Bottom 50 of the 2000s

Not another shallow Hollywood movie. [This is a real tagline! Both the tagline and the title are spot-on!]

If Judd Apatow is the Jesus of modern cinematic comedy, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are the Anti-Christ. Disaster Movie, the latest Friedberg/Seltzer "effort", is not only the worst film of 2008 (dethroning the pair's own Meet the Spartans for the dubious honour), but it's also a contender for the worst film in history! Yet another bottom-feeding cash-grab that exploits current events, takes cheap-shots at pop culture and ridicules recent movies, Disaster Movie is obnoxiously unfunny, poorly-paced, cheap, stupid garbage which defiles the very medium of cinema. If peeking into the toilet after taking a dump makes you laugh at least a little, you'll have double the entertainment value that's provided by this excruciating spoof. The title is indeed unbelievably ironic, especially when it comes to the Unrated "Cataclysmic Edition" (it's actually called that, honest!) which manages to be marginally worse than the theatrical cut.

In a nod to Cloverfield (I think), Will (Lanter) endeavours to save his ex-girlfriend Amy (Minnillo) while their city is being hit by asteroids and maybe being attacked by a monster... (A tornado even makes an appearance. Maybe they were trying to parody Twister?) For his quest, Will is joined by his friend Calvin (G. Thang), Calvin's girlfriend Lisa (Kardashian), and (for absolutely no reason) a Juno imitator (Flanagan). Eventually the plot transforms into Indiana Jones when a Crystal Skull randomly enters the equation...apparently it's the cause of this Armageddon and it has to be returned to its cushion to end the rampant destruction (seriously, the film is so low-budget that the skull rests on a fucking cushion).

As you've probably ascertained from the (very short) story outline, there isn't much to Disaster Movie. It's a five-minute-long story pumped up to 75 gruelling minutes, using the same ol' tired formula to pad out the runtime. Granted, the plot doesn't matter in a spoof movie, but there needs to be something funny going on (Airplane!, The Naked Gun! and Top Secret! are examples of spoofs with a shallow plot but are made enjoyable with constant clever laughs). In Disaster Movie there is not a single mildly amusing gag to behold. Practically the whole film involves Will's group watching someone from a movie or from popular culture being imitated while something colossally unfunny goes down. If you've endured the prior instalments of this horrific "Movie" franchise, you know the formula: introduce a character who has no reason to be there, make a joke, overexplain the joke through close-ups and dialogue clarification, and then introduce a predictable gag to get rid of this character (Hancock flies upwards into a street light, Indiana Jones swings out of a conveniently-placed window, and so on). Friedberg and Seltzer cling to this simplicity for dear life. Words do not exist in the English language to express how bad and agonisingly unfunny Disaster Movie truly is.

The title would likely lead one to believe that this flick is actually a spoof of, you know, disaster movies. Of course, it'd be stupid to think such a thing (about as stupid as deciding to watch this train wreck). Friedberg and Seltzer instead do precisely what they did for Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans - they spoof unrelated blockbusters and reference pop culture regardless of how it fits into the title concept. Thus the movie provides imitators of Iron Man, Batman, Hellboy, the Incredible Hulk, Beowulf, Juno, Hancock, Indiana Jones, Prince Caspian, the Superbad guys, the kids from High School Musical, the gals from Sex in the City and more, which are blended with spoofs of Wanted, The Day After Tomorrow, Night at the Museum, Cloverfield, 10,000 BC and The Love Guru (and more) before mixing in Justin Timberlake, Amy Winehouse, American Gladiators, the Macbook Air, Facebook and Hannah Montana. God, even Michael Jackson shows up! This nonsense is brought to life using downright illiterate filmmaking. Sadly, none of this spoofing results in anything even remotely funny. Laughs are non-existent, and nearly every scene suffers from repulsive slapstick humour or primitive dialogue. Whether it's an Amy Winehouse lookalike burping for about a minute, Dr. Phil trying to get laid at a party, the Hulk losing his pants or a Juno wannabe beating a male Carrie Bradshaw, the list of dire moments is endless.

When Seltzer and Friedberg run out of movie trailers to quote, they toss in some really long and utterly pointless scenes to extend the film to its contractually mandated minimum runtime. One particularly painful sequence rips off Alvin and the Chipmunks and is bloated with three songs before they go rabid and gnaw on our heroes' balls. This abovementioned sequence could be the worst five minutes in cinematic history. There are countless moments, including the High School Musical dance number and the Kung Fu Panda fight, during which I temporarily departed from my physical body and entered a sort of limbo for an indefinite period of time before re-entering my skin and thinking "It's still going?". At least this Fresh Hell breaks at the 75-minute mark (not counting the fucking woeful closing credits, which are played over an incompetent song & dance sequence as well as a bunch of boring outtakes). As this tosh plays out, there's a cast one genuinely pities. Their performances once again lower the bar - each joke is poorly delivered, and all that's missing is a corny wink.

No longer housed at Fox, and taking up residence at the much smaller Lionsgate, Friedberg and Seltzer worked with less backing here. The lack of budget is highly evident as this slapdash motion picture looks as if it was filmed on a vacated condo. The picture looks enormously amateurish, with pathetically inept versions of Iron Man, Batman and the Hulk. Alvin and the Chipmunks are turned into dime-store hand puppets and Kung Fu Panda is a man in a cheap fluffy costume that a usual costume shop would be embarrassed to stock. There's an obvious allergy to special effects as well, leaving inert spoofs of Night at the Museum and 10,000 BC looking bizarre and conceptually embarrassing.

Disaster Movie is godawful. It's not deep or profound or memorable or even slightly entertaining, and it caters to the lowest common denominator. To Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, all one needs in order to make a great spoof is a list of summer blockbusters and a subscription to a monthly gossip magazine. With a continuous stream of pop culture icons stepping in front of the camera to say their name before either farting, burping or getting crushed by something, creativity is at an all-time low. Portraying Amy Winehouse as a sabre-toothed alcoholic is not funny. Saying Sarah Jessica Parker looks like a man is not funny. Puerile beyond all comprehension, the only thing this dross gets correct is the title. A horrific waste of time, money and oxygen, Disaster Movie is unquestionably the worst movie I've ever subjected myself to (coming from someone who has endured multiple Uwe Boll films). Fortunately, the film flopped in America (only $14 million domestically), meaning we might - might - be spared of further spoofs.

"This is bullshit!" (an actual quote that accurately describes everything about this movie as well!)

Meet the Spartans is a film I wanted to avoid and at the end of the day should have avoided. After the creators of the appalling Date Movie and Epic Movie announced yet another spoof...I was almost in tears. Just spare a thought about the money the duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have wasted while making these fruitless, futile spoof movies! That could have been enough to fund a few small movies, or altogether could have funded one bigger movie. There's a few potentially decent films we will never see!

In the spoof movie world, there are funny spoofs...and there are Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer spoofs. The former may not produce brilliant results, however they are at least entertaining enough due to the high levels of hilarity that emerge in multiple scenes. The latter...well, you'll be hard-pressed to find the slightest urge to laugh. I have no idea why the talentless duo continues to produce elaborate hack jobs that waste money, time and potential talent. (In this case I'm looking at you, Diedrich Bader. Shame on you for agreeing to star in this mess!)

Meet the Spartans is about as funny as being sexually violated by a horribly disfigured elephant and about as painful. I must give props to the two guys for making the standard for their comedies lower and lower...Date Movie being their best (this is an astoundingly faint praise), Epic Movie resulting in worse results, and Meet the Spartans not only resultant in their worst effort, but possibly the worst film of all time! This is the cinematic equivalent of receiving a very painful enema! How bad are we talking? Well, when I watched the movie I felt sick to the stomach and had to possess a vomit bucket on stand-by. This is a teenager who is saying this...a member of the supposed target audience! Meet the Spartans relies on childish, puerile humour consisting of sometimes insensitive cracks about society and juvenile sex/potty jokes.

I heard reports of people in the cinema yelling out "This is crap!" and other such things. Normally I abhor those who yell stuff in the cinema...but this is an exception. Who am I to quibble? This film is pure crap! It needed to be said.

The film is ostensibly a simple spoof of the hit 2007 film 300. Okay, so the idea of spoofing a highly stylised film adaptation of a graphic novel may seem like a decent idea. There's plenty of material for a raft of clever gags, right? Wrong! The screenwriters only incorporate the obvious and predictable laughs. The pacing is always affected by a scene turning into something from American Idol, Deal or No Deal, Dancing With The Stars, and America's Next Top Model (some of which have been slightly modified to suit the setting). What does this do? It saps all the tension and fast pacing that was set up...instead adding an extra 5 minutes to the already minuscule running time. The film also takes a stab at several other recent movies and even video games! It's all incredibly mindless and pointless! But is it funny? Absolutely not!

Just when you think they've run out of ideas, they decide to spoof Stomp the Yard and have a dancing competition. Then when you've come to the conclusion that things can't get any worse...a competition consisting of people exchanging 'Yo Mamma' jokes! Interestingly enough, they managed to choose the jokes that aren't funny. Yes, it's that bad! But wait...there's even more! You'd think they've run out of ideas, right? It seems they haven't as they incorporate several instances of blatant product placement and commercials. Just like the added TV shows, it slows the pacing and makes the audience even more bored. Worse has yet to come - soldiers walk around the battlefield carrying blue screens to use digital effects to give the impression of a menacing army. In all fairness, I think the filmmakers couldn't find many extras who were willing to be part of the production. If I was offered money to be an extra I wouldn't do it! It'd taint my image, and even if my name was omitted from the credits I would be mentally scarred from so much as stepping onto the set!

In the midst of this cinematic chaos emerges a cast that you feel forced to pity. Carmen Electra's performance always seems to repeatedly reinstate the message to the audience of "I can't act...but I'll always take a role if you want big breasts and zero acting talent!" Sean Maguire never looks committed or convincing. They are supported by a cast that are all standard for the genre. Did they really need the pay-check to suffer through this mess?!

Meet the Spartans only supplied one single line of funny dialogue. But it came in the first minute of the film's running time...thankfully the entire movie only went for about 68 minutes (still too long). I was still forced to sit through over an hour of poorly written gags and a terribly executed screenplay! Then, just when you think the film is finally over, the credit roll is accompanied by the cast singing and dancing followed by a montage of deleted scenes. Ever heard of DVD extras, guys?! This just adds insult to injury!

I'll keep it short, sweet and simple: do not let curiosity get the better of you! There is a line, and Meet the Spartans crossed it. If you ever watch the movie please make sure there is no food in your stomach as it will be explosively hurled in disgust. The movie lacks humour and an entertainment value. The constant stream of parodies are merely based around recent movies and TV programs, and continue to question the viewer's decision to ultimately watch the movie! I can't recall a recent movie I've seen that is worse than this turd on film! In a few years when the potency of the pop culture references have disappeared there won't even be a scrap of laughter to be found. I will never watch this movie again in whole or part, not even if I was paid. Afterwards I felt violated and raped. It gets worse...the same duo are making another spoof film. R.I.P modern cinema!

"Fear is what protects you from the things you don't believe in." (Please note that this quote was only included as an example of the dreadful screenwriting. Each line is as corny as this very quote)

Alright it can be that bad! Alone in the Dark is bluntly a fruitless, steaming pile from Uwe Boll that is hardly watchable, much less memorable.

Usually I can look at a recently produced film and say that it looks good because it's well made, or it might have nice production design; but with this mess I felt that nothing looked good on-screen - quite honestly it's all tremendously ugly! It looks like someone gave an untrained monkey a camera!

Boll is pathetic when he's placed behind a camera, and what's worse is that every person who worked on the movie did an abysmal job. The opening few minutes did nothing to engage me; it's nothing more than stupid violence and unnecessary uses of slo-mo that Boll seems to think "looks cool". The entire duration of the movie keeps becoming more and more painful, stupendous and painful to watch.

Alone in the Dark is basically about a paranormal investigator (Slater) who discovers some strange things that then leads to some creatures getting set loose and many people getting killed.

There are several things that stood out after viewing the film. First of all, the dreadful acting. Christian Slater could not act to save his life. I guess that's what happens when a wooden actor works with a terrible director. But the film's lowest point was casting Tara Reid in the part of a scientist. I don't have any clue why she was even placed anywhere near this film. She does not look anything like a scientist or anyone of any intelligence for that matter.

And I could not believe how shocking the unnecessary sex scene was. It was out of place and put in there just for the sake of a sex scene. Sometimes I wonder not only if Boll has no clue about how to make a movie, but I also wondered if Boll has ever even seen a film.

The directing was appalling, contrived and incompetent. Cinematography was another of the film's low points. Seeing bullets leaving a gun in slow motion is completely unnecessary and used to poor effect. The CGI used in the film for the creatures is AWFUL! The creatures looked bleak, dull and unrealistic. I honestly thought the CGI had to be some kind of joke. One must wonder how Boll got an enormous amount of cash to make the movie and still come up with dreadful CGI and such a steaming pile of horse manure for a movie!

Alone in the Dark is highly stupid, illogical and a complete disgrace to the video game. This film ain't worth your time, so leave it alone and never even consider watching it or you'll probably suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome for the rest of your life!

"Those are sharks on steroids!"

The tagline for Dark Waters reads "No Air. No Time. No Escape." For the safety and well-being of all audiences worldwide, it would be a sublime marketing choice to add another two words onto the tagline: "No Good!" Dark Waters is dreadfully below average, even by customary standards of direct-to-DVD features. By the look of the film, it seems every cent of the budget went into creating an interesting DVD cover: it displays a few very realistic looking sharks looming underneath an oil rig. We know it's a direct-to-DVD feature and won't be a masterpiece, but you'll think that at least it'll be worth a shot, right? After watching 90 minutes of this garbage, I'm beginning to think the front cover was images from a David Attenborough documentary!

Those familiar with the résumé of director Phillip Roth know what they're in for. Remember Boa a.k.a. New Alcatraz? Credit must be granted for director Roth, as Dark Waters is far worse than his previous movies by incredible margins: Z-Grade special effects, hideous set design, no motivation...heck even the locations appear dull due to the disjointed nature of Roth's lens. Before reading any further, be warned that I have nothing positive to say about this movie so prepare for an exhaustingly long review diving into everything wrong with this shark action tosh!

The plot is a poor excuse to showcase a few poorly executed moments of shark mayhem. Basically, an Oil Transfer Station in the Gulf of Mexico is attacked by large Great White Sharks. The owner of the station, Allister Summerville (Gray), has no idea what happened and feels the need to investigate. Enter aspiring marine biologist Dane Quatrell (Lamas) and his assistant Robin Turner (Mackinnon). The two are drugged by Summerville who plans to hire the hi-tech submarine owned by the couple.

So imagine this situation: an underwater research station, a few highly intelligent sharks, and a few people to become shark food. What's that I hear you think? You're absolutely correct...this is the sub-par low-budget equivalent of Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea. The CGI effects in Harlin's picture were terrible enough, but at least there were practical sharks for higher realism. Dark Waters is all CGI...almost every shot. As a result nothing looks remotely believable. It looks like the graphics of a video game from 10 years ago! Even the opening shots are enough to leave a bad taste in the mind of the audience. After the first few minutes I was bored to tears, and I couldn't even laugh at the shark attacks because they're that bad. We can't even see sharks eating people due to the poor filmmaking!

The script had potential...I must grant them that. But that's not in the dialogue, the concept or the situations. The potentiality was purely in the use of hi-tech sharks, of which have 10 minutes of allocated screen-time. Half of that shows the sharks being mobile! So this is a 90-minute shark flick, with barely 10 minutes for the sharks. What's in the other 80 minutes? Laughable drama, incompetent action scenes, atrocious acting and clichéd situations! There are countless clichés that surface within each minute: marines who can't shoot straight, inexperienced civilians who can miraculously stay alive and shoot competently, loose air vents for a convenient escape, sharks never attacking a protagonist...the list goes on!

The plot is filled with plot holes aplenty, to the point that it's a slice of Swiss cheese in comparison. There are also script irregularities, factual errors that are impossible to overlook, and even logical flaws to boot. On top of this, Roth's usage of the camera is ugly. The central fault, though, is how impossible the task remains to categorise the film. The first scene is horror, then it's a drama, then it's a tense drama, then it becomes action before returning to horror/thriller before throwing it all together for the film's climax. The worst part is that there is no intensity. Even the editing is bad! Flashbacks are unnecessary, and there's fast cutting during the attacks that frequently employ close-ups. These looks so bad that it's not even worth a laugh! Dark Waters should sink into dark waters...forever.

The filmmakers must have been on some kind of drug to think producing this pile of rubbish was a bright idea. When I heard the title it sounded like a take on the Adam & Eve story which captured my interest. Then when I read the synopsis I was proved wrong, but still found this an interesting premise for a movie. Upon viewing it...I detract everything I previously thought about it.

The film was dull, clichéd, horrible and almost painful to watch. Not much of a plot, really, just a group of teenagers go to a camp-ground, they're warned about murders that occurred there a few months ago (Surprised?), they start partying and then a murderer starts killing all the teens.

Now, back up, anyone think this sounds like Friday The 13th 200: Jason Gets A Makeover or something? God, the cinematography was hopeless and the acting was pathetic.

