Review – Jack Frost

Jack shit, a two-word description for the script, the acting, the effects and just about everything else to do with this dreadful ordeal of a movie. The title character is a psycho-killer who is on the way to his own execution when he’s exposed to some sort of nonsense chemical that turns him into a giant, homicidal snowman. Really. No kidding. Actually, kidding is just about all this movie seems to want to do. The characters are constantly spouting lines that would embarrass even the great Freddy Krueger himself. The plot also sports more false endings than Brazil, ultimately tending to suggest that this is nothing more than a cheap, stupid parody of cheap, stupid slasher movies. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Dracula 2000

Just about the nicest thing I can say about this one is that at the folks in marketing were kind enough to build the year into the title, thus saving me from the need to date it in parentheses. Otherwise this umpty-millionth Prince of Darkness reheat is silly and boring in approximately equal measure, with both qualities making for a predictable but not especially good horror movie. In fact, the only thing that wasn’t predictable was that the movie features only the bare minimum allotment of nudity and gore to earn an “R” rating. Usually if you’re going so light on the script and acting, you’ve gotta build some cheap thrills in. Oh, and it turns out Dracula is actually merely an alter-ego for another historical baddie, whose name I’ll omit just in case anyone’s actually foolish enough to rent this stinker. I wouldn’t want you to lose the only surprise twist in the whole 90-minute mess. See if desperate

Review – I, Zombie

“Fangoria presents” because probably nobody else would be willing to touch it. Though I’m usually a big fan of zombie movies – especially the low budget variety – this one is far too sentimental for my tastes. The plot revolves around an English guy who gets bitten by a zombie and ends up with an overpowering craving for human flesh. Needless to say, this forces a bit of a lifestyle change on him, compelling him to abandon his girlfriend and take to killing and eating whomever he can get his hands on. And to make matters worse, his dead-but-still-ambulatory body begins to rot away. Some of the gore is sort of fun, but the gross-outs are interrupted far too often by uninteresting, soul-searching monologues, dream sequences, extended convulsions and other unwelcome distractions. The result plays out like a Romero-ized retelling of The Metamorphosis. Final capper: decomposing zombie masturbation with sickly comic result. See if desperate

Review – Brokedown Palace

They should have called this one Midnight Express 2: The Women. Though it lacks most of the brutality and honesty of the original, the parallels between the two (young Americans accused of smuggling drugs and imprisoned by evil, oppressive foreign regimes) are inescapable. Though I have no particular yen to see torment inflicted on either Clare Daines or Kate Beckinsale, I wish this had been followed a bit more closely in its predecessor’s footsteps and more honestly portrayed conditions in Thai jails. Instead about the worst that can be said about the “inhuman conditions” are that the hairdos are bad and the food isn’t the tastiest. So the whole experience is more of a mild bummer than a genuine injustice. On the other hand, my hat’s off to the filmmakers for having the courage to leave the question of guilt (or even the exact nature of the crime) ambiguous throughout. Mildly amusing

Review – Dracula (1979)

The setting may be turn-of-the-century England, but the plot, characters, and even some of the costumes are pure disco. Frank Langella stars as a smarmy, big-haired version of the infamous count, hamming it up in a performance that ranges between campy and grating. The story is Stoker’s, only it seems to have been run through a blender so the original characters play different parts in this tale and the original settings provide backdrops for all the wrong scenes. And to cap it all off, the effects are genuinely wretched. For example, Drac’s seduction of Lucy is accompanied by disco lighting so awful even ABBA would have been embarrassed by it. Maybe big vampire fans might enjoy this more than I did, but just about everyone else can probably regard this as little more than a historical curiosity. See if desperate

