Review – The Eye

This is one of those movies that makes me wish I knew a little more about the folk traditions in the land from whence it came – in this case China – because they seem to play at least some role in the visuals. And truly the visual horror elements are the strongest part of this otherwise run-of-the-mill offering from Hong Kong. The plot’s standard stuff about a transplant recipient who ends up with the power to see ghosts after getting eyes from a psychic woman who died a violent death. The art direction has a lot in common with the better-known Japanese offering, Ringu. But at least some of the ghostly doings are more than a little on the creepy side, including at least one booga-booga shot that really works. Mildly amusing

Review – Amen.

After Mad City I just about gave up on Costa-Gavras, but I’m glad I decided to give him another try. This tale of the Catholic church’s complicity in the Holocaust is a lot closer to the director’s traditional stomping grounds. The plot follows two idealistic young men – an SS officer with a crisis of conscience and a priest in whom he confides – as they learn some hard lessons about international diplomacy and the Pope’s unwillingness to speak out against the mass slaughter of Jewish people. The story remains intriguing throughout, depressing and unflinching enough to do justice to its subject matter. Worth seeing

Review – Possessed

If not for the steady stream of profanity that spouts from the carrot-topped victim of evil in this bargain basement Exorcist rip-off, I’d swear it was a made-for-TV affair. It’s just that bad. Even grand ham Timothy Dalton appears to have trouble spouting the dialogue he must deliver as the valiant priest doing battle with the forces of darkness. The parts that are clearly intended to be scary fall so flat that they very nearly make it to comedy. Fans of the sub-genre may want to check this out just so they can say they’ve seen it, but otherwise there’s little entertainment to be found in this silly production. See if desperate

Review – The Handmaid’s Tale

Here’s a heavy-handed story about how awful life would be if the religious right actually gained firm control over society. First constant war and utter disregard for environmentalism poisons the planet and renders the majority of the population infertile. The few women who are still capable of conceiving become the sex surrogate slaves of couples in the power elite, following a ritual based on the procreation-oriented love triangle between Abraham, Sarah and Hagar. The production makes some solid points about the subjugation of women in Western religious practice, and parts of the drama are intriguing in a soap opera sort of way. However, the constant pessimism and pedantry tends to make the whole thing start to seem a little silly after awhile. Mildly amusing

Review – Final Destination 2

I’m not sure what drew me to the sequel, inasmuch as I’m already on record as not regarding the original as one of the great moments in American cinema. Guess I was just in the mood for a cheap horror movie. And on that front, mission accomplished. Some of the gore wasn’t too terrible in a “dude, you just got blowed up” kind of way. But beyond that much of the production is nothing short of annoying. Sympathetic characters are in short supply, and many of the suspense scenes are so laboriously constructed that they almost descend to self-parody. I was especially un-fond of the choking sequences that seemed to drag on and on and on. Perhaps I should applaud the film-makers for actually inspiring the physical sensation of suffocating, but by the end of this barker I wasn’t in the mood to dish out any brownie points in exchange for making me uncomfortable. See if desperate

Review – Dreamchild

Mix the innocent childhood magic of Alice in Wonderland with the considerably less-than-innocent real life of the Reverend Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll). Throw in some creepy Muppets and this is what you get. The main plot follows a journey to America undertaken by the little girl who inspired the Alice tales now grown to doddering old age. A handful of other silly subplots intrude, but the really compelling stuff here are the flashbacks done as a combination of Alice’s traumatic childhood memories and scenes from Carrol’s work. Unfortunately in the end the movie does away with its own apparent point. Hooray for happy endings and all, but it’s rough to see even true love prevail when that love takes the form of the bond between a ten-year-old girl and a dirty old man. Mildly amusing

Review – The Core

I’ll let you all invent your own “rotten to the” jokes for this one. I guess I should be grateful that at least this time the trauma threatening to destroy the entire earth isn’t a meteor. But somehow the notion that the planet is doomed because the fluids in the core stopped spinning because of some stupid government plot actually makes the meteor thing seem downright plausible. Certainly by the time you’ve crammed a group of mavericks and misfits into a giant vibrator that can somehow resist the heat and pressure of the mantle (let alone the core itself) … well, let’s just say that it’s hard to maintain much interest in the virtually endless parade of implausible plot twists and sophomoric character development. See if desperate

Review – Corpses Are Forever

I wonder if they’re going to try to make it all the way through the panoply of Bond titles. Though I’m sure I would have loved to have seen “Corpsefinger,” “The Man with the Golden Corpse” or “Octocorpsey,” my guess is that we’ve seen the last of whatever series this might have turned into. If nothing else, this one wins the Mark Borchardt prize for the actor/writer/director who turns out to be equally inept at all his various jobs. Though the choices were legion, I think my favorite part was when – in a post-apocalyptic world supposedly inhabited almost exclusively by zombies – cars kept driving past the backdrop. I suppose they might have been going for so-stupid-it’s-funny, but they only managed the first half. The final icing was the sad, withered husk of what was once Linnea Quigley still valiantly trying to act. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Orange County

Life is hard on upper middle class white boys, especially when they don’t get into Stanford because their dingbat guidance counselor mixes up their standardized test results. Actually, that’s the point at which life gets hard for the audience. Because when our youthful protagonist – an aspiring writer, no less – loses his bid for the college of his choice the wacky antics ensue. And with screwball divorcee parents, druggie older brother and oddball friends, you can bet those antics are going to be pretty wacky. Actually, to be fair some of the gags work on a small scale. But for the most part this is an MTV production with all the limitations on audience demographics thereby implied. Mildly amusing

