Grave of the Vampire (1975)

 Rapist vampire… let me say that again. Rapist. Vampire. This story is about a vampire who is specifically a rapist who then brutally (yet bloodlessly) kills his victims. And you know what? I’m fine with watching bad movies on a DVD that I bought for five bucks. I really am. But I’m just not sure how I feel about watching a movie about a rapist vampire. Personally I think rape is pretty serious business and if you’re going to do a movie with rape in it than it should damn well be the central theme and not just a plot point to serve as a motivational backdrop for the main character.

 Ok, so a couple is making out at a graveyard, marriage is proposed and it ends with a rapist vampire killing the dude and raping the girl, mercifully off screen. But their union is… ‘blessed’ with a vampire baby. The baby grows up on his mother’s blood and swears vengeance on the rapist vampire father. I’m pretty sure this is the basis for Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’. The plot goes nowhere at first, with most of the people you’d think would be the main character dying off pretty quickly. The full-grown vampire baby isn’t introduced until much later in the film. It’s a mess.

 I could barely finish this film. It starts slow and the main character is just not that interesting. You can’t even like the villain since, well, he’s a rapist and you can’t make rapists likeable. Don’t even bother. It’s not fun. It’s not frightening. Quit frankly you’d be better off watching Twilight. And I don’t say that often. Part of the Dark Moon Thriller Collection

Fangs of the Living Dead

Holy crap this is a confusing one. The plot is all over the place and we’re never really told why things are happening and when we are told nothing makes sense. About the only thing this movie has going for it is the sexiness of its characters. Pretty much every character in this movie looks like an Italian supermodel. And for the ladies out there (and some men), there’s even a scene where this sexy guy gets put in chains with his shirt. If this movie had just made that jump to soft-core porn it might have been more watchable. As it is I’d rather get my sexy Italians from actually competent movies. So this girl finds out she’s a Duchess and that means gets a castle… or something. So leaves her sexy Doctor boyfriend to go see the castle near this town with sexy barmaids. But when she gets to the castle she finds that sexy vampires inhabit it. She’s forced to stay there by the shear sexiness of the head vampire. So her sexy boyfriend and his sexy comic foil sidekick person go to see what’s what. There’s some light bondage, vampirism is involved and there’s a surprise and kind of funny resolution. The plot should be simple but they muck it up with flashbacks and confusing plot cul-de-sacs. It’s boring and just not that interesting except for the pure sexiness involved. Basically it’s pretty skipable. Not bad enough to be good, not good enough to be fun, and even the sexiness of it’s characters aren’t enough to save this wreck of a film. Watch something else. Part of the Vampire Werewolf Dark Moon Collection, bought at Walmart for five bucks.

In the Name of the King (2007)

Ok, lets get this out of the way. This movie sucks. It’s a clichéd, run of the mill sword and sorcery story with absolutely no surprises. The actors sleep walk through their performances and the special effects are crap. I cannot believe this movie took $60 million to make and am convinced he blew it all on crack and hookers. But I have to admit, I kind of like this movie. Yes, all of what I’ve just said is absolutely true; it is not a good movie. But let’s be honest, geeks have a lot of love for movies that are a lot worst than this. If this movie was made in the eighties it would be considered a classic.

So at the beginning of the movie we’re introduced to our innocent protagonist with his innocent son and beautiful wife. Of course something horrible is going to happen! His son, who I’m sure had a long life ahead of him, is killed in a Krug invasion, which are controlled by an evil Wizard. And of course his wife is kidnapped which forces him and a few of his friends to make the long journey to rescue his wife and whoop the ass of the man who killed his son. There’s some court stuff, completely comprised of the King and an evil Duke who is fabulous, and there is a totally not surprising twist where the King’s son who everyone thought dead is found to be actually not as dead as most people thought. Hint: It’s the farmer! I would try to spare you the spoilers but really, there are none to spoil. Nothing in this movie is going to surprise you except for how cheap it looks. Seriously, $60 million and they couldn’t even hire a bloody make-up artist!

John Statham is pretty badass as always. He’s always the best part of the action sequences, going all medieval on the Krug’s asses without the benefit of armor of any kind. The only stupid thing about his character is that he uses a freakin’ boomerang, which is probably the stupidest weapon ever invented. Burt Reynolds is… well even Burt Reynolds needs to eat. And Matthew Lillard has a lot of fun being evil.

