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Awix (3310 KP) rated Elves (1989) in Movies

Dec 24, 2020  
Elves (1989)
Elves (1989)
1989 | Horror
2
4.5 (4 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Bargain-basement everything-but-the-kitchen-sink horror movie. Three young women accidentally summon up a homicidal elf as part of a conspiracy to take over the world. Features a lengthy scene in which a department-store Santa (Dan Haggerty) engages in a gun battle with neo-Nazi agents, while the young female leads are stalked by a knife-wielding glove puppet. (The film is not nearly as good as it sounds.)

Sort of a slasher movie, sort of a monster movie, but definitely tasteless and tacky schlock by any reasonable metric. It seems to be trying to play the knowingly-ironic card at a few points, but it's simply not accomplished enough to pull that off: it looks cheap, sounds cheap, has long stretches where not much happens, and there's the obligatory badly-edited and confusing climax. Would be virtually unwatchable if not for an heroic performance by Dan Haggerty, who for some reason is taking this fiasco seriously. Nasty, brutish, but not nearly short enough.
  
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Lenard (726 KP) rated Hellboy (2019) in Movies

Aug 26, 2019  
Hellboy (2019)
Hellboy (2019)
2019 | Action, Adventure, Fantasy
Here we go again. Yet another reboot of a popular movie series surgically removing the charm of the original actors and director. Guillermo Del Toro is a truly visionary director who turns monsters into romantically tragic figures, like a underworld Heathcliff or a mutated Rochester. To review, Hellboy was raised from the bowels of Hell toward the end of World War II by Nazi supporter Grigor Rasputin to turn the tide for the Axis. A squandron of Allied forces closed the portal before more "monsters" could come through, but Professor Broom, a paranormal investigator, adopted the baby Hellboy and raised him to protect the world from other forces of evil. Humans do not trust Hellboy since he was created by Evil and the supernatural beasts cannot trust him because fights for Good. Cast aside, Hellboy must prove himself as a immortal sorceress rebuilds her empire on Earth with Hellboy as the key.
  
Dead of Night
Dead of Night
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Second entry in Simon Scarrow's now so-called 'Berlin wartime thriller series (after Blackout), again following Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke of the Kripo (criminal police) as he first investigates the murder (as the wife of the doctor believes) - or was it suicide? (been already ruled as such) - of a SS doctor, before being told in no uncertain terms to leave it alone.

He is then pulled into an investigation of a separate murder (again, is it such? The parents believe so, but the state does not) of a child which, as events transpire, seems to have more and more to do with the death of the SS doctor.

So I could see from roughly a third of the way into this where it was going. And it is horrifying that these events - well, maybe not *these* exact events, but very very similar ones - took place routinely in 1940 Nazi Germany.

Learn from history.

So it will never be repeated.