Pet Sematary: Bloodlines

If you can think of one reason why this movie exists feel free to DM me

2/4

 

Promising Young Woman

Best movie of 2020 and this should have been the year of OsCarey Winnigan. I said what I said. 

4/4

 

The Poughkeepsie Tapes

Bonechilling and at times it is unbearably tense.  I can't remember the last time a movie wasn't Shitty yet I wanted so many scenes to be over with already. 

3/4

Pet Sematary

Competent, but lifeless, as if the script was buried and never resurrected before it hit the screen

2/4

The Prodigy

Only feels like a prodigy in the form of unoriginality, as the whole thing feels Frankensteined together from pieces of much better movies. 

1/4

Poltergeist

So painfully lazy and perfunctory when the hands touched the tv screen I wondered if they were trying to escape into a better movie.

0/4

Punch-Drunk Love

An Adam Sandler movie I really enjoyed...God help us all.

4/4

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

Ugh. Just when I was starting to warm up to the Paranormal Activity franchise they had to do this shit to me. I actually quite enjoyed part 3 and though part 4 was terribly unnecessary, it wasn't really painful to watch. This laughable entry (which for some dumb reason isn't being labeled as number 5) is back down in the dumps with number 1 and 2. It's ghastly and horrifying but for all the wrong reasons.

Andrew Jacobs plays Jesse, the ridiculously bland lead who is unlucky enough to be the cursed one. Fun fact, I had actually had to look on IMDB to remember what the character's name was. Shows how much I was paying attention. But anyways, after an elderly, possible witch of a neighbor is killed, him and his equally fun to watch friend; Hector (Jorge Diaz) start snooping around where they shouldn't and well...if you've seen at least one movie in your life or are over the age of five you should be able to tell me what happens.

I just can't fathom how this movie was released into theaters or how it has fans. I knew I wasn't watching 12 Years A Slave/Gravity worthy material but goddamn it there's just no life here (all puns intended). The performances are ridiculously lazy and uninteresting, the characters have no personalities and could have been killed by a ghost or a demon or a killer cold for all I cared within minutes. The dialogue feels terribly forced, the costumes look Walmart-y and there's no wit or frights to be found. I bitched about the first couple of movies in the series being lazy and unimaginative but they were Spielberg worthy compared to what's on screen this time. Real black magic can be found within these movies but it's not on screen; it occurs whenever any entry after this gets signed off to be viewed by the public.

Rating: 0/4

Philomena

Judi Dench is so wonderful as Philomena that not receiving an Oscar nomination for her work would be as big of a screw job as the one her character receives. Dench plays Philomena, a good-natured, Catholic woman with so many questions about the son that was taken away from her by the Catholic church. She's spent 50 years wanting to reunite with her son, and when she meets a journalist named Martin (Steve Coogan) she just might get her chance to get her answers to who her son really is.

One of my favorite things about Philomena is the dynamic between Judi Dench and Steve Coogan's characters. Their dynamic is so perfect, natural, and charming you would swear the two characters (or even the two actors) have known each other forever, I certainly could have watched them forever. It's such a yin yang dynamic with Philomena's purity versus Martin's sarcasm and sting yet the two blend in a way you wouldn't see coming. They couldn't be more different yet their journey to the answers couldn't be more enjoyable. Dench is as stellar as being sweet as Coogan is as being sour.

Philomena's journey is so heartbreaking and involving you'll follow the two characters' path like a roller coaster. What they find out will punch the viewer in the gut yet also will hit your funny bone along the way. Philomena involves all senses in the journey due to the warmth, humor, and sheer fascination I had in her story. Philomena is a knock-out.

Grade: 4/4

Prisoners

The scenes that I remember the most about a movie are the final scenes, the last moment. This is why I can't help but feel terribly disappointed with Prisoners, a movie that keeps the momentum going so steadily for two hours before dropping the ball to an immense degree in the last thirty minutes.

