With only three days to prove his innocence, a struggling ex-soldier (Derek Davenport) is forced to take one last job and save his sister (Amelia Haberman, who was in not one, but two Krampus-themed films) or go to jail for a crime he did not commit.
This comes from writer/director Joseph Mbah, who was also behind Krampus Origins and the upcoming Battlefield 2025.
Richard (Davenport) is dealing with the memories of his military past while struggling to make ends meet as a Uber-style driver while also looking after his sister Sarah (Haberman). On a day that he’s running late to pick her up, a man named Chris (Richard Lippert) kidnaps a co-worker’s daughter and Richard gets blamed for the crime.
When Chris takes Sarah as well, that’s when this all gets even more personal. There’s also Detective Moro (Michael C. Alvarez), who thinks Richard had something to do with the crime.
I don’t know what the deal with the wound and bruise makeup was in this movie, but it’s so dark that it’s borderline distracting in parts. Also, the PR for this film compares it to Commando, which is a pretty high bar for it to reach. Amazingly, this movie ends with a total science fiction twist that seems to set up for a sequel, then hits you with over ten minutes of credits that pad its hour-ish run time to eighty-five minutes.
Expo is available on digital on demand from Green Apple Entertainment.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team, but that has no impact on our review.
Along with Mike Whitehill and David Briggs, Steven Knight created the game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? He’s also written plenty of screenplays — he contributed to Eastern Promises and Shutter Island, which this movie feels like the Italian ripoff of — and wrote and directed the films Locke and Hummingbird. None of these things will prepare you for this complete and utter grease fire of a movie.
Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey, who should know better) is a fishing boat captain who lives off the coast of Florida on Plymouth Island, yet all the steering wheels are on the wrong side of the cars. He spends most of his days drunk or out on the ocean, hunting an elusive tuna named Justice.
That all changes when his ex-wife Karen Zariakas (Anne Hathaway, who should know better) shows up and begs him to save their son from her abusive husband Frank (Jason Clarke, who was in Chappaquiddick as Ted Kennedy, another excoriable bit of Hollywood dross), giving hi $10 million dollars to feed the man to the sharks. This seems like an exorbitant figure and an overly elaborate plan, but don’t worry. This film is about to go off the rails in a way that few do.
Seriously, if you felt like watching this movie, you should stop reading right now.
The truth is, DIll — who is really John Mason — was really killed in Iraq and is now a video game character in a game that his son Patrick has designed based on the one memory he has of his father. Now that he’s stuck with a stepfather that beats his mom and attacks him, the game changes to one where Dill or Mason or whatever must kill the new dad. That means that everyone else in town, from Djimon Hounsou’s Duke to Diane Lane’s Constance, are all non-player characters.
Just before virtual dad is about to be killed by the monstrous tuna, the real Patrick stabs his real stepdad with his real dead dad’s knife. He is released into custody before a trial and designs a new game where he just hangs out with his dad.
I made none of that up. This all really happens in this bizarre film noir with people that have no understanding of the genre. Also, if the son designed this game, does he really want to see his dad’s bare ass double digit times? Does he want his virtual dad to get with his virtual mom and sail the seas of mayonnaise on a houseboat together? Who can say!
No matter how bad a movie is, it usually gets millions of dollars’ worth of promotion. The test screenings for this film were so bad that Serenity‘s distributor Aviron canceled a full campaign, even after all of the actors agreed to a full press junket as part of the contracts. According to a Deadline Hollywood article, only nine TV spots aired in the middle of the night in obscure cities, one assumes only to answer some contract or requirements. That means that this movie went up to 2,500 screens with no one knowing a single thing about it.
Aviron said in a statement: “As much as we love this film and still hope it finds its audience, we tested and retested the film — with audiences and critics alike — and sadly, the data demonstrated that the film was not going to be able to perform at our initial expectations, so we adjusted our budget and marketing tactics accordingly.”
