Review – Criminal Law

Gary Oldman plays a lawyer who wins a not-guilty verdict for a client (Kevin Bacon) only to have the psycho continue his serial killing ways. The two men develop a really creepy love-hate relationship as Oldman tries to find a way to get his clever, pop-collared client to slip up and get himself caught. Stir in some icky Oedipal stuff and a message about abortion that’s likely to please neither side of the debate, and you’ve got one hard to look at movie. See if desperate

Review – Dead Space: Downfall

If you like animated gore and you aren’t too picky about the quality of the animation, this may well be the show for you. A spaceship picks up an alien artifact that starts turning the whole crew into monsters in fairly short order. The main weapon of choice to combat the beasts is a combination of chain saw and light saber, which is about as close to clever or creative as this production ever comes. Much of the design work looks like a cheap knock-off of Doom 3 (no doubt at least somewhat related to the video game this thing is actually based on). Combine that with a nearly-nonexistent plot and you’ve got a waste of an hour or so. See if desperate

Review – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

When I was in high school, one of my friends was a real Douglas Adams nut. He’d quote this stuff like it was the most profound thing since the epistles of Paul. Even a quarter century later I think that still colors my perception of the stuff. Some of it is funny. A lot of it, however, plays like one of those skits on Monty Python’s Flying Circus that’s more odd than humorous. The plot (for anyone not already familiar) is the story of Arthur Dent, an ordinary guy suddenly sucked off the Earth right before it’s destroyed to make way for an interstellar highway. High jinks ensue. I’m guessing fans of the books will get a kick out of it, but it left me a little flat. Mildly amusing

Review – The Poseidon Adventure

The first 30 minutes or so of this picture are a lot of fun. Well, actually the lengthy introductions of all the annoying major characters are dull, but knowing that they’re all on a ship that’s about to capsize makes it all worthwhile. Then when the vessel tips some fun effects come into play. After that, however, the production sinks into a deep mire of speechifying and narrow escapes from doom as a small band of survivors tries to make it to the bottom – now the top – of the ship. If you see only one Irwin Allen movie, this would be a good candidate. But that assumes that you have to see an Irwin Allen movie for some reason. Mildly amusing

... and Zombies

For reasons known only to the American book-buying public, a tome known only as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has resided on the best-sellers list for some time now. I haven’t read it (nor do I intend to). For all I know it could be a work of staggering genius. It could also be a cheap trivialization of Jane Austen by the slap-dash addition of flesh-eating, ambient corpses. As we will soon be treated to another gift from the same publisher entitled Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, I'm guessing the latter is probably the case.

This suggests no end of possibilities for other empty-headed combinations of literature and movie monsters. I’ll let you form your own impressions about what the following eight books might be like.

• The Moon and Sixpence and the Bride of Frankenstein
• A Streetcar Named Dracula
• Madame Bovary Versus Godzilla
• Romeo and Juliet: Rise of the Lycans
• Dr. Dolittle and Mr. Hyde
• Invisible Man Meets The Invisible Man
• Lady Chatterly’s Creature from the Black Lagoon
• The Canterbury Tales from the Crypt

I can't wait for this trend to spread to textbooks. As a once-upon-a-time Art History student, I'm especially hopeful that some enterprising publisher will turn his seven-year-old kid loose on Gardner's Art Through the Ages and re-release it as Art Masterpieces and Moustaches.

Review – Ikiru

Funny how a phrase as grandiose as “triumph of the human spirit” seems so often apt to describe quiet little movies like this. Early in his career, Akira Kurosawa serves up the story of a bureaucrat who learns he has terminal stomach cancer. He spends the first half of the movie moping, feeling sorry for himself, and otherwise trying to come to grips with his fate. Then the production fast-forwards to his funeral, where his fellow paper-pushers reminisce about his efforts to get a park built. Slowly they come to realize that the park construction wasn’t merely an exercise in inter-office turf battling but rather an expression of his love of life. Such a summary is accurate enough but nonetheless inadequate to cover the sweet, subtle nuance of the picture. Buy the disc

Review – The Haunting of #24

This is one of those pictures where the director has a handful of good ideas for spooky shots and then tries unsuccessfully to weave a movie around it. The story is some flimsy nonsense about a young man who moves into a haunted apartment building. The old lady down the hall creeps him out. Ghosts live inside his TV (including his girlfriend after she goes missing). Someone’s buried in the back yard. As I said, it’s got a moment or two. But otherwise it’s just dull. Mildly amusing

Review – The 39 Steps

I remember liking this one more the first time I saw it. This time around it struck me as an uneven blend of Hitchcockian spy thriller and Capra-esque screwball comedy. To be sure, it has some good moments. But it also has some weak points, such as Robert Donat’s odd failure to remove his overcoat at any point during the first half of the movie. The story is typical Hitchcock: an innocent man lets an attractive spy into his hotel room, and when she ends up stabbed to death he goes on the lam (which of course makes him look even more guilty than if he’d stayed put and tried to explain himself). After a series of miraculous-to-the-point-of-absurdity escapes from the police and killers pursuing him, he ends up handcuffed to crabby Madeline Carroll, leading to still more high jinks. This might have been a better movie if it hadn’t been such a creature of its own time. Mildly amusing

