Author: Admin

Documentaries, schmockumentaries. I used to have my documentaries on Friday, but now they are Thursday. Let us cope with it and move on.

Let’s talk about video games, because I like video games. I would refer to myself as a gamer, even if my time is much more limited from the activity. I have to watch a lot of movies, and keep up with TV shows. It is a hard life.

But with a vague title for a documentary, Video Games: The Movie (claiming to be a movie?) could be about so many topics. Most likely it will involve the history of gaming and how it is evolved today. And really, that is all I can imagine it being about. The history of gaming.

And video games! And video games through time!

Sure enough, this documentary is mostly about video games and the history. And how systems have gotten better. And why people who play video games are cool. And how indie games are doing stuff. Hey, maybe the title is because of that other documentary, Indie Game: The Movie? I swear there were more topics, but I was so bored throughout the movie that it is really easy to forget.

Here are some of the problems. Outside of video games, it didn’t really have a lot of focus. It goes from segment to segment, about different topics, some interviews with some people, and shit ton of filler footage of just video game footage. That might sound like a good thing, but when there is just randomly 2 minutes of video game segments of various games for whatever topic, that just isn’t exciting to watch. That is boring. The segments are so unconnected, you could put them in any order and the movie would feel the same. They even have musical intro/outros for each section which makes it feel even more disjointed.

Obviously this thing isn’t going to have anything about Gamer Gate, for you people who think it would. Come on now. This thing was made like a year or so ago, and Gamer Gate is only a month or so old.

Another complaint? They show this huge timeline of gaming history and start going chronological through it, but they have major events in it that they skip. Then they start going out of order, going forward and backwards, and the events on the time line seemed to be different and change. And they still ignored a lot of stuff on there. Why show it on a timeline if you aren’t explaining it? The time line was an annoying clusterfuck.

But this documentary is still super boring. Definitely don’t watch it if you like video games. And don’t if you know nothing about them. Just read wikipedia articles.

For whatever reason, I know a lot of people who were upset when Disney bought Marvel Studios. They thought it was the end of the good stuff. They thought only bad could come. They said the same thing when they bought Lucasfilm.

I, however, was excited. They weren’t going to mess around with a good thing too much, they didn’t want to spend billions to not make billions more back! But I was even more excited about the potential of a full on, super good CGI Marvel/Disney flick. Yeah. Something with the cutting edge in technology, giving me full on super hero battles, with flash colors and everything the comics promised, and really that live action movies still can’t fully give. So when I found out it was Big Hero 6? Well, I obviously had to look up what the hell that was.

Big Hero 6 is a much smaller property that has a small following. It is most well known for having, at times, Sunfire and Silver Samurai from X-Men in it, but we know that Fox has those rights, so they had to work around it. Disney also wanted to be able to tell a new story and not feel super tied down to any mythos, so messing with a smaller property would work well with that. And hey, if they didn’t have the Big Hero 6 leader in it, they’d probably have to change a lot anyways.

And thus, this animated movie exists, presumably nothing like the (old) comics, and I knowing nothing about it couldn’t have been happier.

Yay surprises and happiness and sunshine flowers!

This story is about Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) and his trouble with ladies. That’s not true, he doesn’t have troubles, he just doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about ANYTHING really, outside of robots and robot fighting. You see, Hiro is only 14, but he already graduated high school. Bright kid. Has a bright older brother too, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), but he is in college doing boring stuff. Hiro just wants to illegally bot fight and make money that way.

But once he finds out that Tadashi is actually in a really fucking cool robotics program, with really cool people? Yeah, that is when he thinks college might be a good thing, and not just living at home with his Aunt (Maya Rudolph) in San Fransokyo (which you should be able to figure out what two cities were combined for this).

Well, Hiro is able to design super sexy nanobot technology to get himself admission to the school! But when disaster strikes and he loses his invention, he is sad again. Not even his new college friends can help: Go Go Tomago (Jamie Chung), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Fred (T.J. Miller).

