"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Mortal Kombat II

I have not revisited MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) since at-home-viewing during pre-vaccine COVID times. My review opens by calling it “a perfectly okay movie,” and that’s my memory of it. Good cast, some fun fatalities, but it was a movie I’d anticipated for some time and it was sadly middle of the road. Its attempt to MCU-ify the Mortal Kombat mythology was not terrible, but not nearly as fun as the brazen, brain-damaged approach of Paul Wonder Stuff Anderson’s 1995 version.

MORTAL KOMBAT II comes from the same director (Simon McQuoid) but a different screenwriter (Jeremy Slater, FANTASTIC FOUR 2015, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE), and it’s one of those sequels that’s being made with the understanding that nobody liked the first one very much and they gotta convince everyone this is gonna be different. (How many of those are there, even? Off the top of my head I’m only coming up with GI JOE: RETALIATION.)

They were pretty much required by law to center this one on the titular tournament that strangely didn’t get around to happening during part 1. They also made the two most popular game characters not featured last time into the leads, while the previous non-game audience identification dude becomes just a guy who’s on the team already when they get there. You’d never guess from this that part 1 was all about Cole Young (Lewis Tan, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE) unless you pick up on the line that’s there to explain that his wife and kid won’t be in the movie. I like Tan and feel bad he got sidelined, but what they do to his character (SPOILER: squash his head with a giant hammer like he’s one of Gallagher’s watermelons) is really fuckin funny. He takes one for the team. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 14th, 2026 | 15 Comments »

Dead Man

May 10, 1996

I don’t remember it seeming weird at the time for Jim Jarmusch to do a western. It just felt natural, somehow, for him to move the deadpan absurdity, casual pace and odd characterization of his previous five indie features into a different time period and genre template. The combination gives DEAD MAN an aura of existential contemplation that seems to me to have made it soar above the other Jarmusch films in the film buff popular imagination, or at least bring him to a different crowd.

It’s the story of William Blake (Johnny Depp between DON JUAN DEMARCO and NICK OF TIME), not the poet, but a Cleveland accountant who’s never heard of the poet when he takes the risk of going west for a job at Dickinson’s Metalworks in the town of Machine. He received an offer by post from one John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum in not quite his last film, though he died in ’97), but things will not work out for William as hoped. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 13th, 2026 | 10 Comments »

Original Gangstas

May 10, 1996

I don’t remember ORIGINAL GANGSTAS playing in a theater near me, but it apparently opened on 474 screens, enough to make it into the top 10 (at #9, below JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, which had been out a whole month already). I was excited for it because it was basically a Blaxploitation family reunion. It stars Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal, it was back when you actually had to have them all on set together to make that work, and director Larry Cohen (BLACK CAESAR, HELL UP IN HARLEM) did manage to get a shot of them all in a row firing guns in front of an exploding car. In the dark, though. But I think it’s them.

Unfortunately the script by Aubrey K. Rattan (HIT LIST) doesn’t do anything beyond trudging through the most basic tropes you expect, and Cohen doesn’t manage to find much energy, momentum or style in it (much less humor). Unsurprisingly, but crucially, the score by Vladimir Horunzhy (ELVES) could not hold a candle to the worst and most generic of ‘70s studio musician jams, and the modern songs we hear bits of don’t do much even though they got Ice-T, Geto Boys and MC Ren to contribute. This movie has the most famous faces of the genre, but not a single drop of the juice. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 12th, 2026 | 5 Comments »

Twister

May 10, 1996

They’re scientists, but they’re cowboys. And they follow the wind. When they get the call they strut and they smile at each other knowingly as they hop into their Jeeps and trucks, slam on the gas and hurtle toward the danger, thinking nothing of it except ha ha, what a fun time we’re having here. They playfully exchange lingo-filled banter over the CB as they look up to the sky or down to the dots on their computer screens. They each have their own quirks and their own styles of musical accompaniment and their own ways of yelling “WAHOO!” in the face of God’s mighty wrath.

They are the wildpeople of weather, the maniacs of meteorology, the tornado terrorists, the thunder jockeys, the Doppler demons, the Hell’s Angels of nerds. They are the storm chasers, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they deploy their new device designed to release hundreds of small floating sensors into a tornado to measure it from the inside and obtain data that could potentially help improve early storm warning systems in the future.

(read the rest of this shit…)

May 11th, 2026 | 24 Comments »

One Spoon of Chocolate

ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE, the new movie written and directed by The RZA, is a little bit deranged. I say that in a neutral way. I kind of like that it’s crazy, but I don’t overall think it’s a movie that works. When I describe what it’s about to you it’s going to sound like a pulpy exploitation movie, a ’70s style revenge thriller with a modern GET OUT type edge, something that could’ve been branded as part of a GRINDHOUSE double feature if those had become an ongoing concern like V*H*S. (In fact it has a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” credit and an appearance by Red Apple Cigarettes.) But most of the time the tone is very earnest, kinda dour, sometimes feeling like a PSA. And when the hero finally gets to fight the lead villain the score (by Tyler Bates and The RZA) chooses not to hype us up like it’s the big pay off, but just give us some synth textures, like it’s sad. It’s kind of a downer. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 7th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

