Change Your Image
warpedmentality00
Reviews
Rampage: President Down (2016)
100 Minutes of Propaganda and Talking
I'll start off by saying that I haven't seen the first two movies although I doubt that I'm missing any critical information. I'm actually surprised that I made it through the whole movie.
First off, despite the title of the movie being "Rampage," there's surprisingly little action. The first 5 minutes and the last half hour or so has lots of gunfire and explosions but the other hour of the movie consists of talking. Either conversations between law enforcement agents, conversations between Bill Williamson and his equally delusional girlfriend/wife/baby mama or Bill Williamson's paranoid rants to the camera. The continuous, repetitive rants yearning for some kind of weird, hybrid
socialist/libertarian nation becomes tiresome after a while. It's obvious from watching that there was little to no script before filming started. Bill Williamson preaches hatred and violence towards the rich yet has amassed an arsenal of weapons including C4, automatic rifles, grenades, drones, landmines, remote controlled machine guns and an underground bunker in the forest. I guess the best part of the movie comes from realizing that Bill has become one of the hypocrites that he so despises. Either that or the not-so-subtle indication at the very end of the movie that Uwe Boll may finally stop churning out his crap movies.
If you've seen the first two (which I'm told are far superior), then go ahead and finish up the trilogy. If you're randomly floating through Netflix and the title catches your eye, give it a pass.
Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001)
Children of the Corn: Revelation: Trying to do too much with too little
With 7 titles and 1 remake under it's belt, everybody knows that the Children of the Corn series has run it's course and is now being kept alive in attempts to bleed it for a little more money.
That's not to say that they didn't try in Revelation. I watched this on Netflix expecting another painful installment like Isaac's Return but this showed slight improvement.
They attempted to breathe new life into the series by trading the cornfields of small-town Nebraska for a dilapidated apartment building in small-town Nebraska; going for more of a haunted house feel than an evil children feel. The story line had potential but, unfortunately, it didn't live up. And here's why:
The Children: The children are really what the movie is always about. But for some reason, the small but menacing children of the series are swapped out for more of a generally weird brand of child. The "stand there and stare" move gets less creepy the more it is used (and it's used A LOT) and starts becoming more annoying than anything. The only thing scary about the "main" evil child, Abel, is his Amish-style haircut. Although their uncanny ability to teleport makes for some creepy moments, I never really found myself being scared of the kids.
The Supporting Characters: Almost every single character that we meet in the movie serves one purpose; to give the kids someone to kill while the main character, Jamie, tries to figure out what's going on. The few supporting characters who don't meet a grisly end pop up at random times during the movie until they're needed to progress the movie along.
The Story: While the story has never been a strong point of the Children of the Corn series, Revelations tries a little too hard to make the story compelling. It begins with Jamie trying to find her missing grandmother. It then turns into a trip to the past where we learn that her grandmother was the sole survivor of a mass cult suicide and, in an odd reverse-butterfly effect type of motivation, the children return to kill Jamie since her grandmother was supposed to die and Jamie should not have even been born. It's a rather complex plot line for a run-of-the-mill horror movie.
The Main Character: Although we follow Jamie as she frantically searches for her grandmother, we don't really feel any connection to her. Very little background is given to her character besides the fact that she lives in California and talks to her grandmother regularly. The casting director did a good job of bringing Claudette Mink on for the movie as her good looks tend to distract you from the sub-par script that they handed her. She does a good job as the concerned grand-daughter but when the action starts up, she starts to overact. You see this most obviously towards the end when she's attacked by evil corn stalks that remind many horror movie aficionados of the "tree rape" scene of Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead."
In the end, it was a half-way decent movie. It certainly won't win any awards but it's just creepy enough to hold your attention. And at brisk 82 minutes, it goes by pretty quick.
Gone (2012)
Had potential but falls flat
This is a movie that had a lot of potential. The plot was simple and allowed the director a good amount of freedom to do the film the way that they wanted. Unfortunately, the finished product falls flat on its' face.
The movie starts out well enough. It has the main character going through her daily routine while acknowledging her past as a kidnapping victim. But things take a turn around the 15-minute mark when the main character's sister disappears.
It doesn't take long for Amanda Seyfried's neurotic and paranoid character to get on your nerves as she seemingly bumps heads with everybody that she encounters. Her character, for some reason, feels the need to make up gigantic lies that constantly change when talking to people.
Minor characters pop up and seem to conveniently have information that Seyfried's character needs.
The movie slowly builds up to the climax that ends rather abruptly and the ending will have you looking at your fellow movie-watchers and going "Really?"
In the end, it's the kind of movie that I'll watch once, put back on my movie shelf and probably never watch again. The movie felt really rushed; like the director was running out of time and just threw some stuff together. I've seen worse but I've also seen much, much better.