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widey
Reviews
[Rec] 4: Apocalipsis (2014)
A dire ending, and an insult to the classic first two films...
Rec 1 and 2 are two of the greatest horror films ever made.
Using found footage, they were able to add incredible immediacy, tension and rawness to a tired genre and established an identity all of their own.
The second film also managed to raise the stakes by adding a really creepy Satanic dimension to proceedings.
I was utterly gripped by the story and was looking forwards to 3 and 4 to see where the story would lead.
It went only one place...straight down the toilet. Rec 3 and 4 are almost tragically bad. Selling out everything that made the first films such bona fide classics in favour of tired cliché.
This particular film is just a poor man's Resident Evil.
I don't suppose we'll ever really know what happened and why the creative team made such poor choices, but it's a real pity. They had the formula, they'd set the story up perfectly...but then they fixed everything that wasn't broken, and completely broke it.
No series I've ever heard of has betrayed itself in this way before, and we can only hope it never happens again.
The Babadook (2014)
Dreadful in almost every way.
One of those films that make you think you must have watched an entirely different movie to the rest of the world.
I keep hearing people say that it was real horror and not cheap scares...and all I saw was the cheapest and most clichéd of scares all badly mishandled.
The spooky voice on the phone, the banging at night, the enemy put on fast-forward, the creature in the closet. All present and, unfortunately, incorrect.
It had only two redeeming features...the sound design was OK and the Art direction on the book was good. It was poor in every other way.
Story was terrible, the dialogue amateur, the set design awful and clearly a sound stage, acting was overwrought and unrealistic, the directing unimaginative and it features what must be the least scary villain in all horror history. Most of all it was just deeply, deeply boring.
I felt like there should have been a warning at the cinema that this wasn't a real film...I felt badly ripped off paying standard rate to watch this youtube movie.
Avoid, unless you have some severe phobia of marigold gloves.
Utter tripe.
Diva (2008)
A deeply engaging and moving look at the nature of fame and identity in modern society
Well written with excellent characters. I saw this at the Cannes film festival and was greatly impressed with it.
Although it wore it's low budget on its sleeve at times, it was a deeply engaging film with multi-dimensional characters who I really cared about and the film was incredibly well paced with brilliant acting from the two main characters.
More could have been made of the very end of the film from a Production point of view ( I won't spoil it), but nevertheless it was very moving.
It's rare to see a film where there is a palpable sense of tension created with just two characters, both of whom are sympathetic. It will be interesting to see how the Director develops because there is clearly some real talent there.