Reviews

This movie starts off promising, with a story about 3 government hitmen who deal with their morally-dubious job of killing anyone infected with an epidemic virus. It's the kind of story you can do pretty well in a low-budget movie, and I thought the 3 lead actors were pretty good (for B-movie standards). But the movie just falls apart with sloppy writing that makes no sense, really bad visuals, mind-numbing filler, and a couple of truly terrible actresses who drone on horribly.

It's just impossible to care about the plot: we have a super-virus spreading across the land, a virus whose victims act perfectly healthy & can outrun a trained killer for hours on end. We have government killers who are allowed to kill people as painfully as they choose... Why? And those killers get covered in blood, yet never get infected by this "super virus." That'd be OK for a comedy, but this is all played as serious drama!

The lighting is horrible in this movie, especially at the beginning when the light is blinking on the actors' faces, like they're trying to give you a headache. If you're looking for a gory horror, there are no fun visuals here.

Most of the movie is about the killers meeting in a hotel room & discussing their latest kills. They try to do some gritty film noir-ish banter on their grim work, and it's pretty okay stuff. But there's SO much filler, with constant repeated footage of 1 guy lighting his pipe, pointless random scenes of a random worker shoveling coal in a furnace (and never ever doing anything important), the typical wastes of film that B-movies use to drag out their runtime to 90 minutes.

The film's gritty lead actors are the selling point, so it really shoots itself in the foot by adding a cliched "pure perfect young pretty girl" who might create a cure for the virus. It's bad enough that we get this embarrassing schoolboy cliche of the idealized girl, but she's a rock-bottom awful actress, and of course she has horribly long tedious speeches.

It's a shame that the bad outweighs the good in this film, because the setup had a lot of promise. You get a young hotheaded killer, a brutal efficiency-obsessed one, and a weary older killer who's questioning his duty. It naturally makes you curious where these characters will go, and the answer is NOWHERE. After the setup, the movie just throws its hands in the air and gives up on any payoff. It tosses in a couple of comic relief actors who can't act, wastes time on them, and rolls the credits. It's a massive "screw you" to the audience.

I want to give this movie credit for its promising parts, but it just goes out of its way to waste the viewer's time. It's a frustrating watch, and that's worse than just being boring or incompetent.

This film had some OK potential, but unfortunately it's just a mess. It's your typical "kids wander into ghost town & discover zombies" plot. There are some fine makeup effects on the zombies and their attack scenes show some decent effort... but even these are undercut by goofy and confusing editing.

Sadly the film isn't all goofy. The first half is a real drag, with annoying characters who squabble on & on and never shut up. The girls especially are as annoying, spiteful and selfish as possible. At least it makes the audience happy when things go badly for these losers.

A lot of that is the director's fault, but honestly the actresses are just plain bad. One of them, "Misty," does that horrible lisping voice that you never hear in real life, but for some reason bad actresses love. Think of a swishing gay stereotype voice, except it's a woman doing it. Bad, bad casting.

For a movie that wastes so much time with nothing happening, it sure crams in a bunch of concepts that go nowhere. There's some drifter with an English accent who knows stuff about the town; a picture in a church suggests he was the local cult leader, but the guy just disappears from the movie. There are some military goons apparently chasing a Mexican killer into this town; wouldve been fun if the killer showed up, but nope. There's a preacher who sounds like Sam the Eagle and randomly shows up out of nowhere at the end. Misty and Ruben (2 of the loser protags) just kinda die off-camera, I guess. The movie tries to be a morality tale where the main characters are coping with their own guilt, but the characters are just too stupid to sell that idea.

Still, you'll get some chuckles from this movie. The character of Kevin is a mumbly, schlubby guy who gets the most dramatic lines. He's very miscast, but the way he says super-dramatic stuff in the most casual, wimpy way is pretty funny. And the bad editing has a few laugh-out-loud moments, especially Kevin's appearance in front of a cheap green-screen at the end.

It's not a total disaster, but this movie isn't laughable enough to reach "so bad it's good" territory, and it spends too much time being just plain boring. I don't think more time in the oven would've saved it... This one was just badly conceived, badly cast, and badly planned from the get-go.

This film seems to have gotten a cult following because the director and lead actor, Steve Buscemi, is such a likable celebrity. He has a quirky sense of humor and seems down-to-earth, so people enjoy watching a whole movie featuring him. But for someone who actually wants a good story or a well-made film, this movie is a tedious waste of time.

It's a slice of life movie about a down-on-his-luck guy trying to get a job and interacting with the other losers at the local bar. Like most slice of life films, it takes dramatic ideas (death, divorce, infidelity, family disputes) and plays them in low-key ways. In other films, this would feel relatable and lifelike, but everything just rings false in this movie. The dialogue constantly tries too hard to be clever and ironic, and the whole movie feels like it's on the verge of becoming a sitcom, before awkwardly remembering that it wants to be "dark and serious."

The relentless "clever" dialogue is something I've seen in lots and LOTS of amateur movies by first-time directors. If you've never seen anything like that, I guess it could have novelty value, but it's very generic rookie writing.

Buscemi over-directs his actors, and his style is extremely limited. You know how Buscemi often plays guys who are schlubby but still charming, with a wry sense of humor? Most characters in this movie drift into that type, because Buscemi has a hard time coaching them to play any other style. When a couple of black guys show up, Buscemi obviously realized he had no idea how to direct natural-sounding dialogue for these 2, so he backed off and let them do their own thing. It's like you're suddenly watching a different (and WAY more entertaining) movie, because these 2 guys were allowed to play their own characters instead of being over-directed. But the script still forces them to say a few "clever" lines that just sound stupid and unnatural, and it totally pulls you out of the scene.

A teen girl shows up, and she mostly just strikes generic poses and expressions to look cute or cool or glamorous, instead of, you know, ACTING. Buscemi the director has no clue how to create a teen girl character, and he's self-indulgent enough to just enjoy filming "that there purty girl." And of course, she's a major character who then has a romance with Buscemi's role. That's where the film goes from weak to straightup garbage. I want to see an actress who actually knows how to act & a director who actually gets a character from her, not this boring vapid pretty face. And it's just embarrassing seeing this homely 40-year-old man create a story where an idealized model-looking teen girl falls for him. It's pretty pathetic and reflects badly on Buscemi.

The tone is just plain phony overall. It tries to show gritty small-town life, but it's obvious that Buscemi has been isolated from that world for too long. It's like the film is self-consciously saying "hey look, this sure is different from the glitzy Hollywood lifestyle" instead of just taking inspiration from reality. A young 20-something director who's coming fresh from a small town could portray it well, but at this point in his life, Buscemi was too out of touch with that setting and atmosphere. "Phony" sums it up.

The pacing is disjointed and lousy. You get some decent low-key scenes followed by pointless skits that would work in a TV show but just feel tedious and pointless in a movie. There are other smaller complaints one could make, like Buscemi's drawn-out dialogue scene where he's eating peanuts and making loud, annoying slurping noises during his entire speech. Overall, this movie just doesn't do anything right.

