panik65 Reviews

Suicide Squad (2016)

Rock Bottom

[1/10 · 16 November 2016]

How bad was this? It was bad. It was so bad a stranger next to me killed himself. It was so bad yellow tape was stretched around the theater during the showing and the theater declared an "intellectual Superfund" site. It was so bad that the audience amused themselves by correcting the actors' grammar. Everything about this movie is simply terrible. It is vapid, banal, safe, corporate, unimaginative, lazy, amateur, sophomoric, predictable, precious and most of all? BORING.

Imagine the 25 worst music videos you've ever seen, back to back, except with the same idiotic looking morons in each one. This movie is practically a musical of canned music. You can hear the idiot writers high fiving each other as they say: "Oh man, we'll set that scene to "Paranoid"! Dude! It'll be awesome!" No, it isn't. Your movie sucks. And I mean "Human Centipede" level of suck. As in people sewn together and forced to suck level of suckitude. You suck and your movie sucks.

Cell (I) (2016)

passable entertainment, until the end

[2/10 · 12 June 2016]

Stephen King can write good sentences here and there, even paragraphs, but god does he not understand anything else. He certainly doesn't have anything interesting to say. As usual with a King based script, be prepared for some of the most awkward characters and dialog you've ever heard. This was a passable apocalypse movie until it started taking itself seriously. Yes, this is a "zombie" movie, but the "zombies" here are not actually dead, which was a relief. There is no excuse anyone can conceive of that would enable dead creatures to be walking about, let alone eating things, and not getting consumed by, well, all the things on this earth that consume dead things very efficiently and quickly. Anyway, the film meanders around for about 90 minutes and then it ends. And the ending is so terrible one wonders why they even made this. King never knows how to end anything, so he goes for the cheapest shot imaginable. So long as it's "unexpected" King thinks it's good. The problem is, King always tries for the shock or unexpected ending and most always it has nothing to do with the story or is some revelation that is introduced just to end the movie, out of nowhere. It's not good. Don't bother watching this.

Extraction (II) (2015)

By the numbers action thriller

[5/10 · 22 December 2015]

Nothing wrong with this film, it's what it is: very formulaic and predictable with high production values and action scenes. CIA Dad, who is villainous and murderous himself, get's caught in a sticky situation as CIA son, who is an institutional failure, must rescue him, as CIA son is of course the only one who knows what's going on and where CIA dad is being held captive. CIA son of course inadvertently uncovers a deep institutional betrayal in which his tattered, nuclear family somehow wins and becomes transcendent. A murdered mother is avenged but it has zero dramatic power, but it's excusable as they didn't take it too seriously. Does it deliver? Not really, but then it isn't boring either. Nevertheless It's being dissed as "straight to DVD" (which is true) but compared to the junk released in theaters, it's probably above average, really. Nothing special, nothing terrible, perhaps worth a watch on a rainy day. Not bad enough to be funny, not good enough to pay 100% attention to, it's more or less "just there".

The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997)

The only good documentary on this subject I've seen

[10/10 · 30 April 2009]

I second what a lot of other reviewers have said, but only add this. Ruthless, authoritarian governments are often portrayed as being "efficient" - one of Mussolinis mottos was that he would "keep the trains running on time." The Nazi propaganda machine pushed this image of the efficiency of fascism so well it persists to this day. This documentary show the reality - the Nazi's were grossly incompetent as cronyism very quickly set in, as it does in all such tyrannical states. I'm also tired of this myth that the Nazis "almost won" - they did not only not "almost win" WW2, they got completely obliterated and got their own country destroyed.

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Beautiful and Astounding Cinema

[1/10 · 20 October 2008]

OK, as a histery major at a MAJOR American university, I'll tell you right off the bat this film had some serious problems with its histery - where was the Titantic? Doesn't Bay know it was sunk at Pearl Harbor along with the Battleship Lusitania? And what was with that Dr. Doolittle raid? Dr. Doolittle was a Canadian zookeeper, not a bomber pilot. And it wasn't an air raid that devastated Vietnam after Pearl Harbor, it was Texas-sized planet killer asteroids dropped from stealth planes. Didn't Bay see "Final Countdown"? And when did Ben Affleck become, like, a fighter pilot? They could at least have given him a jet plane, or used Tom Cruise, who is a real jet pilot. Other than these ridiculous hitorical innaccurasies, it was a great summer blockbuster film! The sizzling chemistry between the two pilots was amazing and heartwarming. Cuba Gooding was fantastic as the black sailor, OMG OMG OMG I didn't even know they had black people back then (and I'm not alone on that one ask any white person)! I watched this with my grandmother and she agreed there weren't any black peeple at the time too, so this film is HIGHLY progressive too.

