After the mysterious death of a loved relative, reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) discovers the source behind the death and begins to investigate. What she begins to discover will be a descent into darkness and evil that will forever change her life. This was based on the original Japanese horror series of movies that took Japan by storm and became a classic. The execs at America took notice and decided to remake it hoping to spawn an equally engrossing hit. What is spawned by it is a truly horrific movie that has the makings of a masterpiece. The one thing that stood out from this movie is the incredible cinematography.
Tag Archives: Thriller
The Sum of All Fears (2002)
Formula 51 (2002)
There have been many rip-offs of “Pulp Fiction” over the past years, many movies mimicking the exact formula that made this influential movie so famous. This movie is an incredible mess including crude humor, a lot of which involving butts and farting, a running gag that plays throughout the movie about a common stereotype of African American genitalia, and a few plot holes here and there including one large one that made absolutely no sense. After Elmo McElroy is caught with marijuana, his potential career as a pharmacist is over. Thirty years later, a crime syndicate led by the Lizard wants his formula for the ultimate addictive drug POS Formula 51.
Murd3r By Num83r5 (2002)
The movie barely has any legs to stand on as far as a real story goes. The story is slow moving and often lagging, going on and on focusing on Sandra Bullock’s character, who is barely interesting to begin with. I like Sandra Bullock and know she’s capable of giving great performances in movies, but her selection of scripts is terrible. I found her character to be very unlikable and often annoying as her personality goes all over the place in the movie. I’m not sure if I can call this a true psychological thriller, based on the fact that the movie’s tension and atmosphere is all wrong and often very annoying.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)
“Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” sways the general public into thinking this is a sort of “Spy vs. Spy” film, but it’s not. It’s not “Ecks vs. Sever”, it’s “Ecks fights Sever for a while and then they become allies when they discover they’re fighting for the same cause”. But that would be a stupid long title, not like “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” which is… never mind. The film is chock full of clichés, meaningless violence, lapses in pure logic and plausibility, little to no character emphases, and plot holes galore. Antonio Banderas’ character Jeremiah Ecks is a mix of many, many tired and generic hero elements from previous action movies starring Sylvester Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and a lot of other people.
Empire (2002)
“Empire” is a fiasco for the record books, one that desperately tries to carve heroes out of thugs, gangsters, and deviants, and fails horribly. The movie, noticeably, takes much of its formula from better gangster flicks, including “Scarface” and rips apart the movies, taking each element, pasting it together in this. The entire narrative and pitiful attempts at character development are annoying, slow and so predictable it’s disgusting. Franc. Reyes directs this like a film student, never contributing anything new or different to talk about.
Metropolis (Metoroporisu) (2001)
Based on the comic book by Osamu Tezuka, we visit Metropolis, a humongous city where high-class humans roam free and robots toil and work underground occasionally surfacing illegally. We meet detective Shunsaku Ban and Ken-ichi two people searching for a scientist performing illegal experiments with robots. This is probably one of the most unusual anime movies I have ever seen. The entire animated sequence and character designs closely resemble the works of legendary animator Ralph Bakshi (Cool World, and Fritz the Cat). No two characters in this movie look alike and no two characters seem alike. Many people who hear about this seems to think this movie is an animated Japanese remake of the 1929 Fritz Lang “Metropolis”.