Reviews

It's got a lighter tone but it's got more monsters & monster action. The Yokai are the good guys & they are faced with a monster disguised as a human that they must protect the humans from & that's pretty much the plot. It's pretty simple that I can't spoil it by saying it.

The effects, for me, are a step up from the first movie & the Yokai are characters now,they have dialogue & everything.

The movie still has some creepy & atmospheric moments but it's mostly traded out a fun monster on monster action movie.

Recommended to the same people who I recommended 100 Monsters to.

Neil Marshall has a fantastic debut with this film.

It's just a straightforward blast of no holds barred Werewolf action. It's got excellent Practical effects in the Giant Lycans & the Gore is top notch.

The soldiers are very believable in how they act, but that's why Marshall's process was so ingenious. It's a War/Soldier based movie first, werewolf second.

This is one of my favourite werewolf movies of all time,totally underrated gem that not many people who are outside of the horror community are aware of & that's a shame

The camera angles are also very smart since there were only 3 costumes they had to shoot it at angles where the costumes didn't have any damage.

It's just an awesome movie that is fast paced and a blast to watch.

A lot better in fact,Harbour isn't necessarily a bad casting choice for Hellboy but given the script of this,Perlman did it way better.

The result here is a final product that I was looking forward to but it fell flat. It OD'd on CGI, it's overly crude & violent and it also swears for the sake of swearing.

It's very much trying to bank on the success of Deadpool but not in an original way. It feels like it's a Hellboy movie with a Deadpool movie's script.

The swearing is abundant & misplaced, they have Broom swear at Hellboy in the most out of place line in the entire movie. It just takes all the emotional impact and squanders it.

I love Dog Soldiers so I know Neil Marshall but this is a departure from the greatness that is Dog Soldiers, the effects in this look bad & while creature design is cool it looks kinda fake.

The Hellboy effects are actually pretty decent but everything else looks terrible.

It's not the worst thing ever but it's a pretty good example of don't get your expectations too high.

I'm in the boat of this being Groenings best show, it's smart, imaginative and witty.

All the characters are charming and unique like the egotistical yet incompetent Zapp Brannigan or the Better executed Meg in Zoidberg. Like Meg is something that they can't do good in family guy either being indecisive or down right spiteful against the character;Zoidberg has just been turned down as sucking but the show & characters don't seem to hate him cause of episodes like Why must I be a Crustacean in love?, Stench & Stenchibility & Tip of the Zoidberg showing a much deeper side to the character even up until the near ending of the show.

Aside from that the concept of many episodes are based on real science and executed very well as well as their conceptual episodes like the Prisoner of Benda or One Hundred Big Boys being just a fun idea of what everyone would do if they were each given 100 dollars to blow. These can be some very high points of the series but Jurassic Bark, Luck of the Fryrish, the devils hands aren't idle playthings and meanwhile are all very deep emotional episodes and the late Phillip J. Fry being the perfect blend of both emotional & fun.

However season one finale is still the best episode by far in my eyes Hell is other Robots, start's off with the beastie boys concert which totally is a product of its time and I love it. To Bender getting hooked on a robots version of drugs, finding religion and overcoming it to being so insufferably boring and bland that they push him to going against his religion and then going to Robot Hell where we get THE BEST MUSICAL NUMBER! Done by the great Robot Devil.

Now I'd like to talk a bit about Space Pilot 3000 and how it's the perfect introduction to the three main characters Fry, Leela and The Greatest, Bender Bending Rodriguez;As well as introducing it's idea in a highly unique and original way. "Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!" Sums it up fantastically.

A fresh start for a loser in his past life Fry, a reassessment of what She really wants to do in life with Leela and a realization that he has a reason to live in Bender. The show is the most consistently good adult cartoon I've seen tied with South Park.

I think though what sums up peoples initial thoughts on this show can be done by the Bending Unit Himself, Bender "YOU'RE FULL OF CRAP FRY!/YOU MAKE A PERSUASIVE ARGUMENT FRY!"

And hasn't deserved it for years now. It might have deserved this 8.2 rating for its first 3 seasons, 4-7 were a drop in quality but nothing terrible and then afterwards it started going down the tubes. Don't get me wrong there were stellar episodes after season 7 road to multiverse, and then there were fewer, and road to North Pole, but it's pretty shotty otherwise. It's having too many and/or too long of cutaway gags, absolutely Cruel humour that aims to shock and nothing else, like not even be smart. The characters are hollow shells of their former selves. No more evil, super genius Stewie, Lois and Peter hate each other, Brian went from charming to the most shallow and awful character. Worse than quagmires shallow nature cause Brian wasn't established to be shallow at the beginning where quagmire was. It's not good anymore, my 6 is for the earliest seasons, if it weren't for them, nothing but trash would remain.

This is my favourite Tim Burton film, granted I haven't seen a whole lot of his work, but this movie just never gets old. I know it's not particularly the most cohesive plot but I think it's worth the sacrifice, we get amazing gothic and twisted cartoon like visuals, an amazing Michael Keaton performance, it's bonkers, witty, charming, quotable as hell, and just trademark Burton.

The plot is just a Segway for the movie to deliver what it does best, twisted fun. Keaton obviously is what everyone comes to see here, Betelgeuse is a terrible character in all the right ways. He's not a good person, or what's left of one, but he is so terrible in the most charming way. He's a little bit of everything here, a ghost, con man, ladykiller, sleazebag, looney tune, an 8 year old maturity level, and everything else in between, he's unpredictable, which is why the movie is as good as it is he makes it a roller coaster ride of wild visuals and ridiculous moments that makes sure that the viewer is never bored.

