RT01-Sting of Death

*Since I don't have a proper digital copy of the episode yet, all photos are taken from the trailer

Film Year:  1966

Genre:  Horror

Director:  William Greffé

Starring:  Joe Morrison, Deanna Lund, Valerie Hawkins, John Vella, Jack Nagle

MST Season:  The RiffTrax Experiments

The Movie

I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS MOVIE UNRIFFED!

Put on your bikini, bend over frontways, and bob your head up and down because it's time to "Do the Jellyfish!"  The YouTube promo for Sting of Death made it look like Catalina Caper meets Horror of Party Beach, so I was kind of hoping this movie would meet the mood that I brought to it.  I had low expectations and somehow Sting of Death still didn't manage to meet any of it.  This movie is neither Catalina Caper nor Party Beach, and has a vibe that's more like Teen-Age Strangler meets Pod People.  So prepare for things to look dirt cheap, sprinkled with disengaged actors, and plotlines that have no clear direction.

The storyline to this movie follows a group of teens throwing a pool party at the home of a marine biologist and his daughter, unaware that there is a humanoid monster on the loose who happens to have a jellyfish for a head, and when I say "Jellyfish for a head" what I really mean is "Giant plastic bubble on top of scuba suit."  This is easily one of the dumbest looking monsters in MST3K history, if not the dumbest.  Some of the twists involving the monster are interesting, as the movie goes inexplicably down a Dr. Z route where it's someone in a cave who happens to have gizmos and devices that mutate him.  The culprit has clear arrows pointing at him in the beginning, but it's revealed halfway through so I don't think it's that much of a spoiler to just bluntly say that it's Egon (no, not Ghostbusters Egon), the Mickey-from-Screaming-Skull-like lab assistant who just creeps around and gives people the willies.  Our villain is a bit of an exhausting character, wanting to garner both sympathy and hatred because he is basically treated like Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Quasimodo didn't have a secret laboratory that turned him into even more of a freak to exact revenge on those who mocked him though, so fuck this guy.

The movie can be pretty funny with how cheap its attempts at being harrowing are.  A group of teens escape on a boat, only to find it sabotaged by Egon, and they slowly sink in an extended sequence of panic and are attacked by jellyfish.  And by "attacked by jellyfish" what I mean is "attacked by floating saran wrap" which floats at them as they scream.  It's very Creeping Terror.  Then it shows us the aftermath with the floating bodies like we've witnessed a tragic loss and should be unsettled by what has transpired, which would have been easier if it wasn't so funny.  The movie then just lumbers along, as teenage bikini beauties go missing and nobody seems to care.  The movie eventually climaxes similarly to Creature from the Black Lagoon as Egon drags the not-Julia-Adams-but-still-very-pretty leading lady into his cave lair, professes love to her, only to have boyfriend bust in and save the day.  When the day was saved and the movie ended, I found myself grinning because I was fondly remembering watching Black Lagoon instead.

Was Sting of Death worth anything by itself?  Not a whole lot.  I thought lead actress Valerie Hawkins was very attractive, and the movie's special effects were pretty funny.  Ultimately, the thing that is grilled into my brain is how upsetting the dad's short-shorts were.  I can't take his scientific expertise seriously when he's showing more thigh than the women of that surround him.  That was the true terror of this movie.

The Episode

Mystery Science Theater is back, baby!  Albeit in a form none of us expected.  Since the Season 14 fundraiser floundered, the fate of the series was up in the air for a good long while.  Personally, I really wanted another season with Jonah and Emily.  I think they've earned the keys to the franchise, and were fun to shoot-the-shit with when I attended MST3Kon in 2023, so maybe I'm biased.  Sadly, a lot happened since then.  The crowdfunding bubble burst, Shout Factory went through some changes, Joel Hodgson sold off his stake in the series, and the Gizmoplex had to be shut down as its video server provider closed its doors.  There were a lot of reasons to think the show was dead.  But there is something unique about this show, because it always has a habit of coming back.  For the longest time, what we took as a resurrection of it was RiffTrax, which satisfied our riff lust until the show proper could be revived.  Now, MST is struggling.  RiffTrax seems to be doing just fine though.

Say...here's a thought...what if RiffTrax made MST3K?  It's a wild idea, but it just might work!

Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett are back with the franchise that helped them become who they were destined to be:  three guys who talk over movies.  They've been offered the chance before, and Kevin and Bill cameoed as Bobo and Observer during Season 11, as well as the trio participating in Gizmoplex events (Bill, mostly).  On top of that, the RiffTrax crew invited Joel and Jonah to participate during the MST3K Reunion Live show in 2016.  Contrary to semi-popular belief, there has been a cordial relationship between the two entities.  We just couldn't get Mike to show up for The Christmas Dragon.

In a complete kick to the pants, he returns in the episode directly after that.  What a wild thought.  But getting brand new Mike episodes in the can is a dream come true.  We got three new Joel episodes last season, so this feels right.

Several format changes to note off the bat:  the theater seats have been enlargened, closer to the size of the seats during the 90's run, if slightly smaller.  This could be a nostalgia play, but it also seems likely that they were showing off a new lighting effect on the silhouettes, as light bounces off our riffers to make them look more three-dimensional.  This is not all that different to the way the KTMA episodes where silhouetted, but those seats were so small and fan copies were so rough that it was hard to notice.  It's kinda fun, but it's also a weirdly unnecessary flourish.  It's mostly just notable during darker scenes, which allows the figures to pop against the movie, otherwise it just makes the figures look thin.

.

One thing I will rejoice in is that with the RiffTrax Experiments, physical sets have made a triumphant return.  Thank fucking Christ, because the Flatimation really wasn't tickling my fancy.  There are some light innovations on display, as the set for the series has this giant video screen behind it, making it look ever so slightly higher tech than it used to.  I don't know if this is how "the Volume" works on all those expensive Star Wars shows that I never watch, but it's a big screen providing background.  Based on my rudimentary knowledge, it seems to be a similar thing.  It's an interesting effect that is mostly used for stargazing.  I prefer the handcraft stuff, which was just Christmas lights against a black backdrop, but I won't complain about something just because it's new.  Only when it's bad.  And it isn't.

The new theater doors are an improvement over the Flatimation season, which had a pretty atrocious take on then.  These doors have been designed by MST icon Trace Beaulieu, who had a hand in the production design of the season.  What's interesting about these doors is that they are not the basic, sci-fi set chambers of seasons past, but they're all popular movie inspired.  You go through a theater lobby straight into the space station from 2001:  A Space Odyssey, then into a room that looks to be an archeological dig which may be either Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Mummy (likely the former), and then into a hallway straight from The Shining.  There was also a bonus door at one point that had the Laserblast aliens in it, but I need to watch the episode again to see if it was just the one time.  I don't know what was up with that, but maybe they have a rotating door for Easter eggs.  It's an interesting take on the door sequence.  I don't know if I want it to be permanent, but it has a lot of novelty to it.

Pedantics aside, what most people want to hear about is the episode itself.  The frank answer is that it's lightly above average.  I'm a little middling on this one because the experience was more "I'm smiling because my show is back and not because this is the comeback is nailing it."  It's kinda how I felt about Santo last season.  Sting of Death is a better episode overall than Santo, but I'd say it's still a weaker premiere than Reptilicus or Mac and Me (especially Mac and Me).  If there was a genuine reason to this, it was hard to pin down.  Honestly, I think it's a vibe thing.  The writing can feel a little sparse, as if it lacks variety of what type of joke they're going for.  This is a RiffTrax thing.  Their writing staff is smaller than MST, especially for the last few seasons, so it tends to stick on the little details that they get caught on.  That's not to say they can't be funny, but I do miss the broader range of targets and references.