Of course most of you already know this movie is stupid. The question is not ‘is this movie good?’ It’s ‘is this movie bad enough to be good?’ And I’d have to say yes, but barely. It’s obvious that Uwe Boll really is trying to make a good movie here; going so far to hire the best B actors $60 million can buy. It just barely makes it into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category, helped along by John Statham and Burt Reynolds, who actually have some good scenes here and there. I found this movie to be very entertaining and probably the best movie I’ve reviewed for this blog yet. By no means is this a good movie.. It’s stupid, forgettable shlock that has a certain amount of entertainment value because it’s so stupid.

Let me put it this way, at no point is it so bad that it’s painful. Now stop your bellyaching! You knew what you were getting into when you got a Uwe Boll movie.

I bought this movie for $6.99 as part of a 3-1 deal at IGA.

The Brave One (2007)

I suppose I should have guessed that the majority of movies I’d be reviewing for a blog about movies bellow $20 would feature movies that were not the best Hollywood had to offer. I’m hoping that the next movie I review will be a diamond in the rough. Although considering it’s an Uwe Boll movie I kind of doubt it.

Anyway, the movie that I am reviewing right now is The Brave One, which stars an honest to goodness a-list celebrity. Which in no way saves this movie from being a chore to watch. Which is a shame since the cinematography is actually pretty good and the ending does take a left turn that, although makes no sense, at least takes a bit of a different direction than most revenge pics. The movie looks good and at least from my inexpert eye was edited quite well.

The movie is about Erica Bain, a radio host, who must survive after she is beaten and her fiancé killed by a gang of thugs. After she buys an illegal gun she begins to enact her own sense of justice after an uncaring system fails to bring the men who committed this act to heel. Detective Mercer is caught between his sense of duty and justice as he investigates her string of bloody murders. The come-out-of-nowhere ending makes absolutely no sense, and side steps the question of justice vs. vengeance that this movie should have answered.

The characters are worse than one-dimensional and never step outside their pre-ordained archetypes. You’ve got your embittered detective, slimy lawyer, steely female protagonist who finds a strength she never thought she had… through murder and of course an uncaring system that no longer cares about the citizens it is suppose to represent. It’s just so played out and boring. I’ve seen this before and I’m just not that interested in seeing characters I have already met in a story that just does not work. It’s also telling that everyone who gets shot in this movie is a minority… even the good guys.

There are some nice moments and the movie does look great. I especially liked the juxtaposition of violence and sex, which is a motif that repeats throughout the movie. Other than that, I can’t say this was all that good or even cathartic. I’m not a huge fan of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but at least it had the balls to show an honest portrayal of vengeance.

I got this movie for $6.99 as part of a 3 for 1 deal at IGA.

September Dawn (2007)

September Dawn is one of those movies that have a good, even noble concept, which utterly fails in the execution. The historical event that this movie is based around is obscured by its ham-fisted dialogue and poor script. Which is a shame because this truly is an event that the majority of Americans don’t know about and it deserves a much better movie.

The movie is about a real life massacre of settlers traveling through Utah, supposedly perpetrated by Mormon extremists in a place called Mountain Meadows. Utah militiamen belonging to the Mormon Church killed hundred and twenty men, woman and children. Although there is some debate about whether senior members of the church knew about the attack, this movie takes the view that they were involved in issuing the orders to attack the settlers. Set amongst this tragedy is the love story of two young adults, John the son of Bishop Jacob Samuelsson and Elizabeth, one of the settlers.

One of the biggest problems with this movie is that it is obviously an attempt to hang responsibility of the massacre on the heads of the Mormon Church. The settlers are almost universally portrayed as innocent God fearing Christian folk who are looking for a little piece of heaven in California, while the Mormons are almost universally portrayed as hateful bigots who want revenge for what happened to them in Missouri. It really hampers the telling of the story when the main characters cannot be fully-fledged human beings and instead are used as ciphers for propaganda. I’m not saying that I don’t believe the leadership knew nothing of this attack, I don’t really know which way or the other, only that it fails in its attempt to create interesting characters. I’m not really interested in its historical accuracy, only in its merits as a film.

Given that the characters are not much more than caricatures, it is understandable that the actors give little life to their roles. None of them move beyond their roles as innocent settler or villainous Mormon. Even John Voigt fails to bring anything to his role. Heck, at least in The Code Morgan Freeman is interesting to listen to. This a very paint by numbers script that does not serve as an effective delivery for the real tragic events that happen in the film.

About the only good thing I can say about it is that it does bring to light a historical event I knew nothing about… that and it gave Dean Cain some work. Watch this movie if you’re interested in finding out more about a historical event that is not in the history books. Otherwise, I’d avoid it.

I bought this movie as part of a 3-1 deal at IGA for $5.99 CDN.

