Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: The Tattooed Stranger was another of those rare B-movies that BBC2 screened over Christmas/New Year 2005-2006. See also They Live By Night and The Brighton Strangler.

In this one, a man walking his dog in Central Park comes across an abandoned car and discovers a dead woman inside. She was shot and police then try to identify her with only a tattoo as the main clue. After being identified, the murderer is discovered and is shot in the shootout at the end.

Most of this movie was shot on location in and around New York, so we get to see some areas of the city we don't normally see, especially the back streets.

Mostly unknowns are in the cast, with John Miles getting top billing.

The Tattooed Stranger is worth seeking out. Excellent but rather obscure.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.
Problem: OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive negative
=++++=
Answer: Boris Karloff is Matthias Morteval, a dying, lonely old nut who lives in Morhenge Mansion with some servants and tells his doctor friend, "Don't try to doctor me, doctor! I'm disgustingly healthy!" He invites his nieces and nephews to his home and warns them they may have inherited a genetic disease that causes madness by "shrinking the brain" (?)

***SPOILERS***

Morteval/Karloff ends up dying, and murderous "toys" (designed by his dead brother) start killing off the relatives. A mini cannon fires real bullets into a guys face, a life-sized knight in armor attacks with an axe and a dancing Sheik stabs people with a knife. One guy getting strangled makes some hilarious faces. At the end, Julissa and her boyfriend find Karloff is still alive and hiding out in the dungeon where steel gates seal off the room. He plays the recurring organ theme music (sort of a death rattle used for the killings), the brother's spirit starts talking ("The whole house will go with me!") and the mansion goes up in flames.

This senseless mess is too dark, boring and the stupid dialogue never matches the lips.
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: I watch movies for a living, picking out which ones are good enough to distribute... Tossing aside those that don't make the cut. I'm not saying that I know more than anyone else based on this, I'm just leading you to how I came to watch "The Gospel of Lou"... Anyways... So many bad movies land on my desk and I actually sit through all of them. I don't actually "watch" everything, usually I just look over at the TV occasionally while I'm working the scan for production value, performance, and how well the story is being presented. If something catches my eye I'll take the time to watch it. "Lou" drew me in during the first few minutes where I closed my laptop and wheeled my chair over to the TV so I could completely tune in. Needless to say I was enthralled throughout the whole movie. The story is told well, the characters are either endearing or repulsive (depending of course on the actor and directors intention for the character) and all very well played. At times I caught occasional amateur mistakes in the camera work and editing, but the emotional nature of the story make these faults easy to dismiss. I've heard other people's comments say that at times the film brought tears to their eyes, other time extreme elation... I was laughing one minute and crying the next and was incredibly touched by this movie. Sadly I was unable to acquire it because I was - as the saying goes - a week late and a dollar short. That's the way it goes sometimes... but at least I had the pleasure of seeing this one and I can't wait to see what kind of response it gets. Good luck and great fortune to you Bret Carr (if you read this), you are without a doubt a talent to watch for.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Let me be the first non Australian to comment on this :) I got the movie for Hugo Weaving and I watched it to the end. It's one of those "drama of life" films, as my mother used to call a movie that depicts a real life story with no extraordinary events and that is mostly descriptive.

I liked the light and the girls. The rest was without too much fault, but without too much merit either. I yearned for something like The Interview, or at least some matrix villain element here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary. The story does teach one about facing one's own destiny and break free from the environment others build for you, but this happens when the life giving peach factory in the area is about to close, so not much of an effort to change things is required.

The "smart" American Beauty sound-alike song in the background could have been part of a larger soundtrack, but just that one playing over and over again became annoying after 100 minutes of film.

In the end, I guess it did his job of presenting a part of Australian life, but to me it didn't seem specifically Australian (it could have been placed anywhere) and it didn't seem attractive as a story.

I guess one must be in a certain mood to like the movie.
Problem: Write a negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: SLASHERS (2 outta 5 stars)

Not really a very good movie... but I did like the idea behind it... and the the filmmakers did make it look pretty good considering the tiny budget they had to work with. The movie is ostensibly an "episode" of a live Japanese reality show that sends several contestants into a sealed off "danger zone" and has three costumed creeps sent after to them to kill them. The survivor, if there is one, wins fame and fortune... everyone else just winds up dead. The main drawback to this movie is that the acting is pretty bad. None of the "real" people seem real at all. The actors playing the killers are kind of fun... because they are portraying cheesy and over-the-top caricatures of popular modern horror movie types... and that's exactly how they would be done if this was an actual show. The movie pretends to be done all in one take... there is one cameraman who follows the contestants around the "danger zone" and everything is seen from the point of view of his camera... but the lights keep flickering on and off constantly (to hide the "cuts" from one take to another, I would imagine).
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer:
If this is supposed to be a portrayal of the American serial killer, it comes across as decidedly average.

A journalist [Duchovny] travels across country to California to document America's most famous murderers, unaware that one of his white trailer trash travelling companions [Pitt] is a serial killer himself.

Rather predictable throughout, this has its moments of action and Pitt and Lewis portray their roles well, but I'd not bother to see it again.