Change Your Image
drummer303
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againMy personal taste is generally veering toward anything science based not necessarily action packed or Hollywood. I do love a bit of British low budget film making, some old C4 movies with a bit of drama and I often love a good thriller. I have to be talked into watching comedy by my wife but I normally thank her for it. Romantic comedy is the kiss of death. Long live the Coen Brothers!
Reviews
Land of Bad (2024)
Ignore the good reviews. It's terrible
Just utter formulaic nonsense from the get go. Captain what's his name and Colonel thingy are part of some utterly stupid military tactical team that does god knows what god knows where. Who cares?
In this horrendous instalment of American soldiers abroad revisited, our team of classic cliche soldiers, the even tempered captain, the gung ho lunatic, the quiet introvert (the hero obvs) the scaredy-cat, finds itself confronted with angry Philipinos, (yeah??) Russians and a CIA operative they are trying to save. But it all goes to heck.
Our "good" guys get killed except for our (very good looking) hero who we are trying to bring home using the pie in the eye in the sky drone team headed up by a rather large Russell Crowe who's wife is about to give birth which adds not one iota of suspense to anything at all.
Bombs and guns and pellle getting killed is definitely off the menu for me considering what is going on in the world. Why they decided to release this drivel is beyond me. I lasted about 45 mins. Which is not bad going. I gave it a good shot (no pun intended).
I had to give up. It was not only extremely ill timed but a narcissistic and irrelevant waste of time , money and talent.
If you are a complete dribbling moron and you just like watching people shooting at each other and getting blowed up while runnjgthen congratulations buster! This is for you.
For all other sane people. Leave well alone.
Dreadful.
Severance (2022)
Just awesome, desperately awaiting SE2
This one really got me straight away, from the opening scenes right to the very end, completely hooked.
The characters are so well developed, so interesting, so bizarre, but so real. The story is just insane, but somehow it manages to keep a sense of "this could really happen" about it, so even though it's off the charts weird, you never feel as though it's silly, or following a formula or just "another TV show trying to be weird" it actually is the real deal, proper strange utterly bizarre scenarios which go together to make one cohesive plot that draws emotions from you as you become more invested in the struggle the characters are going through in both their lives, inner and outer.
For those who have not seen it yet, the basic premise is that new technology has been invented by Lumen Industries which allows a small hand picked group of workers to become "severed" from their "outie" minds.
With this small chip installed in their brain they are unable to remember who they are or what their lives are about once they are inside the Lumen severed workplace, and once they leave the workplace the have no memory of the workplace, their collegues are strangers, their memories not accessible, it;s as if it didn't ever happen. But it did.
For some this seems like almost a type of slavery, slavery of your own self. But there is another side, escapism, desperate to escape outside problems and painful memories some of the characters are using this as a way to retreat from situations they can not handle.
The fact that this tech is very unlikely or just downright impossible doesn't really matter because of the big "what if" scenario. It's made very compelling by the excellent writing and the careful consideration of each characters reasons for doing such a weird and unpleasant thing to themselves. Effectively opening themselves up to complete abuse ( during work hours ) at the hands of this weird aloof coporation who communicate through almost Stasi type mangement figures and a small desktop speaker which never gives away their true purpose.
Performances are all amazing, especially Mark who somehow manages to be two people at the same time by very simple facial expressions.
The cliffhanger at the end of SE1 is just incredible.
Roll on SE2.
65 (2023)
Dreadful, terrible, dreadful and even more terrible and back to dreadful
From the moment this started I knew it was going to be bad!
The premise made no sense. 30 second in and it was already tugging at heart strings, the dying duaghter, the alien world where everyone has american accents, the absolute refusal to explain any of the details so we are left wondering?......oooooh how we wonder.... or do we?
No not really, because hey, guess what? Nothing so far is interesting enough to make it mysterious, it's just information withheld, and that's just annoying. WHY is the daughter going to die? What is wrong with her? Come on! Flesh it out a bit, what does Adam Driver DO for living, TELL US! Why does he have to undertake this journey it's lazy, that's what it is. If we knew more, we may get behind him a little more....
Then we get so much anti-science, space fantasy nonsense, noise in space, wind in space, exlosions and fire and basically "let's just completely ignore the fact that any of this is set in space at all" like they do in Star Trek.
