Tag: 0 out of 4

I didn’t get a huge helping of sexual thrillers in 2016 like I had in previous years. It was a genre that was just severely lacking.

And of course, I missed it when When The Bough Breaks came out in theaters. One of the few films to really fit the bill. But I made sure to grab it right away when it came out to DVD. You know, just in case it is a giant pile of trash like a lot of similar genre’d films end up being. Remember The Boy Next Door? Addicted? I feel like both of them made previous worst of the year lists.

So sure, I went in expecting the worst, but I have been surprised before.

Ah what a happy pseudo-family, pre bough breaking.

John (Morris Chestnut) and Laura Taylor (Regina Hall) are two very successful married people. They both have fantastic jobs, they make bank, have a nice hall, come from nice backgrounds. But they cannot have a baby together, for whatever reason. After multiple miscarriages, the two have spent years looking for a good surrogate who they trusted with their baby.

And they think they have finally found someone with Anna Walsh (Jaz Sinclair). She is a young and sweet girl, wanting to help others. She will also use the money to help get a good house for her and her boyfriend, Mike Mitchell (Theo Rossi). He is deploying soon, and with the her sudden extra income and his, they should be able to have their dream home.

Well, the surrogate is a success and she is pregnant. But it turns out that Mike is abusive, so they decide to protect Anna and let her live in the house with them. But Anna begins acting peculiar. Spying on John and refusing to be modest with her body. And she is still seeing her boyfriend on the side. He wants her to threaten to back down and keep the baby, they will pay her more money to give it up and they can get rich.

Also they lied about their names and their past. She is also becoming obsessed with John, to the point where she tries to tear their marriage apart and his life if she will not be with her.

Ah, yes, the old unborn baby hostage deal for that sweet Chestnut loving.

Also featuring Michael K. Williams, Romany Malco, Glenn Morshower, and Tom Nowicki.

“Oh sorry, I seem to have fallen on the floor and can’t get up or cover up.”

When The Bough Breaks wants to take a perfectly normal and already scary situation for a couple and go to the extreme with it. I won’t say there is anything morally wrong trying to scare people away from using surrogates, because technically there isn’t, but it is still a pretty damn dark and grey area.

As this isn’t just a drama type film, but a SUPER drama, the actors mostly end up having to over act instead of letting a potentially great thriller play out. The plan for the girl and her boyfriend was pretty dumb. Her way of slowly seducing Chestnut was pretty dumb. Hall’s character was completely absent and terrible in this film as well. Just a lot of badly working together gears not making a lot of progress.

And the ending where all the potential scares occur? Yeah, I was scared once when a character drops the baby safely strapped in its car seat, but none of the other tension was felt. It was instead all laughable, including its finish.

There won’t be any surprises in this film. Heck, there isn’t even nakedness to make a real sexual thriller. Just a laughable thriller, with a terrible idea for a plot, acted by people who normally do a bit better.

After the success of my Saw Franchise review as a Milestone Review, I knew I wanted to do it again at some point in the future. Films that were mostly too old to be reviewed individually on the website, but as a whole, could make a pretty decent Milestone Review investment, for whatever relevant reason I could think about. And yes, I was a bit surprised that it was review 550, when it doesn’t feel like that long ago.

And I knew the next one of those I would want to do would be the Resident Evil Franchise for a variety reasons. The fact that this is review 1750 makes it extra special in my eyes.

1) When I moved to Ames, I started to review EVERYTHING that hit our theaters, both new and the cheap-o theater. I made that declaration the week AFTER Resident Evil: Retribution left the main theaters apparently. I had no worry, I would watch it when it hit the cheap theaters, because I would even watch “horror” movies now. And then the cheap theater never got it.

2) End of January, a new Resident Evil film comes out, and hey, I need to watch these in order to prepare for it.

And finally, 3) I own all five of these films on Blu-Ray, bought a couple years ago on Black Friday real cheap. So, uhh, I really need to watch them already. Also, I never rushed to watch them, because I have never really played any of these games. I played like, 5-10 minutes of Resident Evil 4, found it too scary, and didn’t touch it again.

And I will finally have some context for The Kick Heard Around the Video Game Movie World.

Let’s talk about Resident Evil, the first movie based on a horror video game, based on the first horror action video game. This film starts us in the Umbrella Corporation facility. They do tech stuff around the world, basically Google, but they also secretly did weapon stuff around the world, making them filthy rich. After some disease juice gets loose in their facility, the AI who runs the whole thing (The Red Queen), kills everyone inside the facility. Every single scientist, worker, peon.

So a military group of soldiers are being sent down there to investigate why and to turn off The Red Queen. Before this happens, we see Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up naked in a bathtub, in a mansion, with some amnesia. And that is when the soldiers bust in. The group, led by “One” (Colin Salmon) bring Alice along into The Hive (the name of the underground research facility) and let her know that she works for the Umbrella Corporation as well and is meant to guard the entrance. The rest of the team includes Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Crewes. They also have Matt (Eric Mabius) as someone who they recently arrested, and Spence (James Purefoy), Alice’s husband and also guardian of the mansion.

Don’t get your pants in a twist, this monster is coming.

When they get down there, they find destruction, death, and weird shit everywhere. Getting into The Red Queen’s server room is difficult and people die, but damn it, they shut down The Red Queen. Yay! Time to leave and go back to the fun outside in Raccoon City, good job everyone. BUT WAIT. With the AI shut down, all of the locks and operations shut down as well. And it turns out that the virus, the T-Virus, basically made zombies. And shit like that thing in the picture above to deal with.

Somehow Alice is like, super incredibly, awesome. She fights so well. Turns out that Spence is the one who spread the virus, because he was trying to stop Matt and his sister from telling the world about what they were doing. So Spence has to die, and Alice and Matt barely escape to the top before bad things happen, with Matt dying from a claw mark, the antidote so close… And then they are found by Umbrella operatives and taken away.

When Alice awakes, she finds herself in an empty hospital. After she gets out of there, she finds Raccoon City in ruins. Crashed cars, fires, and apparently the T-Virus got out and it is zombie time in the real world. MOVIE 2!

