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Recent Reviews

Zombieland (Blu-ray)

See? And here I thought the Zombie-Flick-with-a-Climax-Set-in-an-Abandoned-Amusement-Park sub-sub-sub-genre peaked thirty years back.

This is from Nightmare City, by the way.

Sorry, Umberto.

So anyway, the downfall of civilization

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kicked off with a gas station cheeseburger. Some sort of E.coli/Mad Cow cocktail...? No idea. Whatever was in that burger made some poor schlub get violently ill...he started spewing black bile, his skin began sloughing off, pus and other sticky stuff oozed from every sore and orifice, and he was consumed with a blinding hunger for human flesh. The first person he nom-nom-ed on became infected too, and...yeah, flip forward a few pages, and mankind is all but extinct. Jesse Eisenberg stars as one kid who seemed to be dealing with it alright, though. I mean, it takes direct contact with a zombie or its bodily fluid to become infected, and who's better equipped to deal with that than a paranoid shut-in toting around a laundry list of rules to survive Zombieland? Okay, maybe you're snickering at a rule like "Beware of Bathrooms", but hey, he's still alive and kickin', and you're a cannibal with no upper lip and half your face encrusted with pus, so there's that.

On his way to see if his folks in Ohio somehow managed to make it, he bumps into a shit-kicker in an post-apocalyptic Escalade. They opt not to tell each other their real names -- don't wanna get too attached or anything -- but Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) lets Columbus (Eisenberg) tag along anyway, at least for a while. It seems to be going alright. This jittery kid's good for a laugh, if nothing else, and he plays it so safe that he never manages to get into trouble. Meanwhile, Columbus doesn't have much to fret about with a sociopath like Tallahassee ready to hack apart any zombies they run into with garden implements or El Kabong 'em with a...[read the entire review]

Planet Hulk (Blu-ray)

"...then I made a little joke and said maybe the only way to really protect the world from the Hulk if he ever goes really nuts is ta stick him in a rocket and shoot him out into space...let him be somebody else's problem."
- The Thing, Fantastic Four #530-something

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As plans go, you could do a lot worse. The Hulk may have saved the world as we know it hundreds of times over, but his unparalleled strength and unchecked rage are to blame for numerous deaths and who knows how many billions of dollars in property damage. Sure, the Hulk's never killed anyone in cold blood -- the only time he's stomped on any civilians have been during his mindless rampages -- but that's not good enough. A secret cabal of superheroes have deemed the Hulk far too great a risk to continue roaming free. They can't cure him...they can't imprison him...the only way to prevent the Hulk from doing any further damage to the planet is to ensure he's not on it anymore.

Misguided...? Maybe. They're not cruel, though: rather than duping the Hulk into walking into a spaceship and flinging it into the sun or something, they pick out an idyllic, far-flung planet...one lush with vegetation, teeming with game for him to hunt, and devoid of any intelligent life to torment him. 'Course, this sort of thing has been tried before, and it didn't work then...not gonna work now. An enraged Hulk smashes the ship off-course, sending it careening away from paradise and hurtling instead towards the barren wasteland of Sakaar. He barely has a chance to step out from the wreckage of his ship before becoming enslaved. Weakened from that passage through a wormhole, the Hulk can't even scream that he's the strongest one there is. He's vulnerable...he bleeds.

A creature like the Hulk is too valuable to be wasted on slave labor, but his strength and fury...[read the entire review]

The Stepfather (2009) (Blu-ray)

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...and yeah, that pretty much sums up how I feel too. This remake of The Stepfather is written and directed by the same guys behind the retread of Prom Night a couple years back, and I could probably stop the review right there. Take Terry O'Quinn's cacklingly awesome cult classic from 1987, neuter every last thing that was great about the flick until it starts to look like some Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?-grade Lifetime Original Movie, and you're somewhere in the ballpark.

David Harris

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(Dylan Walsh) -- or, at least, that's the name he's going by these days -- is hellbent on finding the perfect family, and he's not so much the type to settle for second-best. His M.O. is to worm his way into a broken home, saddle up as stepfather, and cut his losses (literally!) once things stop fitting into that Ozzie and Harriet postcard he has swimming around in his head. Flash forward to Portland as The Harding Family marches next in line on the hit parade. The younger tykes love the guy. Mom (Sela Ward) is smitten. Heck, even her sapphic sister and neighbors are won over. The only one who's leery is Michael (Penn Badgley) -- a troubled teenager that shows, um, no signs of being troubled other than people talking about it offhandedly a few times -- who's back for the summer after a stint at not-quite-military school. David puts on a happy face, but the cracks quickly start to show as he manhandles one of the kids for cranking up his TV too loudly and creepily stares at Mikey and his Maxim-cover-girlfriend (Amber Heard). Everyone who gets too close to the truth is aufed in the most inoffensively PG-13 ways possible, and when Michael won't let his suspicions go, it gets to be time for David to cut and run again...

