Review – Hybrid

Some random guy gets into an industrial accident that leaves him blind. Ambitious scientists give him an eye transplant from a wolf. The Army is interested in him because now he can see in the dark. Some local American Indians are interested in him because somehow the spirit of the wolf has seeped out of the eyes and into his brain. That’s worth around 15 minutes of screen time, eh? Unfortunately, to stretch this out to 90 or so, the film-makers pack in tons of random footage of wolves wandering around in the woods, killing bison, wandering around some more, and so on and so on. The result is poorly assembled and almost completely effect free, one of the dullest werewolf movies ever made. See if desperate

Review – The Hills Have Eyes 2

By the time they’ve produced a sequel to a remake of a movie that wasn’t very good to begin with, you can bet you’re in for some watered-down crap. Indeed, the only “spice” in this production is a continuation of the can’t-wear-out-soon-enough torture porn trend. A squad of National Guard trainees is sent to the desert to rendezvous with some technicians, only to discover that the techies are the appetizers and they’re the main course for the remnants of the tribe of mutant cannibal hillbillies from the first one. The subsequent parade of implausible plot twists, cheap gore and brutal rape does nothing to justify its own existence. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Rock Monster

This movie would have been better if they’d gotten the B-52s to do the theme song. Oh, who am I kidding? Just about anything would have made this a better movie. What we get here is the deadly dull tale of a quartet (swiftly reduced to a duo) of American college kids vacationing in Eastern Europe. One of them removes an Arthurian sword from a local rock, unleashing a deadly pile of ambulatory CGI on a nearby village. The script is stupid beyond description, and the acting is of a quality better suited to background appearances in “Priceline Negotiator” ads starring William Shatner. In other words, this was typical Sci Fi Channel fare, and I should have enjoyed it immensely. Guess I just wasn’t in the mood. See if desperate

Review – It Came from Beneath the Sea

The brief moments when Ray Harryhausen steps in with his animated monster, this is a really good movie. It’s no end of fun to watch the giant octopus climb the Golden Gate Bridge and generally cause panic in San Francisco. The trouble, then, is the other 75 minutes of the production, which are purely terrible. The premise is that radiation from oceanic nuclear tests has mutated an octopus and sent the giant beast in search of a new food supply (its usual diet of fish apparently now easily avoiding it because radiation makes it easy to avoid). That’s got some potential, but it’s swiftly squandered on a ten cent romance between a rough-and-ready Navy captain and a brainy-yet-beautiful ichthyologist. Please. Just show me more octopus. See if desperate

Review – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

By this point in the series you have to have seen the previous episodes or this one isn’t going to make any sense at all. Given the popularity of the books and previous movies, it’s a safe bet that most audience members will qualify for admission. I’m also given to understand that reading the book before seeing the movie also helps, as Amy (who’s read it) was seeing things that I (who haven’t) was missing. That said, Potterheads will most likely get a kick out of this picture. It has all the usual characters and stock elements. The action and effects keep things moving where the plot runs thin. In other words, it does the job it’s designed to do. Mildly amusing

Review – The Burning

How sad it must be to have no greater ambition in life than to make a cheap knock-off of Friday the 13th. And yet here it is, the inevitable consequence of the surprise profitability of the first chapter in the Voorhees saga. In this effort the killer is a burn victim seeking revenge for ill-treatment at the hands of campers. Tom Savini did the special effects, bringing his usual stylish-yet-cheap aplomb to the various hackings and slashings. Otherwise the picture is notable only for the before-they-were-famous appearances of several actors, including Holly Hunter and Jason Alexander. Mildly amusing

Review – Aftermath: Population Zero

This is really more of a program on the National Geographic channel than an actual movie. Indeed, once the ads and duplicated footage are removed, it probably isn’t even feature length. But a few of its elements bear mention. For starters, the premise is fascinating: what if every human being on the face of the earth suddenly vanished? In the wake of this über-rapture, the world almost immediately begins to change. The production spends an inordinately large amount of time dwelling on the fate of our house pets. We even get treated to a bizarre battle between abandoned dogs and a free-roaming zoo elephant (as if such occurrences would be among the primary consequences of humanity’s departure). On the other hand, once the film-makers finish scratching the house pet itch (around midway through), the story gets interesting. In the end, it’s a comforting surprise to learn just how swiftly almost all trace of mankind – and the damage we’ve done to the planet – will vanish from the face of the earth. For my taste, I would have preferred more emphasis on the long-term stuff. The tale of what would happen to Paris, London and New York is interesting, but more cities and landmarks (and less wild dogs) would have made this a better production. Mildly amusing