But when he finds out his invention was stolen and is being used for nefarious purposes, well, he cannot just sit idly by. He has to fight back. And he has to use Baymax (Scott Adsit), the soft robot helper and turn him into a fighting machine! And maybe he can fight back too. And his friends. Yes… Maybe they can be…super heroes.

Also featuring James Cromwell as Professor Robert Callaghan and Alan Tudyk as the seedy business man Alistair Krei.

Shake that sexy butt.

Color? Yes. Fantastic animation? Yes yes. Likeable characters? Yesx3. A plot about science and why knowledge is good and how science can change the world? Hells to the yes.

Watching Big Hero 6, the best way to describe it was having a blast. This Disney film is notable for not having a lot of songs, which might be their goal. They went Tangled, then Wreck-It Ralph, then Frozen, and now Big Hero 6. A lot more “macho” themed movie, if you go by outdated gender stereotypes, so there is no room for silly songs. Just action, humor, and sexy sexy graphics.

This was just a really great both super hero movie and animated family film. That is a hard one to pull off. A lot of great humor and it has a lot of similarities (based on my research) with the comics, but unique enough to make it its own thing. The only issue with it being in the animated field and a Disney flick, is I know that if we are going to get it a sequel, we have at least a four year wait. Can’t have one of these guys every two years, as it will make them compete with themselves for Best Animated Picture, and they don’t want that.

And can we get another shout out to science? Yay science! Some of the tech was inspired by real life advances too, making this futuristic tale also a bit modern.

It is too close to Halloween now, but I expect fully by next year that we will see a lot of Hiro and Baymax duos out and about. Not more than Elsa, but a fair number still.

I really wanted to do some clever parody of Spoonman to start this review, but those lyrics kind of suck. Didn’t give me a lot to work with, outside of obviously changing Spoonman to Birdman.

But let’s talk about this great title. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) is the full title and so we should say it every time in public as such. Such a provocative title on its own right, and given that some of the people in here play strange fake versions of themselves, it gets even crazier.

And the movie itself is very pseudo-meta. In the quickest description, it is about a man going through a midlife crisis, who used to play a very famous super hero, but stopped and hasn’t had great work since then. That person is looking for a comeback into the public fame and risking it all to succeed. Michael Keaton of course used to play Batman, and after Multiplicity, well, who cares? And now he is in a very similar situation. Awesome. I am stoked.

And Norton plays a great actor who others can’t stand and is hard to work with. Hey!

To reiterate, Riggan (Keaton) used to be a hot commodity. He played BIRDMAN, the best super hero, people loved him. But then he stopped. He didn’t want to do it anymore.

Now look at him, middle aged, divorced, and putting on a play. A play?? Yes. On Broadway, an adaption of a a short story that he is writing, directing, and starring in. Why? Hard to say, could be the crisis, could be because he likes the author, could be anything. But it is happening and soon. But at the same time, his life is falling apart. His relationship with his daughter (Emma Stone) is strained. He is putting all of his wealth into this production. His lead performers are either bad or egotistical. He might have gotten someone pregnant. He has to deal with critics with a vendetta. And bad things just seem to keep happening!

Did I mention mid-life crisis? Because Riggan is also having trouble, when he is alone, perceiving his own reality. He almost sees reality in a different light than everyone else. They just couldn’t understand.

Also featuring Zach Galifianakis as his lawyer, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, and Edward Norton as his actors, and Amy Ryan as his ex-wife.

Also starring that guy, played by some Harvey or something like that.

One of the coolest things a director can do is have a few “really long shots” in their film, where the camera never leaves the scene, where there are not cuts, just a lot of dialogue and a lot of acting. The Master had an intense one of those, Before Midnight had a few, Tarantino does it a lot. It is awesome and shows a lot of great acting during these sorts of scenes.

I don’t know a lot about the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, except that I have reviewed only one of his films, Biutiful, but I am convinced that this man is a genius. The ENTIRE FILM is made up of incredibly long scenes. I’d say the camera must have only cut away under ten times the whole film, which is about two hours long. That is incredible.

