Is there a less successful subgenre among SyFy’s stable of schlock than the natural disaster flick? I’m at a loss to remember a particular one that works; if you think cgi killer animals come off unconvincing and silly, then consider how large-scale destruction looks on a shoestring budget with novice animators onboard. It doesn’t help [...]
Seth Grahame-Smith’s ‘Abraham Lincoln Vampire Killer’ is a reasonably funny and charming tale in book form. It’s an unusually compelling portrait of the 16th president if you can set aside the wacky bits about him being a killer of the undead. Oh wait, that’s the hook of the entire thing, isn’t it? No matter, [...]
As time has passed, I’ve found my interest in Josh Trank‘s upcoming “found footage” superhero thriller, Chronicle, growing. Releasing in theaters on February 3rd courtesy of Fox Pictures, Chronicle tells the story of three high-school kids who discover miraculous powers and then go on to mismanage and abuse them.
He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as hewiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.‘I will give you a name,’ he said to it, ‘and I shall call you Sting.’”
“The movie is definitely epic in its scope. One of the filmmakers that we ended up talking about to a fair degree of redundancy was David Lean, who directed ‘Lawrence of Arabia. We wanted to make the movie feel big by having the characters be small in big spaces. That connected to the larger themes [...]
The 69th Golden Globe Awards were held last night in Los Angeles, hosted again by Ricky Gervais, despite the silly upheaval over his performance last year . Although they have become increasingly shabby as a form of predicting the Oscars, the ceremony is still noted as one of the landmarks of the awards season.
The new crime thriller “Contraband”, starring Mark Wahlberg in typical tough guy action mode, pulled off a heist this weekend, stealing the box-office top spot from the re-release of Disney’s ’Beauty and the Beast-3D’ and the Dolly Parton/Queen Latifah comedy vehicle ‘Joyful Noise’.
For all prospective parents and parents still raising children in their formative years, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin might be the single most unsettling film you see this year. As a soon-to-be father, I do hope that when my son arrives he’s not anything like this film’s Kevin, a terror tot who [...]
Quick, cheap and grittier than it needs to be, Mark Wahlberg’s new crime thriller ‘Contraband’ does just about what we expect from a B-grade January actioner and not a jot more. You won’t find anything new or revolutionary inside, but like a bargain-lunch Chinese buffet, there’s plenty of stuff to choose from even if [...]
Camel Spiders (Not rated) 2012 Running time:80 min Directed by: Jim Wynorski Written by: Jim Wynorski, J. Brad Wilke Starring: Brian Krause, C. Thomas Howell, GiGi Erneta, Diana Terranova, Michael Swan When one sits down to review a movie like Roger Corman’s Camel Spiders it’s helpful to be honest about your expectations. I have long since given up fighting my ridiculous [...]
See that date on the calendar? It’s January again, and apparently that means it’s time for another low-rent horror film featuring everyone’s favorite supernatural diva, Satan. Of all the various prophecies and alleged ancient texts related to the Antichrist and the end of days, there has to be one out there that predicts Old Scratch’s [...]
Our agent across the pond Jarv, brings us the lowdown on the real identity of the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy adaptation. How does it measure up to the book, or for that matter, the Alec Guiness mini-series? Read on to find out….
It was neither the best of years nor the worst of years, but just as there were a number of great movies hiding in the misasma of 2011, there were some absolutely wretched movies. And while there were a stunning number of completely useless mainstream flicks, there were an equally stunning number of mean-spirited, entertainment-free indie films shooting for art or [...]
Like many other genres, when horror movies are bad, they can be very bad. However, when they are good they can sometimes be great. The horror films of 2011 seemed to fall mostly along this divide; there was either mainstream junk not even worth a Redbox rental or vile, pretentious drivel disguised as indie [...]
‘Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol’, the fourth film in the MI franchise, continues the ambitious quest to keep Tom Cruise a viable, perfectly coiffed action star.In Brad Bird’s live-action debut, which handles death-defying feats with the same dazzle he brings to animation, Cruise leaps past eroding sink holes, fights Russians in mechanized parking garages and scales [...]