Category: Film Review

Cult movies aren’t born, they’re made by audiences willing to put in the time and money to celebrate features that either died while trying to be mainstream, or never stood a chance when offered for universal acceptance. Cult entertainment is a topic that’s been explored repeatedly in all forms of media (it’s bread-and-butter content for podcasts), but director Danny Wolf hopes to provide expanse and access with “Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All-Time,” which is a three-part examination of cinematic offerings that’ve become a secret language for some, creating legacies few could predict but millions adore. Next up is “Volume 3: Comedy and Camp,” examining the efforts that, for the most part, died during their initial theatrical runs trying to delight audiences with strangeness and satire the general public wasn’t ready to accept at the time. With the box office bloodshed over, Wolf is now taking on the endeavors that managed to hold on due to unique perspectives and low-budget ingenuity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 1973, Peter Medak directed “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” a pirate adventure starring Peter Sellers. In truth, he didn’t really direct the feature, he survived it, and barely that, going into the project with slight hesitation, coming out a changed man with a profound fear that his career was killed by the experience. Over four decades later, Medak’s blood still boils at the thought of the endeavor, wrestling with unresolved issues pertaining to Sellers and his atrocious behavior on-set, showing little care for anything but himself. With hopes to reconcile with the past and see if there’s a way back into the time lost while making “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” Medak turns to documentary therapy for “The Ghost of Peter Sellers,” where he recounts his days spent on the doomed project, managing a star who hired him but ultimately didn’t want to participate, methodically destroying the movie in the process. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Screenwriter Rita Kalnejais has her heart in the right place with “Babyteeth,” constructing a lived-in ode to adolescent heartbreak and parental anxiety. It’s an Australian production that aims to explore painful relationships exploding under one roof, delving into all sorts of uncomfortable realities and stunted interactions, with the story basically out to understand the mindset of frustrated people who can’t communicate with the precision they hope for. It’s about messiness, and director Shannon Murphy tries to respect the free spirit nature of the material, securing a loose feel for characters experiencing the highs and lows of life. Murphy also spreads the roaming narrative over two hours, which tends to strangle elements of intimacy that work so well for the effort. “Babyteeth” has moments of emotional clarity that are exquisite, but there’s also a large portion of the overlong feature that resembles a filmed acting class. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s a bit of nostalgia tied to the release of “Artemis Fowl,” which returns viewers back to a time when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” managed to become a bigger hit than anyone was expecting, triggering a gold rush from studios trying to get their hands on similar properties. It’s hard to remember the specifics of “Eragon,” “The Seeker,” and “The Mortal Instruments,” but they all wanted in on the YA fantasy lottery. “Artemis Fowl” is cut from the same cloth, presenting a complicated universe of humans, fairies, trolls, and dwarves, all on the hunt for a special weapon of power while a shadowy figure plans multiverse domination. The mixture seemed to work for author Eoin Colfer, who turned his 2001 book into a popular literary series, but the film adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh is baffling for much of its run time, burdened with way too much story to tell and only 88 minutes to work with. It’s “Exposition: The Movie,” and while visual might is there, this picture is a chore to sit through. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s no secret that writer/director Judd Apatow has a filmmaking formula. He takes biographical scraps from the lives of his stars and uses comedy to press a story into place, going for emotional authenticity while trying to score laughs with improvisational humor. He did it with Adam Sandler in “Funny People,” himself in “This Is 40,” and, most recently, with Amy Schumer in the 2015 hit, “Trainwreck.” He’s been away from the screen for five years, but Apatow returns with “The King of Staten Island,” which pairs his helming habits with “Saturday Night Live” player, Pete Davidson. The combo is more effective than it initially appears, finding Apatow not only able to make Davidson likeable, but understood in many ways, creating a seriocomic journey into the man’s personal history and professional charms, which were previously a source of heated debate. “The King of Staten Island” isn’t fresh, but it’s lived-in and amusing, with Apatow coloring inside the lines with a cozy vision for childhood trauma and maturation blues. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

How director Olivier Megaton still finds work as a filmmaker is an industry mystery that might never be solved. He’s a franchise killer, ruining “The Transporter” and “Taken” brand names with awful sequels, and he’s done dreadfully on his own, guiding “Columbiana.” Now fully departed from the ruins of Luc Besson’s company, EuropaCorp, Megaton is back with “The Last Days of American Crime,” and, no shock here, it’s an abysmal picture. Actually, it’s the worst movie he’s ever made, put in charge of visualizing a graphic novel adaptation that perhaps didn’t need cinematic representation, dealing with blank characters and a non-starter of a plot. It’s all coated in grungy style and ultraviolence, while casting is atrocious, unleashing bad actors on worse material. I’m sure the production is aiming to shine a light on the failings of American society (the effort was shot in South Africa), but the first mistake was hiring the graceless Megaton, who has no idea how to put together a scene, much less a punishing 150-minute-long viewing experience that can’t successfully put one foot in front of the other. