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Reviews
Miracle Workers (2019)
A terrible waste of talent
What a pile of garbage. This is a poorly stitched together mess of cliches and propaganda. There are good actors here who are totally wasted. I was left wondering what horrible secrets they had that meant they were ripe for blackmailing into appearing in this mess. Avoid it unless you consider your brain surplus to requirements.
Corporate (2018)
Excellent
This an excellent satire and it's actually funny too. The writing appears to have been left to someone who knows how to do it, the acting is competent and the plots are intelligently thought out.
Back to Life (2019)
Weak and unbelievable.
This isn't an unlikeable show but don't watch it hoping to find any originality, humour, wit or plausible storylines.
The overall concept is a jumbled up re-telling of 'Scumbag' with a bit of the story and characters shuffled about. It's so similar that i wonder how the 'creative' team haven't been sued.
The situations defy logic at every turn. The initial premise of a woman returning to her life after completing a sentence for murder is interesting. We're fed little bits and pieces as we go along, stretching out the drama and building intrigue. While that works, it falls apart as every fact we get serves to make the entire situation less and less believable.
The final real is based on a wafer-thin piece of writing and it's totally predictable.
The main character is likeable but there are no supporting characters that make any sense whatsoever. Nobody behaves logically, it's like it was written by someone who has never met people before and has no idea how they actually behave. There are some interesting ideas but they fall totally flat because they're simply not developed.
It's not funny, there are no laughs to be had here and it isn't quietly amusing either. It's just a piece of sloppy writing that doesn't deliver on its initial premise.You should only suffer through it if you enjoy voting in national elections or have flu.
Fear the Walking Dead (2015)
Not Walking Dead.
Potential spoilers.
This just wasn't a good start. Walking Dead has descended into a bit of a rut with the main characters endlessly walking through the woods bemoaning their sad existence. Bit it didn't start out that way, it managed to grab your interest with compelling characters, decent performances and production values equal to any zombie movie. That's what made it work, it was like watching a good zombie movie every week and it didn't hurt that the characters grew on you. And that's where this falls flat on its face. It's a typically-for-TV politically correct family, ethnically diverse (slightly), daughter in a mixed-race relationship, oddly middle-class and actually very mundane. The mother is plain annoying, strutting about like your average liberal bragging about her immunity thanks to a flu shot and when her son goes missing from hospital she demands someone else fix the problem for her, even though it was caused by her own bad parenting. She refuses to accept anything might be happening or else those in charge would come and save her. The Step-father is a little too likable, as if they've deliberately made the rest of the family unpleasant so he's the accessible one. The result is a weak character, far too weak to pin the series on. He just rolls over and accepts everything, he takes the blame, he lets this family emotionally abuse him. He is not going to survive a zombie apocalypse, Walking Dead has taught us that. And even though the father is a walking doormat, the daughter still appears to hate him for some unknown reason. She's also meant to be gifted but comes across as anything but. In fact, there's literally nothing else to say about her. After his episode we know more about her boyfriend than we do about her. Finally we have the son. He's a drug addict, a brain addled with chemical abuse to the point where he witnesses a zombie attack at the beginning of the episode and thinks he imagined the whole thing. Oddly he's the only one that's even remotely likable and for the beginning of the episode seems more in tune with reality than the rest of the cast who are all living their life on auto-pilot without a thought in their heads. It might be that this is a switch and bait. Perhaps the writers are trying to depict this liberal dream family and then watch them abandon their beliefs as the world changes around them. Maybe but for the most part, these are the kind of people we're all hoping the zombies get rid of. The episode suffers from a lack of action throughout. There's a standout scene where people are shown a glimpse of what's coming and the people are depicted of watching it on smart-phones and telling each other it can't be true. All the while the mother is telling them it's all a rumour or else the government would be trying to help. The action scene they're watching was lifted straight out of 'Diary of the Dead' and didn't bring anything new to the table. The eventual finale was dull, there was no struggle, it just seemed all too easy with the only character taking any kind of action being the one we presume to be the weakest. So there is some promise as they do appear to be taking a direction where they'll show how culture is a delusion and strip it away from these characters to see what's underneath. But who are they? The father strikes me as a bit-part player who Rick Grimes is likely to encounter briefly and move on from. The mother and daughter have no business surviving the first season and only the drug addict son is interesting. There were plot holes that were too massive to ignore. The show has some potential, maybe. It needs to overcome this pretty awful family-drama premise and get to actually being 'Walking Dead' pretty soon. It suffers from something a lot of spin-offs suffer from, arrogance. There seems to be a presumption here that Walking Dead is such a success that this can't fail. I think we're going to find that that's not the case.
The Invasion (2007)
Just another remake.
Ultimately a disappointing movie. The original had a depth absolutely missing in this version, and a tension that appears conspicuously absent. The opening concept of the invasion was quite good but after that the plot begins to unravel and descends into normal Hollywood blockbuster fare with no really thought put into the how and why. There is a nice political undercurrent running through the movie which was quite subtle but too subtle to be hang the final scene on which was what they tried to do. The plot revolves around freak random chance rather than building a more stable foundation that seems believable. The ending is a typical whitewash which dissolves consequences and flies the Hollywood banner unashamedly. It's not all doom and gloom, the movie is quite watchable thanks to a decent cast putting in decent performances. Where the movie falls down is a lack of real power that feels like it's come from one to many conference-room rewrites. This movie is just a typical modern remake with just enough new material to make it watchable but after watching it, it is just a remake. If you can accept that it's a modern rehash of a classic sci-fi which is just there to make a few bucks then the film is quite watchable and better than most.
Bone Eater (2007)
Kids! Just say no.
A great cast, a fantastic CGI monster and a brilliant script. If this film had had any of those things then it might not have been amongst the worst films I've ever wasted an hour and a half on. Infinite chimpanzees with infinite typewriters have not yet written the complete works of Shakespeare but along the way this has appeared in their waste-paper bin and somehow it got made into a movie. You can tell the the actors regret signing those contracts with every word they mutter directly into camera. The CGI is amateurish in the extreme and they might have created more tension of the cast had been attacked with the Sinclair Spectrum it was created on. I wanted to like this film, it has nice cameo appearances by Gil Gerard and Walter Koenig so I expected a fun horror movie that didn't take itself too seriously. It actually does try to take itself seriously but is about as much fun as trip to the dentist. Do yourself a favour. Don't watch this movie, you'll only encourage them to make more.