Tag: Amber Stevens

Please don’t get confused. This review is going to be about Jessabelle. Not Annabelle. Sure, they are both horror films, and they came out around the same time, and you know, have that belle thing going on. But they are nothing alike.

Okay, they have one more thing in common. But we will get to that later.

Jessabelle is obviously the less well known of the movies. It was supposed to come out in January, pushed back to August, then pushed back to a soft release in November with some of that video on demand. It ho hummed its way into existence, and then ho hummed its way onto my laptop. I love you video on demand.

Oh hey, I remember this scene from A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Jessie (Sarah Snook) is living a nice life. In fact she is about to move into her fiance’s house finally and she is pregnant with child. Then surprise, car crash, fiance is dead, unborn baby is super dead, and she is paralyzed legs down. Wow, that escalated quickly.

Now she has to go back down to rural Louisiana, with her dad (David Andrews), and you know her old family home isn’t wheelchair accessible. She just has no where to go.

Well, Jessie finds a box of VHS tapes under her old bed. They were made by her mother (Joelle Carter) before she was born. That is good, because she died when Jessie was young from that cancer. But these tapes are weird. She is acting all funny, talking about death and seeming threatening. Her dad doesn’t like them, saying that wasn’t her real mother, by then her mom was out of it. From the cancer. But what can it mean?

What. Can. It. Mean?!

Also featuring Amber Stevens, Chris Ellis, and Mark Webber.

Acting.

Somewhere lurking in the marshy waters that surrounds this Louisiana horror movie Jessabelle is a unique and decent plot. It it totally there, you just kind of have to scrape off the crap. But not everyone has time to scrape off the crap on their own, and the film makers certainly didn’t do it for us. So instead we got packaged crap and were kind of told to look for it on our own.

That sounded pretty harsh, but I thought I was being clever there.

But it is true! The acting wasn’t terrible. The movie was just slow. Some times people think movies set in rural areas need to take their time and can’t be high energy, but that is just silly. It had its jump scares, it had scenes that were alluding to other movies. And it had a decent plot. But it was full of other crap and given to us in a boring “seen it!” before way.

Oh well, maybe you can surprise me with some indie sequel in like, four years.

If I told you four years ago that not only would a 21 Jump Street comedy be made, but that Jonah Hill would be involved, and they’d have a sequel called 22 Jump Street, you would have kicked me in the nuts. Then publicly shamed me for being a terrible person. You also may have been slightly confused at the oddly specific-ness of that foretelling.

For all intents and purposes, 21 Jump Street should not have done as well as it did. But it ended up being funny, making a lot of money, and here we are. And this time, they don’t care what you think.

Picture speaks for itself.

College! That is where our heroes, Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) are going. Same aliases. There is a new new drug that has its own list of side effects that killed a girl. So they are going to infiltrate the dealer, find the supplier and take them down. Hmm, same plot too.

But this time it is different. Because in College, people can be free thinkers. You also don’t need a hall pass.

This time, Jenko is going to try out for football looking for dealers, where he meets the quarterback Zook (Wyatt Russell), who is basically Jenko’s clone and instant best friend.

Schmidt is going the art kids route, looking for drama and poetry geeks who might be hitting the WHYPHY up hard. That is where he meets Maya (Amber Stevens) and gets a girlfriend out of it. It isn’t creepy like the last movie, because she is of age.

But no! It is not just the same! After all, their bosses are still played by Ice Cube and Nick Offerman. Because that makes sense. But the new thug bad guy is Peter Stormare. That is different. Not to mention we have people from Workaholics, like Jillian Bell and uhh. That might be it.

Basically, what is important though is that they have the same blanket set as I do in real life.

After viewing, I determine that 22 Jump Street was like one very long and elaborate inside joke. That would be annoying normally, but here is the good news. You are in on the joke, too. It all makes sense, because you are a person who saw the first film and understands that everything probably has an extra layer of meaning to it.

That’s right. This film is really aware of itself/meta/whatever you want to call it. And it will beat you over head with the jokes and at least for me, it didn’t get stale at all. Not only did it just keep building and building, along with an increase in action, but they didn’t even stop when the movie ended. It had to be one of the more amazing/funny credits I have ever seen. And they didn’t even fill the credits with dumb outtakes or anything.

Tatum might just be a comedy guy. Hill’s character had its moments, mostly dealing with one fight scene near the end and his interactions with Ice Cube, but Tatum had so many laugh out loud lines and moments. Only a few were shown in the trailer. The “lightbulb” scene with Tatum might be the funniest thing I have seen in a movie in over a year. Just thinking about it makes me laugh.

I feel like I am giving out this rating far too much over the last few weeks, but seriously, movies are really earning their keep this summer. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are comedy gods and they should be worshiped as such.