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RealBohemian
Reviews
Predestination (2014)
No, it's called All You Zombies and the end is totally skewed
I haven't read all of the reviews, but out of the many I read, only one got it even half right. Far too often reviewers on this site compare a movie to some other recent movie, for as silly a reason as --one example-- "both movies has some guy kill someone in a park!". Far too seldom do any of those reviewing ever recognize the actual antecedents of some adaptation or remake. This is one of those, and while it's a decent movie in itself, it so totally changes the ending that it leaves a bad taste to those in the know.
Only one reviewer mentioned "All You Zombies", the short story written by Robert Heinlein back in '48 that was adapted to film to make this movie. That reviewer felt compelled to assure readers that the movie is not about undead corpses of any kind, which only goes to underline the complete lack of possibility that anyone would understand the point of the original story, which is not in this film at all.
That skewing is in itself so profound a loss that it makes the movie merely another well filmed and acted standard time paradox sci fi tale. And Heinlein deserves far better than that, even in a movie unsuitably parsed from his ingenious tale. And it's even more infuriating and stupid given that the movie virtually lifts most of its dialog word for word from the short story.
It's not the change of the stint as mother's helper and night classes at a charm school from prior to enlistment in the space angels to after being washed out. It wasn't changing the time machine from a 23 kilo suitcase shaped object to a 20 kilo violin-case shaped object, although that was just too dumb for words for people who supposedly were to blend in, eliciting neither question nor comment wherever they went. It's not changing meeting after kissing her goodbye on her porch to walking away from her in the park. And although this is a MAJOR change, it isn't even that they expanded one small comment about a war "fizzling" in 1963 because the protagonist prevented the bomb that was supposed to go off in New York from doing so into the whole point of the story, the entire reason for everything that happened, and even added out of thin air the idea that the guy planting the bomb in 63 was the protagonist.
It's that they invented that BS as easier pablum for the masses to swallow than using the real ending. That they fabricated a simple-to-digest, oh-well-you-can-think-about-it but it's not the blow to the heart and head the real ending point would be. Or perhaps, that they did that because they figured the stupid viewers out there couldn't tell the difference between what Heinlein meant and the moronic unending fad of impossibly reanimated corpses wondering about eating people. They expanded one of a few short comments just listing a couple of things that had happened during the lifetime of the temporal agency the protagonist worked for into the point of the story...
but the real ending is so far more profound it's terrifying. So terrifying that the stultifyingly stupid change alone can drop the movie's rating to a six despite good filming and acting.
Here are the last lines of the story. Hopefully more than stupid pablum loving masses read IMDb reviews; and will see the extreme and significant difference from the last lines of the movie and understand what it meant. And snort at the simplistic-minded change made in the movie.
"I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from? I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!"
The Navigator (2014)
Very good if you get past the 27:00 unbelievable stupidity mark
Only 23 ratings and no reviews as I write this, and it was at just over 4 when I logged in. And that's too bad, because it really is a very good film hampered by the sheer stupidity in the last part of the first half hour. At about that point I threw up my hands and said, "Oh COME ON, yes stupid people exist, but how am I supposed to care about anyone THAT STUPID?" It was that well known requirement for an initial suspension of disbelief, but in this case the suspension asked of the viewer was just too large. But when I checked the IMDb page I found the film was made for very little money, and I am a sucker for indies, so I decided to give it another half hour. very glad I did.
The latter 2/3 of the film start a not-too-gradual build-up of suspense due first to the unknown and then to the terrifying known that will have anyone who looks for a real story rather than the usual bad movie clichés of triple porn (ie gratuitous sex, gore, and torture in any combination). This is NOT a horror film but it is horrific, terrifying, and disturbing due to the very possibility of such a thing really happening to...any one of us. And remember, I DON'T mean the stupid gratuitous serial killers around every corner, throw buckets of blood and guts at the screen, and/or depict the starkest and grossest of depravity non-story crud we see so much of today when I say...this could happen to anyone.
