The Hurricane Heist (2018) – Review

I’m a sucker for disaster films, so the idea of blending in a Die Hard style heist with a natural disaster was pretty much catnip to me. Sadly, director Rob Cohen fails on both counts as this movie is neither an exciting disaster flick nor is it a good caper film. With what can be achieved with modern day special effects, even silly disaster films like San Andreas can be fun to watch - no matter how ridiculous or completely implausible things get - but you still need characters to root for, and that is where The Hurricane Heist stumbles the most.

 The movie opens with a dad and his two young boys, Will and Breeze, driving through Hurricane Andrew when their truck is driven off the road by a falling tree.  The boys are forced to take shelter in a nearby farm house while their father tries to use his truck’s winch to get their vehicle back on the road. If you’ve seen the movie Twister, where the father is killed by the storm - while the two boys watch helplessly on - you will of course not be surprised when the father dies here, too. Even less surprising is the fact that one of the boys grows up to be a meteorologist because apparently according to the great “Movie Laws,” your career choice must stem from some personal tragedy.

 

“I will get even with Mother Nature by staring pensively at her.”

Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell) is one of those "action meteorologist" who drive around in armored vehicles that look like they were borrowed from the disaster film Into the Storm, while on the other hand his brother Breeze Rutledge (Ryan Kwanten) is an ex-Marine who runs a “Tow and Repair” business. We get the standard stuff of Will telling his superiors that the oncoming hurricane is going to be worse than what the predictions are stating - he has one of those magical gut feelings that trumps technology - and of course he is proven right because the hero is always right in these movies. Then we have good ole Breeze - who is more of plot point than a character - and any moment of screen time with him is almost instantly forgotten — he's just a complete waste of screentime. And what exactly is the plot of The Hurricane Heist? Well if you’ve seen the 1998 action film Hard Rain, you’ve pretty much seen this film.  Hard Rain was about an armored car being heisted while it was collecting money from local banks that were in danger of being flooded by a terrible storm; The Hurricane Heist is about crooks using a category 5 hurricane as cover to rob a U.S. treasury facility. As in Hard Rain, two of the key players of The Hurricane Heist are armored car drivers, but the similarities don’t end there.

 

“It says here in the script that I’m going to be betrayed by my partner.”

In this film, we have Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace), a Treasury agent - who has a tragic back story of her own but one that has no real bearing on the plot so I’m not sure why the writers gave her one at all - and her driving partner Connor Perkins (Ralph Ineson), who turns out to be working with the crooks just as Ed Asner in Hard Rain betrayed his partner played by Christian Slater. But wait, there's more! When Casey eventually hooks up with our heroic meteorologist, they run to the local sheriff’s office for help only to discover - like in Hard Rain - that the local cops are in on the heist. It’s at this point I suspected that the producers of this film concluded that they wouldn’t be sued for plagiarism because their movie was doomed to flop at the box office and was thus not worth suing over.

 

“We’re in the suck zone!”

Now, ripping off another movie does not necessarily mean a film won’t still be entertaining - a disaster movie is mostly about spectacle and not about originality or tightly woven plots - but where a film like the aforementioned San Andreas had the charismatic Duane “The Rock” Johnson to anchor it, none of the cast members in this film rank above the actors you'd find in an average SyFy original. Not only did I not care about the plight of anybody in this movie - and what plight we get is more boring than suspenseful - I was actively rooting at times for the storm to just kill everybody, but sadly the heroes had more plot armor than a hundred Arnold Schwarzeneggers.  I literally lost count of how many times Will and Casey should have died. These two not only heroically fend off numerous armed goons, but somehow stand around - or in one case hang on a tether high up amongst the killer winds and flying debris- with Mother Nature turning the environment into a hellscape — our heroes somehow escape it all without so much as a scratch. Not only is the weather depicted as taking sides in this conflict - villains being sucked away while the heroes who were basically right next to them are spared - but we see people standing in the street while cars are being thrown around like their matchbox miniatures. Just how localized can wind be?

 

Can our heroes survive this? Of course they can.

This almost works as comedy - as the absurdity on display is truly staggering - and the scene with meteorologist Will leaping onto the back of a moving transport truck to take on the crooks is particularly laughable; but when it comes to making a disaster film work, the stakes must seem high, yet at no point did I believe our heroes were in the remotest bit of danger. On the heist aspect the story, the movie also drops the ball as the criminal crew consists of unmemorable thugs who pop in and out of the story - to give us a break from watching the CGI wind blowing shit around - and the threat level they provide our heroes is never above minimal.

With the proper amount of alcohol consumed, a viewer may find some level of entertainment out of this film - though to achieve this, alcohol poisoning is a real risk - but as a whole, this is a product that can be skipped by disaster film enthusiasts and heist film fans alike. The Hurricane Heist is simply boring when it’s not being utterly laughable.

Mom and Dad (2017) – Review

It has become clear to movie goers that there exists in the world today two completely different Nicholas Cages - one who is the series actor, starring in films such as Adaptation and Leaving Las Vegas - and then there is the more wild and crazy Nicholas Cage who fans love to see going completely off the rails in films like Drive Angry and The Wicker Man remake. Technically, there is a third Nicholas Cage - one who appears in action films like the National Treasure movies - but he isn’t anywhere near as remarkable as the other two. Today we will look at the dark comedy simply titled Mom and Dad, a film that is a nice little romp on the dark side, and definitely fits into the camp of Crazy Cage.

