App review of the week: Fandango Movies vs. A Horror Movie Collection
With thousands of new mobile applications entering the market every week, it's becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to identify the apps that deliver the best--and the worst--that smartphones have to offer. Appealing/Appalling is a weekly feature that separates the wheat from the chaff--from games to navigation tools to augmented reality solutions, we cover it all, encompassing both free and premium downloads and spanning all major operating systems. Read on.
(And click here for previous installments in this series.)
| Fandango Movies vs. A Horror Movie Collection | |
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(Developed by Fandango) Available for: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 Price: Free Summer is officially here, which means the summer movie season has arrived as well. Whether you want to score last-minute tickets to The Hangover Part II, prefer to read some reviews before you go or just want to check out stills of that chain-smoking monkey in the denim Rolling Stones jacket, there's really only one mobile application you need: Fandango Movies remains the movie app by which all others are judged, and it keeps improving with each new update, cleverly leveraging platform and device enhancements to immerse fans progressively deeper into the cinematic experience.At this point, Fandango Movies offers up pretty much everything except the film itself. Users can find out what's playing in local theaters, purchase tickets, screen trailers, clips and exclusive interviews, flip through stills, read critic and audience reviews, get driving directions, sort cineplexes for amenities like stadium seating and 3D, and share your findings and reactions via Facebook. Fandango Movies is a must-have on smartphones, but its wealth of multimedia content truly flourishes on the larger screen and HD-quality graphics of the iPad, which also boasts special features like tools to "favorite" actors in addition to movies and theaters as well as Showtime Alerts identifying ticket availability for the movies you want to see. Perhaps the only caveat with Fandango Movies is that it's typically more entertaining than the Hollywood tripe it celebrates. |
(Developed by VA Entertainment) Available for: iOS Price: $2.99 There are many compelling reasons for creating mobile applications. For some developers, it's the first step towards building their own business--for others, it's a creative outlet to help alleviate the pressures or tedium of their existing career. Some developers want to educate, some wish to entertain and others hope to simplify everyday life. But no one develops mobile applications simply to irritate others. Well, almost no one: Mosquito Ringer, sold in the App Store as a utility but about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle, appears to exist expressly to test the patience of everyone unfortunate enough to enter its sphere. It's like the Gilbert Gottfried of smartphone apps. There are thousands of films available in the public domain--all motion pictures produced and exhibited in the U.S. prior to 1923 are out of copyright, for example, while in many other cases, the intellectual property rights expired or the owners forfeited them. Movies in the public domain range from landmarks like Fritz Lang's sci-fi epic Metropolis to legendary failures like Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space; because no one owns these movies outright, many circulate in poor, even unwatchable prints, turning up like bad pennies on bargain-priced DVDs most commonly found in truck stops alongside old Boxcar Willie cassettes and bottles of Ephedrine. A Horror Movie Collection is the mobile application equivalent of one of those cut-rate DVD sets--stuffing eight public domain shockers stretching from 1932's White Zombie to George Romero's 1968 cult-classic Night of the Living Dead into one download, it's a waste of money even at $2.99 simply because the picture quality is so abysmal. By and large, the movies are pretty terrible as well. For reasons unknown, developer VA Entertainment decided to advertise A Horror Movie Collection with an App Store icon riffing on the Scream franchise--even more inexplicably, the product description promises the app features "movies that will blow your chair off." Huh? Even Ed Wood screenplays make more sense than that. |
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