Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Friday, October 4th, 2024
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.
You see, it opens in a hospice somewhere outside New York City, where Sam (Lupita Nyong’o, NON-STOP) is grouchily living out her last days. We see a little bit of her life before the aliens, but at that point she’s already dealing with a different apocalypse. Before that she was a poet, daughter of a jazz pianist, we don’t know much else. Now she’s funny but kind of a bummer, anti-social, disruptive of the peace. A friendly nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff, HEREDITARY) seems worried about her, is trying to nudge her out of her grim mood by convincing her to come on the weekly field trip to see a performance in the city. He bribes her with a promise to get pizza afterwards, and she brings her cat Frodo. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou, John Krasinski, Joseph Quinn, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael Sarnoski
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 8 Comments »
Thursday, October 3rd, 2024
At some point in the last decade or so the movie-discussers really latched onto the term “body horror.” They kinda act like if you can identify a movie as body horror that means it’s legit. But also when they say it they almost always mean one thing: it has some David Cronenberg-inspired New Flesh type stuff at some point. I kinda wonder how many of the people comparing any vaguely misshapen flesh to Cronenberg bothered to see his last movie, but I suppose that’s irrelevant.
THE SUBSTANCE definitely fits the category, and there are reasons to compare it to Cronenberg, but tonally, I gotta say, this is way more Frank Henenlotter and Brian Yuzna. Picture a movie that’s a descendent of SOCIETY and the BASKET CASE trilogy and makes you wonder what Screaming Mad George is up to these days, but that also boasts an acclaimed lead performance by Demi Moore, won Best Screenplay at Cannes and is distributed by MUBI. That’s what THE SUBSTANCE is.
For me it was a must-see because it’s movie #2 from Coralie Fargeat, writer/director of REVENGE (2017). It sucks that it took her 7 years to do another feature (with only the serial killer convention episode of The Sandman in between), but thankfully she struts into her delayed sophomore outing like she has diplomatic immunity. She brings along her stylish design, blood-smeared rich people homes and mythic battles between beautiful women with star-shaped earrings and awful men, but this time in a sci-fi vein and much broader, sillier and more indulgent. I’m not sure if I would’ve noticed it was 141 minutes if I didn’t know it going in, but I love Fargeat’s dedication to overdoing absolutely everything, beginning with its narratively redundant (but all the more beautiful for it) time lapse sequence about the lifespan of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: body horror, Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Margaret Qualley
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 31 Comments »
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024
INFESTED (Vermines) is a very good French giant spider movie I watched on Shudder a while back and I’m happy to recommend it for your October viewing (or otherwise). It’s a movie with tons of style, energy and personality as well as, you know, spiders. The opening has almost an INDIANA JONES, adventure movie kind of feel, as we follow a pick up truck of Arab smugglers into the desert where they smoke a swarm of rare spiders out of a hole to capture in plastic containers. These things are so deadly that when one of their crew gets bit they have to put him out of his misery with a machete, but they still pack some of them up. And one of them will end up in Paris.
This is a good creature movie, but for me it could go in some other genre direction and still be amazing, because it’s just so good at establishing this setting and the main character Kaleb (Theo Christine, GRAN TURISMO), and you may assume one thing or another about him but you keep finding out he’s more odd and complicated than you had previously assumed. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Emmanuel Bonami, Finngegan Oldfield, Florent Bernard, French horror, Ike Zacsongo, Jerome Niel, Lisa Nyarko, Marie-Philomene Nga, Samir Nait, Sebastien Vanicek, Sofia Lesaffre, spiders, Theo Christine, Xing Xing Cheng
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 18 Comments »
Monday, September 30th, 2024
As I write this there’s a terrible sickness going around. All the world’s authoritarian assholes have agreed it’s time to whip out the ol’ “immigrants are scary” cliche to rile up the dumbest motherfuckers on earth. In my country there’s a specifically idiotic one where the two sweaty goblins running on the Keep Trump Unaccountable For His Crimes ticket purposely spread a racist myth about Haitian immigrants in a specific town in Ohio, leading to weeks of chaos, harassment and bomb threats. And of course they’ve refused to apologize, doubled down on the lies, and promised to deport these (legal!) immigrants if they manage to take power again.
