Review – Batman: Under the Red Hood

After a college roommate did a thorough job of exposing me to high-quality animation from Japan, I've never been able to go back to the produced-on-the-cheap stuff made for the American market. As this picture is no exception, I mostly just turned it on for background noise while I worked on something else. Oh, and I initially thought it was a different movie. Still, taking it for what it is and not expecting it to be anything else, I guess it wasn't too bad. Batman runs up against a new enemy – the mysterious Red Hood – who appears to simultaneously be killing off Gotham's drug criminals and setting himself up as their overlord. Mildly amusing

Review – The Burning Bed

Farah Fawcett turns in one of the first "if I de-glamor myself will you take me seriously as an actress?" performances in this at-the-time-groundbreaking drama about domestic violence. She plays Francine Hughes, a lower-class woman from Mississippi stuck in a long-term relationship with an abusive man (Paul Le Mat). When family, friends and authorities all fail to help her escape the rising tide of violence in her home, she takes matters into her own hands and sets fire to the guy while he's asleep. Her subsequent murder trial (not to mention this movie and the book it's based on) did a lot to draw national attention to a serious problem. Unfortunately, that makes it a bit of a creature of its own time, important in 1984 but now at least a little dated. Mildly amusing

Review – World’s Greatest Dad

Director Bobcat Goldthwait really seems to love movies based on awkward situations. This time around, a middle-aged high school teacher (Robin Williams) spends all of "act one" dealing with rejected manuscripts, a slipping-away girlfriend and – worst of all – his creepy asshole son. But when the kid dies from autoerotic asphyxiation, dad rearranges the scene and types a note so the misadventure looks like a simple suicide. When the note is published in the school paper, our hero suddenly finds himself the "ghost writer" recipient of the praise and adulation his actual writing never merited. Though the ending went where I hoped it wouldn't, I concede that it made a thought-provoking point or two about the need for validation from people whose opinions are invalid. Oh, and I should note that all three 8sails staff members who watched this movie (even part of it) had high-school-related nightmares afterward. Weird. Mildly amusing

Review – Slices

One of the Netflix user reviews of this magnum opus began with "You'll love this movie if you're related to someone who's in this movie." To which I have little to add. Five guys direct five horror vignettes, each vying for the title of "worst of the set." I could get into specifics, such as "if you're going to make a zombie western, at least shell out the bucks to rent a horse or two." But what would be the point? Ultimately all this thing proves is that five talentless morons with camcorders don't make a production any better than – or honestly different from – a movie made by one talentless moron with a camcorder. Wish I'd skipped it

Review – The Rite

It's been awhile since I saw an exorcism movie that even tried to be serious, let alone scary. So on that point this was a refreshing change. It even starts out with an element of doubt, an "is this demonic possession or merely mental illness and/or parlor tricks?" reminiscent of William Peter Blatty's famous novel (though not the movie based thereon). Sadly, Hollywood simply can't resist the temptation to abandon ambiguity and dive into the pool of gnarly devil effects. A young priest-to-be (Colin O'Donoghue) with doubts about the validity of his chosen profession gets sent to Rome for exorcism training. There he's paired with a crusty old practitioner of the art (Anthony Hopkins) who takes his own approach to the practice, performing the job like a blend between a family dentist and one of those sleight-of-hand guys who bother people at Applebees. I watched this because I was in the mood for a horror movie that someone actually spent some money to make, and on that count it did a reasonable job. Mildly amusing

Review – Dead of Night (1977)

Awhile back we watched a 1945 English movie of the same name based on the recommendations of respected film folk (including Martin Scorcese). I put this one in the Netflix queue based on the chance (the hope!) that they actually meant this picture rather than the older stinker. Nope. This one was even worse than the English production. Screenwriter Richard Matheson cooks up a good Twilight-Zone-esque intro speech, but the three stories that follow are little more than an obvious attempt by Dan Curtis to pilot another horror TV series. The first is some time travel nonsense about an old car, twaddle that even Ray Bradbury would have found excessively sentimental. The remaining two – a vampire whodunit and a monkey's paw – are a little better but still not anything that would ever have become a going concern. And to make the attempt even more pathetic, the disc's special features include a shot-on-video episode of a DOA TV series that looked like it was supposed to turn into some kind of half-assed live action Scooby Doo (minus Shaggy and Scooby). See if desperate

Review – X-Men: First Class

I liked this better than I thought I would, at least in part because it wasn't as grandiose as the original three or the Wolverine backstory. Though Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) are still the stars of the show, this prequel works more on establishing character and less on Hugh Jackman being a bad boy (indeed, he's only in it for 15 seconds or so as an in-joke). The whle X-Men thing still doesn't do much for me, but this was still easier to swallow than the productions that assume I care about the characters. I think you'd probably have to have seen the rest of the movies (or at least know a bit about the story), but if this is familiar territory for you then you should have a reasonably good time with it. Mildly amusing