by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 31: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 1

Happy SHOCKtober 2025! This is only the fourth episode of The Last Ten Minutes to feature screenshots, but more to come.

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Silver Bullet (1985, Daniel Attias)

Holy cow, it’s Gary Busey, visiting a “wizard of weapons” (per narrator) who uses some pretty non-magical tools (just normal gunsmith tools) to create the titular bullet. Everyone is overdoing everything. Uncle Busey schemes to get rid of the kids’ parents for the full moon, the wolf attacks, they shoot it, case closed (didn’t realize until Trevor mentioned the wolf was Big Ed). Where’d all these 1980s people end up? The girl grew up to be Anne of Green Gables, the boy to be Corey Haim, and Attias won awards for directing prestige TV.

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The Dark Half (1993, George Romero)

Timothy Hutton doppelgangers face off kicking each other in the nuts while a flock of finches swarm the house and Amy Madigan (the witch from Weapons!) is tied to a chair somewhere. Isn’t “hero writer vs. villain arguing who gets to write a story ending” reused from Misery? Cop Michael Rooker arrives to untie Amy but more importantly he lets the finches in and they eat Evil Hutton (good fx as he’s reduced to a skeleton). Adapting this into a movie was a bad idea but the acting and overall look are higher caliber than Silver Bullet. Hutton was also in Ghost Writer and Secret Window, has a real thing for dumb movies about split-personality authors.

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The Mangler (1995, Tobe Hooper)

Here it is, the “king” of the shouldn’t-have-been-adapted stories, as three drunk(?) people think they’ve succeeded in exorcising the killer laundry machine, then it starts chasing them down some stairs. The priest-guy (also a priest in Hooper’s Night Terrors) gets mangled, Buffalo Bill (his voice!) escapes, and his girl falls into the hands of laundry-machine cultists. Movie got two sequels, I assume ironically. I watched this in the theater in ’95, maybe this is why nobody wanted to hang out with me.

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Sleepwalkers (1992, Mick Garris)

Angry Alice Krige (who specializes in playing witches) bites off Officer Ron Perlman’s fingers and twists off his arm, sets another cop on fire, knows exactly where to aim a pistol to cause cars to explode with a single shot. She kidnaps Shelley (in her Twin Peaks follow-up), taking her to dance with her mutant zombie son Charles in a house surrounded by cats. Turntable plays “Sleep Walk” by itself as Charles attempts to suck her soul. What is it with King and soul-sucking cats? But Shelley turns the tables (err, knocks Charles down and gouges out his eyes) and cats jump on Alice until she spontaneously combusts, but not before she makes time to kill one more cop. Mick’s first of seven King movies is set in Indiana, not Maine, disappointing.

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Watchers (1988, Jon Hess)

This was my favorite Dean Koontz book, and I think Watchers II (a remake masquerading as a sequel) was the better adaptation, but nobody’s got that for download. Supergenius Scrabble-playing dog and his boy Corey Haim are under assault by Michael Ironside, who claims to be a labmade perfect killing machine but gets immediately wasted by a couple of noobs. Now they’re attacked by an evil gorilla (psychically linked to the dog, if I recall?), and they waste it too, easy peasy. Director Hess went on to make Alligator 2: The Mutation, Corey’s sister was Frank Zappa’s niece.

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Humanoids from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peeters)

A girl with her tits out is beating a humanoid (seaweed-people with external brains) with a rock. The setting is a marina carnival on fire with a few-seconds-long tape of screaming citizens on endless loop. For some reason I thought this was James Cameron’s first movie (that was Pirahna 2: The Spawning). Doug “The Virginian” McClure and Vic Morrow and some pretty girls with short careers all survive.

Nice tile:

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Dog Soldiers (2002, Neil Marshall)

Are the dogs soldiers, or are soldiers just fighting giant dogs? Trevor: “The whole military seems to be made up of clones of Mike from Spaced.” Surrounded in a house with breakaway walls, the humans fight with pots and pans, aerosol cans, etc. One guy always has a blue glowstick in his mouth, and I know there’s gonna be a payoff… ah nope, he just likes glowsticks. If Brits call bathrooms “the closet” what do they call closets? Spoon gets eaten, another guy is starting to wolf out, so he stays behind and blows the cabin using the gas stove, still time for one more ugly-looking fight. Marshall went on to be one of those almost-cult horror guys making almost-good movies until he faded to Hellboy-remake status.

