Featured Review: PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

This article was originally written on July 18th as part of the Advanced Reviews series.


Pineapple Express



Starring- Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Danny McBride, Amber Heard, Kevin Corrigan, Craig Robinson, Ed Begley Jr, Nora Dunn.



Directed by David Gordon Green



Grade: B-



"Thug life!"

Marijuana smokers rejoice. Pineapple Express becomes the first box office wide release since 1998's Half Baked to make no qualms about it's weed-y roots. Trying to create a new breed of film with over-the-top violence and action coupled with dirty, raunchy humor and gloriously unabashed love for the plant drug, Pineapple Express tries to do too much, and ends up doing way too little.

Opinion-takers at the advanced screening were asking patrons if it was the next Cheech & Chong. Not that Cheech & Chong is such a good movie to want to compare praise to, but Pineapple Express is not only inferior to the former film, but it's a black mark on Seth Rogen's otherwise sterling Apatow-linked career. Freaks & Geeks, Undeclared, The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, all great shows and movies. Pineapple Express? Disappointing.

Rogen stars as Dale Denton, a subpoena server who is inexplicably dating a teenager in high school. And he really, really, loves pot. Off the bat he witnesses a drug kingpin (Office Space's Gary Cole) and a saucy little policewoman (Rosie Perez) murder one of the sons of his main rival. They connect Dale to the crime scene thanks to his rare 'Pineapple Express' joint, and thus sets off a chain of who's-working-for-who scenarios involving his pot dealer Saul (Spider-Man's James Franco), two hitmen (Kevin Corrigan, Craig Robinson) and Saul's own middleman Red (Danny McBride). Dale and Saul bond as their adventure reaches its climax.

The humor, both marijuana-related and otherwise, have some extremely funny moments. But for every joke that hits, there are just as many that are extremely awkward to sit through. The cast was obviously going for that semi-improvisational, stream-of-consciousness feel that Apatow ekes so well out of his directed cast, but for Rogen and director David Gordon Green, it just throws the film's pacing out the window. Granted that success rate is much better than most other comedians' films this year, but for Rogen, we the audience expected better. The funniest parts of the redband trailer, as well as the awesome song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A., are literally M.I.A. from the film.

James Franco steals the movie performance-wise, but maybe it's because the rest of the cast fails to inspire. Franco seems genuine as Saul, a stoned loser who just wants companionship. He often has the best lines in the film and we tend to care about him over Dale. Rogen on the other hand is actually sort of annoying and loud, and when the scenes get packed with quick reactionary moments, he exposes himself to still be a green actor.

The other players are one-note at best. Gary Cole has very little personality, playing his drug lord as almost a straight villain. Rosie Perez hasn't been in a film I've seen since God knows when, and I STILL can't understand her when she talks. Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson (of Grounded For Life and The Office respectively) are more awkward than funny, and Danny McBride's one good line in the movie-- "Thug life!"-- is in the trailers. The clumsy ending involving Rogen, Franco and McBride, was seriously anti-climatic.

Why is Dale dating a high school girl? Statutory Rape aside, they never explained it, nor does it make a lot of sense, even for a movie like this. If she was ugly, or if Rogen was particularly good-looking, then maybe I'd get it. Or if she was only using him for free drugs, I'd totally understand. But from all accounts none of that was the case, and we are forced to believe that model/actress Amber Heard (Hidden Hills, Never Back Down) genuinely wants to date a scuzzy 25-year-old subpoena server who looks like he's 35. How much of a boner/ego did Rogen get while writing this idea?

For the longest time I was a fan of Seth Rogen, years before he became the warty toad prince of raunchy but pathos-driven R-rated comedy. From Freaks and Geeks to Undeclared, popping up in minuscule roles in Donnie Darko and Anchorman, he was very much under appreciated. Judd Apatow gave him a chance at screen-time in The 40 Year Old Virgin, which led to bona fide stardom in Knocked Up. Now he is no longer the dirty Seth Rogen with a cult fan base but Seth Rogen, the dirty Hollywood multi-tasking entity.

Pineapple Express could have been a resplendent example, setting up a template for more films of the same cloth. But something here did not click at all, at least not from the Rogen Wing of the School of Apatow. Maybe it was the budget. Maybe it was the director (who previously helmed the extravagantly different drama Snow Angels). Maybe they all were affected too much by the stage weed on set. Whatever it was, Pineapple Express failed to rocket to the pinnacle of our funny bones.

DVD Review: SHORT CIRCUIT (1986)

This is the second review I've done about an older film on DVD. It may become a weekly series if I have time.


Short Circuit

Released: May 9, 1986

Box Office: $40.6 million
(Ranked 21st of 1986)

Starring- Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, Fisher Stevens, Austin Pendleton, G.W. Bailey, Brian McNamara

Directed by John Badlam

DVD Issue: 2004

Grade: C+



As the Wall-E previews made the rounds late last year, many keen observers born in that span between Generation X and Generation Y, the ones who grew up on the highest content of Saturday morning sugar, television and movies, were quick to dismiss the compact little robot as a Johnny Five knockoff.

Nevertheless, while there's no doubt the two robots share quite a few striking similarities in both looks and actions, Short Circuit was made in an era that valued niceties and a breezy entertainment formula that hinders its potential. Even more so after the looming monolith of what Wall-E has become. In fact, Wall-E is everything Short Circuit aspired to be, 22 years too early.

