monster warriors when they are fighting each monster. Creep. The other thing I find strange about this show
is that the warriors always have to go to their headquarters to have meetings, even though they’re usually right beside the place where the monsters are found. They should be smart enough to just have a brief meeting in their car. What if the monsters started killing people while they had a meeting? What can I say? This show is horrible! I would not recommend it to anybody, unless you want to be bored out of your mind. HANNAH GARCES-SLOANE
...AND BEHOLD!
LO Starring Jeremiah Birkett, Sarah Lassez and Ward Roberts
Written and directed by Travis Betz Synkronized
Dante’s Inferno: A tedious infernal smackdown.
EA/Visceral button-masher. The game takes ex- tended liberties with Dante Alighieri’s 14th-cen- tury poem, morphing our hero into a scythe-wielding soldier of the Third Crusade, and this project from EA and Film Roman (the team behind Dead Space: Downfall) continues on the same interpretive thread that Johnathan Knight took up when developing the script for the game. In this Inferno, Dante (voiced by Graham Mc-
Tavish: Prison Break) doesn’t only journey through hell, he obliterates everything that stands in the way of finding his beloved Beatrice (Vanessa Branch: Pirates of the Caribbean), who is trapped in the clutches of Lucifer (Steve Blum: Batman: Arkham Asylum). Watching Dante travel through nine circles, slaying one gatekeeper after another, quickly becomes a tediously predictable smack- down. And salvation never comes. The project is ac-
tually a collaboration between six different animation studios, with each studio being responsible for its own segment. Un- fortunately the style changes are only no- ticeable in Dante’s
overall appearance, Virgil’s outfit and the size of Beatrice’s expansive (always nekkid) boobs. This makes it more of a distraction than a cool gim- mick and, with the plot already hurting, the au- dience is bound to lose interest after the second or third circle. Repetitive and inconsistent, you can bet Dante’s Inferno was rushed to meet a video game release date.
JESSA SOBCZUK CINE MACA B R E HANNAH: 1, WARRIORS: 0
MONSTER WARRIORS Starring Jared Keeso, Mandy Butcher and Graeme Lynch
Created by Wilson Coneybeare Directed by Wilson Coneybeare, Marnie Banack, Graeme Lynch et al. Written by Wilson Coneybeare, Hugh Hardy, Steve Westren, et al. Anchor Bay
[It’s time to welcome back
Hannah, our intrepid ten-year- old critic.] Monster Warriors is a televi-
sion show for kids. It’s about four kids that destroy mon- sters. Except the team doesn’t kill the monsters, they just mo- mentarily paralyze them. It’s not very exciting. The pros of the show are… actually, there are
no pros. This is a terrible show! A great kids’ monster show is Mad Monster Party. That show has great animation, the characters have real emotions and, to be honest, it is spooky. Very un- like Monster Warriors. The cons of Monster Warriors: the monsters
are horribly animated – it looks like a five-year- old did the animation. The actors’ expressions are so unrealistic! After they defeat a monster, they don’t even realize how much they helped their community. They don’t congratulate each other or celebrate. When they are getting dressed to paralyze a monster, one girl puts on earrings! Doesn’t she know that she doesn’t have time for that? And why would you need to look pretty when you are temporarily killing a monster? Some of the sets in the show are filmed on a stage, but they don’t even try to make it look real. This crazy man creates all the monsters that the monster warriors tackle. He watches the
A lack of money can often be a source of in-
spiration and innovation for indie filmmakers. Enter writer/director Travis Betz, the latest fledg- ling artist to attempt to use financial constraints to his advantage, with Lo, a horror-comedy take on the Faust myth. Justin (Ward Roberts) draws an elaborate pen-
tagram on the floor of his darkened apartment and carries out a ritual he hopes will help reclaim his girlfriend, April, from hell. After successfully summoning the demon Lo (Jeremiah Birkett), Justin hopes to convince the hellion to use whatever clout he might possess to help him locate and rescue April. Lo, played as both funny and menacing by Jeremiah Bir- kett, traces the history of Justin and April’s relationship through live theatre-style flashbacks, cleverly staged just outside the pentagram. Lo toys with Justin, attempting to lure him outside the safety of the sacred sym-
bol, while he pushes him to figure out his girl- friend’s dark secret. Turns out April isn’t just lost, she’s completely psychotic – giving neither Justin nor the audience any reason to like her. That’s the script’s first
fatal mistake; if we can’t empathize with Justin’s quest, why would we want to watch him pursue it? Additionally, since the interaction between Justin and Lo makes up the backbone of the story, it puts the onus of the film’s success entirely on the script and the acting – and that’s where the rest of it falls apart. Birkett seems to genuinely be having fun play-
ing the demon, performing under two inches of makeup that make him look like a grittier ver- sion of one of the monsters from The Descent. It’s just that Betz can’t handle the storytelling. The goofball tone of Justin and Lo’s give-and-
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