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Darkness Falls” runs a hair over 80 minutes. It’s a lean run time for a serial killer drama, and what’s so odd about the movie is how it portions out the horrors it wants to share. Director Julien Seri spends the first ten minutes of the endeavor highlighting a slow, agonizing murder involving the forced digestion of sleeping pills and a staged suicide, never introducing the characters beyond their crude depiction as predator and prey. It’s just ugliness without context, which does nothing for tension or storytelling. However, what initially seems like a single offering of editorial mismanagement becomes a feature-long problem for the helmer, who merely supplies select scenes of rage and reflection, not a nail-biting viewing experience involving a haunted cop and two deranged individuals causing problems for the women of Los Angeles. It’s an 80-minute-long time commitment, and nothing really happens in “Darkness Falls.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Becky” is being sold as the dramatic debut for comedian Kevin James. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, as I saw “Grown Ups 2” on opening night in a half-full auditorium, and nobody was laughing. But who am I to get in the way of marketing? The great news is that James tries to be steely and humorless here, and he does a fantastic job playing a menacing character. Even better, “Becky” is an absolute blood-drenched joyride of a film; a revenge picture that’s lean, mean, and unexpectedly interested in the bodily harm a 13-year-old kid can inflict on the Nazi goons looking to destroy everything she holds dear. Directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion don’t pull any punches with their endeavor, offering a nightmarishly graphic descent into feral outbreaks of grief, going wild with B-movie rampaging from an unlikely source of rage. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of “Judy and Punch” is writer/director Mirrah Foulkes’s interest in returning to the past to examine a different origin story for a famous puppet show. Offering a feminist take on the saga of Punch and Judy, the feature winds back 400 years to a time of male dominance, religious fearmongering, and desperation for entertainment. Foulkes has something original with “Judy and Punch,” and something angry too, with the picture delivering an impressive level of violence to go with its pitch-black sense of humor and horror. It doesn’t always connect as it should, getting a little lost when it comes time to form a resolution, but Foulkes makes an impressive debut with the macabre endeavor, and while she’s not dealing in real history, her imagination is big enough to reconsider the state of art and gender balance during a chaotic time period. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1995’s “Showgirls” has experienced a true roller coaster ride of appreciation. When it was initially released in theaters, sold as a sinful NC-17 viewing experience, it was promptly dismissed by critics as unforgivable trash. Audiences were initially curious, bur horrible word-of-mouth spread fast, killing the picture in its second weekend. And then it was gone. All that hype and promotion was over just like that, sending the effort to the VHS afterlife, destined to live the rest of its days as a cinema curio from Paul Verhoeven, a mighty director. And then something happened to “Showgirls.” Around 2000, it started finding an audience, and one that responded to the extremity of the endeavor with absolute delight, giving the box office bomb a second wind on home video and around the world as a midnight movie oddity. “You Don’t Nomi” is fairly late to the party with its offering of admiration and deconstruction, but for those with a profound love for the production, director Jeffrey McHale strives to present an understanding of what went right, and what went oh-so-wrong. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Shirley” isn’t a bio-pic of writer Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” It’s an adaptation of the 2014 book by Susan Scarf Merrell, who used her admiration for Jackson’s work in psychological horror to create her own homage to the writer, imagining a complicated, almost parasitic relationship between Jackson and a pregnant woman who comes to lives with her for a significant amount of time. There’s a twinge of disappointment that the material isn’t more interested in history, with screenwriter Sarah Gubbins aiming to make more of a chiller, combining Merrell’s material, Jackson’s reputation, and her own dramatic interests to construct an unnerving exploration of mental illness, literary inspiration, and obsession. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Just last summer, director Nisha Ganatra delivered “Late Night,” a study of power and gender within the talk show circuit. It was meant to be a big thing, but it ended up a very small thing when it was finally released, ignored by audiences, who couldn’t quite find their way into a mediocre picture. Ganatra is back with more vanilla in “The High Note,” this time exploring the ways of power and gender in the music industry, with a young, naďve woman struggling to navigate the anxieties of a powerful, older woman trying to compete in a cutthroat business. Okay, so she’s basically made the same movie twice, and “The High Note” is equally bland but not entirely unpleasant. It’s the rare film where most of the supporting characters are more interesting than the main players, and while Ganatra is skilled at creating softness, she’s lost with dramatic urgency, allowing the feature to slowly evaporate. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Just six months ago, director Matt Eskandari and star Bruce Willis were working on their VOD game with “Trauma Center.” It wasn’t an inspired feature, with plenty of lackluster filmmaking and casting choices, but it was marginally better than what’s typically made for the home video market, dialing down hyperactive action antics to try its luck as a thriller. Eskandari is back with “Survive the Night,” reteaming with Willis for a home invasion chiller that’s big on keeping costs down, containing most of the action to a basic household setting. Willis continues down his career path of picking roles that require the least amount of standing, and though the picture doesn’t provide an extended run of screen tension, Eskandari does relatively well for the first hour of the endeavor, especially with lowered expectations for a brisk display of antagonism and family issues. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“A Clear Shot” is “inspired by” the true story of a 1991 Sacramento hostage crisis, where a group of four armed Vietnamese men stormed into a Good Guys electronic shop, demanding strange ransoms and immediate satisfaction. Writer/director Nick Leisure doesn’t have the budget to deal with the chaos of the day in a satisfactory manner, offering a low-budget version of the events, spruced up with more active characterizations and charged encounters between gunmen and hostages. Leisure has a few ideas he wants to sell on the immigration experience in America, but he doesn’t have much of a game plan to achieve his vision. “A Clear Shot” emerges as weirdly ambitious in some areas and far too low wattage in others, with Leisure unable to reach any noticeable levels of suspense as he wages war with limited budgetary coin. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

