THUNDERBOLTS* (2025) ** ½

Thunderbolts* is a bargain bin version of The Avengers featuring leftover B and C characters from various Marvel movies and TV shows.  Because of that, it often feels more like a placeholder than an honest to goodness Marvel movie.  It doesn’t help that the team members have similar powers and costumes. 

Assassin Yelena (Florence Pugh) is having a bit of an existential crisis.  She wants to retire from black ops work, so she takes one final mission from her boss Valentina (Julia Louis Dreyfus).  Naturally, she double crosses Yelena, along with several other cut-rate superheroes in hopes that they will kill each other off.  They manage to survive, only to band together to fight off Valentina’s latest creation, the all-powerful evil supervillain Sentry (Lewis Pullman). 

Thunderbolts* is fast-paced and is never boring.  The stakes are refreshingly low too, although that winds up being kind of a mixed blessing.  On one hand, it just looks and feels like a Disney+ show.  On the other, it’s sort of nice to have a superhero flick where the fate of the galaxy doesn’t hang in the balance for a change. 

The idea of a ragtag group of misfit superheroes coming together should’ve been a home run, but the movie itself never really comes alive. While there is a brief spark of fun here and there, for the most part, it just seems like another day at the MCU office.  While Pugh does her best to keep the film together, it ultimately winds up feeling like a lower budget version of the shit we’re used to seeing.  Wyatt Russell is pretty funny as the delusional Captain America knockoff, USAgent, as is David Harbour as the loudmouth Red Guardian.  For the guy who’s been in the MCU the longest of anyone in the movie, Sebastian Stan feels curiously underutilized though.  Pullman is also much too bland to register as the villain.  At least Dreyfus is having fun chewing the scenery. 

Once the team finally starts working together to save citizens from crumbling rubble, the movie comes to life.  Too bad the scenes of Yelena getting trapped inside of her darkest memories almost immediately bog it back down.  For every misstep though, there’s a strong scene that showcase the film’s potential.  For a movie about a bunch of screw-ups fighting against their nature to do the right thing, I’d say that’s fitting. 

AKA:  The New Avengers.  AKA:  Thunderbolts*:  The New Avengers.

Marvel Cinematic Universe Scorecard: 

Spider-Man:  No Way Home:  ****

Avengers:  Age of Ultron:  ****

The Incredible Hulk:  ****

Iron Man:  ****

Thor:  Ragnarok:  ****

Avengers:  Endgame:  ****

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  ****

Spider-Man:  Homecoming:  ****

Iron Man 3:  ****

Captain America:  Civil War:  *** ½

Ant-Man:  *** ½

Guardians of the Galaxy:  *** ½

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:  *** ½ 

Avengers:  Infinity War:  *** ½

Werewolf by Night:  *** ½ 

Black Panther:  *** ½ 

The Avengers:  ***

Captain America:  The First Avenger:  ***

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  ***

Deadpool and Wolverine:  ***

Thor:  Love and Thunder:  ***

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness:  ***

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings:  ***

Captain Marvel:  ***

Spider-Man:  Far from Home:  ***

Thor:  ***

The Marvels:  ***

Captain America:  Brave New World:  ***

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3:  ***

Thor:  The Dark World:  ***

Iron Man 2:  ***

Thunderbolts*:  ** ½ 

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  Quantumania:  ** ½ 

Doctor Strange:  ** ½ 

Black Widow:  ** ½  

Black Panther:  Wakanda Forever:  **

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special:  **

Eternals:  * ½  

INTO THE DEEP (2025) **

As a young girl, Cassidy (Scout Taylor-Compton) watched in horror as a shark devoured her father.  Years later, along with her husband Gregg (Callum McGowan), she takes it upon herself to face her fears and go diving for sunken treasure in the same spot where she lost her old man.  Wouldn’t you just know it?  They are attacked by sharks once again.  When they flag down a passing vessel, they are dismayed to learn the captain (Jon Seda) is a drug smuggler who is searching the deep for a payload of cocaine.  The desperate Cassidy eventually offers to dive and recover the drugs in the shark-infested waters in exchange for her friends’ lives. 

As the title suggests, this is sort of like a mash-up of Into the Blue and The Deep with a little 47 Meters Down thrown in there for good measure.  While the shark attack scenes are decent, the waters are often muddied (both literally and figuratively) by phony-looking CGI blood.  They’re probably the best part of the movie.  Once the action switches to the drug dealers coercing our heroes into diving for their loot, the pacing begins to sag. 

The supporting cast is pretty weak.  McGowan doesn’t really register as a hero, even though he’s top billed.  Likewise, Stuart Townsend is rather bland as the boat captain.  Seda is just too obnoxious to make a credible villain as he looks and acts like a Wish version of David “The Demon” DeFalco.  I did think it was funny that he had a Michael Myers tattoo, seeing how Taylor-Compton played Laurie Strode in the Halloween remake.  I’m not sure if that was intentional or not. 

Seeing Richard Dreyfuss in another shark movie is kind of fun though.  He plays Taylor-Compton’s grandfather who gets a cool speech about people being a “guest" in the shark’s environment.  Too bad he’s mostly seen in flashbacks which are often intrusive to the narrative and take away from the immediacy of the action. 

