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Reviews
The Honeymoon (2022)
Everyone in this film has crap hair
And it just goes downhill from there. What's astonishing is that the writer and director, Dean Craig, is credited this year for writing a movie I enjoyed, The Estate. He also wrote Death at a Funeral a few years back, which was solid. What the actual hell, Dean?
Everything the first reviewer said is true. This is a painfully terrible film with stock jokes, stock characters, and actors with no chemistry. If there were to be an article in the New York Times in a month about how the script was written and characters were selected by an AI that had ben fed a corpus of sub-5-star films, I wouldn't be surprised.
There are, of course, worse films out there. I'd like to congratulate the continuity staff for ensuring that the characters wore the same clothes from scene to scene. Also everyone involved remembered the plot all the way through.
Unseen (Invisible) (2020)
A great idea ruined by a padded script
Going in, you'd think this series had it all--a malicious invisible person, nudity, terrorism, a teen girl blowing a dude for an ugly tote bag, and endless shots of a crazy lady with a court jester's hood driving her Volvo around town yammering about 5G. There was even good acting all around. Yet somehow, the writer(s) managed to make it all so boring. The part with the creepy invisible mom stalking the old man was great, but after that the story splinters into a bunch of boring threads. The reward of watching Jester Hood wave sticks around while climbing from the Pit of Hobos just isn't the payoff you'd hope for after four hours of watching people talk about hospital studies and whether they have enough data to publish.
The story never actually tied a link between the antenna and invisibility, so the whole must-blow-up-antenna resistance movement was a red herring. Disappointing.
A Wounded Fawn (2022)
All hail the red owl of extra credit
This flick started well. The creepy guy was just the right level of douche and the chick was the right level of jaded art chick who's slow to catch on. No matter who kills who everybody wins, right? Right up until they arrived at the "cabin," the stolen artwork was put to good use, and suddenly it all fell into a rabbit hole of allusion and art-school drama club where pretention and boredom fight it out.
When I was an undergrad, I stopped going to student films because most of them were overblown yawnfests like this. Yes, we get it, we all had to read the Greek tragedies. We all know what's going to happen.
I hope everyone got credit for this boring piece of crap.
Wifelike (2022)
Late night tug flick kinda redeems itself
I confess, I downloaded this film because I figured there had to be a "wifelike typing detected" joke in there somewhere. (Spoiler alert: not there. Nor were any other jokes. This film takes itself terribly seriously.)
I almost bailed on it halfway through. The disconcerting sex doll stance of Meredith, the gratuitous "self-exploration mode on" scene, the gross lizard kissing with the balding guy 20 years older who "teaches" her, Agent Jack's wife doing a sexy-wexy dance in lingerie for him-it's like the people who make Skinamax movies saw Ex Machina and Humans and had an idea. It's the sort of film where you suspect the target audience are basement dwellers jerking it to every frame with a woman in it, even the one in teal randomly dancing by herself in the background of the dream party. (Not here to moralize, but if you want to watch porn, just admit it to yourself and watch porn.)
However, the end the film uses its essential creepiness and makes it pay off, handsomely. Jonathan Rhys Meyers not only looks like a balding and confused Ben Stiller from Zoolander, but he's even grosser than we thought! A surprisingly decent justification for a whole lot of creepiness.
Special callout to the extras playing sex dolls, I mean wives, on the stairs at the company run by the cut-rate Bill Maher! What thankless roles. Elena Kampouris does a fine homage to Gemma Chan from Humans.
Wolf Hound (2022)
Cliché-packed silliness
Wolf hound? You'll be the one howling with laughter at this thing. Come for the gigantic brass star of David pendants apparently all Jewish flight crew were issued. Stay for the big plastic swastika flag melting.
This flick ticks all the cliché boxes: We've got a creepy scientist who looks like a cross between the Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Gollum. We've got the now-obligatory Black soldier(s) and French resistance woman. We've got a guy yelling "nooo" when someone gets shot in slow motion, with the surrounding firefight thoughtfully remaining silent for a minute so dying guy can say his last words. We've got a big musclebound Nazi who strips down to his wifebeater for the big fight scene. We've got a guy saying "This ends now" and "Let's finish this."
We've got so much modern language going on ("brainstorm"? Really?), that you expect the evil commandant to bust out a "Hashtag Jews be bad, yo."
Four stars for the story managing to hold together and for the effort the Nazi officers put into sucking in their cheeks to have cheekbones.
