Takes On Films

Introduction

Well, we're back.

It's probably against the rules to write your own introduction to a book, but I don't have a lot of options.  Out of the few people who bought the first edition of Takes on Films, most of them didn't even read it.  So it's hard to get anyone who's at all familiar with this thing in the first place.

By the way, shout outs to James and Joe, Shaun, Lexi, Adelle and Michelangelo for giving me some meaningful feedback on that one.

This time I had set out to write about newer movies.  I failed at that pretty hard.

Like, first of all, I saw some of these films in the movie theater since I published that first edition and they're already a year or two old now.  Once a movie is two years old, it might as well be two decades old.  So I decided I'm not even going to stress about keeping things current and I'm just watching whatever I want.

Also, nobody is giving me inside access to upcoming films or pre-screenings or anything like that.  I just go to the movies when I have time, which means I'm watching stuff that I'm interested in and not really giving a shit about whether or not people want to read about it.  Illegally downloading something is about the most effort I put into watching a new release.

And I hate to say it but I think most new movies suck.  I'm not paying fucking $13 a ticket to get out and watch everything that Hollywood can manage to shit out of its ass.  Even if I had a tree that grew $13 bills instead of leaves, I still wouldn't do it.  Fuck them.

So that's why I still have stuff from decades ago that nobody cares about.  I'm happy with those.  The review for Tormented was a lot of fun to write.

I also had some of my happiest movie moments in the last few weeks and it involved old bullshit rather than new releases:  So, I have three kids.  My son is the only one who has consistently watched movies with me.  He likes all those Marvel movies and things like that, but he'll sit down and watch a Schwarzenegger action banger or a Quentin Tarantino movie with me and enjoy them.  My two daughters have always been more into anime series and things like that.  It's always been hard to get them to sit through an entire film without being bored.

It turns out my youngest actually does have a movie genre she likes- the Silent Era.  Buster Keaton, the Dracula with Bela Lugosi... I even watched Aelita with her. Then, just in this last week, my eldest made her dad's day by texting and asking what my favorite bad movies were.  I haven't watched an entire movie with her since Air Buddies but if she wants to hang out and watch Suburban Sasquatch, I'll take it.

Oh, I also went back and forth about the layout of this book, since it will be twice as long as the first edition.  I was originally going to have two sections, with the new material up front and the reviews from the first book making up the second half.  But I decided that was a stupid idea, because readers searching for a specific movie would have to look in two different places every time.

Also, my favorite movie book Creature Features has the two columns of text on every page and the font is pretty small.  I think most of my reviews are too long to work in two columns.  Two columns is OK when you're like John Stanley and a lot of your reviews are two sentences long.  The only time my reviews are that short is if I was completely phoning it in or if my disdain for the movie was such that I couldn't bring myself to think about it much.

So, it ended up being this way.  Although I didn't make any money off the first edition, I considered it a success.  I have kept a copy in the bathroom and I do read it for entertainment.  I'm so stupid about movies that I occasionally flip open to something and I have to read my own review in order to remember what it was about.

The best is when I don't agree with myself.  I'll be like, Dude, that movie wasn't that bad.  I'm about to go watch it again.  Then, two hours later, I agree that it did indeed suck.

Welp, thanks for checking out the book.

Takes On Film: The Next Generation

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) **** Aw, man, have you seen this one?  It’s about his woman (the beautiful Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who gets into a car crash, she wakes up and her leg is fucked up and she’s chained to the wall.  So it’s looking like a god damned Misery (Look, kids, it’s a Stephen King story about this author guy who gets rescued from a car crash but the bitch who rescued him is a fucking nutjob who holds him captive.) situation.  Sure enough, she’s in this bomb shelter with John Goodman and he’s acting like a total psycho from the first scene forward, talking about how there’s been an event and they can’t leave or they’ll be killed.

There’s also another guy stuck down there with him (John Gallagher Jr.) who has a broken arm and John Goodman constantly feels the need to remind him that he’s an unwanted guest because he forced his way into the shelter while all the shit was going down outside.

So this lady doesn’t know who or what to believe.  Both of the guys, who don’t seem to like each other, are insisting that the event thing is real, but she can’t know for sure because she was unconscious when it all supposedly went down and there’s no contact whatsoever with the outside world.

Regardless of all that, her immediate threat is clearly John Goodman who plays an excellent psycho.  He never even attempts to come across as normal or friendly, but the tension builds nonetheless as the extent of his ruthlessness and desire to maintain control is revealed.

Director Dan Trachtenberg, who, uh, has directed this and some Coca-Cola commercials, did a nice job making a movie with one fucking set.  That is, you feel the claustrophobic tension without the repetitive backdrops getting boring.  Great performances by all three actors.

I would have given it 5 stars but the ending was so fucking stupid and unbelievable that it truly does ruin everything that was built up.

12 Years A Slave (2013) **** This one is about the time when Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man living in slavery-times New York, got bamboozled by these two assholes who sold him into bondage and he went without seeing his family and had to live the shit ass slave life for twelve years.  The beautiful Lupita Nyong'o plays this slave woman who constantly catches the ire of the owner couple; she does an amazing job.  The beautiful Adepero Oduye plays this other woman who gets somehow scammed into slavery and is then separated from her children, she also played a tough part brilliantly.

The movie is pretty faithful to the original autobiography by Solomon Northup.  I could only think of one major section that was left out, but it doesn't take anything away from the overall story.

There are great performances by just about everyone.  The actors playing the victims successfully convey the frustration, pain, anger, hope and who knows what else we can imagine those people felt.  Those portraying the white master class all successfully convey cruelty and elicit a desire to punch them in the face.

