Reviews

Never heard of this film and it seems few others have as well given the lack of reviews here on imdb. Which is a shame because this little film about redemption after a lifetime of crime is worth a viewing. Populated with actors I have never seen before, everyone comes through with taut, genuine feeling performances, backed up by dialog that feels real as well.

This is no over the top cartoon movie about dangerous people doing dangerous things with cheesy dialog and Fast & Furious fantasy stunts.

Garland Scott turns in a very strong performance as a recently released felon who makes a deal with the authorities, snitching on his former criminal associates in return for early release and a new identity. But Scott's character has a deep sense of devotion to the wife and child he left behind and he risks it all to go back to his old neighborhood to reunite with his family, all the while being hunted by those whom he betrayed. Scott plays the strong, silent type throughout, capable of instant violence yet tempered by a still decent heart.

As I mentioned in the title, this film to me does have some similarities with the excellent Ghost Dog Way Of The Samurai which featured the breakout performance by the great Forrest Whitaker. Both films are quiet films, avoiding excessive music and score accompaniment which actually lets the actors and movie breathe a bit.

Technically, the film is similarly low key, shot with competence instead of cinematic trickery.

The film is far from perfect. But what is there is an old story competently executed and definitely worthy of a viewing.

I give it strong 7.

Even the fight scenes feel phoned in here. This film is the far lousier, less competent across the board, evil clone of the still meh but far superior movie Lockout with Guy Pearce, Peter Stormare, Maggie Grace and others.

In other words, Lockout had actually good actors as well as far superior production values and...gasp...story!

Plus you get to watch Guy Pearce channel his badass wiseass self for the whole movie. And Maggie Grace looks nice.

Sorry Scott - strike this one from your filmography immediately.

As is often the case, the wildly varying imdb reviews fail to hit the mark. Dead Night is a fairly well-shot, supernatural horror flick containing some better-than-low-budget visuals, creature effects and gore. It's just that the production team forgot one key point when making a film:

It's the story, stupid.

Not going to dissect Dark Night here - a couple of other reviewers have done a pretty good job there already. Still, for me, this is certainly not a "9" but is equally not a "2". The criticisms about the near complete lack of a storytelling narrative are not unfounded. This is a film that desperately needed a singular storytelling voice.

The truth then, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. This one gets a pretty strong "5" from me for the look and feel alone. Plus a few non-cringeworthy performances.

Oh, and Barbara Crampton does a fine job as well.

Tons of cogent and inciseful reviews of this film here - no need for me to add anything else on the disservices this film does to the masterpiece original novel and Truffault's excellent adaptation.

So instead, I will focus a bit on the actual cinematic elements of the film.

Visually, the film is a mixed bag. Some occasionally excellent dystopian-esque imagery gets lost at times in some over-the-top Blade Runner homage, this time replete with emojis, digital flames on buildings and live chat feeds during news broadcasts. Not a fan of that last as it screamed "Hey! I'm being relevant and hip!" The set designs are occasionally interesting and for the most part the overall look of the film is your fairly standard dystopian style. Nothing exceptionally noteworthy but generally inoffensive.

The performances are also a mixed bag. Shannon is as compelling as he usually is. I particularly enjoyed his moments of "private" introspection - the inner conflict he actually does feel comes through pretty well. Jordan is a fine actor and he continues to build his chops though to be perfectly honest you'll have to ignore his first 15 minutes on screen as they are fairly cringe-worthy. For that I blame the director...The rest of the cast is adequate though some of the "Eel" rebels are a bit over the top.

Others have said it best here - when you blatantly title your film after one of the greatest pieces of modern fiction ever written, well, you damm well better deliver the goods. All of them and at the very least, the main concepts. This film reminds me of book review essays written by people who read the Cliff's or Monarch Notes (Monarch Notes at least were significantly more meaty) synopses instead of the actual source material.

Again, as another reviewer noted, had the film been titled something like "The Fireman - based on Fahrenheit 451" it would have been deserving of at least a 6 star rating here from me.

As it is, they clearly bit off way more than they could chew and are paying the price for an awfully incomplete remake and film adaptation.

Meh film - read the book, watch the original film and take a look at one of Bale's earliest works, Equilibrium, instead.

5 stars out of 10 - they did it to themselves.

Wow...just wow. Every so often I come across a film that actually screams out for me to give it my lowest imdb rating of "3" {which is as low as I go while still trying to give a bit of respect for the work people undertook}.

Yep...this one gets a "3"! And boy do I wish I could go lower than that. But no, I will stick by my own guidelines.

