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Jory
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28 Dec 2011, 5:22 pm

First there was A Movie a Day. Then there was A Movie a Day 2: Movie Harder. Then there was A Movie a Day 3D: 2D Edition. This time, it's personal. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense, but it didn't make any sense when Jaws: The Revenge used that tagline, either.

September 1st, 2011. That's when I started my first A Movie a Day topic. I've taken short breaks between topics, but I've pretty much been watching at least one movie every day since then. (My current record is three in one day, 15 in a week.) It's not always enjoyable, particularly when my tendency to pick movies basically at random has me watching cinematic colostomy bags like Laser Mission or Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, but it gives me something to do with my jobless, friendless life. Besides, who knows when I would otherwise have ever gotten around to seeing good stuff like In the Mouth of Madness or Demon Planet? Once again, there are no strict rules. I can watch a movie whether I've seen it before or not, but I plan on watching mostly stuff I haven't seen.

Dagon (2001)

I'm off to a good start. The very first movie of the new topic, and I gave up 20 minutes into it. Dagon is an anagram for "gonad," which is appropriate since the movie sucks monkey balls.

Stuart Gordon's first movie to be based on H. P. Lovecraft's writing, Re-Animator, was terrific. His second, From Beyond, was decent. I haven't seen his other two (Castle Freak and Dreams in the Witch-House), but it's hard to image them being as bad as Dagon.

Five minutes into the movie, I was already bored and wanting to turn it off. It opens with a guy and his amazingly hot girlfriend who's completely out of his league waking up in bed on their yacht and talking about buyers and how rich they are. She wants to get busy with sex but he wants to get busy with work, so he goes to his laptop to look at stocks. She correctly points out how boring this is. A word of advice to filmmakers: if your characters find the action in your movie dull, so will the audience.

The plot picks up but it doesn't stop pissing me off. The yacht crashes, the young couple leave behind their two friends to go get help, and they find someone with a boat willing to go save them. I gave up here because it was obvious that the guy was going to be the main character while his girlfriend was going to get left behind, something I wasn't willing to tolerate since up until now she's been smart, resourceful, and likable while he's been annoying, stupid, and completely ineffectual. I don't have the patience to wait around for the hideous half-human half-fish creatures from Lovecraft's story to show up. They probably won't even be pulled off well, if the opening of the movie is anything to go by.

Oh, and where the hell is Jeffrey Combs? You know, that brilliant psychopath who was in Gordon's previous Lovecraft adaptations and at least half the reason they were worth watching? He's missing here, which is sad because he could have made it at least watchable. I guess he was busy with The Attic Expeditions, which Wikipedia tells me is a horror film also starring Seth Green and Alice Cooper that "has been criticized for being 'random,' 'incoherent,' 'violently confusing,' and lacking any plot whatsoever, at any point." Ten bucks says it's better than Dagon.

I'll have to find something else to watch so that the first day of A Movie a Day 4 won't be a complete failure. Be back later.

By the way, this is the third Lovecraft movie I've seen that used the title of another story. It's based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, not Dagon. Cthulhu was also based on Shadow, not The Call of Cthulhu, and The Haunted Palace used the title of an Edgar Allan Poe story! And apparently there's another movie called Cthulhu which is based on The Thing on the Doorstep. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go work on my screenplay adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's classic novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I will title Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.



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28 Dec 2011, 5:44 pm

Actually your titles make perfect sense. ;)



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29 Dec 2011, 12:43 am

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975)

Well, I managed to watch this one from start to finish. Too bad it also sucks.

Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman... I guess this was supposed to be like Young Frankenstein. Mel Brooks didn't direct it (Wilder did), so I guess that's one explanation for why it's nowhere near as good. I knew it was going to suck after the opening scene. A man walks up to Queen Victoria, who's sitting on her throne. She hands him a scroll and tells him that the future of England is in his hands. He tells her how honored he is, then proceeds to drop the scroll and say, "Sh*t!" Haha, he dropped it and swore. Isn't that hilarious? Roll credits.

