12 May 2008

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)

2/10
One of those movies I caught late at night on Moviepix and saw a lot of young actors I recognized (Ryan Philippe, Heather Graham, Christina Applegate, Mena Suvari, Guillermo Diaz, etc) so I just had to keep watching till the end to see what it was all about. It could have been a decent commentary on the state of bored, drug- and sex-obsessed teenagers but instead a stupid, inexplicable subplot involving some sort of alien invasion runs throughout and basically undermines any intelligence or "message" the film is trying to convey, especially at the end. Maybe that was the point.

08 May 2008

The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)


7.5/10
The acting was terriffic but I found some of the plot to be more than slightly implausible - where did the priest come from and how did he know all this stuff was going to happen? How could Damien's parents go five years without noticing their son has a "666" birthmark on his head? Anyway I much prefer Rosemary's Baby in the canon of "devil child" films.

Ride in the Whirlwind (Monte Hellman, 1965)


4/10
Early Monte Hellman western featuring Jack Nicholson (who also wrote the movie) wasn't nearly as good as I was hoping. It had a very weird pace, the standoff in the cabin was dragged out far too long and the rest of the movie seemed to have to rush to catch up.

The Wild One (Laszlo Benedek, 1953)

7/10
I didn't like it as much as I hoped I would but it was still entertaining, and I'm coming to enjoy pretty much anything involving Brando.

Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog, 1987)

7/10
Probably my least favorite of all the Herzog/Kinski collaborations. I had a hard time following the plot in this one but admittedly I wasn't paying too much attention. The last scene with Cobra Verde trying to pull the boat into the ocean was great though.

28 April 2008

Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997)

1/10
There must be some reason I stick around to watch this every time Teletoon replays it so I'll give it a 1...but good lord it's bad on so many levels. Every time I see it I think "it's probably not as bad as I remember" yet it's even worse. The entire dialogue is horribly lame, cheesy one-liners. Everything is so ridiculously unbelievable. Schwarzenegger's performance has to go down as one of the worst ever put to screen in a major motion picture.

24 April 2008

Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985)

7/10
Not really what I was expecting after having seen Night, Dawn and Land. Day is more about humans' reactions to zombies living amongst us, so it was interesting from that POV. The message is pretty clear (humans are a greater danger to humans than any outside force) and for the most part it's well-acted...I found the scenes where the Professor was "teaching" the zombie Bub to be a little corny, and the ending felt like a bit of a cop-out to me. Also it didn't bug me much but I can see where some people would be disappointed with the lack of true zombie-on-human killing action (until the end, of course). As of now my Romero zombie hierarchy goes Dawn > Night > Day >>>> Land (haven't seen Diary yet).