The Pallbearer

May 3, 1996

THE PALLBEARER is not a movie I was interested in in 1996, because it was, as far as I could tell, a romcom starring David Schwimmer. I didn’t even watch Friends, why would I branch into his cinematic efforts? But 30 years later I was curious because it turns out this is the directorial debut of one Matt Reeves, whose subsequent works have been the following: CLOVERFIELD, LET ME IN, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, and THE BATMAN. Apparently he also created and directed 5 episodes of a television show called Felicity and it would be interesting to know if this kind of has a similar feel in many ways, including the way it integrates the score by Stewart Copeland (FRESH), but you’d have to asks someone else for that information. I only know that I liked all of those movies he directed, as well as his one credit prior to this – UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY, which he co-wrote with Richard Hatem.

Reeves’ debut here is produced by his pal J.J. Abrams (credited as Jeffrey Abrams) and written with Jason Katims, a story editor from My So-Called Life who later developed Roswell and worked on Friday Night Lights. With its ugly poster and DVD cover I always pictured THE PALLBEARER as some shitty, uncinematic comedy Reeves would be embarrassed of, but actually it’s a good looking indie type of movie, shot on location in New York by motherfuckin Robert Elswit, who had already done HARD EIGHT and would go on to not only shoot most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s other movies but also MICHAEL CLAYTON, REDBELT, THE TOWN, NIGHTCRAWLER and many other fine films. The guy seems to know camera stuff pretty good in my opinion, so it looks like a real movie. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 6th, 2026 | 18 Comments »

The Craft: Legacy

THE CRAFT: LEGACY is, in my opinion, a remaquel. It technically takes place after the events of the 1996 film, with new characters, but the basic setup is intentionally a repeat, and the sequel part plays like it was meant to be a surprise at the very end. I believe that if they cut that scene and the subtitle then everyone would’ve accepted this as just a remake with some nice twists and changes in details.

Whatever you want to call it, it works best as a companion piece, a compare-and-contrast exercise, and there’s quite a bit that lines up. Once again we have a new girl moving to town with her single parent, she befriends the three outsider girls who are in need of a fourth person for their witch’s circle, they successfully cast some spells on their tormenters, including a mean jock boy who she causes to start following her around being nice to her. A small difference is that it’s not a Catholic school this time, so they get to be straight up goth without taking liberties with the school uniform. A bigger difference is that the newcomer’s family is central to the story. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 5th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

The Craft

I saw THE CRAFT when it came out 30 years ago. I’m a little younger than the actors, so I was a little older than the characters, and thought I was above it, going to see it for a laugh. This is what they think teens think is cool, ha ha ha. But I was not as removed from that life as I imagined I was. I was practically the target audience, I just didn’t want to admit it.

Watching it now, of course, there’s an added layer of nostalgia: for when music sounded like that, even though that wasn’t the stuff I was listening to; for when I would definitely have had a crush on Nancy, even though she’s a psycho and Rochelle is way nicer and prettier; for when they made movies like this, which is code for when I was young and the horizon was widening instead of narrowing. The good old days. Obviously.

I know I’ve seen bits of it on cable over the years, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it in full since the theater. It’s an interesting type of teen horror because it’s not a body count movie, and it doesn’t exactly have an antagonist. It’s timeless teenage girl material like the sisterhood of girls who don’t fit in at school, revenge against bullies and exploitative boys, etc., and then they add the supernatural into that. I guess you could say some of that about CARRIE, though, couldn’t you? So maybe it was nothing new. But in 1996 it felt a little different to not have a Freddy to worry about. We are the Freddys, mister. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 4th, 2026 | 22 Comments »

Apex

APEX is a solid made-for-Netflix picture – nice looking, to-the-point, occasionally surprising, and a good showcase for its star, who happens to be one of my favorites. When I revisited ÆON FLUX recently I mentioned how ever since that movie I’ve thought of Charlize Theron as one of those rare actors who’s exactly as serious about the physical performance as the emotional, and excels at both. So, you know, she wins an Oscar for throwing herself into MONSTER and then when she does ATOMIC BLONDE she goes just as hard at fight training and stunt work as she did at portraying the inner life of a serial killer. Here she says you know what? I’m gonna learn how to climb rocks. I’m gonna climb so many rocks in this movie.

Not that that’s the entire topic. Her character Sasha enjoys extreme sports. In the opening she and her husband Tommy (the motherfuckin HULK Eric Bana!) are tandem climbing the Troll Wall in Norway. You know, climbing until they get tired, hanging a tent from the side at night, it’s fucking terrifying, who does that? Sasha and Tommy, that’s who. Though Tommy is getting wary that maybe he’s past his prime. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 30th, 2026 | 13 Comments »

The Christophers

THE CHRISTOPHERS is the latest Steven Soderbergh/Ed Solomon collaboration (after the mini-series’ Mosaic and Full Circle and the movie NO SUDDEN MOVE) and it’s another great one. It feels weird to say that it might be the best of them, because it’s so simple in its elements; it revolves around two characters talking in one location. It could definitely work as a play, but it feels much bigger than PRESENCE, Soderbergh’s 2024 limited location movie that could absolutely only work as a movie.

