Reviews

I didn't know what to expect when I put this on. I knew it was a zombie flick, something I've pretty much had enough of, but I hoped that the Ozzies would bring something new to the table, and they did. In heaps. This is billed as a horror, but it is actually one of the very darkest comedies you'll ever see. There were parts that made me laugh out loud, a couple of very funny beer gags and it has the single best line of any movie in history:

'This truck runs on Zombies'

I nearly wet myself at that. Although this is a very, very violent and gory film, it never relies on that but instead tells a very human story with genuinely unsettling sequences, but enough gallows humour to stop it from becoming bogged down in it's misery. An absolute treat and a must watch for any fans of horror, zombie or black humour. A solid 10/10 from me. My favourite movie of the year.

I got about 30 minutes into this and was all but throwing the remote at the TV in sheer exasperation at the ridiculous, but never funny, story line. OK, so we have the same two idiots in the same situation doing the same stupid stuff and ha ha ha. Seriously, if your idea of funny is watching two guys shouting 'I'M ON DRUGS!!!' then you're either a moron or you've never done drugs because that's really not how people behave. The bormance between the two of them is handled so poorly that it borders of homophobia too. This is an ugly film made by people with no sense of humour or subtlety. It might appeal to emotionally stunted 14 year olds, but if you want to see a buddy flick about a pair of screw-ups, go buy a Cheech and Chong movie.

I mentioned the dreadful Pineapple Express because this piece of crap uses the same 'It's not funny, but if we shout the lines then it becomes funny' trick and it fails and fails badly.

I sat through this purely because I try to be honest about any movie I've reviewed instead of giving up and assuming it's garbage on the strength of the first bit, but I was in pain by the end of this and I really, really hope that the threat of another movie in the shape of 23 Jump Street never materialises.

One of the very worst films I've ever watched.

Honestly, I thought this was going to be some tired 'America saves the universe' pastiche, full of same old same old characters and heroic dialogue, beautiful and invincible agents and so on. So when it me laugh out loud within 5 minutes, more from surprise thanactual comedy I'll admit, I started to think that maybe this would be something a little different.

What I realised early on is that this is the film Serenity thinks is was and so desperately wanted to be. Nothing wrong with Serenity (apart from poor casting), but GOTG was fun, funny, thrilling and looked fantastic from the start. It took the old superhero clichés and made then look ridiculous with lines like 'Ok, Im standing. Here we are, all standing in a circle. Like jackasses'. Sure, the pirate with a heart of gold has been done to death, but never with so much tongue in cheek irreverence, panache and plain old fun.

Visually it's stunning, the characters are believable and well constructed, even Groot, a walking and talking tree. There is absolutely zero in the way of hero talk and that's what really sets this apart from the likes of Capt America and The Avengers. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but is happy to poke a bit of fun at the genre. Maybe some of the language and humour isn't suitable for children, but its not too strong and kids under 9-10 probably wont notice anyway.

Also, it has a brilliant soundtrack. I can't wait for part 2.

As is my habit, I'm going to make a short list of everything I hated about this movie.

1) Everything.

That was too easy, let's try again.

1) Appalling acting. The main 'character' seems to have had his face frozen before filming, so his only expression is one of bemused disinterest.

2) The military can see that guns and bombs have no effect on the monsters, so they continue to attack them with bombs and guns. Once they learn that the Muto has an EMP weapon, they continue to use electrical equipment. In fact...

3) Everything the military did was so half assed and poorly researched that I found myself shouting at the TV screen. Special forces making all that noise, and their torches shining all over the place? A HALO jump without proper preparation? An naval OED luitenant with HALO experienceand training? We don't have time to open the casing of the bomb, sowe'll carry it through the city for a couple of miles and put it on a boat. yeah, that will be much faster and not dangerous or stupid at all. Not with that huge monster that feeds on nuclear bombs searching for it after we killed her entire brood.

4) The bomb, we are told, makes the one that levelled Hiroshima look like a firecracker, goes off about 2 miles offshore and causes absolutely no damage to anything at all. Either it was a dud, or we have to believe that American engineering, and indeed Americans, are impervious to things like blasts, fireballs, concussion or radiation. Not like those Japanese weaklings. USA! USA!

5) When the monsters reach SF, we see Godzilla wade through the water which is just about up to his knees, but then a Muto dives in head first and disappears for a few seconds.

6) EMP would have no effect on a petrol or diesel powered engine. It might stop the ignition, but once its running then it is mechanical rather than electrical.

