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Hagan Reviews: Gayniggers from Outer Space (2012)
Worst Film Ever? Must Watch
This must be a (deliberate?) contender for the worst film ever, up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space (to which it owes something) and Manos : The Hands of Fate. The title alone told me it was going to be so bad that it must be worth watching. It didn't disappoint.
It's bonkers. Basically a spoof on Startrek (the spaceship has a steering wheel), but other spoofs are contained within it - spoofs on gays and what we now call MGTOW, LBGT, BLM, feminism etc. Or maybe it is spoofing the spoofs, it is hard to tell.
The plot is purile and the screenplay could have been written by a dirty-minded 12 year-old. The main characters are black males, and the only women appear briefly and are either hookers, bitchy or both. There is a lot of crudity about gays and I don't know how any of this gets past any censors (does it?), even the title.
The technical quality is appalling. Most of it is in low resolution black and white, so ill-lit that the black actors blur into it. I cannot help feeling the low quality was deliberate because it would be hard to be this bad otherwise.
Could be the worst film ever, but it is hard to choose. The title is a winner though.
1917 (2019)
Gripping but some serious blunders
I like stories like this based on hazardous journeys, from the Odyssey onwards. The scenery of the "front" is amazingly well done, and the characters realistic - ordinary guys, not John Waynes. I was gripped by the menace all through.
However there were some very unrealistic moments. He falls in a river that looks like the Anduin in the Lord of The Rings and goes down a high waterfall like the Falls of Rauros - in Northern France? More likely a sluggish stinking canal.
Then he comes across a guy singing to soldiers who are so attentive and motionless that at first I really thought they were dead men propped up. Squaddies? Seriously?
And then our messenger, needing to get through, argues like a nutter with everyone and their dog that "The attack must be stopped!!" when all he needed to say, and would say, was that he carried orders from HQ - that would have been perfectly customary.
When Eight Bells Toll (1971)
Bond Clone
A Bond clone, complete with the hero British spy having the rank of naval commander (well played by a younger Anthony Hopkins), an "M" figure (over-acted by Robert Morley), underwater fight scenes, and a megalomaniac villain (well played by Jack Hawkins) with a luxury yacht and an ambivalent mistress.
Lower budget and a bit more realistic than Bond, with nothing like the extreme and exagerated action of the later Bonds. There is too much under water action and fighting in the dark - it gets hard to see what is going on at times. There are some weak attempts at comedy, but I did laugh when Morley's "M" type character slated Calvert (Hopkins with his trademark Welsh accent) as "from a northern grammar school", but I think that humour was unintentional.
Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Purile Tripe
Earth is being invaded (again). The action cuts every few seconds between different locations so fast you don't know where you are half the time, they include Area 51, somewhere in Africa, Salt Lake, Washington, down a bunker, some big city that's being destroyed, the Moon, the control room of a ship somewhere, a prison for aliens, in a jungle inside the alien spaceship - usually with some kind of disaster going on.
Seems the last invasion has united Earth into One World, albeit adopting American culture complete with politically correct operatics and speeches to brass-band music.
The characters create zero empathy with the viewer. Everyone except Goldblum is over-acting like crazy. The pilots fly their space fighter craft with cowboy whoopees, and Brent Spiner, trying to act a nutty professor, comes over like Coco the Clown without the make-up. There is a feud between two of the pilots (I didn't catch why) and they are still yapping about it over the radio in the middle of dogfights with the aliens. There are some side-plot love stories that interrupt the height of the action but fail to create interest. The stupidity of some of the characters' actions is beyond belief.
Towards the end, two idiot characters drive a school bus load of kids into the middle of the area set out for the showdown battle. Instead getting out as fast, they drive up to the feet of the gigantic Alien monster, apparently out of curiosity, and turn off the engine. The monster, which until then had been aiming to conquer the Universe, is now diverted into trying to squish a bus. It's ridiculous, but the kids on the bus are a clue about what age group this trash might appeal to.
The only thing to do with this film is to ignore the plot and try to appreciate the technicalities of the CGI, which is almost non-stop - to the point of boredom.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
Boredom and Overacting
Set in the Spanish Civil War, the film starts with a (model of a) train being blown up. The American saboteur (Cooper) then joins a group of guerrilla fighters living in a mountain cave for his next assignment, which is blowing up a bridge. But then for what must be about an hour there is tedious bickering over who should be the group's commander. It is like "Waiting for Godot", but without the wit. After a time you want them to shoot each other to make a conclusion and get on with the story, but they don't.
The Spanish men look, talk and act like village idiots. The make-up team must have dipped all their heads, and that of the matriarch, in a bucket of used engine oil, with the exception of the immaculate Maria (Bergman), who looks like she has just teleported in from Hollywood.
