Category Archives: Comedies

THE MACHINE (2023) – Needs an Oil Change

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THE MACHINE (2023) is a new movie based on the comedy of stand-up comedian Bert Kreischer.

For my money, comedy is the most difficult genre to do well in the movies. A really good comedy is really hard to find, more so these days. Hopefully at some point soon we’ll witness a comedy renaissance, and they will be as prolific as Marvel superhero movies.

But that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon, and THE MACHINE certainly isn’t a step in that direction. As comedies go, it’s not very good. Actually, it’s kinda bad.

I saw it not because I’m a fan of Kreischer’s, whose comedy I barely know, but because the trailer was actually pretty funny, and Mark Hamill was also in the cast, playing Kreischer’s father. I was hoping to laugh a lot. I didn’t. The laughs are few and far between, and they’re not very hearty.

As I said, the plot of THE MACHINE is based on Kreischer’s comedy routine, in this case his famous story about how he earned the nickname “The Machine,” when he was in Russia and robbed a train with the Russian mob. In the movie, he’s pretty much playing himself, and so the film opens with Bert struggling to be a good dad for his two daughters, and a good husband. He’s trying, but he’s also failing. To make amends, he throws a lavish Sweet 16 birthday party for his daughter, and at the party, his estranged father Albert (Mark Hamill) arrives, and Bert and his dad have major issues with each other.

Also arriving at the party is Russian mobster Irina (Iva Babic) who tells Bert that her father, the head of a powerful mob family, wants his watch back that Bert stole when he was in Russia twenty years ago. Bert says he doesn’t remember stealing a watch, and so Irina and her henchmen kidnap both Bert and his dad and bring them to Russia where they are forced to find the missing watch.

Which is what the rest of the movie is all about, Bert and his father’s misadventures as they try to find the missing watch. I’ve seen worse plots. However, the humor in this one never really takes off.

While Kreischer is a fairly funny guy, he doesn’t knock it out of the park. At times, he can be raunchy, but most of the time he’s a goofy wannabe likeable “fat guy.” It’s also part of his shtick to go around without a shirt, which doesn’t really happen in this movie until the final reel. Neither persona is all that sharp, and so the humor is tepid at best. There are some laugh out loud moments, like when Bert is trying to pull a shaft out of Irina’s leg and he has to throw up, but these are few and far between.

I actually thought Mark Hamill was pretty funny as Bert’s weird dad, and his best moment is when he is high on drugs, but being high to get laughs is a rather low bar for comedy.

Iva Babic makes for an icy cold and sexy Russian mobster, and she plays it straight for the most part.

THE MACHINE is being marketed as an action comedy, but the action scenes aren’t very good. The fight sequences are a bit slow in their choreography, and they’re just not as slick and polished as what we are used to seeing in action movies these days. Director Peter Atencio features some nifty camerawork here and there, but he drops the ball with the action sequences.

The screenplay by Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes is meh. The story is okay, but the situations which should be rife for hilarity just aren’t. Bert and his father’s exploits in Russia have the potential to be laugh out loud funny, but they’re not.

I’m tempted to say that this one is for Bert Kreischer fans only, and he does have lots of fans as the theater was packed, but while these fans were laughing and being boisterous before the movie started, during the movie, they were fairly quiet. I laughed as much as anyone else, and that wasn’t that much.

And that’s the bottom line with THE MACHINE. It’s simply not very funny, and for a comedy that runs nearly two hours, that’s a long time to sit through an unfunny movie.

I give it a paltry one and a half stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

IN THE SPOOKLIGHT: THE MUNSTERS (2022)

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Rob Zombie’s reboot of THE MUNSTERS (2022) has been shown very little love by fans and critics alike since its release in September 2022.

Sure, the jokes are bad, the characters silly and over the top, the plot completely goofy, and the feel that it is all intended more for kids than for adults is prevalent throughout, but lest we forget, this is exactly how the campy original 1960s TV series THE MUNSTERS (1964-66) played out. Zombie has captured the exact feel of the show, and yet he seems to have been criticized for doing so. While I’ve always enjoyed THE MUNSTERS, I’ve never found the show all that funny because its humor was always purposefully awful, the canned laughter forced and annoying, and the situations more amusing than comical. This was how the show was, and how many of the 1960s comedy series were. The folks laughing the hardest were the ones on the laugh track! But this didn’t stop me and plenty of other fans from loving these shows.

And Zombie’s reboot isn’t just a rehash of the series. It’s an origin story and explains how these characters got together in the first place. There are also lots of homages and neat bits of casting, and it’s all wrapped in a lively exceedingly colorful package that makes this one a hoot to watch with or without your kids. I mean, you’ll love it on your own, but if you have kids, they can watch it, too. It’s not often you can say that about a Rob Zombie movie. In fact, this PG rated film is the first Rob Zombie movie not to be rated R.

In THE MUNSTERS, Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) lives with her father The Count (Daniel Roebuck) in his castle, and she is actively searching for the “man of her nightmares.” Her latest date with the vampire Orlock (Richard Brake) doesn’t go so well, as he is more interested in rats and the plague than in her. Meanwhile, Dr. Wolfgang (also played by Richard Brake) and his assistant Floop (Jorge Garcia) are busy trying to create life, and their creation, Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips), thanks to their mistaken use of a brain belonging to a failed comedian, awakens thinking he’s funny, and so he can’t stop telling bad jokes while trying to entertain people.

When Herman and Lily meet, they instantly fall in love, and the rest is history. And when the Count loses his castle, Herman moves them all from Transylvania to California, paving the way for their future family adventures on THE MUNSTERS.

Everything in THE MUNSTERS is completely silly and over the top, which is exactly how the show used to be. My favorite part of Zombie’s THE MUNSTERS is its exaggerated color scheme. The entire look of the film is bright, showy, and pretty darn impressive. It looks like a live action cartoon.

