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Bond Bond Bond. In case you missed my other reviews on the subject, I have no craps about Bond growing up. My parents didn’t care, so I didn’t get him in my impressionable youth phase, so the only Bond films have had Daniel Craig at the helm.

Casino Royale was okay, Quantum of Solace was terrible, Skyfall was interesting, and now we have Spectre. The internet tells me that the wiki page has spoilers on the subject and the trailer gives too much away. Apparently Spectre is a reference to an older Bond villain from a past film and they are redoing it. I think?

The good news is, I won’t have to compare it to something decades ago. Like always, I will just look at this film and see if I like it as a stand alone action spy film. And for those who are counting, this is the FIFTH Spy movie of the year. After Kingsman: The Secret Service, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and of course, Spy. Strangely enough, the other 4 were all good movies. This might be the best year of Spy film ever recorded. Assuming the grand daddy of spy films can end the streak with a bang.

I’m sure this is just a metaphor.

Do you remember the last three films? Because you will need to. You especially need to know that M (Judi Dench) died in the last movie, and now there is a new M (Ralph Fiennes). The 00 program is potentially going to get shut down, what with half of their building destroyed in the last program and all. They have a new commander, who we will call C (Andrew Scott), who is going to bring all of the British agencies together and more transparent.

Bond (Daniel Craig) don’t give a damn. He opens the movie in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, killing an assassin and a few other people who planned on blowing up a stadium! This doesn’t help his cause, and he gets house arrested in London for the time being, complete with GPS nanobot tracking in his blood. But like I just said, Bond don’t give a damn. He was told to kill the assassin, Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona), by M (dead one) herself! She sent him a video from beyond the grave to get it done, should she die. So of course he followed orders.

However, in killing Sciarra, he stumbles upon a large and secret organization calling itself Spectre. His only clues involve using Sciarra’s wife, now widow, Lucia (Monica Bellucci) to find the organization and find The Pale King who is also involved in their bad evil guy plans…somehow.

Spectre is led by the mysterious Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) who seems to know an awful lot about Bond. We also have returning favorites, Q (Ben Winshaw), Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and Tanner (Rory Kinnear). Also returning is Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) from the first two films, and introducing his daughter, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). And of course Dave Bautista as scary intimidating no talking killer, Hinx.

This is…also a metaphor? Is Bond getting religious?

Spectre is not what it is hyped up to be. Heck, if you look at my reviews for the other spy movies that came out this year, you will see that they all earned higher marks, making Spectre, technically, the worst spy film of the year. The good news is that it is still at least okay or average and not complete shit.

Here is what is wrong with the film. Bellucci is used in like one scene, and never seen from again. Most of the actors don’t seem to be giving it their all. They really forced the love interest in this film, none of it felt believable and trying to make it a for sure thing is just lazy writing. A lot of lines I couldn’t even understand, due to mumbles or louder sound moments, allowing me to miss jokes and important plot points. There are plot twists, technically, but everyone you can see coming from miles away in the first 20-30 minutes.

But most of my complaints revolve around Waltz and his villain. First of all, Waltz is normally fantastic, but again, his character was always reserved and never felt scary or intimidating. His character also felt like he was barely in the film until the end. We needed a lot more of him for him to reach his true big bad scary levels. Most Bond fans know everything about the villain already, as there is only one notable Spectre leader. However when the reveal occurs, it is also mumbled quickly and then ignored. So for a non serious Bond fan, it does nothing, and for the serious ones, well, they knew it was coming all along.

They connected the villain from this film to the last three, but it all felt shoe horned, offering only a quick explanation and then moving on. More details would have helped understand the bad guys motivations, outside of the vague backstory they gave him. The villain also had a cool brain altering needle that would just take out important functions for whoever is getting tortured. Well. Bond had two pricks, and basically everything that was said would happen, did not. What the hell even was the point?

And the ending itself felt forced and dare I say, heavy handed.

Not saying there weren’t moments I didn’t like. I loved the intro, both in Mexico City (which opened with a very long shot), and the credits, with all the octopus imagery. Q and M were good. The Rome car chase, the train fight scene, and the plane ridiculousness were all very entertaining and well shot. Classic Bond moments from them all.

