FrightFest

5/10 - Twaddle. The benefit of having 4 producers and 12 executive producers really showed. But... I did enjoy a few moments - notably two inspired musical choices. Toyed with the 'President of the Internet' idea before just giving up on it. Three inconsistent endings really rounded things off... or did they? OR DID THEY??? Eh... Worth seeing if it's free and you're too lazy to walk over to the Blu-ray pile.

6/10. Started off good, in a 28 days sort of fashion, but lost it after about 45 mins. Way too much melodrama.

A few good one liners as expected by Samuel L Jackson, who can never put a foor wrong in a movie, but i thought ending was lame, and the music at the end (wont spoil it for people who havent seen it)? Why?

Not the worst movie ive ever seen, but im sure it could have been so much better.

I'm still mourning the tragic death of DJ Liquid.

In all honesty this was a trashy Stephen King adaptation like the ones they used to churn out during the nineties. Cheap-looking effects, off-putting bad shakey camerawork, and they completely messed up the climax. It does have some moments of surprise, and I could see glimpses of what must have been social satire in the original novel. The dropped hints about the zombies evolving and using a hive mind is the most interesting thing about the film, but it's never properly developed or explained. Worst of all, the film is frequently boring between zombie attacks. Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack are just slumming it here, but I was glad of their presence anyway as they help prevent the film from being a complete wash-out.

I was amused by the similarities of the opening scene with James Moran's Turn off your bloody phones warning before My Father Die

Or "28 Dials Later". Cusack and Jackson both turn up in their fair show of dtv dreck so we shouldn't be surprised. Wouldn't their characters at least have some reluctance about driving a truck over hundreds of people and then torching them? It seems not. A few unexpected deaths at least provided a few surprises and good to see stacy keach taking the exposition role normally reserved for Ian mcshane!

The book itself was pretty awful.

The ending copied from John Wyndham.

The movie rushed through so much of the book and somehow still managed to be boring. What worked as creepy on the written page didn't really translate to the screen, everyone walking round with their mouths wide open just looked silly. Speaking of silly lets not mention Cusacks make up and hair. Then it gave you three endings and guess what, they're all awful.

I yawned at the prospect of yet another zombie apocalypse, but at least Cell tried to do something different with it by introducing a few new ingredients into the mix, even if it failed to fully explore them.

There were a few unexpected plot twists that helped maintain interest, but too much of the action was too fast and indistinct to see what was going on.

It also seemed to lose the plot towards the end, unless the whole film was a satire about Liverpool?!

6 / 10

Such a promising, fun start, then soooooooo dull for the majority of the rest of it.

Capped off with that bizarre Brookside ending.

This should be being hammered into the ground. The Blood Feast remake was straight up incompetent film-making, but this wasn't far behind, especially given the (presumably) far larger budget - a derivative mess of a film built haphazardly around a ludicrous central concept. The 'phone people' are basically just rubbish zombies. Total dreck.

Dont know why so many people disliked this film . Great start and i liked the ending where he became one of them

Akin to Maximum Overdrive, only not as much fun.

I was entertained by this but I too wonder how this would play to audiences in Liverpool still reeling from Hillsborough*

*And by that I mean not the families and those directly affected but those that just like to associate themselves with the tragedy to get noticed, which is a venerable trait in this blame/claim society we live in.

5/10 Forgettable; hardly anything worth saving, including Cusack's wooden performance and laughable finale.

-For me this was genuinely the scariest film of the festival.

-It allowed my brain to create a very interesting cell world dream, the only fright fest film dream I had all festival. 10/10 dream. 7.5/10 film.

-I enjoyed it from start to finish without drooping. The film's pace alongside the rapid development of the hiveys and the characters' pooled understanding/reactions that were never fast or effective enough was incredibly satisfying. I didn't want them to out think it.

-Not caring about the characters seemed intentional and instead made me care about society and humanity as a whole, utilising them as a basic device through which we are forced to consider the rapid tech based evolution of the hive humanoids and the seemingly inevitable demise of humanity.
I.e. the opposite of Busan which made us care about the experiences and future of the characters and not how screwed all living beings on the planet were.

-I'm not very articulate, can't use tedious film student language and am punching this in to a tiny phone screen but hopefully that makes some sense.

-watched a girl walks home alone earlier today, it had about the same number of producers. I'm not sure why films suddenly have so many producer credits, but I can't distinguish how they positively affected one film but not the other.

-Does everyone prefer their hive movies with a low budget but also incredibly shit like 'The Hive', 2015?

I've reviewed Cell here:

http://letterboxd.com/sue77/film/cell/