The premise of Mom and Dad is pretty simple: it deals with the parental instinct to protect one’s child, but somehow it is switched into reverse, where the parents now want to murder their offspring instead of protect them. What exactly has caused such a bizarre and violent change? Is it some government bio-weapon gone wrong like in George Romero’s The Crazies? Or has nature decided to unleash a virus to help with the overpopulation problem as seen in M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Happening? This film posits a couple of theories - at one point we get an eerie shot of static filled television screens that could be hinting at a broadcast signal causing the change - but writer/director Brian Taylor doesn’t seem all that interested in giving reasons for the events that unfold, and when the movie’s end credits roll - without a conclusive explanation - some audience members may be less than pleased.

 

“Go ahead, ask for your money back. I dare you.”

The film’s main protagonist is teenage daughter Carly Ryan (Anne Winters), who has more of an interest in her cellphone than what her mother, Kendall (Selma Blair) has to say. In fact, she's the standard cliché self-absorbed teenager - that we've seen in countless after school specials - who doesn’t care if her callous words hurt her mother deeply. Kendall, on the other hand, has come to the conclusion that having your life put on hold to raise two children may have had a downside. We also have Carly’s little brother, Josh (Zackary Arthur), who seems to still have a good relationship with his father, Brent (Nicolas Cage), but their father/son relationship may be built on a broken foundation created by Brent’s own issues with his dad (Lance Henriksen), and when the “event” happens both Carly and Josh will discover how some of these issues can run quite deep.

 

“I told you that asking for a raise in our allowance was a bad idea.”

Though billed as a “Dark Comedy,” Mom and Dad does tackle some serious issues - and handles them fairly well, for the most part. In particular, the Midlife Crisis that strikes many a family is summed up nicely when Brent bemoans to his wife, “We used to be Kendall and Brent but now were just Mom and Dad.” This loss of identity - and the perceived failure of a future they once were assured of - is at the heart of this film, and even though one can’t realistically blame a child for the lemons life has handed you, it's certainly not an uncommon feeling. It's this emotional undercurrent that elevates Mom and Dad from just being a horror version of Home Alone.

 

There are points in the film that would make Kevin McAllister proud.

I’d go so far as to say that the comedic aspects of this dark comedy are rather downplayed, and aside from some sarcastic comments during the crisis - ones I doubt anyone in their right mind would say at that point - there really aren’t all that many funny moments in the film. As for horrific moments, there are plenty - I will just say one more thing about how dark this movie gets, and that would be Maternity Ward - a scene that is truly horrifying. *shudder* 

Mom and Dad is not without its flaws - Carly’s boyfriend must have a head made of iron and a spine consisting mostly of rubber for all the damage he survives - but overall, it’s a solid horror film with great performances by all involved. I’d even say Cage restrained himself from going too over-the-top, as his character could have easily become cartoon-y if he had let himself go hog wild. and he handled his part with professional aplomb. So, if you’re not a person hung up on having all the loose ends tied up in a nice tidy bow by the time the credits roll, you will most likely have a fun time with this movie; but if you don’t like dark open-ended films, this may not be the one for you.

 

Note: This film is about a seven on the Cage Crazy Meter.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) – Review

Did we need a Han Solo origin story? The obvious answer is no – we learned everything we needed to know about the character in Star Wars: A New Hope – but with Disney hell-bent on making the Star Wars brand as big a money-maker as the Marvel movies, we can expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing.  That said I will start off this review by saying that Solo: A Star Wars Story isn’t all that bad – I’d compare it to a big budget version of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles – and the entire assembled cast all put in solid work here. Where the film kind of lets us down is in how safe they are playing with the story – though to be fair they can’t really throw in big surprises in a prequel – and as narrative, the movie doesn’t so much as have a plot as it does a sequence of action set pieces.

In this prequel we learn that Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) grew up on the shipbuilding world of Corellia – where he lived as a sort of Artful Dodger to some weird-ass alien Fagan type – and along with him, we meet the beautiful Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), who is kind of the film’s love interest, but as she’s not Princess Leia we know this relationship isn’t going to work out in the long run. This is a key problem when making a prequel, as the viewer has already seen the future of this universe – when a character from the original trilogy makes an appearance, we certainly know they’re not going to die – and that kind of places all the other characters we meet into the disposable category.

 

"Who you calling disposable, I'm a natural born killer."

We meet Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who becomes a sort of mentor figure to Han, then there is Val (Thandie Newton), Beckett’s wife and part of his criminal crew, and they - along with a four armed alien pilots - take Han in when he tries to flee Imperial Service. We also have a ruthless crime lord named Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) – and Bettany does nice work as the villain, but as the movie spends so much time racing from one location to another we don’t get to spend enough time with him – and rounding out the criminals in this corner of the galaxy is Enfys Nest (Erin Kellyman), a leader of a band of space pirates and a personal thorn in Beckett’s side, and who also may have an agenda beyond making a quick buck. All these new characters are quite fun – I especially loved robot L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who kind of highlights the question that I’ve wondered about for some time, “Are droids just machines built to serve or are they a slave class?” – Sadly we aren’t given too much time to get attached to any of them as the screenwriters had a check list of things that “must” happen, such as…

• How Chewbacca and Han Solo became friends.
• Meeting Lando Calrissian.
• Chewie losing at holochess.
• Han Solo getting the Millennium Falcon.
• The much-talked about Kessel Run.

