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Reviews
Horror in the High Desert (2021)
Really poor film, extremely disappointing
1 hour of repetitive documentary style explanation of a 10 minute story, followed by 10 minutes of actual found footage which was comical, absolutely no story or interesting feature to it at all.
I am perplexed with the number of good reviews here so am leaving I believe is more realistic.
This film is a mocumentary, unfortunately its in the same vein as the terrible Netflix crime documentaries they churn out currently. You know, where you have the same mundane points regurgitated by three different narrators one after the other. Its a strategy used to increase the length of content, it makes for extremely poor viewing.
You have the sister, the room mate, the journalist and the private investigator of the missing party. The first hour of this film is basically the story leading upto the disappearance told on repeat by each of these characters, exactly like a Netflix content void doc. Its mind numbing. You are hoping for something interesting to happen, or better yet for the film to actually start. At 30 minutes you start to wonder if an actual film is going to start soon and by 45 minutes its now clear this is the film and your gonna get a 10 min video at the end of actual found footage showing the missing persons last video recording.
Your final hope is that this 10 - 15 minute video the entire 'film' has been building upto is going to be interesting, or scary at least. Ideally it would be impressive to counteract the complete waste of the prior hour. Its not.
Completely relying on the darkness and poor quality camera to disguise what is essentially 10 minutes of looking at bushes, a weird looped noise in the background and precisely 2 jump scares which are basically a dude wearing a 14 year old childs paper mache art project on his head. Absolutely nothing about who/what/why its there or even what happened.
Just a complete let down after having to deal with the hour that preceeded it.
There is low/no budget and there is also low/no effort. This absolutely falls into the second category, it takes nothing to come up with a interesting story. It takes nothing to go out and actually take footage. This film just does the absolute bare minimum and is reliant on trickery to be classed as an actual film and not a 10 minute youtube short. In fact thats insulting to some of the quality short low budget films out there on youtube.
No idea how anyone would enjoy this, but people obviously have done, so who knows anymore.
His House (2020)
Decent film, weak horror
Was an enjoyable film that really does grip you with some nice touches and dark comedy mixed in.
I felt as a horror movie though the scares and horror elements were not particularly interesting, scary or coherent.
Good film overall, but if your looking explicitly for a horror movie then I don't think this scratches the itch personally.
Hannibal (2013)
Hannibal: An honest review
I checked IMDb for a TV series to watch and to my joy one of my favourite film series of all time had been serialised and received a mega 8.6!
I was willing this to be a great TV series. The truth is its not.
If you have a brain, you will begin to notice that Hannibal is one of the most ridiculous TV programmes you have ever seen. It is a thriller designed for people who are so stupid they don't actually care how a man cuts open his own chest and then pins his own lungs to his back and then proceeds to crucify himself 30 feet in the air on the rafters of a barn, alone and without the aid of a ladder and for the brightest murder investigators in the FBI to accept this as a plausible suicide.
The people this was written for stopped thinking after being told a guy kills people and pins their lungs in a 45 degree angle from their shoulders so they look like angel wings, because somehow this is cool so we don't really care if the writers then proceed to make the rest of the story impossible and verging on being supernatural. The Hannibal Lecter series has nothing to do with the supernatural.
Hannibal Lecter is a hard act to follow, so I forgive the casting of some emotionless European guy who can't act, however the Anthony Hopkins version got inside not only the FBI investigators and serial killers he conversed with heads, but he got inside ours, the viewers head. This guy couldn't get into a prostitutes underwear with $100, such is his screen presence and charisma in this show.
Think about Lecters iconic scenes in the films, how he escapes from that cage through sheer genius, guts, insanity and a fountain pen. However implausible it seems it was explained and every detail this mastermind escape was delivered to the audience. You could see how the FBI were fooled by a genius psychopath. Even you were fooled, as if you had seen a magic trick! It makes sense once you knew how he did it, sheer magic. The writers in this serialisation make no attempt to be even a tenth as intelligent.
They don't explain anything. Like why is a psychologist cannibal almost immediately invited to every crime scene after one meeting where he does nothing? How does said psychologist manage to slip off, murder and then impale teenage girl at the crime scene they are travelling to before they get there? Why is a stupid online journalist considered to be as powerful as the FBI? Why does said journalist not get arrested even though she has literally broken 10 laws per episode (that they know about) and impedes the course of justice constantly. Why do the FBI seem powerless to stop her? Why do apparently worldly and intelligent people not know the difference in taste between human insides and pork? WHY ALL THE IMAGERY OF STAGS AND ANTLERS!!!
I could literally go on forever, this TV series is so bad. If anyone else performed this badly in their jobs they would be fired and a note put on their permanent record advising that they never work in their business again, yet the writers of Hannibal got a second series.... I have heard of dumbing down but surely no one would watch this and actually think it's remotely thrilling, psychological or intelligent in anyway.
The reviews that call this a 'Psychological thriller at its finest' or 'The thriller you've been waiting for on T.V', are written by people who wouldn't know a thriller if it called them on their mobile and said 'Hello Agent Starling'.
It stinks so bad I am literally amazed by the reviews written here, this is half the reason I have decided to offer an alternative critique such is the level of unintelligence I see amongst the user reviews for this TV series.
