S_Soma Reviews

Lost Ollie (2022)

An ode to misery and loss.

[8/10 · 1 September 2022]

To reiterate, this review is literally dripping with spoilers, so DO NOT READ if you want to discover stuff on your own.

You've probably noticed that I, like most of the people around here, have given LOST OLLIE a very high rating.

In my case, this is a side effect of my movie rating system. I don't actually have to LIKE a movie in order for it to get a high rating from me. This peculiarity doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I'll spare you the boring details.

Honestly, I don't like LOST OLLIE at all. I am astonished about how most people sing its praises when, to my way of thinking, it's a movie about relentless, soul crushing misery and insufferable loss. I can't believe that most of the reviewers around here saw the same story I did.

EVERY major character, and most of the minor ones, endure horrific loss, even to the point that it drives an otherwise good and loving character insane with rage, morphing into the villain of the movie. In the end, considering what he went through, I had to feel bad for the villain in spite of his monstrous behavior. Poor sad bastard.

I wonder at so many reviewers seeing this movie as happy and uplifting. It just isn't.

Ollie thinks he was abandoned by his little boy, Billy. (More on this later...).

Billy and his father lose their mother/wife to cancer, and there's even a scene where Billy and his dad are waiting around for her to die.

The mother goes to her grave having to worry if her husband and son will be able to manage without her since she is keenly aware of their emotional issues. After all, she's the one who's been holding the family together all along. What will happen when she's gone?

Zozo, once a kind, giving, generous character loses his beloved (what? Girlfriend?) Nina and literally spends decades searching for her, becoming hateful, twisted and vengeful even to the innocent along the way, and his reward at the end is to find out that his beloved Nina eventually disintegrated (fell apart) with age because he couldn't find her. And immediately following this revelation, he gets run through with a cocktail saber in the back from his only remaining friend (Rosy) who sadly sees that he has to be put down like a rabid dog. The last we see of Zozo and his friend Rosy is the pair of them, apparently dead, drifting away down a gutter, drowned. A truly nightmarish death scene.

Why did Zozo and Nina hang around in the abandoned amusement park when they easily could have run away at any time? The movie makes it clear that mobility is an option for them. Oh, no, they wait around for who knows how long to be split up and auctioned off and separated from each other forever.

And why did Ollie think his friend Billy had abandoned him? Well, because he did. He fairly quickly regretted doing it, but his motive was being embarrassed and ashamed to have a homemade plush rabbit toy. Bizarrely, although children throughout the movie are capable of "seeing" the fact that certain dolls and similar toys are "alive", somehow NONE of the kids in Billy's own classroom CAN. This causes the classroom bully to pick on Billy about it because it's just a wimpy kid with a dolly toy to him. Have to think the scene might've played out differently if EVERYBODY in the class, like all the kids outside of the class, could see that Ollie was a magically living toy.

And so on ad nauseam.

And much of the story doesn't make any sense to me. Fairytales are my favorite genre and I can readily accept the magic of toys and dolls coming to life.

But even stories of magic have rules that must be obeyed and this structural requirement for a good story is mostly expressed by story consistency.

There's no consistency in LOST OLLIE. Sometimes the magical dolls have to hold perfectly still so adults don't see their magical nature, and at other times here's a whole parade of magical dolls walking along a city sidewalk so densely packed with people they're having to dodge their human legs, and yet nobody bats an eye. Huh?

Near the end we find out that Ollie hasn't actually been gone for just a day or two, but has actually been missing for decades. We first discover this when OLLIE finally makes it back home and the place is literally falling down, full of dead leaves and broken furniture. And yet it's still full of Billy's family belongings, as if they just got up and walked out one day. Important family photographs and papers and such just left in place and the home abandoned. What? What on earth happened here? What exactly was it that happened to Ollie such that he didn't know how much time had passed?

We are led to believe that there is treatment for the mother's cancer, although it is extremely expensive. Rather than go into debt to save her life, she insists that she just dies and the father and Billy just go along with it. Who does that? My wife's family pauperized themselves trying to save my mother-in-law in the same situation. But these people are like, you're too expensive to try to save mom, so off you go.

The kind of-sort of "happy ending" did not mitigate the quantity of loss and suffering throughout this movie. This is a monstrous, brutal movie composed primarily of misery and loss. But it is well-made.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

It's only a werewolf movie if you don't understand it.

[10/10 · 17 May 2022]

No doubt you'll have noticed that I gave THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW 10/10 which, I am sure, calls for an explanation. I rate movies on two simple, subjective criteria:

1. Is it a high-quality movie? In other words, does the direction, the story, the music, the production design, the acting and so on all smack of high quality workmanship?

2. Does the movie give a strong sense of actually being the movie its makers INTENDED it to be? I.e., did they do a good job making their movie, or does the movie seem fragmented, schizophrenic and unfocused.

Based on these criteria, THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW is just obviously a 10/10. I don't give these rankings easily; I've done a zillion reviews and if you check them out you'll see that 10/10 ratings are few and far between.

I absolutely DO NOT rate movies on whether they are "new" or "novel" or whether or not I "approve" of the subject matter. At this point in the timeline of human entertainment, demanding that every production be something brand-new is idiotic. If you hold out for that sort of thing, you're not going to be seeing many movies. Whether it's hamburgers or clothing or smart phones or movies, it's really only reasonable to hope for excellent executions of what is essentially variations on a theme. Nothing new under the sun.

I have to say there are a lot of people around here who have completely missed the point with respect to THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW, even as regards something so fundamental as what the movie is ABOUT. Over and over again I see the movie described as a "werewolf movie". Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a moronic thing to say because the movie doesn't actually HAVE any werewolves in it. Not a one. And that's a fact. Period.

Simply, obviously, inarguably, and unequivocally, THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW is nothing other than a murder mystery. It would seem to me that a person would have to have NOT watched the movie to NOT get that, but this blunder seems to be the case around here more often than not.

The PRIMARY subject matter of THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW is the inexorable and inescapable gradual breakdown of the second-in-command sheriff lead character (and son of the Sheriff), John Marshall, played by Jim Cummings, while he attempts to keep his life together while solving what is essentially a serial murder mystery. The type of psychological and emotional pressure he's under, and under the strain of which he inevitably collapses, even to the point where he describes his behaviour as a nervous breakdown, would have crushed the strongest of men, and Marshall is not the strongest of men.

Watching the progress of Marshall's deterioration is seriocomic, vacillating between tragically sad and hysterically funny. In the end, he never really gets a win, if you think about it, and loses nearly everything in spite of his sincerity and how hard he tries to give everything his all. He is a very tragic character. In the final scene, if you watch him carefully, he literally just tries to keep his head down and keep moving forward.

It is very popular for horror and science fiction movies and television series nowadays, in a formula designed to, apparently, capture the broadest possible audiences, to attempt to mix family-drama elements with science fiction/horror. This almost uniformly leads to outlandish juxtapositions where, I don't know, flying saucers and space aliens are flying around thick and fast while primary characters struggle with marriage infidelity and daddy issues. It's generally appalling.

THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW is a nearly flawless expression of a similar idea except that it's perfectly balanced, completely legitimate and gives no sign of being heavy-handed or forced. The entire thing unfolds cleanly and organically.

In my opinion, it's almost a perfect example of moviemaking art and skill as I would define it. It's only because the movie does such a stellar job of hiding its plot element cards that so many people seem to go right off the rails in understanding the movie. PARTICULARLY irritating is the fact that so many people are drawn to the movie EXPECTING the formulaic tropes of a werewolf movie and come away disappointed and uncomprehending when it actually turns out to be something completely different.