A lot of people cut this movie some slack because they like Buscemi, but it's simply a bad film. It's full of sloppy, stupid, and amateurish mistakes that would be forgivable coming from a 20-year-old director with no experience of storytelling or filmmaking, but Buscemi doesn't have that excuse.

This movie has some of Argento's signature visual style, but it's just plain amateur, with incredibly bland, dislikable characters and a totally aimless story that quickly falls apart. Everything great about Argento's other movies is missing here: it fails at suspense, pacing, character development, and a twist ending. It could be worth a glance if you're curious about giallo history, but if you actually want a good story, this movie is just plain stupid and even insulting to its audience.

A lot of reviews on here absolutely gush about this film, and it's clear that many people love Argento's movies just for their visual style. But that is NOT enough to make a movie good! This movie isn't a slideshow of pretty pictures, it's a murder mystery, and its story is an embarrassing failure. Ignoring its huge flaws does everyone a disservice, including Argento, who sets a way higher bar with his other movies.

The plot is extremely simple: Our hero, Roberto, notices a strange man stalking him. He confronts the man and accidentally kills him while a masked figure takes photos of the murder. The photographer then threatens Roberto, murders the people around him, but strangely doesn't demand any blackmail. It would all be very mysterious, except for two things: 1) the villain obviously has a woman's voice, and 2 of the 3 female characters get killed off. Gee, I wonder who the villain could be. And 2) the movie tells us WAY too early that the villain was a former mental patient, so we know there's no clever revenge motive, the killer is just cuckoo.

A better film such as Argento's "Deep Red" gives us varied little glimpses into the killer's past, so at the end we have this great "aha!" moment of understanding how those images fit together. But in "Four Flies," Argento hadn't learned "show, don't tell" yet. So the killer just gives a cliched villain speech at the end, where she exposits her motivation in the most heavyhanded way possible, but she just tells us the same info we got from the insane asylum scenes earlier! It's not just hack writing, it's botching the most basic stuff.

So there's no setup to the mystery, and the payoff falls flat on its face. Besides that, the movie is mostly a disjointed mess of pointless time-wasting scenes. Our plank-of-wood "hero" Roberto never takes any action. He spends a lot of time saying the same whiny, mopey things over and over and over. But he also throws parties with his lame comic relief friends, and he keeps playing drums with his band. In fact, Roberto is such a brainless moron, he seems to totally forget about the whole "serial killer stalking me and my friends" thing, and he spends a totally carefree, jolly time rocking out with his bandmates while his girlfriend gets brutally stabbed to death.

Mind you, she tried calling him in the nick of time, and he could've saved her life, but he brushed her off because he was having too much fun. Oh, and she got murdered because he left her alone in his apartment, which he knows the killer has already repeatedly broken into. Great hero and great script, eh?

Roberto expresses no remorse for getting his girlfriend killed through his total stupidity, but that's OK because he's the "good guy" and we're just supposed to root for him. Oh, and also he's married (and strongly implied to be leeching off his wife's money) and instantly seduced this other girl the moment his wife's back was turned. That's a charmless scene, where Roberto gropes and paws at the girl despite her angry protests. She rightly calls him a pig, but she instantly falls for him anyway. Literally, there's a jump cut and she instantly goes from acting disgusted to being his obedient pet. It's like a 14-year-old virgin's fantasy, where he has no idea how he could actually seduce someone, so he just skips over that part. And after he's gotten his kicks from this girl, she's conveniently killed off. It's really really pathetic stuff. At points like this, the film goes from merely dumb to insulting and embarrassing.

There are a couple atmospheric chase scenes, and the film does deserve credit for being stylish and a bit surreal in these parts. The scene where Amelia, Roberto's maid, goes to a park and becomes increasingly fearful is the highlight of the movie. But these brief pieces can't compensate for what a sloppy, dumb mess the rest of the film is.

There's a reason this film is lesser-known. A lot of the reviews on here are misleading because they're written by hardcore Argento fans, but this film falls very short of Argento's usual standards. And even ignoring the director's other films, this is just an amateurish B-movie by any standard. If you've seen all the famous giallo movies and you're curious about the weaker ones, then this film would be interesting. But otherwise, you should spend your time on something better.

This movie is a godawful misstep in Polanski's career. It deserves to be infamous as an example of a talented person making a misguided mess of a film, much like "Nothing But Trouble," "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu," "Hudson Hawk," or "Ishtar."

But for some reason, people praise this movie out of blind fanboyism for Polanski. Based on the reviews, you'd think this would be some hugely influential laugh riot, but there's a very good reason you never ever hear people discuss this film as an influence, or quote it, or describe funny scenes from it. It's a horribly unfunny film, with lame 1-dimensional characters and godawful pacing.

There's not much to the plot: a dorky yet boring professor and his incredibly bland assistant (played by Polanski himself, who was so busy directing that he forgot to give his own role any personality) show up at an inn, hang around doing nothing, and eventually go defeat a totally generic vampire. It's all just a backdrop for a string of slow, incredibly lame clown acts: dorky middle-aged men mug at the camera, fall down, do a "funny walk" for no reason, then fall down again, then mug some more. Most of these "funny" scenes have barely any dialogue or music, making it all the more dull and boring. Some reviews call this approach "subtle," but that really doesn't apply when every joke is "man make funny face" or "man get hit in head."

This movie really doesn't have comedy, it just has the kind of clowning that would amuse a 3-year-old or a drunken hillbilly. This is also part of the pacing problem: just when something finally starts happening, the movie slows down so someone can fall down, or the professor can describe how bats fly while hopping up and down. That last bit in particular is presented like it's some totally hilarious gut-buster. It doesn't help that every single gag just drags on until it fizzles out; even vaudeville actors understood clever snappy pacing, but this film feels amateur in the worst ways.

The camerawork also spends a lot of time at the beginning going "hey look, women have boobs! Have you ever noticed that? It's a totally wacky new idea to us!" I'm serious, there aren't any jokes or sexual innuendoes, no emotional tension. Polanski just focuses the shots on boobs like a 15-year-old virgin who just figured out how to work a camera. Yeah, real "subtle and mature" movie, guys.

After 25 whole minutes (I am not exaggerating, it seriously wastes that much of your time) the movie remembers it has "vampire" in the title, so a vampire finally attacks and the plot begins. Then they meet the most generic and boring Dracula-type vampire ever, plus his son, who is also generic but comes with some lame gay jokes. Not innuendoes, that would be clever; it's just "haha, gay men exist, isn't that hilarious?" Sadly, this makes him the only character with more than 1 personality trait.

That's all there is; the plot doesn't reward you for sitting through all the godawful barely-even-jokes. People call this film a parody of vampire stories or the Hammer Horror movies, but it really isn't. A parody builds on stories by adding clever twists & looking at those stories in a different light. Breaking the rules can lead to something fresh & new! But this movie marches backwards into the most brainless & lame jokes, and it just sticks them into a totally cliche and bland vampire story. It's way, way less creative or interesting than the material it's supposedly parodying. Everything about it is unbelievably mindless.

