Brian Yuzna, the happily disturbed director of such films like `Society' and the `Re-Animator' sequels, returns here with an ultra-violent movie that goes straight for attacking the viewer's last bit of good taste. John Jaspers makes a pact with the devilIn return for his eternal soul; he's offered the change to avenge the death of his girlfriend. John is satisfied after this, but the devil (referred to as `M') wants John to go on with his killing spree. He refuses and gets buried, only to resurrect as Faust! A typical comic book and cloaked superhero, but slightly more bloodthirsty than the average Bat-, Spider- or Superman. Is `Faust  Love of the Damned' a good movie? Nonot at all, in fact, but it could have been worse. The basic Faust plot outline (selling your soul to the devil) is as old as cinema itself. The eminent director F.W Murnau (Nosferatu) already made a film with this theme back in 1926. Try and compete with that, Brian Yuzna! The screenplay contains a few slightly ingenious aspects, like the character of the insatiable, sex-addicted sidekick of M, played by the ravishing Monica Van Campen. But the biggest goal of Faust is showing as much gore as humanly possible. Make-up artist Screaming Mad George gets to be his old, filthy self again and inserts grotesque gore such as eye poking and decapitations. There even is a melting-sequence, entirely in the tradition of `Society'. Regretfully, the acting performances are a giant letdown Mark Frost overacts terribly and Andrew Divoff (who already annoyed the hell out of me in `Wishmaster') is the most undeserved horror lead ever. Jeffrey Combs still is the man, although it hurts to see him being downgraded straight to the supportive cast. Furthermore, there's not the least bit of tension, depth or atmosphere so I wouldn't exactly call this a successful new horror film. Lots of fun guaranteed if you're a gorehound, though


I love a lot of Yuzna stuff like "Society", "The Dentist", his final

episode in "Necronomicon" was easily the best in the movie,

"Progeny" wasn't bad and "Return of the living dead 3" had some

good outrageous moments, but this movie...really... it is just

astoundingly bad! It's so bad it's almost embarrassing to watch. The acting is

terrible,it's sad to see Jeffrey "Re-Animator" Combs in this mess,

but probably he couldn't say no to an old pal Like Brian Yuzna.

The effects, especially the digital bits, are laughable too. The

costumes are rubber costumes that seem to come from a shop

that sells cheap Halloween outfits! And worst of all, there is no

atmosphere whatsoever. Knowing his previous work I really don't

know what to say...it seems as if Yuzna has directed this

blindfolded. I know the man has intelligence and a sharp sense of

humor (in his grotesque but enjoyable over the top way), but it

seems he's lost them completely on this one. Avoid at all costs Vote 2/10


This movie is really to awful for words. They took a beautiful play and comic and turned it into absolute crap. The special effects are so bad that you can't laugh about them anymore. You can on the other hand wonder about the fact that the movie won an award for best special effects at some festival....Why? Are the people who gave away the awards blind? Cause that's the only logical reason I can find for it. And then the acting...Oh my God, even wooden puppets could act better then all those people together in this movie. The worst thing of it all is that Brian Yuzna really could have made a beautiful movie looking at the story of Faust, but he didn't. Instead he made a movie not really worth seeing. In my opinion this movie never should have been released in the first place.


Yes, it's a strange movie. Yes, I still don't know if I like it: Divoff was right as M, I liked him. The plot place for Van Campen's character was right, too, although her own dubbing (to spanish) was bad bad bad. Mark Frost was Jim Carrey in a Gore movie but I liked his Faust part of the role. The psychiatrist character and actress are the most defined and well worked ones. The FX were right (wonderful make-up, specially the Van Campen-turns-into-DesireWoman one: horny at the beginning and more disturbing as it went on). But the mix of bad acting, Spawn-theft plot and bad worked scenes and connections didn't leave me clear one thing: did I like this movie? I don't know...


I rented this video due to the presence of Jefferey Combs, who was the guy who played the demented Federal Agent in the Frighteners. The fact that one of the creators of the all time B-movie "Re-Animator" was directing it. Boy, was I wrong.

I have not read the original comic book this film is based on. But judging from the acclaim it got, I have to assume that this film is an inferior adaptation. This film is a dull, shoddy mess, filled with every comic book you can think of.

The script is skeletal, a ramshackle construction that rips off many of the most popular recent comics and comic based films. Take a little bit of Batman and Darkman, mix in large dollops of Spawn and the Crow, add some cheap effects and bad acting and presto! you have this thundering bore of a film.

Not even the performers can save it. Mark Snow, who plays the lead, is so wooden and ridiculously self-serious, there isn't even any good camp value in his portrayal.

Jeffery Combs, who should have been the best part of this, is wasted as a stalwart cop. Why use this guy if he's just going to play the straight man?

The rest of the cast are just plain amateur hour. They appear to be foreigners of various nationalities, so the already silly dialog is made even worse by their wooden readings in a babel of thick, impenetrable accents.

I can't see how this film can appeal to anyone. It's not bloody or sexy enough for gore and T&A hounds, the comic book elements are nothing you haven't seen in better films and the special effects are laughable.

It's not even good for MST-style humor, because the cast and crew seem to be taking themselves far too seriously. It's more boring than inept.

Skip this turkey.


This movie was the first made by the Spanish company Fantastic Factory, they have released later two films more "Arachnid" and "Dagon" but While these two have been a total flop "Faust" was at least a bit more successful. Nevertheless it was, at my opinion, the worst of the three.It was nothing more than a kind of "Spawn" rip-off but more cheaper and the plot and specially the dialogues were written in a completely careless way. I still remember a scene in which the female leader character was talking about her rape when she was a child and she defines the raper as "The soft man", everybody laughed at that and the dubbing of the Spanish actress Monica Van Campen was so ridiculous that again everybody laughed when she talked (Despite her undoubtful beauty. But not everything was a disaster here, at least special effects were OK and there are some funny moments.I only hope that Fantastic Factory gets better monetary and artistic results with their next film"Darkness" directed by Jaume Balagueró, the author of the very interesting "The Unnamed", I trust in that project which has good actors in it such as Lena Olin or Anna Paquin, on the contrary this adventure of Filmax in fantastic genre will have a very dark future.


There is just one question (ok I am lying there are many questions, only one that matters) that pops into my mind after watching this: Why? The idea for the vengance filled superhero back from the dead has been done before and done much better: Spawn, The Crow!!(not counting those horrid sequals). The acting is beyond awful. Whomever that Jack Frost is really shouldn't quit his job at Jack in the Box just yet. If that is his real name, shoot I wouldn't want to be known for this movie. The plot has been done before, dialog was MST3K fodder, and the makeup/effects are laughable. They state they won awards for them at the beginning of the movie-they pry got them from a bunch of beauty school drop outs. Now I feel that I have to be a little more choosy when I see a Jeffery Combs movie on the shelf. This was a waste of 99 minutes, even if there is a unrated version I still think that it would stink. It felt like half of the movie was cut out. A horror superhero that slashes people up-including cops-with wolverine arm blades and you see nothing but the aftermath? The editing was irritating as hell! A gore movie with nothing shown? Why,why,why,why,why? What were they thinking?


After watching this, strangely Faustless version of Faust, two things came to mind... One, that this was never intended to have anything to do with "Faust" and two, that I had just wasted two hours of my life.

Now, B movies are great. if you want to laugh at campy dialogue, bad acting, gratuitous violence and no hint of plot what so ever, B movies are king queen and half the court. But this takes it all to the Nth degree, and everything comes off as trying far too hard, and being just too stupid for words. From the impossible tangental character shifts, to the way the lead "actors" eyes cross whenever he's upset, this movie is enough to make Mephisopheles himself throw the television of the window.

The only up side to this travesty is the decent special effects (the Demon/Batman-wolverine guys costume accepted.) Indeed even before the credits appear, it is shown in large letters that yes, this movie did win an award for them. However, in the context of the rest of the picture, it only makes the viewer realize that special effects don't mean as much as they once did, since any idiot with a computer can make a half realistic looking... anything.

If you want to enjoy a good B movie, watch the Evil Dead Series, Death Race 2000 or one of my favorites, They Live. But please, for the love of Ed Wood, if you ever get curious about "Faust," remember that you can get the same experience rubbing sandpaper over your open eyes and less the cost of the rental.


****SPOILERS*****

Long awaited in some circles, this adaptation of Quinn and Vigil's graphic novel is bound to disappoint all but the most die-hard fans of the source material. No doubt Brain Yuzna was the correct choice for this material given his taste for sex and violence, and this could have been a flashy showcase for his new Spanish production company as it looks fantastic (care of A Nightmare on Elm Street cinematographer, Jaques Haitkin) and has has some good FX, but the film goes down in flames fast because of Quinn's convoluted script that throws in everything but the kitchen sink but refuses to define its characters or tell a coherent story. John Jaspers (the ever-mugging Mark Frost) is given a second chance at life by the demonic M (Andrew Divoff- who should be doing better movies) as a razor-clawed assassin. After wiping out a crowd of diplomats (was this ever explained?) he's arrested by a tough cop (perennial Yuzna star, Jeff Colmbs, who couldn't even Re-animate this movie) and interrogated by a sexy shrink who wants to understand him. Of course, M won't let Jaspers out of his Satanic contract, and ultra-violent hilarity ensues, sprinkled with kinky sex and bad one liners. Fast paced and never dull but quite dumb, a frustrating miss.

CS


I´ve been a fan of the movies of Brian Yuzna for a long time. Although he won´t be remembered as the greatest directors of all time, his movies have been funny, bloody and imaginative entertainment. But what he did with his new movie "Faust" is beyond words. The acting is painfully terrible, the score destroys every atmosphere, the settings are cheap and the special effects are absolutely cheesy. But, hey, it could´ve been a nice popcorn-movie nonetheless, if "Faust" wasn´t so completely in bad taste and if it had a story. There are moments which remind me of the worst in pornography: There is a disgusting torture-scene which is supposed to be sexy and nearly every boring, stupid and unmotivated scene ends with sex or some uncreative killings. This movie was directed only for money and you see it in every second of it: Throw in some gore, some metal music and some sex and those stupid horror-fans will like it. But it simply doesn´t work, it just makes you want to throw up. "Faust" is the debut of Yuzna´s new production company - He couldn´t have a worse start than this one. Avoid at all cost!!!


