tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8988688827821333362024-03-28T06:17:46.238-07:00Kevin's Review CatalogueKevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.comBlogger683125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-42630293131481309412024-03-25T16:11:00.000-07:002024-03-25T16:11:11.345-07:00Review Double Feature: Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Dune</i> (2021) and <i>Dune: Part Two</i> (2024)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material (<i>Part One)</i></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some suggestive material and brief strong language (<i>Part Two</i>)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBZnNOjbe-iiI2e5WydgpdrhGrk2FUVM5CszrccT6HclckSn33Wf5jBdB-cSDcNPzwmtdm49Kefg2jTCIvAu0cpLC_UuLQfJzkKAa0H4g0qWHbHR69dAQJRJL0TtHi5QnRc4lknininr0hKBzLj9zXHoIhmlJARsniSaQ2YLG1CM-iV46Ih43pq-V9Vp8/s2005/Dune%20Parts%20One%20and%20Two.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1477" data-original-width="2005" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBZnNOjbe-iiI2e5WydgpdrhGrk2FUVM5CszrccT6HclckSn33Wf5jBdB-cSDcNPzwmtdm49Kefg2jTCIvAu0cpLC_UuLQfJzkKAa0H4g0qWHbHR69dAQJRJL0TtHi5QnRc4lknininr0hKBzLj9zXHoIhmlJARsniSaQ2YLG1CM-iV46Ih43pq-V9Vp8/w640-h472/Dune%20Parts%20One%20and%20Two.png" width="640" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Yep, we're doing the <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/06/review-double-feature-kill-bill-volume.html">Kill Bill</a></i> thing again and grading two movies together as one singular whole. And that's because, much like <i>Kill Bill</i>, this is no ordinary pair of movies. Rather, they're a two-part adaptation of the absolute monster of a novel that is Frank Herbert's <i>Dune</i>. A landmark of science fiction, it is no pulpy airport paperback, clocking in at 896 pages and covering everything from the ecology of a desert world to the use of religion as a tool of control to the fall of empires to the nature of power to a deconstruction of "chosen one" mythologies and everything in between. It's a novel that typically comes up on shortlists of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, one that's been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien's <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy in fantasy in the canon of modern speculative fiction. (Ironically, Tolkien disliked <i>Dune</i>, though he didn't really say why in the interest of remaining diplomatic.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">It's not a book you take lightly, is what I'm saying.</p><p style="text-align: left;">What's more, the very things that have made it so tempting to adapt to the screen are the same things that have long given it a reputation as "unfilmable". Attempts to make a movie out of it have bedeviled nearly every filmmaker who's tried, including some of the greatest of the modern age. David Lean was offered the film, but turned it down. Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to adapt it in the '70s and failed. David Lynch actually managed to get his movie made back in 1984, producing a film that's widely remembered, not least of all by Lynch himself, as a psychedelic mess. The Sci Fi Channel produced a miniseries in 2000 that faithfully adapted the text of the book and, despite a very large budget for a TV show at the time and a huge marketing push, proved to be just as divisive among sci-fi fans. Its influence wound up coming less through its own adaptations and more from other authors and filmmakers inspired by it to make their own, less categorically weird stories, including a number of films that emerged directly from the ashes of Jodorowsky's abortive production. (You might've heard of a few of them, like <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2017/05/review-alien-1979.html">Alien</a></i>, <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2017/05/review-fifth-element-1997.html">The Fifth Element</a></i>, <i>Warhammer 40,000</i>, and even <i>Star Wars</i>.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">So when Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve decided that he wanted to adapt <i>Dune</i>, many critics, film journalists, and fans predicted it would be his Waterloo. Sure, he's a modern wunderkind who's never made a bad movie, up there with Christopher Nolan as a darling of today's film buffs (and, in my opinion, one who has a better track record). Sure, he'd already done the impossible by making a sequel to <i>Blade Runner</i>, one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, that was just as good as the original. But if Jodorowsky and Lynch couldn't do it, then how in the world was Villeneuve, somebody whose background was chiefly in gritty, spectacle-light thrillers like <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2013/09/review-prisoners-2013.html">Prisoners</a></i> and <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2015/10/review-sicario-2015.html">Sicario</a></i>, going to pull off adapting a novel as famously trippy as <i>Dune</i>?</p><p style="text-align: left;">What Villeneuve did was largely stick to the text of Herbert's novel as the miniseries did, cut a lot of the backstory and many of the psychedelic elements, and instead focus heavily on both the ecological themes of the story and the events of its present, especially its political subtext and its commentary on "chosen one" narratives. What emerges is a film duology that feels like a dark retelling of <i>Star Wars</i> (or at least <i>A New Hope</i>) in which the story of Luke Skywalker, instead of a tale of a straightforward hero saving the day, is instead a tale of the rise of the Antichrist -- and, incidentally, a far better take on the idea of "what if the chosen one turned out to be the bad guy?" than the <i>Star Wars</i> prequel trilogy. It's not a perfect adaptation, and honestly, I'm still not sure if a "perfect" adaptation of a novel like <i>Dune</i> is even possible outside of a miniseries. (Jodorowsky's version would've been ten to fourteen hours long.) But whether I was watching it at home on a big-screen TV (as I did with <i>Part One</i> to get caught up) or in a packed movie theater (as I did with <i>Part Two</i>), I got a gorgeous, compelling, slow-burn sci-fi epic filled with a rich cast of complicated characters that sets up even bigger things to come but still ends in just the right way, without a doubt the best adaptation of Herbert's novel so far and one that I expect to endure in the canon of science fiction classics just like the novel.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Our story starts over eight thousand years into the future, with humanity ruled by the Imperium, an empire in classic medieval fashion where power is divided between the Emperor and the various Great Houses of the nobility. Arrakis, a harsh desert planet that is strategically vital for its supply of spice, a drug that is necessary for faster-than-light travel to be possible, has just been transferred by the Emperor from the control of House Harkonnen, which ruled it for decades, to House Atreides. The Atreides patriarch Duke Leto knows that this is a power play by the Emperor to thwart the growing power of his family, as control of Arrakis paints a giant target on their backs for other families to go after, not least of all a bitter House Harkonnen, but he also knows that he can't openly defy the Emperor's wishes and turn down this white elephant of a gift. Sure enough, exactly what he feared comes to pass. However, when House Harkonnen took back the planet, they didn't count on one man: Paul Atreides, Leto's teenage son, who survives the initial attack with his mother Lady Jessica and runs off into the desert to live with the Fremen, the tribal native people of Arrakis who have always resented the power of outsiders over their world, and plots revenge. Unbeknownst to Paul, however, a secretive religious order called the Bene Gesserit, one that includes his mother, has plans for him, and has set in motion events that will lead to his rise as a mythical savior of humankind called the Kwisatz Haderach... but unbeknownst to the Bene Gesserit, Paul, who's been having visions of himself causing a galaxy-scale spree of death and destruction, has his own ideas as to what kind of man and leader he's going to be.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The first film opens with Chani giving a vivid description of the beauty of the desert ecosystem of Arrakis, and it's clear that the environmental themes of the story were where a lot of Villeneuve's attention lay. He keeps the exposition indirect in order to fit as much of the book into five-plus hours as he can, instead preferring to show us how the world functions: a mouse-like alien creature wiping the sweat off its ear and drinking it again, the fact that nearly all of Arrakis' human development is either underground or otherwise shielded from the brutal sun, the human population being consequently nocturnal, the status of mountains and large rocks as islands of safety amidst the sea of dunes and its terrifying sandworms, fresh water being a resource as precious as gold. This short of "show, don't tell" exposition extends throughout the story. We don't need to be told that the proliferation of personal protective force fields that only slow-moving objects can get through has made guns obsolete in industrial warfare and led to a revival of melee infantry weapons like swords, pikes, and daggers, nor do we need to be told that, against the Fremen who don't have those fancy shields, guns are still very useful. We can figure that much out just by watching how these devices function and figuring out the implications, and then doing the same with all the other neat stuff about the worldbuilding. In the book, Herbert explained the setting's retrofuturism and lack of computer technology with a lengthy backstory about a war between humans and AI called the Butlerian Jihad in which humanity's victory was followed by a thorough backlash against "thinking machines". None of that makes it into the movies, but it didn't really need to, not when the films do an expert job of crafting a society that thinks it's too good for computers, and not when it's resting on the visual shorthand of countless past space opera flicks like <i>Star Wars</i>. A rare case where the fact that the source material has inspired countless great movies actually works in the favor of its own adaptation, letting it spend less time on the parts of the worldbuilding that we've all seen before and instead focusing on the parts that stand out from the pack.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And the part here that stands out is a big one. Over a decade before George Lucas played a "chosen one" sci-fi story pretty much straight (and over three decades before he made the prequels as a deconstruction of such), Herbert wrote a story that portrayed prophecies, Great Man narratives, and organized religion as tools that could be easily exploited by a tyrant. Paul Atreides may have meant well, hoping to liberate the Fremen from tyranny, but by inserting himself into their struggle (with help from shadowy figures who had their own agenda in paving the way for his reign), he built something terrible, and the psychic visions he has throughout the story make it clear that his accomplishments will end in tragedy. Timothée Chalamet plays Paul initially as a rich kid struggling with the pressure placed on his shoulders, one who takes to Arrakis astoundingly well to the point that, when he's forced to leave his safe and secure life at the palace, he winds up comfortably integrating right into the Fremen's society. Throughout the films, we get hints of darkness within him, especially in <i>Part Two</i> once he starts delivering bombastic speeches to enraptured crowds that at some point start to sound uncomfortably like the speeches that the villains normally give in these sorts of movies. Even more than the psychic visions he has of the death and destruction to come, it was in these moments when I was both captivated by Paul's power and, more importantly, scared of the kind of leader he was growing into: a harsh, unforgiving warlord who's willing to resort to extreme measures to secure the independence of the Fremen. He's an easy guy to root for, but there's always a pit in your stomach as he slowly but surely pushes the boundaries right up to the breaking point. It's here where Chani, her role considerably expanded from the books, emerges as the film's voice of reason, serving as Paul's lover but also somebody who realizes that the Fremen are trading slavery at the hands of a colonial overlord for slavery at the hands of a cult leader, even without knowing the behind-the-scenes machinations that put Paul in his position.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That said, if it wanted to completely stick the landing here, there was one final shoe that needed to drop but didn't. Paul's psychic visions merely show him ominously as a leader with Hitler-esque undertones, as well as him in battle. The book went a lot further when it came to having Paul's visions showing him with far more than just undertones, sketching vivid displays of the misery that he is fated to cause: famine, genocide, the apocalypse on a galactic scale. What the films show us is designed to make us uneasy about Paul, while letting Chalamet's performance do the rest in making him look like a budding villain, but there's a point where "show, don't tell" can be taken too far, and that's when you're talking about prophecies of disasters to come that you can't linger on for too long in the film itself and can only tell us will happen. I was only a bit freaked out by Paul, when I should've been picturing myself in Germany in 1933. I was getting all the cool and badass parts of a great villain, but the things that actually make him a <i>villain</i> are still to come, and that, I think, undercut some of the menace and unease I was supposed to get from Paul. It wasn't a <i>huge</i> problem, but it was still a not-insignificant blotch on what's otherwise a great pair of films.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Fortunately, once you're past the plot, as a sci-fi epic this duology is gorgeous to behold. Villeneuve has always been a guy who, like Christopher Nolan, has an affection for gritty realism even when he's working with big blockbuster epics, and he made the most of the desert environments that give the story its name. He does a great job in particular imagining what big melee fantasy battles would look like augmented with futuristic technology, in which the pikemen and knights charging their enemies in the field are supported with artillery lasers. The cast is absolutely stacked and excellent all around, with Chalamet shining in the central role but everybody around him also doing great work, from Zendaya as the skeptic Chani to Rebecca Ferguson as Paul's mother with her own agenda to Austin Butler stealing the show in a surprisingly brief amount of screen time as the Emperor's depraved nephew who gets sent in in <i>Part Two</i> to stop Paul. It was perhaps a bit overstuffed; Florence Pugh wound up getting lost in the shuffle, not an easy feat with an actor of her caliber. I understand why Villeneuve decided to split this movie in half, because there is no real way this story could've been effectively told otherwise.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Villeneuve accomplished an impossible task here, crafting with two movies an adaptation of a legendarily dense novel that does it justice. This one has its faults, and there are things that the otherwise inferior Lynch version does better (especially with regards to its psychedelic elements), but even so, it is gonna go down in the ranks of all-time sci-fi classics. I give it a solid recommendation if you have even the slightest interest in science fiction.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-67588354074522698432024-03-03T08:55:00.000-08:002024-03-03T08:55:35.208-08:00Review: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Eight Legged Freaks</i> (2002)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzMzODg5MDk4OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTM0Nzc3._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="541" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzMzODg5MDk4OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTM0Nzc3._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="271" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Eight Legged Freaks</i> is a self-conscious throwback to '50s monster movies that does the job it sets out to do perhaps a little too well. It's the kind of movie you'd imagine American International Pictures themselves (the Blumhouse of the '50s and '60s) would've made back then if they had a big budget and modern CGI technology to spare, a film that gets right up in your face with all manner of icky arachnid goodness that it takes every opportunity it can to throw at the screen, and even though the effects may be dated now, it still works in the context of the lighthearted B-movie that this movie is trying to be. It's a movie where, as gross as it often is, going for an R rating probably would've hurt the campy tone it was going for. Its throwback to old monster movie tropes is a warts-and-all one, admittedly, especially where its paper-thin characters are concerned, such that it starts to wear out its welcome by the end and could've stood to be a bit shorter. That said, it's never not a fun movie, especially if you're not normally into horror, and it's the kind of film that I can easily throw on in the background to improve my mood.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Set in the struggling mining town of Perfection, Arizona, the film opens with an accident involving a truck carrying toxic waste accidentally dumping a barrel of the stuff into a pond that happens to be located right next to the home of a man named Joshua who runs an exotic spider farm. He starts feeding his spiders insects that he sourced from the pond, and before long the spiders start growing to enormous size, eating Joshua and eventually threatening the town, forcing its residents to start banding together for survival. I could go into more detail on the characters, but most of them fall into stock, one-note archetypes and exist mainly to supply the jokes and the yucks, elevated chiefly by the film's surprisingly solid cast. David Arquette's oddly disaffected performance as Chris, the drifter whose father owned the now-shuttered mines and returns to town in order to reopen them, manages to work with the tone the movie is going for, feeling like he doesn't wanna be in this town to begin with and wondering what the hell he got himself into by returning to the dump he grew up in. Kari Wuhrer makes for a compelling action hero as Sam, the hot sheriff who instructs her teenage daughter Ashley (played by a young Scarlett Johansson) how to deal with pervy boys and looks like a badass slaughtering giant spiders throughout the film. Doug E. Doug got some of the funniest moments in the movie as Harlan, a conspiracy radio host who believes that aliens are invading the town. Every one of the actors here knew that they were in a comedy first and a horror movie second, and so they played it broad and had fun with the roles. There are various subplots concerning things like the town's corrupt mayor and his financial schemes, the mayor's douchebag son Bret, and Sam's nerdy son Mike whose interest in spiders winds up saving the day, and they all go in exactly the directions you think, none of them really having much impact on the story but all of them doing their part to make me laugh.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The movie was perhaps a bit too long for its own good, especially in the third act. Normally, this is the part where a movie like this is supposed to "get good" as we have giant monsters running around terrorizing the town, and to the film's credit, the effects still hold up in their own weird way. You can easily tell what's CGI at a glance, but in a movie where the spiders are played as much for a laugh as anything else, especially with the chattering sound they constantly make that makes it sound like they're constantly giggling, it only added to the "live-action cartoon" feel of the movie. The problem is, there are only so many ways you can show people getting merked by giant spiders before they all start to blend together, and the third act is thoroughly devoted to throwing non-stop monster mayhem at the screen even after it started to run out of ideas on that front. There are admittedly a lot of cool spider scenes in this movie, from giant leaping spiders snatching young punks off of dirt bikes to people getting spun up in webs to a tarantula the size of a truck flipping a trailer to a hilarious, Looney Tunes-style fight between a spider and a cat, and the humans themselves also get some good licks in, but towards the end, the film seemed to settle into a routine of just spiders jumping onto people. It was here where the threadbare characters really started to hurt the film. If I had more investment in the people getting killed and fighting to survive, I might have cared more, but eventually, I was just watching a special effects showcase. The poster prominently advertises that this movie is from Dean Devlin, one of the producers and writers of <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2021/07/review-independence-day-1996.html">Independence Day</a></i> and the <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-godzilla-1998.html">1998 American <i>Godzilla</i> adaptation</a>, and while he otherwise had no creative involvement, I did feel that influence in a way that the marketing team probably didn't intend.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Eight Legged Freaks</i> is a great movie with which to introduce somebody young or squeamish to horror, especially monster movies. It's shallow and doesn't have much to offer beyond a good cast, a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of CGI spider mayhem without a lot of graphic violence. Overall, it's a fun throwback to old-school monster movies.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-59530199368372478712024-02-12T10:30:00.000-08:002024-02-12T16:17:22.495-08:00Review: The Last Boy Scout (1991)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Last Boy Scout</i> (1991)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for graphic violence and very strong language</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjJmYWE3ODEtZDljNi00YmQwLWE3ZDYtYzE0MTdmNGRlNjZkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUzMDUzNTI3._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="536" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjJmYWE3ODEtZDljNi00YmQwLWE3ZDYtYzE0MTdmNGRlNjZkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUzMDUzNTI3._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="268" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>The Last Boy Scout</i> is a wild, unwieldy, and immensely entertaining buddy-cop action flick cut from the same cloth as <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2019/12/review-lethal-weapon-1987.html">Lethal Weapon</a></i>, not much of a surprise given that Shane Black wrote both movies. It's a movie that opens with an over-the-top song that would make for a legitimately good intro to an NFL broadcast, followed by a prologue of a football player (played by Billy Blanks in a cameo) shooting three members of the opposing team on the field before killing himself. The plot of the film is one that has only become sadly relevant in the years since 1991, especially as sports betting has been legalized and normalized as just a regular part of the professional sports landscape. It's got Bruce Willis at the height of his glory post-<i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-die-hard-1988.html">Die Hard</a></i> playing a salty private eye, a young Damon Wayans in a role that, while more dramatic than anything on <i>In Living Color</i>, still supplies a lot of funny moments in his interactions with Willis, and director Tony Scott delivering a ton of exciting, spectacular action scenes. It's a shallow film that's mostly an excuse to have Willis and Wayans do their thing, but that alone is enough to make it practically obligatory viewing during football season.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Our protagonists are both disgraced men. Joe Hallenbeck is a private detective and former Secret Service agent who lost his last job after he punched out a senator he caught raping a woman. Jimmy Dix is a former star quarterback for the Los Angeles Stallions (because like hell the NFL would let them use real team names in a movie like this) who was fired and banned from the league as the chronic pain caused by his injuries on the field led to drug addiction and, from there, involvement in gambling. Together, They Fight Crime -- specifically by uncovering a gambling ring within the league that's scheming to get sports betting legalized in order to make it a more exciting experience for viewers, damn the consequences (gambling addiction, game-fixing), and is willing to kill in order to do it. It's the kind of suspicion of authority and rich fat cats that, almost as much as witty buddy-cop banter, I've noticed is something of a trend in Shane Black's screenplays, and while it's an altogether shallow treatment of sports betting that serves largely as background flavor, it's a story that predicted, decades before the rise of DraftKings and FanDuel, just how corrosive it would be to sports in general. (One change, though: I would've had the shadowy hitman in the opening threatening to kill the running back if he <i>wins</i> instead of loses, since throwing matches and point-shaving are how a lot of sports betting scandals go down in real life.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">The heart and soul of the film is Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans as Joe and Jimmy, both deeply troubled men who mean well but are otherwise plagued by all manner of demons. Joe's strong moral code gets him compared to a Boy Scout (hence the title), but it also ruined his career once it put him on a collision course with the powerful crooks who run everything, while Jimmy was chewed up and spit out by a corrupt sports league that wore down his body and then blamed him for the resulting drug addiction. They're both bitter, cynical assholes, but they have damn good reason to be. Willis was always a master of action movie snark, and his talent for such is on full display here as he has to put up with indignities from everyone around him, not least of all his estranged wife and his rebellious daughter. Wayans, meanwhile, gets the more serious role as a guy who's pissed at the world and jumped head-first into hedonism as his life fell apart, but one who's not all that different from Joe except that his vices aren't as socially acceptable as alcoholism. Two guys who look like polar opposites, especially in the contrast between Joe's blue-collar status and Jimmy's fame and fortune (highlighted in a great exchange involving Jimmy's $650 leather pants), but turn out to have a lot more in common than they think is ripe material for a buddy comedy, and Willis and Wayans have great buddy chemistry together. The supporting cast, too, is filled with character actors giving fun performances, whether it's Noble Willingham as the villainous team owner Marcone, Taylor Negron as the terrifying hitman Milo, a young Halle Berry as Jimmy's stripper girlfriend Corey, or a young Danielle Harris stealing the show as Joe's daughter Darian, feeling almost like a prototype for Angourie Rice's character in <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/05/review-nice-guys-2016.html">The Nice Guys</a></i> in terms of being what happens if you gave Nancy Drew the mouth of a sailor. (And now I wanna see Shane Black write a Nancy Drew movie.