Review – Custer’s Last Stand

The iconic commander of the Seventh Cavalry gets a thorough PBS treatment in this feature-length documentary about his life and death. Though little of this information will be new to anyone who’s read a book (or two or three) about the subject, it’s still a good job of dealing with a complicated subject. Mildly amusing

Review – Night of the Creeps

It came from the 80s! If you’ve got an itch for rubber leeches attacking lackwit teens with serious cases of mall head, this picture will scratch it. Mildly amusing

Review – End of Watch

I guess at this point audiences have become so accepting of shaky-cam crap that it no longer bothers anyone that the logic of the whole “found footage” thing has given way to “standard narrative storytelling only with really bad camerawork.” Robert Peña and Jake Gyllenhaal play cops just trying to do their jobs amid the urban (read: ethnic) squalor of South Central Los Angeles. The story is neither edifying nor interesting, but I guess I’ve seen worse cop movies. Mildly amusing

Review – The Little Mermaid

I could have sworn I reviewed this years ago. Well, problem rectified. The characters, story and songs are all typical Disney, so I found myself focusing on the animation quality. Highly inconsistent. The high points are on par with the work Chuck Jones did for The Incredible Mr. Limpet. But in other spots the art is weak and inconsistent. At least it’s a step up from the studio’s output in the 70s. Mildly amusing

Review – POE: Project of Evil

Of course POE could also stand for Piece of Excrement. Edgar Allen Poe’s poems and short stories are used as vague excuses to generate brain-dead torture porn. The result is an insult not only to Poe but to audience members in general. And though I concede that the actors speak English better than I speak Italian, it’s a near thing. Even if it hurt rentals, they should have stuck to their native tongue and subtitled it. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Young Lions

I have trouble putting movies like this in their proper historical context. From my 21st century viewpoint, this is a parade of clichés. Our three heroes (Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin and Marlon Brando) are a gentle-yet-stubborn nerd who becomes a war hero, a singer who wants to be treated like the rest of the soldiers, and a brash German officer suffering pangs of conscience. But I wonder if this wasn’t somewhat more groundbreaking back in 1958. In any event, the story has enough twists and turns to sustain the running time. I’ve seen plenty of World War Two movies way worse than this. Mildly amusing

Review – Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy

If you’re a big Freddy Krueger fan, you’re in more than three hours worth of the right place. Who knew the Nightmare on Elm Street series could generate this much trivia? Some of it even manages to be interesting (assuming you’ve got any interest in the subject). Mildly amusing