Movie Review: Hamlet (review 101)

I decided, in order to make up for the abysmal showing of my 100^th review, I would make up for it by showing off something special. Something foreign with an exploitative topic of a man murdering his brother so he could bang his wife and steal the inheritance. The story of a son, discovering his father murdered flies into a murderous rage. A young girl’s boyfriend takes sexual advantage of her, murders her father, and then leaves her to fall into insanity, eventually driving her to her own suicide. It’s even got a supernatural element, just in case you were afraid that this could in anyway be considered classy. A man even gets two of his old school chums murdered, more or less for the lulz.

What is this movie you ask?

Word up for The Bard bitches!

Hamlet (1996 Castle Rock Entertainment Dir. Kenneth Branagh)

Now I know what you’re asking… am I kidding? NO! I am not. Had this been written in 1975, entitled “Prince of Blood” or any of a dozen alternate titles, and made for under $100K it would be looked down on as much as any other exploitation movie. It’s got all the nasty hooks. Ghosts, revenge, sexual shenanigans, murder, a hint of incest, bad action, characters that pop in and out of the tale at random, and huge events happening off camera. Not to spoil it for you, but one of the most important side characters in the entire play dies off screen! This is not a classy play, let’s be clear on that. This is an exploitation movie, plain and simple. It just happens to get a larger budget and better actors than most exploitation flicks. Because of that, it’s a great exploitation movie, don’t get me wrong, but it is still exploitation. Not only that, but it’s a really silly exploitation movie. Let us be perfectly frank about this so called Greatest Work of the English Language. If the script for Hamlet were handed in today, zombie Louis B. Mayer would rise up from the grave and slap the taste out of Shakespeare’s mouth.

Movie Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Another short one today, signs we’re running out of archive material. When the archive runs out, we’ll be going to once or twice a month.

Check it out! It’s the title page!