Three Films Make A Post: FILMED WITH THE NAKED FURY OF FACT!

Warning: this trilogy of crap movies isn’t for the faint of heart!

Dracula 3000 (2004): Not to come over as excessively negative, but this German/South African co-production directed (in a rather generous interpretation of the term) by one Darrell Roodt must be one of the most joylessly bad films ever made. At the very least, it’s one of the most joylessly bad films I have seen in a long career of trying to find the entertainment value in things of generally dubious quality. There’s a theoretically okay enough cheapo cast including Casper van Dien, Tiny Lister and at least two minutes of Udo Kier, but the combination of Roodt’s clueless yet boring direction, the industrial building this was shot in nobody even tried to dress up as space ship interiors, and a script that includes lines like “I wanna watch my anaconda spit all over your snow white ass” and deems them funny come together to produce the perfect piece of shit.

To be avoided at all cost.

L’immortel aka 22 Bullets (2010): I’m more often than not criticizing the films that Luc Besson’s Europacorp crap out for their blatant stupidity but at least, they don’t have pretensions of artistic class and do their best to entertain their audience, quite unlike this particular Europacorp film. Richard Berry’s L’immortel plays out as a painful attempt at cramming as many gangster movie clichés into nearly two hours of running time as possible, filming them in an overbearing way that’s so pseudo-artistic it becomes tackier than anything Olivier Megaton has ever done, and hoping the audience hasn’t seen the dozens of better movies using these clichés to much better effect. Poor Jean Reno does his best as our honourable hero gangster boss (he’s against drugs, saves prostitutes etc) but not even he can save this particular film.

Repo Men (2010): And yet, the Berry film is still more watchable than Miguel Sapochnik’s dystopian SF action comedy monstrosity that takes a perfectly serviceable anti-capitalist idea and turns it into a series of scenes that are by turns unfunny, puzzling in their use for the film, would-be transgressive, or painfully generic. As is the custom for films like it, it also features way too many scenes where it winks into the camera while clapping itself on the shoulder for how clever and subversive it is, never actually finding the time to be clever or subversive.

As an action film, it also suffers more than a little from the fact its hero is the kind of asshole who has no problems with murdering people for money until his head is on the table, and never demonstrates anything even vaguely resembling a change of heart. Which is of course unavoidable in a film whose characters never resemble actual human beings, either.