Watch -closely- for a seeming reveal near the end. Ultimately I like the way they choose to film it, though when I first saw it I was throwing popcorn at the screen. This is a nice intelligent grab-you-by-the-seat and take-you-on-a-ride film with a greatly satisfying ending.
Oh, yes...what is so stupid about the first half hour? Tell me, would YOU be so moronic as to use a GPS you;d recently gotten as a present from...well, you have no idea and neither do any of your friends and relatives...with a "shorter route" for some very straightforward trip you'd planned to someplace you;d been before? And keep following it for HOURS past the time you should have arrived following your old route, until you were low on gas and utterly lost? I didn't think so.
Threads (1984)
Don't assume it's not relevant in 2013
I never saw this movie before tonight, and it was extremely tough to watch.
Y'see, I grew up in the States during the infamous Cold War --the one that made me every day from the age of ten terrified we'd all die in a nuclear holocaust before I was 40. The one that everyone breathed a sigh of relief when, in 2000 when I turned 40, we all realized we'd gotten safely through, and that the turn of the millennium had arrived without that horrific exchange taking place.
The one that doesn't exist today...or at least not in the same form.
If I could, I'd burn this movie's images into the brains of every powerbroker, every politician, every fanatic in Iran, North Korea, China, and any other country that decides nuclear weapons are OK for any reason whatsoever --all those places where fools now live who refuse to learn from our (Soviet Russia and the USA) near-miss mistakes.
Watch it if you can. Pass it on if you dare. We are both the most intelligent and the stupidest species this planet has ever produced, and we are the only ones who can stop ourselves from destroying this planet in this oh-so-meaningless fashion...
Winter Lily (2000)
NOT HORROR - now you know
IMDb staff, please categorize this turkey appropriately! I love good horror films and so watched this due to the categorization..If I could, I'd remove the ridiculous "horror" tag and stick on thriller or even (bad) drama. The synopsis makes it seem that Lily is some sort of supernatural creature, a vampire, a werewolf perhaps. Nope. This is not a horror movie, it is a plain sicko flick that tries to justify itself by playing the taboo card multiple overdone times.
The plot? Simple. Crazy husband and wife, dead barely pubescent daughter, dead adult family friend. Followed by eventually (probably) dead paying guest. Not a smidgen of horror movie anywhere, instead this turkey takes you thru a slow whatever beginning to then one after another pop up A) Gross and completely gratuitous scene of man gutting skinned rabbit B) Guy waking up and explicitly vomiting for no reason and with no prior sign of discomfort C) Supposedly normal adult B&B customer --who looks and sounds about 15-- male becoming instantly inexplicably obsessed with never seen or heard barely 14 year old girl through reading melodramatic diary entry D) Dramatization of diary entry (or possibly dream after reading it) of barely 14 girl putting various clothing items over a fire screen while wearing an open shirt and a pair of panties, and her father screaming "How dare you come down here NAKED!" in such a way it;s clear he is a pedophile E) barely 14 year old girl being comforted by adult family friend alone in her bedroom, telling him that her mother and father know she is ill and want her to die F) barely 14 year old and adult family friend meeting in barn for intromission after a couple of kisses G) Obsessed customer waking up next to corpse of barely 14 year old girl H) later having intercourse with corpse I) pedophile dad revealed as murderer of daughter and family friend.
And finally, as many bodies as the last act of Hamlet. Boring, stupid, shlock.
The Dark Lurking (2009)
Alien vs zombies with no aliens, no zombies, but lots of GAWD
Yes, I watched the whole thing. I kept laughing through most of it, when I wasn't feeling sick to my stomach from gratuitous blood, viscera, and black or red slime. No, there are no aliens in this movie. No, there are no zombies in this movie. Zip. Zilcho. Not a one. If you LOVE gratuitous gore used in place of a halfway decent story, this is for you. If you LIVE FOR pastiches of other movies with not a single original idea, this is for you. (If you don't know what a pastiche is, that's when an idiot puts together more than one story other people came up with and pretends the combo is a new idea. This movie is a straight "Alien 1" plus a straight "Resident Evil 1" plus...are you ready for this...? Oh, how about I don't tell you, you can guess when I explain what IS in this movie, since it has no aliens and no zombies.
