Halloween: Resurrection

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There's a scene in this movie where Busta Rhymes yells at Michael Myers. At first glance, you assume that Michael is going to kill him. Instead, he turns around and walks away. I am bringing this scene up right now because it is probably the only part of the movie I genuinely enjoy. Halloween: Resurrection is one of the most popular picks from fans for least favorite Halloween film, and for good reason. This is the first movie in this franchise that I actively hate. Let's start with something I touched on a little bit in my review for H20 - that movie's ending. If this movie didn't exist, I would have no complaints with it. The fact that Resurrection does exist makes the ending to H20 feel cheapened, like it doesn't matter. They bring Jamie Lee Curtis back for this film, and kill her off in the first ten minutes. The problem is, I don't feel like this movie earns her death, at all. On top of that, I feel like Jamie Curtis just didn't want to be in this movie at all. The new characters that we are introduced to after this suck. I would have actually been a little more ok with it if they brought Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams back, but they don't. We have an all new cast of thinly written dead bodies that I couldn't care less about. The acting is pretty poor all-around. Perhaps the worst example of this is Busta Rhymes. I actually enjoy his music, but this movie seems to want to prove that he CANNOT act. The ending is almost laughably bad. Michael Myers, an icon of horror, is defeated by Busta Rhymes doing kung fu. Oh, that's not a joke either. Overall, Halloween: Resurrection only seems to exist because the franchise, and the Michael Myers character make money. This movie is a lazy piece of shit that's only a thing because of money. There is one other movie in this franchise I hate (we'll get to that later). I think I hate this one more because there just seemed to be this attitude of "eh, let's make a Michael Myers movie just because."

1 / 10    

North

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North is one of those movies that I feel almost at a loss to review. Released in 1994, the film follows a young boy named North (played by Elijah Wood) who divorces his parents and travels the world searching for new ones. This movie is a lot of things. It's bizarre, surreal, and stupid. The one thing I can definitely say it isn't is funny. You know what, saying this movie is unfunny might be too nice. Let me be more blunt. North is a barren wasteland of comedy. If you think I'm being too harsh on this movie, then know this: it is unbelievably easy to make me laugh. So, naturally I will be harder on this movie than most others. It probably doesn't help that North couldn't even manage to get a smirk out of me. To give an example of what this movie's sense of humor is like, there's a scene of dialogue following North's decision to divorce his parents. A random parent says "They won't take this lying down." The film then smash cuts to North's parents (played by Jason Alexander and Julia Louise-Dreyfuss) fainting. Ha. Ha. Ha. I know that this movie is from the mid 90s, but I still find it a little problematic that they cast Kathy Bates as a Native American (and spray paint her tan to do so). I would actually have a lot less of an issue with just keeping Kathy Bates white. I'll give Elijah Wood some credit. He is the only actor who seems like he's trying to give a decent performance. Everyone else is clearly phoning it in. The most obvious example of proving to have an "I don't give a shit" performance is Bruce Willis. Alright, I've talked about the movie's awful humor and half-assed acting. At this point, I need to talk about what might one of the worst parts of this movie, the ending. I could say spoilers, but this movie is 25 years old, and isn't worth seeking out. At all. They went for the "it was all a dream plot twist." The reason this doesn't work isn't because it's one of the most tired cliches ever (even if that really doesn't help). It doesn't work because it actually makes most of the movie pointless. Plot developments feel like they just kind of happen as the movie goes on. They don't come off as happening organically. It feels more like they come up as the script is being written instead. I think this might actually be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. North is one of those movies that I actually hate more the more I think about it. 