OK..so it's Star Trek territory that we are in not Kubrik. I should have guessed from the adverts. ( I really wasn't expecting Kubrik )
Ok I can go with Star Trek type stuff, aliens, laser guns etc, Yep OK that's fun.
But gues what, it isn't fun. It's just stupid.
So some how Driver manages to crash land on Earth 65 million years ago. After being hit by ansteroid cloud that his super advanced spaceship navigation gear didn't see ( while he was in cryosleep and the ship was being steered by this very same super advances navigation gear ). They hit the planet AT THE EXACT same time that THE great asteroid is about to hit and wipe out the dinosaurs, considering events in time at this point in history took many millions of years to happen, does this not seem rather....coincidental? Perhaps a little TOO coincidental? Just a smidge.
So anyways, Our hero crash lands and everyone except him and a young person dies. (obviously) Young person cannot speak english trying to create some kind of cute father/sondaughter type communication type thing between them but just gets in the way and get annoying, both of them learn each others names and scream them all the way through the film, Kai! Kai! He shouts over and over again as they help each other as they get attacked by EVERYTHING around them. Constant barrages of T-Rex and other Dino monsters try to rip them apart througout the entire film without a moment to rest.
Which is kind of silly because by scale humans are very small for a T rex. It would be a bit like me trying to swat a fly for food, when I could kill a chicken, or a sheep or a deer? It just doesn't seem worth the aggro for a huge hulking gret thing like a T rex to hunt a tiny little human. I mean he eats the human then what, go get another?
But here it is...oh yes and hunt they do, in packs, and they seem to ONLY be interested in these particular humans, not the birds or each other or fish or any other kind of wildlife. Nope they REALLY want to eat these humans, and slowly too, sauteed preferably with some kind of dino salad, hold the mayo.
Driver has a ray gun and he shoots at them but it's not very powerful and they don't get vapourised. They just shriek a bit and occasionaly lose an eye. He has some explosives too which seem to range from really huge explosions to really little ones depending on how convenient it is. Handy.
Then at the end when all we've been told all along is that everyting is hopeless, and they are stuck here forever, he decides to launch the inner capsule (hold on what?) and take off (GRAVITY!!!!) into space generating a help beacon that the rescue team can zero in on, and and and ......hold on a minute....let me process this....hang on.... and them Booom!
Credits roll.... I mean, eh?
Did they make it? Honestly who cares? No one does, absolutley no one cares if Driver and the "kid" got rescued, did his daughter die? Yeah probabaly. Do we care? Nope.
It is the single most stupid pathetic piece of overly expensive CGI Hollywood drivel I have seen for ages and whoever made it should be ashamed. Why did I watch it? I am still trying to work this out. Hence the review, I am cleansing my soul through online ranting.
Adam Driver what happened mate? I thought you were better than this!
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)
No it is not "cheesy fun"
No it really isn't it's crap.!
Rubbish acting horrible plot dialogue and direction. All shot horribly.
Seriously. It is so bad. Jason Statham looks embarrassed. Ron Perlman is just laughable. They are just running around in dreadful costumes like some kid of dreadful middle England thing fighting some pig faced soldiers and fighting and fighting and more fighting which the women cook and feed the children. It's so horrible, cheesy fun is not this. This was meant to be serious. Oh my word!
Avoid like the plague.
How on earth do they get away with making this bilge I will never know someone has their hand in a deep pocket somewhere.
Vantage Point (2008)
Annoying
Possibly the most irritating film ever told from just about every different angle by rewinding the tapes literally.
Director : Hmm I wonder how I can make this 15 minute scene stretch out for 90 mins?
Editor: hold my beer.
The Ice Road (2021)
Advert for Kenworth trucks
Kenworth trucks are great apparently
This movie offends everyone pretty much.
White people and
People of ethnic origin equally.
Drivers of trucks
Non drivers of trucks
Manitoban people
All other Human beings
Women & men
Miners & Mining companies
Editors
CGI pros
Script writers
Audiences
Physics experts
Structural engineers
Medical pros
Veterans
Disabled people
Veteran medical centres
The list goes on.
It is the worst most badly put together piece of tripe I have ever seen. If this were an indie flick not only would it be better but ot would have an average of about 2 because they can't afford to pay for the stupid 10/10
Reviews.
