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svenjins
Reviews
Faust: Love of the Damned (2000)
How in the heck did anyone rate this beyond 1 star?
Holy moly, what the heck happened here? Brian Yuzna...you're better than this! I've seen you do better than this! How did you make something this hideously AWFUL?
I watched this because it has Andrew Divoff and Jeffery Combs in it. Well, at least both of them are fun to watch as always, but they're only as good as the awful material will let them be. It seriously, truly feels like they shot this from the first draft of the script, and that said draft was written by a high school dropout goth. The two leads are horrifically awful. Frost hams it up something fierce as John Jasper. Hamming is probably too generous a word. He has absolutely no idea what he's doing and uses idiotic facial expressions to fill in his complete lack of any talent whatsoever. Brook is nearly as bad, just slumming it hideously the whole way through.
The makeup is awful, with Faust's outfit looking like the cheap rubber that it is. His Wolverine-knockoff claws look like flimsy plastic and bounce around everywhere. You really don't believe that he could cut through a car roof with them. The story lurches around and barely manages to stick together. The characters have no dimension to them. They do things because the script wants them to, not because it actually fits their paper-thin character in any possible way. They just do what's necessary to move things along. There's no motivation here beyond "The director and writer said to!" One minute, the lead chick loathes and fears Faust, and the next minute they start shagging. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yuzna, how did you mess this up so BADLY? At least his other efforts have managed to be fun. Reanimator, From Beyond, Dagon (I know, he wasn't the director, but he was heavily involved in creative direction), etc may not have been great movies, but they were fun cult flicks. Faust isn't fun at all. It's not even so bad it's fun. It's just nigh-unwatchably horrid.
How this movie won ANY kind of award other than a Razzie is something that I will never grasp even if God himself came down and explained it to me. Do yourself a favor and miss this. If you want to see Divoff being sinister, go watch Wishmaster. If you want to see Combs doing his fun hamming (and I mean that in a good way. Combs is fun to watch), go watch Reanimator, From Beyond, or The Frighteners. If you want to see something that will make you truly believe that you've wasted 92 minutes of your life beyond anything you could imagine, watch Faust.
Dead Silence (2007)
Awful, bare-bones piece of junk.
This movie is terrible. It's a knockoff of Darkness Falls, which itself wasn't very good, but this makes it look like The Exorcist. I was surprised to see the cast was that long, because outside of one flashback scene, there were probably less than a dozen people in this whole stinking movie.
The entire thing hinges on creepy ventriloquist dummies. However, that angle wears thin pretty quickly. The rest of it is a meandering mess with poorly or non-defined characters who's actions make no sense, a town that is conveniently as abandoned as the lazy hack writer needed it to be, a lot of stretching, contrivances and conveniences (really, in all that time, nobody found her creepy dummy room? The one that was right in the danged theater??)...and that's about it. This movie had a bare framework and didn't bother putting anything on it.
Whoever said this is how horror should be needs to stop watching movies completely. This movie was awful. Sorry, but you have to rely on more than just a cheap gimmick to make a movie properly scary. It's also helpful to make it believable and give us characters with which we can empathize. This movie does none of that and instead gives you a script-by-the- numbers small town mystery ghost story, tosses in dummies, and expects that to scare us. Ugh. Don't even bother with this.
Warehouse 13 (2009)
Awful, poorly-executed show.
This show has a whopping two things going for it, and those are:
1. A good concept. This idea isn't entirely new, but it has great possibilities. 2. Artie, who is the best developed and acted character on the show.
That's it. Those are about the only positive things about this show. The characters are mostly paper-thin or utterly unbelievable. Pete is completely out of place. He's a Secret Service agent...yet he's also way too much of a goofball and doesn't seem to take many things seriously, which you kind of have to do as an SS agent. He bounces around from goofy to flat to jerk whenever it's convenient. His acting is lousy, too. Myka isn't much better. She's cynical and at least puts on the guise of being more professional, but it still falls flat. That and her lips make her look like a friggin' goldfish. Claudia is a walking stereotype who's only purpose is to irritate Artie and act as an utterly ludicrous contrivance. She's the Gyro Gearloose of the series, just tossing artifacts, electronics, and software together within the space of an hour like they're lego bricks when it's convenient to the show. Leena doesn't have a character. She reads auras, runs the B&B, and makes cookies. That's about it.
