Artemis Fowl

 

"I'm Artemis Fowl, and I'm a criminal mastermind." I wanted to highlight this line from near the end of this movie. I want to highlight it because none of Artemis Fowl's actions really make this line feel earned. There were a lot of other things in this movie, very few of them being good. For example, the special effects are shoddy, at best. I have no idea what kind of performances Josh Gad and Judi Dench were giving. The action felt small scale. There were only a couple of locations in this movie, mainly Artemis's house. The villain has no dimension to her. She feels like a complete afterthought (probably because Artemis Fowl himself is the main antagonist of the book). The one character I actually did enjoy was the Holly Short character. She had a backstory that actually helped you to understand her drive, her motivations. The pacing is quite poor too. I feel like a lot of the film's plot beats are rushed, just so this movie can fit into an hour and a half time frame. Overall, there was very little about Artemis Fowl that worked for me, and I could honestly see why Disney dumped this onto their streaming service rather than delay its theatrical release. If you do happen to come across this movie on Disney+, just go ahead and skip it. 

2 / 10   

Ouija

Ouija is a 2014 horror movie about a group of idiot teenagers who unwittingly summon evil spirits just because they mess with a ouija board. I'm going to be completely transparent. In my opinion, this is probably one of the worst horror movies of the past ten years. A couple of performances worked well enough for me, I suppose. But, for the most part, the acting is just bland at best. As far as scares go, this is a film that solely seems to rely on shitty jump scares. Every now and then, there might be one scare that almost works. Almost. Ok, there is one thing that really sinks this movie into being among the absolute dreck of horror. Let's talk about the film's twist ending. Our idiotic heroes make the assumption that for all of their nightmare to end, they have to set the spirit of a young girl free. The twist is: the little girl was the evil spirit all along. The ghost of the girl's mother was trying to prevent this from happening. Here's the problem. The mother's ghost is the actually doing most of the killing. So, when you really break it down and give it any genuine thought, this is a plot twist that actually creates plot holes. Honestly, just watch the prequel, and avoid this piece of dogshit at all costs. 

2 / 10 

Fantasy Island

Where do I begin? Hm. This was written and directed by the same people behind 2018's Truth or Dare. I think that should speak to this movie's overall quality. For much of the running time, this felt like it was going to be nothing more than a generic horror movie put out by the Blumhouse machine. However, the last twenty minutes actually gave me exactly what I wanted. This is a movie that offers up a couple of different twists. Neither of them really work. The first one feels like it was kind of just made up on the spot. The other is so indescribable that I just sort of screamed "What!?" when the credits started to roll. Naturally, I won't give spoilers. I will say that I actually do think the cast works well enough. Michael Rooker is probably my favorite part of the movie, and there honestly wasn't enough of him. A lot of the dialogue is laughably dated. One of the lines in this 2020 movie is two characters sharing the line "YOLO," something that hasn't been said unironically since probably 2013. If the whole movie was more like the climax, I probably would have recommended this as a fun kind of bad movie. Judging the movie as a whole, It's mostly just generic, and really not worth your time.

2 / 10    

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

 

The Human Centipede is a movie I have only watched once in my life. It's one of those movies where I watched it, felt like I got it, and felt no need to watch it again. Two young women break down, and go to the nearest house looking help. The home belongs to a rich doctor who ends up abducting them, and then stitches them together with another man to create a "human centipede." When I watched this film, I wondered to myself whether something like this was the director's fetish. This isn't a movie that is overly explicit. However, the idea is one of the few things I can think of that actually disgusted me while I watched. If there is one bright spot to this film, it would have to be Dieter Laser as the villainous doctor. He is the one actor I think understands the kind of movie he is involved in. The rest of the actors in the film are just bad, coming across as though they were plucked off the street and told they were going be in a movie. Overall, this is one of those movies I watched out of morbid curiosity when I was in high school, and immediately wondered what I had gotten myself into. No, I did not like this movie. No, I would not recommend this movie. 

2 / 10  

Black Christmas (2019)

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Black Christmas is the second remake of the classic film from the 1970s. Without going into spoilers, this film really does go in a very different direction than either the original or the first remake. I almost feel bad. The actors in the film are clearly trying. Imogen Poots in the lead particularly feels like her performance deserves to be attached to a much better film than the one I got. Alright, I have a lot to unpack with this movie. For starters, I kind of appreciate that this movie tried to talk about some pretty serious things. By comparison, the original did something similar. However, the original was far more subtle in its intent. This version prefers to take the approach of beating you over the head with its political views. Most of the characters kind of suck. I don’t necessarily mean that they’re shallow. I would typically expect that out of a slasher movie, and this tries to give some depth. Adding on to that point, the writing is genuinely pretty bad. But, my biggest problem with this film (and the thing that actually tempered my initial excitement) is the film’s PG-13 rating, especially because this film apparently was originally shot to be an R. So, the PG-13 move only suggests money to me. Overall, I don’t think there’s that much more for me to say about Black Christmas 2019 other than to say that I really didn’t like it.  

