Category: ⓏⒺⓇⓄ
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Initially middling–and very dated in rather cringe-y ways–comedy about high school track coach Goldie Hawn talking back to her male boss (a cartoonish, but great, Bruce McGill) and getting transferred to be a football coach in the (eighties mixed race) ghetto high school! Too bad her literally evil ex-husband James Keach is pissed off about…
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Terribly acted–a combination of the script, the direction, and (mostly) the actors–post-apocalyptic zombie picture from Romero. Lacks any personality (probably because Romero had to shoot it in Toronto instead of DEAD central (Romero’s native Pittsburgh). Simon Baker’s a really, really, really bad lead. Eugene Clark’s awesome as the lead zombie (they get smarter in this…
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Cheaply animated family-targeted KING KONG adaptation, complete with (recycled?) original songs from famous Disney songwriters the Sherman Brothers. Sadly none of the songs are for Kong; all of them (all three of them) are pretty generic and have nothing to do with the movie’s specifics. The bad script is more damaging than the cheap animation.…
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Scare-free TV movie about a transatlantic flight under attack from vengeful spirits. The story goes from disaster movie tropes followed by haunted house movie tropes without much enthusiasm from anyone involved, though William Shatner does occasionally give his material a gnaw. It’s the peculiar example of when a bad movie isn’t bad in the right…
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Atrocious “family” “comedy” about Tony Randall dragging his family into his experimental underwater house of the future to prove the validity of the project to boss Jim Backus. Janet Leigh plays Randall’s wife (she could’ve done a lot better); she’s terrified of water. Their kids are in a band. The band comes along (including very…
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Vapid multigenerational Irish family epic about Oliver Parker, Dennis Price, and Dermot Walsh running the family copper mine and having to contend with the locals. Margaret Lockwood plays the woman who enraptures the first generation of sons, which leads to the problems for the next generation’s. Runs just under 100 minutes, has about a scene…
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Lower budget horror movie has some impressive technicals–lots of solid CGI to make a yacht in terrible storm conditions work–but confuses narrative tricks with narrative. Single mum (sorry, mom–while filmed in Australia with an Australian cast, they’re playing Floridians, which might explain some things) Melissa George goes boating with potential beau Michael Dorman and his…
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Here’s an all-encompassing theory to explain The Godfather Part III, based only on on-screen evidence (i.e. ignoring production woes, casting woes, rewrites, budget and schedule comprises, and whatever else). Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo hate everyone in the film and everyone who will ever watch the film—maybe Coppola didn’t cast daughter Sofia Coppola in…
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The Predator has a really short present action, which is both good and bad. Good because one wouldn’t want to see screenwriters Fred Dekker and director Black try for longer, bad because… well, it gets pretty dumb how fast things move along. Dekker and Black don’t do a good job with the expository speech (for…
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At one point during Hostages, I thought there might actually be a good performance in it somewhere. Czech freedom fighter Katina Paxinou faces off with her mother over her Resistance work. It has the potential for a good moment, turns out it’s just an adequate one (amid the sea of inadequate ones in the film).…
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The only impressive thing about The Toy Wife (not good, not admirable) is the film’s ability to keep going professionally, no matter how stupid it gets. There are no easy outs in the picture; even when people start dying off to up the tragedy, there’s still a seemingly endless amount of run time remaining. The…
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When I decided to write about Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy, it was because I wanted to make the wee dick move of putting it in Stop Button’s rarely used “Cult” category. Thought it’d be funny. Controversy, which never suggests it’ll be anything but writer-director-star Mahoney setting up a flimsy straw man and knocking…
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Tell Your Children, or Reefer Madness, is sort of mundanely bad. Sure, Carl Pierson’s editing somehow pads shots to make the sixty-six minute movie drag even more than it does because of the terrible script and bad acting, but the script is just dumb and bad. There’s nothing exciting about it, other than to see…
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There may be a pseudo-sly Speed reference in The Lake House, which reunites stars Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, but it’s a spoiler. Unfortunately it is not Bullock’s Speed 2 co-star Jason Patric as her wet towel boyfriend (Patric infamously replaced Reeves in the sequel). Instead, Dylan Walsh is the wet towel boyfriend. His performance…
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Mister Buddwing is kind of amazing. And exceptional. But only if both those descriptors are used as pejoratives. Like. Wow. What a mess it is. What’s funny is how director Mann maybe sees what he’s trying to do with the film but doesn’t see how he’s not achieving it. The film wants to be edgy…
