20161121: Horror Review--I Survived a Zombie Holocaust

Name: I Survived a Zombie Holocaust (2014)
IMDb: link to I Survived a Zombie Holocaust page

Genres: Horror   Country of origin: NZ.

Cast:
Harley Neville as Wesley Pennington, Jocelyn Christian as Susan Ford, Ben Baker as Tane Henare, Reanin Johannink as Jessica Valentine, Mike Edward as Adam Harrison, Andrew Laing as SMP,

Directed by: Guy Pigden.  Written by: Guy Pigden,

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
The film is set on a zombie movie shoot in remote area of New Zealand.  The male lead actor is a jerk and the female lead is a diva.  New runner Wesley, just out of film school, starts his job on a day when personnel are mysteriously disappearing.

The director, SMP, is a dictatorial prima donna.  The cook, due to the quality of her product, is not beloved.

Delineation of conflicts:
As with every zombie film, the zombies want to eat the humans, and the humans do not want to be eaten.  The humans eventually figure out how to kill zombies and gather the clarity to do the deed early and often.  Ample evidence of this resolve does not deter the zombies.

When the two leads become indisposed, SMP tries out the runner and the cook as replacements.  SMP would like to finish his film, but the zombies keep giving him personnel problems.  Also, they seldom obey him.

Resolution: The film does get finished, but without SMP, his second in command, the lead actors, or the original zombie extras.

One line summary: Zombie film shoot.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 6/10 Sometimes fine, other times poor.

Sound: 6/10 No particular problems.  The background music was too florid for me.

Acting: 0/10 There was acting?

Screenplay: 2/10 One bad cliche deserves three more.

Final rating: 2/10

20161027: Comics Review--Mad Max Fury Road

Name: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
IMDb: link to Mad Max: Fury Road page

Genres: Action   Country of origin: AU, US

Cast:
Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, Hugh Keays-Byrne as Immortan Joe, John Howard as The People Eater, Richard Carter as The Bullet Farmer, Nicholas Hoult as Nux.

Directed by: George Miller.  Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris (screenplay).

Max, Furiosa

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
Max gets caught by a colony (the Citadel) which exists in a desert of heat and nothing.  The colony has water, and produces edible food.  It trades with the Bullet Farm, which has lead and gun technology, and Gas Town, which has petrol and the like.

Imperator Furiosa decides to take a new direction.  She leads a run to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, but takes five young women capable of breeding with her instead of produce.  She gets off the usual routes.  Her home colony sends warriors against her, and gets reinforcements from the Bullet Farm and Gas Town.

There is a long fight.

Delineation of conflicts:
Furiosa wants the young women to be free and not breeding slaves.  Everyone else disagrees. There is a large scale fight in which perhaps 20% of all the resources of the three towns is destroyed.  Brilliant.  No one cares about that; winning is everything, even if it means cutting your own carotid artery.

Max starts as a portable supply of untainted O-negative blood.  Max would like to free himself of his nightmares; he did not save his wife and child from all this badness.  Max eventually joins Furiosa as a badly treated slave.  He would like to be free.

Furiosa heads into a giant sandstorm and more or less escapes for a while.  The pursuit is far from over.  What will end this nonsensical behaviour?

Resolution: There is change in leadership after many deaths, the loss of much water, petrol, food, and mechanisms that still work.

One line summary: Visually engaging, logically stupid.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 2/10 Ugly, garish, ridiculous.  Absurd camera filters, vile makeup, stupid closeups.  Some of the 3D effects were just plain terrible as well as terribly stupid.

Sound: 2/10 Ugly, garish, pointless, irritating, jarring.  It sucked.  Electric guitars on a road trip?  These stupid sods don't have enough resources for such extended displays of conspicuous waste.

Acting: 2/10 Were there actors?  I read somewhere that Charlize Theron was in this, but she reputedly is a better actor than any of the women I saw in this POS.

Screenplay: 2/10 Pointless absurd dystopian crap.  Much of the fight choreography was too embarrassing to be performed by the Keystone Kops.

The opening is in voiceover with irrelevant inter-titles.  That is always a bad sign.

