Don't Look Up

I can see why some reviewers thought this film was a bit messy. But I can see how that adds to the, this person is loosing their mind and what is, and what is not actually real. I thought some of the ideas here were cool.

It's not the best work for this director, but I thought it was still a pretty interesting watch. It has some cool ideas, and the idea behind the story was pretty interesting too. Like finding out more depth behind the spirit the filming is meant to be about would have made this a better film.

The acting and script are pretty average, but overall I think the film is worth a watch.

Marcus Reed (Reshad Strik), a film-maker troubled by strange visions, travels to Romania to try and make a movie based on a long lost film by legendary '20s director Béla Olt (Eli Roth). Reed's film is hampered by strange accidents on-set: is Marcus losing his mind or is an ancient gypsy curse causing his problems?

Don't Look Up is a remake of the 1996 Japanese film Joyû-rei; it is an American/Japanese/South African co-production starring an international cast and directed by Asian film-maker Fruit Chan. No wonder it's a bloody mess. The first half of the film is extremely boring, while the second half makes no sense whatsoever.

A couple of gruesome death scenes and frequent clouds of CGI flies do nothing to make this garbage any more bearable. Boring dialogue, terrible acting, horrible editing effects, a set that looks like an old derelict junkyard, an irritating Romanian character who says 'Mr. Marcus' every few seconds: this sorry excuse for a horror film is a total dud from dull start to utterly incomprehensible finish.

The formula has been repeated so often you have to wonder why they don't just quit.

Take a good Japanese suspense film of the same name, which was directed by Hideo Nakata (The Ring Trilogy), and had a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi, who also wrote the screenplays for the Ring Trilogy. and bring in a big time director (Fruit Chan) and someone to adapt the screenplay to add gore instead of suspense (Brian Cox), add some American eye candy (Rachael Murphy), and you have a film that is a pale imitation of the original directed to teens.

Forget the eye candy, find the original.

This movie started with some promise, considering that it's from the same writers of "The Ring," and directed by (until now) promising director Fruit Chan.

The beginning is fairly intriguing, but maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in, I was losing interest, and wondering where the plot had gone. In my opinion, the writers definitely missed out on an opportunity to really scare us, to give us the next "Ring," or "The Grudge," but they passed it up. God knows why.

I didn't find Chan's direction particularly riveting or impressive, which was disappointing, to say the least. Without any notable exceptions, the acting is dismal and unconvincing, making a bad movie worse. The fake Romanian accents, in particular, started to get to me after a while. (Our hero's name is MarCUS. Not MarCOOS.)

I still felt they might have managed to salvage it at the ending, but this, as well, was a disappointment. Any brief horror they had managed to drum up had been whizzed right down their legs in roughly fifteen seconds.

Yes, there is some gore, and at times I felt an uneasy sense of foreboding, but this film ultimately failed in delivering the punches. Rent it if you like, but beware that it won't live up to expectations.

Normally I don't write reviews... although after watching this movie, it marked my life in such ways I had to leave a comment and warn others. Just spare yourself the misery. This movie shows promise at the start, thinking of such urban legends as the filming of The Exorcist... yet sadly it fails to deliver. The plot is very poor to say the least, and the main character inspires as much empathy in his role as a mad director, that by the end of the movie you are actually rooting for something to happen to him. The movie ends, and ends again, then ends strangely... and I now have to find a way to wash my brain of this dreg...