Review – The Curse of the Cat People

Apparently the cat people’s curse is that the sequel shall include no cat people. The characters from the first one are back, but now poor, witless Oliver is married to his gal-on-the-side Alice and the pair have a pre-teen daughter. Little Amy is a daydreamer, which bothers her straight-arrow father to no end. As the father-daughter rift widens, the girl seeks solace in the company of the ghost of Irena, Oliver’s first wife, who actually was a cat person in the first movie. If considered strictly on its own merits, this is an amateurish but otherwise inoffensive production. However, it’s a poor excuse for a sequel to one of the best black-and-white horror movies ever made. See if desperate

Review – Pan’s Labyrinth

I’ve seen a lot of movies along these lines. Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm) and Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters, Hook, and just about everything else he ever made that has a kid in it) in particular have dished out plenty of pictures about magic and imagination in the face of worldly evil. However, this one is head and shoulders better than just about all the rest. The Spanish Civil War provides a particularly chilling setting, particularly as personified by the protagonist’s stepfather, a cruel captain in the Fascist army. But the thing that impressed me the most was the flawless mix of innovation and fairy tale. Case in point: the eyeball monster. The creature, its lair, and the scene that takes place therein are all a terrific blend of special effects (of the non-digital kind no less!), art direction and dark, childhood fantasy. Overall director Guillermo del Toro does a superior job of capturing an often-grim real world through the eyes of a fantasy-obsessed girl. The vision is beautifully child-like without being sappily childish. Worth seeing

Review - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Bobcat Goldthwaite once joked that Elvis Presley shouldn’t have needed drugs because he was rich enough to pay people to perform hallucinations for him. Now thanks to Terry Gilliam, even the poor and humble can watch drug-addled weirdness without risking top dollar or arrest for possession. Johnny Depp does a good job in this cinematic version of Hunter S. Thompson’s conclusive proof – as if any were really necessary – that Las Vegas on acid is one strange place. Of course with a literary junkie protagonist, a pile of big names (presumably drawn by the hip-ness of the project) in the supporting cast, and a lot of bizarre special effects to create a reality-challenged experience, this evokes the memory of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; this time around the story is more cheerful but likewise more frivolous. Overall this came across as the sort of movie one makes when one loves a book but can’t quite find the cinematic “words” to express one’s affection. Mildly amusing

Review – Embedded '45: Shooting War in Germany

It’s a little hard to tell because of the English narration, but this appears to be a documentary originally produced for German television. Certainly problems with translation might go a ways toward explaining some of the odd information presented here and there. However, one could almost watch the movie with the sound off and still appreciate the main asset of the production: lots of fascinating footage of the last three months or so of the European end of World War Two. The movie-makers combed the National Archives and found some impressive stuff, film of American soldiers fighting house-to-house in the ruined cities of Germany, capturing prisoners of war, liberating work camps, and even executing an SS saboteur. However, the visuals aren’t aided much by the narration (mostly run-of-the-mill description with little insight into the process of shooting film in the middle of a war) or the added sound effects. The narrative structure also apparently required the re-use of some of the scenes, as (for example) we see the same POWs being captured at several points in the story. Overall this is worth it for the pictures as long as one doesn’t expect much else to go along with it. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil Wears Prada

So now having a crappy job makes you worth a major motion picture? This is one of those message pieces that tend to defeat their own purposes. For example, I think we’re supposed to scoff at the fashion industry’s obsession with thinness. However, our supposedly normal-bodied protagonist is repeatedly identified as a size six. Not to mention that she’s played by model-esque Anne Hathaway. Much of the rest of this production is as stiff and ill-conceived as its take on positive body image. Like the corner of the publishing business it attempts to lambaste, this movie is pretty, slick and expensive but short on substance. Mildly amusing

Review – 21 Grams

Is the title a reference to the supposed weight of the soul (as measured when it departs the body after death) or the amount of coke you have to get into a studio executive before he’ll green-light a movie like this? Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro star as three people brought together by a fatal accident and a heart transplant. This stiff little melodrama’s only real claim to originality is that the scenes are scattered with no particular respect for chronology. That makes it annoying until one gets enough of the plot down to be able to piece the thing together (and only moderately less annoying even after the story finally emerges). See if desperate

