J*A*S*M

A very nice start and middle, but that sudden ending was like a cold shower – like, “good, but that’s it?”

Fortunately (and given the mixed responses), I managed to avoid most of the hype before this film made it to Czech cinemas and today I was able to truly enjoy it. I don’t know what half of the reviewers watched, but it can’t have been this hearty and spooky ghost story that even made a group of teenagers in the last row go quiet (before the film started they were speaking loudly and throwing popcorn at each other). The night sequences are terrifying, but the scenes during the day are also good, with the occasional joke to lighten things up. We can argue about the behaviour of the characters and their reasons to film in some moments, but who wants to go there? Oren Peli gets my respect and I’m looking forward to Area 51. PS: The cinema ending from 2009 is better, scarier and more striking than the alternative ending from 2007.

This film left me with only negative feelings, I haven’t seen anything less likeable for quite some time. My Sister´s Keeper is emotional blackmail in its purest form and I consider it a personal success that it didn’t affect me. In “dead serious” dramas, children should never be more mature than adults, period. The actors and the direction are excellent, though.

I’m not really thrilled about this film (I expected a bit more), but it’s still a pretty good (not-quite) zombie flick. During the first fifteen minutes, however, it didn’t look like that; I won’t lie, at the beginning I was shocked at how awful this film, which I had been looking forward to for several months, looked. Unreasonably frantic cinematography, music (or rather, noises) that almost drove me insane, characters that even a humanitarian would want to kill… there was a lot that bothered me. But those things eventually go away (or I got used to them, I’m a flexible person :D) and are followed by a very interesting atmosphere (a post-apocalyptic French winter), some nastiness here and there and, especially, perfect looking mutants. In the end I had a lot of fun, but there’s plenty that prevents the highest rating: a pretty ordinary story (but with a nice core premise), unlikeable characters (with one exception) and an excessively frantic camera. That said, Mutants is not a taint on the French horror new wave.

If I were Barney Stinson, I wouldn’t have expected anything from Summer’s Blood and I wouldn’t have been disappointed. It’s Canada, after all… It’s not utterly bad, I can imagine that I would like it if it was my first abduction thriller or horror. But today this subgenre is already exhausted, and Summer’s Blood is certainly not the film that can bring it back to life.

I don’t want to be a heretic, but even though Thirst is a hundred times better and more original than Twilight, I had more fun with the latter – at its expense, yes, but at least something. Thirst is the kind of film that mixes genres so fiercely that their effects don’t multiply but actually cancel each other out. Clearly, it does work on many people, but not on me, unfortunately. I only enjoyed the last forty minutes or so, which raised it to three stars.

I will start my review with an invective: Kill the editor! It’s been very long since I saw action scenes so confusing, there were many times when I couldn’t be sure whether a monster got a person or a person a monster (and I’m complaining about this as someone who loves REC, Seventh Moon, Cloverfield...!) Given the premise, Pandorum could have been an incredibly depressive and oppressive film, but Alvart conceived it as an action B-movie (instead of a new Alien, it’s a new Resident Evil, in space), and only at the very end does it show the masterpiece it could have been. The twist and its outcome are not as original as it’s sometimes claimed (a couple of months ago I read something very similar in a book), but they do feel fresh. Unfortunately, however, the script doesn’t deliver them with the force they deserve. Thumbs up for the premise, the atmosphere, the monsters, the final insanity and the twist, thumbs down for the editing, the flaws, the characters and the lack of horror. 70%

Bad, very bad. Not even my great love for humanoid monsters can make me give a better rating to this awfully acted bullshit. Really, a very bad job in many aspects. Actually, in all aspects.

Pilot: A very promising premise, but the execution is a little too weak and shallow, it doesn’t go very deep and the story moves forward at supersonic speed. I can imagine the events of the first episode could be told in five episodes, without it feeling like filler. Elizabeth and Joel, or rather, Juliet and Tom are good. I’ll probably keep on watching, but I hope they slow down a little… 7/10

I confess that despite the excellent responses, I didn’t believe in Zombieland, at all. The trailer didn’t interest me in the slightest and given how much I (didn’t) like that other highly praised zombie comedy (Shawn of the Dead), I expected 80 minutes of boredom and suffering. Fortunately, the heroes of Zombieland are a lot more likeable than the gang around Simon Pegg. Where I fundamentally disagree with most other reviewers is in my opinion about the course of the film. I consider the beginning as the weakest part (those first fifteen minutes made me fear a new Shawn, with the corresponding two stars), the quiet moments in the middle (the interactions of the characters) as the best, and the action-packed climax as a fun end to the ride. BM’s cameo was awesome!