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Reviews
Snakes on a Plane (2006)
You have to like horror movies to appreciate this one.
If you thought Jaws was the best movie of the 1980s, then you probably want to see this one too. It's very similar, only with snakes instead of a shark, and a plane instead of beaches and boats.
The plot is extremely thin (I would say worse than "Manos" the Hands of Fate) and on top of that is also very trite. Also, the major premise (that exposure to pheromones would cause a wide variety of snakes to actively hunt down and attack humans in monster-movie fashion) reminds me of an Ed Wood movie.
However, Snakes on a Plane is rather better in other respects.
For one thing, Snakes on a Plane makes a serious attempt to do real character development. A lot of horror movies don't bother, but this one does. There are several fairly well rounded characters and even a moderately dynamic character. There are numerous scenes wherein the viewer is likely to sympathize with one of the characters. There are also a couple of lame and/or stereotypical characters, but on the whole I would rate the character development as pretty good -- very good for a horror movie.
The writing (in terms of the lines) is not great, but it's not extremely bad either (except in a few places there is some weak dialog), and almost all of the acting is passably good. (Most of the worst acting is pretty early in the movie, before the snakes get loose.) Indeed, there is even some quite good acting in places, particularly the two young boys.
What really saves this movie from being a B Movie is that the technical aspects of the film (lighting and camera work and sound and scene editing and so on and so forth) are all pretty well done. Most really bad movies botch those things severely, but this one handles them more or less like a major motion picture.
On the other hand, the special effects are rather poor. It is very obvious that most of the snakes you see are computer animated, and considering that the movie was made in 2006 it's third-rate computer animation at that. The snakes look very fake. On the other hand, they are very well integrated into the action. The live-action human characters interact with them very much as if they are really there. I did not notice a single instance where the human character's actions and the snakes' actions were out of sync. That helps a great deal, and it's yet another thing you'd never see pulled off correctly in a B movie.
I'm not sure who labeled this movie an Action/Thriller. It's definitely a horror movie. Some aspects of it are particularly well-executed for a horror movie, but it's a horror movie through and through, from the monster's-eye-view camera shots looking out at the humans from behind things right on down to the scenes where you keep expecting someone to get attacked and it doesn't happen and doesn't happen and doesn't happen, and then just when you realize it's not going to happen then it suddenly does.
The first few minutes are crammed with inane physical comedy (some of which is fairly vulgar, and none of which is even vaguely original), but I'm happy to say that almost all of that is done by the time the movie really gets underway.
If you like horror movies, you'll want to see this one. If you don't particularly like horror movies, then you probably want to give it a miss.
The Creeping Terror (1964)
without peer: spectacularly bad in every possible way
An ordinary B movie is bad, usually in a variety of ways. A few special movies stand out from the rest because they are unusually bad in a wider variety of ways. Occasionally you will see the term "Z-movie" used to describe the worst of the worst. This one makes them all look like award-winning major motion pictures. Nothing else is bad like this move is bad.
There are so many things to pick on in The Creeping Terror, one review cannot begin to enumerate them all, so I'll just give a small sampling.
I'll talk about lighting first, because it's one of the things that really separates the men from the boys when it comes to badness. A lot of otherwise fairly bad movies do an almost passable job with the lighting. The Creeping Terror, on the other hand, botches the lighting in a remarkably diverse collection of different ways. Some shots are underexposed. Some are overexposed. Many have uneven lighting. Some have lighting in exactly the wrong places, e.g., the background is lit better than the action. Scenes that might have benefited from limited lighting were filmed under the noonday sun. One could spend two or three viewings of this movie just making notes about various ways the lighting was botched.
Many other reviewers have talked about the soundtrack, but it really is spectacularly bad. Not only is every part of it bad individually, but the parts do not go together to form a coherent whole, not even stylistically. The music, quite aside from completely changing styles partway through the flick, is terribly out of place in a horror movie. Even if TCT is considered as a spoof, which I don't believe for one minute was the director's intention, the music is still badly out of place. Then there's the talking. I'm not a big fan of narration at the best of times, but this movie raises bad narration to an art form. There's not much bad dialog, but that's because there's not much dialog. Most of the actors, even some fairly major characters, do not have speaking parts at all.