Review – The Barnyard

Yeesh, what a dreadful experience. For starters, this is the biggest disconnect I’ve ever seen between the content of a movie and the studio’s description of the content of a movie. The box under the MPAA rating for this thing warns us of “some mild peril and rude humor.” In the first few minutes the protagonist’s father is murdered on-screen by vicious coyotes. The villains go on to threaten and/or attempt to kill every other animal in the movie. Paramount should know that this goes considerably beyond “mild peril,” but of course putting words such as “violence” or “terror” on the box would likely have cut into sales and rentals of a kiddie flick. If that had been the only problem, I could probably have extended some slack on the rating. But it gets worse. Nickelodeon Movies appears to be jockeying for the position of “Pixar Cheap” with efforts like this. The animation is terrible, not much better than current generation video game graphics. The cast is mostly has-beens and never-will-bes. Even the music sucks. A lot of it is off-the-rack, and the “original” performances tend to be things like a cow doing an acoustic version of an old Tom Petty tune. Still, I think the thing that sticks with me most is an odd bit of annoyance: all the bovines in this movie – male and female alike – have udders. Somebody here needs to get out of the big city every once in awhile. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Demonic

Straight single female film fans, here’s something new for you: a horror movie that can be used as a potential boyfriend meter. Show him this picture and see how long it takes him to get tired of the nekkid vampire chicks that suffuse this hunk of junk. If he can make it all the way to the end without saying “ah jeez, not more nekkid vampire chicks” at least once, he has the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old and should immediately be kicked to the curb. I find myself astonished once again that a production of this caliber requires so many people in the end credits. Couldn’t such crap have been made with nothing more than a cameraperson, someone on post-production, ten actors (well, eight actors, an obscure novelist and a bizarrely-ageless Tom Savini) and a handful of emaciated strippers? Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Idiocracy

I recall several occasions when I’ve found myself sitting through a commencement exercise among some of the less-gifted students whose papers I’d graded, listening to a speaker describe the kids as “our future,” and thinking “Wow, I hope not.” In this movie, Mike Judge dares to ask that most unpleasant of questions: “What if the future really is run by idiots?” His answer is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages. Luke Wilson (who isn’t my favorite actor but here manages not to offend) stars as an average Joe accidentally frozen for five hundred years. Our hero awakens to find himself in an entire world of … well, let’s be polite and say “people with few critical thinking skills.” In a country so moron-ized by lowest-common-denominator pop culture that nobody realizes plants die when watered with Gatorade, even a slacker from the 21st century instantly rises to national prominence. The humor is strictly absurd, but that’s okay. Several of the sight gags made me laugh so hard my head hurt. I had a qualm or two about some of the eugenic overtones, but the nature of the production made it impossible for me to take even that part seriously enough to get upset about it. The only down side, then, is that after you see this, every stupid thing you see on TV or in real life (and of course such occasions abound) takes on an oddly apocalyptic feel. Buy the disc

Review – The Covenant

This movie does for warlocks what Underworld did for vampires: it takes a run-of-the-mill plot and smears it with a stifling load of blue-filtered, jump-cut, flying-around-on-wires-combat-sequence, teen-angst-ridden, MTV-style faux hipness. Some of the fight scenes are mildly diverting. But they comprise a relatively small chunk of the running time, most of which is devoted to long exchanges between protagonists who can be distinguished from each other and from their enemies only by their hairstyles (and sometimes not even then). By the time it finally boils down to a battle between the two main characters, I found myself mumbling, “if these guys toss one more glob of computer-animated witch goo at each other, I’m really going to have to turn this thing off.” Fortunately it ended shortly thereafter. See if desperate

Review – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

The Disney-fying animation of the classic Hugo tale is definitely not a step in the right direction. Tom Hulce and Demi Moore voice Quasimodo and Esmeralda, which should give you some idea of what’s in store for you in the voice talent department. The animation is a step or two above the studio’s low points back in the 70s, but now it’s an awkward mix of mediocre foreground cells with computer-animated backdrops that frequently seem out of place. But worst of all – with the possible exception of the hero’s annoying gargoyle sidekicks – are the musical numbers. They’re almost universally mawkish paeans to counterfeit emotion, the sort of thing beloved only by habitués of motivational seminars conducted by the likes of Mary Lou Retton. I was actually in a fairly good mood when I watched this, so I really wanted to like it. But the movie stubbornly refused to meet me halfway. See if desperate

Review – Venom (2005)

