Movie Review- Rolling Thunder (1977)

Rolling Thunder is an exploitation movie that forgets to actually exploit anything. It follows a POW named Major Charles Rane who has returned home to his family in Texas after being imprisoned in Vietnam for several years. However, Rane's return home is not a happy one. His wife and son are shot and killed during a home invasion, and the Major loses a hand. After being released from the hospital, he tracks down the criminals with the help of a waitress and Tommy Lee Jones, hell-bent on getting revenge by way of a prosthetic hook and a sawed-off shotgun.

Given the premise of hook-handed ex-military vigilante justice, one might expect this film to revel in its exploitative cheesiness. However, Rolling Thunder plays itself dead serious and deliberately paced; there is little action until the last 20 minutes or so of the film. The gritty and grounded approach feels like wasted potential, because a majority of the film is Rane going "boy, I am sure am going to kill those guys when I find them". A touch of nuance or substance, anything, would help to strengthen the many ambling scenes in the film. To make matters worse, the villains have no motivation. They appear suddenly 30 minutes into the film with no prior buildup and are not seen again until the film's final moments. It has been said that a film's hero is only as good as his villain, and these villains are hardly memorable, let alone present in the film.

The film's approach to violence is bothersome as well. It handles vigilante justice with a dour, nihilistic attitude that is not fun to watch. Vigilante characters like the Punisher, for example, work best when the moral ramifications of violence are thrown out the window and the viewer can indulge the inner reptilian brain's craving for people getting blown up. If Rolling Thunder had a greater comment on the nature of violence, or any deeper meaning at all, the grim approach to vigilantism could work. But as it stands, it reflects a repugnant attitude found in other 70's vigilante films such as Straw Dogs and Death Wish, an attitude that takes a bothersome glee in sadistic justice. 

I would have much preferred the cartoonish approach to violence. Keep in mind this is a film where the hero sharpens his prosthetic hook hand on a grindstone for the express purpose of attacking people. Taken in the right direction, this could have been a pulpy fun time. I would even be happy if it were a  poignant comment on the futility of revenge. I just wish the film wasn't so middling. Narratively, it is dull and padded out, but from a technical standpoint it is perfectly serviceable. There are some generally well-constructed themes throughout, including PTSD flashback sequences that would used again to similar effect in First Blood. Just add this one to the long list of "not exactly bad per se, just not all that spectacular" movies.

Movie Review- The Lego Movie (2014)

Originally written Feb 17 2014

The Lego Movie. Something I could have only dreamed of as a lad. But since popular toys are getting blockbuster movies these days, it’s only a matter of time before Lego jumped on the bandwagon. I was skeptical at first, because kids movies are generally crap. But the initial reviews were positive, and the audience consensus seemed to be that The Lego Movie was fantastic. And then I saw it.

It’s an okay movie, but it’s way over-hyped. It’s flashy and colorful to the point of occasionally being an eyesore, and the animation is more spastic than Superjail! on speed. It’s definitely a style over substance kind of movie. That doesn’t make it terrible, but it’s certainly not 90something percent on Rotten Tomatoes good. The overall design of the movie is fantastic. The sets and environments have that awe-inducing feel of massive Lego landscapes they sometimes have set up at cons. The character design is excellent as well. The textures and shading are incredibly realistic, and the attention to detail on the minifigs is impeccable.

The animation is obviously CG at times, but for the most part the animation team did a great job of recreating the low frame-rate look of stop motion animation. The only problem is that most scenes constantly have stuff crap flying around in the background, and it’s usually a distraction from whatever’s going in on the foreground. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of creative stuff going on with the animation. While the action scenes are painfully frenetic there are a few nifty things here and there, like Lego vehicles being rapidly reassembled in the midst of a chase scene.

