The Lovely Bones (2009; Peter Jackson)

My feelings behind the announcement of this title were very strong. The idea that Peter Jackson might start honoring his humble beginnings by giving us another Heavenly Creatures was just blowing my mind. I just kept thinking to myself how nothing could go wrong, because obviously Peter Jackson is immune to the trends of the spotlight...


A very young teenage girl gets murdered. However she refuses to leave the land between the living and dead so she can observe what is happening to the people who were around her.

If the very ominous "..." didn't give it away, that was sarcasm up in the first part of this review. Being under the spotlight with high financing seems to have finally killed Jackson's chances of handing us another Heavenly Creatures (let alone another Bad Taste). The wonderful soul behind the somewhat twisted message is completely absent for this recent attempt.

First off, if you are trying to decide whether or not a certain scene requires CGI, it doesn't. This film felt like a gigantic test of my tolerance for computer animation. Half of the effects were completely unnecessary. They were supposed to express the wonderful creativity that was the land between Heaven and Earth, but one can find beautiful locations on Earth that fit just as well and don't kill the atmosphere nearly as bad. Look at Lord of the Rings for example, which was also shot by Jackson and the environments looked absolutely breathtaking in some scenes. While on that topic, I'm no expert on the book, but half of the imagery and symbolism just felt absolutely needless. Throwing in imagery and CGI for the sake of having them simply doesn't cut it, sorry (just look at Halloween II).

Now to just to throw the rest out there and meet my minimum requirements, the soundtrack was interesting at a few points, but ultimately just distracting, poorly timed, and kinda loud. The acting was mostly solid (Stanley Tucci did wonderful) but the characters weren't given much to work with within the story arch. The entire message of the film sort of gets jumbled between all the abstract, useless sequences and it really just falls apart.

Before ending, I will give it a few positive spins. A small handful of scenes actually were well executed and enjoyable, and even though I had a perfect example lined up it got buried under the garbage pile in my mind, so that is all I got.

Score: 1/5

Notes: I know it doesn't release until 2010, but IMDb insists on 2009 and who am I to argue? Also, they didn't have faces on the back of milk cartons. What the hell was up with the cheap looking digital film?

The Uninvited (2009; Charles & Thomas Guard)

This is a touchy subject for me. Like so many others, I am sick of this remake trend. The idea that foreign films are not enough to stand on their own and need "translation" into our culture is quite sickening to me. However, I simply decided to ignore the bulk of this trend and try to ride it out. Needless to say, the J-horror remake fad is dying slowly but surely (making way for slasher remakes...) and then this monstrosity pops up. As seen on the front of this blog, one of the films in my top ten is the deeply profound "A Tale of Two Sisters". Kim Ji-woon is an unstoppable force in the world of cinema today, and his works should not be touched. The labyrinthine structure of "A Tale of Two Sisters" mandates the viewer to watch its intricicies over and over to fully establish its beauty and awe-inspiring construction. So when it comes to the remake, well, comparisons must be made to establish the complete lack of necessity of it all. This will, in turn, lead to many aspects of the films being exposed, and while I will never divulge anything gigantic, I will be forced to dissect and compare specific scenes. So if you have never laid your eyes upon Ji-woon's masterpiece, I recommend you stop here and just know this; Never fuck with the Kim.


Some girl (now named American) is traumatized by her mothers death and is temporarily sent to an institution to recover. After some time, American is sent home to reunite with her father and sister (now named Bullshit) only to discover that her father's girlfriend has moved in. There is something off and neither American nor Bullshit like her. The veins go much deeper, but that is enough for now. Now to compare!

The first thing shoved into our face is how Americanized this film has become. We start out watching American make out with some guy at a party. Why? In the original folktale and Ji-woon's interpretation, there was never a need for such acts. I guess this is the US way of establashing innocence because she denies the advance to fornicate. That is how we interepret morals in our youth? Disgusting and unwarranted. The strengths of the character should lie within the character herself as this film is very much an understanding of her mind, not how much or how little she loves dick.

This paragraph is simply another example of Americanizing the film and contains spoilers, so skip this if you haven't seen the first one (it is the only one that matters). The development of the "other" sister in this film is quite a dramatic difference. In the original the sister was developed, just like everything else, as a way to cope with the guilt and resentment. The sister represented that which needed protection from the materialized evil that needed to be fended off. All forms of deep symbolism are discarded in the remake, choosing to adapt the more surfaced twist that is seen in umpteen dozen other films that have come out in the past decade.

The visual style of the remake craves desperately to be identical to its parent, but fails in all forms. As seen in the image above, the solemn beauty of the house in the first film is tried at, but simply comes off as background noise. The soundtrack is dull and does nothing but carry us from scene to scene as if they only included it because they knew they had to. The focus on water is present like in the original, and just like the original, it is simply there as an allusion to the original folktale. In that regard, I suppose, it can be considered even.

