Review – Dawn of the Mummy

This might have been a better movie if it had been made 20 years later. Well okay, it probably still would have been cheap horror exploitation garbage, but at least the folks who made it would have had more liberty to include the sex and gore they seem so desperately to want but were probably prohibited by 1981 mores from including in their production. The story starts off as a standard mummy tale, with fashion models added into the cadre of crass English-speakers disturbing the mummy’s tomb. But by the end this has disintegrated into a cheap rip of the zombie movies implied by the syntax of the title. See if desperate

Review – Hellboy

This was actually a little better than I thought it was going to be. I liked the Lovecraftian stuff, even though it was a side element rather than a key part of the plot. Beyond that this is a pleasant mix of comic book action, horror and comedy. Our hero is a demon raised to be a quirky champion of good and slayer of monsters. He doesn’t play by the rules. He has trouble with a woman he really likes. He cares for stray cats. And so on. Despite the vague feeling that this movie was trying to be too many things at once, I thought it flowed reasonably well, staying interesting throughout with an even mix of character development and effects-intensive action movies. However, those who harbor a prejudice against the whole comic book thing might well have a lower opinion of this outing, which is a shame because otherwise this is a fine production. Mildly amusing

Review – Keeper of Souls

Okay, now it’s official. For the record I hereby swear off horror movies with the word “keeper” in the title. Of all the pictures in this accidental sub-genre this was the worst, and that’s saying something. It isn’t just sloppy and amateurish. At points it was actually like scenes were actually missing. I know sometimes Hollywood Videos rents stuff that’s been butchered for the suburban market, but this was missing basic transitional material rather than just the gory and/or racy bits. The opening titles – probably the most expensive part of the whole movie – explain that the story has something to do with a “dark man” who vanished from Salem after the witch trials and resurfaced in the South sometime later. Not a bad premise, but the movie that follows this brief intro is just too poorly crafted to take advantage of the push it started with. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Bourne Supremacy

They must have heard me griping last time that the plot was too much of a cookie-cutter spy yarn. Now the pendulum swings to the other extreme, and the second one barely has a plot at all. Needless to say, that’s even more fatal to an espionage thriller than the formulaic route. Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne, dragged out of amnesiac retirement when the j-random forces of darkness kill his significant other and frame him for a hit on a couple of CIA agents. While this might seem like the set-up for an old-fashioned, linear revenge tale, instead it becomes a meandering game of cat-and-mouse in which Bourne and his former taskmasters swap the feline and rodent roles back and forth. A good revenge flick should leave audiences with the word “dude!” on their lips, but this one merely left me with a “huh? so that’s the end?” Oh, and this thing has a car chase that went on so long that the audience was actually laughing by the end of it. See if desperate

Review – The Gold Rush

There are three Chaplin movies that nobody should die without seeing. Though this one lacks the technical sophistication of Modern Times and most of the emotional content of City Lights, Chaplin’s comic genius is nonetheless at its height here. The roll dance scene alone makes the whole thing worthwhile (even if it was “borrowed” from Fatty Arbuckle), and the rest of the movie is just about on par. One of the versions of this classic includes running commentary by the man himself, but his ham-handed monologue damages the production far more than it helps. Buy the tape

Review – The Day of the Jackal

Ah, whatever happened to the days when they made international thrillers like this? The production isn’t especially slick by later standards; indeed, the extensive use of hand-held cameras give it an almost documentary feel in places. But the plot is tight and the story keeps moving. The most striking thing about the story is that – particularly by the end – it’s hard to know whom to cheer for: the assassin whose exploits we’ve been following for a couple of hours or the police official who’s trying to prevent him from killing Charles de Gaulle. Though this isn’t precisely a Cold War drama, it still has that intriguing 70’s era look and feel to it. Genre fans shouldn’t miss this one. Worth seeing