Viewed in 2008, Short Circuit is seen as a good example of the lighthearted fare of the mid-1980's. It's extremely dated yet innocent enough to provoke a fun attitude, whether its a childhood classic or seeing it for the first time. It has a genial message of love and the appreciation of living life, and chugs along at a steady pace towards its climax, replete with kid-friendly humor and a predictable turn of events.

Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is a lead programmer of NOVA's newest military robots. Designed to blow up enemy warfare in the fight against the Soviet Union, a malfunction causes the last of these prototype robots, Number Five, to become 'alive' with feelings and thoughts. He escapes and finds himself bonding with Stephanie (Ally Sheedy), a quirky girl who takes care of a hoard of pets. Together, along with Newton, the trio must stop NOVA from destroying Number Five from being deprogrammed, which according to him is equal to death.

Number Five (commonly referred to Johnny Five, despite only calling himself that at the very end) not only shares common ground with Wall-E, but I believe his inspiration in 1986 was E.T. Both are non-human creatures that at first are ugly in appearance but become comfortable and even cute to look at. Both are curious, intelligent, and their mysterious properties forces them to run from the authorities. Most importantly, both aimed to cash in the family market with PG-rated antics. While Short Circuit was a modest success that spawned a sequel two years later, it was not anywhere in the monetary and thematic stratosphere as E.T. was.

Let's get this fact out right now: Guttenberg and Sheedy make one of the worst pairs in cinematic history. If there was a Prezzie Awards back in 1986, Sheedy would win Worst Actress hands down. I'm not sure if she was just playing a loud, crass, annoying, vapid, spaced out twit, or if Sheedy really is that bad of an actress. She was definitely tolerable in The Breakfast Club, but her overexaggerated mannerisms and complete lack of subtlety interacting with an inanimate character endangers the entire Short Circuit project.

Never one to set an example, Guttenberg, already a grizzly veteran of three Police Academy films and Cocoon, isn't much better. But at least he doesn't scream his lines with all the fervor of an actress looking for a coke fix. Also among the shockingly terrible is Fisher Stevens, playing perhaps the most stereotypical horny Indian-American computer scientist in the history of the world. Never mind that Kal Penn must have drawn inspiration from him for the Van Wilder films, but Stevens isn't even Indian. Kind of derogatory.

Another dated but fun reference to the time period Short Circuit offers (besides its terrible actors who mostly disappeared after December 31st, 1989) is the "advanced" technology used on the Soviet Union front. Like films such as Firefox, Red Dawn, WarGames, Russkies, Spies Like Us, Rocky IV and countless other 1980s seminal classics, Short Circuit features characters navigating fancy green and black computer screens, making not so subtle jabs at the Russians. You're not a scientist unless you have a robotic hand giving the middle finger.

Short Circuit is just one of the glut of movies from the 1980s that appeal to 20 and 30 somethings out of fond memories, not outright goodness. We are forced to deride films released today that might be on par with Short Circuit, but in reality the kids who see movies such as Journey To The Center Of The Earth will love them 20 years later like the parents of today loved The Goonies. Short Circuit may not even be fit to wash Wall-E's treads, but it's a cute diversion, exactly what nostalgia was made for.

Featured Review: THE MUMMY 3

The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor



Starring- Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, John Hannah, Luke Ford, Michelle Yeoh, Isabella Leong, Russell Wong



Directed by Rob Cohen



Grade: B



"You fought one mummy Dad..."
"Yeah one mummy... twice!"

Who knew Brendan Fraser still had this much clout in Hollywood? After striking out in scarcely seen serious fare like The Air I Breathe and The Last Time, Fraser goes back to his action comedy roots so seamlessly, that the seven year gap since 2001's The Mummy Returns almost seems non-existent. The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor is by no means an outstanding film, but a fast-paced, easy to swallow adventure that pulls enough punches to gloss over some of the goofy content.

The Mummy franchise has always felt like a light-hearted rip-off of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones series. Less overall violence, less Harrison Ford quips and more Fraser mugging. Dragon Emperor falls into the same vein as the previous two; our heroic characters get into peril time and time again, a massive hoard of the undead stage unrelenting attacks on them, and in the end they manage to scrape out a victory. It's a tried and true plot fitting for the old cinematic heroes of Errol Flynn's era.

Dragon Emperor picks up about 13 or 14 years after the previous installment. Rick O'Connell (Fraser) and wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, pulling a Darrin Stevens on the audience after Rachel Weisz opted out) are rich and retired in the English countryside, while unbeknown to them, son Alex has dropped out of college to follow in his parents' footsteps as an archaeologist and explorer. He finds the temple to the Emperor Han (Jet Li), a ruthless dictator who was frozen in stone by a curse. Of course through a twist of allegiances, the diamond stone that alleviates the curse falls into the wrong hands, Emperor Han is freed, and all hell breaks loose for the O'Connells.

The plot is your standard fare for action adventures set in foreign countries with mysterious ruins. Lots of booby traps and needlessly difficult puzzles and wall openings litter the tombs and temples. Fraser spouts "I can't believe this is happening again" type quotes for humor, although the script keeps the real groaners to a minimum. I won't even go into length badmouthing the field-goal kicking Chinese Abominable Snowmen. At least the bland Alex O'Connell character, all grown up from being the stereotypical 'meddlesome child' of action movies in The Mummy Returns, unlike Shia LeBeouf in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is played by too less of a name (Australian Luke Ford) to get spin-off aspirations.

