Review – The Emperor's New Groove

For a Disney production this is sort of a small animation, with production values somewhere between usual theatrical releases and their straight-to-video sequels. For example, the cast is solid enough, but almost all of them are sitcom vets rather than more well-established movie stars. The story – a simplistic bit of fluff about an obnoxious Incan emperor turned into a llama – depends heavily on lead voice David Spade’s personal brand of humor. Beyond that it’s mostly sight gags, well-executed but still little more than physical comedy. There’s the usual collection of in-jokes only adults will get combined with a strictly-for-kids moral about the importance of friendship. If you like Spade’s usual humor (toned down for the Disney audience, of course), then you’re likely to have at least some fun with this production. Mildly amusing

Review – Frailty

Imagine you’re 11 years old or so, and imagine you’ve got the perfect dad. Now imagine one night he comes in to the room you share with your younger brother, wakes you both up and announces that an angel of God has ordered him to kill demons. Further imagine that the demons look just like ordinary people and might in fact not be demons at all. Not so good. Apparently that sort of thing can really mess a kid up. On the other hand, it makes a really good premise for a creepy horror movie. If only Bill Paxton had decided to stick with the central plot rather than snapping back and forth between the kids and their psycho dad and one of the sons grown to adulthood telling the tale to an obnoxious cop. I can’t say much about the surprise ending without spoiling it, so suffice it to say that it features some genuinely bizarre theology. Despite not caring much for the “present day” part of the production, I did get kind of a kick out of the whole Hand of God Killer thing. Mildly amusing

Review – Topsy-Turvy

Not that I’m any great connoisseur of their catalog, but if I had to pick one Gilbert and Sullivan operetta as my favorite, it would probably be The Mikado. Sure, the racism and sexism are hard to take, but under all that there’s a genuinely charming story and more than a couple of funny songs. So I suppose it’s only natural that I was charmed by this backstage comedy about the trials and travails of the thespians working on the first-ever production of the operetta. It was interesting to see the characters struggle with the racism in the plot as well as their various individual problems. However, I was glad the filmmakers decided to keep it fairly light. Good acting and a good script combine to make this an entertaining piece of work. Mildly amusing

Review – 13th Child

“Legend of the Jersey Devil Volume One”? Don’t count on a sequel to this outing. It wasn’t that good. However, it was at least somewhat better than I expected. I’m a big Jersey Devil fan, so I’m picky about how the subject is handled. Just another slasher movie with the Devil grafted onto it isn’t likely to impress me much. However, this one had a few things going for it. Sure, it’s a low budget production with the usual shortcomings that entails. And Cliff Robertson, Lesley-Anne Down and Robert Guillaume serve to lend the show a certain circus-of-the-out-of-work-actors quality. But Robertson’s got co-writing credit, so maybe he wasn’t just a hired gun. Shortfalls aside, however, the story was moderately engaging and at least a little anti-hunting (a sure way to get onto my good side). The monster was cheap, and Gieger should probably sue over its teeth. But throughout almost the entire picture it’s handled in a sufficiently subtle way to avoid working it beyond the limitations of the effect. As cheap horror movies go, I’ve seen a lot worse. Indeed, the only thing I could have genuinely done without was the exploitation of Native American culture, a plot element that should have been completely unnecessary given the number of Jersey Devil origin stories that don’t have anything to do with indigenous people. Mildly amusing

Review – The Mummy’s Kiss

Okay, this one was my fault. One look at the box should have told me that this was soft-core porn rather than an actual mummy movie. Sure, there’s a mummy in it briefly at the beginning, but it’s almost immediately magically transformed into a topless woman. From there on out it’s a quasi-rip of the Fraser/Weisz mummy movies only with a pseudo-lesbian twist. And though I have little use for soft-core smut, I’ll confess to being at least a little peeved to discover that the tape rented from Hollywood Video is missing most of the sex scenes (or at least so I suspect, considering that anything that looks like a sex scene gets cut abruptly short, in at least one case leaving a gap in the plot). I wanted a mummy movie, but once denied that I guess I would have preferred to at least gotten what I did end up renting however dreadful it turned out to be. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Endurance

