jocedeg Reviews

Twinsanity (2018)

Tedious, plotless boring mess.

[1/10 · 24 April 2020]

Half an hour in, I still didn't have a clue about what the actual plot was.

I had no clue which twin was doing what. I guess that, on many occasion, onr took the other's place, but it wasn't clear.

Anyway: I didn't care.

Positive point: I was paid to watch that piece of irrelevant garbage by a tv station (I'm a promo producer). So I guess I can't say "I couldn't watch it even if they paid me!"....

But I do agree with a lot of other reviewers: the twins are really cute !

Happy Memories (1981)

A pretty bad film. Very pretentious

[1/10 · 12 September 2018]

Coming from the director of "Les bons débarras", this movie is a complete letdown. Very important elements are introduced into the script's third act without any previous hint at them and those element, meant to be shocking, have no bearing on the storyline.

Mankiewicz tries very hard to add elements of poetry, either with odd visual elements or strange, idiotic dialogue and he fails miserably.

We don't know for sure if Marie is just odd, mentally retarded or just plain crazy. Nothing explains why the father seems to have become mute. The incest angle, dropped into the story without any subtlety, makes the characters either sad or damaged or completely oblivious of it. And in the end, Marie seems comfortable with it and makes it seem like it's the life she wants.

Totally puzzling as far as what the intended message was meant to be.

Acting is overly theatrical, or maybe just plain bad. Hard to know what the director aimed to achieve with his actors.

One of the worst French Canadian movies from the director of one of the best.

Le dernier tunnel (2004)

A wildly entertaining and original movie, this ain't

[3/10 · 21 June 2011]

Brief summary: annoying overwhelming music clutters every moment of this ridiculously cliché movie. Every character is a one dimensional joke, every plot point predictable and, as far as American heist movies go, this one is the least interesting. Oh, did I mention this "american" heist movie is Canadian ? It's like the hugely under-talented ex music video director decided to copy the Michael Bay style of bad Hollywood crap but without bringing anything original to the recipe. And with very little money, I might add.

Canuel, the director, once said in an interview about his other movie "Bon Cop, Bad Cop" that the way he writes his scripts is by watching lots of movies like "Lethal Weapon" and reproducing what he thinks works. Thank you for being honest about your lack of originality, Érik ! The writer of "Tunnel" probably used the same method to bastardize true story and make it so generic. Canuel's talent resides in color grading his movie to look like a bad episode of CSI and using every tired directing cliché used in the past decade to remove any interest this might have had.

Skip it at all cost ! Seeing "Tunnel", and knowing that its inspired by a true story doesn't help

Wushu Warrior (2011)

Entirely boring, cable TV quality martial arts film

[3/10 · 25 February 2010]

It seems that the way to go for Alain Desrochers is to direct the most cliché-ridden scripts available to him.

His take on "The Fast and The Furious" was the forgettable "Nitro". Now, he goes "Crouching Tiger/Onk-Bak" with this boring martial arts adventure, even more forgettable.

This tale of revenge, while well shot, will make you lose interest once you see Matt Frewer as the bad guy, delivering the kind of dialogue a 10 year old kid uses when playing with his action figures.

The combat scenes are as best as they can afford, meaning they're pretty lame. Everybody fights kinda slowly, going through the steps of the choreography like grade schoolgirls doing an unrehearsed Swan Lake.

Sure, today's technology allows the post production team to easily erase the wires during the less than spectacular acrobatics, but you can still feel those wires supporting the fighters in many of the confrontations. Embarrassing.

Other digital effects are on par with today's video games. Not tody's movies.

Yeah, I realize I don't spend a lot of time talking about the plot: it's just not worth my time. Nor yours.

You'd be better off seeing a Uwe Boll film if you want to be entertained: at least, he's decent at sucking and his movies are laughable. Alain Desrocher's Wushu Warrior won't event make you laugh at it. It's just a boring, unremarkable waste of your time.

Big City (2007)

Misguided, offending, boring waste of celluloid

[1/10 · 5 November 2009]

Avoid at all cost: and keep your kids away from this, unless you don't mind seeing children smoke, says racist comments, and even become prostitutes !

Yeah, it's all meant to be taken as "social commentary",but still: seeing a 12 year old girl, made up like a far-west hooker, charge "50 cents for a kiss on the cheek, or a dollar for the lips" is a little too much for my taste. For kids, all the second degree satire will go over their head. For adults, boredom and disbelief will make you want to turn off the TV.

Even the kiddie drivel served by Robert Rodriguez is better than this.

Skip it and you'll be glad !