And most assuredly, it isn't "odd", "quirky" or "hard to define" or any of that other nonsense. People only say this because they can't get away from the fact that they THINK it's a werewolf picture.

Kotaro Lives Alone (2022)

Unexpectedly good

[9/10 · 20 March 2022]

Before you read the balance of my review, which has some venomously negative comments to make, please note the 9/10 rating.

In general, I absolutely detest anime. From its el cheapo animation style done in threes and fours to its utterly moronic "plot lines" and imbecilic character designs to its at-best lame character development, I almost uniformly find little to like, let alone admire.

Occasionally, VERY occasionally, someone rises above anime's cheap foundations and produces something of better quality with some genuine artistic value, but it's very rare.

KOTARO LIVES ALONE does generally suffer from MOST of anime's par-for-the-course, customary failings.

Fortunately, even accidentally, the usual insane-plot-line-taken-direct-from-a-delirium-tremens really only happens around one element in the KOTARO LIVES ALONE story. A four-year-old child, with the informed knowledge and acquiescence of everyone in the show (just about), lives more or less entirely on his own in his own apartment and, for the most part, taking care of himself.

While getting this particular point past your willing suspension of disbelief filter is a big ask, it's just about the only real requirement to buy into the story. And, not so long ago, only a handful of decades, it was not at all unusual to see children starving to death in the streets of Japan, even in plain sight of daily commuters. Watch GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES if you don't believe me. So completely emancipated (or simply largely ignored) four year olds may be a stretch in today's world, but there's at least SOMETHING of a precedent for it.

The secret sauce for the entire series is the emotionally overwhelming noble nature of the titular character, Kotaro. Constructed from an all but magical mixture of naïveté, apparently brilliant intellect, and an iron-will determination to remain honorable in all things, Kotaro cuts a figure not entirely unlike Cyrano de Bergerac, just replace the big nose with the intrinsic weaknesses of a four-year-old for a tragic flaw, and those characters are a fairly close match. He is a character impossible not to love and who cannot help but inspire those around him to rise above their own feet of clay. If an orphan four-year-old can do it, then why not me?

Personally, I'd be less surprised to find a rare orchid sprouting from a solid block of concrete then such an endearing fairytale from the barren wasteland of anime, but there you have it.

I guess magic is where you find it.

The Seance (II) (2021)

A Christmas Miracle

[5/10 · 30 December 2021]

THE SÉANCE is a Gravitas Ventures production. And all that entails.

To ME, it entails two things. Firstly, as the Gravitas Ventures logo slithers off screen, I look for the ridges and troughs of the slug slime it leaves behind and secondly, I have to prepare myself to view a movie that is unconscionably execrable.

So imagine how shocked I was, shocked I say, when THE SÉANCE actually DIDN'T make me reflexively void my bowels. It was, and I gag as I say this, actually... kind of... good? Which in this case means not terrible.

Do remember that it was, after all, a Gravitas Ventures picture, and even though I actually enjoyed it, all of the boilerplate contract terms and conditions of a Gravitas Ventures abomination still apply. That is, bargain-basement production values, color balancing that makes you want to bathe, sound design where the soundtrack drowns out the dialogue, a single location set for the entire picture, and so on. Yep, it's all there.

And yet, though it astonishes me to admit it, the story was somewhat interesting and the acting didn't trigger retching. The two principles who were the only people on screen about 80% of the time, were actually, dare I say it, pretty good. The male lead even managed to be a little charming. He might go on to perform in real movies someday.

THE SÉANCE did go on one scene too long and ended with a clunk, but still, I actually would call it worth watching.

I'm viewing the whole experience as a Christmas miracle. But be careful, Gravitas Ventures putting out a decent picture could be a sign that Armageddon is upon us.

Risen (2021)

Apparently the best alien weapon is to rely on human incompetence.

[3/10 · 20 August 2021]

When all is said and done, RISEN is ultimately an invaders from space movie. It is not the best rendition of this genre that I've seen, but it's certainly a reasonably competent execution.

Unlike the INDEPENDENCE DAY style of invasion consisting of overwhelming force, advanced technology and well armed alien invaders, RISEN is the "seeding" approach that starts small and vulnerable and grows to irresistibility before we earthlings figure out what's going on.

At the time of this writing there appear to be a lot of negative reviews regarding RISEN. I would contend that RISEN is a "good" movie (whatever that means) that garners a lot of viewer negativity because the success of the aliens in taking over our planet primarily derives from the efforts of a human traitor inadvertently supported by a generally widespread incompetence on the part of those authorities that would nominally be tasked with protecting humankind from such things.

There are undeniably some weak plot points in the picture and they tend to be a little infuriating because the alien's success significantly turns on these weak plot points which is intrinsically annoying to a viewer.

The events of the movie are mostly about what turns out to be the third attempt at colonization by the aliens. The first one is caught and thwarted by the Americans, and the second attempt is caught and thwarted, although kept secret, by the Russians (employing their signature shocking violence).

The third attempt, the subject of RISEN, largely succeeds because of the (somewhat) "unwitting" assistance of a traitorous woman who was "altered" and "programmed", somewhat by accident, during the course of the first failed attempt decades previously. During the course of the movie, we find out how much she has been aiding the invasion process literally all during the years of her life.

As an example of a weak plot point, one of the things the female traitor does is feed the aliens information about the nature of our planet and its location. If you think about it, this doesn't make any sense. Firstly, she appears to be using a regular radiofrequency radio and not some super advanced communication device because other people can hear her doing it on their receivers. So why didn't we track her down at the time? The aliens must've been fairly close by or else how would they have received a radio signal in anything like a usable time frame; why would the aliens need information from her? Their first attempt had already been made on the planet BEFORE they infected her as a PART of that first attempt. This suggests they already know all about earth and its location.

There are many more such easily recognizable plot holes. Enumerating them here would be more boring than I have already been.

The traitorous woman character spends most of the movie giving vacuous stares in lieu of acting, slack-jawed and mouth hanging open. There is literally NOTHING engaging about her and, speaking for myself, I had an overwhelming desire to give her a good thumping with a crowbar through the entire picture even BEFORE her thoroughly traitorous nature was fully revealed. Add that to the fact that the aliens were only successful because this traitor was allowed to operate without oversight or review by any authorities, and a movie with otherwise good quality production values becomes a disappointment.

RISEN is a worthwhile watch for science fiction fans but make sure you bring along your desktop stress-reliever toy with you because the movie will irritate.

Claw (2021)

Self-destructed at the finish line.

[5/10 · 7 July 2021]

A note about my rating system: because I rate on a highly subjective, relativistic scale, virtually any movie can achieve a 10/10 rating with me. After all, nothing prevents even the very cheapest of movies from telling a great story. A limited budget and amateur actors needn't cripple a movie in the hands of enthusiastic and devoted makers. And so on.

Just as uninspired workmanship can flush a giant budget down the toilet, so can talent and enthusiasm carry the day for the poverty-stricken. You'd be surprised how your old aunt Mabel and best pal Cooter can reach for the stars on their Walmart lunch break last Tuesday. A 10/10 is within the grasp of any movie that cares enough to rise above itself and reach for it.

And, sadly, it's precisely because of this truth that CLAW was so disappointing. For about 90% of the movie, CLAW was sailing along, high and proud, and was well on its way to getting at least a 9/10 and had the potential of even a top 10/10.

And then CLAW literally self-destructed right at the finish line. The writer/director (mostly the same person) somehow lost control or simply went insane and CLAW transmogrified back into the moldy pumpkin from whence it came. Somehow, watching the movie, which had been doing so well, suddenly sprout warts out of nowhere was more disturbing than if it had simply been garbage all along.

