isaged

I disagree strongly with dispel from Melbourne's review of "Watch Me". I bought it a package with fourteen other horror films which I'm slowly working through. Thus far it's easily the best: excellent camera work, very effective building of suspense, very effective music. I appreciated the absence of nudity – all the more so in a movie about porn films. With perhaps one exception, the actors and actresses are adequate to better than adequate … I didn't say "great", but quite sufficient. The plot is a little hard to follow at times, though that may partly be to problems that I still have comprehending Aussie lingo. At points, especially towards the end, the motivations of the principal characters are baffling: in their situations it would need no menacing background music to make me GIT. However, the movie's underlying idea/gimmick is excellent, and it's carried out splendidly … right down to the end!

Being a kindly old thing and easily amused, most of my other reviews thus far have been more or less favorable towards low-budget movies that other reviewers have panned. Not this time. Given what they had to work with, the actors and actresses in Slaughtered were mostly adequate. The gore was appetizing. But the plot was extraordinarily confused, inconsistent, and self-contradictory. Even worse, as another reviewer has pointed out, the emotional states of the characters after they had witnessed appalling murders were ridiculous. The chicks, being chicks, of course had bouts of incoherently babbling hysteria, but then they returned to reasonably cheerful barmaid normal. The males sought to keep the terrible things that were going on secret. I'm not sure why, though there was some talk of wanting to protect the bar's reputation. Minor concerns: I doubt that the Australian police are nearly as slow to respond as they were depicted, and also doubt that they would have sent only one officer when phoned about massive bloodshed. The actress whom I felt to be easily the most attractive was one of the first to be Slaughtered. Oh well, the advice that I've given my son is "Ask yourself whether her conversation still be interesting thirty years from now." I know nothing of the actress herself, but in the case of the character she portrayed the answer would clearly be No. All that said, the mask worn by the Slaughterer was excellent.

After having been reasonably well entertained by "Marked", I found its 2.7 overall rating unfair. Fortunately, slaym666's review IS fair. I'd add that Mark Colson gives a fine performance in his rather crucial role as Dr. Frederickson, that Tara Carroll rather good as Diella, and that none of the other actors are really poor. As other positive negatives, the f-word isn't used very often and there is neither nudity nor semi- nudity, nor any simulations of fornication at all. Yes, the plot is confused and confusing, but it never really drags. Its score is good. Its references to the Apocrypha can be confusing to those familiar with actual Biblical literature, but even these fit a non- standard sense of the word that's briefly mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrypha. I found the scenery beautiful and appropriately ominous; many of the gore effects appealing to my unsavory tastes, and the white makeup on the ghostly gentleman splendid. I wish that I could smile as he does. I watched "Marked" in 20-30-minute segments as relaxation from doing work on my laptop. It could be that is the best way to watch it.