The Mask of Zorro is a movie that SHOULD be a classic….but for whatever reason it just isn’t.
There’s no doubt in my mind though that if the masked hero penetrated the silver screen with the tip of his blade today, that people would’ve gone crazy over it. Just look at the smorgasbord we have here: Lush practical sets, a musical score that perfectly captures a call for adventure, two impossibly sexy leads, and driven by a high octane sense…
There’s no shortage of socially conscious horror movies, the genre just works as a natural delivering vehicle for confronting the worst of humanity and bringing to light real world issues that have yet to be addressed. Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs fall snugly in this category, with the horror legend tackling his most political movie yet up to that point. Gentrification, class, and race relations are just a few talking points boomeranging around the movie’s old money brain. The…
Think of the worst possible version of a Jeepers Creepers sequel, and Reborn is somehow even more disposable than that. Its use of exposure and digital effects isn’t just cutting corners, but chomping the whole damn thing off. You’d be hard pressed to find a horror film this hell-bent on neutralizing its own atmosphere. In comparison to your garden variety Scify channel original, Reborn launches the acting and writing quality into subterranean depths of sewage.
The best thing I can say in its favor is that it wasn’t directed by a convicted child rapist.
Insanely high production value for a straight-to-video animated feature, I forgot how razor smooth the moment-to-moment actions are in these bite-sized DC toons. It makes the plentiful fight sequences even more exciting, in addition to the hard PG-13 viscera of watching Wonder Woman barrel her fists through monsters, thugs, and abominable gods.
If you’ve seen the Patty Jenkins/Gal Gadot live action film, then you’ll recognize Wonder Woman’s familiar plot beats. Steve Trevor crash lands on Themyscira, only to find an…
"If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place"
-Sylvester Stallone, probably
It's funny that Stallone's most iconic characters, Rocky and Rambo, both metamorphosed into objects for state propaganda. In the legendary fourth instalment, the Italian Stallion finds himself fighting the Cold War on his lonesome and he's determined the end it for good in order to avenge the death of his enemy turned lov- I mean friend, who was murdered in the ring…
Wall-to-wall sicko ultra violence. Project Wolf Hunting is like a 90s Bruckheimer/Simpson joint with no pretenses for audience accessibility that shifts gears into a 30 minute Mr. X Resident Evil 2 chase, and then degrades as a chintzy superhero movie (my least favorite of these tonal side-swipes). A lot of what I just described sounds like a lot of fun, and while the film does supply a steady stream of kills, it does become redundant after awhile. There’s some creativity…
Rocky 2 takes the safe route for a first follow-up, making sure to not tread to far from the successful formula of its predecessor but introducing enough new internal challenges for the eponymous protagonist to triumph over. Above all, the smartest thing Stallone does behind the camera is maintain the quiet innocence of Rocky’s first Cinderella story. The stakes are higher, because Rocky’s financial state and self-esteem demand that he wins, but Rocky’s will to persevere always takes center stage.…
Stupendously entertaining. Timothy Dalton doing the angst-ridden, punished James Bond routine nearly 20 years before Daniel Craig but with dashes of camp to even out his more brutish nature. The movie doesn’t dwell in its own darkness as it comes stock with the over-the-top action theatrics you’ve come to expect, lots of things that blow up real good and a car that skates on thin ice. You gotta appreciate the simple things when watching an action movie, and The Living…
Evil movie. Skinamarink skimps on the narrative, while encapsulating the disorienting doomsday fatalism of a true nightmare. You won’t find a movie that better captures the feeling of being 10 years old and surfing LiveLeak at 1 am unsupervised.
Extremely uneven. The sloppy pacing and "throw everything at the screen" approach to its narrative really hurt its ability to provide emotional catharsis. Wakanda Forever wants to be about overcoming immense grief (In a literal and meta contextual sense), the strength of familial ties, and above all, a triumphant memorial to Chadwick Boseman. All of these somber points of thematic interest then have to compete against the never-ending tidal wave of the Marvel movie machine, meaning it has to co-operate…
Violent Night deserves major props for taking the "pissed off Santa" genre movie approach and making an actual entertaining movie out of it, even if it finds itself top-heavy with plot and an excessive amount of Christmas cheer. It tries to bounce between a dysfunctional family holiday comedy to a ridiculously gruesome Santa action movie which doubles as a Die Hard ripoff and because of that it struggles to hold all its Christmas cookies down. Thankfully, Tommy Wirkola loads the…