Despite being direct to video releases (yes, some have had limited releases in theaters and the first was considered for theatrical release), the Puppet Master series is one that’s packed with content. Produced by Full Moon Features, the series started in 1989 with Puppet Master, which has been followed by ten sequels/prequels, a non-canon crossover with the characters of Demonic Toys, two comic book mini-series, an ongoing comic book series, toys and now, this reboot.

Opening in Postville, Texas, where that “old guy” comes into a bar where he’s been frequently upsetting the female customers. That “old guy” is Andre Toulon, the inventor of the puppets who this movie is all about and he’s played by Udo Kier, all of people. After bothering the bartender and her girlfriend, he leaves into the night, upset as they embrace and kiss.

Later that night, the girls leave the bar and discuss their future. After hearing a noise, one of them is attacked. Soon, we see Toulon lying in a basement, telling the puppets to come to him. This scene felt really disjointed — setting up the murder but not showing it actually happening. Everything jumps forward to the police investigating the crime scene, with both girls dead and small footprints running away from the car.

The police rush — with no backup or warrant — to the Toulon house, where we see Andre rise painfully and pull down a concrete pillar. They enter the house and we hear gunfire as the title card appears.

Note: the producers have stated that this film takes place in a parallel universe, which is why Andre Toulon is an evil Nazi instead of battling against the Third Reich.

Dallas, Texas. Today. Edgar (Thomas Lennon, The State, Reno 9-11 and a character actor who has shown up in plenty of films way below his talent level) is recovering from a divorce and has retreated to his childhood home to heal. There, he discovers a mint condition Blade doll in his dead brother’s room and decides to sell it at a convention that celebrates the Toulon Murders for a big profit. Joining him on the way are Markowitz (Nelson Franklin, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and Ashley.

They sign up for a tour of the Toulon house, led by Carol Doreski (Barbara Crampton, Re-Animator, Chopping Mall, We Are Still Here), the officer who raided the mansion thirty years ago. She explains the backstory of how Toulon began creating the puppets and where everything went wrong.

Once Toulon escaped World War 2 — his wife committed suicide at sea — he settled in this small Texas town. On the night the police were called in, they found a house of horrors, including a soundproof room where Jewish women were tortured. There are also books in the house on all manner of subjects like astrology, numerology, demonology and more, as well as books that came directly from Adolf Eichmann, the creator of the Final Solution.

Finally, Doreski shows the tour group where Toulon was shot as she finishes the tour at the mausoleum where his body lies in rest. There are rods inside the building that some feel have occult significance, but that no one can really explain.

When Edgar and Ashley — now a couple who make out at every opportunity — come back to their hotel room, his Blade doll is missing and the front desk answers back in French, saying “Remain in the shadows.” If you think things are going to get normal from here on out, well, things are only going the other way. Soon, Torch appears and makes the first two gory kills. In a world of CGI, it’s nice to see some practical effects here! The burn effects are really well done.

This isn’t a film that skimps on nudity, either. We cut right from those brutal kills to a couple in the throes of passion — including breasts against the window ala Catholic High School Girls in Trouble from The Kentucky Fried Movie. Blade soon gets involved, slicing them to ribbons, including a Pet Semetary style ankle shredding.

Say what you will about this movie, but it knows its audience. We find another convention goer watching some wrestling in his room (I recognize David Starr, which I wonder is intentional as he’s a Jewish pro wrestler). Man, I don’t want to spoil the kill that follows, but suffice to say I’ve never seen anyone urinate on a decapitated head before. Just wow. If you’re looking for the red stuff — and I guess the yellow stuff — this movie has you covered.

While Markowitz tries to get some action at the bar, Detective Brown (Michael Paré from Streets of Fire! This is the kind of casting I’d dream of if Italian exploitation movies were still being made!) shows up to investigate the missing Blade doll. Soon, he learns that everyone that brought a doll has lost them. And man do they pay. We don’t meet a single character really and get to know them, we just watch puppets decimate them. But hey — isn’t that why you’re watching this?

This movie totally needs a Joe Bob Briggs breakdown of the kills. Spinning robot fu. Intestine ripped out fu. Drill fu. Puppet abortion fu. Seriously, that last one is on the level of Joe D’Amato or Ruggero Deodato depravity.

The police make everyone leaves their rooms and gather in the lobby as multiple crime scenes appear. Can everyone survive the onslaught of Blade, Pinhead, Tunneler, Torch, Mechaniker, Happy Amphibian, Grasshüpfer, Mr. Pumper, Junior Fuhrer, Autogyro and Money Lender?

“Lots of terrible shit happens to people who don’t deserve it,” says a fan at the end of the film. “I don’t think things are fully resolved,” says our sole survivor as a TO BE CONTINUED comes up. Well, here’s to hoping!

