Action, 93 Minutes, 2011:
[Wife and kids are away on their last weekend jaunt before school starts so while I catch up on some mind-numbingly tedious work I’m distracting myself with bad movies. This is the second.]
Tag: Film
Movie Review: Doghouse
Zombie alert!
See the review of “Doghouse” on our sister site, MoreBrains.com dedicated to all things zombie!
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Movie Review: Sanctum
Adventure, 108 Minutes, 2011
Yet another excellently made Australian movie. (I won’t go into, yet again, how impressed I’ve been by Australian productions lately.) Sure, it’s an “anthem” movie – in this case to caving (as an aside, when did we stop calling it “spelunking”? I liked “Spelunking”!) and underground diving. As you might expect this activity is incredibly specialized and incredibly dangerous and the movie does an excellent job of relating it meaningfully to the audience.
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Movie Review: Pete Smalls is Dead
Comedy, 95 Minutes, 2010
In a good way this reminded me a lot of “The Big Lebowski” [IMDB]. Not in story but in sensibility and pacing. It’s not as good – Lebowski is an acknowledged classic from master filmmakers after all – but fans of it should like this. A subdued kind of depressiveness permeates the entire thing but is offset by moments of deep optimism and emotion.
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Movie Review: The Hunger Games
Adventure, 142 Minutes, 2012
I have to begin this by admitting that I’ve not read these books. My wife has, however, and wanted to see the movie and I want to continue to see my wife so we watched it. So I can only speak to the film and not how well it honors its source material.
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Movie Review: Insidious
Horror, 103 Minutes, 2010
With almost no tweaking this could easily be a remake of “Poltergeist” [IMDB]. Although the haunted house angle (which was completely superfluous to begin with) is abandoned early the plot has all the same touch-points. Josh and Renai’s son, Dalton, enters into an unexplained coma that appears more like normal sleep than anything medical. Surrounding this are terrifying visions and things that go bump-in-the-night.
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Movie Review: The Lorax
Family, 86 Minutes, 2012
My 10 year daughter loved this movie. I didn’t. Like other attempts to enbiggen Dr. Suess to feature-lengths it’s too self-indulgent with its own ideas and loses the soul of the source material. “The Lorax” was a simple story with some very basic themes – most of which seem to have been lost in this translation.
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Movie Review: I Spit on Your Grave
“I Spit on Your Grave” on IMDB
Horror, 108 Minutes, 2010
This is not a movie for a first date… or a third for that matter. Or, in fact, any week were you might want to actually have sex… on second thought make that any month. This is a remake of the controversial 1978 classic horror movie of the same name [IMDB]. Often mislabeled an exploitation film the original was anything but sexual. (While I’m sadly sure that some people must enjoy this kind of brutality it was clearly not the intention of the film to cater to that audience.)
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Movie Review: Knife Edge
Thriller, 90 Minutes, 2009
The grunting, slobbering core of this movie is an unwieldy, multi-tentacled plot that drags itself into your living room, sits in your favorite chair and demands, “what kind of snacks you got?” It sits there eating your food and throwing what it thinks are insanely clever ideas at you for 90 minutes then gets up. That’s when you notice the smell and the movie’s core, noticing your look of disgust, admits: “By the way, I shit in your chair.”
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Movie Review: Texas Killing Fields
“Texas Killing Fields” on IMDB
Crime Thriller, 105 Minutes, 2011
I have to admit I’d never heard of this movie before. My wife started it before I came into the room and when I saw the title I assumed “B-grade horror”. Then when I started seeing the cast I thought, “Hey – this is an actual real movie!” And indeed it was – A-list actors and everything!
