Category Archives: Reviews

Movies, Reviews

Inception (2010)

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"For everything, turn, turn turn, there is a season, turn, turn..."
“For everything, turn, turn turn, there is a season, turn, turn…”

In the lead up to Inception a lot of the advance press wondered if the movie would prove too complicated for modern audiences, something we should’ve all dismissed as “bullshit.” Then the advance critics started crowing about it being the BEST MOVIE EVAHR, which I dismissed out of hand because advance critics are bullshit artists. Then the print critics who actually matter found out it was something other than the BEST MOVIE EVAHR. So it became “[t]he emperor’s new bed-clothes.”

Such is what this film’s had to deal with, over and above all the ten years of Hell its creator supposedly endured just to get it written in the first place. Either Christopher Nolan wrote the thing right after Momento and needed the Dark Knight‘s billion dollar profit to get a green light or it just took him ten years to write. Either way, I’ll believe it. Paradox, right?

Modern movies are caught in a terrible paradox of their own. Either they’re the BEST MOVIE EVARH or they’re the latest grand scam of Hollywood hacks. It’s a terrible state of affairs, particularly for just-straight-up-good movies that deserve to be appreciated for more than one weekend in July. Just because so many directors are artless assholes who only know how to make commercials doesn’t mean Christopher Nolan is too. It just means he has to compete with them all. So his films are inevitably less than the masterworks they probably should be. Continue reading Inception (2010) →

Movies, Reviews

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

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I don't know. If some crazy Scientist started blabbing about "unlocking" my mind, I just might go crazy and try to take over the world too.
I don’t know. If some crazy Scientist started blabbing about “unlocking” my mind, I just might go crazy and try to take over the world too.

began life as a live, six-part TV serial that aired for consecutive Saturday nights on the BBC over the summer of 1953. By episode four, the serial became a national event. Unfortunately, contemporary recording methods were…less than adequate (British films make me polite) and only two episodes of the original serial survive…though the BBC did stage a remake for its fiftieth anniversary.

That they did so is all the testament this story ever needed. There’s evidence this show doubled the number of TV-owning U.K. households all by itself, and the BBC immediately commissioned writer Nigel Kneale for a sequel. Needless to say, even back then, a movie was inevitable.

It only took two years thanks in part to the production company: Hammer Studios. Resurrected after its founders returned from service in World War II, Hammer quickly established itself as the go-to house for “quota quickies” – cheap movies, made fast and bought up by theater chains anxious to satisfy their requirements under the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927. Parliament originally hoped the Act would fertilize a bumper crop of upstanding, vertically-integrated, English film production company monopolies, like the ones that dominated Hollywood at the time…and still do today, for that matter.

Things didn’t quite work out as planned. Continue reading The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) →

Movies, Reviews

Outland (1981)

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At least there's no gigantic clock tower.
At least there’s no gigantic clock tower on Io. That would’ve been too obvious.

is another weird one, neither fish nor fowl. It’s another transitional fossil, from a time when Star Wars had not yet begun to ruin everything. Not that it didn’t do some good. Before the first Death Star’s destruction (spoiler alert), sci-fi films were exclusively B-listers, unfairly ghettoized, not for the content of their character, but for their budget’s relative cheapness.

Then came Spielberg. And then came George Lucus. And then came a whole horde of big budget sci-fi pictures, most long-since forgotten. So when, after taking a figurative dump on The Rock and a literal one on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, someone requested I review a “good” Sean Connery film, I immediately thought of this one.

No, wait; that’s a lie. At first I thought of Dragonheart. But I’ve already written an intro for Outland and if I start flip-flopping now, terrorists will nerve gas San Francisco. I should know. I’m the guy with the nerve gas. Continue reading Outland (1981) →

Movies, Reviews

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

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You all know the story, right? Friday the 13th Part VIII was both the most expensive and least profitable film of the franchise. Gee, I wonder if those two facts are connected somehow? Even if they aren’t, Paramount spent the late-80s and early-90s “restructuring” itself after a string of flops (like Friday the 13th Part VIII) drove newly hired managers to do what managers love to anyway and sell everything that wasn’t nailed down. Including Jason Voorhees.

So New Line Cinema bought Jason up for cheap and promptly sat on him until Freddy died his “last” death in 1991. While Final Nightmare had the highest opening of its series, there was no getting around the sad fact that it sucked. So New Line spent 1992 proving they hadn’t learned a damn thing, making a Final Friday film that sucks even more…in a completely different way. Continue reading Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) →

Movies, Reviews

Team America: World Police (2004)

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So, if actors are such pussies, how come this one gets to use his magic Acting powers to save the world?
So, if actors are such pussies, how come this one gets to use his magic Acting powers to save the world?

Every morning I thank God we no longer live in that sick, bipolar year of your lord, 2004. Were we still stuck back there, in one of the crappier years of one of the crappiest decades in world history (so far), I’d have to start this review out with an equally crap introduction. Tons of them litter our great series of tubes, all saying the same damn boring things:

“Boy, it sure has sucked, suffering through all these films with explicit political messages. Sure do wish all these filmmakers would just shut the fuck up. How dare they exercise their right to free speech in a supposedly-democratic society? Thank God for Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and their Great Gift, Team America: World Police. It’s a film that gleefully farts in the face of our entire political spectrum. Thank God someone’s finally made a film for apathetic, hipster douchebags whose main source of current events is cable TV news…or award winning satires of cable TV news, Monday-Thursday at eleven, on Comedy Central. (Now where’s my damn check, Paramount?)”

