imdb-9887 Reviews

The Last Winter (2006)

Stunningly awful

[2/10 · 11 December 2007]

Starts off slow... so you think it's just taking its time, introducing you to the characters so you care when they (presumably) start to die horribly later on.

Nope. It starts off slow, because that's how the rest of it goes too. Assuming you've managed to stay awake past the first 45 minutes we have some of the characters going slowly mad while ghostly sheep or something run around on the edge of their vision and random shots of environmental disasters are scattered across the screen.

Just before you'd walk out of the cinema or fall asleep in your chair somebody finally gets killed (couldn't tell you who, despite all that build up), then they go mad/off themselves/get killed/whatever in quick succession.

So, all self-induced mania? Well an incoming group on an aircraft crash for no reason whatsoever so they obviously had the instant version of the mania.

Then it all goes completely to pot while crappy CGI see-through DragonMoose (tm) starts walking about and slapping people.

Honestly, it's worse than I've described.

Good job to the marketing team on getting all these positive reviews up here though! Two stars just for that.

The Apocalypse (2007 Video)

Predictable TV movie rubbish

[2/10 · 31 May 2007]

Amateurish acting (I'm being kind), very poor special effects, huge continuity howlers (e.g. it's "raining ash" one minute, not at all the next, and there's no ash on the ground), risible dialogue, awful and inappropriate music, massively poor sound design, bad physics... yep - this film's got the lot.

Armageddon was popcorn nonsense but enjoyable all the same. Deep Impact was nearly a great film but fell flat due to poor casting. This, though... well, it's just bad. It's a bad movie. It doesn't deserve any of your time.

As for the religious element well frankly in a film this bad it simply doesn't matter.

Footsteps (2006)

Amateurish, boring, utter rubbish

[1/10 · 4 April 2007]

As usual the cast and crew have written the first few reviews! I wonder why they bother when surely everybody by now knows that anything with a decent rating and a low number of votes must just be being pimped by the people who made it.

Please don't waste your time watching this total garbage. It looks like it was made by schoolkids. The violence is laughably badly done (think 8 year olds pretending to play war or something - punches that don't connect, blood out of a ketchup bottle, etc. etc.). The endless 'thoughtful' silences at least have the decency to let you know the film is going to be boring as hell within the first 10 minutes.

The camera work is awful, with the usual shaky-cam work trying to give it a gritty feel (I would suggest changing the sheets on your bed Mr Director - bound to be some grit floating about there), sometimes the main subject of a shot is out of focus while, for instance, a bus window frame is in focus... poor poor poor. If they can't even get the basic mechanics of film-making right it's no wonder the end result is a total waste of film, money, effort and more importantly the viewer's time.

Watching Battlefield Earth is a better use of your time.

Map of the Human Heart (1992)

Insulting; banal; revisionist nonsense

[1/10 · 28 February 2007]

As a film, were the bombing raid depicted near the end to be some fictional raid, it would be merely below average, plodding as it does from one banal situation to another.

However, it deliberately depicts the raid on Dresden, and departs from all sanity at this point. First of all we are told that the raid is ordered by an RAF officer in order to kill his ex-girlfriend who he believes lives in the city! Then we have our 'hero' urging his crew to fly lower and lower until the explosions from the firestorm actually reach up higher than their aircraft. As the raid was performed from heights of several thousand feet, that's a neat trick.

The revisionist treatment of the aircrew who are seen to be questioning their orders and saying things like 'what have we done' after the bombs are released stinks of the worst kind of political correctness.

To top it all our hero's aircraft is shot up and he is blown out of the escape hatch when it explodes, and parachutes down into the burning city. Miraculously he is not lynched the minute he lands, and while the firestorm burns up his precious x-ray photo of his girl, tears the clothes off a nearby German girl, it doesn't touch him at all. Continuing to not be lynched, he covers the German girl with his jacket.

Then he continues not to be lynched for who knows how long before suddenly he's back home 30 years later. Honestly, who came up with this nonsense? Wandering around Dresden in an RAF uniform would not have been conducive to continued healthy living.

The only way any of this could make sense would be if he was killed in the initial attack on his bomber, and all else from that point was his own private hell.

Shadowboxer (2005)

Random rubbish

[2/10 · 12 September 2006]

I am the old fashioned type that prefers a movie to have a plot, and perhaps some point to it. This one sadly lacks both, and substitutes attempts at 'shocking' images. These have all been seen before so it fails on that score too. Nothing hangs together or makes any real sense and it just seems to be an excuse to put a random collection of actors together and have most of them shot dead like a collection of sprites in some console shoot-em-up. Even Helen Mirren can't rescue this dog. The director seems to be of the school that thinks 'cool' is the use of oiled naked bodies and the random dispensing of instant death from hand guns. It isn't cool; it's pathetic. Quite why we are meant to think the 'villain' is any worse than our 'hero' is beyond me, when clearly our 'hero' has offed a lot more people in his busy life of crime; the end is a cop-out, naturally, and frankly I'd rather have seen the whole lot of them wiped out.