Abandoned – Dragon Day

I had hopes that this prepper fantasy would be unintentionally funny. Perhaps if I’d seen it back in 2013 I might have walked away with a different impression (or at least been able to finish watching it). But after years of watching this racist insanity hold power in this country (with no end in sight), it was more than I could take.

Review – The Killer Eye

Shit slinger David DeCoteau has amassed quite a collection of aliases throughout his career. In this effort from 1999 – one of six he directed that year, according to IMDb – he goes by Richard Chasen. The story – to the extent that there even is one – is about a scientist who allows an eyeball monster to cross over from the eighth dimension and have vague, softcore sex with a handful of dumb people. Given how thoroughly the niche market for this sort of thing has been eclipsed by easily-available porn on the internet (particularly Japanese tentacle stuff), this movie is likely to appeal only to a tiny group of viewers who were at just the right stage of puberty when it first hit video decades ago and are now for some reason nostalgic about the experience. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Hacksaw Ridge

Mel Gibson serves up an epic version of a story that actually deserves telling. Army Medic Desmond Doss won the Medal of Honor for his service in the Battle of Okinawa, during which he saved 75 men who were too wounded to retreat from an enemy attack. The first half of the movie was a typical Hollywood mix of semi-accurate history and personal sentiment about Doss’s struggles to make it through basic training without violating his religious beliefs that prohibited him from touching weapons. But once the battle commences, the story improves considerably. Mildly amusing

Review – Hellarious

For the last five minutes or so I’ve been trying to come up with a Hell-related pun more apt than the title. No luck, so I’ll cut straight to the review. Here we have seven mostly terrible attempts at horror humor. The first story was somewhat amusing (and reminded me of a joke from Matinee). But the rest fell flat for one reason or another. See if desperate

Review – 8-Bit Christmas

I’d appraise this at around a quarter of the title’s stated value. Imagine A Christmas Story rewritten as a Nintendo ad, and you’ve got the gist of all but the last five minutes of this movie. And not only was the twist at the end syrupy sweet and more than a little implausible (even in the realm of Christmas miracles), but it also for no obvious reason redeemed a character who spent the rest of the movie being an asshole. The contrast provides an all too accurate comparison between the naive optimism of the early 1980s and the cynical stupidity of 2021’s retro version. See if desperate

Review – Crazy, Not Insane

In law school I took a class in mental illness and the law, the often-awkward relationship between an often-inexact science and a system that demands precise proof. The fact that there was a whole class on the subject demonstrates the level of complexity and uncertainty involved. The career of Dorothy Otnow Lewis, the subject of this documentary, proves to be a perfect case in point. Lewis advocated for the unnecessarily-revolutionary noting that many violent criminals are mentally ill, often due to physical and mental abuse and trauma from their childhoods. But of course the question of using mental illness as a defense in a criminal prosecution is a tricky business, especially when a controversial diagnosis such as Dissociative Identity Disorder enters the debate. Thus Lewis and her work make an interesting subject. Mildly amusing

Review – The Wind

This is one of those slow-paced, subtle horror movies you kinda need to be in the mood for before you watch it. However, if the mood strikes you, this is a good scratch for the itch. Somewhere in the open frontier of the late 19th century, a woman, her husband and their neighbors find themselves beset by an amorphous evil. Is there something supernaturally wrong with the land where they live, or has the protagonist been driven insane by isolation coupled with tales of demons? Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because the result is the same either way. Though this isn’t a movie for fans of jump scares and gore, it rewards viewers who have the patience to let it unfold. Mildly amusing

Review – For All Mankind

A ton of NASA footage is edited together to tell the story of the Apollo space program. The structure follows a typical voyage from the Earth to the Moon and back, assuming that such trips could ever be considered typical. That’s an advantage because it helps turn the trips into a single, easily-followed story. But other than famous moments such as Apollo 11 and 13, it’s often hard to tell which moments come from which missions (unless you’re better than I am at telling one crew-cut white guy from another). Mildly amusing

