It's April, which is my unofficial "Foreign Movie Month", but I haven't posted in almost 4 weeks, so here are all the things....:
UzumakiThe movie based on the comic by Junji Ito. It follows the original storyline to a point, but then it completely diverges, because they started production before the comics were finished. So the filmmakers had to come up with their own ending. Which, yeah, it's open-ended and it sucks, but I can deal with it. What bothers me isn't so much that they had to come up with their own ending, but the fact that the filmmakers
start to give you their own explanations as to what's going on, but then they give up on those explanations partway through, and completely drop their own plot threads. THAT I found far more irksome.
Other than that it's a pretty fun, gory, and completely bonkers horror film from Japan. You know, the kind of stuff you expect.
The Tag-AlongAh, a Taiwanese horror movie. Don't think I've seen one of these before. It's... Well, it's not bad, but it's not great either. The characters are likable and the cinematography is quite lovely. But the story is predictable and gets a little too preachy towards the end, and the twitchy CGI child could have used a bit more work in order to not look quite so funky. But the CGI isn't used too much, so as long as they don't overdo it I'm sure any followups they make will turn out just fine....
The Tag-Along 2Aaaand they overdid it. Way to go, filmmakers. It's like they decided that the only proper way to do a sequel was to add more to every aspect of the production, and that mentality didn't do them any favors. The characters are still likable enough, and the cinematography is still quite strong. But the movie feels
WAY too bloated, the story is even more preachy than before, and the CGI is about 10x more prevalent, which just makes it that much easier to highlight all of it's flaws. I do appreciate that they tried to give some backstory to the ghost girl, but at the same time they also failed to give her motivation for her actions, which just leaves you with more questions than when the film started. Oh well. Again, good effort, but not quite there yet. Better luck next time, Taiwan.
ThingsAhhhhhhhhh!What the hell did I just watch!?! Where was Ack?! He's supposed to warn me about crap like this! OMG, I think I'm in physical pain. The crappy, unfollowable story, the horrible characters, the absolute technical ineptitude.... I....I think I need to go lie down for a while.