July 10, 2023

65

Rating: 3 of 5 CGI dinos
Visually great, although wonderfully generated dinosaurs has been played out by now. Very superficial and common plot. Crash landed on a planet, protagonist struggles against impossible odds to figure out how to escape. That’s the big plot, so mostly, it’s dealing with dinos. But the endless Jurassic Park films already numbed us to that plot-line. So, it’s a chance to watch Adam Driver run around and try out new facial expressions.

June 27, 2023

M3gan

Rating: 4.5 of 5 non-Asimov robots
A rare combo of creepy, funny, and scary. All done pretty well. A few surprises, well done effects, and good acting all around. Came in not expecting a lot, since most all recent horror attempts weren’t great. This was refreshingly entertaining.

June 26, 2023

Evil Dead Rises

Rating: 2 of 5 Necronomicons
A big fan of the first 3, featuring Bruce Campbell, I don’t expect much from the continued sequels, even though Bruce and Sam Rami are involved as producers. Just to say, my bar is pretty low for these remakes. This started out pretty well, good visuals, a cursory nod to the original general plot. But, about halfway through, it just fizzled. More of the same, repeated, didn’t keep up with the scary bits.

June 10, 2023

Violent Night

Rating: 4.5 of 5 sledgehammers
This looked pretty cheesey when I first saw the poster, before the holidays. Finally showed up for free streaming, so we gave it a shot. It was hillarious. And violent. But, that’s in the title, so can’t really complain about the violence! Simple plot, Santa is visiting a house where the family is being held by armed and violent thieves. And, it has actors you’ll recognize: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, and Beverly D’Angelo lead the cast.

June 5, 2023

Captive State

Rating: 2 of 5 puffers
Aliens take over earth, some people don’t like it, and I guess they fight back? Hard to tell, really. I found it confusing, with little to no character development, at it was unclear what was so different about alien rule, or just a global dictatorship. All in all, I’d pass on it, there are a lot of perfectly good aliens take over and are challenged by spunky human flicks out there.

May 6, 2023

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

Rating: 2 of 5 straightjackets
Visualy unusual, starts off creepy and disturbing. Stays disturbing, but not all that creepy. The close-in photography wears a bit thin, and the music is definately a character in itself. The plot is pretty light. It’s more of a slice of life, following people through a couple weird days, but for people on the fringe. Not really horror or sci-fi, more offbeat drama-thriller.

May 1, 2023

Scream VI

Rating: 4 of 5 sequels
I haven’t seen all the Scream movies, so this isn’t a totally fair review. But, it’s a slasher horror flick, so we’ll just go with that. A lot scarier than I expected, and actualy pretty good. The “prey” don’t run around doing stupid things, the bad guy is really bad. There appears to be a deeper story following on from the prior flicks, but it wasn’t necessary to get the overall gist.

April 23, 2023

Lights Out

Rating: 4 of 5 jump scares
Hope you like jump scares, ‘cause this is the definition of a jump scare flick. Also has a pretty good plot, and at least they had a reason for the film being dark (see the title for a hint).

April 16, 2023

Life After Beth

Rating: 3 of 5 zomcoms
A zombie rom com. A pretty average comedy, riding almost entirely on Aubry Plaza’s talent for playing manic characters. Some really funny moments early on, it gets a bit tragic in the third act.

April 16, 2023

Bullitt

Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Let’s start with the obvious. The big car chase is a 5 out of 5. For fans of classic 60’s cars, and nostalgic views of San Francisco, this movie has them in abundance. However, as a thriller, it’s not very thrilling. In fact, it’s very dark (were hospitals actually this badly lit after the invention of electric lighting?) and fairly slow and plodding about 75% of the time, with remarkably little dialog throughout.