The first half of the episode is better than the second because it's doing more diverse and surprising stuff.  We follow a daffy group of teens who party and start to realize they're in a horror movie, and the odd reveals of the movie's bad special effects inspires quite excellent laughs.  Part of this is the movie doing the heavy lifting, but also the riffers are having fun with it, including the lengthy "Do the Jellyfish" musical number (which, let's face it, would have been unrightfully cut out had this movie been done by the Season 13 crew, and thankfully we get to see it in all its glory).  The movie gets sluggish the longer it goes on because it has little new to offer except that hilarious creature design.  As it starts to drone, the riffing can drone too.  The laughs don't entirely halt though, and they hit some of the predictable riffing targets with the flair that I had hoped, espcially the dad's tear-inducing choice of wardrobe.

"Is the doctor a baker too, because that is a lot of cake!"

Those who follow RiffTrax will certainly note that there are a couple of RiffTrax nods thrown in.  Their patented running gag of "Golden Corral's New Slogan!" makes an appearance, and there is a reference to Birdemic's "I hear a mountain lion!"  There aren't too many of these, which is good because throwback lines to a completely different series can be off-putting, but this is clearly a RiffTrax product.

Getting into the host segments, one thing that should be noted is that we've dropped a good portion of them.  Those who were upset because Season 12 dropped a host segment are probably going to be less than thrilled to hear that we've scaled back to merely an intermission segment.  I'd assume this might be to appease the performers.  Maybe less on-camera time made shooting faster and easier, or maybe they were just out of practice in writing sketches and didn't want to do too many.  The sample we have here is hammy but enjoyable.  Mike, who apparently hasn't seen Crow or Servo in nearly thirty years (they must have moved out of his apartment real fast), is kidnapped from his job at a cheese factory by Observer, and Pearl has restarted her Mystery Science Theater experiments.  There are no references to Kinga or her experiments, but there is also nothing here that claims that they didn't happen, either.  Like Kinga, Pearl has taken on a sponsor, and S.O.L. no longer simply stands for "Satellite of Love," but also "Syd's Olive Loaf."  Taste the olivy goodness!  The lone intermission segment features Mike and the Bots doing a parody of the "Do the Jellyfish" dance, which has fun costumes, even if it goes on a bit long.  We close out with more fun costumes, as Crow and Servo do cosplay of the monster, while Mike takes the title "Sting of Death" down a different path.  The Mads don't really do much.  Pearl wants to sell these new episodes to "A.I."  I don't think you can sell to A.I. more than it just copies stuff you make, but whatever.  Also, Bobo is wet and it makes me uncomfortable.

One thing that I think eases the lack of host segments is that they have bonus footage playing during the closing credits of this episode.  I, for one, loved this.  It's a huge step-up from the previous few seasons, as their lengthy end credits padded the run-time and were just an elongated wait to see what the stinger was.  In Sting of Death, we have behind the scenes footage of the crew rehearsing the song, followed by Mike and the Bots reading fan letters, then we close off with an extra bit where Mike and Servo parody Taken.  This is a great format.  I hope they keep it.

I'm going to give this episode a recommendation based on the fact that I got some good laughs and the movie is a trashy hoot that definitely deserves an MST3K audience.  I was tickled, and I'm easy to please.  The one nagging feeling in the back of my mind that didn't really hit me until late into the episode was that the episode felt like a very lite MST3K experience to me and I couldn't figure out why.  Then, suddenly it popped into my head that getting this episode felt more like getting a new episode of the Film Crew DVD releases way back in the day than a new episode of MST3K.  That's actually a very bizarre feeling, to be honest.  And I like the Film Crew.  Those were some solid outings with this group.  It was just a derivative project, and it was that feeling of being derivative rather than driving forward that I think was puzzling me, because I'm not used to that with MST3K because it's supposed to be the bar.  This episode doesn't quite reach that bar.  Doesn't matter.  That just means I'm probably going to judge these episodes on the RiffTrax curve rather than the MST3K curve.  And yes, there is a difference.  If I were to judge this based on my standards for the latter, there is an off-chance that I'd go lower, but this was a fun night with some old friends.  I'll treat it as such.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Good

Cinema Playground Journal 2026: Week 36 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

By Any Means

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Thriller

Director:  Elegance Bratton

Starring:  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, David Strathairn, Giancarlo Esposito

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays an FBI agent who investigates the murder of civil rights activist Giancarlo Esposito, and he is partnered up with mob enforcer Mark Wahlberg to get the job done, even if it means cracking a few skulls.  By Any Means has ambitions of being a no-punches-pulled portrayal of the violence that hampers political change but it winds up being a weird mesh between Miami Vice and Green Book.  The movie is at a crossroads between being a civil rights drama and a hyperviolent crime thriller.  The fact that it can't fully commit to either turns the movie into a dramatically dissonant display of anger at everything.  Of course, African American civil rights in the 1960's did deserve anger, as well as fear and sorrow, all of which are displayed here.  However, the rage the movie promotes is largely at the pushing of Wahlberg, who doesn't really seem to care as long as he's getting paid and as long as he gets to hurt people.  Most of Wahlberg's actions seem to be because he prefers lawless anarchy over hate crimes.  Of course, maybe he's just mad because of that stupid nose prosthetic he's wearing.  Meanwhile, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a great actor, and I understand why you would want him in your movie, but I personally think he is slightly miscast here because he's such a tall and powerful presence playing an accomplished man who is downtrodden by his environment and is forced to be meek at times.  I think someone that carries himself with less confidence would have given the role something more.

By Any Means is a movie with an intentional rage behind it, but it's unfocused, muddled, and struggles to express itself.  There is a haunting movie of political and racial violence somewhere in here, but these filmmakers didn't quite find it, settling for a violent movie with some on-the-nose moments.  It's interest value drowns as a result, and it's not particularly thrilling because it's too busy seething to actually stimulate.

Fall:  Deadpoint

⭐️1/2

Genre:  Thriller

Director:  Peter Spierig, Michael Spierig

Starring:  Harriet Slater, Arsema Thomas, Tom Brittney, Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner

Fall is one of those movies that isn't very good but it's worth sticking through its worst tendencies to experience what it does well.  I kinda like it in spite of itself, and watched it for the second time last month.  Not in preparation for this, but rather because I wanted it fresh in my mind because it was a recent subject of an episode of the How Did This Get Made? podcast.  They pretty much had the same take on it that I did.

Anyway, climbers get into more extreme worst case scenarios in this sequel, which is more connected to the previous film than I expected it to be.  Harriet Slater plays the sister of Virginia Gardner's character from the first film (DANGER D!!!!!), who met an unfortunate fate (the title of the movie should tip you off on what happened to her).  Slater meets up with a former acquaintance of her sister, played by Arsema Thomas, who talks her into honoring her sister's memory by going on a plank walk in Thailand.  The cliffside breaks and the duo wind up stranded on a plank thousands of feet in the above the ground.  I tried not to overly judge the movie too early on when it's dramatic beats feel over-delivered and unnatural.  The first film had the same problem and it made up ground on interest value once it got to the meat of the story.  I had hopes that Deadpoint would at least deliver excitement, but it doesn't have the same delivery.  The original Fall compensated for its melodramatic script with a hefty sense of vertigo. Fall 2 is usually dark and murky and takes place against a wall, so its vertigo looks like a gray CGI blob.  When everything looks so hazy and fake, the danger doesn't feel that dangerous.  Some of the better suspense sequences happen during daylight, and while the film continues to struggle with CGI problems, the sequences have more power to them.  This is especially true of the climax, which is probably the most lively sequence in the movie, and is also directed with a sort of flair that the rest of the movie was missing.