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">When it comes to action, this is a Tony Scott movie, and if you know the first thing about Tony Scott, you know what you're getting: flashy action, glamorous vistas, and a lot of visual flair. This movie looks damn good in that peculiar '80s/early '90s studio way, a movie that knows exactly how big and dumb it is and leans right into it. The opening scene of an ill-fated running back at the end of his rope giving a whole new meaning to "pistol offense" sets the tone and lets you know what you're in for straight away, a film big on splashy visuals and moments designed to set a mood. The plot is fairly boilerplate and easy to figure out, existing largely to drive the action and the characters' banter and get you to the real reason this movie exists, which is the car chases, shootouts, and explosions that are all handled with aplomb. From start to finish, this movie is incredibly entertaining, the kind of flick that invites you to turn off your brain and have a great time watching a pair of very charismatic actors run around Los Angeles with guns.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>The Last Boy Scout</i> is a kick-ass, no-nonsense buddy action/comedy anchored by a pair of great lead performances, a witty script, and director Tony Scott doing what he does best. This was perfect viewing just before the Super Bowl, and honestly at any other time of year.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-34731710513992811732024-02-11T12:16:00.000-08:002024-02-11T12:35:45.272-08:00Review: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> (2024)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, sexual material, language, sexual assault, teen drinking and drug content</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjJkZDExMGQtNGE2YS00YzJiLWJiNjEtNmYwZjIxZGMxNTZiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjkwOTAyMDU@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="540" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjJkZDExMGQtNGE2YS00YzJiLWJiNjEtNmYwZjIxZGMxNTZiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjkwOTAyMDU@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> is a vibes movie. Despite having been heavily marketed on the fact that it was written by Diablo Cody, the writer of <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-jennifers-body-2009.html" style="font-style: italic;">Jennifer's Body</a> (who has said that the two films take place in the same universe), her screenplay is actually one of the film's weak links, falling apart in the third act as the plot starts to get weird and disjointed in a way that left me wondering just how many scenes got rewritten or left on the cutting room floor. No, it's the cast and director Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin) who put this movie over the top, crafting a film that feels like if a young Tim Burton directed <i>Weird Science</i> in the best possible way. (In the interview with Cody that the Alamo Drafthouse showed before the film, she cited both <i>Weird Science</i> and <i>Edward Scissorhands</i> as inspirations, alongside <i>Bride of Frankenstein</i> and <i>The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari</i>, and I'm not surprised.) It's at its best as a pure comedy, one that sends up its nostalgic '80s setting to the point of farce and pushes the PG-13 rating as far as it can go. I'm not surprised that, much like <i>Jennifer's Body</i> did in its initial run, this movie failed to find its audience in theaters (though releasing it on Super Bowl weekend probably didn't help), but while I don't think it'll be treated as an outright classic in ten years' time, I do believe it'll follow a very similar trajectory of being rediscovered on home video and streaming.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Set in suburban Illinois in 1989, our protagonist is Lisa Swallows, a teenage girl who's been moody and morose ever since her mom was killed by an axe murderer two years ago, followed by her father Dale remarrying the obnoxious jackass Janet and thus gaining a stepsister in the cheerleader Taffy. She likes to hang out at the old cemetery, where, one night after going to a party where she accidentally takes hallucinogens and subsequently gets sexually harassed, she runs off and tells one of the men buried there that she wishes she was "with him" (i.e. dead). Something must've been miscommunicated, because that night, that grave is struck by lightning and its occupant rises from the dead, trying to find Lisa and be with her. Lisa is initially horrified, but soon realizes that, beneath this creature's rotten exterior, there's actually a romantic soul who longs to be human again. And after tragedy strikes, Lisa decides to find a way to make her new boyfriend's dream a reality... no matter who gets in her way.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The first two acts of this film felt like they were building to something very interesting. The thing about the best takes on Mary Shelley's <i>Frankenstein</i>, not least of all <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-frankenstein-1931.html">the 1931 Universal classic</a>, is that they recognize that the real "monster" is in fact Dr. Frankenstein himself, the creature's creator, and this film leans heavily in that direction with its depiction of Lisa. She eagerly starts killing people in order to build the perfect boyfriend, getting sucked into darkness as she's blinded by love, and Kathryn Newton completely steals the show playing her, starting the film as a dowdy, depressed dweeb but eventually developing a gothic fashion sense and, with it, a catty diva-like attitude while channeling a young Winona Ryder in both <i>Beetlejuice</i> and <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2013/05/review-heathers-1988.html">Heathers</a></i>. There were many places that this film could've gone, most of them involving Lisa becoming a full-bore villain while Taffy suddenly finds herself in her stepsister's path, with the creature either serving as Lisa's partner in crime from start to finish or perhaps slowly gaining a sense of morality as he becomes more "human" and realizing that Lisa is evil. All the while, the <i>Frankenstein</i> metaphor becomes one about somebody who'd do anything for love, including <i>that</i>, and loses herself in the process. And at times, it seemed to be going in that direction, especially as Taffy grows increasingly traumatized over the course of the film.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Unfortunately, whether it was the PG-13 rating or a desire to make Lisa more sympathetic (and Taffy less so), the film won't commit to the bit. Lisa's characterization does a near-total 180 in the third act as the film asks us to side with her as, at the very least, a sympathetic anti-villain with good intentions. Lisa should've been the bad guy that the film was building her up as, no ifs, ands, or buts -- a sympathetic and compelling one like Jennifer Check, but still somebody who crossed the line miles ago and never looked back. It would've given Liza Soberano, who plays Taffy and will probably be the breakout star of this film, more to do instead of making her a supporting player in Lisa's story who plays only a minor role in the third act. Instead, it felt like I was watching a whole new character entirely that just so happened to share Lisa's name and face. I highly suspect that there's a lot of alternate material here, either in earlier drafts of the screenplay or deleted scenes, because the sudden tonal shift in the third act feels like a product of a completely different movie.</p><p style="text-align: left;">What saved this film in the end were the style and the humor. Much like Karyn Kusama on <i>Jennifer's Body</i>, Zelda Williams imbues this film with a ton of gothic flair, Lisa's outfits being just the start of it, inspired by Tim Burton and, by extension, the German expressionism that he in turn drew from. The bright pink suburban house that Lisa and her family live in is almost cartoonish, and draws a sharp contrast to the world around it. The moment we're introduced to Carla Gugino as Lisa's stepmother, a hilariously over-the-top parody of an '80s suburban mom who needlessly antagonizes Lisa every chance she gets, and Joe Chrest as her spectacularly inattentive father who <i>looks</i> the part of a wholesome suburban dad but otherwise can't be bothered to look up from his newspaper, we see exactly the kind of people who'd happily live in a house like that. There are multiple animated sequences that liven up the film throughout, most notably the prologue/opening credits showing us the creature's backstory in life. The soundtrack is filled with great retro '80s needle drops, especially once the creature regains the use of his hands and can play the piano again. Cole Sprouse as the creature had no dialogue barring grunts, moans, and screams, but he still made for a compelling presence on screen as the other half of the film's central romance, proving that seven years on <i>Riverdale</i> was a waste of a lot of young actors' talents. This was Williams' first feature film, and if this is indicative of her skill behind the camera, I can see her going far. And most importantly, this movie is hysterical. The entire theater was laughing throughout, and I was right there with them. There are jokes about everything from "back massagers" to the creature's physical decay, and more broadly, its campy gothic tone is played far more for laughs than frights, most notably in one death scene that would be the most brutal in the film on the face of it but is instead one of the most hilarious scenes in it as the film shows us <i>just</i> enough to let us know exactly what happened and wince while still remaining PG-13. Cody's grasp of storytelling may have been shaky here, but her knack for getting me to laugh my ass off remains fully intact.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> should've had more care put into its screenplay, especially once act three comes around, but it's still a very funny and watchable movie that, much like <i>Jennifer's Body</i>, I can see enduring as a cult classic. If you're not into the Big Game, check it out.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-1127604902356829872024-02-08T09:56:00.000-08:002024-02-08T09:56:33.135-08:00Review: Don't Look Up (2021)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Don't Look Up</i> (2021)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjcwZjY3NjAtNzkxZS00NmFjLTg1OGYtODJmMThhY2UwMTc5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODE5NzE3OTE@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjcwZjY3NjAtNzkxZS00NmFjLTg1OGYtODJmMThhY2UwMTc5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODE5NzE3OTE@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Don't Look Up</i> is a movie that wants to be <i>Dr. Strangelove</i> for global warming, and whether or not it pulls it off depends on your tolerance for very heavy-handed satire. Adam McKay, the film's director and co-writer (together with former Bernie Sanders speechwriter/advisor David Sirota -- i.e. a man literally paid to write stump speeches for a politician) who had previously made <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/review-big-short-2015.html" style="font-style: italic;">The Big Short</a> and a whole bunch of 2000s Will Ferrell comedies, wasn't shy about the movie he was making. He said point-blank that he went out of his way to write the most heavy-handed, blunt-force metaphor for global warming he could possibly think of, a comet destroying Earth that we have the ability to deflect but for some reason aren't, and the result is a pure sadist show filled with unlikable people who you're waiting to see receive their comeuppance, while the only ones who get anything resembling a happy ending are the beleaguered scientists and bureaucrats who serve as mouthpieces for the writers.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I felt it more or less succeeded at doing that, but I also felt that it, almost accidentally, stumbled into something I've rarely seen: a Lovecraftian comedy, specifically one that still goes all-in on his brand of cosmic horror rather than soften it. The central conceit of many of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, that of humanity being small and meaningless in the grand scheme of a universe far bigger than them that doesn't care about any of their puny accomplishments, is one that's usually played for horror, most notably by Lovecraft himself and the many artists influenced by him. When that kind of material is given a lighthearted touch, it's usually in the context of stories that borrow the aesthetics of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (doomsday cults, grotesquely visceral monsters with lots of tentacles, alien gods with unpronounceable names) but give humanity the chance to effectively fight back. This movie takes the opposite track. It's a movie about a comet that's coming to hit Earth and destroy everything. It doesn't give a flying fuck about any of us; it's a comet, an inanimate ball of rock and ice randomly drifting through our solar system that just so happens to be on a collision course with Earth. The protagonists, the graduate student Kate Dibiasky who discovers the comet and her astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy who does the numbers and realizes that it's going to impact Earth, are framed as the kind of heroes Lovecraft would write, people who slowly but surely go mad from the revelation of just how meaningless their existence is in the face of looming extinction. In fact, the basic premise is not unlike that of Junji Ito's manga <i>Remina</i>, which plays a very similar scenario for some truly fucked-up horror, complete with both stories having satire of celebrity culture as a running theme.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But this movie takes that premise and, instead of using it to try and scare the viewer, uses it to mine the darkest possible laughs it can think of. Kate's breakdown on a talk show as she tries to warn the world about the comet goes memetic and is treated like Britney Spears' meltdown in the late '00s. Dr. Mindy's reaction is to dive head-first into wine, women, and song, exploiting his new status as a rock star scientist to have an affair with a morning show host and bask in the fame and adulation of the world because he knows, deep down, that anything else is pointless and he may as well enjoy his last few months on Earth. And most importantly, the film's main satirical thrust is that humanity probably <i>does</i> have the ability to deflect the comet and save itself, but is just too goddamn stupid and greedy to do so. The President is a vain, corrupt, bullying, media-obsessed idiot whose administration is rife with nepotism, cronyism, and graft (guess who was President when this movie was written), the "visionary geniuses" of the tech industry are more concerned with a mix of pie-in-the-sky utopianism and getting rich than in the actual, practical, day-to-day problems that most people face, and the media is chiefly concerned with celebrity gossip and other frivolous stories and buries serious issues that might hurt their ratings. Humanity as a whole doesn't go mad from the revelation of the comet, at least not at first, but that's because, as far as this movie is concerned, we're <i>already</i> living in a world gone mad.</p><p style="text-align: left;">These two angles -- McKay and Sirota's intended one of a satire of the world's (lack of) response to global warming, and a film that takes a lot of the tropes of cosmic horror and plays them for comedy -- feed into each other and produce a pitch-black satire reminiscent of an Armando Iannucci story, a good episode of <i>South Park</i>, or the background worldbuilding of a <i>Grand Theft Auto</i> game. This movie ain't subtle. The comet is a plain-as-day metaphor for the climate crisis that practically screams the message into your face, most notably when Dr. Mindy goes on a furious rant on a talk show that, barring the specific subject matter of the comet, may as well have come from the unshackled id of any climate scientist, meteorologist, or environmentalist who decided to one day say "fuck it" and let everyone know what they <i>really</i> think of all the bullshit they have to put up with. The entire 138-minute runtime of this movie is an escalating exercise in cringe comedy as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the underpaid civil servants and bureaucrats who take them and the crisis seriously find themselves stonewalled, tripped up, and belittled by the vapid, selfish, ignorant dumbasses who actually run the show. Its sense of humor is mean-spirited and often insulting, but it saves its bile for very specific and deserving targets while still affording enough humanity to its protagonists to make me actually care about them, especially as the film rolls towards its conclusion.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Make no mistake, though, this is a very <i>funny</i> metaphor for global warming, much of it sold by an excellent all-star cast. Meryl Streep plays President Janie Orlean as a combination of every terrible thing that's ever been said about Donald Trump and every terrible thing that's ever been said about Hillary Clinton (again, you can tell that a Bernie Sanders advisor co-wrote this), the kind of mediagenic, charismatic politician who looks good in front of the cameras but whose administration is a pit of slime. Streep is clearly relishing the chance to play someone who'd be an unrepentant villain if not for the fact that she's also a complete fucking moron. Mark Rylance plays the President's partner-in-crime Peter Isherwell as a mix of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs who gives off the sense that he's not just a greedy robber baron but someone who genuinely seems to believe his own bullshit, that his sci-fi scheme to save the day would not only work but elevate human civilization into a utopian golden age, and that he's spent too long marinating in the stew of hare-brained Silicon Valley techno-dreamers to think about any practical problems. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the talk show hosts Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer are playing clear parodies of Kelly Ripa and Al Roker, and perfectly capture everything obnoxious and saccharine about morning talk shows and daytime news. The supporting cast is a non-stop parade of both rising stars and "hey, it's that guy!" actors, including Jonah Hill as Janie's Jared Kushner-esque son/Chief of Staff who serves as a symbol of the White House's corruption, Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi as a pair of pop stars putting on a benefit concert who contribute a hilarious song to the soundtrack, Ron Perlman as a war hero with a few screws loose who leads the initial mission to try and deflect the comet, and Timothée Chalamet as a punkish slacker whose response to the comet is to get right with God. Finally Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Rob Morgan get the "straight man" roles as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the government scientist Dr. Oglethorpe, all of them offering up welcome reminders of why they're all considered some of the best actors of their respective generations (and, in Lawrence's case, reminding us why she was an A-lister before she did <i>Passengers</i>) as they have to navigate the sick, sad world around them in their long-shot effort to save it. Even here, though, they're not immune from the film's satirical barbs, each of them (especially Dr. Mindy) shown to not quite be as above-it-all as they assume they are.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It's so in-your-face with its politics and message that it risks feeling insufferable even if you agree with it. But me? I found it to be a hilarious, pitch-black, and frequently on-point satire that pulls no punches and manages to somehow combine big laughs with existential dread. I recommend giving it a watch.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-41253851649024714262024-01-27T09:39:00.000-08:002024-01-27T09:39:27.844-08:00Review: Piranha 3D (2010)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Piranha 3D</i> (2010)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTU3NDg2NTY4Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM0OTE3Mw@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="540" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTU3NDg2NTY4Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM0OTE3Mw@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">There's really no way to describe <i>Piranha 3D</i> as anything other than a guilty pleasure. A loose remake of the shameless 1978 <i>Jaws</i> ripoff <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-piranha-1978.html">Piranha</a></i>, it is an 88-minute parade of sleaze and excess that not only got the Eli Roth stamp of approval (he has a cameo as the host of a wet T-shirt contest) but was directed by one of his "Splat Pack" contemporaries, Alexandre Aja, and is filled with so much gore and nudity that merely having the Blu-ray in the same room as a child is enough to get you put on some kind of registry. In case you couldn't tell by the title, it was a 3D movie originally, and it throws that in your face constantly with all manner of objects jumping out at the screen. It's a movie where a man gets his dick bitten off, two piranha fight over it, and then the winner of that fight coughs up the tattered pieces of that dick right into your face. It knows exactly what it is, and like the spring breakers getting devoured on screen, it says "fuck it, YOLO" and delivers the most ridiculous, over-the-top version of itself it can possibly think of, this time without the constraints of budget or good taste that held back its '70s predecessor. It's a frankly superior film to the original, and the kind of splatterfest that never once takes itself seriously, and likely would never have worked if it even tried to. But work it does, and while its faults are plainly visible, the vibes here are just right for it to overcome them.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Moving the setting to the resort town of Lake Victoria, Arizona (a fictionalized version of Lake Havasu City where this was filmed), the film starts with an earthquake opening a fissure at the bottom of the town's namesake lake, where a horde of prehistoric piranha from a species thought extinct turn out to have survived, millennia of cannibalism and natural selection having turned them into the ultimate aquatic predators. Those piranha escape and become a threat to every living thing in the lake -- and unfortunately, it just so happens that Lake Victoria is a massive spring break destination whose beaches are currently awash in thousands upon thousands of debauched, drunken college kids and the gross, lecherous sleazeballs there to exploit that sea of fine, moist pussy.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And this movie's already turned me into one of them with the way I'm now talking. There's no (pardon the pun) beating around the bush here. The sex and nudity in this movie are copious and gratuitous, whether we're on the beach surrounded by women in various states of undress or on the boat of the softcore porn producer Derrick Jones. One of the highlights of the film is a lengthy, nude, underwater erotic dance between Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele that leaves nothing to the imagination and has no illusions about being anything other than the gleefully shameless exploitation it is. It's 2000s Ed Hardy/Von Dutch bro culture at its most lurid and trashy, and while the film is undoubtedly a parody of that culture where a lot of the entertainment comes from watching these idiots get slaughtered, it's the kind of parody that's chiefly interested in broad farce rather than deeper satire, jacking up the most extreme elements of it to their logical conclusion and letting them run wild from there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And you know what? I loved it. It was a version of that culture that had just enough self-awareness to feel like it was in on its own joke instead of serving it all up completely straight. The protagonists, tellingly, aren't douchebro jackasses and their airheaded eye candy girlfriends cut from that cloth, but people who have to put up with all that nonsense in their backyards because it makes them money, and are the only ones afforded much dignity once the piranha reach the beach. The sheriff Julie and her deputy Fallon, Julie's teenage son Jake and her little kids Zane and Laura, Jake's girlfriend Kelly, the scientists Novak, Paula, and Sam studying the earthquake, these characters are all treated mostly seriously even if they're all pretty two-dimensional. The main representative of the spring breakers, Derrick, is the most antagonistic human character in the film, somebody with no redeeming qualities who melts down and turns into a petty tyrant aboard his boat as everything starts to go wrong for him and his production. Others among that crowd wind up getting themselves and others killed with their own dumb decisions, whether it's refusing to listen to the warnings of impending doom, climbing over each other to get out of the water, flipping over a massive floating stage that wasn't designed to hold so many people, or stealing a boat and running over numerous people in an attempt to escape. The deleted scenes and unused storyboards get even more vicious. This feels like a movie that <i>hates</i> spring break culture and everything it represents, one that I can easily picture proving quite popular among locals in places that get lots of rowdy tourists, a graphic depiction of what they'd love to see happen one day.</p><p style="text-align: left;">"Graphic" is the operative word here, too. If the first half of this film is a parade of T&A, then the <i>second</i> half is devoted to watching all those choice cuts of meat get served up and torn to shreds. This is an absolute gorefest, and Alexandre Aja is a master of the craft. Everything you can picture piranha doing to somebody gets done, and probably some other stuff you never dreamed of. The big, brutal attack on the beach is one that this movie builds to for half its runtime, and when it arrives, it is one for the ages, a carnival of carnage that lasts for several minutes and keeps coming up with creative new ways to kill people. Boobs and blood are combined with reckless abandon, such as in the paragliding scene, a gag involving breast implants, and one highlight moment involving a high-tension wire. While the piranha themselves were created with CGI, the actual gore was almost entirely done practically by the KNB EFX Group, and it is the kind of gross shit that they've made their name with, a vividly detailed anatomy lesson as you get to see all the ways a human body can come apart. At times, it felt like the only thing keeping the film from an instant NC-17 rating was that the water was too clouded by blood (roughly 80,000 gallons of fake blood were used on set) to see the worst of it. Even though this movie isn't particularly scary and never really tries to be, the sheer scale of the bloodbath is harrowing in its own way, like watching a terrorist attack, accident, or other mass-casualty event and its aftermath. The film's darkly comedic tone was the only thing keeping it from turning outright grim, and it was not through lack of effort from Aja or the effects team.