Directed by Sonny Liguna and Tommy Wiklund (Animalistic) and written by S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99) with credit given to Charles Band, there’s a major narrative shift that changes up this film from any that have come before. Where in the past, the puppets were created to battle the Nazis and have been taken over by whomever can command them, here they were explicitly by a Nazi to kill their enemies, like Jewish people, blacks, gay people and gypsies. Essentially, the characters that you want to cheer on are committing hate crimes. That’s a pretty big jump to make. Then again, if you see this is an exploitation film, you know that all bets are off. Creator Charles Band told Entertainment Weekly, “You’ve got to go back to what exploitation movies were 40-50 years ago. I mean, it’s hard today. There’s so much out there. We’re so jaded. I mean, television news, when something bad happens, it’s worse than most horror movies I’ve ever made: decapitations and terrorism. And, you know, what do you do to an audience that has seen it all, to get them talking? What [Cinestate] has done is gone full-on exploitation. They’ve got something going there, where there is going to be controversy.”

I’ve hinted at it before, but the Italian sleaze roots of this film run deep. So deep that Fabio Frizzi (The Beyond, Zombi, Manhattan Baby) did the score! And the role that Skeeta Jenkins plays totally feels made for Bobby Rhodes.

Band has stated that he still has plans to make his own Puppet Master movies and that Cinestate has plans to make a big budget version of Castle Freak next. Here’s hoping that movies like Trancers and Subspecies also get their shot!

Despite the changing of the series’ premise — I’ve never been a hardcore fan, so I got past this quickly — this movie is exactly what it should be. Quick, brutal and filled with the red stuff. Sure, we never find out what the hell is going on in that mausoleum. And we have no idea what happens next. But isn’t that the beauty of a fun exploitation movie? Shut your brain off and enjoy.

Disclaimer: I was sent this film by its PR team and in no way did that impact my review. Thanks!

What is it about Western PA that leads to so many Bigfoot movies being shot here? This is at least the second in as many years, but A Wish for Giants is unlike any cryptozoological movie you’ve ever seen.

9-year old Roxie goes from a normal life to dealing with an inoperable brain tumor. While she still has time, her family connects her to the Wish Kingdom Foundation, whose job is to try and get kids’ minds off their plight by granting a wish. Roxie doesn’t just have any wish. She wants to meet Bigfoot.

Sophie (Naysa Altmeyer, the best part of this film) is the grad student who becomes obsessed with making that wish come true. Nobody understands her, including her boyfriend. Making things tougher for her is Derrick, a senator’s son who just wants to screw everything up for her. Beyond having some incredibly interesting chest hair, he’s also evil just for the sake of being evil, messing up the wish every step of the way. I wish his motivations were explaining a little better. Is he negging Sophie because he thinks she’ll sleep with him? It certainly seems that way at one point. And at others, we’re sympathetic to him because of how his father treats him. We’re so close to a real motivation for him and it’s just a little off.

The real story? The roads that Sophie must travel to try and find a real Bigfoot. She’s a true believer and perhaps that why Derrick dislikes her so much. His idea is to just put a Russian wrestler in a costume. That wouldn’t be good enough for Sophie or, more importantly, Roxie.

There are some bad line readings here and there. And some of the pathos feel piled on at some points. But to be honest, this is a pretty interesting idea for both a book and film. If it’s a little earnest, well, not every film has to packed with subtext and gore. Add in that it was shot for around $25,000 and it’s actually astounding that the film looks as good as it does.

There are also some deep cut Bigfoot facts in this film. You won’t hear this much Sasquatch info in your traditional Hollywood fare.

Want to see this for yourself? Then check out the official website. And thanks to cast and crew member Joe Fishel for sending it my way.

I was shopping at The Exchange — it’s a used DVD store you can find in both the Pittsburgh and Cleveland areas — and I was listening to a kid excitedly describe a movie to his dad, breathlessly detailing how a space station crashes and all these boxes fall into zoos and game preserves and how regular animals become so big that he couldn’t even figure out how big they are. It sounded like the best movie ever made, because it was being remixed through the brains of a ten-year-old. So that’s exactly how I approached the movie, deciding that instead of being critical, I should just remember how I felt watching movies like Destroy All Monsters.

Rampage is big, dumb, loud and silly. Guess what? It’s also exactly what it should be — a giant monster movie based on a video game starring The Rock. If you are expecting Truffaut, get the fuck off my website.

Directed by Brad Peyton, who also worked on Dwayne Johnson’s films Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and San Andreas, this is a fast-moving slam-bang action fest. And if you’re looking to shut your brain off and just watch giant monsters decimate cities and one another, good news. It’s exactly that.

