Oct 222018
 

Mad Scientists. You have to love them. I do. Where would our monsters come from without them?

For my reviews of Mad Doctor/Scientist films, check out my full list here.

This is a horror list, so I’m trying to stick to that arbitrary line. That means I won’t be counting any of the myriad evil super scientists in spy and superhero films. Honorable Mention goes to The Rocky Horror Picture Show for so many reasons.

Starting with #10:

 

#10: Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

The third Living Dead film is the best (and the only one that would qualify for this list). Director Brian Yuzna takes the franchise in a less camp direction, instilling this movie with his darker sense of humor, while keeping the violence and gore of its predecessors. He also slips in a great deal more character development as this is a love story. Think Romeo and Juliet with zombies and the military. Our mad doctor is trying to weaponize zombies. Bad plan. Yuzna will return to this list two times, in the role of producer. (My review)

 

 

#9: Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

I debated if this film qualified, as the mad doctor is the 6th banana, but the plot is built around mad science, and it is filled with all the trappings, so yes, it counts. Here we have a full on comedy, and one of the best horror comedies of all time that also happens to be the best Abbot and Costello film, the best of the Universal classic monster mash-up films (there were only 5), and only the second time Dracula was played by Bela Lugosi. While Abbot and Costello do their normal wacky bits, the monster side of things is treated respectfully. It was the perfect way to end an era.

 

 

#8: Island of Lost Souls (1932)

The first, and best adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau shifts the tone of the tale away from science fiction and toward horror. In doing so, the story is given power and one of the great cinematic “mad” doctors is created. There’s so much to bite into. You can spend the entire film dwelling on the twisted Garden of Eden myth or you can examine what it means to be human or or the nature of laws and society or of religion and a lesser god. Too thoughtful? Then skip all of it and wallow in the horror of the House of Pain. There are plenty of thrills and chills. This is Charles Laughton’s film. His Moreau isn’t mad. He’s suave, clever, domineering, and evil. He enjoys his work, and enjoys the worship of his creations. Island of Lost Souls won my Foscar Award for 1932. (My review)

 

 

#6: Re-Animator (1985)

Based so loosely on a H.P. Lovecraft story that it’s hardly worth mentioning, Re-Animator is as much fun as you can have with a re-animated corpse. It has all the violence, gore, and nudity of your standard survivors-fight-zombie-horde movie, but with wit and one hell of a mad scientist. And it’s that mad scientist that makes the film.  Jeffrey Combs plays him as an intense sprite and it is one of the great performances in horror.  It’s not surprising that Herbert West has so many devoted fans. (My review)

 

 

#7: The Fly (1986)

An honorable mention to the 1958 The Fly which almost made this list, but was beaten out by this re-make. Perhaps re-imagining is a better word as the first film was a family drama focusing on the wife, and this is body horror as metaphor for the dating scene. David Cronenberg was the Western cinematic master of twisted flesh and he finally had the backing to fulfill his vision. It is something to see. The Fly radically changed the view of actor Jeff Goldblum, who previously was limited to “nerdy” friend parts.

 

 

#5: From Beyond (1986)

The Re-Animator team return in a more Lovecraftian film. This may be the only Mad Scientist flick that manages to make a persuasive argument for giving up science and hiding out on a farm somewhere. Gordon has pulled out all the stops to make From Beyond a joyride of gore, nudity, sadomasochism, violence, retribution, and dark humor.  There’s a giant, man-eating worm that sucks off hair and a few layers of skin, and there are flying barracudas that do pretty much what the swimming ones do. There are ax-attacks, brains sucked through eye sockets, and a shape-changing rubber demon with a breast obsession. And there’s Barbara Crampton, first in a ripped nightgown, and then in S&M gear. If you can’t find something to enjoy in that list, you’re not trying. (My review)

 

 

#4: Jurassic Park (1993)

I refuse to say there is anything mad about the science in Jurassic Park. If you can make a dinosaur, then make a dinosaur. I can’t even call it a mad businessman film as I find the business reasonable..ish. They just needed to work on their security. Well, it is close enough to count for this list (and yes, this is a horror film—kids about to be eaten in a kitchen counts for horror). Jurassic Park is a great film in so many ways (frights, action, character), but its true achievement is in pulling the audience into the wonder of it all. And yeah, as we find out in the sequels, the main scientist is a touch on the amoral-obsessed side.

 

 

#3: Altered States (1980)

Filled with all the weirdness director Ken Russell is famous for, Altered States follows a scientist played by William Hurt as he fanatically searches for the meaning to the universe, and finds it. Sometimes it is best not find what you are looking for. It is brilliant and thought-provoking, though could use a few less minutes of drug trips. I question if this film counts as horror, but it has elements that tend that way and others count it, and there’s no question we have a truly obsessed doctor.

 

 

#2: The Invisible Man (1933)

No one has done more for horror and mad doctor cinema than James Whale. The man who formed Universal horror had a brilliant eye and a quirky pitch black sense of humor. This was his second Universal Monster, and skating on a major success, he relaxed and let himself go, slipping a great deal of comedy between the frights. There are no times when Una O’Conner screaming isn’t wonderful. It was also the big break for the greatest character actor of all time, Claude Rains.

 

 

#1: Frankenstein (1931)
       Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
       Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Yes, this is a cheat, putting the three films together, but otherwise half this list would be from the 1930s. Besides, separating the three wouldn’t change much; two of the three would keep the top positions and Son of Frankenstein would only slip a few places. So, the original Frankenstein films take the top spot. James Whale, Boris Karloff, and Jack P. Pierce created the greatest horror icon of all time and a magnificent film. Then they returned, with the help of composer Franz Waxman, and made an even better film. Son of Frankenstein suffers without Whale’s touch, but excels with beautiful German expressionist sets. Frankenstein won my Foscar Award for 1931, though Bride only made runner up in a more competitive year, and Son was a nominee for 1939.

Oct 032018
  October 3, 2018

RenaissanceI discovered Renaissance in the early ‘80s and was sucked into the beauty of their music. I hadn’t heard anything like them, and while I’ve run into copies and bands treading similar ground since, there’s nothing like the original.

Back before “progressive rock” was a term, there was Renaissance, which along with Genesis  and Yes, formed the foundation of British art rock. Renaissance surprisingly rose from the ashes of The Yardbirds, when Keith Reif and Jim McCarty wanted to add classical elements to their performance. Personnel shifts removed both (and everyone else) by the third album, which many consider the true beginnings of the band. Renaissance combined rock with classical (their early albums all incorporated classical works), jazz, and folk. They are best know for their dominate and complex piano, and for lead vocalist Annie Haslam, who is in the running for finest rock vocalist.