I’ll also give credit to Alden Ehrenreich for not trying to do a Harrison Ford impression – taking on such an iconic role had to have been nerve wracking – and he managed to hold his own against Donald Glover's scene stealing performance as Lando Calrissian, which certainly couldn't have been easy. We also get some nice moments with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) – lucky for us, Life Day on Kashyyyk is never referenced – and it’s safe to say if the plot had been streamlined to focus more on the relationships between Han, Qi'ra, Chewbacca and Lando - and not the half-dozen other characters - the film would have held together a little better. Where Rogue One: A Star Wars Story worked as a Guns of Navarone type war movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story would have been better off if they’d gone in the vein of a simple Kelly’s Heroes type war story, and not cluttered the field with a lot of extraneous stuff.

 

"I think our script bounced too close to a super nova."

The film does have some amazing action set pieces – the train heist is especially gripping – but when it comes to extended chase sequences, they probably could have dropped one - or at least shaved a few minutes off a couple of them. The pacing could also have been improved, as after a while it all becomes a bit exhausting.

Who knows what jettisoned directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord had in mind for the story – according to many sources, the cast were not happy with the direction it was going – and if Ron Howard had been given a fresh start the end result may have been quite different. Alas, that is something we will never know - at least what we did get was better than the blended mess that was Justice League – still all in all, it was quite entertaining.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a fun film – fans will have fun spotting references to the original films – and as it didn’t take any chances with the subject matter, it won’t be nearly as decisive as Star Wars: Last of the Jedi was to said Star Wars fans. See it on the big screen, you won’t be disappointed.

Final Thoughts:

• We get an origin story for Han Solo’s name, seriously.
• If a person says, “Trust nobody” that person will betray you.
• In fact betrayal is kind of this film’s theme.
• Required Clint Howard cameo.
• Han Solo shoots first.
• The Kessel Run’s parsec goof is fixed.

 

That’s a load off my mind.

Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2018) – Review

With the popularity of the zombie genre still chugging along - with numerous zombie movies and television shows popping up at an alarming rate - it is sad to report that the percentage of good zombie content versus bad zombie content weighs heavily on the side of “Oh my god this sucks.” Director Hernández Vicens’ Day of the Dead: Bloodline is clearly no exception. When one thinks of zombies, the creations of George Romero (considered by most to be the father of the genre) will always be in the forefront of such discussions, so it’s a bit depressing to see a remake of one of his films being as uninteresting and lame as the one we are discussing here today. Back in 1990, Tom Savini remade Romero’s seminal classic Night of the Living Dead - which was surprisingly good - then in 2004 ,Zack Snyder made arguably his best film with his remake of Romero’s sequel Dawn of the Dead, and so the possibility of a remake of Romero’s 1985 Day of the Dead being decent was not beyond the pale. Well it turns out that the third remake is not the charm.

This movie opens with medical student Zoe Parker (Sophie Skelton) running down the streets - doing her best to survive a zombie rampage - before cutting to a “Four Hours Earlier” title card where we then learn that she was working with a patient/psycho stalker named Max (Johnathon Schaech), who happened to have an alarming amount of antibodies in his blood. Then during this “Four Hours Earlier,” we get her freaking when she sees Max has carved her name into his arm.  Once again there is another time jump - now to a keg party being held inside the medical facility later that night - but the party takes a turn for the worst when Max shows up for some attempted rape. Lucky for Zoe, this rape attempt took place in the morgue, and psycho Max finds himself attacked by one of the now walking corpses. The film then jumps to “Five Years Later,” to where we now find Zoe working as a doctor in a underground military bunker, and we are left wondering, “What was the point of that cold open with Zoe running from zombie hordes?” Someone should have told the editor that playing that much with time jumps in your first ten minutes is not the best idea. Then again there aren’t that many good ideas on display in this film period.

 

Having the main zombie looking like an undead Joker was another strange choice.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Romero’s original Day of the Dead, but a lot of its failings came down to how little money he had to work with; so another version of this one had none of that stigma of “How could you remake a classic?”  So I went into this viewing with an open mind and a little bit of hope – yet that hope was almost immediately dashed when I realized the hero was a total git and the majority of the deaths could be laid at her feet. Though to be fair, almost all the characters are pretty incompetent, varying between rock stupid and suicidally moronic. When Zoe declares they need to make a supply run to get medicine for a sick girl - against the wishes of her commanding officer, who is also a total asshat named Lieutenant Miguel Salazar (Jeff Gum) - she gets one of her teammates killed because she slips away from the group to get some photos from her old office. Now I'll admit vacation memories are important to me, but they are not the "Get your teammates killed" kind of important.

 

She also has morning jogs in front of the fenced off zombies for no fucking reason.

The main plot of the movie deals with her discovering that her old stalker Max is some kind of super-zombie - he's only “mostly dead” - so she believes this could lead to her coming up with a vaccine that would prevent people who have been bitten from turning into the walking dead. Now I’m no virologist, but that seems to me like a hard thing to develop while in an underground bunker - especially if you aren’t even a bloody medical graduate - but good ole Zoe is an uber-genius who can whip up a zombie cure in a couple of hours. And just how special is Zombie Max? Well he finds Zoe’s scrunchie - which she dropped during that tragic supply run - and he is able to track her down like some kind of zombie bloodhound. Zombie Max then attaches himself to the undercarriage of their Humvee - riding all the way to their base unbeknownst to these idiots - and then he sneaks around the bunker by crawling through the air ducts.

 

"Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs."

Seeing Zombie Max wander around the military facility like a fucking ninja is just one of many ridiculous moments in Day of the Dead: Bloodline; every other minute it seems like someone is doing something phenomenally moronic – one particular idiot hears noises in the ducts so he grabs a hammer and flashlight because he thinks it rats (meeting a rat with a hammer in the closed confines of an air duct seems kind of odd), so he climbs up into the ducts to do some hunting, and while there, he is messily dispatched by Zombie Max.  We also have to assume that this is the most acoustically sound underground base ever made as people are constantly being chased and killed with no one hearing a goddamn thing.

