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Reviews
A Lonely Place to Die (2011)
Great cinematography let down by ludicrously implausible plot
I had high hopes and I wanted it to baffle and thrill and excite me, I really did. Instead I found myself cursing and muttering at the ludicrous implausibility of the storyline. If, as a member of a group of innocent mountain-climbers, you suddenly find yourself under attack from an unseen assailant above you, would you run into the most obvious place to be seen and keep shouting "Anna!" at the top of your voice? No, you would creep under cover and keep very, very quiet.
At one point, there was the choice to take one route which was an easy walk of about 12 miles to go back or to take the other which was only 4 miles but risking life and limb by climbing down a really perilous drop. The 12 mile route would take a bit longer but would be risk free. Everybody was in OK shape for the walk so then why do the crazy thing? Didn't the producer believe that one of them might just realize, "Hmmm...whoever put her there might be a bit annoyed when we set her free, so we had better keep a look out for bad guys..."? Nope, not for one moment. And as for staging a Rio-type Carnival in the middle of a highland backwater, I don't think so. As soon as the dancing girl emerged, a local Kirk elder would have nipped out and thrown a woolly rug over her to cover her up before chasing the rest of the troupe out of town.
And this was the problem throughout - the constant irritation that people just do not behave like that in real life unless they are really, really dumb or if the producer thinks that we are really, really dumb so we will accept it. It was impossible to develop any kind of sympathy for the protagonists because I kept wanting to give them a good slap and tell them stop being so stupid. It reflected a total contempt by the producer to credit the audience with a shred of common sense. And once that respect was lost,it was impossible to regain it because the implausibility hits just kept on coming.
So, if you like aerial views of Scottish mountains, you will have a ball. If you like thrillers with a remotely believable plot, you will have a real problem with this one.
Devil (2010)
Sort out your sock drawer in preference to wasting time on this movie
Words fail me in describing just how disappointed I was with the time I wasted on this movie.
The omens were initially good. The movie publicity was convincing. On paper, everything pointed towards an exciting, spooky movie, one that the wife might enjoy. Instead, we were inflicted with standard Hollywood formulaic spooker clichés (Oh-oh, the lights are flickering, that means something really bad is going to happen...) along with the contrived who-is-the-killer character-building so that (of course) we are supposed to be fooled by the obviously nastiest personalities, according to the highly detailed crime sheets the detectives manage to magic up from the bowels of a remote building in record time (from which it is difficult to get a cell phone signal).
Led by the nose and an uncannily correct superstitious Mexican security guard fueling our worst fears, we are force-fed the inevitable "twist" which came not on tippy-toes but driving a tractor to astonish us by revealing that - stand by for more clichés - the least likely person you might suspect HAD TO BE the culprit. Puhleease. Even the wife didn't go for it.
At the end, I really had to check whether some conservative Christian fundamentalist organization had bankrolled this crap. The final spoken line (I won't spoil it for you because that is utterly impossible) is up there with John Wayne's "Surely he was the son of Gawd". I wanted to throw myself in front of the Evil One and shout "Take me, take me!" to end the pain.
Do yourself a big favor. Avoid, avoid, avoid. No need to thank me.