Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Tuesday, December 10th, 2013
HOMEFRONT is a Jason Statham vehicle with an interesting pedigree: screenplay by Sylvester Stallone (Academy Award nominated writer of ROCKY), meth manufacturing villain played by James Franco (Academy Award nominated lead for 127 HOURS), James Franco’s girlfriend played by Winona Ryder (Academy Award nominee for LITTLE WOMEN and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE). Unfortunately the weak link is director Gary Fleder (CableACE Award winner for an episode of Tales From the Crypt), who’s just the guy who did KISS THE GIRLS and RUNAWAY JURY and stuff like that. He’s not terrible but also not the type of strong director that could shoot a bullseye with a simple story like this.
This is the second movie in a row where Statham starts out wearing a long hair wig. This time it’s because he’s a DEA agent undercover in a biker gang. He busts the kingpin Danny T (Chuck Zito), whose son gets shot to death by other cops. Danny and his gang want to kill the shit out of him for this so he has to shave his hair. Also he either goes into witness protection or just retires and moves to a small town somewhere in Louisiana. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chuck Logan, Chuck Zito, Clancy Brown, Frank Grillo, Gary Fleder, James Franco, Jason Statham, Kate Bosworth, Sylvester Stallone, Winona Ryder
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 50 Comments »
Monday, December 9th, 2013
You guys know I got a soft spot for the unlikely DTV franchise. Back in the day I loved to review ’em for The Ain’t It Cool News. Sequels to WILD THINGS, CRUEL INTENTIONS, ROAD HOUSE, THE HOLLOW MAN… movies that really had no business getting sequelized, it made no sense, but there they were on the video store racks. Or now on the VOD menu or something. Of course, very few thrive in this medium. UNDISPUTED is a rare exception, and since it was originally about boxing it wasn’t that much of a stretch to turn it into this generation’s BLOODSPORT. Most of these sequels are not high quality like that, they’re mildly amusing at best, so I should probly stop wishing for those DTV followups to GHOST DOG and REDBELT (starring Harry Lennix). They would probly lead to disappointment. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Cook, DTV, DTV sequel, fighting tournament, Jack Doolan, James Nunn, Scott Adkins, soccer, underground fighting
Posted in Action, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, December 4th, 2013
GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS 2: STAND YOUR GROUND opens with another BRAVEHEART style two-crowds-running-at-each brawl set to an upbeat punk anthem. But the ground they have to stand in this one is fenced in – they’re in the joint. It’s about exactly what you dreamed the DTV sequel to GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS would be about: one of the supporting characters from part 1 is in prison for the big fight they got into at the end and continues to feud with the guy that killed Petey, now played by a different actor.
Ross McCall (SUBMERGED) triumphantly returns to his role of Dave, he was the guy who was the airline pilot, he called them up and warned them there were a bunch of guys that were gonna beat them up at the game or whatever. I don’t remember him being that important of a figure but prison is one of those small ponds that makes his fish parts look bigger or whatever. It’s just him and two oafs we never saw before from the GSE (Green Street Enthusiastic Soccer Fans Club dot org) and all the sudden he’s the brains of the operation, he acts like the leader and they follow him around and stuff. McCall is good actually, I had to look him up to make sure he was in the first one because he has a much stronger presence here, he seems like a different guy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, Graham McTavish, Jerry Trimble, Jesse V. Johnson, Mathias Hues, Ross McCall, Vernon Wells
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013
GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS (as we call GREEN STREET in America) is a very watchable but meat-headed movie about assholes (as we call cunts in America) obsessed with soccer (as we call soccer in America) and exploiting the American fascination with English exoticism. Elijah Wood (THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY Extended Edition Blu-Ray + Blu-Ray 3D + UltraViolet Digital Copy combo pack) plays Matt Buckner, a young writer who gets unfairly expelled from Harvard and decides to go visit his sister (Claire Forlani, POLICE ACADEMY: MISSION TO MOSCOW) and her family in London. His brother-in-law Steve (Marc Warren) wants to get rid of him so he sends him to a soccer game with his little brother Petey (Charlie Hunnam). So they go out to drink beer and sing songs with the fellas and then go to the game. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charlie Hunnam, Claire Forlani, Elijah Wood, Leo Gregory, Lexi Alexander, soccer
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 26 Comments »
Monday, December 2nd, 2013
Ethan Hawke started out as a promising child star, kinda like River Phoenix, who he co-starred with in EXPLORERS. He was a pretty big deal in DEAD POETS SOCIETY, right? Then he became Hollywood’s Gen-X guy in REALITY BITES and he’s from Austin so he hooked up with Richard Linklater and he starred in GATTACA and he did the Alfonso Cuaron version of GREAT EXPECTATIONS and later he actually got nominated for best supporting actor for TRAINING DAY (even though honestly he was the lead). So he had a good run as a pretty respectable actor.
