nickjones-96546 Reviews

Hellboy (2019)

Garbage

[2/10 · 21 March 2024]

Man, the original Hellboy comics were great! The first couple of movies were great, too!

Then there's this crap. Overly-long, trying to do too much and fit modern sensibilities into a movie that should've been more clever, more pulp-noir-y, more interesting in general. Hellboy is whiny and emotional where he should be world-weary and lackadaisical (also, he appears to be much shorter than any other depiction for some inexplicable reason). Multiple stories from the comics are jammed together in a way that doesn't remotely work. There's a subplot where Hellboy sympathizes with demons that goes nowhere. Boring. Boring. So boring.

One Hellboy story doesn't require two full hours to adapt, good lord. This is inferior in every way to the source material and prior films, but I guess that the endless parade of remakes and sequels must go on, for whatever reason.

Crash (1996)

Crash (2004) is a better film than Crash (1996)

[4/10 · 28 April 2023]

I realize that this might be a controversial statement, given that one film (2004) won a Best Picture Academy Award and the other film (1996) is a sex pervert movie that won an Adult Video News Award, but I feel the need to take a stand. Despite the niche appeal of Crash (1996) to sex perverts, Crash (2004) is the far superior film.

Crash (2004) deals with a variety of contemporary social issues, while Crash (1996) deals with a weird, niche sexual fetish. Crash (2004) manages to be unsettling in a realistic and grounded manner, whereas Crash (1996) seems to be shooting for a deliberately provocative and offensive tone. An average viewer is going to come away with more to think about from the former than the latter.

The raw style of Crash (2004) is more visceral and involving then the cold, detached style of Crash (1996). It's easy to dismiss Cronenberg's film as sensationalistic softcore pornography, whereas Crash (2004) very obviously and deliberately is attempting to strike at deeper issues of the American experience. One can't fault Crash (1996) for doing exactly what it set out to do, but one does wonder if it's as valuable as the goal of the message that Crash (2004) was attempting to send.

...

It's not even that sexy.

There. I said it. Just have two sexy people having sex without car crashes being involved and this film is immensely improved.

Fight me.

City of God (2002)

Exploitative and nihilistic

[3/10 · 23 April 2023]

City of God is a movie that bombards the viewers with its relentless and gruesome portrayal of the violence and chaos in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, yet fails to deliver a compelling or meaningful story. The film is a mess of disjointed scenes that jump back and forth in time between different characters, making it impossible to care about anyone. There is no single clear plot or a central protagonist, instead throwing a bunch of episodes that show how the favela degenerates into a bloody battleground ruled by drug gangs at the viewer. The film ignores the root causes and social context of the violence and poverty in the favela, indulging instead in the sensational and graphic aspects of the gang wars. There seems to be no hope or redemption for the characters or the community, rather a cycle of violence and crime that seems a permanent feature of the slum. The movie seems to take joy in depicting violence - including multiple graphic murders of children - as if it was a PG-13 Hollywood crime caper, despite the otherwise serious, tragic, and grotesque subject matter. I'm sure this was intended as a "message" movie, but the filmmakers seemed to be exploiting and glorifying the violence without condemning it, especially given the slick and stylish editing. City of God is a film that is more obsessed with style than substance, more eager to shock than enlighten, and more nihilistic than realistic.

The Jerk (1979)

Humor is subjective.

[2/10 · 10 April 2023]

I understand that a lot of people love The Jerk. I can see where the humor of every single joke is supposed to come from in an abstract way; unfortunately, I only laughed once during The Jerk, as M. Emmett Walsh's character was attempting to assassinate Steve Martin's titular jerk, repeatedly insulting him by using terms like "random," "average," and "run-of-the mill." The entire rest of the film bored me horribly. It's not a matter of older films' humor not translating, as Airplane! Came out just a year later and it holds up to this day. There's simply something about the rank stupidity and predictability of both the humor and the characters in The Jerk that I find simultaneously dull and obnoxious.

Barbarian Queen (1985)

Much less fun than it should be.