But the crumminess of this show doesn't end there. The writers are utterly AWFUL. Not only did they make lousy characters, but the show is completely littered with contrivances, convenient coincidences, and a complete lack of development when there are far too many possibilities. The plot of just about every episode is poorly-developed and moves along when something convenient happens because the writers aren't competent enough to craft a good narrative. Artifacts are almost always so-and-so's such-and-such, which is fine once in a while, but when almost every artifact just happens to be an item from some famous person, then it's just plain lazy. The Warehouse itself was staffed by a whopping ONE person in the beginning, two if you count Leena, who just seems to hop in and out whenever she feels like it. This massive warehouse filled with a multitude of dangerous objects gets ONE person to run it. Give me a break! Opportunities are missed left and right. There is a lot of potential for some good, creepy episodes, but the show never really bothers with this. At one point, the characters have to go through the "Dark Vault" where the really dangerous stuff is kept. What do we get to see? A grinning baby doll is briefly seen, and that could've been nice and creepy, but instead, Pete gets stuck in front of an emotion-sucking typewriter. REALLY? That's the best they can do?? R. L. Stine could write better episodes than this!
That's only scratching the surface. As another reviewer pointed out, it seems that they're spending more on the music budget than on the effects, which are utterly awful to the point that they pull you out of the show, assuming you ever got into it in the first place. The directing is lazy and sloppy. Need I go on?
The Lost Room handled this sort of thing exponentially better than Warehouse 13 ever could, but did Syfy (I hate that name) pick it up for more episodes? Nope, they went for junk like this instead. It's really sad. Instead of more Warehouse 13, they should bring that back, or someone should work out the rights to turn The SCP Foundation into a TV show, which could also be far better than this crap. Don't waste your time with this show unless you're bored out of your skull and want some poorly-made fluff to watch.
Twilight (2008)
This movie was garbage.
Good adaptation? Excellent movie? I hope those of you writing these reviews never watch another movie again. I'm marking it as "spoiler" because it MIGHT contain some small ones, but if you go see this movie, it's already spoiled, rotted, and dessicated without any help from me.
This movie stank. It was inept on almost every level. The acting was mediocre at best, the characters were poorly developed, the camera work was painful at times, the effects were laughably bad, the wirework is the worst I've ever seen, and the whole story is so ludicrous that I wanted to rip my hair out.
First off, these aren't vampires. Dracula was a vampire. These "vampires" have almost nothing in common aside from drinking blood and being immortal and...wait, that's it. They walk in the daylight (and ooh! They sparkle, because teenie girls love sparkles!), they don't have fangs, they don't sleep in coffins, turn into bats, don't have an aversion to silver or garlic, walk over running water, don't mind crosses...the list goes on. Some of that is forgivable, but all of it? Nope. This is yet another pop-culture pussification of vampires, turning them into something ludicrous and throwing almost all the mythology out the window. Give me a nightwalking, bloodsucking, evil minion of the devil any day of the week. Don't call the Twilight "vampires" by that name because, quite frankly, they're not.
Was the director of this movie high the whole time? Did she bother to try directing the actors, much less go over their dialog and realize that no normal human being would talk like that? The culmination of the two would be Bella blubbering in bed at the end for Edward to not leave her. I almost burst out laughing, but by then my soul had been sapped to the point that I thought laughter would be impossible. And I think her only direction for the vampires was, "Okay, ready, set, ACTION! Okay guys, SMOLDER! SMOLDER! SMOLDER!", because that's about the extent of the vampire "acting" in this movie. Lots of smoldering looks and very little else. And couldn't she have made sure the effects weren't awful? Seriously, who could have seen the fast vampire effect and thought it looked better than Scifi channel original movie effects? Did the director blow all the budget on crack to use while she was making this? And what was with the horrid wirework? Seriously. Watch Edward jumping from his window to the tree outside and see how he moves in a perfectly straight line. Watch the bad vampire jump over Bella and watch how his trajectory dips, then arcs UP, then drops in front of her. It's unbelievable. And did anyone else notice how the camera-work in the woods when Bella says she knows that Edward is a vampire was pointless and utterly distracting? Sorry, but that's not a good way to convey what was happening. Try again. Oh, wait, the studio decided you couldn't. Sorry.