Their prime period was ’72-’78, and my favorite songs stay within that era. My ranking of their studio albums (and pretty much everyone else’s) sticks to this as well, with one of their ’72, ’73, or ’74 albums taking the top slot.  I’d order them, from best to worst: Turn of the Cards (1974), Ashes Are Burning (1973), Scheherazade And Other Stories (1975), A Song For All Seasons (1978), Novella (1977), Prolog (1972), Renaissance (1969), Illusion (1971), Tuscany (2001), Symphony of Light / Grandine Il Vento (2013), Azure D’Or (1979), Camera Camera (1981), Time-Line (1983). If you can only buy one, I’d suggest their Live at Carnegie Hall, which does a good job covering their best period, and includes 7 of my 10 favorite songs.

Renaissance faded quickly after ’77, and their dalliance with new wave in the ‘80s was a disaster. They’ve reformed several times with varying forms since, trying to recapture their glory days with only mild success.

My favorites, without further comment:

 

#10 The Vultures Fly High

(from Scheherazade And Other Stories)

 

#9 Ashes Are Burning

(from Ashes Are Burning)

 

#8 Black Flame

(from Turn of the Cards)

 

#7 Song of Scheherazade

(from Scheherazade And Other Stories)

 

#6 Northern Lights

(from A Song For All Seasons)

 

#5 Can You Understand

(from Ashes Are Burning)

 

#4 Prologue

(from Prologue)

 

#3 Running Hard

 (from Turn of the Cards)

 

#2 Carpet of the Sun

(from Ashes Are Burning)

 

#1 Mother Russia

(from Turn of the Cards)

Oct 022018
  October 2, 2018

MotoI’d seen most of the ‘30s detective series when I was a kid, including Charlie Chan, but somehow I missed Mr. Moto. Most of these sorts of films are amusing, but cut pretty much the same and they can get old quickly without something special (like the chemistry between Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man). I assumed Mr. Moto would be a weaker entry, but finally watching the movies, I was taken aback at how good they are. These were inexpensive B-pictures, made to fill in the gap of the lessening Charlie Chan (the stories were written on request because the author of the Chan books had died, leaving a hole in the Asian detective sub-genre, and there was demand). And for the lead, they cast not a Japanese actor, or any Asian actor, but Peter Lorre, a Hungarian Jew with a drug problem and an uncertain interest in the part. This was a recipe for disaster.

But it wasn’t one. Lorre was a fine actor, who not only was up for the challenge of the character, but also of the many fight scenes. And that’s the film series’ second big plus: These weren’t normal detective stories. Rather, Mr. Moto is more of an international spy, and that set these pictures apart. There is as much James Bond at play as there is Philo Vance. There’s a real joy in watching the diminutive Moto taking out one bad guy after another.

As for the casting of a white actor, 1930s Hollywood was ripe with racial issues, but as Keye Luke (Charlie Chan’s #1 Son) noted, the yellow-face and stereotypes were a problem, but the trade-off was that there were roles, the stereotypes were more often positive ones, and there was actually representation. Later, there were no roles at all, and no representation for Asians. And the Moto films had many parts for Asian actors and Asian characters were treated with respect.

And things are better with Moto, as he doesn’t fit a stereotype, nor have a two-dimensional character (he is more complex than either Charlie Chan or Rathbone’s Holmes). He is smart, well educated, athletic, and heroic. He lives well but is able to rough it without complaints. He can, and does, kill (a rarity in “detective” series of the time). He is funny and kind, and is often amused at those around him. He drinks milk in bars, but has no aversion to liquor. He’s a Buddhist, but it comes up no more often than being a Christian comes up for other detectives.

As for stereotypes, they are used in abundance, but not in Asian characters. Instead, silly Westerners (never the villains, who know better) assume the Asian characters will fit their preconceptions, and Moto uses their ignorance to his own advantage. It’s good writing.

And in another bit of joyful twist, Moto is a master of disguise, taking on not only Asian identities, but also German and Austrian. In the Moto universe, no one can tell one race from another (well, until Willie Best shows up in a later entry
).

The series is at its best at the beginning, then stumbles through a rough patch before getting better again, but with the downside that those later entries add comic relief that is out of place and not comic. Another problem is that two of the films (Mr. Moto’s Gamble and Mr. Moto in DangerIsland) were originally meant for Charlie Chan, the first even included Chan’s son as a side kick. I find the Chan films weaker, but also he is a different kind of character—a methodical detective rather than an action hero—so this turns out to be a major problem, at least for Gamble. DangerIsland was actually based on a unrelated novel, that was made into a film and then was being adapted for a second film to feature Chan before it was switched to Moto.

But when the series is good, it is quite good (again, think ‘30s B-movie). There’s a lot of excitement, a touch of archeology (I have to think Indiana Jones owes as much to Moto as Bond does), mystery, and some excellent characters.

I highly suggest the first two films, and then more modestly the fifth, and then a bit more modestly the final three. Use your discretion with the third and forth.

Ranking them (with the # being their release order, not their production order—they changed their dates around when they saw they had a dud with the second one filmed, Takes a Chance):

1 –  Thank You, Mr. Moto (Mr. Moto #2 – 1937)
2 –  Think Fast, Mr. Moto (Mr. Moto #1 – 1937)
3 –  Mysterious Mr. Moto (Mr. Moto #5 – 1938)
4 –  Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (Mr. Moto #6 – 1939)
5 –  Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (Mr. Moto #8 – 1939)
6 –  Mr. Moto in DangerIsland (Mr. Moto #7 – 1939)
7 –  Mr. Moto’s Gamble (Mr. Moto #3 – 1938)
8 –  Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (Mr. Moto #4 – 1938)

 

Sep 192018
 
2.5 reels

It’s ten years after the close of the breach in Pacific Rim and Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the previously unmentioned son to the first film’s stern, dead father figure, is threatened with jail or a return to the jaeger program. He chooses the latter and joins ever-squinting Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) in training a bunch of new teen robot pilots. Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) is back, doing the weird science stuff he did in the first film, but his partner Newton Geiszler (Charles Day) has joined a Chinese corporation run by the ever-grumpy while simultaneously hot Liwen Shao (Tian Jing). Her plan is to replace manned jaegers with drones. When a rogue jaeger appears and kills the cameo-only Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), it is clear that there’s something fishy with the drone program that will result in a lot of giant robot combat before the giant monster vs giant robot combat.

