adrenachrome

This is potentially worse than the TV series remake of "Day of the Jackal" in terms of outright idiocy.

Skipping the intro that is a slavish scene for scene retelling of the intro to Alien, our main character is a dying little girl who has her mind transferred into the body of a synthetic.

Okay, an interesting idea, adult body, child mind, could go places. She is joined by five others in the same situation, terminally ill children now in new "adult" bodies. And props to the actors for pulling that off, making it believable.

But where it really falls apart is the main character is some kind of super hacker who tracks her brother (a medic in a Search and Rescue outfit) through any electronic device around regardless if the device has a camera or not. In any case, the brother gets into trouble doing his job of S+R in a 100 story highrise that a spaceship had crashed into and his sister decides her and her new synth friends can totally super pull off Search and Rescue and go save him!

And the quirky super-genuis who developed the mind-transfer technology (and you can tell he's totally quirky because he walks around barefoot and wears ratty bed clothing everywhere, including into clean room lab spaces...so totally quirky!) listens to his multi-billion dollar investment and says, "sure, sounds neat!" and lets 5 untrained children, with no weapons, or gear, wander into a crashed starship and a 100 story highrise building looking for who knows what.

I mean what could go wrong?

Damn, who decided this "writing" was acceptable? This is complete garbage that would barely qualify as fan-fiction.

Total waste of time. Skip it.

Not really, but the father of the main character looked a LOT like Saddam Hussein, one of the bad guys really looked like Joaquin Phoenix and the lead bad guy looked like Julian Sands.

Nevermind really, just something that jumped out at me watching the film.

As it is, there is a solid interesting twist on the possession genre here, let down a bit by a lack of tension and flow.

Without giving too much away, we've got a lead priest who has lost his way and has returned to his childhood home, where he experiences PTSD because his father was part of an apocalyptic cult.

Strange events occur and all of his past comes home (so to speak) to roost. A neat twist on exorcism happens near the movie's conclusion.

All the main actors give a good showing, and the sfx are rather well done given the budget limitation.

Unfortunately it doesn't quite gel into a solid tension-filled horror film, though it comes close to greatness in several moments.

Still a director worth keeping track of, he has a bright future.

I'll try to keep this spoiler-free. Into the Lost Lands (ITLL for future reference) really feels like all the cut-scenes from some kind of post-apocalyptic video game, simply strung together into a "movie." Lots of great locations, a map shown where our two heroes are heading in each part of their journey, and very little else. There is, in the beginning, a little bit of backstory about the world and how it came to be, but it is poorly fleshed out, so all you can infer is from the cut-scene locations.

The same goes for the characters. Grey Alys (the witch), Dave Bautista (playing Dave Bautista) and supporting cast. All have a far more interesting backstory than it portrayed here. Shame, the Enforcer could stand to get her own film.

For the most part the set designs and CGI are really rather good, until the ending big fight (no spoilers here) which has a shockingly bad CGI monster. I guess they ran out of money, time, interest, or a combo of all the above.

Also, the actual ending is rushed, abrupt and rather nonsensical. I didn't get the impression it was setting itself up for a sequel, but then again look about many Resident Evil films there are by the director...