This whole abomination is set against strong politics of scarcity: water, food, oil, petrol, steel replacement parts for vehicles clearly too old and decrepit to run at all, and medicine, and so on.  Despite this, everywhere the leads go, the local people have enough food, water, gasoline, bullets, and, when needed, brand new motorcycles with just the right equipment. But of course, they do not.  The entire film is infeasible, even though it's not supposed to be a fantasy.

There is practically no dialog in this steaming pile of dung.  What dialog there is entirely stupid.

Final Rating: 2/10 I would recommend this film to no one, unless I wanted their IQ to drop.  I felt disgusted by the director's hatred of reason and of viewers.

Of course, if one is just looking for a popcorn movie, this one is fine.  Many people die.  Huge amounts of precious scarce resources are lost without any goal being achieved.  Brand new hardware shows up out of nowhere (around 15 brand new motorbikes in perfect condition in just one scene).  It's like a sort-of realistic Transformers movie.  That is, it is complete and utter bullshit.

20160204: Action Review--Survivor

Name: Survivor (Sternenkrieger) (2014)
IMDb: link to Survivor page

Genres: Action   Country of origin: USA

Cast: Danielle Chuchran as Kate Mitra, Kevin Sorbo as Captain Hunter, Rocky Myers as Rogan.

Written, directed, and produced by: John Lyde.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 
Earth has been made unlivable.  Seven colony ships left Earth, each looking for a new planet on which to live.  The film starts in one of those ships, and it has long since lost contact with the others.  Further, after 47 years, the original crew is gone except for Captain Hunter.  Half a dozen teens spend much of their time training in combat.

Kate finds a wormhole to a possibly feasible planet.  The captain gets convinced.  So the ship heads through, only to encounter disaster in a space born rock field.  The captain and some of the teens survive the crash of their space ship.

Delineation of conflicts:
The humans are not alone on their new planet.  There are some humanoids with blades and guns, but also some bipedal monsters.  The monsters like to kill members of the other groups.  The humanoids bicker among themselves, and decide, on the whole, not to like the newcomers.

The Captain gets seriously wounded early on, and holes up with his radio.  The teens except Kate get killed or captured soon after planetfall.  So, most of the film is Kate against the world and its natives.

One of the dissenters among the humanoids, Rogan, might lend her a hand, but her finely honed battle training does not seem to recognize that.  He rescues her three times, she tries to kill him four times.

Resolution:
There are not all that many directions for this elimination derby can go.  In any case, rest assured that Kate gets to run a lot.

One line summary: PC cliche meets scifi cliches.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 7/10 Most of the film is shot well, and the Utah desert is stark and beautiful to look at.  The costume design is fairly ridiculous.

Sound: 6/10 I could hear the actors.  The florid background music was more or less irrelevant.

Acting: 3/10 There was one actor, Kevin Sorbo, and a host of extras.  The extras did a lot of running, fighting, and dying.

Screenplay: 1/10 Derivative, badly done, absurdly not feasible on so many fronts.  A show about a non-interesting lead running through brush and rocks in the desert is not engaging.

Final rating: 2/10

20151030: Horror Review--Heartless

Name: Heartless (2009)
IMDb: link to IMDB

Genres: Horror, Mystery  Country of Origin: UK

Cast: Jim Sturgess as Jamie Morgan, Noel Clarke as A.J., Timothy Spall (Wormtail in the Harry Potter films) as George Morgan, Clemence Poesy as Tia, Joseph Mawle as Papa B, Eddie Marsan as Weapons Man, Luke Treadaway as Lee Morgan, Justin Salinger as Raymond Morgan.

Written and directed by:  Philip Ridley

The Three Acts:

The initial tableau: Jamie's face is dominated by large birthmarks, plural.  The largest one covers his whole left eye area.  Jamie does 'real' photography with film, and chemical development where he works with his brother.  While trolling for photo opportunities at night, he runs afoul of some bipedal reptilians, who look like gangsters, while they kill two people and set them on fire.  Jamie lives with his mother.  AJ is Jamie's new neighbor; for lack of other candidates, AJ hopes to become Jamie's friend. Jamie's father George is 10 years dead, but still has a presence in his life.  Jamie seems quite alienated by his life, his deformities, his job, is living arrangement, and his lack of prospects with women.