Lego Lego LEGO…s. I am going to pluralize the word. According to some standard, you cannot say Legos to describe the objects, before you cannot pluralize Lego. You have to say Lego Bricks if you want to talk about the object. That is super fucking stupid.

I am calling the grammar police out. They are legos. Get over it.

Legos are clearly bigger and better than ever now. With The Lego Movie being a resounding success, and many more movies planned, and their ongoing great game line, and their uhh…I guess just legos. They are a big deal. So it makes sense they wanted to cash in on that sweet Documentary money.

A LEGO Brickumentary goes behind the scenes of everyone’s favorite child building material. We will see what makes them tick on the inside!

Behind the scenes and inside the scenes, if you know what I mean.

A LEGO Brickumentary is mostly for people who really like Legos. An obvious sentence if any.

The history of Lego is actually not too long, so it goes through it rather quickly. Our narrator is an unnamed Lego man voiced by Jason Bateman.

What they then go through is the decline of Lego about fifteen years ago, how they started taking customer concerns to heart and making better product, some of the Lego cons and real master builders. They also go into some lines like Lego Architecture (and how it started), and a current fan contest that allows people to present their ideas for future sets, where one a year is chosen to become a real product for them.

Cool stuff! Kind of interesting. But in all honesty this is just a big ad for Lego to show how cool they are, and for you to like them even more. Nothing wrong with that, but since it is a Lego documentary about Lego, by Lego, it loses a bit more of its objectivity.

This is the type of documentary that you will find on one of those How Its Made channels in the future. It felt just like one of them, and isn’t something anyone would ever want to watch a second time or own. Just play with Legos, it will be a better experience than this…eh, okay experience.

A long time ago, in the before time, the summer of 2015, I saw a poster for The Gift. I was a bit intrigued, not because of the box, or the title, or the cast.

I was intrigued because it was written and directed by Joel Edgerton, who is totally an actor, and hasn’t written nor directed anything before this. Well, I take some of that back. He has directed some shorts I haven’t seen, and written some shorts I haven’t seen. Oh, and he helped write the story for The Rover with the actual director. I guess that is something. Needless to say, he isn’t just jumping in cold because he can do it as a famous Hollywood actor. He has some minor experience and this is his first attempt to show he can do things on his own.

And no matter what bad career decisions Edgerton makes, I will still like him as an actor for the feelings he made me feel with Warrior.

And for those excellent nachos he brought over for dinner one time.

Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) have just moved to one of the many suburbs around LA and are loving life and each other! They had a misscarriage. That sucks. But Simon has a sweet high paying job, Robyn doesn’t have to work, their house is basically a mansion, and oh hey look, there is Gordo (Edgerton).

Gordo apparently went to school with Simon, although Simon doesn’t really remember him. But Gordo says he really looked up to Simon. Simon was the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas. So as a welcome gift, Gordo gives them things. Some gifts, if you will. Robyn likes it, but Simon finds it weird, and doesn’t even like it when they have him over for dinner. Turns out Simon did remember Gordo, and they used to call him Gordo the Weirdo. Nicknames are hard, okay.

Either way, they find out that Gordo’s house is super big but he is alone as well. He has rooms with women’s clothes and kid stuff. Apparently he is going through a divorce and it is a tough time for him. Despite all this, Simon decides to call it off. He wants Gordo out of their life, it is too awkward everything that is happening and shit needs to stop.

Well, after this, they find out that he totally lied about that house. It wasn’t his. And their dog is missing. And Simon AND Gordo are lying about their past together. Anyways, all of this gets Robyn pretty discombobulated and their picture perfect life is going to start falling apart real quick.

The reason we invented big open windows is so we could do creepy things, right?

The Gift is a movie that needs to be unwrapped slowly. If you unwrap it too fast, it will all fall apart, so it requires a slow unwrapping to allow everything to fall into place. Of course, you the viewer don’t get to decide watch speed, so you have to accept the slower nature of the film. I was a bit surprised with how much happened early on. I only tagged 3 people because everything else was pretty damn unnecessary. Unfortunately, after the first act of fast moving plot line, the 2nd act goes pretty slow, while the third is mostly slow until finally the end.