Review – Samurai 3: Duel at Ganryu Island

It’s as if director Hiroshi Inagaki heard my griping about the first two, or more likely heard griping from other folks with similar complaints back in 1956. The fight scenes this time around are more frequent and better lit (well, some of them anyway). The soap opera romance is also toned down a bit, though it continues to be an element. As predicted, Musashi’s fellow legendary swordsman Kojiro Sasaki assumes a larger role, becoming rather more villainous than he was in the second chapter. The middle of this picture is a peasants-vs.-brigands drama similar to The Seven Samurai. But eventually we get down to the famous island duel, told in a version slightly different than at least some of the legends but nonetheless quite dramatic. Mildly amusing

Review – Friday the 13th (2009)

Here we go again. This isn’t really a remake, or if it is then it’s a remake of the first three Fridays with a lot left out and a lot of new stuff packed in. The film-makers assume that the audience is already familiar with the Jason saga or at least that a quick campfire tale Cliff’s Notes version will suffice to bring everyone up to speed. Not a bad guess, really. Most folks who rent pictures of this ilk aren’t in it for the brilliant weave of the story or Oscar-caliber acting. They’re more likely to be after gory violence and boob shots, both of which are supplied aplenty by this production. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil's Tomb

The Sci Fi Channel makes a lot of movies like this, only many of them are better and few of them are as expensive. Cuba Gooding Jr. heads a team of mercenaries descending into an ancient ruin in search of a missing archaeologist. The resulting story is an awkward blend of several horror movies ranging from Prince of Darkness to Event Horizon. The production also “borrows” small moments from other pictures (a dash of Predator here, a dab of Aliens there, and so on). Frankly, I’d rather re-watch the source movies than sit through a leftover burgoo like this. See if desperate

Review – Macbeth (1948)

Though the play itself is my favorite Shakespearian work, I didn’t care much for this production. Orson Welles took it upon himself to juke the script around a bit, deleting some characters, adding at least one, and moving lines from one part of the play to another. While I’m not enough of a purist to insist on absolute, unwavering fidelity to the original text, I thought some of Welles’s modifications went a bit too far. Further, I thought the sets looked like a combination of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. The costuming was likewise over-arty; Macbeth’s crown in particular looked as if the poor man had fallen headfirst into an end table. Then there was the high-key lighting. Then there was … well, suffice it to say that this suffered from a lot of the same defects that affected the Olivier Hamlet, which came out the same year. Mildly amusing

Review – Day the World Ended

The nuclear apocalypse gets the vintage Roger Corman treatment. Maybe a “The” for the start of the title would have cost extra, in which case Corman certainly would have opted to do without. A hodge-podge of people are cooped up in a house together after atomic bombs destroy the world. Their two biggest challenges: getting on each others’ nerves and avoiding being eaten by mutated monsters lurking in the woods. The script, acting and effects are all equally bad. Sometimes I get a kick out of these old stinkers, but this one just didn’t do it for me. See if desperate

Review – Savage Planet

Y’all already know how I feel about violence against bears, so you can skip the rest of this review if you want. For those who want a little more info before we get to the zero rating: this starts out as a cheap Stargate knock-off. A team of explorers goes through a transporter to another planet only to end up stranded. They spend the next 80 minutes of the movie fighting with one another and running from cave bears. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Babylon A.D.

The star of the show here is the art direction. Well, that and Vin Diesel. He plays a mercenary assigned to transport a teenage girl and her nun guardian (Michelle Yeoh) from Mongolia to New York. That might have been an easier task if the trio didn’t live in a strange, quasi-post-apocalyptic world full of no end of dangers and opportunities for the production designers to come up with something interesting to look at. Mildly amusing

Review – The Sweet Scent of Death

This Fox Mystery Theatre entry starts out like The Omen without the devil child. And if you’re about to ask what the point of The Omen would be without the devil child, the answer is apparently “not much.” Eventually it devolves into a mystery involving a woman being stalked by the local florist (or is it really him?). Though some of the elements are strictly American, overall it’s as dreary and dull as the English country mysteries it’s designed to imitate. See if desperate

Review – The Brain Eaters

This movie has a lot of odd, unintentional touches. For example, Local Hero fans may get a small snicker from the credit for screenwriter Gordon Urquhart. The governor’s name is Clinton. Otherwise, however, this is just another piece of 1950s body-snatching paranoia. A large metal cone appears in a small Illinois town right around the same time several of the local residents go nuts. The connection turns out to be small critters – kinda cute when they aren’t attaching themselves to people’s spines – who’ve bored up from the depths of the earth to sneak into our brains and take over. And yes, the whole thing tastes a lot like leftovers. The score in particular is arbitrary stuff gleaned from other sources; I even noticed a few bars from Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata at one point. One has to pay attention to catch small touches like that, but overall the picture doesn’t reward the attention required. See if desperate

