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My other internet names are Qwerty100, P*****k, Vjetropev and others.
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againBasically, the list should help you choose good films, while warning you which turkeys to avoid. This is why it's ranked in the order of quality. Although, you might find the bottom-pile reviews more fun, coz bashing films is more fun than praising them.
Until I was around 18 or 19 I had very little interest in horror. But once I subdued my inner snob (the same deluded snob that had prevented me from trying out metal until I was 15) I realized that there's a distinct advantage to watching demons and zombies slug it out in mindless movies over most other movie genres. The majority of horror films are pretty bad, mediocre at best, but give me a bad horror flick any time over an Oscar-awarded drama or a mediocre western, not to mention a boring, pretentious "art" film devoid of a story, with lazy actors staring emptily into walls while contemplating the meaning of life or suicide, or both. Horror films are refreshingly unpretentious, unpompous: usually cretinous but certainly more entertaining than Meryl Streep doing a Moroccan accent while tied to a wheelchair because she'd been raped and beaten by skinheads in some abominable Hollywood flick.
Which advantages does this list have over other horror lists from my highly esteemed horror-aficionado colleagues?
1. I've seen a lot more horror films than most horror fans. Over 1200. That's a sample big enough to give me some bragging rights.
2. I am a bit of a stickler for logic. This means I don't let the really dumb ones get away with contradictory, far-fetched or plain stupid scripts. If a movie is dumb, I call it out, sometimes in great detail. You don't get that from most horror critics who are quite happy to ignore blatant disregard for common sense. I try not to nit-pick though, coz they are mostly fantasy films.
3. My opinions are completely independent from the majority. If a "classic" that everyone loves stinks, I will rate it low and harass its badness. I don't let myself be influenced by general consensus. I get the impression that many horror reviewers follow the herd a little too much, and that some are afraid to admit not liking a "classic" that one is supposed to like. I don't give a hoot for these unwritten rules: I will bash and smash any overrated piece of crap. Reversely, if a good movie is underrated, I shall praise it. I am not interested, in the slightest, what is or isn't considered a classic. I decide what's classic and what isn't. (I love my arrogance sometimes!)
What is a horror film? Which kind of movies qualify? I've decided to include thrillers but only when they're filmed with an obvious horror slant, with gore or an appropriate atmosphere. So the list doesn't only deal with supernatural films, although fantasy is part of at least 90% of the titles here: that's coz I am not a fan of thrillers at all; I consider them hands down the most idiotic movie genre, far too stupid/illogical/absurd, so you won't be finding many of them here. Sorry to disappoint you if you're into home invasion and superpowerful-serial-killer flicks, there aren't many of those here. I am primarily a fan of supernatural horrors, whereas I've grown to despise horror thrillers so much over the years that I hardly even watch them anymore - except when I make a misjudgement (due to someone's flawed synopsis) and one sneaks in and I end up wasting my time on it. I don't see the point in including every thriller, far from it, as most of them are a separate genre. Sci-fi is also allowed, but only if it has emphasis on monsters and/or gore.
What isn't a horror film? Which kind of movies do not qualify? Young Frankenstein, Scary Movie, Arsenic & Old Lace - any kind of totally harmless comedy that merely uses a horror backdrop to string gags to. These movies are neither gory (or at least not in the real sense) nor remotely scary or intended to be such, and often use extreme humour such as farce or absurdist comedy which simply has zero to do with horror. There are many horror comedies on this list, but they're firmly entrenched in the horror genre. Short films don't qualify: if you think I'm going to bore you with every Tom Dick and 5-minute Harry, you're wrong. Rather than use this list as a dumping ground for EVERYTHING even vaguely related to horror, I decided it's better to focus on ACTUAL horror films, because that's what the list title promises to the reader.
RATINGS: Many of these films I'd seen in the 90s, and back then I was less strict, more easy-to-please. Hence not every rating here represents my opinions realistically. The newer movies have more reliable ratings, in general. I don't pretentiously rate films according to how ground-breaking, unique or technically accomplished they are; I focus much more on the entertainment value. AND I am a stickler for logic; I can tolerate a certain amount of stupidity (almost inevitable in horror, and just films in general), but I don't tolerate movies that break all idiocy records. So if a movie is a critics' darling but boring and/or stupid it gets a low score.
NO RATING: Movies without a rating are the ones whose level of quality I can't pin down anymore because I'd seen them decades ago. I placed them roughly where I believe they should be. But generally, films with no rating could be potentially much higher or lower ranked than they should be.
SPOILERS: I have done my best not to spoil any good films for you, even the smaller events and plot-twists that might not necessarily count as proper spoilers. However, I have hidden spoilers for the good and averages films. I can't vouch for the bad ones, for those that are rated 2 stars or lower: those reviews sometimes don't have hidden spoilers, simply because those are all turds and there is nothing to spoil. They're already spoiled. Nevertheless, even most of those have spoiler warnings.
REVIEWS: For some movies I have two reviews: a brief one consisting of one paragraph, and a proper lengthy one. Some reviews are copy-pasted in their entirety, but most only have the first few paragraphs offered. You have to go the link provided below each text to read the rest i.e. the whole thing. Some reviews aren't posted on IMDb (yet): these are, obviously, pasted in their entirety.
ADVICE: Concerning the top 100-200 movies, i.e. the ones I recommend the most, do NOT read IMDb's synopsis of any of them. They often contain spoilers which could diminish the fun factor if/when you decide to watch them. Whoever is in charge of writing "synopsises" is clearly not doing a good job i.e. some of the contributors need to finally realize that you shouldn't tell the film-goer what happens half-way into the movie, but only the broad outline of what is given early on, BEFORE the first twists.
Genre explanations:
non-supernatural - Since the vast majority of these films are supernatural, I've decided to simply mark those that aren't.
non-supernatural(?) - Can't remember for sure. Or the movie itself is so bad it doesn't give a clear answer.
zombapocalypse - When the plague is all-encompassing, and when the movie shows the outbreak itself not just the after-effects.
zombie - When the plague is focused in a smaller area, or is occurring in a post-apocalyptic environment.
infection - Of course every zombie plague has to do with infection of some sort, but I've added it when a zombie movie focuses on the whys and whats of the plague, rather than just show the resulting mayhem.
townsfolk conspiracy - When the inhabitants of a little town or village are all part of some sinister conspiracy or have a major secret. This is nearly always hidden in a spoiler.
agenda-free - Used only for movies made in the 20s, or a bit earlier, it describes those very rare modern films that have zero political propaganda, no PC agendas.
camcorder - I don't like the name "found footage". I thought of calling it "wobbly footage" or "found-in-sewage" but this will do.
mono-setting - When at least 90% of a movie is set in just one room/house/whatever. Does not apply to a large singular area, only smaller spaces/areas.
religious - Films with Biblical themes or a priest running around fighting demons.
mono-colour - A bunch of modern horror films are filmed in doom-n-gloom-o-vision, with only 2-3 colours, or are photoshopped to have just one colour dominate. I am very much an opponent of both these drab-o-vision styles and this descriptor serves to warn you when a film is visually unappealing, when it is drenched in blue, green or just overall grey. I.e. some movies labeled this way may not be drab-looking but are dominated by just one colour basically.
teens - Obviously, teens doesn't mean literally teens coz most "teen" actors are in their 20s, but refers to any flick with all of the sheep-for-the-slaughter being presented as teens.
older teens - 20somethings; instead of "a group of teens goes out into the woods for a picnic" it's "a group of 20somethings goes out into the woods for a picnic", for example a bunch of typical dim-witted students.
malevolent - Films with a lack of moral compass that tend to glorify evil. Often they reveal the film-maker's or the writer's latent misanthropy.
nickotrash - Films with Nicholas Cage.
kingotrash - Films based on Stephen King's bad writing.
netflixia - Films from Netflix i.e. garbage to be avoided.
wesocravenia - Films by Wes Craven, the master of crappy, shoddy horror.
argentonto - Films by Dario Argento, legendary for his silly movies devoid of logic.
Some genres include others by definition: i.e. haunted house is automatically mystery as well, hence I don't add mystery to that descriptor. A horror western is automatically historic, so no need to add "historic" as a descriptor.
There has been an ongoing, persistent and dirty propaganda campaign by all left-wing elements to discredit capitalism (hence democracy and freedom) in every way imaginable. Nit-picking through its flaws (because capitalism isn't perfect) - plus making up blatant lies about it: these are the basic methods used.
Marxists realized that the only way to fight something that works in practice is to smear it in theory - or fantasy, in this case: on the big and small screen. Film and television offer the best platforms for disseminating nonsense and fallacies: you simply make a claim, without having to prove it. A perfect vehicle for anyone whose sole aim is to mislead. Western Marxists will NEVER be appeased until they help bring about the fall of Capitalism and democracy. They are on a mission. It's up to us viewers whether or not this decadent propagandist machine, fueled by sociopaths, quasi-intellectuals and other misanthropes, will eventually bring about this long-awaited negative change and instability - two things Marxists long for with all their hearts. Economic downfall comes right after moral disintegration and all-encompassing dumbing-down, two more elements Marxists work at ceaselessly. The goal? Destroy the Capitalist/democratic West from within, and then take over once there is economic chaos i.e. when there is a fertile ground for political extremism.
And then? Establish a hardcore dictatorship in which a selected elite of psychopaths will walk all over millions in order to expand their own wealth - under the guise of "creating a new man". Btw, this laughable notion of creating "a new man", i.e. this hopeless undertaking of making gigantic artificial evolutionary leaps, is pretty much what the Nazis had envisioned as well. Just one of many parallels between National-Socialism and Marxism, i.e. one of many similarities between the two extremes which Western left-wing propaganda prefers to keep quiet about - with good reason.
Just to avoid any misunderstandings, the list includes blatant propaganda films disguised as "objective" documentaries i.e. fiction pieces, but it also includes "harmless" entertainment flicks that hadn't been made with the sole and expressed purpose of promoting Leftist ideology, but into which the filmmakers threw in more hidden i.e. less obvious messages and occasional jabs at the Right (and I don't mean the extreme Right).
What the vast majority of Western left-wing propaganda film-makers fail to realize is that even when they have some valid points to make (which is admittedly rare), they make it very difficult for any intelligent or sane viewer to take them seriously because they overload their films with excessive bias and utter nonsense. They use anti-logic, fact-twisting, misquoting, half-truths, manipulative editing, music as over-dramatization, and other simple propaganda tools that make their films the useless sources of information they are.
It's called overkill, and when you exaggerate too much you end up achieving very little. Too greedy. Most of the "documentaries" listed here are so heavily biased that they fail on almost every level (except in exposing the film-maker's ignorance and dishonest intentions), even when their criticism is valid (which, again, is rarely the case).
I welcome all suggestions and criticism. If you are a liberal and feel you must label me a "Fascist" just because I don't share your views, it's your choice. But keep in mind that I have omitted all movies whose primary focus is sending a clear anti-Nazi message, such as "Blood In The Face", even when they were made by Marxist directors. If you can convince me that a movie or TV series is here by mistake, I will remove it.
Any movies you find missing here you will quite likely find on my other propaganda list.
COMMENTS: The comments section changes introduced several years ago have basically ruined what used to be a fun interaction between list-maker and reader, hence I will be disabling comments on nearly all of my lists. So if you want to let me know what you think, PM me.
Oh no, wait. They've disabled PMs. So I guess there is no way you can share your views of my lists and reviews with me.
Not listed in any particular order.
Don't get too hung up on the order, it is only rough. The list starts with the best soundtrack albums and ends with movies that contain "only" one great tune. The exact order is not important, mostly because it's difficult to compare movie soundtracks: some only have original material, some don't have any, some have a lot of repetition/variations of a theme, while others are a jumble of all sorts of stuff. Rating them is tricky, let alone comparing them to each other.
There are many movies that have very solid soundtracks, all the way through. Those aren't included. I've picked those films that have stand-out tracks or consistently high quality. I am not interested in solid.
But anyway...
There's a rumour going that Hollywood and European cinema are firmly in the hands of the Left, and that they misuse this enormous media power to disseminate their twisted political beliefs amongst the mostly ignorant sheep aka the film-goers. Their most common victim: the naive brain-washed nerdy film-buff who believes everything Hollywood and French cinema tell him, and who takes movies far too seriously as an "art form" - even going so far as to take flicks as a source of information.
Since WW2, the success of Capitalism in the West has had Western Marxists fuming and foaming at the mouth. How does one fight against something that works - especially when one's own (alternative) ideology has been proven time and time again to be an utter failure? Marxists tried taking concrete physical action by taking their misguided cause to the streets in the late 60s, but it didn't work; aside from a few Soviet-influenced Leftist college professors and a bunch of bored/gullible students, the masses pretty much did NOT want a Red Revolution - in the slightest. There has been an ongoing, persistent and dirty propaganda campaign by all left-wing elements to discredit Capitalism (hence democracy) in every way imaginable. Nit-picking through its flaws (because Capitalism isn't perfect) - plus making up blatant lies about it: these are the basic methods used.
Marxists realized that the only way to fight something that works in practice is to smear it in theory - or fantasy, in this case: on the big and small screen. Film and television offer the best platforms for disseminating nonsense and fallacies: you simply make a claim, without having to prove it. A perfect vehicle for anyone whose sole aim is to mislead.
Western Marxists will NEVER be appeased until they help bring about the fall of Capitalism and democracy. They are on a mission. It's up to us viewers whether or not this decadent propagandist machine, fueled by sociopaths, quasi-intellectuals and other misanthropes, will eventually bring about this long-awaited negative change and instability - two things Marxists long for with all their hearts.
Economic downfall comes right after moral disintegration and all-encompassing dumbing-down, two more elements Marxists work at ceaselessly. The goal? Destroy the Capitalist/democratic West from within, and then take over once there is economic chaos i.e. when there is a fertile ground for political extremism.
And then? Establish a hardcore dictatorship in which a selected elite of psychopaths will walk all over millions in order to expand their own wealth - under the guise of "creating a new man". Btw, this laughable notion of creating "a new man", i.e. this hopeless undertaking of making gigantic artificial evolutionary leaps, is pretty much what the Nazis had envisioned as well. Just one of many parallels between National-Socialism and Marxism, i.e. one of many similarities between the two extremes which Western left-wing propaganda prefers to keep quiet about - with good reason.
Just to avoid any misunderstandings, the list includes blatant propaganda films disguised as "objective" documentaries i.e. fiction pieces, but it also includes "harmless" entertainment flicks that hadn't been made with the sole and expressed purpose of promoting Leftist ideology, but into which the filmmakers threw in more hidden i.e. less obvious messages and occasional jabs at the Right, and I don't mean the extreme Right. In fact, left-wingers generally don't distinguish between the two: nowadays anybody right of center is considered a "Fascist" and a racist. It's become a media witch hunt, whose sole purpose is to shut down free speech in fear of retribution and false accusations.
What the vast majority of Western left-wing propaganda film-makers fail to realize is that even when they have some valid points to make (which is admittedly rare), they make it very difficult for any intelligent or sane viewer to take them seriously because they overload their films with excessive bias and utter nonsense. They use anti-logic, fact-twisting, misquoting, half-truths, manipulative editing, music as over-dramatization, non-science camouflaged as real science, and other simple propaganda tools that make their films the useless sources of misinformation they are.
It's called overkill, and when you exaggerate too much you end up achieving very little. Too greedy. Most of the "documentaries" listed here are so heavily biased that they fail on almost every level (except in exposing the film-maker's ignorance and/or dishonest intentions), even when their criticism is valid (which, again, is rarely the case).
I welcome all suggestions and criticism. If you are a liberal and feel you must label me a "Fascist" just because I don't share your views, it's your choice. But keep in mind that I have omitted all movies whose primary focus is sending a clear anti-Nazi message, such as "Blood In The Face", even when they were made by Marxist directors. If you can convince me that a movie or TV series is here by mistake, I will remove it.
