JimRaynor55 Reviews

Red Tails (2012)

Exciting Dogfights Along With Moving Human Stories

[8/10 · 20 January 2012]

If you like military history or the kind of fighter action seen in the Star Wars series, then Red Tails is the movie for you. But the dogfights are just half of what this film is about. I was pleasantly surprised with the stories that were told when planes and bullets weren't flying through the air.

Red Tails has a sizable ensemble cast of lead actors, who all do an admirable job with their parts. Several characters share the spotlight, and are given time to deal with their own personal stories and issues. They experience prejudice and adversity, but also romance and friendship. The interaction between the cast was terrific and nuanced. I really believed that this was a group of war buddies, who had their differences but nonetheless cared about each other.

Visually, the movie is excellent. Not just the CGI fighter planes, which won't even come across as CGI (blowing up real historical aircraft would've been out of the question). The scenery of the Italian cities and countryside is beautiful.

If I have one complaint, it's that the ending is a bit abrupt. I would've liked to see a "bigger" final battle, but as I understand it this movie didn't get a mega blockbuster budget. Also, though this movie is a fictional one merely "inspired" by true events, the true events still placed a limit on what the movie's heroes could do. They don't singlehandedly wipe out the Luftwaffe or win the war, and are restricted to escorting American bombers as the real Red Tails did.

But still, go see this movie. It's definitely worth it.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Massively Overrated Tripe

[1/10 · 9 October 2006]

The Blair Witch Project is not the brilliant film that it was hailed as by the critics when it first came out. No, instead it's a uniquely-made (not necessarily a good thing) movie that just had masterful marketing. Before it came out, many people honestly believed that it was real. Even after they learned it was not, they were still intrigued by the eerie advertisements and the unique premise. Coming out in 1999 amid the backlash against of big-budget, visual FX-heavy blockbusters like Godzilla (1998) and The Phantom Menace also likely benefited this low-budget film.

I'm not some stupid kid looking for tons of ridiculous gore in a horror movie. I can understand the idea that sometimes "it's what you don't see that scares you." However, I also believe that you do have to see SOMETHING, even if it's just a little, to be scared.

All this movie shows is a trio of stupid kids running around lost in the woods. Occasionally they freak out after hearing spooky sounds, that's basically it. Oh yeah, at one point they find a bunch of little wooden arts and crafts hung on some tree branches. Real scary.

The plot is nonexistent, as is the backstory (I hear it's provided in a sequel which dispensed with the unique first-person video camera perspective, and was just a plain old crappy horror movie). You NEVER learn what the Blair Witch is, or even if that's what's behind the things that go on in the movie.

The characters are stupid and unlikable kids. I heard that the no-name actors were told to improvise their scenes, to make things more "realistic." Believe me, it shows. There's an entire scene where the three characters do nothing but scream "F*** you!" This movie which supposedly reinvigorated the sagging horror genre is completely overrated. There's not a single real scare in it, and the story and writing is pathetic. Save yourself the time and rental fees by passing on this film.

Rest Stop (2006 Video)

Lousy Cliché Horror Movie

[2/10 · 8 October 2006]

This movie is about a young couple running away to start a new life in LA, who end up being stalked by a psycho at a deserted rest stop. Actually, it's really just about the girl (Nicole), since her boyfriend literally disappears within a few minutes. The movie gets going extremely fast, and early on you wonder how it could possibly stretch its story out to feature length. It isn't long before you realize that the movie does this by simply wasting time with unnecessary scenes that go nowhere.

The story is not only paper-thin, but unstructured, stupid, and incoherent. Minutes after the disappearance of her boyfriend and car, Nicole finds a mobile home at the rest stop. She sees the flashing of a camera, and KNOWS that people are inside, but she easily gives up on trying to get their help when no one answers her door knocks. After she is informed by the killer that her boyfriend is in danger, she walks around the rest stop, doing all sorts of stupid and unnecessary things. This includes turning on a TV (and even looking amused when she thinks she's stumbled onto a porno movie, even in this dire situation), sitting around, wandering, and drinking from a bottle of liquor for hours on end. She does all this KNOWING that her boyfriend has been abducted, that the killer is still on the loose and stalking her, and without taking any actions to ensure her immediate safety (she doesn't bother to lock the doors or remain alert). Oh yeah, she tries using a radio to call for help, but why even bother when there's a mobile home with people inside RIGHT THERE at the rest stop? It really seems like the script writer forgot about this important fact while writing this part of the story.

