HINDSIGHT IS 2020: NOTZILLA (2020) * ½

I’m a huge Godzilla fan.  I also like a good spoof as much as anybody.  The G-Man and the entire kaiju genre is certainly ripe for parody, given their low budgets, cheesy special effects, and shoddy dubbing.  Because of that, I was kind of looking forward to Notzilla.  Unfortunately, the film is just flat-out unfunny.  It’s a shame when the straight-up Godzilla movies offer more laughs. 

A Japanese scientist (Frederic Eng-Li) accidentally loses a dinosaur egg down an airplane toilet.  It lands in the Ohio River where it is found by a blowhard scientist named… uh… Dr. Blowheart (Tim Bensch).  One night, he gets drunk in his lab and decides to pour beer on the egg.  Much to his surprise, the egg hatches, and a baby dinosaur emerges.  The cute critter soon develops a taste for alcohol, and drinks more beer, which causes him to grow to enormous proportions.  Before long, the monster begins to wreak havoc on Cincinnati, and it’s up to the bumbling scientists to stop him. 

The set-up is promising as the badly dubbed (on purpose) Japan-set scenes are kind of funny.  Too bad things fall apart once the action switches over to America.  The gags are frequently unfunny and the ones that cause an occasional smirk are repeated way too often and/or are immediately run into the ground. 

Like most kaiju movies, the stuff with the monster is more entertaining that the human scenes, albeit only slightly in this case.  The creature is cute and all, but the filmmakers try way too hard to make him funny.  It would’ve made for a better movie had the creature been menacing in some way, and not an out-and-out goofball. 

The use of obvious toys and models during the monster mashing scenes is a nice touch.  The best gag comes when the jets are called in to stop Notzilla and he takes them out by simply cutting the strings that are holding the model planes up.  The movie really needed more of these fun touches if it was going to work though.

Overall, Notzilla might’ve been a good three-or-four-minute fake trailer, but at seventy-eight minutes it’s something of a chore to get through.  You would think that seventy-eight minutes would be just the right length for this sort of thing.  However, the gags are just too spread out to cut it as a feature.  

Bambi Meets Godzilla was more entertaining. 

SANTA VISITS THE MAGIC LAND OF MOTHER GOOSE (1967) * ½

If you thought Barry Mahon’s Christmas-themed kid’s movies were bad, wait till you get a load of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose!  Lewis basically sat a camera down and filmed a children’s stage, fantasy, and magic show and called it a movie.  That “film” was released as The Magic Land of Mother Goose, but when Christmas rolled around, Lewis added bookend scenes of Santa in there to sucker the kids into seeing it again.  

Santa reads a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes and falls asleep.  He then dreams about a high school-level stage production where Mother Goose’s characters come out of a giant book.  First, Old King Cole struts out.  He has a bit of trouble with the uncooperative Raggedy Ann and calls on his buddy Merlin to perform a series of magic tricks to set her ass straight.  More and more characters float in and out until the Wicked Witch bursts onto the scene and freezes everyone.  Except for Merlin, who puts her in a box and, in the film’s lone badass scene, burns her alive on stage!  Eventually, Mother Goose appears to wrangle the characters back into the book. 

The magic tricks are standard stuff, save for the great burning witch gag (which includes a close-up of her skeleton’s smoldering crotch).  The scenes of Merlin making a handkerchief dance, levitating Sleeping Beauty, and cutting Jack Sprat in half eat up a lot of screen time.  At least they’re more tolerable than the amateur hour high school theater-level performances by the storybook characters.  (The magic trick sequences also serve as kind of a warm-up to Lewis’s classic, The Wizard of Gore.)

Lewis is mostly known for his gore films, but he also did biker, sexploitation, and hicksploitation movies too.  Incredibly enough, as bad as Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose is, it’s far from his worst.  The burning witch scene alone saves it from being a One Star flick.  Also, the stuff with the freaky bargain bin Raggedy Ann doll is pure nightmare fuel.  So, if you are a Lewis completist, have a soft spot for chintzy ‘60s kid’s movies, or like to see vintage filmed magic acts, you might want to pay a visit to this magic land too.

