Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Kaos]

Christmas Trilogy

Spirited

Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds in a musical takeoff on A Christmas Carol.

Ryan is an unredeemable social media influencer without a conscience who is targeted by the spirits of Christmas for a conversion. 

Ferrell is the Ghost of Christmas Present who has his own past baggage.

It’s not as bad as I feared.  There are some truly funnny moments, and it’s got heart. There’s even a clever nod to Ferrell’s Elf along the way. 

You know where it ends up but it’s a decently fun ride getting there. 


Its a Wonderful Knife
Good lord at the gay in this twisted take on the Jimmy Stewart/Donna Reed (love her) classic.

The film lives in the same sphere as Freaky, Happy Death Day, and Totally Killer but it’s not nearly as good as any of them. 

Good lord at the sheer amount of gay. 

Girl saves the town from a serial killer but is haunted by the event and her own teenage ‘nobody loves me angst.’  Wishing she were never born, she’s transported to a reality where the killer got away and continiued his rampage. 

The lead girl is like the Five Below knockoff of the Dollar General version of Tree (Jessica Rothe) from Death Day. She’s not awful but she lacks charisma.

Good LORD at the gay. 

A Creature Was Stirring
Put this in she category of “what the hell did I just watch?”   

Either I’m too dumb to understand what the director/writer(s) intended to say with this messy, meandering story or they are completely inept at crafting a cohesive a narrative. 

I have no idea what happened or what it meant. 

It may have been an allegory.  It may have been a dream inside a nightmare.  None of what you saw on screen may have occurred.

What I think I know:
Excessively, disgustingly, morbidly obese Chrissy Metz is a nurse, maybe with a heroin addiction.  She has a daughter who lives with her who… at certain body temperatures … turns into a …. Ummmm… porcupine(?!) due to being “quilled”’due to an unfortunate zoo incident. 

During a blizzard on Christmas Eve a brother-sister team of Christian missionaries (including Scout Taylor-Compton of Rob Zombie Halloween scream game) appear seeking refuge — or do they?

The rest is a muddled mass of trapdoor plot devices, bizarre porcupine references, and morbidly obese waddling. 

I think the writers and directors thought they were creating some operatic masterpiece about the perils of addiction. Or maybe not.  Either way, in their bumbling hands, all they left me with was a sense of confusion and regret. Regret that I wasted my time on this porker.

[Kaos]

Lower tier Christmas movies

Surviving Christmas

James Gandolfini made some poor choices during and after his iconic turn as Tony Sopano.  This is one. 

But you can’t blame him.  I mean… Christina Applegate. Catherine O’Hara. Bill Macy. Jennifer Morrison. Ben Affleck.  All in a Christmas movie that’s supposed to, at its heart, highlight the importance of family. 

Except it has no heart.  Gandolfini is okay as Soprano with a beard.  But Affleck is so gratingly bad he destroys the entire thing. 

This is, in the end, a cringey, steaming, stinking pile of shit.  It can’t be rescued. 

How bad? There’s an incest scenario played for laughs. 

This film should get whacked.  It’s a monstrous turd.

Fred Claus
One of two Vince Vaughn entries in this list. 

Another great cast squandered.  Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Banks, Kevin Spacey, Kathy Bates, Ludacris, and ridiculously sexy Rachel Weisz.  How could you go wrong?

In just about every way possible.

It has a few decent moments. And it has an idea where its heart should be.  Vaughn ruins it.  Him and a shitty script that doesn’t find its way until the final ten minutes.  By then it’s too late.

Four Christmases
Five too many. 

There’s not a single moment of emotional authenticity in this entire film.  Vince Vaughn plays the only note he knows as an actor (monotone babbling bullshit that isn’t as funny as he imagined it is) and it sucks the life of the entire exercise.

More wasted cast including Reese Witherspoon, Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight, Kristen Chenowith, Robert Duvall, and Sissy Spacek. 

It’s absolutely, flatly, terrible.  I award it no points and am dumber for watching it.

Deck the Halls
The first film in this set worth watching more than once. 

Danny DeVito, Matthew Broderick, Chenowith, and Kristin Davis (always thought she was sweetly sexy) in a tale of combative neighbors. 

DeVito moves in across from Broderick and wrecks his staid, traditional Christmas routines. Their conflict leads DeVito to squander his life trying to light his house with enough Christmas cheer to be visible from space. 

