"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Baby Assassins 3

You know how much I love those Baby Assassins, the young women in the movie series from writer/director Yugo Sakamoto. Chisato (Akari Takaishi) is an energetic, giggly anime girl come to life, Mahiro (Saori Izawa) is her dour bleach blond best friend, they were raised to murder for money, a job they’re very good at, but that they try to just get over with so they can pursue their passions such as enjoying desserts and making soup and going to restaurants.

In BABY ASSASSINS (2021) they had graduated high school so their organization made them find an apartment and day jobs. In BABY ASSASSINS 2 (2023) they had to get out of an enormous debt because they forgot they signed up for an elite assassin gym membership and ignored all the bills. There’s plenty of absurd humor about the bureaucratic operations of this underworld, but the main attraction is obviously the excellent fights, action directed by Kensuke Sonomura (MANHUNT, HYDRA, BAD CITY). Izawa is a veteran stunt pro (doubling the lead of the RUROUNI KENSHIN movies) while Takaishi is an actress, but they both acquit themselves well in long, brutal battles. I like how in this little scene where they play fight on the beach Izawa can’t help but go into a serious fight stance and reveal the muscles she usually keeps hidden under baggy clothes.


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September 24th, 2025 | 10 Comments »

Off Limits

OFF LIMITS is a couple different genres – serial killer thriller, buddy-cop action, Vietnam War movie. It centers on two military police detectives, Sergeants First Class Buck McGriff (Willem Dafoe between PLATOON and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST) and Albaby Perkins (Gregory Hines between RUNNING SCARED and TAP).

It’s directed by Christopher Crowe, who was the writer of NIGHTMARES, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and FEAR, but his only other theatrical directing gig was WHISPERS IN THE DARK. He also created a bunch of TV shows (including B.L. Stryker, B.J. and the Bear and The Watcher hosted by Sir Mix-a-Lot) and (no shit) designed the logo for Cheap Trick. I would’ve guessed it was made by more of a cinema veteran because, though I only think it’s pretty good, it has the muscular cinematistic confidence and atmosphere of A Real Fucking Movie. I mean, let me give you a few screengrabs I made to give you an idea of the fuckin vibes (TFV) in this thing:

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September 23rd, 2025 | 21 Comments »

Drop

After catching up with LOCKED I thought what the hell, I should also see that other recent high concept thriller I kinda meant to see. DROP is the one that Christopher Landon (HAPPY DEATH DAY, FREAKY) went and directed after leaving SCREAM 7 because he didn’t have a movie anymore after the producers (Spyglass Entertainment) fired the star for posting about the genocide in Gaza. (Specifically because she was against it.) I’m not sure what Landon thought about that but he went and worked with the… hopefully at least less evil production company power couple of Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes.

Landon usually writes his movies, but this one is by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach (TRUTH OR DARE, FANTASY ISLAND). It feels a little different from his other stuff, being about people in their thirties, but I think you can still feel his sensibilities in it. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 18th, 2025 | 12 Comments »

Locked

Remember the 2013 movie LOCKE starring Tom Hardy? It’s not a thriller, it’s a drama, but the gimmick is that the whole thing is Hardy driving to a hospital and making phone calls trying to straighten out a huge mess he’s made for himself and others. In my review I joked about it being the start of a franchise, but I assumed they’d have titles like LOCKE: OVERDRIVE and be about Locke making other phone calls on other drives. I didn’t know they’d just add an extra letter to the title and have a different chameleonic actor playing a different character alone in a car talking on the phone for a different reason.

Okay yeah maybe technically and legally speaking LOCKED is not a sequel to LOCKE, it’s just the Sam-Raimi-produced American remake of the 2019 Argentine movie 4×4*. It stars Pennywise/The Crow/the boy who killed the world/younger brother of Tarzan/the Northman himself Mr. Bill Skarsgård, looking like Pete Davidson with his bleached hair, tattoos, pink pullover hoodie under a jacket and vape pen. I think he filmed this right after NOSFERATU, so I bet being locked in a car didn’t seem that bad compared to doing six hours of makeup in the morning and Mongolian throat singing between takes. It probly felt like a vacation. I wonder if transitioning out of his Orlok era is also the reason his accent is less consistent here than usual. Early on I wondered if he was not playing American this time, but he settles in after a bit.