The Gift is a drama based around a mystery. What happened between Gordo and Simon? What is Gordo trying to do now? Does he have a plan or is he just doing whatever weird shit pops up in his mind? Once we get the final reveal, it is a bit sickening and terrible at the same time. I can appreciate the results, but when I look back on the how, I get pretty annoyed. It is one of those perfect Rube Goldberg machines going on, but instead of random shit on your floor, dealing with people’s emotions and expected actions. It requires the level of brilliance of a person that is really hard to accept.

So an okay drama in the end. Clearly Edgerton had the idea for the twists he wanted to do and based a movie around that. Nothing wrong with that approach. It just really drags in the second act, with only a few scenes worth it after the fact.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {http://amzn.to/1GMHfsc}.

“Final Girl” is a term given to the last surviving female in a horror movie. This woman may have been in danger the whole movie. But somehow by the end she has enough gumption to slay the killer, or escape the building, or whatever. Hell, Ripley is a Final Girl.

Enough horror film had this happen for it to become a trope at least. I actually never heard about it until this year. Not just because of the movie The Final Girls that I am about to review, but because there was another movie also out aroudn the same time called…Final Girl. Yeah. It is pretty damn easy to get these ones confused. I haven’t seen such close titles for real unrelated movies since A Late Quartet and Quartet.

Now I will see Final Girl, some day. I have to given how easily it is to mistake The Final Girls. But to make matters even more confusing, they also share an actor. Somehow, Alexander Ludwig decided it’d be a good idea to be a lead in both films.

With an amazing shocked face like that, there’s no question how he landed the roles either.

Amanda Cartwright (Malin Akerman) was in a series of horror films back in the day, but now she is just struggling to find a job. All people remember her for is her role in Camp Bloodbath, now a cult classic, but a movie she doesn’t like too much. But this isn’t her story. You know, because she dies in a car crash early on in the film. Her daughter, Max (Taissa Farmiga) was also in the car but she survived.

Since then, life has been lame. Her best friends brother, Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), has apparently promised that Max would show up to a special screening of Camp Bloodbath. She agrees, reluctantly, as long as her friend, Gertie (Alia Shawkat) comes along. Chriss (Alexander Ludwig), a male friend who is totally into her, also comes along, which means the local bitch, Vicki (Nina Dobrev), who used to date him tags along as well.

And since this is hard to explain, I will be succinct: Some shit went down, and now they are trapped in the movie. Good news: Max can reunite with a version of her mother, that’s cool! Bad news: a masked man is trying to kill them all! But now that they are in the movie, it is harder to predict what would happen. Their mere presence changes the plot line for good, so they can’t rely on their movie knowledge to win this one.

Other campers are played by the likes of Adam DeVine, Angela Trimbur, Chloe Bridges, and Tory N. Thompson.

Honestly the only thing you need to be good at in a horror movie is your scared face.

Remember Cabin In The Woods? That was a genre bending, horror comedy that a lot of people didn’t know how to react to, but has eventually been accepted as a great and unique film. Cabin in the Woods is hard to define. The Final Girls is not hard to define, because I can look at it and say “It is like, Cabin in the Woods, kind of!”

A comedy horror means two things: It is usually funny, and it is usually not at all scary. They all just become parodies of horror without the fear behind it and this is honestly no exception. There are maybe “scary” moments, sure, but no one watching it will find it scary as per the norm.

Instead, The Final Girls should be judged on its comedy and it should be valued highly. Witty and fun, the cast of characters, and movie character stereotypes allow a lot of good deaths that follow and exploit common horror tropes. This is a PG-13 movie, which I feel limits some of the extremes they could have gone to, which is a shame. But the final fight scene felt nicely epic, some of the deaths were pretty creative, and the constant allusions that they were in a movie and not just a strange story were a very nice touch.

Overall, The Final Girls is a pretty good movie experience, and I hope they don’t mess it up with sequels. Hell, I like Alexander Ludwig now, and that is after I also saw When The Game Stands Tall.

Few people are lucky enough to have a film be made on their life. For the most part, they have to wait til they are both dead and a decade or so after they kick the bucket. Obviously, some people wait hundreds of years, because they are old famous people and movies weren’t a thing in the 1600s.