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The humans aren't the only ones who get torn up, either, as the protagonists give as good as they get. Ving Rhames as Fallon has a great scene where he goes to town on a swarm of piranha with a boat propeller, and Elisabeth Shue makes for a likable action heroine as Julie, one who manages to say a lot with just the look on her face and the tone of her voice, especially when she realizes how badly her son Jake fucked up in more ways than one. When they reunite, there's a sense that she's gonna fuckin' kill him for what he did long before she outright says it. Christopher Lloyd steals the show as the marine biologist on land, one whose only role is to deliver an infodump on the piranha but does it so well that he felt like he had a much larger role than he did. The actors playing the kids and the teenagers were mostly alright, but their section of the film is seriously livened up by the presence of Jerry O'Connell as Derrick, a parody of the infamous <i>Girls Gone Wild</i> founder Joe Francis. O'Connell plays him as a guy approaching middle age who peaked in high school and college and has spent the rest of his life reliving and trying to recapture his youth, an absolute scumbag who doesn't seem to know or care about the definitions of words like "consent" or "age of consent". He was like a more comedic version of Wayne in <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2022/03/review-x-2022.html">X</a></i>, a pervert who represents everything wrong with "adult entertainment", but whereas that film was a gritty and grounded one about how mainstream beauty standards and the porn industry fetishize youth and objectify people, this is a Grand Guignol orgy of mayhem where depicting him as a bastard who constantly causes problems throughout the film chiefly means setting him up to die painfully in a way designed to make the crowd roar.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It was that tone that really carried this movie through rough spots that would've sank other, more serious films. There's a minor character, Derrick's cameraman/boat pilot Andrew, who disappears without explanation, implied to have been killed but his death scene cut from the film (it appears in the deleted scenes). The actors are good, but barring Derrick, their characters are all pretty shallow archetypes. Some of the CGI, especially during Richard Dreyfuss' cameo/death in the opening scene, could be pretty dire. I'm not surprised to learn that work on the CGI for this was, by all accounts, an absolute shitshow to the point that Aja threatened to have his name taken off the credits unless Dimension Films ponied up some more money to finish the effects work. It may be parodying the Four Loko spring break culture of the time, but it also feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too with how much the first half lingers on nudity. Christopher Lloyd really should've been in it more. But I was able to put all of that aside for one simple reason: I was just having too much goddamn fucking fun watching this.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">This is a "hell yeah!" movie, one you throw on when your friends are over, there are no kids around, and you just wanna spend an hour and a half goofing off and having a blast with a sick, mean-spirited, yet incredibly fun horror/comedy.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-19384512318096485142024-01-20T14:20:00.000-08:002024-01-20T14:20:34.354-08:00Review: Jennifer's Body (2009)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Jennifer's Body</i> (2009)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use (unrated version reviewed)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTMxNzYwMjc1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDI3MDE3Mg@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="541" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTMxNzYwMjc1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDI3MDE3Mg@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="271" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">At this stage, pointing out that critics and moviegoers in 2009 were completely wrong about <i>Jennifer's Body</i> is about as much of a hot take as saying that they were completely wrong about <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-thing-1982.html">The Thing</a></i> back in 1982. The story of how 20th Century Fox's short-lived youth-focused genre label Fox Atomic screwed over this movie's marketing because they had no idea what to do with it, and how their strategy of selling a very queer, very feminist horror-comedy as trashy softcore erotica aimed at the Spike TV fratbro set (as seen with the poster above) predictably backfired, is <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/megan-fox-karyn-kusama-talk-jennifers-body-at-beyond-fest.html">a long and sordid one</a> that doesn't bear much repeating at this point. It's a movie that bombed badly when it came out and did lasting damage to the careers of both its lead actress Megan Fox and its screenwriter Diablo Cody, but went on to build its reputation on home video and streaming such that it's now talked about as one of the greatest horror movies of its time, and one of the greatest teen horror movies ever made. <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i>, a new horror-comedy written by Cody that comes out next month, is currently being explicitly marketed as "from Diablo Cody, acclaimed writer of <i>Jennifer's Body</i>," whereas if it had been made ten years ago, the trailers would not have even dared to mention her name.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I was one of the people who <i>did</i> see it when it came out, and even back then, I recall enjoying it and wondering why so much hatred was being hurled at a movie that was, at worst, pretty decent. Watching it again now, in 2024? It's a movie that it feels like it predicted every anxiety of young Americans, and especially teenage girls and young women, in the fifteen years to come, an incredibly smart, dark, gothic, stylish, and twisted movie whose comedic streak does little to take away from its scares and which is buoyed by a standout performance from Amanda Seyfried. Yes, it has its flaws. The jokes about Cody's too-cool-for-school dialogue at times becoming downright cringeworthy have been long since run into the ground (even if I think the problem is a bit overstated), and Fox was always a fairly limited actress even if this movie plays to her strengths. But on the whole, its problems, while real, are minor and not debilitating, and I had a blast watching it as both a straightforward teen fright flick and as a movie with more on its mind.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The plot is broadly similar to <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/08/review-ginger-snaps-2000.html">Ginger Snaps</a></i>, a film with which this makes a great double feature, on a bigger Hollywood budget. Two teenage girls, Jennifer Check and Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, in the small podunk town of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota have been best friends since childhood, but while Jennifer has grown up into a beautiful cheerleader and the most popular girl in school, Needy has grown up into a dorky outsider who it seems is only still friends with Jennifer because they've <i>always</i> been friends (and perhaps... something more). One night, while heading down to a local bar to see an emo band called Low Shoulder, a fire breaks out and kills scores of people, with Needy and Jennifer escaping and Jennifer accepting an offer from the band to head home in their totally sweet, not-at-all-creepy van. Later that night, Jennifer comes to Needy's house looking like a bloody mess, eating rotisserie chicken straight out of her fridge, vomiting up black bile, and attacking her... only for her to suddenly come to school the next day looking no worse for wear and, if anything, both more beautiful than ever and an even bigger asshole than she was before. Needy suspects that something is up, and as it turns out, she's right: that night after the concert fire, Low Shoulder took the classic route to rock & roll superstardom and sacrificed Jennifer to Satan. Unfortunately, their victim wasn't a virgin like they believed she was, and so Jennifer came back from the dead possessed by a succubus who seduces her male classmates before eating them.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Both then and now, most of the discourse around this film has concerned its literal poster girl, Megan Fox. Having seen her in quite a few movies over the years, I've come to have a mixed opinion of Fox's acting. Hollywood did do her dirty for bluntly calling out the problems she encountered working in the film industry as an "it girl", but at the same time, she doesn't have much range, and even without the backlash, her career trajectory likely would've been less Margot Robbie or Scarlett Johansson than Jessica Alba (minus the business career that made her far more money than she ever did as an actress) or Bo Derek: a sex symbol whose roles would've slowly but surely dried up once she turned 30. However, while she is a fairly limited instrument as an actor, she isn't wholly untalented, and this film makes the absolute best use of those talents. It doesn't really ask much of her except to play a villainous version of her stock screen persona, a gorgeous, kinda haughty young woman who uses her body to get ahead in (un)life, and occasionally mug for the camera, and she absolutely nails it. Jennifer is a creative twist on the standard possession movie plot, one where the demonic shift in the possession victim's personality manifests in the form of her turning into a grotesque caricature of a high school "queen bee" like Regina George in <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/07/review-mean-girls-2004.html">Mean Girls</a></i>, an utter shitheel who laughs at the suffering of her classmates even as they grieve the deaths of their friends. She may literally eat teenage boys alive, but the actions of hers that best reveal the depths of her monstrosity are those that feel all too human. Fox owns the part and makes it her own, such that I'm not surprised at how many of her scenes in this have been immortalized as gifs on Tumblr and clips on TikTok.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And it was watching the effects of that monstrosity flow through the lives of the people who knew Jennifer's victims that something clicked. One of the big things that retrospective analyses of this movie have focused on is its treatment of rape culture, especially as represented in Nikolai Wolf, the frontman of Low Shoulder. But watching the film again in 2024, I noticed something else. It's the feeling of helplessness that slowly but surely comes over the school, with everybody growing numb and fatigued to tragedy as the "cannibal serial killer" claims more victims right on the heels of the massive concert disaster while the adults are unable to stop any of it -- everyone, that is, except the one who treats it as one big joke and relishes in it like a troll. This may have been a movie made in 2009 about children of the 2000s, but even with its extremely MySpace-era emo aesthetics, it felt like a movie about children of the 2010s raised in a world of rampant mass shootings, religious extremism, resurgent bigotry, raging sexism, shrinking economic opportunity, and countless other social ills while nobody seemed to know how to fix it. Jennifer may be an iconic, catty, and sexy villain who gets many (though not all) of the best lines and scenes, but if you ask me, it's Needy, the one who finally says "no" and resolves to do what nobody else will no matter what it costs her, who's the reason this movie endures. Watching her fight Jennifer was like watching somebody throw down with every wiseass troll who thinks that school shootings, beheading videos, and tiki torch rallies are awesome as their sick way of telling the world that it's "cringe" to care about anything. Yes, it's clear watching this that Cody doesn't really know how teenagers speak, but she managed to capture how they <i>think</i> remarkably well.</p><p style="text-align: left;">When it came to Needy, this movie needed a world-class actress, and fortunately, it found one in Amanda Seyfried. The film practically acknowledges the ridiculousness of trying to frame her as "unattractive", but she manages to pull it off anyway. Watching the intro flashing forward to her locked up in a psychiatric hospital (letting us know early on that this is not going to end well), then jumping back to two months prior when we see her as a meek, bespectacled nerd looking longingly at a still-living Jennifer during a pep rally to the point that one of her classmates thinks she's a closeted lesbian (which, as we later see, may very well be the case), it's hard to believe that they're the same person, but Seyfried manages to make Needy's transformation from a cute girl next door who looks awkward in "alternative" clothes when heading to the concert to a hardened, shell-shocked survivor feel genuine. With Jennifer serving mainly as a monster and a symbol more than a character after she dies and comes back, it's largely on Needy to carry the film's emotional core, her heartbreak at watching one of her closest friendships turn toxic, and I bought every minute of it. This, as much as <i>Mamma Mia!</i>, was the movie that should've indicated that Seyfried was going places as a gifted and genuinely fearless actress, and I'm not surprised that her career would ultimately outlast the hype she first received in her youth.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Most of this film's comedy comes from its supporting cast, a who's who of both contemporary teen stars and older comedy actors. J. K. Simmons plays the science teacher Mr. Wroblewski about as far from his iconic J. Jonah Jameson performance as he can but still managed to make his dry, stern authority figure amusing. The clique of goth kids led by Kyle Gallner's Colin is a hilarious parody of the "edgy" youth counterculture of the era, a group of kids whose obsession with the aesthetics of death and misery seemingly makes them better suited than anyone else to live in the hostile world Jennifer creates with her murders, only for it to create some serious blind spots not just in their interactions with Jennifer but also in their sense of good taste. In the unrated cut that I watched, Bill Fagerbakke steals the show playing the father of one of Jennifer's victims, utterly devouring the one scene he's in where he mourns his son's death and swears vengeance on his killer in one of the most creatively graphic ways I've ever heard -- all while using the same voice he uses when playing Patrick Star on <i>SpongeBob SquarePants</i>. Johnny Simmons (no relation to J. K.) makes for a likable romantic partner to Needy as her boyfriend Chip, enough to make up for a fairly underwritten part, less like a character and more like a gender-flipped version of the stock "girlfriend" characters you see in movies with male heroes. Chip and Needy get what may just be the cutest and most awkward sex scene I've ever watched, one where neither of them really knows what they're doing but each of them wants to make sure that the other is having as much fun doing it as they are. There's definitely a sense of idealization in his character, like Cody was writing the kind of boyfriend she wished she had in high school.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, we come to Adam Brody as Nikolai, the film's secondary villain and the man responsible for everything that goes wrong. In hindsight, the idea of a sappy emo musician who, behind the scenes, is as much a depraved rock star as any classic metal god, which originally came off as a joke, is one that turned out to be shockingly prescient of what a lot of Warped Tour emo, pop-punk, and scene bands were actually like behind the scenes. Not only do he and his band kill Jennifer after they're initially presented as "merely" rapists (and even after, the metaphors aren't exactly subtle), he ruthlessly exploits the aftermath of the concert fire to ever-greater heights of fame and fortune, implicitly the work of the Devil holding up his end of the bargain, all while casually insulting the town where it happened and, by extension, the memories of the victims. Low Shoulder's hit song "Through the Trees" is heard throughout the film to the point where it feels like it's taunting Needy, the one person who knows the truth about their "heroism" during the fire, how they in fact left dozens of people to die instead of trying to save them and how it's implied that the fire was, in fact, their fault (whether it was negligence or malice, it's never stated). Jennifer may have been evil, but the things that had been done to her to turn her into a monster made her a tragic villain nonetheless. I felt no such pity for Nikolai, with Brody playing him as a swaggering and spiteful bastard who I wanted to see suffer.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Karyn Kusama's direction, when paired with the visual design and the 2000s aesthetics dripping off this film, gives it a tone that I could perhaps best describe as gothic. Not just in the fashion sense of certain characters, but also in the heightened, old-school approach it takes to staging many of its scenes. It felt like she had been very informed by classic horror in a manner almost akin to Tim Burton at times, albeit with his brand of whimsy swapped out for black comedy. This is an incredibly moody film even in its funnier moments, serving to underline the grim nature of a lot of the humor here and lend it a dark edge. It feels sexy without feeling sleazy, perhaps best evidenced by the famous lesbian kiss scene, which puts the focus squarely on the characters' faces and plays the situation as something disturbing. Yes, you're watching Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried passionately making out for a good solid minute or so, but you're also watching Jennifer manipulate Needy and exploit the feelings she has for her in order to torment her that much further. At every step of the way, this is a film that knows what it's doing, and it does it well.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It does have its minor annoyances, but this is still a movie that deserved the reevaluation it's received, and one that stands the test of time as a classic of teen horror, queer horror, and feminist horror even if its fashions and soundtrack are carbon-dated to 2009.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-5453032561557859972024-01-16T08:04:00.000-08:002024-01-17T18:50:11.856-08:00Review: Mean Girls (2024)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Mean Girls</i> (2024)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for strong language, sexual material, and teen drinking</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDExMGMyN2QtYjRkZC00Yzk1LTkzMDktMTliZTI5NjQ0NTNkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTEyMjM2NDc2._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="583" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDExMGMyN2QtYjRkZC00Yzk1LTkzMDktMTliZTI5NjQ0NTNkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTEyMjM2NDc2._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="292" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">The new film in theaters titled <i>Mean Girls</i> is a movie with an identity crisis. Is it a remake? A musical? Yes. Specifically, it's an adaptation of the 2018 Broadway musical that was itself adapted from <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/07/review-mean-girls-2004.html">the 2004 teen comedy classic</a> just in time for its 20th anniversary, with Tina Fey, writer of both the original film and the book for the musical, returning to not only write the screenplay for this but also reprise her role as Miss Norbury. It's a film that tries to do two things at once, both faithfully adapt the musical and offer a straightforward remake of the movie, and while it does both pretty well, it often felt at war with itself in the process, like pieces of two good movies awkwardly thrown into the same bag. Don't get me wrong, I liked this movie. The musical numbers were extremely fun, and the cast, particularly Reneé Rapp as Regina (reprising her role from Broadway) and Auli'i Cravalho as Janis, was awesome. Whether you're a fan of the original or not, I still recommend giving this a go. (It's certainly better than <i>Mean Girls 2</i>.) But as I watched it, whenever it wasn't focused on the musical numbers, I found myself nodding my head thinking "y'know, the original is still such a great movie."</p><p style="text-align: left;">The plot is virtually identical to the original, with no major adjustments. The beautiful but naive new girl Cady, raised in Africa (specified in this version as Kenya) by her zoologist parents, gets caught up with a clique of popular girls called the Plastics comprised of the queen bee Regina, her neurotic second-in-command Gretchen, and the airhead Karen. After Regina steals the boy she's interested in, Cady, with help from the outcasts Janis and Damian, sets out to destroy Regina's life and popularity, but turns into a bitchy brat along the way. There's more focus on social media now, there are references to Spotify, Janis is now explicitly stated to be a lesbian after it was merely implied in the original (Regina said she was, but she was presented as an unreliable narrator), and a lot of the edgier jokes from the original (including the subplot of the coach sleeping with a student) are gone, but outside the singing, this is 90% the same movie.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And that right there is the biggest problem it has. The music is the entire reason the Broadway show and, by extension, this movie exist given how closely they hew to the original film's story. And yet, this film removed about half the songs from the Broadway show's soundtrack and shortened several others, ostensibly to make the film feel less "stagey" and keep a more consistent tone. It was a decision that did not serve the film well at all, as it meant that long stretches went by with no musical numbers, leaving only a remake of a better film to stand largely on its own. It's a competent remake, don't get me wrong, albeit one that feels sanitized compared to the original. Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Auli'i Cravalho, and Jaquel Spivey were all very charismatic and did great impressions of Rachel McAdams, Lindsay Lohan, Lizzy Caplan, and Daniel Franzese, while Bebe Wood added a nice touch of neuroticism to her take on Gretchen and Avantika Vandanapu had a lot of fun playing up Karen's sex appeal to make her not just an idiot, but an outright bimbo. I would not be surprised to see a lot of this movie's teenage cast go on to bigger and better things in the future, just as the stars of the original did.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But it's largely just that: impressions. There's nothing here that really adds to anything. Social media is heavily referenced and featured throughout in a way that it wasn't in the original, but in such a manner that you can tell that Tina Fey is now in her fifties. What's worse, while classic scenes and quotes are faithfully replicated, the comic timing just felt off. I laughed pretty consistently throughout, but not as much as I did watching the original. I'm not normally the kind of person who insists that every movie needs to justify its existence, but at times, this movie treads close to Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of <i>Psycho</i> in how it approaches the source material. The trailers may have seemed almost ashamed of admitting that this was a musical, but sitting down to watch it, they turned out to be pretty indicative of how the movie itself approached its changes from the source material.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The one big difference, and the one thing that kept this movie from getting a 2 out of 5 (and honestly, it was close), was the musical numbers. While many of them have been cut, the ones they kept were still extremely enjoyable, and a lot of it came down, once again, to the cast. Rapp knows these songs like the back of her hand, and every time she got the chance to sing, it was like watching a great concert performance or music video by a pop star at the top of her game. Karen and Gretchen each only get one big musical number (not counting the Plastics' ensemble performance at the Christmas show), but Wood and Vandanapu each stole the show during them, such that I wish the film kept in more of the songs they had in the Broadway show. Cravalho and Spivey were exactly how I pictured Janis and Damian if they burst into song in the middle of the original movie, with Cravalho in particular having a very pop-punk edge to her songs while Spivey gets one of the funniest "new" songs in the film in the form of a cover of the <i>iCarly</i> theme song that must be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, where the music was concerned, the main weak link in the cast was a big one. Don't get me wrong, Angourie Rice is a good actress who plays Cady well when she doesn't have to sing, and in a straightforward remake of <i>Mean Girls</i> she would've made for a great Cady. But as much as they may have downplayed the songs, this is still a musical, and as a singer... well, she's a good actress. I would not be surprised to hear that the real reason they cut so much of the music from this musical is because they heard Rice's singing and realized that she wouldn't be able to carry a musical. Rice reminds me here of Gerard Butler in <i>The Phantom of the Opera</i> or Pierce Brosnan in <i>Mamma Mia!</i>, an otherwise talented actor who probably shouldn't do musicals.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">This musical adaptation of <i>Mean Girls</i> exists very much in the shadow of the original film. For better or worse, the most I could say about it is that it's light, harmless fluff that doesn't overstay its welcome and whose good moments are very enjoyable. Come for some great songs, then go home and rewatch the original.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-9203947182662432212024-01-08T15:25:00.000-08:002024-01-08T15:25:33.608-08:00Review: Cloverfield (2008)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Cloverfield</i> (2008)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for violence, terror and disturbing images</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZDNhNDJlNDktZDI4OC00OTE3LWI2M2UtOThkNTFkNjBjYzRmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTA4NzY1MzY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="535" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZDNhNDJlNDktZDI4OC00OTE3LWI2M2UtOThkNTFkNjBjYzRmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTA4NzY1MzY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="268" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Sixteen years after it premiered, to the month and almost to the day, I decided to rewatch <i>Cloverfield</i> in a very different context to that in which I first saw it. When it premiered, it did so at the climax of a hype campaign in which the spectacular and chaotic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcckU9Yi7mc">first trailer</a>, attached to the 2007 <i>Transformers</i> movie, didn't even reveal the film's title, just a release date and the fact that J. J. Abrams was producing it. Six months of speculation, fueled by a complex alternate reality game filled with Easter eggs, clues, and a backstory involving a Japanese corporation's deep-sea drilling activities, left audiences buzzing as to what it might be about. People speculated that it was a new American <i>Godzilla</i> remake, a <i>Voltron</i> adaptation, a spinoff of Abrams' hit sci-fi show <i>Lost</i>, or even an H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. The first one turned out to be the closest to the truth, in that, while it didn't feature the Big G himself, it was still a kaiju movie cut from a very similar cloth, one that used the idea of a giant monster attacking a city to comment on a recent tragedy in a manner I've always found fascinating long after I saw it. It was a hit, big enough to spawn two spinoffs (<a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/03/review-10-cloverfield-lane-2016.html">one of which</a> was a good movie in its own right, the other... not so much), and people still talk about doing a proper sequel to this day.