_kelly's Talk

Slaughter's Big Rip Off

Hey all you jive hustlers, you stone foxes, you mean dudes. Watch out cause Slaughter is back in town!
If you are looking for a bad-ass, funky film to watch some night, this is just right.
'Slaughter' is back and trying to take it easy n' relax after his adventures down in Mexico.
But if you are a narrow-minded gangster like 'Duncan', you are bound to seek revenge. Why, I don't know. Was 'Hoffo' in the first one his brother or what?
Any who. The movie starts off with the old "assassination from a plane" routine.
We all know that that is THE most effective way for taking out one guy in a picnic, full of people. Needless to say Slaughter survives the ordeal, but Cmndt. Eric Lassard, sorry George Gaynes I mean isn't that lucky. SMACK!!
Also Slaughters best friend Pratt is killed.
This is the start of a grand adventure, filled with the hippest, funkiest music James Brown himself has to offer. That's right 'The Godfather of Soul' has put his signum up on this bad-boy.
In addition to Jim Brown in the lead part, this movie is filled with some of the biggeest names the blaxploitation scene has to offer. How about Scatman Crothers, Dick Anthony Williams, Gloria Hendry and Brock Peters. In other parts we see none other than Judith M. Brown and last but fuck-all least the fantastic Don Stroud as the evil henchman.

PS. Just fuckin' watch it!

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1xhIRj0QZM

Devil's Diary

The Devil's Diary

The Devil's Diary (2007)
WRITTEN BY: John Benjamin Martin
DIRECTED BY: by Farhad Mann
FEATURING: Alexz Johnson, Miriam McDonald, Pablo Coffey, Deanna Casaluce, and Magda Apanowicz
GENRE: OCCULT
PLOT: An accused book can grant any desire.


The Devil's Diary is a Lifetime made for TV movie. WAIT! I hate The Lifetime Network too! Seth Macfarlane has dubbed it, "Television for idiots," and I quite agree. Why other women want to watch movies about sadness, anguish, despair, loss, tragedy, stolen babies and wife beating is beyond me. I'd much rather watch a movie about something like a demon feasting on still-beating human hearts. That's normal, right?

I almost skipped The Devil's Diary because it cops out and takes the easy route of choosing a high school setting. The whole high school /nerds versus jocks cliche has been beaten to death, and it's just not a world that I am interested in. The Devil's Diary certainly could have given its concept a more sophisticated treatment had it been set in the real world, but what can you expect for a teenage girls' movie on Lifetime? In spite of these constraints, the film is entertaining, gets right to the point and moves along at a sprightly clip. To it's credit, The Devil's Diary is Canadian and has decent production values. Thus it lacks that cheap, made for TV feel.

Two girls find a book that grants any wish they write in it. They use it to take revenge on the vicious cheerleaders at their high school. Nerds and jocks battle over the book. A pretty simple premise, but it's executed in a lively, interesting way that is fun to watch. And I admit it's satisfying to see the cheerleaders die. However there's more to it than that. One of the cheerleaders actually has some spunk, some good ideas and does pretty well with the book -for awhile.

My only question is, why can't someone who's smart find a book like this? The first thing one should do is write, "Nobody can take this book away from me or ever use it against me. Nobody even knows I have it," and proceed up the ladder from there. Of course nobody thinks of this, and thus the movie has enough material to last more than five minutes.

(I have to digress and assert that I would also add things like, "I have an unlimited IQ," "My multiple orgasms last one hour each," "The police refuse to ever arrest me," "I hold a Nobel Prize," and "Bon Jovi can never make another album." Also, "I have omnipotent power and I don't need to keep lugging this silly book around," might be a no-brainer." Why don't the screenwriters ever consult me?)

Things get really interesting when the Clergy gets involved. Who wouldn't trust a Catholic priest with a book that bestows unlimited personal power?

If you stumble across it and want some simple escapism, The Devil's Diary makes a fun watch for occult fans. It's irreverent, has some memorable images and resists the convention of including a forced, "happy ending." With Danna Casaluce, ("Alex" on Degrassi: The Next Generation) and Alexz Johnson (Final Destination, Reefer Madness.)

The House of the Devil

Rosemary's Babysitter. So, the film stumbles a little in its final moments when it starts to get bloody, but overall it is a very suspenseful, tense and frightening experience.

Autopsy

What total unmitigated pants. I have seen worse but by God this was a close second. Car crash, drunk kids, weird ambulance, medical experiments, really rather poor effects of blood and guts. How can the likes of Goldstein who was the hardest woman in the universe next to Ripley and Patrick fall so far from grace......never mind....soon be Christmas. If you dont watch the rubbish ones you will miss out on some damn fine films.......