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the extremely high bar setting subtitle, take place right after the events of the first film. Because of the team going in to capture Alice and Matt, they accidentally also let off a wave of the infected zombies onto the city. And this spreads like wild, against Umbrella’s interests. They set up a perimeter wall around the city and only have one area for people to leave, assuming they pass the test to show they are not infected or bitten. But when the dead get to that area to, they close off the last gate and leave the people inside to deal with it on their owns, even willing to fire on regular citizens.

And this is a problem. This is what Alice wakes up to. Umbrella tried to get its best scientists out of the city as well, including the inventor of the T-Virus, Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris). They were unable to get his daughter out though, Angie (Sophie Vavasseur), clearly the inspiration for The Red Queen. So he wants people to go in and find her, anyone really, promising them a way out.

It takes a lot of skill to keep that outfit together in a high action zombie apocalypse.

People like Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), an ex-cop who hated Umbrella, and her old friend, Sargeant Payton Wells (Razaaq Adoti). People like Umbrella soldiers Carlos (Oded Fehr) and Nicholai (Zack Ward). And eventually all of them meet up with a news reporter Terri (Sandrine Holt), and T.J. (Mike Epps), a guy with guns, and Alice and the girl.

Also running around the city is a giant monster, named Nemesis, working for Umbrella and killing soldiers, not citizens. He is controlled by Umbrella, namely Major Cain (Thomas Kretschmann). Eventually they find out that the monster is actually Matt, from the first on. He was experimented on, just like Alice, except she just got super strong and looked the same while he mutated as he was already scratched. Oh snap!

Also Dr. Ashford gets killed, a lot of fighting ensures, and the survivors escape on a helicopter as Raccoon City is fucking blasted with a nuke! Their helicopter crashes in the wave, Alice is killed saving the girl and Umbrella finds them some time later. Alice wakes up a few weeks later, in a Detroit Umbrella facility, by Dr. Sam Isaacs (Iain Glen), restores her own memories, breaks out and goes on the run with T.J., Jill, Carlos, and Angela, with Isaacs letting her run, knowing she is still controlled. Or something.

Exctinction takes us five years further into the franchise. The T-Virus has spread throughout the world, and basically life sucks. It is all desert-y and dead, very Mad Max-esque. Alice is now driving on her own, abandoning her friends because she is being tracked by satellite. She also has some sort of psychic powers now, thanks to experimentation.

Somewhere near Las Vegas is where we find them all now, Alice wandering and killing bad people and bad zombies alike. And a big caravan of survivors looking for a place to call home. It is led by Claire Redfield (Ali Lartner), and features some returnees like Carlos and T.J. Yay! No idea where Jill went. Some of the new “survivors” include a girl named K-Mart (Spencer Locke) and other actors (Ashanti, Christopher Egan, Matthew Marsden, and Linden Ashby).

Shit, sand got everywhere. I hate sand.

And uhh, well, eventually Umbrella attacks them again when they are in Las Vegas trying to get supplies. They want to go to Alaska, where they heard there is a settlement. More people die, and Alice goes to the local Umbrella facility to put a stop to them and take their helicopter, so the survivors can go. And she does that!

Inside the lair is of course Dr. Isaacs again, but this time he was weak, so he injected himself with the T-Virus too. This turned him into a hybrid fighting entity, with arms that could be elongated with tentacles. Fun! Alice kills that guy, finds out that this facility has hundreds of Alice clones, and she plans to use them to take down Umbrella. Looks like they are located in Tokyo for sure now, they didn’t like Isaacs, and some guy in glasses (Jason O’Mara) is the new, bad guy. Survivors to Alaska, Alice plans to take out Tokyo Hive, end of film.

Afterlife begins with showing how Tokyo got infected. Then we see Alice storm in after Extinction, clone army and all, and clear house. But Wesker (Shawn Roberts), Mr. Sunglasses himself, now played by a new actor, escapes. During their battle, he removes Alice’s super powers, of which she is happy, they both crash and explode and somehow, Alice survives. So she makes her way to Alaska.

There she is attacked by Claire, with a metal spider on her chest. Once she removes it, Claire stops, with some amnesia and doesn’t talk. But Alice finds no other survivors, just a lot of planes and emptiness. So she flies a plane to LA with Claire and lands on top of a prison with some survivors flagging her down. The survivors include Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), Crystal Waters (Kacey Clarke), Angel (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Bennett (Kim Coates), and a prisoner who calls himself Chris (Wentworth Miller).

Indoor rain scenes are all the rage these days, not at all for sexual reasons either.

And yeah, they are now in a prison, surrounded by zombies. Not just zombies, but a giant one with a big axe/hammer weapon, called Axeman. Turns out Arcadia, the Alaskan settlement, was actually the name of a ship, which is off the coast. They want to get to the ship, to see the other survivors, makes sense. So they do that. They escape, some people die, but when they get to the ship, turns out it also is an Umbrella trap.

They have everyone in tubes under ground, for testing or who knows what. And surprise! There is Wesker again, this time, super super fucking powerful, and fast, and he can regenerate. Much fighting occurs, eventually he is on a ship that explodes and everyone is free! Yay, the survivors are freed from the tubes, when…suddenly! More Umbrella ships show up, with guns. And our old friend, Jill Valentine, now blonde and not at all looking like her former self. But she has a robot spider on her chest, and then…movie ends!

Don’t worry, at the start of Retribution, we will see what immediately happens to Alice in crew, but in slow motion and backwards! Then she will tell us about the first four movie plot, then it will show the attack in regular motion at regular speed. Then we find Alice waking up in a suburban house, with a husband, a deaf child Becky (Aryana Engineer) and no zombies. Weird. Okay. Until zombies attack their neighborhood! Lot of people start dying and of course, then real Alice wakes up, again, in an Umbrella facility.

Sigh. Okay. But the computer that runs it starts to malfunction. So she escapes, a lot of weird things happen, and somehow she finds herself in Tokyo right when the plague begins? What in the fuck? Blah blah action, blah blah plot, eventually we get some knowledge. She is in a large Hive base (They are all really big), but it is a testing facility in Russia. They built huge areas to simulate T-Virus attacks in a few major cities, to sell the tech to governments against each other. It is also underwater and under ice. But don’t work she is being rescued by…Wesker?! What, he survived?

