POMO

The House by the Cemetery is a nice surprise, at least by Fulci’s standards and by the standards of Italian gore trash in general. The filmmaker stays true to the gratuitous nature of the gory scenes, but this time they are part of the story, which actually begins and ends somewhere, has realistic characters and abounds with a secretive and mysterious atmosphere. Don’t you love it when children are placed in horror movies? The film’s protagonist is barely eight years old and goes through a hell that even adults don’t usually go through in films. It’s just a shame that the monster, which finally shows itself in all its glory in the final scene, is a bad joke. At any rate, this is probably the best and most “normal” of Fulci’s well-known horror movies.

Though I have a weakness for Italian gore, this is a dud. Fans of Lucio Fulci consider it to be one of his best works, but... City of the Living Dead seems like it wasn’t even shot according to a screenplay. It utterly disregards plot connections, cause and effect and story, and it is thus merely an incoherent, boring patchwork of gratuitous repulsiveness. Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery is equally bloody and brutal, but it at least has a normal storyline and a mysterious atmosphere.

If there is a better fantasy movie for me than The Lord of the Rings, it’s this film from my childhood.

The Rock is a widely revered action movie. In visual terms, it is an example of great genre craftsmanship. It’s dynamically edited, filmed through cool filters, contains one of the best car chases ever (Hummer vs. yellow Ferrari on the streets of San Francisco), and it has likable and well-cast good-guy characters. But... it doesn't have a proper bad guy (!!!) and everything in it is so artificially timed and polished that I was never in suspense, I didn’t fear for the protagonists and I thus didn’t care what would happen next. Formalistically overwrought and formulaic banality.

Given how dumb it is, Queen of the Damned takes itself way too seriously. It would have been better off with a proper action hero in a leather jacket and with a shotgun in his hand. At least it would then have an obvious target audience (e.g. viewers of Dracula 2000).

While the first Blade was a standard cliché with decent dynamics and a visual gorefest, the second one is a standard cliché with excellent dynamics and a visual super-gorefest. Wherever possible, Guillermo del Toro pushed the limits and the result is grittier, slicker and more exciting that the first one. It’s an upgrade similar to that seen in Terminator 2. If those great characters had been a bit more well developed, Blade II would have been worthy of five stars!

Don't expect this intimate drama to be a suspenseful crime thriller about a detective tracking a murderer. That is not at all what Sean Penn had in mind. The Pledge is a sad drama about a loner whose unyielding effort to get justice and to preserve his honour deprives him of his last chance to fill his personal life with happiness. For Penn, the thriller plot about the search for a killer is the most viewer-friendly way to make a personal creative statement. If it weren’t for the needlessly drawn-out runtime, there wouldn’t be a hint of boredom in this film and it would be worthy of an excellent four stars.

A remake of Besson’s cult movie La Femme Nikita by Hollywood craftsman John Badham. If I hadn’t known the original, Point of No Return would have come across as a standard Hollywood action flick with an interesting subject. But since I do know it, this version instead seems like a poor imitation of the great original with no sign of its creative touch. My three-star rating is only a compromise for those who haven’t seen Besson’s classic.

Compared to his Hollywood debut, The Replacement Killers, Chow Yun-fat’s second American film is an enjoyable step in the right direction, but it’s still not the real deal. Whereas The Replacement Killers was spectacularly filmed fluff, The Corruptor has a real screenplay and the story of the complicated friendship between an honest rookie cop (Mark Wahlberg) and a ruthless dirty cop (Yun-fat) is compelling. Though the plot is full of holes, the bleak atmosphere of the dirty big-city streets and the dramatic potential successfully pull it together. Training Day, a later thriller paradoxically made by the director of The Replacement Killers, has an essentially identical subject, but polished to perfection.

Solid craftsmanship, but the content is so feeble and predictable that you will die of boredom. There have been hundreds of such films and this one does not stand out among them in any way. It’s good entertainment only for viewers who go to the cinema once in ten years. And for small children who are satisfied with the sight of a cute dog and a series of naïve jokes.