Review – Sheitan

If this movie is our only point of reference, we’d have to assume that everyone in France is mentally defective in one way or another. A group of urban club-trash 20-somethings journeys to the country (always a mistake no matter which side of the Atlantic one happens to be on). From there the production proceeds to be as repulsive, awkward and annoying as possible. It particularly specializes in unattractive sexuality ranging from dog molestation to … well, let’s just say it started with the dog and went from there. I was also particularly “fond” of all the racial epithets. Apparently the French have learned a lot from watching American torture porn. Avoid at all costs

Review – Fire Serpent

Though for the most part this is typical Sci Fi Channel fare, it actually turns out to be a bit better in some ways. For example, they’re using the usual bad CGI to create the monster. But because it’s made out of fire, it’s actually a bit on the scary side. If nothing else, the flickering flames blur it enough to make it look less computer-gamey. We also get characters with rational – or at least consistent – motivations. A fireman whose buddy is killed by the monster traces it to a sinister government agent up to no good. Though I can’t go quite all the way to “worth seeing,” this is a measure above most other movies of its ilk. Mildly amusing

Review – Taxi Driver

Though I don’t feel as passionate about this picture as I did back in my “angry young man” phase, I still like it a lot. It’s my clear-cut favorite of Martin Scorcese’s movies, and one of the top five for Robert DeNiro as well. Here we have the grim tale of Travis Bickle going from slightly off to totally insane. His obsession with rage, firearms and political assassination makes this picture particularly popular with certain kinds of crazies, such as Reagan shooter John Hinkley. Still, it has a wonderful 70s NYC texture, an intriguing plot and some shockingly realistic violence. Buy the disc

Review – Doomed

For a movie that doesn’t amount to much more than a cheap knock-off of The Condemned with extra added zombies, it could have been a lot worse. Convicts are forced to participate in a Suvivor-esque reality show in which they’re paired up and pitted against each other, the standard perils of a tropical island, and a whole big mess of flesh-hungry undead. Though obviously plenty stupid, it manages to be at least vaguely entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – Midway

This production does a reasonably good job of combining actual archive footage and re-creations to tell the story of one of the key battles of World War Two. Though the running time on AMC was three hours, I found I could cut a third off that by buzzing through not only the ads but also any scene in which the Charlton Heston character starts arguing with his son about the young man’s Japanese-American girlfriend. Further, the first time I saw this (when I was ten) I got the full effect of Sensurround, an experience that’s hard to duplicate. Perhaps I could just set my cell phone to vibrate and then call myself every time something blows up. Mildly amusing

Review – Last Days

The full title of this movie is “Gus Van Sant’s Last Days.” We should be so lucky. I’ve dropped the byline because a movie starting with “Gus” would show up last in the G section, and that would mean that every time I looked at the alphabetical listings that I’d be reminded that I sat through this stinker. It’s bad enough that I’ll never get rid of Ba’al and P2 on the list. And honestly, if I feel the need to watch stoners wandering around aimlessly, I can just go to work. This is clearly supposed to be some kind of fictionalization of the suicide of Kurt Cobain, or “Blake” as the character is called here. If his life was really this dull and pointless, it’s no wonder he chose to check out. See if desperate

Review – Silent Partner

This is way more serious than I thought it would be. Usually when I see Tara Reid’s name in the credits I just assume that I’ll be able to switch off my brain for awhile. But not so here. If nothing else, part of the picture is subtitled, with Russians in this spy thriller actually speaking in Russian. To be sure, this isn’t going to win any prizes for brilliant plots. A naïve CIA analyst stumbles across some kind of illegal deal between high-ranking Russians and U.S. government officials. Then he becomes entangled with the daughter of … and so on and so forth. Reid actually manages to do a reasonably good job, which alone makes this picture enough of a curiosity to merit a look. Otherwise, however, it’s standard international intrigue fare. Mildly amusing

Review – Ultraviolet

Well, at least it was a little better than Aeon Flux. Same general idea, though. In the day-glo future, a totalitarian regime is menaced by a beautiful woman (Mila Jovovich) with superhuman fighting skills. The plot is nonsensical and meandering, but fortunately there isn’t that much of it. Instead this is mostly ultra-choreographed, Matrix-esque fight sequences, so many that they actually get tedious after awhile. Mildly amusing

Review – Bottom Feeder

Apt title. A scientist invents green goo that regenerates damaged tissue. The problem is that it requires a lot of nutrients to do its work, and unless it’s fed with the scientist’s special blue goo, it causes its host to transform into whatever it eats. And because it makes the host extremely hungry … well, in short order we end up with a rat-dog-guy-monster stalking the tunnels under an abandoned hospital. That’s some bad luck for the maintenance crew and small gaggle of bad guys locked down there with it. See if desperate

