Tag: movie review

 Grade D: Ok, so lets just get this one right out of the way.. I enjoy Victor Salva’s style with horror.

Much to my surprise to hear that he had a new flick out called “Rosewood Lane”, My wife and I decided “Hey, maybe this will be a good rental for the night.”   Boy were we ever wrong..

Now, don’t get me wrong, the last two horror flicks that Salva released (Jeepers Creepers Part 1 and 2) were awesome horror flicks.  Right up there with the old classic Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even Evil Dead.  Hell they are even so good, Ill even watch them when they are on regular TV (and that says a lot).  Jeepers Creepers 1 and 2 both had a style of their own, but it showed through and through that Salva was keeping true to form, allowing his “demon” (if you will) character to run rampant and slaughter a lot of innocent teenagers and adults alike.  The movies kept you entertained, scared, and wondering how in the heck they were going to KILL it.

So, you can imagine my anticipation of this chapter of horror from Salva.. Right?  RIGHT??   Well, turns out this flick was a disappointment from the start.  It all starts with the main character (Sonny Blake)’s father passing away due to unusual circumstances which, of course, the police write-off as an accident.  Somewhat unsettled by the whole event, and the fact that she can’t sell her dad’s house after he passes, Sonny decides to move into the house and make it her own.   Slowly as things progress, Sonny comes to realize that not all things in her dad’s neighborhood are normal.   Her neighbor’s are very reclusive, the dogs living in the area constantly bark at shadows.. and it all seems to stem from the local “paperboy”.

Now, of course this paperboy really starts causing problems in the area (Breaking in Sonny’s house, moving around her figurines, offering her a newspaper subscription….) and of course Sonny doesn’t take a liking to him.  She calls in the cops, to which they once again, prove their ignorance to poor Sonny’s pleas that she is being victimized by this 30+ year old (pretending to be 16) on a Schwinn ten speed.   Of course drama and murder ensue.. As Sonny’s good friends that come to visit her get put six feet under.

Midway to the end of this rental, we found ourselves watching the movie in fast-forward, finding that a lot of the material (and acting for that matter) lackluster, predictable, and even downright boring.  The thought of a paperboy terrorizing a neighborhood just seems laughable.  Unfortunately, we weren’t laughing..

Oh and one other note.. If you are shot in the back with a crossbow, odd’s are you won’t be able to breathe, drive a car, much less run…

Salva, lets call this one a “rebound” movie, or say somebody else wrote it and you were paid to direct it…  Just please please please…  BRING BACK THE GOOD HORROR!!!

Grade B: For a few years now I’ve been a fan of comedian/storyteller Mike Birbiglia and was interested in his one man show turned movie Sleepwalk with Me. The movie’s in theaters now and is also available to rent on-demand.

In Sleepwalk with Me, Birbiglia essentially plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself as up and coming comedian Matt Pandamiglio. Though Matt’s comedy start is rocky, he finds success by delving into his real-life issues for comedy bits. The downside of this success is that Matt’s constantly on the road spending time away from his girlfriend turned fiance Abby (Lauren Ambrose).

The stress of building this career and planning for marriage manifests itself in Matt via episodes of sleepwalking, most of which are played in the movie for laughs.

In one episode, Matt wins the “Dustbuster Olympics” and in another enjoys a pizza pillow which got me laughing so hard I nearly choked. But as the episodes continue and Matt’s more and more successful and stressful career is combined with he and Abby reconsidering their relationship with one and other, Matt’s sleepwalking takes a nasty turn where he almost kills himself leaping from a second floor hotel window in the middle of the night.

I can totally relate to Birbiglia’s story, I’ve been an on-again/off-again sleepwalker for most of my life. I’ve never climbed furniture or leaped from hotels, my episodes usually involve waking in my living room after running out of my bedroom convinced some sort of creature was in there with me. But I’ve also shared that feeling with Birbiglia of slowly awakening someplace other than in bed and coming to the realization that “it’s happened again.”

While seeing Birbiglia’s sleepwalking on-screen as he sees it in his dream is hilarious, there’s also an underlying sense in the film that while sleepwalking might sometimes be funny to outsiders, to Birbiglia it’s something that he must struggle with on a daily basis to control it rather than having it control him.

Grade B: I suspect that many who went to see the movie Magic Mike did so because they were interested in seeing lots of well-toned men wearing next to nothing gyrating on-screen to dance tunes. And while there is much of that in this movie, there is much more to Magic Mike than beef-cakes in banana-hammocks.

Channing Tatum plays Mike who strips on-stage at the Xquisite Strip Club club for a cut of the door and tucked bucks. But what Mike really wants is to open his own shop and build custom furniture for a living. Not because he has many objections to his life of loose women, drugs and rock’n roll, but more because he sees where the life leads in club-owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey). Who, although well to do has some odd views of the world and the people in it. To this enters “The Kid” Adam (Alex Pettyfer), new to the stripping game who sees Dallas as a role model and anything Mike or Adam’s sister Brooke (Cody Horn) might say to the otherwise as lame.

What I found most interesting about Magic Mike was that it didn’t follow that story path of similar movies like this where the characters find themselves in a questionable lifestyle but loving living on the edge, then going over the edge and suffering the consequences before finally discovering the true meaning of life in their downfall. Instead in Magic Mike, it’s more a story about two guys, Mike and Adam, one discovering all the benefits that come with a stripping lifestyle while the other who’s trying to find a way out if only for a pesky bad credit score.

Magic Mike is the second film this year to be directed by Steven Soderbergh and star Tatum, the other being Haywire.

Grade C+: I was interested in the Dark Shadows movie when I first heard about it since director Tim Burton (Batman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) doing a movie based on a horror soap opera* sounded like one heck of an interesting idea. But, for whatever reason I never went to see it in theaters and recently caught up with Dark Shadows on DVD. After watching the movie, I didn’t feel like I missed anything by not seeing it on the big screen.

Dark Shadows follows cursed vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) as he awakens 200 years after he was buried “alive” by scorned witch Angelique (Eva Green). Barnabas must navigate a radically different 1970s America from the 18th century one he left while at the same time stopping Angelique, who’s spend the last two centuries amassing a fortune and local good will, from destroying the modern Collins family altogether.

In many ways Dark Shadows reminded me of the movie Austin Powers (1997) in that both dealt with a man out of time who’s forced to adapt outdated modes of thinking to achieve some goal. But, while I’d argue that Austin Powers was a movie that worked, Dark Shadows never quite gelled for me.

There were interesting characters and the visuals of Dark Shadows were striking. But while the movie was very nice to look at the story seemed to skip over a lot of details and I have to admit that I left Dark Shadows confused. I couldn’t decide if the parts were being skipped were because they were from the TV series, and I was lost because I’d never seen it, or if the filmmakers were simply trying to cram too much story into a movie that could have been a lot simpler and still retained a sense of fun.

* The soap opera version of Dark Shadows ran just five years but produced an incredible 1,225 episodes of television. To put that number into perspective, the animated TV series The Simpsons has aired the last 23 years but “only” produced 500+ episodes.