Write to me on "Vjetropev's Political Rants".
Any movies you find missing here you will quite likely find on my other propaganda list, Part II.
The list consists largely of blatant propaganda "documentaries" and obvious Leftist thrillers/dramas. But also included are flicks that aren't overtly political yet contain little jabs at the Right i.e. sneaky little left-wing messages.
Again: left-wing propaganda is just a rumour. Perhaps I'm TOTALLY wrong, and it's just a figment in our collective imagination. Might even be mass hysteria, this naive notion that Hollywood is a den of Communist/left-wing vipers. Perhaps all these films are Right-wing.
http://morepoliticalrants.blogspot.com/2013/08/marxism-basic-guide-for-gullible_24.html
COMMENTS: The comments section changes introduced several years ago have basically ruined what used to be a fun interaction between list-maker and reader, hence I will be disabling comments on nearly all of my lists. (I said nearly: you're free to spend an hour perusing my other lists to find one that does allow comments.) So if you want to let me know what you think, PM me.
Oh no, wait. They've disabled PMs. So I guess there is no way you can share your views of my lists and reviews with me. That's called "progress".
And while I'm not supportive of this rising extremism and its many harmful side-effects and would prefer things to be the way they used to be (i.e. more chill and with more tolerance), I don't mind joining in the "fun". Since it's already there. So here is a politically-themed list since everybody is so enamoured with celebrities and with the "are you with us or against us" political division that rules much of the West now.
If you react with "who cares who celebrities vote for and what they believe" then you're absolutely right. Yet, a part of you still wants to know, possibly. The fact that you are (most probably) an IMDb user anyway very likely indicates that you do care about these things. After all, most entries you look up on IMDb involve celebs...
During the 2000 election cycle, Hollywood's actors/directors/producers donated about 40 times more money to Democrats than to Republicans. Thirty-one Oscar-winners gave a total of $381,000 to Democrats, vs. seven who anted up a total of $9,000 to Republicans.
Just one example to illustrate how skewed political support is in show-biz. Which is common knowledge. 20 years later, the situation is probably even more tilted to the Left.
If I were to make a list of all the celebs that are liberal/left-leaning/communist, it would be a mission of a lifetime, something I haven't got time for. The IMDb computers would probably all explode, in a spectacular chain reaction, for lack of capacity to handle so much data. I would easily find several thousand of them. Too much work.
So I thought it'd be much easier to list celebs that aren't liberal.
The term "non-liberal" means just that, people who aren't liberal. This does not mean that all the people listed here are right-wing or share the same views (far from it), or that they're all hardcore anti-Leftists or anything like that. After all, the Right wing of the political spectrum is (despite popular belief i.e. misinformation) far more diverse than the more predictable Left all of which revolves around socialism and the "oppressed". (The Right has atheist capitalists as well as "social justice" Christians as well as science-minded Christians as well as free-market Moslems as well as anti-science creationists, just to illustrate this with a few of many examples. Some are for abortion, some are against it. On the Left nearly everyone is for it. The Left has far less diversity, nearly everybody subscribes to widely agreed upon uni-opinionism.)
Besides which, there is a certain thing called "Center". Quite a few centrists are listed. In other words, some people listed here share the same or similar views with liberals on certain issues. All of the people included here are NOT to be lumped in the same basket: that would be completely inaccurate, and besides which it isn't the purpose of this list at all.
However, things have become more complicated in recent decades, making the creation of such a list tougher than before. As Republicans (and right-wing and centrist parties across western Europe) move more and more toward the Left, the differences between Dems and Reps become less and less palpable. For this reason I decided not to include people who are/were Republican or Independent only on paper but adhere to most of liberal ideology and talk like Democrat supporters and/or had recently supported Democrat candidates. (Examples: Patricia Heaton, Penn Teller, Jesse Ventura, Shannen Doherty, Tony Danza, Michael Medved, Kelly Clarkson, Alex Rodriguez, John Cryer or Arnold Schwarzenegger.) This is admittedly a grey area, i.e. some people would disagree with me to omit them, so the list isn't perfect. Some political and especially socio-political issues serve as key litmus tests for political affiliation, and I feel that these people I decided not to include are all more liberal than centrist or conservative. For example, Schwarzenegger went out of his way to oppose Trump, and his stances on most key issues are 100% liberal. (This is a combination of him personally veering increasingly to the Left, plus the Republican Party itself veering more and more to the Left.) Another good example is Jesse Ventura wanting to endorse Bernie Sanders (who rejected it), so obviously he can't be on the list either, considering how far to the Left Sanders is. Nobody who endorsed a socialist in recent years can be part of the list: I had to draw the line somewhere, otherwise this list would be meaningless. (Which it might be anyway...)
I decided that past affiliations don't count, only what's the most current and up-to-date, meaning that I did not include people who used to identify as Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, or independents but now support the Democrats. (For example, Dwayne Johnson, who must have been pressured by his agent and the studios to re-consider after many years of voting Republican; a very common practice in the film industry.) If I made some omissions in this sense, it certainly isn't intentional and could be eventually corrected.
Nor do I include those very rare cases who constantly flip-flop, such as 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) who changes his mind so often (on issues and politicians), people who lack a clear political orientation and a well-defined belief system, people who are still on the fence or simply too apolitical despite being quoted as having an opinion. Nor do I include people who - for example - openly supported Trump only to apologize to their fans a week later, like for example Shania Twain. People are allowed to change their minds over years, of course, this is normal and natural, but not every week...
Which brings me to the elephant in the room: the celebs who may support right-wing/centrist causes/politicians but are afraid to speak out for fear of hurting their career opportunities in industries that aren't very flexible when it comes to political affiliation. Obviously, the list would be a lot bigger if the current political atmosphere weren't so one-sided. If true freedom and democracy reigned, as they once did several decades ago, we would have a lot clearer picture because there'd be far more honesty.
The descriptor "anti-communist" was included for people who had described themselves as such. In other words, just because some entries only state "Republican" doesn't mean these aren't/weren't anti-communist as well. I can only go by the information that is available, I can't make further assumptions without evidence. Being Republican should, logically, imply anti-communist sentiments too, so draw your own conclusions. I decided to include it only when it was clearly expressed, either in interviews, statements to colleagues or through their actions.
This list isn't intended as either a condemnation or glorification of these people, it's just an interesting list free for individual interpretation. Still, one would not be mistaken in giving some of them credit (especially the more current actors) for having the courage to go against the grain in Hollywood. The American film industry isn't a particularly tolerant or diverse environment, and there are even rumours of black-listing...
The names are listed in no particular order, with a few exceptions.
Reviews
Sting (2024)
A "genius" brat that can't add 2 and 2...
A 5.7 for boring claptrap such as this? People must really be enjoying annoying characters and pointless family drama subplots... in a monster movie!
The opening scene is supposed to set up a comedy, so is it a comedy? Who the hell knows... Either way it's a stupid and unfunny intro, though at least it hints strongly that there's still time to abort watching the film. In that sense the movie is playing fair with its captives... I mean audiences.
Not nearly as stupid as the little girl's character though. She sneaks through air vents to her grandmother's floor, and picks up a spider, and she does this in such a way as if she'd known all along that the room kept a special spider hidden there. No way she could have known this, it's preposterous. Basically what she was doing - her "motivation" as a character - was to do the director a favor: she was acting as a plot-device. It's so convenient that she just happens to pick up the alien creature as if she knew what she was doing, and it's very convenient that she is supposed to be super-intelligent yet doesn't realize that this spider doesn't behave like an insect. The girl is supposed to be so incredibly bright, yet she fails the IQ test on several occasions - by doing things that only an exceptionally stupid child would. Awesome writing...
Speaking of super-intelligent children, it is one of the most annoying and mong movie cliches in all of cinema, and to be found only in really bad movies.
She can't figure out that the spider isn't a mere insect, yet she scripts a comic book that her father illustrates, and she has the vocabulary of a three-diplomas adult. She uses Google, yet even with Google she fails to realize that spiders don't mimic voices. Indeed, a 12 year-old of average intelligence would have realized or known that spiders don't make sounds, let alone imitate other creatures. So is she smart or dumb? That's sort of depends on the writer's mood, or rather on the needs of the script. This is particularly laughable considering how there was an attempt here to create character "depth" by including all sorts of very dull and completely unnecessary family drama nonsense.
Why would this guy waste all his time and energy on illustrating a little girl's script? The writer clearly knows nothing about comic book illustrators, like for example that it is extremely time-consuming work which means that you don't do it on a whim just to make your kid happy. Especially since this guy isn't the richest in the world, and would be utilizing his talent to try to make some money.
Of course, in this dumb movie the comic is actually successful, as all comics scripted by little children are... All zero of them. Do you know of any such examples? What's next? A comic book scripted by badgers?
When he informs her that one of their comics will be printed in 45,000 units she reacts almost bored, as if she's been getting this kind of news every day - for the past 50 years. This is a 12-year-old, mind you. Ironically, this is also the intellectual level of the movie's writer. So it's not so much that the kid is super smart, it's that the writer is super thick. Or at least he believes that all of his audiences are.
AND she teaches her stepfather how to draw emotion into the characters! Seriously, this girl should be curing cancer and engineering a rocket to Jupiter instead of taking care of a spider and writing a comic book. Idiotic fair stemming from the imagination of a clueless talent-free scribbler.
She's supposedly so smart, yet whenever the spider hides below the lid of the jar, it doesn't occurr to her to flip it around so she can see it more easily. Instead she bends down to look up at the lid, which only the dumbest child would do. Hell, even Sean Penn wouldn't do this.
Not to mention how slowly the plot moves. Getting through these 90 minutes was a slog. Aside from the intro there is practically nothing happening in the sense of horror in the entire first third. All we have is adults being boring and speaking like idiots, and of course that precocious 12 year-old who has an IQ of 5,000 and knows everything except that spiders can't behave like humans or birds. I said it before and I'll say it again: writers who make kids out to be geniuses either hate children or have never spoken to a child in their life. You decide which is more likely...
The girl is supposed to have a good relationship with her stepfather, and yet she calls him an "idiot" during a dispute, and not at all jokingly. The only idiot is the guy who wrote this though...
How about his whiny, lazy wife criticizing him for not prioritizing Charlotte's teeth - claiming that if Liam's teeth were in need of fixing he'd jump at it immediately, Liam being his biological child. Two problems here: a) there seems to be nothing wrong with Charlotte's teeth, I wish I had teeth like that, and b) Liam is an infant. So not exactly a great example to use for him allegedly picking one child over the other. I'm half-surprised the wife didn't discuss the baby's college fees as well...
Extremely predictable, especially the last third. Very very boring by-the-numbers plot, as generic as it gets.
Just to show you how deranged the writer is, consider the fact that he brutally kills off an innocent woman depressed about the loss of her child, yet expects us to care about a family who are all unlikable.
I guess anybody's script these days can get okayed by clueless execs. The great advantage of contemporary screenwriters is that most execs are illiterate, or refuse to read despite that literally being part of their job description. Well, it's either that or the executives are even thicker than the writers... Though judging by the 5.7 it's not as if the audiences are making it very difficult for filmmakers.
Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
A huge flop, and it's obvious why.
One of the numerous anti-achievements of the 21st century is the total dumbing-down of comedies. Not that they weren't dumb before, but they were certainly funnier, and on average they were less daft. And that's saying something! ANYTHING is less dumb and less useless than Mill Annie Al humor.
This chop-sockey version of the Verne novel, with all of its unnecessary and idiotic alterations, is nothing but a primitive kung fu comedy, a cheesy by-the-numbers action adventure, something that Verne certainly never intended for Fogg nor would have likely condoned (unless he was a greedy pygg willing to sell out to the highest bidder, for example the Chinese). Certainly if he had known what action comedies were, or rather what they would become, it's hard to imagine he would have liked them.
Steven Coogan keeps getting miscast all the time, and this time the decision to have him carry a super-expensive movie probably resulted in many executive heads rolling after this nonsense massively flopped. Not that I am blaming just him for the film's failure, far from it, but he is visibly uncomfortable, or at the very least lost as to how exactly to play this. The dignified-rich-gentleman approach was so obviously not going to work, but execs being as deluded as they are wouldn't have known this of course. Clearly, Coogan had overrated his abilities, especially the spectrum of characters which he thought he could cover. He can't. He's almost like a one-trick-pony. He isn't terrible in this, he's too good to completely fail, but so many other actors would have been better suited. The clueless writers even gave him one or two romantic scenes, something that should be made illegal. Even just a hint of Coogan mating should have most audiences running for the exit, popcorn flying through the air. His performance here is a very far cry from the Alan Partridge series which was tailor-made for him. That kind of snide, ironic, sarcastic humor is what he does very well. Or what he used to do very well. Playing a loser - that too is much more up his alley than playing some kind of naive aristocrat...
Jackie Chan is his usual average self, slightly charismatic and certainly never funny. Commanding an exorbitant fee, he's the one who carried the movie and who is mostly responsible for making this one of the biggest flops of recent decades. Whichever clowns allocated a budget of well over 100 million dollars are probably not in the film industry anymore.
Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days cost a fraction of that yet is superior to this nonsense and is actually closer to the source material - despite being just a documentary series.
The humor is far too broad(bent) i.e. Cheap. It often borders on farce, and even more often crosses that lousy border. A border that should never be crossed, not even by bad filmmakers and actors. Or in fact especially not by them. Farce can only be enjoyed by very young children and Amy Ba.
The resolution is cringingly predictable and completely moronic, with Broadbent saying and doing far too many stupid things to be anywhere near a convincing villain, even for a cartoon villain such as this overkill cardboard character. Broadbent overacts his butter off, not one of his shining moments. Not that any actor could shine in this rubbish, not even if they painted themselves in gold. Was he embarrassed by this role? Did he go into hiding?
The entire Schwarzenegger segment is just cringe. Or even bigger cringe. I'm just surprised that he wasn't given an Irish accent as well, considering that they thought that placing a silly wig on his square head would do the trick. Ts ts ts... A typically Mill Annie Al miscalculation. Mill Annie Al humor: hire a big-name actor for a small role and stick a wig on his head - because obviously that has got to be so immensely hilarious. Imagine Sean Penn or Kanye West playing a "hilarious" king or an emperor? No? Well stick wigs on them and get them to play a banjo, a modern-day formula guaranteed to get laughs... But only from very small children and Amy Ba..
Metsurin tarina (2022)
Deadpan is one thing. Deadbrain is a whole other ball game.
"Now that the men have destroyed everything, we will have to move to the city."
If this movie had been made 50 years ago, the statement could have been understood ironically, in other words to mock the female character that said it. But considering that this is a 2022 movie, and from one of the most politically-correct regions in the world, it is highly doubtful that there is even a hint of irony in it. We are very probably meant to take this literally, at face value, because obviously male toxic swine are at fault for everything, and women as a "minority" are their perpetual victims.
A pretty ridiculous point to make, considering that the woman who said it as well as her female friend both cheated on their husbands which resulted in the death of the barber with whom they had affairs, plus there was the suicide of one of the two husbands. So if anybody destroyed anything, it's those two wives. As usual, no accountability whatsoever... Just like children.
Furthermore, who was it that signed those papers rendering all those men unemployed? It was a woman. She may have felt guilty about it, but she signed the papers nonetheless.
Yeah, about that... The main character loses his job at the beginning, but half an hour later we see him working at another job: no explanation whatsoever. At least not for almost 15 minutes. Thanks, movie!
Just as we don't understand what the burning car was about, and many other things. After roughly 40 minutes this deadpan comedy/drama/whatever gets all pompous on us by turning surreal, and in a fairly uninteresting and very stupid way. Nothing remotely intellectual about any of this, you've been lied to. The old fill-in-the-gaps-yourself Picasso con.
