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Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2014)
what knock knock could have been
great little thriller, the best of the psychological home invasion genre. great acting especially from the two leads, Aaron and Alison, and an interesting examination of love and monogamy, definitely worth a watch. would make a good companion piece with Gone Girl in a double bill designed to break up relationships lol.
Where Knock Knock attempted a similar thing but failed (especially in the last 15 mins) this film succeeds and is consistent in its themes and ending in a way that knock knock struggled with.
**spoilers ahead**
It starts off with a home invasion where our "villain" ties the protagonist and her husband up in beautiful Japanese bondage knots, and slowly over the course of a weekend subjects them both to extreme torment. But where other home invaders are intent on physical or sexual carnage, Aaron has set his sights on the inner cracks of their relationship, and through a bit of torture and psychological manipulation he slowly tries to break it down.
Hell Ride (2008)
Missed opportunities
Whilst the cinematography was good, most notably the colourisation, the movie was severely let down by the quality of the script. The plot itself was mediocre but could have been passably interesting with the right dialogue and set action pieces. Unfortunately these were lacking. The dialogue was sometimes laughably bad sometimes with such elementary errors as words and phrases being repeated too close to each other, such as the repeated pondering on who could "stomach" what. This repetition rose to a sort of crescendo during one particular scene when the main character Pistollero and some chick (one of the long parade of bodies that feature in the film) say "fire" around 32 times to each other achieving nothing. Perhaps the dialogue was intentionally bad or in reference to something I have not seen, but either way it was not enjoyable for this viewer. The characters themselves were hardly developed at all and we had to rely on names and costumes to fill in the blanks. Even some humorous stereotyping and shallow character development would have been an improvement. Motivation was very hazy especially during one scene where two members of the same gang attack each other for no particular reason that I could follow (usually I understand even the most confusing of Lynchian plot lines). I was left at the end of the story with no real idea what the point of the film was, what it was trying to say, who it was trying to entertain. I had no emotional involvement with any of the characters or plot and it just seemed like a meaningless shuffled deck of scenes and characters. David Lynch once said that if you take 75 individual ideas then you have a movie. Whilst a maestro like lynch can find the common thread that unites these seemingly disparate ideas Bishop apparently has difficulty, and proves Lynches theory inadequate. If the film has any structure at all it feels as if it's all first act, building up towards a climax that fails to happen. The final clash between the two rival gangs is over in all of 30 seconds. One character guns down all the other team whilst they stand around stupidly waiting to get shot. All other gang members remain unscathed. A pointless and silly ending for a pointless and silly film. And this is a shame because there are some good things there. It was by no means dull which is a difficult feat when you consider its content. The cast is largely excellent, and if the script was given to another writer who could polish up dialogue, plot, and character such as Joss Wheddon, it could potentially have become a brilliant film. It seems as though however, that Bishop wrote his fantasy self into a film and then all other things were merely peripheral. A film like that isn't art, it's masturbation.