Betelgeuse isn't the only thing that makes this film a timeless gem, the rest of the characters are also very well acted and the visuals on display when Betelgeuse isn't around are just as wild and kinda freaky. Seriously if certain moments in this movie weren't played off for laughs or dismissed by the human characters this movie could've been kinda scary, but Burton strikes a good balance between the creepy visuals and their perception to the other characters that makes it more fun than fear inducing. The movie also shows us other ghosts and they are very visually diverse and range from kinda silly to kinda dark if they weren't playing off so nonchalantly. We see a man who was hit by a truck so he's now just a one dimensional character, honestly that just occurred to me when writing this review. We also see a man who choked to death on a chicken leg, a shark attack victim, a man who had his head shrunk by a black magic tribesmen and probably the darkest a woman cut in half at the waist. Everything onscreen creates some unanswered questions, but honestly I feel like don't have to be answered it's the wild imagination of the viewer that makes it better due to the already wild imagination of Burton it more creates a world of endless possibilities.

Now what last thing is the films score, Danny Elfman creates a darkly playful and sometimes chaotic score to perfectly compliment the mayhem onscreen, and an odd but somehow fitting addition of Harry Belefonte into the movie just adds to the uniqueness and playfulness of the film. Truly an amazing film that just gets better with every watch and is a staple Halloween movie.

By far my biggest problem with this film is it tries to capitalize on the success of the Men in Black trilogy and it's not good at doing or hiding it. Here are the various points I have to back up that it's just a semi-ripoff (semi because it is still based on a dark horse comic but it's written and filmed almost like a Men in Black movie)

1. We have a secret organization that protects people from cgi creatures called deados, just swap the deados for aliens and it's Men in Black

2. We have a young and old duo that we follow in Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges respectively, Men in Black also had this exact same type of setup with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones respectively. The problem is that this movie tries to make jokes and be charming and cool like Men in Black and it sort of works. Jeff Bridges is probably the best part of this movie he's charming and he's got a good personality that works with what the movie is going for, Ryan Reynolds on the other hand doesn't, and it's not entirely his fault, don't get me wrong Ryan Reynolds can do a charming character, look no further than Deadpool. But Deadpool works because Reynolds is a big fan of the comics and knows the character well and he can pull it off with his understanding of the character and overall GOOD WRITING. The writer(s) for R. I . P. D. Didn't write him well enough for him to be charming and cool like Will was in Men in Black but, he also can't pull it off because, WILL SMITH WAS NATURALLY COOL. Will is able to do a cool character with ease and Men in Black knew that and that's why it works. Not to mention Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones just have a lot more chemistry that Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges, I mean they sometimes click but not as much as how agents Jay and Kay did.

3. This is a small point but a point nonetheless, the weaponry that they use are basically energy guns, they do show that they have bullets but when they fire them the guns glow and look like they just shoot energy at cgi creatures. Men in Black had glowing guns that shot energy at cgi creatures as well.

The main problem is it doesn't do a good job at hiding these glaring similarities between it and Men in Black, it's not as well written, it feels a bit rushed, the jokes and quips don't hit that same sweet spot as MIB, and it's more written and casted to have its actors try and be as charming as MIB but MIB was written to compliment its casts natural charm, so MIB feels more natural and genuine with its character moments.

Minor Spoilers It took awhile to find this gem along with Peter Jackson's two previous films, Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles. I just want to point out that Jackson initially got inspired to do filmmaking not only from the original 1933 King Kong which he not only payed tribute to by doing his remake of and also painstakingly remaking the lost spider pit scene from with a crew of stop motion animators, but also he payed homage to by making the rat monkeys home Skull Island the home of Kong. However there is another film that inspired him to make movies, Troma productions The Toxic Avenger, it showed him that you can go out and make a movie with next to no budget and without the studios telling you what's right and wrong. Now let's address why he chose to make his films as nasty as they are, which might I add doesn't make them bad movies but more for a certain audience, I'll say that all three films can be nasty at times but it's what adds to their charm. First off practical effect driven horror was all over the 80's and that the Genre that all the young kids were into, but regardless of how much horror wasn't respected as a genre then there were still many people getting their starts there, John Carpenter and Sam Raimi for example, everybody's gotta start somewhere. Peter Jackson didn't get known as a respectable director because of the tasteless nature of his early films, which might I add were intended to be that way, but his camerawork skills, creativity, brilliant practical effects for low budget filmmaking, humour, and offensive and dark comedy that got him more noteriety as his skills improved throughout the course of each of the following films released. They are good because they embrace the fact that they are gross, offensive and/or gory as all hell and run with it, might I add to you critics out there that won't at least admit that you weren't the target audience for these kinds of films and therefore dismiss them as garbage in their entireties are people who think that you're just above the others who like these, plus if all these were garbage then Peter Jacksons career in filmmaking would've ended just as fast as it started, so obviously there is something that he did right you were just so offput by the nature of it that you couldn't find anything good in these movies even if you tried, sorry if that sounded a bit egotistical, I'm just trying to say that it's SUBJECTIVE so don't act like people are dumb for enjoying these movies or any other movies