Delineation of conflicts:  This is somewhat difficult to describe.  Why?  Because the protagonist seems to be insane.  Just how much of this is real?  It's hard to get interested in characters when it is not clear what is real and what is feverish imaginings.

Let us suppose that what is presented is real. Jamie gets a gun to protect himself after the gang beats the hell out of him and burns his mother alive.  The reptiles rake AJ's abdomen with a deep claw attack.  The whole setup is to justify Jamie's descent into cooperation with dark forces to solve his self-perceived problems.

Jamie would like to have female companionship, marriage, and children. How is that going to happen?  Does the dark pact with Papa B help out this problem?  Can he back out?

If the protagonist is insane, on the other hand, one hopes the conflict in his mind ends before the movie does.

Resolution: The protagonist is a broken toy.  The usual resolution for broken toys is that they stop working.

One line summary: Yet another deal with the devil gone bad.

Statistics:
  a. Cinematography: 2/10 We have here some really fine VHS shooting.  Or is this some really bad current cinematography?

  b. Sound: 1/10 Too loud, too intrusive, and not all that interesting.

  c. Acting: 4/10 Joseph Mawle and Eddie Marsan were good.  I liked what little I saw of Timothy Spall.  Jim Sturgess was way over the top, and most of the rest of the cast I could have done without.

  d. Screenplay: 2/10 The first monolog by Papa B was rather good.  However, things go downhill into a flurry of cliches after that.  There is nothing new here, nothing interesting, just the lies made up by an insane mind.  This film was not as bad as the much more pretentious Babadook, but it is still a rotten mess.

Final rating: 2/10

20150610: Horror Review--Human Centipede 2

The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)

1. Fundamentals.
1. Title: The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)
2. IMDb:  3.9/10 from 22,780 viewers
3. Rotten Tomatoes:
   30% on the tomatometer, from 77 critics
   23% from 10,651 viewer ratings
   Critics Consensus: The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) attempts to weave in social commentary but as the movie wears on, it loses its ability to repulse and shock and ends up obnoxious and annoying.


4. Status: Released
5. Release date: 2011-10-07
6. Production Companies: Six Entertainment
7. Tagline: 100% medically INaccurate.


8. Budget:  Budget estimate not available at review time.
9. Revenue: (US market) 141,877 USD. (International) unknown at time of review.
10. Runtime: 91 minutes.
11. Genres: Crime, Drama, Horror


12. Written and directed by: Tom Six.


13. Starring: Laurence R. Harvey as Martin, Ashlynn Yennie as Miss Yennie, Dominic Borrelli as Paul, Georgia Goodrick as Valerie, Maddi Black as Candy, Kandace Caine as Karrie, Lucas Hansen as Ian, Lee Nicholas Harris as Dick, Dan Burman as Greg, Daniel Jude Gennis as Tim


14. TMDb overview: Inspired by the fictional Dr. Heiter, disturbed loner Martin dreams of creating a 12-person centipede and sets out to realize his sick fantasy.


2. Setup and Plot


1. The protagonist Martin is quite short, morbidly obese, and seemingly without friends of any sort.  His job is as security at a dreary parking garage.  During his copious free time, he obsesses on the first Human Centipede film.  How is that for self-referential?


2. Martin's goal is to create a centipede from 12 people rather than 3.  The first big block of the film is about Martin's acquisition of enough live bodies. 


3. There is a parallel sideshow about his being sexually abused by his father, verbally abused by his mother (since father is in jail for the abuse), and his shrink's desire to bring him new abuse.  Sigh.  His mother tries to kill him herself.  She also sets the psychotic neighbor (biker with loud music, lives above them) on him; he beats the daylights out of Martin with boots and fists.  The list goes on well past these points.


4. A bit over halfway through the film, Martin meets Miss Yennie (the actress, not the character) from the first film.  There is a clash of worlds.  She expects to discuss a role in a new film.  She gets to see Martin's handiwork instead.


