Review – Big Bad Wolf

“Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll rip your guts out!” Actual line from the movie. No kidding. That should give you some idea of what you’re in for. This was billed as a horror comedy, which normally I’d avoid. But I’m a werewolf buff, so I thought I’d give it a chance. Frankly, a horror comedy would have been a relief compared to what this turned out to be. About the funniest thing in the whole movie was a brief appearance by David “American Werewolf in London” Naughton. I’m sure the quip-spitting lycanthrope is supposed to be entertaining, but it made me wish they’d stuck with the tried-and-true werewolf that – at least in monster form – lacks the power of speech. The cast appears to be a mix of actors from other horror movies (including Kimberly J. Brown, who has grown up a bit since Rose Red) and refugees from soft-core porn videos. While this was never going to be a three-star movie, it might have saved at least a point by not featuring a werewolf that appears to use four or five different suits depending on the camera angle. Or at least they could have avoided the graphic werewolf / sorority girl rape scene. See if desperate

Review – Zodiac

Like the Zodiac killings themselves, this movie starts with a lot going on and then tapers off to nothing. The re-creations of a couple of the murders are chilling. But once the crimes stop, so does the story. The rest is an endless parade of uninteresting fits and starts as the cops and a cartoonist from the San Francisco Chronicle (Jake Gyllenhaal) try obsessively to find the killer. The technical quality of the production is good, and the acting is fine. It’s just not all that interesting to watch detailed debates about handwriting analysis. I think this is the kind of movie you get when the director and/or the writers have been pondering the Zodiac mystery so long that they’ve lost all perspective about just how dull the stacks of evidence can be, particularly for a string of murders that went officially unsolved. Mildly amusing

Review – The Messengers

Another pair of brothers join the growing pantheon of directors who have mastered the jump scare but have no skill at all with any other element of the film-making art. As a result, there are some solidly spooky spots here and there, but they’re robbed of most of their impact by irrelevance to the plot, repetitive boredom, poor pacing, or a combination of all three. And honestly, there’s only so many times you can pull the “is it real or is it just imagination?” gag on the audience before interest starts to wane. I could have put up with all that – I’m getting used to it by now – if not for the prosaic heart of the mystery behind the ghosts in this haunted farmhouse. I won’t ruin the ending for those of you who want to see it, but the true nature of the terrible apparitions turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. Oh, and once again a Netflix description leaves me wondering if the paragraph’s author ever saw the movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Gold Diggers of 1937

Even by gold digger standards, this one’s not all that good. Dick Powell sells insurance in between the sparse musical numbers, and about half of the song and dance bits are bad enough to leave one longing to watch some more insurance selling. Particularly noteworthy is the show stopper, a complex number about love and war featuring giant rocking chairs, a huge bomb, and a variety of sex-and-violence strangeness. Some of these movies are weird in an entertaining way, but this one’s mostly just weird. See if desperate

Review – Pterodactyl

Yep, those are pterodactyls. They’ve been released by an earthquake and … oh really, does the plot matter? We’ve got a professor named Lovecraft and a grad student named Heinlein. We’ve got the Sci Fi Channel extra-special effects, as usual done on an Xbox or equivalent thereof. We’ve got Coolio, who turns out to be as good an actor as he is a musician. Expecting a plot beyond wandering-in-the-woods-and-occasionally-fending-off-flying-dinosaur-attacks would clearly be asking for something as useful as screen doors on a submarine. See if desperate

Review – All Souls Day

Apparently the respectful holiday of celebrating the dead is honored a bit differently in this small Mexican town. Once a year the zombies left over from a 19th-century tragedy come out and eat whatever witless American 20-somethings happen to be standing around. So woe unto the four protagonists of this picture. The set-up has some mildly innovative stuff in it, but once the ball starts rolling (30 to 40 minutes in) it ends up as little more than another cheap Night of the Living Dead rip-off. Some bush-league gore does a little to set off the brainless script. Mildly amusing

