"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Jurassic World Dominion

JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION* is not exactly the “dinosaurs running loose in the world” story I expected from the ending of JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM – it ends up centering on yet another dinosaur park – but it does indeed take place at a time when dinosaurs have been running loose in the world long enough to proliferate, and for humans to respond with new governmental agencies, black market industries, etc. Which is an interesting world to spend time in.

Maybe that’s why some of the best stuff is before the plot really gets going – that part of a sequel that’s a loose set of scenes catching us up with the old characters and their new situations. First we get a nice web video about the state of things, featuring fun clips like a wedding where the bride and groom release doves and a pterodactyl swoops down and eats them. It’s in a joyful Dinosaurs Attack! spirit (though admittedly the cards themselves had an even better dinosaur wedding crasher – see right). Then we join JURASSIC WORLD co-lead Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard, HEREAFTER) and her FALLEN KINGDOM dinosaur rights associates Franklin (Justice Smith, The Get Down) and Zia (Daniella Pineda, MERCY BLACK) raiding an illegal breeding facility and rescuing a caged baby triceratops. The chaotic shots of adult triceratopses ramming Jeeps as they escape are a total joy.

*I dig the lack of a colon!

(read the rest of this shit…)

June 14th, 2022 | 48 Comments »

New Patreon exclusive: “TEXAS CHAINSAW Re-Massacred”

Look at this asshole
Do you guys realize that the Michael Bay produced remake of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was 19 years ago? In the time since I watched it one time at a preview screening and despised it, an entire generation of horror fans have grown up, many considering it a classic of their era. And I feel like I’ve calmed down a little, so I decided to finally watch it a second time, write about how I feel about it now, and reflect a little more on how I’ve changed as a writer since the Ain’t It Cool days.
 
I understand not everybody can support me on Patreon so I promise I’ll post it here at some point in the future, but for now it will be a Patreon exclusive. If you can afford throwing a buck or more at me per month, it helps maintain my ability to only work the day job part time and spend most of my hours on the good shit here. For any donation you can read posts like this early, plus exclusive reviews (all the TWILIGHT movies, some vintage TV episodes), book-to-movie comparisons, writings from abandoned book projects, and more. So keep it in mind if it’s within your budget. Thanks friends!
 

READ IT ON PATREON

 
 

June 10th, 2022 | 1 Comment »

Lethal Weapon 3 (30th anniversary revisit)

At first I wasn’t sure I needed to revisit LETHAL WEAPON 3 for this series, because I already wrote a perfectly good review of it (and the other three) back in 2014. But it’s clearly the kick off to the real deal summer movie season of ’92 if you look at the box office charts for its opening weekend, May 15, 1992. It took #1 of course, but everything else on the charts had been out fora while: BASIC INSTINCT in its ninth week, BEETHOVEN in its seventh week, WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP in its eighth week, THE PLAYER in its sixth week, WAYNE’S WORLD in its fourteenth week, etc.

More importantly, I decided it was necessary for comparison. There will be three other big tentpole type sequels this summer, one of them being PATRIOT GAMES (which I’ve also reviewed, but probly won’t revisit) and the other two being, you know… weird. In contrast, this one wants to be exactly what you would imagine a third LETHAL WEAPON to be, no real surprises. As Desson Howe wrote in his review in the Washington Post, “If there’s an original moment in this movie, producer Joel Silver and director Richard Donner sincerely apologize… essentially, they guarantee you the same product you consumed twice before.” (read the rest of this shit…)

June 10th, 2022 | 33 Comments »

Crimes of the Future

(warning: to the extent you can spoil a movie like CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, this review contains spoilers)

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is your typical undercover story – a guy is working for The Man and thinks he’s doing the right thing, but through his investigation he starts to see a different perspective, rethinks his loyalties, and questions whether or not to narc these people out. In this case the guy is a performance artist famous for growing inexplicable new internal organs and having them removed in front of an audience by laying in a machine that looks like a chrysalis, with robotic bone arms cutting him open under the control of a partner sensually poking her fingers into a gooey bladder. And the people he may or may not bust are (spoiler) an underground movement of people surgically altering their digestive systems so that they can eat plastic. But you’ve seen that before too. Just a good old fashioned organ opera like the ones we all grew up on.

