Reviews

I was not expecting something as enjoyable or over the top as last year's Piranha 3D but I was at least expecting some time killing shark attack fun. It seems however that they couldn't even pull that off.

The script is horrific and the plot is ho-hum but more importantly, takes way too long to get going. Every character is dull and hollow and the stale acting doesn't help. But in all honesty this could be forgiven had the film actually delivered on what was expected. There's surprisingly very little in the way of shark carnage. The PG13 rating means death scenes mostly consist of some flailing in red water. Other death scenes are almost completely off-screen. I'm not a gore fanatic but when the film has nothing else going for it, this could have easily saved it to a degree. They don't even capitalize on the 3D. There were a few genuinely creepy moments in the film that actually made me want to cover my eyes (something I haven't wanted to do in over 15 years)but these are so few and far between. I longed for more of these but the film seems to be too interested in silly melodramatic plot. The film also just takes itself way too seriously to the point where it just isn't fun to watch... which is all you'd be wanting going into a 3D horror movie about sharks.

It's a cheap attempt to cash in on the success of 'Piranha 3D' but without the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness or over the top gory thrills, there's very little to recommend in 'Shark Night 3D'. It could have worked as a campy throwback or It could have even worked as a more serious horror movie because I did feel uneasy at times but it really doesn't do either any justice.

While I didn't mind the direction that the series was headed in (I actually liked part 4 and felt it to be almost an over the top parody of itself) I forgot how good these films could actually be.

The film trades in the staleness that was beginning to plague the series offering up fresh twists, exploring things that have never been dealt with in the series thus far. These twists allow for more depth both in character drama and in plot. The space between the death scenes are no longer painfully dull with cringe worthy dialogue; it's not gripping drama but it's a huge improvement and the characters aren't so paper thin. the film also manages to get the tone pitch perfect, keeping things serious and intense but tongue in cheek when it's needed.

The death scenes are fewer and far between this time around but they still pack a punch being significantly more suspenseful than usual and the disaster on the bridge is probably the best and most intense opening out of all them.

The twist at the end actually blew me away and I was not expecting it at all. It's not draw dropping but those who have stuck through the series since the beginning are sure to get a big kick out of it.

I think most importantly, the film just feels like a film again and not just another Final Destination movie. It felt so much more refreshing and new; something the series hasn't felt like in quite some time. Rivals the first film in serving up equal amounts of guilty gory thrills and interesting characters and plot.

Gleefully unapologetic B-Monster-Movie throwback loaded with blood, guts and gratuitous nudity. The premise is simplistic like most movies of this sort tend to be but its great cast, pacing and excellent mixture of tongue-in cheek humour and legitimate thrills turn what could have been a run-of-the-mill creature feature into one hell of a fun ride. It's cheesy but never to the point of parody and while it threatens to go over the top, it sits at a comfortable medium of ridiculousness.

It's been so long since I've seen such an entertaining B-movie of this calibre in theatres. It just doesn't happen anymore. If I have but one complaint, it's the awkward and seemingly tacked final twist ending that I'm still on the fence about.

If you're turned off by how stupid the movie looks, odds are you won't think so strongly of it but for those who go in looking for a bit of fun, the movie will most certainly deliver the goods.

My favourite of 2010 so far.

Coming up with a basic understanding of whether or not I liked or disliked the film let alone compiling a review for it has been far more difficult than I predicted. However considering the movie is still constantly on my mind, long after seeing it I feel like it merits some credit.

In the film, we have two brilliant scientists (Polley and Brody) who spend there lives splicing DNA and then the obvious plan to splice human and animal DNA together eventually pops into there heads. The experiment works which creates Dren. That's all I'll say but the rest is pretty obvious.

The first half of the movie is top notch and was almost flawless but at about the half way mark everything gets exponentially weirder and character motivations and actions go out the window. it's hard not to roll your eyes during most of the later scenes in the film as it just goes way out in left field. It all suits the subtle creepiness that the entire film has but it's just too much at times. Also the horror movie finale seems too rushed and it comes in a little too late.

But despite it's flaws, all the good outshines the bad.It succeeds on it's brilliant and refreshingly original premise despite the fact that the actual end result doesn't fill it out to its full potential. The whole film is scary due to it's unsettling subject matter which is really nice to see nowadays.

So when in a world full of horror remakes, clichéd rom-coms and Michael Bay explode-a-thons... go see Splice.

Let my start by saying I have not read the book.