AKA:  The Magic Land of Mother Goose.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: SURVIVE THE NIGHT (2020) ***

Survive the Night is another one of those DTV movies Bruce Willis made for Emmett/Furla.  I watched it hot on the heels of their other 2020 collaboration, Hard Kill.  After sitting through that thoroughly forgettable actioner, I had my expectations way low for this one, seeing as it was also from the same director (Matt Eskandari).  That was for the best too, because as it turns out, it is one of Willis’ best latter-day DTV efforts.  It also happens (by default) to be one of the best movies of the year.  Hey, in 2020, you take what you can get.

Chad Michael (One Tree Hill) Murray stars as a disgraced doctor who is forced to move his family back in with his folks.  His grumpy father (Willis) is upset with the way he’s conducted himself lately and the two are barely on speaking terms.  When a thief (Tyler Jon Olson, who’s also in Hard Kill) is wounded during a liquor store robbery, his hotheaded brother (Shea Buckner) is desperate to get him medical attention.  They follow Murray home from his new job at a walk-in clinic, break into the house, hold everyone hostage, and force him to perform emergency surgery at gunpoint. 

Survive the Night is a bit of a throwback movie.  The Desperate Hours-type scenario has been around for ages.  The use of one primary location also helps to disguise the low budget.  Contrast the dark house in the middle of nowhere to Hard Kill’s ugly abandoned factory setting.  It’s a much more organic and believable situation.  It also isn’t as noticeable that the filmmakers are trying to conveniently shoot around Bruce’s schedule this time out, which helps a bit too. 

While it feels more like a real movie than many of Willis’ cobbled-together efforts, it is still far from perfect.  The set-up is slow to build momentum and there is a LOT of exposition regarding Murray’s shady past.  It also gets a little repetitive as it comes down the home stretch as there are probably one too many escape-recapture-escape sequences. 

Since I’m a fan of the home invasion thriller subgenre, I was probably a bit more forgiving of Survive the Night’s shortcomings.  Those shortcomings are small potatoes compared to many of Willis’ recent outings though.  The film is surprisingly effective, reasonably efficient, and solidly entertaining.  Heck, it almost seems like Die Hard next to the completely underwhelming Hard Kill.

Murray does a better than anticipated job in the hero role, and he and Willis make for a fairly solid team.  Willis nicely plays a character a bit older than he is, and imbues him with a sliver bit more grizzled swagger than I was expecting.  This is the kind of “Old Man” role Robert Duvall used to play.  It will be interesting to see if Willis is able to turn a corner in his career if and when he eventually embraces his age and takes on more of these types of roles.  If anything, Survive the Night certainly proves there’s a bit more life in him than many give him credit for.  

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: HARD KILL (2020) * ½

During the opening credits, there are glimpses of our hero Derek (Jesse Metcalfe) having flashbacks to fighting in the Middle East.  As we all know, this is action movie shorthand for Hero Who Has Seen Some Shit.  Hard Kill is the kind of movie that doesn’t trust its audience to accept the obvious.  Because of that, after the opening credits, we see our hero having MORE war flashbacks, PLUS close-ups of his back tattoos AND back scars… all of which suggest… you guessed it… Hero Who Has Seen Some Shit.  It’s one thing to state the obvious.  It’s another thing to beat a dead horse for the first five minutes of the flick.

Anyway, Derek steps into the limo of his new employer, a billionaire named Chalmers (Bruce Willis) who hires him and his military team to serve as protection.  It seems Derek’s old nemesis, a terrorist known as “The Pardoner” (Sergio Rizzuto) has stolen Chalmer’s new A.I. technology AND kidnapped his daughter (Lala Kent).  To make matters worse, the place he agreed to make the exchange is a crumbling old factory that is almost impossible for Derek’s team to fortify.

Bruce Willis makes these Emmett/Furla movies on a weekly basis it seems.  He makes so many of them that you have to wonder if the early scenes with Bruce in the limo were filmed while he was on his way to the set of another Emmett/Furla movie.  Like many of these Willis/Emmett/Furla ventures, he isn’t really the star.  Instead, the heavy lifting this time out goes to Jesse Metcalfe.  In previous Emmett/Furla productions, Willis was paired with the likes of Thomas Jane, Frank Grillo, Michael Chiklis, and Christopher Meloni.  Not bad co-stars if you can get them.  However, most times he plays alongside co-stars such as Cole Hauser, Kellan Lutz, Chad Michael Murray, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar. 