Review – Death Bed

For years I’ve been slamming Full Moon in general and Stuart Gordon in particular for producing movies that are little more than flimsy excuses for tons of tit shots and cheap gore. So I expect I’ll sound like a complete hypocrite for griping that this movie didn’t have anywhere near enough stage guts or exploitative sex. But when the premise is that an old bed in a couple’s new loft is haunted by kinky bondage ghosts, one expects the producers’ usual bag of tricks. I concede the possibility that I somehow ended up with an edited-for-squeamish-video-stores version, and there were some oddly-cut sequences that supported that theory. But sex and sexism aside, this would have been a stinker no matter what elements were included or left out. The acting was bad as usual (including a supporting role by Joe Estevez, whom I assume is related somehow to Martin Sheen), the script was bad as usual, but the real killer was the pacing. The production had an almost soap-opera-esque ability to structure drama so that the plot advances as little as possible. That might work for shows that have to eke out five hours a week, but for a simple 80-minute movie it alternated between just plain annoying and so annoying that it actually became sort of funny. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Cold Mountain

For a Civil War movie – not to mention yet another rehash of The Odyssey – this wasn’t half bad. Clearly this one cost a lot to produce, but the expense shows up on the screen in the form of quality acting, excellent cinematography, and a fairly good script. Sure it gets a little maudlin in parts, but that’s part of the point of any marketing blend of action for the guys and romance for the gals. Overall this is a fine piece of Hollywood entertainment that would have gotten a slightly higher rating if it had been a little easier on the animals. Mildly amusing

Review – Club Dread

It should say something that I went into this movie figuring that it would roughly approximate the stupidity of Broken Lizard’s earlier work on Super Troopers and came away feeling that they didn’t even live up to that relatively meager standard. Instead this plays like an extra dumb slasher movie. Some of the snide references to Jimmy Buffett are kinda cute, but the rest of it is a thoroughly un-entertaning hack-and-slash with just enough racism and pointless boob shots to keep it nice and offensive. See if desperate

Review – Exorcist: The Beginning

I read in an entertainment magazine somewhere that the studio brought in Renny Harlin to basically reshoot the whole movie after the first director (Paul Schrader) created something that wasn’t scary enough. And it shows. To an extent this is an interesting prequel to the original, making a conscious and reasonably skillful effort to tie forward to some of the action in Friedkin’s production – particularly the Iraq sequence at the beginning, which was always my favorite part of the movie. But grafted on to the archaeological horror I love so much were a ton of booga-booga shots, elaborate gore and other trademark Harlin sensationalism. This leads me to suspect that the first version of the movie would have been something I would have loved, while the eventual theatrical release was just another fright flick. This weakness shows up especially strongly in the scattering of plot points that go nowhere and seem to bear little relationship to the overall structure. And I don’t expect there’s even any point in getting into the gender politics of the series at this late stage in the game. So suffice it to say that this one lurks somewhere between the heights of numbers one and three and the depths of number two. Mildly amusing

Review – Alien vs. Predator

How the mighty art fallen. Both of the series merged here got off to solid starts, but by this point in history they’ve joined in a descent into the realm of goofy horror-action mix. I should have known going into it that any movie that couldn’t at least eke out an R rating was going to aim for cartoonish action rather than taking advantage of its sources’ horror roots. A team of scientists led by an aging millionaire heads off to Antarctica to check out a buried pyramid that turns out to be infested with Aliens and the Predators who show up to hunt them. If nothing else, this left me wondering why the Predators would set up a game preserve in Antarctica when the first two movies in their own series made it clear that the hunt-monsters prefer things extra hot. So now Predator takes on Jason in the finals, right? The DVD promises an alternate beginning not seen in theaters, but it doesn’t amount to much (and what there is of it is sort of poor quality video). Mildly amusing

Review – Near Death

Straight to video – which was probably how it was shot – goes this flimsy excuse for a horror movie. The plot’s some stupid mish-mash about ghouls and/or ghosts stuck in the mansion of an evil Hollywood type. Most of the movie comes across as cheap soft-core porn with the porn mostly cut out. All of the effects are cheap, but amazingly some of them kinda work. On the other hand, a lot of them really, really don’t work. Script awful. Acting so terrible it hardly even counts as acting. In other words, run-of-the-mill cheap-ass fright flick. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Ran