The "rustic" characters are cartoon Spaniards, and they over-act to the point of slapstick. Manic laughter, whatever happens, seems to have been the director's order. Cooper is the only one not over-acting.
Despite having shared a cave with her for three months (we are told), the men do not seem to have noticed Maria/Bergman's sexuality until she starts pathetically, and with zero subtlety, fawning and fondling the sullen ageing Cooper in front of them; then they only react in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink way. The two indulge in an implausible courtship, and no-one seems to be doing any preparations for blowing the bridge. They are more worried about the weather and how many horses they have, in fact the screenplay makes more of the horse issue than it does of the bridge.
The film does liven up towards the end, but there are still some excruciatingly lengthy intervals in the action for more kissing, sobbing, life story telling, etc - even with the enemy at the door.
I can make allowances for the age of the film and its era, like the incessant mood music, the smoking, and the fact that, when he wakes in the morning, Cooper cannot even rise from his bed without first jamming on his trilby hat. Reading some of the positive reviews it seems to me that the writers are more interested in the politics of the war rather than considering the quality of the film itself. There are worse films, far worse, like "Plan 9" and "Manos". But they were intended as B-movies; this film is about as bad as it gets for a mainstream film, so minimum score.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Waste of Time
Is this the same Hitchcock as the one who directed Psycho and The Birds? This is like an amateur movie from the 30's that they forgot to thrown away. The DVD cover blurb banged on about Hitchock being "the master of suspense", but the only suspense was waiting for the film to be over. That is unless you count, watching the chief baddie taking 5 minutes to load his revolver, and the action pausing for people to light their cigarettes - you hope they will will explode or something just to liven things up, but they don't. I never did catch the baddie's name because the sound quality was so bad, but he looked like Napoleon.
No suspense, just slowness - although to be fair most older films are slow by today's standards. That and the fact that the sets were clouded with cigarette smoke with the actors smoking all the time, because it was meant to look cool.
The hero and his family are put in a very bad place by the villains, but he does not react as anyone would in real life. Instead he seems to find the situation amusing at times, with a smug grin like a kid winning at a game of Snakes and Ladders.
Chappie (2015)
Tripe
The basic storyline should have been OK - gangsters steal a police robot that happens to be an AI prototype, and reprograms/trains it to act for them - helped by the AI expert.
However it is nonsense that the AI expert having been kidnapped, beaten up and then released by the gangsters, keeps returning to them and his robot again and again, effectively assisting the gangsters. He does this out of of love for his AI prototype (which has a ridulously cute personality) and his wish to teach it art and poetry. It does not occur to him to inform the police of the theft and the gangsters whereabouts, nor to the gangsters that he might do so.
SInce the stolen robot is physically a standard model, and the AI program looks like it is on an SD card, you wonder why the AI expert could not have continued his experiments with another robot another time. Did he fail to keep a copy of the AI software?
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)
Far too slow, silly cartoon interludes
Incredibly slow, even for a 1960's film. For about the first half we sit through a half-hearted "affair" between Captain Nolan and a fellow-officer's wife (I cannot even remember her name, played by Redgrave). Was this historical or were they just desperate to spin things out? It involves them doing things like staring at a river from a bridge, and we watch Nolan playing a game of Solitaire. We also have to watch a sort of documentary on how a cavalry trooper is trained, starting right from being recruited in the street. It's poorly done and painful.
The black bottle row between Cardigan and a junior officer at dinner in the mess is historical but that officer was not Nolan. It would have been incredible for Nolan to have remained in the regiment after a row such as the film depicted.
The frequent changes into animated Victorian style political cartoons are plain ridiculous. For a moment I though I was watching Monty Python, with it's terry Gilliam animations, but without the humour. They should have been kept to the opening titles.
Even the superb acting by Trevor Howard could not save this film.
Die Another Day (2002)
Sci Fi, not Spy
It starts off in promising Bond territory, with an illegal arms deal turning into a heavy-weapon fight, but the film deteriorates from then on. Afterwards, I felt like I had watched a low-budget Sci Fi film - despite the huge money that must have been spent on it.
So much is implausible. A clinic that can change a Korean into a ginger-haired Caucasian (with an Oxford accent) by a bone-marrow transplant; CGI fights that transcend the laws of physics by ridiculous margins; a fight between cars with rocket launchers etc at nearly point-blank range, but neither gets a dent
Zao gets a face studded with diamonds after an explosion and stays like it the rest of the film - couldn't the bone-marrow clinic find a pair of tweezers?
