by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 26: SHOCKtober 2022

The movies that letterboxd/justwatch say are available on Prime doesn’t perfectly line up with the movies actually on Prime. On the hunt for horrors I’m kinda tempted to watch even though I know in my heart they’re not worth the 100 minutes, and Prime is mostly full of movies I’m not-at-all tempted to watch… but here’s some.

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A Quiet Place 2 (2020, John Krasinski)

Kids hide indoors while the parents and their cars are not being quiet at all, the movie (unfortunately) giving us very clear looks at its digital aliens. Hey, it’s Djimon Hounsou, oh no, he’s dead now. Then everyone creeps around being vewy vewy quiet, avoiding the preposterously long-armed monsters, Cillian and Emily running into trouble in separate spots simultaneously, until the kids discover the assaultive power of mic feedback on creatures with sensitive hearing. Movie actually looks suspenseful, an unfunny Mars Attacks.

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Paranormal Activity 5: The Marked Ones (2014, Christopher Landon)

We left off with part 2, and this is part 5 – but I don’t think they share characters, and Amazon doesn’t have parts 3 or 4 for free. Handheld long take of gun-toting youth walking around the backyard until suddenly attacked by white ladies, cameraman running to hide in a witch house. The last surviving punk ends up in a cursed closet, and I think teleports into a different Paranormal Activity movie, I dunno, it’s all very panicked. Landon went on to the Happy Death Day movies and a Vince Vaughn serial killer Freaky Friday.

Nocturne (2020, Zu Quirke)

Sydney is gonna play piano onstage, but she’s having dark visions and her sister Madison is being shitty to her. She flees the concert, running towards a yellow light and stepping off the roof, having deathdreams of the great performance she would’ve given. Sydney was a Manson girl for Tarantino, the sister is in the recent Jumanji series. Frank Capra III worked on this, tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather’s most famous movie which is about NOT stepping off the roof.

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Daniel Isn’t Real (2019, Adam Egypt Mortimer)

Hey, it’s Sasha Lane. More artsy high schoolers. Daniel is real, and is wearing a Luke mask, while Luke is locked in a museum dungeon of the mind, fighting and conjuring his way out. Always the teens end up jumping off roofs. Mortimer did a horror anthology I’d never heard of and a vengeful ghost story named after a Misfits song, while Luke was in the latest(?) remake of Halloween, and Daniel has a famous dad.

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The Deep House (2021, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury)

This one had a good poster and premise, but when I can make out the dialogue it’s all “the house, she knows your fears” stuff spoken by a diver who is clearly possessed by demons. Nice trick projecting super 8 film (underwater) of backstory. Tina’s boyfriend gets knifed by ghosts, she doesn’t make it to the surface, and the filmmakers haven’t worked out how to make any of this look compelling. Bilge liked it. I disliked the directors’ Inside (despite Béatrice Dalle), and I’m afraid they’ve also made a Texas Chainsaw prequel.

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Wolf Creek 2 (2013, Greg McLean)

Remember Wolf Creek? I don’t especially, but looks like the villain was alive at the end, returning 8 years later, and he ain’t gay, don’t call him gay. Tough guy Paul, also not gay, fights back with a hammer then wheels through a cellar full of torture victims while Mick bellows behind him, and it’s wrapped up anticlimactically via intertitles. Australia looks unpleasant.

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Hatchet III (2013, B.J. McDonnell)

I liked part 1, not part 2, so let’s see. Sheriff Zach Galligan loses his head, nice. Victor just tears every character apart, then the girl in white smashes the urn with his daddy’s ashes, and Victor melts. Seems like a good time, maybe I was in a mood when watching the previous sequel. I assume the girl in white was Halloween movie regular (and Tarantino Manson girl) Danielle Harris. The director made that Foo Fighters movie, oh no.

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Goodnight Mommy (2022, Matt Sobel)

Remake of movie I didn’t love, with horror remake queen Naomi Watts. The insane boy is sad because something is wrong with his brother Lucas, mom explains that Lucas died, and he burns down the barn with her inside it. Looks like a real drag. The director worked on that Brand New Cherry Flavor series my dad kept talking about, and I haven’t caught up with the original Austrian filmmakers’ follow-up The Lodge.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 25

I watched the endings of some movies, during the brief period of time when amazon prime was working fine on my laptop.

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The Tomorrow War (2021, Chris McKay)

The sci-fi thing that opens with Chris Pratt falling out of the sky. Two hours later, someone’s gonna have to blow this ship manually. Gunner JK Simmons is saved from dreadful-looking CG wolfoctopus beasties by a soldier with a chainsaw. Post-splosion, it’s up to Pratt, his dad Simmons and Chainsaw Guy to track and kill the mother alien. Comes down to melee weapons, a hard-won triumph, and Chainsaw Guy missed the whole battle. Lot of self-sacrifice talk, a very lame home reunion scene, Pratt having been fighting aliens from the future to protect his perfect suburban family. Wonder if Pratt’s “dad” is actually Pratt from the future? Chainsaw Guy is Sam Richardson from Werewolves Within, which I rented this SHOCKtober but didn’t get around to watching. The director’s background is Robot Chicken, and the writer did that Ethan Hawke movie in volume 23.

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The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021, Will Sharpe)

Another true story of an eccentric artist, but we’ve run out of artists to biopic, so this is a guy who painted psychedelic cats? 1925, it’s in 4:3 in Dr. Cook’s asylum, where inspector Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions) recognizes a washed-up Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch with Mark Twain hair). “I have failed,” cries Wain, then narrator Olivia Colman leads us to a much nicer asylum where Wain can see cats again, and HG Wells (NICK CAVE) gives him a shout out on the airwaves. Reportedly only the Claire Foy sections were good, and she’s gone by ’25, but we get a brief flashback to her dying. The director also made a Colman miniseries with David Thewlis this year, cowriter Simon Stephenson worked on Luca.

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The World Is Not Enough (1999, Michael Apted)

Picking up where I left off in volume 007. These things are complicated, so checking the wikis to see what they’re about before jumping into their last ten… Pierce Brosnan is supposed to protect rich girl Sophie Marceau from nuclear-armed villain Robert Carlyle, ok. Bond and the baddie and Denise Richards are on a sinking submarine! The action and acting look not so hot – did Carlyle and Brosnan have in their contract that they’re not allowed any realistic fight scenes? Exciting music plays as Bond has to hold his breath for a really long time. Bond plugs a hose into a socket which shoots a rod through a cavity, I think it’s a metaphor. Cleese and Dench, a high-tech sex joke and a Y2K reference, nice.

