Review - The Feeding

In the first five minutes a werewolf kills two redneck hunters who are out jack-lighting deer. After that things predictably go straight downhill. Law enforcement is hunting the beast. Unsuspecting college students are out camping in the woods. You can see where this is going without sitting through it until it gets there. The budget is low, which doesn’t make too much difference except where the creature itself is concerned. A movie of this quality can get by with bad acting and a useless script, but if the menacing monster looks like two pancakes with teeth surrounded by a big mat of leftover muppet fur, well, let’s say it sort of kills any chance of a successful suspension of disbelief. Clearly the director is aware of the problem, because almost all of the werewolf’s appearances are shot (or later edited) with thick color and filter work that serves no apparent purpose beyond hiding the weakness of the special effects. Also, jumps in the plot of the copy I saw on pay-per-view left me wondering if the editing was really that bad or if semi-explicit sex scenes were being clipped out. See if desperate

Review – Trilogy of Terror 2

Lysette Anthony stars in all three of the vignettes, which means she enjoys the distinction of being menaced by giant rats, a boy back from the dead, and of course the redux of the ever-popular Zuni Warrior Fetish Doll. I guess I’ve seen worse horror anthology movies, but overall this plays like three episodes of Tales from the Crypt only with fewer boob shots. Mildly amusing

Review – Mr. 3000

The baseball parts of this movie aren’t nearly as bad as I thought they were going to be. If only they hadn’t filled so much of the total screen time with, well, filler. Bernie Mac stars as a power hitter who makes it to 3000 hits and then retires right in the middle of a pennant race, displaying a distinctly Barry-Bonds-ish disregard for anything beyond his own personal success. Then it turns out that the record books are wrong and that he actually retired three hits short of the mark. As the shortfall – plus his abrasive personality – are keeping him out of Cooperstown, back he goes to play for the Brewers once more in hopes of getting the hits he needs. The comeback process humanizes the guy, which makes for a reasonably entertaining baseball flick. If only they hadn’t felt the need to stir in a bunch of boring nonsense with a love interest and then make it a significant part of the movie. If you’re into the cliché-ridden realm of the baseball movie, this is a passable specimen. But keep a finger on the fast forward button, and fire away whenever Angela Bassett shows up. Never have I seen her talent so badly squandered. Mildly amusing

Review – Point of No Return

La Femme Nikita does a little bit of business stateside, and in comes John Badham to re-make it. This one gets the full Hollywood treatment, with B+ stars, big explosions, the whole nine yards. If nothing else, Bridget Fonda strikes me as easier on the eyes than the star of the original. However, American slick and pricey don’t really make for a better movie. The French version had production values good enough that the remake wasn’t overwhelmingly different, and the original was edgy in a way the remake wasn’t. So my advice would be to see them in reverse order so you can save the better for later. Mildly amusing

Review – Dirty War

HBO and the BBC combine to give the “what if” treatment to terrorists blowing up a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the heart of London. The production strongly evokes memories of The Day After only on a slightly smaller scale and with more racial tension. And even more preaching, if such a thing can be imagined. The whole “Sept. 11 could have been a lot worse, and we’re still not ready for it” message gets hammered in over and over again, occasionally even entering directly into the dialogue. Overall this is unlikely to show up on anyone’s ten-best list, but it serves just fine as a bit of disturbing diversion. Mildly amusing

Review – Paper Clips

This starts out as the heart of a good idea: middle school students in a small town in Tennessee attempt to fathom the magnitude of the Holocaust by collecting six million paper clips. But several problems soon arise, ranging from the simple difficulty of coming by six million of anything – let alone paperclips – and ending up with the dilemma of what to do with 25 million of them after an NBC news report sparks international interest in the project. The scheme is well-intentioned, but somewhere something started nagging at me. Maybe it was when they brought Holocaust survivors in to speak at the local Methodist church. Maybe it was when some of the more obsessive personalities involved managed to import a WW2-era cattle car all the way from Germany just to house the clips. In any event, the thing that bugged me was that so much time and effort was being expended to teach about one particular bit of inhumanity. Certainly we face an ever-present danger of forgetting one of history’s biggest lessons about prejudice; Mel Gibson’s continuing career proves that it’s all too easy to ignore the suffering caused by anti-Semitism. But aren’t there other lessons – slavery comes immediately to mind – that might be a bit more immediately relevant to Americans in general and kids in the rural South in particular? Well, maybe one step at a time. Mildly amusing

Review – Seed of Chucky

Too bad I wasn’t responsible for potting this one. As I’ve proven on any number of occasions, I somehow manage to kill just about any seed before it grows into a full-fledged plant. And this one desperately needed to die before it flowered onto the screen. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Chucky movie, and it’ll be even longer before I watch another one (assuming another one ever gets made). John Waters caught my eye in the preview, and though his role is all too brief, it is a small ray of entertainment in this otherwise-dull parade of recycled deadly doll shtick. This one’s a bit grosser than some of the earlier entries in the series, but otherwise it’s undistinguished. Wish I’d skipped it