Verdens verste menneske (2021)
Oh my God, end already
Technically excellent and wonderful special effects, but seriously, they should have cut at least 50 minutes from this thing. I have utterly failed to care about a chick going through life like a Rooma hitting baseboards.
A Year from Now (2021)
A steaming Yule log of bad story and acting
Ever wanted to see a family (and town) in which only one person speaks at a time and everyone else just stands there, frozen, waiting for their turn to deliver a line, like an elementary school Christmas play?
Ever hoped for a movie in which there's a weird brother with a bowl cut hairdo just like the protagonist's mom?
Ever wanted to see a film in which the protagonist did nothing with her life year after year and instead of rooting for her to get it together and succeed you just want to give her a pinch?
Do you like movies that are padded out by 15% by having the dippy protagonist stare pensively while public domain versions of Christmas songs play?
Ever wanted to see a film in which the protagonist ends up marrying the brain-damaged feeb from the brewery even though he radiates creepy vibes every time she interacts with him?
Ever wanted to see a film in which the protagonist achieves success not through hard work, but simply by waking up and finding her manuscript complete? Or by finding a copy of the published book by the door?
Do you want to hear multiple mentions of Dad's "special" Christmas pancakes?
If you'd like to see all that and more, this is the movie for you!
The Wilds (2020)
Terrible wrapper for what might as well be a found footage series
These are like stories in an anthology, but given a reason to exist together with a profoundly insulting wrapper.
Solid: The acting of the young women and their individual stories.
Pretty good: The acting and approach of the two therapists. (Though the guy lending Leah his phone was astonishingly dumb.)
Garbage: The acting of the woman running the study (her "presentation" practices are just ripoffs of what everyone seems to think professorial lectures look like), her moody and dumb male assistant.
Beyond insulting: The premise of the study, the dependence on confederates, the continual camping below the high-tide line--even after the tidal surge, the way that more and more of the young women on the island reveal themselves to be confederates, the whole "quarantine" prison setup, the "debrief" of the subjects and asking about stuff no one investigating an accident would ever care about, and the random-ass hole in the ground that Leah falls into.
Most annoying character: Speech impediment twin
Best character transformation: Dead Asian woman
Best psych reference: Asch conformity experiments.
Rating
+7 for the anthologies and acting
-3 for insulting wrapper and bad acting
Total = 4.
Blind Ghost (2021)
The worst improv group in the carnival
Tried to make a movie and this was the result. If you're a fan of lousy community theater and plots that make no sense, this is the movie for you!
Cerebrum (2021)
Misplaced effort all around
If only the scriptwriter put half as much effort into the script as these shill reviews.
My Salinger Year (2020)
Unwatchably bad with lazy characters
Having actually worked in NYC publishing in 1995, we stopped watching after an hour because the protagonist is a naïve dumbass and her boyfriend is a lazy stereotype. The only interesting character is played by Sigourney Weaver, and even that is so over-the-top as to be ridiculous.
Four stars for the production. It's beautifully filmed, but the characters are garbage.
The Christmas Yule Blog (2020)
Not even the low-rent Danny Pudi could save this
I like these cheeseball Christmas moves. I'll watch a few minutes here and there before I go to sleep. This is the first one this year in which I checked the time, wondering just how much was left in this terrible thing and it was half over. Ugh. I jumped ahead to the end.
Okay, the obvious. A travel writer who doesn't go to a strange town with an open mind. Also, she takes a random train to get there as opposed to renting at car at the airport. Sure, being dependent on the dude to take you to the B&B gets the action started, but it's unrealistic. And shall we talk for a moment about her boss who sent her there because she needed her Christmas Mojo restarted?
And the dude. What's going on with the prole worker denim jacket? Not a single other person in the town dresses like that.
A town that's so pathetic that they care what some random travel writer writes.
"Santa" at the inn laughing at nothing throughout the movie. I seriously thought he was supposed to be mentally disabled until he actually spoke a few sentences at the end. Huh. I guess the movie did have a twist ending after all.
City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994)
Cynical retread
Once again, poor yuppie Billy Crystal is having trouble at work. Although he's inexplicably fallen upward from failed ad salesman to station manager, has the house in the Westchester with enough land for a bull, and has a wife who's out of his league. All that and he's only turning 40.