There's no sense of entrapment or ever-present danger in this story. The heroine freely wanders in and around the various buildings at the rest stop, and the killer only drives in occasionally to scare her, before driving off again. There's NOTHING stopping Nicole from simply taking off (even if the rest stop is a long way from anywhere else, that's better than sitting around), but she chooses to stay anyway. At one point in the movie, the main character even ACKNOWLEDGES that she can run off, but doesn't.

The story doesn't go anywhere, and instead just jumps from pointless segment to pointless segment. Nicole finally gets inside the mobile home, and it turns out that the inhabitants are a family of sheltered, presumably inbred or psychotic religious fanatics. They seem willfully ignorant or uncaring about the killer's actions (but there's no indication that they're connected to him in any way), and then kick Nicole out after several minutes.

In the next irrelevant segment, the main character wanders into the bathroom building. She discovers one of the killer's previous victims (a young woman named Tracy), who is still alive and locked in a closet. For some strange reason, Tracy starts vomiting ridiculous amounts of blood. Nicole goes off to fetch a crowbar to pry open the closet door, and when she returns a minute later, both Tracy and her pool of blood have disappeared without any explanation. What was the point? Nicole finds a bulletin board showing many missing persons, and sees that Tracy had disappeared in 1971. So, was Tracy a ghost or something? The writer never bothers explaining.

Next, a cop shows up in the middle of the night to man the police office at the rest stop, which had been conveniently left unattended for the entire day so far. Nicole tells him all about what's been going on, and when the killer drives up in his truck outside the office, the cop goes outside to confront him. What does the police officer do, knowing that something is seriously wrong? He goes up and calmly talks to the killer (who Nicole had even pointed out to be the guy who was stalking her), and buys into the killer's lie that he was simply driving through and needed directions. Seriously. The cop then talks to Nicole outside, totally unaware as the pickup truck turns around and runs him over.

The cop quickly starts telling Nicole that he's a goner who's "lucky to be breathing" still, yet he strangely doesn't die for quite a while. The two of them do some more pointless talking, and the all-important fact that he has a gun is annoyingly not even mentioned for too long a time. When the two of them finally try to use the gun, Nicole stupidly wastes most of her bullets blindly shooting at a door when the killer was possibly behind it. With two bullets left, the policeman tells Nicole to use one to euthanize him. She fires one into his mouth, and he lays still for a few moments, with a chunk blown out of his head. Then, he suddenly and inexplicably yells out "You missed!" and she has to shoot him again. Completely cheap attempt at shock.

Nicole finally confronts the killer…and fails. The movie ends with a scene taking place not long from then, with a woman arriving at the now strangely much more active rest stop. In the bathroom building, she hears Nicole crying for help in the closet (locked in like Tracy was). She gets a policeman to go inside and check it, but he finds an apparently normal and clean closet. The cop leaves, thinking he's been tricked. A battered Nicole is seen coming out from behind some boxes in the closet (she would have been easily spotted if the cop had spent all of 10 seconds looking), apparently too stupid to have said or done anything when the policeman was there. WOW.

This movie is apparently the first in a new line of "quality" direct-to-DVD movies, marketed as being too extreme for theaters. In reality, it's just more cliché, B-Movie garbage.

Man-Thing (2005)

Confusing Waste of Time

[2/10 · 1 May 2005]

I knew next to nothing about the character, but I decided to watch this because I have an interest in comics and comic book movies. Seeing that it was making its premiere on a Saturday night on the SciFi channel (home of crappy B-movies) my expectations were low. However, I expected to be at least marginally entertained.

This movie was originally intended either for a theatrical or direct-to-video release. However, since it came out on TV, all the nudity and a lot of the cursing were edited out. This was unfortunate, since nudity might have been the only thing worth seeing in this movie. The opening scene (in which Man-Thing kills a guy having sex with his naked girlfriend) is so heavily edited that you don't even know what happened to the guy.