Review – A Return to Salem’s Lot

Larry Cohen conducts a master class in how not to make a movie. Start by attempting to make a sequel to a production people like, virtually guaranteeing that your work will be found wanting in comparison. Then write a script that makes no sense, moving awkwardly from scene to scene without logic or purpose. Cast Michael Moriarty in the lead so he can demonstrate his aplomb for flat, indifferent delivery of bad dialogue. Then heap an extra measure of disappointment on the audience by putting the vampire from the original in the movie’s poster despite the fact that he appears nowhere in this production (a bit of shameful chicanery continued by HBO for promotional materials on its streaming service). Dull. Not scary. Not even bad enough to be funny. Aside from giving 12-year-old Tara Reid her big screen debut, this movie serves no function at all. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan

Serial rapist Billy Milligan’s successful use of the insanity defense raises more than one docuseries-worthy question. Is Dissociative Identity Disorder a real thing, and if so how does it differ from Hollywood’s version of people with multiple personalities? Can it be used to establish the legal grounds for an insanity plea? And in this particular case, did Milligan authentically have DID, or was he a clever sociopath pulling a con? As moot as these questions may objectively be, they become downright irrelevant once they’re buried under a heap of terrible filmmaking. Director Olivier Megaton serves up a fidgety mess of jump cuts, heavy filter work and ominous soundtrack. He arranges interviews with key subjects ranging from attorneys to psychiatrists to journalists to family members (Milligan’s, not his victims’). But then he films them in peculiar, random locations, such as abandoned prisons, empty churches and bank vaults. The result is consistent with the Netflix aesthetic, which unfortunately makes it an unpleasant viewing experience. See if desperate

Review – Gotti

So this is what you get when you let the Gotti family decide what kind of movie to make about the Dapper Don and his “reformed” son. During the first act the story hops around in the timeline so often that I had to stop and read the Wikipedia page on John Gotti just to follow what was going on. Even when it settles down and tells a coherent story, the picture it paints is of a protagonist with a bad temper but a good heart. Of course to get to that viewpoint the production has to side step an epic amount of drug dealing, witness intimidation, jury tampering, murder, and so on and so on. The end product – particularly John Travolta’s performance in the lead – sits in that awful valley between “good” and “so bad it’s funny.” See if desperate

Review – They Shall Not Grow Old

The Imperial War Museum and the BBC both gave Peter Jackson unlimited access to their archives of materials about World War One, and he achieved two results. He found some incredible film records of the war, particularly life in the trenches. But then he “modernizes” it all, cropping it to a new aspect ratio, overdubbing it with what people appear to be saying, and colorizing it. I admit I’ve been an opponent of colorization since it first became an issue back in the 1980s, but it’s a particularly terrible job here. For example, all the corpses have been painted pale blue. The process takes one of history’s most epic tragedies and turns it into a bad comic book. The source footage would have made an amazing movie, but the project is undone by the director’s tinkering. Mildly amusing

Review – American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally

Axis Sally, guess you better slow your Axis down. Actually if she’d rid herself of the whole Nazi thing four years earlier, Mildred Gillars wouldn’t have found herself on trial for treason after the war. This fictionalized version of her life and prosecution takes a sympathetic view of its subject. Despite that (or maybe because of it), the tale proves less than heart-warming. Mildly amusing

Review – The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

I originally saw this as The Godfather Part III when it first came out, but apparently it was so long ago that I don’t have a review for it. So this new re-edit by master re-editor Francis Ford Coppola gave me a good excuse to re-watch and share my thoughts. This is by far the dumbest, sappiest episode of the trilogy, a pale shadow of its predecessors. Sure, you get a little of the high-level intrigue that helped make the second one such a masterpiece, but even here it’s mostly financial wheeling and dealing rather than all the cool Cuba conspiracy stuff. In any event, even a better batch of mob doings wouldn’t justify the intolerable wallow in the Michael-Corleone-gettin’-old crap. And that’s not even the worst part of the film; that distinction belongs to the icky love affair between the protagonist’s daughter (played by the director’s daughter, who is much more talented behind the camera than she is in front of it) and her first cousin (fortunately played by Andy Garcia rather than Nicolas Cage). Minor spoiler: it’s funny that the new title mentions a death that occurred on screen in the original edit but doesn’t happen at all in the new cut. See if desperate