As far as comic book adaptation go, this one is out there amongst the worst of them. I had a bad time watching it because of how poorly it all was done.

The movie is made like a B-movie, with a B-cast & crew but still the movie is visually looking like an A-list movie. It creates an enormous contracts between the visual style and actually quality of the movie. It's perhaps a reason why the works out all the more badly.

Brian Yuzna made some decent enough genre movie, with movies that weren't meant as serious ones but with this movie he shows that he's a real lacking director. The movie also features some real bad editing, an horrendous musical score, stupid sound effects and bad looking gore effects.

Not only the storytelling of the movie is really lacking but yes, also the actual story itself. It really isn't a solid story and there is way too little actually happening it and all in all, it just simply lacks a main plot line. Thhis is really the biggest problem of the movie. It also rips off one or two too many other movies. The movie also actually features very little action, especially for a genre movie, and the action that it does feature is done incredible bad and is just plain lame. It's obviously not Brian Yuzna's thing. It doesn't actually help to make the movie any more interesting.

The movie is done quite tasteless at times, with both its gore and amount of misplaced sexuality.

The cast also really didn't do a good job. Odd thing is that halve of the cast consists out of Spanish actors, who were obviously dubbed at a later point during production. But also actors such as Mark Frost and Isabel Brook do a real horrible job. No wonder they starred in so few and meaningless movies. And suddenly their characters fall in love? What was up with that. Talking about a bad placed and unbelievable love story. Oh well, at least it still had Jeffrey Combs in it.

Well, yes I admit that there are even worse movies out there but that doesn't really make this a good movie either, now does it.

2/10


I wasn't sleepy last Sunday night and I chose to watch whatever was on TV. Channel 29 ("Space")was airing this, and I foolishly believed it was "Exorcist III". The movie lacks everything, but it's watchable.

John Jaspers made a deal with some sort of devil named "M" to clear M's way to world domination. Somewhere in the way, he repents and ends up in an asylum, where a pretty psychiatrist (or doctor, or whatever) visits him and hears his story. Jaspers claims "they" (M's band) are coming tonight. She hears it as if he was saying "1 + 1 is 3" but on his way out sees something "unusual" and runs away. Indeed, Jaspers is taken away and buried, while the girl calls a detective friend and is caught by the same guys before the cop arrives. Luckily for her, Jaspers is back as Faust, who should (given it's an horror film) look like a devil but most of the time is a red bug ("Bugman":::). Unfortunately, M won't give up, and the bulk of the movie starts there.

The cast is nothing spectacular. I wonder why Andrew Divoff keeps getting overlooked by the mainstream, since he's a hell of an actor. The girl who plays the shrink is OH beautiful, and M's chick seems to be taken out of a porn. Comic-based, it should be scary but it is not. However, despite everything, it's worth a watch, even to laugh a while.

4/10


There is not a single original line in Faust: Love of the Damned, and, the truth is, that's not even the worst of it. Faust... is a miasma of eye-rolling sexcapades (dressed up in a way that is clearly meant to seem demonic, but that falls exceedingly short), poor and tired special effects, and a completely incomprehensible plot. Even veteran horror actor Jeffrey Combs of Re-Animator fame can't pull this movie into something watchable, although his sudden turn to the dark side is probably the only good twist in this terrible film. One almost wonders whether Yuzna used some sort of blackmail material to convince Combs to be in this dreadful flick (with an interesting pair of sideburns to boot).

Faust... says nothing new about the natures of good and evil or the entity of the devil. In addition, it borders on pornographic with its senseless sex scenes and downright offensive with its portrayal of sexual abuse. Barely redeemable.


I've never felt the need to come to IMDb and actually write as to how horrible a movie is, but in this case I believe this to be necessary. This movie will be forever ingrained in my memory as "THE" worse movie I have ever seen.

The acting was awful, the directing was atrocious, the cinematography was uninspired and the score gave me a headache (people please stop playing heavy-metal music every time someone gets into a fight...it's boring).

What it basically is, is a major cringe-fest. I couldn't even listen to it with the director or the production comments, cause there was nothing that could possibly redeem it (not even the end credits).

So...I give this movie a 1, because IMDb doesn't have a 0.


Unless you count some guy in a cheesy "devil" getup slashing people like Wolverine, there is little horror in "Faust." Like more than a few other unfortunate souls, I rented this based on the presence of Jeffrey Combs, whose unusually stiff performance tipped me off to the long ride ahead. It's low-budget dreck, that is certain--but through its persistent incoherence, it kept my attention, even though the one feeling I had when the credits started to roll was absolute indifference. Director Brian Yuzna's camera angles are inventive at first, but the music-video edits occur so regularly that they become annoying after a while; yet perhaps the one thing "Faust" can hold to its name are the impressive special effects (impressive for such an obviously low-budget production), even though I'm of the opinion that people shouldn't even bother adapting comic books to film. "Faust" turns into a prime example of why that's true.

4/10


because there's nothing else worth seeing!

The plot makes no sense, the acting ranges from bad to REALLY bad (even Jeffrey Combs!) and the dialogue...well, let's put it this way...Ed Wood would be proud! The only reason to see this crap is the gore...there's tons of it (I'm really shocked this got by with an R rating). There's buckets of blood, plenty of severed body parts and a lot of violent fights were people are hacked up left and right. Great stuff :). Also the film is (technically) well done. It looks just great and there is an occasional good shot or two (one shot on a train was truly incredible). But, all in all, the movie really sucks! If you're into horror films and get a kick out of blood and violence (like me) this is for you. Otherwise, AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!!!!


I was rather disappointed by this effort from Freda, who's visual style I have always admired. "Iguana" is by comparison to many of his other movies rather clumsily assembled and Freda is not very sure in his timing of the shock-effects. There are compensations: a thrilling chase on a bridge, above-average performances, nice Dublin locations and a surprisingly nasty conclusion that involves a crazed killer beating up an old woman and torturing a semi-nude 16 year old!

However, these compensations are not enough to make it a worthwhile movie, even for fans of the giallo genre.

The plot is uninteresting and rather muddled, the score and cinematography sub-standard (for a film directed by super-stylist Riccardo Freda, I mean) and what is this hilarious obsession with sun-glasses!!!

According to rumor Riccard Freda wasn't too happy with "Iguana" himself and used the pseudonym "Willy Pareto" in the credits. It's not that it's a bad movie, it's just that it should have been so much better considering everyone involved.


Two things up front: Firstly, anyone who's read this far into the reviews knows the plot of this thing (astronauts chucking a bomb-- if not themselves-- into the dying sun in order to revive it). Secondly, the following is as disjointed as the film it addresses.

So many glowing reviews I've read for "Sunshine" seem to center around the idea that one must simply give in to the power and majesty of the film's visuals. That is to say, one must in the presence of "Sunshine" emphasize oohing and ahhing over thinking.

I'm sorry: I can't do that. Ironically, if "Sunshine" were being touted as a dumb bit of fluff, I'd be far more likely to take it at face value. But "Sunshine"'s makers and culties have trumpeted their darling as a slice of intelligent sci-fi, oh-so-rare these days, etc.

Frankly, it's not. That "intelligent" thing. Not a bit of it.

Thoughts: If you hire a physicist to act as a consultant on your film, and if your screenwriter concocts backstories for your characters, and if you house your actors in bare-bones student digs and send them up in airplanes that permit them to experience zero-g, all so that they feel like "real" astronauts, and if all that consulting and all those stories and all that experience don't end up on the screen-- i.e., if you expect us viewers to mine the film's websites for this science and these tales-- then you as a filmmaker (that means you, Mr. Boyle) haven't done your job. Simple.

We don't know who these characters are, so we don't care about them. Sure, Rose Byrne has her teary brown doe-eyes, so she captures an instant sympathy vote, and Hiroyuki Sanada draws us in with his calm and his silky voice. But the rest of 'em? Cillian Murphy comes off as a stoner and a bit of a jerk, and Chris Evans tries desperately to make something of the "duty" card he's been dealt, but the rest of 'em are ciphers. Alex Garland seems to think that character development is for sissies-- or that it's certainly not important if you have a Big Idea (here "Our Lives Are Secondary to the Saving of All Humanity, Dontchaknow"). I politely suggest that he's dead wrong. If we don't give a rat's patootie about the characters, we certainly won't care about the idea in the service of which they're acting.

And not only are they ciphers: they're inconsistent, too. Early on, Mace goads Capa, the only one capable of operating the stellar bomb (in itself a ridiculous idea: what, in sixteen months, Capa couldn't train a backup to turn the key and press the "LAUNCH" button? Job security, I guess.), into performing a highly dangerous repair job outside the ship. Then, later, when he and Capa and another of the Icarus II's hapless crew must execute an ill-advised human-cannon trick between two crippled airlocks (a situation that falls squarely between "Don't ask." and "What the hell?"), Mace insists that Capa take the only available spacesuit, as he's indispensable to the mission. Sure, Mace earlier may have been feeling piqued and petty, Capa having pulled a bit of a careless dumb with regard to their window for sending messages home, but the fact here is that it's not my job to make Mace's excuses. It's Mr. Garland's job, and his script simply doesn't deliver.

Don't try to cover up the paper-thinness of your story by snowing us with special effects. It's insulting and annoying. Just how many useless beauty shots of the Icarus II does this movie contain, anyway? Not one of them helps us to know where we are on the ship. Also: if you can't afford the effects you wanted for your third-act mad slasher (did I already mention the "Don't ask." thing?), don't try to cover by shaking the camera and overexposing your shots every time said slasher is on screen. That takes "annoying" clear up to "blatantly irritating."