Steve Jobs is a luckier than most men (outside of the being dead from Cancer thing). He had two movies about his life in the last two years! And he only died four years ago! Not only does he have Jobs and now Steve Jobs, he also had quite a few documentaries.

It is clear that Steve was a living legend who had tons of stories about him. It is true that he was a flawed character with a lot of issues, problems, and broken friendships. But he also did a lot of good things, so this makes him an interesting character for people to want to see.

Now, this movie was delayed for awhile. Blame Ashton Kutcher. But at a time, this was supposed to be directed by David Fincher and starring Christian Bale. The script was always Aaron Sorkin I believe.

I believe that Seth Rogen can play a character who doesn’t get high at all. I believe it so much.

1984. 1988. 1998. These 3 years were some of the most pivotal in Steve Jobs’ (Michael Fassbender) life. There were tons of big moments before and after of course. Before that he helped build a computer with Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) and helped create Apple into a powerhouse corporation. There was the failed computer the Lisa. After 1998 he introduce the iPod and the iPhone, crazy popular Apple products in our current era.

But in 1984 he was about to introduce the Macintosh computer, after the best Super Bowl Ad ever. Sure he came to the team late, but he is a visionary damn it. In 1988 he was going to release the NEXT computer, a perfect cube, away from Apple due to the falling out after the Macintosh. And in 1998, his triumphant return to Apple, about to release the iMac computer. He wanted to make the products sexy again. That may have been a line from Jobs, whoops.

Each setting of the film, each roughly the same length in time, takes place the the minutes before his press conference, with all the drama and tension of his life coming together to fuck with him. That includes Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), a former lover who always needs more money from him, to take care of the daughter he originally doesn’t claim to be his. It also involves an Apple CEO, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). There is Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), one of the better computer engineers, and Avie Tevanian (Adam Shapiro) a different engineer. His ever faithful assistant/planner Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), a tech reporter (John Ortiz), and of course his daughter, Lisa (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, Perla Haney-Jardine).

I didn’t remention Wozniak, but he is totally hanging around each time too. But I kept the above vague so you could hear the major players but not the many of their plot lines. Because I care and I am not an asshole CEO, like some people.

“How big is my metaphorical penis you ask?”

I am a big fan of Sorkin’s writing. The dialogue between characters is often quick and forces me to stay on my toes. Several times in the film, standing on my toes didn’t seem to be good enough. The conversations at point were so rapid fire that I practically had to dance to avoid the bullets from striking my legs, like a western stereotype. I think that metaphor works, if not, re-read it and think harder. The best way to describe some of these scenes would be an intense action fight, with words as bullets. I rarely feel that tense during a drama, let alone a biography.

The acting was definitely on point in this film. This is some of Rogen’s best work. Daniels had one majorly great scene with Fassbender. Stuhlbarg? I don’t know anything about Stuhlbarg, but he did a great job. I didn’t even recognize Winslet the whole film, that’s how in character and different she was. And of course, Fassbender. Early on, it just looked like Fassbender acting in a film, but somehow during the movie, he transformed so fully into Steve Jobs that I couldn’t remember who was the main actor. Of course by the end he looks so much like Jobs that it is easy, but I am talking before that, when he still had longer hair. He nailed the shit out of the role.

For comparison sakes, Kutcher did a great job as Jobs too. He had a walk, he went fully into character, but I usually thought it was still just Kutcher. But Fassbender still did a better job. And besides, I saw Fassbender’s penis in that one movie, so for most comparisons he is sure to win.

A lot of this is highly fabricated. The plot lines are real, but there is no way the timing worked for most of this. Regardless, where it excelled was how true to life they made his character. Jobs was egotistical, a know-it-all-, an asshole and a dick. He wasn’t the most pleasant person to work with and that all came across in the film. This wasn’t some fluff piece. This just tried to present the man behind the myth, flaws and perfections and everything in between.

One final comparison: This is not as good as The Social Network. Sorkin is the common link between the two, and the fact that they are both based on real people. I am not saying Fincher is the reason and that Danny Boyle could not pull off a better movie. It was fine, and even if Fincher directed this it probably wouldn’t have been as good. Just don’t go in expecting that and you should enjoy the show.