Review - Femme Fatale

It’s sorta comforting to see Brian De Palma up to his old tricks – over-dramatized thriller, lots of split-screen work – after all these years. A beautiful criminal (Rebecca Romijn) double-crosses her partners, makes off with millions in stolen jewels and assumes the identity of a woman who just happens to look just like her and just happens to commit suicide in front of her. Years later she’s managed to establish a new life for herself, but her old friends are still out to even the score. Eventually it devolves into a silly bit of nonsense about our heroine seducing Antonio Banderas into doing whatever she wants (shades of Double Indemnity, a clip of which adorns the opening credits). And don’t even get me started on the ending. The direction is over-wrought to the point of weirdness, often leaving me wondering if De Palma is serious or merely lampooning his earlier work. Mildly amusing

Review – Dark Corners

Is Thora Birch a blonde with a good life dreaming that she’s a brunette with a crappy life, or vice versa? Either way, she keeps snapping back and forth between reality (pick one) and hallucinations of violence and death. In short order the whole production becomes so fragmentary – yanking the rug out from under our feet over and over again – that it’s hard to follow or try to care about. See if desperate

Review – Clawed: The Legend of Sasquatch

This picture starts out with a pro-environment, anti-hunting theme, which put it on my good side early on. Unfortunately it never really goes anywhere from there. Asshole hunters and high school kids on a science class campout cross paths with each other and with the legendary title monster, defender of the forest. Sure, the beast looks like Klaus Kinski on a particularly bad hair day. But at least they took care to use lighting and blurring to keep the cheapness from completely destroying the effect. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil Commands

For something that I randomly recorded, this actually turned out to be fairly good. Boris Karloff plays a scientist who becomes obsessed with communicating with his dead wife by channeling her brain waves. He achieves some initial success via a mildly psychic woman running a medium scam, but then his work causes injuries and he has to leave town. In his new digs he finds himself distrusted by the locals, particularly after bodies start disappearing from the town cemetery. The electro-séance thing he sets up with the diving-suit-wrapped corpses is actually kinda creepy. Though this isn’t the best horror movie I’ve ever seen, it does have a few spooky moments and a delightfully eerie atmosphere throughout. Worth seeing

Review – Captivity

In the early days of torture porn, movies like Saw resembled the early days of actual porn (at least the mass-marketed stuff). They had at least enough plot to vaguely excuse the parade of explicit sex scenes. But then came the pictures that were nothing but sex from start to finish. No plot. No characters. Just screwing. Well, that’s what we get here. Elisha Cuthbert (Kim Bauer on 24 and pretty much the only reason I decided to give this picture a look) stars as a fashion model who gets kidnapped by a psycho and locked in an elaborate torture dungeon. The thing tries to sprout a story around the beginning of act three, but by then it has two insurmountable problems. First, the twist is so artlessly telegraphed that it’s not enough of a surprise to merit the trouble. And second, by then the mindless torment – including forcing the heroine to kill her own dog – has worn out any welcome the movie might have enjoyed. Avoid at all costs

Review – The Terror

Yeesh, what a boring movie. A young Jack Nicholson stars as a French soldier who stumbles across some mysterious goings-on involving a creepy old castle, a ghostly woman and an eccentric old baron (Boris Karloff). At best this resembles an Edgar Allen Poe tale of death obsession, but more often it’s just a muddled mess. See if desperate

Review – Rise of the Gargoyles

This Sci Fi Channel picture actually gets off to a reasonable start. Underground workers in Paris unearth an ancient gargoyle menace. An archaeology professor pits himself against the creature after a moment of cheap gore that works a little because it’s actually unexpected. From there, however, it turns into a tedious monster chase. See if desperate

Review – Paranoiac

The first time I tried to watch this movie I fell asleep 15 minutes in. This time I managed to stay awake, but honestly seeing it wasn’t all that much different from sleeping through it. This is a dreary little tale of various con men and lunatics trying to cash in on the estate of wealthy relatives. It’s plain from the outset that the script is going to depend almost entirely on implausible twists and turns designed to do nothing beyond prolonging the running time. Not exactly a high point in Hammer Studios history. Mildly amusing

Review – Hamlet (1969)

This is an all-extra-boring version of the classic play. Nicol Williamson – perhaps best known for playing Merlin in Excalibur – heads a cast who all do a journeyman job of memorizing their lines and wearing their costumes, but nobody manages to work much genuine emotional content into his or her role. And speaking of the “hers,” the women in this picture – Marianne Faithfull and Judy Parfitt in particular – adopt a masculine demeanor suited to the drama’s Elizabethan origins but off-putting all these hundreds of years later. Indeed, the whole production seems more comfortable with Shakespeare’s words than with movie-making techniques. Of course it’s always interesting to see how certain aspects of the play are handled (the actor playing the ghost never appears onscreen) and what sections get cut out (alas, poor Fortinbras, skunked again). But otherwise this is too dull and self-consciously theatrical to be worth much as a movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Stan Lee’s Harpies