[2/10 · 8 April 2023]

This movie would've rated higher as a fun B-movie, as it's appropriately campy, hammy, and has some decent action, with a lot of pretty girls in the starring roles; unfortunately, Barbarian Queen suffers from a major, crippling flaw in the absolutely ridiculous amount of rape that occurs in the film. Considering that it's basically a medieval rape and revenge flick, plus the fact that it's a trashy 1980s movie, a single rape wouldn't be surprising to see. Yet all the major female characters are raped, forming a semi-regular interval of rather seedy and unpleasant sexual content throughout the film that the viewer can't put behind them. Watching a film with a bunch of women running around in amazon bikinis should be fun and sexy, but the constant, gratuitous rape just leaves you feeling dirty, despite the inevitable victory of the women in the film against their tormentors.

Dead End (I) (2003)

A boring story built on the worst cliche

[1/10 · 25 December 2022]

A family is driving along a deserted road when the father at the wheel starts to doze off. He collects himself just in time to avoid hitting another car. Spooky things begin to occur immediately after.

Not even having had to watch the first five minutes of Dead End, you already know what's going on from that three sentence description unless you're an alien who has just arrived on Earth. How much more blatant does it get, though?

There's a ghostly woman in white who appears and disappears mysteriously, carrying around a mutilated baby. The road the family travels on is endless with nowhere to turn off. All timepieces have stopped at precisely the same moment. There's a hearse driving around that snatches the characters one by one.

Get it now? If not, I bid you greetings, my interstellar friend. Welcome to Earth, the characters were dead all along.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge's twist was novel at the time it was written by Ambrose Bierce, but that was in 1890. Some variant of "a hallucination as the character was dying," "nothing is real, the events are some kind of purgatory/afterlife shenanigans," and "it was all a dream," were all done to death (so to speak) long before Dead End came out, plus done much better in Carnival of Souls and Jacob's Ladder.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the characters are awful to each other and unpleasant to endure as they bicker. The worst aspect is a younger brother, the most obnoxious sibling in a horror film since Franklin in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

For aliens only.

Luz (II) (2018)

The single most excruciatingly boring thing I have ever seen

[1/10 · 28 October 2022]

At a mere seventy minutes, it's hard to believe that a movie could overstay its welcome. My three favorite films are all significantly longer (Seven Samurai at over three hours, Citizen Kane at two, and The Thing at almost two), but the wonderful thing about those movies is that something is happening in them. When there's a shot that lingers or there's a contemplative pause in those films, something is being communicated to the audience. Contrarily, in the numerous navel-gazing stretches that make up most of Luz's run time, nothing is communicated. This quickly reached the point that I started regularly yawning in boredom, then began to talk to the screen and demand that the movie get on with things. Over. And over. And over.

Luz is a film with a lot of lingering shots. Endless, boring lingering shots. If they served a purpose, that would be fine; unfortunately, they all seem to be in the film to kill time, or if I was in the mood to be charitable I'd say that they were to allow the viewer to stew in the atmosphere. As any cook will tell you, it's still possible to overcook a slow-simmering stew, which happens right at the beginning with an interminably long bar scene where a woman babbles endlessly about things that don't really matter and which we're shown in flashback later anyway. All pointless. It's just one scene out of an entire film made of such expanses of nothing, where characters repeat the same phrases a dozen times, pauses stretch out to no purpose, and every action taken by any character is focused on in minute detail without any relevance.

People seem to be crediting this movie with being too "smart" for the audience, though the story is very simple. A girl summoned a demon years ago and an encounter with an old schoolmate has brought it back, wanting to possess her for unexplained reasons. This is done through a Rube Goldberg device on the demon's part involving possessing a corpse, transferring to a psychiatrist, having the psychiatrist go through a lengthy hypnosis with the girl where he pretends to be other people (while running around naked and/or crossdressing, which were entirely unnecessary touches), and eventually succeeding in possessing her. Okay. And? What were the stakes? The titular cab driver Luz is now possessed by a demon. I never had any reason to care about Luz, nor was any consequence of her being possessed given, so what does any of it matter? Is a demon cab driver even worse than a regular cab driver? Seems like a wash to me.

