samson_k Reviews

The Crazies (2010)

Good, but lacking!

[7/10 · 16 July 2010]

Having watched the original in my early teens as part of a BBC2 Horror Double bill and being disappointed by it so when this was announced I wasn't bothered one way or the other. I always loved the idea but I think Romero's film didn't live up to it's promise – though I'm also aware that I wanted something akin to James Herbert's 'The Fog'. However when the trailers started being released I started getting a little more interested in this.

Is it good? Yes – but not perfect.

The film has some effectively disturbing scenes – a man burns his wife and son to death and mows the lawn. A high school principal casually murders bound patients with a pitchfork. These are genuinely chilling scenes because the capture that element of madness that the movie needed. The performances are all pretty good – even Timothy Olyphant didn't annoy me (he's not a bad actor I just find his performances a wee bit bland) and over all it is an entertaining and tense movie.

Where the film is let down is the fact that we don't get to know anything about the town people – the whole idea of 'your friends, your family' going crazy is a bit lost in that most of the people that get crazy have had either no introduction or a cursory scene where we find out the nurse has a boyfriend etc. I know that it's not possible to get to know everyone but I suspect that the character scenes were filmed and edited out so that the disease started having impact sooner. This is a film where the standard Disaster Movie or Stephen King structure may have served the story well. There was also a bit of an attempt to create paranoia about who of the survivors were going crazy but it was all a bit muddled.

I enjoyed the movie but felt it could have been better.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

The Worst Crime for an Indiana Jones film is to be bland!

[3/10 · 25 May 2008]

Like many people my age - Raiders of the Lost Ark had an immense effect on me, it served as a catalyst for my loves of history, adventure fiction and writing. It is, for me, the perfect movie.

I have been waiting for this for 19 years and as I sat down to watch it in a cinema that was busier than I had seen it for years I began to get a good vibe - Indy was back.

However, two hours later I could only really question that statement - was Indy back? Really? Unfortunately for me the answer had to be no. Sure there was a man in a hat who looked like Indiana Jones and talked like Indiana Jones, but it was a pale ghost of the character that I had wanted to see and he was appearing in a listless, grey adventure that just never seemed to really get started. This wasn't the Kindgom of the Crystal Skull - this was the Kingdom of the needless exposition. Almost as soon as Indy appeared along with his old buddy Mac (a shamefully wasted Ray Winstone) we were being bombarded with information - there seemed to be a need to explain absolutely everything - we learnt that Mac had known Indy and had fought in the war with him. We learnt why the Russians were there and what they were looking for - we learnt far too much.

In earlier days did we ever find out how Indy and Sallah first met? No, there was no need.

The action was there and it should have been exciting but nothing grabbed my adrenaline glads and began to squeeze them. The humour was there but for such a packed cinema there was not one good belly laugh that went through the cinema. The jokes, such as they were, just happened - the sequence with the Marcus Brody statue was there and I'm not sure whether that was meant to be a joke or not.

The film has far too many characters and then just doesn't know what to do with them, Mac changes sides so many times that I found myself not caring. Oxley, a potentially interesting character was a cypher and nothing more. Indy acted so much out of character on so many occasions that I began to suspect that this wasn't actually an Indiana Jones script.

This was like if Eon had stopped making Bond films with Thunderball and then come back with Octopussy.

I have never felt so let down by a film in my life, even the Star Wars prequels did not disappoint me this much and I hated them.

This was like an Indy rip-off from 1985

Zombie Diaries (2006)

A noble but not entirely successful attempt!

[4/10 · 30 August 2007]

Now this film is coming for a rough ride on IMDb message boards – some people seem to have problems with self promotion of the movie and self advertising. I don't. I know how hard it can be to get a film noticed and if the makes of 'The Zombie Diaries' want to use the tools that are made available by today's technology then why not.

However – I do think that ultimately overselling this concept may hurt the film.

See the thing about 'The Zombie Diaries' is that ultimately it doesn't need to be about zombies. They don't really need to appear very often – it should be more of a film about the relationship dynamics between people after an apocalypse. The zombies, when they appear, are actually all pretty well realised (some better than others) but as they makers have set out to make a zombie apocalypse movie on a low budget I think the lesson learnt is that perhaps it is too big a story to be told even in the hand held manner. Shots of a deserted small town are never going to have the same impact as a deserted London and shots of some people in a crowd wearing face masks in crowded city streets don't capture a city in panic.