What's up? Hugh Jackman stars as Keller, a father whose daughter disappears on Thanksgiving. His wife Grace (Maria Bello) is devastated and unable to continue to function through life. Keller is frustrated that the enforcements, most notably Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) aren't moving fast enough and their lack of action is resulting in the death of his daughter. When the detectives' biggest suspect, Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is released for lack of substantial evidence, Keller takes the law into his own hands, going far beyond anyone's idea of cruel and unusual punishment to get the answers. Does Alex know where his daughter is located? How much involvement does he have in the disappearance? Is Keller going to far?

What's good? You don't boast a cast full of Oscar nominees/winners without showing the goods. Prisoners' cast thrives in this setting. Hugh Jackman is stellar as Keller, his scenes are full of heartbreak, terror, pure confusion, rage, and vulnerability all at once. He dominates every scene he fills up. Jake Gyllenhaal also gives one of his best performances, his character is the total opposite of Keller. Where as Keller acts with his emotions, Loki acts with his mind, Gyllenhaal gives a great contrast to the dominance through Keller.

Minus the last 30 minutes which I will mention more of in the last paragraph, Prisoners is filled with so much tension you feel like it's going to burst. The scenes with Keller and Alex are pure torture both figuratively and literally, you never know what's going to happen next and when it does Prisoners will stun you with how far it goes and how far Keller will go to get answers. The beautiful and haunting, yet grimy and dark looking visuals add to this tension, making you feel like you're really watching someone's nightmare come to life.

What the fuck? The final thirty minutes of Prisoners is so incredibly disappointing and thrown together you would swear you were watching some movie of the week Syfy creation. The motive behind the kidnapper feels terribly thrown together, said motive and kidnapper being involved also leave several questions unanswered making certain scenes now feel pointless. And what's worse is you never get any resolution here, as Prisoners' final moments bizzarely insinuate a sequel could be involved. There's no pay off here at all.

Overall: Prisoners had all the goods but just didn't know how to tie them up at the finale. It had the potential to be one of the year's best movies but instead of ending strong on all of the promise that you were viewing for the first two hours, Prisoners squanders this opportunity, locking the cell and throwing away the key.

3/4

The Purge

There's nothing worse then a movie with good potential and an interesting idea that just doesn't use the potential correctly. The Purge had a solid chance of being outstanding but instead, the movie shoots for lazy and ordinary, never reaching the potential of the interesting concept.

What if, for one day a year, all crime was legal? Would you participate? Based on the movie's events, 9 years from now, all crime will be legal for exactly 12 hours with no police or any interference in the way. Apparently doing this will knock down crime rates, poverty, and homelessness. Ethan Hawke plays James, an alarms system developer who makes his living based off other people's fear and desperation to survive. During this year's purge though, a homeless man is allowed inside by James' son, attracting a group of killers who will do whatever it takes to get their target back to them.

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One strength that The Purge has going for it, ironically enough, is that before the purge begins, the material is actually quite chilling. The opening scenes are brutally realistic and the choice of peaceful music adds a perfect contrast to making these scenes even more frightening. Watching the neighbors speak of this in anticipatement and sharpen their weapons for the night's events are scenes far stronger then anything that happens once the purge actually begins. If the movie had stayed this strong it really had a great shot at being stellar.

However, once the purge begins, shit hits the fan, and not just for all of the leads being attacked, the viewers aren't avoiding this either. The Purge begins to drag once the action takes place. At times, the movie starts venturing into a weird Hunger Games/The Strangers lovechild territory which really hurts its' chances of succeeding considering both of those movies were much stronger. It takes forever for The Purge to move from one idea to the other, it's a 90 minute movie that moves like a corpse without any surprises or thrills along the way.