Thank goodness this film is called Burnt. Based on the title and poster, of Bradley Cooper in a chef’s outfit, I can make inferences though. It is about a angry chef, that was wronged and he wants revenge. Maybe. He could be a Gordon Ramsay like character and his life could come crashing down.

I am happy it is called Burnt, because it used to be called Adam Jones. Movie titles where it is just a fictional characters name are already bad ideas, because they don’t mean anything. And if you character is Adam Jones? One of the plainest damn names of all time. It didn’t feature a cool name like Enrique, Pierre, or Sadrik. Just Adam. Jones.

Naming aside, it turns out Adam Jones wasn’t the original name either. The original name was Chef, and we all know why that title was eventually changed. Hell, the plot of Chef was the first thing I thought of when I heard the word Burnt. As long as it is as good as Chef, we should have nothing to worry about.

Hey, it has food in it! Another similarity!

If you didn’t already guess it, this film is about Adam Jones (Cooper)! Turns out Jones used to be a big deal. He lived in Paris and worked for one of the finest restaurants and eventually its head chef. While he was in Paris hear earned himself TWO Michelin Stars. Which is a pretty big fucking deal. But he did some bad things. He was on almost every narcotic, and it messed with his brain. He burned bridges and disappeared from his friends, his coworkers and lovers.

He actually put himself into exile. He shucked oysters for two or three years in New Orleans, getting clean, sober, and his focus back. And now he is ready to take the cooking world by storm again. This time: London. He wants the third Michelin Star. He wants to be one of the all time greatest chefs. He just has to try and reconcile a lot of relationships and find good talent to help him get there.

Obviously it won’t be easy to fix all the issues. He left Tony (Daniel Brühl), a Maître D’ and close friend, in a shambled restaurant. He ruined his good friend and former sous chef, Michel’s (Omar Sy) new restaurant. There is the daughter of his former mentor, Anne Marie (Alicia Vikander), who he was dating at the time. He has a now rival chef, Reece (Matthew Rhys), who used to be a coworker and is now a Three Star chef. And there is Helene (Sienna Miller), a great young chef who he wants to take under his wing, but refuses to work with the guy based on his reputation. She also has a daughter, Lily (Lexi Benbow-Hart).

Here are some more important-ish people. Some of his new chefs are played by Riccardo Scamarcio and Sam Keeley. Emma Thompson is a psychiatrist who has to monitor his blood for any narcotics. Uma Thurman plays a big deal food critic in London. And Sarah Greene is the Hostess for their new restaurant, basically a little Tony.

If I get a plate that has fingerprints on it, I send the whole thing back, personally.

It turns out that my guess on him just being Gordon Ramsey was pretty accurate. Not British Gordon Ramsay, but American shitty TV Gordon Ramsay. He owns like 3/4 of Fox reality shows at this point, and Fox has the worst reality shows. They commercial break at tense moments or cliff hangers, they encourage language just so it can be bleeped out, and half of the episode is a recap, or the intro/outros that transition with the commercial breaks, which tell you what you will see and what you just saw. Except this is a movie where adults can see adults do adult things, so we get to hear the glorious Fucks and so on. One long scene early on during a particularly upsetting service, it is like just a big Hell’s Kitchen break down.

But thankfully after that moment, it gets better. He becomes less Ramsay and more actual character. He has growth in this film, he does’t yell 100% of the time, but he maintains the same passion and drive throughout. It was nice to see his highs and his lows. It was not as nice to see his stunt double clearly in one scene, and in another scene, have his face bloody with a piece of skin falling off and in the next scene a minute or two later, magically only a small cut. Those were dumb moments.

I think Cooper did a good job leading a film that wasn’t a straight up comedy. His French was also surprisingly good, that is, to a lame American’s ears at least. Thankfully, the rest of the cast was really great as well. Let’s give them their own sentence, shall we?

Miller was good as the main female lead, and she wasn’t a typical romance pretty face – she rocked it. I usually see Brühl in more interesting roles, but he helped carry the film and the restaurant with his simplestic and seemingly perfect performance as the best Maitre D’. Sy I don’t see in a lot of films, but this is the second French-ish role. His character had nice surprise and intense moments. And Rhys was a limited role, but brought his own unique intensity to it all.

