A Star is Born (1976)

 

Famous but self-destructive rock star John Norman Howard bails early on a concert and heads off to a bar to get even more drunk than he already is.

There, he meets the talented younger singer Esther Hoffman.  John immediately recognises her potential to be a star.  There's also an instant attraction between the two, though the romance is not exactly a smooth one: John's frequently selfish and inebriated behaviour sees to that.

Nonetheless, the passion burns through the problems.  They marry, and Esther proves every bit the star John believed her to be.  In fact, her career quickly rockets her toward fame and fortune that eclipses John's own.

While his faith in Esther has been vindicated, John struggles with the decline of his own career.  The fact that this is in large part a result of his own  behaviour is not lost on him, and if anything makes the decline harder to bear.

Is Esther's love enough to sustain John, or will his self-destructive tendencies spiral out of control?

I very much enjoyed the 2018 version of A Star Is Born.  While I enjoyed this version too, it was definitely not to the same extent.  A big factor in this was the music.  While Barbra Streisand is a great singer, the songs simply aren't up to the same standard.  There's nothing here that is anywhere near as memorable as 'Shallow'.  To my mind, in a film so heavily focused on the music industry, this lack is a major weakness. 

John Norman Howard is also a much less likeable character than the more recent film's Jackson Maine.  His behaviour is more obviously and directly harmful to those around him, not just to himself.  Also, these actions seem to be driven more by anger and resentment, rather than weakness.  I can understand why someone would fall in love with Jackson Maine, despite his obvious problems; I have a harder time understanding Esther's fierce commitment to John in the face of his poor treatment of her.

Now obviously there are plenty of people who fall in love with toxic partners in the real world; but fiction generally has a higher 'believability' bar to clear than real life.  I didn't feel that this script ever quite cleared that bar.  Esther's "love" felt more like infatuation with John's stardom and gratitude for the help he gave her in her own career.

 

The basic plotline remains a compelling one, however; there's a reason Hollywood has made four different versions of this film; and the cast are all good.  If you simply can't get enough of A Star Is Born formula, but have already watched the 2018 one a dozen times, this one is worth a look.

This Way Up, Season 1 (2019)

 

Áine (it's pronounced more or less like "Anya") is a young, single Irish woman living in London.  She recently suffered a nervous breakdown and is slowly putting her life back together after spending several weeks at a rehab centre.

Supported by her sister and best friend, Shona, who also lives in London, Áine slowly begins to put her life back together.  She resumes her job teaching English as a second language, tries - with decidedly mixed success - to get over her jerk of an ex-boyfriend, and covers up the many anxieties she still feels with flippant humour and good cheer.  It remains to be seen whether time, Shona's unwavering support, and the prospect of a new romance might finally bring Áine the happiness she so resolutely presents to the world.

This Way Up is a smartly written, well performed comedy drama starring Irish comedian Aisling Bea (roughly pronounced 'Ashlyn Bee').  It does get off to a slightly slow start: the first episode is a little sombre.  But this is necessary groundwork to contextualise the show's stories and characters, and it's worth trying at least a couple more episodes after that to get a feel for the 'real' show.  They're only about 25 minutes each, so that shouldn't present much difficulty.

One aspect of the show that I appreciated is that it shows that bubbly, extroverted, chatty people can still be depressed, or suffering mental health problems.  The face we show the world and how we feel inside ourselves can be very different things.  The fact that Áine presents in such a quirky, humorous way also allows for plenty of snappy wordplay and other jokes.  Her off-beat lesson plans for her English class are particularly fun.

I think however that the real strength of This Way Up, though, is in its depictions of relationships.  Not just romantic ones - though those are certainly a factor - but also platonic friendships and platonic bonds.  The slow thawing between Áine and her client Richard (whose French-speaking son she tutors in English) is done very well, for instance.  And the depiction of Áine and Shona's sisterly bond is excellent.

Good stuff!

Paddington (2014)

 

In the deep jungles of Peru live a species of bear who are highly intelligent and love marmalade.  Their only contact with the human world came forty years ago, when a genial British explorer stumbled across them.

After an earthquake destroys the home of one such family of bears, the youngest member is sent to London to make a new life for himself.

There, he meets the Brown family.  Mrs Brown - much to the chagrin of Mr Brown, a highly risk averse individual - not only gives the young bear a human name (Paddington, obviously) but also offers to let him stay with them for the night.  The next morning, the plan is to try and track down the explorer who previously met the bears.  Perhaps he can provide Paddington with a more permanent home.

But forty years have gone by, and the world has changed. Paddington's search may bring him to the attention of people with sinister intentions.  Can a well-intentioned but rather naïve young bear really find a home in the big, modern city?

Paddington is a fun, super cute family film.  It has a cheerful sense of humour and nails a number of good laughs in its breezy 90 minutes or so of runtime.  It leavens these humorous (mis)adventures with a few more sad and poignant elements, as well, but generally manages to find some wry chuckles even in the more sombre moments.

The script isn't just funny, it is also smart.  In particular, it does a great job of introducing concepts - such as Paddington's difficulties operating modern appliances such as vacuum cleaners - that initially seem to just be humorous filler, but which actually have significant pay-off in the plot.  It's a very tidy piece of work indeed, and I really enjoyed seeing those "throwaway gags" turning out to be anything but throwaway.

The film also profits a lot from its fine cast.  Paddington's voice actor is spot on, and the Brown family are all very engaging, while Peter Capaldi and Nicole Kidman both seem to be having a ball in their more adversarial roles.

Paddington is fine family entertainment.  Recommended.

Vida, Season 2 (2019)

 

At the end of season one of Vida, formerly estranged sisters Lynn and Emma agreed to try and make a going concern of their mother's aging bar.  This isn't going to be easy, however.  The two women are very different people, with different outlooks, values, and ideas for the business.  And the fragility of their newly-repaired relationship is certainly not the only threat to their success.  Less-than-ethical local developer Nelson Herrera still has his eyes on the property, and though they spent their childhoods in the neighbourhood, both women have been away from it for many years.  The locals see them as outsiders who intend to 'gentrify' the bar and in doing so, destroy its cultural significance within the community.

This is the longest season of Vida, with 10 episodes rather than 6, and it's quite the ride.  Emma and Lynn's relationship with each other, as well as  those with their sexual partners and romantic interests (which are definitely not identical groups) are turbulent and difficult.  Their efforts to get the bar back on financial track are just as fraught.  

But for all the ways that these two sisters are completely different, they do both share a fierce commitment to the bar and (despite the many clashes they have) to each other.  If they can get on the same page, they just might be able to make this thing work.  That's a very big "if", though!

I very much enjoyed this season of Vida, just as I did the first.  The writing remains strong, the cast is excellent, and despite both Emma and Lynn having a number of significant character flaws, it is easy to get caught up in their struggle and root for their success.

As with season one, though, if strong coarse language or sex scenes are an issue for you, then be aware that this show has a significant amount of both.  It all serves a story purpose, but Vida is definitely much more open and honest about sex than most TV.

