THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (2017) ***

I’m a big enough fan of writer/director Noah Baumbach to call The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) slight and lightweight and mean it as a compliment.  It’s a reiteration of themes he’s explored in past films in better, funnier ways.  That in no way diminishes the entertainment value.  It’s frequently funny and insightful, and Baumbach often captures the minutia of a dysfunctional family in a crisis with a documentarian’s eye.  

The structure is a bit obvious, but it serves its purpose nicely.  We first see how failed musician Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler) deals with his set-in-his-ways father (Dustin Hoffman), a sculptor who came close to stardom, but never quite made it.  The next story shows the relationship between Danny’s half-brother Michael (Ben Stiller) and their father.  Then, once their dad goes into the hospital, we see how the estranged brothers get on with one another.

Sandler has almost exclusively been working for Netflix these days.  This is the first of his Netflix movies I’ve seen.  I can’t speak to his performances in those films, but he’s as good here as he’s been in years.  Like Paul Thomas Anderson, Baumbach is able to take Sandler’s man-child schtick and filter it through his unique sensibility.  Their collaboration allows him to play his usual persona while tapping into his gifts as a dramatic performer.  

Hoffman goes all-in with his bristly performance.  I’m sure many folks out there know an immediate family member who acts the way he does, handing out backhanded compliments and misremembering what sibling did what in their childhood.  Stiller (who also played Hoffman’s son in Meet the Fockers) has a more thankless job, but he still delivers a fine performance.  The supporting cast, which features Judd Hirsch, an unrecognizable Emma Thompson, and a funny Adam Driver cameo are all a lot of fun and provide the film with plenty of seasoning.

WOULD YOU RATHER (2013) ***

The rich have been playing sadistic games with human lives for their own amusement in movies ever since The Most Dangerous Game.  Would You Rather is a low key, but effective variation on the same theme.  No one reinvented the wheel or anything here, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get the job done.  

A rich man (Jeffrey Combs) invites eight down-on-their-luck strangers to a dinner party that promises to change their fortunes.  During the meal, he plays games with them to test their willpower.  The stakes are small at first, but things become deadly when he has them play an extreme version of Would You Rather.  The first round involves them electrocuting each other and the rounds only get crueler and more twisted as the game wears on.

The fine cast help to milk as much mileage from the set-up as possible.  Brittany Snow makes for an ideal leading lady and Combs is a hoot as the twisted host of the party.  The dinner guests are well-cast too.  I especially liked seeing John Heard as a conspiracy theorist drunk and ex-porn star Sasha Grey as the most cold-hearted contestant. 

The film is a lot like Saw as Combs forces his guests to make split-second decisions in life or death situations.  Since it lacks that series’ endless moralizing, it means it can have a bit more fun with the premise.   Would You Rather is a smallish, three-chord, down and dirty horror flick that puts the emphasis on tension and dread and delivers more often than not.  Sure, you can anticipate where a lot of this is going, but director David Guy Levy keeps things moving at a healthy clip and delivers the goods.

WISH UPON (2017) *

Joey King stars as a bullied teenage girl who receives a mysterious Chinese box that grants wishes.  Naturally, she uses it to get revenge on her tormentors.  She wishes one girl would “go rot” and she develops a flesh-eating disease.  She wishes to be rich, and a relative dies and leaves her money.  You know, the usual sub-Twilight Zone shit.

Most of the teenage characters are obnoxious, annoying douches who are obsessed with their phones, so they pretty much get what’s coming to them.  They constantly say things like “haters gonna hate”, which makes you wish the box would utterly eviscerate them.  Unfortunately, the PG-13 rating won’t allow us the satisfaction of seeing it.  Because of that, the deaths are really lame and bloodless. (The box demands a life after every wish.)  They also heavily rely on a lot of off-brand Final Destination shenanigans.  There’s a kill by garbage disposal that tries so hard to trick you, but it’s obvious where it’s going. 

The whole movie is like that though.  It wants you to look one way to catch you off guard before trying to scare you.  If you ever saw a horror film in your life, all of this will be utterly predictable and tedious.