I'm really astounded by what's supposed to be funny here. Feldman keeps hitting himself in the head. Kahn keeps saying no when she means yes. Wilder is a loud as*hole. People get hit in the balls. Dom DeLuise humps a chair. Wilder's idea of a Holmes parody is always being wrong when predicting who's at the door, and making a reference to "The Case of the Three Testicles." (Even for me, there are too many dick jokes in this movie, and that's saying a lot.) Wilder grabs one of Kahn's tits and has a conversation with her while casually squeezing it. Is that the joke? And there are some really horrible dance routines. One of them involves Wilder, Kahn, and Feldman singing about kangaroos and hopping around like them. It's exactly as funny as it sounds.

It's not a complete waste, though. Leo McKern as Professor Moriarty is much funnier than the main cast, mostly because his humor is much more subtle: he pets a handful of snakes instead of a cat, says that he feels compelled to "do something absolutely rotten every 24 minutes," keeps a coin-operated priest in his office so that he'll feel better about his evil doings, and he's poor at basic math despite being a math professor. Also, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are both in the movie, played by Douglas Wilmer and Thorley Walters, who had played these roles before in more serious films. They're surprisingly good at comedy, and I liked how Sherlock is operating in the background, solving the case and letting his idiot brother (I guess the title is supposed to be ironic) think that he's the one doing it.

Overall, though, it blows. I've praised this kind of "throw every joke at the wall to see what sticks" method of comedy before, but this movie feels like they had no idea what they were going to do so they just turned the cameras on and improvised. I also suspect that most of the people involved had very serious drug problems at the time, because there's simply no other explanation for why that soul-sucking kangaroo dance made it into the film. Twice.

Random crap: This is the second Holmes film I've seen in which the characters mispronounce Moriarty's name as "Moriarity." The first was Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, which also had Thorley Walters as Watson. Weird. Also, Sherlock appears in drag in this film, 36 years before Robert Downey did it in A Game of Shadows.



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29 Dec 2011, 9:28 pm

Infernal Affairs III (2003)

The Internet Movie Database lists this movie as Infernal Affairs: End Inferno 3, but there's no way I'm calling it that. There was never an End Inferno, so how can there be a third one? If you're going with the stupid End Inferno subtitle, shouldn't it be Infernal Affairs 3: End Inferno? Where the hell are they getting this title anyway? That's not what it's called in Hong Kong, and the title screen on the American version just says Infernal Affairs III. They might as well list Ghostbusters II as Ghostbusters: Flame Battle 2 or Superman III as Superman: Robot Banana Monkey 3. It makes about as much sense.

Anyway, the movie. Infernal Affairs II was a prequel, and this one jumps all over the place, but it's mostly half prequel (filling in the gap between Infernal Affairs II and Infernal Affairs) and half sequel (to Infernal Affairs). It does a good job with both parts. The prequel parts do what Infernal Affairs II was so good at, fleshing out the characters and making them more three-dimensional, which is what a good prequel should do. (You hear that, Mr. Lucas?) But the sequel segments are the best part. Most sequels just rehash their predecessors instead of exploring the consequences of them, but this one actually has its characters dealing with the fallout of Infernal Affairs. What happens after the bad guy wins? Is he haunted by guilt for the good guy's death? Does he have to keep covering his tracks? I don't think I'm spoiling the film too much by saying that the answers are yes and yes.

The actors are just as good as they were in the first two movies, and it's just as well-directed as ever. There's some nice symbolism here; characters descending in elevators to signify their descent into Hell, and scenes being shot in huge, empty buildings to signify isolation and emptiness. I like how quiet and subtle these movies are compared to The Departed, the American remake of Infernal Affairs. The most riveting moments involve nothing more than a short line of dialogue or a glance across a table. There's plenty of action and twists in the plot, but it's the actors that make it so good. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are nowhere near as good as their Hong Kong counterparts.

My only complaint is that the movie would probably be impossible to understand for anyone who's unfamiliar with the first two films. They're still fresh in my memory, but all this narrative jumping around was a little confusing even for me. We do get a brief explanation of the events of Infernal Affairs, but if you haven't seen that movie, you won't know that the person telling the story is lying to cover his ass, and what you see in this particular flashback isn't exactly what happened. You could probably spend the first half of the movie without knowing that one of the main characters is a police mole working inside a crime syndicate, and the other is a syndicate mole working inside the police.

But I'm nitpicking. All three of these movies are excellent, and anyone who's interested in crime dramas should at least check out the first one, if not all three.



