Reviews

The title sounds promising but you quickly realize it's just pretentious gore with no connecting theme. 47 mins of "what's the grossest thing I can do with my rudimentary gore effects?"

Why is the guy brushing his teeth until blood pours out of his mouth and then gouges his eye out and eats it? Who knows. OH! Wait! Maybe that's what all the shots of the moon are about!! God. How could I haven't seen that??

One of the weirdest things (and I've seen this in other gore films) is not the hatred for women but a certain revulsion to female nudity. It's complicated. One of the vignettes has a woman aborting a baby by stabbing her vagina with a crucifix (so edgy, right?). She's naked in a bathtub. The stabbing part is concealed. Then they show her pulling the baby out of her vagina in close up. She coddles and coos to it. For some reason she stands up. But at no time do they ever show her breasts. I'm not talking about camera angles, either. She keeps her hands over her breasts the whole time.

It's the only interesting thing in this movie...and even that's annoying.

After enjoying the ode to Jean Rollin, Olalla, I thought perhaps Avila and Hasketh might have gotten Justine right. They didn't and missed on too many levels to call it a good try.

At the core, deSade is boring. It's not a story. It's a treatise on unfairness and injustice. Literally dozens of pages of monolog and tortured logic to prove, for instance, that a father should not only be allowed to have sex with his daughter but to kill her as he pleases. It's endless. And tedious reading. The other thing to know is that there's no sex scenes in deSade. Just talking about sex and what has and may yet be done.

So you have two choices for trying to make a movie about it. Attempt to make a cohesive story out of it with a lot of BDSM...or just focus on the BDSM. They chose the later.

I kind of checked out at the very beginning when Justine is "raped" in the pillory. It was more like dry humping and prematurely ejaculating. Hasketh really does try to sell it but it's just a scene of two guys bumping lightly against a woman. That's not "sadistic." Don't misunderstand me, I'm not implying straight out porn but...at least *pretend* something is happening.

If you're a fan of grindhouse movies, you know how Hershel Gordon Lewis use to pad out running times just...walking the camera around. Avila does this with the bondage scenes. Do you *really* need to show all 50 lashes taken out on Justine? AND have them counted. One screen. Really?? Obviously not. Is there a way to make something like that work and increase the horror of it? Yes. But that takes skill. Similarly, the rack and the wheel were just as dull. First contestant #1 on the wheel for 5-7 mins. Then contestant #2 on the wheel for 5-7 mins. Then contestant #3 on the wheel for 5-7 mins. And the same thing with the rack.

Sadly, Justine refuses to push anything boundaries. That is a shame because I do get the sense that at least Hasketh truly has some things to say about power, control and injustice.

My main issue with this (and the new crop of documentaries) is that it's so pretty, you always see the camera. They compose the shots to perfectly I feel like I can here the dialog between the filmmakers and subjects before the camera rolls. Like anti-verite. Blake doing interviews on his side on the bed. Graci in her tub as the camera hovers on her fingers. Teal endlessly jogging towards the camera and stopping to get a side shot as she bends over, exhausted. It's all so perfectly crafted; not a documentary but a movie of a documentary.

That said, how absolutely insane do you have to be to pay someone to find out if you're evil and, when you are, argue with them about it?

If you dig deeper (which the documentary didn't do) you find out that Teal got sent to the therapist at the center of the Satanic Panic scandal which induced false memories in people. Given that you see that happening in a scene in after effect of a role play ("I felt like there was anger and inappropriate touching") and the resulting judgment that the subject's parents were evil I'm stunned this thread wasn't followed.

Also, weird that there's no approximation of the company's wealth which would establish a motive to continue this nonsense.

That's not to take away from the story, which grabs you by the throat, but there's a superficiality to it - style over substance - which, while it fits Teal's personality, keeps the view at arm's length from the subjects by making them look like actors rather than people.

My gasp/LOL moment came listening to Teal attempting to guilt trip Blake about breaking his promise and Blake saying "ok...bye." The scene shows just how weak a personal foundation Teal has that she resorts to emotional blackmail rather than following her own teachings.

I came into this about 10mins in right when they made their first kill and the classic, "HE'S NOT BREATHING, MAAAAAAN!!" Oh, you boys! I guess it's always fun until someone loses and eye...or their life. They bicker about who dealt the death blow since, I suppose, that even when you're all beating the crap out of someone, the actual death only belongs to one person. Next, they jump into a car that breaks down and need water for the radiator. Whaddya know! One of the guys knows the wife and husband who live there! What would YOU do if you were on the run from Johnny Law? Try to rape the wife, right? DUH! Just their luck the husband comes and, oops, they kill both of them. And I swear that one of them says, "SHE'S NOT BREATHING, MAAAAAAAAN." Bad fight, bad fight. Bad fight...and the bad guys win in the end. JK.