What IS in this movie is....THE DEVIL! When you stop laughing and can keep reading, well, let me tell you...that's what all those spiky no-not-an-alien and bubbly no-not-a-zombie things are. (And the tentacle monster as well!) They are MINIONS. That's what happens when the "infected" die off...the demonic biomatter in them begins restructuring them into minions of Lucifer...which is the dead body that the research team has bought from Russia where it was stored since being discovered in WWII and has been pulling DNA from and cloning...and how do I know this? The head scientist tells the mercenaries that near the end.
See what you find out when you actually watch the entire turkey? Anyway, there you have your third movie that was mixed into this mess.
It only deserves a one because the spaceship was nicely done, and the actors really tried hard.
Ta-weo (2012)
Reprehensible and Monstrously comedified minimization of 9/11
This appears to be another movie given very positive reviews by people somehow connected with it; not much else could explain either the ten glowing reviews or why only one of the 13 even mentions the unbelievably sick "disaster" parameters in this shameful piece of junk. Forget that everyone from the kitchen help to the romantic interests to the fire fighters behave like a bad remake of laurel and hardy for the first 28 minutes. Forget that the movie is supposed to be an attempt to "update" a great Irwin Allen disaster movie from the beginning of the disaster movie era (if it is that, it is so only in a superficial manner).
No, let's take a look at the black-hearted ugliness lying at the center of this film. I knew something was really wrong the moment I saw the films depiction of the highrise...now just why would someone remake The Towering Inferno using a bad CGI building that looks exactly like a cartoon version of the Twin Towers? I soon found out.
Because, in essence, this flick is poking fun at what happened in NYC on 9/11.
The fire starts a bit after half an hour into the film because a sudden updraft somehow manages to catch a bevy of helicopters flying around the twin towered high rise to drop artificial snow during the fireworks display highlighting the huge welcome tenants party in the upstairs ballroom...and cause them to go out of control and strike the building.
The scenes of the actual strikes include some that so closely depict the fire starting across the line of windows it's stomach churning.
The scenes of people screaming and running violently evoke what must have been happening after the terrorists' blammoed that first plane into the Twin Towers....
The "solution" at the end involves a scene supposedly shot from above the building...showing a tower collapsing down upon itself....
My feelings upon seeing that much are indescribable. I hope this review is voted near the top so that others who had some kind of involvement in that horror, lost people in it, or suffer from the reactions many Veterans like myself have upon just remembering (much less seeing it used in such a blatantly sick way)will be warned and stay away from it. I stopped the movie between 35 and 40 minutes in after seeing that yes, these sick freaks actually were using 9/11, and advanced it to near the end just to check whether or not they kept it up and found that horrifically pointed ending. I'd like to spare anyone else that knowledge of what some people out there are capable of doing.
This movie is not a remake of The Towering Inferno, though it bears the same name as the book that movie was based upon. It is a sick pointed slyly vicious holding up of the horrors and losses in a comedified sort of gloat that frankly engenders an enduring negative view of Koreans.
Super 8 (2011)
all you need to know in ten words...
Train crash (10 minutes?) SO DUMB = turn off immediately.
Now, to finish out the 10 line minimum...a bunch of teenieboppers snag some filming equipment and go to a trainyard in the dead of night to film (what else these days) a zombie movie. A train blows through and crashes after hitting a pickup someone drove onto the track and pointed at the oncoming engine. It's hardly difficult to view clips of how trains in that situation crash; picture instead a train blowing up, flying apart, train cars flying through the air obviously because they were shot from giant canons 20 feet up, bouncing, flying through dark stationhouses while blowing up, leapfrogging over running teenieboppers, etc, while making so much less than the amount of noise they'd make in a real crash they must be made of paper mache with a little metal here and here for fun.
