Posts Tagged ‘Movies’

Drones Review

Posted: June 29, 2014 in Action, Drama, Reviews
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2fd06dc1755d9f958747442fa58cec57The poster art for Drones features a 21st-century soldier deep in The Suck, a M16 rifle with grenade launcher at the ready and a Batman utility belt strapped around his mid-section. A female soldier with a daintier weapon and a few packs less ammo follows him. The sky is filled with unmanned aerial vehicles and tracer fire. “THE WAR OF THE FUTURE IS UP IN THE AIR,” we’re told.

Ridiculous.

Anyone purchasing a cinema ticket, DVD, or on-demand rental based on that nonsensical graphic, which is nothing more than video game cover art, should be entitled to a full refund plus compensation. (more…)

Beneath Review

Posted: June 28, 2014 in Horror, Reviews, Thriller
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Beneath-movie-imageLet’s begin with a bit of clarification. We’re talking about the film Beneath, not Beneath (2013 – teens on a rowboat avoiding man-eating fish) or Beneath (2007 – car accident victim in a scary house) or Beneath The Dark (2010 – young couple checks in for motel weirdness) or Beneath The Darkness (2011 – Dennis Quaid as a creepy small-town mortician) or even What Lies Beneath (2000 – Michelle Pfeiffer losing her mind thanks to Harrison Ford).

Our Beneath is about a group of people trapped underground, but it’s not The Descent or The Cave or The Descent 2 or The Cavern or Underground or In Darkness We Fall.

And so we establish that the film in question is not the most original in either its title or its subject matter. Beneath is not half bad, but, unfortunately, it is not good enough to make a name for itself.

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The Addicted Review

Posted: June 27, 2014 in Horror, Reviews
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maxresdefaultHave you ever wondered what would happen if a crazed, psychopathic serial killer wearing a mask like Michael Myers or Jigsaw teamed up with a vengeful spirit like Hamlet’s father or the Ghost of Christmas Past? Well, wonder no more, Sports Fans, because The Addicted answers that very question.

It’s clumsy. It’s amateurish. It’s silly. It defies logic, physics, and good taste. Yet somehow, the film remains engaging, and the absolute sincerity and commitment of the filmmakers to getting it done shines through the shoestring budget production values and slipshod script. You may find yourself rooting for them to succeed, enjoying the occasional triumph of a well-delivered jolt or the effectiveness of a minimalist special effect, while overlooking the vast number of shortcomings.

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Deep in the Darkness Review

Posted: June 25, 2014 in Horror, Reviews
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deep_in_the_darkness_650x366Dreck [drek]

noun Slang.

  1. excrement; dung.
  2. worthless trash; junk.

Origin: 
Yiddish drek; cognate with German Dreck  filth; compare Old English threax, Old Norse threkr excrement

(From Dictionary.com)

Pick your definition – Deep in the Darkness is dreck, unless you’re a Viking, in which case, it’s threkr.

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Jason Nash Is Married Review

Posted: June 24, 2014 in Comedy, Reviews
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tumblr_lv10giehNp1qzofn3While watching Jason Nash Is Married, you can’t shake a sense of déjà vu. At first, you might attribute it to the source material for the film, a web series that streamed on Atom.com bearing the exact same title, but the feeling of familiarity goes beyond having previously seen the characters in another format. Slowly, the realization comes that Jason Nash is Married shares DNA with innumerable situation comedies featuring a beleaguered father/husband character. You feel like you’ve seen it before because you have, in 23-minute bites called Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Married With Children, or Home Improvement. Jason Nash Is Married could also be called Seinfeld 2.0 – same idea, newer media.

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Doc Holliday’s Revenge Review

Posted: June 23, 2014 in Action, Reviews
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2When you get about 15 to 20 minutes into Doc Holliday’s Revenge, you’ll be ready to give up on the movie.

Don’t. It gets worse. Gloriously worse.

Doc Holliday’s Revenge is wake-the-kids, call-the-friends, must-see-it-again terrible. It’s not so bad, it’s good. It’s so bad, it’s great. Supremely bad. Magnificently awful.

It’s March 19, 1882, according to the graphic at the beginning of the film. But wait, the calendar in the house shows it’s September 1884. That’s the same house with an electrical light ceiling fixture, next to an air conditioning vent. Hmmm, no-fault divorce and the modern screw bottle cap, both 20th century inventions, are around as well.

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A Fighting Man Review

Posted: June 20, 2014 in Drama, Reviews
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ff-00003949-im-02landscape900x506An air of melancholy pervades A Fighting Man, a boxing movie that may do more to kill the sport than mixed martial arts fighting. The sadness does not come so much from the plot as from the cast. The irony of bringing once-great actors into a third-rate feature about a washed-up fighter seems lost on director/screenwriter Damian Lee. And while the parallels between how boxing and Hollywood both exploit stars well past their primes in order to squeeze out a few extra dollars is lost in the production, they are painfully obvious to those who watch this film.

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Animal Review

Posted: June 18, 2014 in Horror, Reviews
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900x525_Gallery_04It seems almost uncharitable to pick apart the new horror film Animal, a mix of guy-in-a rubber-suit monster movie and dumb-ass-kids-in-the-woods slasher flick. It delivers as much entertainment as one might expect from a movie with a tag line, “Fear lives in the woods,” and a poster that features the snarling muzzle of an unnatural beast with about four different rows of fanged teeth. You go into this one expecting an easy, cheesy ride with one or two scares, maybe a ripped bodice, bad acting, worse dialog, predictable twists, and one chick left standing at the end.

And voila.

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Frequencies Review

Posted: June 15, 2014 in Reviews, Science Fiction
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web_oxvFor two-thirds of its 105-minute running time, Frequencies hums along, generating a pleasant buzz as a quirky romantic comedy, deserving of its self-comparison to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Inexplicably, the movie then abandons the central conceit of the story in a discordant third act that leaves it as less than the sum of its parts.

It’s a brave new world we find at the beginning of the film, where young schoolchildren don blindfolds to take a test that will determine their future. “Knowledge Determines Destiny” reads the placard on the school’s front door, but, in fact, it is one’s frequency that is the most important factor. (more…)

Junho – O Mês que Abalou o Brasil (June – The Month That Shook Brazil) Review

Posted: June 13, 2014 in Documentary, Reviews
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junho08The documentary Junho – O Mês que Abalou o Brasil (June – The Month That Shook Brazil) resembles nothing so much as one of the quickie mass market paperbacks that are rushed to print by newspapers or other media outlets to capitalize on the attention that a particular story has generated. These books are usually little more than a collection of previously published accounts with scant space for context or analysis.

Junho is a filmed version of the same phenomenon. The Brazilian newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, has rushed to get a movie out with a nebulous tie to the World Cup in the hope to capitalize on the attention now focused on that event as well as on the counter-demonstrations that are expected to be held throughout Brazil over the next month. (more…)

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