——3 Evil Masters——

(C+)

3 Evil Masters starts out cool enough: This kick ass kung fu master decides to take on the 3 Evil Masters in a café for, well, being so damn evil. After a really amazing fight sequence where it looks like he’s going to kick all their asses the bartender, who’s apparently working with the Evil Masters, stabs the good guy in the side. That’s when the movie goes downhill. The rest of the movie involves a Chinese pretty boy actor who is picked on by his fellow students and sucks at kung fu because his teacher is a moron until he happens on the injured master who teaches him how to really fight. Blah blah blah, enter many lame plot points. He defeats the 3 Evil Masters. Yea. This movie would have been so much cooler if it were called the 3 Evil Masters vs. the 1 Good Master, because the actors who played them were so awesome. Everything else about this movie sucked.

——Champ Against Champ——

(D+)

Other than the fact that this movie has a guy who breathes fire for no apparent reason, this film pretty much sucks. The plot is moronic, and on top of that hard to follow. The sets and special effects are beyond cheesy. The actors’ kung fu is beyond pathetic. Major pass on this movie.

——Mr. Nice Guy——

(C+)

I like Jackie Chan, but I’m not really a big fan of Samo Hung’s direction style. He really seems to like to speed up or slow down the film at really inopportune times, and it always looks like crap. It also doesn’t seem to help that Samo hired the worst actors in Australia to act opposite Jackie. The movie is pretty fun at times though and Jackie’s stunt choreography is awesome, as usual. Just not his best film though.

——Dawn of the Dead——

(A-)

I’m not sure why, but this movie just seemed a whole lot better the second time around. Maybe it was because I was more willing to just accept some of the movie’s weaker points without going on and on with a fanboy’s zeal. Like the head security guard I didn’t think this time was such a dick. Maybe that has something to do with knowing how the film is going to end, but I was more willing to forgive his asshole attitude in dealing with the people breaking into the mall because this time I honestly felt more like, well, that’s what I would do. Save yourself, fuck everyone else!

The special effects are used to an excellent degree, by far making this the best looking zombie movie yet. And the credit sequences (both of them) are just brilliant, probably the scariest parts of the film. So what if this doesn’t have the social commentaries it should have, and so what if it really has nothing to do with the original aside from sticking random people in a mall together, this is still a damn fun ride.

——Hellboy——

(B)

The visual effects for this movie are both beautiful and amazing. And Ron Pearlman completely steals the movie away with his representation of Hellboy. He acts nothing like how you would expect him to just by looking at him, and that’s what makes him so funny. Unfortunately, other than the above-mentioned points, there wasn’t a whole lot much more going for this movie. It was so completely overwhelmed by exposition that it was really hard to actually get into the movie and just have some fun. You know, I don’t really need to know every little detail from the comic to have a good time. Just bring on the ass whupping and I’ll figure the rest out on my own. The movie could be really boring at times and it was only Ron Pearlman and the insanely cool visual effects that saved this movie from being a snoozefest.

——One Million Years B.C.——

(B)

This movie is like if a director was given two projects to do at the same time, a documentary on prehistoric man and a beer commercial, only instead of doing them separately like he was suppose to, he got really fucking high one night and made both films simultaneously. This movie would probably suck if it wasn’t so insanely bizarre, but since it is so wacked out it is actually pretty fun to watch.

The movie is completely devoid of any dialogue (they grunt caveman-type words and point) and almost lacking a plot. A prehistoric man gets kicked out of the violent Stone tribe by his power hungry brother only to wander into the Shell tribe, a more peaceful and civilized society. There he meets Raquel Welch, who looks so fucking hot in this movie, and they fall in love (kind of, if you can call it love). That’s about the gist of the plot.

Where the movie gets awesome is in the details. Like the fact that all of the women in the movie are apparently supermodels modeling their new line of fur bikini swim wear. Or the fact that whenever the plot seems to be moving a little too slow, a claymation dinosaur just pops up for a couple minutes to chase them around. Or the fact that using trick photography to make an iguana or tarantula appear to be forty feet tall automatically makes them dinosaurs. Or the fact that instead of resolving any sort of plot, the movie just ends with a volcano erupting and a giant earthquake that kills almost everyone. It’s hilarious. You want to watch just to see what’s going to pop up around the corner next. Oh, and did I mention than Raquel Welch is frickin’ smoking in this movie?

——Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind——

(A)

I want to start off by saying that I don’t think anyone other than Michel Gondry could have made this movie as cool as it is. The screenplay is the sort that with any other director it probably would have fallen to pieces and felt like pretentious, asinine bullshit. Gondry finds this rhythm in the words and images though that somehow holds the whole thing together under its own kind of dream logic. It’s amazing. It’s funny and personal and bizarre all at the same time. And most importantly, Kaufman’s scripts in the past have usually been so brilliant that they were completely unique unto themselves, but then they usually kind of fall to pieces in the final act. They work, but you are never one hundred percent happy with how they turn out. Not so with this film. All of the separate threads actually come together in the end and work without really trying. It’s really a great ending, the perfect way to end the film. It all comes together as this great love story that uses elements of science fiction and philosophy throughout without ever feeling preachy, and I’m highly recommending you all see it.

——The Alamo——

(C+)

This movie unfortunately is one where the sum of its parts is actually greater than the whole. There are some great sections in this movie (mainly any sequence with Billy Bob Thorton as Davy Crockett) but the rhythm and editing is just so choppy and inconsistent that you can’t ever really get into the movie. It’s like the director is never really sure what it is that he wants to highlight in the film, hence you get a lot of scenes of background information that never gel together or contribute to a theme for the whole film. Worse yet, after building up and building up the final battles don’t last very long at all. Instead of making some point about how heroic the men in the Alamo were their sacrifice doesn’t really seem to mean much at all, a point that is only magnified after the Texans defeat Santa Anna in a battle that seems more like a senseless massacre of innocent human lives than the Alamo itself. The whole project ends up feeling like a TV movie…informative but not particularly entertaining.