2007: The Year of Watching DVDs, Part 21: Kill Moko

I watched the entire IMDb top 250 list and now I'm watching everything else. All reviews so far.

I dedicate this installment to SUPERBLOG!! fan Booger Moko Toa, because it will be largely spent dissing movies that he likes.

Hostel (2005)
Three guys go to Slovakia or Slovenia or somewhere to get drunk and fuck girls. So far, so good. Then the film gets sadistic and disgusting. Personally, I don't mind extreme violence in movies as long as there's a point to it. But this is simply an orgy in torture and mutilation, and I don't think it has anything interesting to say. (What's the moral? "Tread warily upon foreign soil"? "Don't get drunk and fuck girls"?)


They Live (1988)
Rowdy Roddy Piper is in this and man, that guy can act! Just kidding. This is a sci-fi something by trash auteur John Carpenter. Entertaining but incredibly, mindbogglingly stupid. In fact, it may be the dumbest movie I've seen this entire year. Extra plus for the very convincing alien make-up, though. This is exactly how I imagine aliens to look:



Saw (2004)
Interesting premise (too guys chained in a public restroom with a couple of saws and a dead guy) but ultimately it's a traditional action/slasher film (Seven meets Friday the 13th Part 5), albeit with a handful of extreme sequences. If you're the queasy kind, you may puke while watching Hostel, but you probably won't while watching Saw. Michael Emerson, who is awesome as Ben Linus in Lost, is just WEAK in this. Still, I like Cary Elwes. He was good in The Princess Bride (See Part 3). I wish he'd had a saw in that.



The Music of Chance (1993)
TV movie with Mandy Patinkin, based on Paul Auster book. Unsatisfying ending, but on the whole I kinda liked it. I wish I had more to write about it. But not as much as I wish I had a million dollars. Then I could hire someone to write SUPERBLOG!! posts. And maybe it wouldn't all be about what movies I've seen recently.


Soylent Green (1973) (repeat)
In the overcrowded future, Charlton Heston is a lone cop who investigates a murder, little suspecting that it will lead to the horrible revelation that Soylent Green is... not very good, actually. But Phil Hartman's spoof of this in Saturday Night Live (which spoiled the "surprise" ending for generations) is classic. If I was a better man, I'd find the clip and link to it.


The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D (2005)
Pretty crap. I watched it in 2D first and then in 3D and it probably works better in three dimensions. Some of the visual effects look surprisingly crappy in the 2D version. Robert Rodriguez is usually dependable for popcorn entertainment but this time, the story is provided by his 6-year-old son Racer Max, and kids shouldn't write movies. Sure, this is a children's movie, but so was Spy Kids, and that had Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino and Danny Trejo. And some kids. This one's got David Arquette and Kristin Davis, and some kids. Kids can't act. Did I mention the script is really bad? And the moral, "dream unselfish dreams", seems tacked-on and makes little sense. Important trivia: Both Sharkboy and Lavagirl are named Taylor in real life, even though one is a boy (Sharkboy) and one is a girl (Lavagirl).



Dogville (2003)
Interesting for an hour or so, then it starts getting extremely frustrating and unlikable. Lars von Trier loves turning women into Victims with a capital V (well, in his movies, at least). In this film, like in Dancer in the Dark, his main character is a very gullible woman who is punished for her stupidity by repeatedly being betrayed and abused and raped. Said woman is unable and/or unwilling to defend herself in any way. And in both works, most (if not all) of the people who surround the Victim are Assholes with a capital A. This may be how von Trier views the world... or maybe I should say America: as populated by spineless Victims and sadistic Assholes. I wouldn't object to it (not even to the use of rape - again! and again! and again! - as a plot point) if it weren't so fucking hackneyed and predictable. There's a ton of good actors in Dogville but ultimately they can't save the film from being a piece of shit.