Dreadful script. Xbox-esque special effects. Stephen Baldwin. Must be a Sci Fi Channel presentation. Baldwin plays a Bruce-Willis-knock-off museum security guard who gets zapped back to the Middle Ages to do battle with the title monsters. Why Stan Lee would attach his name to such garbage is beyond me (unless the producers were able to pay him a lot more money than it looks like they possess). See if desperate

Review – The Blue Max

If you just watch the battle scenes in this picture, it’s actually quite entertaining. Indeed, some of the aerial combat footage is downright spectacular, airplane choreography working smoothly with cinematography to produce excellent results. And though I have to admit that I’m a sucker for the whole World War One dogfighting thing, even viewers without an inherent interest should still be able to appreciate the quality of the work. Ah, but then the plot intrudes. George Peppard stars as a young German ace obsessed with achieving 21 kills so he can earn the coveted Blue Max medal. That much might have been okay, but then he gets tangled up with the wife (Ursula Andress) of a general (James Mason), and things go downhill from there. So just keep a finger close to the fast-forward button and hit it whenever no planes are on screen. Mildly amusing

Review – Haunted Forest

In the past I’ve had reasonably good luck with horror movies with generic titles. There’s something refreshingly plain and honest about the straightforward promise of movies like Ghost Story and The Wolf Man. No such luck here. This international picture starts out as a half-baked combination of Blair Witch Project and The Ring and goes rapidly downhill from there. There’s some kind of backstory about the restless spirit of a woman named Satinka – sounds a little like a porn name – who guards a forest from interlopers. But mostly it’s just a lot of confused, irrational meandering that relies far too heavily on ineffective booga-booga shots. At least the dog and one of the women make it through to the end. See if desperate

Review – This Is Not a Test

This movie seems like it would be upsetting, as the upshot is that it’s stupid to try to survive a nuclear attack. Being stranded together on a desert highway during a red alert seems to bring out the worst in people, and their personal weaknesses combined with their desperate situation virtually guarantee their demise. On the plus side, if this is what humanity is really like then atomic annihilation would be a real blessing. Particularly offensive is the power-mad cop who decides a woman’s small dog is breathing too much air in their makeshift bomb shelter, so he strangles it to death. This low-budget mess from the 1950s plays like something Rod Serling might have written if some terrible tragedy had left him with the intelligence of a dim-witted five-year-old child. It escaped “avoid at all costs” only by the narrowest of margins. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Earth vs. the Spider

Legendary low-budget producer Bert I. Gordon strikes again. This time around teenagers uncover a giant tarantula in a cave. After the local authorities subdue it using DDT, they drag it back to town. Bad idea, as it turns out it was only stunned and doesn’t wake up in the best of moods. The picture includes a bunch of black and white footage of Carlsbad Caverns, which is a little bit like a silent movie about ballet but is nonetheless interesting to look at. Some of the giant spider matte work is also good at least by the era’s technical standards. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghoulies

So was everybody a badly-dressed jerk back in the 80s? I hadn’t remembered that. Well okay, I remember the bad clothes. What I don’t remember is infestations of crappy little rubber monster puppets. Of course I never inherited a creepy old mansion, and if I had I think I would have made an effort to avoid performing black magic rituals in the basement. Bewitched or not, this guy has nobody to blame but himself. See if desperate

Review – Highlander

I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to actually sit through this whole movie. After all, it was quite popular back when I was just the right age to enjoy it. Even all these years later, the Queen soundtrack took me straight back to the 80s. Christopher Lambert – yes, he was popular back then – stars a member of a band of immortals who must cut each others’ heads off in order to eventually narrow their number down to “the one.” The story is approximately equally divided between the tale of how our hero came to be the way he is and a modern-day final showdown in New York City. Some of the swordfight choreography is cool, but most of the rest of it is dated. Mildly amusing

Review – Arthur and the Invisibles

This was a bit more juvenile than I expected it to be. Of course there’s nothing wrong with a kids movie actually being for kids; indeed, in many ways this was a refreshing break from grown-up-inside-joke pictures such as the Shrek series. But with Luc Besson at the helm and a cast of big-name actors – including your-parents-generation pop stars Madonna and David Bowie – I figured it might throw a few more bones to the adults in the audience. As it is, this is a blend of live action and mediocre animation that may keep the crib lizards quiet for awhile but not much more. Mildly amusing

Review – Snow White: A Tale of Terror

Sigourney Weaver stars as the evil stepmother in this retelling of the classic tale. Though set in Medieval Europe, the sensibilities are strictly 20th century America. For starters, the antagonism between our heroine and the villain starts when the kid has trouble adapting to daddy’s new wife. The dwarves aren’t little people (well, one of them actually is). The handsome prince is a jerk. Indeed, the movie relies heavily on the whole what-new-twist-will-they-add-next? thing for most of its entertainment value. Unfortunately, the result isn’t clever enough to avoid becoming dull. See if desperate

