Movie Reviews: 2001 Maniacs

I like watching movies. Every movie teaches you something about the world that you hadn't known before. For example - if I hadn't seen all those American movies, I'd never would have known that all Southerners are extremely religious (although in a very unorthodox way), they all have funny accents, live in small and isolated villages where everyone screws everyone including the nearest relatives, they just LOVE anal sex (pigs and sheep are preferred, but sometimes a common man can do the job), their favorite meal is human flesh, and of course - they instantly kill everyone that comes to their village.
I don't know why, but it seems that people from the south are constantly being demonized, movie by movie, for decades. When you make a list of all bad guys from American movies, Southerners would be fighting a tight battle with Russians for the first place, followed closely by Arabian terrorists and, more recently, Serbs.
Now that we got that out of the way, let's concentrate on the movie itself. For some reason, I'm extremely fond of movies where a small group of people stumbles upon a peaceful and quite village with lots and lots of nice people, only to discover that those nice people bang sheep, kill people and serve their meet for dinner. This is one prime example of that type. Movies like this, when done correctly, often manage to create a good one-against-everyone atmosphere and a feeling of hopelessness. Sure, we all know that our heroes are going to get a chance to get out, only to die a horrible death in a bizarre and shocking last scene. But nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, I simply love that type.
What separates this movie from its siblings is its weirdness. It's not your average "these-people-are-crazy-we-have-to-get-out" movie. It's an almost non-stop parade of superultracheesy one-liners ("It's Ricky on a sticky!"), totally pointless sex scenes (unfortunately, most of them are pretty short and are always somehow interrupted, but you get to see almost all major female characters naked), some of the most inventive killings I've seen recently and, what's most important, the completely laid-back attitude, like "Hey, we're killing tons of people in most brutal and sadistic way, isn't that cool?". Even from the other side of the screen you could feel complete lack of sympathy for the victims by the filmmakers, even enjoyment when someone is knocked off. Every single death is followed by a sarcastic remark from the killer and generally everyone in the village is very happy and totally insane. The whole movie could be described as singing, dancing, sex, killing, more singing and dancing, more killing, more singing and dancing, more sex and killing, etc. It can hardly be called a horror movie - EXTREMELY black comedy is probably a better description.
So, anyway, this movie is highly recommended. It is so overblown (intentionally) in its weirdness, you don't see it very often. A small flaw is that near the end it gets an unnecessary supernatural conclusion, but we can live with it.
By the way, it seems to be a remake of a movie called Two Thousand Maniacs. I haven't seen that one (or even heard about that), so you won't find a comparison here. I'm still wondering whether this movie was made by a Yankee who hates Southerners and wants to show them as retarded pig-screwing murderistic cannibals, or by a pissed-off Southerner who got fed up with all that South-bashing propaganda and decided to kill as many Yankees as he could in most imaginitive ways without going to prison for that.

