Film review — Cell
Alternate title: The Dark Phone Tower. More…
###
Tag: offsite
Alternate title: The Dark Phone Tower. More…
###
So… who else was on edge fearing she’d go Full Exene? More…
###
The premise is absolutely preposterous but its technical proficiency is light years ahead of its predecessor just four years prior and it just looks really nice, except for that soundstage swimming pool reshoot ending for international markets. It’s an insult to the original, don’t get me wrong, but hardly the nadir of the franchise when Jaws III is sitting right there. More…
###
The FBI warnings betray that Universal sent the literal Blu-ray files to Amazon for streaming, so I feel sorry for anyone who paid for the physical media as the transfer is piss-poor at best. Besides that, it boggles the mind that the SeaWorld people would see this as any kind of advertisement for their theme park; it’s the equivalent of Mickey gone rogue and slashing people the length of Main Street USA. More…
###
It takes a while to get there, but the last half hour of this one is so much fun that’s forgivable. More…
###
The series just got added to Prime Video so I had to, really…. I’d always aligned myself with the ‘Jaws is a horror movie’ camp but on revision, only the first half feels like a horror to me; the rest is an old-timey adventure that doesn’t quite match those thrills, but remains satisfying nonetheless. More…
###
An aggressively artificial un-spectacle, with added knob-polishing at the feet of Elon Musk and some suspiciously conspicuous product placement for that Russian anti-virus brand that was cool 20 years ago. But at least the pacing was half-decent. More…
###
Ironically enough, for a meandering film with such a threadbare story, it goes deeper as an essay on social class than the shock and awe of the writer/director’s prior, much-maligned New Order. More…
###
Steven Spielberg is such an icon that his story deserves to be told without glossing over the failures that make his career trajectory that much more interesting and compelling. So let’s have another run at this one some time; we’ll need more than two-and-a-half hours, but so be it. More…
###
Craven remade Bergman’s The Virgin Spring as The Last House on the Left, so why not reboot Beowulf in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens… with cannibal children? Okay, I was sold on the killer-kids premise already but there really is a lot more going on here. I mean, it’s an enthusiastic yet amateurish backwoods slasher — from Troma, naturally — so I did not expect a meta-commentary on the aesthetics and function of fantastical fiction. Nor that brutally unforgiving denouement. If you go down to the woods today… actually on second thought, best not. More…
###
We didn’t know what monster we’d unleashed…. More…
###
An uncomfortable number of directors here clearly wished they’d drawn T for toilet. More…
###
A plotless, pointless dirge, overly enamoured with its edgelord trappings. More…
###
It was a fundamental error not to make this an ultra-heightened nail-biter. As it is, it’s almost thoroughly drab and detached save for that ludicrous ending, and the relationship between Affleck’s character and his daughter. When a six-year-old gets it… More…
###
Alternate title: All the Money in the World Part II. More…
###
It’s kind of like The Apartment, if Shirley MacLaine were a pack of rats? More…
###
Do you know what an ambiguous image is? Like that picture that’s a duck one way and a rabbit the other? That’s what this is. It’s not even a movie, really, let alone a horror movie. It’s mere content contrived to appeal to both sides of a perceived binary divide. A duck or a rabbit. A rabbit or a duck. More…
###
I haven’t read Murakami since 1Q84 burst that balloon, so I wasn’t familiar with the source material here. Turns out (!) the titular car is a red herring (as is the Beatles allusion, but so was Norwegian Wood). The real conceit, as embellished by Ryusuke Hamaguchi here, is a stage production of Uncle Vanya that serves as a multifaceted metaphor for all of the characters in one way or another. More…
###
Found this one on Tubi after searching for ages. The production is amateurish but enthusiastic, and the wealth of talking heads not to mention the detail and context for the genre somewhat makes up for its shortcomings. There are more than a few, let’s say lurid moments that will raise eyebrows (it’s a bit rich commenting on misogyny while showing a topless woman being manhandled by crooks, or worse) so take this as a content warning. More…
###
Not quite as good as I remembered, this one. In particular it glosses over the rampant sexism that marks so many of the Ozploitation films celebrated here, acknowledging the pressures put on the women who appeared without really reconciling with that fact. So yeah, that leaves a sour taste in 2022. Anyway, the devil-may-care action flicks are better. Less misogyny, more blowing up cars, please. More…
###
Dreadfully dull documentary about a genre that’s anything but. Give me a decent book or magazine feature over this glorified DVD extra any day. More…
###
So I actually finished this one some time in mid to late 2021, having read it on and off, here and there, since… what Goodreads tells me was April 2018. Being an oral history, it’s the kind of book that lends itself to that kind of dipping in and out of the story. It’s a record of a very different time, but also a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. More…
###
This should be a vehicle for Alexis Louder as the badass desert cop who more than holds her own between Frank Grillo and Gerard Butler’s macho posturing. I say ‘should’, because she wasn’t pushed in the marketing material for its original cinema release, at least not round these parts. More…