Oh and Ada Wong (Bingbing Li) his assistant. Apparently they want to free her to finally bring down Umbrella, because now Umbrella is being run by The Red Queen herself. They now have to escape, with Becky (who things Alice is her mom, despite just being a clone), in a two hour timer before the facility explodes. Also rescuing her on the other side is a crack team of warriors. Including Luther West! Also Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and two guys who are totally not as important (Robin Kasyanov, Ofilio Portillo).

Resident Evil always had the most appropriate outfits for fighting AND doing that BDSM thing.

That’s right, this is another movie where they have to escape a place before they all die. But this one features a lot of returning members, because apparently a lot of them were actually clones the whole time. So people from the first and second movie are back, just to fight her with Valentine, still controlled by a robot, while the base comes crumbling down. And more Axemen, zombies, infected, and guns.

Needless to say, eventually they win, and get picked up by Wesker. Where is Wesker? In the White House, with the “last remaining survivors” ready to finally rid the infected threat once and for all. Maybe.

Oh where to do we begin. I guess the first film. Despite having CGI that has aged terribly over the last 14 years, the first film in the franchise is dreadfully okay. The acting isn’t great, but the concept it is introducing is original for the time and it creates a potentially scary situation. Out of all the five films, it is the scariest because everything is new, but again, bad CGI takes away some of the frights. Some of the scenes felt straight out of a video game, but it still wasn’t high art in any sense of the word.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse introduces us to some video game characters and a lot more action. Action at the expense of horror. Like, there are no fears at all in this movie. The zombies aren’t scary, and Nemesis NEVER feels scary, just threatening and powerful. For a horror franchise to immediately drop large portions of horror is a terrible move to make. But at least this film feels like the next step in the franchise and continues the plot along decently, despite the dumb teaser at the end. It is still bad and should feel bad, but there were some attempts there.

Resident Evil: Extinction takes the series in a completely different direction than anyone expected. The point of it was to make a scarier movie with a lot of it set during the day instead of night like normal zombie flicks. The plot was a bit of a weaker point in this film as well, but it would have been stronger had the next two movies not done what they did. It did increase some of the horror elements from the first film, not to the same level, but that is why I left it as okay. Mad Max and Zombies is a fun crossover idea and the film once again got a closer to some sort of closure.

Wow how did Umbrella get their logo to burn on a building like that? Is that a metaphor?!

Resident Evil: Afterlife is where the franchise starts to hit garbage fire mode. To talk about both films, neither really seem to feature that strongly of a horror element. Once again, these films feel incredibly action oriented, with very weak plots. And by weak plots, I mean the films should barely exist. After the third film, we have Alice heading to stop Umbrella Corp’s main office in Tokyo. Awesome, she does that early in the film, then most of the film is instead dealing with this being stuck in a prison, trying to get on a ship situation. This is not really a new plot line from this franchise or from zombie films in general.

And in the fifth film, we start off once again LOCKED IN A GODDAMN UMBRELLA BUILDING. And the entire focus of the movie is to get out of the building. Just like movie one. Just like movie four. They are just rehashing the same plot line and not moving the plot along. Sure, at the end of the movie, they escape the place that they were. But they are solving problems that the films itself create.

After the third film, we can sort of assume where the franchise is going and will go. And instead of delivering that outcome, the fourth film is almost entirely a filler plot line. At the end of the fourth film, we know where the franchise should go, and instead of getting there, it is entirely filled with a different fucking filler plot line. They create and solve issues in the movie itself at the expense of telling a story and it is downright furious.

Sure, they might have some cool sequences in them. They were movies made for 3D and IMAX screens. But they abandoned the genre of horror, retold the first plot in worse ways, and refused to give us growth, which is goddamn necessary that late in to a franchise.

I can hope and hope amongst all things that the next film, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, will bring us the plot we have been looking forward to. But I honestly am just assuming it will also end on a bad cliffhanger and not actually be the final movie. Because money. And dicks.

I don’t hate Sacha Baron Cohen as an actor, I think he can be amazing. He just lets himself get into a lot of shitty roles. He still always gives it his all.

The Brothers Grimsby is one of those shitty roles. I didn’t really know what it was about. But it did have a bit of genius advertisement campaign.

It went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to show a clip, but made sure to show a clip that could not be shown on TV. A gross, over the top, cringey clip. But since it couldn’t be shown, instead they just showed the audience flipping their shit. Of course that went rival, and hey, probably more people went to see the movie. Good job PR company.

Oh. Um. And this is a bad job, PR Company.

Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a simple man living in the small town of Grimsby. He has a wife (Rebel Wilson), 11 kids, and an empty room. The room is for his brother, Sebastian (Mark Strong). A long long time ago they were separated thanks to the foster system, but Nobby knew that one day he would meet his brother again, and damn it, he needed a room for him.

Nobby likes to drink, watch football, and party. But then he finds out the location of his brother! He has to go to a big charity event to find him, but when he does he gives him the biggest of brotherly hugs. This causes Sebastian, a trained government assassin, to kill the wrong target and get himself into noodles of trouble.

Now Sebastian has to go on the run, while dealing with his incompetent brother. His brother being there is also his saving grace, because no one knows he exists, so it gives him a place to hide and let all of this blow over.

Also starring in this cesspool: Ian McShane, Penelope Cruz, Sam Hazeldine, Isla Fisher, Scott Adkins, Annabelle Wallis, Gabourey Sidibe, and poor Barkhad Abdi, who is just willing to take any job really.

I’m not drunk, you’re a pool table!

Want to know what the gross scene was that they showed the audience? Fine. Strong and Cohen climb into the vagina of an Elephant to hide from pursuers. While hiding, a male elephant decides to go for it and so they are crammed in there, with a large elephant penis coming in an out. Cohen knows it can last for hours, so they actively try to help the penis ejaculate to make it end. And it of course ends with elephant semen. But wait, there ends up being a huge line of elephants ready to jump on, giving them hours of cramped in a vagina, ejaculating elephants fun.