Supposedly this absolute idiocy is all a-OK because its a tribute to 70s' sci fi. Gee, I watched 70s' sci fi in the 70s and never saw anyone pretending train cars flew through the air as SCIENCE FICTION, much less as plain old drama. This is SO incredibly dumb there's clearly no reason at all to waste your time watching any more of the flickiepoo.
Should have known better when seeing ol' "not an original idea in my head, and I love to steal and destroy any good concept I can lay hands on" JJ's name but I thought spielberg might actually be able to save the movie. Wrong.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
It just keeps getting dumber...and more terrifying
I thought it was scary when hordes of teenieboppers (let's call em what they are, Stephie baby, don't go all artsy on us and pretend there never was a name for the preteen/prepubertal/trying desperately to SEEM pubertal children you pander to so you can come up with a cutesy name like tweenies for em) squealed their way through a multitude of moronic gushy junk about sex with vampires. I thought it was incomprehensible when people too young to remember good movie-making idolized ol' JJ for ripping off character names and titles and destroying good stories by transplanting shlock into previous plot --even when they got a chance to see the difference! But this new trend of pretending a sordid/sick-minded story is HIGH ART when it's draped with silly fake fantasizing a la' Life of Pi and Beasts of the southern wild totally outdoes them all in "what exactly is the movie watching public doing becoming stupid beyond hypocephaly?"...
Yep. You heard it. This movie is about a poorer than poverty-stricken kid mistreated by an addict father and the lower than dregs of humanity creeps around them, dressed up by addict hallucinations and taught fantasy not of the constructive but of the destructively crazy type. Perhaps it is a story of just how insane people living a sick drug-soaked life in utter filth of body and mind can become...to run off help and glorify addiction with the attempt to pretend it is part of a heroic epic tale.
So very sad. As sad as auto IMDb forcing me to stop using appropriate slang words in description of the stupidity of this and other moronic fare.
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Bizarre waste of time that could have been a decent flick
Meet Pauline, who thinks her name belongs to a 2 year old and insists on being called "poppy" because it sounds adult. And off we go on a 38 minute ride with a sometimes drunken clearly stupid always teenybopper-behaving stupid-teen-dressing supposedly 30 year old ditsy broad from hell. This creature from your nightmares, just as one example, starts taking driving lessons and quickly proves some people should never be allowed behind a wheel. The dumb little frozen-in-teenybopper-mindset student pays no attention to her driving; she blithers about squirrels, giggles and jokes around about everything and nothing, squeals and takes her hands off the wheel of a moving car just to discomfit the instructor, and refuses to wear appropriate driving shoes instead of her stupid high heeled boots with which she continually messes up. Her whole life is like this, gigglegigglegiggle at everything and nothing, appropriately or not, whether it hurts someone's feelings or not, whether it endangers someone or not. Oddly most reviewers seem to have missed the fact that her squealy and often hurtful stupidity is far from optimism and that others around her whom they classify in negative terms may or may not behave negatively at times but are far more mature, adult, and humane than baby-doll dummygirl. And let's not forget the main character is supposed to be a bona fide schoolteacher of small children --as if any primary school worth its salt would ever hire a wannabe-16-but-still teenie-dressed ditz.
Then, abruptly at 38 minutes into the film, Pauline actually acts like an adult for once, interestingly after getting another talking-to from her driving instructor. I wondered at the time if it occurred then because audience testing showed that any more of it would result in 90% of them walking out in sheer disgust.