I can't be certain, of course, but the impression that I got was that the writer/director couldn't figure out how to end the movie. And so we got a cheesy ending feint of a dream sequence followed by an even worse dream-echo sequence where a full-grown Tyrannosaurus rex just shows up out of nowhere and peeks in through the window. Rawr.

For most of the movie, CLAW had a sort of original TREMORS buddy/monster movie kind of vibe going for it. Structurally, it was almost identical to TREMORS where we have an unjustifiably-present monster effectively just thrown on stage (a premise you're just supposed to accept out of goodwill, apparently) and then the bulk of the movie is our unlikely duo attempting to come to terms and survive in a remote location, with no hope of help, while creatively fending off this monster that wants to eat them.

In CLAW, the two leads did a surprisingly high quality acting job and were very engaging/believable. The simple setting, premise and chase-scene sensibilities in combination with engaging and believable leads was working an excellent chemistry, and then, without warning, the whole thing just took a turn for the stupid.

What a shame.

Katla (2021)

Nordic noir at its "best".

[2/10 · 26 June 2021]

Before you can even HOPE to "understand" a show like KATLA you must first come to grips with the concept of "an acquired taste".

An acquired taste is any form of "enjoyment" that no sane person would EVER actually enjoy upon their initial experience with it. A person must first FORCE themselves to partake of this experience repeatedly until a sufficient number of brain cells, which are so reasonably and strenuously objecting to it, are killed off, enabling a person to then pretend that they "like" this experience.

Examples of such things are quite common. Surstromming is probably the best example, which is as intrinsically Nordic as KATLA. Surstromming is essentially a can of rotting fish that you're actually supposed to eat, although some people try to be polite and refer to it as being "fermented". Even amongst people who "like" it, the can has to be cracked in an open, outside space, away from any area where it is intended to be consumed, and then it's also best to eat it outside as well. The trick is to try to eat it without first catching a whiff of it. And good luck with that. Its fragrance alone is known to be capable of moving against the breeze.

Smoking, professional wrestling, Nickelback music, and so on, are all excellent examples of acquired tastes.

Well, KATLA (which is an example of Nordic noir, as some have accurately pointed out) is like any of these examples of acquired tastes (and it's especially closely related to surstromming, if you ask me).

In this context, it all makes perfect sense if you think about it. As a people, Nordic folk are world class masters of acquired tastes. From their available food choices to their weather to the grim scenery to the perpetual, numbing cold, Nordic people have to be very adroit at forcibly twisting their minds into accepting the idea that their daily experience of relentless misery is "enjoyment". The only alternatives involve suicide or a descent into madness.

Ergo, KATLA. An "enjoyable" example of Nordic noir.

Castlevania (2017–2021)

Killed the dog. Nope.

[2/10 · 15 May 2021]

Oops.

Series 4, episode 5: casually killed the dog for no good reason in the plot. That's it for me. I'm out.

Without Remorse (II) (2021)

Swell. A Tom Clancy movie guaranteed not to be liked by fans of Tom Clancy.

[3/10 · 5 May 2021]

If you're a big fan of Tom Clancy, (which I don't happen to be but I have read this particular novel as circumstance would have it), then I'm guessing you're not going to like this movie because it bears almost no relationship to the original plot. It does involve guns, lots of shooting, and Russia at least tangentially. But the similarity to the original plot from the book ends there.

This is also one of those movies, in this new age of ours, where it's absolutely unacceptable for a white person to play an ethnic character but it's perfectly fine for an ethnic person to play an historically white character even if it makes no sense relative to the plot line.

To elaborate:

The primary plot of the movie (again, utterly unrelated to the plot of the book...) unfolds as a covert ops operation in Russia. The two primary protagonist characters in the movie, both of which are on the small team of "covert operatives", are both giant African-Americans. One is this enormous towering slab of flexing muscle with a head on top and one is a very stunning and exceptionally statuesque woman.

Apparently it's one of the lesser known techniques of successful covert operations to have some members in the operation stand out like walking klieg lights in order to draw as much attention to the operation as possible. African-Americans constitute 3/100 of 1% of the overall Russian population. They'd probably stand out less while moving around Russia, and draw much less attention, if they each had three heads.

But such is the politically correct world we live in today. What matters is strict adherence to the rules of political correctness. Any coherency in the plot line is just passé.

I don't know. Considering how they completely brutalized the story from one end to the other, I guess picking at this particular nit is just straining at gnats.

Ironically, if the movie had actually followed the original plot line from the book, having a black guy as the lead character would actually have fit perfectly. Go figure.

Things Heard & Seen (2021)

Mostly about nasty, mean people with some ghosts as an afterthought.

[3/10 · 4 May 2021]

Stylistically, there are many different "types" of horror movie plot line. A particularly popular variety is the "people behaving badly" variation. You can think of it as a sort of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" of horror pictures. People alternately raking and clawing away at each other like cats at a scratching post or glaring at each other resentfully, in stony, frozen silence. THINGS HEARD & SEEN is one of these.

Name a vice or a human frailty and mostly that is what this movie is about, only heaped up in large drifts. I actually got the sense that whatever ghosts there were were off in the background, sort of halfheartedly waving, trying to get attention. "Hello? Excuse me? If I could just get the focus here for a moment there's some chains I'd like to rattle and doors I'd like to slam and such like. I beg your pardon? If I could just get a word in edge wise here..."

Literally NONE of the main characters are likable or redeemable. The main antagonist is a liar and a wholesale fraud, he cheats on his wife with college age girls and basically goes off his nut and kills a couple of people, and finally himself, when he can no longer conceal his lies.

The main protagonist, the wife of the liar and fraud, is bulimic (which she sneaks around and lies about), prone to over-drinking, and screws the neighbor boy.

But it's okay that she engages in this behavior, see, because her husband was like, such a loser and mean and stuff to her. Or something. Because all her appalling behavior is HIS fault, in the end she gets to be a light and shining angel-type and the evil husband apparently goes to hell. Or something.

Even Lifetime garbage is lots better than this thing.

Valley of the Kings: The Lost Tombs (2021 TV Special)

Just enough interesting finds to make it worthwhile.

[5/10 · 8 April 2021]

Not terribly long ago I reviewed SECRETS OF THE SAQQARA TOMB. I took the position that it was the worst documentary I'd ever personally experienced, on ancient Egypt or anything else. Based upon the name, I had assumed that it was going to be about the Saqqara tomb. Unfortunately, it was mostly about utterly uninteresting and irrelevant insights on what, for example, diggers think about digging. You know, as diggers. Couldn't care less. It was simply awful.

I suppose one might make a documentary about all the people that work on archaeological digs; there may be something interesting there. When I tune into a documentary about ancient Egyptian tombs I really do expect to get information about ancient Egyptian tombs. I guess I'm narrowminded that way.

THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS: THE LOST TOMBS isn't as bad as all that, but it definitely teeters in that direction. An uncomfortably large percentage of the program is devoted to all things Zahi A. Hawass: how much he wants to make a famous find, how he's always wanted to be a successful archaeologist and blah blah blah. Zahi Hawass has always been obsessed with Zahi Hawass and he perennially seeks to be an archaeological rock star. Unfortunately, a very small bit of him goes a very long way. The show was clearly more focused on what Hawass thinks about everything than it is about this potentially earthshaking find (should he manage to find it): Nefertiti's undiscovered tomb.

Like the Saqqara tomb documentary there is some irrelevant focus on diggers and such like but at least it doesn't overwhelm the entire presentation.

Fortunately, there is just enough interesting findings in the program and enough useful new information that it is definitely worth watching.

Fascinatingly, even though they don't actually find any tombs (although there is some hope that they are on the cusp of finding one at the very end of the program) they do find some very interesting rings oddly mixed in with the general rubble on the valley floor, which I would not have expected.

