Tag Archives: Ugh

Raw Edge Review

Posted on by
Reply


I suppose a title like Raw Edge might already get your guard up but I can assure you that the film is even worse than you might think. The plot is annoying and the characters are all terrible. The movie really drags on and the whole time you’re just hoping that some of the villains will get bumped off instead of being spared for the 5th time and you know they will show up again before long.

The film centers around a town with a very rough custom. When a guy dies, his wife becomes an available product to be claimed by the first guy around. As a result you are incentivized to bump off a lady’s husband if you want her. This has been going on for a long while now and the head’s wife isn’t thrilled about this but you don’t worry about stuff for too long when you’re that powerful. One day she is attacked and so the town murders a guy who insulted her a while back and his wife is claimed. Now the brother of the victim has arrived and intends to murder her husband. This is trouble because everyone in town has always wanted her and now’s their chance.

I mean the story is so absurd right from the start. A town where women are literally property to be traded like this? Man, leaving this town seems like it would have been a slam dunk and at the very least you won’t want others to come up here. The victim actually recommended this as a place to live, can you believe it? Tex, the victim’s brother arrives and for starters he should definitely be upset at the fact that his brother would have even thought about him living here. Well, he intends to get revenge which will be hard to do since the head has a lot of followers. On the other hand, at least 3 are helping him out since they want a shot at the wife.

The whole film is using this kind of tension to get the story moving and it’s not the way you want to make a proper film. It’s dark in a distasteful way and of course it makes all of the characters look really bad. One lady tries escaping the village to go to the Indians, only to be hunted down and the Indian is murdered. Nobody tries to help her and instead they are fighting over her. It’s all about power here and everyone is only fighting for their self interests.

I’m guessing the reason why there are no real good guys here is because the ones with any kind of moral compass were probably stamped out years ago. So now you’re stuck with all of the corrupt folks. So of course that’s already bad enough but then even aside from that the writing is just really, really bad. Everyone is super dumb and naive at the same time. One guy in particular has been after the heroine for a while and got caught several times. In each instance someone gets the drop on him but lets him live. This happens over and over and over again until eventually he is left alone with her. Then he tricks her into leaving her horse to check on his and to ride with him? She really made things way too easy for the guy.

When Tex shows up and saves her again, he turns his back to the crazy guy with a gun??? She has to point out that he’s about to shoot for him to turn around. In a world like this where everyone is out for themselves, it should be common sense not to trust anybody. You have to take your opponent down for the count and keep your gun active all the way up until that point. If you lower your guard at all then it’d all over. Then you had the older guy who kept on doing some betrayals of his own and he somehow thought the other villain would forget? Near the end he turns his back to the other villain and talks about sharing again, as if he hadn’t just betrayed him 20 minutes ago….another dumb move.

The card player also took a whole lot of risks the whole time and is a really slow draw. It’s no wonder why he tries to use strategy to win the whole time because when it comes time for a gunfight he really doesn’t last very long at all. Meanwhile the head of the town isn’t the smartest guy either. After allowing a girl to be captured and forcibly remarried, he believes her when she says the Indiana just need to talk to him briefly? You don’t feel bad for him at all but the fact that he didn’t question this at all is crazy.

The film just had really bad writing all throughout the movie and the whole film needed to not have included the town’s weird rule from the start. Throw that out entirely and the whole film gets way better. Otherwise the fact that every guy there is just obsessing over all the women and waiting until they are in the market is wild. It’s just not a fun film and the whole thing just reeks of shock value. There were way better ways to handle this one. I guess it serves as a general reminder on why living back in the days of the wild west would have been brutal. Not to this crazy extent but it would still be bad regardless.

