Author: Admin

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 no idea where I first heard about Stories We Tell. But it totally happened sometime in the last 0-2 years. I think. It was either something I read, or a friend’s post on facebook, or a trailer. Shit I really don’t remember. Which is funny, because this documentary is about memories not being infallible.

Sarah Polley is an actress that really no one cares about. She had a major role in Go, but since then its been mostly random stuff. She has made a project to honor her mother, maybe. She has gathered all of her older siblings, her dad, her parents friends, and others to just tell the complete story of their mother, as they remember it.

The film on IMDB is described as “A film that excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive truth at the core of a family of storytellers.” We are told that basically their stories will show that not everyone has the complete story, that some people have contradicting thoughts about what happened and the only way to really know is to hear every single angle.

Angle means different person, not where the person is talking from in relation to where you are sitting.

But then I watch it.

And uhh, their stories really aren’t that different. A lot of people mentioning different things, but they are all really similar, so the stark differences we were promised don’t really come up.

I mean, this is no Rashomon, the first movie to have an incident occur, and people retelling it all have different memories, til we find out the truth is somewhere in between. It is now a pretty famous plot device. So we would hope for big differences in order for the time to be worth it.

What inspired this video was that she had heard rumors her whole life that her dad wasn’t her real dad. Surprise, it was true. The real dad knew he was the father, but he didn’t tell people. So that guy had part of the story that others were unaware of. A secret love. Maybe. The last line of the film makes us wonder if it was really that good of a love.

But here is the issue I have. Sure nothing crazy happens overall, this is real life. It is an issue a “Character” in the documentary brings up. People are talking for hours about her mom. This movie is less than two hours long. Sarah herself has to pick and choose what memories get told, leaving still an unstructured half truth of her mother, which is not what she set out to do. It is the exact same thing our mind/memories do, but at an editing table.

I just demand the 60 hour version, is all.

2 out of 4.

I saw the trailer for Love and Honor accidentally before the movie As Cool As I Am.

I didn’t like As Cool As I Am, and usually I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch a movie that I saw previewed before a lame movie, if I have never heard of it.

But here I am! The trailer made me kind of interested in the movie. War! Love! Going AWOL! Hot and sexy topics, and all dealing with the little brother of Thor, who of course never disappoints.

Except for Paranoia, Empire State and The Last Song.

This story is set in 1969, so we get to hear Spirit in the Sky and Magic Carpet Ride, because sometimes filmmakers don’t want to be creative with their song choices anymore.

Dalton Joiner (Austin Stowell) and Mickey Wright (Liam Hemsworth) are both soldiers in the US Army, over at Vietnam. They are volunteers and are halfway through their year long tour. After six months, they have earned a whole week off! They get dropped off in Hong Kong to have a week of fornication, tomfoolery, and who knows what else, as long as they are back at that airport to leave in 7 days.

But Dalton has other plans. He was dating this girl, Jane (Aimee Teegarden), but she broke up with him while he was away from the war. The only thing keeping him going was the thought of going back to her, so he was super good at finding traps and shit. His plan is to fly back to America, because troops fly for free, see her again, and that will rekindle everything they had, and she will know that waiting is the best thing.

So of course his buddy Mickey goes along for the ride.

But when they get back to the states, things have changed. Jane has become Juniper, and she is living in a house of war protesters. Hippies. She broke up with him because she couldn’t support the war (and probably started protesting because it took him away!). She is a free spirit now, perhaps too free, but Dalton doesn’t care. They lie and say they abandoned the war in protest, in order to help win her back, but the lies build, and bad things happen. Also Mickey falls in love with Candace (Teresa Palmer). That is important too, I guess, because they become our main characters.

Hey, girl from Warm Bodies (warm bodies). I like Aimee better, no lie. But you are cool too.

The movie being set in the 1960s was actually surprising. I mean, it makes more sense, but I am still surprised.

From the trailer, it looked like bad stuff would go down hard. Like they didn’t make their flight in time and getting arrested for AWOL charges, then presumably a big political affair that would change everything and end Vietnam.

But when they were arrested? They solved the problem in a few minutes, tricked one officer, and that was it. Too quickly, leaving me with nothing but romance based drama. Silly, romance based drama, because it is just all based on lying to loved ones, like most uncreative movies. I give this one props for technically trying a different angle, only by setting, but this isn’t a fantastic romance story in any way, and the romance between Stowell and Hemsworth doensn’t feel real at all. No chemistry, no tissue box for my tears.

