JThomas411

Benny Chan's Shaolin is a solid film for those seeking a good martial arts drama. The film is not as action-packed as some may hope but there's enough fighting to appease the majority while Andy Lau and Nicholas Tse deftly portray the battle of forgiveness in the face of ruthless betrayal. While the pacing falters at times and some of the characters could have used some more depth, the film is still quite enjoyable and well worth seeing if you get the opportunity during its theatrical release.

The latest parody from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, Vampires ****, takes aim at an obvious target that anyone could get some laughs out of. As a result, it manages to be better than the previous efforts by the movie-making team to date. However, that certainly doesn't mean that it is good by any stretch. Friedberg and Seltzer still fail to understand how to make the comedy work and instead populate their spoof with dated pop culture references, cheap toilet humor, obvious jokes and a few examples of horribly bad miscasting. There are many potential jokes to be had with source material like this to riff on but the script instead harps on the same things again and again which results in an irritatingly one-note spoof that fails far off the mark. This may not be Meet the Spartans level of bad, but as you might have guessed it's certainly not worth your time.