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Sophiapediac
Reviews
Out of Time (2021)
High watchability-to-budget-size ratio
It's not a completely original story; it starts out almost exactly like The Hidden (1987), only with three bad body-hopping aliens pursued by one time-traveler posing as an FBI agent, along with a reluctant local cop who has to be convinced these are aliens, instead of one bad body-hopping alien pursued by one good body-hopped alien posing as an FBI agent, also along with a reluctant local cop who has to be convinced, etc. (Also note that the FBI agent here is named "Cooper," which was Kyle MacLachlan's character's name in "Twin Peaks"; MacLachlan played the FBI agent in The Hidden.) Also, the idea of a time-traveling good-guy and/or cop from the past chasing one or more bad guys into the future was used in the movie Time After Time (1979), among others, and more recently in the TV series Continuum (2012-15), and probably a few others whose titles I can't remember.
That said, it's a good movie, considering the low budget. The supporting cast could be better, but the two main characters are well-acted enough. The special effects and dialogue are probably the biggest weaknesses, and there are plenty of cliches involved, but overall it's worth seeing, and maybe even fun in spots.
The Car: Road to Revenge (2019)
This could have easily been a lot better
The thing about the original 1977 movie, what made it both scary and compelling, was that you never got to know why the car was killing people, it just did it. And they weren't bad people either, they were just ordinary people doing ordinary things, and you were introduced to them as such before the car killed them.
By setting up this film as a conventional revenge-from-the-grave story with stereotypical goth-clown villains and what we're allowed to assume is an AI-controlled car (which doesn't even look intimidating), all of that is lost. When the possibility of a supernatural explanation is introduced mid-way through, it's too late - at that point, the audience rightly sees that car as little more than a means of advancing the ho-hum murder-revenge plot-line. It's not scary enough in itself to take over the movie, like the original car did.
People will say, "it's a low-budget film, so don't have such high expectations," but the original film had a lower budget than this one, even in 1977 dollars, and it's considered a modern horror classic. There were good, creative ideas behind it which this one just doesn't have.
Liu lang di qiu (2019)
Special Effects used as a weapon
Probably the highest CGI-budget-to-scientific-implausibility ratio in movie history, this film literally pummels you with special effects footage until you basically have to leave the theater or turn it off. Half the movie is just shot after shot of rocks and blocks of ice falling on speeding earth-movers. It never lets up. The acting actually isn't all that terrible, except for the token non-Chinese character who is used as comic relief. As for the music, at least you can turn that down.
That said, we have to accept that the Chinese didn't come up with this style of film-making themselves, they got it from Hollywood, and I have to assume they took all the worst aspects of it because that's what Chinese moviegoers want to see - or at least that's what they think they want to see. As the Chinese movie industry's capabilities mature and their talents are developed, they'll produce fewer movies like this and more that are genuinely good, if not great. They obviously have enough money to spend on them.