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The Last of Us Remastered

9.0 (23 Ratings) Rate It

Video Game Watch

Joel, a ruthless survivor with few moral lines left to cross, lives in one of the last remaining...

Awix (3310 KP) rated Hellraiser (1987) in Movies

May 20, 2020 (Updated May 21, 2020)

Hellraiser (1987)

1987 | Horror

7.9

(58 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Iconic horror; progenitor of many mostly lousy sequels. An unscrupulous adventurer attempts to escape the clutches of sado-masochistic entities by recruiting his adulterous sister-in-law to provide the raw meat for his renewal (it was the 80s, everyone behaved like that under Thatcher).

Not quite the film an unsuspecting viewer might expect: the focus is mainly on the screwed-up Cotton family, especially nasty Uncle Frank; Pinhead, for all that he is on the poster, is in a very minor role (billed as 'Lead Cenobite'). Visually striking and with some interesting ideas, but the low budget is obvious and this is equally obviously a British movie desperately trying to appeal to an American audience. Where the film falls down is in its lack of focus and the fact that its central metaphor or argument is unclear (beyond the fact that the Cottons are a very dysfunctional bunch). Still, there have been worse debuts from writer-directors; it's just that not many of them go on to have nine sequels.

Kudos

Sarah (7800 KP) rated The Redeemer (Harry Hole #6) (Oslo Sequence #4) in Books

Jun 5, 2020

Another good Harry Hole story

I'd be lying if I said this was the best Harry Hole book I've read. It's not even as good as the last Hole book I read,The Devil's Star, which is the book immediately preceding this one. However there's something about the Harry Hole series that you can't help but enjoy.

Hole himself is your typical tortured detective who sits on the borderline of breaking the law but for his own moral reasons. He reminds me a lot of Luther in a way. The story in this is interesting and has a lot of twists and turns, although it does come across as slightly convoluted at times. I do like Nesbo's writing style and how despite featuring chapters from what you think are the killer or offender, he seems very adept at changing your perceptions completely. Whilst I enjoyed this book, there was something about it that dragged and felt a bit off, which is why it isnt as highly marked as it's predecessor.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Edge of Darkness (2010) in Movies

May 5, 2020 (Updated May 6, 2020)

Edge of Darkness (2010)

2010 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

6.0

(11 Ratings)

Movie Rating

The legendary TV mini-series is retooled for the big screen as a bog-standard Mel Gibson revenge thriller. A detective's daughter is killed, and his investigations lead him to discover she was a target of forces within the military-industrial complex operating above the law.

As well as two-thirds of the running time and most of the plot, the movie version of Edge of Darkness also cheerfully dispenses with virtually everything that made the TV show so memorable: theoretically a fiendishly convoluted thriller, it also contained an environmentalist subtext, an incest subtext, a subtext about Anglo-US relations, even some borderline SF & fantasy elements. All of this is gone and just replaced with Mel Gibson looking intense and beating people up. As a result it is very hard to care about what's happening, although the illogicality of much of it does manage to cut through (someone poisoning someone else and then deciding to shoot them as well is practically a motif). Ray Winstone is not bad as Jedburgh, but given the source material the rest of it is unforgivably lousy.