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Reviews
After.Life (2009)
Overwrought, Overlong, Over acted.
A tensionless thriller with a 30 minute 'twilight zone' plot dragged out to a feature film length.
Is how I would best describe this tortuously dragged out flick. Even top-notch acting talent drown in a sea of nothing to do plot. The characters are so thinly drawn they have no substance and not even stereotypes for the audience to engage with. Long slow scenes play out where character development would have been perfect or exposition a blessed relief. But that's the issue, they have no depth of character, they have next to nothing to exposit so you end up watching tensionless scenes of blank, slow nothingness.
With the characters so intentionally characterless even the finest of actors can only fail to fill the void left behind. I did like the premise and the mystery it raised but with little for the audience to do, with regard to joining dots for themselves, the vacant plot stands out all the more. A skilled director would have added more proactive side characters, more impetus and some sense of danger to scenes where appropriate... But settling for a pot- boiler pace and little in the way of mystery, character or stakes was a huge mistake.
Piranha 3D (2010)
Something fishy.
On paper.. I should have loved this film. It delivered the kills.. Boy did it deliver on kills.. Plenty of sexy ladies and scenes designed to show them off. The film appeared to be ticking off all the campy horror clichés with rather good production values on top... How can it not be a winner.
The trouble was hard to put a finger on while watching but hindsight really brings home the faults.
Just about every character is unpleasant, criminally negligent and deserves a fishy death (A typical horror flick trope) but instead of just being a justification for deaths.. they manage to include our would be heroes in the same set, leaving us with little connection to anyone.
The nudity is gratuitous and after a while decidedly unsexy.. There's no passion or even voyeuristic joy in it when the boobs and butts are just there on screen, usually with the pretext of being shot for a porno. And that's the rub.. porno is sexy.. filming it.. not so much.
Using porn stars obviously helped the film makers get some of the nudity they needed and I think we all know that kind of actress are rarely gifted actors with dialogue and Brooke's performance is deadening flat. Gianna Michaels comes off best where she has no lines and is used for her famous assets, that should have been the case for all such roles.
The story itself is okay.. They give context and setup the creatures and don't get over excited with long explanations but do the setup some service.. its a shame that the main body of the script is just meh! The so-so plot combined with the unengaging characters really deadens the pace and had me wanting to skip ahead over scenes to the action.
This movie could be a lot of fun for the gore fan, just campy enough to be enjoyable and thankfully steered well away form the torture porn genre and back to the films this flick has it's roots in. Also I can't praise the inventive kills enough..they embraced the panic and when it's not the atheism the human are equally effective killers. It's just not enough to cancel out the terrible story and characters.
Paranoid Activity 2 (2011)
Zero Activity.
Ever wanted to watch 2 hours of people cleaning their kitchen? Then this is for you.
Imagine playing The Sims where the only actions you have are: Smoke Joint, Clean Kitchen, Sleep on Livingroom Floor... now you have an idea what Paranoid Activity 2 is like.
Of course the plot is stolen wholesale from it's more famous namesake and they do manage to get in the relevant details setup early on but all pace and tension is lost in endless scenes without any hint of creativity.
The acting is stilted and the film maker seemingly had one spooky occurrence to film over and over and it didn't escalate at all. I would have given them far more credit for even trying to pull the most basic of practical creep-outs (things moved with wires, reversed shots, loud or spooky sounds, voices, screams, etc.) but instead they spent time on a poor digital shadow effect and glitchy camera interference.
Even the famous original did some cheap effortless scares and mixed things up to keep you guessing with a built up to finale.. that somehow got totally over looked here. As an exercise in film making it fails to ape its source and in 2 hours is unable to raise a 'kitchen scare' that Poltergeist managed in under 2 minutes.