mfrost71w Reviews

Acts of Vengeance (2017)

A not very good film that shoots itself in the foot

[2/10 · 14 July 2023]

Well here's a curiosity - a completely unnecessary plot device that destroys the film. Its a ridiculous mish-mash of a film anyway but what turns it into complete absurdity is the lead character taking a vow of silence. There's absolutely no need for this - his wife and kid are murdered and he decides to learn martial arts and go after the killers oh, and also to never speak again until the killers are caught. The bizarre and improbable raison d'etre for this is that, after a few weeks of not speaking, his hearing apparently becomes super-human and he can hear attacks coming. The unintended consequence is that he then proceeds to conduct a murder investigation, questioning and interacting with witnesses and bad guys, all without speaking. These characters have to spontaneously just tell him what information he needs or use their psychic powers to know what he wants of them. He conducts a love affair without speaking to the woman, communicating novels of information by raising an eyebrow.

Now, everything that happens and everything he does could have been done without the vow of silence, so why use it as a plot device when it completely cripples the film? I for one can't answer that - it's complete and utter madness.

Badland (I) (2019)

Few redeeming features

[3/10 · 13 May 2023]

Derivative and clichéd Western adding nothing to the genre. Very like a made-for-TV film but has some edgy violence that lifts it out of that realm. More like a modern episode of Gunsmoke or some other hokey Western series. Completely underutilises the only known actor in it, the great Wes Studi.

Has a really unbelievable and crass ending where the hero refuses a doctor after being wounded in the last gunfight so he can get back to his girl more quickly and of course arrives there dead. Doesn't make any sense and kind of makes the previous hour and 20 minutes a complete waste

The sound track is also largely inappropriate and overbearing.

Every Last One of Them (2021)

The hammiest film ever made

[2/10 · 20 April 2023]

No plot yet huge plot holes. Corny dialogue. Disjointed, throw-away story. Appallingly hammy and wooden acting. Poorly directed, poorly written, poorly produced and cliche-ridden. Sedate and dull action scenes. I can't think of a single redeeming feature that would make this film watchable. What the likes of Richard Dreyfuss are doing in the film I've no idea - I'd guess that at the twilight of his career all he's interested in is money for his retirement.

It has a tense, bass and drum soundtrack to give the film the gravitas it lacks but it plays constantly through the film and soon becomes intrusive.

The Big Red One (1980)

Dull and poorly produced war film

[3/10 · 21 November 2022]

Recommended to me as a great war film I hadn't seen, it was a great disappointment. Disjointed script, lacking pace; poorly written without feeling or character; poor production values, dull and slow-paced; cliché-ridden and at times over-sentimental. Plus wooden acting and a poor script.

Straight, episodic, 'war diary' account of five years of war of five members of the 1st Infantry skipped over so fast and inconsequential that the Battle of the Bulge consists of 10 seconds of snowy trees blowing up before they liberate a concentration camp seemingly consisting of one boy inmate

A Readers Digest of a war film, poorly done.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Grossly over-rated "masterpiece"

[4/10 · 20 November 2022]

Very slow paced to the point of turgid. It has some good vignettes, such as the Air Cav segment but overall is too much up its own arse.

Apart from the few contemporary songs (Rolling Stones obligatory of course) the sound track is a real cheesy 70s synthesiser number more suited to a cheap TV movie or porn film.

Brando is poor. He's suppposed to be menacing and esoteric but just comes across as the shambling, alzheimers-suffering, semi-delerious idiot that he then was in real life.

You don't care about any of the characters, not even Martin Sheen's. They could all be killed or live, makes no odds. Dennis Hopper is probably the only cast member who turns in an acting performance.

Bloodshot (2020)

Tired and clichéd plot with slightly good special effectss

[3/10 · 20 July 2022]

Same old same old. A tired, clichéd, formulaic and highly predictable plot. It is the equivalent of a poor made-for-TV movie for 14 year olds, raised a bit above dire by the special effects. There are a lot of good black English actors but presumably they were all busy being Americans in things like The Wire so they were forced to use Lamorne Morris whose English accent is worse than Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins.

Without Remorse (II) (2021)

Seriously miscast and a dog's breakfast

[2/10 · 11 July 2022]

Everybody in this film is miscast and I mean everyone. Jordan is a lousy Clark, Turner-Smith is a lousy Greer and Bell is a lousy Ritter. Its like someone's gone "OK, What personality types and body types are these characters and, for the hell of it, let's cast actors who are the complete opposite". Its a complete dog's breakfast of a movie.

Eye in the Sky (2015)

Don't thing such pussyfooting is true

[4/10 · 21 June 2022]

An interesting look at the capabilities of modern black ops but I don't think all those characters hand-wringing and pussyfooting about the decisions ring true. I think the instant decision made by the US Secretary of State of 'yes' is more likely, but that would mean the movie would be over in 20 minutes.