Unfortunately, after that, the film itself takes an equally abrupt turn into a different film altogether, becoming rather darkside fare throwing out all sorts of common human problems, and so making you wonder just what the people involved in making it were trying to do. The main character, by the way, continues to have stupid teenybopper moments along with her now sometimes actually adult behavior capped by a facesucking etc session (with some guy she just met, of course) at an hour and a half that seems stuck in merely to prove she actually is over the age of 12. This ridiculous flick winds up with Pauline deciding not to continue taking driving lessons with her instructor after he lets lose a rant brought on principally by the stupid dangerous actions of other drivers and his own students, principally her. Too late, she grows up enough for a moment to apologize for upsetting him -- and even this is touted as her being sad for his lacks rather than for her own stupidity. The whole thing winds around itself into a totally unbelievable mash that probably could have been edited into something quite decent by a discerning filmmaker, but wasn't. After seeing this, it seems clear that nothing else made by the same people is worth even a minute of your time.
Takedown (2000)
Unrealistic realism
After reading reviews, and more importantly, the message board, I decided to write a few lines.
The movie is OK. Not entirely accurate, but OK.
Terminology...that's another thing. I could post about that on the Board, except that I am informed I will have to give the site my telephone or credit card information to do so --and since there is no legitimate reason for that, it isn't happening. So for those who are considering watching the movie and would like a clarification, here goes. "Hacker" is the original term which existed far before the public internet. Back then it simply meant someone who understood the computer/network well enough to get into it and find or do anything. That sometimes meant an ability to bypass any and all security. Hackers were motivated by curiosity and a kind of professional passion, if you will --the simple wish to try to figure out the intricacies of whatever system they confronted. There were hackers who damaged systems back then; often these people took such action as breaking back into such systems to repair what they'd broken. They were not about doing anything malicious; they were about putting skill and knowledge to the test and figuring out new things.
Later, when people bent on malice crept into the fold, hackers themselves termed those "dark-siders" (dark side hackers) and looked at them askance. Even later, outsiders started twisting the original term and inventing more, until few people had any idea what things had actually meant.
But to know all this you have to go back far enough. Before the public internet. Before "PCs" (ie IBM clones). Etc.
Frozen Kiss (2009)
Awful flickorama and not remotely close to "true events"
I hate movies which blurbs that have nothing whatever in common with the movie they purport to describe. Equally annoying are movies so changed from "true events" they are "based on" that that claim is ridiculous hype merely stuck on to grab more viewers.
The ridiculous blurb pretends that a nice couple find themselves by some extraordinary circumstance being chased in freezing weather by some terrifying criminals and having to pull out all the stops in ingenuity and sheer guts to survive the situation. The true events involved a nice college couple lost in a snowstorm and hallucinating from crystal meth possibly taken days before, possibly taken at a New Year's Eve party that evening. Both stories would have most viewers rooting for the young couple to find a way out, to make it through, to survive and come home safe and well. Most of us would be very interested in the unfolding story.
And then there's the actual movie. Let's boil it down to a nice, semi-concise plot statement. At Creepy Friend's trailer, Trashy Adulterer (ignoring responsibilities to wife and child) sleeps with Skanky Whore (ignoring responsibilities to ...)current boyfriend who then arrives and shoots himself through the head, sending her bleating to Alcoholic Pill Popper Mom. "X Weeks Later" in the diner where she waits tables Skanky Whore runs into Old Boyfriend Who Has Returned From Vegas And Is Now A Cop In Town...then BLAMMO basically she and Trashy Adulterer are suddenly standing outside Some House with Some Guy talking about how hard it's snowing while Jerky Freak Crowd draped on and in Standard RedNeck Pickup Truck throw bottles at them and roar off down the road, after which the two bits of trash we care nothing about drive off into the snowstorm and all these freaky, apparently supernatural things start happening. Interspersed with those weird occurrences are Transhy Couple calling 911 for help and everyone and his sibling out looking for but unable to find them. Until the end, when we get a flashback peek inside Some House and find that Trashy Couple did drugs and were SURPRISE! hallucinating all the "supernatural" stuff. And, of course, ended up freezing to death. the End (of my patience with idiots whose movies are so bad they have to SO extremely mislead audiences in order to get anyone to watch any of it....)
