Splatter Rampage Wrestling

Splatter Rampage Wrestling is essentially a "Best Of" the WRC Wrestling Federation. The issue is the WRC is six teenagers "wrestling" in their backyard being filmed by their dad and the two of the referees are tiny children (one who doesn't even bother to physically "count" the pin and just audibly counts to three). The guys all play different characters with names like Orange Sherbet (who wears orange, so I guess that's the whole gimmick), Philbert (who is either a guy who carries a bunny lawn ornament or the lawn ornament is named Philbert and the wrestler is just some guy), and Puppy Lover (they, thankfully didn't explain this one). They "wrestle" on trampolines and wear whatever they could find in pile of clothes that is meant for the Salvation Army (one guy wears the same white pants for two characters and has a large whole in the butt of the pants the entire time). If you are a traditional wrestling fan, this isn't for you. They do a few suplexes, but they clearly have zero training and minimal practice. If you are "Backyard Wrestling" fan, they don't hit the levels of violence and irrational risk you are expecting. There are some chair shots, trash cans, a cheese grater, etc. but the only things that really look gruesome are the terribly executed "wrestling maneuvers" with scary looking bumps (because they clearly watched ECW twice and figured that was all the training they needed) and the barbed-wire. This is a very bad wrestling video, but it has some serious value as a comedy. Some of it is intended, with purposefully bad commentary and characters, but the best parts are unintentional. This was made in some kids bedroom on whatever the 90's equivalent of I-Movie is: the video quality is bad, they consistently use dissolves to transition from scene to scene or splice together camera angles, and commentary and sound effects are clearly added in post-production (chair shots have sound effects pipped in). If you've seen early YouTube skits made by 14 year-old girls, this is essentially that mixed with Jackass. If you don't enjoy bad movies, laughing at how terrible the movie is, or watching Season 3 of NXT (with garbage like Aksana and Maxine) just to hear how little Micheal Cole cares exponentially decline, Splatter Ramage Wrestling is a zero out of ten. If you ever read a review for Wish Upon and felt the primal urge to watch it, there are way worse ways to spend 50 minutes.

Whiplash

Whiplash has all the emotion of a drama and all the intrigue of an action movie. Whiplash really shouldn't have worked for me; a melodrama about a drummer in a music college and his border-line abusive teacher. Miles Teller is surprisingly terrific and of course J K Simmons can do his J Jonah Jamison anger and outrage, but he really nails every beat in Whiplash. There were some extraneous scenes that really didn't move anything forward and the ending didn't really drive the film home (although many disagree and love the ending), but nearly everything about Whiplash is outstanding. The cinematography is great and there were some very cool shots and even though I hate Jazz, the sound design was great and they really used the score to enhance the movie rather than just to add more Jazz to irrelevant scenes. Is Whiplash a movie I can see myself watching 20 more times? No, definitely not, however I can see myself comparing new movies to it 20 years down the road. Whiplash is not a movie for me, everything about the premise puts me too sleep, but Whiplash has artistry and cinematic depth that take what I thought would be a lame plot to true work of storytelling. Nothing fell flat; you feel every emotion and you experience every scene. This is the kind of movie that should be winning best film; not Oscar-bait that just checks off the boxes.

Wish Upon

Wish Upon is the perfect bad movie storm of terrible acting, some of the worst dialog ever, and garbage writing. The dialog is easily the worst offender and was clearly written by someone who has never seen a high school age student in the last 40 years: "Your dad is like Hot Sauce, like Sriracha Hot", "You're smegma, but like ultimate smegma", 'Seriously Bird Ass?". All of the characters are clearly just stand-ins for stereotypes, including the embarrassing dad, the mean rich kids, the love interest that was there the whole time, but she just didn't notice him. The plot offers no surprises, no real action, nothing new or novel. Wish Upon must be someone's punishment for Ryan Phillippe. He clearly did something terrible to someone and this is his penance. As a horror movie, Wish Upon is a zero out of ten, but there is some legitimate Troll 2 bad movie enjoyment to be had, if you appreciate that kind of thing.

The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter

I hate it when people say that a movie wasn't great, "but it has a lot of heart." The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter is going to be one of those times. It's not really a comedy, although Danny McBride (who i don't typically care too much for) has some really funny lines, and it doesn't really have enough narrative thrust to be a solid drama. The acting is surprisingly good and there is a lot of the cliche father/son relationship which plays pretty good without leaning towards saccharine. This film doesn't do anything new or impressively well and I was borderline bored the entire time, but there is something in Deer Hunter that kept me watching. It's a perfectly okay movie, but nothing amazingly good or bad.

