Furiosa (2024)

I was skeptical about this one. Not only was I not impressed with the character in Fury Road, but 2.5 hours long? Sheesh. Theaters booted it quickly for some damn reason, so it's probably rubbish, right?

Honestly... it was pretty damn good. The wasteland has never looked better. A visual feast with loads of action that somehow doesn't get boring. Seriously, how can a movie about constant car chases stay entertaining? I don't know, but it does.

I was surprised that Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't appear until about an hour in. That only leaves her with a mere 90 minutes of screentime. Gay. But she teams up with some Max-knockoff who looks like Stacy Keach. He's even got the lip thing going. There's a lot of connection to Fury Road with the citadel and Immortan Joe, but the timeline is still bogus. George Miller doesn't care much for the chronology and timeline of the movies, so why should we?

Since we're at that point where we've had one spin-off, I'm guessing this is intended to spawn a universe of endless dystopian car and desert hijinks. Low performance here indicates otherwise, so will the Mad Max universe fade away when George Miller does?

#Review

Total Recall (2012)

This remake is just like the 1990 movie, except there aren't any mutants and it isn't set on Mars.

Wait, what? So instead, we're on Earth and there's a lot of robots and some conspiracy going on. I zoned out a lot in the later half, but I still don't know what the cover-up was. It was much more clear in the original movie, in which Arnold gives one of his most sincere and emotional lines ever:

Come on, Cohaagen! You've got what you want. Give doz people ay-uh!

They wanted to tax people for air, but in this one? Fuck if I know why anything was happening. All I know is that it was directed by Len Wiseman, which explains why Quaid's "wife" (Kate Beckinsale) is in a lot more of the movie.

Total Recall? I'll forget this whole mess by tomorrow.

#Review

Twilight Zone 2002

You don't hear about this one much. The original is a classic of its era and sets a high standard. Apparently, the 80s version was good enough to last 3 seasons. Then we have a 2002 version hosted by Forest Whitaker. This only lasted 1 season, 22 episodes, 2 segments (20ish minutes each) per episode. They canceled it.

Honestly, this was such a pleasant surprise, though. Most anthology shows have plenty of dud episodes, but I really enjoyed most all of these episodes. And so many guest stars, too!

Scroll down that page to view a list of guest stars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone_(2002_TV_series)



A few noteworthy episodes:

Katherine Heigl goes back in time to kill Hitler as a baby! She poses as a nanny, working for Hitler's father (James Remar), and he hates the dirty Jews!

A woman is stalked by a bus! Well, some bus nobody ever knows about keeps stopping where she's at, waiting for her to get on. She keeps telling it to fuck off, but it keeps coming back. Will she get on?

Jeremy Piven gets struck by lightning! From that point on, he can hear people's thoughts. A full episode in length, but interesting enough to justify it.

Frank Whaley, the guy who says "what" one too many times in front of Sam Jackson, lives a mundane and tedious suburban life. He gets an offer to trade his life for someone else's. He's got a lot of questions, but then he wonders who he can trade lives with. Maybe a rich person with a perfect life and a hot wife? It's some food for thought on how much is too much and what has real value.

A sequel to "It's a Good Life", the original episode of the boy who could think anything to happen. He has a daughter now. This ep has Stephen King vibes.

Eriq La Salle has 6 months to live! Then he gets hit by a car! When he wakes, he's in the year 1968. Stephen King definitely ripped off this episode for 11.22.63 (written in 2011).

A hypochondriac with an over-active imagination manifests a fictional disease... and that neurotic character is played by Jeffrey Combs! That should be enough to sell it.

Shawn Hatosy is a magician trying to learn the best trick ever from a retired magician (Xander Berkeley). I got really sucked into this one. How is the trick really done, though?

Jessica Simpson is stalked by dolls! A more horror-oriented episode about a babysitter and a sad little girl who has a collection of dolls that she has an anxiety and trust issues with. A tad creepy at times, even.

Jeremy Sisto is on death row! He pleads to the end that he's innocent, but what do you know? The execution machine is botched and they have to try again later. Stay tuned to find out what happens next! Great fuckin' episode. I'll call it my favorite of the lot.

Some archeologists dig up an Aztec chest with a gauntlet of blood in it. They accidentally spill the blood, and just like that... the sun is gone. Huh. It doesn't take long for the earth to start freezing, so they hide in their cave and consider if it was their doing, and if so... how do they fix it? A great disturbing ending.

So yeah, I had a lot of fun with this series. If it went on for more seasons, it probably would have turned shitty, so 1 season was good. Recommended to anthology fanatics.

#Review

Betelgeuse Part Deuce!

Who thought this was ever going to happen? They were talking about it for years and years, I wrote it off as a pipe dream. But here we are, 36 years later, and they finally did it. They made Tim Burton great again.

The first movie is great. Weird as hell, original, and a promising start for Tim Burton. He channeled his filmmaking process at that time to make a very practical effects oriented movie. Finally, a Tim Burton movie with very little CGI. The story is a lot of fun, too.

Beetlejuice himself only has so many minutes of screentime, in which most of his scenes are set in the afterlife as a service worker. Michael Keaton rules. You can tell he loves every minute of being such a douchy character.

Most of the movie is set in the real world, and we're given a grander scope of the town. It's a great setting. Autumnal and set primarily on Halloween. Winona is some solid glue to entry, as is her annoying mother Catherine O'Hara. Jeffrey Jones couldn't be in it for reasons we'll not get into here, but they did include his character in a pretty hilarious way. Jenna Ortega is obviously great. She's a wonderful scream queen as of late, and this movie is slightly closer to the horror genre than the original. More life and death stakes. And afterlife stakes.