And no, having some pretty sets doesn't somehow make it a good movie. A flop like "Hudson Hawk" did vastly more creative and impressive stuff with its sets, and that doesn't magically make it a good film. And the sets in "Vampire Killers" are totally generic, with nothing innovative or fresh. The ridiculous number of reviewers saying things like "most beautiful film I've ever seen" must spend the rest of their time watching no-budget soap operas.

There just isn't any redeeming feature to this movie. It's a film that assumes you're an idiot, so it doesn't only waste your time, it insults you every step of the way. Polanski didn't just fumble, he made a truly terrible little movie here.

Even an infamously unfunny and stupid flop like "Ishtar" at least had SOME grasp of comedic timing and characters. And failures like "Hudson Hawk" or "Nothing But Trouble" are garbage & hard to watch, but they at least have way more creativity. With movies like that, you can say "I can see what they were going for, and you could fix this movie if you tweaked it enough." But "The Fearless Vampire Hunters" is completely mindless, just pure cliches and stupidity all the way to its core. It's a pathetic excuse for a movie, a reminder that talented people sometimes totally fail and make pure dreck. Polanski does not deserve a free pass.

This TV movie has stylish animation, and there was clearly ambition here, but the result is an awkwardly-paced, surprisingly dull film.

The plot is simple: Boy genius Dexter travels through time, teams up with 3 of his future selves (young adult Dexter, middle-aged Dexter, and elderly Dexter), and then they stop his rival Mandark from taking over the world.

As an adventure, it's very disappointing. The interesting parts are all told in flashback, so most of the movie is Dexter passively wandering from one setting to the next, just looking at the situation and hearing some horribly tedious explanation about it. They took "time traveling boy genius on a quest to save the world" and made him the most boring character they possibly could.

Mandark is the only other real character in the movie, and he's in "completely generic villain" mode with nothing remotely interesting about him.

The movie basically has 2 notes: occasional action scenes, and lots of long scenes where characters talk and talk and TALK and TALK. This could be OK if the dialogue was funny, but most of it just repeats points that we could already see onscreen, like the writers thought it was a radio play. It's also a problem that a TON of dialogue goes to "young adult Dexter," whose voice is like nails on a chalkboard. I found myself skipping through scenes where the characters droned on and on and on, just wishing that they'd actually do something fun or interesting with the time travel gimmick. The tedious, talky writing was a gigantic misstep that bogs down the entire movie.

The creators put more effort into the action scenes, but even these are dull and forgettable... Dexter runs away from generic baddies, he fights the pretty wimpy Mandark at the end, and he smashes some robots who stand there waiting to be beaten. Action isn't fun when you're defeating such lame bad guys.

For me, the biggest letdown was that Dee Dee is barely in the movie. The original series worked entirely because Dexter and Dee Dee were a great double act who played off each other so well. There's so much you could do with Dee Dee getting involved in a time-traveling adventure! And a stoic character like Dexter *needs* a fun foil, especially in a 50-minute runtime. But since Dee Dee has only one line in the whole film, and it sounds like a recycled sound clip from the show, I'm guessing that her voice actress couldn't take part. It's a real shame.

The creators clearly got the VAs for Dexter's parents to do a couple lines, but they chose not to use those fun characters either. If the series was like a tasty stew of varied flavors, this movie is like a bowl of plain oatmeal.

I honestly wouldn't recommend this movie to fans of the show. Almost everything that made the show fun and great is gone, and the only reason to see this is the animation style. (And honestly, the style peaks in the opening seconds, with a very cool and classy black-and-white sequence of Mandark in silhouette. Nothing else in the movie looks as good as that first part.)

There just isn't much entertainment value here. Only bother watching it if you're really curious, or if you're studying the creators' overall work.

This is an extremely entertaining claymation film with a heavy focus on snappily-paced comedy. It parodies a number of horror classics, primarily The Exorcist: you have your priest suffering from a crisis of faith, and a demon child picking off hapless adults in hilariously over-the-top and gory ways. It's an "anything for a joke" film, and the comedy really shines.

Most of this film focuses on one comedic setpiece after another: a satirical montage of celebrity-obsessed media; slapstick death scenes full of cartoon gore; a terrific otherworldly seance; the list goes on, while the movie does a good job building the tension and showing the demon child's family growing more and more desperate. There isn't a lot to explain here because it's easy to understand what works, and the creators did a great job on these aspects!

On a technical level, there's a lot to appreciate. The use of color, creative camera angles, and strong shot composition are excellent throughout the film! They give the whole thing a surreal atmosphere that can be playful or intense when the film needs. The creators are clearly excellent craftsmen who brought their A-game visually. It's honestly an excellent example of the bold art direction you can only achieve in stop-motion, and I think there's a lot of inspiration here for aspiring animators to learn from.

Unfortunately, the story fizzles out at the end. Way too late in the movie, we're introduced to a generic demon so the film can do a CG finale sequence. The shift from fantastic claymation to janky CG is a huge step down, and the sequence drags on without being very funny or dramatic. I wish they had 1-upped the entire joke of the movie by revealing that there was no demon, and this kid really was just a rotten brat with psychic powers. In a goofy "anything for a joke" movie, a sardonic twist would've been way more appropriate than a clumsy CG showdown.

The awkward ending makes the other flaws stand out. (The priest's complex personal crises, as well as the boy's mother mourning her husband, both get a ton of buildup but are resolved like the flip of a switch. The film spends a lot of time making us hate a corrupt bishop character, then it just gets rid of him in a hasty anticlimax.) It's unfortunate that the film ends on a letdown, because for most of its run, this movie is an extremely well-crafted laugh riot, filled with excellent visuals, top-notch claymation, and extremely creative slapstick gags.

Still, overall this movie is an extremely fun ride. Its one real goal is to entertain you, and it does an admirable job! The finale is a sore spot, but even with that flaw, the film is still a solid 8/10. I highly recommended it to anyone looking for a madcap horror parody or fans of stop-motion animation!

I enjoyed Anderson's past films, but this one was such a godawful disappointment that I have to warn you: don't waste your money on this shallow, lazy movie. It's a shame to see Anderson fall off so badly. A lot of people have brand loyalty to Anderson as a Hollywood name, but if you care about a film's actual merits, you'll be happier watching one of the French New Wave or black-and-white classics that Anderson cheesily references in this aimless, mindless consumer product.

The kindest phrase for this movie is "half-baked." It's divided into three stories, each narrated by a different writer from the titular news journal. Dividing a film into three smaller stand-alone stories is a new approach for Anderson, and he botched it pathetically. He has enough content and ideas for three 10-minute stories, but instead he stretched them each out to 3 times that length, without adding any depth or substance.

To make things worse, you spend the entire movie listening to pompous, vapid characters narrating and trying way too hard to sound clever. If Anderson had combined the writers into a single character, maybe this role could've had some depth, but instead the film is dominated by three paper-thin characters who all talk like a college freshman wannabe-author. So this movie isn't just awkwardly paced, it's annoying as all getout. If someone told me this script was the first draft with no revisions or improvements, I'd believe them.