Pacific Rim would have flopped if it was up to US movie-goers, but the Chinese had other things in mind. It made 75% of its box-office overseas, so a sequel was planned with a focus on China. Parts of the film would take place in China, characters would speak Mandarin (and apparently Cantonese) and the cast would be filled out with Chinese nationals, including Tian Jing in a major role. The film would look much like Chinese action flicks (think bright) and follow the general philosophy of those films (you must recover from your individuality and join the team to become strong).

The first Pacific Rim wasn’t great, but it got by on the coolness of giant robots fighting giant monster and by the even greater coolness of director Guillermo del Toro. It looked great and had style to spare, which it needed to camouflage its drab and inconsistent characters, weak plot, and trite dialog. This sequel lacks del Toro, which is a severe blow. Gone are the fantasy colors and Lovecraftian feel. In its place is a more standard, Chinese-favored color palette and the feel of a generic robot anime. It’s not that interesting, but it isn’t that bad either. And the characters
well, they aren’t any worse than they were the first time around. Eastwood is a block of wood, which puts him even with the previous generic white guy, Charlie Hunnam, and the rest of the new cast is a slight improvement over the old (except for Ron Perlman—Uprising could have used Ron Perlman). Boyega isn’t anything special here, but he has personality, and I could tell the teens apart, so that’s a plus. Their character development is either ridiculous or non-existent depending on the person, which is on par with the first film. And it is hard not to like Tian Jing.

So, Uprising has most of the same pluses and minuses as its prequel, but with less style. What came to my mind was the old mech films from Full Moon Entertainment: Robot Wars and Robot Jox. Those were cheap, but the cheapness added to the fun. If I’m not going to get an artist like del Toro, I’d rather see some stop motion robots and it all done on a budget rather than fancy CGI. It’s rather silly anyway (they “tie” a rocket to robot and we’re in Wile E. Coyote territory). Pacific Rim: Uprising is low concept filmmaking with a high price tag. It’s as if someone said, “Let’s make a Friday the 13th-type slasher for $150 million.” But hey, if I was given big piles of cash to create a live-action cartoon of robots punching, I’d do it too. And the result it fine. Just fine.

Sep 172018
 
two reels

Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is traumatized by the death of his girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). [No, that is not a spoiler. It happens in the first few minutes; Baccarin only makes a cameo. More than not being a spoiler, this little bit of info should have been on every poster and in every trailer surrounded by flashing lights and the word “WARNING.”] So he joins the X-Men, and ends up acting as protector to an abused fire-starting teen mutant (Julian Dnnison) who is being stalked by Cable (Josh Brolin), a time-traveling cyborg whose family was killed by the teen after he grows up and becomes a super-villain. To save the kid, Deadpool brings in his pal Weasel (T.J. Miller), Colossus (voice: Stefan Kapicic), Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and her girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), lucky mutant Domino (Zaxie Beetz), taxi driver Dopinder (Karan Soni), and a few others who get less screen time.

OK, so they kill Vanessa and then make a lot of really good jokes about how stupid that is in the opening credits. And those jokes are good because it really is stupid. Massively stupid. Movie-destroying stupid. Fire everyone involved and start from scratch stupid.

Sigh.

Deadpool was a fun movie that ripped into the genre and told a lot of great jokes. But it didn’t rip that hard. It wasn’t that edgy. Sure, it was edgy for a big studio tent-pole in a genre aimed at teenagers, but in general, it wasn’t extreme. It wasn’t good because it was so “out there.” It did take some good shots at the genre, which worked, because it wasn’t an action film at its heart, but a romance. Its story wasn’t that of the typical superhero film, where romance, if it exists at all, is a secondary consideration after defeating the bad guys. In Deadpool, the super-villain stuff is only what goes on while Deadpool is working out what he really should be doing with Venessa and none of it matters until she pops in again. That set it apart. More, Deadpool the character is an obnoxious, creepy jerk who I don’t want to spend two hours with, except Vanessa thinks otherwise, and what she thinks matters. Since she’s perfect, and she likes Wade, I like Wade. It’s all about her.

And now she dead. Which leaves Deadpool being annoying and there’s nothing to counter that. And without Venessa, there’s no romance, so the story becomes a typical super-hero film about saving the innocent. Worse still, it becomes a typical X-Men film. The theme here is about picking yourself up after tragedy (like every freakin’ superhero film ever) and making a surrogate family. Deadpool even restrains himself, and while it was fair game before to make fun of everything, it seems child abuse is off-limits. So, a wacky comedy with serious child abuse statements. Oh boy. One film earlier Deadpool was showing us how ridiculous X-Men films are, and now he’s in one.

As for Cable, as some point in the writing process I think they meant to use him to satirize the grizzled, anti-hero trope, but they didn’t get anywhere with it. For most of the film, Cable is taken seriously, and as he’s pretty dull as a character, he brings nothing to the table. Again, we’re not getting a joke about the X-Men, but getting the X-Men (minus any real emotion).

That makes the basic structure of the film a clichĂ©, the lead character annoying, the anti-hero boring, the theme irritating, and there’s nothing to care about. Which leaves the jokes, which no doubt many people consider the main course. And there are a lot of great ones. Most everything involving X-Force, particularly Domino and Peter, is laugh-out-loud funny, though the trailer spoils all the best gags. The Domino “combat” scene alone almost makes the whole film worthwhile. And Deadpool himself has some great moments—fighting to Enya and the mid-credits bits are some of the best. Some other characters are funny, but we’ve seen it before and they are less funny the second time around. The interactions with Negasonic Teenage Warhead still hold up, but Colossus and Dopinder elicited only a mild smile from me, and T.J. Miller, doing exactly the same things he did in the first film, has worn out his welcome. And there is simply fewer jokes than before. We spend a lot of time with child abuse and grieving and that leaves less time for humor. And without the framework to support the jokes, Deadpool 2 feels drab.

Is it worth seeing? For the some of the jokes, yeah, I suppose. Though for the harm it does to the first film it wasn’t worth making. It isn’t a bad film, but it is a disappointing one.

