Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Today I watched an excellent movie “Planet Terror“.   It’s packed with action, zombies, quotes, comedy, and romance.  It has lots of special effects, great photography, and music.  If you ever watched more than three zombie movies which were released in late 1980s or early 1990s, you’ll love this film.

It is Robert Rodriguez’ re-incarnation of “Army of Darkness” in the perspective of bio-chemical accident with military personell involvement and a taste of Desperado.  That’s the best description I can come up with.  But really, you should better see this one.

7 out of 10.

With all the movies coming out of the Hollywood these days, one needs some set of mental filters (aka stereotypes) to pick good films and avoid all the rest.  But, as with any other area of human life, stereotypes can heal and harm.  According to the set of movie stereotypes in my head, I was totally going to avoid the movie “Doomsday“.  I’ve heard that it was about some virus outbreak, sealed contaminated area, and a bunch of people going in to find the cure.  That’s all I knew, and that sounded a lot like something along the lines of “28 Days Later“, “Resident Evil“, and many other movies.  Those movies, they aren’t bad, but I’ve seen enough of them.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Igor likes this type of movies a lot.  So he managed to persuade me to go and see “Doomsday”.  And I’m glad he did.

The story of the film was very much like I expected it.  But, we weren’t there for the story, were we?  It’s how one tells the story.  And in this type of films, it’s all about how you show infected people, their mutations, human flash, body parts, horror, black humor, and the rest of the visual effects.  “Doomsday” was pretty good in this regard.  I’d say it was a little bit more bloodier than it needed, but no serious complains in this department.

All that is not very important however.  Because “Doomsday” has something that so many other movies don’t.  It has the spirit.  The atmosphere, if you will.  And it suits it very well.  It is a very rock-n-roll movie.  So much rock-n-roll, that it is much closer to punk rock in its spirit (and literary, most of the characters appear to be some serious fans of punk rock music).

There are a few places in the movie, which are either boring or a little bit too far fetched, but, gladly, they are very few and very short.  In most of it, the film provides excellent entertainment and positive energy boost.  It is mostly funny, and hilarious at places.  It has excellent special effects and strong characters in it.  There are a few memorable quotes, including some very peculiar ways of using an F* word (the film is very British in its nature).

So, if you like uncensored punk rock with lots of fun, if you are not easily destabilized by motion pictures, if you don’t truly belief that people in the movie suffer in pain or die in pieces, if you welcome the creativity of the creator even if it is a little bit out of your bounds sometimes, if you enjoyed “Mad Max” trilogy and darker (non-romantic) side of “Waterworld” than I strongly recommend to watch this movie.  You won’t regret it.

7 out of 10.

I went to see “I Am Legend” with a few friends of mine.  Some of them saw the film before a few times, but decided that it was worth another view anyway.  That pushed my expectations up a bit.  But.  The film was indeed worth it.

Here are the things that I liked, in no particular order:

• Will Smith.  He is a good actor.  It just that most of the times he has to do those rather simplistic roles.  But in this one, you can see the talent.  He does really good.
• Visuals.  There are some really cool images in the film.  In fact, it’s the visuals that create the bigger part of this movie.  There is some excellent photography, which could have been easily transformed into still images and paintings.
• Drama.  There seems to be no shortage of movies about viruses, zombies, and the end of the world.  However, so many of them fail to create the drama around the events.  Broken families, numerous victims, and blood rivers seem to be present everywhere.  But rarely they are used to create the horrific sense of sadness and pity.

Of course, there were a few things that sucked in this movie.  I’m not going to go through the details on these, since they aren’t worth it.  However I’d like to mention the zombies.  I think that the choice of rather cartoon-ish characters was wrong.  More “realism” in this area could have made the movie almost perfect.

I’d give it a strong 7.5 out of 10, and a recommendation to watch it, even if you are not a fan of the sci-fi end of the world horror.  It’s pretty good.

I went to see “AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem“.

I wasn’t ever a big fan of “Alien” movies.  Space horror is not something that turns me on.  However I remember enjoying the “Predator” flicks.  Especially the first one with Arni.  When they mixed the two, it was sort of interesting to see how it will all come out.  And the trailer was excellent.  But the film was somewhat boring, even though it had its momentss.

The Requiem part sucked though.   The good parts aren’t visible because of the constant mix of night, darkness, shadows, absence of lights, smoke, fog, underground catacombs, water, and a bunch of huge objects obstructing the view.  And just to be on the safe side, scenes are cut at every half a second.  That’s about the good parts.

The bad parts are shiny obvious.  The biggest of them is acting.  I know, I know, I’m not supposed to expect any great acting out of a sci-fi space thriller sequel.  But what this movie had doesn’t even qualify for acting.  I have a suspicion that even Keanu Reeves could do better than that (and we saw speculations of that it is possible to replace Keanu Reeves with wooden plank).  I mean, where do they even find actors like this?

Then, there is the Achilles’ heel of all horror movies - common sense.  This film had the smallest fraction of common sense you can see in the horror movie.  People, evacuating from the town in a hurry, are waiting in the traffic jam on the freeway, while the second line is empty.  A soldier popping out his head of the armored military vehicle to see what’s going on with this shooting outside in the middle of ambush. One predator calling another one for help after an accident, and that other predator going into almost full scale war with aliens, without ever calling for any more help.  Alien inserting eggs into women at the hospital for them to give birth to more aliens only a couple of minutes later (previous parts of the movie seemed to have a rather longer period with eggs growing and stuff like that).  The list goes on.  And of course it is possible to find explanations for each one of them, but that will hardly help the feeling of things happening in the way that they aren’t supposed to happen.

As I said, I’m not the big fan of either the genre or these particular movies.  But I think I can realize a good piece of entertainment, when one is offered. And in this particular case, I don’t think it qualifies.  Rating: a weak 4 out of 10.  Feel free to express you disagreement in the comments.

Choosing the movie to watch in a hurry never worked for me. “They Crawl” is just one of those silly attempts to randomly pick a good movie on a stand with bad ones.

Directed by: John Allardice
Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi
Cast: Daniel Cosgrove, Tamara Davies, Dennis Boutsikaris, Ken Lerner, William Keane, Scott Rinker, Brandon Karrer, Bennet Guillory, Tim Thomerson, Tone Loc, Mickey Rourke, Grace Zabriskie, Andi Eystad, Chase Hampton, Adam Gordon
IMDB raintg: 3.4
My rating: 1.0

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