Archive for the ‘Movie Reviews’ Category
Movie Review: Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)
October 31, 2008
Movie Review: Spaceballs (1986)
June 20, 2008
While I don’t consider myself a particularly conservative viewer, I do keep a mental list of films to avoid like plague-infected vampire rats. At the top of that list, bolded and underlined, are the Scary Movie sequels and the (?) Movie spin-offs that Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg fart out every year. These travesties feature lame-brained parodies of popular scenes, gross-out humor, dated cultural references (oh look, it’s Dr. Phil, ahaha), and a kind of cheap, low-rent presentation aimed at easily misled people with low expectations.
Bearing all of these faults in mind, do I now have to extend the same restriction to Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs? After all, it features lame-brained parodies of popular scenes, minimal gross-out humor, dated cultural references (oh look, it’s the sound-effects guy from Police Academy, ahaha) and, if not a low-rent presentation, then a somewhat mediocre one. And since it’s more heavily a spoof of Star Wars than any of the other sci-fi movies it riffs, it was released three years too late. I’m torn on this one. Spaceballs was one of my favorite movies growing up, but if I gave it any kind of praise now I’d feel like a hypocrite. Is there anything that can save it from ending up on my eBay sale list?
Movie Review: Evil Dead II (1987)
November 11, 2007I was originally going to post this over a week ago, but I got lazy. Go figure.
It seems unfair that I’m reviewing Evil Dead II before penning my thoughts on the first– almost as if I’m playing favorites or something. But the truth is that I’ve been watching it so much lately (at least three times for the film itself, twice more with the commentary track turned on) that not saying anything at this point would be counterproductive.
Movie Review: Ninja Scroll (1993)
October 25, 2007
There was a time, believe it or not, when anime wasn’t considered mainstream. Before it invaded every animation block on television, before ADV and Central Park Media released all that was under the rising sun, before American otaku gathered together at club meetings to cosplay and croon along to Japanese theme songs, it was just me, a few unsheltered friends, and ‘dirty cartoons’ on VHS tapes. To be eleven again…
One of my favorite films from those glory days is Ninja Scroll, which has definitely stood the test of time. Since I don’t really consider myself much of an anime fan at all anymore, it’s one of a handful of Japanese animated classics that I’m not embarrassed to get caught watching. And it’s entertaining to boot.
Superbad= SuperAMAZING
August 30, 2007
I was initially drawn to Superbad (as I am with most movies) by the previews, which touted it as being “from the guy who brought you The 40 Year Old Virgin and Talladega Nights.” The anonymity factor is part of a growing trend: I’ve noticed that a lot of trailers these days never tell us who the ‘Guy’ is. I’d failed to check out Talladega Nights, but I had seen The 40 Year Old Virgin and thought that was damned funny. So I worked Superbad into my modest budget and made plans to see it as soon as my schedule allowed.
Looking back now, I can’t help but wonder why I wasn’t the first in line on opening night. Superbad is not only the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, it’s the funniest I’ve seen in several years, possibly six or seven, or over a decade. It is the defining ‘Losers Trying to Get Laid’ picture of our generation, and in an age where a dozen of those are opening every week, that’s saying an awful lot.