The Colony (1998)

 

As prelude to a full-blown invasion of the Earth, a group of four aliens transplant their minds into human-like android bodies and infiltrate our society.  Their mission is to determine if humanity would make suitable slaves.  If not, the incoming armada will annihilate us.

The problem the aliens face is that some humans seem to make malleable slaves, and some don't.  The quartet wrangle over what this means, with some being happy to just have us annihilated, and others wanting to study us further to see if they can determine a means of enslaving us all.  The latter case wins out and they kidnap a group of humans for experimentation.

Of course, these human captives are not exactly pleased with this development.  They look for a way to escape, only to learn that they can't just save themselves: they also need to find a way to protect the whole planet.

Also known as The Advanced Guard, this is a made-for-basic-cable TV movie.  The effects and sets are every bit as cheap as you'd expect of such a project, but just as great sets and effects do not necessarily a good movie make, so the inverse can be true: a film can look bad but still be great entertainment.

That's not in the case with this film, though.  It's pretty much exactly the kind of film it looks like, and is a pretty lazy and cynical effort all round.

This film contains some of the most cynical nudity I've encountered in a film.  Every so often there's a (deliberately) poorly focused scene of a topless woman undulating her admittedly impressive body. These scenes have nothing to do with the rest of the movie and literally don't intersect with the plot or the film's events in any way.  As noted, the film was originally made for basic cable so I assume this a case of them being able to release an "uncut" version for the home video market.  This kind of thing used to happen a bit back in the late 90s.  In fact, the nude woman in this film went on to have a starring role in a TV show which used a similar gimmick for its pilot episode the very next year - The Lost World.  Though at least that show made some effort to integrate the nude scene as a part of the episode's actual events.

There is one potentially interesting feature to the film, but it squanders it.  That feature is the amount of focus given to the invading aliens as primary characters, rather than the humans they kidnap for study, especially in the film's first act.  These invaders are largely just working joes who primarily care about ticking off the performance targets their bosses have set for them, rather than would-be despots and conquerors.  I think this actually has the potential to be an interesting angle for a film to explore.  This is not going to be that film, though, as it doesn't use this feature to do anything other than engineer a situation of there being one "good" alien and three "bad" ones.

The creation of the "good" alien also leads to the script indulging in some pretty horrible treatment of the female human captive.  She is killed off screen and her body hijacked by the "good" alien, with an off-hand "It's both of us now, really" to try and disguise how gross that basically is.  Also, the fact that the alien can even do this is at odds with the rest of the script: the human-looking bodies that they occupied before this are explicitly artificial, not human at all, and "we struggle to affect human minds" has been a central factor of the plot.

You can safely skip this.

Hitmen, Season 1 (2021)

 

Fran and Jamie have been best friends since high school.  They've stuck together through thick and thin, and even today, three decades since they first met, they always have each other's backs.  Which is a very good thing, for two reasons.

The first is that Fran and Jamie are not exactly the most socially adept of people, and they each pretty much have no-one else in their lives with whom they can openly and honestly discuss the various problems and shortcomings of their lives.  They are each other's safe space to say and feel anything.

The second is that they kill people for a living, which is rather a dangerous gig at times, so they are also each other's safe space to keep breathing.

It's Bake Off Breaking Bad as Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, former hosts of the Great British Bake Off, play Jamie and Fran respectively, and bring their usual daffy, dorky brand of humour to the scenario.  They just happen to be daffy and dorky while also being deadly(-ish).

The sometimes bumbling Jamie and Fran are very Mel and Sue roles; slightly neurotic, often impractical types, with a near-pathological avoidance of any kind of conflict.  Well, any kind of conflict that isn't "I'm sorry, but we have to kill you now, it's our job".  

And it's worth being clear that despite their general nebbish-ness, Fran and Jamie are not in any way reluctant assassins.  They kill without any sign of qualms or compunctions, including bystanders on a couple of occasions.

The episodes of this first season of Hitmen are a bit overly reliant on the same basic structure; most are essentially three-person stories involving Fran, Jamie and their target.  This person is generally already in their custody at the start of the episode, but in each case there is some reason they don't immediately carry out the hit.  To be fair, there is at least some variety in the specifics of why the delay, and how the various potential victims respond to their situation, and the individual scenarios are quite amusing.  Watching them back to back does highlight their similar structures, though. 

The final episode of the season is the one that varies most from this basic pattern, which is definitely a factor in why it is also one of the strongest offerings of the set.  It also sets up a bit of change in the status quo and gives the show new options for season two, which has already aired (and will be the subject of a future review).

A Simple Favor (2018)

 

Widowed single mom Stephanie runs a small scale vlog focusing on parenting tips, crafts and recipes.  She's chronically perky and wholesome, a super-mom whose domestic focus and over-active involvement in school activities leads to a lot of snide comments from the other parents at her son's school.

It's thus a case of 'opposites attract' when Stephanie becomes chums with the swaggering, martini-swilling, decidedly non-domestic Emily Nelson.  Emily's son attends school with Stephanie's kid, and the two mom's bond over after-school playdates and more than a few stuff drinks.  They share secrets; Emily her frustration over her husband's lack of success, Stephanie a past sexual indiscretion quite at odds with her 'nice girl' persona.

Despite their many differences, and Emily's sometimes aggressive demeanour, Stephanie soon counts the other woman as her closest friend.  So she is deeply worried when, after dropping off her son 'for a few hours', Emily does not return.  After 48 hours with no word, she persuades Emily's husband to contact the police.

What has happened to Emily?  Stephanie intends to find out.  People may discount her as a lightweight stay at home mom, but she's determined to not going to give up on her friend.

That determination might prove a lot more dangerous than Stephanie expects ... can she get the answers she wants before the questions get her into something she can't get out of?

A Simple Favor is a fun black comedy that profits immensely from excellent performances at its core.  Both Anna Kendrick (as Stephanie) and Blake Lively (as Emily) do a great job throughout the film, whether performing together and separately.

This film is something of a modern take on the noir tale; we have the femme fatale, the flawed but persistent investigator, the unwise love affair, the innocent dupe ... and of course murder and betrayal.  These ingredients  have however been re-imagined and re-combined in ways that the screenwriters of the 40s would definitely never have considered, which helps keep the whole thing feeling fresh.

The twisty-windy plot that unfolds is perhaps ultimately rather far-fetched and improbable, which might present an issue for some viewers, but I found that it rattled along with enough verve that I didn't really mind.  Anna Kendrick deserves a lot of the credit for this, I think, as she does a great job of showing us the any facets of the more-complex-than-she-appears 'good girl' Stephanie, and depicting her character's slow evolution from would-be wallflower to determined amateur sleuth.

This is a fun romp. Recommended!

One final note: thumbs up for the script's overt messaging about just how much work is involved in being a stay-at-home parent, and the criticism of society's tendency to underestimate its value.

