Review #29: Black Death (2010)


This review was originally written in October 2016.

Day 29: Black Death

Alright, I really didn't care for this movie. The first half was just... uninteresting, for lack of a better term, and while the second half definitely caught my attention and I was invested in what was happening, it ends really suddenly but adds in like a ten-minute epilogue of sorts. I might have cared about that epilogue if I had really cared about the main character, but I didn't. The whole ending just had a really odd structure and just didn't feel like it fit the rest of the movie.

I don't know if I should have liked this movie or I'm justified in not liking it. On one hand, it had a few actors I like- it has that guy that was in Les Miserables, it has that guy that tortured Captain Picard, it has that guy who's always dying in every movie (spoilers: he dies in this movie), and it has a guy who looks like Colin Farrell but totally isn't Colin Farrell. But although it's in a medieval setting and is slightly fantastical, the majority of the setting just bored me and made it hard for me to care what was happening. There was a neat twist near the end, but it's immediately proceeded by a couple of mind-boggling character errors that come out of nowhere and never get resolved. So I dunno. I don't think this movie was very good.

Rating: 5/10 Adorable Plague Rats

Most Awkward Scene in the Movie: The main character is enticed to join the pagan necromancer village with the promise of his seemingly-resurrected love interest while the mob is out for blood. So he goes off to meet her, he's in the hut for like five whole minutes, and comes back out where the entire village, still in mob mode, has literally just been standing there doing nothing the entire time. They continue to stand there as he slowly walks all the way across the square, nobody saying or doing anything. An entire village just staring at this guy, when five minutes ago they were ready to crucify his entire group. What were they expecting him to do? Go in and have sex with his girlfriend or something? Would the entire village have stood around and waited for him to finish that too?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review #181: The Evil Dead (1981)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #36: The Evil Dead (1981) As much as I'm trying to make these reviews as standalone as possible, I feel the need to tie this one (at least a little bit) into the last one (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and the next one (Evil Dead II). So, bear with me I guess. I'm a huge fan of the Evil Dead series as a whole. Evil Dead II was one of the first horror films I ever saw, and for many years was my favorite movie of all time. However, I was never a very big fan of the first movie; I only saw The Evil Dead a couple times and when I did, it felt "lesser" than Evil Dead II in every way. I'll save most of my comments about EDII until the next review, but I just want to say that in this particular rewatch, I came out liking The Evil Dead WAY more than I used to, and liking Evil Dead II a little bit less (though I still love it). If you aren't familiar with the series at all, The E
Read more

Review #153: The Endless (2018)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #8 - The Endless (2018) A disclaimer: Most of this review is going to be me complaining about the logistics and mechanics of this movie, and it's going to be full of spoilers. I'll try to summarize my non-mechanical thoughts as concisely as possible. The Endless is an interesting film created by writing/directing duo Benson and Moorhead. Apart from Spring (which to my knowledge doesn't fit into this film's universe, though I could be mistaken) this was the first Benson & Moorhead joint I'd seen, and I was instantly intrigued by the premise: two brothers escaped a cult ten years ago, and after hearing that the cult was seemingly getting ready to kill themselves, they go back for one last visit to get some closure. When they get there, they realize that the cult's supernatural beliefs seem to be true, and they get caught up in a strange web of timey-wimeyness under the u
Read more

Review #179: It (2017)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #34: It (2017) I read It about twenty years ago; it's probably the longest book I've read in full. I think the book is very, very good (though also very, very Stephen King, which means there's a lot in its pages that makes it quantitatively worse than it could be) and for the most part this movie is a faithful adaptation... of half of it. I'll save most of my book vs. movie complaints for later on, but I'll just say that the book itself is two very important and very intertwined halves of a story, and while I understand the reasoning to cut it in half (doing the whole book justice would take well over four hours' worth of screentime), I really do think it does the whole story a disservice when this entire film starts and ends with the characters as kids. The book is constantly jumping back and forth between the child half of the story and the adult half, to the point where
Read more