SF and Fantasy Movie Reviews Starting With D
Dagon (2002) 
Genres: Hor
Not a total loss. The protagonist does some really dumb stuff and the dialogue is simple at best and otherwise annoyingly stupid. And it's a horror movie so it's kind of dumb and slow, but not as slow as the average horror movie. The ending is an improvement. Not just the fact that it ended, but I mean the way it ended is better than most of the stuff before that.
The Dancing Princesses (1983)
Genres: F Rom Kid
Despite some highlights, this is more mundane parlor melodrama than fairy tale.
Daredevil (2003) NR
Genres: Act F
Watched: trailer
No way am I seeing this. I bet it really sucks. The superhero is purblind lawyer Ben Affleck.
Dark City (1998)
Genres: SF
Everyone lives in a big folding city that regularly changes shape. One of the inhabitants finally notices this and freaks out. The plot is largely driven by the alien city builders' inability to find this one inhabitant wandering its streets. If these aliens can't find their experimental subjects in the maze they built themselves it is no surprise their race is dying out. They're all losers, but it's still sort of nice and atmospheric.
Philip K. Dick's version, "Adjustment Team," is a much nicer story, but that's a story. If you want a movie, you have to put up with this sort of crap.
Darkness Falls aka Attack of the Tooth Fairy (2003) NR
Genres: Hor
Watched: 20 min
Dialogue so mind-numbingly stupid . . . so bored . . . can't watch anymore.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Genres: Hor Act
For me watching a horror movie is an ordeal. It affects me strongly. That is, if it's not a comedy. I was able to make it through this one but I took a bathroom break to rest up in the middle, not so much because I needed to go. But I enjoyed the movie too because of the good script. It makes interesting observations about people and has good character dynamics and some humor.
Driving home afterward I was still hyped up and looked for zombies when I had to slow down or stop in the dark empty streets, and on the freeway the other cars were like zombies, dangerous rushing things out to get me. When I got home I wanted to grab that wilderness survival and emergency medicine book I never read and curl up in bed. The only thing that stopped me was writing this review instead. I feel safer now and pretty sleepy, so I guess I won't be reading that book after all.
The Day of the Dead (1985)
Genres: Hor
Watched: 10 min
A big horde of zombies is introduced early on, which is fun. However, all the drama which suffuses the opening ten minutes is due to the live people being stupid. The bossy woman has this weird idea that they need to keep flying their chopper to all nearby cities and getting out in a main street and shouting in hopes of finding some non-zombified people. But zombies show up each time so they have to run for the chopper and take off. This doesn't seem effective but she won't give it up. Also, back at the humans' base, they live behind a chain-link fence that hordes of zombies rock back and forth alarmingly, and the chopper appears to be their only means of escape but they keep it parked near the fence and the woman doesn't let them fill up its empty gas tank because gassing up excites the zombies . . . So I take it that the audience is supposed to be scared that at some point the zombies will break down the fence and the people will be madly scrambling to refuel the chopper before being gnawed. Except, why would I care? These idiots deserve to be gnawed.
What drama this stupidity isn't generating, is picked up by the hostile interactions. The men bitch at the bossy woman but can't stop her and she bitches back. Again, bossy bitches and wussy men who can't control them might as well be gnawed.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) NR
Genres: SF
Watched: 20 min
Plot: (1) guns = bad, especially since (2) soldiers' IQs =< 50, and (3) the Cold War is "childish" and "stupid," words of wisdom borne to us by an advanced alien who gets shot by a nervous soldier upon landing in front of the White House.
To be fair, it's not entirely the soldier's fault. First, the advanced and peace-loving alien isn't noticeably less dumb than anyone else in this movie. He lands in front of the White House with no warning, comes out of the ship with no warning, and draws something shiny and very like a weapon from his spooky outfit with no warning. (It turns out to be a present for the President designed to help him achieve wisdom while pleasuring his wife or something.) Second, the army's perimeter around the landed UFO is like something the Little Rascals might have organized. Obviously the army is completely incompetent and didn't offer the poor soldier any training or clear instructions so he was only doing what the writer's kid brother might have done under the circumstances.
The Dead and the Deadly (1982 Hong Kong)
Genres: Com Hor Act
Chinese ghosts rule! They're funny and can do kung fu! Western ghosts should just all go away, they are such bores.
Death Race 2000 (1975)
Genres: Act Com SF
David Carradine is very sexy and has good jokes. Which makes him sexier still. Nudity and sexuality pervade, along with the hilarious violence. All the killings are funny and meaningful, the way killing should be. And it has good music!
