"A spacecraft travelling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early."
Yes, I'm sure you've already heard the rumours, "Passengers" is just a "chick flick" set in space. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl... or something like that. Probably more of the latter than the former, regardless of which gender (from the thousands of fictitious ones) you might claim to be.
It looks good, has great effects, and has much better acting than the story deserves. It'll also hold your interest, as it did mine, right to the end. But then you'll think, "Damn, fooled again!" There's nothing here which you haven't seen done a hundred times before but in more terrestrial locations.
For the most part, I enjoyed "Passengers". Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence make a likeable but ill-matched couple, and Michael Sheen is a little bit too perfect as the robot barman. Even the spaceship is quite cool. The trouble is that the plot outline was probably written on the back of a stamp by someone who watched "Wall-E" (and possibly a very small part of "Silent Running") as a child.
With nothing of any substance here, "Passengers" is ultimately an easily consumed and instantly forgettable January movie, and to make matters worse, it's filled with nauseating self-sacrifice propaganda.
"A gang of ruthless highway killers kidnap a wealthy couple traveling cross country only to shockingly discover that things are not what they seem."
Have you ever heard of "No One Lives" before? No? Me neither. Usually when a movie has such beautifully gory set pieces, the internet goes crazy with the buzz about it, but bizarrely, not this time. Thus, we have one of the main problems with anything put out by WWE Studios: For some reason known only to them, they just aren't promoting their movies adequately. The limited theatrical release of this one is another testament to their lack of faith in their own product.
Obviously, the movie business is a bit of sideline for the masters of wrestling shows which delight small children and the poorly educated, and the days of MySpace when we were all encouraged to watch "See No Evil" starring Kane (whoever he is or was) are long since over, but the whole thing feels like a conspiracy. Every big name horror site has hated this movie and gone out of their way to tear it apart. Perhaps they weren't given enough of a financial kickback or something. That also wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Maybe the usually PG-13 friendly WWE are ashamed of "No One Lives" for being R-rated. They shouldn't be because it pretty much rocks if you overlook some of the acting, weaknesses in the script, and a few lags. The dialogue may be more than a little bit hokey, but at least it suits the tone of the rest of the movie. Let's he honest here, "No One lives" is a lot of fun in an over-the-top and mean-spirited way.
With recognisable actors such as Luke Evans and Lee Tergesen in it, I didn't even know that "No One Lives" was a WWE movie anyway although I should have realised that something was slightly amiss when a big, fat, tattooed guy showed up. Other than the fact that he's disgustingly overweight and useless at acting, I wouldn't know that he's a wrestler since I don't watch that crap. I don't know his name and never want to. Even his character is more use dead than alive, but I'll say no more about that because it's a huge spoiler.
Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura of "The Midnight Meat Train" (2008) fame (but nothing else that I've ever seen), "No One Lives" is a difficult movie to place in the horror genre. It starts off as a crime drama about kidnapping, but then really goes into action mode due to a very physical and credible performance by Luke Evans who plays a kind of cross between Freddie Clegg and Rambo.
Although Lee Tergesen starts off well as a crime boss, he's somewhat wasted. I may not like the movie, but he was a lot better in "The Collection" (2012). Adelaide Clemens (from "Silent Hill: Revelation 3D"), on the other hand, isn't very convincing because the part is simply too big for her. Having said that, I can't actually think of anyone except Melissa George who could have done it better, and unfortunately, she's too old now.
Standouts include Derek Magyar as the evil Flynn and Lindsey Shaw as Amber ("the only one with a soul") who go above and beyond what you would expect from TV actors. America Olivo is also her usual self, but I love America Olivo and she can do no wrong. She gets her boobs out too, which is another reason why she needs to be in every horror movie from now on as far as I'm concerned.
As you would expect from a $2,900,000 budget, production values are very high throughout "No One Lives". Not only is the gore outstanding, all of the stunts are exceptionally well choreographed. Presumably that's where WWE's many years of faking fights must have been extremely useful.
Not knowing what to expect, I was impressed by how original "No One Lives" was in places, and even as a seasoned horror fan, I didn't see the twists coming. Mind you, if I live to be 100, I'll probably never see the twists coming in any thriller because I'm not wired that way.
It's not scary as such, the tension could have been handled much better, but for what it is, "No One Lives" is highly entertaining. It's not the greatest horror movie ever made, but it's well above average when compared to most of the junk available right now.
"The burned corpse of Dracula (Stephen Billington) is revived by a wheelchair-bound scientist, Lowell (Craig Sheffer), and his devoted students in an effort to cure Lowell of a fatal disease."
Would you believe that a direct-to-video sequel could actually be good? No? I'm still not sure if it's any better than "Dracula 2000" technically, but I have to say that I had a thoroughly enjoyable experience watching "Dracula II: Ascension" for the very first time.