5. Does anyone get out alive?


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: More gross than the original, but even less engrossing.
2. Two of ten.  One blackhole for screenplay.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 3/10 It's in greyscale ('black and white') which I do not care for in the least.  I like a few (Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and Manhattan (1979)) greyscale films, but they have to be otherwise exceptionally good.  This film does not qualify.


2. Sound: 3/10 The background music supplies some creepiness, but not a lot.  The film is short on dialog (Martin speaks zero words during the movie), so sound is not a big contributor to quality.


3. Acting: 4/10  As in the first film, the protagonist was fairly good, but the other cast members were either not put to good effect or just not strong in acting.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 As a film about crushing the marginalised, this is fairly effective.  As an extreme horror film, this is a complete failure.  The endless use of the first film destroys any sense of engaging the viewers: it is all explicitly fakery.

20150609: Horror Review--Human Centipede 1

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

1. Fundamentals.
1. Title: The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
2. IMDb: 4.5/10 from 50,184 viewer ratings
3. Rotten Tomatoes:
   49% (91 critics' ratings)
   26% liked it; 16,895 user ratings
   Critics Consensus: Grotesque, visceral, and (ahem) hard to swallow, this surgical horror does not quite earn its stripes because the gross-outs overwhelm and devalue everything else.


4. Status: Released
5. Release date: 2010-08-30
6. Production Companies: Six Entertainment
7. Tagline: Their flesh is his fantasy


8. Budget:  2,011,799 USD
9. Revenue: ticket sales, 181,467 USD (72%); international, 70,740 USD (28%)
10. Runtime: 92 minutes.
11. Genres: Horror


12. Written and directed by: Tom Six.


13. Starring: Dieter Laser as Dr. Heiter, Ashley C. Williams as Lindsay, Ashlynn Yennie as Jenny, Akihiro Kitamura as Katsuro, Andreas Leupold as Detective Kranz, Peter Blankenstein as Detective Voller


14. TMDb overview: During a stopover in Germany in the middle of a carefree road trip through Europe, two American girls find themselves alone at night when their car breaks down in the woods. Searching for help at a nearby villa, they are wooed into the clutches of a deranged retired surgeon who explains his mad scientific vision to his captives' utter horror. They are to be the subjects of his sick lifetime fantasy: to be the first to connect people, one to the next, and in doing so bring to life "the human centipede."


2. Setup and Plot


1. Dr. Heiter, an older man who is thin as a rail, drugs and abducts a truck driver.  Two young women (Lindsay and Jenny) on a road trip through Germany get a flat near his house.  Unfortunately, they accept his offer to get out of the rain.  He drugs them as well.


2. They awaken to find themselves secured (tied-up) in the surgeon's basement with the poor truck driver.  Dr Heiter furthers his explanation of his plans for them.  His renown more or less explains his artwork: he became famous by successfully separating conjoined twins.  After his retirement, he attempted an inverse experiment: joining three dogs together, end to end, so that they would have one digestive tract.  This failed, but Heiter wishes to try again, this time with humans. Sadly, Heiter did not investigate why the first experiment failed.


3. Heiter's plans go forward with some bumps in the road.  For instance, he is rather cavalier about leaving sit the vehicles of the people he has kidnapped, all near his home.


4. So, will Heiter succeed, or will the victims find a way to escape?


3. Conclusions


1. For longer, detailed descriptions of some plot problems with this script, try the user reviews on IMDb.  Several people were glad to list them out.


2. One line summary: Gross but not engrossing.


3. Two of ten; one black hole for screenplay.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 8/10 Well done; this is a good-looking film.  Some of the blood effects are non-convincing, but at least they did not look like CGI.


2. Sound: 8/10 The actors' words are easy enough to hear.  Of course,  many of them are in German and Japanese, so the subtitles were essential.  Mood music helped mildly.


3. Acting: 2/10 Well, they tried.  However, I do not think that this film will help the careers of any of the cast. 


4. Screenplay: 0/10 Fraught with logical problems and holes in the plot to the point where little if any of it made any sense.  Also, the subject matter was disgusting without being horrifying.  Suspense?  None.  Could one identify or empathise with any of the characters?  Not really; the whole mess was just too unbelievable.  