Louisiana redneck gets bitten to death by voodoo snakes and comes back as an evil-possessed, reanimated psycho killer. Look out, local teenage population. There’s some vaguely-racist voodoo junk and a couple of mild scares here, but otherwise this is just another undead slasher picture. See if desperate

Review – Sanjuro

Toshiro Mifune’s character from Yojimbo lives again in this tale of corruption, justice, and a whole lot of swordfighting. This one’s a bit more philosophical than the first one, though it’s still not the kind of “think piece” Kurosawa would do later in his career. It also has more of a sense of humor than the first one; though not a comedy by any stretch of the imagination, there are pauses here and there for a little comic relief. And the technical quality is better as well, or at the very least the print used by the Criterion Collection to do the DVD was in much better shape. Still, the action sequences are the big selling point. My personal favorite is the iaido battle at the very end. Buy the disc

Review – Yojimbo

This is a must-see for anyone who likes samurai movies. It’s shorter than The Seven Samurai and thus not quite as complex, but it’s still a lot better crafted that most action movies. Toshiro Mifune stars as a masterless swordsman who strays into a town terrorized by two rival gangs. Half the fun here is watching our hero cleverly pitting the two warring factions against each other, finding ways to trick them into killing one another. And of course there’s plenty of sword-slashing action as well. The Criterion Collection DVD was made from a print that left something to be desired, but the occasional scratch does little to diminish the overall viewing experience. Buy the disc

Review – Benito

Somebody must have told Antonio Banderas that making Reds got people to take Warren Beatty seriously. Otherwise why would he ever have agreed to star in a five-hour-long Italian movie about left-wing radicals in the first decade or two of the 20th century? Of course this is Reds with an evil twist: the protagonist is Benito Mussolini. So we get two DVDs worth of Mussolini’s early career as a leftist, only to have the show come to a screeching halt just as the story starts to get interesting. Honestly, if I want to spend hours listening to liberal radicals jabber on about the minutiae of their causes, I’ll go hang out with my dad and his friends. See if desperate

Review – The Cheap Detective

Come in looking for a Neil Simon send-up of hard-boiled detective movies, and you’ll get just exactly what you expect. One should really be a fan of the genre – or at least have seen Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon – before trying to get much amusement out of this. But most of the humor is entertaining in a dinner theater sort of way if you’re in on the jokes. The cast is a who’s who of 70s comedy cinema, headed up by Peter Falk in the title role. Mildly amusing

Review – Dark Remains

As low-budget horror movies go, I’ve seen worse. For some time now I’ve maintained that just because an independent director doesn’t have the money for big-name stars or fancy special effects doesn’t mean that he has to make a picture with a boring story and a witless script. To be sure, this isn’t going to win any prizes for brilliant movie-making. The acting is amateurish (though on the high end of that spectrum) and the tale gets a little laconic in places. But the production makes good use of the resources it has, conjuring a spooky atmosphere and a few solid, ghostly shocks. Even folks with a lot more cash on hand could learn a lot from work like this. Mildly amusing

Review – The New World

The Mission is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I had high hopes that Terrence Malick might at least bat one into the same ballpark with Roland Joffé. I figured that because the themes of both movies were similar (the disasters of conflict between European colonists and indigenous people in the Americas), perhaps they would be comparably good. I figured wrong. The cinematography was on par; indeed, the visuals in this one were actually a bit more impressive overall, as the filtering wasn’t quite as blatant. Beyond that, however, this outing was dull to the very verge of unwatchable. The basic story is the Pocahontas tale, told from first encounter with the English all the way to her death in Britain years later. And it feels like it takes years to get the story told, the pace is so laconic and the dialogue so fragmentary and odd. Though this scores a couple of points based solely on technical quality, with better acting and a better script this could have been a much better movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Creep

This picture is a masterpiece in illogic. It keeps itself going almost exclusively based on characters’ decisions to act as nobody in the universe ever really would. The victims of a “creep” living in the London underground consistently pass up no end of opportunities to escape, destroy their attacker, or at the very least arm themselves. Indeed, the very premise itself (woman accidentally locked in subway with rapist, homeless people and psychotic monster) requires so many leaps of faith that it’s impossible to accept as anything besides an impossible, drawn-out nightmare sequence. I thought about awarding at least a point for the ending, which did have a vaguely entertaining twist. But unfortunately that small punch line didn’t justify the long, horrible joke. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Casanova

