28 Days Later

IN A NUTSHELL: "Creative genius meets zombie movie"

RATING: Worth My While
REASON: This zombie-riddled movie is not for everyone, but it is a movie worth seeing if you can deal with a little blood and gore. Among the scenes of aggressive zombie assaults (and I say aggressive because these aren't your run-of-the-mill zombies) there is actually a really good story with great character development and intriguing underlying themes. It provides you with a perspective on human nature that is often left unfulfilled in other movies.

This movie has stuck in my mind since I watched it 3 years ago, and I would definitely see it again. Be sure to watch the alternate ending, quite neat and I think I may like the alternate version better.

ALTERNATE RATING: Passes the time
REASON: If zombies aren't your thing, this is probably the kind of movie you'd stick in when your entire movie collection was stolen and your brother gave it to you for your birthday. It can be slow moving at times, but if you stick with it till the end, it won't disappoint.

Troy

IN A NUTSHELL: "If you love Brad Pitt, you'll love Troy, but that's a pretty big if."

RATING: Disappointing
REASON: Troy, plain and simple, is an avenue for the female population to drool over Brad Pitt and his 2 second naked scene. Half of the movie is spent simply holding the camera on Brad's face with his hair blowing in the wind. Brad's character "Achilles" is not well developed, which adds to the fact that this movie is simply all about this pretty boy's presence. In fact, despite the fact that the movie has two love stories (one of which is Helen of Troy, a love-story that brought down a kingdom), neither of the love stories are believable or compelling. The only thing that saves this movie is that the war story and execution is actually fairly well done. Quite simply, this movie does not build up to one final battle like most movies do. Instead, it plays out the events of a war over the entire course of the film, working the human elements into the battles. However, as a result the climax isn't all that climactic, and I was happy to see it end.

ALTERNATE RATING: Spectacular
REASON: Girls will go googily. Visit rotten tomatoes, and you will see that the masses are divided 50/50 on this issue. Interestingly enough, fresh tomatoes were usually given by female reviewers, and rotten ones by male reviewers.

Army of Darkness

IN A NUTSHELL: "Chainsaws, Boom-sticks and a really square jaw. Pure campy goodness"

Rating: Worth my while
Reason: Army of darkness is one of those movies with a small cult following. It is the third installment of the "Evil Dead" series, and was directed and written by Sam Raimi (Same director as Spiderman and Spiderman II). I have to say, I think that Army of Darkness is a great movie. Now, it is very campy, but it does campy so well. At the start, our hero "Ash" gets his hand replaced with a chainsaw, a la Freddy Kruger claw style. Who has a chainsaw for a hand!?

I chuckle to myself just thinking about it.

Furthermore, Ash has this wicked "don't mess with me, even if you're a demon possessed she-bat" aura about him. I can't think of another movie where the hero has so much attitude. He would pretty much spit in the face of the devil himself if he had the chance (You'll understand if you see the movie). Army of darkness won an Oscar for best special effects long ago, and boy, it must have been a long time ago. But, the "oldness" of the special effects kind of adds to the alure of the movie. Technically, I suppose it is a horror movie, but is screams "don't take me seriously" so loudly that you'll certainly being doing a lot more laughing than screaming. As such, "Army of Darkness" was worth my few hours and a bag of popcorn.

Alternate Rating: Made me dumber
Reason: If you can't handle extreme intentional cheesiness, then you're not going to like this movie. It's not cheesy in the same way as say, Batman & Robin (let us never speak of that movie again), but more so in an almost Monty Python type of way. As such, there will be a lot of people who won't get this one, and that's just fine. To each their own.

A Better Movie Review - An explanation

Rating systems for movies have long been a beef of mine. Do you use a four star system, five star system, ten point system, thumbs system, it's all over the map. And what does two stars mean anyways? The time for these ambiguous rating systems has come to an end, and so I propose a new, definitive rating system as follows.

Movies can be broken into 5 categories:

• Spectacular
• Worth my while
• Passes the time
• disappointing
• Made me dumber

There are a few rules to reviewing a movie based on this system:

• They are not numbered, but they are ordinal.
• A movie cannot fall between categories.
• When presenting an opinion along with a movie rating, one must also present one alternate rating, that describes why another person may rank it differently.
• When a movie is rated "Made me dumber", it must be attacked viciously to prevent it from multiplying
  
• No spoilers allowed!