Effects-wise, Dragon Emperor is pretty run-of-the-mill as well. Some good animation of the skeletons during the battle scenes, plus the snow-drenched Shangri-La temple, but a couple of bloody combustions involving Li's are much weaker. They devolve into almost cartoonish fashion. Director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) takes over for Stephen Sommers and works an almost exact rendering of what Sommers would have done with the project anyways. Tit for tat.

Maria Bello (A History Of Violence, Thank You For Smoking), pales in comparison to Rachel Weisz as the "second" Evelyn O'Connell. She's a good actress, attested by at least the films mentioned above, but working out of her element of moody dramas and feigning a British accent, she doesn't muster anything much more than a fond recollection of Weisz in the role.

Li, Michelle Yeoh, Isabella Leong, and Russell Wong however are spot on and interesting in their roles concerning the fate of China and the Emperor's rule. Yeoh, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, is no stranger to the physical side of her role, and Leong proves she can be capable of being a future serious actress. Li doesn't necessarily do much besides growl and kill minions, but he serves as a quiet force to a film that could otherwise lack some credibility.

The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor is nothing else but a summer blockbuster that needs a soda and popcorn to wash it down. By the time the soda gets thrown in the trash bin, the memory of such a film is thrown out of collective consciousness. It wouldn't be a terrible predicament to see a fourth installment in the Mummy franchise, but like this third film, it's not something to look forward to all summer. It's just... there.

Indie Review: MEAT TRAIN

The Midnight Meat Train



Starring- Bradley Cooper, Leslie Bibb, Vinnie Jones, Brooke Shields, Roger Bart, Peter Jacobson, Tony Curran



Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura



Grade: D-




"Please step away from the meat."

The Midnight Meat Train is everything the title suggests. It may sound like a cheesy pornography or a football nickname gone wrong, but make no mistakes, Meat Train is a Clive Barker inspired horror film. Dumped into a little over one hundred critically forgotten second-run discount theatres mostly in the Western United States, despite being a new release, Meat Train's trailer, enigmatic title and release made it worth seeking out. But I soon realized, this Meat was rotten.

Because of Lionsgate's internal shuffle, new head honcho Joe Drake (a former exec at Focus Features, which produced the best horror film of 2008 to date, The Strangers), had a couple of projects from the old regime that he had no faith in releasing. Conspiracy theories abound, but these things are true; The studio's Saw V is expected to be the moneymaker, and because it was contractually obligated to appear in a couple of theatres, Midnight Meat Train was given an esoteric release. Buried not only behind popular new movies, but under the tracks of long-time second-run holdouts College Road Trip and Nim's Island.

I was genuinely shocked by that piece of information, considering how some horror movies can truly perform with a little marketing, including the original Saw. But after sitting through 90 minutes of Midnight Meat Train, I began to understand just how smart Lionsgate must be.

The film stars up-and-coming Bradley Cooper (Alias, Wedding Crashers) as Leon Kauffman, a professional photographer without much success. He takes pictures of the dark underbelly of New York City, but can never capture anything truly remarkable. When Susan Hoff (an ubiquitously perky Brooke Shields), the owner of an art gallery Leon tries to sell pictures to, point blankly tells him to get in the face of danger for those once-in-a-lifetime shots, Leon takes it seriously.

So seriously in fact, that he stumbles upon Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), a serial killer who butchers quiet passengers on the subway in the middle of the night and splays them on meat hooks (hence the title, The Midnight Meat Train). Leon starts to become obsessed with taking the right pictures of the murders, despite the element of danger in being exposed. But while his girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb) is worried, Leon finds by studying Mahogany, there's a whole other, deeper, darker facet to his character and reasoning than just mercilessly slaughtering random passengers.

Meat Train's plot is just as ridiculously executed as it is to read. Based off a short story by Barker in his 1984 novel collection, I honestly gave the movie every opportunity to be an enjoyable horror flick. The merits of plot and and sensibility don't always have to make perfect sense in these kinds of films. I'm one of the few positive critics for last year's The Hitcher re-make because of that reason. But Meat Train is just so over-the-top bad without much to praise in the acting, writing or filmmaking department (although for most of the beginning, director Ryuhei Kitamura's blurry camera work was effective), that the project just became one big non-entity.

The characters were just as bad. Each one of them were comically stupid. Cooper's Leon takes photographs of dangerous thugs, homeless people, and the villain with all the subtlety of a lead pipe to the face. He follows Mahogany around with a camera the size of a 1992 cell phone, creeping around 10 feet behind like he's a member of Mystery Inc. Halfway through, after getting too close to the villain (as in, taking pictures of Mahogany in the same subway train that he's literally butchering people in), Cooper does a complete 180 and becomes psycho and gruff, bent on revenge.

Leslie Bibb's Maya is mostly there for support and skin, and for awhile the only one in the movie with a voice of reason. Then just as you figure there's some validation in her, she and Leon's art friend Jurgis (Roger Bart, apparently not satisfied with Hostel II as the goriest pick on his resume) break into Mahogany's apartment to retrieve Leon's camera. Never mind how they even found the place without Leon's help, but Maya finds evidence Mahogany carries in his suitcase that you'd only find in a cliche movie. You can pretty much figure where its going to go from there.

