Review – Piranha

Though it would be easy to dismiss this as “Jaws Lite,” there’s actually more here than may immediately meet the eye. With John Sayles writing and Joe Dante directing, it’s fair to expect a clever twist here and there. And as expected, the subtle touches may be found aplenty. My particular favorites are the animated fish creatures toward the beginning. They play no role direct role in the plot, but they’re still kinda cool. Beyond the small stuff, this is a standard tale of science run amuck. Piranha genetically engineered by a military scientist are accidentally released into a river upstream from a summer camp and a resort, with predictable consequences. Worth seeing

Review – The Most Dangerous Game

It’s always weird to see Fay Wray in anything besides King Kong. She’s just become so heavily identified with her most famous role that it’s hard to watch her in anything else without expecting a giant ape to show up at any moment. Robert Armstrong’s appearance in a supporting role doesn’t help, either. At least here we have the advantage of a familiar story. A young, well-to-do big game hunter survives a shipwreck to become the prisoner of a madman who amuses himself by hunting humans. Our hero actually seems to learn something from the ensuing pursuit, at one point remarking that now he understands what his former quarry must have felt like. Well, if he’s going to take a lesson away from the experience (and presumably teach the audience a thing or two in the process), that helps justify the parade of clichés we have to sit through in the process. Mildly amusing

Review – Reign of the Gargoyles

When I was a kid I used to absolutely love Weird War comics. That mix of combat and horror suited my tastes to a T. Even this far into my adulthood I’m still more than a little bit of a sap for this kind of thing. As a result, I probably liked this tale of gargoyles unleashed by the Nazis a bit more than I should have. To be sure, it has some weak points. The story sometimes digresses into the kind of character-development backwaters common in two-fisted tales of manly deeds. As usual, that’s completely unwelcome in a production that is for the most part content to thrive on war and horror movie clichés. And the special effects are strictly Xbox. However, the premise is bush-league clever and the telling of the tale is not without charms. As long as one doesn’t come in expecting too much, it’s possible to emerge entertained. Mildly amusing

Review – Mansquito

Yep, this is really just as bad as it sounds like it would be. If it ever had a chance to not suck – and that’s a big “if” – that opportunity is swiftly squandered on a script so terrible that Ed Wood himself could have written it. Quick sample: “He’s more mosquito than man now.” The “he” in this equation is an escaped convict who gets bitten by radioactive, chemically-mutated mosquitoes, which of course makes him mutate into, well, a mansquito. Sadly for our hero cop protagonist, a similar fate befalls his scientist girlfriend, though her slower rate of transformation prevents her from becoming a full-blown chicksquito before the dramatic bug-zapper conclusion to the tale. At least they managed to avoid a few obvious bug jokes, so no warding off the monster using giant cans of Off or swatting him with a giant swatter. See if desperate

Review – Locusts: The 8th Plague

Here we have one of these wonderful scripts in which almost every plot twist, every character motivation, is almost completely implausible. My personal favorite was the part where the killer, carnivorous locusts pass up the hero and the love interest because they eat only organic food. Heck, this trend starts with the title itself. The whole flesh-eating bugs thing is ostensibly a reference to a passage from the Book of Revelation, but of course the “8th plague” thing would be an Exodus … wait a minute. Am I really arguing theology with a stupid bug movie from the Sci Fi Channel? All that really needs to be said here is that if you want a stupid bug movie then you’re in the right place. See if desperate

Review – 12 Years a Slave

This is even more depressing than the title implies, which is saying something. Nobody other than traitor-rag-waving dumbasses thinks slavery was a good thing. But this is a couple of hours of unrelenting misery. If you feel the need to get really pissed off about social injustice, this should get your motor running. Mildly amusing

Review – Mean Streets

I expect that in 1973 this was some cutting edge stuff. It’s nearly two hours of almost completely plot-free macho posturing. Clearly the theme of the evening is gritty urban realism, but if Little Italy is really like this all the time, they should build a wall around it so it can’t make the rest of New York City any worse than it already is. Harvey Keitel turns in a solid performance as our hapless hero Charlie, a man caught between his basic inclination to be a decent human being with some buddies and a girlfriend and his apparent duty to adhere to the moral code of the testosterone-driven, micro-fascist, small-time mob underworld. More significantly, Robert De Niro here teams up with Martin Scorsese for the first time. He plays Johnny Boy, Charlie’s goofy-yet-vicious friend, a ne’er-do-well intent on going down and taking everyone else with him. Scorsese’s directing is simultaneously innovative and irritating, particularly his excessive use of lengthy, hand-held tracking shots. Overall this isn’t a terrible production, but just a few years later a lot of the cast and crew would re-unite for a much better movie: Taxi Driver. Mildly amusing