The Athena-1 space station — owned by the evil gene company Energyne — is being destroyed by mutant rats when one lone doctor manages to get research canisters back onto Earth, where they crash land into the swamps of the Everglades, the forests of Wyoming and the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary.

That’s where primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) works. He’s a former US Army Special Forces black ops soldier whose record is filled with redacted missions and was also part of an elite anti-poaching unit. If you’re saying — but wait these things seem quite ridiculous — of course they do. Certainly you can be all these things and more, also able to speak to gorillas and have an albino one named George as your best friend. It’s The Rock — if he wants his character to be able to juggle thunder and fart fire, just let him.

George ends up finding one of those samples and begins to grow, just as the other two creatures — a giant crocodile and a wolf — do the same. The bad guys lure them to Chicago with a sonic beacon, all hell breaks loose, the US Army obviously screws things up and only a rogue government agent (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as if he’s having the most fun ever), The Rock and a scientist (Naomie Harris, The Pirates of the Carribean films and Moneypenny in Skyfall and Spectre) can save the day.

If watching a team of mercenaries battle a giant wolf that can shoot quills and fly seems like your idea of a good time, well, here you go.

It’s packed with product placements, like the Bronco that The Rock drives (it’s actually an unreleased 2004 concept car) and a Dave and Buster’s being destroyed — look for Rampage: City Smash to play when you’re there! — but again, I gave this movie the widest of berths.

If you were ten years old again, wasn’t this what you’d want to see? The Rock armed with a grenade launcher teaming up with a white gorilla as he battles a real life dragon? Don’t lie. You totally would.

Lucy Bellerose has come to the Loire Valley in France on vacation but has ended up inheriting a chateau that’s inspired all manner of local legends and fears. What happens when a girl addicted to social media ends up confronting the unknown?

If we learned anything from Dan Brown ripping off Holy Blood, Holy Grail — or even better, the documentary The Otherworld — France is a crazy place, particularly the areas around Rennes-le-Château. This film concerns one such ancient place that has a past that the townspeople have been whispering about for some time.

Lucy (Sam Valentine, Someone Marry Barry, Followed) is mostly concerned with herself and making videos for her social media audience. I’m an old man, so I don’t get the need to post videos and amass followers, but I tried to keep an open mind about our heroine (that said, she has a great monologue near the end about always cheering for the bad guy, making out with boys in cemeteries and wanting to see dead bodies in funerals).

The castle she’s staying in has guests that she is to never meet or speak to, as well as some crazy ones that she has to deal with, like The Vicar of Borley (writer/director Jude S. Walko), who details the rules of the house and presides over the funeral for her great uncle, and Mary the chambermaid, who nonchalantly cleans up after Lucy, even when her sheets are covered with blood.

In the midst of all of this strides Dean Cain — of all people! — as Abel Baddon, an insurance salesman who knows way more about the castle, the area and Lucy than he is letting on. Just checking out his IMDB page shows that Dean’s a working actor, appearing in a variety of films and genres. And if you’ve learned anything from my reviews, I do so love it when a major actor shows up in a genre film.

Lucy starts to fall in love with Jean-Pierre (Dylan Kellogg), a local boy who helps her explore the grounds and history of the gigantic home that she’s inherited. Of course, that means exploring rooms that she isn’t allowed to enter and following a flower girl covered in blood. And her inheritance is more than just having a great house filled with awesome lighting to take selfies in.

The locations for this film are amazing — the house and surrounding area offer so many vistas for the eerie nature of this film. There are plenty of drone shots, but you have to forgive the urge to feature so many views of the scenery.

I’ll give the team behind this film credit — the movie looks great and the music is stellar. There are some issues with the story — I never felt concerned about the heroine’s fate as I never grew to like her. But I really enjoyed seeing Dean Cain play a demonic character. I mean, the guy had to have sold his soul to get to keep his looks all these years. And when you factor in that he’s the dude who took Brooke Shields’ virginity, he definitely has some pact with some demon somewhere, right? And hey, any film that has the balls to end with such a shoutout to The Shining has to be admired (or admonished, but I’m writing this at 3 AM, so let’s go with admired).

Contrasting the great performances from Valentine, Walko and Cain are some rough ones from people playing townsfolk. It’s almost enough to take you out of the film. And hey — there’s a bat attack and lots of corridors filled with black cloaked monks near the end, which are always buzzwords to get me into a film. I mean, how many movies are you going to get where Dean Cain force feeds communion to a girl? Here’s your answer: exactly one.

The Incantation is available July 31 in iTunes, Amazon Prime, Redbox and pretty much everywhere you stream or watch films.