Review – Malignant

Here we have further proof – as if it was needed or even wanted – that “borrowing” plot elements from a bunch of old movies doesn’t make a good new movie. The Dark Half and Basket Case are the most obvious donors, but horror movie fans will notice many other familiar moments. Fans of James Wan’s directing style will find enough common ground between this and his other efforts to justify the experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Bill and Ted Face the Music

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are getting too old for this. Or I’m getting too old for this. Or both. This second unnecessary sequel follows the formula of the first two, bringing in the title duo’s daughters for any shenanigans their dads can’t plausibly indulge. If you’ve been pining away for more plotless, witless, time-traveling situation comedy sprinkled with sub-references, pine no longer. See if desperate

Review – A Quiet Place 2

If you liked the first one, odds are you’ll enjoy this one as well. I enjoyed the prequel at the beginning, because any time society falls apart in a movie I like to see how it came about. But even there the audience has to suspend a fair amount of disbelief in order to go with the monster flow. This one includes some familiar new faces in addition to the cast from the original. And of course it has terrifying-yet-sound-sensitive beasts aplenty in a constant parade of alien menace. Mildly amusing

Review – Hangman

At this point in his career, Al Pacino has become a bad Al Pacino impersonator. Without his wretched scenery chewing, this might have been an average psycho-killer-with-a-gimmick movie pitting Karl Urban against a murderer who prefers nooses and leaves missing letter clues. See if desperate

Review – The Empty Man

Never have I seen a movie drop so precipitously in quality from the beginning to the end. The opening act was purely awesome, cerebral and visceral and genuinely scary. I assumed this would be yet another dumb take on the Slender Man thing, so I started actually paying attention to it when it turned out to be something much better. When the main story commences, it sustains that wonderful sense of eerie, undefined menace. The plot begins to meander around midway through, but it still packed enough frightening moments to keep things moving. Oh but then the goddamn end. It was like they used everything they had on the set-up, couldn’t come up with a punch line and instead unleashed the shaggy dogs. What a disappointment. Mildly amusing

Review – The Mortuary Collection

This certainly isn’t the best horror anthology I’ve ever seen, but it’s far from the worst. Of course at this point I’m grateful for anything in this realm that’s an actual, intentional movie rather than a weakly-packaged Youtube playlist. Yeah, the stories are a little on the dumb side. But the production values were reasonably good, the acting was fine, and the bracket had a fun twist at the end. Mildly amusing

Review – Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Criticizing Scientology may be a practice of picking low-hanging fruit, but it’s a task that needs doing. This documentary provides a good introduction to the cult, covering its bizarre founder, questionable financial practices and abusive recruiting and retention tactics. If you don’t know much about the subject, this is a good place to start learning. Mildly amusing

Review – Leaving Neverland

Recently I was putting together a playlist of some favorite music from the 80s, and I decided that in good conscience I couldn’t put a Michael Jackson song on the list without first taking a look at this HBO documentary about two boys Jackson molested. So now “Man in the Mirror” isn’t on the playlist anymore. Worth seeing

Review – Baby God

Thanks to 23 and Me, a couple of years ago my family discovered that we had a relative none of us knew about. Though finding a previously-unknown cousin was a pleasant experience, I can’t imagine how unpleasant it was for the people in this documentary to learn that they had dozens of brothers and sisters. Their moms were all treated for infertility by Dr. Quincy Fortier, who used his own semen to impregnate them. This documentary’s search for answers paints a chilling picture of a once-respected physician who turned out to be a calculating psychopath. Mildly amusing

Review – I Love You, Now Die

After 18-year-old Conrad Roy killed himself via carbon monoxide poisoning, investigators discovered that his 17-year-old online girlfriend, Michelle Carter, sent him a series of texts encouraging him to commit suicide. She ended up convicted of involuntary manslaughter primarily based on the text she sent encouraging him to get back into his exhaust-filled truck after he attempted to abandon his suicide scheme. The picture that emerges in this documentary is a portrait of a boy living a sad life with an abusive parent and a girl who lacked a firm grip on reality (a condition not unusual among teenagers). Though there’s nothing remarkable about the filmmaking, the movie tells an interesting tale. Mildly amusing