Or not. If you haven't read Barker's story, the last five minutes veers past left field and into the bleachers of weirdness. We go from over-the-top serial killer film to excessively violent supernatural film. It answers those long-standing questions that arise during the movie, such as "Why is he doing this?" and "Why am I watching this?", which in the grand scheme of the film is kind of exalting, but after 95 minutes of a certain kind of terror, changing the course of Meat Train entirely with that ending just adds to the terrible aspects of it.

Maybe it was the stains in the horrendously patterned carpets or the smell of stale relish coating the walls, but seeing Midnight Meat Train at a barely-managed dollar theatre almost enhanced the experience. As dreadful as the film was at times, you almost felt like in the dank and dark confines of the auditorium, you had every much chance to die as the victims in the film. That at least kept the surprisingly low scare factor in Meat Train from totally ruining the experience.

If you have the chance to see The Midnight Meat Train, I suggest you go, if only for the novelty of seeing a unique and distasteful horror flick in the presence of the acidic popcorn and sticky linoleum floors of yesteryear. It may have been given an ultimate backstabbing job by its own hand, but had something as amusingly abnormal as Meat Train been released in major market theatres, I doubt it would've fared much better than last year's parking garage thriller P2. So almost by accident, the fans in the know get two interestingly horrific experiences for the price of less than one.

TOP TEN Anticipated Movies (8/08)

This month I decided to pick closer releases, rather than many that are still 4+ months away, so that I don't have to write about most of them EVERY month until then. Most of my picks may seem juvenile, but trust me when I say I can't wait for the holidays when we can throw away most of the mainstream junk until January and start to break down and analyze the "serious" junk.

In order of tentative release:

Tropic Thunder (8/13)
Iron Man has come and gone, and almost seems diminutive compared to the juggernaut that is The Dark Knight, but Robert Downey Jr. gets another chance to reign supreme. I hope beyond all hope that despite the rocky presence of Ben Stiller and Jack Black that Tropic Thunder is a cohesively funny film, which can't be said for most of the comedies this year.

Mirrors (8/15)
I don't know about you, but there's something just magical about the way Kiefer Sutherland, Jack Bauer of all fictional people, stands next to a demon mirror and screams "What do you want!?". But who knows, maybe a horror film with Sutherland, Paula Patton, and the literally jaw-breaking Amy Smart will actually be kind of good? Too much to ask?

Hamlet 2 (8/22; limited)
Since we're still a few months away from getting into ultra-serious award fare, Hamlet 2 looks like the oddball little comedy that might score well at the indie theatres. After that box office debacle Around The World In 80 Days remake, can Steve Coogan really take America by storm with "Rock Me Sexy Jesus?"

Disaster Movie (8/29)
My friend Mikey @ The Movies sits through way too much cheap direct-to-DVD fare for me to handle, but sneaking into these bottom of the barrel "parody" films have become almost a rite of passage. We do not condone this kind of filmmaking with our hard-earned money, but damned if we don't peek our heads in and get tortured with 90 minutes of this.

Burn After Reading (9/12)
Clooney! Pitt! Malkovich! McDormand! Swinton! Coens! That's all I'm going to say, lest this gets overhyped.

Righteous Kill (9/12)
This is going to be either really good, or really, really, really, terrible. Consider; Robert De Niro and Al Pacino pair up for the first time on the same screen and only the 2nd time (after Heat) in a film, and written by Russell Gewirtz of the tantalizing Inside Man. But, Pacino hasn't made a decent film since 2002's Insomnia, and Righteous Kill is directed by none other than Pacino's 88 Minutes auteur Jon Avnet. And it co-stars 50 Cent as 'Spider'. Yeah.

Miracle At St. Anna/Blindness/Eagle Eye/Choke (9/26)
This is a cop-out I know, but September 26th looks to be an amazingly strong week in movies, especially in a September filled with uninspiring fare such as Bangkok Dangerous and Lakeview Terrace. We have a serious Spike Lee war movie, a new Fernando Meirelles film (Cidade de Deus, The Constant Gardener), a goofy new Shia LaBeouf flick, and independent theatres will run Sam Rockwell's sex-fest Choke.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (10/3)
All hail the return of Michael Cera, our hero of teenage neurosis. Youth In Revolt comes in December, but for October Cera teams with Charlie Bartlett and 40 Year Old Virgin girl Kat Dennings for a romance set in NYC's underground band scene. Expect plenty of Cera being a badass on the music stage, while stumbling with his words off-stage.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua (10/3)
In the season of the dog (future slated dog movies this winter include Bolt, Marley & Me, and Hotel For Dogs), Beverly Hills Chihuahua, directed by Scooby-Doo fanboy Raja Gosnell, is going to be outright horrible. But damn it if I haven't been caught mumbling "Chihuahua!" in group affairs. Whether it turns out to be pure infantile crap or an infectious holiday hit (I'm leaning towards the former), I know I'll end up seeing this. Natch, I'm actually looking forward to this... yikes.