His only trouble (aside from a mother whose still alive and loves him and calls him on his birthday) is that he gave a job to his friend and his loser brother has come to stay. Oh, and he thinks he's being haunted by the ghost of Jack Palance, who's looking for his lost dignity. They even manage to spend a whole sentence on why the fluffy blonde Meg Ryan chick from the first movie never came back.
Crystal finds a treasure map and decides to take a side trip from a Las Vegas convention to get the gold. For some reason he decides not to just take an extra couple days there as vacation, but instead lies to his wife about his intentions, even though she was completely understanding about his spending two weeks playing cowboy last year. Oh look, plot tension.
A little Jon Lovitz goes a long way, and there's enough of his usual shmuck routine to last you the rest of your life here.
Throw in a complete recycling of the two bad guys routine, a stupid rip-off of Temple of Doom mine car railroad stuff, and a completely contrived ending in which Parlance has found the gold (and has proof) and yet claims he needs Crystal to help him find the gold.
First Lady (2020)
A steaming load
I actually checked IMDB to see if I had downloaded one of those Royal Engagement Wedding Christmas Dognapping films by mistake. The initial story sort of made sense, running as a First Lady in conjunction with the single president. But then there's this castle and a king and I'm wondering where in the world that came from. And then the king, who apparently loves costumes, is somehow just allowed to slouch around the White House and I'm out.
This would have been a one-star review, but I tossed in an extra for the "hot" opposition wife with the fake dog who has more strings on her neck than a guitar. Very brave casting.
Writer's Block (2019)
Worst fight scenes EVAR
Dumb premise for a story, utter ignorance of how writing and publishing works, and the story just falls apart in the last half hour.
The Understanding (2019)
A pretentious load of pigwank
Y'know how some movies are so bad they're good to make fun of? This isn't one of them. Don't waste your time.
Marionette (2020)
You've seen this all before. Don't bother.
I knew this movie would have everything I hate about "mystery/thriller" films. The obligatory psychiatrist who gets sucked into her patient's reality, the obligatory creepy-ass kid, and the obligatory unreliable narrator storyline, but I was an idiot and decided to watch it based on the shill reviews. What a steaming load. I could have spent this time doing something more rewarding, like scrubbing bathroom grout with a toothbrush.
The cinematography is nice, but you've seen this film a million times since the '70s. This version doesn't do anything any better, although you can entertain yourself trying to decide if the creepy-ass kid is a boy or a girl.
One Last Night (2018)
If you're under 30, and have had a lobotomy, you'll probably love this
A team of unlikable poseurs who aren't actually good at anything (owners of an empty theater and a bookseller who's never read a book) spend a night and a day trying to impress each other, only to come up with a dumb, derivative idea. The story is further dumbed down with cartoon squiggles, like the visual equivalent of the stupid noises added to "America's Funniest Home Videos."
Witches in the Woods (2019)
Morons in the Woods
I don't know what it is about movies with "witch" in the title, but it makes suburban kids act like idiots as soon as there are trees around. In this instance, these dumbasses manage to get lost in western Massachusetts, which is really difficult to do. Sure, these folks choose to go along a closed logging road, but they also (a) don't bother to check their position against a map and obvious landmarks like the mountains, or (b) don't bother to say something like "Check the odometer. If we don't see the place in a mile, we turn back." Instead, they drive for hours (!) before Dude with Rage Issues crashes the car because, well, he's an idiot in a witch movie who's driven for hours in western Mass without managing to cross a major road.
I'll also point out that Dude with Rage Issues doesn't know jack about driving in snow. He gets stuck and immediately gives up. No tries at rocking the car, nothing about putting branches under the wheels for traction, no bags of kitty litter in the back. But he yells a lot, and has his hair slicked back to signify his douchitude, so he's got that going for him. Dude with Rage Issues carries the action by being an idiot in every possible way, from running his car out of gas, shoving people, and stabbing Competent Guy because Spaz Chick gives him a scare. His trademark acting move is to yell like a bleating goat at every setback.
Then, of course, once the car is stuck, everyone does the dumbest thing they can. Look for people but don't bother to, y'know, follow their tracks in the snow? Check. Go off in the woods alone? Sure. Oh, and meanwhile, Smart Chick didn't feel it was worth mentioning to anyone that there were bear traps in the woods because, well, this is a witch movie. When someone inevitably steps in one (looking for someone who disappeared with no explanation what happened to him), he spends his remaining time trying to break a chain with a rock instead of opening the trap. Probably too complex to figure out.
