Film Reviews by DC

The older I get, the more I notice that real life is usually well lit, with neutral white light indoors and natural daylight outdoors, and the less patience I have with films that ignore this. 

John Wick has great action, good drama, and consistent annoying lighting. Give it an extra star if you have a blue filter over your eyes. 

I thought that this was such a great film when it came out, but that was nearly forty years ago, and I was clearly a different person back then. I watched it in 2024 for the first time in decades, and the longer it went on, the less I cared about what happened. People got shot, some of them had it coming, stuff blew up, yeah, whatever. 

The film starts off with Eric wanting to get his car back from the men who stole it, which is a reasonable thing to drive a plot, in a comfortingly familiar post-apocalyptic setting. And then he murders a man because he doesn't want to pay full price for a gun. I immediately lost my sympathy for him at that point, and nothing he does afterwards made me like him any better. Eric wants his car back because of something inside it. I didn't think that it justified the trail of bodies left in his wake, and the other reviews suggest that not many other people were impressed by his motive. 

Apart from all that, it's a well-made film, so add one or two extra stars if you'll forgive any wrong doings by a film's protagonist because he's the hero, and that makes everything OK.  

There's a scene in this horror film where a young woman is locked up alone in a dimly lit torture dungeon. I thought to myself "Why is it dimly lit all the time, instead of brightly lit so that the torturers can see what they are doing, or lights out when she's alone?" They cut her hair short on camera, and later she appears with a buzz cut. Why not give her the full buzz cut straight away? She's chained up, but in one scene she has her chains off with no explanation, and the torturers just chain her up again. 

This is a horror film. I really shouldn't be wondering about the lighting choices and continuity.

The gore didn't bother me. Maybe I'm lacking in human empathy, or maybe deep down I know that it's all special effects. It did bother me that one of the leads is axe-crazy, and the other one was too stupid to CALL THE COPS  when she found the dungeon. And yes, I know that the film would have been shorter if she had done the smart thing, but that would have been a good thing. 

The fights and chases are all exciting in isolation, but the film portrays Turkey as the sort of place where it is entirely acceptable for a man to murder an adulterous woman, so any escape that Ayse achieves can only be temporary. 

Do I regret watching it? No. Would I watch it again? Also no.  

I have no complaints about the quality of the story and acting, but the film-to-video transfer looks like I did it. It's all a bit murky, and things tend to merge together in the many scenes of men in dark uniforms against dark backgrounds. 

Rich and beautiful people are jerks or something, so our gang of dim-witted anti-heroes go on a rampage of murder and kidnapping. No one in the film had any redeeming features. My sympathies were with the empty-headed rich girl kidnap victim up until she developed a case of Stockholm syndrome that even the lead villain thought was ridiculous.   

Somehow, it was both offensive *and* boring. 

"Freaks" is a 1930s film about circus freaks, featuring real circus freaks, about which the film critic Mark Kermode once said "It's the sort of film that everyone should watch once,  but you have to wonder about people who want to watch it over and over again." I feel the same way about this film. 

 The parade of sex, violence, sexual violence and sexually violent demons is absolutely not for everyone, but if you want to know how far a film can go and still be released, well, here you are. "Legend of the Demon Womb" is less extreme than "Legend of the Overfiend." This makes it easier to watch, but also somehow less worth watching: if you're watching films for shock value, why bother with the film that is less shocking? 

This is a film like so many others that I have seen: both enjoyable and forgettable. 

Did I like it? Yes. Did I waste my time by watching it? No. Do I remember much about it? No. Will I rent it again? No.

I don't speak Russian, so the English dub didn't bother me: I like to watch films, not read them. 

The time-travelling camera gives the film an SF plot, but it's really about the relationship between the three friends, the strains that the secret puts on that relationship, and how they turn out not to be quite as good friends as they thought. 

If you don't like effects-heavy SF films then rest assured that this is not one of those films: it's about people, not effects. 

A recently developed pet peeve of mine is when films and TV are deliberately under lit. I have been in houses and offices and factories and lecture theatres and classrooms and shops, and they they were all brightly lit so that people can see what they are doing. In this film, everything is miserably grey and dark, and it drove me mad. Instead of thinking about the characters and the plot and the mystery of the aliens, I was thinking "Why is it so damn dark in here?" in every single scene. I eventually gave up after 50 minutes. 

This isn't an inherently bad film, but it was obviously made on a tiny budget, and nearly every scene would have benefited from having more money spent on it. Money for costumes and props. Money for extras. Money for effects. Money for sets and locations. Money for stuntmen. Money for teaching the actors sword fighting. Money for historical research. Money for proofreading. Watching it was more embarrassing than anything else. 

Also, I can't see why it was rated 18. There's no sex or nudity, and while there's some violence and blood, it isn't explicit (probably because the producers couldn't afford  the required FX work). Not very scary either. 

This film cost tens of millions of dollars to make, but the makers couldn't seem to find the money for a decent tripod for the camera. The framing drifts around a bit in every scene, and once I had noticed this, I couldn't stop noticing it. 

What did I think about the writing and directing and acting and effects? Dunno, it was hard to form an opinion on any of that when I kept on thinking "For God's sake man, nail the camera down!" 

This film is a sci-fi version of "Moby Dick," and when you know that, then you can probably see the ending coming. The description doesn't make it obvious, but we have a space captain obsessively hunting a giant animal, and there is a small plaque of a white whale above his desk. Yep, "Moby Dick." 

Why only two stars? It isn't inherently terrible, but:

It's always dark inside the ship. This quickly became annoying: industrial workspaces should be well lit so the workers can see what they're doing, and so the audience can see them do it. 

The crew show some needless stupidity, especially towards the end of the film. One of them has gone mad and is roaming the ship with a knife, and the lack of urgency about finding him leads to two deaths.

The film is only 89 minutes. Some films could do with being shorter, but this one could have done with an extra five or ten minutes of people talking about what was happening and why.  

 On the plus side:  

The effects work is good for a straight-to-video film featuring no one I have ever heard of.

The characters are mostly likeable, and believable as the sort of people who would end up at the end of the line.