[For those curious about the different cuts, the theatrical is a touch better. The Super Duper cut has the same feel and none of the changes are significant. Mostly, a joke is swapped for another joke or an additional line is added to a string of jokes, and rarely are the new ones any more R-rated than the original. Sometimes the new jokes are funnier; sometimes the old ones are. More often, they are just different. Except in the case of Domino, less is more, so adding lines is not a plus. Adding more of Colossus and Dopinder doing the same stuff is not a good addition, and more of T.J. Miller drags the film down. Additionally, the extended cut gives us two additional scenes with the mutant teen, and somber child abuse is not what I look for in my wacky comedies. The theatrical version is better paced, better edited, and includes the best musical moment (an acoustic version of A-Ha’s Take on Me, so add a half reel to the rating.]

 Reviews, Superhero Tagged with:
Sep 092018
 
one reel

In a dystopian future, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a simple-minded, selfish, undeveloped, pop-culture fanatic who we are supposed to like. He, like most people, spends all his time inside the OASIS, a virtual universe where people can be anything, sorta, but tend to go for things that were popular in the 1980s. The OASIS is the most important economic entity in the world, and how it is run can determine the fate of the planet. So when the trillionaire inventor of the OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylace), died, he didn’t will it into the hands of a carefully chosen committee, but instead set up a contest that seems to be about pop trivia, but is really about obsessively digging in to Halliday’s personal life. He is giving control of the world to any jackass who worshiped him. Wade, known as Parzival within the OASIS, isn’t worthy to run a hotdog stand, but he’s decided to go for the big prize. Working with him is Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who is a resistance leader in the real world. She is more competent than Wade in every way, but she’s a girl, so she slips into a sidekick role. His friends are Aech (Lena Waithe), Sho (Philip Zhao), and Daito (Win Morisaki), who are all members of minority groups, so they stick to their sidekick roles as well, even though they too seem infinitely better than Wade. Opposing Wade is Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) the head of an evil corporation. Sure, his corporation runs debtor’s prisons (allowed by Halliday), but he’s really evil because he doesn’t know ‘80s pop culture, likes Nancy Drew (and you know what that means
), and wants to put ads in the OASIS, and ads are bad. (Good thing Ready Player One has no product placement). Wade must use all of his stalking skills and pure luck to win the contest and the girl.

Ready Player One is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with computer games instead of candy. That’s not my statement, but that of the author. But it is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory if Mike Teavee was the hero and Willy Wonka was a selfish sociopath who cared nothing about innocence or morality. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was also a kid’s book, made into a kid’s movie (at least the first version), where a certain amount of simplification of the universe and ethics and human behavior is reasonable for the intended audience. Ready Player One is filled with references to a time before any current kids were alive. It is a book, and film, specifically for adults who still think like children. The theme of this mess would be toxic if it wasn’t so poorly delivered that most people have no idea what it is.

So what is the theme? It is that pop culture has become a religion. While spelled out in the book, director Steven Spielberg prefers to simply grab every religious symbol he can and toss it in helter skelter. There’s cathedrals and heavenly clouds and shafts of light and kneeling before the representation of god. It’s not subtle. The main character is Parzival and he’s on a Grail quest.

And making pop culture your religion is bad. That’s the stated point. We shouldn’t elevate all this stuff above real life. Yeah
 Except that is diluted down to “Hey, take a day off from obsessing over pop culture every once in a while.” That’s not much of a message, but it is a message—except it isn’t. Stating a message in a film doesn’t make it the message. Spielberg made this slip before in a much, much, much better film. In Jurassic Park, the theme is stated by Jeff Goldblum and boils down to, “Don’t do things just because you can, but carefully consider the consequences,” And while the plot does back that, the visuals say, “Dinosaurs are AWESOME!” Who left that film not wanting to make a dinosaur? In the end, the theme of Jurassic Park is that dinosaurs are so cool that nothing else should be considered in our mad dash to make them.

Ready Player One takes it further by not backing the theme with the story. How do you win the day? By obsessing about pop trivia and the makers of pop trivia. How to you get the girl? By obsessing about pop trivia and the makers of pop trivia. Obsessing about pop trivia is the only thing that matters (that and buying some of those sweet, sweet, Warner Bros licensed materials—really, this movie is a nonstop ad), and you need to worship that trivia and destroy anyone who isn’t part of your church. Sorrento doesn’t know the right trivia, so he must be stopped—sort of like how sending death threats to people who disliked Batman vs Superman is a perfectly reasonable thing as they aren’t part of the right sect. Now Sorrento does like some pop culture things, but he likes girls’ things, so
 Go ahead, work out why liking Nancy Drew makes you open to ridicule, but praying to Mechagodzilla makes you cool. I’ll wait.

This pop culture religion that we’re told not to embrace, and then shown that embracing is the only thing worth doing, is the worst kind of religion. It is all words with no meaning. None of the references have any depth. You don’t need to know the meaning of The Shining, or the metaphor of the Iron Giant (hint: he doesn’t want to kill). Actually understanding pop culture, thinking about it, is of no use—you just have to be able to rattle off facts and feel it is cool. It’s how Warner Bros would like you to watch this movie: Don’t think about it, just feel it is cool.

It needed to be a lot cooler to pull that off. The visuals are
fine. There’s no great moments. Nothing like the first sight of the sauropods in Jurassic Park. It doesn’t even approach the level of the giant robots fighting giant monsters in Pacific Rim. Apparently in the future everyone will love graphics that look like cut scenes from the 2010s. They can have photo-realistic graphics as is pointed out in the “hacking” scene, but no one goes for that. Ah, but that’s thinking about this world, and no one involved in making this movie wants anyone to do that. The OASIS has been around for years but people haven’t dealt with the fact that what you look like inside the OASIS may be different than what you look like outside it—they deal with it the way someone in 2018 would. Ah, but there I go thinking about world-building, and Ready Player One doesn’t world-build; it just pours some pop culture icons in and stirs.

Ready Player One is a mildly sexist and racist film (women are trophies! Wohoo!) but its true foulness lies in its support of the nostalgia-fanboy mania that has fueled much of the problems in current “fandom”: gamergate, comicsgate, sad puppies, driving people off social media, etc, etc. Thank god it is so bad at it. None of these hate groups are using it as a rallying cry because all they see is a bunch of cool references. Instead of being a garbage fire, it’s empty. Did you see that Terminator 2 thumbs up? Yeah, that was cool. And a time reversal device is named after Robert Zemekis. That’s cool. And that’s all Warner Bros wants you to see. Don’t forget to buy your Buckaroo Banzai T-shirt and Iron Giant figurine when you pick up your blu-ray.

