Films In Motion
Zoe Saldana, Jamie Chung, Rosamund Pike, Dylan McDermott, Lake Bell, Shannen Doherty, Paz Vega, Nick Stahl, Robert Hoffman, Adriana Barraza
Burning Palms is an anthology of five separate and distinct stories of characters in the LA area who are truly demented in one way or another. Each story is told in it’s own segment, started by a comic book page that shows the storyline on a comic book on the ground. At the end of the film, they burn the comic book. Perhaps they should have burned it before they made it into a movie?? This is Creepshow or the Twilight Zone Movie where the segments don’t cross and have anything to do with each other. The first story is of a father/daughter combo that is very, very close. The second is an Asian girl worried that her boyfriend likes big boobs!. The third is a gay couple who buy a child via the Black Market and have second thoughts. The fourth is a story of a very bad boy and a very bad caretaker and parents who are always out of the country. The final segment is about a lady who was raped, but finds the wallet (and drivers license) of the rapist in his wallet under her couch. Each of these stories tries to shock, and tries to come up with a shocking ending. All in all, it’s a lot like watching a Twilight Zone marathon without the clever stories.
This has to be one of the dumbest movies I have seen. I have seen people who were amused by the film, but I don’t think there is anything funny about any of it. I think they tried to really shock us, perhaps “Mondo Cane” style, but most of it doesn’t work. The payoff’s are not there, and the stories are very short. Some are downright dumb. I was truly disappointed in this film, as the write up sounds great. It just doesn’t deliver. Trying to shock us just for the sake of shock and awe rarely comes off very good. In this case it doesn’t. It’s quite to opposite. I simply did not enjoy the format or the content. It was not so gross that it makes you sick, nor was it really shocking. Stuff like this can happen anytime. It just is not a very good film, and it’s very hard to put it into a category. Nothing seems to fit it exactly. Netflix categorizes it this way: “Comedy, Spoofs and Satire, Dark Humor & Black Comedies, Indie Comedies, Blu-ray”. Comedy I don’t get, nor do I see it spoofing anything (except maybe Creepshow, but why?). Dark and Black it is, but humor, not really. Indie Comedies, there they are trying to make it sound funny which it’s not. So maybe Dark, Black Indie Blu-ray is the best you could do. Avoid it!
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