It really feels like Wes Anderson wrote a big notebook of ideas, then he just adapted it into a film. Instead of deciding on a key story or theme and asking "what can I add that will make it stronger," Anderson just asked "wouldn't I look totally clever if..." and piled on the gimmicks. The first story is about a mad artist and the art dealer who profits from his work. Do we learn what makes the artist tick? Does the film make us feel any strong emotions about him? Are we supposed to care about the art dealer's greed? No, of course not. The point of the segment is just "look at this art dealer promoting the madman's work! Isn't that just so quirky?" And that might have been fine at half the length, but the segment drags this one-note idea on and ON, hitting you over the head with the same concept long after it's gotten old.

The story BRIEFLY toys with heavier ideas, touching on the cruelty of the madman and his sorrow at being imprisoned for life, but it also has cartoonishly silly ideas that are just plain stupid, such as a prisoner routinely bribing a fat guard with candy. The silly parts seem to be Anderson's way of saying "don't take any of it too seriously!" which gives him a cheap excuse to avoid making any worthwhile point.

The second story is even worse, about students from a private school rebelling against the faculty, then the entire city. First the boys simply demand that the school allow them to visit the girls' dorm. But then they form a huge youth movement that clearly wants something bigger... but the movie never bothers to explain their new goal. What are the stakes? How are we supposed to sympathize with these characters?

You could argue that the segment is a satire about "rebels without a cause," but the film never makes any point about the teens' naivety. The rebels are mostly a bunch of obnoxious pseudo-intellectual teens (accompanied by an equally flaky journalist) who never shut up, and Anderson seems to think they're really cool and entertaining. It honestly feels like something a sheltered teen would write, and I assume that's the target audience here.

This segment is so stupid, it doesn't even have a plot. There's a hasty last-second line about the youth movement splitting into factions and collapsing, but this means absolutely nothing since the script is too lazy to flesh out what the different students actually wanted. It's like an amateurish student film, awkward and incredibly lazy but convinced it's clever.

The first couple segments also feature some of Anderson's aloof women who act like robotic aliens. In past films, Anderson has had some steely women whose relatable depths and complexities become clear as we watch them, but in this movie, the characters are total cardboard cutouts. The prison guard in the "mad artist" segment is the worst offender; she's directed as a robot, plain and simple. It's always been clear that some immature part of Anderson still views women as "strange foreign creatures," and it is embarrassingly clear in this film.

But at least his women do active and dynamic things in the story. In the third segment, Anderson self-consciously points out that the writer is gay, and so, despite being a very wealthy, successful, extremely respected, and highly privileged man, the character is a passive wimp who doesn't take any action in his own story. The character is clearly confident about his sexuality, mentioning it casually in his public articles, but Anderson adds a scene where this highly privileged man (in a city where most people are shown to be poor and struggling) mopes about being gay and misunderstood. In this film, Anderson doesn't bother showing any sympathy for the gaunt streetwalkers who have to sell their bodies just to survive, but he has to stereotype the gay man as weak, pitiful, and ineffectual, no matter how obviously empowered the guy actually is. Anderson's attempt at open-mindedness just reveals his own insulting prejudice, not to mention his disregard for the suffering of the poor while the wealthy praise themselves.

Without a good story or sincere concepts to explore, all Anderson has is his stable of gimmicks. And when he trots them out over and over, you begin to realize what an annoying and flimsy crutch they really are.

Everything about this movie is shallow, underdeveloped, and half-baked. Some shots make references to classic old films, but so what? If you reference good movies in your lazy, twee, forgettable movie, you just make your audience wish they were watching one of those original films.

Do yourself a favor, and watch literally any film that the director made because he wanted to share something significant. Don't watch this product that came from a complacent Hollywood has-been, surrounded by yes-men, resting on his laurels, and churning out an insulting imitation of his earlier work.

"The Editor" is a big pile of references to old Italian giallo films that, in the end, just doesn't stand on its own two legs. You have a murder mystery that isn't very satisfying, but the whole thing is just there to prop up the movie's string of references.

This movie feels like an awkward teen who sees something cool, then won't shut up about it, referencing it over and over again to remind you that he's totally hip now. And these giallo references are very superficial and entry-level, with no clever twists that build on them. Oh look, there's bright primary-color lighting and badly-dubbed voices just like in giallo movies, who could've seen that coming?

The film's awkward teen vibe also shows up whenever it tries to be "adult." Italian giallo often used sexy content in an urbane way that could be both beautiful and gritty. Those classic Euro filmmakers were totally comfortable and familiar with the human body. But The Editor's Canadian filmmakers clearly think it's an exciting novelty to show nudity onscreen, like a bunch of virginal boys who think the human body is totally naughty. There's this cringe-inducing sense of "tee-hee, I can't believe we just showed some T&A, ohmygawd" throughout. Unless you're still in high school yourself, it's just embarrassing to watch.

The thing that really sinks this film though is the godawful acting. The two lead male actors are supposed to be a bit hammy, but again there's absolutely nothing clever here. It just comes across as stupid when one is doing a lousy accent and the other acts like a college improv student. Udo Kier and Laurence R Harvey appear in small roles and actually *act* instead of just hamming, and they just make you wish you were watching a movie where the other actors made an effort too.

The actresses though are simply atrocious. I honestly wasn't sure if they were doing bad, cheesy acting on purpose too, or if they really were just random wannabes hired for their looks. It's clear that the filmmakers were more thrilled about making the actresses strike extremely generic sexy poses instead of actually playing characters. It's a double-whammy of failure from both the director and the actresses.

If you're a big fan of Udo Kier, you can easily skip to his scene in the middle of the movie, so that's convenient. Overall, this film isn't shockingly bad or anything. It just feels like the filmmakers' money would've been better spent on just about anything else.

This review will go into the film's merits as well as its most gaping flaw.

By now, you've surely seen many movies and shows that imitate or reference this classic horror. So you might wonder: can it still surprise you and thrill you, or is all the surprise ruined like Rosebud in Citizen Kane? Simply put, it's a thrill alright. This film is full of utterly unique and creatively creepy ideas that have never been successfully imitated. You can tell the cast and crew put a ton of energy into this production; the dream scenes are both extremely spooky and just plain fun.

The film doesn't beat around the bush or give you infodumps about how the nightmares work. It just jumps into its Twilight Zone concept, truly embracing its genre of horror-fantasy. It piques your imagination and puts you on the edge of your seat during the tense parts, especially in the claustrophobic cat-and-mouse finale. Almost 40 years later, the film's style still feels like an innovative breath of fresh air.

By now, you surely know the premise: a killer stalks teens in their nightmares, and when they die in their dreams, they die in real life--often in very bloody and messy ways, at that! So the plot is a thrill, but what about themes? The story's themes are pretty familiar territory for slashers. But when you step back and look at the film's meta-themes, there is some darker, deeper stuff at work here.

For instance, if you're watching as an adult, you'll probably notice how exploitative the film is towards its teen actors. The movie is glad to give glamorous shots of half-naked teens, showing off the boys' muscles and as much as they could of the girls--after all, we all know sex sells. But this is a movie where the villain is a child molester who sexually assaults teens onscreen; the villain's actions are presented as evil, yet director Wes Craven (a middle-aged 45 year old man when he made this film) is utterly shameless in objectifying his teens for profit.

