Movie Diary
a) 100 Feet
Part of the Sci Fi Channel's unfortunate rebranding as 'Syfy' seems to involve laying off the hilariously low-budget original movies with the worst CGI in the world and premises shamelessly ripped off from Jurassic Park, and instead filling up their weekend programming with C-list theatrical thrillers and horror flicks. I weep for the possibility that monthly airings of Raptor Island may be a thing of the past, but for the time being I'm enjoying the wealth of bad scary movies. This one had an interesting premise (battered wife is haunted by the husband she killed while trapped in their home on house arrest), but so-so execution.
b) Boogeyman 2
The Syfy weekend horror blocks came especially in handy this week, when the wife and I observed our usual Valentine's Day tradition of ordering Chinese food and watching scary movies. However, Syfy made the completely bizarre decision to run Boogeyman and Boogeyman 2 in reverse order. It didn't matter too much, since they had completely different casts and stories and only the flimsiest common thread of a premise to justify sharing titles, but it was still a weird programming move, and 2 was weak enough that I didn't really bother watching the first afterwards. This had some good nasty gore, but it was also one of those movies I need to remind myself now and again that gore and gore alone can't hold my interest in a horror flick, as much as I do enjoy a good bit of blood-spraying carnage.
c) Joshua
This is another 'normal family has a creepy kid who starts doing horrible things for no apparent reason' horror flick, and not a particularly great one. But Sam Rockwell, who I don't always like as an actor but sometimes am really impressed by, kind of elevates it by making his father character kind of unable to contain his own resentment toward and suspiction of his own 9-year-old son, who appears to be trying to hurt or kill his newborn sister, and actually makes you second guess who you should feel about him being a dick to the little baby-shaking bastard. This is pretty disturbing to watch when you have your own newborn baby, too, like you start thinking: what if the baby had an older sibling that seemed to be hellbent on killing it? Unsettling stuff.
d) Shortcut To Happiness
I watched this a few days before a My Year Of Flops piece on it ran in which I learned that Alec Baldwin directed it and that it was shelved for something like 6 years after being filmed. But at the time I was just like hey, weird, an Alec Baldwin movie I've never heard of, let's check it out. And like the AV Club writer, I was more disappointed by how chaste Jennifer Love Hewitt was playing a sexy incarnation of Satan than anything else.
e) Company Man
Douglas McGrath, Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway co-screenwriter, somehow got himself a starring vehicle with an all-star supporting cast, including Woody in a small entertaining role, despite the fact that I'd never heard of him before this movie, and the fact that I'd never heard of the movie itself until catching it on cable almost a decade later speaks to how much of a fluke that was. This was really funny, though, and much better than its footnote vanity project status would suggest, with McGrath playing a schoolteacher who stumbles into becoming a CIA agent in the '60s, although at some point the satire goes offtrack and the story goes from entertainingly ridiculous to just kind of stupid.
Part of the Sci Fi Channel's unfortunate rebranding as 'Syfy' seems to involve laying off the hilariously low-budget original movies with the worst CGI in the world and premises shamelessly ripped off from Jurassic Park, and instead filling up their weekend programming with C-list theatrical thrillers and horror flicks. I weep for the possibility that monthly airings of Raptor Island may be a thing of the past, but for the time being I'm enjoying the wealth of bad scary movies. This one had an interesting premise (battered wife is haunted by the husband she killed while trapped in their home on house arrest), but so-so execution.
b) Boogeyman 2
The Syfy weekend horror blocks came especially in handy this week, when the wife and I observed our usual Valentine's Day tradition of ordering Chinese food and watching scary movies. However, Syfy made the completely bizarre decision to run Boogeyman and Boogeyman 2 in reverse order. It didn't matter too much, since they had completely different casts and stories and only the flimsiest common thread of a premise to justify sharing titles, but it was still a weird programming move, and 2 was weak enough that I didn't really bother watching the first afterwards. This had some good nasty gore, but it was also one of those movies I need to remind myself now and again that gore and gore alone can't hold my interest in a horror flick, as much as I do enjoy a good bit of blood-spraying carnage.
c) Joshua
This is another 'normal family has a creepy kid who starts doing horrible things for no apparent reason' horror flick, and not a particularly great one. But Sam Rockwell, who I don't always like as an actor but sometimes am really impressed by, kind of elevates it by making his father character kind of unable to contain his own resentment toward and suspiction of his own 9-year-old son, who appears to be trying to hurt or kill his newborn sister, and actually makes you second guess who you should feel about him being a dick to the little baby-shaking bastard. This is pretty disturbing to watch when you have your own newborn baby, too, like you start thinking: what if the baby had an older sibling that seemed to be hellbent on killing it? Unsettling stuff.
d) Shortcut To Happiness
I watched this a few days before a My Year Of Flops piece on it ran in which I learned that Alec Baldwin directed it and that it was shelved for something like 6 years after being filmed. But at the time I was just like hey, weird, an Alec Baldwin movie I've never heard of, let's check it out. And like the AV Club writer, I was more disappointed by how chaste Jennifer Love Hewitt was playing a sexy incarnation of Satan than anything else.
e) Company Man
Douglas McGrath, Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway co-screenwriter, somehow got himself a starring vehicle with an all-star supporting cast, including Woody in a small entertaining role, despite the fact that I'd never heard of him before this movie, and the fact that I'd never heard of the movie itself until catching it on cable almost a decade later speaks to how much of a fluke that was. This was really funny, though, and much better than its footnote vanity project status would suggest, with McGrath playing a schoolteacher who stumbles into becoming a CIA agent in the '60s, although at some point the satire goes offtrack and the story goes from entertainingly ridiculous to just kind of stupid.
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on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 11:43 PM.
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