Overall, Raw Edge is a film that is trying to be rather brutal the whole time and it succeeds. It’s all just so corrupt with nobody to root for. It feels rather contrived and no amount of songs that the film would throw my way could change that. Even the song at the end is going for a rather upbeat/chipper tone and it just doesn’t work with the rest of the movie. I couldn’t buy into the romance at all but you could interpret the ending as a strategic move in order to get out of there and I couldn’t blame the heroine for that. You need to leave the place asap and can think of the long term plan after that.

Overall 2/10

FLCL: Shoegaze Review

Posted on by
Reply


Saddle up true believers because we’re about to talk about a show that’s real bad. It’s like the meme: “I’m sorry, I wasn’t familiar with your game. I knew you were bad, but wow!, you stink!” I mean FLCL is a series that typically ranges from horrible to terrible. The seasons keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. I don’t know how it has gotten this many seasons when the plot is basically the same every time. You’ll be shaking your head every minute or two, trust me on that.

So the show starts with wouldn’t you know it? A shy guy who’s never had any luck with girls named Masaki. He’s rather depressed because he can see ghosts that nobody else can and nobody likes him. He builds a bomb one day and decides he might use it someday but he is caught by the school delinquent, Harumi. She offers to help him blow everything up because she is certifiably insane. Masaki didn’t really want to blow anything up and is too timid to do something like that but she quite easily persuades him to do it. She’s as worldly as they come and enjoys using as much suggestive dialogue as possible. Can Masaki keep his cool under these conditions or is he doomed? Also what’s even the point of this?

Well, enter Kanda and Kana. Basically a lot of craziness is going around and Kanda is still trying to find Haruka and get to the bottom of this whole multiverse adventure. Somehow Masaki and Harumi are at the center of this all now and they have to find a way to use the steam engine and the metallica thing to stop the changes from occurring. Translation? They have no idea what they’re doing either and in this show the villains will never be defeated because they are never around anyway. What this means is that in every situation everyone’s always going to be panicking no matter what.

There is one good thing I can say about the show though and that’s that they only made 3 episodes. So it is really over before you know it which is really a good thing all around. That’s one of the shortest seasons you will ever see. The soundtrack is on the forgettable side though and the animation is okay but nothing special. It is worlds better than that odd previous season so I have to give some credit there though. The art at least makes sense this time which is massive. Definitely the way to go if you ask me.

Okay so back to the story. Why does this one fail so hard? A lot of it comes down to Harumi and how she is so crude all of the time for no reason. Her dialogue is as out there as possible and it’s all just to make Masaki squirm. Here’s the thing though, even if there is an in-universe reason for why she is talking like that, it doesn’t make the scenes any easier to get through. She’s trying way too hard the whole time with her suggestive lines and Masaki doesn’t even really call her out on it.

No, instead he just falls in love with her because the poor guy has finally found the one girl who will give him the time of day. That’s not heart warming, it’s just sad. It’s pretty tragic if you think about it because this should have been such a fun story about a girl who got him to believe in himself and all. What am I saying though, this is FLCL? That’s never how it goes down here. It’s always about the main girl just teasing the main guy over and over until he explodes and that eventually happens here as well. He lets the monster out and then the climax starts to come in hard and fast with the quick battle.

It’s less of a big battle than the original FLCL or some of the sequels though. So it’s actually a bit more low key than you might expect. I think this series is the kind where the fan theories will likely be infinitely more interesting than the show itself. Like it does seem to be some kind of multiverse thing going on here as each season is having the same kinds of things happen without a ton of rhyme or reason. Even if it is to set up a multiverse that isn’t going to help a ton though because we don’t have many likable characters or tings to look forward. Potentially you’re just delaying the end of the series which wouldn’t be a good thing.

Kanda is pretty useless the whole time he appears in the show but at least Kana looks reasonably well. She is forced to be a lackey for Harumi for most of the season which can be annoying though. Kana has been through a lot and you’d think as an adult she would be able to finally just have fun but it wasn’t in the cards for her. It’s a pretty raw deal in fact since she should be just living a normal life instead of having to get involved again. Although in a way her presence didn’t matter either way because the story would have mainly still happened in the same way.