This hypocrisy is utterly disgusting. If you're actually thinking while you watch the film, you will probably find that its exploitation (and lack of integrity) is a huge drawback that makes it harder to enjoy the movie.

And so, if you really want to enjoy this film, it works best to view it as a meta-horror. It is a psychological tale of a director, Wes Craven, a middle-aged man who makes a movie about his idealized, sexy teens. He creates a scene where two teens have cartoonishly loud, screaming sex while a virgin boy listens obsessively--a scene that clearly reflects Wes' own intense preoccupations. We see a dirty old man living out both his sexual fantasies and his sexual insecurities through teens, like a stunted Peter Pan wannabe who never accepted his own adulthood.

That statement might sound like a stretch, but it simply isn't--Wes' rejection of adulthood is on full display here. He portrays every single adult in the film as a useless loser or an adversary. In appearance, the adults all range from frumpy and homely to downright monstrous, making the teens even MORE idealized in comparison. The heroine is Craven's flawless dream girl: smart and brave but also vulnerable and fine with getting half-naked for his camera. We never even learn about the characters' interests; she is just Craven's tool. He presents her as sexy, but it's important that she's virginal because that childlike innocence makes her more exciting to Craven. Craven's next step is making a villain who embodies all of his dirty-old-man qualities, allowing him to self-flagellate but also revel in his sleaziness, entertaining people with it, making it charming and fun. His idealized girl degrades and dominates Craven's shame-avatar Freddy... and yet Freddy gets what he wants in the end.

If you just take the film as a story, it has some great spooky scenes and a tense, satisfying ending. If you take the film as a whole, then its exploitation will detract from its appeal. But if you take it as a meta-story about a twisted director who exploits teens, self-flagellates for it, but ultimately embraces his sleaziness because it's profitable, you will find some a thought-provoking psychological tale here (as well as a shining example of Hollywood's usual hypocrisy).

Whether you enjoy this film for the surreal, gory spectacle or for its meta-narrative value, I can confidently recommend it for sheer horror value.

Cybernator is a terrible terrible movie. If you can laugh at B movie incompetence, then this will be right up your alley!

The movie is packed with goofs a-plenty: the weird background noises when the actors are talking; the moment in the showdown when the villain pauses, checks his mic, then carries on with the scene; the hilariously dorky cyborgs (one of whom has a high-tech cyber-chin); the cartoonish rubber-faced acting from our "hunky" male lead; the list goes on. The film's main cyborg, Captain Hair, has a laughable, scream-filled death scene reminiscent of Bela Lugosi getting killed by a fake, immobile octopus in Bride Of The Monster.

Thanks to the hammy actors and schlocky visuals, this film doesn't get boring. Despite having some obvious padding scenes, it stays entertaining throughout, which is a feat for a B-movie. The final showdown has a lot of talking, but William Smith as the smug villain is so entertaining, and both characters are so totally bumbling that even this scene is a hoot. (At one point, the villain is strangling the life out of the hero... then just quits and starts to wander away while still talking to him, as if he just got bored with the strangling and forgot to keep it up.)

Fans of Invader Zim might recognize Captain Hair from his little cameo in that cartoon. ("What I'm trying to say, sirrrrr...") If the creators of Zim enjoyed this movie, that's quite an endorsement if you ask me!

This film follows a loose plot about some teens finding a cursed book that makes spooky things happen. The teens start to get picked off one by one, and eventually the 2 main characters manage to end the curse. It's a cookie-cutter plot with decent possibilities, but this lazy movie just doesn't give you anything interesting or clever.

Besides the slightly quirky and goofy Austin Zajur as Chuck, I found all of the acting to be your usual teen fare, in other words, bad. The teens spend most of their time trying to show cheesy anxiety or just smiling like fashion models while delivering infodumps. Of course, this is largely the director's fault for getting such a schlocky performance from the young actors.

Ultimately this movie is like cheesy old shows such as Are You Afraid of The Dark, Goosebumps, or made-for-TV family horrors like "Tower of Terror," except this film has a teen focus along with modern tropes & cliches.

And cliches are something it has in spades. Every single character is completely flat and 1-dimensional. I couldn't care about any of the main characters, despite spending a ton of time watching them just hang out. I especially hated how bland & generically cute the two leads are (the boy, Ramon, is supposed to be a tough drifter but looks like a rich, airbrushed metrosexual), and how they survive at the end for no reason other than being the central characters. There's also a stuck-up girl who survives, presumably because if you're pretty, you're not allowed to die in this movie. (That's the level of braindead Hollywood cliches we're dealing with here.)

Now for the BIGGEST PROBLEM of this film: The vast majority of the runtime is just these boring, shallow characters standing around and talking. Seriously, they just stand there, not doing anything interesting, and they just drone on and on and ON and ON. Was it too hard to write some interesting actions for them to do under the dialogue? Apparently. And all this does is waste your time, since the endless talking never makes you care about the loser characters or the paper-thin plot.

Some people have praised the effects and creatures in this film, but I thought the CG looked incredibly dated and godawful. Many of the CG effects (especially spiders in one scene) look like something from fifteen years ago, which is just embarrassing. And obviously it ruins any scary impact those scenes might have. Besides the pale lady (who's honestly an extremely generic Tim Burton style rotund character), all the creatures in this movie were very boring to look at: you have a scarecrow and a couple zombie things.

So if you want cool or scary visuals, you will be completely let down. And since the film drops the ball on that score, there's really nothing left to redeem it.

Oh right, and the movie takes place in 1968. All this amounts to is some incompetently shoehorned references to Vietnam and Nixon. It feels like it was written by a twenty-something who didn't do any research on the '60s and instead just used the most obvious references he'd learned from pop culture.

This is honestly one of the laziest movies I've seen in a long time. I give it 2 stars instead of 1 because it isn't outright offensively bad. But you should stay far away from this cheesefest.

I went in hopeful for this movie. The bare-bones approach of just having 2 actors who mostly chitchat was promising; I figured this movie would be about compelling characters who build suspense without any fancy gimmicks. I was only right about one thing: instead of fancy gimmicks, this film uses lazy, zero-effort gimmicks.

The story is simple: an amateur filmmaker is hired to tape a home movie of a weird guy named Josef. Josef claims that he has cancer and wants this movie to be a memento for his son, but it's obvious from the get-go that he's lying & has something to hide. It could've been a fine setup for a psychological tale about an interesting character.

But instead, Josef isn't a character. He's just a vehicle for random "crazy" antics that feel like something from a youtube skit made by teenagers. He does idiotic things like putting on a wolf mask and growling while rubbing his butt against a door, or telling a lame "Creative Writing 101" story about his wife's sexual deviancy, or stealing a lock of the filmmaker's hair while he's asleep. It's the kind of thing that every wacky "creepy" character does in a lame comedy, except here it's actually played straight. In the second half of the film especially, he turns into a generic "creepy gay stalker" like something out of Family Guy. He also does lots and LOTS of cringe-inducing, meaningless """clever""" monologues, and they all sound like they were written by sheltered college freshmen who watch too much TV.