Okay, yeah, on second thought maybe it’s fair to say that this is a weird fuckin movie that could only be made by writer/director David Cronenberg (TOP GUN [offered but turned down]). When he did that trilogy of more reality-based Viggo Mortensen joints (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, EASTERN PROMISES and A DANGEROUS METHOD) people thought he’d moved beyond slimy mugwumps and uncharted glands and shit, and that this is a throwback. But he wrote and tried to make this before all those, so maybe he’s just getting back on track.

Either way, this has a scene where Mortensen (AMERICAN YAKUZA) has had a zipper installed on his belly and can open it up, and Léa Seydoux (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL) pleasures him by spreading it open and licking his innards. So it was cool to see at a multiplex on a giant screen with Minions ads and shit playing before it. The summer movie season has finally begun. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 8th, 2022 | 15 Comments »

Interceptor

INTERCEPTOR is a new straight-to-Netflix action movie with a story in the tradition of an UNDER SIEGE, but a feel more like a (good) DTV movie. You know – you don’t have the scope or production value of those ‘90s studio action programmers that warm our hearts, and you don’t have an army of veteran character actors in the supporting cast, but the trade off is you get fewer explosions and vehicle crashes and more care put into choreographing and executing exciting hand-to-hand duels between the heroine and her various opponents. Less spectacle, but more intimate.

The thing that piqued my curiosity is that this is an action vehicle for Elsa Pataky, who apparently was in BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR and SNAKES ON A PLANE, but I know her as Brazilian police officer Elena in FAST FIVE. Elena falls in love with Dom, but steps aside when Letty turns out to be alive in FAST & FURIOUS 6, and by the time of FATE OF THE FURIOUS she gives birth to Dom’s son and dies. I like her in the FAST movies but she’s not exactly a standout character, so it’s cool to see a movie all about letting her show off. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 7th, 2022 | 25 Comments »

One False Move

ONE FALSE MOVE was the Summer of ’92’s little crime movie that could. Like POISON IVY’s Katt Shea, director Carl Franklin was an actor turned director of Roger Corman productions (NOWHERE TO RUN, EYE OF THE EAGLE 2: INSIDE THE ENEMY, FULL FATHOM FIVE). Here he moved into the film festival/arthouse side of the indie world, having come across a hot screenplay from the new writing team of Billy Bob Thornton (an actor who had been in HUNTER’S BLOOD, GOING OVERBOARD, CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN, an episode of Knots Landing, etc.) & Tom Epperson.

Thornton told Entertainment Weekly at the time that they’d been trying to get it made for five years. He said the studios “all pounced on it” but then decided they couldn’t make it because “it didn’t have a rocket launcher or an oversized baby.*” Instead it was produced independently through I.R.S. Media (hip record label and makers of Cynthia Rothrock’s RAGE AND HONOR I & II), completing it in May of ’91. It sat on a shelf for a year except for playing some film festivals, where it was well received enough that the producer convinced I.R.S. to release it in a few cities on May 8, 1992, ostensibly to get review quotes for the VHS cover. It did better than they expected, though, and eventually expanded to 51 markets. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 6th, 2022 | 8 Comments »

I MUST BREAK This Podcast

I was shamefully unaware of this until recently, but there’s a podcast called I MUST BREAK THIS PODCAST that’s all about the films of Dolph Lundgren. And it’s up to episode #87!? That’s the one where I got to come on and talk about the 2016 film FEMALE FIGHT SQUAD starring Amy Johnston. Dolph plays her dad. I’m glad I had an excuse to watch it again because I remembered it being good but it was still better than I thought it was gonna be.
 