A Bunch of Amateurs (2008)
Funny real life. Right on reality. Free of the mind numbing progression of gratuitous everything.
After a pointed opening, first showing an almost empty theater complete with someyoungchick euuuuing "Gross! He could be her grandfather!" at the end scene (Reynald's actor character kissing someotheryoungchick) of Steele's last film, then going to a brokendown slummy playhouse to show Steele's daughter dressed in modern clothing sucking a cigarette while delivering woodenly lifeless lines from Austin's Pride and Prejudice before removing her shirt in order to show her breasts to an actor of another race (note the male audience member clearly there just to see that), the film moves into an understatedly amusing exploration of what it means to be an older actor in a realm that attempts to deny aging exists. Along the way we get some brilliantly funny moments (as when a passerby mistakes Steele for Sean Connery) and a nice sprinkling of other thematic analyses on a light hearted note (eg class, pretension, the changes wrought in character by fame and/or fortune, eccentricity and acceptance of it). As mentioned in other reviews, this is not a gutbuster laffaminit production; it's far too realistic for that. I personally dislike most of the comedy genre because, as a friend put it, (most of) what is considered funny involves a total lack of reality and/or utter stupidity. Those enjoying that sort of humor will probably like this for its comedic value, but we laughed aloud several times. On the whole, a very good movie, and much better than the majority of modern fare in its ability to tell a story without relying on utterly gratuitous sexual/gore splattering/vicious-and-malicious/physical violence scenes.
New in Town (2009)
Another psuedocomedy relying on idiocy for "laughs"
The story has been talked about elsewhere, so i'll turn my hand to a short more technical critique. Apparently this is a Canadian production, so perhaps the following list might be helpful to future efforts by our cousins to the north: 1) Every person in Minnesota does not speak with a Scandinavian accent. In fact, I spent years living in small town, rural, and city situations in that state and never once heard such an accent. 2) Every female executive does not wear SPIKE heels, not even those from California. in fact, after having lived in that state for years, including in the Los Angelos basin, i never once saw a female executive in spike heels, much less spike heels 6" high, except for actresses pretending to be executives on screen in the movies. Think of this as being similar to the weird "psuedosuits" featured for awhile in such places as Victoria's Secret catalogs...no real life female executive wears a shell. camisole. or blouse consisting of transparent material with one opaque band across the bustline. 3) It is actually possible to buy bottled, not jugged, wine in Minnesota. 4)While it's possible that a city dweller would be ignorant enough to drink alcohol while sitting in a snowbound car after running off the road in a blizzard (alcohol actually lowers body temperature and can be fatal in such a situation), someone whose flight has been canceled and is returning home to wait for the airport to re-open would probably not have booze with them. 5) I realize Thanksgiving is on different days in the two countries, but trust me, Christmas does not occur two days after Thanksgiving in the States. It would probably be a good idea to show some sort of passage of time between a character leaving the closed airport on the same day "just before Thanksgiving" as she fired another character, waking up the next morning and attending a street fair, then going on to work either later that day or the next morning on Christmas Eve. 6) I don't know what's done in Canada. but 13 year olds with parents who actually care about them do not go to their first dances dressed and made up to ape 17 year olds. True, a lot of kids barely pubescent run around wearing clothing more appropriate to sexually active adults, but then a lot of little girls also have "bratz" dolls --made to look like teen whores-- because their parents are less interested in being parents than in aping celebrities or shutting up their offspring, too. Heels on a 13 year old, alone, are ridiculous....and on a practical note even low spike heels are impossible to walk in the first time worn, even when on adults or older teens rather than those stupid enough to try to look sexually active while still children. lastly, parents who think and act as if 13 year olds are 13, rather than 17 (or 21), are PARENTS, not overprotective. 7) Incompetent female business execs who act like pouty six year olds don't get far enough to be sent anywhere to do jobs for any company. and 8) I do realize that it's the fad now to shoot in EXTREME WWIDE SCREEN...and because the vertical dimension is then so small it's impossible to actually put the heads of two people of disparate height in one shot, cut off the head of the taller one above the eyebrows...but cutting off the entire head of one person in the conversation and removing the entire area above the eyebrows in shots of a single person is frankly stupidly unprofessional.