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Die Another Day (2002, Lee Tamahori)

Another billionaire is involved, and it’s one of those twisty triple-cross mole movies so I won’t expect to know what’s going on. Something extremely explodey is happening while Rosamund Pike is threatening Halle Berry at swordpoint on a plane and Pierce fights large-mouthed villain Toby Stephens. Halle and Pierce both make good kills with nice 90’s kissoff dialogue, but the action’s a hash and the slow-mo photography and CG flair are laughable. Why’d they cast Michael Madsen as a good guy? The smarmy dialogue seems forced as they fall from the plane in an escape helicopter. High-tech and low-tech sex jokes.

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Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell)

Prequel time, new Bond Daniel Craig, whose job is to bankrupt yet another rich guy so he can’t finance evil stuff, ok. Movie long as hell, so I’ll give it eleven minutes. A more grounded movie, no crashing vehicles, Bond is a guy with a pistol using ingenuity to save Eva Green from eyepatched baddies. I spoke too soon – the Venice building itself is collapsing/sinking as a stand-in for World’s submarine. Since it’s a 60’s throwback, women can’t fight – all Eva can do is commit suicide-by-elevator. Wait a second, Bond’s using a Vaio laptop and Ericsson phone in the postscript, so it’s a prequel set in the present, and sponsored by Sony? I think all the major actors were already dead, so I missed Isaach de Bankolé and Jeffrey Wright and Mads Mikkelsen. This looked much more decent than the last couple, but still not approaching Mission: Impossible quality.

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Quantum of Solace (2008, Marc Forster)

In which Bond stumbles upon another rich terrorist whilst avenging the death of Eva Green. The action’s a hash again, but that’s because Bond is fighting an axe-wielding Mathieu Amalric, and you gotta shake the camera a lot to make that look convincing. These things always feature guys outrunning explosions, and a gun dropping down some metal stairs out of reach. Bond and Olga Kurylenko escape a lot of fire and abandon Amalric in the desert, then he chases down a Quantum agent and has closing dialogue with Judi Dench in the snow, Bond not having much film-end luck with the ladies ever since the movies killed his best girl.

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The Aeronauts (2019, Tom Harper)

Out of Bond movies I can watch for free, this is the Eddie Redmayne ballooning movie. Their hot air balloon is falling from above the clouds, so they toss lots of heavy objects from a great height, probly not killing anyone below since populations were sparse in 1862, then Eddie cuts loose the basket so the balloon will act as a parachute, which drags poor Felicity Jones through a field. They are two cheesy handsome youths, and both survive for narrator Felicity to run around giggling while Eddie presents his scientific findings to an all-bearded-men conference. From the director of Wild Rose.

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Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan)

Watched the opening scene on a wiki tip that it featured baby birds, then plunge into the sci-fi dystopia. Poots attacks her neighbor with a pickaxe, but he’s a skittering insectoid from a subterranean hellhouse, and she keeps quicksanding through the floor into color-coded Charlie Kaufman realms. The alien baby-man buries Poots, I guess Eisenberg is the other bodybag in the hole. Cool looking set, anyway.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 24: SHOCKtober 2019 Edition

It has been over a year since I’ve watched the last ten minutes of a bunch of mediocre horror movies on streaming sites, and the temptation to properly watch some of these has been building, so it’s time to knock out a bunch and save myself some time.

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Bird Box (2018, Susanne Bier)

Sandra Bullock regains consciousness and calls out “boy! girl!” when searching for the boy and girl, while phantoms are trying to trick the kids into removing their blindfolds. Is avoiding names a Pontypool sorta thing? “I have so much I want you to see” sounds like a sideways Hellraiser reference? The oppressive sound design is meant to distract the characters from locating the birds they seek. Once they get indoors, where the monsters cannot reach, there are no birds, annoyingly, it’s just a school for the blind – the last survivors of the suicide-sight monster-pocalypse. Blinds are like normals, now. She DOES have a box full of birds, pretty blue-green guys, then she names her “son” after the guy from Moonlight, presumably deceased. This was part of that wave of netflix movies that everyone thought they had to watch just because they had netflix, so I’m probably the last person in the world who hasn’t seen it. Bier made After The Wedding, which I saw a very long time ago, Bullock hasn’t been prolific since Gravity.

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The Silence (2019, John Leonetti)

Netflix knows you want to watch this after Bird Box. This is obviously where Bird Box and A Quiet Place meet. From the fast-forward it looks Tucci-centric and monotonously beige. Stanley Tucci’s family encounters a traumatized lost girl who was sent with a noisemaker-rigged suicide vest to attract the murder-bats that killed the world, while masked dudes kidnap family members in slow-mo, and mom does that Quiet Place thing where she suicide-screams so the kids can escape. Tucci-gang and kidnap-gang brawl under a swarm of murder-bats, then an unwelcome voiceover catches us up. The director made Mortal Kombat 2, the writers worked on Transmorphers and a C. Thomas Howell movie,

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Velvet Buzzsaw (2019, Dan Gilroy)

Zawe Ashton wanders into a haunted art gallery alone at night, the artworks all streaming paint onto the floor and into her body, while in a storage facility, Jake Gyllenhaal encounters a killer android on crutches, and at home Rene Russo gets assaulted by sculptures. Russo survives the night and tries to stay safe by divesting herself of all paintings and sculptures, but her tattoo counts as art, and kills her via shady CG. As in Bird Box, Malkovich had been killed off in the previous 90 minutes, damn it. Gilroy made Nightcrawler, but more importantly, he cowrote Freejack.

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Apostle (2018, Gareth Evans)

Since we’ve watched the Downton Abbey movie, let’s see what old too-good-for-TV Dan Stevens is up to… ah, burning swamp witches in direct-to-video films. Dan rescues two women from a sexist cultist, whom they strenuously murder, while the cult compound burns, the camera bouncing here and there, recalling Evans’s V/H/S/2 segment. A mountainside explodes in fire and blood, the women escape, and the cult beardo watches a dying Dan embrace the grasses and become the new swamp-witch. Evans made The Raid movies… oh jeez, I watched one of those just three years ago and have forgotten all about it.

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The Hole in the Ground (2019, Lee Cronin)

Seána Kerslake is in a hole in the ground. I hoped from the description that this would be a modern The Gate, but it looks like another The Descent. After an eternity of crawling, she rescues her unconscious son but awakens the blind beasties who can transform into people who probably died earlier in the movie. Back home, how can she know who’s real and who’s a beastie? Movie characters do not care about what is knowable, so she burns down her house with one son inside, and drives off with her “real” son, then we wait for the inevitable reveal that she got it wrong – there it is! Lee is presumably Mikal Cronin’s brother, his cowriter did a series called Zombie Bashers.

