Category Archives: Half-assed

Films in this category have something to offer but also have one or more flaws that detract from the experience. Still, these movies are probably better than most of the shit on Netflix.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

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This “moviefilm” could have been simply called Borat 2 but clearly Sacha Baron Cohen figured, why not have an 18 word title instead? Considering that Borat 1 had a 12 word title, a troublesome pattern is emerging, and that’s far from the least troubling pattern in the Borat franchise.

Borat is a terrible character and you can rest assured that Cohen has not toned things down in any way for the sequel, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Borat is just as offensive as ever, a racist, misogynistic reporter travelling through the U.S. and A., on a mission to gift a monkey to Vice President Pence as a tribute to Trump’s great success in undoing a hundred years’ worth of human rights. The difference this time is that everyone in America has seen his first movie so it’s much harder for him to sneak up on anyone. Fortunately for him, his non-male son Tutar (Maria Bakalova) stowed away in the money cage, and she has always wanted to follow in her journalist father’s footsteps. Unfortunately for Borat, he does not believe women can be journalists (or really anything other than residents of cages). Unfortunately for both, Tutar had to eat the monkey to survive the trip to America. So naturally, Borat decides to gift his daughter to Pence instead. And off we go on an adventure that includes Borat embarrassing a number of people who should know better, most notably Rudy Giuliani, who I expected to have been better coached by his friends in the KGB in the art of kompromat.

In 2006, I have to admit that I enjoyed Borat’s first moviefilm. Who could believe that people would say such outrageous things on camera after being offered a little bait by Cohen? It seemed unbelievable at the time. Fast forward to 2020, where no matter what Borat “tricks” people into saying, it pales in comparison to what happens every day on President Trump’s Twitter feed, or any given afternoon at Giuliani’s hotel suite. Cohen’s brand of shock humour seems almost quaint in comparison, which is terrifying.

For all its improvised scenes, Borat 2 has a remarkably focused and cohesive narrative, and contains quite a few funny character moments. But by nature, it also serves as a near-constant reminder of the ongoing nightmare that is American politics, which for me sucked all the fun out of the movie. No matter how hard Cohen and Bakalova tried (and they tried hard), I just can’t laugh at this stuff right now.

Cadaver

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Leonora’s family is starving. In the wake of a nuclear event, everyone is starving. Leonora (Gitte Witt) and husband Jacob (Thomas Gullestad) are doing their best to keep their young daughter Alice (Tuva Olivia Remman) safe in an increasingly violent and unsettled world, but they cannot put enough food in her belly. Leonora was an actress in the time before the apocalypse so she may not have needed much convincing to take in the new play being mounted in an abandoned hotel, but considering the pay-what-you-can tickets include dinner, it’s a done deal.

The dinner is real enough, but the play turns out to be more like interactive theatre, which is enough to spoil even a starved belly’s appetite. Mathias’ (Thorbjørn Harr) particular brand of dinner theatre requires patrons to wear masks as they discover the actors in different scenarios, macabre or shocking or enticing. But the show blurs the line between performance and reality; the masked guests grow increasingly weary as they pass from one dreadful scene to another. But when Alice goes missing, Leonora’s frantic search turns up some uncomfortable truths and the guests, transforming from spectators to spectacle, must confront the true cost of an evening’s entertainment.

Cadaver has an interesting premise and a disappointing follow-through. It cultivates an atmosphere of dread and tension capably but resolves them predictably. Writer-director Jarand Herdal sets his horror in a world I’d like to know more about but then all but shuts it out, locking down his subjects in an old hotel, the likes of which we’ve seen before, and seen better.

The guests’ desperation and Mathias’ instinct for survival are the most banal and expected conditions in this post-apocalyptic world. I suspect the more interesting stories were taking place out in the streets, just beyond the hotel’s doors.

