The Village (2004) – Shucks, you don’t need me to tell you about this, right? I mean, I’m probably the last person to see it who’d ever want to. As with most Shyamalan movies, it’s visually arresting, well acted, and paced with understatement… and the twist ends up making you say, “Now, wait a sec… really?” In this case [no spoiler warning because see above], is there really no middle ground between “mired in urban crime” and “living a life so isolated that the Amish look like globe-trotting city-slickers in comparison”?
Ah, well. Still better than Signs. That movie still pisses me off.
Croc (2007) – Given the crank-em-out character of killer monster movies these days, you have to give props to any competence on display. In this case, the 20-foot-long killer crocodile was realized by a combination of stock crocodile footage, original crocodile footage with backgrounds that don’t destroy the illusion of scale (one time even with a scaled-down prop arm hanging from its mouth), and a full-sized mechanical head; CGI only shows up very rarely, when nothing else can do the job.
I mean, beyond that, it’s nothing to write home about; the script is half-way competent, although a couple of subplots get aborted in the last act when someone realized that we didn’t have time to wrap them up; and Michael Madsen shows up playing the standard-issue Michael Madsen part (in this movie, basically being an ersatz Quint). But hey, actual crocodiles — including the stars actually interacting with the animals.
Code 8 (2019) – Don’tcha just love titles which tell you absolutely nothing about the movie? Fortunately, the title is the worst part. This is X-Men with the serial number filed off: Throughout the alternate 20th century there have been “powereds,” who have become mistrusted and criminalized, and hunted at times by android “Guardians” (see?); in this story, a twenty-something “electrical” who’s always tried to stay under the radar needs to make more money to pay for his mother’s medical treatment, and falls in with some penny-ante powered criminals who are looking to up the ante.
It’s a fine little movie, as long as you don’t mind dialogue that sounds like actual low-life criminals — i.e., carpet-bombing every sentence with the “all-purpose adjective.”
Abandoned movies:
Deep Trap (2015) – Just a little too slow and squicky for my tastes. What can I say? It’s a South Korean movie, and international tastes don’t always mesh.
Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016) – I gave it twenty minutes, but I just got bored. Mostly the problem was that the designated hero, a high school kid, had no personality in evidence. (Unless the designated hero was actually the improbably young sheriff — but the fact that I’m uncertain is its own problem.)
Bug (1975) – I think the problem here is that no one making this movie realized that the subterranean cockroaches who fart flames and try to burn down the Seventies were the heroes.
Death Force (1978) – I’m sorry, but if a movie contains Japanese soldiers surviving on a Pacific island since WWII, I insist that one of them be played by John Fujioka.
re The Village: A year after this movie was released I could call up Google Maps and be able to get a pretty good view of the back yard of the house I grew up in as well as the apartment building I’m currently living in and I’m pretty certain that US intelligence would have had access to exponentially greater satellite technology much sooner than 2004. When you consider this in addition to, you know, aircraft how would it be possible that the outside world would not have found the village long, long before it’s quasi-medieval inhabitants discovered the outside world?
Well, there was some dialog in the ranger station about bribes paid to air traffic control… but I think the best answer is “No one was looking.”