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A Town Full of Ghosts (2022)
Just needlessly awful
So the film had a decent premise, a couple buy a ghost town and it all goes wrong. I was expecting plenty of paranormal scares and creepy atmosphere, what I got was a total mess and zero scares.
First of all, how can such lazy writing get funded? They characters constantly moan there's no running water or electricity but yet have no issues staying spotlessly clean and powering their phones, cameras, drones and even a super 8 projector. The whole town was supposedly murdered in the 1800's and the state of Texas hushed it all up and wiped the town from the maps and yet, the town still had electrical wiring running along beams and skirting boards, modern day light switches on every wall and even light up EXIT signs above the doorways, not to mention the plastic seating in the saloon. It was almost as if a child had wrote it and paid no attention whatsoever to the location.
Then there's such illogical plot points as the investor who was "all in" despite never having seen the place before, took one look and said I'm out but not before divulging that two teens were murdered there three weeks before. The lead character Mark decided to do some research AFTER he bought the place and watched the super 8 footage. With terrible writing like that the film stood no chance. However the bizarre directional/editorial choices made a bad film even worse. A musical soundtrack on a found footage film? How does that work? Are we supposed to be watching a live stream with a soundtrack or has someone gone back through the footage, edited it together and stuck some music over the top of it? Either way it makes zero sense. The exposition contained in the super 8 film is supposed to drive the story along but is a confused mess and only further clouds what's gone on before. The film tries desperately to be like the shining, the maze, the axe, the husband going crazy but it's got more in common with maximum overdrive. Tosh of the lowest order.
The acting was decent but overall such a bad film.
WNUF Halloween Special (2013)
Well made but in no way scary
So I'd seen this film being highly rated amongst found footage lists and so decided to give it a try. It looks great and had all the legitimacy of a real VHS tape from the 80's, however having said that the endless adverts that pop up seemingly every 5 minutes soon become tiresome and actually detract from the film.
The story is simple enough, a TV station is having a live investigation of a supposedly haunted house and we're watching someone's tape of the event. All this is your standard FF story but the light tone and 80's setting help differentiate it from others in the genre.
Pretty much everything that happens during the investigation takes place off screen, some kit gets destroyed, a cat dies and that's about it. It takes an absolute age for them to get in the actual house (roughly 50 minutes into its 80 minute run time) and when they do it's a big let down. Any tension that gets built up is instantly lost as another ad break starts and believe me when I say that the adverts make up the vast majority of the film.
True to form people start disappearing and then it's revealed that it's nothing supernatural at all but the result of an Evangelical Christian group who think that Halloween is satanic and so is killing people to push their agenda? To be honest I'm not really sure why they're doing it. They feature early on in the film as part of a news broadcast and that's the last we see of them until one interrupts the broadcast and then again at the end.
The ending does leave a lot to be desired, after seeing the host and the rest of the crew murdered and it all being broadcast live we then cut to a week later and the news where it's announced that there's no trace of anyone and that they don't know what happened. I mean it was broadcast, hence how it's on the video we are watching, recorded from the TV station.
Overall it looks great, but isn't remotely scary and the adverts start to annoy after the first 15 minutes. The acting is varying degrees of amateur, from ok to good but no stand out performances. Is it worth a watch? Absolutely. Would I watch it again? No.
Coming Home in the Dark (2021)
Decent idea but runs out of steam towards to the end.
First off this film isn't a horror, if you're looking for a film to terrorize you then this definitely isn't it. It does contain some violence but a lot of it is off screen and it is no more horrific than most tv dramas.
What starts out as a family picnic is interrupted by two strangers, who proceed to murder the teenage twins and kidnap the parents. It's soon discovered that the kidnappers have a history with the father, who was a teacher at a boys school. A boys school where abuse was rampant. And that's pretty much it. Turns out he witnessed an abusive act once and even though he didn't take part he didn't report it either.
The acting is very good, especially the guy who played Mandrake, he comes across as menacing, unhinged, unpredictable and yet still weirdly likable, which is a very hard thing to do.