Yay acting! Are there cliches? Sure. But it is a well done cooking movie that doesn’t make one feel stupid for not knowing how the fancy foods work. It tells a fun story and doesn’t turn into a sappy romcom ever. Yay food!

I have not seen a lot of actual horror films made by Eli Roth. He is supposed to be a big name, but when I looked at his directed list I had seen…well, zero. I thought he had directed Aftershock, but I was wrong about that.

But I am sure I will watch Knock Knock at some point! That is some sort of Thriller and it is on VOD exactly when it was supposed to be. Apparently The Green Inferno was not as lucky. Made in 2013, it was supposed to come out in 2014, but shit hit the fan, and it got delayed over a year. Which is why Eli Roth even has two movies coming out only roughly a month apart.

Speaking of intro small talk, the film was clearly inspired by Cannibal Holocaust. That is a film from the 1980’s which introduced found footage before it was even a thing. It was very gruesome, realistic, and basically the same plot of some white people heading to the rain forest to get eaten. In fact, people insisted at the time that it must have been a snuff film! The title itself was the name of the movie that was being made in Cannibal Holocaust.

“Ooooh hair, my favorite.”

Being an activist in college is one of the easiest things to do with your free time. Once you walk through a quad or a pit or a hallway, you will find dozens of protests happening all around you. Every day. Guaranteed. All you have to do is stand around, do a chant, and maybe (maybe!) hold a sign.

Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is just a bright eyed and bushy tailed freshmen in NYC. She gets interested in the activism, but her roommate (Sky Ferreira) thinks the local group on campus is too crazy. They plan to go to Peru! There is a logging company who is illegally taking out trees and threatening to remove local tribes from their homes! They will dress up like loggers, tie themselves to trees and record their actions straight onto the internet. That should stop them from hurting them and get people to care about their group and hate on the one company. Sweet. That goes fine enough. Outside of spoiler stuff.

The real issue occurs when they drive to leave the jungle. Something goes wrong with their plane, killing half of the crew as it crash lands back into the jungle. This is where they are quickly found by the local friendly natives. Just kidding, they are all painted red and totally scary. They tranq those college students and capture them to bring them back to their village.

And guess what? You already know what. They eat people! Yay!

Now they have to figure out how to survive the tribe, run away, survive in the jungle, and get back to America as soon as they can. And guess what, again! They ruined their best chance of escape by making the logging company stop their illegal actions. Life is a bitch some times.

Starring Ramon Llao and Antonieta Pari as the main two village people. As for our other activists, we have Aaron Burns, Nicolas Martinez, Magda Apanowicz, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, and Ariel Levy as our leader.

“What? Tribal mom got your tongue?”

I have heard some of Roth’s movies have been very graphic and hard to watch. Why the fuck would I ever want to go back and watch Hostel if that is true? The first major torture porn right, outside of some Saw movies? Well, The Green Inferno, if you didn’t already guess it, was very graphic and hard to watch.

I had to look away numerous times throughout the movie, my stomach unwilling to negotiate with the eye terrorists on the screen. Eating people it turns out can be pretty gross. Unfortunate, if everyone was simply just eaten, that’d be a boring and just gross film. They do a good job of keeping more of the deaths diverse so that it doesn’t get stagnant. Although watching that boy from the Spy Kid movies felt very weird for me.

As a horror film, it did its job in terms of grossing/creeping out the viewer. It definitely isn’t boring, outside of some of the earlier moments before they make it to the other country. It is super violent and should make you uncomfortable.

But it feels all very cheap at the same time. Overall the film lacks a lot of substance. It is trying to make a statement about social justice types, or America butting into things, or…something else. It just does it in a terrible way. “Don’t do this, or you will get eaten by the natives.” Cultural exploitation aside (which I do not care about), it isn’t a strong link and ruins any message it was trying to make.

For those who like gross stuff, this is your movie. If you want anything besides that, well…uh, not this movie then.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

Insidious: Chapter 3? CHAPTER 3? This is why we can’t have nice horror movies in America. Gotta fucking franchise everything.