Okay so typed out that is terrible. Watching it is gross (but don’t worry, it doesn’t look incredibly realistic, it just looks stupid and a little gross). Having gross scenes in a movie does not make the movie terrible, being overall terrible and unfunny does that.

There are quite a few “outlandish” scenes in the film that will make an ordinary viewer just want to turn it off. A very long joke about sucking out venom out of a penis. The first picture alludes to the seduction of a woman who doesn’t have the normal standard of beauty. Jokes about AIDS and Trump (before it was fashionable, still dumb jokes) and of course a very weak plot line.

There is just nothing amusing or remotely interesting in this film. Cohen is over the top, he is always over the top, but the film is shit and really can hopefully be easily forgotten from my existence. After I finish typing up my worst of the year list.

Hey, everyone love’s cats. Just go onto the internet. But the love for cats comes from being cute, or seeing them do derpy things. They don’t love all cats.

Which is why the concept for Nine Lives is so bizarre. The plot comes straight out of a film from the 1990’s (Or a Rob Schneider film from any decade). Guy goes into a cat. The only way it could be really worse is if the cat itself could talk in English and spoke to the cast, but alas, it just has to meow at them.

People don’t like those sorts of films anymore. Those are the films that get mocked and burned at a stake. And here it is, 2016, with Nine Lives coming out. Sure, yeah, I did think Keanu would be a movie about a talking cat, but ended up just being a regular cat and pretty decent.

I don’t think the same sort of change can occur here while watching.

He is going to stare a whole through that cats head.

Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey) is what his name suggests, a walking brand. He is all about his image and his companies success. As CEO, he wants to do fascinating things and leave a permanent mark on society. And he decided that permanent mark would be the tallest building in America. Now that it is almost completed, it turns out another building in Chicago being built will easily beat theirs in height, ruining his dreams.

One of his workers, Ian Cox (Mark Consuelos) was supposed to know about this sort of thing, but he didn’t care. He wanted to take over the company and sell it for money.

All of Brand’s success means his family had to suffer a little. His new wife (Jennifer Garner) and daughter (Malina Weissman) don’t see him a lot and he forgets things, like birthdays. And his daughter wants a cat, but he doesn’t want a cat in his house. But eventually he just gets the cat.

Buys it from a weird guy (Christopher Walken), and sure enough, an accident happens putting Cox in a coma and his spirit or mind or whatever in the cats body. Knowing that the last thing he did before the accident was to actually get a gift for the daughter was a good thing, they take the cat in while he recovers. This allows Brand to try and bond with the daughter and convince them that he is a man in a cat’s body.

Also starring Robbie Amell as the son who is trying to help Brand’s company while he is in a coma, Cheryl Hines as his ex-wife, and Talitha Bateman as his ex-wife’s new daughter.

Oh ho ho, the human is on all fours. What a role reversal!

Jennifer Garner almost had the worst year ever. She had three movies come out, and I have seen two of them. Nine Lives is beyond terrible and Mother’s Day (which I haven’t seen) was blasted by critics as well. She is down right lucky that Miracles From Heaven ended up being a relatively decent Christian film, and not a standard tacky/corny over the top Christian film. It would have been real close to being just a complete fail of a year.

There isn’t a whole lot to be said about Nine Lives that isn’t already out there on the internet. What the hell was everyone involved thinking?

There are very little surprises in this film. Spacey, Garner, everyone just phones it in. When things start feeling the bleakest, it was because they made the son character a passive, dumbass. He seemingly refused to fight and it didn’t make sense. So why did it happen? Oh, so the son could do a bigger distraction near the end of the film, in order to end on a bigger note. So yeah, temporarily changing how a character works, because the writers don’t know what the hell they are doing to get to the finale they want.

The cat looked terrible when it had to switch to CGI, which was whenever the cat had to do anything special. So a giant chunk of the movie.

Walken was in this movie, and he has been in mostly shit for years.

There is just nothing really positive to note. It has a weak script, weak plot, weak acting, and at under 90 minutes it still feels too long.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my 1700th (ish) movie review. Yes, a Milestone Review!

Except this is also technically my 1702th review. I have been quite busy lately and I forgot this grand milestone was coming upon us. Technically my review of Central Intelligence was the 1700th posted, but hey, close fucking enough, right!?

Anyways, Looney Tunes: Back In Action. Do you remember it existing at all? I doubt it. The first movie after the wildly cult success of Space Jam, I remember avoiding it at all costs. It looked bad, it looked different, it wasn’t Space Jam 2. Fourteen year old me knew it would be bad, and after it came out we basically all agreed to stop talking about it.

But to continue with a different theme. Is this the movie that helped kill Brendan Fraser‘s post Mummy career? I already did a milestone review of Journey to the Center of the Earth, but that didn’t kill his career as it was already on the decline in 2008.

Can a duck bring down a jungle boy, a caveman, and a rock star?

In this world gone mad, Looney Tunes and other cartoon figures roam the streets and live throughout the world, because they are just strange animated actors. Yes, they can still ignore physics and have other cartoon perks, but they are just…real. And in this real world, Warner Brothers is about to fire Daffy Duck.

He is being a dick, demanding rewrites, tired of getting shot and so on, so they just say screw him and kick him out of the studio. They don’t give a fuck, people want to see Bugs Bunny anyways, not the other cast and crew.

Surely this decision will not come back to bite Kate Houghton, Vice-President of Comedy (Jenna Elfman), in the ass.

These are the only other non LT cartoon characters shown and hey, it is a funny scene.

DJ Drake (Brendan Fraser) is a sort of stunt man and security guard at WB and he is yelled at to find the Duck and make sure he actually leaves the lot. Of course there is a huge scuffle and the batman mobile ends up knocking over the WB water tower, all over executives and equipment, thanks to DJ and Daffy. So DJ gets fired too, a double whammy firing day!

Those WB executives sure are cold. Looks like Kate didn’t know that he was a special security guard/stunt man. His father was Damien Drake (Timothy Dalton), a really famous movie star for the company. Shit.

She doesn’t care, they ruined her hat!

Speaking of his father, turns out Damien Drake is more than just a movie star. He is secretly a spy (because spies are usually a secretive profession). Damien needs his son to travel to Las Vegas, find his associate, and help find the “blue monkey” diamond. What is that? Good question. DAmien is too busy getting kidnapped to answer though.