Well, Benedict Cumberbatch plays the plantation owner who originally buys Solomon Northup at the auction, in his biography Northup describes him as a decent fellow aside from the whole owning slaves thing.  Brad Pitt plays the Canadian migrant worker who ends up being the catalyst for Northup achieving his freedom.  He pretty much acts the same way Brad Pitt always does.

The story moves somewhat slowly thanks to a lot of lingering shots, but it's hard to charge someone who is dealing with this kind of source material with overindulgence.

Steve McQueen was the director.  No, not that Steve McQueen.

13 Ghosts (2001) *** This one is about the time when this wealthy ghost hunter guy (F Murray Abraham) gets killed on the job and some distant nephew of his (Tony Shalhoub) moves into his crazy mansion after inheriting it.  So right off the bat, the plot is kind of stupid because nobody's broke-ass nephew is going to keep a mansion that they inherited.  The guy's going to get one fucking heat bill and be destitute.  The nephew would immediately sell the mansion, if this story does indeed take place on planet Earth.

Anyways, this nephew and his dumb family don't even get one night of sleep.  It turns out the ghost hunter uncle was actually successful at capturing these ghosts.  They live in the basement and they're pissed.  The guy's stupid kids get eaten by the house and the rest of the movie is the remaining cast trying to find them while struggling to contain the mansion's unruly, unearthly residents.

It's a pretty dumb story and most of the cast feels generic and one-dimensional, with the exception of Matt Lillard who positively lights up the motherfucking screen any time he shows up.  Also bailing the film out is some excellent creature and gore effects.  The ghost design and the kill scenes truly are top notch.  I'm too lazy to look up who did all of the special effects, set design and creature concepts but they deserve recognition.

I wish somebody in Hollywood would figure out these, special effects movies, as I call them.  Any time a movie's main appeal is the special effects, like Hellraiser or some shit, you get a story and characters that are so fucking stupid and boring that all the effort feels like a waste.  Why the fuck can't they just write a good story with decent actors, then carefully plan and execute some genius special effects?

I think James Cameron is the only director that consistently does both.  Maybe that one other guy, is Benicio del Toro his name?  He's alright.  Oh wait, no, it's Guillermo del Toro.  Unfortunately, 13 Ghosts wasn't directed by either of them, we got fucking Steve Beck.  Oh, shit, he did that movie Ghost Ship?  I've always wanted to see that one.

16 Blocks (2006) ***1/2 This is the one about the time when Bruce Willis, who wears a moustache in this one, had to get Mos Def from the police station to the courthouse which is a titular 16 blocks away.

Back in 2006 we still had a little hope that we might get the return of cheerful, wisecracking Bruce Willis instead of the stoic, grumpy Bruce Willis that has been around since the late 1990s.  After, his character in that movie Sin City at least gave us a little dark humor.  But, alas, he just scowls and mumbles through this one too.  Good thing we have Mos Def to deliver some sunshine and humanity; he's the one who really puts this movie on his back.

With it being a movie and all, you might have guessed that getting Mos Def to the courthouse wouldn't be so easy.  Indeed, people are coming out of the woodwork to kill them every fucking place they go.  Bruce Willis' raging alcoholic character can't get a fifth at the liquor store or a shot at the bar without somebody popping off trying to put a hole in Mos Def's body.

Yeah, if you categorize this as an action film then it's a slow burn at best, but it's a story where we get to know Bruce Willis and Mos Def's characters a little better as it goes on and there are things like setups and payoffs and redemption.  The plot moves at a steady pace as our heroes stumble from one intense situation to the next.  Some of these situations get fairly implausible, but, what the fuck, it's a movie with Bruce Willis and Mos Def.

The Internets says that the original ending was a little more of a realistic downer, but the producers made them change it to something more upbeat.  It was OK, I guess.

This film was directed by Richard Donner, holy shit the guy was 75 years old when he made this one.  Wow, he did the first two Superman movies, the Goonies, Ladyhawke, the Lethal Weapon movies too!  I'll forgive him for doing Scrooged after all that.  The Omen too!

1917 (2019) ****1/2 This one is about some soldiers (George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) living back in WWI times who are sent on a mission to deliver a letter to Benedict Cumberbatch and get him to call off an attack scheduled for the next day after new shit comes to light and they find out the attack is doomed to fail.  The one dude's brother is in the division that's supposed to make the attack, so he's really into the idea of calling this thing off and feeling a sense of urgency about it.

So these guys have to sneak behind enemy lines in order to reach this colonel fella who's in charge of the attack.  They get into one situation after another, sneaking around buildings, climbing over broken bridges, getting sniped at, all kinds of ho shit.  The one guy, the one with the brother, he gets stabbed by the Red Baron.

It's a nice-looking movie too, gritty without looking too dark.  The best part is, it does the continuous camera shot thing just like that Bruce Campbell movie Running Time.  Boy, that must have been a pain in the ass to shoot.  It looks authentic, too.  I'm an expert on World War I authenticity; I've been to the World War I museum over in Kansas City, Missouri.  Great museum there. 

A lot of these war movies, they don't have the budget to get all these vehicles and blow up all these European buildings and stuff like that and it ends up being a handful of guys running around in fields and woods.  This here 1917 made it look like they scrounged up all the legitimate artifacts.

When I was a little boy, probably eight years old or so, which would make this the late 1980s, I went to the Memorial Day Parade near my grandfather's house in St Clair Shores.  I was standing by the corner of 9 Mile and Jefferson and these floats started passing by that were basically just giant carts for veterans to ride on.  The first float was the Korean War, it was full of older middle-aged guys.  Then came the World War II float, these were genuine old guys my grandpa's age.  They were all waving and smiling.  Then, last but not least, they had a big empty World War I float with only five or six guys on it, the oldest group of guys you could see unless you were in an old folks' home or something.  A couple of them were in wheelchairs, the other three or four were just kind of staring vacantly at the crowds.