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Cabin Fever Remake (2016, Travis Z)

Oh no, sad Matt (Daddario, of the Buffy-looking series Shadowhunters) is burning down the cabin with his feverish girlfriend inside, then his feverish buddy gets shot by rednecks and Gage blows them away. I see this is going the horror-comedy route, with the ever-popular overbearing sound design. He comes across Louise Linton of The Midnight Man, calls her a bitch, then I guess he walks into the woods and is killed by the editing and the too-loud music. Our director Mr. Z worked on Hatchet III and Behind the Mask, and screenwriter Randy cowrote the original with Eli Roth, who made not one but two poorly-reviewed films last year, plus a History of Horror doc series.

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Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2018, Hèctor Hernández Vicens)

Ooh the zombie can talk and kidnap children in this second remake of the Romero sequel. Some bellowing army dudes are extremely good shots with their pistols as a horde approaches, but they all suffer the fate that army dudes in zombie movies must, while Sophie Skelton (Outlander) runs right past the horde to rescue her kid, beheads the talking zombie (Johnathon Schaech of The Scare Hole) with typical action-movie kissoff dialogue, then reads some science narration in as bored a voice as possible. The director’s follow-up to The Corpse of Anna Fritz, which itself got a remake, perpetuating some sorta horror sequel-remake super-cycle.

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Await Further Instructions (2018, Johnny Kevorkian)

I skipped back an extra couple minutes because I noticed the movie’s blue-gray palette suddenly bloom into full color. It’s nothing though, and back in the blue-gray house the TV is telling the family members to kill each other, and dad complies with a hatchet before he’s taken down. I hope this all turns out to be a gag by the neighbor kids at the end. Nope, when smashed, the TV comes to Cronenbergian life and Tetsuos the dead dad. Sam Gittins (this year’s Ray & Liz) appears to win, then the whole family is murdered by cables except the newborn who I guess grows up with cables as parents. The director made family thriller The Disappeared a decade ago, the writer has a short about deadly colors called Chromophobia.

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Cargo (2017, Ben Howling & Yolanda Ramke)

Oh, Martin Freeman is not gonna survive this pandemic apocalypse. After he goes blind and hungry, a kid takes his baby and rides undead-Martin to the zombie-hunter tribal lands in painful, wordless slow-motion. A remake of their 2013 short, but 98 minutes longer.

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Veronica (2017, Paco Plaza)

The Spanish Ouija horror – kids are fleeing a demon-infested apartment building, Vero goes back for the youngest, then realizes the demon was inside her all along and tries to stop herself. Inventive effects, a cool look, and kickass post-punk song over the credits – one of the rare Last Ten Minutes entries that seems like a good movie. From the director of the original [Rec] plus two of its sequels.

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Life After Beth (2014, Jeff Baena)

It’s killing me that the Zombie Aubrey movie was deemed not good enough to watch, but hey, my time is valuable. Dane DeHaan (Valerian himself) has strapped a fullsize oven to Aubrey’s back to slow her down, and they go for a romantic canyon hike before he shoots her. “I am sorry the whole world went to shit, but it was totally worth it.” John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon must be dead, but Anna Kendrick is here. The movie’s best original detail is that zombie gravestones have two death dates. Our writer/director specializes in little-loved Aubrey Plaza movies, also made The Little Hours.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 23: Netflix Originals Edition

It’s neat that Netflix is buying up genre movies from the directors of Moon and Gattaca and, um, Suicide Squad, but I keep reading online that they are very bad. Obviously after watching the end of Cloverfield then the entire sequel, I’m gonna check out part three, so afterwards I let the mighty algorithm tell me where to go next, then threw in a Star Wars.

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The Cloverfield Paradox (2018, Julius Onah)

The astronauts are stalking each other with guns after accidentally opening a portal to a dark alternate universe. I guess Liz Debicki is the baddie, and Gugu pulls the usual defense, grabbing onto something and blasting a hole in the wall so her assailant gets sucked into space. She sends the plans for the universe-generator to alternate-herself, then hyperdrives back home with a wounded Daniel Brühl – but something is amiss on earth and a Cloverfield appears in literally the last five seconds of the movie. Guess I’ll have to trust the reviews that nothing interesting happened in the first ninety minutes. Onah is Nigerian, is making a Naomi Watts/Octavia Spencer feature next, and the sequel-centric writers worked on Star Trek Beyond and 22 Jump Street.

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Tau (2018, Federico D’Alessandro)

Maika Monroe (It Follows) is trapped in a chair, convinces a robot to untie her before the nerdy guy can give her the evil injection, kicks his ass then chops off his hand to get through the security doors, evades Tau (a Decepticon in a fancy living room), initiates the self-destruct sequence then duck-n-covers under a desk as everything very slowly blows up. Supposedly the computer is the voice of Gary Oldman but I’m not hearing it. This looks generic and I feel bad for everyone involved. The director has been doing storyboards for Major Motion Pictures for the last decade and the writer works on a Harry Potter ripoff series for Syfy.

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Anon (2018, Andrew Niccol)

Clive Owen is kicked out of his detective agency, goes home and sulks while his former coworkers watch his every move through surveillance gear. “Anon” is Amanda Seyfried, who interrupts a Proxy Dude after he shoots Clive – people can see through each others’ eyes through some Black Mirror tech, so I think Proxy watches himself die. Seyfried just wants privacy in an all-seeing world, knows “the algorithm” to glitch everyone’s eyeball-computers into not seeing her, I guess, but I was more focused on the weird eyelines in the final scene so I may have missed something. Niccol made Gattaca, of course, and I hear his In Time is good.

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Mute (2018, Duncan Jones)

Apparently Paul Rudd is dead already, and Rudd’s friend (a moppy blonde Justin Theroux) wants voiceless Alexander Skarsgard (the new husband in part one of Melancholia) to apologize for killing him, drives them to the docks and talks way too much before Skarsgard uses his mute-ant breath-holding powers to dunk them both in the river and drown Justin, then he Finds His Voice to yell at a child. Too bad I didn’t get to see any of the neon Blade Runner stuff from the posters.

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The Outsider (2018, Martin Zandvliet)

Oh no, Jared Leto gets shot in the leg after a business deal seems to have gone badly wrong, then the cops bust up his gang’s headquarters, so Jared collects his Japanese girlfriend to blow town, but for some reason he stalks into his rival’s gang meeting instead, challenges a guy to a duel, cuts him down when he refuses, and is allowed to leave, then is recognized as the new boss by his surviving buddies. Movie looks dreary and unfun. This was Zandvliet’s followup to Land of Mine, which played the Ross so I’ve seen its preview a hundred times.