Home Economics,. Season 1 (2021)

 

Tom Hayworth is a critically acclaimed novelist.  Critical acclaim doesn't always mean rampant financial success, however, and together with his wife and three young kids, Tom is just barely clinging to middle class status.  A struggle that is complicated by the fact that having three young kids makes it hard to find time to write.

Now as it happens, Tom could always swallow his pride and go to his younger brother Connor, for a loan.  The genial oaf of the family, Connor has made a huge amount of money and now runs a successful private equity firm.  He can certainly spare the money.

But pride is a difficult thing to overcome, and there's also his sister Sarah to think about.  Tom knows that Sarah and her wife live in a tiny apartment with their two adopted kids, and battle to get by from pay check to pay check.

Perhaps key to Tom's reluctance though, is that he needs the loan to tide him over while he writes an autobiographical book, in which his sometimes tempestuous relationship with his siblings is a central feature.

Home Economics is a lightweight situation comedy series about three basically decent siblings who all want to do the right thing while achieving success, but who have drastically different ideas about what 'the right thing' and 'success' actually are.

Like a lot of sitcoms, the show relies on characters with exaggerated, archetypical traits; Sarah is the strident activist, Tom the overly cautious over-thinker, Conner the buffoonish but well-meaning man-child.  In the wrong hands, this could quickly get annoying, but a likeable and well-chosen cast makes all three characters work well.  Plus of course, they have their siblings and each other to point out their more egregious foibles.

Overall the show's comedy works well, as it maintains a light and breezy overall ambience and gives each sibling an opportunity to be on different sides of a situation.  It is not always the same sibling as the voice of reason, or the instigator, and so on.  The humour can veer a little bit into 'cringe comedy' at times, but it does not generally last too long, and the scripts tend to focus more on slapstick and banter.

This first season runs a slender seven episodes, and in addition to the usual episode by episode sitcom shenanigans it delivers a reasonably complete story about the three siblings and them re-establishing their familial relationships.  You could sit down and watch this season in an afternoon, then walk away feeling like you've seen a somewhat oddly structured comedy film with a satisfying conclusion.

I enjoyed this season of Home Economics, and I appreciated that it included a longer story arc rather than just "the wacky situation of the week".  I have to say though that I am not sure how well the formula stretch as an ongoing series, especially as there are 22 episodes in season two.  The premise might get a bit thin.

Dinoshark (2010)

 

Pliosaurs were ancient marine predators that grew to lengths of up to 15 metres (50 ft).  They went extinct around 100 million years ago.

But in this movie, one example of the species was cryogenically frozen in the arctic ice.  When global warming melts the glacier in which it was frozen, the creature revives.  A few years later, the now fully grown  predator arrives off the Mexico cost, where it soon proves itself absurdly fond of attacking and eating any human it encounters.

Local bad boy Trace McGraw is the first one to survive an encounter with the beast, but given his history with the local authorities, he has a great deal of trouble convincing them to listen.  Can he find a way to stop the Dinoshark before it kills again?  Or at least, before the movie ends?

This low-budget monster movie is produced by industry veteran Roger Corman.  Corman's followed the same basic "make it as cheap as possible, as fast as possible" approach to film since 1954, and there's little sign here that the leopard has changed its spots.  The movie smacks of high budget conscious decision-making on several levels.

The CGI, for instance, is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a no-budget project.  The basic design of the dinoshark itself doesn't look too bad, probably because it's not that hard to stick an allosaurus head stuck on a shark's body, but as soon as you see the creature move, it's very obviously not real and doesn't look remotely convincing. The film's (regrettably few) old-school practical effects look a lot better.

Probably the most Corman-tastic section in the film is a party scene where the band are playing too loud.  This allows blatant padding to the film's run time by forcing characters to repeat themselves; a minute or so is even devoted to having one of the characters ask the band to reduce the volume so they can hear each other. 

There's also a fair bit of padding in the profusion of scenes where some random people turn up on screen for the first time in the movie and then promptly get eaten. Sure, these films have been doing that ever since the days of Jaws, but not quite so often or so like clockwork. This is very much "no-one got chomped in the last 10 minutes? Better throw someone to the shark" territory.

Speaking the granddaddy of killer shark films, there are several unsubtle  and not terribly funny Jaws references in the score and dialogue, with the most blatant being "you're going to need a bigger chopper".  Few of these really land as anything more than a gratuitous film nerd reference, though.

Ultimately, one to skip unless you're desperate to see dependable TV actor Eric Balfour slumming it in a second rate creature feature.

My favourite part of the film?  The line of dialogue where someone talks about the dinoshark being sighted in New Zealand, and then shows a map depicting Papua New Guinea, which is some 5,000 km (3,000 miles) from the land of the long white cloud.

Vida, Season 1 (2018)

 

After the sudden death of their mother Vidalia (“Vida” for short), estranged sisters Emma and Lyn return to their old neighbourhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.  They need to settle up their mother's tangled estate, in particular determining the fate the bar she owned, which has become a prime target for developers looking to gentrify (that is, make more white) the primarily Latinx location.

For the career-focused, Type A Emma, this is all an unwelcome distraction from the life she's forged away from the family she feels cast her out.  For free-spirited but directionless Lyn, it is an opportunity to reignite old romances and maybe sort out her life a bit (though probably, just make new mistakes to compound the old).

Neither woman expects to remain in the old neighbourhood for very long.  They expect to just come in, wind up the estate and leave.  But there's a lot they don't know about their own family and about the place they left behind.  Perhaps even some things worth staying for.

Vida is a series about the experience of Latinx people in the United States, especially Latinx women, and Latinx people of the LGBTQ community.  To ensure authenticity, series creator Tanya Saracho deliberately assembled a writing team with personal experience of these lives.  All the writers are Latinx; only one is a cisgender male; over half identify as queer.  I certainly lack the knowledge to say whether she has succeeded, but the show has won praise from numerous people who are far more qualified to judge than I am, so it seems likely she did.  

This is also a show about relationships; this includes romantic ones, of course, but also familial ones (sister to sister, daughter to mother, and so on) and platonic friendships.  All of these relationships are sometimes messy and challenging, but they are also capable of being rewarding and constructive.  It's nice to see a show tackle the complexities of interpersonal relationships with such openness.

That openness definitely extends to sexual relationships.  Vida features a  considerable amount of nudity and a number of high impact sex scenes, and for that reason may not be to all tastes.  These scenes do have a clear story purpose, however, rather than existing for mere titillation.  They show how sexual intimacy can often be emotionally and physically messy, and they frequently show some aspect of the participants' personalities.  The first time we see Emma have sex, for instance, she tells us a great deal about herself even though she never says a word.

Vida explores what its characters (think they) want and how that compares to what they actually need to be fulfilled.  How the characters process and address the gap between what they have (they they) want and what they actually need is a key part of the narrative and of the characters' development.  It's all smartly executed.  The writers have delivered writing that is compelling and interesting, and we ploughed through the six episodes of this season in only a couple of nights.