The Wolves of Kromer (1998)
Kinda cute but also infinitely boring
Perhaps it's because I saw the movie listed as a werewolf genre film. It's very difficult to find good werewolf movies, most of the junk out there is just slasher-flick-in-fur. The good movies made decades ago are impossible to find, and the new ones cater to a jaded taste for sex gore and violence to such an extent that anyone with half a working brain gets rather turned off by them.
This is not, of course, a werewolf film; wolves are merely used as a substitute for another term. This is an allegory. It would certainly help if it were advertised as what it is, a silly political statement. Though sometimes funny, and certainly loaded with pretty boys (acting like stereotypical homosexual males), and even at some small points rather touching, the movie goes on WAY too long. I read a review expressing confusion at the subplot involving a murder; that actually made sense as the point of this political statement is to tell watchers that gay men are persecuted by the nonhomosexual population and having the psuedowolves blamed for something heinous they had nothing to do with fits that bill quite well. However, after 33 minutes I had reached my sugar and silly surfit and turned it off to move on thankfully to something else. Perhaps if I had been watching it for what it was, rather than what it had been misadvertised as, I would have watched longer. It seems to be a nicely made film with some good points; but both too heavy handed and too limited for my taste --ever notice how homosexuality and persecution keeps coming out to be the exclusive right of males in such flicks? At any rate, I suspect anyone into art films, male homosexual films, being made uncomfy by the pointing out mainstream societal wrongs, cleverly backdone pointed references, or eying male boody will enjoy this one. I have no idea what the play was like, but again....if advertised as an allegorical play about the perils of male homosexuality or of being nonmainstream rather than as a werewolf flick, it might have come across as a charming effort.
Trauma (2009)
Bad Medicine, Ridiculous Aero
Can we have a zero rating, please? I've just watched the Thanksgiving episode and frankly will never watch another. To compare this TURKEY to ER is unbelievable...where to even start listing the points that make it a terrible show? Others identifying themselves as involved in emergency services have commented appropriately on various Darwin Award moments, so I shan't except to second their words. But let's put in one point about past shows on TV...waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy back when there was a series about medicine in the field rather than in the hospital...it was called Emergency! and it did a pretty decent job of showing realistic paramedic work as well as gave us some character development and story lines to follow. Laugh all you want at the dated look of the series now, it did a far far better job than this ridiculous excuse for a "medical show replacement". This mess should be described as a soap opera, with just as little believability.
BTW, catch the sudden "you can't go off and eat turkey dinner, everyone get dressed, get the rigs, and get out to the airport...there's a big plane about to crash land" announcement for a real laugh. It's portrayed as if EMTs go home for the holidays, every holiday...like, man, ain't gonna be ANYONE out there at the station house on shift. Good grief.
Let's move on to the airplane crash, shall we? As a former medic and pilot I winced throughout the scene...airplanes that land belly up on paved surfaces have a strong tendency towards burning, which is why runways are foamed prior to such a landing. They had enough time in the show to have emergency vehicles along the sides of the runway, but they didn't foam AT ALL? And the plane, shown as creating a shower of sparks and spilling jet fuel all over, had no actual fire except in the conveniently detached engines? Oh, yeah, which the firefighter was training WATER on? As for the medical portion...where was the triage? You do not just randomly float about a major trauma scene blipping along happily from whoever to whoever as you please...or sit around hugging any of the victims while others have not yet been seen.
There is absolutely no urgency portrayed here. Either the actors are incapable, the point of the show is so much to be a soap opera rather than any sort of "medical show" that realistic emergency response has been tossed by the wayside, or the people writing or possibly directing have no idea of the realities. Definitely a miss of a show.