Smart people creating jeopardy by making dumb choices or nonsensically arbitrary decisions is less likely to evoke sympathy than smart people who find themselves in peril because of natural disasters or mechanical catastrophes. That is, a supposedly smart guy who makes a calculation that leads to half a spaceship going up in flames is less likely to earn a "You poor people!" from me than, say, a freak solar flare that leads to half of said spaceship going up in flames. And have I mentioned yet how much I despise selectively "smart" computers? As in, a computer that talks to you and calls you by name and yet can't tell you when half your spaceship has just caught on fire? (Not that it's entirely the computer's fault here, the fire thing: it happens during one of "Sunshine"'s many randomly placed beauty shots, so it's quite likely that the computer, like the viewing audience, isn't sure if the ship that catches fire is actually the Icarus II, the ship on which Our Story is taking place. "Oh, look: there's a ship on fire over there. Hey-- do you smell smoke...?")

Selective flammability: Not only do Capa and the film's Mystery Slasher not burn up when Capa, hoping to effect a desperate getaway, yells "Full sunlight!" in the observation lounge of the Icarus II, the lounge itself doesn't burn up. By comparison, when the show's nutter psychologist (again: don't ask) tries the "full sunlight" thing, he burns up just fine, thank you.

So: who gets the star? It's a split: Chris Evans, who tries so desperately to be the voice of reason (if only for a moment) on this ship of fools, and Underworld and John Murphy, who were obviously watching a much more intelligent, moving, and dramatic film when they concocted the score.

Even though it's rare to see a movie so lovingly misconceived, you'd be wise to give this a miss. Dumb, depressing, muddled, and thoroughly unentertaining.


The combination of director Danny Boyle, writer Alex Garland and actor Cillian Murphy should have meant that Sunshine was the best film of the year so far. Sadly it's meaningless drivel.

There are two kinds of space movie. The first are those with shooting and/or aliens (Star Wars, Serenity, Alien etc). Then there are those in which the focus of the film is on people going mad in space for no well explained reason (Solaris, 2001, Silent Running etc). Sunshine falls into the latter category. If you've knowingly seen a Tarkofsky film then go and see Sunshine - you're bound to be able to find some spurious justification for why it was meaningful.

*Spoiler*

A group of ethnically diverse astronauts are in the final leg of the second and last mission to chuck a cosmic paint can into the sun in an attempt to "restart" it.

Nothing much happens until the crew discovers that the ship from the first mission is still orbiting the sun. The crew then decide that they'd rather be in "Alien" than "Solaris" and go to investigate. Naturally someone is still alive on the original spaceship. This surviving loony has a god-complex, a bad case of sunburn and the ability to blur film. He kills everyone except Cillian Murphy who manages to detonate the bomb and everyone on earth is saved - hooray.

Apparently:

1) Sentient super computers aren't very good at providing useful information such as "there's an extra person on board" or "shall we make sure the mirrors are adjusted before turning the ship?".

2) Vitally irreplaceable sections of space ships often explode and/or catch fire for no reason. Providing backup systems (or even fire extinguishers) is apparently pointless and unnecessary.

3) Computers that rely on complex liquid cooling devices to function do not require emergency shut offs. Or spares.

4) Gold lame space suits are in.

5) All derelict space ships should be investigated in case they contain plot devices.

6) If the sun is going out restarting it will be a doddle.

*End Spoiler*

There are some people who may decide this is THE in thing. Me, I'd rather watch Space Truckers again... and that's saying something. I'd give it some points for the special effects but really, given that none of them serve the story in any useful way, I cannot even justify that. 1/10


Ghastly.

The first two thirds of Sunshine were fair. Nothing great, but fair. There were immediate problems from the very beginning (such as using a calm voice when it should be awed, and the exact opposite as regards the music), but I liked the fact that none of the crew members were either particularly heroic or evil, but just ordinary people. But I certainly sat there wondering where the hell this story was going. Then came the last part, and, as is the case with so many bad movies, it went straight to hell in a hand-basket. Throughout the movie the logic between events were unclear. Where were we? How did we get from one situation to the next? How did this or that bit work? There was an abject lack of explanations for a host of things, from what exactly was wrong with the sun, and to just what it was that caused the Earthroom fire.

But it can be argued that these elements are not important, because the producers were trying for an art movie. So the substance is all in the themes: World is doomed; scientists are trying to save it; insane religious fanaticism is sabotaging science. Also the scene where they vote on whether to kill Trey: Cassie is the conscience; the emotional and irrational heart among all the rational analyses. Sure. Nice themes. But utilized inside the confines of an utterly incompetently structured narrative.

Nothing made sense. For instance, I could write several pages on the zany way this movie treated gravity. And how it tried to get by on clichés. And was unsuccessful in building suspense due to sloppy writing, directing, editing and sound effects. The creators of this movie know very little about science fiction, and they should stick to what they do marginally well: horror.

Sunshine was a failure, and its IMDb rating (currently a staggering 7.8!!) will plummet when more people (such as actual SF fans, and people who're not friends of the the director) see it. Halfway through it I thought it might merit a 5 rating, but the ending was so ludicrous, unbelievable and stupidly put together that I can only end up awarding the movie a 2 out of 10. I now believe this movie has the worst ending of any sci-fi movie I have ever seen. Event Horizon, move over!

Sheeze.


I went into the cinema with mixed expectations. The premise - a team of scientists sent with a giant bomb to return our dying sun to normal levels - seemed B-movie material of the worst kind. I could just imagine card-board cut-out characters, clichéd plot twists and a truck of scientific errors. Yet this is directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) so who knew, maybe he could work the same magic he did on zombie flicks on the disaster-in-space sub-genre. I am surprised to report Sunshine delivered on all of these points.

Cillian Murphy, star of 28 Days Later, returns as ship's primary physicist, Capa. He and the rest of the 8 crew members of Manhattan-sized bomb Icarus II are on a mission to fix the Sun, which is cooling perilously. 16 months in and something forces a change of plan. The previous (failed) expedition is discovered floating in orbit of our star. It's when Capa makes the decision that they change course for the Icarus I that things start going wrong. One small mistake leads to great danger, which causes more havoc and forces the desperate saviours of humanity to take even more dangerous risks and so on, all culminating in an insane and murderous survivor rampaging through the ship with a motorised scalpel.

Up until actually reaching the Icarus I, it's all so Apollo 13 and so good. Spot-on characterisation, beautiful long shots and rather familiar set design (watch out for the cockpit). But it's when Sunshine tries to be a psychological-thriller and a sci-fi and a horror flick and an action movie that it all starts to go horribly wrong as a film. It loses direction - maybe because Danny Boyle is too busy looking over the computer graphics guys' shoulders and saying "Ooh, that looks cool. Hey, how about we obscure half the action? Or put in pseudo-subliminal images? Or blur the screen?Orstoptheframe? Addsomeghostingthere!Andthere!Andblurthis! Andputaflashoflightthere!" Individually, each graphic trick that Boyle tries looks really, really cool and usually flows properly but when he throws them into the movie like Picasso throws paint, it gets very tiring awfully quickly. Quite frankly, it gives me a headache even to remember it.

What plot is full of holes, too. Some may actually have been explained but I must have blinked during those frames. For example, and worst by far, is that they seem to ignore the effect of the Sun's gravity for the most part. If an object is thrust parallel with the spin of the Sun, gravity should pull them towards it in a curve but instead they travel in a totally straight line. Bah.

It's such a shame that Sunshine ends up so incomprehensible and random because it is packed full of good ideas. It's apparent that they tried to do too much at once and weren't critical enough to get rid of the stuff that was un-necessary or didn't work. Still, the 'lesser of two evils' theme running through certainly makes food for thought. It's refreshing to see such sensible characters who know what's at stake. Would you kill a friend to save humanity and all the solar system? What about three friends? More? That's the question isn't it...

I can't recommend watching this film. It's smart, it's oh so beautiful, it's well acted... but it has collapsed under its own weight into nothing more than sun-scorched stardust. Go watch Pitch Black, or dig out that old VHS of Apollo 13, Alien or the Abyss. Anything. Just not this.


I'm wondering, first of all and a little queasily, what, in ten or twenty years, will be the movie that makes "Sunshine" seem smart and entertaining. After sitting in a combination of slack-jawed shock and sheer blistering irritation through this latest and most misguided effort from wonderboys Boyle and Garland, a viewing pal and I dug out "Event Horizon" and "Supernova" (the latter henceforth to be known as "Mace Is Pinbacker, and There Be Boobies, Too"). And, guess what? The two that once seemed chunks of rankest Velveeta now blossomed like the sweetest of Edams next to "Sunshine." Call me old-fashioned, but I like films to be entertaining. I like them to have plots that progress with a semblance of logic. Oh, and I like films that have characters. With character. "Event Horizon" and "Supernova" at least take a shot at those criteria. "Sunshine" places itself above such silliness. Oh, Mr. Garland, what were you thinking...? (After the third draft, let alone the thirty-fourth, you should by now know enough to say to yourself, "This isn't working, is it?") Mr. Boyle: What possessed you to want to film this script...? And all of you in the cast: How high was the bar tab when you signed on the dotted line...? So many reviewers have singed this thing already that I'll focus on a few idiosyncratic annoyances and have done.

We're told-- and shown-- throughout "Sunshine" that the sun will burn you to a crisp in less time than it takes to think the phrase "bug zapper," and yet at the end Cillian Murphy's scientist-hippie-savant Capa stands face-to-face with a roiling wall of solar plasma without so much as a blister on his milk-white skin. Of course, earlier he mumbles something about the laws of physics not applying within the sun itself, and I guess he's the expert so he ought to know, but I can't help but wonder silly things like how the sun can burn right through the wall of the bomb housing (which bomb, for some reason, requires a crew of nuts to run it right up to the sun-- I guess there's a real danger of missing a target as tiny as Old Sol) without burning right on through him, too. It burns through him eventually, sure, but not before we're treated to the Obligatory Poetic Destiny Moment. Earlier in the show, another character roars in agony as he roasts alive in direct sunlight; here, now, in the Land of the Big Finale, Capa gets to look all wondering and angelic as the solar breeze flutters his flowing locks. It's as if Danny Boyle took the afternoon off (given the sloppy direction throughout the film, a month or two off wouldn't have been out of line) and flagged Steven Spielberg-- in full golden-glowy schlock mode-- to stand in for him.