So here I am, I'm getting older now myself.  It's getting to where the Korean War guys would be the ones in the big empty float, clinging to the rails so the breeze doesn't knock them over.  Kids watching this movie are probably looking at World War I times the same way that I used to look at the American Civil War or something like that.

Anyways, this movie here, directed by Sir Samuel Mendes, is pretty danged good, especially when you consider the fact that it's a British film.  Hey, I have all the love and respect for British people in the world, but their movies are usually slow and stuffy.  This one was packed full of action, the characters were likeable and the story kept moving.

2067  (2020) *** Hey, who doesn’t love a good time travel movie!  At the special request of The Future, Ethan Whyte (Kodi Smit-McPhee)  has to travel through time in order to find the cure for a disease ravaging humanity, even though he's just some random working stiff.  What’s the disease?  Well, 2067 is kind of a post-Shadowrun future where corporate industries have completely eradicated all plant life on Earth and it turns out people don’t take to artificially created oxygen quite the same way as the natural stuff.  Hey, I didn't come up with the science here.

So Eth, as his best buddy Ryan Kwanton calls him, goes to the year 2475 (I think) where the plants have all grown back but apparently all the humans, animals and insects are still all dead.  You know what I’d like to know?  The premise is that these 2067 scientists can only send one person and they have to send Ethan Whyte because The Future specifically asked, but then they immediately send his stupid coworker from his low-level maintenance and repair job after him.  How?

2067 is a good-looking film visually, if heavy on the CGI.  The dystopian future has a Blade Runner (The one with Harrison Ford, kids.) look to it except it’s brighter and the costumes are more colorful.  Then there’s the distant future scenes which look like they were filmed in a large, well-lit terrarium.

There’s sort of a mystery that unfolds as Ethan stumbles through the future-future, but when the cast of your planetary disaster film only has 8 people it’s pretty easy to figure out whodunit. 

You know what I want to know?  If Ethan Whyte was murdered in 2067, why was his body still there in the place he got shot when he goes to the future?  Like, there wasn’t a sudden apocalypse, the world slowly ran out of oxygen and everybody died.  So wouldn’t his girlfriend have found time to claim his corpse and have a funeral?  Did the janitor of the building where he died happen to quit on the same day?  Then nobody happened to see his body for 400 years?

And you know what else I’d like to know?  If Ethan went to the future and there were plants even after they had all died on Earth, how would sending plants back to the past save humanity?  Seeing as how he got them from the jungle that had grown over the past four centuries, which means he wasn’t sending The Past anything new, exactly how would that have changed the trajectory of human history?

This fucking movie doesn’t make any sense.  The music was kind of depressing too. 

Written and directed by Seth Larney.

21 Jump Street (2012) **1/2 This one is about the time when Jonah Hill, aged 33, and Channing Tatum, aged 29, were high school kids.  Despite the fact that one is a fucking dweeb and the other is a jock who hangs out with the cool kids, five years later, with both of them sporting graying pubic hair, they both decide to become police officers at the same time.

Now, as far as I know, to become an actual detective I believe there is a requirement of time served as a police officer and possibly some kind of college degree needed.  By being complete fucking dumbasses, these dipshits discover a plot device loophole that circumvents all of that.  They fuck around and find themselves back in high school working undercover.

Hilarity ensues.  Well, it's kind of funny, I guess.

There's a drug problem at the school for sure, but these assholes quickly become embroiled in a popularity contest instead of trying to bust any dealers.  After a low point where they start hating each other, you already know there's going to be a heartwarming reunion where they put their differences aside and take down the head perp.

I don't understand why these comedy writers resort to these personal beef storylines so often.  Do you understand what I'm talking about?

A standard film has three acts.  In the first act some adventure presents itself.  Then in the second act things get really shitty and the protagonist is placed in a hopeless situation.  In the third act, the protagonist gets some help, or maybe digs a little deeper, or whatever, they overcome the odds and emerge triumphant.

So, imagine if you're watching the Terminator.  Sarah Connor has an unstoppable killer robot guy trying to murder her and this other guy is scrambling around in an unfamiliar place and time trying to protect her.  That's the first act.  Then, instead of the second act being the two of them hiding out, baring their souls while preparing for the hopeless battle ahead, we have to watch a fucking half hour of them not getting along.

Like, they both just decide that they don't like one another, probably over some petty misunderstanding due to Sarah Connor's mom leaving a misleading message on the answering machine which Kyle Reese takes the wrong way.  (God damn, am I a movie story idea machine or what?)  Then in the third act they find out that the whole misunderstanding was just a nefarious plot by the terminator and that motherfucker had imitated Sarah Connor's mother's voice just to try and split them up, so they are reunited and team up to smash the robot in that stamping machine or whatever that thing was.

That movie would have sucked donkey balls.

The second act of 21 Jump Street could have been something like... whichever Franco brother that is invites Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum to a party.  Whichever Franco does sort of a Revenge of the Nerds rape scene thing where he sends both of them into a dark room, each under the impression that they're going to hook up with the beautiful Brie Larsen, but they start making out with each other.  Like, we as an audience are forced to watch it in that weird green night vision lighting and it's both revolting and hilarious.  So then Whichever Franco blackmails them with the video and forces them to sell drugs for him.  That would be the second act low point which they must overcome.

I mean, that's just something I came up with off the top of my head and to me it sounds ten times better than what we actually got with this bullshit movie.  If you don't agree, it's probably because either your imagination is not as vivid as mine or maybe you are Jonah Hill or Michael Bacall and you can't get over the fact that my writing, however uninformed and amateurish, is better than yours.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were the directors.  These were the guys that got fired from that Han Solo movie.  They also did the Lego Movie, which I thought was pretty good.

The 39 Steps (1935) **** This is sort of a man on the run spy thriller starring your boy Robert Donat and the beautiful Madeleine Carroll.  It's based on a novel of the same name written by John Buchan all the way back in 1915.