Review – Last Holiday

One small casting problem brings this whole picture down like a house of cards in a stiff wind. With a different actor in the lead, this would at worst have been an inoffensive little situation comedy about a woman who decides to live life to the fullest after her doctor tells her she’s dying. But our heroine is played by Queen Latifah, which introduces a horrible element of racial politics to the mix. Her new fatalism primarily endows her with the power to sass back to white folks. Indeed, as she blows her IRA funds at a swanky European resort, just about every joke is predicated on how wacky it would be if black women were rich. Aside from Tim “Mail It In” Hutton, the cast does their best with what they’ve got to work with. Unfortunately, what they’ve got to work with is crap. See if desperate

Review – American Drug War

Once again a documentary crushes itself under its own trendy weight. At heart this is an important piece of film-making. Director Kevin Booth makes many crucial points about the United States’ so-called war on drugs, providing clear evidence that the whole mess – from the laws themselves to the way they’re enforced – is little but a reprehensible attempt to re-institute slavery in this country. But then he saddles the story with a stiff coating of post-Michael-Moore nonsense. In particular, an excessive quantity of screen time is devoted to Booth’s personal problems, particularly the damage drugs and the war thereon have done to him and his friends. Further, some of the interviews are put together in ways that make their subjects sound crazy, even when they aren’t. Overall I admire the guts it took to make this movie. I just wish a bit more brain had been added to the mix. Mildly amusing

Review – 20 Million Miles to Earth

One of the big drawbacks to watching Ray Harryhausen movies is that his animated characters often have way more personality than their human foes. Many times I’ve found myself wishing that a saber-tooth tiger would put the bite on Sinbad or the scary skeletons would get the better of Jason. And this production is seriously not an exception to the rule. It goes without saying that the Ymir – a bipedal reptile from Venus – is a lot cuter than its human adversaries. But to make matters worse, the script repeatedly reminds us that the creature would be docile and harmless if only people would leave it alone. Needless to say, they don’t. The result is a smattering of well-crafted effects saddled with a bad script, worse acting and a general bummer of a plot. Mildly amusing

Review – Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe

Everyone’s favorite giant atomic turtle gets dragged out and dusted off for a 21st century tour of duty. The bad guys this time around are some kind of flying reptile things that look like Rodan with triangular mortar boards stuck on their heads. Humanity causes our hero some trouble until the military figures out that he isn’t squashing half the city for the sake of squashing half the city, he’s merely trying to get to the villains and stop them from squashing half the city. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing, most likely you won’t be disappointed by this effort. Mildly amusing

Review – Vice Squad

How can a movie this terrible not have been remade in the first decade of the 21st century? It has everything that Hollywood usually looks for when questing about for a decades-old picture to dust off and redo. It’s full of scummy criminals, misogynist violence, bad dialogue, characters with hokey names such as Ramrod and Princess, really everything they’d need to sell the story to current audiences. Sure, the villain (played by Wings Hauser) is the wrong ethnicity to fit the Hollywood mold for “killer pimp,” but that’s a shortcoming that could easily be rectified in rewrite. Why should producers shy away from making a movie far more offensive than the original? It sure didn’t stop Rob Zombie when he remade Halloween. Standing on its own merits (rather than potential re-marketability), this is a vaguely entertaining tale of prostitutes and the cops who seek to both arrest them for their transgressions and protect them from their violent lives. Mildly amusing

Review – Elizabeth: The Golden Age

I guess if they’d called it Elizabeth 2 there might have been some confusion about exactly which queen the movie was about. Nonetheless, this is very much a sequel to the Oscar nominee from a few years back. And it suffers from many of the same flaws as its predecessor. Shekhar Kapur didn’t suddenly sprout talent between the first round and this one. And once again the more interesting elements of history give way to awkward romance and petty intrigue. To be fair, I can’t imagine exactly how a film-maker would capture some of the more interesting elements of this particular period. For example, the key importance of Spanish history in this era is the collapse of the country’s economy and the emergence of modern economic theory in its wake. But of course that’s nowhere near as cinematic as Papist plotting against the Protestant regime of our heroine. Cate Blanchett turns in another good performance, but otherwise the costumes are the star of the show. In other words, second verse same as ye first. Mildly amusing

Review – Beowulf (2007)

With a script co-written by Neil Gaiman, this should have been a much better movie. Indeed, a production with no script at all except for the original text would have made a superior product, even if it had been shot entirely in undecipherable Anglo-Saxon. Once again I find myself wondering why oh why movie folk feel the need to take a classic story and “improve” it. Here we learn that Grendel was mad at the Danes because their loud parties hurt his sensitive ear-like-object. We also learn that the monster’s mom was a smokin’ hot Angelina Jolie with a prehensile ponytail, and Beowulf himself was a morally weak braggart who tended to luck into his successes. Add to that the just-real-enough-to-be-creepy computer animation, and this turns out to be a colossal disappointment. See if desperate