Each actor sounded contrived and appalling; breathing absolutely nothing into an already lifeless script. Needless to say the script was one of the worst piles of rubbish to get the green light in a very long time.

I appreciate the fact that it's probably meant to be B-grade and shoddy...but this is just plain inexcusable not to mention highly demoralising. Lots of unnecessary violence, profanity and filthy dialogue are all that make up the script. And none of the lines sounded natural at all, especially when the actors spewed all their lines out on camera in such an artificial way.

It must take a director really devoid of any talent to get involved with this crap. I can't waste anymore of my time warning you, but if you must watch this film I suggest you watch it with a heap of mates while accompanied by nibblies, pizza and fizzy drinks as you will enjoy ripping it off. Adam & Evil is nothing more than a film to watch plainly for the prospect of having a good laugh at how dreadful it is.

"I know who killed me." (That's an actual quote...wow the filmmakers are trying to relate a quote back to the title...who would've thought. And I know who killed me: the filmmakers. For making this painful garbage!)

I Know Who Killed Me is officially career suicide for Lindsay Lohan: an actress who seemed to have a promising future as an actress after films like Mean Girls and Freaky Friday. The most unfortunate fact is that Lindsay desired to be taken more seriously as an actress by starring in a serious movie. Like most working actors/actresses, there comes a time to aim for an Oscar moment. Little did young Lindsay realise that this was the time for the Razzie committee to review her work. Lindsay became the honoured recipient of several Razzies: she tied with herself for Worst Actress, and she won Worst Screen Couple (once again shared with herself).

During 2007, audiences witnessed several inhumanely appalling horror flicks including Captivity, Hostel: Part II and even The Hills Have Eyes Part II. However, Lindsay's flick managed to rightfully beat the competition for the Razzie award of "Worst Excuse for a Horror Movie". Needless to say, I watched this film with shockingly depleted expectations. I knew that I was going to see a fairly poor flick...I just wasn't aware it would hold a convincing place on my 'Worst of 2007' list. Why is the film so appalling? Well, where to start...Lindsay's acting is dismal, director has no sense of style, the screenplay moves from one pointless scene to the next, it contains atrociously written dialogue, it's poorly made, and the film is also highly boring. I had to press the 'pause' button every few minutes to refill my coffee because I was falling asleep!

The plot essentially borrows from most commercial torture/horror porn witnessed over the past few years. We have elements of Saw and Hostel with a script that also mirrors police detective tales. This could have worked if done correctly. However, the film represents a Z-Grade version of all aforementioned elements. The horror scenes aren't even effective! Instead we have gore...lots of gore...nothing else.

Basically, Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) is a promising young teenage girl living off her parents' wealth. The idyllic small town in which she lives is soon rocked when a teenage girl is abducted and sadistically murdered. Soon Aubrey is abducted by (who we believe is) the same bloke. This is where the film goes from bad to worse. Flaws in logic begin surfacing multiple times every minute. I mean, they have one dead girl and a missing girl, yet the entire police force and even the FBI are called in to investigate! Talk about overkill. I mean, shouldn't they have dangerous fugitives or illustrious serial killers to catch? If not flaws in logic, it's things we simply find hilarious. An example? Well, the town sheriff resembles Santa Claus. So as Sheriff Claus makes his suspect list (and checks it twice) we also have unnecessary, tasteless scenes of pole dancing and nudity that make no sense at all. Oh, and there's a random gardener who decides to stroke a stick suggestively in order to impress Lindsay's character. No, I am not making this up. And of course, when the killer abducts Lindsay, her friends find a blue rose in her car. How did it get in there? Due to the futility of every other scene, imagine this: Lindsay asks the killer if she can quickly put something in her car, to which the killer responds "Oh yeah, sure. We'll do this torture and abduction thingy when you're ready". I can imagine that scene actually happening. Can't you?

Lindsay Lohan's acting is bottom of the barrel. 80% of the reasons why this film is so appalling are due to Lohan and her (*ahem*) so-called "acting". Every line she delivers is contrived, unrealistic or plain dreadful. At times she's meant to be screaming because of the unbearable torture. It doesn't sound like she's in pain. It's almost like she's moaning in pleasure...I'll leave that up to your imagination. To make matters worse, her pole dancing even looks incredibly trite! Lindsay spent time "researching" her character by spending time with real strippers and pole dancers. Whoa, you mean Lindsay wasn't doing this career already? Poor Julia Ormond...she looks like she's making an effort, possibly a few Oscar moments, but she wound up getting a Razzie award nomination.

The director and writer can't be let off too easily. Director Chris Sivertson has less talent than a film student. His uses of colour motifs simply do not work. Okay, so red signifies one character and blue signifies the other. Sure, we get it. But is it necessary? Nope. Not at all. And at the beginning there's a neon sign with a bulb darkening for the right arm and leg. Seems like the director wanted some foreshadowing in an attempt to look clever...but is he clever? The answer still remains an emphatic NO! Every scene in this movie is poorly written and its execution is distressingly weak. The result is boredom from the first 5 minutes. Highlights from these first few minutes: a few shots of Lindsay being a stripper (with no talent at all to show for), some blood dripping down her pole as she slides down (even blood dripping from where she never even touched...it's like witnessing the annual sap flow of the Stripper Pole Forest), and there's a few moments for Lindsay to read a story. Her writing is god-awful, and yet the class look so entranced and fascinated. On top of this, talk about a painful stereotype: Lindsay is wearing glasses in an attempt to look smart! Take the hint, Lindsay: if you wear glasses it doesn't mean you look smart. And you're starring in this film...so you're not smart at all!

The screenwriter should be banned from writing anything else in his career. The story is far from interesting and so cliché-ridden it's almost hard to comprehend! The whole concept is based on the myth of 'stigmatic twins'. Sound interesting? Didn't think so...because it's not! This film cannot be counted as a horror flick either. Aside from a few moments of gore that showcase decent prosthetics, there isn't a shock or fright in view until the finale when we've already lost interest. In between the torture of Aubrey and the rescue of Aubrey, there is a whole lot of nothing except for Lindsay showing the world her attempt to act like the daughter of a crack whore.

I Know Who Killed Me is a boring mess that fails to frighten, fails to entertain and has little to no redeeming value. After the first few minutes I found myself indescribably bored. The director has no sense of style at all. The result is a succession of pointless scenes with no abiding content. Heck, nothing seems vital except for the abduction and rescue. I wish this was a short film, because the filmmakers surely killed me with this film. At one stage the characters describe a serial killer who kills people in the cinema. If people were in the cinema watching this movie, it'd be a truly welcome favour. That scene is more irony than this film can handle.

"We need you. They will not fight with us."

For lack of a better word, 10,000 BC is genuine crap: a primitive, braindead, overblown, boring, glaringly stupid, distractingly historically inaccurate production that proves to be an exorbitant waste of both time and money.

Director Roland Emmerich is not an unfamiliar face to movie audiences. He's remembered for his previous crowd-pleasing epics including Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and several others. The man is unable to think small. In fact, I don't think the word is even in his vocabulary. Even worse, I don't think he's even heard of the word "quality" when it comes to filmmaking. He usually makes light-hearted features with the intention of basking in the glory of box office profits. To date, people frequently regard his worst movie as Godzilla. This is understandable considering the disastrous outcome of that blockbuster. 10,000 BC easily dethrones Godzilla as Emmerich's worst movie. Where Godzilla was at least mildly entertaining in its scope and scale of action, 10,000 BC has nothing to even remotely interest an audience.
We never expected a masterpiece, of course, but we at least expected a lavish spectacle featuring impressive visual effects and a sense of escapism. We never expected a mind-bendingly lacklustre effort that provokes more questions than answers, and forever appears to be reaching for a specific MPAA rating as opposed to crafting a complete movie experience.

The plot, if it can even be called as such, concerns some tribe of cavemen in the year 10,000 B.C. The opening narration sets up the story as being about "destiny, myth and legend". He probably should have introduced the story as being about science fiction and pure fantasy, because that's exactly what we're given. Anyway, the protagonist (I think he's the protagonist. Just like every other character in the film he's poorly distinguished and has no discernable personality. I think he's the main character because he's just given the most screen-time) is a guy named D'Leh (Strait). For some reason he's "destined" to marry some girl named Evolet (Belle). We're never told why they're in love, and why they're meant to be together...apparently it's just convoluted mumbo jumbo concerning fate. After D'Leh's tribe is attacked by a horde of so-called "demons", D'Leh now tries to accomplish two things: remove the strain of his father's so-called cowardice, and rescue Evolet from those who kidnapped her. Cue plenty of boring dialogue, remove the small evidence of a plot, introduce a few beasts, set up a few action scenes...and this is the result.

The script feels like it was written by a room of fourth-graders. Either that, or director Emmerich was desperate for ideas so he stole a few stories from local kids. The problem is, one wishes that the story was penned by children much younger...because then at least we'd have characters battling T-Rexes. It'd be preposterous, but no more absurd than what we already have.

We feel most cheated at the lack of ambition. The director's previous movies weren't masterpieces; however they were adequately entertaining at least. With this film, the action scenes fail to be eye-popping, the special effects look mediocre at best, and there's never any intensity to keep one on riveted. The concluding battle amidst pyramids is also far from captivating. It never serves any purpose...but apparently this is an action movie so a final action sequence just had to be necessary. Because the filmmakers were aiming for a watered down rating to attract the biggest box office gross possible, everything fails in this final battle. With lack of blood or gore, we're watching as people lightly hit someone else and they die. Or even worse, an arrow that has barely broken the skin proves lethal. The lack of blood acts a microcosm for everything that's wrong with this film. With the sanitised violence, everything else is dumbed down into horrific stereotypes. The climactic battle is perhaps the worst mass action scene in current film history. Not plainly due to its lunacy (that does play a rather large part), but because there's never a sense of conflict or even a build-up to it. Everything just...happens, hopeful to come off as an extravagant event. It's just blasé and unimaginative.

So all we have in terms of action apart from this pyramid battle and a mammoth battle is giant chickens and a sabre-toothed tiger. The giant chicken attacks could have been brutal and graphic, instead we see poorly orchestrated action and we cannot make out what's going on for the most part due to low light and poorly designed locations. And as for the tiger...nothing happens. It's a cameo where the main character becomes a feline whisperer. It doesn't attack the protagonist. Why? Become D'Leh saved the tiger's life, and the tiger remembers this event.

This big turkey also commits a cardinal sin of boring the audience. If they weren't going to introduce epic battles with rampaging dinosaurs, Emmerich could have at least thrown us a frickin' bone! It never happens. Also, the cast deliver deadpan performances. They remain solemn and serious...never any smile, never a sense of humour to be uncovered. But the worst has yet to come...the main characters speak perfect English the whole time while the enemies speak sinister gibberish with subtitles. Both the English dialogue and the grunting dialogue is poorly written and cheesy. Also, every character has perfect 21st century dental. Even some of the protagonists have dreadlocks. Maybe this unspecified land eventually became Jamaica...

Overall, 10,000 BC deserves all the panning it took. This is the worst big budget movie in recent memory. You'll be laughing at the funny climax where people lightly hit each other, resulting in immediate death. It looks so fake and staged, in fact, that in its already terrible context I can imagine a warrior hitting someone and saying "Sorry, old chap, was that a little too hard?" Hey, at least then the film could have had an intentionally comedic undertone to it.
The film never gives its audience any reward for the lead-up. It's not entertaining at all, to the point that every scene and every frame is excruciatingly boring. I had to pause the film multiple times to refill my coffee as I was falling asleep. Even then, the caffeine levels weren't sufficient. On the other hand the film doesn't have any historical insight either. What are we left with? Dull, monotonous, appalling and drastically un-entertaining epic fluff that proves to be as primitive as a cave painting. Everything is missing - an entertainment value, a sense of excitement, and even the punctuation for "B.C."

"From 1969 to 1973, the Hewitt family murdered thirty-three people across the state of Texas. To this day, it is universally considered the most notorious and brutally sadistic killing spree in the annals of American history: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is an additional inept Hollywood gore fest that endeavours to misrepresent itself as a terrifying horror flick. After all ideas for sequels have come and gone, Hollywood studios then move onto the prequels. The philosophy behind this prequel was ostensibly to inform the audience of the back-story of "Leatherface" (Bryniarski) who is the central serial killer in the series. Clearly, the motivation was to reveal why the cannibalistic family become the way they end up...what pushed them over the line? First of all, I must rip into the concept. Tobe Hooper's 1974 original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was absolutely petrifying because of the inability to understand the characters and their origins. Therefore with no palpable motivations, the characters are frightening. Thus revealing the genesis erases all mystery surrounding Leatherface and his family, and no longer do they possess a scary screen presence.

The second fatal flaw in the screenplay is not even fulfilling the concept! The first five minutes show Leatherface's birth, and then all of a sudden the central character is an adult chopping up meat just like he was in the predecessors. Cue the brainless, incompetently-minded characters travelling through Leatherface's region...prompt the rest of the sadistic family who are suddenly cannibals eating people, and the stage is set for a pointless rehash of the original films with a different slate of characters. This time, though, you can predict how it will end. We know the events that will unfold a few years later, thus these characters can't tell the tale to the authorities and uncover the mystery. Hence the villains won't get their comeuppance (there's no vengeance at all), and the audience are exposed to endless scenes of mindless torture.

I've basically described the film's plot, but I will elaborate further: Thomas Hewitt - a.k.a Leatherface - is born in a slaughterhouse in Texas and is abandoned in a dumpster. He is adopted into a family, and he grows up to become a worker at the same slaughterhouse. Then the slaughterhouse is closed down, with workers left unemployed. Many of the local inhabitants desert the area. The Hewitt family stays put, but are on the verge of starvation. Leatherface's deranged step-father executes the local sheriff, assumes his identity and begins running the town his cruel way. Two young couples then venture into the region and become hopelessly stranded. The Hewitt family wait...with an enormous assortment of torture tools on hand.

It's impossible to point out all the flaws evident in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. The main flaw is its nature of nothing but a mindless gore fest. The film has no problem with moving from one unnerving torture scene to the next, with blood and guts spurting all over the place: showing more inventive methods to kill a human. I know, I know - I'm supposed to praise the low-budget affair for creating an authentic atmosphere with realistic gore, blah, blah, blah! The impressive gore effects aren't a redeeming feature. As a matter of fact, there are no redeeming features at all! With all the misogynistic scenes depicting horrible torture and rape of girls, I wanted to walk out of my viewing area and keep on walking.

Tobe Hooper's original film wasn't a gore fest. There was barely any gore at all! It was scary because of what you didn't see. Of course, modern movie-goers apparently search for endless amounts of blood and gore. If it's present in action movies I usually devour the violence as it's realistic and in an intriguing context. In the context of torture it's just stupid. The film is also plagued with stupid characters and villains that are stereotyped as having the superhuman ability to pop up anywhere at any time whenever things have potential to look up for the protagonists. The film has zero scares. Instead of suspense and terror, we have lots of blood flow with an equal amount of guts. Speaking in terms of successful relentless horror flicks, something like Wolf Creek does better. Even though that's largely a relentlessly gory affair it has more skill and class. This is crap! Stupid, pretentious, tasteless crap!

"I can fix that." (It would have been nice if Ice Cube was referring to the screenplay...unfortunately he's not)

Unfortunately, as long as Hollywood sees a profit in them they will continue to roll out these types of appalling, strictly by-the-numbers children's flicks. When it comes to this genre quality is never the concern. It's the money. They hire the cheapest cast and crew they can and supply a reasonably small budget. Filtering little money into the film means that they'll easily return a large profit at the box office, even more easily returning its original budget.


This inevitable sequel to the inexcusably dismal 2005 film Are We There Yet? is just as bad as its predecessor, if not even worse. Ice Cube continues to dig a bigger hole for the corpse of his career by starring in films like these.


After the events of the first film we once again follow Nick Persons (Cube) who is now married to Suzanne (Long) and is now the stepfather of Suzanne's kids. The four of them are living in Nick's small condo that can barely accommodate them all. After Suzanne falls pregnant they soon decide that a bigger house is necessary to support the growing family. While looking for a house they meet wacky realtor/contractor/building inspector/policeman Chuck (McGinley) who convinces Nick to buy a big luxurious house that he can barely afford. Predictably, trouble strikes in the form of termites, dry rot, loss of electricity, falling through floors, and so on.


This then begins the film's journey down into the world of conventional storytelling that we've seen before as things go from bad to worse. It's a bunch of unfunny slapstick gags strung together as a sequel to an already appalling movie.


All the gags and pratfalls are easily predictable several minutes before they occur. I mean who would have predicted that Ice Cube would begin falling through collapsing walls and floors...? Aside from that it's also predictable that he will get struck by lightning, fall from ladders and get attacked by a cavalcade of different animals. And then of course the trademark cherry on top: Suzanne begins to go into labour at an awkward and inconvenient moment.


What's more - it's a credited remake of the 1948 movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (complete with an RKO logo at the beginning). But Ice Cube is no Cary Grant. The film is even more tragic by its references to several other (better quality) movies like Jaws and The Birds.


Just like its predecessor, Ice Cube's performance is somewhat questionable. The kids have further lost their appeal because now they're not young. Now they are older annoying snots who are even more irritating. I couldn't believe someone like John C. McGinley agreed to appear in this film. The man can be funny when given good material. Unfortunately there are no clever lines of dialogue for him to work with.