Review – Raptor Island

I don’t think they’re even trying anymore. This starts out as some mish-mash about a Navy SEAL team pursuing terrorists to an island in the South China Sea (where apparently the weather is like autumn in Romania). Then a bunch of velociraptors show up and start eating people, a turn of events that seems to surprise nobody. Seriously, the whole cast is like, “oh, velociraptors.” Like their jobs as commandos or terrorists constantly pit them against giant carnivorous lizards that have been extinct for millions of years. Better yet are the special effects. In other reviews I’ve griped about CG that turns out to be no better than the average Xbox offering, but here it isn’t even that good. The raptors stand stiffly next to their victims and continue to munch oblivious to how many times they’re getting shot. Every once in awhile one will just sort of tip over and die. The result is a lot like the brain-rotting experience of sitting around and watching somebody else play a bad video game. Somebody who isn’t especially good at the game, either, but ends up winning because the game’s AI has the brains of a Frisbee and the monsters just stand there like clay pigeons and take shots until they flop over. See if desperate

Review – The Incredible Shrinking Man

This could easily have been yet another cheap radiation-scare horror flick from the 1950s. However, thanks in no small part to Richard Matheson (source novel and screenplay) this turns out to be a multi-layered drama. On the surface this is a straightforward story about a man who – thanks to a blend of radiation and insecticide – starts to shrink. But as he gets smaller, he becomes more and more neurotic about his role in the world. The result is both a standard period sci fi picture and a commentary about the diminishing masculinity of the middle class salary man. To be sure, the pacing is off. Most of the plot is packed into the first half, with the final 40 minutes or so occupied by an extended battle between our tiny protagonist and a spider. But thanks to a decent script and some fun special effects this turns out to be a bit above the usual crop from the period. Mildly amusing

Review – Deep Freeze

Imagine The Thing remade with just about everything good removed. A research station in Antarctica is attacked from within by a monster that’s been frozen in the ice for millennia. Those are the good leftovers from the Carpenter production. The rest of it is strictly Sci Fi Channel dreadful. The monsters turn out to be overgrown trilobites (sort of), way cuter than the grad students they’re chewing up. The research base appears to be an empty factory of the sort often used for location shoots in movies like this, which here raises questions about how – not to mention why – an oil drilling company would build such an extensive concrete and metal structure on a mess of ice and/or unstable rock. Overall this is just another one of these. Mildly amusing

Review – The Ghost of Frankenstein

This episode picks up where Son of Frankenstein left off. And it does so right away. In less than five minutes the torch-wielding villagers are already storming Castle Frankenstein to blow it up and do away with the (presumably dead) monster and his hunchback sidekick. Of course blowing up the place merely frees the creature from his sulfur pit tomb, and off he goes in search of another Frankenstein. Fortunately there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of them, with Cedric Hardwicke (Seti in The Ten Commandments) stepping in as the original mad scientist’s other son. Lon Chaney Jr. steps into the creature’s big, clunky boots; he should have spent more of his career playing roles that don’t have any lines. By the time the final reel plays out, the plot has gone through a number of twists and turns, some interesting and some less so. Mildly amusing

Review – The Zombies of Mora Tau

Here’s proof that the practice of squandering a cool concept on terrible film-making isn’t a new phenomenon. The idea here is that a wrecked ship contains a fortune in diamonds. The catch is that the wreck is guarded by amphibious zombies who don’t react kindly to attempts to remove the treasure. Something could have been done with the set-up, but not this. The story is dullness itself, running something like “argue about the diamonds and oh no a zombie attack then argue some more and oh no another zombie attack and so on and so on.” And naturally it has logic gaps big enough to drive a train through. Perhaps if the monsters themselves had been something scarier than extras sprayed with a hose, that might have helped. Sadly, this one has nothing going for it but its premise. See if desperate

Review – Full Metal Jacket

This is one of my all-time favorite Kubrick movies, and one of my favorite war movies as well. Actually, this is arguably two separate movies with a couple of characters in common. The first section takes us through the harrowing experience of Paris Island Marine Corps boot camp. From there it’s off to Vietnam for an unflinching look at G.I. life in the wake of the Tet Offensive. I particularly enjoyed the quirkiness of the characters; these guys act like real human beings with idiosyncrasies, flaws, in short: personalities. Thus the movie presents war as a human enterprise rather than some mythic, glorious pageant. Just about my only gripe is that the picture contains a number of sloppy continuity errors. Still, that’s a small price to pay for Kubrick’s masterful handling of character, plot and atmosphere. Buy the disc