Review – Bring It On

A cheerleader movie? Well, at least I didn’t go into this with real high expectations. Thus I can’t honestly say I was disappointed when it turned out to be an empty-headed, teenage exploration of issues ranging from artistic integrity to race relations. Kirsten Dunst stars as a newly-elected cheerleading squad leader who faces no end of problems with boyfriends, parents, rivals, the usual collection of adolescent woes. If you’re of an age appropriate for this kind of thing, then you may well enjoy it immensely. Otherwise it’s sort of hard to find any redeeming value among the clichés and melodrama. See if desperate

Review – Bridget Jones's Diary

As romcoms go, this one’s not half bad. Despite criticism largely from the British press (who apparently didn’t like the idea of an American woman playing an English character), Renee Zellweger does a superb job as the slightly-overweight heroine of this tale of a thirty-something woman’s search for happiness via a fulfilling relationship with a man. And yes, it should be noted for the record that the plot of the movie diverged from the story told by the popular source novel, giving it a less realistic and more man-centered (though presumably happier) ending. That aside, however, the script is well-written, the dialogue clever, the characters compelling, and the film-making polished. I’m not famous for liking movies of this particular ilk, so perhaps it was just that I was in the right mood in the right place at the right time. Whatever factors were to blame, I really did get a kick out of this. Worth seeing

Review – The Gate

This might have been a considerably better movie if it hadn’t been so darned juvenile. The basic plot – gate to hell opens, protagonists must shut it in order to save the world – is a little trite, especially considering the location of this fabled gate is a back yard somewhere in suburbia. On the other hand, there are some nice Lovecraftian touches here and there, and some of the effects are visually interesting despite being a bit on the cheap side. What really spoils it is the decision to make just about all the characters in the movie teens and pre-teens. While that alone might not have sunk it, the result of the kiddie casting is a considerable dumbing- and toning-down of the violence and scary stuff. It didn’t exactly help that at least part of the plot depended on the death of the family’s pet dog, and the monsters themselves were for the most part just a little too cute to inspire much beyond sympathy for their plight. To top it all off, who would ever have thought that of all the young actors in this movie the one who would go on to have a career was little Stephen Dorff, who plays the protagonist. Mildly amusing

Review – From Here to Eternity

This is a soap opera version of the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, with strong emphasis on the nobility of stubbornness in the face of adversity. The result is a parade of bullies and their tough-as-nails victims, illicit love affairs doomed from the outset, and final redemption for all characters – in one form or another – once the bombs start to drop. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Heck, it isn’t even the worst Pearl Harbor movie I’ve ever seen. I just didn’t find it quite as inspiring as some other folks did. Mildly amusing

Review – Lucky Numbers

When I’m wrong I admit it, and here’s yet another opportunity for me to eat a little crow. In the past I’ve heaped at least moderate amounts of abuse on Lisa Kudrow, but now I think I need to apologize. She’s genuinely good in this quirky caper flick about a TV lottery hostess who teams up with her station’s weatherman (John Travolta) to fix the weekly drawing. As with many Nora Ephron productions, the bulk of the entertainment to be had here comes not from the story itself but from the sight gags and throw-away jokes interwoven throughout. On the minus side, the plot keeps twitching a bit after it should have died a natural death. However, as a whole the story works and the actors work with it. To be sure, this isn’t an award-winning masterpiece. But as an entertaining diversion for a relaxing evening at home, it works quite well. Mildly amusing

Review – Breaker Morant

There’s moral ambiguity aplenty in this film about the legal repercussions for the horrors of war. The story is a true tale about three Australian officers who were court-martialed by the British Army during the Boer War for illegally executing prisoners. In the end nobody comes off especially well. The Aussies seem like basically honorable men made cruel by circumstance. The English come across as scheming politicians eager to sacrifice the rank and file to achieve their selfish ends. And everyone seems to have little qualm about lying under oath during the trial. You probably need to be in the mood for a military justice movie, but if that mood has in fact struck you then you could probably do a lot worse than this choice. Worth seeing

