Twist lives up to its title as a modern-day retelling of Oliver Twist, with Michael Caine as Issac “Fagin” Solomon, Rafferty Law as Twist, Lena Headey as Sikes, Rita Ora as Dodge, Noel Clarke as Brownlow, Jason Maza as Bedwin (Clarke and Maza co-produced the film), Franz Drameh as Batesey, Sophie Simnett as Nancy “Red” Leigh, David Walliams as Dr. Crispin Losberne, Dominic Di Tommaso as Tom Chitling and Leigh Francis as Warden Bumble.

The world of Twist is less about pickpockets and more about the world of art theft, parkour and graffiti, so it’s definitely a much more modern update, right?

This was directed by Martin Owen, who also made L.A. Slasher, Let’s Be Evil and Killers Anonymous. It has the feel of Kingsmen or Now You See Me and if you liked those movies, you’ll like this. If you’re a stickler for the classics, you surely will not.

Raff Law is, of course, the son of Jude Law and this is a nice way to introduce him to audiences. And it’s filled with needle drop songs you obviously know, so there’s that was well. It was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, to be fair.

Twist is available on demand and on blu ray from Saban Films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We reviewed Snake Eyes when it came out in theates back on July 31, 2021. Now it’s available to watch at home, whether you choose Premium Digital Purchase or Premium Video-On-Demand (PVOD), as well as on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD and a 4K Ultra HD Combo in a collectible SteelBook. As a lifelong G.I. Joe fan, the movie may not have been what I was looking for, but I can definitely admit that the action looked great and the UHD looks beautiful. Plus, it comes with five deleted scenes, a new shoft film about how Snake Eyes’ sword was created and features about the film. 

Have I ever told you how much I love G.I. Joe?

If you know me in person, the answer is probably yes. In addition to an entire room of our home being devoted to movies, there’s an entire room for my collection. Did you know that they made an aircraft carrier that’s bigger than your coffee table? I do. It’s in my house.

When I first started dating my wife, the entire upstairs of my house was devoted to this toyline. And not just a figure here or there. I’m one of those maniacs that troop builds, which if you don’t know, be happy that you’re a normal human being and not devoted to buying and outfitting hundreds of the same army figures and building gigantic platoons of them. Hey, to be fair, Peter Cushing did this as well, so I cling to the knowledge that at least one respected person also played with toys, but I doubt Peter Wilton Cushing, OBE ever had a woman say to him, “Why do you have thirty of the same tank?*”

I’m telling you all of this to tell you that there’s no way that I can be objective about this movie.

Snake Eyes has the same problem that comic book movies had before the Marvel Cinematic Universe did something incredibly simple: they just followed the source material. Sure, the problem is that there’s all sorts of source material. G.I. Joe has multiple comic books, toy lines and cartoons, but perhaps the best version of the story are the Marvel Comics that came out written by Larry Hama in which Snake Eyes was the central character**.

Snake Eyes looks at that source material, especially the central story of two sword brothers who fate has torn apart — actually, it’s super close to Enter the Ninja — and says, “Well, we can do some of that. But what if, and go with us on this, there was a meteorite that people can use like a laser?”

The issue is that there’s an audience that knows G.I. Joe from the silly cartoon stories***, an aging out audience that angrily only loves the comic and toys, and then there’s the audience you want: the general ticket-buying public, the ones that actually make a movie successful.

Look — if you plan on watching this movie and don’t want perhaps its dumbest plot point spoiled — sneak out now.

I’ll get to it. Trust me.

Why look! It’s like someone wrote and storyboarded the perfect Snake Eyes story already!

Snake Eyes is not a soldier in this movie. I understand that the Vietnam War was decades ago and the story needs to be updated. I’m also not even remotely upset that Snake Eyes is now Asian-American and played by Henry Golding, who is a fine actor and really went all out to do the physicality that this movie needs. And I get it — the idea that Snake Eyes lost his father and it put him on a path of revenge is also not a bad idea. There are tons of movies based on the very same idea and it works.

