Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Evil Dead

Right away you know that everything is definitely not going to be OK. There’s a girl running through the woods. What’s she running from? Two guys with a shotgun. They catch her. They knock her unconscious. They bring her back to the cabin. Yeah, that cabin. In the basement. Yeah, that basement. The one with all of the dead cats hung from the rafters. With all of these deformed looking relatives standing around, some crazy witch lady reading out of a serious looking spell book in some unrecognizable tongue. There’s cursing. There’s a twist. Lots and lots of fire.

And that’s all even before the title, Evil Dead, is slammed on the screen, right in your face, big nasty red letters on an all black background, the last A in Dead, it’s got that cabin built right into the font. We’re not wasting any time here folks, we’ve only been in the theater for about five minutes now, and the pace isn’t about to slow down any time soon.

Now we’ve got the cast pulling up to the cabin. That cabin. It’s like the cabin from Cabin in the Woods, but not pretending to be a horror movie. This is the real deal. Every square inch of this dump looks like it’s one footstep shy of a rot-induced implosion. Why would anybody want to spend any time here at all, let alone five young, good-looking guys and girls?

Unlike the 1980s B-movie franchise from which this new release was derived, this plot is at least slightly more believable. Whereas thirty years ago Bruce Campbell and the gang thought digs like this would make a nice spot for a weekend party getaway, our contemporary crew is here on more serious business: helping their junkie friend swear off hard drugs and make it through the ensuing withdrawal in total isolation from the outside world. Don’t worry, one of the women is a registered nurse.

Again, this was a novel plot twist on a very played out genre. When that spell book from earlier is found, despite barbed wire wrapping, with total disregard to the written-in-blood warning to, whatever you do, do not read from this book, the nerd of the group cannot let his curiosity lie. He doesn’t know it right away, but he summons an old demon, it infects the addict, and everybody mistakes her possession for classic dope-sickness.

Even when she beats the dog to death with a hammer. Even when she scalds herself with boiling water. Even after she starts stabbing people with a box cutter, proclaiming, “You will all die here tonight,” in a clearly demon-possessed voice. And yes, even after the nerdy guy figures out what he’s done and tries to burn the spell book, only to realize that it simply will not burn. “I don’t know,” the non-nerdy guy protests, “Maybe she’s just really, really sick.”

I’m partial to cheesy horror movies. I spent the summer in between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college driving to various Blockbusters on Long Island in hopes of finding all three parts of the Evil Dead trilogy. Back in the eighties, Sam Raimi had little to no money to instill fear upon an audience. He made up for it by making his movies as over-the-top as you could imagine. Think buckets of blood everywhere.

The new movie is obviously a big budget production, but they stay true to form, squeezing every possible ounce of gore and violence out of every dollar in the budget. There’s not a second of down time. It’s scene after scene of squirming in your seat, not knowing from which way what horror is going to come at you this time. There’s a chainsaw. There’s a nail gun with a never ending supply of nails. There’s a jury-rigged defibrillator made out of a car battery and some leftover syringes. In homage to Sam Raimi’s buckets of blood, the sky literally cracks open and pours torrents of red.

My pulse is still racing. As an adult, when I see new horror movies I’m either left overly disgusted by torture-porn or terribly underwhelmed by bad writing and unconvincing stories. Evil Dead didn’t give me a second to feel anything at all. I sat down, the words Evil Dead pounded on the screen, my body locked up all tense for an hour and a half or so, and the words Evil Dead were stamped once again. Go see this movie. Wait for it to come out on Netflix months from now. Find an old VHS player and somehow record it onto a blank tape. When you have kids, wait until they turn seventeen and set it up so that they find it lying around on their own. Baton passed.

Movie Review: The Host

Wow, I feel like I’ve been had. Is it because it’s a holiday weekend? I thought studios love to snag people in with big movies during holiday weekends. But the only new releases this week were G.I. Joe, some Tyler Perry movie, and The Host.