On the IMDB page for “The Vast of Night,” under the trivia section, someone has added a list of film festivals that passed on the feature as it was making its rounds. As with anything on the website, it’s difficult to tell if this informational addition is either a source of shame or a point of pride. However, such rejection makes sense with this endeavor, which is meant to play like a tribute to television from the 1960s, and is often executed like a podcast, more interested in telling tales than showing them. “The Vast of Night” marks the directorial debut for Andrew Patterson, and it’s clear he has talent, as the effort showcases a sure moviemaking approach. It’s the overall urgency of the feature that’s more in doubt, with the slow-burn viewing experience strictly reserved for those already interested in the art of oral storytelling. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The poster for “Villain” promises a blistering action viewing experience. There’s star Craig Fairbrass in full brutalizer pose, clutching a gun while walking away from a wall of flame and scattered sparks. Gotta have those sparks. The marketing for the feature is presenting a distinct image for revenge cinema, so it comes as something of a surprise to find out that “Villain” isn’t anywhere near the bone-breaker offering initially imagined. Writers Greg Hall and George Russo keep their distance from displays of aggression, with the story concerning the emotional toil of a life of crime, with the lead character spending his hours trying to pick up the pieces after experiencing a stint in prison, locked away while the world changed. Promotional efforts want to sell some slam-bang entertainment, but this movie is far from that, offering a compellingly emotional journey, boosted by a terrific turn from Fairbrass. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 1997, Peter Cattaneo directed “The Full Monty.” The little picture about working class blues and male nudity became a big deal, enjoying critical acclaim and sizable box office, also starting a trend of sorts, with studios suddenly ordering their own tales of miserable people overcoming great odds through peculiar hobbies. Cattaneo couldn’t capitalize on the hit film (bottoming out with the awful 2008 comedy, “The Rocker”), and now he’s attempting a similar viewing experience 23 years later. “Military Wives” is based on the true story of female choirs who pour their heart and soul into song while their significant others are away on duty, and the premise is ripe for feel-good entertainment, observing emotionally wounded people coming together for a greater good. While the whole thing seems unbearably contrived, Cattaneo actually locates a pulse for “Military Wives,” finding a sincere way to approach pure cliché. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Two years ago, director Vaughn Stein delivered “Terminal.” It was his attempt at a stylish crime thriller, boosted by star power from Margo Robbie and a rare turn from Mike Myers, but the feature was seriously underwhelming, falling apart long before it reached its crescendo. Stein returns with “Inheritance,” which happens to peak way too soon, delivering an intriguingly twisted premise from screenwriter Matthew Kennedy (making his debut) before it doesn’t do anything of note with it. Stein once again provides a dearth of thrills with his twists and turns, and his feel for casting is way off this time around, finding the wrong people in the wrong roles trying to make a tepid, anticlimactic tale of dark secrets connect on some level. If “Terminal” was slow-burn stroll into tedium, “Inheritance” is in a hurry to get there, making a series of poor creative choices on the way down. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Fighting a fledgling directing career, Michael Showalter scored a hit with 2017’s “The Big Sick,” impressing many with his ability to balance frightening elements of medical uncertainty with silliness, going for big heart with a side of wackiness. Showalter also turned comedian Kumail Nanjiani into a leading man, as viewed in last year’s bomb, “Stuber.” The pair reteam for “The Lovebirds,” though sensitivity is really the last priority for the production, which intends to play as more of a farce, with brief elements of romance to preserve the date movie appeal of the picture. “The Lovebirds” doesn’t possess any noticeable depth, and its sense of humor is seriously lacking, with Showalter in more of a coaching position, cheering on Nanjiani and so-star Issa Rae as they stumble through terrible improvisations, trying to cover for the lack of a complete script. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Scoob!” marks the return of the “Scooby-Doo” franchise to the big screen (at least that was the original release plan), arriving after 2004’s “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed” failed to match the gross of its 2002 predecessor. However, there’s been no shortage of “Scooby-Doo” entertainment over the years, with Warner Brothers mining the brand name for everything it’s worth, churning out DTV animated movies (where the Mystery Machine gang has paired up with pro-wrestlers, Batman, and KISS) and television shows, making sure there’s a Scooby-themed offering for every star in the sky. And now there’s “Scoob!” Instead of ordering up a uniquely spooky adventure for the characters, the producers have decided to launch the Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe, blending known cartoon personalities to help give Scooby-Doo and Shaggy the big-budget formula to inspire future sequels and spin-offs. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com