7) Have you any idea how heavy a nuclear warhead is? You don't just pick it up and carry it around. But hey, one American soldier saves the world, yet again.

8) Godzilla. OK, its hard to make a big monster look real, I understand that, but to make it so flat and unthreatening must take at least as much effort. it remeinded me of the old Chewits advert half the time, the other half I was wondering where he/she was. There is about a minutes worth of Godzilla screen time thats worth watching, the rest he/she is either playing hide and seek with battleships of sneaking through the city, hunting Motus for some reason thats never adequately explained.

9) The bomb. Yes, again. That really angered me. When we first see the Motu nest, its about 150 feet down a crater, but the marines just appear at the bottom and somehow manage to appear back at the top a few minutes later despite carrying a live and armed nuclear missile.

I could go on and on about flimsy plot lines, the cardboard cut out cliché cast and absurd twists etc, but the whole film would fall apart. This int a creature feature, nor is it a thriller or an action movie. it is entirely fraudulent and deserves to be erased from history. 1/10

In my review of the first Hobbit movie I complained that PJ was taking liberties with the story line and brushing over important details for the sake of action. Well, in part 2 he dispenses with such inconveniences as plot and credulity and instead plumps for almost 3 hours of ridiculous fight scenes, twisting the original story into such unwieldy and impossible shapes that you will very likely spend the entire film going 'What? That's not what happened! She doesn't even exist!'

I won't make a list or anything, but the dwarfs didn't split up, there wasn't an army of orcs chasing them, Laketown was nothing like that, Beorn didn't do that and so on etc etc. This is less The Hobbit and more PJ making it up as he goes along.

I know that Hollywood needs a love story to feed the need for the get the girl kill the baddies plot line that's been the staple of film making for almost a century, but to entirely invent 2 characters (Legolas is not mentioned in The Hobbit) simply to make it happen reeks of desperation. We shan't mention the vomit inducing Dwarf/Elf touchy feely segment.

The film fails on all but the most basic of levels; it is an action film, very loosely based on a JRR Tolkien novel. What it certainly is not is The Hobbit, a tale of adventure and personal courage. had this been made before LOTR then it would have rightly been laughed out of the cinema, but audiences are so hungry for more of the same that Jackson has been allowed to do whatever he likes, even, once again, adding a knob gag to a children's story.

For his next project I fully expect him to remake the story of Jesus, only this time he'll be a prize fighter who has to beat Pilate to win the life of Mary Magdelene, who has been taken prisoner by the evil drug lord Satan.

Utterly appalling.

Apart from some shaky acting, this is a very good film with a good story and some fantastic cinematography and scoring. A lot of people have been left cold and confused by it, and to them I say read The Third Policeman by the late great Flann O'Brien*,where two men commit a crime and are killed in the process, then spend the rest of eternity in hell, reliving the moments over and over again, but never knowing that they're dead. This is a very similar story and has a similar unreal quality to it. Whitehead was killed during the battle and is now trapped in a mobius strip version of hell that he can never leave. His self proclaimed cowardice is his own torment and he find himself in the company of men he doesn't know or understand, where he is forever afraid, and these other characters, who may be other casualties of war, are condemned to a similar fate, none of them ever reaching their goals. There is no ale house or buried treasure, but they are condemned to look for them forever.

It's only when Whitehead faces his fear that he escapes the field, only to find himself confronted with his erstwhile captor and tormentor. It will never end for any of them.

At least, that's my take on it.

This is one of the very few movies I've ever watched where I actually felt embarrassed for the actors involved.Forget the massive plot holes, idiotic behaviour of Kent, multiple McGuffins and the fact that a spaceship thats under 300 feet of ice and thousands of years old is completely unguarded and an untrained journalist can just walk into it via the perfectly drilled horizontal tunnel thats suddenly appeared, even though the temperature is around 30 degrees below freezing. In just the same clothes she wore when she got there. She's a hard hitting type of gal and she doesn't need thermals or anything.

Once she's in there she gets to see Superman fiddle around with some stuff and gets hurt, but he uses his super powers to heal her, just like Jesus would.