Sep 072018
 
one reel
The+Titan

In the near future, the Earth is dying due to multiple vaguely stated reasons. To “save humanity” a group of scientists, lead by Professor Martin Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson), who are unaware that Saturn’s moon Titan isn’t the only other object in our solar system with an atmosphere (really, couldn’t their non-science have given some gobbledygook reason why Titan is the best choice rahter than simply lying about its atmosphere?) plan to genetically modify adult humans to live there. To do this, they select a group of soldiers who both have proven to be survivors, and are all spectacularly stupid and unstable. Our hero is super soldier Rick Janssen (Sam Worthington), who is too boring to be unstable. He moves with his hot wife (Taylor Schilling)—who is supposedly very brave for giving up her medical career on a dying planet—and his cinematic kid to an insanely expensive house (I think that half the budget was used for renting the house) on the international military base. Shock of shocks, things don’t go smoothly, people die, and soldiers hunt soldiers, but that house is really nice.

Ah, nothing like that Sam Worthington name to say, “Hey, why don’t I watch something else.” He’s every bit as good here as he was in Clash/Wrath of the Titans and Terminator Salvation. Is he a bad actor or does he just choose bad projects; based on this film, I’d say both. The Titan is a sci-fi story about surviving on Titan, except there’s only about 20 seconds on Titan. 50% of the film is spent in a pleasant glass house, and the rest at what I assume was a local Spanish YMCA. There’s a lot more dramatic staring in the first half than science fiction. If you like people gazing off while filmed with a deep blue-green filter, then you’ll be happy. No one else will be.

This is a film where no one seems to have thought that “genetically” altering people in virtually every way to survive on a moon that is in no way habitable to humans might actually change them. One of the solider actually states that he thought there was no danger. Really? I
 Really? Everyone is shocked that making someone able to live at negative 290 Fahrenheit, at a 6th of Earth gravity, and in an atmosphere that’s 96% nitrogen and 4% methane would make them look even slightly different than they did before. And they’re very upset about these changes, because they’re stupid. But hey, we learn that future space men will run around naked without penises, so, there’s that.

The plot is ridiculous, the characters are brain-dead, and the “science” has no resemblance to science. The senior scientists/military conflict is just silly. The arguments are goofy and even more so for being allowed to exist (why is doctor-wife yelling that they can’t operate on her husband when it is already way to late to do anything else?) Why are they keeping family members around at all? And the last act, with its multiple endings, raises the stupid factor to unimagined heights.

So everything is stupid, but stupid can be fun. The Titan chooses slow and drab. It looks ugly (except for that house), and trudges along. If you want to make a character drama, then create some interesting characters who show some emotional connection. If you want to make a mad scientist/monster movie, as this drifts into, then make it fast and exciting. Whatever you want to do, don’t make this.

Sep 042018
 
one reel

Recently divorced Edgar Easton (Thomas Lennon) returns to his home town to his pleasant mother and needlessly nasty father. He has the uncommon good luck to meet the once pleasant and attractive girl in town Ashley Summers (Jenny Pelicer), who likes him for no reason we’re ever given. In a mostly ignored subplot, Edgar’s brother had died as a child, and he happened to have a creepy puppet made by long-dead Nazi psychopath Andre Toulon (Udo Kier). Edgar, Ashley, and his Jewish boss Markowitz (Nelson Franklin) head to a convention/auction of puppets made by Toulon to sell the puppet. The convention is filled with Jews, lesbians, and other minorities oppressed by Nazis. To no ones surprise, the toys become mobile and go on a killing spree, mainly of people we have never seen before. Detective Brown (Michael ParĂ©) is called in, but he’s an idiot, and his only help comes from ex-cop Carol Doreski (Barbara Crampton), who killed Toulon years ago.

Puppet Master didn’t need a reboot, nor did they need to change Toulon and his puppets from Nazi fighters to Nazis, nor take away the puppets’ personalities, but it could still have been fun. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich isn’t fun. It isn’t anything because it wants to be so many things, and that’s the problem. It seems like a cult flick, with lots of gratuitous blood and tits. But then it tries to be a light comedy. Then it attempts to be a serious statement on Nazism. Then it switches to try its luck at real horror. And these don’t fit together. The murders are mean spirited, which kills the comedy. The silly moments kill the horror. And everything kills the message.

A film directed, shot, and lit this poorly needs something strong to overcome those flaws, or it needs to dive into them as ‘70s euro-cult often did. But here, during the big dramatic death (should this film have a big dramatic scene?), I can’t see the characters’ faces well enough to know what they are supposed to be feeling. And I need to see their faces. Or maybe drama wasn’t the way to go. Maybe if your film is about killer Nazi puppets, you should go for zany fun because… killer Nazi puppets!

I assume there was rewrites going on during filming as the film’s structure is odd. Why do we spend time with Edger’s terrible father or in his home town when it doesn’t connect to the rest of the story? Why not just start with everyone arriving at the convention? Why do some characters get long intros while others get nothing? They could have saved some money by cutting those unnecessary scenes and sets and characters, and used it to buy a light or two.

As for the ending, it doesn’t have one. It ends with a “To be continued
” notice.

Charles Band made far too many Puppet Master films, and most of them weren’t very good. But Band made films that could be enjoyed on some level. Now with others taking over the franchise, they’ve made something that is just ugly.

 Artists, Horror, Reviews Tagged with:
Sep 042018
 
three reels

Sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) finds himself at a predator crash site. Knowing the government will try and hush it up, he mails pieces of alien tech to his P.O. Box as evidence, but it ends up in the hands of his magical autistic son (Rory McKenna), who switches it on and calls a predator. Quinn ends up imprisoned with a group of mentally unstable soldiers (Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Agulera). When things go wrong for the government agents led by Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), the soldiers escape, and join with hunted scientist Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn). This sets up a four way battle, between the soldiers, Traeger and his henchmen, a predator, and a super-predator.

Some movies are too dumb to be bad, and this is one of them. Of course that also makes it too dumb to be great, but it’s a lot of fun. This is what you get when a bunch of talented people, spearheaded by writer/director Shane Black, get together and just toss things at the wall. A lot of it sticks. There are an excessive number of well delineated and skillfully brought to life characters. There’s a non-stop stream of one liners which surprisingly give depth to the characters and are witty around half the time. There’s around three hours of action squeezed into the hour and fifty minute run time, including explosions, thirty different types of small arms fire, crashes, chases, and so many deaths. This is a film packed to the gills.

