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Reviews
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (2001)
The movie did not live up to the plot
Let me start out by saying that I love horror movies but I am not a fan of gore. Once you start grossing me out, you no longer scare me and that is what I want out of a horror movie. So, Halloween when a friend forced me to watch the video: gross, but when I saw it on TV on Halloween? Scared the bejeezus out of me. So, basically you need to impress me with the story and the scares and I am perfectly willing to look away from the gory parts if you can do that. This movie did neither. I have not seen the the first two Wishmaster films but have read the plot summaries and the user comments. Based on them, I would have to agree that the Djinn in this movie is different from the first. The legend here says that God created the Djinn and the Angels, there isn't only one Angel so why would there be one Djinn? Horror movies to a large extent ask us to swallow some incredible lapses in logic but ooh boy this film left us with some doozies. But first let me say the heroine hacked me off to no end and yes I am a female. She watched in her head all of her friends die and (I missed the beginning) - apparently her family - but was too much of a wuss to even try to do anything to stop the Djinn. By the time she was finally ready to try sacrificing herself instead of all the people around her, I was ready to kill her myself.
The conjuration of St. Michael to help fight the Djinn was interesting and fit very well into the mythology. The Angels and Djinn must be enemies and who better to call upon for help than the Genreal of the Heavenly Host. That being said, wasn't he a little um-underdressed? They couldn't afford to make him look like a warrior? And, if he could heal wuss girl from third degree burns, how come he couldn't heal her friend after she was all rat bit? I came up with the possible explanation that it was because Diana's wound was caused by the heavenly weapon. But you know what - that's not my job, it's the screenplay writer's.
The gore I can't comment on, but some people here liked it and some people didn't. So take that as you will. But, he story overall was very weak and did not fulfill the promise of an interesting plot.
Survival Island (2002)
Um,what????
How, I say how did the Pinata know to destroy modern boats that look nothing like the kayaks from it's own time? And why, since it had the bear paw does it need to beat everything with a stick? And what, in it's origin explains the whole hanging body parts on a tree? Why the Hell after deciding in safety in numbers for perhaps the first time in horror movie history do these idiots leave Doug to get the rock out of his shoe alone and why does it take so damn long to get it out? Why in God's name did no one bring a cell phone with international access with them? Instead they have to count on someone sending a boat 'soon'. I won't say how they killed it, but I will wonder until my dying day why that should have worked! And you know claymation boy looks soooo much better than cgi boy. The only interesting cgi effect was the black smoke that chased um-Nick's girlfriend. OTOH, the cinematography in general is not bad and the islander does have that foggy eerie look to it at times. And. on the upside, Nicholas is some nice eye candy. Lastly, I really hate incredible coincidence movies too, but I would have felt better if we had learned that Nick was a Mexican history major, or totemic magic buff, or descendant of the tribe that created this thing 'cause that legend seemed awfully obscure for someone to just 'hear'. I am assuming, based on this movie, that Brendon is looking to earn his chops as a Producer from the bottom up and God know I've seen worse (as has any fan of MST 3000) and/or he is one of those actors who just likes to act in anything. Hey, so was Roddy McDowell.
The Alamo (2004)
The time in this movie was not used well...
I muse say I did enjoy the movie and there were a lot of very poignant moments in it as well as depictions of great heroism I thought. I won't go into the detailed movie minutiae as many have before me but i must say that the use of movie time was extremely poor. I knew Marc Blucas was in the movie and I knew he was playing Jon Bonham, one of the central figures of the Alamo story and one of the most heroic (even in New York schools we learned about him). I then spent the entire movie waiting for Bonham's ride. I caught Blucas behind an actor in one scene and writing a last letter home in another. Um - what? I then find out that they did film Bonham's rid and obviously other footage to support this but it was cut out so that we could see a lot of grand sweeping shots of the Alamo at dawn, at noon, at dusk, at night... Oh! We also got to see Santa Ana molesting some woman and twenty-minutes post-Alamo of Sam Huston. I have read that the director plans to release a Direcor's cut DVD with this footage restored and I hope he does. But when a big part of your hype about a movie is the historical accuracy and you leave out a huge chink of that history and disrespect an extremely heroic act (Bonham did not have to be at the Alamo at all, he chose to go there and bring troops with him to support his friend, even knowing that he would more than likely die)in order to have your obligatory 'powerful man sex scene' left in, well...
Versus (2000)
Silly but fun!
Wow! This was the first kung-fu/zombie/action-thriller/semi-horror/pitched gun battle/whoa-where'd that homoerotic moment come from? movie I have ever seen. And then the ending literally made me go "Um-what?" That has got to be one of the silliest endings I have ever seen. If the guy wants what he asks for, why the Hell doesn't he just go for it? And to thew people who say it's an action film and one shouldn't expect a plot. Well, no, if it doesn't have a plot then it's not a story. The plot elements of this movie, with the Forest of Resurrection being one of the 666 gates of Hell, the Yakuza being resurrected evil warriors, the heroine who couldn't string together enough sentences to just tell the Hero what the frac was going on, the cops who...Hell I have no idea what they were doing there, the zombies who - while numerous- were actually fairly easy to kill, and the villain with questionable dietary practices were a mixed bag of successful and unsuccessful. But the central battle between good and evil and the interesting notion of a hero who was changed in order to defeat evil is actually explored with surprising depth here. If you become more like evil in order to defeat it, are you so different that there is no discernible difference between you and does your victory become nullified? Is it even really a victory? It's a fun movie but not a great movie. I gave it five stars for the entertainment, for making me see that the philosophy was there, and for that hug which I in no way saw coming.