Review – The Beast Within

For an indie horror picture from the early 80s, this could have been worse. A married couple’s car breaks down in the Mississippi backwoods, and while husband is off trying to find a tow, monster comes out of the woods and rapes wife. Years later, the child born from this unholy union starts having problems a bit beyond the normal, adolescent growing pains: killing the neighbors, transforming into a beast, continuing the family sexual assault tradition, that sort of thing. So this thing has a couple of unpleasantly graphic rape scenes. On the other hand, it also has a reasonably good script and solid special effects, at least for the period and budget level. Mildly amusing

Review – Wonderland

This is the movie that Boogie Nights would have been if it had sucked. It sticks closer to the facts of the Wonderland murders and porn star John Holmes’s involvement therein, but ultimately it’s to no avail. The production is full of jittery jump-cuts and other spastic editing tricks, rendering it fit fare only for viewers stoned enough to get a kick out of such nonsense. And that of course raises a question: who exactly is the audience for a stoner-cut movie about how drugs mess up people’s lives? Still, somebody must have wanted to make it, because this is also one of those movies full of celebrities who normally would get more money that a mid-budget production like this could afford. It does settle down a bit toward the end and turns into a half-baked Rashomon thing, but by then it’s a little late. See if desperate

Review – Samurai 2: Duel at Ichijoji Temple

The saga continues, as do the poorly-lit swordfights just like in the first one. Still, even as hard as they are to see, the action sequences are still the best part of what turns out to be a really long hour and 45 minutes. This time around Musashi has no less than three women chasing after him – is this guy supposed to be Japan’s answer to James Bond? – which transforms big chunks of the picture into a soap opera. Samurai-action-wise, our hero embarrasses the members of a swordsmanship school, who decide to assassinate him to prevent him from humiliating their teacher in a public duel. In this episode we also meet Kojiro Sasaki, who will no doubt play a major role in number three. Mildly amusing

Review – Solstice

This is around as close as the Lifetime Channel and I come to crossing paths. The whole ghost-of-a-dead-twin thing might have had some spooky story potential, but here it swiftly turns into a long, tedious, what-does-the-spirit-want-from-us debacle. All the eerie goings-on get wrapped up neatly in the last ten minutes, but by that point it’s hard to muster much caring about the dark secrets of this standard pack of 20-somethings. See if desperate

Review – Mystery on Monster Island

This movie needed way more Tina. I watched this thinking that with Peter Cushing in it that it might be a Hammer or at least Hammer-esque horror picture. No such luck. The biggest mystery here is why this place is called Monster Island. Yeah, it’s got some kind of big, blue, vaguely-dinosaurish thing that puts in a brief appearance. Some guys draped in seaweed drop in. And of course our hero’s ship is destroyed by road-flare-wielding beasts that look like a blend of Barney the Purple Dinosaur and the Sleestak from “Land of the Lost.” Other than these fleeting moments, this is an exceptionally tedious excuse for a low-budget British comedy. The curly-haired protagonist gets stranded on a tropical island, but rather than Brooke Shields he gets a wimpy male dance instructor. Then cannibals show up, introducing an especially offensive racial element. Then there’s the woman in the feathered cape. Then there are the treasure hunters out for … well, you can see where this is going, which is nowhere. Cushing is long gone, but I’d think Terence Stamp might take an interest in buying up all the copies of this to spare himself (and us as well) the humiliation. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – In a Dark Place

I wonder just how many movie adaptations of “Turn of the Screw” have been made over the years. Well, here’s another one. Leelee Sobieski is the new nanny for two peculiar children who live in a haunted house in the country. This version features some creepy sexuality, including so many nearly-nude scenes with Sobieski that they became intrusive after awhile. Though I liked the wintry settings, I found the plot and characters just as dull as the Henry James original. Mildly amusing

Review – Island of the Dead

If nothing else, this picture features one of the grossest horror menaces of all time: clouds of venomous flies (and the maggots they produce all over everything and everyone). And it’s the bad luck of our implausible band of protagonists (including Malcolm McDowall as a Donald-Trump-Rupert-Murdoch asshole) to be stuck with clouds of the things on Hart Island, potter’s field for the great city of New York. The production starts out on a good note with some quiet, low-key build-up. It even appears to be prepared to make some points about the callous treatment of the urban poor. But then in the last half hour or so the production goes all talky, aided by some highly inconsistent behavior by the flies. So great wind-up, but a little weak on the delivery. Mildly amusing

Review – Crash (1996)