It could've done with at least one more rewrite as it soon descends into long shots of driving in the dark and once the cat is out the bag regarding the boys school, which happens fairly quickly, nothing much happens. Just talking in a car.
They drive to the school with the intention of killing the dad, turns out neither kidnapper was the boy that was abused (I think, it gets very confusing and isn't clear if it was a coincidence they found him or if it was intentional) and after a bit more talking and some more violence it just inexplicably ends.
It could do with at least 10 minutes trimming out of it and a bit more story. It felt like a cheap "The Strangers" rip off, if no motive was the point then use it, if revenge was the point then use it, by having a maybe it is maybe it isn't motive, it just waters down any meaning it has. Having any violence that isn't a single gun shot take place off screen is also a detraction, it wants Mandrake to shockingly violent but then doesn't show the violence. Show it.
Overall, it's a decent low budget film with some excellent acting but let down by a weak script and weak direction.
Older Gods (2023)
Meh
First of all it's strengths, it's well made, it's well acted and it does have some creepy moments. But the negatives outweigh all these, poor script tapers out, story becomes increasingly absurd, it looks great but it is dull and it's 80+ minute run time seems a lot longer, so much so that I just wanted it to end and had no interest in how that happened.
So the story concerns a man piecing together what happened to his childhood friend and he stays in the remote farmhouse where his friend died. So far, so good. Then it's revealed the man has left his pregnant wife and his job back in America to come to Wales to look for answers. Ok, bit weird. No reason on Earth why he couldn't have stayed home and typed on his laptop and looked at the notes that he travelled thousands of miles to do at the farmhouse.
It turns out the dead friend was looking into the exploits of a cult and wants his long, lost childhood friend to continue his research for some reason.
The cult worship some ancient deity and practice blood sacrifices and are trying to summon it to earth. That's the story dealt with. Not the best premise to start off with, with a lot of unlikely and irrational things needed in order for it to work.
The film has a couple of creepy moments but is in no way scary, I wouldn't consider it a horror film, more a drama with supernatural undertones. The final third just seems like they ran out of ideas and so introduce a voice over that explains everything with a nice piece of exposition until the film just peters out and nothing happens.
It did have potential but if you've watched the trailer then you've seen the film, at least all that's interesting in it. As a fan of Lovecraftian horror this is a missed opportunity, it looks great, especially for a low budget film, but needed a much better ending.
Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle (2022)
A misunderstood cinematic masterpiece
Birdemic 3 - Sea Eagle is possibly the finest film ever made. Nguyen has managed to strike gold and challenges our understanding of film as an art form. Shots that are overexposed rendering the actors faces a white blur represent the white hot passion the director has for his subjects. Similarly the shots that are too dark and incorrectly colour balanced represent the darkness within the souls of the birds. Skillfully changing from shot to shot the lighting plays with our very notion of "acceptable". As does the entire cinematography, "crossing the line" is widely frowned upon in a stale industry and is indeed taught to film students as a big no no. Nguyen cocks a snook at this and gleefully teases the viewer with various camera angles at random, line be damned!
His mastery of sound should not go unnoticed too, long silent shots with no background noise remind us, the viewers that we are watching a film, a piece of art. The piercing artificial shrieks of the sea eagles are purposely off putting to remind us to pierce through the glitz and glamour on show and get to the truth held within. Something that Nguyen does that no other director has tried before and is truly visionary in its scope is to "un-mic" the actors. By rendering them mute so that their words are barely heard we are forced to rely upon the emotions displayed. Ah but once again Nguyen is one step ahead of us all and has instructed his actors to show no emotion whatsoever, in fact they barely react to anything that is happening around them, in what must be one of the bravest decisions in cinema history. Just when you think you have figured out what is happening, the Maestro out foxes us again by adjusting the sound levels insanely high and distorting the dialogue so that even though we heard the words, they have lost all meaning.