Countdown

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Quinn (Elizabeth Lail) is a young nurse working in a hospital. She befriends a teenage patient who was injured in a car accident and awaiting surgery. Evan (Dillon Lane) is very nervous about the surgery, and Quinn’s reassurance doesn’t help – he has an app on his phone that predicts the exact moment of his death, and guess when his time’s up? That’s right, the very next day, scheduled mid-surgery. Quinn is dismissive on the app but Evan explains his certainty; at a recent party, his girlfriend and a bunch of friends had used the app as a drinking game. Everyone had downloaded it, and the person nearest to his or her death had to take a shot. Evan’s girlfriend drank the shot – her countdown to death was just 3 hours away. She wisely turned down a ride from drunken Evan but wound up dead anyway, and Evan crashed his car, a tree limb stabbing through the passenger seat where his girlfriend would have been sitting. At shift exchange, Quinn relays this conversation with her peers, and all are excited to download it themselves. Most have countdowns decades away, meaning long lives ahead, but Quinn’s clock is counting down from just 3 days from now.

Quinn’s little sister Jordan (Talitha Bateman) is scheduled to die right around the same time, so they team up with fellow near-deather Matt (Jordan Calloway) to seek out any possibility of extending their lives, including the help of a priest and some salt. The thing about death, though, is that it comes for everyone.

This movie isn’t exactly going to uplift the genre or defy expectations or win awards, but for what it is, it’s pretty decent. The countdown clock is an effective if often-used tool. Elizabeth Lail isn’t exactly given first-rate material to work with, but she’s a good actor and the character’s not a ditz, and those things alone put Countdown in the top half of all horror movies. The story’s generic and predictable but the jump scares still work enough to get your heart pumping, and that’s always worth something in the horror genre. If you’re up for a little fate-dodging, and are prepared to meet Death himself, choose Countdown, but leave your phone in another room.

Zombillenium

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Hector gave up his passion for music when his wife died. He put his young daughter in boarding school and he went to work to provide for her, even though his job as a safety inspector hasn’t exactly made him popular. One day, after dropping his daughter off at school, he’s off to Zombillenium, a monster-themed amusement park, where he suspects his inspection might turn up some violations.

What Hector’s inspection actually reveals is that the theme park us run and staffed by actual monsters, it’s a safe haven where monsters like mummies, vampires, werewolves, skeletons, and witches have hidden in plain sight, away from human persecution. The bad news is that to protect the secret, the park manager has to kill Hector. The good news is that Hector, now a zombie, has a job for life at Zombillenium. Or well, a job for the next few days, unless business really picks up or foreign investors take an interest. As it is, only a handsome, sparkly vampire who bears a striking resemblance to Robert Pattinson draws in any crowd.

This is an animated film on Netflix, dubbed in English from the original French. However, it remains in essence and heart, a very French film. The zombies threaten to strike and the vampires threaten to overthrow the management to instill a vampire-elite class system. It lacks the energy and manic story-telling of an American cartoon. The monsters have to find a way to turn a profit or else literally face going to hell.

Zombillenium is not a great movie. It’s meandering, it cares too little about orphaning a young girl, it’s too bland for adults to enjoy yet the monsters are weirdly sexualized- and I don’t just mean the hunky vampire. Hector the dad goes from business man dad to ripped zombie (and forever shirtless); Gretchen the witch has a tramp stamp visible thanks to low-slung jeans and a very cropped top. I’m confused about for whom this movie intended, but I’m pretty confident it won’t be enjoyed by many.

Nocturne

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Juliet and Vivian are twin sisters studying at an elite academy of the arts. They both study piano, they both hope to be classical musicians, and they both want to go to Julliard. It is widely thought that Vivian (Madison Iseman) is the more talented twin, and Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) the less successful. It is tough having such fierce competition and such a direct comparison; Vivian isn’t just the better musician, but the better student, the better daughter, the better friend, the better girlfriend. Oh, and she just got in to Julliard. Juliet did not.

