TheDOMINATOR's Movie Review Thread

You're the only person that I've ever seen (or heard of) that rates Gigli so highly, it was interesting to read why you thought so.

30 Days Of Night is OK once you realise that it's a zombie movie dressed up with vampires. I liked it a lot more once I realised that.

Nice thread Arnie

__________________
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

Thank you, sir.

Yep, I really don't understand why Gigli is often rated so poorly. I've browsed the IMDB boards and looked over Rotten Tomatoes and I still don't get it. One critic on RT, though, said something like this:

"Gigli isn't a misunderstood masterpiece, but it is a brilliant film."

That isn't the exact quote, but it went somewhere along those lines. That's just about the only positive comment about the movie I could find. Heh.

Thanks. Call me Dom. The Dom. *key Terminator theme song music*

__________________
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
John Milton, Paradise Lost

My Movie Review Thread | My Top 100

Ok Domdot

Wow, I knew exactly what you were gonna say in your reply, that's funny.

D'oh.





All right, I should be posting up a new review fairly soon. I haven't written a review for any of the films in my Top 10 except Shawshank, so perhaps I'll get to work on doing that before I hit the theater again. It's going to be tough to match yours on 12 Angry Men, Movieman.

But we all know who your inspiration was for writing it and buying/watching the movie in the first place, huh?

Yeah, but you got like 10 people to watch it, that's gotta be a record (or at least tied with Fight Club).

On our other forum, I'm pretty sure I influenced more than ten people to watch it; I'd say ten people minimum. And yeah; that's a record on our other forum.

Well it's right around 10.

Now that you got me going, I'm curious. Let's see, here.

On our other forum, I influenced:

Swan
Yourself
Midgard
Yodasmeagol
sushi
Omega
The White Knight
Bartle
LuckyDawg
fructose (he hasn't watched it yet, but it's on his Netflix)
KHS

So yep, that's eleven and I might be forgetting one or two. I'm going to write up a review for it over the next couple days and get it posted.

Really good thread, TheDOMINATOR.

I hope this isn't sarcasm because my thread here is severely lacking in reviews, or getting close to that point. But thanks; I should've entitled it "TheDOMINATOR's Slow Review Thread" like Meatwadsprite did with his.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) - 10/10



Set in the quaint Maryland town of Burkittsville deep within its foreboding woods, The Blair Witch Project is a terrifying first-hand account of primordial terror that is my personal favorite horror film of all time. A visceral tale of three student filmmakers set out to create a documentary about the town’s infamous “Blair Witch,” the movie is shot in a handy-cam “home movies” style of cinematography which adds to the surrealism of the film. The opening sequences introduce the setting, characters, and lore of the eerie town’s horrifying past and grips you like a vise from that point forward.

Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Michael Williams play Heather, Josh, and Mike (characters of the same names) respectively. Heather and Josh are good friends who, before they depart to Burkittsville, invite a guy their age (which is mid-twenties) named Mike to come along as he’s handy with a camera. The film begins with introductions to each of them, revealing why they’re setting out on such a task as making a documentary on the Maryland’s “Blair Witch,” and when they plan to return. Right away, we distinctively become familiar with their likeable personalities and grow a certain fondness and attachment to them, Heather proving to be the main protagonist; Josh the cool but eager-to-go friend; and Mike, the funny comic relief. Little do they know of the true nightmare that awaits them.

After the opening sequences but still early in the film, the team arrives in Burkittsville and begins to interview the townsfolk for their documentary. The people Heather, Josh, and Mike interview seem like normal folk, but each of them has an aura of displacement around them when the camera’s rolling and they’re talking into it; an aura of fear. When the team mentions the name of the Blair Witch, people don’t seem to want too talk much. However, Heather and her companions still manage to get some useful information from the folk for their footage. The Blair Witch, as it turns out, was a real women that lived long ago in the 1800’s, condemned for practicing witch-craft. She was exiled from the town—back then known as Blair—forced out of her home and into the deep, unforgiving woods…in the dead of winter. Her name was Ellie Kedward.

The lore of Ellie Kedward and her story is deeper still than that and has many sub-stories of its own, such as the story of the Blair Witch Cult that formed in the 60’s that allegedly came into the woods to meet and perform demonic rituals, and the story of Rustin Parr, the crazed hermit who, at one point in the town’s grim history, lived in the woods. One night, the local urban legend goes, he heard a grisly voice that told him to torture and kill—mutilate—seven people and drape their remains over a rock, and he did. This is perhaps the primary element of the film that makes it so remarkable: the deep, complex and mystifying lore of its dark story surrounding the Blair Witch.



The movie begins to get intense once Heather, Josh, and Mike find themselves hopelessly lost in the woods. With limited food, tired and aching bodies, and an outdated map that none of them know how to read, things between them get tense quickly and tempers begin to flare. Only does their great frustration turn into terror when one night, while all three of them are in it, their tent is attacked from the outside by an unseen force. When they calm down minutes later, they find piles of rocks, and later in the film after another similar occurrence, small figures made out of sticks, hanging in the trees around their tent. No animal could have possibly made the piles of rocks, and the team is too far into the woods for anyone from town to have followed them. It is at this point that the scariness turns into a primal terror that, while watching, feels like a stationary, insanely scary roller-coaster ride.

The Blair Witch Project’s grisly conclusion is unrelenting and one of the most memorable endings in film that will leave you gasping for air and begging for resolutions to your dozens of unanswered questions. The film’s final sequences are on a scale of realistic terror that only a few other movies in the world are on, and its ominous story and incredible climax will leave you thinking for days about what you’ve just watched.

I enjoy your reviews, but The Blair Witch Project was nothing more than a marketing scheme to get unknowing teenagers into theatre seats so that they would perpetuate the false "truths" of the film and all share some fake communal experience of being scared. The Blair Witch Project is a much lousier fllm than Plan 9 From Outer Space because that filmmaker knew not to expect anything while the makers of Blair Witch were just about as jaded as any filmmakers in history in knowing that they could conduce and take advantage of their audience. Personally, I give The Blair Witch Project , and I find it so irrelevant to movie history that I cannot comprehend why anyone signals any praises for it anymore. Sure, I know alleged rational people who were afraid to walk to the parking lot after the movie was over, but they were nothing but tools. Plus, if that was such a great flick, why haven't the filmmakers been able to make a single other "legit" film? I know, they made other films, but who the hell has heard of them or seen them? That's OK. You should like what you want, but crap floats.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

This movie was one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. I would definitely give The Blair Witch Project a .

What appeals to me so much is the story of the film; the lore surrounding the Blair Witch character and the many "sub-stories" that go along with her own central story. I find the story very intriguing and thought it was well-acted and genuinely scary.

I never claimed The Blair Witch Project to be a pivotal benchmark in filmmaking history; it doesn't have to be for me personally to give it a full 10/10 (or 5/5 or whatever) rating, and/or for me to like it so much.

Very nice.

For some reason I just can't bring myself to watch this after seeing the shorts

Look too scary/freaky/weird for ya? It's not what you see that scares you in this film; it's what you don't see. It's the mystery of it all, because [slight spoiler] we never actually see the Blair Witch on-camera.

If you think you can hack it, I strongly recommend.

I can't explain it it just looked silly to me I will add it to my Bigpond movie list and then at least i can have an opinion about it

Just to make sure, you do know that the movie ended up being untrue, that the kids who made the film admitted it was fake. They even made a fake documentary on the film called Curse of the Blair Witch.