Starring Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller, Boris Kodjoe, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts, & Spencer Locke
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220634/
This movie was terrible. Why bother anymore? The last Resident Evil was such a slap in the face of gamers it should have been burned. Now, years later some idiot thought it would be cute to revamp the dead horse, but this time in 3D. Everything about RE4 was wrong. the acting was a joke, the story was a complete rip off of Escape from NY, and having not one man in on the good action was not only very sexist, but beyond cheesy.
What i hated about RE4 most was the inconsistencies and blatant rip off of other movies. Case In Point #1: Early on in the film Alice loses her powers and thanks Wesker ( a terrible Shawn Roberts looking like a white morpheus ) for turning her human again, only to crash the aircraft into the side of a mountain, and walk away unhurt. I call bullshit on that. Case In Point #2: After ripping off Escape from New York and the Matrix, we the viewers are treated to Alice loading a pair of shotguns with quarters. Next we see alice with the shotguns on her back running through a zombie gauntlet and then pull the shotguns and fire them without a single quarter falling out of the barrel while she pulled them. Bullshit again.
I won't even comment on the acting. OK I will, but only to point out how terrible it was.......
Alice: Totally Pathetic attempt at any sort of action hero.
Claire: Yeah who was the idiot who gave Ali Larter this role?!?! Hey Ali, note to self: Stop trying to pass as any sort of actor/actress cause that boat left looooong ago
Chris: Channing Tatum called and wants his look and style back.
Shawn Roberts: Nice touch on ripping of the Matrix and making Morpheus white.
It also must be said that the production sets looked like they were bought wholesale at the "Look Futuristic" store, because everything about them was a total visual abortion. Oh, and did i mention how much the Matrix was ripped off? Every damn thing that the matrix did in 3 movies, this piece of shit tried to do in one. Oh I am so sorry. My friend pointed out that they also ripped of blade 2. See? Even a guy not in this f'd up industry can see garbage when he see's it.
The zombies were almost not in the movie. It took almost an hour from the first on screen zombie attack to the next. Even then the zombies were tiresome and totally contrived. I felt it looked like somebody fudged on the budget and decided to make all of the dead people look the same. I mean, isn't this the balls of the franchise? zombies? So why take the only remaining good thing about this muck, and not hype that up?
Last thing I'm gonna say is even the decent 3D couldn't save this film. I really liked the 3D, but kept getting distracted by the stop and start motion rip off ala matrix. Do yourself a favor, ignore this movie.
Mr. what? (no stars)
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Piranha 3D ( 2010 )
Starring, Christoper Lloyd, Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss, Eli Roth, Jerry O' Connell, Steven R. McQueen, & Jessica Szohr
Directed By Alexandre Aja
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464154/
If you came to see the next Avatar in 3D adventure, well you are totally out of place. Piranha 3D is nothing more than a great splatter movie in 3D. Not Too much sex, but with all of the half nude bodies, Gruesome Gore and attacks and seemingly endless bare boobs and big booty's, it almost seemed like a miracle this movie was released. to the naked eye, it looked like there were almost no R rated movies this summer, and the only one that got any sort of attention was that overbloated, thin story The Expendables.
Piranha 3D is a remake from of the 70's camp classic directed by Joe Dante. In the current state, or lack of, Good remakes, P3D slides past the rest and leads the pack. To say that director Alexandre Aja has a nack for turning stomachs, is to put it lightly. With P3D you get a typical Spring Break crowd being devastated by prehistoric fish, with plenty of 3D Boob shots and Blood in it's wake.
The story is simple. A crack opens at the bottom of a lake, releasing thousands of prehistoric fish hellbent on tearing apart anything in their way. As usual the town has no idea what is about to happen, nor do they seem to care when warned almost at gunpoint by the local law Enforcement. Maybe it's better that way. I really enjoyed watching your typical MTV beach crowd be torn to ribbons.
The cast was, in my opinion, spot on for the film. E. Shue reminded me of her AIB days, jumping all over the place, and not affraid to get dirty. Ving Rhames was great as the Deputy sidekick, and both Jerry O' Connell, and Eli Roth stole the show as a sleazy Girls gone Wild type director, and a cheesy spring break DJ. Both of their deaths are great and bloody, but O' Connell's character has a little something for your pervasive 3D gorehound.
Overall i felt that P3D did exactly what it had set out to do. You will walk away from this movie either laughing at some stuff, or shaking your head at some of the story. Either way, you will not be let down.