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Underworld / Transmutations (1985, George Pavlou)

Masked baddies shoot green gas into their own face, then onto our (presumed) mutant heroes. These guys are terribly incompetent villains – they keep pointing guns but not firing them, and end up sabotaging each other’s plans. Some glowy-eyed woman repeats “show me your dreams” at the baddie leader over and over again, then scans him to death, the music one shimmery note taped down on a synth. Was this an early version of Nightbreed? At least two of these actors were in Dennis Potter movies. Great color on the remaster, glad I waited forty years to watch the last ten minutes of this.

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Rawhead Rex (1986, George Pavlou)

Howard (of Stephen King TV movie Rose Red) finds a bloody man whose dying words might be the key to defeating the evil demon, then a priest yells for Howard to “get the fuck out” of his church – there’s the Clive Barker we all love. The church houses a hellish horror… oh no it’s just a rock. Rex looks deliciously fake with his light-up eyes, and since he’s a puppet and can’t move, the priest has to lean into him to get bitten to death. Useless Howard gets knocked around by the monster then a lady picks up the rock and unleashes its lady-magic in the form of 1980s light effects. Meant to be the first in a series of Books of Blood adaptations, but fortunately the following year Clive took things into his own hands with Hellraiser.

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TerrorVision (1986, Ted Nicolaou)

I kinda remembered this movie’s theme song, but it’s much less sinister and more new-wave than I recall, and the movie is more knowingly goofy and popping with color. Two kids with machine guns are busy defeating the monster with electricity when a spacesuit alien beams in to explain what’s going on, but a random party guest executes him and the monster eats everyone, haha. Wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the best-looking movie of the bunch.

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Source Code (2011, Duncan Jones)

Off to a bad start, since justwatch says peacock has got the magician-heist Now You See Me movies, but I’m not seeing it on the damn roku… it brings up this instead, the Moon director’s train-bomber Quantum Leap time-loop thingie, so let’s just see. Donnie Darko is in a quiet moment, calling an army buddy’s dad, while Vera Farmiga discovers the real Donnie in a medical tube, I guess dreaming all this? His smiling girlfriend Michelle Monaghan doesn’t know he’s a chewed-up torso whose brain is running a simulation, but nervous lab supervisor Jeffrey Wright does, and is mad at Vera for pulling his plug, though Donnie’s dream continues – it’s all like if Deja Vu sucked. When the credits come up, the streamer thinks I should watch some incredibly unpopular (100 views) generic garbage, oh boy.

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Victor Crowley (2017, Adam Green)

I think this is Hatchet 4. Four unpleasant actors are trapped in a crashed airplane while Vic attacks it with a circular saw from the outside until they flee into the swamp, hide, then fight back. One guy plays the same character he played in part three, but not the same one he played in part two or one, hmmm. “Oh no, he died.”

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan)

Prime still has ads, so I guess we’re stuck with HBO – let’s give this one 15 minutes since it’s a long movie by a best-picture winner. Marion Cotillard is evil, Anne Hathaway is good, Gary Oldman is kidnapped: we’re all caught up. Futuretanks and cybercycles and batdrones battle weightlessly on the city streets, the music louder than the explosions. It seems Oppenheimer wasn’t his first nuclear ride, as Batman nukes himself to save the city – OR DOES HE?

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Man of Steel (2013, Zack Snyder)

Oh it’s very loud, as Supe (“Soup”) rescues Amy Adams from a black hole to a ruined city where evil Michael Shannon is angry and destroys the city even more, but he cannot hurt Soup because they’re both cartoons. Is he to be reached? He’s not to be reached! I like that it’s making little jokes amongst the big fights, reminds me of Supermen of yore and their friends Richard Pryor and Kevin Spacey. Shannon can survive hurling through exploding satellites in space, he can peel back the mountains, peel back the sky, stomp gravity into the floor, but he can’t take a classic Steven Seagal neck-snap move. Soup invents his Clark alter-ego in the movie’s final moments, exciting.

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Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, Zack Snyder)

Same(?) ruined city but now Soup is dead and Amy Adams is sad. This is the problem with overlong movies: the last ten minutes are all coda, so I’ll never know what killed him. Also not sure what CG monster muck Jesse Eisenberg was dealing with when the army picked him up. The Daily Planet’s front page is pretty loose with punctuation. “Amazing Grace” at the funeral is giving me The Rehearsal flashbacks. At least there’s hardly any dialogue because everyone in the movie is so unspeakably sad, until Batfleck shows up to ask Wonder Woman to form The Avengers. I miss Bale’s batvoice, but Eisenberg is fun. A guy who started his directing career with a Living Dead remake can’t help but end on a jumping coffin.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 29: SHOCKtober 2024 part two

Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups?
I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out!

Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros)

This got decent reviews, I avoided because of its AI scandal. A talk-show guest is getting carol-anne’d into the video realm, her priest and mom suffer grievous neck injuries and someone I’m going to assume was the show’s Andy Richter gets melted by the split-headed beastie, then the show resets and host Jack is back on set disoriented, experiencing time as clip-show. I guess demons Lawnmower-Manned the airwaves. An owl-headed ceremony leads him to a reunion with his dying wife, then wow it ends on “Keep It Warm” by Flo & Eddie. The host was David Dastmalchian, a regular of Batman and Antman movies.

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Smile (2022, Parker Finn)

With part two in theaters it’s time to admit I’m never gonna watch this. I don’t exactly know what it’s about but I bet someone smiles at the end. Sosie (of a Manson movie) is having the childhood trauma talk with her alive-again mom, who then becomes an overly tall hair-monster with a spooky Lawnmower Man voice. She sets the beast on fakey-fire, then goes home and explains her trauma to her man Kyle (one of the Red State kids, with a Downhill Racer poster). But she was dreaming that part, and now the hair-monster takes both their heads apart, and this must have cured her trauma because she smiles.

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Maxxxine (2024, Ti West)

Shootout at the Hollywood sign – this must be Bobby Cannavale dying in her arms, and another cop has been stabbed in the eye by her dying serial killer father, bringing postscript fame to her acting career, and the story fizzles out on her next movie set with Liz Debicki. On one hand I was right when I decided Ti West was bad 14 years ago, on the other, I don’t learn from my mistakes and watched two more of his features plus two anthology segments and the tail ends of four others. Why can’t I just leave Ti West alone?

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Civil War (2024, Alex Garland)

Ballistic and vehicular mayhem, the press is on the scene, and Dunst seems to know something the soldiers don’t, so her team wanders straight into the White House. The soldiers in the ensuing shootout are awfully accommodating to the photographers, then Dunst gets shot rescuing her reckless comrade. In the end they’re just like me, wanting to get real close to an action movie and take screenshots. Nick Offerman would be a pretty good pick for President irl.

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Men (2022, Alex Garland)

Suitably creepy and cool-looking as Jessie Buckley is chased by a little car with a maniacal driver, then encounters a nude forest god which gives anal birth to a screaming pregnant man-baby which gives alien-egg birth to… I’m guessing Rory Kinnear from Peterloo, who gives spinal birth to a bloody mutant Rory, who gives oral birth to, finally, a different guy (Paapa Essiedu). I looked up the word “portentious” to make sure that’s what this is, and, yup. Definitely a more suitable Annihilation follow-up than Civil War was, though in between he made the computer conspiracy series Devs.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, Halina Reijn)

I can’t believe these fuckin streamers. They’re computer programs, supposedly learning about you and recommending stuff to your tastes, but when I hit play on this it showed a promo for Maxxxine, the movie I just watched twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t be too hard to improve on this system. Anyway, Borat’s daughter and Amandla “The Hate U Give” Stenberg are still alive in a house full of their dead friends, having hushed talks in poor lighting. It’s nice of Bakalova to give us latecomers a tour of all the deaths we missed, then they play with their phones for a long while. The director’s Nicole Kidman age-gap follow-up is getting better reviews than this did.

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Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Joost & Schulman)

Also, it’s unpleasant enough to type in the search field using the Roku’s NES-style direction pad, is it too much to ask for the rows of letters to wrap around, so I never have to hit left-arrow six times in a row? First-person-cam dad can’t find his family, but finds occult artwork in the dining room and a coven in the garage (the witches from part 5?). His wife knocks him down with gallows-swing-attack, and one of his daughters is a beastie, then a psychic witch snaps him in half. Not as jump-cutty as part two at least. The directors made the Catfish doc.

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Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, Joost & Schulman)

This one’s well-lit and in color. Wow, did anyone realize all these movies have the same girl in them? I figured each movie was about a different family. This one’s got static cameras in each room, and the jumpcuts are back. Mom gets psychically hurled into the ceiling then Johnny Exposition arrives with internet research on covens, but a longhair girl JCVDs his neck. The surviving girl seems decently famous, starring with Vince Vaughn in Freaky, but she doesn’t survive for long, the coven having grown to a mob of hundreds of suburban women. Instead of fun songs over the closing credits (Civil War had “Dream Baby Dream”) these just have a low rumble.

