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Current IMDB Rating: 7.2/10
My Rating: 6.2/10
I suppose this movie would have been much funnier and made much more sense had I ever played a game of Dungeons & Dragons. For the most part I just went along with the ride and laughed at parts I thought were funny. I understood the Lord of the Rings parody through the last part of the movie, but a lot of the game references were lost to me.
I have to say that the second Futurama movie was the best so far. The jokes were funnier and the story kept my attention much better than this one. I know this is a short review, but I can almost guarantee that I will have forgotten most of this movie by next week. I'm still looking forward to the next Futurama movie that is supposed to be out in February, but this one may go down as the worst of them.
Current IMDB Rating: 4.6/10
My Rating: 5.2/10
Although this movie went straight to video, it seemed like a late night movie you could catch on some lower cable network. Everything was nothing more or less than mediocre. I would actually say that the direction was worse than most of the acting.
The movie starts out with a very short scene from Gacy's childhood which would imply that his father was the cause of all of the events to play out later in life. The movie then switches to his middle age where he is surrounded by people who seem completely oblivious to anything that is going on around them - especially his mother who, when confronted by one of the boys Gacy has attacked, calls him a son-of-a-bitch and slams the door in his face.
The acting in the movie leaves more to be desired, mostly because all of the supporting characters do not appear to have much experience, but it's the directing that brings down the movie. Instead of focusing on Gacy and his murders, the movie spends way too much time establishing Gacy's relationships with people who ultimately become unimportant. This only leaves time for the murders to be shown in short snippets and does not even begin to illustrate the number of murders the man actually committed.
People come into the movie knowing exactly who Gacy is. They know he killed many people, they know that nobody suspected him of anything up to the very end, and they expect to see this in the movie. Instead we get a story about a man who seems to ignore his family, ignore the cleanliness of his house, does a large amount of drugs, swears up a storm, and does not do his job well, but is highly regarded in the community for some reason. It is this man who gets away with murder even though people should be expecting it from someone who is depicted this way. With decent enough actors and a budget that would have allowed for a good story to develop, it seemed as though the people making the film did not know what direction they wanted to go in and made a movie that reflected that lack of preperation.
This movie is a good one for a late night one-off viewing, but if you want to know the real story of the man behind the crimes, find another way to learn about it.
Current IMDB Rating: 8.1/10 (#171 in the Top 250)
My Rating: 8.3/10
It has been a long, long while since a movie has truly sent a chill down my spine and this movie has done just that. You have all of the elements of classic psychological horror here: a secluded location, the option of a horrific fate, and the extremes of mistrust which develop. It is, however, not a perfect film because, I feel, that the people who made it took it's believability factor too far in the last 15 minutes or so and assumed that if you had gotten that far in the movie, then you would just accept anything that happened from that point on.
The story follows a group of Antarctic researchers as they discover an alien presence living among them and imitating those in their group. The alien takes over the body of any living creature in order to survive and tries to get those around it to trust it so that it can take over their bodies as well. As the movie progresses, the researchers become less and less trusting of those in their group to the point of tying several members up and testing their blood to make sure they're human. This scene is one of the most nerve-wracking parts of any movie I've seen because as the alien is exposed, the other members of the group are tied up and cannot get away.
I think the ending of the movie left something more to be wanted as well. To leave the characters alone in the Antarctic is less satisfying than letting the audience know they actually survived and that fighting for their lives for the entire movie was worth it. It left me with what I call "The Descent feeling" where, in the American version of that film one of the characters made it out alive, whereas in the international version all of the characters died. I felt that the international version was more creative, but as a film the American version was more satisfying; that is the same with The Thing.
Current IMDB Rating: 8.0/10
My Rating: 6.8/10
The Searchers is a movie I've always wanted to see, but never really made the time or effort to watch. I recently had a few hours free and saw this on my Netflix instant watching service, so I was finally able to view the film. I have to say, after all of the fuss made over the film from what I've read online, I was hardly impressed. The movie seemed to jump around as inconsistently as the characters. The only real thing that seemed to drive anyone in the movie was the idea of trying to save the surviving member of the family.
As the story goes, a group of Native Americans draw the men of a small town out into the desert in order to easily attack the town. When they return, they find one of the homes on fire and the women from the home are either found killed or presumed kidnapped by the "Comanches." This starts the movie as the two surviving men in the family set off with some others from the town to find the missing girls.
As the movie progresses, years pass without any real sense of time or place except for the mentioning of a passing of time (what amounts to five years by the end of the picture). We see several snowfalls, but it is never really said that it is winter as the men are traveling around the western United States and could just as easily be up into the Rockies instead of any new season. As with the inconsistent passage of time comes the inconsistent way the characters act, mostly seen in the character of Debbie: the last surviving female member of the family who is taken in by the Indians and made a wife of their leader Scar. When she is first found she pleads with the men to leave the tribe alone and let her live in peace with the Indians, but when they get to her the second time she is happy as hell to leave "her people" behind. I did not, and still cannot understand the change in her attitude. First she wants to stay with the Indians, then she can't wait to leave.
Looking past all of the strongly inconsistent actions of the characters in the film, I can understand why it is seen as a classic. The real locations of the film alone are enough to watch the movie. It shows the expansive lonely beauty of the west in a way not seen in probably any other movie.
After all of this, there is the realization that you have just seen stereotypes unlike those seen in many other movies. There is a close-knit American family surviving on their own in the middle of a dusty desert, but somehow they find the means to make it until they are attacked by vengeful Indians who attack and kill the family because they are on "their land." It was hard to see the "good guys" in the movie call these people "Comanches" and "Injuns" - terms that are now seen as racist and inappropriate, but were probably commonplace during the setting of the film. This made it impossible to identify with the main characters because you don't want the heroes of a movie to be bigoted men.
Overall, the movie was a decent story of a time in American that has long since disappeared. It does not reach the grandeur of an epic Gone With the Wind film, but it gets pretty close and does not make you feel as though you wasted your time watching the movie.
