input: This film is terrible. I was really looking forward to it, as I thought "Lantana" was great.

The following review may contain *spoilers*

*****

First, the good things: it looks great, some of the performances are OK. The bad things are everything else about it.

The story, as you possibly know, is about some blokes who go fishing and discover a body, with the twist that they find it on Friday but continue fishing and finally report it on Sunday when they get back into mobile (cell phone) range. However the film takes it's time (boy does it take its time) getting to this central event.

Of the ensemble of characters (about a dozen), not one seems to like another one (which is, I suppose, consistent, because they are all unlikable). I was extremely frustrated by the failure to adequately explain how the characters are related, and it was not until near the end of the movie that I could vaguely construct the family tree.

It's hard to think of a film us unrelentingly grim, which is a failure in the structure of the story, as the character's lives seem just as bad before the fishing trip as after. Once you've set the bar so high, it's hard to up-it short of everyone committing suicide.

There are silly lapses in logic. The killer dumps the body in the lake, and then it somehow drifts miles upstream into the mountains. The fishermen walk out Sunday morning, but for some reason Byrne gets home late at night after his wife has gone to bed. Then first thing the next morning the cops bang on the door to get him to come down to the station. Um, they haven't heard of the telephone? Down at the station, the media know the whole story, less than 24 hours after they reported the body?

Totally missing from the story is the debate the blokes surely had after they find the body. This is a mystery - everyone asks them "how could you do that?" and the audience is asking the same question. (The debate about what to do with the body is the key scene in "Deliverance"). I know exactly what I'd do in their situation. Someone needs to walk out to the car, drive to mobile range, call the cops, wait, and them guide them back to the location. If the others wait at camp and fish, who cares?

A lot of all this just seems false. The only thing that rung true was that, as the girl was black, the local aboriginals seized on the fishermen's actions as racist - "wouldn't have done it if it was a white girl."

Throughout there is a curious indifference to who might have killed the girl (I think the subject is mentioned once), and there is no mystery, as the audience sees the killer in the opening scene.

So I'm sitting there simultaneously bored and confused, when there's a twist - not in the plot, but the theme. Suddenly it becomes about the quiet dignity of the bereaved aboriginals leading to a ludicrous ending with some incoherent stuff about black-white reconciliation. Huh?

This is Australian film "at its finest", according to The Age.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: photography was too jumpy to follow. dark scenes hard to see.

Had good story line too bad it got lost somewhere. Too noisy for what was really happening Bottom line is it's a baddddd movie

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: I'll just put it out here, that was the Worst sequel to a classic Disney film I've EVER seen. In 1950, Disney released what I hail as one of his greatest films of all time. Now Take away the great songs, add a poor plot that resembles that of a lost TV show. "Put it together and what do you get?" the biggest load of Crud I've ever seen. After i saw this, I thought it was all over for Disney. Cinderella should've ended with, "and they lived happily ever after." not this garbage. This film did not deserve a sequel like this. I thought it would be like "A twist in time" which was moderate but better than this. Also, What do we care of Anastasia? She switched sides like Iago did, but it didn't help anyone.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: This would have been so much fun to see in a theater, back in 1996. There is a guilty pleasure corner of my movie taste which really appreciates really well done shocker movies.

"The Dentist" is panned sometimes probably because people usually have strong feelings over dental matters. Maybe the ADA launched a campaign against it, since dentists report they have to apologize for this movie and for "The Marathon Man" (which only has one scene comparable to the many in "The Dentist").

It's amazing to note that according to the trivia page, the movie was shot in 21 days. Of course, post production can take longer than movie shooting sometimes and the editing for "The Dentist" is picture perfect. The quick cuts heighten the tension so much that in the scene where the Dentist "takes care" of his wife there's only two quick cuts showing what is happening. The rest is left to our very fertile imaginations! Corbin Bernsen was a good choice for the role since he has lots of experience playing psychologically "off" characters and he completely sold the obsessive compulsive aspects of the dentist.

For me the pacing of the movie was just right. The film makers reveal the wife's naughtiness in just the right way. All of the characters in the dental office look like they are actual people working in a real office. There's lots of tension while they are dealing with impatient people awaiting the dentist's arrival. Meanwhile the dentist is off on the cusp of a huge psychotic breakdown! Unlike so many movies of this genre, the script is very very tight. All the victims fall into the dentist's trap in very calculated ways. Two law enforcement types even get involved in a little subplot that ends up creating a shocker of a showdown near the end.

Definitely not for the faint of heart or the dental-phobic but a real roller coaster ride and heavily recommended for fans of intelligent gorefests.

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pos/neg ans:
positive