Anyway, I had a fun time talking about it. CHECK IT OUT HERE if you’re interested.

June 4th, 2022 | 2 Comments »

Cruel Intentions 3 – the lost review

Outlawvern.com’s heroic master of coding Clubside Chris has been going through the old reviews as part of preparing some new features, and he’s noticed that we’re missing a few things. Back in the day he tried to grab all my old Ain’t It Cool reviews, but he’s noticed some that reference other reviews we don’t have in the archive and can’t find on that difficult-to-search websight. For example I definitely remember writing about CABIN FEVER when it played the Seattle International Film Festival in 2003, and we’ve found other people’s reviews that referred to mine (like this one) but haven’t been able to find my actual review. So if some adventurer out there wants to be The Phantom, go find that artifact and return it to the original owner, it would be appreciated!

Luckily I was able to find the text of one (1) of the pieces Chris was looking for in an email reply buried deep in my inbox. So today I am vaguely semi-proud-ish to present for the historical record, and for the benefit of future generations, a goofy, dated review I wrote 18 years ago (in Spring of 2004) of a straight to video sequel most people forgot (or never knew) existed. I did not polish anything, but I added five parenthetical notes from the future about what some of the people referred to have been up to since I originally wrote the review.
(read the rest of this shit…)

June 3rd, 2022 | 10 Comments »

Poison Ivy

POISON IVY was a movie, then a franchise, and a genre, and an American institution. I don’t know if it was the first erotic thriller that could be described as “teenage FATAL ATTRACTION,” but I do think it kicked off many more of them, likely influencing movies like THE CRUSH, THE BABYSITTER, DEVIL IN THE FLESH and SWIMFAN, and evolving into WILD THINGS and CRUEL INTENTIONS and their DTV sequels. POISON IVY mostly spread its metaphorical itchy rash of underage femme fatalery by growing in clusters on late night cable and in the suspense/thriller section of video stores, but before that it had a very limited theatrical release on May 8, 1992.

Sara Gilbert (four seasons into Roseanne) made her movie debut starring as Sylvie “Coop” Cooper, protagonist and narrator-via-journal-entries. She’s a private school kid who sees herself as an outcast whose very rich parents don’t understand her. She wears Doc Martens, a tie-dyed yin yang shirt, and has an Egyptian eye design shaved discreetly under her hair. She smokes cigarillos, including in bed. She claims to have no friends*. She tells needless lies, like that she’s adopted, and that she’s half Black, and that she tried to commit suicide. Also she plays piano, loves her dog Fred (who she says doesn’t like any other humans), and teaches reading to inner city kids two days a week. A messed up kid but a good kid. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 2nd, 2022 | 8 Comments »

Top Gun: Maverick

Well, the crazy sonofabitches did it. They made a 36-years-later-part-two to TOP GUN. Tony Scott had actually developed a script and scouted locations before he died. Eventually the duty fell upon Joseph Kosinski, who had previously directed Cruise in OBLIVION (2013) and who ushered in the age of legacy sequels with the 2010 smash hit cultural sensation TRON: LEGACY [This review’s factual accuracy is disputed].

I gotta admit that I was unreasonably excited just to hear the electronic beat of Harold Faltermeyer’s TOP GUN anthem over the production company logos – I love that synthesized gong sound – and it’s kind of comical how much they mine that type of nostalgia at the beginning of this movie. The original opening title card, the original theme, “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins, similar footage of jets landing on an aircraft carrier – is this just gonna be a re-enactment?

Then we reunite with Captain Peter “Pete” “Maverick” “Mav” Mitchell (Tom Cruise, THE MUMMY), fittingly working as an experimental test pilot. He dons his old patch-covered leather jacket and aviators (both kept in places of honor as if he understands their iconographic significance) and rides his motorcycle very fast to the hangar. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 31st, 2022 | 91 Comments »

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