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hotspurh
Reviews
Swastika (1973)
The Accountants of the Apocalypse.
I think the scariest thing about Swastika is that Hitler and his amoral cronies looked about as threatening as a bunch of accountants on holiday for most of this movie. For the bulk of the home movie sequences the fuhrer & co could have been just as easily been seen as "uncle Freddy from Bathurst", which is an indication of just how non-evil these people appeared on the surface, no slavering fanatics or blood drinking monsters to be seen here kids, just a group of rather dull, boring people with nothing much to say that would set them apart from anyone else. And it can't help but make me wonder that if a bunch of boring old farts like these people are capable of initiating one of the most horrifying periods of the twentieth century then there is perhaps no limits to the potentiality for evil buried in the darker recesses of the human psyche, no matter how banal the person may appear on the surface.
War of the Worlds (2005)
Worst Adaption Yet.
I've never understood why directors / movie studios take a popular book and then proceed to largely ignore the source material. Sometimes you can get away with it, but more often than not they fail miserably, succeeding only in disappointing the fans of the original in the process.
If SS wanted to do a angsty, dysfunctional family drama set against the backdrop of an alien invasion he should have just made up his own story, rather than bastardizing the work of someone else.
It's ironic that when you consider this movie in comparison to the George Pal version from the 50's, suddenly George's messing with the plot doesn't seem so bad, at least I enjoyed that movie even if it also largely ignored the bulk of H G Wells original plot.
Steven, give me back the two hours of my life wasted on this movie!
Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei (1971)
Art or BS?
I have seen both versions of this film and I would have to say that the primary feeling I get afterwards is ambivalence. Now maybe the director was trying to say something and then again maybe he wasn't; ambiguity is often a sign of an artist trying to force the viewer to think, but it is even more often a sign of a lazy and pretentious CON-artist with nothing particularly cohesive to say and no particular idea on how to say it.
Not all that is Ambiguous is art; in just the same way that not everything that is yellow is cheese.
And then there's the whole child porn / not child porn argument, now whether you get turned on or not by watching badly acted scenes of children having sex with adults remains to be seen, and it doesn't alter the fact that there's a hell of a lot of people out there who do.
Now whether the director is trying to say something with full frontal child nudity and sex is up to others to argue about at length rather than me, but nothing makes a cult movie better that questionable content and there is nothing to say that the director wasn't simply being shocking to gain attention.
But I would also point out that we've only got the directors word for it that child porn wasn't his intent.
And for me that is just another reason to be turned off by this movie.