Handsome, Pretty Handsome. One of the formative TV shows of our youth, LOST IN SPACE, is rebooted as an enjoyable Netflix series, capturing all the dynamics of the original show, and leaving out the camp and the bubble-headed booby. In the year 2046, the space-faring Family Robinson leaves a dying Earth, onboard a mothership of colonists, headed for the star … Read More
ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES
The Corporatization of Dumbification. There are a few above-average jokes in ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES, but most of them are quite average. Underpinning the plot of a TV news anchorman struggling to find meaning in his job and love life, there is the cheeky indictment of the vapid 24-hour news culture and, by association, indictment of all those responsible … Read More
THE RELIC
Horror Movie Handbook meets Callous Director. Another good scientific story sacrificed to Hollywood’s Lowest Common Denom. THE RELIC finds a field researcher dabbling in tribal drugs on the dark continent shipping a crate containing a strange fungus back to his lab at the Chicago Natural History Museum. Also in the crate is a relic of an ancient god that could … Read More
DYLAN DOG: DEAD OF NIGHT
Doggy doo. Brandon Routh is soooo Christopher Reeve. He wasn’t this much Christopher Reeve even when he was Superman. You would think that anyone who hired Reeve – I mean, Routh – post-SUPERMAN RETURNS (after which he was unfairly stripped of the cape), would cast him as a character as far from the Man of Steel as possible, but in … Read More
YOUR HIGHNESS
Their Lowness. The trailers fooled us with witty asides and raunchy innuendo, but YOUR HIGHNESS is a fast-paced slow-brainer for people who like to hear swear words unsurrounded by actual comedy. Not only sophomoric – uninvolving and uncomfortably devoid of laughs, with sloppy, predictable writing, direction and story; Danny McBride at his unfunniest as a slacker prince; James Franco as … Read More
PREDATORS
Roaring Ripping Rending Rebirth! At last – the sequel to PREDATOR we’ve been waiting for! With the internet ablaze with derogation over the casting of Adrien Brody in the lead role (purely because action fans cannot comprehend life after Arnold), and the B-movie schlock of the ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movies sullying DVD rental racks around the planet, it would seem … Read More
UNDERWORLD
Overwrought Underworld. Guns, Gore and Grrrrrls in growling leather. UNDERWORLD gives a shot in the arm, so to speak, to the vampire and werewolf iconographies, updating/reimagining both to be in an ongoing millennia-aged war that is escalating, plopping them in modern day Europe (or somewhere with underground rail transport and rain that won’t quit) with automatic weapons and computers. And … Read More
TERMINATOR SALVATION
The Manchurian Candidator. For fuck’s sake, man, you’re amateur! — Christian Bale on the set of TERMINATOR SALVATION. That’s the best description *I* can think of for TERMINATOR SALVATION. What more could we expect from writers who penned the silly TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES and a director whose claim to fame is the CHARLIE’S ANGELS franchise? James Cameron … Read More
HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY
Hell-Tilt With The Wheels Comin’ Off. PAN’S LABYRINTH smashed up against the Cantina Sequence from STAR WARS and Guillermo del Toro rode that bad boy all the way to a town called HELLBOY. In HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, writer-director del Toro has concreted his gleaming vision, found his devil stride, piling spectacle upon wonder upon bombastic fantastic. From Mike … Read More
LADY IN THE WATER
Part real. Part fable. All Night. In his book, On Directing Film, David Mamet says of movies, “it’s all make-believe. The question is, how good is the make-believe going to be?” M. Night Shyamalan‘s LADY IN THE WATER is truly what it sells itself as – a bedtime story; make-believe of the highest order, taken with a generous pinch of … Read More
HELLBOY
Hell-Freed but Earth-Bound. They say he’s from Hell – now is that the Christian version or the ancient Jewish version? Or the Greek version, or Nordic, or Moslem? Why, there are as many versions of Hell as demons from there. But enough about George Bush Junior. HELLBOY is a classic example of hype over-riding content. I am as big a … Read More