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tichy_cnp
Reviews
Creepypasta (2023)
A collection of pointless vignettes
What if we sat a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters and waited for them to churn out something vaguely similar to VHS? This is it. The framing device is similar. The segments are for people who think the ones in ABCs of Death are too nuanced and bloated. There is nothing good about this movie. I have watched more terrible anthology horror than almost anyone and will continue to make the same terrible error in judgment over and over but this really should be my rock bottom. Spare yourself. Go watch Creepshow or Cat's Eye or Bodybags or Southbound. Watching any of those for the 10th time will be orders of magnitude more satisfying.
Terrifier 2 (2022)
Gore Doesn't Make Up For the Absence of Anything Else
This is a profoundly tedious movie. The violence is surreal with long and very detailed scenes of mutilation and dismemberment that violates any semblance of biological reality. That could be fun if it were integrated into something resembling an interesting story. Instead we have a lot of flimsy narrative threads that apparently the filmmaker expects the viewer to weave together into something coherent. This could have literally been half as long and nothing would be lost. They're trying to turn Art the Clown into Jason or Freddy but there is no charisma, no humor, no backstory to accomplish this. There's no reason to find the character remotely interesting. Or the film for that matter.
Moonfall (2022)
Transcendently Dumb
About five minutes in, the moon splooges on a space shuttle. This is the inciting incident and the movie will never be this good again so you might as well stop there. Anyway the moon is a space ship and the nano cloud is like skynet from Terminator. The dialogue seems like it could have been written by a wonky AI. The story was written while Emmerich was blackout drunk Im sure. It's utterly soulless. You will feel the intelligence draining from you like an arterial bleed and if you make it to the end will likely feel dirty and exhausted. "We scanned your consciousness, you're part of the moon now." Enjoy!
Left Behind (2021)
Like a not scary, radioactive Blair witch
We're to believe no one in this group of Americans has heard of Chernobyl and that it's possible to just accidentally wander into Pripyat. This movie is like a matryoshka doll of implausibility at the center of which is just bad actors screaming at one another.
Spirit of the North (2019)
Frustrating
No sense of progress in levels and no way to save In level means good luck picking it up when you have an hour or two and making any progress. The puzzles are all variations on a theme that often requires repeated backtracking and relies heavily on jumping in a game where jumping is wonky. I loved the aesthetic and really wanted to see it through but one too many apparent dead ends in level 5 and it's just not worth it anymore.
Fatal Exam (1990)
Oof
This movie is excruciatingly long. I think there's a fun low budget so bad it's good film somewhere in there but it turned into an endurance exercise.
A Hidden Life (2019)
What Hollow Solace, Sympathy
Fairly early into A Hidden Life, Malick's film about the life and death of Franz Jagerstatter, we find him talking to a church painter. The man is offering support for Franz, who is wrestling with his conscience. The painter says "the life of Christ is a command." He laments his own cowardice, that he paints Christ as a figure of sympathy, that those looking up at the ceiling in church might feel better about themselves, believing that they would have stood up to defend Christ against the Romans. He wonders if he will ever have the courage to paint honestly.
A central theme in A Hidden Life is the way we become slaves to our compromises. And how ultimately meaningless sympathy is when divorced from action. Franz becomes a criminal simply for refusing a loyalty oath to Hitler. He is told again and again how pointless his refusal is. That words are meaningless and he could simply say the oath and take a job in a field hospital where he could still be a noncombatant. He is told this by his neighbors, his priest, and by the legal and military authorities. And we can see in their pleas, a desperation, that if only he could compromise, it would validate their own compromises. That his opposition is an indictment to them.
And at times Malick sits with their private suffering, these men who fail to convince Franz and so fail in convincing themselves. But their suffering, like their sympathy, is meaningless. Because these men, despite their attempts to console, continue to invest in their compromise. Their sympathy doesn't stop them from imprisoning Franz, from ultimately sentencing him to death and killing him. Ultimately sympathy is that hollow solace where we bury our heads in the sand, telling ourselves that deep down we are still good people, just victims of circumstance.
Camus wrote in The Fall, "Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day." The loss of a soul is a death by a thousand cuts. The first is the deepest and sets the groove for all that follow. What Franz insists to us is that taking the stand against what we know to be wrong matters and if we don't take the stand at the beginning, there isn't enough left of us to take it further down the road.
A Hidden Life is about the creeping corruption of fascism in a war almost no one living now remembers, but it is also a very timely reminder of the fragility of a humane world and the importance of principled action to preserve it. I found myself thinking at many times throughout the film how absurd it was to expend so much energy trying to convince a single person to give in. It betrayed their repeated arguments that Franz' protest didn't matter, that no one would ever even know he existed. Everyone wants absolution, the guilty most of all. The rest of the Camus quote is "There are always reasons for murdering a man. On the contrary, it is impossible to justify his living. That's why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence only rarely." We defend the good only by living it. Watch this movie. It's going to stay with me a long time.
Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2017)
Abysmal
So at this point we should assume any movie trying to capitalize on the night of the living dead franchise is cancer. This movie was painfully dull. Romero couldn't have saved it, not that he would. I fast forwarded through the last 30 minutes.
The Ballerina (2017)
A meandering mess
A homeless camp is a terrible metaphor for the realm of hungry ghosts or whatever you want to call it. It's an idea that seems like it might be deep until you give it any serious thought. And the whole movie hangs on that metaphor so I'm sure the writer thought it very clever when he concocted it. And most of what happens in the first half of the movie makes no sense once that twist is revealed. This trend of non scary horror that takes itself very seriously really needs to go.