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30 Dec 2011, 8:30 pm

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978)

The Hound of the Baskervilles just keeps following me around like a fart. Why do I keep watching all these different versions? It's not even one of the better Sherlock Holmes stories, and there's no reason in the world for there to be over 20 film versions. Well, this one's a bit different: it's a comedy. After suffering through The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, I was hoping for something better, but this one is even more of a letdown. It's strange how the movies that intentionally set out to parody Holmes aren't as funny as more serious movies that just let the humor flow naturally, like the two Robert Downey Jr films. As with Smarter Brother, there are some isolated funny moments, but it's mostly just boring and comes off as deperate for a laugh.

Peter Cook seems like he wishes he was in another movie, and Dudley Moore seems to think that having a loud, high-pitched voice is hilarious. Most of the time I can't even tell what I'm supposed to find funny. There's a really bad Exorcist parody that keeps popping up from out of nowhere. The maid leaves out some lamb for dinner, but it's still alive. One character is missing a leg and prefers to hop instead of using a crutch or peg leg, and I guess that's supposed to be funny. I chuckled when he stood with his leg on the floor and his stump on a chair. Oh, and a dog pisses in Watson's face. Then someone spills hot tea in his lap. It's just as hilarious as it sounds. Four stars! (out of twenty)



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31 Dec 2011, 8:04 pm

Without a Clue (1988)

Of the three Sherlock Holmes comedies I've watched this week, this one made me want to kill myself the least. I only thought about injecting bleach into my neck once or twice. The idea behind this one is that Watson is the real detective and he hires a drunk actor to play the character of Holmes. It plays out exactly as you'd expect: Watson gets sick of Holmes, fires him, tries to strike out on his own, but everybody wants Holmes instead.

It's rarely funny, but there are only a few scenes in which it felt like the filmmakers were desperate for a laugh and just started throwing goofy BS at the screen. It's quieter and more subtle than The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and therefore much less annoying when it fails. And at least this time I can tell what's supposed to be funny, even when I'm not laughing. Ben Kingsley is good as Watson, but Michael Caine as a drunken as*hole Holmes is responsible for the few moments that work. It's nothing I'll ever want to see again, but it didn't piss me off, which is more than I can say for most of the movies that I end up watching for these stupid topics.



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01 Jan 2012, 7:10 pm

Dracula (2006)

The BBC made a Dracula adaptation in 1977. It was very faithful to the novel, the production values were cheap, the supporting actors ranged from good to awful, and the actor playing Dracula (Louis Jourdan) was excellent. This second BBC version is the polar opposite: it only loosely follows the story of the book, the production values are terrific, the supporting cast is mostly great, and the guy playing Dracula (Marc Warren) is terrible. If the people responsible for the Twilight movies made their own Dracula adaptation, they would probably cast someone like Warren. He was 39 when he made this movie but he looks and sounds about 17, and he looks exactly like one of the Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. He's never threatening for a moment.

They keep one aspect of the book that's usually left out in adaptations, the fact that Dracula is an old man at the beginning of the story and becomes younger as he feeds on blood, but it was a poor choice with this actor because Warren just looks like a young man in old man makeup at the beginning, which is exactly what he is. He also plays Dracula as a disturbing freak right from the beginning, which doesn't have the same impact as having him seem like a polite and likable gentleman who's gradually revealed to be a monster. I guess I should be thankful, though, that he's actually played as a monster and not some kind of romantic anti-hero. If I see one more Dracula movie that does that, I'm going to take a sh*t in a shoebox and mail it to the director.

I like the fact that the movie doesn't follow the book too closely, since I get tired of seeing the same scenes over and over again in movie after movie, but the new material isn't very interesting. A lot of time is wasted on subplots about Holmwood (a minor character in the book but a major character here) seeking treatment for syphilis and joining a cult devoted to Dracula, and Seward being jealous of Holmwood marrying Lucy.

But despite all these complaints, the movie is so well-made that I still managed to enjoy it. Like I said, the production values are great, it's well-directed, and the actors (aside from Warren) are far better than the script really deserves. On the list of Dracula adaptations, it's nowhere near as good as Nosferatu (1922 or 1979) or Horror of Dracula, but it's a hell of a lot better than the hideously overrated 1931 film with Bela Lugosi and the vomit-inducing romantic versions with Frank Langella and Gary Oldman. If someone were to edit footage of Jourdan into this movie to replace Warren, you'd have a hell of a Dracula movie.