Dramatically, the movie hits similar beats to the first film, with the duo trying to cooperate, conceiving dangerous stunts to try and save themselves, and having a falling out for generic betrayal reasons.  One thing that is lessened in this film is the problem solving element.  In the first film, Gardner and co-climber Grace Caroline Currey spent a good amount of their screentime coming up with ideas to signal for help and retrieve their supplies.  Slater and Thomas do that occasionally, but a lot of their time is spent simply sitting on a plank.  The movie even seems to forget that they have no food or water, as that never really comes up.  On top of that, Slater's character is not the thrill-seeker that the characters of the first film were and she spends most of the movie miserable and whiny because she didn't want to do this.  For good long while in this movie, she is mostly useless.  That is until the end decides it's time for her to get over it and do some extreme stuff pretty effortlessly.  It's kinda funny, because the movie seems to be made with the thought of just making the same movie over again only slightly different but these small differences make it a far inferior experience.

Onslaught

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Action, Horror

Director:  Adam Wingard

Starring:  Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Beihn, Alex Pereira, Drew Starkey, Rebecca Hall

Adam Wingard's latest is his homage to grindhouse drive-in fare, while throwing in little flourishes that see him honoring the likes of John Carpenter and Robert Rodriguez.  Onslaught centers on a group of rampaging super soldiers, who are brainwashed with the single thought of killing every living thing in their way, as they escape confinement and terrorize a trailer park.  Inside said trailer park is former sniper Adria Arjona, doing her best Michelle Rodriguez impression, who fights to protect her young daughter.  Protect she does, as Arjona successfully projects the image of tenacious, feral badass, but the threat around her often fails to truly feel like the menace they're supposed to be.  Despite its promise of relentless carnage, Onslaught has struggles in actually putting it on display for the audience to enjoy.  Instead of pulling off intense action, most of the time it defaults to long takes of shadow people with glowing eyes just standing in place.  Our villainous super soldiers have an intimidating look, sometimes being the striking image of a hulking slasher antagonist ala Leatherface or Jason, but they often feel like they aren't actually doing anything.  Throughout most of their raid, Arjona and others are pinned down in a single house, and the soldiers seem keenly aware of where they are, but they don't actually act on it until their prey jumps out a door and runs out into the open, or just when the plot runs out and something needs to happen.  It's weak suspense because it feels like just being behind any given wall is a safe space, which means the main selling point of hard-boiled mayhem is a wash because it is stunted and contrived.  Outside of its action, the movie is primarily hammy kitsch, seeing Dan Stevens in silly mad scientist cosplay and Rebecca Hall as a high-ranking government ballsqueezer who has everyone on a leash.  It's from the aesthetic that you can tell the movie they wanted to make, but they fumbled the ball in making it entertaining.

Netflix & Chill

Big Shark

⭐️

🏆"Hurts-So-Good" Must-See Bad Movie Award🏆

Streaming On:  Tubi

Genre:  Comedy, Horror

Director:  Tommy Wiseau

Starring:  Tommy Wiseau, Isaiah LaBorde, Mark Valeriano

Tommy Wiseau, you magnificent bastard, you've done it again!

It has taken twenty years but Tommy Wiseau, the visionary auteur who brought us The Room, has finally graced us with his sophomore film.  This one was originally announced as a trailer that was filmed with The Room star Greg Sestero, who was evidently under the impression the trailer was just something silly they made for fun.  Apparently, Wiseau did want to make a movie out of it, and when he finally managed to film it, Sestero dropped out.  The movie screened in 2023, but that appears to have been limited, and it's finally hit wide release on Tubi.  The film takes place in New Orleans, where Wiseau and a pair of fellow firefighters watch as the streets flood and a BIG SHARK begins sliding through the streets and eating people.  Wiseau and his friends set out to save the day.

My main concern with this movie is that I didn't want a self-aware movie from Tommy Wiseau.  If the man behind The Room makes a comedy, that could be an experience infinitely worse than just a bad movie.  What I failed to take into account is that Wiseau is such an eccentric that, even if Big Shark is supposed to be a comedy, it's unclear as to what about it is actually humorous.  The movie is goofy, but that's because it's so odd and aimless.  The Room is also odd and aimless.  That's what makes a Wiseau movie a Wiseau movie.  The movie could possibly be a comedy, but it also could just as easily be Wiseau doing his genuine take on a disaster movie.  It's hard to be sure.  What I will say is that The Room probably has more sincerity behind it, which will likely make it the preferable option to Big Shark.  The Room was someone trying to make a masterpiece.  Big Shark is the result of a madman who knows he can sell a project with his name and made whatever he wanted.

To an extent, Big Shark feels like Wiseau making his own version of Birdemic.  Wiseau is taking a trope-laden genre and putting his own stamp on it.  It might be his homage to Jaws, but I suspect that Wiseau might also be trying to pay tribute to kaiju cinema.  The rampage of the Big Shark kinda plays out like Godzilla attacking the city, and the heroes of the film's scuba diving third act almost feels like a hybrid of Godzilla's 1954 climax and the Orca scenes of Steven Speilberg's famed shark movie.  It also seems interlaced with Wiseau's own brand of commentary, which is delivered almost indecipherably but has little hints of a Global Warming message (like Birdemic).  It's hard to understand the intent because so much of Wiseau's drama is stream-of-consiousness mumbling, but there are oddities that can be picked out every so often.  One of my favorite examples happens during a scene where Wiseau and another character are having a nonsense argument on a couch and it's hard to make out any of their dialogue because there is an angry newscaster who is upset about delivering news about penguins.  It does, however, result in my favorite line of the movie:

"Penguins are usually found in the South Pole, where they are eaten by Polar Bears."

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the coherence of this movie.  So much of this movie is just dicking around, muttering about nothing.  It starts with Wiseau's firefighter squad saving children in a burning building, which turns out to, apparently, be footage that is also being screened in a movie theater that is celebrating them.  They go around town and people hero worship them, though nobody believes Wiseau when he tells people he saw a Big Shark.  This is likely because he tells them in a very Tommy Wiseau way, where he flails his arms around and goes "BIG SHARK!"  When it turns out there is a Big Shark, the firefighters take the initiative to be the ones to vow to kill the Big Shark.  That doesn't mean they'll do anything about it.  They'll play pool and lounge around, saying something needs to be done about the Big Shark, and just spend several minutes muttering in agreement.  When they do act upon this urge to kill the Big Shark, it's usually in a digressive way, such as the most amazingly pointless section of the film where the firefighters get live pigs for bait, take them to a butcher to get slaughtered, only for the butcher to say "I have pigs already slaughtered, so take those," then they put the butchered pigs in the truck with the live pigs and ar like "Don't worry, piggies, we'll let you go."  Also, Wiseau is having some sort of issue with his girlfriend, who at various points gets angry at him, rekindles with him, throws him out of the house, and just forgets about that several scenes later.  There is no real continuity or plot to this movie.  There is just a Big Shark and also Tommy Wiseau is here.  Frankly, that also might be just enough for this to be a must watch.

The Runner

⭐️1/2

Streaming On:  Prime

Genre:  Thriller

Director:  Kevin Macdonald

Starring:  Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Alfred Enoch

I think I'm only watching this movie because it's called "The Runner" and next week there is a movie simply called "Runner" and I started getting the press for the two movies confused and only just realized they were two different movies, so I need finality on which one is which.