</p><p style="text-align: left;">All of that, of course, was peripheral to the film itself. Watching it again in 2024, I had only vague memories of its viral marketing campaign, most of which was hosted on long-forgotten websites (some of which are now defunct) and very little of which is actually referenced in the movie unless you know what you're looking for. The question of whether or not the movie actually held up on its own merits as a movie was the important one this time, not whether it answered questions about the Tagruato corporation or what's really in the Slusho! beverages they sell. And honestly, if it wasn't a good movie all along, even without Abrams' "mystery box" marketing, I don't think we'd still be talking about it today. Make no mistake, there are elements that don't hold up today, especially the slow first twenty minutes and anything involving T. J. Miller's character, and not just because of his real-life scandals. But those are mostly fluff on an otherwise very well-made film, one that takes a monster movie and puts viewers in the shoes of the people on the ground running like hell from the monster. Much as <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-godzilla-1954.html">the original 1954 <i>Godzilla</i> movie</a> was the kind of movie that could only have been made by Japanese filmmakers after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is the kind of movie that could only have been made by American filmmakers after 9/11, one that lifts a lot of its visual shorthand from the attacks to depict a kaiju rampage as 9/11 on steroids. It's a movie that starts slow but immediately starts ratcheting up the tension once the mayhem starts and only rarely lets up, one whose special effects and thrills are still spectacular years later despite a fairly low budget. In the pantheon of kaiju movies, <i>Cloverfield</i> still holds up as not only one of the best made outside Japan, but one that matches and rivals some of its inspirations.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The initial hook of this movie is that it's a found-footage take on <i>Godzilla</i>, one where a giant monster attack is shown from street-level through the eyes, and specifically the video camera, of somebody running for his life. Here, that person is Hud Platt, a guy whose first name (as in, "heads-up display") says it all: he's less a character than he is the viewer's avatar filming the real main characters. Those guys are the brothers Rob and Jason Hawkins who Hud is friends with, Jason's fiancé Lily Ford, Rob's estranged girlfriend Beth McIntyre, and Marlena Diamond, an actress who Hud has a crush on. The film starts with all of them at a going-away party at Rob's apartment in Manhattan to celebrate Rob getting a promotion that will see him move to Japan, one where Rob and Beth's relationship drama threatens to ruin it before something far bigger comes along to do that: a sudden earthquake, followed by an explosion in Lower Manhattan caused by some<i>thing</i> that's come ashore from the ocean and is big enough to throw the head of the Statue of Liberty roughly a mile. As the city plunges into chaos, Rob, his life shattered, vows to do the one thing he possibly can for himself: find Beth.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The first twenty minutes at times were largely an exercise in watching a group of rich twentysomethings talk and argue about their frivolous issues. In the context of the broader film, especially with its many, many 9/11 allusions and how it developed these characters later on, it worked to set the mood, that these were not heroes but a group of ordinary people whose lives are suddenly upended by tragedy and horror. As I was watching those first twenty minutes, however, I came to find the characters grating, not least of all Hud. He's your stock 2000s bro-comedy goofball and the film's main source of comic relief, and I quickly grew to despise him. A lot of the first act is built around his awkward attempts to hit on Marlena and his spreading stories to the rest of the party about Rob and Beth's sex life, the latter of which causes no shortage of problems. The other characters all get room to grow as the film goes on, but Hud remains the same obnoxious dick that he was in the beginning, such that some of my favorite moments in the film were when the other characters told him to cool it after his jokes got too much even for them. T. J. Miller may have been playing exactly the character he was told to, and he may have done it well, but the film as a whole didn't need an annoying asshole as the cameraman constantly interjecting. Hud should've been somebody who gets killed off to raise the stakes, let us know that things are serious, and give us a bit of catharsis after all the problems he caused for Rob at the beginning of the film, while the camera is instead carried by either a flat non-entity who doesn't act so annoying or one of the other characters.</p><p style="text-align: left;">(If I may indulge in fanfic for a bit here, there's a version of this movie in my head where Marlena, the outsider to the main friend group, serves as the camerawoman and basically swaps roles with Hud. What's more, she would have had her own secrets that would've tied into the ARG viral marketing, creating an aura of mystery around her and the sense that she can't be trusted -- and since she's the one with the camera, the question of whether or not we're dealing with an unreliable narrator would've come up. Even without that subplot, though, I still think she would've made a better cameraperson than Hud, if only because she was less annoying.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">Once the monster attack begins, however, everything not involving Hud is gold. The actual monster is a beast, and while the film loves to keep it in the dark for long stretches, its presence is never not felt once it shows up. The <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-godzilla-2014.html">2014 American <i>Godzilla</i> remake</a> tried to do something similar in showing us its monsters only sparingly, but there's a difference between having their presence felt even when they're not actually on screen and having them appear so little that you start to forget you're watching a <i>Godzilla</i> movie. Here, while most scenes, especially early on, give us only brief glimpses of "Clover" (as the production team called the monster) as it hides amidst New York's skyscrapers, the viewers, by way of the characters and their video camera, are never not in a situation where they can't notice its presence, whether they're escaping from plumes of smoke and debris when it topples the Woolworth Building, scrambling to get off the Brooklyn Bridge before it tears it in half, hiding in the subways and encountering its nasty offspring, crawling through a skyscraper that it's partly toppled over onto another one, or wandering through trashed city streets and hastily-constructed emergency service tents in scenes lifted straight out of post-9/11 news reports from Lower Manhattan. Reeves shot the action incredibly well, in a way that constantly had me on the edge of my seat afraid for the main characters' lives and, because the found-footage perspective put me right in there with them, even my own life for a bit. (The <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/12/review-godzilla-minus-one-2023.html">recent Japanese <i>Godzilla</i> movies</a> definitely feel influenced by this film in how they approach showing the monster from a street-level perspective.) The shaky cam may have become a meme after the movie came out, but it's actually not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, used in exactly the right ways with the film knowing when to have the camera held steady to give us a good look and when to use it to convey the panic that the main characters are facing. The look for the monster that Reeves and the film's effects team came up with is also a unique and creative one, especially once we finally see it in full view, in all its glory, towards the end. When we see the military fight Clover, it feels like a struggle that they're losing, and I completely bought that this thing was able to stomp them the way it did. This is a disaster movie played not as an action flick, but as a horror movie, and it's an approach I'm surprised more disaster movies haven't taken.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The cast was comprised largely of unknowns and TV actors, quite a few of whom have gone on to bigger and better things since, and I'm not surprised given how good they were. Michael Stahl-David was the centerpiece as Rob, a man whose seemingly stupid decision to go back into the city starts to make a surprising amount of sense once you see the grief that's come over him over everything he's lost by the end of the first act of the movie. He's a man whose old concerns with work and moving now seem like nothing in the face of an eldritch abomination like Clover that took almost everything from him, and who now only cares about making things right with Beth, the love of his life, the one thing he has left. He's almost a Lovecraftian protagonist, somebody who loses it in the face of unspeakable horrors from beyond, albeit one whose spiral into madness is less overt than you normally see in explicitly Lovecraftian works. Jessica Lucas, Mike Vogel, Lizzy Caplan, and Odette Annable (credited here by her maiden name Odette Yustman) all made for good sidekicks to Rob as Lily, Jason, Marlena, and Beth, all of them scared out of their minds as they're trapped on an island with a monster and nowhere to run, even if I thought that Caplan unfortunately got short shrift in the film despite having a bit more depth to her character than she let on. (See: my proposed story idea above.) This was the kind of monster movie that needed interesting, well-rounded, and well-acted human characters to anchor it, and it had them in spades.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Cloverfield</i> wasn't just a fluke of viral marketing, but a legitimately outstanding monster movie even on its own merits, one that knows when to cultivate a veil of mystery and when to drop that veil and let loose with an all-American take on classic kaiju mayhem. Even sixteen years, two excellent Japanese <i>Godzilla</i> movies, and one MonsterVerse later, it still holds up.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-56593805930029727762024-01-06T16:11:00.000-08:002024-03-28T05:39:47.446-07:00Review: Night Swim (2024)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Night Swim</i> (2024)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for terror, some violent content and language</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTFlZWVlNDctZDBiMS00MGY1LTk3MjUtNWUzZjY5NGZkM2M1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjY5ODI4NDk@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="505" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTFlZWVlNDctZDBiMS00MGY1LTk3MjUtNWUzZjY5NGZkM2M1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjY5ODI4NDk@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="253" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 2 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Night Swim</i> is the quintessential "fuck you, it's January" movie. Hollywood loves to ring in the new year by dumping into theaters the garbage they had no faith in at any other time of the year, because January is when kids are in school, theaters in half the country can get shut down by blizzards, there aren't many holidays offering extended three-week weekends (save for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which isn't universally celebrated as a day off), and prestige films given limited release in the fall are expanding their theatrical runs in anticipation of the Oscars. And lately, a tradition has been to give the first weekend of the new year over to a low-budget horror movie. While Blumhouse struck rare gold last year with <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/01/review-m3gan-2023.html">M3GAN</a></i>, a sci-fi horror film that actually turned out to be far better than its release date suggested it would be, this year January returned to form with <i>Night Swim</i>, a ho-hum ghost story adapted from a 2014 short film where the worst thing about it is that it's not <i>completely</i> wretched. There were seeds of a good movie buried in here, with all-around solid acting and production values, some effective sequences, some cool cinematography, and a nifty central conceit behind its evil pool, and there was a brief moment when it finally started to get good. Unfortunately, as with many movies that were adapted from short films, there's not enough to carry it, resting on the most generic haunted house story possible (but with a haunted <i>pool</i> this time!) to stretch a four-minute short to feature length. It's not the worst January horror film ever made, or even in the Bottom Three (I assure you, the competition is <i>stiff</i>), but it's otherwise completely generic, disposable, and at times unintentionally funny #content that would've been thrown into the wasteland of the direct-to-VOD/streaming market if not for January.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Stop me if you've heard this one: a family called the Wallers, comprised of the father Ray, the mother Eve, the teenage daughter Izzy, and the adolescent son Elliot, has moved into a big, luxurious house whose price is too good to be true, only for them to soon learn <i>why</i> it was so cheap. Namely, it's haunted. Or rather, the swimming pool is. And much like every poor sucker who's ever lived in the Amityville house, the mother Eve and the kids Izzy and Elliot start experiencing supernatural forces when they come in contact with the pool, while the father Ray, a former Milwaukee Brewers player whose baseball career was tragically cut short by multiple sclerosis, sees his illness miraculously cured and starts behaving in increasingly erratic fashion.</p><p style="text-align: left;">If you've ever seen a movie about a family stuck in a haunted house, you've seen this movie. Virtually every plot beat was visible from a mile away, from each family member having their own encounter with the supernatural to the mother doing research on the pool's dark history to somebody getting possessed by the spirit causing all of this. There are random plot threads about the Wallers' neighbors perhaps knowing more about what's happening than they let on, and Izzy's hunky swimmer love interest Ronin being a devout Christian, but the film does nothing with them. Every single plot point here is standard haunted house movie boilerplate, like writer/director Bryce McGuire had a cool idea for a cool scene that he turned into a cool short but never thought about how to turn it into a 90-minute movie until Jason Blum and James Wan decided to give him a lot of money to do just that. The worst part is, once we find out what's actually going on with the haunted pool, a glimpse at a far more interesting movie is had, one focused on Ray as he grapples with how his illness destroyed his life and how whatever's in the pool seems to have given him a second chance -- but one that comes at a terrible cost. As it stood, however, while Wyatt Russell played his stock Horror Dad character well, he never had much of a chance to do anything more beyond play a stock Horror Dad, nor did anybody else in the cast have the opportunity to play more than the stock Horror Mom, Horror Teen, and Horror Kid. The film wanted me to care about the Wallers as a family, but they were such a thinly-written family that, even when they were in peril, the Eight Deadly Words were ringing in my head: I don't care what happens to these people.</p><p style="text-align: left;">(I will, however, give the film points for having a sense of humor enough to have Izzy's high school be named after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Harold_Holt">Harold Holt</a>, an Australian Prime Minister who infamously disappeared when he went out for a swim on the beach.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">The scares, too, don't really do much to excel. Using a swimming pool as a setting gave some fun opportunities for cool aquatic cinematography that the film readily took advantage of, meaning that, at the very least, this was a pretty nice-looking film. Any sense of originality stopped there, however, as what followed were all the scares you've seen in a dozen other haunted house movies: jump scares ahoy, characters seeing things that aren't there, you name it, all of it done in ways that have been done better before. Characters make stupid decisions constantly, especially the young son Elliot, and while I could at first justify it by saying that at least it was a dumb kid acting stupid around the pool, by the end he really should've known better than to even think about doing what he did. The teenage daughter Izzy had no real purpose beyond recreating the scene from the short film, because that featured a young woman who looked good in a bikini, which meant the movie had to have someone who fit that description. The design of the ghost is a bloated, half-rotted corpse that probably sounded good on paper, but its execution in the movie is almost laughable, leaving a lot to be desired and not coming across as scary in the slightest.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Night Swim</i> isn't a movie I'd personally push into the pool, but if somebody did, I'd probably have a good laugh at its expense. It's competent, but beyond the idea of a haunted pool, everything about it is the sort of thing that's been done better before, and worst of all, I can easily see how a better movie could've been made out of the same material. I wouldn't even bother waiting for Netflix.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-17062011907914611702023-12-30T07:58:00.000-08:002023-12-30T07:58:15.431-08:00Review: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Puss in Boots: The Last Wish</i> (2022)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG for action/violence, rude humor/language, and some scary moments</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjMyMDBjMGUtNDUzZi00N2MwLTg1MjItZTk2MDE1OTZmNTYxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQ5NjA0NDM0._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="527" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjMyMDBjMGUtNDUzZi00N2MwLTg1MjItZTk2MDE1OTZmNTYxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQ5NjA0NDM0._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="264" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 5 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Puss in Boots: The Last Wish</i> is a movie I missed last year, which made it kind of annoying to hear so many people praising it to the heavens as one of the best animated films in years, not least of all because I'm the kind of guy who does not like spoilers. Flying down to Florida just in time to share a house with three little kids over Christmas break gave me the perfect opportunity to check it out, and the only thing I'm disappointed about is not seeing it sooner. It doesn't reinvent the wheel or have any pretensions of being a particularly revelatory movie, but it's still an outstandingly well-put-together one in everything from the animation to the characters to the humor to the mayhem. Putting it side-by-side with <i>Shrek</i>, the film that put DreamWorks Animation in the spotlight and which this one is a sequel to a spinoff of, shows just how much the studio has evolved in the twenty-plus years since then, going from mischievous, Looney Tunes-esque pop culture spoofs with barbs aimed directly at Disney to a kind of family-friendly, character-driven adventure comedy that's clearly inspired by the Mouse but still has enough unique style and dramatic edge to stand out. I don't really have much to add to the conversation on this one except to say that it's easily one of the best films that DreamWorks has ever made, especially given what I thought of <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2022/06/review-bad-guys-2022.html">the movie they released</a> just eight months before this, and one that I expect to stick around as a classic just like <i>Shrek</i> itself.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Set in a fantasy/fairy-tale version of Spain, our eponymous protagonist is an intelligent cat who has exploited his nine lives to become an adventurer who doesn't fear death... at least, not until he loses his eighth life thanks to his carelessness fighting a monster attacking a town. Suddenly, he no longer feels so invincible, especially once he encounters a mysterious wolf bounty hunter who seeks to claim his ninth and final life after watching him squander his previous eight. Going into retirement in an elderly cat lady's home after burying his sword and gear, Puss is dragged back to the world of adventure when Goldilocks, the thuggish leader of the Three Bears Crime Family (guess who her "enforcers" are), seeks to hire him to find the Wishing Star, a magical rock that would grant one wish to whoever discovers it -- and she won't take no for an answer. Puss decides that this star is his key to regaining his nine lives, and with help from an old flame named Kitty Softpaws, he sets out to find it himself, staying one step ahead of Goldilocks, the evil businessman "Big" Jack Horner who wants it for his own ends, and of course, the Wolf.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The look of the film is one of the most immediately striking things about it. While it's not the first film to use cel shading to make computer animation emulate the look of hand-drawn animation while being distinct from both (<i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-spider-man-into-spider-verse-2018.html">Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse</a></i> and <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2021/05/review-mitchells-vs-machines-2021.html">The Mitchells vs. the Machines</a></i> did something similar recently), it's going for a different set of influences than those films, its look instead resembling a mix of the fairy tale artwork that the <i>Shrek</i> movies have always spoofed and anime in the action scenes. The settings feel lifted almost from a highly stylized painting or storybook, while the action looks downright sublime, the film's characters doing battle, chasing one another, and facing various treacherous foes on their quest for the Wishing Star in all manner of awesome ways. Even as cats, Puss and Kitty came across as credible and cool adventure heroes, especially with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek Pinault leaning heavily into their live-action screen personas, Banderas playing Puss as a riff on Zorro where the only real "parody" element comes from his species and Hayek playing Kitty as the cool femme fatale who has history with the hero that they'll inevitably have to settle. Florence Pugh was hilarious doing her best gender-flipped Ray Winstone impression as Goldilocks, especially with the real Winstone himself voicing one of the three bears (alongside Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo), while John Mulaney made Horner into an absolute bastard who I couldn't wait to see get his well-deserved comeuppance. At first glance, with three separate groups of characters all racing for the Wishing Star, this film can feel sprawling, and yet it always manages to tie these three stories together in a way that feels organic.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The key to doing this was the Wolf. From the moment we're introduced to him, he's presented as a metaphorical representation of death itself, an impossibly skilled fighter who trounces and nearly kills Puss in their first encounter and who is seemingly unstoppable from that point onward, every meeting he has with Puss feeling like it could be their last. The film's comedy stops dead cold whenever the whistling announcing his arrival starts up, Wagner Moura's performance lending him an almost demonic menace without going over-the-top into cackling supervillainy. He is one of the best villains I've seen in any animated film in a long while, a no-nonsense monster whose evil combines the most terrifying elements of an unstoppable force of nature and somebody who hates you personally, the closest thing that a family film could come to an outright slasher movie villain. There have been many jokes made about this film having one of the most realistic depictions of a panic attack in any animated film, but watching it, it was no joke: I understood immediately how this guy completely disarmed Puss' suave, arrogant demeanor and left him a trembling wreck running for his life. The Wolf wasn't just scary, he was a perfect villain for Puss, a representation of how his wasted life is finally catching up with him, and watching Puss reach a place where he can finally confront the Wolf and turn the tables on him was immeasurably satisfying.</p><p style="text-align: left;">From this, we get a fairly simple moral that largely boils down to a celebration of living life to the fullest rather than either wasting it on hedonism or remaining stuck in an idealized past. It's nothing revolutionary, but not only is it exactly the kind of thing that the fairy tales this movie is sending up have long embraced, it's well-told enough that I fully bought into it. If the original <i>Shrek</i> was a deconstructive parody of fairy tales that sent up their moral messages while offering a few of its own, then this film serves largely as a more faithful, straightforward throwback to them, amped up with a swashbuckling action/adventure plot and some jokes for the parents but otherwise falling squarely within the modern, post-<i>Kung Fu Panda</i> DreamWorks wheelhouse.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It's a very straightforward movie once you get past the stylish animation, but hardly to a fault, as it's still a riotous, heartfelt, and just plain awesome ride that delivers exactly where it counts and doesn't overstay its welcome. Easily one of the best family films of the last ten years.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-7741696593019609152023-12-24T15:53:00.000-08:002023-12-24T15:53:00.622-08:00Review: Jingle All the Way (1996)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Jingle All the Way</i> (1996)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG for action violence, mild language and some thematic elements</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMmJlYzViNzctMjQ1Ni00ZWQ4LThkN2YtMzI2ZGU5Nzk0NTAyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="525" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMmJlYzViNzctMjQ1Ni00ZWQ4LThkN2YtMzI2ZGU5Nzk0NTAyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="263" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Now this is a Christmas movie I <i>am</i> nostalgic for. In its day, <i>Jingle All the Way</i> was a film that critics roasted on an open fire, seeing it as a symbol of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career decline in the '90s after years as the man who redefined what an action hero was, and it's easy to see why. It's a broad, farcical spoof of holiday consumerism with a ridiculous plot, Schwarzenegger playing for broad laughs instead of the straight man roles he excelled in when he normally did comedies, and a shamelessly schmaltzy ending, one where the only way to enjoy it is to recognize that you're watching a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. But it's also a film that knows what it is and does absolutely nothing to get in the way of that enjoyment. Schwarzenegger acquits himself surprisingly well playing the funny man for a change, the outrageousness of some of the directions the story takes are amusing just on the face of it, and while it's kind of wobbly for much of the first hour, it pulls itself together in the third act, ironically just as the plot goes <i>really</i> off the rails. It's easy to envision a much better version of this movie, but the film we got still has a lot to like about it, be it for your kids or for your inner child.