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Cell (2016, Tod Williams)

Prime movies have ads now? Fuck that, guess we’re skipping Paranormal Activity 6 and Five Nights at Freddy’s, but we gotta check out the ad-free Cell to complete our series of Lawnmower Man references. John Cusack is telling his kid the story of Orpheus and saying goodbye to his team before driving away in an ice cream truck and discovering that the transmission tower is surrounded by a very-CG mob of zombified cellphone addicts. He fires all his shotgun shells into one teenager and locates his own cell-poisoned kid within the mob, then blows the truck and tower and everything sky high – or does he??!? I was sorely tempted to read this book at one time, but went with The Ruins instead, damn. Movie looks like shit – this was Williams’s follow-up to Paranormal Activity 2 (a coincidence, I swear).

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 28: SHOCKtober 2024

Secret Window (2004, David Koepp)

Our first-ever Criterion Channel pick, to see if this movie is as silly as I remember it (yup). “The only thing that matters is the ending,” says Johnny Depp (Yoga Hosers), justifying our little project, a welcome rejoinder to Bill Pullman last year. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) arrives at Depp’s trashed place and the camera isn’t sure what to do while she looks around. Depp is lurking in a pilgrim hat doing his Southern John Turturro impression, having scratched “shooter” into all the walls. She tries to escape but has fatally forgotten how cars work. Tim Hutton (The Dark Half) shows up too late and they both get shovel-murdered and buried in the cornfield, closing on Depp relishing his homegrown corn, a meta-commentary on this corny movie, which I watched in theaters even though Koepp’s Stir of Echoes wasn’t good.

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The Watchers (2024, Ishana Night Shyamalan)

On to HBO, which I probably won’t have for long so let’s max out our enjoyment (heh). Dakota Fanning (Coraline) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are waiting in a roachy house when the real Georgina arrives, turns out their friends are being possessed by shapeshifting humanoid ancient insect creatures. Now the new Dakota arrives, calls herself the daywalker, and discovers she’s part-human, hmmm. “I’m so glad it’s over” says Dakota later to her identical twin, but their CG parrot knows it’s not. I’m on an M. Night kick and was sorely tempted to watch this new one from Lady Raven’s sister, but just saved myself 90 minutes

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Godzilla II, King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

Sequel to the Gareth Edwards remake, starts and ends with people shouting names in rainy wreckage. Just as the family unit of Kyle (Day the Earth Stood Still Remake) and Vera (Orphan) and Millie is reunited, Rodan flies Gz into space then drops him like a bomb onto the city, then Mothra intervenes and gets vaporized. Vera sacrifices herself using an electro gizmo to lure King Ghidorah away, then Molten Godzilla rises and explodes KG and the whole city. Rodan arrives late, missed the whole fight. I saw Zhang Ziyi for two seconds! Unfortunately, Dougherty directed the great Trick ‘r Treat.

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Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Godzilla is fighting Mechagodzilla, Kong is awakened with a small nuclear device and a deaf girl with Rebecca Hall tells Kong to help out, so he does. Tables turn on Kong, computer guy Brian Tyree Henry helps out, and our guys fuckin destroy Mecha-G. This must be a different city, since most of the buildings are standing. I’m glad Kyle is still alive, since he was in the Peter Jackson Kong, uniting cinematic universes through his pointless presence. This movie looks more fun than the others – I actually forgot that after not liking Wingard I started liking him again.

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Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)

It’s gone fully cartoon, as all manner of CG monkeys and lizards fight in Narnia or somewhere, until Evil Anti-Kong escapes to the beaches of Brazil, followed by Power Glove Kong, Gz, and Ice Gz, who all destroy Rio, then team up to PG-13-slaughter Anti-Kong. The humans in these movies always seemed like time-wasters but now I see that without any grounding presence, all that’s left is loud empty colors. A lasting peace between giant apes and lizards is achieved, and Mothra and Rebecca Hall are still alive, fwiw.

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Saw 7 aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010, Kevin Greutert)

The timer’s countin’ down and a bunch of saps are stuck in killer traps. Sean Patrick’s nipples aren’t strong enough for him to stop Gina Holden (death non-escaper in Final Destination 3) from getting cremated alive. Meanwhile, Mandylor from the last couple movies puts an exploding head trap on Jigsaw’s secret assistant Jill, then gets taken down by Jigsaw’s secret-secret assistant… Cary Elwes, sure, why not.