I’d never heard of The Host, and all the better, I thought to myself. Here’s a chance to really do an honest film review. No marketing campaigns or commercials to influence my opinions beforehand. No, without any preconceived notions, I’d be able to truly judge a motion picture based on what I thought, what I felt.

Well, almost. Right as I was buying my ticket in the theater, I noticed a The Host movie poster. “From the makers of Twilight,” it read. Damn. The ticket lady directed me toward theater one, a room full of teenage girls, the occasional senior citizen, and me, at eleven in the morning on a Friday.

OK, the movie … jeez, I don’t know where to start. I guess I’ll mention that I’ve never actually seen Twilight, so I can’t really give an apt comparison, but I’ve read reviews about Twilight, I’ve seen tons of shows and online videos making fun of Twilight, so yeah, this movie was pretty much like Twilight. Except there aren’t any vampires. There are aliens.

The opening exposition cuts right to the chase, as the main character, Melanie, tells us how we’ve gotten to where we are. Aliens have invaded the earth, these little silver glowing worm aliens. They’re not invading, the invasion is already over. I don’t know how much trouble the first few aliens had in taking over individual earthlings, because they’re so tiny and delicate. They get beamed to our planet in these small silver pods and physically bond with and seize control of individual human beings. But it’s weird because, in order for this to happen, already-possessed humans have to perform a surgical operation on a non-possessed human for the little guys to weasel their way inside.

Backstory isn’t super important, I guess. They’re here. They’ve taken over nearly the whole world. And they’ve brought harmony. They don’t fight. They don’t pollute the planet. Everything’s just great.

Except there are a few remaining humans living like fugitives. The main character, Melanie, she’s caught right away at the beginning. Rather than succumb to the invaders, she chooses suicide, leaping through some pane glass out of a fourth or fifth story window. But she survives. This one’s a fighter. The aliens put an alien inside of her. We can tell because her eyes start glowing. Oh yeah, all of the possessed humans, their eyes all glow bright blue.

I could never wrap my head around this plot device, mostly because the aliens, spending so much time trying to locate the resistance, desperately trying to smoke out any remaining humans, they never think to maybe put on some contact lenses. The eyes are always the dead giveaway of who’s possessed and who’s not.

The alien in Melanie’s body, her name is Wanderer, and at first she’s put in charge of finding the remaining humans, of eliminating the resistance. But that same fighting spirit that helped Melanie survive that fall? You guessed it: it allows her to somehow survive the mind-meld. She’s still around, albeit as a sassy disembodied echo-voice with a Southern accent. But the aliens don’t have Southern accents, just regular accents.

As she struggles to assert dominance in Wanderer’s new body, we learn more of Melanie’s alliterative backstory, about her kid brother Jamie, her boyfriend Jarred, her uncle Jeb. She convinces Wanderer to escape the alien city, to make her way to the desert, where we find the rest of the survivors, living in some intricate network of pretty cozy looking caves. Her uncle Jeb “found” them, somehow. There’s a hospital inside the caves. And electricity. And running hot water. Also, there’s a gigantic system of crank operated mirrors that allow them to grow acres and acres of underground wheat. But they have to retract the mirrors every time an alien helicopter flies by, because you know, they don’t want to get caught. It turns out the whole process is a lot easier than I’d imagine.

The rest of the movie is just this long weird series of events. The Seekers are trying to hunt down the resistance. Melanie’s boyfriend and family at first treat Wanderer like a prisoner, but then they grow to love her. Melanie rekindles her romance. But Wanderer develops a romance for someone else. There’s a lot of perfectly groomed and shaved refugees staring longingly at each other, almost about to kiss, but then fighting off their temptation, because, I don’t know, I guess that’s a teenage problem or something.

