gossip-5 Reviews

Cypher (2021– )

Please do not torture us with a 2nd season!

[3/10 · 20 December 2021]

This one has ALMOST everything, a strange document encoded with some super-duper secret decoder ring, a unemployed cryptanalyst torn between his duties to family and solving the enigmatic cypher, a shadowy organization of grim looking men seemingly infiltrating every group, an FBI director with mixed loyalties, a token car chase (mostly slow motion), yada, yada, yada...

What IS missing is even a marginally plausible explanation of why someone would go to all that trouble. I waded through the whole thing just waiting for some sort of a deus ex machina resolution to tie up all the dangling threads but was sadly denied.

While it's hard to place the most blame for this mess, the director and actors are equally at fault. The director must have thought he was getting paid by the minute because the actors were apparently told to pause between every line of dialogue, otherwise they could have knocked this series out in five episodes, not seven. Add to that the actors, no doubt all graduates of the Lee Majors school of wooden acting, stumble through their parts with little conviction making many scenes coma inducing.

The only way to watch this would be to play it at around 1.5 times speed and it just might give the illusion of excitement.

Risen (2021)

It will put you to sleep

[1/10 · 2 September 2021]

Apparently the director was being paid by how long he could drag out all the scenes in this snooze fest. The entire cast must have been recruited from the same wooden school or acting because there are entirely too many scenes of characters just staring blankly. I don't think it could be salvaged into a watchable film even if the editors cut out two thirds of the useless scenes. Do not waste your time!

Predestination (I) (2014)

A top 10 in my book!

[10/10 · 16 June 2019]

With a lot of movies I usually have the ability to predict what is going to happen next because they generally seem to follow a similar formula (much to the annoyance of friends when watching a movie together)

What I really loved about this movie were all the things I DIDN'T see coming! And man, that surprise at the end blew me away.

Evan a former girlfriend, who usually hates science -fiction, loved this one (or maybe it was because I couldn't see what was going to happen next)

Project Ithaca (2019)

Wake me when it's over...

[2/10 · 16 June 2019]

Yawn. I tried. Really I did. I managed to tough it out till about midway but one too many scenes that drag on managed to conk me out. Had to restart in the middle and power through the remainder of the movie.

The first thing that clued me in to how bad this was going to be when I spotted General Boreland about 5 minutes in with three stars on his shoulder epaulets along with Staff Sergeant stripes on his sleeves!?! Apparently the army surplus store where they got their costumes didn't clue them in to rank structure (or maybe they did)

The majority of the movie was shot in a poorly lit interior where the actors were restrained by snakelike tentacles and mostly covered in dark goo -- curiously managing to miss the center of their faces (guess they didn't want to mess up their close up). Periodic screaming and flailing ensue when another snakelike tentacle descends from the ceiling and covers the head of one of the people with a translucent covering that has flashing pulsing lights. This turns into a sort of flashback / illusion with some narrative dialog regarding the person. And one by one we get pieces of the puzzle.

Honestly, this dragged on for entirely too long! Some skillful editing and this could have been a pretty good 30 minute story for some anthology series. The reviewer that claimed he was glued to his seat must have ACTUALLY been glued to keep him restrained. There are entirely too many other movies out there to waste one minute of your time on this turkey!

A Vigilante (2018)

Good, but a bit too anticlimactic ending

[6/10 · 3 June 2019]

The beginning stories allow Olivia Wilde to show off her abilities to confront and overcome the abusers of other people. However, when so finally tracks down her husband there is a bit of cat and mouse chase but none of the anticipated violence that I for one was looking for her to wreak upon the person who deserved it the most.

I wanted to see her dish out some slow payback of the same cruelty we heard about him during the movie but... [SPOILER: Dang! All we got was a short glimpse of her fingers squeezing his larynx]

I'd have given 2 more stars for some graphic and righteous vengeance!

Trashsploitation (2018)

Bad enough for a Drive-in theater...

[1/10 · 31 May 2019]

How appropriate that the poster for this collection of awful is a Drive-in theater! For those of us old enough to remember, fooling around with your girlfriend was the only excuse to go because the movie was basically unwatchable. Unlike the only other reviewer to leave a comment I skipped through this just to verify it was truly awful -- it was.

Tales Beyond Madness (2018)

YIKES -- Compared to this, 'Plan 9 from Outer Space" would win an academy award!

[1/10 · 30 May 2019]

At first I thought it was a collection of student film projects thrown together and disguised as an anthology... but that would be an insult to student film projects. Realistically,the only value I could imagine would be as a form of torture by subjecting someone to watch it over and over until they went mad. At that point, in an ironic twist, it might actually live up to it's title.

5 Galaxies (2019)

Yawn! -- your eyes will glaze over

[1/10 · 13 August 2018]

Who green lit this piecs of crap?!? I saw little evidence of Artificial Intelligence in any of the plots but robots could certainly have written a better movie. There are better Sci-Fi shorts on YouTube, don't waste 80 minutes of you life watching a single second of this dumpster fire.