This movie isn't one dimensional it half-dimensional. This isn't even up to a 80's Thailand war picture.

The only saving grace of this picture is that music completely overpowers most of the dialog so you don't haver to listen to how badly it's written and how miserable the acting is.

This movie answers the question: What if we made a movie with actors who had no charisma?

Synopsis: By 2025, COVID turned the world into an ill-defined totalitarian regime run by five people who hate freedom and Christianity. Four or five Christians manage to covert most of the world back in about six days or so using DVDs.

This is a prime example of a movie that could (and probably should) have been written by a precocious twelve year old. As it stands, it feels like they tried to Spinal Tap the dialog since so much of it is "um," "so," "yeah." Even lines that might have been written cannot be recited without either awkwardness or error. I could barely follow the pretty simplistic plot.

The plot, though, isn't the point. Fanatics made this movie for other fanatics. It's as if your uncles' and grandparents' FB feed sprung to life. The characters love to talk about "the good time" when their bibles weren't burned and they could hang out with friends at Bible Study. "My parents were Christians and we'd worship in our basement. But they couldn't stand the strain and killed themselves." Soooo...Their faith in God kinda sucked, I guess.

The whole movie is like this. It's one big strawman that they're too incompetent to knock down as witnessed that at the end the movie. German metrosexual writer/director/producer/editor AND "special effects" guy, Joshua Wesely fits perfect in the center of the void that is this movie. It's all just really misplaced ego. How egotistical? At the end, he's taken out and shot by the bad guys...and that's when the movie ends. It literally ends. There's no inspirational quote. There's no "Thanks to his efforts, by 2026 Jesus returned from Heaven and killed all the bad people." He's just dead. So, the Christians lost?

Most of the leads are Germans speaking English...kind of. And the Americans only kind of speak English, too. None of these people are actors. They hem and haw, look very uncomfortable and their posture is atrocious. If you're watching on Amazon Prime, be sure to turn on subtitles since it makes it even more hilarious. It must be an AI translation since, after a woman is shot, she's asked "Are you busy?" which should have said "Are you dizzy?' But she's sitting down when asked so, yet another pointless question. Another great line is, "(These christians) are dancing on your noses."

Throughout the whole movie, the HG Lewis trick of padding out the running time with long walks and the exciting and dramatic act of watching people praying or better yet....typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse.

NOTE: I'm giving this three stars so it doesn't end up on a worst of the year list here. I'd urge you not to give this atrocity money. There are always other ways to watch it.

There's a bunch of reviews on this movie that call it boring, hopeless, muddled and (in one case) de facto says that Parker Posey wrote the best line in the movie. Those people must have been playing Candy Crush or had some other reason for not paying attention.

This movie requires focus. A fair amount of focus. If you focus and think about it, it pays off. Fans of MCS or movies that spoon feed them will, as has been shown, hate this movie because it's a tone poem. The line that needs to be focused on, from the 2nd segment, is "Everyone has their own personal velocity. Every single story does just that. Do I care about the narration? No. I don't. It's from a book and some of the narration is critical to the understanding. If you tune it out you're going to miss a large chunk of it.

Given that a few people see this movie as "hopeless" I'll go over the segments briefly.

Delia was the unashamed high school slut who legitimately loved sex. At 17, a guy married her only to keep her away from other men. Over the course of having three kids he became aggressively abusive. She finally took the kids and left. After getting back on her feet and dealing with the guilt and remorse she never had as the high school slut, she lets some ineffectual loser drive her around for a bit and then jerks him off. She's recovering the sense of who she actually is and what made her happy.

Gretchen's dad was a powerful lawyer and she wanted to be him. She always thought he was moral. Driving home to tell him how Harvard Law Review published a paper of hers, she finds her dad is banging one of the junior partners, cheating on his current wife who he cheated on with his first wife. She's destroyed and stops caring about power. She takes a job editing recipe books until she gets a job editing a major authors work, which goes on to sell millions of copies and launches her as an A-list editor. She has regained her need for power.

Paula is a runaway who was taken in by man who helped her. The man whose walking her home is killed in an accident that should have killed her. She panics and starts driving. She picks up a hitchhiker, a teenage boy who she finds has been tortured. She's freshly pregnant and plans to abort it because she knows she can't care properly for it. It's not who she is. In the course of the segment, she winds up surprising herself and taking care of the teen like a mom. She wants to take him home to her boyfriend, who reluctantly agrees but tells her to take a train. Which she has to because the boy winds up stealing her car. It's unclear at the end whether the stress caused her to miscarry but either way, she's happy know that she can care for people.

