krotkruton Reviews

The Forgotten Ones (2009 Video)

so-so

[4/10 · 10 May 2009]

Recipe for this movie: Start off with "The Descent" Replace cast of girls with one likable actress and others no one will care about Change setting to jungle Make the bat-like creatures into monkey-like creatures, but keep the blindness and echo-location because, you know, monkeys are like that too. End on a Hollywood happy note

If it wasn't so similar to "The Descent" or had come out first, I probably would have like it more. It didn't have the grittiness, the terror, the bad ass lead character. On top of that, the plot is pretty obvious and your typical Hollywood formula. It just doesn't measure up. It's not a bad movie, it just doesn't have any of the qualities that made "The Descent" so great.

AVH: Alien vs. Hunter (2007 Video)

worst movie ever?

[1/10 · 9 May 2009]

Sometimes a movie is so bad that it's good (i.e. Night of the Comet). This isn't one of those movies.

Some movies are so bad that you wish you had never seen them. This would be one of those movies, but it has one redeeming quality: it sets a new benchmark for horrible sci-fi / horror movies. Once you've seen it, you'll watch other movies and find yourself saying, "Well, at least it wasn't as bad as 'Alien vs. Hunter'".

Looking past the fact that this is a complete ripoff of "AVP", the acting and production quality aren't too bad. What ruins this movie is the plot / script (not sure what word is best here). It's not that the movie is confusing by any means, like when a complicated movie gets edited too much and loses its meaning, although it does seem that editing is at least part of the problem. There are plot holes left and right, and I constantly found myself wondering why the characters acted as they did. Sometimes you could chalk it up to the typical "girl runs upstairs to avoid murderer" nonsense used to draw the plot along, but other times it just seemed to be random events strung together. It would be like watching a movie where a guy is running from a monster towards an abandoned hospital then the monster is chasing him through a house of mirrors at a fun house.

And now my brain hurts from trying to think about the movie. Go see it if you want your brain to hurt.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

amazing - great for anyone tired of the negative conflicts

[10/10 · 19 February 2008]

First off, this movie is amazing. I consider myself a bit of a cinemaphile and have sat through a lot of good/bad movies. While I enjoy them, I'm a bit tired of all the "conflict" driven movies and television shows out there that focus on the negative conflicts. Sure, you can make an amazing and thought-provoking movie out of showing the worst people in the worst situations and introducing those people to other horrible people in other bad situations, but those movies are so common that only those that present the worst of the worst have a real impact anymore.

To me, "Lars and the Real Girl" takes a totally different approach. It takes a tough situation and shows how much good people can do when they try to help someone. Lars lives in the kind of town I would hope to live in. The town reacts in the way I would hope my town would react. Instead of showing all the negative aspects of the situation, this film brings things together to show what it means to be understanding.

I wouldn't classify this as a funny movie. There were a few parts that I laughed about, but I wasn't laughing at the movie. I wouldn't classify this as sad either. It's touching in the way people respect each other, but it's not the type of thing to cry over. This is the kind of movie that you watch, and afterwards you feel a little bit better about the people around you. Relating to my original point, this movie is the opposite of "Requiem for a Dream" or "Running Scared", but it hit me just as hard as they did. This is a movie about what it means to be a good person, and that's so nice to see sometimes.

Puppy (2005)

hard to define this movie, which is part of what makes it great

[10/10 · 7 December 2006]

First off, I only checked the "spoiler" box for the next paragraph I'm going to write, so if you really want to, you can read everything after that.

This movie is kind of like taking a watered down (and by watered down, I mean not so psychotic) Buffulo Bill from Silence of the Lambs and send him out on a date with the bad girl from Poison Ivy. A little while into the movie, I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen in the end, only I didn't believe that the movie actually had the balls to do it. You don't see a lot of movies that deviate from the Hollywood norm for their genre and are still able to pull it off well. The other thing that really did it for me was that the people, for the most part, acted the way I would if I was in their messed up situation. There is nothing even close to a "girl runs up the stairs because she is being chased by a psychopath" scene. As the girl realizes she is dealing with someone who obviously doesn't have a good grasp on reality, instead of crying in the corner, she uses his illness against him. That is hard to find in movie about crazy people.

With that said, this movie is great for plenty of reasons. The acting is well done, and you actually care about the characters. I was constantly wondering what would happen to them, when one of them would snap, who would end up safe, etc. There were plenty of twists and turns to throw you off the scent at time, and a lack of twists at others so as to not be predictable. As I said above, although I figured out how the movie was going to end (or at least figured out how I wanted it to end), I didn't actually believe it until it happened. This movie is definitely worth watching for fans of thrillers or psychological movies. There is not a lot of violence so anyone who is faint of heart can enjoy it too. There might have been a couple startling moments, but nothing that made me flinch. All in all, great movie.

Vlad (2003)

Simply put, average

[5/10 · 18 January 2006]

I read a couple of the other reviews of this movie and didn't think that most of them were fair. I really think this was just an average movie, not a good or bad movie, just average.

I watch a lot of movies and love anything about vampires, but this movie didn't really do it for me. There was a lot of information about Vlad, but there wasn't a whole lot of info about vampires. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that the causes are Vlad's vampirism were nothing you haven't heard before if you've seen more than one vampire movie. With all the build up about Vlad, I was hoping for a more original plot. However, I don't think that because the movie failed to be original that it should count against it, I just think it shouldn't be praised for it either.

Besides the plot, the movies did have a pretty good production value. I'd say that it was a bit better than a made-for-TV movie but obviously not a big budget film. Just because it's an independent movie doesn't mean that its great. Independent companies put out plenty of bad movies, but this falls somewhere in-between.

I wouldn't say this movie is worth watching, but I don't regret watching it either.