One of the most disappointing things in The Purge is how many missed opportunities are present. There's an odd, and very unneeded subplot with Ethan Hawke's daughter and her boyfriend that is ended before it even has started. They go through so much shit to protect this homeless man and you never find out anything about him besides being homeless. And all of the action scenes feel like a ridiculously broken record. There's only so many times someone can almost be killed just to be saved with a second to spare by another family member that just popped into frame before the material just feels stale. And what's worse is none of the performers excluding Rhys Wakefield, as the leader of the killers with a joker like-smile and menace to match seem to really be giving it their all here. It's hard to give a shit about any of these paper thin characters.

The Purge had an interesting concept but instead of exploring this, we're treated to nonstop tedium and typical, bland action scenes. It had all the potential to be a stellar thriller about humans' animal-like instincts and love of violence but instead the whole thing comes crashing down as easily as the family's house.

2/4

The Possession

      Just because the rating limits the amount of gore that can be shown, that doesn't mean you should also limit the amount of fun and thrills that should be shown as well. Generic and bland PG-13 horror movies are a dime a dozen and The Possession is here to keep the chain going.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick star as Clyde and Stephanie, the divorced parents of two children, one of which is given a magic box from a yard sale that contains a demon that possesses her. No I'm not kidding, demons are now coming out of music boxes. What the fuck?

The Possession fails on many levels, it's impossible to really decipher what was the biggest flaw. I would pinpoint one of them on the lack of tension. There's never any source of thrills here. All of the characters are paper thin, you don't really give a shit about anyone, and even when the daughter is possessed, the most frightening thing she does is chill in her room filled with moths or eat raw meat off the ground. Damn, these demons must be getting lazy.

The special effects feel terribly cheapened as well. The aforementioned scenes with the moths are quite well done, but everything else feels like a cheap video game and there's really a problem when a movie places effects in place to replace thrills.

For a 90 minute movie, The Possession feels like it will last until you're in Hell. It takes forever to get going, after it reaches a climax you feel like nothing has happened and the ending feels terribly unsatisfactory and what's even more terrifying; it leads a possibility for a part 2. Let's hope the box picked up in the next story is filled with a reason for existing, something terribly missing from this nightmare.

0/4

ParaNorman

It's rare that a movie gets stronger as more time passes, but ParaNorman actually manages to kick some ass by the end of it. Paranorman is about a little boy named Norman who can speak to the dead, including his deceased Grandmother who never seems to want to leave. He's labeled as a freak due to this unusual gift, but has to learn how to use it in order to stop a deceased witch from summoning the dead and placing a curse on the entire town.

ParaNorman's animation is very captivating. There's something very gothic & Tim Burton inspired about the style, but there's also something very original about the way it looks as well. In addition to being beautiful, ParaNorman also manages to bring some genuine humor into the movie as well, with some unexpected comedy you rarely get in animated, family films.

Even though it's meant for kids, ParaNorman actually shoots for the grown-ups as well with its' tone. Themes of death, loneliness, revenge, and hatred are present as well. It's rare that a children's movie touches on themes such as these, but ParaNorman actually keeps a beating heart into the material focused on all that is dead.

3/4

Prometheus

It's probably one of my biggest movie UO's that I absolutely despised Alien. I found it to be terribly slow, way too long, definitely not scary, and poorly written. But when the previews for Prometheus began to air, I thought it was going to be tons better considering the pace of most science fiction movies these days moves a lot faster then back in the day. I was certainly right, in that I did appreciate Prometheus 1,000 times more than Alien, however I felt a bit disappointed overall. I was expecting Prometheus to blow me away but something didn't add up to that.

Prometheus stars Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green as Elizabeth & Charlie, two archaeologists on a mission to discover the first documented forms of human existence and how/why the human race was created. Their journey leads them on a mission lead by Vickers (Charlize Theron) that finds the team on a foreign planet with intrigue at every corner. Unfortunately for them, they're far from alone, and whatever was already on the planet is certainly not welcoming them with open arms.

I feel like I should love Prometheus so much more then I should. The visuals are astounding; the atmosphere is beautiful, the set pieces are immaculate, and in some scenes (most noteworthy being the C section), there's not one ounce of artifice involved. Charlize Thereon as the robotic leader and Michael Fassebender (as an actual robot) deliver the goods with their characters as well, easily becoming the two most intriguing characters of the film. And for the most part I would say I was entertained, despite a few draggy bits and a length that arguably could have been trimmed a bit.