And just so we are clear, this is not a movie with only a handful of locations where the camera is just watching a few people talking for 10-15 minutes at a time. No. People walk and people move from room to room of this tiny Broadway theater, from main stage to dressing room, to balcony, to the streets below. So the entire film is so meticulously planned that the whole thing is like a Rube Goldberg machine. Actors have to come into rooms at the right time, also props, sight gags, everything has to fit in correctly. Given that this is a comedy, timing is key for half of the laughs, so it was an incredible feat. It is almost as if they tried to convey this movie as if it was a play, where real acting had to occur.

Speaking of real acting, there were so much incredible talent in this film, but Keaton and Stone knock it out of the park. Obviously Keaton will get most of the fame, and rightfully so, most likely earning a Best Acting nomination nod for his work here. But I want to make sure that people know that Stone was also fantastic and had a monologue or two to convey intense emotions through.

The film had a great plot, it kept me guessing, and shit, even the soundtrack of “mostly just drums” worked really fucking well. Go see Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) and then maybe go see it again.

When I first saw a trailer for The Book Of Life, I was taken aback with the animation styling. And the story line. And everything about it. Well, everything but one thing.

Guillermo del Toro‘s name was attached to the picture. Really? I like del Toro, so I found that surprising because it didn’t seem like something that he heavily influenced. Outside of the Mexican influence, it just didn’t seem like his work. But I decided to give it a benefit of the doubt. There is reasoning behind the animation style, there is some cultural significance to the whole picture, and damn it. It might be excellent.

If you didn’t know, this movie has something to do with the Day of the Dead, which takes place from Halloween to Nov 2. In particular, they call Nov 2 the Day of the Dead, as that is the day that they celebrate the gravestones of their family members and party in their remembrance, the central theme to the story.

The non central theme hopefully is searching for this mythical Book of Life that gives everyone super powers. I hope.

Oh shit, those kids found it! Run! Chaos everywhere! Ahh!

Mexico in this case is the center of the universe, not only that, but the center of Mexico is a place that looks like a guitar surrounded by water, in San Angel. That is where a lot of shenanigans take place, given its central location. I guess I should explain the afterlife. Get ready for some facts. Everyone knows that once people die, their spirits go to a really sexy place where they party all day and all night and live with their families and friends! La Muerte (Kate del Castillo) rules the Land of the Remembered and it is totally fetch. But there is another afterlife place. The Land of the Forgotten, ruled by Xibalba (Ron Perlman). That is not a fun place. You see, if people in the Land of the Forgotten ever forget about someone that has died, the spirit gets moved to the Land of the Forgotten for the rest of eternity. Not a fun time at all. 🙁 🙁 🙁

Xibalba of course doesn’t like his job and wants to rule the cool place, so they make bets and wages all the time over the lives of humans to determine who rules what.

So they see these three kids running around. Manolo (Diego Luga) with his guitar and sensitivity, Joaquin (Channing Tatum) who likes to sword fight and wants to be a soldier, and of course, sweet sweet Maria (Zoe Saldana) the object of their affection and daughter of the general.

Bets! They place them. Xibalba picks Joaquin to eventually marry Maria, and La Muerte picks Manolo. If Xibalba wins, he gets to rule the Land of the Remembered, but if La Muete wins, Xibalba has to stop interfering with the lives of humans. Oh golly.

The fate of so much on such a little arrangement. And who is to say the girl will marry either boy? Pfft. Gods.

Also featuring the voice acting talent of Christina Applegate, Ice Cube, Carlos Alazraqui, Danny Trejo, and Hector Elizondo.

Not to be weird, but that is the sexiest hair I have seen on a CGI wooden puppet ever.

Turns out, del Toro didn’t have a lot to do with this movie. Sure, he was involved on some level as a producer, but he wasn’t even the executive producer. He probably provided some nice funding and helped design the Land of the Remembered, because it was vibrant and unique, but not sure what else he might have done.

