That was an excellent one.
It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.
View MoreClever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
View MoreI think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
View MoreFor some reason, various young couples hiking through the Italian Alps split up to see who can reach their campsite designation first. James (Gregory Lee Kenyon) enters a cave, finds a skeleton of an ancient demonic gladiator and becomes possessed by the spirit of "Tyranus" when he puts on a helmet belonging to the corpse. He then spends the rest of the film running around in the woods hunting down his friends and hacking off their limbs to add to some stew to bring the undead "Demonicus" back to life. This shot-on-digital Full Moon release is stupid, senseless, has terrible acting and sound and the (Los) Angeles National Forest is a poor substitute for Italy. However, it's pretty high on the unintentional laugh scale thanks mainly to the overwrought lead performance. Whether bug-eyed running around in cheap-looking armor brandishing a sword or spouting neurotic Latin gibberish about demons and resurrection, Kenyon's ridiculous facial expressions and awkward line delivery must be seen to be believed. Oh well, at least he's not boring like most of the rest of the cast.
View MoreSome kids are hiking in the mountains, and one of them goes into a large tunnel and discovers some old mummified gladiator. He puts on the gladiator's helmet and spends the rest of the movie killing all the other hikers.This thing is just so utterly senseless it's maddening. Here's a short list of things that don't make any sense:1) A guy and a girl are in their tent and they think they hear something outside. The guy goes out to investigate and finds another hiker outside. Then he hears his girlfriend scream so they head back to the tent - arriving the next morning?!? He was only 50 feet away!2) These two dunderheads then hear another girl scream (What, 100 feet away?), but don't investigate because they're afraid they'll get lost.3) Another guy and a girl are walking around, and in about their 10th scene together the girl informs the guy that due to the circumstances, protocol no longer requires him to address her as professor. I mean, what the...? First off, that's just a really stupid thing to say, secondly he never called her professor in the first nine scenes they were in together.4) A wounded girl attacks Demonicus and he stops her, telling her that part of his gladiator training taught him how to wound without killing. Um, yeah, we kinda noticed she's wounded and not dead because she's up and walking around. But, thanks for that tidbit of information.5) One girl is tied up in Demonicus' lair, and when someone attempts to free her, she instead instructs this person to go and get help. Um, look, idiot, if she set you free, which would take about 5 seconds, there would be no need to get help.And it just goes on and on. The whole middle part of the movie is spent with the two idiots getting lost in the woods, then they fight, then they pitch a tent and ignore the screams of their friends, then they wander around some more. It's just so damned boring and pointless that I turned the DVD off halfway through. None of these characters are sympathetic, especially the ones that get the majority of the screen time. Demonicus himself made me laugh out loud every time I saw him - he looks like a kid in a Halloween costume, scrunching his face up to look evil. He runs, or should I say scampers around like he's gay. The special effects are comedic, the acting is for the most part awful, and nothing makes any sense.Overall, maybe this concept could have produced an enjoyably campy film if they put some more time and effort into it, getting rid of the ludicrous dialogue, creating characters with actual likable personalities, having some sort of logical flow to the action, and maybe even making Demonicus a female character in a sexy gladiator outfit. But no, instead we get this senseless pile of nonsense that will bore you to death.
View MoreThis movie is about Tyrannus, a gladiator who is brought back from the dead to summon Tyrannus, a gladiator who must be brought back from the dead. Tyrannus, we learn after about an hour, is also called Demonicus. This adds much needed depth to the screenplay and calls into question our assumptions about identity, psychology and ourselves. The spirit of Tyrannus accomplishes his little to-do list (killing some people and saying repetitive phrases in Latin) by possessing the body of a college guy. He uses a magic mind-control helmet to do this, which the college boy willingly puts on his head, and then at several points in the movie, takes off and puts back on.Maria performs oral sex on a poor man's Sean Willian Scott, and Tyrannus wears the Rollerball glove. Tyrannus has his own green backlighting for no reason, and has apparently been sitting next to CG fire in an ancient concrete tunnel for centuries like this. Utter misfortune.This movie is empty and will hurt you. See it.
View MoreThis is simply the funniest movie I've seen in a long time. The bad acting, bad script, bad scenery, bad costumes, bad camera work and bad special effects are so stupid that you find yourself reeling with laughter.So it's not gonna win an Oscar but if you've got beer and friends round then you can't go wrong.
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