Dumbo (2019) – Review

How do you take an animated classic like Dumbo, a film that was barely over an hour in length, and then turn it into a two-hour live-action summer blockbuster? This was the problem facing director Tim Burton but the fact that he was also the man who started this whole Disney live-action-remake binge in the first place, with his successful live-action version of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, this should have been no problem, right?

 The movie takes place in 1913 and opens with an introduction to the Medici Brothers Circus, a not too successful enterprise that owner Max Medici (Danny DeVito) has been having a hard time keeping afloat, what with attendance dropping as audiences lose interest in his increasingly shrinking traveling show. Enter Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a returning World War One veteran hoping to rekindle his old life as a circus performer, but having lost an arm in the war his ability as a trick rider is questionable at best. Is that depressing enough for you? Well, we also meet Holt’s two children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), who have been living as circus orphans while he was off fighting the Hun, and they’ve been on their own due to their mother having died of influenza. Yikes, it’s good to see Disney hasn’t gotten tired of the “Dead Parent” trope yet. Now, those of you familiar with the original Dumbo may be scratching your collective heads and wondering, “Where is Dumbo, and who are all these people?”

 

Is Tim Burton remaking Dumbo or his own film Big Fish?

Eventually, Dumbo does arrive, Medici having purchased a pregnant Indian Elephant to hopefully boost attendance, and before you can sing the first verse of “When I see an elephant fly” we find Milly and Joe teaching a big-eared baby elephant to fly. This film literally jumps to Dumbo flying at the bloody twenty-minute mark, where the original film had Dumbo learning to fly as the story’s climax this movie seems more concerned with giving modern viewers – who the producers of this film clearly believe have no patience – immediate scenes of their CGI atrocity flying. This brings us to another key problem with this film, making a live-action flying elephant look believable. The animated format is perfectly suited for this kind of thing, photorealism not so much, and throughout this film, Dumbo veered between cute and grotesque, with his big floppy CGI ears looking especially terrible. The best this film gets. with the effects on full display, is when it looks like somebody glued fake ears on a real elephant.

 

When photorealism and fantasy collide with mixed results.

Of course having a film about a failing circus and a crippled war veteran trying to reconnect with his children, all while teaching an elephant to fly, is still apparently not enough to fill two-hour running time, because this film also has villains, lots and lots of villains. The original film had bitchy pachyderms and asshole clowns but that’s not enough for Tim Burton, not on his watch, so we have one of Medici’s animal handlers who gets off on animal cruelty – it’s his death that leads to Dumbo’s mom being declared a rogue elephant – and then we get the film’s chief antagonist in the form of a rich New York showman named V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who comes looking to acquire this amazing flying elephant for his massive amusement park. Keaton’s portrayal of Vandevere is one part P.T. Barnum and two parts evil Walt Disney, with no piece of scenery left unchewed, and to make matters worse he also employs a bald evil henchmen so that we can have someone to menace the children. Is Vandevere supposed to be a showman or a Bond villain?

 

His park also looks a lot like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio.

194l’s Dumbo was a short picture telling the simplistic story of a little elephant learning to accept his differences, embracing them, and then becoming a star. Now, with Tim Burton’s version we still have Dumbo learning to accept who he is – though this comes through a pep talk from Milly instead of Timothy Mouse – we also get Holt coming to grips with his disability, Milly’s desire to pursue a life of scientific exploration, Medici futilely trying to keep his troupe together against the evil machinations of Vandevere, and then to top it all off we also have the character of Collette (Eva Green), a trapeze artists working for Vandevere, who sides with our heroes so we can a love interest for Holt, because the story of Dumbo has always been missing a love story. It’s nice that this version ditched the racist crows but by god did they overstuff this thing.

And what kind of Dumbo movie would you have if you didn’t also include a theme park turning into a fiery conflagration of death and destruction?

Stray Observations:
• No talking animals in this film, so no storks bringing baby animals to the circus – we do get one shot of stork outside Mama Jumbo’s window – and Timothy Mouse is just a pet mouse belonging to Milly.
• This makes Milly’s pep talk to Dumbo at the end of the film rather odd. Can Dumbo understand English?
• The heartbreaking rendition of “Baby Mine” is now performed by an overweight woman with a ukulele. What the hell?
• Dumbo gets a WWE style introduction, “Let’s get ready for Dummmmmboooooo!”  That is just sad.
• The nightmare fuel sequence of Dumbo drunk and hallucinating “Pink Elephants on Parade” is replaced with showgirls creating giant animated bubble elephants that traipse through the air of Vandevere's Coliseum.

 

I find a flying elephant more believable than this shit.

Gone is the beautiful and vibrant animation of the original, instead we now have the darker tones of a Tim Burton horror film, something that is completely out of place with the subject matter. Now, I’m not saying the 1941 animated Dumbo should never have been put on the remake block in the first place – I’m all for remakes if the people involved have an interesting take on the subject matter – but what I am saying is, “You should never have remade Dumbo!” ARE YOU PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR BLOODY MINDS!

 

Does this look like a good idea to anyone?