I can’t make up my mind. Is this a brilliant exploration of sexual fetishism or just an over-arty piece of porn? With David Cronenberg at the helm, it may well be a bit of both. James Spader plays an idly-wealthy movie producer who gets into a car wreck. While recovering he gets to know a woman (Holly Hunter) who was also in the crash, and she introduces him to an underground group of people who share an art-sex fascination with cars, accidents and injuries. The whole thing is shot with a lethargic, dream-like quality, which Cronenberg has used to good effect in other production but here overdoes until it becomes tedious. Perhaps if watched in small intervals rather than all at once it might be a more pleasant experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Cerberus

Needed way more three-headed dog. The parts of this production that feature the low-rent version of the monster from Greek mythology – not to mention the first Harry Potter movie – were okay. The rest of the picture, however, was a boring tale of crooks trying to find a sword that belonged to Attila the Hun and archaeologists and government agents trying to thwart them. Some kind of burp in the satellite signal cheated me out of the final confrontation between the bad guy and the beast, but unless it was radically more interesting than the rest of the movie then I didn’t miss much. See if desperate

Review – Anacondas: Trail of Blood

Beware Halloween, Friday the 13th and Hellraiser. Apparently even after a series outlives any natural usefulness it might have had, it can still live on with new installments generated by the Sci Fi Channel. In this go-around the giant CGI snake comes with an extra added bonus: it’s been treated with a drug that allows it to regenerate if it’s injured. The stuff must also make it all extra hungry, because it swallows dude after dude and comes right back for more. And with no less than three groups of nitwits wandering around in the woods, it’s a real anaconda smorgasbord. Overall the production is vaguely entertaining in a you-get-what-you-pay-for way. Mildly amusing

Review – Point Break

The problem with this movie – well okay, one of the problems – is that Keanu Reeves is a lot more convincing as a surfer than he is as an FBI agent pretending to be a surfer. The reason for the subterfuge is that the bureau is trying to track down a group of bank robbers who wear ex-president masks while committing their crimes. The trail leads to a group of thrill-seeking surfers led by Patrick Swayze. The result is an expensive blend of adrenaline sports and crime drama. Mildly amusing

Review – Hollow Man 2

The invisible man strikes again. This time the villain (played by Christian Slater’s voice and in a couple of spots by his body as well) is a mercenary rendered transparent by a sinister government conspiracy. They give this assassin a drug to make him invisible, then for some reason they deny him the “buffer” drug that will keep him from developing cancer and/or going insane. Naturally he goes after the only two possible sources for the stuff: the company that made him what he is and the doctor who developed the buffer. The script doesn’t amount to much, the acting is standard but no more, and the direction gets the job done but fails to impress. And though I can guess why they did it, the filmmakers chose to include some completely superfluous nudity. Overall this is neither as clever nor as offensive as the first one. See if desperate

Review – Wall Street

Wow, this thing is preachy even by Oliver Stone standards. Charlie Sheen stars as an ambitious young broker who attaches himself to the apotheosis of the Reagan 80s: mega-dealer Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Of course things take an immediate turn for the Faustian, and before he knows it our hero is ass-deep in insider training, industrial espionage and no end of other soul-destroying nonsense. The slick, high-dollar, morally-bankrupt environment is a real throwback to the decade of its origin. Unfortunately the show gets bogged down by dialogue that consists mostly of people making speeches to one another rather than actually talking. But if you can stand the sermons, this’ll give you at least some idea of what Hollywood thought America was like in the 1980s. Mildly amusing

Review – The Agony and the Ecstasy

If only I’d had this movie back when I was assigned to read Irving Stone’s novel in high school. Charlton Heston stars as Michelangelo in this tale of the artist’s tumultuous relationship with Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), particularly the disputes between the two over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Though Carol Reed directed, this turns out to be a fairly run-of-the-mill epic. Mildly amusing

Review – Boogeyman 3

The formula for number two must have worked too well, because for this outing they went back to the approach from the first one: just string together a long series of booga-booga shots, and don’t worry so much about plot or character development or anything like that. Mistake. See if desperate

Review – End of the Line

Here’s something odd: a low-budget horror movie that actually has half a brain. A group of strangers are stranded in the subway when the apocalypse hits. The phones don’t work. The radio doesn’t work. The television shows nothing but blood. But worst of all, the place is crawling with knife-wielding religious fanatics looking to send everyone to heaven on an accelerated schedule. To be sure, nobody here is going to win a MacArthur grant. But the picture packs a novel premise, a passable script, some clever twists and even a genuine chill or two. Mildly amusing

Review – From Within

The premise has potential: the descendants of a witch murdered by an angry mob put a curse on their small town, causing people to see demons that drive them to commit suicide. Honestly, though, if one’s only two options are fanatical fundamentalist Christianity and some half-baked Wiccan nonsense, perhaps suicide isn’t all that bad an option. Unfortunately the story almost immediately gets Twilighted up as our heroine becomes infatuated with the disheveled outsider son of the witch family. Mildly amusing