Zombie’s screenplay isn’t going to win any awards for best comedy, as the jokes are goofy and lame, the plot silly, and the characters absurd, but since it captures the spirit of THE MUNSTERS TV show, it’s ultimately successful.

He also includes various homages, like Herman’s fur vest, which is an homage both to the iconic Frankenstein Monster ads in 1960s comic books and to Boris Karloff’s Monster attire in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939). The vampire character Orlock is a dead ringer for Count Orlok from the silent classic NOSFERATU (1922), and the scenes between Dr. Wolfgang and Floop leading up to Herman’s creation parody situations and conversations from the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN.

The cast is fun. Jeff Daniel Phillips cracked me up throughout as Herman, and he captures Fred Gwyne’s goofy persona when he played the character. Herman is a hoot throughout this movie. Likewise, Sheri Moon Zombie captures the spirit of Yvonne De Carlo’s Lily from the series. And ditto for Daniel Roebuck as The Count, who also embodies Al Lewis’ performances as Grandpa.

Jorge Garcia, probably best known for his role as Hurley on the TV show LOST (2004-2010) enjoys lot of comedic moments here as the mad scientist’s assistant Floop. The cast also includes Catherine Schell, known to genre fans as Maya on the TV show SPACE 1999 (1975-77) as a gypsy woman, and Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, as a real estate agent. And original MUNSTERS cast members Butch Patrick and Pat Priest both have voice cameos.

THE MUNTERS isn’t high art. It’s not even a very good comedy. But neither was the original TV show. What it is, however, is a colorful and very amusing salute to the 1960s horror comedy series.

If you want to know how the Munsters first got together, and you want to enjoy a trip down memory lane, in one extremely colorful and cartoonish package, you should check out Rob Zombie’s THE MUNSTERS. It completely captures the undead spirit of the original. The only thing missing is the canned laughter.

And that’s a good thing.

—END—

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 (2023) – Final Installment in Marvel’s Guardian’s Trilogy Mixes Light and Dark with Favorable Results

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The GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movies have been the most offbeat and fun of the Marvel movies, and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, the third installment in this series, is no exception.

Even with a serious plot— a race against time to save Rocket’s life— the movie contains enough shenanigans and quirky conversations to keep this most recent installment a lighthearted affair.

The biggest reason for this consistency is that all three films were written and directed by James Gunn, who has quite the interesting resume, as he has achieved success with comedies, superhero films, and horror movies. He even worked for Marvel’s rival DC, and created a movie I liked every bit as much as the first GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movie, THE SUICIDE SQUAD (2021), which was my favorite superhero movie that year. He is a master at writing witty, snappy, and flat-out funny dialogue.

I had a blast watching GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, even with its serious plot. When Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) is injured with a life-threatening wound, the Guardians, our friendly neighborhood protectors of the universe, discover that they cannot treat him, that his body has been encrypted with a suicide device if he is tampered with, which leads the Guardians to a search for Rocket’s origins so they can learn how to diffuse the device and save his life.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn Rocket’s origin story, and it’s not a pretty picture. He was created in a lab by a cold-hearted scientist known as The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who would have felt right at home on the set of STRANGER THINGS experimenting on the likes of Eleven, only his experiments are far worse. Rocket spends his youth with his closest friends, animals who have also been experimented on, and they dream of the day when they will be free from their cages, but freeing them is not part of The High Evolutionary’s plan. All these years later, The High Evolutionary is still at it, creating worlds and destroying them when he’s not happy with the result. He is also obsessed with capturing Rocket again, as Rocket was his most successful experiment, and so he welcomes the news that the Guardians are on their way to him to learn the secret of saving their friend.

And that’s the main plot of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, which really is secondary to watching the Guardians interact on screen.

It’s been a tough time for Star Lord aka Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) as he’s still lamenting the loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), who’s not dead, but since returning to life after the Thanos purge, has lost all her memories and does not remember being in love with him. Chris Pratt has always been fun in the Peter Quill role, and he’s just as fun here in Vol. 3.

In fact, you can say the same for the rest of the characters as well. Dave Bautista as Drax gives probably my favorite performance in the movie. Drax gets the best lines and for my money is the funniest character in the series. Pom Klementieff is enjoyable as Mantis, and she and Drax share many fun scenes together.

Karen Gillan gets more screen time as Nebula, and we get to know her character more in this installment. Vin Diesel voices Groot, and he gets his share of moments. And Bradley Cooper gets more serious scenes this time around in the very dark story of Rocket’s origins.

Chukwudi Iwuji is okay as The High Evolutionary. He’s more sinister early on. By film’s end, he becomes a more traditional mad scientist, and the character ends up being less menacing than we was at the beginning of the movie.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 provides a good mix of laughs and drama. I laughed a lot, as did the very large movie audience I saw it with— which is a very good thing, by the way. It seems more and more movies these days I’m watching in near empty theaters.—. And it does this even as its plot covers themes like ruthless experiments on animals, mindless destruction of entire planets, the rescue of children, and in the film’s final reel a rescue of a myriad of animals which resembles something out of Noah’s Ark.

The one thing I wasn’t crazy about in this movie is we don’t really get to see the Guardians together all that much. They’re all involved in their separate mini adventures as they attempt to rescue Rocket. And when finally, they are reunited at film’s end, we’re met with the news that some of the Guardians are going their separate ways. As Rocket complains, “We’re breaking up?” Indeed, they are, as the film previews what the next variation of Guardians will look like, while others are going off on solo and smaller group projects. I’m all about evolving, but I also enjoy revisiting successful stories, and the present group of Guardians, certainly had not worn out their welcome yet.