Another random ranting: Even though the film's makers and supporters yodel to all and sundry about how their marvelous picture-show manages to get by without any aliens or supernatural elements, "Sunshine"'s third-act mystery killer is not only super-duper strong (okay: so maybe toting the admittedly, erm, fine-boned Cillian Murphy around by the throat would realistically call only for "reasonably strong," no "super" or "duper" about it), he's completely immune to wild extremes of heat and cold. He takes a blast of "full sunlight" (the same brand of "full sunlight" that incinerates at least two other characters) without so much as an "Ouch!"; then he removes from their silly huge open vat of cooling liquid the ship's preposterously big computer components and suffers not the least touch of frostbite-- even though frostbite fatally mauls the poor schmuck saddled with the task of re-dunking those components.

About halfway through, I started thinking how much fun Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright would have making a parody of "Sunshine." By the end, however, I'd modified the thought in two ways: 1. the Pegg parody would have a beginning, a middle, and an end; action one could follow; and warmth, humor, and heart-- all of which "Sunshine" lacks in spades; and 2. the parody had already begun. Maybe it was a pre-emptive strike on the part of Boyle and Garland, but by the time they were milking for drama the fact that Mr. Murphy had fallen in his spacesuit (note to Mr. Boyle: don't EVER admit that you based a spacesuit design on Kenny from "South Park." Trust me on this.) and-- yes!-- couldn't get up, I burst out laughing. Oh, he's grunting-- he's sweating-- he's making that deeply endearing "Nnnnnnnggghhh--!" sound that signals to fluttery fan-ears and -hearts worldwide that He, Cillian Murphy, Is In Distress-- and it's one of the most cracker-jack funny film moments I've seen in months. Which months in fact included a Pegg parody, "Hot Fuzz." Perhaps Boyle and Garland should hearken to a new calling.

'Cause sci-fi certainly isn't their strong suit. Come to think of it, neither is character development. Or pacing. Or middles. Or endings. Or....


I had high expectations for this film, as the scenario is an interesting one. Unfortunately, the film is clumsily structured and incoherent in parts, and many elements are contrived to keep the crew in danger. Here's a not quite comprehensive list:

- The movie opens with a voice-over explaining the situation and you jump right into the ship. Since there's no shots showing what is actually happening on Earth until the very end, I didn't feel invested in the mission.

- Any science that was once in the script has been gutted here - there's no mention of WHY the sun is dying or exactly how the bomb will restart it, although an interesting theory about a "Q-particle" infesting the sun is on the production blog.

- You'll be confused by some of the most incoherent fight scenes ever filmed. With his extreme closeups and quick cuts, Boyle can't even pull off a 20 second fight in a corridor without losing the audience. It gets worse with the Pinbacker character, who's filmed so blurry and artsy that my wife seriously thought he was some kind of trans-dimensional alien.

- For such a critical mission, the Icarus ships are not very robust. They contain only one airlock (even the shuttle has two ways to get out!), one mainframe that depends on a constant supply of coolant with no backup computer, and no emergency lighting. Instead of the habitat spinning to provide gravity (which would make more sense than the never-mentioned but apparent artificial gravity), the only part of the ship that spins are the communication antennas - the one part you want stationary and pointing to Earth. The heat shield is composed of thousands of mechanical louvers with no imaginable function, instead of a simple solid piece. I rarely had a clear idea as to where anything was in this ship; for example, the viewing room was cut into the bomb's heat shield, but there was no impression that anyone had to walk through the bomb area to get there.

- Oxygen levels play a big part in the suspense, with Michelle Yeoh calculating that there's only enough air for four crew. Yet this was a vast ship with literally cubic acres of air in the bomb area alone (which begs the question, why have air around the bomb at all?). And all this oxygen was generated by the small plant area? I don't think so.

- Why exactly did the first probe fail? Did everyone just decide to burn themselves up? Didn't quite catch that explanation.

- If the mainframe fails, there's only one person who can operate the bomb. Why weren't the rest of the crew trained to operate it? What else did they have to practice on for 16 months?

- The bomb will be traveling so fast space & time will break down? Please. This thing is the mass of Manhattan, you're not going to accelerate it very fast.

- Why was communication lost as they neared Mercury? We've had probes go to Mercury and even closer to the sun, and we've talked to them just fine.

- All remaining plausibility flees at the end, when Capa detonates the bomb and has a leisurely gaze at..what? The wall of nuclear flame? The fires of creation? You tell me. The famously cryptic 2001 made a lot more sense than this.

In general, much of the film impressed me as contrived situations to keep the crew in danger. This movie had a lot of potential, but Danny Boyle chose to get lost in his own head.


To be fair for a short while I was quite taken with the sheer atmosphere of Sunshine. The ship, the location, the effects. Breathtaking.

Still, it didn't take long for them to mess it up. Here they go again... The wheels started to fall off about the time the crew start having a brawl. I'm thinking, maybe the selection process should have focused a bit more on the maturity of the people saving the human race? Responsibility and all that.

The story continues and we have a major catastrophe and the shield is damaged as a result of a human memory malfunction. Two observations:

1. We have an intelligent (?) computer that will override their vital mission to fix the shield in a vital, life threatening way but it wouldn't bl**dy well make the one point something angle correction to the shield when they changed course in the first place! (Which thus also endangered the mission) Since when do we let computers make judgment calls? Why didn't they again use their codes to override the computer for the mere 30 seconds or so it would take to save the Captains life?

2. There was a huge, inconvenient fire in the oxygen producing compartment. Now the computer tells the crew many useful things but did it mention there is a fire? Nope. Was there an effective way to deal with this risk? Again no. Unless you consider burning the oxygen you need to survive effective..... I might mention here that the implication is that the trees have created so much pure oxygen that the fire is particularly violent. Um, surely you have been feeding the trees CO2 or basically the same air everyone is breathing?

Moving on...

We have the space jump from the Icarus 1. Some guy, we really don't care who, ends up in the absolute cold of space behind the shield. Absolute cold of space being -273 degrees Kelvin we're told, so pretty rapidly he freezes. Now that's tough I guess but it's even worse, it's just wrong.

If we assume there is no radiant heat coming from the shield itself here's the story. Space is a vacuum, a vacuum is nothing, so it is neither hot or cold. If, there is no radiant heat source present, then an object will radiate it's heat without gaining any in return until it's all gone. This occurs at absolute zero which is -273 degrees Kelvin. Good so far.

The reason freezing instantly is rubbish is because the writers haven't realized that there is no heat loss by conduction (as in air) but only by radiation. This can be a very slow process. Which is why we put hot drinks in a vacuum flask to keep it hot, a vacuum is the best insulator. Basically freezing would be the least of your worries in space without a suit.

A few more minor points too sharp to swallow

- The shield has lots of moving parts, that don't appear to be useful... - If the plan all along was for the shield-bomb unit to fly into the heart of the Sun, what was going to protect the spacecraft on the return journey? What was going to protect the bomb when it entered the Sun and the heat could come from behind? - Why can you simply raise the, absolutely vital, mainframe computer out of it's coolant without any safety devices or alarms going off? (To override a mission saving action by the computer you need two people and security codes...) Once you raise it, although it turns off, in a while it will destroy itself, somehow. To service it the best way is to dive into freezing water and use a....spanner. The system that raises and lowers it has enough grunt to trap and maim a human being. - When the computer goes off the lights go out, there are no emergency lights... - You can ask the computer to allow so much heat and light in that it will kill you. What the...


a movie with a great premise, unfortunately falls under the weight of it's own expectations. problems i had with this movie abound. why is none of the crew over 30??? one of the things that kept 'deep impact' out of the made for TV section was Robert duvals superb turn as a widowed astronaut. why do they jeopardize the whole of earth just to see what Icarus 1 is like? why couldn't an astrophysicist calculate shield angle correctly? why did they go over to Icarus 1 with no spacesuits? why don't they have any robots to do external work? how does the looney from Icarus 1 get aboard 2 undetected? why do they spend so much time in the observation lounge staring at the sun? how did the payload manage to get so far inside the sun without astronauts dying instantly from radiation poisoning or melting? it just got more and more ridiculous the longer the movie went on.

it seemed like earth was in the hands of a bunch of 30 something slackers who couldn't add up and were more interested in zoning out than doing a professional job. as long as you don't think too long or too hard it's not a bad way to spend 90 or so minutes, but that hardly elevates it over standard Hollywood fare. this movie is nothing like alien or 2001. it's a blot on Danny Boyle's copybook.


If you haven't seen 2001, Silent Running, Event Horizon, Dark Star or Alien, you might enjoy this film.

Otherwise you'll just find your mind continually wandering back to the previous films. If you've seen them then avoid this one, as they're much better films (yes even Event Horizon).

As stated in previous reviews, the FX are very good, but that alone isn't enough to save this film.

I read that Alex Garland wanted the film to be about meeting god. It's a shame he didn't want to inject some humour and more action into the story also, because its quite heavy going.

I'm amazed that Danny Boyle has produced such a turgid and morose (quite boring) film (by his standards that is).


I'm trying hard to think of alternatives, but i think this is the worst movie I've ever seen. That said, I'm pretty generous when it comes to reviewing movies, I can normally look past problems and just get a few laughs, or shocks, or whatever out of a mediocre move and then be happy. But Sunshine not only disappointed me, but it enraged me that such a thing could be.

The first thing that hit me was massive lack of realism. I already knew the story was about the sun going out, but I didn't mind that too much, a movie is allowed to bend physics for the sake of plot, but when a reported brightness increase from 2% to 3.1% changed from a dim glow to blinding white any suspension of disbelief I could have ever attempted was crushed. Still, it may have been jarring, things such as the >1 year journey that is inside earths orbit also jarred me, but other than that first one I don't think the average viewer should have noticed, and unreal-ism, even in the case of this movie, shouldn't lose more than 1 point from movie's score, rather it was the plethora of other problems that doomed Sunshine.

