I actually gave codename diablo a go today and bought the movieset (HD download, Disc, whole shebang).
At the risk of stepping on people's toes, but would like to give my honest review to the movie.
I didn't really have a lot of expectations on this movie. I actually first watched the interviews with the ladies before watching the movie.
I guess that was for the best, because they lowered my expectations a bit. It was often said that the movie was a lot of fun to make and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
That it was a Russ Meyer / Austin powers version of a James Bond movie. With that in mind, I watched the movie.
Or well... they call it a movie, and judging by my wallet, I paid for a movie and then some.
I am well aware that this movie is one of it's kind and that you can't put a price on something that's rare.
That said, I paid $55 (+ 5 euros for Euro to Dollar conversion) for a movie that's 34.5 minutes long. However the film is only about 28 minutes if you leave out the credits, warnings, full cgi animations, cliprepeats/reversals and silences. Which leaves no more than a runtime of a short TV show.
So, the story is simple: story starts with the good girls kicking ass to some of the bad girls' henchmen. Bad girl wants to kill stuff with some plastic deathray gun, good girls are on a mission to stop them.
I find this movie very difficult to follow. It comes to no surprise that some of the ladies are no native English speakers, but most of the time there's also no subtitles either, making it difficult to figure out what's going on.
It also does not help that the cutting of the movie is a mess. You don't know what's going on, some scenes that connect things with one another are just missing. Now they're here... And now they're suddenly there!
And some fight scenes were just never shot. As if it was too difficult to motivate the cast to shoot some more moves, so they were replaced with really, REALLY bad CGI. Did I mention how bad? It's like 'birdemic' level CGI. It looked like they tried to make up for by adding "Biff" and "Pow" effects like the old Batman series for comedic effect. But these effects were drawn in Paint, with a mouse!
The music is also very distracting, I timed it: there's 1 music track that repeats after 10 seconds. That's it.
And then there's little things, like the bad girl not taking her role so serious by referring to her gun as: this Diablo ray 'thing'. It sounded a bit condescending towards the whole movie, which sounded very unmotivated.
Also, and this is personal, I think there's an overabundance of latex. It just looks silly. If it's meant to cater to latex lovers... I've seen some really good latex outfits but this is not it.
I'm very aware that this movie is not about the movie, but it's about the girls, doing something 'mainstream'. But it certainly isn't mainstream.
It's just a porn movie... without porn...
So I need to ask myself, what is this movie, and who is it for?
Is it for generic movie lovers? Absolutely not.
Is it for the grindhouse / Russ Meyer loving movie audience? No, not even close.
Is it for huge boob lovers? Obviously but it's so cringy that you (or at least myself) can't enjoy that.
So, why am I so negative about it? It's clearly a low budget amateur movie, should I be so hard on them?
Well, yes! This movie had a public red carpet opening, the movie is listed on IMDB and I paid premium ($60) to actually get it. The movie tries very hard to be a 'mainstream' project, so I treat it as such.
For half the price you can buy a 4K BluRay with a good movie, or spend it on your favorite girl online and get a whole lot more boobie goodness.
So, what are my considerations for Codename Diablo 2?
Right now, I'm certainly not interested.
Can it be done better? Possibly, but I fear it will only be another glorified porn movie... without porn.