Anyway he plays Eddie Barrish, a real fuckup. Eddie’s baby mama (Gabrielle Walsh, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES) is on his ass about failing to pick up his daughter Sarah (Ashley Cartwright, A GODWINK CHRISTMAS: MIRACLE OF LOVE) but he’s helpless because he can’t get his van back from the garage because he doesn’t have the money he owes and he can’t get the money because he can’t make deliveries without the van. Not that he’s averse to dishonest work. When, in desperation, he steals a wallet and starts trying the door handles on parked cars it sure doesn’t seem like a first for him. But he’s nice enough to share his bottle of water with a dog locked in one of the cars – a “save the cat” moment that’s also foreshadowing. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 17th, 2025 | 3 Comments »

Honey Don’t!

HONEY DON’T! is Margaret Qualley lesbian crime comedy #2 from Ethan Coen and his wife/editor Tricia Cooke. When the first one, DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS came out last year we learned that 1) though only Coen is credited as director he considers it a directing team 2) don’t worry, she’s a lesbian (they have an unusual marriage) 3) they can make a really funny movie even if it’s not as slick as FARGO and shit.

It took me a couple weeks to get to this one, and the reviews I saw were dire, but I figured I’d still get some laughs from it. Instead I came out honestly confused what those people were talking about. It’s not just not as bad as they say, it’s straight up a good movie. To my surprise it’s more serious than the last one, still funny and absurd but an actual neo-noir/pulp/crime type deal, like a detective novel my cool building manager two apartments ago would’ve left in the free book box in the laundry room. It has fewer big laughs than DOLLS, but by design, and I think it’s much better directed – nicer looking, more seamless in its storytelling, more interesting balance of tone. I’d have to guess that what people are rejecting is not some messiness or failure but just the shaggy quality of this style of crime story where a bunch of stuff happens by accident or coincidence and nobody fully figures out what’s going on or achieves what they’re trying to (which is, of course, part of its world view and one of the main things that’s fun about it). (read the rest of this shit…)

September 16th, 2025 | 7 Comments »

The Constant Gardener (and Summer 2005 conclusion)

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the greater New Orleans area.

On August 30th Kanye West released Late Registration, three days ahead of saying “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” on a live Katrina telethon.

On August 31st THE CONSTANT GARDENER came out.

SUMMER 2005I had not seen this one before. It’s not quite my type of movie, but it’s a good one. The stylish Brazilian crime saga CITY OF GOD (released in the U.S. in 2003) had been a sensation and its producer, Walter Salles, came to Hollywood to make DARK WATER. Meanwhile its co-director Fernando Meirelles was making this British movie set and filmed partly in Kenya. Based on a then-recent (2001) novel by John le Carré (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY), adapted by Jeffrey Caine (GOLDENEYE), THE CONSTANT GARDENER is not exactly a spy movie, but a drama involving a murder mystery, a conspiracy, and international intrigue.

The first thing I noticed is that it’s kind of arty. Meirelles, cinematographer César Charlone (also following up CITY OF GOD) and editor Claire Simpson (C.H.U.D., PLATOON, BLACK BEAUTY) immediately create an aggressive style, following a brief opening at an airport with a puzzling collection of beautiful images of the aftermath of a car accident, shot from deliberately disorienting perspectives and angles, and intercut with hypnotic shots of a flock of birds.

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September 15th, 2025 | 9 Comments »

Sovereign

SOVEREIGN is a very solemn and creepy true crime movie about a doomed father and son. We know from the opening flash-forward (with what sure sounds like real 911 recordings) that they will be involved in a shootout with police. A traffic stop gone wrong, small time end-of-the-road shit, nothing spectacular, but just as final as if it was.

