Review – Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo

Is there such a thing as a “female gigolo”? The question suggests the level of humor that pervades this picture, almost entirely written for (and quite possibly by) 12-year-old boys. Rob Schneider stars as a professional fish tank cleaner who trashes a high-class gigolo’s apartment while house-sitting. Naturally in order to pay for the damage before the violence-prone owner returns, he has to start doing the guy’s job. He ends up dating women who are for one reason or another not datable in the conventional sense, such as a woman with Tourette’s (Amy Pohler) whom he takes to a baseball game so her loud, random swearing won’t be any different from anyone else in the crowd. In the end the picture tries to make some kind of point about how women who aren’t supermodels can have trouble getting dates, but the moral is a feeble graft onto a parade of sophomoric sex jokes. See if desperate

Review – Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

Be sure to wait until after dark and watch this picture in a dimly-lit room. That’s not for spooky atmosphere as much as it’s a feeble attempt to be able to see the movie, at least a third of which is shot in light so poor that many sequences are more-or-less pitch black. On the other hand, the inability to see what’s going on is probably a blessing, judging by the quality of the parts that are actually visible. The implausible Alien-Predator cross-breed from the end of the first AvP returns as the chief baddie this time around, an unwelcome touch vastly magnified by the fact that the new uber-monster is able to plant Alien eggs in victims without the use of the creatures’ well-established bug-snake-monster life cycle. This departure from the conventions of the series was no doubt necessary to supply the mass quantities of Aliens needed to keep the story moving, but it’s also symptomatic of the brainless-yet-commercially-successful disregard for consistent plot logic. Though the production values are on par with the rest of the movies in both sets, the cast and script would have been better suited to the straight-to-video gunk that provides programming bread and butter for the Sci Fi Channel. Mildly amusing

Review – Darkon

If we combine the nerdiest elements of D&D and Civil War reenactments, our journey to the Dork Side will be complete. And here’s a documentary proving it. The competently-assembled production dips into the lives of participants in Darkon, a Baltimore-centered alternative reality in which nations are drawn up on a hex-divided map and then fought over in mock battles. I’m actually kinda impressed by these folks. They’ve dedicated a big chunk of their lives to their fantasy world. And for the most part what they do is relatively harmless fun. However, I felt sorry for some of the players who turn out to be losers both in the real world and in the imaginary realms of the game. Mildly amusing

Review – Gargoyles: Wings of Darkness

I actually started watching this some time before I did the complete viewing upon which this review is based. I didn’t make it all the way through because I watched the first 15 minutes or so, got bored, paused it and switched to something else. And before I could return and finish the job, the Tivo took it upon itself to erase it. Frankly, I should have listened to the Tivo. Michael Pare stars as a CIA operative in Eastern Europe who runs afoul of a nest of gargoyles disturbed by archaeologists working on a church renovation. Even by Sci Fi Channel “standards” this is cheap, boring stuff. See if desperate

Review – Sisters

This movie is hoisted on the petard of Margot Kidder’s dreadful French accent before it ever gets the chance to get moving. Fortunately, Kidder didn’t kill anything that had much of a chance at life anyway. The plot is a trite bit of nonsense about a woman with a multiple-personality problem caused by the separation and death of her conjoined twin. This is a very Brian De Palma early 70s production, so in addition to the split personality we get a lot of split-screen. The hacking murder early in the picture goes well with the choppy editing. Overall, however, it’s just not that interesting a movie. Mildly amusing

Review – All the King's Men (2006)

Assuming the original cried out for a remake at all, this is not the remake it had coming. Sean Penn stars as Willie Stark in this repeat roman a clef about Huey Long’s time as the governor of Louisiana. I understand that Penn is now too old to play the intense, misunderstood youth roles that made him famous, but if this picture is any indication he shouldn’t plan on making the transition to middle-aged, overbearing cracker politicians. Some of the supporting cast members are better suited to their roles, particularly Jude Law who has of course made a career out of playing spoiled rich kids who get caught up in the serious affairs of the world. But what really kills this is the look and feel. They seem to be going for a grim, depression-era aura with lots of shadowy sets and sepia filters. That worked okay in Road to Perdition, but here it’s out of step with the steamy southern locations and the cynical faux-optimism of the Long era and the original movie. See if desperate