To be fair there were a couple of honest-to-goodness moments wonder in this remake – for the most part, the Dumbo flying sequences worked fairly well – but the overabundance of side characters and ladled on drama was just too much and completely unnecessary.  What was once a simple story has now been turned into the overblown atrocity, something that this movie itself was criticizing by way of the Vandevere character. Is self-awareness something that the people over at Disney are incapable of? Tim Burton’s Dumbo is a loud overindulgent mess, where fantastic visuals superseded good storytelling, but worst of all is the fact that Dumbo has become a secondary character in his own bloody movie.

The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972-1973) – Review

In 1969, Hanna-Barbera launched one of the most seminal cartoon series ever produced. This show was, of course, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and not only did it give the world one of the most beloved animated characters of all time, it also gave kids cool mysteries in spooky settings, making everyone’s Saturday morning just that much better. That show only lasted two seasons before being rebooted in 1972 with The New Scooby-Doo Movies — a rather strange title when you consider there were no “old” Scooby-Doo movies nor can anyone honestly consider an hour-long cartoon (40 minutes minus commercial breaks) to be a movie — and in this series the focus would shift to goofy guest stars 

 

Each week, Scooby-Doo and the gang would run into the likes of Phyllis Diller and Jerry Reed or characters from other Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as Speed Buggy and Josie and the Pussycats, which is the element that makes this particular incarnation of Scooby-Doo to be very dated as I doubt many kids today would have a clue as to who comedienne Phyllis Diller or singer/songwriter Jerry Reed was. Hell, even back in the 70s, most kids would have been asking their parents, “Who in the blue blazes is Cass Elliot?”

 

Did they really expect kids to be fans of The Mamas & the Papas?

The formula for each episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies was very similar to the original show, with Scooby-Doo and the gang driving around in the Mystery Machine before encountering a mystery in need of solving, the big change here would be the “Guest Star” of the week being the focal point of the mystery. No longer would they be helping out Joe Average to uncover crooks that were using fake ghosts to execute their lame criminal plots, now they would be assisting the likes of Don Knotts and Davey Jones to uncover crooks that were using fake ghosts to execute their lame criminal plots. So, not exactly reinventing the wheel here, but this was the 1970s and if we kids had Scooby-Doo and Shaggy running from a gaggle of ghouls we were pretty much happy. Now, looking at it with adult eyes, and nostalgia blinders removed, the show is problematic at best. The New Scooby-Doo Movies also gave kids hour-long Scooby adventures, and when you consider how padded these episodes feel, it's not surprising that this format was ditched.

 

Three Stooges humor is best taken in smaller doses.

The quality of the guest appearances ranged greatly; we got three rather fun episodes with the Harlem Globetrotters, a nice Sherlockian Holmes episode with Don Knotts, and the gang's team-up with Josie and the Pussycats and Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie were really quite enjoyable. Sadly, the two seasons were overbalanced with less than stellar entries, which included the likes of comedy legends Laurel and Hardy and the aforementioned Three Stooges, whose comedic styling the show’s writers failed to capture, and to make matters worse, the hour format made the repetitive nature of the show even more egregious. If you don’t enjoy the particular antics of whichever guest star appears that week, then an hour of it will be even more painful. Easily the two best episodes of The New Scooby-Doo Movies were the ones that included Batman and Robin, with Scooby-Doo and the gang teaming up with the Dynamic Duo to spoil whatever dastardly plot the Joker and the Penguin had going on. Though, one has to admit, that Batman being okay with a group of teenagers aiding in the apprehension of two of Gotham’s most dangerous criminals seems a bit odd.

 

“Shouldn’t you kids be in school?”

Another classic episode was “Wednesday is Missing,” where Scooby-Doo and the gang end up becoming “housekeepers” for the Addams Family, and what I found particularly interesting here is that Fred recognizes Gomez Addams and his family from their television show. Was this implying that the ABC Addams Family series was a reality television show and that viewers tuned in each week to watch the goofy antics of the real-life Addams Family? I’m not sure if that is meta or just stupid. Regardless of that, this is an excellent episode and despite the “villain” turning out to be a couple of neighbours who kidnapped Wednesday to force the Addams Family to move, our heroes have a rare encounter with actual supernatural events. The villains may have been wearing masks but the Addams Family mansion was just chock full of ghostly organs, weird monsters, and animated skeletons.

Note: The animators took their character designs from the style of the original Charles Addams "Addams Family" cartoon strip rather than doing caricatures of the actors who played them in The Addams Family (1964).

Aside from the occasionally dated guest star and the hour-long format that made episodes drag at times, the biggest criticism that I can level at this show would be towards the sloppy animation on display. At times poor Daphne Blake looked like a dude, characters would randomly have elongated sausage-like fingers and other varying anatomical proportions, and worst of all, the backgrounds no longer had that gothic horror vibe that animation legend Iwao Takamoto had developed for the original series. The New Scooby-Doo Movies is far from the worst incarnation of Scooby-Doo, but it does lack some of the fun and flair of the other versions, and the idea of Mystery Incorporated teaming up with celebrities still continues to this day, with such adventures as Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost — where the gang help out celebrity chef Bobby Flay — and Scooby-Doo & Batman: The Brave and the Bold that once again has our heroes teamed up with the Caped Crusader.

 

“Jinkies Batman, this is the best team-up ever!”

