.

This movie was not what I expected from Wesley Snipes. I started to get disappointed. But the more I watched, the more I realize that it was mis-marketed.

It is not an action movie so much as a movie that has some action in it. The dialogue is sparse which means the actors really have to work that much harder. Directing wasn't that bad but the shoot-out with strobe lights was a poor idea. The longer I watched, the more I wondered if this is actually a British film rather than an American. The tone was much different.

This movie deserves a better rating than people have given it. Try watching it without thinking of it as an action movie and you may like it more. It is really an excellent film.

I liked Event Horizon. I like this film better because it made a little more sense in the end.

I watched it in three segments. Mostly because it was too dark for most of the film and more gore than I care for. The concept was good, the acting good, the writing good. The only flaw was in the execution.

I struggled on through the gore to find out how everything would tie together in the end. I liked the explanation of where the 'monsters' came from but found myself curious as to why genetic treatments (that were supposed to help them adapt to the new planet) caused those that were woken up early to adapt to the ship environment in those particular ways. I love the way it ends with all the undisturbed sleeper pods bouncing up out of the ocean and people sitting up and enough people surviving to still have a large, diverse, genetic population to start a viable colony.

So while I do wish so much of it wasn't so dark and dirty and gory, I still think it is a film worth watching.

While this movie isn't the greatest example of it's genre, it is a very fun film.

I started out with fairly low expectations. But the story concept sounded good so I thought I would give it a try. A few actors were too stiff, and one was too much of a ham, the rest of the cast gave fairly to very solid performances.

I know some viewers liked the idea of teachers finally getting back at the bad students. That was only a minor concern to me. What I liked was the military assault specialist that discovers that he has a taste for teaching. I also like the idea that everyone is trying to figure out whom he is working for when he is working for himself. I didn't like the way most of his team dies in the final engagement.

On the whole, it was much better than I was expecting and I would recommend it for people who want an interesting action movie with some funny moments but don't want to have to think much while watching it.