A Quiet Place

One of the special features on the Blu-Ray release, they talk about how John Krasinski already had a list of who he wanted to play the rest of the cast. While I commend Krasinski for his obvious passion for this film, they really shouldn't have let him run so much on his own. Noah Jupe, who plays the oldest son, is great and I never had any complaints about him, the issue is with Millicent Simmonds. I understand Krasinski demanding that a deaf actress to play the deaf daughter, there is no other way to get that authenticity, but they really should have auditioned actresses instead of just letting John have his way. Millicent isn't terrible, but she is unconvincing and pretty blank in this film. I never questioned her begin deaf, but every emotion and action of hers was unconvincing. Her role certainly required a lot more range than Jupe's, who really only had to acted frightened the entire hour and a half (which I bought wholesale, I believed him 100%), but she just couldn't do it. Aside from that issue, A Quiet Place has a unique idea and does a great job of building a genuinely tense atmosphere, but that's about all that's unique. Beyond the sound element, everything else feels very cliche and unoriginal. It's a typical monster movie with a monster that looks and works exactly like a cross between the Clickers from The Last of Us and the Demogorgon from Stranger Things with B-movie CGI. There aren't any interesting twists in the story full of plot-holes or novel cinematography. A Quiet Place really can only rest on the one unique element of quiet being necessity. Obviously, there is very little dialog and score, but the score they do have sometimes makes it hard to determine if a sound if part of the music or part of the events in the world. If A Quiet Place was given to a seasoned director or at least given Krasinski a co-director to keep him in check, this could have been a very good film, but they clearly let him wield too much power and he just didn't have the experience to be able to write, act, direct, and be the executive producer for A Quiet Place. I've seen that a sequel is on the books, so hopefully his can use this experience to make the next one better.

The Last Vampire On Earth

Red Letter Media said The Last Vampire on Earth is what would happen f Tommy Wiseau made Twilight and that feels pretty accurate. The acting is very, very bad, the cinematography is garbage, the script is terrible, and even the lighting and sound are wrong. I saw the Mill Creek release, which was color-graded so that everything was darker, which combined with the existing fuzz around the border of the entire movie made things hard to see often. The editing was also atrocious; the post-production music often plays louder than the dialog and since the actors already mumble most of their lines, everything is hard to understand. As a film, The Last Vampire on Earth fails on every level; it is a zero out of ten. The only way to get any enjoyment out of this film it to laugh at it's failures. If you like good bad movies, The Last Vampire on Earth has plenty of unintentionally hilarious enjoyment. If you don't enjoy bad movies, stay far away.

mother!

mother! doesn't really work as a film, but I don't think Darren Aronofsky really cared. mother! is very heavy-handed allegory that hits some surprising notes and gives us some very interesting and unique scenes, but spends most of its time wallowing in pretension and making sure you "get it". mother! feels like a dream: time is distorted and we have no idea how long things take, everything is over-the-top, and when the lights come on you feel disoriented and confused. People keep saying that the story is confusing, but there barely is a story to begin with. Aronofsky spends the first hour vaguely giving us a plot to follow, but then quickly drops it and goes off the rails to hammer in his message. There is nothing subtle about mother!. The allegory is very obvious and is only confusing because it has no flow. It is kind of fun to pick out the little "Easter Eggs" and roll your eyes at the huge billboards Aronofsky puts up. mother! doesn't seem to be intended to be enjoyed as a film, but to be endured as an experience. I don't know anyone I would recommend it to as a movie they would like, but I recommend it to everyone as an experience to be had.

The Happytime Murders

If you have seen the trailer, you have seen all this movie has to offer. All of the humor is obvious and in the trailer, everything else feels like an afterthought. It almost feels as if they filmed the scenes specifically for the trailer first and then gave up and fluffed up some filler to make it feature length. I love Melissa McCarthy, I even liked Tammy (which the internet tells me is a terrible movie), but she just felt tired and over it and Joel McHale was awful. I love the idea and was really hoping for something in the vein of Greg the Bunny, but The Happytime Murders takes itself too seriously. They don't even attempt humor that often, instead opting to go with ham-fisted commentary on racism. Greg the Bunny got the parallels in without bludgeoning you over the head with it and making it so lazy and unoriginal. There were a few high-spots, notably Maya Rudolph's performance and all the scenes from the trailer. I really wanted to like The Happytime Murders, it has such a great story and concept, but no one in the film seems to care even half as much as the audience.

Sausage Party

Lake Mungo

Lake Mungo is a horror faux-documentary that does a great job with feeling like a legitimate documentary but not so great with feeling like a horror movie. If it wasn't about ghosts, you could easily have convinced me that Lake Mungo was an actual situation being covered in a real documentary. The acting is perfect and they filmed it like the best Planet Earth crew they could find. For a movie made with a minuscule budget for an Australian film festival by a guy with no real movie experience, Lake Mungo is very impressive. My issue is that for a film that is almost and hour and a half, very little happens and we follow too many unimportant plot lines that take away from the real meat of the film. It works to create an atmosphere of unease, but I never felt it accomplished anything as a "horror" movie. I appreciate that it doesn't use jump scares and tries to actually build a scary aura, but it doesn't do enough to create that aura. Lake Mungo is a great film by technical standards, but misses the mark as a horror movie.