Overall, Hawass' reasoning as to why he's looking where he is seems legitimate, and there is some tantalizing debris found that would tend to support his theories.

They do find a workers village INSIDE the Valley of the Kings itself which is incredible, and it's pretty much located about where you would think it should be if there is a tomb nearby. VERY exciting.

And most fascinatingly of all (to my nerdy self, anyway) they discuss tracking natural fault lines within nearby rock formations as potential clues to direct them in locating possible tomb sites. The builders of the tombs themselves heavily focused on the natural rock formations in picking their tomb sites and so using the same formations as possible signposts as a searching technique is completely new information for me. Spectacular.

The show does drag on for an hour and a half and should probably have only been the standard 42 minutes typically allocated to an hour show (with advertisements). If the show had been stripped of its human interest crud it would probably have been just right.

The show is worth watching for what dribs and drabs of new information and interesting findings it does squeeze out, but I'd suggest that you record it so you can fast-forward through the irrelevant bits.

What Lies Below (2020)

What lies below? That's the question we all have since this movie doesn't tell us.

[2/10 · 7 April 2021]

In my opinion, "the story is everything". Unless there is something very clear and specific and unusual about a movie that makes it abundantly clear that you SHOULDN'T expect it to have an actual plot line (like it's just a movie version of an opera for example), then it better have a comprehensible and legitimate plot line or else.

In short, WHAT LIES BELOW is an absolute crap movie because it only has a plot line in the vaguest, most tenuous sense of the word.

As a very short synopsis, teenage girl returns from camp to find her mother has started a romance with a man 12 years her junior. Not only does her mother's new beau turn out to be extra creepy, he also turns out to be some sort of, what?, a fish monster? Hell-bent on achieving some sort of procreation with her mother. Things go downhill fast and don't end well for the humans.

Ostensibly, WHAT LIES BELOW is the type of movie that makes the deliberate and intentional storytelling/directorial choice of "leaving some questions unanswered". Of course, this is a well-established and completely recognized stylistic choice. After all, the point in a horror/monster picture is to scare you, and leaving you with some unanswered questions is an excellent method of strongly amplifying the overall sense of unease in the mind of the viewer.

But the execution of such a filmmaking choice has to be carefully crafted and very deliberate or it just makes the movie look sloppy and ill-thought-out. And this is the case with WHAT LIES BELOW. Its unanswered questions are just as likely to stem from plot holes as they are anything intentionally crafted.

One of the questions left unanswered for example, is just what the nature/origin of the fish-monster boyfriend is. Is it from outer space, another dimension, native to the earth or what. You can tell it's okay not to answer this question because it doesn't really matter; the net effect is the same either way. We understand that he's some sort of water monster there to breed with the teenage girl's mother. Do his origins make a substantive difference?

Conversely, the teenage girl successfully calls 911, the authorities know exactly where she is and they are supposedly on the way. And then nothing. What happened? Did the police stop for a burger? Had the police arrived, there was evidence of peculiar goings on literally everywhere, together with another victim apparently still alive UNDERWATER and serving as an ongoing meal for several lampreys.

Come to that, the girl acting as lamprey food was known to be at the remote house where all this was going on, her cell phone trail would have clearly led there, and her father had been expecting her back; did her father just forget she was missing?

Also, in order to move the plot line forward, the daughter engages in extremely unrealistic behavior. The mother's fish-monster boyfriend has engaged in some pretty questionable behavior, such as licking the daughter's menstrual flow from his fingers. The daughter sends her teenage girlfriend upstairs where her mother and her monster boyfriend are to give them what for, and then the daughter just falls asleep, allowing the fish-monster boyfriend a little private time to capture and imprison the daughter's girlfriend. Who would ever fall asleep when your friend has gone upstairs to question your mother and her fish-monster boyfriend? Completely unrealistic. You'd be so fully amped up by this tense situation that you wouldn't be able to fall asleep if your life depended on it. More than likely you would go upstairs in a few minutes yourself, but you sure as heck wouldn't fall asleep.

Certainly WHAT LIES BELOW pegs the meter on creepiness. But it storytelling is lackadaisical and lazy to the point of effrontery. It relies on its creepiness and weirdness to carry the day to the point where it merely becomes a meaningless succession of creepy scenes that portray no coherent plot.

WHAT LIES BELOW doesn't really care about its story. It's content with throwing sexy and/or unsettling images at the viewer and clearly feels a plot line is of little importance.

The Banishing (2020)

The Banishing... of entertainment.

[3/10 · 6 April 2021]

There are many different "styles" of horror. There is body horror, supernatural horror, Lovecraftian monster horror, and alien horror just to name a few, and there are many more.

I'm not sure that it actually has a horror category name, but there seems to be a variation of horror that's largely composed of "people behaving badly", for lack of a better name. Alcoholism, insanity, random emotional clawing going on any time more than one character is on the screen at once, constant bickering and squabbling, mutual distrust amongst all the characters, implied sexual derision, and just general, constant unpleasantness permeating every scene, are all hallmarks of this kind of horror.

You could remove all supernatural elements and the movie would still be an horrific viewing experience. It's practically nothing more than WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF with maybe some ghosts or witches or something, although you can't usually tell whether these supernatural elements aren't simply illusion (because of the insanity part...). Oh, and it's usually a requirement that everything be very dark, as in you have to watch it at night or you can't actually see anything on the screen because there's no light.

The experience of watching this movie is like a prolonged aversion conditioning session.

It is into this unpleasant category that THE BANISHING neatly falls.

To try to give the plot a little supernatural street cred, there is a setting back story where some perverted Christian cult was headquartered thereabouts who believed that torturing people cleansed them of sin and brought them closer to God. This (naturally) sort of saturated the house and surrounds with supernatural nastiness. Or something. This has the effect of driving people insane and separating loved ones one from another. This at least somewhat explains all the unpleasantly bad behavior amongst the characters; usually no explanation is given in this kind of movie.

We experience a red herring happy ending where the chief source of the "haunting and visions" is uncovered, and the bones of the wronged parties are given a "decent Christian burial".

And here I must confess a bit of confusion as I am not entirely certain that I understood the true ending. The newly consecrated and buried bones are dug up, some of them are placed in the small catacomb associated with the area, and some are carried off to Nazi Germany for some purpose not actually specified in the movie that I could detect. A comment is made to the effect that "our plan worked; the girl found the bones". Shortly after this the movie comes to an end.

In the entire movie, during one of the incessant arguments between characters, there was only one vague reference to the evil priest character having some connection to Nazis that I can recall. Beyond this, up until this ending scene, Nazis had not been involved.

I cannot speak with confidence, but I THINK this is to suggest that these bones were desired by the Nazis as part of their infamous occult obsessions, based upon what I see in this scene tied together with my coincidental arcane knowledge of this very subject. But I can't see how anyone without this background understanding would be able to understand this final scene at all, which would be a major hole in this movie in my opinion.

Personally, I'd recommend giving this movie a pass. Some people are giving THE BANISHING credit for being a subtle "slow burn", but it really isn't. It's just slow, exceptionally unpleasant to watch in a very self-flagellating sort of way, and sorely lacking in any entertainment value. Any sense of horror that you feel doesn't have anything to do with any supernatural entertainment; it's just natural discomfort at being in the presence of an entirely obnoxious collection of characters for the entire run time of the movie.

Lastly, I have absolutely no idea how the movie got the name THE BANISHING. Who was banished? Why were they banished? What banishing even happened to anyone?

Chaos Walking (2021)

Why not just shoot the dog during the opening credits so we don't have to wait for it?