It’s awkward in places. It’s cheesy in others.  The pacing is sometimes weird. The setups are ridiculous. Most of the jokes don’t land as hard as they could.

 Broderick is off his game and comes off way too odd for the role sometimes.  But this film is so much better than the rest of the turds in the eggnog bowl that it looks like classic cinema in comparison. 

I don’t watch it every year, but I could.

Jingle All the Way
Going against the grain.  I really like this film.  It’s silly and stupid.  It’s part of the Arnold arc where he was trying to shed the muscle-bound meat head image.

The main thing that works for me and what elevates (and literally saves) the movie is the lecherous next door skeeze played by Phil Hartman.  He’s great.

Having worked retail during the height of the Cabbage Patch craze I have to say the brawl for the one remaining TurboMan isn’t too far from reality.   

It also features the debut of future WWF(WWE) superstar Big Show as a gigantic Santa. 

It’s on my list for every season.

[Kaos]

Last Voyage of the Demeter

Dracula on a boat. He’s tapped out the village where he resides so he’s shipping himself to England for better hunting grounds.

So much promise.  And did a lot of things right. But couldn’t get past the things it did wrong. 

The tone is good. The acting isn’t bad. The creature is well rendered. It does an adequate job of building tension.  But there were so many missteps and plot blunders.

1. Let’s artificially insert a racial angle for no reason and in an unrealistic manner. 
2. They know the creatures haunting the ship only comes out at night. So they only attempt to deal with it—- at night. 
3. They find a woman buried in dirt in a broken shipping container and alleged Cambridge grad Dr. Dre deduces immediately and with only superficial examination that she “needs a transfusion.” 
4. They know the creature(s) live in the crates in the hold.  They could have thrown them overboard and ended the threat. They didn’t.
5. Instead they develop a cockeyed plan to sink the ship.  And continue with it even when they learn Dracula has developed wings. 

It looked like at the end they were setting up for either a black Van Helsing or the possibility that Dracula prowled London as Jack the Ripper.  Neither should happen. 

It wasn’t a bad movie but it just left so many turds in the bed they were hard to ignore. 

[Kaos]

Saw X

I heard so many good things about this.  How it was true to the nature of the story, how it added so much to the narrative, how it was a necessary addition to the saga.

No. No. No. 

It was unnecessary and superfluous.  Almost all of it seemed out of sync.

Yeah, it was cool to see Amanda and Billy again. It was awesome to hear that iconic music as a trap was sprung. 

But everything else … and especially the ending … felt completely off. 

The first Saw was brilliant.  This one seemed tired, stale, and out of touch. 

The traps were uninspired, the tasks to escape unnecessarily arbitrary and cruel.

I like the the series and hope this is the end, even though I hate for it to end in this flat fizzle.

[Kaos]

There’s Something In The Barn

This was the third of a new Christmas horror slate that I wanted to try, the others being A Creature was Stirring and Wonderful Knife.  I should have started here.  It’s so much better than either of those.  It’s not quite Krampus or Violent Night level but it’s in the same general area code. 

It mixes a little bit of a lot of other Christmas fare in creating a solid, gory-ish, funny, violent, and engaging story.  You’ll see dashes of Gremlins, Vacation, Elf, and more. But it’s never derivative.

Martin Starr, the satanic, deadpan coder from Silcon Valley, stars as a nerdy dad who inherits a farm in Norway and moves his kids and his new wife to the frozen north in a misguided effort to help hold the family together. 

In addition to the house, they inherit a ramshackle barn where a barn elf resides.  It’s like a gnome.  His son discovers the little guy and also learns the few simple rules for keeping it happy. When the rules are followed, it does chores for the family like shoveling the walk, chopping wood, etc.  Of course everyone thinks the kid is imagining the elf. 

His dad, in griswoldish fashion, breaks every   single elf rule, eventually pissing it off to the point that it ignites a bloody, deadly war between the family and a horde of diminutive elves.

The film was helmed by Norwegians so there are some deadpan running jokes about clueless Americans including one about our love of guns and the lack of firearms in their town.  “We don’t go around carrying guns to shoot each other in the face….This isn’t Detroit.”  There’s another about the Oslo Accords (which given the current administration’s foreign policy bumbling hasn’t aged well).

It’s uneven in places and the war drags on a little too long.  I’m pretty sure the wife, son, and daughter are all Norwegian because the accents slip occasionally. 

