- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- Jurassic Park
- Robot Jox
- Pitch Black
Featured Review
Pitch Black (2000): 6.5/10
What feels like a made-for-tv slasher film eventually transcends its form by virtue of an obvious but clever premise, a strong performance from vin Diesel, and copious fresh, well-revealed monsters treated as scary alien animals. The music video editing was killin’ me, the jump zooms, saturation, rad edits – this does a good job of looking like absolute shit for quite a while (impressionistic would be putting it politely) and succeeds in spite of its own cinematic bad taste.
The attention to the monster design is really apparent (and evidenced by the credits – majority monster design people). What was particularly convincing about the CGI was that the movement of the animals seemed very lifelike (and the movement is all that really seems to matter to my brain). This is a feat that James Cameron, $400 Million, and over two decades of Moore’s law fail to achieve with Avatar (e.g.). The characters are thick cardstock, falsely cosmopolitan, in bright simple colors, but ultimately the characters butt heads usefully and predictably. The direction here is terrible, most of the actors are just reciting their lines without connecting with the other actors at all. Obviously, Vin Diesel directed himself.
The writing has a lot of fine, subtle sci-fi touches that helps to differentiate it from similar-looking films – I particularly liked that the monsters are cannibalistic after they (presumably) reproduced off-screen. The exoplanet/space setting and the fact that the monsters don’t really care about the humans created a satisfying brand of bleak, wild horror that is way too infrequently explored (no gods, no humans, just proteins eating each other with Riddick reveling in all of it without preference). The whiskey-spit flame-thrower revealing a crowd of huddled monsters around the British chap was a bold, silly shot, yet it was fitting for the character and it worked extremely well – the subsequent head-chomp is one of the best goin’.
Pitch Black successfully walks the line between science fiction and slasher by virtue of some really well developed monsters, a slow-reveal of planetary ecology, and by leaving a lot of the dying to the end of the movie – by the time it feels like a slasher, you’re locked into sci-fi mode. Did it really take until the year 2000 for someone to make a movie about monsters who only come out in the dark?
An unbalanced, surprising, solid little flick.