I was exactly the wrong age to appreciate the animated TV series Batman: The Animated Series (TAS) when it originally debuted 20 years ago in 1992. Back then, I was a geeky high school teen who was into comic books and movies but felt I was too mature to watch a “kids” animated TV series like Batman: TAS. So, I totally missed the three season, 100+ episodes of this groundbreaking show that would reinvent the “kid’s” action cartoon and is still influential to this very day.
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The Cabin in the Woods Movie Review
Grade B- – The movie The Cabin in the Woods got a lot of positive buzz when it was released earlier this year. People who saw the movie said that it was different, that it played with the typical slasher movie conventions, turned these conventions around and created something new and unique. Being written by Joss Whedon (Firefly, The Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was a huge plus as if anyone has experience with convention-busting it would be Whedon who helped reshape the vampire mythos in Buffy and later Angel.
While I’d say The Cabin in the Woods is a good movie and there is a certain amount of convention-busting going on here, I’d also say that what keeps Cabin from being a better film is that it still relies heavily on those same slasher movie conventions to deliver the scares.
In Cabin, a group of teens visit said cabin in the woods where things aren’t quite what they seem. There, the teens accidentally let lose and ancient evil that begins murdering the teens one by one. But, the twist here is that something is controlling the teens and the evil for their own purposes. And telling anymore would spoil the movie.
What works well in Cabin is everything NOT to do with the teens and their horror situation. The teen part of the story is just like every slasher movie that’s come along in the last 30 years and is dull, dry and boring. However, everything outside of the teens and the situation they’re in, the spoiler territory, is quite interesting and unique.
However interesting it might have been, that and the fact that the ending that seemed to be a version of the ending of Cloverfield (2008), made The Cabin in the Woods a good film rather than a great one.
Jarhead Movie Figure
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Prometheus Movie Review
Grade B+: I’ve been a big fan of the Alien franchise of films for a long while now, and when the movie Prometheus was announced with it being rumored to be an Alien prequel film my interest was piqued. But Prometheus got enough bad press when it was released that I skipped seeing it in theaters and only recently caught up with it on DVD. What a mistake that was!
While Prometheus isn’t a film that’s going to win a lot of awards come Oscar season, it’s a really fun sci-fi flick that’s also nice to look at.
In Prometheus, the crew of the ship of the same name set down on a far off planet that might contain the remnants of an alien species that had a hand in seeding life on the Earth. But what this crew instead uncovers on this planet are unimaginable horrors that if released would threaten all life everywhere.
Honestly, Prometheus reminded me a lot, fairly or unfairly, of the Alien “inspired” flicks of the 1980s like Creature (1985) or Galaxy of Terror (1981). Essentially, those “inspired” movies all told slightly different versions of the Alien story — namely the crew of some spaceship fending off some sort of primitive force/creatures on some far off part of the galaxy — and that’s essentially what Prometheus does too, riff on that theme. But I’d argue that Prometheus is the BEST riff on Alien since Alien which is good enough for me!
If Prometheus has any weak points it’s that the movie seems oddly edited, like lots of exposition and story elements that might better explain what’s happening on screen were seemingly cut out in order to make the running time shorter and the writers of Prometheus seemed bound and determined to insert as many references to Alien as they could in the film no matter what.
A few of these references are cool, too many and they lose their impact.