As far as the acting, it's probably enough to say that I don't think anyone in this movie was also in another movie, either before or after, and I don't believe that's a coincidence.
The characters are bad, unbelievable and mundane at the same time. The writing is terrible. The directing is so impossibly inept, the movie would certainly have been much better with no directing at all. The costuming is at the level of junior-high drama class. The props are bad even for an extreme-low-budget sci-fi horror flick. The word "plot" can scarcely be mentioned in the same sentence with this movie.
The best thing about The Creeping Terror is the sets. Rather than filming the whole movie in a single room with amazingly bad backdrops, as would be consistent with the general level of quality in this flick, they instead actually filmed in several outdoor locations (a field, a road, a hill, a woods, a creek) and two or three different buildings. In fact, I would go so far as to call several of the sets mostly believable. If it is theoretically possible to make a worse movie than The Creeping Terror, the mechanism by which this dubiously impressive feat would be accomplished would have to revolve around using worse sets.
However, I am not sure that it is possible to equal the severe badness of this movie in other respects. Certainly, I have seen no other movie that's even playing in the same ballpark. The infamous "Manos": The Hands of Fate, for instance, falls well shy of the extreme horribleness that is The Creeping Terror.
Just to cite one concrete example, the long driving scenes in Manos feature changing scenery and some dialog and yet are much shorter and fewer than the many, lengthy, boring, painfully-slow creature-approach scenes in The Creeping Terror, which are only exacerbated by the incredibly dull narration. Manos also has better lighting, writing, characters, acting, dialog, camera work, ... and Manos is potentially scary, if you're very easily frightened. The photo on the wall in Manos (or even the barking dogs for that matter) is FAR scarier than anything in The Creeping Terror, unless you're afraid of being bored to death. The music in Manos is arguably in the same general category of badness as the Creeping Terror music, but the Manos music is more consistent in theme throughout the movie, and spookier.
Also, Manos has a plot that is developed as the movie progresses. Indeed, compared with anything The Creeping Terror has to offer it's practically Pulitzer material.
No, Manos cannot compare. The Creeping Terror is far, far more execrable.
Indeed, nothing compares. Name whatever outstanding example of bad film-making you like, from any genre: terrible no-budget children's movies, high-school drama class projects, you name it, this pile of turkey dung tops them all. The people who say other movies are bad have not seen this one. There is no other bad movie. The Creeping Terror stands alone, the one and only truly abysmal, completely and severely botched movie in all history. Next to The Creeping Terror, all other movies are well conceived, well planned, well executed, quality storytelling.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that The Creeping Terror is preachy? Oh, yes, it is, and in the most lame way imaginable. If I nearly forgot to mention the horrible, pedagogically condescending, egregiously didactic rhetoric in this flick (especially at the ridiculous end), it's because the viewer hardly even notices such a minor and forgivable thing amidst the movie's many much worse issues.
Siu Lam juk kau (2001)
Replacements meets Crouching Tiger, but with less plot
I'm not entirely certain, but it seems likely that this movie was sent to the US because the Chinese wanted nothing further to do with it.
I'm assuming you can get over the wacky fictionalized martial-arts physics, because if you can't get over that, you have no business watching this movie. Really the physics aren't any crazier than in Looney Tunes, so if that were the only weird thing about the movie, I'd get over it. However...
The most interesting and original content in the movie consists of the lead character's monologues about the value of Kung Fu in everyday life, and his discovery of someone who puts these principles into practice directly. This is a fairly original concept, or at least one that many Westerners may not have seen previously, and as such is the best thing the movie has going for it.
