Reel Film Chronicles – Page 16

Gemini Man

I got a weird feeling from Gemini Man, and I’m fairly certain it wasn’t the high frame rate (HFR) 3D, although you have to take into consideration the way the film was shot when assessing the overall score, I will try to separate them as best I can. There’s nothing much to be said for the plot or story of this film: you’ve seen the trailers so you know the core premise that Will Smith’s uber-agent character is cloned and they must face off against one another. The way they put them together is a bit cliched as you roll your eyes gently (but not too much because you don’t want to miss the incredible 3D effects) as the film takes its sweet time getting to where you know it’s going. Immediately after coming out of the theatre I found myself picking apart many of the small things in the film which never feels good, but in this case those small things seemed to be related to plot points that the characters kept mentioning in dialogue but seemed superfluous to the…

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (or maybe this is a reboot) feels much more natural than some of the other horror franchises I’ve gorged myself with in the past year, like Friday the 13th or even A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I have to attribute it to the fairly inconsistent sequels and the years that separated them. Whereas with something like Friday the 13th, they managed to keep some semblance (albeit VERY loose) of continuity in the numerous sequels, Texas Chainsaw didn’t adhere to anything as there seemed to be soft reboots/remakes throughout without sticking necessarily to a stringent timeline. This 2003 reboot takes the biggest leap of all the sequels and firmly plants itself as a chainsaw for the modern era. It doesn’t transplant our massacre to modern times, instead recreating the timeline in the mid-70s, and upping the terror by splashing ludicrous amounts of gore and making more impactful shocking moments than the original sequels could muster. At first I thought this was a relatively generic slasher film that just so happened to star our beloved Leatherface and…

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

Not only does Renee Zellweger appear in this atrocious entry in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, but Matthew McConaughey appears in full force as well: they very well could be the best thing about this film. McConaughey plays Leatherface’s brother Vilmer and does in fact surpass the popular chainsaw wielding villain in terms of scares. Zellweger doesn’t have much to do here but play the classic final girl trope as best as anyone and is in fact, the only character in the film that passes as a decent person. The rest of the characters are all awful and the film doesn’t skirt around it at all: you find yourself rooting for both good and bad folk to die gruesome deaths, but yet the film doesn’t really deliver there either. I read somewhere (and I apologise as I didn’t bookmark it) that perhaps the film is a commentary on the franchise itself, if not horror movies in general during this time frame: villains are reduced to a fraction of what they were before (as Leatherface is the weakest part of the…

Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

Number three in the series feels more akin to a reimagining of the original film than a sequel as it follows the basic outline rather than treading new territory like the first sequel did years before. I guess in 1990 the original was sixteen years in the past, which by horror fanchise standards is old enough for a remake. Unfortunately, this feels rather like the other generic films of the decade; wherein with Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 which ventured into a creepy underground domain with our cannibal clan and added a healthy dose of camp, the third one goes straight serious yet can’t match the match the shocking horror of the original. Indeed, I don’t think anyone is actually killed with a chainsaw in this film; Leatherface is in the title yet does very little in this slog of a thriller. The film spends an inordinate amount of time running around in the dark and focusing on the shenanigans of the killer Sawyer family, which I think takes away some of the fear factor. Aside from young Viggo Mortensen’s menacing…

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

While I found it difficult to sit through the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I did end up rating it quite highly. The big takeaway I had was the amount of screaming that dominated the last act of the film, and I found it exhausting to complete. I leveled a similar complaint against The Goonies when I watched it the first time: there just seemed to be sections of loud talking, yelling and general tomfoolery that overloaded my (apparently) old man sensibilities. It pleases me to report then, that the “screaming” of TCM2 was much more bearable. The film though, does not hold the same significance of the original, although I did enjoy watching it quite a bit: the sequel does not seem to take itself seriously, as it has a bit of surrealism that leans into comedy rather than the shock horror of the first. It’s a good mix as we’re treated to a zany performance by Dennis Hopper (that scene where he’s shopping for chainsaws is out of this world) and a solid showing of the cannibalistic family, including…