As I said in a previous post, I had no idea that any sequels to "Dracula 2000" even existed until I recently bought the DVD pack of all of them. Either my local Blockbuster in England didn't bother to get them, or I was interested in other things at the time. I know it's hard to believe, but, really, I do have other hobbies.
Anyway, "Dracula II: Ascension" was apparently filmed back-to-back with the second sequel, "Dracula III: Legacy" (which didn't get released until 2005 for some reason), and so is really the first half of a completely different story rather than continuing with the same cast of characters from "Dracula 2000". Thus, there's no sign of Gerard Butler, Jonny Lee Miller or even Justine Waddell. The absence of the latter two pleased me greatly.
Apart from the director, Patrick Lussier, being the same, and the title having "Dracula" in it, there's only the slightest link possible with the original film. The burned corpse of Dracula, which was apparently left to the local authorities to cut down from the illuminated Jesus sign, provide the vampire body which is the centre of all the shenanigans which follow. Strangely, he's never once referred to as "Dracula" during the whole movie, and he's blond like Lestat, so make of that what you will.
Of course, "Dracula II: Ascension" owes more to "Blade" than it does to anything by Anne Rice. Jason Scott Lee plays a laconic, half-vampire, Catholic priest to the best of his ability, but the "Blade" influence overshadows his ethnicity. I'm not entirely certain, but I think the comic book version of "Blade" was supposed to be English. Maybe I'm confusing him with someone else since it's been years since I read a comic. The point is, it doesn't matter if a vampire-hunter is black, white, yellow or purple because "Captain Kronos" was the first anyway. You thought I was going to say "Blade" again then, didn't you?
Now that I've brought "Captain Kronos" up, I'm sure he was the first character I remember who was bitten by a vampire and survived. Other than the mythology about destroying the head vampire to release the victims as invented by Bram Stoker, there wasn't any attempt to change that prior to Hammer. In the Wes Craven/Patrick Lussier "Dracula 2000" story, Dracula cannot be killed, so obviously they had to do something new which was actually done before slightly differently. Thus, you have Father Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee) having to very painfully burn the vampire infection out of himself in sunlight every morning. Presumably any other victim would have to do the same thing or turn into a vampire.
Obviously, at least one person wants to become a vampire in "Dracula II: Ascension" otherwise there wouldn't have been any need to steal Dracula's body from a morgue, chain it up under spotlights in a drained indoor swimming pool, or conduct cruel experiments on it. It isn't exactly "torture porn" by any stretch of the imagination though. If you've seen "Blade" then it isn't very original either. I'm tempted to throw in "Day of the Dead" as an influence too, but really any movie where a monster was captured and experimented on could have inspired this.
Usually I like to run through the cast at this point in a review and say what I thought of them, but I honestly didn't recognise any of the actors apart from Jason Scott Lee. I've probably seen them all in different things over the years, but I don't know their names without looking them up on the IMDb.
The disabled Professor (who is a big character in this) is played by Craig Sheffer. I thought he was channelling Gary Busey for most of his role so finding out that he wasn't a Busey was a surprise. John Light plays an English guy named Eric and there's nobody who was more shocked than me to find out that he was married to Neve Campbell.
As for the rest of the cast, who cares? The pretty girl, Diane Neal, who plays Elizabeth is very lovely and, of course, her wannabe boyfriend, Luke, I now know was played by Jason London. Are they famous on American TV or something? To me, they were unknowns.
It's only from the synopsis that I even knew that Dracula is played by Stephen Billington. At one point I thought he looked just like a younger version of Rutger Hauer. I only realised the irony of that thought after I'd watched "Dracula III: Legacy" later.
It doesn't matter if I'd never heard of any of the actors in this before anyway since they all do a really good job. I didn't notice any particularly weak links among them or even anything too horrible about the dialogue. There were a few smartass one-liners, but nothing stupidly comedic.
The effects are really good with lots of blood everywhere although only half a dozen moments could really be described as "gory". One of those involves a dead cat which I'd rather forget about, but I suppose it was necessary to that part of the story. As ever, I can't say that anything is scary in this unless you overthink it all.
I learned a couple of things about vampires from "Dracula II: Ascension" which I probably knew before but had forgotten. I'm not going to tell you what they were because I'm going to recommend that you watch this movie for yourself. You've probably already spotted that I've embedded the full movie from YouTube at the top of this review so you don't even have to go to Wal-mart or Kmart to grab a barebones copy from the $5 bargain DVD bins.
I enjoyed "Dracula II: Ascension" so much that I'm going to put it into "The Vault". It wasn't a new film, but it was new to me, and it was way above what I expected.