Review – Ghost Rider

This movie bets a lot on the “whoa, it’s a motorcycle-ridin’ dude with a flaming skull head” factor. And I’d be the first to admit that I spent enough of my pre-teen years filling notebooks with drawings of dudes with flaming skull heads to derive some entertainment from seeing my youthful visions echoed on the big screen. But you can get the flaming skull head dude just by watching the previews. The rest of the movie is a blend of action, horror and comedy so uneven that the elements end up canceling each other out. For example, I lost count of the number of times they’d get something potentially eerie going and then wreck the mood by tossing in a goofy, falling-flat joke. The cast also leaves something to be desired. Wes Bentley looks like a young investment banker dressed up as a goth demon on Halloween. Sam Eliot and Peter Fonda do workmanlike jobs in their supporting roles. But Nicolas Cage … seriously buddy, your Elvis impression is not a substitute for acting. Everybody but you learned that years ago in Wild at Heart. The visuals were the clear highlight, but even so they went no farther than the comic-to-movie conversion required. The combination of demons and motorcycles has some aesthetic potential, but the art direction here is more ESPN than Outlaw Biker. Overall this is a good opportunity largely squandered. See if desperate

Review – Repo Man

I may not be in the best position to judge this picture, because I first saw it when I was at just the right age to really love it. But all these years later I still think it’s great. And I still use lines from it from time to time when the occasion suits. Though technically it’s a bit rough, the low-budget feel of the production is in perfect keeping with the plot, the story of a punk (back in the 80s when that still meant something) who ends up working as a repo man. But no synopsis could ever do justice to the small touches that run throughout. Honestly, this is one of the best-written movies I’ve ever seen. I’m fond of my metal box special edition, which includes one of the best soundtrack albums ever put together. However, just the movie itself is still worth having. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and each time I see something I didn’t notice before. That sort of movie is the kind of thing that goes in a permanent collection. Buy the disc

Review – Parasite (2003)

I wonder if Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon had any idea in 1979 that more than two decades later folks would still be making cheap knock-offs of Alien. This time around it’s set on an oil rig (or at least an abandoned factory that subs for an oil rig). The crew is besieged by eco-terrorists just as someone mixes the wrong things and produces a batch of angry, flesh-eating worm-snake-things. Nothing new here at all. See if desperate

Review – Less Than Zero

No, boys and girls, the 80s weren’t really like this. All we have here is a dumb fantasy cooked up by Bret Easton Ellis, a sad tale that aspires to be an indictment of the greed and carelessness of a generation but never manages to rise above the level of cheap soap opera. If you want some idea of how rich people in the 80s saw themselves, this might be worth a look. Otherwise the high point is The Bangles covering “A Hazy Shade of Winter” on the soundtrack (oh, and some off-the-rack tunes as well). See if desperate

Review – Breach

I would not have guessed that the biggest espionage case in American history would be so gosh-awful boring. Here we get the story of FBI administrator Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) as seen through the eyes of a young clerk (Ryan Phillipe) placed in his office to spy on him. The result is a strangely superficial examination of one of the most serious cases of treason our country has ever faced. We get the standard spy thriller twists and turns. We get a lengthy portrait of our villain as a conservative anti-Communist, fanatical Catholic and good family man. We’re also given a portrait of the same man as an arch-traitor, paranoid nut and sexual deviant. What we never get – and what this movie desperately needed to give us – is any idea how one man could embody two such radically different lives. Absent any meaningful insight, this is nothing but a run-of-the-mill espionage picture, and a laconically-paced one at that. Mildly amusing