So it all starts when this Robert Donat fella, whose character is a sort of everyman Canadian, but to this Detroiter indistinguishable from the British characters in the movie, is at, uh, I guess you would call it a variety show?  You know, you sit in a rowdy auditorium and you see musicians, dancers, a comedian, maybe an animal that does tricks, that sort of thing.  The movie spends a lot of time on this variety show to the point where it feels like we're padding the runtime, which we may be, but to the film's credit it does end up mattering by the end of it all.

Old Robert Donat meets this crazy dame (the beautiful Lucie Mannheim) who needs a meal and a place to crash.  On top of that, she is involved in some espionage-type shit where a vital British military secret might fall into the wrong hands.  My guy isn't convinced about all of this spy business, but he's apparently a heterosexual male so he lets m'lady into his apartment.

Well, Robert Donat's life gets flipped turned upside down when this spy woman wakes him up in the middle of the night making all kinds of fuss about the knife sticking out of her back.  She warns him that the spies will come for him next and tells him to run for his life.  He's still not altogether clear on this spy plot situation but he knows for sure that if the old Scotland Yard finds a dead woman in his apartment with one of his kitchen knives sticking out of her back, well, he's going to learn a hard lesson about British justice.

Now, if you've been keeping up with this tale thus far, you might be wondering why some spies might be going through the trouble of breaking into his house and killing this mysterious woman without killing him as well.  I don't have an answer for this.  Maybe they thought the police would find it such an obvious case of Robert Donat kills Spy Lady that they wouldn't have to worry about any loose ends?

Anyways, this review is already running long and I don't want to spoil too much of the story.  The dude takes the little information he has about the plot and attempts to track down the ringleader of this spy group, knowing that his only chance at clearing his name is to expose their nefarious deeds.  Along the way he is forced into an unlikely partnership with the beautiful Madeleine Carroll, who hates him.

The movie is full of colorful characters, it moves at a very brisk pace and benefits from the clever direction of Alfred Hitchcock.  You might remember him having done the Birds and Psycho, though this movie is more along the lines of the Lady Vanishes.  It's only 86 minutes long, too.

300 (2006) ****1/2 Oh man, this movie is the shit!  This emissary representing the massive army of Xerxes comes to Sparta to tell them they are now property of the Egyptian empire, the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) kicks him down the hole from Army of Darkness.  So Xerxes is going to come down there and personally fuck him up, and the ho-ass Spartan council guys won’t let the ruler of Sparta put together an army to defend the nation and he has to do it with only his personal guard of 300 soldiers.

This movie was action-packed and full of well-defined abdominal muscles.  The beautiful Lena Headey plays the queen, she stabs this dude who’s trying to seduce her while her husband is gone in the dick. David Wenham was also billed, you might remember him having played in every 90s film that had Irish people in it.  This time he’s a Greek, though.

Sparta was in Greece, right?  Nobody in the movie looks Greek at all.  Rodrigo Santoro, whose name doesn’t sound very Egyptian, really fucking nailed his role as god emperor Xerxes.

Zack Snyder directed.  There are some saturation issues but otherwise the movie looks great.  He really stylized the graphic violence that runs rampant throughout the film.

8MM (1999) ***1/2 Another review in this book reminded me of this Nicholas Cage movie that came on the tail end of his string of hit films in the 1990s.  Also, I thought the numbers section of this book was a little thin and it was an opportunity to add another entry.

It's about the time when Nicholas Cage was a private detective and this old rich lady (played by the beautiful Myra Carter) calls him up to investigate this snuff film she found in her deceased husband's spank bank.  The guy was wealthy so apparently when you have a lot of money you masturbate to literal films in your private home theater because in 1999 DVD was for the poors.  (I'm being sarcastic, kids.  In 1999 most common households still probably had a VCR connected to their old school television set and used that to watch their pornography.  I myself didn't get a DVD player of my own, technically, until 2001 when I bought a Playstation 2.)

So our boy Nicholas Cage ventures into the underground world of indie fetish porn, guided by a young upcoming Joaquin Phoenix.  In this movie's world there was whole underground flea market that had a well-dressed doorman for people to buy their specialty porn.  And give the writers some credit there, because that's much more exciting to watch than the reality of 1999, which was probably going into the regular porn shop and asking the clerk to see the good shit and being handed a milk crate full of VHS cassettes with masking tape labels.

Anyways, Nicholas Cage not only has to contend with the shady characters of underground porn but also the surviving people involved in the production of this real-life snuff video who aren't trying to go to jail on a murder charge.  It ends in a showdown with, the Machine, a sadist in a bondage mask who likes to be filmed torturing women.

Not exactly a horror movie, 8MM is more like a suspense thriller with a couple horror elements.  Some contrivances aside, watching the mystery unfold is a pretty good time.  Joaquin Phoenix comes just short of stealing the show from Nicholas Cage, who was arguably a genuine A-lister at the time.

Having re-watched this fairly recently, it made me surprisingly nostalgic for the pre-internet world.  I mean, we had a little Internets in the 1990s but people still had to venture out of their house to get most things and even the rich people were still using landlines for their telephone conversations most of the time.  This movie is a good depiction of those last days of the Old Times, kids.

Directed by Joel Schumacher, whose photo on Wikipedia makes him look like a wax dummy.  He brought you such hits as the Lost Boys and Batman & Robin.

Abigail (2024) ** This movie had potential.  I love movies with a good ensemble cast, where the characters are trapped in a pressure cooker type situation that requires wits to survive and escape.  Unfortunately for this film, the actors who make up this ensemble cast are a bunch of dumbshits, the basic story scenario is headscratchingly stupid and a good premise is wasted.

