movies

[mathewxentrix88]

Now, this is a 2/10 film...



The Redwood Massacre

Probably the cheapest looking, worst shot, worst written, worst acted Friday the 13th/Texas Chainsaw Massacre clone I've ever seen. The murders are gory without ever being horrific, there are plenty of death scenes but none of them are scary, there are buckets of blood and guts but none of it looks real, and there are loads of characters but none of them do anything more than walk around and die.
Oh, and it's Scottish.

2/10

Ah shit-i'm supposed to be watching this round a mate's tonight.Surprised you hated it that much-it's had some fairly decent reviews.Oh well-i'll report back tomorrow.

[Darkweasel]

CHAPPiE

Robocop meets Short Circuit with some great special effects but completely knackered by a naff story, some frankly atrocious acting and some even worse haircuts.
There's no urgency during the first hour and things start to drag very quickly. There are too many superfluous or uninteresting characters. The dramatic elements don't come off because for all of its newborn, innocent about humanity stuff (which is meant to evoke sympathy but actually just feels manipulative and cheap), CHAPPiE is basically a robot with a handy box of spare parts. So even when he's taken apart, you don't feel sorry for him so much as wonder what upgrade he'll end up being fitted with. Much like when Murphy was disassembled in Robocop 2.
Actually, there's another moment in CHAPPiE which made me think about Robocop 2 but I won't say what because it's a fairly big spoiler. Suffice to say that Robocop 2 dealt with the situation better. Which is saying something in itself.

Anyway, Hugh Jackman wanders about with a stupid haircut and a pair of safari shorts, Sigourney Weaver appears to have been handed her script thirty seconds before her scenes were shot, and the couple from Die Antwoord are especially rubbish. Especially the woman.
Loads of blatant product placement doesn't help either. The Red Bull scene is a joke, and Die Antwoord even use the film to promote their band by wearing t-shirts with their own fucking names on them.

I'm afraid with each film Neill Blomkamp directs, all he does is prove that District 9 was just a massive fluke.
4/10

[Haldamir319]

Apparently Die Antwoord were a nightmare to work with. Some crazy stories came out of the production of that.

[Darkweasel]

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Orange, yellow and red.
That's all I can see now.
And the dizziness.
I hope that passes soon. My brain is still struggling to take in the amount of cameras showing so many different things at once. And then, just as things start settling down again, I remember the editing. Fast cuts and multiple frame rates used to speed up or slow down the action accordingly. One second it's keystone cops, the next it's a John Woo film without the doves.
Hearing stuff. Yeah, that's difficult too. I can hear a dull, throbbing murmur like someone is speaking to me underwater, but the predominant noises in my ears at the moment are the MASSIVE FUCKING EXPLOSIONS WHICH NEVER STOP.

But is this a bad thing?
Fuck no.
It's AMAZING.

An assault on the senses, the likes of which I'm unaccustomed to because for once I was seeing REAL cars, REAL motorbikes, REAL supertrucks, and REAL stunts. Fury Road simply has to be viewed at the cinema. Don't mess about downloading some shitty copy onto your tablet, laptop or mobile phone. Open your wallet, take the hit and visit that place which usually annoys the shit out of you because of people rustling sweet wrappers, slurping and gurgling drinks, and constantly whispering and giggling to each other.
It won't bother you this time, I promise. BECAUSE THE FILM IS SO FUCKING LOUD.
Be warned though. At one point, somewhere around the hour and a quarter mark, there aren't any explosions, weapons being smashed into people's faces, shouting, screaming, engines revving, or fist fighting for about three whole minutes.

The story? Don't worry about it. Good vs evil and all that good stuff really.
There's hero Tom Hardy (Max) heroine type Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa), sidekick bloke, Nux (young Beast from the X-Men films), villain of the piece, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne from the original Mad Max), and five lovely girls used for breeding purposes. Oh, and Hell's Grannies. Not to mention a metric fuckload of insane looking vehicles travelling at stupid miles an hour.
The characters names say everything you need to know: Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, Slit, The Splendid Angharad, The Dag, and Cheedo the Fragile among many, many others.
But it's The Doof Warrior you'll probably remember the most. The guitar player backed by massive amps set up on the front of one of the big rigs, seemingly there only to be the biggest, loudest car stereo in the post-apocalyptic world.

