The Echo (2008) 6/10
This remake of a Philopino horror film was a better-than-average thriller flick about a ex-con, Walter (played by Kevin Durand) who moves into his mother's old apartment building after parole (she's dead and no longer resides there, incidentally).
Once he moves in, he begins to hear loud noises through the walls from his next door neighbor. The noises are very violent and it sounds as if a woman is being beaten. He listens through the walls to try and make out what's happening, but to no avail.
The woman from the apartment occasionally knocks on his door, crying, but when he answers it she's gone back to her own apartment. He knocks on the door and receives no answer. Eventually he gets a knock and when he opens it, it's a police officer who angrily tells him to mind his own business before disappearing into the next-door apartment.
People in the building also come to Walter's door accusing him of being the noisemaker. Strange things begin to happen to both Walter and the rest of the tenants. The biggest of which is a sharp, ringing headache which ends with blood coming from the ear of the afflicted.
After one particularly loud occurrence Walter decides to actually check the apartment. After pounding on the door with no answer, he bursts his way in to fins the apartment empty. The landlord gives him some half-ass story about the family that lived there and that there was murder involved.
The upshot is that Walter (and by extension the rest of the tenants) is experiencing a haunting that emanates from the apartment next door. So far, a pretty standard horror-thriller. That is until Walter catches through his peep-hole the ghosts re-enacting the brutality that caused the haunting in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009) 8/10
This was a pretty clever little flick that I really enjoyed. I need to watch it again to make sure that the time travel stuff is solid, but most of it's pretty cool.
It has been dubbed "Doctor Who meets Shaun of the Dead" and that isn't entirely inaccurate. Although they forgot to mention
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure which this flick has a resonance to (but isn't anything like it).
Ray (played by Chris O'Dowd) is a bit of a freak about science-fiction in general and time travel specifically. His two friends Pete (played by Dean Lennox Kelly) and Toby (played by Marc Wootton) even have a bet going on how little time it'll take for Ray to starting talking about time travel.
On the night Ray gets fired from his job, the three are in the pub and Ray nips over to another part of the bar where the queue isn't as busy. While there he meets a girl named Cassie (played by Anna Faris) who eventually gets to talking to Ray about time travel. She claims to be from the future and is there to repair a 'time leak' - in addition to meeting Ray who she claims is famous in the future.
Ray is completely incredulous, thinking that she must've been put up to talking with him by Pete and Toby. He ends his talk with her and then goes back to relay the story to Pete and Toby, who claim to know nothing of her, while mocking him for what appears to be a tall tale.
Pete gets up to use the restroom and when he emerges, he finds that the bar has been destroyed and everyone is dead - he even finds his own corpse among the bodies. Pete freaks out and runs back into the restroom to hide for a bit. When he re-emerges the bar is back to normal. He explains to Ray and Toby what has just happened, and when they don't beleive him, Pete suggests they try to make it happen again.
They go into the head and follow what Pete had done exactly (this is actually a pretty funny bit, too) to try and make the time shift happen again. When they emerge, the bar is intact and busy - everyone is alive. Slightly disappointed, they start back over to their booth when they realize they can hear their own voices from a conversation they'd had earlier.
Sure enough, they are all sitting at the table as they had been about a half-hour before. The 'time leak' Cassie had been searching for is apparently in the gents'...
The rest is a series of comic-tinged capers with the three guys trying to get back to their original time without meeting themselves and ceasing to exist.
And it's only a measly 79-minutes long, check this one out...
S.Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale (2009) 2/10
This is the sequel to 2001's excellent
Donnie Darko which frankly is a waste of everyone's time.
It's only redeeming quality is that they got Daveigh Chase to play Samantha Darko again after 8 years. Other than that, the flick is more or less a remake of Donnie Darko, but without all the heavy undertones of having the main character perish.
Samantha and her bitchy friend are on their way to California to be dancers when their car breaks down in Conejo Springs, Utah. They get stuck their waiting for the car to be repaired and a series of
Donnie Darko-esque things start happening to her.
This is the point at which the filmmakers show that they had no idea what was going on in the first movie. What follows is a mess of cryptic dialogue, questionable time-travel and irritatingly 2-dimensional characters.
Had this not been free, I wouldn't have watched it all the way through...
Up in the Air (2009) 6/10
An okay flick about Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney) whose job is to fly around the country and fire employees for companies that are too spineless to do it themselves.
He enjoys his life on the road and has it threatened when a young upstart shows up with her new-fangled way of firing people over the Internet. If this is implemented, he would then be permanently grounded, something he dreads.
I'm not entirely certain why everyone's supposed to be going apeshit over this movie.
It's an okay flick with decent acting and such, but I didn't find it to be anything super special.