The invisible car - 'R' (John Cleese) explains that cameras looking out the far side create an image then shown on the near side body panels with LEDs. Sorry, parallax would sink that idea. You would need to be looking at the exact same angle as the cameras were, even to be momentarily fooled from a distance, otherwise it is just going to look like a car with pictures on it.
The car fight scene (again) is just confusing - lots of shots of Bond or Zao struggling with the wheel, or opening shutters concealing yet more ineffectual weapons, with the film switching between them every split-second. "Goldfinger" did car gadgets much more effectively - spectacular ("Ejector seat? You're joking!" Connery said back then) but plausible.
The only good scene apart from the arms deal is the Bond-Graves sword fight - a little OTT but OK for a Bond movie.
Goldfinger (1964)
Part Good, part Bad
While the main actors and many scenes are good, parts are overacted and contrived. It has a sanitised and dated look even for its time. For example the landing of Pussy Galore's flying circus girls is presented like a 1950's bathing beauty contest, quite unreal.
Scene silliness : At his ranch, Goldfinger holds a meeting with (over-acting) gang bosses who want paying for equipment that they have supplied him, and explains his whole plot them. He then gasses them all (but one). Why waste the time explaining the plot, when he must be a very busy man on the eve of his big day? I know the plot had to be explained to viewers, but couldn't a better device have been found?
But the silliest scene, distracting me from the main plot, was the car crushing. The one surviving gang boss is chauffeured away by Odd Job with his gold ingot payment in the boot. Down the road, Odd Job shoots him. But instead of driving back to the ranch, Odd Job drives on to a breakers yard where the car is crushed into a cube, which Odd Job then drives back to the ranch in a pick-up truck. Here Goldfinger makes the comment that gold now needs to be extricated from the cube. What was the point of crushing the car? The body was still in it anyway. It seems like the film director just wanted to entertain us for a few minutes with seeing how a car-crusher works. I am open to better theories.
Lincoln (2012)
More about voting process in Congress than about Lincoln
Very disappointing. I had expected a sweeping story of Lincoln though the background of the civil war, covering for example his relationship with his generals and with Europe, slavery in the context of the time, and how the Union triumphed against superior Confederate soldiery by means of superior logistics. I also expected a staging of the Gettysburg address.
Instead we got a excruciatingly detailed and tedious account of the machinations and wheeler-dealing of passing one particular Constitutional amendment. The scenes are almost all in committee rooms or Lincoln family domestic - it seems like a budget. Lincoln himself comes over as going senile (perhaps he was), constantly telling stories from his earlier years; he does not seem focused. One set-piece speech was pathetic ("That's my speech").
As a non-American, I cannot raise much interest in the detailed mechanism for passing an amendment; the fact is that it was passed. But even if I were interested, the film left much unexplained. Eg a 2/3 majority was needed, and most of the film was about the lobbying for the number needed; however in the vote some members were absent or abstained, and the film gave no explanation of how such non-votes were handled in evaluating the 2/3. This was important, as these numbers were the whole point of the film.
And no explanation either of how the Southern Congressmen (presumably absent, so not voting) were handled in this 2/3 count, given Lincoln's insistence that the US remained a single nation all the while.
This film may mean a lot, and be familiar ground, to Americans; but it ignores other audiences. Near the end, there is a scene at the Appomattox Court House (we are told in a sub-title), and we see a grey haired man in a grey uniform mounting a horse. I happen to have read a lot about the Civil War, but I needed to explain to my wife (who was almost asleep with boredom) that it was Robert E Lee signing the Confederate surrender (oddly, shown departing rather than arriving for the event); otherwise it would have meant nothing to her, nor to most other non-US viewers I suspect.
Lord Jim (1965)
Not Conrad's Best
I am a great fan of Conrad's books, but not of Lord Jim. I find it astonishing that it is sometimes described as one of his best.
Not many people seem to realise that Conrad intended it as quite a short story - just the Patna episode to illustrate how anyone can be thrown into a terrible dilemma by circumstance.
But then he continued writing it, taking it beyond the Panel of Inquiry into the further life that Jim then sought in the Malay village. It is really two separate stories stuck together, imperfectly.
With the fights Jim then has against bandits attacking the village, the book degenerates towards the Boys Own Mag level, quite unlike Conrad's normal style. The film reflects this, becoming more like a poorly made Indiana Jones sequel.
There is nothing in this second part that is philosophical, allegorical, or equal to the culminating psychological struggle in "Victory" for example. Nothing like the atmosphere and almost photographic imagery in "An Outcast of the Islands".
If only a top flight director would make a film with modern methods of one of Conrad's better stories (Almayer's Folly, Outcast or Victory) that conveys the fatefulness of life that Conrad describes so well against the serene but dazzlingly oppressive backgrounds of the East Indian coasts and jungles.