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02 Jan 2012, 1:34 am

Sherlock Holmes (1932)

Now here's a pleasant surprise. Very few of the Sherlock Holmes movies that were made before 1939 have impressed me, but this one is pretty damn good. It's far better than the other Holmes films from around the same time, and it's even better than some of the films in the 1939-1946 series, which is pretty terrific for the most part. Clive Brook is an excellent Holmes. He's able to deliver the witty dialogue while striking the right balance of being a smart-ass without being unlikable. He's also great at disguise and impersonation, unlike a lot of other Holmes actors who leave me wondering how anyone could possibly be fooled. He's better at dressing in drag than Robert Downey Jr, at least.

I have my problems with the script – Holmes has a wife (!) and Professor Moriarty shouldn't be foolish enough to physically take part in the crimes that he plans – but I was consistently surprised at how smart it could be. At one point I was getting annoyed with how stupid Holmes seemed to be in the film, but his apparent stupidity turned out to be a ruse and part of a pretty brilliant twist later on. Watson, as usual for Holmes films from this period, doesn't have much to do, but Reginald Owen plays him with energy. (Owen played Holmes the next year in A Study in Scarlet, and he did a bit better in that role.) The movie's no masterpiece, but I think I'll have to revise my notion about there being no really good Holmes movies before 1939. It's well directed, well acted, and (mostly) well written, and it looks like they had a budget of more than $0.35, which is more than you can say for the other Holmes films of the time.

Random crap:

* Funny how slang changes over the years. Back in 1932, "bump off a dick" meant to kill a detective. I also like how Holmes refers to Americans as "aliens."

* Best line of Holmes dialogue: "I don't like your face."

* Clive Brook starred in two Holmes films, this one and another called The Return of Sherlock Holmes. What's strange is that Return is the first movie and this one is the sequel. Don't ask me why they got the titles backwards, because I have no idea. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find Return anywhere. It's sad not only because I enjoyed this one so much, but also because Return was the first Holmes film to have sound.



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02 Jan 2012, 4:46 pm

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia (2012)

Last night, the BBC aired Season 2, Episode 1 of Sherlock in the UK. If you live in the US like I do, you have to wait until May. That is, unless you have access to YouTube or Dailymotion. Why do they even try to pull this kind of crap in the internet age? And why do they act surprised when people pirate their TV shows? There are programs you can download that trick the BBC website into thinking you're in the UK and therefore let people anywhere in the world watch episodes there, but why bother with that when there are decent people willing to upload them to YouTube or Dailymotion within hours?

Anyway, this is technically a TV show but the episodes are 90 minutes long, so I'm counting them as movies. There isn't much I can say about this show that hasn't been said by a million others. Most critics will tell you it's brilliant, and I agree with the majority for once. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are a terrific Holmes and Watson, the supporting cast is equally excellent, and the script has enough twists and turns to make your head spin.

That last one is actually a minor flaw for me – the plot is so complex that I'm sure I would fail a quiz on it five minutes after watching the episode. At one point near the end, Holmes says, "the game was too elaborate," and I'm inclined to agree. But it's all wrapped up nicely at the end, so it's not a huge deal. I'm glad they aren't playing things too straight and remembered to include humor – the episode begins by resolving the Season 1 cliffhanger with a gag – and it's nice that they found something for Irene Adler to do, unlike the Robert Downey Jr films.

Any other complaints are nitpicks, like the fact that Inspector Lestrade only briefly appears and isn't given much to do. I don't have much else to say about the show that isn't effusive praise. I would gladly pay to see these TV movies in a theatre. I'm more fond of the Downey films than most people seem to be, but the TV show surpasses it in nearly every way. It's a pretty damn nice time to be a Sherlock Holmes fan.



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03 Jan 2012, 7:06 pm

The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1934)

Thirteen minutes.

That's how long I lasted before turning off this pile of horse waste. I'm continually amazed at how many movies from the 1930s and 40s expect me to sympathize with some obnoxious, wise-cracking as*hole who's always barging in where he's not welcome. Were reporters really allowed to snoop around crime scenes back then? A lot of these old detective movies have a main character who's a newspaper reporter prone to walking all over the scene of a murder as if it's his legal and moral right to do so. I can usually tolerate that, but the lead in this movie is insufferable. He's not just obnoxious, he thinks he's funny, and anyone who reads these stupid topics of mine knows how I feel about 1930s comic relief. It's usually about as enjoyable as gang rape, but not as subtle.