As good as the writing is, I can't complete this review without also praising the cast, who deliver strong performances.  All of the central roles require a lot of vulnerability and demand a lot of the actors, and every one of them fully fulfils the brief.

Steel Dawn (1987)

 

Nomad, a swordsman, wanders through the desert in a post-World War III world. He searches for his mentor's killer, the assassin Sho.

Nomad's travels bring him to the settlement of Meridian, where he finds work on a farm owned by the widow Kasha (who is, of course, young and attractive), and becomes friends Kasha's son, Jux.

Meridian, however, is not without its troubles.  A local landowner named Damnil has employed a gang of thugs to harass the town and gain a monopoly on the local water supply.  Kasha and Jux are among his targets.

When Nomad proves more than Damnil's thugs can handle, the land owner hires a deadly assassin - Sho, naturally - to get rid of the interloper.  The stage is set for a showdown.

Steel Dawn owes a considerable debt to the western Shane; in that film, a drifter comes to town, befriends a young boy, and helps small land owners stand up to a corrupt cattle baron.  It is of several films that star Patrick Swayze made with his real life wife Lisa Niemi; she plays Kasha, of course, a role that features some hysterically 80s hair.

Released in the same year as Dirty Dancing, this low budget post apocalyptic adventure attempted to try and cash in on the (unexpected) success of that film and Swayze's resulting surge to stardom.  The effort was unsuccessful.  There are good reasons for that, I think.  Much of the fight choreography is mediocre, and the script - in addition to being heavily derivative of another, better film, is pretty weak.  It has a tendency to try and skate by doing just the absolute minimum.

As an example of this, there's a brief scene early on where Nomad meets a dog.  The encounter is not hostile, and the dog then disappears from the screen for almost an hour, before abruptly turning up once more to rescue Nomad from imprisonment.  That kind of Doggie Ex Machina needs more effort to set up.  At least show the dog hanging around the farm and Nomad throwing it some of his food, or saving it from mistreatment.

The best part of the film?  Probably Brion James.  Best known for playing big dumb bad guys, he here gets to play the role of Nomad's big dumb sidekick, and is really rather fun.

Overall, this is only for fans of 80s post-apocalyptica.

Saved by the Bell, Season 2 (2021)

 

After a year of learning from home, the student body returns to Bayside High.  This one again includes the transplants from the far less wealthy Douglas High School, which was closed due to budget cuts.

The kids - and their parents and teachers - will have to face a new host high school tribulations and wacky shenanigans this year, most significant of which is the regional 'Spirit Competition', in which the Bayside kids will face off with their nemeses from nearby Valley High.

All is fair in love and war, and the Spirit Competition is absolutely a war.  The jinks, they will be high.

This second season of the sequel-slash-reboot of the 90s TV series of the same name picks up more or less where the first season left off, albeit with the acknowledgment that an entire school year pretty much happened off screen.

The cast remain great fun, bouncing off one another well, and while the writing is often deliberately overboard and exaggerated, it is overboard and exaggerated in really smart ways.  A lot of time and attention was spent on getting just the right mix of silliness in place, such as the amusing little references to Elizabeth Berkley's role in the notorious box office bomb Showgirls.

It's also nice to see more long-form story telling taking place over this season.  While every episode continues to feature an immediate focus and plotlines that are resolved within it, the writers have also included the loose season-long arc of the Spirit Competition as a framing mechanism for the episode-by-episode shenanigans.  This helps make the season feel more connected and less 'episode of the week'.

It also results in some entertaining character arcs.  Coach Slater and Mac Morris both get solid character development as they learn a few life lessons while remaining still recognisably the same people, and Aisha's new romance is all kinds of adorable.

Alas, the show has not been renewed for a third season.  I would absolutely have been turning up for Senior year, if it was.

Charlie's Angels (2019)

 

Elena Houghlin discovers that an energy conservation device that she helped invent, 'Calisto', has the potential to trigger fatal seizures when used.  She tries to raise this with her head of development, but he proves determined to cover up the issue.

Elena turns to the secretive Townsend Agency for aid in exposing the truth and preventing the dangerous device from going into use across the world.  The Agency sends its 'Angels' Sabina and Jane to make contact with Elena, but the meet is interrupted by a deadly assassin.

It seems that someone is determined to keep Elena's story a secret, and as their efforts to regain Calisto continue to be thwarted, Elena, Sabiona and Jane come to suspect that someone with the Townsend Agency itself is working against them.

This third big screen adaptation of the Charlie's Angels TV series was not a success at the box office, and its release attracted a lot of histrionic whining from men who had their feelings hurt by the film's subtle and not so subtle pokes at male privilege.  Personally though, I thought this was good fun.  

The cast are all solid, delivering the film's constant stream of banter in a natural and entertaining style. Kristen Stewart in particular, in the role of Sabina, demonstrates excellent comic timing.  

The film offers good action set pieces, too.  There's a good variety of types of action; fist fights, gun fights, car chases and foot races; in a broad variety of locations, and the narrative purpose of each scene is clearly defined.  This scene is about saving Elena from the assassin; this scene is about trying to recover the Calisto prototype; and so on.

With the exception of camera's tendency to ogle Kristen Stewart's bottom, this movie feels more truly feminist than the earlier iterations.  Let's not forget the original got a lot of mileage out of 'attractive women get tied up'.  I have a strong suspicion that this cost it with critics and male audiences.

If the film has a weakness, it is that it perhaps puts a bit too much focus organisation the Angels work for, and assumed knowledge about the Townsend Agency.  I think when you're re-starting the franchise after a long break, as this was trying to do, it might be better to go with a more stand-alone storyline.

Paper Girls, Season 1 (2022)

 

1 November, 1988.  Four young women (Mac, Tiff, KJ and Erin) rise in the pre-dawn hours to begin their jobs as bicycle-riding paper delivery girls.  For Erin, it is her first day on the job.  For the others, it is 'the worst day of the year', as they know that Halloween's most dedicated (and often inebriated) celebrants are still out and about, and will almost certainly get in their way and complicate their jobs.

This year, though, there are even stranger folk about than the usual ghosts and witches.  Strangely-clad outsiders, speaking a foreign language, steal a walkie-talkie the girls are using.  When the four teenagers pursue, they stumble into a conflict between warring factions of time-travellers.  The deadliness of said conflict is soon made apparent, and as the quartet scramble to survive, and the sky turns pink, they find their escape path leading them into the very strange world of 2019 ...

This show is based on a comic book of the same name, but I think it is a fairly loose adaptation.  While the TV show and comic share the same core cast and the same basic premise, a lot of the plot specifics seem to be different.  Certainly, the girls' initial jump into the future in the comic is only to the 1990s, not the modern day.   My knowledge of the comic is fairly limited, though.

Judged purely on its own merits the TV show is a pretty solid one.  It is perhaps a little slow to get started, but once the cast reach 2019 - which is by the end of the first episode - things begin to motor along quite well.