It's about a misfit group of asshole criminals who kidnap this mafia head's daughter (the beautiful Alisha Weir) in an effort to acquire a $50 million ransom.  The selling point of the film is that what is supposedly a 12-year old girl turns out to be a vampire.

Our elite group of criminal masterminds includes differently-abled driver Angus Cloud, beautiful boring halfass nurse Melissa Barrera, beautiful 90s computer hacker Cathryn Newton, guy who is there for some reason Dan Stevens, token black guy William Catlett and Elon Musk-looking motherfucker Kevin Durand.  The only one who has any level of charm is Durand, who captures the same vibe Dave Bautista does in Guardians of the Galaxy, except his performance is effected by the inferior writing (Stephen Shields and Guy Busick).

They take the child to this mansion, where they are locked in.  So for the rest of the movie we have to wonder why none of these people are even trying to figure out a way to escape.  In the third act, when sunlight begins to show through windows and they even walk into a dilapidated greenhouse-type thing where the sun is beaming through very thin boards, it becomes unbearable.

That Alisha Weir might have some mad dancing skills, but she's annoying as fuck as a sinister vampire girl.  They also have her do random dance moves while she stalks her prey, I suppose it was intended to up the creeper vibe but it just kind of looked stupid.

I would recommend this one to people who like low-effort vampire movies where the only satisfaction comes from seeing characters you hate get maimed and murdered.

Oh, that reminds me- Sometimes a shitty horror movie can stand out with a good use of makeup and gore effects.  This is not one of them.

Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.

Aladdin (2019) 1/2 So, I realize that I'm exactly the kind of person who has fond memories of enjoying the Aladdin from the 1990s and is going to say that this movie sucked because it fails to be the other movie.  But hey, even as a kid I thought Robin Williams was annoying and I consider myself to be a Will Smith fan, so I came into this one hoping for good things.

Nah, bruh.  The movie fucking sucked.  It gets the Too Stupid To Watch stamp from me.

But holy shit, it grossed a fucking billion dollars?  Like, this makes me suspicious of how they're doing their accounting down at Disney, or in the movie distribution world in general.  I don't know one person who saw this shit in a theater, they all watched it on the Disney streaming service.  So who bought a ticket or otherwise paid to see this thing? 

And, what the fuck?  I realize this is, the live action version but they couldn't give us a motherfucking talking parrot?  Gilbert Gottfried put the original movie on his back and they all but completely wrote the character out?  Again, how is the popularity of this movie explained?

Fucking Guy Ritchie directed.  See, shit like this is why I don't take Guy Ritchie seriously.

Alice in Wonderland (1915) **1/2 This one here comes from the era of silent filmmaking where they were lucky if they were able to string together a cohesive story on film.  It was mostly like performing a play in front of a camera instead of an audience.

This is the first feature-length adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books, although it has some short-film predecessors.  This one would have been even longer if a good chunk of the film hadn't been lost over the years.

If you're thinking silent films are mostly boring, I tend to agree with you.  Aside from its historical value, the viewer will be treated to some pretty ingenious and awesome animal costumes.  There are also some interesting practical effects, but they are few and far between.  If you don't care about any of that stuff, skip this one.

The beautiful Viola Savoy plays the titular Alice and is just as boring as any other actress who has ever played the role.  WW Young was the director.

Honestly, the only version of Alice in Wonderland that I've enjoyed even a little was the TV movie they made back in the 1980s.  It had a bunch of Hollywood Squares-level actors from that era who were considered old and crusty even when I was a kid.  It had Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat, Sammy Davis Jr as the Caterpillar, the beautiful Carole Channing as the White Queen, there was also the beautiful Shelley Winters, Scott Baio, Ringo Starr, Pat Morita, Patrick Duffy, Ernest Borgnine and the beautiful Sally Struthers.  How can you go wrong with that star-studded cast?

Directed by WW Young.

Alienator (1990) ** So... the movie starts and it looks like we're watching a sci-fi film which takes place in the distant future.  The space cops featuring a highly intoxicated Jan-Michael Vincent are about to execute this elderly man (Ross Hagen) but he escapes.  Old boy flees to... modern-day Earth!

Well, it was modern at one time.  The production values and character sensibilities, however, would have one believe that it takes place at least 7 years prior to the film's actual release date.  The mullets, the hairspray and the wood panelling carry a lot of weight.

So this space asshole crash-lands on Earth and these dipshit kids hit him with their Winnebago.  It's a perfect I Know What You Did Last Summer setup, but unfortunately these kids have some sense of duty and they take him up to a park ranger, who is actually a game warden, whose fucking name is Ward.

Meanwhile, the space cops have sent down their deadliest assassin, the beautiful Teagan Clive, to kill this fugitive old guy.  The stupid kids and their park ranger friend don't know what the fuck is going on but this space bitch is fucking vaporizing everything with her laser arm so they try and fight her off.

The budget is tight, the story is clumsily told, the costumes and special effects are pedestrian and the action is plodding.  If you have a thing for female bodybuilders then you'll probably want to check this one out.  Otherwise, it's a pretty boring movie with not one memorable scene or line of dialogue.

Directed by Fred Olen Ray, who brought you such films as Bikini Hoe-Down, Bikini Airwaves, Bikini Chain-Gang, Bikini Cavegirl, Bikini a Go-Go, Bikini Escort Company, Bikini Frankenstein, Bikini Pirates, Bikini Round-Up and Genie in a String Bikini.  This movie was loosely based on the 1958 film the Astounding She-Monster.

Alien Private Eye (1989?) *1/2 Objectively speaking, this is a pretty fucking terrible movie.  It has all the hallmarks of low budget trash: Sets that are obviously hotel rooms, scenes filmed in places where they clearly did not have permission to film, bottom shelf special effects, cue card dialogue delivery, cars that obviously have no purpose other than to be crashed, an inane plot and a genuine botched explosion effect.  If I'm making it sound awesome, that's because it is.