Also, in typical Marvel movie fashion, there are scenes after the end credits, including one at the very end, so if you want to see it, you’ll have to wait till all the credits have rolled.

My favorite GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movie remains the first one from 2014, but I enjoyed this third installment more than the second film in the series, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 (2017).

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 is nothing new, but that’s not a bad thing. The characters here are all fun and quirky, and their interactions make for an enjoyable two and a half hours at the movies. It’s all well-written and directed by James Gunn, and it looks amazing as well, filled with bright stunning and colorful visuals throughout.

And oh yeah. It features a worthy soundtrack of tunes which would make Peter Quill proud.

I give GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 three stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

RENFIELD (2023) – Nicolas Cage Rocks as Dracula; The Rest a Mixed Bag

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Horror comedies are a dime a dozen and are incredibly difficult to do.

The best ones play the horror straight and include spot-on humor. The worst are over-the-top silly and show no reverence towards the horror elements.

RENFIELD (2023), a new horror comedy which stars Nicholas Hoult as Dracula’s long-suffering servant Renfield who in 2023 joins a self-help group to give him the confidence to break ties with his narcissistic master, does show respect to its source material, Dracula, and does include moments of well-timed and clever humor, but overall is bogged down by a stale plot of gangsters and police corruption that sadly takes center stage and definitely gets in the way of the better story of Renfield and Dracula, making this one a mixed bag for sure.

The best part of RENFIELD is Nicolas Cage’s performance as Dracula. At first, it might seem with the obvious connections that this movie makes with Universal’s DRACULA (1931) that Cage’s performance is a direct homage to Bela Lugosi, but Cage doesn’t stop with Lugosi, as his interpretation also at times captures the essence of Christopher Lee. And director Chris McKay also shoots some scenes where Cage even resembles Carlos Villarias who played Dracula in Universal’s Spanish version of DRACULA (1931). But as good as Cage is, and as expected, he’s very good, he’s not enough to save this movie.

RENFIELD gets off to an impressive start as both Nicholas Hoult as Renfield and Nicolas Cage as Dracula are inserted into scenes from Universal’s DRACULA (1931) which both serves as an homage to the Bela Lugosi classic and also shows the origins of the relationship between Dracula and Renfield, making this movie a sequel of sorts to the 1931 movie. It’s a great way to start, and it had me excited about what was to follow.

The action then switches to present day where we see Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) joining a self-help group in New Orleans and listening to these people’s stories of how they are being abused by narcissistic companions. Since Renfield is still finding victims for Dracula, he targets these people’s abusers, hoping to do some good as well, by ridding the world of some pretty awful people by turning them into food for Dracula. Usually, a vampire’s victims turn into vampires themselves, and so Renfield would actually be making the world worse, when these folks turn into vampires, but the movie doesn’t go there.

Instead, the movie goes to places which frankly just aren’t very interesting. Renfield’s selective victim process inadvertently lands him in the path of a very powerful crime family who has nearly the entire police force in their pocket. The one honest cop— seriously, nearly everyone else in this movie who wears a badge is corrupt— Rebecca (Awkwafina) constantly finds her efforts to take down this family thwarted by her corrupt superiors.

The more interesting storyline follows Renfield’s efforts to distance himself from Dracula (Nicolas Cage), especially after opening up to the others in the support group who encourage him to stand up for himself, as well as Dracula’s efforts to keep Renfield as his slave. Whenever Dracula is on screen, the movie fires on all cylinders.

Unfortunately, and strangely, the film instead leans heavily on the crime family and police corruption plot, and even when Rebecca and Renfield team up, and Dracula joins forces with the crime family, things never become all that interesting.

The screenplay by Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman, a screenwriter for THE WALKING DEAD TV series, has as its centerpiece the support group sequences where Renfield talks about his relationship with the narcissistic Dracula. These are the best scenes in the movie and play out like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Unfortunately, neither Ridley nor Kirkman do much to build a movie around this idea. The crime family/police corruption plot is flat out awful, and why the movie spends so much time on this cliched claptrap is beyond me. And while the Renfield/Dracula storyline is better, the script is largely repetitive, as the same ideas are churned over repeatedly. As a result, the humor is not overly sharp. There are some moments and some jokes that land, but for the most part, the screenplay is a one trick pony that gets old long before its end credits run, which is pretty bad, since RENFIELD clocks in at a brief 93 minutes.

Director Chris McKay, who directed THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (2017) and the science fiction flick THE TOMORROW WAR (2021), which I really liked, does a nice job with the visuals here. The aforementioned use of scenes from DRACULA (1931) were fun to see, and he does a terrific job shooting Nicolas Cage as Dracula, who is quite menacing. As I said, at times Cage resembles Lugosi, and he speaks like him, but at other times when he’s violent and hissing, he calls to mind Christopher Lee.

There are also a ton of action scenes in this movie, and they are polished and slick. Renfield inherits superhuman strength whenever he eats bugs— who knew! — a trait that comes in handy whenever he has to fight armies of bad guys or corrupt police officers. But while these scenes are handled well, they are all rather dull and unexciting. They are also incredibly bloody. You can probably fill multiple tubs with the amount of blood spilled in this movie, which brings me to another complaint. So much blood, yet both Renfield and Rebecca always seem to walk away without one ounce of the red stuff on their clothes or bodies. It’s all way too neat and sanitized.

Like I said, the best part of this movie is Nicolas Cage’s portrayal of Dracula. He takes the role seriously, and he plays the vampire king quite menacingly. He’s definitely not a spoof of the character. He makes Dracula downright evil throughout. But that’s not to say he’s not funny, and that may be the greatest strength of Cage’s performance, in that he is both funny and serious. He is able to make the audience laugh as Dracula without sacrificing the integrity of the character. Cage is so good here; he deserves to be in a better movie.