The New Scooby-Doo Movies may come off as rather dated, and the hour-long format clearly was a poor decision, but fans of Scooby-Doo will still find a lot of fun and charm with this outing, just maybe avoid binge-watching and instead catch it in smaller doses.

M. Night Shyamalan’s “Glass” (2019) - Review

With Marvel’s Cinematic Universe literally pulling in billions of dollars, it’s no surprise that others would try and cash in on the whole “Shared Universe” idea, but where some, such as The Conjuring Universe, succeeded — now sitting at eight films — others like Universal’s Dark Universe failed miserably with only one film getting made before being abruptly aborted. Then there is M. Night Shyamalan, who made a big splash back in 1999 with his horror film The Sixth Sense and has been on a rather rocky road ever since, especially with his latest attempt at combining his films into some kind of shared universe, but with a Shyamalan twist of course. Which brings us to Glass, a film that tries way too hard to create some big mythology.

Glass is the third installment in a “trilogy” that ties M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero film Unbreakable with his supernatural thriller Split. This film deals with superhuman vigilante David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and the malignant psychopathic Kevin Wendell Crumb aka “The Horde” (James McAvoy) being captured and brought to an institution for the criminally insane run by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who is working under the auspices of her study of people with the delusions of being superheroes. Also locked up in this hospital is the evil mastermind Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who tangled with David Dunn in Unbreakable, and this film spends much of its two hour-plus run-time with Dr. Staple trying to convince these three that they aren’t special, but given the fact that David’s powers are empirically easy proof, this comes across as utter bullshit … unless, of course, Dr. Staple has some secret agenda. I will now just highlight a few points that make this trilogy shattered like so much ... glass.

The Stupidity that is “Glass” *Spoilers*

• David is locked in a cell that can be pumped full of water — his one weakness — but if Staple is trying to prove David is normal, putting him in a “kryptonite” cell isn’t a smart move, because if he is supposed to be this average dude, then a regular cell should hold him just fine.
• Dr. Staple has a group therapy session with our three leads, where she tries to chip away at the belief that they are superhuman — pointing out that “The Beast” could have bent steel bars because the bars were old and weak, and survived a shotgun blast for the same reason — but she never gets around to explaining away how David is virtually unbreakable and super strong.
• Elijah is given pretty much free reign in this psych ward due to the fact that they apparently only keep one guard on duty at a time, and if one is late showing up for work, the other one fucks off anyway.
• Video footage is only checked on when it’s helpful to the plot, and Elijah is able to delete all his wanderings without anyone noticing jumps in the footage's time code. He’s apparently that good or everyone else is just that bad at their jobs.
• Dr. Staple plans to use laser surgery on Elijah’s brain to lobotomize him, but unbeknownst to her, on one of his nightly forays he’d stolen the lenses out of the laser, and thus after the surgery is “performed,” he is returned to his room unchanged. Question: How in the fuck can you perform a lobotomy with a dismantled laser and not notice? Are there some kind of magical lasers out there that can access the brain without actually cutting through flesh? Or is Dr. Staple just an idiot for not seeing that her operation isn't actually happening?
• Elijah informs David of their plans to attack and destroy a chemical company, but David actually is starting to wonder if Dr. Staple is right, that his powers are all in his mind, which once again is ridiculous because he has quantifiable superpowers.
• Elijah and The Beast are able to walk through hospital checkpoints simply because they have a stolen key card, and somehow none of the guards recognize two of the most notorious killers to ever walk the streets of this fair city.
• It’s revealed that Dr. Staple works for a clandestine society that has been covering up the existence of superhumans for centuries, and her plan is to convince these three they aren’t special but if she fails they will be executed. This is apparently to protect humanity from the fights that would stem from superheroes and supervillains popping up everywhere, but my God, there has to be a more efficient way of handling this situation.
• Staple's primary mission is to keep the world in the dark about people with superpowers, yet she installs dozens of extra security cameras to keep an eye on the ever-slippery Elijah, which just plays into his hands as he was able to hack the system and stream the superhero fight to an offsite server. So if your goal is secrecy, maybe have fewer cameras and instead have more guards on hand — guards who work for the secret society and not the idiots we see employed by this hospital.

 

When this film ended I just wanted to scream.

It’s clear that M. Night Shyamalan had this big idea about superhero mythology — and that idea does have merit — but the moronic actions and statements by Dr. Staple made it pretty obvious early on that the "twist" would be that she must have some secret agenda, because her “People with delusions” theory wouldn’t hold up to ten seconds of scrutiny when put to David Dunn, who could just ask an orderly to stab him in the leg with a pen to prove he’s really unbreakable. The amount of hoop-jumping Shyamalan had to write into this script to make this twist work is simply inexcusable, and is basically an example of a screenwriter trying to ram a round peg into a square hole.

"This was an origin story the whole time."  Yeah, keep telling yourself that.

The Endless (2017) – Review

The expression “You can never go home again” refers to the inability to recapture a time and place — one that may only exist when seen through rose coloured glasses — but if your home was a UFO Death Cult, that may not be such a bad thing. Filmmaking team Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead return to the sci-fi/horror genre with The Endless, a bizarre tale of two brothers trying to achieve some closure while dealing with powerful forces surrounding them. Will a valuable lesson be learned about clinging to the past, or will they be horribly trapped in an unending horror? Only time will tell.

