Problem: This review is like what?

Review:Many of the reviewers have made it a point to note that Pinjar is unlike the run of the mill films produced in Bollywood. While this is true, Bollywood films in general are geared to a specific audience and should be appreciated for accomplishing their aims in this regard.

However,Pinjar is an excellent film for those seeking a change from the normal equation based Bollywood film. Set during the time of Partition between India and Pakistan, Pinjar focuses on a Punjabi girl who becomes the victim of societal and cultural attitudes toward the treatment of women in her time. Paro, the protagonist, is forced to choose between a life with a man who has abducted her and the fleeting hope of a life with her family back in Indian ruled Punjab. More than an issue of Hindus and Muslims, Pinjar addresses and defines a woman's role as a daughter, as a wife, and as a mother in India and Pakistan in 1947. Unlike typical Bollywood films which are escapist in nature, Pinjar is a film that makes its audience contemplate these issues during and after the film.
+++++++++
A: positive

Problem: This review is like what?

Review:Hunters chase what they think is a man through the forest, though the audience sees he is a werewolf. The hunters never seem to realize this, because after they shoot him, he looks normal when they decapitate him.

A doctor transplants the werewolf's eyes into a man who lost his own in a laboratory experiment. The man, Rich, gets to have sex with his nurse (Stephanie Beaton) before he even gets his bandages removed.

After he leaves the hospital, he finds his wife has been cheating on him too. When a smoke machine sends clouds past an amateur painting of a moon (with a fake tree branch on the foreground), he turns into a werewolf! His torso grows larger, splitting his shirt, and he grows a giant werewolf mask on his head that has red lights in the eyes. His pants stay intact. The mouth chews unconvincingly, though some sort of robotics (or hidden hands) in the eyebrows give him a baleful look at times.

Despite the poor werewolf costume, there is a fair amount of blood and gore, and those are fairly well done. There's even a pretty good decapitation later in the movie. However, when a man falls from a height, a rather bad dummy does the job.

Rich has a friend named Siodmak who is some sort of occult expert, and he also accidentally stumbles across a small man with crutches named Androse who is also such an expert. They try to help him a little.

Rich kills people who have done him wrong. A policewoman investigates the murders and tries to hit on Beaton, who doesn't much care for lesbian scenes so nothing comes of it.

Quite cheap, but between the nudity and blood and gore, and a not-terrible story combining (sort of) The Most Dangerous Game with The Hands of Orlac and The Wolf Man, it's somewhat entertaining. Available on its own, or in the box set Scream Queens Vol. 1.
+++++++++
A: negative

Problem: This review is like what?

Review:In Europe, it's known as Who Dares Wins; in America, it's known as The Final Option, but under any title this ludicrous SAS action flick asks the audience to put their disbelief to one side for around two hours. I find it incredibly hard to comprehend how Lewis Collins (the hero here) was almost chosen as Roger Moore's successor in the Bond films.... this guy is so expressionless he'd struggle to get a job in a waxwork museum (as a waxwork!!!) Luckily, Judy Davis is on hand to partially redeem the affair with a meaty performance as a hard-line lady terrorist, and there's a climactic ten minute action sequence that is quite competently orchestrated by director Ian Sharp. Let it be added that it's a very, very, very long wait for these closing excitements to come around, and I can't honestly say that a near two hour wait for a bit of decent action was worth the effort.

SAS hard man Peter Skellen (Lewis Collins) goes undercover among a group of peace protesters who would like to see the end of nuclear weapons stock-piling. He meets their leader Frankie (Judy Davis), a strong-talking and opinionated woman who might just be capable of taking extraordinary measures to achieve her goals. Frankie's dedicated bunch violently lay siege to the American Embassy in London, demanding that a nuclear missile be fired at a naval base in Scotland (she believes that when the world witnesses a nuclear blast for real, everyone will be so appalled that they will join her campaign for disarmament). Unfortunately for Frankie, she makes the mistake of taking Skellen on her little embassy raid, and he plans to thwart their plan from inside with a little well-timed outside help from his SAS comrades.

The film is inspired - quite obviously - by the awesome SAS assault on the Iranian Embassy in 1981. Someone who saw that event on the news apparently thought it would be good to devise a film along similar lines. Unfortunately, the film is rather banal, with too much stupid dialogue and a heck of a lot of embarrassingly bad scenes (the arch-bishop's debate which descends into a riot, anyone?) Frankie's idea to bring about peace by instigating a nuclear blast is ridiculous anyway, so she becomes a laughable figure just when the audience is on the verge of viewing her as an interesting villain. Who Dares Wins tries to be a celebration of the military legend that is the SAS, but at the same time it dips into clumsy action cliches and ill-thought-out plotting. The result is a well-intentioned but wholly ineffective slice of Boy's Own absurdity.
+++++++++
A: negative

Problem: This review is like what?

Review:I purchased this film on the cheap in a sale, having read the back of the DVD case and assuming that either way I can't lose, it if was rubbish then no loss, if it was any good then bargain...

Then I watched it...

I am normally a fan of Christopher Walken, but in this film he commanded very little screen presence, seeming not to do a whole lot, even the death of his friend near the beginning which sparks off the "action" in the plot seems to affect him very little, and his eventual revenge is just boring and undramatic.

Normally a film which has themes as grand as revolution and revenge are able to capture the audience and snare them into feeling something for the characters, however watching this film felt more like seeing a series of confused, and almost random events that loosely tied together towards it's eventual conclusion...

At this point I wept...

I thought this film was the most horribly painful piece of viewing I have ever been subjected to, the scene where the pilot sacrifices himself by refusing to jump out the explosive laden truck due to not wanting to kill any civilians is not so much tragically sad as it is unnervingly horrible and painful, although not quite as bad as the emergency surgery on the wounded girl. The acting was poor all round, the script and story was weak, the "action" was even weaker, and the "visuals" were but bluntly not all that visual. To summarise there are films which are good, films that are bad, films that are so bad they are good, films that are terrible...

And then on a whole new level is "McBain"
+++++++++
A:
negative