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DrSkyTower
Reviews
Barbarossa (2009)
Boring load of utter tripe
There was a lot of the same horse sound effects being used for every single horse scene (of which there are many).
The end battle scene was OK. It just took 120 minutes to get there. So whilst waiting for the big money scene, you are forced to sit through a boring, impossible romance, some boring politics, some peasants trying to take on the bad guys, and one peasant fellow who was probably the most useless character in the entire movie.
Not one of the characters was engaging. The movie spends a lot of time with a feral witch female character who looks like she was born in the jungle. She spends a lot of time crawling around on all fours like a rabid mutt, sniffing the ground and her boyfriend, and peering at the camera through dirty oily curtains of hair. She also spends the majority of time wearing a potato sack for clothes. What exactly did the BF see in this dirty little rat creature again? Oh, and she had magical powers.
After the prerequisite love scene (interspersed with the death of her sister, how utterly original) you'd think things would start moving. Nope, it takes another hour. The end is an impossible-to-read narration of events that happens, but at least our hero lives happily ever after with his feral wife and they have lots of children together.
This looked like it was made for TV. The production values were strangely cheap looking and the same locations were used to portray totally different places. How utterly boring.
1/10
Red Riding Hood (2011)
What the hell did I just watch?
One word sums up this movie: BORING.
I did spot the Twilight connection when I hired the DVD for this flick but put that aside, thinking this might be an OK movie. How utterly wrong was I.
Why do our young villagers speak in today's appalling American English when they're not even American, they're from prehistoric Norway or Austria or whatever, living in a tiny mountain village?
Why on Earth is there a 15 minute (real time) rave party, complete with today's rave party music using today's musical instruments, just pretty much the worst rave party music I've ever heard in my life?
And three elderly village musicians are belting THAT out on some odd looking horn things... we're supposed to believe THEY'RE creating that ridiculous eye-watering cacophony?
Why does half the village look like it's CGI? And what's with the eye gouging, foot long spikes sticking out of every, single tree in the place?
Death scenes are ridiculous. A giant, horse sized, English speaking CGI wolf rips people apart... and all they have to show for their injuries is a cut to the forehead or a scratch on the neck. These have GOT to be the cleanest werewolf deaths ever seen in a werewolf movie. Was the director making this movie for ten year old girls? Probably not, when you are forced to sit through the ridiculous, badly acted "love scenes".
The main point of this hokey flick seemed to be the love triangle between the three prettiest people in the whole village. Her two boyfriends are prettier than her. She does utterly nothing in the entire duration of this flick. Her daddy lisps creepy things to his daughter along the lines of "I'm your lover, my dear. Let's run away and live together forever."
It's been a long time since I last saw a movie where the main female character does nothing except wait to be rescued by two males who are both much, much prettier than her.
This is the reason why I haven't picked up a Twilight flick. Watching paint dry is more entertaining.
0/10.
The Celestine Prophecy (2006)
WTF did I just watch?
Why am I constantly picking Made for TV movies from the video shop??
This movie made no sense. It seemed to be a Christian/Catholic Church anti-New Age rant and witch hunt through the ages, up to the present day. Something to do with a dumb cult prophecy proclaiming Love and Peace Forever dude!
The main character spends the entire movie wandering around completely lost, and things just happen because other characters said so. Everything that happens is one boring coincidence after another. And for a guy who knows nothing about New Age/cult religion, he somehow manages to learn in record time how to make himself invisible to the bad guys not once, but twice. While standing in full view of them.
Sigh.
Also accompanied by mythical sounding music and filters over the camera lenses to make stuff "glow gold-like". With rainbows, waterfalls and fluffy white clouds in the background.
Whatever.
I felt like I was watching some kind of hoaky religious cult flick.
Facepalm. Shake, shake, shake.
Alien Lockdown (2004)
What a Piece of Crap
I've just noticed this is a film "Made for TV". Why am I constantly getting "Made for TV" movies from the local video shop??? Well that will explain why this flick is such rubbish.
CGI scenes are atrocious. There is a scene at the end with a helicopter vanishing into the horizon. It just sits there, static, against the fake CGI background. The CGI looks terrible, especially on the helicopters. Shadows and light falls wrong on a flying machine - it's even worse on the fake little baby alien larvae-things.
The big alien is just a dude in a monster suit. It looks clumsy and slow. How the hell is it able to bring down fast running human soldiers is beyond me. It's a ripoff of Alien and Predator. Yawn.
