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nigel_essex
Reviews
No Time to Die (2021)
Dull, dull, dull.
First of all they killed Bond!!!! If they didn't like the character then make another film about a super spy but don't kill Bond. Thinking about it, it was probably a mercy killing as like other childhood heroes Dr Who and Robin Hood the iterations the 2020s have come up with have been run into the ground to become cyphers for the dreary politics of the time.
As for the film? Dull, tedious and oh so "dramatic". It's a Bond film not bloody Shakespeare. No gadgets, quips or ninjas rappelling into volcanoes. When did Bond get so worthy.
Acting: Craig doesn't want to be there and mopes and grumbles to the end. Sedoux is SO sulky you could slap her (she is French after all) but really nobody appears remotely interested in being in the film (they're international film stars being paid millions show a little spark please). Then there's replacement 007... I can't begin to say how wrong that was. It's a bloke in a dress, right?
To the makers of the Bond films. You've done it now, he's dead, leave it there. I don't want to watch anything you come up with next.
Death on the Nile (2022)
Couldn't get through the first 20 minutes
So many inaccuracies to be forgiven. I wanted to like this but couldn't. I bailed after the first 20 minutes. Beginning with an unnecessary and inaccurate WW1 prologue then shifting to a London "jazz" club with cringe dancing (which Poirot wouldn't be seen dead in) presumably to up the diversity quota. By the time the story gets to Egypt in a very fake pyramid scene I was getting wary. Then to a preposterously fake Nile-side hotel with a French and Saunders double act (I kid you not) and some dreadful dialogue. Then the band from the jazz club appeared (no, really). At this point my willingness to suspend my disbelief was no longer willing and TV was switched off.
Look, it might have got better after this but I'm afraid Mr B lost this particular member of the audience before the first reel ended. The story is well known, the Peter Ustinov and David Suchet adaptations were classy, capturing the spirit of the book and the age. This version is an overblown, inaccurate historical fairy story to pander to attention deprived millennials; all visual key jangling without the style of the age or the class of the original writing. This is a good example of how films are nowadays turning a classic book with a pedigree of film adaptations into something unwatchable. Shame on you Mr B.
Sky Bandits (1986)
Enjoyable nonsense but fails to fulfill its promise.
If ever there was a film needing a re-edit it's this one. It lurches awkwardly from one scene to the next with an air of making it up as it goes along. Which is a shame as within all its staleness there is a good film in there somewhere. Okay the acting from the two leads is bad and the dialogue they have to say is worse. There's an attempt to make them lovable rogues but they come across as objectionable idiots. Nonetheless the film is chock full of invention, excellent design and pyrotechnics. It just doesn't flow as it should. Not a bad film as such but could do better. Hence a re-edit would save its potential. BTW Gunbus is available on Amazon Prime but the transfer is awful; VHS picture and distorted sound. Terrific poster though.
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002)
Oh wow, watch this film. You WILL be entertained.
Of course, you can't take it seriously but if anything, a lot happens in it's run time. Boats, helicopters, submarines; all are threatened by the stock footage shark. It has everything you need in a shark movie - "close the beaches, damn it", man plays with dog by the water's edge (with a twist), drunk teens in the water, even a dum dum dum dum musical score and the model shark looks as good as the one in Jaws (even though this was made almost 30 years later). Yes, this film has it all!
I particularly liked the 1%ers jumping into the sea to escape the sinking ship to be swallowed whole. There's a message in there somewhere.
Okay, the effects are risible, the acting minimal, the dialogue terrible but there's a crazy energy to this. If you want a double bill to go with The Meg try this out.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
Grotesque and shocking but not for the reasons you might think.
Cannibal Holocaust, tacky title but not as tacky as it first appears. This is a competent well made film with a lot to say and some new ways to tell a story.
Basically it's a film of two halves a) anthropologist seeks out a lost documentary crew and b) we find out what happened to them through the footage shot by the documentarians.