Let's get right to the bottom line: this "film" is, no joke, nearly a shot by shot, sccene by scene ripoff of the modern classic Blair Witch Project. Honestly.

They changed the location {Europe! Just like Chevy Chase did}. They added snow to a forest! They changed the gender of the creepy local to a guy and made him a total ditcher guide!

Pretty much everything else is directly ripped off from BWP, including a tent confessional from a guy this time when things start going sideways.

The only thing missing was a ripoff of Heather's fear snot...

One could not possibly find a more effective way to waste one's time while watching this god-awful piece of garbage.

Team Devil Complex: seriously...polish up those CVs...don't ever foist such crap on the world ever again, at least not until you go to night film school.

There. I said it. Thus far as of May 2018, The Devil Complex is the absolute worst movie I have had the displeasure to watch this year. And there have been a few stinkers but none so far that has prompted me to write a warning review.

Don't. Please...for the love of god...DON'T WATCH THIS DRECK...You're welcome...

Imdb user rushknight has beaten me to it with a spot-on review of this ludicrously bad piece of film. I will simply augment their review with this list of this laughably horrible film's lowlights:

• Agonizingly terrible overacting across the board: check

• Unbelievably inept and inconsistent sound editing and audio levels: check

• an awful MTV style video piece thrown in during an "action" scene: check

• pointless insertion of grainy, shaky CCTV footage for absolutely no reason: check

• laughable amounts of close-up teen angst scenes intended to but failing miserably at displaying emotion: check

This one clearly gets my minimum rank of "3". And that's being generous. The UK has produced quite a few superlative horror films in recent years. This is absolutely not one of them.

rushknight: well-played review.

The good: a very good performance from Natalie Burn.

But that's pretty much all you get here. And that's kind of stretching it...

This film doesn't even deserve a full sentence-structure effort from me so instead here are bullet points for the many lowlights in this MUST MISS flick:

• Exploitation and sexploitation films can be fun and of good quality [Troma, Ed Wood, etc...] but this one is just idiotic and mean-spirited. It even fails on the sexploitation bit as there is zero nudity during the second act, giving us absolutely unnecessary nudity in the form of a bathtub scene featuring Miss Burn. FAIL.

• Strangers is an example of a home invasion film done right. The invaders here are nearly as inept as the idiots from Home Alone.

• This actually happens in the film: the victims end up arming one of the invaders/rapists/killers with a gun after the tables have been turned. Yes, you read that right. Truly an epic WTF moment in cinema.

• Never have I heard worse ADR sound effects - the gunshots sounded like they were all recorded in a dive bar toilet...but without the classiness.

• The so-called twist ending is so patently absurd it defies all logic.

• A lot people tried to make a movie here. Pretty much everyone failed in their task, except for Natalie Burn.

Kill the shills on imdb - this movie is the definition of an irredeemable waste of time. A very weak 4, one higher than my minimum imdb rating, solely for a competent performance from a single actress.

Like some others here, I found Bite to be a mixed bag. Clearly quite a bit of a David Cronenberg influence here via homages to insect-human mutation and some quite heavy-handed and sometimes effective goo and body horror effects. The acting was capable all around with nothing overtly cringe-worthy. Direction was competent as well. So on many levels Bite works fairly well.

Still, this is one of those films where even if one allows for reasonable amounts of suspension of disbelief, one can't help thinking that a single action taken by the protagonist could have rendered the entire movie pointless. Why on earth did Casey and her BFFs not even consider rushing to the hospital immediately especially after Casey begins to notice the incredibly unusual physical symptoms manifesting on her body? She's not presented as someone like Goldblum's Brundle character, an obsessed scientist hell-bent on discovery, all consequences be damned. Rather, Casey is for all intents and purposes a typical, average woman yet her actions to her horrendous symptoms are anything but average or typical.

Does she not have medical insurance? Is she deathly afraid of hospitals? Is she in trouble with the law? Yes, all trite questions to wonder about in a fictional body-horror film, but some kind of reference as to why Casey never even considers getting to a hospital would have been immensely meaningful here. Instead, all we get is Casey making a two minute phone call to some useless, anonymous medical professional.

Huh? Anyway, maybe it's just me. Bite is a decent enough gross-out fest with not terrible acting and some over-the-top use of FX goo. Watchable for fans of the genre but that hospital thing just won't go away for me.

4.9 on IMDb is just about right.

Once again, the blatant shill reviews are in force on IMDb. Unlike what the obviously questionable matthewsstone user would have you believe, this film is the farthest thing from "amazing".

I don't know what's more pathetic - what the so-called filmmakers were trying to do here or the ludicrous post from the aforementioned matthewsstone.