The acting is spectacularly mediocre. Easily the best acting in the flick is done by Zhao Wei. She and _arguably_ Stephen Chow are the only actors with major roles here who deserve to get acting parts in any future movies. None of the acting is really *spectacularly* bad, like the so-bad-it's-hilarious acting in B-movie horror flicks, but none of it is good, either. The writing in the English subtitles didn't help the situation much. I hope it's just poor translation, and that the original Chinese is rather better.
The characters are very two-dimensional. All of them, even Mui. At least they aren't all also static, but their changes are sudden, trite, unconvincing, and predictable even by American movie standards.
The special effects are the modern equivalent of the endless flashing lights in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The movie has seemingly _hours_ of special effects, the _same_ special effects, over and over again. They're more advanced (i.e., modern) than the flashing lights of ST:TMP, but they don't push any boundaries, are not that impressive after about the third minute, and are overdone in such a way as to draw much attention to themselves. If the movie had quality in other respects, the special effects would actively detract from it.
If I said anything about the plot, I'd have to check the "Contains spoiler" box. If I even set out the _beginning_ of the plot, the reader would know the end. There is no middle. Mighty Ducks (and the sequel, and the other sequel) had a similarly predictable end, but at least it had some minor plot twists in the middle. This movie has none. Zilch. Nada. Each sequence just goes badly, and then they use the Kung Fu, and suddenly everything is better. Sometimes everything goes badly even when they use the Kung Fu, and then one of the characters uses a little more Kung Fu, and suddenly everything is better. Sometimes the enemy uses more Kung Fu than the good guys, and everything goes badly, and then the good guys use more Kung Fu, and everything is better. It gives new meaning to the word "lame". Come to think of it, I'd better check the "Contains spoiler" box, as I've pretty much given away everything. Wouldn't want to be blacklisted for giving spoilers without warning.
Since I checked the spoiler box anyway, there's one more comment, which really is a spoiler: probably the biggest surprise in the whole movie for any Western audience will be that nobody kisses at the end. Those wacky Chinese. Such innovation. A movie with absolutely no sex. Come to think of it, I didn't notice any objectionable language in the subtitles, either. So the movie's not *all* bad. In fact, I would go so far as to call it a pretty *good* B movie.
How it got billed as a major motion picture is another matter, though. No plot, no character development, crummy overdone special effects...
The Crawling Hand (1963)
Remarkably mediocre.
This is not a great movie. It's definitely a B movie. It was clearly done on a low budget, belongs to a generally unremarkable genre, and has a plot that leaves much to be desired. For all that, it's actually not nearly as bad as would be expected.
The major premise (that in space there is some kind of immateriel life form that possesses human flesh and wants to kill people) is obscurely bogus, yes, but many much better movies are open to the same criticism. SpiderMan's premise is hardly more realistic, for example, but that is a major motion picture and gets very good reviews.
Then there's the plot. Sure, it's a little thin, but the movie does *have* a discernible plot (not something you can take for granted in a B-grade movie), and what is more, the plot is quite coherent. You do not find yourself confused part-way through about what is going on, which of the people on the screen are from which group (good guys, bad guys, et cetera), or any of the other vagaries that often haunt the plots of lousy movies. The plot isn't deep, but as far as it goes it is solid.
The acting, moreover, is not bad. I did not notice a single instance of noticeably poor acting. Not that anyone's going to win any awards for the acting in this movie, but they don't do anything to break all pretenses of mimesis and make you want to scream at the actors, either. This is fairly unusual, especially for such an obviously low-budget flick, and extra-especially in the horror genre. You expect, in a movie of this sort, to be disgusted when actors stutter, scream at the wrong times, leave long pauses between lines, and have wooden, unlifelike expressions on their faces. I didn't notice any of that, unless you count characters who were at the time possessed by the alien life form, and that was clearly a deliberate charactarization of the menace as quirkily unhuman.
As for the writing, I've seen worse. The characters were mostly flat and static, but horror movies seldom make any pretenses about having round, dynamic characters. Only a couple of the characters were really obvious stereotypes (notably, the scientists' boss and the deputy).
Probably the worst thing about this movie is that the ending quite obviously left things wide open for a sequel.