So it's an early 'found footage' film and you can see the proto reality the actors and director wanted to achieve. In this day when everything is reality (even though it's not) it's amazing to think how shocking this must have been back in the day. Now we have the comfort of viewing such material and saying, "fake", seeing the developmental special effects of the time (with Walking Dead jaded eyes) and saying, "seen better". But this looked real in 1980. Hence the controversy. Yes and no.
What is really shocking is the degree of sexual violence in this film. Rape and genital mutilation are rife and this makes for uncomfortable viewing. I suppose this is a metaphor for the West's rape of nature and the destruction of virgin rainforest. It's overdone and unnecessary. I can imagine the writer explaining this to the producers who went, "gee, we can up the nudity and throw in some rape scenes" while perhaps another said, "yeah, I like mud wrestling, can we put that in too? ". I seems they missed the point.
Further to this is the film's treatment of animals. Various unfortunate creatures are dispatched live on camera. OK, death happens in the real world all the time but I don't want to have it as an entertainment. Unfortunately, the cannibal genre seems to portray this a lot. I suppose it reflects the savagery of nature but animal snuff footage is wrong.
So two big negatives to this film. But taking those aside the film works as an 'man against nature' adventure, an Emerald Forest or The Revenant in its way. Its message is clear (although one feels as if one is sitting next to the director shouting it through a megaphone) the civilization of the West is far from civil.
Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)
Engrossing found footage horror. Better than most.
Bigfoot, found footage, what could go wrong? Actually those two titles could be enough to put you off but this is a great little film worth a watch.
Starting out it appears to be a comedy with some nice back and forth dialogue between characters. In fact it doesn't really get started as a horror until some way into the running time. Blink and you miss it figures, shadows, eyes. The audience is presented with a standard Bigfoot movie, is it a hoax or not? The lead is consistently sceptical against all the events and evidence presented to him. The audience is led to anticipate the relish of his realisation of the truth when it comes, but when it does, it's the audience that have been wrong footed, it's not a Bigfoot movie at all!
In getting to that point we do have to sit through the standard frat boy nonsense that seems to be regulation in American horrors, people behave stupidly, overreact, shout a lot etc. etc. But it's all very well made and a cut above the usual Asylum level dross that gets put out.
The ending? It all gets very Evil Dead, doesn't it? My take on it is that the hooves belong to the Lovecraftian Goat of a Thousand Young. So adding an element of cosmic horror to all the chaos.
Fallen Soldiers (2015)
Great idea, moderately well executed, let down by low budget.
Well the poster looks like an Iron Maiden cover and I've always been interested in Napoleonics, so I thought, why not? The acting is OK, mostly, although I can't vouch for the accents. The costumes are pretty good and to my eye look accurate. I liked the iron masks the French soldiers wore. There's a fair amount of gore, competently splashed. The dialogue is interesting and relevant, always a good sign of a decent script, which this is. Plenty of intriguing twists and turns and the flashback story works well.
But does the film hold together? Generally yes, I was entertained. But I'm afraid I've seen so many of films similar to this and I'm sorry to say the budget or lack of it really shows. Cinematography is shockingly "video", sound is echoy and hollow, music (although a decent score) is electronic and synthetic. I can see what the producers and director have in mind but the technology (and the budgetry restrictions) has not allowed their vision to be realised. It's such a shame that so many decent low budget films are let down by poor pictures and sound. It's like a pencil sketch compared to the full Hollywood oil painting. Which, incidentally, this film with a Hollywood budget would be really something to see.
The Being (1981)
Toxic monster on the loose! Almost an 80s classic, but not quite.
This film is a lot of fun. It's not Hamlet. A toxic monster is on the loose, the mayor and a government inspector either deny or hush up its existence, an inept police detective always one step behind and all the while the body count rises in the most inventive and gory ways possible. You know the drill. And yet for all its 50s B movie, Sci fi trappings, this film has a lot to offer. Admittedly, great performances from Landau, Ferrier and Malone sit amongst some flat and wonky turns but a black humour punctuate the monster attacks with some real (intended) laughs. The small town 80s America is well observed (Stranger Things fans take note, this is from the 80s after all). At times it feels like a early John Carpenter, yet sadly not consistently. And it has some of the best acting by a baby under twelve months that this chap has ever seen. Okay, the ending is somewhat lame; a bust up in a chemicals warehouse (who knew cyanide was needed in such quantities!) but it's got some good jumps, enough quirks to keep it interesting, a cat with a paper cup stuck on its head and even an environmental message, so it can't be bad can it? Just add beer and pizza and you have a good evening's entertainment.