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Bright (2017, David Ayer)

Joel Edgerton is an orc, Will Smith his mouthy partner cop who grabs a magic dagger and blowtorches Noomi Rapace to save some girl. I think the orc is gonna die saving Smith from a fire, oh no they’re both fine, but the next day Police Chief Legolas wants to cover the thing up. As far as movies where Will Smith is partnered with a gruff-voiced dude in a dangerous world of magic aliens, it’s not as funny as Men In Black.

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The Titan (2018, Lennart Ruff)

Ah, another movie where Sam Worthington gets experimental treatment to transform into an alien (is that what happened in Avatar? I can’t remember). Soldiers led by Tom Wilkinson are trying to shoot him while I guess Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black) and Agyness Deyn (Sunset Song) are trying to help. So many pointless military guys… Sam has a splashy dream-vision and everyone’s suddenly on a plane. “That crazy bastard did it,” says some dude, and I’d like to think Sam used his Titan Powers to teleport them onto the plane but it was probably just editing. Later, Taylor is doing science stuff unbothered by the military, and she gazes at the sky, where her husband lives on another planet, looking like he’s about to start the Prometheus civilization. The director is German, worked on a Daniel Brühl movie called Krabat and The Legend of the Satanic Mill, and one of the writers did Grace of Monaco.

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24 Hours to Live (2017, Brian Smrz)

The day after watching First Reformed, I guess if I’m gonna check out the end of the bad Amanda Seyfried movie, I’ll check out the bad Ethan Hawke action flick too. It’s Pushing Daisies meets D.O.A., as dead Ethan Hawke is resurrected for a day as a revenge-zombie to kill the guys who killed him. He comes fucking tearing into a room full of armed dudes and just destroys everyone, while two main baddies sit passively because they’re too damn cool to flinch from danger. The Sam Neill-ish super-confident guy (wow, is that Rutger Hauer?) isn’t quite killed by zombie-Hawke, so Hawke’s friend Paul (not that one or that one) Anderson takes care of it. Hawke is pretty cool-looking in this, anyway. Smrz has been a stunt guy forever, and his other film as director was also about a nearly-dead guy seeking bloody revenge,

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Desolation (2017, Sam Patton)

Damn, I thought this might be a Stephen King movie but I was thinking of Desperation. This is the one where a mom and son are stalked through the woods by a psycho, and we’re at the point where they decide to turn the tables. I think they lure the stalker to their camp and have a stick fight, but the camera and editing go all to hell, so who knows. She knocks the dude over with a backpack full of rocks, then the boy kills the hell out of him with stone and pocketknife, which is probably traumatizing. LOL as they finally reach their car and the battery is dead – it’s hard to tell if this movie had any point, and everyone involved is pretty much best known for this.

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Rogue One (2016, Gareth Edwards)

It’s not an “original” but I’d better check this out before it disappears. Oh shit, Wen Jiang got blown up already. A little ship rams a star destroyer into another star destroyer and nobody seems to notice until it’s too late. Felicity Jones thrillingly aligns an antenna, is nearly thwarted by an overly talky cape-wearing British soldier until Diego Luna shows up, and the frog/fish pilots receive the Death Star plans, then the baddies blow up the planet so none of these actors had to sign multi-year contracts. It ends with a Vader slaughter and a creepy Carrie Fisher impersonation, and this only brings to mind Sarah Jeong’s Rat Film essay, which was more interesting than any stop-gap prequel-bridging Star Wars movie. Edwards was following up the Godzilla movie I didn’t like, the writers are Chris Weitz (that Cinderella movie I didn’t like) and… Tony Gilroy!

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 22: NebrasKING Edition

I’d planned to fill this out post-SHOCKtober with some Netflix originals or Star Wars spinoff sequels but never got around to it, so this is a short one.

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1922 (2017, Zak Hilditch)

New movies of Stephen King’s It and The Dark Tower and Gerald’s Game came out this year, and if it was 1993 I would be so excited. Two new Kings went straight to streaming, so I’m starting with the one I’ve never heard of. Slingblader Thomas Jane (The Mist, The Punisher, The Predator) is trying to unload some land on Neal McDonough (Minority Report, Ravenous), who is complaining that their children have died, says the land is cursed. Then Jane shoots his dying horse and the voiceover tells us “that was the end of 1922,” but not of 1922, since there’s an epilogue where Jane loses the farm, drinks heavily and is haunted by rats. “I went to Omaha, city of fools,” then in the final seconds the ghosts of his dead family arrive to murder him. Zak is following up two apocalyptic movies in a row: a short and a last-day-on-earth redemption drama.

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Gerald’s Game (2017, Mike Flanagan)

Carla Gugino (Watchmen, the Spy Kids trilogy) is out of bed and driving under a red eclipse sky, being haunted by Moonlight Man, (Carel “it is happening again” Struycken) then slams into a tree. I remember about a quarter of this book, but don’t recall the ending at all. Months later she’s had surgery to fix the hand she messed up while escaping, and she gives a long, terribly explainy voiceover telling us Moonlight Man was a real person and not a supernatural dream figure, then she busts into the courtroom where he’s being sentenced to deliver a pithy kissoff line. Flanagan also made Hush, which I watched the last ten minutes of earlier this year.

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Children of the Corn (1984, Fritz Kiersch)

“I think we’re safe in here for now,” says a man in a dilapidated barn being battered by a supernatural evil. Holy shit, Linda Hamilton plays the mom. The man enunciates very clearly, which is handy when shouting orders at your family while under attack by He Who Walks Behind The Rows. He runs outside like an idiot and gets attacked by sentient corn, then a fake-looking red cloud rolls in as he sprinklers the corn field with gasoline and lights that sucka up. Mostly it’s members of an overly large family shouting each other’s names, which is consistent with my experience of living in Nebraska. Our man Peter Horton worked on Amazon Women on the Moon, which I was just thinking about, and the local kid who helps him start fires was one of the Monster Squad. Sadly, I didn’t see the main kid with the big black hat, but there was a jump-scare scythe-girl in the final scene, at least. Kiersch went on to greater successes, directing an Armand Assante film and a couple episodes of Swamp Thing.