Are We Done Yet? is almost a rehash of the original with a house being wrecked as opposed to an expensive car. The film is phenomenally bad, notoriously unfunny, and pitches a more valuable question to the viewing audience: are we done with this series yet? One of the poorest films of 2007!

"Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing."

Bigger and more overblown in every aspect (except where it's needed), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen represents Michael Bay at his most unrestrained and confident. Bay and his trio of screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) have slathered this sequel with unrelenting excess, particularly dumb humour and an overwhelming amount of CGI. There's no coherent story here - just an arbitrary collection of explosions, robot battles and machismo posturing that's tagged with an awkward conclusion. The endless excitement is downright boring: there's no sense of anticipation, no tension, and no downtime...it's on all the time, like being stuck on a bus with a screaming baby. The movie, all 150 goddamn minutes of it, is just an audio-visual assault on all senses (including common) that mimics storytelling without understanding it. With the keen urge to bypass all traces of logic, reason, character development and depth, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an utter mess of an action opus.

Now...the story? Yep, that's horrible as well. Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) is departing for college, and the Autobots are busily hunting the remaining Decepticons. When Sam conveniently finds a shard of the Allspark in his jumper, his brain is flash-loaded with ancient symbols pertaining to the location of a deadly machine that will let the bad guys destroy our sun (for reasons too stupid to explain here). Megatron (Weaving) is hauled out of his deep sea tomb (where the government dumped him as part of their military strategy to set up the sequel) and revived before being placed in the service of the Fallen - i.e. "The First Decepticon": a being so important that nobody bothered mentioning him in the first film. The plot more or less just has Sam becoming all spastic as the symbols overwhelm his brain while the robots engage in fight sequences. Sam and his pals also meet Agent Simmons (Turturro), and they all travel to Egypt where the pyramids are...because that's what happens when you give $200 million to a bunch of idiots who failed geography, and allow them to make a blockbuster.

The straightforward plot is padded out to an unholy two-and-a-half hours, which means the whole thing is packed with dreadful filler. For instance there's a subplot in which Sam and his girlfriend are too nervous to say "I love you" to each other...until, of course, the finale, because that's how it's done in Screenwriting 101. By the time the all-in rumble between the Autobots, Decepticons, Otherbots (?) and the US Army finally arrives, one will be too numbed and fatigued to actually give a damn about how it all ends.

The blunders of the first film have been accentuated rather than expunged, while the very limited charms of the predecessor are gone, leaving nothing to recommend. For Revenge of the Fallen, Bay indulges in so much excess that he delivers the cinematic equivalent of snorting cocaine off a hooker's arse. The "money shots all the time" approach robs the action of weight and coherency.

For reasons that escape this reviewer's mental perimeter, Bay and his writers place greater emphasis on comedy for this sequel. The dead space between the action is therefore reserved for rear nudity from Turturro, jive-talkin' Autobots (triggering uncomfortable memories of Jar Jar Binks), extended time with Sam's stridently unfunny parents, and a Decepticon spy with leg-humping tendencies. Does the concept of a robot humping a woman's leg seem funny to you at all? Bay seemed to think it was so hilarious that he also threw in two scenes of dogs humping each other as well. Transformer testicles also make an appearance, and there's an exceedingly long gag involving Sam's mother tripping out on pot brownies. And slutty chicks can transform into robots too, because the film patently refuses to make sense. If Bay had another ten million to spend, he probably would've tossed in a musical number as well.

When the characters aren't engaging in embarrassingly witless dialogue or doling out tiresome exposition, they're running away from explosions in slow motion (although outrunning an explosion is physically impossible). Meanwhile the "action" is relentless in its monotony. Robots pound on robots, humans launch rockets and missiles at robots (though never in the history of the sci-fi genre has artillery ever actually harmed aliens), robots wipe out humans, etc. This stuff goes on and on - far beyond what's necessary for a brain-dead, CGI-laden motion picture. Worse still, there are over forty Transformers in this film (most are interchangeable cannon fodder). Unfortunately the Transformers are all similar in design, not to mention they're poorly defined and make absolutely no visual sense whatsoever (a car can transform into a robot a few storeys tall?!). Combined with the director's typical hyper editing and close-ups, it's impossible to tell who's who during the battles. Bay is unable to keep his camera still for a second to allow a viewer to actually watch the combat, instead opting for dizzying camera patterns. In the long run the action becomes a nauseating, incomprehensible blur of confusion. It's frustrating and burdensome, and one will struggle to figure out what's happening instead of relaxing and enjoying. Revenge of the Fallen is just sensory white noise that beats its audience into either submission or boredom. It's like watching paint dry while being whacked over the head with a frying pan!

Naturally, Bay has less luck with the humans - his characters range from obnoxious to pointless. Every character is a bland cipher who either yells at the top of their lungs or runs away from explosions in slo-mo. Megan Fox's character is particularly superfluous - she serves no purpose in the story, and is there just because she's hot. The camera spends so much time ogling her torso that one will wonder if Bay allowed a 13-year-old boy to operate the camera. At the end of the day, the characters are all just stereotyped caricatures and there's no anchor among them - there are so many characters but no-one is in the centre to root for.

The CGI work courtesy of ILM is strangely mixed. On the one hand the facial expressions of the Transformers have more range, but on the other hand the integration with the live-action footage is less smooth and more cartoonish. There's also no sense of physics or gravity to these creations - the giant robots are just tossed around without any weight or inertia.

No Bay movie would be complete without the director's disturbing sense of reality. The women are all supermodel hot, and they love to spread their legs for geeks. Minorities are best used as comic relief, and conform to every stereotype imaginable. Oh, and a scene set in a foreign country must depict the country's clichés (just in case the under-titles don't make it clear which country we're in) - snails & mimes in France, and camels in Egypt. And of course, the American Armed Forces are fetishised - the final act more or less serves as an army recruitment commercial.

Perhaps more than anything else, Revenge of the Fallen is about Michael Bay's love for Michael Bay. He accomplishes this in countless ways; most overtly by placing a large poster for Bad Boys II in Sam's dorm room, and more subtly (but not really subtle) through visual homages (including a shower of fiery objects destroying buildings in Paris which causes a tower to collapse that's taken directly from Armageddon, as well as the destruction of an aircraft carrier which is an obvious nod to Pearl Harbor).

Fans of this woeful picture can only say a couple of things in the film's defence: it's entertaining and the special effects are amazing. But the latter is arguable, and the former is merely a subjective opinion. Every summer blockbuster has big special effects and action...Revenge of the Fallen is just a tired rehash of summer action movie conventions. Why bother?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen perfectly embodies every negative aspect of summer blockbusters. It's a big lumbering idiot of a movie that substitutes noise and movement for any type of emotional connection. Bay simply trudges through his hoary, heavily rehearsed motions of explosions upon explosions, and reduces the globetrotting plotting to a repetitive yawn. It's an unforgivably long, obnoxiously unrewarding and brutally tiring experience. Look, I understand the original Transformers was a colossal box office hit, and this sequel is doing just as well. I also understand there's a market for this sort of brain-dead blockbuster. The Transformers films may be popular, but so is junk food - and they both poison your insides and rot your brain.

At one stage John Turturro asks of a Transformer in relation to the current crisis "Beginning. Middle. End. Facts. Details. Condense. Plot. Tell it." - I'd like to ask the screenwriters the same thing.

Oh, and you know what? Michael Jackson saw this movie on opening night. Next day, he was dead. Coincidence?

King Konreid: "Gallian is raising armies... Vast armies"
Farmer: "I'll kill him."

Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is an overproduced, nonsensical, pale aping of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
It's impossible to start a review of a Boll product without mentioning the man's abominable career. Boll, the purveyor of such "efforts" as BloodRayne, appears to genuinely enjoy vandalising modern cinema. Boll possesses a truly repulsive ego as evident in recent video interviews, and believes he is a great filmmaker. He also dismisses negative reviews as the products of small, jealous minds. He frequently directs video game adaptations with absolutely detestable consequences.

Uwe Boll appears to have no soul, nor does he possess any filmmaking skill or artistic acumen. Yet his company never fails to release endless amounts of appalling films helmed by the German hack director. Renowned filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and David Lynch are suffering in the industry while this German joke persists in the nonstop creation of new projects that yield terrible results. Millions of dollars have been utilised by Boll to create these movies...with embarrassing box office earnings (BloodRayne was his biggest flop - its budget was roughly $20 million, and worldwide it didn't even break $4 million). Uwe Boll's personality and "talent" in filmmaking is so detestable that words fail me. Just to think that out of the trillions of unborn sperm, Boll was granted the gift of life. What a senseless waste!

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale evokes ideas from several fantasy epics rather than producing something original. In a nutshell: Boll's latest film to stain global TV screens is an everything-must-go yard sale of clichés and proverbial formulas. I have no idea how to recount the plot of In the Name of the King as Boll's storytelling faculties are awful. There are too many inept occurrences during the 2-hour running time that I'd be wasting cyberspace just to list them. Essentially the central character is a labouring chump known as Farmer (Statham). Apparently his name is Farmer because, as his wife quotes, he believes we "become what we do". What a peculiar philosophy, Mr. Talentless-Hack Boll.
Anyway, Farmer's family is torn apart when the Uruk Hai - sorry, I mean Krugs - desecrate his village. Farmer vows revenge on the Krugs and sets out with two companions. Meanwhile, King Konreid (played by Burt Reynolds...yes, you read that right) is amassing an army to attack a powerful sorcerer (played by Ray Liotta...yes, you also read that right) who controls the Krugs.

I honestly haven't a clue how to further elaborate on the plot. The best I can do is list all the films it steals ideas from: the aforementioned Lord of the Rings series (basically all the battle scenes are situations taken straight from these films), Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Princess Bride (hero's wife is taken hostage, hero must rescue her), Gladiator, Friday the 13th (yes, it appears to steal from here as well) and many others. Heck, for good measure we have the inevitable "twist" of a long lost father and son. Better yet, they're reluctant to believe the long lost family tie until one of them is on their death bed.

As for the rest, In the Name of the King is a mind-boggling accumulation of random events and non sequiturs. 90% of the film makes little sense. Like why do the Krug warriors - fundamentally pale imitations of Uruk-Hai from LOTR (except less dexterous) - set themselves on fire and get launched out of catapults? Furthermore, why do the flaming Krugs get launched into trees? And how does Ray Liotta's character plan to kill Farmer with a few magically placed books attached to his wrists and ankles? More importantly, where the hell to the ninjas come from? All questions without answers. Uwe Boll's intention is to give his audience mindless action. He forgets that action sequences are futile if the audience has no reason to believe (or care) what's happening. The stupidity increases as Statham's Farmer becomes capable of acrobatic jumps that could never be achieved by a regular human unless a trampoline was in place. The ninjas have no reason to be there either, yet they are...and they descend from the trees halfway through a battle.

Qualitatively, this medieval mess establishes Boll as being in the same league with folks who produce porn. But Boll is unbelievably worse. You see, porn films still give the audience what they want - nudity and sex - while Boll isn't capable of giving an audience the action they yearn for. Boll's films retain a few similarities to the porn universe though...such as the terrible storyline and appalling acting.

There are an abundance of secrets behind the sub-par quality of Boll's movies. Virtually everything is wrong with them and it's a waste of space to list them all! There is one solid logical reason that could provide reasoning for the retarded nature of Boll's filmmaking. This reason is up there on the screen for everyone to see...the man cannot cast a movie properly! It's amazing that despite Boll's horrendous reputation, he can still attract a few decent names. The only true A-List performer is Jason Statham. Statham had delivered solid performances in films such as Crank. Mix him with a bad director and the results aren't anything to write home about.
The rest of the cast are has-beens and never-really-weres. Ray Liotta and Matthew Lillard appear to be vying for the Ham and Cheese Award in each scene they share. Lillard's accent is dismal, to the point that not even Boll was responsible for his awfulness. Liotta is some creepy sorcerer who appears to spend his time in a magical bubble controlling his warriors. These scenes don't make a lick of sense!
Burt Reynolds hasn't done anything good for years. As a medieval king he fails hopelessly. The armour never seems to suit him (the helmet even looks crooked) and he's given embarrassing dialogue.
John Rhys-Davis is further proof of Boll's ambition to place this film in the league of Lord of the Rings. Rhys-Davis hasn't been given much work lately, but surely he has sufficient funds to keep his life going. So why on earth did he agree to defile his career?! At one stage his dialogue grows incredibly clichéd and embarrassing: he's wounded and says "How could I have been so stupid? Forgive me!" Frankly I think his agent was sitting beside him, and Rhys-Davis was talking about his career being ruined by agreeing to appear in the film.
Additionally there are a few females tossed into the mix. Leelee Sobieski, Claire Forlani and Kristanna Loken are as useless as everyone else. Leelee in particular is a vain, emotionless wreck who appears useless.
Then there's Ron Perlman in a career-worst performance! In all fairness, it wasn't his fault. It was the fault of the screenwriter.

This brings me onto my next point: Boll keeps failing due to the poorly written screenplays. Doug Taylor's terrible screenwriting skills are brought to the fore when it comes to criticising this awful production. Taylor appears to be striving for lyrical dialogue similar to Lord of the Rings. The primary difference is that the screenwriting committee for LOTR also had an outstanding creative team to breathe life into the script. Peter Jackson's transcendent direction totally immersed us into a beautiful universe...instead of achieving this, Taylor reels out endless clichés and archetypes in addition to countless ideas completely stolen from the LOTR trilogy.

During most of the battles it's possible to evoke memories of LOTR. Occasionally shots look like they've been lifted from the trilogy. The only difference is...Uwe Boll has no sense of style! The mayhem is poorly orchestrated due to disjointed editing and shoddy over-the-top conceptions. You will have no idea what is actually going on. Boll's camera zigzagging around the action is comparable to a drunken hobbit with ADD! Just like BloodRayne, Boll's camera movements are as stylish as a monkey with a paint brush...however this probably offers questionable degradation to monkeys.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is simply Boll's late entry into the Lord of the Rings rip-off competition. If you're longing for another woeful copy of every sword-and-sorcery epic ever made, this film is definitely it. Throughout the time between the film's opening to its conclusion, we're dropped into the middle of this unconvincing world and asked to buy every moment of it. Even worse, it's overflowing with pseudo-spectacle swordplay and dull special effects. The pacing is schizophrenic, the editing is clearly from the "meanwhile, in an alternative section of the film" school of cutting, and the stupefyingly stilted dialogue bestows more inadvertent laughs than the actual moments of forced funny business. The violence is also diluted to attain a certain rating in a bid to score big at the box office. This is the kind of crap that makes Eragon seem like the second coming of Tolkien! At the end of the day, the film runs at 2 hours and it's too exhausting to be fun. It's still superior to Boll's usual output, but even that's the furthest thing from praise.

"Ahhhh!" (This is said many times when someone is eatem. This is one of the limited quotes I can remember. Proves how lazy the screenwriter was)

I am completely aware that Arachnid was only made to be a fluffy entertainment piece showcasing a giant spider eating people. Despite this, I found the movie to be the furthest thing from a decent slice of entertainment.

Instead I was fed this stupid, cheesy, barely memorable poppycock that could be beaten by a student film! I can't honestly believe that this film was marketed as being an addition to the horror genre because I didn't find anything remotely scary about this horrible mess other than the terrifying thought that people actually gave money to filmmakers to get this thing made.

The story of the film is basically about a group of people who are terrorised by some giant mutated spider. Well...how impressive is that? This is a plot that has been reused for a countless number of monster movies, most of which score as much better quality than this rubbish.

One of principal things that stuck out for me here was the terrible screenplay and the bad actors involved. It's truly painful how conventional and by-the-book all the characters are. There must be a book for screenwriters to turn to for ideas on what characters to include. Spider expert who is an easy target? Check. Big-breasted girl for show? Check. Dumb characters to get knocked off first? Check. Smart character that swoops in and saves the day? Check. A few tough-looking soldiers to die in triumphant, heroic ways? Check. From the first few scenes we can comfortably predict which characters are going to die, and in which order.

The script is filled with cheesy, dull dialogue. And none of the actors appear to make an effort. The special effects were cheesy and laughable. The animation honestly looks like a group of students made a dodgy clay model. They aren't even slightly impressive. If you want the special effects to look just marginally striking then you'll need to get drunk - fast! All this film has to show for is a bit of gore and a spider killing people in predictable ways.

What I also picked up is that when the spider is shot the bullets comfortably fly off the thing's body with no effect at all. For the final showdown the hero picks up a gun and suddenly the thing is vulnerable!

In the style of Anaconda the film is nothing more than a trip into clichéd territory. I found the film so clichéd it was almost to the point of offence. It will lower your IQ because of how incredibly appalling the film is! Arachnid is a foolish, juvenile, laughable B-Grade horror movie. Despite some action, the film is also incredibly boring. I was watching it with some friends who had fallen asleep half-way through the movie. I wish I could have done the same thing. The film is not at all scary, thrilling or even entertaining. I've seen better quality movies produced on a budget of $5.

"If your Uncle Jack helped you off an elephant, would you help your Uncle jack off an elephant?"