Most of the movie is not exactly about crime, it’s just about their lives shortly before that fateful conflict. Joe Kane (Jacob Tremblay, BEFORE I WAKE, THE TOXIC AVENGER) is a quiet, gawky teenager who doesn’t go to school. He tells police he’s home schooled, and it’s basically true; he follows a lesson plan and everything, but usually there’s no teacher. His dad Jerry (Nick Offerman, THE KINGS OF SUMMER) is away on business most of the time, putting on small seminars about debt elimination and forestalling foreclosures. He’s an expert, I guess, because they’re threatening to take his house away but he refuses to accept any communications about it and spews all kinds of arcane (what he considers) facts about why they can’t do that. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 11th, 2025 | 9 Comments »

The Brothers Grimm (20 years later revisit)

August 26, 2005


THE BROTHERS GRIMM is one of the types of movies these summer retrospectives were made for: it was kind of a big deal at the time (because of who directed it), I’ve barely heard anyone talk about it since, and I’ve never really considered revisiting it before, so doing so becomes a weird sort of time travel. Something like BATMAN BEGINS or WAR OF THE WORLDS has stayed in my brain and in the culture, so it’s ongoing. I have to put myself in a certain mindspace to remember what it felt like at the time. But does THE BROTHERS GRIMM even exist outside of the year 2005? I don’t know, I’d have to see more evidence.

SUMMER 2005It was an intersection of a bunch of different things happening in that moment. Terry Gilliam was a respected, still-we-hoped working director for people who loved film. Dimension Films was dominant and this was their most expensive film ever. Hollywood still saw screenwriter Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES, THE RING, THE SKELETON KEY) as an exciting new voice, and there was a bidding war for this spec script. When you think about it this is exactly the kind of high concept screenplay that always ends up on The Black List, which started that year, so it just missed it. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 10th, 2025 | 13 Comments »

The Toxic Avenger (remake)

Man, a Hollywood remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER has almost happened a million times since, what, the ‘90s? I always thought something like that would be funny or interesting or maybe even good. For a while they said it was gonna be for kids, a live action version of the cartoon Toxic Crusaders. Fifteen years ago it was gonna be from the director of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the villain (but he did TERMINATOR GENISYS instead? I love you Arnold but you gotta get your priorities straight). Later it was gonna be the director of SAUSAGE PARTY, a movie I did not finish but I wondered if an animator would want to give us a goopy partly animated Toxie I thought that could be cool. But it became more promising when Macon Blair, the star of Jeremy Saulnier’s MURDER PARTY and BLUE RUIN, and director of I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE, signed on to write and direct. That was in 2019, so that’s how many years I’ve been waiting just for this version. One of my friends saw it at Fantastic Fest two years ago and raved about it, but it went without a distributor until finally the TERRIFIER people Cineverse picked it up. These things take time I guess.

It’s hard to live up to all that, but I still had a great time with Blair’s transmutation of my questionable childhood favorite. It has some of the spirit of what we love about the original, blended with a concoction of entirely new active ingredients. It’s not the same story or even the same character, Melvin Ferd. Instead Peter Dinklage (THE THICKET) plays Winston Gooze, who is also a janitor (this time at a sinister pharmaceutical company called Bi-Toxiphetamine Hydroxylate) but he’s a grown man whose wife died of cancer and now he struggles to make a connection with his teenage stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay, THE PREDATOR). If I had been guessing what the TOXIC AVENGER remake would be about the entire time they were developing it I would’ve needed at least a couple more months to come up with that one. That may be the single most surprising change from the original: this one is sincere about some things. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 9th, 2025 | 15 Comments »

The 40 Year-Old Virgin (20th anniversary revisit)

August 19, 2005

I completely forgot that I reviewed THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN when it came out in 2005, but there it is. It’s not the kind of movie I normally review, but I thought it would be important to include in this series as the most influential comedy of the summer and as the opposite of WEDDING CRASHERS. That one was about smarmy well-paid pickup artists really falling in love while trying to just get laid via deception, this is about an awkward dork who works as a stocker at an electronics chain store and doesn’t own a car who has spent his life deliberately not trying to get down women’s pants, and the lie to the woman he’s falling for is just not telling her that he’s okay with not having sex yet because he’s scared he’ll do a bad job.

SUMMER 2005Steve Carell (last seen in BEWITCHED) plays Andy, friendly but socially awkward action figure collector whose life changes after his co-workers David (Paul Rudd, HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS), Jay (Romany Malco, URBAN MENACE, TICKER) and Cal (Seth Rogen, DONNIE DARKO) very reluctantly decide to invite him to fill a vacancy in their after-hours poker game in the store. He does such a bad job of joining in their locker room talk that they figure out he’s a virgin and make it their quest in life to help him change that. “From now on your dick is my dick. I’m getting you some pussy,” vows Jay. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 4th, 2025 | 13 Comments »

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