Cruising Bar 2 (2008)

Overdue comedy sequel misfires

[2/10 · 3 April 2009]

This sequel to the mildly amusing 1989 film tries to recapture the spirit of the original but, sadly, misses the mark by a long shot ! We meet the four losers again, almost 20 years older, and still trying very hard to seduce, with limited success.

The pacing of this movie is very slow and the structure does nothing to keep the viewer interested. We're treated to a series of vignettes that are neither clever, nor funny. A crime for a comedy.

Michel Côté, again playing the 4 roles that made him a comedy superstar in Québec, somehow fails to raise the movie above it's mediocre plot, something he did very well in the original movie.

If you make it pass the 1 hour mark, you could decide to either stop watching or keep going. Whatever you choose won't make a big difference: you won't find any reward by staying until the end, because by that time, you'll have figured out that this sequel is nothing more than another boring movie.

Four Extraordinary Women (2006 TV Movie)

Dull melodrama has no pulse !

[3/10 · 7 January 2009]

The nicest thing about this movie, other than getting to the end credits, was seeing Lindsay Wagner again. Her acting was decent in this unmoving tale of a man surrounded by cancer victims.

Shot on a minuscule budget, you can't expect high production values, but the worst part is the DULL script that moves slooowly and doesn't have anything to keep us hooked.

Sure, "decease of the week" movies made for women cable channels have a built-in audience, but this one will probably lose viewers at the halfway point: getting to 45 minutes felt like it took 2 hours !

The worst crime of movie making is to release a dull film. This one is a prime example of that.

Zombie Diaries (2006)

Terrible low-budget film. Avoid at all cost !

[1/10 · 30 December 2008]

When you have a good script, you can rise over the limitations of a small budget. That's not the case with this piece of junk. They could not afford good actors, the bad make-up effects are hidden by the poor image quality (intentionally poor image quality, but still...) and the script does a 360 at the end, branching to a cringe inducing subplot about a couple of serial killers that does nothing to move the so-called script forward.

It's hard to believe that this movie is praised by some horror website when there's so much good stuff around, like the brilliant "REC".

I can't believe I wasted my time on this piece of junk !

Taking the Plunge (2007)

Not terrible, not very good... average time waster

[5/10 · 10 November 2008]

Written, directed and acted like a very typical US-made teen comedy. All the ingredients are there: good looking teen cast, pop-sounding but generic soundtrack, a few local Quebec celebrities thrown in the mix like Olympic diver Alex Despaties in a surprisingly well acted supporting role, and you get your average moderately entertaining flick.

Sure, all the roles are stereotypes but what do you expect ? Once you get over the annoyingly clumsy product placement, like for Super Écran, a pay-TV broadcaster that has it's logo in the most incredibly stupid and hard to believe spots, like gym towels and coffee cups, in a school, no less... you have to endure a low-budget music score and predictable plot.

But, hey: all those kids do a decent acting job. Fans of Eva Green should look for Catherine de Lean as Julie, the resident bitch: she could be her younger sister.

Shake Hands with the Devil (2007)

Great story, bad movie.

[5/10 · 6 May 2008]

Yes, the story is very moving. But let's not confuse this terrible moment in history with what is a pretty bad film ! Roy Dupuis, yet again, shows the limits of his range. Spottiswoode's direction is puzzling: alternating between the story itself and a moment, taking place after the events, when we see Roméo Dallaire in the office of a woman (shrink) narrating a bit of the events in an awkward inner dialog that makes very little sense as far as storytelling is concerned. The movie is clumsily edited, the few special effects are uneven (you'll see when you get to the stadium scene) and it seems to go on forever.

I recommend the superior "Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold" if you want to see a touching, horrifying diary of one of the great failures of humankind.

Final Contract: Death on Delivery (2006)

Competent cinematography...

[4/10 · 3 March 2008]

..and, well... not much else.

This movie takes place in a world where the laws of physics don't exist. The action sequences just don't make any sense. The final bike jump is like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon: acme physics at work.

I know German cars are well built, but the beating all these Mercedes take in that movie is just hilarious ! And they still roll ! Alison King is cute, but she can't act. But, hey, what can you do with such a stupid script ? If you have 90 minutes to waste, like, really really waste, then this movie will do that for you.

But they will be wasted forever: no refund, so think about it !

Toi (2007)

Exploitative in the worst sense of the word.

[5/10 · 2 March 2008]

Let's take a boring story about a 40ish woman who leaves husband and son for her lover.

Let's have a few explicit, but un-sexy sex scenes and mix it up with second thoughts, booze, abuse of every kind and shoot a 75 minutes movie about all that.