My biggest problem with the movie is that I do not really see the need to try and make this into a portmanteau movie – it doesn't need the 3 diary structure as it dilutes the characters somewhat and to be honest I found myself investing so little into any of them that two days after watching it I can't remember any of their names (apart from Goke). Having three sets of vignettes doesn't work fully because it's fairly obvious that they were all filmed in the same geographic area (I can understand that they all do touch on each other at some point) but as it stands it just has a tendency to run a little to the bland side of story telling.

I would not say that it is a terrible film – though some of the acting is very weak, not awful just tremendously bland and it doesn't have the urgency that the end of the world would bring. Shots of people shouting expletives don't really cover the panic and fear and hopelessness that a situation like that would bring and I feel that the one thing a hand held docu-fiction really needs is real acting – raw and harsh. If the illusion is this is footage that was found then you need unstudied emotion. Also the illusion was spoilt by the use of music as a score.

I suppose the things I liked about the movie were (and there are spoilers below) . . .

I very much liked the revelations at the farm – the slow and steady thematic reveal of Goke's character – from one woman survivor flinching from some unheard remark to the discovery of a bound and naked woman who appeared earlier in the film and the implication that Goke was keeping her bound and reanimated as a plaything. The unease that was generated around this character was good and effectively managed. It would have been more effective if we had a better knowledge of who everyone in the farm was and then their deaths would have had a huge impact. I also have some gripes that I thought the last scene of finding out what happened to the news team and why one of them was a captive zombie was a bit superfluous and lessened the shock a little.

All in all I think it is a noble and brave effort – I don't think it's being marketed properly but that won't be the film makers faults – and I don't think it is such a 'new concept' it tells a well used story in a well used way. It's not entirely successful but it is also not a complete failure – a noble effort.

Van Helsing (2004)

A Wasted Opportunity

[3/10 · 6 December 2005]

I loved the idea of Van Helsing as a character - in fact I loved it in 1993 when it was announced that Anthony Hopkins was about to reprise the role from Coppoloa's Dracula in a film called 'The Van Helsing Chronicles' - the whole idea of a monster hunter, while not original is always appealing (in fact I kind of wished that instead of 'The Mummy Returns' Sommers had made a sequel about Evie and Rick facing up against another of the Universal monsters.

However, Van Helsing shot its wad severely by including three (four if you include Mr. Hyde) of the established heavy hitters of the Universal stable in the first film. Who was left? The Invisible Man, The Gill Man and The Phatom of the Opera.

It sort of aped the philosophy of the later Universal films when they were trying to grab audiences in the later, declining years - slam as many monsters in as you can. Now that was alright for the Monster Squad as it was a one off film but with a potential franchise it was an incredibly stupid mistake.

Also, the fact that Sommers seems to have lost any of the leanness of story telling that made Deep Rising and The Mummy such fun that the whole affair became so damned bloated that it effectively screwed up a character that could have had a lot of potential and that's the tragedy.

The storyline was so bloated that it became difficult to care for any of the characters and some of the choices for characterisation smacked heavily of TV Pilot movie sensibilities - Van Helsing did not need to be immortal (or whatever muddied nonsense was hinted at in his final confrontation with Dracula).

The acting was fine from Jackman, Wenham and Beckinsale - was superb from Frankensteins monster, was bland from the wolf man and was almost unwatchable from Dracula and his Brides - it was almost as if Richard Roxborough (an actor I usually rate) thought that the movie was 'Carry on Dracula'.

A terribly wasted opportunity that did the unforgivable thing - by becoming an action film that became boring and turgid.

Jake Speed (1986)

A movie? Have you tried dealing with those people?

[7/10 · 7 October 2005]

Jake Speed is a film that lacks one thing – a charismatic lead. Unfortunately that's something that really taints the entire movie and it's a shame because at heart it is an enjoyable action movie with a witty enough script and an interesting, if derivative, premise. Although it's genesis probably can be traced back to the success of the Indiana Jones trilogy – the film actually plays a little more like 'Romancing the Stone' albeit in reverse. It's not an author of romantic adventure fiction being led on an adventure by a character very much like one of her creations it is an adventure fiction character (who happens to chronicle his own adventures) leading an ordinary woman on one of his adventures.

When a young woman goes missing in Paris, her sister Margaret (played by the appealing Karin Kopins) gets embroiled with pulp hero Jake Speed (Wayne Crawford) and his sidekick Dennis (Dennis Christopher) who both turn out to be real and very flawed individuals in an adventure that takes them into the heart of a civil war torn African state and ultimately into the clutches of two brothers the deliciously evil Sid (John Hurt) and his ridiculously camp sibling Maurice (Roy London). That's the plot – it's not labyrinthine and it's not complicated but the story that it tells doesn't require great depth.