OK, no one is bringing their A-game, but everyone is bringing a solid B-game. Every actor pulls it off, every scene looks good (not great, but good), and every emotional beat lands, though with more of a tap then a hammer blow. It feels like the best SyFy channel movie ever.

So am I being far too kindly in overlooking the major flaws? No, as this is the type of movie where the regular rules of what’s a flaw don’t apply. It doesn’t matter that everything is too convenient, that much of the plot doesn’t make sense, or that people just make wild leaps in assuming what the predators are up to. None of those take away from the fun. What does hurt it is it is too proper. It needed to go a bit more into Deadpool territory. It needed more extreme kills, more ridiculous battles, and a lot more offensive dialog. It’s too pretty. This is best shown by our nude scenes with Olivia Munn, or rather, our lack of them. The film focuses on her undressing for decontamination, and then again, when having her clothing on is keeping the doors from unlocking to let her escape. We should have seen her standing naked (as well as Jake Busey’s bare ass and probably some shadow swinging between his legs), but for this softest of R ratings, they play it off as if the audience should be titillated just by the thought of Ms Munn’s theoretical nudity. That’s too timid. Play ball or go home, and The Predator is the type of film where everyone should be playing, and cheating.

So, The Predator was never going to be a great film. With a bit more balls, it could have been a “classic” B-Sci-Fi cult film. With less talent it would have been trash. It ends up thoroughly enjoyable, if brain-dead.

It follows the cheesy good time Predator (1987), its nearly as good sequel, Predator 2 (1990), and the disappointing Predators (2010). There were also two Alien crossover films that everyone likes to ignore, the surprisingly good AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), and the not at all surprisingly horrible Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).

Aug 272018
 

johnhustonNo one burst into cinema like Huston. His first film was a masterpiece, his greatest, and the best first film of any director. He arose as the perfect director, and for ten years he defined genius behind the camera. Far more of a rebel than Welles, he squeezed art out of Hollywood against its will. He had ten years like few others.

There’s that old line about the candle that burns brightest?

Huston was known to live wildly, selfishly, and cruelly. He was also thought to be a great deal of fun if you were the right person, which no doubt is in part due to his hard-living ways. As a young(ish) man, attacking life, he filled his films with a reckless power and his vision of what could be, as well as the sins that men are prone to. He lost that in later years, when mortality was on his mind, along with regret, and the strength seemed to drain from his work.

It is strange to see a director whose films looked so beautiful early on and end up looking like TV movies. He worked with some of the best cinematographers in his first ten years (Arthur Edeson, Jack Cardiff) while he ended his career with the guy who shot Freddy vs. Jason.

His greatest successes were with Humphrey Bogart, who he directed six times (and wrote the screenplay for an additional two films). Five of those make my list of Huston’s best; it would be six if I was counted the writing-only gigs as High Sierra would come in around 6th.

An honorable mention for Prizzi’s Honor (1985), which doesn’t hold up as a whole, but the scenes with his daughter, Anjelica, are gold. And one for Moby Dick (1956), which had a too young Gregory Peck forced upon him by the studio (Huston himself would have been better in the part) and never achieves greatness, but is probably as good a film as will be made from the classic and complex novel. And finally an honorable mention to his attempt at a counterculture poem, A Walk with Love and Death (1969); it isn’t good, but it is interesting.

His eight best:

#8 – The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) — A spy who-done-it that is remembered mainly for its many disguised cameos. Watching it is all about trying to figure out if some odd looking character is really a star under layers of makeup. It’s not a top notch film, but fun.

#7 – The Asphalt Jungle (1950) — Huston had made beautiful, nightmare Noirs. Here he made a bleak, gritty one, with weak, stupid people doing weak, stupid things, and it’s hard to look away. (Full review)

#6 – Across the Pacific (1942) — Huston reunites with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet to try and recapture the magic. This is no The Maltese Falcon, but for a war-time, spy, propaganda film, it’s about as good as they get. Astor is a decade too old for her girlish beauty role (they really should have changed the line about her being a nineteen-year-old’s dream), but the chemistry is there. It is a shockingly non-racist film for the time.

#5 – Key Largo (1948) —  Another collaboration with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. As good as Bogart is, it is Edward G. Robinson, in one of his two best performances, and Claire Trevor who really nail this one. Both, in different ways, are so sad. [Also on the Best Actors lists for Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson]

#4 – The Man Who Would Be King (1975) — His one great film of his last thirty years. Perhaps it was because Huston planned the film in the ‘50s when his thinking was still vibrant. Sean Connery and Michael Caine play former soldiers and conmen who go into hard to reach lands and one is made the god-king of the local tribe. It’s a reminder of what Huston once had done.

#3 – The African Queen (1951) —  John Huston and Bogart could do no wrong. Bogart’s only Academy Award and well deserved. Basically a two person show with him and Katherine Hepburn. [Also on the Best Actors lists for Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn]

#2 – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) — Huston and Bogart team up yet again in a stunning movie that tackles the nature of greed and evil. Brilliant from start to finish. This is where the “stinkin’ badges” line comes from. [Also on the Best Actors list for Humphrey Bogart]

#1 – The Maltese Falcon (1941) — A film that changed history. Great actors giving great performances with a great director and a great script and great themes. Damn! The camera work is the best I’ve ever seen, and that ranks about 7th on the list of why this movie is wonderful. (Full Critique) [Also on the Best Actors list for Humphrey Bogart]

 

Aug 172018
  August 17, 2018

Much of my disagreement with the general view of film critics of the 1950s comes down to a disagreement on method acting. Which is to say, they like it, and I hate it. Now it is important to note I’m speaking about method acting in film, which is a very different topic than method acting in theater, and more specifically, I’m talking about what is generally known publicly as method acting in film as opposed to what acting instructors might call method.

In theater things get more complicated as there’s really no single “method.” Rather one school of acting (Stanislavsky’s) was split into three schools (with Lee Strasberg’s being the one most name-dropped) that all approached the method in different ways. The core idea is to find the emotional center of the character, but how that’s done and what that means varies. These three schools then splintered into a dozen or more major schools and hundreds of minor ones, where the teachers modified “the method” to form their own system. Method acting has been described as a cult of personality where students kneel before their specific prophet, and I think that view has merit. But that’s talk of philosophy, and in the theater, what matters is the performance. So if one of these method schools produces superior actors, it’s a bit silly to condemn the school for a stupid philosophy. There is one aspect of that philosophy I will touch on, as I think it is always a problem, though perhaps one that can be overcome by the virtues of the training. The problem is that method acting always focuses on the actor, not on the story. It is about finding the emotion, not necessarily showing that emotion (although all schools that I’ve heard of do try for that expression as a dependent goal), and more importantly, it is not about getting a performance that will work best with others, building to a collaborative story. It is always about the self first.

