The Watcher 5
Tiny Reviews for Fair Play / The Creator / V/H/S/85 / Pet Sematary: Bloodlines / The Master Gardener / Ballerina / Totally Killers / The Nun 2 The Exorcist: Believer and many more
Tiny reviews for:
Seconds (1966) ★★★★★
Fair Play (2023) ★★★★★
V/H/S/85 (2023) ★★★★★
The Creator (2023) ★★★★☆
Ballerina (2023) ★★★★☆
Master Gardener (2023) ★★★★☆
Totally Killer (2023) ★★★★☆
All Fun and Games (2023) ★★★☆☆
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023) ★★★☆☆
The Nun (2018) ★★★☆☆
The Nun II (2023) ★★★☆☆
The Exorcist: Believer (2023) ★★★☆☆
An Outlaw (1964) ★★★☆☆
Bull (2021) ★★★☆☆
The Breach (2022) ★★☆☆☆
Bad City (2022) ★★☆☆☆
The Ones You Didn’t Burn (2022) ★★☆☆☆
A Town called Bastard (1971) ★★☆☆☆
Slotherhouse (2023) ★★☆☆☆
Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) ☆☆☆☆☆
Natty Knocks (2023) ☆☆☆☆☆
Seconds (1966) ★★★★★ A bank manager agrees to a deal by a mysterious company to undergo plastic surgery and be reborn in a new life as an artist, only to find himself with the face of Rock Hudson in a kafkaesque nightmare. The film is a parable on escaping societal boundaries and enjoying new supposedly freedoms with naked hippie girls and drinks and parties, just to demolish these as delusions and sending it's protagonist on a search for himself, when ultimately, he only finds death. It's the weirdest thing Hudson has done for sure, and it's famous for a whole variety of things, from giving Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys a hyperparanoid cinema experience which led him to not watch a movie in theater until the release of E.T., to the highly innovative camera work by James Wong Howe, to the various censorships and controversies it went through. It's a dazzling and desorienting experience and surely this is one of the most daring things that ever came out of Hollywood. It's quite unthinkable that something like this would be produced there, today, where every movie is caught in the marketing playbook and prescreenings are grinding off all the edges of any subversive messaging there might be. One might think a mysterious company should offer todays hollywood directors a deal, but, eh.
Fair Play (2023) ★★★★★ Slick thriller about a couple in high finance with an insecure man not coming to terms with the success and rise of his fiancee. It's a beautifully shot film showing interpersonal power dynamics as a punching ball in the cut-throat world of trading. Story and script follows a near perfect flow with strong sounddesign and lighting, while strong acting performances underline a script which doesn't clear cut who is good or bad, where lines are blurry and everyone becomes a victim as a metaphor for the eat-or-be-eaten style of predatory capitalism, where, to quote Emilys boss: "accountability and blame are irrelevant".
V/H/S/85 (2023) ★★★★★ I always liked the V/H/S movies and this one is the most clever and fun entry in the series. This time they intertwined the segments featuring some short weird interstitials, which gives the movie a MTV zapping feel even more so than its predecessors, but the stories this time are more blody and gory and more sopisticated than before, sometimes they are even a fascinating watch, something you could not say of the previous ones. V/H/S always was daring and gave newish filmmakers a space to kinda experiment with fun and guts and the movies sometimes failed for it. But this one gets pretty much everything right, and it's whole lotta fun watching it.
The Creator (2023) ★★★★☆ A visually stunning scifi blockbuster which stumbles over it's kitschy script which doesn't really follow through with its more interesting questions about transhumanism. I'm a visual guy so i can get a lot out of this, but even then the movie looks like a mashup of District-9 and some Simon Stalenhag illustrations, where the scifi doesn't take place in african slums but in asian landscapes. The story pretends to examine transhuman evolution but doesn't really tell us much about that, except that the intelligent machines are from human origin, which, duh? The rest is an all too kitschy lost love plot with a guy protecting a machine child, which all stays a bit too flat and distanced to make you really feel with the protagonists. It's a good movie and i'm a bit picky here. I had a good time and it has enough ideas to keep you entertained and engaged, but it's not great and given that AGI is the hot topic these days it's also a wasted opportunity.
Ballerina (2023) ★★★★☆ A bodyguard seeks revenge for her best friend who was killed by sex traffickers. I'm a bit over the Female Badass Vigilante stuff following the always same Nikita-script, but this was a fairly original take on the trope. The fight scenes were well choreographed and shot, and i liked some of the not-too-weird but whimsical settings of some of the scenes and the burning Lamborghini was just a great end point for this flick. Good stuff.