Then at some point he said “Fuck it” and decided he was gonna do a bunch of genre movies, mostly ones with ridiculous premises. I think DAYBREAKERS is a real under-the-radar gem all around, regardless of Hawke’s participation, but SINISTER and THE PURGE are corny movies elevated by his commitment to the roles. I think he’s got a little Kevin Bacon in him. If he signs onto a movie about a dumb looking demon who haunts super-8 home movies and children’s drawings or whatever he’s gonna give it equal or greater effort than what he did in SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. I respect that. I like him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: car chases, Courtney Solomon, Ethan Hawke, John Voight, Selena Gomez
Posted in Action, Reviews | 33 Comments »
Tuesday, November 26th, 2013
Johnnie To’s DRUG WAR is a hell of a procedural, a fast-moving, heavily detailed look at a batallion of Chinese narcotics cops flipping a big time meth manufacturer and trying to use him to take out a guy that’s above him. We watch them step-by-step, finding the guy, making him give in, making a plan on the fly, changing things up as the facts on the ground evolve. They gotta worry if they can trust him, is he gonna blow the whole operation, are they gonna get him killed. They’re like high stakes gamblers almost. Seems like stressful work in my opinion.
In the opening scene the squad catches a bus full of drug mules on a toll bridge. They bring them to the hospital and proceed with the unglamorous work of making them shit out the “drug pods” into bowls before they burst inside them and kill them horribly. I’m looking for a HOLY MOUNTAIN Alchemist/shitting in a bowl joke here, but maybe I’ll just let the moment pass. I am nothing if not classy as all fuck. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Johnnie To, Lam Suet, Louis Koo, Sun Honglei, undercover
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Monday, November 25th, 2013
(I’m trying to mark the biggest spoilers as usual, but be careful with this one if you don’t want anything given away)
You remember back when THE HUNGER GAMES came out I avoided it. I know this makes me a weirdo, but it wasn’t until Francis Lawrence signed on to direct the sequels that I got interested. The conventional wisdom was that part 1’s Gary Ross (PLEASANTVILLE, SEABISCUIT) was a classy director and this was a step down to replace him with the guy who did CONSTANTINE and I AM LEGEND. But I’m a fan of Mr. Lawrence, I see some genius behind the admittedly large flaws of those movies. As pretty good as THE HUNGER GAMES is I’m way more impressed by Lawrence’s depiction of post-human-New-York-City and Will Smith’s performance as the lonely omega-scientist. Yeah, we all know that there are some problems when the vampires turn out to be leaping computer animated beasts, but shit, they’re better than the animated dogs in HUNGER GAMES. Scarier and with more personality and meaning. Let’s not pretend either of these is flawless, but I know which one I like better.
Now Lawrence’s first HUNGER GAMES chapter has hit, and virtually ever review I’ve seen says what I predicted, that he made a better movie than the first one. See you guys, I know shit.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amanda Plummer, Donald Sutherland, dystopian futures, Francis Lawrence, Jeffrey Wright, Jena Malone, Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 99 Comments »
Saturday, November 23rd, 2013
I think DAWN OF THE DEAD will always be my favorite zombie movie, but DAY OF THE DEAD is the one that’s grown with me the most. When I first saw it I liked it, but my enthusiasm was held back by the obnoxious performances of the guys playing the soldiers. They’re written as total assholes, taunting everybody, dropping weird racial slurs, and the actors (including makeup artist Greg Nicotero, who is now effects head/producer/director/writer/zombie on The Walking Dead) play them as giggling, yelling wackos, more like Rapist #3 in a cheap vigilante movie than like army professionals. The best performance among them is Joe Pilato as their leader, Colonel Rhodes, but he’s so convincing as a detestable prick that I was always convinced he was just being himself.
But I’ve watched the movie many times over the years and it just gets better and better. What once seemed like major flaws have faded away while its successes seem more and more impressive. These days I love to hate Rhodes, who’s such a dick that I can’t even root for him when he pulls off the award worthy badass move of grunting “Choke on ’em!!” at the zombies who’ve torn him in half and are eating his intestines. And the rest of those guys don’t bother me that much anymore. Their undeniable obnoxiousness has been far eclipsed by the aspects of the movie I love: everything else. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: George Romero, good part 3s, great sequels, Greg Nicotero, Howard Sherman, Joe Pilato, Lori Cardille, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 40 Comments »
Wednesday, November 20th, 2013
“WE WHIPPED ‘EM AND WE GOT IT ALL!”
How do you write a review of DAWN OF THE DEAD at this point? I’ve discussed it to death with a million people over the years, and I figure we’ve all gone over it all before, right? It’s kind of presumptuous to think you’ve got something semi-new to say about a movie that’s been discussed this much. In a way I’ve already reviewed it in bits and pieces over the years, talking about it in my review of the remake and probly other places. But this year I sat down and watched it again and I thought it was a shame it’s not in my reviews archive, because it’s one of my very favorite movies. Look – I can prove it by going on about it for a while! Let’s discuss how great this movie is. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: George Romero, Goblin, great sequels, Ken Foree, Tom Savini, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 116 Comments »
Tuesday, November 19th, 2013
I still love the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, a nice, moody little cinematic play about differences of opinion between strangers hiding out in a farm house during the first ever worldwide zombie epidemic. I believe I watched it Halloween night of 2012 and I realized I’d kind of worn it out, it was too burnt into my brain and I’d need to take a break from it for a few years at least so I could appreciate it more next time.
But I was really jonesing to watch DAWN and DAY of the dead before Halloween this year so I decided to do a historically inaccurate color trilogy by substituting the 1990 remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which I hadn’t watched in some time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Moseley, George Romero, good remakes, Patricia Tallman, remakes, Tom Savini, Tom Towles, Tony Todd
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 36 Comments »