In fact, a lot of the movie works up until the middle of the film, when a moment just tanks the concept (and it gets worse from there).

A Yakuza boss named Kenta (Takehiro Hira) discovers Snake Eyes fighting in an underground MMA circuit — how that gets him close to the man that killed his father is debatable — and hires him to put machine guns into fish. One day, Kenta asks Snake Eyes to shoot a traitor — it ends up being Tommy AKA Storm Shadow and Kenta’s cousin and yet he doesn’t recognize him — but our hero ends up saving the man’s life. But to double back on why he didn’t recognize his own cousin it turns out that it’s all a ruse and Snake Eyes is really the bad guy, sent to infiltrate the Arishkage Dojo, a family of ninjas that has protected Japan for centuries.

Trust me — other than Akiko (Haruka Abe) most of the Arishkage are complete morons who just allow a stranger into their midst and show him every single one of their secrets.

Which brings up one of my biggest issues before we dare go any further. There are moments of great drama in this movie, like when Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow slice their hands open and become blood brothers. We know that this should happen, but we’re never given a dramatic reason why they should be so close when it’s all based on a series of lies, which makes Snake Eyes seem to be a manipulative jerk instead of the hero we should get behind. And don’t give me the redemptive journey excuse — this is the first time I’ve met the hero, I guess, and I want to like him.

The film cannot decide if we should know the source material, because if we do, we’re going to dislike lots of this. And if we don’t, we’re not going to understand the dramatic reasons why so many things are happening****.

The dramatic event that causes Storm Shadow to turn away from his family — in the comics — is when Zartan has infiltrated their dojo and uses technology to murder the Hard Master (he had intended to kill Snake Eyes for Cobra Commander, as Snake Eyes’ family and the evil leader’s brother were in a car accident that ruined both of their lives). This makes it seem as if Storm Shadow killed his uncle out of jealousy, so the ninja clan dissolves and Snake Eyes leaves for America. The two are destined to battle again and to become brothers once more after all of the intricacies of fate are untangled.

Contrast that with Snake Eyes being hired by the Yakuza and Cobra — kinda shoehorned in with the Baroness (Úrsula Corberó) appearing to battle (and team with, awkwardly) Joe representative Scarlett (Samara Weaving, who deserves to be the lead in movies like Ready or Not and not a second banana) — to steal the Ariskage source of power, which leads to Storm Shadow using said McGuffin and being kicked out of his ninja clan while Snake Eyes just asks to be forgiven and everyone says, “Well, you got our entire base burned down and lots of our people killed, but at least you said you were sorry” while Storm Shadow quite understandably flips out.

But back to the point that ruined this for me.

Snake Eyes must get through three trials. The first one is a great lesson in selflessness, as he must take a bowl from the Hard Master without losing his bowl. The second seems like straight-up Luke in the cave The Empire Strikes Backmoment. And finally, he must descend into a pit and be judged, as the third trial kills most of the people involved.

That’s because — seriously, this is the spoiler — deep in that cave there are a whole bunch of sacred anacondas that can sniff out whether someone is pure of heart so that they can be ninjas, which are killing machines when you come to think of it, which reminds me of how Wanted went from an order to supervillains in the comic to sacred assassins all listening to a loom that wove fabric that told them who to kill for the good of humanity in the baffling goofiness of the film.

The moment I saw a gigantic snake start judging this film’s hero, I just sat into space, staring and said, “Well, I’m out.”

If I can say anything nice, there’s a decent neon-lit Oldboy influenced battle at one point. Scarlett’s costume looks a lot like the new Classified figure. And it remains a thrill to see the Cobra logo on the big screen. Yet the majority of the fights grow too dark, too oddly cut and too small for what should be a big and bold action film.

