Scary bears and mediocre zombie things...

We decided against seeing this film at the cinema even though it was quite hyped and we were in our super duper horror watching period when it came out.  Now it has come out on DVD and we have watched it!

Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

The plot is simple, a group of friends decide to go on an adventure to the nuclear disaster town of Chernobyl. Weird things start happening and they lose their guide and car. There's something lurking in the darkness, something mutated from the nuclear disaster.

This review won't be very long because it's the first one in a while and it was quite a while since we watched the film. There's one word that can describe this film: mediocre. It's all through a watchable film but it's definitely nothing special, it has a couple of scares but in a horror you want a little bit more bang for the buck.






Here's a picture of a bear that's somewhat related to the film.

Grade:







~ Chris

Once upon a midnight dreary

I love seeing films that I've never heard of before and thus have absolutley zero preconceptions about. It's super fun making judgements right from the title and as the opening credits run. And so my initial thoughts about this film were; 'Awesome! I love ravens. Ravens are great....'

This might actually be a rook, but the sentiment still stands.

The Raven (2012) 

Firstly, there's not enough ravens in this film. But there is John Cusack with an amusing beard as a down and out Edgar Allan Poe running around Victorian era Baltimore trying to trace a crazed obsessive serial killer who is reenacting Poe's fictional murders. It's all very dark and complex with a vaguely (and literally) tortured romance going on as well.

You're plunged into the scary dark world right from the onset. And having read none of Poe's fiction, I was totally unprepared for the grisly violence! I was feeling fairly creeped throughout the entire film as the body count notches up. Stylistically, it was like a time warped Se7en with touches of the game 'Hard Rain' for good measure the way you're led to consider 'whodunnit?'

John Cusack, as ever, is excellent and compelling. I don't really remember the rest of the cast, which goes to show... The script is surprisingly witty with some great exchanges between Poe and everyone he speaks to really. His is a very lovingly developed character.

The ending I thought was a very clever take on the actual facts surrounding Poe near the time of his death. 

Quoth the raven; it's a tongue!  

~Aim

Also when we saw this scene we both burst out. Is that a tongue?

~ Chris

We withdrew some money...

...and watched ATM.

ATM is a film I've seen a trailer of somewhere, either in the cinema or some DVD, Aim doesn't recall seeing anything about it but we (I) decided we should give it a try anyway.

ATM

The basic plot:
Three people go in an ATM hut, neither me nor Aim has ever seen a building like that before but maybe they actually have them in America. There they get trapped by a hooded man, that at first just stands there and watches them, they get freaked out and holes up in the hut. Later the guy kills a man that is out walking his dog in front of them and they realise that they're in mortal peril. His attempts to lure them out/kill them in the hut continues as they try to think of a way to escape.

My thoughts:
The film is...meh...and quite unsatisfactory, it gives no reason for the hooded man to do this and the acting is really awful. Furthermore there's tons of pointless dialogue and a romance that makes Twilight seem like Romeo and Juliet.

The idea for the film is good but it leaves much to wish for. A higher pace, a better insight to the hooded man, better acting, and less crap dialogue.

That the script was written by the guy that wrote Buried first struck me as quite the surprise but when I come to think of it, the dialogue of that film wasn't the best either. It was better delivered by Ryan Reynolds though. I also see the similarities between the two films and that the writer has drawn inspiration from his own work. Although if you're going to watch one of his films go with Buried, take my word for it.

And now for what you have all been waiting for...
will it get a tongue?

Nope, I can't recommend this film even though I liked the basic idea of it enough to watch it after seeing the trailer.

~ Chris

We went to the cinema!

A film I actually experienced on something bigger than the 10.1" netbook screen! Seriously why do they even bother to mention the extra .1 of an inch? Anyway we stocked up on such cinema nibble staples such as PINEAPPLE and MELON before heading to Centertainment to enjoy the magic of cinema; an experience shared full of people talking and touching each other and using their phones and rustling all the shit they've brought with them. Oh, was that us? 


Prometheus (2012) 

I was horribly distracted by the light SHINING IN MY FACE for quite a lot of this film. But regardless, Prometheus was ok and I enjoyed various aspects of it but it was sadly disappointing overall with some pretty unforgivable plot holes. 


I loved Alien. It's one of my favouorite films of all time and I adore Ridley Scott. Perhaps because of these high hopes I felt the fail more keenly. I was also horribly teased and led on by the trailers which seemed to offer a more worthy companion to the original than how it actually was.


The bad bits: The stupid half-hashed characters. The stupid spirital 'meaning of the universe' plot.
Noomi Rapace as the nympho scientist religious fanatic with daddy issues.You're so annoying! How did this happen when you were so great in Girl with a Dragon Tattoo? And why are you making a face like a Mongolian hamster all the time.? And why wasn't Charlize Theron given more lines instead?

The good bits: Michael Fassbender as the android - This man is amazing, I want more of him. I'm going to watch every film he's ever done. Ridley Scotts's landscapes - You just know when you're watching a Scott film. The scares and creepy alien gore- I was pretty damn tense for quite a lot of the film. There's a lot of action, beautifully shot, with effortless effects and lots of disgusting, disturbing  violent alien bits. 


