In short: Hell Girl (2019)

An impressively annoying group of ghost hunters who really double down on the greed by having an Internet show, getting paid for their “services” by the haunted, and being scam artists without the art, are hired on by the owner (Tom Sizemore as always wearing the facial expression appropriate for a guy who is only ever in garbage anymore) of a place that once was a mine, and a bordello, and is an assemblage of cabins now (or something) to exorcise the place (or something). The bordello-mine-cabin-park is haunted indeed – there’s a nasty little girl ghost, an undead MILF (the film’s term), and a lot of strange crap going on.

Even though the supernatural entities have pity on the audience and eventually start killing off the idiots whose lame soap opera nonsense and horrible jokes the viewer has endured for what feels like hours, none of the survivors think about leaving until the final act. But then, this takes place in a world where the lone cop around doesn’t call in assistance when she encounters murders, ghosts and annoying ghost hunters, or at least attempts to get dead bodies to a medical examiner (or vice versa) but rather hangs around and teams up with said ghost hunters, until we finally get to the completely nonsensical final act.

On the positive side, said final act is certainly the film’s highlight because it replaces the standard nonsense of the most boring mediocre horror low budget fare presented before with random bullshit mythology about demons, children birthed as ten year olds from the wombs of dead women, and plot twists that must have sounded good in somebody’s head, breathing the blessedly blighted air of the kind of irrationality you would have encountered in an early 80s Italian horror film. Unfortunately, getting to the final act is a bit of a drag, full of bad acting that’s annoying instead of fun, writing that is the wrong kind of stupid (but at least plenty of that ) to be actually entertaining, direction that undercuts an air of vague professionalism by moments of atrocious staging, and an editing job that also looks professional if boring for most of the time but then inexplicably seems to be missing half scenes, reaction shots and important transitions.


It’s tough going until it finally becomes pretty watchable, is what I’m saying, but at least you can’t blame the film for being too mediocre to be enjoyable. It’s really much too stupid for that.

Films Make A Post: When the kidding stops...the killing starts!

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014): The second and fortunately last of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films – again directed by Marc Webb – doubles down on most of the flaws of the first film. So there’s a screenplay made out of many bits and pieces that very often go nowhere and bloat the film to a run-time of nearly two and a half hours for no good reason whatsoever, character motivations that egregiously follow the needs of the script, surprisingly mediocre special effects for a film of this type and budget, so many nagging details that either just don’t work or don’t work in the places where the film puts them, too many villains for the thin script or Webb’s personality-deprived direction to handle, and so on and so forth, until the whole thing turns into a confused slog.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014): Doug Liman’s adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s brilliantly titled “All You Need Is Kill” is good enough to satisfy even the needs of a Tom Cruise hater like me. It does help that the old placenta eater is teamed up with the generally and specifically lovely Emily Blunt, as well as that the film early on uses Cruise’s slimy image for its own needs for a bit. Liman also gets a decent performance out of Cruise, even managing to put a lid on the actor’s often distracting vanity (cinematically useless heroic poses usually being to Cruise what vaseline on the camera lens was to aging Joan Crawford).

The script uses the good old time loop (not invented by Groundhog Day, by the way, as much as I like all parts of that film not Andie McDowell) structure for a fun, fast, in the early proceedings darkly funny military SF adventure of highest entertainment value. The old SF reader in me wants to decry the lack of actual substance, and my politics the film’s inability to even think of any way to solve problems but violence. However, that’s really asking of what at its core is a clever and fun adventure movie with CGI monsters to be something it isn’t trying to do while ignoring it is rather brilliant at what it does do.


Atomica (2017): Dagen Merrill’s – nominally SF – thriller is certainly well meant: it is pleasantly serious in tone, obviously believes in character as the basis for plot and clearly tries very hard. Unfortunately, it’s just not very effective at being a thriller. There are few actual surprises, and while the writing certainly is serious and character-based, it is also just not very interesting and never becomes gripping or exciting in any way, shape, or form. Visually, the film suffers from pretty bland warehouse-style sets, and direction that never chooses anything but the most obvious way to shoot any given scene. It’s certainly not a bad film, but I find it hard to find much more than theoretical praise for it either.