The cast is definitely one of the strengths of the show. All four of the young actors are very good.  They're all obviously a bit older than the characters they are supposed to be playing, though not quite to the "30 year olds pretending to be in high school" standards of some other TV shows.  And when that's the only complaint I can level against them, they are clearly doing their jobs well! 

The supporting cast are also good.  I particularly enjoyed Mac's interactions with her vastly more grown-up brother in the modern day, and when they later end up in the 1990s, KJ's encounters with her older self's girlfriend were delightfully done.

Budgetary constraints clearly were something of a limitation on the show.  In an era where producers are spending tens of millions of dollars per episode, Paper Girls has a decidedly less opulent look to it.  We're certainly not at early 1980s BBC levels of poverty, but there is a clear gap between the money being splashed on screen here and what I saw in a show like Carnival Row.

Alas, the show does not seem to have found the audience it deserved, and has been cancelled after one season.  It's a shame I won't get to see the end of the Paper Girls' story (or at least, the TV version thereof - I could still read the comic!), but I am sure I will see the cast in other things.  They definitely deserve success.

Hotel Artemis (2018)

 

On June 21, 2028, a riot breaks out in Los Angeles over the privatization of the city's water supply. In the midst of the chaos, professional criminal Sherman attempts a bank robbery.  This goes badly wrong, leaving half his team dead and his brother Lev critically wounded.  They don't even get away with much in the way of spoils, though Lev does steal a fancy pen from a well-dressed bank customer, despite the man saying that doing so is a terrible mistake. 

Sherman and Lev escape to the nearby Hotel Artemis, a secretive hospital that treats only criminals.  This is run by "The Nurse", who has not been outside the Hotel for 22 years, due to her severe agoraphobia and her grief over the death of her son.  The Nurse has a strict set of rules for the hospital: "No weapons", "No non-members", and "No killing of other guests".

Of course, the fact that we're watching a movie ought to clue you into the fact that pretty much all of these rules are going to be tested during the next couple of hours ...

Hotel Artemis has a truly top notch cast, several good action scenes, and some snappy dialogue, but it unfortunately felt rather less than the sum of its parts, to me.  I place most of the blame for this on the execution of the sub-plots.  One example is the Nurse's breaching of her very own rules.  This whole sub-plot feels a bit orphaned.  While it does tie into the Nurse's trauma about her son, it doesn't really connect up to the broader action within the hospital on this particular night, and the exposition it delivered could easily have come from somewhere else that potentially could have been used to strengthen our understanding of other, more central themes of the film.

Similarly, one major character's fate is left essentially unresolved. I don't actually hate this as an idea.  The character's personal journey has arguably already been 'finished' through the choices they make and the reasons behind them.  But I don't feel that the execution quite works: it doesn't feel finished, even if it technically is.  I suspect this is because the characters choices feel more like they are made to facilitate someone else's story, rather than to complete their own.

This lack of a sense of conclusion is actually a recurring theme within the film; for most of the characters, I was left saying "wait, that's the ending you're giving them?".  The whole movie feels like a case of an intriguing premise that doesn't deliver on its promise.

I will say that I did appreciate the film's trenchant criticism of the privatisation of essential utilities like water and law enforcement. Thumbs up for that at least.

Killjoys, Season 4 (2018)

Dutch, D'Avin, Jonny and the rest of the Killjoys crew have discovered that the real enemy behind the alien menace of the Hullen is "The Lady", a mysterious and malevolent entity that exists in the psychic(?) stasis realm of "The Green", and who seeks a way to (re-)enter our world through the minds and memories of humanity.  If she ever succeeds, it would mean Bad Things.

This fourth batch of Killjoys episodes reminds me a lot of season 2.  Like that season, a major theme here is that your enemies might not be who you think they are, and that the obvious "bad guys" might have good reasons for their apparent malevolence.

That's a potentially interesting arc to explore, but as with season 2, I don't think it really works.  These ten episodes have to justify a pretty huge shift in not one but two enemies into allies, and for my tastes it has pretty limited success in doing so.  These characters have shown active pleasure in their own 'wickedness' before now, and their journey to the side of the angels is pretty much justified solely by the old rubric 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'.

Also like season 2, I think this series suffers from trying to do too much, too fast.  The show covers a lot of ground here, in addition to the shifting alliances there is a new arachnid menace, a cross-species pregnancy which leads to a baby that rapidly develops into a 'vital to the plot' teenager, and all sorts of other shenanigans.  For my tastes, even as individuals elements and episodes can be quite enjoyable, it doesn't really gel as a whole.

A Star is Born (2018)

 

Ally is a waitress with aspirations to be a singer-songwriter.  One night she is performing an Edith Piaf number at a local drag bar, she is spotted by country rock superstar Jackson Maine.

Maine is struck by Ally's powerful vocals and stage presence.  It doesn't hurt that he finds her easy on the eyes, as well.  The two go on an impromptu, rather rambling date, where Ally sings some of the lyrics she has written.

This new relationship with Ally, and the energy she brings to his life, his music and his tour, revitalises Jackson at a time when his alcohol and drug problems were beginning to damage his career.  The two fall in love, get married, and make beautiful music together.

But as Ally's star begins to glow ever brighter, Jackson feels the shadows creeping back.  Can Ally's light really keep his darkness at bay, and what will be the repercussions for her, if it can't?

This is the fourth filmed version of A Star is Born, and the third to be set in the music industry (in the original, the setting was Hollywood itself).  It's not technically a musical - no-one narrates their feelings or provides plot exposition via song - but music is definitely an integral part of the story.  And on that front, it is a triumph.  The smash hit "Shallow" is clearly the stand-out number, and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, but all of the original songs, principally written by the film's two main stars in collaboration with Lukas Nelson, are impactful and memorable.  They are a key part of the movie's success as a work of entertainment.

The casting is also excellent.  For me, Lady Gaga was a real revelation as she proved more than capable of holding her own as a Hollywood leading actor.  I can see from IMDB that it was not her first role, but it does seem to be the first on this kind of scale, and she looks entirely at home.

The rest of the cast is also good.  Bradley Cooper does a good job of making Jackson Maine into a flawed man, bordering on a screw-up, while still remaining sympathetic.  Sam Elliott is as dependable as always.  Perhaps the biggest surprise outside of Lady Gaga was seeing former shock comedian Andrew Dice Clay turn up as Ally's father, Lorenzo.  Apparently this is a role that Robert De Niro was interested in, and I have to say that as good as De Niro is, I don't think the film lost anything at all by using Clay.

If I were to make one complaint about the film - and it's me, so I will almost always find at least one complaint to make - its that the narrative ultimately centres Jackson more than Ally.  Despite the fact that Ally is the bright new star, and the one on the rise, the film is much more about how her arrival and ascent impacts Jackson, than on Ally's experience.  When this story gets filed for the fifth time - which is almost certainly will, though perhaps not in my lifespan - I hope that we finally get a version that centres the female character's experiences and ambitions.