Review – The Suicide Squad

The fight sequence choreography and editing are excellent, and Margot Robbie is in it. I expect that’s all most fans of this corner of the DC Extended Universe are here for. But this entry is dark and cruel, even for the DCEU. The cast includes several actors I’ve liked in other movies, but here I just couldn’t get past the story’s profound mean streak, especially the wanton, unnecessary cruelty to animals. See if desperate

Review – Toxic Shark

I’ve actually started feeling sorry for the actors in Syfy shark movies. They take tons of theatre classes, spend time on the stage performing in everything from serious dramas to musicals, move to California, work service industry jobs and wait for their big breaks. And then comes the day when they get to call home and say, “Mom, I got a job! I’m in a movie about chemically contaminated sharks that have things on their heads that shoot toxic goo on people. So my character is either going to get eaten or turned into a 28-Days-Later-style goo zombie.” But take heart, aspiring thespians. Celebrities from Jennifer Aniston to Renee Zellweger got their starts making sludge like this. See if desperate

Review – Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

The second Nightmare on Elm Street movie isn’t one I’ve given a lot of thought to. I’ve seen it a couple of times, but it isn’t a personal fave. However, I found this documentary about its star fascinating. Mark Patton was a young gay actor trying to establish a career in the middle of the AIDS panic, and starring in a horror movie that explored homosexual themes turned out to be a bad move. Naturally a lot of the story is tragic stuff, but it’s a good portrait of the bigotry in the movie industry at the time. Worth seeing

Review – Here Comes Hell

I’ve slammed ever so many low budget horror movies with the observation that the people who made them seemed to have never seen a movie before. So at least this black and white, 4:3 aspect ratio production suggests that the filmmakers are at least aware that movies existed before 1950. Unfortunately the rest of the crap elements are still present, particularly the meandering script and community playhouse acting. The story blows half of its run time – literally – on setup. And from there it goes Evil Dead for a little while before returning to dull, juvenile horror comedy. See if desperate

Review – Fade to Black

This movie comes from the faraway age of the early 80s, when violent stalkers were new and interesting rather than filler for a slow news day with no riots or mass shootings. Dennis Christopher is iconic as Eric Binford, a movie nerd pushed into a psychotic killing spree by the usual blend of bullying and unrequited love. The production is awkward in an early 80s way, and it’s fun to count the plot points that would have played differently in the age of home video and cell phones. Overall this is just creepy enough to be entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – The Call

Clearly the producers hope that prominent roles for horror movie staples Lin Shaye and Tobin Bell will be enough to carry this dull-witted parade of supernatural revenge clichés. Once again a movie made in the 2020s tries and fails to recapture the look and feel of 1980s genre pictures. See if desperate

Review – Horsehead

I got lured into this one by the preview, which featured a monster with an obvious Fuseli reference. They made good use of it early on, but it swiftly became clear that the overall movie was going to be a long series of dream sequences with little grounding in a plot. This might have made a good short or maybe a music video, but at feature length it was like watching a magic show put on by a magician who knows one or two tricks and keeps doing them over and over for an hour and a half. See if desperate

Review – Black Christmas

It’s hard to believe this was directed by the same guy who made Murder by Decree and A Christmas Story. In Bob Clark’s partial defense, this is one of his earlier efforts, back when he clearly had a lot to learn about filmmaking. If you’re trying to make it through a history of the slasher genre, you’ll have to sit through this early entry in the set. But be prepared for a thoroughly annoying experience. See if desperate

Review – Major Grom: Plague Doctor

I wouldn’t have much patience for such a relentless parade of clichés from a Hollywood production, but there’s something about seeing them in a Russian movie that makes them quaint if not exactly clever. A rogue cop with his own brand of justice goes after a vigilante in a plague doctor mask. They spent enough money making this to keep things entertaining despite the silly story. Mildly amusing

