Damiana_Dimock
Joined Jul 2010
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Reviews13
Damiana_Dimock's rating
...but, while the first half of the film is pretty strong, it's loose ends begin to show and the film simply feels like it's falling apart even if it was not. I do happen to think the script and editing could have been a bit tighter.
It conjures both the spirits of the Mad Max films and John Carpenter's Escape From New York. I appreciated a Snake Plissken style character that does not lean on an affect of stoicism. For a moment I thought Nicolas Cage was going to channel Sailor Ripley and got a bit excited. Cage blends that Plissken stoicism and that stylized quality of a Cage character we've come to expect in a way that feels just forced enough I cannot buy it. I wish we had less staring angrily into the distance and more of the bike-riding, "you used to be fun, man" moments.
Sofia Boutella felt wasted.
Bill Mosley was incredible.
Every single other actor in this film was fantastic, and there are so many that I really cannot mention them all here just to say, "so-and-so nailed it, they were great." Trust me, they were all great.
The chaotic energy, the set design, the characters and costumes, the merging and mixing of time, place, and culture, were all beyond fantastic. The mixing of languages, sing-song moments, and Altman-esque, natural dialogue, were all fantastic ways to shape this world and pull me in.
Ultimately, the film feels like it's falling apart goes from something incredibly interesting and has a voice that wants to speak to a formulaic action film in the vein of the stereotypical Asian action film--Whether a Jackie Chan flick or a Yojimbo (1961) like ronin/samurai movie. It's a film that opens with me asking questions and glued to the screen, (at one point I literally said to myself, "I wish we had more films like this",) but ends with me critiquing editing decisions, rolling my eyes at cliché dialogue choices, and wishing we had more of anything else.
The way the story unfolded and we got reveal after reveal, I was impressed. So much of this film felt fresh and inventive, (until it did not.)
It conjures both the spirits of the Mad Max films and John Carpenter's Escape From New York. I appreciated a Snake Plissken style character that does not lean on an affect of stoicism. For a moment I thought Nicolas Cage was going to channel Sailor Ripley and got a bit excited. Cage blends that Plissken stoicism and that stylized quality of a Cage character we've come to expect in a way that feels just forced enough I cannot buy it. I wish we had less staring angrily into the distance and more of the bike-riding, "you used to be fun, man" moments.
Sofia Boutella felt wasted.
Bill Mosley was incredible.
Every single other actor in this film was fantastic, and there are so many that I really cannot mention them all here just to say, "so-and-so nailed it, they were great." Trust me, they were all great.
The chaotic energy, the set design, the characters and costumes, the merging and mixing of time, place, and culture, were all beyond fantastic. The mixing of languages, sing-song moments, and Altman-esque, natural dialogue, were all fantastic ways to shape this world and pull me in.
Ultimately, the film feels like it's falling apart goes from something incredibly interesting and has a voice that wants to speak to a formulaic action film in the vein of the stereotypical Asian action film--Whether a Jackie Chan flick or a Yojimbo (1961) like ronin/samurai movie. It's a film that opens with me asking questions and glued to the screen, (at one point I literally said to myself, "I wish we had more films like this",) but ends with me critiquing editing decisions, rolling my eyes at cliché dialogue choices, and wishing we had more of anything else.
The way the story unfolded and we got reveal after reveal, I was impressed. So much of this film felt fresh and inventive, (until it did not.)
...but more Zombie and less Damí.
So much of this film was what I love from the lesser-known, schlocky, and low-budget Horror from the '60s & '70s, and is what I find myself inspired to write. But, Rob Zombie and I certainly have different aesthetic interests.
I struggle with how I feel about this film. On one hand it's simple: The Running Man (1987) meets The Purge (2013) but covered in the greasy, dirty grime of the Rob Zombie filter and all on a $20 budget. But, on another hand: it's the kind of low budget schlock that feels so slapped together it's easy to zone-out or notice the zipper on the back of the monster, (real someone who was going to provide an extra car or two fell through vibes, action is shot close up or w/ a shaky cam style to keep it from looking lame vibes, a scene that is actually interesting had to be cut so here's a good 10 minutes of nonsensical dialogue to pad-out the runtime vibes.) And on a different hand: it's well-acted, it's set-dressed well & shot well, some of the characters were well formed and interesting.