Movie Reviews: BloodRayne

Imagine this: I watched an Uwe Boll movie and it wasn't a total disaster (!) Well, actually, I think Uwe Boll is unjustly demonized as THE worst filmmaker ever. It seems all of his movies are placed on the IMDb bottom 100 list and people are considering his movies crap almost by default. True, one certainly can't call Alone in the Dark a good film (or even watchable). But, Boll's films often have that weird amateurish charm, you know, like when you're watching something and it's so unbelieveably bad that you just can't take your eyes off it. House of the Dead was like that. Sanctimony too. On the other hand, had someone more "famous" made Sanctimony, they'd probably call it a masterpiece.
Anyway, I'm getting carried away. The point of this post is BloodRayne, which I have just seen. It's certainly the best of Boll's films I've seen so far. I don't know how the heck did he manage to convince all those people to appear in the movie (with his reputation and all that stuff), but what we have here is almost an all-star cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley, Billy Zane, Meat Loaf, etc. None of these people is Robert de Niro, but for an Uwe Boll film this sure is an achievement. So, the acting is vastly improved. Usually, every time when it comes to talking in an UB film, you want to bang your head on the wall. Here, it's different. Somehow those (rare) scenes suffer only from terrible writing, rather than from BOTH terrible writing and terrible acting. Fortunately, the filmmakers wisely realized that a film based on adventures of a dhamphire (half human, half vampire) wanting to kill her own father wouldn't make a good drama, so they turned it into an action movie. Luckily, action in Uwe Boll's movies usually passes smoothly. It's nothing spectacular, but it's not unwatchable, either. Here we have LOTS of action, and lots and lots and lots of blood. So, when you have a large fight scene, with, say, fifty actors, and everyone's cutting everyone everywhere, and every cut causes a fountain of blood to flow, you can't help but feel at least a bit satisfied. And Uwe even manages to surprise us with some very nice-looking outside scenes, you know, sunsets, mountains, forests, pretty pretty, it looked as if he used some scenes that Peter Jackson threw out of his Lord of the Rings trilogy (which is a good thing).
Naturally, the writing is terrible. The source material (an action game from PlayStation) is nothing spectacular, of course, but the writer tried to further destroy things with absolutely crappy dialogue and some extremely pathetic and lame scenes. Surprisingly, the worst moment of the movie is the sex scene (?) which was completely unnecessary and terribly directed. Actually, it looked and sounded like someone was raping someone with a wooden stick. Sure, Kristanna Loken shows her baloons in clear light, but even with that great advantage that scene was so painfully terrible that it was painful. It seems that Uwe Boll can't direct sex scenes. He has finally learned to make talking scenes, now he will probably have to spend three or four movies to make a decent sex scene.
I will shut up now. The point is - although this movie is far from good, it is definitely not what you'd call crap (like Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, or Charlie's Angels). So, I recommend seeing it. Of course, if you're not a rabid Uwe Boll hater who has given up on him long time ago just because he directed like fifty terrible movies.
By the way, it seems that Boll's next project is an adaptation of the already legendary FPS game FarCry. Let's hope he does better than with Alone in the Dark, which was probably the worst film adaptation of any work from any medium ever.

Movie Reviews: A Tale Of Two Sisters

As a general rule, you may want to stay away from South Korean horror movies. I know that to us Europeans everyone from Asia looks the same, but when it comes to movies, the differences are important. For example - people from China make the best action films. In Japan they make good horror films. I don't know what South Koreans (sp?) are good at, but it sure isn't horror. True, they made one really great scary Ringu clone (Shutter), but the rest is pretty much forgettable.
Take this movie for example - it's absolutely and completely terrible. One thing that I hate about recent movies is how they put all this bizzarre supernatural Lynchian stuff in, and in the end everything is explained like "this character is MAD, so he's imagining things, this one is schizophrenic, so he also has some problems with reality, this one is being eaten by guilt for cooking his neighbor's cat, this one is of course DEAD" and you're like "DAMMIT, what the hell am I watching????". This movie is exactly like that. It starts with two sisters returning home from a mental institution. Their father is married to a woman who's a real bitch, so you can see straight away that lots and lots of supernatural stuff is going to happen, with the obligatory long-black-haired creepy ghost girl staring at you from under that hair that's covering her face (wonder how she sees anything) and wanting to rip your heart out, put it in the oven and then serve it to her pet iguanodon. But, I'm digressing. Anyway, I was saying, you COULD notice those things if you were paying extreme attention. Of course, I haven't. So, while I got the grip on the characters (heck, how hard can it be? There are only four of them!), their backgrounds and motivation were pretty foggy. And everything went straight to hell when they started introducing other characters (!)
Note, however, that my lack of attention should be blamed on the crappiness of the movie and not on me. The author of the movie made three fatal mistakes: First, there were only two scary scenes (one with opening the door and pulling down the blanket, nice, but it was done much better in Shutter, and the other one was really scary, with that Ringu-like movement and stuff). Both scenes appear relatively early in the movie. It seems like the movie is divided in three parts: 1) Ripping off the classic Japanese ghost story 2) Nothing happens in a very Cubrickian sort of way, with extremely looooooong and slow scenes that, unlike Shining for example, work against the movie (or rather, they work in movie's advantage, since the point of this movie is to induce boredom and frustration). 3) Lots of weird stuff happens, where the author is rubbing his hands with glee and muttering to himself: "Tee hee hee, I rule! Look at that girl under the sink! And all those blood trails! And everyone is acting strange at dinner! And she's locking her in the closet! Hell, I'm better than David Lynch!" Note that, of course, the author of this movie is NOT better than Lynch - you will enjoy most of Lynch's movies, no matter if you understand what's going on or not, because he's kinda good at creating intriguing atmosphere, you know, and besides, he has a habbit of including sex scenes with Laura Anna Harring and Naomi Watts. Anyway, I think we went over the first mistake in detail.
The second mistake is that the sisters show NO KIND of incestuos behavior whatsoever! I don't know what kind of a sick bastard the director is, but he's sure one sick bastard.
The third mistake is of course the aforementioned tendency to make random crap and putting some crappy plot twist that "explains" things. Right.
Oh, I almost forgot about the fourth mistake - the movie is totally uninteresting and often boring. You have been warned. Now it's up to you whether you're going to trust all those high rankings at IMDb and www.kfccinema.com or Dragon's Vampire. I suggest the latter. Just because a movie is crap doesn't mean it's a masterpiece.