I watched another Mr. Wong movie, The Fatal Hour, for A Movie a Day 2. I thought The Mysterious Mr. Wong would be part of the same series, but Mr. Wong was a detective in that movie, and he's a power-hungry villain here. Boris Karloff played Mr. Wong in that one. Here, it's Bela Lugosi. Karloff didn't really attempt any kind of accent, and neither does Lugosi. He sounds like Lugosi always sounds. I know that filmmakers are notoriously unwilling to cast anyone who isn't white in a lead role, but I'm just baffled by all these movies about Asian people who are played by white guys. This wasn't just standard 1930s racism, either – Peter Ustinov was playing Charlie Chan in 1981.

Thirteen minutes. F**k you, Wallace Ford. You're awful.

Sometimes when I give up on a movie before finishing it, I feel like watching something else to make up for it. Not this time. Wallace Ford ruined my day.

I guess that's it for Week 1. Has it really only been a week since I tried watching Dagon and gave up? It feels like a month. And I only watched five Sherlock Holmes movies this time! Anyway, recap: Dagon (2001) [gave up], The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), Infernal Affairs III (2003), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), Without a Clue (1988), Dracula (2006), Sherlock Holmes (1932), Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia (2012), The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1934) [gave up]



Jory
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04 Jan 2012, 9:55 pm

No update today. I'm not ending the topic yet, but I'm getting sick of watching movies during the day on the computer when I'm surrounded by the obnoxiously loud sounds of those I live with (TV shows, barking dogs) and I've got daylight reflecting off the screen, so I'll be watching movies late at night and posting here the next day.



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05 Jan 2012, 3:20 pm

The Giant Gila Monster (1959)

I cheated last time by giving up a mere 13 minutes into the movie I was watching, and I'm cheating again this time by watching the second half of a movie I gave up on halfway through when I tried to watch it during A Movie a Day 2. Why would I want to finish a movie I gave up on after finding it too awful to continue? Blame it on OCD. After I bought the 50 Horror Classics DVD set (for $10 on Amazon), I printed off a list of the movies in the set so I could keep track of the ones I've watched. I've had the set for a few years, but when I recently looked at the list, I saw that only 17 of them had been crossed out. I want to cross a few more off the list, but for the sake of completion, I needed to finish this asslicking movie. How bad can it be? I made it through Creature from the Haunted Sea, didn't I? I even made it through Monster from a Prehistoric Planet.

Good f**king lord, it's awful. This movie made me commit suicide seven times, but every time I died, it was there waiting for me in Hell and sent me back because it's just that f**king evil. I thought the second half wouldn't be as painful as the first since nothing happened in the first half and surely something must happen in the second, but I was wrong. Oh, more happens alright; the monster shows up, wreaks some havoc, and is defeated. But they just keep piling on the crap. Scene after scene after scene after scene AFTER SCENE AFTER SCENE AFTER SCENE of nothing happening, of people just talking about crap that has nothing at all to do with the plot. It just never ends. And then there's the music...

I turned the movie off the first time when the main character started singing to his little crippled sister, but little did I know that he would sing this putrid song in its entirety. Then he sings it AGAIN later in the movie, and there are teenagers at some dance in a barn (?) where some as*hole DJ who thinks he's cool and funny is playing the lamest 1950s rock you've ever heard in your miserable life, and oh God f**k this f**king movie. F**k you, Giant Gila Monster. F**k the movie, f**k the director, f**k the writer, f**k the stars, f**k the distributor, f**k every single person who was involved in the making and release of this movie who did not immediately donate the money they made off it to charity as an act of restitution.



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06 Jan 2012, 2:30 pm

Doomed to Die (1940)

JESUS CHRIST, LOOK OUT!!

Image

Oh, sorry. I just wanted to warn you about those Asian people coming your way. They're pretty scary, right? They must be, since every movie I watch with an Asian lead character is played by a white guy. I just assumed that real Asians were too frightening for most people.

Doomed to Die is another god f**king forsaken Mr. Wong movie, not the evil Mr. Wong from The Mysterious Mr. Wong, but the detective Mr. Wong from The Fatal Hour. Once again Mr. Wong is played by Boris Karloff, who's about as Asian as Queen Elizabeth.