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The Reaping (2007, Stephen Hopkins)

Yesss, a Christian-apocalypse thriller. Lincoln, Nebraska’s own Hilary Swank is about to re-murder her resurrected daughter in a field of burning trees while having major culty flashbacks. Bleeding white guy David Morrissey (The Walking Dead, Red Riding) shows up, is revealed to have killed Idris Elba, then 200 people are destroyed by God in a hail of videogame fire effects. This movie actually seems better than the previous two. Swank realizes she might be pregnant with the antichrist, then cut to credits, nice.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 21: Netflix Originals Edition

War Machine (2017, David Michôd)

Oh no, Brad Pitt looks sad. I’m guessing all the fun light comedy from the first half turned sour when people started dying in whatever war this is. Then Rolling Stone writes a mean article about their squad, and smartass Topher Grace argues with another guy. Pitt, using a toned-down version of his Basterds accent, says goodbye to his men and flies off to be fired by the President over the article, according to a cheese voiceover, everything moving just as slow as it can. Nice closing-credits Blues Explosion song, tho. Netflix is now making their own prestige pics with major movie stars from the director of The Rover, but I still read reviews instead of just watching whatever they place in front of me, and the reviews said nah. Speaking of which…

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Beasts of No Nation (2015, Cary Fukunaga)

UN blue-helmets disarm a large troop of child soldiers to slow doom-music. The rescued kids have trouble adjusting to the peaceful community, are tormented. These prestige pics, nothing really happens in the last ten minutes, it’s all boring epilogue. Time to switch to something more disreputable.

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Clinical (2017, Alistair Legrand)

Another “netflix original,” this one a mystery/horror by Michel Legrand’s legrand-nephew. I don’t like to speculate on the first 90 minutes of these movies, but from the screens flying by as I fast-forwarded, it appears that 75% of this movie is conversations inside a house, then in the last quarter there’s some home invasion action. When I hit play, there’s a conversation in a house in the dark. Jane is being tormented by a disfigured, possibly incestuous torturer backstory-expositionist. Our lead kidnapped psychiatrist is Vinessa Shaw (lead prostitute of Eyes Wide Shut), who escapes and beats hell out of her captor (Kevin Rahm of the Lethal Weapon remake) then rips his face off. Between the psychiatry angle and the face removal, it looks like someone has been watching Silence of the Lambs.

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Spectral (2016, Nic Mathieu)

Ah good, an action movie with a dingy blue-brown color palette for a change. Guns with thick cables attached making a whiny powering-up sound, it seems we are in sci-fi action territory… ah yup there are spectral aliens in clone-pods. This looks like a Starship Troopers sequel with ghosts. Pretty cool effects – a good guy set off a superbomb that accidentally freed all the spectres, then another guy pulled their power cord leaving them all suspended and slo-mo evaporating. “They’re not alive… they’re not dead.” Science-hating dude who I’m going to assume is Jimmy Dale of World War Z discovers some brain/nerve experiments controlling the spectres and murders them all. Writer George Nolfi directed The Adjustment Bureau and wrote Oceans Twelve.

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Doctor Strange (2016, Scott Derrickson)

Everyone in the city is frozen except Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Cumberbatch. BC flies into space, protecting himself from a galaxy-god in a time-loop with a magic shield – speaking of which, how come everyone on the internet is so conflicted about Patty Jenkins directing this week’s superhero movie when they gave this thing to the director of Hellraiser: Inferno? “Pain’s an old friend,” says a frankly unconvincing BC, trying to channel Hellraiser. He tricks the god into sparing Earth, then some underlit Infinity Stone sequel-setup mumbo, and I skipped to the awkward cutscene with Thor.

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2: Sword of Destiny (2016, Yuen Woo-Ping)

Hero-style, it looks like a soldier did something great in order to get close enough to slay the king. Outside, all hell breaks loose, Michelle Yeoh and her team versus an army, with some really nice wall-stepping, float-jumping, sword-thwacking action. “Now you will join your beloved, Li Mu Bai” – this looks like a killer movie, but this rebels-vs-kingdom stuff seems out of charaacter with the romantic original. Also, like an idiot I changed the language to Chinese then changed it back when I realized the movie was shot in English. Anyway Donnie Yen defeats Lord Whoever, and our heroes return to the mountain Zhang Ziyi jumps from in the original.

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Hyena Road (2015, Paul Gross)

How can I pass up the Canadian war movie that was the subject of Guy Maddin’s Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton? Looks like some shit is going down, and the Taliban is fighting back hard. Whoa, a soldier got his legs blown off then crawled away. Music and camerawork all seem like the usual mediocrity. Then the lead guy authorizes his men to blow him up in order to take out the bad guys, after some military types shout numbers and codes at each other very emotionally (“three! niner alpha!!”). In the end we see that the Canadians died for a noble cause, that the good guys are good indeed, and war is necessary. I failed to spot Maddin playing a dead body. Writer/director Gross was a lead actor in Slings & Arrows.

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Special Correspondents (2016, Ricky Gervais)

Forgot about this until it showed up on a favorite critic’s “worst of the century” list. So it’s a fake-kidnapping-turned-real-kidnapping comedy-turned-drama, with Gervais and that Hulk guy Eric Bana. I think Gervais is on drugs, singlehandedly shoots his way out of Ecuador to Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”. Hey, it’s America Ferrera and Kevin Pollak, then the movie peters out. “This is like the end of a movie.” “A low-budget movie, maybe.” Remake of a French film with Omar Sy, which is hard to picture.

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Zootopia (2016, Disney)

We watched the first 15 of this once and it was insufferable so we quit, then it won an oscar. So let’s check out the last 15 – maybe that’s where all the better-than-Kubo stuff is hiding. Good bootleg-Disney-movies joke… then we’re in a meth lab on a train, odd. “Doug is the opposite of friendly… he’s UNfriendly.” Uh oh, the sheep mayor is the bad guy, with a speech about teaming up to defeat the predators, which doesn’t sound so bad really, then she turns our fox hero evil with drugs, sort of, then a final speech about how we have to understand each other and improve the world. I forget that award voters translate “best animated film” into “cutest message-movie for kids”.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 20: Award-Winning Edition

The Sea of Trees (2015, Gus Van Sant)

Just for a change of pace, let’s start with something that played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, by a director I’ve often loved. McConaughey is searching for his missing friend Ken Watanabe, to no avail. He limps into the Japanese forest, leaving a trail of objects, while the music soars (and soars! and soars!), finally discovering not Ken but an orchid. The orchid gives him flashbacks, and he opens a package he’s been carrying for years I think, finding a children’s book, which he reads on the plane ride home to his old life in a gorgeous house, teaching undergrads about “forces of attraction” whilst remembering his dead wife. So I think Ken was a ghost in a haunted forest. Writer Chris Sparling also did Buried, which I’ve been low-key wanting to watch for six years.

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Captain Fantastic (2016, Matt Ross)

This won a directing prize at Cannes and lead actor Viggo got an oscar nomination, but the Guardian says it’s terrible, so who to believe? Viggo has already lost his beard from the movie poster, has gathered his clan for the viking funeral of his wife. That’s two dead wife movies in a row! The kids play a hippie “Sweet Child o’ Mine” while their mom burns up, then her ashes are flushed down a toilet. Really glad I didn’t watch this one – thanks, The Guardian. The director is better known as an actor, in American Psycho and The Aviator.