Review – Across the Universe

Youth of today, be warned. Back in the 80s we fought the war against The Beatles so future generations wouldn’t have to endure crap like this. Actually, the music itself is the least annoying element of this production. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s hard to pick the most annoying part of the picture. Perhaps it’s the names. Every time a new character is introduced, her or his name is instantly recognizable as a sub-reference to a Beatles song, which more often than not ends up performed before the movie runs its awful course. Or maybe it’s the celebrity cameos. I don’t mind watching Bono humiliate himself, but I could richly have done without Eddie Izzard’s valiant yet ill-fated attempt to add a sense of humor to the production. And that’s the movie’s biggest failing: the grim-faced seriousness of the whole thing. One of the few charms The Beatles possessed was an element of play and fun. But what we get here is the determined certainty of the inexperienced that their problems are graver than anything that’s come before. The very fact that this is a movie set in the 60s but clearly designed to parallel contemporary messes should put lie to that particular myth. And in the end the 60s thing is the closest this comes to self-justification. If movie-makers 40 years ago had possessed this technology, this is the movie they no doubt would have made. That’s not much of a recommendation. See if desperate

Review – Hitman

To date this is the hands-down winner for Picture That Most Closely Resembles the Video Game Upon Which It’s Based. Tim Olyphant even manages to endow the hero with the same smooth-yet-mechanical gait of the player character from the game, which is actually kinda creepy. The plot – some mish-mash about a bred-from-birth assassin who gets double-crossed and goes on a killing rampage – is pure cartoon, but in a picture like this one should expect – maybe even enjoy – something cartoonish. After all, the audience goes into this knowing that it’s the tale of a six-foot-tall bald assassin with a bar code tattooed on the back of his head who nonetheless manages to pass unseen through crowds of pursuers despite the use of only the most minimal of disguises. So some suspension of disbelief will be required. The action sequences are choreographed and edited well, the weapons are cool, and the acting and script at least manage to stay out of the way. In other words, it’s an experience very much like playing the game. The only nettlesome difference is that the game rewarded craftsmanship. The only way to earn top ratings and bonuses was to kill the target without so much as alerting the guards. Wading in and blasting everything that moves would get you to the end of the level, but you’d wind up with a disrespectful ranking of “mass murderer” or “postal” as a result. But in the movie version, Agent 47 blithely slaughters (or at least injures) just about every character with a speaking part and dozens more who never get a word in edgewise before being gunned down. The trickier twists of the game were a lot more entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – 30 Days of Night

Just one of the many disadvantages to living above the Arctic Circle is that if your town comes down with a case of vampires in December, you’re going to be stuck with them for awhile. That novel plot twist is both the driving force and the fatal undoing of this picture, because as clever as it is, it introduces some logic problems that are difficult to overcome. In fairly short order, the bloodsuckers manage to thin the herd down to a small handful of survivors, but then weeks of cat and mouse ensue. In a town of less than 200 residents, how long would it really have taken to search every building in town from attic to basement? Further, in some scenes the protagonists make enough noise to draw vampires from Miami, let alone nearby buildings, yet often they manage to get away with it. Suspension of disbelief aside, the vampires are annoying. They’re the usual cadre of goth Euro-trash, speaking some nonsense language (actually it could have been Romanian for all I know, but it sounded more like Klingon). And yet the picture completely lacks the aura of kinky sex that’s usually such a staple element of vampire movies. However, some of the scary moments are actually kinda scary. If only the movie featured more of them and less of the plot and dialogue. Mildly amusing

Review – Death Wish 4

In my review of Death Wish 3, I noted that the action had taken on the flavor of Don Pendleton’s Executioner series. Here the trend continues. Indeed, it goes too far in that direction. Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) tries to settle down with a new woman and her daughter, but all that does is give the criminals someone new to kill (thus setting him off once again). But unlike the last couple of sequels, this effort gets bogged down in petty intrigue as our hero tries to sneak his way into the drug gangs responsible for his once-potential-stepdaughter’s death. And rather than do the dirty work himself, he gets a lot of mileage out of faking them into killing each other. Overall this isn’t a terrible movie. It isn’t even the worst in this series. But it lacks the simple, single-minded vigilante violence that supplies the real entertainment value in these pictures. Mildly amusing

Review – Death Wish 3

Street hoods murdered all Paul Kersey’s family in the first two, but that’s okay. He doesn’t seem to need much of an excuse to kill criminals anymore. Sure, the scum still commit awful crimes against innocent people, crimes that deserve to be punished with The Vigilante’s brand of justice. It’s just that it seems to have become a full-time job for him at this point. To be sure, he’s good at it. This picture introduces weapons fetishism akin to the Executioner novel series, which is both a good and a bad thing. And although the end lacks a Punisher-style lingering death for the chief baddie, at least it isn’t quite as limited as the usual gunshot-to-the-chest payoff. Indeed, the only real disappointment is that after the gang leader gets his just desserts, our hero loses interest in snuffing the rest of the criminals. He actually lets them run away. Where’s the fun in that? Mildly amusing

