Review of Borderland (2007) by Shea A — 28 Jul 2007

Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King is possibly Uwe Boll's masterpiece of bad cinema, although I don't think many people will recognize it as such. It starts off relatively mediocre, but Dr. Boll cranks it up to eleven in the latter half. It's inept beyond normal mortal capacity and yes, the acting is as bad as the trailer led you to believe. That dude from Scream gives the worst performance I've seen from an Hollywood actor in a long, long time. Ray Liotta is also spectacularly bad. The only actor who doesn't turn out a piece of poo for a performance would have to be John Rhys-Davies.

Uwe Boll turned out to be as amazing in person as I hoped he would be and the crowd loved him (some people boo-ed him during his pre-movie speech for Postal, but they were overwhelmed by Boll lovers). He talked loads of trash about Hollywood and every word was (relatively) true. Among his victims were Ben Stiller and Flags of our Fathers (which, according to him, is a propagandist piece of patriotic poo-poo that would never have been nominated for an Oscar if it hadn't been directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Steven Spielberg).

Borderland was Hostel set in Mexico. It isn't particularly good, but it does have lots of machete kills and Samwise Gamgee as a serial-killing redneck.

Retribution is more or less poopoo. Kiyoshi Kurosawa sounds like a broken record in this one, echoing Kairo like it was actually a good movie worth repeating. And even then, Kairo was led by very strong thematics that didn't actually removed anything from the under-developed plot, unlike Retribution, where Kurosawa gets constantly confused about if he's trying to go completely metaphysical or he's got an actual plot. The end result is a complete mess that covers itself in ridicule when it tries to avoid the cliched ways of creeping you out. I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that shooting ghosts from the side is a really, really bad idea. But it's still a better idea than having them open up doors and fly around the city like Superman.

God, what an awful movie. You suck, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. You freakin' suck. Just admit that you had nothing to do with Cure already.

City of Violence was surprisingly enjoyable. My main issue with most of the asian action movies I see is how seriously they take themselves and this was a wonderful little satire of the genre. The action is mostly forgettable though.

Memories of Matsuko takes too much time to really get off the ground and stays stagnant for too long once it actually does take off, but it's an otherwise visual delight with plenty of heartfelt moments. Each character is treated with deep respect and love which makes it that much more enjoyable.