It would seem Juliet it is in for a lifetime of second place, but a suicide at her school opens her up to the possibility of a Faustian bargain – is she desperate enough to sell out her own sister, or, just maybe, is getting to sell out her sister the whole point? Nocturne unravels sibling rivalry on a whole new level, and in a way that keeps you guessing as to how much this “deal with the devil” is a literal event, and how much is perhaps just the very idea of it empowering Juliet to come out of her sister’s shadown and challenge her for supremacy. Oh boy.

Director Zu Quirke sidesteps easy chills and obvious gore in favour of something that is more subtle, and far more unsettling. With teenage protagonists you expect something flashy and slashy, blow out parties and surrendered virginities, but this horror is of a more creeping variety, eerie and unknown.

The cast is uniformly solid, but Iseman and Sweeney deliver spell-binding performances that make the tragic relationship between sisters so difficult to crack but so interesting to watch and interpret. Your sympathies may switch teams several times before the last act, which is predictable, yes, but dizzying and vital. The horror bits are actually Quirke’s most conventional beats; her strength is in story-telling. The academic setting is both cutthroat and ripe for predation and exploitation. The interesting is figuring out who, or what, is behind it all.

Nocturne is one of four “Welcome to the Blumhouse” horror offered in a bundle on Amazon Prime. Stay tuned for more reviews, and be sure to let us know if you’ve taken the plunge.

The Glorias

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Gloria Steinem is 86 years old; I wonder how she feels about getting the biopic treatment while she’s still alive. She was a leader for the American feminist movement in the 60s and 70s. She is a journalist, activist, and the co-founder of Ms. magazine.

At least four actors portray Steinem in the various stages of her life, including Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander. Director Julie Taymor clearly wants to impress us with a litany of Steinem’s experiences, influences, and achievements. There are a lot. So many they start to lose their power, they start to feel less real. Which is counter-productive to the goal of celebrating Steinem’s life. Reduced to a mere character, we never get a complete sense of who Gloria is as a person, Taymor gets trapped in an achievement-oriented cycle that feels more like separate segments in a shared universe than a narrative running like a river through a single life.

Individually, a lot of these chunks work. The talent is there, and the story-telling is inventive. Unfortunately, Taymor’s flair as a director doesn’t seem suited to Gloria’s no-nonsense attitude. There is almost certainly an interesting story here, I’m just not sure this script ever had a firm grip on it, despite Taymor’s accumulation of gifted actors and clever staging. It feels more invested in painting a fuller picture of history than it serves Steinem’s particular place within it.

Alien Addiction

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Riko (Jimi Jackson) is what you might generously call a man-child. He’s fully grown but lives with his Auntie (Veronica Edwards), plays role playing game Galaxy Gods with his friends in her basement, gets high and generally fucks about.

Throughout the history of science fiction, we have sent many fictional scientists and doctors to make first contact with aliens, but writer-director Shae Sterling tries a different approach with good-for-nothing stoner, Riko. That turns out to be quite fortuitous as the aliens, Jeff (Steven Samuel Johnston) and Gurgus (Mel Price), are just here to party. Meanwhile, alien blogger Pete (Thomas Sainsbury) thinks he’s finally hit pay dirt. Aliens have touched down in New Zealand and he’s going to be the one to introduce them to the world. Huzzah!

Will you like this film? Not everyone will. It serves a niche market at the intersection of crude humour and science fiction. I was totally up for the stoner humour, and didn’t flinch too much at the scatological stuff although that’s largely not my bag, and I allowed for more “probing” comments than I normally tolerate. I draw the line, however, at the fat jokes, and this movie doesn’t just make fat jokes, it makes Jacinta (JoJo Waaka) the joke, and I felt bad being complicit as au audience member.

It’s too bad because this film truly does have its moments, not to mention a certain New Zealand charm. But in 2020, such mean-spirited pot shots just feel unfair and out of place. Alien Addiction was doing fine without them.

Jimi Jackson is…well, he’s exactly what the character demands. He’s loose, he’s chuckle-heavy, he is surprisingly cool with his new alien friends. This movie was never going to win any awards, it’s here to make you laugh, and to subvert some of the common sci-fi tropes. If it had done that without needing to fat-shame anyone, I could have endorsed that.