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If Unbreakable wasn’t a one hour and forty-six minute self-aggrandizement from wannabe mainstream-auteur (notice, not mainstream auteur) Shyamalan, it’d somehow be even worse. Because at least if Shyamalan is intentionally doing all these things, making all these choices, it’s a cohesive flop. If he’s not, if the mishmash elements are actually mishmash (like, you know,…
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Just because you can get Patrick Wilson to say “Call me, Oceanmaster!” over and over again with a straight face doesn’t necessarily mean you should have Patrick Wilson say “Call me, Oceanmaster!” over and over again. Unless director James Wan was just trying to get my wife to laugh uproariously. Every time. Because every time…
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I want to say nice things about The Descent. Or, more… I wish I could say nice things about The Descent. There are some nice things to say about it–the production values are strong, Marshall’s composition is decent, Sam McCurdy’s photography is good. It’s rarely boring–though it does drag a little. Tedious without being boring.…
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For most of the movie, Venom’s greatest strength is its potential. It certainly seems like lead Tom Hardy can do anything but as things progress, it becomes more and more obvious the potential is an illusion. Director Fleischer just hasn’t done a big action sequence yet, so the movie hasn’t shown its hand–Fleischer’s action sequences…
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Wholly terrible serial about infinitely stupid master detective Jack Mulhall, whose only idea is ever to go start a fight at the sailor bar/gang headquarters. Sometimes involving being in makeup, though not particularly good makeup. Serial is never amazing, there are rarely exploits; unfortunately there’s a lot of clutching hand shots throughout, menacing unknowing victims…
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Sleepwalkers is a very peculiar motion picture. Director Garris never quite composes the shot right, even though he’s really close. Maybe he needs a wider frame or just to zoom out a bit. Instead it always looks like he’s shooting for the home video pan and scan. Rodney Charters’s photography is totally fine, unless they’re…
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The Dark Tower is the story of unremarkable white kid Tom Taylor–wait, he’s supposed to be eleven? No way. Anyway, it’s the story of unremarkable white teenager Tom Taylor who discovers, no, his visions are real and he is a wizard and he’s going to travel to another dimension and bring a legendary hero back…
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The only good thing about Halloween II are the end credits. They run like nine minutes, meaning the movie is closer to ninety-five minutes than 105. Even though the ninety-five minutes feels like an eternity. The movie starts with director Zombie making fun of the idea of making another Halloween II. He’s not remaking Halloween…
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Halloween is very loud. It’s about the only thing director Zombie keeps consistent throughout. It gets loud. It starts kind of quiet–comparatively–then gets loud. Jump scares always have some noise. But once the jump scares are every two seconds, there’s just loud noise. Giant spree killer Tyler Mane destroys a house in the third act,…
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The Incredible Hulk Returns is severely lacking. It’s severely lacking pretty much everything. Despite being set in and filmed in Los Angeles, the movie looks generic and constrained–director Corea has a truly exceptional aversion to establishing shots. The interior shots often have a different visual feel. More like video (Returns was shot on film, but…
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Halloween never met a MacGuffin it didn’t embrace. Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and director Gordon’s script strings together MacGuffins to make the plot. And if it’s not a MacGuffin, it’s something they’re not going to do anything with. With a handful of exceptions, Halloween is usually at least reasonably acted. Sure, everyone lives in a…
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Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers doesn’t even run ninety minutes and gets boring fast; the last twenty minutes are completely mind-numbing. Nothing makes sense, characters act without motive, cults cult without purpose, it just goes on and on. At least Donald Pleasence is lucky enough to get knocked out for a bunch of it.…
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Dick Tracy starts reasonably strong, which one forgets as the serial plods through the near five hours of its fifteen chapters. The first chapter’s a decent enough pilot, with lead Ralph Byrd actually solving a crime, something he doesn’t really do later on. It doesn’t even open with him, instead there’s a creepy introduction to…
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I’m going to start by saying some positive things about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. It has fantastic CG. Wow is cinematographer Henry Braham truly inept at compositing it with live footage, but the CG is fantastic. Whether it’s the exploding spaceships or exploding planets or the genetically engineered, bipedal racoon, the CG is…
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It’d be nice if A Quiet Place were exasperating. If, after seventy or eighty minutes of building tension, the finale somehow disappointed. It doesn’t. It’s not exactly predictable, but by the time it arrives, it’s been obvious for a while the movie’s not really going anywhere. The film’s split into three days. The first day…
The Stop Button 