Joe has had his car stolen by CD and Adele, a couple on the run with some ill-gotten cash who have even worse criminals after them. Can he connect with these strangers and save all of them? Or are some people well beyond being redeemable?

With a title that comes from late 1800s Victorian slang that means “don’t lie to me,” as dog sellers would often pass off mutts as high pedigree show breeds, this movie also proves another truism a little closer to our time. As Notorious B.I.G. said in the late 1990s, “the more money we come across, the more problems we see.”

Shot in eight days between COVID-19 lockdowns in Ireland with director Pauric Brennan, the cast and writer Mark Hampton as the only crew, this movie looks way better than the challenges that it faced as it got made. Hampton was also somehow able to write this tight crime yarn with just four characters in only two months.

This is probably the best ninety minutes you’ll spend trapped in a car with a group of drug addicts this year. Or maybe not, I don’t know how you lead your life.

In 1893 Southhold, New York, dark doings are afoot.

Mary (Stefanie Scott, Insidious: Chapter 3) starts this film blindfolded with blood pouring out of her face, being interrogated in the wake of the death of her grandmother (Judith Roberts from Dead Silence and Eraserhead, known as The Matriarch). There’s also the matter of Mary’s relationship with Eleanor (Isabelle Fuhrman, Esther from Orphan), the family’s maid.

The family has the Word of God on their side and takes the relationship between the two girls as a sin against the Lord, so they’ve been dealt with incredibly harshly. But when The Intruder (Rory Culkin) arrives, things suddenly take a turn down the Left Hand Path.

A dark film that values look and feel over a story that really comes together, this is at the very least a strong vision from a first-time filmmaker that will definitely win over some fans and point to a strong career taking what one hopes are its first steps toward greatness. This has been picked up by Shudder and will debut their in early 2022.

Simone (Katharine Isabelle, Ginger from Ginger Snaps and the titular character of American Mary) has disappeared from life. Once, she was a heavy metal singer named Sim Chaos — metal is infused in every scene of this movie, from the shirts that characters wear to the music on the soundtrack from bands like Hazel Doupe. Sacrilegia, Malthusian and Vircolac — and an author whose first book was a huge success.

Now, she lives in a house that looks like its becoming run down, with most of her life in boxes and her days revolving around how much vodka she can get her hands on. One night, she accidentally hits a teenager in a drunk driving accident. That girl, who is only called Kid for the majority of the film’s running time and is played by Hazel Doupe, is actually the character in the book that Simone has been struggling to write since a massive tragedy destroyed her life.

In Simone’s dreams, the Kid is chased by old men through an abandoned factory. She also has dreams of the face of a man, a hunting accident and her bloody hands. Even when she tries to go on a date with a well-meaning mechanic, hearing the rumors about her from the locals in the small Irish town that she’s run away to drives her to go overboard with her drinking.

Director Randal Plunkett takes a story that could have meandered in sentimentality and delivers a supernatural take on the process of self-forgiveness. Isabelle is supercharged as the lead, as she has no concern with coming off as someone you would like to be around, yet you slowly get behind her and cheer on her personal growth.

I was completely unprepared for this movie and the emotional power that it owns. This is the kind of movie that we need more of, a gorgeous yet dark examination of life that’s seen through the lens of the fantastic.

You can learn more at the official site.

Jake has been trying to get into reporting by starting as a video editor. While editing a story on a routine traffic stop that resulted in the death of a police officer and a major political official, Jake is sent dashcam video evidence that tells a completely different story than the report he’s told to make.

Working alone from his small apartment in NYC — most of the film takes place on his computer screen — Jake studies the footage and figures out the truth behind what actually happened. But has he uncovered a conspiracy or is he seeing something where there’s nothing at all?

Shades of, well, the entire last year and some months of our lives.

Citing Blow-Up, The Conversation and Klute, this is director Christian Nilsson’s feature film debut. It’s an interesting take on the story as Jake keeps going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

Your mileage may vary when it comes to the way the story is told, but I found this an intriguing journey.

Yeah, I get it. There are a lot of superhero movies. But saying there are too many is like saying there are too many slashers or comedies. It’s a genre in and out of itself that can tell a variety of different stories. And nobody has done a better job of that than James Gunn, who started in the world of Troma and low budget horror like Slither before making Super and then taking over his own part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Guardians of the Galaxy.

But let me tell you — this is basically a high budget low budget film with a heart and you’d be silly to skip it. What other movie would be audacious enough to — spoiler warning — kill more than half its cast including most of the names on the poster before the credits even begin?

