Bria Lou Reviews

  An ice cream man (Ari Millen) sells treats to children, with murderous consequences. Sometimes hearing bad things about a movie makes me more excited to see it than positive reviews, and this was definitely one of those times. I'd heard so many terrible things about the movie that I couldn't wait to see it for myself! And the reviews are right, this isn't a great film. Though for the most part I did enjoy watching it. From the beginning it's clear that the acting isn't going to be great. I think the majority of the kids did a good job, but generally speaking this isn't an acting masterclass. But the thing that lets it down majorly is the writing. For a start, the characters are caricatures, particularly the child bullies. It's like someone wrote down the traits of a typical bully, mixed them up and threw them into the script with no accounting for individual personalities or anything that could have been used to develop the characters or push the story for...

  This was one of my most highly anticipated rewatches on the bucket list. I love this movie, and for me it's definitely one of Hitchcock's most underrated. And thankfully this rewatch was just as great as all the other times I've seen this movie, which is a lot! I really like that the film took the time to establish the characters before the horrors start. We really get to know our main character, Melanie, and it's so much fun to follow the story with her. The result of this, though, is that it can make the beginning of the movie feel a bit slow, but because you're interested in the characters, you're interested in the entire story. So when the horrors start, you're that much more invested. In particular, I really liked the development of the female characters, who make up the majority of the film. Not only is it female-led, but the women are the centre-piece and absolutely who we're watching the film for. It was very ahead of it's time in that way....

  Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and her in-laws are plagued by demonic forces following the death of her husband. I'm not the biggest fan of the Evil Dead franchise. I've seen most of the movies and haven't found one that I've really liked, but I still wanted to give this one a try. I actually liked this more than some of the other ones I've seen. That's not to say that I think it was a great movie, but it was better than I thought it would be. I really liked the opening. It does a great job of reminding you what world you're in. The introduction to the family is interesting, we get to understand their dynamics really quickly and it makes you want to get to know them. And while I did like the characters, I also felt distant from them, and this remained until the end of the movie. I never felt like I really knew them, and I never cared about them enough. But it's their dynamics that make things interesting. While we aren't particularly interested in the cha...

I hadn't heard of this one before the bucket list and had no idea what it was about before pressing play, so I went in completely blind.  I have mixed feelings about this movie. There were some great things, but also some things that I didn't love.  The opening scene is great. Not only does it set the tone for the rest of the movie well, but it also puts you on edge and holds you there for a lot of the film. The main reason the film works is because the actors are so great. Even when you don't really know what's going on, you buy into everything that happens because the actors performances are so convincing and feel authentic. Despite being a ghost story, something about it felt really grounded and real. Even though you know there are fantastical elements, the characters feel human.  It does a good job of creating scares, particularly because a lot of what's scary is the story itself rather than using jumps. You can feel the fear within the characters, which makes y...

  When faced with a dangerous enemy, Supergirl (Milly Alcock) teams up with an unlikely ally for revenge. I had seen all of the bad reviews of this film before watching it, and while I didn't expect it to be as good as Superman, I was surprised by how much hate it was getting. I actually didn't hate the film, but it definitely had a lot of flaws. I really liked that they set it on another planet, rather than doing another story set on Earth. It would have been nice to see more of the planet and how the world was different to Earth. One of the first flaws of this movie is that it assumes Supergirl's appearance in the Superman movie was enough to make the audience care about Kara, and it really isn't. So because of that, no work was put into making us care about her. But in addition to that, Kara isn't as funny or likeable here as she was in her small Superman scene. And while she doesn't have to be, at times it doesn't feel like the same character. I kept wai...

  For a long time I thought I'd already seen this movie. It was only the night before watching it that I realised I've actually only seen the 2004 remake. While not a sequel, this is the second in a series of zombie movies by the director, the first of which being Night of the Living Dead. Despite liking both movies, I definitely preferred the former. It begins from a place of chaos, which is a great way to get the audience to understand the characters' states of mind. It took a while for the movie to grab me. The chaos of it all made it hard to follow, and hard to latch onto the characters.  The movie kind of takes Night of the Living Dead and expands it to a much larger scale. I actually preferred the smaller scale, as we got to intimately know the characters and we got time to understand their world. In comparison, this one definitely felt like being thrown in at the deep end.  As with all creature feature-type movies, I wanted to see more of the 'creatures'. Its...