This film is also being described as "artistic" and "surreal," but aside from some bleed over between memory and reality it's clear what's going on, just not why anyone should care. The people are all acting off-kilter, but that's probably more of a function of them being German than any deliberate intent on the part of the director. Even if it was intentional, why have your actors come off like weirdos both when they're possessed by a demon and also when they're not?

I also have to knock the score, which almost never stops playing and is often wholly unrelated to what's going on in a scene.

Giohazard (2017)

Night of the Living Fashion Models

[6/10 · 16 October 2022]

I'd say that this is a zombie movie masquerading as something else, but the structure is so beat-for-beat identical you could swap out the beautiful women for zombies and it'd be indistinguishable from a 28 Whatevers Later film. There's clearly an element of satire involved and much of the movie is presented in a tongue-in-cheek way, plus the feminization of the men in the movie (both through crossdressing and actual transformations into women) is doubtlessly some kind of commentary on gender relations in current Chinese society. The problem with translating these things across cultures is that outsiders are going to be completely in the dark as to what is being commented on. Without that knowledge, it reads as a generic zombie movie with pretty girls, which is fine for what it is.

The Dark (1979)

The most generic horror film in the history of horror films

[4/10 · 11 October 2022]

There's a creature. It kills people. Then the film ends.

Yup.

This is one of those movies that makes absolutely no impression on the mind. People talk to each other, occasionally there's a killing of some sort, people talk some more, then it all wraps up without the slightest interesting event occurring. William Devane is wasted in his role, he's excellent at playing sinister characters in other contexts, but here he's squandered.

I'm honestly unsure why this movie exists. It might be the biggest "sci-fi horror" film that doesn't have a single reason to exist. It says nothing. Nothing happens. It accomplishes nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.

The end.

Flowers in the Attic (1987)

At least there's no teenage incest

[5/10 · 10 October 2022]

It's hard to separate this movie from the process I went through while watching it. I went in knowing nothing about the film aside from it being classified as horror (the rule is all spooky movies, all October) and the late Louise Fletcher having starred in it. In the opening minutes there seemed to be a weird vibe between the father and daughter, so I went to make sure that it wasn't some sort of creepy parent-child incest movie. That took me down one hell of a rabbit hole where I learned about the book series and its rampant degeneracy, though strangely that particular father and daughter are one of the few relationships WITHOUT incest. Go figure. If the movie had been true to the novels in the other grotesque relationships it would've been my cue to shut it off unfinished, but there were enough complaints online about the movie not being horrifically perverse enough to please fans of the books that I kept watching.

What I found was a generally unpleasant movie consisting almost entirely of child neglect, abuse, and murder. That might be somebody's idea of a good time (teenage girls, apparently?), but not mine. Unsurprisingly, the one bright spot of the film was Louise Fletcher's performance as a stern grandmother who hates what the children represent (they're the product of incest, because their creator VC Andrews was some kind of creepy fetishist), not a pleasant character yet one delivered in such a convincing way that it elevates the more lackluster cast around her.

A mean-spirited and somewhat pointless film, but it was decently made and thankfully teenage siblings weren't bonking each other.

The Oracle (1985)

The (Screaming) Oracle

[4/10 · 9 October 2022]

The Oracle is about a shrieking, hysterical woman who starts fooling around with a magic automatic writing hand that's possessed by the ghost of a murdered man; unfortunately, she can't convince anyone that what's happening is real, because she comes across like an irrational basket case in everything she says and does.

This is not, by any means, an effective horror film; however, it does manage to be unintentionally funny, as the characters around the protagonist - her husband, her best friend, a psychiatrist, the police, et al - dismiss her concerns every time she opens her mouth. The audience is supposed to be on her side, since we know that she's not crazy (at least in regard to the ghost, her constant screeching doesn't say anything good about her general emotional stability), but it's just so obvious why nobody takes her seriously that their completely warranted skepticism becomes comedic.

Oddly, the plot resolves itself, with the ghost killing his killers, so it's not clear why there even needed to be a titular oracle in the first place.