The show suffers from being fairly aimless the whole time in general. This is the case with most FLCL seasons as well but it’s like the season is mainly slice of life as the characters climb up the tower but there isn’t much reason to actually go through with it. Masaki was upset for a while which is why he was thinking about being a terrorist but gets over it very quickly and meanwhile Harumi was basically just wanting to see the world burn the whole time. Even at just 3 episodes long that’s not enough of a plot to keep this going for too long. We don’t fully understand the effects this will have on the rest of the universe, much less on others.

We are 5 seasons in and we still don’t fully know the villains’ goals or even just how sentient they are. Are they just following their nature? We’ll likely never know because the show isn’t interested in actually explaining its plots. Keeping some mystery is fine of course to keep the crowd guessing but keeping all of it is just bad writing. You have to show something or it’s fair to say that you likely don’t even know what you’re doing which is my main theory here. I doubt the writers even fully know what they are setting up because it just isn’t that important to them. They are just enjoying the dynamic of the shy guy with the outgoing girl and want to use that over and over and over again. It’s a real shame.

Overall, FLCL delivers another stinker with this one. Stay far away folks, there is just no reason to really get excited about this one at all. It makes mistake upon mistake throughout each episode with no real strengths to back it up. The romance was basically nonexistent the whole time as well. I know they tried really hard with it by the end but it went way too fast and didn’t make sense anyway. You get the feeling that the main guy was way too inexperienced here and was just being pulled along for the ride. Not very romantic and this is not a show that would survive on its writing or action so it was doomed either way. You can absolutely make a great slice of life about climbing a tower or something dramatic like that but you do have to put in some work and keep every character interesting. This one did not do that. As one last positive, at least the poster is good. If you didn’t know any better it would look promising.

Overall 2/10

Tokyo Mew Mew Olé! Review

Posted on by
2


It’s time to talk about an absolutely brutal manga that is just awful on so many levels. Man this one was bad and I had a bad feeling about it right from the jump. The original Tokyo Mew Mews may not have been fantastic manga but they at least had a lot of fun moments and cool things happening at all times. This one? It’s trying its very best to be a nonstop reverse harem at all costs while destroying all of the characters in the process. Even having some serious fights was not enough to save this one.

So the plot starts out rather similar to the main series but in reverse. Shibuya is a rather shy guy who keeps to himself. Some think he’s cool in an aloof way while others just think he’s a jerk but he doesn’t care. Unfortunately, a mad scientist (The mother of his crush Anzu) ends up firing off a powerful energy blast that transforms 5 teenage guys into cat warriors. Shibuya is now the leader of this Mew Mew group and he has to try and hide this from the world or he will be a laughing stock.

The only way to get rid of these powers is to find a bunch of “Mew Aqua” crystals. Along the way he will also have to fight off powerful Chimera monsters and a villain group led by Deep Blue who seem to want to destroy the planet. Along the way Shibuya must now try to confess his feelings for Anzu. The tough part is that the other 4 guys are in love with her as well and the same is true for the 3 big villains. Anzu loves the attention from the 8 guys but the problem is that she is slowly falling for all of them as well. Can she choose…must she choose? She will have to handle this carefully.

The original Mew Mew series was a classy affair. The cat gimmick may have been a bit much but hey it was a classic magical girl show about fighting monsters. You had a wholesome romance with the nice guy and the “bad boy” trying his best to get the lead’s attention. The romance itself may have been super weak but the show as a whole was just classic. This series just feels desperate right off the jump. The whole series is about getting in as much shipping as possible and it’s absolutely nonstop.

