Tag: offsite
Written and shot like a TV movie-of-the-week, What We Do Is Secret renders the chaotic story of LA hardcore band the Germs largely limp and lifeless. Indeed, its most remarkable feature, and an ironic one given the laissez-faire attention to detail throughout (like the burly Bronx standing in for the actually quite wiry and frenetic Black Flag pre-Rollins), is its uncomfortable relish in depicting the venomous homophobia amid the scene at the time. More…
Satire really only works with a defined target. The Hunt’s satire, unfortunately, is about as scattershot as an AR-15, while at times it approaches a level of smugness only rivalled by the worst of South Park. It’s better just to ignore all that and home in on Betty Gilpin’s badass lead, as she Rambos her way through this latest twist on The Most Dangerous Game. More…
Get this, kids: it’s well over an hour before this film gives us our first glimpse of its big scary monster. And it’s a decent creature, actually, even if they minimised its screen time to hide rough edges. The bigger issue is that DeepStar Six spends an uncomfortable amount of time in the preceding 67 minutes letching after Nia Peeples, who seems like she’s being set up as the Ripley of the piece (this being Sean Cunningham’s ‘Alien Under Water’, more or less) before she all but disappears from the plot. And then gets eaten. Spoiler alert? More…
Pedestrian political drama does exactly what you’d expect, but at least does it with some panache. More…
I have nowt to say about this movie, except two things: one, I’d forgotten Chuck Wepner had a boxer-versus-wrestler match with Andre the Giant; and two, you’re telling me the casting director couldn’t find anyone who looked even a little bit like Muhammad Ali? More…
There’s a sweet romance at the core of this genre-mashup Yakuza flick, but Takashi Miike’s First Love is really all about the comedy of errors as its rogue’s gallery of characters — bent cops, inept gangsters and even bungling brain doctors — flail around Tokyo after hours. More…
Do you see? The cuckoo is a METAPHOR. More…
This was made at Ardmore in Wicklow (with a scattering of other locations: I spotted the Civic Offices, and maybe Dollymount Strand?) and I remember the buzz as if we’d scored some big Hollywood production (Dennis Hopper! Stephen Dorff! Names we’ve heard of!) when in reality it was a cheap and cheerful slice of post-Charles Band space-ploitation. Critics absolutely piled on it at the time, but there’s really a lot to love. More…
A few things to note here, having watched this for the first time in donkey’s years: there’s a set-up, but basically no real plot, it’s more an experience than a movie; it does not out-stay its welcome, all wrapped up in a neat 90 minutes; and Michael Keaton is the GOAT. More…
Picked the wrong evening to watch a Wednesday night movie but hey, times are weird. More…
I was really not enjoying this — the humouring of awful people isn’t my bag, to say the least — and then comes the twist (lifted from [REDACTED], pretty much) and it becomes something genuinely fucked up. But still about the humouring of awful people. So I can’t say I liked it, but at least it was unexpected? More…
It’s ZZ Top so yeah, come on. But it’s far too slight to do a band that good the justice they deserve. More…
It’s fine, though ‘fine’ probably isn’t the response you’d want for a whodunnit. More…
There’s straining credulity, and then there’s casting David Spade – a man who was born middle-aged – as a skateboarding ‘youth’. (And his stunt double? Some guy called Tony Hawk, you’ve probably never heard of him…) More…
The real damning indictment of the police force here isn’t that they’d let any old person join off of the street, but that they’d happily put a badge on their most racist recruits. More…
This one prompted my first laughs of the franchise, and all of them were for Bobcat Goldthwait. More…
Why am I watching these? Am I that desperately ill this week? Anyway, the first instalment of the Police Academy franchise surprised me by a) not being as actively terrible as you might imagine or remember, and b) really going for the racial ‘humour’ to a startling degree, even if the black cast members are explicitly not the butt of the joke. More…
CM Punk — excuse me, Phil Brooks — stars in this economical haunted house horror with a clear feminist message, but a less clear backstory/mythos that’s bungled in the execution. Bonus points for a brooding soundtrack courtesy of Alison Chesley (Helen Money) and Steve Albini, and a really beautifully done opening title sequence. More…
I can’t even. More…
There’s enough good material here for a 90-minute, maybe two-hour oral history of the making of these late 1980s horror classics. For some inexplicable reason, however, the makers of Leviathan decided they needed three-and-a-half hours, shoving in what seems like all of the material they gathered (whether it adds to the story or not, and even then it’s wanting in certain areas, like the Coil soundtrack), and topping it off with a voice-over that’s both poorly scripted and terribly recorded. Strictly amateur hour on the production front here, so, and it does the interesting anecdotes (of which there are quite a few) serious disservice. More…
Hail to the king. More…
I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to watch this had it not been streaming on a service I just got a free month for, but it’s a fun little exploration of why horror cinema matters as a personal and cultural phenomenon. It’s breezy and light in tone, but also substance; there’s scope for someone else to pick up the baton and blow this into a series, investigating, say, whether mainstream aversion to horror as a genre is unique to the western context. Not just why horror, but how? More…
It makes sense that this was based on an academic text on the black experience in and of horror cinema, as it’s far more of a video essay than the usual talking-heads, oral-history documentary shtick, and all the better for it. More…
I’m not especially a fan of Argento’s original (stylistically it’s a winner; his giallos appeal more in substance) but this? It’s metaphor straining for meaning; hollow, pretentious. It’s a compendium of all the worst tendencies coddled by the art-housing of horror. More…