 Brothers Justin (Justin Benson) and Aaron (Aaron Moorhead) were raised in a compound in the hills of Southern California, their mother having died in a tragic car accident and the two young boys being taken in by Camp Arcadia. We learn that a decade ago, the two brothers had escaped what Justin called a “Death Cult,” but Aaron, the younger brother, has different recollections of his time at Camp Arcadia, and when a video cassette shows up with a message from the camp, Aaron becomes super psyched to go back, at least for a visit. Justin reluctantly agrees, what with Aaron pointing out that their current life completely sucks, so the two hop in their car and head for the hills.

 

“If anyone offers you a glass of Kool-Aid, just say no.”

Things start off nice enough, with the brothers being given a warm welcome from everybody at the camp, even camp leader Hal (Tate Ellington) doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge, which is nice considering that after “escaping,” Justin announced to the press that Arcadia was a UFO Death Cult that practiced ritual castration; this seems rather big of him. As the visit extends, with Aaron constantly badgering his brother about staying one more day, things start to get a little weird … well, weirder. To start, it seems that none of the members have aged a day in the decade since the brothers left — Aaron tries to blow that off under the explanation of “Clean living” — but it certainly doesn’t explain flocks of birds that can be seen flying in weird circular formations, or that Arcadia member Shane (Shane Brady) performs magic tricks that are clearly way beyond mere sleight-of-hand. Then there is the night the brothers join the group in a “team building exercise,” a late night tug-of-war against a rope that ascends into the dark night sky — who is at the other end is never revealed — and there is a lone shack with the massive 19th-century looking padlock that just oozes foreboding. Add to all that the fact that the environment around the camp constantly reveals one inexplicable phenomenon after another, from multiple moons to a mirrored landscape, it becomes clear things are not what they seem.

 

It’s at this point I’d be packing my car and getting the hell out.

This film goes the slow burn route here, with the story dropping in clues and weirdness at just the right intervals to keep the viewer hooked, but it's when Justin starts pushing for answers, and Hal’s chalkboard physics-scribbling being all but meaningless, that the true horror of the situation becomes apparent. I don’t want to get into spoilers here — and trying to explain the plot would be rather a difficult thing as The Endless isn’t one of those plot-centric stories — but if you are a fan of films like Groundhog Day and In the Mouth of Madness, you will probably get a kick out of this little flick, as you get a nice mixture of time anomalies as well as mysterious dark forces, all working perfectly to keep the viewer off-balance and intrigued.

 

Camp Arcadia may not be a “UFO Death Cult,” but there is a good chance it's worse.

The Endless is one of those independent low-budget films that renews one’s faith in the film industry. I’m all for Hollywood blockbusters, full of superheroes and exploding planets, but I love these smaller films that often tackle bigger, more interesting themes, and with this film, Benson and Moorhead have created a world that simply bursts with its own rich mythology — which it doesn’t feel the need to worry about explaining — as well as giving us characters we can truly relate to and a cast of actors who all provide stellar performances. The Endless is a film that will still be sinking in well after the lights have come on and you are home safe in bed … or are you?

Polaroid (2019) – Review

Cursed objects have been a staple of horror films for decades — one can almost consider it to be one of the bigger subgenres with such films as The Ring, Sinister, and Annabelle sprouting multiple sequels and spin-offs — but with his film Polaroid, director Lars Klevberg doesn’t so much as explore that subgenre as he does mine it for all its worth so that he can plug and play whatever he finds into his own movie. If you are seeking a bland and unoriginal horror film, look no further than Polaroid, as this film checks off clichés and stolen ideas faster than you can count, and with a plot basically lifted from an episode of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" it should surprise no one that this film sat in development hell since 2017.

 As with many horror films, this one starts off with a prologue — when or where this prologue takes place is never made clear nor ever addressed again — and we are introduced to Sarah (Madelaine Petsch) and her friend Linda (Erika Prevost), a couple of teenage girls who we see going through a box of possessions belonging to Sarah's late mother. In this box of “memories” they discover an old Polaroid camera. Linda takes a picture of Sarah to test it out, 'cause why not, but later that night, Sarah notices the picture now has a shadowy figure in the background. Upon hearing strange noises in the attic and after a bouncing ping-pong ball startles her — a clear lift of the bouncing rubber ball from The Changeling — she decides to investigate, 'cause why not, and then she is brutally killed by a mysterious entity. This scene is utterly ridiculous, not because we have a teenage girl exploring a dark attic alone after hearing a creepy noise — which is something that can be found in Screenwriting for Horror 101 — the problem here is that if this entire prologue had been cut from the film, it would have had no impact on the story whatsoever.

 

If these two were watching a cursed videotape it’d be the opening of The Ring.

We then jump to the “Present Day” where we are introduced to the film’s protagonist, shy high school student Bird (Kathryn Prescott) whose outcast status seems to stem from her insistence on wearing scarves all the time — people call her “Scarf Girl” as if that could be a thing — and she works at a local antique store where her co-worker, and unbeknownst admirer, Tyler (Davi Santos) gives her an old Polaroid camera that he picked up at a garage sale. At home, Bird notices an odd smudge-like figure on the photo taken of Tyler, which will, of course, lead to Tyler being brutally murdered by the mysterious figure from the prologue. While all that is going on, Bird is dragged to a costume party by her best friend Kasey (Samantha Logan), where for some reason Bird will take random pictures of a few of the partygoers with the Polaroid  — don’t ask me why she’d bring an antique camera to a party full of drunken idiots — but it’s here that we are introduced to the rest of the film’s cast of victims.