I hated The Fatal Hour, and my feelings are no more positive toward Doomed to Die since it's practically identical. Mr. Wong is the only likable character, which is a problem since he's basically a secondary character in his own movie. More focus is put on the loud as*hole American detective and the annoying female reporter who can't shut the hell up about getting a good story and inexplicably is allowed to burst into the police station and accompany the detectives on their investigations.

The plot is the typical detective crap – someone is murdered, there's an obvious suspect, the American detective thinks the case is closed, but Mr. Wong shows up to say "not so fast." I stopped caring and trying to pay attention about halfway through. These movies would be torture if they were any longer than 70 minutes.



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07 Jan 2012, 4:13 pm

Metropolis (1927)

It shouldn't have taken me this long to see Metropolis, given my affinity for 1920s silent films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but if there's one thing I'm good at, it's procrastinating. My copy came from the 50 Horror Classics DVD set, but it's not a horror movie. It's sort of an early science fiction film about class warfare in an indeterminate future city. Imagine if Blade Runner were made in 1927, and that's about what it looks like. It's even got a Replicant, but this one isn't an escaped slave robot; she's made to look like the leader of the workers' resistance and sent to disrupt them.

It's a good movie, but it's got too many problems for me to consider it the masterpiece it's made out to be. It's sometimes hard to tell exactly what's going on, particularly in the second half. There are many different versions of Metropolis with various amounts of footage missing, but some of the confusion is clearly due more to poor writing or editing. I also didn't like how a lot of the plot rested on misunderstandings, and the optimistic ending is too simplistic and unrealistic. It feels like they were anxious to end the movie as quickly as possible, and it takes them all of 20 seconds to explain that everything worked out okay and fade to black.

But it's not bad. It's worth watching just for the brilliant set design. It's still impressive today, so I can't imagine how amazing it must have seemed in 1927. None of the actors are hugely impressive, but the movie's filmed with an admirable energy, especially in the second half when you've got hundreds of extras running about. It's sad that the word "spectacle" has come to mean Michael Bay movies, when it used to mean movies like this.



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07 Jan 2012, 11:28 pm

Dagon (2001)

"F**k Dagon!"

So says the main character one hour and 17 minutes into this movie, but I said it far earlier. I gave up after 20 minutes the last time I tried to watch it. I finished it this time, not really because I wanted to, but because I felt a compulsive need to. With all the other movies I've seen that were based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, I didn't want there to be one that I had abandoned. I'm glad it's out of the way, because it sucks. I have no idea how the people who wrote, produced, and directed Re-Animator and From Beyond could have possibly been responsible for this shitsucker.

I was right in assuming that the smart, resourceful, and likable woman would be pushed aside while her annoying, stupid, and completely ineffectual boyfriend became the protagonist. Imagine a horror movie with Screech from Saved By the Bell as the main character and that's about what this is like. And even if there had been a better protagonist, it's all so bland and boring that it wouldn't have mattered much. Dagon is every Sci-Fi Channel original movie you've ever seen: bad acting, cheap CGI special effects, and every scene stretched out to fill time. F**k Dagon indeed.



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08 Jan 2012, 9:47 pm

Incident at Victoria Falls (1991) Part 1 of 2

It's sad that Christopher Lee was involved in so many Sherlock Holmes movies without ever getting a really good one. The 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was terrific, but he didn't play Holmes in that. He seemed like a good Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, but it was hard to tell because some as*hole thought it would be a good idea to redub his voice with another actor. He got to play Sherlock's brother Mycroft in the lousy The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock again in this boring TV movie at the age of 70.

It's not too bad when it finally gets around to the mystery, but the plot keeps getting derailed by filler. There's about half of a good Holmes story here, and I suspect there's the same amount in the second half, so why is it three goddamned hours long? Just because you can get away with longer running times on TV doesn't mean you should. There are so many pointless scenes here that just go on and on.

But filler isn't the only problem; Holmes isn't even written very well. There's very little deductive reasoning going on here, no eccentricity, nothing that would ever make you think of this guy as Sherlock Holmes if you changed his name. Also, the music is totally inappropriate; the composer seems to have thought that he was making music for a comedy. Lee is good considering what he's working with, but there's so little else to recommend that I doubt if I'll even bother to watch the second half.