Review – Can't Stop the Music

You can’t stop the torment. Nobody can stop the torment. The really scary part about this movie is that it must have been what the 80s looked like back before AIDS and Ronald Reagan stole the show. Though the reality proved to be worse, this fantasy still would have been pretty bad. Start with the very idea of a movie structured around the Village People. Add Steve Gutenberg, Valerie Perrine, Bruce Jenner, and a handful of other “luminaries.” Then throw in some of the worst dialogue ever committed to film. Ah, but the topping on this cake of wretchedness is the apparently-unstoppable music. “YMCA” – one of the group’s earlier hits – is the only recognizable tune in the whole picture, amply demonstrating just what a failed marketing device the whole thing turned out to be. See if desperate

Review – American Gangster

Imagine Serpico and Scarface awkwardly crammed into the same movie, with one Pacino part played by Russell Crowe and the other by Denzel Washington. Unfortunately, the production picks up the worst elements of its predecessors. It’s boring like Serpico, and it supplies the same empty-headed worship of drug crime that made Scarface such a hit. The overall plot itself isn’t bad, and some of the acting is okay. But the good points swiftly get lost in a two-hour mass of dull intrigue and macho posturing. Mildly amusing

Review – Death Wish

I’d seen two of the other movies in this series before watching the original, so this effort actually surprised me on a couple of counts. The biggest one is going to be hard to believe if you’ve never seen it, but the story actually features some nuances. Our hero begins the story as just another guy on the street, an architect whose military record is limited to CO service as a medic in Korea. But after his wife and daughter are attacked in their apartment (wife dead, daughter sexually assaulted into a catatonic state), he begins a descent into vigilante-dom. And while the subsequent pictures in the set tend to be simple revenge fantasies, here Bronson’s character takes to the task slowly and reluctantly. Also interesting is that he doesn’t end up getting the criminals who actually hurt his family (or at least not that I noticed), opting instead to kill muggers at random. As anti-crime action movies go, this is unusually emotionally honest. Worth seeing

Review – 638 Ways to Kill Castro

How could a subject this fascinating possibly have been turned into a documentary this crappy? The twisting tale of the hate-hate relationship between the Cuban dictator and the CIA features more than enough interesting material to have made a movie twice as long as this production without a single dull moment. But here the filmmakers appear intent on making the production as boring as possible. Some of the interviews border on interesting, but others come across as pure braggadocio from players at best peripherally involved in the real drama (frequently evoking the old adage about how “those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know”). The picture is further marred by stupid editing tricks unworthy of freshman film students, let alone professionals. Overall I might have been able to call this a middle-of-the-road mediocrity if it hadn’t squandered such immense potential. See if desperate

Horror and comedy don’t mix

Anyone who’s read enough of my movie reviews has noticed a trend: I don’t like funny horror movies. I like comedies. I like horror. I just don’t like the two combined.

That isn’t to say that I need horror movies to be wall-to-wall grim. I’m fine with a horror movie that has a sense of humor. For example, the “his dinner’s in the oven” line from Fright Night is one of my favorite horror movie moments. Even in a situation that doesn’t call for jokes at all can occasionally benefit from a little wit, such as when the demon in The Exorcist offers to take a message for Father Karras’s mother.

I’ve even been known to enjoy horror parodies. Young Frankenstein is a particular favorite. But parodies don’t really count, because they play primarily by the comedy rules and don’t really aspire to be a horror picture on top of the funny stuff.

So when the whole thing is supposed to be a farce and a scare at the same time, that’s when we start running into trouble. I think the problems are caused by two things.

First, a lot of horror comedies are made by talentless dolts, people (guys mostly) with lifetime memberships in the “idiot with a camera” club. Such “artists” can’t make a funny comedy or a scary horror movie, so for some reason they think if they combine the two that everything will come out okay. Needless to say, it doesn’t.

But more than that, the two genres tend to violate each others’ rules. Comedies are supposed to be cinematic safe spaces, experiences where we can rest assured that – even if there’s some mild peril along the way – everything is going to turn out okay in the end. Indeed, the original definition of “comedy” was that the work wouldn’t turn out to be a tragedy. For example, some of Shakespeare’s comedies aren’t funny at all. They just don’t end with everyone dead.

You can’t make that promise in a horror movie. Good horror is very much a campfire experience, a blend of myth, social commentary and cautionary tale. One needn’t take them dead seriously, but on the other hand one can’t really laugh them off and at the same time enjoy them on their own terms.

Does that tell us something about the nature of bad movies?