Category Archives: Reviews

Movies, Reviews

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

16 Comments
Hey, I'd buy that postcard. No matter where you are, it'd still be accurate.
Hey, I’d buy that postcard. No matter where you are, it’d still be accurate.

By this point the Nightmare films were officially on auto-pilot, each one more profitable and less sensible than its predecessor. In terms of sheer dollars, the initial trilogy of Nightmares became a living refutation of the Law of Diminishing returns. The first grossed $25 million in theaters. Freddy’s Revenge pulled in over twice that. Dream Warriors broke them both, along with the bank, with an $87 million gross. Its success triggered the last great wave of Slasher movies. Most of them are rightly and truly forgotten, looked down upon even by sub-genre fans as the movies that finally ruined everything for everybody.

Except this one. While researching this review, I found an inordinate number of folks willing to give Nightmare on Elm Street 4 a pass. Not just for the usual, “It’s a Slasher movie, whaddaya expect?” bullshit reasons, but for their own reasons, varied as the person itself. Too bad I’ve always hated this movie. And now that I know why. I know this movie and I were destined to be enemies from the start. Say what you want about New Nightmare or Freddy’s Dead. For me, coming off the high-highs of Dream Warriors, this movie became the lowest of the series many lows. Continue reading A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) →

Movies, Reviews

The War of the Worlds (1953)

13 Comments
"All your base are belong to us."
“Though I walk through the valley of the Martian Invasion, I will fear no evil…”

I’m sorry. That title line should read,

“And now, fought with the terrible weapons of Super Science(!), menacing all mankind and every creature on Earth comes: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS!”

So our Humble Narrator concludes as the black-and-white pre-title montage of World War stock footage gives way to the bright, technicolor titles of this, the Alien Invasion movie that inspired all subsequent Alien Invasion movies. All of them – from the Independence Days of my childhood to the Battle: Los Angeles of today – owe their existence to this…which in turn owes its own existence to Orson Welles. Continue reading The War of the Worlds (1953) →

Movies, Reviews

The Quick and the Dead (1995)

10 Comments
Now there's a halo legend...
Now there’s a halo legend…

A lot of people rightly praise Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, but I’ve always preferred his…”more mature” feels like an obscenely inaccurate phrase, so I’ll just call them his “middle-period” pieces. Between Evil Dead 2 and Spider-Man, Raimi struggled for mainstream success, feeling – like every decent genre director in the ’80s and ’90s – that niche audiences and cult success are all well and good…until you looked at the numbers. Besides, Universal wanted to create its own TV channel. Who better to make that happen than a writer/director/producer triple threat?

These struggles cost him fans and failed to win him the wide audience Hollywood’s power brokers and spreadsheet psychics insist every director must possess before they’re allowed to sit in the Front Room with the Grown Ups, where they might accidentally/on-purpose break the studio’s Nice Things (like, oh, I don’t know, say…a profitable superhero franchise). While Darkman and Army of Darkness are “kinder” and “gentler” films than either previous Dead movie (and easier to follow than the Great Black Mark on Raimi’s pre-Spider-Man career, Crimewave), I’m going to own up another Fanboy Heresy and admit I actually prefer them to the original Dead duology.

Not that I don’t love the Dead movies, but I prefer flicks with characters over flicks with mobile viscera containers (that just so happen to speak and/or emote). Why do you think I go out of my way to avoid “art house” or “Sundance Channel” films? Continue reading The Quick and the Dead (1995) →

Movies, Reviews

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

2 Comments
One of the most famous shots of the movie. Yes, the suit's head actually caught fire. Yes, it was an accident. But it was the coolest fucking accident they could've had.
One of the most famous shots of the movie. Yes, the suit’s head actually caught fire. Yes, it was an accident. But it was the coolest fucking accident they could’ve had.

The international success of King Kong vs. Godzilla ensured it would be a major moment in the careers of its two top-billed stars and the director behind both of them,  Ishirô Honda. Prior to directing the original Gojira ten years earlier, Honda specialized in slice-of-life dramas with the occasional break into that new, Hot Genre of the 1950s: the Workplace Comedy. No matter the story, these films were usually quiet pieces set on a slow boil, focused (like his much more famous monster movies) on small groups of ordinary people overcoming something or other through their unwavering hope for a better tomorrow.

These films were a refuge for Honda: small-scale, relatively everyday productions he could always escape to in between monster movies. Then he made the mistake of directing a workplace comedy/daikaiju eiga hybrid. After that, his professional goose was cooked. And thank God. Because, after three mediocre-to-shit sequels, Honda and the metric tons of talent he brought with him finally gave us a Godzilla film I can unconditionally rave about.