Land of the Lost

They can be so hit and miss Will Ferrel movies...I have to say I was on the cust of really enjoying this one but something just kept it just that little bit away from it. Freil's accent was 'interesting' and what the hell the point of McBrides character was I do not know. Overall the interview with the tv presenter was probably the best....that and the dino poo scene...

Traitor

Traitor; sure it's long, sure it reminds us of TV series : 24, it has some cliche moment in several scenes. But this have everything of what i like in a movie. From the first scene, i was hooked and i kept guessing till the end. I kinda see the twist coming, but it was still presentable and well act.

Don Cheadle is a great great actor! He did his job well, i hope he won some freaking Golden Statue in years to come. Guy Pearce was even good. Nice script, background music, cinematography. This gem is under-rated!

8/10.

Days of Heaven

Stunningly beautiful. I cannot express enough how perfect every single frame is.

Vertige (High Lane)

"Vertige" is a french horror/thriller in the vein of "Wrong Turn", "The Hills Have Eyes", "The Descent" and many more. The flick offers good acting, beautiful landscapes, good action sequences, suspense and some gore.
An standard slasher/surviving movie.

Forget Me Not

"Forget Me Not" maybe you will forget it because there is nothing to remember but while you are watching it will deliver some creepy moments and entertainment.

Forget Me Not

"Forget Me Not" maybe you will forget it because there is nothing to remember but while you are watching it will deliver some creepy moments and entertainment.

Santa's Slay

''Santa's Slay'' needs to be considered more of a black humor comedy then a horror movie. I didn't find this movie very funny, just some chuckles, and there was not gore at all.
If you watch it, don't expect a good/decent movie, actually don't expect much at all. Just watch it for some action moments, not the story.

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)

You want some real terror?! forget the exorcist, watch Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Watch it and you will see the obscure side of society, a dark-side profile that might not exists. I mean: that is why this movie was so scary to me because you just dont know what the f*ck, you dont know who or why this crimes are committed, the only thing you know is that cruel things are happening and that's it.
Sinister, dramatic, "Das weiße Band" is high-class filmmaking: good acting, beautifully shot, good screenplay and good direction!

The Killing Room

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The Killing Room

The Killing Room (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Liebesman
WRITTEN BUY: Gus Krieger and Ann Peacock
FEATURING: Timothy Hutton, Nick Cannon, Clea DuVall, and Chloë Sevigny
GENRE: THRILLER
TAGS: WEIRD, DISTURBING

The Killing Room is about covert psychological experiments. Four subjects volunteer for an unknown study. They presume that it will be something routine, like the testing of a new flu medication. They receive the surprise of their lives when they become guinea pigs in a ruthless behavioral experiment.

After filling out lengthy personality questionnaires, one volunteer is murdered in front of the others. It turns out that none of the participants are very important people who will be readily missed. The viewer hastens to guess whether the study is designed to determine if they will help each other, suspect each other as being collaborators, turn against each other, or if they will be subjected to further odd scenarios just to trigger selected behaviors.

Locked in a sterile, escape-proof room under continual observation, the hapless detainees find that the furniture is bolted into place, and there is nowhere to hide. Everything is being recorded. How much of the ordeal is controlled?

Are sounds that enter the room real or part of the experiment? The captives discover writing scratched into the walls, now painted over. Is it really from prior test subjects, or is it another trick? Are the personality tests part of the experiment, or were they an irrelevant subterfuge?

An army psychologist has been recruited to conduct the experiment from a hidden control room, but her reactions are being gauged to determine if she is appropriate to the assignment. Could she be the real subject of the experiment?

The candidates must answer trivia questions. Those with answers that are least correct will be killed. But will the survivor be allowed to live after what he has witnessed? The macabre lab practical follows a bizarre course as personalities are probed and reactions are tested.

Why is there a potential escape route? Why are limited weapons given to some of the participants? The dilemma begins to resemble the SAW films, with substantial differences. The Killing Roomi s not contrived. It does not dwell on the characters' anguish. There is no evil genius behind the proceedings. There is nothing gruesome to make the viewer squeamish. The experiment is gritty and credible.

Scenes in the killing room are interlaced with an insightful examination of the psyche and motivations of the psychologists who control the twisted research. The revelation is frighteningly authentic. The Killing Room is more reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and 3 Days of the Condor, than SAW.