At least this wasn’t as bad as The Libertine. Particularly with Heath Ledger cast in the title role, this Hollywood farce comes across as a 10 Things I Hate About You treatment of 18th century comedy of errors. The production values are good, and the acting is suitable for the overboard silliness of the show (especially Jeremy Irons, who goes completely over the top as a church official out to persecute our hero). Though this is plentifully stupid, for the most part it manages not to actively offend. Mildly amusing

Review – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

Series veteran and splatterpunk guru David Schow helped pen the source story for this stinker, which was more than appropriate given that the whole thing reeks of the witless gore-fest sub-genre. If anything, this outing is an even more relentless parade of torture, mutilation, rape and brutal death than previous Chainsaw movies. Maybe I’m getting old, but I just can’t take this sort of thing like I used to. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Illusionist

The big problem here is that about the only thing worse than a magician who shows how he does his tricks is a mystery where the end is obvious from the outset. Of course, given that the story is about an illusionist in love with an aristocrat betrothed to a tyrant, it goes without saying that the audience is in store for a long series of elaborate tricks. The cast is solid and the production quality is reasonably good (aside from the tedious filter work). It just didn’t turn out to be all that remarkable a production. Mildly amusing

Review – The Descent

If I had started watching this movie around two thirds of the way through, I would have liked it a lot better than I did. That’s how long it takes the monsters to put in an appearance. Once the creature action gets underway, the movie transforms into something reminiscent of some of Lovecraft’s less dramatic works (particularly “The Lurking Fear”). The trouble, then, is the hour it takes getting there. After sixty minutes of six women lost in a cave, grunting and groaning as they make their way through tiny tunnels and across obstacles, the production has worn out its welcome too thoroughly to stand much of a chance. Overall the whole thing is more than vaguely reminiscent of The Cave, and casting it with all women rather than mostly men – while a novel step in the right direction for women in horror movies – didn’t help make the characters any more distinct or sympathetic. See if desperate

Review – The Enemy Below

As macho, two-fisted tales of the sea go, this one’s not half bad. Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens star as the captains of an American destroyer and German U-boat squaring off in the South Atlantic. This is set apart from the usual war yarn in that the two skippers actually use tactics rather than sheer brute force in their attempts to defeat each other. The picture also includes elements such as the consequences of war and the notion that violence need not make inhuman monsters of combatants. Overall this is very much a post-World-War-Two version of World War Two, and much the better for its distance from the propaganda mills of the 1940s. Mildly amusing

Review – The Conqueror Worm

I believe this was originally released in England under the title The Witch-Finder General, a considerably more apt identification. The only thing this movie has in common with Edgar Allen Poe is the appearance of Vincent Price (who of course also starred in other movies that actually were based on Poe’s writing). Price plays a witch-finder in Cromwellian England, a man who strays from village to village torturing people and stealing their property in the name of God’s justice. But after he murders the uncle of the fiancé of a soldier (raping the fiancé in the process), the aggression escalates. For the time, this is unusually packed with sex and violence. Otherwise, however, it’s an unremarkable bit of low-budget costume drama. See if desperate

Review – The Aristocats

Disney creates an hour and a half of animated cats all telling the same dirty joke. Okay, that’s not really it. Instead, this is the ultra-precious tale of a rich woman’s cats (mother and three kittens) dumped in the countryside by a money-grubbing butler. Kitties are befriended by an alley cat who helps them return to Paris, vanquish the villain and regain their rightful place in the household. By this point in studio history, the quality of Disney animation had slipped considerably. The result here looks and sounds pretty cheap. See if desperate

Review – A Night at the Opera

I’ve heard that some folks consider this the best picture the Marx Brothers ever did. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to be able to make a pronouncement like that, but I can say for sure that this is a really funny movie. It’s got some slow spots (especially the non-Marx musical numbers), but the excellent physical comedy more than makes up for it. I can’t say which is my favorite routine, the cabin on the steamship or the opera at the end. But with two such excellent choices (not to mention several other classic moments spread throughout the production), this one’s worth a look. Worth seeing

Review – Xtro 2

This is little more than a bargain-basement Alien rip-off, which oddly enough actually makes it better than the first and third installments in the Xtro series (though not by much). Scientists find a way to transport people to another dimension, but the first time they actually try it one of the crew comes back with a chest-bursting … well, you see where this is going. See if desperate

