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