Review – Rat Race

This one sure puts the screwball in screwball comedy. A gaggle of bad actors (and maybe one or two good ones) struggle through a nearly endless parade of improbable situations in their pursuit of a train station locker stuffed with a couple million bucks. The production sports a funny moment here and there, but to be honest if you’ve seen the preview then you’ve already seen most of the best this flick has to offer. Even if you haven’t seen the preview, it’s doubtful that you’ll regard a small collection of sight gags worth the whole running time of this dog. See if desperate

Review – A Mighty Wind

Every step these movies take away from Waiting for Guffman seems to be a step in the wrong direction. Or maybe the whole set even traces all the way back to Spinal Tap. In any event, imagine Best in Show only with folk singers rather than dogs and you’ve got the general idea here. Trouble is, most of the humor is too silly and too broad by far. Having grown up with parents who were into the whole folk music thing, I recognized some of the characters (or at least the character types). It helped that the acting was solid as ever. However, the plot and the dialogue just didn’t do enough to hold the production together and make it funny enough to justify the running time. Mildly amusing

Review – The Shunned House

Aside from small snippets here and there, this should be “The Shunned Movie.” Elsewhere I’ve tagged Brain Dead as an even lower rent version of Full Moon, and I guess the BD people took that as a challenge. So here they import a bad Italian shot-on-video production loosely (and I do mean loosely) based on not one but three H.P. Lovecraft tales (the title tale at least very briefly “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Dreams in the Witch House”). The Zann piece has a moment or two, even if it does turn out to be an awkward Erica Zann rather than a more literal interpretation. But the other two plotlines are little more than muddled messes filled with actors struggling with the English dialogue and gore so cheap most bargain basement haunted houses would reject it. The production’s final downfall is the curious decision to intermix the three tales so that they run together in a really uninteresting way. See if desperate

Review – The Cucumber Incident

Here’s a bargain basement video documentary about a rather outré subject: three women who took a dislike to a guy. Of course by “guy” I mean “spouse of one of the women.” Oh, and throw in “convicted child molester supposedly rehabbed yet apparently still French kissing the girl he previously molested.” But wait, it gets better. By “took a dislike” I actually mean “tied him up, shaved him above and below, rubbed Icy Hot on his man area, and then sodomized him with a cucumber.” The working class dramatis personae alone make this a worthwhile investment of an hour or so. And that’s fortunate, because the production values aren’t too whippy, especially the dreadful and frequently intrusive soundtrack music. Mildly amusing

Review – Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey

Though clearly intended to be more of the same from the successful original, this first (and no doubt only, considering Keanu Reeves’ lack of incentive to do another) sequel somehow lacks the charm of the “Excellent Adventure.” Maybe it’s that what works for history doesn’t work for theology. Maybe it’s that the humor here is even more juvenile than before (if such a thing can be imagined). Maybe it’s just that the joke’s worn a little thin. In any event, the picture features a few sincerely funny moments (most of which center around the Grim Reaper). But overall if you’ve seen the original you’ve clearly seen the best of the two. Mildly amusing

Review – Down with Love

Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellwegger have both been in more charmless movies, but that’s at least in part because he did Star Wars Episode 2 and she did Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. This movie has a number of things going for it. The cast is solid, or at the very least capable of keeping up with the sitcom plot. The art direction is likewise good, creating a 1962 that never existed outside home décor catalogs. The dialogue isn’t even all that bad; indeed, it manages to be charming in a silly sort of way. The problem turns up when the film-makers try to graft 21st century sensibilities onto a 60s-era battle of the sexes. By the second or third false ending it should be apparent to all just how hard they’re working to get the two incompatible outlooks to mesh somehow. Moral of the story: screwball comedies don’t need to be morally uplifting. In fact, they may actually be better when they aren’t. Mildly amusing

Review – Dreamcatcher

If you liked the novel, you’ll probably like the movie (aside from the fact that the ending’s a bit different). Funny, though, how dialogue that doesn’t distract in the book sounds really false when actors actually have to deliver it. Some of the plot devices that worked well in print failed to make the jump to the silver screen. That notwithstanding, this isn’t the worst alien attack movie I’ve ever seen (hey, there’s always Signs). Of course that’s at least in part because it “borrows” copiously from several more successful predecessors. Overall the acting and production values are at two-star level, so that’s the rating I’ll end up giving it. However, the picture came dangerously close to a lower rating because of genuinely excessive animal suffering (particularly the prolonged torment of a dog toward the end). Mildly amusing

Review – The Italian Job (2002)

I haven’t yet seen the original, so at this point I can’t compare the two. I expect the Cooper Minis played a prominent role in the first version. Beyond that, however, this is a typical Hollywood caper movie. Marky Mark stars as the brains (yeah, no kidding) behind a gold-theft scheme that goes awry when he and his quirky cohort are betrayed by the most sullen of their number (performance phoned in by Ed Norton). Big production values but not a whole big bunch beyond that. Mildly amusing

Review – Underworld

Vampires vs. werewolves. Aristocracy vs. proletariat. Goths vs. metal heads. Could they have built a couple more simple-minded, plot-churning dichotomies in here someplace? The action sequences aren’t too shabby, though many of them have an unpleasant Matrix-ish under-taste. On the other hand, the characters follow the worst vampire comic book traditions, and because I come into this from the werewolf camp I guess I could have done without the goth clichés, neurotic vampire whining and uninteresting machinations. And the logic falls massively apart in a couple of spots, with the story clearly catering to the need for gore and flying fists of kung fu death rather than a coherent plot. I guess I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen better too. Mildly amusing