Disclaimer: I was sent an advance screening of this film by writer/director/actor Jude A. Walko. We appreciate the early look and in no way did getting the film in this way influence our review.

The first Purge, that is, the original 2013 film, wasn’t all that great. Yet each sequel has done the exact opposite of tradition by being better than the film that inspired it. 2016’s The Purge: Election Year ended the 12-hour evening of lawlessness, so where do you go from here? A prequel. Can it live up to where the series has gone over three films?

While this entry is written and produced by James DeMonaco, this is the first time he has not directed one of the films, handing those duties over to Gerard McMurray.

Ever wondered how The Purge came to be? Well, to push the crime rate below 1% for the rest of the year and restore the economy, the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) decided to test Dr. May Updale’s (Marisa Tomei, slumming it here John Cassavetes style) theory that a one night venting of aggression would do wonders for people’s state of mind.

However, the test doesn’t happen in the suburbs, but instead in the marginalized, low income, black and Latino neighborhood of Staten Island. Despite $5,000 being given to each Purger (you gotta spend money to make money, I guess) and more money offered for each kill, people decide that they wanna party more than they wanna kill. And that’s when the NFFA takes matters into its own hands, sending in mercenary death squads to get the job done.

Can protestor Nya and her brother Isaiah survive the night and the attention of the maniacal drug addict Skeletor (the best part of the film, as he owns the screen from the second he first appears)? Will drug lord Dmitri rise up and defend the neighborhood that he’s pillaged? Will white people wear Klan hoods and Nazi outfits and burn churches to the ground?

Do I even need to answer these questions?

That said — I was entertained by this movie, which is both simultaneously wish fulfillment and dire warning. It’s also so many movies in one, combining a slasher film with a running movie with a dystopian/post-apocalyptic film, then adding a side of gritty urban drama, a crime movie and finally, an action shoot ’em up. It works if you don’t think too much about how The Purge could ever become true. Actually, screw that. Over the past two years, I totally see how it could not only happen, but be endorsed by the American people.

This movie isn’t going to be escapism from the slowly darkening world outside the theater. It’s junk food, sugar-filled candy that conceals a center that we’re all finding harder and harder to swallow. If only the world’s problems were so easily solved within 12 hours that could unite us all by violence, which in these films, seems to solve everything. The real world is much messier, much more depressing and much more oppressive.

That said, if you want to see a Nazi in neon gleaming latex get shot with a rocket, it’s pretty much the best pick you’ll find this summer.

This movie is brought to you by our friend Paul Andolina. Check out his website Wrestling with Film.

I stumbled upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft in a roundabout way. Back in 2006 I got a job at Game Crazy which is a video game store that used to be inside Hollywood Video locations. I would get free rentals from the video rental side and one day I picked up Beyond the Wall of Sleep directed by Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Mauer. It wasn’t the best horror movie but it was one that stuck with me for a very long time. I read the short story Beyond the Wall of Sleep, the story the film got its namesake and plot from on my old Gateway PC and dial-up internet. That was pretty much the extent of my exposure until many years later I won a contest with a few books of Lovecraft’s stories. I bought a nice leather-bound edition of his stories and it’s been love ever since. Being infatuated with cinema I decided to look into adaptations of his work which later led to discovering films with a Lovecraftian bent. Lovecraftian is a loaded descriptor, for some it simply means tentacles, fish people, and the relative weird associated with the writer. For me and many others Lovecraftian cinema means films that are either direct adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories or deal with themes prevalent in his work; xenophobia, the insignificance of mankind in the vastness of the cosmos, the inability of men to fathom and understand our reality, and devolution of man into more primitive states. 

Back in 2014 a film called Spring directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead came out and it really stuck with me. I watched it, completely transfixed on the utter weirdness and sheer madness of what was on display, a romance that would culminate with the end of everything civilization had ever known. This directing duo was somehow able to completely convey the attraction and repulsion to the other in Spring and I simply could not wait to see more of what these could do with film. Well, this week saw the release of another film by the duo titled The Endless. The Endless focuses on two brothers, Justin Smith played by Justin Benson, and Aaron Smith, played by Aaron Moorhead, who escape from a UFO death cult and after receiving a tape from a member of the commune decide to return.