Despite the aspect ratio, this comes across as a PBS production. A slickly-produced member of the species, but a public TV artifact nonetheless. That notwithstanding, this is an excellent documentary about the ill-fated Shackleton expedition. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that despite the hardships faced by the crew – especially after they were forced to abandon their ice-locked ship – they managed to save a vast quantity of motion picture and still film of their experiences. I found the fates of the expedition’s dogs and cat a little hard to take, but other than that the production was nothing short of fascinating. How anyone could survive for nearly two years under such conditions is almost beyond imagining. This is a must-see for anyone with an interest in Antarctica or the Age of Exploration or just a general curiosity about the outer limits of human endurance. Worth seeing

Review – Piñata: Survival Island

I’ve got to start paying closer attention to video boxes. Around midway through watching this stinker I grabbed the box, and yes there it was, the word “piñata,” in smaller type than “Survival Island” but nonetheless unmistakably there. We rented this at least in part so a friend who wanted to be able to claim he’d seen every Jamie Presley movie ever made could move one step closer to his goal. And on that front, mission accomplished. Beyond that, however, there’s not much reason to sit through this stinker. The acting is abysmal, the script almost nonexistent, and the production so cheap that they actually had to use video effects to make it look like an ATV was on fire rather than just setting an ATV on fire. I expect it probably goes without saying, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway: the killer piñata is about as scary as, well, a piñata made menacing by bad video game graphics. It’s not quite bad enough to be funny, but it does come close. See if desperate

Review – Chicago

If you go into this expecting a Bob Fosse musical starring Renee Zellwegger, Richard Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones, you’re going to get exactly what you expect. The production’s expensive and elaborate, but still at its heart its just a big Broadway musical. Zellwegger does a fine job as Roxy the homicidal ingénue, and Gere matches her as her smarmy lawyer. Zeta-Jones doesn’t have quite the screen presence her co-stars enjoy, but she can dance the steps well enough. The supporting cast is solid as well, especially Queen Latifah. Upshot: if you like musicals you’re in business, because this is a fine example of the genre. Worth seeing

Review – Identity

Do writing teachers no longer do the lesson about not writing shaggy dog stories? If not, they seriously need to consider restarting the practice. This movie starts out as a Hitchcock/Serling style thriller about a group of 11 people trapped together by unlikely circumstances in a motel in the middle of nowhere. One by one they’re murdered a la the explicitly-referenced Agatha Christie novel not to mention dozens of other closed-environment murder thrillers (though the gore here is somewhat more graphic than in most of the older productions that take this same path). As the cast thins, the remaining characters discover that they’ve got an unnatural number of trivial things in common. And then … well, then comes the plot twist that made me almost entirely lose interest in the whole show. I guess it was original enough, but it made the drama a little less than compelling. The acting was fine, production values were solid, and even the dialogue wasn’t the end of the world. The movie was just undone by its own plot. See if desperate

Review – They

Somewhere around midway between Darkness Falls and previous Wes Craven effort A Nightmare on Elm Street lies this mediocre production. In keeping with 2003’s official theme – movies that have great premises that never quite seem to pay off – the wind-up is much better than the pitch. The thesis is that night terrors aren’t just bad dreams; rather, they’re a window into a dark dimension full of evil demon things. But when the demon things turn out to be something between big bats and pinky mice with old men’s heads, they start to seem a great deal less menacing. They manage to get a couple of decent booga-booga shots out of the monsters, but not much else. The production is further defeated by the lead actor, who does a passable – if somewhat over-wrought – job as a woman descending into madness. Trouble is, we seem to be intended to believe that she isn’t really crazy and that her “delusions” are actually things from beyond out to cart her off to their evil realm. So when she acts like she’s completely nuts, it sort of defeats the purpose. Unless, that is, you go with the alternate “Wizard of Oz” ending available on the DVD. Mildly amusing

Review – The Life of David Gale

There’s a big problem with movies that put all their eggs in the mystery thriller surprise twist basket: they’ve got to walk a razor-fine line between twists so obvious they aren’t surprising and twists so surprising they end up coming across as ridiculous. I’ve griped heavily in the past about the latter, so perhaps when confronted with the former I shouldn’t gripe too much. But I’m afraid I’m going to anyway. The surprise twist at the end of this production is so completely set up early on that the audience spends the whole rest of the show waiting for the set-up to pay off or for the filmmakers to find a way to keep the plot from going in the obvious direction. Briefly summarized, the picture tells the story of an anti-death penalty activist who finds himself on death row after being convicted of murdering one of his colleagues. Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslett do their usual craftspersonlike work in the leads, but they’re just not given all that much to work with. Mildly amusing