IN: Review: There are some movies you just know they are going to be bad from frame one. Even if you were totally oblivious of Ed Wood's work, one look at that commentator from "Plan 9 from outer space" and you just KNOW you are not gonna see the next cinematic masterpiece. Just like that, when I saw the first shot of Uwe Bolls masterpiece "House of Dead", with that guy sitting at the front of the house starting his introduction while trying desperately to sound like he just arrived from Sin City, I knew I'm in for a helluva ride.

So, the movie starts like this - first the lead character says that everybody else is going to die. You know, to keep you wandering. Then he starts introducing the rest of the characters with lines like "Karma..thinks she's Foxy Brown" or "Alicia..my ex.. we broke up recently.. I had to study and she had to fence". No, I'm not kidding.

Anyway, this bunch of 20-somethings who couldn't act their way out of a wet paper-bag are going to the "Rave of the century", rave in question being a few tents, a port-a-potty and a shoddy stage located on small island in the middle of the Pacific. Our gang missed the ferry, but thankfully will find a way to get there, the way being a fisher-boat ran by Kirk (Cpt Kirk? Get it? Man, whoever wrote this script is a genius) and his sidekick who is a bastard child of Simpsons' Cpt McAllister and that hook killer who knows what you did last summer.

To make the long story short, the gang gets to the island, finds nobody there except some bloody T-shirts and then decide to run the hell away from there. No wait, they do not, they actually get all happy and like cos there's free booze.

With that scene the movie hits rock bottom and then against all odds proceeds to go further downhill. Some guys in rubber suits start running around, there is some screaming and shooting, our gang goes to some house to meet some other gang, they go out of the house, meet Cpt Kirk and some police woman (who between them have about 500 pounds of weapons) and then decide to go back to the house. Somewhere along the line they transform into a S.W.A.T. team, enter the Matrix, the rubber-suit guys start multiplying like bacteria and I start to cry because I actually paid to see this. To add insult to the injury, every few minutes there are shots from the video game this crap is based on and there is a cute game-over cut-scene for a few characters when they die.

I seriously hate this movie. It doesn't even fit in that famed "So bad it's good" category. It's just plain bad. The script is bad, the zombies are awful, there is no tension, lines are bad, actors are bad.. the list just goes on.

You will probably want to see this movie just because of its reputation of being awful. Don't. There are bad movies that deserve to be watched. This is not one of them.
What is this review like?
OUT: negative

IN: Review: Forbidden Planet represents the kind of science fiction that is precious in cinema, especially from the 1950s. There was The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds, but lest not forget this gem which took some of its story from Shakespeare's The Tempest to tell a tale of astronauts on a planet that has a doctor on it who has made a remarkable breakthrough. It's the kind of breakthrough that is not so much incredible to look at (though for 1956 it does look quite amazing to look at some of those sets and that gigantic machine the doctor creates), but with its emphasis on the characters and its themes of technology taken too far by the more primitive side of human nature even when we don't know we're channeling it.

On the surface- that is in the first ten minutes- it looks standard, if a little more professionally acted and directed with better skill than the B-movies of the period. A ship of astronauts are on a mission to the planet Altair-4 to bring back an expedition that went missing decades before. But the only one left is Dr. Morbis (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter, who somehow were immune to an attack that left everyone else dead. Morbius appears to be a cordial and highly intelligent man, and his technology looks to be so impressive that the only thing the astronauts, led by the Skipper (Leslie Nielsen), can think to do is to report it back to their superiors on Earth.

But there's a catch - something is killing off members of the crew of the ship, one by one, every night, even when the others keep an eye out and then put up an invisible electric fence, which the invisible something goes through easily. Meanwhile, there's some romance possibly between the Skipper and Alraira, and there's a more pushy vibe from the doctor: you shouldn't have come to the planet to start, and now you need to go. What happens from this is even more fascinating, just on a purely intellectual level, but Forbidden Planet never forgets that its audience should also be entertained by this story while getting some useful ideas. While everyone may remember Robbie the Robot, and for good reason, perhaps the most unforgettable image for me is the monster realized on screen with the crew firing to no avail, animated with red electricity and looking so beastly that it looks out of Fantasia.

The acting from Pidgeon is subtle: you wouldn't expect him to be a villain, though something is there in the character and in the performance that speaks to this, and by the end it makes the character far more complex than one would expect. And the other performances are workmanlike but also excellent, from Nielsen as a born leader to Holliman providing some great comic relief as the Cook (who, I should add, helps with one of the funniest scenes in the film with those gallons of bourbon Robbie provides). And the effects for its time are extraordinary (sophisticated in a nostalgic pulp way for today too), and the music, done by electronics, is beautiful in its "tones". But ultimately it's the screenplay and careful direction from Hilcox that puts this a notch above the rest of the B-movie lot. When it's meant to be funny, it's intentionally so and it works. When it's dramatic it connects quite well even in its stiff moments with the actors. And when we are made to think about a horrible situation, it comes on gradually, with nuance, not shoved in our faces or injected with mega-action.

An inspiration for many other sci-fi films, and a fine marker of thoughtful science fiction stories and books from time-old, it's a classy and entertaining classic.
What is this review like?
OUT:
positive