2 / 10 

Leprechaun: Origins

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Four American friends (played by Stephanie Bennett, Andrew Dunbar, Melissa Roxburgh, and Brendan Fletcher) are touring Ireland for the summer. They stop in a village, and end up staying in a cabin in the woods after talking to a local man named Hamish (played by Garry Chalk). It doesn't take too long before they end up being terrorized by the titular leprechaun (played by WWE's Hornswoggle). I went into Leprechaun: Origins with a sense of dread. I haven't really heard anything good about this movie (even from Leprechaun fans). From the moment this thing started, I realized I should have heeded every warning about how awful this film was. It certainly didn't help my case that I had decided to review all of the Leprechaun movies this month. Before really delving into what didn't work for me about this movie, I should start by talking about the things I actually did like (however few there are). This is one of the better acted films in the franchise, even if that really isn't saying much. Brendan Fletcher is clearly the best part of the movie. He performs circles around many of his co-stars just through sheer charisma. I also like the film's concept (which might just make the final product that much more infuriating). The village got greedy and stole the leprechaun's gold, so they now have to sacrifice outsiders to stave off the creature's wrath. This is actually premise with potential. OK, I'm done being nice. One of this film's biggest detriments is a lack of Warwick Davis. The leprechaun is nothing more than a creature. This is a thing that has no real personality or character. The effects on this thing (I don't dare call it a leprechaun). are unimpressive, to put it nicely. The actual creature looks bad. It also sees in a Predator-style gold vision. The film is poorly written and poorly directed. Any character development feels out of nowhere and unjustified. The exposition is clunky at best. While the acting is halfway decent, some of these characters are some of the most thoroughly unlikable characters I have ever seen in one of these movies. The pacing is horrible. It's a slow, plodding slog. Some of the performances work. A couple of kills are kind of cool. Everything else is horrendous. Is Leprechaun: Origins the absolute worst movie I've ever seen? No. However, it is still a piece of shit, and the worst film of the Leprechaun franchise.

2 / 10 

Nobody's Fool

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Danica (played by Tika Sumpter) is a success-driven woman that is conned by her mother, Lola (played by Whoopi Goldberg) to pick up her sister Tanya (played by Tiffany Haddish) when she gets out of jail. Once Tonya finds out Danica has an online boyfriend she has never met, Tanya sets out to prove Danica is being catfished. This is one of those movies I really wasn’t looking forward to because I am not a fan of director Tyler Perry. Yeah, this film is plagued by all of the problems. I hate all of these characters. They don’t do much of anything besides yell and talk all over each other. To be fair, they talk all over each other less than they did in Boo! A Madea Halloween (the last Tyler Perry movie I saw). The writing is not good. For example, Tanya admits that she has seen the movie Bridesmaids and the TV show Catfish, but doesn’t know what Skype is. To give an example, Skype was first released in 2003, but started getting popular in 2011 (the same year that the movie Bridesmaids was released). Furthermore, the plot has a lot of contrivances. There are points where the movie could have easily ended, but some new plot twist just keeps it going longer than it needs to. It also makes Danica come off as thoroughly unlikable at every occasion possible. The movie was honestly predictable for most of the movie. One of those plot conveniences also ties into my all-time least favorite cliche (the third act misunderstanding). Why does every filmmaker seem to think romantic comedies need this bullshit? The jokes very rarely land. The one point I legitimately thought was funny was a scene between Whoopi Goldberg and Tiffany Haddish. I will be the first person to admit that I am not the audience for most Tyler Perry movies, so take these criticisms with a grain of salt. As much as I don’t particularly like the characters, I will give the performers some props (especially Tiffany Haddish, Omari Hardwick, and Whoopi Goldberg). One of the things that this movie tries to sell is a budding relationship between Danica and Hardwick’s character (named Frank). The problem I have with this is that Frank has a lot more chemistry with Tanya than he does with Danica. A moment of dread came over me once I realized I was only a third of the way through. The guys from Catfish show up, and they play themselves. These two are fine, even if they aren’t the greatest actors in the world. Okay, I won’t sugarcoat this. Nobody’s Fool is one of the most agonizing watches I had for the year, even if I can admit it had its couple shining moments here and there. When it isn’t annoying me, it’s just incredibly dull. I can already say that this movie is guaranteed a spot on my worst of the year list.

