When it comes to revenge, Hollywood has exploited the theme in just about every conceivable way.   It’s a genre that has been done so much that it’s hard to find a fresh hook to bring the audiences in, much less create a story that will motivate the audience to root for this blood thirsty protagonist.  Getting the audience on your side as your hero hunts down individuals for retribution is asking a lot, but still there is always going to be an audience that will fill theater seats.

As for how Piggy fares in the lexicon of revenge films, unfortunately this was a film that seemed to be doomed from the start.  I had caught a trailer for the film, and for the most part it left me at least optimistic about the possibilities.

The World War 2 genre has been done to death by Hollywood, but The Monuments Men gives us a fresh look at the war and delves into a story that is a breath of fresh air to the genre.  Despite all my history classes that delved into the atrocities of World War 2, it was never discussed about what happened to the great landmarks that were spread throughout Europe and encountered the cold hand of war.  Granted, when measured against the staggering amount of lives lost throughout the war, the thought of a sculpture being destroyed or a Picasso painting being incinerated simply seems petty by comparison.

In 1943 as the war seems to be making its final push toward the defeat of the Nazi party, Frank Stokes (George Clooney) delivers a pitch to President Roosevelt about the importance of preserving the art of the past before the war destroys it all. His pitch is passionate though idealistic, but still it is enough to convince the president that assembling a small unit simply to help preserve certain classical monuments couldn’t cause any harm.  Stokes goes on to gather a team of scholars, most of whom are well past their prime, to join him on this quest to protect and preserve the past.

With a title like The Zombinator you basically know the kind of B-movie spectacle you are getting into.  Any notions of great special f/x or even a good script should be cast aside, and you simply have to tell yourself to sit back and enjoy the silliness that should follow.  But what the title did was build up these crazy thoughts of a cyborg from the future to take out hordes of zombies.  Well, this isn’t that movie.  Even the cover art gives promise to this kind of cheesy film, but there are no cyborgs from the future; instead we get another run-of-the-mill film about a documentary film crew that stumbles into trouble.

I don’t have a problem with this found footage/documentary style that seems to saturate the horror market these days but at the same time with so many films that get it right, you’d imagine all these up-and-coming filmmakers trying to emulate this style would latch on to what works and figure out ways to improve upon it.  George Romero’s Diary of the Dead, as well as the film Rec, are examples of how to do it right.  But what usually comes from these films are large doses of shaky cam and shots that never really show the viewer enough of what they want to see.