The plot even curves around this for no reason. Let me give you an example here real quick. One aspect of this is how the Mew Mew formula not only turns you into a cat but it also affects your personality this time. Shibuya is forced to yell stuff like “Pleased to be of service”! and every time he tries to gag himself but it’s too late. By the end of the series he stops resisting but apparently it’s something that happens to all of the characters. Part of the transformation is a mental suggestion that forces you to strike up different poses and say crazy catchphrases. This is obviously not serving any point except to try and make the characters as embarrassed as possible. It’s not a good look.

Then there is the romance which is awful. As mentioned in the intro, everybody likes Anzu. They just can’t stop thinking about her and while it’s obvious that she will choose Shibuya in the end, did we need everyone to fall for her like this? It’s just really excessive but the absolute worst part of it is that Anzu gets her own feelings confused as well. If she was just being very stoic about it the whole time or patronizing that would help but when she actually starts to think that she likes the other guys as well then it becomes an issue.

The series could have easily tried to make Anzu better by being decisive but this was just here for the drama. At the end of the day the whole series is just here for a lot of shipping. You even have the guys showing off so much that they all start to be in awe at times. At one point they’re stranded at the desert and have to make some desperate crazy calls. The plot takes a backseat all of the time and so this ends up being a horrible manga. Every single moment is weaker than its original incarnation but not by a little, it’s by a lot. There is no reason to actually read this manga in the end. There’s just no replay value here and it feels like the worst possible way to continue the franchise. I’m glad the original show got a reboot so people can check that out instead.

So as you can see, I didn’t like Anzu as the main heroine. She’s just not decisive enough and gets kidnapped a whole lot. Anzu may have been brave to enter the villain base on her own at one point but she’s captured so effortlessly that it just makes the whole decision look bad. Shibuya is also bad as the main guy because he is way too timid. He also has no control over his cat form so he will suddenly get real serious and possessive, then back to normal. These massive mood swings don’t help his character in the slightest or help you see how Anzu could have fallen for him in the first place.

Yoyogi is the smart member of the group so expect him to be talking down to everyone all the time. It isn’t very impressive though considering that his abilities aren’t even above the others and intelligence barely matters in this series. You either land your attack and destroy the enemy or you don’t. There’s no room for big fancy plans or any of that stuff. This guy’s annoying all the way through and you know he has no shot at the romance either way. While you can’t have a team without a bunch of team members, there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to this guy. There’s nothing interesting or endearing about him.

Ryusei is the youngest one of the group and he’s very headstrong as a result. Usually I like that kind of character but of course it’s more to show him as the naïve character who gets some feelings for Anzu but isn’t able to express himself. He can be really wild in his cat form as well and is often a liability. I think he could have been a decent character if handled right but of course the series was not going to handle anything right like that so it was game over right from the start.

Ayato is the rich member of the group who tries to be the mature guy who keeps everyone in line. Of course that doesn’t prevent him from falling for Anzu as well. He mainly tries to stay out of the race at least so he doesn’t complicate matters but of course it would have been even better if he could have just been a mentor figure. At least he can pull his weight more than some of the other characters and actually seems to understand the stakes. I can give him some reasonable props next to the other characters but wouldn’t say that I liked him much at all.

Finally we have Taichi who is the worst member by far. It’s not even close, the guy whines a lot and is super weak so it gets to his head and he starts to think about the dark side. C’mon now, you can’t be switching up this quickly. It’s a really bad look for him and he never really rebounds from this. It would be extremely difficult for anyone to make a comeback from that because once you’re a traitor then you’ve crossed a line that must not be crossed. Getting back from that is incredibly difficult to the point of being nearly impossible. This guy got off really easy if you ask me.

Then for the 3 Wiseman group: Latte, Chai, and Mocha, none of them were all that good. Latte was another guy obsessed with Anzu the whole time and he wanted her to love him but of course that wasn’t possible. It’s an awful motivation for a character as well. Then you have Chai and Mocha whose motivations were weak enough where they were also ready to quickly jump in and help the heroes out when things got rough. If you were a villain with a lot of convictions then that surely wouldn’t happen right? I like the title since the 3 Wisemen sounds impressive but there’s nothing particularly wise about them.