A movie can get away with deadpan humor if it's executed right, with the appropriate script and deft direction. But when the dialogue is mostly boring, obvious or nonsensical that deadpan delivery becomes a harakiri move by the film.
The first half hour is alright, promising at least a modicum of entertainment. Unfortunately, right after the guy kills himself, so does the movie too commit suicide. And this is literally the only symbolism that the movie succeeded in, if only completely unintentionally.
The second half of the film reveals the writer's misguided ambitions shaped as a philosophical film. He must have mixed up philosophy with random babbling, though to be fair these two things have been known to cross paths on occasion... So perhaps in a sense he was being true to some of the "greats" of semantic-gymnastic pseudo-intellectual hogwash that we all call Philosophy. Characters say deeply "profound" things out of the blue, completely out of context, and not to dissimilar to the very wise musings posted on Facebook by housewives and other kitchen philosophers. Even worse, the film commits a cardinal sin by making kids talk like adults. Not just average adults, but intellectuals. Or at least quasi-intellectuals... The main character's son makes no sense, nor does the little girl that he was in love with, yet who appears only once or twice very briefly. She too only talks gibberish.
Things just happen randomly, they aren't explained, and they bring nothing to the table in terms of story. Because there is no story. The psychic appears out of nowhere, he isn't even properly introduced, he simply starts his shtick as if we knew him from before. The entire second half is like this. Random nonsense with no rhyme or reason.
The death of the psychic and the violence that he perpetrates just before his demise is complete and utter rubbish. Writing of the laziest kind. At the latest here the movie completely disintegrates.
The passive nature of the characters isn't funny, it's moronic. The fat guy kills his wife's lover with an axe, yet she barely reacts despite sitting half a meter away from the action. The main character gets his face smashed in, yet none of the 30 people react, much less help. The main character watches his son enter a burning car wreckage, and he just stands there, emotionless, as if Finnish kids were trained since kindergarten to do this. That's why this movie isn't deadpan strictly speaking, it is deadbrain. Or braindead if you like.
Needless to say, and so very predictably for this allegedly unpredictable film, there is no conclusion whatsoever. Somebody started writing a comedy drama, then accidentally took a large dose of Bolivian mushrooms, and the rest is history. A page from cinema history that nobody will care about. Nobody cares about it now let alone in 50 years.
The Addams Family (1991)
One-joke premise with a lousy cast. Vintage Sonnenfeld.
Applying Bugs Bunny cartoon humor to a real-life movie never worked or perhaps only extremely rarely. But how would Barry Sonnenfeld possibly know this? His comedies are all abysmal, unfunny. Whether MIB or that awful fantasy western, B. S. had exhibited nothing but complete incompetence in all things comedy-related. I'd like to say that his comedies are some of the unfunniest big-budget ones ever made, and I could have certainly had a solid case for this back in the 90s, but after decades of atrocious, super-cringe millennial "comedies" he is no longer one of the worst. Any unbearable Farrell vehicle (yet another nepotist so probably Barry would like him) is 10 times worse than Barry's dumbest gag. Mr Sunnyfield is a technically proficient director, very stylish, but that is all he can do, absolutely nothing more to offer. Some cameramen are cut out only for that, deluded if they think that technical know-how suffices to make a great film, or even a reasonable film. He understands comedy like I understand alien invasions in the Aquarius Nebula. (You say there's no Aquarius Nebula? Precisely...)
Barry is so utterly hopeless that he didn't even notice all the dumb illogical jokes that infest this pitiful script. For example, Hedaya opening the book Gone With the Wind. WHY would he open it in the first place though? Barry's response would be so that a strong wind could blow into his face, a very Looney Tunes gag if I might add. No, Barry, what is the character's motivation for opening the book? Not YOUR motivation as the director, duh... The answer is that there is no motivation, no logical reason for Hedaya to open it. He took the book off the shelf to see where Raul was, or at least it appeared that way, he was curious about the vault. The only way that a title of this book could have distracted and intrigued the lawyer would have been if it was something like Nosferatu's Buried Treasures or something of that ilk, something that might have promised a path to easy money.
In order for humor to work, even in childish films, there has to be an underlying logic to a character's behavior and decision-making, something that the audience can understand or even relate to - otherwise it simply won't be funny because it's disconnected from reality.
Another example of shoddy logic is Angelica complaining that her husband is coughing up blood, but then quipping three seconds later how he used to cough up more blood - in the sense of this being a positive thing. There's no logic to this: either she's complaining that Raul is coughing up too much blood or she's complaining that he is coughing up too little blood. You can't have it both ways and then expect this stupid joke to work.
Which brings me to just how obvious and predictable the humor is. Half the movie is these kinds of obvious "reverse logic" jokes. What I mean by this is that whatever is normal for regular humans, the opposite of that is true for the Addams Family. I have no issue with this from a logical standpoint, but this "opposite behavior" shtick gets old pretty quick. It's a one-joke premise, it's infantile.
There are only two "reverse jokes" that work: the one when Ricci is asked to be rude to Lloyd at the dinner table, the other one when Morticia sighs how her husband is no longer a layabout loafer.
The girl-scout cookies quip works too. As does the scene in which Raul keeps pestering Sally the talk-show host. But that's about it. I've just listed you all 4 gags that worked. Everything else pretty much flops. A lot of the humor is the kind of loud overacting nonsense that's always a poor substitute for real comedy.
I don't care what kind of a comedy you're making, and whether it's geared towards adults or children, but character behavior must make some sense otherwise a movie falls apart. Raul Julia, who doesn't appear to be playing a moron, is exactly that: he can't figure out immediately that Lloyd is an imposter, yet his two young children can! Does Mr Sunnyfield actually expect me to believe that an adult man, and even if he were a moron, wouldn't be able smell out an imposter impersonating his own brother - while his two young kids who had never met him can? Right...
Later when Ricci's suspicions are confirmed, what does she do... Does she rush to the ball to inform her parents of the conspiracy? No. This girl, which had behaved intelligently until then, simply disappears, choosing to hide somewhere. When her parents return and find her, she says nothing. She merely mumbles that Fester isn't real, an utterance that Raul perhaps doesn't even hear. It's the stereotypical "avoid- character-communication-to-advance-the-plot" shtick used only by lazy and inept writers. I've only ever seen it in bad movies, whether comedies or thrillers. Awful sitcoms use it all the time, whereby a character is "prevented" from sharing some crucial information with another character, which predictably results in a "comedic" misunderstanding. It's never funny because it's too absurd, very often not in line with human behavior.
This illogical nonsense is followed by even more absurd tedium when the Adams family suddenly lose their property. Just like that! Their judge neighbor evidently has more power than the President, because he can actually do that, and within minutes even. Another ridiculous plot-device which is completely non-entrenched in reality and basic common sense, hence isn't funny let alone convincing. It is absurd that a family with such magical powers would simply leave the house without a fight, instead of immediately taking necessary steps to defeat the enemy. For example they could have made the papers disappear. Anything. They can look literally do anything. The only plan that any of the Adams Family have is for Morticia to let herself be captured, and this is not even a proper plan because she does this without telling anyone. Total nonsense. The family is so inept that they had to rely on Fester betraying his camp in order to be saved - without even knowing that Fester would help them.
The only good plot point in the entire story is that fake Fester eventually grows attached to the family. Most of the other stuff is too formulaic. Although, even Fester's turnaround was predictable, fairly obvious halfway already. The fact that he turns out to be the real Fester is a plot-twist that's a bit silly but it works for the franchise overall, I suppose.
This may be a comedy, but that doesn't absolve the writer of the responsibility to come up with a story and characters that respect this world's own logic. A film can have its own unusual logic, but only as long as the film then abides to its own rules. This movie doesn't know what it is or what it wants, so it lurches from one silly plot-device to the next, trampling all over its own logic. Sorry for not being a zombie, for not being able to ignore all its blatant nonsense...
Fester and his mother don't do anything at all, after realizing that Ricci found out everything. Shouldn't they be panicking or something? But that's how sloppy this script is. Barry is one of those directors, kind of like Brian De Palma and Terry Gilliam, who solely focus on the technical side of the production, neglecting or at least not taking seriously enough the content on which the quality of every movie relies. This movie may look very good, as the Coen brothers movies that Barry filmed, but unlike those (at least the earlier ones) Barry has very little to offer in terms of content.
A much better story would have been to have Raul toy around with Fester because he had sussed him out immediately. It would have made a lot more sense, plus it could have provided some better gags at the expense of Fester, his mother and the lawyer. Or ditch this entire ridiculous imposter premise and go with something more fun and more imaginative, perhaps not even have a central plot that is so important. This family in itself is unusual enough to carry a movie that doesn't rely on some kind of a stupid generic conflict-arises-conflict-is-resolved premise. Far too many comedies fall apart because of this incomprehensible need to always have a very important central plot to attach jokes to. Classic comedies such as the Holy Grail prove that this isn't necessary, that comedy does not need a well-defined, strong, basic story at its foundation, as the main focus of the film. Explaining this to Hollywood execs would be a total waste of time, they wouldn't understand what the hell you're talking about.
This should have been a movie geared primarily towards kids, so having all that hooey with the lawyer and that other legal stuff is absurd, because how are kids going to understand it or be interested in it, in these legal matters. There should be some kind of unwritten rule that you never use lawyers or any kind of overly complicated or bureaucratic adult themes in a kids movie! Bloody obvious. Imagine if Bambi wasn't able to move from one part of the forest into another because its passport wasn't stamped properly. But that's exactly the kind of nonsense that inept writers sometimes inject into kids films.
Perhaps the primary reason why this movie was destined to fail, either with a good or bad script, is the horrible casting. This also happens to be the reason why I refused to watch these films back when they were released.
Not one comedian in the movie! Raul isn't funny, never was. Not a comedic actor. Lloyd is a one-note uni-grimace overactor, and there isn't a single movie in which he was funny. He plays Fester very well, but not in a funny way. But by far the biggest casting travesty is Angelica. Never mind comedies, she can't act at all! One of the most abysmal and charisma-free nepotists in the history of Hollywood gets cast in a COMEDY. As a BEAUTY. Of all the thousands of beautiful and more competent actresses, from A-listers all the way "down" to unemployed waitresses that hadn't been on a casting couch yet, he casts Angelica.
Saloum (2021)
Muddled script that's all over the place.
This isn't "weird cinema", but it's definitely unusual, basically due to the fact that it's an African film. The first thing I noticed is that it looks better than other films of this era, you just immediately know that this can't be yet another vapid American product. The photography and the colors are too good for that, though far from me saying that it's visually spectacular. The monocolor pandemic that started in the States several decades ago has by now spread all over the world, which an increasing number of colorless "exotic" films proves. I've never understood this need to ape everything that Americans do, which especially goes for Western Europe who behave as if they are all just one big American colony. Pathetic, really...
It should have been a little more colorful, especially with all that great scenery. But tell that to the thousands of current filmmakers, 99% of whom are completely inferior to those of the 20th century.
The plot is odd, occasionally confusing. Part of that has to do with the interplay of genres and themes: horror, crime, child molestation, revenge, some humor, and slightly political. It's all over the place, somewhat undisciplined. Just as things are about to go down between the Hyenas and the police, the horror stuff is thrown on board. Speaking of which, there is nothing horror-wise for the first 45 minutes. This shtick of starting with a thriller then introducing a supernatural factor, or starting with one type of thriller then switching gears to a different type, has been done before quite a few times. For example, Abigail, No One Lives or Deep Rising. So it's nothing spectacularly new at all.
When Chaka exacts His revenge, the cop doesn't fire a single bullet, which seems unrealistic. As absurd as the fact that he was alone at the table, yet again, without any backup right there.
Some things are unexplained, some don't make sense. The Hyenas get their accommodation after there is some screaming nearby. Who was screaming and what was the threat? Who knows. Stranger still, the gang didn't care. Nobody seemed to care, not even this location's shady proprietor.
Chaka is supposed to have sabotaged the fuel tank, just so they would land in the middle of a desert in Senegal, where he had a score to settle with the proprietor. This was a completely ridiculous plan, which only an insane or very stupid person could come up with. If he wanted revenge, he could have done it at some other time, like AFTER delivering Felix. He's the leader of this infamous gang, yet he turns out to be the saboteur. Really, movie? You're going with that? Besides, by delaying his revenge - instead of immediately killing the proprietor - he was risking everything: their lives, the mission, and the revenge itself. He knew that there was a cop, so why wait? This isn't the tightest script.
I also believe that considering who Chaka is, how dangerous he is, and just how justified his revenge is - it would have made much more sense to do this as a separate mission, and one in which he could slowly torture his victim. Shooting him dead seemed like a rather weak revenge plan considering the crime and who Chaka is.
The scene in which Chaka is watching his friend and the cop being attacked is ludicrous. He hesitates too long, because it's a no-brainer that he should help his friend first.
The supernatural part of the film doesn't work because it lacks menace. The "zombies" look like guys surrounded by a bee swarm, and the soundtrack during their attacks is pitiful. The last third is inferior to what preceded it. Rather boring actually.
The speed with which Awa recognizes the trio is far-fetched. They are mercenaries, not celebrities. Chaka's interactions with her are weird, because sometimes verging on comedy, plus one gets the impression that they'd known each other from before which isn't the case. But the dialogue is generally strange, with irrelevant little tidbits here and there that only serve to confuse.
Completely unrealistic is Chaka's high education level, which even includes speaking sign language for the deaf. It's laughable, because if the filmmakers had met any real African mobsters or revolutionaries they would have found them far more basic than that. That the Hyenas "don't kill civilians" is also highly implausible, too romanticized for a movie that is essentially going for realism. Anyone familiar with African politics would know how unlikely this is. It's a very brutal continent, with only very few films exposing the extremity of it all. There are no heroes in Africa, only victims and perpetrators.
Mister Frost (1990)
Intriguing 1st half, meager 2nd.
There should be a movie about how sometimes interesting scripts barely get made while so many garbage ones are filmed more than once. This is not only just a TV movie, but it seems to have been shot somewhere in Europe, probably for budgetary reasons, hence the accents being all over the place. And once you hear the cheesy soundtrack you will be convinced of the film's financial struggles.
Admittedly, the film is too intelligent for most horror and thriller fans, who get restless and peeved if 10 minutes go by without an action scene involving buckets of fake blood.
Character studies tend to be dull, because most writers are dull and have little to nothing interesting to say. This one is different because it's about the devil taking the appearance of Jeff Goldblum, then toying around with people.
The premise of a shrink conducting conversations with a very unusual patient is reminiscent of the movie K-Pax, the crucial difference being that K-Pax is a silly semi-commercial movie trying to be profound. In it Kevin Spacey plays and alien that came to Earth. The alien is supposed to be wise and intellectually superior, yet comes off as a hippy moron, moralizing like the fool that he is.
In Mr Frost, Goldblum doesn't come off as a goofy moron. Far from it. He is menacing, intelligent, infinitely evil, charismatic, and supremely confident. The only time he loses his cool is when the question of his existence and allegedly diminishing power is brought up. His huge ego is his only weakness, if one can call it that. The fact that mankind, as he claims, stopped believing in him riles him to no end. (Which kinda doesn't make sense, as he should be glad that evil is still omnipresent, regardless of the belief.)
In the hands of somebody who wrote K-Pax this idea wouldn't have worked because Frost would have been a goofy clown instead. Who knows, the devil may have even softened, turning to the Good Side by the end? I wouldn't be surprised by Hollywood writers to come up with such nonsense.
Speaking of clown films, that silly Spacey flick has 50 times more votes than Frost, and a far higher average. Draw your own very obvious conclusion...