They manage to capture Zombie Max - which leads to more tension between Zoe and Lieutenant Asshat - and even more tension between Zoe and her boyfriend Baca Salazar (Marcus Vanco), who briefly gets jealous of Zombie Max for some bloody reason. All this relationship nonsense aside – and it is all pretty ridiculous when you consider a major part of the plot deals with a romantically obsessed zombie – I'm left with one final burning question, “Why in the hell would you keep your super zombie chained to the wall in your bloody lab?” Are you too lazy to walk down the hall to get blood samples from the zombie in a more secure enclosure? I have to believe that a slavering monster constantly growling your name would not be conducive to delicate scientific work.

 

“Can you still hear the Lambs, Clarice?”

The one real positive thing I can say about Day of the Dead: Bloodline is that the gore we do get is none of that horrible CGI crap we see in a lot of the low budget horror films these days, here at least we get the bulk of blood and guts the old fashion way with nice practical effects. I will give a final shoutout to Johnathon Schaech whose Zombie Max was the only interesting thing going on in this movie -even if a bit ridiculous at times - and if they had managed to write a plot that deserved him, we might have had something worth remembering. But Day of the Dead: Bloodline is just another tepid remake that doesn’t say or do anything new, and should be avoided, even by fans of the genre.

Note: Producer Christa Campbell has been quoted as saying, "We wanted to keep it as close to the Romero version as possible. To make sure that his fans are happy. These are not going to be zombies climbing walls and doing back flips like in World War Z.” A nice sentiment to be sure, but the zombies here are basically the same fast running zombies that have appeared in countless modern zombie films, and not the classic Romero shambling undead at all.

Pirates (1986) – Review

Pirate films have existed since the very early years of the 20th Century, from the silent film classic, The Black Pirate (1926) with Douglas Fairbanks, to the rousing epic Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn, yet modern audiences are mostly familiar with the genre’s re-emergence in the early years of the 21st Century with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Today, we will look back at a film that did its best to destroy the genre, and that film would be Roman Polanski’s Pirates.

The movie opens with infamous English pirate Thomas Bartholomew Red (Walter Matthau) and his ship's teenage cabin boy Jean-Baptiste (Cris Campion), nicknamed Frog, lost at sea on a cobbled-together raft. Now when one thinks of "movie pirates," the names Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, and even Burt Lancaster - and now Johnny Depp - readily leap to mind, so the casting of Walter Matthau was certainly an interesting choice on the part of Polanski (Note: Polanski wanted Jack Nicholson for the part but the actor demanded too much money and later Michael Caine also declined), and Matthau does give us a performance that can certainly be credited as being very piratical, as he is gruff and unlikable as one would believe many a pirate to be, but if your lead actor is playing a rather disgusting human being, his co-star better be able to provide a character for the audience to root for. Sadly this was not the case.  Actor Cris Campion was not quite up to the challenge and makes Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl seem scintillatingly charismatic by comparison.

 

The pirate and the driftwood that walks like a man.

To be fair this was Campion's first movie, so one should not be too hard on him, and the script certainly did him no favors, but when you have two lead characters that vary between obnoxious and boring, your movie is going to have to contain some great action and good comedy to make up for the crippling lack of likability for the leads. This is a pirate movie, so we can at least look forward to some great swashbuckling action with dazzling sword play and cool sea battles, right? *sigh* Back in the thirties, Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone set the standard for cinematic swordplay in Captain Blood - director Michael Curtiz was a master of putting together thrilling action sequences, and the sea battles in Captain Blood are second to none - such is not the case with Polanski’s pirate movie — the fight scenes look like a haphazard mess of random extras flailing around at each other (maybe accidentally hitting one another) and aside from one broadside of canon fire at a bunch of longboats, we don’t even get a decent sea battle.

 

This is about the best moment in the movie.

Question: Do you find rape jokes funny? Comedian Ricky Gervais has rightly stated that anything can be funny depending on the context, and apparently Polanski didn’t get that memo as this film has not one but two attempted rape scenes - with the second one being an attempt at slapstick comedy - and neither of them are funny in or out of any frame of context. Of course, pirates did a lot of raping and pillaging - this is a historical fact which cannot be disputed - but if you are making an adventure/comedy, that might be an aspect you should shy away from. You can certainly hint at that element of the pirate life, but its best to refrain from scenes where women are tossed over a bed with their dresses raised over their heads. That young Jean-Baptiste steps into save the honor of María-Dolores (Charlotte Lewis), a beautiful Spanish girl who finds herself in the pirate’s clutches, does not help the film’s case as it then tries to brook a romance between the two simply based on his not wanting to see her raped or rape her himself. I’m betting the list of romantic comedies that have a “meet cute” during a rape scene is rather small.

 

Now quickly google "Roman Polanski" and "Rape." I’ll wait.

For those of you not in the know, the production of Pirates was delayed for years because Polanski was forced to flee the United States when he was charged with the drugging and raping of a 13 year old girl, and then in 2010, actress Charlotte Lewis came forward accusing Polanski of “predatory sexual conduct,” claiming that Polanski insisted that she sleep with him in return for casting her in Pirates. Now I know Polanski has given us some classic movies over the years, but seriously, how is he still getting work?

 

“I say we keelhaul the blighter!”

Horrible and distasteful aspects of the film's production aside, the movie itself is also terrible on pretty much every other level - excepting the amazing costuming and set designs - but at the heart of the film’s problems is what, at a glance, seems to be an unfinished script that lacks focus and peters off towards the end, and the audience is left with no actual conclusion.