James Wan has even gone down this road before. He directed Saw and watched it drivel into a sorry state of a franchise. He did The Conjuring, which was great, and that followed up by a terrible Annabelle from someone else. This franchise from the first to Chapter 2, I have always found it just okay, but at least he directed the sequel. He didn’t let someone Saw the fuck out of it.

Until now. Now it is directed by his writing friend, Leigh Whannell. So Wan hasn’t completely abandoned it for the super hero films he is now directing, but it is still just another film series that doesn’t need any new material.

What made the news of this sequel even more disappointing was finding out that it was a prequel. Prequels sound great because they can answer questions directly that might have been brought up about the past. But Paranormal Activity 3 tried to do this method and all it did was waste our times and actually answer close to nothing.

Good. A new face to the franchise who won’t affect anything at all.

Hey, that new face has a name. Quinn (Stefanie Scott)! And she has an issue. Her mom died awhile ago and now she thinks her mom might be trying to contact her. She tried the normal methods of contact and nothing worked.

So she found herself on the door steps of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye). She heard she was a powerful psychic who could talk to those in the afterlife. But an accident in Elise’s life had her retire, vowing to never do it again. But eh, the plot has to move along some how, so she does it anyways. Elise doesn’t like what she sees, so she tells Quinn to never try to contact her mom again.

And guess what? Now Quinn and Elise have a demon fucking with them. It gets worse when Quinn gets hit by a car, breaking her legs. Now she has to rely on her dad (Dermot Mulroney) and younger brother (Tate BerneyT) to take care of her. She has a bell to ring when she needs help, a nice sudden sound making device to make things extra creepy.

This film also shows where Elise meets Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell), who of course you would recognize from the previous, set in the future, movies.

When jumping around the time domain, sometimes colors get all sorts of fucky.

What does one do with a drunken franchise, early in the morning? That is the only way I know how to describe Insidious, as its movies attempt to give us something deep but end up just stumbling around all the place, slurring their words, and personally thinking they are the best. The first two films ended up being weird, with a couple of random scares. In Chapter 3, we got the prequel that no one wanted. Did we need to see how Elise and her goons met? No. No we did not. Now, it also alluded that shit went wrong for her in the past, and thankfully they answered that question through dealing with demons in this film. But why not have an actually younger Elise, facing that problem head on before she retired from psychic shit? Actually change up how we see the character?

Instead this film takes place, I don’t know, a year or something before Insidious. If you were reading this as a book, it would be a confusing placement to throw in a flashback chapter for people who have been supporting (albeit important) characters.

Unfortunately, this film is also the weakest of the three in terms of plots and actual scares. It stars a family that I end up feeling nothing for, despite their hardships, because it isn’t the same characters as the first two films. There is no Chapter 4 currently planned, but the director/writer/costar said that if it was, he would probably place it after 3 in the plotline, but before the first. That would officially just turn this series into “Elise and the Boys Para-normally battling demons!” That is fine, but to me that clearly just makes 3 and 4 spin-off films, and it is kind of shit that they are just calling it Insidious.

Most of this review is just arguing semantics. That aside, I didn’t like the film, and thought it was a boring side story from an already meh series.

It turns out there are more than just popular wide released horrors happening this year. Yes, they are the ones we all hear about and have been mostly disappointing. But there is indie stuff out there, and the indie stuff ends up being the best.

You know, like The Babadook, It Follows, and Goodnight Mommy. All from this year or last year. So when I found out about The Boy I decided to wait a couple of months to make sure I could review this around Halloween instead. That’s the level of dedication we provide here at Gorgon Reviews. Delaying reviews to fit silly little themes.

The only worry with indie horrors is that sometimes they can go a bit too slow. Usually they build up for an amazing payoff, but if the journey isn’t worth it, then payout be damned, no one will care.

As long as the movie has a good early hook, the rest should be fine.

Life as an only child can be boring. Especially if you live in a small town. Wait. No. Near a small town. You actually live in a hotel by a small mountain highway road. Sometimes people stay there, but usually it is dead and boring as shit.

It doesn’t get any worse for Ted (Jared Breeze). His mom left some years ago with a client who stayed in their hotel frequently, leaving just his dad (David Morse), an empty shell of a man. So he just works in the hotel and finds things to do with his time. Some of these things are bad or questionable, but since he is alone so often, who will care?