Some critics have dismissed The Killing Room for being derivative. The crucial distinction is that the film is not about the people trapped in the room. It's about how dangerous and out of control governments can be.

The impetus for The Killing Room originates with alleged psychological experiments once carried out by the US government. The administrators of the killing room have a discernible, nefarious plan. The movie is scary, because in real life, no real goal would be necessary. Researchers would successfully make up any rationale in order to conduct such testing, as long as they didn't get caught.

Many governments' have acquired reputations for deliberately exposing soldiers and civilians to radiation, testing chemical weapons on the unwary, and subjecting the unsuspecting to mind bending drugs and other odd substances. National boundaries are meaningless in the multicultural game called "Let's Make A Deal." The minions of greed freely assist each other in making the rich richer. A cornucopia of unconscionable tactics and endeavors that contribute to this goal are commonly aided, abetted, and officially or unofficially condoned.

Corporations and the Pentagon have carried out a plethora of research projects over the years involving shocking animal cruelty. Some of the studies have been clever, others products of utter charlatanism. The CIA used to dose unknowing subjects with LSD and God knows what else, just to see what would happen, sometimes with fatal results. The US government allegedly tortured terrorists in Guantanamo. Third world dictatorships have had national torture chambers devoted to political dissidents. The Nazis did every horrible, perverse thing that they could come up with. It follows that numerous nut jobs would, and possibly do fall all over themselves applying for private grants to do weird things to humans in behavioral experiments -just because they can.

The concept of The Killing Room is not far-fetched. Since the worlds' weapons industries, oil companies, corporations, organized crime mavens, dope cartels, warlords, and armies routinely collaborate internationally, no specific entity need be blamed for such a genre of human testing in order for the prospect to be credible and likely.

The Killing Room is therefore all too believable. It does not matter how much or how little similarity there is between The Killing Room and anything that may have really happened. Because the depicted testing is exactly the type of dirty, covert, amoral activity that the power structure engages in, The Killing Room is a compelling film.

The Killing Room - trailer

Wolfen

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

At first glance Wolfen might look just like any other werewolf-movie, but that's a big no-no.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This 80's horror isn't just missleading it's downright awful. Albert Finney stars as detective Dewey Wilson. A New York police-officer that does things his own way.
When dismembered bodies starts to turn up around the city, Dewey naturally turns towards the native-americans, because as anybody who has seen a western-film knows, 'injuns' can shape-shift(?). Anyhow, this worthless excuse for a police runs around the ruins of south Bronx trying to find a supernatural beast that can rip peoples head straight off. But he never really does any police work and he runs as soon as he suspects that there might be something dangerous in the surroundings. Of course he hooks up with his partner without any previous flirtations. I guess that's just how it was in the early 80's, before AIDS and work ethics was invented.
Dewey is nothing more than a puppet, standing in the side-line, observing without grasping jack-shit. I can understand that he just stands, gun lowered, when his boss is attacked (who wouldn't), but he just lets his friends drop dead one by one too. Act ffs!!
The summation and standing impression of this film is that Dewey Wilson is the worst police EVER, and I don't talk Bad Lieutenant bad. Just totally worthless.

PS. If you hear something that sounds like a baby crying, stay the fuck away!! It could be Wolfen.

Bakjwi (Thirst)

An interesting spin on vampire lore.
While it starts out a little on the slow side, the last 45 minutes are quite enjoyable and worth the wait.
Almost a sort of (slightly more subtle) vampiric version of a Tarantino film, without having to deal with Tarantino's penchant for excessive dialog and self indulgent cameos.

Surveillance

I heard about David Lynch, but never bother to look for his movies, and now his daughter is directing? well, i never thought Surveillance would be good or at least disturbing for that matter. I really enjoyed the movie, the way the movie goes - i read in other sites, how people complained about how slow the movie is; but well trust me i have watched slow movies, and this is not one of them. The build up tension was exhilarating; disturbing, sharp and the gore involvement was amazing. It was disturbing caused, you can't guess who is the good guy in the movie, no happy ending, and just plain harsh reality of the world - and that's what exactly what i like in a movie.

Bill Pullman could easily be replaced, Julia Ormond did good - and so does the supporting actors. Not a long movie to watch, but surely memorable one.

