Watchable on https://how-to-give-your-best-self-some.rest/ - quite fun!
This seems to be a remake of Joachim Hedén's previous film https://trakt.tv/movies/breaking-surface-2020 fwiw...
A simple but effective short film.
While initially very off putting in it's targeting of foreigners/white people it's easy to look past that once it gets going and the additional context in the outro is certainly eye opening.
Fun movie that doesn't dig very deep and needs you to suspend disbelief. The hook for Sigrid to engage with this was perfectly fine but it doesn't explain Frank's passiveness at all. Also takes the convenience of turning the back to the baddie... Soured it for me.
While I didn't hate this, and the central conflict of the movie is well explored it didn't really land for me. The sci-fi element takes a backseat which is fine but it's implication makes you anticipate something coming throughout the movie. It also lost some of it's believability towards the end unfortunately (the way he was sagging at school they would have dropped him in an instant and not invest so much in keeping him, I also didn't quite get why the other top cadet went batshit when he still had a seat?). Also those numbered chapters... not helping!
Except for the initial setup this one is quite transparent to the viewers but it's still competent and has a fun final act to conclude on.
Enjoyed the first "Becky" but expected more from the sequel. Imho the middle part would have benefited from some additional kills as it runs already short and that is with some fakeouts and an epilogue attached. Elena also had very little impact on this - would have been a good excuse to have her be more manic instead of just making it about "getting the dog" later on.
Maybe I've seen too many of these docs but I found this one to be quite tedious. Doing a wrap around is certainly a unique choice but even in short segments it got quite taxing and added very little.
While they managed to include plenty of big names it didn't help to structure this thing as they've included parts not really having to do with the segments they were on nor were they that insightful. Also could have added some extreme metal bands to the mix and not just the popular ones.
I guess watch this if you want to know some artists horror influences but not for "historical" context.
I didn't realize this was a Predator movie the first time I saw the poster and thought this was some random horror movie but the positive buzz certainly didn't pass me by so here we are again. After watching it I'm certainly... shocked?
From the get go this did very little to pull me in, be it the CG animals, one-dimensional plot or the the selfish attitude of our heroine. Now obviously one can argue how much that all matters when the action is good but it didn't really scratch that itch for me either... the Predator fighting with the animals was certainly entertaining but random guys biting the bullet with mostly offcam/unclear CG gore not so much. Would have been nice if they showed some wits when they fought him at the camp but somehow him going invisible is enough reason to lower their weapons and start talking to each other. She saw how the camouflage works multiple times in action already..?!!
What all those scenes, and the movie poster for that matter, certainly established, is that our protagonist has little to worry and that a showdown was coming but I would never have predicted the amounts of bullshit that would contain:
- Somehow becomes a baller and expert in alien technology. Knows when the Predator is coming, takes her magic herbs to immediately lower her blood temperature (but is not shivering and still standing up) and is in the Predators path who obviously doesn't see a standing corpse right in front of it or notices her moving out of the way...
- Never used the gun but knows the right angle to shoot and remove his mask (betting on this being a weakness when this did little to stop it before).
- Gets to conveniently escape for the n-th time and has enough time to finish up some traps (which the Predator even hit on some random tree lol).
- Gets hit to the head twice from the shield that cut through the Predators limbs, spear and even stone but is unscathed.
- Can easily remove a fang attached to it's face to save herself just in time.
- GPS dog that always magically reappears is ready to bring her the tomahawk...
- Manages to sit on top of the Predator and even pull him into the bog with a tiny rope and a much much smaller statue.
- The Predator obviously submerges immediately, but little does it know of her the grand plan to have him placed at that exact LOS of the mask in anticipation that he is gonna fire from his gun (despite not having had his mask for the whole time) while he is already targeted by the laser the entire time... b r a v o. Obviously that one shot was also enough to kill it.
...
Honest to god - how does a movie with such a contrived finale get so much praise, or even leave the script writing phase??
I didn't really inform myself what I was gonna watch so my first thought was "oh. shit.. a Chinese kids movie... that's probably going to suck" but I don't think this has to hide to the big Western players in the field. Most noteable (to me) was certainly the 3d animation. Besides the odd face designs and some scenes involving water this not only looks really good but is damn near photo realistic in the lion dance scenes (I really would love to see a behind the scenes of that).