Outside of the accidentally amusing elements it's a rather dry film overall, with only a couple of moments that are intentionally interesting. More recommended for B-movie fans than strict horror buffs.

Everyone Must Die! (2012)

Barely qualifies as a movie

[1/10 · 8 October 2022]

Some people are killed. The brother of one of the victims wants to find the killer. That's the first five minutes of this movie. The next hour is a series of obnoxious weirdos - each with a stupid quirk that somebody may have mistakenly thought were funny (man who raps every sentence, man who speaks in golf analogies, man who only wants to talk about eggs, etcetera) - hanging out together and blathering idiotically until some guy dressed all in black shows up to kill them. Everyone dies. The killers' identities and motives are never revealed. The end.

While the lack of quality of many low budget films comes from incompetence, at least they seem as though somebody in the process was trying to make something entertaining. This film is the product of not even one single person involved in making it caring in the slightest.

Beyond Dream's Door (1989)

The true horror is student filmmaking

[2/10 · 4 October 2022]

"It was all a dream" has long been the hallmark of bad storytelling, a way to bring something to a conclusion without actually doing the work to wrap it up coherently. Usually when a story ends as a dream, it has the veneer of comprehensibility for most of its length; however, this film uses its very nature as a film about dreams and dreaming as an excuse to make little to no sense for its entire runtime.

People act like idiots, characters seem wooden, the plot meanders about without any focus, and events occur for no reason. Are any of these actually deliberate choices because the line between dream and reality is blurred? It all hits more like bad writing. Nothing really seems dreamlike or surreal, there's just a series of obviously-not-actually-happening scenarios that the characters are subjected to before a monster pops in to say "boo."

Say what you will about the Nightmare on Elm Street films and their varying quality, but almost all of them of them had creative dream scenarios, the characters had clear motives and you knew why things were happening, and there were no pretentious voice-overs reciting poetry.

The Haunted Graduation Photo (2017)

Dull, though with some good performances

[3/10 · 2 October 2022]

The Haunted Graduation Photo is ostensibly a horror movie, though there's very little in it to justify that categorization. A group of young Chinese students spend the majority of the film talking (and talking, and talking, and talking), with the "scares" coming from occasionally interspersed fake-outs and the vague idea that the characters might at some point be menaced by a ghost that never really materializes as a legitimate threat. The dialogue is banal and the characters flat, though the one bright spot of the movie is that actors are legitimately trying to do a good job and their earnest acting elevates the tepid material a bit. Unfortunately, it's not enough to deliver anything of real substance, interest, or even the slightest whiff of horror.

Death Ship (1980)

Death(ly dull) Ship

[2/10 · 10 June 2022]

A movie about people trapped aboard a derelict Nazi ship, possessed by some unspeakable evil force. How could such a thing possibly go wrong?

It goes wrong by being boring beyond belief. Despite the "R" rating, Death Ship manages to be more toothless than kid-friendly horror films like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, or Poltergeist. Blood pours out of a shower nozzle, a man gets hit with a swinging crane, a person falls into water and presumably drowns, generic screaming is heard, a man walks through a freezer filled with well-preserved and fully clothed bodies hanging from the ceiling, a film reel of Hitler giving a speech plays, a woman eats candy and it gives her extremely bad make-up effects on her face that are supposed to indicate illness or something, the voice of a German ghost(?) speaks and only one person can hear it, a movie projector starts playing on its own and chooses a 1930s musical, lifeboats drop themselves into the water, gauges read zero, an elderly man with poor eyesight shoots a gun, young children wander around looking for a place to piss, machinery on a boat moves exactly as it is supposed to in close-up, a man is unable to turn a wheel that another man is able to move easily when he tries, a man bloodlessly gets his arm damaged in some gears under a heavy coat so you don't actually have to look at the injury. Unless I fell asleep at some point, that's every supposedly "frightening" thing that happens in Death Ship and you'll note that there isn't a single scare in there. I was desperately hoping that the trip through the frozen corpse locker would lead to the bodies coming to life and attacking - or at the very least grabbing somebody by the arm like the suspiciously-placed scarecrow at your local haunted corn maze - yet what happened instead was absolutely nothing.