I think my biggest issue with Prometheus is that it just doesn't take the leap from good to great. There aren't any great risks of surprises here. When I think of movies I would label as superb/excellent, there's at least one scene that knocks my socks off and I don't think Prometheus contains one of those. It's definitely good from beginning to end but it's not something that has an element that makes me count down until I watch it again. Solid, but Prometheus fails to really knock it out of the park, or the planet in this scenario.

3/4

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

High school seems to be a difficult subject to capture on film. If it isn't depicted as all sunshines and rainbows like a Disney channel movie, then it's shown as a depressing time from beginning to end. Neither I feel are accurate as high school is a time of many stressful and positive moments. One of the rare movies to get it 100% right is The Perks of Being A Wallflower, one of the best movies of 2012.

Perks stars Logan Lerman as Charlie, a shy, social outcast starting off high school with no friends and a bad tendency to turn off his brain before acting in a stressful situation. He's completely alone until he meets Patrick and Sam (Ezra Miller & Emma Watson from Harry Potter) two seniors that will drastically change Charlie's life for the better.

Every performance in Perks is top notch. Lerman is sympathetic and charismatic as Charlie and Watson is downright loveable as his love interest Sam. The most noteworthy performance comes from Ezra Miller as Charlie though. He steals every scene that he's in and transforms this role from a character in a movie to an actual human being, quite the rare accomplishment in a teenage comedy.

The screenplay is brilliant as well. Unlike a lot of movies these days, the script actually feels a lot like something you would hear real people saying. Authentic is certainly an adjective I would use to describe the overall tone and direction of Perks, a movie that manages to balance the great and shitty moments that life brings especially in youth. Perks is a stellar movie for those who want the realism of life mixed in with the magic of what a great movie can provide.

4/4

Paranormal Activity 4

It's no secret that I absolutely loathed the first two entries into the Paranormal Activity series. I found them to be quite slow, very flat, not scary, and just unintentionally hillarious. Then part 3 comes around, and low and behold....I was actually quite impressed! My standards for part 4 were surprisingly high and unfortunately, I felt the movie fell a bit short of what I was hoping it would be.

Paranormal Activity 4 begins with where previous entries left off. Katie (Katie Featherton) has stolen her sister's child; Hunter, after killing her sister, her sister's husband, and her own boyfriend as well. The two are now located in Henderson, Nevada where Hunter (who now goes by Robbie) begins spending a lot of time with the neighbors. As unsurprisingly, the more "Robbie" is around, the more unexplainable events begin to happen to the family.

The performances in this entry are quite stronger than previous entries. Kathryn Newton holds her own, as Alex, the teenage girl who is on the receiving end of most of the spirits' mischief. She keeps the audience interested in her character and actually plays the role quite naturally. Katie Featherton once again shines as Katie, the girl who you know is up to no good. Every scene with her is bonechilling, Featherton milks every moment to its finest.

There are some pretty solid thrills here as well. It's not 100% terrifying from beginning to end, but a lot of the "Gotcha!" moments pay off and there some quite impressive visuals on display in this one, especially the scenes with the Wiiconnect playing as a camera to monitor all of the ghosts' whereabouts. And as usual, the last 20 minutes are easily the most frightening as all Hell breaks loose and it becomes a guessing game of who, if anyone will live to tell the tale.

Now for the negative; one of my biggest disappointments with PA4 is how little it explains to the audience. Part 3 left you with a lot of cliffhangers about the unlucky family's past, how this is happening, and why no one has noticed that more and more people just happen to be possessed by demons who give them the strength of Superman. PA4 provides little answers and doesn't seem to concerned with tying up the loose ends that previous entries have started having us think about.