Mr. What? ( * * * )
Directed By Alexandre Aja
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464154/
If you came to see the next Avatar in 3D adventure, well you are totally out of place. Piranha 3D is nothing more than a great splatter movie in 3D. Not Too much sex, but with all of the half nude bodies, Gruesome Gore and attacks and seemingly endless bare boobs and big booty's, it almost seemed like a miracle this movie was released. to the naked eye, it looked like there were almost no R rated movies this summer, and the only one that got any sort of attention was that overbloated, thin story The Expendables.
Piranha 3D is a remake from of the 70's camp classic directed by Joe Dante. In the current state, or lack of, Good remakes, P3D slides past the rest and leads the pack. To say that director Alexandre Aja has a nack for turning stomachs, is to put it lightly. With P3D you get a typical Spring Break crowd being devastated by prehistoric fish, with plenty of 3D Boob shots and Blood in it's wake.
The story is simple. A crack opens at the bottom of a lake, releasing thousands of prehistoric fish hellbent on tearing apart anything in their way. As usual the town has no idea what is about to happen, nor do they seem to care when warned almost at gunpoint by the local law Enforcement. Maybe it's better that way. I really enjoyed watching your typical MTV beach crowd be torn to ribbons.
The cast was, in my opinion, spot on for the film. E. Shue reminded me of her AIB days, jumping all over the place, and not affraid to get dirty. Ving Rhames was great as the Deputy sidekick, and both Jerry O' Connell, and Eli Roth stole the show as a sleazy Girls gone Wild type director, and a cheesy spring break DJ. Both of their deaths are great and bloody, but O' Connell's character has a little something for your pervasive 3D gorehound.
Overall i felt that P3D did exactly what it had set out to do. You will walk away from this movie either laughing at some stuff, or shaking your head at some of the story. Either way, you will not be let down.
Mr. What? ( * * * )
Monday, September 6, 2010
Machete ( 2010 )
Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jeff Fahey, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, & Lindsey Lohan
Directed By Ethan Maniquis & Robert rodriguez
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0985694/
Often we complain that trailers give away the whole plots of upcoming movies, but I don’t expect that to be the case with “Machete.” The film began as a trailer, you see -- or, more technically, a spoof trailer sandwiched between the larger parts of the 2007 portmanteau movie “Grindhouse.”
That quite funny clip ran about two-and-a-half minutes and featured Danny Trejo, the tough-guy actor with the face like a walnut shell, as a former Mexican law enforcement officer hired to assassinate a Texas politician. Double-crossed by the folks who gave him the job, Machete launches an all-out assault on his betrayers, abetted by a shotgun-wielding priest (Cheech Marin) and an army of illegal immigrant day laborers. (Yes, you really can tell all that from the original trailer; maybe it did reveal too much....)
Now Robert Rodriguez, who directed that spoof trailer, and Ethan Maniquis, his frequent editor, have combined to turn the original brief joke into a feature film, fleshing out the story, adding characters and subplots, and turning what was, in effect, a barroom jest into a full-fledged narrative.
In a sense, its origin makes a special case of “Machete” -- you can’t criticize a movie for being thin on plot or cartoonish or ridiculous, after all, when it has its seed in a parody of an ad for an over-the-top exploitation picture. That said, Rodriguez has so often been so slipshod in deploying his talents and indulging his sometimes sophomoric tastes that it’s possible, in theory at least, that he might swing and miss at even this slowly lobbed pitch and turn it into a tiresome one-note joke like “Snakes on a Plane” -- with blades instead of fangs.
Happily, Rodriguez has mostly avoided his own worst tendencies. You wouldn’t call “Machete” a well-made movie -- it’s sloppily crafted, silly, self-satisfied. But it provides, more or less, everything that the original trailer promised: lurid action, gratuitous nudity, absurd humor and the glaring, taciturn Trejo, who can’t act, exactly, but sure can signify. This is, in effect, the film that “The Expendables” wishes it were: raw, macho, funny, up-tempo and disposable in the best possible sense.
The full-length “Machete” adds dimensions that the spoof trailer couldn’t contain. There’s a (fairly muddled) political story about a state senator (Robert De Niro, milking a cheesy Texas drawl with glee) running on an anti-immigration platform and engineering a fake assassination attempt to boost his bona fides. There are two women of Mexican descent: a taco vendor (Michelle Rodriguez) who serves as a kind of Harriet Tubman for immigrants and an border agent (Jessica Alba) who wants to shut down the other gal’s network. There’s an uber-villain (Steven Seagal) who runs the Mexican drug trade and has been trying to kill Machete for years. And there’s a vigilante (Don Johnson) who’s willing to execute anyone to secure Texan sovereignty.