Additionally, they could have murdered the heroes so many times but kept choosing not to which was a big mistake. They’re so much stronger than the Mew Mew fighters that it’s scary. They would often win in a single blow but just let the heroes live because they can. That certainly came back to bite them later on. Then you have Dark Blue who has no conviction of her own here either.

She wants to effectively reset the world as humans have messed everything up. Okay that’s great but then all it takes is a few words for her to rethink everything? That felt way too fast if you ask me, there was just no compelling points brought up beyond the obvious. So that shouldn’t have been enough to turn Dark Blue. Not at all, it just serves to show us that she really didn’t have much drive before now.

This series probably has the most reverse fanservice I’ve seen in a minute as well. One look at the costumes and you can see how they aren’t practical at all. I’ve always said that a bad costume isn’t necessarily fanservice on its own. It’s all in how the camera zooms in or how the manga panels are meant to draw your attention. Well, here they are obviously meant to be fanservice bait. It’s a little hard to take seriously compared to traditional fanservice but I’ll still dock points in the same way because it’s yet another element that is taking priority over the plot.

When you stop to think about it, there is barely a plot here. None of the characters actively work to remove their powers after the opening chapters. The 3 Wisemen want to change the planet so they send one shot monsters out once in a while but don’t do much about that until the very ending either. Even the whole environmental theme is mostly removed from the original series. The villains own a company where they talk about going green as a front which was interesting but it’s ditched almost immediately. Going more into that could have been interesting but ultimately it didn’t happen. This series just feels like a waste all the way through.

The series works to have a bit of a body count by the end and a lot of emotional scenes but they ring hollow as you don’t like any of the characters by this point. The only consolation I can give the series is that the art was actually fairly good. There is a lot of detail put into each of the pages so I can appreciate that but at the same time a series cannot survive on art alone. A bad story will be just as bad even if the art is excellent. So the fight scenes look good at least but don’t do much to salvage the overall product.

At the end of the day, if the series wanted to be anywhere close to the original then it should have grabbed the stronger elements from the first title and built upon them. For example, the main girls there were all friends by the end and had solid banter. These guys? Well, they’re all jealous of each other because of Anzu so there’s a lot of fighting but it’s more personal and not as bantery like with the old cast. You don’t really have any scenes of the characters getting to know each other and having a good time because they have one track minds. The characters don’t have great development and again there are no big story beats or deeper themes to keep track of. It’s like the series just grabbed the concept but didn’t actually read the original series.

Overall, Tokyo Mew Mew Olé! is a really awful series. The romance here is probably some of the worst that I’ve seen since Black Bird and that one was historically bad. The whole series is really focused on the romance as everyone tries for Anzu but at the end of the day there isn’t any substance here for it. The series tries to bring you back every month with the shipping but it’s just not enough. I mean that’s probably one of the worst ways you can try to promote a series. By the time things get serious in the final chapters it is way too late. This is really a series that never needed to be made. The concept itself isn’t awful automatically of making the guys the magical fighters for a change but it feels like the series never intended to take its own premise seriously and that’s the most disappointing thing here. Definitely skip this series if you can, it’s not worth checking out.

Overall 1/10

Extremities Review

Posted on by
Reply

This review is of the edited TV-14 version of the film. All thoughts should be addressed as such as this review would be even more negative otherwise.

There are some films were you know they will be trash almost immediately and this is one of those. With nothing redeeming to be found in this film you know that you’re in for a rough time right from the jump. That said, the film is pretty straight forward about this so if you’ve even seen the plot summary then you know that this should be an instant skip. Extremities does its best to be as extreme as possible and succeeds, much to the detriment of the film as a whole.