What really stuck out to me was that the overall plot of the movie resembled the radical right’s exaggerated fears of what a liberal America might do to God’s favorite country. The aliens are sleek, sophisticated. They live in cities with socialized medicine, socialized everything, there is no more money at all. They wear all white. They drive chrome sports cars, fly chrome helicopters, zip around in chrome motorcycles. They complain in their northern accents that humans are barbaric, polluters of the environment. They shop for big boxes labeled “food” and jugs labeled “water” in big warehouses labeled “Store.” It’s big government at it’s worst, controlling the lives of every citizen, punishing, overbearing, cracking down on dissent in all forms.

The resistance is the real America, down to earth people with real Southern accents, listenin’ to country music, slingin’ shotguns, sayin’ stuff like, “I reckon,” and “ain’t” and “for a spell.” When Wanderer successfully fights off the advances of an admiring boy, Melanie screams in her head, “Hallelujah! (pronounced Hah-luh-LOO-ya!)

Wanderer falls in love with the real America. They rename her Wanda. She says that after being alive for one thousand years, spending her time amongst countless worlds, this is the hardest but most beautiful life in the whole galaxy. It’s American exceptionalism on a cosmic scale.

Now I just feel bad, tearing apart this movie that’s clearly intended for an audience that I’m not a part of. Still, maybe I wouldn’t mind all of the cheesiness if the movie weren’t so boring. The plot isn’t really a plot at all. It’s solipsistic. Most of the movie is the main character talking to herself, about boys, about feelings, about how feelings are hard. Whatever it’s for teenagers.

What was I watching when I was a teenager? Face-Off, The Water Boy, Starship Troopers. I guess it’s a hard market to sell stuff to. Actually, it’s a really easy market to sell stuff to. I don’t know. Next week I’m going to see Evil Dead, so come back and read the review.

Movie Review: Olympus Has Fallen

What is Olympus Has Fallen about? Because the commercials don’t really tell you anything, other than that it’s an action movie. It’s a big action movie, true to form, never straying at all far from the tropes of the genre. It’s about the President, kind of. The opening scene is of the President boxing one of his secret service agents at Camp David. It’s a big action movie.

I think it’s President Asher or something like that, but that kind of stuff never matters. In fact, just hearing “President Asher” only serves to remind the audience how not real any of this stuff is. Which to me is fine. You go to see an action movie, you have to suspend your belief in lots of things if you want to have a good time. But hearing stuff like “President Asher” kind of messes with the illusion somewhat.

Whatever, that’s a small point, Aaron Eckhart, who plays the President, is hardly in the movie at all. The boxing scene at the beginning is about as good as it gets, because almost immediately after, his wife dies in a freak falling-off-a-bridge accident.

The movie isn’t really about the President. It’s about the Koreans. And Gerard Butler. But really the Koreans. They don’t tell you any of that in the commercials. Because the Korean people are not well represented in this movie, that is, coming from this non-Korean’s perspective. I’m assuming it’s why it was left out of any advertisements.

They’re going for a good old-fashioned America vs. movie. America vs. what? You had Red Dawn in the eighties, but now there’s no Soviet Union anymore. And didn’t they just reboot that movie also? I can’t imagine how the story stood up to the geopolitics of 2013. So no Russia, no Middle East, I mean, those actions movies are all too depressing, too weighed down in the realities of the past decade.

North Korea. It just might work. There’s a sort of real threat coming from that direction. Technically we’re still at war, right? Brilliant, North Korea it is. Without ruining the movie, I’ll tell you that a rogue group of North Koreans stage an all out assault on the White House, capturing the President and some other senior officials in an underground bunker.

Before you say, “But, how? That doesn’t make sense,” the movie already has it answered: “It takes fifteen minutes for the armed forces to get to the White House. We took it down in thirteen.” Actions movies like this don’t have to rely on making sense or logistical plausibility, as long as they keep the helicopters crashing, the knives stabbing, and the Abe Lincoln busts bludgeoning, the audience will accept that the terrorists somehow got their hands on a prototype US antiaircraft gun. “How they hell did they get that?” somebody screams in the situation room, to which some general responds, “It doesn’t matter how they got it!”

