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Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)
If you can't make it competent, don't do it.
This movie is a strange case. Very strange indeed. It's a phenomenon, a bad one. I don't think this deserves a in depth review, so let me just give you the important details.
First off, the actors, they can't walk properly. I'm not joking. During the intro scene it is most obvious; the main character Rod, when he exits his car in the first scene after the long and boring credit sequence, walks as if he has a stick shoved in his backside. The rest of the actors are no different, their movement is not fluid, which leaves out many scenes awkward and generally boring. Besides movement, the actors are incapable of making spontaneous conversations, nor convey proper human emotion. There is no character development within the story, this movie really wants you to feel connected to the characters, but it fails miserably due to bad acting. Talking about story, I can summaries the whole plot in a few words. Guy meets girl and takes her out. Guy gets filthy rich, somehow. Guy and girl go out and have sex. Guy and girl meet killer birds. Guy and girl try to survive bird apocalypse with other people. Short tragedy happens, movie ends abruptly. Yeah, the story isn't complex in any stretch of the imagination, but simplicity does have beauty if its presented well; sadly the movie is not presented well, by the performance of the actors, as well as the overall cinematography, which has the quality of a school video project. The music, there is very little of it, it's not nice to the ears and it loops. There are story segments that don't make sense; as I said earlier, Rod and the girl meet up with a bunch of people, a man and a woman. The man has a 9mm pistol and a assault rifle, yes, a assault rifle, stashed in his car, which they use to kill the birds. By the way, the guns have unlimited ammo. And nice muzzle flashes. As final note, the movie is filled with goofs. You can tell that this done with quickly with no real effort put in. One of the characters the woman, vanishes, then comes back out of nowhere. No really, she does.
Save your brain cells, don't watch this movie.
Samurai Cop (1991)
So bad it's entertaining.
Alright, this movie is pretty horrible. It's horrible in so many aspects, which is honestly all of them, to the point where it's actually pretty entertaining.You can just sit there and laugh, goof after goof after goof, it never gets boring.
Okay,let me explain how horrible it is.
-Cinematography: This movie is ripe with something I like to refer to as forehead shots. There are a lot of scenes in this movie that feature a close up of a character's face. But it isn't a normal close up, rather, 40% of the screen, the distance between the top of a character's head and the top of the screen, will be nothing but empty space, meaning that your eyes will naturally center on a person's shiny polished forehead. Aside from forehead shots, we've got scenes that are filmed in different times of the day and in different places, not natural day to night/place to place transition within the story, but different places for one scene! Imagine this: Main character meets bad guy. Camera switches to bad guy. Daylight. Camera switches to hero. Nighttime and different interior. Overall video quality is poor, as in, old VHS tape poor.The video quality, for a movie that came out in 1991, is sub par.
-Audio: The music sounds like something from the Sega Genesis. Music aside, 50% of the entire audio of the movie, is dubbed in a studio.
I kid you not.
Two guys are going in a car, there is about a 50 meter distance between the camera man and the actors, and when they talk, the audio is perfectly clear. There's also a scene where 3 people have the same identical voice, saying the same identical lines.
"HEY WAIT UP I WANNA TALK YOU!". Just an example.
-Acting: The whole movie feels as if it was shot on one take.
The performance is so bad, so generic and more often than not over the top, to the point where the whole movie, turns into one big blooper. The main character, Samurai cop ( who, although the movie states he is fluent in Japanese, he can't pronounce the most basic of Japanese names even if his life depended on it), you just can't relate to him; he is a hulking mass of polished muscles, that is immune to bullets, who has no character development. In fact, all people have no character development. They are the same throughout the movie.
There are plenty gun fights in the movie, and whenever somebody dies, the death scenes are really, really exaggerated, and if you pause and look at the "wounds" ,there are no bullet wounds, no ripped cloth or anything, it's just ketchup.
The two main characters, Samurai Cop and his buddy, look a lot like the duo from Lethal Weapon, and I mean a lot.
-Story: Well, the story is about two detectives investigating a Japanese crime gang, who for some reason, have only one Japanese member, and that's the main boss. Well, they don't do much investigating. In fact, half of the movie is just filler. As in super long needless sex scene filler. ( For some strange reason, the sex scenes are the ONLY part of the movie where the cinematography is okay.). The plot is so simple, linear, and underdeveloped, to the point where there is no plot at all. The film makers knew it, it'll become obvious within the final 20 minutes of the movie; it's like the director said " You know what? We've got nothing, might as well make them go on a rampage and kill everybody. Because that's what normal people do".
-Other things to consider: It's offensive to women. The vast majority of female characters, and I mean literally the vast majority, are portrayed as sex objects, nothing more.
The poster for the movie, at least the original one, bears heavy similarity to a previous movie poster called Maniac Cop. It's also worth nothing that the two movies shares the same main actor, Robert Z'Dar. I've come to believe that Samurai Cop tried to leech of the popularity of Maniac Cop, which came 3 years earlier.
And that's pretty much it. It's horrible, but it's so horrible, you can laugh at it.
Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
Not worth your time.
First of all, I want to focus on the positive aspects of the movie; the 3D special effects and sound design, as well as the soundtrack, are top notch. Now, let's focus on the bad aspects of the movie, which is pretty much everything else. The acting is awful, unrealistic, there are plenty of moments where the characters the actors are playing behave in a completely inappropriate manner ( such as Jack Reynor's character, in a very unnatural tone, admitting he has no problem having an intimate relationship with Wahlberg's underage daughter character, en front of said Wahlberg. And yes, this movie has pedophilia moments. And it's PG 13). The only cast that's actually good, is the voice cast. Plenty of explosions and mayhem, so much that it gets very repetitive. Camera work is okay; I hope you enjoy the lens flares Story is very inconsistent; a lot of segments, if you actually bother thinking about it, don't make sense. Also, there's plenty of scenes, especially during the introduction, that are not important; they are simply used as filler. The real meat of the film comes about halfway in. Product placement ruins this movie. Every scene that is critical to the plot or characters in any way, is made completely void by product placement. ( Imagine this: character is killed brutally. Less than two minutes after he dies, shameless Lamborghini product placement!) Overall, Michael Bay follows the same formula over and over again; he offers nothing new in this installment. He does manage to make it memorable, but not in the kind of memorable that makes you want to watch it again.