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The Party (1988 Video)
2/10
So bizarre, its existence needs explaining
18 March 2018
Warning: Spoilers
I'm not sure where to even begin with this movie. It's one the the most odd films I've ever seen in my life. I suppose you'd call it a slice of life flick, but that's being generous. I have no idea what the angle was here, what was trying to be accomplished. The whole movie is like a fever dream of banality.

Movie starts with Richard Wells, fictional billionaire playboy, choosing a wife, and throwing her a bachelorette party. And that's what this movie is. A bachelorette party. As you approach the halfway mark of the movie, you start to ask yourself "...is this... is this it...?" - and the answer is yes, yes it is.

The story, or whatever semblance of one their is, is that the bachelorette must go through these awkward, short, and unnecessary little "games" to reveal prizes, like a creepy blow up doll, a dildo, and the like.

Eventually, a small group of male strippers have gathered, and they proceed with this bizarre suddenly pink and blue lit dancing montage that goes on for almost 10 minutes, before the girls pile into a limo.

After they get in the limo, one of them pops in a VHS tape into a player, and the weirdest 4 minutes of this movie begins. The tape is basically this surreal scene of this pixelated blue covered guy against a pink background, posing for 4 minutes. No explanation as to what this is is given, and it ends very abruptly.

So the limo takes off, and the girls do typical limo things, like drink champagne, while poking their heads through the sun roofs and screaming.

Eventually, the limo gets pulled over by a "cop", who turns out to be Richard Wells himself (the whole time the limo is pulled over, there is a man in the background on his front lawn looking at the scene like he thinks it's real. It's pretty funny.) and he takes them all to his boat to drink more champagne.

Then cut to later, Richard and his now-wife who I forgot the name of are now married and watching the tape back together. The end.

Honestly, one of the strangest movies I've ever seen
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3/10
Starts strong, but ultimately boring and disappointing
18 September 2017
Warning: Spoilers
Bought the DVD from the shameless collection, and I thought it was going to be terrible, as many others in that series are (but funny terrible.) I was initially pleasantly surprised, as the film got off to a good start, and was solidly paced and interesting.

It was the part where they change trains, maybe about 30 minutes in, where it absolutely tanks.

So there's these two girls taking a sleeper train home for Christmas, and these two psycho ruffians board, and cause some shenanigans. Then one of them starts raping a woman, only for the woman to change her mind halfway through and get way into it. In fact, she gets so far into it, she just randomly up and decides to become the ruffian's ringleader. Okay, that part was a little weird, but whatever.

Then the train stops for some reason or other I can't remember, a bomb threat or something, and the girls, creeped the hell out by the ruffians, persuade the staff at the train station to allow them to board another train which gets in sooner.

They enter a quiet compartment, only to be quickly surprised by the two whackjobs and this completely random woman who just decided to join them, and who they're now taking orders from for some reason.

From here on out, the movie becomes unbearably boring. A bad movie I can forgive, a boring movie is, however, unforgivable.

The next 40ish minutes of the movie is basically the girls running back and forth the compartment, screaming, while the boys make weak and non-committal attempts at sexual assault. While this is happening, the female leader of the boys keeps going on and on "Come on! Don't you want to? What's wrong with you? Get drunk! Have sex! Come on! Come on! Why won't you? What's wrong with you?" over and over and over and over and over again, seriously, she doesn't shut up, and becomes completely obsessed with getting these girls to party for some reason. She could just kick them out and have a private threesome with these two dudes, but no, for some reason the girls need to be there? No realistic motive or explanation is given for why any of this is happening. Okay, they're all nuts, but the characters are so shallow it doesn't seem like an authentic action, and the whole thing comes across as quite forced.

Even the guys aren't that into it. They keep grabbing the girls and letting them go, occasionally kissing them, but they seem to get bored, until the woman starts ordering them to grab them again. It's just bizarre. Eventually, someone decides it would be fun to have sex with a knife or something for some reason, and surprise, surprise, they kill one of the girls. It's not even clear that their intent was to murder, it was like they were going to use the knife as a frigging sex toy or something.

After the first girl is dead, the three basically have an "oh crap" moment, and half freak out, the other girl dies when she jumps out the train, and they dump the second body out as well.

The train pulls in, and the final part of the movie begins. Honestly, I was so done with the movie at this point, I was struggling to keep my eyes on the screen.

Basically, the parents come to pick up the girls, they're obviously not there, there's some confusion, but then they decide they might be on a later train. Somehow, at some point - I really can't remember how because I was struggling that bad - the trio get invited into the parents house, and it just seems to drag on and on and on. Long story short, dad finds out who killed the girls, and kills both the guys.

What bugs me so much about this is that the film portrays the ruffians as these innocent, impressionable rapscallions, who just wanted to play some harmless pranks, and the terrible things they did were all the woman's fault, they didn't understand what they were doing! Of course, this is rubbish. All the woman did was sit in the corner and be really annoying, and tell them to do random crap. Honestly, it makes the guys out to be these little two year old boys who don't understand, but they're really young adult men, who are more than capable of not taking orders from some random 30-something year old woman they were just trying to rape like 45 minutes ago. And the woman is made out to be this evil genius, who masterminded this whole thing, when really, she's just a nutjob.

In the end, the father kills both the guys, the woman seems to get away. The end.

Overall, really boring movie. Solid avoid.
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Four Lions (2010)
2/10
Pretty Awful
6 June 2012
Warning: Spoilers
I went to see this with a few of my friends, shortly after it came out. We had seen the trailers, and it looked absolutely hilarious, but sadly the trailer was better than the movie.

Where to start? Well, the only reason I haven't given it a 1, is because there were some unarguably funny bits, though they were very few and far between. That's probably the best thing you'll get me to say about this movie.

It wasn't the 'controversy' of the subject - I don't get offended by small things like that, especially if it's done in good humor, so that really wasn't a problem - I knew exactly what this movie was about, and that's what I thought would make it great.

About 25 minutes in, my hopes and expectations were really being drained quite quickly, and that's when one of my friends tapped my shoulder and told me that the other guys wanted to leave early cause it was that bad. The audience was in agreement - there was very little laughter throughout, and a constant stream of people leaving. I convinced my friends to stick it out a while longer, however. Good grief, that was a very bad idea.

More about why the movie was bad - for a start, the locations. Low class, English council houses, urban - ugly buildings, awful colors, very drab I don't expect every movie to be shot in glamorous locations, but watching a council estate as the primary location for an hour and a half was a bit depressing. Even the parts shot in countryside were incredibly dull and drab, not pleasant to look at at all.

Secondly, the characters - for starters, they were completely unremarkable - I couldn't put names to any of the characters, and I didn't care about any of them one bit. I had no clue who was who, and that really took away from what little enjoyment was left.

Thirdly, the story - rubbish. Meaningless, pointless - whatever you want to call it. It had no real feel to it, and seemed a bit directionless at times.

All and all, I though this was a terrible movie, and you couldn't pay me to watch it again.
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