A lot of music in this movie, and about half of it (or more) were actual songs but with a lot more mariachi feel to them. We got Creep and I Will Wait and much more. I think there is also unique music, but I just might not be hip enough on the music scene to get the references.

I think this is a hard movies for kids to follow. A lot is going on, a lot of characters are good and just misunderstood. After all, Xibalba isn’t a bad guy, just looks bad. Joaquin isn’t a bad guy either. The only bad guy is a bandito who doesn’t show up til the end, and I will say, he had very entertaining fight scenes.

The movie has a lot of spirit and energy, but I just found it hard to really relate to anyone. Or the story itself. It just ended up on the “okay” spectrum, which was disappointing, as I figured this one would be one of the best films of the year. Maybe I made a mistake in picking The Book Of Life over The Boxtrolls. I hope not!

There are documentaries of all sorts of varieties. There are historical documentaries (technically, most if not all fall under this?), political documentaries, biased documentaries, science/learning documentaries, scary/thriller documentaries and more.

And then every once in awhile, they have documentaries about movies, which is of course extremely appealing to someone who likes watching movies. The movie makers can be subjects of documentaries themselves, it isn’t weird!

And then every once in a longer while, we get a documentary that doesn’t worry about fitting it all in one tiny package, but giving you as much info as they can, all the info they can, with as many people as they can, and saying “fuck your time constraints, you fascist time Nazi!”

That’s right, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy is a whopping 240 minutes long. That is about four hours for your math inept bastards out there. This documentary doesn’t cut any corners, unless you count the recent reboot of the franchise, A Nightmare On Elm Street. It isn’t featured in this one, most likely because it came out the same year as the documentary, and because who cares about that title? No one. It is a reboot, it is different, it isn’t Robert Englund.

So what does this cover? Well, of course the original concept of A Nightmare On Elm Street with Wes Craven and New Line Cinema, while also going over the start of New Line Cinema, because they made it big off of Freddy. We get the “gay” second film, the really great return of Craven for Dream Warriors, the second highest grossing 4th film which jump started director Renny Harlin‘s career, the clusterfuck of a fifth film, the “final” sixth film with Freddy’s death, and second return of Craven with the brilliant New Nightmare, a lot of info on merchandising and the TV show and it ends with Freddy vs. Jason.

Freddy’s arms have been elongated to encompass everyone in this documentary.

That is a lot of material to go over, and now you know why it is so long. The best part about the length? I didn’t feel like a torture session trying to get through it. It was very entertaining hearing the stories behind scenes, how shots were made, how decisions were decided upon, how casting/directors were chosen. Everything. Including snide comments with Craven and Englund throughout. Hey, they even had a small interview with an actor who had the role of Surfer in one of the movies. He had a say. They talked to people who wrote scripts that were ignored. They talked to everyone. I think the coolest part is when they talked to someone who played one of the roles, they also had them read their script description of the character when they first enter the movie. Made them relatable?

But here is one annoyance. When you hear about stars in these movies, a lot of people will think back to Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette. The Elm Street series were each of these heavy hitters first roles, and Patricia in particular was the lead in the third film. Yet they don’t get interviewed for this movie? Were they too busy for the franchise that gave them their eventual millions?

Either way, this documentary is an information overload, and only biased in the sense that a lot of the people who worked on one movie will over hype their own work, obviously, or blame others for any failures. If you were a fan of any movie of the franchise, you will enjoy aspects of this documentary. If you are curious about it, you will enjoy this. You can watch it over days and in sections quite easily, and it is on Netflix and will probably stay there forever.

Overall, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy is a fantastic documentary. I learned a lot, and I will forget most of it. I was worried about finding time for the four hours, but it was a very easy documentary to watch, it ended up not even being a big issue.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you are thinking. “Didn’t you just review this movie?” Nooo, that was The ABCs Of Death! This is the sequel! You see, The ABCs of Death came out like, last year or 2012, depending on who you ask. This one is new, it is fresh, and that is why I had to rush it out before Halloween. On the same week as the original.