Review – Frankenstein 1970

Several times I’d noticed this picture on my Tivo box’s list of upcoming horror movies, but somehow I just never seemed to be in the mood for a production with that grainy color and loud clothing and all the other trappings of low budget film-making from the 70s. So when the mood finally did strike me and I gave this one a try, it came as quite a surprise to find that it’s actually a black-and-white thriller from the 1950s, the title implying the monster’s presence in a future that turns out to be, well, a lot more like the decade when it was shot than the decade when it supposedly took place. Boris Karloff plays the mad scientist, and sadly this is from the point in his career when he’d deteriorated enough to make his performances hard to watch. The monster is also no great shakes. It spends almost the entire production wrapped in a thick coating of bandages, almost making this more of a mummy movie than a Frankenstein picture. I suppose they had to keep his head covered in order to set up the “shocking” ending, but the resulting departure from sub-genre conventions turns out to be an uneven trade. Mildly amusing

Review – Shooter

This is one of those Hollywood productions that leave me wondering about the development process. Did this begin life as a clever script that got dumbed down into a run-of-the-mill action movie, or did it start as a standard, stupid thriller and end up with a few good bits stirred in at some point in the rewrite just to make it a bit more interesting? I suspect the former. In any event, the conspiracy stuff is a lot of fun. In particular, I was actually impressed by the scene with the ballistics expert in Tennessee. Unfortunately, such gems are few and far between. For the most part this is a brain-dead intrigue vehicle. Mark Wahlberg plays an expert sniper who gets framed for an assassination. His attempts to evade capture as he works to clear his name are cookie cutter action movie stuff. The occasional clever bits got my hopes up, leaving me wanting the plot to advance via interesting twists and turns rather than more brutish, empty-headed shooting and explosions. For the most part those hopes were dashed, especially by the ending. Actually, the movie had three points at which it could easily have ended, and the final one left me with a profound sense of, “if that’s how you were going to wrap it up, you could have done it 20 minutes ago.” I suppose I’ve seen worse, but this could have been a lot better than it was. Mildly amusing

Review – Beneath Still Waters

For an odd little Spanish production (with scenes shot in English, at least for the U.S. version) this isn’t half bad. The premise has promise: 40 years ago a village became so overrun with evil that the locals built a dam and flooded the whole valley, submerging the town in the middle of a lake. Unfortunately the leader of the cult that caused the problem to begin with managed to escape. And four decades later he’s back for revenge. This has a few slow spots, but it also has a few solid chills that make it worthwhile. Mildly amusing

Review – The Tomb

After years of watching Stuart Gordon movies, I’ve developed the ability to forgive a little creative cinematic license taken with H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories. This, however, flatly has nothing to do with “The Tomb” or anything else Lovecraft ever wrote. Instead, by six minutes into the picture it’s more than apparent that what we’re getting here is a bargain basement Saw knock-off. Putting Lovecraft’s name on the box is an act of fraud not excused in the slightest by tossing the author’s name in here and there. To the rich uncle who keeps giving Ulli Lommel money to make movies: please for the love of humanity stop. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Hannibal Rising

I gave up on reading Thomas Harris after Hannibal, so I don’t know if this latest Lecter episode is faithful to the novel version. I assume it is, as Harris wrote the screenplay. That just makes me double glad I skipped the book. It was bad enough wasting two hours on this dreadful story, let alone the time it would have taken to read it. So here we have the birth of the monster, the horrible childhood trauma that turned an innocent little boy into Hannibal the Cannibal. For the most part this plays out as a revenge flick, and you can imagine that if this guy tortures people just for fun then he’s going to be all extra hard on the war criminals who killed and ate his sister. However, what the killings should have been just made what they turned out to be even more dull. Evil geniuses are supposed to be imaginative. This one’s mostly just brutish. See if desperate

Review – Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep

Okay, just because you put a giant squid in a movie doesn’t make it the Kraken. This is especially true if the script goes from beginning to end without using the word “Kraken” once, instead identifying the monster as Scylla, and even then just to tie its appearance to a weird plot twist that pits the squid against anyone who tries to remove a valuable opal from the briny deep. The story is a flimsy combo of a male photographer out for some payback against the squid that ate his parents and a female scientist trying to save her academic reputation by finding the legendary squid gem. The script is dumb and the effects are cheap. Still, at least it was a sea monster. I’ve a weakness for sea monsters, even bad ones. Mildly amusing