Whole scenes are filled exposition in a subversion of the great rule of filmmaking "show it, don't say it". We are therefore forced to watch as one person monotonously explains what is happening and the other responds in much the same way. Truly minimalistic acting is the way forward? I'd be disappointed if it wasn't. The films plot is in keeping with this minimalistic approach, by keeping it childishly simple the director misdirects the audience and instead delivers a film not about sea eagles or even birdemics, but an art piece, an art piece that is universal, love. They also mention global warming once or twice.
But enough from me and my humble opinion, watch for yourself and be challenged by a writer/director at the top of his game.
The Gracefield Incident (2017)
Great special effects but not much else
So as everyone else who's reviewed the film I'll mention the appalling acting first. Is it as bad as everyone says, in short - yes. It's incredibly amateurish, especially the lead who is also the writer and director. If he wasn't the writer and director would he have been cast? Almost certainly not. Which is a shame as it detracted from an otherwise entertaining film. It has plenty of jump scares and does build up the tension BUT the final twist is just terrible and undoes the good the film built up.
So the plot is fairly typical of the found footage genre, six friends go for a break, film everything and are stalked by an alien, the only time they stop filming is when they drop the camera, even when terrified and fleeing for their lives. A meteor crashes in the nearby forest at night, they find it, they keep it and then are picked off one by one by an alien. It takes them nearly 24 hours to figure out that the alien is after the meteorite and they should give it back. Turns out it's an alien egg and once the alien gets it back it returns all the people it took during the length of the film.
The film also has some bizarre editing choices as in the addition of music to enhance the jump scares and title cards being typed out at certain points. These are both red flags in found footage films as they detract from the realism they are trying create. Are we supposed to believe that after that night they edited all the footage together and added sound effects to it in order to make what happened scarier? The footage that they all sit around and watch at home. "Hey, remember the night we got abducted by aliens, well have I got a treat for you"! Or would they have sold it to the highest bidder as it shows undisputable evidence of aliens?
As ridiculous as the plot is the film does have some decent scares and the special effects are way above average. Really excellently done and much more professional than the film warrants. But they are not enough to save it from a low score. A swing and a miss.
Ghoul (2015)
A mess
So I went into this blind and as soon as it started I spent the first five minutes scrabbling to find some subtitles as it was mainly in Russian/Ukrainian. None were to be found, seems the filmmakers decided that English speakers were to be kept in the dark on the many, many conversations between the Ukrainian characters.
Now onto the actual film itself, to put it kindly the film is a mess. They were making a pilot about modern day cannibals and were there to film about a killer called Boris, who was suspected of eating his neighbour. They spend all of two minutes with him before going to his house and then the rest of the film takes place there. When he doesn't show up for an interview they decide against looking for him and instead have a drunken seance. This obviously goes wrong and for some reason they have summoned the evil spirit of Andrei Chikatilo dun dun duuuun.
There's more shouting in Ukrainian without any translation offered so we can only guess at what's happening. Is it ghosts? Is it a possession? Is it Boris? Yes it's all three. I think. I'm not sure. Could be none of them. The last 20-30 minutes are people running in the dark and screaming at things we can't see or hear only to disappear into the darkness and be presumed dead.
It had promise but the Chikatilo addition seemed weird and gimmicky, it added nothing and actually detracted from the film as it seemed to excuse his crimes as being those of a possessed madman.
The acting was decent but the problems far far outweigh any positives the film may have. I'd avoid it.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)
Boring and badly made
So I had high hopes for this film, I was expecting a humourous tongue in cheek horror along the lines of Scream, The Evil Dead or The cabin in the woods. What we actually get is a dull, slow moving slasher film that Winnie the Pooh could be substituted out of for literally anyone else.
It starts brightly enough with some animated backstory but then rapidly goes downhill after the opening credits. A group of girls are staying at an air B&B house in the middle or edge of 100 acre woods, it's not made clear, it's also not made clear who's house it is or where they're renting it from. This is especially puzzling as the opening credits reveal several missing people from the area via newspaper headlines. So a group of women decide to have a weekend away in a kidnapping/murder hotspot. This is the basic premise of the film. And that's not even the stupidest decision in the film!
