Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Enough To Die For

The Hamiltons:

A family of serial killers tries to survive, now that their mother and father are gone. It has the twists that you'd expect, and features actors who aren't Crispin Glover or Rose McGowan, but would like to be. Victims go to amazing lengths to die, but my main issue with the film is how terribly psychopathic most of the family is. Whether you root for or against the family, the kill-crazy brother has to die, and the movie never twigs to that fact.


Gravedancers
:

This starts off as a very typical going-for-creepy film, and if you're going to watch it you ought to skip the rest of this paragraph. Anyway, dancing on graves with your drunken buddies is bad. Our hero and is wife become puzzled over a mysterious stalker who keeps rattling the water pipes and turning invisible. All standard stuff, until they visit their screwup friend who was smart enough to hire Tchéky Karyo, paranormal scientist extraordinaire. The movie shifts directly into adventure mode, and then the fun starts. While the movie will does dive into the glorious excess of driving a humvee through a mansion while being chased by the giant floating head of a piano teacher, the rest of the film is played mostly straight. So now that you're expecting this sudden shift, the movie's going to lose a lot of its punch. Sorry.
You can still enjoy Tchéky Karyo.

But it also raised two points in my mind: First of all, this was the only movie where some of the characters who are utterly screwed react in ways that, you know, normal people would. It really can't be that hard to do in a movie. Secondly, people being trapped on opposite sides of a door is boring.


In the end, I did enjoy watching all of the films, except for Penny Dreadful. What I can't do is recommend them to you without knowing how many flaws you're willing to put up with.


I'll go out on a limb and say that if you thought Descent was a genius piece of filmmaking, you should see all three. If you hated Silent Hill, then none of them. If both of those are true for you, then I foresee many disagreements in our future.

3 comments:

Narraptor said...

I keep changing your font to Arial Normal and will continue to do so until you do or Skipp tells me otherwise.

So if you want me to leave your posts alone, you need to talk to Skipp.

Sorry about the missed day. Perhaps we should enact a missed day=extra post penalty? That seems fair. But as intimated in my post, I may need to sit down with take a second look at what days work for sure for me.

Narraptor said...

Yay un-editable artifacts.

Mister Bile said...

I think that a mere furrowing of the brow is penance enough, for now. My main concern is that after a bad week, it would too easy to have one's spirits crushed by a veritable mountain of additional posting.