After Captain Red and Frog are rescued and locked in irons by a passing Spanish galleon, the two incite a mutiny - which they fail at - and they are sentenced to death.  And how do they escape being hanged from the yardarm for such an act?  Why they incite another mutiny, of course.

 

If this is how the Spanish ran their warships it’s no wonder they lost to the British.

Onboard the galleon is also a golden throne belonging to an Aztec king - this is basically the film’s MacGuffin as it is quickly stolen and lost by Captain Red throughout the film - retrieved by the villainous Don Alfonso de la Torré (Damien Thomas), but then through trickery and torture (and the threatened rape of the girl), Red and Frog get the golden throne back only to lose it again when they get hung up on the harbor chain.

Note: This giant golden throne is lowered and loaded into small boats so often I couldn’t help but wonder, "Just how light would a throne made of gold actually be?"

The movie ends with Captain Red leading his murderous pirates on a nighttime raid of the Spanish galleon - that starts out clever with the pirates following the galleon in a small sloop while dragging behind weighted barrels to lure the Spanish into thinking the ship is too slow to catch them - but at night, they cut the barrels loose and sneak up on the Spanish ship.  Then things become completely idiotic when Captain Red fires one of his own deck guns into the hull of his own ship to help motivate his men into attacking the Spanish. Sure sinking your own ship will prevent your men from retreating - Cortez famously burned his ships to motivate his men - but firing off a canon will also alert the people on the ship that you were supposedly trying to sneak up on. Then to add insult to injury, we get Captain Red ordering Frog to help him - with the golden throne - instead of freeing the girl from the clutches of Don Alfonso and her forced marriage to some old Spanish dude. And the kid abandons the girl to her fate so he can help the pirate. What the hell?

Not only does the film end with our two leads sailing off alone on a small boat with their prize - having abandoned their own men on the burning and sinking Spanish Galleon - but the love interest of our “hero” is also left behind with the bad guys.

 

Was someone actually paid to write this script?

The only positive thing I can say about this movie is that The Neptune - a full scale fully functional replica of a Spanish galleon made for the film - looked simply spectacular, and it's not at all surprising to learn that a quarter of the picture's $40 million budget went into its construction. So just how well did Polanski’s Pirates do at the box office?  Well it managed to make $1.64 million in the U.S. with a total of $6.3 million worldwide - which would have barely covered the cost of marketing the film - so Pirates was indeed a colossal bomb of epic proportions.  This also makes Polanksi's film one of the bigger nails in the coffin of the pirate movie genre - a coffin that would have its lid at least temporarily slammed shut after the release of Renny Harlin’s epic failure with Cutthroat Island in 1995 - only to be resurrected again in 2003 with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

Note: The Neptune has been more profitable as a tourist attraction in the port of Genoa than it was for the movie.

Roman Polanski’s Pirates is a bad movie - and not the sole reason for the pirate movie vanishing for years - but it is in my opinion one of the most egregious examples of the genre, and is a film that is best forgotten other than as a cautionary footnote to future filmmakers. Since Disney has now driven their Pirate franchise into the shallows with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, we could find ourselves waiting another ten years for a good pirate movie.

Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018) – Review

Can South Africa pass for the Canadian Arctic Circle? The producers of this sixth Tremors movie certainly hope so as budgetary concerns keeps the series production in the southern climes of South Africa – some kind of Graboids tax break, I guess – passing off South Africa for Nevada or Mexico is one thing, but it’s a whole different kettle of fish to make us believe we’re on a glacier by the Arctic Circle. Now one does not go into a movie called Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell expecting to see authenticity – some nice monster attacks and fun characters is what we all hope for – but does this latest entry manage to pull it off?

The movie opens with a research team drilling ice core samples up in the Arctic Circle – that the snow is actually desert sand colour corrected white is especially hilarious and not at all convincing – and before you can say “John Carpenter’s The Thing,” a trio of researchers are quickly made into lunchables by an angry Graboid, and thus the call for help is made to Graboid expert Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) and is idiot son Travis Welker (Jamie Kennedy). The decision to call in Gummer is made by Valerie McKee (Jamie-Lee Money), the a daughter of Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter) from original Tremors, as she is some kind of Graboid super fan. To her, a couple of bloody body parts lying in the snow just screams desert burrowing monster.

 

That she is right does not diminish how stupid this is.

By this installment I’ve become rather tired of Michael Gross’s right wing gun nut Burt Gummer – he was fun in the first movie but as the years go by I find a gun-obsessed paranoid to be less than endearing – and the script for the most part saddles Michael Gross with some of the worst tough guy lines imaginable such as, “My balls are in the Guinness book of balls,” or he is given incredibly nonsensical bon mots such as, “We’ve got to get to high ground, nobody move.” By the ninety minute mark, I just wanted him to shut up. The film tries to add an interesting wrinkle with Burt having been infested with a parasite during a previous encounter with a Graboid – swallowed alive by one – and now he has mere hours to live unless they can get antibodies from a living Graboid. I’m curious to know what difference there is between an antibody from a live Graboid or one you’ve just killed, but hey I’m no doctor so I’ll let that one slide. What I won’t let slide is the way the Graboids tentacles have gotten longer – rivaling the tentacles of Doctor Octopus – and how they can somehow now “see” their prey.

 

Do these things have some kind of radar sense along with good hearing?