Gal Gadot plays a lawyer who is out running when she receives a phone call telling her that she needs to murder her own client or her son will die.  Because this murder plot needed a gimmick apparently, she needs to run across the city in order to get there at a certain time.  I'm not sure why this is plan A for our bad guy, because there are too many outliers that he seems unprepared for and, honestly, she leaves a lot of carnage in her wake.  There is mention of "contingencies" and I'm curious of why this, of all things, is the preferable option.  I guess there would be no movie otherwise, and the movie is taking a wild stab at a Hitchcockian thriller, probably closer to Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth than actual Hitchcock.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn't have the mojo of the best of its kin because it's just so senseless.  I'll give the script credit for coming up with scenarios for this concept it came up with, but it struggles in paying them off.  Often, the movie will make Gadot do something big only for paltry consequences.  That's also in conjunction with the fact that there seems to be a disconnect between how the film is crafted and what the movie thinks it is.  The movie is too flatly made for action and doesn't have much kinetic energy.  Gadot, herself, even seems to have intermediate interest in any given scene.  It makes what could have been a decent time-waster and turns it into an empty experience.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

Buddy ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Coyote vs. Acme ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

The Dog Stars ⭐️⭐️

The End of Oak Street ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Idiots ⭐️⭐️1/2

Insidious:  Out of the Further ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Magic Faraway Tree ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mutiny ⭐️1/2

The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Paw Patrol:  The Dino Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2

Spider-Man:  Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Toy Story 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Digital

I Want Your Sex ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Brink of War ⭐️⭐️

The Wrong Girls ⭐️1/2

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2026: Week 35 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

Buddy

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Horror, Comedy, Fantasy

Director:  Casper Kelly

Starring:  Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key

We can't have nice things.  All of childhood must be weaponized into something dark and deranged by the horror genre at some point, because we can't allow innocence and all that is good must be corrupted.  This movie takes place in a backyard straight out of a PBS children's show, where a group of kids play with their magical stuffed unicorn pal, Buddy.  The children slowly begin to realize that they might actually be prisoners and Buddy is actually a violent monster feeding off of their love.  Obviously, the movie is a play on that Barney stereotype of preschooler show, showcasing it as a sterile purgatory that one's senses recognize as fakery.  The film uses this as a hurdle for a bizarre fantasy survival scenario for children, as it's leans into being a weird combination between a Grimm fairy tale and a really out-there Goosebumps book.  It can experience slowdown as it stumbles upon its segmented format, but it's hard to be upset at a movie that is this proudly weird and off-center for too long.  The movie is not going to be for everybody, and its ending is more of a rambunctious explosion than a conclusion, but it felt to me like this movie was more about the weird journey than it is in telling a conventional tale.

Colony

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Horror

Director:  Yeon Sang-ho

Starring:  Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Cang-wook, Kim Shin-rok, Shin Hyun-been, Go Soo

I had the choice between sitting through a Christian rock musical for free or driving to a different theater and paying real money to see a Korean horror movie.  I made my decision and I stand by it.

Yeog Sang-ho is back with another zombie movie.  Considering he directed quite possibly the greatest zombie movie of all time with Train to Busan, that comes with lofty expectations.  But I'm willing to let him cook.  Colony takes place mostly confined to a building, where a biological attack infects people and they begin to attack everyone in their way.  They also begin to display insect-like attributes, seemingly communicating and working in a hive mind.  It's an interesting reinvention of the idea of a zombie movie, but it also comes at the cost of listing out its dense rulebook as it goes.  The amount of explanation required to understand everything almost makes one wish the movie came with an instruction manual.  Still, Sang-ho is a master in crafting set-pieces.  The movie has excellent sequences of suspense and the climax is genuinely spectacular.  And anybody who was impressed with the zombie choreography in Train to Busan will find a lot to admire here, which takes that craft to the next level.  The movie doesn't hit nearly as hard as Train to Busan but it's also not trying to be Train to Busan.  Train to Busan arguably wasn't even a horror movie.  Colony is a nastier movie through and through.  Yet, it's not as memorable.

Coyote vs. Acme

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Comedy

Director:  Dave Green

Starring:  Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P.J. Byrne, Eric Bauza, Kenneth Choi

I really hate that this movie is always going to have an asterisk next to its name.  Coyote vs. Acme is now famous for the notoriety of having been a movie that has escaped being forever vaulted by Warner Brothers as a tax write-off after their merger with Discovery Media.  This resulted in several movies being scrapped deep into post production, including Batgirl, Scoob:  Holiday Haunt, and nearly another Looney Tunes movie called The Day the Earth Blew Up, which Ketchup Entertainment released last year.  Ketchup also did its due diligence in acquiring Coyote vs. Acme, letting the world finally see what David Zaslav thought nobody wanted.  Oddly, the negative press for the near-junking of this film probably put more eyes on it than it would have gotten otherwise and the movie might now just be a focal point of supporting art and sticking it to the corporations that were partaking in activities that were both anti-artist and anti-consumer.  If a movie does its job correctly, a viewer shouldn't think positively of it out of spite.  Luckily, that shouldn't be the case here.  Creative, heartfelt, and wildly entertaining, Coyote vs. Acme comes the closest to replicating the magic of Who Framed Roger Rabbit that so many movies have been struggling to recreate for decades.

We all know the Road Runner cartoons.  Wile E. Coyote chases him, Road Runner runs, Wile E. Coyote fails, often with a weird gizmo exploding.  Those gizmos are normally made by the Acme Corporation.  Wile E. takes his frustrations to small-time lawyer Will Forte, where it balloons into a massive multimillion dollar lawsuit.  When one looks at the types of movies the Looney Tunes have done in the live-action/animation hybrid space, be it a Space Jam or a Back in Action, they're usually high-concept ideas that inject the Tunes into a big adventure.  Coyote vs. Acme scales that back and uses these cartoons as actual characters and not big personas littering a wacky narrative with jokes.  The film maps out an actual story and uses them to tell that story and enhance the satire, which is a refreshing novelty when it feels like the Looney Tunes haven't been used like this in a very long time.  It makes the movie feel like it has a purpose and isn't riding a gimmick.

I had always heard that this movie had a surprising heart at its center.  I wasn't sure how much I believed that, because it's difficult to graft emotional pull onto a character like Wile E. Coyote, who is a pretty big jerk.  But the movie is actually pretty smart about what his appeal is, as it makes a very interesting point about Wile E. Coyote's tenacity, showing him as an example of never giving up, even if you're used to failure.  Sometimes the coyote's more greedy attributes overwhelm the message the movie is going for, as he mostly just wants to use the trial as a giant trap to catch the Road Runner, but the movie does know how to use this character to his maximum potential and it follows through.  The fact that this nearly lost piece of media that we only got through popular demand has a message of living to fight for what you want is oddly perfect.

This is a great movie.  I'm not just saying that to justify what it took to release, nor from being a long-time lover of the Road Runner cartoons, it is legitimately one of the better movies I've seen this year.  People shouldn't just see it to thumb their noses at Warner; they should see it for its own merits, of which there are many.  Looney Tunes fans should see it because it's easily the best Looney Tunes movie ever made.  Families should see it because it's a ton of fun.  And we should all breathe a sigh of relief that it is here and we can enjoy it.

The Dog Stars

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Thriller

Director:  Ridley Scott

Starring:  Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce

The Dog Stars is not a terribly interesting book, but it's more interesting than you'd assume by simply watching the film adaptation.  Jacob Elordi plays a widower who lost his wife during a pandemic who flies around in a little airplane and kills time with survivalist Josh Brolin.  He goes out flying to search for greener pastures, where he stumbles upon Margaret Qualley and father Guy Pearce living on their ranch.  Ultimately, the book uses a post-apocalyptic backdrop as an allegory for wallowing in greif.  The movie feels like it understands this but works surprisingly hard to stifle it.  I've never seen a movie try so hard to pretend it doesn't have a point.