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Schwarzenegger's character is named Howard Langston, but it would probably be easier to just call him Movie Dad, because that's basically the broad, instantly recognizable family movie archetype he's playing here: the upper-middle-class suburbanite father who's successful on the surface but is so caught up in his job that he constantly disappoints his wife and son back home, and has to learn a hard lesson about how to be a family man and not let work consume him. His wife Liz is starting to fall for the affections of their lecherous divorced neighbor Ted, who seems like he could become everything that Howard isn't when he's not hitting on every other woman in the neighborhood, while his son Jamie has found a surrogate father figure in Turbo-Man, the TV superhero whose action figure is the hottest toy this Christmas. Problem is, it's already the night of December 23, and even though Jamie told his dad what he wanted for Christmas weeks ago, Howard still hasn't picked up the toy. Thus begins his long quest on Christmas Eve across every mall and toy store in Minnesota to get his hands on a Turbo-Man action figure and hopefully salvage what's left of his relationship with his son.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The main body of the movie is mostly non-stop gags. Ahnold fights other shoppers more than once, chases a little girl at the Mall of America who accidentally snagged his ticket for one store's limited run of action figures, discovers a conspiracy of mall Santas and elves selling bootleg toys from Mexico, gets in a fight with a reindeer, and crosses paths several times with Myron Larabee, a blue-collar mailman played by Sinbad who's also looking for a Turbo-Man action figure and becomes Harold's main rival over the course of the film. The film tilts at satirizing the commercialism of the holiday season, from Myron's story about how watching "Santa" give the rich kids more presents ruined his life growing up to the requisite sappy ending about how the true meaning of Christmas is about family rather than having the hottest toy for Christmas, but it's all pretty shallow. This is as straightforward a family comedy as they come, a movie packed with gags that often hit thanks purely to how over-the-top they are, culminating in a finale at a parade where, thanks to shenanigans, Howard winds up actually becoming the fictional superhero Jamie idolizes and he's spent the entire movie looking for an action figure of.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Schwarzenegger is game for all of it, the role playing less to his physicality than to his goofiness. Even the action scenes are staged for comedy, like they were written with a far less jacked comic actor in mind to play Howard. I bought him as a stressed-out suburban dad watching his life fall apart, the over-the-top manner in which he was playing it lending to the film's gleefully campy, farcical tone. His irrepressible Austrian accent does create a plot hole late in the film, but the presence of that accent in a Schwarzenegger flick is like the characters in a musical breaking out into song -- you just go with it and don't ask questions. Unfortunately, I can't say I enjoyed most of the supporting characters in the film. Sinbad was clearly having fun playing Myron and did his best to elevate him, but the way he's written often switched on a dime from somebody trying to be Harold's buddy to a stone-cold madman whose obsession with getting a Turbo-Man doll approaches Gollum levels. Given his role as the film's main antagonist, he deserved at least a coherent characterization. Rita Wilson, meanwhile, felt wasted as Liz, Jake Lloyd felt like background scenery as Jamie, and while Phil Hartman played a great sleazeball as Ted, his character barely affected the plot and deserved a much better comeuppance. The best supporting characters were the one-scene wonders who crossed paths with Howard, from Jim Belushi's mall Santa who runs a bootleg toy operation to the overeager technician who gives Harold a quick crash course in controlling the Turbo-Man suit he gets forced into wearing in the third act.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It's dumb fun, but it's still fun, and elevated by Arnold Schwarzenegger and its unapologetic embrace of how ridiculous it is. It's no classic, but it's still a nice, candy-coated Christmas treat.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-33009718613254861692023-12-18T14:34:00.000-08:002023-12-18T14:34:09.659-08:00Review: Elf (2003)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Elf</i> (2003)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG for some mild rude humor and language</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzUxNzkzMzQtYjIxZC00NzU0LThkYTQtZjNhNTljMTA1MDA1L2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMxODk2OTU@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="539" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzUxNzkzMzQtYjIxZC00NzU0LThkYTQtZjNhNTljMTA1MDA1L2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMxODk2OTU@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Elf</i> is the kind of Christmas movie that you'd think was made in 1983 or even 1963, not 2003. It's a straightforward throwback to the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials of the '60s and '70s, with a plot largely devoid of crude humor... starring Will Ferrell at a time when he and the rest of the "Frat Pack" of gleefully lowbrow comedy stars and writers were pushing boundaries with a new breed of decidedly grown-up sex comedies. Director Jon Favreau consciously toned down the original PG-13 script into something a lot more lighthearted and family-friendly once he got on board, at times to a fault (and to Ferrell's frustration on set), but it ultimately worked out in the end to produce a film that a lot of people of my generation regard as a comedy classic and one of their favorite unironic holiday movies (i.e. not something like <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-die-hard-1988.html" style="font-style: italic;">Die Hard</a> or <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-bad-santa-2003.html">Bad Santa</a></i>, the latter of which came out the same year as this). As someone who missed the film when it first came out and only saw it recently, I don't quite have the same attachment to it, but I definitely see where the affection comes from. There's barely much of a plot, but what it has is ultimately enough, the film being largely the kind of "sketch movie" that's about dropping unusual characters into funny situations and seeing how they react. I had a very nice time watching it, thanks to both Ferrell's performance as the titular elf and an old-fashioned sense of humor that's not afraid of getting cornball and doesn't try to pretend it's anything other than what it is, and while it did feel kind of insubstantial, it's still a film I'd happily recommend around the holiday season.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Our protagonist Buddy is a human who, as an infant, accidentally snuck into Santa Claus' sack when Santa visited his orphanage on the night of Christmas Eve. Growing up at the North Pole, he's always known he was different from the other elves: he's much bigger, for one, and he aged into an adult far faster. One day, he finally learns the truth about his ancestry and realizes why all the other elves made fun of him, which marks the beginning of a journey to New York City to find the birth father who abandoned him, Walter Hobbs, now an executive at a children's book publisher and, by all appearances, a right jerk who values money over his family and even the quality of his company's books.</p><p style="text-align: left;">If you've ever seen a heartwarming holiday special, then you don't need me to tell you where this movie's going from there, and this movie knows it. It devotes fairly little time to its story, instead concerning itself with its jokes and its comic routines, most of which revolve around Buddy, played by Ferrell as essentially a young boy in the body of a grown man, interacting with the modern world and causing chaos wherever he goes. He's not <i>completely</i> helpless, shown to be a surprisingly gifted handyman thanks to his experience in Santa's workshop (where do you think all the toys under your tree as a kid came from? Your parents? China?), but he's otherwise a less shouty, more family-friendly take on the archetypal Ferrell manchild character, with the emphasis here placed on the "child" thanks to him having been raised in a candy-cane, primary-colored version of the North Pole straight out of <i>Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer</i> (complete with a cameo by Ray Harryhausen voicing a stop-motion polar bear). And honestly, Ferrell was perfect in the role. There's a reason this kind of character has been his type as a comic actor, and that's because he brings exactly the kind of energy that a movie like this needs. There's just something inherently funny about a grown man dressed as a Christmas elf, but Ferrell doesn't just rest on the premise here, he gives it his all and always makes me smile.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The cast here is large and sprawling, and some of them get more to grab onto than others. James Caan as Walter is the closest thing a movie this wholesome has to an antagonistic force, and while his arc of realizing that there's more to life than getting ahead in the cutthroat corporate world is predictable, he otherwise sells it admirably. The first act at the North Pole is filled with memorable presences like Ed Asner as a Santa straight out of an old Coca-Cola commercial and Bob Newhart as Buddy's adoptive elf father, as well as great set design that makes for a very sharp contrast to the rest of the film spent in the Big Apple. Peter Dinklage only has one scene as a full-of-himself children's author, but the moment he steps foot on screen, you can figure out immediately what the casting directors of <i>Game of Thrones</i> saw in him. Unfortunately, I thought that Zooey Deschanel got short shrift as the cynical department store clerk Jovie, feeling as though a lot of her character arc was left on the cutting room floor. She gets a lot of focus in a few particular scenes and sells them very well, especially when it comes to her singing voice, but she's otherwise absent for such long stretches that I was at times surprised when the film remembered that she existed. (It was amusing, however, seeing her play the grouch who doesn't believe in Christmas and has Ferrell's manic pixie dream guy inject some excitement into her life given how she'd later be typecast. Especially since she's blonde in this film, without what would become her signature bangs.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">This was a symptom of the film's biggest fault, the manner in which the plot jumps all over the place, from Buddy's relationship with his father Walter to his romance with Jovie to Walter's problems at work and home to a sudden third-act turn into Buddy having to literally save Christmas. It's very scattershot, and while I was often amused, I wouldn't say I was particularly hooked by the film's story, threadbare as it was. At times, I wonder if Ferrell might have had a point in wanting this to be a somewhat darker movie than what we ultimately got, one that spent more time with its characters and gave them room to breathe between all the jokes. The 2000s were a time when comedies weren't afraid to slow down, and when Pixar was in its golden age of animated family comedies that nevertheless threw a lot of kids my age for a loop. I think a version of this movie that's ten to fifteen minutes longer, mostly devoted to character beats and interactions, might have left more of an impact on me.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">At the end of the day, though, <i>Elf</i> is still a very funny movie with Will Ferrell doing what he does best, one that I don't think would've endured as it has if it <i>hadn't</i> been as lightweight as it is. Overall, I had a very good time watching it, and whenever I have kids, I guarantee this one's gonna be in rotation every December.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-14561429699380816192023-12-07T08:52:00.000-08:002023-12-07T08:52:48.629-08:00Review: Godzilla Minus One (2023)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Godzilla Minus One</i> (</b><span style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Gojira Mainasu Wan</i>)</b></span><b> (2023)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for creature violence and action</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTZkNWQyMDEtMmRhNi00Nzc5LWFhNjQtMWRiOTllYmEzOWE5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMwNzYxMTUx._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="566" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTZkNWQyMDEtMmRhNi00Nzc5LWFhNjQtMWRiOTllYmEzOWE5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMwNzYxMTUx._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="283" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 5 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">The <i>Godzilla</i> movies, at least in their original Japanese flavor, have never been subtle. The <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-godzilla-1954.html">1954 original</a> being a plain-as-day metaphor for nuclear weapons is a central part of the mythos and folklore of not only the character, but also, by extension, all of the giant monster movies that emerged in its wake. Over the years, the series has used Godzilla and his foes as metaphors for environmental destruction, the world's reactions to Japan's postwar economic ascent, and (in the recent <i>Shin Godzilla</i>) the devastation of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. This is something that I've always felt even <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-godzilla-king-of-monsters-2019.html">the better American <i>Godzilla</i> movies</a> missed, that their main message was always "giant monster battles are awesome (and us puny humans should respect nature more)," and conversely, why I still love <i>Cloverfield</i> as a better Hollywood take on this kind of monster movie than any of its official cracks at the Big G.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And the latest <i>Godzilla</i> movie continues the tradition, and in doing so produces one of the best movies in the entire franchise. This time around, the message is about love of one's country, specifically the difference between its vices and its virtues. It is a distinctly anti-government, and particularly anti-military, film that depicts blind faith in one's leaders to the point of being willing to die for them as a foolish endeavor that gets one killed, one born from a distinctly postwar Japanese mindset on the subject -- but at the same time, it's no Randian tract, but a film in which the heroes are ordinary people who unite around a common cause for the benefit of all. It's a film that celebrates Japan and its people while condemning the "great men" who had led the nation to ruin in the imperial era, courtesy of a filmmaker, Takashi Yamazaki, whose previous film <i>The Great War of Archimedes</i> was a historical drama about the construction of the <i>Yamato</i> battleship that portrayed the entire project as a mess of graft, bloat, and outdated thinking on warfare for the sake of a narrow vision of national prestige. It's a movie that's as interested in its human characters as it is in the monster mayhem central to any <i>Godzilla</i> movie, and it provided a great protagonist who I not only rooted for, but one whose arc and ultimate fate remained in doubt up until the very end in the best way possible.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But it's still a <i>Godzilla</i> movie, too. And while the monster is used sparingly, the film makes no bones about what a terrifying beast he is, with every appearance he makes delivering grand-scale carnage resembling something out of a Hollywood blockbuster with ten times the budget. It's a kaiju movie dropped into a historical drama, and the film's two sides elevate one another, not only providing a unique environment for Godzilla to stomp around in (and one replete with homages to the original film) but also adding a new spin on the message of the original movie. This is easily one of the finest films this series has ever produced, and it's in the running for my list of the best films of 2023.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film takes place in Japan in 1947, less than two years after the nation surrendered at the end of World War II. Tokyo, firebombed by the Americans during the war, still has many neighborhoods that look as though Godzilla had graced them with his presence, most notably the one where Kōichi Shikishima and Noriko Ōishi live in a glorified shack, hastily assembled with what little money and resources they could gather. Kōichi is a veteran, specifically a kamikaze pilot in the last days of the war who got cold feet and turned back to Odo Island for "repairs", where he watched a fifty-foot, dinosaur-like sea monster, known to the island's locals as "Godzilla", tear apart the small Japanese garrison on the island -- a monster that he's spent the rest of his life wondering if he could've stopped. Noriko, meanwhile, is a young woman orphaned in the bombings who is raising a little girl, Keiko, who also lost her own birth parents, and who moves in with Kōichi so that they can both support each other.</p><p style="text-align: left;">From the introduction on Odo Island, we see Godzilla presented not so much as a representation of the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but one of the nation that dropped them. The soldiers could've easily hid and let Godzilla pass, but one of them just had to start shooting and drawing it to fight back, even commanding Kōichi to hop into the cockpit of his plane and try to shoot Godzilla with its 30mm cannons -- a move that, as we see later when much bigger guns are turned on Godzilla, probably would've just gotten him killed (which, apparently, the novelization explicitly states). Kōichi being a failed kamikaze pilot isn't just an incidental detail here. It's used to paint Godzilla as the Americans after Pearl Harbor, a pissed-off, seemingly unstoppable force that, unlike prior animalistic portrayals of the monster, seems to outright enjoy laying waste to Tokyo. Its terror, moreover, was invited by Japan's cocky, foolhardy leadership as they picked on someone way more than their own size and threw away the lives of their people in the name of preserving their honor, telling them that their deaths in battle would be glorious. Even as an American, I didn't need much of a history lesson to figure out the parallels between Godzilla's rampage in the opening scene and Japan finding out after fucking around in 1941, 82 years ago today.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And even after the war, with the totality of Japan's defeat, many people's first instinct in the face of a threat is to simply give up, preoccupied more with their own survival than anything. Men like Kōichi who fought in the war can barely look at themselves afterwards, shamed by their neighbors back home for having "failed". If only they'd fought harder, if only they hadn't been cowards, the war could've been won, many seem to think, all while those veterans are gripped by PTSD, night terrors, and panic attacks. This, too, is no way to live, the film argues, especially once the Americans, after its nuclear tests inadvertently turn Godzilla from a "mere" fifty feet tall into the fire-breathing mega-monster we know and love, abandon Japan to its fate because sending the full force of the US military to fight it might provoke the Soviets. In the end, this is a story about Japan, and more importantly the Japanese people, learning to stand up for themselves when nobody else -- not the Americans, not their own ineffective government -- will. With emphasis on "learn", because here, Godzilla is defeated not by fighting harder, the strategy that led Japan to catastrophe in the war, but by fighting <i>smarter</i>, figuring out its weaknesses and then exploiting them to the fullest. (Am I detecting a bit of admiration for how, to paraphrase Mr. Takagi from <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-die-hard-1988.html">Die Hard</a></i>, Japan ultimately got us with tape decks after Pearl Harbor didn't work out?)</p><p style="text-align: left;">Beyond just the plot and characters being top-notch, especially by the standards of a <i>Godzilla</i> movie (a series that's kind of infamous for being very "screw the plot, get to the monsters," for better or worse), there's also the matter of Godzilla itself. The monster is smaller this time around, bucking the trend of escalation that this series has long gone for in favor of scaling it down to its size from the 1954 film, but as your insecure best friend in high school always said, it's not the size, it's how you use it. Even a monster that's "only" 150 feet tall is still a monster that's 150 feet tall, and this film shows it tearing up naval warships, chasing a minesweeping boat, tossing train cars and boats like ragdolls, smashing buildings into rubble, and using its atomic breath in a manner that calls to mind an atomic <i>bomb</i> more than ever. It's easy to forget that there are only really four major scenes where Godzilla is on screen, because in each and every one of those scenes, the monster was so impactful and terrifying that it always hung over the rest of the film. I've seen a lot of people impressed by how this film cost only $15 million to make and wondering why Hollywood can't pull off the same with comparable budgets, and while I would like to remind people here that <i>Cloverfield</i> cost no more than $30 million and delivered just as much grade-A monster mayhem (short version: big-name stars tend to devour your budget, and there's a lot of bloat beyond that in blockbuster filmmaking), that doesn't take away from the accomplishments of Yamazaki or the effects team. This movie is beautiful, raw, and terrifying.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The rest of the production values are also outstanding. I can't really judge line delivery in another language, but I will say that Kōichi's actor Ryunosuke Kamiki was outstanding. He felt like a guy who'd seen some shit on Odo Island and still hadn't let go of it. His reaction to seeing Godzilla destroying Tokyo, without spoiling anything, was the kind of thing that made me not want to see Godzilla destroy Tokyo, a moment that took the human toll of the awesome carnage that these kinds of movies are built on and made it personal. The rest of the cast was also excellent, as was the set design that captured not only the historic time and place of late '40s Japan but also the feeling of deprivation. Kōichi and Noriko's home and community reminded me of shantytowns in Latin America, Africa, and India, a far cry from the nation that Japan would reemerge as, and it did a lot to sell me on the idea that these two, and the Japanese people as a whole, had lost everything in the war and been thrown back to "year zero" when it came to their development, the film's title implying that Godzilla will somehow find a way to throw them back even further. From top to bottom, and not just in the special effects, this was a movie that looked and felt alive.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Godzilla Minus One</i> is one of my favorite films of the year and one of the best movies of its kind ever made. I'm glad that it found its audience in the US and is getting a wide theatrical run this weekend, because it is just a wonderful movie that I can't recommend highly enough.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-63591137928885105822023-11-24T18:32:00.000-08:002023-11-24T18:32:30.470-08:00Review: Thanksgiving (2023)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Thanksgiving</i> (2023)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, pervasive language and some sexual material</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGZhOGJjZTAtOTJmYS00ZTk2LTgxYWEtNjM3ZmUxMjY2NWFiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjU2NTI4MjE@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGZhOGJjZTAtOTJmYS00ZTk2LTgxYWEtNjM3ZmUxMjY2NWFiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjU2NTI4MjE@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Thanksgiving</i> is a movie that feels like a remake of itself. Specifically, a 2000s Platinum Dunes slasher remake, rather appropriately given that the film began life as a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL8LOMMOaDo&t=322s">fake trailer</a> for the 2007 film <i>Grindhouse</i> homaging the retro holiday slasher flicks of the '80s, with a mix of depraved and gory deaths, phenomenally stupid characters, and low-budget sleaze. It's an idea that has been bouncing around in director and co-writer Eli Roth's head for years, and even as he went on to make other movies, he never gave up on the idea of turning it into a feature film the way that <i>Machete</i> and <i>Hobo with a Shotgun</i>, two other fake trailers attached to <i>Grindhouse</i>, had been. The film he and co-writer Jeff Rendell ultimately made feels like a film that's ultimately, after sixteen years, wound its way from being an homage to '80s horror to being an homage to '00s horror, the decade in which Roth cut his teeth as a filmmaker, filled as it is with elements of that era's slasher flicks that now seem old enough to be nostalgic in their own right. It homages a lot of the trailer's more memorable scenes, but wraps them in a package that's at once darker and grittier but also slicker and more polished, with a big-name cast (a mix of veteran actors like Patrick Dempsey and Gina Gershon, Disney Channel stars like Milo Manheim, and influencers like Addison Rae) paired with exactly the kind of violence you'd expect from a filmmaker who was once considered one of the leading figures behind the "Splat Pack" of ultraviolent 2000s horror movies. Most importantly, it's a movie I enjoyed, even if I'll be the first to admit that it's no classic, or one of Roth's best. It's a fairly by-the-numbers whodunit teen slasher cut from a very post-<i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2015/01/review-scream-1996.html">Scream</a></i> cloth that doesn't have a lot of surprises, but does have some solid thrills and chills that I suspect are gonna ensure that it gets rewatched a fair bit by horror fans around the Thanksgiving holiday.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the film opens with a Black Friday riot at RightMart instigated by a mix of the store's owner Thomas Wright deciding to open early on Thanksgiving night and a group of teenagers, including Thomas' daughter Jessica, managing to sneak in early and provoke the crowd outside when they see them. Three people die in the ensuing stampede, a security guard, a shopper, and the wife of the store's manager, while the high school baseball team's star pitcher Bobby gets his arm broken, killing his sporting dreams. One year later, a killer in a Pilgrim costume and a mask of the Plymouth Colony's first governor John Carver is hacking up people connected to the "FightMart" riot, on a quest for revenge. Now, the teens, along with the local sheriff Eric Newlon, must figure out who's behind the murders before they're the next to die.