The film does have some decent monster attacks – though a lot of it is just people shooting into the dirt or floor – but what really hurt this outing are the complete inconsistencies in the attacks. One minute Burt is demanding silence, but then the very next second everyone is yelling and running around like complete morons, and the Graboids only attack a running person if the script deems it necessary. We also have the complete unnecessary addition of a neighboring research facility run by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) who would like to bio-engineer the Graboids into bunker busting weapons, but nothing much is done with this subplot so I'm not sure why they bothered to introduce it. We also get attacks from Ass Blasters – flying Graboids that fart fire – that were introduced in Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, yet after a couple early attacks by them they are soon forgotten. My guess is that they were included here because the writers think people saying “Ass Blaster” is high comedy.

 

Note: Calling something “Ass Blaster” is not intrinsically funny.

The only way this type of film works is if you manage to round up a cast of fun and likable characters – so that you care if they get eaten – but with Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, we find ourselves stuck with a collection of uninteresting characters who mostly fall into one of two categories: annoying cannon fodder or annoying comic relief. The film even tries to cram in a love interest for Jamie Kennedy’s character but any moment spent with him was quite cringe-inducing and the idea of him kissing somebody was a more horrifying thought than being eaten by a Graboid.

 

Jamie Kennedy: Poster boy for abstinence.

The film does manage to blend practical effects and CGI creatures fairly well, and as mentioned, a couple of the attacks are quite decent, but overall the film fails to engage the viewer with either humor or scares. On a more positive note, we are getting a new Tremors television show, which will surprisingly see the return of Kevin Bacon, so if you are keen to see more battles with everyone’s favorite underground burrowing monsters, I suggest you check out this new SyFy Channel series; it can’t be worse than this poor excuse for a monster movie.

Valley of the Dragons (1961) – Review

From Georges Méliès Trip to the Moon to Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea filmmakers have taken to adapting the works of science fiction giant Jules Verne like a duck to water, with even lesser known pictures like Master of the World earning a certain amount of screen cred, but in 1961 producer Al Zimbalist tried to prove that a movie based on a Jules Verne story could succeed despite having a poor script and a "on-the-cheap" budget. That film was Valley of the Dragons, which was based on one of Verne’s lesser known novels Off on a Comet, and though the film did manage to turn a profit its been mostly forgotten by even the most astute genre fan.

The movie opens with two men preparing for a duel in 1881 Algiers, American Michael Denning (Sean McClory) and Frenchman Hector Servadac (Cesare Danova), who have decided a duel to the death is the only honorable way to solve their issue of being attracted to the same woman, but when a passing comet carries them away the issue of their love lives becomes the least of their problems. The two men at first think some natural disaster had wiped out the nearby city - a logical assumption to sudden the disappearance of a major metropolis - but after noticing that the Southern Cross was now in the sky overhead, instead of the North Star, they conclude that the Earth must have shifted on its axis.  Then one night they realize that the oversized moon they were starring is not the moon at all, but in fact the Earth.  So they finally tumble to the idea that they are actually on a passing comet, one that somehow chipped off a piece of Earth, atmosphere and all. What is hilarious is that these realizations come to them after having seen a pterodactyl, watched dinosaurs partaking in titanic battles, and after they were attacked by a Neanderthal. I myself would have assumed that a time rift of some kind had occurred, but then again anything would make more sense than being safely scooped up by a passing comet.

 

“What a beautiful Earth we are having tonight.”

Granted the original Jules Verne story had that same basic premise, though the novel had no dinosaurs or cavemen, but the group of people that were carried off by Verne’s celestial body were quick to figure out that due to a noticeable lesser gravity, water boiling at 66 degrees Celsius - which would indicate a thinner atmosphere - and finally that day and night was now about six hours long, not the standard twenty-four, meant they were no longer on Earth. In the case of this movie we must assume that these idiots never even graduated public school as not only is their theory preposterous - even by quickie science fiction standards - but Hector goes on about how dinosaurs and Neanderthals must have been picked up when the comet last passed Earth 100,000 years ago. I know that this movie takes place before mankind had really nailed down when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth but most Universities, even at that time, knew that the differential between man and dinosaurs existing on Earth was at least in the millions of years, not in the thousands.

Note: This film used the standard optical effects to make regular lizards appear to be titanic creatures with many of the shots consisting of stock footage from the film One Million B.C.

Michael and Hector eventually come across cave people who look a lot closer to modern man than the Neanderthals that attacked them earlier did, and their first act after meeting them is to steal food and furs from these primitives. Truly heroic acts define our protagonists. Our duo is shortly separated by a rampaging Woolly Mammoth, who knocks poor Hector off of a cliff and down to a raging river far below, and thinking his friend to be dead Michael ends up back with the cavemen they robbed earlier.  Michael quickly uses his superior intellect to defeat the tribe's alpha male and win himself a cute brunette cave girl (Danielle De Metz). At the same time good ole Hector is found by a cute blonde cave girl (Joan Staley) belonging to a rival tribe, and the two of them quickly become a couple.

 

Hector quickly introduces the concept of “making-out” to the locals.

This section of the movie is easily the most entertaining as it's hilarious to watch the blonde bombshell cave girl stake her claim on this clean shaven hunk of a man - with the men of her tribe consisting mostly of bearded hairy brutes you can't really blame the girl - and her chasing off all the other hot cave women, who also would like to try out this thing called kissing, is goofily charming.  There is of course trouble in paradise because even though Michael is able to take over his tribe - by re-inventing the basic sling to take out these primitive Goliaths - he runs into trouble while hunting in a cave for the ingredients to make gunpowder.  He and his cave girl find themselves being chased by low rent Morlocks.

 

“Who let H.G. Wells into my Jules Verne movie?”