The first time I 'saw' the film I had only caught the last 30 minutes or so, Which I thought were fantastic and I was stunned because I had heard so many bad things. SO to see for myself, I re watched the whole film shortly afterwards... and my opinion changed a bit. It's not as awful as most will have you believe but it's not without its problems.

The plot is fairly simple. A young girl named Susie is raped and murder by her serial killer neighbour and then proceeds to watch over her killer, family, etc. from a sort of limbo/heaven.

The film fails where most Novel adaptations fail. Everything feels rushed and underdeveloped. Despite some great performances by Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan most characters feel pretty two dimensional. Sme characters are so underused and underdeveloped that it feels as if they were only kept because they were an integral part of the storyline but the majority of their stories have been removed. This makes character actions and reactions somewhat unjustified and unclear from the audience's perspective.

Susie's story is a little weak and it's fairly unclear what she is doing in the limbo type area, and what exactly she has to accomplish. Many people complain that these scenes are overdone and Jackson went to CGI happy with them. Well I agree to some extent because if so much effort was put into making everything look so fantastical, why couldn't the same amount of effort be applied in making a tight, cohesive narrative? All aside these scenes ARE beautiful and are one of the strong points in the film.

Despite the film's faults, it still managed to snare me emotionally which means it's doing SOMETHING right. I did get the gist of everything even though the film left me scratching my head a lot and wanting to know more.

Overall there was just something about the film I really enjoyed. It was touching and sweet but also tragic and heartbreaking. It's artistic and stylish with beautiful visuals in and outside of heaven.It's a shame that everything else in the film feels so weak because this could have been a truly great film.

A potentially great old school zombie movie with a clever twist that is squandered by shoddy production values.

I saw the trailer for this film and I was absolutely stoked. An old-school Romero-esquire zombie movie blended with comedy and satire sounded like a sure thing. With the success of other zomedies like Shaun of the Dead, Dead and Breakfast and ZOmbieland, there's no reason why this should have failed, but sadly it does... to some degree at least.

It's got it a decent amount of laughs and gore scenes. It's post-911 terrorism paranoia twist works excellently and is so refreshing for a genre that is getting stale.

The film just isn't any good on a technical standpoint. The editing is really bizarre and during some of the intense scenes, everything looks warped and choppy. Poor editing aside, the worst thing is the horrendously bad sound design. Everything sounds awful. Everything. When anybody raise there voices, the levels peak and the quality is distorted. this combined with the poor editing makes any sort of action scene almost unbearable to watch.

A really good idea and a good attempt but next time, more talent and experience might produce a better movie.

It's big, it's bold, it's beautiful, and it marks the triumphant return of James Cameron.

Visually stunning with one very notable feature being the incredibly realistic facial animations of the Na'vi not to mention the beautiful world that has been created.

However, the story is very very simple and not all that original (plays out like FernGully meets Pocahontas). For such a plot driven film, this doesn't bode well and it just gives the entire film a very simplistic, almost two-dimensional feel. It also felt like a lot was left out to keep it this way.

IMO the film is just way too catered to a general audience in the sense that it has been created so that kids, teens and adults can all go see and enjoy it. Technically that's a good thing but it really started to bother me... I wanted a much deeper film. It can be emotionally stirring but not nearly as much as it could and should have been. The whole humans are the enemy theme that District 9 managed to pull off brilliantly seems like a missed opportunity here.

With all of that said, it is still a good film that is no doubt entertaining and well crafted, it is just far from being perfect. Think of it like a summer blockbuster with actual merit.

I first heard about this one at the FanExpo in Toronto where I picked up the awesome looking poster. AFter watching the trailer I was a tad bit disappointed but was still aching to see it. Now I'm aching that I did.

Quite possibly one of the biggest wastes of time ever. Just so everyone gets the picture, the humour in this and the overall quality is on par with the disastrous collection from Seltzer and Friedberg (Epic, date Movie etc.) There are so many problems with this film that it borders on insanity. There is virtually NO plot, structure or pacing and we never get any explanation of whats going on or why. Even all the villain spoofs (which is what the point of the movie is supposed to be) are so paper thin and mind-bogglingly-stupid. Why is Freddy supposed to be all gangsta? or why is Mike Myers Jewish? The villains get minimal screen time and their all just kind of there...for no particular reason.

The film is full of toilet humour and gross out/sex gags (as i said, Friedberg/Seltzer) and while I did chuckle once or twice, I wouldn't say it was funny.

While watching I was hoping that there would be some wicked fight at the end to redeem it to some degree. But the ending is just as disappointingly awful as the rest of the film.

