Change Your Image
bjdomeij
Reviews
Pandorum (2009)
**Spoilers** Thoughts about the movie **Spoilers**
First I'd like to express my overall opinion about the movie. It's well worth a watch, both if you like sci-fi and horror, and specially if you like sci-fi horror. I think it did well in both genres. Also the acting was pretty good.
Though some things distracted me... (I might have missed some dialogue. It was a lot of whispering and I had no subtitles.)
First, the ship is full of maneating mutants. Usually you'd say that a common threat unites people. Then why would that girl agressivly attack him? Because she wanted his boots? I mean come on... That cliché I-trust- no one attitude just felt stupid.
And oh, why would that first encountered mutant just drag him away and leave him? If the mutant was saving him for later or something, why not wound him, tie him up, or lock him in? That really made no sense to me. First he gets dragged away, then they cut the scene, in the next moment he's hiding in some room and there's no sign of the mutant.
And about these mutants. Way too exaggerated for my taste. Their spikey armors, their superstrength, their wallclimbing, their ridiculous chest-first superleaps, their weapons, their lack of speech. One mutant even got hit by a machete deep into his scull, whereupon he just rips it out and keeps fighting like nothing. And yet, despite these awesome abilities, they seem to spend a lot more time screaming, and pushing away the prey than actually killing it.
Also I felt the plot rather confusing. (Again, this may be because I had no subtitles and there were a lot of whispering.)
Others than that I felt the movie was pretty awesome. The ending was nicely done. First they confused you by saying, "Look, there are no stars!" And your mind started trying to work out what the h*ll was going on. I really felt like "whaaat?". For a second I thought they'd actually hit the end of universe and was travelling in the emptiness haha. I didn't expect that ending at all.
Grace (2009)
Making horror of motherhood
I can see why people would not like this movie. First of all, Paul Solet is making satire and horror of something that people hold sacred. The very love of a mother. This is embodied by two characters. The protagonist mother Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) and her mother-in-law Vivian Matheson (Gabrielle Rose).
The movie starts with a soft-core sex scene in which Madeline seem extremely bored. We soon find out she's lesbian, so it is implied she did only get a husband to get pregnant. This is also implied by her lack of care when her husband dies. The scene where Madeline for over two minutes hugs and kisses what looks to be a baby corpse was disturbing. Later on in the movie she proves that she loves her baby no matter what.
After Vivian loses her son,Madeline's husband Michael (Stephen Park) in the car accident she becomes desperate to get hold of the baby, as she does not trust in Madeline's being-mother knowledge. She shows disturbing behavior, wanting her husband to breastfeed on her, seemingly because she wants to have a child, and probably can't have one because her biological clock has run out.
Overall this is a pretty decent horror though. It has a very disturbing atmosphere to it, probably at the cost of pace. It has some moments I felt a little ill (in a good way), because of the mood and atmosphere. The dialogs were cheap. The characters were overall a little boring. Madeline was luckily the most interesting and best played character. Vivian was overplayed by Gabrielle Rose. I didn't get a grip of the husband, nothing was lost to the audience when he died. But the thing is, cheap dialogs and poorly developed characters is not uncommon in the horror genre, as I said the movie is pretty decent.
I recommend this movie to everyone who likes the trailer, and are not bothered by a slow pace. The trailer is pretty much, what you see is what you get.