The main character here is a lady named Marjorie who is assaulted one night by a mysterious figure. She tries to ask the cops for help but unfortunately there isn’t anything they can do to assist and the villain has her address. She heads home when the guy strikes again. Ultimately she is able to subdue him but her two roommates think he should be given leniency while she just wants to murder the guy or at least get a confession out of him. Will she be able to destroy him or will the roommates get in the way?

The movie certainly makes the roommates annoying as they try to fall into every horror trope imaginable. Believing the main villain, letting their guard down, etc. For a while there you think things are really going to backfire on them but fortunately the film at least doesn’t go with the whole he escapes into a whole new climax filled with lots of fighting. That would have been rather pointless and would have only served to drag the whole film out even more.

The movie moves at an incredibly slow pace. The first 30 minutes feels like it’s 3 hours. The scenes just never end and I can’t imagine seeing this kind of movie in theaters. Then the whole second half doesn’t need to exist as Marjorie should have finished the guy off already. Just end him immediately and you don’t have to worry about the debates and aftermath that follows. Because that didn’t happen you have to go through scene after scene of the characters debating.

Everything is really detailed in this film including the actual assault and rape which puts this film at a 0 right out of the jump. This is never a plot device that should exist in a film, much less be the main plot point. Just including that doomed the movie and there was no way the film could salvage itself after that. It just makes for a painful watch. The home invader plot is already a tough storyline to tackle because it will almost always devolve into a long hostage situation and this just takes the whole thing one step further.

With this kind of plot there is no way to make a movie good. It’s absolutely impossible and thus shouldn’t even be tried. The villain’s awful and as far as I’m concerned the roommates are awful for taking this guy at face value at all. C’mon now, this guy’s rather obvious the whole time. This is one of those films that is transparently putting the main heroine in as bad a position as possible so that when she starts getting her revenge and torturing the villain you can cheer along.

The issue is that this cycle of violence will always make for a poor viewing experience. For starters, it means that the villain is going to do something truly awful at the start to make the revenge feel that much better. This is a really bad decision. Then you will have the hero doing something really awful like full on torture as well to even the scales. So in effect it’s an excuse by the film to have two super violent moments and to just keep going in circles like that. It goes without saying that this film is very violent and dark as well so keep that in mind if you actually end up wanting to check it out. Trust me, you don’t want to watch this one though, you could do better with numerous other films. It’s no exaggeration to say that 90 minutes of watching paint dry with some fireplace sound effects in the background would be better as it would at least put you to sleep.

Overall, Extremities is an absolutely awful film that is horrible from start to finish. It’s the kind of film that’s so bad that you just want to forget about it rather than even discussing the film for very long. If you ever see this on TV or in a store you’ll want to keep on walking right past it. If you hear about a remake being in production and a trailer pops up on Youtube feel free to leave a dislike if the feature has been brought back onto Youtube. You’ll have a better time buying a bag of potato chips and mixing it into your mac n cheese or dusting off the old Sega Genesis and playing some old games there. Either way that would be a more ideal way to spend your evening.

Overall 0/10

Communion Review

Posted on by
2

This review is of the edited TV-14 version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative.

Whenever you have a film with aliens in it you are hoping that a lot of fun things are in store for you. Aliens should be fun and make for imposing villains. Unfortunately that was not the case here. The film is based on a book of pure fanfiction from an author who was delusional but you hope that the film can surpass this. That’s not the case though and the film is very weird from the start. This weirdness ultimately starts to crossover into just being an awful film and by the end you’ll be cringing so hard that this will hit rock bottom. The film was just reeeeally bad.

The movie starts with a guy named Whitley who is an aspiring author. The issue is that he can’t focus on anything for more than 5 minutes so instead of working on the book he’ll play pranks on his wife and kid. Whitley is always rambling on about random stuff but one night when a few friends are over there is a bright light that shines across the world. An alien shows up as well. Whitley doesn’t want to tell anyone about this though so he keeps quiet and continues to go more and more insane. Eventually the aliens come back to kidnap him and things get dicey for the guy. Can he cope with the experiences that he went through?