In fairness, I do think a lot of the plot needed to be reworked.  The book is meandering and repetitive, turning in circles before progressing its story in any given direction, often feeling like it was written by someone whose favorite episodes of The Walking Dead are the boring mid-season ones where people glower around and nothing happens.  A lot of the plot points in this adaptation are simplified and gussied up as an action sequence to give the movie a bit more whiz-bang than just a story of a sad man who finally discovers the only woman in town and decides he's also really horny.  To my surprise, a lot of this comes at the expense of numbing the romance between Elordi and Qualley.  Considering that relationship pushes the entire theme of the story, one would think you would fight to keep that fleshed out.  Stripping it down makes your story feel like it has nowhere to go, and the movie leads to its greatest creative liberty in an action-packed third act that is more noise than payoff.  I'm not sure how good of a movie you could have made out of The Dog Stars but it certainly feels like they took their eyes off the ball.

Idiots

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Comedy

Director:  Macon Blair

Starring:  Dave Franco, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Mason Thames, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun, Peter Dinklage

Two losers are tasked with driving a spoiled rich kid to rehab in this comedy that is more brash than funny.  The movie's most positive attribute is that it escalates in ways that try to counter predictability.  Whether or not its smart plot progression is a matter of perspective, but it's not afraid to get bold, even if it's just bizarre.  It wears its brazzenness with confidence, and it's always good to see a comedy that is this sure of itself.  The problem is that the movie is very aggressive with its escalation, which boarders on being too unpleasant to be amusing.  I can't call this a bad movie but I also can't call it a good time.  I appreciated the effort to make a unique goofball of a movie, though.

It Ends

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Horror

Director:  Alexander Ullom

Starring:  Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole

I hope horror fans love psychological movies about purgatory because they are spoiled for choices this year, between this, Exit 8, and Backrooms.  It Ends hits the road with a quartet of friends who find themselves on an endless highway that seemingly has no destination, and they just drive into the distance hoping to find a way off.  I hate road trips too.  It's an experience of being trapped in a metal container with people you're somewhat fond of and slowly growing more irritated at them.  If It Ends let's down in its existential ambitions, at least it understands that part of life.  This movie can be proud that it's an excellent simulator of it.  It Ends seems to be an exploration of a group of people who are in a situation without reason, watching what hope they maintain and the eventual loss of it.  As to what's actually happening, the movie doesn't explain this.  It offers hypotheticals, but never an explanation.  The only aspect of this that's bothersome is that it offers a very specific set of rules that it demands its characters to follow, and also a vague notion of the things that happen outside of the car, but it offers little in the way of exploring itself other than just living with the characters.  It feels like there is more movie here and this is just a proof of concept.  But still, it's an interesting movie.  There's not enough here to fully resonate, but they took a swing at something big with very little resources and I respect that.

Art Attack

Finding Emily

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Comedy, Romance

Director:  Alicia MacDonald

Starring:  Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver

I saw Obsession seven times over the summer.  Every time I saw it, the last trailer during the opening previews was for Finding Emily, which was Focus Features' next big acquisition release, coincidentally also dealing with a "love obsession," albeit in a different way.  Finding Emily didn't make it to my multiplex, despite how very familiar I became with the trailer because they were showing it.  Maybe it'll expand next week, I don't know, but I felt like I needed closure to my Obsession experience.  So I drove down to my little arthouse and sat down with the daffy little romcom.

Finding Emily centers on Spike Fearn, a guy who meets an "Emily" at a club but is accidentally given an incorrect phone number.  He tries to find her on her college campus, and his stunts get more extravagant as he is encouraged by Angourie Rice, who who decides to study him for her psychology thesis without his knowledge.  It's high-concept romcom shenanigans, more cute than funny, but the last romcom I took in was that not-so-great One Night Only movie, so just being a pleasant smile-inducer was more than welcome.  The one thing that really struck me while watching this is that the concept is a minefield of conflict because when one aspect of the story is wrapping up, another one ignites.  It makes the third act feel very extended as even if the main conflict is resolving, further are still in the air, and it even ends when arguably there are still more to resolve.  It's pretty interesting on how much this film choses to juggle when we all know the ending is just going to be Fearn and Rice doing a big kiss.  There is some commentary on modern-age romance in a social age that is inclined to scrutinize but it's watered down and played for silliness.  That doesn't matter because the romcom audience wants the big kiss.  That's the money.  The movie has big kiss, so it delivers.

Late Fame

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama

Director:  Kent Jones

Starring:  Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, Edmund Donovan

Willem Dafoe plays a former poet living in obscurity in Manhattan who is taken in by a group of young, upper-class writers who push him into writing again.  That sounds like a feel-good story, right?  Then you're reading it wrong.  Ultimately, Late Fame is the comparison of how art and artists is used and mistreated by those who don't value the work but use it to dress themselves.  Dafoe's character is an actual, grounded, lived-in person.  The movie puts him in a room full of people who are performative, acting as if they're supporting and influencing his passion when they are really pressuring him to help them improve their stature and impress others.  Dafoe goes along with it because he never achieved success and had never had this type of attention before.  The film is a realization that he is leaving reality behind for something fake, seduced by the idea of recognition (and also the allure of Greta Lee in a ridiculous wig).  The movie wants to frustrate because it showcases art being made, used, and discussed for the wrong reasons, and it will hopefully prompt a discussion of what art should really mean to the person who makes it and the people who consume it.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

The End of Oak Street ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Insidious:  Out of the Further ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Magic Faraway Tree ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mutiny ⭐️1/2

The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Paw Patrol:  The Dino Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2

Spa Weekend ⭐️1/2

Spider-Man:  Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Tony ⭐️⭐️⭐️

New To Digital

Her Private Hell ⭐️1/2

Motor City ⭐️⭐️⭐️

New To Physical

Abraham's Boys ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Breadwinner ⭐️⭐️

Disclosure Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Father Mother Sister Brother ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Mandalorian and Grogu ⭐️⭐️

Power Ballad ⭐️⭐️⭐️

She Rides Shotgun ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Sheep Detectives ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Whistle ⭐️⭐️1/2

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2026: Week 34 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

Insidious:  Out of the Further

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Horror

Director:  Jacob Chase

Starring:  Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Lin Shaye

My confession is that I hadn't seen all the Insidious movies until this week.  I tried to grind them when the fifth one came out, but only had time for the first two.  Well, most of the first two.  I didn't finish the second one, but I got ten minutes away from the end and just ran out of time.  I'm pretty sure I could guess how it ended, though.  But this time I was determined to finish the Insidious journey and watched the third and fourth movies, which I did complete.  And yet, I still haven't watched the last ten minutes of the second one.  It's always nagged at me that I never watched this series in full, because I legitimately always thought the first one was pretty good.  Then sequels came out and they just slipped my mind.  My conclusive thoughts on the Insidious series is that it's surprisingly melodramatic, especially when you get to the ones where Lin Shaye is the headliner.  Shaye is a good actress, but the movies always give her big walls of dialogue for her to deliver with theatrical sadness in her eyes.  This is especially true of the fourth movie, which feels like it was written around monologues that they wanted to give her.  The horror elements are usually creative and fun enough to counter, but this franchise is usually a weird mixture of playfulness and a stone face.

But, long story short, I missed out on the Insidious series for all these years.  Turns out I didn't miss much.

Anyway, this sixth film revolves around a dentist who finds that she has a special link to "the Further," that spiritual realm where all the scary spooks live in.  There is also a malevolent force inside it that wishes to use her connection to help all the ghost people escape into the real world and create havoc.  I like this story.  At the heart of it is that theme of paternal bonds that all the Insidious movies have, even if its themes of generational trauma echo the fourth film more than I think it realizes, but it's a solid and sturdy script.  It's pretty definitively the best Insidious movie since the first one.  It has the best balance between the horror story and the personal drama, without falling into the familiar traps of being too convoluted for the former and too overbearing on the latter.  These things especially hurt the last two movies in this series.