Kathy Baker's character is also generally well fleshed out. She starts off as a smug shrink, a career woman clueless about the real world, thinking she has it all figured out. The scene in which she bravely but stupidly decides to watch Frost's videotape is well presented, adding more layers to the film.
And very little about the Devil's stay on Earth is silly or illogical. He kills and tortures 24 people because he felt like it. He gets arrested because he didn't mind getting arrested, he wanted that experience too. He then spends two years in jail without trying to escape. Why should he? Two years is a mere millisecond in the life of a supernatural entity. Besides, he must have enjoyed the prison environment, more for him to learn...
Most of the above pretty much only applies to the first half. The second half of the movie is a letdown. The romance between Baker and Bates is kind of silly. The fact that Bates is losing his belief that Frost is the devil makes absolutely no sense, especially in light of the fact that the evidence had been mounting that he is the devil in those recent days, and he didn't even need additional evidence. Not to mention the totally unconvincing way, almost cartoonish, in which Christopher escapes an angry mob of basketball-playing kids. That whole subplot with Christopher takes up too much space, it's not particularly relevant.
The head of the psychiatric clinic is about to jump from the building, and yet his colleagues all look on bored, as if he does this often.
There is also an underlying logic flaw permeating the whole film. Frost says he intends to create chaos, but considering his vast powers the chaos he creates is very minor, it's on a micro level. Baker even explains to him that all the bad stuff that goes on in the world is far bigger than him. Shouldn't he be instigating new wars instead? Nor is it explained how come all this 20th-century evil had come about without the devil. Shouldn't he take the credit for all that? Or was there a Free Will implication here?
The conclusion is very sloppy. It isn't explained why Bates reacts the way he does when Baker finds his gun. She takes the gun and shoots the devil. In fact, she shoots herself because Frost takes over her body. Bates looks at Baker as she is being arrested and it isn't clear why he's nodding. Was he also possessed? Why so late, after two years?
Aside from the cheesy music there's another cheapening effect and that is that several actors are dubbed over. Maybe for budgetary reasons they had to hire local actors who barely spoke English.
A Banquet (2021)
Guess what? Yet another film without a resolution.
I had to watch this without subtitles, which reminded me how pathetic modern actors are. It's all about mumbling, being incomprehensible in the name of "realism". As if the entire planet mumbles. At least that's what modern filmmakers want us to think, that speaking like a drugged-up Marlon Brando is how most of the population on Earth communicates.
But there is a bigger issue here. There is a plague in horror films of recent years, an infestation without end, and that is writers wrapping up their dumb movies without a resolution, without basic explanations.
Why did this girl get possessed and by whom? Why did this happen after she popped an acid pill? The movie doesn't care to explain anything, all we know is that whatever demon took hold of her infected her with nihilism. In a sense, one could say that she was turned into a depressed hipster. I half-expected her to start buying Radiohead LPs, and telling everybody how awesome Sigur Ros are. That would have been even more concerning for her mother, because no parent wants to deal with a child inept enough to dabble in hipsterism.
The only thing that we do know for certain is that supernatural events dominate the film. The girl couldn't have been insane. The fact that the scale was set on 9 stone all along does not convince me that the girl was anorexic and died from starvation, because several things contradict this.
First of all, even if the scale didn't work fact is that Betsy did not look any thinner than before. The plot covers a span of at least six or seven months, hence Betsy should have been skin and bones by the time she's snuffed it. Why the movie chose to show us the scale being set on nine is a bizarre and silly plot-twist - perhaps intended to make us question whether this was a supernatural story. Unoriginal and unnecessary, because there are tons of films playing this game with the viewers. Also ridiculous, because Betsy's mother very clearly has a supernatural experience in the very last scene. Nothing that the movie would confirm or deny, of course, because this is just a silly guessing game. As usual, the filmgoer is irrelevant and doesn't need to know anything. We are supposed to muse on the ending, as if this were some profound film. Muse on what though? The film gives you nothing to go on. Anybody can concoct a wild theory "explaining" this film, but whatever anybody comes up with is completely subjective and essentially has nothing to do with the film itself. Fill in the blanks, for such movies, automatically means speculating without sufficient proof.
Thirdly, nobody lives six or seven months without eating anything. Fourthly, how could Betsy possibly have known that she was going to be in a major crisis very soon, telling her mother to not give up no matter what she says.
By telling us that Betsy's mother experienced insanity in her own youth, the film was trying to throw us off. Why? Possibly because there was no resolution, so the writer was forced to do something, anything, to justify himself and his very vague story. To spice up the thin story with that cheesy guessing game.
There is an absolutely hilarious 8 star review that states with conviction that this movie is about a mother who should have had her daughters taken away from her by social services. That reviewer is convinced that the girl died from bulimia and that there is nothing supernatural going on. The person doesn't care to explain how Betsy managed to survive for so long with no food, plus there's no physical evidence of weight loss.
The thriller tag is completely wrong. This is the total opposite of a thriller. It is supernatural, the pace is very slow, there are no crimes committed, and it has no human antagonists.
Falcon Lake (2022)
Another male fantasy in French.
I thought this may have been supernatural but unfortunately it's just the usual coming-of-age nonsense, which in modern terms means drugs, decadence alcohol, and puking. Because according to Movieland that's all the youth does. There's no fantasy here. Certainly not in the first 90 minutes.
Actually no, there is fantasy here. Male fantasy. Not the kind involving a young teenage girl madly in love with a fat, bald, ugly, middle-aged man. No, that is a common French trope, but not here, this is a Canadian film. This is the male fantasy not from the point of view of a middle-aged man, but from the point of view of boy. A 13 year-old boy is seduced by a 16 year old girl. This only happens in movies. How many 16 year-old girls have you come across that prefer three years younger as opposed to three years older? None, exactly. They may go out with a 15 year old guy, but even that is not so common.
In fact, though I have no concrete evidence to support this claim, I believe that there is a bigger chance that you find a ghost in Quebec then a good-looking 16 year-old girl who is willing to go out with a 13 year-old dweeb. She's practically a woman, he's just a kid. The fact that girls physically mature earlier than boys is just one of several reasons for this.
Admittedly, she more-or-less only toys with him. She's forced to share rooms for a certain period of time, so she makes him her orbiter. This is a practice commonly used by the human female of various ages, usually by the attractive ones and ones that enjoy exercising their power that way.
The masturbation scene was absolutely ridiculous. I mean the first masturbation scene, because there are two. Because how can we have a coming-of-age drama without coming? Not in this era.
The hairlipped older guy asking the boy whether he did it with Chloe was an unconvincing scene, because why would an 18 or 19 year-old ask a 13 year old whether he did it with a 16 year-old girl. That kind of nonsense wouldn't even occur to anyone, because it's so unlikely. This was only added as a plot-device so that the two would have a fight, leading to his demise.
The conclusion is rushed, superficial, and unconvincing.
The female lead is very good, but the rest of the cast are hopelessly bland and dull.
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
Hipsters playing hide-and-seek. That's what you get here.
The only vaguely interesting or somewhat likable character is the female lead. The rest are a bunch of weak indie film hipster putzes. The sort of annoying West Coast millennials that give America a bad name, confirming its reputation as a decaying empire full of clueless, animated, confused dweebs.
It's supposed to be a character study, but there isn't that much to study in the lead's character. She's shy, very introvert, withdrawn. What's there to study? Nor do we anyway really find out anything more about her. What makes her special? Not much.
The less said about her love-interest the better. It's hard to care about the success of this relationship because this guy is unlikable and mostly dull, a dorky attention-seeker. One of those film buff nerds which we are supposed to like. I am glad that he never names his favorite movies because I'm pretty sure they all stink. Logically, she should be repelled by him, and yet she's instantly attracted to him. Plus there is this sense that she can do a lot better than a fat bald twice-divorced nerd.
The argument that they have in the car is way too sudden, doesn't really make sense, and feels contrived. Because every drama requires "conflict"... Except that conflict needs to appear natural, not forced.
The only thing the movie succeeds at is the very good soundtrack.
The Stairs (2021)
When kids experience monsters as "cute".
What 10 year-old would not run away from a monster in the woods? The one in this movie, that's who. From his reaction it would appear he'd seen some cute animal or something, but it later turns out that this very clearly isn't the case. That was the first nonsensical reaction in the film, though probably the biggest one.
The reaction of the hiking group to "the family matter" segment wasn't entirely kosher either. I was wondering how or whether Doug would change his comic-relief attitude after the sheet hits the fan. My suspicions that he wouldn't change too much were confirmed, which helped lessen the movies horror levels, because why would anyone joke under these circumstances. He still found the time to goof off even after that spectacularly weird encounter. Nobody is that mentally resilient.
Josh telling Nick that he's getting wound up "over nothing" seemed like such an oddball move by the writer. Who would say something like that - after seeing a witch, a baby shaped like a worm, and a zombie blow his brains? The group should have been in far more panic. They should have had fits, going into shock, convulsions, screaming in terror. Such basic common sense, too much to ask for?
The only person in the group who reacted somewhat realistically aside from Nick was Rebecca. She just wanted to get the hell out of there. I mean, after you see an infant shaped like a worm being held by a witch demon - all bets are off. You just run. And you don't forget to scream occasionally.
Josh, who seems to be one of the sensible ones, suddenly deteriorates and starts making the dumbest decisions. First he is fascinated with the stairway then actually smashes the door leading into the cellar, but by far the dumbest thing he or anybody else in this movie does is the way he gets himself killed. He, Nick and the kid find the escape door yet he hesitates to climb up because he thinks that they've lost the monster! It is an unforgivably ridiculous scene, really poor writing.
Nick's behavior upon Jordan getting killed is off too. Instead of instinctively running away from the stairway he curls up in the fetal position, doesn't run away with the others.
There are several moments when the characters are talking way too much instead of running or at least moving away from the danger.
In the end the cops are being almost mocking about there having been monsters involved, yet they never asked themselves how it's possible that a kid who disappeared 20 years ago reappears and hasn't aged a day. Stupid. If you find a child that hasn't aged 20 years then you're pretty much open to any possibilities regarding aliens, monsters, witches, ghosts...
One of the biggest story holes I'd countered in recent months is how the zombie family is never again mentioned! Their appearance is left unexplained, which is a mind-boggling level of sloppiness. There is absolutely nothing in the movie to justify their existence.
Meg 2: The Trench (2023)
The Chinese as do-gooders in the Philippine Sea... Wonderful.
Already the prehistoric intro is botched. A T-Rex has a huge fresh carcass in front of him, yet bothers to chase down smaller lizards into the ocean, where he predictably gets killed by the megalodon. But I'm not really surprised. The T-Rex had been previously informed that the star of the movie wasn't him, so would he kindly offer himself as bait for the big fish? This enormous sea creature somehow manages to hunt in very shallow waters, which didn't make sense to the T-Rex who complained to the director about it but his logical comment was dismissed as irrelevant. I suppose the writer must have figured "if orcas can do it then so can the meg". It's always awesome when Hollywood writers try to be biologists.
All of this nonsense takes place "65 million years ago", because the filmmakers falsely understood that all these creatures existed only 65 million years ago, not 67 million years ago or 100 million years ago. What their tiny minds don't seem to comprehend is that 65 million years ago there was the destruction of the big lizards, due to a comet or whatever it was, hence why that number keeps showing up everywhere. They must have heard this number many times and mistaken it for the "date" when all of these creatures existed. And these are the same people who try to indoctrinate us with various mentally ill agendas...
These are the Hollywood writers that are in charge of big budget films these days, and that's the level of negligence, incompetence and ignorance, and they display it in practically every movie. These are the same people who went on strikes very recently. Demanding more pay for even more inferior work? Talk about cajones.
"Like a green James Bond." That's Jason Statham involved in eco warfare. Except that James Bond was never a commie moron. I'm not at all surprised by this kind of nonsense, nor surprised that the toxic waste criminals are portrayed as English, as opposed to some third world nation seafarers, which would be so much more realistic but so much less politically correct.
Certainly China was not going to be portrayed as ocean polluters. After all, the movie features Chinese actors and characters, and very probably the movie was co-financed by the Chinese.
This Oriental cast includes a 14 year-old teeny bopper "genius", a character so over-the-top ridiculous, boring and unfunny, that even the black guy who talks like a rapper yet works on a high-tech scientific mission can't match.
In fact, no probably about it. I Googled this trash, and yes, it's a Chinese franchise. Which is why there are no Japanese or Korean actors here. Imagine the hypocrisy of all these Hollywood do-gooders who throw in all this phony green agenda stuff in their useless scripts, yet work for China, the biggest polluters on the planet by a very wide margin. Hilarious.
Not to mention that the plot takes place in the Philippine Sea, a region which the Chinese have been trying to wrestle out of the Philippines through brute force and superpower bullying for many years now. This never even makes it to headline news, let alone in Hollywood films. There will literally never be a Hollywood film about Chinese invasions and intrusions in Philippine territory.
I had to quit this piece of crap after about 30 minutes, it was showing all the signs that it would be even dumber than the first film, which is a level of badness and boredom that I prefer not to repeat. Besides, I was awfully bored; without exaggerating, not even one minute is interesting, not one minute is without nonsense. This kind of garbage is impossible to sit through, unless you're 12 or younger.
If you want to find out about all the other nonsense that very definitely takes place in the rest of the movie, read the other reviews with low ratings, of which there is an abundance. They include more details, unless those people too couldn't finish the film.
Let me know when they finally make a proper movie about the megalodon.
A Creature Was Stirring (2023)
One of those movies that blatantly lies to you for 90 minutes, then tries to shock with one of the biggest plot-twist cliches.
Plenty of nonsense is stirring in this very random script. Very little adds up.
I don't understand why Corey makes jokes all the time, why he's rude. He is behaving as if he were in a comedy yet this clearly isn't one. The jokes do subside quite a bit after things become dangerous.
The scene when Charm (named this way probably after one of Frank Zappa's brood) gets a seizure during dinner makes no sense. Several seconds later all three people disappear around Scout. Where did the fat one and her brother go?
After Corey meets the creature he talks to his sister yet doesn't even mention this, he doesn't properly warn her and actually lets her leave the room. What kind of bizarre writing is this?
Generally speaking the film tends to become more and more weird and baffling after the first half. Scout not believing Charm that she is a monster makes no sense because she had seen a creature in the tunnel. She was screaming, wasn't she?
The 70th minute is one of several examples of bizarro behavior of everyone involved, and of random nonsense. Corey is falling down a flight of stairs with porcupine spikes stuck inside him, while his sister is successfully wrestling Charm. Totally confusing. What the hell is going on? Who is stronger? Who has the upper hand?
Scout's behavior is inconsistent. Her character isn't fleshed out well. She is insistent that she and her brother not leave even after she had seen the monster. And yet just a little later she leaves through the window, barely dressed, into the blizzard, without even trying to locate her brother: this behavior contradicts literally everything that she'd said and done until then. Even sillier, the fat lady begs her to stay, only minutes after she had been tasered by Scout in what was a rather drastic scuffle. So first they fight, then all is forgotten?
A lot of the dialogue seems off, like it isn't what the characters should be saying.
Much of the second half is chaotic, even more so than the first half. Not just the dialogue, the events appear to be random at times. Less and less actions and events add up to anything rational.
A second monster that claims to be Charm's father appears. And yet we were told earlier that she got infected through an accident involving a common porcupine. Again nothing adds up, too many random occurrences.
The scene in which fatso has flashbacks with a suitcase is total nonsense.
Even if the movie had included a late twist that everything had transpired in a parallel world, it still wouldn't make sense.
But hold on. You can ignore everything I wrote above, because the actual twist completely negates the entire movie. There is no monster (kind of like the B-movie classic Monster A Go-Go), there are no visitors, and fatso is just a hallucinating junkie. Charm is dead, I have no idea why or how. The notion that a story should be or can be completely nonsensical for 90 minutes, and that this narrative chaos can be "justified" because the main character dreamt it all up, is preposterous.