1 / 10 

Gotti

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Gotti is one of the most haphazardly structured movies of the year so far. It feels like they wanted to do a bunch of different wraparounds, but they couldn’t decide which one they wanted to go with, so they chose to do all of them. The movie literally opens with John Gotti (played John Travolta) talking to the audience House of Cards style. One of the opening lines of the film is something along the lines of: “In this life you either end up in jail or dead. I did both.” As far as I’m concerned, this confusing line set the tone for the mess that was about to come.  From there, it jumps between Gotti as old man (with iffy makeup on) in prison talking to his eldest son and Gotti making his way through the ranks as a middle aged man. Gotti also narrates the movie at random points. The movie also uses new broadcasts as transitions between scenes from time to time. I don’t know why. It doesn’t add anything to the movie, and wouldn’t change anything if it was removed entirely. Most of the blame for these decisions should go to director Kevin Connolly. This movie looks cheap. At no point did I ever think to myself: “this looks like it belongs in theaters.” The movie kind of just crawls along. Even the moments that are supposed to be tense are filmed in such a way that I really could never bring myself to care about anything I was watching onscreen. This movie also glosses over a lot of things. There’s a point where Gotti’s friend Angelo (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince) yells at Gotti’s son. He says: “The proudest moment of your father’s life was watching you graduate from military school.” I just thought: “Wait. What?” The acting in this film is truly awful. Almost everybody speaks with exaggerated accents. It doesn’t feel natural. It feels more like actors saying lines like how a stereotypical gangster might say a line. The one exception to this is Stacy Keach (though even he can’t necessarily make all of his dialogue work). But, the crown for awful acting has to go to John Travolta. It kind of sucks because I know Travolta can be a good actor, and I think he could have done a good job in the role of John Gotti in a much better movie. In all honestly, there are very few things about Gotti that actually work, and I have no intentions of ever watching this movie again in my life. 

1 / 10 

Deep Blue Sea 2

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Deep Blue Sea 2 is one of those movies I kind of had to watch out of morbid curiosity. I first heard that this movie was going to be a thing back in January, and that it was going to get dumped out direct-to-video at some point this year. My first thought was: "well, this is going to be a lazy piece of shit whose sole existence was to cash in on the Deep Blue Sea name." To me, that was the weirdest thing about this movie's existence. Had it been dumped out sometime in the early 2000s, it would have made sense. The first warning I'm going to give you is this: don't even remotely go into this movie expecting something good. Hell, I pretty much only enjoy the first film on a guilty pleasure level. Shark conservationist Misty Calhoun (played by Danielle Savre) is a shark expert brought on to consult a problem. You can guess the plot from here. Idiot humans are hunted and picked off by sharks that are made smarter through testing one by one. So, yeah. this movie is awful. The fact that this movie was a direct to video release really hindered it. The sets are cheap, and they do next to nothing to actually stand out. The characters pretty much all suck. These people don't actually feel like characters, so much as it feels like the filmmakers want us to feel invested in the all-you-can buffet. I wouldn't go so far as to call them unlikable. They just aren't interesting. The only character that kind of stands out to me is the character known as Carl Durant (played by Michael Beach). The reason is because I know he's supposed to be an irredeemable villain and psychopath. I will give the movie props for allowing the characters to have at least enough brains in them to sort of recognize that the obvious bad guy is obvious, even if it isn't 100%. The acting in this film is bad. I'll admit that it isn't the worst acting I've ever seen though. Unfortunately, this leads into the next problem I have with this movie. Because I don't really care about the characters, the movie just sort of drags for me. Part of the problem for me is that this movie kind of just repeats all of the same beats of the first movie, and just seems like it's trying to pass all of it off as something different. Was Deep Blue Sea 2 what I expected it to be? Yes and no. On the one hand, I expected this movie to be a lazy cash-in. On the other hand, I thought this movie was just going to make me angrier than I was. It was mostly dull. Every great once in a while, there would a moment of unintentional laughter, but nowhere near enough to make me want to seek this thing out ever again.

