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Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers (2018)
It's not about new evidence, it's about (vindicating) Bob Lazar.
I agree with some of the user criticisms of this film but I think these 1/10 scores are ridiculous. What did you expect? For Bob Lazar to pull a chunk of Element 115 out of his arse?
You have to go into this movie without expectations, which unfortunately are rife in the UFO community desperate for a smoking gun. It's simply a look at Lazar (a man who was harassed, bullied and discredited for speaking his truth) 30 years on to see who he is now, what he's up to and how he feels about coming forward in hindsight.
On that level it succeeds and shows a clearly honest man whose life was irrevocably changed for doing what he thought was for the good of humanity.
Maybe there is a little too much style over substance, but ultimately it's great to see Lazar in an intimate setting with close family offering their support and character testimony, and the ensuing raid by every government agency ever (a reaction to his taking part in this documentary), pretty much vindicates the guy.
It's no smoking gun but it's worth a watch.
Poltergeist (2015)
No Tension, All FX and Jump Scares. Bitterly Disappointing,
I loved the original Poltergeist and was very wary of this remake, but I decided to give it a chance after reading some of the reviews on here.
The casting is great, Sam Rockwell is always on form, and the kids were cool and not annoying, which is always a big win.
For the first half hour, this was a solid 'remake' in the truest sense of the work, staying faithful to the tone of the original whilst making it relevant for a modern audience.
But it all completely fell apart with the spooky stuff, which was handled with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. There was very little build up at all, and then suddenly everything happens at once, completely spoiling the tone and bordering on the ridiculous.
Take the classic tree scene for example.
This worked so well in the first movie due to pacing and slow burning tension, that builds over time and unfolds later in the movie and allowing us to suspend our disbelief when it hits us.
In this iteration, there is no such skill, instead we're almost immediately hit over the head with everything at once, too early in the movie and a scene that is more 'Whomping Willow' from Harry Potter than Poltergeist.
Talk about shooting your load too soon, the makers of this film clearly don't understand what made the original so compelling. This would have been in much better hands had it been made by the team who brought us The Conjuring.
Jarhead 2: Field of Fire (2014)
Mildly Entertaining Nonsense
If Jarhead was a subtle, slow-burning study of the Middle Eastern occupation through the eyes of a grunt, Jarhead 2 is the complete opposite.
It's an entertaining if dumb action flick but has very little in common with reality or common sense.
Ambushed on a supply run, a team of marines switches their mission object to keep an Afghan woman out of the hands of Taliban with the help of Cole Hauser's NAVY Seal.
The acting is fine and the action is well shot, if totally preposterous with overkill.
I can't claim to have served in conflict, but I'm pretty certain soldiers on both sides wouldn't frequently waste RPG's just to blow up one person armed only with a gun, instead of disabling vehicles and such, for which these weapons are designed. A lot of the action pieces seemed designed for cinema gore effects only and pretty much took me out of the reality that the rest of the film worked hard to achieve.
As did a point after a gun fight where the soldiers opt to walk to their destination through hostile territory, instead of commandeering the Taliban cars.
It wasn't the worse movie, and for the most part was exciting enough to hold my attention, but it could have been a lot better had it not been for nonsensical movie tropes that burst the bubble.
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
A Bold, Original and Noble Failure.
Why are mainstream movie-goers so keen on bullying original properties or films that dare to dream big and be different?
Do we really want all tent-pole blockbusters to be familiar, homogenised and served up like a cinematic Big Mac?
For all the internet hate, sniping reviews and box office derision on release, I assumed Jupiter Ascending would be a steaming turd of a film, but far from it.
What I saw on Blu-Ray was a bold and ambitious attempt on the scale of Flash Gordon or Dune, films that were similarly savaged on release yet are now appreciated on a cult level, 30 years on, for their sheer audacity and originality of vision.
The visuals of Jupiter Ascending are particularly stunning, like the covers of Asimov or Arthur C Clarke novels of the 70's, the costumes are lavishly inspired, the sound is enveloping and the acting is top drawer, particularly Eddie Redmayne, who is just batsh*t crazy.
The 'verse created by The Wachowski's is wildly ambitious and daring and some credit should be given for that at least.
Sure, there are problems.
The movie has 2 'endings' so my attention started drifting later on and for some reason, whatever the Wachowski's were attempting didn't quite stick, the movie clearly lacked the humour of The Fifth Element or the excitement of The Matrix.