2 / 10  

Robin Hood

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After having seen 2018’s Robin Hood, the first logical conclusion I could come to was that this film should be studied. It’s difficult for me to explain. The best way I can describe this movie is that, at least it’s an interest kind of bad. For starters, all of these actors are trying. This is a talented cast (including the likes of Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, and Ben Mendelsohn). Even Jamie Dornan isn’t that bad in this movie. It sort of surprised me because I’m used to seeing him act dull and lifeless in the Fifty Shades movies. Mendelsohn is clearly the best part of the movie, even if it does look like he’s just sort of on autopilot. This movie is poorly paced, and horribly edited. I mean it is done to a point where I wasn’t sure what was going on half the time. The attempts to update this movie are laughable. The movie relies on gimmicks that have been old for about five years. For example, the movie has a lot of 300-style slow-mo action scenes. At least, the ones that I could make out were like that. The rest of them were a nauseating, shaky cam-laden mess. The filmmakers don’t really do anything new with these moments. Either way, it feels like more of the same, and kind of leaves me wondering why I should care. Some of the choices they make with the characters were different, to say the least. I think they wanted to make the Sheriff of Nottingham a paranoid xenophobe in addition to the greedy nature of his book counterpart. But, that was done better when the character was played by Alan Rickman. The movie opens with narration, and it serves absolutely no purpose. It’s something you could cut out of the film entirely, and it wouldn’t change the film either way. It’s also that generic “you don’t know the story” narration when a movie wants to show that it’s edgy. There were points where I did find the movie kind of dull. To be fair, there really weren’t that many to me. The big ones were the moments where I had to put up with the stupid love triangle, something that is quickly becoming one of my least favorite cliches. I also got this sense that they wanted to this movie where they made Robin Hood into a superhero. I don’t think the filmmakers realize that that is the basic story of the Green Arrow. Perhaps, the most misguided effort of this film is that it had aspirations to be another cinematic universe, without ever taking into account that Robin Hood is not a character (or world of characters) that this idea was ever going to work with. I almost want to recommend Robin Hood as this sort-of Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie. It’s stitched together by other, better stories and ideas. It just happens to be such a spectacular failure that it almost needs to be seen to be believed. 

2 / 10   

Truth or Dare

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You're probably gonna call me crazy when I say this: I recommend watching this movie. Keep in mind, I don't recommend this as a good horror movie (because it is definitely not that). I recommend this as legitimately good comedy. Full disclosure, I will be going into some minor spoilers, so read this review at your own risk. There are some halfway decent things about this movie, but not very many. The acting isn't half bad. OK, it's nothing Oscar-worthy. But I've legitimately seen a lot worse in my life. The concept is actually good. The movie is about a group of friends who are brought into a supernatural version of the game truth or dare, and have to figure out how to survive. Everything else about this movie is just bad. Even if most of the actors actually are decent (and clearly trying), the characters themselves are awful. None of them are particularly likable, so you're never really upset when someone dies. The absolute worst character in the movie is Ronnie. He is every bro-y douchebag stereotype with nothing else to him. The best thing about this character is that he's not in the movie for very long. The character development doesn't really work either, mostly because it all just kind of comes out left field. The writing is one-dimensional and kind of forgettable. Hands down, the best-worst part of this movie is the faces people make when saying "truth or dare." A character in the movie describes the faces as "photo-shop filters." I kind of think they look like derp faces. The point is, they are really funny. They're not scary, and unbelievably hard to take seriously. You see these faces a lot. After a while, it becomes clear that the movie's PG-13 rating really hinders it. Considering how dumb the movie already is, it should have embraced this idea fully by going for a hard R. Some of the kills are kind of creative, but the filmmakers cut away from them too quickly for us, the audience, to really take them in. Between this and one of the dares in the film involving two characters sleeping together, this feels like it could've been an R at one point, but was eventually neutered down. I have no idea if that's true or not, but it really wouldn't surprise me. You also have to really suspend your disbelief because this movie has some major plot holes and leaps in logic. The movie hinges on characters acting like idiots, as well as just making up rules for the game that, to my knowledge, don't actually exist. The reason for this is obviously because they needed a way to try and keep the movie interesting. There are a lot of problems in this movie (and it really is awful), but I laughed at most of it because the movie's execution just wasn't there.

*Edit: Apparently, this was the unrated version to the movie. So, even in the unrated version of the movie, the kills still feel tame.

