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The Black Hole -- a review

The very first time I saw The Black Hole was in a movie theater with my father. I was fifteen years old then, and was readily anticipating a new science fiction epic, this time produced from the Disney Corporation. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture ) had opened the week before, but at that point I still hadn’t seen it. My Dad decided to splurge and make it a double-feature, SF-flick weekend for the both of us, and we saw The Black Hole first. We would see Star Trek: The Motion Picture the following day (my retro-review of ST:TMP is forthcoming). Re-watching The Black Hole forty years later, I’m struck at how good the film is--at least in its first twenty minutes. The deep space exploration vessel Palomino, under the command of Dan Holland (the late, great Robert Forster) finds a massive black hole along its flight path. But it also discovers something even more amazing: a large ship that’s parked right on the black hole’s event horizon, seemingly unaffected by it. A search through

Midsommar --a review

Ari Aster strikes again with Midsommar . The horror auteur, who broadsided us with Hereditary just last year, is back with another in-your-face horror thriller that pulls no punches. Florence Pugh stars a Dani, a young woman who suffers a terrible tragedy early on in the film when her sister kills herself and winds up inadvertently killing their parents in the process. Understandably flailing with grief and misery, Dani seeks comfort in the arms of her manipulative lover, Christian (Jack Reynor), whose relationship with Dani has been suffering some setbacks shortly before receiving the terrible news. Several months later, Christian and friends receive an invitation to visit Sweden by Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who lives there in a commune. One is tempted to describe the people who live in this commune as being a cult, but Aster effectively masks this suspicion on the part of his characters (who wisely suspect it at the very beginning) by having them trying to be politically correct

Satanic Panic --a review

Satanic Panic fills me with nostalgia for two reasons: first, it’s a movie that’s been produced by Fangoria, the horror movie magazine that’s made a triumphant return recently (and welcome back); and second, it’s a horror comedy, which I haven’t seen since the heyday of Fango back in the 1980s. To be sure, there were plenty of horror films with humorous moments, and more than a few really bad horror films that were unintentionally funny, but it’s rare to get a full-bore horror film--complete with blood and guts--that also serves a healthy dose of satire, as well. Satanic Panic takes aim at the greedy top one percent in our beloved capitalist society, stating outright that the reason they’re so rich and powerful (as well as being cold, soulless bastards) is because they worship Satan, and Old Scratch apparently takes very good care of his followers. The major catch is a human sacrifice must be made every now and then, and Danica (Rebecca Romijn), the leader of the cult, already had

Crawl (2019) -- a review

Kaya Scodelario stars in Crawl as Haley, a college swimmer who’s struggling to maintain her scholarship at a Florida school when she realizes that she had bigger problems. After a swim meet, Haley receives a call from her sister, who hasn’t heard from their father in a while. There’s a major hurricane bearing down on Florida, and the fact that Haley’s father has gone silent--not answering calls or texts--is a bad sign. Despite the fact that she and her dad are not on speaking terms, Haley agrees to make the two hour drive to check in on him. Taking her four-wheel drive vehicle off road to avoid the safety roadblocks set up by the authorities, Haley drives ever closer to the outer fringes of the hurricane. The winds pick up, the rain falls horizontally, and the old neighborhood of her childhood house is completely abandoned--with the exception of Haley’s dad (Barry Pepper), who’s trapped in the basement of his house under some debris. But as the basement begins to flood from the hur

Men In Black International -- a review

You can tell, right off the bat, that there’s a problem with Men In Black International ( MIB:I ) from the way the movie opens. We get a flashback scene of the two MIB:I agents H (Chris Hemsworth) and High T (Liam Neeson) fighting aliens at the Eifel Tower in Paris. After watching this sequence--which falls flat with lame humor--we then flashback even further, to when a young Molly (Mandeiya Flory) watches her parents get zapped into forgetting their alien encounter by two MIB agents. But Molly herself retains her memory, and when she grows up (her adult role taken over by Tessa Thompson), she begins a rabid search for this mysterious organization, until the day she finds them and tries to bluff her way into their headquarters. Personally, I felt that MIB:I would have been a much more enjoyable movie had they begun it with little Molly watching her parents get zapped, and continued onward from just her POV. Just show us the fleeting glimpses of the MIB organization that Molly see

Hellboy (2019) -- a review

When they announced that they were doing a reboot of Hellboy , I started sharpening my knives in preparation of slicing this ‘turkey-to-be’ right up. The original Hellboy , directed by Guillermo del Toro, and released fifteen years ago, was an enchanting dark fantasy that starred Ron Perlman as the titular character, a demon turned superhero who battles the forces of evil for a government agency. In 2008, del Toro wound up making a sequel that was even better, and it hinted at a third film that would wrap up the series in a very dark fashion. But instead of getting a trilogy of del Toro’s whimsical, imaginative take on Mike Mignola’s original comic book series, we got a Hellboy reboot in 2019. I have to admit that I was originally very happy to hear that the rebooted Hellboy bombed at the box office, and looked forward to seeing this on home video just so I could gleefully dissect it and explain why it sucked so badly and how wrong they were to even reboot this series when they coul

X-Men Dark Phoenix -- a review

Coming nineteen years after the first X-Men movie, X-Men: Dark Phoenix wraps up the superhero team saga without any mention of Hugh Jackman’s Logan/Wolverine (Jackman retired from playing the character after 2017’s Logan ) in a more toned down adventure that, at times, seemed derivative of past (and better) X-Men movies. It’s the far-flung future of 1992 and the X-Men are called to rescue the crew of the space shuttle, which has come under attack from a strange cloud of energy from outer space while in orbit above Earth. Jean Grey’s (Sophie Turner) already considerable physic powers receive a major boost when she’s exposed to the otherworldly energy. And not only is she more powerful, but she can also see through a lie that Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) had created within her mind as a child in order to “protect” her. This incites Jean to become very cranky, which is not a good fit for a person who’s now armed with the powers of a god. Vuk (Jessica Chastain), the leader of an ali

Nosferatu the Vampyre -- a review

The ironic thing about the classic silent vampire film Nosferatu is that it probably wouldn’t be the masterpiece that it is were it not for the Bram Stoker estate. F.W. Murnau, the German filmmaker genius, had wanted to make a movie of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , but Stoker’s estate denied him the rights to film the book. And so Murnau simply changed the names of the characters--Count Dracula became Count Orlok, and so on--and in doing so, by being forced to create his own take on the story, Murnau gave us a unique version of the vampire tale. His Nosferatu , released in 1922, remains genuinely creepy, with plenty of unsettling, nightmarish imagery that still sends chills down the spine of a viewer almost a hundred years after its original release. When Werner Herzog, another brilliant German filmmaker, remade Nosferatu in 1979, he kept the character names from Stoker’s novel (the Dracula copyright had long since fallen into the public domain) while still retaining Murnau’s original

Sleepy Hollow -- a review

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Sleepy Hollow , dealing with the legend of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, which was one of the few folk stories that actually managed to creep me out as a kid. The film takes place in 1799, and recasts Crane as a constable with the New York City Police Department. Crane is played to jittery perfection by Johnny Depp, who deftly plays the duality of a skittish, squeamish man who still bravely tries to get the job done by tirelessly seeking justice for the victims of senseless crimes. To this end, Crane constantly pushes a scientific approach to police investigation, about a century or so before scientific police investigations would finally take hold. Endlessly tired of Crane’s crusading, a local judge (played by Hammer horror legend Christopher Lee in an effective cameo) orders him to the Hudson Highlands town of Sleepy Hollow, which has suffered a series of murders. Perhaps Crane’s reliance on newfangled science might solve the