###
While Maggie Q makes for an arresting presence as a psychologically scarred Bond/Wick analogue, this is still at root a geezer teaser. More…
###
The TV Burp sensibility does not translate to the big screen in the way I imagine Harry intended. More…
###
Once it finally coalesces into a plot, this becomes tremendous stuff. But even up to that point it makes for a decent comedy. More…
###
The germ of a good idea (‘virtual reality exorcism’ has a lot of potential) is lost within a poorly fleshed-out script and student-film, make-do execution. It’s too late now, Blomkamp, you blew it. More…
###
What a mess. Some of the set pieces here betray at least the notion of enthusiasm, but at some point early on Charles Band must have got bored and settled for cobbling together a bunch of random half-assed takes till it made up a contractually obligated hour. It’s only remarkable for having an incredibly sleazy denouement, and for the soundtrack keeping that glam metal flame alive when grunge had long since conquered the industry. More…
###
They kind of just threw everything at the wall with this one, didn’t they? An extended riff on the opening to Child’s Play with nods and winks aplenty to the Elm Street series, The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby… it’s a lot, and somehow a lot less than the sum of its parts. More…
###
“Hey man, the script is great! A cop the size of a doll! Where does Band come up with this stuff? But, uh, it’s running a little short…”
“No problem, I’ll just copy-paste ‘fuck’ a few hundred times. That should do it.” More…
###
I can’t help but see this as a genre-specific deep-dive companion piece to Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film project. It’s clearly made by someone with a solid sense of the sociopolitical context of horror (I was going to say ‘horror cinema’, but this covers plenty of made-for-TV productions in its wide remit) and interprets folk horror in particular as an idea that varies depending on its cultural milieu (in Britain, age against youth, urban against rural and so on; but a post-colonial spectre in America and Australia) yet sharing common threads, like the tension between ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’. More…
###
Not the most enlightened premise in this day and age. But the pace is near breathless, and the choreography truly exceptional. Like, Rogers-and-Astaire-but-kung-fu good. More…
###
That is a sweet watch, in fairness. More…
###
After a thrilling start, this one turns into a 90-minute training montage with absolutely wild swings of tone. It doesn’t work so much as I enjoyed it despite its glaring flaws. More…
###
Wishful thinking to posit that taking the moral high ground will get any positive material results in the Hobbesian atmosphere of a Shaw Bros martial-arts flick. More…
###
Two things: one, I was aware of Super Dave as a bit from late-night talk shows but I did not realise until shockingly recently that he was Albert Brooks’ brother; and two, he’s legitimately funny without the unfortunate compulsion for “dialect comedy”, as its phrased so euphemistically here. More…
###
It’s just a sleazy King Kong knock-off. Aside from some nicely crafted model work and city destruction, there’s nothing worth seeing here. More…
###
Hate to say I found this one a bit slow-going until the Wooden Men Alley sequence; that’s when the fightin’ starts and never lets up for the entire second half. More…
###
I had to read about five Wikipedia articles to get a handle on the story before I could even start with this, despite having watched the original series not so long ago, so yeah, it’s one of those. More…
###
I’m convinced I at least half-watched this before but if I have it’s been erased from my memory. Proof enough of the existence of psychic powers, if you ask me. More…
###
There’s a glimpse of Steven McDonald in the last half hour that teases a parallel universe where there’s another version of this film but it’s about Redd Kross. More…
###
It’s got the same problem as The Happening, and The Village, and most of Shyamalan’s ‘big’ movies in that an attempt at serious human drama clashes with a preposterous premise, and the results are expectedly muddled. I much prefer the fake Wikipedia plot where this turns out to be a sequel to Lady in the Water and shit gets even crazier after the credits roll. More…
###
There’s so much to ridicule about this pitiful excuse for a satire, but maybe the most egregious is that no one gets cut off for swearing on TV. More…
###
I have zero recollection of watching this in 2011, but my thoughts from that viewing still stand, and in fact I rate it higher now. I miss this kind of fun and adventure that doesn’t sink into cliquish nerdy referencing; the nostalgia is far more broad, and all the better for it. Looks great in 4K, too. More…
###
Those rabbits were still alive? They were just like crawling in the ground dazed when your man dropped them there. That will stick with me. More…
###
It’s got more politicking than fighting, and I’ve been distracted this week so it took me a few goes to get through. But if you want a masterclass in vengeance-fuelled resilience, the last half hour is for you. More…
###
Did… an AI write this movie? More…
###
I suppose all these ‘haunting’ movies of the late ’70s were just a way to explain away the cultural disease of patriarchy. More…
###
Diving (digitally) into Arrow’s Shawscope box set, and this one is the first in the list. There’s a hint of Iko Uwais in Lo Lieh’s determined martial arts student who finds himself embroiled in a clash between honourable tradition and shady politics. The fight scenes are where it’s really at, though, and it’s no surprise to see why this sparked such a craze in ’70s America. More…
###
The pretensions to high drama are laughable but I loved it regardless. More…
###