In the periphery of São Paulo, the very low middle-class dysfunctional and hypocrite family of Teodoro (Giulio Lopes), Cláudia (Leona Cavalli) and the teenager Soninha (Sílvia Lourenço) have deep secrets. The religious Teodoro is indeed a hit-man, hired to kill people in the neighborhood with his friend Waldomiro (Ailton Graça). He has a lover, the very devout woman Terezinha (Martha Meola), and he wants to regenerate, going to the country with her. Cláudia has a young lover, Júlio (Ismael de Araújo), who delivers meats for his father's butcher shop. Soninha is a common sixteen years old teenager of the periphery, having active sexual life, smoking grass and loving heavy metal. When Júlio is killed and castrated in their neighborhood, the lives of the members of the family change.
"Contra Todos" is a great low budget Brazilian movie that pictures the life in the periphery of a big Brazilian city. The story is very real, uses the usual elements of the poor area of the big Brazilian cities (drug dealers, hit men, fanatic religious evangelic people, hopeless teenagers etc.), has many plot points and a surprising end, and the characters have excellent performances, acting very natural and making the story totally believable. The camera follows the characters, giving a great dynamics to the film. In the Extras of the DVD, the director Roberto Moreira explains that his screenplay had no lines, only the description of the situations, and was partially disclosed only one week before the beginning of the shootings. The actors have trainings in workshops and they used lots of improvisation, being the reason for such natural acting. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "Contra Todos" ("Against Everybody")

Save the $8.97 you'll spend at Walmart to buy this DVD and go see the real film by Steven Spielberg.
I'm a filmmaker, and being an avid fan of H.G. Wells, I had to buy this hoping to sit down and watch three hours of good entertainment. Instead, it took four days to finish watching this because I couldn't stand watching more than 10 minutes at a time. It's horrible.
There are reports that Timothy Hines had a $20 Million budget for this production. Where the heck did it go? Did he use most of it to buy a new house? Finance his retirement? Or what? Let me start with what is actually good about this film. It does stay true to the book AND there are a few good performances in it. I can respect the actors who obviously tried to make this a good film. But good performances were quickly overshadowed by horrible... and I do mean horrible special effects. Any freshman film school student could have done a much better job with the CGI. To me, most of it looked like "stop action" card board cutouts that were used rather than sophisticated CGI software that a $20 Million project should be using.
There's no excuse for the amateur post production that was applied to this film. My own partner and I sat down and recreated our version of the Ferry scene using software that cost less than $1500.00 and within a day had five minutes of scene that looked better and more realistic than what Hines created. I've seen films with budgets of less than $2 Million look better. Much better.
In my opinion the special effects used in the original King Kong were more sophisticated and better than Hines' special effects in this film. IN fact, I have a much better appreciation for Attack of the Killer Tomatoes because of this film. There's no excuse with today's technology for a film to look like a 50's B-Movie unless that was the intention, which shouldn't have been with this particular project.
A problem I had with the DVD transfer was that the film is jerky, another demonstration of amateur film-making.
Overall, I have to say that I produced a $45,000 project in 2003 that have better cinematography and special effects than this film.
I strongly encourage anyone who appreciates good film-making or who is a fan of WOTW to leave this film on the shelf and watch Attack of the 50 Foot Woman instead. It would be easier on the eyes.