I really think the potential to make a G.I. Joe move exists. Actually, it’s called The Expendables but that’s a moot point. It’s just hard to watch filmmakers make a simple concept more difficult than it needs to be. The story beats have been lined up for you. And if you follow them, they can help make a movie that makes sense. And yes, giant snakes are silly, but if they work for the story, they can be forgiven, because I watched an entire film where Cobra Commander devolved into human snake while clinging to Roadblock and bemoaning how he was once a man and then Burgess Meredith leads a Lovecraftian world of bugs against the Joes. As dumb as G.I. Joe: The Movie is — and the first five minutes remain the best distillation of what a movie with these characters could be — it’s somehow nowhere near as daft as this.

I really wanted to love this. Hasbro stopped making G.I. Joe toys for years and shuttled the fan club just to reset the brand for this. But hey — as bad as the movie is, at least I have new action figures. If that’s all I get, as most Joe fans, I’ve learned to be happy***** with it.

*That same woman, nearly a decade later, said to me at the end of this movie, “All this time, I thought Snake Eyes was the bad guy.” I have failed.

**Which is interesting because Snake Eyes is the whole reason I was allowed to have these toys. My parents were hippies who were very anti-guns and military. The inclusion of a ninja allowed them to see that this was not all just army figures. To be deeper, the comic series was an integral part of my brother’s development, as it was how he learned how to read — he’s somewhat dyslexic — as my mom and he would read it together. He had the opportunity to tell this to series creator Larry Hama, which is a treasured memory.

***Snake Eyes once dressed as a disco woman with a dancing dog on the show. Yes, really.

****Why does Akiko change her mind and see anything in Snake Eyes when all he does is act like a jerk to her and repeatedly sneak punch her in the face? Why does Tommy give Snake Eyes his sword when they’ve known each other for all of a few days and not years like the comic? Why does the word of the man who killed Snake Eyes’ father mean more to him than nearly everyone else in this entire story? Why does the film wait until the end to give you what you want — Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow taking their names and costumes? Am I the only one that remembers that it took 90 minutes of sheer dross for Jem to give audiences what they wanted when Kesha showed up as Pizzazz right when you realized that there was no way a sequel was happening?

*****It’s still better than the first movie, which is the lowest bar ever even if that movie has a Brendan Fraser cameo as Sgt. Stone, and about the same as the second, if only for that film’s astounding ninja mountain battle scene and because it has the Rza as the Blind Master.

What if you combined a Ouija movie and a riff on Battle Royale? This is a question that I never would have thought to ask but here this movie is to answer.

Karen — yep, that’s her name — is an American housewife living in Japan who desperately wants to fit in. This leads her to play Kokkuri-san, which is like Ouija but also astoundingly Japanese in that it summons an animal spirit that is a mix between a fox, dog and raccoon. The fox (kistune) is the trickster, the racoon (bare-danuki) is the bearer of both mischief and fortune, while the dog (inugami) is often used as a curse.

By using three bamboo rods arranged to make a tripod and a pot is placed on the tripod. Three or more people ask questions of the spirit and the pot either moves or remains still, which can be explained away just like a Ouija board. And just like one, this game has plenty of urban legends.

As far as I know, it does not install an app on your phone and give you credits to buy weapons and kill other housewives to the death.

This is director and writer Masaya Kato’s first movie as well as the initial effort for much of its cast. It also shifts between bad English and subtitled Japanese and noen of the voices match up. All of the blood seems to be CGI. Man, should I keep this laundry list going to let you know just how rough this movie is?

Great idea. Weird idea. Goofy idea. Whatever — the execution fails to live up to what this could have been.

Ouija Japan is available on Amazon Prime Video and on blu ray from Leomark Studios and TokyoSHOCK Japan.

There’s no way to be wrong or right about how you feel about this movie, but tell that to the sycophantic fanboy audience that has already told people to kill themselves if they didn’t like this movie. Yes, after a lifetime of dealing with hard knocks, the thing that finally kills me is a bottom-of-the-barrel slasher that wouldn’t even place in the top fifty films of this genre that came out in 1981*.

First off, that’s not fair, as a metric ton of slashers came out that year. But also, a lot of really great ones did that did at the time weren’t thought of as being all that great, but in retrospect — and with the law of withering slasher quality — seem like bona fide classics in 2021.

