[8] Director Tim Burton (Batman, Ed Wood) followed his debut feature, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, with this stylish fantasy-comedy about a young deceased couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) trying to haunt an annoying new family out of their quaint countryside home. When the new family ends up more amused than alarmed by their ghostly antics, they’re left with no choice but to summon the …
[7] Director Tim Burton puts his stamp on Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, casting his Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands star Johnny Depp in the role of Ichabod Crane. In this retelling, Crane is a 1799 New York forensic investigator sent to Sleepy Hollow to investigate a string of murders. The townspeople tell him the victims are decapitated and their heads haven’t been …
[6] [SPOILER WARNING] Part-way through production on 2017’s theatrical version of Justice League, director Zack Snyder suffered a tragic loss in his family and had to step away from the production. Joss Whedon (The Avengers) was then called in to finish the film and oversee re-shoots (Snyder retained sole directing credit). I suspect the studio also wanted Whedon to tighten up the pacing and bring …
[7] SPOILER REVIEW: Technically, there are spoilers in this review. But if you look at the movie’s credits, you shouldn’t be surprised by them. Although we’ll probably never really know for sure, it looks to me like Joss Whedon saved Justice League from Zack Snyder. The movie has character and heart and it’s paced like a real movie, whereas Snyder’s movies lack character and heart, and, …
[7] Diminutive Herve Villechaize (TV’s Fantasy Island) stars in this gift from cult movie heaven for which no summary could do justice, Forbidden Zone is a prolonged crash of the whacky and perverse. The utterly irreverent storyline tests my patience in a few places, but the inventive animation and catchy soundtrack (featuring Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo) keep things afloat. Susan Tyrrell is camp-tastic as the …
[8] Anthony Hopkins plays filmdom’s master of suspense in this movie that chronicles the director’s relationship with his wife, Alma, played by none other than Helen Mirren, during the making of Psycho. It should come as no surprise that Hopkins and Mirren are terrific. Hopkins’ best moment comes when Mirren asks him why Psycho is to be the next film, why when Hollywood decries it …
[8] See review of the Nightbreed theatrical cut here. Clive Barker’s Nightbreed was originally released in 1990, dumped onto a handful of screens by the studio and barely marketed. It was a financial failure, and for the director it was also a creative one. Barker was forced by the studio to compromise his original vision, dropping key plot elements, shooting new scenes and an alternate …
[8] Nightbreed, directed by Clive Barker and based on his book Cabal, wants to be a sprawling horror-fantasy epic for the ages. But the multifaceted story is told so quickly and haphazardly in the studio’s cut of the film, the end result is something between whiplash and total discombobulation. As messy as the end result is, I still really admire the sheer ambition behind the …
[3] With two-time Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi) at the helm, and a cast that includes Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte, and Sam Elliott, you should reasonably expect a much better movie than Hulk turns out to be. I mean, wow. It’s so not good. The script begins with an abundance of exposition that never seems to stop. Bana as …
[7] Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) takes the reigns and casts Tobey Maguire as the famous web-slinging superhero. The script is ripe with pointed dialogue, but I’ll be darned if the cast don’t pull it off more often than not. Raimi’s approach is decidedly ‘comic booky’, full of color and frenetically paced, with all the grace notes and emotional high points bent toward operatic. As …
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