Word: thriller
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Promoted as a suspense-filled thriller about a man chased by atrocious fate, “First Snow” never musters enough strength to hold an audience’s attention. In his directorial debut, Mark Fergus—who was nominated for a screenwriting Oscar for “Children of Men”—fails to enliven his own elementary script, and the film suffers from a lack of momentum. Written by Fergus and Hawk Ostby, “First Snow” follows flooring salesman Jimmy Starks (Guy Pearce, “Memento?...
...Rodriguez's feature jumbles the zombie, cop, political thriller and rural-trash-melodrama genres. Like The Night of the Living Dead, it's about a random bunch of people trapped in a shack and beset by flesh-dripping, flesh-eating zombies. In the spirit of that 1968 classic, Planet Terror celebrates the community of the still-living, except that Rodriguez's humans do a lot less grousing than George Romero's did. It's also got deadly gases, go-go dancers, pretty disgusting shots of men with extreme gonadal anomalies, and Bruce Willis as the man who killed bin Laden...
...Mark Wahlberg: you’ve gone from being a hoodlum on the streets of Boston to an underwear model to a mediocre rapper to an Academy-Award-nominee. What would you do next? Star in an action film, obviously. With “Shooter,” a thriller about sniper Bob Lee Swagger—who is framed in an attempted assassination of the president—Mark Wahlberg returns to a rough-and-tumble role similar to the butt-kicking captain he played in “Planet of the Apes.” But according...
...fill three hours at scuzzy urban theaters. And just the right auteur-perps showed up for the job: Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill), plus a few other cult directors to provide zesty trailers of fake horror films. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is a zombie thriller with some bloody fabulous effects; it's fast, icky and smart. You can skip the second feature: Tarantino's Death Proof, above center, offers an hour of gaseous girl talk and an inane car chase. More than the autos get totaled here; so does Q.T.'s reputation as cinema's fanboy...
Just as natural are the rules of capitalism. Rule No. 1: Make a profit on your product. Saw, the 2004 thriller that triggered the latest barrage of ultragore, cost $1.2 million and earned more than $100 million at the worldwide box office. The Hills Have Eyes and Silent Hill grossed more than $150 million between them. Then all the films went to DVD, where the real money is. Cheap movies that make a bundle--that's just good business...