The concept is of course exactly the same. In The ABCs Of Death 2, we have 26 new short stories, one for every letter of the alphabet, with some repeat directors, some new people, and overall, a lot less subtitles.

If the man on the left represents this franchise and the woman represents the average film goer…

With the second iteration, I feel like I should note that the overall tone of the movie seems to have changed a lot. Technically it is still a horror comedy, but there is a lot lot less comedy and a lot more tales going for a serious horror/thriller short. Like, a lot of them.

For instance, guess how many of these shorts are about farting and dying from farts? Well, 0, which is definitely less than the first film.

Here are some other notable differences – Every short is a story, and there are no meta stories unlike the first film. I think there are more animated/claymation/etc shorts than the first film, of which I think only had a couple. This one didn’t have a lot either, but there were more. And of course, one of the shorts made me want to throw up, everywhere, and still makes me feel comfortable.

And it definitely wasn’t the bros versus hoes segment.

Seriously. I am going to do my best and not tell you what any letter means. And it will be simple, because I am typing this and not talking directly to you. Z. The ending of this film is fucked up. Super fucked up. Like. Really really cringe inducing, gross, yucky yuck, bllaarrrghghghghg. I had to send my loved one out of the room when it was happening so that she wouldn’t experience any of it and refused to tell her about it. It was just that bad and even describing it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.

And you know what? I guess that makes it kind of awesome. They wanted to freak me out, they did, and that is hard for a lot of horror films to do. Z will unfortunately stick with me for a long time, but that also speaks out to its uniqueness.

In other news, on a whole, I think I technically disliked this one more than the first. I thought the first was okay, and overall, this one too was okay. There is so much diversity and stories, it is hard for a single bad one to drag it all down, or a great one to elevate it. There is just so much average, that after watching it, I can only really remember a few of them anymore. The extremes.

I know I am mostly alone when I say I disliked this one more than the first, as most people liked how it was less humorous, but I thought the humor aspects gave the first one some sense of identity. I think it has to either embrace the comedic element more fully and equally, or get rid of it completely and go straight 26 tales of fright and terror. That is what I think a future movie needs to do. With the time constraints, they should’t have issues actually making tiny terrible tales, I just don’t want half of them to feel half assed.

Another V/H/S movie, another year. I liked the first two installments. They offered me a lot of variety, some bad, some really good, at least most of them were okay tales and pretty dang unique. I like the anthology format, as a lot of these stories you wouldn’t expect to last a full movie.

There isn’t a lot I can really say about V/H/S: Viral ahead of time. A few short horrors, one that plays between them that somehow branches them all together. Like before, this one was released on V.O.D. before a small theatrical run, in order for people to watch at their home for Halloween I guess.

Turn around bright eyes.

For this part of the franchise, we have an astounding FOUR short stories that make up the entire movie, including the one that is spread throughout the film. The main story, I guess, is Vicious Circles, and involves a police chase of an ice cream truck throughout Los Angeles. It interests a lot of the community, hoping to grab shitty cell phone footage to place it on youtube.

We have Dante The Great, a story about an illusionist who finds a magical cape that grants him real magical power, but one that needs to feast on the blood of others.

There is Parallel Monsters, about a man who builds a portal into an parallel universe, right when his parallel universe does the same. Everything seems identical, so they agree to explore the others side for 15 minutes, but of course, not everything is as similar as it seems.

And finally, Bonestorm, about a group of people wanting to film a skateboarding video, who head to Tijuana where there are big ditches that no one would care if they did tricks there. And then they also get involved with a Mexican cult.

There was supposed to be a story called Gorgeous Vortex, which was apparently cut for some unknown reason. I just know it was sixteen minutes long and it did not make it to the final movie (but I think I even still saw it mentioned in the credits, awkwardly enough).

First thing of note, this is incredibly disappointing in terms of number of stories. I feel cheated, like I barely got enough diversity.