It contains many marks of a Soderbergh movie – the efficient editing, the David Holmes score, the elevation of a really interesting but not-yet-superstar actor, a confidence in the audience being able to figure things out – but it doesn’t feel like a repeat. In a way it’s a caper movie, but not at all like OUT OF SIGHT or an OCEAN’S or LOGAN LUCKY. It’s a serious character drama, but I laughed quite a bit. It’s full of suspense and twists, but I wouldn’t call it a thriller. It’s a story that brings up ideas about art and people, but in ways that aren’t too specific for us to interpret and puzzle over like one of the paintings the movie is about. And if you enjoy the powerhouse acting I came out thinking no one will see this and Ian McKellen will still get nominated. And that Michaela Coel might deserve one in a role that’s more about just reacting to him. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 29th, 2026 | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
  • Hey bud, thanks for reading.

    Don't feel obligated, but here are some

  • WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHIT OUT OF VERN & OUTLAWVERN.COM

    if that's your thing:

  • 1. Patreon

    Toss me a couple bucks a month, support the good shit, also get access to a bunch of exclusive writing. This is my primary source of writing money that has allowed me to cut down to part time at the day job. Thank you!

  • 2. Buy my books from your local bookseller or somebody

    click here for my Amazon author page

    (NOTE: My ten year contract has passed on the Titan books, so I don't get residuals on them like I do WORM ON A HOOK and NIKETOWN, but I would love for you to read them because I'm proud of them)

    EXTRA CREDIT: Review them on Amazon! That would really help me out. Unless you didn't like them, in which case forget I said anything.

  • 3. If you ever buy from Amazon, go through my links or search engines



    (you pay the same amount you were gonna pay anyway they cut me a little slice)

  • I also have an Amazon UK one:

    (I can't get the search box widget to work anymore, so click on MOONWALKER and then search for what you want.)

  • 4. My exciting line of fashion and leisure products

    (I get a couple bucks per item, you get a cool t-shirt, mug or lifestyle item)

  • 5. Spread the word

    Tell your friends about my reviews and my books and everything. Only cool people though please, we don't need a bunch of suckers and/or chumps around here.

    THANKS EVERYBODY. YOUR FRIEND, VERN

    * * * *

  • Recent commentary and jibber-jabber

    • grimgrinningchris on Skyscraper (1996): “Crudnasty… I’m with you. I was an Audie England guy myself. Hubba! As for Smith… I was pretty enamored with…” Aug 10, 20:39
    • VERN on Skyscraper (1996): “Fred – No, I haven’t seen that one. I need to get to it.” Aug 10, 19:50
    • Crudnasty on Skyscraper (1996): “I could never watch Anna Nicole Smith in anything without feeling really uncomfortable, she seemed deeply unwell and exploited, like…” Aug 10, 19:33
    • Franchise Fred on Skyscraper (1996): “I did not realize this was 1996. Thank you for including it. It does remind me when the Dwayne Johnson…” Aug 10, 18:55
    • Falconman on Skyscraper (1996): “I was thinking the other day about the phenomena of Playboy magazine, Playmates, and how being named Playmate of the…” Aug 10, 15:13
    • Tim Bobo on Skyscraper (1996): “I’ve never seen nor heard of this movie. Probably a good thing.” Aug 10, 15:13
    • CJ Holden on Skyscraper (1996): “Oh shit, while looking that movie up on IMDb I learned that the Charles Huber who plays the villain is…” Aug 10, 10:38
    • grimgrinningchris on Skyscraper (1996): ““…but she seems to know what she’s doing.” made me laugh more than you even intended, I’m sure. Also, I…” Aug 10, 10:08
    • CJ Holden on Skyscraper (1996): “One thing that you have to explain to the kids today is that in the 90s you could indeed become…” Aug 10, 08:53
    • Al Shut on Trainspotting (plus some notes on The Frighteners): “I rewatched this a couple of years back and when the credits rolled I was like ‘Huh, there are two…” Aug 10, 08:34
    • Bill Reed on The Odyssey (2026): “I’ve avoided the discourse, but I find it ironic that folks are arguing about Nolan’s interpretation, when the movie is…” Aug 10, 07:00
    • VERN on Trainspotting (plus some notes on The Frighteners): “I’m interested that the movie most famous for the hero diving into a toilet full of shit and being haunted…” Aug 9, 20:45
    • jojo on Trainspotting (plus some notes on The Frighteners): “Now I want to organize all the drug themed movies from “glorifies drug use” to “basically DARE commercial in feature…” Aug 9, 15:18
    • Mr. Majestyk on Trainspotting (plus some notes on The Frighteners): “The idea that you can make a movie that doesn’t glorify whatever topic your movie is about was dispelled for…” Aug 9, 08:33
    • Crudnasty on Trainspotting (plus some notes on The Frighteners): “I’m one of those assholes, and it seems to me the entire point of TRAINSPOTTING was to humanize the “why…” Aug 9, 07:45

  • Recent Commented on Posts

  • Most Comments