Guess which category Jesse Metcalfe belongs to.

Hard Kill (which was probably titled to trick older folk with memory problems into thinking it was Die Hard) is a joyless, uneventful, and dull slog.  It mostly takes place in one ugly location, the supporting cast are all forgettable, and the villain (who looks like a Bradley Cooper stunt double) is blander than bland.  The action suffers from too much slow motion (again, to remind the audience that our Hero Has Seen Some Shit) and the various shootouts are rudimentary at best.

Willis doesn’t exactly phone it in, but he seems itching to use the speed dial.  The problem is, he isn’t given much to work with and he usually has a sidekick around to handle the exposition-heavy stuff while he stands around looking glum.  The way they get around overworking Willis is pretty funny though as Metcalfe and his team lock him in a room and forget about him for a good twenty minutes of screen time. 

In short, Hard Kill is hard to watch.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: AVA (2020) **

Ava is a perfectly acceptable, instantly forgettable variation on the hitman genre.  Instead, you know, this time it’s a hitwoman.  The good news is, it’s not one of those “One Last Job” plotlines.  The bad news is, we’d be better off if it was one of those “One Last Job” plotlines. 

Jessica Chastain stars as the titular hitwoman.  Lately, she’s been having a bad habit of talking to the targets in an effort to see if they really “deserve” what’s coming to them.  When her latest hit goes south, Ava’s boss, Duke (John Malkovich) suggests she take a leave of absence.  Ava then returns home to patch things up with her estranged family and former flame (Common).  Meanwhile, Simon (Colin Farrell), Duke’s top protégée and eventual successor, deems Ava a liability and becomes determined to take her out himself. 

The hitwoman plot works well enough.  The various shootouts and fight scenes are adequately handled by director Tate Taylor (who also directed Chastain in The Help).  There aren’t any particular action beats that will wow you, but at least the quick-cutting and shaky-cam stuff is kept to an absolute minimum.   

The performances help to give the movie a boost too.  Chastain makes for a likeable lead and she has a lot of chemistry with Malkovich, who delivers an eccentric performance in what otherwise could’ve been a thankless role.  Farrell also does a lot with a limited role and screen time.  I especially liked the way he always seemed a bit hurt and jealous of Malkovich’s affection for Chastain. 

The problem is the movie more or less grinds to a halt during the second act when Ava returns home to Boston to sort out her family shit.  Other than a catty performance by Geena Davis as Ava’s mother, these scenes fall flat with a sometimes-painful thud.  The love triangle stuff between Ava, her sister, and her ex-boyfriend just feels like it belongs in a different film altogether.  Some may appreciate that fact, but things get awfully clunky during the subplot with her ex getting in deep to a local underworld figure.  While I’m glad to see Joan Chen with a decent-sized role again, it’s kind of disheartening to see her playing what is essentially a softened spin on the stereotypical dragon lady character. 

Had Ava (the character) put her past fully behind her from the get-go, Ava (the movie) might’ve clicked.  I’m not saying it would’ve been a classic or anything, but it certainly would’ve improved things dramatically.  Because of the unnecessary subplots and family drama, it winds up missing the mark.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: AMITYVILLE ISLAND (2020) ½ *

Seems like the closest you can get to going to a video store and scanning the shelves for hilarious/stupid VHS boxes these days is opening up Tubi and mindlessly scrolling through all the thumbnails in the Horror Section.  I have to admit that when I saw the title Amityville Island along with the terrific artwork, I laughed for a good twenty seconds.  I got more enjoyment out of looking at that picture for twenty seconds than I did watching seventy minutes of the movie.

The artwork seems to suggest it’s going to be an Amityville Meets Jaws kind of thing.  That makes sense, especially if you know the old wives’ tale about being able to spot the Amityville Horror house in Jaws.  I mean, it’s not too much of a stretch as Jaws takes place on “Amity Island” after all.  So, this at the very least SEEMED like it could work. 

