#miserable cinematography

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/02/20140220-horror-review-exit-to-hell.html

One line summary: Bad screenplay, acting, cinematography; gratuitous skin and cannibalism jokes.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 1/10 VHS quality or worse; bad editing all around.  Cheap jack coloured lights and filters.

Sound: 2/10 Terrible incidental music, especially the nonsense coming from that ancient AM radio played extra loud.

Acting: 2/10 So much of the acting was not even amateurish.  The +2 is for Kane Hodder and Dan Higgins.

Screenplay: 3/10 Yakov kills his accountant inside a paramedics van.  The accountant flatlines right there; the paramedic (ten feet away) does not notice this?  The cops are there; the paramedics don't call them?  The film did have a beginning, middle, and end, of sorts.  It's just that all of them were written and executed badly.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/02/20140209-horror-review-big-bad.html

Vanity film, since screenwriter = lead actor = co-producer => 3 x fail.

One line summary:  Bad werewolf script overshadowed by terrible camera work.

One star of five

Cinematography: 2/10 Framing, lighting, focus, depth of field, and continuity errors---all suck rocks.  Throw in shaky camera.

Sound: 4/10 Not very good.  I needed the subtitles all too often.

Acting: 0/10  Uniformly bad.

Screenplay: 0/10 That opening was -8 points all by itself.  The film's plot development was as murky and jerky as the camera work.  None of the characters were interesting.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/02/20140201-movie-review-upstream-color.html

Some of the words and phrases I see applied to this film are cerebral, artistic, intellectual, 'artistic side of the brain,' beautiful, compelling and so on.  I would counter with pretentious, ugly, pointless, unfocused, deficient, ill-planned, bovine scatology.

One line summary: It takes considerable skill to make a film this bad.

One star of five.  Four black holes for cinematography, sound, acting, and screenplay.

Cinematography: 0/10 Some stretches of this film show expertise.  Based on that, one must figure that the poor quality of the film was a choice.  Poor framing, poor focus, poor depth of field, jerky camera, massive, avoidable flair not avoided, and so on.  The number of abrupt meaningless transitions is rather high, in the hundreds at least.

Sound: 0/10 The incidental music is irritating at best, mind numbingly bad at worst.  The voice miking is rather variable.  I had my hand on the volume control just so I could attempt to hear the dialog or not be drowned out by the atrocious music.  In several passages, the visuals have the characters silent while the sound from another scene is being played.  This choice not to synchronise is repellant.

Acting: 0/10 Speaking without affect: no smiles, no frowns, no sparkling eyes, no concern.  Fire the casting director as well as the director.  Most of all, lose the two lead actors.  High school actors with calm faces could have done as well.

Screenplay: 0/10 Death by a thousand (editing) cuts.  Remember the fable of 'The Emperor Has No Clothes.'  This movie sucks rocks.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/01/20140130-movie-review-persona.html

One line summary: Poorly made Japanese export that is slow, boring, non-engaging.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Poor, VHS quality or worse.  Grainy, pixelated images, washed out appearance, camera shake.

Sound: 6/10 The incidental music sucks rocks.

Acting: 2/10 There was acting? Poor fight choreography.

Screenplay: 2/10 Enough of the girl fighter PC nonsense.  Very little story spread over 84 minutes.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/11/20131127-drama-review-end-of-watch.html

One line summary: A good script tarnished by terrible camera work.

Three stars of five.

Cinematography: 0/10 The film used button cams, security footage, and various hand-held cameras to give a deeply incompetent presentation.

Sound: 8/10 Fairly good considering the video.

Acting: 6/10 Who can tell what the actors are doing when the cameras are out of control?  Gyllenhaal and Pena were great, despite the director's contempt for the viewer; otherwise I would give this category a zero.

Screenplay: 5/10 Way, way, way too many abrupt cuts.  The thing looks like a quilt made from left over cloth pieces put together with duct tape.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/11/20131123-horror-review-area-407.html

This is yet another found-film, hand-held camera, cheap, bad production.  Why does a US air marshal have an Aussie accent?  Why does the blood on everyone never dry, never run, nor change colour as it must?

One line summary: The worst in found film; lots of closeups of bloody faces; not much plot.

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

Cinematography: 0/10 Hand-held nonsense.  All the usual failures are there: continuous and unnecessary zooming, bad focus, bad framing, settling on a subject who is doing nothing other than zoning out.

Sound: 5/10 Varies wildly.  Trish's high pitched voice rates a good minus four.

Acting: 0/10 The hand-held camera trumps acting.

Screenplay: 2/10 Is there a story here?  Way too much time is spent on the camera zooming and re-zooming and focusing on characters who are basically not moving, not talking.  So far it is: plane crash, deaths, scramble, hope for rescue, then hopes dashed.  Looks like a nice ten minute short.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/11/20131108-horror-review-vhs.html

One line summary: Thieves review ever more horrifying tapes in order to get paid.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Features low-end cameras, bad framing, insufficient light, bad focus, and terrible lack of contrast.  Then of course, there are shaking camera movements, anti-relevant POV, and old bad recording media.  One of my least favorites is where the camera is left on to record time going by in a room where nothing moves, often in complete darkness.

Sound: 5/10 Who cares?  More often noise than anything else: audio chaos to go with the video chaos.

Acting: 0/10 The only actor of note is the camera.  The camera trumps the efforts of all actors.

Screenplay: 2/10 Boring.  Short on plot.  Badly executed with next to zero motivation.  Worst of all, not the least bit scary.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/10/20131031-horror-review-paranormal.html

Boring, murky, non-engaging.  Please, let it be over.

One line summary: Third sequel in a popular series.

One star of five; two blackholes for cinematography and screenplay.

Cinematography: 0/10 Hand-held cameras.  Built-in laptop cameras.  Badly done.  Wretched editing.  Zero of ten is just not low enough.  Hire some competent cinematographers next time.  I've seen movies with budgets of 50,000 USD that look 20 times better than this hideous mess.  Why should I be spending so much time (around half of the picture) trying to figure out who is on camera?  This thing is appallingly bad.

Sound: 2/10 Whenever anything remotely resembling something interesting comes up, the sound is worthless (blaring or silent).  During transitions, there tends to be unexplained booms and bumps.  After an hour of this, with no discernible reason to call this a horror picture, I'm desensitized.  When the sound track goes bump, the movie had conditioned me not to care, not to react.  By the time the depiction of the 'supernatural' elements start, I just don't care.

Acting: 4/10 Hire some actors next time; with a budget of 5 million USD, there should be plenty of competent actors ready to do a better job.

Screenplay: 0/10 What screenplay?  They shot some film and assembled in post.  Why is the boy Robbie not with Social Services? Why is his mother not under psychiatric care?  Those would be the correct decisions, and would have terminated this mess very much earlier.  One of the most comical foul-ups in the later part of the film was when Alex was dragged across the street, but still manages to keep filming.  This continues right up to her final encounter with the circle-triangle group.  There is no sense to be made of this.