20130921: Horror Review--Lovely Molly

Lovely Molly

1. Fundamentals
1. American live action feature length film, 2011, rated R, 100 minutes, horror, drama.
2. IMDB: 5.3/10.0 from 6,697 users.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 41% on the meter; 32% from 4,840 audience ratings.
4. Directed by: Eduardo Sanchez; screenplay by Jamie Nash and Eduardo Sanchez.
5. Starring: Johnny Lewis as Tim Reynolds, Alexandra Holden as Hannah, Gretchen Lodge as Molly Reynolds.
6. Watched streaming on Netflix.  Currently available on Netflix DVD.
7. Estimated budget, one million USD.
8. (Box Office Mojo) Estimated revenues: States, 18,424 USD.  It was in release for 11 days in 5 theatres.  Overseas revenue, zero.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Molly and new husband Tim move into an older home from her side of the family.  Tim is a truck driver who is away a lot on work.
2. First up, their security system gets tripped and they cannot explain to the sheriff what did it.  They get to know the sheriff, who remembers when Molly's father died in the house.


3. Molly starts hearing voices on Tim's next trip, the day after her birthday.  Then the bumps in the night, the sobs Molly hears when she is alone at night, and lights turned on but not my Molly.


4. Great, handheld camera footage at night with light that is about 5% sufficient.  I had thought that this was at least not Blair Witch level bovine scatology.


5. When Tim returns, Molly is alone naked in one of their bedrooms, staring at the wall.  Tim soon segues to 'do you want to see a doctor?' and 'are you using again?' So, is the film psychological drama (denies the supernatural, and she's insane) or horror (embraces the supernatural, it's not just Molly) ?


6. Christian rock concert, followed by church.  Her sister asks where she's been, as in not at work.  The next time Tim is gone, Molly gets out her teddy bear, and opens up a photo album that clearly makes her sad. The bear is where she keeps her stash.  She gets more reclusive at work, asking to work where no one will see her.  She starts hearing voices at work.  Some CCTV footage her boss shows her that something is seriously wrong.  She goes off on her boss, claiming things happened that are not in the footage.


7. Looks like drug-induced hallucinations with unresolved underlying psychological problems.  I'm still waiting for the horror part of the movie, 49 minutes in.


8. She consults with her pastor while wearing a black negligee.  Great. The seduction fails.  Well, the first time.  She seeks help from her sister.


9. Tim returns to the house being filled with a horrible smell.  He finds Molly's drug paraphernalia in open sight.


10. At 59 minutes in, Tim hears Molly making a video.  She introduces Tim to her father, who's dead.  Oh, goodness.  Molly insists that she is not crazy.  Next stop, medical tests, to be followed by psychiatric tests if the sleeping aids do not do the job.


11. Molly kisses Tim, then bites him badly, causing a great deal of bleeding.


12. Things go downhill from there.  No signs of the supernatural, just one psychotic drug addict.


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Even worse than American Mary.
2. Final Rating: 2/10.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 4/10 Poor.  The interior shots and night shots tend to look bad.  Focus, camera jump, panning that is too rapid.  Tungsten yellow prevalent.  Segments of night filming from low end hand held camera.  Lots of footage where there is not enough light to capture enough information to prevent pixelation at the user end.


2. Sound: 8/10 Actors seem adequately miked.  Creaky doors.  Irritating incidental music.


3. Acting: 0/10 Terrible.  I did not believe a single player.


4. Screenplay: 2/10 Merely poor as a psychological drama where the protagonist is crushed instead of defeating the trauma.  This is a complete bust as horror.

20130820: Review Comedy--Losing Control

Name: Losing Control (2012)

IMDb: link to Losing Control

Genres: Comedy.    Country of origin: USA.

Cast: John Billingsley as Professor Straub, Ben Weber as Dr. Rudy Mann, Miranda Kent as Samantha, Reid Scott as Ben, Jamison Yang as Dr Chen Wa Chow, Lin Shaye as Dolores, Kathleen Robertson as Leslie.

Written and directed by: Valerie Weiss.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: Samantha is pursuing her PhD at Harvard.  Her experimental results fail to support the central hypothesis of her thesis. Her major professor enables her experimentation to continue, but lets her know that it should be converging, not going sideways.