After the White House is in enemy hands, our nation’s only hope lies in Gerard Butler, a former secret service agent who had a little something to do with the first lady falling off of that bridge. He sees the White House under attack, and he runs there, making it inside, everybody else dead, just he makes it, on foot, and eventually he finds a conveniently placed Bluetooth cell phone that somehow maintains constant communication with the situation room.

Also, Morgan Freeman, in a surprise move, is demoted from Hollywood’s favorite black President to America’s first fictitious black Speaker of the House. I was like, what the hell? How can you have a table full of fake officials and not automatically defer to Morgan Freeman? But it’s OK, because after the Vice President gets executed, Freeman gets to be acting President for the rest of the movie. That’s more like it.

Olympus Has Fallen was entertaining, although not as entertaining as say The Rock, or Con Air, or Apocalypto. I feel like six months from now we’re all going to be watching it on USA or TBS. This movie looks like it was made specifically for strategically placed TV commercial breaks. The pace definitely slowed down toward the end, and I didn’t have that same sitting on the edge of my seat feeling that I usually get toward the climax of good actions movies. But that’s because I think it was a relatively safe film, a pretty safe script, a safe cast, a safe time of the year when not a lot of cool stuff is playing in theaters.

But it’s an OK movie, if you like over the top action flicks. I don’t want to spoil anything, but somewhere around the middle, Butler tells the main villain, Kang, that he’s going to “stab you through your brain with my knife.” Who do you think wins in the end and how do you think he does it?

Movie Review: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

I’m going to start writing movie reviews. I figure every Friday, I’ll look at the week’s new releases, I’ll pick one at random, go see it, and then review it. So today was the first day. Unfortunately, I chose The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. I guess it was kind of subpar week for new releases. My options were this or The Call, which labeled itself as a low-budget thriller starring Halle Berry. It was a tossup, but Burt Wonderstone was showing earlier, and I figured I’d get it out of the way earlier, before I have to go to work tonight.

I don’t want to be overly negative. I hate reading movie reviews where everything is about how bad the movie was, how unfunny all of the jokes were, how positively unwatchable everything turned out to be as whole. So I want to start with something positive. Here it is: While I was watching Burt Wonderstone, I didn’t die. As far as I know, everybody else in the theatre escaped equally unscathed.

That’s all I’ve got. In all honesty, the movie was terrible. It stars Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi playing Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton, two childhood misfits that find solace and friendship in their shared love of magic. We experience their start as kids, learning all about magic from some boxed magician set, complete with a VHS of Allen Arkin playing Rance Holloway, an older magician.

Anybody who saw DodgeBall will notice the almost exact same bit being stolen directly from the VHS of old dodge ball pro, Patches O’Houlihan. As soon as I saw them pop in that cassette, I knew it would be a total rip-off, that sometime later one of the main characters would find Rance as an old washed up magician, that he would help them overcome whatever problems the story might throw their way.

Anyway, cut to the present day, Wonderstone and Marvelton are famous magicians hosting a nightly show at some Vegas hotel. There are a few cheap shots, some sort-of gay jokes, “We have a magical friendship / We always knew we weren’t like other boys,” and the usual over-the-top in-your-face sex jokes. After insulting his magician’s assistant to the point where she walks off stage, Wonderstone picks a female volunteer from the audience. After the show, we see the woman signing a release form in Wonderstone’s penthouse, agreeing that she is providing consent to all of the various sexual acts they will be performing.

The rest of the story is pretty cliché. The duo’s magical act is getting stale. A threat arises in the form of Jim Carrey, who plays Steve Gray, one of these edgy street magicians, a weird combination of David Blaine and Chris Angel. Gray’s show is called “Brain Rape,” a not at all subtle or funny jab at Angel’s “Mind Freak.” This all might be clever if “Human Giant” hadn’t successfully parodied all of this stuff years ago. As Gray’s star rises, Wonderstone and Marvelton lose their audience. They get in a fight, they split up. What follows is the typical riches to rags to personal epiphany to reunion to comeback story.