Review – The Hoax

Novelist Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) is down on his luck, so he decides to pretend that reclusive millionaire nutjob Howard Hughes has secretly arranged for him to write a biography. In the beginning the scheme sounds simple, but complexities from the grand (what if the real Hughes denounces the whole thing?) to the simple (how do you cash a million-dollar advance made out to “Howard Hughes”?) soon set in. The resulting farce of a plot would be too ridiculous to watch if not for the “true story” (or at least Hollywood-true) angle. Most of the points at which the scheme goes awry should have been obvious at the outset. Thus the characters have no real motivation to do what they do other than the fact that in real life they actually tried it. The resulting tale takes an unanticipated twist or two, but for the most part this is a suspense comedy that is neither funny nor suspenseful. Mildly amusing

Review – The Killer Elite

Somewhere in here, wrapped deeply in a lot of Sam Peckinpah nonsense, might have been a good movie. A mercenary (James Caan) is double-crossed by a buddy (Robert Duvall) who kills a man they’re supposed to be protecting. So we start with a good cast and a solid premise. But then we have to watch while our hero undergoes a lengthy rehab. On the one hand, this gives the audience a thorough appreciation of just how desperately the guy wants to recover so he can go after his duplicitous friend. On the other hand, it’s hellishly boring (especially for an action movie). However, once he recovers the ability to walk, the gunfights resume. As an added bonus, the new client he has to protect from his old nemesis is the head of a Japanese ninja clan. The martial arts are stiff by 21st-century standards, but I can remember being quite impressed with them back in 1973. The climax of the picture takes place in a mothballed fleet of old Navy ships, a location that has little direct relevance to the plot but is still kind of a cool place to shoot a sequence. Mildly amusing

Review – Gryphon

This reminds me of being back in school again, when the kids who were equally obsessed with D&D and the A/V club would make movies like this. At least here we get professional actors and a half-hearted attempt at production values. The title monster is particularly awful, like a combination of a lion and an eagle with a scrunched-up beak that makes it look as if it flew into a wall. Bad effects aside, for the most part this is just another cheap fantasy movie. But pity poor Larry Drake. If only he’d invested the Darkman money a little more wisely, he wouldn’t get stuck playing the evil wizard in something like this. As a consolation, at least they gave him a couple of “Girls Next Door” sidekicks. See if desperate

Review – Ogre

This reeks of cheap knock-off of The Village, though to be honest I can’t say that for certain because 20 minutes or so into Shamalayan’s movie I was reminded that I’d sworn not to watch any more of his movies and shut it off. At least here we aren’t really expected to take the production seriously. The role of bad guy is shared between John “one of the Duke boys” Schneider (whose acting hasn’t improved a jot since the TV series that made him semi-famous) and a computer-animated ogre. Thank goodness they gave the thing a loincloth! Aside from Schneider, the cast includes a couple of refugees from Freddy vs. Jason and not much of anyone else. The script and production values are likewise weak. I guess the Sci Fi Channel has shown worse, but this is still nothing to write home about. Mildly amusing

Review – Warbirds

I kinda liked Reign of the Gargoyles, the Sci Fi Channel’s previous attempt to combine World War Two aviation and CGI monsters. So perhaps I went into this movie with my expectations too high. To start, the action has been moved from Europe to the Pacific, which normally would have been fine with me. But then half the cast turns out to be a crew of sassy female aviators who happen to end up flying a secret mission to transport the A-bomb. The actors themselves were okay, but almost all their lines were cartoonish knock-offs of movies actually shot in the early 40s (except of course for the sexual innuendo that would never have gotten past the Hays Office). In any event, their plane is forced to crash-land on an island full of Japanese soldiers and pterodactyl-esque flying monsters, and things progress from there. Mildly amusing

Review – The Guardian (2006)

With Kevin Costner playing an old pro mentoring an up-and-coming kid with talent and attitude (Ashton Kutcher), the most obvious parallel is of course Bull Durham. But this turns out to be more Heartbreak Ridge, with lots of military macho posturing and boot-camp-esque escapades. At least these guys are rescue swimmers for the Coast Guard, so that comes across as somewhat more heroic than Marines liberating Grenada. Though the result lasts somewhere around twice as long as it really needs to, I’ve seen worse celebrations of masculinity. Mildly amusing

Review – The Invisible

This is a spoiled-yet-angst-ridden teenage boy’s ultimate dream: being mostly killed transforms our protagonist into an invisible spirit. Thus he’s able to see how sorry his mom is that he’s gone and heap unheard abuse on the girl who attacked him and left him for dead. The female character is interesting in that she starts the movie as a genderless thug in a toque, but as she slowly comes to regret the error of her ways she becomes more and more feminine. Overall this is one of those movies that serves primarily as a long ad for its own soundtrack, a thick layer of complaint rock nerve-grating enough to be well-suited to this nerve-grating movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The Mist