I mean it had so much potential but it could've been so much more than just a Friday the 13th fan film. There's no reason whatsoever to include Winnie or Piglet here, any faceless, mask wearing killer will suffice. Plus it's biggest crime apart from the acting (just awful all round) is it's so boring. No scares, no laughs, no interesting commentary or characters. Avoid.
Choose or Die (2022)
Meh
Ok first and foremost, why was a film that was very clearly filmed in England, with English actors pretending to be set in the USA? It completely threw me when we were introduced to "the sidekick" and he pulled out a bunch of dollars to pay for something. The story does not need to be set in the US so why do it? It literally detracts from the film.
Anyway the film itself has a decent set up but doesn't actually go anywhere with it or deliver the goods at the end. So it's a big build up and then ends like they ran out of money/ideas. Will pass the time but that's about it. It's like a fart in the wind, it's there and gone with nothing to remember it by.
Howard's Mill (2021)
Good film but not a horror
The film only scores a 5 from me simply because I watched it expecting a horror film. It's not. It's a very well made and well acted faux documentary with a vaguely paranormal/sci fi element. It has an intriguing story but doesn't really go anywhere with it and "the watchers" although mentioned, are never seen or play any part in the mysterious goings-on. The film looks great and the acting is impeccable but it's a missed opportunity.
Mommy Is a Murderer (2020)
Absolutely woeful
There's not a piece of dialogue that isn't exposition or terribly acted. The whole film is just utterly ridiculous from start to finish. The lead opens a children's clothes shop called "juvenile shop". That should tell you the amount of creativity that went into this. Whilst not birdemic bad it's not too far away. The writing is really quite breathtakingly bad, I mean who doesn't invite two virtual strangers to a childs assembly and quite inexplicably gets one to lead the proceedings! Every protagonist is overwhelmingly stupid, the kidnapper who refuses to leave the state or change the childs appearance in any way, even when making a flee for it towards the end, presumably to disappear again, she stillrefuses to leave the state! The lead who refuses to go to the police because they won't believe her but yet rings various hotels and the dmv/insurance companies to gather information whilst impersonating people. How about you use those skills to ring the police and make an anonymous report? Just so so bad.
YellowBrickRoad (2010)
Don't waste your time
It was appallingly dull, utterly ridiculous and completely unscary. A decent premise but they threw that out the window almost immediately and it became a nonsensical wander around the woods with some old timey music playing from nowhere and for no reason for 3/4 of its runtime. Just rubbish in every way.
Unsolved Mysteries (2020)
Pointless when 5 out the 6 mysteries are anything but.
So out of the 6 episodes only 1 is a genuine mystery. The other 5 are just about murders where no one was charged. They're not mysterious at all. It's blatant to anyone who watches who's killed whom or why. The biggest mystery is why weren't any suspects arrested? Not a patch on the old version.
The Vast of Night (2019)
Don't listen to the positive reviews
This film is dull as dishwater. If you want a sci-fi film where people sit and talk in a few different rooms then this is the film for you. If you actually want an interesting and entertaining film then avoid it.
People sit and chat for 1h 25 of its run time, then a spaceship appears the end. It only gets a 4 from me for the 1950's setting and the cinematography, but even that was let down with some wildly uneven editing in the last 5 minutes, some shots looked like they hadn't been processed properly meaning one minute the screen is a weird matt blue shade, the next it's crisp black and back again. The supposed story is exactly as it sounds, they here a weird noise on the radio airwaves, two people say it's aliens, aliens show up, the end. That one sentence stretched out over 90 minutes. But with masses and masses of exposition.
Slender Man (2018)
Utter Rubbish
I had to turn it off after half an hour as I simply couldn't see anything. This film was shot almost entirely in pitch black, even the interior shots were so dark they might've well have left the lens cap on. Even if it hadn't been so dark what I did manage to see was boring, predictable teen rubbish. Give it a miss.