The teenagers are all annoying, but at least we have Sherilynn Fenn and Ryan Phillippe as the adults.  Trust me, nothing makes you feel old like seeing Phillippe playing a dad in a movie.  I did like the fact that he was a dumpster-diving hoarder.  I think that might be the first instance of a hoarder in a horror movie.  We also get a random ass Jerry O’Connell cameo too, because, why not?

I should’ve known it was gonna suck because it’s from the director of Annabelle.  It’s slightly better than Annabelle, but that’s like the faintest praise there’s ever been. Trust me, you’ll want to wish away Wish Upon. 

PREDESTINATION (2015) *** ½

Ethan Hawke works for a shadowy time traveling agency in 1970.  He poses as a bartender who hears a long, unlikely, but heartfelt story from an unassuming stranger who enters the bar.  Because of Hawke’s job description, he finds himself in a position to help the customer and offers them an opportunity to go back in time and fix their past.

To divulge any more would do the viewer a great disservice.  Because of that, I’m going to try to keep this review as short and spoiler-free as possible.  Do yourself a favor and stop reading this review and go check it out.

Based on a Robert A. Heinlein story, Predestination, from The Spierig (Undead) Brothers is a twisty, engaging, and fun thriller that starts small and personal before getting increasingly bonkers as it goes along.  It all hinges on a wild reveal that in lesser hands could’ve wound up being a total disaster.  However, the brothers handle the various time-hopping shenanigans and potential paradoxes with panache.

While the movie often threatens to go off the rails, the excellent performances help to keep it grounded.  Ethan Hawke (who also starred in the Spierigs' Daybreakers) and Sarah Snook are simply terrific together.  At first, it almost feels like their scenes in the bar came out of a two-character play, but the more they reveal to each other, the more moving and poignant it becomes.  These scenes are so good that they pretty much blow the time-traveling sections of the film (which sometimes resembles a slightly classier version of Timecop) out of the water.  One could argue that the ending is a bit pat, but then again, I guess it had to be in order to keep all the various paradoxes and timelines in check.

In short, this is a total blast from start to finish.  The final twist is particularly jaw-dropping.  By the time it’s over, you’ll probably wish you could go back in time and see it again for the first time.  

BLOOD FEAST (2018) ***

Blood Feast is one of my all-time favorites.  It had already been remade as Blood Diner (and to a lesser extent, Mardi Gras Massacre) and had an excellent, underrated sequel.  Because of that, this remake didn’t seem all that sacrilegious to me.  Besides, Two Thousand Maniacs and The Wizard of Gore had already been remade.  It was only a matter of time until someone got around to remaking this.

Robert Rusler stars… let’s take a moment to acknowledge how great that sentence is.  With the one-two punch of Weird Science and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 in 1985, he delivered two of my favorite asshole performances of the ‘80s.  He’s worked steadily throughout the years, but this is probably his meatiest role to date.  I can’t tell you how good it is to see him mostly unchanged and clearly having a ball with a rare lead role. 

Sorry, where was I?  Oh year, Robert Rusler stars as diner owner Fuad Ramses.  Together with his wife (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s Caroline Williams) and daughter (Sophie Monk), Fuad opens an American diner in Paris.  Before long, he’s knee-deep in financial troubles and resorts to taking a night job working as a security guard at a museum to make ends meet.  When he stops taking his anti-psychotic pills, he goes nuts and starts seeing visions of the goddess Ishtar (Sadie Katz from Wrong Turn 6) who demands sacrifices in order to be brought back to life. 

There are some nice nods to the original.  The fact that most of the action takes place in a diner is a fitting shout-out to Blood Diner too.  It’s also nice seeing Herschell Gordon Lewis himself popping up in brief cameo in his final film appearance.  

I’m still not sure how I feel about the domestic scenes of Fuad and his family.  Making him a semi-relatable character was an odd choice, but it helps to give this version its own identity.  (I did like the fact that the Connie Mason character from the original is now Fuad’s daughter.)  Rusler takes things very seriously and he’s admittedly quite good.  The whole movie rests on his shoulders and he is more than up to the challenge.  He even manages to make the role his own along the way.  While I personally miss Mal Arnold’s over the top theatrics, Rusler was enormously fun to watch. 