Review – Blood and Chocolate

These werewolves are almost boring enough to be vampires. That’s no big surprise, given that this was produced by the same folks that created Underworld. The art-direction-intensive, jump-cutty goth crap that worked okay for bloodsuckers and then only just sorta worked for the witches in The Covenant works not at all for werewolves. This production also falls into the same trap that snagged The Wolfen many years ago: actual wolves – especially if they aren’t special-effected up in some way – are way too cute to make menacing monsters. The case isn’t helped any by the use of the lamest transformation sequences of all time. I’ve griped in the past about the extended man-into-beast effects parades that stop stories dead, but even that would have been better than the twinkle-intensive soft fade leap that does the trick here. Are these savage, flesh-tearing beasts or extras from Barbie Fairytopia? Mildly amusing

Review – The Seventh Victim

It has a satanic cult in it, so maybe it’s a horror movie. Certainly the high-contrast, shadowy cinematography is more than a little evocative of The Cat People. It features homicides and an extended search for a missing woman, so maybe it’s a murder mystery. Goodness knows there are nearly as many twisting, turning non-sequiturs in the plot as there were in The Big Sleep. Judging by the oddly abrupt conclusion, it might even be a morality play of some kind. One thing’s for certain, however. It’s weird. Very, very weird. Mildly amusing

Review – The Black Sleep

This movie has a few things going for it. It’s got a stellar horror cast, including Basil Rathbone, John Caradine, Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney Jr. (though the last three don’t have a single line between them). It has an intriguing premise: a mad scientist performs personality-destroying surgery on unwilling victims in order to figure out how the brain works. It even has a cool title, a reference to the death-simulating drug the good doctor uses to sedate his patients. If only the pace hadn’t been quite so laconic; I was nearly in a black sleep myself by the end of it. Mildly amusing

Review – Hannah and Her Sisters

If only all these neurotic nincompoops didn’t keep getting in the way of the scenery! This movie has some of the most impressive location work I’ve ever seen. The backdrops give a wonderful flavor of New York City, or at least the upper class white Manhattan portion thereof. Beyond that, however, this isn’t exactly Woody Allen’s finest moment. The story is 10% Annie Hall and 90% “Days of Our Lives.” The plot centers around three sisters (Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest) and their various husbands, ex-husbands, lovers, and so on. The result is a pretty picture of nothing more important than melodrama spawned by the petty dissatisfactions of well-to-do urbanites. Mildly amusing

Review – Awakening the Beast

Imagine Reefer Madness redone (with LSD as the substance of choice) by Kenneth Anger. Now imagine that rather than Anger it’s his even-weirder Brazilian equivalent. If you imagine that you like bizarre black and white (for the most part) experimental movies with a lot of gratuitous nudity and drug use, then I imagine you’ll get a kick out of this. See if desperate

Review – Revenge of the Creature

Well, they had the left-over suit from The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Why not give it another try? This sequel starts with our “heroes” capturing the creature by dynamiting the river where he lives (perhaps later they can jacklight Bigfoot). Once he’s captured, it’s off to a theme park in Florida, where the Gill Man becomes a big attraction. But those pesky scientists just can’t stop messing with him, performing cruel operant conditioning nonsense on him until it drives him to break his chains and run amuck in the park before escaping into the sea. Rather than just swim the hell away from the place, however, the creature sticks around to see if he can get a shot at running away with the love interest. Overall this is a typical first sequel, not as good as the original but better than number three (except for the underwater cinematography, which was actually better in both of the other two). Mildly amusing

Review – Blessed

Rosemary’s Baby gets a 21st-century reheat in a production suited primarily for the Lifetime Movie Network. Heather Graham stars as a woman who seeks help from an upstate fertility clinic. Unfortunately for her and her charming husband, the place they pick has a bit of a side-line going: cloning embryos from a blood sample left behind by Lucifer and planting them in unsuspecting women in order to bring about the apocalypse. Through various dull twists and turns they manage to stretch this meager thread out to an hour and a half. The only point of interest here is that the audience ends up in the awkward position of hoping everything works out okay for Graham and her unborn twins despite the fact that we know the babies are evil. Mildly amusing