In short: The Relic (1997)

Tough times in a Chicago museum: a pair of crates full of leaves and a South American relic turn out to be rather dangerous deliveries. Soon a strange monster is on the rampage. The investigating cop, Lt. D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore), would probably be competent enough to avoid a particularly high body count if he had his way, but there’s a party for the mayor and the big spending contributors of the museum in the works that just can’t be postponed.

So soon it’s on D’Agosta and evolutionary biologist Dr. Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) to protect the One Percent from being eaten by a monster. I’d be rooting for the monster, if our heroes weren’t so damn likeable.

For reasons only known to professional critics, Peter Hyams’s adaptation of a novel by bestseller factory Preston & Child, has something of a bad reputation but for a lover of the classic monster movie, this thing’s actually pretty wonderful. The pacing might be a little off in the film’s first hour or so, with slightly (but only slightly) too much time spent on things not monstrous, yet once the real monster rampage starts, it’s a particularly good one, expertly paced, and full of great moments of suspense and mildly weird exposition (that’s a good thing in this type of film). The monster, a Stan Winston creation, holds up very well too, with Hyams taking great care to only ever show the curious yet effective creation in (slimy) bits and pieces.

And, unlike your usual 50s monster movie, the film does put a bit of effort into making its characters likeable, giving Sizemore and Miller enough material to work with to create two characters we for once don’t want to become monster fodder, leaving it to a working class guy and a female scientist to save the day. The Relic gets extra bonus points from me for keeping Miller’s character competent and relevant throughout without needing to turn her into an action heroine or regressing into turning her into the object to be rescued. Why, there isn’t even a romance between her and Sizemore!

Add to that Linda Hunt and James Whitmore (who just happens to have been in the best US monster movie ever made, Them!) doing their respective things in minor roles, and I have real difficulty to see what I’m supposed to dislike about The Relic.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,giant monsters,peter hyams,penelope ann miller,tom sizemore,linda hunt,james whitmore

In short: The Intruders (2015)

Warning: spoilers are a fact of life!

I have a terrible confession to make: I don’t loathe PG-13 horror movies and thrillers and their sisters and brothers with the burning fire of a thousand suns as all good horror fans are supposed to do. In fact, I not just don’t mind them; some of them, I even downright enjoy. Of course, there’s a bit of the quality of an assumed taste to this particular genre. Or rather, these films, dear long-time horror fan, aren’t actually made for an audience with a lot of genre sophistication – and neither for one that can’t live without huge amounts of blood and gore or metaphorical depth. These films, I suggest, are really the replacement of the classic TV horror movie, at least that part of the canon of classic TV horror nostalgic horror fans do not like to speak rather highly of – horror films and thrillers one might be able to watch with one’s grandma and genre films parents of a nervous disposition might allow their teenage kids to watch. Now, if this kind of audience actually still exists today (are there really people who don’t know the most basic genre tropes?) is a different question, but I didn’t make my market research roll, so I don’t have an answer to that one.

Adam Massey’s Canadian produced The Intruders is a case in point for what these films tend to be: a former Disney kid (Miranda Cosgrove, who is not unexpectedly a perfectly decent actress) in the lead, character actors like Donal Logue and Tom Sizemore in supporting roles, and a script that really seems to be written for an audience that has no clue about the old “He’s been inside the house all along” trope, setting up red herrings so obvious my grandmother (and yeah, I really tested it) doesn’t fall for them, making some decently melodramatic noises about mental illness and loss (oh, if only that part of the film and the rest of the plot were connected by more than the mere concept of mental illness), and constructing serviceable thriller scenes.

Not surprisingly, the whole affair feels decidedly on the cozy side to me, which is a bit strange when you keep in mind that the whole idea of a (crazy, murderous) stranger living secretly in your home with you is just plain creepy however you put it, but is most probably a result of the film’s inherent PG-13-ness, where you can be sure that things will turn out alright for everyone, and where nobody involved is actually ever aiming for hitting its audience where it hurts.

And if you go into The Intruders expecting not more than some very traditional scares – though I have to commend the film for the nearly complete absence of jump scares – and just as well-worn thriller tropes, I honestly think there’s fun to be had here. At the very least, there’s quite a bit of filmmaking competence on display, and while that may sound like I’m damning with faint praise again, it’s just the right thing for those times in life when you don’t actually want to be too disturbed or very excited by a film.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,in short,adam massey,miranda cosgrove,donal logue,tom sizemore