I have not had a movie viewing experience like this in a while. I’ve been having a very hard time fully concentrating on a film lately. The Endless, however, grabbed me by the beard and demanded I watch. It was so engrossing with the atmosphere it had, the characters it portrays, the imagery it gives you to process, and the mystery surrounding it. The cult members of Camp Arcadia are welcoming yet at the same time unsettling. You really care about the brothers struggles to discover what it is they have been searching for these past 10 years since escaping the camp. If you have read the short story Call of Cthulhu and wonder what the Cthulhu cultists were worshiping down in those Louisianian swamps then this is the film for you. Heck if the Jim Jones massacre is a morbid fascination for you then you should definitely check this out. This movie plays with so many of Lovecraft’s themes that it’s practically a treasure trove of material for you to ponder. If you’re even remotely interested in H.P. Lovecraft you’d do well checking this film out. Lovecraftian cinema is really a mixed bag, although there are many films that are direct adaptations of his writings, and some that play with his thematic elements, I feel like there hasn’t been a movie that can really make you think about the themes that he wrote about so often. In fact, I believe The Endless has the most fully realized Lovecraftian universe ever put onto a screen, even more so than my personal favorite In the Mouth of Madness. In the movie’s 111 minute run time you are treated to a smorgasbord of cosmic weirdness that will leave you wanting another 3 more courses of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s delectable fare. I for one cannot wait to see what this duo can come up with next.

There’s a moment where Isla Nublar sinks as a volcano destroys what was once Jurassic World — no real spoiler, the film’s tagline is “The island is gone” — and a brontosaurus stands in the smoke, unable to escape, where real emotion came out of me. It’s like that moment when I was a child, when we went to a Mystery Spot near Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. They had a dino tour that had statues of different creatures and sound effects, acting like they were real and at one point of the tour, encouraged you to shoot at them with fake M16 machine guns. I ran up and down our little train and begged everyone to please stop shooting the dinosaurs.

I have a troubled relationship with Jurassic Park. This film makes the same mistakes as nearly every other in the series. One, never go back to the island. Two, every kindly inventor of the park has a younger successor who only cares about making money and has hired mercenaries who are never there to help. Third, BD Wong is always up to no good.

Yet I found myself really enjoying this movie much more than previous films in the series. Maybe it’s because so many of this iterations set pieces play out more like a horror or disaster movie than a blockbuster, starting with an attempt to retrieve the DNA of Indominus Rex from what is left of Jurassic World, which ends with a spectacular attack by the Mosasaurus.

Throughout the film, the question is often posed — should these creatures live or die? During a Senate hearing, Dr. Ian Malcolm (a welcome Jeff Goldblum) opines that they should go extinct again to make up for the mistakes of John Hammond. Meanwhile, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) from the last film has started a group to save them. Late in the film, it’s posed that she — by authorizing Idominus Rex in the first place — is just as responsible for where the world is as the bad guys. Malcolm may have said the same if asked — he feels that mankind cannot handle the power of evolution, a trait that holds true to his character in the original film.

Of course, we have to go back to the island. And Claire is lured, just as everyone has been, by the chance to fix her mistakes and save the creatures that are left. She’s contacted by Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), Hammond’s original partner, and asked to help save what’s left of the species on the island. There’s another reason to go back — a chance to see her one-time (twice now?) boyfriend Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, making a very real run for man of summer between this and Infinity War) and rescue his dino daughter, Blue the raptor.

There are secrets, though. Eli Mills, Lockwood’s aide, has a secret agenda. If this seems like a rerun of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, well, it totally is. And if Ken Wheatley (Silence of the Lamb‘s Ted Levine) is the same merc as every other merc in the series, so be it, although his trait of taking teeth from every dinosaur is a neat character tic.

That said, there are some thrilling moments here, such as the aforementioned destruction of the island, an auction where the viewer cannot wait for the chaos that the dinosaurs will eventually cause and a horrific sequence where the new Indoraptor stalks Maisie, Lockwood’s granddaughter (kinda sorta — there’s a reveal here). There’s some fun character interplay between techie Franklin Webb and Dr. Zia Rodriguez, a paleoveterinarian who has never seen a dinosaur for real. And the end — where the question is asked once again if these creatures should live or die — hit all my emotional buttons.

Look — it’s a big dumb summer blockbuster. Sometimes, that’s all you need on a Friday night after a long week of work. Sure, we’ve seen everything before in this series, but the end of this film, which finally takes the dinosaurs away from the park and loose in the world for the final part of this trilogy cycle, sets up something brand new. And that’s actually the most exciting part of this film.

feedshark

SPOILER WARNING: Most of the movies that we talk about here are more than 25 years old, so I never worry about spoiling their plot. This movie has been in theaters a day or so and depends on surprises so much that I feel that discussing them, much less how I feel about them, will ruin the movie for anyone that hasn’t already seen it.

When I was a kid, my parents often discussed a movie that they had seen when they first started dating: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. People had been talking about how amazing the film was and when they went, they sat there confused and upset in the theater. For years, any time they rated a movie as boring, too strange or overly hyped, they would reference Argento’s film. I always wondered if it upsets them that I grew up loving horror and giallo films so much.