Max Payne/Flash Of Genius/W. (10/17)
Another cop-out, but what an interesting weekend this presents. First and most popularly is Max Payne, Mark Wahlberg's gory thriller based on the iconic video game. But this same weekend also features a quaint tale about the corporate injustices of a car company over a patent, starring Greg Kinnear, and Oliver Stone's slick-looking, fascinating but questionably needed W.

Future Must-Sees: The Brothers Bloom (10/24), Changeling (10/24), Zack & Miri Make A Porno (10/31), Quantum Of Solace (11/7), Australia (11/14), Harry Potter (11/21), Defiance (12/12), The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (12/19), Yes Man (12/19), Marley & Me (12/25), Revolutionary Road (12/25)

DVD Review: CREEPSHOW (1982)

Because The Prezzies don't have ENOUGH topics to cover on this site (Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Actor Spotlights, Awards Speculation, Retro Awards, Anticipated Releases), there will now be the occasional DVD Review here. I have almost 250 DVD movies, and about 30 television seasons, and lately have been trolling Half Price Books for older clearance discs at $2-3 each. The reviews will mostly cover the film itself, since they are older, many younger people may have not seen them, but we'll discuss the Special Features if they apply or are noteworthy. Today, we will take a look at the 1982 camp horror classic, Creepshow.



Creepshow

Released: November 12, 1982

Box Office: $21 million
(Ranked 37th of 1982)

Starring: Hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, E.G. Marshall, Ted Danson, Fritz Weaver, Ed Harris, Stephen King

Director: George A. Romero

DVD Issue: 1999

Grade: B



Stephen King and George A. Romero's Creepshow is perhaps the most well-known portmanteau in horror cinema. Grossing a modest $21 million in a 1982 era dominated by E.T., it's success greenlighted the likes of future "tales of terror" popular in the 1980s, such as The Twilight Zone Movie, King's Cat Eye, and Tales From The Darkside. It, along with the cheap double features of the sixties and seventies, inspired Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make Grindhouse (Eli Roth's short segment 'Thanksgiving' in the film even uses part of the Creepshow score).

But while Creepshow may have helped revived the genre of anthology horror, movies that pieced together several unrelated tales of the macabre into one feature film, the United Kingdom had quite a run with these type of tales at least a full two decades before that.

One of the first was Dead of Night in 1948, which influenced many radio programs and future television adaptations at the time. The genre picked up in the late sixties and seventies with such fare as Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors and The Vault Of Horror. The most famous of these was 1972's Tales From The Crypt, which later lent its name to the HBO series and its run of knockoffs. The 1972 version starred Joan Collins and Peter Cushing, and featured a memorably stirring tale involving a tunnel of razors and a German Shepherd that can be seen as a precursor to today's Saw franchise.

Creepshow is all about tongue-in-cheek camp. Romero uses comic book fonts to segue from one tale to another, and often implements it into the stories themselves. This gives the film a playful vibe that many films in the 'grunge' era would use 10 years later. King adapts five stories, two from previously published short works, and three written exclusively for the screen. They range from zombies to aliens to (gulp) bugs.

The first two are obviously the weakest, but both have their guilty pleasures. In Father's Day, a demented older woman and her snobbish relatives (one played by a 31-year-old, pre-The Right Stuff Ed Harris) are murdered one-by-one by the abusive father she had killed seven years earlier, now a zombie out for his "Father's Day cake". In The Lonesome Death Of Jody Verrill, King himself plays the dim-witted titular character, who finds a meteorite that turns everything it touches into a grassy substance. King's performance is majorly ostentatious, but engrossingly fun to watch at the same time.

Something To Tide You Over starts off good, albeit without much 'horror' element, but then loses its steam at the end. Leslie Nielsen, fresh off Airplane! and the original Prom Night, devises a murder plot against his cheating wife and her lover Harry (Ted Danson, with Cheers in its first season). He forces them to be buried in sand up to their neck and eventually drown when the tide comes in. Nielsen's Richard takes glee in his set-up, but the segment soon spirals into a zombie revenge plot.

The best, longest and most realized segment is The Crate, based off of a King short story. Hal Holbrook (All The President's Men, Into The Wild) stars as Henry, a college professor who loathes his brash, foul-mouthed wife Billie (early 80s sexpot Adrienne Barbeau). When Dexter Stanley (longtime character actor Fritz Weaver), a colleague of his, finds a box under the laboratory stairs that contains a man-eating primate, Henry seizes this opportunity to put Billie away once and for all. The plot may sound stupid, but unlike the previous three stories, The Crate is actually quite suspenseful and holds a steady pace the entire segment.

Finally we have They're Creeping Up On You, which for me personally, was almost impossible to watch. E.G. Marshall goes to town as a rich millionaire germaphobe with a soulless attitude and a fear of cockroaches. I have my own major fear of certain insects, not so much the cockroaches themselves but seeing their bodies up close (which is why I don't own The Fly, Mimic, Joe's Apartment etc) . So suffice to say, the whole story revolving around his eventual demise by the deed of many, many cockroaches left me very, very uneasy.

The whole film has the fun and charisma of laughably dated makeup/effects by Tom Savini (Friday The 13th, Dawn Of The Dead) and over-the-top acting. But in a way, these kinds of films are long gone and sort of missed. While Creepshow may look garish compared to some of the best special effect efforts of our time, it was a labor of love. Many of the features we see today that look cheap are effectively because they were made strictly for money and a job. Creepshow may be frightening, but it has a lot of heart, something many horror films are missing in this generation.