Review – Ice Spiders

Movies like this have one thing solidly going for them: you get exactly what the title promises you. How often can you say that about anything in 21st century society? We live in a world where sugary candy is labeled as “fat free,” as if that makes it good for you. We’re bombarded with no end of too-good-to-be-true offers with treacherous fine print. How refreshing it is, then, to be able to come home at the end of the day, sit back, relax, and watch a movie called Ice Spiders that turns out to be nothing but a ski lodge being attacked by giant spiders. The straightforward nature of the proposition almost made me sorry when they broke down and tried to concoct some kind of excuse for the arachnids’ gargantuan size and unusual tolerance for the cold (something about a military lab creating them for strategic spider purposes). The effects are horrible in an entertaining sort of way, as are the writing and the acting. Edifying, Oscar-winning cinema this ain’t, but I’ve made more useless use of 90-minute stretches of my life. Mildly amusing

Review – 1969

This cliché-ridden stinker plays like a version of small town America in the late 1960s written by an especially talentless high school student. Robert Downey Jr. and Kiefer Southerland star as draft-avoiding college buddies making their ways through just about every imaginable trite situation the “hippie days” could supply. We get the uptight parents, the older brother in the Marines, the younger sister caught up in the idealism of the age. We get the freaky-painted van, the war protest, the bad acid trip, and so on and so forth. What we don’t get are any original characters, situations, or even a good line of dialogue (though we do get some bad enough to merit Golden Turkey awards). See if desperate

Review – Beneath the Planet of the Apes

So this is what the apes have been sweeping under the planet all these years. Okay, seriously, this is the second best of the Apes movies (Conquest is still #1 in my book). It’s got a lot going for it. Human-hating gorillas. A spooky Forbidden Zone guarded by eerie optical illusions. The post-apocalyptic ruins of New York City inhabited by creepy psychic mutants who worship an A-bomb. Still more heavy-handed, simple-minded, 70s-era social allegory. A whopping disaster ending. Heck, it’s even got the best part of the first one (the end) tacked onto the beginning. Of course seeing the first one will help a lot if you’re trying to figure out what’s going on this time around. Otherwise, however, for my money the second time is more of a charm. Mildly amusing

Review – The Beast Must Die

This has got to be the cutest canine of evil since Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. Other than the attempt to pass this fluffy pet shop specimen off as a vicious werewolf, this actually isn’t too bad for a 70s-era horror movie. It even features some innovative touches. One is the “werewolf break,” a pause toward the end of the production to give the audience the chance to draw its final conclusions about which character is the shape-shifting beast. It’s a salient plot point, as the whole story is structured around an eccentric millionaire’s scheme to drag a handful of people who may be werewolves off to his country estate and wait around to hunt whichever of them turns furry under the full moon. Further innovation: the Great White Hunter is played by a black actor. Overall this isn’t a brilliant comment on the human condition or anything like that, but for a high concept horror flick this isn’t bad. Mildly amusing

Review – Bobby

Wow, has it ever been my week for disappointing movies. First Night at the Museum and now this. The thought here must have been “ensemble piece,” but instead it comes across as a gaggle of Hollywood types (particularly “writer” / director Emilio Estevez) treating the hours before Robert Kennedy’s assassination as their own personal vanity project. As a result, what could have been a poignant story of the small lives affected by big events instead becomes a festival of the worst of the “look at me” school of acting. Combine that with a stiff – and in some spots downright stupid – script and some bad editing decisions, and this turns into a poor entry in the long series of movies made about the lives and times of the Kennedys. Mildly amusing

Review – The Picture of Dorian Gray

This is a worthy production of Oscar Wilde’s thought-provoking tale about the consequences of evil, though naturally it deviates from the novel here and there. It’s an interesting thing to watch. For starters, close-ups of the painting itself suddenly switch from black and white to color, a cheap trick but one that works. But more than that, there seem to be big chunks missing from the story. I don’t know much about the history of the production, but I wonder if maybe the Hays Office didn’t have something to do with the vague treatment and/or total extraction of Gray’s more “perverted” conduct. In particular, the sideways references to homosexuality are entertaining for their strangeness alone. Though it drags a bit in parts and tends to be a bit over-sentimental, it nonetheless holds up as a solid piece of writing transformed into a worthwhile piece of cinema. Worth seeing