Everything bad about the movie industry is laid out in this film.
Netflix and liam Shame on you.
This is a one hour advert for Kenworth trucks. Nothing more.
If you work for kenworth go see it with your work colleagues and have a beer and cheer when Liam
does something utterly predictable
Schindlers list this is not.
Avoid.
Castle Rock (2018)
Enjoyable but no real ending.
The Stephen King multiverse has been brought to life with references to many of his books already filling the first season. However this does lack the focus of Kings best work and gets knocked off balance along the way.
Castle rock starts off well. Cinematography and music all on point. Direction solid and actors all very good in their characters Including the wonderful Sissy Spacek who of course was Carrie.
Lots of King references throughout and it settles into a dark, slow burn pace about the mysterious guy locked in the basement of shawshank prison.
But slowly things come undone. Lots of areas of the story get either left unfinished or untold. Such as the fires. The time loop. The eerie sound. The telepath. The break ins. The murderous couple. The people in the woods with the silence chamber.
There is an infuriating lack of communication between main characters. This is obviously used to keep the level of intrigue high but after a while becomes tiresome as you say the equivalent of "it's behind you " for the umpteenth time in your mind.
Bizarre characters enter and leave without any explanation as to what their part in it all really means and take up valuable screen time without adding anything.
And then we hit the ending just like that. With still no communication between the Deavers and no real finale.
Ok perhaps the big finale is not what they wanted but in case it left everything so unanswered that it crossed the line into disappointment.
Shame. I really was enjoying it. I love King and his books like I said before. But he has been involved in a few projects without a great payoff and this is sadly going to be added to that list.
I give it a 7 because for the most part I did enjoy it and it is high qualityTV. But doesn't hit the spot for me. I will check Season 2 and I hope it improves.
Inheritance (2020)
Extremely poor and very silly
Utter utter rubbish of the highest order. Acting is beyond wooden. Plot is incredibly stupid. Believability factor of zero. None of the characters suit their casted actors with the grand wizard of terrible acting sitting proudly at the top of the pile none other than Simon Pegg. Stupid dialogue and wigs abound as they go through their paces to collect their Netflix pay check. If you like terrible movies then this is for you. Otherwise avoid.
An English Haunting (2020)
So so bad.
Oh my goodness!
Ok they did get use of a huge quaint English country house. That must've been due to the producers being lord and lady what's name.
Acting is so dire it's just painful. The script is awful dialogue is completely unnatural. Special effects are cheap and they look it. Photography is good though. Music is OK. Going for an old Hammer vibe. But the story is just stupid and everything is held together so flimsily that it just makes one big messy tangled laugh out loud snooze fest.
I am normally very happy to support indies. Love low Budget and can cope with multiple gaffs and budget restraints, I can see past all that but there is a line and this is way over it.
Too many stupidities and plot errors to make it even faintly believable, and just too much crappy acting. I just lost interest about half way and caught the little twist at the end which was way too little too late.
Sorry. Not for me.
Avoid.
Undercover (2019)
New kids turbo does cop drama
There is something darkly funny about this show. The tracksuits. The language. The oddball characters. The horrible tacky campsite. So far all the review seem to have it pegged out as a serious drama. Which it kind of is but it's also a very black comedy. One of the actors from new kids turbo was actually in it sadly he was shot in the first episode. Got to use subs. Subtitles are always better than dub. I never watch dubbed movie. Ever. So, dark Dutch self effacing humour with a slight distaste for the Belgian next door neighbors? Yeah go on.
Star Trek: Picard (2020)
Oh dear oh dear. No patrick no.
Dreadful start. Dream sequences that are really obvious. Terrible generic opening credit music. Cheesy dialogue & wafer thin characters. It's just a really bad Star Trek tv show and that's it. Such a shame, it looked interesting at first, but after 25 mins or so I'd had enough. It wastes no time going straight into silliness. Very sad. Patrick Stewart cannot save this turkey.
The Collapsed (2011)
So bad. 2 stars just for getting it made.
Pretty much the worst film I've ever seen. God knows what kind of budget they had. The experience level is unknown too. So for the simple fact that they got it made and they managed to keep the story relatively coherant. I'll give it a couple of points. But seriously unless you just love watching film for the sake of it, or maybe if you know one of the cast or crew give it a very width berth.