While it was a clever idea to do the movie as if it were being written in the mind of a 10-year-old, there’s a reason they don’t let kids write movies. The whole thing is painfully cliche-ridden and full of unfunny overused jokes. (Why yes, Starbucks does charge a lot for coffee. I’ve never heard a joke about that before. EVER.) You can’t come up with a lame script and get away with it by angling it that it’s from the mind of a kid. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but it’s not fun to actually have to watch.

This isn’t so much a criticism of the movie itself, but something that really bothered me about the ending: that kid is a total dillweed. Will Ferrell was right all along. The kid clearly has his own Legos to mess around with, but instead chooses to mess with his dad’s obviously expensive model setup. As a purchaser of Legos myself, I can tell you now that to put something together like Will Ferrell did would cost several thousand dollars to assemble. Admittedly Will Ferrell was acting a bit OCD about the whole thing, but that kid should have stuck with his own stuff and left his dad alone.

Overall, this is just okay. The whole thing is a visual overload and has a really boring script. There are occasional moments of fun, and the designs for everything are fantastic, but that doesn’t make up for the lame majority. It will probably entertain your kids, but that’s about it. If Charlie Day screaming about spaceships and Will Arnett doing a shopworn Batman impression sounds like your cup of tea, maybe go check it out. Otherwise, just watch the trailer on Youtube. That way you can see all the cool designs and save yourself 100 minutes.

Movie Review- Bad Milo! (2013)

Originally written Feb 23, 2014

Bad Milo!- the story of a movie that promised little and gave nothing. When you have a ludicrous premise for a movie, it’s an uphill battle trying to get people to take you seriously. Most of the time, filmmakers go for the “Might as well have fun with this” approach and let the weirdness run wild. But the guys behind Bad Milo! decided to take on the Sisyphean task of making a dramedy about a colon-demon and then were promptly squished by their figurative boulder.

In case you were unaware, Bad Milo! is a movie about a guy with a carnivorous demon living in his intestines. The premise sounds good(ish) on paper, but somehow the writers royally screwed it up. The first 15 minutes or so of the movie had potential, but the story completely shifts gears after that and everything goes down from there.

The main character, Duncan, goes to see a therapist after having nightmare visions of Milo. The therapist is a generic hippie guy played by the woodchipper guy from Fargo, who tells him that he has some sort of ancient demon living in his guts. The therapist tells Duncan that he needs to come to terms with Milo, and then he’ll go away. (Get it? Dealing with personal demons, except it’s an actual demon! Hilarious!)

What follows is what can only be described as a weird indie dramedy with ass-monsters. Duncan decides to make amends with his estranged father, but apparently his dad has a colon-monster too. The movie is pretty much a blur of sappy father/son bonding stuff, with the occasional rubbery puppet popping up to break the monotony. But even then the stuff with Milo isn’t that interesting. There’s a whole realm of silly possibilities to explore in an colon-demon movie, and the potential is never tapped into.

For what’s supposed to be a horror-comedy, there’s not much humor either. There’s a brief bit about how Milo’s killings have been blamed on a rabid raccoon, and that’s about as funny as it gets. The rest is just poor attempts at gross-out humor. There’s a certain line that has to be crossed before something becomes so gross it’s funny, but Bad Milo! constantly falls short of that line.

Overall, this is a weird and lame movie. I’m not sure what the writers were going for, and it doesn’t seem like they knew either. The movie has two modes- gross and melodrama. The shifts between the two are really distracting and make the movie drag like crazy. Bad Milo! barely clocks in at 80 minutes,but it feels considerably longer than that. This is a movie about a butt-monster for crying out loud, it should at least be entertainingly bad. Unfortunately all we got was a boring and confusing concoction of a movie.

Movie Review- The Mutilator (1985)

The Mutilator is an oddity; it is the apotheosis of the slasher film, but it came out several years after the subgenre's boom in the early 1980's. It's an endearingly ramshackle film. It is appparent that everyone involved making this film was having a grand old time, and never taking themselves too seriously. Any slasher film that features a catchy shag song as its theme has clearly placed fun as its chief priority.