And that's my main problem with this big pile of plop. Ka Els story is told via flashbacks to his youth and early years where he travelled the earth doing menial jobs, saving everybody's life (apart from his dads) and never, ever hitting back when attacked. I started to wonder if I was watching Superman or The Littlest Hobo at times. These flashbacks served no other purpose than to show that he was a good guy who never asked for reward and always turned the other cheek. Well, he once destroyed a mans truck and livelihood for being a douche-bag, something he managed to do in a busy truck stop without anybody hearing or seeing it, and only eliciting a look of mild bemusement from his erstwhile assailant.

So when he reaches the age of 33, duh, its time to reveal himself to mankind and show off his superpowers. The baddies are here and they wan't to kill everybody and it up to Ka El to stop them, even though he knows humanityy might reject him. They won't, obviously. He's the 2nd coming and we all know how well that went for us last time we were mean to the saviour.

So the baddies come with their guns and they have a pretty impressive fight that takes them into space,through a gazillion skyscrapers via exploding trains and stuff like that, but they never seem to leave the same city block and always crash back to the exact same place. Right where the good guys are. And the cardboard cut out Lane.

Now, during this fight, the baddies are crushed, burned, shot, bombed, dropped from hundreds of feet, smashed with huge steel bars etc, but Ka El manages to kill Zod with the old 'break your neck like this HEEEEAAURGH!!'choke hold trick that you'd expect to see in an especially crappy Chuck Norris flick.

The dialogue in the film was dreadful, the acting atrocious, the characters completely one dimensional (especially Zod), the underlying Christian message lurked like a fart on a cold day and stank the whole thing up. It is a terrible, terrible action film made worse by the over use of special effects and sentimentality in all the wrong places.

I wish IMDb would give us a 0-10 option, but as I can't go lower than 1- 10 then this gets that. It's appalling. Oh, and add to the rest of the garbage the typical scene where the Americans hear the news of imminent attack in a massive military complex while the rest of the world lives in huts and tents made of Yak.

When I first heard of this, saw who was directing and read the synopsis I was expecting something special. Maybe not a treatise on the human condition or anything, but I had expected better than a crappy mash-up of Godzilla having a boxing match with a rusty Transformer, via Top Gun, Casshern and The Nutty Professor. Seriously, why the hell where those two 'scientists' even in the film? They added nothing but a mildly annoying distraction to what could have been a much, much better film.And what was the bit about how our would be invaders trying millions of years previously with dinosaurs supposed to be? The function of the Kaiju was to rid earth of human life, but in the time of dinosaurs the only life on the planet was bloody dinosaurs, so they sent them to kill themselves. It made no sense. I can only assume it was there to show us that it was never ending, like in Predator 2.

What should have been an epic and heroic tale of man-kinds last stand against an enemy bent on destroying us, turned into just another lantern-jawed-hero-saves-the-day pile of crap.

Not camp enough to be funny, too funny to be taken seriously, but taking itself to seriously to be fun, this fails on so many levels. It's either an hour too long or an hour too short, but in its present form its nothing more than eye candy with absolutely no substance. A huge disappointment.

I love Corys work, The American Astronaut being one of my all time favourites, and Stingray Sam is just as good. The story, such as it is, follows the same dreamlike logic of TAA and one gets the feeling that its where the original inspiration came from. There are huge gaps in the plot and we are expected to take a lot for granted, but thats OK. I'm happy to sacrifice a little character development in favour of moving the story forward, in this case to the next episode. The six episodes that make up the film are perfect little movie-ettes in their own right, reminiscent of the old western series from the 60's and 70's, the ones that used to get shown on a Saturday afternoon.The ridiculous characters and absurd situations Sam and his companion, the never reliable Crugie, find themselves in can often only be resolved by song and dance, neither of which make any sense or are in any way appropriate to the circumstances, hence the dreamlike quality to his films. If you wan't plot led big bangs then look elsewhere. If you want storytelling from an entirely unique perspective them this is the film for you. An absolute gem.

I only know of this film because it was on the memory of a 2nd hand mp4 player I bought today. I had a look on here before watching it and saw that a few people were complaining about the lack of plot and poorly developed characters. I can only assume they were either watching a different film or had been brought up on linear Hollywood pap. this is a brilliantly realised film with absurd but very real characters who have found themselves in an absurd but all too likely situation.

the plot twists and turns and just when you think you've got a handle on it, it twists again and takes you on another tangent. no opportunity to make a joke is missed and all of them work, some are hilarious. show me another film that has a dwarf running away from a wedding in a tree stump or a man wiping sh*t from himself with a goose and I will buy your popcorn for a year.

although this is ostensibly a gangster movie, it is never ugly or cynical and there is warmth and humour here and even a very touching love story, shot beautifully in the sunflowers. i loved every second of it.

