Tag: Thriller

Who would have thought that the little girl from The Nanny would become the most famous person on a movie cover?

Of course, Madeline Zima is no longer famous for that reason. It is for her bare all performance on the incredibly slow Californication. Regardless of why she is famous, she is now the reason I picked up Breaking The Girls to review today.

Also, the term “breaking” in the title has my imagination running wild.

Poor little old Sara (Agnes Brucker). She is a nice girl, she is. But because she pissed off the wrong classmate, Brooke (Shanna Collins), she is potentially getting expelled from class for doing something she didn’t do. But she has met Alex (Zima), and although she never fancied herself a lesbian, she apparently fell for her charm.

Next thing you know, they are living together. That sure did move fast. Alex is mad at her dad (John Stockwell), who is totally rich, but not letting her live her life the way she wants to. So drunkenly they decide to kill each other’s nemesis! They will both have alibis, and there is no way people could put them working together, if they live together! (Dumb).

Next thing you know, Alex actually goes through with the plan, much to the surprise of Sara. Alex also made it possible to blame Sara with the deed if she didn’t end up keeping her half of the bargain. Yep, you done messed with the wrong lady.

Also starring Shawn Ashmore…somehow, and Davenia McFadden as the main police person.

Oh, he is in the movie as guy who helps drunk ladies! That’s nice.

I was actually excited to watch this movie, and accept it as a thriller. I was ready for the twists and the turns. But the twists near the end didn’t make a whole lot of sense (When you compare them to actions earlier in the film), and the ending was pretty lame because of it.

The acting through out it was pretty poor, and really, I don’t why I keep talking. This part of the review is basically filler, because I have jack shit to say that’s really good about this movie. I guess it sort of had a Wild Things vibe going with it, so I am surprised it just isn’t another of its many bad sequels.

But by the time the movie is about to finish, they throw another twist your way. Unfortunately by that time, I stopped caring.

1 out of 4.

A movie called Flatline can honestly only go a few different ways. One is a horror route, pretty obvious, some sort of deranged killer.

The only other way is some sort of medical drama. This goes the latter way, thankfully, because medical dramas can really have some powerful stories and usually a great crying scene or two.

Not that I like watching people cry or anything like that.

Get it? Get it? It is a flat line.

Marc (Drew Russell Robinson) really likes his dad, William (Mark Nutter). So after they leave dinner for the dad’s birthday, and they get into a car accident, Marc is very very upset.

So when they get to the hospital (finally) he really can’t believe that his dad has flatlined and died. He gets so upset, that he steals the security guard’s gun (Ryan Hayden) and threatens the doctors on duty (Howard Flaherty, Farah White) to save his dad or else. At first, the description seems like some sort of a reverse John Q, where the son is trying to save the father. But there is one big difference in there.

In John Q, the son is only dying. In Flatline, the dad is already dead.

Yeah, Marc gets really crazy, starts yelling a lot, and threatening to shoot people, and that is most of the movie. I can tell you for sure, the movie does not end in his favor.

But that is also because the end of the movie doesn’t really make much sense. Out of no where, it turns into this very messy and somewhat vague trick, about what was going on the entire time. I think I understood it, but I really really don’t accept it.

None of these names are really big in the acting field, and Drew Russell Robinson is a rookie at movies. He wasn’t terrible, to be fair. Just the overall movie was terrible. The twist, the plot, the flashbacks, and the point.

I derived no entertainment out of this at all. This movie came out in 2010, but it has one of the barest IMDB pages I have ever seen. I could only find one picture from the actual movie, but its quality was too shitty to actually use, so that is why I am stuck with just the heart monitor picture. I could have added another picture in here, to make the review look better, but in all honesty, the film didn’t even deserve that much.

Much waste.

0 out of 4.

Love Sick Love is not the first movie with a man duct taped to a chair on the cover that I have decided to watch randomly.

No, that would be Serious Moonlight.

