Moose And The Movies

Oh, man, do the critics hate this one. But you know something? Several gazillion of my best friends and I beg to differ.  Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is a fantasy action adventure that killed at the box office in January 2013 and has been a healthy property for Paramount in the home-video and streaming markets. It was the first English-language film for Norwegian writer-director Tommy Wirkola. He since has won over critics with a handful of successful genre films, including Santa Claus slasher Violent Night in 2022. I don't really understand why critics didn't like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. I discovered it on streaming a few years ago, and I watched it recently for at least the third time. Every time I see it, I have a blast with this movie. I think it's fantastic. Wirkola's concept here is to establish what became of Hansel and Gretel. We get enough of the fairy tale in the first few minutes to establish the relevant backstory. Several years after the ...

Go was a film that came and went in relative obscurity near the end of the 20th century and has remained well below the cultural surface.  It definitely was a product of its time, one of a boatload of Pulp Fiction derivations that fought for attention in the latter half of the 1990s. It is an interesting and rewarding watch, particularly if you were a fan of all those Tarantino-esque crime adventures of the era. Go gives us a fascinating early look at several faces we've gotten to know pretty well in the past couple of decades. Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr, Timothy Olyphant, Jane Krakowski and Melissa McCarthy are among the notables I recognized. All were in the formative stages of their careers when they appeared in Go. Go was the first feature film written by John August, who went on to pen the megahit Charlie's Angels and five Tim Burton films -- including Big Fish and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Director Doug Limon was coming off the success of Swingers, in 1996, and moved...

Sunday Mornings is a homemade indie effort produced as a pilot for a TV series. Apparently, no one wanted it, and it found its way to a low-populated corner at Prime Video. I found it recently while playing around with the randomizer at Reelgood. It is the story of six women in Atlanta raised as sisters. The film basically is a series of vignettes framed as diary entries by the central character, Sunday, portrayed admirably by Courtney Arlett. Arlett as Sunday provides voiceover narration to tie it all together. All the women were raised by Sunday's uncle. Sunday says in the first few minutes that the other five women are sisters and that they all consider Sunday a sister. Sunday and her husband have two foster children in their home. Sunday hopes she can have a biological child someday, but apparently she knows that isn't really going to happen. She and her husband treat the two foster kids like they are their own, and the youngsters seem quite happy. The little girl calls Sun...

This Blu-ray set, released in August 2017, includes the four 1979-97 films starring Sigourney Weaver and the two Ridley Scott prequels from the 2010s.  The only one of these movies I had seen before diving into this set was Alien, the first film. The rest were first-time watches. I really enjoyed this collection of iconic spaceship films. We get a couple of unquestionably great movies. Three of the other four are fairly decent. The first two films alone are worth the price of admission.  Alien is one of the most memorable films I've ever seen. Who could ever forget that shocking scene when the creature explodes out of John Hurt's chest? Imagine seeing that in a dark theater in 1979 when you have no idea what's about to happen. Ridley Scott delivered an influential classic in both the science fiction and horror genres. It holds up extremely well. I loved it this time around. James Cameron came on board as writer and director for Aliens, which hit screens in July 1986. Camero...

Bud Abbott And Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948, directed by Charles Barton, 3.5 stars. Bud Abbott And Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein was a surprise box-office hit in 1948. It was a movie the two stars did not want to do. Most everyone involved hated working with them. But not much else was happening at the time for anybody, so they all had to suck it up and just do it. Abbott and Costello were at a career crossroads. They had just lost their long-running radio show, they were in a nasty personal feud with each other, and both were struggling with health issues. Universal's megahit monster series had petered out, reduced to lame sequels and crossovers during the World War II years. And the studio was struggling to stay afloat through a succession of desperate mergers and acquisitions. Universal-International, as it was known in 1947, got hold of a script titled The Brain Of Frankenstein that featured several of the studio's iconic monsters. The plot had Dracula seeking a si...

Hell House LLC, 2016, directed by Stephen Cognetti, Prime Video, 3.5 stars. Hell House LLC is a top-notch found-footage film from 2016.  This was a Video On Demand release from writer and director Stephen Cognetti , making his feature-film debut. It was successful enough that Cognetti has been able to make a career of turning out Hell House LLC movies. His fifth one, subtitled Lineage , landed in August 2025. In Hell House LLC, a young entrepreneur and his staff go to work converting an abandoned hotel into a haunted-house attraction for the Halloween season. The plot is framed as a documentary crew's investigation five years later into an unexplained "malfunction" on opening night that killed 15 people. The story is told through video shot by the crew while setting up the attraction -- as well as clips from TV news coverage of opening night and an interview with the crew's only survivor. Let me interject here: We all know there are two kinds of movie fans, right? ...