Featured Review: X-FILES 2

The X-Files: I Want To Believe



Starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly, Amanda Peet, Alvin 'Xzibit' Joiner, Mitch Pileggi



Directed by Chris Carter



Grade: C-




"I don't believe this."
"You know, that's been your problem from the very beginning."

I certainly wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that this second film installment of The X-Files franchise would be an engaging sci-fi thriller, something that could possibly lend credence to future sequels. If anything, give David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson something to do with their careers and balance out the negativity surrounding most of the recently released tripe in the horror/sci-fi genre. Instead, like the religious beliefs of Anderson's Scully, all that was left for The X-Files: I Want To Believe, was ugly, open-ended doubt.

It's been so long since the television series and first film premiered, that I barely remember said film, 1998's Fight The Future. But there were some indelible images. A kid being consumed by black goo, our heroes being chased by bees, a giant alien spaceship. It was an entertaining movie that combined some of the best elements of the show; aliens and dramatic tension. But I Want To Believe refuses to mix in its' most unearthly lineage, rather opting to put away their metaphysical playthings for a more complex 'human' touch. And that extracts all the interest out of new and casual fans like myself in enjoying this movie.

Years after their last hurrah in the FBI, Dana Scully (Anderson) is a doctor in a Catholic hospital dealing with a crisis of faith, especially over a presumably terminally ill little boy. She gets called upon to dig up her old partner Fox Mulder, a not-so-sought-after fugitive, to help solve an unusual case involving another missing FBI agent. He eventually agrees, and begins to not only earn the trust of Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) the agent in charge of the investigation, but gets Scully involved in the process as well. The main chip the FBI have is Father Joe (Billy Connolly) a former Catholic priest and pedophile who has psychic visions that relate to the missing agent.

In essence the plot is less an exertion of the paranormal and supernatural, but that of a straight crime thriller with mythological subtext. However, therein lies its biggest problem: there seems to be more elements of films such as Zodiac or Stigmata than anything uniquely exciting or worthy of being a nearly two hour stand-alone television franchise vehicle. It drags on very, very slowly from one scene to the next without much of an element of surprise. When something climatic DOES happen, it pops out at you with all the excitement of a broken jack-in-the-box.

As fellow critic Michael Brieaddy points out, the film has very much the same feel that die hard fans of the television show know of. Like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The X-Files focused just as much on serious issues of people's lives and relationships as they did on the creatures. Not every episode is filled with alien and ghost arcs.

I'm all for serious drama fare. But ten years between films and a six year layoff on the franchise in general does not give them the excuse to build a template for a whole movie series with this much conversation building. Franchises like Batman and Spider-Man has earned the right to space out their action sequences with exposition and tension building and introducing future characters, but for The X-Files, with all subtle references to characters' past lives aside, we need a little refresher course. Had this been a direct sequel to Fight The Future, released in 1999 or 2000 while the show still was on the air, I Want To Believe might succeed without much mythological ado. But it's 2008, and nobody but the resolute fanboys care anymore.

None of the original supporting characters from the series' run appeared in the film (although many actors who served in bit episodic roles are littered throughout), save one. Mitch Pileggi, Assistant Director Walter Skinner, shows up for a brief scene towards the end. His appearance, no matter how canonical within the series of events, seems like an underwhelming attempt at getting longtime fans to clap or holler for another familiar face. But this is The X-Files, not The Brady Bunch Movie.

I may be nitpicking, because the performances were adequate enough. Xzibit never shouted 'Pimp My Ride!', and Connolly stood out as the formerly immoral priest, but really, if you're only making the movie to please a fan base that can't even beat Mamma Mia! in its second week at the box office, why not just resurrect it for cable television (The Sci-Fi Channel would kill for this license), or make a direct-to-DVD film series? Or are Duchovny and Anderson too busy to resort to such low wages? Looking at their resumes, I certainly find THAT hard to believe.

Featured Review: SPACE CHIMPS

Space Chimps



Starring Andy Samberg, Cheryl Hines, Jeff Daniels, Patrick Warburton, Kristin Chenoweth, Stanley Tucci, Jane Lynch, Carlos Alazraqui



Directed by Kirk De Micco



Grade: D



"Let's chimp this ride!"

Space Chimps, the second of three computer-animated tales about non-humans going into space this summer, is by far much less quality than its' predecessor, the stunning and exquisite Pixar offering Wall-E. Sadly, with Fly Me To The Moon yet to be released, this laughable and insulting excuse of a film to 'entertain' children, may not even be the worse of the lot. But it certainly fails to muster any sympathy with a no-budget animation crew and the lamest excuse of a script this side of the nebula, even by kiddie film standards.

Produced by Vanguard and Starz Animation (raise your hand if you knew the premium cable movie channel had its own animation division), Space Chimps looks like a product of a burgeoning technical college animator circa 1994. One can use the excuse of the simple and bare graphics as eye-pleasing to the youngest children who might be scared of some imagery in Wall-E. But let's face it, Toy Story had more depth and complexity in its computer generated scenery than Space Chimps, and the former film was released THIRTEEN years ago. This is just a cheap attempt to cash in on the cartoon market.