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Jigsaw (2017, Michael & Peter Spierig)

And it’s over to Netflix for the prequel. Their fast-forwarding is slower than HBO’s, but the thumbnails load properly so you get a nice sense of the movie leading up to the last ten minutes. No clear winner. Two dudes are locked in laser collars, but Dr. Logan’s collar is fake, trying to get the corrupt detective (Callum Rennie of Hard Core Logo and Goon 2) to confess his corruption. It seems Jig had let the doctor live, now he’s jigsawing people himself, and his clip-show flashback explanation of this takes up the whole ten minutes. Directed by Australian twins who made an Ethan Hawke time travel movie, and the new writers would also take the next two Saws… one of which is on Hulu, who has the smoothest fast-forwarding of all…

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Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman)

Max Minghella is already in the midst of backstory infodump, telling Chris Rock how he killed
a bunch of dirty cops and wants to apply the ITIL continual improvement process to the city police department, but Chris is more concerned that his dad (chief dirty cop Samuel L. Jackson) is hooked to a blood-removal device, which transforms into a suicide-by-cop machine. Max just takes an elevator out of the abandoned factory surrounded by SWAT and the movie ends, what?

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Pearl (2022, Ti West)

Mia Goth repression prequel to X, which wasn’t great, and reviews of this and MaXXXine didn’t convince me that it’s a trilogy worth the time. Bouncy haired girl Mitsi is over at Pearl’s place, admits to getting the dancing role that Pearl wanted, but they’re cool, still friends, oh no Pearl is chasing her with an axe. Some pretty good split-screen body-choppin’ shots.

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Madame Web (2024, S.J. Clarkson)

Okay, just for the heck of it, the year’s most mocked superhero movie. Dakota Johnson has slow-mo future-sight spidey-sense among a meteor shower of CG metal scraps in a sparks factory. Oh boy, Tahar Rahim plays an evil spider-assassin, until a giant letter P falls on him. She astral-projects to save her useless friends, then they have to save her from drowning, and Adam Scott shows up during hospital recovery. The friends are terrible: Reality Sweeney, Isabela Romulus, and Ghostbuster Celeste, and it ends by teasing a sequel where all of them become heroes. Half of the writers also wrote Morbius, haha.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 27: SHOCKtober 2023

Surveillance (2008, Jennifer Lynch)

The attraction here was Bill Pullman standing on a (lost) highway in a Lynch joint, but now that I’ve seen Boxing Helena I’m being more selective about my Lynches. On fast-forward the movie looks like 100% conversations in rooms and cars. Something has gone down in one of those cars as Julia Ormond (Inland Empire) dumps a body, then a rough-looking Pullman is explaining the murders we missed to cop hostage Kent Harper, we see them in slow-mo flashback with Bill in a gruesome mask. “You probably read the end of a book first, don’t ya? That is no way to live” – Bill is casting aspersions on the entire Last Ten Minutes project here! His girl Julia arrives and gets very turned on by murdering the remaining hostages. I think the twist is that FBI Agent Ormond was a serial conspirator all along. David Lynch sings over the closing credits.

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Chained (2012, Jennifer Lynch)

Another serial killer/hostage story with another past-his-prime actor, yay. Vincent D’Onofrio is hiding Angie in the crawlspace, her would-be rescuer is a vampire-looking boy in the garage. I think he’s Evan Bird of Maps to the Stars – these two turn the tables on Vincent and bury him down there. Evan was presumed dead, looks up his dad Jake Weber, but dad apparently did something dark relating to the kid’s disappearance so he has to die, then I guess the vampire boy goes home to the late serial killer’s house. No David song over the credits, just footsteps of the boy walking through the house. Between these Jennifer made an Indian snake-woman movie, and she has a couple of new things out, but let’s just act like she doesn’t.

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Saw VI (2009, Kevin Greutert)

Where we left off in volume 15, “bland-looking Costas Mandylor” was the only known survivor of whatever traps Dead Jigsaw is still laying. Big climax here with too many people and a minute left on the countdown clock. Amanda and Deathbed Tobin Bell both get flashback cameos, giving new context for stuff from part 3 which I haven’t considered since 2007. Peter Outerbridge is our man here, being taught a lesson in front of his wife and some business client he was cruel to. Jigsaw appears on VHS to explain how the client’s survivors can melt Peter with acid, which they promptly do. Costas barely, bloodily escapes from his head-smooshing trap. And I’m afraid Jigsaw’s voiceover was telling us the meaning of all this, but the mixing was bad and it got lost under the music. It’s hard to understand the titles, but next comes Saw 7: 3D: The Final Chapter, then Jigsaw, then Saw X (pronounced “socks”) which is part nine but numeral ten, what am I missing?