Where David Ayer’s Suicide Squad was pretty much considered a fumble — I liked the Deadshot moments and seeing the cast on screen — this movie fully lives up to the premise of John Ostrander’s run on the comic book. These are the very lowest of the low when it comes to super-villainy, forced by the American government to do missions where there’s every single chance they’ll die, whether at the hands of their enemy, one another or by the bombs implanted in their heads by their team leader Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, perhaps given less to do in this movie but nailing exactly who the character is).

Two different versions of Task Force X have been sent to the island of Corto Maltese to destroy Jötunheim, a laboratory that holds the secret of Project Starfish. One team — led by Rick Flag made up of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, who has this character down as perfect as it gets), Captain Boomerang (a sadly wasted Jai Courtney), Savant (Michael Rooker), The Detachable Kid (Nathan Fillion), Javelin (Flula Borg), Mongal (Mayling Ng), Weasel (all CGI and looking like Bill the Cat) and Blackguard (Pete Davidson) will take the beach. The other — using them as a distraction — is Peacemaker (a perfect John Cena), Bloodsport (Idris Elba), King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian, not the first choice for a superhero character or actor, which should explain a bit of this movie to you) and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior).

This is a deep cut, but even Squad pilot Briscoe shows up to fly their transport. Deeper still is getting characters like Calendar Man, Kaleidoscope and Double Down into the prison.

There’s really no way that I can be subjective in my review of this. The Ostrander-era Suicide Squad is my favorite comic of all time and I subscribe to its modern remix Copra — you should too RIGHT NOW — and this movie completely hits all of the right notes, from how Killer Shark could eat anyone on the team at any time to Savant running from the battle and paying the price.

So yeah. There are a lot of superhero movies. There is only one that has a kaiju starfish, a man who loves peace so much that he’d kill for it, full-frontal male nudity and perhaps the most gore I’ve ever seen in a mainstream film, as well as moments in the Project Starfish lab that would not feel out of place in an Italian zombie film.

Movies can be and should be escapist fun. In a world where nearly every DC film has faltered to almost astounding levels, unable to even get the character of Superman correct in the last few decades, Gunn hits it out of the park. I can’t wait for the Peacemaker show and whatever comes next.

This is how you should feel after watching a blockbuster, folks.

You have to give it to the filmmakers for that title. I mean, that took balls.

Writer/director Ramin Niami is behind this story, working with his daughter Tara Violet as camera operator. It’s about Henry, an agoraphobic resident of Los Angeles who has learned how to hack into the webcams of women all over town. He sees himself as their white knight as he watches them live their lives. His roommate Eric, an actor and influencer, wants him to head out into the real world and yet has no compunctions over getting to uses his male gaze on these women.

Henry also believes that one of the girls is a serial killer. So there’s that.

Naimi was inspired by this high tech film by a story he heard on the radio, stating “I heard about a female college student who found nude photos of herself on the Internet. The FBI discovered that her webcam was hacked and that a fellow college student had taken these images when she was changing in her college dorm room in revenge because she had rejected him for a date. This story inspired me to create a modern Rear Window.”

That’s a high bar to shoot for and this film may not reach it. But hey — it’s a great goal.

This was a hard watch considering how much the way men behave has been publicized. It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for an incel like Henry or a lothario like Eric.

Eye Without a Face is available on demand from Gravitas Ventures. You can learn more at the official website.

The Dalton Gang terrorized Kansas and the Oklahoma territories on their way to infamy, robbing two banks in the middle of the day — October 5th, 1892 — at the same time and in the same town of Coffeyville, Kansas.

Nicholas Barton has directed several westerns in recent memory like Wichita and Deadman Standing. The genre doesn’t get much attention these days, so it’s always good to see an effort come out. Plus, he wrote this movie and appears in it as John Kloehr.

This film was made at the Old Cowtown Museum, the same Wichita location as several movies, including One Day Only, Home on the Range, Bloody Dawn, Midnight Shanghai, The Only Good Indian and Stolen Women, Captured Hearts.

The plan — made because Coffeyville was called No-Gun Town — is soon foiled by the townsfolk who don’t follow that law. Will the Daltons escape? Will they outdo their cousins the James Gang by living up to Bob Dalton’s claim that he could “beat anything Jesse James ever did — rob two banks at once, in broad daylight?” And will the townsfolk be around to celebrate ousting them? History — or this movie — will tell the tale.

Death Alley is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment. You can learn more on the official site and Facebook page.

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 Back moment. 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.