It's a great movie and the performances are stunning. But, again, if you think The Notebook is deep, you'll probably hate it.

The guy likes to look in the mirror. The woman on the bed is only wearing panties. She goes to sleep and he wakes her up which she oddly doesn't mind. He gets up, puts a gun in his pants, takes the elevator, gets in his car.................and makes a phone call threatening a pedophile. The end. Literally. That's the plot and it ends with him huffing an puffing into the phone.

My first thought was why was he watching a video involving pedophilia? Also, how did he get the guy's number? Mostly, though, why do I care about any of this? There's nothing compelling about the static shots. There's nothing to dig into.

Save 5mins of your life and don't bother with this.

I missed the first 30mins (happily) but the set up seems to be that some girl from earlier in the series (Raven? I'm not sure) is talking to a psychiatrist in his...den? I'm really not sure what the room was supposed to look like. Everyone thinks she's crazy because she saw some murders take place so the whole movie consists of exposition and then flashing back to the murders.

The linear time is: She witnesses the murders The shrink writes her a scrip for anti-psychotics.

She decides to take two girlfriends into the wood to kill the guy.

Oh. And the killer wears a bad, evil clown mask.

The ONLY thing this movie has going to for it is an NC-17 sex scene featuring a couple with matching tattoos. The rest is horribly shot on video. It's either too dark to see or the white balance is way, way off.

How bad is the actual direction? There's a scene where one of the girls is being chased. It's a static shot. First the girl runs left to right. Then Mr. Killer Clown follows her. THEN, without seemingly moving the camera, the girl run right to left. Then Mr. KC. Again she runs left to right. There's like a 5 second pause before Mr. KC follows. The scene may have been lit with a MagLite.

It's also a perfect storm of really bad writing and really bad acting. It's really bad. Not fun, bad. Just bad.

Now I'm going to see if the cast and crew who gave this POS 10/10 have written glowing reviews.

Avoid this.

I don't get the hate on this movie. I missed the first 15mins (it was on B-Movie TV) so perhaps the setup is bad but I couldn't turn it off.

John Shea is one of the creepiest stalkers I've seen in a while. He's handsome, charming, a bit of a schlub and very charismatic. Pauline Kael once said that Dustin Hoffman was so great in Rainman because he finally didn't have to be bothered with other actors. But Shea uses this to great effect, clueless as to what's going on around him and set in his certainty that his cause is just and the world is there for him.

Nathalie Baye does a look with the thankless role of the victim. She's not an idiot, simpering and powerless. She takes control of a horrible situation and while it doesn't get better (and the script gives her bad choices) she's compelling to watch.

Richard Berry, Baye's incarcerated boyfriend, has possibly the worst role which is to sit behind plexiglass and try to look sympathetic...and he succeeds. His line readings are pretty amazing. He asks Baye if she's screwing anyone while he's in jail but it's not accusatory as much as it is resigned.

Some of the supporting cast is annoying and some of the scenes are contrived but the lead up to the final scene where Shea take Baye to slice her up is still steady and controlled. Shea's speech about what her death will feel like is chillingly comforting. He truly wants her to feel safe as she's dying and not be scared.

Is it action packed? No. It's not that kind of a movie. But it's claustrophobic and effective.

I came in maybe 1/4 into it on B-Movie TV. I thought, "Huh. Maybe I missed a bunch of plot because this make no sense." But I hadn't. It just makes no sense.

The woman's a cop (maybe?). The guy is a talk show host but I only know that from the synopsis. Again, didn't see it from the start, but I guess that's why he reached for his video camera...I mean...camcorder, puts it down and then picks up a GUN instead. Duuuuuuuude!

A girl is kidnapped by a Mexican dude 3 seconds after the kid waves hello to her as she rides her bike in the street. Oh. You didn't see that POS car RIGHT across from your kitchen window? Bad cop, no donut.

Apparently, they know who did it because they go straight the hideout...and get their asses kicked. I mean...brutally...for the next 45 minutes.

The man. woman and the bad guys all wind up in someone's back yard. The girl is sitting on a milk crate floating in a blow up boat in the middle of a pool that apparently the producers couldn't find the budget to clean. Mom, in possibly the least convincing maternal wail ever on screen says "mybabymyBAYbee" and continues to say this over and over again.

The bad guy has a deal: Talk Show Host will fight the seven guys there and every 30 secs fought, he'll poke a hole in the blow up boat....which is tiny and doesn't even look that deep. Look who's futile getting his ass kicked again!

