rick-463 Reviews

Bathory: Countess of Blood (2008)

So much potential, but a crushing disappointment

[4/10 · 1 July 2009]

If you are a fan of the Bathory legend, Gothic period films or Anna Friel, this is worth a watch, mostly for Anna Friel's performance and the high quality technical aspects of the film (the cinematography, set design and costume design are fantastic and help the film come off as quite epic at times). I also really liked the twist on the Bathory tale, which I wont describe here to avoid spoilers but I will say it may be the best thing to come from the film. There were times I truly enjoyed watching Bathory and was enthralled by the story.

But having said all these nice things and recommending a watch for certain people, I cannot emphasize enough how dreadful this film was. The dialog was horrible, many of the actors in important roles come off as amateur at best, and the worst crime here is the addition of the monks as poorly conceived vehicles for exposition and totally unnecessary comic relief. This element of the film is so terribly bad and inappropriate that whoever introduced it into this film needs to never, ever be involved in making another movie again because they are clearly incompetent. That may sound over the top, but I cannot stress enough how much it hurt this film. I saw the need for exposition, but it could have been done in a myriad of more appropriate ways, and the comic aspects were so completely out of place here it killed any mood the film created. It truly helped ruin what could have been a fantastic movie.

That is the most obvious example of what makes Bathory so disappointing - seeing the potential of what could have been great constantly squandered by bad film making. They made a world class epic film with excellent technical work, a great re-imagining of the Bathory legend and a good performance by Ms. Friel, but regularly sabotaged it. The entire time I watched it the thought running through my mind was "It could have been so good!", so it was quite a frustrating experience.

I gave Bathory a 4 which I think is fair. To explain - on one hand it may deserve a bit higher rating, but on the other hand I was originally going to give it a 2 or 3 simply because when the film was at it's best you see it could have been an 8 - 10 but they just kept ruining it. I went higher because I felt a score that low wouldn't give enough credit to the people who did a very good job in an otherwise bad film but anything over a 4 would be rewarding the incompetence as well.

What a missed opportunity.

Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America (2007)

I cannot believe a real studio is distributing this.

[2/10 · 24 January 2009]

EDIT/ADDITION - My review has been up for a couple of months, and 0 out of 4 people found it helpful, and the other negative reviews of this film are rated similarly. I don't know if it's the filmmakers, their friends and family, or staff at Magnet/Magnolia, but seriously - get a life. Whether a review is helpful or not should be based on how well it's written or what criteria the writer used to judge a film - not whether or not your brother made the movie and/or you disagree with the reviewers opinion. If the reasons why I judged the film were bad, sure, say it's unhelpful, but this movie was poorly made, and that's not the fault of either myself or the other people who gave this amateurish dreck bad reviews. I read and appreciate reviews that disagree with my taste all the time, but I would only rate opinions as unhelpful if they were based on bad judgment (like giving "A Trip To The Moon" a bad review because the 100 year old special effects weren't as cool as "Transformers"; which totally takes the film out of its context and is just plain retarded), not if they were simply expressing a different taste than mine.

You can rate our reviews as being unhelpful, but it won't get your film judged any better once people actually see it.

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ORIGINAL REVIEW

I had to see this for work at a film market and I almost died when I heard that Magnolia picked this up to release through their "Magnet" sub-label. You went from THE HOST and GONZO to this? Seriously?

This was like watching videos about vikings made for youtube or public access TV that some friends did over a weekend using a low quality home video camera, $100 and the kind of stuff only MacGyver could make something useful from (e.g. twigs, string, tape, etc). Now if that description sounds good to you, especially if you are into super cheesy "so bad it's good" films - let me tell you, it would sound good to me too but this is not in that category. It is not cheesy or fun, I think it is supposed to be serious and it is just so bad that it is, well, bad. This isn't crazy or super talented people make a cheap film, this is boring as hell people make a cheap film.

***SPOILER ALERT*** But not that much of a spoiler because that would imply something of merit actually happens during the film.

POV/Blair Witch-style cameras follow two vikings as they trudge through the woods. Every once in a while, something happens - first, after walking for awhile, a guy stops to take a dump in the bushes. The beauty of this "groundbreaking" scene is that in this movie you actually see it come out. I am not kidding - full backside shot of the poop chute in action, YUCK! There is a reason other films don't do that, mainly because most sane people don't want to see it. This is followed by another boring ten minutes of walking, then they kill and eat a chicken. Then another boring 10 minutes, they beat up a Christian missionary (as any good Viking should) and burn his stuff while Black Metal plays, which was the only sort of amusing thing I saw. Or maybe they burned up the monks stuff first and then ate the chicken, I can't recall. Does it matter? No, not really. And so on and so forth.

***END NOT MUCH OF A SPOILER ALERT***

I don't know if the people on here who are rating this a 10 saw a new cut where they added in a bunch of super awesome stuff, because what we all saw was boring and bad. Most of the viewers at the screening walked out, except for me and these super rowdy German guys I ended up getting drunk with. And I am stunned by the few good reviews from credible sources (LA Weekly, Variety) I have seen for this film, comparing it to Herzog and Dreyer, because I seriously saw very little of redeeming value, let alone film making of that sort of caliber.

Listen, I am not one of these armchair Internet critics who just like ripping stuff apart, I am very even handed review-wise. Also, I watch tons of film and my tastes range from super highbrow to super low budget schlock, so it's not that I am "above" this type of film due to budget or turned off by it's non-existent pace. But really, this is just terrible. Unless you really just want to see something so off the wall in it's badness that you will forgive that fact that it has no redeeming value whatsoever other than just being as horrible as a film can be - skip this film. It really is this bad.

If you want to see micro budget done right, try any film from The Stunt People (e.g. CONTOUR or UNDERCUT) or the twisted horror film POP SKULL. If you want to see an awesome viking movie, try OUTLANDER, one of the BEOWULF films, a dozen Scandanavian films or even the spam sketch from MONTY PYTHON. Even PATHFINDER was 10 times better than this.

I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 because of the Black Metal Viking destruction moment was pretty amusing.

Kill Zone (2005)

Great fight choreography, mediocre story

[8/10 · 14 November 2005]

This is some of the best fight choreography I have ever seen in 25+ years of watching martial arts films. The action was so exciting the entire crowd I was with in the theater were howling with delight. Sadly it is so rare nowadays to see a martial arts film where real martial artists are fighting instead of pop stars on wires, and it makes such a huge difference because Donnie, Sammo and Jacky Wu were simply incredible. My only complaint with the action was that there was not enough of it. Donnie Yen has finally joined the ranks of great fight choreographers with S.P.L.

As good as the action was though, the story fell flat for me and put the film into the "Very Good" category when it could have been "Great". They tried for an "Infernal Affairs" style police thriller and didn't nearly hit the mark. While Simon Yam and Sammo Hung were both great in their parts, the other acting was just functional and the story had way too much overdone melodramatic content that seemed very forced. The emotional arc of the picture was pretty much set up right at the beginning and would have been sufficient, but they had to keep laying on the unrealistic drama and it did slightly take away from my enjoyment of the film. Another criticism with the story was that it seemed like parts may have been cut from the film, because some pieces of the story that earlier had seemed pretty insignificant became a big deal towards the end of the film and it felt like it came out of nowhere, like we weren't told everything.

Having said that though, my negative criticism about the story should not stop you at all from seeing this film. I didn't go into S.P.L. expecting The Godfather, I just wanted to see some incredible martial arts action and I got it. I cannot wait to see what Donnie will do next.