But I ended up liking Serious Moonlight, so why not this one? I bet it just a darker take than Serious Moonlight, since it is advertised as a thriller.

Or maybe I just like it when women duct tape their significant others to chairs in film?

Oh shit, this one has kids!

Norman (Matthew Settle) has got it going on. He is decently wealthy, one of those guys who buys up foreclosed homes, fixes em up, and sells them back for profit. It is going excellent. He also has been seeing a few ladies on the side, nothing serious yet. Like Dori (Katia Winter). They have had a small sex based relationship for about two months, every once in awhile, nothing serious yet. So he doesn’t mind that she invites him up to a cabin for the weekend. It will be fun and exciting.

Even if she says that she loves him on the first night. Not what he expected, but whatever. The next morning is awkward too, because he hears kids running around. This is not what he expected this weekend to be like, babysitting kids. But they are her kids. A boy and a girl (Dean Kapica, Lindsay Rose Binder), about 7 and 10. That is one way to surprise him, I guess. For some reason they all have Valentine’s day based gifts too, even though it is in July. This bitch is crazy.

Not only that, but how did the kids get here? Of course. Her parents (Charlotte Rae, M. Emmet Walsh) are here too. The fuck?

Nope. Nopenopenope. He is getting out of there. Except for his car steeling wheel seems to have been sawed off. And he has no cell service. WHAT IN THE FUCK NOW HE IS TIED TO THE BED? And they are celebrating Easter?

According to Dori, you don’t know if you are really in love someone until you spend all the holidays with them. So she is going to speed things up and give them a holiday a day. But if he isn’t really ready by New Years, well…

Jim Gaffigan is in this movie. But he isn’t funny. He is just a coworker friend who said don’t go on that trip. That trip is dumb. Good ole Jim.

Normally Easter on its own its torture enough.

The film certainly escalates. It starts with a girl being potentially too attached. Then kids and grandparents. Then car. Then the next thing you know he is hit over the head and tied to a bed. But it could get worse. He could get tied to a chair. Or shackled to the floor. Or chained up by his neck with a shotgun pointed at his face.

Oh dearie me, all of that is exactl what happens.

It is all sorts of fucked up, but I couldn’t take my eyes away. Despite elements of torture, it wasn’t torture porn, like The Loved Ones or Saw. It had some slight, twisted, comedic elements behind it, and torture came from just not letting him leave and subjecting him to the awkward games of torture.

But the part that makes it more fucked up is that somehow the kids and grandparents are involved as well, the kids probably thinking it is all normal. I love the explanation for why Dori does this to men. In her situation, finding the right man IS hard, and she won’t have her looks forever, so she might have to speed it up to make sure the men will love her for her, and not just if she is pretty.

I am not agreeing with the actions in the movie, just noting they make sense.

And honestly, this film was surprisingly entertaining for its premise, and I’d watch it again.

3 out of 4.

Out of the Furnace has the honor of being the only movie coming out this week, in a month that is typically packed to the brim with movies to take advantage of those holiday sales.

It also has the honor of making me think of the Meatloaf song, “Out of the Frying Pan,” so much that whenever I hear the film’s title, I can’t help but sing “And into the fire!” in my head.

This is an actual scene of the film, lollipop and all.

Russell Baze (Christian Bale) is your average factory worker living in Pennsylvania. He is a man who works for a living, a guy who will never be rich, but overall, a very caring and loving man. He has a lady (Zoe Saldana), a younger dumber brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) in the army, and his father is getting sick. But after a night of trying to do good and a few mistakes, Russell finds himself behind bars after a drunk driving accident.

Now, years later, his life has changed drastically. His father: dead. His woman: left him for a cop (Forest Whitaker). His brother: suffering from extreme PTSD after four tours in Iraq. Rodney is also deep in gambling debt and starting to take up illegal bare knuckle boxing to pay his debts. But when he gets involved with the Appalachian hill folk and their leader, Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), his life is going to make a change for the worse.