If this sounds like a lot of potentially heavy stuff for an action picture, rest assured that the political satire and commentary merely provide backdrop for flying bullets, swinging blades, spurting arteries, naked babes, and tough-guy one-liners (“Machete don’t text” is tattoo-worthy). The film takes absolutely wild-eyed delight in viscera, gore and grotesquerie (to wit, one poor fellow’s intestine is used as an escape rope, while another man is quite explicitly crucified). Not only doesn’t “Machete” have good taste, it has never heard of good taste.
But what “Machete” does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment (anyone who casts Seagal these days is surely engaged in facetiae of a high order). You can’t always count on Rodriguez to get the balance of lunacy, competence and coherence right. But here he more or less gives you exactly what you were looking for: 100 or so minutes as bloody, excessive and ridiculous as those initial 150 or so seconds.
( * * * )
Mr. What?
Directed By Ethan Maniquis & Robert rodriguez
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0985694/
Often we complain that trailers give away the whole plots of upcoming movies, but I don’t expect that to be the case with “Machete.” The film began as a trailer, you see -- or, more technically, a spoof trailer sandwiched between the larger parts of the 2007 portmanteau movie “Grindhouse.”
That quite funny clip ran about two-and-a-half minutes and featured Danny Trejo, the tough-guy actor with the face like a walnut shell, as a former Mexican law enforcement officer hired to assassinate a Texas politician. Double-crossed by the folks who gave him the job, Machete launches an all-out assault on his betrayers, abetted by a shotgun-wielding priest (Cheech Marin) and an army of illegal immigrant day laborers. (Yes, you really can tell all that from the original trailer; maybe it did reveal too much....)
Now Robert Rodriguez, who directed that spoof trailer, and Ethan Maniquis, his frequent editor, have combined to turn the original brief joke into a feature film, fleshing out the story, adding characters and subplots, and turning what was, in effect, a barroom jest into a full-fledged narrative.
In a sense, its origin makes a special case of “Machete” -- you can’t criticize a movie for being thin on plot or cartoonish or ridiculous, after all, when it has its seed in a parody of an ad for an over-the-top exploitation picture. That said, Rodriguez has so often been so slipshod in deploying his talents and indulging his sometimes sophomoric tastes that it’s possible, in theory at least, that he might swing and miss at even this slowly lobbed pitch and turn it into a tiresome one-note joke like “Snakes on a Plane” -- with blades instead of fangs.
Happily, Rodriguez has mostly avoided his own worst tendencies. You wouldn’t call “Machete” a well-made movie -- it’s sloppily crafted, silly, self-satisfied. But it provides, more or less, everything that the original trailer promised: lurid action, gratuitous nudity, absurd humor and the glaring, taciturn Trejo, who can’t act, exactly, but sure can signify. This is, in effect, the film that “The Expendables” wishes it were: raw, macho, funny, up-tempo and disposable in the best possible sense.
The full-length “Machete” adds dimensions that the spoof trailer couldn’t contain. There’s a (fairly muddled) political story about a state senator (Robert De Niro, milking a cheesy Texas drawl with glee) running on an anti-immigration platform and engineering a fake assassination attempt to boost his bona fides. There are two women of Mexican descent: a taco vendor (Michelle Rodriguez) who serves as a kind of Harriet Tubman for immigrants and an border agent (Jessica Alba) who wants to shut down the other gal’s network. There’s an uber-villain (Steven Seagal) who runs the Mexican drug trade and has been trying to kill Machete for years. And there’s a vigilante (Don Johnson) who’s willing to execute anyone to secure Texan sovereignty.
If this sounds like a lot of potentially heavy stuff for an action picture, rest assured that the political satire and commentary merely provide backdrop for flying bullets, swinging blades, spurting arteries, naked babes, and tough-guy one-liners (“Machete don’t text” is tattoo-worthy). The film takes absolutely wild-eyed delight in viscera, gore and grotesquerie (to wit, one poor fellow’s intestine is used as an escape rope, while another man is quite explicitly crucified). Not only doesn’t “Machete” have good taste, it has never heard of good taste.
But what “Machete” does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment (anyone who casts Seagal these days is surely engaged in facetiae of a high order). You can’t always count on Rodriguez to get the balance of lunacy, competence and coherence right. But here he more or less gives you exactly what you were looking for: 100 or so minutes as bloody, excessive and ridiculous as those initial 150 or so seconds.
( * * * )
Mr. What?
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