They don't make movies like this anymore. Today movies take themselves too seriously. They don't attempt any weird stuff (e.g. futuristic worlds) unless they can get a good effects budget so the CGI's good. But this movie put together this interesting weird world and has no problem at all with having primitive effects, because who cares, you get the idea. It has so much chutzpah; they sure go for whatever they want to go for. Also actors in modern SF movies act they like have an icicle up their butt. But these actors are funny and vigorous.
It doesn't take itself seriously and goes for all this outrageous comedy bordering on the surreal, but also it has interesting earnest messages. And it put its finger on the social consciousness of the time so well. All these video games came out later exactly about this -- scoring points off people you run over. (My boyfriend says he wrote one himself, when he was twelve, several years after this movie came out, but he hadn't seen it; he must have absorbed the desire from the culture.) People really really love running over pedestrians for relaxation and entertainment. Incidentally the Death Race 2000 arcade game, which came out a year after the movie, was the first video game to get banned -- it was too violent.
Deep Rising (1998)
Genres: Act Hor
Tentacled monster attacks a cruise ship. It's silly but fairly entertaining, and doesn't take itself seriously.
Demon Knight (1995)
Genres: Act Hor
The exact premise is generic but that's not the point -- the point is that there's hicks fighting demons! There's fun scares, a decent bit of humor, demon seductions, and a sexy demon emcee moving things right along. Plus, this movie has a surprising amount of depth. For example, the hicks' tragedies, brought on as much by their being silly hicks as the unfortunate demon invasion, are insightfully foreshadowed early on by their reckless electric play. You of course know better than to apply electrodes at or above heart level!
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
Genres: F
The movie's based on Stephen Vincent Benet's literary fairy tale (loosely, as the original is too short for a movie). It is fairly entertaining and in some cases well-acted, although the big trial scene is kind of a letdown. You'd think with all the lawyers working in Hollywood they could have cooked up a more impressive speech than that.
They added some women, of course. Old Ma is an ornament, but the wife is disconcerting. She doesn't seem like a real person, but more like a kind of robot, set to simper or frown. What she is is an archetype existing in the mind of Hollywood writers of the time. Well, that's not entirely inappropriate. The story is a parable, and so it has a right to be populated by archetypes.
As to the message of this parable, some folks might say it follows the gist of Mr. Benet's story and some might say different.
The Devil's Backbone (2001 Spain)
Genres: Hor
It's pretty slow and not very exciting but there's nothing much wrong with it if you're feeling mellow. I guess people in other countries feel more at ease with taking their time to tell a story. It's an attitude problem . . . that's why they're poor and want to come to America.
Dogma (1999)
Genres: Com F
Seems to have been made by enthusiastically imaginative but silly juveniles.
Don Giovanni (1979 France)
Genres: F Mus Com
People used to have very strange and unbecoming hairstyles. It's impressive that Don Giovanni managed to seduce thousands of women despite his unnerving hairdo, but hey, the rich women had weird hair too and the rest liked anything the rich wore. Plus women are very curious -- I'm getting all curious about his hair already! Yes, a fascinating and piquant man. I like him a lot -- he's very finely acted.
The singing is lovely, the sets and costumes lavish and appealing. It's shot as a movie, so the aristocrats enact the tragicomedy as they stroll through stately pleasure grounds or pretty countryside bestrewed with peasants. The acting is very nice too. The lovely ladies do a great job of running the gamut of expressions as dictated by the silly script. I don't mean "silly" in a derogatory way -- it's charmingly silly, it's supposed to be silly -- it's an opera. The comedy and the tragedy come through well, as does Mozart's message of class inequality. The statue could have been scarier though. I was looking forward to the scary statue, but was disappointed by its mildness.
J complained that "it's boring because they say everything five times. Is it so that the audience has some chance of understanding them?" Yes, that may be a downside of subtitles: perhaps they aren't suitable for operas. J enjoys puzzling things out but if it's all spelled out like that and repeated five times, sure, he'll get bored. Hopefully modern operas take this into account and eschew this traditional repetition. I wouldn't know -- you won't catch me watching a modern opera.
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976 Brazil)
Genres: Com MR
Dona Flor (Sonia Braga) is very pretty but her husband fools around all the time because he's such a sexy layabout that all the other women in town keep trooping in and throwing themselves at him. But she is such a sweetie that providence rewards her, in the Brazilian way. In You Me Them, another Brazilian movie, a peasant woman has three husbands simultaneously. I know very little about Brazilian cinema; maybe there's other movies where the husband count is even higher.
A South American gentleman who has a TV show here in LA where he helps people train their problem dogs said that Americans treat their dogs like children and that doesn't work, and they treat their women so well he was for a while just too baffled by it. In South America, the men don't waste any time talking to their women; they talk to other men, and make love to any women they can get. This makes their women sad, he said; now he's of the opinion that the South Americans should pay more attention to their women, or at least that's what he says on TV.