The one let down is that the movie isn't as "scary" as the other films in the franchise.  There are scenes of discomfort, and one lengthy scene that has the sole aim of just being gross, but it's not as creative as the other films in this series when it comes to trying to unsettle the audience.  For a good long while, this movie doesn't have a big suspense setpiece that makes you lean forward in anticipation.  In the home stretch, it starts to fuse typical Insidious spookies with Evil Dead insanity, causing one to wonder where this spirit was the whole time.  I'm going to forgive this because I think, as a whole, this movie has more going for it than the other sequels, but the original is still the only film in this series that got the balance right.

The Magic Faraway Tree

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Fantasy

Director:  Ben Gregor

Starring:  Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nonso Anozie, Nicola Coughlan, Jessica Gunning, Jennifer Saunders, Rebecca Ferguson

Based on the classic children's book series, Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy play a pair of unemployed parents who take their family out to the countryside to start a tomato farm.  As their trio of city kids adjust to the simple life, they discover a tree in the woods that leads to a magical lands in the sky.  The Magic Faraway Tree is pure flamboyant British whimsy, with little reason to be purely cinematic cotton candy other than because it can and you're powerless to stop it.  All the set-design is sumptuous and all the costumes look ridiculous, while both are fulfilled by a game cast who are ready to fill the screen with their over-the-top, giggling personas.  The moral of the story is basically escaping the bubble of indoor tech and learning to play outside, which is both simple and obvious.  It delivers it with warmth and cheer, making this a quality option for any family.

Mutiny

⭐️1/2

Genre:  Action

Director:  Jean-François Richet

Starring:  Jason Statham, Annabelle Wallis, Roland Møller, Adrian Lester

Traditionally, a mutiny takes place when a crew strips command away from their ranking officer and takes a station or vessel for their own intent.  That doesn't happen in this movie.  I'm not sure if the people who made it thought a mutiny was just taking over a boat, but it takes balls to make a movie called "Mutiny" that doesn't actually have a mutiny.  What actually does happen in this movie is that Statham is framed for murder, and his search for answers leads to a container ship, where he does Jason Statham things to bad people who are human trafficking.  If one wants to get into the minor details, Annabelle Wallis is a person in the command chain on the ship and she helps Statham, so technically she's committing mutiny, but it's also kind of a paltry mutiny.  Statham's the one doing most of the work.

But we all come to a Jason Statham movie to see Jason Statham bruise some balls.  Can the action in Mutiny save the fact that it's a conceptual mishap?  Mutiny is pretty bottom-tier Statham.  The plot is meandering and clumsy, as Statham just runs around saving people, abandoning them, saving them again, abandoning them again, only to save them fully in the climax.  It's not a thrilling story by any means.  The action is pretty solid when the movie decides to get dirty, and Statham doesn't disappoint.  You get to see him pick up an ax, a crate hook, and harpoon gun, and that's when you know you're about to see some quality violence.  But for a movie with a script this thin, there needs to be more.  This needs to go full Die Hard (or even Under Seige) to make it exciting.  There is not enough event on that boat to film a whole movie around, which makes you wonder why they didn't just actually make a movie about a mutiny.

Spa Weekend

⭐️1/2

Genre:  Comedy

Director:  Jon Lucas, Scott Moore

Starring:  Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris, Adam Demos

Hoping to attract all the ladies having a girl's night this week is Spa Weekend, a comedy featuring a group of lifelong besties hoping to relax on a weekend that becomes more chaotic as their one friend who doesn't have her shit together shows up.  While I was open to letting this movie just do its thing, ultimately Spa Weekend was a bit of a drag.  Nothing about it has any flow to it, and most of its plot beats feel performative and manufactured, right down to our lead having a love interest whose only personality is to be generic perfect guy.  Even the comedy suffers because of this.  There is a very plastic way all the jokes are delivered in this movie and it stresses me out.  Spa weekends shouldn't raise my blood pressure.  Everyone is doing their best in trying to improve their script by improvising most of their lines, but editing them all together is a janky experience of people saying weird dialogue in a vacuum.  But if I were to give credit to one performer, it would be Isla Fisher.  She storms in with a Peg Bundy wardrobe and plays every scene way larger than she needs to.  Sometimes she overwhelms the movie, but a lot of the scenes she's in kinda need a big presence like hers to kick it in the ass.  There's a scene where she disrupts a group meditation that is pretty fun. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it's easily the best scene in the movie.  The movie is painless fluff, but it's not the joyful good time it wants to be.  One scenery-chewing performance can't overturn such a flimsy production.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Horror, Thriller

Director:  Jane Schoenbrun

Starring:  Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler

I had to play a Where's Waldo? game to find this movie in my area.  My normal theater has been advertising it extensively, but that doesn't always mean they're showing smaller movies like this.  Sometimes they pick them up a week or two later to fill screens, but it also isn't a guarantee.  This might be partially because Spider-Man is still a guaranteed theater filler, but I'd rather blame a bad movie than a good one.  My theater played that stupid Elijah Peel movie last week but they wouldn't put up Camp Miasma.  That's bullshit.

From I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is yet another allegorical queer film meshed with meta homage to the type of media they consumed during their formative years.  This one is inspired by 80's slasher movies, mostly the Friday the 13th franchise and a dash of Sleepaway Camp, telling the story of a young director hired to helm a reboot of the fictional Camp Miasma franchise.  Her quest for a new approach to the tired slasher story leads her to the doorstep of the original "final girl" star of the first film, played by Gillian Anderson.  And no, the fact that Anderson is in this film while her series The X-Files was obviously a strong influence on I Saw the TV Glow was not lost on me.

The film is another tour of the psychological effect media has on those who view it during their formative years, and, as the title implies, this one is more specifically focused on sexuality.  And what a better way to express sexuality than what Joe Bob Briggs refers to the "blood, breasts, and beasts" of 80's horror.  A lot of 80's teen sexuality is linked to that culture, from making out in a theater to watching people do it on-screen before they get killed, and bringing it all together as a bizarre sexual awakening.  The killer's name in the Camp Miasma franchise is "Little Death," which is derived from a French nickname for an orgasm.  This is very intentional, becoming a heavy metaphor that drives the third act of the film.

As smart and as interesting as this film can get, it never replicates that crawling-into-your skin energy of I Saw the TV Glow.  But it's also very clearly the same creative force pushing for something equally provocative.  The movie is a very specific expression from a very specific artist, albeit one that has less power behind it than their previous film.  The film is flooded with an LGBTQ identity, and even a good chunk of the film's cast identify as queer in one way or another.  Gillian Anderson is also having the time of her life performing in this movie that drives itself against the grain of the hetero-normative cinema experience, and she spends most of the movie overwhelming it with her character.  Sometimes it struggles infusing that queer identity into its homage of Friday the 13th, as the queer Sleepaway Camp elements don't blend seamlessly with the more popular slasher franchise.  It's doesn't resonate with me as strongly as Schoenbrun's previous film, but it's one that is still worth combing through to see what you can find in it.  And it would probably make an interesting double feature with fellow slasher deconstruction In a Violent Nature, if one were so inclined.

I also felt like lighting a cigarette when it was done with me, so it did something right.

Tony

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama

Director:  Matt Johnson

Starring:  Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Dagmara Domińcyk, Rich Sommer, Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall

Popular chef and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain is the subject of this latest biodrama, which sees a young and petulant failed writer named "Tony" following a girl to Massachusetts, only to become stranded there.  With few options, he becomes a dishwasher in a restaurant ran by Antonio Banderas, who eventually allows him to work with the food, igniting his passion for cooking.  The movie feels like a good serving of a story about figuring out what one's purpose in life is, though I feel it's a bit too casual to actually hit.  While we do spend a lot of time with these characters, sometimes it feels like their development happens off-camera.  The movie wants us to read the eyes of the actors more than it wants to tell us what their thinking, which can be virtuous when it when it doesn't stumble upon expressing that adequately.  Still, it's an interesting biopic, and it will be of interest to kitchen-philes.  Bourdain was an interesting guy, though this movie is only just a taste of what made him worth knowing about.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

The Brink of War ⭐️⭐️

The End of Oak Street ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Fast and the Furious ⭐️1/2

The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Paw Patrol:  The Dino Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Rivals of Amziah King ⭐️⭐️

Spider-Man:  Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Super Troopers 3:  Farva's Wedding ⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Digital

Toy Story 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Physical

Backrooms ⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2026: Week 33 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

The Brink of War

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama

Director:  Michael Russell Gunn

Starring:  Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, J.K. Simmons

It had to come to this, didn't it?  I'm still reeling from that fuck-awful Ronald Reagan biopic with Dennis Quaid and now I have another Reagan movie breathing down my neck.  I'm still dealing with trauma, here.  This isn't helping.