But, my biggest issue with PA4 is just how similar it feels to past entries. Granted, it's much superior to the first two, but still, I didn't feel like this one really presented anything fresh to the series. It's pretty much the same ol' stuff, just with different people. Certain scenes seem like carbon copies of scenes that were used in the first three, and if they were creepy the first time....seeing them repeated in this one just makes the material feel stale at times. Paranormal Activity 4 had the potential to be stellar but instead it just decides to lay down and play dead.

2/4

Primal

These days I'm convinced that climbing Mount Rushmore is accomplished with less trouble than making a horror movie that keeps my interest from beginning to end. Failing to provide the goods, is Primal, a horror movie which really should stayed in the stone age and never came to this one.

Primal is about six friends on a camping journey in the wildnerness. When one of them falls sick after skinny dipping with leeches, the other five panic as her condition goes from worst to monster-worthy. She begins her "illness" by bleeding and ends it when she's completely deformed and hungry for anything with a pulse. She attacks, which then brings up the question of whether or not the others can kill a friend or not. Most of them seem to get on board, but others (mainly the boyfriend), are a bit less for the idea.

Primal unfortunately provides very little of merit, but I guess one thing I would consider satisfactory is the makeup. The creatures actually look really swell and I was impressed that that the monster/cavemen creatures weren't styled as shabbily as most movies of the genre tend to look. Granted, this is probably one of the few things I enjoyed about this movie, but still, could be worse I guess.

Now for the dreadful; and there's a bundle of problems worthy of being mentioned. All of the characters are ridiculously unlikeable. They behave in such stupid and barbaric ways it's hard to imagine there's something less intelligent running around. All five of them could have been killed at once and it would have been easy to not give a shit at all. The movie just feels routine and bland at all, created without any sense of fun or fright. Add in a routine finale and a movie that leaves you with more questions than answers, and you have something that is as substantial as a movie that was made by cavemen for the cavemen.

1/4



Piranha 3DD

I get bored with shit easily so I'm going to temporarily start up a new format called P.I.G.S. Which stands for;

P. Plot

I. Introduction of opinions

G. Good stuff

S. Shitty stuff

Let's try this out! :)

P- It's been about a year since the piranhas invaded Lake Victoria and they're back for more flesh. Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) comes back for the Summer to check on the progress of her water park, which has now been turned into a tits, booze, and water infested playground by her stepdad (David Koechner). He comes up with the bright idea of draining the lake's water for the theme park, giving the piranhas a direct extension to a buffet of Maddy, her fellow employees, and all of the park's guests.

I- I'll just summarize it easily, I think Piranha 3DD is easily one of the worst movies of 2012. There's very little (if any) redeeming factors here. It's really like watching a 90 minute beer commercial if the chicks got naked and then murdered at the end of it. How the franchise has two movies to its' name is a mystery and if this franchise expands into a third movie, then piranhas should just be let loose into the theater to end moviegoers' misery.

G- Like I've mentioned before, the good is very small in this movie. I will say that minus signing up for this movie, Danielle Panabaker actually gets out of this movie the least unscathed, as she's probably the only performer that shouldn't be sent to the Razzies ASAP after finishing this movie. Hmm, it's also quite bloody as well. How the murders are done, I'll discuss in a different paragraph but hey....Kool-Aid/blood ftw. And I can't lie, hearing the line, "Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina", was a guilty, if very slight humorous moment of this movie. A scene with a surviving character from the original movie did provide some fun as well.

S- First off, the acting....oh God, where to begin. The performances range from God-awful to, "Your mother is screaming in her grave due to what you're doing", and sadly most of them fall in the latter category as opposed to the former. The death scenes are painfully fake as well, the piranhas look like action figures, you can smell the plastic off the fake limbs that are thrown everywhere, and like I said....Kool-Aid blood all-around. And the story is an exact copy of the original, which was already as substantial as a piece of thread. The movie tries to throw comedy and horror in the blender to mix and ends up about as appetizing as a protein shake. Do yourself a favor and avoid this movie like the main stars avoid clothing.

