Blood and Chocolate (DVD), Captivity

Blood and Chocolate - First let's talk about what is good in this movie (because that is a much, much, much shorter list): Hugh Dancy. He's got charm to spare. He does his absolute best to work with the crappy dialouge has was given. The good news is that thanks to his great performance in Evening and the fact that he's gaining recognition, he'll never have to make a crappy movie like this again. Now, the bad, or, everything else. This movie is just plain awful. The editing and storytelling was chaotic at best. The script was poor and the acting (by stars Agnus Bruckner and Olivier Martinez) was terrible. The characters are all stereotypes of stereotypes of stereotypes. Even without the bad acting and writing, the movie itself is just plain boring. But worst of all, the way the film was shot looks like a TV movie of the week and not a feature film. The story of a romance between a werewolf and a human has been done to death in countless better films. This movie is very much like Underworld but even less interesting (if that is even possible). It's not much of a werewolf movie and isn't even remotely close to a horror film. There was no development... nothing! Of course, compared to the next movie I'm going to talk about, it's a masterpiece.

Grade: D-

Captivity - If Captivity were to win an award, the award would be called the "How Not To Make a Movie Award" or, perhaps, "Worst Acting, Screenplay, Directing and Most Mistakes EVER Award." When I found out this was from "After Dark," I immediately became worried. After all, they are responsible for Horrorfest which was the biggest disappointment in the horror genre in recent years. Elisha Cuthbert plays a model who is suddenly abducted from a club and thrown into a dungeon sort of room in the basement of a house in Jersey. She is supposedly tortured but the tortures are definitely not frightening. I mean, these people obviously watched Saw and Hostel, you think they could have at least ripped them off a little more and came up with something scarier. These supposed tortures border on comical when she's stuck in an hourglass type situation with sand falling on her. Sure the idea is cool but I could think of a million ways I'd rather torture the people who made this movie. But, hey, for being held captive for four days, the girl sure does get a lot of wardrobe changes so life can't really be all that bad, right? There is absolutely no character development at all. Actually Cuthbert's character (whose name I really don't care about) is sort of a brainless blonde bimbo type and there's really no reason at all to like her. She's stupid too. Her preferred way to try to escape from a car is to pound on the windows instead of trying the door handle. I cared more about her character's dog who may or may not have been shot then I did about her. Every "twist" these people cooked up was apparent at least an hour before it actually happened. Everything about this movie is just so contrived and fake. And there are so many mistakes in this movie that I wouldn't even begin to be able to count them all. Now, the acting. I know that Elisha Cuthbert is no Meryl Streep. But, she was fine enough in The Girl Next Door (which is pretty much the only movie I even know she was in). Honestly, I have no idea why she gets jobs now that I've seen this movie. She's absolutely awful. Horrible. Terrible. So bad I can't even think of a word that is bad enough to describe how bad she was. The guy isn't a good actor either (I have no idea what his name is and I don't care because I'm pretty sure he's not going to be someone we'll ever see on screen again) but at least he looked like he was having a little bit of fun with his role. This is, almost definitely, the single worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life. Worse than Ocean's 12, you ask? 100% yes. (And you know how much I HATE Ocean's 12). If I could give this something lower than an F, I most certainly would. Can I give it a negative grade? A negative F?

Grade: F (to infinity)