POMO

At the age of eighteen, when I was angry at the system and I liked the Doors (the band) and Pulp Fiction, Fight Club would have been the movie of my life. But today, I don’t think I could be a movie star even if I really wanted to and did everything necessary to achieve that. And I've learned to get by in the system. Which is sufficient reason for me to think of this movie as just very spectacularly filmed bullshit.

Daredevil is a relatively entertaining movie with great jokes, but it’s unintentionally comical in the dramatic moments. Colin Farrell is great, Ben Affleck seems bored and Michael Clarke Duncan doesn’t fit in at all. And the action is routine. This is just an average comic-book movie and it’s the first one that made me want the bad guy to kick the main character’s ass, which surely was not what the filmmakers were aiming for.

There is always something happening in this likably short sci-fi flick. And you can even see an effort to actually depict characters. However, the situations and the acting (i.e. the directing) are so poorly handled that they drag the whole thing down to the level of a B-movie. It’s a shame that the actors look like they have a chicken running around on their ship. Along with the director, they butcher a rather decent screenplay.

An amazing subject that deserved a screenplay with fewer plot holes and better production quality. Impostor looks like it was knocked out in three weeks in a B-movie studio. It would have been a pleasant surprise if it were a big-budget Eastern European sci-fi flick. As a Hollywood blockbuster based on a story by Philip K. Dick, however, it’s a dud. It gets three stars only for the dynamic directing, thanks to which we’re never bored for even a second.

Phenomena is less bloody than Argento’s other films and focuses more on the story and atmosphere than on the visual aspect, which is a big plus. Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence are superbly cast and the hypnotic insect mystery works wonders in combination with the psychedelic music and wonderfully isolated alpine setting. If it weren’t for a few minor shortcomings, this would be a genre gem!

A TV reporter and her colleagues take a trip to an old abandoned factory, where a sadistic killer in a raincoat starts massacring them. For the first half hour, the film comes across as light and “sporty”, which seems very tacky in combination with the splatter brutality and synth pop soundtrack. Later, however, the darkness rolls in and the film takes off, turning out to be a low-budget yet surprisingly well-directed, stylish murder flick. It’s like Psycho in terms of content and like a Dario Argento movie in terms of form, and the murder scenes are reminiscent of Lucio Fulci’s cruelty (and they are hellishly sophisticated, by the way). This is a dream-come-true combination for any horror fan!

Wilderness. Visually captivating in the mold of 8MM. One of Val Kilmer’s best roles and a parade of extraordinarily wacky bad guys – the noseless Vincent D’Onofrio properly turned my stomach. But The Salton Sea stumbles somewhere along the way. The pseudo-artsy visual interludes (the trumpeter, the sea, the tree) have no place in it and, at the same time, the harmony between the incessantly dynamic form and the powerfully psychological content is creaky. In this respect, Joel Schumacher was better, as he remained firmly in the psychological and escalated the dynamics only in selected scenes so that he didn’t drown in them.

Apocalypse Now is a very heavy existential film that will leave a knot in your stomach for a few days and make you think about what you have seen. A depressing journey through hell. What makes it different from other war films is that we don’t see the evil that war embodies, but rather we feel it. And even though it’s painful and uncomfortable, we can’t turn away from it. A hypnotic, breathtaking work.

Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt is a great, timeless thriller whose formula is still used in the genre today. Brilliant, psychologically precise filmmaking craft.

The scary scenes are genuinely scary. The London Underground... brrr! But the humour diminishes their impact. An American Werewolf in London is neither a horror comedy nor a comedy horror movie. It’s a schizophrenic hybrid that could have been either an excellent, atmospheric horror movie or an entertaining, parodic comedy.