 

Central Casting clones from The Final Destination franchise.

We meet Mina (Priscilla Quintana), Mina's boyfriend Devin (Keenan Tracey), party girl and hostess Avery (Katie Stevens), and Bird's high school crush Connor Bell (Tyler Young), but don’t bother trying to place names to faces as these characters have fewer dimensions than the Polaroid pics themselves and are instantly as forgettable. When poor Tyler is found murdered, and Avery is killed later that night when the entity snaps her neck, Bird starts to suspect that the shadowy figure appearing in those Polaroid pics is somehow linked to their deaths, and that the entity seems to disappear from the photos after it has made the kill, then appearing to move to the photo of its next intended target. Now, it may seem that Bird jumps to this supernatural conclusions rather quickly here — even Sam and Dean Winchester wouldn’t have drawn those conclusions that fast — but as we only have ninety minutes, and a bunch of people to kill, there's no sense wasting time.

 

Note: This film relies almost solely on jump scares, none of which are all that effective.

What follows is your standard supernatural mystery with our protagonists visiting dusty libraries to uncover the history behind the killer camera — learning that it belonged to a serial killer who preyed on a group of teens and was shot dead by the police — and they also discover that trying to destroy the photos is not a good idea. When a very anxious Devin tries to burn the group photo he’s in, there is a less than desirable side-effect, for as the photo of Mina's hand burns, so does Mina's actual hand, with the fire only being extinguished when Bird stamps out the flames on the burning pic, which then mysteriously repairs itself. With the body count rising, Bird and Connor attempt to convince Sheriff Pembroke (Mitch Pileggi) of what is going on, but unsurprisingly he doesn’t quite buy into the whole “A serial killer’s camera is murdering our friends," and he sends them on their way.

 

“I didn’t take this crap from Mulder, I’m certainly not taking it from you.”

The script tries to throw in some twists and turns as to why the vengeful spirit is murdering people — we meet the wife of the killer and she is super helpful — but given the fact that the entity wants vengeance on the particular people responsible for its death, I’m not sure what’s the point of all the collateral damage among the teen population. It seems the entity’s whole plan revolves around its intended target eventually coming into possession of the camera, and then taking a picture of themselves, which seems rather unlikely. The episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? "The Tale of the Curious Camera" — which also had a camera whose photos predicted doom — made more sense than anything we find in Polaroid, and that was a kid’s show.

 

I swear the ghosts on "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" were scarier than this.

• The entity is revealed to have a weakness to heat and light, so we get moments that appear lifted right out of David F. Sandberg's horror film Lights Out.
• We get one of those "movie hospitals" that seem to be staffed by only two or three people.
• The entity’s modus operandi has a strange inconsistency to it; the ghost is either breaking necks or forming a blade out of its arm to stab its victim, yet it then for unknown reasons makes some of them look like accidents or suicide, while others are obvious murders. What would be the point of making it look like a suicide? Is it because the filmmakers of Polaroid are fans of Nightmare on Elm Street?
• We constantly get the sound of the Polaroid camera charging its flash, but that particular make and model doesn’t even have a flash. What the fuck, people?
• Bird and Connor find newspaper articles about the kidnapping and torturing of four students and the killing of three of them, and the paper includes actual photos of the teens in bondage, which would have gotten the newspaper editor quickly sued because the victims were all minors.

 

Is their small town paper The National Enquirer?

Director Lars Klevberg and writer Blair Butler — who was also responsible for the screenplay to the derisible horror film Hell Fest — manage to create one of the most innocuous horror movies I’ve seen in quite some time, with no scares or chills to be found, but its greatest crime is in how unoriginal the film is, constantly stealing from several different and better horror movies. Polaroid is easily one of the most forgettable horror movies ever released, failing even to be so bad its good, making this a hard film to recommend to even horror buffs. Skip this movie and watch a rerun of Supernatural instead.

Dark Phoenix (2019) – Review

Marvel’s “The Dark Phoenix Saga” was a comic book story arc that took four years to tell and ran across about forty issues — we’re talking major epic here — so when 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand used the Dark Phoenix as a “B” plot to Magneto’s fight against the mutant "cure," fans were less than thrilled. This was a clear case of a studio chucking in stuff that they'd heard comic nerds liked, but not actually bothering to work it in organically or logically, it’s all about rush, rush, rush. Now it's thirteen years later and I’m happy to report that 20th Century Fox has not learned a goddamn thing.

 This sequel to X-Men: Apocalypse takes place in the 1990s — jumping ahead a decade without bothering to deal with the fact that Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) or Magneto (Michael Fassbender) should now be in their sixties, yet for some reason don’t look a day over forty — and after a brief prologue, where we find out that eight-year-old Jean Grey accidentally killed her parents with her mutant powers before moving to the everyone’s favourite school for gifted mutants, we discover that, over the years, Xavier has become a huge dick. Even Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), his loyal adopted sister, calls him out on his bullshit, pointing out that instead of helping mutants, he’s actually endangering their lives in what's conservatively called public relation stunts, just so that he can impress the President and create supposed “goodwill” between Homo sapiens and Homo superior.