Review – The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

Or “The Fall of the House of Usher” with a lot of uninteresting twists and turns built in. Seriously, neither the pit nor the pendulum actually puts in an appearance until the last 15 minutes or so. The rest of the story is almost pure soap opera. For a Vincent Price movie ostensibly based on a Poe story (and with a script by Richard Matheson to boot), this should have been a much better movie. Of course even a bad Price Poe is likely to be better than many other horror vehicles before or since. This just isn’t anywhere near as good as I’d hoped. Mildly amusing

Review – Clive Barker's The Plague

Like many of its brethren in the “zombie apocalypse” subgenre, this entry is a lot more wind-up than pitch. The concept is intriguing: every child on earth under the age of nine suddenly goes into a coma. Then ten years later they all emerge from their trances in the mood to murder everyone in their paths. From there, however, it swiftly evolves into a standard “rag-tag band of survivors struggles to evade imminent death while trying to figure out what’s happened and what to do about it.” Also, although I’m normally against the pretentious practice of bylining movies, I’m glad they stuck Barker’s name into the title of this one. I’m a big Barker fan from all the way back around the original Hellraiser, and I might not have given this outing a second glance if not for the tie to the author. And that would have been a shame, because it’s got some of his characteristic touches in addition to the usual zombie shtick. Mildly amusing

Review – Nine Lives

Nine 20-somethings trapped in an isolated mansion. An evil spirit moving among them, possessing them and making them murder one another. And once again, it might have been easier to care about any of this if the characters had been more interesting, or even if I’d been able to tell them apart. Some are men. Some are women. One is Paris Hilton. Otherwise they were completely interchangeable. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Son of Dracula

I’m not sure what insults the audience’s intelligence more: the decision to “mask” the villain’s identity early in the movie by having him call himself “Count Alucard” or the multiple “expositions” of the truth in the most ham-handed manners possible. Lon Chaney Jr. brings his usual aplomb to this genuinely dreadful production. Honestly, this thing plays like a bad soap opera that just happens to have a bunch of vampire nonsense grafted onto it. See if desperate

Review – Son of Frankenstein

Though not a revolutionary masterpiece like the Whale Frankensteins, this is an interesting picture nonetheless. Basil Rathbone stars as the latest member of the Frankenstein clan to revive the monster (once again played by Boris Karloff), this time at the behest of his father’s sidekick, Igor (Bela Lugosi). This time there’s no ambiguity in the monster’s character. Gone is the misunderstood, childlike creature whose greatest fault is a bad temper. Now he’s just the brutal henchman for the scheming hunchback. This makes him a little more menacing but a lot less interesting. Beyond that the visuals (particularly the set work) and an occasional bit of dark humor are the principal distinguishing characteristics of this episode. Mildly amusing

Review – Night at the Museum

As of this writing it’s only June, but this is still an odds-on favorite for “disappointment of the year.” The concept – that the displays in a natural history museum come to life at night – had immense potential. And the picture has enough of a budget to be able to pull off the visuals required (indeed, some of the effects here are quite good). But then someone somewhere decided to turn the whole show over to the comic “genius” of Ben Stiller. As a result, almost every gag in the whole production falls flat, the jokes taking two or three times longer than necessary, their over-elongation strangling them. The parts that work do so quite well. They’re just simply too few and too far between. Mildly amusing

Review – The Legacy

Now that I look back on it, I think I actually read the source novel for this stinker. In fact, I think I wrote a book report about it in high school. Watching this movie again all these years later, I can only conclude that I was quite an idiot when I was a teenager. Or if not a complete moron, then at least a lot more easily amused than I am now. What we’ve got here is the oh-so-70s story of a woman (Katherine Ross) and her boyfriend (Sam Elliot) surreptitiously summoned to the bedside of a wealthy, dying Englishman. There they meet a quintet of rich weirdoes (including Charles “The Criminologist” Gray and Roger “That Guy from The Who” Daltrey) who inform our heroine that she is the sixth heir to the old guy’s estate, a legacy that apparently includes supernatural powers as well as great wealth. The trick is that only one of them can actually take title, so most of the rest of the movie is devoted to the heirs croaking over in strange circumstances. Some of the twists and turns (such as the nurse / werecat) were vaguely entertaining, but overall the story’s pretty dull. Mildly amusing

