Ed's Review Dot Com

Unified Pictures, Media House Capital, A Single Shot Productions,

Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Ted Levine, Kelly Reilly, Jason Isaacs, Joe Anderson, Jeffrey Wright, Ophelia Lovibond, Amy Sloan, W. Earl Brown

John Moon (Sam Rockwell) is a hunter, though convicted a few times of poaching, he seems fearless as he hunts down game illegally. But a mistaken shot finds a beautiful young woman dead. John panics and decides to hide the body, but in the process finds a great deal of money hidden in a cave where he tries to hide the money. John has an estranged wife and daughter who quickly become the target of the bad backwoods criminals that find out that John has their money. Things just getting worse as John tries his best to resolve it without anyone more dying.

This is an unusual story. The backwoods West Virginia dialect is a little tough to follow, but it does feel very realistic. With a simple single storyline, you’d think this would get boring, but it never seems to. The story of one bad decision which leads to a landslide of events is actually quite interesting. This is another film that has been in my queue for ages, but has finally floated to the top of my queue. As intriguing as the story is by itself, I must say that Sam Rockwell’s performance is pretty good. He played the loner guy really well. William H Macy has a smaller role as the small town lawyer, but he never disappoints in bringing the role to life. There is a lot of intrigue and suspense and it was a nice surprise to pop this DVD in the player this afternoon. Not a well known movie at all, but certainly worth watching. I enjoyed this.

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Red Granite Pictures, Mandalay Pictures,

Daniel Radcliffe, Juno Temple, Max Minghella, Joe Anderson, Kelli Garner, Heather Graham, David Morse, Kathleen Quinlan, James Remar

Ig Parrish (Daniel Radcliffe) has been in love with Merrin Williams (Juno Temple) since they were children. Noww Ig is prepared to ask her to marry him, but suddenly she turns up brutally murdered, and everyone in town seems to think he is the killer. To make matters worse “horns” begin growing on his forehead and everyone seems more than willing to confess their deepest and darkest sins ever since. It appears Ig is doomed unless he can somehow use this bizarre situation to determine who really killed Merrin, or if he did actually do it an can’t remember, before it’s too late.

People seem to have a love/hate relationship with this film. Either it’s extremely loved or wildly hated. I think perhaps the haters just don’t get it or don’t get the point of the story. This story is definitely not intended to be taken literally, nor can it be watched as a mystery/thriller with the expectation that normal things are going to happen. This is more of an allegory, or a way to look at issues that haunt or torture us. In normal thrillers, people do not grow horns that only certain people can see. If you try to take this film literally, you’ll go nuts. But this story is presented, like most fairy tales, as if it were real, so you have to suspend the disbelief at the premise, but simply accept that this happened, and enjoy the ride. Daniel Radcliffe did an excellent job with this role, and went through many metamorphoses along the way, not only in physical appearance, but emotionally.

The look of this movie is excellent, it’s very creepy. The suspense level is very high, and there’s quite a bit of blood and pain. The two main actors, Daniel and Juno are excellent, and the dialog is pretty good. It’s one of those films that you have to sit back and think about. I must admit, I really enjoyed it quite a bit, and I’m glad I passed on my instinct that this would be silly, and gave it a try.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

1984 Private Defense Contractors, Liddell Entertainment, Scott Free Productions,

Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale, Ben Bray, Anne Openshaw

John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is in Alaska working for an oil company. His job is to watch out for wolves, and take them out if any come too close to the camp. But Ottway is having a personal crisis. He’s missing his wife, and severely depressed. On a flight with a bunch of the men from the camp, the plane is in distress and crashes out in the middle of nowhere. When Ottway wakes up in the freezing cold, he puts together the few survivors and makes a plan to survive by marching across the snow. But there are packs of wolves in the area, and they’re very defensive of their territory. It’s a huge struggle to get across the plain to search for civilization, and along the way, they’ll all find out what they’re made of.

This is a wild epic film with beautiful scenes of mountains and snow, and intense suspense and downright horror. But it’s not only a grand adventure, it’s a close introspection of self, what you believe and what you doubt, and what you’re made of. Ottway is determined to survive, at any price, yet it’s hard to figure out why. But in extremely harsh times, someone steps up and takes the lead, and that falls to him. He has the only experience with wolves, and therefore knows more about what it takes to survive than anybody else.

If you see this on the big screen with a spectacular sound system, you’re in for quite a few jolts!!! My wife grabbed my arm so hard at one point, I thought perhaps I’ll have a bruise. I truly jumped several times. But additionally, this film does a better job of putting you INSIDE the movie than any I’ve seen in a long, long time. The plane crash is edited in a way that you’ll think YOU were inside the plane. It’s terrifying. The cold and wind and snow is so close and you are in the fight with the wolves from start to finish.

There are many critics of this film. Some people hate it. There are a couple reasons for this. One is that wolves just don’t act like that. Well, ok, perhaps that’s a fact. Certainly you can’t dismiss Jaws because sharks don’t behave that way either. In this case, I will accept that wolves probably don’t hunt humans for sport, but that’s not important to this film. I don’t want the wolves to get a bad rap here, but the story is about survival, introspection, faith, and true grit. It’s not about wolves hunting people. The other reason is that some people claim that it’s a superficial story and the writers and director are too “full of themselves”. I dismiss this. This is really great work by Liam Neeson, and his supporting cast, and it’s a very exciting and suspenseful movie. So the job of writers and directors are to bring exciting and suspensful…and entertaining films to the screen. This is what they did, and they did a great job.

This is way too intense for youngsters, so please follow the guidelines for R rated film. It’s R because of the violence and intense FEAR in this movie, and it would provoke nightmares in kids, so please please don’t frighten your kids. But you want to see an extreme adventure with very intense, edge of the seat suspense, and downright terror, this is a great ride. I completely enjoyed this film, completely forgot that I was watching a movie, and felt as if I was in the middle of the terror. It is an excellent terror filled thriller!

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

Overture Films

Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker, Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby

You’ve seen this movie.  You’ve seen this movie time after time after time.   It’s the same old thing.  There are NO surprises.

Why take a 1973, George Romero film that is not very good, and remake it into a brand new 2009 movie that’s not very good?  I can’t think why, as at least the original was set in Evans City, Pa, (outside Pittsburgh) and had that going for it.  Filmed right near Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” which was in Zelienople, Pa.  I think I’d prefer the original to this boring overused plotline.

Let’s see, is it suddenly aliens, mutant spiders, or radioactive undead zombies?   It doesn’t reallymatter.  It’s all be done.

Good guy local sheriff,  evil government/army,  misunderstood monsters, evil military commanders,  all the same characters are still here, and this could be a half way decent 1959 Twilight Zone episode in 30 minutes, but to try to stretch this out to a feature film is torture. There is no reason to rent this movie unless you’re a fan of really awful B movies.

Trouble is, they had somewhat of a budget, and it’s somewhat modern movie making, so it’s hard to make fun of it just for the sake of how bad it is, cause I don’t think it’s supposed to be bad.

Now some Netflix people loved it and rated it very high.  Why, I’m not sure.  Perhaps they haven’t seen a lot of movies, or maybe they were in a really good mood when they watched it, but for me it just didn’t even come close.