Here are a few indications that the movie a person is about to watch isn’t any good. One, I reviewed it (heyooooo!!). Two, the Wikipedia page for the movie barely breaks 300 words. Three, there is one item in the trivia section of the movie’s IMDb page. Four, I didn’t bother to use anything other than Wikipedia and IMDb when I researched said movie. Continue reading “Graveyard Shift”
Tag: Bloody Flick
Carrie
How times have changed. Within two minutes of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, an adaptation of Stephen King’s first novel, there’s a scene in a girls’ high school locker room after gym class with no less than half a dozen full frontal nude shots. High school girls (all played by adults) are bouncing around and giggling after showering, showing off their gloriously naked bodies. I can’t imagine there would ever be a film made today that featured nude teenagers so prominently, much less with such sappy eloquence and, yes, sexuality. It’s not long before the camera pans and settles on the film’s main character, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), as she showers and caresses her body, culminating in a horrific display of bullying after the onset of her first menstrual cycle. That’s how viewers are introduced to the confused, introverted, oppressed, overgrown adolescent of the title: as she is brutalized by her peers. Continue reading “Carrie”
Resident Evil: Retribution, or, Story? We Don’t Need No Stinking Story!
October is here. Rejoice! For this is the best month in which to watch horror films. Summer has just died and the month ends with Halloween. The chill that has suddenly arisen in the air portends the coming cold slumber of winter...or the passing whisper of a phantom. To celebrate, Missile Test once again dedicates the month to reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, or the putrid. It doesn’t matter. If there’s blood, it gets a watch. Welcome to the fifth annual October Horrorshow. First up is a real winner. Continue reading “Resident Evil: Retribution, or, Story? We Don’t Need No Stinking Story!”
The Last Stand, or, Look! The New Chevys Are Out!
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 “The Last Stand, or, Look! The New Chevys Are Out!”
Olympus Has Fallen
I’m heartened by the savviness shown by the audience members during a showing of Olympus Has Fallen this weekend. This was a crowd that was having none of director Antoine Fuqua’s shenanigans. It was clear from the moment the first commercials hit the airwaves that this film would be utter nonsense. It appeared that most of the people in the theater came with the knowledge they would be watching a total piece of shit, and they didn’t care. They were there for the shitty, for the schadenfreude, and for all the other reasons that bad movies entertain us. They were laughing and groaning in all the right places. It was my kind of crowd. Continue reading “Olympus Has Fallen”
Total Recall (2012)
It’s no secret. Hollywood loves remakes. They love squeezing new cash out of old ideas. And why not? We’re a country that embraces the familiar. We find comfort in it. It’s this tendency of the public to seek out what it already knows that makes Applebee’s and the Olive Garden successful properties in Times Square. Who the hell would come all the way to New York City only to eat the same food they can get in Boise? Americans, that’s who. Continue reading “Total Recall (2012)”
Red Dawn (2012)
It’s been awhile, but Shitty Movie Sundays returns for the first time since last Halloween. What a doozy we have today. Continue reading “Red Dawn (2012)”
Dredd
“Let’s finish this.” Really? Still, it’s good. Trust me.
Blink and you would have missed it. Dredd, written by Alex Garland and directed by Pete Travis, went in and out of movie theaters so quickly this fall that by the time I realized it had been released, it was already gone. Maybe it was a failure of marketing, maybe it was a lack of interest in the characters, maybe it was just fatigue after a summer filled with overwrought comic book adaptations which kept viewers away. And, it has to be said, maybe it was the hard ‘R’ rating the film earned. Whatever the reasons, one or a combination of all of these and more, Dredd was a flop. Which is too bad, because it was the best of the comic book films released this year, and one of the best comic book films I’ve ever seen. Continue reading “Dredd”
Runaway Train
1985’s Runaway Train is a very unique film. It’s American made, filmed in the white wastes of Alaska, but in a blind taste test, cinephiles would swear it was a Russian film. The film stock, the cinematography, set designs, costumes, etc., all scream that the film was made on the other side of the Iron Curtain. That’s not by design, but a result of the film being helmed by Andrei Konchalovsky, who, until the 1980s, was a Soviet filmmaker. Continue reading “Runaway Train”
Savages
Taylor Kitsch just had a bad year. He starred in three major release films. How can that possibly be bad? The three films were Battleship, John Carter, and Oliver Stone’s latest ham-fisted effort, Savages. Three films, three disappointments, and Mr. Kitsch has suddenly moved into Ryan Reynolds territory as the latest bankable star that turned out to be not so bankable. It isn’t all his fault, though. John Carter was doomed from the start, and Battleship was so awful, a cavalcade of thespians from the Royal Shakespeare Company couldn’t have saved it.
Which leads us to Savages.
Occasionally Oliver Stone gets an itch to make an over-the-top movie full of extreme violence and outrageous criminality. When that has happened in the past, he gave us Natural Born Killers and the screenplay to Scarface. This year it was Savages, adapted from the novel by Don Winslow, which tells the tale of a California airhead and the two drug dealers who love her. Continue reading “Savages”