It is up to Russell, a good man who hasn’t done a lot wrong in his life, to potentially give up his moral convictions, his good nature, and his innocence, in order to avenge or save his brother… You know, depends on what they do to his brother first.

Willem Dafoe is also in here as a small town loan shark, and Sam Shepard plays a family friend.

Here’s a hint. That gun is not for hunting. Okay, normally yes for hunting, but right now it isn’t. Shut up.

Out Of The Furnace might feature some of the better acting performances of the year. There is a scene with Bale and Saldana on a bridge and it absolutely tore my heart up. It was very unexpected and it felt incredibly real. This is the best performance for Affleck since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. If it wasn’t for Harrelson’s goofy looking head, I wouldn’t have recognized him speech wise as the incredibly corrupt hill folk.

Unfortunately, the great acting is the only real thing I like from this movie.

It is definitely a slower moving film, as it wants to build up the fact that Russel is a great human and just trying to live his life. A lot of intense scenes involving others are spliced with Russel hunting and working, just to show how un-extreme his life is. In fact, the movie goes to incredibly lengths to make that point during the ending, which seems to drag on forever. On top of that, the ending almost feels a bit dreamlike, including an ambiguous final scene that I am unsure of its purpose.

I believe this film has a lot of symbolism incorporated within it, but potentially too much symbolism, and not enough entertainment.

Fantastic acting, a good idea for a story, but just a dull way to deliver that story.

 

2 out of 4.

It took a few years, but I am really stoked that I finally had the opportunity to see 1408. Technically the opportunity was always there, but never the drive.

1408 is part of an unintentional grouping of films. You probably know what I am talking about it. It fits in the category of “Movies that are just four numbers starring John Cusack”. Of course! 2012 is the other half of the pair.

Honestly, the only reason I never watched it was because I wanted to release it when it made sense from the date. But 2008 and was so long ago and there is no 14th month. 🙁

Overall, a terrible reason to wait, when SLJ has been waiting so patiently.

Mike Enslin (Cusack) is famous for debunking paranormal encounters, made famous around the world. You got a haunted house? Prove it. A haunted rocking chair? Doubt it. A haunted room? Let him stay in it.

Most of these people are lying to get more people to visit, and he finds out the truth. A pretty famous author now too, with people recognizing at least one of his books. Some of them about actual scary places too, but more often than not…you know.

Until he clambers his way over to Dolphin Hotel, a new rumor that has reached his ear despite its apparently long and dark history. The hotel refuses to let him rent out room 1408, but some court battle seems to work in his favor. Still, the head of the hotel, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), does his best to convince him, including providing a full history of everyone that killed themselves or died in that room over the last hundred years. Still no dice.

Because ghosts aren’t real, right? Right?

Also starring Mary McCormack as his wife. But mostly for haunting purposes.

What in the fuck is wrong with that room?

Room 1408 turns out to be extremely ludicrous. Note, that is more than a normal amount of ludicrous. At first, it is your standard haunted room stuff. Phone/TV on the fritz, hot, seeing images. But eventually it gets beyond reasonable, as you can see in the picture above.

And it also decides to use a lot of deception/trickery to catch the the viewer and poor John Cusack off guard. But, was it scary?

Not to me at least. I didn’t think it was terrifying really, but I more so just felt bad for John, who must have had a killer headache or something. Hah. Killer.

I think if they went a more realistic approach, I would have found it scarier. However, because it was so far past realism, I gained some entertainment out of it as the room in the middle of a large hotel somehow crumbled under neath him. I wish this movie could have been better for me, I really do. But eh, shit happens.

2 out of 4.

Ah, Paul Walker. A man who died too soon.

Sure, generally, people only know him from The Fast and the Furious films. But he has been in other action things. Like Running Scared! He also had a small role in Pleasantville. But really, not a lot more of extreme note.