This one has a narrowed-down scope, focusing on the meeting between Reagan and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev over nuclear disarmament in 1986.  The movie feels like it's only ambition is to be a "movie day" film for history classes in middle school, opting for hammy stage drama instead of anything meaty.  The movie never breaks free of its overwritten dialogue, hamfisted attempts at human relation schmaltz, and uneven casting.  I like Jeff Daniels, but he is very miscast as Reagan.  He is sometimes trying too hard to push that Reagan impression into his own screen persona, and at other times he just gives up, walking in a room like regular Jeff Daniels and is all "I'm Ronald Reagan."  Jared Harris, on the other hand, is excellent casting as Gorbachev.  He takes a script that a lot of actors in this movie are struggling with and he is fully locked-in, ready to sell it.  So half the movie has the heart it needs and half of it feels artificial.  I'm really struggling to compromise with this movie, which is probably fitting, giving the subject matter.

The one thing that makes me softer on its weaker aspects is that the film goes out of its way to actually have some humanization and empathy for the Russians, treating them as real people instead of just the enemy.  Compare this to the Dennis Quaid movie, which portrayed them as blubbering buffoons who were destined to fail because they weren't American.  This aspect of The Brink of War gives the movie a backbone, taking its tricky subject of dramatizing a debate table and giving it a form of dignity that the propaganda of that other movie wouldn't allow.  After all, nobody wants nuclear war, but also nobody wants to give up their nukes.  It was a tricky thing to compromise on and I'll give the movie some credit in understanding that part of the assignment.

Elijah Peel

⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Faith

Director:  Nathan Ross Murphy, Kevin D. Sepe

Starring:  Robert Malcolm Cumming, Evelyn Grace Kite, Kevin Sorbo, April Billingsley, Princess Elmore

The poster for Elijah Peel says it's inspired by a true story but, for the life of me, I can't find any information on what that true story is.  As far as I know, Elijah Peel is not a real person.  Google's AI says the movie is just a loose translation of co-director Kevin D. Sepe's born again experience, but it will be a cold day in hell when I trust an AI summary at face value.  But if that is true, I'd say that is some heavy duty bullshit advertising, up there with claiming Texas Chainsaw Massacre is inspired by a true story because, technically, serial killers exist and they might live in Texas and own a chainsaw.

So, this fake true story is about a hard drinking, hard partying rock star name Elijah Peel who has a heart attack and finds himself in ICU, visited by a young girl with cancer who wants him to know that Jesus loves him.  They become friends and this convinces him to become a Christian rock artist.  If you think any of this happens gradually, you'd be wrong.  The movie does nothing with subtlety.  There is melodrama and then there is whatever this movie is doing, where it portrays dramatic beats by hitting sudden mood swings, dropping to its knees and bursting into shrill wails.  Even Al Jolson would tell it to calm the fuck down.  The drug scenes are so brazenly in-your-face that it almost feels like a stern warning by people who have never done drugs in their lives and it becomes a movie about conquering drug addiction that feels like it was made by someone whose experience with it was limited to watching Reefer Madness and thinking it was a biting commentary.  After all of this, our title character spends thirty seconds with the little girl and becomes completely obsessed with her, going through a Patch Adams phase where he just clowns around the hospital with her.  Then the movie hits lows where everyone is on the floor and crying because of "the power of music" or something.  This somehow forces him into a relapse, where instead of being given drugs, some dude just locks him in a room with a girl who is OD'ing.  Even after-school specials  would think it's too much.

This isn't even mentioning the various things in this movie that are odd.  The movie's portrayal of nurses is strange, because some will wear proper scrubs and others will dress in uniforms that feel like they were rented from porno sets, with short skirts and cleavage bearing, to show "temptation."  The movie has a long (humorous?) montage of him rejecting personal nurses because they're all too sexy.  Then there is a scene where a nurse threatens to give him strychnine instead of morphine after he won't stop flirting with her, which I'm pretty sure could get her fired even if she was being sexual harassed.  Then comes a late revelation that the movie is pro-stem cell research, which is usually the exact opposite of what a faith film would normally do because that also implies that it's pro-abortion by association.  But then again, maybe the filmmakers just don't know what stem cells are.  They aren't rocket scientists, they just want to make a movie about a magical sick girl who knows everything about life.

This leads to an ending that is very strange and I can't tell if it's trying to be ambiguous or not because it's shooting too many conflicting ideas at the audience.  I'm just going to spoil the fuck out of it because I'm the only person who will ever watch this movie, so you've been warned.  This being a movie about a cancer patient, the movie obviously is going to get to that point where cancer is going to do what it does.  But then it presents the that experimental stem cell treatment and then it flashes forward to our titular musician singing a song because he promised the girl he'd "sing at her funeral," then it cuts to the audience and she's just sitting out there.  Maybe the intent is that we're supposed to decide whether she lived or died by ourselves but there are so many aspects to this movie that are underdeveloped that this ending just comes off as the movie just being done with itself.  To be frank, it's hard to hate a movie that presents a trite story as stupidly as this one does.  I just don't have the energy.  But nobody who worked on this film had any ideas of how to pull off something that has been done a thousand times, and that's just mind-numbing.

The End of Oak Street

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Science Fiction, Adventure, Thriller

Director:  David Robert Mitchell

Starring:  Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery

Oh, that's cute.  Someone remade The Day Time Ended.

An entire neighborhood goes on an "Excellent Adventure" as it's hurdled through time, transplanting both it and its residents in the prehistoric past, where they fend off dinosaurs and other dangers.  The movie is very Speilberg-coded, centering on a singular family trying to navigate the carnage as everyone dies around them.  In that aspect, it actually reminded me of Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds the most, even though it's a more majestic-minded film, wanting to be a cross between E.T. and Jurassic Park.  Speaking of the latter, The End of Oak Street is actually quite a bit better than that franchise has been of late, being preferable than...honestly, about all of the sequels, maybe?  If anything holds the film back, it's that the scenario it creates is so chaotic that some of the plot set-up in the film is cut shor and never paid off.  Focusing on a single P.O.V. then giving glimpses of others surrounding them who are having their own experience that we know near nothing about makes the story feel like Swiss cheese, which is technically whole but full of empty space that offers nothing.  And it leads to an ending that is presented as sweet but is honestly very problematic if you think about it, but I can't rant about that unless I laid the entire thing out and explained what was wrong with the entire idea.  But the movie mostly works on a solid foundation of weird adventure candy cinema that can be fun one moment and savage the next.  It's more worthwhile of the price for your ticket than all of the Jurassic World movies, so that's something.