And Daffy hasn’t left DJ alone, so he demands to come along for the ride. The studio be damned, he has an adventure to do.

About this time also, Kate realized she fucked up, the movie isn’t as funny without Daffy, so she makes it her mission to find DJ and Daffy to restore her film and restore her job.

That is a different woman with a different job.

They end up meeting up, making it to Vegas and that dancer is of course Dusty Tails (Heather Locklear, shit, how old is this movie?), a secret spy as well. She works at a club run by Yosemite Sam because he works for the ACME corporation, the big bad guys of this world.

Wanna know why they are bad? Good question. But they are the ones who captured Damien! Dusty gives them a Queen playing card with Mona Lisa’s face and they are chased off by Yosemite.

They also find out that the evil ACME corporation wants the blue monkey diamond to…turn everyone in the world into monkeys! Oh, okay. Mr. Chairman (Steve Martin), is that really your goal?

“Of course it is, why else would I be stretching??”

The gang heads to Paris, France, as they are basically now spies and fuck it. They go to The Louvre because The Mona Lisa painting is there and they know how to read obvious clues.

Using secret card technology, they discover that behind The Mona Lisa is a map of Africa. And it doesn’t look to detailed, but it is the best they got. Elmer Fudd also shows up, turns out he was secretly working for ACME as well, oh no! Fudd chases our duck and bunny through a series of paintings because they are cartoon characters, whatever.

And you know what? It annoys me. They go from famous painting to famous painting. Like The Scream painting. And the god damn Scream painting isn’t at The Louvre, never really was, but the movie goes lazy. Sure, they can get the Mona Lisa right, but then they decide to skirt the details?

Come on assholes. Anyways, as expected, they escape and head to “Africa” to find the next clue.

Hopefully there isn’t another art museum there. It’s best paintings will have been stolen b The Louvre.

In Africa, they awkwardly find the Jungle Temple like. Really quickly. The Grandma and Tweety bird show it to them, because they know things too. Inside is the Blue Monkey, and then, shenanigans! The Grandma and company were actually Mr. Chairman the whole time!

They transport everyone back to their lair, using technology, and force DJ and Kate to give up the blue diamond when they show Damien as their prisoner.

Mwhaha!

And now, by putting it on the satellite, they can turn the whole world into monkeys!

This picture is entirely out of place, but its strangeness makes it okay.

At this point, a lot of comic violence occurs. They have to fight to save Damien, fight to get the blue monkey back, and more people appear.

Of course they save the day and the only one who turns into a monkey is Mr. Chairman himself, take that fuckers. Daffy had to become Duck Dodgers to do it, but he was successful.

They determine the whole thing was staged to be a film and all of this was meaningless. Makes a bit more sense now. But don’t worry, Bugs is going to make Daffy equal partners from now on, until the credits suddenly appear and a deal can’t be made. Ha ha, suck it Daffy!

Other people I didn’t even bother to mention in this film include Joan Cusack and Roger Corman!

And we have to end the film with a kiss, it just makes sense.

There were so many bad decisions made in this film, it is unbelievable.

In Space Jam, we go from a regular human world with cartoons, where they live in the earth in a magical other realm, to…they just live on Earth and everything is fine? Having all of these characters not together,spread out awkwardly around the world means outside of Daffy and Bugs we rarely get any real cameo time. So it is all Bugs and Daffy and very little else, feeling like a huge missed opportunity.

And the genre shift goes from space adventure sports film to a spy film? Going from Sports film to Spy film is usually not a good genre order, but at least now can understand where Cars 2 got the terrible idea from.

I am not sure if this is the film that killed Fraser’s career, because no one really saw it or cared for it enough to damage his already strange career. Plus, Monkeybone was already a thing at this time. Another film I haven’t seen but could try it for a future milestone given the weird things I’ve heard. It might have damaged Elfman’s movie career before it could really take off, so she basically stuck to TV.

But here is the most important question I have. The subtitle is Back in Action. What the fuck at they back in action to? Like, if this was a direct sequel to Space Jam that might make sense. As they return to Earth to do things (spy things unfortunately, but things nonetheless). But no, it is talking about a return, but there is no return at any point in this movie.

If it should have a title along these lines, Looney Tunes: Now in Action might make sense as this spy adventure is not their normal cup of tea.

This movie is a disgrace. Space Jam might not actually be a great film (according to lame people), but this one is far below Space Jam.

I am a huge fan of The Purge series. Or at least the first one, which I still think is the best, and The Purge: Anarchy. And The Purge: Election Year didn’t live up to the first two for me.

Anyways, because of this I was actually excited to see Meet The Blacks. It had virtually no advertisements, opened in only a little over a thousand theaters, and I think quickly left them. And now it is out on DVD and again, no one really knew anything about it.

I also would have ignored it, but someone else let me know that it existed and was actually a spoof on The Purge films. Shit, The Purge came out in 2013. How did it take three years for them to come out with a spoof film? It is just about the first film too, so just seems weird for such a delay.

And here is clearly a scene from the ending of the movie. Spoiler?!

Carl Black (Mike Epps) just wants to make a better life for his family. Sure, they have been living in the wrong part of Chicago, he has been super in the drug game and been a real dick, but he just wants what is best for them. So when famed criminal, Key Flo (Charlie Murphy) is getting sent to prison for a few years, Carl grabs a shit ton of his cash and moves his family out of Chicago.

His family involves his new wife, Lorena (Zulay Henao) who is notably white, his daughter (Bresha Webb), his son who pretends to be a vampire (Alex Henderson) and cousin (Lil Duval). He gets them a sweet crib in Beverly Hills, a gated community, basically all rich white people.

And they are there right before The Annual Purge. Carl says rich people don’t do the purge, so they don’t have to worry. But they have made enough enemies in life to come halfway around the country to kill them. Let alone the racist old white people who don’t like their new neighbors.

Now they just have to survive the night and each other. Starring Gary Owen and George Lopez as President El Bama.

Whatever joke I made for this pic in The Purge, you should assume I said it here as well.