But it’s got enough humor and horror that I enjoyed it. May not go into full holiday rotation but I will 100% watch it again.

[AUJarhead]

Leave the World Behind

I made it all the way to Exexutive Producers: Barack and Michelle Obama and then noped my way right back out. 

No thank you.

It's not that bad, to be honest.  Wasn't a fan of the ending, but it was worth the 2 hours.  Lots to make you think about, that's for sure.

[Kaos]

It's not that bad, to be honest.  Wasn't a fan of the ending, but it was worth the 2 hours.  Lots to make you think about, that's for sure.

I saw it described somewhere as “liberal foreshadowing”. 

[AUJarhead]

I saw it described somewhere as “liberal foreshadowing”.

Could be where we are headed, yes.  I heard Obama used his notes as POTUS with the screen writers to give them ideas, that honestly could be scary if some of the scenarios play out.

Movie ends with lots more questions than answers.

But also the first movie I've seen with the new Blade in it.

[Kaos]

Oldboy

I don’t agree with Wes very often. But that was a twisty movie and took more than one turn I didn’t see coming.   

It’s hard to say you “enjoyed it” given the final act, but it kept your attention. 

Thankfully I’ve never read anything about it.  Didn’t bother with the Americanized version.   So I wasn’t prepared for the last 15 minutes. 

You’ve seen revenge movies done time and time again.  Just not like this. 


Yes some of the set ups are almost preposterous.  But so is everything in Saw if you think about it.  And the acting has that almost frantic Korean expression and pace. But that doesn’t matter either. 

Watched it.  Glad I did.  Not sure I could again given that final act.

[Snakebite]

Oldboy

I don’t agree with Wes very often. But that was a twisty movie and took more than one turn I didn’t see coming.   

It’s hard to say you “enjoyed it” given the final act, but it kept your attention. 

Thankfully I’ve never read anything about it.  Didn’t bother with the Americanized version.   So I wasn’t prepared for the last 15 minutes. 

You’ve seen revenge movies done time and time again.  Just not like this. 


Yes some of the set ups are almost preposterous.  But so is everything in Saw if you think about it.  And the acting has that almost frantic Korean expression and pace. But that doesn’t matter either. 

Watched it.  Glad I did.  Not sure I could again given that final act.

This one is one of those that’ll stick with you. I saw this movie once, back in 2012. Incredible movie, but once was enough.

On the subject of Korean made films, my personal favorite is The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Very entertaining movie.

[Kaos]

Lift

Imagine George Clooney was short and black. Imagine Catherine Zeta Jones was black.  Imagine Matt Damon and Brad Pitt were women of various ethnicities.   Imagine Don Cheadle was white.

Imagine? Thanks to the magic of movies, you don't HAVE to imagine!  The film Lift brings this fantasy world to full fruition.

Kevin Hart takes the Clooney role as a leader of a rouge band of art thieves, who o escape Interpol prosecution, agree to steal a massive shipment of gold (conveniently contained in a square block). 

It's not bad. It has entertaining moments. But the comparisons to Oceans 11, 12 and 13 render it a weak and washed out version of those caper films.  The fact that it steals so much from them is impossible to overlook. 

I like Kevin Hart as a general rule, and I respect his desire to squirm out of the loud comic pigeonhole in which he resides.  But it's a really ludicrous stretch to see him as some kind of hard-fighting action hero.  It just doesn't play.

The rest of the cast (unknowns except for the weird Vincent D'Onofrio in the role of Saul Bloom from Ocean's, and Jean Reno in a cookie cutter bad guy role that required no effort on his part) was adequate, but nothing special. 

They didn't have the panache or breezy cool camaraderie that the Ocean's cast had, but it wasn't a terrible film.  Wish they'd done it as a homage rather than a sloppy copy.   

[Kaos]

A Haunting in Venice

Ok. Kenneth Branagh does a really good job in the role of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.  He was good in Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. He was good here, too.

The cast in each of those films is really strong.  This was no exception.  Kelly O'Reilly (not playing an oversexed cowgirl) alone should elevate the film.  The production values are top-notch.

The problem is the pacing. It's so slow to the reveal. It just plods along as Poirot deduces things with only a passing idea of how he figured it out. 

I'm sure the films are fairly loyal to the books (or in this case a loose interpretation of the book) but I really wish Branagh had taken the time to watch Robert Downey's Sherlock Holmes films and used them as a template for breathing life into these efforts. But he didn't.

