I watched Wet Hot American Summer with some people that like it.
I hated it.
Tought it was alright and absurd enough not just to be another shitty movie parading as a parody, but I can see how it would be utterly grating if you don't get into the film.
Saw
Terminator 4... Honestly the machine designs are OK (decent SFX too with some practical effects) and I guess that it's enough for me not to lose interest, at least at the beginning of the film, but at some point it was totally what I expected : a convoluted mess that devolved into mediocre fare soon enough, with some terrible structure (you can feel how disjointed it is, weird ellipsis or continuity, sequences ending too soon or too late... The Skynet infiltration is a total joke), shitty fan service (That Guns & Roses song
Also how many time have the "I'll be back" be uttered now in this franchise ?) you can feel the production tried to salvage what they could. The core problem however is that in the end, the post apocalyptic war was never the point of Terminator and decent designs or not all of this is superfluous and does not live up to the concentrated power of the few flashforwards in the original film, the absolute dreadiness of the refugees living underground and all that... Doesn't help that the story is so by the numbers and is supposed to be held up by one of the most boring acting duos in recent memories, a clash between boiled vegetables (Bale can be a decent actor... but not here).
Also saw
Late Phases (the joy of browsing low budget movies on Netflix), about a blind Viet-vet who move in a senior community and has to fight a werewolf. The directing is pretty bland but it's a decent story and the film is not shy in playing his cards right away, it's a nice change of pace from typical DVD fare where all the film is a long tunnel of terrible teen scripting with all the good bits in the last 10mn. The SFX suffers from the budget but while it is obvious it's people in suits there's some good crafting there (Honestly it holds up pretty well with werewolf films of the eighties and nineties).
I could say some similar things about the
Hole by Joe Dante. While it lacks the visual flair of the director's best film (obviously some money shortages there), it's a really solid film with good teen characters (and none of the shitty tropes), that goes right into the essence of the plot and doesn't get sidetracked. Dante manages to create a decent horror mood, as far an only midly violent film can. It's really a shame that he is working so little now, I suspect his career is suffering from a string of lackluster commercial success, which is really harsh considering he never made an outright bad movie.