Nimrods

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Comedy

Director:  Lee Kirk

Starring:  Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman, Ryan Faust, Mckenna Grace, Jenna Fischer

Nimrods is one of those self-promotional movies that popular bands make about fans having misadventures on their way to a concert.  Today's group of the day is Green Day.  The film follows a teen band that has been pranked into thinking they're opening for Green Day for a big New Year's concert across the country, so they steal a car and go on a road trip to make the non-existent date.  From my understanding, the film is partially inspired by Green Day's early experiences before breaking out, with some loose inspiration also from another band called Waterdog that opened for them in the 90's.  As to what is true and what is bullshit, I'm not familiar enough with "Green Day lore" to tell you, but the fact that Green Day made the movie semi-autobiographical makes this movie feel slightly more personal than other films of its ilk.  There is heart and care put into it, and the film can be really funny at times.  It can also digress into oddity, notably in a section that is a horror movie parody halfway through that is more strange than humorous.  The film has these small blemishes that feel odd in the moment but don't take away from the experience, like Mckenna Grace's character serving zero purpose other than to have a love interest for five minutes, but she's a pleasure to have in any movie, so it doesn't really matter.  It's a series of comical scenarios that are mostly successful at creating smiles, while also ending on an emotional beat that I'm not fully convinced the movie was properly building to, but still kinda hits.  The movie works in spite of itself, resulting in an uneven joy.

Paw Patrol:  The Dino Movie

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Adventure, Fantasy, Superhero

Director:  Cal Brunker

Starring:  Carter Young, Ryan Janjua, Mckenna Grace, Hayden Chamberlain, Henry Bolan, Lucien Duncan-Reid, William Desrosiers, Nylan Parthipan, Terry Crews, Jameela Jamil, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg

This is both the second movie this week with Mckeena Grace, as well as the second movie with dinosaurs.  I don't know if that means anything, but this one has talking dogs, so...win?

The Nickelodeon sensation is back on the big screen for the third time, this time seeing the rescue pups discovering a lost island full of dinosaurs.  Because kids love Paw Patrol and kids love dinosaurs, but not every kid is old enough to see The End of Oak Street, so we'll take them to see the one where even the carnivorous dinosaurs make friends with puppy dogs.  I'm assuming these Paw Patrol movies are made to center around one specific dog from the team with each movie, offering an origin story and a specific character flaw to overcome.  The last movie focused on Skye, the flying pink one, and, while I haven't seen it, I'm assuming the first movie featured Chase, who is the blue police dog.  For The Dino Movie, the pup of the hour is Marshall, who is the one with the red firehat.  Marshall is portrayed as very clumsy and accident prone, having a hard time to work past his mistakes.  I'm not sure if those aspects are actually a thing in the TV show, but if they were, I've never noticed while babysitting and playing on my phone.  But the message of the movie is failure is what we need to learn how to succeed, which is why we never give up, and that's nice.

The one small thing that was nagging me about this movie is that the Paw Patrol are a rescue squad.  It's kind of the one thing that they do.  So when the premise of your movie is that they find a lost dinosaur land, the film needs to convolute ways of getting them to do that one thing and not just stand around an island while playing with dinosaurs.  Ultimately, the dinosaurs are just an aesthetic choice, providing a backdrop where they maybe will sell a few toys in addition to the shiny new Paw Patrol vehicles and outfits (they wear pants now!) and the all-new team member Rex, who rides a T-Rex ala Dino-Riders, and Marshall's new dino friend Rubarb.  It feels like the movie can be blatantly toyetic in that regard, but Paw Patrol has always been a high merch seller, and the last movie had them as superheroes, so I can't blame the movie for being what it is.

The real test case for these movies is the audience they were made for.  The six-year-old I took to see it thought it was the best movie ever.  He got a lunchbox full of popcorn, a little cup with Marshall on it, and a Paw Patrol poster and pin-on button.  He's living his best life.  Paw Patrol:  The Dino Movie gave him a good day.  Thank you, Paw Patrol.  You saved the day again.

The Rivals of Amziah King

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Comedy, Thriller

Director:  Andrew Patterson

Starring:  Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori, Kurt Russell

Matthew McConaughey plays a beekeeper who reconnects with a foster child he used to care for, played by Angelina LookingGlass.  After his bees are stolen, McConaughey dies of a heart attack, leaving LookingGlass as an heir to a bee colony that has no bees.  LookingGlass then seeks out those who might have taken his bees and tries to get them back by any means necessary.  To be frank, I'm kinda disappointed in myself for not liking this movie.  The movie started out as a vibe, and I was enjoying it.  Then the vibe shifts.  Then it shifts again.  And again.  The type of movie this was kept changing.  By the end, I was very disengaged.  Maybe it's my fault.  Maybe it's the movie.  I'm not quite sure.  This movie almost feels like it was two movies that were spliced together in an editing room and presented to its audience as if they mixed peanut butter and chocolate together and made something delicious, but the taste is so bitter that I can't appreciate it.  The movie starts out as a happy little movie about family.  Then it becomes sad.  Then it becomes angry.  It seems to me, to the best of my media literacy, that the movie is trying to be a folk tale that is mixed with the presentation of a mafia movie.  The movie becomes a story of "they who control the bees controls the honey," which is an interesting prospect.  I don't think it forgives the many tonal shifts of the film, as we venture down some dark paths that are glossed over too quickly in favor of shifting the tone for the next scene.  At no point during this movie did I feel like I understood what the movie was.  I was okay with that for a little while.  Movies that try for unique experiences should be encouraged.  By the end, the experience I was having felt like enduring instead of experiencing.  That's of no fault of the creatives or the actors, because this movie feels like exactly the movie they wanted to make.  The honey just didn't taste very sweet.

The Wrong Girls

⭐️1/2

Genre:  Comedy

Director:  Dylan Meyer

Starring:  Kristen Stewart (line?), Alia Shawkat, LaKeith Stanfield, Tony Hale, Zack Fox, Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Kate McKinnon, Geena Davis

This oddball comedy is a professional collaboration between Kristen Stewart and her wife, Dylan Meyer, who wrote and directed the movie.  The movie follows Stewart, who is confused with a woman who looks exactly like her at a nightclub, and is passed off a suitcase full of an unknown substance while she is too drunk to realize what's happening.  She then drinks it with her roommate/bestie Alia Shawkat, and the two become telepathically linked.  They then venture off to sell it for rent money, oblivious to the fact that they might now be the most powerful people on the planet.  If that sounds dumb, that's because it is dumb.  I'm pretty sure the movie's only goal is to be dumb.  The Wrong Girls plays like it was made by someone who really loved The Big Lebowski and Dude, Where's My Car? and decided to mash them together for the ultimate dummy stoner comedy.  Maybe they're a tad aggressive on it, as its aesthetic is overbearing and sometimes hard to pay attention to because of how much they're throwing on the screen.  And, as stated above, the movie is really stupid.  That's not a bad thing if it's funny enough.  There are laughs to be had, but as the movie indulges itself in getting weirder and weirder, it seems like it has gotten high on itself and is stuck in a loop of giggling at a joke that it never says out loud.

But I'm pretty sure that's part of its vibe, willing to be its awkward self because it's better than being like everyone else.  I respect that.  Despite the fact that the movie didn't really vibe with me, it does have this tone to it like it's one of those dumb movies they'd play on the 2000's era USA network over and over again until it accumulated a proper cult following from teenagers who would just lie on the couch with a bag of Doritos handy.  Maybe the same fate will be bestowed on The Wrong Girls, because it's nothing if it's not a midnight movie targeted at a very specific demographic.  After all, any movie that casually drops a Sliders reference can't be all bad.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

Ice Cream Man ⭐️1/2

Minions & Monsters ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Moana ⭐️1/2

The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

One Night Only ⭐️⭐️

Spider-Man:  Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Super Troopers 3:  Farva's Wedding ⭐️⭐️1/2

Toy Story 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Train to Busan ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

New To Digital

The Invite ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jackass:  Best and Last ⭐️⭐️1/2

Minions & Monsters ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Young Washington ⭐️⭐️

New To Physical

Barbarian ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Dolly ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Furious⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Hokum ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Project Hail Mary ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Tuner ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!