Review – From Hell

This latest entry in the cinematic saga of Saucy Jack isn’t half bad. For the most part, it’s a gory, stylish rework of plot points first explored in Murder By Decree. Johnny Depp stars as a police inspector with at least bush league psychic abilities who ends up in charge of the hunt for Jack the Ripper. The romance between Depp and the Heather Graham character, the most attractive of the circle of prostitutes-friends-victims, doesn’t work in a big way. Further, the movie spends all too little time on the blood and guts that helped set it apart from previous Jack movies and all too much time on the same ol’ same ol’ pseudo-mystery, a decision made all the more disappointing by the culprit the screenwriters eventually settle on. Plot aside, however, the reasonably compelling characters, intense art direction and bittersweet ending all work to make this effort worthwhile. Worth seeing

Review – Totem

Okay, now I feel genuinely deceived. I’d be the first to admit that it’s my own damn fault when I rent videos from Full Moon and they end up falling far short of reasonable expectations. However, even at my most gullible I’ve almost always managed to avoid the series of movies the studio did that employ evil toys, puppets and the like as the antagonists. Because the box made this sound like an “evil spirits trying to break free from hell and destroy the earth” plot, I figured it would be a safe rent. I figured wrong. The evil spirits turn out to be three gargoyle-esque things from a stone totem pole. When an obscure system of human sacrifice looses them one by one, they turn out to be two-foot-tall dolls easily as fakey and stupid-looking as even the dumbest demonic toy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this movie has nearly nothing else going for it. The story starts with six teenagers dropped for no apparent reason into a cabin in the middle of the woods, and it just meanders aimlessly from there. The plot seems to serve as nothing more than an excuse for the shock sequences, which would be okay if the shocks didn’t suck. Overall this struck me as a half-baked knock-off of Evil Dead. Because one can usually find the original on the same shelves where this dog is stocked, there isn’t much reason to rent the cheap imitation. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Assault on Precinct 13

This is some of John Carpenter’s earlier work as a director, and one of his few forays outside the realms of horror and/or science fiction. The plot here is a simple bit of business about a police station running on a skeleton crew suddenly besieged by a gang of fanatical gang members. The whys and hows of the whole thing would take too long to explain in full. For here, suffice it to say that a couple of cops and a couple of cons from the holding cells must hold off the urban marauders until help arrives. And that’s the bulk of the drama. Some of the action sequences are sort of fun, but otherwise this is a less-than-compelling bit of cinema. Oh, and advance warning: early on the gang leader ruthlessly executes a kid (motiveless but nonetheless integral to the plot, so you can decide for yourself whether or not it was really a good decision to include it). Mildly amusing

Review – Braveheart

In the grand tradition of Celts versus the English melodramas, here we have yet another festival of histrionic flopping about the nobility of rebellion against the English crown. Mel Gibson takes the helm of this epic about Scottish rebel William Wallace and his struggle against the crown. Some of the battle scenes are impressive; as an action movie, this works quite well. Sadly it’s a bit too long for an action movie, and the historical drama wedged in between the carnage isn’t really all that interesting (and in places not all that accurate, or so I’ve been given to understand). Further, the end is too silly and sentimental by far, especially for a torture sequence. But as historical dramas go, I guess I’ve seen worse. Mildly amusing

Review – The Insider

Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Of course, if you don’t have an interest in investigative journalism, you may not get anywhere near the kick I got from this movie. But even if ethics, reportage and corporate dirty tricks don’t exactly get your motor running, you may still enjoy the excellent cast and well-written script. The story here is the sad tale of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), an ex-tobacco executive turned whistle blower for CBS’s 60 Minutes. Al Pacino plays Lowell Bergman, the producer who persuades Wigand to come forward and turns out to be his only ally when his former employers go after him in just about every way possible. The result is an unflinching, unflattering portrait of a large network news division caving in to corporate pressure and turning its collective back on its source, its producer and its integrity. A must-see for members (and aspiring members) of the profession, and a good show for anyone else. Worth seeing