The Code aka Den of Thieves (2009)

There are great movies and bad movies and all those in between. I have a great love of great movies and even a love for movies that are so bad that they’re good. Unfortunately The Code aka Den of Thieves is smack dab in the middle. It’s not good enough to be great and not bad enough to be good. It’s just a tired excuse of a heist film where everyone involved phones it in.

If you’re still interested the movie is a by the numbers heist film staring Antonio Banderas as Gabriel “Gabby” Martin as an impetuous jewel thief and Morgan Freeman as the veteran art thief Keith Ripley. The two meet as ‘Gabby’ is robbing two men on the subway. After some hemming and hawing by Gabriel they join forces to steel two Faberge eggs from a high tech security vault. Complications arise as Ripley’s Goddaughter is kidnapped. But *gasp!* things are not as they seem. I’m not going to give away the super secret plot twist but given that you have an intelligence greater than a brain dead gerbil you’ll figure out the supposed twist far before the ending comes.

Although the movie does start off fairly well and at least one plot twist is actually somewhat surprising, this movie is as dull as dishwater. None of the actors bring any effort to playing their roles, content with phoning in their performances and refusing to bring any sort of humanity to the characters. Gabby comes off as just a tad bit creepy as he pretty much stalks the main romantic lead. Although for some reason she finds this all very alluring. At the very least Freeman brings a certain gravitas to the Ripley character. But that’s mainly from Freeman playing himself. None of these characters are likeable or interesting.

The actual heist is very poorly executed. Such tropes as ‘avoiding the lasers’ and ‘cracking the safe’ are nothing more than flat renditions with very little life or action. The laser scene is particularly bad since they were so cheap that they didn’t even give us actual lasers, just a laser light show on Ripley’s iphone. Given that the whole movie was leading to this moment the whole thing just felt anemic and far too short.

This is not a movie to buy, neither for its greatness or badness. It is a bland and regrettably forgettable heist film that deserves to languish at the bottom of a bargain bin. Since there are so many other better heist films I would suggest moving on to something else.

I bought this movie for $5 CND at Wal-Mart.

Alice in Wonderland (1966)

This is probably the oddest yet most faithful version of Lewis Carols Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland I’ve seen to date. I can’t say it’s my favorite version, but it does beat the pants off of any recent effort to portray the nonsense of the children’s classic. While most versions try to portray Wonderland as a place of whimsy and fantasy, forcing the poor actors to don animal heads or the main human actors to talk to CGI rabbits, Jonathan Miller focuses on the melancholy and underlining brutality of the original. Although this movie may not be for everybody, it does have a lot to offer for Lewis Carol lovers like myself and others who enjoy a well-shot art film.

Most of you, I’m sure, are at least familiar in passing to the plot of Alice in Wonderland. A bored girl follows a rabbit down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a topsy turvy world where the logic of the Victorian world is played out in a ridiculous fashion. She meets the denizens of this world in a series of encounters that culminates in her confronting the Queen of Hearts. She is then forcefully evicted from this world and finds herself back in normality. Whereas most films try to tack on a plot onto this nonsense, Miller can be credited to keeping faithful to the original text and leaving it unsullied by plot. In fact, there is no real script for this film at all. All of it, except for one or two ad-libbed lines, is taken directly from the book.

The cinematography in this film is fantastic. The film is shot in beautiful black and white that, according to the director, was meant to mirror the photography work of the late nineteenth century. Watching this film really is a visual treat. It side steps the usual Tenniel route and goes for a more Victorian era look, with humans in period costume rather than humans in animal costumes wearing period costume. Most of the supporting cast does a fantastic job at bringing Carols work to life. Leo McKern plays a wonderfully brutal Duchess, Wilfrid Brambell plays a mincing White Rabbit superbly and Peter Sellers plays a passable King of Hearts. Perhaps my favorite has to be John Gielgud playing the Mock Turtle. But where it falls apart is in the portrayal of Alice by Anne-Marie Mallik. Although perhaps we shouldn’t expect much from girls named Anne-Marie. I can see where the director was going in casting this girl as a far more melancholic Alice. But in this actresses hands the performance falls a little flat.

In many ways this is an exceptional film. The cinematography is fantastic and the set pieces are wonderful. Especially considering they were producing this on a shoe string budget. This film isn’t for everyone and I would reconsider showing this to your children. Not because there is anything objectionable in the material, but they will be flat out bored. But if you’re an adult and like Alice in Wonderland, you will find many things to love about this film. The special features on the DVD are very interesting as well, especially a retrospective look at a silent film version of Alice in Wonderland.