We meet Ham III (voice of Andy Samberg), a circus performer and grandson of the famous Ham, revered as the first hominid to successful fly in outer space (possibly because in real life at least half the monkeys launched during the era died). Ham III however, doesn't have the same ambition. But when the space program comes under flak for losing an expensive probe in a wormhole, letting a meglomaniac alien (voice of Jeff Daniels) bent on ruling his home planet with a giant casino inherit it, they use Ham III and fellow more serious chimps Luna (Cheryl Hines) and Titan (Patrick Warburton) as a last-ditch public relations stunt to retrieve the probe.

If there's one minor kudos to be given to the animators, it would be the texture of the monkeys. At least the detail of their fur seem to been given a little time to materialize. But the set pieces and other beings that populate the film are so terrible-looking, it sucks whatever tiny bit of clean and composite animation right out of your brain. The NASA space center and the humans therein are chunky and lifeless looking, while the alien planet the chimps descend upon is again, cheap enough to be made on a Macintosh in 1994.

But if that isn't sad enough, the characters and the script are completely asinine as well. There is a mentor simian named Houston (who looks eerily like a chimp version of actor Gary Cole. Was that intentional?), named specifically for a "Houston, we have a problem" joke. Every other line spoken by Titan is a pun involving 'chimp'. "We'll have to chimprovise!" and "Let's chimp this ride!" are not exactly what constitutes a good movie. Then we're littered with random references to Beverly Hills Cop and David Bowie, just to see if parents are paying attention. Worse yet is a couple of off-color remarks that to adults can insinuate sexual references, but still should have no place in a G-rated film whether the kids get it or not.

Jeff Daniels at least does some liberations with his voice, because his villainous alien character Zartog sounds nothing like him. But that's also to say his new voice is awful, loud and screeching. The same could be said for Kristin Chenoweth's character, nicknamed Kilowatt (again, so named as an eye-rolling pun). Every moment she's on screen, there's a shrillness in her voice that can only be heard by dogs. The fact that Kilowatt claims she's the last of her race on the planet, then towards the end of the movie we see several more just like her in the crowd just proves how poorly conceived this whole project was.

Maybe it's futile to debunk a film that's squarely aimed at the crowd young enough to believe anybody and their grandmothers can go into outer space. But when there's magnificent entertainment for children out there, including Wall-E and Kit Kittredge, there's no reason for Space Chimps to have to pander to the lowest recesses of our toddler's minds. We need to engage them in thoughtful, well-written entertainment. But for Space Chimps, that's 'chimply' not the case.

Featured Review: MAMMA MIA!

Read up on the quickly forgotten dark political satire War Inc. movie review HERE.


Mamma Mia!



Starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Amanda Seyfried, Stellan Skarsgard, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper



Directed by Phyllida Lloyd



Grade: C+



"I don't care if you've slept with hundreds of men!"
"I haven't slept with hundreds of men..."

If last year's Sweeney Todd was an exercise in bringing the ultra-dark, consummately Gothic stylings of Broadway to the multiplex near you, Mamma Mia! could be considered the polar opposite. With its flamboyant costumes, beautiful and entirely dreamt up exteriors of Greek isles, and gads of pretty people of European ancestry singing along to the collective works of ABBA, Mamma Mia! is less a movie experience but a theatre revue filmed for a community playhouse.

I'm not here to judge the merits of the actual musical, for I'm sure the stage-to-screen transition lost many elements that made the Broadway/West End/Las Vegas show such a smash hit. But one certainly has to wonder why there's such a fervor for a franchise revolving around cheeky disco-flavored Swedish pop music that is 30 years old. Across The Universe worked because there was a multitude of great Beatles songs to play around with. How can they possibly fit such ABBA gold as "Dancing Queen" and "S.O.S." into a workable storyline?

Sophie (Mean Girls' Amanda Seyfried) is a beautiful young lady living in a resort town in Greece. She's about to be married, but there's still one major aspect of her life she hasn't wrapped up. The identity of her father. After reading through her mother Donna's (Meryl Streep) diary, Sophie finds out it can be one of three men from different parts of the world. Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) are all invited, all show up, and all must play a game of cat and mouse with Sophie's, and especially Donna's, feelings.

It's the kind of movie that you absolutely cannot take seriously. Nearly everyone on the island aside from say, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski (channeling her best Samantha Jones and Nina Van Horn) are young, fabulously gorgeous and have no duties but to group together and dance the day, afternoon, and night away. And if they aren't immaculately good-looking, the older ones like Baranski have the promiscuous spirit and spunk to make up for it.

It's the kind of movie where Streep's Donna can pity herself for living in one of Earth's paradises. Where there's only one black person and he's instantly attracted to the older ladies. Where one of the fathers can be swarmed by a sea of young, attractive ladies, then instantly realize he's gay. Where Pierce Brosnan, a famous Irishman, is tabbed to play an American, and yet cannot hold a tune in any dialect.

Thankfully both productions stay away from such kitsch hits as "Waterloo" and "Fernando" (although Streep hums the latter tune while walking about the village, and the cast sings the former in credit-rolling, non-canonical camp fashion). While it doesn't fit the context of the film's spectrum, "Dancing Queen" is the most joyous and infectious number, giving the village cast a few minutes to drop what they're doing and go on a town excursion with Donna.

