Here’s another metric crapload of capsule reviews of movies I’ve seen recently but haven’t felt motivated to write about at any length.
The Pilot: A Battle For Survival (2021) – Russian-made WWII thriller about a pilot shot down during the winter, who has to survive and make his way back to the Russian front. Not based on any specific pilot’s experience, but the closing credits include the bios of a half-dozen pilots whose experience informed the script.
Rampage (2018) – An albino ape and several other dangerous animals violate the square-cube law when an experimental pathogen makes them giant and irritable. Dwayne Johnson saves the day, but not before Chicago gets “renovated.”
Bell, Book and Candle (1958) – Fifty-year-old Jimmy Stewart falls for twenty-five-year-old Kim Novak, who’s actually a witch, which means that she’s magical as long as she doesn’t fall in love or something. Doesn’t make much sense, but one can’t fault the performers (including a young Jack Lemmon).
Hotel Artemis (2018) – In sort of a John Wick-style premise, agoraphobic Jodie Foster and unflappable Dave Bautista run a secret underworld-only hospital in Los Angeles. One night, during a city-wide riot, a whole bunch of conflicting loyalties turn violent.
They Crawl Beneath (2022) – A young cop is trapped beneath a car he was working by an earthquake — an earthquake that also releases subterranean carnivorous worms. Overall, it’s much better than its 3.3 rating on the IMdb, but it’s marred by two things:
- One pivotal expository scene is dominated by a truly execrable actress.
- The worms themselves are entirely realized by practical effects, which is a good thing, but it’s obvious that the FX hand-puppets don’t have the leverage for all the things they’re doing.
Haywire (2011) – Gina Carano’s first stab at the big time, with a supporting cast including Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton… However, the fact that Carano needed to be dubbed by another actress portended that maybe she couldn’t carry the non-action parts of this action thriller.
Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) – Not quite as good as I thought it was 30 years ago, but it still holds up fairly well. (Due for a Broadway revival, in fact!)
Konga (1961) – Batman’s butler Alfred injects a baby chimpanzee with a nonsensical “animals with the characteristics of plants” serum, which successively turn it into an adult chimp, then into a man in a gorilla costume, and finally into a man in a gorilla costume against a bluescreen or towering over miniature sets (with wildly inconsistent scale). Come for the bad FX, stay for the monomania and self-refuting claims to scientific dispassion!
The Condemned (2007) – An innovative TV producer pioneers a livestreamed TV tournament of condemned criminals fighting to the death on a secret island. Unfortunately, he’s roped in disavowed Delta Force operator Steve Austin as a contestant. Action movies like these often have a subtext about the morality of watching violence as entertainment (which reflects on the viewers of the very movie making that point); this movie makes it explicit.
The Black Sleep (1956) – Basil Rathbone! Lon Chaney Jr.! Tor Johnson! John Carradine! Bela Lugosi! Okay, Tor Johnson and Carradine are little more than cameos (ever wanted to see a photograph of Tor in a hairpiece?)… and Lugosi is mute… And Chaney isn’t that big a draw… but Rathbone goes all Obsessive Mad Doctor, and that makes up for it.
The Arrival (1996) – Increasingly paranoid sci-fi thriller in which astronomer Charlie Sheen discovers an artificial signal beamed toward Earth, being answered from someone down here. There’s something charmingly naive, looking back from 2025, in the idea that if we only reveal an unbelievable conspiracy, the people actually do something about it.
The Assassination Bureau (1969) – Very much trying to follow in the footsteps of adventure-comedy The Great Race (1965), with Oliver Reed instead of Tony Curtis and Diana Rigg instead of Natalie Wood. Not as satisfying, at least partially because there isn’t an antagonist with the comic genius of Jack Lemmon.
Redemption (2013) – Jason Statham is Joseph Smith (no, not that one, a different one), a disgraced Special Forces soldier turned homeless drunk turned Chinese mob enforcer in London. I discovered that if you surround Statham with other Brits, his accent becomes so impenetrable that I have to turn on subtitles.
Things to Come (1936) – Based on the H.G. Wells novel The Shape of Things to Come from 1933, long after Wells had stopped writing actual novels in favor of fictionalized socialist agitprop. Trumpets loudly that Golden/Silver Age trope of “If only the completely selfless and objective scientists were in charge, everything would be groovy.” Also just a really clumsy movie.
The Toxic Avenger (1984) – How shameful is it that I had never seen the movie that put Troma on the (New Jersey) map? It’s one of the first “intentionally bad” B-movies, but not nearly as diligently transgressive as later Troma output.
Aaand that catches us up. Will I return to writing longer-than-twenty-five-words movie reactions? Only time will tell!
Looks like you’ve been busy! Some of these I’ve seen myself, others not so much.
In the popular arcade game on which Rampage is based, of course, Chicago is just one of the many cities the players are called upon to “renovate” in the manner the monsters in the movie do. The way things are going in virtually all those cities these days, seems to me that game should be more popular than ever. (As noted in a history book on Marvel Comics, one of the popular things for comics and other pulp fiction to do during the Great Depression was portray major cities—especially New York City where so much of this stuff was being published—being destroyed, because so many of the unemployed men who were struggling to make a living at the time were feeling bitter and betrayed, thinking civilization had failed them and therefore might as well be swept away.) That’s kind of a funny choice of games on which to base a video game movie, but as you and I well know, Hollywood could make worse choices; and has on numerous occasions.
I’ve never seen all of Bell, Book, & Candle, but yeah, I know how interesting it can be to see how some famous actors (like Jack Lemmon) and actresses looked when they were just starting out and hadn’t yet been typecast in certain roles. Though he later went on to star in a lot of more comedic roles, Leslie Nielson always appreciated how Forbidden Planet came to be such a popular nostalgic classic with him playing the serious protagonist because, as he put it, “I was looking good!” My late mother and I had a similar reaction to seeing young Bruce Willis and Jonathan Frakes in certain episodes of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone (although they were playing more according to type already by then).
Speaking of my late mother, I never saw all of Earth Girls Are Easy either. No one in my family ever even thought to rent a copy for so long as she lived, probably in part because my hard-working honey-haired late mother really hated “dumb blonde” jokes. That hilariously offensive “‘Cause I’m A Blonde” song would undoubtedly have had her constantly giving the screen two one-fingered salutes if we’d ever screened it back then.
As for Things To Come, yeah, I already thought that guy from the “Wings Over The World” organization sounded mighty puffed up and pretentious even when watching that movie as a kid. H.G. Well’s naive utopian notions that we’d all be living in a veritable Paradise-on-Earth if we just put all the Right People™ in charge originates from even further back than the Socialists in many of the conceits Plato laid out in his book The Republic. What’s rather disheartening is seeing how after so many centuries of failure, so many people still believe putting the Right People™ (be they philosopher kings or scientists or D.E.I. hires or whatever) in charge is totally going to create a utopian society like the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek franchise rather than the kind of bankrupt crime-ridden gangster-government-run hellhole of Turkana IV (also from the Star Trek franchise, oddly enough) it always does in real life when people try organizing their governments this way in places like… well, Chicago, to cite a particularly recent example.
Trumpets lously that Golden/Silver Age trope of “If only the completely selfless and objective scientists were in charge, everything would be groovy.”
I’m sure it would be, just like everything would be groovy if a host of archangels were in charge. The difference is that I actually believe in archangels.
KONGA does have the sterling virtue of making GORGO look absolutey brilliant by comparison.
Hey now, GORGO’s got it going on. Trucking the scale model through London alone is priceless.