Let me get my personal issue out of the way, the amount of Zombie-grease Rob slathers on the lens of his films has a pretty direct relationship with how much I like or dislike his films. This film is not only covered in it, but he is sticking his slop-covered figured under our noses and making us smell it. So, I have a bit of a personal bias against this film.
The film's opening scene & monologue, fantastic--Hooked me immediately, all I wanted was more. Then, the next scenes did the exact opposite, pushing me away. The momentary bedroom shenanigans pulls me in again only to push me away at the gas station only for a gas-pump conversation to pull me back in. This back-and-forth continues throughout the entirety of the film.
I found myself wondering, well into the third act, "they're some kind of carnival folk, right? So where is the rest of the carnival?"
Malcolm McDowell was a lovely surprise, not too much else though. Again, that back-and-forth.
I feel like this film's star-rating goes up a full point if it had 3x the filming budget--Proverbial plaster over the metaphorical holes, add another coat of paint, (more can sometimes be more,) and whatnot. Is there really anything more frustrating than watching John Carpenter, The Soska Sisters, and Robert Zombie get $5 to make a movie while I have to watch as Eli Roth and Alex Garland get a good $50 million to $100 million and more to make mediocre garbage.
Sherri Moon Zombie might be one of the most under appreciated actors of the 21st Century, thus far. Her acting has improved drastically over the last 20 years, and yet she is exclusively in Rob Zombie films. I'm not really all that sexually attracted to her, so when she is able to catch may attention I know it's probably not the result of her husband's ability to expertly frame her ass in an overlong-shot or the scarf she's wearing as a top, but rather the way she is able to play to the camera. In this film, I did not care for her character in the beginning and by the end I was fully in support of her. You want to get her tits out and cover her in blood, I am here for that, but it doesn't mean I'm going to care about their character--A trap lesser Horror falls into.
I had a similar reaction to Meg Foster's character, in the beginning I felt an indifference for her but by the end I had grown to like her to a degree where I ended up feeling disappointed in her character's decisions.
Jeff Daniel Phillips played his role well, but at moments he felt more like a cross between Adam Goldberg and Shaggy Rogers.
Kevin Jackson & Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs' characters felt like they were just developed enough to be cannon fodder for the kill count to only have their roles expanded at the last minute.
Pancho Moler was great, but it felt like the scenes where his character is heavily in play drag on and especially when he is not on screen. The segments with David Ury, Lew Temple, Elizabeth Daily, & Torsten Voges felt so much shorter than Moler's segment, but that was not a bad thing.
I appreciated Foster, Ury, & Temple's characters as the film progressed, but was quickly disappointed in Foster's character.
Personally, I would have liked a lot more of Daily's character and a more interesting/unique character for Voges--It was like Voges got to the costume closet last and that was all there was, and then he had 5 minutes to come up with a character, (like he was called in last minute to do Smosh's Try Not To Laugh segment.)
All that is to say, Richard Brake's character was basically the Chekhov's gun of the film. While Moler's character is wandering around I found myself waiting for Brake. Only for Brake's segment to feel like a gun firing a series of blanks. The back-and-forth I felt throughout this film finally ends with a high note, and the two MVPs of the movie leave me saying to myself, "okay, cool."
After thinking about the movie for a while, I am pretty convinced it should be a series, 8 to 10 eps each October. Each season is a new year's game. We see new participants collected (for both sides of the game,) we follow Richard Brake around in and out of the game's character, we only ever know the characters in the "murder lounge" within that part of their world, (From limo to lounge to limo, and never telling us about their personal lives,) and so on. I think I would watch that series more than I would rewatch this film.
Just my 2¢ 🙏🏼😊
So much of this film was what I love from the lesser-known, schlocky, and low-budget Horror from the '60s & '70s, and is what I find myself inspired to write. But, Rob Zombie and I certainly have different aesthetic interests.