The blonde cave girl escapes the Morlocks - but is then quickly captured by passing members of Michael’s tribe - lucky for her she had managed to pick up enough English from Hector for Michael to figure out that his friend must still be alive. Things start to head towards a happy reunion when all of a sudden a nearby volcano erupts - you really can’t have a proper prehistoric movie without at least one cataclysmic eruption - and the ground is torn asunder.  Rivers of lava aren’t the only threat facing our heroes as Michael’s tribe soon find themselves trapped in their cave by a bunch of angry dinosaurs who were displaced by the disaster.

 

“Guys, be careful not to poke your spear through the rear screen.”

It’s a good thing that Hector had earlier discovered the ingredients for gunpowder - as this allows the group  to explode the rocks above the cave and bury the dinosaurs under tons of rubble - but how this didn’t cause a cave in is the true mystery here.  But such trivialities as logic and geology cannot get in the way of our valiant heroes - they have more important things to do - like hugging and kissing their primitive partners. The movie ends with Hector mentioning to Michael that he’d been studying the heavens over the last few nights and has deduced that the comet they are on is in a new orbit and that it will be passing by Earth again in about seven years. Michael states this is great news, and that seven years is not that long at all, especially when these two guys can basically set themselves up as gods.

 Valley of the Dragons is one of those ridiculous science fiction movies that probably did great business as a second feature at local drive-in - where the audience was probably too busy in the backseat to care about what was going on up on the big screen - but this is why the film is mostly forgotten. This movie was so on the cheap that not only did it use footage from such films One Million Years B.C. and King Dinosaur, with even cheesy moments lifted right from Cat-Women of the Moon (see horrible giant spider attack), but most egregious of all was that the film used footage from the Japanese kaiju film Rodan, which they tried to pass it off a random pterodactyl.

 

“Have anyone of you seen my pal Godzilla?”

Producer Al Zimbalist and director Edward Bernds took a fairly absurd premise from a forgotten Jules Verne story - crafting it into an even sillier prehistoric travelog - and starring two leads that would have been more in keeping with the heroes of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot. If you are one of those people who get a kick out of those on-the-cheap adventure tales, and don’t mind the tasteless footage of real animals fighting each other, you may get some entertainment value out of Valley of the Dragons, but overall it’s not one I can easily recommend.

Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018) – Review

What can you expect from a sequel almost two decades late that goes straight-to-video? Well certainly don’t expect much from Deep Blue Sea 2, as it could either be billed as “The sequel that no one wanted” or, more accurately, “A carbon copy of the original minus the fun.” That it stars a bunch of television B-listers, one should not be surprised that this particular shark film sinks without a trace.

In 1998, director Renny Harlin created a fun shark film with a pretty ridiculous premise; sharks don’t get Alzheimer’s, so if we genetically enlarge shark brains, a cure for Alzheimer’s disease would be right around the corner. Of course, this results in super smart sharks who proceed to eat the scientists. Now in 2018, we have a sequel where pharmaceutical billionaire Carl Durant (Michael Beach) is playing around with neurotransmitters in sharks and extracting their antibodies to create a brain enhancing serum. What is hilarious here is he isn’t doing it for anything noble, like trying to cure a disease that afflicts millions of people—no, Carl Durant is in full-on mad science territory (heavy on the mad) as he believes that quantum computers and artificial intelligence will soon lead to machines dominating mankind. He’s clearly a fan of The Terminator franchise, and so his solution is to use his drug to artificially enhance human brains one thousand fold so that we can compete with computers on a level playing field.

 

Note: To complete the “Mad Scientist Checklist” he, of course, experiments on himself as well.

That Deep Blue Sea 2 is not only a rock stupid movie and one of the most unoriginal films every created; and is mostly a carbon copy of the original film—though with a drastically reduced budget—but the film’s protagonist, Dr. Misty Calhoun (Danielle Savre), is approached by Durant’s lawyer because of her shark expertise and is offered full funding on her research if she will make a visit to their facility. Replace shark with dinosaur and you have one of the opening scenes in Jurassic Park. And the character of Misty is as badly written as the plot; we first meet her as she gives a lecture on how sharks are not the evil killing machines as depicted in movies, with bull sharks being the only ones she considers really scary, and then when she arrives at Durant’s aquatic research facility and sees his tests subjects are bull sharks she freaks out claiming, “This will end in disaster!” Now at this point she is unaware of the nature of the experiments, she simply believes even normal bull sharks are too dangerous to be kept in captivity. This was basically Alan Grant's sensible reaction to Hammond cloning raptors in Jurassic Park, but here it’s seems a tad over-reactionary as they are just sharks; sure, I wouldn’t want to swim with one, but if you are not in the water, you are pretty much safe.

 

Question: What’s with giving our protagonist the stripper name of Misty?

The original Deep Blue Sea was guilty of having a certain level of script stupidity for the plot to work; for instance making a shark smart should not in turn make them knowledgeable, but we see them taking out cameras when even the idea of what a camera is would be totally foreign to a shark. In Deep Blue Sea 2, we get a moment where one of the sharks is actually listening at a porthole when Durant is discussing his plans to kill the sharks once his project is complete. Director Darin Scott may just as well have given the sharks mustaches to twirl and monocles to adjust.

 

That the sharks aren’t given to maniacal bursts of laughter is the film’s only restraint.