Delineation of conflicts:
Early in her research, Samantha made a perfect sample of 'Y-kill' but since then, she cannot reproduce the result.  Ouch.  Straub encourages her to continue, but with larger volume.  So a bigger amount changes quality of results?

Her fellow in the research environment, Dr. Chen Wa Chow, gets arrested on suspicion of stealing research and giving it to China. Sam's surroundings are under surveillance, and something is going wrong.  Will she be the next target?

Sam is engaged to Ben, but she decides to test whether he is her best match.  She's in conflict with herself, clearly.

The stint in the mental hospital was the second or third 'jump the shark' moment.  On the other hand, perhaps that was the correct place for the lead character.

Resolution: It did end like a romantic comedy, but not in a convincing manner.

One line summary: Clueless Harvard PhD student.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 9/10 A bit dark, but adequately framed and focused.

Sound: 9/10 Adequate, but occasionally dips too low.

Acting: 2/10 The acting was not a plus.  I liked John Billingsley somewhat.

Screenplay: 0/10 The writer seems not to like Harvard professors, PhD students, and post-doctoral fellows, or, for that matter, performance art and artists.  At least they are the ones made to appear the most stupid, ignorant, indecisive, disloyal, thoughtless, disgusting, or downright traitorous.  I had zero belly laughs, zero chuckles, zero wry smiles.  Why did it take Samantha so long to figure out that her major professor was betraying her?  That was clear in the first 10 or 15 minutes.  Then there is the hardcore bigotry of the piece: anti-male, anti-Jew, anti-Chinese, anti-science.

Final Rating: 2/10 Two black holes for acting and screenplay.

20130816: Comedy Review--Wilby Wonderful

Name: Wilby Wonderful (2004)
IMDb: link to Wilby Wonderful

Genres: Comedy.   Country of origin: Canada.

Cast: James Allodi as Dan Jarvis, Sandra Oh as the realtor Carol French, Paul Gross as Buddy French, Ellen Page as Emily Anderson, Rebecca Jenkins as Sandra Anderson, Maury Chaykin as Mayor Brent Fisher, Callum Keith Rennie as dyslexic handyman Duck MacDonald, Daniel MacIvor as Stan Lastman.

Written and directed by: Daniel MacIvor.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
The film is set on the small island/town of Wilby in Nova Scotia, Canada.  Realtor Carol French is working hard at breaking up her relationship with Buddy, and she seems to drive everyone near her to the edge.  She certainly drove my acceptance of the film's premises down to zero.  Many of the people in Wilby are outwardly in much calmer places than Carol.

Delineation of conflicts:
Dan Jarvis makes a few attempts at suicide.  The reasons for this are brought to the surface through various investigations.

Buddy French is looking for female companionship, while single mother Sandra Anderson is looking for male companionship.  They do find each other, with consequences.  

On the one hand, the mayor is involved in some suspicious activity; on the other hand, the Sheriff would like to get a few crimes fully explained. Carol is trying to make money; if that rubs people the wrong way, that's just cost of doing business.

Resolution:
This is a feel bad comedy, so bear that in mind.

One sentence summary: I would not recommend this to anyone. 

Statistics:

Cinematography: 5/10 Looks like so-so straight-to-video quality.  Choppy at times.

Sound: 3/10 The background recorded music is irritating at best.  The speech is often about a quarter second out of synch with the visuals.

Acting: 1/10 Ellen Page is a deal breaker, and she's as bad as ever.  This is the worst performance I've ever seen from Sandra Oh.  Sandra Oh's skill at portraying OCD comes through, as does her mastery of irritating everyone around her.  The +1 of 10 is for Callum Keith Rennie. 

Screenplay:  2/10 The screenplay has lots of threads, in the style of Robert Altman.  In Altman's films, I tend to have interest in every single thread, and I rejoice as each of his films come to conclusion.  In this movie, every thread seemed pointless; the end of the film was a relief.  Development of motivation apparently was not on the menu.