But damn! It was a kinetic and colourful effort and there's a some fun to be had in this universe.
In the current economic climate, it's difficult to get anything green-lit, even for the Spielberg's of this world. If we keep on kicking these noble failures to death online and at the box office, the studios won't make them any more, and just stick with the tried and tested properties, sequels and reboots, saturating the market to death.
The nay-sayers and negative, vibe merchants really need to review their understanding of what is to get a movie made in the current climate and then re-assess their definition what a 'terrible' film is, because more terrible than Jupiter Ascending is an endless line of predictable, bland and safe movies.
Be careful what you wish for.
Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015)
Killed A Dull Rainy Afternoon For Me, No problem.
I haven't read the books.
I only watched these movies after exhausting everything else, but contrary to many reviews on here, I was entertained throughout.
There isn't of a lot of originality in the concept but then there wasn't in the first movie either, which was a 3-way mash-up of The Hunger Games Vs. The Village Vs. Lord of the Flies, but it had a lot of heart from a first time director with something to prove on a 'low' budget and The Scorch Trials is more of the same in that respect, albeit with double the budget of the first.
*Isn't it ironic that we live in the midst of a global economic crisis yet $30m is considered 'low budget' for a movie?*
Politics aside, What gives this series as an edge is the energy from director Wes Ball and the cast, who give depth and instant likability to the characters, somewhat lacking in other YA films.
The core fan-base is obviously annoyed that this movie deviated wildly and I understand that completely, I would be too, but as an action/thriller sequel, and separate to the books, there are a lot worse ways to spend a cold, wet, winter day.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
The Hateful Eighth, Good. Bad and then Ugly.... From Pekinpah to Platinum Dunes.
I was one of the few people who saw the original run of Reservoir Dogs when it opened in the UK. After reading a review with a picture Tim Roth, swimming in blood with a freshly emptied 9mm, I was hooked.
QT's ground breaking debut was not a success on release, it only gained notoriety when it was pulled last minute from the TV schedule of Channel 4, who had helped fund the movie, primarily due to the cop torture sequence.
The media uproar drew enough attention for a second run in theatre and the rest is history, a legend had rewritten all of the rules and shot them in the face for good measure.
From that point on we were spoilt with the wild ride of Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Natural Born Killers as Quentin Tarantino was, quite rightly, hailed as a genius, but he seems to know this and that's where he falls down.
The steady pace of the more mature Jackie Brown polarised audiences, as did the 2 part Kill Bill, which I felt could have been told in one film.
Death Proof was pretty much unanimously kicked, Inglorious and Django were seen as a return to form even though their flaws (disjointed storytelling, last act issues, that stupid Australian accent) are widely debated or acknowledged.
The Hateful Eight is no different, with the added bitter disappointment that Quentin has not learnt any lessons from his last few outings.
The first half of his 8th movie is a master-class in cinema.
The opening theme is a statement, the cinematography stark and beautiful as the film unfolds in its own sweet time on Quentin's trademark colourful dialogue.
Kurt Russell's bounty hunter is dogged as his recent and sublime turn in Bone Tomahawk, Jackson is Jackson... 'nuff said, and Jennifer Jason Leigh looks like she's having the time of her life in her role as a gang member in chains who's every bit as brutal as her male counterparts.
Enter Walton Goggins in a role that seemed written for him, and on rolls the story to Minnie's Habbidashery where the mystery unfolds in true 'whodunnit' style reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs where we meet the rest of a perfect ensemble cast and things start to really get fun.
Until the sudden introduction of a condescending directors voice over...
Previously that day I listened to interviews with Aaron Sorkin and Harrison Ford, both of whom bemoaned the use of exposition for expositions sake, Ford quite scathingly inferring that it was a lazy device in a visual media, particularly when the point has already been made verbally.
For 90 minutes Quentin trusted us to patiently invest our time, drip feeding the mystery piece by piece as the greater puzzle started to fall into place through clues in the dialogue, vicious glances and suspicious body language, all shot in this epic photography when suddenly 'out of the f****n' blue' he starts describing what's going on, on screen.
At this point, the film lost me. I was completely taken out of it, like Django and Inglorious before, by a random, jarring, amateur swerve- ball. A turd in the punchbowl. It just didn't fit, it wasn't needed and felt vain. A lot like that Australian cameo in Django.
From here on the movie took a sour turn.
