markmarks Reviews

Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997)

An alternative viewpoint: Not worth 100 minutes.

[1/10 · 22 May 2014]

I got such great recommendations for this movie, I thought it must be great. What I got... was a disappointment. Half an hour of it was just getting ready to do a radio drama. Another half an hour and the movie sorta, kinda, dragged its feet into a patchy, commercial-filled start. I was feeling the slowness from all the way over here. I sped it up to 2x, scanning the subtitles. Maybe the last 1/3 or 1/4 picked up the pace and added humor, but at this point an hour of my life was blown and no amount of dry humor could bring it back.

It had the long, drawn out scenes that reminded me of Gravity... except the acting was mediocre and uninspired, with no interesting developments in it.

Was there humor? Oh, maybe. If Dana Carvey's Master of Disguise was funny, so was this.

Was there excitement? Just imagine the slow moments from 2001 a Space Odyssey, and remove the sci-fi elements (or ANYTHING with a budget).

This movie was boring, dull, and over-dramatized with the weak point it was trying to drive home. It feels like a play, probably because it was adapted from one. A weak 1990s movie in a 1980s setting hearkening back to the 1930s, with all the appeal of the dud it portrays.

Do not watch.

Invasion of the Pod People (2007 Video)

I can't believe this was actually released as a movie.

[1/10 · 9 December 2012]

I watched the whole of Invasion of the Pod People with low expectations. Asylum makes rip-offs. But I didn't expect it to be this bad.

In terms of content, I can't figure out what we were supposed to see. Clothed humping? Naked women caressing each other? The movie was labeled (in a ten-pack) as a sci-fi movie, however it has elements of horror and random sex scenes thrown in, presumably just to appeal to the adult audience in the most effort-free way possible.

From a technical perspective, this movie is bad. The video looks decent but it's almost completely devoid of special effects. The audio is horrible -- the models' main office sounds like it's located right next to a loud washing machine. (And you KNOW it's the main office because the girls have nowhere else to go when they need to talk.) In outside scenes, people's voices are occasionally overpowered by the wind.

The dialog is horrible. Often I had to rewind and listen to the dialog again just to see if it made as little sense as I thought:

Zach: "I'm here to warn you. 'Cuz if you don't warn other people, there'll be nobody, like you, left." Melissa: "who?" Zach: "them."

Gun shop owner: "Maybe you should think about a shotgun, it only shoots in four directions... north, south, east, and west."

The girls' competence wavers drastically. One girl cannot figure out long-standing relational problems she has that are more than obvious to the viewers, and her friends. However she has a Sherlockian moment when she is able to accurately predict more about the aliens than even the audience knows.

But as the movie progresses, I start to wonder how horrible the pod people are (besides their tendency to constantly repeat "we just want to help you"), versus the regular people in this story. Before their transformations the men are hyperactive, the women are snobbish and whiny. Afterwards, everybody is extremely kind and easygoing. The Pod People seem to resort to violence only when absolutely necessary, feeling that gentle, kind coercion is the best option -- not bad for a race that's attempting to take over Earth.

Honest to goodness, after I watched that movie, I yearned for everyone to be a Pod Person -- no hammy acting, no annoying voices, no screwy dialogue.