Basically it was about like, these totally cool people, like Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett and all these geeks, who were like, foreign or something and totally evil dorks who can't even speak English. Then the cool people like totally kick the their geek Vietnamese butts. We'll be renting this film for decades to come.Sure it wasn't highbrow, but that isn't what films are for. If you want highbrow just watch Fox News like every other American.

The Boondock Saints (1999)

An abysmally stupid film

[1/10 · 14 August 2007]

Capsule review: Think Dirty Harry or Death Wish as vomited up on the screen by formerly molested altar boy who has just seen Pulp Fiction.

It's an "angry white dude" vigilante movie for the oi/fascist/skinhead crowd, since Dirty Harry just isn't cool anymore, Clint Eastwood's too old, Charles Bronson doesn't have enough tattoos, and well, Rambo's too establishment.

I was not bothered by the "ridiculousness" of the movie, nor the poor production quality. It's just stupid and offensive, that's all. How do you make catholicism hip? I know! have them kill people while reciting their prayers in Latin! Yeah, that's it! Catholicism's now part of the hip, sadistic, Tarantino-fueled counterculture!

On some level the movie is at times enjoyable, but it's so stupid and reactionary. Psychopathic reactionaries like Troy Duffy seem to have hit the "hip jackpot" of blood, guns, snuff & torture scenes, heavily choreographed "slow mo" shootouts and fake, "snappy" dialog replete with obscure pop culture references ... it really seems to have a never ending appeal with the troglodyte population of the USA.

Sorry, there's just no way to make Christianity "hip," not all the snuff gore in the world will do that.

(it's already been tried)

Deacons for Defense (2003 TV Movie)

Good Film about a little known group

[8/10 · 29 July 2007]

The only nitpick I have with this film is that it is obviously NOT filmed in Bogalusa, LA. It also does not show the poverty of African Americans who lived and worked there - one gets the impression the blacks there were leading perfectly cozy middle class lives, save for racial segregation and oppression. These folks did not live in 3 bedroom nicely decorated, cozy homes. They live in what amounts to shanties and the poverty there is third world. Bogalusa is not some idyllic looking, charming small town. It is a very depressing, gloomy place, centered around a paper mill which smells horrible (and you can smell it all over town). By not showing this it disconnects racial oppression from how bad the economic oppression was (and still is), and it's always there.

Other than that, the Deacons rock, and predated the Panthers by several years.

Penitentiary III (1987)

unbelievable - FEEL IT IN THE GUTS!

[10/10 · 15 August 2004]

This film is one of the greatest human achievements ever. A boxer, "Too Sweet," framed for murder, is sent to prison where he must fight a crack smoking, inmate raping, kung fu midget called the "Midnight Thud." At first "Midnight" is a snarling beast, the willing retainer of another homosexual inmate - Serengetti - and his tranny 'girlfriend' and does nothing but smoke crack in his dungeon (yes, there is a dungeon) beneath the prison and snarl. Episodically he is released by his handlers (prison guards wearing welding suits and masks!) to discipline various inmates. In fact, his mere existence seems to threaten the manhood of the entire prison. There is evidently a LOT of crack smoking going on down there, since the floor of the dungeon is knee high in billowing crack smoke. Also, there are no women in this film, only transexuals. Even Too Sweets 'conjugal visit' near the end was clearly not a (biological) woman.

Later we discover 'Thud' is a great martial arts trainer and enjoys smoking expensive tobacco from fancy pipes (as well as crack), and he eventually trains Too Sweet - in a Rocky style montage episode - to win the prison boxing match. Wouldn't you win too if a three foot crack addict was yelling "ENEMA TOO SWEET!" in YOUR corner?

The absurdity of this movie isn't a slow burn but a head scratching, perfectly ballistic sustained crescendo; it never lets up, escalating into a jaw dropping finale. Bravo!

Armageddon (1998)

Absolutely horrible

[1/10 · 2 September 2003]

This movie is utterly worthless, I've never seen anything so vapid, loud and obnoxious in my life.

You can get the same effect as this movie by jumping up and down screaming, crashing cymbals next to your ears and waving American flags while looking at a cardboard cut out or Bruce Willis.

Unimaginably bad. Anyone who thinks this is a good movie has an IQ under 40.