Though Frank Darabont has had some success with Stephen King’s non-horror work (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) in the past, this time he’s taking on a novella from squarely inside the genre. The result is fairly good. Thomas Jane does a solid job as a man who gets stuck in a grocery store when the whole outside world turns into a misty nightmare. To be sure, the story strains credulity a bit. Why is it that the monsters can’t find victims unless they’re dumb enough to go outdoors? Why do they lose interest in the people they kill? Aren’t they hungry? And why do fundamentalist Christians turn out to be even worse than Lovecraftian monstrosities? The creatures themselves are cool except when they get too much light on them. The end has to be one of the all-time worst bummers ever churned out by Hollywood, but otherwise this is well above the average for King movies. Worth seeing

Review – Rendition

Here’s a mediocre movie about an interesting subject: the practice of seizing people suspected of being terrorists and transporting them to countries that have few compunctions about torturing them. The part of the movie that deals with a victim of this despicable practice – and his wife’s attempts to find out what happened to him – is pretty good stuff. But then we get a bunch of other complications, some of which were more soap opera than international intrigue. By the end of the picture, even the time stream starts to unravel. Though there’s a good story and an important message buried in here somewhere, they end up smothered under a thick load of extraneous nonsense. Mildly amusing

Review – Days of Darkness

The title and box cover are pretty clearly designed to sell this as somehow connected to 30 Days of Night, though in reality it has nothing to do with vampires in Alaska. Instead this is yet another low-budget piece of crap about a small band of humans trying to escape an onslaught of flesh-eating zombies. The only even vaguely entertaining twist here is that the survivors were spared the meteor-borne doom of the rest of humanity because they had alcohol in their bloodstreams when it hit. Otherwise this is cheap, badly-written, badly-acted and dull. See if desperate

Review – Day of the Dead (2007)

Though the box made this sound like a remake of Romero’s movie by the same name (presumably along the same lines as the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead), this production had little in common with the older, better movie. What we get this time around is a standard survivors-running-from-a-plague-of-zombies flick. The show includes some entertaining innovations, such as an infection that starts with flu-like symptoms, then causes brief catatonia, then instantly transforms the victim into a flesh-eating corpse. And them zombies is fast, too, even the legless Ving Rhames zombie. Aside from an occasional good scare, however, this is substance-free stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Spirit Trap

Five housemates who don’t know each other end up sharing a dingy old mansion in London. Do I even need to tell you the place has a curse on it? It has something to do with the ghosts of an interracial couple whose “forbidden love” wasn’t understood by their Victorian contemporaries. And somehow they’ve become imprisoned in the house’s grandfather clock, which is actually a spiritualist jim-jam known as a spirit trap. Aside from some bush-league gore and sex, there just isn’t much to it. Mildly amusing

Review – Newsies

If you locked Luc Sante and Andrew Lloyd Webber in a room and told them they couldn’t come out until they came up with a musical about turn-of-the-century newsboys going on strike against Joseph Pulitzer, this is likely what you’d get. And even so, the pair would be half-assing it so they could get it done as quickly as possible so you’d unlock the door and let them out. Fortunately for Sante and Webber, neither one of them had anything to do with this stinker. Unfortunately for Christian Bale, he can’t say the same. He must have a terrific agent, or Newsies would surely have put an end to his career. The songs are dreadful, the choreography is stiff, and worst of all the story itself, doubtless intended to be an homage to movie musicals from simpler times, instead comes across as hackneyed and dumb. See if desperate

Review – Sweeney Todd

Why can’t American Idol competitors ever do songs from musicals like this? I’d totally pay the standard text messaging rates to vote for anyone with the guts to perform “The Worst Pies in London.” Overall this is exactly what you’d expect when Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter take on a musical about an upstairs barber who butchers his patrons so the woman who owns the downstairs restaurant can bake them into meat pies. As usual with Burton, the murky, atmospheric art direction is the real star of the show. But the cast also does a solid job of keeping things entertaining. Worth seeing

Review – Next

Nicolas Cage stars as a psychic who can see two minutes into his own future. That might not seem like all that nifty a skill, but it sure has a team of government agents (led by Julianne Moore) mighty interested in him. Perhaps they already know that when he’s around the love interest (Jessica Biel) he can suddenly see far enough ahead to predict things like nuclear bombs planted by terrorists. In other words, this is yet another big-budget, high-concept, empty-headed action movie. Mildly amusing

Review – And Now the Screaming Starts

After that, the yawning gets underway. During the brief bits of this movie when something is actually happening, it’s actually not too bad for a British period piece. The core of the plot is about a curse placed on the descendants of a libertine who raped a peasant’s wife and then cut off the guy’s hand. Unfortunately, the back-story doesn’t come out until well past the midway point. And by then too much screen time had been wasted on long, go-nowhere meanderings throughout the dimly-lit halls of the estate. The cast (Herbert Lom, Patrick Magee, and of course Peter Cushing) is good but could have been used to better effect. Mildly amusing