That one quibble aside, however, this is an exceptionally well-made film.  It's not as emotionally powerful on the second and subsequent viewings as the first, but few things are.

Well worth seeing.

Suspiria (2018)

 

Berlin, 1977.  As the city struggles to come to grips with a series of terrorist actions by the militant left-wing Red Army Faction, dance student Patricia Hingle tries to persuade her psychotherapist that something even more sinister is afoot at the Markos Dance Academy, where she studies.  She believes that the school's matrons are a coven of witches who will consume her for their magical empowerment.

The good doctor does not take Ms Hingle's claims of witchcraft particularly seriously, though he does believe she is genuinely frightened.  When she abruptly vanishes, he begins to become concerned.  And so he should: the school most definitely is a coven of witches. 

Shortly after Patricia vanishes, a new student arrives from the US.  Suzy Bannion has no formal training, but there is raw power in her that the witches immediately sense.  They move immediately to bring her into the school, intent on harnessing this power for their own sinister purposes.

I found this remake of Dario Argento's (in my opinion, overrated) 1977 horror film to be very interesting due to how profoundly it differs from the film on which it is ostensibly based.  The very first scenes of the film establish this very different approach.  They demonstrate that this movie will be visually sombre, with lots of shadow and muted colours, in direct opposition to the deliberately garish primary colours of Argento's film.  Similarly, the soundtrack is subdued instead of bombastic.

This remake also avoids many of the narrative flaws of the original. In the original, the strangeness of the academy is very open and in your face.  Maggots shower from the ceiling, the building floor plan clearly makes no sense, and creepiness abounds.  It's not the kind of place that any halfway sensible person would choose to stay, and it's hard to believe that the weirdness would not be common knowledge.  The coven here is far more subtle in its activities.

I have to give the film kudos for actually making the dance academy setting explicitly relevant to the plot.  The link was more tenuous in the original.

On the other hand, the new version introduces its own narrative issues. I think it exposes too much of what is going on to the audience too early, and keeps it from the cast too long. The movie tends to be a bit indulgent in its use of time in general, and could easily have lost 20 minutes.

Then there is the climactic confrontation, which - while I appreciate what they were going for - was a bit of a misfire for me. I was irked that suddenly the entirety of the young and attractive female cast were naked for it, for one thing: this seemed unnecessary and a bit gauche.  It was also a victim of the film's "over long" issue. It took far longer for what actually happened to happen than it needed to. Perhaps they thought the audience needed the time to process the 'surprise' of what happened. This audience was not surprised at all, though, and thought it had been thoroughly telegraphed already.

A brave effort with some good elements, but not ultimately a success.

Black Roses (1988)

 

Nothing much ever happens in the sleepy little town of Mill Basin, a fact that its teenage inhabitants lament on a regular basis.  So there is considerable excitement among the younger set at the news that their town will host not one but four live shows by the heavy metal band "Black Roses", as they kick off their first nationwide tour.

The town's conservative parents, on the other hand, are deeply perturbed at the band's reputation for rebellious, anti-establishment lyrics.  They strongly resist allowing the event to go ahead, but eventually their concerns are mollified by the band's initially low-key appearance and by the town's mayor assuming that the band is harmless.

Only one person, high school teacher Matthew Moorhouse, suspects that the band's agenda is more nefarious than it seems, but even he does not suspect the truth: Black Roses are literal demons from hell, and these shows are a test case for their plan to transform America's youth into an army of unholy abominations!

Black Roses clearly trades on the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980s, where people genuinely worried that listening to heavy metal would lead to Satanism, and that playing Dungeons & Dragons would teach you 'real magic'.  It is tempting to laugh at the naivety of such nonsense, but as a society we continue to demonise that which we do not understand, making all kinds of baseless accusations against it, such as with the current war on trans rights.

Now by 1988 the 'Satanic Panic' was actually more or less over, in part because heavy metal had changed through the decade and the likes of Guns 'n' Roses were superseding bands like Iron Maiden as the face of the genre.  Still, it was probably still recent enough to resonate, and I don't think the film-makers in any way bought into the idea, themselves.  If they did, they wouldn't use so many real life heavy metal musicians in the cast and soundtrack, nor would the tone of the film be one of goofy, corny excess.

Because make no mistake, this is is not in any way a scary movie, nor does it make any attempt to be.  It's very much focused on delivering lots of hard rock on the soundtrack while throwing some goofy monster action and a few bosoms up on the screen.  It's pretty much tailor made for teenage boys of the era.  Or it would be, if it was better executed.

One of the movie's biggest flaws is its mostly puppet-based demons and mutations.  They generally look like under-nourished muppets, and the lack of sophistication in them is transparent from the limited views we get of them.  When one attacks Mike in his home, for instance, we pretty much only ever see its head.  The rest of it is always out of shot, likely because it didn't exist; there's just someone crawling around behind the kitchen counter, waving the head and one claw in the air above them.

This is a bit of a shame, because the band's make-up in the opening scene actually looks pretty cool (if lacking in flexibility).  I do wonder if this sequence might have had a formative experience on a young Mr Lordi.

hard rock hallelujah

The lack of motion of the monsters contributes to the overall weakness of the action scenes.  Mike's face-off with the 'big bad' is hilariously stilted and awkward, with it being clear that the supposedly terrifying demon (which is actually someone in a suit, at least, unlike many of the others) is not actually capable of doing very much except standing in one place and menacingly waving its arms about.

It's all thoroughly naff, and while ultimately, I had a decent time watching Black Roses, I was very much laughing at the film, not with it.  If you are a fan of 'so bad its good' movies, it may appeal.  Though honestly on that front it is not a patch on the director's earlier offering Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, which is gloriously terrible and which also actually had one interesting idea to go with all the cheese.

Chopping Mall (1986)

 

Park Plaza Mall has just installed a state-of-the-art security system, including shutters across all exits and three high-tech robots programmed to disable and apprehend thieves using tasers and tranquilizer guns.  A suave salesman gives the mall's business-owning tenants a demonstration of the high-tech sentinels, smilingly assuring them "Nothing can go wrong!"

Everything, of course, is going to go wrong.

And it happens to all go wrong on a night when eight 'teenage' mall employees (the actors are all clearly well into their twenties) are having an illicit after-hours party in the complex's furniture store.  When a lightning storm fries the logic circuits and safety inhibitors of the security system's computer, the would-be partiers find themselves locked inside the mall with three implacable and very, very lethal robot menaces.

Chopping Mall was produced by Julie Corman, the wife of legendary schlockmeister Roger Corman, after she landed a deal to produce a horror film set in a mall.  Mrs Corman seems to have learned a few tricks from her husband: she apparently picked Jim Wynorski to write the film on the basis that he agreed to do it for cheap if she also let him direct.

