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