Review – Surf’s Up

Well, at least it wasn’t as annoying as Happy Feet. For starters, the designers of this effort figured out ways to make the animated penguins look different from one another without resorting to distracting tricks like a half-adult-half-chick character. On the other hand, the penguins in this one surf (as the title implies), so there are plusses and minuses. This is a goofy comedy about a penguin from Antarctica (which oddly enough doesn’t seem to be the home of any of the other penguins in the movie) who gets the chance to compete in a surfing competition on a tropical island. The result is an inoffensive bit of fluff, the sort of thing I’d probably miss if not for premium channel free weekends. Mildly amusing

Review – Chamber of Horrors

If you liked the Vincent Price classic House of Wax, then odds are you’ll recognize this production. Indeed, if memory serves, this was originally intended to be the pilot for a “House of Wax” TV series. But if this ever did make it to test audiences, I’m sure its horribleness instantly doomed the series. The story is some drivel about a corpse-marrying nut who hacks off his own hand to escape from death row and then goes on a spree of deadly, one-handed revenge against the men responsible for his conviction. The only real stand-out element is the William-Castle-esque use of The Fear Flasher (red frames intercut with the action) and the Horror Horn (an annoying bleating sound) that show up to warn the faint-of-heart that something horrible is about to happen. And I mean really faint-of-heart, as more than once all the hoopla precedes is a blade being raised and then a pan away that spares the audience from the slightest hint of gore. Except of course in the end when the villain gets his just reward, an impalement with nary a flash or honk to warn us to shut our eyes. See if desperate

Review – Brotherhood of Satan

This is one of those movies that in the beginning seems like it might be unusually innovative and artistic but turns out to just be unusually inept. A coven of aging Satanists needs to swap their bodies with 13 of the local youngsters, so they begin murdering their way through town in order to gather up the requisite kid count. Though this production fails on many levels, the editing is a real stand-out. The pacing is laconic at best, with little attention to meaningful plot structure or even logical shot sequence. The casting is also odd, with most of the male characters played by uniformly tall, skinny actors. Strother Martin – as the Satanist-in-chief – is at least an exception to the no-name beanpole coterie, but he turns in an okay-hail-Satan-hail-Satan-if-you-need-me-I’ll-be-in-my-trailer performance. See if desperate

Review – The Vampire Bat

I should admit at the outset that I fell asleep twice during this movie, so if something really incredible happened during the bits I snoozed through, I missed it. The parts I saw were, well, obviously a little boring. Something or someone is sucking the blood out of the locals, and suspicion naturally falls on the neighborhood nutjob (Dwight Frye). But in a moral victory for bat-obsessed lunatics everywhere, the real culprit turns out to be a mad scientist who needs his victims’ blood to sustain an experimental hunk of goo. Fay Wray is her usual perky self, but beyond that this is more of a historical relic than a worthwhile viewing experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Shogun

Yes, this is a mini-series rather than a movie. Plot-wise, however, it plays like a motion picture except for an extra long running time that apparently required every scene to drag on for at least twice its natural length. And as is typical with Hollywood productions about foreign cultures, we are called upon to experience medieval Japanese society through Western eyes. Richard Chamberlain stars as an English sailor cast up on the shores of Japan in the middle of an extended feudal feud. Our hero must learn the ropes – not to mention the language – in order to keep his head on his shoulders and later pursue the complicated affections of his beautiful translator. I watched this decades ago when it was originally broadcast, and at the time I thought it was pretty cool. But now Toshiro Mifune’s presence as Lord Toronaga serves as a poignant reminder of just how deeply inferior this tale is to the movies Mifune and Akira Kurosawa made about the same time and place. This series isn’t bad, but it fares poorly when compared to movies with better cinematography, more action and a less Euro-centric perspective. Mildly amusing

Review – Blood on Satan's Claw

Particularly early on, this picture features a few genuinely spooky moments. As one might expect, it suffers from many of the defects endemic to British horror movies from the 60s and 70s: it’s slow, the production values are bad, the acting is melodramatic, and so on. Indeed, this tale of an evil presence that lures the young folk of an English village into a coven turns out to be more visceral than many other productions from this time and place. A graphic rape sequence stands out as a strong example of the sort of thing that wouldn’t show up the average edited-for-television Hammer horror flick. However, the film-makers wisely decided not to use the makeup effects too far beyond their usefulness. The result features several scare spots that end up subtle enough to actually be scary. Mildly amusing