Nicholas Hoult is okay as Renfield, but the character is much less interesting here than Dracula. Hoult does his best to make Renfield a good guy, but the script lets him down. His efforts to free himself of Dracula never rise above the superficial. We just saw Hoult play a less than good guy in THE MENU (2022), a supporting performance that I actually enjoyed a bit more than his portrayal of Renfield.

Awkwafina is fine as Rebecca, but she is stuck in a horrible cliched storyline that drags down the entire movie.

I did really enjoy Brandon Scott Jones as the leader of the self-help group who in the movie’s best sequences gets some of the best moments and lines.

One other disappointing note. While this movie is a wonderful homage to Dracula, thanks to Cage’s performance, what it’s not is a wonderful homage to the title character, Renfield. Dwight Frye as Renfield is one of the best parts of the Lugosi DRACULA, and once you’ve seen that movie, you will never forget his performance. RENFIELD, in spite of being about Renfield, treats Frye as merely an afterthought. Which is all the sadder because even after nearly 100 years, no other actor has played Renfield in a movie the way Frye did. His performance remains the gold standard for the role, and yet, he died young and poor in 1943, and Hollywood has never really given him his due. He deserves better here.

RENFIELD rocks whenever Nicolas Cage is onscreen as Dracula, and its support group scenes are the only ones in this movie that go for the throat and really resonate. They’re hilarious. The rest of the movie features a dull subplot that actually grows into a main plot, and even the better storyline featuring Renfield and Dracula struggles to move forward, as it gets stuck repeating the same points over and over. This is one movie that really could have used… well, some self-help and support.

I give RENFIELD two stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

IN THE SPOOKLIGHT: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1953)

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Bud Abbott and Lou Costello had a habit meeting monsters.

It all started in 1948 with their highly successful horror comedy monster mash, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948), which had Bud and Lou meeting up with the Frankenstein Monster (Glenn Strange), Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) The film was wildly successful, and a major hit for the comedy duo.

They would repeat the formula three years later with ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN (1951), followed by today’s movie ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, and they closed out their monster meetings with ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY (1955)

Their initial outing meeting Frankenstein remains their best, as it has the funniest script, and one can make the argument that the quality dropped off with each successive movie. But there’s still a lot to like about ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

For starters, it stars Boris Karloff in the dual role as Jekyll and Hyde, and like his horror star predecessors in the previous Abbott and Costello monster films, he plays things straight. While he gives it his all, it ends up being just a decent performance, mostly because he’s overshadowed by the previous actors who played the role. Both Fredric March (who won an Oscar for playing Jekyll and Hyde) in the 1931 version, and Spencer Tracy in the 1941 remake deliver two of the strongest performances in a horror movie ever, and so the bar had already been raised quite high. But it’s Karloff, and so he still turns in a deliciously dark performance. One interesting tidbit regarding Karloff’s performance is unlike his predecessors, he portrays Dr. Jekyll as rather evil as well. Karloff’s Jekyll uses Hyde when he wants to kill people. Not exactly an exercise in good vs. evil. It’s more like evil and more evil!

The most memorable thing about ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is the frightening make-up on Mr. Hyde by Bud Westmore. Mr. Hyde here is quite hideous and monstrous. In fact, he’s referred to throughout the movie as “the monster.” He’s certainly more of a werewolf type character than some of the other Mr. Hydes. Westmore used similar make-up on the diseased scientists in TARANTULA (1955), and on the monster in MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS (1958).

While I often say that one of the best parts of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is that the monsters play it straight, here in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, director Charles Lamont takes things a step further and for much of this movie plays the whole thing straight! There are some genuinely scary scenes in this movie, and while it is funny of course, I’ve always enjoyed this one more as a horror movie.

It opens with a very creepy murder scene on the foggy streets of London, where we witness Mr. Hyde emerge from the shadows to murder a man. Each time Hyde shows up, the film is scary. There are memorable scenes with him looking through a window, popping out in a jump scare, and creeping up behind the heroine. There are also plenty of action-packed chase scenes in this one.

The plot is quite simple, as Bud and Lou —- oh yeah, Abbott and Costello are in this movie! —-play detectives, goofily named Slim and Tubby, who are on the case to help hunt down the monster. The jokes are okay. Both ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN are funnier films than this one. Here, there’s a lot of physical comedy, including the aforementioned chase scenes, with one memorable one in particular over some rooftops.

The screenplay by Lee Loeb and John Grant is more amusing than funny. While director Charles Lamont helmed a bunch of Abbott and Costello movies, including some of their best, he seems more interested here in directing a monster movie, which has always been fine for me! I enjoy Abbott and Costello, and they’re fun in this movie, but they are certainly funnier in other flicks. There’s just not a lot of memorable gags or one-liners. There is one very goofy sequence where Tubby gets turned into a human-sized mouse, which in spite of taking place at a bar plays like a scene out of a children’s movie.

Helen Westcott makes for a fine heroine, Vicky Edwards, while Craig Stevens plays the dashing leading man, and Reginald Denny, who I always remember as Commodore Schmidlapp in what would turn out to be his final role in the Adam West BATMAN (1966) movie, plays the very British inspector.

Boris Karloff makes for an unusually villainous Dr. Jekyll, and gives the role his signature Boris Karloff treatment, meaning he’s soft-spoken yet sinister.

The true stars of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE however are make-up artist Bud Westmore and stunt man Eddie Parker, who played Mr. Hyde. The monster in this flick is quite menacing.

While everyone else is tuning in for the laughs, I’m tuning in for the horror. In fact, this one gave me nightmares as a kid. Mr. Hyde was that chilling!

Are you up for some monster thrills with a few chuckles thrown in for good measure? Then check out ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

It’s one creepy comedy!