Review – Ring of Darkness

And here I thought it was just the fans of boy bands that were mindless zombies. Turns out the band members themselves are also reanimated corpses held together by black magic and heavy makeup. So when the guys decide to eat the lead singer, a replacement has to be found. For some reason they decide to go with a rebellious lad who of course doesn’t take any too well to the undead lifestyle. Though I suppose it was integral to the plot, this picture featured far more boy-band-style music than I’d normally sit through voluntarily. See if desperate

Review – Earth Girls Are Easy

Okay, here’s what we get: three aliens with Crayola-bright fur crash-land their spaceship in Geena Davis’s pool. She takes them to a beauty salon, where a thorough shaving and dye jobs all around reveal that they look just like Jim Carry, Damon Wayans and Jeff Goldblum. Does this review really need to go into any greater depth than that? The high point of the whole picture was when – apropos of nothing – the story was interrupted by the music video for Julie Brown’s “’Cause I’m a Blonde.” See if desperate

Review – Succubus: Hell-Bent

This picture’s heart may be in the right place, but it clearly left its head in its other pants. On the other hand, at least the screenwriter can tell the difference between a succubus and an incubus. An obnoxious rich kid and his “wing man” run afoul of Lilith, a combination of vengeful demon and psycho girlfriend. Between bouts of rough sex with our “hero,” she slaughters any other woman he might be interested in. Overall the picture seems like one of those premium-channel-soft-core pictures, but then the nudity is almost nil so it doesn’t even have that much of an excuse for existing. I want to support horror movies produced and directed by women, but y’all have to meet me half way on this. See if desperate

Review – Riddles of the Sphinx

Heaven help me, I’ve seen so many of these cheap-ass Sci Fi Channel movies that I’m actually beginning to recognize the sets. This particular one happens to be about an ancient CGI monster unleashed by archaeologists. Fortunately for the effects budget, the beast is able to transform itself into an overweight wrestler with bad fake teeth. This isn’t any worse than other pictures of its ilk, but then it isn’t any better either. Mildly amusing

Review – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Though I’ve seen this movie several times, I don’t know if I’ve ever succeeded in staying awake throughout the whole thing. Parts of the picture are really good, but they’re divided by long, laconic stretches during which next to nothing happens. The movie has nice atmosphere, particularly when supported by Ennio Morricone’s legendary score. Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef and Eli Wallach play the title characters, three men in search of a hidden stash of Confederate gold. Mildly amusing

Review – Trekkies 2

Second verse, similar to the first. Denise Crosby once again explores the realms of devoted Star Trek fans. This time around the production values are a bit cheaper, no doubt to make room in the budget for trips to Europe, Australia and Brazil in search of the international Trek phenomenon. Frankly, they could have saved the money. The overseas footage was largely devoted to conventions, which don’t look much different in Italy and Germany than they do here. The crew also revisits some of the folks from the first one and unearths a few new ones. Overall this one seems more affectionate than the last one. I wonder if Crosby took some heat from the fan base after the first one made them look a little crazy. Though most of them look just as nuts, the spin is less freak show and more at-least-they’re-happy-and-don’t-hurt-anyone. Mildly amusing

Review – Magic

I remember when I was a kid (12 at the time) I was really spooked by the ad for this movie. If only the picture itself had been as eerie. Anthony Hopkins stars as a professional ventriloquist, and do I even have to tell you that he has a psycho dissociative disorder thing going with his dummy? Fleeing the pressures of show business, he returns to his old home town hoping to rekindle a romance with his old high school crush (Ann-Margret). She’s stuck in a loveless marriage. His agent wants him to get professional help. And so the soap opera goes. Some of Hopkins’s exchanges with the dummy are bush leagues creepy, but for the most part this is just dull. Mildly amusing

Review – The Book of Beasts

I need to set up a macro that will automatically type “Typical Sci Fi Channel fare.” Lame story, bad acting, cheap effects, 90 minutes worth of harmless brain candy. This time around it’s the children of the original Camelot crew – giving the production a Medieval Muppet Babies quality – up against Mordred and a magic book that makes beasts appear. So it isn't just a clever name. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil and Daniel Webster

Poor Jabez Stone. When his contract with the devil comes due, he wants out of it in the worst way. Lucky for him he’s acquainted with the great lawyer Daniel Webster. This is a big bucket of 1941: it’s overdramatized and often downright silly. Still, it’s refreshing to see a movie that seeks to generate chills – and sometimes even succeeds – using nothing but script, acting, and some basic lighting and editing tricks. Walter Huston does a particularly fine job as Mr. Scratch, and Simone Simon does a nice turn as his seductive henchperson. Mildly amusing

Review – Forbidden Warrior

Usually one must turn to the Sci Fi Channel for productions of this quality, though I think I actually recorded it off one of the Showtimes. Regardless of venue, here we have yet another Asian-flavored sword and sorcery movie. A young woman – the “chosen one” – is taught martial arts by a blind magician while the two sons of a ruthless warlord … well, I think you can see where this is going. If you like this sort of thing, you’ve come to the right place. Mildly amusing