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It's a simple slasher plot of a sort that we've seen a million times in the last twenty-five years, and it was honestly a fairly predictable one. The killer's identity is telegraphed pretty early on, it wasn't much of a surprise when the big reveal came, and the main plot was rather boilerplate once you scratch the surface. You've got a lot of archetypal teen horror movie stock characters (the aggro jock, the sexy best friend, the shifty boyfriend, the cool geek because it's 2023 and unpopular nerds don't work anymore, the girl who you know is gonna make it to the end and defeat the killer) who largely stay within their lane, as well as adult supporting cast members who are there to serve as cannon fodder and/or suspects. The plot involving the store's greedy management was established in the first act but never really built upon after. It's not altogether completely disposable from a writing standpoint, but this is still a teen slasher movie, and you don't watch these films for particularly in-depth plotting and characterization unless you see an A24 plate on the opening credits.</p><p style="text-align: left;">No, you watch because you want <i>the goods</i>. You want stabbings, decapitations, dismemberment, mutilations, and more, all vividly displayed on screen in ways that earn this movie an R rating. And when you've got the guy who made <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-cabin-fever-2002.html">Cabin Fever</a></i> and <i>Hostel</i> behind the camera, that's what you're gonna get. This movie comes alive when it's time to kill, and it doesn't care how ridiculous it gets with the bloodshed. The deaths range from the deadly serious to the awesome to the comical (one death in the opening Black Friday scene involving a man literally shopping 'til he dropped had me in stitches), but no matter what, when John Carver is doing what his name suggests, that's when it felt like Roth was most invested in the material. There's one lengthy chase scene late in the film, climaxing with one of its best and most gruesome kills, that I think is gonna go down as one of the classics. The gore is plentiful, and it is icky and gross.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The cast was surprisingly good for a movie like this. Nell Verlaque may not have had much of a character to work with as Jessica beyond "the final girl", but she did it well, in particular giving great "scared face" whenever she was confronted by the killer or realized that her friends were in danger. Patrick Dempsey made for a good authority figure as the sheriff, and if you're wondering how Addison Rae did, she actually wasn't bad. Finally, the actor playing the killer was wonderfully hammy after the big reveal, and I wouldn't have accepted anything less given the kind of movie this was, delivering the most ridiculous dialogue ("this Thanksgiving, there will be no leftovers!") with the straightest face without even once winking at the camera. On every technical level, this movie was at the very least competent, and never wore out its welcome.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Thanksgiving</i> could've stood to have a bit more meat on its bones story-wise in order to make the parts between the kills more interesting, but the kills were plentiful and grisly enough, and its other qualities competent enough, that I could forgive it. Even if it's just from lack of competition, I see this sticking around as a go-to Thanksgiving/Black Friday horror flick.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-48245342865236700282023-11-19T16:37:00.000-08:002023-11-19T17:00:11.578-08:00Review: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes</i> (2023)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTZmMmY2MzctMjU2Yy00YjJlLTk1NjAtY2U4MmMxOWZkZWY4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjM4NTM5NDY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTZmMmY2MzctMjU2Yy00YjJlLTk1NjAtY2U4MmMxOWZkZWY4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjM4NTM5NDY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2013/11/review-double-feature-hunger-games-2012.html">The Hunger Games</a></i> was my jam in my college years. Even being just a bit older than its target demographic of teenagers, it was a series of books that I readily embraced as an antidote to the big young-adult literary sensation of my own high school years, <i>Twilight</i>. No sparkly vampires or Mormon abstinence messages here, no, these books were dark satires about teenagers forced to kill each other, like an American version of <i>Battle Royale</i> or a post-apocalyptic version of <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2019/12/review-running-man-1987.html" style="font-style: italic;">The Running Man</a>, and what's more, they were actually shockingly well-written. Even if you were the kind of guy who'd never otherwise pick up a YA novel, there's no denying the appeal of that basic premise. And then came the film adaptations, which ranged from good to damn close to classic, even if splitting <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/11/review-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-1.html">the last movie</a> into two parts was kind of a dumb idea, and all the commercialism that got attached to the series was quite ironic given the messages in the books. It's those messages that are the big reason why I'm still nostalgic for the series today, long after the YA dystopia boom has passed us by. Suzanne Collins may not have been a subtle writer, but she was a smart one, and her books, for all their pulpy sci-fi flair, were fundamentally about how difficult it is to organize a revolution against even the most obviously unjust system, and how people you think of as allies may in fact have very different goals that stand opposed to your own -- a lesson that a lot of young people raised on the series and other teen-lit wastelands had to learn themselves as they organized against real-world injustices later in the decade.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Naturally, with the 15th anniversary of the original novel having recently passed us by, somebody decided that the time was right to revisit it. Three years ago, Collins, after having held off for years, wrote a prequel novel, <i>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes</i> (a title evocative of the trend of epic fantasy novels that took over YA literature after the sci-fi dystopia boom), about the main villain of the series that explored his youth, the early years of the titular Games, and how they intersected to turn him into the bastard he became. I haven't yet read the book, but if the movie is any indication, I want to. It's a big and bloated movie that I thought could've stood to be trimmed down in some places and padded out in others, but it's one that boasts a star-making performance from Rachel Zegler as its heroine, an interesting new twist on its series' setting, and the same thoughtfulness that elevated the original trilogy above its peers. It had my attention from start to finish despite its length, and I'm not at all disappointed by my return to the world of Panem after all these years.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Set about 64 years before the events of the first book/movie, this one is set around the time of the 10th annual Hunger Games -- which is to say, ten years after the "Dark Days", the brutal war between the Capitol and the Districts for control of Panem, the post-apocalyptic wasteland formerly known as North America. The Capitol won the war, but ten years on, the scars are still visible. The film's retro-period setting was designed to evoke the 1950s with the technology and aesthetics on display, and in practice, it specifically evokes '50s Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, a time when the British were still winding down their wartime rationing, the cars were tiny econoboxes, the soldiers carried G3 rifles and traveled in Unimog trucks, the new construction replacing the bombed-out ruins was mostly shit-ugly brutalist monoliths, the old elite sought to maintain an appearance of propriety by dusting off old prewar fashions, and the scars of the war were still fresh in the minds of the younger generations. It's how I imagine a post-apocalyptic world that hasn't completely forgotten 21st century science would actually look once it had the time to start rebuilding itself, retaining some elements of modern technology (color TVs, certain plot-relevant biological weapons) but lacking the means to rebuild past a mid-20th-century level of technology, infrastructure, and industry; that would have to wait for later.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It was a creative choice that highlighted not only that this film is a prequel, but also the continuity between Panem's history and what it had become in the original trilogy -- because if "modern" Panem is an exaggerated parody of 21st century Western society, then it stands to reason that "historical" Panem might resemble a similarly grotesque version of what that society looked like seventy years ago. The world of Panem has always been part of the appeal of <i>The Hunger Games</i>, and this film did a lot to flesh that world out, showing us not only what it once looked like but also, more importantly, how it came up with the sick idea of the Games in the first place and how it might have possibly thought it a good idea. Watching the prologue set during the war, it took no time to realize the deprivation that the citizens of the Capitol experienced, and how pissed off they probably were when they finally won their hard-earned victory and peace, the future consequences of such be damned. The Capitol looks down on the Districts the way that Europeans at the time looked down on their colonies, or the Soviets looked down on their "fellow workers' states" in the Warsaw Pact (above all else the German "Democratic" Republic).</p><p style="text-align: left;">If the film's aesthetics look backwards, however, then its themes look forward, specifically to the life experiences that a lot of the books' readers in the years after their publication. Coriolanus Snow was, in his youth, a student at an elite academy competing with 23 of his classmates for a university scholarship, with the recipient of the scholarship decided by having the students each mentor a tribute in the Hunger Games, the winner being the one who puts on the best show for the citizens of the Capitol. Again, Collins wasn't subtle, and neither is this movie. The students' struggles may not be as life-or-death as those of the tributes, but direct and obvious parallels are drawn from the start, highlighting how the Capitol's system grinds down even the children of its own elites and turns them into the worst possible versions of themselves as they compete for favor and stab each other in the back. We see Snow, initially motivated by a desire to provide for a family that lost everything in the war, slowly but surely shed his morals as he comes up with a number of what would become the Games' signature concepts (particularly making the tributes into celebrities) and develop a star-crossed romance with his mediagenic, hot-headed tribute, District 12's Lucy Gray Baird. I liked Tom Blyth as Snow, watching him transform from a naive but well-intentioned rich kid into somebody who's willing to throw everybody and everything around him under the bus to advance his own interests, such that, by the time he finally, triumphantly returns to the Capitol at the end (not really a spoiler in a prequel telling the villain's origin story), even his own dear cousin Tigris barely recognizes what he's become.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The real MVP in the cast, though, was Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray. Implied to have been thrust into the Games thanks to a corrupt mayor in District 12 and her getting on the wrong side of a love triangle involving said mayor's daughter, from the moment she made her grand "screw you" entrance I was immediately rooting for her. Zegler gave the kind of "star in the making" performance that Jennifer Lawrence had for Katniss Everdeen, albeit playing a very different sort of character who has to learn the opposite things that Katniss later would. If Katniss was an outdoorsy survivalist who the Capitol turned into a glamorous romantic figure, then Lucy Gray is a theater kid (specifically, part of a group of traveling musicians known as the Covey) who has to learn how to fight, but one whose charisma and presence become an asset, especially once Snow realizes their potential to sway the audience to her side. Zegler carried a lot of this movie on her shoulders, from her multiple musical performances (putting her background in musical theater to great use) to her being the one who initially forces Snow to confront the ethics of the Games, with the breakdown of their relationship marking the last straw in his descent into villainy. Mark my words, Zegler is going places.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The supporting cast, too, was filled with standouts. Viola Davis devoured the scenery as the loopy scientist Dr. Volumnia Gaul who helps design some of the Capitol's bioweapons, Hunter Schafer had a small but memorable presence as Snow's cousin Tigris who watches his transformation, Jason Schwartzman played the Games' host Lucky Heavensbee like a snappy yet flippant '50s game show host, Ashley Liao made Snow's rival Clemencia such an obnoxious and cocky jackass, and Peter Dinklage playing Snow's dean at the academy as basically Tyrion Lannister as a bitter prep school headmaster, but I'll forgive it because there aren't a lot of people who play "I drink and I know things" better than him. Josh Andrés Rivera in particular got a lot to do as Snow's friend Sejanus, somebody with roots in District 2 who, even after his family got rich enough to become citizens, never forgot where he came from and voices the loudest objections to the morality of the Games. When it came to the tributes in the arena, the film sadly didn't take a lot of time to flesh out the ones not named Lucy Gray, but there were still highlights like the butch District 4 combatant Coral, Lucy Gray's District 12 partner Jessup, and the District 11 guy Reaper whose scary name turns out to be not at all indicative of his personality. The action was up to par with some of the best scenes from <i>Catching Fire</i>, director Francis Lawrence having lost none of his touch since the last time he worked on these films, with the bloodbath that opens the Games in particular being a hell of a one-take action scene shot largely from Lucy Gray's perspective.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Where this film ultimately let me down was its structure. It is a big movie, and there eventually comes a point where it rapidly shifts gears into something completely different, pulling Snow out of the confines of the Capitol and out into District 12. And if I'm being honest, it felt like a completely different movie from the one I'd been watching until then. It was still a good movie and an interesting story, but it felt like a whole new chapter of Snow's life where the problems he'd encountered in the first two acts, while still there, got pushed into the background as new characters and problems were introduced and Snow got sucked into the personal drama of District 12's inhabitants. I would've liked to see another scene of him interacting with his friends and family back home and keeping tabs on what's going on in the Capitol, as well as, more importantly, an scene or two in the first half of the film establishing some more of the people in Lucy Gray's life before she's chosen as tribute instead of throwing all of them at us in act three, especially given how it's all but stated that some of this drama was why she wound up in the arena in the first place. It would've been a minor change that likely would've added only a few minutes to the admittedly long runtime, but it would've alleviated a big problem I had with the third act of this movie, suddenly being asked to care about people I'd only just met knowing that there isn't a whole lot of movie left and there isn't much time to flesh them out.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">This movie has a lot of, well, movie to cram in, and I'm not sure it entirely stuck the landing, but overall, it's a welcome return for a series I love, elevated by an outstanding lead performance by Rachel Zegler. Whether you're a diehard <i>Hunger Games</i> fan who was one of the first to snatch up the book this was based on the day it came out or a total newbie to the series who only knows it from memes, I recommend this movie.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-57075624637269116912023-10-22T21:53:00.000-07:002023-10-22T21:53:04.457-07:00Review: Vampire Circus (1972)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Vampire Circus</i> (1972)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated PG</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTU2MzQzMjA0OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjY2Mjg4NA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="524" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTU2MzQzMjA0OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjY2Mjg4NA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="262" /></a></div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">One of the last good films made by Hammer Film Productions during the famed British horror studio's latter period, <i>Vampire Circus</i> delivers exactly what it promises: a creepy circus run by vampires. It makes smart use of its premise, it has an engaging and alluring villain, and it has exactly the mix of bloodshed, sex appeal, and period glamour that make Hammer films at their best feel dangerous and classy, at least to me. Is the supporting cast a mixed bag? Are there way too many unfortunate stereotypes of Romani people in how the circus is portrayed? Yes and yes. But when the finished product works as well as it does, I can push all that to the side and enjoy what is still an entertaining vampire flick.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film takes place in the Eastern European village of Stetl in a vaguely 19th century time period where, fifteen years ago, the locals, led by the schoolmaster Müller, murdered the nobleman Count Mitterhaus after learning that he was a vampire responsible for the disappearance and death of numerous local children. Before he died, he cursed the town, telling them that their children will die to bring him back to life. Meanwhile, his mistress Anna, Müller's wife and a willing servant of the Count, escapes into the night to meet up with the Count's cousin Emil, who runs a circus. Now, a plague is laying waste to Stetl, which has caused the local authorities to block all the roads out of it. Somehow, the traveling Circus of Nights got through the blockade to come to the town; the locals aren't too inquisitive about how they made it through, not when they're eager to just take their minds off of things. The circus has all manner of sights to show them, and what's more, the beautiful woman who serves as its ringmaster looks strikingly familiar.</p><p style="text-align: left;">This isn't really a movie that offers a lot of surprises. Even though she's played by a different (if similar-looking) actress, the movie otherwise makes it obvious that the ringmaster is in fact an older version of Anna even before the big reveal. I didn't really care, not when Adrienne Corri was easily one of the best things about this movie, making Anna the kind of (pardon the pun) vampish presence that it needed to complete its old-fashioned gothic atmosphere. She made me buy the villains as a dangerous force but also as a group of people and vampires who would seduce the townsfolk into ignoring their crimes, enough to more than make up for Anthony Higgins playing Emil, her partner in crime and the main vampire menace for much of the film, far too over-the-top for me to take seriously. The circus itself also made creative use of how the various powers attributed to vampires in folklore and fiction, from animal transformations to superior strength and senses, might be used to put on a flashy production of the sort where those watching might think that what they're seeing is all part of the show. And when push came to shove in the third act, we got treated to the circus' strongman breaking down the doors of people's homes, the dwarf sneaking around as a stealthy predator, and the twin acrobats (played by a young Robin Sachs and Lalla Ward) becoming the most dangerous fighters among the villains. It exploited its premise about as well as you'd expect from a low-budget film from the '70s, which was more than enough to keep me engaged.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Beyond the circus, however, the townsfolk generally weren't the most interesting characters. Only Müller had much depth to him, concerning his relationship with his lost wife Anna that grows increasingly fraught once he realizes who the ringmaster really is. With the rest of the cast, I was waiting for them all to get killed off by the vampires, as none of them left much of an impression otherwise. It was the circus that mostly propped up the movie. I also can't say I was particularly comfortable with the old-timey stereotypes that this film relied on in its depiction of the Roma. Notice how I'm calling Anna the "ringmaster" throughout this review. The film itself never uses that word, but instead uses a rather less polite anti-Romani slur to describe her, and it only gets worse from there, with the villagers using that word to describe the circus as "vermin" who need to be exterminated. This is why I've never been a fan of modern vampire fiction that, in trying to portray its vampires sympathetically, invokes the real-life history of persecution of marginalized groups (<i>True Blood</i> being one of the more famous examples). Given the history of both vampire legends and bigotry, especially that of real-life blood libels, pogroms, and hate crimes, it is a subject that can easily veer into suggesting that certain groups really are preying on people in unholy ways, especially when you bring children into the equation as this film does. Yes, Anna originally came from Stetl and isn't actually Romani, and for that matter, neither is the Count. But it's a subtext that this film, by invoking those parallels with a decidedly villainous portrayal of vampires, lays bare, and it had me feeling queasy at points in ways I'm sure the film didn't intend.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It's a movie that's very "of its time" in a lot of ways, and has problems fleshing out its supporting cast. Fortunately, it's buoyed by some great villains and that trademark Hammer horror mix of sex appeal and gothic flair. It's easily one of the better films to come out of their late period.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-22417992060754487802023-10-19T17:18:00.000-07:002023-10-19T17:18:38.309-07:00Review: The Funhouse (1981)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Funhouse</i> (1981)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTNhMWY3N2QtYWY5MC00ZTFhLWJmYTItODZjMmNmMTVjNTRiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="513" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTNhMWY3N2QtYWY5MC00ZTFhLWJmYTItODZjMmNmMTVjNTRiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="257" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 2 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Where classic slashers from the genre's golden age are concerned, <i>The Funhouse</i> stands out as a serious disappointment. It had Tobe Hooper returning to the slasher genre seven years after <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/06/review-texas-chain-saw-massacre-1974.html">The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</a></i>, it boasted a carnival setting that promised some thrills and chills, and the killers were legitimately compelling in ways you don't normally get from slasher villains, so the parts were there for a great movie. What went wrong? A lot, if I'm being honest, but the biggest problems start with the characters and the pacing, which are both terminal. Throughout the film, I was constantly annoyed by the group of four teenage friends who served as this movie's focal point, and waiting for them to finally get killed. I'll give the film points for trying to develop its main characters and present a portrait of backwoods, trailer-trash Americana on the skids in the form of the sleazy carnival they go to, but when the people you're supposed to be rooting for are either loathsome or one-dimensional in such a manner that the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people") have kicked in about twenty minutes into the film, all of that goes to waste. Both of the guys are sleazy horndogs, the "hot" girl of the group is a vapid airhead, and the heroine is one of the flattest, most boring, and most useless final girls I've ever seen in a horror movie, somebody who survives almost by pure luck with how many stupid mistakes she makes during the last act as she tries to fight the killer.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Having such a terrible cast made it that much more insufferable how the film stretched the obligatory twenty minutes of first-act character development into roughly half the movie. Until the main characters enter the titular funhouse, there are barely any horror elements in this film barring a fake-out opening parodying <i>Psycho</i>, and the first kill happens around the 45-minute mark. This meant that half the movie was spent watching these jackasses run around a carnival acting like jackasses and doing nothing to endear themselves to me, all while I was constantly checking the runtime wondering when they were finally gonna get hacked to pieces. What's more, there's an entire subplot involving the heroine's little brother that contributes absolutely nothing, feeling like it was there solely to pad the runtime without any payoff. The kid is briefly in danger at one point, but any tension fizzles out soon after as that is quickly resolved. The intent of the subplot felt like it was to give the protagonists hope for a rescue only to snatch it away, but again, I cared nothing about their fate, and consequently wound up more interested in the kid's own peril instead, a subplot that ultimately didn't go anywhere. In a film with better-written protagonists, spending that much time developing them so we come to care more about their deaths would've been a laudable creative decision. Here, however, it meant that the film simply dragged.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The worst part is, there were moments when a much better film was peeking through here, moments that were themselves connected to its characters -- specifically, the killers. The clown with the axe on the poster never shows up in the film, but fortunately, we do get a pair of very interesting villains, a father-and-son duo who run the titular carnival dark ride. The son is a malformed, mentally disabled freak whose father employs him as a worker on the ride while wearing a mask to cover up his hideous face, and who has a habit of killing locals in the towns the carnival travels through, with the father covering up the murders and growing increasingly frustrated having to raise him. These two could've made for the villain-protagonists of a much better movie, one about the two of them traveling with the carnival and working with all the other colorful characters who are part of it (who are all far more interesting than our actual main characters from what we see of them), all while a trail of corpses follows them with each new town they visit. Rick Baker's effects work made for a very scary-looking monster, while Kevin Conway was by far the best actor in the movie as the killer's undeniably evil yet multilayered father.