—END—

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES (2023) – Fun Fantasy Full of Humor and Adventure

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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES (2023) is a fun movie that is enjoyable even if you don’t know anything about the famous role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Players of the game will probably appreciate it more, but in terms of audience satisfaction, this one delivers whether you’re a player or not.

To be honest, I really wasn’t all that interested in seeing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES, as high fantasy really isn’t a genre I enjoy all that much. But the trailers for this one looked pretty darn funny, and writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have a proven track record, as they wrote the screenplays for Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (2017), the first and probably my favorite of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and the HORRIBLE BOSSES movies. They also directed the funny comedy GAME NIGHT (2018) starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams.

On the other hand, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie!

And that’s because the story in this one really doesn’t matter. It’s all just an excuse to write humorous lines for dashing witty characters in a colorful fantasy land where the good guys battle the bad guys, and the end result is never in question. Which could be the formula for a dreadfully dull movie, but that’s not the case here. At all. Because the dialogue is humorous and the characters are sharp-witted.

The whole thing is just popcorn-movie-fun.

The plot is about a group of thieves– and these are nice heroic thieves, Robin Hood style robbers— Edgin (Chris Pine), Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), Simon (Justice Smith), Doric (Sophia Lillis), and Xenk (Rege-Jean Page) who are in search of various relics which will lead them to the ultimate prize, a magical object that Edgin hopes to use to bring his murdered wife back to life. They each have their own reasons for wanting to help Edgin, and along the way they also need to rescue Edgin’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) who has been in the care of their former associate Forge (Hugh Grant), who has since changed his ways and is now poisoning Kira against her father, and also teaming with the main villain in the movie, the red devil Sofina (Daisy Head).

As I said, the end is never in doubt. You know who will come out on top long before the movie ever gets there, but the fun of this one is the journey along the way.

And that’s because the script by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, and Michael Gilio is a good one. The situations are lighthearted, and most of the jokes land.

It also helps to have a talented cast. Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez seem to be having a lot of fun, and they have a good chemistry together. Pine is perfect as the dashing hero, and as light and witty as his presence is in this movie, his performance is even better because there’s a deep undercurrent of seriousness in the character, as Edgin identifies as a loser, telling his friends when they are down that he has consistently messed up, so much so that his wife’s death is on him, and so he’s driven to get things right this time and make things better.

Rodriguez also has a field day playing silent tough guy type, and her character Holga can pretty much hold her own against anybody and then some.

Justice Smith as Simon gets most of the best lines in the movie, while Sophia Lillis as the shapeshifting Doric gets to be the freckly soft-spoken cute presence when she’s not turning into various creatures. Lillis played young Beverly Marsh in the recent IT movies.

Rege-Jean Page is both handsome and humorous as Xenk, arguably the most powerful one in their group, and once again, Hugh Grant plays an over-the-top eccentric villain, something we just saw him do in Guy Ritchie’s OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE (2023). I enjoyed Grant’s performance more in OPERATION FORTUNE, because there was a deadly serious side to his character that doesn’t exist here in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, but that’s not a complaint, because Grant is so good at playing these types of characters. Like the rest of the cast, he’s fun to watch throughout.

I also really enjoyed Daisy Head as the villainous Sofina. Head is serious and frightening and plays the role with a driven sense of purpose that looks like she walked off the set of GAME OF THRONES.

The movie also looks great, as it has a clear, crisp print that projects the colors of its fantasy world to the point where unlike a lot of movies with CGI created worlds, it looks incredibly realistic, like directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were shooting on location. The action sequences are decent. They’re nothing earth-shattering, but they are certainly watchable and don’t go on for too long.

Sure, the story plays out like a story in a Dungeons and Dragons game— duh!— with lots of magic spells and conversations about which powers to use and the advantages and disadvantages of each, but this doesn’t get in the way of the success of this movie.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES is a fantasy adventure comedy that is as satisfying as it is jovial. It’s a summer popcorn movie that just happened to be released in the spring.

I give it three stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

MOVING ON (2022) – Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin Strike Again in Well-Made Comedy Drama About Love and Murder

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It’s always a pleasure to see stories about characters who are of a certain age.

Not every movie has to be about people under 50. There are plenty of stories to be told about characters in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and… just keep going! And two actors today who are actively working and being able to star in stories about folks in their golden years are Jane Fonda, 85, and Lily Tomlin, 83.

Fonda and Tomlin currently star on the hit Netflix TV show GRACE AND FRANKIE (2015-2022), and they also just appeared in the movie comedy 80 FOR BRADY (2023).

Actually, today’s movie MOVING ON (2022) was made before 80 FOR BRADY but was just released to theaters this past week. Simply put, MOVING ON is a winner of a movie, the type of small release that might not get noticed by audiences, but it’s one you definitely want to check out, both for the performances of Fonda and Tomlin, and for the story it tells.

MOVING ON is the story of Claire (Jane Fonda) who attends the funeral of her best friend from college, not only to pay her respects but because she has an agenda. When she approaches her friend’s widower Howard (Malcolm McDowell) she promptly tells him that now that her best friend and his wife is dead, she is going to kill him. And she is going to kill him because forty years earlier he did something unspeakable to her.

Also at the funeral is Evelyn (Lily Tomlin), who is not only Claire’s other best friend, but also was in love with the deceased. She agrees to help Claire murder Howard. Sort of. She agrees with Evelyn that Howard deserves to die, but as she constantly tells Claire, she doesn’t want to see her spend the rest of her life in prison.

While MOVING ON is marketed as a comedy, and it is a comedy, it’s not a silly goofy one. In other words, don’t expect slapstick shenanigans from Fonda and Tomlin as they plot a murder. It’s not that type of comedy. The humor comes from the situations, like when Evelyn accompanies Claire to help her buy a gun. It’s a very funny scene, but it’s not slapstick or goofy.