That doesn't even address the good points.  The fucking costumes in this movie are, muah! *chef's kiss* and the synthesizer-heavy soundtrack is amazing.  You just may want to get up and dance along with our hero, Remlo, who will dance at the drop of a fedora.  But don't get too comfortable, because just when you think there are hints of competence with this movie there will be portions of scenes where the soundtrack is inexplicably missing.

The plot is about aliens secretly living on Earth, one of whom has found a cache of Soma, which is more deadly than heroin or cocaine, so he of course wishes to become the head drug kingpin on the planet.

You know how people say that the poorest humans living in developed nations today would be living a higher quality of life than the kings and queens of previous centuries?  This asshole from Remlo's planet of Styx wants to be king of Earth but they say that his home planet is a thousand years more advanced than our world.  So, by that reasoning, one would imagine he could become the manager of a Space Taco Bell over on planet Styx and be better off than he would as the main head drug kingpin on planet Earth.

But this guy, Scama is his name, he really gets his kicks by enslaving people and having them grovel for more Soma.  It's a passion project for him, he's not in it for the money.  He also worships Adolf Hitler for some reason, like tales of Hitler's exploits have spread throughout the galaxy and he must be some sort of cult icon over on Styx.  Wow, this movie's got it all!

Somebody answer this for me: Is the fucking guy who talks like Peter Lorre (Geez, just look him up on YouTube if you're curious, kids.) played by Carl Crew?  Because it sure fucking looks like him, although the role is credited to another name.

Carl Crew is a guy who doesn't get enough credit in these, good bad movies.  He's in fucking Blood Diner, which is a fun movie even if somewhat self-aware.  Then of course he has the titular role in  The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer, which is an abysmally bad film and fucking hilarious.  Oh my god, he's in Urban Legends?  That one actually got a nationwide theater release back in the day!  I think I read somewhere that at one point he was part owner of a B-movie film museum.  I might have to put that on my bucket list.

Alien Private Eye was written and directed by Vik Rubenfeld.  He has no other directing credits.

Aliens (1986) ***1/2 This sequel to the singularly-titled film Alien has the beautiful Sigourney Weaver getting woken up from stasis 57 years after the events of the first film.  Old girl is given no time to acclimate herself to over a half-century of technological advancements or ponder the fact that everyone she has ever met in life is either very old or dead, because she is needed to accompany a company of space marines on a rescue mission.

Destination: The planet where they found the original killer alien, which has now been terraformed and colonized.

The squad is oozing 1980s machismo, including Michael Come With Me If You Want To Live Biehn,   Al Big Cigar For Donkey Lips Matthews, Bill Laundry Day, Nothing Clean? Paxton, Paul "Eddie Murphy's Friend in Beverly Hills Cop" Rieser, the beautiful Jennette Goldstein and another baker's dozen of cannon-fodder cardboard cutouts rounding out the cast.  Sigourney Weaver has been brought along as an advisor but once the alien finally comes out she quickly becomes the one calling the shots.

This movie does a lot right.  There's the iconic Zenomorph (sp?) alien, the creepy alien habitat imagery created by Stan Winston, who simply copied HR Giger, some quotable dialogue and memorable scenes.  There's a kid in the movie, but she doesn't talk much.  A lot of folks would say this one is right up there with other 80s sci-fi action classics like Terminator or Robocop.

Me, I think it's kind of meh.  Aside from Sigourney Weaver and the slick little shitstain Paul Rieser, I don't find any of the characters very charming.  It's also a dark movie, you know, not like the subject matter is dark but the images on the screen are literally dark, which I'm not trying to look at for over 2 hours.  Which is another issue, this motherfucker is long as hell.  They don't even bust out with the titular aliens until an hour into this god damned movie.  Up until that point, it's all Sigourney Weaver and a bunch of assholes that you would love to see killed.

Well, for those of you who love special effects and makeup and creatures and stuff like that, you'll probably love this one.  They didn't turn it into a bonafide franchise for nothing.

Directed by James Cameron of Avatar: The Shape of Water fame.

All Quiet On the Western Front/Im Westen nichts Neues (2022) *** This is a German-made adaptation of the classic 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, which follows a soldier named Paul Baumer from the time he is recruited for the army during World War I up until the closing days of the conflict.  Paul Baumer is played by a guy named Felix Kammerer. 

Paul is recruited, along with a few of his dipshit friends from school, in 1917 at a point where the war is already going badly for Germany.  The army, short on materials, issues him a uniform that was reclaimed from a dead soldier.  We get to see a little short scene where that previous soldier gets killed and, honestly, the point of the movie is made pretty succinctly right there with the uniform situation and they could have spared us about 140 minutes of our lives by ending it right here.

Anyways, mostly we see Paul, his friends and a couple older soldiers go from one shit-ass war situation to another, attempting to survive and occasionally failing.  There's lots of rain and mud.  The side plot, if you will, is the movie occasionally cutting to the German army's high command who are finally accepting the futility of the war and accepting an armistice.

Once in a while we also see this German general guy who sits in his crumbling mansion ordering attacks, saying it's all for pride and honor and the glory of Germany and all that military fluff.  At the end of the movie he orders one last attack, even though the war has effectively stopped, just to be an asshole.

The battle scenes in this movie are pretty danged good.  It's an anti-war story, so there are no macho heroes, no inspirational feats and none of the other corny stuff you often see in war movies.  It's just mud, misery, death, mud, longing for home, despair at the pointlessness of it all, hunger and mud.