But that’s theater. And method acting is a very different creature in film. What does method acting mean now? As it is popularly used, it is about the actor losing himself in the part, taking on the attributes of his character both on and off set. The biggest recent examples would be Jared Leto sending rats and used condemns to his co-stars, Wesley Snipes hiding out in his trailer and communicating only through post-it notes that he signed “Blade,” and Christian Bale screaming at and physical attacking crew members. But that isn’t method acting. That’s just bad diva behavior that is crossing into a personality disorder. None of that has anything to do with acting; it’s just being an ass. Montgomery Clift did not spend his off time during From Here to Eternity starting knife fights with anyone chubby. He drank. Apparently a lot. Which is reasonable.

Similarly, people like to call it “method” when an actor changes his body for a role, but that’s got nothing to do with method acting (it’s almost the exact opposite). You don’t get much more of a change than Charlize Theron’s for Monster, but she laughed between takes and specifically stated she wasn’t method in the part. The disconnect can be seen when Robert De Niro’s physical change for Raging Bull is said to be method, but Chris Pratt’s was not for Guardian’s of the Galaxy.

The term “method acting” has become close to meaningless in film as it no longer refers to the training the actor has received, but what stupid things he’s doing. Oh, there’s some actual method actors about, but you can’t tell them apart from non-method actors by watching the finished product. Some are thought to be very good; Daniel Day-Lewis is generally considered a great actor and his method training is given some of the credit, but there’s nothing about what he’s done on screen that is fundamentally different. And that’s not how it once was.

Once upon a time, there was no method acting in film. And then at the very end of the 1940s, things changed. Three men appeared: Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. Oh, there were others with the training such as Rod Steiger, but there weren’t any print campaigns on him. It was all about the Trinity. They were the first generation movie method actors, and they were different.

They were also pretty men, two of them (Clift and Dean), extraordinarily so. If you think that’s not relevant, then you don’t know Hollywood. Also, I point you back to Steiger, who was not considered pretty. It was Brando who was most important, in the short term, though it was the other two that gave him longevity. What did they do? They died. Dean died quickly, at the peak of his fame, so he’s always remembered as he was. Clift got into a car accident also at the peak of his fame, and then slowly killed himself, but he too has been sealed in a time capsule. They didn’t have a chance to make fools of themselves the way Brando did, (The Island of Dr. Moreau leaps to mind).

But in 1951, no one was laughing at Brando. He burst into cinema with A Streetcar Named Desire and people at the time were very confused. Critics loved it, so they called it realistic, and as Brando was a method actor, they called his acting realistic. I can’t figure how they could be so wrong. There’s nothing “realistic” about either A Streetcar Named Desire or Brando’s performance. That is not, on its own, a condemnation. It wasn’t supposed to be realistic. They took a stage play, with a stage director (Elia Kazan), and all the major actors from a stage company, except for Vivien Leigh, who’d played the part on stage for a different company, and they slapped in on film. It’s a stage play and it feels like it and every single actor plays it that way. Hell, Kazan even shrinks the apartment set as the film progresses to show Blanche DuBois’s feeling of claustrophobia—life was closing in on her. This isn’t realism. It’s representational.

People get it now, or at least some people do, where now is the last thirty years. Roger Ebert calls method acting hyper-realism. What Brando was doing wasn’t what a human would actually do, but a way to represent emotions. No one would yell “Stella” as he does, but reality isn’t the point. The point is feeling that emotion, the need and desire and self-loathing, without any connection to how things are. And he succeeds. You do know how Stanley feels. And so would those people sitting in the back rows of the theater. Kazan and Brando seem to have forgotten that cameras can pick up subtlety.

I am not fond of Brando performance in Streetcar, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t fit the film. No one in it is subtle. No one is real. It’s emotions turned up to 11, then turned up some more, and projected into space.

The problem with method acting comes when this artificial, hyper-realistic acting style is placed in a film that’s actually supposed to be realistic. On the Waterfront isn’t shot as a stage play. It’s shot as if this is reality. But Brando continues to over-emote. He isn’t showing us the external Terry, but the internal one, which conflicts with the film’s style. The same can be said for Clift in A Place in the Sun, as well as From Here to Eternity (although it is hard to call From Here to Eternity realistic with their sandy beach sex scene and the he-man machine gun heroics at the end, but in general, it is trying to be, while Clift is not). These hyped-up performances reached their ridiculous peek in Rebel Without a Cause, when James Dean screams, “You’re tearing me apart!”.

Now that’s some overacting. Has any teen (Dean was 24) ever done that? Has any human? Put this into a film now and it’d be laughed off the screen. I’m betting it would have been in ’55, but Dean was dead by the time of release and no one was in a mood to laugh at him.

So our Trinity was all about hyper-emoting. Again, in the right kind of movie, that could work in theory, but I want to get a bit more specific. Brando and Kazan have both stated that the heart of method acting—of what they were trying to put on screen—was unpredictability. That was the key, that the audience never knows what the character will do next. Brando said that at any moment he might explode out, or he might not. You’d never know. And here we have a huge problem with story. How a character reacts is not supposed to be random. It is supposed to build upon the character’s past actions and visible personality, and it’s meant to further the story. But if a character just “explodes” at any time, then that’s not a character, or a story. That could work if we’re talking about The Joker, but for most any other character, it’s a mess. These explosions of emotion don’t tell us anything about the character (except he might be psychotic). It does, however, explain scenes in Streetcar and Rebel.