Color Out of Space (2019)
Such divided opinion
How to film a new colour? A intangible property that cannot be described. Richard Stanley has gone a long way in achieving just that in Color Out of Space. The HP Lovecraft short story is a marvel of conveying the descent into madness caused by the inescapable decay inflicted on a family by an alien entity. First the trees and plants, then the livestock and finally the people succumb to the colour. This film captures the essence of that story perfectly.
As adaptations go this is as faithful as we can expect. Remember this is cinema, not literature and so a visual license is allowed. The llama-thing in the barn, the fused bodies in the attic, the perversion of nature; all valid Lovecraftian images thrown into the pot. The kaleidoscope of horrific images and indescribable colour set against the deep green of the forest "where no axe has fallen" make the progressive madness all the more pronounced.
And of course there's Nicholas Cage. You either like him or don't. I think he's great and his mad-as-a-box-of-frogs performance is perfect for such a situation. I loved Mandy (didn't know what was going on) but loved the craziness of it all. And this follow up taps into that crazy. After all how would one react to the indescribable cosmic horror of the colour?
If you've never come across Lovecraft, watch this and then get reading you won't be disappointed. If you have, well I hope you will applaud Mr Stanley's work and hope he gets to delve into that universe again.
Witchtrap (1989)
Snappy dialogue, bad film
Okay, I've just sat through Witchtrap and I'm dumbfounded. On the one hand it has genuinely funny dialogue, some great one liners and a goofy sense of fun. On the other it has wooden acting, so so effects, no suspense, not very gory or indeed scary. Is it a horror film? Is it a comedy? Is it a horror comedy? No to all three. Worth a watch? Maybe, if you've nothing else to do. For 80s nostalgia it's up there, for everything else it falls way short.
Anazapta (2002)
Medieval curiosity.
If The Name of the Rose and High Plains Drifter had offspring it might look something like this. Although this child would, alas, be inferior to the parents. That's not to say it's a bad film. If you want to spend two hours in the worst year England has known you've come to the right place; rain, plague, misery, violence. There's something Pythonesque about the squalor the characters inhabit "Ooo, there's some nice muck here". There's even a chastity belt and a false nose thrown in. The acting is top notch, Lena Hedley holds everything together as the noble milady, Ian McNiece as a delightfully corrupt bishop and Jason Fleming a psychotic knight with a tiny monkey, no really.
The music is epic but strangely out of place evoking an England in happier Arcadian times. A darker, base toned score as used in The Name of the Rose would have contributed to th menace. The photography is, I believe, in film rather than cinematic video and this raises the film's quality allowing rich, glowing colour in the warmer scenes to grainy realism in the rain-soaked outdoors.
But it's flaws are the run time, it's a lot to get through in one sitting as a times the story can drag in places. There's a degree of confusion over what exactly is going on for some time, admittedly wrapped up toward the end, but taking some leaps in the viewers imagination to piece it all together. Nice ending though, which I think suggests the Black Plague is a human manifestation travelling from village to village exacting revenge for the sins on the guilty. A wandering Angel of Death.
Incidentally, the title and poster art rebranding on Amazon suggests a Game of Thrones cash in which is unfair as the film is it's own thing, for good or bad.
Mortal Engines (2018)
Steam punk action epic
A cut above the usual YA book adaptation. Visually gorgeous, fascinating and requires more than one viewing to appreciate the detailed world building. Great action set pieces - fast-paced, bombastic and explosive. It has Peter Jackson's fingerprints all over, which is no bad thing. One criticism is it borrows from so many genre favourites : Star Wars, Terminator and, yes, Lord of the Rings but perhaps that is the fault of the source material. Still it is its own thing, impressive steam punk action. Well worth a look.