One of Kurosawa’s better movies based on one of Shakespeare’s better plays. As Throne of Blood was to Macbeth, so this production is to King Lear, a samurai-ization of Elizabethan drama. Visually this is a stunning movie. The Masterworks restoration does wonders for some parts of the picture but appears to give other scenes something of a brownish, shadowy shift. But technical quality aside, the story is an entertaining if sometimes over-sentimental retelling of the Lear tale. Lots of Byzantine intrigue. Lots of lightning-quick swordplay. An epic battle or two. I admit it would probably help to like the director’s work or at least be a genre fan, but if you qualify on either count you should get a real kick out of this. Worth seeing

Review – e-Dreams

Just climb on board with a dotcom startup and let the cameras roll for the whole roller-coaster ride! This documentary chronicles the rise and fall of Kosmo.com, a company that promised to deliver books, videos, food and the like via bike messenger within an hour of an order being placed on the Internet. In its favor, this was at least a better idea than a lot of its contemporaries, web-based businesses that didn’t seem to be selling anything or have any way of making money aside from sucking down venture capital. But when the vapor-companies crashed heavy in 2000, they took a lot of businesses like Kosmo with them. One also gets the sense from watching the exuberance of the early days contrasted with the deep depression of the company’s last few months that the whole thing stopped being fun once the participants had to stop riding the initial success wave and actually sit down and try to work for a living. Though this is too much of a fish-in-a-barrel experience to count as ground-breaking film-making, it’s still an interesting picture. Mildly amusing

Review – Catwoman

The sexual politics of this plot – meek woman empowers herself by getting in touch with her inner strength helped by a hefty dose of cat magic – might have been really radical 30 years ago, but now it’s not exactly enough to sustain an hour and half worth of movie, not even an empty-headed action flick. The script and acting help, particularly Halle Berry in the title role. Unfortunately, the direction undoes the goodwill everyone else in the production works so hard to drum up. It’s like the director watched MTV for years without managing to learn anything useful from it. As a result, just about every time the show starts getting interesting it dissolves into a spattering of spastic jump cuts that more often than not get in the way of the stunt work, special effects, even the acting. Though it’s a given that there’s a bit of a difference between Bob Kane and Citizen Kane, this still could have been a better production than it turned out to be. Mildly amusing

Review – I, Robot

Perhaps they’ve finally run out of old Phillip K. Dick novels to make into effects-intensive sci fi flicks, so now they’re turning to Asimov classics. In any event, if you’re in the mood for a vaguely depressing action movie you’ve come to the right place. The subtexts about the fine lines between humanity and automation have been done to death in the years between the novel’s original publication and now. So it seems less a clever plot element and more a shortcoming when the characters – human and robot alike – come across as stiff and cold. That aside, however, some of the visual effects are kind of fun. Overall it doesn’t quite sustain its running time, but like many other productions in this sub-genre, the effects keep it from dragging too badly. Mildly amusing

Review – The Hills Have Eyes

Well, the movie wasn’t exactly called “The Hills Have Brains,” so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. But I’m going to anyway. This early Wes Craven effort comes across as a cross between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Craven’s even earlier Last House on the Left. A trailer-load of city folk end up trapped in the desert, stalked and slaughtered by a latter-day Sawney Beane clan. These grubby, drooling loonies eat tourists because they can’t afford groceries, and yet they seem to have a copious supply of walkie-talkies and at least one bottle of J&B. Sadly, plot logic isn’t the low point of the flick. That distinction belongs to the dialogue and Craven’s tin ear for same. The acting’s no great shakes, either. And few movies end as abruptly as this one does, though even as sudden as it is, it’s not exactly unwelcome. Finally, this picture came darn close to drawing a lower rating because of the animal cruelty, but for once one of the animals gets to be cruel back. See if desperate

Review – The Other

Taut, suspenseful psychological horror or just a really boring movie? You decide. The first time I saw this I was eight or nine years old, so I didn’t pick up on the movie’s twist until Uta Hagen came right out and told us what it was. Upon more recent viewing, the catch seems as obvious as a trick from an old Twilight Zone episode. That aside, this is the laconically-paced tale of a boy and his evil twin, a twin whose evil-ness is established over again so often that it becomes as tedious as it is creepy. Overall this is a solid production, but you have to be in the mood for it before it’s going to work for you. Mildly amusing