pattyp-37595

I really tried to like this. Unfortunately, it's made to get very young children only to laugh, and brings nothing to the table for an adult watcher. The parts played by the trolls and wolf are waaaay overacted, probably at the will of the director. Too ridiculous for this fantasy fan. I'm willing to overlook a lot, but when the acting becomes completely idiotic, I'm outta there. I tried very hard, but could not even make it through the first episode. I love most fantasy, but this stank.

I was pleasantly surprised watching The Dead after reading so many bad-ish reviews here. I am a zombie flick junkie, but that doesn't mean I will sit through badly made films. I found this rivoting and realistic. It had me on the edge of my seat, much more so than some of the American made fare I've watched. I guess some folks don't consider an African setting work worthy of their notice.

Too bad the movie won't even show up in search results, and that's not the only one. Oh, there is a page for it, but I had to search for the lead actor to get there. This is happening with irritating frequency whenever I try to look up a mid-budget foreign film. Whoever runs the site must think we shouldn't be able to locate certain films, practicing some sort of elitism. Filmed in Africa, this was definitely not some "stinker" of a film.

Off the bat, though the movie has decent special effects and CGI, the English dubbing in the version I watched was performed by people reading lines, not actually acting. The result is far less than satisfactory. Perhaps viewed in the original Russian language with subtitles, it would have come off better. Regardless, I was sucked in and soon could ignore that most of the time. My biggest peeve was the lack of understanding that a meteor shower cannot happen on Earth during the daytime, though some large ones passing by the Earth can be seen during the day on occasion. Meteor showers though smash into the side of our planet that is facing forward as it travels around the sun. I'm no huge science geek, but we are smashing into them more than they are just randomly "falling to Earth". The night side of the Earth is always facing in the direction we are traveling around the sun, so "all meteor showers happen at night" simply because that's the side that's smashing into them as we travel around the sun. The movie makers obviously didn't check their science facts or thought we were all too ignorant to know. An early scene in the movie has them "falling to earth" in broad daylight.