FrankenScript :: Lee Gabel's Screenwriting Journal/Blog

Ryan Reynolds carries the weight of this movie so convincingly that I felt like I was right there in the coffin with him. Who wouldn’t be scared shitless by that? Playing out in realtime, we find out in frightening detail what it’s like to spend 90 minutes buried in a coffin. At times I disagreed [...]

Picking up where the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo left off, we’re led on another journey to solve several murders that have targeted the main character of Lisbeth Salander. We learn more about her and her past, but not much. She still is mostly a mystery to us. The first film was a breath [...]

There’s nothing really special about this film that we haven’t seen before, however it doesn’t fall completely into the “startle equals scare” camp that so many horror films do. There are some genuinely scary moments that have us gripping the edge of our seats. But there’s not enough of them to really make this film [...]

For a non-stop action film, this pulls out all the stops… and physics, and… well, you really have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy this. In all honesty, it’s not that hard to do. And the film is also pretty good at keeping you guessing what is going to happen next. In fact while I [...]

For a supernatural, sci-fi story, you don’t see much supernatural or sci-fi. I know that is partly because this is a low budget film with a limited visual effects budget. I know “less is more” and “what can’t be seen is more scary than what can.” That’s really clear and effective in other films. In [...]

An interesting experiment, in both the film and the social experiment it is based on. It shows, believably, how a group of people, or students in this case, can willingly become a fascist group and eliminate democracy. Some of the characterizations were weaker and more predictable than others, and the climax of the film is [...]