There's all sorts of chatter in the extras about how The...[read the entire review]

Triangle (Blu-ray)

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Before she so much as steps foot aboard the boat, Jess (Melissa George) looks drained...distant. You'd think she'd appreciate the break. It's supposed to be a breezy Saturday of sailing off the Florida coast: Jess' autistic son is being cared for at school, she says, and the forgettable gig she has at a diner down the road is off in the rear view mirror. Jess, her friend Greg (Michael Dorman), a few of his pals, an awkward matchup, a gorgeous sailboat, and the Atlantic Ocean...sounds like there could be worse days. As they're who knows how many miles from the shore -- with nothing a flat, endless patch of blue in sight -- the winds abruptly die down. Distant voices crackle on the radio before fading away entirely, and some sort of electrical storm looms just off in the distance. Greg's sailboat capsizes from the violent assault of the storm, but Jess and most of her new friends somehow manage to escape unscathed, leaping from the tattered remnants of the ship onto a passing oceanliner. At first sight, the S.S. Aeolus looks to be deserted. Maybe it's just a prank by a bored crew...? It's a sprawling ship, so for all we know, maybe whoever's running it are all bunkered down together somewhere. Still, the ship is moving, so someone has to be onboard, right? As the five of them skulk around in search of answers, it becomes increasingly clear that something's not quite right: trickles of blood on the floor, a placard with an odd date on it, Jess being plagued by an inescapable sense of déjà vu... They're not alone on the ship, and the shadowy figure that soon reveals itself seems hellbent on slaughtering them all.

Look, I know that plot synopsis doesn't sound overwhelmingly original, and between that and the title, chances are you're expecting some sort of basic cable slasher flick wrapped around...[read the entire review]

The House of the Devil (Blu-ray)

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A gray, ashen palette. Hypercaffeinated quick cutting. Low-rent digital effects. Some sort of nu-metal/mallcore soundtrack chugging away at eighteen quadrillion decibels. The subwoofer whacking away like a sledgehammer to punctuate the lazy jump scares that crop up like clockwork every eight minutes. It's not hard to wind up feeling disillusioned with all of the interchangeable horror flicks coming down the pike these days, but as you could probably guess from the title card up there, The House of the Devil veers off in a completely different direction.

The House of the Devil may not actually have been shot sometime around 1982, but it might as well have been. Writer/director/editor Ti West and his crew have recreated the era down to the most minute detail, from a Walkman the size of a brick to Farrah-feathered hair all the way to those red, waxy Enjoy Coke! fast food cups. Even the grainy photography, muted palette, and the slight optical jitter of the opening titles are pitch-perfect. West only loses out on...[read the entire review]

10 Things I Hate About You (Blu-ray)

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Okay, maybe there aren't all that many movies crammed into the Shakespeare-centric Teen Relationship Comedy endcap at Blockbuster, but that sub-sub-sub-subgenre did produce two of the best teen flicks to divebomb into theaters in the wake of She's All That's colossal success. One of 'em is Get Over It!, which swirls around a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and worms some of Willy's work into the narrative as well. The other is...well, obviously 10 Things I Hate About You, since otherwise this whole introduction would be pretty pointless, right?

10 Things I Hate About You takes its cues from "The Taming of the Shrew", and if you say the title of the flick really, really quickly, it even kind of sounds the same. Try it! I'll even wait for you to finish. This is me waiting. Okay, with that out the way, 10 Things... opens with perennial new kid Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) mooning over the most deliriously gorgeous girl in school: Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik). Bianca doesn't exactly come across as the sharpest crayon in the box, vapidly rambling on about stuff like how she likes her Sketchers but lo-o-o-o-oves her Prada backpack, but Cameron thinks there's something more substantial lurking underneath all that froth and frosting. 'Course, he'll have a tough time finding out. For one, there's Joey (Andrew Keegan) -- the resident Bee-Emm-Oh-See -- an overfunded, double-digit IQ male model who's been sniffing around Bianca for a while now. There's also the whole thing about the Stratford sisters' hyper-uptight pop (Larry Miller), an obstetrician who's up to his elbows in placentas all day as he helps teenaged pregnant moms squirt out their mistakes. Not so keen on his daughters winding up spreadeagle on his operating table, Poppa Stratford lays down the law: no dating till after...[read the entire review]

More reviews...

Stuff I've Watched Recently

2/7: My Neighbor Totoro (DVD)
2/7: Kiki's Delivery Service (DVD)
2/6: Fallen Angels (Blu-ray)
2/6: Whip It (Blu-ray)
2/6: Zombieland (Blu-ray; Commentary)
2/6: Zombieland (Blu-ray; Commentary)
2/6: Zombieland (Blu-ray)
2/4: Planet Hulk (Blu-ray; Commentary)
2/4: Planet Hulk (Blu-ray; Commentary)
2/3: Planet Hulk (Blu-ray)
2/1: Aziz Ansari: Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening (DVD)
1/31: Porco Rosso (DVD)
1/30: Make It Happen (Blu-ray)
1/30: Eden Lake (Blu-ray)
1/30: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Blu-ray)