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Les Diaboliques

Train to Busan vs World War Z

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If thou openest not that I may enter I will smash the doorpost and unhinge the gate. I will lead up the dead, that they may eat the living.”    (Enheduanna). Excerpt from “Descent of Ishtar/Inanna to the Underworld.” Written somewhere between 3000 B.C. to 1900 B.C. Train to Busan and World War Z: A Comparative Approach Call them what you want: the undead, revenant (French word meaning come back or one who has returned), Zombi or Zombii in Haitian, or as many Western viewers know them, zombies. There are fast zombies (both of these movies) , slow zombies (George A. Romero’s classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead), zombies who are under mind control through nefarious black magic or sorcery, and many more. Zombies are a very important concept in pop culture and society. Specifically, lots of movies have been made about them.   Two interesting films about zombies are World War Z (2013) and Train to Busan (2016). Even though World War Z is has more jump scares and fits into the
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Titanic: The Legend Goes On (2000 animated film)

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     The RMS Titanic.  One of the most famous ships ever. The single biggest passenger ship afloat at the time, it was almost 900 feet long and had 10 decks. Embarking from Southampton in the UK, Titanic was destined for New York City. Unfortunately, this was not to be.      It was almost midnight on April 14th of 1912, several days into the voyage, when Titanic struck an iceberg. A submerged chunk of the iceberg scraped along the ship's hull and ripped open a large section. Rivets popped, metal plates buckled under immense pressure, and water came cascading in. This led to a chain reaction in which multiple sections of the ship flooded. Long story short, Titanic sank in about two hours taking about 1,500 people to the bottom of the North Atlantic. The vast majority were lost due to freezing to death in water 27-28 degrees Fahrenheit or -2.7 Celsius.      Tragic events like this are often immortalized in media such as books or movies. Titanic is no exception with quite a few movi
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Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

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Tagline- Who will survive?      Several factors can make or break a film. Actors and actresses have to achieve the best performance possible to avoid shattering the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. Sound design and mixing (making sure all sound is the right volume and is consistent to what's happening on the screen) is very important.  Careful editing and attention to continuity are essential in making a great film.  Birdemic: Shock and Terror  has absolutely none of these things. Read on and I'll go through just how hilariously terrible this movie is.     Let's get the technical information out of the way first. Birdemic: Shock and Terror  was written and directed by James Nguyen. The cinematographer was Daniel Mai with music by Andrew Seger.  It stars Alan Bagh as Rod, a software salesperson and Whitney Moore as Nathalie, who is a model. Moore also was in charge of makeup after the first makeup artist quit or was fired (details are shaky on that). Mona Lisa
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And Then There Were None (2015 BBC miniseries)

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 Tagline- Agatha Christie's darkest thriller      All humans, past and present, have certain things in common such as language, economy or some form of social hierarchy. There's another thing that all humans have but not many people acknowledge: secrets. Whether it's something small like not telling your mom it was you who took the last cookie from the jar or something with much more serious consequences, everyone has things they'd rather have swept under the rug and forgotten about. Skeletons in the closet as it were. Secrets can ruin and even end lives. Let's take a look at 10 people whose secrets catch up to them with fatal results.      And Then There Were None  is a novel by British writer Agatha Christie. It was published in 1939 and to this day remains the best selling mystery novel of all time! The dark clouds of the Second World War were looming on the horizon. That's apparent both in real life and the book and its adaptations. How many adaptations you
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The Birds (1963)

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 Tagline- Suspense and shock beyond anything you have seen or imagined!      Hello friends! I have a question for you: If you had to choose, which animal do you think would be most likely to overthrow or even wipe out the human race? Cats? Domestic cats think they already own the world so they wouldn't want to wipe out all their potential human slaves.  That'd be a waste of labor.         Insects surely?  Locusts can completely strip vast areas of land and crops, leaving humans and livestock to starve. Mosquitoes are easily the most active and bloodthirsty (literally) killers in the world, infecting and killing millions of people with diseases such as malaria, West Nile virus, and dengue.      What if birds went bad? Imagine that there's a magical "button" that if pressed could somehow influence the birds themselves to attack. Even if we don't count the diseases that birds can carry and spread, humanity would be in big trouble.         With millions of pigeons
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A Quiet Place (2018)

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     Rule #1: Don't make a sound.  Rule #2: Never leave the path.  Rule #3: Red means run.     Happy Halloween Eve to those who celebrate!    Life is full of noise. I often take it for granted and I'm sure many other do as well. When we do stop and pay attention to our surroundings it can surprise us on how powerful and ever-present sound is. My fan is on and is quite loud in the otherwise quiet room. My fingers making deafening impacts on my keyboard as I write. Cars and motorcycles are always background noise. It's almost unnerving and even overwhelming when you really stop to listen to everything. I don't live in a rural setting but at the same time I find it difficult imagining living in a large capital city like London, Paris or Washington, D.C. Life is already chaotic enough without millions of blaring car horns and a constant stream of sensory information.        With that in mind, let's have a (very quiet) chat on today's movie: A Quiet Place . Spoilers
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The Last Kingdom (television series)

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   Tagline-  England is Born. Hello friends! I really enjoy period movies and TV shows. The definition of period is: a work set in a particular time period in history and uses props like clothing or objects either directly from or similar to those used in their respective eras. The budgets and scale for these types of media can be quite enormous: James Cameron's Titanic (1997) holds the record for biggest budget for a film ever (at the time at least, it was since beaten by Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides which cost $378.5 million dollars to make) at $200 million. As we know Titanic  was a massive success. Globally it made just over 2.2 billion dollars!  As we see, period films can be enormously expensive and lucrative as well. But what about TV shows and films on streaming services and things like that? Can they hope to compete?  In short, yes. Not every movie with a massive budget and scale will succeed at the box office, or even be a good film for that matter. I'
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Batman: The Movie (1966)