Where to even start? The 'characters' were so shallow that they would barely ripple of you dropped a rock into them. I hated them both so much that I feel driven to bullet point just how awful they were.

1) Little rich girl in alone in Mexico, seems utterly incapable of wiping her own nose let alone negotiating hundreds of miles of alien infested wilderness. She has the personality and presence of a damp sock.

2) Cynical journalist out to make a name for himself and willing to risk it all, including the life of the aforementioned girl. Luckily for him, his camera seems to have unlimited battery life and is impervious to just about anything. More of that later. He also seems to have an awful lot of money for a guy who doesn't get paid.(see ferry ticket) He is a whiny little cry-baby and a sleaze bag who, when he fails to seduce rich girl, gets hammered and takes what we assume is a hooker, who of course robs him for everything. Except his invulnerable camera.

3) Little rich girl is going to be married when she gets home and is obviously several classes above journo boy and several leagues out of his game. He drunkenly hits on her and she rejects his clumsy and badly scripted advances, yet she somehow feels betrayed when she finds him with the assumed hooker the very next morning, and runs away. Now, at this point she has asked him if he wants to go for a coffee before the ferry leaves and not for her passport. What an idiot! When they realise that the hooker has robbed him of passports but not her ferry ticket, (Which cost $5,000 by the way. Lucky he had that much cash on him eh?) does she call rich daddy or fiancé and say 'send me some money and a hit man to shoot this douche bag'? No, she just shrugs and decides to sell her fabulously valuable engagement ring and risk her life going through the killer alien infected zone with sleaze bag journo and a gang of unknown, untested and un-trusted mercenaries. How can we possibly believe this character? There is some hinting that all is not well at home and she is unhappy with her life, but enough that she would risk it like this? Yeah, right.

End of character assassination for now. So off they both go, encountering exactly one alien up close. It kills everybody but them in a way that's never explained, but it involves some blood. Or none. Depending. Before this, the mercenaries tell them that thealiens won't attack unless provoked, and then start shooting at one when it gets a bit close.

So now they're lost in the jungle, a hundred miles or so from the American border. No, wait. That's impossible, because the jungles in Mexico are in the south. If I were to go into all the geographical goofs in this film then it would take all day.

What we are told is Mexico is either Costa Rica or Guatemala, but they have conveniently decided to deal in dollars and made all road signs in English. Wasn't that nice? Luckily, the camera, which had been appropriated by one of the mercenaries, is undamaged. It's covered in blood and has been dropped from around 30ft while attached to said, and now dead, mercenary, but it is indestructible.

So, they carry on and, luckily again; meet no more monsters along the way. They talk a bit, they walk a bit. They walk some more and talk some more. Phew! Exciting stuff. The one part of the film where they could have encountered a threat or even advanced their burgeoning friendship/relationship is utterly wasted with a quick cut from night to morning and a brisk stroll to the border wall. Except that the wall has been breached and there are no guards or anything! The place must be crawling with aliens. Except no, it isn't. they wander about a bit then find a gas station with all the lights on and a working telephone and call the emergency services to come and save their worthless, dull, spoiled whiny useless asses and just sit there until they come. A monster has a sort of half hearted look for something to eat while they wait, but meets a buddy and they have a minute or two's touchy feely, accompanied by some honking, and off they go. See? If you don't bother them they won't bother you. In fact, you can just stand there and watch the whole thing. Inexplicably, journo-boy doesn't take a picture of this supposedly moving and touching scene. I think we are to take it that he is so overawed that it touches his soul and he lets this beautiful moment be private or something. He'll risk the life of a stranger, pay for a hooker and take pics of dead children for money, but two giant land squid getting freaky? No way, that's out of bounds man! There are just some things you don't do, OK?

A minute or two later the army arrive to take them away and they share a last minute kiss before being separated, hopefully for good. These two should never be allowed to mate. Their offspring would come out flat and made of composite clichés. I have never found myself caring less what happened to the two main players in a movie.

There is just so much wrong with this piece of garbage that it would be impossible to list all of its faults, but apart from the flat characterisations, horrible script, casual and lazy racial profiling, the monsters themselves are rubbish. They offer no real threat and fall in line with the accepted giant squid stencil that was adopted a thousand years ago. Here's the deal with squid: They suck at everything except being squid.

I hated this movie.