Seems every hack with a movie website cranked one of these out and unjustly tacked them on to reviews of this film. Reading them all in sequence is like reading a series of variant print-outs from some evil artificial intelligence: the Critic-Tron 9000. They may be perfectly accurate descriptions of the South Park episode writer/directors Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Pam Brady turned in immediately after this film premiered (“Douche Vs. Turd”)…but as a description of Team America, they sell the film far too short. Just like I did, at the time. Continue reading Team America: World Police (2004) →

Movies, Reviews

Batman Forever (1995)

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And is that...Bat-lipstick?
And is that…Bat-lipstick?

This is where I fell off the boat. I was twelve in 1995, when the Batman blitz began again, and from the start, things felt different. For one thing, I’d started paying attention to the news. This new thing called “the internet” was suddenly driving up everyone’s phone bills, an instantaneous worldwide communication network that quickly became the ultimate gossip and pornography distribution system. And the gossip surrounding Batman Forever set all my Red Alerts ringing.

Everyone learned all the wrong lessons from Batman Returns. And I mean everyone. America’s Moral Guardians learned that Tim Burton was a demented genius, something any of Burton fan could’ve told them a decade before, had the assholes bothered to ask. They complained his film was “too dark,” that it had stained the eyes of their precious Children with twisted sexuality and Danny Devito’s idiotic one-liners. Economics compelled Warner Brothers to Think of the Children and consign Burton to a Producer-in-name-only-credit (he was off making Mars Attacks).

Replacing him, Warner Brothers hired the director of 1993s Falling Down and 1994’s smash hit, The Client: Joel…God help us all…Schumacher. And, true to his reputation as an all-around nice guy, not at all deserving of the jokes I’m about to make at his expense, Joel brought along The Client‘s writer: Akiva…fuck me running…Goldsman. Continue reading Batman Forever (1995) →

Movies, Reviews

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

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"Yeah, eat it!"
“Yeah, eat it! I popularized this genre first, biz-natch!”

Given King Kong‘s one of the most successful and popular monster movies of all time, it’s enjoyed numerous revivals over the years. Including one in the early 1950s that directly inspired the American atomic monster craze and the daikaiju eiga of Japan. Kong‘s direct sequel, Son of Kong, and its kissing cousin, Mighty Joe Young were…less than successful.

But that didn’t stop special effects wizard Wells O’Brien from conceiving yet another sequel. Something that would retain all the grandiose power of the original but do away with that slapdash, chash-in feel that made Son of Kong suck. It would be a conscious throwback to that Golden Age of Monster Movies: the 1930s, the age of O’Brien’s primes. And it would climax in a gigantic fight scene in the streets of San Francisco, with Kong squaring off against a gigantic Frankenstein monster composed of animal parts and, presumably, a constantly-beating heart, irradiated by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

By 1960, O’Brien had a treatment all worked up, but the projected cost of the stop motion animation necessary to pull all this off made Hollywood skittish. The producer O’Brien hired, John Beck, began to shop the movie around overseas. He eventually wound up at Toho, who liked the idea of a giant Frankenstein so much they sat on it for three more years…after they made this. Continue reading King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) →

Movies, Reviews

Nightbreed (1990)

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Filmed on location in beautiful Branson, Missouri.
Filmed on location in beautiful Branson, Missouri.

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed by Clive Barker is a horror film based on the 1986 novella “Cabal,” written by some British dude named…Clive Barker…huh…Funny: the writer of the source material and the writer/producer/director of this film share the same name…almost as if they’re…gasp…the same person! But no…that’s so outlandish a concept it couldn’t possibly be true…could it?

Cabal‘s a product of what Barker scholars (i.e., the five or six voices in my head who claim to specialize in his work) refer to as his “middle” period. By 1990, the once-poor English playwright (and how Byronic can you get?) was an international sensation, alternatively praised and maligned as “the British Stephen King.” But whereas King takes us into the minds of old Twilight Zone and Outer Limits protagonists, Barker built his career on taking us into the minds of their monsters. Continue reading Nightbreed (1990) →

Movies, Reviews

Die Another Day (2002)

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This is where I abandoned all hope.
Don’t know about you, but this is where I abandoned all hope.

Bond is, in many ways, every “civilized” government’s wet dream: a nominal superman, possessed of  knowledge, skill-sets, and technologies far beyond we mere mortals…with no attachment to humanity.

Die Another Day finds the Fifth Bond (Pierce Brosnan) visibly aged since his previous appearance on the world stage and sent to assassinate one Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee) of the North Korean Army. Moon’s your usual evil hypocrite, having used his American education to get in good with international Conflict Diamond smugglers. As he tells Bond “I studied at Oxford and Harvard: majored in Western hypocrisy,” and it’s nice to see a fellow History Major on screen, even if only as a Bond Villain. So far, so good, but things will get bad very quickly. Continue reading Die Another Day (2002) →