Change Your Image
riffbw-04554
Reviews
Damsel (2024)
Decent Premise Wasted on Mediocre Writing
No Spoilers up Top
Underwhelming to say the least with a twist that was easy to predict. This basic story has a ton of potential to it, but the payoff wasn't there. With such a weak and disjointed story, you would hope for more epic set pieces or more focus on the antagonist and their motives.
This would fit in nicely with 80s fantasy movies, but would still be one of the weaker storylines from the decade.
This is bad B-Movie shlock at it's weakest. The cast is great for a B-Movie, but underutilized. The story is thin and the message is hollow. There's no real conviction from any of the characters. Robin Wright gives my favorite performance in the movie, but isn't given the screen time necessary to really set up the ending.
Ultimately this move is going to fade into obscurity. It offers nothing new to the genre and doesn't give us anything memorable to go back to. The CGI dragon is wonderfully done, but the story doesn't facilitate more use of the dragon. The characters aren't interesting enough to want to watch again and there's no real character development to speak of and the hero isn't believable in any way.
Spoilers Below
The misunderstood and sympathetic antagonist schtick is getting old. Attempting to justify the dragon's actions with a revenge story is quite unique, but ultimately fails in the delivery. The revenge subplot would be a nice twist if it was plainly obvious it was coming thanks to the ritual. When you make a cat and mouse movie, you need the cat to be more epic and memorable rather than flip the script and make the cat the hero.
This really feels like two movies in one and fails to deliver on either. Either make a good Damsel vs the Dragon story and flip the narrative of needing the Knight in Shining Armor or make a good Monarchy Subverts the Dragon's Revenge movie and give us more of Robin Wright's evil queen role. Instead we get very little evil queen and the cat and mouse game is ultimately a waste of time.
Ultimately I walked away feeling little satisfaction at the villains getting what they deserved and felt more distaste at the suffering they inflicted on so many. Their demise was not fitting of their crimes and given the dragon's love of chasing victims, there easily could have been a much more satisfying conclusion to the movie.
Even attempting to make this a politically motivated movie about throwing off wealthy oppressors that scapegoat justice on innocents falls flat as there is no real liberation for any of the victims or subjects to speak of. Their whole society seems to be in on the gag (which speaks volumes) but there's no payoff in that either.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Too Real with Incredible Writing
I largely ignored this one for a long time. I grew up watching Westerns with my family, but haven't like many more modern takes on the genre. This one was a pleasant surprise.
The writing is fantastic and the characters, while somewhat flat, are fleshed out with great dialogue which amplifies the whole movie. Nobody feels like they are there to pad out the cast list. Everyone has a purpose and everyone is a real character and not just there to pad the kill count (outside of a few one scene characters).
This one delivers for horror fans, dialogue fans, and wester fans. A bit of a slow burn, but never felt dull or drawn out and the tension remained high where you always felt like the next step could be fatal.
But what really sells this one for me is the villains. They are both human and supernatural. You believe they are real, but they sounds so fantastical. It really bridges the gap between realism and supernatural in a way I haven't seen since The 13th Warrior. The brutality on screen and through sound design is wonderful and makes the scenes that much more off-putting.
Definitely worth a second watch to catch more of the dry humor I couldn't focus on as I waited to see what was coming next. A good horror should grip you to the point you can't anticipate the next scare and drags your attention away from subtle details you will see during a 2nd or 3rd viewing. Bone Tomahawk delivers on that perfectly.
Screamers (1995)
Underrated Gem Adapted from PKD
When your starting point is a Phillip K Dick story, you've got a lot to build from. When a writer and director understand the key concepts of PKD's story, they have the framework for a solid movie with a great plot.
Screamers is solid mix of sci-fi, action, and horror that doesn't lean too heavily on any one genre while telling a compelling story full of suspense. In a war between generic opposing sides, an alternative to nuclear weapons has been invented. Small robots with blades/claws were designed to assassinate opposing forces while moving and hiding under the surface of the planet. But what happens when these robots gain sentience and begin to operate and evolve outside their programming? Screamers takes you through the story as PKD intended.
Where this movie loses points is the timing of the release and the overall budget. Originally written in the 50s, you can see where other major films took inspiration with The Terminator being on of the most notable. It's tough to tell if Screamers took inspiration from Tremors in how it depicts the robots' movement on screen or if Tremors took the idea from PKD's work. Either way, Screamers gets the feel of being a knock off of Tremors due to coming 5 years later. The special effects would have been ground breaking for the 80s, but by 1995 they feel dated. The B-Movie cast is headlined by Peter Weller and while I have few complaints about the acting, an A-List cast would have been much more impactful.
Overall the movie gets a 9/10 for being a faithful adaptation of a cerebral work and delivering a compelling story within budget. Despite the lack of budget and cast, the movie never feels cheesy or campy. The movie does lean in to a few tropes, but considering it's a PKD work he pioneered many of the tropes in Sci-Fi so it's excusable.
