matt-dalton

I saw this on opening night at the Miami Gay Film Fest and I, along with about 98% of the audience, hated it. Everyone left hissing and didn't bother to stay for the Q&A with director Duncan Roy, who was just as pretentious on stage as his film was on screen. The film itself is clumsy, underwritten, and lazy, supposedly taking place in the 80s and 90s but clearly the budget was too small to hide the fact the backdrop is obviously 2005 New York. The acting was bad and the placing of dialogue as text in huge letters on the screen is about as film-school- amateur-ostentatious as you can get. Also the film was obviously trying to say something about the AIDS crisis among gay men but failed to register any conclusive facts or interesting ideas. As it is, this Picture of Dorian Gray is a sluggish piece if crap that will have a hard time getting theatrical release. Most likely, the film will go directly to HERE or LOGO or DVD where it will fade into bad movie obscurity.

I'm a fan of Tarantino but not much of one of Rodriguez and it came to my surprise when I found Planet Terror to be much more entertaining than the bloated Death Proof. If I didn't know any better, I would say Tarantino has never seen a 70s grindhouse film. His half was filled with bad dialogue that sounded like it was left on the cutting room floor of his other films and the characters were uninspired and cringe-inducing. I actually wanted all of them to die and was rooting for Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike. Planet Terror, on the other hand, was great fun and while it still wasn't exactly a "grindhouse" movie (I don't remember any zombie movie from the 70s OR 80s being that well made) it worked as a stand-alone gore flick. Even the fake trailers were amusing, including Eli Roth's Thanksgiving and my personal favorite, Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS.