#miserable sfx

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/2014/02/20140206-horror-review-hatchet-2.html

One line summary: Expedition to the swamp to recover bodies turns out badly.

Two stars of five

Cinematography: 6/10 Not too bad, but never really fine.

Sound: 9/10 One of the better parts of the film.

Acting: 4/10 The usual for low budget elimination derbies.  Danielle Harris was not in her best form.  Tony Todd was good.  Most of the others were not.  I do wish they had hired an accent coach.

Screenplay: 4/10 Simple plot, but it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

SFX: 4/10 Lots of splatter, lots of fake internal organs. Not much of it was very convincing.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/02/20140203-scifi-review-alien-dawn.html

One line summary: Full of sound and fury, signifying less than nothing.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Some of it is bad; much of the rest is really bad.  The found footage parts were as atrocious as expected.

Sound: 2/10 Terrible.  Leveling was done by someone who hates audiences. 

Acting: 0/10 Terrible.  All the performances. All the characters are unlikeable.  There are too many absurd arguments about ridiculous non-issues.  If one is going to have a mostly eastern European cast, why not film in eastern Europe to save money?

Screenplay: 0/10 Very stupid dialog.  Rips off War of the Worlds and Skyline rather openly. The depictions of ultimate stupidity (Woman asks for water. Man forces a cup of bleach down her throat.  Man gets excited; does not know why the woman is suddenly in acute distress.) were fairly convincing.  How are such lame, incompetent people to make any progress against the aliens?  Cell phones work during this invasion?  Not for long. The military hands out heavy weapons to civilians?  Nope.

SFX: 0/10 Incredibly bad. One of the worst jobs I have ever seen, beginning to end.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/01/20140129-scifi-review-100-degrees-below.html

One line summary: Family tries to reunite while natural disaster strikes Europe.

Two stars of five.

Cinematography: 7/10 Not too bad, but has a habit of soft focus.

Sound: 6/10 Incidental music was varied between irritating and irrelevant.  The actors were miked well enough.

Acting: 3/10 John Rhys-Davies and Jeff Fahey were wasted in this film.  Sara Malakul Lane, Marc Ewins, and Ivan Kamaras were truly bad.

Screenplay: 4/10 How many times do the son and daughter need to fall down or say 'are you okay?  In any case, the repeats were more than a bit much.  How did the 'rising seas' figure into the plot?  How were the planes able to fly to Australia, but not around Europe?  These were not the only plot points that make no sense.  For instance, during a cell phone conversation, the kids say that only the Eiffel Tower was standing whereas one's eyes show everything still standing around them.

SFX: 2/10 Hail the size of basketballs?  This was mighty unconvincing.  Even worse, one of them grazes Ryan and knocks him down and out.  In contrast, Taryn raises her dainty foot and knocks another one away by touching it.  It's nice to know that physics is controlled by PC.  The CGI of storms out at sea was also beyond unbelievable.  Why was there rain on the windshield during a snowstorm?

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2014/01/20140106-action-review-hansel-and-gretel.html

One line summary: Acting, screenplay, SFX, sound: black holes.

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

Cinematography: 5/10 Amateurish. The re-use of some of the campus stock footage was beyond irritating. Some short clips were each repeated at least ten to twelve times.

Sound: 0/10 Fracking hideous.  The sound has multiple personalities: (a) pieces of the score sound as if they were made in the 1970s by an out of work composer with a lesser grade synthesizer (b) other pieces are florid, symphonic, and ridiculous for an action film (c) another set of background music is second rate industrial, say late 1990s.  Some of the conversations were very badly miked, and sounded noticeably hollow.

Acting: 0/10 The leads were dull non-actors who are a huge anchor around the neck of this drowning film. Booboo, in particular, is so poor that it is painful to watch any scene he is in.  His attempts to read a sentence from a book were pathetic.  Judy Norton and Eric Roberts were wasted.  Roberts' slurred speech in the early scenes sounded as if he was recovering from something, and that hair cut was laughable.  What was the director thinking?

Screenplay: 0/10 Why would an ineffective ruffian (Jonah) be placed in an elite prep school?  It's like asking a fish to walk 100 miles in a desert at the height of summer.  What were the real reasons that he was admitted? Why would his sister go as well? The answers come late, and were not that interesting when they showed up.  The dialog was between sub-standard and just plain bad.  The great dramatic moment at the end was a complete dud.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/12/20131226-scifi-review-grey-skies.html

One line summary: Bad SFX, bad acting, bad screenplay trump the reasonable camera work.

One star of five.

Cinematography: 7/10 Well done for a low budget film.

Sound: 8/10 Not too bad.

Acting: 0/10 Michael Cornacchia and Anne Griffin were absolutely terrible.  Stacy Jorgensen was also rather bad.  The others were unconvincing.

Screenplay: 2/10 There are lots of inconsistencies about what the aliens can do.  There was a large percentage of the film that was just plain boring.  The pointless yelling sequences were very irritating.

SFX: 2/10 Amateurish; special effects were laughably bad.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/12/20131221-action-review-alien-uprising.html

One line summary: This was one of the poorest indie films I've seen from the UK.

One star of five.  Black holes for acting, screenplay, SFX.

Cinematography: 4/10  There was way too much shaky camera work.

Sound: 8/10 OK, though sound levels get out of bounds now and then.

Acting: 1/10 Jeez, terrible.  JC van Damme was by far the best, but he did not have all that many lines. 

Screenplay: 2/10 Showed early promise, then went down hill.  Badly.

SFX: 0/10 Bad, terrible, looks poor as in 1970s poor.

http://moviessuite92online.blogspot.com/2013/12/20131202-horror-review.html

One line summary: Recalculate the dates: the Mayan apocalypse is on!

One star of five.  Black holes for screenplay, SFX, and acting.

Cinematography: 7/10 Daylight scenes should be sharp and good to look at. The film starts in washed out, low contrast mode.  I felt like I was watching VHS output from a tape player with dirty heads. Color contrast was low as well.

Sound: 5/10 Too much maniacal laughter.  Some of the incidental music is poor.

Acting: 0/10 Some of the worst I have ever seen.  Enough fake laughing to last twenty years.

Screenplay: 2/10 Stupid dialog plus terminally stupid dialog.  Very little in the way of natural motivation.

SFX: 2/10 Poor.