The performances and tonal voices range from very good to "if he can't sing, why the heck did they cast him then?". Meryl Streep at some points of Mamma Mia! carries the movie on her back, giving a surprisingly well-rounded singing and acting accomplishment. 'Surprising' shouldn't be a word used for a 14-time Academy Award nominated actress, but Streep at 59, is quite spry and jubilant throughout. Her swan song, "The Winner Takes It All", isn't the most realized piece of pop music, but Streep commands a good acting presentation while pulling off the singing. It's guaranteed she'll add a record-tying 22nd Golden Globe nomination for this film, and it's possible she'll pick up Prezzie and Oscar bids.

Seyfried, Baranski, Walters, Cooper and even Skarsgard hold their own in various degrees, and Colin Firth does okay. His one solo, an acoustic folk version of "Our Last Summer" is suspect, but he gets through it. But the real travesty is Brosnan. His character is the lead of the three possible fathers, and his two big numbers are almost a pain to sit through. The Streep/Brosnan duet "S.O.S." is supposed to be a climax leading into the final act of the film, but his jarring lack of vocal range, best described as not having any whatsoever, pretty much ruins whatever emotion is coming out of Streep. His "When All Is Said And Done" is stranger yet.

It's good to see the movie musical trickling back into contemporary cinema after many years of exile. But whereas some recent musicals, Chicago, Dreamgirls, Across The Universe, Moulin Rouge! and et cetera have attempted to put a modern day film technique on the tried and true classic genre, Mamma Mia! plays like a forgettable MGM picture during the height of the movie musical generation of the 1940s and early 50s. The only changes made is the progressive sexuality and the retro-hip soundtrack. Like the band that provides said soundtrack, Mamma Mia! is just an aberration in the pop culture lexicon.

Featured Review: STEP BROTHERS

STEP BROTHERS



Starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn, Rob Riggle, Seth Rogen



Directed by Adam McKay



Grade: D+




"Your voice is amazing. It was a like a combination of Fergie and Jesus!"

Step Brothers has officially broken my tolerance and taste for the vulgar. Long after many people turned away from this brand of comedy, I've been there to defend the art of humor in any shape or form. It was my belief that if your film cannot be witty or smartly comedic on its own merits, there's nothing a couple of tasteless, out-of-left field vulgarities and expletives can't usually fix.

Though while Step Brothers derives much of its best and funniest moments from these lewd scenarios, it ends up coming off so vicious, you really have to have no morals at all to laugh without feeling a little shame. For the writers and stars of this movie, it's obvious they were too busy laughing at themselves to realize how threatening and egregious their lines escalate into when seen as a whole 95 minute film. Like Anchorman, Step Brothers is very much a quotable movie, but unlike Anchorman, this picture doesn't have the same good will.

Ferrell and Reilly team up again, akin to their last effort, Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby, they have plenty of chemistry together. But also similar to the previous film, it veers off course and quickly becomes graceless to laugh at, and worse to appreciate as an actual piece of cinema. By the time Step Brothers attempts to steer the characters into a happy ending, it takes away the awkward laughter and replaces it with ugly transitory scenes that don't even make sense.

Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly) are two 40 year olds who have been coddled by their parents Nancy and Robert (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins respectively) for so long, they strut around their houses in their underwear with a sense of entitlement. But when Nancy and Robert get married, Dale and Brennan are forced to co-exist. At first each are threatened by the change in their comfortable lifestyle, but soon enough they become fast friends over a mutual hate for Brennan's younger brother. This ends up being a bigger problem for their exasperated parents. The bad influence Dale and Brennan bring to each other gives Robert incentive to give the men an ultimatum: get jobs or move out.

It's a good subject to mine humor from. There is a whole society of people in this country who refuse to grow up and take responsibility for themselves (at 23, I try my hardest not to end up like that). Such films as Failure To Launch and You, Me & Dupree touched upon the slacker, overgrown teenager infesting their responsible antagonists angle, but Step Brothers put a crude, adulterated take on it.

However, it's one thing to hear the brothers argue and shout obscenities at each other (often with body parts being involved), but how many times do you need to hear them cuss out their parents? Jenkins is played off almost as a bad guy for drawing a hard line on the two, but after 40 years of laziness as a father and the recent trouble the duo had gotten into, he was entirely justifiable. What's so funny about disrespecting EVERYBODY around you, at least after the 14th time?

Besides the viciousness and outrageousness of the characters' feelings towards one another, the supporting characters vary from bad to outright horrible. Adam Scott (Monster-In-Law) plays Brennan's much more successful younger brother, who is made to be a complete jerk. But his character is seen as an annoying jackass, and his scenes usually bring the movie to a complete halt. Even worse is Kathryn Hahn (Crossing Jordan) as his repressed wife, who after witnessing Dale punch her husband, goes off the deep end with a major crush on him. Every scene that involves her, in conjunction with Scott as her husband, totally ruin the chemistry, however vile, between Ferrell and Reilly.

Don't get me wrong, I laughed, and I laughed hard. But for every one-liner that was brilliantly observed or random, there was plenty of them to make you cringe. It ends up becoming like a series of skits, trying to find out what the step brothers can possibly do to be funny. For such a solid premise for a straight comedy, the whole effort was terribly disappointing, which has become an increasing reality for projects with Judd Apatow's name on it. I think he and the other guys involved in his circle need to just sit the rest of this year out and recoup before they even attempt an Anchorman 2.