According to sources, Lee Harry’s “Silent Night Deadly Night 2” was given a horrible budget, and was asked to re-cut the original film to make it look brand new. What we get is basically a barebones plot about the brother of the original murderer… for about thirty minutes or so. About seventy five percent of the film is a highlight reel from the original film with everything from the origin of the series, to every single murder that ensues, right down to Linnea Quigley’s famous death. While that amounts to nothing, Eric Freeman works overtime to make this “sequel” a worthwhile viewing experience, and he accomplishes that.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2019)
Opening in a limited theatrical engagement on January 16th – visit “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” for theaters & showtimes.
I haven’t kept up with “Dragon Ball Super” but thankfully the feature films don’t require a lot of catch up for casual fans. I went in to “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” basically without having known many of the characters, and had a good time just the same. While ““Dragon Ball Super: Broly” is a very good “Dragon Ball Z” film, it’s also a pretty darn good tale about the deeper back story of character Vegeta and Goku, and how deeply rooted their nemesis Frieza has been in their entire lives.
Holmes & Watson (2018)
The movie so bad that not even Netflix wanted it, “Holmes & Watson” looks like one of those movies where the only reason why its stars signed on was because studio promised a potential blockbuster. What we get instead is two very talented men reduced to delivering one of the most atrocious movies of 2018 that contributes to the death of the comedy genre in film. “Holmes & Watson” is laughless, pointless and actually poorly reflects the capability of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly both of whom can turn in comedy gold with the right material.
Rust Creek (2019)
Sawyer Cotter is an over achiever who is very much looking forward to a new job and decides to drive home. While driving home, she accidentally loses her bearings and winds up on a deserted path on the back woods of Kentucky, where she meets Hollister and Buck. The pair happens to be drug traffickers who suspect she might have seen what they were up to. Anxious, they attempt to kidnap her, but Sawyer manages to fight them off and flee in to the woods. As they track her down, Sawyer has to rely on her wits to find her way back home, and becomes a part of a bigger plot involving the drug wars.
Mid90s (2018)
Director and writer Jonah Hill very much likes to paint “Mid90’s” as a film that’s basically for the kids that grew up in the nineties. But despite some choice nineties tracks, “Mid90’s” is once again less for the whole of the nineties kids, and more for the suburban skater kids that spent most of their time riding around on boards, and hanging out in parking lots getting drunk. If you can accept “Mid90’s” as mainly a niche arthouse drama that projects nostalgia wholesale, you might enjoy it, but I left it pretty much indifferent and not feeling very connected by anything that unfolded.
Jailhouse Rock (1957)
In a way “Jailhouse Rock” also works as something of a pseudo-biography that would prophesize a lot of Presley’s endeavors. Whether or not intentional, “Jailhouse Rock” serves as a fascinating and often entertaining peek in to what the man would become, except with some slightly sweeter end results. Richard Thorpe’s “Jailhouse Rock” is a solid Elvis Presley vehicle that presents the definitive Presley on film. If you’ve never seen a single Elvis film, this is the great place to begin tracking his film career.
Heavy Trip (hevy reissu) (2018) (DVD)
“Symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal”
In a year where the inferior “Bohemian Rhapsody” promises to storm awards shows in 2019, “Heavy Trip” is a movie that’s far more deserving of audience attention. Like most of the best music oriented drama comedies, it’s an engaging, and very funny tale of a band with grand aspirations and have to literally fight to break out of their small home town in hopes of making it in the larger world they want to be a part of. “Heavy Trip” is centered on a group of aspiring death metal musicians from Finland, and you’d think a movie with a focus on that music genre would be more niche than anything, but Jukka Vidgren, and Juuso Laatio’s drama comedy is basically for everyone and anyone who has had a dream at one time or another.
Empire Records (1995)
Even for a nineties kid like me, I can fully acknowledge that “Empire Records” is a clumsy, tonally uneven, and terrible coming of age dramedy. It works hard to be as relevant and generation defining as “Dazed and Confused” or “Clerks,” but it comes up short as artificial and hollow, despite its great soundtrack. “Empire Records” even for 1995 is a pretty insufferable film that never quite finds humanity in its archetypes and cast of nineties youngsters. It’s hard to enjoy a film that features a fun sing along to AC/DC one moment, and a tear soaked nervous breakdown by one of the characters who pops pills forty five minutes later.