While the movie is certainly goofy at times it surprisingly doesn't shy away from pointing towards the poor working conditions in the country (in whatever form that is allowed anyways). The conclusion offered is certainly a spectacle with the visuals but also makes good use of music so yeah, my bias was very wrong.
It always bothered me a bit that the Chinese animation studios are eating away at the Japanese anime market already (which is relying on Korea, etc. too) but if this is the level of 3DCG they can offer then that bundled with good stories certainly makes them a force to be reckoned with even more.
This one has aaaa lot of jumpscares... guess one is bound to get you. Nothing really original to be honest but with the right expectations still watchable.
Filming underwater with a limited budget is obviously not easy so I can sort of understand that the elevator pitch of "it's a haunted house BUT it plays at the bottom of a lake" didn't really result in a great movie but I didn't expect them to also fail so miserably at the writing portion. The dialogue felt stiff like it was dubbed into English having me not invested in the couple at all and the they didn't really know what to do with their runtime after the initial exploration of the place and even forcing exposition for the "climax".
I did like how the set looked submerged though but I can't say that it felt very claustrophobic since the camera still made things look oddly sterile. Maybe they should have just stuck to the POV/drone cam so they could do things besides the jumpscares (the rotating shots do however not boost my confidence in that)?
À l'intérieur remains a fluke sadly :(.
More or less passable but doesn't really innovate on conventions besides mixing various elements. I'm also a bit iffy on how some of these things worked. The scene were Beto comes to the house was offensively stupid though.
While Kate starts out OK and Winstead is a good lead it just dulls out with a paper thin and predictable plot seen in countless other action movies before. To not fall into the mould they attempt to style things up by being quirky and pimping out the Japanese setting but it's just way too tryhard for it's own good. As soon as she put on the glasses for the final showdown I was pretty much done with it. I don't really care for slow-mo action scenes when they're silly and unimpressive thanks to her being a Mary Sue let alone the lame confrontation with the antagonist.
As good as the gore was... the script was just horrid. Everyone kept reciting the same lines, the characters were one-note and everything about the townspeople was just absurd. Why is everyone up in arms about something that doesn't really concern them from 40 years ago? How they dealt with Michael was also dumb... it's like Judy Geer's character wasn't listening to her mom at all. The 2018 effort was OKish as it dealt with Laurie's trauma but this really had nothing to show for it.
Honestly the best thing they probably did with this is having two different cuts...
None of the rooms in the sequel felt particularly exciting with the beach one being especially terrible and the solutions were not very rewarding either (constantly running after single clues as a group or solving things randomly).
I saw people mentioning a better ensemble cast but honestly it was all very stiff and Zoey became ultimately annoying with her Mary Sue stick.
The backstory also didn't really make sense to me alongside a lot of contrived elements in the movie... I hope the next part puts more effort into the rooms/puzzles again.
Also did I miss something? Like... just... go under the taxi girls? Or how about you enter the code to get out of your own game? And if you forgot - the solution is still on the glass you know? :rolling_eyes:
Not sure if I would have liked it more or less if I didn't know who was attached to this. A tech-possession movie sounded really cool but the "mind-space" idea was underused and felt detached which can be said about a lot of stuff in the movie. It has little time for genuine interactions between characters and instead prefers to fill the dialogue with info dumps "let me show you what I have in the garage" :face_with_raised_eyebrow:), tension and horror are pretty much absent (they had every excuse to blend realities here) and the final third just poked holes in any of the remaining logic the lore (and story) might have had...
Yeah what the heck. Besides the title this has little in common with the "Wrong Turn" movies. While some individual scenes themselves play out OK others turned out really dumb... essential "character building" is left to the imagination (it's a horror movie, I know) and ultimately the dreamt up scenario makes very little sense. I never watched all of the sequels but I'd imagine that even if they're objectively bad they probably turn out to be more fun than this given that they don't want to be taken as serious.
Quite the boring watch that fails to be anything but generic for the most part. While the last third feels more like Barett's usual style it doesn't really match the tone of the movie and is far detached from reality.
Another uneven season with mostly duds. and sadly this wanna be horror snoozefest full of plotholes joins that pile...