Review – Basilisk: The Serpent King

This one’s cheap and terrible even by Sci Fi Channel standards. I have to admit that I came in slightly late on it, so if something Oscar-worthy happened in the first 20 minutes or so I missed it. On the other hand, if the part I didn’t see was consistent in quality with the part I saw, then I didn’t miss much. The beast is a big, computer-animated lizard with teeny little appendages that give it a downright comical look. And the show-down between the monster and the villain was so inept – in terms of both script and special effects – that the segment actually made it onto The Soup, an “honor” it richly deserved. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Grendel

The Sci Fi Channel strikes again. I wish that once and for all movie-makers would take a solemn oath: when making a classic like Beowulf into a video, either just shoot it straight or make damn sure that changes in the plot are actually improvements (which is of course a task that would challenge even talented persons, let alone the pack of mooks who cobbled this thing together). Overall this comes across as the Geat Commando Strike Force versus the bad computer-animated monsters. Honestly, I got more entertainment out of the Culture Made Stupid parody of Beowulf than I did out of this whole stupid movie. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Zombie Nation

I’m genuinely curious here. Does the screenwriter even speak the language in which he’s writing? Has either the director or the editor ever seen a movie? I’d ask a similar question about the set designer, but I can’t imagine there even was one (I didn’t bother to check the credits to see if anyone would plead guilty). The story here has something to do with a psycho cop who kidnaps, tortures and murders women. Or is he a cop? The “police station” where he works with the rest of the “force” looks so much like an empty warehouse that it’s hard to say if we’re being confronted with an alternate-reality law enforcement operation as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or merely really terrible production values. I suspect the latter. In any event, a group of odd voodoo women raise the killer’s victims from the dead. Smeared with greasepaint that makes them look like raccoons, these poor souls go after revenge. With quality this bad and misogynist violence this excessive, this one dodges “avoid at all costs” only by the narrowest of margins. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Unnatural: The Fruit of Evil

It’s hard to say if this is stiff and awkward because it’s an early talkie, because it was translated from German to English, or merely because it was German to begin with. Erich von Stroheim plays a mad doctor who creates a woman from a mandrake root (grown in the usual spot, with a depraved murderer for a “father”). Sadly for this beautiful creature, the evil that spawned her eventually surfaces, and one by one the men who are attracted to her begin to die. This production turns out to be the worst of both worlds: too simple and straightforward to join the ranks of German Expressionist masterpieces but too awkwardly Germanic to succeed as a plain, old-fashioned horror movie. It manages not to offend, but unfortunately it also manages not to impress. Mildly amusing

Review – King of the Zombies

Voodoo. Zombies. Nazi spies. Rampant racism. What more could a person possibly want? Ostensibly the stars of this picture are a couple of two-fisted, All-American types whose plane is forced to crash-land on a strange island in the Caribbean. But the real stars of the show are Henry Victor and Mantan Moreland. Victor plays the sinister owner of the island, his accent a 1941 dead give-away for his true allegiances. His European smarm stands in sharp contrast to Moreland, the “sho’ nuf, boss” manservant of one of the protagonists. Every time a zombie or haint as much as gets mentioned, this guy’s eyes bug out so hard that they look ready to pop straight out of his head and roll around on the floor. This production is a stark example of the talent actors like Moreland possessed and thus how squandered they were in menial roles in low budget movies. Beyond that this is a dirt cheap horror flick made interesting only by the early-World-War-Two plot elements. See if desperate

Review – At the Circus

This Marx Brothers outing makes its main contribution to western civilization when Groucho sings the now-legendary “Lydia The Tattooed Lady.” Otherwise it’s the usual blend of fast talk and slapstick occasionally interrupted by musical numbers. Mildly amusing

Review – Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

For a low-budget propaganda piece, this one isn’t half bad. A lot of the arguments made about the subject company (discrimination, unfair labor practices, general greed) apply to a lot of other companies as well. But Wal-Mart is one of the more visible success stories in the evil corporation market and thus a perfectly legitimate target for this sort of attack. A few of the people victimized by the Wal are a little hard to feel sorry for, particularly the conservative small businesspersons. Voting Republican and then complaining when a huge corporation snuffs out your mom-and-pop hardware store is a bit like voting Democrat and then complaining when your taxes go up. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to extend sympathy to the “associates” who work full time for the Waltons but still end up on welfare. And don’t even get me started on the foreign sweat shop segments. The disc version is worth a look, particularly for the parody ads created to help promote the movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Mark of the Vampire