Wynorski and his cowriter Steve Mitchell packed the film with quirky little references to earlier Corman productions, including squeezing in bit roles for long term Corman collaborators Dick Miller and Mary Woronov.  As a fan of several of their earlier films, such as Little Shop of Horrors and Death Race 2000, it was fun for me to see them both turn up here, even if I didn't particularly like Ms Woronov's scene.  Her character is one of the store owners, and during the salesman's presentation they mock the killer robots for looking like "The Three Stooges" (among making other, more offensive comments).  This was a poor choice, I think.  Don't undermine your monster, movie-makers!

Once the robots go berserk, of course, no-one is mocking them.  They're running and screaming and in many cases, dying.  There's not really any narrative surprises here.  Chopping Mall is at its heart a straightforward slasher movie in the best Friday the 13th style.  The killer(s) here may be robots, instead of a psychotic human with severe hang-ups about teenage sexuality, but they're still unstoppable, implacable murderers and the script still targets the cast in descending order of their promiscuity.

Said targets are not the hapless, clueless victims we most often see in slasher films, though.  They become aware of the threat much earlier than is usual in such films and are largely proactive and cooperative about trying to find a way to survive. Their strategies were not always the smartest - and wow, they were lucky they were in a mall that was so well stocked with weaponry! - but at least they had agency in the film and showed real efforts to defeat the robots. 

Chopping Mall was a surprisingly fun bit of nonsense.  If you are a slasher fan, check it out!

Dagon (2001)

 

When Paul Marsh wakes from a dream about a mermaid with razor-sharp teeth, he's not in the best of moods.  This leads to a squabble with his girlfriend, Barbara, but the bickering is quickly forgotten when a sudden and violent storm sweeps in.

The storm drives the boat they're staying on into some rocks, smashing a hole in the hull and trapping one of their friends in the wreckage.  While that woman's husband stays with her, Paul and Barbara climb into a dinghy in a desperate attempt to seek assistance in a local village.

Unfortunately, the little town of Imbocca is most definitely not a place to look for safe harbour.  In their efforts to survive the storm, Paul, Barbara and their friends have put more than just their lives at risk ...

Despite its title, Dagon is not an adaptation of the H P Lovecraft story of the same name.  It is, however, based on another of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'.  And as an adaptation of that tale, while it differs a lot in the details - featuring in particular a lot more violence and nudity - it is actually reasonably faithful to the basic story arc.

And that combination of 'faithful in the broad strokes while adding a lot of sex and violence' should probably not be a surprise, coming as the film does from Stuart Gordon, who in 1985 gave us the wonderfully goofy squick of Re-Animator. Schlocky though that film definitely was, it was a fun watch.

Dagon is unfortunately not up to delivering the same amount of entertainment.  Some of this is the fault of the script: in particular the fact that the opening squabble on the boat doesn't make either our leading man or his love interest seem very appealing people.  Some of it is the production.  The film's action sequences are not generally well-staged and  on at least one occasion are were executed so poorly that the only fitting description is "thoroughly laughable".  The film also suffers from the inclusion of cheap noughties-era CGI, which is particularly a shame given that when it relies on old school practical effects, they're genuinely rather good.  Though very gruesome, I should note.  If you have a weak stomach for gore and grue, be warned.

 

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for me though is the cast.  Though I have to say this is not because of anything the actors do.  On the whole they are quite acceptable in their roles.  It's just that as I was watching the film, I found myself thinking on several occasions "Dang, I wish this movie was made 16 years earlier, so Jeffrey Combs could have starred - he'd have been great in this!".  And in fact, it seems that Stuart Gordon had indeed planned to do more Lovecraft-based films with Combs after 1986's From Beyond, but they didn't manage to make the films happen at that time.  A real shame, I think.  It would have got rid of the cheapie CGI, if nothing else!

One final note, because it needs to be mentioned: even for the deeply racist time in which he lived, H P Lovecraft was notoriously, egregiously racist.  This fact often came through in his work.  While the basic themes of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' definitely reflect his xenophobia and prejudice, the film is thankfully spared the the smug, judgemental superiority of Lovecraft's narration.

Still, ultimately, I think Dagon is probably for hard-core Mythos-fans only.

Mom and Dad (2017)

 

The Ryans are a family of four with a strained relationship. Father Brent disapproves of his teenage daughter's (slightly) older boyfriend. Mother Kendall is keenly aware of the emotional distance developing between her and both her husband and her daughter, Carly. Her efforts to resolve both merely seem to exacerbate Brent's frayed temper and Carly's scorn. Only young son Josh seems more or less content, though his habit of getting into things he shouldn't do causes occasional flare-ups from the other members of the family.

Despite all that, though, they are a family and they love each other. Nothing could make any of them turn on the others. Particularly not the parents on their children, right?

Right?

Well that, of course, is exactly the scenario presented in this entertaining little comedy-horror. Somehow, through unknown means, a wave of madness is spreading. It turns the fierce love (most) parents feel for their children into savage, violent hatred. Parents across the city are engaging in brutal acts of filicide. But it only their own children who are at risk. Their behaviour toward other people is wholly unaffected.

It's going to be volatile times at the Ryan household, today ...

Despite its child-murdering premise, Mom and Dad is surprisingly fun horror comedy. ... provided you like your comedy black, that is!  It has a straight-forward hook that I think will resonate with most people.  Almost everyone has parents or children or both, and while some families are obviously much more deeply dysfunctional than the Ryans, the ideal of a more-or-less functional family is one that we see depicted in fiction all the time.

The movie profits hugely from the pairing of Selma Blair and Nicholas Cage as Mom and Dad, respectively.  The script gives Cage plenty of scope to indulge his renowned ability for histrionic, impassioned ranting, and then neatly juxtaposes Brent's always-on-the-verge-of-exploding mania with Kendall's far more considered and thoughtful approach to child-murdering.  They make a fun double act, especially as the script slyly shows their joint homicidal efforts helping them to reclaim some of the affection and camaraderie that the years of middle-class drudgery have ground away.

Blair and Cage are ably complemented by the younger cast members.  Anne Winters is good as the initially resentful and self-absorbed Carly, who suddenly finds herself thrust into the role of her young brother's protector.  Zachary Arthur is similarly good as young Josh, who wants nothing more than for things to go back to normal.

The script smartly keeps the run time lean - less than 90 minutes - and eschews too much graphic on-screen violence in favour of merely suggesting what happened, such as by the presence of a thick pool of blood on the kitchen floor, or a gory baseball bat clutched in a man's hand.  It also saves its most manic sequence for the final act, building to it through the elder Ryan's escalating efforts to slaughter poor Carly and Josh.

I enjoyed this.  Recommended for fans of horror-comedy, as well as for those who just enjoy Nick Cage being his most Nick Cage-like.

Happy Death Day (2017)

 

After a night of drunken partying, university student Theresa "Tree" Gelbman wakes up on her birthday in the dorm room of classmate Carter Davis. She ignores a phone call from her father and dismisses Carter, returning to her sorority.  Her behaviour there is no more friendly: she ignores her sorority sisters as much as she can and when Tree's roommate gives her a birthday cupcake, she throws it on the floor for having "to many carbs".