Why the heck is Edward so dreamy? He's a creepy stalker! He sneaks into Bella's room at night and watches her sleep? Oooh, so romantic! I sneak into a girl's room at night to watch her sleep? Pepper spray, a boot to the balls, and lots of community service. He follows her around wherever she goes? Nah, not stalking at all. He's just enamored with her and it's sooo dreamy! What a hairy load. Setting aside his saving her life twice (a contrivance so they can speed things up and they don't have to make them fall in love the old fashioned way), Edward could do anything to her and it would be so wonderful. I cannot understand that. Maybe that's why so many women will date total jerks and excuse everything they do. It explains a lot, actually.
Sorry, but his movie is crap. Those who love it are likely so whipped up into a fervor about the book being turned into a movie that they'd watch anything with Edward in it. It could be Hostel 3: Vampire Style with Edward ripping limbs off of Bella in a bloodbath and it would be wonderful to them. Girls, I know you're obsessed with this fictional character in ways that only hardcore comic book nerds could ever hope to match, but please, step out of that bubble and actually WATCH the movie. Please. We don't need any more lazy, crappy cinema staining the multiplex screens. There's enough of that coming out of Hollywood these days. My wife loves the books (and I get to hear all about them...groan), but at least she's not so wrapped up in it that she couldn't admit the movie sucked. She's at least got that going for her. Other fans with claw your eyes out if you dare speak ill of it. Makes me wanna puke.
Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (2008)
Not nearly as good as the first
SPOILER ALERT!
I enjoyed the heck out of Feast. It was a fun and sometimes creepy survival horror monster movie that struck the right balance of scary with not taking itself too seriously. It had some great gore that was just comical enough. Well, I just watched Feast 2 and have to say that I'm disappointed.
Feast was a pretty graphic flick. Goring, dismemberment, faces getting torn off, maggots in eye sockets, and little monsters face-porking biker chicks and giving them a mouthful of monster spunk. Feast 2 tries to push the envelope even further, but it tries way too hard and is too obvious about it. There are some good moments, but those are lost in the sea of "Look! We're even more graphic than the first!" moments.
The dissection scene was particularly irritating. The dead monster farts, barfs, craps, and blows a load all over everyone. It got old pretty darn fast. Then there's the giant eyeball and mouth inside it, which made no sense at all and didn't ever have a purpose in the film. The monsters pile the bodies up, but they only show up when it's convenient and can be outrun and outmaneuvered (way too easily, I might add) when they need to be. These monsters also seem fatter, slower, and cheaper than those of the first.
Then there's the baby scene. This was utterly pointless beyond "Hey look! We killed a kid in a wheelchair in the first, now we're going to have a graphic baby death! Aren't we pushing the envelope?" It was so forced. The guy swings down from the roof on a cable, grabs the kid (which has been sitting in a car for a day and nobody noticed, not even the monsters), runs off and slips past the monsters WAY too easily, then somehow swings back onto the roof from the ground, and nobody helps him up as he slips off. Then he tosses the baby away as he runs, even though that's the whole reason he went down. Utterly stupid, and the slow-mo of the baby falling was stupid as well.
Or how about the first biker chick getting taken out? Even though most of them are armed, they run inside and let her get killed. Yep, makes perfect sense.
Or how about those midgets? Sure, midgets are fun, but it seems the only reason to use them was to stuff the midget fight scene into it and have a midget with half his guts ripped out lying in the street. Oh, and he was still crawling around and seemed perfectly conscious after being torn in half.
This movie just tried too hard and fell way short of the original as a result. Sure, there were some good bits, but this flick got exasperating pretty quick.
The Producers (2005)
A direct translation from stage, and dull as a result
I rented this hoping for some good old tasteless Mel Brooks humor. I loved Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, Young Frankenstein, etc. Mel Brooks is a comedic genius...sometimes. The problem with The Producers is that it was taken directly from the stageplay without bothering to do any kind of visual adaptation. It looked like it was filmed right on the stage set most of the time, complete with the same costumes, lines, and even the same blocking. What works on stage does not necessarily work on film, and The Producers is a shining example of that. I found myself chuckling occasionally and laughing a few times, but for the most part, I was flat-out bored. From what I understand, the original film was much better.