Ahoy, squirts! Quint here, quite pleased with himself over that headline. Extremely clever, ain't it? Here we have Dmann, who is certifiably insane. Or maybe I'm certifiable. Either way, I totally disagree with his review of SAW 2. I wish it worked as well for me as it did him, but he's nuts, so... Anyway, here is the crazy insane Dmann and his reviews of BLOODRAYNE and SAW 2!
BLOODRAYNE
Hey hey kids, Just came from the “World Premiere” (such as it was) for the newest Uwe Boll magnum Opus, Bloodrayne.
A little background. I’d never seen a Uwe Boll film. I’d never played a game for which Uwe Boll made a film. All I knew was that Quint fuckin haa-aa-aa-aa-tes him the way hookers hate herpes. But I’ve played Bloodrayne, I’m at a film festival that features Bloodrayne, oooh ooh ooh, do I get to hate Uwe Boll the way all my friends do? Sorta, not really.
Bloodrayne is, in short, the most amazing, fantastic, glorious piece of dog shit I have seen since god knows when, possibly the 80’s. In fact, so much of this movie reminded me of the wonderful crap from the 80s.
This movie sits along side of other amazing crap works from the 80s, back when you’d head down to the mom and pop video store, and scout the racks for such classic sword and leather films as the Deathstalker cycle, Beastmaster 2, and the Gor films.
Start with the setting, is it medieval, is it some fantasy age, where the hell is this place where people of all races and accents sort fo run around on horses with swords? Is it in Transylvania? If so, where did the latino actors come from? Why the hell is it medieval anyway, so they don’t have to use guns, and can instead use the cheapest, fake swords of all time? Just like all those stupendously crap movies from the 80s, they grabbed a bunch of soft fetish wear, some horses, and headed for a wooded area to shoot.
The Casting is a bit off, to really fit the 80s mold, Michael Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez and Ben Kingsley SHOULD have enough going in their careers that they don’t need this, but...sigh, they did.
Kristiana Lokken is good....looking. I liked seeing her chest, I guess. I can’t say whether her acting is any good, everything she’s given is so damn hamfisted, who knows if she has any talent. If the best Boll is going to give her is a goofy sex scene, at least give me some Terminatrix Tushie to stare at. Thanks for the boobs, tho.
Meatlof was good, although, that again, could have just been all the naked whores he was surrounded by, I’m not sure.
The real standout performance was a small bit by Michael Pare, as the weapons smith guy, I was completely convinced that Michael Pare was dead before this, and now, I actually have a reasonable doubt.
All in all, I had a blast watching this, and if you walk in with the right attitude, you might too. But honestly, it’s a flick better reserved for a bunch of friends watching on video, playing your own home game of Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
This isn’t my best review, but.... Um... I don’t know what else to say... it was bad.
SAW 2
Straight off the bat, let me say that this is about 10 billion times better than the original saw, a movie I frickin hated.
This one fixes everything that the original got wrong, and keeps everything I liked.
Like the first one, Saw 2 features characters thrust into a life or death situation, with no knowladge of how they got there, only to be told by the villain, referred to as “Jigsaw” that they must commit some horrific act or acts.
This time around, we have a bunch of people who wake up in a house with seemingly no connection to each other, only to be told that they have all been breathing in some sort of deadly Sarin type gas that will make them die in two hours, if they don't get some kind of antidote. You then have a bizarre device attached to the spyhole in the door kill one of them suddenly and we all buy that the deadly gas is real. This was actually a decent way of getting around the whole “yeah right, deadly gas my foot” problem. Kill one of the characters and it feels right that they all are going along.
Director Darren Lynn Bousman does a pretty good job of keeping the suspense going, especially in the first half, where the characters keep following along with the traps laid out before them. They feel like things that you COULD escape, but it would suck, just like the foot thing in the first one.
We are treated to a good performacnce from Glenn Plummer, who is always pretty solid, even in some of the bad roles he had since I personally first noticed him in South Central. Plummer manages to give something meaty to a part that so many actors would have played as a straight thug, including at least one in this film.
Among the others that are trapped in the house is also Shawnee Smith, who you will remember from the original movie as the girl in the crazy iron jaw that looked like Trent Reznor and John Millius designed it on a meth spree in a welding shop. She’s back in the eyes of our jigsaw killer, and gives us a pretty good performance, especially in one insane scene that will make the needle phobic in the audience’s buttholes pucker right up like you dropped alum in them.
Don’t let me forget about the “B” plot, or is it the “A” plot, I’m not quite sure, because one thing this installment in the Saw franchise gives us is a cop story that is actually interesting, where the killer really is messing with them from the start and we can see possible out comes whether the cops do what Jigsaw says he wants in his “rules” or what Jigsaw actually expects them to do, as evidenced by the traps set out. Donnie Wahlberg joins the returning Dina Meyer as the cops, who not only follow the clues of the killer, are actually intelligent, sort of, in a movie cop kind of way. They quickly get to Jigsaw’s lair, and Wahlberg, due to the machinations set out, is forced to sit and talk to him. This is done without conjuring too many images of Hannibal Lecter, for which I give Bousman credit, it’s not easy.
The problems with the movie come from one place in particular, the casting, writing and direction of the “Big Psycho Drug Dealer”, played by Franky G. It isn’t that he is a BAD actor, it’s just that he doesn't fit. The rest of these people seem...somewhat real, they seem like people, and he seems, looks and is written as the big Latin drug dealer who solves things with a knife, fist, club, or whatever. It doesn’t fit, and a lot of his motivations are lacking.
Overall, I would say that SAW is a pretty good horror movie, it has some inventive traps for the victims, some cool as heck gore, and it even cuts the music video flashy stuff down to a level that didn’t make me wanna shove a wallet in my mouth and have an epileptic fit.
