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Reviews
Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama sanso e no michi (2007)
the definitive film of the "shack beating" sub-genre
HUT BEATINGS: THE MOTION PICTURE (aka United Red Army)
If you are a fan of people being beaten in hovels, shacks, or huts, this is the film for you! The movie features at least two shacks where the beatings take place.
Every kind of pummeling, pounding, beating happens on screen - INSIDE THE HUTS!
Sometimes the people being beaten are taken outside of the hovel/hut/shack, where they die. Some viewers might be disappointed by that. But don't worry though, most of the action takes place inside the hut.
The film suffers from only one flaw: there is a third hut featured in the last part of the film (kind of a fancier one); unfortunately I don't think anyone was savagely beaten to death inside it.
Hostel: Part II (2007)
Awful
This movie was much weaker than its predecessor. The worst part about it was the plot. Towards the end I found myself utterly disbelieving the characters' actions and motives. As for the end - did we really hate that one character so much to see her head get kicked around like a soccer ball? Did that satisfy anyone? Didn't the evil head honcho behind the whole operation deserve it more (the older guy who shot the child)? The way they neatly pruned off Paxton in the first five minutes was transparent. I would've been fine without seeing him at all in the film. The torture scenes are much more scarce. Skip the movie and see the first one.
An American Haunting (2005)
confusing and not scary
I didn't like this movie. I thought the whole idea of a flashback was not needed. The filmmakers didn't make it clear how the present-day events were related to the events in the 19th century. But I guess to understand that, you'd first need to know exactly what happened between the father and the daughter, the answer to which was lost in the flashback-within-flashbacks which comprised the latter half of the movie. I didn't find the movie scary, either. The bedroom scenes with the girl jerking around seemed epileptic rather than supernatural. Another thing I disliked was the "spirit cam" - the scenes where the color fades and the camera floats around the room from one character's frightened face to the next. This really failed to jar me, or frighten me, or provoke any kind of aesthetic reaction, unless annoyance counts. I did, however, like the ghostly imagery - the scene where the screaming woman appears momentarily, then vanishes, for example - but little was made of this. To summarize: not a worthwhile movie.