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CWagner
Reviews
The Punisher (2004)
Competent direction, fire the writers
This is a Punisher movie?
The director of this film is pretty competent. The action scenes, such as they are, are well-done. The visuals are quite impressive.
But there's a grand total of two setpiece gunfights in the entire movie. In a Punisher film. This is like a Spider-Man film where we only see Spidey web-swinging twice. And basically everything in between the action scenes is painfully acted and badly written. The hideous alt-rock soundtrack does not help, either.
I went in expecting a body-count like an 80's action film or a John Woo gun-ballet. What I got was a generic modern action movie where the main character has a skull on his chest. There have been a lot of comic-book adaptations lately where the spirit of the comics was faithfully translated; this is not one of them.
5/10 total. 8/10 for the action scenes and 2/10 for the "drama" scenes.
Blade II (2002)
Solid horror/action
"Blade 2"'s biggest weaknesses are a weak plot with a number of holes in it; however, its strengths overwhelm that flaw and produce a very solid piece of horror/action fare that follows the original movie very well.
Del Toro's direction is top-notch, with darkness and light playing a much greater role in this film than the original. With character design and art consulting by comic-book masters Timothy Bradstreet and Mike Mignola, and sets taken straight from the decaying inner cities of Eastern Europe, the film has a consistantly strong texture. Of special note are the character designs for the "Bloodpack", the group of vampire warriors which Blade must lead. The detail level of their costumes and equipment is phenominal.
Ron Perlman's character "Rheinhart" will be quite surprising for those of us you who only know the actor from movies like "The City Of Lost Children". As Blade's mirror-image (as the former leader of the Bloodpack), Rheinhart shows off Perlman's ability to play villians to the hilt.
The primary "bad guys" of the film, the uber-vampires known as "Reapers", are extremely well-created. None of the trailers show off their most important feature, which will both shock and amaze you when you see it. Similarly, the gore effects are quite amazing, with excellent blending between computer effects and classic methods.
That said, there are a number of moments where the computer effects are sub-par; in particular, the scenes where Blade is rendered fully by computers are lacking in believability. Those scenes are short, however.
Finally, the action scenes are choreographed extremely well. There are a number of scenes that are deliberately evocative of the original movie, but Del Toro's direction is distinctly his own. My only complaint is that Donnie Yen (the HK film star, known to US audiences for his role in "Iron Monkey") didn't get to kick enough ass... but this wasn't a starring role for him, so I guess I can't expect too much.
Overall a good sequel. Now I'm waiting for "Hellboy" with even more baited breath.
The Fantastic Four (1994)
Not really that bad
When you consider that this movie was made by Roger Corman for less than the budget of your average "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" episode (rumored to be approx. $2mil), and without the benefit of recent low-budget computer graphics techniques, this film hangs together surprisingly well. The writing and plot (while cheeseball) are surprisingly good, and the makeup for the Thing is by the award-winning group Optic Nerve. Unfortunately, most people would see a movie like this for action scenes and special effects, and with a bargain-basement budget, it's impossible to do proper superheroic fight scenes. But Corman's crew did a better job that some people have done with huge budgets, so there you go.
Guyver (1991)
Rating 12.5 on the Cheez-O-Meter!
Yeah, this movie is crap. Yeah, it's badly acted, badly written, and generally kind of lame. But if you've ever seen any of Steve Wang's work before, you know that it's par for the course, and you'll enjoy it anyway. Miniscule budgets make it more fun, and the costumes would be almost cool if people didn't flail around in them like crackbabies.
With tributes to dozens of cheese films buried in it, "The Guyver" is the funniest damn thing I've seen in weeks. Anyone who takes it seriously, deserves to.