Change Your Image
Anthony-M-Stark
Reviews
A Haunting in Salem (2011)
Apparent burn victim Sheriff and his inexplicably hot wife move into a haunted house, die.
Wow, what a cinematic experience this was. There were a few things wrong with this movie that prevented me from enjoying it, primarily the story, cast and set. I'm a straight male, so I'm usually indifferent to an actor's appearance, but I couldn't get past the fact that the lead actor looked like a flesh-muppet in a fright wig, wearing his dad's oversize sheriff costume. The victims are supposed to be living in a home from the 1600's in Salem, Mass., but there is clearly an orange tree in the background, and the house looks to be from the Victorian period. Practically every victim is murdered by stabbing, but when their bodies are found they are actually hung. I'm pretty sure that was an unnecessary hassle, even for ghosts. There were a few scares, but the type of scares I get by yelling boo at my dog. In fact, they should have named this movie, "Boo! You're dead!", and they could have avoided the whole 'obviously not Salem' problem. I could elaborate about the various ridiculous plot holes, the cheesy makeup, the shoddy foley work, (like in the climactic scene, where the possessed daughter's bat makes a swinging noise before she actually swings), but why run up the score? This was just a dumb movie. Not the guilty pleasure type of dumb, either.
Land of the Dead (2005)
What a huge disappointment!
I want to preface my comments by saying that I'm a big Romero fan, and the original Dawn of the Dead is still one of my favorite movies of all time. When I heard that there was going to be a fourth installment, I got very excited. I always felt like Night of the living dead, groundbreaking as it was, was hindered by it's low budget and the technology available at the time. Dawn of the Dead, having a higher budget and a decade or so worth of additional movie-making techniques to draw on, turned out to be an exciting action flick. It seemed like Day of the Dead was short-changed by budget troubles, and that's why it wasn't the ultimate finale for the series that it could have been. That's what made the idea of Land of the Dead so exciting: Here was Romero making a new dead film with a relatively large budget, big Hollywood stars and modern technology. Can't miss, right? Unfortunately, what came out was a legacy-polluting piece of over-indulgent garbage. Land of the Dead violates too many established rules of the genre to be embraced by existing dead fans, and is too lame in the light of recent films like 28 Days Later or the remake of Dawn of the Dead to really make any new fans. For example, the fact that some zombies are now intelligent, that they can organize and form plans, not to mention actually show compassion towards one another. A good zombie film has to have certain elements. First of all, the zombies need to be mindless, relentless killers. Sure, they attack en masse, but only because they are all senselessly lurching towards the same goal, food, not because they sat down and thought about it. Second, a zombie must have no regard for his own safety, or that of others. It's scary when you shoot someone in the chest several times before getting that crucial headshot, only to find they are unimpressed and keep on coming. Especially if that zombie used to be your loving grandmother or best friend. It's less scary when you callously shoot a zombie and one of his zombie brothers gets offended and organizes an attack. Third, a real Romero zombie movie represents a breakdown of civilization. The zombies force all authority out of business, so the survivors are able to do things like live it up in a shopping mall or hole up in some strangers house. Who would choose to live in a settlement like Fiddler's Green? First of all, you somehow have these "Rich" people living it up in luxury condos, buying things in shopping malls and enjoying French champaign. Why would US currency continue to function in a world where people can simply go outside and take anything they want from a country full of abandoned cities? Who is manufacturing the goods for sale in the malls? Who even prints the money they're using? Is there a functioning mint in the Green? I guess we're meant to believe that people go out into the world, go to banks and haul out truckloads of money, which they then obediently bring home in exchange for a small wage paid out of that same money. Here's an idea: Instead of bringing back bottles of liquor to sell in the city, why not just bring back a couple of hundred million dollars and live it up? Better yet, why ever go back? It's hard to point out all of the ridiculousness in this movie, because nearly every aspect of it is absurd, even within the context of a movie about dead people that get up and eat the living. My response to this movie is to pretend it doesn't exist, bar it from the canon, and consider the living dead series a trilogy. I'm still a big Romero fan, but he really missed the mark with this one. It's too bad that he had to drop the ball with a series of movies that is special to so many people. Next time George, rent a few of your old movies and compare them with your new script before you start filming.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Oh my God this movie sucked!
Maybe it was because I was expecting another "Saving Private Ryan", but I cannot believe how boring this movie was! This is one of the few films that I've ever actually paid full price to see and then walked out in the middle with zero regrets. I still suffer PTSD from the hour of my life that was stolen from me by this pretentious tripe. I wish I had one of those magic tickets from "The Last Action hero" so I could enter the movie, tip off the enemy and watch these idiots get massacred by the Japanese. This movie is like "Apocalypse Now", if Martin Sheen decided to never get off the boat and instead drove around the river in circles, talking to a young Lawrence Fishburn about the nature of man and what causes him to be violent.
Last Action Hero (1993)
This movie rocks!
I can't understand why this movie was such a flop. It's got all of the action and excitement of your typical Arnie film of the era, plus a relatively brainy plot. The movie is heavily clichéd at times, but that's done intentionally to parody the action genre. I love the way the movie is willing to make fun of itself. At a time when Arnold was an action star with a capital "S", it's amazing that he would even make a film like this. I especially like the part where the characters come into the real world and discover things like that it hurts to break a window with your bare hands or to get shot. Having the villain recruit evil characters from other movies was a great idea that they could have expanded upon. Why not have Jack Slater versus Darth Vader and Chucky? Let's have Last Action Hero 2, starring The Rock!