Quite a slog to get through and ultimately unrewarding. A lot of fucking huh... not sure how any of that made any sense really or why it needed that stupid closing scene. Found him through news stories and piecing things together... last time I checked the bodies were hidden/burried and it took on his identity ?!?
Having watched quite a lot of found footage films and liking the genre as a whole I have never once touched PA. In part due to the hype but also because it always looked quite boring. The movie's initial notoriety certainly influenced my viewing experience so I was more so impressed at the restraint they showed with it rather than finding it particularly scary but was ultimately also disappointed at how it all played out (are you really just going to stick to sleeping in the same bed with no additional precautions or even locking the doors..? the "mythology" was also terribly under baked.). Still, for FF this was serviceable and very representative of the formula :smile:...
Depending on what you expect out of Season 2 of Scare Pewdiepie this might be a "OKish" watch but ultimately I wasn't really that engaged in it. They certainly surprised me with how visceral they started out the game but the rest of the movie didn't really match that. It was setup as the "ultimate" escape room experience but the main guy certainly didn't handle this like a VLOGger would nor were there really any "puzzles" justifying that title. I also noticed the same as @catsy did; certain parts felt extremely stealth game-esque rather than cinematic. There also happens some stupid "horror" movie stuff which sealed the "meh" experience for me (but most of that can be explained away by the twist). That twist they're able to hide quite well imho since it's layered but it also opens the movie up for even more plotholes... it's frankly just not believable that they managed to trick him with all those FX without him noticing that it's all bullsh*t.
This was a big miss as a sequel... as established early on in the movie the character of "Borat" is pretty much dead as he is part of pop culture now so he can't do the same stunts as before. To work around this issue we are instead introduced to his daughter who travels with him while Sacha is mostly going around in throw-away disguises akin to his recent "Who is America?" show (which was already plagued by similar issues). Unfortunately they did very little to help ground this in reality. Borat as a journalist had a reason to travel around and have a camera on where as in the sequel it feels quite unauthentic and often scripted. The "charm" Borat had is also mostly absent as he was mostly just in narritive driven scenes (making the Giuliani scene the "climax" AND releasing the movie with this deliberate timing only did it a big disservice imho). Did I chuckle in some scenes? Sure... but as a complete package it was just really disappointing and hollow.
Ultra low-budget snooze fest where the title is literary the movie. Might do something for you if you're claustrophobic but for me they failed quite hard at making the setting and creature threatening (looped crawling ambient sounds do not help) nor does it's "plot" hold up... I mean they are there to save the LAST fertile woman which everyone seems to neglect /nice helping her by shooting her/ and funnily enough they're just 2 miles from a base but unlike those guys they do not know how to kill the monster :rofl:??? RIP humanity.
I don't think it's all bad but the movie is quite generic (based on a 2012 comic book) and it pretty much banks on it's "twist" reveal (or the extent of it anyways) which ended up being quite lackluster the foreshadowing is there since the start and it added nothing on top of it. With the ending this got it also opened itself up for plenty of lazy writing moments and plotholes (-1).
Often quite fun with likable characters but this could have easily shaved off some of the concert scenes to flesh this out a bit more.
I found the first half of this to be somewhat decent with a setting far away from dark underwater labs, more time spent on establishing characters and somewhat interesting pseudo-science (+some gym bros playing "Depth" IRL)... but as things tend to go the usual dumb stuff starts to piles on... Not quire the redemption it could have been. (And not that I spent to much time thinking about it but there are probably quite a few plotholes in this too.)
It's decent and Natalia Dyer does a good job in the lead role but it doesn't really have anything that makes it stand out. These kinds of coming-of-age stories exist in multitudes.
Imho this had too much "normalized sex" in it. If she was really brought up firmly catholic she would have behaved a lot more reluctantly in many of the scenes. Same goes for other people in the camp; eg. giving head in places where they can easily be spotted or the Father jacking-off without any precautions..?
Another big miss for me to have her "adult life-guidance scene" in lesbian bar... I'd assume a catholic camp in this period would be far away from a place like this, nor would there be such a big local scene... felt more like forced progressiveness.
Also the hairy arms on Wolfgang Novogratz... so unnaturally fake that I have no idea what the thought process was. Were they afraid it wouldn't show in the light?
