Max Takeshi said:
Paranormal Activity 4: aka MICROSOFT'S KINECT IS WELL NEAT, EH?
What we have here is the third sequel to what was a pretty dire original. Fourth in the franchise and there's nowhere for it to go.
Yeah, the product placement is just horrendous for that film. One of the many, many flaws of it. I personally disagree with your point on the original though. I thought the first was a well worked film and was the first horror film in many a year to be generally scary. It was kind of a lightning in a bottle sort of thing and unfortunately they, and other studios, have tried to do it again and again without (critical) success. But there's nothing surprising there, Hollywood just latches onto an idea and extorts it so long as it makes money, speaking of...
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
5/10
Apparently witches are the new money maker...Yeah, this made money, and with Vin Diesel possibly going to be starring in his own Witch Hunter flick suggestions are this'll be the trend for at least a few years.
It's not a "bad" film really. Nothing particularly offensive about it, in fact, it
could have been fun...But wasn't quite. If they had went the full way of being super exploitative with violence, etc. then this could've been a decent mindless, bloody rampage, but they held back a bit. There were suggestions and hints that things would go further, the odd exploding body and expletive thrown in there, but never enough death-plosions for me. Taking all that potential away and what we're left with is a by the numbers point A to point B flick. You never get to know the characters, they're there purely to walk through the plot and there's no real time spent developing anything. It's a case of
"there's a super evil witch, there she is, let's kill her...they kill her". I'm not SPOILER-ing that because I honestly feel I'm not giving anything away you couldn't deduce from the trailer alone.
I will say that I did think it was quite clever that they made Hansel into a diabetic.