The kid falls unconscious. They try to resuscitate her while Mom says (with little emotion) "breathe damn you." Then she feels badly because she "cussed" her kid.

More asskicking of the heroes. Some dude from Internal Affairs shows up out of nowhere talking about (in the middle of asskicking) "This won't look good on your record."

Asskicking...asskicking...asskicking...some new wave chick who shoots and walks like Robocop...well... more like Robo Vampire and then in the end...

Honestly I have no idea. My wife came in with the groceries so I turned it off.

(Pretty sure the kid died though)

(NO-OOT!)

Two brothers kill their parents and escape from death row. Fine. Got it. Pretty standard. They do a home invasion of a nice Christian family who just watched the news of the escape on TV. Mom and the two daughters (17 and 12) have crushes on the guys. Older sis has a shrine to one and has sex with him. Dad is tied up while his wife and the other brother throw darts at him. Dad slips his bonds to watch his wife have sex with the other brother...and just watches. The cops show up, raid the home and Dad kills most of them.

Yes. it's a family of psychos and the brothers picked the wrong house. But it's so poorly and confusingly done there's no real revelatory moment.

THEN we find out there a dungeon in the basement with at least 10 captives. And it all goes to hell after that. The lead cop also has a crush on one of the brothers. Dad has sex with his older daughter. There's a mutant transgendered guy who's never really explained. Everybody dies except one brother who then finds out....I'm not making this up...that the whole town is full of zombies. Yes. Zombies. Is this supposed to be a surprise ending? Because it's stupid.

"Um. How do we end this abortion?" "I...dunno...the town is full of zombie." "Sure. Whatever."

Honestly, a lot of this could be forgiven if it didn't take itself so #&$* seriously. There are looooooong, overwritten speeches that consist of pseudo-deep word salad that ALL of the characters have. Each speech sounds the same. One is about Juliet Lewis. One is about Michael Madsen. People recite poetry cuz...that's something people do. Are you sensing a pattern? That's right! The writer is REALLY edgy and deep. He wants to out stone Oliver Stone. Hard boiled. No morals. No mercy, maaaaaaaan. REAL #*$%'in life, maaaaaaan. He even stupidly puts in a commercial for action figures based on the brothers. But he fails to create a world where these things can exist. NBK actually created a world...it was a shallow world with no nuance, but it was a functional world. The folks who made this were either too dumb or too lazy to do that.

I'm adding a star because there's some good editing and the occasional glimpse of subtly. They pan past a single shotgun shell on the floor to indicate the clerk has been killed. It's well shot and lovely. The editing on the first sex scene goes on slightly longer than you feel it should which only increases the tension. Nicely done.

But, sadly, the majority of it is at the level of a precocious high-school student whose mom left him alone in the McMansion while she went on her third honeymoon. Don't bother with this unless you're under 14.

We open up on a car engine that doesn't start. Then cut to an adulterous affair in progress. The engine belongs to the husband of the wife who cheating on him and he's on his way home. This motif continues and the tension is outstanding. It's a great device. The husband seems like a nice guy, very plain but kind looking. He ends up walking home since the engine finally dies and watches his wife having sex through the window. And bad mouthing him as a wimp. He snaps. He hides out in the back seat of the lover's car. The lover drives away.

It's all set up so nicely, you don't really question the logic of the husband killing the lover as he stops to pick up a hitchhiker. Naturally, the husband as to catch the hitchhiker, which he does, and drives everyone to his home. I don't want to get into specifics, but it's a great scene. The husband plays it perfectly.

Then it all goes to hell.

He decides to rape the hitchhiker...who ends up loving it. NO. WRONG. Rape is never enjoyed by the one getting raped. Ever. Period. End of story.

But it gets dumber.

Two cops stop by the side of the road to look at the car that died. They drive to the husband's house. One cop walks into the house. He doesn't knock. He doesn't call out. He *literally* sneaks around the house like a burglar. He comes across a bloody scene...and keeps on looking around the He finds the hitchhiker in the shower...getting ready to masturbate. Because, ya know, that's what women do after they've been raped SO GOOD.

Oh. It's not stupid enough? Ok. The cop, still being quiet as a mouse, starts to take off his jacket looking as if he's going to (you guessed it) rape the hitchhiker.

What happens after that? It descends into more ridiculous fantasy ending with the hitchhiker know *exactly* what's wrong with the car and having the part to repair it in her coat pocket. Then she drives off.

What the hell happened here? It went from gripping psychological slasher film to a complete and utter disaster. There's no allegory here. There's no good reason for any of it to happen. He just ran out of plot and started making stuff up.

It's incredibly disappointing.