I debated just sharing with you my alternate titles for this film** instead of my thoughts, but that seemed like a cop-out.

So…if you haven’t seen it yet…spoiler warning.

Mommy, please don’t let me read them spoilers…

About a decade ago, I had the feeling coming out of Pineapple Express that was, “Yeah, so…what did I miss?” And I’ve continually felt that feeling with nearly every movie that David Gordon Green has made.

The one thing that people seemed to agree on about the last film — Halloween — was that it worked best when it was when it let the Strode women — Laurie, Karen and Allyson — kick some ass. This film takes a cue from Halloween II — and not the one that works — and basically keeps Laurie*** and her family out of the action for a large chunk of the running time, instead of devoting its running time to a group of doomed survivors led by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) and including fan service**** character Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet), Lindsay Wallace (Kyle Richards) and Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) as they drink in a bar and remember the night that they all almost died, ruining the worst talent show ever so that Tommy can remind us that nothing bad has ever happened to him since forty years ago and generally bumming everyone out.

Somehow, Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton in 2018, Thomas Mann in 1978) survived being stabbed in the throat by living plot device Dr. Ranbir Sartain in the last film, which leads him to remember all the things we didn’t see at the end of the original movie, like him screwing up and shooting a cop in the throat instead of The Shape, followed up by him having all the marksmanship of a Cobra trooper or clone of Jango Fett and then, finally, stopping Dr. Loomis (Tom Jones, Jr. under a load of makeup) from shooting Michael right in the head.

Halloween Kills is a movie that simultaneously wants us to remember it as the one true sequel to a film that’s had more timelines than most slashers have quarts of blood while also having its cake as well, showing us Leigh Brackett in footage from the second film in the series which it has conveniently retconned out.

Speaking of that, the new reason why Michael kills people is so hilarious that I laughed out loud to the point that you may have heard me, wherever you are. He likes to look out the window all the time into the darkness in his soul, so whenever he’s done killing, he just likes to look out that window and if anyone gets in the way of him and his window, they die. Kind of like the mirror in Boogeyman but somehow in no way better, which is beyond a crying shame.

Yes. All these years of murder and dread and sorrow and fear and it was all about a window.

So anyways…

I really don’t even know if I want to go on after that. By that point, I was borderline enraged in the theater and upset that we challenged a global health crisis instead of being smart and just watching this on Peacock.

Anyways, let’s soldier on.

After Michael raises the ire of first responders online — hey, I’m still mad about him eating dogs, which I’m reminded of again in this one, so get in line — with a massacre of the very firemen sent to save him, The Shape is loose again like some kind of apex predator or Jaws with his burned up face and out and about and randomly killing comedy geek favorites like Lenny Clark and Michael McDonald (making him the only person I know to get killed by Michael Myers the actor and Michael Myers the killer in a movie).

For all the critiques of just how rough Halloween II is — and yes, it is, but it’s also a movie not even in the same breath as this one — the violence in this movie goes beyond even what my usual slasher dreams entail. There’s a saw to the face. A light tube to the throat. Multiple knives in Uncle Teddy’s back. A cheese knife to Stewart’s heart. And yet, in the midst of all this grand guignol, something hit me.

The moment that makes Halloween stand out is when Michael murders Bob and takes a moment to step back, cock his head and admire his handiwork. It shows how detached that he is from the human race. He does that move exactly one time in the original film. He does it six times before I lost track in this film. And that’s one of the many issues here: this is a bloated film, losing the plot of more than one story while overdoing it. It isn’t enough to have one person yell “Evil dies tonight!” It happens over and over and over when someone should have said to Nurse Chambers, “C’mon, inventing that tagline is as bad as picking your own nickname.” But everyone follows suit and before you can say Q-Anon, we have Tommy Doyle drunkenly taking the streets and making perfect charisma rolls to convince the town of Haddonfield — which no doubt has the worst kids ever between the jerks in this one and the bullies of the fourth one which does not exist — to come together in the beautiful dream of surrounding one man and beating him to death.

