LADY VENGEANCE (2005)

As far as the Vengeance Trilogy goes...OLDBOY is the best, followed by SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE and this one third.  The story was too slow and the vengeance was weak as fuck. Visually though the film was great to look at!

The story jumps around back and forth and all over the joint, so I'll just give you the simple version and say a woman served 13 years in prison for the murder of a child she didn't kill. Now she's out and she wants revenge. She gets it, but it slooooowly. At least in SFMV you had a bunch of stabbing and that great baseball bat the the skull scene, in OLDBOY you had the tooth-pulling and the legendary hammer scene, but in SFLV there's really nothing that stands out. It's a good movie, but I found it overly boring and nowhere near as exciting as I had expected from Chan-wook Park.

Good film and definitely worth watch, but I found it to be a minor drag. Honestly the highlight of the entire movie was seeing the brief cameo by Kang-ho Song and that other dude, the guy who farted on his mother in THIRST. Check out Park's other stuff first.

Part 1 - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Part 2 - Oldboy (2003)

THE PRIVATE EYES (1981)

There's been a murder at the Morley Manor and it appears that the victim, Lord Morley himself asked that detectives Don Knotts and Tim Conway come solve his murder. How can it be that the murder victim is the one who contacted Scotland Yard? Kinda strange huh? Well, not as strange as the cast of characters that make up the servants and family that live in the mansion. I won't go through them all, but my favorite is the butler who murdered his wife's 13 lovers and now anytime he hears the word "murder" he goes into a violent frenzy until you kick him in the balls!

Naturally, both Knotts and Conway are idiots (Knotts thinks he's smart and Conway has a knack for inventing useless items, like the "Time Gun" that goes off every hour), but despite this they still somehow come across some clues. Will they solve the murder? Or figure out who's the hooded figure going around killing all the servants?! Well, you're just going to have to find out for yourself.

I might be biased towards this film since I fell in love with it as a child and watched it a million times, but I genuinely think it's a funny film and well worth checking out especially if you enjoy silly mystery comedies.  Highly recommended.

The audio commentary by Don Knotts is also worth a listen. He tells some pretty interesting stories about filming this movie in such a huge mansion and even says the script was written in two days, but I find that very hard to believe.

PONTYPOOL (2008)

[Update 02/21/2021: need to redo this entire review and fix the screenshots.]

PONTYPOOL is a piece of vomit. The movie starts with this dork arriving at his job as the morning DJ off in Bumfuck, Egypt (small town in Canada). So he goes On Air and it's absolute torture. There's no way in the world that anybody would ever listen to this guy and not kill themselves. Here's just a sample:

Mrs. French's cat is missing. The signs are posted all over town. "Have you seen Honey?" We've all seen the posters, but nobody has seen Honey the cat. Nobody. Until last Thursday morning, when Miss Colette Piscine swerved her car to miss Honey the cat as she drove across a bridge. Well this bridge, now slightly damaged, is a bit of a local treasure and even has its own fancy name; Pont de Flaque. Now Collette, that sounds like Culotte. That's Panty in French. And Piscine means Pool. Panty pool. Flaque also means pool in French, so Colete Piscine, in French Panty Pool, drives over the Pont de Flaque, the Pont de Pool if you will, to avoid hitting Mrs. French's cat that has been missing in Pontypool. Pontypool. Pontypool. Panty pool. Pont de Flaque. What does it mean? Well, Norman Mailer, he had an interesting theory that he used to explain the strange coincidences in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. In the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details they spasm for a moment; they sort of unlock and when they come back into focus they suddenly coincide in a weird way. Street names and birth dates and middle names, all kind of superfluous things appear related to each other. It's a ripple effect. So, what does it mean? Well... it means something's going to happen. Something big. But then, something's always about to happen.

Wow. Wasn't that was exiting!? No bullshit, this idiot rambles on like this like 40 minutes. It's Hell on Earth. Finally, he gets some wacky phone calls that have weird zombie outbreak sounding stuff going on, but they're stupid. Eventually, the dork figures out that the zombie virus is carried by the English language...really? So now that he's figured out what causes it, he spends the next 15 minutes scribbling notes back and forth to his producer and talking in broken French. It's horrible.

Skip it and just watch the original DAWN OF THE DEAD again instead. Even if you've already seen DOTD 25 times, the 26th time will be better than the 1st of PONTYPOOL.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD (2008)

Set back in 1930's China the story is about a treasure map. The Weird dude steals it during a train robbery. So now the Bad guy and his gang are chasing him, but there's also a Good guy who's a bounty hunter and he's chasing both. But that's not all because you also have the Japanese Army and a bunch of other secondary gangs showing up and blasting the shit out of everything.

Tons shooting, massive body count, catchy music, excellent cinematography, outstanding direction by Kim Jee-woon and the three leads are all really good.  My only complaint is it's probably 20 minutes too long.