Sam Raimi is back! With a new movie. Not one of his best, but hey – we got a new Sam Raimi movie. SEND HELP was brought to him by screenwriters Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (FREDDY VS. JASON, FRIDAY THE 13TH 2009), but it follows part of the DRAG ME TO HELL template in that it’s about a timid woman who doesn’t fit in and gets overlooked and mistreated by the sexist assholes at her corporate job, then finds her inner viciousness to be able to compete with them. A difference is that in the earlier film the horror scenario comes as punishment for the shitty thing she does to get ahead. This one is about how getting stranded on an island with her asshole boss becomes her opportunity to unleash her mean side.
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams, PASSION) has worked for seven years as a corporate strategist, though her new boss thinks she’s an accountant. The previous CEO promised her a promotion to vice president, but then he died and his son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien, AMERICAN ASSASSIN) took over. To Linda’s shock he gives the promotion to Donovan (Xavier Samuel, THE LOVED ONES, Bernard Rose’s FRANKENSTEIN), an idiotic Patrick Bateman type who’s pretty new there, steals credit for her work and happens to have been Bradley’s frat brother. (read the rest of this shit…)
LOVE AND MONSTERS is pretty much what the title says – the story of a lovestruck young man in a world of monsters. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic California, after 95% of the world’s population of humans has died off and the survivors live in small colonies hiding from giant bugs and reptiles. The filmmakers are wise enough to know that explaining that too thoroughly is for assholes, so it gets brushed over in a couple minutes of introductory narration from our protagonist, Joel (Dylan O’Brien, 
Weird, but true: turns out you can make a TRANSFORMERS movie that’s sweet and funny, with sensible, reasonably concise storytelling that never feels like it’s whacking you in the face with a frying pan, and has characters you can care about. Even a human female one! All you gotta do is get the director of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS and a script by Christina Hodson (SHUT IN, BIRDS OF PREY).
The trailers for AMERICAN ASSASSIN had me confused. Here is this mainstream, slick and expensive looking movie, Michael Keaton is in it, they’re advertising it before respectable movies. And then the plot is that a guy’s fiancee is killed in a terrorist attack, so he trains himself into a super-duper-badass warrior and master of covert ops and goes on a personal mission undercover into the terrorist cell to get revenge on the motherfuckers. That sounds exactly like a movie I would watch if it starred Scott Adkins or Jason Statham or The Rock or somebody. But this just stars some guy. Some actor.