1 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.

Another day, another unknown straight to DVD movie release, where I recognize someone on the cover.

At least As Cool As I Am is a phrase that almost sounds like it could be said by a human being.

Almost.

This movie fits in with Cracked.com’s theory on the actor, unfortunately.

Actually, this movie is about a family that isn’t your normal family. You know, like most movies. Lucy (Sarah Bolger) likes being from an unusual family. Her mom, Lainee (Claire Danes) is mostly stay at home mom, until she gets a job as a telemarketer in this movie to ease her boredom. Her dad, Chuck(James Marsden), is a lumberjack, and gone weeks at at time, only able to come back for a week before going back on the road. He must make decent enough money for that type of commitment to be worth it, I guess.

Anyways, Lucy is becoming a young woman and wants to experiment with her sexuality a bit. She kisses a boy. She then kisses her best friend, Kenny (Thomas Mann) who kisses back.

Aw, they are now dating.

And the rest of this movie involves awkward situations between her and her friend, her and other friends as she starts to fit in amongst other boys, and the falling apart of her parent relationship. Then it ends!

You recognize the mom from Homeland. You are welcome.

Awkward teen relationships. That is basically the entire point of this movie. That is a lie, just a small part. The other small part is her own parents relationship and how it affects here. The rest of the parts are about nothing much at all.

About nothing much at all? That is right. I am having a hard time describing this movie just because overall, not a lot happened, and then it ended. Hmm. Some arguments, some sex, then end of a movie. If it was a much better movie, it could be the type that just ends and gets away with it, if there was powerful acting, or anything worthwile, but that isn’t this movie. It is just pointless, and I’d want my money back if it ended up costing me anything.

Ahhh…okay. I do like that it is another movie where James Marsden technically gets cheated on. Dude’s been typecasted in such a weird way.

Also, there was a theme in this review. Pretty easy to figure it out. Was also really easy to do.

1 out of 4.

Bad Grandpa, Bad Grandpa, Bad Grandpa…

Well, it is presented by Jackass, and I can say I have never seen one of those movies in full, or the TV show, just random skits before that people have gone out of their way to show me. And this music video by Andrew W.K.

I literally have no desire to see people hurt them selves and do stupid things for amusement. Like, none. I am not high brow at all, not in the slightest, it just doesn’t seem appealing to me.

But this movie is different. So much different.

Like, this kid, who was the best part of Fun Size.

The “plot” of the movie is that Irving Zisman (Johnny Knoxville) is old, his wife just died, and he is stoked. Too bad his only daughter is going to prison, and her son, Billy (Jackson Nicholl), needs someone to watch him and take him to visit his daddy in Raleigh, NC.

But Irving lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. That is far away. Fuck all that noise.

Well he does it anyways, and that is the backbone for this roadtrip film, which has the main goal of just doing ridiculous things and providing shock value to real people and our enjoyment.

And some stunts too.

Or fabricated little girl pageants in Raleigh just to confuse and bewilder people.

In case you can’t wait for the ending, I am giving this a 2 out of 4 for a few reasons.

Yes, it is at times entertaining. Some of the stunts/interactions are really creative. Nice moments. But a lot of the time they feel too far in between, or the joke takes too long to set up (so instead we are just given a lot of diatribe between Johnny Knoxville pretending to be a mean old man.

Speaking of that, this may be the only time I say this in a review but…

This movie has too much plot.

To be more entertaining, we need more skits, more hilarious interactions between real people and the actors. We have a lot of scenes just between Knoxville and Nicoll who in the car talking. And it is all bullshit, all stuff we would expect to see in a real movie, that feels just completely unnecessary in this film.

Similarly, because a lot of these scenes are so detailed, like the pageant, and that machine that crashes through a store window. That wasn’t just random, other people had to be in on it. So some of those other people are in the shots too, doing reactions as if its real, but you know they know its about to happen.

So to recap, this movie would have been a lot more entertaining overall if they just made more of it be real skits and less plot, and reduced the number of people who knew what was going to happen. Here is one thing I learned from the movie: The Guardians of the Children, a bikers gang, is incredibly fucking awesome, and they really believe in their cause.

2 out of 4.