In all, I found it hard weighing it up and my initial feelings when I came out of the cinema can be summed up as 'meh' and 'but why?' If you can go and just enjoy the nice space romp with the cool scenery and nice nasty aliens then good for you. But if you were yearning after something more densely plotted, well characterised and challenging on par with Alien, then you'll be disappointed as I was. 


Grade: 





Go see it, just don't get too excited.


~Aim

Yet another ASDA film...

Yes, we found one more film on the ASDA top seller list. This time it was:

Babycall

It's a Norwegian film starring Swedish actress Noomi Rapace (who we had recently seen in Ridley Scott's Prometheus, which we will review very soon).
IMDB describes the film as following:

"After a baby monitor picks up another channel, Anna begins reliving the nightmare she'd recently escaped."

I would say that the film is a bit more complicated than that. The baby monitor is not as central in the film as this might indicate. Don't get me wrong it does play a vital part in the film although in what I would consider a sub plot.

If I were to summarise the film in a sentence it would be something like this:

"Haunted by her past Anna moves to a new place, she becomes friends with home-electronics salesman Helge while her psyche falls apart."

The film is ultimately scary, not in a jumping out of your seat and choking on your cheese curls way but in a more clever way. It gets you thinking what traumatic things can do to a person and gives you goosebumps when you finally get what has happened. Although...with that said the film holds out on everything until the very end and you sit and guess what really is going on, which ultimately becomes quite annoying.

Being Swedish I can also tell you that the dialogue is a bit strange from time to time. That could maybe be because it was a Norwegian writing the script. I don't see any reason why the main character would be Swedish when it's a Norwegian film, every other character in the film is and speaks Norwegian even Anna's child Anders.

The acting is through-out the film good with some really low-marks, especially in the scenes with children.

Don't get fooled by the slow pace of the film, it's really worth it in the end. Also don't reject it because it's not in English, subtitles are available.

Grade:

~ Chris

I want my life back

I'm just glad it wasn't me who paid for this. Another one we chose from the infamous top 20 DVD releases in ASDA that appealed to us with its 'super awesome' cover art...

Dark Island (2010)

The premise: 'After losing contact with its researchers on a remote island, a military corporation hires a group of scientists and soldiers to find out what went wrong. When they arrive, the team quickly discovers that experiments performed on the island have unleashed a powerful and deadly entity that will stop at nothing to destroy them all.'

What we actually got: A dull and uninspiring cast with bizarrely uniform nasal voices running around a miserable Canadian island interspersed with some truly hilarious shots of pseudo cold blooded military personnel discussing things in a dingy office. Every now and again they are terrorised by some sentinent black dust.

I wanted to hate them, it would've made this whole viewing experience more enjoyable for when they started dying stupidly and horribly, but I couldn't even force myself to care enough. 

So many of the scenes in this film felt like shoddily made remakes and direct lifts from other films; ye old assembling of the 'crack team' of scientists and experts with 'clashing' personalities, (read stereotypical; the beardy mysogynist, the Asiatic expert in combat, the plucky female scientist etc) before shipping them off to a secret island used for military weapons testing to squabble and flail about miserably before causing each other's deaths through incompetence and deception.

The scariest thing about this film was probably the opening scene, but then that fails miserably as soon as the cast start speaking. There's some really quite tortuous dialogue that kills anychance of tension building. Another thing that stopped any tension whatsoever is the editing of the combat and action scenes. It zips about all over the place, with random close ups of random body parts. This is coupled with a soundrack that just doesn't fit, doesn't serve any purpose apart from to be irriatingly disonant from what you're seeing.

I'm going to try and pretend I didn't waste my life watching this. 

Grade:

Stupid ASDA.....

~Aim

And the award for...

The suckfest film that inspired us to start our blog goes to...none other than...

Grave Encounters (2011)

That has to be worth an applause. We found this film on the Asda top DVD-chart and thought we'd give it a try. That was a mistake, it was only a waste of time and all the DVD is good for is as a frisbee disc.

Grave Encounters was written and directed by "The Vicious Brothers" and when I saw that my sucksense started tingling. If someone doesn't want to put their name on something, but rather use something like "The Vicious Brothers", there has to be something wrong with it.

The plot is simple and could have been so much better. I won't go into details but here's the set up.

A production crew that works for a ghost hunting show gets a tip about a disused mental hospital that is supposedly haunted. They decide to lock themselves in and spend a night recording things. Mysterious paranormal activity starts and it rapidly gets worse.
(It's a good start and it gets you interested but it's been done before though, like everything else in this film, in for example 1408*.)

I have a feeling that the writers/directors were trying to stuff this film full of stuff from horror films that they like. Even though the base plot is simple and worth so much more than this film they manage to screw up royally. There's too many characters none of them really memorable and there's too many different "scary" ideas. The film is such a jumble of things and they're so poorly executed that I was laughing through long parts of it. I have to admit that there was one or two scenes that made me jump a little but those were cheap scares.

Is it worth watching then?
If you have nothing better to do and have watched every other horror ever made, then yes. If I ever had to chose between this film and any other horror ever made, I'd pick any other horror ever made seven days a week.

Grade:

~ Chris

*Horror film from 2007 based on a Stephen King short story and directed by Mikael Håfström.