Other than the relationship between Dreyfuss and Taylor-Compton, Into the Deep is rather shallow.

THE FAVOURITE (2018) *** ½

In 18th century England, Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) becomes bedridden, and allows her loyal lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), who also happens to be her secret lover, to handle the affairs of the country.  One day, Sarah’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) comes calling looking for a job as a lowly servant.  She soon ingratiates herself with the Queen and begins to curry favor with her.  She eventually winds up in the royal bedroom, much to the ire of Sarah.  Thus begins a series of betrayals between Sarah and Abigail as they vie for the Queen’s affections. 

It’s not every day you get to see a lesbian love triangle involving the Queen of England.  From the outset, The Favourite looks like your typical period piece, but it has a wicked streak about it and a sense of fun that a lot of these things lack.  Also, this might be the only movie on record with a slow-motion scene of British aristocrats in powdered wigs watching a duck race, so it’s got that going for it too.  I guess that’s what you get when you put a guy like Yorgos (The Lobster) Lanthimos at the helm. 

The backstabbing and conniving between Abigail and Sarah to win the heart of the Queen is a lot of fun.  Seeing the lengths each woman will go through to get what they want gives the movie an unexpected kick too.  I’ve seen some reviews that state the last reel or so is “anticlimactic”, but it’s a crucial part of the film as it shows the characters grappling with the consequences of their actions.   Without these scenes, it would’ve played like a typical romance.  With them, it’s more like a tragedy. 

Emma Stone is a real spitfire here, and she seems to be having a ball playing a devious temptress.  Weisz is equally fine as the more mannered of the suitors, but it’s Colman’s heartbreaking performance as the lonely and love-starved Queen who is the most memorable. 

Stone and Lanthimos later teamed up for the audacious Poor Things. 

OVERLORD (2018) **

American soldiers parachute behind enemy lines just before D-Day.  Their objective is to storm a heavily fortified Nazi compound.  Once inside, they are horrified to learn it’s a twisted medical facility housing gnarly Nazi medical experiments.  Seems like they’ve been making a serum to reanimate dead bodies and turn them into super soldier zombies.  It’s then up to the men to bury the fortress and the experiments along with it. 

Produced by J.J. Abrams and directed by Julius (The Pope’s Exorcist) Avery, Overlord is a bit of a mixed bag.  There’s a fun zombie movie lurking here somewhere, but the filmmakers never seem to find it.  While the film works in fits and starts, it seems like every time it gains a bit of momentum, it inevitably stalls out again. 

Maybe the tone was the problem.  It often plays like a war movie with horror undertones.  Honestly, it would’ve played better if the ratio was reversed.  Because of that, it takes a good chunk of the running time to get to the horror stuff.  Once we finally do, it’s not all that and a bag of chips. 

There are some scenes that work, like when one of the American troops turns into a monster or when our heroine makes like Rick Dalton and uses a flamethrower on a Nazi monster.  However, after these brief flashes of fun, the movie almost always reverts back to your standard “men on a mission” flick (but, you know… with zombies).  Then there’s the abrupt climax featuring two super soldiers squaring off that’s over before it even manages to build up any steam. 

Wyatt Russell is good as the no-nonsense corporal.  His performance probably singlehandedly got him the job playing the Temu Captain America for Marvel as he carries the same kind of brawny swagger here.  Bokeem Woodbine is also memorable as the hardass sergeant who leads his men into battle.  The rest of the cast struggle with their cliched characters though. 

I don’t know.  This might’ve been one of those cases where if the movie was generic but consistently entertaining, I may have been more forgiving.  It’s just that it’s a frustrating experience to see a film with fleeting sparks of inspiration that never really knows how to capitalize on them. 

AKA:  Operation:  Overlord.

THE KISS OF HER FLESH (1968) ****

The Kiss of Her Flesh was the capper of the “Flesh Trilogy”, created by exploitation mavericks Michael and Roberta Findlay.  And what a conclusion it is!  It’s one of the nuttiest roughies of all time. 

Michael returns as Richard Jennings, the one-eyed lunatic who goes around dispatching loose women in a variety of mind-boggling ways.  In the first scene, he ties a woman up and tortures her with a lobster claw before clamping electrodes onto her earrings and electrocuting her.  When Maria (Uta Erickson) hears about the death of her friend, she sets out to stop Jennings’ reign of terror once and for all. 

There is no such thing as a regular sex scene in this movie. In one wild scene, Erickson shoves a bunch of anal beads up her lover’s ass while he’s banging her.  This must’ve really been a doozy for the raincoat crowd back in ‘68.  It’s even funnier now when you realize the actor is none other than Earl Hindman, the neighbor from Home Improvement! No wonder he was always hiding his face.  He probably thought Tim Allen saw this. 

Oh, and did I mention there’s a scene where Erickson has sex with her sister?  You know a movie is twisted when incestuous lesbian lovemaking is the most “normal” sex scene in it. 