1 / 10  

Collateral Beauty

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So, I watched this movie in early 2017, and I've wanted to do a review for it, but just couldn't bring myself to do so until now. This movie is hands down one of the most soulless, cynical, mean-spirited movies I've ever seen. What's more is it tries passing itself off as something you're supposed to find uplifting.The trailers passed it off as a movie that was about a man who had given up on life and was visited by the physical embodiments of death, love, and time (whom he had been writing letters to), while his closest friends are trying to help him and reach out to him. Instead the movie is about a man who has given up on life after losing his child and begins writing letters to death, love, and time. He has become a recluse, and his company is going under. His friends and colleagues hire actors to play the physical embodiments of these abstract entities in an attempt to make him look like he's crazy and take the company away from him. When I first heard that that was the actual plot of the movie, I thought it sounded so insane I had to see it. By the time the movie was over, I felt little else other than contempt for humanity because we allowed a piece of shit life this to exist. This is a movie that asks you to root for the most unlikable, despicable characters. It doesn't do it in a David Fincher, Martin Scorsese kind of way either. At least something like Fight Club knows Tyler Durden is a horrible character. This movie doesn't know its characters are the biggest assholes you'll ever meet. It genuinely thinks they are good, relatable people. There's a scene in this movie that tells you everything you need to know about them. The three friends (Edward Norton, Michael Pena, and Kate Winslet) are discussing this plan. Kate Winslet reminds her friends that their friend, coworker, and boss (played by Will Smith) lost his child. Norton's character chimes in with something along the lines of: "That was a year ago. He really needs to get over it." Here's why I have such a problem with this scene of the movie. As far as these characters go, Kate Winslet is the only one of the three who never married or had children. So, even if his own daughter is still alive, why the fuck would a fucking father say something like that!? The only character I found even remotely likable or relatable was Will Smith. When he really gets the chance to shine as a dramatic actor, the man can really pull it off, and he was the best part of this movie hands down because I genuinely bought into his emotions. Everything around him just made me mad.

1 / 10    

Unforgettable

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Unforgettable stars Katherine Heigl and Rosario Dawson as two woman who battle each other both physically and mentally when one perceives that the other is taking her place. The best way to describe this movie is Lifetime movie of the week material. It takes a truly special film to have me bored by the time I hit five minutes. Heigl’s Tessa has no subtlety to her. Right from the get-go, they make it overtly clear she’s the villain. I’ve made it no secret in the past that I am not a Katherine Heigl fan. Yeah, she’s not any good in this movie. She pretty much plays crazy by just widening her eyes (and they are like that for the whole movie). The pacing of this movie is grindingly slow, and ploddingly dull. The daughter character was just kind of there. The character feels like someone even the movie just kind of forgets about for awhile before the writer just went “oh yeah, I should probably do something with the daughter to raise the stakes a little bit.” The actress playing the daughter is awful, even if I personally don’t like picking on child actors. The story and writing is atrocious. The movie has a website in it where Heigl can find everything out about Dawson, including a restraining order Dawson filled out against her abusive ex-boyfriend. Here’s the thing I have to wonder. Isn’t that something that wouldn’t exactly be uploaded onto a website where anybody can find it? There’s a point in this movie where we get a first-person point of view of someone sneaking through the house, stealing some of Dawson’s things. The issue with trying to build this sort of suspense up is that they make it incredibly clear right from the get-go who the villain of the movie is. The good thing is that this movie has one saving grace: Rosario Dawson. I honestly think that she’s a different, better movie. Overall, despite Rosario Dawson giving this movie her all, everything else just doesn’t work, making Unforgettable a predictable, ironically-titled slog of a movie that I don’t even think I would show to my worst enemy.