Wait: A 75 minutes running time is very long ! We don't have enough content to bore you for that long.

So let's make the lover a sound engineer. That way we can insert a few crappy songs that are loosely connected to the narrative. Let's also have a few club scenes, so we can insert crappy techno music and show our unhappy protagonists dancing.

Also, since the movie's in french, why not have the main character talk on the phone in English with one of her friends. That way, we can please the Anglo market and, at the same time, serve some philosophical "good advice" to our troubled main character.

Still not quite 75 minutes ? Let's overstretch the short credits (nicely designed white text on a black background without any sound).

Hey ! What do you know ! Now we have a bad movie that's almost 80 minutes long ! And guess what ? It seems like 180 minutes.

Anne-Marie Cadieux's a fearless actress. Not because she has some raw, naked, sex scenes, but because she's in that clunker. Quebec's cinema is plagued by "auteurs" who go against the trend and try to offer daring, clever movies but fail miserably, mainly because they go and shoot a script that feels like a first draft. A first draft without an ending.

"Toi" is not very clever and it thinks it's daring. But let's face it: it takes more than raw sex to be daring. Next time Francois Delisle decides to make a movie with such a great cast, I hope he won't mistake "open ending" with "No ending". Let's also hope he spares us his horrible amateurish music...

Exploiting sex to sell a bad script is the trade of bad filmmakers.

The Cradle (2007)

Pretty bad "Shining" ripoff !

[3/10 · 28 February 2008]

Writer and wife buy a house in a remote place. Writer has writer's block. Weird things occur around the baby. Could all these strange happenings be the visions of a troubled mind ? This movie is a succession of "false alerts" where you think something bad is happening but, hey, not really. It was either a dream, hallucination or just a misleading semi-scare.

The tone shifts from mystery to occult, just to confuse you about what's really happening. Maybe there's a ghost involved, or maybe the old woman telling that horrific story about a born-dead baby is just nuts.

When you get to the end, you'll be offered a very unsatisfying quasi-explanation and you'll realize that this 90 minutes movie that feels like it's 180 minutes could have been done in a 60 minutes "Masters of Horror" format.

Unfortunately, the director's no "Master" and the horror's mostly absent.

Waste of time.

Sur la trace d'Igor Rizzi (2006)

Oddly amusing !

[6/10 · 21 November 2007]

Not really a good film, not really a bad film. It's only a collection of moments in the disillusioned life of Jean-Marc, an ex-football (soccer) star who left France after his love's death to come live in Montreal.

Completely ruined, his life is as empty as his apartment and he has to steal to make ends meet.

He reluctantly agrees to kill a man, Igor Rizzi, but a few twists of fate convince him to maybe give the guy a chance, and at the same time give himself a fresh start.

The acting is pretty good from all the members of the great cast. Mitrani's art direction consist of having his characters walk (a lot !) in some of Montreal's landmarks, which gives the movie a weird sense of discontinuity as the action moves all over the city.

It's just too bad that the movie feels so amateurish: from the repetitive names in the quirky credits to the random hand-held camera work and the lack of a solid narrative. Remove the time wasted on Jean-Marc's snow walks and this movie becomes a short film.

Despite all this, oddly, this "barely 90 minutes" movie shows enough warmth and humor to make up for all it's faults.

Let's hope Noel Mitrani finds a decent budget and a more rounded script and crew to come up with a more polished end product on his next project.

Framed for Murder (2007 TV Movie)

Yet another convoluted dtv thriller to waste your time.

[2/10 · 17 November 2007]

And your time WILL be wasted ! Badly written, without any subtlety or desire to be realistic, this story of a bipolar woman accused of murdering her husband has no basis in reality. Unless you believe bad soap operas are realistic...

After spending 8 years in jail, June is released and goes on to stay at her rich sister's house until she can find a job. With the help of another ex-con, she soon unravels (without a lot of difficulty) the mystery of her husband's murder, making any policeman or layer who worked on her case look like a fool.

Name a cliché, and you'll see it in this clinker.

Acting is terrible: Perry King was never a good actor but the one-dimensional rich guy he plays won't help his career. Thank God he's barely in the movie ! Susan Walters can be sexy, but she has no subtlety playing June's sister. At least Elisa Donovan (June) does an OK job as June, the bipolar ex-con fighting for truth and her estranged child.

Shot on Digital in Canada on a low budget, this movie will bring you nothing you haven't seen before. And when you saw it before, it was better.

Another one you should skip !

Échangistes (2007)

Lame, amateurish tale of troubled couples.

[1/10 · 2 November 2007]

From the start, you know you're watching a bad movie...

