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Ewanjessamine
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Reviews
The Job (2017)
Abysmal
Watched on Amazon Prime.
Having watched Orion's first feature film Despair, I was curious to see if he had improved. Despair wasn't good but it was at least a little bit ambitious and original than this awful film.
After robbing a bank (Which we don't see and are only told this, no budget), a group of criminals are trapped in a room by an unknown party and told to wait. Yup. Wait. There's so little story it's insane that this film was stretched to 80 minutes, pacing is horribly slow and the dialogue is bad, really bad. When the characters aren't repeating the same lines of dialogue (What is this? What do we do now? What's going on?), the rest consists of swearing. I have absolutely no problem with swearing, but when it's overused to such an extent it just becomes utterly boring.
On a technical side, the film struggles. Visually the film looks better than Despair, but most of the shots start to look the same after a while and it becomes uninteresting. The sound quality is utterly atrocious, filming in a big open warehouse for the whole film was not a good idea, the dialogue suffers from severe reverb and is hard to hear at times. In some scenes it sounded like the filmmakers tried to used some sort of anti reverb filter but it just sounded worse.
Setting your whole film in one room is an interesting experiment and it can work if executed well. This film is thin, boring and painful to watch/listen to. Avoid.
Despair (2017)
Dreadful
Watched on Amazon Prime. Despair is a slow burn psychological thriller, emphasis on slow. The film moves at a snail's pace, which wouldn't be a problem if it was an interesting film, but it isn't.
Dispair follows a couple in their holiday home in the Highlands during the winter. One day the couple find a woman nearly frozen to death, but all is not as it seems as the woman seems to have sinister motives.
Story wise it's decent but the execution is fairly bad. On a technical level the film doesn't perform well. Sound is muddy and fairly poor in parts. Cinematography isn't great, interior shots are noisy and ugly to look at but exterior shots look quite nice.
Acting is poor, performances feel amateur and wooden. Editing is also bad and the soundtrack is uninteresting.
Could have been decent but sadly isn't.
Dig Your Own Grave (2012)
Honestly quite decent
Having picked the DVD up in Poundland, I had pretty low expectations for a film that described itself as "Goodfellas meets Lock Stock", the film is nothing like those two films, and that's a good thing.
The film is fairly well made despite its obviously low budget. Being under 65 minutes, the film is fairly well paced and I was never bored while watching it.
Performances were decent and fairly believable. The characters had some depth but could have been fleshed out more.
Visually the film looks decent. Shot in black and white, the film doesn't have that obvious digital look and awful looking colour seen in many other low budget films, I think being in black and white helped that.
Story wise it's fine for something that's just over an hour long but would have been thin if it was any longer.
Overall it's a decent little film that deserves more recognition than it's currently getting.