While not without merit, there was plenty of excitement to be had when the bullets started flying but when the violence escalated to epic proportions it lacked the visceral edge of Dogs or the sudden twists in Jackie Brown.
After his heavy handed exposition, the language started to feel clumsy and misjudged as the "bitch" and "n****r" count started to rise with gleeful abandon and the explosive gore-fest seemed less pulp fiction and more torture porn. It felt more nasty and mean spirited than edgy. A movie that had started out with ambitions of Pekinpah was now looking more Platinum Dunes.
Maybe if the film had been voiced by Sam Elliott and started with narration, maybe that would have sat better with me, who knows? But what is certain, is that I'm increasingly frustrated with Tarantino's growing propensity to almost give us the perfect movie, yet always seems to be one final, ruthless edit away from the true genius he is.
Return of the Living Dead: Part II (1988)
Everything Dreadful About 80's Sequels...
When I was a kid I had the poster to this movie on my wall.
Not just that, I also had a 4x3 foot cardboard stand from the local video shop that stood proudly in the corner of my room.
I also had a miniature cardboard display next to a 5 foot RoboCop, a 4 foot Crocodile Dundee and a 6 foot Robin Williams from Good Morning Vietnam.
Liking this movie was a given, I had stacks of Fangoria magazines piled next to my graphic novels that were cushioned next go my porn collection.
Comics, gore, porn.... everything a growing teenage boy needs, but why is it that I can't remember anything from this movie, yet I could recite lines from the original verbatim?
25 years on I got the Blu-Ray of the first 3 ROTLD movies and decided to spend a whole Sunday watching them back to back with hot winter food and alcohol, but 5 minutes into this....effort, it all came flooding back.
It's appalling.
I'd like to say it's like a lifeless corpse of a movie in some ironic attempt at thematic humour but it's just a pale imitation, a copy bereft of charm or wit, a typical studio failure to replicate an original premise that had vibrancy, heart and soul.
From the awful staged sequences of the badly directed kids 'fighting' at the beginning.
Cringe-worthy music that sounded like it was taken from a TV movie sound library.
Shocking editing, as the 'gas' creeping through the graveyard is blatantly shot on 2 completely different film stocks and it just looks woefully poor.
Yes, the original movie suffered from certain budget restraints and I could write a list of deficiencies as long as my arm but that makes it all the more memorable and charming and re-watchable.
All of these years later, watching Return Of The Living Dead again, just hours ago was fun filled, laugh a minute entertainment.
This film is everything the first movie isn't and everything we dread about sequels.
I have no idea what Ken Weiderhorn thought he was doing but pissing on the legacy of a great concept.
I switched this film off 15 minutes.
I guess I must have done the same when I was a kid, before tearing the poster off my wall and ripping the cardboard stand to pieces.
All of these things, utterly forgettable.
The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
A Lesson For The Curious
It's been over 20 years since I last really touched the world of Clive Barker, avidly reading the Books Of Blood, Cabal and the Hellbound Heart.
There has been the odd revisit to Hellraiser on DVD and more recently the Blu-Ray, which is actually quite astounding in terms of the atmosphere and story almost 30 years on but those ground- breaking practical effects are truly wondrous in the hi-def format and quite breathtaking, still.
Well worth a revisit.
There was also a 'directors cut' screening of Nightbreed at The Dancehouse Theatre in Manchester 3 years ago, which an avid fan had spent years finding lost scenes from various sources and stitching old VHS timecode workprints together with the studio cut in an attempt to restore a film that was butchered on release.
Although the result was jarring due to the varying degrees of quality of the added scenes, it prompted one of Barker's close friends to source the actual footage and a fully restored cut is now available.
My deeper interest was renewed after hearing his Nerdist Podcast interview that was recorded in 2 sessions exactly 1 year apart.
Like myself, Barker was struck by an unknown, undiagnosed illness, which confined him to convalescence for over a year, but somewhat worse than my situation, he was initially in a coma for over 3 weeks after an innocuous visit to the dentist to have some basic cleaning work done. The Dr's were convinced he should be dead.
So that bizarre story of mixed fortune got me diving back into the dark to take a closer look, particularly at a film I'd shrugged off when I saw it in the Netflix library, one of the early Books Of Blood, The Midnight Meat Train.
The short story follows Leon, who falls asleep on the subway only to wake up quite a way past his station to witness the disembowelling of other passengers by the butcher 'Mahogany' in preparation for the creatures that come to feed on them.