That's the biggest takeaway from this film: Absolutely nothing of interest ever happens on the NAZI GHOST SHIP.

Confessions of a Time Traveler - The Man from 3036 (2020)

Lazy fake documentary

[1/10 · 26 May 2022]

As I was exercising in the park today, a fellow who had just gotten done smoking some crack in the bushes came up and engaged me in conversation. Among the various topics he brought up were the hollow Earth, the Mark of the Beast, and this "documentary" about a fellow from the future. Despite my skepticism of the subject matter I promised him that I would watch it, though as it turns out this is not actually a documentary. Confessions of a Time Traveler is a short sci-fi film shot in interview style, consisting of a poorly-delivered series of monologues from a masked man pretending to be from the future droning on and on and on. John Titor - who claimed to be a time-traveler from 2036 and was a frequent topic on paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM - at least made his claims about very near-future history engaging. With precisely one-thousand extra years of time to work with (a number that seems too coincidental to be anything other than a deliberate homage to Titor on the part of the filmmakers), the writers of this film couldn't even manage one interesting development. The people of 3036 allegedly live in pods, have flying cars, ban cell phones, get a chip implanted in them thanks to COVID-19, and keep dogs in zoos because they're so rare. There's nothing there that you couldn't set ten years in the future, much less a full thousand. Give the viewer some entertainment value by claiming there's interstellar travel or a robot apocalypse, for chrissakes. The last few minutes give a twist ending where the time traveler is revealed to have been murdered to conceal the fact that the planet Nibiru is going to destroy the Earth in 3036... or something... which makes you wonder why the "documentary" would be allowed on Tubi without time-traveling assassins doing something about it.

There is literally no reason to watch this, unless you're the type of person who spends time smoking crack in the bushes, in which case you might enjoy it.

(You should probably just stop smoking crack in the bushes, though.)

Judge Dredd (1995)

Fantastic, as long as you don't think of it as an adaption of the Judge Dredd comics

[6/10 · 8 April 2022]

Judge Dredd is a dystopian sci-fi comedy, in spite of the source material's seriousness. The authoritarian nightmare of Judge Dredd is a world that nobody would want to live in, turning vigilante films like Death Wish where criminals are killed on the spot on their head (and I say that as someone who loves vigilante movies) when the brutal tactics of the regime are turned against its own executors. Sylvester Stallone reaches his apex of hammy overacting in this film (perhaps barring Spy Kids 3) and it's glorious. Rob Schneider's oft-criticized performance is out-of-place only in the context of the original comics, in this film he's entirely appropriate as the everyman who sees the world as the ridiculous hellscape that it is; Schneider is the jester who can speak truths to the king, poking fun at the idea that the law is impartial and fair.

The only problem is that Judge Dredd is out of step with the tone of the original 2000 AD comics that the character originated in. It's a Judge Dredd movie in name only, so if you can get past that aspect it's a great comedy/action/sci-fi B-movie.

Linnea Quigley's Horror Workout (1990 Video)

I'm honestly not sure what this was supposed to be.

[1/10 · 25 March 2022]

It's technically a workout video, but there's no actual instruction. The performers flail around on screen in often seemingly-random ways that are impossible to follow, made even worse by the cinematography and constant cuts.

It's technically a horror video, but it's not frightening at all. The horror creatures are played entirely for comic relief.

It's technically a comedy, but every single attempt at humor is painfully stupid and unfunny.

It's technically a softcore erotic video, but the gyrations of scantily-clad women are far too awkward to be sexy in any way.

So unless this is a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking where I'm missing all of the nuance and subtle philosophy, this amounts to an utterly worthless waste of time.

Snake Eater (1989)

This ordeal, the trial to survive.

[5/10 · 24 March 2022]

No snakes were eaten in the course of this movie, which is naturally a humongous disappointment. The set-up of a city cop using traps that he picked up in his military career to target urban criminals is a good one, but that is abandoned in the first fifteen minutes to move the action to a bayou where he dicks around with rednecks who are holding his sister hostage for more than an hour.