It's loud, it's violent, it's batshit mental, and it just never fucking stops.
9/10

[Jobdone]

Cemetary Man

What in the fucking fuck did I just watch

9/10

[Darkweasel]

Maggie

It's zombie apocalypse time again, folks. Except not really. See, in Maggie, the zombie virus takes so long to take over the human body that the population of undead is handled quite nicely by Quarantine Camps where people are euthanized when they get too bitey.

Arnie's daughter, the titular Maggie, has been bitten by a zombie and so the big man brings her home to the family homestead to spend as much time with her before the inevitable happens.
It's a slow and depressing film, unlike anything I've seen Arnie in before, and to his credit, he handles it better than I imagined he would. He cries, he rages, he beards, he stares off into space, and he's generally in the doldrums for the entire film.

Although Maggie is quite obviously not going to be a laugh a minute thrill-ride, it does tend to take itself far too seriously for what it is - which is basically just another zombie film. In fact, for the most part (a couple of wandering corpses aside) it appears to want you to forget about the living dead entirely and think more along the lines of the subtext - namely incurable diseases, their impact on family and friends, public fear and paranoia, and ultimately, the possibility of legalised euthanasia.

Interesting and absorbing without ever being truly gripping.
7/10

[MetalBeast]

It's a slow and depressing film, unlike anything I've seen Arnie in before, and to his credit, he handles it better than I imagined he would. He cries, he rages, he beards, he stares off into space, and he's generally in the doldrums for the entire film.

Does his acting get past the "high water mark" he set in Escape Plan? (i.e. the bit where he pretends to go a bit mental in German).

[Darkweasel]

I haven't seen Escape Plan, but he puts in a very good, understated, performance in Maggie. Only gets involved in one fight too.

[Jobdone]

Wyrmwood Road of the Dead

With the poster and the name, I expected your new standard dross zombie movie (I wish we'd move around back to slasher dross being mass produced, at least that always had tits) but instead you get a really fun, fairly interesting movie.

I mean, it's still zombies. But you've got australian accents, some cool spins on the normal ideas, and a lady with a lovely pair of jublies.

8/10

[Brendancoles]

Mad Max Fury Road. Just watch it! And do so at the cinema!

[Soze]

Mad Max is bloody brilliant. Batshit bonkers but hugely entertaining. This is the surprise of the year for me, wasn't even looking forward to it particularly, have no great memories of the originals.

[CrappyMike]

I am going to see it tomorrow and tbh I wasnt overly excited but I have heard nothing bad about it, so I'm looking forward to it now.

[Darkweasel]

I wish I could have watched it tonight.
Instead, I watched this.



LUCY

I never honestly thought for a solitary moment that Luc Besson could ever direct a sci-fi film worse than The Fifth Element, but having just endured the utter stupidfest that is Lucy, I can honestly say he has actually managed it. And then some.

The whole film is crammed with hilariously bad science where an actual, sensible hypothesis of what could happen if you used 100% of your brain is completely undermined by the writer's own glaringly limited imagination. Plus the fact that most of the theories have been debunked years ago anyway. Entire sequences are seemingly only included to show off some very pretty, but wholly unnecessary (and occasionally desperately feeble) CGI, and it has a story which disappears up itself after less than half an hour, becoming lost in its own happy self-congratulation.

It's like Besson tried to remake Leon and Nikita by turning them into a single film but accidentally ate a truckload of LSD and decided that it actually needed to be a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only using all the worst parts of Inception. And Morgan Freeman.

Use 100% of your brain and don't watch it.
3/10

[Jobdone]

I stand by Lucy being the best bad movie of last year.

I watched it because usually any movie that talks about "HUMANS ONLY USE 10% OF THEIR BRAIN" is hilariously terrible, but Lucy took it further than I could've possibly hoped.

It's like, within using 20% of her brain she's fucking levitating. It can only get worse from there

[Soze]

Never did see Lucy. Noah was the worst film I saw this year, absolute shite. The worst I've seen this is Jupiter Ascending.