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I Care a Lot (2020)
Does not deliver on its promise
To me, the Netflix trailer came off as billing it as a revenge story with some social satire, so that's what I expected going in. There is none of that, but instead an uneven film that can't decide what subject it wants to tackle and what genre it wants to be.
Rosamund Pike is doing a decent job portraying Marla Grayson, who games the legal system to con old people out of their savings. Her latest mark is connected to Peter Dinklage's character, who will then attempt to save her.
Marla Grayson is essentially pure evil comparable to Cruella DeVille, with the exception that she is gay. Apparently this is the reason why as half of the film is over, we're supposed to root for her to defeat the guy trying saving his elderly relative. This I found the most puzzling, because the first half builds her up to be such a villanous character
Essentially, around one hour in though the first half of the move becomes completely inconsequential, and it turns into a sort of action movie. The old lady in the care home turns out to be a MacGuffin and is pretty much never spoken off again. Marla Grayson becomes a sort of Mary Sue character who is always unfazed and proves suprisingly inept at a range of things including emergency medicine and commando operations. After a series of increasingly outlandish turns of events, there is an ending which, without spoiling anything, seems yet again mostly unconnected to what happened before.
I liked the performances from Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage and some of the minor characters, but overall I'd advise against this movie. The execution does not deliver in the slightest on the promise of the concept and the trailer, and it ends up being mediocre at best in all the genres it tries to play with. It is at 81% on Rotten Tomatoes which honestly makes me question the very integrity of that site. It is sad that "Made for Netflix" has become the "Lifetime Movie" of our times, but apparently that's the world we live in now.
Basket Case (1982)
Brutal... and not in a good way
A lot of people give glowing reviews for this movies, in what I can only assume is an elaborate troll conspiracy to get people to watch it. Don't fall for this. This might be quite literally the worst movie I've ever seen, and believe me, the competition is fierce. I expected to see a good campy fun movie like Re-Animator, but it's really not. It's bad, not so bad it's good, not even so bad it's horrible, it's Star Wars Holiday Special bad.
The story, if you haven't read the summary, is that Duane Bradley and his Siamese twin were separated by evil doctors against their will, and have now come to New York to take revenge. And that's pretty much it. Sure there is a pointless romantic subplot, but apart from that, there is really no conflict or twists of any kind. It pretty much plays out exactly as you would expect.
It really fails in every respect imaginable. The plot is bad, the dialog is worse, and the acting is just painful to watch. You shouldn't think it possible to fail in acting a simple thing such as screaming or running across a lawn, but these people show you different. The deformed brother doll is just hideously tacky, and he moves with stop motion animations that I have seen better done in silent movies. There is a bit of nudity at one point towards the end of the movie that is kind of okay, but most likely you'll be long dead from aneurysms by then. There isn't even a lot of gore in the death scenes, just the camera panning away for a gory discretion shot and a lot of screaming before, during, and after.
How Frank Hennenlotter got to make not only this movie, but others as well, and two sequels to this no less, is completely beyond me. He should have spent the money he bamboozled out of his producers for crack and hookers and the world would have been better off for it. In fact, I now regard this as the definite proof there is no god, because if there was, how could he let this film happen?
Hostel (2005)
Not half bad, though not as violent as you might think
Although I'm a huge Horror fan, I never really got warm with the whole "torture porn." It was therefore relatively late that I got to see both Saw and Hostel, probably the best known exponents of the genre, and both I only watched them because they are so well known and I wanted to know what everyone was talking about.
I found Saw to be better than I expected, which isn't generally saying much, but at least it didn't suck. As for Hostel, I read somewhere that Eli Roth liked Saw, but found the final "twist" (which I obviously can't talk about) to be silly and unbelievable. A sentiment I strongly agree with, so I had to see this one as well. And I was positively surprised with it, more so than with Saw.
The story is that three backpackers tour Europe in search of women to have sex with, and drugs to consume. The first half hour or so introduces the characters and their motivation, as they get stoned and rent prostitutes in Amsterdam. A slightly creepy Russian dude they meet tells them of a hostel near Bratislava, that doesn't appear in any guide book, and is supposed to be some sort of insider tip for hedonistic travelers. The description entices them enough to cancel their previous plans and travel there immediately. At first it appears to be everything that was promised, as they hook up with beautiful girls and take lots of drugs in a disco, but gradually, the atmosphere becomes more threatening, until the first of their friends disappears.