The movie is actually a very close adaptation to book with enhancements and embellishments of plot and character that add to and flesh out the tale as opposed to the typical studio rewriting and deviation that often ruins adaptations.
It would be difficult to tell his story in one event on film so instead of being a sleeping passenger, Leon, played by Bradley Cooper, is an urban photographer who starts piecing the gruesome truth together over a period of weeks in an attempt to really 'capture' the honest, dark reality of the city after being initially rejected by Brooke Shields art dealer for not quite having true grit.
He stalks the brilliantly physical and mute Vinnie Jones' Mahogany from Meat Train at night to Meat Factory by day, piecing together the gruesome truth, all the while spending more and more time engaged in nocturnal stalking, becoming more detached from himself and his life.
There is a lot of CGI gore initially, which can often be a big turn off for me, but there is something a little more creative and even amusing about the violence here and the atmosphere immediately held my interest, the gamble pays off later on with some seriously nasty practical prosthetic surgery later on involving teeth, eyeballs and finger nail removal, well worth holding out for.
If you find yourself in the mood for a horror with a little more imagination than the usual Platinum Dunes output, I'd definitely recommend this faithfully re-produced Clive Barker gem, with added bonus cameo from Ted Raimi.
It isn't perfect, but what is?
A true adaptation of classic literature is a rare thing though, don't pass this one by.
The Hallow (2015)
Signs Of Great Potential, Even Though It Misses The Mark...
Listening to an interview then a review on the Empire Film Podcast with Corin Hardy, I immediately warmed to the director and just had to see his debut, The Hallow.
Hardy talked about meeting Ray Harryhausen as a kid, his ambition for practical effects working in synchronicity with CGI and the tragic, violent beauty of James O. Barr's graphic novel and his next project, The Crow.
A second review backed up the first, referencing Evil Dead and Pan's Labyrinth as visual influences and my interest was piqued despite my apprehension of the premise, in which a young couple and their baby come under attack from the faerie folk and the surrounding woods for their trespasses against the elemental.
This isn't a new concept and neither are a lot of the beats in this ambitious if flawed chiller.
The 'English Country Garden' of trimmed hedges and large flat empty lawns was a Christian reaction and attempt to eradicate Pagan places of power and beauty as the new religion swept across the west.
In the name of God, ancient copses, waterfalls and trees that had stood for a thousand years were flattened destroy the last vestiges of the old time religion and usher in the new and where legend has it, the faerie folk retreated from man, further into the woods.
The Hallow doesn't delve so far back into mythology.
Instead it nods to development and industrialisation, whilst our protagonist is a scientist earmarking 'infected' trees for destruction, which, after an effectively atmospheric and eerie build up, invokes the ire of the rather terrifying Del Toro-esque creatures.
Aesthetically, there is so much right with this creative creature feature but on other levels, some things just don't hang right.
Owing a little too much to the original Evil Dead is a crucial point but I was left wondering why they didn't go the whole hog and have a lead character as charismatic as Ash Williams. El Heffe is an utter dick, but he's funny and charming with it.
Here, the protagonist is just a dick. Period.
It's hard to have any sympathy whatsoever for a man who goes exploring derelict, condemned houses, digging around spores and dead animals with a young baby on his back.
You go with it for the sake of setting up the story, but when he comes home and ignores his wife, refuses to speak to the neighbour who popped round several times, gets stoned and leers at his wife while she cooks pasta, he confirms his status as a dick of the highest order.
When bad things start happening I wasn't invested and for a film like this to have impact, I have to feel emotionally for the characters, good or bad, or there's no peril or payoff.
That said, there is a certainly a lot of potential given the aesthetic quality and atmosphere of the piece. I just hope by the time Hardy gets around to The Crow, he's given as much depth to the monsters on both sides.
Predator 2 (1990)
Entertaining and under-rated... MCU prototype?
If there's a failed precursor to the Marvel Comic-book Universe this is possibly it.
On a list of movies that got a critical kicking they didn't quite deserve, Predator 2 is a comic book movie that promised a crossover franchise and although flawed, it holds up well 25 years later and in many ways is ahead of its time.
Heavily inspired by the Dark Horse comic that featured Dutch's brother as an LA gang cop, the lack of Arnie, who's wage demands were knocked back by the studio, clearly went against the movie from the start.