The Northman (2022)

Monty Python does Vikings

[3/10 · 5 June 2022]

Over-the-top, overly darkly-lit film where all the actors overact and all the men speak with Robert Newton "Arrgh, Jim-lad" pirate voices. Many of the scenes are just silly, sometimes to the point of unintentional comedy.

The Eastern Front (2020)

Everything substandard

[3/10 · 6 February 2022]

They obviously had a shoestring budget and it shows. The writing is second rate as is the acting and the directing. That it was filmed in the leafy lanes of southern England is obvious; the vehicles, uniforms, and weapons are all obvious inaccurate stage props. It has the feeling of a movie made by the Scunthorpe Amateur Dramatics Society who somehow got some money to make a film but they had to use Mrs Minge's back garden as a set and find whatever props they could from the basket back stage at the Town Hall theatre.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Dixon is the main character, not Mildred

[8/10 · 8 November 2021]

A clever and entertaining film. You watch the whole film thinking its about Mildred and her quest to find her daughter's murderer but when you get to the end you find out it is actually about the redemption of Dixon. This is why it doesn't matter that the ending doesn't resolve the murder - it was never about the murder in the first place, it's a film about Dixon, and his story is resolved at the end.

Midway (2019)

Dull and something missing

[4/10 · 19 October 2021]

A lacklustre and passionless re-hash of the 1976 film that adds nothing except better special effects, although some of the CGI is a bit cartoon-like

Someone made the strange decision to cast the hammy Ed Skrein as the lead. He plays it like a cheap 1930s B-movie hero and his poor American accent seems to be based on W. C. Fields

Ultimately, a very disatisfying and unfullfilling film.

Dark Encounter (2019)

Strange and pointless

[5/10 · 29 September 2021]

The first half of the film is virtually a remake of the first half of Close Encounters of the Third Kind but then we find out why this highly advanced race of aliens have travelled a zillion miles to earth - apparently it's to help solve the disappearance of an 8 year old girl in a hicksville town in backwater USA. Is this a good or a bad film? I'm still not sure...

Last Train from Gun Hill (1959)

A re- hash of 3.10 to Yuma lifted by its stars

[8/10 · 14 July 2021]

Basically a re-hash of 3.10 to Yuma from 2 years earlier in 1957 - a man on his own with a prisoner in an hotel room waiting for a train with the baddie and his hoodlums lying in wait outside. Saved from being a plagiarised B-movie by Sturges and the performances of the stars Michael Douglas and Anthony Quinn.

The Predator (2018)

Disney makes a Predator film

[3/10 · 1 July 2021]

Worse even than Predator v Aliens, this is a kids film with the same tone and feel as Home Alone 3 but not as entertaining. Only dim-witted adults will get anything out of this cliche-ridden, entirely-predictable, piece of childish hokum.

The Core (2003)

Hokum of the worst kind

[2/10 · 26 May 2021]

Probably the most absurd and ridiculous movie I've seen. You have to suspend disbelief from moment one, right to the end. Bad directing, bad plot, bad acting, cliche after cliche. The Trafalgar Square pigeon disaster made me laugh out loud for 10 minutes; it was if Mel Brooks had filmed it for a spoof movie. This was followed by a similar funny space shuttle disaster involving landing in a Los Angeles sewer. It doesn't get any better.

Basic (2003)

Miss Marple in the Jungle

[3/10 · 12 May 2021]

A very strange and dog's breakfast of a movie. Someone's taken a 1930 Agatha Christie Miss Marple murder-mystery set in a sleepy English village and spectacularly failed to update it to a modern US Rangers training camp setting. Incongruous and baffling.

The Poison Rose (2019)

Formulaic but not bad

[7/10 · 3 May 2021]

A standard formula been done many times before - a worn-out alcoholic private eye goes back to the home town he left decades earlier, revives old friendships and old enmities, saves the day and finds redemption. For all that, its done well and moves with pace, and Travolta isn't bad as the broken-down private eye.

I couldn't find a reason for it to be set in 1978 other than it allowed everyone to smoke and to smoke in any place they liked, which I suppose gave it a touch of 1940s film noir.

Sahara (1995 TV Movie)

A lot of action but a pretty ridiculous film

[3/10 · 3 September 2020]

Like most remakes this film is not a patch on the original. There are a lot of battles with hundreds of Germans killed and it holds a pace quite well. There are two main problems with the film; one is the almost continuous inaccuracies such as there were no Lee tanks, no Americans and no free French in the Sahara in early 1942 before the fall of Tobruk and many of the weapons are wrong. The plot exhibits the usual gaping hole of many war films - the protagonists are running short of ammo yet ignore the hundreds of dead Germans holding machine guns lying literally feet from them. The second problem is that of the appalling accents from the cast. This is an Australian made film and all the British soldiers are played by Australians, none of whom can do a credible British accent, especially Todd McDonald whose accent is reminiscent of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. The Frenchman is played by an American who does a bizarre comedy French accent. The only actor who manages to actually act is Jerome Ehlers, whose accent is flawless. The poor accents will probably only grate on the ears of a British audience; anyone else will find the film reasonably entertaining if somewhat lightweight and annoying

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Did anoyone involved actually watch the original?