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Anthropoid (2016, Sean Ellis)

I thought Inglorious Basterds would’ve halted the nazi assassination attempt movies for a while, but nope, here’s another one based on another extraordinary true story. Looks like it’s all gone to hell and our heroes are being shot at. Well-directed scene of Jamie Dornan’s last stand. A captured ally tries to convince Cillian Murphy and his remaining buddies to surrender from their church basement hideout, but they finally get flooded and blasted, shooting themselves when all hope is lost, but not before Cillian sees the ghost of his dead wife (so that’s three in a row). At least the closing titles say they killed their target nazi, though 5000 civilians were murdered in response. Whatever the Czech Lion awards are, this movie got nominated for a hundred of them.

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Equals (2015, Drake Doremus)

The movies are getting less respectable now, though this won an award in Venice for its many-layered scratch-roar music, as Nicholas Hoult pretends to wanna jump off a building. That’s four suicide-referencing movies in a row… this is what I get for watching serious festival shit instead of the usual dumb horror. Hoult has a tearful reunion with Kristen Stewart in their dark blue apartment, the whispered dialogue buried under the yelling of my suddenly-active birds. I think the idea is these are the only two people in a future universe who have emotions, and I guess at the end they get separated and she is sad – or he loses his emotions and she is sad. It depends whether this guy in the final scene is Hoult or not. I cannot ever recognize the guy. Doremus previously made Like Crazy with Anton Yenchin and Jennifer Lawrence, which Katy has probably seen.

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Terminator 5: Genisys (2015, Alan Taylor)

I missed the future-set Salvation but it costs four bucks to rent, so let’s see if this alternate-timeline sequel makes any sense without it (or at all). Out of respect for a formerly-beloved series, I’m gonna give it twelve minutes. Ol’ one-eyed Arnold is back from part two, fighting another liquid metal thing. I guess Genisys is a virtual baddie with a dramatic countdown clock before he becomes Lawnmower Man all over the internet, and John Conner has turned evil. “You are nothing but a relic from a deleted timeline.” Arnold stolidly sacrifices himself yet again, and yet another big building blows up, as Jai Courtney and some fake Sarah Conner make their escape into a hopeful future, aided by new T-1000 liquid Arnold. The director did Thor 2 and lots of television, the writers did Alexander and Dracula 2000, and I can’t believe that Terminator was handed over to these bozos.

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Yoga Hosers (2016, Kevin Smith)

This feels like an SNL movie or an Austin Powers sequel, since it’s all painful jokes extended past their breaking points. Hey, miniaturized nazis inside a Friday The 13th–Alien costume, so maybe this is an Austin Powers sequel after all. The bad guy wants to kill art critics – that’s the only Kevin Smith-sounding thing I’m hearing. Johnny Depp’s makeup is excellent since I only realized that’s him after looking up the character name – but then, why cast Johnny Depp at all? I don’t get how terrible this looks, since I thought Red State was good. An important precedent has been set – I couldn’t bear this any longer and didn’t watch the full ten minutes. I guess the extra couple minutes for Genisys evens things out.

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Antibirth (2016, Danny Perez)

AV Club gave this a C- but I almost watched it anyway because of the sweet blacklight poster. Chloe Sevigny tells Natasha Lyonne that she knew about the horror experiment from the start, so Natasha escapes with Meg “sister of Jennifer” Tilly. None of the dialogue or camerawork is good, and now villain Stephen Stills from Scott Pilgrim is driving Chloe somewhere while Natasha gives birth to a rubber demon head (which I guess is better than a CG demon head), then in some of the most incompetent strobe-light flailing I’ve seen in a movie, she gives birth to a full-size demon body that pummels Stephen Stills to death. Danny Perez also made Oddsac, which I rather loved.

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Sinister (2012, Scott Derrickson)

Ethan Hawke finds the director’s cut of some ghost home movies in the attic of his haunted house, and a thrilling, poison-coffee-fueled film-splicing scene follows. Deputy James Ransone calls to say a serial killer will probably kill Ethan tonight, then Ethan calmly returns to his film screening, learning that the missing children of the murdered families did all the murders. Then I guess his own missing daughter chops him up with an axe. I think they hoped to do for small-gauge film what The Ring and V/H/S did for videotape. Derrickson made previous LTM entry Hellraiser: Inferno, and I don’t have high hopes for his Doctor Strange.

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Hush (2016, Mike Flanagan)

The one about a deaf woman being stalked at home, not the one that premiered the exact same day about a blind man being stalked at home. Scared Kate Siegel emails her family a physical description of her attacker, says “died fighting,” and waits for the inevitable. But the attacker is super dumb, and tries sneaking up behind her as if she has no other senses, gets stabbed. Fight ensues and he chokes her to death. But wait no, she is alive and corkscrews him in the throat. Seems like your standard-issue murder thriller. Director and star also made Oculus and a Ouija sequel together, are working on Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes Vol. 19: Twelve SHOCKtober Movies in Nine Innings

Sometimes the Mets make it to the postseason, threatening the amount of free time I have to devote to SHOCKtober movies. Tonight is the National League Wild Card game, Syndergaard pitching for the Mets against the mighty Bumgarner for the Giants. I shall attempt to multitask, following Gameday on the laptop while watching the last ten minutes of bad horror movies on streaming sites.

It is tempting to just pick any old crappy horror film and watch the last ten minutes of it. There are so many! There is a cyberbullying horror called #HORROR, and movies with every generic title you could ask for: Slasher, Creep, Circle, Hush, The Presence, The Chosen, Visions, Dark Skies, The Unborn, Rebirth, etc. However, The Last Ten Minutes wasn’t supposed to be a time-wasting review of the latest straight-to-video garbage, but a time-saver – watching only the endings of movies I’ve been tempted to watch in their entirety. Because I really do watch bad horrors sometimes (recently: The Editor, The Guest, Willow Creek, We Are What We Are, Lesson of Evil), so trying to ignore the generic nonsense tonight and stick with stuff I have some reason to wanna see.

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Knock Knock (2015, Eli Roth)

I never liked Eli Roth’s signature Hostel movies, but he’s one of the major names in modern horror so I at least follow his career. This looks like a Funny Games scenario (“it was just a game,” they even say) with a married guy (Keanu Reeve, also in The Neon Demon and The Bad Batch so he may turn up again this SHOCKtober) and two interloping hot foreign girls (incl. Roth’s Green Inferno star). Clumsy-ass Keanu gets captured and buried to his neck. Anyway the girls leave him buried there watching the sex tape they made on his cellphone and they wander away to the same closing song as Fight Club. Eh, seems pretty tame by Roth standards. No excitement in the first inning either.