 

He'll also spend much of the film looking constipated.

One such stunt involves rescuing space shuttle astronauts when their spacecraft was critically damaged by a strange solar flare, and to do this Charles sends his kids up into space aboard the modified Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird — even though Beast (Nicholas Hoult) points out that the plane isn’t rated for outer space — things, of course, go badly and while Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is tasked with keeping the vessel together — using her telekinetic powers to hold the shuttle together — Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) collects the astronauts by teleporting them from the shuttle to the Blackbird, just as a mysterious energy wave smashes into the shuttle, engulfing Jean in cosmic fire.

 

“Everyone, hold up a hand if you can breathe in space.”

Having absorbed the entire brunt of the energy flare, Jean Grey is soon revealed to have mega-boosted her powers with this close encounter, and before you can say “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” she’s tossing her friends around like ragdolls and murdering poor Mystique. Now, this should have come across as a very dramatic moment, Mystique being a founding member of this team and sister to Charles, but this film has about as much emotional weight as a deflated bouncy castle. It was widely known that Jennifer Lawrence had no real desire to return, being naked and blue must wear on a person, but the way the writers treated this beloved character is just shameful. Speaking of lack of “emotional weight,” let us not forget the tragic love story between Jean Grey and Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), because the writers of this movie certainly forgot about it. The romance between Scott Summers and Jean Grey is another victim of the rushed timeline as their appearances together in X-Men: Apocalypse barely registered on the radar, and not at all helped by the complete lack of chemistry between the two actors. Sophie Turner had more chemistry with cast-mate Jennifer Lawrence, and that relationship had an even more tragic ending.

 

“Don’t worry, you’ll always have Game of Thrones.”

To say that as a film, Dark Phoenix was just one larger clusterfuck after another, would be a vast understatement, as character after character are forced to trot out some of the worst bits of cliché dialogue, before walking off camera to be forgotten until someone pokes the writers with a stick. The only truly interesting moments in this film happen when Michael Fassbender is on camera, as both he and his character bring a sense of gravitas and power to the proceedings, but then the writers do the best to fuck up Magneto as well — he tends to forget his own abilities as the plot demands — in fact, a better title to this movie would be Dark Phoenix: Character Assassination. Then, to make matters worse, if that even seems possible at this point, we are introduced to the shape-shifting alien race known as the D'Bari, who arrive on Earth to hunt for the “cosmic force” that now lives inside Jean. The leader is named Vuk (Jessica Chastain) and she needs this power to supposedly resurrect her people — we are told the D’Bari homeworld was wiped out by the Phoenix Force as it passed by — and she pops in and out of the movie for literally no fucking reason. Vuk and her shapeshifting goon squad simply provide cannon fodder for our heroes, with the D'Bari soldiers switching between being indestructible and easily killed with no rhyme or reason — Nightcrawler breaks one of their necks with his fucking tail — and why an omega level powered Jean Grey would give this albino chick the time of day is another case of lazy ass screenwriting.

 

“You are my number one, gal.”

The “Dark Phoenix Saga” could have easily played out across several movies — which the Marvel Cinematic Universe proved could be done with something like Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet — but instead, we get this half-assed public school primary version of the story. The comic dealt with the Hellfire Club and the White Queen, with Jean Grey briefly becoming the Hellfire Club's Black Queen and going full-on evil, while later in Dark Phoenix mode she had to recharge herself by devouring the energy of the nearby D'Bari star, causing a supernova which kills the entire population of the only civilized planet orbiting the star — clearly a much better way of introducing the D’Bari and a reason to hunt Jean Grey — and then you had the Kree and Skrull empires concluding that Dark Phoenix is an even more serious threat than the planet-consuming Galactus and must be destroyed. Doesn’t that sound better than anything this film had to offer? How can one studio so colossally fuck up such a great story?

Stray Observations:

• At the end of X-Men: Apocalypse, we saw Jean Grey go all “Phoenix Force” incinerating Apocalypse's body, but this event is now retconned to not have happened.
• Storm (Alexandra Shipp) uses weather powers in space.  Huh?
• With the Phoenix powers, Jean has the ability to instant-kill her opponents, which she will not use against enemies who may be required for later films.
• Jean will switch back and forth from good to evil so often that I’m surprised her teammates don’t get whiplash.
• Beast goes from nice guy to “Must murder Jean Grey” with little to no character progression.
• Quicksilver is dispatched and forgotten so that the writers don’t have to worry about him winning every fight instantly.
• Storm has a decidedly tough time fighting a mutant whose only ability is whip-like dreadlocks. *sigh*
• We find out that the United States Government has granted Magneto and his mutant army an island to live on, which is all kinds of fucked up when you consider in the previous films Magneto had not only dropped a baseball stadium on the White House, and threatened the life of the President, but in X-Men: Apocalypse he was directly responsible for the death of millions.

 

“What's a few crimes against humanity among friends?”