Master Gardener (2023) ★★★★☆ A slow burn from Paul Schrader which tells a story about redemption in a beautiful shot metaphor, where the titular garden becomes a visual canvas, getting built up, transformed and destroyed with the developing story. It's a bit on the nose with an ex-nazi assassin ridden with guilt saving the black grand-nice from her past in drugs and crime, but it does so with enough mesmerizing style to keep you hooked to its ebbs and flows.
Totally Killer (2023) ★★★★☆ Fun slasher comedy that mashes Back To The Future and the typical highschool horror flick. It's actually clever at times, and has some nice moments in which it comments on contemporary safetyism, and while the settup is a bit too loose and fast for my taste, i like what it does with all the 'oh god i know this guy when he was old'-stuff. But it's also a bit of a sloppy script with stuff that just falls into place without establishing it. Still, it's a fun ride, even hilarious sometimes, and it's entertaining throughout.
All Fun and Games (2023) ★★★☆☆ Kids bring home a haunted knife from an abandoned house in Salem which, obviously, bad idea. This is a good, solid demon horrorfilm which provides it's possession story without any nonsense and has the guts to be, despite it's aiming at a young adult audience, actually violent and mean. I can't stand some of the visual styles though, especially the fast-shaky-filmed possession scenes, and the movie also just checks in on all the tropes of demon movies ever filmed. But at little over 70 minutes it's also short enough to be on point and focus on what it wants to be, and it does a good job at that.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023) ★★★☆☆ Modernization of Frankenstein in a black hood which I would've liked more if it explored the cultural themes it hits on earlier more in depth and examined of the dynamics of street life with gangs, drugs and crime. Instead of that, it becomes a straightforward horror after the first act stumbling over some inconsistencies and it's low budget. But the movie tries something and while it doesn't entirely succeed, it has it's heart in the right place which is more than you can say about most of the other Frankenstein-retellings which came out in the last years.
The Nun (2018) ★★★☆☆ While this is not a good movie, it has enough going for it to entertain you. I expected nothing and got some good visual ideas and FX, some actually creepy shots and cool creature design. The script is unoriginal and the movie relies on constant jump scares, but it kind of works, if you give up on sense and meaning or a story that says more than 'boo'.
The Nun II (2023) ★★★☆☆ Still not a good movie, but it is an improvement compared to the first. We still get good creature FX and the demon manifestations are slightly less random than in the first one. The story has a tad more meat on it's bones, but still there are a lot of inconsistencies and dull stuff in the script. Another entertaining jumpscare flick from House Wan, but nothing more, and maybe it doesn't need to be anything but that.
The Exorcist: Believer (2023) ★★★☆☆ The best thing you can say about Believer is that it's the best of all Exorcist-sequels. While it does have it's inconsistencies and wasted opportunities, like the completely detached return of Linda Blair for about two seconds, it has some fairly creepy moments and interesting ideas, e.g. the double possession is an okay spin and works good enough. I also can't shake the feeling it tries to say something about fundamentalist religious sects in the US, especially about Evangelicalism, but it stays on the surface at best and doesn't really go there. The movie tries it's hands at the naturalistic and realistic camera style of the original, which masterfully contrasted this imagery with the atmospheric possession shots exploding in pea soup, but this one doesn't take it's time to develop the necessary tension to get there and then wants to makes up for it with not too gory violence that also shortcuts character arcs. Being the best Exorcist-sequel doesn't say much: it's still a lukewarm experience, and the original is still best viewed as a standalone classic masterpiece of horror cinema.
An Outlaw (1964) ★★★☆☆ Nice gangster thriller from Japan with a jazzy soundtrack in which an assassin kills an innocent man and seeks revenge. An Outlaw follows too many sideplots in the middle which distracts, but it never strays too far away to be confusing, and it makes up for it by a thrilling third act when the movie becomes the straightforward revenge story with a bloody climax i hoped for. It looks a bit dated and the pacing is a bit off, and i wish it was shot with a bit more finesse it only hints at sometimes to justify its cool soundtrack, but therefore you get some interesting shots from Kowloon.