That's it. That's the movie. A cheap parlor trick, utilizing one of the oldest twist cliches in cinema, as old as The Wizard of Oz.
Good photography, decent direction, but really awful writing.
Baghead (2023)
Expect a good first half and a very disappointing finish.
The main character, played by Freya, is quickly shown to be egotistical, lacking empathy and greedy. Additionally, she might not be too bright because she starts her first witch seance without first watching the instructional video-tape. Perhaps being a zoomer she doesn't know how to play a video-tape? She could have googled it!
She confirms her daftness in the 70th minute when she actually enters the hole, looking for Katie. Freya was specifically warned not to enter the hole under any circumstances, which should have been a golden rule for her considering that she was dealing with an enormously powerful witch, plus it should have been abundantly clear to her that the phone-call was not from Katie but from the witch herself in a very transparent attempt to lure her into the hole. Literally, the witch's main talent is impersonating people. Duh.
(This game of wits was very one-sided: a centuries old witch, sly and powerful, pitted against a 21st-century 20something airhead. What chances could Freya possibly have? The ending was a forgone conclusion, and I hate those.)
How Freya failed to add up 2 and 2 in this particular situation is beyond me. Especially since she had been already manipulated before, and had already experienced the witch's extensive powers. It's as if she kept underestimating the demon, something only a buffoon could do.
That this was a trap and that Katie had already been murdered was probably obvious to the majority of film-goers - at least those who have a bit more experience with horror films. Only the youngest and most naive viewers might have fallen for this trick the way Freya did.
So how she managed to escape the hole is unclear. That boring bland actor saves her, he just happens to be there at the right time. Deus ex machina? Even before Freya broke the cardinal rule by entering the hole, she was once almost killed by the witch - and from a distance, while not even being in the basement. So if anything the witch's leverage over Freya should have quadrupled after the broken rule.
But nevermind this. The bigger issue is that inept charisma-free young actor who plays that rather boring character Neil. Here we find out that he murdered his wife, something that was hinted at much earlier. I don't quite understand how a wife-murderer can be so emotionally attached to his dead wife. He pays tons of money to be with her, while admittedly also being obsessed with the unknown identity of her alleged lover. Yet it is clear from his actions (for example, ironically, from the lousy actor's very bad crying) that he isn't resurrecting her over and over just to find out who the lover is. Otherwise why would he want to strike a deal with the witch to keep visiting her repeatedly? He wasn't only interested in the identity of her imaginary lover, he genuinely wanted to spend more time with her. Utterly absurd and stupid. It makes no sense that a psychopath of that ilk would have remorse.
Nor do I understand why this minor plot-twist is revealed at a crucial time, when we really don't care about this guy at all. I couldn't care less that he murdered his wife, he shouldn't be the focus of the story. Freya should, as should the witch. His goofy attempt to take over possession of the house and the witch is too half-baked, as if he too were a moron just like Freya.
An earlier absurdity is the events that suddenly start taking place in the 48th minute. Without any explanation Freya becomes the witness of a past conversation between Mullan and the witch. How did she get there? Doesn't she need to go through the ritual/process in order to see the dead? How come she gets this for free, out of the blue? Why can't the movie follow its own rules? A little later, what rule did Freya break for the witch to be able to physically assault her? There are several plot holes, as per usual...
Very unfortunately, the movie eventually regresses to a mindless, cliche thriller when Neil starts chasing Freya. Both of them are fools for constantly being so easily manipulated by the witch, and in very predictable obvious ways, not in any incredibly intricate ways, so by this point I just didn't care how the movie would wrap itself up. I wanted the finale to be supernatural, and to revolve around the witch: her origins and her motives - rather than these two zoomer clowns playing a cat and mouse game of who's gonna kill whom. I absolutely hate it when supernatural movies get usurped by thriller nonsense, with human murderers taking over center stage. That crap bores me senseless.
A potentially good movie botched.
Don't Look Away (2023)
It's one of those because movies. Things happen, because.
A miracle! A modern horror film with colors! Hooray!
Different camera? Different lenses? What? Or did the director simply choose not to Photoshop the hell out of the film in post-production, turning it into 30 shades of grey as all the other movies.
The girl Frankie avoids getting murdered after she accidentally runs over the truck driver. There is a reason she isn't disposed of immediately, but it's absurd that she survives all the attacks.
A day later everybody but her gets slaughtered in a nightclub, doesn't quite make sense, because the mannequin (going by the movie's silly premise) should have left several more survivors in order to expand the killings. This is where the movie starts getting more frequently stupid, and at an accelerated pace. It's as if the stupidity in this movie needed a bit to warm up.
Why would Jonah not volunteer the information to the police that he also saw a mannequin? He had several reasons to do this: to help his friend Frankie so that she doesn't think she's crazy, to help the cops, and to increase the chances that the slaughter ends. So is he a moron or a psychopath?
When Steve returns he is disappointed that Frankie still believes in the evil mannequin. 5 other people in the room had seen it - from up close - and yet NONE of them verify the mannequin story to Steve! Instead, they just leave without a single word, like frigging zombies. Idiotic to the umpteent degree, staggeringly ridiculous writing. Even when Jonah tries to reason with Steve, he is cut off yet does not try to stand his ground, despite life and death literally being on the line. As if these people are terrified of Steve, who at this point is normal.
Why should anybody care about such characters? They don't behave like human beings hence they are meaningless and there existence is futile. They are not much more alive-looking than the mannequin itself.
In fact, these characters are anyway so annoying that it is a pleasure to have the mannequin slaughter them. They're supposed to be scientists (!), but they're just dazed and confused hipsters who probably listen to Lame Impala and Neutral Milk Hostel while they are not busy being easily killed. As far as I'm concerned, the mannequin wasn't quick enough in eradicating them. If this is what America's next generation of scientists is like, then NASA and MIT might as well just close shop...
Besides, aren't scientists supposed to be open-minded? Especially to things that they'd witnessed firsthand? A real scientist wouldn't discard a blatant piece of evidence like it was garbage, just because it doesn't fit into his worldview. Science isn't about denial, it isn't about religious doctrines which must be upheld forcefully, it is about observation and dealing with mysteries head on. So no, none of these characters can be scientists, at best they can be janitors and waitresses.
The writer uses the stupid non-communication shtick throughout the movie. From the very beginning, characters are not informing each other about the stuff that's essential for survival, or they leave out crucial details. This is a cheap plot-device used only by inept writers. Another cheap ploy that repeats over and over is characters unintentionally sneaking up on each other, which greatly cheapens the film with its many utterly boring jump-scares. I can't remember the last time that I jumped or got scared to a cheesy jump-scare.
The next baffling scene is when Steve starts doing Jack Nicholson. This is only minutes after a scene from The Shining was played, which triples the confusion. (Did the writer actually think that playing The Shining would act as a valid excuse for exploiting it?) Steve's dream of butchering Frankie in no way relates to the plot of this film, it only makes sense in the context of The Shining. The mannequin does not have the power of mind control so what was this nonsense about? This scene is like a parody of a scene from The Shining, when Jack promises he won't hurt Danny. This is in the 39th minute. In the 58th minute a THIRD The Shining scene gets aped: the legendary fake-novel type-writer scene.
It turns out that Steve is turning into a psycho, just like that, no explanation given, which is kind of like having a second movie appear within the original film. Why introduce a random psycho character into a bogeyman/slasher film? Especially a character that was perfectly normal at the outset, whose growing insanity has no foundation. Just laughable amateur writing. If you want to do a remake of The Shining, or a ripoff of it without having to pay for the rights, then do this in a different movie... Don't just throw all of your (and other people's) ideas and cliches into one film. 90 minutes are never enough to carry several different films in it. Even amoeba know this.
Another scene that stupidly and shamelessly copy-pastes Stanley Kubrick's classic is when Steve talks to the imaginary bartender. At this point you can't care about the movie anymore, it disintegrates completely into an irredeemable mess. A movie that not only dares copy many scenes from The Shining, but hires an incredibly bland bad actor to impersonate Jack Nicholson - one of cinema's finest roles, no less. That would be like NASA hiring a five-year-old for a mission to Mars. Like a mountaineer buying a snail instead of a donkey as transport. High cringe. This is very much like the Monty Python joke involving a movie invading another movie. Imagine David Arquette being asked to reprise the role of Jack. That's how pathetic this is.
Nor does it make any sense that the mannequin would spare Steve, and avoid being seen by him for so long. The killer is supposed to be brainless, right?
The film's rapid decay includes the increasingly flat pedestrian dialogue, and some pretty horrendous wooden acting. As a result the last 30 minutes are excruciating to sit through. Despite being incredibly dumb hence having potential to be unintentionally funny, the film does somehow manage to be extremely boring as well.
In the 44th minute when Jonah phones up the black guy, the latter is very defensive and skeptical about the whole mannequin business. This makes zero sense in light of the fact that he was totally paranoid just a little while earlier and was waving his gun around.
Frankie and Jonah find time to flirt, in the midst of all this stress and carnage, a moronic scene thrown in just so Steve can get jealous and do something stupid. Or in this case something smart, because he sets fire to the mannequin, which the others should have tried earlier. This writer doesn't shy away from any pathetic plot-device, he's got no shame.
When they finally figure out that the mannequin is harmless when you stare at it, none of them comes up with the possible solution of burning it down or cutting it up. Which even a plankton would have tried... Or Steve.
When Steve finally gets killed, i.e. When this pathetic actor is finally put out of his misery and there are no more The Shining scenes left to rip off, his headless body walks for half a minute. Total disintegration. A debacle.
I shall spare you the rest... suffice it to say that an old blind man starts killing off the kids as well. Plus a glued-on conclusion which certainly must rank as one of the most ridiculous "resolutions" in a horror film ever. Both Frankie and Jonah survive, inexplicably and impossibly. Wasn't Jonah killed? How did Frankie simply walk away from that situation? She did absolutely nothing to stop the mannequin, yet the mannequin simply stopped killing. Just like that. Because.
Why? Because! It's one of those because movies. Things happen, because.
The ending makes no sense at all, things just come to a head without their being any kind of conclusion, as if there were last minute rewrites or something. Frankie ships the mannequin somewhere or other, only for the transport box to be broken by two workers who clearly must be on the same drugs as the writer.
I could say that it's one of the dumbest horror films I've ever seen, but that would be overly dramatic because I've seen hundreds of incredibly dumb horrors and thrillers, probably no better than this one, and some actually worse. This is just another turdolla, a pile of garbage to be placed on top of the already very large heap of horror garbage that keeps increasing every year.
You'll Never Find Me (2023)
Promising, then a major letdown.
The only reason I gave this a 5/10, a very high score for a dumb thriller, is because the first half was quite interesting and well shot. The final third gets a clean zero. As in 0/10. Which is a rather typical rating for the grand finale of most thrillers.
SPOILERS
Just what the world of bad cinema needed: a philosophizing serial-killer. With an Aussie accent.
Apparently, Australian serial-killers don't have to hunt down their prey, because their victims come to them of their own accord.
Also, Australian serial-killers can be ugly and old yet still have young dyevochkas come knocking to be killed. Aussie serial-killers don't have to look like Ted Bundy. They have it easy. Feeling blood-thirsty? Just be patient: a girl will approach you for a ride or even to get into your home on a stormy night. Or both - in the same bloody day!
Wow. This movie really expect us to be idiots. And then (potentially) dumps a cliche "was all a dream" ending, negating half of what had previously occurred.
For well over an hour the mystery is set up, very slowly and interestingly, though after I finished the film I realized the whole thing was a hot air balloon, which I had hoped would not be the case, but which I suspected would be the case. As so often. Because very little makes sense. Too many liberties by the writer-director, which is Indiana.
The story piles on the mystery, one unexplained event after another, one weird statement after another, one strange sound after another, but then the plot falls apart like a deck of pathetic cards. Unintentionally symbolic is the card game the two characters were playing, which the killer called "BS", literally. I should have read this as a warning.
Rather than resolve all the many unknowns and the numerous question marks, the film cops out in a stereotypically cowardly way that is becoming far too common in modern crime cinema, namely the "metaphor cop out". Instead of explaining itself, the movie dumps itself into a swamp of muddled art-house scenes that mean very little, or are "free for interpretation" - which also means that they basically mean nothing.
Indiana, who is responsible for this Swiss-cheese-holed script, must have thought how brilliant and clever she was in setting up a story drenched in mystery. What she forgot, or conveniently ignored, is that every setup needs a resolution. In fact, setting up a huge, fascinating mystery isn't all that difficult. The trick is to wrap it up neatly: that's what separates the girls from the women. Otherwise any moron could write a thriller script. (Which, incidentally, happens all the time.) Great setup, very weak resolution. This happens far too often.
Here's a list of just some of the scenes and details that make no sense in hindsight, stuff that completely negates the ending:
1. The earring incident would indicate supernatural events. The girl came inside the trailer wearing earrings. Half an hour later she was no longer wearing them but found them in a jar. The only possible explanations could be that this is a fantasy thriller and that they are stuck in a time loop, or he is in hell, and/or that she is hallucinating because she is insane. Of course, neither of those things are true because this is just another idiotic serial-killer film with a "wuz all a dream" ending. The movie keeps lying to us, expecting us to pay attention to details, but then in the finale tells us that we needn't have bothered...
2. The previous girl couldn't have been poisoned, she was killed with a hammer. This makes no sense because we are told she was poisoned. Or did he actually smash her head in after poisoning her? Which would make zero sense.
3. What are the odds of a woman stumbling into a serial killer's lair, just an hour after his previous victim was killed? Even dumber, in the middle of nowhere and in some remote trailer park? The serial killer may call it a "strange event", and muse on it philosophically which he very stupidly did, but I prefer to call it "self-serving idiotic plot device". A strange event, or a self-serving idiotic plot device? You be the judge... Either way, Indiana thinks she has an excuse because of the dream ending. That would be the case only if this were the first ever film to feature this cliche ending. But since there were dozens of such films already, it is a weak and pathetic conclusion. Don't try to ride on the shoulders of giants but then pretend that those are your shoulders...
4. Why would the girl constantly lie from the very beginning about everything? Even if she's a figment of someone's imagination, there has to be some semblance of logic. Indiana assumed wrongly that by showing us a delirious nightmare she had Carte Blanche to do whatever she wanted. But that's not how cinema works, sweetheart. If the girl is the victim and he's a serial-killer then why would she be the one making stuff up from the very beginning? Sure, the philosophizing serial-killer lied too, but she was by far the bigger liar, plus she had no motive to lie whereas he did. This is one of many things there are not explained.
Actually I can explain it. She lied to the serial-killer just so the writer could lie to us. In effect she was lying to us, to throw us off, and not in a good way, the way good thrillers do. (The very few that there are.) This is not the kind of trickery that is acceptable, this is just plain incompetence.
5. The way the movie was directed was done in a way that cheated the viewer because it was not only merely suggesting but telling us that this must be a supernatural story. Then suddenly it regresses and devolves into yet another stupid serial-killer flick. Serial-killers: the height of originality, huh? And the movie doesn't even have the decency to explain itself which even many of the dumbest thrillers do, or at least try to.
6. The theory that the supposedly paranoid killer hallucinated the whole evening doesn't work because we have scenes that feature only the woman, segments in which the movie is shown from her perspective. Not to mention the "big twist" is both a cliche and a copout, a very unsatisfactory conclusion to a promising setup.
7. The theory that he hallucinated everything because he took a drug makes no sense either because the movie told us that it's poison. You can't lie to an audience this way, especially not when the plot is already burdened by too many unknowns and far too many questions.