I really can’t explain just how bad this movie is, one that starts as a Body Heat style neo-noir and somehow becomes the redneck Matrix while at the same time threatening to become a shark week movie. Compounding the pain, my wife — who had wanted to see this — fell asleep an hour in and that meant that I had to soldier on alone.
If you’re as dumb as me, you can watch this on Amazon Prime.
Peter Sullivan is a writer and producer whose IMDB page is replete with TV movies with words like Christmas, The Wrong and Cheerleader in the titles. If this was 1970, he’d be making movies that’d run late at night on CBS and play at drive-ins. Today, his movies end up on Netflix.
Brenda Song plays Jennifer Williams, a woman who has just recovered from a brutal car accident, yet she can’t remember her husband Russell (Mike Vogel, who was in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). You’ll guess the twist from frame one of the film, as this is no giallo or even Lifetime movie. It’s not even that good, sadly.
The one good part of the whole film is the scene where Detective Frank Page wraps a teddy bear for his daughter, only for the reveal that his daughter disappeared years ago and he has an entire room of wrapped teddy bears as he weeps gigantic tears. That makes up for the fact that every time Dennis Haysbert, who plays the role, speaks, all I can think of are his insurance commercials.
There are junk movies. And then there are movies that are painfully boring, not even good enough to be cinematic NyQuil. This would be one of those movies, a film so bad that I’m shocked that it wasn’t littering the bottom of the new release racks of sub-Asylum films at Walmart.
This is the first Child’s Play movie made without the involvement of creator Don Mancini and actor Brad Dourif. Instead, Lars Klevberg (whose film Polaroid has been lost in the legislative downfall of the Weinsteins) directed from a script by Tyler Burton Smith (who wrote the video games Sleeping Dogs and Quantum Break).
Mancini has criticized the remake while understanding that rights holder Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer can do anything they want. When asked if he and fellow producer David Kirschner would be involved, he said, “We said no thank you, because we have our ongoing thriving business with Chucky. Obviously my feelings were hurt… And I did create the character and nurture the franchise for three decades. So when someone says, “Oh yeah, we would love to have your name on the film,” it was hard not to feel like I was being patronized. They just wanted our approval. Which I strenuously denied them.”
Instead of the supernatural origins of the past, this Chucky is a Buddi doll created by the Kaslan Corporation. This kind of tears out the most frightening part of the Chucky concept — a doll that somehow comes to life yet is consumed by pure evil.
The real problem starts in a foreign Buddi assembly factory, where an employee takes out all of the safety protocols before killing himself. That doll eventually makes its way to the home of Karen Barclay (Aubrey Plaza) and her hearing-impaired son Andy (Gabriel Bateman, who was also in Annabelle and Lights Out).
While Andy eventually gains real human friends, Chucky places his friend’s happiness above all common sense and restraint. Unlike the past, where Chucky is motivated only by his own concerns, here you can see how his lack of human understanding leads to all of the murder and mayhem. He doesn’t realize how a movie that the kids watch, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, can provide laughter and pleasure while real death leads to life-changing results.
This Chucky also has the ability to command phones, household objects, drones and cars, as well as command an army of the next line of Buddi dolls on the night they are introduced, which includes a positively harrowing bear version.
I was totally prepared to absolutely despise this film until I saw it in a new light. I wondered, what if Claudio Fragrasso somehow got his hands on the chance to make Child’s Play? The results wouldn’t be all that great, but they’d sure be fun. That’s what this movie aspires to. It’s certainly entertaining — any movie where the adulterous villain is scalped by a tiller in a watermelon patch while taking down Christmas lights and his face is skinned off and passed around as a gift or a child is sprayed right in the face by a store manager’s blood is going to be a winner in my book. But it could have been a totally different film with a totally different title and lead character without changing the story all that much.
But hey — Mark Hamill is awesome as the voice of Chucky and Tim Matheson shows up as Henry Kaslan, the head of Kaslan Industries. I laughed out loud a few times. And I’m not as married to Chucky as a slasher hero as I am to Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, Leatherface or anyone else. And let’s face — all of those characters have had some pretty bad movies in their history, too. This one isn’t as bad as any of those. Sure, Chucky looks like unfinished CGI, but you can’t have everything.
