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V/H/S/85 (2023)
A return to form after 99's problems...
V/H/S/94 had been a return to form (with few flaws) after the thoroughly misguided V/H/S/Viral. Unfortunately, V/H/S/99, despite having the appropriate look, absolutely dropped the ball and appeared to not even really understand what the franchise was about (only the "Suicide Bid" segment fit the bill). Approaching V/H/S/85 therefore came with some serious concern that the wrong lessons would be learned from V/H/S/99's success (which was built more on the success of 94 than its own content).
Thankfully, V/H/S/85 feels more in-keeping with the first two entries in the franchise as well as V/H/S/94 and sweeps aside the myriad mistakes of its immediate predecessor.
"Total Copy" (the wrap around story) convincingly recreates the feel of those 1980s television documentaries about the paranormal, oozing a creepy and unnerving sci-fi-tinged tone, and is balanced well throughout to not outstay its welcome while maintaining a sense of mystery.
"No Wake" features a group of young friends out for a party at a lake that turns into a blood-soaked nightmare. Thankfully, the cast of characters aren't the irritating idiots we've too often seen depicted throughout this franchise in some segments since its inception. However, the acting is a bit uneven, so the viewer always feels quite aware that they're watching actors performing their lines (replete with unnatural pauses in character's dialogue and actions), but a twist invites further interest.
"God of Death" mixes natural disaster horrors with supernatural wrath and arguably features the best acting of all the segments in the movie. The series has often featured one segment from a non-English-speaking nation, which adds a little variety to proceedings, but they do inevitably feel slightly off-kilter with the rest of the segments. The ABCs of Death movies have better handled this notion of a multi-national horror anthology, but this is still a solid portion of V/H/S/85.
"TKNOGD" faithfully recreates that feel of a pretentious black box theatre performance, but that's also it's biggest problem. Quite often with these films there's one segment that just doesn't fit, and VHS 85 could have done without this segment and quickened its overall run time. The idea of using VR is interesting, but doesn't quite work in the 1985 context. There's some good gore effects in it, though, but this one sticks out like a bit of a sore thumb.
"Ambrosia", quite enjoyably, is linked to an earlier segment and is fairly unnerving. The only downside is that the viewer is left with a lot of questions, so the story feels unfinished, but the connection of two segments adds a nice spin and a thrill into what is now the sixth instalment of a long-running franchise.
"Dreamkill" is the most stylish of the segments, combining serial killings with the gritty style of 8mm film in a dream-like way. The mystery of exactly how/why the murders are appearing on videotapes before they happen never quite gets a satisfying exploration, but the mystery, gruesomeness, and chilling style of this segment really stand out in a good way. Much like "No Wake/Ambrosia", this segment feels like it could easily be expanded into a satisfying feature film in its own right.
V/H/S/85 has some flaws, and I never found myself becoming tense let alone scared (but perhaps this is the curse of the seasoned horror fanatic), however I was almost always entertained (one segment notwithstanding). All said and done it's a successful entry in the franchise.
Cocaine Bear (2023)
C minus for what should've been an A+ B-Movie
The best moments of the movie (many glimpsed in the trailer) are what saves this mixed-bag of a flick from the dumpster. When its firing on all cylinders, Cocaine Bear is a hell of a lot of fun (e.g. The park ranger station attack, or the first appearance of the titular furry lover of the booger sugar), but the movie also stumbles on numerous occasions with two major problems.
For one, the over-sized cast. There are far too many characters, most of whom have extremely little to chew on and fail to draw the audience in, while some of them are downright annoying, and to cap it off Ray Liotta is criminally underused. For two, despite the title screaming "B-Movie" (I love B-Movies, btw), Cocaine Bear regularly feels like it's too afraid to really get stuck in, let loose and live up to the concept - a rampaging, muderous bear extremely high on someone else's supply.
Had the movie taken a far more focused approach to its story and characters, and been bold enough to cannon ball its way into the out of control hot tub party we were all expecting (think Piranha 3D), then it would've been a roaring success. However, and quite unfortunately, Cocaine Bear compromises itself throughout its slightly baggy-feeling running time with its nervous indecisiveness.
Half of it is the sort of uproarious fun you were hoping for, but the other half is a disappointing swing-and-a-miss.
Halloween Ends (2022)
Shockingly bad middle finger to the fans and the franchise
Having loved Halloween (2018) and really quite enjoyed Halloween Kills (despite the odd issue - e.g. The infamous 'Evil Dies Tonight!' chant, and how anyone thought the other escaped prisoner could possibly be physically capable of slaughtering numerous people), I was looking forward to the closing chapter in this 'H40 saga' ... but, put simply, I was truly stunned and thoroughly let down by just how poor Halloween Ends turned out to be.