I realize that the version of this movie I saw was dubbed into English and that it might be better in some regards in its original German, but some of the story and character stuff was lackluster.  Visually, the performances are amazing.  These kids did their best to recreate the horror a soldier experiences in trench warfare.  The script, however, doesn't do much to establish any of the more human elements.  From the beginning of the film, we have very little to go on to give Paul and his friends any identity or character depth beyond them being schoolkids bamboozled into joining the German army.  We are given no lead-up into the development of Paul's friendship with sergeant Katczinsky, they are just suddenly in scenes together doing things that friends do like taking shits together in the woods.

None of the actors really puts the film on their back, as it were.  I'd say the two best performances were the guy who played the jaded Tjaden, another friend of Paul's, and the actor who played General Friedrichs, the asshole who doesn't mind how many German soldiers are killed in order to achieve glorious victory.

There's no memorable dialogue or speeches, which again might be the result of the German-English translation.  The film definitely gets its point across visually, on the other hand.

I'm trying to look at this film as an independent entity, but it's difficult having read the Remarque novel and seen the 1930 film directed by Lewis Milestone.  I read the book when I was probably in 10th or 11th grade so I don't remember it too clearly, but the other film is one of my all-time favorites and I've seen it a few times.

That older movie is much more about the characters than the battle scenes.  The guy who plays Kat in that one steals the show, although you do wonder why a guy in his late 50s is hanging out with a bunch of 30-year-olds who are supposed to be teenagers.  Lew Ayres, who plays Paul in that one, really hams up the innocence he has going into the army and I always thought it contrasted beautifully with the harsh realities of war and helped serve the film's point even if it was a little corny.

Anyways, as far as movies that attempt to portray the Hell that was trench warfare... well, I can only think of the older All Quiet On the Western Front, 1917 and that one Stanley Kubrick movie, which I've never seen in its entirety but it looks pretty good.  There's also Johnny Got His Gun, that's the one about the Metallica song where the dude gets all of his limbs blown off and uses Morse code to beg for death, which I've never seen either.  So out of the ones I've seen, I'll say that if you want Hellish trenches, you go for this movie.  If you want a gripping action-driven tale, you go for 1917 and if you want likeable characters you go for the old All Quiet On the Western Front.

Edward Berger directed.

Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds (2017) ***1/2 This Korean movie was, like, a new genre of film for me.  I've never seen tears flow in a movie the way they do in this film about a firefighter (Cha Tae-hyun) who dies and goes to the Buddhist (I think) afterlife where he has to go through seven trials over the sins he's committed in his life.  He is accompanied by advocates (Ju Ji-hoon, Ha Jung-Woo and the beautiful Kim Hyang-gi) who provide his defence in the proceedings.

Our boy dies while saving a child from a burning building, so he's got an advantage with these afterlife gods who will be judging him.  Of course, shit isn't that simple.  These gods are digging up every bit of sinning this guy ever did, there's some bullshit with the guy's estranged family and also these advocates have their own aims in this whole deal.

There's even some action scenes.  Once in awhile, the movie thoughtfully spices things up by having these advocate guys fend off the demons from hell who are after this firefighter's nuts.

But apparently we came for the crying porn.  Never have I ever seen such a gratuitous display of tear-jerking.  Literally every character cries at one point or another.  The gods cry, the ghosts cry and I'm pretty sure I saw some inanimate objects crying.  The soundtrack is blasting emotional symphonic strings the entire time.

Well, you know me, I'm not into these CGI-heavy films so I knocked off a star for that.  Also, thoughtful and deep as the subject matter is, some of the story stuff didn't make any god damned sense.  Overall, though, it was a pretty good movie.

Kim Yong-hwa was the director.

Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days (2018) ***1/2 The three soul advocates from the first movie (Ju Ji-hoon, Ha Jung-Woo and the beautiful Kim Hyang-gi) shift roles to become the protagonists of the film.  This time around, they are charged with getting the soul of this murdered army sergeant (Kim Dong-wook) through the seven trials.  Remember all of that?  He was the firefighter's brother in the first movie?

Thanks to the most whimsical of requests made by the head god in charge, the death advocates also have a side quest where they have to get rid of this household god, which is a thing in this universe, who is keeping this old man on Earth because his grandson needs him.  The whole thing is really an excuse to shoehorn Ma Dong-seok, AKA Don Lee, into the movie.  A household god's apparent role in this religion is to deliver exposition dumps and provide comedy relief.

The flow of tears has been cut back by at least 75% in this movie, which was a pleasant surprise given the typical progression of film sequels.  It does introduce the sappy concept of graffiti murals that Ma Dong-seok is able to magically draw despite having only three different colors of spray paint.  If they were real paintings and not CGI, I would have said the designs were the best graffiti murals in a movie since Blood In, Blood Out.

Kim Dong-wook gives a satisfyingly grounded performance as the soul on trial, appearing mostly apathetic but good-natured about his fate in the afterlife.  At times, he speaks as the voice of reason to the advocate who is escorting him through his various trials.

There's also a kid in the movie and the old man, who provide some fun moments and aren't super annoying.

Kim Yong-hwa was the director, who was the same dude who did the first movie.

A Karate Christmas Miracle (2019) * You know, Eric Roberts is one of my all-time favorite actors and I try to hype up his filmography regardless of the quality.  But this shit crosses the line.

Oh, it looks good on paper: An ingenious title, terrible acting, bottom-shelf production values, adults masquerading as children and a story that doesn't make any sense are all here.  What makes it sound even more awesome is that there is very little Christmas and even less karate in this motherfucker.  Then throw in Cobra Kai Martin Kove, who almost always appears to be intoxicated IRL, and it sounds like gold.

Then they have fucking Eric Roberts' head in a Christmas bulb on the poster/DVD box cover and you immediately think, "Wow! Eric Roberts and Martin Kove teaming up for the first time since 2001's Con Games?  That movie was fucking awesome, so this must be the shit!"  But here's a spoiler alert for you kids- Martin Kove is in this movie for about 5 minutes, which we've come to expect from that man.  Eric Roberts, on the other hand, isn't even in the movie.  I don't remember if it was a dream sequence or what, but at some point in A Karate Christmas Miracle they play footage of Eric Roberts but it's from another movie.  It's about 20 seconds long, it has absolutely nothing to do with the story and it's never referred to again. 