The kills are even crazier this time out.  In an ordinary movie a scene where a woman is killed by acid in her douche would be the highlight, but as you could probably already surmise, The Kiss of Her Flesh isn’t an ordinary movie.  The most insane scene is when Jennings forces a chick to suck his dick only to learn he has “poison semen”, which kills her almost instantly.  The nonchalant way Findlay says, “So long, suckah!” as he walks out of the room will have you scrambling for the rewind button so you can watch it again and again. 

Like the previous entries in the trilogy (The Touch of Her Flesh and The Curse of Her Flesh), this one features a funny/bizarre opening titles sequence.  This time, the names of the cast and crew appear on handwritten notes shaped like lips that pop up on a naked woman’s body.  Once again, the music is downright amazing and will have you tapping your toes throughout the depravity. 

The Kiss of Her Flesh is proof that sometimes the third entry in a trilogy can be the best.  It is also proof why movies are my drug of choice.  If you’re jonesing for a fix of WTF cinematic insanity, check it out!

ERASER: REBORN (2022) ** ½

If you’re reading a review of Eraser:  Reborn, you’ve probably already entertained thoughts of watching a twenty-six years later, completely unrelated, DTV sequel to an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick that doesn’t star Arnold Schwarzenegger.  By reading said review, you’re probably only seeking one thing:  Confirmation that it’s as bad as you’re expecting so you can talk yourself out of watching it.  Sorry to disappoint you.  While it’s no means what anyone would call a “good” movie, it is moderately entertaining and much better than slews upon slews of unrelated DTV sequels that are on the market. 

You know it’s kind of fascinating to me which movies get decades later DTV sequels and what doesn’t.  Let’s use Schwarzenegger’s filmography for example.  Why does Eraser get a sequel and not, say… End of Days?  It seems like you could do more with that concept.  Maybe brand name recognition?  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because the idea of an agent that acts as a bodyguard to people in Witness Protection and erases their identities is a lot easier to do on a DTV budget than say, a satanic action flick.  

The plot involves a woman (Jacky Lai) working with the Feds to get the goods on her kingpin husband.  When she accidentally kills him in a scuffle, an “Eraser” (Dominic Sherwood) comes in to take her into protection.  Predictably, his team accepts a bribe, and they set out to erase him too. 

Eraser:  Reborn is competent, albeit completely unnecessary.  The set-up, while derivative, is sound.  It’s not bad.  It’s just that the film begins to tread water whenever the action begins to dry up.  At best, it’s an above par DTV sequel.  At worst, it plays like something you would catch on ION TV in the middle of the afternoon. 

To his credit, Sherwood doesn’t even try to copy Arnold.  He’s more than happy to just play the role like the lead of a TV show.  His character is pretty bland for the most part, but I think he might go down in history as the first action movie hero that has a pet ostrich, so he has that going for him. 

Speaking of animals… The original had a memorable sequence involving alligators.  This one double-dips and provides silly kills featuring hippos and rhinos.  (The CGI is wonky on both counts.)  So, as you can see, the filmmakers were at least trying to honor the first movie while still daring to be a little different.  Oddball touches like that ensure Eraser:  Reborn won’t be completely erased from your mind soon after watching it. 

REAR WINDOW (1954) ****

Rear Window is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films.  It stars his Rope leading man Jimmy Stewart and it manages to one-up that movie.  In Rope, Stewart didn’t leave the room.  This time, he can’t leave his wheelchair. 

Stuck at home with a broken leg, Stewart grows antsy.  To pass the time, he takes to spying on his neighbors.  One day, he witnesses one of his neighbors commit a murder, or at least so he thinks, which causes him to peep on him even more. 

Stewart is excellent in a deceptively difficult performance.  Since most of the movie depends on his reactions to the goings-on across the street (curiosity, bemusement, fear, etc.), he effectively serves as our window (no pun intended) to the suspense.  In addition to Stewart, the film also reteams Hitch with his Dial M for Murder star, Grace Kelly, who looks effortlessly beautiful.  Thelma Ritter is a hoot as Stewart’s cantankerous nursemaid and the banter between the pair is often hilarious.  Raymond Burr gives a chilling performance as the prime suspect and the creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks, Ross Bagdasarian also appears as a musician neighbor. 

Rear Window finds Hitchcock fully leaning into his voyeuristic tendencies.  The subject has always been a part of the Hitchcock dynamic, but here the subtext becomes text.  Since we spend the whole movie with Stewart, the audience becomes virtual co-conspirators with him.  I’m particularly thinking of the scenes where he leers at a sexy neighbor he dubs “Miss Torso” dancing in her underwear. 

What’s so much fun is how Kelly and Ritter get caught up in the drama.  A lot of bland scripts would’ve wasted a lot of time with no one believing Stewart.  While that is initially the case, it doesn’t take long before they become just as curious as he is. 

The view outside the window is mesmerizingly orchestrated.  The comings and goings of the various neighbors going about their day unaware that they are being spied on while in constant motion doesn’t feel choreographed.  In fact, the view almost becomes a living, breathing character in the film.  

In short, it’s a must-see.

Hitch’s next was To Catch a Thief, which also starred Kelly.