So, Tree is not winning many friends here.  And when you add in the fact that she is having an affair with her married professor, there's a pretty long list of people who might want to stick a knife in her.  Which is, in fact, exactly what someone does, that very night.

Which would make for a short film, if it were not for the fact that Tree wakes up again in Carter's bed, the memory of her own murder still fresh in her mind.

Yep, what we have here is "Groundhog Day, but a slasher movie", as Tree tries to work out who's killing her (and killing her, and killing her) and why.  And if the whole ordeal happens to teach Tree a few things about being a better person along the way, well, let's hope she'll eventually find a way to live through it and put those lessons in practice!

I thought Happy Death Day was great fun.  Jessica Rothe shows great versatility in portraying Tree's obnoxiousness at the start, and then of first her rising hysteria as she realises what is happening, before moving on to her subsequent later manic experimentation - and more - as she tries to resolve her situation.  Despite how awful her character is at the beginning of the film, she's pretty easy to root for after a couple of times through the loop.

I also that Tree isn't necessarily an easy kill.  Even the first time, she doesn't go down without a fight, and in subsequent loops she learns from previous experiences and tries to find new ways to avoid her fate.  This is a smart choice as making her scrappy makes her more relatable and easy to cheer on, even while she remains quite snotty.  Plus, it's fun to see how her efforts go awry, as they inevitably must, for quite some time!

The script does a couple of other smart things, too.  It avoids any real engagements with the question of how or why Tree got stuck in the loop to begin with, and isn't just dead.  Given her situation, I can definitely understand why this is not something that Tree - and therefore the film - spends much time worrying about.  Seizing the opportunity to survive, rather than worrying about how the opportunity came to be, is very much the name of the game.

I also liked that the film found a way to still make Tree's situation a precarious one.  Without spoiling the details, it quite smartly presents evidence that sooner or later, these loops will stop, and Tree needs to find a way to survive before they do, or she will be really for real dead dead, and not just temporarily non-breathing.

Good stuff.  I see it has a sequel: I certainly plan to check that out!

Forget Me Not (2009)

 

Sandy Channing and her brother, Eli, are teenagers on the cusp of attending college.  To celebrate the end of the academic year, they attend a party at their friend T.J.'s house. Many of the people at the party are long term friends of theirs, and the whole group of them go to the graveyard to play a spooky, ghost-themed version of 'tag'.

A new girl their age meets them at the cemetery and asks to join the game. There is some reluctance, but when she proves to already know how it works, they agree.

The new girl wins the game by evading capture the longest. She then asks Sandy if Sandy remembers her. Sandy says she does not, and the girls states, "You will," before jumping from the cliff behind her.

Sandy, understandably, freaks out.  The kids call the police, who arrive and search the base of the cliff, but are unable to find a body.

Sandy's friends are all willing to chalk off the experience as weird but ultimately unimportant - the girl probably knew a safe way down, and then ran off - but Sandy herself thinks something far more sinister is going on.  And this is, of course, the kind of movie where such suspicions are well-founded.

Forget Me Not is a tale of ghostly vengeance.  It's a fairly low budget production, a fact that occasionally undermines it.  For instance, there's a scene where someone is trapped in a "pit", and it's pretty obvious that the walls of the alleged pit are fake.  I actually saw them shift at one point.

Fortunately, the limited resources don't seem to have extended to the cast.  They are mostly pretty good in their roles, even if they're almost all clearly much older than the characters they are portraying.

Said characters, it should be noted, are frequently not especially nice people.  They're certainly not all bad enough to merit being murdered, but they're in a horror film, so I don't think it is much of a spoiler to tell you that grisly fates are definitely on the cards for at least some of them!

The variety and execution of kill scenes is a common metric of quality for hardcore fans of horror films, and if it's one that is important to you, I think Forget Me Not should satisfy.  The film's deaths are nicely varied and come with decent regularity.  The staging is not always the best, as already noted, but some are done well and there is some nicely creepy make-up at times, even if in many cases the 'spooky monsters' don't do a lot more than stand around looking ghastly.

Probably my favourite sequence of the film, though, has nothing to do with the kills.  It's an early section where we see Sandy getting ready for her day, which is intercut with a comatose hospital patient going through a similar process at the hands of her carers.  It's quite nicely done, and pleasingly avoids being too skeevy, which it could easily have become given that it involves two attractive young women bathing and getting dressed.

Overall, Forget Me Not doesn't break much new ground, but it's a relatively solid low budget horror offering.

 

The Banana Splits Movie (2019)

 

Harley Williams is a huge fan of "The Banana Splits", a successful children's television series featuring four animatronic characters —Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper, and Snorky— along with their human co-star Stevie. As a surprise birthday present, his mother Beth takes him, with his step-father Mitch, step-brother Austin and his classmate Zoe, to a live taping of the show.

Unknown to the family, or to any of the other fans queuing to get in, the studio's new vice president has decided that this will be the show's final ever episode: he considers the program an embarrassing throwback that's well past its use-by date.

However, when the animatronic denizens of the show get wind of this decision, they have different ideas, and are willing to go to any lengths to ensure the show does go on ...

This comedy horror film is ostensibly based on, and uses the characters from, the real life Banana Splits television series.  This show (which used people in costumes, of course, not implausibly sophisticated robots) ran for 2 seasons in the late 60s, but then enjoyed another 12 years of screening in syndication.  I watched them as a kid in the mid to late 70s.

I suspect the computer game Five Nights At Freddy's is probably the real inspiration, but the Banana Splits were existing designs that doubtless proved a lot cheaper to license.  Making a horror film based on the franchise did come with some other costs, though: the movie was the target of a review bombing campaign from fans of the real TV program, who were outraged at the 'desecration' of their childhood memories.  

I, on the other hand, am fully on board with the 'desecration', as long as then movie is any good.  And it is, in fact, a pretty good example of the kind of film it sets out to be.  It's not high art by any means, but overall it's an effective and entertaining little bit of gory horror-comedy.  Certainly a far more engaging watch than the similarly themed Willy's Wonderland.

Key to this film's entertainment value is Dani Kind's performance as Harley's mother Beth.  She channels great, manic "Mama Bear" energy as her character swings from appalled horror at the unfolding carnage to "nobody messes with my kids" avenging fury.

While Beth's arc is the most fun, and gives Kind plenty to do, I was happy with all the other performances as well.  All of the cast seem to be embracing the script's goofily macabre vibe and just going with it, which keeps things fun and rollicking even as the body count escalates

Speaking of escalation, I enjoyed the film's structuring of the Splits' rampage.  Their early murders are of pretty awful people, band you might even cheer the 'bad guys' on a bit for one or two of them, but once their homicidal impulses are unleashed, they rapidly become (almost) wholly indiscriminate.  The gore and the likeability of the victims pretty much rise in parallel.

Oh, and one other thing the film gets absolutely right, and which wins it huge points with my inner child: Snorky is BEST BANANA.

#TeamSnorkyForLife