[1/10 · 4 April 2021]

I realize that my review will get nothing but negative feedback, and that's okay. It's happened before. I'm willing to take the hit in order to push my point.

CHAOS WALKING is one of those movies where a fairly sweet, utterly defenseless, terrified little dog is killed in a brutal way simply for the purposes of attempting to manipulate our feelings about a villain. Yes, it has THAT trope in it.

I'm not an animal rightist by any stretch of the imagination. But tropes are always a clear indication of a crappy movie vomited up from a lazy story composed of exceptionally lame writing and utterly devoid of actual creativity. And needlessly killing a harmless little dog because the writer was just too inept to find a legitimate way to pull our emotions other than by the hackneyed use of this clumsy cudgel is an expression of the lamest unforgivable trope of all.

The presence of this trope in this movie tells you everything you need know about its level of quality storytelling.

The Irregulars (2021)

There was too much truth in my first review so they made me rewrite it...

[3/10 · 2 April 2021]

So, if you started watching a show and it claimed that its setting was Jupiter and all the parts were played by squids, and it became readily apparent instantly that neither of those things were true, what would your reaction be?

My reaction to such a thing would be that this show is stupid, misleading and at best confusing. Why would you claim those things and then go out of your way to make it abundantly clear that NONE of those things were actually TRUE?

Of course, doing such a thing is not some sort of great crime and there is nothing especially egregious about misrepresenting the fact that your show involves squids on Jupiter. But what is the value of doing such a thing? What does it do for the show?

And so it is with THE IRREGULARS, at least from my perspective. It claims to have got Sherlock Holmes in it and that it is set in Victorian England, even though it is patently obvious that neither of those things are true.

What was the point of doing that? The only thing that I can suggest is that here is some sort of bizarre attempt to rewrite established history with a big slathering of politically correct paint. That struck me as especially pathetic since it REALLY doesn't work. It just looks like what it is.

What really made this ridiculous way of telling a story stand out as supremely sad was the fact, if you think about it, you could make this show EXACTLY the same with the same plot, script and actors and have it be perfectly fine. Just neglect to call it Victorian England and have a "great detective" named something else other than Sherlock and his sidekick Watson. Then everything works and there's no cognitive dissonance when the show stupidly and clumsily flies in the face of reality/actual history.

The desire to be politically correct is so thickly spread onto this show that it actually becomes the leading character.

The only things "Sherlock Holmes-like" and "Victorian England-esque" in THE IRREGULARS were those words themselves. How absurd.

Unfortunately, once this show's maker's got into the habit of attempting to restructure reality wholesale, they also made other stupid mistakes. I especially liked a street urchin referencing "clones" during the Victorian England era before the word had even been coined and anachronisticly set against burning-flame footlights.

If it hadn't been for such clumsy mistakes and attempted manipulations, THE IRREGULARS would've been a passably good show.

Dune Drifter (2020)

It's small and broken, but still good. Yeah... Still good.

[8/10 · 19 March 2021]

Based on the prevalence of excessively negative reviews of this movie around here, I would say that a lot of the reviewers are seriously lacking in perspective.

Without doubt, DUNE DRIFTER is a low-end, low budget sci-fi picture and does suffer from many of the ailments that naturally result from that status.

But it's simply unfair to be so completely down on this movie. It does genuinely rise above its circumstances and tries to tell a passable story with what it has to work with.

It is very easy to point out its readily apparent flaws, not the least of which is its name. Unfortunately, the name DUNE DRIFTER really does get everything off on the wrong foot, sad to say. It's clearly one of those movie titles that some management weenie has chosen in hopes of glomming extra attention through a mistaken association with the legendary Dune stories. It does a disservice to this poor movie because it effectively coats it with cinematic marketing slime even before the opening credits. It's a much better movie than this sort of appalling behavior would suggest. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the reviewers were angry at this movie before they even saw it because they recognized this behavior.

The comparisons to ENEMY MINE are legitimate; it's basically the same story in most respects except there is no friendship that blossoms. It's total warfare from beginning to end. The comparison is so close, as a matter of fact, there's no point in giving much of a synopsis. Space battle, two damaged combatant ships crash land on nearby planet, fight for survival ensues, human wins over execrable aliens and departs. The end.

I would be lying if I claimed it was all good. More than a few low-budget cinematic sins are present. Our heroine has a blaster that only irritates the enemy (yes, it actually has THAT trope...). Human space ship parts and alien spaceship parts are interchangeable, apparently. Endless amounts of screen time are devoted to characters doing almost nothing while trudging across desolate wastelands. And the list goes on, unfortunately.

But basic fairness requires the granting of credit where credit is due. A movie should be judged by the realities of what it ever COULD have been given the circumstances. Given its limiting realities, it probably rates a 7 or 8 within its caste.

If you doubt me, before watching DUNE DRIFTER, I strongly recommend you go watch JURASSIC GALAXY. You should really get a firm grasp on what kind of garbage low budget sci-fi CAN be before you pass judgment on DUNE DRIFTER.

It has its warts and zits, but it's still worth watching for all that.

Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb (2020)

Feeeeelings. Nothin' more than Feeeeelings...

[2/10 · 29 October 2020]

Probably 60% or 65% of my video watching time is spent on documentaries. It's a fascinating world and there's just so little time and so much to know, as they say. Ancient history is right up there near the top of my interests. How can a documentary that covers something like new discoveries regarding ancient Egypt be anything but absolutely spellbinding? Well, just watch SECRETS OF THE SAQQARA TOMB and you'll find out. I would not have thought it possible.

I've been looking forward to this particular documentary for about a month. A large, undisturbed tomb from four thousand five hundred years ago? Holy moly, let me at it. This is going to be epic! I'm probably going to need a ball peen hammer to pound down all the goosebumps!

Turns out not. Instead, we got this crap.

SECRETS OF THE SAQQARA TOMB is The. Worst. documentary on ancient Egypt I have ever seen, bar none.

My expectation was that the program would be about the Saqqara tomb. Mostly it turns out that the Saqqara tomb is relegated to being the set or backdrop for where we can learn about what a dirt digger thinks while digging dirt and how his son is going to be a digger, too. And then there's this guy who rides his motorcycle to the excavation every day with his boss on the back seat and how interesting it is to ride from the city center out to the desert. Why, we even get to spend a lot of time riding along with him. And his boss. Gosh, I learned a lot about the Saqqara tomb from that. I learned, for example, that people who don't know how to make documentaries should be forcibly restrained from making documentaries.

Then there were the incessant appalling flights of fantasy where they pick up a fragment of bone or a pottery shard or a statuette and wax eloquent on what all of this "might mean" or all the things they "might learn" from it. No ACTUAL learning or genuine meaning, mind you.

In attempting to glean SOMETHING about what would seem to be a phenomenal find such as the Saqqara tomb, I get nothing listening to a digger wax philosophical about his life or hearing the foreman talk about how being a foreman is the family business, handed down father to son. Literally. Absolutely. Nothing. What. So. Ever.

Turning a mooing herd of grad students loose on this discovery would have yielded far, far more informative insights and information than this Keystone Kops version of what was supposed to be an archaeological excavation.

I suppose there are probably lots of people who would be interested in a show entitled "Deep Thoughts on The Meaning of Life According to a Glump of Random People at an Archaeological Dig", but none of them would be me. As far as I'm concerned, advertising a show about a fabulous new archaeological discovery and then filling the program with 90% human interest BS is just misrepresentation of the first order. I'm pretty sure what happened was that they got to the end of the thing and realized that very little useful information had been uncovered and so they threw a human interest angle at it, a theme, to distract from how scientifically lame was the entire affair.

Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020 Video)

It's all in the Burt...