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Pulse (2006, Jim Sonzero)

They remade Pulse, which seems like the worst idea, but I’ve always wondered… co-adapted by Wes Craven and a writer on Greta. This is “free with ads” so it ain’t really free. Kristen V-Mars Bell has reached the server room, but reality around her is melting and she’s violently assaulted by the editor and the vfx, but before she can be drag-me-to-hell’d, Ian intervenes and uploads a killer virus to crash the system, but the ghosts reboot and the couple flees into an ugly 2006 apocalypse, when everyone was using CG but before it was good. Computer ghosts can break car windows and get punched in the face, ok. After this Sonzero crawled off to video games, but Craven must not have held Kristen Bell responsible since he cast her in Scream 4.

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Child’s Play (2019, Lars Klevberg)

While the Chucky sequels hadn’t even run out of steam they rebooted the original with Aubrey Plaza for some reason. Chucky is ugly now, and has the power to control all toys so he sends an army of quadcopter drones and teddy ruxpins after a toy store full of kids and parents. Or is it not a toy store – there’s a refrigerator section, and the kids fight back with a hedge trimmer. Aubrey is being held hostage so Andy lets his badly dubbed friends escape and goes on the attack, whacking Chucky with a RoboCop toy then stabbing him through the heart. Chuck is then shot by Brian Tyree Henry (where’d he come from) and decapitated by Plaza. I didn’t get to hear Mark Hamill say “give me the power I beg of you!!” Andy was already a veteran of Annabelle and Lights Out and went on to The Fabelmans, not a bad career. The director made another bad movie the same year, and the writer is already hard at work on next year’s bad movies.

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Renfield (2023, Chris McKay)

This year’s first Dracula movie reportedly had a fun Nic Cage performance and nothing else to recommend it. Oh no the music’s too loud again, and I came just in time to see Nick Hoult kill rival Jean-Ralphio then confront a wooden Awkwafina. Cage has no lines here, explodes into a CG batstorm, then during the big showdown we get flashbacks to Ren’s group therapy sessions. Then Nick and Hoult triumph and chop up Drac. Good tumblr joke, but then they repeat it, and the movie peters out. This is my tenth Nick Hoult movie and I have never once recognized him. McKay made The Tomorrow War, the writers are from Walking Dead and Rick and Morty.

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Alone in the Dark (2005, Uwe Boll)

I once thought it would be funny to watch some movies by Boll, with his reputation of being the worst to ever do it, but I checked out House of the Dead and it did me damage. Now every Shocktober I see his follow-up’s title pop up, so let’s consider its ending then put Boll’s name behind us forever. Christian Slater and gang are held at gunpoint by doomed Prof. Matthew Walker then they escape into a hell of CG beasts which is honestly no worse-looking than Pulse. Stephen Dorff has to sacrifice himself to blow up the beasties while Slater and Tara Reid escape to… the front yard of a nice large house, which they wander through, finding only a dead nun. All these movies just wish they were Resident Evil.

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C.H.U.D. (1984, Douglas Cheek)

Ever since the early video store days I’ve known I need to see this one – the trouble is that everyone says it’s bad. The chuds are gross mutants with flashlight eyes, but trapped Kim Greist (Brazil) has got a sword and starts choppin. Chris Curry (Starship Troopers) is radioing Daniel Stern (Home Alone), and I dunno which guy is John Heard, maybe the hero threatening this goverment flunky who’s risking/losing his life to cover up the waste disposal/mutant development project. Feels like if Larry Cohen’s idiot brother did an urban Swamp Thing reboot.

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All today’s movies found on amazon prime, which is a wasteland: searched titles appear multiple times, as free-to-watch, pay-to-watch, and unavailable, just like Amazon’s main store and its utter catalog confusion. Canceling plans to watch the endings of The Howling parts 2-6, because that’s an entire hour I can spend on a Tod Browning movie. I also made a Disney Plus list with both Haunted Mansions, both Hocus Pocuses, recent Marvel crap, Wrinkle in Time, Black Hole, Black Cauldron, etc, but gotta remember to stick to the mission and not watch bad movies for the sake of watching bad movies.

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!