Icon. Showstoppah. Main Eventah.

I really don’t like Quentin Tarrantino films. Reservoir Dogs? Ick. Pulp Fiction? One of the most overrated films I’ve ever seen. Kill Bill 1 & 2? Utter crap. So you’re probably wondering why I own this? Well, it’s for very stupid reasons. It is the last HD DVD ever produced and with a steelbook case to boot. It cost me 8 bucks or 11 dollars with shipping to import and HD DVD’s are region free, so I thought I’d get it just to have it. After all, I preferred HD DVD after all. But I’ve got to review 365 DVD’s this year, so I decide to give this particular one a go.

What I encountered was basically two hour long episodes in one. At first I enjoyed that the movie was filmed to look like a 1970’s bad horror film, but then it started to grate on me, mainly because people dressed and talked like they were int he 70’s, but then had cell phones and talked about CGI and things fromt he 21st century. Either go thr whole nine yards or don’t. This aspect just came across half assed.

For a quasi-horror movie, there was just too much damn talking. 85% of the movie is just jibber jabber that neither pertains to the plot nor is interesting. The could have knocked the movie down to 90 minutes and it would have both still made sense and flowed better.

ACT 1 takes place in Austin, Texas at a bar where the crazy Stuntman Mike is stalking his soon to be victims. Kurt Russell does an amazing job here, but then he usually does, Captain Ron non-withstanding. The characters in Act I are amazingly inferior to Act II and one has to wonder if there were two different scriptwriters because of how different both acts are. Stuntman Mike has some great lines but all of the other characters in the movie are boring, shallow and I damn near fell asleep from bordeom watching this.

Then came the last ten minutes of Act I where Stuntman Mike finally lets loose. Oh me, oh my was the one car crash in Act 1 worth the 50 minute of mostly crap. I loved the replay of the crash from different angles and the sheer amount of gore gore gore. The cinematography and the direction of this scene is the best I’ve ever seen from Tarrantino. I actually rewound and watched it twice just to get the full effect and to catch all the nuances.

Act II was dramatically better with far less talk and more smashing, screaming, crying and violence. Oddly enough though, no one died in this act. Here we also have a better cast of actors like Zoe Bell (LOST), Rosario Dawson (Rundown, Josie & the Pussycats) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Live Free or Die Hard). The dialogue was better, faster paced, and one third of the film is Stuntman Mike scaring the crap out of them and nearly killing them and the final third are the girls turning the tables on him and reducing him to a mewling crybaby before dragging him from his car and repeatedly punching him. The movie ends with the beat down. there is no resolution or ending. It’s just punch, punch, kick - THE END with the girls cheering. It doesn’t appear Stuntman Mike died. He just got his butt kicked while crying. The lack of reolution or even a true ending is annoying, as is the completely different personality Stuntman Mike has between Act I and Act Ii, giving credence to the belief that this was written by two very different sources.

I strongly preferred Act I to Act II, although Act I had the best scene in the entire movie. Like all of Tarrantino’s films, this went on for far too long, and as a homage/parody or a dead genre, this film took itself a little too seriously. There are some great actors involved and I actually liked this better than any of Tarrantino’s other films - although that’s mainly due to the cast making this awful script work.

On the DVD technical front, this has the worst menu navigation I’ve ever seen in an HD DVD. I’m not sure in Germany just did it ass backwards, or what, but I’ve never encountered menu issues like this one, especially since High Def DVD’s have some maazing menu navigation options.

In the end, I’ll keep this for HD DVD collector value rather than movie quality. It’s a mediocre film that deservedly bombed in the box office and spent way to much time babbling rather than developing characters.

Is It Worth Keeping: Only because it’s the last ever HD DVD and it’s a German import with a Steelbox case.

Rating: 5/10

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under DVD of the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.