input: An enjoyable game, which offers fun and easy game play and fair replay ability. Staying true to the comic and providing a low learning curve gives this game something not seen in most action cartridges today. Also, the narration and animated scenes used (though lengthy animations are replaced by slide shows on the Nintendo 64 version) use full advantage of the platforms' capabilities.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: Ouch, what a painfully BORING Sci-Fi movie! And that's especially saddening because the opening 15 minutes were so action-packed and full of potential! During the intro, we follow a bunch of nervous security officers and hired hit men as they chase a doctor who escaped from a mysterious laboratory with a briefcase full of top-secret files. As he's about to reveal the supposedly horrible & inhuman events that take place in the lab, he's executed. Figures From then on, the 'action' swifts back and forth between two locations, the aforementioned laboratory and the rural mansion of a corrupt senator (or something), and it quickly becomes clear that the experiments are actually the complete opposite of disturbing. More like dull, pointless and vague. Scientists selected four random persons without living relatives and it's really really really really important that they speak the truth even though a giant machine reads the content of their minds, anyway. They all hide dark secrets from their pasts and people suffer when get revealed; yet I fail to see how these tests could ever result in a humanity-threatening device. Perhaps I missed something, but I doubt it. The interactions between the patients and doctors are even less interesting to follow, as really none of them have personalities. So basically, "The Brain Machine" just handles about a bunch of lame people living in an awfully decorated room. The film also could have been half an hour shorter if it weren't for a THOUSAND stagnant shots of buildings! The relocations from the lab to the villa and vice versa are indicated EVERY SINGLE TIME by a five-second shot of the places. Either the makers really needed the padding or they just assumed that all Sci-Fi viewers are morons unable to notice a change of location by themselves. Staring at a forsaken pool with a mansion in the background for the tenth time in only five minutes becomes quite annoying, I assure you. James Best's performance as the reverend with mental issues is rather decent, but one man definitely can't save this thing from being an absolute waste of time. Avoid!

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: Somebody called Howard Koch a schlockmeister but he did write the screenplay for "Casablanca", didn't he? Or didn't he. Maybe there's more than one Koch slinking around in Hollywood, and I'm not too fond of "Casablanca" anyway. Wait a minute -- yes, there is another Howard Koch slinking around Hollwyood. That's the one who wrote "Casablanca." No matter. I'll put as much care into this comment as "Howard W. Koch" put into this production, which is to say only a little.

You know what this sounds like? Somebody read Cliff's Notes on Shakespeare's "King Lear" and decided, since no original thoughts were aboard the Inbound Inspiration Express, to update it and Hollywoodize it with a happy ending.

There are differences. Lear decides to divvy up his vast estates between three sisters and before doing so, asks them how much they love him. Two of the sisters throw themselves at his feet and brown nose him to get at his money. The third is the good girl and refuses to go operatic on Lear. But in the play, Lear remains alive to regret his decision to give the two connivers his stash and deprive the honest girl. He winds up crazy and naked during a gale on the moors, putting flowers in his hair and hallucinating. Kids can do that to you. (Take my kid, for instance. After all the effort I squandered on raising him, does he show any interest in becoming a doctor or a lawyer? No.) In the end, everybody in the play dies.

In the movie, evidently, the good sister is morose and suicidal but when she tries to off herself, somebody jumps in and saves her, so the ending is, more or less, happy. That's the difference between Hollywood and a genuine tragedy, unless you define Hollywood as a tragedy sufficient unto itself.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: Sometimes laughter in the middle of a horror film is a signal of its greatness. I remember the nervous laughter from the audience in the re-release of The Excorcist really nervous laughter. It punctuated just how freaked out we all were watching the voice of Satan coming out of a 12 year old girl. In the case of the 2006 remake of the 1972 cult classic The Wicker Man however, it made me think that this new Wickerman is about as scary as the South Park character, Scuzzlebut, the friendly forest monster with TV's Patrick Duffy for a leg and a celery stalk for an arm who's favorite hobby is weaving wicker baskets.

3 years ago a friend of mine in Hollywood told me that he heard that Nicolas Cage was going to do a remake of the film. I started laughing and my friend (Keith) got mad at me touting Nicolas Cage as a great actor. I just didn't think that he could pull it off and unfortunately for moviegoers I was right. Gone is the realness, the outstanding original music, the originality, the creepiness and the wonderfully powerful dialogue. Instead we have horror movie cliches, affected acting and changes to the storyline that make any believability fall apart. Like many of the countless Hollywood remakes we have been inundated with lately this feels like we are watching 4th graders on a playground "playing Wickerman".

The original film takes place on a remote Scottish Isle where a Scottish police officer is lured there to find a missing young girl named Rowan Morrison. In the new spin a California cop (Cage) is lured to an island of the coast of Washington state by his ex-girlfriend to find her missing daughter. She sends a photo and the missing daughter looks exactly like a young girl he tried to save in a fiery crash not long ago. The crash still haunts him in part because the girl's body was never found. Yet even after he gets a letter with her picture in it that connection is completely cast aside as he heads north, alone, to help his ex-girlfriend find her daughter. He arrives to find an island full of actors pretending to be the descendants of Wiccans, many of whom seem like they didn't get call backs for roles in The Village. And like The Village it isn't long before you realize there is nothing to be afraid of here. Not even the cloudy eyed blind sisters who speak in unison.

I think that the opportunity in Hollywood to make great amounts of money on a film often comes at great expense to the artistry. I think someone like Nicolas Cage who is in so many films these days loses touch with the magic that film can be when it gets to the point where he has a personal chef on the set preparing his snacks. We needed a bad re-make of the Wickerman like we needed yet another '9-11' movie. I'm starting to wonder if Nicolas changed his surname from Coppola because he wanted to or because he was pleaded with to do so.

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pos/neg ans:
negative