There’s also another Chucky movie coming out this year called Charles and Mancini has a TV series in development. Want to learn some more about killer dolls? Check out this list of ten evil dolls that we posted a few weeks ago.
If you haven’t noticed — I mean, we did a Quentin Tarantino week on this site and have published articles about the 37 Movies That Make Up Kill Bill and the Movies That Influenced Quentin Taratino — but I enjoy the man’s films. So when Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood was announced as a film all about the Manson Family, I was a bit worried.
I’m not a part of my generation that worships Charles Manson and thinks he really had anything interesting or relevant to say. In fact, I’ve compared him to advertising consultants and TED talk speakers, two groups that I find as abhorent as the man who ordered the murder of everyone in the house where Sharon Tate lived and believed that the “White Album” was to be the start of a race war that his Family alone would survive.
I didn’t want a Tarantino film all about Manson. And good news. This movie is anything but. Instead, it’s a love letter to the end of the studio system as Hollywood moves from dashing square jawed leading men to neurotic antiheroes for a few years before blockbusters would change the game all over again.
This is the first Tarantino film not to be associated with producer Harvey Weinstein, with Sony Pictures winning the distribution rights, as they met Tarantino’s demands, least of which is final cut.
At its heart is the relationship between two men: Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) Dalton and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), which is somewhat modeled on the relationship between Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham.
Rick is a veteran of war movies and 1950s Westerns like Bounty Law — based on Wanted Dead or Alive, which starred Steve McQueen. Unlike McQueen, Dalton’s foray into the movies did not go so well. He got his show cancelled and now has to be content with playing the bad guy of the week, always going out on his back.
His best friend Cliff is a veteran of the actual war who went on to become the stunt man that makes Rick looks so good. There’s been a rumor going around that Cliff killed his wife Billie (Rebecca Gayheart), but the movie neither confirms or denies this. We can tell that Cliff is a capabale man because of the way he can leap onto a roof with no ladder and because he dresses like Billy Jack without the hat. He lives alone in a trailer on the outskirts of a drive-in theater with his pit bull Brandy.
Now that the work is drying up, Cliff mostly drives Rick around town, as our hero is a drunk. One of those drives takes Rick to meet Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), who tries to talk him into leaving Hollywood behind and doing cowboy movies in Italy.
In marked contrast to Rick’s spiral is the rise of his neighbors, Roman Polanski (Polish actor Rafał Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Rick dreams that if he could just meet them, he knows that his life would be so much different. In fact, everyone dreams of Tate, including Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis, who looks near picture perfect), who laments that “Yeah, I never stood a chance” to win Tate over. The entire Playboy Mansion scene is wonderful, from the logo that bursts onto the screen to the cues of who each and every person is.
What follows are nearly three rambling hours in 1969 Hollywood, from encounters at Spahn Ranch with the aofrementioned Mansons to a fight between Cliff and Bruce Lee on the set of The Green Hornet, Stuntman Mike’s — from Death Proof — brother Randy (still Kurt Russell) showing up and married to Zoe Bell, the typical bare female feet you expect from a Tarantino film, Sharon Tate going to watch herself in The Wrecking Crew while a poster for The Mercenary is on screen for an extended time, Rick’s acting emerging on the set of Lancer, a young Method actress named Trudi (Julia Butters) who steals the show, Rick’s trip to Italy where he works with Antonio Margheriti and Sergio Corbucci and a last night of bromance drinking that turns into a pitched battle between Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel against Rick, Cliff and Brandy, who are armed with cans of dogfood and an audience pleasing — SPOILERS PLEASE! — flamethrower.
There are the little in the margins moments that fans fo Tarantino love, too. A premiere for an adult film at the Eros Theater is in the script just to get a cheer from the crowd when this movie premieres at Quentin’s New Beverly Theater, its modern name.
I just love how Rick sings “The Green Door,” a song about not knowing what’s going on at a party when soon, the stars of Hollywood would be celebrating drugs and porno chic, with films like Behind the Green Door. Rick starts off clueless but his self-aware nature grows, particularly in the scene where he cries in front of Trudi.
