Reviews

'Wieners' is a budget installment in the genre of teen sex comedies such as 'American Pie' and 'Porky's'.

The humor is hit and miss. Some of the gags did in fact tickle my funny bone, but many just fell flat. As the title name would imply, the majority of the humor is centered around sexual innuendo and themes. 'Wieners' was surprisingly less raunchy than I would have assumed, and that actually works in it's favor. The plot is more or less a disposable vehicle for the comedy, centering around a group of friends heading cross-country in a hot dog van to seek revenge on a daytime talk show host.

The hijinx and situational comedy encountered on the road trip are, of course, the highlights of this movie.

If an median movie is a 5, this is a slightly subpar bit of cinema, yet not a completely wasted effort or a true stinkbomb.

• 4/10 -

Another Paul Greengrass movie with shallow characters and a few enjoyable action sequences. Along with United 93 and Bourne Supremacy, this film marks his third installment of the 'edgy' nausea inducing earthquake cam cinematography.

The only fascinating aspect in all this is how every uninspired but well funded blockbuster quickly rises into the IMDb top 100, then completes its box office and new release rental run before slowly fading into well deserved mediocrity and forgotten oblivion.

The shills can't keep this movie propped up among the greatest films in the history of cinema indefinitely, no matter how many "sock puppet" accounts they create. In which case you *might* see my review resurface from the last page of user comment moderation in a few years.

In the mean time, please treat every comment that starts with "Greatest Movie EVER !!!" and ends with "GO BUY IT !!!" with the same respect the marketing and advertising industry has shown you, fans of cinema.

• 4/10 -

I went to see this film in part due to praise heaped on it by previous reviewers who had described it as clever and a fresh addition to the genre.

And it was .. for at least the first ~45 minutes or so.

I was immediately drawn in, the dialogue was notably above par for the genre, full of witty quips and more subtle bits of humor that reference horror classics. In the opening scenes we see notable cameos from Robert Englund ("Nightmare On Elm Street" series) and Tony Todd (of "Candyman" series fame). A respectable flashback sequence is included to introduce the "Hatchet" back story.

And so the movie takes off running, seemingly quite well. Fresh and unique, forging a new path through the wastleland of redundant slasher flicks as "Sean of the Dead" and "Scream" had done in previous years.

Unfortunately about half way through, this movie does a complete about-face. The witty banter is replaced with idiotic dribble more reminiscent of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" than the first half of the film. It's almost as if they fired an adept writer halfway through the script and replaced him with the proverbial thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters.

At this point the dam breaks, and the tired clichés pour through in droves. We are treated to a prolonged scene of foliage inspection and other such nonsense to fill the reel between death scenes. The characters repeatedly wait to flee screaming in panic until *after* they have disabled or incapacitated the title baddie. The only dread anticipation built in the second half is whether this film will be the schoolbus that was hit by the train, or the one that managed to avoid it.

Once the gore fest begins, it is eerily reminiscent of early "Troma" titles, over the top and fatuous. The "Hatchet" character even seems like it might have been modeled from the "Toxic Avenger". I can appreciate the merits of a lawn sprinkler arterial spray or projectile vomiting, on occasion, but modern film gore effects really have no excuse to still be of that "BrainDead" visual quality.

Despite the dual personalities of this film, I think it still manages to hack out a few good parts.

• 5/10 -