[9/10 · 13 October 2020]

Surprisingly for a thirty-year-old franchise that's... What is it?... 7 installments?... into its run, TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND is actually quite good, at least for those of us who are fans of the franchise. As with nearly all of the Tremors installments, this installment is mostly composed of a new environment for the graboids to play in (an isolated tropical island this time) together with some new monster "functionality" to freshen up the creatures and give us Tremors fans something new to explore. In this installment the creatures have been genetically fiddled with using stem cell technology so who knows what they might be able to do? This basic graboid formula has worked well in the past and continues to work here. Some new and fresh mixed together with the tried and reliable.

Good ol' Burt Gummer is here again to give us confidence that we might just survive this encounter, not to mention the fact that at this point it's doubtful any Tremors movie would even be accepted as such without him in it.

A bit darker than many of the installments but still clearly recognizable as being from the legitimate Tremors pedigree, TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND actually stands out in terms of the quality of the creature effects. There are a couple of sequences involving fire and flamethrowers which are absolutely top shelf and really serve to put some serious monster horror topspin on the whole thing.

For me, the only hitch in the entire affair was noticing that Burt Gummer, who basically looked only a handful of years older than he did in the very first Tremors movie, seemed to be showing a bit of stiffness in his movements. Ol' Burt (Michael Gross) is seventy-three, after all, and has been fighting bloodthirsty monsters for thirty years. One has to expect that to put a bit of rust on the gun barrel.

SPOILER:

Burt is apparently killed near the end and the end of the movie is a "loving" retrospective composed of clips of Burt being Burt and culled from all of the Tremors movies. I think we can probably surmise that this is the unequivocal end of our adventures with Burt Gummer; he does just sort of disappear at the end, although we do have reason to believe that the graboid got him, but there is no body or certain evidence of his demise. If the movie had ended on that note, we could probably convince ourselves that if there is another Tremors movie it will turn out that Burt somehow miraculously survived. Burt HAS been swallowed by graboids before, after all. But I think the redux of Burt Gummer scenes puts the writing clearly upon the wall. An entirely appropriate end to the movie and the franchise, but it reflects my affection for the Tremors world to the extent that it left me feeling old and sad.

TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND is clearly not the GONE WITH THE WIND of monster movies, as neither were ANY of the Tremors movies. But they have an undeniable and very worthwhile panache all their own and TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND holds its own easily with any in the franchise with the possible exception of the very first one, but it is at least a close second.

If you're not a fan of the franchise, you won't really fully enjoy TREMORS: SHRIEKER ISLAND and may perhaps wonder where all the affection comes from. But if you like unabashed, wholehearted monster pictures with a little style and craft to them and characters you inevitably come to love, give yourself a treat and run through the franchise from beginning to end. It's worth it.

The Beach House (II) (2019)

A movie that just sort of sleepily slouches around

[2/10 · 24 July 2020]

In order to be minimally watchable, a movie has to have something to express, some theme or point, and then traverse the process of expressing it from beginning through middle to end.

THE BEACH HOUSE, as far as I am intelligent enough to tell, didn't have ANY of those elements. Consequently, and of course inevitably, this results in a movie that somnambulates around for about eighty-eight minutes and then just falls over, plop. The end.

The final scene depicts our female lead, arguably the primary protagonist of the movie, lying on her back on the beach, her milky white unseeing eyes (traditionally de rigueur to indicate everything from some sort of terminal infection ranging from alien parasites to zombie diseases) staring skyward, incessantly repeating to herself, "Don't be scared. Don't be scared. Don't be scared" until a wave that wouldn't move a toddler somehow magically washes a full-size human female away leaving not a trace in the sand.

Don't worry, dear. I'm not scared. Just bored and annoyed.

In a very vague sort of way the movie suggests some kind of malevolent and infectious element bubbling up from underwater smokers resulting in psychedelic trip-inducing blue fog, extra-large predatory parasitic earthworms and a whole beach-full of flesh-colored Portuguese Man-Of-Wars that materialize on the beach practically instantaneously from nowhere, all without even a light sprinkle of explanation. I suppose we are to understand that some sort of a biological catastrophe has occurred but it's not really made clear. Or even semi-opaque. It could all just as easily be metaphor, analog, symbolism or an attempt at "pathetic fallacy" or blah blah blah. In a drifting and directionless movie such as this, who can tell? Not me.

In the hopes that you won't notice a storyless story, lots of human interest-y, angst-driven manure is cast about to fog the issue. Because drama. The older wife is terminally ill, the older husband already grieves his imminent loss, the bright-eyed ingénue dreams of her bright and unexplored future while her boyfriend drifts haplessly through life yearning for a purpose.

Sn0000000re... snort... Hah?

Unfortunately, no amount of fine accoutrement will conceal the fact that there is no food on the table. There's no story here. It's barely a tableau that starts, goes and ends nowhere.

And just to annoy the audience, our ingénue successfully arranges for portable, breathable air (to avoid the infectious fog...) and transportation and begins to make good her escape from the infected zone and then... And THEN... stupidly out-drives her ability to see through the fog and runs into a tree. Derp.

"Don't be scared", splash splash, roll credits, be irritated and feel cheated.

Ghosts of War (2020)

Couldn't figure out an ending, I guess...

[3/10 · 19 July 2020]

Anyone who's watched more than four or five movies has almost certainly encountered bitter disappointment with an ending. It's common enough that one has to be braced for that outcome with every movie one watches. You know, just in case. GHOSTS OF WAR raises the phenomenon of the bad ending to a religious experience. You know, the one where you shriek "oh God I'm in hell!" out loud.

The much rarer, even unique, experience that GHOSTS OF WAR provides the viewer is that of seeing a movie that has been sailing along rather well suddenly decide, apparently from instant onset dementia, to commit storytelling suicide in the most grisly manner possible right at the end. It was literally astonishing to see. It was as bad as "and he woke up and it was all a dream" but carried to such an astounding extreme that your mind almost refuses to accept it while you're seeing it unfold in front of you. From moment to moment, just as you repeatedly think "NOW this can't possibly get any worse", it DOES.

For the first hour and twelve minutes, GHOSTS OF WAR is a middling acceptable horror/ghost movie. It has its share of faults and foibles, as does even the best horror/ghost movie, which is apparently the nature of the genre as far as I can tell, but all in all it's reasonably well crafted, has excellent production values, and features a handful of namebrand, well-established actors. I might not describe its build quality as excellent, but it's at least very good.

It's World War II and a small handful of soldiers, about five or so as I recall, are dispatched to relieve another small group of soldiers who are babysitting a good sized rural mansion that had been used by the Nazis as a field headquarters. In a bit of foreshadowing, the group of soldiers they are relieving practically run out of the building when our group arrives, departing so rapidly one of them even leaves a personal rucksack behind.

Since we know it's a horror/ghost picture to begin with set in a building that's intrinsically creepy from top to bottom with lots of odd bits in evidence that could easily be ghost-spoor, it's not long before the paranormal fertilizer hits the ventilator.

The setting is not unique in the genre, of course. Given the stupefying bloodiness of World War II, the widespread sociopathic insanity of the Nazis, the Nazi obsession with the occult, the made-for-a-potboiler level of advancement of the Nazi experimental weaponry, and so on, the whole World War II/Nazi "thang" is hyper-ripe soil for any plot line having to do with supernatural horror. And so, as you might expect, the number of Nazi oriented horror pictures became uncountable decades ago. The fact that GHOSTS OF WAR excavated from this particular mine is not a bad thing. It would be hard to argue that the vein isn't endless.