The action sequences are appealing to begin with and it's certainly true that the heroic trio are put through their paces (whether caught in battles between government and rebel forces or being dropped into a pit full of lions) and there are certainly some quite funny lines. However the film does seem to struggle to find an ending and unfortunately the action sequences that are quite appealing to begin with go nowhere and ultimately become a bit bland and irksome. This, however, may not have been such an issue if it was possible to like Jake Speed but due to Wayne Crawford's performance it becomes harder to really care what happens. Now I don't know if he was stretching himself a little thin as he was also the producer and writer of the movie or whether he's simply not a good actor (as I haven't seen him in much else) but he never really convinces as a roguish mixture of Doc Savage, Indiana Jones and Jack Colton.

This is a shame because most of the other characters play their roles well – Karen Kopins is funny and convincing and her character shares some nice banter with Jake (unfortunately it never convinces). Dennis Christopher is perfect as the archetypal sidekick and John Hurt plays the part with camp relish – almost as if he were in a sixties episode of Batman. He strides about his few scenes growling in a ridiculous cockney accent putting in a performance that almost belongs in another film. Sid is no Moriarty (he is presented as Jake's nemesis from a number of his previous adventures / books) but he is always fun to watch.

Jake Speed tries to channel the same fun B movie spirit as 'Night of the Comet' (a film produced by Crawford a few years beforehand) and almost succeeds but misses – which is a shame because Jake would have been good to watch in a few more adventures and may have been served better by a television series.

I would recommend this out of curiosity appeal but ultimately it leaves a bitter taste because most of the elements were there to make something genuinely good.

Sky Pirates (1986)

Oh, painfully bad

[2/10 · 6 October 2005]

I am notorious amongst my friends concerning my leniency towards the plethora of Indiana Jones rip-offs that swamped, in the UK at least, the home video market but even I struggle to find much good to say about this slice of high adventure hokum!!! The beginning, as pointed out by another reviewer, does hold some promise with a sequence in the Bermuda Triangle - which in this movie isn't really too close to Bermuda but we are given hints of a slightly more intelligent fun film than we are eventually given. In the bizarre dimension our hero and his motley crew find the ships used in the infamous Philadelphia Experiment and this in itself hints that the movie is going to have some geek chic.

However, once they leave the mysterious unexplained dimension the movie plummets downhill faster than Indy in a Rubber Raft. It becomes a lazy collection of uninspired and misjudged scenes that vary between bland and just plain annoying. A low budget truck chase, followed by some badly and uninvolving fights followed by some admittedly quite pretty flying montages. These are mixed with some unexplained supernatural hokum and sequences that imply that the crew forgot to switch the camera on at times. The prime example of this is the sequence where Lt. 'Bomber' Harris is being attacked by a shark whilst diving being followed by a sub Indy sequence where he is hanging onto the side of the plane as the villains fly off - no explanation to where the shark is or how he got his heavy leather flying jacket back as I'm sure that it wasn't under his diving suit. I am sure that the finale wasn't just an excuse to blow 100 Australian Dollars on special effects and served a purpose but don't ask me what that might have been.

The filmmakers seem to assume that they can get away with the same levels of suspension of disbelief that Spielberg got away with in 'Raiders' and 'Temple of Doom' but that has to be earned. It's not the genre it's the style with which it is done - audiences will watch Indy climb onto a submarine and still be on it hours later because the care about Indy and are engaged by the film. Sky Pirates has not got that style or panache so we will never be on its side.

Couple this bad film making with some awful acting from Max Phipps (best known by genre fans for his role in Mad Max 2), a heroine that echoes Melody Andersons insipid turn in Flash Gordon played by Meredith Philips and prolific Australian actor John Hargreaves. To be fair the cast are not given much to work with when the scriptwriters blatantly copy dialogue from Dirty Harry movies and write one liners that are to humour what an elephant is to skateboarding. Example _ Harris rescues the heroine who has been tied up in a truck with the Bond style one liner of 'I didn't know you were into bondage?'. If you watch this film be assured your sides will be safe from any form of splitting incidents.

So terrible script, lazy and often embarrassed performances and appalling direction - is there anything of merit in this film? Not much! Brian Mays score isn't bad - it's derivative sure but it's done with a certain amount of panache. Hargreaves, a prolific and talented actor has enough rugged charisma to be watchable but it does make me wish that he had been in a better film than this as he would have made a tremendous pulp style action hero.

When all is said and done I wouldn't watch this film for whatever reason - as it isn't painful it's just boring!