Cherry Falls (1999)
A big let down
I had never even heard of this film when I saw it on the shelf of my second hand DVD shop but at 75p I thought I'd give it a go. I was robbed. OK it wasn't that bad but considering the cast it had it was very poor. Brittany Murphy is uglied up with a terrible fright wig for some bizarre reason, Michael Biehn is phoning it in for most of the film and just when he starts to act he dies! The whole twist is centred around a woman called Loralee but it's blatantly obvious to anyone that loralee is a man in drag and again it's so obvious who that man is. I guessed it within ten minutes. The murders are also a let down, the film has an 18 rating and yet is almost entirely free of gore and bloodshed. Even the killing of the bad guy is without the required splatter of a stalk and slash film. With cardboard characters, bad dialogue, huge plot holes and general ineptness in film making this should be avoided. The film is neither funny nor scary nor sexy and so fails on it's three main selling points.
Heretic (2012)
Awful
I had never heard of this film but my brother had gave me it in a bagful of DVD's he didn't want. After watching the film it's perfectly clear why he gave it away. It would be a decent student film for a final college piece (It's not even Uni student quality), within the first five minutes there's a whole scene where the cameraman's shadow is clearly seen throughout, add to that boom's in shot, badly recorded sound in places (especially in an early pub scene) and it's very tiring to try and ignore them. The acting is uniformly dreadful throughout but that is also hampered by the excrementally bad script which has huge plot holes and so much exposition that most of the characters spend all their time explaining to each other what's going on rather than reacting to the events as would be natural. Fair play to the cast and crew for getting it made but it's still tosh of lowest order
Låt den rätte komma in (2008)
Unconscionable bore
I was really looking forward to this film after hearing lot's of good things about it. I was maybe expecting too much, first off let me say that good vampire films are few and far between, Twilight - Awful, New Moon - Awful, Lost Boys - Good, Bram Stokers Dracula - Awful, Hammers Dracula - Superb and so on. I sat down in the dark and started to watch, now the first thing that hit me was, and this may seem a bit xenophobic, the clothes and surroundings, it took me a while to figure out it was set in the 1980's. I thought maybe they were just a bit backwards. No caption had come up to explain the time period and so you're left looking at a rather ugly, emaciated child wearing brown flares and a blue jumper thinking are so it's like an inbred community thing going on. But that, my friends, is where it all starts to go down hill. The first MAJOR complaint I have is the truly awful, excrementally bad dubbing. It's as though they've stolen the soundtrack to a bad spaghetti western or an even worse 1970's kung fu film. The characterisation of the dubbing is just terrible and the literal translation of some of the dialogue is even worse "the unknown man poured acid on his face making it really difficult for the police to identify him" and that's from a newsreader! the second complaint is that the film can't seem to make it's mind up on whether it want's to be a horror or a social-drama/art house film about alienation. chose one or the other because the two do not make for easy bedfellows. long scenes filled with nothing but silence and intense looks do not make for scary horror thrills nor are they incredibly entertaining. Thirdly the secondary story concerning a group of alcoholics who gather in a scruffy diner is just totally pointless, it leads nowhere and adds nothing to the story. some of the actions of these characters are totally unbelievable and ruin any sense of disbelief. and last but not least the fourth and overall most important complaint, the two leads. The two leads were so unsympathetic and uninvolving that halfway through the film what ever little interest you may have in finding out what is going in will have started to evaporate. a very dull and very confused film and not at all what i was expecting. very poor.
Watchmen (2009)
not very good..