Plus — Clu Gullagher shows up as a bookstore clerk!
My worries about the Manson Family in this film were unfounded. Sharon Tate exists as an angel here, above and beyond the cares of the characters that somehow live in the same world as her. She dances alone, not only at the Playboy Mansion but throughout the reality this film has stitched together. She’s as much of an ideal and McGuffin as Pulp Fiction‘s briefcase. Her mentioned what a great actor Rick was is enough to make him forget that he just stared death down and might have almost lost the only person in the world who truly loves him, no matter what.
And how about Timothy Oliphant as James Stacy? The sadness of real life is that Stacy was hit by a drunk driver while driving his motorcycle — he pulls away on it at the end of the shoot — leading to him getting his left leg and arm amputated. He had formerly been married to Connie Stevens and Kim Darby, and to compound the sadness, he was arrested for molesting an 11-year-old girl and stalking two others in 1995.
Is Trudie Fraiser really supposed to be Jodie Foster? Did Cliff really kill his wife (I’d kill for a Tarantino American giallo all about this)? Will Rick’s career change now that he’s finally had that one pool party at the Tate house? How amazing is it that Tarantino could change history not just once in Inglorious Basterds but now all over again? Where can I get those amazing fake Italian movie posters?
I don’t really want to say much more. As Tarantino himself said before the film earned a seven-minute standing ovation at Cannes, “I love cinema, You love cinema. It’s the journey of discovering a story for the first time. I’m thrilled to be here in Cannes to share ‘Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood’ with the festival audience. The cast and crew have worked so hard to create something original, and I only ask that everyone avoids revealing anything that would prevent later audiences from experiencing the film in the same way. Thank you.”
Scrawl is the film debut of Daisy Ridley, who has gone on to star in Rey in the new series of Star Wars movies. Shot in 2015, she plays Hannah, who literally becomes death itself in this movie, which is about teens that create a comic book that comes to life with deadly results.
Simon Goodman and Joe Harper are teens living in a small town that have created a comic book called Scrawl in the hopes that they can get famous and meet women. Once they meet Hannah (Ridley), a mysterious new girl, their dreams start to come true. Girls want to meet them and life gets way more interesting.
However, the more violent situations in the comic start coming to bloody life. And on page 21 of the new issue, there’s a violent massacre that hasn’t happened yet.
Scrawl is a movie filled with great ideas and not so great execution. The idea of getting to live your dream of creating a comic book is one that many viewers would totally empathize with. Despite the numerous murders and blood in nearly every scene of the movie. this movie quite frankly drags. That said, the quality of the production is solid and the comic itself looks pretty interesting. I just wish the rest of the actual film lived up to the great premise.
Scrawl is now available via On Demand and on DVD at Walmart.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team but that has no impact on our review.
Let’s lead this off with the director’s statement on the film: “Great horror films find ways to create physical manifestations of abstract fears and anxieties. Modern popularity culture imposes a certain pressure on younger people to create complex, performative identities, and to fearlessly face the consequences of the resulting fracturing of their self-image. We wanted to create a “monster” that manifested from those performative pressures, and one that is actually fed and brought to life by every character in the movie inadvertently. We hoped to depict the different types of personas people take on in social-media forums, and the impossible reconciliations they face. We hope you will find these circumstances tragic and sympathize with the victims who have this vapidity thrust upon them, rather than viewing the participants as themselves vapid. We do not wish the film to be a condemnation of millennials, so much as a condemnation of the way that they have been commoditized by Facebook, Google, and other Internet giants.”
Bailey and Emma (Colby Stewart and Brandi Aguilar) are college roommates who work together to fuel Bailey’s obsession with gaining fame via the St33ker app. Up until now, she’s led everyone else on the site, but when another user of the site reveals that she is dying from cancer, she loses her popularity and even her place in the world.
