Review – Doctor Sleep

Here’s a historic moment in the horror genre: a black female protagonist and a cat both live to the end of the movie. Overall this proves to be a worthy sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. The villains in particular are some of the most evil characters I’ve ever seen. The story is good and the production values high. Worth seeing

Review – Fail Safe (2000)

The 1964 Cold War classic gets a retro revamp more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union. Recorded in black and white and performed live for broadcast, this production was designed to mimic the look and feel of televised dramas from the 50s and 60s. They even got Walter Cronkite to narrate. The result works reasonably well, thanks in no small part to a cast of familiar faces. Worth seeing

Review – Galaxy of Horrors

An astronaut trapped in cryogenic suspension finds out the hard way what happens when you type “sci fi horror” into a Youtube search and then leave it on autoplay. See if desperate

Review – Da 5 Bloods

I found myself strangely disappointed by this movie. That might be because as soon as I heard that Spike Lee was making a movie about Black soldiers in Vietnam my imagination pictured something so good that no actual picture could live up to it. A cast full of talented actors further raised my expectations. The result wasn’t a terrible movie. But the story was unfocused until it settled into patterns familiar to anyone who’s ever seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Overall not bad, but I expected better. Mildly amusing

Review – Ready or Not

The Most Dangerous Game gets a honeymoon twist. New bride Grace (Samara Weaving) learns that in order to gain acceptance from her new in-laws, she’ll have to survive an evening of their attempts to murder her. Though not exactly clever, the story keeps moving well enough to keep things from getting dull. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – Child’s Play (2019)

I love cats in general and orange cats in particular. So six minutes in when the family’s pet made its first appearance, I ran scrambling to the content advisory list on IMDb. Nope. Oh so much nope.

Review – The Boys in Company C

So this is what Full Metal Jacket might have been like if it had been directed by the guy who made Superman IV. In fairness, this one came out before Kubrick’s, so at least it isn’t a ripoff. Nor is it a terrible movie. Some of the Vietnam War clichés might even be forgiven because back in 1978 they weren’t clichés yet. However, the picture suffers from technical defects and script problems, including a general lack of direction and such a frequent use of the phrase “body count” that if you tried turning it into a drinking game your body would join the count. Mildly amusing

Review – Aquaman

When I was a kid, I thought being able to breathe underwater (like really breathe, not just wear scuba gear for awhile) would be the best superpower ever. Even as an adult, I wouldn’t turn down the offer. So I’m a little surprised Aquaman never floated anywhere near the top of my list of superheroes. Maybe if his Saturday morning Superfriends incarnation had as much panache as Jason Momoa brings to the role, it might have been a different story. The hero’s grumpy snark aside, this is a standard superhero movie with plenty of the genre’s standbys: action-packed story, flashy effects, elaborate stunt work and so on. The only moment of real cringe was the casting of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Manta (because getting a Black guy to play a criminal named Black Manta …). Mildly amusing

Review – Lights Out

This movie’s plot description sounded so much like Darkness Falls that I had to watch at least a few minutes of it just to be sure I hadn’t seen it already. Turns out it isn’t literally the same story, though it has a lot of similarities. Director David Sandberg expands his chilling little short subject into a feature-length tale, and though the longer version isn’t as scary, it still works reasonably well. Mildly amusing

Review – Joker

I watched this seriously annoying movie when I wasn’t in the mood to be seriously annoyed, and that interfered with my ability to understand how it ever managed to be as popular as it was. In fairness, it does get better around 40 minutes in once the antihero is firmly established as a mentally ill ne’er do well. When he finally starts fighting back, however, the plot becomes more engaging. Joaquin Phoenix spends more time making a serious Oscar bid than playing his role, but otherwise it’s an entertaining piece of moviemaking. If nothing else, it was novel to actually be grateful when Thomas Wayne gets killed. Mildly amusing

Review – Rio

Buried somewhere in here is a message about the evils of the illegal international trade in exotic animals. But it gets largely buried under romcom and prison escape clichés. A rare blue macaw so domesticated he can’t even fly gets sent to Brazil to participate in a breeding program to save his species. When his intended mate would rather return to the wild than procreate, high jinks ensue. Overall this packed about as much entertainment value as its own Angry Birds game app adaptation. Mildly amusing

Review – Knives Out

I can’t claim to know enough about murder mysteries to be able to say for certain whether this works as an actual mystery, a mystery parody, both or neither. But I’m confident that I had fun watching it. Daniel Craig’s Southern drawl is so terrible it’s hard to picture it as anything other than British revenge for Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins. But the rest of the cast does a fine job playing their parts in this tale of the squabbling heirs of a murdered patriarch. Mildly amusing