And the subject matter covered here is serious. There’s Evelyn’s secret love for their deceased best friend, there’s a subplot about a young boy who is questioning his sexuality, who befriends Evelyn. Then there’s the big reveal, what Howard did to Claire, an assault that ruined her life and her marriage. She never told anyone about it other than Evelyn. Of course, Howard says that he remembers it differently, that they were both drunk, and that it was a mutual thing.

But as I said, MOVING ON is a comedy, so while the subject matter is serious, the movie will make you laugh. This isn’t an easy combination to pull off, but the movie does it just fine. It also has a very satisfying ending. In fact, the whole movie is very satisfying.

Directed by Paul Weitz, who also wrote the screenplay, MOVING ON builds to a suspenseful yet comical conclusion, as Claire is hell bent on murdering Howard, and the audience wants to see her do it, but as Evelyn keeps saying, this will only land her in prison. The situations grow both more dramatic and funnier as the movie goes on, which as I said, is not easy to do. It’s a terrific script by Weitz. The scene with the flair gun is priceless.

Both Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin continue to work at the top of their games. Fonda is superb throughout in a wide variety of scenes. Her best scene is when she finally confronts Howard and tells him exactly in painful detail what he did to her. And of course, Howard fires back that she’s delusional, that she wanted it as much as he did. It’s a painful scene, well-acted by two masters of the profession, Fonda and McDowell.

Fonda also enjoys some tender and romantic scenes with Richard Roundtree, who plays her ex-husband Ralph. Their date scenes, both at dinner and afterwards, are well done and really resonate. It was good to see Roundtree back on the big screen again, although it really hasn’t been that long, as he played Shaft, Sr. in the Shaft reboot SHAFT (2019). I enjoyed him more here in MOVING ON.

Lily Tomlin also knocks it out of the park as Evelyn. As always, she gets some of the movie’s best lines and handles them all well. She and Fonda obviously work very well together, and even though naysayers may call this just a variation of GRACE AND FRANKIE, I thought the characters they played here were different enough from Grace and Frankie that I didn’t find myself thinking all that much about the show while watching the movie.

And then there’s Malcom McDowell as Howard, and as you might expect, McDowell makes Howard sufficiently despicable. You won’t shed many tears at his final fate in this movie.

Sarah Burns also stands out as Howard’s daughter Allie.

There’s a lot to like about MOVING ON. From two phenomenal performances by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, to a well thought out and executed story that contains both dark drama and light comedy, a combination that is not easy to pull off, but writer/director Paul Weitz does just that. MOVING ON might be his best movie yet.

I loved it.

I give it a strong three and a half stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

COCAINE BEAR (2023) – Campy Horror Comedy A Dud

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Killer bear movies are a thing.

Probably the most famous is GRIZZLY (1976), which in spite of being a complete rip-off of JAWS (1975), is a highly entertaining and gory killer bear on the loose horror movie, and it made a killing at the box office back in the day. Before that you had NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLY (1966), a well-made western about a family trying to protect its farm from a marauding bear, and there have been many others over the years, films like INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE (2015) which tried and failed to be a more contemporary killer bear horror movie.

Now comes COCAINE BEAR (2023), which is loosely based on a true story from 1985, when bags of cocaine were dropped from a plane by a drug dealer who died when his parachute didn’t open, and the cocaine which landed in the forest was ingested by a black bear. This movie is very loosely based on that story, as in real life the black bear promptly died, which is what you would expect to happen to an animal after overdosing on massive amounts of cocaine. Here, the film imagines what the bear would have done had it not died, which is, go on a murderous rampage.

The movie follows a set of quirky characters as they converge in the Georgia forest and have to contend with the cocaine bear.

Two children, Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince) and Henry (Christian Convery) skip school and decide to spend the day in the forest. Dee Dee’s mom, Sari (Keri Russell) goes into the forest in search of the children. Drug dealer Syd (Ray Liotta, in his final film role) sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), who’s still grieving over the death of his wife, and fellow drug dealer Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) into the woods to retrieve the cocaine. A cop named Bob (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) is also in the woods searching for the drugs, and then there’s a forest ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) who is more interested in her boss Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) than helping Sari find her daughter and her friend. There are more characters as well, and they all have one thing in common: the cocaine bear!

COCAINE BEAR, as its title suggests, has all the makings of campy comedic horror classic, and that’s what I hoped this one would be.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Try as it might, COCAINE BEAR isn’t much of a black comedy. It works a bit better as a horror movie, because there are some gruesomely gory bear attack sequences, but the rest of the film isn’t serious enough for it to work completely on this level, and it doesn’t work as a comedy either because the humor isn’t even close to being sharp.

The screenplay by Jimmy Warden fails to bring any of the wide array of characters to life. They’re not well-written, we know little about them, nor is the dialogue memorable. Most of the characters are caricatures of characters we’ve seen in other movies, the generic drug dealers, a mom searching for her daughter, precocious children, etc.

Elizabeth Banks’ meandering direction doesn’t help. COCAINE BEAR has very little pacing and no momentum. Rather than building to a climax, the story just moves from one bear incident to another. Characters come and go and have their encounters with the bear, but the film doesn’t build on any of it. There’s also not a likable character in the entire movie because the characters we are supposed to like are not fleshed out, and the characters we could love to hate are dull.

Jimmy Warden also wrote the screenplay to the horror sequel BABYSITTER: KILLER QUEEN (2020), which I thought was pretty dreadful. COCAINE BEAR is equally as dreadful.