Here is a true story. I was slowly trolling down the aisle at the local video store, when I ran into the movie Crazy Enough. I saw that there was only one copy, despite being a “new release,” saw who was the star, saw the ridiculous of the cover and thought “Hey, I should totally watch that movie. Right away!”

This is how I learned that when I walk near movies, I get controlled by a puppeteer and make awful decisions.

I saw this cover and thought “THAT’S THE ONE!”

Fred Mulberry (Chris Kattan) is a psychiatrist, has a doctorate, and a loving family. He is kind of spazzy though, and his kids might not look up to him.

Either way, he has to head over a few hours to a mental hospital to sign some forms for a new patient to go there. Tough part of the job. Well, as fate would have it, his identical twin brother Teddy, is a resident at that hospital. They were both adopted at birth, one raised to be a scientist, one who unfortunately went a bit insane. Luckily for Teddy, everything works out perfectly for him to steal Fred’s wallet and items while he isn’t looking and make it out of the hospital, making the hospital think it Fred is Teddy and lock him back up instead.

Hooray! Oh what zany adventures they can get in to, a sane man trying to get out of a hospital that assumes he is crazy, and a crazy man trying to act like a dad and raise his family.

Hyuck hyuck hyuck. Susana Gibb plays the wife, Brooke Anna Leedy is another patient at the hospital who claims she doesn’t belong. There might be some fishy stuff afoot here, it turns out!

I can’t believe a movie starring Chris Kattan twice could be considered bad.

I am not going to bore you with more words than are necessary at this point.

I didn’t laugh once. Parts made me more sad, because shit, being improperly imprisoned in a place where people assume you are not all there in the head. That sucks. It could be used for comedic purposes, but it was just done badly. On the other side of the coin, crazy guy in the real world. Some shenanigans, but most of them fall flat too.

There is also mixed messages. While he is trapped inside, he realizes that these people are nice people, and most of them could easily live in society and not be shunned. But the other side of the story, Teddy, yes he is nice guy, but they kind of imply that he really cant function in society and the hospital makes sense for him. Well, minus the cheesy ending where they ignore it all.

Blah. Just blah. Dang it Chris Kattan. Dang it Chris Kattan. That is for both of him in this movie.

0 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.

I might have heard of Valhalla Rising a few years ago. Those two words I definitely know exist, so I think I knew this movie existed.

But it wasn’t until it was requested by a friend and found on Netflix did I actually finally get around to it. Here is my knowledge going into it: Violent violent violent!

What? This doesn’t look violent at all!

Valhalla Rising is told in six parts: Wrath, Silent Warrior, Men Of God, The Holy Land, Hell, and The Sacrifice.

Really, that by itself probably serves as an adequate plot outline. Just imagine those sections and vikings and your probably get the whole movie.

Our story is about One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), the only character who really gets a name. He has one eye, because the other got slashed away. He is also mute. But he is a bad ass warrior. But a prisoner, until he was able to escape and kill his captors. One Eye wants to head home, and won’t let anyone get in his way. What about The Boy (Maarten Stevenson), who fed him as a slave? He can follow, sure. Why not.

Eventually they meet up with some Crusaders, journeying to Jerusalem. Free boat ride.

Oh, yeah, One Eye totally has visions too of the future, and has been using that to decide which path to take, as his visions continue to come true.

Valhalla Rising: Norse and Christian spirituality, combined with violence.

Based on the earlier description, this film is way different than I imagined. In fact, it reminded me of another film I watched recently. Only God Forgives.

Shit. It is Nicholas Winding Refn, the same director of that and Drive. Basically, he has shown to make movies many would consider very violent (but this one didn’t feel that bad), while also avoiding names, having high levels of cinemetography, and slower parts to really draw out certain emotions and feelings.

Basically, it could be hard to watch. You won’t get to simply half ass watching it, or else you won’t get anything out there. Yes, some of the fights and conflicts are violent, but they are not the main focus of this story. It is kind of a story of redemption, but not really, of one mysterious figure.

I think too much of this story is left up to the viewer, and not a lot happens besides it. It bugs the shit out of me. Yes it is pretty, and yes the acting is decent, but not enough happens.

Overall, I liked it more than Only God Forgives, because I understand this one more, but not as good as Drive. It’s on netflix, might be worthy of a watch. It is okay overall, just…I thought it could have been more entertaining in the long run.

2 out of 4.