Reviews

If The Nothing from The Neverending Story was made into a movie, this would be it. Giving this bore-fest a 3 was being generous. It tries so very hard to be relevant and artsy, but simply puts you to sleep with mind-numbing narrative and pseudo science. The acting is tolerable but far from memorable. The effects are mostly computer generated Etch-A-Schetch pics, dressed up with pretty colors and warpy movement. The sets are cheesy and often silly. But, the worst part is the story line. It begins with a worm hole and then slowly worms its way through a non-story about going through one. I am in need of a time warp to get back the 90 or so minutes I wasted on this nothing.

What if you wanted to make a movie about dinosaurs terrorizing people on a deserted island, but you just could not get over the fact that you really wanted to make a zombie apocalypse movie. This movie begins as all of these wastes of film do; with people running through a forrest, from "something." That is the clue that it is without any real imagination. Then you couple it with confusing stories intermingled involving dinosaurs, strange insects that take you over and turn you into blood-thirsty zombies. Then you couple it with poor actors, dreadful CGI, and maudlin music, and you have, this nearly unwatchable brew of inanity.

Peter Jackson is an amazing director. Of that there can be no doubt. But, the screenplay for this film, which he helped to write is sorely in need of major editing. The film runs a heafty 3 and a half hours, for a story that could easily have been done in under 2. Make no mistake, the effects and acting are top notch, but one begins to wish it was just over. There are gratuitous scenes designed to impress, excite and horrify. Encounters with dinosaurs. Encounters with giant bugs. Encounters with giant leeches. You name it. Jackson threw it in there, with little to actually advance the plot. The plot. Remember the plot. It is basically a love story, but that gets lost. About an hour of this film should have been left on the cutting room floor.

What would you get if you combined a few religious doubters, a few born agains, a vegan, two strangers who meet in the jungle, a golen cross found by an archaeologist, a black hole, the slowing of the earth's rotation, multiple natural disasters, a pregnant woman, the Mayan calendar, the End Times, and all trying to reach a pyramid in Chichinitza before doomsday arrives? You would get this preachy mess. I am not adverse to a science fiction disaster movie with a religious twist; but, good grief, the lord, himself would have turned this movie off. You have about 6 minutes of action and disaster footage, mingled with a big, old, dollop of maudlin, melodramatic, preachy dialogue. And, this from a few decent actors. As you are taking your mother to safety from an impending collapse of the west coast, the last thing you might say in the harrowing car trip is "when did you start believing in god?" Well, the vegan says it. So beware, this one really fails on so many levels.

I get it. You came to see a science fiction movie about an alien invasion. In true bait and switch, it turned out to be, you guessed it, just another zombie movie. What you missed was the real bait and switch. This is not a science fiction movie, but only has a few of the trappings of one. This is not a zombie movie, but has the altered humans, as zombies, to add the thrills, of which there are not many. The real movie, and the real bait and switch, is that this is a Love Story. If you accept that premise, it is an okay film, with some decent acting and a lot was done for a little bit of money on a really low budget. There is potential here, and I hope it is realized with other films by this director.

How does one begin to describe such an assault on the visual and aural senses? The plot is basically any science fiction B movie you have ever seen. And, that is the highpoint. The action does not begin until over one third of the movie is over, with typical 1970's sexual teasers thrown in to "flesh out" a weak story line. Then there are the sad performances by once revered actors. Special effects are pathetic, as expected and overall sound quality is dreadful. But, as if that was not enough, the real star of this cess pool is the music score. The composer should not be allowed near another film, with his annoying, ear assults, he calls music. I wanted to give this a fair shake, so watched it to the end. The world did not end; but I was overjoyed that this film did.