One day, I explained what I thought that movie was about to my parents. There’s gender reversal, as well as being a foreigner and the isolation of modern life, filtered through the lens of an auteur. Maybe it didn’t all make sense to mom and dad, but I think my explanation made them get a little more of why I liked it so much.

My wife and I are planning on having kids someday. If one of them ever sits me down and explains why this movie is good to me, I’m going to fucking disown them.

This is yet another in the wave of important modern horror films, movies that people are all too eager to proclaim the next Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist for this generation. Think The Babadook or It Follows. If you liked those movies and found that they were important films packed with “something to say,” then you’ll love this movie and feel that everything I have to say from here on out is basically the words of someone who “just doesn’t get it.”

Director Ari Aster claims that he grew up on horror movies, saying things like “I just exhausted the horror section of every video store I could find.” There’s no denying the talent that he has. But after 127 minutes of film that felt like 127 months, I wanted to be an editor more than I ever have before.

If you thought movies like The Witch moved slowly, the glacial pace of this film makes that film seem like a slam-bang Honk Kong action pic. It takes forever to decide on what the movie is even about, smashing our expectations and killing off a major character — again, let me reinforce that spoiler warning — when Charlie goes to a party, has an allergic reaction and is beheaded while her brother races to get her to the hospital.

That was the one true surprise of the film, one that made me think that it was getting ready to gear up and deliver on its promise to be the scariest movie of our generation.

Look — I’m not going to deny the talent of the people involved in the film. Toni Collette is an amazing actress and she imbues the mother of this film with true emotion. It’s as if her parts of this film seem to be a drama about dealing with loss and never truly understanding our parents and the gnarled roots of our family tree.

Up until now, you’ve been led to believe that this movie is all about Charlie seeing her grandmother, being basically raised by her and even wondering what is meant by the line that she wished that she had been born a boy. But when she’s taken from the film, it becomes all about the family coming apart at the seams.

No matter how far from a traditional horror film this movie wants to be, it comes back the traditions of what not to do in horror film situations. Do not go to a teen sex and drug party. Do not take leave your weird sibling along to said party. Do not engage in magic rituals or you will unleash something you cannot control.

In these new and important takes on horror, these old tropes still remain. Did people feel like this when Argento, Polanski and Romero reinvented horror? Were their films seen as endless parables that meander and go nowhere when people were only used to B movies and classic monsters?

I worry that when it comes to a movie like this — and the aforementioned other modern horror films — that I simply do not have great taste. That my love of pure junk like the films of Mattei and Fulci has made it impossible for me to recognize a true piece of art when it makes its presence known.

I’ve read post after post from people talking about how this film stuck with them for days, how they can’t shake it, how truly horrifying it was. And I sat there, in the theater with an audience that was as confused as me. I’ve seen comments like, “how dare people laugh at this movie” or “how do these non-horror loving people dare to ruin this movie by saying they don’t get it.”

Well, I got it. And I didn’t really like it. I think it’s because you can boil down so many of these films as simply being bad people or bad parents and if we solved that issue, we wouldn’t have these horrors. The mother in The Babadook is a shitty mom. Toni Collette’s mom was shitty — well, she was also a cult leader at best and the conduit to a legit King of Hell at worst — and Annie was a shitty mom too when you get right down to it. Nobody can communicate and pays the price for it. And then there always comes a moment where these horror movies, where people proclaim “it’s more than just a horror movie” yet they still succumb to the conventions and tropes of the genre and appear to be absurd. And then people don’t know how to react. And then people just laugh at the movie and further upset the folks who want these important movies to be sacrosanct.

While I was watching this film, a man snored loudly to my left and I wondered what magical dreams that he was having and how I could experience them instead of what was on the screen. I was jealous of the fact that his girlfriend allowed him the pleasures of dreamland while my wife continually poked me in the ribs to keep me awake during the slow opening of this film before it ground its gears and moved even slower, like a doom band that never gets past playing 19 minute long songs about how shitty life is, but has never listened to anything of Black Sabbath past the first album and learned that they can get quite funky at times and change it up.

So how do I reconcile all that with reviews like this one from Pete Travers from Rolling Stone, who said that the film and its performances “for sure will keep you up nights. But first you’ll scream your bloody head off.” Again, I saw this with a packed house that only reacted with laughter.

At no point did I find myself enjoying this. Instead, I was concentrating on the technical aspects, appreciating the artistry on screen from a very how is that shot framed perspective. That’s when a movie stops working. Then, I was trying to think of movies I could compare this to, like Don’t Look Now and The Haunting of Julia, movies that take the loss of a child and convert it into horror. Why do those movies work so well and this just feels like claptrap to me?