While still not absolutely crushing the movie, the characters themselves certainly ensured it could never get a rating better than "semi-decent". The characters showed the average intelligence and foresight of a dead maggot. these problems ranged from the relatively benign; such as when near the start of the movie a crew member did all the necessary procedures for changing the ship's course entirely on his own, not even asking another crew member to skim his work for problems; to the absolutely ridiculous "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it". That quote comes from a section where one of the crew decides to angle the deflector in such a way that a portion of the ship will be annihilated with 100% certainty. The rationale behind this decision (and the quote) was that "they weren't using that part of the ship at the moment". Many other such things happened, some even more ridiculous, such as venting the entire oxygen supply into a fire so it will burn faster, with no real reason given exactly why they would want that, though "We'll cross that bridge" was a personal favourite.

Even with the above massive stupidities (which seem to be the main driving force for the movie's plot) the movie still would have had a chance for maybe 3 or 4 out of 10, but alas, it was not to be. the movie's plot firmly cemented it in the "Avoid this movie at all costs" zone. The plot starts out simple and understandable, deliver the Dues Ex mechina to the sun, it soon takes a twist, that under normal circumstances would add to a movie, by finding the previous, failed mission to the sun. At this point everything is as you should expect, problems arise, the crew has to fix problems, think of a sci-fi version of Apollo 13, except really bad. It could have still gotten 2/10 at this point, at least it would be reminiscent of a great movie, but at this point the plot turns to "We need to kill crew members to conserve oxygen!" and it carries this plot worse than your average fan-fiction. At this point my mind wandered to how this movie could have gotten one extra star if it had asked an interesting question, such as if humanity is worth saving if it will so readily kill it's own (still a questionable question). Instead, it asks a flat and simple "Is the crew more important than the mission?" and before you can think it answers "No! The mission is all-important!" in what seems like a bad ripoff of 2001 or (less related to the main plot) Alien. None of that matters though, because at the end it turns into "There's a madman on the ship!!!!" (More Alien allusion?) complete with scary sound and visual effects.

There were other problems, such as generally confusing parts, (Looks like he made it to the other part of the ship only for it to explode.... oh, wait, turns out he was going the other way!) tonnes of sections that seem directly ripped from other movies, ("I'm sorry unmemorable crew member #1, I can't let you do that", but don't worry, it's only HAL for one scene) and parts that just didn't seem to make sense (Why did the hydroponics section catch fire? and why didn't the computer warn them 'till half an hour later).

Finally, what could have been the redeeming factor of the movie, if it was redeemable at all, were the special effects. Even then they were "neat" but nothing to write home about, and for those hoping for a fancy flashy colourful special effect when the "Plot Device" activates at the end, there isn't one, seems you just can't win.

For me, the highlight of this movie was being able to write the summary for this comment, and I think that should speak louder than anything else.


Should one avoid exposure to Sunshine or not?

ON THE SUNNY SIDE:

I always welcome a serious attempt at a high class SF movie. Of course most efforts lead to serious disappointments. But this one has both Alien and 2001 as references. If it delivers at only 10% we would still be treated with the best SF in decades. 28 Weeks Later by Danny Boyle struck me as a very good horror movie. And descent horror movies are as scarce as descent SF movies. Hopes are up.

It looks fantastic. Just based on its looks it deserves ten shiny, not dieing, stars.

The acting, though not great, was certainly acceptable (apart from the navigator).

The beginning doesn't ruin what now can still be hopeful expectations. Though the element of a dark kind of fascination with the sun by the crews psychologist is shown in a really stupid and in your face (lol) manner (exept if to you something like: "yeah, I'm very close to the sun, but waring these cool sunglasses I can take her on" seems in place for a crew member on a mission to prevent this nuclear 'monster' from kicking the bucket).

Music by Underworld. Great choice (I am a fan).

With this a bright side, what can go wrong?

ON THE DARK -LEFT A BIT TOO LONG ON THE BBQ BURNED TO CHARCOAL- SIDE:

A whole lot. Actually the whole enterprise.

The error of the ships navigator (horribly portrait by an Asian actor who's reinvention of overacting is not worthy of anything but rotten tomatoes) is ridiculous. Hope fades.

I don't know if characters need to be developed necessarily, like a lot of comments imply. But it IS needed here that viewers get involved and care for the characters. I don't care how that's realized but Sunshine does the opposite. Maybe Mr Boyle thinks it's cruel to let us care for characters who all get killed. So he let's them do all kinds of stupid things that make us quite indifferent to their fate. And since this group of childish amateurs is the elite crew selected from earths entire population in some future, we don't care a rats ass about that earth as well. Don't take our care for the planet for granted Mr Boyle. All hope is lost.

Plot twists get sillier and sillier as the movie progresses, eh sorry, degenerates into a very vague monster (not a joke).

Bad acting? I think the actors are not much to blame here. The Script is. It's amazingly bad. Isn't a script a key element in deciding if the making of the movie will go through? Why was this movie made (with this script)? I can't believe the rating here on IMDb is not corrupted. Maybe there are really a lot of people who enjoyed Sunshine, but it would have been so easy to improve on the script. And I hate the flawed clichés like instant freezing in the vacuum(!) of space. Are clichés required for urning a big budget, no matter how flawed? Do flawed clichés get past expert advisors? What deluded arrogance to present this as serious SF. Furthermore the 'science' is degraded by showing too much and leaving too little to imagination. It's OK to introduce techniques that are not explained to the point it can be reputed but do their amazing stuff like in Star Trek. If Sunshine is trying to be more scientifically supported by sharing more of underlying principles it shoots itself in the foot, for even layman can dismiss the science as fantasy lacking enough fantasy. And furthermore, ask yourself this question: If you take a man from earth, expose him to the sun insufficiently protected for seven years, how would he look like? See the answer the makers of Sunshine come up with! Like a walking talking grumpy piece of meat that's badly burned (yeah, right). But wait, maybe I'm astray, lost from Sunshine's ambitious path...

Not invited by the movie itself, but by a state of boredom, stubbornly still not fully convinced of Sunshine's dark failure I start to wonder about possible philosophical implications the makers may have intended when abandoning simple movie conventions that enable viewers to see what's in front of the camera and to follow what's going on. How else to blend in a bit of Kubricks' odysseys' depth? Toying a bit with concepts of god, the sun and humankind my goodwill runs out in a last effort to deny that this sun will shine no more. Soon I decide that Sunshine with its vague villain won't score better in this respect than just any movie we look at through some kind of blurring device.

Science fiction in my opinion is fiction with a certain level of scientific plausibility. A horror movie just needs to be scary. This movie aims to shine bright in both genres and fails horribly. I suggest, instead of seeing this star killer, to read all the 'hated it' reviews here on IMDb. To me that was a lot more fun. There is however still some attraction in seeing it for its good looks and missed potential.


There's been a lot of debate about whether this movie is good or bad. I liked it at first, but then I started thinking.

This movie really just consists of a problem, there's a solution to this problem, however as a result of that solution another problem occurs, this is fine until about the 6th problem or so, and then you just get a headache. If you don't understand me let me break it down, for example (this does happen in the movie) problem: they realize the Icarus 1 is still orbiting around the sun, there is a distress call and the crew of the Icarus 2 believe there could be someone still there, or they could take the bomb from the Icarus one and use it in case their bomb doesn't work to restart the sun. Solution: they change course towards the Icarus 1. Problem: they changed course but didn't fix the sheids (which were set for the normal journey, couldn't the super-genius computer have done this? or simply warned them), the ship might be destroyed if they don't fix the sheilds, a fir occurs in the ship (etc etc) Solution:they fix the sheilds. Problem: the captain loses his life in the mission and all hell breaks loose on the ship between the crew. As you see its as if one thing leads to another, but thats not necessarily a good thing.

The whole movie really consists of that. I would describe all the bad things that don't make any sense in this movie but other people have probably named them all.

In some peoples defence to this movie they say things like "you should simply watch it without thinking, don't think about its flaws". OK...

1. If you didn't think about a movies 'flaws' every movie would be perfect, and none would be bad.

2. The movie its self gets you thinking, so who is to blame?

A lot of things are left unanswered, for example the captain dies and one of the crew members is like 'captain...what did you see...what did you see?' this really got my interest for a while, until i realized that the captain didn't see anything, or whatever he did see we would never know. The characters seem to change their personality throughout the movie. For example there is one character who seems to have a fetish for plants, half way through the movie she decides to have a change of heart from treehugger to a "lets kill him, he isn't any use to us" sort of person. In the directors defence he did this to show how people could change in different circumstances...OK?....

Another idea, when your making a movie stick to one set genre, OK? don't decide, hm...im getting bored of sci fi i think im going to move to horror/thriller. The director must have though 3/4 of the film in, that he'd like to have a crazy killer in the movie. OK i really don't want to explain it all... Its worth watching ONCE, rent it, don't buy it.

If you watch it more then once in (for example) a month, then there's something obviously wrong with you, and you should seek counselling.

There's nothing really good about the movie, but its still interesting (for a while).

Id give it a 4 (maybe 5 if im generous) out of 10.

P.S. if the character is close enough to put his hand into the sun and his hand gets burnt, how come the rest of his body doesn't burn as well? This is one of the many unscientific occurings in this movie.


This film had everything, a good director with a solid body of work behind him, a fairly healthy budget but not too big and a pretty good cast too. Unfortunately it has Alex Garland writing and here lies the problem, Alex Garland is not John Hodge and this is a fact that Danny Boyle seems completely unaware of. Alex Garland is a novelist, not a screen writer and this becomes very apparent when looking at his work.

Sunshine starts out and it's atmospheric and clastrophobic, I thinking it's got a very good '2001' thing going on. The set up for the story is sound and the science seems movie credable. Then things start to go wrong for the characters, OK well this is a movie it was bound to happen. Then they get even worse and suddenly the whole film changes.

I find myself in a paranoid piece that reminds me almost of 'The Thing' except the plot doesn't grip nearly as tightly. Characters start dropping like flies but they have been so underdeveloped that I really don't care about their fates.