One thing that bothered me greatly was the change of title. "The Uninvited" seemed like a ridiculous title to me given the original content of the first film. I guess it is supposed to be a reference to the girlfriend who was never wanted in the home. However, most people would assume it to be about the apparations that occur, as if they were unwanted ghosts haunting the innocent people inside. That, of course, wouldn't make any sense, as in the original the apparations are not only wanted, but are needed in order for the center of our film to exist.

As I kept pondering the title, I suppose I came to understand it a little better. As I said before, the remake stripped all forms of depth and tradgedy that were essential to the original's success and beauty and threw them into a hole. I kept wanting to analyze the copied imagery for what it was in the original and tried to apply it to the remake. That was a poor mistake. All the copied scenes were thrown in without second thought by idiots who apparently didn't understand their existence in the first place. The example I will use here is the blood trail.

The blood trail was the essential escalation of her coping after her illusions were threatened when her father confronted her. The trials she was putting her sister through had to become more rigorous as her guilt grew heavier on her conscience. The trail was then later shown to represent the fragments of her different realities colliding as she finally lost herself with the confrontation with the girlfriend at the end. So what does any of this have to do with the remakes blatant copying? Nothing at all, they simply threw it in to create "tension".

The significance of "A Tale of Two Sisters" was built upon the significance of all of its little pieces. Everything that was shown was placed in front of us delibrately. What we get with "The Uninvited", however, is simply another collage of the dozens of other remakes, scare scenes slopped together by a story devoid of soul and meaning. Not only can the film not stand up to it's predecessor, it can't even stand up as its own film. The importance of this review really comes in expressing many of my ideas on "A Tale of Two Sisters" so that my eventual review of it doesn't have to be a book like this review is.

Score: 1/5

Notes: Bells, Pearls, and Insignificance

Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (1982; Tony Malanowski)

Okay, before I step anywhere near this review, I just want to point out that this is a Troma release. I want to stress that very carefully. For those who don't know Troma, they release the shittiest quality films just because they are too ridiculous to let die with VHS.


No, that is not a shitty still from the film, that is what it really looks like. I know it almost seems unfair to review a Troma film so harshly, but for the safety of non-Troma fans, I must go on.


I am going to make this short and sweet. We follow three couples (that is six people) on a hunting/picnic adventure that they apparently do quite often. However, the men decide (they are so brave) that they would rather take a new trail then retread the same tired path over and over. They happen to stumble upon a church with a graveyard... zombies... end.

Okay, I must stress this again, that is really what the film looks like. Once night strikes, the film becomes an orgy of indecipherable masses flailing about. That becomes exceedingly annoying when we are forced to watch zombies rise out of the ground for roughly ten minutes. That's right. We are shown pictures of people in masks standing up for ten minutes. There is a reason that most good zombie movies either never show that or only show it for a brief few seconds. The reason being that it is fucking boring.

Pretty much the rest of the film is trying to guess what you can see through the darkness. If any of you have the pleasure of going through this wonderful piece of cinema, try looking for Waldo, he might be there for all I know.

Note: There is one certain point in the movie that does bring about a sense of unease. It is during a point where, as far as I could tell, the zombies were eating some people, and the only thing you could hear was slurping and chewing for anywhere from five to ten minutes. It made me cringe, which is more then most decent horror movies can say, even if it is for a ridiculous reason. So after saying that...

Score: 1/5

Notes: Chomping, Slurping, Asians (Yes, Asians)

Murder-Set-Pieces (2004; Nick Palumbo)

Still dumping old reviews out at you...

Sideburns. If you could sum up any movie that easily, you could know what to avoid and what to watch. Well, with this movie, you can. Sideburns.

Our unnamed lead (Sven Garrett) is a photographer working in Las Vegas. He is a very big sideburn.

Let me try again. Our unnamed sideburn…

Our unnamed lead (Sideburns)…

Our unnamed lead (Sven Garrett) is a photographer working in Las Vegas. When he is not “working”, his days consist of killing. Well, really, when he works, he just kills. This movie is getting really hard to write about.

Ok, our guy (You know his name already) pretends to be a photographer so he can kill girls. That is it. The movie follows Sven’s sideburns around Vegas as he finds naked women and kills them. I have no problem with naked women, and I have no problem with slashy movies. I do have a problem with it being very unimaginative. All the deaths were never shown. This movie, wanting to be one of the goriest movies out there, cuts out during all the deaths. They aren’t even exciting pre-deaths, they are just your average, everyday pre-deaths.

As I watched the first few pre-deaths, I realized that most of the money for this film must have gone into showing boobies. I could think of no other reason for it to cut out as much as it did. I only remember seeing one interesting pre-death, but the rest of the film was so dull and mind destroying, I forgot what it was. I think it had something to do with teeth.