Great, terrific. Yes, I could go on about how the movie is totally uninspired, how it blatantly tries to copy movies like DodgeBall, like Anchorman, like every other big budget comedy movie. I could write about how the supporting cast is made up of has-been TV typecast actors, James Gandolfini, Britta from “Community,” Raymond’s cop brother from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” plus lots of old SNL faces I haven’t seen anywhere else in like ten years. The whole cast, they’re like crabs trying to get out of a barrel, clawing every which way in a futile effort to somehow stay famous, to be relevant. At one point Carell goes to a retirement home in Las Vegas. He walks in and goes, “So this is where old entertainers go to die.” This movie has to be self-aware.

It’s all of the bloat of big Hollywood, the bad writing, the terrible acting, all in a one and a half hour snooze fest. The studio must have been aware of this, must have been conscious that the film was unwatchable. The finale involved the two magicians drugging their entire audience unconscious. I wish they would’ve handed out samples for us on the way in.

But the real problem with this movie is that it’s just not funny. The jokes were awful. I only laughed once, mildly, at a minor scene where Buscemi, having left for Cambodia to provide magic to the poor (Operation Presto,) gives some little kid a rabbit to pull out of a hat. We see the little kid walking the animal off screen as he pulls out a huge knife. Also, Wonderstone’s hair goes from long to short, back and forth multiple times throughout the course of the film, with no explanation. That was kind of funny.

Steve Carell screams a lot. Jim Carrey makes Jim Carrey faces and Jim Carrey noises. We’ve seen stories like this a thousand times, with the same endings, the same one-dimensional romances. The girl hates the lead. The lead tries to seduce her all while calling her the wrong name throughout the entire movie. She’s disgusted. He has his personal epiphany. He calls her by the correct name. Now she’s in love. Now she’s having sex with him. Her reward is a promotion, from magician’s assistant to magician’s opening act. Go women. How liberating.

Whenever I watch really bad comedies, I always get to a point probably three quarters of the way in where I’m just like, this sucks, I’m bored, I don’t want to have to finish this movie, and it’s taking forever. This movie was way too long. I was struggling to pay attention. I was thinking, how do they get away with making boring movies like this? They definitely cost millions of dollars to produce.

And then I remember being in high school, after I first got my driver’s license. I remember being free, for the first time, I didn’t have to ask my parent’s to take me to the movies, I didn’t have to answer their, “What movie are you going to see?” followed by, “I don’t know, that sounds inappropriate.” I’d go see all sorts of shows, finally, movies I wanted to see, adult movies. I’m remembering stuff like American Pie 2, Shallow Hal, Austin Powers 3, Some ping-pong movie with Christopher Walken.

That’s how they get you. They make these movies for adults, but market them to little kids. Adults leave their kids at home to watch these terrible comedies. Kids sit at home and wish they could go and see adult movies. Adults come home, disappointed, because nobody can watch this junk. But the damage is already done, the kids are totally primed to get their driver’s licenses and head out to see whatever’s opening up on Friday night. Then they have their own kids and leave them at home. It’s generation after generation of big movie studios making terrible movies and robbing us blind, laughing all the way to the bank.

At one point, Wonderstone and Marvelton try to do a Blaine-esque spectacle where they sit in a glass box suspended in the sky for a week. As they get hoisted up, some producer shouts at them, “Remember, all you have to do is nothing!” I think everybody involved in this movie took those instructions a little too strictly.

Don’t see it. If you were going to see, and didn’t because of this review, I just saved you thirteen bucks. I’m not saying I deserve all of those thirteen dollars, but if you could give me five, that would nice.