Then, guess what, the whole film does another massive switch and I find myself watching something along the same lines as 'Event Horizen'. I'm starting to think Garland must have just watched his favourite movies and then blended the plots together to create something he passed off as his own.

Then came the ending of the movie and OH MY GOD I was left in a state of confusion and relief (I've never been so happy to see credits roll since I sat through 'Pearl Harbour'). The ending makes no sense and the bits that do are just boring. They all die in the end but, as I said before, I really didn't care.

Sunshine would make a good book but it made a god awful movie...Garland should write it as a book actually, then write another one and then another. Hopefully it would stop him from writing dreadful scripts.


OK, you probably already know about the main plot. Some astronauts are flying to the sun aboard the spaceship Icarus II, in order to "restart" it with a "bomb". Exactly why the sun needs to be "restarted" or why a "bomb" would do it, is not explained. Nor is it explained why they need a manned mission in order to reach the sun. The film contains lots of beautiful pictures of the sun and the ship that adds nothing to the plot. None of the crew is really introduced to us properly, so we don't really care when they die.

17 minutes into the film they discover Icarus I circling the sun. The crew decides to investigate it, in order to bring the extra "payload" or "bomb", so they get two chances to "restart" the sun. This decision is of course fatal, but unfortunately for the film, not in any realistic way. It turns out that one of the crew-members of Icarus I is crazy and killed the old crew. After having survived alone for six years, he now continues his work by killing the crew of Icarus II. Gasp! could you find a more boring way of killing this movie? Apart from being crazy, he also lacks skin, and for some reason, every shot that contains him is blurry, either because they spent all their special effects money on pictures of the sun, or because the director was a big fan of the Blair Witch Project, and thought it was a good idea to recreate those fancy shaky-cam effects in a visually beautiful scifi-movie.

The crew also faces lots of other dangers, but they are all forced, unlikely incidents that would only happen in a bad movie. There's a faulty manual calculation that makes the "shield" point in the wrong direction, which damages a part of the ship, but no explanation for why the calculation needed to be done manually, or why the computer didn't correct it. There's a fire that starts for no reason, and a sprinkler system that fails for no reason as well. A computer that overheats because it doesn't shut down or go to power-save mode when cooling fails. I could go on, but you get my point...

Avoid this movie.


After winning tickets to the premiere on local radio, I was looking forward to the event, but after reading up on the film's history was sceptical about the film.

The plot, while it touches on the original story, sends you off course all the time with poor direction, and what to me, was obviously at best a pretty poor script. The sub-plots tried to grab your attention, but in reality only increased your eagerness for the film to grind to a blundering halt. I don't want to be too harsh on the director, and whilst she could of perhaps done better, the "hollyoaks" style actors are mostly to blame. The lead male (matthew chambers) was no where near strong enough for the part, and, an already "fake" uninteresting side plot involving prince William (matthew Turpin), was made worse by the "prince's" acting. At times it looked like he was reading off an auto cue for direction. The film then, I would only recommend to die hard lady Godiva fans or girls/guys on a awful blind date, as their is a perfectly acceptable excuse for leaving early. Dire! I don't normally comment on film's but I usually check reviews before going and only see "good" ones, so as no one had commented I thought it was only my duty to try and save some peeps some money.

I'll give it a 2/10 as I saw a semi naked young lady riding into the premiere on horseback...

Thanks for reading, Jason


Just abysmal. All of it. Unprofessional, poor excuse with no redeeming features, made by a talentless hack who is so naive about the industry and yet so pretentious - the two always go together. No surprise she had to raise the money herself - there is not a professional in the world would give her a penny, or do anything other than laugh and cringe at her every attempt to sound like a director who follows Orson Welles. She probably enjoys pretending, but you wonder when she goes out in public where is her self-awareness for herself and her material. Her naivety and lack of personality shine through her every word.

The movie itself doesn't even bare thinking about. It aims to be one of those 'Let's get the show on' movies, where it's all leading up to this one performance. If you can't get the climax right with this kind of thing, then you have no movie. The climax, which in this case culminates in the protagonist baring all and riding naked on a horse (as goes the legend of Lady Godiva of Coventry), could have been handled in one of two ways. It could have been done tastefully and elegantly which is probably how this pompous director would have like it to be. Or it could have been done with an element of sex appeal to it, which doesn't even necessarily mean nudity, but something sexy about - and that would have been the better way to go with it so that it would at least get people talking about this scene, generate attention to at least one remotely memorable scene and as anybody knows (except for Ms. Vicky Hack-son) movies need a couple of very memorable - aspiring to iconic - scenes. Either way it achieves neither and is merely as bad as the rest of it, she must be the only person who can make stripping, streaking and riding a horse bareback bare completely boring, stale, flat, trite and what I thought was chalked up the biggest cringe of the movie... until I heard the final line - I went away with stomach ulcers!

If you look at the great filmmakers (which Vicky Jewson seems to believe she is destined to become with her delusions of grandeur), from Welles to Spielberg, and Allen to Scorsese, their debut/early films have been their best or at least shown some signs of developing talent. The only thing here seems to be some ideal that she is going to turn Oxford into Hollywood. She wanted to make a comedy. People are at least laughing at her, but for the wrong reasons.


'I've bought a new film' my girlfriend beamed ' and it was only £3!'

'Oh, cool i said, picking up the case' Pink letters a ginger on the cover, lucky it wasn't made out of glass or it would have shattered on impact as I dropped it.

'Um, you appear to have bought the film made by that jumped up girl who's always in the newspaper' I said...

There was a moments pause, in which she had plenty of time to shout 'nah only kidding, it's actually the Lost Boys, I switched the covers!'

Instead she said 'But £3...'

'What's going on?' I said about 20 minutes in, we'd seen a nice but cheaply made, with some woeful sound effects flashback sequence, which basically killed any hope of a final pay off, as you already got to see her ride naked although it could have been mistaken for an ironing board. A few bits about a bloke who was a 'bad boy' and a lot of mixed up plots involving school children, badly dressed women and dead brothers...oh and lots and lots of cheesy music. 'I'm not sure' my girlfriend said 'but I'm sure it'll make sense and it was £3'

I wish she'd stop using that as an excuse.

What seemed like a lifetime passed, but it was actually only half an hour, in which we'd seen some Japanese men strip a girl whines a lot (take your pick from any of the female cast) and lots of people acting, talking and dressing like it was 1955...oh and a slow mo horse ride...in black and white...to Enrique Iglesias...without irony. 'What's going on?' my girlfriend said 'I'm none the wiser' I said 'but I feel like crying, for all the wrong reasons' An old lady using a Zimmer frame doddered past my window at the slowest speed ever recorded; even she was having more fun than we were.

In the end, not much happens the big naked ride never really materialises; it looks like it's about tothen just turns into something that looks like a documentary shot by 17 year olds who've got their mums to play members of the crowd. A fake Prince William turns up, fluffs some line, but it was in keeping with the rest of the acting so nobody really notices and the ironing board and the bad boy, who clearly hasn't done anything bad except forget to send a birthday card get together  hurrah you should say

We both could have cried, not at the appalling script/acting/Directing/ (I would say delete where applicable, but they all are) but that it cost £3still it looks like by our single purchase they recovered all their budget.

My verdict  Don't watch this film, instead go out, find a ginger person a rocking horse and some mums, borrow your dads handy cam and make your own version, it'll be a fun way to spend a couple of hours


To say that this is the worst film ever is probably the safest statement that I've made in my life. Where does it all go wrong? It's hard to know where to start but I guess that the beginning is a good place; the film opens with a naff historical reenactment of the Godiva legend which adds nothing to the film that follows but at least this part is reasonably well shot unlike the rest of this movie. Thereafter the film jolts about like an episode of Hollyoaks with simply the worst script and flimsiest characterisation of anything ever seen on screen. It is truly that awful! The story, which might have started as something worth telling, is ruined by appalling direction which jolts around unfathomably with characters acting out of character and for cheap laughs to the extent that after half an hour the amateurish crassness of the whole production isn't even funny any more. At several points I asked myself how the film could get worse only to find that the next scene eloquently answered my question. The saddest part is that I watched this film hoping to like it and believe that someone could fight the corporate film making machine from the outside. This however is an embarrassment to independent film makers everywhere, as though a bunch of drunk sixth formers had run amok with a camera. Nobody associated with this film apart from Phoebe Thomas emerges with any credit. Sorry.


OK, I'm not one for cheap shots or gratuitous personal attacks BUT I will call it how I see it: Lady Godiva is a disaster and a depressing waste of resources. It may not be the worst film ever made, but it's certainly the worst British romantic comedy ever made, beating the hateful Love Actually into a distant second place - which I guess is some kind of achievement.

So how did this happen? Firstly, the director had VERY little experience and apparently little to no interest in the 90-degree rule or continuity in general. Godiva is a mess of weird blocking and odd cuts throughout. And not in a good way. The editing feels like a salvage job which doesn't work. Secondly, and despite her inexperience, I believe the director was very badly served by some of her crew. £1.4 million in the right hands can go a LONG way, and it seems clear that some of the people involved in Godiva were not giving of their best.

Godiva feels cheap - the school and "art factory" with suspiciously few kids, the Prince William lookalike and Queen cover version on the soundtrack, the rubbish attempt at CNN-style graphics.

One thing director Vicky Jewson can fully take the blame for is Godiva's pervasive upper- class snobbery. It's there in the fawning over Prince William (woodenly played by a lookalike who unlike the real Wills isn't going bald). The snobbery is also present in the extraordinary character of Michael's 'unsuitable' girlfriend Veronica, a middle class woman who drinks martini instead of sherry and thinks that letting a horse run around the kitchen is "unhygenic" (she's got a point). Tellingly, Michael (Matthew Chambers) twice disparages Jemima's Mini. The Mini factory in Oxford has been a fixture of Oxford's economy for years, but this fact is either unknown to Jewson (likely) or ignored by her as she fetishises more upper class aspects of the city.

Over and above these flaws however is the damning fact that Lady Godiva is meaningless and unfunny from start to finish. Scenes start and finish at random points, dialogue is either completely inconsequential or totally explanatory.