This film is honestly really pathetic, because it's like someone tried to make a horror movie based on postmodern horror references in pop culture, instead of learning from actual horror films. I can't believe so many reviewers actually call this movie scary and "deep." Do all these people live under a rock? If you've viewed any media from the past twenty years, then this movie is just a third-rate imitation of things you've seen before.

The other character, the filmmaker, really isn't a character at all. He's a boring nobody who's just there so Josef can screw around with him. That's right: the creators were so lazy, they could only create one gimmicky half-character, so our "hero" has exactly zero personality traits.

Don't believe any of the hype you hear about this lazy time-waster. If you like cliches and unoriginal things with no subtlety, you'll enjoy this movie. The only good thing I can say about it is that it's mercifully short, at a little over 70 minutes.

Horror anthologies have a lot of potential; they can allow directors to experiment with unusual ideas, and the short format of each segment often makes for nice, snappy pacing. Unfortunately, "German Angst" only offers half-baked, shallow ideas with awkward, disappointing pacing.

The first segment, "Final Girl," is a minimalistic tale of a young girl who sits around in her apartment and sometimes tortures her bound-and-gagged father. This could have been an interesting character portrait, but the actress playing the girl is utterly robotic and dull. Unlike the rather tragic and complex characters seen in Buttgereit's other films, this girl is a faceless cypher with no personality. There is a brief bloody death scene, but that's no substitute for an actual horror story.

The second segment, "Make A Wish" attempts a heavyhanded message but winds up being very muddled. This one is about a young deaf-mute Polish couple who get attacked by thugs. The lack of sympathetic characters is a big problem here, too: we're supposed to sympathize with the couple, but we learn nothing about their personalities. They frankly come across as vapid, upper-class idiots, since the man looks downright preppy, and they both think it's a jolly fun idea to wander alone into an abandoned building that's covered in street gangs' graffiti.

This short attempts to make a social commentary about the suffering of Poles in Germany, but it shoots itself in the foot by stereotyping the working-class characters as scary, psychotic villains. Hardly an open-minded portrayal.

This short also features a flashback to a WWII scene where nazis invade Poland and kill a farmer's family. I guess this scene was supposed to be shocking, but the violence and villainy are so over-the-top that it felt very cartoonish. When the nazis come zooming in on motorcycles, you KNOW they're evil because there's a dramatic shot of them running over a tin can! This segment is bound to get some laughs from the more irreverent audiences, as some unintentionally-goofy piano music kicks in, the Colonel Klink-esque commander yells a lot and grins like Snidely Whiplash, and the nazis slap everyone around with all the subtlety of a high school improv troupe.

In the end, this short pulls an "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" cliche, and that's the height of its creativity. When they finally attempt to make a "deep" message, they resort to a character expositing straight into the camera. I could hardly believe they used such an amateurish hack move.

The third and final short is "Alraune." It's the most decent of the bunch, and if you actually want a spooky story, skip to the 58-minute mark to watch this one.

Unlike the first two shorts, "Alraune" understands the value of suspense and piquing the viewer's imagination. This one is about a guy who discovers a mysterious sex club which turns out to harbor a supernatural secret; most of the short is about building up the mystery surrounding the club, so this is some engaging stuff that keeps you intrigued. This short also has the only scene that actually delivers on the horror; there's a scene involving a bathtub that is both spooky and visceral.

That said, "Alraune" is a decent short but still very flawed. Again, the main character is utterly unsympathetic. The lead actor is embarrassingly hammy, like a past-his-prime action hero wannabe. At the club, we briefly see some other characters who aren't nearly as weird or creepy as the movie thinks they are. The elderly host of the club is the best character in the film, but too much of his dialogue consists of "you can't understand our secrets" cliches.

The worst aspect is the climactic scene, which is the big monster reveal.It's fine to only show your monster briefly; less is more, after all. But it's a seriously lazy, stupid gimmick to violently shake the camera around during the entire scene. It doesn't make the scene more intense or scary, it's just an annoying crutch that takes you out of the moment. After that, instead of ending on a high note, the film awkwardly fizzles out with a few final scenes, ending everything on a very weak note.

I had really hoped for some creative and spicy material from this film, but the whole thing is just plain tepid and disappointing. It simply fails to live up to an anthology's potential.

This film gets a very bad rap, and understandably so. But the fact remains that it's an entertaining flick, for what it's worth.

It's clear that the filmmakers knew this was Vilmer's movie. It's not really about Leatherface or chainsaw-based terror. The creators put all their eggs in one basket, and that's the character of Vilmer, played by Matthew McConaughey: he's a completely fun, over-the-top psycho who obsessively delights in scaring teens. Literally every other character in the film exists to support his performance in some way.

And there's the problem: A big chunk of the film takes place before Vilmer shows up, and it just follows extremely generic teens who spend too much time 1) whining and 2) wandering around the woods while nothing happens. There are some funny lines, but they're too few and far between; it's a big problem when the original TCM was made by amateurs in the 1970s yet had way better pacing & more interesting characters.

The pacing is the number 1 problem with this film. It drags and drags one-note scenes out for way too long; some of them are boring, while others are supposed to be tense (like the chase scenes) but just feel stupid because they're so dull.

And it's a shame, because this movie's heart is in the right place. As mentioned, the bonkers character of Vilmer is a treat, but the ironic twists in the film have a lot of potential too. I loved the moments where the victims say something really understated in the middle of being menaced. I loved the scene where Vilmer's girlfriend meekly hits a victim with a stick before politely giving up. I loved the scene where a teen locks himself in the villains' house and thinks he's outsmarted his captors; it would have been great to see that wiseass character deal with the situation some more, but he's killed off way too fast--And that's a perfect example of the movie's problems.

It has a few really good ideas, but it needed another rewrite to really expand on them and use them well. Everything is just half-baked and never really delivers; there's no satisfaction or punchline to anything. For instance, Vilmer talks about how much he loves scaring people, so why are his first 2 kills so incredibly boring & lame?

On top of that, the execution is just incompetent, with terrible lighting and really drab, dull scenes of characters bumbling around in extremely boring locations. There's absolutely no atmosphere or spookiness to the woods, and everything just looks really bland. And there's really no reason for Leatherface to be in this movie; he's just there because the director thought a "creepy transvestite" would be a novel, mind-blowing concept... which it isn't.

It's a movie that had potential and could've been really good. But Kim Henkel simply wasn't competent enough to make it work, and the result is a mess that's just boring too much of the time. All the same, I definitely enjoyed this more than the 1986 TCM 2; while this movie had its heart in the right place and was botched by bad execution, TCM 2 was just an embarrassingly campy & stupid concept even if it had a competent execution. I can respect this film for what it attempted to be, at the least. If you're patient or if you fast-forward through the dull scenes, I would honestly recommend this film for its creative aspects.

I came to this film hoping for an atmospheric, dark movie along the lines of Nekromantik and other twisted films. "Subconscious Cruelty" tries hard to be such a film, but it tries way, way too hard and fails pathetically.