Batman: Hush

While I read the original comics that this movie is based on, you must know that I am not a reliable source; the memory of those comics are long forgotten and yes, I should have either read them before taking this on or maybe I should read them after and *before* I write this. But I’m not interested in making comparisons: I didn’t grow up with Hush like I did some of the other iconics stories, such as Year One or Dark Knight Returns. I have enjoyed – for the most part – the DC animated features: it’s always felt to me that they have their act together and are able to make coherent, concise stories that often excel past their live action attempts. It’s no different here: we get the luxury of moving beyond the capabilities of live action just adding in so many of Batman’s rogue gallery in such a short amount of time; they come and go to server their part in the story perfectly and in true comic book fashion. Hush elevates in its exploration of…

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

2016 | dir: André Øvredal | 99 m I don’t know if it says more about me or about the horror industry that when I first heard about The Autopsy of Jane Doe, I immediately assumed necrophilia was going to play a large part in the plot. (Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.) I’m not sure why, exactly, but my mind kept trying to connect it with Deadgirl, a movie that involves some teenage boys, a zombie girl, and a whole lot of lube. Although, I’m not sure whether sex with somebody who’s only mostly dead counts as necrophilia or it’s really more of a grey area, zombiphilia. Either way, the point is The Autopsy of Jane Doe was actually nothing like Deadgirl, and I definitely don’t have a fetish for corpses that can legally be proven in a court of law as far as you know. I picked up The Autopsy of Jane Doe for a good price at FanExpo last year, but for some reason, it never made the cut in my yearly Halloween horror movie marathon. I mean, I guess I…

Collector’s Corner: 12 Monkeys

Almost since the beginning, Terry Gilliam has been a mainstay in my movie collection, and my DVD copy of 12 Monkeys has been around since university. It easily claimed a spot on the list of Essential Cinema that my friends and I hashed out over countless drunken nights and weekend marathon gaming sessions of SSX Tricky. So I was super stoked to upgrade to the Arrow release of 12 Monkeys a couple weeks back when Ryebone and I made our annual pilgrimage to FAN EXPO, it being a staple of my cinematic diet for so long. And also a little sad. Not at the superior visual and audio quality of the new Blu-ray version, which is awesome, but at the replacement of the specific DVD copy that has been a part of my life, literally for decades now. For some, sentimentality over a particular copy of a particular movie that was mass-produced around the world may be difficult to grasp. It’s the same basic drive that fuels all sentimental connections, I suppose; that particular thing is associated in one’s brain with another thing that occurred in…

Spider-Man: Far From Home

2019 | dir: Jon Watts | 129m The Marvel Cinematic Universe is, by this point, a well-oiled machine that basically prints money on command. Spider-Man Far From Home, the second solo outing for Peter Parker and his alter-ego in the MCU, seemed destined to be a smash success, as most Marvel films are these days. And, of course, it is raking in a tonne of dough. There’s no question it’s a financial success for Marvel Studios and their evil overlords at Disney. It did what it was designed to do, and exactly nothing more. I went in to Spider-Man: Far From Home as a fan of the MCU in general: a few terrible films, a few great films, a lot of solid films somewhere in between those two extremes, but always well-thought out and part of a larger plan. I remember walking out of Avengers: Infinity War and thinking that this is probably as close as I would get to experiencing a cinematic event that people watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time in theatres must have shared. I’m impressed at the MCU’s long-form storytelling,…

Dark Phoenix

Sometimes a film is nearing release amid a turmoil of negative hype, and as it crests to a swelling of negative criticism in the final days the movie releases to a thud at the box office – exactly as expected. And sometimes, your curiosity still gets the best of you, and you have to watch the train wreck for yourself. As an avid enthusiast for so-called “bad” films, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to watch the (presumably) last entry in Fox’s rocky X-Men franchise that began so innocently, and triumphantly nearly twenty years ago. The series was a owed a small debt as well; I’ve seen every entry in the theatre and I wouldn’t allow some nasty reviews to deter me from completing the saga: it was the least I could do for the franchise that ultimately opened the door for our modern superhero blockbuster films. It nearly bears repeating, that expectations into a film hold a lot of sway over opinions of the film (least for me). So in this case, my expectations are pretty low. Like, VERY…