The original Blood Feast invented the gore film as we know it, but it still manages to pack a wallop more than fifty-five years later.  There’s plenty of gore to be found in this version.  We get castration, throat slashing, butt carving, and scalping.  There’s even a clever update of the original’s famous tongue-ripping scene.  My beef is that unlike the original where all the kills were bathed in bright light so you could see them in all their glory, the director of this one, Marcel (Seed 2) Walz drenched them in darkness.  Sometimes, it looks atmospheric, but most of the time, it’s just too dark.  

Blood Feast kind of stumbles a bit in the second act.  The build-up to Fuad’s mental breakdown is handled well enough, but some of the kills are lackluster (especially compared to the original).  HOWEVER (and that’s a big however, if you can’t tell) the final reel is a real showstopper.  Once we finally get to the blood feast, all bets are off.  I don’t want to spoil it for you (although I will say it’s kind of like if Panos Cosmatos directed the end of Hannibal), you’ve just got to see it for yourself.  I can definitely say that while the main course is a bit undercooked, Blood Feast ’18 delivers on the dessert.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST SHARK (2015) **

Drilling in a Canadian lake awakens a megalodon shark.  Anyone who is dumb enough to go swimming in there (and there’s quite a few) wind up becoming fish food for the prehistoric beast.  A college professor (Candice Lidstone) whose sister was killed by a meg is brought in to help destroy the shark.  Predictably, that’s just when a bunch of her students go out to the lake for a party.

You’ve got to give this movie one thing:  It has a great title.  As for the film itself, it’s about what you’d expect from a sub-SYFY Channel shark movie.  Sure, a lot of it is dumb on purpose, but unlike your typical Sharknado sequel, Raiders of the Lost Shark will every so often manage to squeeze a laugh or two out of you.  

Most of the humor comes at the expense of Canadians.  There are a lot of Canada jokes (one French girl goes topless in the lake and is promptly eaten) and many of the characters sport thick Canadian accents.  It’s almost as if writer/director Brett Kelly was trying to set a record for how many times he could get a Canadian to say “a-boot” in a single scene.

The shark attacks are somewhat fun.  They usually require the ladies in the cast to strip down to their bathing suit (or less) before going swimming and being eaten.  I don’t want to get into spoiler territory (then again, why worry about spoilers when you’re talking about a movie called Raiders of the Lost Shark?), but the ending is flat-out ridiculous.  It’s here where we learn a mad scientist has genetically engineered the shark to become a flying killer.  While the CGI shark attack scenes on the lake were passable at best, the flying shark effects are just the pits.  

That last paragraph may or may not make you want to see Raiders of the Lost Shark even more.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but as for me, there was some amusement to be found here.  As far as these things go, you can do a helluva lot worse. 

LEGEND OF THE FIST: THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN (2011) **

You’d think a movie where Donnie Yen plays a piano player who moonlights as a superhero to take out Japanese soldiers in occupied China during The Roaring ‘20s would be a no-brainer.  In fact, the opening scene, set in WWI, promises awesomeness at every turn.  I mean once you see Yen running around the battlefield like The Road Runner and taking out enemy snipers using only a knife and some Circ de Soleil moves, you sort of expect that level of excellence throughout the rest of the picture.  Sadly, Legend of the Fist:  The Return of Chen Zhen quickly bogs down from there and becomes a sluggish snooze fest that only occasionally brushes with Kung Fu glory.

I freely admit Chinese history is not my strong suit.  I have no real frame of reference for all the historical back and forth between the Chinese and Japanese forces, so all the spying shit between them didn’t really play for me.  That said, director Andrew (Infernal Affairs) Lau didn’t do much to bring these sequences any life or urgency, and as a consequence, they fall flat.  His pacing is stagnant at times, and the action is much too infrequent to make it truly worthwhile.

How you can mess up a movie in which Donnie Yen dresses up like Kato and beats the crap out of bad guys is beyond me.  Despite the rousing opening, the fights elsewhere in the film just can’t measure up.  There are a few good action beats here, mostly having to do with Yen taking people out with his knees, Tony Jaa-style.  There’s not nearly enough of them to make a difference though.  The finale is especially lackluster.  Yen, who is amusing while wearing his little fake mustache during his secret identity scenes, gives it his best shot, but he deserves better. 

AKA:  Legend of the Fist.  AKA:  The Return of Chen Zhen.  AKA:  Chen Zhen:  The Turbulence of Jing Wu.