Review – Nightmare Cinema

I appreciated one thing about this anthology set: characters from the individual stories appeared in the bracket. Lately I’ve seen enough anthologies that turned out to be little more than Youtube shorts cobbled together on the cheap. At least this wasn’t that. The chapters were unmemorable, and I could have done without Mickey Rourke in the wrap-around. But I’ve seen worse. Mildly amusing

Review – Luca

Disney once again dives into the realm of merpeople who long to live on land. As with some previous Pixar productions, this movie does a better job of showing off what they can do with digital animation rather than bothering to tell much of a story. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil Below

I want to like subterranean horror movies. Unfortunately most of them seem to turn out like this. After spending the bulk of their budget on Will Patton and smoke bombs, the folks who put this indie together apparently didn’t have much left for a script. See if desperate

Review – Greenland

Mega disaster movies can go one of two ways. They can dish up tons of impressive, effects-intensive scenes of massive destruction. Or they can leave the fun stuff out and concentrate on a relentless parade of characters getting in and out of tense situations, each more implausible than the last. I’ll let my rating indicate which route this one chose. See if desperate

Review – Superdeep

Superlong and superhardtofollow. I suspect that there may have been some cultural stuff that didn’t translate between Russian and English. Even so, I’m not sure that even in the original language this would have been anything besides a bizarre underground twist on Alien. Which is a shame, really, because the “Well to Hell” hoax about the Kola Superdeep Borehole might have made a better movie. See if desperate

Review – Darkest Hour

After a long career of putting his personal touches on familiar characters, Gary Oldman finally got his Oscar for this one. I freely concede the possibility that someone who likes Winston Churchill more than I do would have found this more entertaining than I did. Mildly amusing

Review – All the Way

Bryan Cranston does a solid job playing Lyndon Johnson, not that mastering a walking wad of clichés like LBJ is exactly the height of the thespian craft. And that’s a shame, because the politics and emotions surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act called out for an exploration of Johnson’s nuances rather than his cartoonish bombast. With such a stellar cast, a better movie might have been made. Mildly amusing

Review – The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

The Conjuring series seems to be paralleling the zeitgeist of the Republican Party. When the first one came out in 2013, its standard horror movie approach coincided with the final days of the GOP as a mainstream political party. By the time the second one rolled around in 2016, movie and party both had taken a hard turn into the realm of fanatical self-righteousness. And now in 2021 we’ve got a Qanon-esque demonic conspiracy that’s equal parts elaborate, nonsensical and pointless. The Warrens even use their flim-flam as a legal argument, which in the real world was soundly and justly rejected by the court. How much more Trumpian can they get? I like a good demonic possession as much as the next horror movie fan, but this series is taking things to places where it just isn’t fun anymore. See if desperate

Review – Thunder Force

For the most part we’ve got yet another quirky-dumb Melissa McCarthy comedy, this time about a pair of mis-matched best friends who gain superpowers and battle villains who are trying to take over Chicago. But a couple of points stood out. I was genuinely awestruck that they’d ask Octavia Spencer to play a Black woman whose super power was invisibility and then show absolutely no self-awareness about it. And I had to check the trivia notes to find out how they faked the scenes where characters eat raw chicken just so I could sleep at night. See if desperate

Review – Blood Vessel

There’s the tiniest germ of a good concept here: among the art treasures looted by the Nazis was a pair of ornate coffins containing vampires. Sadly, all the potential that had to weave into an entertaining story is squandered by the decision to stash them in the cargo hold of a deserted ship that happens to end up boarded by the occupants of a life raft. Predictably enough, this hodgepodge of Allied soldiers and sailors spend more time bickering with each other than they devote to doing anything practical to save their own lives. Even the title is a dumb pun. See if desperate

Review – Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula

I’m not sure what – if any – actual connection this South Korean zombie apocalypse picture has with Train to Busan other than name and theme. But if it’s a follow-up, it’s a worthy one. It’s sort of a Dawn of the Dead to the first one’s Night of the Living Dead, with the story starting four years after the start of the zombie plague and the remaining population of South Korea in full survival mode. Action and gore abounds as a small group of smugglers try to get a truck full of American money past a vicious gang and a few million zombies. The plot takes some intriguing twists, which adds nicely to the well-crafted scares and chase scenes. Worth seeing