The film is slow, awkward, and hampered by the wretched music.  The payoff for the slow development is next to nothing.  All the characters were irrelevant, start to finish.  The big secret is neither shocking nor interesting.  Many things look quite dated.

How quickly things change!  In this 2004 film, Sandra Oh nearly runs down Ellen Page because she's driving while on her cell phone.  These days there would be some sort of penalty for distracted driving.  The reason behind Jarvis' suicidal thoughts might have been compelling in 1990, but seem less compelling in 2013.  The strength of the anti-gay bigotry was a bit jarring compared to the rest of the environment of the film.

Final Rating: 2/10, with two black holes for acting and screenplay.

20130815: Comedy Review--Attenberg

Name: Attenberg (2010)
IMDb: link to Attenberg

Genres: Drama, Comedy, FeelBad    Country of origin: Greece


Cast: Ariana Labed as the protagonist Marina, Giorgos Lanthimos as the nameless Engineer,Vangelis Mourikis as Spyros, the ill architect father, and Evangelia Randou as the best friend Bella, who is warmer and more worldly than Marina.

Written and directed by: Athina Rachel Tsangari.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 

Marina lives in a small company town in Greece.  Marina generally does not like people, and she thinks her industrial town is boring.

Spyros, Marina's architect father, is dying of cancer.  Marina takes him to treatments and waits with him.

Spyros and Marina like David Attenborough's nature documentaries, especially the ones about mammalian behaviour.  That is part of the context of many of their conversations.  This is sometimes also true of Marina's many conversations with her friend Bella.

Delineation of conflicts: 

As Spyros' health fades, he has earnest conversations with Marina about the future.  Some of these are chewy, since neither party has been perfect.

Marina is a 23 year old virgin.  Bella tries to help ease her into experience with men. Marina's thorny personality makes this more difficult.

Marina is assigned to driving the Engineer around.  She decides that he is the one to help her end her virginity.  How well will that work out?

Resolution: 

Some of Marina's delayed coming of age issues are resolved.  Is she at a substantially different place at the end of the film?

One line summary: Life in small Greek company town.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 I saw this streamed in HD, but it looked like fuzzy video.

Sound: 5/10 Merely OK.

Acting: 4/10 Dead. Bang. Boring. However, I think the wretched acting was just what the director/screenwriter wanted.

Screenplay: 2/10 At least a third of this debacle was committed in silence.  I am most strongly reminded of 'performance art,' which entails a great deal of silence and lack of motion.  IMDb called it part of  'new wave Greek cinema.'

For some reason, hulu classified it as Comedy.  After watching the film I see that it was a comedy, as the director/screenwriter was laughing at the audience with every single frame. 

Final Rating: 2/10  The two points are for the many shots of the Greek countryside.

20130811: SF Review--Apocalypse Earth

Name: AE: Apocalypse Earth (2013)
IMDb: link to AE: Apocalypse Earth

Genres: Action, SciFi   Country of Origin: USA

Cast: Adrian Paul as Lt. Frank Baum, Richard Grieco as Capt. Sam Crowe, Bali Rodriguez as Lea, Gray Hawks as TIM (Trans-human Interactive Machine; shades of Data on Star Trek, the Next Generation), Jayson McCardell as Sergeant Peebles, Michelle Jones as Hannah.

Written and directed by: Thunder Levin.

The Three Acts: 

The initial tableaux:
There is a massive failure at establishing context at the beginning of the film.  Just what is the initial situation?  War?  Disaster?  I'm guessing war, but with whom?  How can a ship (Ark) big enough to transport a sufficient set of survivors across interstellar space take off at a moment's notice from the middle of a city?

After cryo-sleep, the passengers on the Albert Einstein (the Ark seen initially) awake to find they are about to crash on a planet.  There is a lot of confusion, then stragglers coalesce to form the group to be followed by the viewer and the indigenous hunters.

Delineation of conflicts: 
Most of the locals ('Chameleons') are hostile.  For instance, they imprisoned the surviving crew of another Ark, the Isaac Newton.  The Einstein crashed into the prison where the Newton survivors were being held, and some of the Newton survivors are in the group.