I went into this movie expecting a bad movie, but I honestly still expected to be better than what I was given.

Most parody films have sucked, a lot, in the recent years. They do bottom of the barrel jokes. They make references and think references to film and pop culture are good enough when it comes to humor. Meet The Blacks couldn’t even do that much.

For a 90 minute film, it dragged and dragged to set up the family and their situation. So much that the actual purge didn’t begin until about 43 minutes in, basically halfway. Shit.

And the purge part also dragged. They had a lot of different people coming after them it turns out, so each character had its own scare and introduction, story of why they were mad at Carl Black, and then altercation. It didn’t flow well at all. The film became just more and more ridiculous people looking for more petty revenge.

Damn was it boring. Damn did it suck. Damn did it no make me laugh at all once. At least Fifty Shades of Black, also out this year, made me laugh occasionally. This one has unlikable characters, unnecessary amounts of backstory and talking filler.

A good movie can make dialogue work. This dialogue just felt like they were stalling. It was a low budget film not getting a lot out of its budget.

Damn it. I knew there was probably going to be a Sharknado 4, I just pretended to live in a world where it wouldn’t happen. Once I knew I was watching this movie, I figured I had to review it too. Which means I am even more disappointed that my Sharknado 3 was written as if I wasn’t actually writing a review. Like the movie was beneath me.

I am disappointed, because that was my first idea when I set off to write this review. Damn it. I am an idea thief, from myself!

Oh well, there are worse things you could be. Like someone who wants to be part of Sharknado 4.

I feel like those nuts are a metaphor for myself.

Despite the third film ending with April Shepard (Tara Reid) potentially dying, we don’t get to find out right away. Apparently there was a fan vote to see if she lived or died. And now, this movie takes place five years later, with Fin (Ian Ziering) dealing with his family and no April in his life.

Oh, and since the last movie, no Sharknadoes either. A company, Astro X, has developed technology that lets them use weather science to stop any tornado that begins to form. Their leader Aston Reynolds (Tommy Davidson) is now super rich and famous, and he even made a shark themed Vegas hotel and casino to show how baller he was. Well, now that Fin, his son (Cody Linley), and his son’s fiance (Imani Hakim) are in Vegas to have a wedding, things of course go bad.

Because a sandstorm happens. A big one. Astro X cannot stop a sandstorm. It hits the hotel, sharks happen, they call it a sandnado and everyone loses their minds.

Because in this movie, it isn’t tornadoes getting formed. It is a sandstorm and blizzard and water spout stuff. All of which gain sharks somehow, they don’t even try to explain it well this time. Except these things also gain boulders, lightning, fire, oil, and yes, nuclear bombs, just so people can name them worse and worse names.

Other people in this movie include Masiela Lusha, David Hasselhoff, Gary Busey, and Gilbert Gottfried.

Also pirates! Kids are still into pirates, right?

Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, Heather. As expected, this film was a painful 90 minutes of my life. The plot moves so quickly, nothing important is really ever to develop. The action scenes are shit, the CGI is bad, and the acting is worse.

“But Gorgon Reviews!” someone might wail. “That is the point of this film, to be bad and funny because of it! Entertainment, popcorn fun!” Hey, straw man, go fuck yourself. There is a god damn difference between so bad it is enjoyable, and so bad it is bad. The difference lies in intent.

In the so bad it is good field, the movies that were being made were made by people who truly thought they were making something wonderful. Tommy Wiseau thought he was making a serious, amazing drama with The Room. I do not mean that they are only good if someone is incredibly wrong in their vision. But in these films you have some heart and attempt to make a good product and well, shit goes wrong.

It is the reason why Birdemic is amusing and Birdemic 2 is not. In the sequel, they set off to make a shit film, and you know what, it was a shit film and not worth anyone’s time. If they are so bad, you cannot even appropriately rip on them with your drunk friends, because the films do everything for you already. You cannot be clever about it and you would say the same thing that anyone else watching it would say.

The Sharknado and other recent SyFy terrible movies are basically the physical moving representation of this comic. Fake praise from internet fanboys needs to stop at this point, because damn it, the joke wasn’t good the first time, and now this is the fourth time we have heard it.

Not surprisingly, this will make my worst of the year list. Surprisingly, there are still films that were worse.

Almost every single introduction joke I could think of for The Boss was incredibly lame. There are way too many Boss-based pop culture references that every single one became cringey at just the thought of them. I don’t think there is a single good joke or reference I can make without the readers closing their browser in anger.

If Kelsey Grammer and Tony Danza were locked in a room all night, even they couldn’t come up with something clever to make a chuckle.

Although they would have made something at least more appealing than this turd.

Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy) was an orphan kid and no one wanted her. She got returned a lot. Must be too much spunk. But now, as an adult, she is wickedly rich and famous. I can’t actually tell you what she does, but she is famous and sells stuff. She also sells her image, women love her, she is a rock star and she knows how to put on a show.

But then she gets arrested. For insider trading crap, even though everybody does it. But she is rich so she doesn’t have to go to jail for years, just has to post a bond and honestly, I think everyone forgets about it. Claire (Kristen Bell) doesn’t forget though. She was her assistant for years and never got the raises she deserved as a single mom. With the arrest she had to find a new job and quick. And now Michelle is showing up to sleep on her couch.

Long story short, the daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson), is in an off shoot girl scouts group. Michelle sees how much they make selling cookies, but dislikes that the girls don’t make anything out of it. So she makes her own alternative off shoot girl scout group, but this time the girls can get commission on their pastry sales and Michelle can also make a lot of money. Hooray money!

Also conflict about other business people, Michelle being not super nice, and girls beating up other girls in the streets. Starring Peter Dinklage, Tyler Labine, Kathy Bates, Cecily Strong, Kristen Schaal, and Eva Peterson as a tall teenage girl.

Because all out brawls make the best scenes in comedies.

I really need to harp on this. In my eyes, a comedy reaches the lowest levels of its potential if it resorts to an all out brawl between parts of the cast. It was the conclusion of Grown Ups 2, and the most advertised portion of The Boss. As you can see, it is hilarious because there are young teenage girls in the fray, along with overly concerned mom, all dressed super funny. Ha ha ha!