Ford v Ferrari is not an inspiring title. It reduces the substance of this quasi-biopic to a mere clash between rival car brands, implying a corporate-driven monstrosity on par with, say, The Emoji Movie. If they’d used the title under which it was released over here, Le Mans ’66 – think French sophistication, retro chic, Steve McQueen and Paul fucking Newman – perhaps it would have fared better with those who’ve dismissed it out of hand. Turns out, it really is all about the image. More…
Hardly the disaster I’d been led to believe. But it doesn’t really amount to much, does it? More…
Very much like the group it depicts, Hail Satan? is less about contemporary organised Satanism as a thing than it is about highlighting the hypocrisy of an insidious theocratic Christianity and the people who buy into its bullshit. It doesn’t really add anything new to the thesis, but it’ll while away an hour and a half. More…
Think of Doctor Sleep less as a sequel to an indelible Kubrick classic and more of an overzealous fan’s tribute to same. It’s got a different, lesser kind of obsessive attention to detail, with none of the aesthetic flair, and ultimately gets lost in the maze of its own references (not only to The Shining; the villains are straight out of Near Dark). But it also kind of works, if you treat it as a standalone piece with only a casual, if enthusiastic, connection to the original. Honestly, I’d mostly given up on Mike Flanagan — the good (Oculus, Before I Wake) is outweighed by the bad (Hush, Ouija, The Haunting of Hill House) — but this restores my faith a little. More…
The Authorised Hagiography of Lloyd Kaufman. More…
I imagine a bunch of saddo men have moaned about the new Terminator requel (a new word I just made up*, a portmanteau of reboot and sequel) that it’s too political or feminist or whatever. Which is of course ignorant of the fact that the franchise is inherently political — Government contractors messing about with rogue AI? That’s politics, bozos! — and that since the second film, a woman kicking ass as much as if not more than the men has been kind of central to its thing. More…
It’s remarkable enough that Takeshi Kitano made a film this good on his first go. But knowing he fell into the job by accident when Kinji Fukasaku had to pull out? That’s just taking the piss, like. More…
“Even if I died and became a ghost, I would still arrest you!” More…
There’s a bit in this film where Mia Wasikowska’s character comes to a stunning realisation, and the camera tilts to bring a lampshade fixture on the wall behind into frame: a literal lightbulb moment. I didn’t know whether to laugh or run away to join the circus. More…
Watched this based on its thematic comparisons with Videodrome (it’s kind of that crossed with In the Company of Men, if you want my facile elevator pitch) and… nah, not my bag. Too long and meandering for an espionage thriller, not engaging enough to work as a mood piece — and then in its final few minutes it devolves into some kind of live-action video game, which was probably interpreted at the time as saying something about yadda yadda but it’s nothing more than a provocative stylistic wheeze. Blah. More…
David Cronenberg must think back on this film, nearly 40 years after the fact, and get chills. Not so much for the prescience of the themes (the deleterious effects of life mediated through screens, sure, alongside hefty slices of transhumanism, dark enlightenment and totalitarian tendencies) but because his extremist depictions more or less came true. More…
The ultimate western libertarian fantasy. More…
Works far better as a straight, cold-blooded revenge thriller than as a tonally haphazard parody of the same. More…
Three whole hours and they couldn’t even muster an ounce of the frights or the tension of its predecessor. Instead, they decided to make some kind of hamfisted tribute to Evil Dead II? I don’t get it. More…
They didn’t even use it on the evil emperor ffs. More…
It’s hard to watch this as a wrestling fan, knowing that one can pull up Paige’s debut on Raw within a matter of moments on the WWE Network and witness the enormous pop for her entrance, and her effortless confidence in the ring — nothing at all like the timid ingenue before a dead crowd that the film would have us believe. There’s a lot of that revisionism here, pushing the credulity of kayfabe, but there’s also a lot of genuine rapport between Florence Pugh’s Paige and the rest of her fighting family that makes it worth sticking out. So, bad as a wrestling movie, but decent as an irreverent comedy-drama, I suppose? More…
A pleasant surprise, to say the least. To say any more would be spoiling it, in the best sense of the term. More…
‘Beloved Eighties sports-themed romcom hasn’t aged all that well’ shocker. More…
There was something in the water, pardon the pun, with 1989’s proliferation of subaquatic thrillers: The Abyss, DeepStar Six and this here Leviathan, where the pitch is more or less ‘What if Alien, but like The Thing, at the bottom of the ocean?’ Sounds alright, but these people exercise such poor contamination protocol, they deserve everything they get, so the only thing left to root for is the monster. More…
It verges on criminal how dull this is. More…
Works as both an amusing contemporary reboot of 1995’s Jumanji and as a consistently more engaging retread of 2003’s star vehicle for The Rock, Welcome to the Jungle. More…
As rote as it gets for an action movie, sigh. I don’t even have any witty remarks about the high frame rate nonsense as it saw it in ’normal’ HD. More…
Not sure how you can make this without mentioning Golden Harvest’s biggest hit by far was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in 1990. More…
“I’m not sittin’ there. I’m sittin’ there.” More…
What do you get when you cross The Hallow with The Babadook? This, more or less. More…
No time to write up a proper review of this one, but I have thoughts. Mostly around the idea of this being yet another narrative of familial abuse and estrangement where redemption is achieved through reconnection and forgiveness as if that path is mandatory. Honey Boy presents itself as something different, and to be fair it’s remarkably staged and beautifully shot, with performances that deserve awards attention for going where you might not expect. (And yes, I know it’s Shia LaBeouf adapting his own relationship with his father for the screen.) But in essence it’s as clichéd as the rest of ’em. And that cliché, an almost bullying edict (‘You must forgive your parents even if they’ve been extraordinarily shitty to you!’), is not something I care to stomach. More…