So I guess I was excited to see Vehicle 19, because it came out this year and puts him a role that we are used to seeing.

Well, normally the wheel is on the other side, but close enough.

Michael Woods (Paul Walker), is an ex convict, but he is now in Germany! Yay! And he has rented a car. Yay cars! In fact, he has vehicle number 19 from the lot. There you go. Yes, leaving the US is breaking his parole. But he has a reason.

He wants to visit his ex-wife, who he hasn’t seen in five years. Not in a creepy way, but he misses her and wants to surprise her. Okay, still sounds creepy.

Either way, mix up at the terminal, but he gets his vehicle, and while driving, boom, a phone rings. Not his phone. Strange. He checks the glove compartment, and there is a gun! What? He eventually answers the phone, and someone wants to know if the deed has been done. Oh no, some mistake! Turns out the car was meant for an undercover policeman, and they will give him the right vehicle at a meet up. Great. Whatever.

Until he also finds out that there is a living, breathing woman in the trunk (Naima McLean).

Uh oh. She was going to testify against corrupt cops. Looks like we got some sort of shenanigans going on. Whatsa Paul Walker gonna do!?

Apparently turn his casual drive into something more.

Not to change the topic of this review, but Vehicle 19 reminds me of The Transporter. Or at least, it has a guy driving, and discovering a girl in his trunk. At least in The Transporter, he was a skilled person, in this movie, it is just a normal guy. So basically, it is like taking all of the boring parts from The Transporter. Nothing like the high octane thrills of Fast and Furious. Like, no chases really, not a lot of shooting. Mostly drama and decision making talking.

Very, very, quite boring.

That is really all I can say about it. I am glad that it was only 80 minutes or so long, because I was definitely falling asleep by the end.

Definitely a skippable film, with a lackluster ending.

0 out of 4.

Oh how I wish Breakout was actually a movie version of the classic video game of the same name.

How cool and abstract would that be? I mean, they made Battleship, which sucked, but why not a game that is actually fun.

That’s right. Here at Gorgon Reviews, we think the board game Battleship sucks. I am sorry to take up space in this Breakout review to spread anti-Battleship propaganda.

Because we got “Action stars” to talk about!

In this movie, Jack (Brendan Fraser) is an…environmentalist/activist? What? Well, he lives in a forested area, way up north. When his daughter Jen (Holly Deveaux) was younger, she made him promise that he wouldn’t let anyone do anything bad to their home. So he said sure and really took it to heart. Little later, he is leading a group of protesters right to the bulldozers, get off our land, raw rawr!

Well, jee wilikers, he gets involved in an altercation and gets put in prison. In fact, he can only get out later if he agrees to serve as an adviser for that same company. That stands against his ideals!

All of this has really nothing to do with the main plot. Just minor character points, that are overblown in the movie.

No, the main plot appears when two brothers, Tommy (Dominic Purcell) and Kenny Baxter (Ethan Suplee) are released from prison and on their way to Canada, to live free from the law. They may have killed a man, and it also may have left Kenny mentally scarred in the process. Things don’t go the way they expect them to, so Tommy ends up killing another guy. Damn. Protecting your brother apparently leads to killing other people quite often.

Well, Jen and her younger brother Mikey (Christian Martyn) see this event happen while they are out kayaking. Sucks. Now Tommy is out to get them too, willing to kill some kids and others in their way just to protect their identity. These guys are really serious.

But it is up to nature boy Jack to save the day!

Basically him versus a guy with a gun and his morally and mentally confused brother is all.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. I have no idea why they added all that protester stuff to the Jack character early on. Just to make him also a criminal kind of? Even though he was only protecting someone else who was getting hurt? Seriously no fucking idea.

But he is never shown to be bad either, just pissed off at people digging, and I am pretty sure that doesn’t change by the end of the film. It is all just a cluster fuck of extra story that ruins the main plot line.

