Gone-review

“Gone” reminds me slightly of someone telling a version of the aristocrats joke.  The good part comes from the set up and the pay off is the weakness.  Amanda Seyfried does a good job and works well with what she was given.  On the other hand, the script is full of holes.  The red herrings are all over and the ending would have been so much better if it went in a different direction.

Jill Parrish, played by Amanda Seyfried, is a young woman in Portland Oregon who was kidnapped by a serial killer the year before.  The local cops couldn’t find a trace of the crime so they don’t believe she was ever kidnapped.  All ready this screams of B.S. to me. Thanks to the local Barney Fifes for not finding the remains of the other girls which the killer keeps out in the open, in the woods. I am pretty sure in multiple missing person cases like this, the F.B.I gets involved. 

Presently, a year after since Jill escaped from a hole in the woods, the villain has kidnapped her sister.  Jill now has to piece together what an inept police dept couldn’t in a year to find her sister. Meanwhile, she bumps into oddballs and strange characters who might be involved, but you just aren’t sure.  To top it off, this all might just be in her head.  Jill has had a history of mental illness.

The end is so-so at best.  It really should have gone in another direction, more towards the mental illness angle.  That would have been very clever and made the movie seem really innovative instead of sort of thrown together at the last minute for a conclusion.  Still, it’s an okay movie.  It's certainly worth a matinee viewing or a rental at the very least.  

Red Riding Hood- review

Click your heels three times and maybe you'll be in something better.

            Good god.  This movie is such a piece of shit.  With all the potential they have, they fuck it up so much.  It’s like they couldn’t think of anything better to do so they took elements of one part “Sleepy Hollow” and one part of “The Village”.  It felt so bland and the characters were so unremarkable that it’s a very forgettable movie. 

            For one thing here’s a shocker.  Gary Oldman is a villain and is so transparent that it should be tattooed on his forehead.  His last scene is so predictable that the setup is a complete waste.  Amanda Seyfried is a good actress.  Why does she need to take the roll of the doe eyed girl that is basically high school fanboy fodder? 

Nice back lit forest assholes.

            The set is like something out of a Syfy original movie and the effects are not good whatsoever.  The werewolf is a blurry effect that you know is not there and any scare factor is taken away when the fucking thing talks.  You read that right.  The werewolf talks to Amanda’s character. 

            Characters are in the village for no other reason then to be red herrings to determine who in the village is a lycanthrope.  Meanwhile you got Gary Oldman acting like an asshole yelling “NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPAINISH THE INQUISION!” So he doesn’t really yell that but he might as well with the hammy over-the-top crap he gave us.  He might have well been twiddling his mustache while tying a girl to a train track.

Gary Oldman as a bad guy? (Scoff) In what medium?

            They try to hard to follow the children's story just to make it interesting.  But it sucks. “Sleepy Hollow” did this so much better.  They took a story with some major differences to the source material and they came up with a really decent supernatural murder mystery.  This one fails.  It takes liberties but there is no purpose.  Like when getting rid of a body why would a person decide to actually sew a person’s stomach with stones and drop them in a river?  You could just bury them in a shallow grave. It’s not as if a medieval CSI is going to come and catch your ass.

            So anyway it was a crappy movie.  The romance comes off completely forced and a waste of time.  The main actors are far too good for this source material.  All in all you can find much better werewolf movies out there.  If you’ve seen “Sleepy Hollow” and “The Village” and you’ve seen this movie.  They could have done so much better with it and the ball is dropped in a huge way.