"Subconscious Cruelty" is like a 15-year-old boy's concept of a dark movie. The entire film is a montage of scenes that are supposed to be disturbing or gory. Every moment is so in-your-face and trying so desperately hard to impress you that it all feels godawfully phony and amateurish. The ABSOLUTE WORST aspect, however, is the downright dorky and embarrassing narration that doesn't shut up until halfway through the film. Every single line feels like something from a goth teen's deviantart page. The film opens with the line "Reality. (dramatic pause) It traps us in a monotonous deadening cycle." A later scene features a man mugging at the camera as he narrates "Imagery is built on a constant thread of depravity and horror." With the constant droning of these laughably stupid lines, the film is more likely to torment you with secondhand embarrassment instead of horror.

Even if you ignore the narration, everything else is amateurish and eye-rolling too. The filmmakers couldn't come up with any actually-creepy camera shots, so they try to compensate for this in various ways that all fail. The lighting throughout uses garish primary reds & blues, making the film feel like Creepshow or some other uber-campy flick instead of a gritty horror piece. The later parts of the film use spastic MTV-style editing that will annoy you more than anything else. You get lots of extreme closeups to hit you over the head with how spooooky the imagery is supposed to be, when really a more naturalistic approach would be way more impactful. The fourth segment of the film has loads of static and industrial noise screaming over the soundtrack, idiotically ruining any chance of being scary or disturbing.

The film's sexual imagery also just feels like "edgy" teenagers' performance art. The creators seem to think that the sight of phallic objects, some guy blandly doing it, and missionary position sex are totally shocking and mind-blowing. Some moments throw fake blood on the so-called actors, which isn't exactly impressive. It's all too clear that this movie was made by very naive people awkwardly trying to be edgy and dark.

Do yourself a favor and skip this movie. It isn't hit-or-miss, it isn't a cult movie, it isn't shocking, and if you're a gore hound it isn't fun. It's just plain stupid, and it fails on every level. You have better things to do.

Tusk is a film with a very quirky premise that should be fun, or eerie, or at least entertaining. A melancholy old man abducts a podcaster and surgically alters him to resemble a walrus, which he thinks is the world's finest creature. Anyone with half a brain could make this bizarre idea either really funny or really creepy; it would take a lot of incompetence to fail. Yet Kevin Smith and his hangers-on are clearly such a black hole of talent that they managed to fail dismally.

The comedy is nonexistent. The movie throws in bad Canadian accents, an old guy saying "poop hole" and "hyuk, Canadians like hockey a lot." If you think that's side-splitting, then this movie was clearly made for you. The humor in this movie makes Family Guy look like comedic genius.

Since the comedy is dead in the water, you'd think the movie would try to do something worthwhile on the horror element, but we are not so lucky. We're treated to the gimmick of a guy in a lame costume, and then... well, that's it. It's just scene after scene of a guy sitting around in a lame walrus costume while nothing interesting happens. At that point, it's clear that the creators knew they could make a lame, boring time-waster and still rake in a ton of cash thanks to Kevin Smith's name in the credits. Hurray for pop culture.

The "creative" team was so lazy that they actually have to pad out the movie with tedious love triangle dreck about these characters we don't care about. It's nice knowing they spent millions of dollars to make this happen.

So the content of the film is pathetic; how about the performances? Justin Long is just another limp-wristed white guy as our protagonist, and he spends half the movie in the stupid walrus costume. Nothing to see here. Michael Parks does the best he can as the villain. He has one great scene where he tells Long a made-up story about a poisonous spiderbite; in this scene, he is an unpredictable, compelling character. But outside of those 5 minutes, he just plays a generic crazy old guy who exposits a lot and sometimes makes lame literary references.

Haley Joel Osmont plays a forgettable non-character, and Johnny Depp appears as a pointless detective with a "hilarious" accent like some amateur SNL comedian. Genesis Rodriguez stands out as the stinkiest log on this pile, appearing as the obligatory airbrushed girl who couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. Most of the actors are forgettable, and they clearly understand this movie isn't worth much effort. But Rodriguez is trying way too hard, and her godawful lack of any acting ability is painfully bad.

I enjoy B movies and "so bad they're good movies," but this one is just a time-waster. Don't watch this flick unless you want to see an interesting premise turned into a boring failure.

Lascars is yet another example of what happens all too often when people want to make an animated movie for adults. They're too concerned with proving that it isn't for kids, so they spend all their effort on awful Family Guy-quality writing, where every joke is simply acknowledging that sex and drugs exist. If you have a mental age above 13, this movie will be a horribly insulting waste of your time.

The animation, designs, color work, all the technical aspects show a lot of talent and effort. It's heartbreaking to see that so many talented people wasted their work on such a lazy, garbage script.

On every level the story is an obnoxious failure. There is a generic plot about two stoner friends trying to make some money and impress a rich girl. One friend is slightly more serious and one is slightly more goofy, but they are otherwise the exact same character copy-pasted. They don't have any funny dynamic together, they're just 2 boring losers who bumble around for 90 minutes. Each scene is a lame skit that hits you over the head with a one-note joke that never amounts to anything.

The content of this film is really nothing but entry-level "ha ha, sex exists" and "ha ha, drugs exist" humor with no irony or effort. I've already compared it to Family Guy, but the "comedy" in this movie is honestly even lazier.

Outside of that, you have painfully sexist material in which one of the sleazy heroes thinks his new rich girlfriend just might be cheating on him, so he trashes her house with a huge party, he makes out with as many girls as he can, he never learns any lesson or does anything to redeem himself... and then the rich girl STILL comes back to him in the end like a loyal pet. That's the film's "happy ending." I can excuse filmmakers who come from a narrow-minded background and reflect this in some unintentional way. But no matter how you slice it, this movie has an in-your-face message that's utterly vile. It paints this horrible person as the good guy and presents the woman as a trophy who deserves no self-respect.

In making this trash, the filmmakers show horrible disrespect for their hard-working crew, for their audience, and for anyone who enjoys animation. They seem to say "if you like cartoons, you deserve garbage." If you want to watch an animated film for adults in an urban setting with some raunchy humor, see Nerdland instead. It has actual characters, an actual plot, and actually gives you an entertaining story instead of wasting your time. France may have a reputation for producing classy animation, but Lascars is a moronic, depressing and insulting exception to that trend.

Nighstlave is a bad movie. Let's be clear about that; to enjoy this film, you need to appreciate low-budget Ed Wood style filmmaking. If you're like most people, you probably won't like this film, but if you enjoy the unique charm of awkward grade-B films or simply strange movies, this one will probably be worth it! I certainly enjoyed it.

Here's a very simplified summary of the plot: Most of the film is about Lord Thrax (Denis Smith), a strange, immortal, cobweb-covered dirty old man who imprisons a young businesswoman named Norma (Claudia Udy, who steals the show in my opinion) so he can sacrifice her to a demon called Uncle. Also Thrax has a servant named Grimstone, portrayed by a stuffed puppet with a soothing, dubbed-in voice that reminds me of Eric Thompson's narration from The Magic Roundabout, in contrast to Thrax' campy antics. Also, this is actually all just a fantasy by a pathetic janitor named Jervis: Thrax is his imaginary alter-ego, while Norma is based on a clerk he met earlier that day. From there, things get really weird as the filmmakers pile on one quirky concept after another.