Half the movie has trudged by before Michael even shows up, and even then he's a wilted balloon. Shifting focus onto new character Cory proves to be a frustrating waste of screen time, taking the kernel of a workable idea and running with it in the completely wrong direction. This is the story of the entire project, taking a few interesting ideas and squandering them entirely (e.g. Haddonfield becoming a town of paranoia in the wake of Myers' disappearance, the threat of his return looming around every corner and with every tragic event). What's even worse is that so many of the new characters are utterly repellent any time they're on screen due to slipshod writing and characterisation (e.g. The gaggle of teen bullies roaming around in their car, the doctor and the nurse, etc). Even carry-over characters are lumbered with woeful dialogue and moments of completely illogical thinking, at times to a degree that their actions simply don't make a lick of sense.
If you're only here for kills and gore, you're going to be sorely disappointed as there's only one good kill in the entire movie, with the rest proving to be boring affairs that are as welcome to the eyeballs as a fart in an elevator is to the nostrils. Even the climax feels limp and clumsily staged, once again wasting a good idea.
The film's story and characterisation is also riddled with utter nonsense and plotholes galore, boasting a level of carelessness that leaves a truly horrible taste in one's mouth. The screenwriters should be ashamed of thinking this would be a fitting close to the 'H40 saga', and Blumhouse needs to look at itself in the mirror for not only approving this script, but paying for it to be made.
Halloween is a franchise that has been rebooted and retconned more than any other, pretty much (aside from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and here we are again, once more in-need of another retcon that would expunge Halloween Ends from existence and give us the closing chapter in the 'H40 saga' that the fans wanted and deserved. This is Halloween Resurrection levels of terrible, and I'm really disappointed to be saying that.
77 Minutes (2016)
Exploitative under the guise of respect
While covering a tragedy I had no prior knowledge of, Charlie Minn's documentary is ultimately a poor analysis of the event. While it is somewhat admirable to keep the killer's name out of the documentary (although not his innocent wife's face, for some reason), any attempt to "respect" the victims of the massacre is lost thanks to Minn's ghoulish obsession with the video of the police's walk of the crime scene.
Repeatedly, the viewer is presented with the aftermath of the carnage, including the sight of a murdered infant wedged between two murdered adults, blood coating the floor. While the horror of the event should not be censored or glossed over, many other documentaries take the more respectful choice to either blur a dead victim's face or avoid showing it entirely - especially in the context of interviewing the deceased's family members (some of whom also survived the massacre). Would you want the 'face of death' of your loved one repeatedly paraded by a filmmaker who gives off the impression of being a wannabe 'hard hitting investigative reporter'? There's a better line to walk in such tricky territory, but Minn sees the line, ignores it, and goes for bloodthirsty tabloid shock in a manner more befitting of the film "Nightcrawler".
The tabloid, and even exploitative, approach continues with Minn's constant hectoring of anyone on the law enforcement side of the massacre. Frequently hostile, Minn bases his attacks on rumour, conjecture, and a weekend warrior mentality that simultaneously heaps 2016 moralism on a 1984 context while blindly ignoring the basics of police procedure in that situation and at that point in history. Minn gives the impression that if he had been there he'd have arrived in two minutes, immediately understood the entire situation, been armed and armoured to the teeth, crossed an open field amidst a hail of bullets and snuffed the killer with Agent 47-like proficiency. Pull the other one, Minn.
Far below the key problems of Minn's tabloid 'moralism', rampaging ego, and fixation on murdered innocents riddled with bullets and soaked in blood, comes the film's presentation. "Inconsistent" would be one way of describing it, "amateurish" would be another, with the on-screen graphics varying wildly in style, approach, and use. The director's overbearing presence throughout the doc becomes increasingly aggressive and ultimately repulsive, especially come the end crawl of text in which he boasts some kind of moral declaration. The closing moments of the survivor interviewees is similarly questionable - why do we need to know their employment status and where they currently live?
Pointedly misguided at best, out-right leering and exploitative at worst, the victims and their families deserve a far better testament of their shared tragedy than this.
Fear the Walking Dead (2015)
Inconsistency has plagued this show since the beginning.
The original purpose of the show was to dig into the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, to see the stuff that Rick Grimes missed while in his coma, but that entire conceit was quickly abandoned by the end of season one. Afterwards, FearTWD just became a poor immitation of its parent show, retreading the same ground but with wildly inconsistent writing and characterisation.
Speaking of characters, throughout the show's time we've run quite the gamut from interesting and complex to catastrophically cliched and boring. FearTWD has continually felt like a show that has always been trying to keep its head above water while searching for a purpose, while rapidly losing cast members who've evidently lost all hope of getting anything interesting or worthwhile to do on-screen.
