Archives: Movie Reviews

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.

Fun enough, and probably an amusing watch for fans of the original (which I am), but not really anything special. The first one broke new ground, and this gets bigger and badder in the best tradition of sophomore sequels but doesn't really bring much new to the table beyond that. The sole exception to that is one notable and long stunt sequence, in which teeny-tiny gamine Chloe Grace Moretz takes out a whole van full of bad guys from on top of, alongside, and finally inside it as it speeds down the highway. That was cool.

Torture porn with a ham-fisted social message. A leering, smug, designed-to-be-hatable billionaire fed up with the"Kardashianization of humanity"(yes, they use that phrase in the movie) imprisons a bunch of reality show stars in a house where they must engage in competitions that inevitably end in them torturing or killing each other, while it's all broadcast live over the internet for the world to vote on who gets the axe next, which somehow helps with the Kardashianization because movie. Yawn.

Middling sci-fi drama about a geneticist, discovering her teenage son is a serial killer, cloning and re-cloning his latest victim for him in hopes of keeping him from killing anyone else. Not bad, typical sort of vaguely decent low-budget indie flick, but not worth going out of your way to see, either. Mostly-appealing cast is made up for by the fact that the lead sullen teen serial killer is the least charismatic character to grace my screen in ages. Considering it's an"Into The Dark", sure, ok, better than a lot of those, at least.

Basically,"Threat Level Midnight", with 10% time-travel content added to the end. Cool silver shirts, though.

Paranormal Activity, only with satanism.

John Carpenter's The Thing, but with little bugs instead of a big shape-changing monster. No, really, that's it.

Starts with a five-minute-long fat joke and goes downhill from there. Seemingly aimed at people out there for whom the Farrelly Brothers' movies humor is too subtle. So broad it seems like it's aimed at kids, except the humor is too raunchy for kids, so, god only knows.

Funny one. Teenager in Salem, MA finds a cursed knife and a demon leaps from friend to friend killing people, for some reason or other having to do with a curse from colonial times. This isn't even a teen scream, more like a pre-teen scream. It's like I imagine the"Goosebumps"movies are like (there are"Goosebumps"movies, right? I think so.) It's absolutely made for adolescents. But: it's actually kind of scary. It's just directed really well. So: definitely a movie for junior high students. But weirdly scary for one. Kind of reminds me of some of those early 70s tv horror movies like"Bad Ronald"or"Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark", which weren't necessarily the best movies, or even the best horror movies, but they managed to ramp up the disturbing imagery to where they were kind of strangely memorable. This isn't quite that good even, but it's in that direction. (Not to be confused with the execrable"Funny Games".)