And so here's the movie, sailing along, dropping satisfying horror tropes left and right (people being dragged along by invisible hands, haunting scenes of misery and torture being played out over and over in proper paranormal style, bangings and clangings and a large smorgasbord of inexplicable and terrifying sounds, etc.) when suddenly the whole thing detonates with the grace of a pig that swallowed a hand grenade.

So it doesn't just have a bad ending, you get to see a pretty darn good movie, in the blink of an eye, just abruptly impale itself on the punji stick of unforgivably bad writing. In my experience, that's not something you see every day. You kind of expect movies that weren't very good from the beginning to have bad endings in keeping with the rest of the movie. It's a whole 'nother thing to see a movie that was doing fine suddenly slam into the ground without warning.

I would describe the ending to you but for two reasons.

Firstly, it would be like watching a movie that suddenly flings a scene involving coprophilia at you; it was an unpleasant shock to begin with, you didn't want to see it the first time, now you can't un-see it, and you sure as heck don't want to write a description of it.

Secondly, if you're the type of person who likes watching train wrecks, and you would have to be to want to see this movie, a written description is just going to spoil the fun for you anyway. Go watch it yourself.

DRIFTING DRAGONS (2020)

Typical bewildering Japanese anime logic. But there is this one scene...

[4/10 · 3 June 2020]

DRIFTING DRAGONS, like most anime, at least in terms of any kind of "willing suspension of disbelief", is composed almost entirely of stuff, nonsense, twaddle, and balderdash. Its basic premise and storyline depend upon wholesale disregard for natural law of any kind. Any story cohesion or sensibility is forgone in favor of distorted narrative manufactured from whole cloth out of thin air and splashed on the screen, take it or leave it.

To my way of thinking, again as with most anime, the entire show lies somewhere between stream of consciousness, waking nightmare and uninterrupted delirium tremens.

Additionally, most of the animation work is of the kind that is known as twos and threes; low-quality animation of which even Hanna-Barbera's Yogi Bear would be embarrassed. Inexpensive production cost is the tyranny that drives everything about its creation.

That having been said, also like much of anime, while the animation work is generally shoddy, individual scenes can be astonishingly beautiful. Some of the scenes of the airships sailing through the clouds in skies lit umber, crimson and lavender by a rising or setting sun can be romantically beautiful in the extreme.

As others here have noted, the setting of the story is a completely unveiled parallel of early to mid 1800s whaling industry. All you have to do is exchange dirigible-like craft (although exactly what it is that holds them aloft is never made clear) for whaling ships, swap "dragons" for whales, and exchange the ocean for the sky. Virtually every other aspect regarding whaling is simply copied unaltered into this context. For example, the dragons have important oils that are a large part of their harvested value, the tools and implements that butcher the dragons are virtually identical to the type of implements that were used on whales, large rectangular strips of tissue that looks like blubber are cut and peeled away with the aid of pulley-mounted hooks, hours or days are spent rendering the carcasses, and so on. It's just whaling in the sky and there's no attempt to hide it.

Ambergris is even vaguely mentioned in at least one scene that I can remember, and it's presence in the movie is as redonkulous as anything else. Ambergris is a result of a digestive buffering within the alimentary canal of sperm whales to help buffer some of the damage of undigested and accidentally trapped giant squid beaks. There is nothing about the entire process of its creation and aging that would find a parallel in the circumstances described in this series nor do we even find out what kind of food the dragons actually eat (although there is a vague mention that some dragons might eat other dragons near the end of the series) that might result in this material for the purposes of this series.

In keeping with the unalloyed proclivity to lift every element it portrays from other circumstances, representations of the dragons are more similar to enormous, inexplicably flying nudibranchs; while they are called "dragons", few of these creatures look anything like dragons. I believe the first one that I saw struck me as almost a wholesale "borrowing" of the real-life Blue Dragon nudibranch.

Apparently only accidentally as far as I can tell, occasionally such anime series happen to produce little individual vignettes which, taken by themselves and unlike the balance of the program, are quite moving and beautiful and DRIFTING DRAGONS has one such vignette.

A lovely young girl, Katja, who was sold as a child to a local Madam and who is working temporarily at the house of "professional" women as a barmaid until she is old enough to begin her eventual "trade" in earnest, has a little romantic interlude with an equally young Jiro (a.k.a. Giraud), a still-wet-behind-the-ears young apprentice crewman from the flying dragon/whaling ship and who is in town on leave at one of the major stopovers on the flying dragon/whaling ship circuit.

Katja mentions that she has never left this small town her entire life and has no idea what the outside world is like and is entranced at Jiro's tales of the dashing life he leads as a great hunter who stalks dragons in the sky and sleeps in the clouds. On a sort of "date", Jiro surprises Katja by getting his hands on a little gyrocopter, having Katja hop on the back and before she can really consider what she's doing, whisking her off into the sky and away over the mountain parapets of the valley/caldera in which the little town squats. She sees the scale and majesty and beauty of a world she has never imagined, let alone experienced, even to the sea so far away, and the experience moves her to tears. This scene, at least by itself, was nothing less than magic.

Of course, in keeping with the long tradition of the Japanese sensibilities of storytelling which most often leaves love unrequited and unfulfilled, in the fullness of time Jiro flies away into the sky and Katja remains behind to her unhappy eventual fate. He is who he is and she is who she is and their circumstances allow for no other outcome because for the Japanese, love never conquers all nor can soften unfortunate realities. If you like the sort of tragic Japanese romances that never have the outcome you hope for, you can also watch 5 CENTIMETERS PER SECOND to see a similar heartbreaking outcome to perennially doomed love. It is utterly and relentlessly excruciating.

Personally, I try to view Japanese anime specifically as fairytales and fables in order to modulate their fundamental senselessness into something acceptable. This makes it possible for me to consume the vast tracts of nonsense for the little pearls of beautiful, accidental, sad perfection. Shibui, shibumi, shibusa.

A Haunted House (2013)

If it hadn't been for that one thing...

[1/10 · 21 February 2020]

I'd recommend you skip over this review. There's nothing open minded or balanced about it.

See, within the first five minutes of A HAUNTED HOUSE they literally stomp directly on one of my personal hangups. They needlessly kill a dog and then mine it for comedy. After that, the rest of the movie could have been GONE WITH THE WIND and I'd still pan it as hard as possible. Foregone conclusion.

I'm aware that comedy is comedy and it can't be watching every word it says or it won't get much said. I also realize I'm elevating my personal attitudes as some kind of an exception, but there you have it.

I live with dogs all day, every day, and they're a HUGE part of my life. I already think dogs get screwed by us way too much already. Being killed onscreen for comedy value is just something I can't get past.

Carry on.

The Jack in the Box (2019)

Not as bad as the usual junk AND with some historical background.

[6/10 · 18 February 2020]

There is nothing particularly special or surprising about THE JACK IN THE BOX recently released from the UK. You can pretty much tell what you're going to get within the first few minutes.

In short, there is a supernatural Jack-in-the-Box toy, together with a collection of supernatural rules that govern it, that if you pop it open you give the demon associated with it access to our world and it goes on a killing spree. In a 2 for 1, there is a rather disturbing-looking toy clown within the box that pops up when you turn the crank together with a full-size demonic-looking clown that sort of appears near the box that does the actual damage to the collection of victims. As a viewer, you're supposed to understand that the demon is coming out of the box based on the fact that you see a demonic hand coming OUT of the opening occasionally and a victim's hand disappearing INTO the opening, also occasionally.

The person that releases the demon can't be killed by the demon (keep track of these rules; will be a test at the end of the week), although the demon does bash him around pretty good just for fun, but everyone else is fair game for recreational killing. And there is a ritual the box opener can perform to trap the demon inside the box, and if you can prevent the box from being opened (after successfully performing the ritual) for the number of years that equates to the demon's number of victims times 3, (and there's a very handy and convenient counter on top of the box to help you keep track...) then the demon is fully kaput.