Review – The Eugenics Crusade

Anyone who thinks Hitler and his cronies invented this shit seriously needs to watch this documentary. It’s a chilling portrait of the rise and fall of the eugenics movement in the United States. Nor does it let us get away with the comforting lie that we learned our lesson in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Germany. Forced sterilization laws remain on the books in many states, and rhetoric about immigrants corrupting the gene pool have obvious parallels in current right wing rhetoric. Worth seeing

Review – Door in the Woods

If you found a chain-wrapped door standing in the middle of nowhere, how likely would you be to think, “Hey, I should grab that ratty-looking thing and install it in my house”? Even if you’d never seen a single horror movie in your entire life, it still just seems like a bad idea. Which of course it turns out to be. I liked the casting of CJ Jones as the family’s personal psychic and helper character. But beyond that the wise decisions are few and far between. The cast spends a considerable chunk of the third act clustered around a table in the woods yapping about what kind of deal they can cut with an evil spirit in order to get their kidnapped child back. And then the demonic presence (or whatever the hell it is) turns out to be named “Empusa.” That started a debate in the audience about whether that sounded more like the name of a small town in western Kansas (welcome to Empusa, population 341), a car model (drive the revolutionary new Subaru Empusa) or a prescription medication (do not take Empusa if you are allergic to Empusa or any of Empusa’s ingredients). See if desperate

Review – The Quiet Ones

After sitting through this effort from Hammer, i felt the need to go back and watch a couple of old pictures from the (allegedly) same studio just to remind myself that they used to make movies that didn’t suck. Apparently the mighty art fallen into dismal little bits of nonsense about psychology academics tormenting a girl who can supposedly conjure a ghost exclusively using the power of her mind. For what it’s worth, saying this is based on the real-life “Philip experiments” is a little like saying Transformers is based on the work of Alan Turing. See if desperate

Review – The Command

The Kursk disaster would have been bad enough if it simply involved a nuclear sub sinking in the Barents Sea. But as this docu-drama observes, loss of life was caused as much by Russian Navy bureaucracy as by the explosion that first damaged the sub. Thus the story here is less about the dangerous lives of sub crews and more about an incompetent government bungling rescue operations and lying to the men’s families. Mildly amusing

Review – The Rocketeer

This should have been better than it was. The graphic novel upon which it was based supplied a perfectly usable story. And Disney should have been better equipped than any other studio to tell a nostalgic story reminiscent of adventure pulp serials from the 1930s. But somehow it just never manages to get off the ground. Mildly amusing

Review – The Vatican Tapes

This starts out as a run-of-the-mill exorcism movie. Apropos of nothing, a young woman finds herself possessed by an evil spirit. As long as the story stays in that lane, it’s an acceptable entry in the sub genre. But then toward the end the plot takes a considerably more apocalyptic turn, either making it more interesting or just running it off the rails, depending on your point of view. See if desperate

Review – Ad Astra

Apocalypse Now in outer space. Literally. Brad Pitt turns in a flat, Ryan-Gosling-esque performance as a man sent to Neptune to put a stop to the solar-system-threatening antics of his insane father (Tommy Lee Jones). Before we’re done, we get moon pirates, space monkeys and Donald Sutherland (not necessarily in that order). Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

The title comes from the Florida trial judge’s description of this picture’s subject, Ted Bundy. Apt as it is, it’s a strange starting point for the approach taken to the telling of his tale. From the perspective of his long-term girlfriend, Bundy comes across less as a vicious murderer and more as a crappy boyfriend, stalker-y but otherwise just a garden variety jerk. Zac Efron looks and plays the part well. Mildly amusing

Review – Our House

You can tell you came from the 80s if you immediately want to follow the title with “in the middle of our street.” And you can tell you’re an indie-film-loving hipster if you like this movie. The story begins with a Tesla-esque attempt to invent wireless household current. Sadly for our already-sad orphans, the experiment 1. doesn’t light lightbulbs and 2. awakens evil spirits in their house. The cast isn’t bad, but they’re wasted on a lackluster script. See if desperate

Review – The Good Dinosaur

This is one of the most beautiful animation showreels I’ve ever seen. The visuals – from the landscapes down to the tiny details – are remarkable feats of CGI. Unfortunately the story and characters are by no means the equal of the images. The classic Disney plot elements – dead parent, hero’s journey, and so on – are all here. They just aren’t used to any particular effect other than loosely stringing together a series of elaborately-constructed scenes. Mildly amusing