Bad Movies

Generally speaking, I tend to try and keep an open mind while watching movies. I'd like to enjoy any movie I watch, rather then pick them all apart for what they did and didn't do well. However, these past few weeks have brought upon me a number of terrible movies. The kind that made me wonder what in the hell could I have thought in buying/renting them?!

Let's begin.

First up is a movie called "Cool Dimension." Now the description of the movie sounded good enough to me: A trio of female assassins kill whomever their master commands them to, without a second thought or even a question. Then one day, one of these assassins suddenly starts to regain some lost memories and all hell breaks loose. Sounds good, right?

That is exactly what I thought about it until I started to watch it. About 15 minutes in and I began to have that feeling like I had just made a mistake.

These "assassins" don't really kill much of anyone and their fights surely doesn't make them come across as real bad asses either. Granted, it appears as though this was a Japanese indy movie and so it wouldn't be the best of the best, but come on.

The story itself is scatter brained at best, most times things are just hopping here, there and everywhere. Best of luck in keeping up with everything, because there are elements in the movie that are in there just for no apparent reason. For example, just out of randomness I suppose, there was a sex scene thrown in and it had to do with the boss of the master of the three assassin girls. What did the scene have to do with the assassins, the overall movie or anything? Not a damn thing.

It was irritating, as it was stupid and I regretfully wastes $15 in getting this "movie." Lesson learned right? Hardly...

Now this one I thought there could be no wrong done on it's part. And considering I never played through the end of the third and final volume, this would help piece together the rest of the story for me.

What was impressive of this movie was the look of it all. The backgrounds, the characters, everything was just beautifully done here. I thought they had just rehashed the cut scenes from the game, but I was wrong. The job done here was awesome!

And that is where my praise ends for this movie. Now maybe if you never touched any of the games in the G.U. series, the movie wouldn't be all that bad. However, if you were like me and went in expecting to see the whole story retold in the form of a movie, you will be disappointed.

Basically, without ranting about this for the next three months, the story was butchered to the point where the only characters to appear was Haseo, Ovan, Aina (Ovan's little sister), Yata, Azure Kite, Atoli, Shino, Pi, Kuhn and Sakaki.

As for all the other supporting characters and the like, NO ONE ELSE APPEARS. The Canard guild is a no show, same goes for the Moon Tree guild as well. That alone takes a large portion of the story away. Overall, this basically leaves behind a story without meaning, because of how the story was originally structured, the absense of these characters bascially destroys any reason to really give a shit about Haseo.

Needless to say, the movie left a bitter taste in my mouth and furthered my regret in not finishing the game myself. I could go on and on about this one, but I just won't do that. I will just say again... if you've played the games through and expect to see something similar to the game's story, you'll end up very disappointed because the results is nothing even close to it.

Lastly, is a movie I just endured last night and it was just too much for me to handle. It is called "An Empress and The Warriors."

For me, my only real interest in seeing this movie was because of Donnie Yen. The last movie I had seen of his was Flash Point and he was a pretty damn good action guy.

This, however, didn't leave me wanting to watch it over again. I am actually surprised I watched it through to the end in the first place.

I was going to write out a long, drawn out bitch fest about this, but I thought I shouldn't. I will simply say that this, according to the director, is suppose to be a more action oriented movie. What it came out to be (in my eyes) was a romance movie with a little bit of fighting here and there.

What is worse is the romance parts are cheesy and so badly timed that it just ruins the flow of the story. It surely killed any care I had for the characters, that's for certain.

So at the end of the day, I spent most of the month of August watching so bad movies. While there were some exceptions, the vast majority that I saw during the month was just plain ugly bad. I guess you can only watch so many movies before you run into a few that you outright dislike.