kyla-72302

Ugh.

This is just preamble for the 3rd movie. Totally unnecessary. The first one was so good. I was exited for the continuation of the story, but they did what seems to be all the rage in studios now which is to stretch the material for the sequel into two parts. (This is something I learned from watching the Pitch Meeting Guy.)

Instead of a film that introduced some new characters and expanded on some tensions from the previous film, we're given a long, drawn out, very poorly paced, boring movie where any moment of tension or concern for the characters was quickly sorted by the next scene.

There's an attempt at an Empire Strikes Back reference here which is made all the worse by the fact that the filmmakers failed in every way to understand what made Empire work as the middle of a trilogy.

I saw this around when it came out and all I could remember about it was that it was a bit silly. On rewatch it turns out that's about right. Very campy and silly and fun. This must be among the most high budget camp there is. If you want a dark serious vampire movie, this isn't it.

And it looks great! We figured it must have been a direct inspiration for Bloodbourne and it sounds like this is so.

It has strong theatre kid vibes. Strong vibes.

I thought this was pretty well done! Seems to me a decent PG-13 kind of adventure flick.

Normally I don't care much how a film looks, or how well the special effects were, but we had all those Edgar Rice Burroughs books in the house when I was a kid and I recognized so much from the covers! How they got the lighting and the monsters so perfect is super impressive.

I enjoyed a number of the over the top fight sequences. I would describe this as a family adventure movie and I enjoyed it as such.