howardjohnson76 Reviews

American Woman (2018)

Pretentious Schlock, and the abused, defective single mother experience.

[6/10 · 4 February 2020]

I lack the energy to properly blast this film, because it has sucked the life out of me. Just another fabricated tragedy, designed to inspire guilt because you're not a poor white trash single mother (grand mother) with a murdered daughter, abusive boyfriends, a cheating husband, and so on. When the movie isn't playing out like a commercial full of abused dogs, it's completely absurd. Not only is she a lousy mother, she's a lousy grand mother/surrogate mother for her son/grandson. Did you know that when the cops find out what happened to your missing daughter a decade later, they don't tell you what happened, you have to harass the killer's wife to get an interview with the killer in prison? Or that they don't have you identify the remains, and you don't have a funeral, instead they take you to the burial spot and hold up the 'Do Not Cross' Police barrier tape so you can wallow in the shallow muddy grave where the remains were uncovered? Sure, that could happen.

Once again faith placed in IMDBs reviews and ratings was misplaced and my trust was abused. If only there was a system in place to prevent every extra, and production assistant's nephew from giving a crap movie a 8-10 star review and claims of being a "powerful character driven drama". Not sure why I'm not rating this lower, it doesn't deserve 6 stars, and the false positive reviews certainly could use a reality check.

Donnybrook (2018)

An intensely vapid journey into misunderstanding poor white trash and the meth head experience

[1/10 · 24 January 2020]

Someone clearly forgot that movies are supposed to be entertaining. Pretentious crap from a creative team completely out of touch with reality. Sure, there are pathetic meth head people with no futures in this world, but they seldom look like sculpted beautiful actors. The plot, dialog, acting, etc is so bleak, this movie is as deep as watching the TV while it's unplugged. I suppose you can insert your own narrative and try to say it's confounding, excellent art, like a choose your own adventure book, but ultimately this is a movie with zero relatable or realistic characters. It plods along for what seems like an eternity, never reaching any satisfaction. It'll make you pause the film and check the IMDB rating, review the Wikipedia synopsis, and question whether you'll even want to finish the film. Perhaps there is gold at the end of this rainbow, but the sweet release of silence after turning off this tripe is it's own reward.

Pure crap. I'd give it ZERO stars for being unwatchable, if IMDB allowed for that.

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

A less than perfect film that hasn't aged well

[5/10 · 11 January 2020]

Other reviewers seem to enjoy this movie, so I have to assume there was a time this kind of film was acceptable. The sound alone is enough to drive you crazy. Like they are playing the audio over a telephone line and remastering it on a Speak & Spell. The acting is bad. The plot is silly. Baby Hitler is sufficiently creepy for reasons unknown. Simply being a clone of Hitler doesn't make someone a creepy, blood thirsty little whacko.

I really tried to give this movie a chance. I remember seeing parts of this movie and being unimpressed some 25 years ago. Tastes change, so I figured maybe I misjudged a decent film. Well, I went in with low expectations and thought that at any minute things would pick up a bit, and it'd start to get interesting. Half way through I stopped and read the synopsis on Wikipedia to see if I even wanted to continue. I was pretty sure I was wasting my time at this point, but I grit my teeth and watched the rest.

My verdict? This movie is garbage. Garbage pretending to be a mystery/thriller, but ultimately it's garbage.

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019)

Wait, wut?

[1/10 · 29 December 2019]

Saw this was coming on the tv, thought I'd change the channel, but then why not give it a chance? Well, here I am an hour and a half later, and I have NO IDEA what is going on. All these little creepy animated things are running around being creepy. Things are exploding and crashing and falling down like one of them Transformer movies. I don't even know man. I guess maybe you have to be a fan?

This is the kind of movie that makes you want to cancel HBO.

The Aeronauts (2019)

Mediocre movie even without the offensive revisionism

[3/10 · 26 December 2019]

This could have been an interesting, and entertaining movie. But it was tedious to sit through and boring. After sitting through it, only to find out after that they gave credit for someone's real life accomplishment to a poorly acted fictional female... Why did this story need to be told?

Mine (II) (2016)

Boring

[1/10 · 28 March 2019]

This movie sucks.

Sucks.

Sucks.

Sucks.

A Fabio and Fabio Film indeed.