Now if you are going to “explode” emotionally, what do you do? You can’t “explode” calmly. Pretty much, explode means violence, of one kind or another. So we’re left with attacking someone/something, sexually assaulting them, or throwing a tantrum. And that’s what we get. This is the biggest change that the first gen method actors brought to ‘50s cinema: they’d suddenly attack or throw a tantrum. And to make it an “explosion,” they’d tend to act overly subdued, and mumble, until the big moment. And this was not the norm for male leads of the ‘30s or ‘40s. That’s the visible change. Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and Laurence Olivier did not suddenly drop to the floor crying, kicking their legs in the air. Nor did they scream and sweep the dishes off the table. This was new. Well, more or less new. It’s why I’ve stuck to male pronouns above. Because actresses had done this before. Bette Davis made a career out of having fits. Not that it was any more realistic for women to act this way than men, but it’d popped up for years in film for women. Was it a good change? I’d have suggested a better way to go would be to stop having women throwing tantrums than to start having men do it.

The sudden excitement about this new form of acting wasn’t so much about a new form, but rather having a few males act in ways that had been acceptable only for females in the past. A few emotionally vulnerable pretty men… Yeah, marketing was involved.

Alright, so Brando, Clift, and Dean were focusing on their own emotional states and “exploding” randomly. That sounds problematic to any kind of production, but I can imagine it being workable in the theater. But films aren’t made like stage plays. Scenes aren’t shot sequentially. Often full scenes don’t exist at all. An actor’s emotion rarely has anything to do with the emotion the audience feels. Hitchcock famously demonstrated this “Kuleshov effect” by taking a shot of an actor and splicing in different shots of what the actor was reacting to. If a shot of a mother and child is placed between the shots of the man, his smile displays kindness. But if a shot of a women in a bikini is put between those same shots, then that same smile means lust. There’s no change in the acting. Films aren’t created on set, or on a stage, but in an editing room. A jigsaw of pieces are put together to make the puzzle. So even if your film was an overly emotive representational one, this form of method acting would have no advantage.

Hitchcock had a horrible time with Clift. He wanted Clift to look up after coming out of a church, but the actor couldn’t find any emotional reason for looking up. Of course the reason is that it will have an effect when edited in—the actor’s feelings of the moment were (and are) irrelevant. The actor is trying to make his own movie, and actors simply can’t do that. It doesn’t work. Hitchcock suggested his paycheck be his motivation.

Some historians want to point out that the coming of the Trinity was the beginning of the great blossoming of film method acting. But it wasn’t. It was the end. And that’s easiest to see when the second generation came in. Paul Newman is the perfect example, as he’d trained at the same school as Brando and was brought in once as “a similar type” to push Brando into taking a role (so this new young pup wouldn’t get it). When Newman started to rise, things had changed, as had film method. You can see it in 1958’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. There’s lots of emotion, and Newman even gets the seemingly require method temper tantrum. But it is less fake. Newman understood there was a camera involved, so he played to it, not the back rows. Those outburst were more subtle, more real. The hyped-up acting was gone. His tantrum was still odd (but Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was based on a play, so some stagey action is expected), but it seemed like something that a person might actually do. He expressed emotion, lots and lots of emotion, but expressed it, not represented it. Within a decade, the peculiar acting style of the Trinity was gone. Even Brando pulled it in (sometimes
). This overwrought, theatrical acting had appeared, made a splash in a few pictures, and then faded, and everyone once again acted as if they knew that this was a film, not an open air production. And because it was gone so quickly, critics and the public didn’t have the time for the new smell to fade, and to see that it was all pretty silly. By then the films and actors had been declared to be great, and no one likes to contradict themselves. And with two martyrs, emotionally, people just clung to a greatness that never was.

 

 

Aug 172018
 
two reels

He-man Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Dwayne Jonson)—for some reason using the name Davis Okoye, but he’s just The Rock—pretends to be a special forces trained killing machine, who loves animals. He’s also a primatologist, which in this film does not require any scholarly training; it just means you hang out with apes and joke around, when not massacring bad dudes who messed with the animals. He’s buddy-buddy with George, the albino gorilla. Unfortunately George runs into a genetic re-writing mist that squirts out of a container that fell from a space station, turning George into a giant monster with anger issues. Far worse, similar mists also effected a wolf and an alligator, giving us a whole lot of monsters headed toward Chicago. Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) shows up to exposition all over The Rock so that he knows about the evil corporation behind it all. The Rock and the Doc abandon all the characters that we were introduced to in the first act to go save George and Chicago, now working with their new friend, the secret agent cowboy (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). It looks like there’s going to be a lot of giant monster battles
but not for a very, very long time.

It isn’t a problem that Rampage is unrelentingly stupid. This is a film about a giant gorilla, an even bigger flying wolf, and a gigantic armored alligator, so being smart was never going to be a thing. But it does matter how it is stupid. Wolf with wings? That’s fine. Shooting The Rock right in the stomach so he dies, and then having him pop up five minutes later acting fine with the explanation that the bullet missed all the vital organs? That’s not fine. Also on the not fine list is that modern weaponry seems to have no effect on these beasties. Look, I can accept a giant Earth moth that responds to fairy songs and has attack pollen, so I’m not that picky. I don’t need smart; just don’t keep rubbing the stupid in my face.

But the stupid would be easier to take if the rest worked. If we got tossed into some good monster on monster action. But Ramage has a lot of time to waste and waste it it does. It spends more time with character beats than with mayhem, and all the character stuff (except between The Rock and George) is awful. We spend time with three characters around the primate center: a manager-type and two students. We get a reasonably good idea of what the manager is like, and we get to see the students’ single defining traits (he’s a coward, she’s got the hots for our star). And then
 they’re gone. Did they get killed to provide motivation? Nope. They just stopped being in the picture. So, why did we spend time with them? Cut them, and that’s more time with a flying wolf eating people. Its far worse with The Rock and the Doc, as their “character development” isn’t just unnecessary, it’s painful: Brother with cancer; jail time; The Rock seeing how mean people are. Oh, the emotional depth
 Yeah. When the point of your film is to have a giant ape punch a giant wolf, maybe you shouldn’t be going for serious emotions. That or write better dialog and have the actors at least try and express those emotions. And all that character stuff comes to nothing. Zero. There’s no payoff. The only thing needed is that The Rock and George like each other, and we even get too much of that. Everything else is waste of time. So much time.

What we have here is a bad script, with bad dialog and bad plot points, brought to life with bad acting, that fills in the time between monster fights. OK. That’s pretty standard in the Daikaiju film world and can be a good time, as long as there’s plenty of that sweet, sweet monster goodness. But there’s not “plenty.” There’s not enough. What little we get is fine, though nothing special. The CGI is pretty good. The fight sequences aren’t great and have too many long shots, but they’ll do. There just aren’t enough of them.

Rampage is forgettable and I suspect it will be forgotten.