I won't go into any detail as for the events that follow except that it involves violence and torture, as should be expected from the genre. Both are, however, not too graphic or shocking, especially if you have seen films such as Tokyo Gore Police, or pretty much anything by Takashi Miike (who has a cameo here BTW). A lot of the violent acts are shown in gore discretion shots, which makes you wonder why the camera suddenly pans away if you're familiar with aforementioned films. In the first part of the film, we get treated to lots of gratuitous nudity, even by horror film standards, which my girlfriend didn't like all that much, but as for me personally, things could be worse.
The acting is generally decent, especially considering that there's no big names among the actors. Particularly outstanding was Rick Hoffman as The American Client, as remarked by lots of other reviewers. But I also liked Jan Vlasak as The Dutch Businessman, who was very creepy from the first shot he appeared in. Also, Eli Roth has shown again that he knows how to integrate dark humor and suspenseful horror - a feat that is in no way easy and can fail spectacularly at times. Yes, I'm looking at you Rob Zombie. What ultimately sold me, however, is that he builds up tension and suspense very well, and keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end. This is also what mainly sets it apart from Saw, which I found kind of tedious at times. Not to mention the solution to the plot - say what you will about Hostel, it is a lot more believable than Saw's silly twist. On a side note, the beatings Hostel takes while Saw is generally praised makes me think less and less of the cumulative IMDb ratings, and is one of the reasons I wrote this review.
A final word to common points of criticism from other reviewers. Lots of people seem to complain that it wasn't made by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know how they managed to write this in reviews, as they must clearly be illiterate: the movie starts with the words "presented by Quentin Tarantino" followed by "written and directed by Eli Roth." Seriously, have you ever considered how many films and TV shows Alfred Hitchcock "presented" without having anything obvious to do with it? It is a common device in Hollywood. Also, I don't get the complaint by Slowakians. Sure, it is portrayed as a pretty bleak and impoverished place, but who in their right mind would watch Hostel as a source of real world information on Eastern Europe? Roth clearly takes artistic liberties here. Deliverance portrayed inhabitants of Georgia as inbred rapist crackers and you don't hear them endlessly complaining about it.
Ultimately, if you don't buy into the hype and don't expect too much, you will find that you could have spend 90 minutes far worse than watching this. If you squirmed at the violence in Kill Bill, and somehow expected another Tarantino flick, this isn't for you. If you thought Koroshiya Ichii was too tame and hope to see a more violent and gory film, stay with Japanese productions. But if you're looking for a nice, suspenseful horror flick with a small dose of dark humor, and don't mind looking at naked girls in between, this is worth a try.
Final Rating: 7/10 might watch again, but I added a star in the final rating to countermand the plethora of unjustified one star ratings.
Day of the Woman (1978)
This is what all the fuss was about?
So this is it, the infamous Day of the Woman a.k.a. I spit on your grave, banned in several countries and considered the worst movie ever made by Roger Ebert. The last fact was enough for me to want to see it, since I often noticed that my taste in movies is largely the opposite of Ebert's. Meaning a lot of movies I like were absolutely pulled to pieces by him, and most I hate he loves - especially with horror movies.
So needless to say, I went in with relatively high expectations, but I should have known it wouldn't hold up to them. First off let me say, all this fuss is completely unjustified. Same as with a lot of banned movies from that era, you will find yourself wondering why. Sure, the rape scenes are fairly gruesome since it's rape, but as for the violence, you can see a lot worse in newer movies, among those some that are hyped by Ebert. On another side note, Ebert's hypocrisy becomes very apparent in the accolades he gives for Irreversible, another rape-revenge flick with a painfully extensive rape scene, but this one loved and revered by critics. But I digress.
The plot is easy enough, as should be expected with the rape revenge genre. A woman moves to a vacation home somewhere on the country to finish her first novel. She encounters several of the cracker inhabitants of that town, who seem immediately sleazy and unlikable. They hit on her in increasingly menacing and threatening ways until they - relatively early in the movie - abduct and gang rape her. IMDb tells me this is the longest rape scene in movie history, and indeed it seems a little too drawn out, but I guess it's supposed to highlight the brutality of the experience - very successfully. Afterwards, she takes revenge on them, and that's basically it.
On the plus side, the Camille Keaton's performance is really very good. It's a shame that she apparently became known as the woman in that rape flick, and didn't seem to get a lot of acting gigs afterwards. The rest of the cast is largely unremarkable, but not particularly bad either. The setting is beautiful and forms a stark contrast to the gruesome events. The cinematography is decent considering the low budget. The revenge scenes are largely gratifyingly violent but not particularly gory by today's standards. On the negative side, she gets naked a few times more during her revenge, which seems unnecessary - but then again, it is kind of an exploitation flick. The audio was really bad, again, to be expected given the low budget.