The soldiers are all cardboard cutouts, you don't know jack about any of them so who cares. They're just monster-fodder. They can't seem to hit anything when the guy in the rubber suit plods at them, so his costume must be impervious to normal bullets. But these macho soldiers continue to use the same weapons against the rubber-suit guy even though Rubber Suit is picking em off one bloody body part at a time. Why don't they try to use better weapons against Rubber Suit? There are plenty of times in this boring flick where they could do better stuff to improve their survival, but no. Let's just continue to run around and shoot our ineffective guns that have unlimited ammo and we don't ever need to reload, not once!
Also that woman was a poor representation of Ellen Ripley. She's so hardcore tough nothing except Arnold can defeat her. She easily takes down Rubber Suit Guy with a little knife. Yawn.
What rubbish.
0/10
Skyline (2010)
WTF??? Yeah... Right.
What I learned from watching this movie:
1) If you stare at a blue glowing zombie light long enough and are then knocked aside by your good friend, you suddenly become invincible and your brain turns orange.
2) Once your brain has turned orange, you are then able to kill a giant, naughty-tentacled, genital-mouthed alien brain-sucking monster with a piece of brick... and then your bare hands - when just half an hour ago a four tonne, four wheel drive car smashes one of these things into a wall and crushes it, yet it just stands up on its naughty tentacles and wafts away.
3) Your Orange Brain has the capacity to take over a 20 foot tall, gorilla hulk of a monster and control every part of it, right down to the emotions. Way to go!
4) Your orange brain conveniently takes over the driver of one of those giant walking Tank Things, and not some waif-like floating tentacled thing which must be a female, its tentacles are just so thin and girly!
5) Big dumb ape tank drivers are color-blind despite having nearly ten eyes, so don't notice the obvious color difference between a Regular Human Brain and a Super Human Brain.
6) Alien physiology is Perfectly Matched to human Brain physiology, despite the two species having never encountered one another in the entire history of human kind.
7) When your brain is ripped out of your head, it is a clean and gore-free operation. Not a single drop of blood is spilled.
8) You can be sucked into the giant claw-hand of a towering, bull-rushing, car destroying mega-hulk and jammed inside its massive paw, without a single drop of blood being spilled.
9) An entire city can be firebombed by a Nuclear Warhead - and suffer Zero damage.
10) Huge alien space ships use Human Brains to repair themselves via immaculate regeneration.
Avatar (2009)
Nice To Look At... But This Movie Is Pants
A year after all the hype for this movie and I finally decide to write my review... but only after I watch it again on DVD.
I have to admit, this movie is actually better in 2D. I could look at all the pretty things without staring at migraine-inducing blurry nothingness for three hours.
I tried to suspend disbelief while I watched this movie. It didn't work the first time, and it didn't work this second time. I couldn't really enjoy this flick as I have that other terrible movie, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. At least with that movie, one can sit there and enjoy the CGI without being too distracted by the lousy storyline.
I face palmed often throughout my second viewing of this ridiculous, corny flick. Its story is beyond stupid, it is so insipid and so utterly lame it completely unraveled the great work WETA Digital did for this movie. It is totally impossible to sit there and enjoy WETA Digital's CGI effects without Mr Cameron's lousy, political environmental, anti American (LOL, isn't he a white American too) agenda slamming into your face over and over and over again.
OK, Mr Cameron. I get that the Human Race are nothing more than hideous, evil orcs, trolls and goblins using advanced technology to kick the noble, beautiful, blue-skinned, cat-faced, 10 foot tall American Indians off their land so they can get the filthy rich Unobtainium all for themselves. Because, the evil corporation headed by that airhead white American CEO don't want to save the Earth with that stuff, oh no. They just want to shove it all in a bank vault and let this Unobtainium's value increase over a few decades give or take. This should send their corporation's shares through the roof, they'll be the richest evil humans in the history of human kind!!!
This movie's portrayal of the American Military was idiotic, unbelievable and poorly presented and like the evil, vindictive, greedy, planet-raping American corporation, just as ridiculous and cliché riddled.
Characters were horrible caricatures and acting was by-the-numbers cliché cardboard cutouts. Mr Worthington was especially poor and laughable, as was his co-star, that screaming, hissing, crying, over-emoting soapy, the giant blue cat-chick. Her performance was creepy, horrible and unbelievable. She knows this dude is a human, yet she still lays down and has sex with him? WTF? In the most awkward fail of a sex scene I've ever seen in a movie. So their sex is the same as ours? Their genitals are the same? They have human woman breasts, just on giant ten foot tall blue emaciated smurf bodies. They suck face the same too, just with vampire teeth and "hair plugs". Uggghk.
