Pitch Black

Fight Evil With Evil

Drunken Master

SCORE: 7 Beers

Now I could say where the filming of this movie could be considered cultish or some such, or that the story was fairly decent. But I would be lying. Hammerhead space monkeys that have not only thrived but I can only suspect that there are millions of these SM's flying around that have nothing to eat on this desert like moon/planet thing but each other. Very view movies do I just outright vote for the villain, however in this one, what else is there to vie for. SPACE MECCANS? What the fuck is this shit. They bow in a certain direction cause this is the direction of the holy city or some such. When you're a space meccan, do you bow towards the brightest star or whatever. Ok, this movie did have one thing going for it, K I L L the young, cause they generally can't act. However they left the most non-acting one of them live, who by more means is also a mystery meat factor. (WHAT IS A MYSTERY MEAT: A Neither MALE or FEMALE designated role that says one way or the other which sex they are. Thus the mystery). I ramble in this review, but rambling is good. It lets me know when it's time for bed.

Darth Buzz

SCORE: 6

This isn't going to win any awards for acting or script writing but the film does have some things going for it. One of the things that I liked about Pitch Black was some of the cinematography. There are cool alien landscapes with weird trees and an animal graveyard that is cool looking too. The alien creatures themselves are rather cool also. The FX while not over the top are pretty good and the sets for the insides of the ships are nice and dark and give a good atmosphere. The collection of characters in Pitch Black is fairly odd with a prisoner, a drug addicted bounty hunter, a pilot, a Muslim with his children, and a stereotypical money grubber a.k.a. corporate daddy (observe DM, the corporate daddy didn't make it too long in a survival of the fittest scenario, he was too busy trying to grub money instead of survive).

Those were the positives here goes some negatives. It's always a bad idea in my opinion to try and inject philosophy or religion into a movie that is superficial, it usually just brings more attention to the lack of depth, and this movie had its share of those injections. Example, Imam (Keith David) talks to Riddick (Vin Diesel) and asks him if he believes in God. Riddick response is something along the lines of "yeah and I hate the mother fucker." Let me tell you that's real deep and was an almost pointless scene. There is several more scenes in this film that run into that kind of territory and most of it is lame. Another problem with the film is that the characters are a little too stereotypical. Corporate Daddy will die of greed, the pilot who tries to sacrifice all the passengers for herself ends up sacrificing herself for the passengers, the killer (Riddick) ends up being the savior, the religious man has his faith tested just like Abraham, and bad cop gets what's coming to him. You see these stereotypes early and know how the characters will behave for the rest of the movie. Also like Drunken Master says, how the hell do these flying creatures survive on a planet with just them?

If you can get over the faults then there is a fair amount that is fun to watch. If you can't...