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The Invasion (2007, Oliver Hirschbiegel)

Since I’ve watched two Body Snatchers movies and am hoping to watch a third soon, here’s the remake I never cared about. Seems like Daniel Craig is already a pod person and Nicole Kidman has a gun, but she lets him unlock a door to unleash the others, then the director uses video-game POV while she shoots them all. Car crash and she’s swarmed by pod people. Argh, Brandon Crawford took nine pitches to strike out. Why did Nicole Kidman agree to do this movie… because Cruise did War of the Worlds? Bottom of the second, her car is on fire, then I think she accidentally knocks out her son with a fire extinguisher but the editing sucks so I can’t tell. Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation, then a montage tells us the world was saved. “For better or worse, we’re human again,” and Kidman’s not so sure it’s a good thing. Two Mets strike out, also not good. PG-13 adaptation (humans are infected, not actually killed and replaced, so Craig is cured in the end) by David Kajganich (A Bigger Splash). This was director Hirschbiegel’s follow-up to Downfall, and he hasn’t been heard from since.

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Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves)

A tiny monster! Godzilla ’98-style – I was not expecting that. Another helicopter, huh? Whew, the camerawork looks even worse than expected. Top of the third went fast. Why are these party teens being rescued from the city instead of anyone else? It’s like watching a monster movie with a drunk friend screaming commentary in your ear. Chopper crash… “initiating hammer down,” says the radio. Rabbit ears? Hammer down. The teens survive the crash and keep filming until the monster arrives and eats them. Hey, our first hit, go Rivera. An actor (Brooklynite Michael Stahl-David) is visible on camera for once, then he and his girl get blown up. Glad I watched the sequel and skipped this one, though I’ll bet it was fun in a crowded theater opening night. Written by Drew “Cabin in the Woods” Goddard, produced by JJ “Trek Wars” Abrams and directed by Matt “Planet of the Apes” Reeves.

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Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (1999, Turi Meyer)

Had to check and make sure I’ve seen part two, which I don’t remember at all. Caroline (Baywatch‘s Donna D’Errico) is staring at bee-covered retro painting of Tony Todd, while her boy David (original Nightmare on Elm Street actor Jsu Garcia) hangs from meat hooks nearby. Candyman totally appears without anyone saying his name in a mirror. And we walked the D-Span with no outs? Candyman is promising that their legends will live forever, but I don’t know if anyone’s even aware that there was a third Candyman movie, so maybe not. Tony opens his shirt and says “behold” and the filmmakers apparently think the human body is a giant ribcage with one big pulsating organ just behind it. Haaha, D-Span caught stealing as Caroline slashes the painting from behind a video layer effect of angry bees, then Candyman literally explodes, a hilarious ending to the trilogy. Giants lost a challenge, and what, another walk? Multiple false endings in the movie, lame. Same goes for the inning, which Mike “Hunter” Pence finally ends by striking out. The cowriters also worked on Leprechaun 2 and a Carrot Top movie.

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Intruder (1989, Scott Spiegel)

This movie recently played the Alamo, who advertised the Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell connection, but it seems mostly valuable for the historical footage of late-1980’s grocery packaging. Supermarket at night, a killer busts through the Frosted Flakes after Jennifer. It’s a bloody murder movie, but there’s some humor in the music cues as a delivery boy is slaughtered, and when the killer puppeteers a severed head. Who is the unshaven hero who comes to her rescue at the end? Actually it looks pretty fun and well filmed as far as slasher movies go. Only minor excitement in the fourth. Amazon worked well for the first four movies, but Hulu’s user interface is ill-suited to The Last Ten Minutes project, so now it’s off to Netflix.

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Bleed (2016, Tripp Rhame)

Okay, I feel bad about not watching this one in its entirety. I waited years for it to come out (used to be called The Circle) and my former coworkers made it, but time is precious so let’s just watch the end and see. Cross-cut between gravedigging and a girl coughing up dirt, that’s interesting. I think she is Chelsey Crisp of Chicken Suit. Her brother Eric (Riley Smith, substitute Dennis Quaid in the Frequency TV series) shows up in the haunted/abandoned warehouse then is killed by an angry mob, and a homeless beardy dude speaks wisdom then vanishes into smoke. There’s some gruesome shit in here, a welcome change from the previous PG-13 fare, too bad it’s stuck in the generically-titled netflix horror bin. Not even close to any score in the game yet, and only 51 pitches from Bumgarner in the 5th… wait, runner on second… wait, a different runner on second… okay, nevermind. Credits say “featuring David Yow”?? Cheers to Tripp and Nate and Kevin Hamm.

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Hellions (2015, Bruce McDonald)

I love the postseason stats reset, everyone with a 0 ERA and .000 batting average. This is immediately better than the last few movies, visually and musically, but it’s definitely the night for pretty girls getting chased by faceless hordes. The girl gives herself an abortion (or c-section, hard to tell in this lighting) by scythe while a pumpkin patch bursts into digital flames. D-Span is the first person to reach base twice, and this time he’s not caught stealing. Hospital epilogue nightmare! Dead-baby hospital epilogue, then alive-baby second hospital epilogue. Top of the sixth went quickly. Bruce is the great director of Pontypool and The Tracey Fragments and Roadkill, but this movie got pretty bad reviews.

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Baskin (2015, Can Evrenol)

Freaky guy with a knife, and they just walked Cabrera with one out, and someone’s throat is getting slashed. Tribal-looking, long hair and dirt in low light. I think Arda and Remzi are cops. Dude retrieves a key from throat of his dying partner, Saw-style, then stabs the weirdo baddie with it before beating him to death with a wooden bench. This doesn’t look great, but the baddie is excellent looking (apparently a deformity, not makeup, but still excellent). Nice, the sole survivor is run over by approaching police van. Turkish movie. Someone’s gonna have to score a run if this game is gonna end. Third walk of the night – that’d do it, too. Whew, got out of that one.

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The Uninvited (2009, Guard Bros.)

A remake of A Tale of Two Sisters, so after hitting play I was reading what I wrote about the original movie and accidentally heard this version’s opening line: “I love you… and I have a condom.” Skip to the last ten minutes and there is blood everywhere. In flashback, the twins blow up their house, one of them dies and hello Addison Reed. Did the original end with the surviving twin in an asylum? Crazy sister Emily Browning will appear in the American Gods series, ghost sister Arielle Kebbel was in The Grudge remake-sequel, David Strathairn and Elizabeth Banks slumming as dad and stepmom.