The main story is terrible. For whatever reason, despite the good technology to capture all of the events, was full of class video tape stylized cut and screech noises, and it got totally annoying. It didn’t make any sense until the end, where it was kind of cool, but very disappointing leading up to it.

Dante The Great didn’t match the V/H/S style at all. It was very shitty and I don’t even want to count it as a short on this movie. It would have been better without it.

Parallel Monsters was the only good story of the bunch. It had a nice sci-fi concept and told a bizarre story. I still think it had too much filler in the middle, where it was just being weird without advancing the plot any forward.

And Bonestorm? I think it had a good concept, but the main characters were very annoying, it took too long to get to Mexico, and then when the cult appeared, it became incredibly confusing as to what was happening, who was dead, who was dying, and a lot of chaos made the end almost unwatchable and not exciting.

This is the worst addition to the franchise, by far. And based on the Vicious Circles story, it kind of gave the whole thing a bit of closure. But I assume they will still keep trying to milk this franchise, because it is cheap, and they don’t need to come up with 90 minute plot lines. I have no issues with the anthology horror genre, but this one is so much worse than the other two, it is incredibly disappointing.

Almost universally agreed upon, Leprechaun is one of the worst franchises known to man. It has always been known for its more comedic elements and campy atmosphere, but a lot of people just seem to loathe it. Most of knowledge of it came from Wayne’s World and seeing the first one as a kid, which kind of creeped me out. But then we also got Leprechaun 4: In Space and Leprechaun In The Hood. The series kept going because, presumably, no one puts Warwick Davis in a corner.

But now that part of the Leprechaun franchise is presumably dead. Now Leprechaun: Origins, serving as a series reboot, is being made by the very prestigious WWE studios.

The company who brought us character studies such as The Condemned, Oculus, and The Day.

Let’s not forget the filter. How else will they know it is dark and brooding?

Ireland, because that’s where leprechauns live. Two couples, one adventure to discover the richness of the land in front of them. What secrets may they find? What hidden gems?

Well, Jeni (Melissa Roxburgh) is looking to get her Masters in History next year, but not sure what she wants to do it on. So why not look around Ireland? Her boyfriend Ben (Andrew Dunbar) more or less supports her theories, although he wants to see cooler less boring things. They also have the less important couple (Brendan Fletcher, Stephanie Bennett), who are expendable.

They go to town, hearing good things, and find out artifacts that are super old. Just a 7 hour trip from the town. They had planned to stay there just an afternoon, but when offered a free cabin to stay in over night and a tour to the site? Well, sure.

But it turns out the town has pact with an ancient leprechaun. It wants to kill the town, as they stole his gold, but they have instead let them have human sacrifices in the form of out of town visitors. Yay, appeasing leprechauns!

Some townsfolk include Garry Chalk and Teach Grant, while the leprechaun himself is played by Dylan “Hornswoggle” Postl, who I have been told is a professional wrestler.

Oh yeah, you can tell this is leprechaun, because of his…uhh. Um…Uh.

I was being a bit too hard on WWE studios earlier. They also helped give us Dead Man Down, which I absolutely loved. This is not one of those glorious times.

First off, no comedic elements. Okay, fine, straight horror. I can do that. But don’t give me a leprechaun movie without anything that resembles a leprechaun. You see that picture up there? That is a hideous fucking C.H.U.D. That is not a leprechaun. It looks like they took the C.H.U.D. costume, reduced the eyes, and just said fuck it, leprechaun.

Not only that, but a lot of the “Fear” early on, involved an unseen force rushing through the tall wheat or grass or whatever, and grabbing people. That shit is straight out of Jurassic Park, is it not?

Despite going for straight horror, this movie is not scary in any way. It is just dumb. Bad acting, bad plot, bad reboot, bad characters, bad “villains”, and it feels like it drags on forever. I’d rather watch the original Leprechaun film than watch Leprechaun: Origins again. I am also confused as to why they even bothered to have someone “famous” playing the leprechaun? He has no discernible features, doesn’t talk just growls, and is a complete waste.