The Craft

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Confession: I had never seen this movie before tonight. Sean thinks this is shocking, like I had somehow missed out on some pivotal 90s moment and I’m not a fully formed human adult because of it. I think it’s more shocking that he DID see it, considering that in 1996, he was not a teenage girl.

The Craft in question is witchcraft. Like many young girls before them, social outcasts Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell), and Rochelle (Rachel True) are tempted by the dark arts. It’s a phase that attracts many teenage girls; witchcraft offers a sense of control over your own life that a lot of girls are seeking, a feeling of empowerment and self-actualization that is often denied them. Nancy is oppressed by a cruel step father, Bonnie is covered in scars, and Rochelle is bullied by a swim team-mate. They all wish things could be different, but nothing changes until their coven finds the all-important fourth, new girl Sarah (Robin Tunney), who completes their circle and actually summons some power.

Being teenage girls, they exact revenge on those who have wronged them, but that first taste of power goes to their pointy-hatted heads and things get out of hand.

I always imagined that this was a scary movie and it’s really not, which I should have guessed because my imagination is nearly always much worse than reality (last week I had a dream that I was being chased by a serial killer and it wasn’t a nightmare – what is wrong with me???). But I don’t regret missing out because I really wasn’t. Turns out, this is kind of a crappy movie. I did not need it in my life and chances are you don’t need it in yours. If you’ve seen it – heck, even if you loved it – that’s cool, I get it. Sometimes a movie is just exactly what we needed at that time. It’s not likely to win over any new fans, but that’s okay because *dramatic drumming of the cauldron, please*: there’s a sequel!

Yes, it’s 24 years later, but that’s what we do now. We drop in on movie characters a generation later just to see what’s shaking. We recently got reacquainted with Bill and Ted 29 years after their Bogus Journey. Heck, we recently revisited Mary Poppins 54 years after we first made her acquaintance. Except this time we’re not catching up with old friends so much as making new ones. The Craft: Legacy takes place 20 years after the first one, with all new teenage girls forming a coven, one or some of whom are tangentially related (via photograph anyway) to Nancy (Balk) of the first film. It’s a loose sequel, let’s say, but you don’t have long to wait: you can stream it October 28th.

For more discussion, and more release dates for movies this month, check us out on Youtube and consider subscribing – it’s free!

Crawl (mistakes were made)

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Crawl is a horror movie available on Amazon Prime in which a young woman named Haley (Kaya Scodelario) attempts to save her father during a hurricane but ends up trapped with him in a flooding house filled not just with water, but also alligators.

I’m not normally one to blame the victim, but people in horror movies routinely make terrible decisions while we yell pointlessly but with increasingly frustrated indignation at the screen. Let’s discuss (spoilers ahead):