The film introduces over half a dozen supporting characters, all of which are completely useless, in terms of storytelling, AND within the universe of the movie. The movie portrays Lousianians as a bunch of stereotypical drunken, stupid, hicks. Even if there might be people who live up to that stereotype, it was annoying that pretty much EVERYONE was like that. Particularly annoying was the extent of some characters' drug addiction. A security guard is seen drinking on the job, and then putting cigarettes in his mouth even as Man-Thing comes to kill him. The characters who aren't hicks are either cowardly or stupid. Almost none of these characters served any storytelling purpose before being unceremoniously killed off, yet the movie introduces so many of them (and mentions several other people at different times) that it got hard to keep track of everyone.

Plot? What plot? Basically 80% (if not more) of this movie could have been cut, with no loss to the story. An example of such a scene is when a hick villain leaves his brother to take a dump alone in the swamp. A perfect time to kill him off, right? But no, we hear the man fart, see him take a dump, fall in the mud, and then walk back to his brother complaining. What's the point? The few parts that did seem to be relevant to the story were muddled and confusing.

The love story was completely forced, and made no sense. The sheriff and this blonde woman meet each other only a couple times, and she mostly just hates him. Then, with no explanation, they just started kissing.

This movie really offers you nothing. There's no drama, because the characters are just a bunch of useless cardboard cutouts, and they're handled so ineptly that you can't even determine some of their motivations. There's no horror, because the monster barely shows up, and you always see it coming. There's no story, because nothing happens, and what little happens is poorly handled and confusing. This movie elicited no emotion from me, and I watched the whole thing in a bored neutral state. The only reason I'm not giving it a 1/10 rating is because I've seen worse, and the movie didn't offend me so much as bore me.

The Wonderful World of Disney: Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House (2002) Season Unknown, Episode Unknown

Completely Unfaithful Sequel

[11 April 2005]

First, I'll give a little background about what I thought about the previous Home Alone movies: The first two movies were childhood favorites of mine. They basically played on every kid's fantasies of being left alone to do anything they wanted. Kevin got to screw around the house/New York, spend lots of money, watch violent movies, talk back to adults, and beat the bad guys. What little kid wouldn't want to be Kevin? Home Alone 3 was trash. It was obviously just an attempt to cash in on the franchise, and resembled the original two in nothing but name. Replacing badass Kevin was a completely new, annoying kiddie brainiac. Instead of being truly left home alone for an extended period of time, the kid was just staying home sick with the chicken pox. And instead of a simple story about a kid fighting off two bumbling burglars, there was some lame wannabe James Bond plot about international spies working for the North Koreans. The franchise was pretty much dead with the aging of Macauly Culkin, and I couldn't believe this movie was even made. I didn't think the Home Alone series could sink any lower. I was wrong.

Home Alone 4 came out as a made-for-TV movie, on ABC's Wonderful World of Disney. It's TV origins definitely showed in the poor production values and acting. I watched this movie only because I had nothing better to do, and I wanted to see whether this one would be as big a failure as the third. It turned out to be worse.

They at least they got it right by using Kevin as the main character, but it was all downhill from there. It's like the writers didn't even watch the first two movies. I understand the use of younger actors, since the originals are now too old. However, Kevin, Buzz, and everyone else actually seemed younger than they were in the originals.

The kid in this movie was Kevin in name only. The badass Kevin from the originals was reduced to some whiny, 5 year old crybaby. His parents were now in the middle of a divorce, which was very painful to him. Uh, when the hell was the Home Alone series ever about divorce? At one point Kevin's father mentions that his family always stays up to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" because it's one of their traditions. Funny, I never remembered seeing that tradition in the previous movies.

Marv of the Wet Bandits was back, but he too was completely changed. The real Marv was a goofy moron, while this guy was a grumpy grouch (it looked like the writers got him mixed up with his partner Harry from the originals). Harry was gone, replaced by Marv's fat, whiny wife. When the hell was Marv ever married? The jokes were lame and unfunny, and because the movie was made by Disney, there was also very little violence. The original Kevin hurled bricks and he laid complex systems of traps involving fire, electricity, and sharp objects. The new Kevin never even had a plan in this movie, and he resorted to such wimpy tactics as locking a burglar into an elevator, and using prerecorded messages to fool the others.

Nothing in this movie, from its attitude to its characters, resembles the originals. It really fails to recapture the greatness of the movies that preceded it. In a way, I guess that's a good thing. The lack of continuity makes it easier for us to just forget about this piece of trash.