Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Mann’
Wednesday, October 1st, 2025
My recent revisit of THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) pushed me to finally get around to seeing HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS (2013). I had wondered whether they were kind of in the same genre and yeah, turns out they’re more similar than I even guessed. Just like Gilliam’s movie this one starts out with a fairy tale inspired childhood flashback, then tells the story of a pair of traveling supernatural expert siblings hired to help a small town where the children have gone missing. Both movies even have Peter Stormare (GET THE GRINGO) as a cartoonish bad guy (this time he’s the sheriff who gets a chunk of his nose bit off by Gretel).
The major distinction is that they’re not con artists or skeptics – as the title suggests, Hansel (Jeremy Renner immediately following a run of THE TOWN, GHOST PROTOCOL, THE AVENGERS and THE BOURNE LEGACY) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton, CLASH OF THE TITANS) grew up to become witch hunters, and this being a twenty-teens studio movie that means they wear cool leather outfits, have fancy steam punk shotguns and crossbows, do lots of slo-mo spins and flips and what not. Yes, that kind of sounds like a parody movie-within-a-movie meant to satirize Hollywood excess (like something from LAST ACTION HERO, or the Max Landis action version of Huckleberry Finn from the pilot of Jean-Claude Van Johnson). Fortunately writer/director Tommy Wirkola (DEAD SNOW, VIOLENT NIGHT) takes the ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER route of keeping a straight face and trying to make it cool instead of giving in to the temptation to prove to the audience that he’s in on the joke. I was worried for a second because there’s a joke at the beginning about drawings of missing children on milk bottles, but that was a one time occurrence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alice Krige, Brothers Grimm, David Leitch, Derek Mears, Famke Janssen, Fiona O'Shaugnessy, Gemma Arterton, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Jeremy Renner, Osgood Perkins, Peter Stormare, Robin Atkin Downes, Sam Hargrave, Samuel Leakey, Sophia Lillis, Thomas Mann, Tommy Wirkola, Zoe Bell
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Horror | 7 Comments »
Thursday, September 11th, 2025
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…)
Tags: Christian Swegal, Dennis Quaid, Jacob Tremblay, Kezia DaCosta, Martha Plimpton, Nancy Travis, Nick Offerman, sovereign citizens, Thomas Mann, true crime
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, October 20th, 2021
HALLOWEEN KILLS is the controversial new film from director David Gordon Green (YOUR HIGHNESS). It is a sequel to his 2018 film HALLOWEEN, which was a sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 film HALLOWEEN, but not any of the other nine HALLOWEEN movies. It’s in the unusual (unprecedented?) situation of being a slasher movie that’s the middle chapter in an already planned and greenlit trilogy – I see it as part 2 of Green’s HALLOWEEN II series.
When I went to the first show on Friday I had already seen enough comments online to sense that many or most people disliked, strongly disliked, or flat out despised HALLOWEEN KILLS, in many cases sounding like they were prepared to live for decades as recluses building traps and practicing firearms on mannequins to prepare for when it comes for them again. I clearly don’t have my finger on the pulse of what other horror fans are looking for these days, because I’m positive had I seen it before hearing anything about it I would’ve figured it would go over well. As a guy who enjoys all but one of the HALLOWEEN movies on some level and will keep watching them over and over forever, I feel like it’s plain as day that KILLS has more on its mind than most of them, looks way better than most of them, and finds an approach that’s very different from what we expect or are used to, feeling fresh and new despite being more reverent of the first film than any previous sequel. It’s the kind of thing where if I didn’t like it so much I would have to at least respect it. But many people obviously don’t see it that way. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall, Brian Mays Sr., Carmela McNeal, Charles Cyphers, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, Diva Tayler, Dylan Arnold, Holli Saperstein, James Jude Courtney, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Carpenter, Judy Greer, Kyle Richards, Lenny Clarke, Michael McDonald, Michael Simmonds, Michael Smallwood, Nancy Stephens, Omar Dorsey, Robert Longstreet, Scott MacArthur, Scott Teems, slashers, Thomas Mann, Tristian Eggerling, Will Patton
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 210 Comments »