Acting is hammy to say the least. Story although promising is all a bit pointless. The entire thing is a pastiche of rip offs from other movies but done really badly. The characters are annoying especially the 2 kids who act like they are 12 but are actually in their 20s. Dad has turned into Rambo overnight. Mom starts smoking again. They are being chased by someone or something. The music. Oh my god don't get me started on the music. Where a simple drone would do to ramp up tension he puts in some kind of horrendous screechy orchestral thing that would work better in the shining during and intense door chopping scene or maybe not actually. The music was just awful all the way through. Irrelevant and over complicated with a really bad choice of instruments. The dialogue was stilted and fake. There was a masterclass in fake crying going on all the way through. All the actors took a shot at it but none of them could get it right. The editing was also dire. With splices mid shot along with screwing up the narrative. Then the DOP decided he'd like to take loads of depth of field shots of the woods so there's a ton of pointless blue into focus shots which no doubt are supposed to be scene setting to add to the dark vibe of the forest but come of as making the woods look like a nice place for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. Continuity suffered with things like dirty faces and clean boots and shirts. People waving guns around like they have never picked up a firearm in their lives. Haha. You've got to laugh in case you cry. Or try to cry fakes tears on screen in this case. It's a huge miss. Avoid.
Joker (2019)
Incredible dark gritty movie, forget rich powerful superheros, this is the time of the underdog.
After falling out of love with the Marvel & DC universes and now pretty much giving up on all super hero movies altogether, I was apathetic when the ads for Joker first appeared in my local cinema. I looked at my 16 year old son, who loves watching movies too, and we both shared the same thought: "yeah whatever"....
But as the trailer rolled, it started to look interesting. Then I checked facebook, and friends who had seen the trailer too were talking excitedly. Someone said "in Marvel they take a human and give him superpowers, here we have the opposite, a man who has everything taken away from him" and that really resonated with me.
This is one of the most important movies of our time, starring one of the most important actors of our time, the incredible Joaquin Phoenix, who has blazed a trail of cinematic excellence for many years and who's career, I think, culminates to huge climax here in this film.
It's dark, dark, dark. So damn gritty and real the camera work gives us this filthy downtrodden vision of Gotham and city on the brink of self destruction. No one flys or has a special suit there are no superpowers, or laser beams, there is just a man being spat out by the system, which is run by the rich for the rich and is becoming increasingly greedy and selfish. Included in this system is the Wayne family, who despite whatever their intentions actually are, are presented here as little more than white over privileged rich people who live in a huge gated house with private security. Yeah whatever Bruce but did you ever really spend time in the ghetto?
This is the commentary and Joker is trying, he's really trying to absorb the hate and the crap and the downright hardship that life is throwing at him, but he lacks the presence of mind to do it quite literally, struggles with an insane urge to laugh all the time even when things are absolutely not funny and of course the rest is history.
I hope this doesn't spoil it for you, go and watch it, that's 2 hours of your life you will want to repeat.
Anon (2018)
Futuristic hacker Sci Fi reminiscent of Black Mirror
Set in a bleak near future. Everyone is connected to "The Ether" which records their memories through their own eyes. Clive Owen plays a cop who is tortured by his own emotional demons over the accidental death of his son.
As he makes his way to a crime scene for a strange murder, he notices a woman who is "unknown" to the system in the street, and from there begins the hunt.
The bodies begin to pile up and as they go back through the memories they see that each victim sees themselves through the killers eyes as they are shot, therefore making the killer anonymous.
It's interesting, and very slickly made, with a grey colour tone and great visualisations of the constant computer enhanced feed. I love the electronic soundscape music which reminded me of Mr Robot.
It does feel like this kind of connection between humans is not so far away, and the right to remain anonymous is slowly being erased/eroded from our lives as we appear in our own social media, but more to the point we also appear accidentally in other peoples pictures, videos, memories etc. These are things beyond our control that build a full picture of who we are. This to me seemed to be the drive of the film.
The logic stays on point, things are carefully worked out so they make sense, apart from one really big plot hole. which is WHY?
Why does the murderer decide to murder these people? It's never really explained, or maybe it is and I just didn't work it out, but it left me a little confused at the end, good film I might watch again to see if I can pick up more of the plot I feel I'm missing something.
