Quick Review – Shark Night

What would happen if you tried to cross the creeping dread of ‘Jaws’ with the sadism and shock of torture porn movies like ‘Saw’? Would you get a boffo new genre (monster porn?) that brings this movie-pirating generation of teens streaming back into theaters?

Not if you are the director of this glossy turd. What this director managed to create is a film that combines the unpleasant aftertaste of torture porn with the ludicrous plotting necessary to get run-of-the-mill animals to hunt down a specific gaggle of stupid teenagers. It’s a worst of both worlds scenario.

I’m going to spoil …

Quick Review – Fright Night

The ‘Fright Night’ remake raises many important questions, like is my creepy neighbor a vampire?
Is my sexy girlfriend’s libido a hassle or a drag? Isn’t that McLovin?

Important queries all, but they pale in comparison to the most important question raised here. Namely, when did Colin Farell become John Stamos?

I’m including photos for comparison. Shocking, isn’t it?

But we can’t stop with “when”. We must ask “how”, and ultimately “why”. We could also ask “where”, but that makes no sense. So we will limit our attentions to “when”, “how”, and “why”.

Sometimes why.

There’s a glut of vampires in pop culture right now. …

Quick Review: Warrior

The winning formula of ‘The Fighter’ was taking the underdog sports film and freshening the cliches with some references to a true story and a supporting cast that to a person was punching down to the material. Crazy success followed. People respond to a training montage. They love a underestimated washout who takes inhuman amounts of punishment before finally scoring the win. It is difficult to fail with this strategy, but it’s also difficult to make a worthwhile movie with this strategy. For every ‘Rocky’ there’s an infinite number of ‘Rocky Balboas’.

‘Warrior’ uses some similar tactics, with some interesting additions. …

Quick Review – Conan the Barbarian

I think I went into this remake with reasonably modest expectations. The Conan books are silly, ponderous, and far too concerned with rippling and sinews. The first movie was all these things, but somehow wildly entertaining. Entertaining to my 12-year-old self, at least. Arnold’s cartoon charisma, his impenetrable accent, and the overqualified supporting cast improved upon the source material, but it was still comfortably in the guilty pleasure B movie category.

This reboot is far less successful. It’s essentially a weaker cast in a weaker film. The only new element is a thick coating of leftover CG effects from ‘300’,and that’s …

Quick Review – Captain America

I’m pretty done with movies about comic-book superheroes. I love a crazy popcorn flick full of explosions and poorly considered dialogue as much as the next guy, More, probably. Still, there are only so many movies about ubermenschen in tights you can watch before it becomes abundantly clear that the type of heroes we line up to see is evidence of some kind of cultural abcess, festering below the surface and threatening to kill us with fever and rot.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of things you could say about the sicknesses of a society that worships at …

Quick Review – Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I expected very little from this movie, and was pleasantly surprised in all kinds of ways.

The plot is what you think it is – this is the story of how reckless science creates the super-apes that knock Man off his spot at the apex of the food chain. The acting is what you’d expect in a this kind of sci-fi potboiler.

With one exception. Andy Serkis plays Caesar, the first ape born with the mutation that changes everything. And by “plays” I guess I mean that he wore the motion capture suit that forms the basis for all of Caesar’s …

SIFF Review – Detention

Take two parts Breakfast Club, one part Heathers and a dash of the manic energy of Gremlins. Blend until frothy and exhausting.

The writer/director was present at my screening. He told us, with some embarrassment that he was responsible for ‘Torque’ – a ‘Fast and Furious’ on motorcycles that failed in all measurable respects. He said that doing the bidding of a studio on his first film is the reason that movie sucked, and the reason that he spent his own money making this much quirkier, more high-concept action/slasher/timetravel/romance/black comedy.

The gambit mostly pays off artistically, by which I mean it really …