Reviews

The art from the original Dances With Smurfs has been recycled successfully. No budget was wasted on any pretense of plot. It's jam packed with maximum nonsense, just as set ups for morality lessons. Lessons such as: ignore evidence based medicine, depend only on prayer and acupuncture.

The Blue conservatives fear any change. They don't have any sustainable economy, and depend on parasitical cargo culture. When the different races of blue people fight against each other, they switch to talking in English. All the races of blue people seem to share the same strange embarrassment and shame about nipples. This installment introduces implausibly miscegenetic half breeds. Presumably intended as an opportunity to lecture on metis oppression.

The Blue Conservatives torture big ducks, to make them fight against the Red Liberals, who are trying to provide aid to the blue people as a sideline while protecting their own families. Oh, and a psychic whale goes all Moby Dick and Jonah and the whale, at the same time. Pretty much any random thought from anywhere else is crammed into this mess.

The popcorn was ok.

With Hallowe'en in mind, thought this could be fun to watch. But after the first couple of curses it got too repetitive and predictable. CGI up to par with 1980s TV shows. Who would you pick as the worst demon: atheists, or gold digging women? I won't spoil it by giving the answer here. While arguably well intentioned, this is the kind of thing that can give organized religions a bad name.

It was a bonus seeing the superhero with the gold lightning bolt on her chest, right after a trailer for the reboot of Shazam!

Recommended only when combined with a critical thinking discussion group to follow. Some homework going in could help too.

Writing what you know is always wise. Artists writing about their art, easily gets incestuous and tiresome. Sorry to Bother You draws on experience and pulls in imagination in the blend of good science fiction.

Future viewers will be discovering this one, for decades to come.

The original was tense and gripping. The original had good acting. The original is recent, with modern sensibilities. Maybe once a generation a good story is worth re-making. Update it for cultural relevance. Update the technology and the look.

But if Americans really can't understand Australian, they can watch it with subtitles.

Is this really the only way to get an American audience to watch something? How cheap can ABC be? Very sad.

I suppose this is the easiest way to censor it, and water down the content so as to not disturb delicate puritan sensibilities.

The world can be so much better than this if you look outside your borders.

Source code is not bad enough to be funny, it's just pointless. I'm sure the script looked good to somebody's rich uncle looking for a tax write off. It could have been worth half watching over the Internet except Russell Peters ruins it. It could have been improved with some cowboys on spaceships with lots of slave girls. But Source Code is no The Purge. Visually it's dark and unappealing. Nothing to titillate or arouse here. The music is overly dramatic to no apparent purpose. The blatant product placements are great, but the ads before the movie have more of those, framed better, without the annoying people playing amateur actor in between. Source Code tries hard to trick and mislead you, like Agatha Cristie could. Sadly it fails, and given the rest of the elements, you don't even care that it fails. I really did watch this all the way to the end, just in case it turned into a different movie half way, or the protagonist started claiming "I see dead people." There are plenty of Philip K. Dick stories that haven't been remade into movies often enough yet, so no excuse not to have a decent story to work from, even for giving such a shoddy treatment as this. Buy this one from the delete bin, as a present for some relative you don't like. But make sure to get it in some old format you know they can't play.

Sucker Punch is a pathetic attempt by over the hill producers at a cash grab by throwing every cliché that hooked them as kids into a random hodgepodge with no pretence of connecting them to make any sense or reason. They even throw in a gratuitous steam punk reference, because they think that's still cool. It could have been another Heavy Metal for the Zoomer generation if they'd bothered to pay for a soundtrack. Instead they throw in covers of tired old hits, like K-Tel records did to squeeze every penny out. They don't even budget a costume change for each number.

They get everything wrong, not by trying, just from not even caring. Admittedly this makes it one of the good kind of bad movies. A few of the ideas they steal could have been cute on their own, like flint and steel in a dragon's throat. And the monorail to Jupiter could have been funny except they put regular tracks on what was otherwise an obvious monorail, and the planet didn't work.

Clearly set in 1950's New York, no wait 1800s Paris, or is it 1970s Germany? When did flappers use photocopiers and Japanese Gundams to fight dragons to escape polyester suited pimps? Dream sequences aren't sufficient excuse for this. At least there's no way to pick on continuity errors when the whole movie is one big continuity error.

It's wrong that it's socially acceptable to go out in public to see a movie based on a comic book when you wouldn't be caught dead reading a comic book on the bus. Only watch this movie at home, secretly, with a riftrax MST3k style running commentary. Better, re-read Tank Girl while watching it again instead.

Iron Man 2 is the worst waste of digital film I've seen all year. I enjoy bad movies, but nobody should have standards this low. I actually walked out of it. Three times. Atomic Twister wasn't this bad. Don't waste your money seeing it in the theatre. If you must, see it secretly at home, after the Rifftrax is out.

This is what happens when property holders know people will see a movie anyway, so they don't need to irresponsibly spend investor money on things like a script, soundtrack, or special effects. You might as well see Escape From New York again instead, it has better special effects and more thought and story in it.

That chick who was in all the ads, Scarlett Johansson, isn't even in the movie in any significant way. That was just a PR plot to gauge interest in a potential perpetually put-off ripoff spin off. This movie does not contain boobies, and even the curse words are beeped out, gratuitously. It's like watching a low rent Transformers with all the sexy stuff stripped off.