The story is effectively simple. In an opening flashback, a young boy named Ed accidentally shoots and kills his mother. Flash forward years later and the young boy is now a 20something-pretending-to-be-a-college-student headed to a North Carolina beach house for some fall break shenanigans with his friends. Unfortunately, when they arrive, Ed's father is still hanging around, and Dad is still upset about the whole "dead wife" incident. And so he stalks and kills the nubile youngsters in the classic slasher formula.

My personal meter of slasher film quality is its ability to successfully provide a variant on a well-worn theme. This usually amounts to "Are the horror parts inventive?" and "Are the non-horror parts engaging?". The Mutilator's villain is just a crotchety old guy, so nothing particularly scary there. But if nothing else, this film is dedicated to its cheap thrills and presents gory scenes that still manage to shock today. The filler in between the audience-attracting violence is where the film's charm lies. The sloppy technical details are endearing in a way. There is no consistency between night and day shots; characters continually walk in from the moonlit beach to the sunlit beach house. The comic relief character Ralph is operating on some strange manic level of existence that is always entertaining. The music cues often drown out dialogue, and so on. This is not a so-bad-it's-good film, the movie is having too much fun with itself to be truly bad. This is a film that invites you to have fun alongside it, not at its own expense. The Mutilator set out a modest goal to be a lunkheaded slasher film, and not only does it achieve that goal, it manages to  have fun in the process. With a narrow subgenre like slashers, that bit of fun is all I ask for.

Movie Review- The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Originally written 4/8/16

The Roger Moore Bond films are often maligned as campy dreck. Those detractors would be right, but that is the appeal of the Moore films. They are Bond at his goofiest, and it sure is fun to watch. The Man with the Golden Gun is no exception. It makes little sense and is over-the-top, but it sure is entertaining.

The Bond movies have always unabashedly cashed in on what was popular at the time. Live and Let Die has elements of Blaxploitation, Moonraker is James Bond in space, Die Another Day is the x-treme early 00's Bond, and so on. The Man with the Golden Gun was made when kung-fu movies were popular, so of course Bond fights a karate dojo and sumo wrestlers. It must be seen to be believed. The creative team seemingly dumped any idea they had into the film, and it is a wonderful mess. A midget henchman? Okay. MI6 has a secret base inside a partially sunken ship, so that all the rooms are tilted? That would be cool to see, throw that in. That racist Smokey and the Bandit reject sheriff from Live and Let Die? Nobody liked him, sure we can bring him back. A slide whistle sound effect during a car stunt? Hell yeah, go for it! This movie is gloriously silly and bizarre. It is hard not to be won over by its discombobulated strangeness.

The plot is loopy and nonsensical. Some junk about the energy crisis. Christopher Lee is a villain named Scaramanga whose defining traits are "Has a golden gun and a third nipple". Bond disguises himself as Scaramanga at one point by wearing a fake third nipple. (Which he later peels off and throws onto the side of the road. Because this movie is really whacked.) Scaramanga has a secret island base with a shooting gallery in the basement so he can practice Golden Gunning people. Why his basement setup has a full array of animatronics and neon German expressionist decor is never addressed. He uses a solar-powered laser to blow up a plane. Truly this is an amazingly dumb film.

In the few "serious" moments of the film, the point is brought up that Scaramanga is essentially the evil version of James Bond. He is a hitman and kills for money, whereas Bond does the same thing but because he works for the government. The few scenes in which they address this point are well done, and I would have liked to see this point developed further. However, that would have required a complete overhaul of the film. A spy movie with a flying car is not the place to discuss moral gray areas.

The Man with the Golden Gun is a fun mess of a film. It has all the dumb campy junk you would expect from a Roger Moore Bond movie, but for once it actually clicks. Most of the Moore movies are amusingly campy on occasion. This one is just balls-to-the-wall weird. It is by no means a good film, but it is one of the most fun James Bond films in the series.