I still can't decide if I liked this film or not. I think I wanted to like it so much that it's clouded my judgement because I got very bored very quickly and started to fidget and had to concentrate on what was happening. First let me just say this I hadn't read the "graphic novel" or to give it it's real name the "comic". So I wasn't versed in the mythology in which it was set, but that was very nicely summed up in the first 15 or so minutes of the film. Secondly this was quite possibly one of the dullest superhero films ever, probably on a par with Hulk. Third major point with the exception of Dr. Manhattan not a single one of them possesses a single superpower, unless you count Rorschachs mask (which can change its image like the test its named after which in itself is about as useful as turning into an orange). They're all retired by an act of government and the world is on the brink of war, so they decide to try and stop it, in the meantime someone is trying to kill them all and is hunting them down, so far so who gives a frig? The characters are so underdeveloped and two dimensional that you end up not caring what happens. Rorschachs voice acts as narrator and my god is it annoying, he's gone for the "batman angry voice at all times because if i speak gruffly then everyone will fear me" thing, can someone just give the man a strepsil or some sort of lozenge? The film takes an absolute age to get going and then speeds along at a snails pace, occasionally livening things up with a fight sequence but that's it. The ending, without giving it away, is absolutely pathetic. Turns out there's a traitor in their midst and he's brought about the end of the world in order to save mankind. Eh? Did I see that right? you may be asking. the answer is yes you did and I had trouble when i saw it in the film. It was this at this point I realised I had sadly wasted 2 and a half hours watching this. Would I watch it again? probably yes. would I recommend someone else to watch it? no.
Day of the Dead (2008)
shares nothing but the title with the original
Dear God what the hell were they thinking? Let's take the final instalment of a trilogy, the first two parts of the trilogy have already been re-made successfully by keeping very close to the originals, and give it a completely different story! Instead of a small unit of military men and scientists trapped in an underground bunker occasionally testing on zombies we have a small town turning into zombies by some weird virus. However as bizarre as the dead coming back to life is it's nothing compared to the dead climbing on ceilings upside down and running about and leaping 20-30 feet in a single bound all done with the brilliance of a "my first cgi kit" seriously the cgi in this film is awful. If you can't do it well then don't do it! the gore is very poor indeed and the casting is incredibly poor with Danny Cannon stopping just short of saying fo'shizzle at the end of every sentence because he's a bad ass gangsta pimp army man. this is nothing short of an abortion of a film and should be ignored by all fans of the genre.
Philosophy of a Knife (2008)
Very Poor
Having read all the reviews about the "Worlds most violent film" I thought I'd give it a watch. Now I'm not much of a gorehound these days but when I was younger I would actively seek out banned films etc. Having done a bit of research into both the film and the actual Unit 731 I knew I was in for an unpleasant experience, however nothing could prepare me for the mind-numbing dullness of possibly THE worst art-house piece of exploitation I was about to endure. The film was almost all in black and white, fine I have no problem with that but after the first 15 or so minutes it starts to look very tacky. The fake film scratches are repeated ad nauseum over four hours with no variations. The music is absolutely horrendous, mere words cannot describe how awful it is, at some points you'd gladly swap places with the people being tortured in the film as their ordeal would be a lot less painful! It's sound like Kraftwerk playing music composed by Ed Gein. Just awful repetitive beeps and electronic noises for four hours. The film itself is very badly made with what appears to be the same five or six people being used over and over and over again. By their very nature the experiments are horrific but are filmed in such an arty style and with such inept actors (they show very little or no emotion as they are being tortured to death)and in almost total silence apart from the music that you couldn't care less what was happening. A terrible voice over attempts to link each experiment but it, like the rest of the film, is incredibly dull and void of emotion. Some of the effects were very ropey indeed and with a more prudent editor he could've hidden a multitude of sins. Overall this film is far too long, far too arty and far too dull, a total missed opportunity to tell the world of what happened as many will be put off by the ridiculous style with which it is filmed.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Rubbish
I had high hopes for this film but was bitterly bitterly disappointed. A quick word to Tim Burton just because everything is a shade of grey does not make it atmospheric, it's lazy film making. It shows you couldn't be bothered to express it in other ways. The film should've been great but thanks to one miserable dirge after another and pretty much nothing happening for forty odd minutes I was wishing I could get in the film so he could slit my throat! I only watched the film last night and can't remember a single song, despite the fact they are almost always singing. Johnny Depp gives his jack sparrow act another dust off, the only difference being the wig and make up, seriously the voice and accent is exactly the same. the set pieces are all so bland and the characters are never fully developed that it is hard to care what happens at all. a very very poor film.
