Review – Near Death

Straight to video – which was probably how it was shot – goes this flimsy excuse for a horror movie. The plot’s some stupid mish-mash about ghouls and/or ghosts stuck in the mansion of an evil Hollywood type. Most of the movie comes across as cheap soft-core porn with the porn mostly cut out. All of the effects are cheap, but amazingly some of them kinda work. On the other hand, a lot of them really, really don’t work. Script awful. Acting so terrible it hardly even counts as acting. In other words, run-of-the-mill cheap-ass fright flick. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Ran

One of Kurosawa’s better movies based on one of Shakespeare’s better plays. As Throne of Blood was to Macbeth, so this production is to King Lear, a samurai-ization of Elizabethan drama. Visually this is a stunning movie. The Masterworks restoration does wonders for some parts of the picture but appears to give other scenes something of a brownish, shadowy shift. But technical quality aside, the story is an entertaining if sometimes over-sentimental retelling of the Lear tale. Lots of Byzantine intrigue. Lots of lightning-quick swordplay. An epic battle or two. I admit it would probably help to like the director’s work or at least be a genre fan, but if you qualify on either count you should get a real kick out of this. Worth seeing

Review – e-Dreams

Just climb on board with a dotcom startup and let the cameras roll for the whole roller-coaster ride! This documentary chronicles the rise and fall of Kosmo.com, a company that promised to deliver books, videos, food and the like via bike messenger within an hour of an order being placed on the Internet. In its favor, this was at least a better idea than a lot of its contemporaries, web-based businesses that didn’t seem to be selling anything or have any way of making money aside from sucking down venture capital. But when the vapor-companies crashed heavy in 2000, they took a lot of businesses like Kosmo with them. One also gets the sense from watching the exuberance of the early days contrasted with the deep depression of the company’s last few months that the whole thing stopped being fun once the participants had to stop riding the initial success wave and actually sit down and try to work for a living. Though this is too much of a fish-in-a-barrel experience to count as ground-breaking film-making, it’s still an interesting picture. Mildly amusing

Review – Catwoman

The sexual politics of this plot – meek woman empowers herself by getting in touch with her inner strength helped by a hefty dose of cat magic – might have been really radical 30 years ago, but now it’s not exactly enough to sustain an hour and half worth of movie, not even an empty-headed action flick. The script and acting help, particularly Halle Berry in the title role. Unfortunately, the direction undoes the goodwill everyone else in the production works so hard to drum up. It’s like the director watched MTV for years without managing to learn anything useful from it. As a result, just about every time the show starts getting interesting it dissolves into a spattering of spastic jump cuts that more often than not get in the way of the stunt work, special effects, even the acting. Though it’s a given that there’s a bit of a difference between Bob Kane and Citizen Kane, this still could have been a better production than it turned out to be. Mildly amusing

Review – I, Robot

Perhaps they’ve finally run out of old Phillip K. Dick novels to make into effects-intensive sci fi flicks, so now they’re turning to Asimov classics. In any event, if you’re in the mood for a vaguely depressing action movie you’ve come to the right place. The subtexts about the fine lines between humanity and automation have been done to death in the years between the novel’s original publication and now. So it seems less a clever plot element and more a shortcoming when the characters – human and robot alike – come across as stiff and cold. That aside, however, some of the visual effects are kind of fun. Overall it doesn’t quite sustain its running time, but like many other productions in this sub-genre, the effects keep it from dragging too badly. Mildly amusing

Review – The Hills Have Eyes

Well, the movie wasn’t exactly called “The Hills Have Brains,” so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. But I’m going to anyway. This early Wes Craven effort comes across as a cross between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Craven’s even earlier Last House on the Left. A trailer-load of city folk end up trapped in the desert, stalked and slaughtered by a latter-day Sawney Beane clan. These grubby, drooling loonies eat tourists because they can’t afford groceries, and yet they seem to have a copious supply of walkie-talkies and at least one bottle of J&B. Sadly, plot logic isn’t the low point of the flick. That distinction belongs to the dialogue and Craven’s tin ear for same. The acting’s no great shakes, either. And few movies end as abruptly as this one does, though even as sudden as it is, it’s not exactly unwelcome. Finally, this picture came darn close to drawing a lower rating because of the animal cruelty, but for once one of the animals gets to be cruel back. See if desperate

Review – The Other

Taut, suspenseful psychological horror or just a really boring movie? You decide. The first time I saw this I was eight or nine years old, so I didn’t pick up on the movie’s twist until Uta Hagen came right out and told us what it was. Upon more recent viewing, the catch seems as obvious as a trick from an old Twilight Zone episode. That aside, this is the laconically-paced tale of a boy and his evil twin, a twin whose evil-ness is established over again so often that it becomes as tedious as it is creepy. Overall this is a solid production, but you have to be in the mood for it before it’s going to work for you. Mildly amusing