The flying scenes weren't as good as the flying scenes in How to Train Your Dragon. Wall-e was better with its environmental message. Heck, even Princess Mononoke has a better story concerning Earth, Forest guardians, and protecting the environment. Plus, the characters from these movies have more personality and humility, which not a single character from Avatar has. I didn't even like Sigourney Weaver's character, and she's an awesome actress. I still don't get how a dumb, trigger-happy marine could suddenly go from crippled nobody to the Na'vi's version of Return of the King! That not even the scientists could achieve, and they'd been on that planet, what - five years? Rolls eyes.
The worst aspect of this "film" was the battle scene at the end. The idiot marine-come-smurf decides the only answer to a conflict is to inflict genocidal murder and violence. Rolls eyes. You'd think a movie three hours long would see him change from trigger-happy gun-toting douche-bomb to someone understanding that violence is definitely NOT the answer. Nope. Now he's a red-bird riding, gun-toting, trigger-happy, arrow shooting war-smurf on the absolute, murderous, anti-human rampage. Rolls eyes.
And to add insult to injury, he willingly offs himself (no conflict in sight here though!) so he can keep that nice piece of tail all to himself forever and ever.
What a fairytail ending to a fairy tale masquerading as a "science fiction epic".
BOO!!! Mr Cameron!!!
1/10
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
I expected more from Michael Bay...
... but he has proved, yet again, that he can't direct human actors. He can direct big CGI kaboom-boom, 60 foot tall CGI robots lumbering about, and CGI in general. So why is it his human actors seem incapable of delivering believable lines? And their relationships are forced and more fake than the CGI going on around them? What is it with the dumb sex jokes? This is a movie based on toys and a kids cartoon. It's like making a movie about the Smurfs and inserting human actors and live action scenes... and then adding some soft core porn and an avalanche of unfunny sex jokes.
Spoilers... So many scenes in this movie are just eye-rolling, cringe-worthy, 'yeah right - whatever!' moments. Mr Bay has his female humans present themselves as nothing more than brain dead eye candy. Characters die and come back to life. All the standard action movie clichés are used and are ridden to death.
An attempt is made to insert a plot, but it soon spirals out of control. Sam goes to college and his mother gets wasted on dope cake. Then he is subjected to a near robotic rape by a Decepticon/Terminatrix Fembot and his girlfriend just so happens to walk in on him at *exactly that moment*. She gets her leg humped by a little toy truck Decepticon. A robot farts. Another robot talks like a gangster, but with a lisp because its gold tooth is so huge. A joke is made about testicles. And another robot farts. Then we watch two male dogs humping. Twice. Another joke is made about testicles (robot ones this time!) This goes on an hour too long. Yawn.
...is this movie over yet?
Jumper (2008)
This Movie Was Blah
I do like the special effects in this movie. They're not too bad. Very entertaining to watch, but that's all that's good about this flick.
Hayden Christiensen (ohnoes!) When I discovered he was the soul given the epic task of wielding this "film" upon his scrawny shoulders I thought "Anakin Skywalker" and had instant misgivings. But I decided to give this movie a chance and hired it on DVD.
Mr Christiensen... I'm really sorry to say this. But your acting sucks.
I'm not sure what the director and writers were telling us. Did they want the audience to connect with this self prick of a character, and root for his every exploit? He uses his powers merely to further his own gain. I'm not even sure if the message this movie was putting across is "If I really did have powers like this, would I even bother using it for good? Nah, I jus' wanna hav fun!"
So many things don't make sense. Why are the people hunting these Jumpers normal like you and me? They can't teleport. Instead they use ridiculous gadgets to catch and do in the Jumpers. I kept expecting to see Mr Jackson teleport and kick Mr Christiensen's arse... but he doesn't! Instead, he's a normal guy kicking ass-hat on a guy who can teleport.
Apparently, being a Jumper makes you invincible, just like the Highlanders in Highlander. You can be electrocuted by thousands of volts of electricity and still survive. And like Highlander, there's been a war going on between these norms called Paladins and Jumpers since medieval times. Also, it appears that the kids born to Paladins have this teleporting ability... or I could be wrong, and Jumper kids just randomly appear in the general populace. Are only male children born with teleporting abilities? Does anyone really care?
Blah. It's fairly cliché these questions will be answered in the ghodawful sequel lurking on the horizon.
This movie was totally dull, with empty characters whose motives were unknown and whose purpose was meaningless. It even lagged in the entertainment department. It's just a disappointing, lacklustre flick which could've had so much more potential.