Haddonfield’s citizens are themselves turning into monsters! Why, as Laurie later says, this is Michael’s masterpiece! But didn’t we just also learn that Michael had nothing to do with finding the woman who is not his sister as he was put in her way by Dr. Sartain and everything is a coincidence? If he’s a six-year-old child in the body of an adult — one nearing seventy mind you — how can he plan these things? Or perhaps is he supernatural and gains his powers with each person he kills, as Laurie later says? Is he flesh and blood? Or is he a demon? Are we going to cut to him having a Cult of Thorn tattoo just to confuse everyone?

Ah man, we still have Halloween Ends to get to, which Green has said is a “coming of age story” in which “some of the characters… have processed the insanity of the circus of the massacre of 2018. And not only that, but they’ve also processed the world as it’s spun so wildly in the last four years.”

So yeah. The crappy world outside that I ventured out into in the hopes of escaping the world outside by watching a slasher is now intruding into said slasher. Cool.

Again, for a movie that wants us to believe that it is the one and only timeline, the idea of a vigilante mob after Michael comes directly from the fourth movie. And the best parts of this only happen in flashbacks.

I mean, at least this movie didn’t have a long discussion of bahn mi sandwiches, instead deciding to show how quirky and cool it was by featuring a moment from Minnie and Moskowitz and characters listening to Pete Antell’s “Stop, Look and Listen, It’s Halloween.” It doesn’t feel like bonus content and something cool. It feels extraneous.

Actually, this whole thing feels extraneous.

Then again, it’s also the kind of movie that has The Guardian saying that it’s the new high in “horror renaissance” and has Variety critics saying that it’s a ripoff of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then doubling down by saying Mario Bava was inept.

Much like the mob that’s created in the film, this is a dumb piece of nothing that creates more moments of absolute dumbness. And within said dumbness, there is no moment of joy, no love for craft, no escape. Halloween has become a commitment, a movie that you have to go see because you’ve endured all the others and there’s no way this can be worse than that time that Freddie Harris spin kicked Michael or when he had a neckflap.

But it is. Somehow, it’s worse.

*Off the top of my head, the 1981 slashers that are light years better than this movie include Absurd (which is my third favorite Halloween movie), Bloody Moon (yes, when Jess Franco makes a better movie than your Hollywood budget, get the axe), Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone! (which sucks, but I love, and it’s actually made with love unlike this), Madhouse, Just Before Dawn (I mean, that’s like comparing…actually in the future I will use the example “That’s like comparing Just Before Dawn to Halloween Kills), Madman, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, The Fan, The Funhouse, Happy Birthday to Me, Hell Night (the very best example of a movie people hated in 1981 that’s had forty years to suddenly seem pretty decent), My Bloody Valentine, Strange Behavior, Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker and two of the best slashers ever made, Halloween II and The Prowler.

**Those alternate titles include:

• Halloween: January 6
• Halloween: Make Haddonfield Great Again
• Halloween: Surprisingly Not a Fan Film
• Halloween: Just Wait Until You See These Guys Ruin The Exorcist Too
• Halloween: Did Someone Say “Evil Dies Tonight?”
• Halloween: Rob Zombie’s Redemption
• Halloween: Wherefore Art Thou, Busta Rhymes?
• Halloween: Cookie Woman Returns
• Halloween: Donald Pleasence Says Yes to a Role Beyond the Grave
• Halloween: Two Old People Make Funny In Adjoining Hospital Beds
• Halloween: Window Licker
• Halloween: The Kids Are Not Alright
• Halloween: Gratutitous Bob Odenkirk Stock Photo

***This is the only movie in the series where Laurie and Michael don’t have a scene together.

****To be fair, this is an entire movie of fan service that seems worse than many of the fan films of Halloween that I have seen. Oh cool, the Silver Shamrock masks, they want you to yell, while inside you realize that Carpenter was right and this should have ended with the second film and become an annual series of unconnected stories.