#miserable acting

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/10/20141002-drama-review-drones.html

One line summary: Drone operators debate moral issues during a mission.

One star of five. Two black holes for sound and acting.

Setup and Plot

Jack Bowles flies drone missions because he is good at games and using game controllers.  He's better at it than most career military personnel.  However, his gamer attitudes and general lack of maturity leave him little likelihood of advancement in the ranks.  Sue Lawson is gung-ho military, but she has a detached retina which takes her out of being an in-the-air pilot.  So, she's paired with Jack and is his superior officer.  He's more experienced and skilled in flying remote drone missions.

The awkwardness of their getting to know each other is almost tangible, rather like discovering one has stepped hard on someone else's used and discarded chewing gum.  Fortunately, that phase ends while they are flying recon against a target (Mahmud Kahlil) in the Middle East.

The pair misidentify a civilian as the target, and alert their superiors, who alert their superiors.  When the protagonists rescind their initial assessment, they receive verbal fire in return.

Will the pair destroy their target and avoid killing civilians?  Will the translations from Pashto be accurate enough?  Will the moral debate ever end? Will the protagonists follow orders even if it means killing civilians?

Scores

Cinematography: 6/10 Ugly as anything; then again, so was the film's subject.

Sound: 2/10 I can usually make out the dialogue, but the music in the sound track is annoying.  Also, the sound levels are quite variable.  To keep up with the voice but avoid being blasted out by the music, one needs to be on the volume control often.

Acting: 0/10

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/10/20141001-horror-review-kill-zombies.html

One line summary: A bad, unfunny zombie comedy from the Netherlands.

One star of five.  Two black holes for SFX and acting.

Setup and Plot

Aziz works in a grinding office job in the Netherlands.  His boss is a pain, but tall and attractive Tess seems to like him.  Perhaps life is OK on the balance, or is this the high point for Aziz?

Aziz loses his job due to his brother Mo, then considers starting a new business with the same brother.  At that point, six minutes into the film, my respect for the protagonist dropped to zero.  Since the film is purportedly a comedy, I kept watching.

The fired Aziz goes to the party from which Mo got him fired.  Mo proceeds to anger the host of the party, a black drug dealer.  The host sets two of his lackeys on the brothers; a fight ensues and all four are arrested.  In holding cells, they witness some of Officer Kim's dexterity.

The next morning, the cell doors open.  The four jailed ones venture out to discover a landscape littered with the outcomes of fights between zombies and normals.  Aziz starts into his voicemail, and notes a couple of calls from Tess.  She implores him to come rescue her from the building where the space station fragment stuck that started the zombie outbreak.

That is the end of the setup that might be different from a few other zombie films.  The bulk of the film concerns the attempt by Aziz to rescue Tess within the zombie apocalypse.  The ending was not worth waiting for.

Scores

Cinematography: 4/10 I have seen worse.

Sound: 0/10 Pointless.  The subtitles, I think, were roughly accurate.

Acting: 2/10

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/04/20140422-thriller-review-mark.html

One line summary: Mostly ineffective action film with spiritual overtones.

Two stars of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Poor close-ups accompanied by camera shake. Stupid camera angles.

Sound: 7/10 The actors are miked OK. The music is not all that effective.

Acting: 2/10 Absurdly bad. The lead actor, Craig Sheffer, is perhaps the worst of them all, with Gary Daniels a close second. The pair who played the pilot and co-pilot were terrible.

Screenplay: 4/10 The dialog is odd and stilted, especially where Christian beliefs are being injected. There is not much story stretched over 92 minutes.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/04/20140412-scifi-review-bermuda-tentacles.html

One line summary: Bad script plus horde of non-actors trump three good actors.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 5/10 Most of it was OK, though not good; the CGI was laughable.

Sound: 4/10 Lots of sound and fury, signifying very little.  Seriously, the music was too blasted loud in spots, to no good effect.  The actors were mostly miked OK.

Acting: 3/10 How did Linda Hamilton, Jamie Kennedy, and John Savage get stuck in this mess?  Compared to everyone else, those three were just excellent, despite the poor lines.  Trevor Donovan, Mya, and Tiffany Pulvino were incredibly bad.  Mya, in particular, was so bad that this film did not even deserve 1/5.  The large cast seemed to be composed mostly of non-actors. 

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/04/20140405-horror-review-germ-z.html

One line summary: Space borne bacteria yield ultra-fast zombies.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 5/10 Occasional exposure mistakes, too many doses of shaky camera, way too much of the idiot biking in the woods while listening to her MP3 player.  Blood effects range from poor to terrible.  A woman barfs inside the deputy's cruiser, mostly onto the inside of the windshield.  In one shot it's yellow; in the next it's blue, but still yellow on her mouth.  The end credits were badly done.

Sound: 4/10 I could hear the dialog; this was a mixed blessing.  The music was very amateurish.  The plus 4 was mostly for the song during the end credits.

Acting: 0/10 Marguerite Sundberg, Michael Flores, and Mark Chiappione were irritating on the one hand, not interesting on the other hand. The actors who played the military were the worst.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/03/20140322-drama-review-cargo.html

One line summary: A much better film was Abduction of Eden, 2012.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 7/10 Mostly OK.

Sound: 7/10 I could hear the lines spoken.  Music was mercifully minimal.

Acting: 0/10 I would have liked to have seen some acting in this two-character film.  One might as well have teleprompter messages instead of people mouthing words.  Neither was believable, even when they revealed that they had been lying previously.  Who cares?  This goes beyond the rottenness of the screenplay.  The bit players were almost as bad as the principals.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/03/20140320-horror-review.html

One line summary: Avoid this ersatz zombie film plus poor action film.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 3/10 Dark.  Poor camera angles.  Colour palettes so reduced as to be only slightly different than greyscale.

Sound: 4/10 Horrible accents.  Background music was not an asset.

Acting: 0/10 Terrible performances.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/03/20140316-horror-review-darkwolf.html

One line summary: Poor cinematography and sound complement bad acting and screenplay.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Some very bad SFX.  Odd camera angles, sudden switches to closeups of very bad werewolf masks, some shaky camera.  The SFX of the DarkWolf in four-footed mode are particularly poor.

Sound: 4/10 The actors are often poorly miked; the voices are often hollow or overdriven. In some segments, the music is looped with an overlay of moans, gasps, and groans.  One might as well be watching and adult film.

Acting: 2/10 The two leads, Samaire Armstrong and Ryan Alosio, are particularly poor at delivering lines.  When Samaire Armstrong tries to sound authoritative and commanding, she sounds screechy and ineffective instead.  It was nice to see Tippi Hedren again, but her role was rather abbreviated.