The story is fine, the acting is fine, the locations are kind of great. But the very slow burn left me dry. 

[Kaos]

Had a long day at the dentist Friday.  Lots of smoke, needles and pain.  The place I go to is staffed by extremely attractive women - literally ALL of them - which I like.  Each treatment room is equipped with a television.  So during the entire ordeal I was hostage to what was playing on Netflix.  I should have asked them to put on another movie, but when I got there, I only expected to be there a few minutes, not over two hours.  I was stuck with what was on when things got started. So I ended up being "treated" to the second half of one film and the first half of another.  Both were bad.   

Feel the Beat
Another one of those rag-tag bunch of kids with no coordination or presence win a dance competition type efforts.  They checked all the boxes. Uncoordinated sassy ass chubby wearing glasses. Ugly uncoordinated black girl (the ugly one from the new Exorcist movie). Diminutive uncoordinated Asian. Preppy white girl snob. Deaf girl.  Etc. Sprinkle in a few flamboyant gays, which they did, and you get the gist.

The girls are being coached by a blacklisted Broadway dancer hoping to revive her career. In a script that would make the most earnest Hallmark Movie writer roll their eyes and gag, she has to choose between getting her career back and helping the girls (and one little guy) at their competition.  It was so saccharin.  It was so completely predictable.

At the end, the motley assortment of girls do their "big dance number" which looks like a bunch of untalented kids being tased repeatedly. They were flopping and jerking all over the stage. The dance number featured a too-long shot of the chubby girl's wide ass jammed straight into the camera.   It was absolutely atrocious. Of course the on-screen audience cheered and cried at its greatness. I was horrified.

You've seen this movie done a million times and done far better than this trash.

Home Team
Kevin James attempting (poorly) to portray then-New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton.

This was ABC After School Special bad.  James was horrifically awful (and he kind of is awful in pretty much everything).  I know he's trying to broaden his scope beyond the fat-ass Mall Cop.   He played a Nazi home invader in Becky. And this. Both are abject failures. All he is and all he can be is a shrugging schlump.  He's not meant for this. 

As bad as he is, the film is dragged to the burning pits of hell by Rob Schneider. Leaning into the man-bun-wearing dopey loser that he's done in several films now, he's the ruination of the movie. The proverbial silk-robe-wearing, shoeless straw that snapped the camel's back in half. Having that hack portray Payton's ex-wife's new husband (actually a normal and relatively wealthy real estate broker in real life) was clearly a case of Payton (or someone) taking a huge and vindictive swing at his ex.

Taylor Lautner is also atrocious. So bad.  In fact, the entire cast was struggling and awkward to find the rhythm.  BAD.

I only saw roughly the last hour of Feel the Beat and the first hour of Home Team.  I have no interest in catching the parts I missed of either.   I'd prefer more dental work to having to watch any part of either of them again.  Well.... except the broadway dancer who couldn't act a lick (not one lick) was pretty in a way.  She also couldn't dance (if in fact that was her trying and not a stunt double).

[Jumbo]

Kaos, have you watched Tulsa King with Sly Stallone?

[Kaos]

Kaos, have you watched Tulsa King with Sly Stallone?

I have.  I think I put stuff about it in another section.  Maybe the Broun Hall one.

[Kaos]

Killers of the Flower Moon

I know this got all kinds of praise, attention, and awards.  In truth? I've never seen a compelling story told in such a boring and slow-moving fashion. 

The movie (almost FOUR hours long) outlines the story of the oil-rich Osage Indians and how the white men took advantage of them - primarily through the ruthless scheming of King (Robert DeNiro) and his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio).  It tells it slowly. Painfully slowly.

It's basically the Beverly Hillbillies if Mr. Drysdale was a murderous banker with designs on eliminating Jethro, Elly Mae, Granny, Pearl, and Shorty in order to take control of Jed's fortune.

It was a tedious slog through people talking in fake country monotone and looking morose.

DeCaprio apparently decided that Marlin Brando's greatness was contained in cotton balls, because he did the same thing - stuffing his cheeks with cotton and then mimicking Jeff Bridges' jut-jawed mumble.

DeNiro I hate personally with great intensity. I get that he's supposedly a good actor, but every role he takes is just a variation on what he does in every role. This is no different. Same role. 

On top of that, the score was intrusive, headache inducing and rarely matched what was happening on the screen.  That, in itself, wrecked this film.