Twilight (2008)
Awful
Never before have I been tempted to rip off my face and throw it at the TV screen just so I didn't have to watch anymore. Not only was this THE worst Vampire film I have ever seen, but it was also one of the worst films ever. It is quite clearly Vampires for Disney, or rather Vampires for barely pubescent girls. I am actually getting really angry just writing this, for a start forget all the well known Vampire folklore, that goes right out the window. They can walk about in sunlight, crucifixes do nothing, they don't have fangs and they never sleep. They can however run very quickly and also fly without wings. If all that doesn't put you off they don't even kill humans, they just ponce about looking like a load of pasty-faced EMO's (another group the film is clearly aimed at) keeping themselves to themselves. and that is it. for the first hour and a half! then some proper Vampires turn up and they run away, then fight, then run some more, then fight the end. The love story is absolutely pathetic, she's new in town sits next to him in class he seethes, he walks out. she doesn't see him for three weeks, he apologises, saves her from a crash and wham bam they're in love? It's mental. I don't care how hormonal she is. The way she figures out he's a Vampire is so laughable I suggest you watch it on you tube, obviously don't watch the whole film or you may end up dead from boredom, just that scene. Please please please don't watch this awful abomination of a film. Watch The Lost Boys instead.
Britain's Got the Pop Factor... and Possibly a New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice (2008)
Exceptionally Poor
I was looking forward to this programme as I had missed it first time around. However nothing could prepare me for the dullest two hours of my life. This "parody" was nothing short of a direct copy. if i had taped the x factor then it would have been more entertaining and just for the record i hate all reality shows. The "jokes" and i use the term lightly were unfunny and predictable, the rejects start was terrible as indeed was the rest of the show. The usual parade of freaks were brought out R wayne? I'm sorry but I'm from Middlesbrough bout 30 miles south from where he was supposed to be from and no-one talks like that up north! Bolton maybe, but not the north east. None of the characters were appealing and it was one of THE worst shows I had seen for a long long time. It seems that the real genius behind Phoenix Nights were Sparkey and Fitzmaurice because everything Peter Kay has done since has been awful!
The Dark Knight (2008)
Massively overrated
Forget all the hype of it being the best film ever and it being the best film of 2008 and Heath Ledger being fantastic. None of these things are true. Yes the film is good, bordering on very good. But that's it, no way is it as great as everyone is making out. Let's start at the beginning the story, the story is just not involving enough, there's a power struggle between gangsters and Batman/the police, the Joker offers to kill Batman in exchange for half the gangsters money. The end. That's it? that's the whole story? Yeah, OK we have the relationship angle with Rachel and Harvey and Bruce but seriously what a ridiculously dull storyline. The action is good without ever being exciting or involving, personally I didn't care how many anonymous henchmen Batman fought with or how many faceless extras were put in danger by the Joker. This film needed a major face off between the two and that just didn't happen. As for Heath Ledger's performance, the characters name is called the Joker, clue is in the title, he just wasn't funny. I can't remember a single wisecrack in the whole film. Joe Pesci in Goodfellas is the perfect template of how to play the Joker - likable, hilarious with a serious threat of explosive violence. Heath just wandered about looking like a mad goth grumbling in a Richard Nixon voice. As for Harvey two face what really was the point in introducing him right at the very end of the film? a total waste of a character. Overall I feel slightly cheated by this film. It's not the fantastic movie I was expecting, it's an above average sequel. Nor is it up there with THE great superhero films Superman - The Movie and Superman 2, Spiderman and Spiderman 2. These are great superhero films, these set the benchmark way above whatever this can reach. An enjoyable film but not worthy of it's overblown status.