2 / 10  

Fifty Shades Freed

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I am happy. I am fucking happy. I’m not happy because somebody gleaned something good out of this shitty trilogy. I am happy because it is over! That said, this actually might have been the one I enjoyed the most. I could kind of tell that from the beginning. Again, this is a terrible movie. Right from the get-go, the two leads (Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan) don’t really try to hide their contempt. They still have no chemistry, but you can kind of tell they’re probably just as happy this is over as the rest of us are. Hell, I feel like every time they talk, you can practically hear them asking “where’s the paycheck?” under their breaths Plot wise, this is almost as meandering as the first two movies. Almost nothing happens. I still have the same moral problems with this movie that I had with the first two, I feel like a broken record, but I really feel like this is glorifying a toxic relationship, and trying to pass it off as romantic. Christian Grey is verbally and mentally abusive, while Anastasia Steele is weak-willed moron that doesn’t seem to question much of anything. The sex scenes are still dull, uninspired and lifeless. The writing is just as juvenile and atrocious as ever. Then again what else can I expect with the line “it’s like boobs in boob land,” before I’m even ten minutes in? The editing in this movie is awful. I have no idea what sort of time frame this movie goes through. In one scene Christian Grey is clean-shaven. In the next scene he has a beard. The movie will go through one boring plodding scene. The next scene will be someone breaking into Christian Grey’s company (feeling more like it should come from a Jason Bourne movie). Am I just a little more forgiving towards this movie because I am praying it’s finally over? Maybe. On the other hand, this is the first one in the series to actually give me some unintentional laughs just from the seething hatred the two leads don’t even really bother trying to hide.

2 /10  

Flatliners

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A group of medical students (played by Ellen Page, Diego Luna, James Norton, Nina Dobrev, and Kiersey Clemons) try to find out what happens after a person dies. It’s a remaek of the 1990 film starring Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts. No, I haven’t seen the original movie. As I was watching, I felt this nagging feeling eating away at me. It didn’t take long before I realized this was just bad. Twenty minutes into the movie, the plot actually starts, and they try having this moment tension to make you the main character might not make it. Why do they do this? I don’t know, maybe because they know the movie sucks. It wastes a talented cast on a boring, plodding movie. Part of the problem could be that, at first, Ellen Page (a very talented actress) doesn’t seem like she’s interested at all. She shows more emotion and gets better as the movie goes on. There are attempts at humor sprinkled throughout, and they almost all fall flat. It also sucks because she’s the character with the most development, and it’s thin at best. Kiersey Clemons, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, and Kiefer Sutherland are the only people who actually feel like they’re legitimately trying. Their characters have equally thin development, but these actors are trying to put emotion into their roles Diego Luna is one of those actors I really have yet to be fully impressed by. He was the weak link in Rogue One, and I don’t think he was particularly good in this either. The horror element of the movie also doesn’t work because it relies on lazy jump scares far too often. One thing that happens in this movie is that the characters who flatline find themselves being haunted by their mistakes. Now, this is an idea that could work had this movie been better. The problem is it comes out of nowhere, and you can’t guess what’s happening until you’re flat out told. Rather, it doesn’t make much sense. Scenes in this movie feel like they go nowhere. The main characters drive away from the police (for reasons), and they end up at a party. This party doesn’t serve any actual purpose beyond having an attractive young cast. As if I couldn’t say it enough, this movie sucks.

2 / 10     

Wolves at the Door

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Wolves at the Door is directed by John Leonetti. The movie centers around the famed Manson murders. I will say this is probably the best movie this director has made, but that isn’t saying much, considering his filmography also includes The Butterfly Effect 2, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and Annabelle. I think that’s why the overall movie isn’t nearly as engaging as it should be. This movie is pretty short, clocking in at only about 72 minutes. When the writing doesn’t work very well, and a talented cast doesn’t always seem that invested, you end up feeling all 72 minutes of the movie. Nowhere is this more evident than the lead performance by Katie Cassidy as Sharon Tate. I like Katie Cassidy as an actress, but it doesn’t really look like she wants to be here. The beginning is probably the best part of the movie, despite some iffy acting. There actually was some demonstration of tension, and a legitimately creepy moment. The look of the movie isn’t something I’m a fan of. It’s incredibly difficult to make out what’s happening a lot of the time. This is a movie that really could’ve been executed well, but the wrong director was chosen. As an example, the Manson murders are going to be the topic of Quentin Tarantino’s next movie. Tarantino is a much more skilled director than Leonetti. The overall result is a movie with a couple of glimmers, a talented cast that doesn’t bring their A-game, and an otherwise sloppy mess.

2 / 10