It is hard to say that, but this reboot is a disgrace to the already pitiful Leprechaun franchise.

Every once in awhile, a new movie concept comes out, and people liked it. In this case, I am talking about V/H/S, which decided to add outdated technology plus short horror films into one. It was an anthology. Made up of five or six smaller horror stories, good ideas that wouldn’t have been good if dragged out over 80-90 minutes. Brilliant!

Shorts are hard to make and require you to do a lot in a short amount of time.

Well, The ABCs Of Death took the idea of a horror anthology and went several steps further. Five to six shorts? Fuck that. Twenty-Six shorts is what people really want.

Yes, in case you didn’t get the gimmick, that is one for every letter of the alphabet.

Like Stab. Or Betrayal. Or Fetish.

This is really a hard series to really describe. After all, I could just tell you what each clip is called, as they each have the alphabetic name/theme going on, but that kind of gives it away. The movie shows you the short and then tells you the name afterwards. The titles themselves kind of give things away and ruin a lot of the surprise.

However, there are sill some awesome titles. Like Hydro-Electric Diffusion, WTF, and Toilet.

Given 26 directors, these range in many different ways. We have one animated short, and a claymation short. Two of the shorts are meta and aware that they are a specific letter / feature the people making the short. I guess both wanted to be original, and bam, now they are not unique.

And the genres range as well. Some of these are entirely humor based, some are going for creepy and weird, some are going for horror, and others? Well, others are just down right disgusting.

And arguably, some people would consider some of these “hot”.

I am talking super disgusting. I am talking I had to pause it after a short and come back to finish the movie an hour later. I just didn’t expect some things to happen. Some people with fucked up imaginations out there is all I really have to say about that.

I definitely think 26 is too many shorts in one package to get a real good feeling about this movie. Because they range so dramatically, you might have a dramatic thriller piece, followed by something completely absurd, followed by a slasher, and it can be exhausting.

However, on the flippy side, because of it is format, it is one of the best movie types ever to let you take breaks if you feel like it and come back days later and not feel like you will forget things. You could watch one a day and you will still get the same basic experience. So that is cool.

I will note that going into it, I didn’t know so much of it would go for strange/humor, I thought this would be a straight horror film like V/H/S. So at least that differentiates it from that series as well. Overall, it is an average film with a bold concept. And also very fucking weird. This is the type of film that may be more enjoyable in a group, with everyone trying to guess what the word theme may be.

No, don’t worry. This isn’t another dang review about another movie about doppelgangers. But if you want to see those check out The Double, Enemy, or The One I Love.

No The Imposter is something much more sinister, much more creepier, because The Imposter is real. That’s what a documentary is, folks.

This is a story about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay, a 13 year old boy from San Antonio, Texas. This was in 1994, so you probably didn’t hear about it. Which is why you also might not have heard about it 3 years later when he was reportedly found alive in Spain. Kind of messed up and traumatic, but alive.

However, no one could have guessed at the time that it was actually Frédéric Bourdin, a 22 year old French man.

Typical French smug look on his face too.

What can drive a family to think that a complete stranger is actually their missing son? Especially when traits such as eye color, accent, and body type are all different. That is what this documentary strives to answer.

The documentary uses some actual footage from the 1990s, both in terms of hand held cameras from VHS tapes and news footage about the incident. But for the most part footage and narration comes from two ways. From Bourdin himself, and from the family members of Nicholas who are telling their versions of the events of that story.

They also recreated some scenes to add a sense of tension to it all, to recreate the initial call in to police and all of that. And man. EVERYTHING IS SO INTENSE. I was captivated throughout the documentary, I wanted to absorb all of the information. The music they used and the scenes created such an eerie vibe that I was able to label this a Thriller and a Documentary.

Who is to say that documentaries cannot make you scared? Not like someone is going to come out and get you. But at the lengths a person, a real person, might go to in order to get away.

I don’t want to talk more about it, because it is such a unique discovery and journey that the film takes you on. Definitely one that came out of nowhere for me and is highly recommended.