String together every monster movie cliche you have ever witnessed and you might come close to this. Only, play them trough slowly. Get ready for spoilers. Let's overlook the poor CGI and get on to the poor acting. Stiff, cardboard gives better performances. Then the story line. Seriously? The things are killing right and left and someone wants to catch it while the minister wants to try to understand its motives. Where, oh where, have we seen this before? And, these crocs could literally sit in a lounge chair and get plenty of bodies. Every single person is clumsy and cannot run on a flat surface. Add to this, that those who manage to remain standing, do just that. They stand and look, wide eyed at the thing that is going to eat them, without any attempt to run and get away. When they do run, they manage to either join those who are clumsy and fall or get themselves into a corner for easy pickings. And, I still am unable to understand how someone who has literally been bitten in half only has deep scratch marks on his face. Well, you get the idea. Watch it for laughs and little more.

Words fail me to describe how completely lacking in any merit this movie is. I wanted to give it a fair shake, so I watched until the end. I could literally feel my IQ dwindling and the soul being sucked out of me as the movie progressed. Literally nothing happens in the first half of the movie and that was the good part. The last third is your usual found footage poor photography, people screaming and dropping cameras, like that is the thing to do. Then we begin the arguments with the spirit and the triumph of the witch and the cliche exorcist moves. If you want real scares, go out on any Halloween night and watch the costumes go by. What a complete waste of my time.

Portals is a movie that begins with an interesting enough premise and then devolves into a hot mess of disjointed segments that the makers claim is an anthology. They miss the definition of an anthology by a mile. They start with a 2001esque monolith, except that it is like your 80 in high definition television turned on its side with lots of missing pixels. This, of course, after the unimaginative world-wide blackout. The plasma tv shows up in all the segments, so they think this somehow ties this mess together. Then, we have a hospital scene, with an eye implant. And, what creative effort would not be complete without zombies, or their version of zombies. Throw in some gratuitous head expolsions, eye gouging, and lots of girly hysterical screaming, and how could you go wrong? Trust me, the breaks for ads were more interesting.

Early in the movie, the two protagonists are out in nature. There is a glacier, with an amazing waterfall flowing down it. They sit with their backs to it, so that they can be in the picture with the scenery. It does not get any better. Of the 75 minute running time, one gets about 5 seconds of what was purported to be a flying saucer, which it is not. Add to this the voice-over narration by the main character, and the annoying, ever present sappy, sappy, sappy music which seems to play at any point where there is no dialogue. More of a travelogue than a movie. Turn off the sound and watch the scenery, which is the only thing this movie has going for it.

I had high expectations for this film. After all, it was a big Hollywood remake of a television movie on one of Stephen Kings best books. Well, yes, the effects and production qualities are better, but I still prefer the Tim Curry character. Simply having a bigger budget and having more gruesome special effects, does not make the movie better. When I read the book, I was caught up in the relationships of the group of young characters, which came across in the tv movie much better than in the Hollywood version. They were all working and experiencing the horror and working to fight it. In the 2017 version they seem like individuals just thrown together, who are forced to help one another out of need and not out of friendship. Hollywood splits them up into neat little packages and tells their individual stories and does little to make them a cohesive force. And, moving the story to a literal haunted house and out of the barrens was a major blunder. How cliche.

I watched until they met and, of course started with the climate change, fossil fuel demon, overpopulation, bovine droppings. Getting so sick of these disaster movies that have but one culprit and they keep beating it to death. The science used in the film is pure conjecture, and almost laughable, but, of course, follows the mantra of the times. When, oh when, will writers and directors get some real inspiration and stop using the same cliches to fuel their disaster scenarios. The acting is not bad, nor are the effects, but one tires of the same premise, over and over. So, with that said, watch at your own peril.

I made the mistake of watching this all the way through, hoping at some point it would make a point. It did not. It begins with a protracted apology to the trees and plants and earth for all the evil we have done; if you can believe that. Then suddenly there are other people running from a fog. There are glimpses of what you assume will be the monsters that never again appear in the film, while everyone gets preachy about global warming, the end of the world, and other theories of what the heck is happening. Sadly, even the director did not know what was happening, and gave us a salad of bad acting, incessant posturing, dismal poetry, and unfulfilled expectations. Please don't make the mistake I made by watching this drivel.