Anyways, outside of that scene there is little else I remember about the film. Wait, I remember Melissa McCarthy making fun of Kristen Bell’s boobs for a long time. And I remember never laughing.

A comedy without laughter is like torture without pain. Wait, no, it actually IS torture and very painful. Sorry, messed that up. The Boss offers nothing new to the movie experience, not even the comedy movie experience. It is a complete waste of space. Thank goodness Ghostbusters also came out this year and was at least mediocre, or else McCarthy would have had her worst year since starting this recent trend.

Don’t watch The Boss. After reading this review, don’t remember anything except for the last line. Just a disappointment all around.

You saw the title of this review. You aren’t a complete noob. You know what is going down.

With this, I have reached review number 1650 for my website. Like I have been saying more and more lately, sure, that number isn’t sexy, but a milestone is still sexy to me. My last few Milestone Reviews have had a theme of career ending films for the actors involved. So I figured we needed to take a break from that and switch to babies.

I used to hate babies. They confused me. Then I went and had one of my own. Hell, my baby turned 1 just last week. Literally a week ago from this posting. That is crazy. I understand babies now. And I also understood that Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 was considered one of the worst films ever created. Have I seen it? Of course not, why would I watch anything back then starring babies? But now it is basically a film I have to review eventually as a Milestone Review.

BUT IT IS A SEQUEL. A movie has come before it. Baby Geniuses. A whole five years earlier, when it was still the 1990s! The 90’s have a lot of weird and strange movies, reviewing them all would be a terrifying endeavor. But this time, there is an important reason. If I never see Baby Geniuses, then I can never see Superbabies without the proper context! Don’t worry, Superbabies won’t be review #1700. Instead I will just sneak it out sometime in the future. Definitely before review #2000.

Daww, babies giggling or something. That can be cute.

Babies are inherently smart. That is the main point of this movie. They know a whole lot about the universe. Secrets of the universe. That is all hiding up in their baby heads. And they can communicate with other babies, using their baby talk language. It is just that once they start learning the actual human language they forget everything before then. They call it crossing over. Learning human talk means forgetting everything they knew from baby times and thus becoming non important entities in the world.

If you missed my explanation, don’t worry, a high tech computer explains all of the backstory to Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd), despite being a doctor who knows all of this to be true. Heep and Dr. Kinder (Kathleen Turner) just haven’t fully figured out baby speak yet. They know how to teach babies to be incredibly smart, including karate and shit, they just don’t know how to communicate with those little ankle biters.

Look at how evil they look! Mwhahaha!

Anyways, their best baby is Sylvester (I don’t want to tag the babies or their voice people) as he has been there the longest. He is almost 2 years old, an excellent fighter (sigh), and constantly trying to escape their laboratories at BabyCo. BabyCo is a company that just makes toys and items for babies, makes sense.

Sylvester (or Sly as they call him) is a twin that they took from an orphanage. The other twin is Whit, but he was adopted by Robin (Kim Cattrall) and Dan (Peter MacNicol). Robin is the niece of Dr. Kinder, and Dan is just really good with babies and writes books or something.

Holy fuck that is a big baby!

Anyways, Sly does another escape attempt, and guess what! It is successful. It involves hiding in a dirty diaper basket, getting thrown away, and getting the crap (heh) out of there. He tries to bring another baby with him, a girl, but she is too scared to go. So, obviously, she goes alone.

And then he heads to a mall. To hide, he switches clothes with a girl baby and goes completely undercover. Yep, he wears drag as the baby calls it. Sly waits until the mall is closed before going out of hiding and he has the mall to himself! Yes!

When you have a mall to yourself, obviously you can now play video games. And change your outfit! So we get an entire baby fashion show, seeing the baby in a tux, a Saturday Night Fever outfit, and more get ups. While dancing and doing random shit.

This picture isn’t good enough. Just watch the scene while it exists on YouTube.

That scene really irks me for probably obvious reasons. Babies can’t dance, just like babies can’t fight and stuff. But since this is just a one camera shot of him dancing a few times, not a lot of quick cuts, they couldn’t fake it well. So they got a tiny good dancing toddler/kid or midget to do all the dancing. Or a large person and made them look small by perspective. But then they OBVIOUSLY just kind of attached a the face of the baby onto the dancer both times. It looks awkward as it is badly done and obviously fake.

Just such poor quality. I mean, at this point in the movie I already knew it was terrible. I just didn’t expect it to get this bad.

Oh hey, did I mention JoyLand? It is a baby themed Theme Park, entirely indoors. Kids can use it too. All of it is free for them, parents have to pay and the money goes to research or charity. Everything is robotic, including that one giant robot baby. There is an entirely robotic petting zoo too, that a child can take a controller for an animal and make them do things. Why? Because apparently no one else has one like it.

Although, it takes away from any reason to really go. People can see fake animals every day, clearly a real petting zoo is a superior thing, but whatever. I am sure the robot stuff won’t come back to harm them.

I also have barely talked about these guys. Maybe I will do that now.

Thanks to the most unlikely of circumstances, Sly picks and outfit that Whit owns. And they both happen to be wearing it. Robin decides to take Whit to the mall and they run into each other in one of those big crawl tube places. They freak each other out, go opposite ways. So Robin ends up grabbing Sly and the goons end up grabbing Whit! Oh no!

Sly is stoked, because he escape. He goes back to that house. He finds out that Whit had a sister, a bit younger than him, Carrie. And Carrie knows that Sly is an impostor but doesn’t know what to think. Whit is back at the secret lab, with a bunch of smarter babies, all sad and crying and confused. But no one cares. They don’t care about the crying baby. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE CRYING BABY EVERYONE.

This lady is a big fat phony. She just wants to eat the babies.

Where am I? I barely remember.

Dr. Kinder realizes quickly that the goons grabbed the wrong baby. It is actually that fuckface Whit, her nieces adopted kid. So she figures she will just go running over to her house to grab the correct kid, no problems.

But there are problems. Namely in that Dan through his own research has basically figured out baby talk. He can understand the babble and what it means in actual Human English. That’s fucking crazy. And when his kid tells him to not let him be left with Dr. Kinder, he listens.

