Reviews

How can the same person who wrote and directed Sixth Sense have created such a uniformly bad movie?

If it were not for the special effects, I probably would have pressed STOP on the DVD player very early in the movie.

The acting was uniformly bad. Was that due to the directing?

The story line had potential, but the execution didn't really work.

There were a few unanswered questions which really leaves the audience puzzled.

The passage of time seems to affect different people at different rates. Is this a hole in the plot or simply a result of poor editing.

This movie left me watching from the outside, very rarely enveloping me in the story and characters. I didn't care how it ended.

The only reason to watch this movie is to see the special effects AND learn how NOT to write dialogue.

I confess, I rented this movie by accident. I thought it was the original Lost Boys when I scooped it up with a collection of other older movies.

When I realized it was not the original, I had hopes for something similar to the original (in quality) but I was disappointed.

The quality of the story line waxes and wanes. I totally get the parallel to the original movie, but the weak fight scenes and effortless slaying of the vampires left me thinking it would not have been difficult to do a better job of those scenes, had someone actually WANTED to present something better than what was shown.

One moment the vampires are demonstrating incredible speed and strength, then they are killed with very little effort. A group of vampires who "are capable of knowing what you are thinking before you do" are surprised and killed because they didn't see what was coming next in the mind of their slayer.

Yes, there were a few very attractive young women with very little clothing, and while that might carry a film to a certain degree, it wasn't quite enough to save this movie.

If I had to guess, they blew the budget on the initiation scene and had nothing left to fund a solid set of fight scenes.

Corey Feldman's performance may have been the highlight of the movie.

Where to begin, there were so many problems with this movie.

The written dialogue was often weak filler and the delivery was frequently unnatural. Almost as if the moments where the actors were exploring how to deliver the dialogue were captured and used to create the movie. At times there was dialogue when it wasn't needed.

Generally, a movie is good if the audience is not "aware" they are watching a movie. Thus when something in a movie forces the viewer to stop watching and think, it isn't a good movie. At one point in this film a character commits an action they regret right away, yet their dialogue states they didn't know *something* before they committed the action. However the character should still not know the *something*, yet they are lamenting what they have done because of the effect on *something*, which is unknown to them. Like a chunk of the movie is missing to explain what was going on, but actually it was just poorly written, in my estimation.

The big name actors both seem to be having a bad day on set, for almost the entire film. Michael Madsen & David Carradine are so very good in Kill Bill (1&2) yet somehow it seems they made no effort in Road of No Return. It is as if we are watching two actors who just happen to look like Madsen and Carradine, but lack their talent. Maybe they just could not get into their roles, perhaps the characters felt too similar to the characters they portrayed in Kill Bill.

Over acting and under acting were not the only weaknesses. The framing, lighting and dead end quality of some scenes creates an ongoing internal dialogue in the viewer. The voice in the mind of the audience is often saying things like: "Why did they shoot that scene in such a strange way?" "What was the value of that line of dialogue?" "Is this supposed to be a comedy?" "Why are the only good scenes the ones where someone is talking to the child actor?" "Is this whole movie a bizarre parody of a movie?" "Am I on candid camera as I watch this movie?"

The special effects are so lame the are almost non existent. With so much gun fire I was left wondering why there were so many poorly produced effects connected to gun fire? Less gun fire done well would have been a better idea.

Conceptually, the story line worked well, it was just the execution that sucked. (pardon the pun) In fact, the only reason I kept watching was to see how the story line played out.

Were the actors that bad or was there something else going on which caused this production to turn into card board cut out characters? I'm still not certain, but it felt like something was restricting all of the performances as they could not have all been uniformly bad actors.

In the end, this is a great movie for use in learning how NOT to shoot a movie.