Knock-off sequels are notoriously of a lesser value, but Deep Blue Sea 2 reaches new depths of awfulness as not only is the script dumber than the already pretty-dumb original, but the cast is full of third-tier television actors, has effects that make the Sharknado films look good by comparison, and worst of all, it is a damn boring shark movie. We are told that five bull sharks have been enhanced, but for most of the film’s running time, all we get is our cast of characters running down partially flooded corridors with a swarm of baby bull sharks (the lead evil shark having secretly given birth) hot on their heels. If we let slide that bull sharks have litters of around three pups, and not the several dozen we see in this film, we are still left with the problem that people running hip deep in water is not intrinsically exciting. For what one assumes is a budgetary reason, we rarely see these piranha rip-offs, but instead get shots of water churning as our “heroes” flee for their lives, and when someone is caught, a bunch of red dye is dumped into the water. We do get an occasional shot of the CGI swarm of little sharks, mostly the same shot repeated over and over again, but it is neither convincing nor exciting.

 

Even the aftereffects of an attack are pretty cheesy.

When I sat down to watch Deep Blue Sea 2, I certainly didn’t expect it to be on par with Spielberg’s Jaws, but not only is it simply a poor knock-off of the original Deep Blue Sea, it’s not even as fun as the crappy Sharknado movies. This film promised us a bio-engineered pack of highly intelligent, super-aggressive bull sharks hunting and killing people, and it failed to even deliver that. Be warned this is not a “So bad it’s good” type of movie; it is simply bad and completely forgettable.

 

No amount of alcohol will help you get through this piece of crap.

Psychokinesis (2018) – Review

What would Joe Average do if really given superpowers? This is the question South Korean director Sang-ho Yeon posits in his film Psychokinesis which deals with a lowly security guard who finds himself gifted with extraordinary powers and then must decide how to use them. With Marvel and DC duking it out to see who can dominate the ever-growing superhero market, it’s nice to see some independents out there throwing their hat into the ring.

There is nothing startlingly original about Yeon Sang-ho’s film Psychokinesis, hapless individual gaining powers that he is able to use to save others has been a staple ingredient in comics for almost as long as the medium has existed, so the key to a successful superhero movie is in having an engaging story, decent special effects to pull off the powers, a good villain for the audience to root against, and a relatable hero to cheer on. If you don’t have those crucial elements you end up with something like Marvel’s first attempt at Captain America or the abysmal Catwoman with Halle Berry, but what if you only manage two of the three?

When security guard Shin Seok-heon (Seung-ryong Ryu) drinks from a local spring, one that had been tainted by remnants from a fallen meteorite, he gains the ability to move things with his mind. His first thought is to how he can improve his crappy life by exploiting this new found power, and he quickly makes an appointment at a nearby nightclub to see if his gift can earn him some serious money. But when he learns that his estranged daughter Shin Roo-mi (Eun-kyung Shim) is in trouble, he abandons this idea of quick cash and runs to her aid. Seok-heon doesn’t quite get the “With great powers comes great responsibility”  moment that steered young Peter Parker onto his path to superherodom; in this story the tragic family death isn’t partially the fault of the hero - like Uncle Ben's was - but instead is the catalyst to bring the father and estranged daughter together.

The basic plot of Psychokinesis has to do with an evil real-estate developer who plans to tear down a bunch of small businesses to put up a mall for Chinese tourists. The current occupants want to be properly compensated, but of course evil corporations don’t work that way and soon windows are being smashed and people are getting hurt by an army of rent-a-thugs. Roo-mi runs a successful restaurant in this area, and she becomes the de facto leader of the protestors; it is her safety being threatened that causes our Seok-heon to set aside his showbiz plans. Now if you grew up watching television in the 70s, you will most likely be familiar with the plot of “Evil Real-Estate Goons vs Downtrodden Citizens,” as that was the plot of about every third episode of The Incredible Hulk—even the Disney movies back-in-the-day were no stranger to David and Goliath superpower plot lines, as they were used quite liberally in such films as The Absent Minded Professor and the Kurt Russell Dexter Riley movies. Sadly, Seok-heon’s hapless security guard has neither the affable charm of Fred MacMurray, nor the screen charisma of Kurt Russell, and so I found myself less than engaged during his heroics. Even the daughter in Psychokinesis isn’t all that fleshed out, and despite how hard actress Shim Eun-kyung tries to make her a plucky fighter—something more than a one-dimensional character—the script unfortunately keeps her pigeonholed as the damsel-in-distress for most of the movie. The one stand-out character in the film comes in the form of the villainous Director Hong (Yu-mi Jung) who is delightfully nasty as she chews up every available piece of scenery.

So with weak protagonists, a standard plot, but a good villain, we must now look at how the powers are depicted in this little superhero movie—and if they are convincing. Avengers: Infinity War probably spent more on catering than what director Yeon Sang-ho had to spend on the entirety of Psychokinesis, so one should not go in expecting to see that level of effects, but I’m happy to say what Yeon Sang-ho manages to bring to the screen is pretty damn good. Some of the CGI used for flying scenes were less than convincing, but the moments of Seok-heon tossing goons and cars around with his telekinetic attacks are easily on par with the great stuff we’ve seen on modern shows like Stranger Things. What really sells the superpower scenes is the body language actor Ryu Seung-ryong uses when deploying his psychokinetic attacks, and it's really fun when he kind of goes Dark Phoenix.

The film tries to balance comedy, drama and social commentary, and that is probably the film’s greatest failing as the story never seems to completely gel. I give it to Yeon Sang-ho for trying to avoid the conventional ending these types of stories usually have, but I found the chosen conclusion to be a bit half-assed and unsatisfying. I hate ending this review on such a negative note because I did mostly have a good time watching this movie, but as a follow up to the excellent Train to Busan, maybe I was hoping for a little more. So I will say that Psychokinesis is more than worth your time checking out on Netflix, just lower your expectations as tad.