Archives: Movie Reviews

Google Glass™️ commercial disguised as a first-person shooter, as two students on vacation in Jerusalem run from the beginning of the apocalypse, which apparently consists entirely of zombies attacking, and living people turning into winged demons. I guess the filmmakers were concerned that people are so addicted to pop-up notifications, they wouldn't sit through a whole movie unless it contained them. Maybe this appeals to the sort of people who think that if you're running from zombies and your Google Glass™️ starts unexpectedly blasting music into your ears, the thing to do is spend the next five minutes yelling"Glass™️, music off! Glass™️, music off!"over and over, instead of just /taking the damn glasses off/.

Mechanics trapped in a garage fighting for their lives against an alien shapeshifting car. Fortunately, there's plenty of shotguns there. The leading lady's face is square, which is something new. Honestly? I've seen worse.

Goofy, extremely unintentionally campy Australian film about an affable middle-aged amateur exorcist, going around doing exorcisms. Lots of good rubber demon costumes and Buffy-style production values but they play it completely straight. I dunno, somehow the Australian accents let them get away with this.

This had to be made originally as a TV pilot. Lance Hendrikson (who does not die in this one, because nobody does) leads a cast of gorgeous actors as they stand around in ultracool sci-fi cyberpunk secret headquarters and do nothing but talk and talk and talk and talk.

A sneak attack! What starts off looking like a halfway decent sci-fi about the first human born on Mars traveling to explore Earth, turns into a fairly cliched teen romance-adventure-drama of the sort you might get from Disney or Spielberg's cheesier moments (not a good thing, in my book) when he hooks up with the earth girl he's been video chatting with and they go off to try to find his father, while being pursued by NASA scientists desperate to find him for a heart transplant before his enlarged heart gives out due to Earth's great gravity. Saved by the charming performance of Asa Butterfield as the protagonist, with numerous fun moments such as his convincingly startled expression the first time he sees a horse, and for some reason got a lot of really terrible reviews it didn't really deserve, but at the same time I have a hard time going for the teen romance adventure thing.

"After losing his parents, a priest travels to China, where he inherits a mysterious ability to turn into a dinosaur". Between that, and the obviously rubber dinosaur head shown in the preview, unfortunately I will not be able to review this film, because I refuse to watch it.

One of my old ex-girlfriends goes to Ireland and finally becomes the blood-drenched psychopath I for one always knew she had it in her to be. You go, girl! (I thought it might not be her, until the closing credits say,"A film by Normal", which is so totally something she'd be involved with.)

I have never seen a movie pull such a successful turnaround over its runtime as this one. I found it in with FreeVee's horror movies, but noticed the names of a bunch of comedy actors in the credits (including Max Greenberg as the douchebag he's only hinted at in every other role he's ever played.) It starts seeming like a somewhere trite revenge fantasy—woman goes out, acts drunk, gets guys to take her home and try to take advantage of her, and then confronts them and does something to them that's never actually revealed. And, it was well done enough to be enjoyable on that level, even if it seemed a little on-the-nose and unimaginative. I figured , with all the comedy actors, I was in for satire on the level of"Teeth", perhaps. Then it progresses to reveal the crime she is avenging, and she moves from general douchebags to targeting the people from her past who were specifically involved in the crime. Also shows characters with some depth, not everything is black and white... such as the parents of the friend she's avenging (without their knowledge) asking her to move on from the loss, which she's clearly unhealthily holding on t, noticed even by the other people in the film who care about her. The tension ratchets, and by the end, not only are there some profoundly disturbing scenes (which is saying a lot considering how many horror movies I've seen) but I genuinely didn't know what was going to happen next, until it finally built to a very satisfying final act that I didn't see coming. It's a tough call if I can recommend it as a watch, as a very good chunk of the movie is no better than ok, it takes a long time to build and I'm not sure the denouement is quite worth all that. But I will say it opened by setting expectations very low, and only turned up the heat extremely slowly, but by the end totally had me, I was kinda blown away.

A confusing ending spoils a fairly decent sci-fi thriller in which a team of army people goes to rescue the final survivor of a faraway space outpost where everyone else been infected by intelligent ooze that drives them mad.

This might seem an odd thing to review but I just binge watched it for the first time in a long time and it holds up. Overall, it was always kind of uneven, but the best episodes—and there are many of them—are well-remembered for a reason. The worse ones are perhaps a bit sentimental, or a bit too predictable, but never that bad. Also interesting is the long-forgotten fourth season, which never appeared in syndication because they expanded the episodes to an hour for that one. To me, the punchiness of the storytelling suffered, TTZ had always made great use of the half-hour format with concise stories that ticked along well. You can sense that the writers wanted to see what they could do given the little extra time, and mostly they make good use of it, but still, I felt a series of this nature kind of benefitted from the strictures of the shorter time slot. Also interesting was that I had forgotten just how many people who went on to be famous later were in this series. Beyond the obvious, a fair bit of both the regular cast and guest-stars of Star Trek played roles: from George Takei as a Japanese-American dealing with post-WWII racism, to James Doohan in a bit part as a father in a small town, to Leonard Nimoy with a non-speaking role as party of a platoon of WWII soldiers, to familiar bit or single-episode players whose faces I recognized but names I didn't know, like Antoinette Bower (Sylvia in 'Catspaw') or Stanley Adams (Cyrano Jones, 'The Trouble With Tribbles') or Susan Oliver ( from 'The Menagerie', who apparently specialized in playing the psychic sole attractive female inhabitant of the planet where the ship crashes.) Plus there were a host of others, from just about anyone who had a prominent role in a famous sitcom later in the 60s, plus many who I didn't even know were acting that early: such as a very young Robert Redford, and an almost unrecognizable 27-year-old, clean-cut Dennis Hopper as a neo-nazi in one of the S4 hour-long episodes, among many, many other recognizable-at-second-glance faces. Also surprising, despite the series's preoccupations with themes of the time (the space race, the military, the old west, the threat of nuclear obliteration) is how well the stories hold up. In particular, the Dennis Hopper one, in which he spends a lot of time making neo-Nazi speeches, struck me as entirely contemporary (unfortunately) in terms of the story and much of the dialogue. He said things on that episode in 1962 I still hear from certain 'news' outlets and other disreputable sources today.