Review – Hard Core Logo

This is like This Is Spinal Tap only it’s about punk rather than hair metal. Oh, and it isn’t funny. Emphasis on the latter. As near as I can tell, this is intended to be a dark, mean-spirited send-up of a music genre that’s already a dark, mean-spirited send-up. Thus the pointlessness of the production should have been self-evident from the outset. But they made it anyway. It comes as no surprise that the most entertaining moment in the whole movie is a ten-second cameo by the late, great Joey Ramone briefly playing along with the gag. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Insecticidal

The computer-animated giant bugs are kinda cute – especially the spastic praying mantis – which of course contributes nothing to a production like this except a sense of sorrow and loss when they eventually succumb to assault from those arch-enemies of giant bugs everywhere: witless sorority girls. Actually, here the word “witless” doesn’t do the cast justice. I’d assume the Sci Fi Channel was treating us to a chopped-up bit of softcore, but these actors are too talentless even for pornography. In their defense, however, it isn’t like the script gave them much to work with. See if desperate

Review – Tidal Wave: No Escape

No, this can be escaped. Just turn it off. Or better yet, never turn it on to begin with. Corbin Bernsen stars in this low-budget flick about a scientist who uncovers a plot to use torpedoes with nuclear warheads to create tsunamis that destroy only small, targeted areas of coastline. But don’t worry too much about the plot. It runs a distant second to the awful script, featuring dialogue that’s bad even by the loose standards of productions like this. Indeed, even the set work may be more awful than the story line. In particular, the headquarters of the company (scientific consortium? government agency? it’s never made quite clear) trying to sort out the mystery looks for all the world like a museum gift shop. About the most amusement I got out of this was noting that it was produced way back in 1997, when large-scale terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and killer tsunamis were the stuff of bad sci fi movies. See if desperate

Review – Man-Thing

I ran really hot and cold on this picture. The monster was cool. The pro-environment message was nice (even the exploitative Native American aspects of the moral weren’t too hard to choke down). On the other hand, the cardboard characters, stiff dialogue and meandering plot don’t do much to help make this a more worthwhile production. If only this had been more monster and less crap-other-than-the-monster, it would have been a better movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Broadway Melody of 1936

This musical romp appears to have been the original source for a big chunk of the songs that would later appear in Singin’ in the Rain. Thank goodness the producers of the later musical didn’t decide to use the “Sing before Breakfast” number – or much of anything else performed here by Buddy Ebsen. There’s some talent in this picture, particularly Jack Benny in one of the lead roles. Some of the musical numbers are cleverly staged. However, for the most part this is a goofy farce that alternates between charming and grating. I mean really, was the guy who can do dozens of different kinds of snores considered high comedy even back in the comparatively less sophisticated days of the 1930s? Mildly amusing

Review – Tombstone

I’ve never quite acquired the knack for westerns, so I have to admit that I can’t say for sure whether a genre fan would like this one or not. To my taste, this was a mediocre action movie and not much more. Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer star as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, playing their roles in a distinctly non-legendary mode. This is particularly true of Kilmer’s tubercular pallor, sweating and coughing, not at all becoming for a great hero of the American West. Normally I value realism and attention to detail in movies, but in the fabled realm of the gunslinger, normal human traits such as vulnerability to illness are more of a distraction than an asset. Beyond that, however, this is a comfortable parade of the usual clichés. Mildly amusing

Review – Tales from the Hood

With Spike Lee in the executive producer slot, we at least get the chance that this isn’t going to be just another crappy exploitation movie. And in fact it isn’t. As the title indicates, this is a horror anthology piece with all the cheap thrills that implies. However, the stories also have a social conscience, focusing on important issues such as racism, police brutality and domestic violence. My personal favorite tale pits a David-Duke-esque racist politician (played by Corbin Bernsen) against the spirits of murdered enslaved people inhabiting animated dolls. However, all four tales and the bracket are all entertaining and at least a little thought-provoking. Worth seeing