Review – Blood Gnome

Rubber monsters need to feed on blood, their hunger satisfied by killing members of the blood fetish sub-stratum of the BDSM scene. If you’re shocked or titillated by nudity, bondage or crappy rubber puppets, then they finally made the movie you’ve been waiting for. Sadly, that’s all this picture has to offer. See if desperate

Review – Grave Encounters

Okay, let me make sure I understand the concept. A team of videographers working on a reality show about haunted houses end up stuck in a house that’s really haunted. Oh no, it’s an abandoned asylum. And rather than actually put monsters or ghosts or any kind of supernatural thing in the movie, the production is mostly given over to characters bickering with each other. Huh. Nobody’s ever done anything like that. Thank you, Vicious Brothers. To be completely fair, when this movie actually does anything scary, it musters some fun effects (at least some of which were a little too reminiscent of House on Haunted Hill). But that’s less than five minutes total out of more than 90, and zero for the first hour or so. Too little too late to save the show. Plus killing the rat would have cost it a point if it had any points to spare. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Hollow

I admit at this point I’ve lost almost every ounce of tolerance I ever had for found footage horror movies. Throw in “cheap” and “British,” and there’s just no way it ends well. The production got off to a fairly good start with a spooky old tree, but then it doesn’t really go anywhere with it. Unless you count the usual cast of annoying 20-somethings bickering with each other as “going somewhere.” Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Promise Keeper

Actual Promise Keepers would have been more frightening. This is just some squish about a law firm that decorates its lobby with an African fetish that turns out to be dangerous to anyone who makes a promise, drives a nail into its head and then breaks the promise. So seems like three ways to avoid running afoul of the thing right there. Further, the lion’s share of screen time goes to relationship drama silliness rather than scary fetish fu. I’m giving the production a respect point for multiethnic casting and for at least having a plot rather than taking another tedious trip down found footage lane. Otherwise, however, this is amateur hour stuff. See if desperate

Review – Your Sister’s Sister

As if Robert Altman hadn’t already proved this, when you let actors improv in front of a camera you don’t get realism. Productions like this always seem to be after spontaneous takes on genuine human interaction. Instead they inevitably get embarrassed smirking and what-clever-line-would-my-character-say-next dialogue that makes everyone seem drunk, high or otherwise mentally impaired. This mopey indie further adds a ludicrous quasi-plot about a woman whose male best friend has secret sex with her lesbian sister. See if desperate

Review – Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1

Clearly they don’t make these things for me, and other than special occasions (such as being in a hotel room with limited channel options) I tend not to watch them. I should also admit that I’ve skipped one or more chapters, so if something crucial to this one was revealed in one of the other sequels, I missed it. That said, the only above-and-beyond objection I had to this round is that Stephenie Meyer seems too willing to paint herself into plot corners and then escape by inventing some new vampire and/or werewolf rule that allows her to wiggle out. Otherwise this is a reasonable example of what it is. See if desperate

Review – Zero Dark Thirty

This obvious, desperate attempt to reproduce the success of The Hurt Locker falls well short of the mark. Gone is the clever tension of bomb diffusing, replaced by standard espionage thriller fare. Almost all the “surprise” bombings in this picture are so ham-handedly telegraphed that they become “throw the switch and get on with it” ordeals. Further, I frequently found myself distracted by little nagging details. For example, the infamous torture sequences struck me as more pointless than objectionable. Why demand email addresses that even a witless teenager could have set up anonymously, made untraceable and abandoned at the first hint of compromise? Is this really how they tracked down Osama Bin Laden? See if desperate