The idea of a great descendant of Van Helsing fighting off all of the big time movie monsters of contemporary film is actually a great idea and It could have worked as a zany spoof or a Jack Brooks style over the top horror-comedy, but it is so poorly executed that it defies logic. It doesn't work as a comedy. It doesn't' work as a horror. But most importantly, it doesn't work as a MOVIE. There is no film here. Only a pathetic half arsed attempt at one.

Don't watch it ever, in fact try and forget it exists, it will make the world a far better place

I feel like the point of the film, the morals learned and the entire narrative structure is lost on most.

The film is the REtelling of a man (Kevin Bacon) and his immaturity to his marriage and refusal to grow up. The weird dream sequences show this visually and since it's being told to us, these represent exactly what he felt at the time. We never see his happy moments that are only revealed in the finale because at the time, he didn't notice them so we are denied them to be put in his shoes. It can be confusing the first time you watch it may feel kind of disjointed but it makes sense in the end.

Because the film was created this way, the montage in the final moments is heart wrenching as we see Bacon go trough his transformation and realization.

This was Hughes' attempt to break out of his brat pack films into serious drama and while I wouldn't say it's award worthy, it's easily one of his best films and most certainly his most underrated.

It was much better than I had expected, probably due to the ultra low expectations I had going in. Even so, I generally think the movie isn't as bad as it's made out to be.

It was poorly marketed and the target audience isn't exactly clear. From the surface it looks like a family/ kids movie and it is based on that type of TV show but it's humour is targeted at a much older audience. Therefore it's too inappropriate for kids and too colourful and silly looking for most adults.

Also the plot isn't all that cohesive and it feels almost like a sketch comedy based film with one zany situation after the next.

It's very special effects heavy which is usually a con for most films but I found it suiting and strangely not too distracting.

One other notable feature is that Ferrell breaks from his usual ultra macho, cocky idiot character that he plays in almost every movie he's ever made. He's not that different but even the subtle dulling down of his usual attributes was refreshing.

Despite it's flaws I found it quite enjoyable and very funny. I haven't seen the original show but I feel like the movie is supposed to be a parody rather than a homage or an honest recreation... and I think this is lost on most.

Take 2 dozen stars. Mix in a dozen plots. Add a dash of horribly unfunny and painfully unrealistic dialogue. NOw top it off with every romantic comedy cliché in the book, clone it a few times and top it off again.

The end result is worse than it sounds.

It physically pains me to hear that people came out of this movie having enjoyed it . This is no doubt the biggest pile exploitive tripe that I have ever seen.

Not only is it poorly written and laugh-less, the abundance of different stories that are going on ( there is honestly about 9 or 10 main stories) leads to terribly underdeveloped characters and a choppy, dishevelled pacing that allows the movie to reach it's climaxing point 10 different times throughout the movie.

Not only are there too many stories but half of them are god awful and absolutely POINTLESS. Taylor Swift/Taylor Lautner's story for example, added NOTHING to the over all plot and it was just another way of cramming more familiar faces into the movie. Also half of the stars that are first billed appear in the movie for only minutes. It's pure exploitation and an obvious attempt to snare a huge audience. Unfortunately for the world and for the sake of film, it WILL snare that audience and most will come out liking it.

The movie had a few (only a few) nice tender moments and plot twists but the amount of bad overshadows this by a long shot.

A god-awful mess. Don't fall for it.

The movie kicks off where the original ended and the film starts with a horribly infected and decaying Paul waking up after lying in the stream. He wanders off only to get hit by a school bus. It seems like a phony selling point and gimmick because beyond this, Deputy Winston, and the Water truck, there are no real connections to the first film, but it works well enough to stitch the films together.

The film's obvious failing is the actual final cut of the film. Ti West walked away from the film only for lionsgate to recut his footage and cap on a jarringly out of place ending that fits so awkwardly into the film. The editing is poor and fairly sloppy in places and the pacing is passable but inconsistent. It begins quite well and it isn't until the last half hour where the quality really started to decline tremendously, reshot ending or not. This is a real shame because the footage that West shot looks great.

In terms of the gore, the movie holds nothing back and displays some ultra vile material. I can usually handle super gory movies but parts of this were too much and I feel like they could have done without some of them.

Despite all of its faults, it's still a fairly entertaining and enjoyable horror-romp. It's got a great soundtrack, excellent leads and a great premise.It's still a shame that we can't see what West had originally intended the film to look like.

The overall premise of the film is a little silly yes, but it's incredibly original and it had so much potential.

