Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Movie Reviews

Having seen and enjoyed the House on Haunted Hill, I decided to rent Return to the House on Haunted Hill when I found out about it. Let me give you a piece of advise: don't watch this movie. The plot was terrible, the acting was terrible, the music was terrible, the dialogue was terrible, the special effects were terrible. If I had to describe this movie in one word, I would have to say it was horrible. I know you thought I was going to say terrible, but I was over my quota on that word.

I started to question whether or not I'd made a mistake renting it about the time the opening credits ended. By the time they made it to the house, my worst fears had been confirmed. The barest of pretenses was provided to get the people into the house, and once there, the movie was reduced to disgusting blood and gore, cheap scare attempts, and completely stereotypical thug villains who did nothing but swear incessantly, point guns at everything and everybody, and generally pretend to be tough. Throw in some ghost T&A and you've got yourself one bad movie. And unlike other B horror movies, this didn't even make any attempts at being campy leaving absolutely nothing to like about it.

From there I moved on to the Transformers. I had been pretty skeptical about this one based on the previews I'd seen, but was pleasantly surprised. It had more story to it than the none I'd expected. The special effects were outstanding, except the transformation animations you couldn't really tell what was going on and while in robot form, the transformers looked too complicated. More like modern art than robots. It could have done without so much attempted humor though. John Turturo's character could - nay should have been eliminated entirely. A more serious movie would have been preferable. But these are relatively minor complaints in the grand scheme of things. After all, at it's core, this is a big budget movie about cars and airplanes that turn into giant robots and battle each other and destroy buildings in the process. And it delivered on what you want in such a movie. Great special effects, competent acting, a couple of super hot women, one of them even a genius, and just enough plot to tie the whole thing together and keep the cheese to a minimum. This one gets the Scott seal of approval.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was completely ready to hate 'Transformers', but I was sucked in by a surprisingly decent storyline. The movie is no epic, but as entertainment it worked very, very well...and I kind of liked the Turturo character as comic relief. Meagan Fox was exceptionally easy on the eyes, but not much of an actress. What's his name, Shia Labouf? He was alright, I suppose, but the stars of the film are the actual Transformers. It would have been cool to see more Megatron, as a villain he didn't see much screen time - so far he's the Darth Maul of what I can only imagine will be at least a two movie franchise.