Change Your Image
author1995
Reviews
Britannia Hospital (1982)
I really felt sick after watching this
I couldn't decide whether this is a good movie or a bad one, but I don't think it will leave you unshaken. People die in the corridors (probably painfully) because of the staff's neglect, and I remember being very shocked by the sheer callousness of this (but that's satire, after all). But the thing that stayed with me was the experiment in the new wing - creating a new human being from parts. Even though it has been years since I saw the film, just writing about it makes me feel sick again. The mad doctor's ghoulish interest in his patients was shocking, and the despairing expression on the transplanted head's face was worse - but when the new man finally bit the doctor's hand and the surgery staff literally tore the body's head off to free the doctor was nothing but revolting. It's strong stuff, really strong stuff, and even though I sometimes wish I hadn't seen the movie because of that scene alone, I don't know... it was a learning experience, after all, that was nicely summed up in the final shot of the disembodied brain quoting Shakespeare: when man wants to play god, the result can be indescribable.
Van Helsing (2004)
Hit and Missed Opportunities
I was rather sceptical when I heard about the movie's monster parade, but they are meshed into one piece astonishingly well, I think - Dracula was killed and accepted vampirism rather than die, the gypsy's vowed to stop him and thus took onto themselves the curse of the werewolf (if you look closely, you notice that all werewolves apart from Van Helsing are family members, even if they need to be bitten to get infected), because only a werewolf can stop Dracula (that is also the reason why the gypsy's need to stop the count before they are allowed into Heaven - werewolves don't look good with angels' wings, after all), and Dracula hires Frankenstein because he wishes his children to live, a feat that only the obsessed Doctor can accomplish. Van Helsing as Dracula's killer only makes everything come full circle.
That's the hit, now the miss. The vampires' ball is set magnificiently (re also Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers and the ball there), but it's missed opportunities all along. Much more could have been made of masks. Much, much more of Carl's fool costume. And the weird artistes were not used to their full effect. The entire ball should by rights have been one of the high points of the movie, instead it was a rather short quote and a waste of space that gets only worse when you consider how much money must have gone into it. A pity, really.
Equilibrium (2002)
It's not just a copy of Fahrenheit, it's its opposite
Although Equilibrium certainly takes quite a bit of its ideas from Bradbury, the focus is the other way round: in Fahrenheit, thought is forbidden and people are encouraged to indulge in excesses, particularly emotional ones like window-smashing and tv families. In Equilibrium, emotion is forbidden, and people are forced to only think, but not feel. Interestingly enough, Fahrenheit doesn't need a drug to make people emotional - that's part of people's psyches. But Equilibrium needs the drug, because what the Tetragrammaton - their control organisation - wants to force on people is something other than human. It's reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World and its some drug, actually - only the points of the compass are reversed again: people take soma when reality becomes too much to bear in BNW, people take their shots in Equilibrium so that they can bear an emotion-free reality in the first place. All in all, I think Equilibrium really is more than a cheap copy of Fahrenheit and Brave New World, it's a look at the other alternative - a thoroughly "adult" society instead of an infantile one.
Underworld (2003)
The teaser's promises went unfulfilled
When I saw the teasers for this movie, I started looking forward to it. The idea of vampire and werewolf characters suggested that the film would have action scenes which might rival the Matrix, simply because the characters are supernatural creatures and probably capable of extraordinary feats. However, the choreography was one of the worst I've ever seen. I particularly recall a fight between a vampire and a werewolf - the vampir took out two rather impressive-looking metal whips and started showing off with them, and I thought, now it's going to get really, really impressive. The disappointment that followed was worse, because you only ever saw one of the combatants on the screen at a time. There were no martial arts anywhere. There was showing off on one side and a werewolf getting a whip in the face on the other. It's one of the worst ways of screening a fight I've ever seen, and unfortunately much the same is true for the rest of the movie. The fights never get enthralling because they stay single-character affairs, there is no sense of struggle because you don't see struggle. One of the great disappointments of 2003.
Soulkeeper (2001)
Watch out for the German version
Watch out for the German version of Soulkeeper, it's disastrous. Whatever is funny about the English version is lost, because they use only two actors for the dubbing - and they only use two because they need a male and a female speaker. The male speaker at least makes an effort to speak in different voices (though he only comes about with French accents of varying severity), but the female speaker says lines like "run for your lives" with all the urgency and emotion of a cafe waitress at 1am asking, "You want sugar with that?", and always sounds the same. I couldn't say much about the dialogue, since I didn't compare the two versions, but the speakers will give you a real bad case of nausea. Still, it's good enough if you want to watch a C film and don't mind the abominable voices.