What can I do about this within my chosen medium of outlaw film criticism? The level of ignorance and gullibility a person would have to possess in order to believe these particular grifters on this specific con seems almost unfathomable, and I do not think it’s within my gifts as a writer to express the humanity of Haitians to somebody lacking the wisdom of the common housefly. All I can do is enlighten myself a little by watching a movie from Haiti and trying to learn a little something. There aren’t many of them available in the U.S., but I found a pretty good one. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anisia Uzeyman, CCH Pounder, Guetty Felin, Haiti, James Noel, Joakim Cohen, magical realism, Mira Nair
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 14 Comments »
Saturday, September 28th, 2024
KNOX GOES AWAY is, somehow, the second movie I watched in a week where a professional killer is diagnosed with the fatal neurocognitive disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In THE KILLER’S GAME it quickly turns out to be a false alarm, but even setting that one aside there’s a small subgenre of killers trying to do one last job before their dementia stops them. I’ve also seen THE DYING OF THE LIGHT with Nicolas Cage and MEMORY with Liam Neeson, which is a remake of a Belgian film called THE ALZHEIMER CASE (or at least an adaptation of the same novel). I suppose all of these are a cousin to movies about killers with other fatal diseases – in 3 DAYS TO KILL, for example, Kevin Costner has an aggressive form of cancer, in SHADOWBOXER Helen Mirren has the cancer, in KATE Mary Elizabeth Winstead has been poisoned, etc.
This one has a little dark humor but it’s mostly grim and serious. Michael Keaton (AMERICAN ASSASSIN) directs and stars as John Knox, who has hidden his memory problems from people including his partner Muncie (Ray McKinnon, FOOTLOOSE). When a specialist (Paul Perri, MANHUNTER) tells him the news he starts saying he’s “going away” and “cashing out,” as he arranges to launder his assets and give them to his ex-wife Ruby (Marcia Gay Harden, SPACE COWBOYS), estranged son Miles (James Marsden, ACCIDENTAL LOVE) and favorite sex worker Annie (Joanna Kulig, COLD WAR). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Pacino, dementia, Gregory Poirier, James Marsden, Joanna Kulig, Marcia Gay Harden, Michael Keaton, Paul Perri, Ray McKinnon, Suzy Nakamura
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Thriller | 19 Comments »
Thursday, September 26th, 2024
A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early ‘90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to BATMAN RETURNS. In my opinion that’s one of Burton’s best movies and one of the great sequels – it’s a continuation but reinvents so much of the first movie’s approach that it feels completely fresh and even more potent.
A bit of the song “Macarthur Park” echoes hauntingly over the production logos of the BEETLEJUICE sequel we finally got 36 (!) years later: “I don’t think that I can take it / ‘cause it took so long to bake it.” But after all that time in the oven, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is no BATMAN RETURNS. It’s more of a getting-the-gang-back-together type of sequel, not as much of a shift as it probly would’ve been back then, or that it would need to be to be a new classic. To me it feels less aggressive about nostalgia than most of these types of things, but I gotta admit it’s built more on “remember this?” than “hey, check THIS out!” It returns to the afterlife but mostly just the same bureaucracy/waiting room stuff as the first movie. We get another sandworm, another non-consensual lip synch, another wedding. All fun stuff, but wouldn’t all-new stuff be better? I bet younger, hungrier Burton would’ve brought us somewhere totally different. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Gough, Catherine O'Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Michael Keaton, Miles Millar, Monica Bellucci, Sami Slimane, Santiago Cabrera, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tim Burton, Willem Dafoe, Winona Ryder
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, September 24th, 2024
A while ago I reviewed BABY ASSASSINS, the really fun 2021 Japanese action-comedy about two teenage assassins forced by their organization to get an apartment and day jobs. It has a bunch of top notch martial arts action choreographed by the great Kensuke Sonomura (MANHUNT, HYDRA, BAD CITY), but it’s mainly about the friendship, personality conflicts and growing-up-struggles of these two goofballs who have fun killing people but mostly enjoy laying on the couch eating desserts and talking about anime and stuff.