Sin City

So finally, after many many months, I decide to watch the infamous Sin City. The reason I hadn't watched it earlier is because the whole thing sounded terribly uninteresting. Not to mention the probably irritating black-white photography. The reason I watched the movie is because I decided to watch at least one movie in one day, and have succeeded for more than ten days. During that time, I watched literally everything in my movie empire that was worth watching (and also a few things that weren't). So, the only thing left to watch was Sin City.
And I have to say - the movie was a pleasant surprise. It was dynamic, interesting, violent and all that stuff and the black-white-with-occasional-colour photography really worked. It was great how they designed all the scenes to be almost identical replicas of the scenes from the comic book (of course, I haven't read the comic, this brilliant comment owes (sp?) its existence to the Behind The Camera DVD feature). Of course, absolutely the best part of the movie is when Carla Gugino gets out of the bed and holds a gun. This scene alone made the movie worth watching. Sadly, this leads us to the sad part of the story, which we shall call: Why Robert Rodriguez Smells.
Here's why - one of the main characters in the movie is Nancy. She's a stripper. Most people (Robert Rodriguez excluded) know that what strippers do is - stripping. I.E., taking their clothes off. He wisely hired Jessica Alba for the part, but what happened was that she refused to do any nudity. Oh, no! Another Julia Roberts in sight! And what did Robert do? NOTHING! He thought it wasn't important to the movie and just let her dance wearing clothes (!!) EXCUSE ME??? NOT IMPORTANT??? Nudity NOT IMPORTANT in a movie called SIN City? As we all know, nudity is one of the greatest sins, so excluding Jessica Alba nude scene delivered an almost lethal blow to the movie's credibility. That Mexican bastard, he should have fired that bimbo (who's going to get naked very soon, anyway) and give the role to... I don't know, Brittany Murphy. Yes, I know she already was in the movie, but she also played a non-nude role. Terrible.
Another terrible decision is in the scene where Nick Stahl is torturing the aforementioned Alba. It was originally designed to be extremely violent, but Rodriguez toned it down with the explanation that "it crossed the boundaries of good taste". Heard that? GOOD TASTE. In a movie where Mickey Rourke cuts Elijah Wood's legs and lets his dog eat him, where Bruce Willis beats Nick Stahl's head to a pulp and so on. Good taste. Robert Rodriguez, you suck.
Another thing that sucked in this movie was the decision that bloody scenes be coloured white. So, when someone cuts someone's arm off, it looks like the arm is ejaculating rather than bleeding. But I guess it was that way in the comic, so they had to leave it, right? WRONG!!! Nancy was naked in the comic, and Brittany Murphy's character showed pretty much, but no, that WASN'T IMPORTANT! And the torturing scene wasn't important. But hey, white blood - THAT'S important.
And one final criticism, that is related to the making of the film, rather than film itself: You know how Robert Rodriguez always has his guitar with him when he shoots movies? Well, not this time. Not a sign of a guitar! I found that terribly strange and discouraging.
Having said all that, the movie actually kicks ass. The third third is the best, with fine interaction between Jessica Alba and Bruce Willis, not to mention that ending ruled. I can't wait to see the sequel, and maybe even read the comic if I ever have a chance.
By the way, don't get too attached to characters in this movie. Seems like Frank Miller is one dirty rotten sadist, introducing tons of characters just to kill them fifteen minutes later.