I can see the boardroom exec somewhere saying,"We don't have enough 'Hunger Games' content. Find me something."That said, this is a reasonably entertaining take on the postapocalyptic-everygirl-fights-the-government-and-other-factions-of-survivors-on-her-way-to-becoming-their-greatest-hero-and-standing-in-front-of-a-cheering-crowd, probably-adapted-from-a-young-adult-novel genre. All the kids have developed powers and are put into camps where they are labeled by a color indicating how dangerous they are. An 'orange', the most dangerous kind and supposed to be killed on sight, escapes and hooks up with a band of other survivors who try to evade bounty hunters and determine which of the warring factions left of society are really on their side.

17-year-old"prepper"survives a plague due to his paranoia, then tries to survive in a cinematically familiar landscape of tough-as-nails men seeking to take the womenfolk and shooting guns at each other. Eh, could've been worse, they could've cast a familiar face as the kid.

An android aboard a spaceship is upgraded and begins to have feelings. Funny, this is about as amateur and low-budget as it gets, with an odd assortment of clearly amateur actors, but, while I usually hate that sort of thing, the level of commitment on the part of everyone involved makes it kind of entertaining. Like, if this was presented as a fan film, and judged by that standard, it would be pretty good for a fan-made film. Which is, uh, something, I guess. I ultimately kinda liked it, which is a surprise. But be aware of what you're getting into. Prepare mentally to watch a cheapo fan-made home-movie, and you'll do fine.

I saw what I thought was going to be a mid-80s"Mad Max"ripoff, and it turned out to be in a mid-2010s ripoff of a mid-80s"Mad Max"ripoff. James Franco, Milla Jovovich, and Lucy Lui, amusingly also featuring Snoop Dogg playing a post-apocalyptic version of himself who, in the film's only entertaining moment, finally gets the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of his"hoes"in a post-closing-credits sequence.

Well, I have found it—the least believable movie of all time. A bunch of rich people go to a chef's exclusive island for an exclusive meal, which will end in the death of all the guests and staff (as part of the"art"), and some attend even aware of this beforehand. How they got a bunch of well-known actors to participate in this silliness is beyond me. Only slight redeeming point: Ralph Fiennes, already proven great as menacing authority figures, as the chef. But B-list faces abound: Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, Judith Light. What were they thinking??

You know, as dumb escapist entertainment goes, this was pretty dumb and escapist and entertaining. A more fun way to kill an hour and a half than I expected.

Ok, I can't say this is a great movie, but it scores pretty high for originality. In a kind of"Home Alone"meets"Invasion Of The Body Snatchers", a girl living in an isolated house single-handedly fights an alien invasion that has taken over her town. More clever than awesome, and arguably just plain silly at times, it's nonetheless supported by very decent cinematography, a script that adds just enough original elements to keep it from becoming either a stale home-invasion movie or a stale fighting-space-aliens movie, and most notably, only 3 words of dialogue in the movie's over-90-minute runtime. Reading up afterwards, apparently it created quite a critical stir, and that makes sense. Even though it's got more style than substance, that style does stand out as something kind of different than I've seen before. Apparently it's the same guy who wrote and directed"The Babysitter", one I wasn't as crazy about, IIRC it leaned a little to heavy on just being silly.

Plucky small-town mayor sees her town through a shower of meteor strikes while they await The Big One. You know what? I kind of liked it. It was cheesy and sentimental, but disaster movies are gonna do that. The acting was good, it stayed realistic and didn't go all hollywood and over-the-top, and overall, I haven't seen a disaster movie in a long time, and this fit the bill nicely. I should have hated it, but I didn't at all, not even a little.

A girl buys an evil-looking artifact at a garage sale that a woman smilingly tells her,"It's a friendship game. You put your hands on it and speak your innermost desire. If your friendship doesn't survive the game, neither do you."So of course she buys it and plays it with her friends. Unfortunately the woman didn't tell her the other part of the curse: it puts you in a movie with a totally nonlinear narrative that makes no sense.

Can you watch J. K. Simmons for 90 minutes? I can. That's all it took for me to like this piffle of a buddy comedy about Simmons and his daughter's slacker ex-boyfriend searching LA for her when she doesn't answer her phone.

Elle Fanning as a young model garnering resentment among other models by rising too fast when she gets to LA, so they kill her. Technically very well made, it's sort of like someone saw a Gaspar Noe movie and said,"I can do that!"because they didn't notice there's actually more to Gaspar Noe's movies than slick cinematography.

A couple inherits property on the Oregon coast, only to discover that The Creature From The Black Lagoon lives in their well. No, really.

Local kids go to explore a haunted house in the woods and get picked off by a masked psychopath, except, way slower and more boring than that sounds.

one of those movies that's so bad, I don't know how it got made. Obviously intended to be a comedy spoof of horror movies, but avoids tipping its hand by never being funny, just being execrable as if doing that intentionally is enough. A paper-thin caricature of a sorority sister adopts a murderous sloth, which murders the entire sorority, occasionally driving a car or looking up information online to do so.