Wow, was this ever a strange one. For the first 45 minutes or so, this appears to be an attempt by Todd Browning and Bela Lugosi to re-reap the Dracula rewards by making another vampire movie. The technical quality here is better than the original horror masterpiece, but almost as if by exchange the characters and plot are nowhere near as interesting. Indeed, I found my attention wandering. However, toward the end I returned from a bathroom break to discover that I appeared to be watching an entirely different movie. What had been a standard vampire flick had suddenly become a run-of-the-mill murder mystery with a hypnotism twist. I’m not sure who that was supposed to please. Perhaps the fan base for vampire movies that turn out to be detective dramas was bigger back in the 1930s than it is now. See if desperate

Review – The Last Man on Earth

As in “I wouldn’t sit through your boring movie if you were the last man on earth”? This low-budget, pre-Omega-Man adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend has a few moments, but for the most part it’s amateurish and dull. Vincent Price is largely wasted playing a character whose thoughts are expressed almost exclusively via voice-over and flashback, though of course that’s exactly the lead role one would expect in a movie about the last living man in a world of zombie-like vampires. See if desperate

Review – Monkey Business

The Marx Brothers are working here for the first time with a script that isn’t based on one of their Broadway productions. But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. This time around the boys stow away on a passenger ship, where they get tangled up in a feud between mobsters who … oh, let’s be honest. What difference does the plot make? The entertainment value is the usual Marx shtick. Mildly amusing

Review – The Aristocrats

Yes, believe it or not, this is actually an hour and a half worth of video of a gaggle of comedians telling the same joke. Sure, some of them spend time discussing the history or philosophy or sexual politics for the gag, but for the most part it’s just the same joke over and over. However, it turns out to be a little more entertaining than it sounds like it would be. My personal favorites were Billy Connoly – who seemed to be having a great deal of fun with it – and Eddie Izzard – who appeared to be so intoxicated that he couldn’t even tell the joke. Mildly amusing

Review – The Invisible Boy

Hey, we’ve got this leftover Robby the Robot suit from Forbidden Planet. Audiences liked the robot in that one. Maybe we could make another movie and they’d like him again, even if it was a really cheap production with a terrible script and bad acting. Or then again, maybe not. In the last half hour or so there’s some vaguely chilling stuff about a supercomputer trying to take over the world (a plot used to better effect in other movies). But for the most part this is a stiffly-written tale of a math nerd who ignores his son until the lad ends up befriending a potentially-dangerous automaton. Mildly amusing

Review – Monsters Gone Wild

Do you like cheap gore and pointless boob shots but just can’t stand all the plot and dialogue you have to put up with in most monster movies? Full Moon has you covered. Here we’ve got clips from several of the company’s productions with no particular regard for story, character or script. The only surprise here is that they didn’t think to do this a lot sooner. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural

Once again I find myself at odds with the blurb writer from Netflix. Apparently someone considers “weirdly erotic” an apt description of a child-molesting lesbian vampire. The blurb also invokes Night of the Hunter, which I completely didn’t see anywhere in this production. Instead, the first part of the movie has the distinct look and feel of odd indies from the late 60s and early 70s, such as Carnival of Souls. There’s even a bus ride evocative of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Beyond that, however, this is the fairly dull tale of a sweet little Christian girl corrupted by the forces of darkness. The already-boring story is made worse by the inclusion of a chase sequence that lasts at least half an hour and seems like it goes on a lot longer than that. Technical problems also interfere, particularly the sultry vampire beauty whose bad skin and cheap wig seriously don’t survive close-ups. See if desperate

Review – Horsefeathers

I’m not much of a Marx Brothers connoisseur, but I don’t think this is one of their best. The shtick is the usual stuff. It’s funny. It just doesn’t seem quite as good as Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera. Maybe it’s the whole college football thing. Even in a lampoon, I just don’t get that much entertainment out of it. Mildly amusing

Review – Jackass Number Two

I’m tempted to say nothing about this other than “if you liked the first one then you’ll like this one too.” However, something beyond the usual parade of antics caught my eye here: the Jackass guys are starting to get old. Sure, they’re doing the same kinds of stunts they did five years ago. But running throughout this picture is a constant undercurrent of “I can’t believe I’m still doing this.” Indeed, at least a couple of the guys vocally express their disbelief. This occasionally lends an almost bittersweet quality to the usual parade of semen drinking, poop eating, and other stunts typical of the TV series and first movie. Mildly amusing