Look — movies can really be about anything you want them to be. You can love the art — like The Holy Mountain — while embracing the lowbrow — like City of the Living Dead. You can react to a film however you wish, whether you want to laugh at it or be afraid or love it or hate it.

But let’s be perfectly frank. I hated this movie. It doesn’t matter to me how many people love it or proclaim it as high art or say that it’s the scariest movie they’ve seen and how much it haunts them. That’s great — I’m happy that they had such a reaction to it. My reaction differs and I’m willing to sit down and ponder for nearly three times the length of this film exactly what I have to say about it. And that, I guess, is something of a success for this movie. Films should make you think and consider and examine. And this movie certainly did that. It also made me wonder exactly what I’d chose to watch when I got home to exorcise its stink from consciousness.

It commits the most cardinal sin of all movies: it is boring. Somehow, a movie where a woman saws her own head off is exceptionally boring. That’s quite a feat.

This movie is style over substance, an effort that tries to tell a story that has no character to root for or care about. We have no idea what they are battling against so we have no way to figure out how they can avoid the outcome. I feel like I wasted money on this film, which is rough yet I can get it back, but I also wasted so much time caring about it and watching it, which is something that I can never get back. It needs an editor that could have trimmed its various narratives into a better collective whole. It’s like steak on steak on steak, covered with 19 kinds of steak sauce, all eaten slowly through a straw after someone else has methodically chewed it for you. And after all that, it tastes like shit.

The trouble is, that I know that the next time there’s a big important horror movie, we’ll be there on opening night, eager to see something that exceeds our expectations. We’ll buy into the hype all over again, because we want something to do exactly what it promises. But again — that’s the power of film and why we love it.

You may have a different viewpoint. And that’s great, too. I’ll be happy to read yours, think about it and discuss it. Feel free to share it below.

When discussing the Star Wars prequels, comedian Patton Oswalt said: “I was thinking the other day about a time machine…and the first thing I thought of doing if I actually had a time machine, is that I would go back in time to about 1993 or ’94, and kill George Lucas with a shovel.” So you as you can imagine, he has some strong feelings. After all, he also famously said, “I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!”

George Lucas began developing a young Han Solo film in 2012 (he loves young versions of his characters, such as The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) and Lawrence Kasdan began work on a screenplay. Kasdan has a great history with Lucas, co-writing The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as his own work on films like The Big Chill, Silverado and Body Heat.

The shoot was fraught with issues, with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie) leaving the movie in June 2017 after reportedly being fired over creative differences with Lucasfilm. Ron Howard took over directing duties after that and the budget soared to more than $250 million — making it one of the most expensive films ever made.

Let’s get into it: we start on Corellia, where a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his partner Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke, Daenerys Targaryen from HBO’s Game of Thrones) are making an escape from a gang of criminals. They use coaxium, the McGuffin that fuels this film, to bribe an Imperial officer to help them escape. However, Qi’ra is detained and Han must escape on his own, as he is recruited by the Imperial Navy as a flight cadet (and given his last name).

Years later, Han is still fighting to get back to Corellia to rescue her. He’s been expelled from the Imperial Flight Academy and is now just cannon fodder on the mining world of Mimban. There, he meets Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson, Natural Born Killers, HBO’s True Detective), who in Long John Silver fashion teaches Han to become a scoundrel. He also is set up for desertion and thrown into a pit where he’s due to be killed by a beast (shades of Luke in Jedi), which of course ends up being Chewbacca.

The scene here where Han speaks Wookie is a bit silly and took me out of the film. But after a slow start, the movie kicks into light speed and gets much better.

Soon, Han and Chewie have joined Beckett’s gang, which includes his wife Val Beckett (Thandie Newton) and pilot Rio Durant (voiced by Jon Favreau) and are part of a thrilling scene where they attempt to steal more coaxium from a train high above the planet Vandor. That plan gets blown up sky high by the Cloud Riders and their leader Enfys Nest, who end up killing everyone but the core crew and blowing up the contraband.

This puts a price on the heads of our heroes thanks to Crimson Dawn boss Dryden Vos (who is played by Paul Bettany, who is The Vision in the Marvel films. He ended up taking over this role from The Wire‘s Michael K. Williams, who couldn’t make reshoots. His version of the character was due to be a lion/human hybrid). At the same time, Han finds Qi’ra working as Vos’s top aide. I just want to call out how much I loved Vos and want to see more of him!

To get the price off of their heads, Han suggests stealing unrefined coaxium from the Kessel mining colony. And to ensure that it happens, Vos asks Qi’ra to go along with them.