8. The theory that he hallucinated everything, after having poisoned himself, is made less plausible by the fact that he laughs at the very end. This character never smiles throughout the film, so why is he going to smile just before he dies? If that is what Indiana was trying to tell us, then she is a fool... Was he even about to die? Nor does this theory explain WHY he would have such a detailed and frenzied bout of hallucinations. Is he insane? Did he take drugs as well? Questions upon questions, which in the end Indiana doesn't bother to answer. If she actually believes that an equation with 11 unknowns can be successfully solved, then she's very optimistic. Your job as a writer-director is to communicate information to us, not to have us guess what you intended to do, even after the film ends. How the hell am I supposed to know that? Maybe Indiana possesses ESP, but the rest of us plebs just don't have this amazing gift...
Besides, and this is a crucial point, serial-killers never commit suicide, unless they are caught, about to get caught, or already imprisoned. Patrick is a Grade A sadist, a psychopath, a narcissist, and this personality type don't even consider suicide. They love themselves too much to harm themselves. Read up a little on serial-killers, Indiana, don't just assume things and make crap up... Do some research. Make an effort. Write a real script... A serial-killer who philosophizes as well as gets suicidal? I suppose we can file this nonsense under "supernatural", which would be ironic.
9. The notion that the title of the movie is the killer's middle finger to the cops because he's about to kill himself, is also flawed. I've explained why the suicide theory is dumb, regardless of whether it was intended or not, but if he kills himself then the cops certainly WILL find him. After all, that dead body in his trailer is real, isn't it? So they WILL find him, just not alive. So if the killer really did have this "you'll never find me because I'll kill myself" attitude, then he's a moron, because it simply isn't true. The movie doesn't even make it clear whether his last victim is in the trailer during the suicide, which is just another example of Indiana's sloppiness. If the corpse was there then they would find him. The movie's title is just plain dumb, however you spin it... The kind of title they give to cheesy mindless thrillers, not to pretentious arty ones such as this.
So is it a supernatural story or not? This question cannot be answered. That stupid "arty" ending is too vague and nonsensical to be interpreted in any rational way. For a while there it seems as if all the ghosts of his past victims are haunting him, but then suddenly... they're not. Sorry, movie fans, it was just a nightmare. The killer is suicidal, the poor dear, he is paranoid, so please shed a tear for him. Because serial-killers love their children too.
There's no storm either. Did he hallucinate the entire movie? Did he poison himself because he was depressed? The movie is so pathetic it doesn't even answer that question. He laughs, presumably at us naive enough to expect a smart ending. Followed by that stupid caption "You will never find me".
Who will never find him? The cops? The victims' ghosts? Reggie Miller?
In fact, tell you what... I don't even know for sure if he's a serial-killer. I can't even say for sure that he had a female visitor that evening. I don't even know when the last victim was killed. We are told almost nothing, that the visitor might be his first victim.
Immaculate (2024)
Hollywood, L.A., 2024. A place of infinite idiocy. Albert Einstein was right.
Without further ado, or in fact any ado, let's list some of the abundant nonsense, in an approximately chronological order. Not in the order of increasing or decreasing stupidity, because I would be hard-pressed to decide which of these things is the dumbest.
1. Cecilia was clinically dead for 7 minutes when she was a girl. This isn't possible. She would have been a vegetable, at best. Nobody's brain can sustain itself without blood flow for that long. Because the film isn't supernatural there's no excuse for it.
2. Gwen's character makes little sense. She claims to have joined the nunnery because of men's violence. (A little feminist touch, just to fulfill the agenda quota.) A woman abused by her boyfriend, who obviously hates men, deciding to escape male violence by joining a male-dominated institution such as the Catholic Church? Either she's a moron or the writer is.
3. How can Cecilia have zero memory of being impregnated? Or at least a memory of being dragged into a room and sedated. This priesthood has the technology to use old DNA to fertilize women with. As far as I'm concerned, that's as advanced as they can be. But apparently they had also developed highly advanced scientific methods whereby a person's memory - of selected events, no less - could be totally erased. This is absolutely hilarious, because why would the priesthood have this kind of scientific knowledge?
What else can they do? Time travel?
4. Why would a collection of Vatican's psychopaths go through all this trouble on the mere wild speculation that the nail really was used on Jesus? What evidence have they got that they had his blood? Far more likely, they possessed the DNA of some random Joe Schmoe, or in this case Joseph Schmosovitz.
5. The movie essentially contains nothing supernatural, it is pure thriller rubbish. It may be extremely stupid, but there are no real fantasy elements in it. This begs the question: why did Cecilia lose a tooth and then a nail? Obviously, this is not what happens during pregnancies. Are we led to believe that because the baby's DNA stems from a 2000 year-old man that the side-effects on the mother would be tooth loss and nail loss?
6. The entire premise on which this story rests is completely ridiculous and deeply flawed. What was the priesthood going to do with this child?! They couldn't simply go public with it without any evidence. The only way that they could prove it would be to have all the necessary documentation AND Cecilia herself as their willing accomplice! Not to mention that the public would have to be dumb enough to believe that the blood used was Christ's. (Not that the public isn't dumb...) Or were they going to keep the whole thing secret? If so, were they going to keep this kid in a cage? Send him to Cambridge? Teach it basketball? What would they do with it? Pretty laughable.
7. A strong candidate for the dumbest scene is definitely the priest getting burnt alive, yet managing to break open a really thick door. You can't do this in a non-supernatural thriller. Show us the Horned One and then maybe we can believe it.
8. That scene is in stiff competition with the priest actually managing to chase down Cecilia. All burned up. One of cinema's greatest "oh come on" moments. Admittedly, (modern) cinema is so full of such impossible rubbish that we could easily come up with 100,000 such examples.
9. Once he catches her, he actually chants some nonsense while trying to cut her up. This wasn't verging on comedy, this WAS comedy.
10. It takes Cecilia very long to take the knife and stab him - as he is cutting her up. Why?
11. A woman nine months pregnant manages to kill several adults, to burn down a nunnery, and to run at least one mile, despite the fact that her water broke. I am glad that this malarkey was written by men, probably guys who don't have children, though there is absolutely no excuse for such stupidity, or for laziness in not Googling this kind of stuff. I say this because if women had written and directed this what excuse would they have?
Ultimately, the film isn't all bad, and the revenge murders were fun, but the script is too trashy, the plot rips off old movies, and the basic premise doesn't work.
Sweeney is rather sexy, definitely making this more tolerable than it deserves to be. But as one of the producers she carries some responsibility.
65 (2023)
This script was found in a Jurassic dung pile, wasn't it?
You will be bored by this daft nonsense, but stick around for the 79th minute... dumbest scene ever.
"Running risk assessment". The computer starts "assessing the risks" AFTER entering a meteor shower? That's some really smart, advanced civilization we're dealing with here.
Besides which, meteor showers as shown in sci-fi flicks are such an extremely rare occurrence that the odds of an interplanetary, let alone intergalactic (?), ship coming across one are mildly put miniscule. The real danger to ships are the tiny particles that move at very fast speeds, there's much more of that. But hey, the popcorn sniffers need things to be obvious, big, blatant and dumb. And anyway, why would Hollywood films teach us anything? They are there to brainwash us, to make us dumber, prepare us for a leftist Utopia. Though ultimately whether cinema makes you dumber or not depends entirely on you. You can choose to be a meek sponge, or you can be a freethinker.
Like that stupid intro. Agendaist nonsense on some alien planet, 65 million years ago. They look, talk, act just as we do. They could have avoided this hilarity if only they'd introduced the idea of a time warp (a cliche pulp premise but still better than this tripe), rather than some allegedly superior civilization coming to visit Earth.
How about the movie title giving away the ending? It should be obvious to anyone who finished Primary School that the two protagonists will have to deal with a meteor shower at the end of the film. What are the odds of this though? I mean, think about it... the first time ever that dinosaurs get alien visitors, and this just happens to occur mere days before the big cataclysmic event that occurred 65 million years ago! The odds of such a coincidence is probably one in a billion, at best. Preposterous Hollywood malarkey. And so cheesy too...
Not to mention that meteors are used not once but TWICE as a major plot-device. Pretty lame, huh?
The first dinosaur that attacks Adam is the size of a large cat. Pretty daft, because such a small lizard would never attack anything so much larger than itself. Not unless it's one of the infamous kamikazee dinosaurs, known as kamisaurs. (OK, I made that up... but if the movie can make up nonsense about lizards then so can I.)
It does get much dumber though. The girl stalks Adam, managing to move around and to hide as well as an experienced jungle guide, then inexplicably runs away from him, making me wonder whether he was transporting idiots or the mentally challenged. Perhaps his planet, much like Earth, had an excess of morons hence he was hired to transport them as far away as from his planet as possible. (I wish we could do this for Earth, starting with the immediate exile of Hollywood writers.)
Admittedly, his planet might have wanted to get rid of Adam as well. He actually thinks the girl is 9 years old! The elitist, nepotist, entitled brat that plays her was in fact 15 or 16 during the shoot, and the minimum age I could give her is 12. Nor does it make sense that the ship's logs don't list her age, and yet the computer has her name. But this is the kind of sloppy dumb writing that's been part-and-parcel of Hollywood's ineptitude for at least the last 20 years.
The kind of goofy writing that includes cute Disney-like baby dinosaurs that have literally nothing to do with the Earth's past. That stuck-in-mud dino is as realistic as Dumbo the flying elephant.
After baby dino gets attacked and killed by a gang of smaller lizards, part of the gang is sniffing out Adam and the girl. Why though? If they already killed an animal - that will easily feed the whole gang - then why should they continue exploring? Animals simply don't behave this way: if they have food and they're hungry they will eat. But silly me... these are Hollywood critters, they can be as illogical and absurd as they want to. And why does Hollywood keep making large lizards far more intelligent than they really were?
Except T-Rex. It is portrayed as a moron. It attacks a ship. With all that meaty food lying around it, the huge buffet at its feet, this huge evolutionary success of a beast chooses to stick its teeth into metal, because obviously what could be more enticing to a predator than the smell of metal. Spielberg's T-Rex was way too smart, whereas this one is just too dumb. Hollywood, never a place for moderation or realism. They just can't get anything right.
Then the third T-Rex appears. But instead of eating its dead pals, which would provide enough meat for the next three months (were it not for the meteor shower), for some weird reason it wants to hunt down Adam Driver. For revenge? Because fully clothed snacks taste better? Because it hates bad actors? What?
Still, this is nothing compared to what happens next: the single dumbest thing in this entire silly film. The T-Rex corners Adam, yet chooses not to kill him but stares at him, as if knowing that you can't just kill the protagonist quickly - or at all. The lizard just stands there like a dumb lug, just long enough so the girl can save Adam. She attacks the T-Rex and actually kills it! (The less said about the poison the better...)
No, if you saw the film you would know that I'm not joking. We've got a nine-year-old girl attacking a T-Rex to save a grown man. Girl power, quite literally. Hollywood waving its femini$t flag to the point of baffling, unhinged hilarity.
She kills it. Yep... I kind of expected her to fly the ship too. And become the first female president of her home planet. And win 25 medals at the Summer Olympics, beating out all of her male competition.
In the 42nd minute, why are the lizards talking to the Puerto Rican girl? Why not just attack and kill her? Or did they somehow know that they weren't supposed to kill a main character, especially a child?
The second time a lizard tries to hunt her down, it also fails abysmally. It even gets outrun by the girl - by something like 50 meters! Repeat after me: a 9-year-old child outruns a dinosaur. By a margin.
Another laughable scene is the girl being unconscious while a huge insect is inside her, yet the moment Adam gets the insect out she's conscious again. Unless the insect is telepathic or has hypnotic abilities, I don't understand this scene.
I was utterly bored by Adam Driver and the little nepotist girly. The interplay between them is stereotypical and dull, and both are measly actors. If you have a friend that recommended you this film, unfriend them, and report them to the nearest Lobbo Tummy station...
Deadbolt (2024)
It's all there, all except surprises.
This mystery throws in everything but the kitchen sink. There are weird noises in the house, dead rats, strange neighbors, there's a weird roommate, Amelia's very suspicious new boyfriend, stalkers in the dark, Amelia's narcissistic ex. It was difficult to imagine that all this stuff would be tied up neatly in the conclusion.
Unfortunately, several key things were predictable. That the junkie is innocent was very obvious, because he was anyway a very marginal character. Amelia's new boyfriend was the very obvious killer early on. I don't know why they made this so obvious, though perhaps they thought it was well-hidden. I mean, well hidden from five-year-old viewers...
When the movie mentioned a shy boy in that family's demise, I immediately knew that it was him. Not only a predictable plot-twist, but a stupid one too. I am sick and tired of these omnipotent genius murderers, especially ones who are so completely normal and well-adjusted in private life. He shmoozed Amelia way too slickly for somebody who is completely insane. It's one thing to be a schmoozy psychopath, but completely another to be a smooth operator who has many screws loose.
The only thing I didn't know up until the very end was what kind of a stupid motive they'd give him. Of course I knew that it would be a stupid motive, because in these thrillers the killer usually has a ridiculous motive, I just didn't know what kind of nonsense they would concoct this time. But the movie was so lazy that that the writer couldn't even bother to think up of a proper motive. It turns out that Melanie was killed just because she saw David. And yet David was a murderer BEFORE this anyway, so what were his motives for killing the others? No explanation. Why did he kill that young blonde woman from before? This isn't explained either.
Very predictably David kills Amelia's ex, and then gets killed by her. In fact, I wrote this previous sentence BEFORE these events occurred, because I was so convinced that the movie was going to resort to all the usual serial killa-thrilla cliches. The way he kills her ex is utterly idiotic, which was totally predictable as well.
Amelia then does something that it is way too stupid. Right after David brutally kills her ex, in a scene that is incredibly dumb, she catches David in two successive lies, yet calls out his name from another room instead of being quiet and rushing for the door. When she does finally go for the door guess what? The door is locked. I did say that David is omnipotent, a walking movie cliche.
The way she kills David is preposterous. She lunges at him, with all of her 45 kilos, yet somehow manages to drive him all the way through a closed window, which he breaks due to the incredible force exerted by this 45-kilo woman, falling into a garbage bin - where this movie's script should have been waiting for him.
Melanie's character is too cartoonish. It's as if she is in a comedy, like she is playing this for laughs. She never comes off as a real person, just a sitcom caricature. Her reactions are too quirky all of the time. Her behavior even made me think during the first third that this was a comedy, which it definitely isn't.
The first half isn't bad but it sets us up for something much more interesting than the disappointing reveal of David being the generic thrilla-killer. It was predictable, as I said, but one still hoped that it wouldn't be the case. The last 20 minutes are just sheer idiocy in combination with very many cliches. That's a shame because Amelia's character was more interesting and likable than most such people in horror films.
Lord of Misrule (2023)
Lord of Miss Rule.
A totally formulaic so-called folk horror tale that has the cheesy stench of the Wicker Man all over it, from the very beginning. After less than 5 minutes you know what this is about and how it's going to go down. That's about as bad as it gets for horror films, when nothing can surprise you and all you have to look forward to are the multitude of cliches and tedious "plot twists" that you expect from the start. Practically every scene is very familiar hence holds nothing of interest. Even the appearance of the forest demon is exactly the sort of thing you could have expected, the type of monster horror films are full of. So it's no wonder that the rest of the movie gets increasingly boring. By the time the first 30 minutes are over this becomes sheer monotony. I could swear that this film lasted three hours.
And stupid. Especially stupid.
Actually, no... The boredom levels were off the charts. Boredom trumps stupidity this time, but both are very powerful and over-represented.
How come the vicar woman doesn't mention to the cop about the little girl who had said that Grace was gone?
How about the moronic scene when that girl and the other kids chant "up your ass" to the vicar? This is certainly some competent writing.
When the couple get a lead to the whereabouts of the potential kidnapper they go to this address alone, without informing the cops. This is BEFORE they suspect corruption.