Elizabeth Banks, whose work as an actress I enjoy, also directed the reboot CHARLIE’S ANGELS (2019), which most people hated, but I actually enjoyed. Banks’ work here with COCAINE BEAR is a mixed bag. The bear sequences are intense and scary, while the rest of the movie which was aiming for dark comedy misses its mark by a long shot.

The cast is also a combo of hits and misses.

Young Brooklyn Prince who was amazing in THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017), doesn’t get to do a whole lot here as Dee Dee other than be scared. Christian Convery fares better as Dee Dee’s friend Henry. He is able to inject a lot of personality into the role and has some of the better lines in the film, which he handles very well.

Keri Russell as mommy Sari plays things straight and as such makes very little impact here, even with her heroic stand at the end. Alden Ehrenreich, who played Han Solo in SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018), makes drug dealer Eddie a sympathetic character, but he’s also a rather dull sympathetic character. O’Shea Jackson Jr. makes more of an impact as Eddie’s buddy and fellow drug dealer, Daveed. The scene where he’s jumped by three teens in a restroom is one of the more entertaining scenes in the movie.

Isiah Whitlock, Jr. has a thankless role as Bob the policeman, in a case where he is simply let down by the writing.

The same can be said for Ray Liotta as drug dealer and main villain in the movie, Syd. It’s a terribly written role, and it’s kinda too bad that this was Liotta’s final movie role. He died a week after completing work on this movie, in May 2022.

There are other quirky characters here as well, but none of them are developed. They show up for one sequence with the bear, and that’s pretty much it. Some of these sequences include a tense standoff inside the ranger’s cabin, a scene where the bear actually chases an ambulance, and a sequence where characters climb trees to escape the bear which doesn’t end well. All of these sequences have their moments, but none of them work as well as they could.

The bear itself is pretty frightening looking for a CGI creation, and the fact that it moves so quickly also helps make it scary. Interestingly, the killer bear movies I mentioned above were all about grizzly bears, while COCAINE BEAR is about a black bear, which traditionally does not attack humans, but this one does, because it’s high on cocaine.

I thought I was going to have a fun time watching COCAINE BEAR, but that simply wasn’t the case.

There’s certainly a story here to be told, an imaginative one about what might happen if a bear high on cocaine didn’t die and went on a crazy killing spree in the forest…

But sadly, COCAINE BEAR isn’t it.

I give it one and a half stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars – Perfect, Top of the line

Three and a half stars- Excellent

Three stars – Very Good

Two and a half stars – Good

Two Stars – Fair

One and a half stars – Pretty Weak

One star- Poor

Zero stars – Awful

YOU PEOPLE (2023) – Netflix Romantic Comedy Generates Few Sparks

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YOU PEOPLE (2023), a new Netflix rom com starring Jonah Hill and Lauren London, is the latest example of a movie done in by its trailer, which reveals all its best parts.

I watched the trailer for YOU PEOPLE and laughed out loud. I laughed less watching the actual movie, because I had already seen its best bits and there wasn’t more to this one not revealed in the preview. And I know this isn’t the filmmakers’ fault, because they don’t control the trailers, but sadly this is still a thing, and when it happens, it does hurt the movie. In other words, if the trailer is better than the movie, that’s a real problem.

I continue to believe that comedy is the most difficult genre to get right in the movies, because unlike other bad movies, where when they are so bad you can at least laugh at them, a bad comedy, where you are supposed to be laughing, there’s nothing left to do when you’re not laughing.

The other issue with YOU PEOPLE is that as it goes along, it becomes less comedic and more romantic, and so if you are into rom coms, you will like this one more than I did. A bigger issue is the two romantic leads, Jonah Hill and Lauren London, don’t really generate a lot of onscreen chemistry together, and so I wasn’t really buying their romance. Plus, and I’m showing my age here, Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and David Duchovny all play parents here, and I found their characters the most interesting and enjoyable in the movie and wished the story had been about them. But it’s not.

YOU PEOPLE, in a variation of GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER? (1967, and tons of remakes over the years), is the story of a young white male Ezra (Jonah Hill) and a young black female Amira (Lauren London) who meet, fall in love, and decide to get married, but they have to deal with their parents first. Ezra’s parents Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Arnold (David Duchovny) are very Jewish, and while they try to be liberal and open-minded, they constantly put their feet in their mouths. Likewise, Amira’s parents Akbar (Eddie Murphy) and Fatima (Nia Long) are very Muslim, and the two families are like oil and water. Plus, Akbar pretty much decides to make Ezra’s life a living hell to pry him away from his daughter.

Finally, because their families and cultures are so different, Ezra and Amira decide to call off their wedding, believing that there are just too many differences to overcome. This is the one true and honest moment in the movie, and as sad as this admission is on our modern-day culture and society, had this plot point been allowed to stand, that would have been quite the statement. But YOU PEOPLE isn’t interested in statements. At the end of the day, it’s a rom com, and so Akbar and Shelley decide that they have done wrong by their adult children and decide to make amends and make things right. If you like happy endings, you’ll be satisfied with the direction YOU PEOPLE eventually takes.

YOU PEOPLE was directed by Kenya Barris, who gives this one a rapid fire pace early on, but then things slow down during the movie’s second half. Barris shares screenplay credit with Jonah Hill. This one makes its points early, that trying to have a relationship with someone from a very different culture is difficult, but how things all play out later isn’t very satisfying. The two leads seem to like each other less and less, and so you would think they’d break it off for that reason alone, and the families don’t exactly behave all that realistically, and so the situations which could be comical don’t exactly ring true which gets in the way of the comedy.

The film’s best sequence, again, revealed in the film’s trailer, is the dinner scene where the two families meet for the first time.

Like I said, the two leads, Jonah Hill and Lauren London, don’t share much onscreen chemistry. I never really believed in their romance. Hill rings most true early on, when his character laments about how he just can’t find the right person.

