Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source material. It does its utmost to ignore as much of the source material as possible.
This movie is a surreal and absurd look at death. Deaths so terrible that sometimes you can only laugh. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, nor does it look to hit you with jump scares. It’s a typical cursed MacGuffin movie that knows its to be laughed at no matter how high the body count gets. Yes, the clock work driven, drum playing, malevolent looking toy monkey of the title is evil.
Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie. There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and politically. Each tower has a top tier shooter responsible for maintenance of the automated defences preventing what is in the gorge from escaping.
By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, explains why the talent evaporated and for those 60 pages it’s worth the read. In this book, I found two interesting pieces under glass in a museum of the mediocre.
Vampires one week, werewolves the next. Unlike the highly cinematic Nosferatu, Wolf Man is merely a good-looking streaming movie. It could be psychological scarring from Covid, but monstrosity because of disease has taken root in the mind of horror writers. In fiction, lycanthropy has been everything from a pact with the devil to a supernatural curse, but here we return to the idea of it as an illness. This is a movie where the werewolf is neither calculating nor 8 feet tall on two legs with a great coat of computer generated hair.
There’s a silver undertone to this movie that reminds me of vintage black & white film stock. But then everything about this movie is looking to remind you of something vintage. Once again, a couple opposes a personification of evil. A misshapen, diseased creature of catastrophic power. Of the other times I’ve seen Nosferatu told on screen, this couple is the best looking. Genetic super lottery winners, who I’m sure have real people's problems, but the only problem we are concerned about here is the murderous Count Orlok.
If you want to tell a good story about a man, show him fail. He can recover but there needs to be a journey into darkness. Part II of the Godfather trilogy is Michael Corleone’s journey into darkness. By the end of the movie he’s lost his wife, his mother, the trust of his adopted brother and his last brother by blood. His enemies are dead by their own hand or by his.
While lacking a 6’ tall sword wielding heroine in boob armour riding on a flying reptile, Secret Level still gives off Heavy Metal movie vibes. This is a character driven show that has to hook you fast. Some episodes are less than 15 minutes long. Stories with famous actors get a bit more time, but you’ll know if you’re in or out in the first three minutes. The quality of the anthology stories in the first 8 episodes ranges from “this is a series pitch” to “this is a cut scene” to “could you give us another 90 minutes of this story, please?
Are “honourable criminals” lying to themselves? Is servitude worse than death? Less a criminal drama and more a criminal soap opera Prime Video’s Yakuza has thoughts on these questions. Focusing on four orphans, two male and two female, on the cusp of leaving their orphanage the four protagonists here walk themselves into a nightmare of a heist gone awry. Gangsters who come looking for stolen money don’t shut up. The assassins who will kill them at their leader’s whim don’t talk.
I commend Francis Ford Coppola for taking an idea he wanted to do for 40 years, putting his money into it and bringing it to the screen. But this is an experimental movie overstuffed with his fancies which does not resonate with an audience. He brought it to life through his will, but he is the intended audience. It may not matter to him if no one else watches it.
This doesn't work as a musical or a villain movie but it held my attention for most of its running time. The massive flaw in the production is that it's not supposed to be this horrific a musical. The wasted life is a goldmine for an operatic performance. That's what Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) life is. A grinding misery that gets more miserable in increments. Every day the sun rises life takes a razor blade to Arthur's soul and shaves off another thin slice.
The Substance About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because this is a movie of ludicrous escalation. Sue (Margaret Qualley) is so refreshing she's the condensation on the Coca-Cola can. Her firm buttocks enter the shot several times before she does.
A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium.
Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series. The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet.
Is it better than season 1? Yes. Will it bring back the audience it lost after its meandering first season? No. The superchat farmers on YouTube say nothing has changed. But there are improvements. The issue is that this show’s story arc is set and has to build on the dull foundation of season 1. You are into it or you are not. Any adaptation is not going to be the source material.
This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie. Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered the 1994 movie every week since it came out, The Crow as a media property has a simple formula. It is a tale of vengeance, redemption and the supernatural told in a style that drips with atmosphere.
I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is about the elite, their ideas and what it means to not be one of them in David's case. Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien Romulus is about the working poor and their life that is already horrific.
It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it. Yes it has the colourful character design, eater eggs and the 1080p CGI makes Pandora look like the dusty trash pile it is.
An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with a cosmic map of time and space on the run from order and chaos. The ambition on screen here isn't enough.
Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's menace yet. The villains are..okay. I enjoyed the Boris Karloff spin on Clayface. Christina Ricci's Catwoman is an entertaining spend-thrift kleptomaniac.