Donkey's Hide (1982 USSR)
Genres: F
Watched: 38 min
Annoying, simpering and unnatural acting from the good main characters -- the princess, her boyfriend, and her fairy godmother. The bad characters aren't so bad. They ham it up -- the silly pushover father king, the fat old rich lech king, the manipulative stepmother queen, and their bumbling servants with their ridiculous ceremonies. This is standard presentation of royalty in Communist fairytale films. It's sometimes more flagrant, and sometimes not noticeable. This movie is somewhere in between. I get the feeling that all the moviemakers involved in this project know the routine very well. There is much that is competently done here, so I imagine they can take pride in it. Nevertheless, I would also imagine that they occasionally get hit with a feeling that inspires them to drink until it passes. At least I hope so.
Doom (2005)
Genres: SF Act Hor
The original plot of Doom the video game is pretty straightforward; it's basically an excuse for the uber-manly exercise of the gameplay. Certainly this plot could benefit from sensitive artistic embellishment prior to movification (or whatever the correct term is). Perhaps the writers were too artistic and sensitive to tell their bosses that there's better ways of approaching that than retooling the plot as an amalgam of several stupid older manlily-chasing-monsters-through-hallways-because-the-government-did-bad-science movies. Because they've seen their bosses manlily chasing several older writers through the hallways for talking back to them.
It's too bad the writers weren't more manly. There is some nice enough running around and shooting monsters, but it's not as nice as actually playing the game. Heck, I've gotten more excited watching other people play
Despite all this suckiness, I very much look forward to the sequel. On the one hand, Karl Urban will have an incontrovertible urge to stick his tongue into good people. On the other hand, he will retain his sanity. So naturally, he'll start with the gorgeous women. It's only logical -- otherwise they'd put him in the nuthouse. Doom II will be a porno. (Or will it be his tongue? Well, we'll just have to wait to find out.)
Dracula (1979)
Genres: Hor Rom
Watched: 2 minutes
I don't buy this guy as an irresistible seducer. I mean realistically I do, there's tons of guys dorkier than him getting plenty, but in Dracula I expect an ideal. The woman gives up her life and soul to him because he's so great; that's way heavier than catching an infection from a passing hunk.
Dragon Fighter (2003) NR!!!
Genres: SF
Watched: 20 min
I can't tell whether this is NR or NR!!! because it didn't really get going yet but they were showing it before they were going to unveil Mansquito on SciFi Channel, and it makes sense if you're unveiling some utter crap you've made to first show something even worse.
Dune (1984)
Genres: Act Adv SF
It's a fun and elegant movie and a fine rendition of the book, but if you haven't read it the movie gets baffling. The director's cut has more of what everyone's thinking, with helpful voice-overs, like the protagonist wanting lunch or wondering whether he's the Kumquat Häagen-Dazs (did you ever see a movie or read a story where the protagonist repeatedly wonders whether he is The One and turns out not to be?). It's a lot of voice-overs, but any kind of clues as to what is going on is welcome. If you find this version baffling, you'd find the version I originally saw in the theater really baffling. Not that it wasn't enjoyable anyway; it's easy to tell the good guys from the bad, and if you're not clear on the issues that's OK because it's such a visual movie anyway.
One of the artifacts of this being the book, which is the first book in a series, is that the ending sucks. It feels as though they just sloppily dropped it without quite wrapping up, like it's to be continued. I don't know what they were thinking; that sucks.
Dune by Frank Herbert is good. It has some silly water science but the silliness is largely attributable to being poetical so it's not worth getting picky about it. Also sometimes it's slow and boring but mostly not. You should read it. At least you'll know why the protagonist's thighs look fat, not a fetching look -- but you'll see it's not his fault. (He might also have fat thighs, but that's unlikely, him being a handsome movie star.)
Dungeons and Dragons (2000) NR!!!
Genres: Act Adv F
Watched: 10 min
Inspiredly awful. This isn't the ordinary kind of really bad -- it's in its way a minor masterpiece of really bad. I was for a bit mesmerized by it, like one might be at a freak show. The script was written by monkeys. The acting is -- I don't know. The director must have told the actors, "Forget all that stuff about acting they taught you in acting school; just scowl and shriek a lot -- no, scowl harder! Harder!"
The Dunwich Horror (1970)
Genres: H
Based on an H. P. Lovecraft story, not well. I'll give it a dispensation because it's old and back then they didn't know how to make movies and thought it was OK to make really boring ones.
Please note that all material on this page is Copyright © 2005 by D. Aline Lurie.
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