There are a fuck ton of other babies in this movie, but none of them really matter.

Anyways, some more dumb stuff happens for awhile. Then all the babies in the research facility are sent to Lichtenstein, because that is where their other lab is. The babies at the house led by Sly decide to break into Joyland/BabyCo to break the other babies out. Or destroy the research. Or something. They do it by hypnotizing Lenny (Dom DeLuise), whom I don’t even know why he is in this movie. Him or Dickie (Kyle Howard).

And of course, the robot animals and robot babies are used to take out all the guards. Some more things happens, Dr. Kinder loses, and the babies Whit and Sly decide to cross over from the baby speak land into Human language land, leaving behind the secrets of the universe and more. Sly gets adopted by Robin and Dan and yay families.

The ending then has like, 3 minutes of montage of the babies doing stuff, like, actual clips from the movie we just saw, with the Randy Travis song The Gift Of Love for some reason. I guess they wanted that emotional impact ending and to fulfill your quota of babies for the next week.

Kyle, what are you even doing? And this isn’t even his worst outfit.

I can readily admit that this is not my best written Milestone Review. It is not even top half most likely. It doesn’t help that within the first 10 minutes of the movie I knew I already hated it, with the rest of the 80 or so minutes not doing a damn thing to change my mind.

So yeah, it became a bit harder to remember all the different aspects of the film. Like random baby names. Like the purpose of Deluse or Howard in the film. Like the plan at the end. Like how Lichtenstein was even involved. My mind tried to completely wipe all knowledge of the film right after viewing it, with only my few notes written down as a guide to actually write this summary.

It doesn’t help that this movie is from the 1990s, was a crap quality, and finding decent pictures of it on google was a major pain.

The biggest problem with this movie is that it is a comedy that doesn’t have any good humor. Oh, they insert a bunch of giggling babies to make you think funny moments are happening, but babies giggle at every random little thing. It is like they made this movie for babies and no one else to find entertaining. But if you know babies, they can watch and be entertained by anything, regardless of how deep the content is.

And honestly, if you are going to have a movie where babies before 2 years are super smart, know all these things and communicate with each other, you shouldn’t still have them sound like babies. That is boring. You know what is funny? Babies sounding like adults. Just look at those ETrade Baby commercials, talking about adult things with a grown up voice.

Hilarious!

This movie is not and once I hit Publish, I will forget about this one too. Let’s assume I need no previous knowledge to understand Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.

For the most part, I try to avoid reading a book if I know it is going to turn into a movie. Or even worse, just try to read a book right before watching the movie. I can’t stand it, I will go into the movie with biases, and the movie won’t be able to surprise me.

I don’t know if I would have been able to cry during The Fault In Our Stars had I read the book! And those were some good tears.

But I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I think I read it in 2010, before I started writing reviews, with the actual book coming out in 2009. I read the entire book the whole way though, and then quickly got rid of it. I paid full price for it and gave it away for free. It was dreadful trash and I couldn’t stand it. I only finished it because I assumed it had to get better, there had to be reason for the success.

The book was about 80% original Pride and Prejudice and about 20% the author changing some scenes and throwing in zombie fights. Every time the author switched it was so jarring, going from well written to complete trash. All it made me do was appreciate Pride and Prejudice more and vow to not read any of the other mashups that would exist, no matter how popular.

Needless to say, I am going into this movie incredibly biased. And also I am in general surprised that it took 7 years for this film to get made.

Well, you know what they say. You cannot spell Slaughter without Laughter.

Oh that zany 19th century England. Full of lords, ladies, romance, guns, and zombies.

What is a patriarch (Charles Dance) and matriarch (Sally Phillips) gotta do when they have five daughters, all of viable marriage age, needing husbands to take care of them?

Their oldest daughter is Jane (Bella Heathcote), but everyone knows their best daughter is Elizabeth (Lily James), despite her strong wills. The other three daughters, Lydia (Ellie Bamber), Mary (Millie Brady), and Kitty (Suki Waterhouse), are around but not super important.

Jane falling for one Mr. Bingley (Douglas Booth) is important though, as he falls for her as well. Now the parents can meddle and force a marriage. When they meet Bingley, they also meet Colonel Darcy (Sam Riley), whom is seen as a pompous and arrogant person, but also wealthy as fuck. And you know, he can kill a zombie like no other it is said.

Can headstrong Liz learn to love another, more than her love of zombie killing? Can headstrong Liz keep her head strong enough to avoid zombie bites? Find out…well, in this movie.

Also starring Jack Huston as Wickham, Lena Headey as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Emma Greenwell as Carolien Bingley, and Matt Smith as Parson Collins.

Kicks to the chest also can be quite deadly, apparently.

Fuck. Just fuck. I feel like this movie was actually worse than I imagined. I imagined it would have bad acting, sure. I imagined it would shit on something I find enjoyable, yeah. I imagined the CGI wouldn’t be top notch and a lot of corners would be cut when it comes to fight choreography, of course. But on top of everything, I also didn’t think it would be Boring. As. Fuck.

Say what I will about Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (and of course I did), but at least there was an inherent entertainment level there. At least I could sit in the theater and laugh at some of the more ridiculous scenes. But with watching this film on DVD, I found myself constantly wanting to pause to get a drink, go to the bathroom, spin in my chair. I wish my laptop worked so I could have laid down in my comfortable bed and fallen asleep to the movie, instead of actually watching all 90ish minutes.

I think it is notable to mention when you fall asleep in a film, which usually happens only in theaters for me. But I know I would have passed out for a lot of this movie if I was watching it while feeling any bit comfortable.

Everything about it is magnified so much, because of how interesting the story becomes. I get annoyed at the bad fight scenes. Annoyed at the acting. Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy? They picked a guy, who decided to give a raspy voice performance and absolutely no sex appeal in a role that is still very much technically in the romance genre? Riley is not my Darcy. The cast for most of the parts in this film is just the final nail in the coffin.

But let’s end this on a fun fact. Emma Greenwell plays one of the three younger sisters. I already forgot who. But she also was in the movie Love & Friendship, also out this year, and also based on a Jane Austen novella. How cute.