Add in Spaz Chick, who may or may not have been gang raped by the Jock Team, and observed by Dude with Rage Issues. Everyone seems to hate Spaz Chick and it makes you wonder (a) why they invited her, and (b) why she came, other than to act all spooky and mumbly and stuff.
Spaz Chick kills Mall Chick, who you wonder why she's on this trip, since she doesn't appear to get along with anyone. Happily, she gets a ski pole in the throat to shut her up. How that happened doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but hey, witches, right?
The scenery is beautiful, and the woods are gorgeous and peaceful. You can't help but notice there is a ton of standing deadwood, which would have made a lovely campfire and shelter if these dumbasses had ever thought to build one. But witch movie, so of course they're all morons and will die, probably a two-minute walk from a Friendly's.
Double Eagle Ranch (2018)
Much better than the score suggests
I downloaded this movie because I wanted to know how a film with this subject could really have a 2.7 rating. I mean this thing must be garbage from start to finish, right?
Wrong. I mean it's not perfect, relies too much on drugs to provide character transitions between acts, and could use some editing, but it's fun to watch this collection of unlikable characters pretend to get along. It's even better when they just stop trying. There are a few excellent lines and funny scenes.
If I were going to write some sort of essay I'd probably write about how both of the primary male characters are both control freaks, but in completely different ways. Happily, though, I'm not in school so can just enjoy watching them be jerks.
Dead Water (2019)
Three annoying people on a boat
Hey, characters, we're all having a tense time. Let's go on a small boat where there's nothing to do in the middle of nowhere and drink a lot. Great idea.
Every character in this schlockfest is a cheap ripoff you've seen before:
Newscaster "babe" is a low-rent Renée Zellweger with the annoying voice of Leslie Mann. Unfortunately, she's the only sensible character.
Pirate guy is the Dollar Tree version of the bad guy who is always standing in the back left of the mob boss's office. Normally he never gets any lines. This movie shows you why.
The two main guys are basically indistinguishable. No, wait, the creepier guy has a cleft chin.
I Like Me (2018)
Seriously, just don't.
FYI, every 10-star review for this movie is the only review posted from that IMDB account. Nice try, shills.
If you like contrived family drama, whitebread characters living dreary lives in sterile McMansons, and big setups with no payoff, consequences, or resolution, this is the movie for you!
Sue Schaffel (a low-budget Fran Drescher) provides intermittent entertainment with her inconsistent accent. Coming in second is the mole on Anna Fagan's cheek, which appears and disappears from scene to scene. Chris Kozlowski manages to make no impression whatsoever. I hope everyone else got college credit or hours stuck off their community service sentences for participating.
I'll Be Next Door for Christmas (2018)
Good set up, skip the end
It's an okay movie, but compared to the usual "o noes we have to save Christmas" garbage out there this is a masterpiece. The movie has bits that are much more clever than one would expect to find in a family friendly Christmas movie. Unfortunately, it runs out of momentum before the climax, and the obligatory resolution and reveal of the sitcom lie feels even more forced than these things usually are.
The Middle of X (2018)
100 things I learned from watching "The Middle of X"
1. The most successful GenXers are drunk all day, every day.
2. When you turn 45, you're not going to look remotely like you did when you were 18.
3. Wives who aren't blonde are miserable.
4. Wussy "nice guys" aways wear a gingham shirt.
5. If you increase the amount of time you spend buzzed by half an hour per day every year, eventually you can be buzzed all your waking hours.
6. Lines paraphrased from "Some Kind of Wonderful" sound really pathetic when coming from middle-aged actors.
7. When one bad boy taunts another, if the victim doesn't get angry, it's because he's recording it all on a cell phone.
8. 45-year-olds still care about whose daddy is richer, even when daddy is dead.
Christmas Crime Story (2016)
Long and pointless; no thrills in this "thriller"
Too many actors plod their way through this interminable wannabe ripoff of Magnolia. I don't blame them--the acting was adequate (aside from the imaginary friend, who was obviously getting paid by the expression), but every scene dragged in this drama wankfest of clichés.
The entire film could have been cut by 25% without losing anything. Did the actors not sense the lack of chemistry of the scenes? Was the director playing video games on his phone while the dialog clomped along to the inevitable?
The "surprise" endings were as implausible as a homicide detective bothering to pull over a speeder or a client threatening a hitman to negotiate a price. Ugh.