Actually, I do. At least the filmmakers were probably trying to make something decent and I usually try to avoid slagging honest, hard-working cinema efforts.

Sadly, this film is simply a mess. It's a poor man's Memento copy in terms of the completely non-linear storytelling all while mashed up with every single evening, multi-POV film ever made. Yes, the results are as unspectacular as you would imagine.

Insipid writing. Blatantly unbelievable and hackneyed characters.

I like Adrian Paul. But let's just say that he will likely want to purge the bad taste in his mouth left from this film ASAP.

Shill reviewer matthewsstone claims he likes "suspense and action" and that "life is too short for boring movies". If this movie is his shill reviewer idea of an exciting, suspenseful action film, he needs to sell his TV and spend all of his remaining years watching paint dry.

+1 from my minimum grade of 3 for seeing Adrian Paul on screen again, though his character was awful.

Not even the lovely and talented Ana de Armas can make this woeful Fast and Furious ripoff more interesting than occasionally pretty eye candy and car pr0n. What's even more tragic is that she's not given very much to do at all.

Compared with this one, most of the Fast and Furious films seem like Citizen Kane in terms of both plot and storytelling.

Two particularly laughable low points, which were kind of hard to come up with given that there were so very many in this film:

1: English speaking team leaders need a group of "skilled" drivers to be part of their crew. So of course, the finest levels of coordination and communication are achieved by bringing in a bunch of drivers that only understand French;

2: Priceless collection of cars is kept in a high security garage behind 15 foot tall, 6inch thick metal doors. After blowing the doors flat off their hinges, it only takes two guys to effortlessly move the doors out of the way so the cars can be driven out. I need to take whatever vitamins those folks are eating.

Say what you will about the F&F films (sheer brainless entertainment especially in recent installments), but there is no question most of the leads in the F&F films possess healthy amounts of on screen charisma. The same absolutely cannot be said of nearly everyone in this cast. There are no budding Wonder Woman's in the lot and Vin Diesel and The Rock are like DeNiro and Pacino in comparison to everyone here in Overdrive.

Scott Eastwood and Ana de Armas especially deserve far better than this pale F&F wannabe.

100% a film for car pr0n lovers only and those who want to see some occasionally nice shots of Marseilles and Paris - these elements elevate the score from a 4 to a 5.

That's it. Really, that's it.

The mostly positive reviews about Wheelman are pretty much spot-on. One reviewer put it nicely - a (mostly) A-grade thriller wrapped around a B-grade Netflix budget. Well done to everyone involved.

Original plot? No, but then again, in our seen-everything-done-everything world, few things truly are. What you get with Wheelman is small, taut, lean and an extremely focused 80minutes of tension.

Frank Grillo is no Tom Hardy - and, as much as I like Jon Bernthal, I will always think Grillo is the more perfect choice for Marvel's Punisher. Here in Wheelman, even more so than in The Purge films, Grillo's character is that flawed everyman trying to put a criminal past behind him yet suddenly finds himself in the middle of an impossible situation. He's terrific here - like Locke, the vast majority of the film takes place inside a car with Grillo being the only one on screen and like Locke, Grillo carries it off nicely.

Yes, lots of cursing and F-bombs, but in the urban NYC sprawl that I grew up in, the dialog in Wheelman rang largely true. Quite a few interesting interior vehicle shots as well and of course we do get a couple of chase scenes befitting a film called "Wheelman".

Yes, where are the cops, blah blah blah...Suspension of disbelief folks as it's fiction.

Grillo is but one of the myriad hard-working, talented actors out there who truly deserves his big break and hopefully he will get it soon. This one won't win any awards but Frank Grillo, actor and first time producer here can feel proud of what he's accomplished...a very polished, no-nonsense, focused, gritty and easily digestible thriller.

A very solid 7 indeed.

Hostel, this isn't. And sadly yet again, further proof that anyone with a camera can now "create" something and dare to call it a movie.

Gore and torture for gore and torture's sake. A Japanese condom-thin excuse for a story. Irritating, inept "acting" - need I say more? This one gets 1 point higher than my bare minimum 3 solely for the reasonably creepy torture prison set/location.

SHILL REVIEWS ON IMDb NEED TO DIE.

Worst of all, there is a sequence in the film midway through where a dog is repeatedly shown being restrained in a highly questionable manner, one in which it appears that the animal could have very seriously injured itself. Honestly, the ASPCA should probably investigate the producers and crew for this.

So the only reason to watch this dreck is to see the scene in question for yourself and then decide if an official investigation needs to be initiated.