Moose And The Movies

Open 24 Hours, 2018, directed by Padraig Reynolds, streamed on Prime Video, 2.5 stars. This was a 1-star movie for about 45 minutes. A young parolee convicted for setting her serial-killing boyfriend on fire is forced to take an overnight job at a remote 24-hour gas station. Serial-killing boyfriend escapes prison and turns up seeking revenge at said gas station on parolee's first night on the job. It took 45 minutes for writer-director Padraig Reynolds to set up that story with the convoluted maguffin that young parolee is paranoid delusional and takes medications to suppress hallucinations and yadayadayada. And, of course, we know all along that she will start seeing real things but think they're not real things and yadayadayada. And then, once we finally get to the point 45 minutes in when we know what she's seeing is really real, we get a thrilling, great-looking, action-packed slasher set piece to ride for close to an hour.  Had those first 45 minutes been left on the ...

Nine of the movies I watched in January were rewatches. A couple of them I have seen several times, favorites from my DVD library from the early '00s. The rest are films I remember watching only once before. Here are my tier-list rankings of those rewatches. I'll be back in the next day or two with a recap of all the movies I saw for the first time, and I also plan a combined ranking. 9. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, 1978, directed by Philip Kaufman, streamed on Kanopy, 2.5 stars.   I had always remembered this as a pretty good film since I saw it probably during its first theater run. But it didn't hold up for me at all, mostly because of all the plot holes. 8. V/H/S/2, 2013, multiple directors, streamed on Prime Video, 2.5 stars. You need more than one excellent and one decent segment to hold up a five-segment anthology. 7. Southern Comfort, 1981, directed by Walter Hill, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars. A decent thriller about a National Guard unit lost in the swamps ...

American Beauty, 1999, directed by Sam Mendes, Paramount Pictures blu-ray (2017), 4 stars. I was apprehensive about this movie this time around. American Beauty was one of my favorite finds of the early DVD era, more than 20 years ago. I loved everything about it, and watched it several times back in the day. But it had been awhile, long before the Kevin Spacey thing happened. I recently picked up a blu-ray edition of American Beauty at a clearance-sale price, so I decided to give it a revisit. And I wasn't sure how it would feel knowing what we now know. I am happy to say that even though much of American Beauty did feel a little ickier now than it did a couple decades ago, it still held up pretty well for me. Spacey's central character, Lester Burnham, had that slimy, creepy feel about him. But it was fine because the character was written that way -- and because Spacey was so damn good at playing creepy people. That was his stock in trade. And for years, he was celebrated fo...

The Woman, 2011, directed by Lucky McKee, streamed on Prime Video, 3.5 stars. A deranged dad captures a feral woman in the woods, shackles her in the cellar and orders his family to help train her into civility. The plan goes awry, a couple of other disturbing family projects are revealed and mayhem ensues. This indie horror film is particularly twisted, and I enjoyed just about every minute of it. It had me a bit discombobulated at first because I didn't understand what this wild woman was all about. The film opens with The Woman lurking in a river with a machete near a cave opening where we hear wolves howling. We later see her catching a fish with her machete and eating it raw as deranged dad drops a net over her from behind. But that's all we know about this woman covered in dried blood and mud who only utters guttural sounds. I was fine just going with it. As we moved into the story of the psychopathic dad and his oppressed family, the captive's backstory really didn...

Freeway, 1996, directed by Matthew Bright, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars. Man, this movie started out great. Reese Witherspoon as an abandoned teen-ager on the run to avoid getting tossed back into the foster-care system, and Kiefer Sutherland as the suspected pedophile serial killer who gives her a ride. This was setting up as a banger of a road-trip movie with these two brilliant performers jumping off the screen. But that scenario abruptly played itself out about 30 minutes in, and this film went completely off the rails. It became this weird unfocused mishmash of dark comedy and satirical procedural drama for about an hour before it ran completely out of gas as it limped into the closing scene. Witherspoon is the reason to watch this movie. She was 19 years old at the time of filming, and she was brilliant. She made the first half of this movie intriguing and the second half endurable. Sutherland provided a great foil when the two were onscreen together. Unfortunately, that didn...

Blink Twice, 2024, directed by Zoe Kravitz, streamed on Prime Video, 2 stars. It's difficult for me to express how much I despised this movie for the first 75 minutes or so of its 102-minute runtime. I found no joy whatsoever in watching a debauched gazillionaire tech bro and his hangers-on stranding a group of women on a private island for a substance-filled, brutal raping good time. I don't care how dazzling the movie looked. I don't care that people like Christian Slater and Kyle MacLachlan and Geena Davis whom I generally love watching are along for the fun. I only cared that the longer this movie went on and the slower the pacing got, I was in active hate mode for this piece of crap. My extreme displeasure eased up a bit during the predictable but somewhat satisfyingly revengeful third act. The final scene that was supposed to be a clever twist was really bad, but the resolution of this horrible story was enough to keep me from thinking of Blink Twice as a total disast...

Assault On Precinct 13, 1976, directed by John Carpenter, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars. A pretty good indie action thriller that has become a cult classic. It was John Carpenter's second feature, a couple of years before his breakout film, Halloween. Carpenter wrote, directed, scored and edited Assault On Precinct 13, in which a heavily armed street gang raids a nearly shuttered police station. The first half of the film is spent introducing us to several key characters and getting them all to the precinct at the same time. Once everyone is in place and the gang starts its siege, the back half of the film is an entertaining thrill ride right up to the closing credits. I felt a bit of Night Of The Living Dead happening here, with armed thugs instead of zombies. I read later that this was Carpenter's nod to the 1959 Western classic Rio Bravo (which I've never seen). Assault On Precinct 13 is a nice little gem, a great look at the early work of an auteur who would become a...