I struggle with how I feel about this film. On one hand it's simple: The Running Man (1987) meets The Purge (2013) but covered in the greasy, dirty grime of the Rob Zombie filter and all on a $20 budget. But, on another hand: it's the kind of low budget schlock that feels so slapped together it's easy to zone-out or notice the zipper on the back of the monster, (real someone who was going to provide an extra car or two fell through vibes, action is shot close up or w/ a shaky cam style to keep it from looking lame vibes, a scene that is actually interesting had to be cut so here's a good 10 minutes of nonsensical dialogue to pad-out the runtime vibes.) And on a different hand: it's well-acted, it's set-dressed well & shot well, some of the characters were well formed and interesting.
Let me get my personal issue out of the way, the amount of Zombie-grease Rob slathers on the lens of his films has a pretty direct relationship with how much I like or dislike his films. This film is not only covered in it, but he is sticking his slop-covered figured under our noses and making us smell it. So, I have a bit of a personal bias against this film.
The film's opening scene & monologue, fantastic--Hooked me immediately, all I wanted was more. Then, the next scenes did the exact opposite, pushing me away. The momentary bedroom shenanigans pulls me in again only to push me away at the gas station only for a gas-pump conversation to pull me back in. This back-and-forth continues throughout the entirety of the film.
I found myself wondering, well into the third act, "they're some kind of carnival folk, right? So where is the rest of the carnival?"
Malcolm McDowell was a lovely surprise, not too much else though. Again, that back-and-forth.
I feel like this film's star-rating goes up a full point if it had 3x the filming budget--Proverbial plaster over the metaphorical holes, add another coat of paint, (more can sometimes be more,) and whatnot. Is there really anything more frustrating than watching John Carpenter, The Soska Sisters, and Robert Zombie get $5 to make a movie while I have to watch as Eli Roth and Alex Garland get a good $50 million to $100 million and more to make mediocre garbage.
Sherri Moon Zombie might be one of the most under appreciated actors of the 21st Century, thus far. Her acting has improved drastically over the last 20 years, and yet she is exclusively in Rob Zombie films. I'm not really all that sexually attracted to her, so when she is able to catch may attention I know it's probably not the result of her husband's ability to expertly frame her ass in an overlong-shot or the scarf she's wearing as a top, but rather the way she is able to play to the camera. In this film, I did not care for her character in the beginning and by the end I was fully in support of her. You want to get her tits out and cover her in blood, I am here for that, but it doesn't mean I'm going to care about their character--A trap lesser Horror falls into.
I had a similar reaction to Meg Foster's character, in the beginning I felt an indifference for her but by the end I had grown to like her to a degree where I ended up feeling disappointed in her character's decisions.
Jeff Daniel Phillips played his role well, but at moments he felt more like a cross between Adam Goldberg and Shaggy Rogers.
Kevin Jackson & Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs' characters felt like they were just developed enough to be cannon fodder for the kill count to only have their roles expanded at the last minute.
Pancho Moler was great, but it felt like the scenes where his character is heavily in play drag on and especially when he is not on screen. The segments with David Ury, Lew Temple, Elizabeth Daily, & Torsten Voges felt so much shorter than Moler's segment, but that was not a bad thing.
I appreciated Foster, Ury, & Temple's characters as the film progressed, but was quickly disappointed in Foster's character.
Personally, I would have liked a lot more of Daily's character and a more interesting/unique character for Voges--It was like Voges got to the costume closet last and that was all there was, and then he had 5 minutes to come up with a character, (like he was called in last minute to do Smosh's Try Not To Laugh segment.)
All that is to say, Richard Brake's character was basically the Chekhov's gun of the film. While Moler's character is wandering around I found myself waiting for Brake. Only for Brake's segment to feel like a gun firing a series of blanks. The back-and-forth I felt throughout this film finally ends with a high note, and the two MVPs of the movie leave me saying to myself, "okay, cool."
After thinking about the movie for a while, I am pretty convinced it should be a series, 8 to 10 eps each October. Each season is a new year's game. We see new participants collected (for both sides of the game,) we follow Richard Brake around in and out of the game's character, we only ever know the characters in the "murder lounge" within that part of their world, (From limo to lounge to limo, and never telling us about their personal lives,) and so on. I think I would watch that series more than I would rewatch this film.
Just my 2¢ 🙏🏼😊