I can watch Eddie Murphy all day, and whenever he was onscreen, I was enjoying this one, even if his character wasn’t all that likable. The same can be said for Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Again, I found myself wishing this movie had been about the two of them. David Duchovny is also enjoyable here as Jonah’s father Arnold, but to a lesser degree, since the story focuses more on Louis-Dreyfus’ mom character, Shelley. Nia Long plays Amira’s mom Fatima, and we just saw Long play another mom in the recent thriller MISSING (2023).

Based on the film’s trailer, I had higher hopes for YOU PEOPLE, but ultimately, I didn’t like this one very much. I never believed the two characters played by Jonah Hill and Lauren London were really in love, and the comedy which wasn’t all that strong to begin with gives way to romance as the film moves towards its conclusion.

Veteran actors Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and David Duchovny are the best parts of this one, with Murphy leading the way. The film is at its best whenever Murphy is onscreen. But it’s a supporting role, and he’s not onscreen all that much.

As a result, I give YOU PEOPLE two stars.

—END—

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars- Excellent

Three stars- Very Good

Two stars- Fair

One star- Poor

Zero Stars- Awful

10 Worst Movies of 2022

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It’s time now for a look back at the 10 worst movies I saw in 2022.

Here we go:

10. ORPHAN: FIRST KILL – this prequel to ORPHAN (2009), a horror movie I liked a lot, really isn’t all that bad; it’s just not all that good. It was fun to see Isabelle Fuhrman reprising the role of the dangerous “little girl” Esther, especially since Fuhrman’s no longer a “little girl” in real life, which meant the use of some forced perspective and a body double. This one has a brand-new plot twist, but overall, simply doesn’t work all that well. Two stars.

9. MONSTROUS – tepid horror movie starring Christina Ricci as a mom who flees with her seven-year-old son from an abusive husband. She moves into a new house and unfortunately, she has to deal with a supernatural presence there. Not awful by any means, but also simply not a lot going on here. Twist at end is predictable. Two stars.

8. THE BUBBLE – This comedy by writer/director Judd Apatow takes a fun concept— a group of actors stuck together at a hotel when their movie production shuts down because of a pandemic— and does little with it. More silly than funny, with just a few good laughs here and there. Two stars.

7. BLONDE – for me, the most disappointing movie from 2022. This Netflix film features an Oscar-nominated performance by one of my favorite actors, Ana de Armas, as Marilyn Monroe. Ana de Armas is indeed terrific, but the story is based on “imaginings” of Monroe’s life, as the screenplay is based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, and so events unfold here in Monroe’s life that simply didn’t happen. There’s a brutal scene, for example, showing JFK treating her horribly, yet it didn’t happen. I just found the story elements here head-scratchers. Andrew Dominik’s direction doesn’t help, as this nearly three-hour movie is clunky and uneven. Onr and a half stars.

6. WHITE NOISE – Weird, confusing movie with a script in which nobody seems to make sense when they talk. Funny premise and interesting cast led by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are wasted in this unfunny story about a family who for one third of the movie are faced with a seemingly apocalyptic event, but this “event” wraps up neat and tidy long before this one ends. And then the film goes on about something else. One and a half stars.

5. DAY SHIFT – pretty awful horror comedy starring Jamie Foxx as a modern day vampire hunter. Not funny, not scary, and action scenes don’t wow. Dave Franco plays one of the more pathetic characters I’ve seen in a movie in years. Pretty forgettable stuff. One and a half stars.

4.CHOOSE OR DIE – horror movie starring Asa Butterfield about an evil video game from the 1980s which can alter reality, and it uses this power to force its player to make horrific choices, to harm people around them or die themselves, hence the title, Choose or die. Sounds better than it is. Very little of what happens makes sense, and the horror scenes aren’t as scary as they should be. Most inspiring bit in the movie is the casting of Robert Englund as himself, as he provides the voice on the promos for the video game. Sadly, Englund doesn’t actually appear in the movie. One star.

3. VIOLENT NIGHT -David Harbour playing Santa Claus in a Santa Claus action/comedy. What’s not to like? Actually, a lot of things, mostly a story that features some of the most unlikable characters in a movie I’ve seen in years, and we’re supposed to care about these people when they find themselves held hostage by a baddie who goes by the name of Scrooge? A disgruntled Santa decides to save the day. While Harbour is very good, and John Leguizamo is even better as the villain, mostly because he plays things straight, the film ends up being a cross between HOME ALONE and DIE HARD, with very unfavorable results. One star.

2.BARBARIAN – some folks really liked this horror movie. I wasn’t one of them. It’s not an anthology film, but its one plot is divided into three segments. The first one starring Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgard is by far the best, and so the film gets off to a very scary start, but things change in the second segment starring Justin Long, as the entire tone of the film shifts to something much lighter and offbeat, and then for the third and final segment, which wraps everything up, things fall completely apart. You really have to suspend disbelief to buy into some of the plot points here. One star.

1. UNCHARTED – My pick for the worst movie of the year is the film I enjoyed the least. This silly action-adventure comedy pairs Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg as fellow treasure hunters seeking treasure. The script is ludicrous, the inane banter nonstop, and the plot, well everything these two knuckleheads do works, and so there’s no adversity or conflict, just banter, banter, and more banter. Have I said there was banter in this movie? One long snooze of a movie. Unless, of course, you like… banter. One star.

There you have it. My list of the 10 Worst Films from 2022. Overall, 2022 wasn’t really a bad year for movies. There were far more movies that I liked than I disliked this year,

Okay, let’s get back to 2023! See you at the movies!

As always, thanks for reading!

—Michael

RATING SYSTEM

Four stars- Excellent

Three stars- Very Good

Two stars- Fair

One star- Poor

Zero Stars- Awful