What could have been a revealing journey to the still taboo world of swinging clubs ends up being just another embarrassing waste of 80 minutes.

The acting is mostly horrible: actors are waiting for their time to say the lines without a hint of credibility. At some point, the director thought it would be clever to have the characters speak to an off-camera shrink to comment on their feelings or actions. We'll, I couldn't help but smile at how clumsy that device was but I do understand it's purpose: since nothing in the main plot is giving us any idea as to what is going on in their respective heads, why not just tell it to the viewer and skip some more bad acting.

The dancing scenes in a dimly lit bar makes you think they didn't have the budget to light it properly. Sound is horrible as well as art direction. In fact, nothing is directed in this clunker.

Watching that movie was complete torture but it did teach me a lesson: making movies is not as easy as you might think, but apparently, getting a little cash to finance it must be. There's no way they got financing based on the script.

Skip !

My First Wedding (2006)

Another turkey !

[1/10 · 26 September 2007]

The fact that this movie stayed on the shelf for over 2 years should be a good indication as to how awful it is.

Good looking sex-starved Vanessa, who is not a catholic, walks into a catholic church to confess that even if she's getting married in 3 days, she hasn't slept with her fiancé and she wants to sleep with every guy she sees.

Well, believe it or not, the man listening to her confession is the church's handyman, Nick.

Of course, Nick wants to take advantage of the situation, so he impersonates a priest and tries to get in bed with Vanessa.

Shades of "Three's Company" as far as credibility goes...

The improbable premise prevents you from believing everything that happens from that point. If you watch this, you'll suffer through 90 minutes of attempted humor delivered by bad actors in a movie shot in a bleak autumn-feeling Montreal that has rarely looked this bad.

Michel Cusson's music is up to the crummy standard he has reached since taking his clichéd TV work to the DTV world: Johann Pachelbel must be turning in his grave ! Another score written while sleepwalking and dreaming of that small check he's gonna cash, laughing all the way to the bank (and leaving any self-esteem behind...). A truly annoying score.

Rachael Lee Cook is still a looker, but her bad acting makes her unsympathetic character look truly retarded. Too bad she doesn't have the skill to match that cute face...

In the end **spoiler** the guy gets the girl he deserves and you get to hate yourself from having wasted your time, yet again, on a clunker filled with unknowns and a cute young actress who'll never rise above this crap.

Blind Trust (2007 TV Movie)

Not so bad for a c-grade direct-to-video movie.

[7/10 · 5 September 2007]

Incendo media specializes in quickly shot, low-budget TV dramas with convoluted plots and has-been actors.

But...

This shot in Montreal (standing-in for New York, I guess...) crime drama is above their usual crop. Louis Bolduc, the director, could very well be the guy to save this segment of the entertainment industry by cleverly giving these quickies a bit more production value than the budget can afford and by getting decent actors who can give their best despite the obstacles of a tight shooting schedule and zero rehearsal time.

Jessica Capshaw is believable as a cute and clever young woman who must use all her wit to get out of a murder accusation. She may not be as drop-dead gorgeous as her mom was, back in her "Temple of Doom" days, but she can surely act circles around her !

Veteran Canadian TV actor Art Hindle has fun with the role of a charming media-loving lawyer who has a few tricks and surprises up his sleeves.

Overall, you won't get the feeling that you've lost your time watching this drama, even if it doesn't "feel" like a big movie.

Let's see what Louis Bolduc serves us next !

Young Triffie's Been Made Away With (2006)

Terrible, terrible film.

[1/10 · 4 September 2007]

I won't spoil the plot, except that it's adapted from a play and it does seem like a bad adaptation of a vaudevillesque whodunit.

The music sounds like a Warner Bros cartoon and is very distracting. It surely doesn't make this very bad movie easier to stomach.

The second rate actors roll their eyes and can't elevate the weak material above its own level of mediocrity.

Remy Girard proves, once again, that he'll do anything for a paycheck. Andrea Martin, who never was a convincing actress, overacts so much that her second city work look like Shakespeare compared to this phoned-in performance.

Overall, it's a vulgar, unfunny piece of trash that does not seem to make up it's mind as to what genre it belongs to: kiddie comedy or violent adult murder mystery. A complete waste of time, but not talent.

The Rival (2006 TV Movie)

One of the worst TV movie I've ever seen !

[1/10 · 2 March 2007]

After an assault, a pregnant woman loses her unborn baby and her soon-to-be-ex husband. Jump 7 years later: she's remarried and trying to find a surrogate mother to finally have a baby.

But this woman is a total nut-case: she has visions of her murdered aunt who tells her to do very bad things.

And she does.

