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Dracula Untold (2014)
Dracula Untold (2014)
2014 | Action, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi
6
7.0 (26 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Untold, uninspired, and underwhelming take on a Dracula origin story, very much in the style of a comic book movie. Historians look away: Vlad Tepes is a client king of the Turks, who is forced to rebel against them and seeks out demonic, blood-sucking powers to help him defeat his opponents. (Charles Dance, playing his mentor in evil, is the best thing in the movie.)

Mildly diverting as an empty spectacle (gasp as Superdrac uses his FIST OF BATS power to squish the Turks!) but essentially useless: the film fails to engage with either the historical Vlad the Impaler or the iconic Dracula. Luke Evans fails to communicate any essential darkness lurking in his character, just coming across as a nice guy who makes a bad decision under pressure. If Dracula's not going to be a properly evil monster, what's the point of him? Good effects and reasonable art direction, but misses the point in every narrative sense.
  
The Beast House (The Beast House Chronicles #2)
The Beast House (The Beast House Chronicles #2)
Richard Laymon | 2021 | Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
8
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
16 of 250
Book
The Beast House ( Beast House chronicles book 2)
By Richard Laymon

Once read a review will be written via Smashbomb and link posted in comments

Author Gorman Hardy is hot on the trail of another bestseller and if half what's said about Malcasa Point is true, he's bound to make a killing. Petite and pretty Tyler and sexy Nora visit Malcasa full of expectation. But Malcasa Point is a place of pain, bestiality and death in The Beast House.


Well I have to say it’s 100% better than The Cellar! I can see from other reviews a lot of people agree on it. I found myself enjoying this. It was a classic horror in my opinion and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of classic. I enjoyed the captains story on Bobo it was very King Kong based except this was a rampant rabbit monster gone wild! A bit of cheese to keep a girl who loves horror happy.
  
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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.
  
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018)
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018)
2018 | Animation, Comedy
I know some people complain about how dreary some kids films can be when it comes to the summer holidays. They knock out a bunch of stuff to make your little munchkins get excited and nag you into going. If the nagging takes you to see Hotel Transylvania 3 then I don't think you'll need to worry about it being a dreary outing.

Is it groundbreaking stuff? No. Is it entertaining? Yes.

My toes were tapping. I was laughing. It's an entertaining film. You know where it's going, you know before it even starts if you've seen a trailer for it, and it doesn't matter.

I don't want to spoil it, but there was a part in the movie where I was laughing before something had quite happened... maybe that's what too many years of terrible life choices does to you... when it happens, if you aren't dancing in your seat then you're a monster. And not the fun kind like in the movie!
  
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Awix (3310 KP) rated Jaws (1975) in Movies

Aug 26, 2019 (Updated Aug 26, 2019)  
Jaws (1975)
Jaws (1975)
1975 | Thriller
Spielberg's exemplary suspense-fright machine remains the only killer shark movie you will ever need to watch. A two-course fish supper: the first half concerns police chief Roy Scheider's attempts to persuade the self-serving authorities of the danger posed by a marauding shark (post-Watergate subtext is fairly obvious); the second sees Scheider, bright young oceanographer Richard Dreyfuss, and salty sea dog Robert Shaw setting off on a primal quest to slay the monster, in a boat which may well prove to be of inadequate size.

Spielberg does an excellent job of hiding the pulpy horror-story origins of the tale, swathing it in plausible small-town Americana, low-key humour and excellent characterisation; John Williams' score is, needless to say, essential to the enterprise. The battle to the death in the second half is superbly constructed, paced and executed. Superb entertainment; I am happy to report that over forty years on, Jaws remains entirely capable of making cinema audiences squirm and scream.