There’s actually a part 3 coming out, it played the New York Asian Film Festival in July and Fantastic Fest yesterday and I’ve seen more than one person saying it’s one of the best action movies of the year. Also, in Japan it’s already continuing as a TV mini-series called Baby Assassins Everyday (I watched the first episode on Youtube, and it’s a delight). So, shit, I better get caught up by finishing my review of part 2! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akari Takaishi, assassins, Joey Iwanaga, Junpei Hashino, Kensuke Sonomura, Saori Izawa, Tatsuomi Hamada, Yugo Sakamoto
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 6 Comments »
Monday, September 23rd, 2024
You bet your ass I’m gonna go see a theatrically released Dave Bautista vehicle directed by action legend J.J. Perry. THE KILLER’S GAME came out during the week I was traveling and it’s already down to limited showings but I got in there in time. I’m glad I did, but I gotta admit I can already feel it dissolving from my memory as I type this. I didn’t know it was based on a book and that it’s been in development since the ’90s (more on that later), but coming now it’s very well-worn material within the familiar Wacky Assassins mode of action filmmaking (think THE BIG HIT, LOVE AND A BULLET, THE TOURNAMENT, SMOKIN’ ACES, BULLET TRAIN, POLAR, ACCIDENT MAN and its sequel or HOTEL ARTEMIS, which even features both of THE KILLER’S GAME’s leads).
Bautista (MASTER Z: THE IP MAN LEGACY) stars as Joe Flood, elite assassin who in the opening scene kills an arms dealer in the balcony of an opera house. All he really has to do is come in wearing a tux and kill a couple guards to get up there. It’s kind of funny that this is the last role before Bautista decided to slim down from his giant wrestler body, because his huge size seems like a disadvantage in this job (along with his attention-grabbing hand and neck tattoos). That’s not a complaint, though! I enjoy improbable muscleman characters – Schwarzenegger playing scientists, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Balazs Lengyel, Ben Kingsley, Daniel Bernhardt, Dave Bautista, Drew McIntyre, Felix Betancourt, George Somner, J.J. Perry, James Coyne, Jay Bonansinga, Justin Yu, Lee Hoon, Marko Zaror, Pom Klementieff, Rand Ravich, Scott Adkins, Sofia Boutella, Terry Crews, Troy Robinson, Wacky Hitmen
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime | 10 Comments »
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
REBEL RIDGE is the latest from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, who’s now five for five in my book. He did the gory art world satire MURDER PARTY (2007), then broke through with the revenge deconstruction BLUE RUIN (2013), followed by the punks vs. skinheads gem GREEN ROOM (2015) and the eerie Alaskan Gothic HOLD THE DARK (2018). Like that last one, REBEL RIDGE is a straight-to-Netflix movie, but it already seems to be more of a crowdpleaser (being their number one movie for a week) and I appreciate that I’ve been able to watch it twice already, even if I would’ve loved to see it in a theater. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Pierre, AnnaSophia Robb, C.J. LeBlanc, David Denman, Don Johnson, Emory Cohen, Jeremy Saulnier, Zsane Jhe
Posted in Reviews, Action, Thriller | 45 Comments »
Wednesday, September 4th, 2024
STRANGE DARLING is a lower budget horror-adjacent thriller currently playing in theaters. It’s one of those movies that premiered at Fantastic Fest, it had a cryptic trailer and some buzz, so I checked it out without knowing much, and that went well for me.
It starts off kind of winkingly pretentious. The first thing you see after the production logos is a card saying “FILMED ENTIRELY ON 35MM FILM.” I laughed out loud. It seems that others have written off the entire movie for that boast/marketing hook/disclaimer/joke/whatever. Pardon my French, but you’re being a bunch of fuckin silly billies. Did you ever see the opening title of UNBREAKABLE? Of course you did, and maybe you joked about it later but it wasn’t the one thing you had to say in any discussion of the movie UNBREAKABLE. Back then you knew how to let things like that go.
Next is a riff on the narration from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, leading into the type of knock out opening credits sequence that warms my heart (with an “in” between the actors and the title, even). Then it says “STRANGE DARLING – A Thriller In 6 Chapters.”
I really like this type of storytelling, laying out at the beginning what the approach is gonna be. Oh, okay. Six chapters. Got it. Thanks for the heads up. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barbara Hershey, Ed Begley Jr., Giovanni Ribisi, JT Mollner, Kyle Gallner, Willa Fitzgerald
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Thriller | 36 Comments »
