You can save her, Kal. You can save all of them.
So says the ghostly avatar of Jor-El (Russell Crowe) in Team Nolan’s Man of Steel, right before the Man himself, Superman (Henry Cavill), falls backwards out of a spacecraft, arms spread wide, mimicking the posture of Christ on the cross. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Man of Steel, or, Church”
I was really hoping this movie would have been appropriate for the October Horrorshow. Alas, it was not. Sure, there is some exotic, overly aggressive wildlife to be found, and they do devour a good amount of the cast, but this movie is more a straight action flick than anything else. Too bad. I was looking forward to featuring this review right after Pitch Black. Well, at least it’s shitty!
Riddick, of course, is the second sequel to Pitch Black, featuring the eponymous character played by Vin Diesel. In this flick, Riddick has abandoned the burdens of galactic leadership and returned to his animal nature, a sly acknowledgment by writer/director David Twohy that the second movie in the series, The Chronicles of Riddick, was a stupidly overwrought idea that never should have been put to film. Riddick isn’t a fucking politician. He’s a badass. No one wants to see him speechifying or fending off the knives of palace assassins. The world, this world, needs Riddick to get in gunfights with mercenaries and fight creatures with big pointy teeth. Message received. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Riddick”
Filmmaker James Wan has, in the last decade, become horror cinema royalty. He was behind the creation of the Saw franchise, the two Insidious movies, and, from just this past summer, The Conjuring. His bona fides as a horror auteur are unassailable...which must be why he’s currently helming Fast & Furious 7. After directing three straight ghost stories, maybe a change in direction was inevitable. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Conjuring”
The October Horrorshow has been a little thin on zombie flicks this year. This is only the third zombie flick that’s made the cut (four if one were to count Resident Evil: Retribution, and I do not). This is also the best of the bunch. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: World War Z”
Oh, what’s this? Paranormal phenomena plaguing a family, a child being targeted, a frantic mother, a skeptical father, and a paranormal expert showing up in the third act to offer some wisdom. It’s yet another Poltergeist clone! Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Dark Skies”
I don’t know why, but I love stories with an Arctic setting. The poles are some of the most inhospitable places on the planet for life, topped only by the few locations that rise into the deoxygenated death zones at the tops of mountains. The starkness, the harshness, of these places I find fascinating. So much so that, once upon a time, I looked into getting a job summering over at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Alas, I am unqualified. They have PhD’s down there scrubbing toilets. What more can I offer? Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Colony (2013)”
If someone were to guess where this movie takes place, there’d be a fifty-fifty chance they’d get it right. Is it Connecticut or Georgia? Well, let’s analyze. The film is called The Haunting in Connecticut 2, subtitled Ghosts of Georgia. Going in, knowing nothing about the film, I inferred that it takes place in Connecticut, but the characters, or possibly whatever ghosts are causing the haunting, have roots in Georgia. Maybe there’s a plot that has something to do with the Civil War or the Underground Railroad. Not exactly original, but logical.
But another, cynical way of thinking is that the film takes place in Georgia, and has absolutely nothing to do with Connecticut; that this sequel is attempting to cash in on a brand. The original Haunting in Connecticut wasn’t a blockbuster, but it was profitable. And Hollywood loves profit. Lionsgate had this successful property on their hands, and they were looking to squeeze it dry. Rather than put any time and effort into a serious sequel, they chose to slap the Haunting in Connecticut title on some low-rent production they had set to run, in the hopes of making some cash. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia”
As moviegoers, we’ve been spoiled rotten this past decade. When a good movie is released that makes a pile of dough, the studios have been more than happy to invest money in a sequel, or two, or three. Unlike the days of Hollywood past, these latter-day sequels usually measure up to the original. Sure, there are still dogs out there, but long gone are the days of Jaws 2 and Rocky 2...and Jaws 3, and Jaws: The Revenge. The willingness of original stars and creative teams (i.e., them being contractually obligated) to retread familiar ground is a big part of this. Outdated notions of artistic integrity don’t stand a chance with all that potential money flying around. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Last Exorcism Part II”
The last horror flick I saw with Guillermo del Toro serving as executive producer was The Orphanage, from 2007. I reviewed it in last year’s Horrorshow, and while I did like it, I lambasted it for its derivative nature. This time around, the film del Toro chose to attach his name to is Mama, from writer/director Andres Muschietti. It’s also a fairly derivative horror flick, in that there’s not much happening on screen that will be all that unfamiliar to horror fans, but unlike The Orphanage, I couldn’t find any quotes online where the director is being a pretentious ass, so there’s that.
Mama tells the story of two lost little girls and the ghost that loves them. Beginning during the financial crisis in 2008, a businessman played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau goes on a murderous killing spree (thankfully off camera). He kidnaps his two young daughters and flees the city for the countryside. After a car accident, the trio are lucky to survive, and they seek shelter in an abandoned cabin in the woods. There, Nikolaj is about to finish off his bad day by killing his daughters, but a spectral apparition inhabiting the cabin gets to him first, saving the girls’ lives. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Mama”
Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t starred in a movie in ten years, since Terminator 3. In The Last Stand, his first major foray onto the silver screen since he ended his time as governor of California, Arnold (normally I’d refer to a person by their last name in an article, but I’m not going to subject myself to typing out Arnold’s last name more than once) plays Ray Owens, the sheriff of a small border town in Arizona. He’s a former narcotics cop from the mean streets of Los Angeles, and the wistful gazes with which he paints his little town in the opening scenes are evidence that he prefers this life in small town America to the one he left behind in the LAPD. It’s either that, or Arnold was just thrilled to be back in a starring role. I can’t tell, but it’s easy to picture the film’s director, Kim Jee-Woon, instructing Arnold to express his real feelings of satisfaction at being back in the spotlight for these scenes, as getting Arnold to display any emotional range at all is more difficult than flying the space shuttle.
That’s not a knock on Arnold. Well, not much of one. After all, I never, not once, went into an Arnold Schwarzenegger (whoops, that’s two) flick expecting an Oscar worthy performance. Action flicks aren’t about nuance. They’re about violence and blowing shit up. Seeing Arnold in anything else is a waste of mine, and everybody else’s, time (I’m looking at you, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Junior, and Jingle All the Way. In fact, I’m not looking at you. I’m going to pretend those films never happened, like Michael Jordan playing for the Wizards or Miles Davis coming out of retirement in 1981. My goodness, did I just equate Arnold Schwarzenegger [that’s three] to the greatest basketball player of all time and the greatest jazz musician of all time? Yes. Yes, I did. And you know what? That’s okay, because while Arnold is not the greatest actor of all time, he has a solid case for being the greatest action star of all time, and that has to count for something, right?). Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Last Stand, or, Look! The New Chevys Are Out!”