Director Simon Kinberg had a tough job trying to cram a sprawling storyline into one two-hour movie — though at times it did feel like a three hour movie — and as this was his first feature film as director — another strange choice by Fox — I must put the bulk of the blame for this mess on the studio. Dark Phoenix had a $200 million budget — which as I put this writing, the studio is looking at a $100 million loss — and it's clear that much of that money was spent on some gloriously awesome visual effects. Unfortunately, they were in support of a script that didn't make a lick of sense. At least with Fox being purchased by Disney we can consider this last installment as some kind of syphilitic fever dream, and wait patiently until it is rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

 

We do get a nice cameo of the mutant singer Dazzler, so that's nice.

Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost (2018)

When one thinks of gourmet food, Scooby-Doo wouldn't normally leap to mind — Scooby Snacks and Dagwood-style sandwiches being the more typical foods associated with everyone's favourite mystery-solving Great Dane — but with Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost, our intrepid group of amateur sleuths journey deep into the world of gastronomical delights. So, who exactly will introduce us to this new flavour of mystery? Well, in the vein of the 70s' The New Scooby-Doo Movies, this direct-to-video movie teams Scooby-Doo and the gang with celebrity voices — playing themselves — and in this case, they are from the world of celebrity chefs and reality television.

 This animated movie stays true to the Scooby-Doo formula with the Mystery Incorporated gang arriving at a new location only to discover that there is a supernatural mystery to solve. In this case, it's at the Rocky Harbor Inn, a New England colonial historical site, which has recently been purchased by Fred's (Frank Welker) Uncle Bobby Flay (Bobby Flay), the world-renowned celebrity chef and restauranteur. Needless to say, Scooby (Frank Welker) and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) are more than excited to discover that Fred has a world-famous chef in his family tree, and even Velma (Kate Micucci) and Daphne (Grey Griffin) are happy to learn that they are going to be part of a live broadcast of Bobby Flay's new cooking show.

 

Could a real mystery be brewing in that pot?

Throughout the movie, we learn the history behind the Rocky Harbor Inn, which was originally owned by Fred and Bobby's Very-Great Uncle Edward Flay, a colonial hero during the American Revolution, but most importantly is the fact that it has remained empty for two centuries, ever since Edward Flay mysteriously vanished after being heard uttering his final words, "The Red Ghost!" Bobby has converted the inn into a hotel resort/high-tech cooking arena, from which he plans to launch his new cooking show … that is, if the Red Ghost doesn't get in the way. Before you can say "Jinkies," a ghost is terrorizing guests and chasing poor Scooby and Shaggy up and down the halls of the inn, along with a few other cooking celebrities: Giada (Giada De Laurentiis) who has martial arts and parkour skills that come in real handy, and Marcus (Marcus Samuelsson) and his supermodel wife Maya (Maya Haile).

 

Can they cook up a plan to stop this terrifying specter?

What follows is your standard Scooby-Doo mystery with the gang splitting up to search for clues — there is a particularly nice bit where Shaggy and Scooby wreck a library while futilely looking for a hidden passage behind all the books — while Velma does the usual heavy-lifting when it comes to finding clues and solving the mystery. Fred is pretty much left alone to be the lame comic relief in this outing, being stuck as the inn's concierge during the ghostly crisis, while Daphne becomes Watson to Velma's Sherlock Holmes. The ghost itself is a very frightening apparition, whose weird "shushing" sound is a harbinger of its evil arrival, and the very appearance of the phantom causes the high-tech kitchen to go completely crazy. But who could be responsible for all these ghostly shenanigans? Could it be disgruntled caretaker Jeremiah Noseworthy (Jim Cummings) who believes that Edward Flay was a traitor to his country? What about noted scholar Henry Metcalf (David Kaye) who wrote the book on the heroic history of Edward Flay, could his opposing viewpoints be the crux of this mystery? Then there is Sue (Audrey Wasilewski) the psychotic Sous-chef who isn't too fond of Scooby and Shaggy's penchant for eating everything in sight. But most troubling is the arrival of Bradley Bass (Jason Spisak), a shady real-estate developer who seems to have his own plans for the Rock Harbor Inn.

 

The chase through the inn's hedge maze is a nice nod to Stephen King's The Shining.

What makes Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost stand apart from previous Scooby-Doo movies is the mystery itself. Not only does it have a couple of nice twists to delight fans, but the clues and history our group of crime-solvers manages to dig up is pretty solid; from old documents written in invisible ink to the ghostly apparition itself and how it was created — spoiler, it's not an actual ghost — all leading to a more than satisfying conclusion. Now because this movie lays out such a fount of clues and information, older viewers will have no problem guessing who the culprit really is, but Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost isn't without a few tricks up its sleeves to keep even the most astute viewer on their toes. The animation is topnotch, the jokes and shtick work to keep the scares in check so thus it will not terrify any kiddies watching this movie, and the voice-acting is surprisingly good considering half the cast is made up of reality show celebrities and not professional voice actors. This is an entry in the history of Scooby-Doo that I can heartily recommend to new and old fans alike.

 

Dinner is served with a side order of terror.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) – Review

With director Michael Dougherty helming this latest installment in the Legendary MonsterVerse, we enter an era where Hollywood is finally giving the Japanese a run for their money when it comes to kaiju films, with both 2014’s Godzilla and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island being excellent entries in the giant monsters genre, and now with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the cinematic world of monster smackdowns explodes even further.