Part of the problem here is even before the abduction, Whitley already seems certifiably insane. He just never makes any possible sense. He’s always wearing a different costume while working on his book and never ends up making any progress on it either since he ends up throwing out what he had started on each time. Then once the aliens do appear he starts to grow worse as he sees them everywhere. Hypnosis only makes the visions grow even more and he can’t trust anyone even at the end so he fights on his own. One of the annoying things about Whitley is that he’s also really bad at explaining things. Often times he may make an attempt to talk about the aliens but he does it in such a round about way that it doesn’t get through.

Additionally, the aliens seem to have told him not to tell anyone. Throughout the film we eventually learn more about what happened. See, initially we only get the quick jump scare before going to the present but a lot more happened that night. By the end of the film we learn that they definitely did a number on him. So, you would expect that after this he would probably want revenge or something right? Well, this leads to the most insane part of the film where he tracks the aliens down and ends up dancing with them for kicks.

Never mind the fact that the aliens also attacked his wife and used psychic powers to murder his son once already (and vowed to return) but he still wants to dance with them. He takes the old approach of forgive and forget. His wife doesn’t seem to mind either when he tells the story to her. The whole thing is just off the walls. It’s clear that after a point Communion is intentionally trying to be as weird as possible. The characters just don’t make a whole lot of sense with their actions. If they should do something then they will do the other. I dare say the dancing scene had to be part comedy or something. How do you seriously do a scene like that? The music was also as happy as possible for ultimate contrast.

A better film could have handled this well as perhaps a parody of some sort but not this one. This film seems to actually be trying to have a horror vibe at times but I can tell you now that it doesn’t succeed in the slightest. The characters are all too ludicrous for that to work. They never act scared in a natural way so why should we be scared? Whitley has a panic attack at one point when a kid scares him using a costume and it’s so over the top that you’ll just be shaking your head. The writing isn’t any good either. You’ll lose count of how many times the wind has to silence Whitley as he goes off on a tangent. The actual story makes no sense either.

The film doesn’t exactly have any subtlety either. For example a big thing here is that Whitley is traumatized because the aliens physically ran experiments on him including some rather invasive maneuvers. Anyone can put the pieces together particularly because there are tons of memes about this and it’s the first question someone asks whenever anyone mentions being abducted by aliens. Communion doesn’t realize that though so we get a long flashback detailing this just for extra grit and edge. The movie tries to make this as tragic as possible with Whitley attempting to fight them off at first, then trying to joke around so they’d let him go but none of this works.

It makes the rest of the scenes with him and the aliens even worse. It seems like the film was trying to say Whitley had stockholm’s syndrome with the aliens to an extent and that’s why he likes them now but that’s a very disturbed way to end the title. You just know that by the end he has completely lost and that’s the real shame here. There isn’t a happy ending to be found as the aliens have won and you know that more and more humans will keep on being attacked. Since nobody believes that the aliens exist it’s not like anyone has begun to fight back against them either. That just means that the aliens have completely won.

The premise has some potential of course because alien invasions are fun. Maybe have the government find out about this and have them send over some heavy artillery. I think that would go a very long way to making this interesting. At the end of the day one of the big things holding this film back aside from all the other negatives like the endless flashbacks, slow pacing, extra grit, and characters making nonsensical choices the entire time is that the character cast is just really bad. They all come off as insane and it’s really hard to follow a group of characters like that.

Overall, Communion is definitely a disgrace. There aren’t any core positives to be found here. The movie wastes a whole lot of time in each plot so the story developments that are in the film could have easily been handled in half the time. I like to think a sequel could start to fix this film a bit by making it a total action thriller but the first step is to completely shift the focus from this film. Maybe even ignore this film entirely so in a way the sequel of this film would be starting from scratch. Kind of like a reboot. Regardless, I would highly recommend staying far away from this one.

Overall 0/10