Movie Reviews

A Combination of last week and this week premieres. If you don't see the film listed here it means I avoided it like a disease (Haunted House 2),  did not get dragged to it (Heaven is for Real) or I'm still pissed of at the Actors last film (Lone Ranger=Transcendence).

Draft Day: 2 - Who's idea was to release a topic on football in the spring season of Baseball and not even show any Football for the hardcore fans. Poor man's Moneyball and that annoying splitscreen to cover the film weaknesses did not help. Love Costner but he couldn't save this. He should wait to make another Baseball movie. Moneyball 2?

Oculus: 1 - Nope, I was not dragged to this. The Ginger red head from Dr. Who was in this so I was curious to see this. Total waste of time. She bites it at the end. Big spoiler, so what. Total yack fest of a bore. No thrills, no scares, nada. The end was funny tho. Want to see a movie about mirrors?
Rent MIRRORS with Keifer Sutherland (IMDB). Solid 3 for its type, spooky, good scares, and a damn good twist at that end you don't see coming. See that instead.

Railway Man: 3 - Solid drama based on the book of a true story. The end credits show you the real guys on whom this story is about. What works is the flashbacks involving the Japanese prison camp in WW2. Excellent drama. But the movie gets weak  in present day when Actor Firth goes to find his tormentor from the camp who he finds out is still alive. It ends on a quiet note.
To find out more about the making of the railroads in Burma at WW2 is an Oscar winning picture:

Bridge on River Kwai: 5 - Blu Ray Collector's Edition.
While the movie itself takes certain liberties on actual history it does give a an insight on the surfering the men of WW2 went through on making these railroads. This edition gives you a few documentaries on the acutal events and the making of the film but the highlight is the trivia track that explains the details between real life events and the film. I couldn't recommend this enough. See this and then rent Railway Man to get the full impact of the events.

Raid 2: 3 - Good but overrated with its long dialogue scenes and too fast quick cutting action scenes.
Film was way too long and the action scenes, while cool, suffer from shaky cam. Half the time you didn't know what was going on. But there is Tarentino inspiration all over especially with Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man aka Kill Bill. Brutal to say the least with a great bloody violent body count is what makes this film. Better than the first film as its not a redundent and lets see if Raid 3 will be shorter this time.

Extraction: 3 (RB) - 2 for Tuesday B-movie action flick which delivers on the action and then some. With Vinnie Jones being the usual bad villain but with more screen time than usual. What's interesting is this was produced by the Crackle network for about $1 Million (kind of shows) and was available for free for a while on their channel. Sort of VOD.  For its type the film delivers and they should make more like this for the channel. Rounding out the cast is Danny Glover who is doing quite a few of these low budgets an Sean Astin (LOTR) out of all people. He also did Cabin Fever 3 (which sucked big time). Makes you wonder who the hell did he pissed off in Hollywood.

Death Do Us Part: 1 - (RB) Group rents out a cabin to celebrate a couple getting married. So they go to the cabin and yack for the next 45 minutes of the movie. Then the last 30 minutes (short film) the body count starts. It's the ground keeper doing the killing until HE gets it. There's were the twist comes in, just a bit to late for you to care. This is how not to do a so called slasher flick film school 101. Actually the big twist was the 2 main characters were also the writers and producers on this. Well that's one way to keep the budget small.