Tockinit not horrible nor great

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Fletcher Conner This movie had potential. It had a interesting premise, people who kill themselves through their own sheer stupidity, but struggled to create a plot to draw the view in. Joseph Fiennes awkwardly plays a police personality profiler turned insurance claims investigator who faints at the sight of blood and can't figure out social interactions. He gets paired up with a no-nonsense insurance claims investor played by Winona Ryder, and they go cross country investigating and debunking the claims of various Darwin Award types who hurt themselves through their ridiculous actions. The movie is filled with brief appearances by recognizable TV actors like Ty Burrell, Julianna Marguiles, Josh Charles, Tim Blake Nelson, Juliette Lewis, and David Arquette. There is even a brief appearance Mythbusters' Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who have debunked several of the stories featured in the movie on their show. However, the laughs and only occasional, and the time in between them could best be described as plodding. The movie isn't terrible, but there is probably a more entertaining way you could kill 90 minutes.

rooprect "The Darwin Awards" is a breezy dark comedy that attempts to capitalize on the cult popularity of the website of the same name, but falls short in that respect. Still, it's a fun & entertaining story, well worth the price of admission.In the late 90s, coinciding with the internet explosion, urban legends (or rumors too juicy to be true) took the world by storm. Immediately, several TV & film studios jumped on the sensation, putting together productions like "Urban Legend" (1998), "Magnolia" (1999), "Myth Busters" (2003), "1000 Ways to Die" (2008), and "The Darwin Awards" (2006). All of the above focus on strange-but-largely-untrue stories of human stupidity, providing morbidly funny entertainment. The biggest problem is that "The Darwin Awards", while purporting to be based on the true stories found on the website, in actuality doesn't use any true stories but instead falls back on the standard urban legends we know so well. In other words, none of the stuff in this movie is true, despite what the title leads you to believe (visit the Darwin Awards website and click the "Urban Legend" link at the bottom).OK, if you can get past that, I think you'll enjoy the movie. The plot is pretty original: an ex detective (Joseph Fiennes) and an insurance investigator (Winona Ryder) team up on a road trip that takes them cross country checking out some quirky claims, while each of them confronts their own personal quirks.It does a pretty good job of tying together the urban legends in a linear story with some romance, laughs, mystery and a nice moral statement. Of all the titles I mentioned above, this is probably my favourite because it covers so much ground without getting too heady. In the end, it's great entertainment for an evening.Other films like this I recommend (dark comedies) are "Grand Theft Parsons" (2003), "Remarkable Power" (2008) and "The Last Word" (2008).

misbegotten The Darwin Awards is a quirky little independent film, loosely based on the website & spin-off books cataloging the real-life stories of people who have suffered accidents caused by their own stupidity. Any individuals who are killed are posthumously given a 'Darwin Award' for improving Mankind's gene pool by removing themselves from it.The movie stars Joseph Fiennes as a police profiler whose unfortunate tendency to faint at the sight of blood (he's phobic) causes him to get discharged from the force. Finding employment with an insurance company, he's partnered with experienced, hot-shot investigator Winona Ryder, who specialises in bizarre and unusual claims. Together the two of them travel back and forth across America, examining various strange accidents.One of the things I liked most about this film is that the accidents that Fiennes and Ryder investigate are all based on well known urban legends, and such modern-day myths have always fascinated me. I own many books on the subject, and have enjoyed previous movies that have either used an urban legend as a starting point and then built a story around it (for example, Dead Man's Curve, When a Stranger Calls, and Lover's Lane), or have featured several legends (all three Urban Legends movies, and the anthology film Campfire Tales). Therefore, I got a huge thrill seeing several urban legends reenacted in The Darwin Awards.Although it's an independent production, the movie has an impressive budget and features many big name stars in cameos (including Chris Penn in his last role - he died the day before the film debuted at Sundance). However it went straight to DVD, both in America and here in the UK. I suppose it's hard to market an offbeat, character-led black comedy in which most of the laughs are generated by people getting either seriously injured or killed. Personally, I liked it a lot.

sophistic8 I hadn't heard anything about this film prior to renting it. The fact that Ryder and Fiennes were credited on the box were the main reasons I picked it up. I don't think ANY comedy ever gets recognized for what it's worth, but this one ranks right up there with some of the best. I've seen so many films...I'm rarely surprised by the content anymore, but this was genuinely unique and funny. Even the Darwinian personalities were developed with affection---a feat which must have been a difficult proposition, given the number of idiotic things that people manage to do, and how easy it would have been to simply portray them as single-dimensional dimwits deserving of extinction! The lack of malice depicting characters we'd normally describe as clearly contributing to a thinning of the gene pool makes us identify with these people: Who HASN'T suffered a lapse in judgement at one time or another?! I especially found the sound-track amusing--every song was obviously chosen for the relationship it bore to the characters or content in each scene, and even though there was no subtlety to the selection, I found humor in most of the associations. This was, in spite of the content, death and swearing...a film that actually gives me hope for humanity. *grin* Definitely worth watching--go rent it!