Overall, the movie is not nearly as bad as people would have you believe, but it's not all that memorable either. To be sure, I strongly disagree with people who claim it glorifies rape and violence against women. The rape scenes aren't in any way erotic, and the rapists aren't people anyone can identify with - they are sleazy, ugly, and altogether unlikable.
Mainly, this movie made me wonder why everybody hates this, while Irreversible was highly acclaimed. One reason might be that the fact that the wrong guy is killed in Irreversible plays on European and liberal's sensibilities regarding the death penalty and violence in general which always works well. Also it is artsy made by artsy people, what with the reverse chronological order and Cannes regular Vincent Cassel. But more importantly, I think the key difference is that in Irreversible, it's the boyfriend who takes revenge, while in Day of the Woman, the heroine is an independent woman who takes matters into her own hands. This is just something that doesn't sit well with the general public, but neither with most self-styled feminists, who like to see raped women as helpless victims who need others to care for them. In my opinion it is that, more than anything else, which makes people like the one movie and hate the other.
Secret Window (2004)
Mediocre King adaptation with some good acting
At one point in this movie, one of the characters says that a good story is all about the ending. I find that ironic coming from Stephen King because I always considered the endings the weakest parts in his stories. As a writer, he definitely knows how to build up suspense and tension, and he has some good plot ideas, but if you strip them to their bones, the plots are comparatively weak. That may be the reason why a lot of them make for very poor movie adaptations, and the greatest King adaptation of all times, The Shining, is the one that deviates most from his original story.
So as you maybe glanced from this, I'm not a huge fan of Stephen King as such. I haven't read the story this is based on either, so I judge it purely on the merits of what I've seen on screen. Like so many of King's stories, it's a suspenseful thriller about an author of suspenseful thrillers (Depp). The author is going through a painful divorce while at the same time apparently experiencing a kind of writer's block, also a frequent theme of King's work. In addition, he is being stalked by a guy (Turturro) who claims he was plagiarized by him. He is being threatened by that guy and things turn increasingly violent.
I don't really get how reviewers can claim that the ending was unexpected or illogical. It does make perfect sense from the movie, but if you pay the slightest attention to the clues laid out, you will indeed see it coming from miles away. To me, this was indeed the weakest part of the movie, because even though it builds up some suspenseful atmosphere, the obvious clues kind of destroy it as it is built. To me there was scarcely any doubt as to what was going on, which is a prerequisite to this kind of psychological horror movie.
Having said that, it seems this isn't the worst story King ever wrote, and it's definitely by far not the worst adaptation. Depp as the main character and especially Turturro as the main antagonist act very well, and the supporting cast is also decent. The photography is beautiful, as are the set and locations. In the end, it's mainly the acting performance that added two or three stars to the score I would have assigned based on the story alone.
But even if it was mostly good craftsmanship, this movie left me intellectually unsatisfied, and decidedly not scared or creeped out enough. It would make for a good watch should you happen to catch it on TV, but I wouldn't recommend buying or lending it.
The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
worst. torture porn. evar.
OK, so I guess IMDb automatically detects the presence of the word "spoiler" in the review and puts up a warning, but there's really nothing to spoil here - see below.
I heard that this flick had some problems with censorship and will probably never be released in Germany, so naturally I got curious. Boy, what a letdown. For once, I would actually have been grateful had censorship spared me this crap. The plot can be pretty much summed up in a sentence: it's a mockumentary showing home videos a serial killer made with him abducting and torturing people, and in between you hear folks from FBI and such fawning about how great and "crafty" he is and how they could never catch him. And that's it. There's no plot or character development, no twists and not even a real ending, it just plays out exactly in that way, only it is painfully stretched over 90 minutes. I don't even get how you could put up spoiler warnings for this one, since there is nothing whatsoever to spoil here.
I'm not much into the whole torture porn genre, but even if I were, this doesn't have the gore factor to really fit in that genre. The killer's home videos are painfully badly made, or maybe he stored them next to a huge electro magnet, I don't know. His killings are as cliché as can be, with his victims young women and such. Basically, if you find yourself confused by the complicated plot in Saw or Hostel, or you find that your average porn movie has too much character development to keep track of, yet America's Funniest Home videos are too gory for you, this may be the film to watch, otherwise, watching your fingernails grow for 90 minutes would be scarier and more interesting. Maybe this guy tortured his victims, but probably his craftiest move was that he got to torture large audiences with this snooze fest.