The film suffers from a handful of serious flaws that ruin just about everything good that the film has going for it. The pacing is horrendous. The action scenes are few, far between and horribly rushed and the down time in between them slows to a crawl. This time is used for each of the uninteresting, two-dimensional characters to melodramatically shed out stories of their troubled pasts. We just don't care about ANY of them due to minuscule character development and a horrible script.

The whole film is terribly written with some questionable scenes that seemed to have been written only for the convenience of the characters. The plot is pretty simple but mostly unexplained and full of holes. SO much is left in the dark and the main point of the film isn't even explained so it's hard to care at all during the supposed dramatic moments.

Too much talking and not enough action for it to be a wicked B-movie and the overabundance of melodrama and terrible writing keep it from being a serious, dramatic epic.

There are slivers of a good film and some great ideas that occasionally appear and the few, brief action scenes are fairly entertaining, but everything else is so terribly executed that it isn't worth any kind of recommendation.

Going in expecting the worst (I'm talking Transformers 2 bad), I came out pleasantly surprised and satisfied.

However, there are more than a handful of critical issues with the film. The biggest and most prominent one that continued to strike my nerves was the comic relief. In a film depicting the end of the world where millions upon millions of people are dying comic relief and any sort of humour at all is BEYOND unnecessary. It just doesn't work.Period. It seriously hurts the film and without it, I would have awarded the film with at least another star Also the dialogue and most of the characters are corny and poorly written.This is somewhat expected from a disaster flick. However, it gets really distracting and for such a grand scale disaster film, some more time should have been put into fixing this problem to enforce the credibility and believability of the whole film.

The visual effects in the film are easily the strongest point but we all knew that anyways. the scenes of disaster are beautifully crafted and look wonderful on the big screen: this is definitely a must see in the theatre. There is enough destruction to keep the film interesting and it is properly spread out throughout the 2 and a half hour runtime. SO surprisingly, the film kept me entertained for the entire length and I never once thought, "When is it over?" The story is much stronger than i would have expected and does a decent enough job at setting up the disasters and stitching them together well enough. It is in no way excellent but it gets the job done.

The film plays out like a corny 70's B-disaster-movie when it was advertised as a dramatic, ground-breakingly real and chilling depiction of the end of mankind. The later is what it should have been. However beyond all of it's flaws the spectacular visual effects and solid enough storyline are enough to merit a recommendation.

Check it out, just don't take it too seriously.

Even 4 stars is being generous... A hokey but original premise full of potential that starts great but slowly boils down to a half baked, clichéd mess.

The films primary downfall is the horrendously skewed sense or morality. The movie begins with a disturbingly real story of an alienated girl who is bullied at school only to go home to her alcoholic, sexually abusing father. On top of this, she's infatuated with her English teacher a good 10 years her senior who is also married to another member of the faculty.

Even after discovering her interest in the black arts we still feel for her. Now the movie could have just focused around this part and could have passed as a solid coming of age high school drama but anyone watching the movie knows whats coming and after seeing the abuse she takes...we want her to get some sweet satisfying revenge.

Tamara's revenge is weak and poorly executed and the movie starts to focus on the teens that did her wrong. Now we as an audience are confused about who we are voting for. DO we cheer for the pompous high school jocks who killed an innocent young girl? Or do we cheer for the vengeful demon seductress whose first victim was the nerdy AV kid who actually didn't take much part in her death? Well we WANT to cheer for Tamara but the movie forces is in the other direction unfortunately Even this becomes the least of your worries as the movie slowly melts into oblivion in the final chapter with a lame conclusion and a "shocker" ending that makes no sense whatsoever. Even Tamara's character gets less and less screen time towards the end.

Even with the lame execution, the movie was somewhat entertaining and the first half is enough to give it a bit of a credit...but even so...it isn't recommended.

This entry to the series takes a different approach. From the moment I saw the X-rayed-death-scene opening credit sequence with the hard rock cover of the creepy main theme of the series, I knew that the movie was not to be taken seriously, and a little help from the third dimension drove that idea home.

The Final Destination is a caricature of itself and the the entire series for that matter. This film was made with the knowledge that people still see these films for the ridiculously over the top and creative death scenes. Its like watching the trap go off in mouse trap; Its the only thing people came for.

There are about a dozen deaths in this entry as opposed to the regular 6-8 and the majority of them are fairly lengthy. Little attention is payed to the story or the characters but why bother? We've seen all this before? And I find that the hammy dialogue that the characters do manage to sputter out, only enhances the self-parody.

Fans of the series are either going to love it or think its OK and almost everyone else will hate it. SO If you've stuck it out through the other 3 films, check it out, and don't take it seriously.