Prey (2022)
Solid Predator Fare with a Few Hiccups
I saw the Rotten tomatoes score before watching and was expecting more. This one was a bit of a disappointment given that, but overall one of the best in the franchise.
My biggest complaint is with the advertising. This is not the first or "one of the first" predators to come to earth. Billing this as an origin story is a disservice to the franchise. AvP introduces the idea of a hunt at Aztec temples around 3000BC. This movie set in the 1700s rewrites that.
This is a solid blueprint for future Predator movies. Making these time period movies with varying levels of tech throughout human history brings lots of new scenarios to the table. This hits all the high points with fun fights, glorious kills, and villains we can cheer when the Predator finally gets them.
I'm not going knock the rating down for this as I don't think it's that big of a detraction or distraction, but this movie feels very 2020s preachy. An almost unbelievable female lead and tropey "white man bad" when dealing with Native Americans. From my understanding, Comanche women would do the gathering and cooking rather than the hunting. Having an individual break this far from tradition while being outspoken isn't believable. Trappers of this era did not waste buffalo as depicted in the movie and that inaccuracy feels intentional. Their treatment of captured Native Americans is accurate enough and serves the purpose that they are villains in this story better than slaughtered buffalo.
Given the female lead, I found her final kill to be perfectly executed and believable. She's not beating a Predator toe to toe so she finds a way to take it out another way. Outsmarting a superior species works better than brute force.
Little Monsters (2019)
10/10 For what it is.
As a movie I'd give this 6/10. It's cliché, uses the tropes well, and downright funny. For what it was aiming to be it's a perfect 10 and I can't fault a movie for that. It's fun, easy to watch, and heartfelt at the right moments. It's not a movie you turn to to be challenged, it's a movie you turn to for feel good entertainment.
Lupita Nyong'o is incredible towing the line between sweet, innocent teacher and total badass that doesn't want to show the students that side of her. Josh Gad delivers as always and brings a fair amount of dark humor to the story. I don't know who the other lead was, he's there and does a good job, but his role could be played by a lot of people and get the same result.
If I had any complaints, it's that the opening bit before we meet Nyongo's character drags a bit, but after that it really picks up.
Donkey Punch (2008)
How far will people go in a bad situation?
This isn't a good movie, but it's not utter trash like many reviews make it out to be.
The first half is a solid lead up to the titular event and then everything comes crashing down. With the event having been filmed, everyone fights for something throughout the remainder of the movie.
Marcus and Bluey see an opportunity to cash in on a sex tape, snuff film combo. Tammi and Kim fight for their very lives. The brothers, Sean wants to save his brother Josh and his friends. Josh needs the tape destroyed as it's evidence of his wrongdoing.
It's not a great movie by any means, but it's an interesting piece on how far people are willing to go when things spiral out of control. The gore is rather tame, the sex is rather graphic, and the story is fairly bland. But you don't need much story to dive in to character reactions.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021)
A Great Movie... For Showing Terrible Adults
This show is a train wreck that I couldn't look away from. Honestly the twist was so bad and unbelievable, they had to do a post credits explaining how it should make sense. It would have been better if they had stuck with their red herring villain. That would have been believable.
But for the good parts. Don't follow the example of any of these parents and adults.
We've got a mother who fakes her own death the get away from her kids/family, but she hasn't left the cult.
We've got a father that so obviously favors one twin over the other, they know it and he then convinces the surviving twin to assume the identity of the deceased twin.
We've got a a cop that turns a blind eye to hard drugs at a high school party.
We've got a mother that seems to be covering for her daughter being a drug dealer and at one point indicates she wants drugs from her daughter.
We've got a mid 20s man that is lacing fast food with drugs.
And to top it off, we've got a mother living vicariously through her daughter's social media career by controlling what she eats, how she posts, and sends her to therapy and rehab when she breaks down. This is the one that goes psycho and kills everyone which makes total sense.
This series is a great example of how bad parenting can lead to some messed up kids and that's the only redeeming quality I could find in this show.
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
Campy Fun Due for a Remake
With the trend of remaking movies, something like this deserves a revamped take.
I find this movie to be a mindless entertaining ride and that's the problem. I thoroughly enjoy it for what it is, but I can see why the rating suffers. Carpenter's movies generally sell well because of the thought provoking ideas that go in to them. His most iconic movies make you think and don't always rely on over the top action and gore to be successful.
That's why Ghosts of Mars failed. We didn't get the classic Carpenter mind bender and in 2001, we weren't going for this style of of action and camp. Carpenter didn't try to dive in to horror and gore with this one that would have made it an instant classic in the genre and could have kicked off the torture film genre
With a slight rework and a no director, I could see a massive hit in the torture/gore movie scene and it would stand out with the action element carpenter brought to the table.
PS. I think we know what inspired the Reavers in Firefly.
PPS. This honestly could have a DooM title slapped on it and it's wouldn't be out of place in the terrible run of movies in that franchise. (This is a joke)