[2/10 · 27 June 2018]

I can only assume that nobody involved in this movie actually watched the original before deciding to remake it. This garbage bears no resemblance to the original at all. The original is a tour de force in tension and fear as they sit in the hotel room awaiting the train - this makes up most of the 1957 movie; in the remake it forms less than a quarter of the movie and all the tension and dread has been removed. The hero redeems himself by sticking to his principles and wins through; in the remake the hero sticks to his principles and gets killed.

As a stand-alone movie its a pretty poor formulaic western with all the usual cliches. An uninspiring story played by uninspired actors - I thought Peter Fonda was the best actor playing the best character but he's only in it 15 minutes. As for adding a kid character who simultaneously gets in the way and saves the day...I can only assume the makers of this turkey also haven't watched several hundred b-movie westerns that use the same plot and have done it to death

The Double (I) (2011)

An unbelievably bad film...

[2/10 · 24 May 2018]

Probably the worst film I've seen in over a decade. Completely pointless it being made

Its a cold war thriller brought up to date, clumsily constructed around a double twist.

It is appallingly written - the plot makes little sense and has plot hole after plot hole. Characters make correct conclussions from almost no evidence and seem to stumble from one leap of faith to another. Sometimes new storylines just pop into existence with no, or almost no, origin. Dialogue is cliche after cliche, lifted from cold war thrillers made when the cold war was still on 30 years ago. The storyline is confused and muddied

It has no redeeming features - the writing is poor, the directing is poor, the acting is poor

On a personal level, I found the pronunciation of 'Cash-us' really annoying. Is it an Americanism? I think the rest of the world says 'Kass-eus'

Tank 432 (2015)

College student film of little value

[3/10 · 27 October 2017]

First off, its not a tank it's an armoured personnel carrier...bit of a faux pas given the non-USA title 'Tank 432'. The film itself is a cheap, confused and poor quality affair; something I would expect from college students at film school who are still anal retentive about their art form. The plot makes little sense and is exploited, badly, for effect rather than story. It has a similar quality to 'The Day' which is essentially another college film, only one done somewhat better

Gravity (2013)

Science? We don't need no stinking science

[3/10 · 28 July 2017]

Is it just me? Did I miss something? After all the hype and Oscar wins I finally got around to seeing Gravity three years late and what a disappointment it was. It is beautiful to look at with super special effects but other than that it is a very poor film. The dialogue is poorly written and poorly delivered, Bullock's acting is wooden, the plot is preposterous and, worst of all, the science is non-existent. As far as the film-maker's are concerned Newton was never born; they certainly refuse to accept his 3rd Law of Motion. They almost never get the motion right for space and indeed one major plot point relies on the commander of the mission apparently having no knowledge of physics....when he's at the end of the tether and tells Bullock she has to let him go to survive, he is stationary - there will be no forces acting on him at all, so his tether wouldn't be under tension like he's hanging off a roof; if he just jerks gently on the tether with his arms it will impart enough force to put him in motion back towards Bullock and the space station - he certainly wouldn't start moving away from the tether just by letting go. As for Bullock being able to undock, fly, separate and re-enter both Russian and Chinese craft after 6 months astronaut training as an electronics equipment mission specialist, well.....words are beyond me - she wouldn't have been trained to fly the Shuttle let alone foreign craft. Space debris flying fast enough to orbit the earth in 90 minutes would be lethal down to a millimeter in size - the smallest speck would hole a spacesuit yet all the astronauts are in the middle of clouds of such debris that decimate the Hubble, the shuttle and a space station. The Chinese space station could never be in a stable orbit that would decay enough after 90 minutes or so to burning up on reentry. I can see it would be an exciting and tense film for children and the dim-witted but I'm afraid sentient adults will be gnashing their teeth throughout the film.

We Bought a Zoo (2011)

Cliché after cliché

[3/10 · 25 July 2017]

This film takes every cliché from every Hollywood romantic comedy and animal film of the last 60 years and stitches them into a single vomit-inducing tear-jerker. There is not one second of footage that is unique - every scene, every plot device, every character, every film trick, you will recognize from a hundred other films. It is a Frankenstein monster of a movie, long-dead parts sewn together into a shambling barely-alive whole. It comes across as a poor made-for-TV movie made by people who had been fired by Disney for being too schmaltzy. Based on the book of a true story in England, the film omits or changes all the good parts of the book and replaces them with Hollywood clichés, for what reason is not known. No redeeming qualities whatsoever, it is a feel-good movie for the retarded

A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)

Surprisingly bad film

[3/10 · 7 July 2017]

Mmm...now here's a curious thing - a comedy that isn't funny, an 1882 western set in the modern day, a star who's a cartoonist rather than an actor. The childish toilet humour will appeal only to 11 year old's and the retarded; the anachronisms from imposing modern day speech, idioms, values and culture on an 1882 setting are annoying in the extreme; love Family guy but Seth is not an actor as is abundantly made clear by this film. In short, a real turkey