Worst scene: The business meeting. Somehow, thorough a "hilarious" sequence of accidents, Michael and his business partner are shirtless when 2 Japanese businessmen enter. The businessmen, having no understanding of western culture or basic common sense then proceed to strip off. Oh, the hilarity! Then - get this! -Michael's secretary takes her blouse off! And the Japanese businessman whip out cameras and start taking pictures of her! It's like the one racist urban myth Sofia Coppola couldn't cram into Lost In Translation crossed with a '70's sitcom, only worse.

Other people on this board have nominated many other 'lowpoints' in the film. They're all right. Everything sucks.

And now, just to be fair, I must admit that over the course of the film I actually smiled once. It was when Matthew Chambers copies the "I'm watching you" gesture Robert De Niro does in Meet the Parents. God knows why I found that funny, it may have been hysteria induced by the extreme rubishness of what I was witnessing. After that my brain just shut down under the onslaught of ineptitude and wrongness.


STAR RATING: ***** The Works **** Just Misses the Mark *** That Little Bit In Between ** Lagging Behind * The Pits

There were some things I was aware of before I even sat down to see Sci-Fighter. I knew the plot regarding a video game that sucks users into it whereby they must fight to come out alive was laughably ridiculous. I knew Don 'the Dragon' Wilson couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag. And I knew it was a low budget sci-fi actioner, so I didn't get my hopes up too much. I just sat back, switched off my brain and tried to enjoy a guilty piece of fun. That I still came away very disappointed should speak volumes of the lowly piece of trash I was treated to.

The cast and director of Wilson's previous dud Redemption are re-teamed here. Though the film styles are different, they are as big a let-down as one another.

The film has a really cheap looking feel. I know it's made for DVD, but these are almost of home video standard. And the fights are really tepid. This is especially bad since the film proudly boasts a host of martial arts stars and their accomplishments in the lead roles.

Story-wise, the plot is incoherent and really badly paced, meaning one scene doesn't relate well to the next and there's the clichéd, stereo-typical angle of the dead mother and father and son struggling to bond sub-plot.

I knew this wasn't going to be a work of high-art. I only had minimalist expectations for a cheap, harmless bit of fun. It speaks volumes that this couldn't even accomplish this. *


Like Mike is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The plot in particular is awful.

OK, let me explain the plot of this awful movie. An orphan, played by Lil Bow Wow, finds a pair of shoes that used to belong to Michael Jordan. The shoes git hit by lightning and whenever this kid wears them he has the abilities of Michael Jordan. Yeagh.............. So then the plot is pretty predictable, he plays great, makes an NBA Team, and helps a bad team to a better record.

The plot is just so illogical. Most sports movies are about underdogs that work hard to get better. The whole Idea of a kid finding shoes that make him better and that is the ONLY reason for him to play good just bugs me. Another thing I have an issue with is how good the shoes make this kid. If it gave him the abilities of Michael Jordan, he would not be this good. Do not get me wrong, Jordan is great, but Jordan was not as good as this kid is by wearing the magic shoes. I mean, what type of message is this film supposed to send. Find magic shoes and it will help you to succeed in the NBA. Stupid.

Also I really do not like Lil Bow Wow all that much. I mean just look at his name. It sounds like a dogs name.

The ending is predictable and terrible. After his shoes break in the last game of the year, he quits after the game even though the team made the playoffs? So basically he is admitting he is nothing without the shoes, which is what he is. I just hate the plot SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much. Stupid magic shoes. And he never really tells any of the players why he can not play in the playoffs. They do not even care. Horrible.

Do not watch this film. Ever.


Lil Bow Wow does a good acting job, but Crispin Glover steals the show. Crispin Glover plays himself to perfection. He doesn't talk very much, only when it serves his own purposes. Morris Chestnut is also very good as he is one of my favorite actors. Jonathan Lipnicki's character is annoying and should be kidnapped instead of adopted. I'm glad they didn't have Bow Wow dunking too much, because it does look fake. A good family film. 4/10 Fair


1st watched 4/19/2005 - 4 out of 10(Dir-John Schultz): Sappy formulaic story about an orphan who gets everything he wants and as well gets to be like Mike(Aka. Mister Michael Jordon) when he puts on his magic shoes(that may have been owned by a young MJ) and goes on the basketball court. What I didn't like about this movie was how the bad guys were "really" bad, the good guys were "really" good and everybody smiles up to the end about the poor unfortunate orphan who makes it. I'm not saying that this is a horrible movie but it just follows too many of the same patterns as others like it. The young rapper, Lil Bow Wow, does an OK job with this acting stint but the rest of the cast is kind of just there and playing characters that their used to playing. I really wanted to like this movie as much as I like the game of basketball but it just didn't quite cut it for me.


These two guys are the scum of the earth and obviously Jesus didn't manage to give these two suckers a little bit of dignity,reason and decency. If their message was " Lets watch porn" and "screw sin" I get it.As I am an Atheist I am grateful for such miserable "Christians"; opening our eyes to what religion has become, a device of self-worship, self-indulgence and though being corrupt considering yourself holy. I watched these two stand up comics and I am appalled by their sincere vanity, boasting about the money they earn and gloating in the media attention. It seems their vocabulary only consisted of "porn" and "masturbation". What revolutionary Christians! With their obscenity they scare every normal person.


Watching this movie frankly made me angry. Not at the big evil porn companies like the filmmakers intended, but at the filmmakers themselves. All this movie does is reinforce the stereotype that anyone who looks at porn is perverse and needs to be cured.

Looking at other people naked is a human urge that is unhealthy to suppress. This kind of urge isn't like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc because this is an urge that WE WERE BORN HAVING. Attraction to the opposite sex (or same sex, whatever) is the same thing as every other human function, like breathing, sleeping, or going to the bathroom. Any doctor can tell you that this urge is healthy, and suppressing it isn't. While it is easy to get carried away every once in a while, if you have an ounce of self restraint it won't "ruin your life". The huge majority of Americans of look at porn, yet a slim slim slim minority end up having their lives destroyed.

According to the interviews in the movie, the reason why pornography apparently "destroys families" is because whenever they get close to their spouse / loved one, they feel ashamed of their porn addiction (two people interviewed claimed that this was their problem). A shame that's probably created by the church, parents, and society in general. When society is constantly telling you that you should be ashamed of something you can't help doing, that's bound to screw you up a little. I'd guess that if it weren't for people like the two pastors in the movie, this shame would not exist, and many of these unfortunate (and don't get me wrong, they are unfortunate) people would be better off.

Based on what I've seen in the movie, xxxchurch.com spends an overwhelming majority of its time and resources merely going around the country advertising the site and telling people that they're sick and that porn is evil. The only real thing I saw the two pastors do to help these porn addicts is provide a support group. And what does a support group do? It shows you you're not alone, thus making YOUR SHAME GO AWAY. So congratulations, I guess. You're absolving people of the shame that you directly created.

For further proof of their outreach based on shame, look no further than the x3watch featured in the movie. Anyone that wants to can download a program that alerts an 'accountability partner' of all the porn sites they've visited in the past two weeks. When talking about potential accountability partners, they suggest the two founders of xxxchurch.com, your pastor, or your mom. Although they try to play it off as something like an AA sponsor, it really is nothing more than just a way to shame you out of looking at porn. If sending your pastor or mom an email every time you look at a dirty website isn't merely a way to shame you out of looking at porn, then what is it? Another note: if pornography didn't exist, this natural human urge wouldn't magically disappear. If anything, the unfortunate people featured in the movie would be even more confused than they are now.

Having said all that, I have to admit that the two pastors do seem to have the best intentions. Although they're against porn, it doesn't look like they're trying to outright ban it, as many Christian groups are. And I give them credit for handing out pamphlets that promote love instead of trying to scare people with images of burning hellfire (like the group outside of the porn expo). But although their hearts are in the right place, I still have to say that they're wrong.

I'll close in saying this: I find it extremely ironic that the pastors claim that everyone who looks at porn is only seeing "one side of the story".


Despite a raging indifference to the acting chops of Carol Kane--I still can barely stand to watch "Taxi" largely due to her annoying grate--I decided to give "When A Stranger Calls" a chance. After all, who hasn't heard about the opening segment of this film, where babysitter Jill Johnson (Carol Kane) fields an increasingly sinister series of phone calls imploring her to "check on the children"? Lingering camera shots showing the dark, silent parts of the house highlight the growing sense of fear and despair felt by Kane's character as she bravely stands her ground for the benefit of her employer's children. Several phone calls to the police bring the men in blue into the picture, but will they get there in time if the caller materializes? The ominous shadow on the staircase signals trouble of a most horrific nature, Kane reacts, and the scene plays out to its grim conclusion. And then the real horror starts, the stark, soul shattering horror of watching a movie with a memorable beginning sink into a morass of banality. "When A Stranger Calls" would have worked better as a short, independent film strongly emphasizing its bravura opening instead of plunging into the sprawling mess we get here. Too bad.

Years after that horrible night Curt Duncan, the crazed caller, is back out on the streets after a lengthy stint in an insane asylum. Unfortunately, no one told retired detective and now private eye John Gifford (Charles Durning), the cop who was there the night the caller terrorized Jill Johnson. The father of the children brutalized by Duncan hires Gifford to bring the psycho down anyway he can, if for no other reason than to prevent a repeat performance in some other person's family. Gifford agrees to take the case and begins looking for Duncan. "When A Stranger Calls" rapidly descends into boredom from this point forward, as we see Duncan attempting to rejoin society and utterly failing. He ends up in a bar where he meets Tracy (Colleen Dewhurst) and promptly receives a heck of a beating after attempts to ingratiate himself with Tracy brings on the wrath of a beefy bystander. Why Duncan expresses so much interest in a cranky barfly is just one of the many inexplicable questions that arise frequently during the film. You have a better chance of discovering the origins of the Sphinx or learning quantum physics at the age of three than understanding why this movie takes the turn that it does here.

