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Skeleton Crew (2009 Video)
1/10
A demented doctor gets into film making!
28 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
The tag line for this offering from the bowel of Satan is 'There's no sequel for you'; and trust me…if you have the balls to stick with this pile of steaming poop through to the bitter end, you'll thank all that you hold to be holy that there won't be.

I don't know where to start really. The plot is the most contrived that you'll ever wish to see in and grade F movie…I won't even dignify this with the honorific of a 'B' movie…that would be an insult.

Basically a film crew turns up at a derelict Asylum somewhere on the border of Russia…it never really explains the location…where 30 years previously a demented doctor decided to go into the film making business by turning out his own snuff movies by using the inmates as his cast. The erstwhile medic then disappeared taking the majority of his footage with him. The modern day crew turn up to re-create the events in a schlock horror movie.

The plot then, of course, is totally predictable as the new director assumes the mantle of his real-life predecessor and starts joyfully killing off the cast and crew in various horrific ways.

Let me talk for just a moment about the actor who portrays this new and improved homicidal maniac; I feel he has to have special mention, although there is plenty of guilt to go around. His name is Steve Porter. Don't bother getting too attached to his performance, which is the most wooden one I've seen since Pinocchio, as I can almost guarantee after this movie we won't be seeing him again…unless it's on his mug shot as he is led away by the police after being arrested for crimes against the viewing public. I mean, he can't help looking like a refugee Amish extra from 'Witness'…I won't hold that against him. But why the hell does he have to deliver every line like he's an alumni from the William Shatner school of acting? He was awful. The stick up his ass looked like it had a stick up its ass. His manic eye-rolling teeth-baring performance as an insane killer was silly to the point of being ludicrous. I cringed as I watched it, but for all the wrong reasons. It wasn't fear it was embarrassment.

Finnish director Tommi Lepola who also made that unforgettable 2003 classic Kohatalon Kirja (aka 'The book of fate'…remember that one? Of course you don't!) puts the action together in a totally lackluster way…you can almost feel his desperation in every scene as he quickly comes to the inescapable conclusion that he is working with the absolute WORST bunch of actors, writers and continuity people since the immortal Ed Wood graced the silver screen and tries to salvage something from this rapidly sinking tugboat of a movie.

But despite all their combined efforts…or perhaps because of them…the end product had the inevitability of a low speed car crash.

Lepola also seems to have a predilection with actresses with large butts. It was almost like you couldn't act in his movie unless your ass reached a certain weight; it was quite Bizarre. All I have to say on that particular subject, is some people should definitely wear clothes. Or at least underwear that actually fits. It really did add insult to injury.

Suffice to say, that the cast ran the gamut of emotions from A to…well… to A really.

Skeleton Crew was bad. Not just bad in the conventional sense as in badly written, acted, or directed…but unwholesome like biting into a rotten apple or taking a mouthful of sour milk. It was violence and gore, for the sake of it…gratuitous lesbian sex that had NO real relationship to the plot, other than trying to appeal to people's baser instincts. All in all it left a nasty taste in my mouth.

I now live in mortal dread that any of these people involved would ever option one of my own stories for the movie rights.

Avoid this awful rubbish like a dose of terminal hemorrhoids, unless you really are, like me, in pursuit of the worst horror movie ever made!
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The Snow Spider (1988– )
2/10
A contrived tale involving apparent Celt magic in a bleak farming community in rural wintry Wales.
11 July 2007
I didn't see this when it came out, thank God...but sadly I was forced to watch it on video with my youngest a couple of weeks ago. What the redoubtable Sian Phillips was doing in this contrived, garbled steaming pile of Welsh pony poop is beyond me. The effects were (understandably) lamentable, the script contrived. The basic crux of the plot about a 'disappearing' sister stretched this watcher's credulity almost to its limit. But at least the dull, lackluster ending sucked big-time. Overall, I'd have to say this should be avoided. And if Nimmo's original tale is anything like this, it will be one of those books that you put down and can't pick up again. AVOID!
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1/10
Criminal!
1 November 2006
This movie is bad. I don't just mean 'bad' as in; "Oh the script was bad", or; "The acting in that scene was bad".....I mean bad as in someone should be held criminally accountable for foisting this unmitigated pile of steaming crud onto an unsuspecting public. I won't even dignify it with an explanation of the (Plot??) if I can refer to it as that.I can think of only one other occasion in some 40-odd years of movie watching that I have found need to vent my spleen on a movie. I mean, after all, no one goes out to intentionally make a bad movie, do they? Well, yes. Apparently they do...and the guilty man is writer/director Ulli Lommel. But the worst of it is that Blockbusters is actually renting this to their customers! Be advised. Leave this crap where it belongs. Stuck on the shelf, gathering dust.
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