Mike Myers has never been one to baulk at penis jokes, juvenile potty humour, boyish smut, fart gags or scatological comedy. The actor produced a lucrative career by featuring in Saturday Night Live skits as well as the Austin Powers trilogy, and he lent his voice to the animated Shrek film series. The Love Guru is his latest comedy (I use the term "comedy" very loosely) and it was supposed to be a return to form for the successful actor who had spent the last 5 years hitting the big screen with Shrek sequels (there were many TV specials and direct-to-DVD spin-offs that he was involved in as well). His last live-action outing was 2003's Cat in the Hat...I doubt a comment is necessary.

For months preceding the release of The Love Guru, Hindu groups were protesting and urging for a boycott. The Hindus saw the film as being in bad taste and it offended them. After watching the film I can see their point. Perhaps it didn't offend me in the way it offends Hindus, but it certainly offends anyone with good taste in comedy. I'd urge a global boycott to be enforced as The Love Guru is a criminal waste of time and talent. Life is too short for filmmakers to spend months working on rubbish like this. Life is also too short for audience to spend 90 minutes watching this awful movie. With so many delayed projects (with great potential) waiting for cameras to roll, it's a mystery why celluloid is wasted on films like this. It's also a mystery how this film ever got funding. A straightforward donation to charity would have made everyone a lot happier. Only true 100% dedicated Mike Myers fans will find the film hilarious. Everyone else with good taste in comedy will watch the film stoney-faced and annoyed at the film's general dullness as well as the lack of any creativity. This is quite simply a shockingly appalling, self-indulgent, shallow, repetitive, juvenile piece of rubbish.

It feels like Mike Myers and co-writer Graham Gordy used leftovers from the Austin Powers trilogy in an attempt to generate most of the flimsy plot for The Love Guru. The film is a single-note succession of extended skits that never spawn a moment of hilarity. Never is it even a guilty pleasure! A clever situation involving an apple, a midget, an adult man and a bottle of water behind a white screen from Goldmember is funny...two elephants having sex on ice in the middle of a hockey game is not! Once two elephants commence an orgy, we realise how low the script has truly sunk and how desperate Myers was for a laugh.
All the gags revolve around conventional funny names (that stopped being funny years ago), burps, farts, diarrhoea sounds, peeing, defecating, testicles, and penises. One of the film's key scenes includes a mop fight with mops soaked in urine. The film starts with little-boy potty humour, and it stays that way throughout its duration.

The Love Guru denotes the lowest point in Myers' career. I used to like him...believe me I still laugh incessantly during the Austin Powers movies. But, with very little exceptions, I never want to see Mike Myers work in the film industry ever again!

The story tracks a "neo-Eastern, self-help spiritualist" known as Guru Pitka (Myers). As a child he was abandoned outside an ashram and subsequently raised by gurus. Now he's a celebrity guru, endlessly writing books and developing acronyms. He's hired to sort out romantic troubles between hockey player Darren (Malco) and his wife Prudence (Good). If Pitka can get the two back together, Darren's hockey team could finally win the Stanley Cup.
The problem with the film's story is its central character. Guru Pitka is a clichéd creation, but never is he bestowed with the fun clichés. There are numerous clichés one could employ to actually make this character funny - Pitka could be a successful fraud (who knows he's a fraud) who decides to drop the act to truly help someone, or perhaps Pitka could be an utter failure who still manages to offer knowledge and wisdom to people in need. Either of these would be really clichéd, but at least it'd be fun. It could also add some tension or possibility into this cold and lifeless film. As it is, watching Pitka deliver horribly written dialogue (and laughing at himself every time) while he frets about how he can go from the number two guru spot to number one (through the blessings of Oprah) makes him a total bore.

One must wonder how so many actors were attracted to this mess. Many cameos permeate a majority of the proceedings. Val Kilmer, Jessica Simpson, etc. In the more major supporting roles there's Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Ben Kingsley (this guy still wants to be respected and still wants his title of "sir" after starring in Uwe Boll's BloodRayne and this cinematic abomination?!) and Verne Troyer among others.
I have no idea how he did it, but Myers makes Alba look quite unattractive. In fact the whole cast look bored and listless. After the first 5 minutes, each actor looks as if they've regretted the decision to appear in the film. The material is notoriously unfunny, and this is reflected in the awfully weak performances.
Mike Myers must get a bit of credit for giving Pitka some energy. After the first few minutes, though, the accent is just plain annoying. There are a few moments during which the film shows promise and potential for what it could have been. The Bollywood-style musical numbers of The Joker and 9 To 5 are among them. But these are punctuated with Myers' self-indulgent eagerness to wallow in his obsessions - poor accents, innuendo, sexual talk and farting. Myers is so self-deluded that he actually believes he's creating comedy gold. In reality he's creating pure unadulterated shit!

Overall, The Love Guru is genuine hit-and-miss comedy. The jokes are repetitive and the entire film feels as if it could have been written by adolescent boys on the wall of a public toilet. Throughout the flick you'll feel embarrassed that you endured the labour to get your hands on this film - be it from a video store, at a cinema or catching a screening on TV. The only laughs to find are pity laughs at how dreadfully weak the gags are, or an amusing outtake at the end while credits are rolling. You'll certainly get the sense that you've seen it all before. If Myers wants to satisfy his obsessions of all things childish with a camera tracking him, that's his problem. If an audience is paying to watch the appalling result, suddenly it becomes ours.

Deck the Halls is total shit!

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I wish I could forget I ever watched it

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This is simply crap unbridled

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Watching it made me suicidal

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Got any kids who've been naughty this year? If you do, then Deck the Halls is their present. It has grown to be a time-honoured tradition for studios to nonchalantly distribute below-par Christmas movies in time for the holiday season to unfairly steal money from naïve movie-goers. Of all the abysmal Christmas movies in recent memory, Deck the Halls is certainly one of the worst - if not the worst. It even fails to meet the low standards established by The Santa Clause 3, Jingle All the Way, and Christmas with the Kranks. It's obnoxiously unfunny, juvenile, remarkable tedious, painfully formulaic and hackneyed. It fails to retain the cheery Christmas spirit, not to mention it's missing a heart. It doesn't do an adequate job of heart-warming or entertaining. It's also infused with messages regarding the holiday season that are shallow and pointless. The jokes are lame and recycled, and there isn't a funny moment to be found. It's topped off with embarrassing sentimental scenes, and a climax so terribly insipid it makes Christmas with the Kranks seem like It's a Wonderful Life in comparison.

Deck the Halls is a derivative, sloppy, imbecilic, simple-minded, dim-witted, miserable excuse for entertainment - one of worst films of 2006, and one of the worst Christmas movies in history. It almost makes one want to renounce Christmas altogether. This is the definitive Christmas present for any naughty child - far nastier than a lump of coal. Deck the screenwriters instead!

As for the story: Steve Finch (Broderick) is a successful optometrist living in a quaint Massachusetts town. As December sets in and Christmas draws closer, Steve finds his title of Mr. Christmas being challenged by his new neighbour Buddy Hall (DeVito). At Christmastime Steve usually organises small town events - nothing too ostentatious. He coordinates carolling expeditions, he's in charge of the tree in town square, he owns his own Christmas tree farm, and he unofficially presides over the annual Winterfest carnival. Meanwhile, Buddy (without an adequate motivation) develops a goal of his own for the season that's anything but ostentatious: cover his house with so many lights that it can be seen from space. This garish display offends Steve, and thus their December battle commences as they see who will win the title of Mr. Christmas. One-upmanship and jealousy ensues.

Deck the Halls contain characters living in a world devoid of logic or reason. As a film, it offends the senses and abuses the intelligence. It even causes viewers to despair of ever knowing delight or mirth ever again. Virtually every situation is implausible or impossible. Characters never act like a person in the real world would. In addition, the story is nothing but an excruciating succession of contrivances. It's clichéd, by-the-numbers filmmaking that's so unfunny one must wonder why it was even made. Matt Corman and Chris Ord have been credited for writing the screenplay, and this is their first ever Hollywood credit. Boy, it couldn't be more obvious. Every amateurish trick designed to entertain is employed. Like an expensive, prized family vase mentioned early into the film - you can pretty much guarantee it will play a part somewhere in the third act to provide an additional giggle.

Once Matt Corman and Chris Ord submitted a screenplay for Deck the Halls, it was turned over to Don Rhymer...then John Whitesell was brought onboard as the director. Garbage of a monumental degree was destined to be born from this point forward. Whitesell has previously directed Calendar Girl, See Spot Run, and Malibu's Most Wanted. Rhymer performed as a screenwriter for movies like Carpool, Big Momma's House, The Santa Clause 2, Agent Cody Banks 2, and The Honeymooners. But it gets even better...Rhymer and Whitesell's last cinematic masterpiece was Big Momma's House 2. These two are the purveyors of hopeless crap. They're some of the worst "talent" Hollywood has ever seen.

Deck the Halls is apparently intended to be a relatively light-hearted family comedy, hence the family-friendly PG rating. So why are the two protagonists such unredeemable bastards? In black comedies (like Bad Santa) it's acceptable to depict a contemptible protagonist due to the tone and target audience. In a family romp...you'd be confusing the kids who would come under the false impression that retribution should be implemented. And good lord, the protagonists are clichéd beyond all comprehension! Buddy is annoying, manipulative, greedy and contemptible, yet Steve is the only one capable of seeing that. Everyone else thinks Buddy is delightful, and Steve is grilled for not liking his neighbour. The more Steve attempts to show everyone what a jerk Buddy is - and he IS a jerk; a lying, thieving, crass buffoon - the more it backfires, making HIM look bad and making everyone love Buddy all the more.

It's also detrimental that characters never seem to live in the real world. Case in point:

In a phoney display of apology, Buddy gives Steve a new car from the dealership he works for. Steve is utterly gob-smacked by the generosity and (out of guilty) he repents for decidedly misjudging Buddy. As it turns out, Buddy forged Steve's signature on some legal documents...meaning Steve has officially BOUGHT the car and must now pay for it. This is probably six different types of illegal, but does Steve ever go to the police to sort things out like a smart person? No, instead the men decide to settle matters by having an ice-skating race at the Winterfest. No matter who wins the race, Buddy still doesn't get charged with fraud, theft, or forgery - all of which could be proven, and all of which could put a man in gaol for a long time.

Furthermore, characters mysteriously recite one-liners when no other characters are nearby to hear them. Like a scene during which a young boy (seeing two hot girls undress through a window) exclaims - out loud, even though he is all alone - "This is going to be the best Christmas ever!" Who are you talking to, you horny little brat? Yourself? The audience? The telegraph pole you're perched on? The Lord?

Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito appear to give it their all. Nevertheless, they are merely playing the umpteenth versions of their long-established screen personas. It's difficult to imagine a performance in which Broderick has displayed greater stiffness. It's as if Ferris Bueller has been aged and starched. On that note, Broderick has been gradually losing his charm since the 80s ended. DeVito is marginally better, but it's a very tragic state of affairs when someone of DeVito's stature can't get a laugh (only two or three lines at most provoke a slight lip movement...but nothing more). Kristin Chenoweth and Kristin Davis have roles as the supportive wives who become friends as their husbands bicker. The two Kristins are so forgettable. Meanwhile, the kids are annoying to an alarming extent.

A typical scene in the film depicts either Matthew Broderick or Danny DeVito (or both) with some sort of situation to handle. Cue the part when something foolish is done (which can be predicted years before they transpire). This same formula is used over and over again, and that's what makes up Deck the Halls. Trees are burned, dads perversely leer at their teenage daughters without realising it, and of course a character gets covered in animal excrement - in this case a camel spitting on Broderick. Yet after every bad joke and awkward situation, it's obvious there will be a reunion of sorts at the end of the film and amends will be made. Why? Because it's Christmas! All is forgiven, right? Hell to the no! It's not possible to forgive the writers and actors for wasting one's time with recycled clichés and unfunny moments. It spends an hour establishing Buddy as a despicable wretch, and then somehow the audience is expected to start liking him because Steve is dumb enough to be conned into forgiving him? In the real world, Buddy would be forced to reform - to admit his wrongdoing and plead for forgiveness. In this twisted wreckage of Hollywood excess, somehow STEVE is the one who needs to change his ways.

There are a few Christmas movies that are really, really good. Bad Santa, for example. Or Christmas Vacation. Deck the Halls, however, is not destined to be remembered among them. It's a superficial exercise, bursting with poorly motivated characters hanging from a clichéd story. It wouldn't be so bad if the jokes and the set-pieces were actually funny - as it is, though, they're sluggish and obnoxiously unfunny. The one sole positive (perhaps that word is far too strong...it actually pains me to admit this) is that it's periodically enjoyable. Oh, and I'm also happy it actually ended.

Those tempted to give this film a chance as a mark of respect for Broderick and/or DeVito should think twice. If you're a fan of one or both performers, you simply don't want to behold the material they've been given here. Deck the Halls is a worthless, brazen, witless, soulless, hollow husk.

"I want my house to be seen from space!"

"This guy is like the Terminator!"

Action movies are generally split into two categories - smart actioners, and dumb guilty pleasures. Overblown and ridiculous in every conceivable way, The Marine fails to meet the criteria for either category. This second movie offering of WWE Films (See No Evil, starring Kane, was the first) is so indescribably awful, inept and downright stupid it may actually cause brain damage. Far too mindless to be considered a smart actioner and not fun enough to be considered a guilty pleasure, The Marine is one of this decade's worst action movies. In interviews, WWE superstar John Cena has compared this cinematic abortion to 1985's Commando (featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger). Sure, both pictures are stunt spectacles in which everything blows up, but Commando is at least mildly respectable...The Marine, on the other hand, is poorly made, detrimentally unoriginal and appallingly acted, not to mention the sheer level of stupidity also prevents the film from fulfilling its primary objective of entertaining. It clearly strives to be a serious 80s-style action/adventure with humorous undertones, but instead the entire flick is unintentionally hilarious. This utter garbage could've been so bad that it's good. Instead, Cena's film debut is so bad it's just really, really bad.

In a standard action movie opening sequence, Sgt. John Triton (Cena) - a US Marine - disobeys a direct order and rescues some captured comrades. His superiors aren't fond of his gung-ho style, however, and he's honourably discharged before being shipped back to the US. It's a tough break for John who immediately accepts a job as a security guard. But more over-eagerness on John's part results in his sacking (on his first day of work). Following this second tough break, John decides to embark on a romantic getaway with wife Kate (Carlson).

Meanwhile, the ruthless Rome (Patrick) and his gang of thieves implement a diamond heist in the most conspicuous way possible - people are shot (including two police officers), a cop car is blown up (exploding in a 20-foot ball of flame), and the gang wield massive weapons on the street in broad daylight. Since tough-guy ex-marine John Triton needs someone to kill, the script throws these diamond thieves in his direction. John's wife ends up being taken as a hostage by these criminals (for absolutely no discernable reason). John wants his wife back, so he pursues these diamond thieves through a crocodile-free (but alligator-infested) South Carolinian swamp.

What ensues is a totally unbelievable action romp. Lots of bullets fly (the bad guys are unable to aim a gun properly, of course), everything in sight explodes, and the good guy kills the bad guy. Whoops, was the ending just spoiled for you? Or did you realise (through common knowledge) that the good guy was going to win?

The whole movie is laden with winks (Robert Patrick starred in Terminator 2 and John Triton is compared to the Terminator), tossed in a smorgasbord of a screenplay that gives one of Rome's henchmen a fear of rock candy and a moment where (in mid-threat) Rome answers a phone call to discuss his cable TV options. Couple that malarkey with the fact that Triton survives multiple big explosions (including three building explosions) and an impossibly lenient detective with sketchy motives. Everything in The Marine is pumped up to deafening proportions, from Cena's physique to sports cars for South Carolina state troopers. Continuity errors abound and impossibilities flourish throughout this tedious star vehicle.

The Marine is also infused with a sickening (almost insulting) level of American patriotism. Cena is introduced wearing Marine garb during the opening credits sequence, and he's standing in front of an American flag! Cena looks like a total moron, and these few seconds are enough to elicit derisive chortles. After this despicable sequence, Cena's John Triton proceeds to save US soldiers who have been captured in Afghanistan. Triton is a perfect marksman of course, and those he's battling appear to opt for hand-to-hand combat instead of just shooting the trouble-maker. Cue vomit-inducing, cheesy patriotic music. Oh yeah, and a Russian helicopter arrives to extract the soldiers from the battlefield. After this military propaganda video (that's also very disrespectful to the whole Iraq/Afghanistan situation), the movie gets right down to business...exploring John Cena's two facial expressions.

Modern action movies are normally overwhelmed by unconvincing CGI. Therefore, in theory, an actioner containing traditional stunt work and old-fashioned pyrotechnics should be refreshing and exciting. But it isn't - CGI is eschewed, but the approach is marred due to the fact that realism is thrown to the wind very early into the movie. During the film's main car chase, for example, roughly 300 bullets are fired into a sports car, none of which manage to hit John Triton who's behind the wheel. Tyres are visibly shot, but are perfectly re-inflated in subsequent shots. As the car chase ends, this car flies off a cliff and explodes...and John survives by leaping out of the flaming wreckage to safety. How do the thieves not notice John jumping out of the car when he's in plain sight?!