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rob Zombie should remake this movie. No, seriously. His sensibilities line up perfectly with the mood this film was trying to go for, and he'd likely avoid a lot of its worst pitfalls. As it stands, though, <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-hell-fest-2018.html">Hell Fest</a></i> is a better version of this movie, which just has too many problems with its boring characters and sluggish pacing for me to recommend it to anyone other than the most diehard '80s slasher aficionados.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-60956133252096026592023-10-15T20:01:00.000-07:002024-03-28T06:17:11.847-07:00Review: Frankenstein (1931)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Frankenstein</i> (1931)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzNjODJlM2UtMGJiNC00NWY1LTkxZmEtOGYzM2FkYmYzNDhhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTY5Nzc4MDY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="517" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzNjODJlM2UtMGJiNC00NWY1LTkxZmEtOGYzM2FkYmYzNDhhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTY5Nzc4MDY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="259" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 5 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Frankenstein</i>. What else is there to say? It's the original mad scientist movie, adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley that invented modern science fiction and, by extension, sci-fi horror. One of the biggest changes it made from the book was to make the monster a lumbering brute rather than give him human intelligence, and in doing so, it foreshadowed the zombie as an iconic monster of horror cinema and later gaming. It's a film that not only left an indelible mark on its source material and how it's perceived, but also, together with their adaptation of <i>Dracula</i> earlier that year, enshrined Universal Pictures' status in the '30s and early '40s as Hollywood's masters of horror who shaped the genre's contours in ways that are visible to this day. Nearly every scene in this 70-minute film is now iconic. It's been imitated, homaged, parodied, dissected, and simply ripped off so many times over the years that one might think it would lose some of its impact watching it in 2023, ninety-two years after it premiered.</p><p style="text-align: left;">One might think.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I decided to finally watch this film for the first time last night, and while so far I've enjoyed my trip into the classic Universal monster movies, this one has easily been the standout for me. It moves at a surprisingly brisk pace that builds a constantly escalating tension as the consequences of its protagonist's crime against nature become clear to everyone involved, Boris Karloff's take on the title character's monster is iconic for a reason, and the cast and production values all around remain impressive even after nearly a century of advances in special effects technology. It's a film that's at once beautifully gothic, larger-than-life, and treads close to camp, yet remains distinctly grim and melancholy throughout, without ever feeling slow or plodding. So far, I'd easily rank this as not only my favorite of the Universal monster movies, but as one of the all-time great horror films in general and sci-fi horror films specifically.</p><p style="text-align: left;">While this film may have a literal monstrous creature at the center of its plot, there's a reason why, as generations of pedantic nerds have pointed out, he's not the title character. No, that would be his creator, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, who's played brilliantly by Colin Clive and, despite being perfectly human, may well be the film's metaphorical monster. Henry is guilty of many sins, the big one being pride. He's nakedly out to prove himself as the greatest scientist who ever lived and the man who conquered death, not least of all to his former professor Dr. Waldman, his father Baron Frankenstein, his friend Victor (with whom he swaps first names from the book), and his fiancé Elizabeth. He compares himself to God in the mother of all blasphemous boasts shortly after he brings his creature to life, one that several state censorship boards ordered to be cut. He genuinely cares about the life of his grand achievement, but chiefly as a trophy of his accomplishment, and soon finds that he is in no way ready to care for him. He's an egomaniac high on his own supply, one who's set up for a terrible, well-deserved fall in the third act as the consequences of his creation come back to bite him and the horror of what he's done starts to sink in.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Even here, however, rather than swallow his pride and admit he made a mistake, he sets out to salvage it instead, not merely joining the mob of angry villagers but insisting on leading it. Whereas once he made the bold claim that he now wielded the power of creation in his hands (just don't ask about how he was too careless to check the quality of the brain his assistant Fritz gave him), now he insists that only by those same hands can this horrible creature be destroyed. After all, only Dr. Henry Frankenstein, the most brilliant man who ever lived, knows how to stop the monster he made! At risk of getting sidetracked into a rant, watching Henry's transformation I couldn't help but be reminded of the far more recent phenomenon of tech gurus who made their fortune with advanced technology, from social media to self-driving cars to AI, insisting that their expertise as the creators of these technologies leaves them uniquely qualified to manage their deleterious consequences on society. Watching this movie today, its portrayal of Henry was one of the most frightening things about it, a shockingly prescient portrait of what a lot of the boy wonders of Silicon Valley who convinced everyone around them, not least of all themselves and each other, that they were saving the world and uplifting humanity were actually like. He may mean well and have a ton of technical knowhow, but outside his area of expertise, he's a fool. I'm specifically reminded of Larry Fessenden's recent <i>Frankenstein</i> homage <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2019/08/popcorn-frights-2019-day-5-girl-on.html">Depraved</a></i>, which I saw four years ago at Popcorn Frights' 2019 festival, and which updated the basic plot to the present-day world of Silicon Valley biohackers but otherwise hewed very closely to this movie's themes.</p><p style="text-align: left;">A great monster isn't enough to make a great monster movie, though. And that brings me to the <i>other</i> monster. If Henry is a self-serving jackass with a bloated head, then his creation is a different story entirely. Boris Karloff's performance brought to mind nothing less than a dog, specifically one who's been mistreated for so long that he can't help but be violent and has no idea that he's doing anything wrong. Drs. Frankenstein and Waldman horribly mistreat him, Fritz the assistant hates him and tries to kill him, and it's no wonder when he starts to lash out like a chained-up junkyard dog with the strength of ten men. Even when he tries to be friendly, such as when he escapes his creator's castle and meets a little girl on a farm, his lack of knowledge of how human beings operate has terrible consequences. Make no mistake, Frankenstein's monster is just that, a monster who, at the end of the day, needed to be put down and never should've been created in the first place, much like the rest of the Universal Monsters. But if <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-invisible-man-1933.html">Jack Griffin</a> was the trollish monster and <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-mummy-1932.html">Imhotep</a> was the sexy monster, then Frankenstein's creature is the tragic monster, one whose entire brief existence on Earth was practically engineered for suffering and whose ultimate fate may as well be mercy after everything he's gone through. Even after what he does, you can't help but root for the monster, if not to prevail then simply to find peace.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The look and feel of the film are exactly what you'd expect from a classic, classy 1930s monster movie. The sets are lavish, and director James Whale incorporates a lot of clear influence from German expressionism into the film, giving many locales a heightened, creepy, and unreal feel to them of a sort that Tim Burton would become famous for decades later. The film is short, and it moves briskly, focusing on building up a situation that slowly but surely spirals out of the control of everybody involved due to their own hubris. It gets moving early, and scarcely lets up from there, with only a brief lull in the middle after the monster escapes and everything suddenly starts to sink in for Henry just as his wedding to Elizabeth is about to get going. Whenever the monster was on screen, I knew in my heart that he didn't mean any harm, but that didn't change the tension in the air at the knowledge that he could still snap and turn on the characters around him at any moment, as he often did. This wasn't really a slow burn, but it wasn't a "jump scare" movie either; a lot of the frights were built around the characters and the mood, and Whale pulled them off.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Even now, <i>Frankenstein</i> is a film with no less power to frighten and amaze, its themes still relevant to this day and the performances by Colin Clive and Boris Karloff crafting a pair of legendary monsters. It's a must-see not just for fans of horror interested in its history, but anybody who wants to watch a sci-fi horror classic that still holds up.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-83804863455167664822023-10-14T11:53:00.002-07:002023-10-14T11:54:42.482-07:00Review: Never Hike Alone: The Ghost Cut (2020)<p style="text-align: center;"> <b><i>Never Hike Alone: The Ghost Cut</i> (2020)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Not rated</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGIyZDIzZDctN2FkZS00YTFmLWI5NGEtMTk4MTExNmQyY2QxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzkyMDA5MTc@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="578" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGIyZDIzZDctN2FkZS00YTFmLWI5NGEtMTk4MTExNmQyY2QxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzkyMDA5MTc@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="289" /></a></div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">If you've read my, or anybody else's, reviews of the <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/search/label/Friday%20the%2013th">Friday the 13th</a></i> series, you'd know that it has a very spotty track record. <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/04/review-friday-13th-1980.html">The first movie</a> is hardly most people's pick for the best in the series, the fact that there were more than twice as many films <i>after</i> <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/04/review-friday-13th-final-chapter-1984.html">the one titled <i>The Final Chapter</i></a> than before it has made the series the butt of jokes about horror franchises that get run into the ground, and nearly half the movies in this series range from just mediocre to borderline unwatchable. In short, it's an iconic slasher series where it wouldn't take much to make a movie that's around the middle of the pack quality-wise where its installments are concerned. And given the long legal battle that plagued this series for much of the 2010s, leave it to the fans to make just such a film. <i>Never Hike Alone: The Ghost Cut</i> is an anthology-style compilation of three <i>Friday</i> fan films by Womp Stomp Films that together range from pretty good to one of the most inspired things ever done with the idea of a big guy in a hockey mask hacking people up with a machete. It's a labor of love that (being a non-commercial fan film) is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cctkoxx-c">free to watch online</a>, and which I highly recommend doing.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film starts with a music video called "Disappear", a darkly humorous opening where Jason Voorhees hacks up three teenagers who ventured into the ruins of Camp Crystal Lake to drink and screw, all soundtracked by the titular acoustic guitar song by Trevor Vaughan. It sets the mood very nicely, playing right into our expectations of what a <i>Friday</i> movie is and delivering exactly that, while also examining just what Jason might be like in his "downtime" when he's not hacking people to bits. The second segment, <i>Never Hike in the Snow</i>, started out strong by showing Jason in an environment that's new to him: the winter, chasing and killing a young man named Mark Hill through the snowy woods. It starts off strong with a great buildup to a great kill, though as it went on it became the weakest segment in the film by my estimation, turning increasingly disjointed with plots about the sheriff Rick Cologne (a returning character from <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2018/07/review-friday-13th-part-vi-jason-lives.html">Jason Lives</a></i> played by the same actor, Vincent Guastaferro) comforting the victim's mother, the same sheriff having to deal with Tommy Jarvis (again, returning from <i>Jason Lives</i> with Thom Mathews reprising his role) as news of the murder causes him to come out of the woodwork suspecting that Jason is back, and a scene of a hapless deputy going into the woods searching for clues as to Mark's murder. Each scene was exceptionally well-shot even by the standards of a professionally produced film, let alone a fan flick, but while there were interesting ideas, especially in the scene with the mother, it didn't come together particularly well.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Fortunately, the film spent the next hour with its best part by far, its titular centerpiece originally filmed and released in 2017 and later included with the other two segments as the "Ghost Cut". This is mostly a one-man show in which a hiking influencer named Kyle McLeod ventures into the trails of the Wessex County forest, stumbles upon Camp Crystal Lake, and must fight for survival against Jason. Much of the first half is a slow burn as Kyle ventures deeper and deeper into Jason's turf, with growing clues that something isn't right, from the coyotes wailing in the distance one night to the "No Trespassing" sign he encounters to various signs of the carnage past at the long-abandoned camp. It's an effective buildup that's paid off wonderfully when Jason himself shows up to kick ass and take names. He's played here by the film's director Vincente DeSanti, and watching him, I felt something I had only rarely felt in the past watching the <i>Friday</i> films: genuinely afraid of Jason. All too often, Jason gets portrayed as a crowd-pleasing mascot who the film not-so-secretly sides with as he takes out the trash, rendering him less a monster than a roguish anti-hero of sorts. Not here. This movie portrays him as a mean, brutish, no-nonsense, and surprisingly cunning villain who could probably kill you with his bare hands, let alone his machete, and who you absolutely do not want to mess around with. It helped that Drew Leighty as Kyle was a guy who I could easily root for. He may be a YouTuber, but the film avoids making him an obnoxious caricature for the sake of it, with scenes of him grumbling about the spon-con deal he's doing with the company that made the collapsible shovel he's carrying. And when push comes to shove towards the end, he turns into a real-deal survivor who feels like a genuine match for Jason. I wanted to see this guy live and prevail, which was more than I could say for a lot of the people who've crossed paths with Jason, and that fact made me fear what Jason was trying to do to him that much more.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It's rare for a fan film to be this good, but <i>Never Hike Alone: The Ghost Cut</i> manages to be not only better than a lot of the actual <i>Friday the 13th</i> films, but a damn good horror movie in its own right. Even if you're not a <i>Friday</i> fan, I still recommend giving this one a look, especially since it's free and easily accessible.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-35836179781938243162023-10-13T11:15:00.002-07:002023-10-13T11:28:24.075-07:00Review: Totally Killer (2023)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Totally Killer</i> (2023)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for bloody violence, language, sexual material, and teen drug/alcohol use</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzQwYzY4YWUtNDMxMS00Y2UxLTlhODQtY2ExZDY5ZDhhZGMzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUzMTg2ODkz._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="540" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzQwYzY4YWUtNDMxMS00Y2UxLTlhODQtY2ExZDY5ZDhhZGMzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUzMTg2ODkz._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Totally Killer</i> is a film where you can see the marks of <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2017/10/review-happy-death-day-2017.html">Happy Death Day</a></i> written all over it. That movie, which has grown in my estimation over the years, set a template for a kind of horror-comedy that Blumhouse has since come to specialize in, one that combines a slasher movie storyline with a big, high-concept hook straight out of a classic retro comedy (in <i>Happy Death Day</i>'s case, it was <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2022/02/review-groundhog-day-1993.html">Groundhog Day</a></i>). In this case, director <span style="white-space: normal;">Nahnatchka Khan and writers </span>David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D'Angelo not only put a slasher twist on the basic plot of <i>Back to the Future</i> and the <i>Bill & Ted</i> films, they went the extra mile and set large parts of the film in the '80s as well, having its modern-day protagonist confounded by the values of the decade as much as Marty McFly was by the '50s. The result is a film I enjoyed, but wanted to like more than I actually did given the wild ride that the trailers promised. On one hand, it nailed the comedy side of the equation and had a cool-looking killer, a great co-lead performance by Olivia Holt as an '80s mean girl, and a story that seemed to be going in some interesting directions, but on the other, the horror side was fairly rote, it held back on some of the ideas it leaned towards, and its leading lady Kiernan Shipka didn't do much to elevate the material. Ultimately, I'd sooner rewatch <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2015/10/review-final-girls-2015.html">The Final Girls</a></i> as a film that did a superficially similar story more effectively, but I can't deny that there's still a lot to like about this one, and I don't regret having watched it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film starts on Halloween in 2023, thirty-six years after Pam Hughes survived a killing spree where three of her friends were murdered by the "Sweet Sixteen Killer", a masked murderer who stabbed each of his victims sixteen times on their sixteenth birthdays in late October. Now, Pam is a soccer mom with a teenage daughter named (what else?) Jamie -- and tonight, she herself gets murdered by the Sweet Sixteen Killer, who was never caught and seems to have come back to finish the job. Jamie, distraught over her mother's death, suddenly receives two leads, first from a local true crime podcaster named Chris who tells her that Pam had received a note from the killer reading "you're next, one day" that she had kept secret, and second from her best friend Amelia, a science whiz who's trying to enter the science fair with a time machine that her mother Lauren designed but which she can't get to work. Thanks to some accidental intervention by the killer, Jamie somehow manages to figure out how to make the machine work, and gets sent back in time to 1987 on the day of the first murder. With a heads-up from the killer, she sets out to not only solve her mother's murder in the present, but also save her mother's friends in the past.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The comedy side of the film was clearly where Khan and the writers were most invested in the material. A lot of humor is mined from Jamie's reactions to not only how different the adults in her life were when they were her age, but also how the '80s were a very different time when it came to everything from politics to permissiveness, and not necessarily for the better, a rather appropriate perspective to take given how much of the film's plot concerns Jamie realizing just how much of a bitch her mother was back when she was her age. And on that note, Olivia Holt as young Pam was this film's heart and soul, not only looking like a perfect dead ringer for a young Julie Bowen (who plays her grown-up self) but understanding the assignment and feeling like nothing less than a more mean-spirited (if still heroic) version of the characters that her idol Molly Ringwald plays. Whenever Holt was on screen, which was fortunately often, this movie sparkled to life. The supporting cast, too, served as capable accomplices for Holt, whether it's their job to act frightened or make you laugh, and occasionally do both at the same time. (One kill in particular late in the film stands as one of the funniest "comedy" deaths I've ever seen.) The horror side of the film was a fairly boilerplate whodunit slasher that would be familiar to anyone who's seen <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2015/01/review-scream-1996.html">Scream</a></i> (a film that this one namedrops) or any of the films that followed in its wake. However, it was elevated by a killer whose look alone was creepy, wearing a Max Headroom-inspired mask that feels right at home in this movie's darkly comic sendup of the '80s and giving a twisted sort of edge to him. It may have just been aesthetics rather than substance, but those aesthetics were really damn cool, and given how much this movie is powered by a love of the visual and sonic landscape of '80s pop culture, it was exactly what the movie needed.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It was fortunate that this movie had Holt and its totally killer (sorry) style propelling it, because there were otherwise a lot of weak links here -- and unfortunately, they were some big ones. For starters, while I liked Kiernan Shipka on <i>Chilling Adventures of Sabrina</i>, I found myself very disappointed with her performance here, a problem given that she was supposed to be the main character. She acquitted herself well enough with the scares and as the "straight man" to the humor, but this film was built around Jamie's relationship with her mother, and while Holt carried her side of that story well enough, Shipka fell flat and couldn't get me interested in the character. What's more, the writing missed some very interesting and incisive directions that it could've gone in, tying Jamie's shock at her mother's awful behavior as a teenager to the jokes poking fun at the political incorrectness of the '80s and using both to craft a broader theme about how our memories of the past are all too often colored by selective nostalgia that glosses over the uncomfortable sides of the things we love. It's a dramatic throughline that was practically right there, waiting to be tapped, and yet the film barely even seems to think about how two of its primary elements might connect to one another. Finally, the reveal of the killer's identity was telegraphed almost from the moment we're introduced to one particular character, and the film did nothing to play around with it, resulting in a flat, uninteresting villain with a motive that's been done many times before and often better.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Totally Killer</i> is goofy to a fault, seeming to actively avoid finding any deeper meaning in what it's saying in favor of delivering a sugar rush of '80s nostalgia. On that front, it delivered exactly what it set out to, a mix of retro aesthetics, lots of funny jokes, and a performance by Olivia Holt that ought to be a stepping stone to bigger and better things. If you wanna have some fun, check it out, though I do wish it got a bit meatier than it wound up being.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-296453481810308772023-10-08T12:46:00.003-07:002023-10-08T13:14:21.790-07:00Review: The Mummy (1932)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Mummy</i> (1932)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDMwZmMwMTgtODgxYS00NDFkLTllNzctZjA1YjAzYmZjMzRkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc5NjEzNA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDMwZmMwMTgtODgxYS00NDFkLTllNzctZjA1YjAzYmZjMzRkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc5NjEzNA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">The second classic Universal monster movie I was able to check out at Cinema Salem this October, <i>The Mummy</i> is one of the few such films where the classic 1930s version isn't the definitive example these days. In 1999, Universal <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2019/10/review-mummy-1999.html">remade it</a> as an Indiana Jones-style action/adventure flick starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, and if I'm being perfectly honest, having now seen both movies I kinda prefer the '90s version. The original still has a lot going for it even more than ninety years later, but the remake's pulpy, two-fisted throwback style is just nostalgic for me in ways that hit my sweet spot. That said, I will argue that this was a better and more self-assured film than <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-invisible-man-1933.html">The Invisible Man</a></i>, having a monster and effects just as memorable but also remembering to keep a consistent tone and, more importantly, have a compelling non-villainous character for me to root for in the form of its female lead. It is, shall we say, of its time in its depiction of Egypt and its people, but there's a reason why Boris Karloff is a horror legend, and here, he made Imhotep into a multilayered villain and a compelling presence on screen -- rather appropriately given how he's presented here as ominously seductive. At the very least, both it and the Fraser version are a damn sight better than <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2017/06/review-mummy-2017.html">the 2017 Tom Cruise version</a>.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film starts in 1921 with a tale as old as the first exhibit at the British Museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts, as an archaeological expedition in Egypt led by Sir Joseph Whemple discovers the tomb of a man named Imhotep. Studying his remains and his final resting place, they find that a) he was buried alive, and b) a separate casket was buried with him with a curse inscribed on it threatening doom to whoever opened it. Sure enough, Joseph's assistant opens that casket, reads from the scroll inside, and proceeds to go mad at the sight of Imhotep's mummified body getting up and walking out of the tomb. Fast-forward to the present day of 1932, and Joseph's son Frank is now following in his father's footsteps. A mysterious Egyptian historian named Ardeth Bey offers to assist Frank and his team in locating another tomb, that of the princess Ankh-es-en-amun. It doesn't take much for either the viewer or the characters to figure out who "Ardeth Bey" really is, especially once he starts taking an interest in Helen Grosvenor, a half-Egyptian woman and Frank's lover who bears a striking resemblance to the ancient drawings of Ankh-es-en-amun.