I have no clue why the vicar was allowed to leave with the beast with her daughter nor why the daughter was suddenly unconscious. That was the only unpredictable part, though only because it was so staggeringly stupid. Suddenly, the vicar has all this power and we have no idea why or how. Nor do I quite understand how she managed to turn all the villagers - and so quickly - against Jocelyn.
That's right, the guy who does voice-overs for Discovery Europe, the villain, has a girl's name. Maybe that's why the beast decided to get rid of him, with a name like that he was too much of an embarrassment for the folksy cult.
Not only is this a rip-off of a 50 year-old movie - which had anyway been ripped off so many times before Lord of Miss Rule, but Wicker Man is also boring and unconvincing rubbish, despite its laughable cult status.
The only people who can find this horror film appealing are totally uncritical Wicker Man fetishists, and film-goers that are completely new to horror films.
The dialogue is flat, predictable and non-menacing. Not that a Wicker Man aficioloono would notice this. Nor do they mind all those ridiculous scenes trying to pass off as eerie. The vicar's pathetic pity speech in front of the cult loons is an example of the really bad writing. If you can't come up with your own premise, with your own story, but need to rip off very old films, then at least write half-decent dialogue. I mean, do SOMETHING. Have a little self-respect...
The least the movie could have done is look good considering it was filmed in a pretty British rural area. But no, even that is asking too much because these days horror movies must be colorless. There is only one color, gray. The trees - gray, the bushes - gray, the grass - grey. How I hate modern film-making...
Mastemah (2022)
One of those movies that leaves you with a lot more questions than answers.
Not a very tight script.
A psychiatrist, played by beautiful Camille Razat, sees her patients drop like flies, and eventually starts suspecting that satanic powers might be involved. But she needn't have looked far, because it was her all along.
The last scene is a prologue, serving to shed some light on the relationship between her and hillbilly Liblis. They'd first met when they were small children, and it is strongly implied that she was the one carrying demonic power from the very beginning. She corrupted Liblis, then 25 years later had him as her patient. Destroy him then "heal" him? Unusual twist.
Except that neither of them remember each other. Why? Because they'd met only once or twice as kids? This is unclear, but so is a lot of the movie. Amnesia anyway plays a key role in the story, and is one of the many parallels between these two seemingly completely different individuals. They both have frequent memory lapses, they have the same dreams, they dream each other, both are diagnosed with the exact same mental illnesses, and there is something demonic connecting both of them.
This however is the extent of what we understand. We do know that when her evil self takes over it leads to the murders and suicides of her victims. What is unclear is what she is: a demon? A succubus? Was she born this way, as demon seed? How come she hadn't realized this about herself before? It seems far-fetched that she forges a career in shrinkiatry - of all things. Nor do we understand how come she is allowed to continue with psychiatry after being diagnosed basically as a schizophrenic. Unless she killed her shrink before she could tell everybody. What happened to her shrink? Even if she had killed her, surely the police would have gone through that woman's files.
What exactly does Camille do after she sees her own psychiatric files? We never find this out. Or perhaps we do? Did she go to that mountaintop to have Liblis kill himself? Did this happen AFTER she found her files? This isn't clear at all.
Is she possessed by the devil and about to take over the world? Certainly those Latin utterances would suggest something like that. I don't understand how she's about to take over the world when she's only killing a few people in France.
I don't quite understand how she drove her first victim, who just happened to be her (ex?) boyfriend, to suicide right after hypnotizing him. During the hypnosis there were half a dozen people present, all of these witnesses from the medical profession. Whereas she hypnotized her other victims in solitude, hence was able to say to them or do whatever she wanted. This doesn't quite make sense; after all, her shrink mentor insisted that she didn't do anything wrong, that she followed the protocol during the hypnosis. She later had sex with an electrician who looks suspiciously a lot like her dead boyfriend. Which part of this was real? Did she have sex with this guy? Was it her boyfriend? If so, how did he come back from the dead? Did she have sex while she was crazy or sane?
As I mentioned earlier, the film could be criticized to have a plethora of plot-holes, way too many unexplained scenes.
Ultimately, this is an interesting but flawed thriller that sets up a mystery but like so many modern horror films refuses to resolve it. So many movies these days are like this, as if these young writers had only heard of "setup" but had never heard of "resolution". Or as if they simply don't care, because it's much easier not to have to worry about wrapping up the story, tying up all the loose ends and answering so many question marks. It takes a lot of thought, discipline and imagination to conceive of a full story, one that is without (too many) logic holes. So many of these millennials just give up, opting to go all art-house on us instead. This film doesn't overdo artiness the way many such "metaphor copout" films do, but it does use this shtick occasionally.
What saves the film is that it was decently shot, that it has a good subject matter, but more than anything it's the female lead that oozes sex appeal hence helps carry this flawed film. I really could have used a few more erotic scenes with her, because after all this is a French film, sex is a part of the plot, and why not when you have such an actress in the lead.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023)
All setup and no resolution.
America's agenda policy regarding "equal and fair representation in movies" is reaching new levels of ridiculousness. The head of these park rangers is a woman that barely speaks comprehensible English. Is this even remotely realistic? Whether plausible or completely nonsensical, it adds light touches of unintentional comedy, a silly flaw which could have been easily avoided. They couldn't at least find an actress of this background who speaks fluent English? That would have been somewhat
more realistic...
How did this person, who very clearly learned her English at a late stage in her life, manage to emigrate to America and to become the head of a Park Rangers unit? There should be a movie just about this, IF this writer can come up with a plausible story, which I doubt. Already THIS story is incomplete. The head of this place would be most likely somebody who had extensive vast experience with this region, somebody who was born in the States. A foreigner that barely speaks English having this position is unrealistic. You want diversity? If you insist, but be at least a little bit intelligent about it. This is random, hence does not reflect the real world. Or is the point of this agendaist nonsense to help CREATE a new world?
"And into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul."
The movie starts with this quote which means absolutely nothing. It meant nothing before the movie and it means just as little after it. It's one of those statements that a certain type of filmmaker likes to use use as some divine profound mission statement, but it only sounds good on the surface for one and a half seconds. Then you realize it's meaningless piffle. Just as much as the movie's goofy title has no bearing on the story or its concept.
Unfortunately, the movie itself turns out to be similarly meaningless. As lost as the abductees themselves. Almost the entire first half is event-free, and then some action finally starts, but so does the confusion.
From what I understood, there is a parallel dimension of the forest that snatches people from our world and keeps them over there. There's zero hint as to what these creatures are about, let alone what they look like, whether they're even creatures or aliens or whatever. Nothing at all. Perhaps the writer-director Teresa wanted them to be whatever we decided. Alas, that doesn't work because the filmgoer has absolutely nothing to go on, nothing with which to stretch this basic idea into something more, something subjective yet remotely meaningful.
What really baffles me also is what the purpose of the rangers is. They are aware of this menace yet they can't do anything about it. So for some - never explained - reason they cover it up. It's all one big secret, unfathomably never related to the authorities. Clearly they don't want other rangers to save anybody who is lost because that only leads to more abduction. If somebody from our world saves an abductee, then that hero must kill a person to bring themselves back to our world. Something like that. A rather dubious, pointless, bizarre game initiated by the creatures/aliens/whatever, for whatever unexplained reason. A flimsy premise, because totally unexplored. The premise is there on its own, and it's supposed to hold the entire movie together. It doesn't.
In the end, Georgina falls in line with all the other rangers, and stops trying to save the lost ones. Which brings me back to my earlier question: what's the bloody use of these rangers then? What is their purpose? Certainly not to save people who would be abducted, those few that emerge briefly back to our world. They want to maintain the status quo, and somehow this is still a secret, something the FBI doesn't know about.
The film mostly isn't boring, and is very decently shot considering when it was made, meaning that there are some colors in the film. The forest isn't gray and colorless as it is in many horror films and thrillers. While the first half is pretty event-free the second half has plenty going on. Just too few answers.
Yet another modern horror film with a passable setup, but no resolution. Where this trend of lazy and pretentious writing is leading to, is anybody's guess. Perhaps the next step will be for writers to avoid a setup as well as a resolution? Then perhaps entire films will be total gibberish from start to end. But hey, as long as the park ranger chiefs are played by minorities... That ought to fix all of the world's problems.
Well done, movie.
The Omen (1976)
Like a Grand Slam final in which only one player shows up... Djokovic.
It took me roughly 35 years to go back to this film. I didn't like it that much back then, in fact the silly plot kind of annoyed me. So I was curious what I would think of it now. I expected to like it more, but this didn't happen.
Besides, this is not the kind of movie that is very rewarding on repeat viewings, even if they come 35 years later. The main culprit is the one-sidedness of the battle of good verses evil. The score at the end of the film? Evil 56 - Good 0. A landslide victory, a mismatch, a joke. Anyone who watches sports knows how dull these kinds of victories can be. The Devil's omnipotent presence in the movie is indisputable, as he flashes his powers left and right, helping his pawns every step of the way. Where is God in the meantime? On vacation? If satanists are preparing the Antichrist to take over Earth, then surely God would be aware of this and would do something...? Help Gregory Peck and Lee Remick perhaps? All that Peck gets is a couple of "special knives". To fight sorcery and magic? Laughable. 7 knives to kill one kid? Dumb. Might as well have given him 7 toothpicks.
And this is the crucial, inexcusable flaw of The Omen franchise. You can't have religious horror, deeply rooted in Christianity which is all about good versus evil and with its own rules, yet present this "conflict" in a way that only features one half of the two sides. Like a Grand Slam final in which only one opponent shows up... in this case Djokovic, obviously. Not exactly a crowd-pleasing outcome. Not only are you telling the crowd that evil wins by default because God isn't there to defend His own interests (and teach the Lightbringer a lesson who's boss), but you don't even give the other side a chance to fight back. Admittedly, this is not an ideal analogy because audiences don't know at the beginning that God is a no-show, but this becomes increasingly obvious as the film progresses, or regresses. Which is probably why the movie's first half is much better. Hell's minions exhibit enormous powers, whereas God's priesthood have literally none. It's like pitting a hippo against a small turtle in a ring.
The real reasons this movie was such a big success were its clever marketing campaign, music, atmosphere, good direction - and lucky timing because it came out in an era when really good horror films had only just begun hence people were not used to this kind of realism, slickness and gore. This film would have been far less successful had it come out 20 years later, to a more jaded and more experienced horror audience.
Certainly the story is far too thin. We've got several main characters who do whatever they can to survive and defeat the satanists, but literally all of them brutally snuff it, while the satanists have just one casualty! Come on, it's a joke... Lee Remick is quite literally a punching-bag for the bad guys, it would have been comical had the it been shot badly, and so is everyone else. Rosemary's Baby comes to mind as a similar film in terms of the one-sided approach and the inevitable outcome. Not that I'm comparing the two qualitatively, because The Omen is better.
I much more prefer the sequel, which is just as ridiculously one-sided but has more action and is generally more interesting.
Wonderful 70s photography, and a good (though not brilliant) atmosphere. Aside from that there are some negative things, dumb things about this film.
1. Why did the nanny kill herself so spectacularly? Clearly she was compelled by evil forces to do this, but how does this bombastic act help Gregory Peck in his political career? Isn't the whole point of landing Satan's cuckoo's egg into Gregory Peck's clan just so Damien can eventually become a powerful figure? The nanny jumping from a building in front of hundreds of people can only achieve the opposite. This is more likely to completely ruin his career hence diminished Damian's chances towards taking over the world or whatever. Of course, I am assuming that this initial nanny was not a satanist, because otherwise why would they have her killed?
2. Brennan's opportunity to tell Peck about demon seed was unnecessarily botched. Instead of calmly explaining the situation to Peck, he starts barking orders about taking Communion and doing several other Christian rituals - before even properly explaining himself. Of course Peck reacts negatively to such petulant behavior. Instead of just immediately telling him "I know who your son really is, he was born to a jackal, he was created by a satanic wing of the Catholic Church (according to the 2023 movie)", and so on. Of course Peck wouldn't have believed him, but at least he would have heard the most important information right at the beginning, rather than much later. The priest behaves like a loony moron throughout.
3. The new nanny tells Damien that she's there to protect him. But does devil spawn really require protection from a middle-aged woman? I'm not sure this makes any sense.
No one could logically argue that she wants to protect him from various Christian priests. This wouldn't hold water because in this movie's universe Christians have very little say and zero power. Everything that happens in the first two movies confirms that this franchise is totally devil-biased, meaning that the only side that has power is the evil side. So what does she have to protect him from? It seems to me that her role is to destroy Gregory Peck and his wife, which is not exactly the same.
4. Lee tells the nanny to prepare Damian for church. Devil's missionary woman starts arguing about the purpose of sending a five-year-old to a church wedding. In real life this nanny would have been fired on the spot by Remick. Serving a very wealthy couple yet being lippy and disobedient - there is no way this could go on for longer than five minutes. I appreciate that the writer wanted to show us how the nanny is opposed to Damien being anywhere near a church, but this could have been achieved in a more convincing and less suspicious way.
5. The crazy governess even brings in a huge dangerous dog into the house without even consulting Peck. She says she'd found him outside.
She's still not fired?
6. Brennan gets a second chance to properly warn Peck, yet what does he do? Like a manic street preacher he starts quoting the Book of Revelations, and I don't mean just one line but a whole section. We're meant to believe that Brennan is such a moron that he doesn't know how to approach a person who isn't particularly religious, especially about a subject as important as Damian. Even after Peck shows impatience, because who wouldn't be bored being quoted the Bible, Brennan still doesn't cut to the chase, but continues talking in riddles, even suddenly suggesting that Peck kill Damien. It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest something like that to a person who doesn't even know who Damien really is. First explain to him carefully who Damien is and THEN instruct them to kill the kid. Far too stupid...
7. Satanists orchestrate an accident for Lee. The governess still isn't fired... What will it take for this "smart" politician to fire her? To start World War 3?
8. The dog entered the premises yet again.
The nanny's still not fired? At this point I understood that she would have to cause World Wars 4 and 5 in order to get fired.
9. Even after Lee is brutally murdered, AND after he finds the grave of his real infant (also brutally slayed), AND all the other evidence that he is dealing with the devil - Peck still refuses to kill the kid!
Staggeringly stupid. I don't mean just him, but the script, obviously, as well. Given all the events and all the evidence of supernatural existence that had transpired up to the point when he gets the knives, even the most hardcore pacifist atheists would have turned to believers and would have gladly volunteered to kill the little putz.
It is this scene that almost unequivocally tells us that Peck is playing a Democrat politician. It also makes us care even less about him, because practically all audience members (aside from the satanists, who may or may not take up a large percentage of the Omen fans) want him to kill the kid, and would have wanted to kill the kid had they been in his place. I mean, nobody can be this stupid, come on... Not even liberals. Everyone will turn into a murderer if pushed this far. We're all animals and Gandhi is fiction.
Pandemonium (2023)
This review contains instructions on how to watch this movie...
It's pretty simple. Watch the first 26 minutes and then press STOP. Fast-forward to minute 78. Resume watching the film. The ending may be inconclusive, illogical and poor, but at least you'll have understood what happened in those two sections. You won't understand anything at all in the middle section, stories two and three. Unless of course you take the same Bolivian mushrooms that Quarxx did...
That's right, that's the name of the writer-director. With two Xs at the end, because hipsterism is so hip these days. And narcissism too, goes without saying. So much self-love to go around.
The movie's ending is illogical because hell's demon-guide is actually unhappy that "Billy" the demon unwittingly created the Antichrist. Wait a minute... Since when are demons unhappy about the creation of Antichrist?! In what version of Christianity does this work? In what parallel Christian universe is this a thing? Instead of being glad that they created the Antichrist, albeit unintentionally because Billy is a sadistic putz, they send Billy to Earth to redeem himself by killing the Antichrist. No other way to describe this than as mega-idiotic.