If you want exciting deaths, or even pre-deaths, you can pretty much watch any other movie where someone dies and at least get an equivalent to this film. That's right, even Bambi. If you want boobies, just watch a porno. If you want death and boobies, just watch zombie porno. It is out there. If you want sideburns, then this movie will absolutely blow your mind.

Edit: My review is on the apparently edited copy of this film, which would explain the existence of the pre-deaths. I am not one-hundred percent sure if my copy is actually the edited one or not, but if I assume it is, the gore would still not make up for the terrible ending of the film which I never brought up because I had so many other complaints. I hate children in film. Obviously I could point out movies that I loved where children are in them, but as a general rule, they suck. Keep them away.

This film was also the subject to boatloads of hype about how gory it was and how it was banned in some location I do not remember at this time (use IMDb if you need to know that badly, you lazy people). I can't imagine why that is so, so cut it out. Even with these added notes, that doesn't sway my opinion in either direction, giving it a final of...

Score: 1/5

Notes: Nudity, Sideburns, Nudity

Mazes and Monsters (1982; Steven Hilliard Stern)

To get this site some bulk so people have something to read, I figured I would have to post frequently at the start and then slow myself to about once or twice a week, and what better way then to take old reviews I wrote about movies a long time ago and post them up here now. It feels like cheating to me somehow, but I did write them, so whatever. I will tweak them a little bit so they feel more recent to me at least.


As I sat with my very nerdy friends and talked about movies, one of them turned to me and said he had something he wanted me to watch. You see, me being the only person who really cares a lot about cinema in that group, my opinion tends to carry a lot of weight, and if his movie gains approval from me, the rest of them will want to watch it and he will be the hero of the day for finding such a film (we have small time ambitions). He pulls out this. A very old, very Tom Hanks movie based off of my friend’s favorite game in the world, “Dungeons & Dragons”. Now, I try to be fair, so I just smiled and said I would give it a run through. I am also very honest, so I told him I wasn’t expecting much of... anything for this experience. Well, I paid for my fairness.

The basics are that Tom Hanks… I mean… Robbie Wheeling and a group of college buddies decide that, as thrilling as their addicting game, WoW… I mean Mazes and Monsters is, they want to kick it up a notch. They decide to start playing the game in the local, legendary cavern that no one is allowed in. The movie follows Tom… Robbie and his friends as fantasy and reality begin to blur as the game seems to become their life.

The idea behind the movie wasn’t really that bad, at least to me. I have friends who base their lives around games like this, so I understand where it is coming from. It could have been a really fun movie to watch, however, an idea doesn’t make a movie good. This film excelled at failing. It failed so bad that I could be easily persuaded to believe that they made this movie bad on purpose to scare people away from such games. I was expecting huge mazes and exciting monsters. Instead I got a cave, a city, and a lizard man. Who appeared like... once.

On the positive side, like I said earlier this movie had a fun idea. This movie also had Tom Hanks. I am not saying that Tom Hanks makes it good in anyway, but something about his name...

Score: 1/5

Notes: Tom Hanks, Robbie Wheeling, Tom Wheeling, Robbie Hanks

Automaton Transfusion (2006; Steven C. Miller)

Okay, I, like so many others, love zombies. They are just loads of fun. However, the one problem with zombies is that while they are great, their movies are not. I feel that no matter how much I want to believe that most zombie movies are just fun and not good in any real way, I am constantly reminded that more often then not, they are just not good... and that is all. So on that note I bring you...

Automaton Dysfunction

I want to make this clear right now; the movie is still running as I write this review. I want to make that perfectly clear so people realize that while I find it very wrong to never finish a movie by shutting it off, I have no shame in just not paying attention to it. This movie has been called the greatest zombie movie in years, which I found very hard to swallow. This movie is just so awful that I am not even going to discuss the theme, I am just going to try and remember as many things I hate about it as possible.

1. Most of the zombies are in white shirts. Why? They were too cheap to get fake blood on any real shirts.
2. The fuck is up with the camera? Is that suppose to be style or just not a good camera? The picture blurs with a lot of movement and it gives me a headache.
3. I know watching high school stereotypes is obnoxious in most cases, but hiring what appears to be real high school quality actors as well... come on.
4. No, Evil Dead references are not funny.
5. Black characters who make witty comments are not hard asses, they are just annoying.
6. Zombies are not going to sit in front of your gun while you proclaim "I think you have had enough to eat for one day".
7. Fuck.
8. The sharp point through the eye was great... when it was done first. Copycats.
9. Which leads me to believe that the fetus eating scene was stolen too.
10. GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY! SPOOKY!
11. Christ, that music. No real person likes that obnoxious noise except for teenagers who want attention, which leads me to...
12. The director must be a teenager to be responsible for such garbage.

On the bright side, the gore effects were pretty decent. They also had a good idea on lingering on a few deaths, which adds to the uncomfortable feeling of someone dying.

Score: 1/5

Notes: Fetus, Gore, Cheerleaders