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Showing posts with label terence young. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terence young. Show all posts

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Duel of Champions (1961)

An Italian sword and sandal action adventure film directed by Ferdinando Baldi and Terence Young.
After years of war between Rome and Alba, triplet brothers from each place arrange to fight and have the outcome of their conflict determine the end of the war.
Yet another inferior sword and sandal flick that seemed to drag on forever. These things follow a formula just like generic kung fu flicks and are indeed very similar. Wretched audio and video? Check. Light on plot and characters difficult to differentiate? Check. If I were reviewing how well it fit the mold of this genre, it would get a "best" rating. I'm not.
A movie should be something special and different in some way. It should have characters that feel like old friends by 10 minutes in and a plot that seems to determine the fate of this world (if not other worlds as well). Creative camera angles with good quality video that is easy to see and convincingly tasteful special effects should be a feast for my eyes. Audible, clearly spoken dialogue and an epic musical score of a soundtrack should push it into the realms of ear-candy. A good film should have consistent style and flavor; it should be identifiable as that film at any part in it's duration. In the first 5 minutes, my interest needs to be lured into the world of the film. By half an hour, I need to be engrossed in the story. At about an hour to 1:30, I should not want it to end. At the end, I must desire to watch it again at some point. That is what makes a good movie.
THIS was NOT a good movie. It contained 1/16th of what I described in the paragraph above. The dialogue was clearly spoken and audible. I'm going to rate it bad because it was a cookie cutter piece of crap.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Cold Sweat (1970)

A French Italian crime thriller film directed by Terence Young, starring Charles Bronson.
A man who used to be in the military runs a boating business and has a happy life with his wife and daughter. After seeing his picture in a newspaper, his army buddies catch up with him. They are now drug smugglers so they break into his house, kidnap his wife and daughter and try to force him to use his boat for drug runs.
The whole film happened "at gunpoint" and this phrase should be added to every sentence in my plot summary. For some extra fun, you can add "while being threatened with a weapon". I liked how the plot was presented: It started with "now" and then, once some plot is established, it filled in "before" before moving on to "next". The pace and editing were good. The acting and general presentation was very clear. Technically speaking, it's not too bad. I just didn't really get into it. Crime movies of most types aren't my thing and all the guns put me off too. I'm giving it one of those weird pink ratings because it was well made, but I didn't really like it.