Outside of the ritual, the box is indestructible and can move itself around and blah blah blah. And of course nobody believes anybody who tries to warn anyone of the dangers of the demon Jack-in-the-Box problem.

No real origin information is given during the movie, and rather unusually we are told that it's one of "natures creations" and is therefore mortal, so there that is for what it's worth. A local "expert in demonology" seems to talk about them as if they're a fairly common, pesky annoyance, like having moles; the demonologist speaks of them almost exclusively in the plural.

To wrap things up at the end, there's the obligatory conclusion where we THINK we've got the demon trapped but SURPRISE! the trapping ritual was not properly performed and we wrap up the picture with the literary door left open for a sequel... you know, in case this one made money.

On the positive side, while THE JACK IN THE BOX is not exactly of inspirationally high quality, it's maybe 15% or 20% better overall than the complete junker you would EXPECT it to be. The acting is a touch better, the box and doll execution is up a bit, music is better, the overall sound and other production values are not completely appalling, and so on. You won't write any term papers on it but it won't kill you to watch it, either.

On an interesting note, out here in the real world, the whole Jack-in-the-Box "thang" has some history behind it. If you look up Jack-in-the-Box on Wikipedia you'll find it apparently has French origins and the French refer to them as "diable en boîte" which translates as "devil in a box" together with some other enlightening background information as to how the Jack-in-the-Box toy came to be and become popular, AND it's demon-related. It's worth reading. And it makes this movie a bit more interesting in terms of its background.

If you are into supernatural horror and are willing to keep your expectations appropriately low, I'd say it's worth seeing. Not the best moviegoing experience and it didn't strike me as particularly terrifying unless you've got your own personal hangups about clowns as some people do, but somebody did care enough to try to do a good job where they easily could have turned out a real piece of junk.

I gave the movie a 6/10 which probably requires a word of explanation: I rate movies based on 1) how close the movie subjectively came to being the movie its makers intended to be and 2) how well does it rate against other movies of its genre. THE JACK IN THE BOX I think came reasonably close to being the movie its makers intended to be, but it doesn't seem to be a real standout within its supernatural horror genre. For me, it subjectively averaged out to about a 6. The only real difficulty I had with the movie was the affected, poncy movements of the demon in his efforts to look "otherworldly"... or something.

Utopia Falls (2020)

Actually, it's not the singin' and dancin' that ruins this show.

[2/10 · 16 February 2020]

What ruins UTOPIA FALLS is that it thematically elevates artistic expression to a level of importance that it doesn't have and never will. It's representation of dance offs and sing offs as possessing this level of importance renders it risible and ridiculous.

Certainly musical entertainment is not new. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's been part of human entertainment for millennia. The "Western" notion of the "musical" itself probably stems from the late 1800s. So having various forms of performance art (dance, singing etc.) integrally mixed with fiction storytelling is a well-established and long accepted form of legitimate entertainment. So no problem there as far as that goes.

Anyone who's ever felt a strong emotion knows that music (and other forms of performance art) is a wonderful way to express and/or commune with deeply felt human emotions. In other words, saying you feel really strongly about something doesn't hold a candle to singing a really moving song or composing a really powerfully-worded poem or employing some other, more abstract form of artistic expression to really capture and project that feeling and to possibly profoundly communicate that feeling to others.

But carrying the "meaningfulness" of that artistic expression beyond the point where it is specifically a "vehicle" of expression to where it is held forth as the point itself, THE important theme in the program or what the program is ABOUT, just reads as absurd.

What's that you say? Singing and dancing represents the pinnacle of human evolution, progress and achievement? They are the REASON we do everything else that humans do? Seriously? We're going to solve all the problems of humanity by dancing our way into the future?

I think some people tend to confuse the experience of feeling strong emotion in connection with artistic expression as somehow suggesting that the expression (the singing, the dancing, whatever) has an importance in and of itself that it doesn't have. I'm completely guessing here, but we have at least one generation currently alive so far, and perhaps more, who have grown up in lives more virtual and symbolic than actual and experiential and can't always seem to separate artistic symbology from the things being symbolized. Whatever they FEEL or BELIEVE, that's what IS. They seem to think that perception makes reality rather than the other way around.

From a mechanical standpoint, I have no idea what the heavy top loading of minority performers is supposed to be telling us. Is it that, since GRAVITY FALLS entire raison d'être is about performance art, and literally nothing more (to its failing), all legitimate cultural expression and performance art can only come from traditional "minorities"? Was it just that most Caucasian people got wiped out in the apocalyptic conflagration?

Last time I looked, traditional "minorities" were continuously objecting to the lack of population-ratio-related representation in Hollywood etc.? Why is completely skewed representation totally okay here?

Well, so close and yet so far. If the show had maybe followed the lines of a more "traditional" musical it might have resulted in an interesting novel mix of old styles and new ideas. Instead, it panders to a very experience-limited and reality-challenged subculture while deeply mired in heavily distorted PC sensibilities. I don't see how that's going to be a successful long-term broad appeal formula.

But, hey, what do I know? Maybe hip-hop is so important it can save the world and lead everyone to freedom. Because, you know, inspiring youth-oriented rebellious music never happened before hip-hop. Uh-Huh.

Harley Quinn (2019– )

While I loved it, comic book traditionalists probably would not.

[8/10 · 26 January 2020]

Comic book devotees are legion and, well, DEVOTED. And sometimes EXTREMELY devoted. Like card-carrying aficionados of anything, strong fan affection for elements like origin stories and cannon and the details of character's personalities, motivations and behaviors border on religious convictions, connected as they are to what some fans see as quasi-personal relationships.

Not surprisingly, diddling over much with such well-established "realities" is risky business.

The new cartoon series, HARLEY QUINN, takes sufficient liberties with ultra-well-known, even ancient, comic book characters as to be reasonably called a "reimagining" of many elements of the comic universe(s). Some purists with deeply rooted, borderline religious, perspectives will undoubtedly be offended. You may as well make it rain on Dune as some idiot once did.

Stepped on, or even stomped on, toes are inevitable. That reaction is thoroughly on display around here. Whether that personal reaction is "right" or "wrong" is eternally a matter of hot debate, although many will see that point differently.

For those new to the genre or just predisposed to being attracted to the trying of new things, (and specifically with a high tolerance for violence and gore, even if it is "just" a cartoon) HARLEY QUINN is a hoot. I couldn't recommend it more.

But then again, I'm one of those (some would say appalling) people who generally views comics as an innately barren form of storytelling perennially happy to break any storytelling crime in its grasping attempt to find a way to sell more comic books. Think alternate universes, forked universes, killed-off characters coming back to life, arbitrarily un-cannoning certain stories for profit over plot, "it was all a dream" copouts, and every other possible storytelling crime if it means the sale of another comic book.

Yep. I'm a bona fide comic book Philistine.

The only real quibble I had with the show is that it does have a little bit of difficulty staying consistent with its own, new view of the comic book universe. For example, the shark-man character casually bites the head clean off of some innocent poor security guard (with blood squirting everywhere, and I don't see the head spit out anywhere...) in one episode, goes murderously insane when a SINGLE DROP of blood falls into a shark tank he was swimming around in in another episode, and then faints and/or loses his lunch just LOOKING at carnivorous consumption being committed by a "big bad wolf" or "three little pigs". Makes the character a little wishy-washy and poorly defined.

If you're a comic book traditionalist, just cover your ears and shriek "La La La". Everybody else, with warnings about violence and gore in mind, you should definitely give this one a whirl.