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Reviews
Love at Sea (2018)
A lot of reviewers gave this 1s and it was way better than that
It is a Hallmark movie. Lead is an event coordinator who lost her job due to corporate shenanigans by her almost finance, and has her own business now. On a cruise to help her best friend and you tube star manage a 'lifestyle hack' and cooking show themed cruise-- with a jerk chef.
Love interest is on his first go try out as cruise director. The couple are married in real life and cute, and first nice antagonistic and then innocent flirty, as they work through job issues and have a little fun.
A third star is the ship, this was obviously a paid for movie for the second largest and the longest cruise ship in the word. It shows off lots of great stuff about the ship.
As a light fun romance, and love letter to a great and new ship, this was great. Enjoy it with a shrimp pasta and a few rum drinks.
Nemesis 5: The New Model (2017)
Not great
Sci Fi robot vs augmented human movie with gun fu and kung fu.
The best way to describe it is to describe the first 15 minutes. There is a very very long scroll describing a long and involved back story. Then the credits start, inter spaced with a shot of a hill in the desert and nothing happening. Finally there is a girl in an alley, and she hears gun shots. In the building is an older actress in black business attire with high heels and a mini skirt, who is "shooting" at a combat robot. Except the guns were toys off a discount rack and the actors were flicking the guns towards each other and they put in cheap effect in post. Then the actress slow runs over and beats the robot with weird spark effects.
Then a long voiceover where the child actress describes a bunch of back story that may have been interesting to see, about living with the older actress.
The older actress disappears and the movie appears to start with a scene where the child is now 20, and is seducing another woman only to shoot her in the head without earning, and we learn through terrible computer effects that she is a death bot. A second set of credits start. Not joking. At least as long as the first set of credits.
That ends finally, with two women in weird blond wigs and red sex outfits slow walking doing the same weird gun flick shooting, with even worse special effects, as the child now adult character walks slightly faster than them to get away, and a cut to the simply worse TV movie version of a news cast ever.
All with terrible yellow filters on 90% of the shots. It is all so bad. The acting was like a bunch of middle school kids playing with a camera phone making a movie to pass an afternoon
Xenophobia (2019)
It is so bad
The filmmaker tried to do Canterbury Tales, only with a group of fellow victims of UFO people.
But the tales were not well done--there were flashes of well done scenes and acting, and literally in the next minute it would be grade Z level acting in over the top story line/plot changes that made no sense, even in the context of a UFO story.
There is a torture scene that was supposed to be serious and girl empowering, but was just a weird farce of movie torture scenes from good action or drama films.
Not to do spoilers, but there is a last minute plot twist that was so silly and poorly done I felt dumb for not turning the movie off earlier.
All of My Heart (2015)
Hallmark small town romance movie, that gets a little excessive with dragging out the plot
Lacey and a cute guy are not related but have a house together thanks to someone they don't know dying. She is super cute and likable and wants to open a B&B. He gets fired and blackballed from his great job for no reason of his own fault and moves in and starts reluctantly helping.
He fish out of water tries to fix things. He was a little too jerky at first but gets likable.
That was when the movie started throwing silly conflicts to keep them apart. It went on too long.
On the positive, there is a old time pickup truck, and a fun owner of a diner they interact with.
In addition to the plot dragging, on the bad side, Ed Asner plays a grumpy old man commenting on everyone and was annoying.
Christmas Lodge (2011)
Very similar to a Hallmark, but with more religion
If you have seen any of these you know the basic plot lines and rhythm.
In this case the details: City professional in historic preservation is hiking with city boyfriend, meets Christmas Lodge's new owner passed down from family, it needs a lot of work, he has adorable child, her family are contractors, her slowly dying grandfather knows the lodge from the old days and wants her to save it...
There is a lot of prayer, references to God running things and trusting in him, way way more than a Hallmark would have. However, no special faith or church services, they keep it general which faith it is.
Additionally, the city boyfriend is out and off screen way before the growing relationship with the cute lodge owner.
The conflict here is mostly the grandfather slowly dying and trusting in God to fix everything if you pray hard enough.
Other commentators noted the wasn't a lot of heat between the leads, but this was very religious and there isn't much they can do other than handholding and a chaste kiss. It can't be easy to do that but they did a nice job
Mi chao (2018)
Joint China/Australia sci fi movie has some issues
It was never quite clear who the bad people in the caves were (being vague here to avoid spoilers).
The lead is a well known actress in China, but her English abilities are not such she can carry a lead role in that language. Kelsey tied to overact the tough corporate guy role, but went over the top a lot.
The White handsome tough guy was trying, but he didn't have the ability and the Chinese tough guy never got a good chance to try. That left a plucky Australian actress to try to carry the exposition and status update role, but she had issues with deciding if she was doing a native or US Hollywood accent.
The lead did have good camera presence, which is good because she was forced into the hero mode a lot in addition to being the center of the movie.
