An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: Wow, after trashing the disk of Timo Roses "Rout City" after about 15 Minutes (South Park is about more than meaningless cursing... I guess some people just don't get it) I was interested in this movie. I read quite some positive stuff and the packaging and look of the movie seemed far from the total trash I expected after "Rout city".

Surprise: The movie isn't total trash but the problem seems to be exactly that. Timo Rose tries to walk in the footsteps of German Horror/Splatter Cinema like Olaf Ittenbach and the likes. That means "Barricade" is in parts extremely gory and detailed. The gore FX are not really believable but OK, the acting is OK but in some cases plain sucks. The hillbilly chick in the opening sequence is ridiculous and doesn't get better till she's shot.

So what is the problem... the movie is gory, has a typical German underground vibe (including the classic booby shots in blood), OK FX and a modern feel to it like the packaging already promised?!

1. The script is total BS. You get a typical hillbilly/lost in the woods story with some guys+gal camping out and meeting a degenerated hillbilly family. Everything is just leading towards the torture/mutilation scenes and seems unbelievably random and pointless. This is the first thing that makes "Barricade" half-hearted.

2. Random is also the perfect description for a lot of the camera work (I liked the repetitive cut to the tweezers in the extended booby torture scene... either they had no material or the editor works in a hardware store). Even worse the editing... sure, its modern and far better than a lot of other movies in the genre but its RANDOM. You got an overuse of that typical exposure effect everywhere and with no meaning ... its just there... all the time. Then there's some grainy/noisy film look which also is just thrown in here and there for the sake of it, I don't get the meaning.

3. Like the fore-mentioned effects there is a lot of repetitive stuff in here. For example most of the kills are edited with multiple repetitions of stabbing and punching. Its OK once but here its annoying and fake, especially towards the end. Annoying also attributes the "music" which is permanently used without any change in the background. It doesn't take long until it makes the movie hardly bearable.

4. From all this comes the biggest problem of this movie (and many others in my opinion). If you make a splatter movie with trashy feel its pretty idiotic to polish it with special FX and new school editing. It looks like they take it way too serious. Its no fun because the decent gore FX are plain wasted in this context. And where the classic gore FX are OK the computer FX in scenes like the stabbing in the mouth or the gunshots in the ending look rather silly(and 3D splatter mostly sucks to me even in movies with a budget and decent 3D artists).

I often wondered if the time of serious splatter movies is over and "Barricade" is just another example it might be time to put it in the tomb. Its no fun, has no character and is too trashy for its look. The script is a cheap try on "Wrong Turn" and "TCM" leading absolutely nowhere. You can take that literally... the ending is just there and as random as many other things here ("I love you" in a splatter flick... come on!!). "Barricade" tries to incorporate a lot and fails...you can sure fast-forward through this movie for some extensive disembowelment, acid face melting,nipple pinching and classic Friday the 13th style stabbing of a couple while fingering in a tent (bloody boobies hooray!). But its really hard to get through this. Total failure especially because you can see it could have been something.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: For me an unsatisfactory, unconvincing heist movie. With an A-List cast, particularly the three leads and an experienced maverick director like Spike Lee I was expecting far more and in the end felt that what was delivered added little to this movie sub-genre. For a start I didn't like the pacing of the film, starting off with mastermind Clive Owen's raison d'etre piece to camera, unnecessarily repeated at the conclusion, then finding the narrative peppered with confusing, not to say unreal-seeming witness interviews, then finding yourself jumped into scenes you sense had begun earlier. Of course the camera work is fluid throughout, constantly on the move and incorporating hand-camera shots a-plenty, but director Lee fails to deliver thrills or suspense, falling down fundamentally by not making anything of the key protagonists in the film. Denzel Washington is weighed down with the clothes and bad-ass jive talk of a "Shaft" movie thirty - five years earlier (he even has that "no-one understands him but his woman" thing going on, replete with his "hot" girlfriend, baiting her with some downright crude and inappropriate "dirty-talk") and his mild "In The Heat Of The Night" riff with Willem Defoe (in almost a bit-part) raises barely a ripple. Clive Owens plays his character with a resolutely English accent even as we're given to believe the gang is Arab-based, also hindered by having to play 90% of the film with a mask over his face. Jodie Foster delivers another of her patented tight-lipped, ice maiden, sub-Clarice Starling turns as a well connected financial bounty-hunter, if you will, to little effect. Overall it's a real mish-mash of a film, with a light but obvious twist at the end, in fact the title gives it away from the start, spoiler fans. Worst scene (of many) is undoubtedly Washington's witness-interview, unbelievably, with an 8 year old street-kid, although Owen's dialogue with the same child minutes earlier runs it close in the embarrassment stakes. During the film in-joke references are made by characters to classic heist films like "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon" - but there's no honour in self-praise. More like "The Hot Rock" instead...and even that was good for a few laughs.
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: Since I watched it for the first time, "Piedras" is a personal favorite and one of the few pictures I actually could watch over and over again. The great screenplay depicts the lives of a bunch of women (all of them somehow interconnected) with deep understanding and sensibility. Ramon Salazar achieved a compelling film in his directorial debut, and proves himself as an efficient actors' director.

Not that all performances are excellent, though. Of all leading ladies, they range from average (Najwa Nimri) to very good (Vicky Pena), but the standing ovation should be directed to newcomer Monica Cervera, who convincingly plays Antonia San Juan's retarded daughter. Enrique Alcides is irresistibly charming as the girl's male nurse, and there are nice small turns from Andres Gertrudix, Geli Albaladejo and the director himself, Ramon Salazar.

"Piedras" is beautifully written and filmed, when I watched it I got so moved that I couldn't stop thinking of it for days. I highly recommend it.
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A:
Great drama with all the areas covered EXCEPT for screenlay which was too slow and should have shown more relevant scenes like Pitt's character interviewing the President,or Pitt getting murdered instead of just having it described to us.Scenes like those would have kept the audience awake.Cutting away some useless minutes could have made more room for more heartpounding scenes like those.The dragging of the film kept this one from all time greatness although to see Pitt here makes the film so worth watching.Also,big fans of fising,early 20th century styles and Montana will really like this as well........