Because it would mean that demons work for God and heaven, that they are in cahoots. This is never hinted at, which means that Quarkxx accidentally implies this. He simply didn't think things through as he was preparing the script. This is more than a huge plot-hole, this is an abyss of cluelessness and incompetent writing.
Between minutes 26 and 78 there is only sheer boredom, plus it has NOTHING to do with the rest of the film. Zero. You don't believe me? Knock yourself out, watch the crap then.
You think hell can't be boring? It shouldn't be, but it evidently can be. Perhaps this film's middle section is a sort of hell for viewers, to punish them for things they had never done. Sort of the way the blonde in the third story is punished for nothing.
This fantasy horror starts off promisingly, as a sort of religious parody of heaven and hell. I say this because the movie seems to mock how people are allocated to either Heaven or Hell, according to a set of criteria and rules that are far from precise let alone fair. For example, the dead motorcyclist initially hears Heaven's music, but as soon as the girl is dead his fate changes to that of Hell, which is obviously a mockery. It isn't?
Who the hell knows. The writing of Quarkxx is far too random and undisciplined to have proper meaning. Anyone thinking that they found profound things in the script are hallucinating, or they are simply projecting their own ideas and convictions onto the movie which lacks conviction and ideology - hence lends itself well to free interpretation i.e. Subjective gobbledygook.
Once Nathan enters Hell, which the viewer eagerly anticipates, the script takes a big nose-dive. Suddenly, it's as if somebody changed movie reels in the middle of the film. We get a whole new completely different film, and for an entire 50 minutes, which drags slowly... Not to mention the disappointment of failing to make Hell interesting - at least during those 50 minutes.
It goes slowly because it's so damn stupid, hence very boring. The first half of this abysmal middle section features a little girl that lives in a mansion with her dead parents - whom she may or may not have killed, plus she has a sister that she eventually cooks in an oven, and there's also a monster living downstairs, a violent yet naive creature completely clueless about its own existence. This story is so random and nonsensical that it doesn't even clarify whether all these events are taking place in hell or not. What was the point of the mailman? Zero point, literally a character thrown in to pad some extra time into this film.
In fact, I have a theory, my only theory... The writer didn't have enough of a script for a full movie, so he threw in these two stories in the middle to fill the gaps. That's the only explanation I have... I would be shocked if he actually thought they were good, because they seem like filler.
Are we to assume that this girl is in hell because she killed her parents and her sister? It's an absurd, very far-fetched concept, because how many 7 year-old little girl serial-killers do we know of? I don't know of one single example in real life, and I used to read books about serial-killers (once upon a time when I was young and dumb). But even if we were to accept this ridiculous premise we still don't understand what the hell just happened in those 30 minutes. What is the bloody point of that monster? He couldn't have possibly been part of her earthly past, and yet as a monster he not only doesn't torture her, it is the opposite: it is she that tortures him, if only verbally.
This middle third is complete and utter rubbish. A worthless pile of trash. I can't state this enough.
Fine, the film establishes immediately that hell is a place for humans of all shapes, sizes and ages, but the first person that Nathan finds should have been the type of sinner we could all relate to, a killer that is an actual adult, for example. Besides, if this 30-minute segment was taking place in Hell, then how the hell was the girl being punished? It seems to me that she was simply allowed to live out her sadistic ways, have fun, and that can't possibly be the point of being sent to Hell no matter what your beliefs are or how you interpret this place.
The third hell case is even worse, 20 minutes of total nonsense. Also very random, also pointless and confusing. A blonde talks to her dead daughter in a bathtub as if she were alive. Not a very promising start... but it gets worse: on some other day, other occasion, the blonde again enters the bathroom but this time the daughter is alive. Cut to an exaggerated, laughable, badly acted bullying scene on a school playground. Then the young girl is shown to be dead again. A little later she's in a wheelchair; whether she is alive or dead is unclear. No explanations, nothing, only bundles of meaningless dialogue. OK, maybe the concept of time is meaningless in Hell, but in that case why is the previous story told chronologically?
Not so much a real script as random nonsense. French filmmakers just don't care. Modern American writers are hopeless too, but at least they make some minimal semblance of an effort to at least get the basics on paper, so we at least have some idea of what's going on. French writers just don't care at all... they'll put just about anything on paper, quite literally. Which is why this movie is random, a word that I happily repeat. Zero thought or planning went into this, the writing was totally instinctive. It's just a stream-of-consciousness exercise in gibberish.
Is this movie supposed to be some kind of riddle? Puzzles and riddles are supposed to be fun, remember? As opposed to boring, incomprehensible and unsolvable.
Does the third story take place in Hell? How the hell am I supposed to know this. Nor do I understand why the blonde is being punished. Aside from not taking her daughter's concerns seriously enough, what did she do that warranted eternal hellfire damnation? If anyone should be in hell it's those classmates of the young girl who harassed her so unconvincingly and stupidly. They should be in hell also for being such bad actresses. Those school scenes are so cringe, I'm starting to wonder if the writer ever even went to school! Could it be that he never did? Absolutely nothing about the school scenes rings true. Quarxxxxx must have grown up in a cave.
My God, you open the gates of Hell, and this is the best you can do? Even though I don't write scripts, I could conjure up a dozen much better hell stories in less than 30 minutes.
I commend anyone brave enough to depict
Hell, but you do have to be brave AND successful at it...
Frogman (2023)
Very brave of the movie to portray itself as an instant success...
You know a movie has failed completely when you keep guessing right up until the end if it was intended to be a comedy or not, even up to the last minute. The silly premise would strongly indicate that this is a spoof, but it turns out it isn't. Or?
Even during the last five minutes, when it should have been clear that this isn't a comedy, they throw in a scene that by any right could only BE in a comedy: when Dallas declares his love to Amy - at the most inopportune time possible. I had to second-guess myself yet again, so is this a comedy or not? Such a ridiculous scene can't possibly be in a non-comedy, or?
By the time Froggy was made found-footage had been in existence for a quarter of a century. That's 25 years time for this goofy genre to build up a large collection of its own cliches. Did this filmmaker borrow from this dirty pool of tiresome cliches?
Needless question. Of course he did. They all do. In fact that's ALL he did. The entire movie is just one cliche after another. Not that this is surprising in the least, but I'm just saying...
Starts off with three characters talking a lot, being hyper, trying to be adlibbishly funny - the usual camcorder hooey. Tons of padding, desperate attempts to somehow reach the 80-minute mark. To stretch out this thin plot like a rubbery frog leg.
As per usual, nothing much happens for the first 40-50 minutes, except the ever deepening characterization (ha ha), and then just as the creatures finally appear they look too obvious and dumb, and naturally the camcorder starts exhibiting "interference". This word really means "we have no budget to make the frogoids look good so here's some semi-static, hope you enjoy it".
Very predictably, this turns out to be a townsfolk conspiracy movie, and even more predictably there is a cult-like ceremony at the end. Shoddily shot and directed, but of course... coz "interference".
When Amy and Dallas find George, they ask him what the hell is going on. "The less you know the better it is for you," he says stupidly. Translated from Foundfootageese into English: "we couldn't come up with any interesting explanation so we'll just keep you guessing". Devising a good background story for the monsters requires no money, so it is a failure for which there is no excuse.
It is implausible that the town conspirators i.e. Frog worshipers would leave George alive for such a long time. They don't mind kidnapping and murdering women, impregnating them with froggie demon seeds, but somehow it never occurred to them to get rid of George. Very convenient cheesy plot-device...
Late caption: "Authorities refuse to take this footage seriously."
Well, naturally they refuse to. If film-goers can't take this footage seriously how the hell are cops going to.
The official police statement (conveniently not included in the movie): "The footage that was emailed to us was less convincing than a school play. The police force has better things to do than chase kids in frog masks around the forest. We feel sorry for this filmmaker and we hope he has success in the future with his next mutant-hellbeast projects..."
"Frogman is still out there." Are these people hoping for a sequel? Give it a rest already. Dump the frogs, do bees, bunnies, or some other cheesy B-movie animal instead.
The movie does have a bizarre "twist" at the very end which yet again made me wonder if this is a comedy! We are shown a theater audience LAUGHING as the movie finishes its premiere, this very movie. Were they laughing at the caption "For Scotty"? Admittedly, I smiled a bit too when I read that caption. Because it's so silly.
The bad acting of the Amy actress doesn't help either. Whether as a screen queen or trying to be cute, she is unconvincing throughout. How ironic that she plays a woman who just got signed to an agent in Hollywood...
The real actress playing Amy should never be able to get a serious agent after this film. If she does or if she did already, then only because of her extra special talents...
"Frogman will return"
No, he won't, at least not in cinemas. Only in your local swamp, if you happen to live close to the director.
The First Omen (2024)
The basic premise is actually totally illogical. Why not just show the world the devil?
The Vatican itself is the antichrist, so why would they need to create one?
A lot of the movie is confusing, but most of all it's based on a very dubious premise which raises a plethora of questions.
Where did the Catholics find the devil who created the two sisters? How did they locate this supernatural being? Did they actually strike up a deal? None of this is explained. (Maybe another prequel?)
But even if we were to ignore these questions the most crucial question begs itself: why the hell would Catholics insist on the devil creating a spawn when the devil's existence IN ITSELF was enough for their purpose? It makes zero sense! The plan was to make the Vatican relevant again by showing the masses that evil exists, that the Bible isn't just fairy tales. Well, why not just show them the devil then?! This is so bleedin' obvious yet I don't believe that anybody noticed this huge logic flaw. Certainly not the writers...
"We've already got the devil, why don't we just show him to the people?"
"Nah... An antichrist would be better."
"But isn't the devil the antichrist?"
"Well yeah, technically he is anti-Christ, but just the other day we received a memo stating that the devil has to create the antichrist."
Something like that.
They could have just organized a freak show circus featuring the devil to tour with, making their point that way to the atheists and non-believers. There was absolutely no need to go through the huge roundabout complication of trying to create this new evil spawn.
Especially since the devil has horns and looks like a monster, whereas Damian looks like a regular person! You tell me, what's going to convince non-believers more of the Christian faith: showing them a horned monster or a regular-looking person? A no-brainer.
How could Margaret possibly have forgotten about being raped by the devil? Did they hypnotize her? What? A very convenient, self-serving plot-device. Come on, movie, explain yourself. You mean to tell me that she was successfully raped, by the devil no less, without remembering a single thing - and yet the birth itself had to be conducted in a way as to torture her to maximum effect? I mean, I know that these are devil's disciples (in a sense) but they are also members of the Catholic Church...
Oh, what am I saying... That's one and the same thing. Of course none of the priests and nuns could care less about her suffering, why am I even posing this question...
Since Margaret was so incredibly important to the Church (until she no longer was), how could they have possibly let her roam around the world? She traveled to Italy alone, she moved around Rome sometimes alone. Surely, this woman would have to have been observed tightly at all times, kept on a short leash, possibly even locked up somewhere. Why take chances? Brennan's explanation that "they had to move her around to keep her hidden" doesn't hold water, primarily because aside from Brennan there seems to be nobody else who cared about this conspiracy! In both the original Omen film and this movie he's the only crusader for saving humanity. (Which makes zero sense. Didn't he ever bother recruiting more people to help?) He seems to work alone, not as part of a large organization. His explanation seems to serve just as a flimsy excuse for this story to unravel in this particular way i.e. So as to surprise us with the big reveal - that she is supposed to give birth to the antichrist.
The ending is stupid for other reasons too. Margaret survives the birth and attempted murder, we don't know how... She was butchered during the birth, and in unsanitary conditions, and then stabbed with a long knife. Her sister was present at the birth, we don't know why or how... And finally, the Catholic satanists (or satanic Catholics, though aren't they all satanic, haha) leave Damian's twin sister behind, and we have absolutely no clue why... I mean, it's not as if devil's children are particularly common, so despite wanting a demon boy shouldn't they have venerated and found some use for this demon girl too? Devil's kids don't exactly grow on trees, so surely this girl demon must have some value on the Christian market? They could have sold her to some rich satanic sect for many millions. Then again, the Vatican is so ridiculously wealthy, perhaps they can afford to discard valuable assets like this...
The epilogue features the two sisters and the young girl, all 3 spawns of the devil - and yet they are smiling, being normal, not being evil... How come at least Margaret isn't evil? She turned adult a while ago. Was the point of devil's spawns when they never turn evil?
But it gets even dumber: Brennan somehow manages to locate them, to warn all three - yet Margaret acts aggressively toward him, as if he'd ever done anything bad to her to warrant such negativity. But hey, Margaret isn't the smartest cookie, despite being the spawn of the devil, which makes one wonder... Neither smart nor evil: say what?
Just how smart is the devil to stoop so low to cooperate with the Catholics? He must have fallen on hard times. Or were they allies from the very beginning? I suppose we know the answer to that one...
Am I stupid for missing something here, or is it the movie? Nothing here makes sense, and I'm generally fairly lax on logic scrutiny when it comes to religious movies.
Why bring the two sisters together? The logic behind this escapes me. The entire charade in the nunnery, which takes up a bulk of the movie, makes little sense to me. It's as if the whole circus was orchestrated just for our benefit! It is as if the Church knew that they were in a Hollywood movie...
Because this is a prequel, it suffers from similar problems as the second Star Wars trilogy, namely that there could be no surprises in certain plot areas. Just as we knew that Darth Vader was going to become a putz and join the Sith, we likewise knew that Margaret had zero chance to survive and prevent the birth. (And yet she survived because the movie is dumb.) Because of this the grand finale was not only unexciting because predictable, but very cheap torture porn too. The outcome was obvious, so the only thing left for the movie to do was to torture her during the birth. How is that interesting? I mean aside from sadists who love this kind of stuff.
The very last scene has Brennan telling us that the boy's name is Damien, something that everybody already knows! They actually chose to end the movie with something that WASN'T a revelation.
This leaves room for 48 sequels about the girl, Damien's sister, whose name we DON'T know.
The movie looks much better than most modern horror films, but there's a simple explanation for this. The only way that a modern-day horror film features actual colors is if it's set in the past.
And will somebody please tell these Hollywood millennials that Bonny M did not exist in 1971...
It is absolutely hilarious and ridiculous that this movie has color only because it is set in the 70s and because the Omen films are colorful i.e. Normal. We get the benefits of colors only in comedies and in horror films are dramas set in the past. Nobody notice how ridiculous this is? Occasionally the movie goes to mono-color mode but most of it is in actual color.
You can perhaps skip the 7th to 34th minute section, because nothing much happens in it. Sure, some relevant plot points for later, but nothing horror-related. A weird detour that the movie makes, helping extend the film to two full hours. I've always said avoid two hours if you're doing horror or comedy, if you can. This movie definitely could but didn't want to.
A very silly scene takes place in the 56th minute, when a nun declares that a riot had started and so they should leave the nunnery with all the kids. How the hell does that make any sense? If a riot breaks out then you keep the kids in.
Margaret the Nun is hard to care about, because she's so thick. After she finds the secret files on the girl, what does she do? Go to Brennan who warned her about it and who asked her for the files? Of course not. She's so dumb she locks herself up with her sister, then predictably gets caught and locked up.
Finding all those dead deformed babies from numerous births wasn't enough to convince Margaret that the girl (her sister) is demon seed? Bringing the files over to the priest, right away, was a no-brainer, meaning that even a person without a brain would have known to do this.
There are a few continuity errors in the story. In The Omen from 1976, Brennan says he was present at Damian's birth. So why was he not present there in this movie? Additionally, the original film told us that he too had the devil sign as a birthmark, yet this isn't even hinted at in this new film. Is it too much to expect from these overpaid Hollywood scribblers to make sure that a prequel fits in with all the facts from past films?