They need a ship and what better one than the Millennium Falcon, which Han fails to win in a game of sabacc against Lando Calrissian (Community‘s Donald Glover, who shines in the role). He agrees to join the team and brings along his droid co-pilot L3-37, who may or may not be in love with him. She definitely wants to create a droid revolution everywhere she goes, including beating up Clint Howard! I absolutely adored this character, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who carries on the Rogue One tradition of a droid having the most personality of any character in the film.

After instigating a rebellion on Kessel, which includes Chewbacca freeing several of his Wookie people, Lando getting hurt and L3-37 being destroyed, our heroes make an epic escape through the Kessel Run, an event that Han Solo brings up in his very first appearance in Star Wars.

A note from one of my Star Wars obsessed friends, Jim Sloss, who I have seen every single canon film with on opening day since probably 1997. “They fixed the parsec issue. In episode 4, when Han the Kessel Run being done in less than 12 parsecs, people complained because they thought he meant time when a parsec is really a distance. In Solo, they explain that from Kessel to where they needed to go was a distance of 20 parsecs that Han cut to 12.” These are the things that grown men discuss.

The scheme ends with the several of the supposed good forces being not so good and the bad guys being not so bad. I’m a fan of this shades of the Force thinking, where there can be grey sides to what has previously been a black and white conflict. Even better, there’s a surprise villain appearance, the seeds of why Han went from an idealist to a jaded rogue and even the hints of how he ended up in the employ of Jabba the Hutt.

There are a lot of online issues with the film, as many feel that the female-centric and message-oriented scope of the film are detriments. It’s 2018, people. It’s time to just get with the times.

I went in expecting to not enjoy myself at all and after the aforementioned slow start, I had a blast. Again — I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was a kid. I’m predispositioned to like films like this, just as Becca is usually apt to ignore that they are even released. Take it from someone who bought a Ric Ollie figure at midnight before the first prequel was released: this isn’t the best or worst in the Saga. But it’s pretty entertaining. Does every film have to be a religious experience? Or maybe there are too many of these films every year after decades of nothing. Your feelings will temper how you view this one.

Are you sick of superhero movies? People love to discuss how there have been too many lately. But think about this — in 1950, there were 134 Western/cowboy movies made. So sure, there have been plenty of comic book related movies. But I don’t think we’ve reached saturation point yet.

Deadpool started as a ripoff of DC’s Deathstroke the Terminator, but he quickly grew into his own character, a self-aware, speaking right to the viewer bit of anarchy in the Marvel Universe. Starting his life as Wade Wilson, he gave himself over to Department H, the same group that gave Wolverine his adamantium skeleton, in the hopes of curing his cancer. Yes, I wrote all of the paragraph from memory. I can go deep on the X-Men.

Even more complicated is Cable, the hero/villain of this film. Man, it takes a paragraph to explain him. He’s the son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, who is a clone of Jean Grey. He was given a techno-organic virus by Apocalypse and raised in the future by a psychic projection of his parents before coming back to our time as a much older, much more hardened mercenary who gathered the New Mutants as X-Force to stop the end of the world that his clone Stryfe would bring about. You don’t need to know any of that to enjoy this movie. I know all of it. I also didn’t get laid until I was 23. Such is comic books.

That said — Deadpool screws up and his life is ruined, so he becomes obsessed with ending his life. Then, he meets the teenage mutant Firefist (based on New Mutant Rusty Collins, played by Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople) who needs a friend. Of course, Deadpool screws that up. Then, he joins the X-Men and screws that up. Then, he forms X-Force. And screws that up. Basically, most of the movie is Deadpool being a colossal failure until he learns how he can finally die and be happy. Or not. I’m not gonna spoil it for you.

I’m also not going to spoil the big bad guy reveal either. But along the way, you get appearances by Negasonic Teenage Warhead (a Grant Morrison character named for a Monster Magnet song), Wolverine’s ninja friend Yukio reimagined as an anime girl come to life, Colossus, Black Tom Cassidy, Domino, Shatterstar, the Vanisher and many, many more.

Cable is played by Josh Brolin, who really brings the crusty, always angry spirit of the character to life. I was overjoyed with his casting here, particularly since I didn’t see Pierce Bronson or David Harbour as working in the role.

This is a film that fights to be poignant and achieves it by the end of the film. It’s also an incredibly silly film that wipes out characters as soon as it introduces them. And it’s also packed with references to Yentl. Yes, Yentl.

Basically, if you hate superheroes, you will hate this film. You can make that decision for yourself. If you love them, you will love this. And if you spent most of your teen years drawing pictures of Machine Man, Deathlok and Ulysses Bloodstone, then you’re me and you were incredibly happy at the end of this movie.