Structurally speaking the show is also pretty messy, isolating many of its characters and routinely forgetting about them for so long that you, as a viewer, actually forget they were even a part of the cast!
FearTWD regularly squanders great ideas with poor execution, scripts that are clogged up with filler, and clumsy attempts at profundity as a matter of course.
The show has had some high points, such as much of season four, which was something of a reboot for the show, introducing the best character FearTWD has ever had in the form of John Dorie (so good I wish he'd been used on the main TWD show instead). Sometimes it has cool moments, creatively used zombies, or ideas with potential, but you can never shake the feeling that the ground is always collapsing beneath the feet of the show itself.
I almost gave up entirely at the end of season three, but the season four reboot (of sorts) did enough to enliven things, only for seasons five through seven to once again slump lower and lower and lower. Annoyingly, I've been watching so long that I feel too invested to just give up. I actually watch the episodes sped-up just to churn through them as quickly as possible, always hoping to stumble across a good plotline or zombie sequence or character who isn't an annoying moron. Sometimes it happens, but most of the time it's like fishing in a dead lake.
Resident Alien (2021)
Liked Season 1, but Season 2 wrecked it
I never loved the show, but I certainly liked season one. It had a few clunky mis-steps (e.g. Inconsistent rules for the logic of the alien suggested a degree of laziness, 'sore thumb' moments of pandering), but over all it was enjoyable with Tudyk responsible for a lot of the show's charm.
Season two, however ... what's happened? The show is about an alien that crash lands on earth and has to secretly live amongst the humans, with their mission being to wipe out humankind - but you wouldn't think that from the storytelling direction of the second season. The "A" story (all the alien stuff) is routinely demoted to "B" or even "C" story, while all the 'normal townsfolk' supporting stories (the "B" and "C" plot threads from season one) gets boosted to "A" level attention. Yes, we want some depth and shading to the cast, but when your lead story and character - an alien whose mission is to wipe out humankind! - is punted out of the way to focus on the comparatively quite small scale personal (and very much not sci-fi) stories of the lower levels of side characters, then you know something has gone very wrong with the direction of the show.
I looked forward to each new episode in season one, but I quickly lost patience with season two because of it's bizarre shift in story priorities with the quite awkward addition of some thunderously blunt chips that fell off the writers' shoulders (further illustrating the disregard for the main thrust of the entire show). 4 or 5 episodes in and I just lost all interest in the show, despite it still having some good parts - characters of plotlines that were squandered by the show's curious shift in direction. Series link removed, episodes deleted. A pity.
Blacklight (2022)
Generic Neeson Content
Ticking many of the boxes associated with the generic Liam Neeson flick (e.g. Taking his family, mild action, a dysfunctional man who usually finds a better balance by the end), it just feels like it's going through the motions to justify provision of content for streaming services as well as cobbling together numerous international sources of cash. It feels listless most of the time, and even the sparkier moments have a whiff of 'off the shelf' about them.
The use of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as Block's weakness is decidedly clumsy, too, and gives little insight into what the condition is actually like in reality (speaking from 30 years of personal experience). A few triple-checked locks and some weird visual 'judders' to depict ... what, exactly? ... is about as far as it goes, with some questionable contortions to colour the plot and character interactions tossed into the stale mix.
The motivation for the ending doesn't make much sense either, arriving sooner than expected with a rushed tidying up of the various plot threads. Script wise it lacks any real spark, enhancing that 'content over creativity' vibe, and lumbers the actors with some truly awful lines of dialogue, while the attempts at depicting socially conscious news reporting likewise feels clunky and half-considered with cookie cutter characters and some even worse lines of dialogue than elsewhere in the movie. File this alongside similarly generic paint-by-numbers Neeson flicks like Ice Road, Run All Night, and Taken 3. A long, long way off the likes of Taken, A Walk Among The Tombstones, Unknown, The Grey; even Honest Thief, or The Marksman.
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)
Literally the worst film ever made...
This film literally is absolute trash, it couldn't have been worse. From start to finish it is poor performances from all involved, guaranteed you'll want to cut out your own eyes or demand your wasted time back for viewing this toxic, hideously bad movie.
And what's worse, they cash in on George A. Romero's film "Day of the Dead" but whacking on "Day of the Dead 2" before "Contagium". It has naff all to do with GAR's flick in every sense of the word. The maker's of Contagium are merely using the well-earned success of someone else's work to give their pile of garbage some cred - the lowest thing a filmmaker could ever do.
For the love of all that is good and holy - DO NOT WATCH THIS FLICK. Seriously, there is not one redeeming feature to this movie, it should have been banished to hell to never come back. Watch a good movie, read a book, donate to charity - do something worthwhile with your time rather than waste it on this piece of trash before you regret it.
You have been warned.