Roger Ebert said that video games can never be art, and director Ilya Naishuller is hellbent on proving him right with Hardcore. Promoted as the first POV action film, Hardcore‘s first-person perspective looks, feels and acts like a random shoot-em-up video game crapped out by a B-tier game company any old year. Looking through the eyes of Henry, a Robocop-like man who’s just been reassembled into a man/machine hybrid after a terrible accident, the film establishes its flimsy objective within the first several minutes: save his wife Estelle (Hayley Bennett) from the clutches of her evil, telekinetic boss Akan (Danila Kozlovsky) whose company put Henry together. After escaping from Akan’s lab (which happens to be a giant blimp in the sky), Henry slaughters his way through Akan’s seemingly endless army of soldiers to get Estelle back. And along the way he’s helped by Jimmy (Shalto Copley), a former scientist of Akan’s set on taking him down.

There’s little to say about why Hardcore is so bad. Put simply, it amounts to watching someone else play a very boring video game on God mode, with tits and gore thrown in to satiate audiences with the attention span of a goldfish. It’s infantile trash from front to end, with a few neat moments of stunt work that get lost amidst the numbing onslaught of violence. Copley has fun with it at least, and continues to prove himself as a reliable and charismatic presence in whatever he does. But Hardcore really has no appealing factors, unless you happen to be a 13-year-old boy. Considering the POV format (the film was mostly shot on GoPros), Naishuller could have had some fun or at least used the hectic, low-quality aspects of his cameras’ technology to do some neat things. Instead, he just throws out one fight after another, like he’s just mindlessly slamming his head against a brick wall over and over again. If I was given the choice, I’d probably take the brick wall over watching Hardcore again.

If you’re still riding a sugar-high and aren’t ready to let go of Halloween just yet, check out the trailer for Open Grave, a new horror-thriller from Spanish filmmaker Gonzalo López-Gallego (Apollo 18, El Rey de la Montaña, Nómadas). Gonzalo, best known for his 2011 release, Apollo 18—which found financial success despite it’s unfavorable reception—is offering up his second English-language film, which looks to be a step in the right direction.

Sharlto Copley (District 9, Elysium) plays John, a man suffering from memory loss after waking up in a pit of dead bodies. He’s brought to a group of survivors faced with a similar affliction, and tensions increase as layers of the mystery are pulled away. The film offers up a “whodunnit” mystery set against a gritty, Walking Dead aesthetic.

Open Grave premiered at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain. The film will be available on iTunes on December 24th and it will open in select theaters on January 13th of next year.

Watch the trailer for Open Grave:

After seeing enough films on the subject, can we all agree that space travel outside the orbit of the earth seems to generally be a bad idea? This general consensus is why a film like Europa Report is able to bring in a few startles and a fair amount of suspense, but no true surprises. It certainly isn’t re-writing the deep space travel handbook, though it is trying to present it in a new and interesting way. Europa Report combines (highly improbable) found footage style filmmaking with (attempted) emotion-evoking documentary style filmmaking, but as it turns out the pairing of the two is scripted-reality overkill.

The film chronicles the voyage of a manned space mission to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, which appears to contain water. Believing “where there is water, there is life” and backed by a private sponsor, a team of six experienced professionals embark together on the several years journey. There’s the confident pilot, William (Daniel Wu), and his ace co-pilot Rosa (Anamaria Marinca, whose big dark eyes work well staring directly into camera lenses). They have a sensible doctor (Christian Camargo), a brooding handyman (Michael Nyqvist), a beautiful biologist (Karolina Wydra), and a chummy all-American astronaut, James (District 9’s Sharlto Copley, whose appearance just made me salivate for Elysium’s release later this summer).

From the beginning we know the trip to Europa did not appear to go as planned. The team’s on-Earth leader, Dr. Samantha Unger (Embeth Davidtz), gets emotional as she recalls the day they lost contact with the team and from there the footage is used as our primary means of recounting just what happened. Watching as the crew sleep and work in their rotating artificial gravity area (just one of many 2001: A Space Odyssey references), working at their various stations, and sending messages to their loved ones back home. Halfway to Europa tragedy befalls a crewmember and it seems as though this may be the main mystery of the film as they certainly delay revealing just what happened.

Eventually the team reaches Europa and the suspense holds up better as the team realizes they’ve found more than they could have hoped. But with such a slow journey the end is like a quick rollercoaster ride at the end of a long wait in line. And the thrills, while rapid in succession, don’t feel quite gratifying enough.

If Europa Report had presented itself solely as a found footage film, it may have worked wonderfully, as the “footage” is cleverly pieced together and the look of it all is quite well done. If anything it’s a tribute to how hard it is to pull off a good documentary because the attempt here is so contrived we’re keenly aware we’re being manipulated, and it backfires. Europa Report plays coy – focusing on the characters, the mid-way tragedy and the emotional high of the potential of alien life—but the film’s end offers too many questions and answers only one: Are we alone in the universe? At which point it’s an answer that seems less significant than we’d have thought.

Europa Report trailer:

The highly anticipated American remake of Park Chan-wook’s Korean cult classic, Oldboy, finally has a trailer for your viewing pleasure. While many diehard fans of the original are clamoring that a remake is completely unnecessary, others are glad that the film (both versions) will reach a new audience. Time will tell if Spike Lee’s version with Josh Brolin as the lead and co-stars Samuel L. Jackson, Elizabeth Olsen, and Sharlto Copley will meet everyone’s expectations are not. The trailer confirms that the violent hammer scene from the original is still intact, though the scene involving the live octopus is anyone’s guess at this point.

Watch the official trailer for Oldboy (2013):