D-Rod Reviews

The Craving Heart (2006)

A breath of fresh air

[10/10 · 10 November 2006]

In an age where most movies are all about the big budget, technical standpoint while the storytelling and acting is often overlooked, comes a breath of air. Finally, might I add. Too often do I see indie flicks that try to "push the envelope" or try to do something that nobody has ever done before. Whether it involve a raunchy plot, buckets of blood, or the only driving force behind the film is its mega-star lead, indie films are not what they once were. Enter the guerrilla filmmakers, who just want to tell a story. They do so with the most minimal of funding and resources, and still come out making a great piece of film.

The Craving Heart is such a film.

The Craving Heart focuses on the one thing in life that truly deserves any kind of focus: love. Love, and its many forms, twists, and surprises. Another user on IMDb claims that explaining the plot would give away too many spoilers. I disagree. The film is about a man who is confused about the woman he's with, while he meets another who may or not be the woman he is actually meant to be with. It sounds mundane, but that's the beauty of the film. Take something that's been done to death, and show the audience something new. Obviously, there's much more to the film (much, much more) but if you're a reader who's on here to find out the entire plot of a film, then maybe you should be on the page of a different film. This one is different. All of the characters are written full of life and meaning, and each deals with their own personal confusion about love and life, and all of their confusion is answered at the film's finale, although it may not be in the way they had hoped.

The cast is superb and the music by Katy J. is emotionally haunting. Director/writer/star Stan Harrington has really paved the way for filmmakers out there who wants to be heard. He proves that it can be done, and I can imagine there will be a flood of new films under the guerrilla style film-making will be all over the country. Hopefully more films like this will survive.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Toss up

[20 March 2004]

Okay, to get it out of the way, the original "Dawn" was better, no argument, end of story. But to look at this as an entirely different movie (which was incredibly difficult, but I always try to give a fair chance whenever I see a movie, especially a remake), but again as its own movie, the new "Dawn" wasn't that bad. It was immensely better than most of the new era zombie movies we've been dealing with like Resident Evil and House of the Dead, which were both based on video games and would have been 100 times better if they had let the actual video game creators write the script instead of giving us awful dialogue such as, "So what you're telling us it that we have to shoot them in the head?" Please, it sounds like an eighth grader wrote that.

Sorry. Anyway, what every horror movie needs in order to work is to build strong characterization so that we can feel what they're feeling and truly hope that nothing awful happens to them. For the new "Dawn" I honestly didn't care, most of the time I was silently saying, "Okay, let's drop some of these characters and get moving." Most of the people had no identities at all, such as the slutty blonde and the old man who was trying on the women's shoes. Do you remember their names? Didn't think so.

The only character that I truly had bad feelings for was Matt Frewer's character, "Frank." Solely because I love Matt Frewer and would not be able to bare seeing the man stub his toe. You don't want him to die, especially when they approach him to tell him he's infected, but he was busy talking to his daughter with a smile on his face. "No. . ." Is what I was saying.

The movie wasn't awful, it had some of those obligatory "zombie jumping out of nowhere and making you hop out of your chair a little bit, then you look around to see if anybody saw you do that." Otherwise, the film wasn't scary. It was the same formula; zombies run amok, a group of people unite and isolate themselves, something goes wrong, gotta get out of there, the black character lives. That wasn't a racist remark, it's just something I've noticed with zombie flicks.