1 / 10  

The Emoji Movie

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The Emoji Movie is about a “meh” emoji named Gene (voiced by T.J. Miller) who is considered a malfunction within the world of the phone. He joins the Hi-5 emoji (voiced by James Corden) to find a hacker named Jailbreak (voiced by Anna Faris) in order to fix himself. The whole time they are chased by malware bots sent by Smiler (voiced by Maya Rudolph). I wanted to give this movie the benefit of the doubt. I honestly thought The Lego Movie was going to be a bad movie, but it turned out to be amazing. THIS is what I feared The Lego Movie was going to be. The whole movie is a product, where the plot is moved forward by the likes of Candy Crush, Just Dance, Spotify, and Dropbox. The movie is practically a barren wasteland of comedy. There are two chuckles I got out of this movie. The first came about 5 minutes in, the second almost an hour in. I will admit the animation was decent. Yeah, that’s all I’ve got for compliments. Story wise, you’ve seen this before. It’s just another attempt at Toy Story, The Lego Movie, and Wreck-It Ralph. Here’s the thing, though. Those movies had heart, clever writing, and good humor. The jokes here are terrible puns you’ve seen hundred times before. The ending to this movie is awful. It’s clear hey wanted to have their cake and eat it too. I am going to go into spoiler territory here. So, if you haven’t seen this movie and want to (please don’t), then stop reading here. The main character of Gene gets his big realization that he can just be himself (an emoji with every emotion). I don’t have a problem with that part. The issue I have comes from what they do with the Jailbreak character. You find out halfway through the movie she’s this mysterious princess emoji that disappeared. The whole movie, she wants to be more than just a princess. By the end of it, they give up and she pretty much just gets stuck in the princess role, and actually seems like she’s totally fine with it now. This movie sucks. , I sat there stone-faced almost the entire time I watched this piece of shit. I was almost always bored or annoyed. You know how sometimes, you see a movie that you’ve heard is bad, so you’re kind of curious. Believe everything you’ve heard about The Emoji Movie. It’s every bit as bad as it’s been made out to be.

1 / 10   

CHiPs

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CHiPs is based off the television series of the same name. The movie is written and directed by Dax Shepard. The movie stars Shepard and Michael Pena as two motorcycle policeman who go undercover to find a group of corrupt cops. It is very rare for me to find a movie like this. Not once did I even remotely crack a smile. CHiPs is a laugh-free, aggrevating assault of douchiness and homophobia. Within the first ten to twenty minutes of the movie, the tow leads get into an argument or whether or not the situation they are in is technically homophobic (and it’s horribly executed). The mystery aspect of the movie falls completely flat as well. You can actually make out that the villain is Vincent D’Onofrio when he lifts the visor on his motorcycle helmet. That throws any curiosity I might have had while watching this right out the window. It doesn’t help matters when they actually show his full face before revealing him as a cop. Most of this cast is talented people. In addition to the three cast member I’ve already mentioned, there’s also Kristen Bell, Ryan Hansen, and Maya Rudolph. Everyone has this feeling like they’re just kind of there I will give the movie a measly amount of credit for Dax Shepard and Michael Pena having natural chemistry with one another. I feel like their performances would have worked better if their characters were more likable. In the end, I don’t think I can recommend avoiding this piece of awfulness enough.

1 / 10

Shut In

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A widowed psychologist is left to care for her paralyzed son during a storm. She begins to believe that there is someone in the house with them. Shut In has its glimmering moments that occasionally shine through. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie just doesn’t work. Naomi Watts, Oliver Platt, Jacob Tremblay, and Charlie Heaton from Stranger Things all give emotion to their performances. The problem is in the rest of the execution. The direction of the movie isn’t terrible, per se, just pretty standard. The cinematography is very dull. The writing is awful, and clichéd. Fifteen minutes into the movie, we get a fucking dream sequence. By the time the thirty minute mark rolled around, I’d gotten my first lazy jump scare of the movie. When certain plot elements need to be brought up or explained, it feels more clunky than natural. Then they give one of the absolute worst fucking plot twists I have EVER seen. From there, this movie went from being something that just kind of bored me to something that actually pissed me the fuck off. For all the good horror and thriller movies that have come out so far this year, I was really hoping that those damned jump scares weren’t going to end up rearing their ugly heads. The sad thing is that I felt like Shut In had a lot of potential that comes off as wasted. The isolated setting doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. The movie doesn’t really even seem to have much of a structure. It just sort of meanders. Even by the time the halfway point came up, I felt like nothing had happened yet. Really, the best possible word that could describe Shut In as a movie, it would be boring. Despite the talented cast actually trying, the characters just aren’t well written enough for me to truly care about them. The bland direction and shitty writing angered me and sank a movie that I felt had a decent premise, and the potential to be a good movie. 

1 / 10