However, the girls find their popularity increases when a killer in a spray painted white Donald Trump mask — hello, Nick Castle — begins stalking them. The cops are, at best, ineffective. And the deeper the girls go into danger, the less Bailey wants to escape it, as she’s returning to the popularity she once had.
I really liked the constant sponsored messages for Toot Strudles and seeing each character’s own channel become part of the film. While the budget is low, the ideas are big here and I had a blast watching it. I also love that they made a real site for Str33ker, with longer versions of the videos showed in the film.
Directed by Sophia Cacciola (the upcoming Blood of the Triblade) and Michael J. Epstein, this movie does a great job of jumping tone and even genre as the film goes on. It’s always a struggle for horror comedy to determine what side of the equation that they will land upon, but Clickbair straddles that line quite well.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team, but that has no impact on our review.
The main character in this movie — referred to as Our Man in the credits — is never named. He works from home, gets in arguments with nearly everyone he does meet and has no friends. His life changes forever when he opens a package filled with images that upset him. Now, he must take the secret of that package and take his life on a whole new path.
Wade In the Water is directed by Mark Wilson, who up until now has directed mainly shorts and the documentary The Painted Warrior. Its true strength lies in its lead, Tom E. Nicholson. He conveys the pain of a childhood of abuse that has manifested itself in an isolated and angry existence in his adulthood.
He ends up meeting the daughter (Tilly Anderton) of the man who the package was intended for and forges an uneasy friendship with her. Within that relationship, he confesses more of the personal pain that he grew up with than he does to his therapist. The juxtaposition between the small girl and the giant of a man is in direct proportion to how much more control she has over life than he does, wildly flailing through in and lashing out in all directions.
Wade In the Water isn’t the type of film that we ordinarily explore on our site, but it was still a fascinating watch.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team, but that has no impact on our review.
The Guiterrez family has moved to New York from “nowhere,” with David having to deal with the issues of his abusive father Ralph and mentally challenged mother Mariah. While he’s a loser in school and on the streets, he shines when it comes time to get up on the comedy stage. That’s the tale that Such A Funny Life brings to the screen.
David’s life is brutal — he loses his sister Gabriella to a senseless death as she rides her new bike in the street. Then he falls for a troubled girl named Mariah, who he tries in vain to make happy. This leads him to Los Angeles, where he starts a new life and finally has a chance to achieve his comedy dreams. But there’s a price on his head and a threat to his loved ones and family that he must deal with first.
Such A Funny Life is the first fill-length film from writer/director Oliver Mann. It’s pretty dark and depressing, to be honest, but the story is well told. Sometimes. the funniest voices have had to deal with the most pain in their lives. You can catch it on August 13 in theaters everywhere.
Two treasure hunters have uncovered a sealed tomb, awakening a mummy that has waited centuries to return and bring about Armageddon. Now, they must race against time to stop that evil mummy and his creatures from destroying the entire world.
Basically — if you miss the 1990s mummy movies — good news.
We watched The Mummy Reborn a few months back, but this film has nothing to do with that one. No, this is a whole new take on mummies.
It’s directed by Justin Price, who also wrote the film, and Khu, who acted in and produced The 13th Friday. They’re also listed on IMDB as working on a movie called Pharoahs, which has several of the same actors playing the same roles, so one assumes that that will be a sequel to this film.
Noe (who is played by Carter, a single named actor in a movie directed by a single named director) and Daniella (Brittany Goodwin, who has a Lara Croft outfit that looks way better than any on-screen Lara Croft before) are Indiana Jones-style archaeologists who get mixed up in this whole adventure and the dealing between Egyptians Sebek and Reheema.
Throw in a CGI Sphinx in the middle of the fake desert and a CGI monster that looks like what pharoahs would have made if they liked the fat new American Godzilla and you have a movie. There’s some market somewhere for these, because I keep getting them, so if you like knockoffs of twenty year old genre films, I guess there’s something for you here. I just don’t know why they didn’t hire Brandon Fraser, that guy has to be ready to work for scale by this point.
TheMummyRebirthis available on DVD and On Demand on August 13.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team. That was no bearing on our review.
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