The writing is so bad there are parts I am sure are completely improvised. Like the writers didn't write enough content to fill an entire 50 minutes so they pay Laurence Fishburne extra to improvise scenes with different members of the cast for the last 15-20 minutes. Seriously, there is an episode where they spend 20 minutes of different people reacting to news a completely unimportant unseen to this point character has cancer, and then jump to the killer of the episode having killed himself in the stupidest way possible. Out of no where.
I have not even gone over the terrible acting, the awful attempts to build character relationships overusing the phrase 'are you OK?', bad casting, lazy thoughtless writing, total lack of research in every possible area and sheer stupidity at every level. From police, to FBI, to doctors, to forensic scientists, to serial killers.. Everyone in this show is stupid.
This show is so unrealistic it is possible that in a future series finale it turns out that the whole show is Jack Shephard from Lost's dream.
I am worn out from thinking about this shows flaws so I am gonna stop and I will summarise like this. If you like Lost, or you're being paid five dorrah by the producers of Hannibal to vote this as 10, then this is the TV thriller for you. If you have a brain then I would suggest you re watch the films as this TV show is as stupid as Paris Hilton. In fact Paris Hiltons 'My new BFF' is more realistic and her most recent work 'The world according to Paris' is both more intelligent and more thrilling then Hannibal the TV show.
The only reason I haven't given this a 1 is because Laurence Fishburne is in it.
The Oxford Murders (2008)
Oxford Murders lacks intelligence
I was optimistic that The Oxford Murders would be a clever and interesting story. Unfortunately it was as far from this as possible.
I have never written a film review before and was so deeply unimpressed by this film that I was compelled to share my views. I find it very upsetting to think that the amount of money that was spent on this film could be wasted in such a manner.
The film struggles on every level. Bad acting, coupled with a poorly written script and ill thought out plot plague this film from the offset. It simply fails to capture the imagination.
The film is based in the English town of Oxford, famed worldwide for it's university and intellectual breeding. The plot centers around the relationship between a American exchange student, martin, and a lecturer at the university. The pair, somewhat oddly, become entailed in a series of pointless and quite pathetic 'murders'.
A theasaurus happy writer has quite obviously engineered this film for Hollywood and it is largely for this reason that the film is so bad. The film tries to link complex mathematics and murder, apparently the murderer is leaving some kind of mathematical sequence at each murder. This is a common theme throughout the film, however it is quite sad that the writers think the viewers of this film will mistake basic secondary level concepts for nobel prize winning intellect.
Painful examples of this lurk round every corner, like in one scene Martin and his Tutor are in the police station, they are talking about the murders and a symbol left at the first crime scene. Martin explains the fibonacci series word for word and is giving a impressed look from his tutor who is apparently a famous theoretical mathematician. Most children in England learn the Fibonacci series before they are 16.
It appears as if no research has been carried out either. English characters are displayed whith such stereotypical generalism and it appears as if all extras that are in the film are in fact deformed in some way. Oxford is a village, and it is quite apparent that this version of Oxford looks like a cross between medieval england and the last of the summer wine (english country drama).
From the thick police inspector and his daft side kick to crazy Russian (I say Russian, but you would have no clue what nationality he actually is based on the appalling acting of this character) mathematician. In fact the majority of characters in this film are completely irrelevant and actually serve nothing towards the plot.
Being obviously aimed at Hollywood with every single basic academic principle being completely explained for the obvious benefit of the 'stupid' public, they obviously needed female relationships to complete this film. The sex scene is especially haunting, Elijah Woods pale and childlike figure is something which I would not wish on any man or women.
The acting is of the lowest standard bar the performance of John Hurt, who is makes the best of an awful script and plot. The extras and cameo characters are so bad and Elijah Wood can only act in films which are special effect and fantasy based as they take the emphasis off of the actual acting.
These issues are really only sub issues in comparison to the main problem. The plot.
It really is sad to watch the plot embroil, from the detective inspectors who seem to share case files, car lifts and murder evidence with apparent murder suspects or perhaps maybe the strange cello playing daughter who falls it is later explained fell in love with Martin after meeting him once briefly for ten minutes and sharing a conversation. It could be the beautiful foreign student who is Martins main love interest, who it is explained used to be in a relationship with a 70 year old looking lecturer before hand, although she cannot be over 20 in the film. Or perhaps it is the murder sequence which developed which apparently took 2 police officers, a super intelligent student and world famous lecturer a age and a day to solve, which was eventually one of the most basic and simple series i think i have ever seen.
In one impossible scene a man dies whilst playing a musical instrument and falls off of the stage in front of a packed crowd, in which police were sat. It is later explained with the cheesiest cut scene i have ever seen that after this guy fell of the stage and died, someone sneaked onto the stage in full view of everyone and apparently snuck a clue into the music book on the bandstand! Even though it is explained that at that the time the character in question is being followed and watched by police and the police officer who is watching the suspect is even shown as the camera moves over to him! I think I have had my rant and am finding it to painful to continue conveying the endless flaws which stalk this film so I will stop now. To be honest I am not really discouraging anyone to watch this, i am more upset with the quality of films which talent writers drill out in the quickest possible time because they think they are above everyone else. Please do not waste money on rubbish films like these, it is very depressing.