Paleobiologist Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) works for crypto-zoological organization Monarch as she tries to move past the death of her son, him having died during the destruction that occurred from the Godzilla vs M.U.T.O. battle in the 2014 Godzilla film, which has also estranged her from her husband Dr. Mark Russel (Kyle Chandler) who spent his grief in a bottle before running off to study wolves. We are also introduced to Emma's daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), a spunky young girl who is becoming concerned for her mother, and though she lives with her, and has no contact with her absentee father, she isn’t completely on board with all that is going down — and some serious shit does go down. Things come to a head when eco-terrorist Colonel Jonah (Charles Dance), and a pastel of mercenaries, storm the Monarch facility to take possession of something called the Orca, a device that Emma has developed that can communicate and even influence the giant creatures. Emma and Madison are captured by Jonah, in what looks to be an opening salvo in a plan to awaken the hibernating "Titans" and unleash a new age of monsters that are capable of controlling Earth. Now, as mankind has been doing a pretty bad job of late when it comes to taking care of the Earth, you can’t totally fault his logic, but his methodology is certainly a little drastic.

 

Worse “Take Your Kid to Work Day” ever.

As the story unfolds, certain elements will come to light that will literally tear our protagonists apart, with certain characters being revealed to have very suspect motivations, but family drama is the least of your problems when you have seventeen monsters rampaging across the globe. To save his family, Mark must team up with the people of Monarch to figure out the best way to not only rescue his wife and daughter, but also how to stop the rise of a creature known as "Monster Zero" — that's King Ghidorah for those of you keeping score — who is possibly more powerful than Godzilla. So, alongside Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), Dr. Ilene Chen (Ziyi Zhang) and Dr. Rick Stanton (Bradley Whitford), good ol' Mark will have to put aside his hatred of the Titans and his belief that the only good giant monster is a dead giant monster — which is also the popular stance among the military — as it quickly looks like the only way to save Earth, and all mankind, is to help the very creatures that were partially responsible for his son’s death.

 

It’s that pesky old proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

With this film, it is clear that director Michael Dougherty took to heart the complaints that the previous Godzilla film didn’t have enough monster action — though to be fair, Gareth Edwards brought about the same amount of monster destruction as your average Toho Godzilla film did — and to alleviate this concern, his Godzilla: King of the Monsters packs a surprising amount of kaiju carnage. Now, we still get some painful filler that always seems to plague this genre — if you cut out every moment of Bradley Whitford’s character proclaiming doom or narrating the countdown clock from various monitors, you could shorten the film by about ten or fifteen minutes — and some of the choices our human protagonists make veer between stupid and outright ludicrous.

 

“Don’t move, maybe he didn’t see us.”

What makes this film really stand out is not only the stunning visual effects required to bring the likes of Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra to life — which, and don’t get me wrong, are truly impressive — but it was the sound design and music that completely blew me away. From the first time you hear the sound of Godzilla’s atomic breath revving up to Mothra’s glorious screech, it was all just pitch perfect — just thinking about it gives me goosebumps — and then there is composer Bear McCreary’s wonderful score that brilliantly blends in the classic Toho Godzilla and Mothra themes, which will certainly please hardcore fans.

Stray Thoughts:

• In the original Gojira, it was Serizawa who developed a weapon called the Oxygen Destroyer, but in this film, it is a futile weapon developed by the military.
• Also, the fate of Dr. Serizawa in this movie is a nice twist on what happened to him in the original film.
• Young Madison is inexplicably able to escape the villain’s hideout with the Orca device. I guess Jonah doesn’t believe in pesky things like guards.
• We are told there are seventeen other “Titans” out there, but we only get teased with a few of them.
• The number of times our heroes are saved by Godzilla at the last second reaches such levels of ridiculousness that he’s literally become a “Godzilla ex Machina."
• By the end of this film, every character should be contracting every form of cancer due to all the radiation they've been exposed to.
• Actor Kyle Chandler is quickly becoming a giant monster movie staple, what with his appearances in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, J.J. Abrams' Super 8, and now 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Mothra needs her own goddamn movie in this MonsterVerse!

 

“Mosura ya Mosura.”

The one gripe I have with this film, and it’s a fairly substantial one, is that as an organization, Monarch is pretty much crap at doing their job. Monarch seems to be staffed with dudes who sit around waiting for events to happen while occasionally pointing frantically at a computer display, all while being rather ineffective at everything else. At one point, during a Senate Hearing, it is discussed whether or not Monarch should be under military control, and looking at how they constantly fail against not only giant monsters — which granted is a fairly tough job — but they can’t even handle Tywin Lannister and a half-dozen dudes, so turning this all over to the military isn't necessarily a bad idea.  Monarch looks to be outfitted like Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. — flying around in a massive jet that has its own hanger deck — yet when it comes to fighting monsters, their biggest tactic seems to be, “Run away, run away.”

 

Sure, that’s my default tactic, but I’m not some super-secret organization.

In conclusion, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a rousing adventure movie, filled with fantastic visuals, unbelievable sound design, and some of the best monster-on-monster action ever put to screen, making this a must-see for fans of the genre, and now we just have a year to wait for the much-anticipated remake of King Kong vs Godzilla.