Which on its own is decent. I liked the acting from Purcell, as protective brother, and Suplee, who is super thin, as mentally handicapped brother. He has a voice that is just very believable, and I guess, kind of just similar to his character from My Name Is Earl. They were great. I loved the tension.

The resolution went as expected, but that was fine. What really ruins this movie is all that extra stuff added on top. Also, I wish it was based on the video game. Shh.

2 out of 4.

I have found the month of October to be pretty disappointing in regards to major horror releases. All we got for a wide release was the Carrie remake. There aren’t even any Paranormal Activities, because the next one got pushed back to January. Yes, I find them pretty bad now, but come on, just Carrie?

That is where the indie theaters step in. They have one more addition to the month, We Are What We Are, a remake of a Mexican film of the same name from a few years prior. Well, same name, but in Spanish.

The religious elements are exemplified in the foreign version, where every male is named Jesus.

The Parker family is a strange family. They mostly keep to themselves, the dad, Frank (Bill Sage), his two daughters, Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers), and their younger brother who doesn’t know much, Rory (Jack Gore).

Doesn’t know much? Yeah, because he is young and hasn’t learned a lot yet. He knows about Jesus. But he hasn’t learned anything about math, or science, or books, or their family secret.

Oooh, a family secret. You can probably figure out what it is. Look at the creepy fucking photos. I mean, I could tell what their secret was just by reading a small plot description and seeing the cover.

Well, they totally do that. But then a big rain storm happens, and it causes flooding. Flooding that might accidentally tear up enough ground to reveal their secret, that they have kept in the family hidden for over a hundred years. I am sure no one in the town is smart enough to figure it out. Oh, except for the wily Doc Barrow (Michael Parks), who doesn’t know he is about to discover a secret that big, but is just looking for his missing daughter, and enlists the help of a local deputy (Wyatt Russell).

That ain’t bean juice there, fellas.

Outside of their family secret, there is not a lot of surprising things about this movie. It is not your standard horror, that is for sure. There isn’t a killer stalking victims throughout, all of the deaths are quick and not built up for tension.

In fact, the whole movie is kind of set up like a regular drama. It moves incredibly slow, with the family just doing their thing, the doctor just doing his investigation, until a confrontation near the end. Because of the downpour, the dad is off doing other things, and so the two daughters have to take part in their family activity for the first real time on their own. So that is a bit awkward and creepy.

I really enjoyed the ending, I think it made sense from the build up. However, the time it took for the build up to occur is what killed me. It is a rather slow moving movie. Even though the payoff at the end is worth it, I still dislike how I wasn’t really scared or completely freaked out until that point. At that point I wanted to vomit a little bit.

But hey, at least we have an alternative scary movie this month in theaters…kind of!

2 out of 4.

The initial trailers for The Counselor quickly caught my eye, but one thing really bugged me: I had no idea what the movie was about. It looked like some combination of drugs, sex, high life living, and death, I guess.

In fact, if the trailer was just a tad bit more artsy, I would compare it ahead of time to the very strange Killing Them Softly, but from the trailer it looks like it might just be another Savages.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. It is worse than both of them.

And they didn’t even have Pitt in a cowboy hat. It turns out that this movie is indeed about drugs, sex, high life living, and death. I guess the trailer told me all I really had to know, for once.

The main character goes by Counselor (Michael Fassbender), so try not to get confused. He is a lawyer, a decent one, but lawyering doesn’t pay the bills. Not if he wants an extravagant lady like Laura (Penelope Cruz) in his life.

So he dabbles in the drug trade a bit, doing some smaller deals to get extra funds. His hook up for these trades is Reiner (Javier Bardem), who loves to show off his wealth and posessions. He is currently with Malkina (Cameron Diaz), a sex crazed woman, who owns two pet cheetahs.

Well, the Counselor decides he is only going to do one more deal, a much bigger deal than normal, worth over $20 million. He wants to marry Laura, so he wont be able to keep up his secret lifestyle.