Review – For We Are Many

Hard to dispute the title’s thesis, as 13 bad little stories are definitely “many.” And they aren’t all bad. But most of them are amateurish, silly, even dull. The subject at hand is demons, and the promo paragraph’s promise of an international team effort turns out to be mostly from the UK and USA. See if desperate

Review – Geostorm

Though I appreciated all the elaborate scenes of extinction-level destruction, the story left me cold. I need something a little more plausible. Earth being threatened by asteroids or some other within-the-realm-of-possibility menace makes the plot intriguing. But by the time we’ve gone through a series of ridiculous twists about weather manipulation satellites and zero gravity action sequences, it’s just not as much fun. Mildly amusing

Review – Shutter (2004)

I’m fond of those rare moments when folks making a horror movie can start with a good concept and then do something good with it. The theme here is spirit photography, a subject with great potential to either provide genuine scares or descend into cliché-ridden nonsense. Fortunately the folks who made this Thai production chose the first path. To be sure, parts of this movie are hard to watch (particularly the sexual assault). But overall this supernatural revenge picture is an impressive assembly of coherent story, good acting and some genuine creepiness. Worth seeing

Review – The Final Wish

If the folks responsible for this were bakers instead of filmmakers, they’d be serving their customers bowls of flour, milk and sugar rather than cookies. The ingredients are here. Lin Shaye. Tony Todd. The umpty thousandth piece of inherited junk that turns out to be a monkey’s paw. They just aren’t combined in any kind of interesting or entertaining way. If I’m down to my final wish, this one’s headed to the cornfield. See if desperate

Review – Black Mountain Side

I originally took an interest in this movie after a member of The Thing’s fan group on Facebook sang its praises. Further, the plot summaries promised that the horror would stem from the discovery of ruins more ancient than humanity itself, which of course conjured a tantalizing vision of Lovecraftian adjectives. Instead the archaeological element is a boxy hunk of junk that the filmmakers wisely opt to avoid showing in any detail. And the only real points in common with John Carpenter’s masterpiece are an all-male cast and a cold setting. Beyond that this is a tangle of fragmentary plot threads that aren’t woven together with any skill. Added demerit: cat death. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Greyhound

Aside from a girl-back-home flashback at the beginning and occasional futile efforts by the all-Black galley crew to serve the captain breakfast, this movie is non-stop action. And strangely for a war movie, that’s actually a shame. A faithful recreation of the Battle of the Atlantic would probably be both too boring and too terrifying for a Tom Hanks vehicle, but I was hoping for something a little less like spending two hours watching someone playing a naval combat game on Twitch. The movie would have been just fine with more historically accurate battle scenes, with the ships farther apart and no U-boat commanders taunting their prey over the radio. I enjoyed the effects but otherwise didn’t get much from the storytelling. Mildly amusing

Review – Rabid (2019)

This started out looking like a loving tribute to the original. Though clearly a creature of the 21st century, it had some of Cronenberg’s look and feel to it. Alas, it swiftly descended into the realm of cheap, unnecessary remake. See if desperate

Review – Brahms: The Boy 2

I actually liked this one better than the first one. It’s more of a straight supernatural tale, so it spends much less time on what’s-really-going-on plot twists. To be sure, this isn’t a rewarding experience. But it isn’t a demanding one either. Mildly amusing

Review – Class Action Park

The folks who made this documentary have a truly excellent sense of how to tell an emotional story. The story of Action Park – a popular attraction in New Jersey back in the 1980s – begins by diving right into the sheer craziness of an entire amusement park designed not by safety-conscious engineers but by adults and teens possessed by a spirit of “wouldn’t it be cool if?” The sheer absurdity of this exercise in anarchy is hysterical; more than once I had to stop the movie so I could let my laughter die down and regain control of my breathing. But then toward the end we get a grim reminder of the serious and permanent damage done to many park visitors as well as the arrogant refusal of the park’s owner to take any kind of responsibility for the suffering he caused. Buy the movie