Recensioni di Vvardenfell_Man

The first act of this film is very strong. Special credit to the scenic and lighting design on the set of the airship Albatross, where gels are used to great effect to simulate the ship's motion in the sky and the effect of stained-glass windows set (improbably) into the Captain's cabin. Unfortunately it gets dull quickly: we as an audience are asked to sympathize with the most boring fishes-out-of-water imaginable against the charismatic Captain of the Albatross (who is more recognizably a hero to modern eyes than the people fighting to uphold a Victorian-era global balance of power against the progress of industry). 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a much better film, but this is fun.

This movie starts out strong. The first 20 minutes are excellent in terms of set design. There are some decent effects that lure the viewer in, an intriguing find in outer space that promises to be enough to move the plot along, even a zombie robot thing that builds itself out of junk and spare human body parts--all in the first 20 minutes! Unfortunately, this promising start is followed by 15 minutes of banal dialogue (in a hospital, in a bar, on the moon...), tiny sets, and bad miniature effects. Of course, before we start on the bad miniatures, we briefly show a painting of the lunar surface--not a matte painting, just a painting. It would have been so much cooler if they'd used a matte painting there instead of presumably spending the entire effects budget on the open sequence.

This movie is just awful. It's laughable premise becomes unbearable by the end of the long runtime. It's like Final Destination if bees were responsible for every death and nothing visually interesting ever happened. Every time a character says "bees" it's hard not to laugh out loud. Why its belabored concept needs to be stretched out for so long is beyond me. It's like a failed homage to the structure of a '50s B-movie with the visual style of '70s thrillers. It all sucks.

Also unsettling is the use of the term "African" throughout the film and their "invasion" of the United States. Not only is the metaphor belabored, it's also implicitly (explicitly?) racist. Great job, everyone!

This film sucks. The acting sucks, the sets suck, the lighting sucks, the sound sucks, the writing sucks, and everything else sucks. There's no reason to think that the people who worked on this product should be held up for ridicule, though. They knew what they were making and they made it effectively.

Rarely is a SyFy original as spectacularly sub-par as this. It lacks everything that a real good bad movie needs to hold an audience's attention. The sound is really what kills it. Everything is too quiet, especially the music. With a better score and crisper dialogue (or lines delivered audibly) this might be better.

It's like a materialist version of David Lynch's Dune crossed with an episode of Star Trek TNG. The ideas at play in this film are wonderfully powerful. The more recently released version of this film is a choppy mess that fails to attain a coherent plot. By focusing on telling a story rather than pioneering a pointless visual style, the 1989 version manages to get the point across without sacrificing character. Locations are fairly bland but also excellent choices for this story. It's a sword-and-spaceship epic with important social and political messages. I would highly recommend watching this film whether or not you enjoyed Aleksei German's film of the same English title.

This is like Power Rangers meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meets Spawn. It's not particularly inventive, it's not particularly fun, but there are people in monster costumes running around and fighting each other. The main draw is the costumes themselves, which are probably too good for this movie--way too much thought went into the giant sexy Furby suit. This is classic Brian Yuzna excess.

The largest problem (other than the boring characters) is the pacing. It feels like the plot barely moves until the end of the second act. There's an interesting twist at that point, but by the time it comes along the tone has already been set and it feels like an escalation in a bizarre direction. Visually interesting as it may be, this film offers nothing you haven't seen before in more tonally consistent superhero films; give it a watch if you want something that put too much thought into everything but structure.

This should be treated as a model for how comedy ought to be done. It's got an incredible pace, it's got a perfectly serviceable plot, there's just so much to commend about the humor at play here. Weird Al has never not been at his best. Very few artists can compare to him. It's just that simple. The fact that his medium is comedy just makes it all the more impressive.

This film has aged ridiculously well. You don't have to know anything about the Beverly Hillbillies or Dire Straits or even MTV to enjoy the song that parodies all of these things. Not only is that an excellent song in its own right: in the context of the film, it's a hallucinatory dream sequence that kicks off a comedic ramp-up that doesn't end until catharsis has been earned and delivered.

I don't understand what this is trying to say. The costumes, the setting, the casting--they all add up to nonsense. Ian McKellen has never looked so much like he's phoning in his performance. Maybe that's just how an older Hamlet is supposed to be played, but that's where better casting would have helped. He's so old compared to everyone else onscreen (and has so obviously given every soliloquy a million times) that the other actors fail to match up with him. McKellen's sullen, sunken, lived-in performance clashes with the more vibrant and 'modern' styles of the younger actors. I don't really see why this exists unless it's to keep up someone's membership in one or another actors union (which is perfectly fine). Very bizarre.