The story of the Osage and the greed-based murders that dogged their community deserved better treatment than this. 

It was too long, too boring, poorly told, and deadened by a head-pounding score. 

I do not recommend.

[Kaos]

Wonka

Got roped into going to the theater to see this. 

First, let me just say I didn't realize how much I have missed going to theaters. Got out of the habit over the last few years. Too convenient to wait on streaming. But it's not the same. There are things you just can't get at home. The dirty squeaky floor. The smell of popcorn. Watered down drinks. Previews. Before the movie even started, I decided the trip was worth it, and I decided I'm going to go more often.

I hope others do the same. It was a Friday night, and at a theater with 16 screens I bet there weren't two-dozen people there. I'm using this platform to encourage all five of you who might peruse this review to make the theater a part of your routine again. I don't want them to die. Yes, even though I believe Hollywood to be full of perverts and pedophiles; even though I suspect the Hollywood elites of even far worse than that; even though far too many films are used to promote anti-Christian, anti-American bias, there is still something about the "magic" of movies.  So go. Just be particular about what you choose to see (not Barbie, for instance. Don't watch that).

Now on to Wonka.

Completely unnecessary movie that nobody wanted. But look! It's got artificially inserted DI-versity! 

It wasn't terrible. It had a few humorous moments. It just had no purpose, no reason for being.

I didn't hate it. I didn't like it. I didn't not like it. It was like a piece of bland Wonka candy.  It's not Hershey, it's not Mars, it's not Lindt. It's like one of those non-descript bars schools sell for fundraisers or the Christmas bars you find in your stocking. Unwrap it, eat it, forget it.  I can't recommend. I guess if you like run-of-the-mill chocolate it's okay. There were lots of colors. And Hugh Grant as an Oompa. The rest I really don't remember.

[Kaos]

Talk To Me

Horror-ish Australian film about a group of kids that use a plaster hand to connect with tormented souls. Not necessarily bad, but a couple of things were problematic.

The lead was awful. I've never wanted a character in a horror movie to bite it in a brutal way any more than this one. Die. Please. Just die already. Just a bad character all the way through.

Also didn't much care for the OBVIOUSLY trans trying to be a dude, but quite clearly used to be a girl. Just a bad addition to the cast. 

All told, though, it was a pretty decent movie. Yeah, there were predictable setups, some really asinine logical leaps, a complete inconsistency in motivation and behavior, and some clunky dialogue but it had its moments.

There are worse horror films out there.

[Kaos]

Haunting of the Queen Mary

When a movie's over and you have to go find somebody to explain what exactly it was you just saw happen?  That means the director did an inadequate job of presenting the events in a manner which was understandable. When no one is quite sure what they witnessed? The director or storywriter has failed completely.

That's where the Haunting of the Queen Mary sunk.

Yes, Alice Eve has some impressive yaboobos. But they don't get any further than a flash of cleavage. That's about all I fully understood from this time-flipping exercise.

The film took place in two timeframes. There was a storyline about a voyage in the 1930s which contained murderous passengers, Fred Astaire, and an allegedly talented tap-dancing moppet.  That was intercut with a current-day storyline about saving the anchored Mary from "something" by writing a 3D interactive story from a child's perspective and focusing that story on the haunted history of the vessel.

None of it really made sense. Neither did the dwarf kid who played Alice's son or the brown man who either was or wasn't the dwarf's dad.

There was so much that was left unexplained. So many random turns and events that were rendered nonsensical.

I think the story itself could have been good. I think - and stress think here - the idea was that a modern day storyteller gets into the ship's history.  One by one, they are possessed by the souls of the passengers trapped there for years, essentially swapping bodies. Then the ocean liner's ancient passengers depart the ship in the bodies of the family they possessed.

That still doesn't cover about two dozen other stories left open. At least that many cryptic comments that just hang there, never to be resolved. Like, for one, why does one of the passengers have a mangled, gaping maw that's covered with a Halloween mask. If that's explained, I never got it.

This whole thing was just a muddled mess from a story standpoint. Visually, it was pretty good. Definitely had a decent production budget. Too bad some of that wasn't spent on hiring decent writers.

[Kaos]

Fall of the House of Usher

Let’s morph elements of all of Edgar Allen Poe’s works into a single disjointed time-hopping narrative.  And then slather gay all over it.  And then make sure to get a few woke digs in. 

Worthless.