They didn't bother trying to make Moscow look authentic. They did keep Mickey Rourke looking authentic. Mickey Rourke is the only good thing in the film, and he's supposed to be the bad thing! If you're a fan of Mickey Rourke, or any other actors in this film, go see any of their other movies again instead of this one.

The film keeps to the spirit of comic book erotic horror. The four stories are well matched and all good. It's a little bit sexy, but just a tease (yes guys, you get to see nipples, more than you want).

It's a little bit scary, but in a fun, carnival way. Each story had something in it that got somebody to leave the theatre for a different reason, so don't be afraid that it's totally lame and tame. And only one of the people who had to leave the theatre was obviously a plant to drum up publicity.

Keep an eye out for tributes to genre classics.

This is what the Tales From the Crypt movie could have been.

This is one of those movies that is so bad it wraps around into good. Low budget and cheap too.

This is one film not afraid of low brow humour. Bad jokes galore. I won't be spoiling it for you if I tell you it's full of fart jokes.

Everyone agrees it's about time sheep got a chance to let their alter ego go wild. Scientists are still evil of course, but there's lots of hippy activist alternative healing for balance.

Don't look for depth here (even in the underground scenes) but go in prepared to revel in the gore and silliness.

My other vote for this movie was a ten.

This film is worthwhile for the soundtrack alone. And just as worthwhile in every other way.

Lots of tasteful nudity and sex between uninhibited young friends. Very enjoyable for both young and old to watch. The whole cast is beautiful, like they were born not to wear clothes. Someone complained after the screening that they were too beautiful. I didn't see that as a problem.

The criminal mystery and story background is revealed piece by piece out of chronological order in a series of flashbacks. That is difficult to do well, but here it's done skillfully and adds to the story rather than making it difficult to understand.

At the premiere at the Toronto Film Festival many people walked out of the screening. That surprised me. Sure there's a lot of nudity, but the film festival audience usually expects that and takes it in stride. The film is very French, and perhaps that could alienate Americans used to seeing only Hollywood films. The people who walked out of the film were mostly men. That surprised me too. Perhaps they were offended by the bisexual elements of the film? For anyone who likes film, especially anyone who likes French cinema, this is a must see.

"Category 6" was arguably the worst TV mini-series I ever forced myself to watch. "Category 7" is a worthy successor. It crassly capitalizes on recent tragedies. The acting is up to the level of the writing.

"Category 7" avoids being boring. There's some good camera work. The destruction of life and property is good clean fun for the whole family.

Does it have a message? No. Is it worth watching? Not unless you're really hard up. If you're watching the news some evening and real life leaves you wanting more mayhem without the sense of loss or suffering, this could be just what you're looking for.

It does remind me what I'd love to see some day is a screen adaptation of John Barnes "Mother of Storms".

A run of the mill TV bio-pic.

Pleasant enough to watch as light entertainment. You get someone's romanticised imagination of the story.

Don't expect too much, but watch it if you know the story or want to look at the actresses.

Bettie Page is a difficult subject to get new or personal information about. So the filmmakers here didn't try.

They didn't shy away from showing some nudity, and there's a bit of titillation.

Not a bad film, just disappointing. It could have been so much more.

X Change is pretty standard B grade cable TV sci fi but the mostly gratuitous sex scenes make a point of showing bare breasts in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Oh and there are some thoughtful ideas in the story as well.

As a time killer for a director with nothing to do between real movies, I suppose it could have been worse. There's no consistent vision to the film, but a couple of half baked ideas could have resulted in a couple of mediocre short films. You could edit it down to a 20 minute art film that shows some pretty scenery and/or a 10 minute "thriller" that could be tacked on to the end of screenings of Deliverance.

One possibly wothwhile comment the film could have made is about gender roles. I thought there were some interesting reversals of male and female roles, but the director aparently just meant to show that male and female animals (of any species) are different and in the stereotypical ways.

Certainly not worth paying money to see, but if you had a tape in front of you and nothing better to do, you could try watching it in fast forward to find bits of interest to you, or leave it on in the background at a party for your friends to critique between mouths of cheezie poofs. As long as your guests aren't the least bit squeamish about pointless and graphic violence.

Ok, it's been long enough since the movie that there's an excuse to do it over with different special effects. But a made for TV remake with '90s TV limits and sensibilities would be my last choice.

Do yourself a favour and watch the original again instead.

It would take a committee of romance writers to pack as many cliches into this small community beset upon by two disaster movies concurrently.

The story is set mostly outside police cars being battered by loose pages of scripts from stories that had one. The beautiful people in perfect makeup must have been airbrushed by the first tornado, because the busting bosoms are pointless. The absence of nipples in all that augmented cleavage, and the anti-technology political stance, add good family values that will be a boon to tv historians of generations to come.

Not bad enough to watch, but you can always hunt for continuity errors.

Whatever it takes is bad, silly, predictable, stupid, and romantic, in exactly the ways it's supposed to be. It follows formula to a tee. Good production quality. The beautiful people are very, and the nerds are unmistakable. Teen gross outs. Hot fashions. Adolescent fantasy at its finest. Both a one and a ten at the same time, I have to give it a five.

Consider this a tribute to La Femme Nikita. It's the same almost scene by scene. What distinguishes it, is that it has been redone in English for an American audience. There's not much wrong with it, except it doesn't live up to the original and does not add anything of its own.