8/10

Taking Woodstock

I am going to spoil a scene. I was sitting right up front, literally, for it. Elliot is walking among the beautiful chaos that is woodstock. He meets a hippie couple who own a van and give him acid. This is his first taste of Acid. All three, the guy, the girl and Elliot go inside the van. From this point it gets really awesome. Elliiot and the two hippies are laying inside. Elliott notices the acid taking into effect due to the images inside the van, painted all around, start to come to life. The couple tries to calm him down and he does. All three start rubbing and just enjoying the trip. Once it's over, Elliot and the hippie chick exit the van, still on acid, they run up to the top of the HILL and they look down. Probably one of the best shots I've seen this year. As they look down at the ENTIRE crowd there it is: The stage at the center of it all. They both cry at how beautiful it is (and it's a really beautiful scene too) and since they're still on Acid the crowd turns into a psychedelic wave of different colors and the stage at the center is like a bright light which grows and grows until it engulfs the entire screen. There were many scenes in this film that were very good and very funny, but that particular scene made me realize the meaning of Woodstock. It wasn't just the music, but the light. The center of the universe.

Avatar

I had low expectations for James Cameron's latest megabucks blockbuster, given the rather dreary theatrical campaigns and the uninteresting looking "sneak peaks", so four stars may be more indicative of my immense surprise than actual merit, but my reviews are never going to be objective anyway. Firstly, I should state that the film is rarely unpredictable - the plot trajectory is pretty much a given from the moment Jake navigates his Avatar - and the, essentially, amounts to yet another "white American man saves 'savage' village, somehow developing better instincts/combat skills than the natives" story familiar from the likes of The Last Samurai and their ilk. To be fair, Avatar is far better developed than that because the species' mythology/belief system (a sort of neo-Wiccan religion) turns out to be based on fact and not merely dogma, and because even with so much CGI, the film has a soul. With all this in mind, Avatar remains an exhilarating experience best seen in the overhyped "three dimension" and on a giant screen. I was unlucky enough to be sat in the third row from the front in a packed theatre so did experience occasional bouts of nausea that I was able to relieve by taking off the unflattering 3D glasses for a minute out of every 25 or so. Though I feel slightly queasy about the many, many millions of dollars spent to bring the film to life, I cannot doubt the beautiful imagery. I was disappointed for a while that it seemed the humans and Na'vi rarely interacted together and that perhaps the reason lay in how unwieldy the two species look together in the same shot (the Na'vi tower over the puny humans and look decidedly more alienesque than when they are on their own), but the final extended battle sequence - breathtakingly shot and choreographed - put paid to that, confounding my fears. Physical acting and voice acting was better than expected across the board, with Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver (who has a rather perfunctory character) especially impressing. I actually am looking forward to watching this bizarre film again.

2012

So and so...


It was a guilty pleasure...

Ink

Ink

Ink (2009)
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Jamin Winans
FEATURING: Søren Kelly, Quinn Hunchar, Jessica Duffy, Jennifer Batter, Jeremy Make
GENRE: FANTASY
TAGS: WEIRD
PLOT: Opposing dreamland warriors battle over a little girl's soul in this surreal, good and evil allegory about redemption.

COMMENTS: Ink is well produced, and whether or not one will enjoy it depends upon one's tastes and cinematic expectations. Hardcore fantasy fanatics who value visual spectacle over logical structure will love it. Viewers who require an easily discernible high concept and logical cause and effect may find it complex and unfocused.

Ink is a modern allegorical fairy tale about the struggle between good and evil. The premise is that invisible, supernatural beings inhabit another plane of existence and interact with sleeping humans in their dreams. They are polarized into two competing forces.

There are the Storytellers who give us happy, if not contrived dreams. They are a motley crew of vapid, politically correct warriors. The Storytellers are reminiscent of the lineup from Up with People crossed with the casts of Aliens, A Chorus Line and Cats. Some have rave style haircuts and hip hop clothing. Others look like a cross between Greek goddesses and Woman's Day cover girls. They do handsprings, leap through glass windows and wield ninja weapons with overly stylized physical poetry.

Then there are the Incubi who give us nightmares. They look like Kafkaesque agents of some totalitarian ministry. (More specifically, they look like the band members from the 80's German new wave group Kraftwerk.) Their leader peers out at the world through an improvised teleprompter mounted in front of his face to obfuscate his sinister visage. The image on this teleprompter looks like Bladerunner's Dr. Tryell squinting through one of the video magnifiers in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

These two opposing clans battle for souls as mortals sleep. The Storytellers provide mankind with the hope and fortitude to ascend to the summit of the human spirit. The Incubi incite desperation and anxiety. These dastardly dandies lead mortals astray into the pit of human fears and failure.

