Problem: This review is like what?

Review:Like wearing a hair shirt. Positively, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt one of the worst movies ever. Pure torture. Zero stars out of ten. One long, tedious, labored, pretentious, self-conscious, theatrical, and leadenly artsy scene after another. Intended to be dreamlike and impressionistic, the soul bared, it is, instead, morose mush.

Half-naked, father and son grope and whisper to each other like lovers. "Homo-erotic" is the point, loud and clear. OK, so what?

Repeated more than once by the son is the line, supposedly lifted from "Lives of the Saints," "A father's love crucifies. A loving son lets himself be crucified." The parallel to god and his son, Christ, is heavy-handed, irrelevant, and bombastic, like everything else here.

Some reference points to the theme of Russian filiality: "Mother and Son" (1997); "The Return" (Andrei Zvyagvatsev, 2003); "Little Odessa" (James Gray,1994); Turgenev, "Fathers and Sons"; and, of course, Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov."

Credits in English indicate intended international distribution, meaning that the excuse cannot be used that you have to be Russian to understand this mess.

This is nowhere near as accomplished or compelling as Sokurov's last, "Russian Ark" (2003).

As in his "Mother and Son," an equally powerful soporific, some scenes are filmed from distorting mirrors, though not as interestingly. The film is almost monochromatic, shot from start to finish through beige filters, making it as visually as it is dramatically numbing. A soft-focus haze only adds to the drugged feeling.

An annoying soundtrack drones on, never shuts up, like a tape loop. An old radio constantly plays in the background. Russian Romantic melancholy swells endlessly as "themes based on Tchaikovsky." The presence of a "sound designer" (Sergei Moshkov) signifies, of course, that all those irritating little sounds, radio static, noises, distortion, and such, are "designed."

It's hard to believe someone (Sergei Potepolov) actually wrote this thing. It all seems as arbitrary as traffic, as if improvised by bored actors, popping out of nothingness into nothingness.

Modern art has finally succeeded in signifying the thing without being the thing, so that what we behold is the idea of the idea, empty as a shell, but not even a shell, merely the idea of a shell. Could one ask for a better definition of decadence?
+++++++++
A: negative

Problem: This review is like what?

Review:This is the absolutely worst piece of crap I've ever had to watch - actually it was so bad that I just HAD to watch it :-)

The CGI is sooo bad it's fun! It's not even close to the shitty CGI animations in Spawn, that's how bad it is, har har har...

I'm amazed over the fact that some distribution company actually has put money down to release this on DVD, but I guess they'll get more money out of it that way, 'cos the cost of making it can not have been more than a few hundred dollars.

It's so awful that a kindergarten class could have made it.

See it and laugh!
+++++++++
A: negative

Problem: This review is like what?

Review:The Choke starts as a rock band known as The Choke prepare for a gig at a nightclub called 'Club 905' owned & run by Guy Johnson (Andrew Parker). Lead singer Dylan (Sean Cook) & guitar player Mike (Jason McKee) plan to tell the other band members, bass player London (Brooke Bailey) & drummer Nancy (Tom Olson), that they are both going solo & their services won't be needed any longer. Once at the club Dylan prepares but Mike doesn't show up & the gig turns into a disaster. Then just as the band think things couldn't get any worse they find a dead body in the cellar, that all the doors have been locked so they can't get out & that they can't trust anyone as a mysterious killer begins picking them off one-by-one...

Produced & directed by Juan A. Mas The Choke is a standard by-the-numbers teen slasher that really doesn't have anything going for it. The script by Jessica Dolan & Susannah Lowber (not too many horror films out there penned by ladies...) has some surprisingly good character's in it & some nifty dialogue but while it's much better than a lot of modern shot on a camcorder type horror in that respect it's so slow & boring that even a few interesting character's can't come anywhere close to saving it. As one would expect all the usual teen slasher cliches are used, from the isolated location the victims can't escape from, the cast of good looking teenagers who keep splitting up, a few murders & a really poor twist ending that tries to mimic something like Scream (1996) & be surprising but doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it logically (they couldn't have done some of the things they were supposed to) & to make matters even worse I guessed who the killer was fairly early on & even though I don't want to boast I was spot on. Then there's the fact that the makers of The Choke felt that it's audience would be entertained by showing endless (well it feels endless while watching it) scenes of teenagers walking around dark corridors doing nothing in particular, I am sorry but there is only so many scenes like this that I can take before it starts to become tedious. The kill count is low, at first they all decide to stick together (good idea) but then they all just randomly decide to split up & go their separate ways (bad idea when there's a killer on the loose), the pace is lethargic, the kill scenes are unimaginative & to top it all off the twist ending is poor.

Director Mas does alright, the film looks OK for the most part although there are the odd occasions where he uses some annoying post production editing technique like slow motion or frame skipping. The gore levels aren't really up to scratch, there's some blood splatter, a guy with a hole in his chest, a few dead bodies & someone impaled on some metal poles. Most of the kills happen off screen with the axe kill at the end a good example of the film not actually showing anything. Since the film is about a rock band there's quite a rock orientated soundtrack with some truly horrible, horrible rock songs used on it. I am sorry rock fans but to my ears this crap is just noise pollution. It's not scary, there's no real atmosphere & the lack of blood & gore is just inexcusable when the rest of the film is so bad.

With a supposed budget of about $1,000,000 The Choke is well made with reasonable production values, it looks cheap to be sure but not as cheap as many low budget horror films look. Shot in a place called Spokane in Washington apparently. The acting is one of the films strongest points as it's generally pretty good all round, I mean no-one is going to win an Oscar but it ain't half bad.

The Choke is a throughly routine Scream style teen slasher that has one of the weakest twist endings ever & a criminal lack of blood, gore, violence, nudity & dead bodies. I mean if a slasher hasn't got any sex or gore then what's the point? Those are the only things that the average slasher is worth watching for, right?
+++++++++
A:
negative