0.5

1/4



Paranormal Activity 3

 Santa read my Christmas letter early this year, well, he read about 1% of it but still, he read it. Some of my biggest complaints about Paranormal Activity 1 and 2 were that the whole thing reeked of a bad YouTube video with amateur performances and a total lack of scares or excitement. Paranormal Activity 3 easily improves in categories, slamming the other two movies into the ground and easily earning the title of best Paranormal Activity movie of the three, for me.

What is this movie about? Paranormal Activity 3 starts off right before the first two movies begin. In 2005, Katie (Katie Featherston) gives her sister Kristi (Sprague Grayden) a box of old videotapes. A year later, someone has broken into Kristi’s house, stealing all of the tapes that Katie gave her sister. We then travel back to 1988, with the young Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown ) and Katie (Chloe Csengery ) having their first ghostly experiences alongside their mother Julie (Lauren Bittner) and her boyfriend Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith).

The positives: As I mentioned before, Paranormal Activity 3 easily owns the other two movies in terms of scares. This is the first movie of the three where I didn’t feel like the only people who should be afraid of what’s occurring onscreen are those under ten; this one actually is pretty gnarly in terms of frights. One of the ways in which I feel the movie has improved in terms of frights is through the use of the cameras. In this movie, a camera is attached to a moving fan, so slowly but surely, it moves from room to room, making the viewer hold their breath the entire time as to what’s going to be onscreen in the next room. A scene using this trick, involving the babysitter, is so badass and creepy; this scene alone makes Paranormal Activity 3 superior to the other two movies in my opinion. And as for the ending…though I have to disagree with the slogan of, “It will change your life”, I have to admit it was pretty damn excruciating at times. You really don’t know what’s going to happen next and a fear of the unknown is one that a lot of people can admit to. Though, if you have seen the first two, you know what has to happen to a few of the characters, the way in which it occurs will make you jump. Or at least think twice before leaving all the lights on in your house….or visiting a relative. Just saying.

Excluding the scares, Paranormal Activity 3 is also improved because of the improved performances and writing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting anyone in this movie to be receiving a knock on the door from Mr. Oscar anytime soon, but at least it’s not as cringe worthy as trying to watch the cast members in the first two pretend to act like humans. This one is actually pretty tolerable and I must say that the little girls who play Katie and Kristi do a damn fine job in this. I also liked how this movie played with a side of humor that the first two didn’t really explore at all. Paranormal Activity 3 is actually quite funny, most noteworthy being a scene with Dennis’s friend and a particularly risky game of Bloody Mary.

The negatives: Well, for one, if you’ve watched any of the trailers, you’re going to realize that a lot of scenes from them are not in the final movie. Which was kind of disappointing, especially considering some of the potential awesome thrills that could have been had from the Bloody Mary scenes and the scene where one of the girls (I think Kristi) jumped off the railing and ran up the stairs at a speed level that would make athletes eat their hearts out.

 And though the ending is pretty terrifying, I think it could have been planned out a bit better. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the reasoning behind the ghostly force being present isn’t exactly the most satisfactory or original *CoughTheLastExorcismCough*. It moves a bit further away from the paranormal and more into evil cults which well…isn’t what Paranormal Activity isn’t about at all, so it felt kind of strange why the ending needed to take this odd route to the finish line.

Overall though, I was quite pleased with Paranormal Activity 3. Unlike the first two in the series, I actually felt like I was watching a quality horror movie as opposed to a YouTube video where something “unexpectedly” jumps out just as the video is ending. The performances are pretty solid, the writing has improved and brought a more entertaining and fresh perspective to the series, and there’s actually a lot of frightening scenes here which I’m definitely all for. Just please don’t do a part four. I’m dead serious. If I even hear of a part four being made, the idea alone will send a chill down my spine that will make the last 15 minutes of this movie seem like child’s play in terms of pure horror.

3/4

P2

The lead should have escaped quicker and that's a mistake the audience will surely not make

1/4