Alex Saveliev

Banks ends up with a glossy Hollywood flick disguised as a straight-to-VOD grindhouse title. It feels dishonest, forced, and overstuffed.

The writer-director’s perverse, continuous, and purposeful avoidance of any semblance of genuine emotion or coherence results in an aggressively unpleasant experience.

An inkling of an inventive concept lurks somewhere deep within the murk. Unfortunately, you'll be hard-pressed to spot it amidst all the meandering diversions, prepubescent humor, imbecilic dialogue, and curious casting choices.

Alas, instead of a scathing critique of racial injustice, a revamping of the “man seeks revenge after his family is murdered/kidnapped” trope, the director delivers gratuitously violent, vulgar, clichéd, jaw-droppingly sexist, and racist cinematic bile.

The plot lurches from one awkwardly-staged, heavy-handed, poorly-lit, bathed in eye-scorching soft-focus sequence to another with little regard for tonal shifts or narrative fluidity.

The actors do what they can, but even the talent assembled here can’t help getting swallowed up in the Shyamalan vortex of nonsense.

An eccentric local priest spouts nonsense, blood gushes out of the shower, bodies twist and contort at impossible angles, and creatures from hell crawl towards the camera. By the time the convoluted, shrieky finale arrives, it all blends together into nothing more than dull background noise. Your investment in the story will be indirectly proportional to its running time.

It's jaw-dropping how slapdash Sheridan's approach is to what's supposed to be the heart and soul of the story – the bonding between Hannah and Connor. The characters are so cardboard, it's a wonder they don't catch fire.

Perhaps the worst thing about the writer/director/star’s feature is that it basks in the excess it purports to condemn, confident that pounding the viewer into submission is the way to go, in addition to ending on a hypocritical note that defies everything that’s occurred up to that point.

Its cardinal sin is a complete, total, utter, extreme lack of originality. The title does it justice, really. Sacrilege will most likely be viewed as such by horror film aficionados.

Watching the multiple, nonsensical, seizure-inducing sequences, set to bottom-of-the-barrel, thunderous EDM and homemade melodramatic beats feels like being smacked in the head repeatedly by a blaring subwoofer.

No one would rationally expect the man behind Disneynature fare such as Penguins, Elephant, and Diving with Dolphins to make his directorial debut with a demonic horror feature.Yet here we are, witnessing David Fowler perform a 180° swivel, from anthropomorphizing animals to slaughtering human beings in Welcome to the Circle. The results clearly demonstrate that he should’ve stuck to voicing chimpanzees.

From its unimaginative opening, involving a dumb tourist falling to her death to the anticlimactic day-lit finale (if you get this far, you deserve some sort of Steve Irwin award), Black Water: Abyss will make you want to Crawl back into Lake Placid. To reiterate: if you’ve come for the croc, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you’ve come for anything else… well, why did you come at all?

A commendable subject matter does not a good movie make. Tape is inherently misguided, a queasily voyeuristic project, rendered nearly-unwatchable by its pseudo-artistic tendencies and patronizing tone.

Nothing here is left to the imagination, Pesce running down the list of clichés and ensuring he includes every single one. Once the realization that this is yet another cheap-o retread settles in (about 10 minutes in), the rest becomes agonizingly painful to sit through.

Everything is one-note, dull and, worst of all, pretentious to the nth degree.

Hardcore gorehounds will be disappointed by the lukewarm scares. Fans of throwback films will groan at the lack of tongue-in-cheek references. Anyone who’s seen a film will groan at the stupidity of it all.

Goi and his screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski must have thought that simply stuffing the film with as many shock tactics as possible would suffice. It doesn’t. This ship goes down with her captains.

Designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, in equal parts juvenile and offensive, Purge of Kingdom is the worst film I’ve seen so far in 2019. If a fart gag makes your sides split with laughter, go right ahead – otherwise, avoid at all costs.

Nihilistic and offensive, it leaves you with more than a sour taste – nausea, perhaps, or a need to bathe in Listerine.