The production design of Ink is a mixture of steampunk modernism and Alice in Wonderland dreamscape. There is a lot of undulating, oscillating, constantly shifting color and shading. The effect is reminiscent of the Norwigan band A-ha's music video, "Take On Me."

Psychotic editing blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality. The editing creates disturbing, discordant imagery and instills an air of mystery and ambiguity. It engages the audience in the absence of compelling ideas. There is overuse of digital assistance, such as rapid fire montages and high tempo, machine gun sequencing. There are smash cuts, jerky cross-cuts, and hyperactive, sped up action shots. Action sequences should stir the viewer, not just shake and jar him.

An evil mercenary named Ink works for the Incubi. He looks like a Dr. Seuss character transported into a pane from the late Broom Hilda comic strip. He wears a sniper's black ghillie suit and has a humorously huge Fagan nose.

One night he battles the Storytellers to steal the soul of a slumbering eight year old girl named Emma. Ink leads her to the Incubi. Ink must navigate through a bewildering gauntlet of dimensions of consciousness and dreams, time and space. As he proceeds, the Storytellers attempt a variety of tactics to halt his progress.

The girl's estranged father has dual roles, one benevolent, one malevolent. His two personas interact with the other characters in both the conscious and unconscious realm. The father's split identities both assist and alternately impede his daughter's deliverance as he struggles with good and evil.

Eventually, the father's double identity and the epic good and evil struggle fold in on themselves in a self-referential paradox. Ink conveys the moral that one is perpetually susceptible to evil influences yet always capable of redemption.

This surreal film employs some simple but visually striking special effects. It depicts a multitude of varied, imaginative phenomena in its presentation of the alternate dimensions of dreams and reality.

The plot is secondary to Ink's visual impact. As an undesired, but required structural necessity, the plot must have seemed like an encumbrance to filmmaker Jamin Winans. While the good and evil allegory is simplistic, it is presented without exposition or explanation, making the film confusing and difficult to follow. There is no premise that lays down a given set of rules that the characters must obey, or laws that they are subject to. The story makes itself up as it goes along. The Storytellers' actions are without plan and they invent special powers on demand. The characters are undeveloped and difficult to empathize with.

Ink's storyline does not reveal its direction until two thirds of the way through the film. It is hard to take an interest in the characters' struggles because we cannot comprehend their goals or motives. Without a sense of purpose, Ink becomes tiresome despite its visual brilliance. Viewing Ink is like watching a Junior Variety show at another high school, where all of the jokes depend on inside humor and knowledge. The audience feels left out of the "know." The viewer is never provided with any clue as to why great significance is associated with certain plot points.

Ink is a cinematic impasto that is resplendent with intriguing, but unexplained vignettes. Many of the stylish scenes lack ascertainable meaning. The film is a deliberate attempt to make a mind blowing odyssey. However, without linear structure, the storyline is indecipherable. There is no cohesive, grounded concept behind the symbolic, wandering exploration. The audience must use subjective intuition to grasp the essence of the story. This provides only a fuzzy and vague understanding of the events.

The self referential plot is also puzzling. IOn one level, it could be interpreted that in using a tactic to defeat Ink, the Storytellers contribute to a sequence of events that leads to Ink's creation in the first place. Or is the entire series of evens just a dream? Ink is further complicated by having more than one possible interpretation. This can provide depth to a film. In the case of Ink it makes the already obfuscated cause and effect all the more murky, like trying to see a squid through his defensive cloud.

Some critics are comparing Ink to Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Ink shares some design elements, although they are on a much tighter budget. Like Brazil, Ink is a fantasy. However, unlike Brazil, Ink lacks the grounding of a secular premise. Ink is not a study of ironic Orwellian tactics employed by authority, or the absurdities and inequities of the status quo. Instead it is an attempt to create an instant legend cult classic without the foundation of a solid argument.

Ink presents clever visual concepts such as a scene of an infinite corridor lined with windows into different realities, worlds, times and places. Ink had the potential to direct its budget and effects toward a serious plot. Instead it places stunning superficiality over substance. Ink's characters are more comical than threatening, and the film strives to be family accessible. Ink is alternately clownish, then violent, and sometimes slow and maudlin.

Because it cannot make up its mind as to what it wants to be, Ink winds up being just silly. The piece illustrates the artistic maxim that in order to break rules effectively, the artist (in this case the filmmaker) must first master them. As such, Ink represents an overly ambitious project for writer/director Jamin Winans, who needs further practice with more orthodox cinematic vehicles before attempting a stab at the highly unconventional.

Ink - trailer