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Tagline- MEN DIE! WOMEN SIGH! Beneath that Batcape- he's all man! (There were lots of taglines for this specific film but this one was the most amusing to me haha.) Hello friends!  Today i'm reviewing the 1966 action superhero movie called Batman: The Movie.  This movie is... crazy. In a good way of course.  It's not lacking in action that's for sure. It stars Adam West as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Burt Ward as Robin. There's also an extensive rogues gallery of Batman's most famous villains and i'll list those and who plays them later. It also accompanied a series that ran from 1966 to 1968 with 3 seasons and released a very respectable number of 120 episodes before its cancellation in 1968. There were 34 episodes in season 1, a whopping 60 episodes in season 2, and 26 episodes in season 3.  There are many more interesting things i could say about the production, behind the scenes, controversies, (there were quite a few), and so forth but that'd probably ta
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Orphan Black (television series)

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 (First off i have no clue why my blog says Les Diaboliques in gray before it says Orphan Black and then the date but whatever.) Tagline- One. Of.  A. Kind. ( Sidenote: There were a couple other taglines depending on country or region but most are a bit spoilery you know?) Hello again! Today i'm reviewing Orphan Black , a Canadian science fiction thriller TV show that ran from 2013 to 2017. It stars Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany and quite frankly it's a miracle that the rest of the cast holds a candle to her performances in the show. (Yes performances is plural, i'll get to that later.)    I wasn't even planning on reviewing it anytime soon (eventually i would've gotten to it because it's one of the best shows i've seen by a long way) but i found myself feeling motivated and here we are. Orphan Black excels at many things, like being very unpredictable and having more twists and turns than King Minos's labyrinth in Greek mythology, so even though i do
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Fighting with My Family

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 Tagline-  Meet an Outsider who changed the Game. Hello friends! Today i'm writing about the 2019 film Fighting with My Family. It is about the Bevis/Knight family of wrestlers and specifically about their daughter Saraya and her journey to wrestling fame and a place in WWE history. (As far as i can tell Bevis is the family's collective given name and Knight is their collective ring name. I'll try to remain consistent and refer to them as Bevis, or just use first names, but if i slip up and use Knight/Bevis interchangeably now you know why.) family in Norwich which is a city in the county of Norfolk, England.  Fun crazy fact that i didn't know or just didn't process until recently: The legendary, almost unbelievably successful naval commander Horatio Nelson was from Norfolk!  Nelson won battle after battle against usually the French and Spanish but he also campaigned against the Danes too. These victories weren't without cost though, he lost most of his right ar
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Les Diaboliques

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Tagline- See it, be amazed at it, but... BE QUIET ABOUT IT ! (original Finnish poster tagline) (unusual sidenote: Oddly i was unable to find a official tagline in English or even in French which is where the film comes from.)  Hello friends! This time i'm reviewing a 1955 French film called Les Diaboliques , not to be confused with the 1996 film remake with Sharon Stone called Diabolique . It is a psychological horror and also thriller film and is a masterclass in steadily building suspense. I'm going to say spoiler alert even though it's six decades old but you should obviously go watch it before reading this. A brief plot overview: Michel Delassalle, a despicable school principal becomes victim to a nefarious murder plot planned by a duo of his wife, Christina Delassalle, and his mistress Nicole Horner. However to Christina's and Nicole's shock and dismay, Michel's body disappears and strange things start to happen and threaten to drive both of the women to th
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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

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Tagline- The Courage To Do The Impossible Lies In The Hearts of Men. Hello friends! I love nautical movies and mostly every project Russell Crowe has been in so combining the two definitely works in my opinion!  Master and Commander is a 2003 film based on the 1969 book of the same name by author Patrick O'Brian. This book was the start of a series of 20 books in all. O'Brian kept working on the series until his death in 2000. But i am not here to talk about the books, this is a movie review blog. So here we go. Beware of massive spoilers of course. And also for Star Wars Episode IV- A New Hope!  You will see why in a minute. The cast includes Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey, Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin, James D'Arcy as 1st Lt. Tom Pullings, Max Pirkis plays Blakeney, a midshipman and Lee Ingleby plays Hollom, also a midshipman. Now a brief introduction to the plot. In April 1805, around the beginning stages of the Napoleonic Wars,  Captain John "Lucky Jack"
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The Sixth Sense

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    Happy Halloween! Tagline-  Not every gift is a blessing Be warned this review and my thoughts on the film will contain some spoilers and some are pretty major!  All right everyone ready?   The Sixth Sense is a 1999 film by director M. Night Shyamalan. It follows Dr. Malcolm Crowe a child psychologist who is recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted by one of his disillusioned former patients named Vincent Gray. He takes on a new patient named Cole Sear who reminds him of Vincent and discovers that Vincent and Cole share a lot of symptoms. They both are very antisocial and can apparently "see" ghosts. Malcolm of course is skeptical at first and thinks Cole is mentally ill but further work with Cole and disturbing events slowly change his mind...    It turns out that Cole can see ghosts and needs Malcolm's help to make them go away and help him not to be scared anymore. Now on to the review. In my opinion The Sixth Sense is one of those movies that don't quite fit i
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