This (totally unbelievable) story of a psycho has more than one problem...

I'll be brief: Bad acting from each of the unknowns cast in this poorly written story... next to zero budget... convoluted story... illogical character development... I've seen daily soaps on American TV with all that, but at least the bad actors in these soaps are kinda attractive.

All in all, a totally horrible viewing experience.

Skip !

The Foursome (2006)

Pretty bad movie...

[2/10 · 17 January 2007]

For my part, this movie is a waste of time. The tone goes from semi-comic to slapstick and the characters are all stereotypes: a clumsy fat guy, a bitter, aging, alcoholic millionaire, a sexually frustrated salesman and the playboy con-man. The main problem is that these four guys don't even look like they're very close in age, but they are supposed to be university buddies.

The movie's production values seem very low: the golf course look more like a big park. Most of the time, you see them swing but it doesn't feel like there's a ball on the grass. Amateur stuff all the way.

But the biggest problem is that none of the characters are very sympathetic to begin with.

The wives don't bring a lot to the story, except more stereotypical banter that sound more like 90's talk than actual 2005 realities.

All the jokes fall flat.

There's even an embarrassing "stunt" sequence that features the worst "matched-to-the-actress" stunt woman in history doing the worst bit of stunt driving you could imagine: if you have the courage the see this movie, your jaw will drop when you get to that sequence ! All these little details completely took me out of the movie.

As for the acting, Dillon is in "Entourage" mode and the unknown around him act like sitcom extras.

Maybe they tried to get a "Big Chill for the New Millennium" feel, but it doesn't connect with me, a guy who's about their age. They even insert a painfully "cliché" gay character who is completely ridiculous, but in a way, that's OK: he's just as bad as the rest of the characters.

Bad movie based on a bad play.

Skip !

Neighbors (1981)

Probably the worst movie of the 80's.

[1/10 · 12 December 2006]

There's nothing in that movie remotely funny. This is the Belushi movie I had never seen and now... I wish I hadn't seen it. The pacing is terrible and there's no sense of passing time: everything seems to happen in two hours but the story apparently takes place in more than a day. The plot is full of holes, illogical and characters have unexplained mood swings: they go from hating each other to missing one another in a flash. Continuity didn't seem to be a concern when they made that movie. I felt like parts were missing.

All in all, it's badly written, incoherent, under-directed, the music is terrible (Warner Bros cartoon, anyone ?) and... we just don't care. At least I don't. Too bad Belushi didn't get the chance to make another movie to make of forget this piece of crap.

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

Simon West should be banned from making movies...

[1/10 · 30 May 2006]

From the opening credits, edited in the now tired style of quick jump cuts and "speed shifts" editing (complete with sound effects on the transitions) you can tell this is going to be one awful bore-fest.

Yes, it's full of clichés, but a good filmmaker can inject life in a tired genre. Not the case with this mess... No sense of timing or suspense, no surprises, awful music and a stupid illogical plot: at one point **SPOILER**, the babysitter gets a call from another phone line in the guest house. She asks the stalker "How did you get that number" and manages to keep him online long enough for the cops to trace the call. After he hangs up, she says "I'm on another line" and figures out the cops are not monitoring that phone even if she KNEW she was using another line when she asked the guy how he got the number).

You can see **SPOILERS** the "Carrie" ending coming a mile away. The lead actress is cute (that's about the only quality of this crap-fest) but other than that, it's not even worth a rental. The movie is not even 90 minutes long but it seems to go on FOREVER.

Forever and nowhere...

Le golem de Montréal (2004)

Kiddie movie has no excuse for being silly movie.

[2/10 · 26 June 2005]

A young boy creates a Golem, a sort of artificial being based on old Jewish legends. The Golem hangs with him and his friends and obeys their every orders. From there, the movie gets illogical and struggles to find a precise message while trying to convey about fifteen messages. At the end, the message becomes obvious, but it is pasted on and has very little to do with the previous seventy minutes. Seems like the work of a first time director trying to put too much stuff into too short a running time with very little budget: the awful digital cinematography doesn't help. This movie, obviously aimed at young kids, is trying very hard to be an allegory about an absent parent, amongst all the other things. Problems is, it's badly written, lacks focus and would probably go over the head of it's intended public. The acting... Alexis Martin, who plays the father of one of the kids, is usually a decent actor but he plays over the top, thinking that G rated movies deserve that kind of silliness. The Jewish angle is ridiculous and insulting: if you make a movie about a Golem, even if it's aimed at youngsters doesn't mean you can screw around with the "legend". One great subject, one missed opportunity. Having a small budget is no excuse for bad storytelling: Skip this movie.