The group adds Lea, a non-Chameleon local who is a loner and who becomes their ally.   There is more than a bit of mutual distrust at the beginning: when forming a new heterogeneous group, there is usually the triad: form, storm, norm.  Fortunately, the storm period is not too long.

After the new group is a bit more cohesive, what will they do?  They are outgunned and severely out numbered.  Do they reach for local power, in the form of new allies, or do they try to return to Earth?

Resolution:
After so many losses of personnel and resources, just what did the ark program accomplish?

One line summary: Escape from apocalypse fails.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 Usually plenty of light, but framing is iffy, and depth of field was poor.  Jumpiness is common; it has the look of recurrent missing frames.  All too often, nothing was in focus, and the level of graininess was high.

Sound: 8/10 There were a few problems with sound effects, but the actors' voices picked up OK.  Some of the background music was rather good.

Acting: 2/10 Looks unrehearsed, at least early on.  Gray Hawks' performance was terrible, as if he were doing an imitation of Brent Spiner as Data.

Screenplay: 1/10 The first 15 minutes were awful.  Just two minutes of establishing material at the beginning would have made the first half of the film easier to take without giving the story away.  I nearly bailed.  The second half of the film was a bit better, with most loose ends tied up. Filmed in Costa Rica; on IMDB, I saw two estimates for the budget, 1 million USD and 350k USD.  More money on screenplay would have helped, as would more budget on cinematography.

SFX:  2/10 Special effects were unimpressive to just plain bad.

Final Rating: 2/10

20130807: Horror Film Review--The Thirst

Name: The Thirst (2007)
IMDb: link to The Thirst page

Genres: Horror   Country of origin: USA

Cast: Matt Keeslar (Dune, Rose Red) as Maxx, Clare Kramer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Lisa, Jeremy Sisto (Law and Order) as Darius, Serena Scott Thomas (The World Is Not Enough) as Mariel, Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Full Metal Jacket) as Lenny.

Directed by: Jeremy Kasten.  Written by: Ben Lustig (story), Liz Maccie (screenplay).

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 
Drug addicted couple (Maxx and Lisa) are going in opposite directions.  He's clean and in a 12-step group.  She's still using.  Lisa starts puking blood and collapses while doing a strip tease.  The drug addiction was on top of her advancing terminal cancer, which she can no longer hide from Maxx.  

Lisa commits suicide, or so it would seem.  When his friends invite Maxx to a goth club some days after the funeral, he sees Lisa at the club.  He returns later and finds her and a nest of hungry vampires.  Lisa soon converts Maxx.

Delineation of conflicts:
The notion of trading one obsession (drugs) for another (blood sucking) is explored to some extent.  Lisa and Maxx try to control their blood lust.  This does not go well.

Their attempt to adapt to vampire life was replaced by an effort to stop the family (the nest of vampires) at any cost.  The other vampires are not pleased with that part.

Resolution: Do the protagonists embrace vampire values and settle into vampire lifestyle, or do they align themselves to human values?  They do make a choice.

One line summary: Substituting vampirism for drug abuse.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 Insufficient lighting, soft focus, grainy final presentation.  There's a bit of jerkiness from the low light and cameras that cannot handle it.

Sound: 10/10 The film had several background tracks that were witty and fitting.

Screenplay: 3/10 Poor.  The fifteen minutes of story was stretched too far to get an 88 minute runtime.  The exposition of motivations was terrible.

Acting: 3/10 So many actors, so many bad performances!  Jeremy Sisto (the reason I quit watching Law and Order) disappointed even more than usual, and the coming and going of his various accents was irritating.  Clare Kramer (a major reason I stopped watching Buffy) was marginally better than I thought she would be.  After Firefly, Adam Baldwin has been a favourite, and he did not disappoint me here. The rest of the actors were forgettable at best.

Special Effects: 0/10 Abysmal.  The blood sprays and the bursting into flames are laughable. Blood sprays are all too common, and quite over the top in poor execution.  The fact that they are done in such a ridiculous way eliminates any serious tone to the film that might have been intended. Seeing the tube that feeds the red fluid on Keeslar's back 60 minutes into the film was an amazing gaffe.

Final Rating:  2/10  Awesomely bad: three black holes for acting, screenplay, SFX.