Finally got around to watching Return of the Living Dead and Event Horizon. Return was a great creature feature. The lack of budget really shows and the acting is all over the place, but the entire film has such a manic pace you never have to deal with any subpar effect for too long. There are some real standout scenes, everything with the tarman is incredible and the punks are always a joy when they’re on screen. It’s definitely a defining zombie movie for a reason.
Event Horizon is pretty good. Competently made, the scenes and props are the real standout. There’s some very dated cgi but all of the practical effects hold up. My friends absolutely loved the movie and raved about it but I felt a little more tepid. The hallucinations and space madness felt a little tame to me considering this was an R rated film directly aping WH40K. Was really dissapointed with the villain’s design and there’s a hilariously out of place fist fight in the climax of the movie that’s just screaming “I was made in the 90s”.
So in my attempt to escape depression this weekend while my girlfriend was away, I marathoned all of the Transformers movies. My review is that John Turturro tried desparately to save the first 3 but failed. The 4th and 5th ones toe that line of being so bad they are good and the 6th, Bumblebee, which is the only Michael Bay free one is definitely the best by a huge margin.
I would highly recommend Bumblebee. When Lindsay Ellis did here deep dive on the original Transformers movies, she wrote(spoke?) that it felt like the script had always framed Megan Fox’s character as the protagonist. When I saw Bumblebee, I was reminded of it, because it felt like they were trying to execute on a very similar character from the original movie as the proper main character.
Hailee Steinfeld also turns in a pretty strong performance as the main character and John Cena is a delightful addition to the cast.
It didn’t pack the emotional punch of the first movie. It didn’t create a whole new world to explore like the second movie. But it’s the highest rated, for me, in terms of action. It packed the hardest punch for sure.
I’d heard about killing someone with a book. Sure. But how could that not be stupid? Well, it seems the movie makers (director, choreographer, stunt performers, actors) can make something both very stupid and fist-pumpingly exciting at the same time. I started wincing at the book fight, and had a similar moment or moments in every fight scene from then on.
The fight in the knife fight? Ouch! The setup for “also take off your belt” being paid off at the very end. Very satisfying! The first shot of the armour-piercing shotgun slugs? Literally breathtaking. The whole cinema was gasping and cheering.
The only lull was the middle of the fight with Halle Berry. Just seemed to drag on without much variety and too much disparate action. Compard to everything else in the movie, it had confused geography and timing. Oh well.
Despite that, I still kinda want an entire movie about Halle Berry’s character and her dogs.
Oh my, John McTiernan can direct a good movie. Recently we’ve watched The Predator, The Hunt for Red October, and his two Die Hard movies, and this one stands alongside those no problem. Maybe it doesn’t get the critical and popular attention and acclaim due to it featuring a child actor, and people get confused about it being a kids film.
Or maybe because it is a stupid movie about stupid movies. And yet the layers of stupidness come together into a fun romp that packs in a lot of action alongside some fun character moments and meta-commentary about hollywood.
Probably the least of the Mad Max movies. Not a bad movie, but surpassed in every way by Fury Road. In fact, all of the pre-Fury Road Mad Max movies are kinda made redundant by Fury Road. Someone should do a side-by-side comparison of every moment, scene, shot composition and character in Fury Road and show it’s source in the original three.
And everything in Fury Road is done better than the sources it draws on. Which is a very impressive movie-making achievement, because most directors who draw from their previous movies don’t understand what we as the audience liked about those movies, or how those features worked in the originals.
So for every George Lucas mining the original star wars trilogy for the prequels, or Ridley Scott misunderstanding moments from previous Alien movies, I’m glad George Miller gets it.
This is becoming a review of Fury Road. Oops.
Anyway, of the first three movies, this is the one to watch more as a historical source document than to enjoy in its own right. The first two stand up better, I guess.
This started really good and funny. If it had continued as a movie about these kids at a summer camp, I’d have been into it.
But then aliens turn up and it gets really shitty, really quickly. I appreciate trying to do a homage to the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park, but that can’t be the opening scary monster part! In Jurassic Park, that was the final boss! They had survived the T-Rex, got past the electric fences, we’d seen loads of other people get eaten by the raptors, and THEN the kids are hiding in the kitchen. The drama and danger is established to a super high degree already. You don’t just rush into that kind of scene and expect our nostalgia to carry it.
Caught this on netflix with the wife. Was better than I thought it would be. As she put it “It felt like one big long episode of Batman the Animated Series” To which I could only agree because screenslaver felt like a BTAS/Batman Beyond villian 100 percent.
I’m not normally a horror/suspense type of person, but I really enjoyed this movie. I loved the world building and all the ways the Abbots had to adapt to keep quiet. The story was really tense and compelling. All the actors and actresses were really great with Emily Blunt and John Krasinki both being excellent. There was a giant plot hole with the whole “McGuffin,” but I was willing to overlook that for the sake of the movie.
I liked it, it’s probably the third best MIB movie ever made though. (MIB, MIB3, MIB international, MIB2) It doesn’t have the effervescent charm of 90’s Wil Smith, but at the same time it’s world building on MIB lore in fun ways. (As opposed to “How Star Wars character got his pants”-levels of obnoxious detail.) The movie was relatively subtle about callbacks to previous movies. (As in they didn’t expend any dialogue about them,)
It’s a Sci-Fi Buddy Cop movie with Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, it was fun to watch them play off each other.
After Sicario, Agent Kate retires from the FBI and moves to a small town to avoid the cartels.
She gets married and has a family with Jim Ryan in Quiet Place.
Unfortunately the sound monsters were only advance scouts for the main alien force: time monsters. She is unable to save her family and ends up full space marine in Edge of Tomorrow.