As Duncan takes a beating at the bar, Gifford enlists the aid of one of his cop friends, Charlie Garber (Ron O'Neal), now a lieutenant on the force who remembers the bloody horror of that night but hesitates in helping his buddy. This part of the film is interminable, with lots of shots of Tracy strolling through the blasted landscapes of her city in the middle of the night, Gifford pounding the pavement around town trying to track down Duncan, and the former caller's inept attempts to evade capture. Seeing Charles Durning run, although highly amusing and slightly worrisome from a coronary angle, is not enough to elevate this segment of the film. Thankfully, the film returns to its frightening pace at the end, when the now married Jill Johnson once again encounters Curt Duncan. And this time she has here own children to worry about. The scene where she takes a phone call at a restaurant is worth slogging through the preceding sixty minutes, as is the final showdown shortly thereafter.

Another let down with "When A Stranger Calls" comes when we finally see Curt Duncan face to face. The guy simply isn't that scary in person. He's older, sort of thin, and looks like your average, every day type of guy and not anything like some former sailor with an insatiable lust for blood. Apparently, the actor who played Duncan, Tony Beckley, died shortly after making the movie. As for Carol Kane, she does a good job playing the eternally frightened Jill Johnson but then promptly disappears for a large part of the movie. Durning sleepwalks through the role of the determined cop John Gifford and Colleen Dewhurst is largely wasted in the meaningless role of Tracy. The performances on the whole aren't bad, but the wooden pacing and uninteresting middle part of the film insured that no performer, no matter how good, could have saved this movie from the doldrums.


I had seen the beginning of this movie when i was a lot younger on television. And seeing it as a young kid, i have to admit the opening scene scared the crap out of me. So when i saw this movie on the shelf in the video store a few months ago, they had just re-released it on DVD due to the remake being in theaters at the time i quickly picked it up. When i brought it home i began to watch it, and i have to admit the opening scene, while not as scary as i remember, still holds up as being a truly terrifying moment in the film. Now i wish i could say that the rest of the film held up to what the opening scene had provided for the viewer. After the opening, the film goes around and shows the story of the "stranger" from earlier in the film, who has now been released from prison and wants to start his life over again. Now while this would have been a good premise for a thriller in the drama section, it seems really out of place in the horror section. Watching the "stranger" go to a bar and get in a fight, would be exciting in any other movie, if you actually cared about the character involved and if it helped the plot move forward. But watching the film i wish i had been called by a "stranger" just so i could have had something to do while this sloooooooooooooow movie went on. And while the ending scene did almost match the opening scene in its creepiness, the rest of the movie is not enough to make a viewer sit and watch the rest of the film. So if you rent this movie, my advice is to either not watch it, cause it is really a pretty big waste of your time, or to watch the opening scene, and then fast forward to the ending scene. Maybe at least that would trick you into believeing that you were actually watching a good movie.


Director Fred Walton knows how to grab an audience. The first 15 minutes of "When A Stranger Calls" is powerfully effective as we watch a helpless Carol Kane slowly being terrorized by a series of strange phone calls inquiring as to whether or not she has "checked the children". There is a neat twist which I am sure everyone knows anyway but I won't reveal it here. Sadly, the preview of the film (much like the preview for the upcoming remake) gives away the big surprise.

After the slam bang opening the film grounds to a dead halt as babysitter Kane tries to get on with her life while detective Charles Durning tries tracking down the killer. The next hour is filled with tedious scenes as we get needless character development when what we want is to be scared. The final sequence does provide one really good jolt which is quite unexpected but you may have already fallen asleep by then.

As I said director Walton knows how to grab an audience. When he made the sequel "When A Stranger Calls Back" some 14 years later he had another superb opening sequence (even better then the original's) before it fell apart the rest of the way. If only he could find a way to hold on to his audience with the full grip he applies at the beginning of his films.


This movie is based on a book by the same name that was a blatant character assassination on Patton rushed out after the popularity of the original movie "Patton" threatened to resurrect Patton as an actual American folk-hero. The facts are that Patton was an extremely-successful WWII general who commanded the US Third Army during its famous attack across Europe into the heart of Germany to bring down Hitler's government. After the war ended, he remained in command of the 3rd Army for 5 months as it became an occupation force in the southern portion of Germany that it controlled. Patton began to be criticized during these initial months of the occupation by people seeking to punish all of former Nazis, which in the Germany of that time was roughly about 75 percent of the adults. Patton attempted to deal pragmatically with the situation as he found it by using some of these people to assist in getting essential transportation and infrastructure operating again, much as McArthur eventually did in Japan a few months later. Unfortunately, while Patton was an outstanding general and administrator, he was a poor politician and the long knives in Washington found him an easy target. Patton was removed as 3rd Army commander in October, 1945 for being too 'friendly' with the Germans and placed in command of a 'paper force' 15th Army. Two months later in December, 1945, Patton was in a very minor traffic accident in which he suffered a traumatic injury to his spinal cord that led to his death a few days later. Ironically, Patton's soft-handed approach to military administration in Germany was ultimately followed by his successors and directly led to the successful development of the powerful democratic government that exists today in Germany.

The 'Last Days of Patton' movie and book paint a picture of a brooding, dark figure based on undocumented, unreferenced, and unsubstantiated claims that appear to have been fabricated as a crude character assassination and are totally at odds with facts and published reminisces of people who knew and worked closely with Patton, particularly Eisenhower and Bradley. For further background, read 'The Eisenhower Diaries' by Dwight Eisenhower (who later became the 34th US President), 'A Soldier's Story' by Omar Bradley, and 'War as I Knew It' by George Patton. Patton was one of the last of the American leaders who acted based on their 'old-fashioned' beliefs in Duty, Honor, Principle, and Character rather than on the work of the assassins and spinmeisters who tend to predominate today.


George C. Scott is one of my favorite actors and I have loved most of his movies. However, I thoroughly hated The Last Days of Patton! It was tedious, uninvolving and completely unnecessary! They should have just let the story end with the original movie Patton. Or, perhaps they could have re-released the original movie with a much shorter version of The Last Days of Patton as an epilogue.

Think about it for a moment, just days or weeks after the end of what happened in the movie Patton ended, the general was critically injured in a freak auto accident. He remained paralyzed with a vice-like device screwed into his head for a short time until he died as a result of these injuries. All this, plus a couple flashbacks are the entire basis for this movie!!! Dull, depressing and a waste of time!


The first one is Jack Palance in CHE!, playing the part of Fidel Castro.

The other one is in THE LAST DAYS OF PATTON, when George C. Scott (as General Patton) makes his SINGING DEBUT by performing the the suggestively dirty little soldier's ditty "Lily From Piccadilly, The Blackout Queen".

Either of these performances is more than adequate induce hysterical laughter, projectile vomiting, or the blank, glazed eyed, frozen stare that only the total and utter disbelief in what your eyes and ears are telling you can produce.

Trust me on this one.

George must have done this turkey strictly for the money. Except for the singing, he could have mailed in his performance.


I always wondered about George C. Scott. He won the Academy Award for Patton (1970) and then he made many proclamations about how Hollyood sucked. Instead of banking his success into some better roles, he did several crappy horror movies and some odd films and never saw the light of stardom again. Patton II could have been a decent movie in the hands of a studio if it had been done shortly after the original. Instead, it was done as a TV mini-series back in 1986. Even though Patton was killed shortly after the end of WWII, it is hard not to notice that in The Last Days of Patton, G.C. Scott looks like he is about 70 years old and has aged 16 years since Patton (1970). The Last Days of Patton shows a moody, insecure person who was hoping Eisenhower would give him another command. It is kind of creepy. If you have read Patton's autobiography and some books about him; it is easy to see where someone could portray him as a neurotic. However, considering the career that Patton was in, and the life that he led; it would stand to reason that if Patton were such a soft-touch that he would not have reached the levels of success that he achieved. The Last Days of Patton seems to have been written by Eisenhower and the people that did not really like Patton. It is almost the antithesis of Patton (1970). After seeing The Last Days of Patton, I analyzed the poor man's life based on what I had read and seen; and General Patton dropped several notches down on the list of Statesmen and anti-heroes. The message of The Last Days of Patton seems to be: "He was not a flamboyant, rebellious, politically incorrect leader; he was a sad, sick old man."


When I first heard about heroes I liked the idea very much. It wasn't original in any way (Basically X-men brought more realistically because of low Special Effects budget), but it managed to peak my interest. The beginning wasn't bad, original cast members who were well suited for their roles.

unfortunately that is were the good ends. The build up is way to slow, and often mainly filler material to get to a full season. Things get dragged out, and become boring. Basically, the only reason I stuck with it was on the hope of getting a spectacular ending.

The ending however, was even worse. The writers throw out all logic for their convenience, and there is not 1 exciting or spectacular moment in the entire confrontation with sylar.

Peter spends the entire series learning new powers, and what does he do with them. You guessed it, absolutely nothing.

Sylar, who has basically been doing the same thing, does what he always does: he uses his telekinesis, and only his telekinesis. Boy, it sure was good he robbed all those powers! And apparently, his super-hearing gave out, as he was surprised by both Niki and Hiro.

Niki, finally joined with her alter ego Jessica, puts her great strength to good use. She hits Sylar over the head with a parking meter, before Peter tells her to back off. Else, the makers of the show might have had to spend some money on special effects. Another character who turns out to be a great help! Clair? Well, basically, she stands around a lot. Doesn't do anything. Didn't see that one coming.

Parkman thinks it's a good idea to shoot Sylar. Something simple as a bullet must do the trick right? Wrong, since Sylar uses his Telekenesis (didn't see that one coming either) to bounce the bullets back to Parkman. Let's keep our fingers crossed, and hope he dies.

And then of course, Hiro. All those valuable sword lessons by his father really payed off, since Hiro now understands that with a sword, the best fighting technique is to point the pointy end of the sword towards your opponent, and then run toward your enemy screaming until you impale him. This must have been the most idiotic part of Sylar Season 1 demise. Apparently, their was no money for fight choreography either The only conclusion you can make: very disappointing indeed. Living proof that even complete rubbish can be a big hit (Lost syndrome perhaps?)