WWE director John Bonito tries very hard to pump up the excitement factor with this movie...but he fails. The Marine is more or less an extended trailer...90 minutes of fireballs, failed one-liners and fight sequences which are both poorly choreographed and incompetently shot. Dallas Puett's editing is frenetic, jumpy and downright terrible. Another of the production's biggest blunders is trying to pass off Australian locations as South Carolina. Big fail. There are also countless errors in military attire and hand-to-hand techniques, not to mention the politics behind John Triton's discharge is nonsense. Writing and filmmaking can't get much worse than this.

John Cena is a complete dud. In The Marine he's just an unstoppable, invincible action hero; more or less a cyborg impervious to injury. After he miraculously manages to survive a few explosions and hundreds of bullets, the film can no longer be taken seriously. The main problem with Cena's acting goes far beyond his easily spotted first film jitters. He's a mountainous man, but he looks more like a construction worker than a US Marine. Cena is also cursed with the vocal authority of pubescent 16-year-old. This guy has no business trying to pass himself off as a one-man army similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. At least Schwarzenegger was a hard-ass of the highest order, complete with an intimidating voice. Mired by a PG-13 rating that dampens the mood by placing all the violent money shots off camera, Cena comes across as a bland action figure who's ready to feature in any movie the WWE sends down the pipe for him, but who lacks a zesty charisma that could make him a genre icon. Beside him, Kelly Carlson is very forgettable as his kidnapped wife.

At least Robert Patrick brings a little bit of class and star power to the project. He's easy to watch as the goofy, sarcastic leader of a wacky crew of lunatic diamond thieves. Unfortunately, every other member of the cast is unbelievably awful, including a comical black man with a girly voice and a fear of rock candy.

It should come as no surprise that The Marine is a bad movie. If you had high expectations for this second WWE Films production, you're either a deluded wrestling fan or you just haven't been paying attention. If you've decided to give this dirge a shot, one should be completely aware of what they're walking into. Those who defend this awful movie state that the bad acting and weak plot can be overlooked because there's a lot of action to enjoy. I tried to enjoy the action...I really tried. But this dredge failed to entertain me.

"I just want to make people silky-smooth!"

Adam Sandler's excruciating, lethargic comedy routine stopped being funny around the beginning of his career. With You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Sandler and his usual partners in crime against cinema have actually managed to make a film more agonisingly unfunny than their appalling 2007 film I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. Adding further insult to injury, the beloved super-producer Judd Apatow (he must have aggressive insomnia at the rate he produces movie) has defiled his (predominantly impressive) CV with this ghastly Adam Sandler vehicle. 2008 is the year for movies that are DOA. Mike Myers ruined his career with The Love Guru, Brendan Fraser embarrassed himself with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Will Smith relegated his career to cheap blockbusters with Hancock, and even the much-anticipated The Lost Boys sequel was doomed before its release. During the 110-minute running time of You Don't Mess with the Zohan there's plenty of time for you to focus your anger on everyone involved with the film as you won't be doing any laughing.

Zohan (Sandler) is an Israeli counterterrorist who excels at his profession. The film is marred lethally by the capabilities of Zohan: he's like Superman and is able to do all sorts of ludicrous things, from catching a bullet to swimming like a dolphin. He's the Chuck Norris jokes brought to life...yielding depressingly unfunny, lifeless results.
Anyway, the film mixes comedy with a global political issue; in this case the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Zohan is stuck in the middle of all this fighting and is the finest counterterrorist the Israelis have to offer. But he grows tired of this senseless conflict, and fakes his death in order to escape to America to achieve his dream...he wants to be a hairdresser. His initial dream of working for Paul Mitchell doesn't materialise, thus he settles for working at a small-time beauty salon threatened by a Trump-like real estate developer. Before you know it, Zohan increases the popularity of the beauty salon. He cuts hair sensually - ejaculating shampoo and acting sexually - before sexing old birds in the back room.

As with 2007's I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, Sandler attempts to explore a serious political issue. In the case of You Don't Mess with the Zohan (as I said before) it's the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Why explore a sensitive issue in a light-weight, fluffy mainstream comedy? What does Sandler hope to achieve? The script plays it safe, ultimately exploiting this issue for a string of low-brow gags. Nothing subversive is present in the script, and it simply offers nothing more than a simplistic "can't we all get along?" message. There's also the matter of the obnoxious product placement. Whenever Zohan expresses his obsession with hummus the label is always conveniently facing the camera.

Offensive low-brow gags pervade the film. Like when Zohan and two mates play hackeysack with a live, screaming cat! Adam Sandler is too self-indulgent. He seems to be having an absolute ball, but we're certainly not having a good time. If we were examining a simple Sandler vehicle like Happy Gilmore, he does a few funny things but the film lasts about 90 minutes. In this case, the film runs about 110 minutes and it's devoid of anything genuinely funny. I chuckled, but what's missing are the meaty laugh-out-loud moments. The script frequently resorts to cultural stereotypes and ethnic humour for laughs. None of this even works! It's misfired gags united with offensive misfired gags and boring moments. At times the film even seems like a drama. This is undermined, however, by Zohan's complete inability to offend anyone no matter what he says to them. Sandler's Zohan is a garishly sketched melange of Ali G and Borat, however (despite a screenplay co-written by Sandler and Judd Apatow) he's such a jarringly two-dimensional creation. Sandler's accent is even more offensive. That he has to become a foreigner for laughs is a reflection on how desperate this talentless "comedian" has become. He tries to be of the standard of Borat, but he doesn't have the talent as a writer or as an actor to pull it off adequately. And then there's Sandler regular Rob Schneider as a Palestinian cab driver. Seriously, it's awful stuff!

You Don't Mess with the Zohan appears to lag too much as well. There's a dreadful, contrived romantic sub-plot tossed in for the sake of some romance. It's barely developed and too sudden; hence we seldom care about it. Zohan has been screwing woman ages 60 and above throughout the whole film, yet cringe-worthy true love intervenes. The sign of this "true love" warrants more groaning: Zohan can't get an erection unless he's talking to this girl. The film plays out like an action flick and as a comedy. But Zohan is too unrealistic and overplayed for this to be a serious action film. And there most certainly aren't adequate gags for this to be considered a comedy. It's in the line in between...and this is certainly not a favourable line to be sitting on. The film cooks up is 80s-ish action, trite blather and ceaseless scenes of Sandler making sexy with grannies in the salon run by Palestinian bombshell Dalia (Chriqui). That she lets him continually run amok before eventually falling in love with him is about as insolent as the jaw-droppingly excruciating attempts at comedy, such as dudes discussing which First Lady they'd tap or a montage mirroring Rocky during which cracked eggs reveal developed young chickens and a live cow hanging upside down is used as a punching bag.

If only the Zohan hadn't messed with us! I never thought it'd be possible, but Adam Sandler has made a movie more painful than I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and has further demonstrated his ability to reinvent the term "unfunny comedy". One golden star for a few chuckles...and I have no idea why in hell I'm being that nice!

"Look into their eyes, can't you see the sin?"

See No Evil marks the first motion picture to be produced by WWE Films; the newest arm of Vince McMahon's entertainment empire. This dull, generic, exploitative horror movie also marks the big screen debut of Glenn Jacobs, better known to wrestling enthusiasts as Kane. As a matter of fact, this routine horror flick functions as a star vehicle for the renowned wrestler. Eager to sucker in the faithful by showcasing Kane's abilities as a tough horror villain, See No Evil is nothing more than a one-note genre offering that comes across as nothing more than a banal collection of gory money shots. Granted, the filmmakers deserve props for infusing this flick with gore galore. Unfortunately, though, the whole falls far beneath the sum of its parts.

The plot is customary horror tripe: idiot teenagers are systematically massacred by an unstoppable killing machine (whose past is full of abuse to justify his killing spree) until the shrewdest learn to fight back. With a runtime of approximately 80 minutes, character development is at a minimum. Characters are hardly introduced before the slaughtering begins, and it concludes with a very predictable climax.

To elaborate: eight juvenile delinquents are transported to a run-down old hotel which will soon be transformed into a shelter for the homeless. In return, the lawbreakers will have a month shaved off their prison sentence. As they commence work and carelessly wander around the decayed premises, a reclusive psychopath (Kane) begins stalking them...offing the criminals one by one.

This absurdly convenient plot which would trigger winces from even the most forgiving horror aficionados is merely a means to an end, and this end is a bucket-load of blood & guts. The script is extremely problematic, but this was definitely to be expected considering this is screenwriter Dan Madigan's first feature-length effort (he was previously a writer for WWE Smackdown!). It's obvious that the studio was desperately trying to cut costs given that the screenwriter wrote Smackdown episodes and the director's past efforts include Brittany Spears music videos and pornography. Horror used to mesmerise viewers through smartly-drawn characters, witty dialogue and a compelling story (see Scream, Psycho and Halloween). See No Evil contains dumb characters, silly dialogue and a derivative story.

"This is not what God wants!"

Logic is completely discarded in Madigan's woeful script. For instance, two of the criminals decide to hunt for a "secret treasure". The safe containing this fortune is apparently so top secret that the map leading to it can be downloaded from the internet!

Consider the logistics of this ludicrous scenario: either felons are selected to work in this hotel, but they're supervised by only three people, only one of which is an armed officer. Uh huh. The whole concept is also impossible. The hotel was set on fire, yet criminals are brought in to clean it in order for the building to be transformed into a homeless shelter. Never mind that the walls and frames would have to be replaced by professionals, and contractors should have to be hired to fix the electricity as well as the plumbing. How does the electricity still work after the place has been abandoned for 35 years? Why aren't the inmates wearing prison garb? Why would the officers let the delinquents run around unsupervised while they drink shots at the bar?

See No Evil also suffers from a crippling lack of originality. Slasher movie stock characters pervade the film, and they act in ways recognisable to any horror buff. There are the token ethnics (one black, one Latino), a nerd, a self-righteous lesbian, and four other characters designed to have sex with each other and get high before having their eyeballs torn out by the killer. On top of this, those who are eventually killed are stupid beyond all comprehension. For added measure (and cliché) the correctional officer supervising the miscreants has a past with the murderer - several years prior, he lost not only his hand to the crazed killer, but also his partner, so there's bad blood between them. But wait, the list of clichés grows longer: two characters who depart from the main group in order to have sex are killed (naturally). Oh, and let's not forget that Kane's character is completely impervious to pain, not to mention his back-story is a breeding ground for ridiculous clichés. In addition, the psychopath killer has the ability to be everywhere at once, and characters appear to show up right on time (when it looks like game over for two characters, in comes another to attack Kane and save the day). One should anticipate a certain amount of clichés in a slasher movie, but the filmmakers don't even seem to be trying here. See No Evil is exasperatingly asinine, irritatingly conventional and utterly brainless!

Director Gregory Dark's résumé is filled with such memorable adult porn films as Hootermania and The Psychosexuals. Bearing this in mind, it may be no surprise that the narrative style of See No Evil is remarkably similar to that of a porno movie. A viewer must endure perfunctory dialogue scenes and wooden acting in between the customary genre sequences. Dark has also helmed music videos; therefore general over-stylisation as well as nauseating, jittery editing is certainly present. The movie is consequently a shambolic blur. Dark can only capture the mayhem with a deplorable assortment of first-year film student trick shots and clichéd flashy editing aplenty. All the flashy edits in the world, however, cannot make up for the bad acting, terrible dialogue, and a plot so predictable that anyone could foresee the outcome by the 10-minute mark.

Taking place almost completely in dingy hotel hallways, the filmmakers attempt to enliven the humdrum surroundings with preposterously conceived deaths (eyes are plucked out, one character gets a cell phone shoved down their throat, another is eaten by starving dogs, and someone else gets crushed by a safe) and dangerously disrespectful film tributes (the movies of Wes Craven were apparently an influence, which is in turn an official insult). Even the minor usage of CGI is a dud. As Kane falls from a high window to his predictable death, the computer effects look too cartoonish to be taken seriously.

To make matters worse, none of the actors can act, nor can they convey fear convincingly. When it comes to WWE wrestlers, some can act and others can't. Prior to See No Evil, only Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson had tried his hand at acting with moderately pleasing results. But for the WWE to think that everyone else in their little galaxy will be just as successful is the mother of all delusions of grandeur. Glenn Jacobs, a.k.a. Kane, is not destined for an acting career. He has the acting skills of a fire extinguisher, and has the screen presence of a shaved ape. Granted, Kane only had to grunt, swing an axe, utter a grand total of three words and look confused, but this acting goal is not even achieved. The bald seven-foot wrestler looks more like a modern Tor Johnson, and is so inept he's more cuddly than terrifying. Instead of imposing, he comes across as a junior high school bully with an eye socket fetish.

The rest of the cast - comprised mostly of Australian actors, as the film was shot in Australia - is almost uniformly bland. It'd be redundant to list all the primary actors involved, as they're all quite forgettable. While viewing the movie, a spectator is merely asked to watch as characters die horrible deaths, which can be rewarding at times since there is no reason to care about them in the first place.

To its credit, See No Evil does provide a few delightfully gory death scenes and only occasionally does the film plod during its brisk 80-minute duration. Unfortunately, though, this doesn't count for much when the film as a whole is clearly a by-the-numbers moneymaking operation for the WWE. See No Evil is just another illogical, badly-acted exploitation slasher movie that we've all seen many times before.

The golden days of horror are clearly long behind us. Those were the days when a horror film kept you on the edge of your seat through fear of the unknown. Not only does this awful horror flick leave nothing to your imagination, but it would also seem the director forgot to use his at all. Gregory Dark has set the bar as WWE's first feature film director... It's so unbelievably low that even Uwe Boll would have a hard time limbo-ing under it.

"I see now..."

"Hello. My name is Violet and I was born into a world you may not understand."

Ultraviolet is high-concept, visually spectacular science fiction movie...it is also a criminal waste of both time and talent. Audiences may remember director Kurt Wimmer's initial success with the film Equilibrium. That was a highly impressive, taut action movie with an underlying message regarding the cost of being human. The established fans of Wimmer probably aimed their expectations unfathomably high when Ultraviolet was announced. Could this be another massive cult hit like The Matrix? Unfortunately, the emphatic answer is NO! It's difficult to describe all things that went wrong, as the answer is pretty much everything. The film is so dreadful, in fact, that finding the positives would prove so hard and stating the negatives is virtually redundant.

Critics and audiences alike expressed their hatred for Ultraviolet and after watching the film with high hopes, I can see why. Practically everything on show here is below average - it features an incompetent script, terrible acting, bleak directing that never generates a moment of engagement, and the entire film doesn't make a lick of sense as the exposition is drowned out by the action.

The film's setting reflects that of 2005's Aeon Flux and the plot is essentially identical. Human society has been decimated by a holocaust caused by biological warfare gone wrong. The objective of the research was to create super-soldiers with superhuman abilities...instead this materialises into a destructive virus. Said virus infects humans and transforms them into Hemophages - a sub-species with enhanced physical aptitude and vampire characteristics. Violet (Jovovich) is an infected woman battling the totalitarian dictator who is determined to wipe out her species at any cost. She steals the recently developed secret weapon...and discovers that this weapon is in fact a young boy named Six (Bright) who encompasses valuable antigens. With Violet's species wanting to eliminate Six, and the government desiring for Six's return to their facilities...let the mayhem commence.

The Hemophages are not vampires as some have said, and Ultraviolet is not a vampire movie. The species possess a few characteristics of the vampires - like teeth and sensitivity to bright light - but they don't suck blood and sleep in coffins. It's a shame, though, because that'd be something far more interesting than this.

Ultraviolet is dumb, big, loud and overblown. The sometimes impressive and colourful visuals are never grounded in any degree of credibility. Worse yet, there's no heart behind anything. The action scenes are entertaining for sure; however never are they riveting, and never is there any point! Precious little exposition means we're travelling from one needless action scene to the next. By the film's conclusion you'll be scratching your head with confusion. There is no meaningful narrative - setting up the plot is restricted to a few minutes of an excruciating voiceover. Considering the bad dialogue we do have, maybe it was for the best that it's kept to a minimum.

Worse yet, the action is awkwardly shot and stultifyingly repetitive. The overabundance of corny visual effects makes the action inscrutable. Occasionally it is entertaining and fun to watch...but not past the first 5 minutes. The use of swords mirrors Kill Bill in a sense. But here the action is seriously lacking blood. It's sanitary to extremes, ergo growing tiresome very quickly. And when the characters begin talking, they're twisting their tongues around dialogue so unswervingly awful it sounds like a feebly translated dub track.

The CGI is sub-par as well. Apparently it was to give the impression of a comic book, but this fails badly. Sometimes I honestly thought the CGI was a joke. The characters are also atom-thin, with acting that makes the proceedings seem like a corny melodrama. So neither the action, visuals, nor dialogue redeem this putrid mess! I will admit that the first 10 minutes did have me mildly interested and it saved the film from complete disaster. Things only go downhill from there. Wimmer's lens contains as much style as a monkey with a paint brush...and most shots resemble a poor man's video game.

