FrankenScript :: Lee Gabel's Screenwriting Journal/Blog

Right from the start, I wasn’t expecting much. If you do that as well, you won’t be disappointed. The film is completely predictable, uninspired and full of clichés from beginning to end. The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. So much is going on at one time, that as a viewer I [...]

I have mentioned many times before that what you can’t see is often scarier than what you can see. However, I don’t mean a black screen, and that often what you get in this film. Give me something to get scared about, like characters scared as hell, instead of absolutely nothing. I had the “devil” [...]

This is another example of a film with very real violence trying to be funny. It’s an incredibly hard balance to achieve. But that’s the least of this film’s problems. First, it takes too long to set up. What was done in 40 minutes could have been done in 10. Heigl and Kutcher do have [...]

I am really tired of movies where you know the story before even the movie begins. This film takes a well known story and applies its structure on a lackluster premise. And since we know the story, we can predict this film all the way through. It offers no surprises. The characters are all dumb [...]

Wow. Did I just watch a big advertisement for Fangoria Magazine? There’s not much of a story here to loosely string together a series of gory deaths. I expected more after hearing about the the rags-to-riches backstory this film has. The 3 million dollars needed to make this movie certainly doesn’t appear on screen, so [...]

There was no reason to remake this film. Oh, what’s that? For the money, you say? Greed? Yes, I guess that is a reason. It did earn back its budget in opening weekend, but it is nowhere near as scary as the first and classic film. In fact I would have rather seen the original [...]