The world is full of terrible holiday musicals, good holiday musicals, and failed holiday hybrid musicals. Most of them are lazy and the ones that come out nowadays tend to be artificial-sounding and miserable affairs. This one does a whole lot of worldbuilding to justify the connection of 2 holidays and character establishment to make us care about the invented Halloween characters. The music is functional, but the styles are varied in the way that supports the story and moves it along while allowing for showcases of the animation department's incredible skill. This is one of the best-animated films of all time. In the age of AI, watching this movie is a reminder of the work that used to be required for any creative work to get off the ground.

This is the second-worst historical epic I've ever seen. It's boring, it's flat, and it's not really at all an accurate or relevant portrayal of Cromwell. I have never watched a more boring movie about such a violent person. At least Ridley Scott's Napoleon was brash in its obstinate stupidity; this film cloaks Cromwell in the trappings of glory, making him out to be a culture hero and minimizing (if it even bothers to mention) the horrible things done by him and his peers. Not worth watching. I have to fit another 100 characters into this review, but it's not worth wasting the space. Fine. Here. Skip this.

This movie is just awful. It's Cinderella as told by someone who has no respect for fairy tales, Titanic as told by someone who doesn't think human life has value, comedy as conceived by a moron, tragedy as practiced by bad stand-up comics. The musical numbers make me wish I didn't have ears.

When the dog starts rapping at about 10 minutes in, my jaw dropped. Somehow this wasn't the worst part of the movie. This story is so overloaded with characters and failed bits of plot that it really isn't easy to summarize, although in every way it is just Cinderella on the Titanic. It's AWFUL. Don't watch it unless you want to experience a terrible animated musical comedy.

This movie builds to a fever pitch of claustrophobic insanity and visual intensity. About halfway through, what has been a relatively controlled piece about a bad rehearsal process becomes a film about an escaped mental patient hacking his way through beautiful bodies under highly stylistic lighting.

About halfway though the movie takes a drastic turn which, if you're familiar with the giallo genre, you probably expected. Still, when the change comes, it's not only the sudden commitment to violence on the part of the filmmaker that's shocking: the staging of at least one kill scene makes the other characters complicit in the act of murder as audience members, implicitly incriminating the film's audience, as well, in a shocking interrogation of the role of the viewer in this sort of production.

It veers off the rails in a big and excellent way and ends up being one of the most unique (and also easy to follow) giallos I've ever seen. The unrelenting score, alternating between hectic string sections and blasts of pure synthetic '80s keyboard crunchiness, is strong and effective. The editing is excellent. The mise-en-scene is fantastic. I love this movie and I wish there were more like it.

It's a cacophonous mess that's ugly to look at and even uglier to think about. The opening scene does nothing to elucidate the plot, but it certainly sets the tone for the movie: ugly and stupid. The women all walk around in swimsuits or underwear the whole time while the men treat them like pieces of meat--I'm not talking about the acting, either; this is one of those terrible exploitation movies where it feels like everybody got coerced or tricked into being there and all the actors look uncomfortable on set. None of the sexuality or violence is presented in a context that makes any sense at all. Do not watch this unless you want to be confused and irritated.

Macaulay Culkin, best known for co-starring with superstar Rich Evans in several RedLetterMedia videos, and Seth Green (best known for his appearance in an X-Files episode) turn in stellar performances here. I dunno, there's just a lot of impressive nuance and dedication here. It's a very gay movie featuring performances by actors who generally aren't associated with that genre, young actors who were best known for their performances as even younger actors, and it works. I could watch these two act like spaced-out imbeciles with delusions of grandeur for...about as long as this movie is. I'm pleasantly surprised (which is enough for me to give it 10 stars).

Classic Full Moon trash. It's like Lifeforce meets Independence Day meets Dazed and Confused. Vampire aliens want to shut off the sun, or something, and it's up to our band of worthless high schoolers who look like they're in their early 30s to stop this nefarious scheme. I'm only giving it 6 stars for audacity. The production quality is exactly what it deserves to be (mediocre) and it doesn't really accomplish anything over the course of the plot. The alien/vampire monsters looked...OK? I dunno. They had decent makeup and costumes, so that's good. This may have been one of the last classic Full Moon movies. I had a hard time finding this because the version I watched was under the title Darkness, for some reason.

For what is apparently a distributor-mandated cash-grab made by a desperate man to help his failing business survive in a market that was shifting underneath his feat, this is pretty damn good. It's a decent B-slasher in the vein of Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. I honestly enjoyed this more than any of the last 3 Scream films. The Full Moon brand isn't really at its finest here but you get plenty of tits and ass (male ass, specifically) and the writing rises above the level of the acting and budget in a really interesting way. This is a fun way to kill an hour and 20 minutes if you're into this sort of schlock.