Homosexuality

Hah. Another controversial topic. I remember, when I decided to finally start this whole blog business, my mother said: "Son, having a personal blog is a big move in anyone's life. This certainly makes me proud, but I have to warn you - stay away from controversial topics! They are so controversial they can ruin your mind!" These are the exact words of my mother. I intended to follow her advice, but there are moments in life when everything you know (or THINK you know) just falls apart and knowledge strikes you like a lightning and the words appear in your mind like crystal blue letters - I'VE GOT TO DO THIS! Something similar happened to me when I was walking home last night. It was a beautiful sunny evening, it was raining like ... I don't know, anyway it was raining, and then I thought: "Well, I simply have to write about homosexuality tonight!" And there you have it! When something crosses my mind, like an idea or something, I don't wait long to realize it.

Gratuitous nudity

Hah! You were cheated! No gratuitous nudity in this post! (Btw, I had to use Yahoo! to find how the heck do you spell g-r-a-t-u-i-t-o-u-s).
The only thing even remotely connected to nudity is the lack of nudity in the movie I just saw. It's called Boat Trip and it sucked. Even ROAD Trip is better than this one, not to mention EUROTRIP, which is almost good (!)
But wait, you say! Boat Trip is FULL of nudity! Theoretically yes, but for some reason my DAMN DVD copy is like 8 minutes shorter than it's supposed to be. Aaaargh!!! They cut out all the best parts (though the movie was so lame that it wouldn't have been saved by 100 beautiful naked women (or maybe it would?)).
Anyway, today was a magnificent day for me! I got up early and had breakfast, and then I spent some time listening to music and writing that thing that I don't know English expression for, but it's SOMETHING you have to do to finish college, or however they call that thing that goes after High School, presuming that "High School" is what comes after Elementary School, under assumption that you go to Elementary School after spending some time (though it's not required) in the kindergarten, and by "kindergarten" I mean the place where your parents throw you when you are very very young and small and everything and they want to be alone to watch movies and listen to records and stuff.
And then I watched some soccer, Red Star Belgrade played vs. AC Milan and, imagine this, they lost. By the way, I'm hungry. Tomorrow I have to it, now it's too late. Wait... it IS tomorrow!
I'm stuck in a time warp.

Whee!

The first post! I'm so happy! In fact, I'm as happy as a Frenchman who has invented a pair of self-removing trousers!
Actually, to be perfectly honest, this will probably get boring in a few days, so why even bother? On the other hand, random crap does tend to appear in my head pretty often, so why not post in on the Net and save it for future generations? It may happen that there will be a shortage of crap in the future.
Speaking of crap, instead of creating a blog, another good idea is to write an autobiography. It seems that these days everyone has already written one. Even people who probably can't put two sentences together. Even soccer players. Even YOUNG soccer players. Even Wayne Rooney (!) What's up with that? He's like 20 years old and already has an autobiography! I wonder who could be dumb enough (except his nearest family, who have sort of a moral obligation) to buy that book. Everything you can find in it is probably a list (though a looong one) of places where Wayne Rooney got in a fight with someone else.
- Soccer field
- Dressing room
- Bar
- Street
- Car
You name it. I'm gonna shut up now.