n_earl_roberts Reviews

The Lair (2022)

Well...there is 90 minutes I won't get back.....but....

[10 December 2022]

And what I mean by ".....but......." is this movie is as woefully atrocious as the other reviewers have indicated but it does have one redeeming quality in that it is quite unintentionally hilarious through out.

With respect to the other reviewers I think they viewed this movie expecting a entry level decent flick and when they worked out it wasntt, they immediately soured on finding anything redeeming about it.

Which is fair enough to a degree, you like what you like and you dislike what you don't and initially I felt the same.

However the more I listened to the atrocious dialog and watched the equally bad action sequences and FXs, the more I found myself laughing out loud.

I think this movie given the test of time time will evenly develop a cult following as one of those movies that was so bad it is really good for a laugh. In another words a bar set so low that if you stepped over it, you would miss it by several feet.

Peace.

Restart the Earth (2021)

Oscar material it is not.

[5/10 · 8 November 2022]

Well, what a movie.

Not exactly rife with deep philosophical under tones but if you check your brain in at the door and don't aim too high, you should not be overly disappointed.

The story itself is pretty straight forward and is not what I would call taxing. Plants, mad scientists buggering with things they shouldn't be, end of the world, yada, yada, yada.

The staging of the story was, well, nothing flash. The CQI and the set pieces were at best acceptable and at worse ordinary sometimes boarding on the laughable. For example, it was more than noticeable that as the characters were seen traversing the landscape between the high-rise buildings and the cars on the street in some scenes, the definition of the wider horizon of the landscape was decidedly flat in nature indicating an obvious green screen effect. It certainly screamed low budget.

The other part of the staging of the story, the actors, is a different kettle of fish. Some of the acting was fine, some of the acting was more than a little melodramatic and some was just horrible. Case in point on this, the gentleman who played the rotund science tech "21" (and the comedy foil) simply put couldn't act. This criticism maybe harsh though as I watched the Chinese language version with subtitles (I cannot watch dubbed movies) and a lot of his lines obviously lost a lot in translation.

Finally, the child.

This child should win the Oscar for being the single most unwarranted and annoying child character in any movie since Dakota Fanning played Rachel Ferrier in Steven Spielberg's 2005 War of the Worlds. Certainly, as the film progresses and the child becomes progressive more annoying you hope that the plants do the viewers a favor and eat her and by the end of the movie, you are left wondering if the father saved the right person....

As the movie goes, quite the mixed bag but I have seen worse so maybe 6 out of 10.