It's a scam of the lowest sort, right down there with the time when, allegedly, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab purposely released a low-level respiratory virus upon the planet, got every Western government and major media outlet on the planet to overstate its deadliness and proceeded to make literal billions and billions of dollars selling facemasks and an ineffective vaccine all while dismissing or censoring information about more effective treatments.  All to make an easy buck while the rest of us are stuck picking up these god damned discarded masks that are now as common as cigarette butts and forced to watch a shitty movie about a kid attempting to get his dad back by completing the 12 Labors of Hercules if the myth of the 12 Labors of Hercules was written by an 8-year old who was locked in a closet full of opened cans of rubber glue.

Me, I try to follow the Teachings of Jesus, and Jesus taught his followers that it's easier for a god damned camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  He also said not to fucking lie.

And you know what?  If humans are causing Earth to warm up, according to Bill Gates, why then is he so hellbent on saving the human race from plagues?  You know what Jesus taught?  He said the moment you stop worrying about saving your life is the moment when your soul is saved.  If I were a betting man, I would wager that if Jesus were to meet Bill Gates he'd get straight to exorcising the money-grabbing, Earth-fouling lying-ass demon right out of him. Then Bill Gates would declare himself a New Age Apostle and attempt to actually use his billions of dollars to change the world, but the other billionaires who still have demons up their assholes would throw him to the lions for trying to fuck up their various rackets.

Anyways, there's three kinds of shitty movies on God's Earth:  First you have completely inept productions that inadvertently become hilariously entertaining in spite of a genuine attempt to make a quality film.  Then you have movies where they didn't give a fuck or even intended to make a bad movie, stuff like what they used to show on USA's Up All Night or just about anything currently available on Netflix.  These may occasionally have some redeeming value but are usually trash.  Then you have the third and lowest form of shitty movie, which is the scam movie.  Scam movies are where somebody pitches a movie idea to investors, gets a tentative agreement from a well-known D-list actor to star in order to make the project seem more legitimate, then they take the millions that the producers invested, get a movie made as cheaply as possible and find one of the trash distribution companies to release it.  They and their movie contractor buddies keep the majority of the budget for themselves and the investors get... A Karate Christmas Miracle.  Allegedly.

I would hail this as a Robin Hood-type robbery because it's rich people who are getting scammed, but the ones doing the scamming are just scumbags attempting to become rich people themselves.

Directed by Julie Kimmel, written by Kimmel, Ken Del Veccio and David Landau.

Edit: reddit user Bardic_Inspiration66 was kind enough to inform me that the portion of the film with Eric Roberts originally came from a movie called Joker's Poltergeist, which I of course have to watch now.

Bardic_Inspiration66's source did not give any information on the subject of this being a, scam movie.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) ***1/2 This is a movie about the time when Will Ferrell was an anchorman for a news show back in the 1970s.  I remember this one being pretty funny, and maybe a couple lines of dialogue, but not much else.

This Ron Burgundy character is this debaucherous egotistical moron of a newscaster.  The beautiful Christina Applegate is his co-anchor/love interest.  He gets into some situation, maybe loses his job or something.  He plays the flute at one point, I believe, while trying to seduce Christina Applegate.

Lots of nice clothes in this movie.  Lots of big, fluffy fake mustaches.

Near the end of the film there is a huge brawl between Ron Burgundy's squad of newscasters and the talking heads of the other network affiliates in town.  The town was Pittsburgh or Milwaukee or something like that.  You know, like a city that has major league sports teams but isn't in New York, Florida or California.

Oh wait, is the city Buffalo?  Maybe it is in New York.  Or am I thinking of that Jim Carrey movie where he's a reporter?

This movie was released during the brief span where Will Ferrell made good movies.  I think Semi-Pro was that last movie I saw where he was starring and it was actually good.  I hear that movie Holmes and Watson from 2018 was so bad that Netflix only carried it for 3 hours.  It's just a rumor, though.  Thank the dear Lord that I haven't seen all of his movies or I would have to write reviews for them.  Mercifully, just a few.

Directed by Adam McKay.

Antrum (2018) ** Antrum, written and directed by David Amato and Michael Laicini, irrespectively, is a gimmick film that supposedly cannot be watched.  Well... heh... we'll refrain from making any obvious jokes here about the film's quality or whether that gimmick in fact holds true because I'm a serious writer and of all the things I write about I take movies the most seriousest of all.

It's a movie about this little boy and his... older sister?  They go... camping?  Like, I don't even know what this fucking movie is about.  They're wandering out in the woods for sure and there's a tent, but you don't really get the feel that it's a camping trip.  It's more like that movie Grave of the Fireflies to be honest.  I think they have nowhere else to go.  There's some interaction with this Texas Chainsaw Massacre/The Hills Have Eyes-ass family, only they just come off like they're creepy Russians or something.  Look, there are things that happen in the movie but I wouldn't really call it a plot.  It's more like a series of very bland events that unfold at a molasses-flow pace.

But Dan, you say, two stars?  Maybe it's more like 1.8 stars and I rounded up.  But I put this on not knowing much about it, I see it's kids in the movie (Rowan Smyth and Nicole Tompkins) and I was like god damn this is about to suck, it quickly became clear that it was going to be them wandering around in the woods for 75 minutes with perhaps 20 minutes of Canadian scrapyard footage, so you bet I had my hand on the stop button.  Well, I never stopped the movie, the kids weren't that annoying to me, for all its lack of variety you can at least tell what the fuck is going