In retrospect, Danny Glover's resourceful, seasoned LA gang cop is sound replacement and delivers in what is possibly his best action role. Compared to Murtagh in Lethal Weapon half a decade earlier, he looks a lot younger, fitter and buff enough as a believable opponent for the Predator.
The supporting characters are total comic-book and right on the money.
These larger than life, stereotypes fit beautifully into this world and there are so many of them, Colombians, Jamaicans, Bill Paxtons, that you don't have time to stop and think about their lack of dimension.
They're bubble gum, and fun.
A real treat for me watching 25 years on is the atmosphere and feel of the classic 80's sci-fi movies still celebrated today.
Predator 2 almost seems to exist in the same universe as RoboCop, borrowing heavily from the aesthetic and attitude of the media, the overcrowded police station and Lewis in Maria Conchita Alonso, which is something that may have seemed derivative at the time but in retrospect, would not seem out of place now with the MCU.
Drawing on many influences of the time, throwing them in a pot and seeing what comes out the other end is part of Predator 2's charm but also part of the problem, especially as it veers a little too close into ALIENS territory later in the film, however I can live with that and looking back makes me nostalgic for a great era of sci-fi.
But it's not without flaws and there are a couple of problems I had at the time that are amplified now.
On release, I felt the film was toned down, not as violent as the first and that it had possibly been edited for a lower rating. In retrospect, it's actually a far more violent film than the original, there's blood and bullets everywhere, but what I was picking up on and what I see clearly now, is more to do with the way Predator 2 is lit and shot.
Stephen Hopkins was hired to direct only his 3rd film coming straight off the back of Nightmare On Elm St 5, a film that is widely regarded as the weakest of that franchise and aside from Lost In Space has mostly directed TV since.
So it's no surprise that a lot of the scenes in Predator 2 look far less cinematic that they should and instead have more of an X-Files vibe.
The lighting is too bright and colourful, whilst watching, you can't shake the fact that this is staged and shot on a set. In my view, it suffers the same problem as RoboCop 2 whereby the lower budget of the preceding film gave the original a rough and ready look, where the sequels ramp up the production values to the point where everything looks far too polished and fake.
But crucially, the make up and blood looks almost clean enough to eat and the death scenes are just underwhelming.
Exploding heads and chests are replaced with sparklers and cut away shots, which work well in the right context, the Reservoir Dogs torture is a great example of getting it right, but here the camera avoids everything so there's no pay off.
You just get fragments and sweeps which are very effective in terms of replicating comic book panels but after the imaginative bloodbath of the first movie, you're left feeling short changed.
During the opening sequence there are some brilliant cuts shot between VHS camera's, grainy, hand-held, shaky that represent the view of the media. They look far more realistic for my money and that's how I would have liked to have seen this picture shot.
Overall, Predator 2 is a bold and innovative precursor to the MCU.
It's a movie that appears to have been designed by a studio with bold plans for a bigger universe, heavily hinting at crossover potential and I would have loved to have seen this era of Fox expand into the Alien Vs Predator territory it hinted at, rather than the damp squibs that came a decade later.
Ultimately, Fox picked an inexperienced director who didn't have the resume of a John McTiernan or James Cameron, presumably so that they had more control but in doing so, paid the price with a sequel that almost kills but lacks the genuine wonder and sincerity in its execution, that made the first movie so compelling.
Eragon (2006)
Oh Dear...
I always thought the trailer had something lacking so I avoided watching Eragon at the cinema and opted to watch it on a movie channel instead.
After LOTR set a standard for this genre I didn't expect it to be amazing but I didn't expect Eragon to be so awful either.
How can anyone take such solid performers as John Malkovic, Robert Carlysle and Jeremy Irons and make them look so hammy? The script is weak, the climax is tepid, the imagery is recycled yet substandard as the film bumbles clumsily from plot devise to predictable plot devise.
The photography attempts but fails to capture the grandeur of a certain scenes rendering the climatic or dramatic shots almost laughable and the editing is clumsy rather than lingering and flowing from one scene to a next.
And how about the 'instant talking dragon?' One minute it's a squeaking baby but just add a couple of flashes, and TADAAA! She's fully grown with all the wit, wisdom and knowledge of the universe.
I know this is a film about magic and therefore we should suspend some disbelief but magical films only work with measured plot development and some due care and attention, but Eragon looks like it was served up by a fast-food outlet.... I would be very surprised if any of the aforementioned actors reprised their roles in a sequel.