She lives in Florida, a state notorious for both its devastating hurricanes and its aggressive alligators. It’s also got terrible traffic, too many tourists, abhorrent gun laws, irresponsible gun owners, impossibly fat roaches, a sinkhole epidemic, and, oh yeah, Floridians.
She flouts all good cell phone etiquette by accepting a video call from her sister in a change room where not only are innocent bystanders unknowingly getting naked on camera, but Haley is knowingly doing so as well. Said sister guilts her into checking in on their father.
She should have cut her deadbeat dad out of her life years ago.
She drives toward a category 5 hurricane.
A nice guy at a checkpoint tells her to turn around, but not only does she break the rules and not comply, she pretends to listen and asks him to risk his life checking on her dad (Barry Pepper) too.
She goes into the crawlspace underneath her childhood home (nothing good has ever happened or ever will in a crawlspace).
She goes into a stinky, rat-infested crawlspace that EVEN HER DOG WILL NOT GO INTO.
She finds her father bleeding and unconscious and instead of thinking ‘this is a job for qualified paramedics’, she grabs a disgusting tarp and decides to drag his mangled body through a space so overwhelmingly dirty it already consumed her flip flops.
When she learns the hard way that a very large and apparently very hungry alligator has made the crawlspace her new home, she does not alter her plan one bit.
She fails to use her father’s body as bait or as a distraction. The man is dead weight but likely at least a 30 minute meal for even an above-average gator. Sprinkle him with salt and RUN!
She assumes there is only the one alligator.
She is holding a working cell phone, punches in the 911, but doesn’t immediately press send because there’s no real urgency, plenty of time to look around first. Right?
She thinks she has an advantage over alligators because she can swim.
Instead of warning away innocent passerby, she selfishly beckons them toward the danger and then fails to take advantage as they inevitably become gator happy meals. But she does pat down what’s left of their corpses for useful items.
She thinks this is a good time to talk about their father-daughter issues.
She constantly reaches for her father’s gator-mangled arm with her own gator-mangled arm. USE YOUR OTHER ARM, HALEY.
She practically sends the alligators an invitation to dinner the way she flaunts her skinny white limbs, splashing about in the water like she’s an appetizing snack. By the back half of the movie, even I was salivating!
When she was in the shower stall with the alligator trying to ram its way in, she was terrified. Now that the gator’s in the shower and she’s outside, she thinks she’s safe.
She attempts to save her dog, which is basically amending the dinner invitation to say “Look, now we’re a three course meal!”
She’s very injudicious with a crowbar. That last inch of air pocket where your father’s lips are gasping for their last few breaths is probably not the best place to ram your metal rod. Unless your anger has finally overcome you, in which case just leave him to drown, no need to disfigure him too.
She fails to realize that the dad-sized hole she just opened up is also a gator-sized hole.

I’m being mean because I can’t help it. Also because creature features make it so easy. But even I must admit that as far as horror movies go, this one’s pretty decent. It’s a strange way to strengthen a father-daughter bond, but sure. It could happen. Is it a bit ridiculous? Of course. But no more ridiculous than clowns in a sewer or little girls in VHS tapes or snakes on a plane. Director Alexandre Aja manages to balance the claustrophobia of rising water with the random terror of gnashing teeth. The CGI is excellent. Scodelario and Pepper are 100% game. Crawl gleefully brings the senseless violence and turns an entire hurricane’s worth of water red tearing its victims apart limb by limb.

Last Moment of Clarity

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Sam’s girlfriend Georgia died three years ago and he’s still carrying around the ring he never got the chance to give her. Through his flashbacks we know that she was shot, and her body burned in a terrible apartment fire that took several lives. But Sam (Zach Avery) doesn’t talk about it. He shuffles around Paris all wounded and haunted, but to his friend and boss Gilles (Brian Cox), he rarely opens up. So it probably comes as a bit of a shock when Sam declares that Georgia (Samara Weaving) is still alive – he’s spotted her in a movie, and despite a slightly different look, he’s convinced that actress Lauren Clerk is actually his dead girlfriend Georgia. After going full stalker online, Sam decides to fly his particular brand of creepy obsession over to Los Angeles where there’s a chance he can do it in person. And he does.

Lucky for him he runs into old high school friend Kat (Carly Chaikin), who is just jaded enough not to be put off by his remarkably strong stalker vibes. In fact, she helps him track down Lauren, who does not answer to Georgia and denies knowing the man with whom she once shared an intimate bubble bath (a VERY frequent flashback). As poor Lauren’s privacy gets invaded time and time again, we start to learn a little more about sketchy Sam and how his troubles extend beyond the one dead girlfriend.

Colin Krisel and James Krisel write and direct, though this is a first for both in either discipline. Between them, they fail to generate a single thrill in what is supposed to have been a thriller. Last Moment of Clarity is not thrilling, nor particularly clarifying, but it is competently made and competently acted. If the movie was a dead girlfriend trying to assume a new identity, it would do a much better job than Lauren as it is unremarkable, indistinguishable, and totally forgettable.