Sure people still do occasionally come to the hotel. Like William Colby (Rainn Wilson), who just so happens to get into a crash right outside the hotel and, being a secretive man, doesn’t want to go to the hospital to rest. Or that other family with the little boy, who after staying a night, find that their car no longer works.

Man. Both of those things sure are strange. I hope Ted isn’t behind all of this and, if so, I hope he doesn’t do anything worse.

I, uhh. I got nothing.

As expected, The Boy, like a lot of indie films of this genre, had a slow built up, all culminating towards a huge ending. So, starting from the end, I can say man, that shit was crazy. Imagine me making a gang pose while I said that. Maybe even while covering my mouth and saying “Ohhhh.” It had some very intense moments and the use of visuals and music were excellent with it.

And throughout the film, there were several moments of teetering on evil and not so evil, so that I never really knew when, if, and how often he would snap. They filled their purpose and had me worried.

However, this film is far better defined as a Drama Thriller, not a horror. I would argue a lot of the film is slow and harder to get through (/easier to zone out during). There already wasn’t a large cast of characters, but the mystery about Wilson’s character really started to make me feel indifferent. I no longer cared about the pay out, and started looking for other plot lines to get me interested.

The Boy is not the film for everyone. But if the director turns it into a trilogy (source: another reviewer audibly telling me), then it might have some better moments in the future.

Ah, horror remakes. We need at least one a year right? We’ve had Carrie, Evil Dead, Fright Night, and many more. It is easy and hip and cool to do. Hell, I know it sounds like I wrote that like a sarcastic asshat, but for those three films in particular I ended up liking them or thinking they were okay enough as a remake. I didn’t hate any of them.

Then Poltergeist flashed its way onto our screens like a lightning bolt. “Not so fast, mother fucker!” it clamored through the speaker box.

I may be jumping the gun with the review, but Poltergeist decided that instead of making a nice modern update with its remake, it would instead just…take more of the same elements from the original, cut out a lot of the horror bits, and instead turn it into more of a Sci-Fi Thriller. Yeah. Fuck the original, right?

And always fuck clowns, obviously. As long as its consensual and not Vulgar.

Big day for the Bowen family! They just got a new house. And hey, it is really low because of the stagnant market. Definitely not because no one would buy it. And it doesn’t have many neighbors. Who cares. They can afford it, which is the most important thing in this economy. They don’t have much of an income right now. The dad, Eric (Sam Rockwell), insists that his wife, Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) not have to go back to work, because they can totally get through this without that. So yeah, Eric is kind of a dick.

Either way, they have their three kids, Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), Griffin (Kyle Catlett), and Madison (Kennedi Clements), in order of oldest to youngest. Kendra is DGAF oldest sister, so you can ignore her. Madison is the one who starts saying things and talking to entities in her room alone. Griffin is the only one who believes that something weird is happening.

Either way, outside of funky static TV stuff, other electronics are also acting wonky. It turns out that this house used to be built on an Indian Burial site. That was decades ago (Oh man, is this technically a sequel!?). But weird stuff happened and people got angry, so they had to pay a settlment, I think, and agreed to move the graveyard to a different location. Well, then why the fuck are spirits still angry? Why are they somehow bring the barrier between worlds and stealing their youngest daughter?

Also featuring Jane Adams— and Jared Harris.

Maybe this is a metaphor for letting the TV be your nanny?

Poltergeist has about three scary moments in it. Maybe. Calling it a horror film almost feels ludicrious. It has a lot of other things though!

It has a lot of zero character growth. Rockwell’s character is completely cardboard. A completely unrealistic person given anything that happens in the movie, and even more sadly, he doesn’t even dance. The mom and older daughter role are almost completely unimportant.

It is all about little boy and little girl. And occasionally some adult comes around and does something, but when the girl gets sucked away (for a majority of the film I guess), it is mostly up to Catlett to keep us entertained. He does an okay job, in terms of kid stuff. But he cannot save this boring mess of a film.

That’s right. The biggest shame of this remake is not that it isn’t scary, it is the boringness of it all. It honestly feels like they went so light and fluffy with the whole thing that they wanted it to actually be a PG horror film. It was hard to get through because of how uninteresting it became after only 15 or so minutes.