Review – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Part of me desperately wants to like this movie. There should be something comforting in the notion of a naïve, cornball rube triumphing over graft and corruption based solely on the strength of his moral convictions. But in the world we live in, the land beyond Watergate, the realm of the Military-Industrial Complex, it’s just impossible to believe in stuff like this. Though some regard this production as a finest-moment point for both Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, I’d steer that honor toward It’s a Wonderful Life. Christmas is a suitable setting for a tale of honesty and goodness triumphing over wickedness. Washington, on the other hand … Mildly amusing

Review – My Favorite Year

For a goofy, Neil-Simon-esque comedy directed by Richard Benjamin, this actually isn’t all that bad. Peter O’Toole is the main draw here; he plays a boozy, has-been actor (big stretch) who somehow manages to be just as charming and perfect on every occasion as the swashbuckling heroes he used to play. Normally this sort of mawkish sentimentality would be a big turn-off for me, but for some odd reason here it seems to work. I was particularly fond of the scene in which our hero, overcome with alcohol and stage fright, yells “I’m not an actor! I’m a movie star!” Though obviously not an enduring classic of the cinema arts, this is an entertaining bit of fluff that should fill the bill nicely if you’re in the mood for something entertaining and fluffy. Mildly amusing

Review – The Andromeda Strain (1971)

This movie is fun for a few reasons. First, it’s one of the original “deadly plague threatens to wipe out humanity” movies, made back in the day when creator Michael Crichton didn’t suck quite so bad. And like another Crichton creation, The Terminal Man, it’s a good example of what the future looked like back before the advent of more realistic sci fi in the late 70s. It’s also nice to return to the golden days of yesteryear, when plot and character were as important as special effects even in a sci fi movie. Though this is a distinctly dated movie, it still packs the ability to entertain. Mildly amusing

Review – The Killing

After sitting through the first two Ocean’s movies, I was left profoundly curious about what a robbery caper movie might be like if it was something besides a cheap excuse for a parade of celebrities. This early Stanley Kubrick effort scratches that itch nicely. To be sure, it has some flaws. The voice-over is stiff and distracting, and the plot has a hole or two. On the other hand, the characters have a little dimension to them (indeed, they have a lot of dimension when compared to typical crime drama fare). The storytelling makes innovative use of time frame, moving back and forth in order to slowly spin the tale without being so jarring that the technique becomes intrusive. And best of all, the caper itself is intriguing. Maybe someday they’ll do a celebrity vehicle that has this kind of attention to the non-celebrity elements. I’m not holding my breath, but it would be nice. Worth seeing

Review – Aftermath: The Remnants of War

After watching a long string of Michael-Moore-esque documentaries, it was a genuine pleasure to watch some simple, straightforward, gimmick-free non-fiction film-making. No ambush interviews or other stupid stunts. Just telling the story of some of the awful, tragic by-products of war. What a relief. And here the story really does tell itself. We’re taken to former battlefields in France, Russia, Vietnam and Bosnia to witness the aftereffects of 20th-century conflict. We see bomb, shell and mine removal in progress (in some cases nearly a century after the rounds were originally fired). We meet children crippled by their parents’ exposure to the dioxin in Agent Orange and whole populations mentally scarred by the ravages of armed conflict. This would make a great double feature with any of the hundreds of Top Gun-style movies that make war look like a big video game with no consequences. Mildly amusing

Review – Black Rain

Combine crime drama, Ridley Scott, the 80s and Japan, and you get pretty much exactly what you’d expect. The visuals are slickly-produced, but the plot and characters fall a little short (particularly the lead role played by the perpetually-hammy Michael Douglas). The exception here is the villain, who is interesting in a manic sort of way. Also, some of the violence is well choreographed. I particularly liked the motorcycle/sword combo (about which I can say no more without ruining part of the story) and the finger-chopping scene. Otherwise this is a pretty picture but not much else. Mildly amusing

Review – Borat

This one has some moments, but they’re few and far between. The scripted parts are actually fairly funny. For example, I liked the stuff set in Kazakhstan. I liked some of the interactions between our hero and his sidekick. And I loved Oksana the Bear (especially when they drove her around in an ice cream truck and scared a bunch of kids). Further, I thought that here and there the film-makers made some good points about prejudice (particularly anti-Semitism) in American society. However, most of the movie seems to be made up of Cohen and cohort doing the Borat routine around oblivious – sometimes even unwilling – participants. Even when this works it seldom provokes more than a chuckle. And frequently it fails. There’s nothing wrong with an improv actor coming up a bit short sometimes. It happens to the best of them. But the stale segments when Cohen flounders for something to keep a conversation going … that sort of thing doesn’t go into the final cut. Mildly amusing