On UK TV I watched Death Trench (also known as Trench 11), a 2017 Canadian film set in France towards the end of WW1.
It’s a horror film. Not a hugely original plot. The allied forces are sent to investigate a supposedly abandoned underground bunker the Germans had been using for experiments. They find monsters. Meanwhile the Germans, including the doctor who was in charge, are returning to destroy the bunker and the evidence. But the evil German doctor actually wants to rescue his work…
I wanted to like this. It’s a serious film (as in it avoids any comedy), it’s decently acted and decently filmed and there are a few fairly good gruesome effects here and there.
But for me it failed really badly. Probably because it had a low budget and more to the point failed to work with the budget it had.
There was almost zero sense of it being WW1 other than clothing and haircuts. A (surely cheap) option they didn’t use would have been to include archive shots (stills even) of the era.
The crack allied team was just half a dozen people who walked to the bunker without taking any supplies. The German army was just as small and never seen out in the open.
Despite mainly taking place in dark underground tunnels there was no claustrophobia, no sense of danger.
There was no real character development or even characters. Evil mad German doctor of course. Officious and unpopular allied task force leader of course. But the main hero was blank from beginning to end.
Although, as mentioned, certain horror effects were done well (shotgun to head, face with nose bitten off) your basic monsters were just growling, violent men.
I hate being so negative but… Can’t really recommend it.
CODA (Apple+). Starting to check off all the Oscar nominees, and I think I’ve found a new favorite film of the year. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…it’s an absolute gem.
In case you’re wondering, my faves: 1. CODA 2a. Licorice Pizza 2b. West Side Story 4. Don’t Look Up.
By the sound it reminds me of The Outpost which had a very similar plot but much higher quality and better acting, including Ray Stevenson and Michael Smiley as an Irishman who joined the British army (which is a whole story I’d have loved to have explored).
Overlord I’ve seen and that (and quite a few other films) definitely share a very similar plot.
I felt mean criticising Death Trench because I felt they were sincerely attempting to make a good film. It’s certainly not Plan 9 From Outer Space bad. Nowhere remotely near that bad. However it had no tension, no atmosphere and just fell flat.
Like I said. It appeared to need more budget (what film doesn’t?) Wiki gives a vague budget of $1-2 million. I reckon it should have been much better if they had the full $2 million as a production budget.
Overlord (from recollection) was just OK. Certainly looked much higher budget. Not a film I would declare a favourite.
CODA is my favorite film of 2021 too. I guess my second favorite film of 2021 is The Worst Person in the World, which wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, although it did get two other nominations. But then I can’t claim to have seen every good movie from 2021. I haven’t even seen all the Best Picture nominees. The only one I haven’t seen is Don’t Look Up.
I watched this over the weekend. It was . . .peculiar. It felt like “the other side’s” response to The Crown and the many other things that portray Diana as a victim. And you’re not kidding about the breathy whisper. I think I missed half the dialogue.
Over the long weekend, my SiL and I viewed, “The Power of the Dog”. Without giving away any details of the movie, I can say that it fabulously portrayed the complex and often subtle interactions between the characters. It was wonderfully directed, and the performances by Kirsten Dunst and Benedict Cumberbatch were excellent.
We also saw, “The Tender Bar”. Kudos to Ben Affleck and Christopher Lloyd. A child actor I’ve never seen before, Daniel Ranieri, was also very good.
In my opinion, this year’s group of nominated movies is the best overall batch in several years. I’ve enjoyed every single one of them thus far.
Watched a BBC film called Makeup about a teen girl that goes to Cornwall to be with her boyfriend. Starts out thinking he is cheating on her, then she has a thing with another girl. That’s about it. A total waste of a hour or so. Really boring and pointless.
NetFlix streaming: Tangerine (2015) – I’ll give it an A. It’s a comedy with some drama. The two leading characters are transexual hookers working in LA; I’m not knowledgeable about that subject, but the dialog and acting seemed natural, and none of the humor seemed forced. The film was shot on an iPhone, but that wasn’t an issue with the character-driven plot. Rotten Tomatoes score is 96.
St. Vincent (2014) – The Rotten Tomatoes consensus on this is that Bill Murray is his usual interesting self but the writing and plot are absolutely paint-by-number. I’ve become hyper-sensitive to films where the curmudgeon becomes humanized by love/responsibility/whatever, and I couldn’t finish the movie. Murray did a perfectly fine job during hour that I watched.
Just watched Marjoe(1972). An excellent, Oscar-winning documentary about Marjoe Gortner, an evangelist preacher who started “preaching the good word” when he was 4 years old.
From Wikipedia:
" Marjoe Gortner was a precocious child preacher with extraordinary talents, who was immensely popular in the American South. His parents earned large sums of money off of his earnings until the point he outgrew the novelty of his youthfulness.
Gortner rejoined the ministry as a young adult solely as a means of earning a living, not as a believer. He spent the next several years using his fame and status as an evangelist to earn a living from both tent revivals and televangelism. Eventually, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience and decided to give up the revival circuit. He offered a documentary film crew unrestricted access to him during his final revival tour, which took place in 1971."
Watched The King’s Man the other day. Pretty good overall. Took a while to really get going. There were several sort of starts and stops to the action and the story took some time to develop. The action was good once they got around to it, but there was not as much of it as in the previous films. Overall quality was as good as, as well. It was not a waste of 2 hours at the very least.