I was really impressed with the lead character's house in the beginning, I came here mostly to find out where it was.
The Sleepover (2020)
Comedy child adventure/adult heist movie that goes too far a lot
It is a comedy, but the children are played as literally stupid and maybe 6 years younger than their real age for cheap and empty laughs that never happen because it is painful.
Same with the dad character--someone that useless and stupid would be locked up in a group home. It isn't funny at all, it is so bad it takes you out of the story.
If someone at netflix had viewed this and told the director and editor to chill out this could have been great. The story is the typical child journey and heist plot with a twist. It was otherwise well done, but no one told the director to stop on the way too far over the top dumbness.
Space Mutiny (1988)
A space movie made with space scenes taken from Battlestar TV series, with a number of issues
There is the core of a good story here. A generation ship is going to a new world and the security crew decides to mutiny and sell the rest of the crew/passengers to space slavers. Big fight against them led by the beefcake hero/space ace.
There were a number of issues. The security commander was way over the top scenery chewing even for a sci fi movie. Bridge crew are murdered and then back at their places later. For some reason the filmmakers decided to use an abandoned factory as the engineering section of the ship, where a lot of the combat scenes were filmed, but made no effort to cover up the bricks and cement and windows.
It was filmed in English in South Africa, and with the exception of a few actors most of the cast wasn't good at acting at all, and really had a hard time suppressing their accents.
The lead actress is married, in real life, to the lead actor/action star, but her hair, makeup, and sort of one piece swimsuit type space costume makes her look 20 years older.
There are some sort of security patrol cars used for a long chase scene, but they look silly and go walking speed at most.
Most oddly, there is a crew of space psychic dancers who do long dance numbers, alone in a large room, but have no bearing on any events on the ship.
There is also a scene with a space disco, where actresses are booty popping in 80s style club clothes to a boppy techno disco, and the lead actress does a sexy hula hoop for the lead male. It was super corny 80s, so much so it was funny.
Whatever the (serious) faults, this movie has been covered twice by MST3K, and by Riftrax, and both are really funny.
Night Hunters (2019)
Paranormal film noir made on the cheap
My rating is based on what the film makers and actors did with the obviously very small budget.
There is a magic macguffin the PI is trying to find. The opening scene in a dive bar turned paranormal bar is really good. They got a number of extras and did really good work with the small amount of makeup budget.
Given the limited number of sets the whole crew did a nice job. The story makes sense, internally there are no glaring plotholes.
Character motives are clear, the cheap special effects are pretty good in context.
The dialog broke down too quiet several times, I am sure because of the budget.
Sicario (2015)
Very well shot. You get frustrated until a point of realization
Great shooting. Brilliant colors.
You are following this adventure of the drug war in Mexico and how the US is fighting back.
Except, the protagonist makes you mad. Then you figure out that character is not the lead, and the real lead is understated. That moment is when the film goes from mildly annoying to brilliant.
Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019)
The actresses and the camera people were trying
The producers and the scriptwriters weren't sure if they wanted to make a disney style farce or a serious mystery, so the director decided to do the worst of both.
The actors weren't feeling it, but the actresses were really trying to act as hard as they could given the script. Good video work for something that looks like it was shot in 4 days with only two cameras.
It is poor quality script writing when the lead character is the most unlikable and is always doing obviously stupid actions.
Space Force (2020)
Watched the first one. It was not good
They spent a lot of money, helo, good actors, a main set that looks like it is usually a really cool corporation campus or college.
In fact, several of the actors are great in everything else they do.
This was obviously supposed to be larger than life version of the Office.
But there were only four laughs in the whole episode, and a few cringe worthy moments. The rest were mostly jokes that didn't land.
(To be fair, 2 of the jokes that were funny were really funny)
The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box (2013)
Late Victorian era adventure/steampunk/magic could have been great, but falls short
Lots of pretty good actors. 17 year old finds out his parents are secret agents for a late 1800s British secret agency fighting magic evil in a semi steampunk era. Parents and younger brother are kidnapped, and he flails around as an undercover room porter in the lux hotel/secret evil hideout as he seeks the magiffuns and clean romances a maid. Mostly a chance for the main villains to scene chew, which they do well at.
However, everything falls just a little short. Given a set of choices the hero makes the wrong one every time. Given logical choices, a villain picks the comic book evil one. Hero finally stops being quite so dumb, but his attempt at using a steampunk drilling chariot fails--literally in the climax of the film.
Finally the 'hero' shoots the main villain in the back.
The wrapup scene suggested this was supposed to be a series of films, but the storytelling core wasn't there
Missile X - Geheimauftrag Neutronenbombe (1979)
Great cheesy spy film
It was a great campy spy film.
I was sad to find out Pouri, the actress who played the undercover police captain, didn't get out of Iran in time and spent a year in Islamic jail and never acted again.