Well…maybe not “unconditionally.” But next to Godzilla Raids Again, this fourth entry in original (or Showa) series looks like Casa-fucking-blanca. Continue reading Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) →

Movies, Reviews, Videos

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

2 Comments

It’s been a long, strange trip, reviewing all these Captain America films. So, with a heavy heart, I laid my seven bucks down and sat through the sixth one I’ve seen this year: Captain America: The First Avenger. How was it? Ask the hideous talking head below what he thought.

Movies, Reviews

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)

4 Comments
Yeah, I'd have that look on my face, too.
Yeah, I’d have that look on my face, too.

I won’t pretend I’m some knight-errant, riding in on a white horse to save Tomb Raider. I know that, as a hetero male nerd, I’m supposed to love Lara Croft, but I’ve despised every game in this franchise and things only got worse as it went on, each iteration more shamelessly copy-pasted than the last.

Then the old girl almost died in 2003, when Core Design and Eidos Interactive released the sixth game in the series, Angel of Darkness. It combined the tank-like controls and five-story screaming death drops of the previous five games with a headscratchingly stupid plot involving magic paintings, a camera that’s as bent on Lara’s death as the antagonists, and more bugs than Jurassic Park’s computer systems. Continue reading Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) →

Movies, Reviews

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

8 Comments
Photo by Peter Parker.
Photo by Peter Parker.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a fan of giant monster movies. If I were Emperor, I’d ram a law through the Imperial Senate making it a felony office to call yourself “a giant monster movie fan” without having seen this movie. You don’t have to like it, certainly, since it’s not very good. But the one thing it is beyond all else is influential. Without this film, there would be no Godzilla, no daikaiju genre as a whole. Beast from 20,000 Fathoms did for radioactive dinosaurs what Dracula did for vampires and King Kong did for giant apes. For that, I salute this film, and so should you.

If you want to understand why monster movies are what they are to day, seeing Beast is unavoidable. It’s an indispensable resource, a key to all the genre’s modern conventions. It brought the monster-on-the-loose movie forward, into a post-War age. And it did it all without even trying to do anything more than cash in on a the previous year’s re-release of King Kong. Continue reading The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) →

Movies, Reviews

Unbreakable (2000)

16 Comments
The word of the day is "Parallelism."
The word of the day is “Parallelism.”

had a lot on its shoulders, as evidenced by the ubiquitous banner headline every trailer, poster and DVD box still sport. “From the Visionary Director of The Sixth Sense,” it said, before adding “M. Night Shyamalan” almost as an afterthought, since no one really knew how to pronounce his name correctly in the Year 2000.

Fewer still knew that Sixth Sense was Shyamalan’s third film, the penultimate flick in his autobiographical period. All artists go through one, especially since its propagandists managed to make the dictum, “Write what you know,” synonymous with common sense. They forgot to add the necessary corollary: “The more you learn, the more you’ll be able to write about.”

Night’s first film, Praying With Anger, was about coming to terms with his heritage as an Indian kid raised in Philadelphia, watching baseball and eating hotdogs. Wake the Dead was about growing up Catholic, and going to school with the penguins in true Blues Brother’s style (though not nearly as awesome). The Sixth Sense was about Night’s childhood as a great big scaredy-pants wimp, afraid of Stephen King’s old bogey, The Thing Behind The Closed Door. Shyamalan just painted the doorknob red. Continue reading Unbreakable (2000) →

Movies, Reviews

Captain America (1990)

10 Comments
Hey, at least they ditched those damn motorcycle helmets.
So you see this picture and you think, “Alright, most of the movie’ll be like this.” But it won’t.

So, after reviewing four other films, we finally get to this Captain America. Thanks to its director’s reputation among internet-savvy Bad Movie aficionados, this movie arguably “enjoys” the highest profile of any pre-2011 Captain America production. That’s unfortunate because it’s a terribly flawed film that nevertheless remains faithful to its source material in ways no superhero movie would even try match until the turn of the millennium.

We’re really spoiled in this post-X-Men/post-Spider-Man era. These days, budgets are high, actors are enthusiastic, and corporate shills are rubbing their hands together in barely-sublimated glee as each new superhero movie edges toward opening weekend. Back in the late-80s, the opposite was true. Batman might’ve hit big after a year of full-tilt marketing but, previous to that, the last big budget superhero production in America’s conscious memory was…Superman IV…a cataclysmic failure that undid pretty much all its 1979 prequel’s hard work and turned the entire genre’s Campiness Clock back to 1968. Continue reading Captain America (1990) →