But when has “one last job” ever worked out for anyone? Brad Pitt has a small role in this as well, as Westray, a middleman between Counselor and the drug king pins.

Some people will watch the movie for the plot. The actors in this movie are all fantastic professionals at their craft. Thankfully, they all act wonderfully in this film and I won’t think less of them because of their roles.

No, this mess of a film has to be blamed on Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy. Strong words, I know. Scott is a fantastic director, but this movie is no where close to his finest work. McCarthy is a great writer, and most of the films based on his novels have been excellent, but this is his first time writing a screenplay. Somehow the two of them managed to mess up a great thing and produce a film that feels like a waste of time and talent.

What is wrong with the movie? Basically everything.The editing, the plot, the dialogue, and the resolution.

I only cared about one character, Laura, and that was because she was too naive to realize what she was getting in to. Or she chose to ignore it all. Yeah, the rest o the cast members are all immoral people, but many movies have made me at least hate those bad characters and want them to face justice in some way. In this movie, I don’t care if they get out alive or not. The development doesn’t give me any reason to care.

My biggest problem with this film is that it doesn’t end up making a lot of sense. The plot has holes everywhere and the only major scenes only happen due to coincidence. Things go badly for this drug deal but because the movie doesn’t explain a lot of important details, it took me awhile to realize that any characters were actually in danger. In a movie about drug deals gone bad, you should be able to realize when the deal has officailly gone bad (and that the deal has even started).

The Counselor won’t tarnish the good names of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy any time soon. No, this film will instead be swept under the rug quietly in a few weeks and promptly ignored.

 

1 out of 4.

The Midnight Meat Train.

What a title!

I picked this movie up expecting it to be some sketch bloody B-Horror film, that never gained any ground. Much to my surprise, I find there are actually some famous actors in this one. Whoa.

So what happened to this film? This seems like something that would have made theaters, or at least been noticed by someone. Oh well.

Never mind. Brad was in a lot of questionable movies before The Hangover.

Leon (Bradley Cooper) is a vegan. Ew!

He is also a photographer, just an okay one. He wants to take pictures of criminal activity, he just is kind of a coward and runs away before anything goes down. But he is determined. Well, he runs into a model who is getting mugged, and his mere presence saves her! Yay! Too bad the next morning she goes missing anyways. Interesting. He goes to the police (Barbara Eve Harris) but nothing comes out of it.

But yeah, she totally got butchered while on the train. The midnight meat train. Some dude just rides it late a night, and the train goes into a mysterious path, and this guy (Vinnie Jones), totally takes em out with one of those meat tenderizers. Aw yeah. Secret shit.

Well, through investigative journalism, he actually finds this butcher guy and follows him, pretty sure he has something to do with these disappearances. He also thinks he is over 100 years old.

Err… Okay, now you are crazy. Needless to say, his woman (Leslie Bibb) and her friend (Peter Jacobson) don’t believe him. But maybe, just maybe, Leon isn’t thinking crazy enough.

Oh I get it. It is even more awkward cause of his veganism.

Well shit, this was more than just a B movie. Not only that, but when I tweeted about watching it, I got positive response from others. What in the hell is going on?

For one, the death scenes by this butcher on the train, even if you see them coming, are pretty brutal. Having skinned humans dangling on a train is pretty brutal as well. Turns out this is based on a short story by Clive Barker from the 1980s, so it actually has its foot in the horror door. On its own, I wouldn’t consider any part of this movie “Scary,” just gory at times and a little unsettling but never scary.

Besides that, this movie is also a decent mystery. What the fuck is going on in that train? Is that guy 100 years old? Why the fuck doesn’t anyone care about large amounts of missing people?

I like the answers they gave, and the movie ended really well. Bad things happen, like they should in a horror, and the plot made sense? Holy crap, why has no one told me about this movie?

3 out of 4.