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Let's get one thing out of the way right now. Lots of modern retellings of classic monster stories, from <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2013/04/review-interview-with-vampire-1994.html">Interview with the Vampire</a></i> to this film's own 2017 remake, often throw in the twist of making their monsters handsome, even sexy, as a way to lend them a dark edge of sorts. In the case of the Mummy, however, doing so is fairly redundant, because Karloff's Imhotep is <i>already</i> the "sexy mummy", if not in appearance than certainly in personality. He is threatening and creepy-looking, yes, but he is also alluring and erudite, his hypnosis of Helen presented as seduction and Frank becoming one of his targets because he sees him as competition. He may be under heavy makeup in the opening scene to look like a mummified corpse, but afterwards, Karloff plays him as an intimidating yet attractive older gentleman, the famous shot of him staring into the camera with darkened eyes looking equal parts like him peering into your soul and him undressing you with his eyes. And if it wasn't obvious when it was just him on screen, his relationship with Helen feels like that of a predatory playboy, especially in the third act when she's clad in a skimpy outfit that would likely have never flown just a couple of years later once they started enforcing the Hays Code. He's a proto-Hugh Hefner as a Universal monster. I couldn't help but wonder if Karloff was trying to do his own take on Bela Lugosi's Dracula here, perhaps as a way to make this character stand out from Frankenstein's monster; if he was, then he certainly pulled it off.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Zita Johann's Helen, too, made for a surprisingly interesting female lead. As she's increasingly possessed by the spirit of Ankh-es-en-amun over the course of the film, she's the one who directly challenges Imhotep on what he's doing to her, pointing out that, even by the standards of his own ancient Egyptian morality, his attempt to resurrect his lost love is evil and in violation of the laws of his gods, reminding him why he was entombed alive in the first place. It's she who ultimately saves herself, the male heroes only arriving after everything is all said and done, which was well and good in my book given that I wasn't particularly fond of them. Not only was the romanticization of British imperialism in their characters kind of weird watching this now (the fact that they can't take the artifacts they collected to the British Museum and have to settle for the Cairo Museum is presented as lamentable), but they didn't really have much character to them beyond being your typical 1930s movie protagonists. Frank is the young boyfriend, Joseph and Muller are the older scholars, the Nubian servant is... a whole 'nuther can of worms, and there's not much to them beyond stock archetypes. This was one area where the Fraser movie excelled, and the biggest reason why I prefer that film to this one.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Beyond the characters, the direction by Karl Freund was suitably creepy and atmospheric. I was able to tell that I wasn't looking at Egypt so much as I was looking at southern California playing such, but the film made good use of its settings, and had quite a few creative tricks up its sleeve as we see Imhotep both assaulting the main characters and observing them from afar. The direction and makeup did as much as Karloff's performance to make me afraid of Imhotep; while this wasn't a film with big jump scare moments, it did excel at creeping dread and making the most of what it had. The reaction of the poor assistant who watched Imhotep get up and walk away from his tomb struck the perfect note early on, letting you know that you're about to witness seemingly ludicrous things but at the same time making you believe in them despite your better judgment. This very much felt like the kind of classiness that we now associate with the original Universal monster movies, a slow burn even with its short runtime as "Ardeth Bey" spends his time doing his dirty work in the background, either skulking around or manipulating people from his home through sorcery.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">The original 1932 version of <i>The Mummy</i> still stands as one of the finest classic horror movies. Not all of it has aged gracefully, but Boris Karloff's mummy is still a terrifying and compelling villain, and the rest of the film too has enough going for it to hold up.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-39427292257977957822023-10-07T06:59:00.000-07:002023-10-07T06:59:08.165-07:00Review: The Invisible Man (1933)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Invisible Man</i> (1933)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGUxYmM1M2QtZTg1MC00NWUzLThiMzgtYWYwODJhNWYxMjIxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc5NjEzNA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="531" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGUxYmM1M2QtZTg1MC00NWUzLThiMzgtYWYwODJhNWYxMjIxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc5NjEzNA@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 3 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Having just moved to Boston, a natural destination for a horror fan like myself has been the city of Salem, Massachusetts about 40 minutes north. I have indeed, like a dirty tourist, partaken in many of the attractions that have made Salem famous, but one place I imagine will be a repeat destination for me is the Cinema Salem, a three-screen movie theater that not only hosts the annual Salem Horror Fest but also, this October, is running many classic Universal monster movies all month long. For my first movie there, I decided to check out <i>The Invisible Man</i>, the most famous adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1897 novel, and I was not expecting the movie I got. Don't get me wrong, it was a good movie, albeit an uneven one. But if your understanding of the Universal Monsters is that they're slow, dry, classy, and old-fashioned, you'll be as surprised as I was at just how wild and funny this movie can get. What would've been just a passable horror movie is elevated by Claude Rains as an outstanding villain who may be literally invisible but still finds a way to hog the screen at every opportunity, one who singlehandedly made this film a classic and part of the horror canon through his sheer presence. It has a lot of rough spots, but I still do not regret going out of my way to see this in a theater.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film opens in an inn in the small English village of Iping, where Jack Griffin, a man clad head to toe in a trench coat, hat, gloves, bandages, and dark goggles, arrives in the middle of a blizzard. We soon find out that he is a scientist who performed a procedure on himself that turned him invisible, and shortly after that, we find out that this procedure drove him murderously insane as he came to realize that he could now commit any crime and get away with it because nobody will even know how to find him, let alone arrest him. Immediately, we get a sense of what kind of man Griffin is as he attacks the inn's owner for trying to get him to pay his rent, then leading the police on a merry chase when they step into try and evict him, his crimes only escalating from there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Rains plays Griffin as a troll, somebody for whom the ultimate real-world anonymity has enabled him to let out his inner jerk, and he <i>relishes</i> it. He frequently drops one-liners as he harasses, assaults, and eventually outright murders the people who cross his path, and packs an evil laugh with the best of them. At times, the film veers almost into horror-comedy as it showcases the more mischievous side of Griffin's crime spree, such that I'm not surprised that some of the sequels to this that Universal made in the '40s would be straight-up comedies. That said, Rains still played Griffin as a fundamentally vile person, one who forces his former colleague Dr. Kemp to act as his accomplice knowing he can't do anything about it, kills scores of people in one of the highest body counts of any Universal monster movie, and clearly seems conflicted at points about his descent into villainy only for his power to seduce him back into it -- perhaps best demonstrated in a scene where he talks to his fiancée Flora about how he wishes to one day cure himself, only to slip into ranting about how he could then sell the secret of his invisibility to the world's armies, or perhaps even raise one such army himself and take over the world. The Invisible Man may be the most comedic of Universal's "classic" monsters, but the film never forgets that he's a monster. What's more, while the seams may now be visible on the special effects and chromakey that they used back in the day to create the effect of Griffin's invisibility, a lot of it still works surprisingly well. Already, as I dip my toes into the classic Universal horror movies, I've started to notice why the monsters have always been at the center of the nostalgia, discourse, and marketing surrounding them, and it's because they and the actors playing them are usually by far the most memorable parts of their movies.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It's fortunate, too, because I've also started to notice a recurring flaw in the Universal monster movies: that the parts not directly connected to the monster usually aren't nearly as memorable. I've barely even talked about Griffin's fellow scientists, and that's because they were only interesting insofar as they were connected to him, which made Kemp the most interesting non-villainous character in the film by default simply because of how Griffin uses and torments him. Flora, a character original to the movie who wasn't in the book, felt almost completely extraneous and had next to nothing to do in the plot, feeling like she was thrown in simply because the producers felt that there needed to be at least one token female presence and love story in the film. When the film was focused on Griffin, it was genuinely compelling, whether it was building tension (such as in the opening scenes at the inn, or Kemp's interactions with Griffin) or in the more madcap scenes of Griffin's mayhem. However, when the film diverted its attention from him to the scientists and police officers searching for him, it quickly started to drag. This was a pretty short movie at only 70 minutes, but it still felt like it had a lot of flab and pacing issues.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">The monster is the reason why people remember this movie, and what a monster he is. Claude Rains and the effects team took what could've easily been a cheap and disposable adaptation and made something truly memorable out of it, even if the rest of the film doesn't entirely hold up today. I still think <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2020/03/review-invisible-man-2020.html">the 2020 version</a> is a far better movie, but this was still an enjoyable, entertaining, and surprisingly wild time.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-90133023942607338722023-09-30T17:26:00.002-07:002023-09-30T17:26:27.492-07:00Review: Saw X (2023)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Saw X</i> (2023)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Rated R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, language and some drug use</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMmJhYjBkMzgtZGIwMC00YTAzLWE4NTQtYzVkNDVmYjIzODI0XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODQxMTI4MjM@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="540" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMmJhYjBkMzgtZGIwMC00YTAzLWE4NTQtYzVkNDVmYjIzODI0XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODQxMTI4MjM@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">For some strange reason, <i>Saw X</i>, the tenth film in the venerable <i>Saw</i> franchise, is being marketed as a nostalgic throwback, even though the franchise has never really gone anywhere. Yes, it's been close to twenty years since <a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2014/10/review-saw-2004.html">the original film</a>... but I remember six years ago when <i><a href="https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2017/10/review-jigsaw-2017.html">Jigsaw</a></i> was marketed as the franchise's grand return to theaters after a long period of dormancy. Hell, we got a new <i>Saw</i> movie just two years ago, in the form of <i>Spiral: From the Book of Saw</i>. It wasn't a particularly good movie, and most people missed it because it came out during COVID, but it was a theatrically released <i>Saw</i> movie. What makes this different, I feel, is that it's not only the tenth <i>Saw</i> movie, a genuine milestone that very few horror franchises reach, but that, more than <i>Jigsaw</i> or <i>Spiral</i>, it brings the franchise back to the "classic" period of the franchise in the 2000s. <i>Jigsaw</i> was a soft reboot with only one returning character, the original Jigsaw killer John Kramer himself in one scene towards the end (not counting his voice on the tapes), and <i>Spiral</i> was a spinoff with an entirely new cast. <i>Saw X</i>, meanwhile, takes place around the time of the second and third films, it's once again a numbered sequel after the last two films went by just <i>Jigsaw</i> and <i>Spiral</i>, and most importantly, it not only brings back Tobin Bell as Kramer once more and gives him what's probably his biggest on-screen role in the series to date, it also brings back Shawnee Smith as his first and arguably most prominent apprentice Amanda Young.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And most importantly, it's a return to form for a series that's had a lot of ups and downs throughout its long life. While it acknowledges the sprawling mytharc of the prior films, it puts nearly its entire focus on its central, standalone plot, which serves up one of the series' biggest, most deserving, and most inadvertently timely assholes as its villain. It takes what had been a growing, questionable subtext throughout the series, that of John being less a vile serial killer villain than a righteous vigilante anti-hero, and comes closer than ever to making it outright <i>text</i>, complete with a triumphant hero shot of him and Amanda at the end (given that this is an interquel set before the second film, it's no spoiler to say they make it out alive) and the main criticism of his philosophy being voiced by somebody even worse than he is -- but the film still makes it work, in the same manner that vigilante movies and Godzilla movies work, by setting this monster up against even bigger monsters. It's exactly as gory as you'd expect from a <i>Saw</i> sequel, but it was also quite an in-depth character study of John, being set as it is during one of the darkest moments of his life and spending its whole first act on his attempts to escape his own looming fate, with the obligatory opening death trap turning out to be purely a product of his imagination. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it's probably the best in the franchise since the sixth, or even the first three.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film takes place at an unspecified point between the first and second films, with John Kramer still clinging to some measure of hope that he can beat the brain cancer that's slowly killing him -- and finding it in Finn Pederson, a controversial Norwegian doctor who claims to have developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that Big Pharma wants to suppress in order to protect their profits. John flies down to Mexico to meet Finn's daughter Cecilia, running a clinic outside Mexico City where she carries out the treatment her father developed. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long before John realizes that Cecilia sold him snake oil, and that there's a good reason why she and her father were run out of Norway. Finding that all of her and her father's previous patients ultimately died of their illness anyway, that the "operating room" he was in was a Potemkin village, and that the "doctors" and "nurses" who assisted Cecilia were actually random hoodlums who she hired off the street to make her scam look more legit, John takes his revenge in typical Jigsaw fashion -- and calls his apprentice and intended successor Amanda Young down to Mexico to help him out.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I will admit that, after COVID, there was a measure of catharsis in the idea of the main target of a Jigsaw trap being a phony doctor who steals desperate people's money and cries persecution from Big Pharma when the authorities start investigating her crimes. (The basic plot outline was actually written before COVID, which makes it even more amusing.) That said, Cecilia Pederson was still a great villain even separate from the real-life subtext. I liked how the film initially presented her as a warm contrast to John, somebody who also uses controversial methods to improve people's lives but does so by healing their illnesses with suppressed medical treatments instead of John's tough love approach to straighten out people who are destroying themselves. It doesn't take long, however, before she's revealed as an even worse person than John, somebody whose altruistic motives are all a pose to separate people from their money. She'd probably disagree, though, perhaps best evidenced when she directly calls out John's hypocrisy in thinking he's doing any good in the world versus her flatly admitting that she's motivated by naked greed and that any appearance otherwise is part of her con, probably the closest the series has come in a long while to seriously interrogating the warped morals that make these movies so entertaining but also kind of awkward. Synnøve Macody Lund plays both sides of the character well, coming off as a comforting presence in the first half of the film but rapidly shedding that and turning into a cold, calculating survivor once John catches up to her. She deserves everything she gets in this movie and then some.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That said, this is really John's movie more than any other, giving Tobin Bell more screen time than he's ever had before as not a shadowy villain orchestrating the mayhem from the cover of darkness but a central character who's directly involved in it on the ground. Much of the first half of the movie is a slow burn that builds up to the mayhem to come, a drama about John traveling to Mexico in search of hope only for it to be cruelly taken away from him when he realizes it was all a lie. Bell is a legitimately captivating presence on screen, his typically creepy, ominous tone often cracking at times to reveal genuine anger at the people who've screwed over not just him but dozens of others to make money, as well as compassion for those who did him no wrong, or at least passed his tests. Right beside him is Shawnee Smith as his apprentice Amanda, and while her wig here is awful, she otherwise felt like she was right back at home in the role, no worse for wear. She does the duo's dirty work both literally and figuratively, in the sense of being the "muscle" for the ailing John and in her belief that some of their victims are beyond redemption and ought to be just tortured to death to make examples of them. She's the dark side of John's philosophy, the film showing that she's already on the downward spiral of cold-blooded vigilante vengeance that would culminate in the third film. Together, they made a such a great pairing that it felt like a waste to only have one movie before this, the third, showing them working together like this. It did feel kind of awkward to outright root <i>for</i> them, given who they are and what they're doing, but again, watching the scum of the earth get slaughtered to the roar of the crowd is kind of the appeal of a lot of "body count" horror movies, and a lot of the great '80s slasher franchises, while never going so far as to make their killers into outright anti-heroes like this movie does, still made them compelling, even charismatic presences and often flagrantly sided with them over their victims.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And if you want blood, you've got it. When you're heading out to see the tenth <i>Saw</i> movie, there are certain things you expect, above all else some absolute geysers of gore. And this movie delivers eyes getting sucked out of sockets, bones big and small getting broken, legs getting sawed off (the series' old namesake classic), brains getting cut into, flesh being burned, and more. The body count may be lower than some of the series' greatest hits, but the special effects remain up to par with all of them. There are moments of creeping tension earlier in the film as the victims are stalked and kidnapped, but at this point, the series has its formula down to a science, and it knows how to get big cheers and thrills out of people mutilating themselves to avoid an even worse fate. The plot, too, is one of the most straightforward in the series, keeping the references to the broader <i>Saw</i> mythos limited to Easter eggs and focusing chiefly on John's revenge against Cecilia and her associates rather than turning into the kind of violent soap opera that otherwise runs through the franchise. There isn't much here that reinvents the wheel, but it still serves up some pretty classic 2000s-style torture porn that delivers the goods.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">By putting more focus on its characters, in particular fleshing out John Kramer and making him almost a dark hero of sorts, <i>Saw X</i> proves that, even after this many sequels, the franchise still knows how to tell a compelling story without forgetting the grit and gristle that it does better than few other mainstream movies. It's a very entertaining way to kick off the spooky season.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898868882782133336.post-65510129469699200802023-08-02T16:13:00.000-07:002023-08-02T16:13:24.510-07:00Review: The Passenger (2023)<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Passenger</i> (2023)</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Not rated</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjliNzlmYTktNGI3MS00YTQ0LWIwMWUtMmYyOGYwNjBjMzM4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjY5ODI4NDk@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="540" height="400" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjliNzlmYTktNGI3MS00YTQ0LWIwMWUtMmYyOGYwNjBjMzM4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjY5ODI4NDk@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Score: 4 out of 5</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>The Passenger</i> is my final Popcorn Frights movie before moving to Massachusetts, a film that they held a special sneak preview of last Friday night that's not quite a horror movie, but is absolutely horror-adjacent. It's a low-key crime thriller that, after its shocking opening, is a very talky, naturalistic slow burn as it explores the lives of its two main characters, both of whom have considerable darkness in their pasts weighing them down and setting them on the road to where they are now. It's a movie where you kind of know how it's gonna go, but you find yourself enjoying the journey anyway, not least of all thanks to Kyle Gallner carrying the film on his shoulders as its superficially charming yet unhinged villain. It's not an instant classic, but it's certainly worth a watch.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The film starts with Randy Bradley (who usually goes by just his last name), a twenty-year-old employee at a fast-food joint in a small, podunk town in Louisiana. His boss wonders what the hell he's doing in this job, his co-workers bully him, and the janitor Benson... well, today he went out to his car, grabbed a shotgun out of the trunk, and murdered everybody inside, sparing only Bradley seemingly because he sympathizes with the poor guy. It's not over for Bradley, though, as Benson forces him to help hide the bodies in the freezer, clean up the mess he left behind, and then join him on a long drive through town as he hopes to make a getaway.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I wasn't kidding when I said that Gallner carries this movie. His Benson is a guy who lives with his mother, owns at least two guns, listens to punk and metal on his car's stereo, blames others for his failures in life, and is presented as a lout beneath his superficial charm, quick to anger and mistreating everybody around him, including Bradley even as he tries to be friendly with his captive. His mom, as much of a lazy bum as she is, figures out in no time that he probably crossed a line he can't go back from the moment he arrives at his house with Bradley in tow. We all know a guy like Benson, and the only surprise is that he didn't shoot up his workplace sooner. Gallner dominates every scene he's in, at times to a fault as he completely overshadows Johnny Berchtold as Bradley. Berchtold's performance is subdued, but it works for the character, first as he's being harassed by his co-workers and then as he's practically frozen in terror in the face of Benson, looking for a way to let others know that this guy is a murderer without tipping him off. A lot of the film revolves around him learning to overcome his own insecurities and ironically stand up for himself in exactly the manner that Benson wishes he would, just not in a way that Benson would like him to do at this very moment. Once I heard Bradley's big speech outlining the reason why he turned out such a sad sack, I was able to figure out exactly how his and Benson's stories were going to end, but even then, it made me want to see exactly how it was going to play out, given that it doesn't quite telegraph everything.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Helping me along on that journey was the portrait that director Carter Smith painted of the film's small-town Louisiana setting. I'm familiar with towns like this, and it's the kind of place I can easily imagine producing men like Benson and Bradley who've seemingly given up on life in various ways. It was probably the most dour and uninviting I've ever seen the modern South depicted on screen, a grim yet appropriate backdrop for Benson's antics. (I will say, though, as a former substitute teacher in Florida that elementary school they visit in one scene was oddly nice for a public school in a Southern state.) The whole movie had an aura of doom to it, like you're trapped there with Bradley on this out-of-control ride that's probably going to end badly for a lot of people even if he manages to find a way to stop Benson.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Bottom Line</b></p><p style="text-align: center;">There's not really a whole lot to say. <i>The Passenger</i> is a low-stakes but gripping thriller anchored by an outstanding lead performance from Kyle Gallner, one in which the experience is more important than the details. Check it out when it hits streaming or VOD.</p>Kevin R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/10026065377533098777noreply@blogger.com0