In a world of fantasy epics such as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, many films have tried to measure up to the originality and excellence of those fantasy films. Harry Potter failed terribly and this film was another pitiful attempt with a pathetic script, average CGI and crumby acting! (Shame on you Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Robert Carlyle!) When the dragon gives a better performance than anyone else in the cast, you know there's something wrong. I expected the movie to be okay entertainment...but I should have heeded the warning signs. For one, the director's experience is limited to second unit directing. And secondly, the screenwriter only has one other title to his name: Jurassic Park III. Now there's some major skill and experience...a director who's just directed special effects and a screenwriter who's just written about dinosaurs failing to kill people. Wow, now that's overwhelming talent for you. Based on the popular novel; Eragon is about an orphaned farm boy named Eragon (Speleers) who stumbles upon a dragon egg. The egg hatches and as the dragon grows up it explains that it has chosen Eragon to be its rider. Eragon then becomes the new Dragon Rider; a saviour who will defeat all the evil forces. A pretty yawn-inducing plot doesn't spill out well onto the big screen. The special effects are very dodgy and the script is cheesier than a mouse's lunch! And is this supposed to be epic? Because all I saw during the so-called 'final battle' was about 10 seconds worth of sword fighting, equalling to a body count of about six (when they showed us thousands of men that are supposed to be fighting!) followed by a mere 2-minute dragon battle in the sky that doesn't even look spectacular! Why waste your time on this 100-minute long nonsense that is nothing more than a poor excuse for a fantasy film that bombed spectacularly and attempted to top Lord of the Rings? Don't bother! Why exactly did this movie turn out so terrible? Well, aside from the poor source material they were working with, it's pretty clear what doomed the movie: they just didn't give a shit.

"I hate mummies. They never play fair."

I never thought I'd ever say this, but bring back Stephen Sommers! The two previous The Mummy adventures undoubtedly suffered from Sommers' absurd excesses; nevertheless they were at least fun. The original 1999 flick The Mummy was an enjoyable tribute to the old campy movie serials. Said original film used special effects sparingly, as opposed to being driven by them. As a result, The Mummy is always terrific entertainment: its casual, throwaway qualities ensured it could be viewed constantly and one could continually enjoy the entertaining romp being offered. In The Mummy Returns, Sommers turned to an action/adventure powered by poorly-rendered special effects and re-used scenarios. This sequel didn't work particularly well as it was daft, inane and too over-the-top to be believable. Be that as it may, it was still so much fun!

With Stephen Sommers extracted from the director's chair (hitting the sidelines as a producer), Rob Cohen filled his position. After watching The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor I seriously doubted whether Rob Cohen had ever even seen the two forerunners. Where Sommers created highly entertaining action/adventure flicks that bounced along at a satisfying pace with Brendan Fraser in top form, Cohen creates a boring, cold and lifeless husk.

The problems stem mainly from the script: it's riddled with clunky elucidation, tedious characters, a story that's too extensive to care about, and plot developments lacking inspiration. The cast look bored, with heroics and witticisms appearing forced and routine. Charisma-free characters dominate the screen. The once-charming Brendan Fraser is a frosty and pale imitation of his former self. The film screws up the timeline of the series in terms of character ages, and it eventually turns into a shameless self-parody. Even the character of Evelyn (Bello replaces Rachel Weisz) has written books about the adventures she underwent during the events of the first two films. Furthermore, the events of The Mummy are published by Evy in a novel entitled The Mummy. Likewise with the follow-up. How very creative, Mr. Cohen.
In a nutshell: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a colossal disappointment. It could have at least been 110 minutes of entertainment, instead it supplies 110 minutes of lacklustre action and poor writing. A series that shamelessly aspired to be an Indiana Jones facsimile has transformed into this feeble, third-rate, unremarkable claptrap that I couldn't even recommend to my enemies.

The film is set many years following the occurrences of The Mummy Returns. We find keen globe-trotting adventurer Rick O'Connell (Fraser) living a boring, albeit affluent life in a large mansion with wife Evelyn. Just after the conclusion of World War II, the husband and wife duo officially decide to throw in the towel and retire. Their son Alex (Ford, who's only 13 years younger than Fraser) has, unbeknownst to his parents, dropped out of university to go dig for a mythical tomb in the desolate sands of the Chinese outback. (Like father, like son...how very imaginative) Alex proves successful in his dig, and unearths a tomb belonging to Emperor Han (Li). Many thousands of years ago, Han was a tyrannical leader who ruled China with a barbarous fist until his sorceress (Yeoh) placed a curse on him and his 10,000-strong army. If Han is ever resurrected, he'll rule the world. Upon disturbing Han's tomb, Alex runs into malevolent forces who wish to awaken the ancient emperor and allow him to dominate the Earth. As fate would have it, Rick and Evelyn come out of retirement for one last job and find themselves inadvertently entangled in another adventure with another sacred walking corpse.

It's been reported that the creators of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor wanted to take the profitable series in another direction. They step away from the character of Imhotep (the focus of the prior two flicks) and replace him with some boring Asian emperor. I will admit that bringing back Imhotep again would have been a long shot. But replacing him with another mummy is lame. If the filmmakers wanted to take Fraser's Rick O'Connell on another adventure, why not take his adventures away from mummies?! Indiana Jones hunted for artefacts and it took him to vast cultures. His adventures were refreshing and fascinating. Everything is just messed up here.

Those seeking popcorn entertainment can look elsewhere - this film does not entertain. The script, as I previously stated, is awful. The two writers don't produce anything worthwhile. Sommers filled his movies with interesting supporting characters (in the first film we had the Americans, and Winston the plane pilot. The second film had Izzy) and wittiness in his dialogue. The one-liners aren't funny in the slightest here. The script reduces the dialogue to awkward conversations about sex and even flirting with a yak! Some of the cumbersome scenarios are riddled with pathetic and predictable lines, usually given to the now tiresome John Hannah. The rest of the dialogue is predominantly unfunny and trite. It even feels the need to reference the previous films quite frequently. An hour of nostalgia becomes very monotonous very quickly. The movie tries to entertain its target audience with frenetic action and daring escapades, but the awful writing and incompetent direction leave the film far short of its aspirations. There's a long chase through Shanghai that's meant to be chaotic and intense. However the camera flies around so awkwardly and wildly that I lost track of what was occurring.
Even more painful is how illogical everything is. An example would include all the action unfolding in the streets of Shanghai with no police in sight. The civilians appear to see the feverish chase and resurrected mummy as something not to be afraid of. Suspension of disbelief is a given when it comes to summer blockbusters, but this is just ridiculous! Even more unbelievable is Michelle Yeoh's sorceress character that created the curse of Emperor Han. Why can't this oh-so-powerful sorceress just cast a spell to stop the resurrected mummy to begin with?
By the end you'll be mocking the film with a vengeance. Like when a character sees a massive structure and exclaims "Shangri-La!" one will want to murmur "It's only a model".

Then there's the matter of the eye roll-inducing Yeti snow monsters that make an appearance. Things become so dim-witted that said Yetis dispatch a few enemies, and then triumphantly raise their arms like NRL referees signalling a successful field goal!! The special effects do, to some extent, look impressive. It must be said that CGI was never a high point in the first two Mummy films, but this marks a noted improvement. 60% of the time the CGI looks quite good, such as the emperor as a computer generated creation, or the dragon that appears towards the end of the movie. At other times the CGI is nothing to brag about. The Yetis are a prime example.

The battles grow increasingly stupid towards the end. For example, an army of the dead is raised and one particular soldier knocks the head off his comrade before frantically trying to assist with re-attaching the head. This stuff ain't funny! There's so much wasted potential as well. The dragon is given a few minutes to shine if that! There's also the over-hyped battle between Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. Seriously, that dual is "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" stuff. It lasts less than a minute. Jet Li is also wasted as 80% of the time he's an entity created entirely out of CGI. If you can get Li in a film, why waste him like that?!
The attention also shifts from Brendan Fraser to the appalling Luke Ford. Fraser and Ford do not look like father and son. They almost look like brothers! It's really freakish stuff. 2008 saw the fourth Indiana Jones adventure with aging Harrison Ford accompanied by the youthful Shia LeBeouf. That made sense. But this is just weird!

All in all, I found The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor to be exasperatingly tedious and utterly mindless. It may look competent in terms of special effects, but it's bereft of any memorable moments and it grows really boring. It seems Rob Cohen believed he was creating a godsend to the franchise, hence the complicated plot. With a hefty plot such as this, however, the fun and entertainment value becomes buried deeper than a mummy's tomb. Had it gone really over-the-top it would still have been an embarrassment to the series, but at least it would have been a fun embarrassment to the series. What we've been given is a dreary and frivolous embarrassment to the series.
The one-liners are so painful that you'll develop a newfound respect for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, I mean that!
It never even seems like an instalment in the Mummy series because of how out-of-place everything feels. The closing subtitle is like firing a bullet into a knife wound. It's painful stuff! I never found much value in Rob Cohen's prior flicks, and his despicable signature is unmistakably placed on this film. At 110 minutes, the film is simply too fatiguing and gruelling. Cutting the film down wouldn't have made it better...but it at least would have made everyone a little happier.

"His name's Bison. I've tracked him through eleven major cities on four continents and never come close, not once. This guy walks through the raindrops. Anybody that's against him is either dead, or on their way."

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is not only a compelling early contender for the worst film of 2009, but it's also a contender for the worst film of all time! This second attempt at a screen adaptation of the revered Capcom video game series is unbelievably awful in every aspect. Generic action sequences, atrocious acting, cringe-inducing dialogue and lacklustre filmmaking are all combined, resulting in an hour and a half of pure cinematic torture. The first time the Street Fighter video game empire was adapted for the big screen, it concerned (a cartoonishly costumed) Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue trying to rescue the world from the evil clutches of (an infirmed) Raul Julia...and the film tanked! Now in 2009, fifteen years later, we've been given Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li - a production armed with a few clumsy television actors, Chris Klein, and a member of the Black Eyed Peas. This is not progress! With Andrzej Bartkowiak at the helm (who also directed the awful film adaptation of Doom), this feature is incredibly inept, and even that's putting it lightly. Most disheartening is that this dreck is unable to deliver the barest of bare-knuckle guilty pleasures promised by the genre. So what's left? Absolutely nothing.

At least 20th Century Fox were aware of the dud they had on their hands - they didn't screen the movie for the critics, and apparently most of the theatres showing this reel of used toilet paper only screened it once or twice a day. Why does this movie even exist, anyway? The Street Fighter video game series peaked in the '90s, which justifies the Van Damme movie. This latest rendition, however, is unjustifiable.

The plot concerns Chun-Li (Kreuk) who travels to Bangkok after receiving an enigmatic scroll (oddly enough, this scroll literally looks like a piece of paper that has been shoddily glued onto a piece of cheap cardboard). The streets of Bangkok are ruled by a crime syndicate called Shadaloo, headed by criminal mastermind Bison (McDonough) and his right hand man Balrog (Duncan). It seems Chun-Li battles this crime syndicate to save the city and because they kidnapped her father when she was a kid. Meanwhile, Interpol Agent Charlie Nash (Klein) is equally passionate to stop Bison and take down Shadaloo.

The story does not make much sense. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li simply limps along from one poorly-staged set-piece to the next, climaxing with a whimper rather than a bang. It lacks both coherence and flow. This 2009 picture is distinctly different to the catastrophic 1994 movie failure, exchanging the cartoon atmosphere for a grittier tone that concentrates on revenge scenarios rather than a world domination plot. Justin Marks' script is surprisingly straight-faced...far too serious for its own good. It's also just really badly written. When a character seeks information on Shadaloo, they simply use the internet. No secret is safe from the internet, after all. When Chun-Li needs to know about a secret shipment, she finds a random guy on the wharf and breaks his arm to extract the relevant information. With the help of a guy named Gen, Chun-Li is trained to become a supreme master of kung-fu. This transformation from naïve fighter to highly skilled warrior takes all of five minutes, and mostly involves marbles being pelted at her.

Here's the big problem: both Street Fighter films have next to nothing to do with the actual video game. The basic concept behind Street Fighter is gloriously simple: two fighters face off in the ring, attacking each other with a variety of kicks, punches and special moves until one is beaten into submission. A serviceable film adaptation could be derived from the same formula (maybe a tournament movie like Bloodsport?), but both attempts so far work from a needlessly complicated and ridiculously silly story (in this case a meandering crime syndicate tale which takes forever to unfold). The Legend of Chun-Li is much further removed from the video game than the Van Damme vehicle preceding it. This is only a Street Fighter movie by name, and because a few classic characters have cameos. Chun-Li at one stage fights Vega (one of the video game's coolest characters), but he gets a minute or two of screen-time and just seems like a poor imitation of Wolverine with his giant metal claws.

At its core, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a martial arts demonstration reel, but it's an extremely unimpressive one. For a big studio release, the technical accomplishments are extremely subpar. The strictly ordinary choreography during the fight sequences is captured with scarcely a modicum of skill - some clumsy cinematography which is amplified by the choppy editing. It's impossible to lighten up and embrace the violence when it's just a blur occasionally punctuated by a famous Street Fighter finishing move. These are just silly wire-work sequences during which no-one ever seems to get hurt, and one is unable to get any sense of a character's brute force or skill. The gun battles are just routine, PG-13 filler. In fact, so is the entire movie as it lamely lurches from conflict to conflict in a programmed manner. Some of the gun battles do look mildly cool, but these are unfortunately few and far between. The Legend of Chun-Li cannot be considered a movie - it's a God forsaken tragedy! It reels in some of the most pathetic actors in the industry who are aching for their existence to be acknowledged, and gives them a vastly stupid script to regurgitate.

The acting is atrocious right across the board. Chris Klein delivers one of the most laughably awful screen performances of the decade, making Van Damme seem Oscar-worthy in comparison. His portrayal of Nash is beyond awful - not only can he not act, but he was probably drunk during filming. The performer (calling him an actor would be a questionable compliment) assumes a strange mix of Clint Eastwood and metrosexual paedophile as he desperately tries to come across as a tough guy. It's frankly hilarious to observe his cheese, especially in the presence of the other actors who seriously look as if they're holding back giggles. His character also favours a pistol over hand-to-hand fighting, so why is he even included in the film?! Throughout this cinematic abomination, I was actually missing the acting skills of Jean-Claude Van Damme...
And as for the rest of the cast... Neal McDonough might've fared better had he not used such a goofy Irish accent (Bison is a quintessential Irish surname, after all). One-time Oscar nominee Michael Clarke Duncan is reduced to playing the character Balrog, while a host of other actors (Robin Shou, Josie Ho and the attractive Moon Bloodgood) are unfathomably woeful as the one-dimensional stock characters. Kristin Kreuk is hot, but it seems she was deceased throughout the filming period as she boasts just one expression and one tone of voice. She also does a thoroughly awful job of faking martial arts moves before her stunt double steps in.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is tiresome, brain-dead and ill-considered. It'd be impossible for anyone to have a legitimately enjoyable time watching this awful motion picture which delivers nothing apart from an inconsistent crime plot. Unfortunately, the makers behind this Street Fighter movie are unable to put together a martial arts scene that's worth a damn. Not even morbidly curious film-goers should give this one a shot unless they also have masochistic tendencies.

"Conquer your fear, and I promise you, you will conquer death."

If you're enthusiastic to waste 3 valuable hours on Oliver Stone's tedious, meaningless, lackluster epic then I won't stop you. But the fact remains that Alexander is a substantially appalling film that should never plague your DVD player.

Before continuing with this review, I must clear up a few things: Oliver Stone is a talented filmmaker. Stone's films for the most part have been masterpieces of the utmost quality, and epics like this are ordinarily excellent...but there is nothing here that engages you and consequently the result is 3 hours of an uninspiring script accompanied with barely any action.

It appears that every single actor is miscast: Colin Farrell breathes no life into the character of Alexander (who's turned into a sexually frustrated arrogant king who spends half the film naked), while Jolie adds absolutely nothing but useless dialogue scenes of philosophizing. And every other addition to the cast does nothing more but talk or get killed; no distinguishing features, and a non-sentimental approach to the whole thing.

And even the battle scenes, the only thing you would think would be redeeming, look dull and lifeless and were shot in a manner that results in the audience having no clue as to what is going on. The shaky cam was fruitless, distracting and all it did was cause the audience to sit there thinking "What...the hell...is going on?!" And if that's not enough, why in the name of god did the post-production crew decide to tint part of a battle in red?! You can't make out ANYTHING! I was struggling just to distinguish who is stabbing who.

There was no point to the movie. All it does is try to outline the life of Alexander the Great (played appallingly by Farrell) but instead the dismal script is hard to comprehend and makes it into something from Shakespeare. After watching the movie I had no idea what point it was meant to make, not to mention what actually happened during the movie, and why it's nothing more than violent manslaughter with horrible acting and a script that could be beaten by one penned by a 5-year-old.

Alexander's life was filled with battles of epic proportion and that is what I was at least expecting. Stone never got close to this. When I first saw the trailers and read the information about the movie I expected good results. All the film returned was a bunch of negative reviews and a poor box office return.

Alexander is the first Oliver Stone film one can honestly describe as boring. Please do yourself a favour and leave this one on the shelf! Don't waste your precious time.

"I had this friend, who had this friend who shot documentaries, and he and his whole crew went down to the Amazon, and they were all eaten by snakes, and that's a true story!"

The first film, Anaconda, was probably the worst monster blockbuster to hit cinemas since...ever. I have no idea why, but the studio seemed to think that a sequel to a dreadful film would be a good idea. But this sequel only lies in the name as there is no link between the two other than the central monster being an anaconda.


Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is a film that doesn't even work as a guilty pleasure; like its predecessor, the film is B-Grade, appalling and just plain dreadful. Watching the film necessitates a comprehensive disconnection from reality; it's plagued with inconsistencies and factual errors that arrive by the bucket load. The snakes shown here are far from realistic. They are shown to have a fondness for biting, to be fast moving and the size of a Sydney monorail. Usually one could excuse these things for the sake of entertainment, but these ideas aren't sold in a way that's anywhere near believable. Examples include bad CGI, crummy acting, artificial atmosphere, and a predictable script.


The plot isn't terribly good here either - a plant called the blood orchid is discovered in a remote deep jungle in Borneo. Apparently this particular plant is the 'fountain of youth' and only pops up for a very limited amount of time. Predictably, a pharmaceutical company wants to send a team into Borneo on a scientific expedition to retrieve the orchid before it disappears. Upon arrival in the jungle, the anacondas start eating people.


All the characters are terribly, painfully clichéd - there's the serious one that knows how to avoid being eaten, the dumb (or joking) characters who get killed first and a few babes who wear singlet tops to please the men. The whole movie can pretty much be summed up by looking at the front cover. There are no intriguing plot twists and no attempt to remove this from the "B-Grade horror trash" category.


I couldn't believe how bad all the filmmaking was for this production. For one, the directing is tremendously weak. Because the actors deliver their lines in such a shockingly bad way, there is also no passion in the performances and therefore the scares are non-existent. The music is usually meant to assist in the filmmaking and the creation of first-rate scares. Instead the music makes the film even more predictable. Every time the music gets even mildly intense we know that an anaconda is about to pop up and eat someone. It's all so predictable.


Heck, I'll even go so far as to say that the cinematography and locations were bleak. For the most part it felt like it was being filmed on a sound stage. That's not the desired effect on the viewer. And I think the principal flaw is the CGI. It made the snakes look utterly horrible.


Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid should never have been brought to fruition. The first film was bad enough, but it seems the studio figured they just hadn't tortured their viewers enough. This sequel is even worse than the first movie. And that's one heck of an insult. Interestingly enough, the monkey gets more close-ups than anyone else in the cast.

"Are your nerves shaking?...that means your instincts are turned on.

It seems that in recent years, washed up action stars like Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris and Van Damme obtain their income from starring in low-budget, crappy straight-to-video action flicks. Since they started in that industry, there is little wonder why they continued - they just don't have the acting skills to be hired for anything good.

After Wesley Snipes featured in films like Blade and Demolition Man among others, no-one anticipated that he would lower his standards to the world of low-budget straight-to-video action flicks. It's impossible not to wonder what's compelling this actor to feature in such an appallingly low-rent affair. Regrettably, with Snipes starring in scrupulously inept and poorly produced action fares such as 7 Seconds and The Marksman he's venturing into the same dangerous territory formerly tread by Seagal, Van Damme and Chuck Norris - three actors who sorely need to retire.

Okay, so I admit that occasionally I do enjoy a good violent action flick. Even if they are low-budget, they can supply a healthy dosage of thrills and action. I viewed The Marksman in the faint hope of something like that, and boy was I wrong! The paltry budget is obvious from the first shot! One of the aspects I discovered from the initial 10 minutes is how poorly the film has been made. The opening "action" sequence is impossible to watch because of the poor lighting, the abysmal directing, the choppy editing, the feeble audio mix, embarrassing acting and the shortness of action!

The plot starts off reasonably straightforward and easy to follow. Basically, there's a mysterious mercenary with a formidable reputation only known as Painter (Snipes). After a preposterously terrible opening scene that depicts a training exercise, Painter is presented with his latest mission. The US army send him to a Chechen nuclear power plant with a group of soldiers as his back-up where a group of stereotypical, forgettable evil terrorists are threatening to set off a live reactor. Though his objective is to secure the reactor and save the hostages, Painter's superiors make it clear that his priority is the reactor. However, it doesn't take long before Painter discovers that he and his soldiers are being elaborately set up - leaving Painter with little choice but to take on all the terrorists single-handedly.

After the first 40 minutes the plot transforms into some political mumbo jumbo that's virtually impossible to follow. The dialogue is hard to understand as well, thus the film is hard to follow. Then again the script is filled with dialogue that one won't want to listen to...quite simply, the script is poorly written and executed worse!

The worst insult is that the screenwriters were obviously aiming to create some interesting action flick with a political sub-plot, like Behind Enemy Lines or something. Wesley Snipes is thus tossed into the mix due to the success of his previous movies. The difference is...films in that fundamental style actually flaunt a decent script. The screenwriters here fill the film with ludicrous dialogue and forgettable action.

Wesley Snipes made a terrible career move when he decided to star in this mess. His acting isn't even slightly memorable. One would expect his experience to be the saving grace here...but it's not. Combine a talented actor with a team of hacks and this is the result. The rest of the acting is largely pathetic. You can't help but feel sorry for the waste of talent. It's apparent that the actors tried. Similar to Wesley Snipes, it's the filmmakers that destroyed all the potential for good performances.

Overall, The Marksman is a missed opportunity. The concept is mediocre and could have achieved some entertaining results for sure. However the film looks ugly and feels ugly. Every shot looks grainy, every action scene is lifeless. This film is utter tripe! Wesley Snipes was never the best actor in the world, but surely even he deserves better than this!

"If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake."

The New World is director Terrence Malick's take on the story of Pocahontas. Over the decades, Malick has certainly developed multitudes of faithful and loyal fans that devotedly lap up anything Malick releases, no matter the actual quality of the product. Malick's last movie, The Thin Red Line, was a spectacular war film flaunting visually beautiful visuals. However, he misses the mark with The New World by a country mile. It's an irritatingly lengthy, unfocused, pretentious, irretrievably boring mound of elephant dung supposedly disguised as "true cinematic art". While Malick presents visually arresting cinematography and eye-catching scenery, there's a gargantuan lack of focus when it comes to a solid story or narrative. This unfocused story results in a disjointed, mindless, nonsensical, shallow succession of shots passed off as a movie. This is an abysmal film that runs at roughly 150 minutes, yet honestly feels like 4 hours!

The story was not properly told, instead it was shown. If done right it could yield wonderful results, yet Malick's script is truly awful here. The script jumps from one scene to another with HUGE plot holes and unforgivable gaps in the timeline. The New World is so difficult to get into because it's impossible to follow with a non-existent plot driving the proceedings. I was constantly wondering what just happened and more importantly WHY?! To me, it seemed every shot was as unnecessary as the one preceding it. Malick appears to be so self-deluded that he's under the false impression that his stunning visuals create a masterpiece. Predictably, his loyal fans appear to take his side. But in the long run, films are made to tell an important story and/or to entertain. The New World suffers so severely because it doesn't tell a story...it doesn't even have a story! It's certainly not a slice of entertainment either. The result is a ponderously-paced film with a transparent story that's incoherent beyond all comprehension.

The love story feels so artificial as well. It's supposed to be beautiful, but the payoff at the end is simply not worth your time. It's a build-up to absolutely nothing! Furthermore, there is no hook to keep an audience engaged. We're dropped into a world we have no prior knowledge of and are expected to lap it up effortlessly. There is just no spark!

It's crucial to note a number of things regarding Malick's army of fanboys. These fans appear to worship the man and every frame he produces. They are convinced that Malick is the final word in filmmaking...the guardian of movie genius. Worse yet, they're under the embarrassing false impression that anyone who doesn't share their enthusiasm for the director's work must be a churlish animal frequently seeking entertainment in the works of Michael Bay. The fact of the matter is that Malick fans are unable to prove adequate reasoning or articulate illumination on what makes The New World a "cinematic masterpiece". Instead they opt for childish and shallow statements...proving that they are lacking as much genuine depth as Malick's cinematic creations. Their insulting pomposity also states that anyone who doesn't like The New World is just an "average movie watcher" as opposed to a "real lover of cinema". These fans place so much faith in their opinions, which of course are impeccable and so much superior to the opinions of others.
Well, this is coming from someone whose favourite movies are generally even longer than this flick: The New World is an abysmally over-hyped, excruciatingly boring, inarticulate, pedestrian-paced mess! When I wasn't relentlessly bored, I was embarrassed to be hearing the ridiculous, childish monotony of the pseudo-poetic inner monologues. Malick passes off his awful dialogue as something lyrical and poetic. He so desperately desires to be taken seriously...to be called an artistic filmmaker...but this yearning creates dialogue lacking any genuine elegance or meaning. Through the eyes of his mindless fans, of course, he's succeeded in being artistic.

"Mother, where do you live? In the sky? The clouds? The sea? Show me your face. Give me a sign. We rise... we rise. Afraid of myself. A god, he seems to me. What else is life but being near you? Do they suspect? Oh, to be given to you. You to me. I will be faithful to you. True. Two no more. One. One. I am... I am."
(I prove my point about the stupid dialogue with the above quote. Did a 13-year-old write this in their daily diary?!)

I find it frankly futile to attempt to outline the film's plot, because at the end of the day there is no plot or story. There is no clear-cut beginning or ending. The credits are the only feature that allows an audience to distinguish the beginning and the end. The film is so poorly structured and the proceedings are so unsystematic. Nothing ever makes sense.
Basically, though, a (surprisingly fully-clothed) Colin Farrell stars as explorer Captain Smith. He and his men travel upriver to trade with the Indians. But Smith is captured and set to be executed. That's when he meets princess Pocahontas (Kilcher) with whom he falls in love. His life is spared, and then an agonisingly boring romantic sub-plot emerges. Cue visually arresting shots of scenery (lacking any coherency), a few out-of-place battles and an unsatisfying conclusion that lethally betrays the viewer. Can you spot anything special in this story? ...didn't think so.

In later years, it seems films akin to The New World were released. Among them, There Will Be Blood and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. These two aforementioned films are wonderful cinematic creations. The pacing is ponderous, but the performances are both riveting and accomplished, providing a much-needed hook to see the film through. In The New World, performances are never up to the required standard.
Colin Farrell usually offers good performances. But he's been partnered with a mediocre director. As a result, Farrell is unconvincing and never given the chance to do any scene-stealing. Had he been given adequate material, his performance would have been riveting and compelling. Instead he looks bored and never attempts to demonstrate otherwise.
Q'Orianka Kilcher is even worse as the love interest. She's always striking the wrong notes. The crux of acting is to strongly engage an audience. Kilcher never does this. As an alternative, Malick places her in mindless scenes of running through tall grass, or getting her hair stroked, etc. All things considered, there's absolutely no point!
Christian Bale is also underwhelming. Not his fault, though.

Overall, The New World is definitely among the worst productions ever committed to celluloid. I actually have no idea how anyone could classify this as a movie either as it never conforms to the criterion that makes a movie. Shots are inserted without sufficient reasoning, with never an attempt to build a story. It's so unfocused that words fail me. Malick fanboys defend the film by proclaiming that he's being subversive and innovative. Once again, this is a comment from appallingly small-minded individuals. On the one hand, Malick has always proved accomplished in creating wonderful, arresting images. This talent resurfaces once again. Be that as it may, after 10 minutes it just grows old. Following that it's like watching paint dry!

"The desert is merciless. It takes everything from you."

George Lucas is turning into an enemy of film. After the atrocious Star Wars prequels, I honestly thought the Star Wars legacy couldn't possibly be additionally defiled. Alas, it is this review's despondent duty to report that this animated addition to the Star Wars canon has managed to be worse than all three Star Wars prequels and the earlier Cartoon Network TV series. Star Wars: The Clone Wars even makes the 1980's Ewok adventures look like The Empire Strikes Back in comparison! As soon as it was announced that Lucas was releasing this animated feature, it smelt like a cash grab - and in final analysis this is nothing but a shameless cash grab. Thankfully, it performed disappointingly at the box office. Maybe Lucas will finally realise it's time to stop exploiting the Star Wars franchise.

Sometimes one milks a cow so extensively that the milk turns sour and undrinkable. Lucas has milked this franchise like this for years. The prequels were crossing over into sour milk territory...The Clone Wars enters the undrinkable milk territory. After 10 minutes I was already bored. Unfortunately, things only continued to deteriorate. George Lucas' involvement was minimal. He didn't direct nor write. Never thought I'd ever actually say this, but bring back George! The script for this film is worse than those written by Lucas, the characters are stale, it's juvenile, the animation is putrid and it's dull!

The first 30 seconds of the movie are a warning of things to come: the traditional 20th Century Fox fanfare is replaced with the subdued Warner Bros. logo. The Star Wars theme has also been butchered. After the words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" appear, you expect to hear the immortal music followed by the customary opening scrawl to detail the story so far. Instead there's some peculiar, sub-par pseudo-variation of it. The remixed music sounds like contemporary pop music! Following this, the iconic scrawl is replaced by the voice of a narrator. It sounds like a cheesy version of Starship Troopers! As a whole, the music and narration is like nails on a chalkboard. This alone was sufficient forewarning before plunging into the abysmal central narrative... The son of Jabba the Hutt is kidnapped and the Jedi are assigned to get him back. How utterly lame and un-Star Wars!

Remember the unbearable character known as Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace? After suffering every miserable second of character interaction in The Clone Wars, I felt more tolerant towards Jar Jar! Yes, it's that bad! Anakin's new pre-teen apprentice - Ashoka Tano - is the equivalent of Hannah Montana! Not only does this character spend the entire film getting into trouble constantly and cracking bad jokes, but she repeatedly refers to Anakin as "Sky-Guy". And Anakin calls her "Snips". WTF?! After the introduction of this character I foolishly thought things could not get any worse...but they did.

Meet Jabba's son Stinky. Yep, the characters call him Stinky. He's the baby version of Jabba the Hutt who spends the entire film making funny faces and farting. That's right folks...Star Wars now has fart jokes. And Jabba now uses language like "punky muffin".

The credibility of the plot is very quickly damaged. Jabba has a son with no wife or partner in sight? How do the fat slugs even copulate? At least we can be thankful there's no Jabba the Hutt sex scene. Oh, and it also turns out Jabba has an evil, cross-dressing, English-speaking pimp for a cousin who sounds like a cross between Truman Capote and a member of the gay community with throat cancer. Once this character hit the screen, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. For a moment I thought perhaps my coffee was spiked with LSD. But alas, I was not high.

The battle scenes are frequent and on a large scale, yet they're undermined by a number of things. First of all, there's never an ounce of intensity. The battle droids are even played out for laughs. For example, they tell each other to shut up. The clone troopers are also capable of karate. There are several instances when a random clone trooper would transform into Jason Bourne and begin fighting the battle droids in close combat (at one stage a clone trooper punches a droid...then shakes his hand as if to suggest it rather hurt). During the action there are laser bolts and rockets buzzing around like flies, however we know all this artillery won't ever hit anyone important. The intensity is further ruined when Obi-Wan takes a break during a battle to stall the commander by explaining he wants to discuss the terms of a surrender. They're even served soup!
This is unmistakably a movie for the kids and for the kids only. The Force is never mentioned, Anakin's crossover to the dark side is never even hinted at, and the music will make you detest the very concept of music. The grand touch of John Williams is sorely missed. In its place is an incompetent composer who inserts guitar solos during the action sequences! Maybe George Lucas should hire Whitesnake to record new music for the original six Star Wars movies as well...


Star Wars: The Clone Wars features zero characterisation (save the juvenile interaction we're constantly given) and practically no story. The boring voice cast is accompanied by only three recognisable names. Anthony Daniels, Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee are the only members of the original cast to lend their voices. But they're only allotted a few minutes each. Everyone else is pretty much interchangeable. Frank Oz doesn't even voice Yoda. The replacement can only be described as awful. All these actors make you miss the wooden human acting on offer in the prequel trilogy. The dialogue is also dismal...let's not even go there.

This brings me onto the issue of the poor animation. The filmmakers endeavour to make the CG animation appear as unique as possible. The appearance of the characters, for instance, is blocky and chiselled instead of particularised. There aren't any individual strands of hair on heads or any form of facial hair. Instead there's a solid mass that a sculptor might have carved from stone or clay. The animation comes off looking strangely square and very cheap. Maybe that's the point as this movie introduces us to the television series for which, understandably, the filmmakers must cut costs. Nevertheless, The Clone Wars is a major motion picture, and audiences paying big bucks for tickets deserve far better.

Suffice to say, I did not even remotely like this travesty of a film. The Clone Wars is not Star Wars and it isn't worthy to be counted as part of the saga. This is cartoonish to extremes in everything from the script to the appalling animation. If George Lucas disowned Howard the Duck, I'm surprised he didn't do anything similar here. All this film offers is action and non-stop fighting. As I said, this action isn't even exciting. It's dull and subdued, and the animation is too trite for anything to look spectacular. This is merely a monotonous story with repetitive combat sequences that only add to the turgid video-game anonymity of it all.

Okay, so this is a film made for children and perhaps I'm being overly harsh. But the original Star Wars movies were gritty and competently executed. They appealed to a wide audience. Why couldn't this film be created to appeal to all ages? The Clone Wars even fails as a children's film. I've heard reports of children growing restless and sleepy by the time a cinema screening concluded. There is no fun to be had with this film.

Jake Rodgers: "I'm the Black Rambo!"
Gina: "...Blambo?"

Ever seen a film entitled The Bourne Identity? If you have, then you'd be futilely massacring your precious time with Code Name: The Cleaner as it is essentially the same movie. If you haven't seen The Bourne Identity, watch it immediately so you won't ever feel the need to expose yourself to this rubbish!

