This will be the first of at least two posts today, because I was too busy to put anything up yesterday. This Sunday I finished work on the project I keep mentioning(which I will get into later, I promise, but anything I say might be a bit premature at the moment), and crammed in one movie before I went to work.
The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake was the movie of the day, and it's a bit of a disappointment. Not that the movie is the worst thing ever, but it had so much more potential than it actually achieved. Briefly, the film concerns a pair of brothers suffering under a family curse. One of their ancestors led the massacre of a small South American village in the 1700s, and now the brothers are being stalked by the two sole survivors(kept alive for 200 years by this same curse). The ideas in this film are pretty strong, and the internal logic of how the magic works is pretty cool; the last surviving brother at one point threatens suicide, because if he takes his own life the curse can never be completed and the two men trying to carry out the curse will never be able to rest in peace. But the execution was incredibly mediocre, from the fake, floppy knives to the stilted line readings to the listless direction. It easily could have been a pretty good movie, but it didn't quite seem like anyones heart was in it.
I also read two more stories from 20th Century Ghosts. Better Than Home was in no way supernatural, and was actually a pretty melancholic, sweet story about a boy remembering his father. The second, The Black Phone, was recognizably a horror story, and was pretty decently disturbing. Unfortunately, it ended abruptly on the kind of line you'd expect to hear Stallone or Schwarzeneggar saying after they killed someone in one of their movies. I can't decide if he was just blind to how it sounded at the end of a story that, up to that point, was pretty damn grim, or if he was just taking the long way to a stupid joke. Either way, it deflated the story pretty suddenly.
No comments:
Post a Comment