Bull (2021) ★★★☆☆ Ten years after a mafia guy gets crossed by his gang, he goes on a revenge spree to find his son. A gritty and dark thriller with bloody outbursts of extreme violence, this film could use some relatable or likeable characters to root for, but it's too obsessed with telling it's grim storyline which doesn't allow for any nuance or humanity to be shown. Everybody is angry, all the time, and it's kind of annoying. But it's also well directed (albeit sometimes shot in stupid HDR-photography, which is always a bad sign), and at the very end the movie even shows a tiny bit of cleverness that would elevate it above the other movies of it's kind, if it wouldn't only be hinted at.
The Breach (2022) ★★☆☆☆ Low Budget cosmic horror flick which makes up for mediocre acting and camera work with some ghastly practival gore FX and a not uninteresting but also not very original storyline. The Breach takes some cues from Color out of Space but lacks Nicolas Cage, while the lovecraftian classic From Beyond and Carpenters The Thing are at least two leagues above this effort. But it's worthwhile and not a waste of time if you like this kind of stuff.
Fun sidenote: I'm pretty sure that one idea of the movie — the mad scientist who worked at CERN where they performed 'black magic' —, is based on the CERN ritual hoax some pranksters played in 2016 riffing on some conspiracy theories that the particle collider could open the gates to hell. The film basically uses this scenario and imagines a mad scientist continuing his work at a cabin in the woods.
Bad City (2022) ★★☆☆☆ Japanese crime drama that wants to tell a big scale story about citywide collusion of gangs, cops and corrupt politics, but doesn't have the punch nor the budget to follow through with it. The fighting scenes are weirdly ungripping with bad stunts and editing taking away any kinetic energy to make it pop. I think they wanted to go for some realism here, but some moments actually hint at something like martial arts choreography, so i think they just didn't know how to pull it of. The whole endeavor also is supported by a bad soundtrack that doesn't fit the scenes and sounds like stock music or some demo tracks for a synth software. This movie wants to be way more than it can offer, and it doesn't make up for it with a clever script or at least some original ideas.
The Ones You Didn’t Burn (2022) ★★☆☆☆ Two siblings return to their farm home after the suicide of their father to sell off the land when their past catches up with them. Subtle witch horror that thinks it's creepier than it is and manages to be quite a bore, despite only running for 70 minutes -- but it also has a solid script and good performances by it's main actors running for it. Some nice camera work makes it worth your time too, so it's okay.
A Town called Bastard (1971) ★★☆☆☆ Starts out as a straightforward revenge story in which mexican revolutionaries shoot a priest and his whole congregation, when ten years later a widow returns to the titular town called 'bastard' and sets a bounty on those who killed her husband. This could've been a gritty, mean movie, but becomes a convoluted mess with too many sidestories. Random scenes which mean nothing, bad sound, and a script that is full of fake epic dialogue full of preacherous salmons make this even a bore, despite the flick being a pretty violent one. Getting rid of Telly Savalas in the first act also doesn't help.
Slotherhouse (2023) ★★☆☆☆ Slotherhouse is a horror comedy that ultimately fails at both comedy and horror. If you know the basic plot, a killer sloth invading a college dorm, you know exactly what you get without any surprises. You can say the movie is pretty aware of what it is and doesn't want to be anything beyond that: Dumb splatter fun for the memeing age, which exists solely for the reason that sloths are an internet favorite — but it's not mean enough to kick your butt and be a good splatterfest, nor is it funny enough to really make you laugh. This one is for r/mildlyinteresting.
Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) ☆☆☆☆☆ An utter mess, confusing and incomprehensible, this unnecessary prequel tries to tell the stories of good old Jud Crandall and zombie-kid Timmy Baterman who was buried in the pet sematary by his insane father Bill. I watched this movie thirtytwo times now (i didn't) and i haven't found one scene which makes sense. Not one. Things just keep happening for no reason and you constantly question the intelligence of all characters, who make one dumb move after the other. I guess the only reason why i give this one star is because it's not from The Asylum or something? I don't know. Sometimes dead indeed is better.
Natty Knocks (2023) ☆☆☆☆☆ Wow this is bad. Bloated with so much unnecessary stuff it tries to put everything ever even remotly associated with horror into one trashy flick and then it stumbles over it's crappy script. This, erm, movie demands so much suspense of disbelieve in the worst sense, when characters hide under tables which are so tall and open that you'd see the guy from a mile away, when kids steal copper wire to get fifty bucks to save a smartphone from being cancelled -- which kid steals copper wire of all tings? -- that at some point you just give up. It also fails at being just a fun splatter movie or giving gorehounds a bloody good time at least. It's just terrible in all aspects. Sad for some of the actors who're trying at least, they even got Robert Englund for some reason.