2007 has been forced to bear a number of dreadful film releases with an inadequate number of masterpieces thus far. Code Name: The Cleaner is yet another unspeakably appalling comedy released at some stage during 2007. The film is primarily The Bourne Identity with a different cast. The plot is horrible, characters are all weak not to mention stereotypical, and performances are simply abysmal. Sure, casting Cedric the Entertainer as the lead in a movie may appear like a good idea...but they missed the mark unreservedly. In my opinion Cedric is no longer an entertainer, as I was not in the slightest bit entertained while watching this conventional baloney.

A guy named Jake (Cedric the Entertainer) wakes up in a hotel room next to a corpse with no clue about his identity. As flashbacks of his past come flooding back, he has a memory of being a special ops secret agent. But his allies around him claim he is merely a janitor. The convoluted, non-existent plot then turns into some story about a microchip and the FBI who are trying to track down Jake. Inadvertently, Jake is then entangled in some government conspiracy.

As I previously stated, Code Name: The Cleaner appears to be a pointless rehash of The Bourne Identity with the standard sexual gags and an attempt to include witty dialogue. These films are released far too frequently in this contemporary age of cinema. The filmmakers aim to gain a PG-13 rating from the MPAA to soak up every last dollar they can upon release. They realise it won't win any Oscars so their objective is to supply a bit of fun. This film is not fun at all! It's devoid of any laughs as there is nothing clever or remotely funny included in the film! The only parts I laughed at were merely out of pity because of how dreadful all the gags are. It's obvious there was room for Cedric to do some improvisation while on set, but he adds absolutely nothing to the film. Perhaps it's not my type of humour, or perhaps it was just woefully screen-written. Judging by the other reviews I've seen, I'm guessing it's the latter.

There are a few big names thrown into the cast...unfortunately none of the actors could redeem the embarrassing screenplay! Cedric the Entertainer is an African-American in PG-13 humour territory. The filmmakers seem to be under the impression that people find it funny when someone like Cedric makes cracks about sex or the attractiveness of a woman. This may be a controversial statement, but the only time I've seen this done right is in the Rush Hour movies. Cedric walks through the movie looking lost and confused. Lucy Liu does not even slightly possess any talent or acting skills evident here. Her aim is to utilise agility and acrobatic skills in an attempt to look impressive on screen. Every line she delivered that was meant to be funny...backfires completely. However I can't imagine any actor - no matter how talented - could have possibly redeemed the script. Not even the best screenwriter in the world could have redeemed the awful concept. What does that tell us? The film was doomed from the moment it was conceived and every second of this movie proves it.

The only reason I decided to watch this movie was because one of the featured actors shares the same first name as me (Callum), but watching this brings shame to my name and others who share the same title. To put it bluntly and simply; Code Name: The Cleaner is flat and witless, and among the worst films to transpire during 2007. It's tragic that comedies have sunk this low. Every predictable cliché in the book is shamelessly trotted out.

All my worst fears were confirmed when I took my seat in the cinema to watch this ineffective, appalling horror film. Prom Night firmly takes the title of the worst film of 2008 so far; this remake of the classic slasher film is every bit as horrible as anticipated. The name-only remake is just about some teenager who is being stalked by some insane psycho who's obsessed with her. On her prom night this psycho turns up and starts killing her friends. So what makes this one so horrible? Gee, where should I start... First of all, the film was toned down to a PG-13 in America so it will be a hit at the box office (Sadly, it currently is). But PG-13 means no gore, no sex, no profanity and tame horror scenes. Instead of gore, we're shown tiny amount of blood spatter that doesn't even look realistic (The blood all over the knife didn't look natural at all). This is a slasher movie. How can a slasher film be considered good when the violence is toned down?! The original also contains drug use and sex. None of that here. The word 'sex' isn't even said. Instead they just hint at it. Top points for realism here! I am a teenager and I know it as a fact that teens use explicit sexual dialogue in everyday life. And no profanity? There's mild use of the word 'shit' but nothing else. Another perfect way to portray teenagers; exactly what they aren't. Secondly, the script was woeful. Dialogue was laughable and cheesy even for the genre. It was all so by-the-book. When there are mysterious noises the characters just venture over and ask "Hello?" or "Is anybody there?" into the darkness. On top of this the characters were stupid, illogically developed and could be out-witted by a stuffed animal. An example of this? They hear the killer in on the loose. Do the police remove the teenage girl in trouble? Nope. Instead they let her continue her prom night in fear of messing it up. Well isn't that intelligent. A prom night would mean nothing if the girl in question winds up dead. And of course when the hunt is on they just have to bring in the S.W.A.T. unit. I mean one man with a knife...now there's a massive threat. Let's pull every available officer into this situation to hunt the guy. And of course S.W.A.T. team turn up armed with massive machine guns. The scares occur exactly when we expect them to. There were no surprise scares at all. At least the scares were hilarious. Thirdly, the acting was terrible. The so-called teenagers look like they're in their mid-to-late twenties! The dialogue was already bad enough, but the actors made it sound even worse. There was no intensity while delivering dialogue, and there was no evidence of people actually acting. No more needs to be said on this issue. Finally, I couldn't believe how badly the film was made. The editing was horrible and the directing was terrible. In the cinema where I was, there were sheer roars of laughter when it was meant to be scary. The editing was slow and ineffective. The music makes the film even more predictable. Prom Night is a terrible movie. I never thought I'd ever say this...but I wish Michael Bay's company commissioned this remake because then it would have at least contained some actual gore as opposed to this teen-friendly flick that was more of a comedy than a horror.

"Become the animal. Embrace the other side."

Let's face it: we pay to see summer movies for the explosions, the fight scenes and the action in general. They aren't required to engage us on a cerebral level; they merely offer an abundance of action during which we're required to suspend our disbelief. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, however, is definitive proof that a plateful of action is not enough to create a satisfying summer movie. For a film to attain the status of an excellent popcorn-munching cinematic experience, it's required to pay at least some attention to narrative coherence and character arcs, not to mention the action has to occur in an actual context. In Wolverine, the action sequences just...happen. To arrive at an action sequence, one has to suffer through badly-paced scenes of trite dialogue and terrible acting. Plot holes also flourish, logic is quickly discarded, and it leaves too many things unexplained. Instead of a deep character study, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is merely an action film masquerading as something more. There's no human drama (ala Spider-Man) or witty dialogue (like Iron Man). Even the other X-Men movies had a political resonance to them which isn't retained here. This is Hack Filmmaking 101!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was ostensibly a labour of love for poor Hugh Jackman who also served as producer, but unfortunately his efforts didn't pay off. About a month before the film's scheduled release, an incomplete workprint was leaked online. As it turns out, though, this leak was the best thing to happen to the film industry during 2009. Those eagerly anticipating the movie (this reviewer included) were given the opportunity to see how awful it truly is. Fox immediately attempted to cover their blunder by claiming footage from the reshoots was missing from the workprint (fourteen minutes in total, apparently). Curiously, closer to the release date, Fox's story changed: ten minutes of reshoots are missing from the workprint version, and these ten new minutes are replacing ten particular minutes which have been removed from the final cut. However, the workprint was indeed the final cut sans finished special effects, sound effects and music. The alleged "missing footage" never existed...it was a lie manufactured by Fox in a frantic attempt to convince audiences to go see the completed movie. But those deceptive chairmen at Fox couldn't manufacture a lie to cover one particular fact: Wolverine is completely beyond salvation. No amount of reshooting could salvage this mess. Nothing short of a total remake - with a completely new script and plotline, and a bunch of new actors - could rescue this awful film.

In a failed attempt to distance the franchise from 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand, Fox green-lit this prequel instead of another sequel. Wisely, Wolverine was selected as the focus of this first origins adventure...yet this motion picture fails to illuminate the breadth of Wolverine's tale. His back-story is complex and lavish, traversing over many centuries and veering off into numerous sub-plots (and countries), all the while navigating through various relationships with an assortment of characters. This is all condensed into about 105 minutes, and it falls apart in less than a fraction of that time. No-one cares about where Wolverine got his jacket - a Wolverine-centric spin-off following the main character kicking butt in Japan would have been far better!

The film opens in Canada in 1845 (which is very strange, considering Canada wasn't established 'til 1867) when a young James Howlett first discovers his bone claw abilities. A few deaths occur, and James goes on the run with his half-brother Victor. This prologue, however, is very rushed; it's more confusing than compelling. Following this, a montage is presented as Wolverine and Sabretooth (Jackman and Schreiber, respectively) fight alongside each other in every major U.S. war. Never mind that it's impossible for these two to always be assigned to the same unit, as this indiscretion is reasonably minor compared to the other sins of logic to be found within. For instance, they're also Canadian... I guess no-one checked their papers when they enlisted in the U.S. Army...

After their experiences in Vietnam, the brothers are recruited by William Stryker (Huston) to be part of a team of mutants assigned to carry out missions in third world countries. Off-tangent sub-plots then appear in abundance; the main one concerning Wolverine seeking revenge after his lady friend meets with a violent end. Some betraying also occurs, more mutants are introduced, and this culminates in an endlessly silly climax. Instead of one solid plot, Wolverine is merely a tonne of sub-plots mashed together.

"All the horrible things in your life... Your father, the wars, I can make all this go away. You can live knowing that the woman you loved was hunted down, or you can join me. I promise you will have your revenge."

It's hard to begin detailing exactly what's wrong with this movie, because the truth is, it's just about everything. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a disaster of monumental proportions.

The first major problem is the screenplay. It's a string of well-worn clichés we've seen a million times before - including not one, but two "don't do it, you'll be just as bad as him" moments as well as a conventional, cheesy, embarrassing romance subplot which concludes on the most clichéd note possible. Dialogue is another issue: it's AWFUL! I have no idea what's worse; the dreadful dialogue or the abysmal way the actors disperse it. The script also skims through crucial character development and more or less eschews Wolverine's origins entirely. If it's truly an "origins" tale as advertised, where are the explanations? When initially introduced to baby Wolverine, he's already a mutant with bone claws. How did he get them? The best we can assume is his biological father was a mutant, although the implication is irritatingly vague. These things are brushed aside in a hurry in order to dive straight into the action. The screenwriters never considered, however, that an audience needs a reason to care for the characters that are stuck in the midst of the action (only small-minded, ADD-inflicted individuals will overlook this). Another thing regarding the action: virtually all of the characters are invincible, which jettisons all hope of any emotional investment with them. When Wolverine and Sabretooth battle pointlessly over and over again, we know neither of them will die and the fight will conclude with them just walking away. Why should we care?

Wolverine is never given an opportunity to come to terms with his mutations. Even after his skeleton is coated with Adamantium, he's automatically cool with it all...except for the customary "looking at self in mirror while testing abilities" (TM) scene which lasts one or two minutes. Another major gripe: the name "Logan" is never justified. In the original comics, Wolverine was a Samurai and he was given the name Logan. In this muddled mess of a movie, the name Logan just...appears. We have no idea where it came from...he's just named Logan for no reason, and other characters mysteriously pick this up.

Neither does the script justify why Sabretooth becomes Wolverine's sworn enemy. Reasons for other happenings in the story - such as Sabretooth killing a perfectly harmless mutant, and beginning a Watchmen-style elimination of all mutants in his former team - also never become clear.

"I'm coming for blood. No code of conduct, no law."

The script is beset with absolutely preposterous moments. Like there's a high profile facility on the mysterious "Island", and Wolverine is able to simply stroll through the front doors. No security? No locks? And when mutants are escaping, a grand total of four armed men try to stop them. The cages containing the mutants are also just metal wire fences. Some mutants have powers to cut through these wires easily, like Cyclops who can slice through bricks. On top of this, Stryker is so dumb he decides to erase Wolverine's memory after coating the guy's skeleton with Adamantium, making him indestructible. Characters also pop up at the most appropriate time (an entrance from a particular character during the final showdown is embarrassingly terrible and way too convenient...it will elicit groans). Wolverine is beleaguered with logic problems, primarily from the "Why don't you just...?" variety and the "That's just totally stupid / What the fuck?!" range (like the aforesaid examples). One should suspend their disbelief for a comic book movie, but this takes things to the next level. It's worse than your usual brainless summer actioner. The film's concluding 10 minutes in particular are absolutely retarded. On top of this, the continuity of the entire series is wrecked. Certain conversations in the other X-Men films now make no sense (like Stryker telling Wolverine he gave him claws when in reality Stryker just strengthened the claws).

A plethora of infamous Marvel characters are dispatched not long after their introductions. Virtually every single character is flat; appearing in name-only form to entice fans. Deadpool's treatment is most heartbreaking. Perhaps Ryan Reynolds was behind the workprint leak after he viewed the incomplete version and realised the gross misuse of Deadpool. The character's appearance is no more than a cameo. Don't get too attached to other much-hyped characters such as The Blob, John Wraith, Agent Zero and Bolt, as (like Deadpool) their appearances amount to a mere cameo. Team X is formed at the film's beginning, but after a brief first mission Wolverine has a stroke of moral conscience and leaves the group. Why Wolverine and Sabretooth are so willing to join Stryker in the first place is a mystery. Due to the rushed nature of the opening twenty minutes, there's no way we can get emotionally attached to the characters. A lot of potential is wasted.

Most jarringly, this film clearly wants to be separate from the comics as it takes a separate path, yet if you're not acquainted with all these Marvel characters you won't care about those who appear and won't understand what they're doing here. The story isn't deep enough to provide the uninitiated with requisite information about everything (the title of 'Team X' isn't even mentioned...if it was it certainly wasn't a memorable moment), and it isn't loyal enough to satiate the fanboys.

Director Gavin Hood previously helmed 2007's Rendition as well as Tsotsi (which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature in 2006). Hood's inability to direct a genuinely enjoyable and resonant motion picture surfaces here again. Wolverine is a concatenation of action movie clichés, not just from the hackneyed screenplay but also the selection of shots. Like a shot of the protagonist setting off an explosion and walking in slow motion towards the camera, as well as the customary situation of the hero walking away from the bad guy he's decided not to kill, only to turn back slowly as said bad guy dramatically reveals something.

The action sequences are frequently marred by slo-mo shots, whereas other action sequences can't be enjoyed because of the invincibility of the characters, and as for the others...there's no context. An action scene involving Wolverine taking down a helicopter is admittedly awesome to watch, but within the story it makes no sense. Stryker is trying to kill the creature he just created at great expense, and sends his right-hand man to do the job...knowing fully well that bullets made of Adamantium are the only thing that can take down Wolverine. That's just the first of many irreverent action sequences. Others include a boxing match between Wolverine and The Blob that happens for no reason, and even a large-scale battle against Gambit - a mutant who's actually on the same side! For the climax, an unfinished genetically enhanced weapon is unleashed upon Wolverine, when once again Stryker has a full gun of Adamantium bullets at his disposal...and nothing else can kill the (anti)hero. Nothing in this film deals with the immortal characters in a meaningful or interesting way, and no amount of impressive fight choreography can provide the action with genuine tension. The special effects are also quite shonky, and an appearance of a CGI Patrick Stewart is absurdly unconvincing. The pacing, as well, is awful, as spaces between the action sequences are unforgivably sluggish, and this is due to Hood's incompetent direction. Bring back Bryan Singer!

Hugh Jackman has endless charisma as an actor, but his performance here is hamstrung by the badly drawn character. Wolverine is meant to be a badass anti-hero, but he's toned down for the sake of toy sales and the target audience. All Jackman does is strike poses and deliver dismal dialogue. Meanwhile, Liev Schreiber just alternates between sassy one-liners and open-mouthed rage. Luckily, Schreiber is actually a brooding villain, even if his motivations are never explored.

Ryan Reynolds is good as swordsman Wade Wilson (a.k.a. Deadpool), but he's lost far too early into the movie. His screen-time is exasperatingly brief, as is that of Dominic Monaghan whose character of Bolt has an appealing sadness. Taylor Kitsch is a soulless Gambit with a terrible, false accent. Perhaps Lost's Josh Holloway would've made a better Gambit (he was offered the chance to briefly appear in X-Men: The Last Stand as the character, but declined). Not worth mentioning anyone else, as they're all forgettable, especially Danny Huston who isn't at all sinister as Stryker.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine eventually turns into a confusing hodgepodge of uninspired, clichéd fight scenes and loud explosions. The other X-Men films focused on Wolverine at certain times, and he was more or less the central character. You'd think this "origins" tale would, ya know, reveal his origins...but it doesn't! It's just an action film with Wolverine at its core and mutants surrounding him, not unlike the other X-Men flicks. As a whole the film feels very rushed - it's too short to be considered an epic Marvel feature. The action is occasionally impressive, granted, but the whole falls below the sum of its parts. Good action does not mean an excellent movie.

All superhero films are advertisements for their merchandising departments, but Wolverine is more obvious than most, with product placement substituting compelling characters and an engaging storyline. Combined with limp direction and unimaginative special effects, and there's little to recommend. Even Jackman's natural charisma can't rise above the material...but he sure can strike a pose, doing so in every action sequence to ensure the toy department have a field day. No longer will people have to refer to the Spider-Man 3 fiasco - now Wolverine will be the target of conversations concerning bad Marvel movies. Even Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand is more enjoyable.