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Dream House (2011, Jim Sheridan)

“Jack, you killed them.” Argh, bases loaded with two outs and Mike “Hunter” Pence is up. I think it’s all flashback exposition right now and haaa, struck him out. Hello, Rachel Weisz. Another gas can, house set on fire – isn’t this the third fire tonight? Daniel Craig wakes up, saves Naomi Watts from the flames then goes back for Rachel’s ghost. Whoever Ty Kelly is, he’s on first. Daniel Craig, whose character everyone calls Peter but IMDB says his name is Will, is later revealed to have a bestselling book called Dream House – spooky, right? Netflix says if I liked that, which I did not, I’ll enjoy Master of None, as we strand Kelly on second base. Jim Sheridan used to make best-picture nominees starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

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Stonehearst Asylum (2014, Brad Anderson)

Oh good, another fire. I get that we automatically pitch Familia because it’s the ninth in a high-stakes game, but there’s still no score and this might go all night, so why not just leave Reed in? I suppose because he loaded the bases during Dream House. Looks like Ben Kingsley is a wicked man experiencing war flashbacks from when he’d execute hospitalized soldiers. Kate Beckinsale and Jim Sturgess are arguing over which one of them is sane. Now here’s Angry Brendan Gleeson and Catatonic Michael Caine – things are looking up. Identity theft in the late 1800’s, and Familia walks Joe Panik, dammit. This was based (loosely, I’m guessing) on Poe. Anderson made The Machinist and two good Masters of Horror episodes, and this looked alright.

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The Fog (2005, Rupert Wainwright)

What better way to ruin a night than with a John Carpenter remake by someone named Rupert? “This town was built on nothing but lies… and now they’ve come for their revenge.” The fog bringeth translucent skeletons with surprisingly loud footsteps to murder the movie’s generic actors using cheap effects. Ghost army sets an old man on fire, not nice. Giants home run, not nice either. Ew, corpse kissing. One out in the bottom of ninth but Bumgarner has thrown 108 pitches and he’s not superman – we can do this. Maggie Grace (of Taken) ascends to the ghost dimension after making out with the rotting corpse. “Something did come back… sooner or later, everything does.” I hope that includes the Mets, and does not include Rupert. Better luck next year, Mets.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes Vol. 18: Shabby Studio Flicks from the 1990’s

Wing Commander (1999, Chris Roberts)

I played the first Wing Commander video game a fair amount, the second one a ton, and I think my computer was underpowered for the third (1994) so that one not so much. When the movie came out too-many-years later and I saw its posters splashed all over Barcelona, I ignored it. Looks like that was the right choice. Euro-accented spaceship crew is yelling the standard space-movie stuff about shields, then there’s a solo-flying Freddie Prinz Jr. with a cool monocole. I’ve got nothing against Freddie, didn’t see any of his poorly-received movies of the era and he was alright on The Brak Show. This movie is so full of jargon and effects, I doubt anyone knows or cares what is happening. Cool to see David Warner as the admiral, anyway. I don’t approve of the Kilrathi being slow-motion underwater green-tinted puppets speaking in subtitled death-metal voices. Appearance at the end by Saffron Burrows of Klimt. Why is Mark Hamill credited as “?” when he appears in all the games?

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Star Trek 7: Generations (1994, David Carson)

I went back further than ten minutes because I didn’t want to miss Kirk dying. He and Picard fight Malcolm McDowell in the desert trying to get some magic remote control that makes a missile turn invisible. Doesn’t seem like a plot worth dying for, but Kirk gets crushed under a metal bridge, freeing up Shatner to do more important work, like that amazing Se7en parody in 1996. Epilogue: Data has emotions and a pet cat, Picard has a monologue about time being a flat circle and Frakes makes a sly joke about living forever (he will). Director Carson went on to make Unstoppable (the Wesley Snipes one, not the Denzel Washington one).

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Congo (1995, Frank Marshall)

I don’t remember the novel, other than I hated it but it was the only book I had while stuck in a Costa Rica airport for six hours… or maybe that was Sphere… anyway, why are army people machine-gunning monkeys, and why is one monkey speaking English while wearing a nintendo power glove? Good to see Ernie Hudson, and weird to see Laura Linney blasting monkeys with lasers and oh now a volcano is erupting and burning all the monkeys. Do NOT watch this movie if you love monkeys. Joe Don Baker!! After all the digital motion-capture shit of recent years it’s nice to see one monkey played by an actor wearing a furry suit. Director Marshall went on to make a Paul Walker sled dog movie and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley was slumming between an oscar win for Moonstruck and a nomination for Doubt.

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The Relic (1997, Peter Hyams)

I guess this is the one that wasn’t Species or Mimic. Apparently it stars Penelope Ann Miller (Big Top Pee-Wee) and Tom Sizemore (Dreamcatcher), but I can’t see a damned thing. Looks like figures running through a dark chemical plant. When we finally see the Relic and its gross long tongue, it looks like some Alien/Predator/Pumpkinhead/Krang mashup for the ten seconds before Penelope uses confusing editing to set it on fire, then she spits some weak Hellraiser catchphrase and it blows up. Was this movie about anything? Hyams made a Sean Connery movie called Outland 16 years earlier which I apparently watched (I gave it a 6). He also made Timecop and End of Days, which I would totally watch the last ten minutes of either of those if available, so get your shit together netflix.

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Deep Impact (1998, Mimi Leder)

This was the asteroid movie that wasn’t Armageddon but came out at the same time. Sure enough, the asteroid hits the Earth and kills everyone. It kills the loving couple on the beach. It kills New York City. It kills everything. Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski escape, chuckling at the devastation. Meanwhile some crying astronauts led by Robert Duvall are saying goodbye and it gets real weepy before they crash into a second asteroid and blow it to bits then President Morgan Freeman gives a boring speech. This looks like it was a boring movie. Mimi Leder went on to make the movie that shook my faith in movies, Pay It Forward.

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The Phantom (1996, Simon Wincer)

In today’s superhero-fueled world, it’s quaint to visit the superhero movies of yesteryear, which were medium-budget and starred Billy Zane. Billy is a fine actor as long as he never has to speak, so he’s always cast in major roles and given tons of dialogue. Some bad guy picks up a crystal skull and says “at last!” and someone else is accused of kiling Phantom’s father. All movies are basically the same, aren’t they? Phantom has a pathetic, sub-lightsaber effects-duel with the baddie, whoever he was, then everything explodes. Where is Catherine Zeta-Jones? Holy shit, Patrick McGoohan cameo as Phantom’s dad. Phantom’s girlfriend is Kristy Swanson, the lead in Mannequin 2: On The Move. This has kind of a Rocketeer / Sky Captain / Indiana Jones throwback look which I appreciate. It was director Wincer’s follow-up to Operation Dumbo Drop, and he’d go on to make Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

After each of these movies, netflix assumed next I’d want to watch their new Adam Sandler flick. That is either persistent self-marketing or a sadly accurate attempt to predict the tastes of people watching Congo on a thursday night in 2016.