The Day-O song is only briefly homaged, thank God, but there happens to be an equally hilarious musical number in there. I got plenty of laughs throughout. Willem Dafoe is an actor in the afterlife, acting like a police officer for some reason, and he cracks me up. Danny DeVito is only in one scene, but he's welcome in every goddamn movie ever made. Justin Theroux is the equivalent of Glenn Shadix's character in the original. A phony psychic foil.

I wont say much about Monica Belluci's character, but Monica Belluci is fucking Tim Burton now. That's probably important to the story for some reason. It's strange how a weirdo-looking creep like him attracts women like Belluci and Lisa Marie. And Helena, if you're into zombies.

Basically, everything about BJ2 comes together really well. I think everyone involved had fun making it, and it's a return to form for Tim Burton. This movie didn't even have Helena Bonham Carter or Johnny Depp in it!

#Review

Mindwarp (1991)

Starring Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm! With KNB effects! When I saw that cast and crew, I didn't even read the synopsis. I simply turned it on, thinking I would be in for a good time, but...

This movie was so unengaging. It didn't get me invested at all. There are a few good effects moments, but otherwise, this movie was a big letdown. At least Bruce Campbell screams a lot. It's always fun hearing him in pain.

#Review

Yonkers Joe (2008)

I was getting desperate for a 'Y' movie, so I settled on the first one I could find. I've been on a Chazz Palminteri kick, and this one places him as a gambler trying to scam the casinos for a big win with the help from his wife.

Now things take a more personal/domestic turn when Chazz's son drops by, having been kicked out of his group home because he's a down syndrome guy with violent/inappropriate tendencies. So the movie is Chazz trying to reconcile things with this son of his, who can range from tolerable to asshole.

Now, I've dealt with special-needs before, and I don't have much patience with them. But with that said, this guy doesn't seem totally unbearable, though he does have a potty-mouth and some rapist tendencies. 😦

So I started wondering if this guy was actually retarded or not. It appears as though he is not retarded, so I guess that means he did a great job. This movie would be canceled if it were made today. Some snowflake would bitch that this movie is taking acting jobs away from the real 'tards who want to work ^{don't know the difference either way}.

There's not a whole hell of a lot to say about this movie otherwise, but I liked it.

#Review

UHF (1989)

Weird Al gets his own TV station, which he fills with ridiculous programming.

This movie is pure trash. This shit had me crying.



#Review

Stranger in Our House (1978)

Does anyone know if there is a way to tell when the second showing of Stranger in Our House was? This was the made for TV witch movie with Linda Blair and directed by Wes Craven. It premiered on October 31, 1978 (same night as Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell on a different network). I didn't see it then, but it was rerun some time later, I think probably in the summer or fall of '79. That's when I saw it. I'm trying to determine the exact date because it was the same day as soemthing else that happened to me that I'm including in a written work.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)

This is a good mid-80s NYC period piece following a bunch of juvenile delinquents. It switches between 1986 and the present, as recollected by Robert Downey Jr.

The setting is wonderful. The whole thing is beautifully made and the cast nails it. The crude teens harrassing everybody in town is a lot of fun to me. It's like Kids, where the teens are getting drunk and suffering adolescent melodrama. Shia LeBeauf is among the teens, mostly a spectator rather than instigator to the gang violence that Channing Tatum's bad attitude keeps egging on. The girls are eye candy, everybody's got issues, and people get fucked up. These teens are trash, and I love it.

What's funny to me is that Shia LeBeauf becomes Robert Downey Jr., and Channing Tatum becomes Eric Roberts. This movie needed levity, after all.

It could have been a trash epic if it added some nudity and shown more of the suggested violence. Instead, it's just a really good movie, which is good enough, made better by its level of trash. Like the scene where they beat a small child with a trash can. Fun times for the whole family.

#Review

Alien Romulus

When I heard this was to be set between the first two movies, I wondered how the hell that was going to work. So here's the setup: The company sends a ship to gather some space junk from the Nostromo wreckage. Guess what kind of space junk they find?

But we're not dealing with them. We're dealing with a group of young people on a mining colony planet, and like most young people, they don't want to work. They form a plan to steal some cryo tubes from the wreckage of the ship that went out to get the wreckage from the Nostromo, and... are you still following me?

With the help of a special-ed android, they infiltrate the ship, and then it all goes to shit for them. It's not a bad setup, but it took me a moment to wrap my head around what was going on. Then I got even more confused when I saw a damaged android that looked and dressed like Ash from the original film. Eventually, we confirm that it's a different synthetic that merely looks like him.

This movie relies a lot on nostalgia and doing the same thing over and over again. The atmosphere is good, though, and it has some cool scenes. They do some cool stuff with the facehuggers and the acid, and I liked that ringed planet setting. The movie acknowledges Prometheus pretty readily, and it also homages Alien: Resurrection with a weird hybrid type, who's really stupid and gross.

One part I thought was stupid is how they try to guilt trip the android for not opening the door to save what's-her-face, even though doing so would have guaranteed all of their deaths. I hate that morality shit. It's like that train-track thing where you decide whether to kill the one guy on the tracks or the 5 guys on the tracks, which apparently is a huge moral conundrum for some people.

You'll get a lot of fan service. I read some review say it works best when it's not trying to copy the original so much, and I'd agree. The new ideas were cool, the old ideas are just franchise tropes at this point. Not a great movie, but I don't really hate any of the movies in this series. It's at least better than Covenant.

#Review