Most of the film is surreal-for-surreal's sake, but the movie's saving grace is its playfulness and extremely tongue-in-cheek attitude. The filmmakers never take themselves too seriously; they take a horror movie convention (evil old guy trying to sacrifice a girl) and just enjoy playing around with it. The focus is on the characters, particularly Thrax' bombastic and twisted attitude and Norma's quirky, often sarcastic reactions to her bizarre situation.

I enjoyed the film's merits. In particular, Claudia Udy was an appealing and unconventional leading lady, playing her part with a lot of spontaneity that makes her character unpredictable and fun. It says a lot when the film puts her in a skimpy outfit to show off her physique, yet it's her personality and acting that carry the scenes. I showed my friends a short clip where she simply runs behind a tombstone and pushes a ceramic angel onto a zombie that's chasing her, and just from those few seconds, they could tell Udy had an entertaining and charming style. She managed to put distinct personality into simple actions like that one, and you can definitely tell that Udy was enjoying herself on- and off-camera.

On the other hand, I also got a big kick out of the film's more incompetent, so-bad-it's-good elements. The Grimstone puppet looks utterly ridiculous, like a failed taxidermy; the sound editing is hilariously bad, with enormously loud thuds accompanying every step a character takes; the cutting & editing are often jarring and made me laugh simply from how awkwardly-timed they were. For example, there's a super-sped-up, fast-motion scene where Thrax shows off some torture tools to Norma, and she stabs him with his own sword--and then the movie abruptly yanks us back down to normal speed as Thrax wheezes in pain. It's completely jarring, but in a way that will probably bring a smile to your face if you enjoy funny-bad movies.

7 stars may seem overly generous, but this movie's blend of funny incompetence and earnest creativity work well together, and I had a great time watching it. Most people won't dig this movie, and that's fine! Its appeal is for a niche audience who can laugh at a strange B-movie; if that includes you, then happy viewing!

This film feels like they had enough material for 15 minutes, and so they filmed some other random guys and crammed in as much insulting filler as possible to waste the viewer's time.

The first red flag is the film's opening. Most documentaries start right off with footage of the subject you're here to see, or with thought-provoking voiceover to get the ball rolling. But this one starts with a slow, SLOW, boring credits sequence that's just names on screen intercut with some nondescript folders on a bookshelf. No voiceover, just cheesy "dramatic" music. The first thing this film does is waste your time, and sadly that continues to be its main purpose.

The interviews with Jodorowsky himself are the meatiest part of the documentary, and he basically just fawns over himself and tells you that this movie would've been cool. He doesn't go into detail about the technical aspects or the nuances, he just praises himself and occasionally gives an extremely vague description of a gimmicky scene that he had in mind. He doesn't say anything about the craft of filmmaking or the process of how he would have actually made this movie.

The amount of information this documentary tells you could be summed up in a single-page article. This film is, plain and simple, for easily impressed people who don't know anything about filmmaking or Jodorowsky. One of its interminable filler segments is an incredibly lazy and superficial summary of Jodorowsky's filmography; this sequences would only be useful to someone who's never even heard of the man before. The filmmakers assume you are a complete know-nothing who will be impressed by the barest minimum of work, research and effort on their part.

The most inane time-waster was an absolutely eye-rolling sequence where some guy tells a pathetically dull story about how Jodorowsky gave him some pot laced with hallucinagens. It's the same story every sheltered white guy tells about the first time he took drugs, where he pathetically talks about this entry-level experience like it was something magically unique that never happened to anyone else. And this loser's story is set to a sequence where they just animated his words (like a first-year animation student's project whipped up in one night) because they had absolutely no worthwhile footage to show you.

If you're skeptical about my theory that this film was intended for easily-impressed people who know nothing about the field, a quick glance at the positive reviews validates my assertion. It speaks volumes when reviewers on IMDB call the film "spiritual enlightenment" while admitting they've never seen any of Jodorowsky's other films. If the only movies you ever watch are daytime TV and anything creative or interesting is foreign to you, then you will be impressed by this lazy documentary.

I went into this movie with very low expectations, and I was still let down. "Corpse Bride" is a frustrating experience because it takes a lot of skilled and talented people, then wastes their talents on a lazy, uninspired production.

The script feels like a first draft, where someone threw in a bunch of half-baked ideas and meant to turn them into something good later, but he just never got around to it. For example: We first meet our hero, Victor, in a room with scientific gear, studying a butterfly. His interest in science never shows up again, even though it would be so much fun to see a scientist react to all the magic in the film. Later the spirit of Victor's dead dog comes back; Victor is delighted at first, then he just ignores his dog for the rest of the film.

Victor's parents are earnest, decently-interesting characters who have a huge role for the whole first half of the film... then, suddenly, they're written out of the movie in the most random and stupid manner possible, never to be mentioned again.

We visit the Land of the Dead, where some spirits party all the time, but other spirits work crappy jobs sweeping the streets for no clear reason. Are these spirits just stuck in this afterlife forever? If so, why are there only like 15 people in the Land of the Dead? The very end of the film suggests that they move on to eternal rest (or reincarnation? it's vague) after they find peace, but nothing else in the film ever even hints at this idea, so it comes out of nowhere in the last few seconds.

This is a problem when Emily, The Corpse Bride herself, is a major character, but we never learn what she can or can't do. She can apparently talk to animals and do some other magic. It sure would be fun to see more of her magical abilities, but this movie just can't bother to use that much imagination.

But I must give special attention to the biggest "screw you" to the audience: Victoria's subplot. To sum it up: She sees that Victor is in trouble; she wants to go help him, but her parents tell her to calm down and lock her in her room. So she makes a tense and daring escape! We root for her character and want to see her succeed! But instead, the first person she asks for help just brings her back home, and she's locked in again. The entire scene was a complete waste of time.

This would be disappointing enough. But THEN, her parents tell her they will marry her to a sleazy new suitor. Victoria has been totally dynamic up to this point, and now she has more reason than ever to go find Victor and set things right... but she just gives up instead. The screenwriter got so lazy that he just made her clam up & obey her parents, even though this goes against everything we've learned about her character. For a short time, Victoria is the most likable, proactive character, and then she suddenly turns into a complete wimp.

Unless you have very, very low standards, stuff like the above subplot will leave you feeling cheated, betrayed, and even a little disgusted with the laziness and shoddiness of the story.

My heart bled for all the hard-working animators who put countless hours of work and effort into this film, only to create an embarrassing, ridiculous waste of time because the writing-directing team was so shamefully lazy. The same goes for the voice actors: most of the puppets are so sorely limited, it would be way more fun just to watch the actors saying their lines in a recording booth. (Christopher Lee especially suffers, as he ranges from bombastic to subtle, while his puppet character is stiff & listless.) It's a horrible waste of talent.