I was inspired to write this review by an amazing sequence in which we cut to a coyote unearthing a human arm in the desert, followed by a man on horseback coming across the scene...only for the coyote to be absent entirely. No signs of the coyote's presence are anywhere to be found. This is the most narratively expedient animal in the history of cinema. It gets in, does its job (unearthing a body) and gets out very efficiently. The guy on horseback doesn't even have to fire a shot from his pistol (I assume he has one--we're in a state full of chameleons, after all) to scare the pest-predator away from the body.

Whose body is it? I don't know. I don't care, either. Maybe if they'd put some effort into telling the story, that would be different. There's a token plot but it's like Roadhouse meets mid-season 2 Twin Peaks: nothing really happens, but there's a lot of horny barfights.

-Looks like it was shot for TV in the '70s -Characters that suck -Horrible performances -Man who made a movie just to be around young women that he found attractive -Lack of plot -Awful editing -Intrusive score -Lets you know the Mary-Sue protagonist goes to church and is therefore a good man (although he's a cop, so, by the movie's logic, we should already understand this implicitly) This movie has everything! Apparently I still have *checks counter* 321 characters left before I can post this review. What more is there to say, though? I seriously am having a hard time justifying the rest of this review, which needs to have another 133 characters in it. Don't watch this movie. Just avoid it. It's awful.

This movie sucks. It's only enjoyable as a bad movie, a shlockfest of epic proportions. It's 80% T&A, 10% bad CGI and plastic bugs, and 10% bad acting, which adds up to 100% cheese. Nothing can possibly go wrong for you, the astute viewer and consumer of B-movies, if you choose to watch this.

The less said of the plot, the better. It's a vehicle for overwrought Canadian performances in a house where they were all able to run around naked for a few days. Compare this to Infested, another early 2000s bug-horror movie, if you're looking for a good companion piece. Both are totally inexplicable--you'll find yourself wondering why these people agreed to be in both movies, for totally different reasons.

For some reason I thought that I'd seen this movie before. I had it mixed up with Braveheart and Reign of Fire--which, now that I've seen it, I think is almost fair, but it also reminds me of Lord of the Rings, Army of Darkness, and David Lynch's Dune at various points, although it anticipated every single one of those movies.

This is almost a perfect movie. I detract one star because of the lack of diversity in the cast and the uniformity of performance. Everyone is white and everyone (excluding our D&D party protagonists, to a certain extent) gives a performance based more on their social role than on their character. Then again, maybe that's the point; this isn't Tolkien or D&D, it's supposed to be a medieval reality in which Christians serve their lords and fight dragons. Still, these characters are hard to tell apart, and that comes down to directorial choices which could have been avoided.

I watched this for the famous McNamara brothers and found myself astounded by the terrible production quality, performances, script, and animal handling. Whoever allowed or directed Elliott Gould to feed pizza to a dog should have been blacklisted right away--one can only imagine the gas that the cast and crew must have had to deal with on set after *that* little incident, all for a gag that had a greater impact on the poor animal's digestive tract than it possibly could on the audience. For that alone it deserves 0 stars; the rest of the movie, though, is actually worse and more tasteless than the cardboard-like pizza that our boorish drunken homophobe of an Ivy League professor shares with his dog. Awful, awful movie. The McNamaras shine here, though, thanks to artless ADR of every line of the dialogue that must have been incomprehensible through their Canadian accents. I don't know or care what the actual plot is, and neither should you.

I would say "style > substance" but the style is "photo-journalistic realism," and the script is not smart enough to justify the many failures of direction here. Garland chooses the worst possible lens through which to examine the complexities of civil war and modern American political violence. Our neutral observers and audience surrogates see the end of the war, but we (the audience form whom surrogates are necessary) never see the day after the end, nor do we know what caused the conflict; therefore, it's hard to care about the whole thing. Bodies pile up, but the emotions don't land; our protagonist's jaded perspective prevents them from having any weight. There's a lot of heavyhanded (literal) framing of the relationship between our protagonist and her young unwitting ward, which actually makes it less interesting.

This is not an examination of what causes wars. Somehow, it's basically just Nightcrawler, except Nightcrawler managed to say interesting things about journalism without sacrificing style. Funny how that works.

This is one of the movies that made me love movies. Daniel Day-Lewis' performance stuns on every viewing, but Paul Dano's has stuck with me for a long time, as well. Hell, every minor character, every extra, feels like a lived-in human being or a husk of something that was once human. The words 'shot composition' and 'cinematography' don't do justice to the captured images here. This is an inspired film from top to bottom.

And the sound! This is one of the great soundtracks and one of the best examples of good sound editing and design. Every squeak and whisper is perfectly constructed. I love this film.