The Calendar Killer, 2025, directed by Adolfo J. Kolmerer, streamed on Prime Video, 1 star. This incoherent, jumbled mess is a German film dubbed in English and dropped on Prime Video as an Amazon Original. It's not a horror flick, it's not a serial-killer thriller, it's not a stalker drama, it's not a story about a woman having a psychotic break, it's not a dive into underground BDSM clubs. The Calendar Killer at points during its 94-minute runtime hinted at all those things. But it never became any of them. It just floated along at an iceberg pace, remaining depressingly pretentious as it took about 15 dead-end detours and fell into about a dozen cavernous plot holes. It finally landed in the final act as a tale about the horrors of domestic abuse, I think, though it wasn't really made clear if there is a lesson to be learned or if we should take some kind of moral stance or something. This movie was bad. We got a little taste of chaotic tension for a couple o...

Southern Comfort, 1981, directed by Walter Hill, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars. Nine guys in a Louisiana National Guard unit get lost in the swampland during a training exercise and manage to piss off a group of local hunters. Deadly hijinks ensue. This one was fine. The scenery was great. A sense of danger was constant throughout as this group tried desperately to find their way to safety. I think the problem was that most of the characters we were supposed to care about weren't very likable. Only the two leads -- Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe -- had any kind of charisma. And it wasn't until the last 20 minutes of the film that we were able to focus on them. I did really like that third act. Everything memorable about this movie happened near the end. Everything leading up to that wasn't bad, it just wasn't very interesting or exciting. -------------------- Stream at Prime Video (I am an Amazon affiliate, and your clicks help support this blog)

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, 1982, directed by Carl Reiner, Kino Lorber blu-ray (2021), 3.5 stars. They just don't make 'em like this anymore. As a matter of fact, they never even made 'em like this before. What a refreshingly unique concept. Carl Reiner and screenwriter George Gipe spent months culling short clips from old movies. With Steve Martin, they outlined a plot and a lot of jokes and sight gags around all those old clips. The result was this black-and-white film noir parody in which Martin plays scenes with people like Cary Grant, Vincent Price, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart et. al. It's really clever and pretty funny in that Steve Martin way. This movie definitely keeps you on your toes -- you don't want to tune out at any point so as not to miss something. I had a good time with it. If you're a big fan of those old noir films (which I am not), I'm certain you'd love this. I did not appreciate this much when I first saw it on a ...

Magic, 1978, directed by Richard Attenborough, streamed on Prime Video, 4 stars. I hadn't seen this since its first run in my local movie house, though the image of Anthony Hopkins and Fats -- and, especially, Fats' voice -- have stayed with me through the years. I was a little surprised that this movie was just as good on a second watch as it was nearly 50 years ago. Hopkins, as the dissociative Corky Withers, is just as frightening and memorable as he was 13 years later playing that other guy. Hopkins certainly has a lot more screen time in Magic than he did in that 1991 film. I believe the reason Corky didn't have the impact on the culture as the later guy did is that Magic is not a perfect movie. Ann-Margret ain't Jodie Foster. Hopkins does get outstanding support early on from Burgess Meredith. The "five minutes" scene with those two playing off each other is worth the price of admission on its own. One more thing before we move on: The WB's Buffy The...

I watched eight movies for the first time from Jan. 15-23. Here is how I rank them, from least favorite to favorite. 8. Dead End, 2003, directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, streamed on Prime Video, 0.5 star. Mercy, did I ever dislike this one. Opening scene is a family traveling in a car bickering and attacking each other over dumb shit. I hated all five of them from the top, and it continued for several minutes. I ended up spending about 82 minutes hate-watching this 85-minute film. And I spent a good 70 minutes of that trying to figure out what this film was trying to be before I figured out where it probably was going. Absolutely nothing here worked for me. Even the predictable ending, which did sort of tie everything together, missed the mark. I'm not going to waste any more time on this one. You shouldn't, either. 7. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, 1974, directed by John Hough, streamed on Prime Video, 1 star. This is not the worst movie I saw this month. I enjoye...

These are the eight films I watched for the first time in the first 14 days of January 2025, ranked worst to best:  8. Terrifier, 2016, directed by Damien Leone, streamed on Prime Video, 1.5 stars. This got my attention because of some buzz around Terrifier 3, which hit theaters in October. I stumbled across it on Prime Video and decided to give it a spin. I enjoyed the first 10 or 15 minutes of Terrifier. The staredown scene in the pizza parlor between Art The Clown and Jenna Kannell's character was mesmerizing. Tara could not look away from the freak taunting her, and you just knew unspeakable terrors were about to rain down on her. And then the unspeakable terrors started happening, and they were purely gratuitous and disgusting. The problem was that we were given no context, nothing to make us understand the point of any of it. The entirety of the second and third acts of Terrifier existed solely to shock us. Kudos to the great practical effects, but they meant nothing. Everyth...

I watched 13 films in the first 14 days of January 2025. Five of those were movies I had seen at least once before. Here is my ranking of those five. 5. V/H/S/2, 2013, multiple directors, streamed on Prime Video, 2.5 stars. I dove into this the night after I saw V/H/S, which I'll discuss in a later post. A couple minutes in, I realized that I had seen this one a year or so ago. It's a found-footage anthology, consisting of a wraparound story that leads us into four separate self-contained short stories. Two of the segments aren't very good, the wraparound is just OK, one segment is entertaining and one segment is tremendously batshit crazy. Unfortunately, the batshit-crazy segment, titled "Safe Haven," lands in the middle of the movie, and is followed by the anthology's worst segment and the inconsequential conclusion of the wraparound. So instead of going out with my head spinning round, I was left pissed off that I had to sit through 20 minutes of anticlimac...