Red Shoe Diaries (1992 TV Movie)

Possibly the most aggravating thing I've ever seen

[1/10 · 10 March 2022]

This is one of those movies that probably hits differnet people in entirely different ways.

Women seem to find the forbidden attraction aspect of a woman cheating on her fiance with a horrible douchebag somehow erotic, but as a man I sympathize entirely with the scorned David Duchovny character who simply can't understand why his fiance cheated on him when their relationship was seemingly going so well. This wouldn't be a problem in a film that was centered around Duchovny's character, except the bulk of the movie follows the cheating woman around as she lusts for a dickbag with no redeeming traits. I simply couldn't empathize with Brigette Bako at all and kept hoping that the object of her infidelity would get hit by a bus or something so that some measure of righteousness would be restored to the world. The closest the movie offers is - bizarrely - a shirtless game of basketball, after which it's Duchovny that gets knocked out and the scumbag that was knowingly cheating with his fiancee just walks off into the proverbial sunset.

Chrissakes.

The worst part? The woman in question that these two men are obsessed with isn't even special in any way. She's not inordinately attractive, her personality sucks, she has nothing going for her. Everybody is better off with her dead and everybody would've been better off with her illicit lover dead, too.

God damn, I hate this movie.

Underworld (2003)

The Matrix with Vampires

[6/10 · 23 February 2022]

It's fine.

I wish I could add more than that, but this is the very definition of a disposable action movie that viewers will forget the very second that the credits roll.

It's fine.

C.H.U.D. (1984)

Surprisingly boring for a cult film

[4/10 · 9 January 2022]

There's not a lot to say about C. H. U. D., in contrast to the extensive chattering that the characters in the film engage in. The titular cannibalistic monsters don't eat many people, though admittedly they are indeed humanoid and also dwell underground, so I suppose there's some truth in advertising. If the audience was allowed to spend as much time in the sewers as the largely-offscreen creatures, this movie might've had something going for it; however, we're mostly relegated to apartment and street scenes where people talk about the vaguely ominous circumstances, when they're not opining about their uninteresting relationship troubles.

Too dull to recommend.

The Mutilator (1984)

A distilled version of every other 1980s slasher

[5/10 · 28 October 2021]

Stop me if you've heard this one.

A group of horny teenagers head out to a remote location to have some fun, but they begin to realize that something is terribly wrong as one by one they begin to disappear, picked off by a deranged killer bent on slaughtering them all! Yes, that's the basic plot of the vast majority of slasher movies and Fall Break/The Mutilator is perhaps the most generic example in the history of horror. That's not a criticism per se, there's something to be said for a film that is the ultimate condensation of a genre. You go in knowing exactly what to expect and you get precisely that, with no surprises, deviations, or winking self-aware subversions. If you've seen other slasher films there's nothing new for you here, but this is something that can easily be pulled out for your less genre-savvy friends for some mild scares and modest blood.

Be Afraid (2017)

I will save you an hour and a half

[3/10 · 23 October 2021]

When you go into a tunnel, a shadow person grabs you and you become a spooky ghost.

Why a shadow person wants to turn you into a spooky ghost is not explained, nor their motivation for snatching children, nor why they pester the parents of children they have snatched, nor why the townsfolk are covering up for them. Elaboration on those points would've been nice.

But we didn't get that elaboration, so the entire plot of the movie is that when you go into a tunnel, a shadow person grabs you and you become a spooky ghost. WoooOOOooo. Scary.

Killer Legends (2014)

I Can't Believe It's Not A Basic Cable Documentary

[5/10 · 19 October 2021]

An effeminate man who does double duty as investigator/narrator and a woman with resting bitch face investigate urban legends. This documentary is basically every true crime television show extended to an hour and a half, but covering multiple different cases so that it ends up achieving less depth for each story. There's a lot of wandering around - sometimes in the dark to be spooooooky - and some superficial interviews, but there's nothing new here.