All in all the cast are solid, I love Clive Owen he's always worth watching and Amanda Seyfried was good too.
Worth a watch if you like Sci Fi meaningful and intellectual as opposed to spaceships and laser guns.
The Titan (2018)
Awaiting new Sci Fi? This fills a space for a bit.
It's OK
Not great, but not terrible either.
The FX are decent, the premise is silly as you would expect, and the plot goes largely unexplored, ie they don't really get to Titan, well one of them does, for all of 5 mins.
The idea is that Tom Wilkinson and his team of secret biologists need to develop some kind of super human to be sent to a remote planet, Titan, this being needs to be able to live there without the need for life support (we are never told why). So no oxygen tank, no pressurized suit etc etc, therefore in some way advancing human evolution to live in extreme conditions. Hoorah!
Stupidly, in the end, they only get to send one guy up, and by the time they do, he has morphed so much into a fish person he woud be unable to reproduce anyway, so the idea of re-starting the human race on a another planet is already doomed to failiure, and considering it cost 13bn ( I think that's what they say in the film) it's a very very expensive waste of time.
PLUS, to add to the unbelievability factor, the participants ( sam Worthington and gang) of the evolutionary scheme who slowly transform into fish like creatures, spend most of their time in a swimming pool, complaining about heat and light, while they shed their skin and morph into some kind of human/animal/fish crossbreed.
So when Sam Worthington (in his fish suit) FINALLY ends up on Titan, where is seems to be boiling hot and dry as a bone, it does seem rather weird. They turn him into a fish, teach him to sit under water for hours at a time, just to send him to this boiling dessert planet......fail.
The things that do work are the family scenes, there is some love in there that feels real, there is a feeling of the man who fell to earth in here, I like Sam Worthington and the rest of the cast were all decent enough.
2001 it aint.
But if you like a little Sci Fi and you're not a total snob, it's OK.
Chappie (2015)
So so bad.
Everything about this movie was terrible.
The plot was wafer thin and the concept was scientifically ridiculous. The effects were a re run of district 9. The similarities to older better more original movies did not go unnoticed and then there was the script and the acting, oh the acting! Like watching a school play with kids reading their lines soo badly. "Oh ninja ninja don't leave me!" Screams pixie chick at one point. Just total twaddle from beginning to end.
The plot holes were so big you could have driven a fleet of aircraft carries through them. No security around the development team behind the robots. Robots just hangin around spare. Spare parts easily accessible and only one key on usb to control all the robots and when it goes walkies with the developer no one bats an eyelid!
I read of on set troubles between bloomkamp and ninja. Possibly this is what led to such an outrageously bad film. Perhaps he just gave up and threw it together to get it out of the way. Who knows. But it is the final phase in the nosedive after the superb district 9.
It will take a lot of convincing to get me back in the room for another of his movies.
Pacific Rim (2013)
It's certainly not clever, but it is fun.
To all the reviewers who gave this movie low ratings, I can only say this; What did you expect to see? Did you watch this expecting to see something deep and meaningful? The trailers and posters make it perfectly clear what kind of movie this is going to be. Heavy CGI, regular Hollywood 'save the planet' storyline re-run. Young eye candy super hot actors. You know the score. If you want to see something clever, this is not it and it was never going to be.
Question is, does it do the job it sets out to do? I think it does rather well, yeah OK, it's cheesy as hell and you know how it's going to end before it starts, ( the world will be saved right? ) considering it's being told in retrospect the clue to the inevitable ending is there in the first 10 seconds of the movie.
I liked the mind meld idea of the 2 pilots, and I thought they covered most bases explaining the technology behind the enormous robots (Jaegers) pretty well. It does have a few technical plot holes here and there, but the film does have a 'let's just get on with it' kind of feel. The alien creatures (Kaiju) are great and the robot v monster battles are superb. Towards the end the pace picks right up and the story starts to fall apart a bit, but by that point who cares? In general Pacific Rim is a fast paced, slick looking piece of techno-action that most Sci-Fi fans will enjoy. It's big, loud, dumb and very pretty, largely due to Guillermo Del Toro being at the helm.
It's Sunday afternoon on the sofa material I think. I know these kind of films are 'designed' for the big screen, but honestly I prefer them at home most of the time. Unless of course, you like feeling as though you are sitting the middle of a continuous explosion for and hour and half.