Unfortunately, even as far as no-budget, unrelated Amityville movies go, Amityville Island is unrelentingly bad in just about every way imaginable. 

A mom (Jamie Morgan) buys a bunch of stuff from a yard sale at the Amityville Horror house and soon becomes possessed by an evil doll.  She promptly slaughters her family (off screen) and goes to prison.  After fighting with another inmate (Danielle Donahue), they are sent to an island laboratory where a mad doctor is performing fertility experiments on female patients. 

The gimmick of having the spirit hopping out of our heroine’s body to briefly possess animals who kill people could have worked.  Too bad all we get is one cheap bear attack and, of course, the shitty CGI shark scene.  Both times, the animals’ eyes glow red before they go on a rampage.  If the film kept up this style of lunacy at a steady rate, it might’ve been at the very least, watchable.  However, the stuff with the mad doctor brings things to a crashing halt every time he shows up.

Even though it’s only seventy minutes, Amityville Island feels longer than watching a marathon of the original official Amityville movies.  All the pointless flashbacks help to further keep the pacing firmly stuck in the mud.  While I respect the attempt to weirdly graft a women in prison subplot in there, ultimately, this is a lame hodgepodge of half-baked ideas and cheap special effects strung together on a shoestring budget with amateurish actors.

Honestly, it’s nothing that two, maybe three more shark attacks couldn’t have cleared up.  If you come to the party expecting another diverting Shitty CGI Shark movie, don’t be fooled like me.  That shark in the picture is just there to lure you in.  Don’t fall for the bait, chum.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH (2020) * ½

Welcome to Sudden Death is the sequel to the Jean-Claude Van Damme action flick, Sudden Death.  That movie was a Die Hard rip-off that took place at a hockey game.  The game in question actually went into sudden death overtime, thereby justifying the title.  The terrorist attack in Welcome to Sudden Death happens during a basketball game.  You know… a sport that doesn’t have sudden death overtime.  

That’s just the first tip-off (HA!  See I can make puns that are actually relevant to the sport at hand!) you are in trouble. 

Look, when I started this Hindsight is 2020 column, I may or may not have chosen to review bad movies on purpose to highlight what a bad year 2020 was.  However, this is one of the films I was legitimately excited for and genuinely wanted to see.  It’s a shame too because I like Michael Jai White and he deserves much better than an inane DTV Van Damme sequel. 

I usually grade DTV action movies (especially DTV sequels to twenty-five-year-old action movies) on a curve.  Welcome to Sudden Death flattened the curve.  Sadly, that was the only curve that was flattened in 2020.

First, let’s talk about the look of this thing.  Much of Welcome to Sudden Death resembles a Disney Channel movie with its bright colors and bland camerawork.  Director of Photography Mark Irwin has done everything from Cronenberg’s The Fly to Disney’s Air Bud spin-off, Super Buddies.  This looks like it could almost take place in the Air Bud franchise as everything is bright, sunny, and fake looking.  You know, everything a gritty DTV actioner should not be.  (It is the polar opposite to the smoky, dingy look that Peter Hyams gave the original.)  In fact, the first act kind of plays like a Disney Channel show, what with the comic domestic scenes of White trying to please his wife and putting up with his mouthy kids.  (If you excuse the obligatory military flashback, that is.)

The action is just as bad.  I don’t know if they just didn’t have enough planning time, but the fights feel overly choreographed.  Most of the time, it looks like a filmed rehearsal (or maybe a martial arts demonstration) and not a realistic fight.  White does get one good fight against his wife, Gillian, and even then, it’s over way too fast.  There’s a funny bit during a locker room brawl too.  However, that’s not nearly enough to sustain a Die Hard rip-off.

We do get one novel touch has the henchmen get around the security by 3D printing their guns after they’ve entered the building.  The main baddie is no Powers Boothe, but since it is impossible to hold him to that standard, I will instead say that he is far from the worst thing about the movie.  Unfortunately, he’s saddled with a annoying rapper who’s held hostage in the owner’s box throughout the film.  Speaking of annoying, White also gets saddled with a stupid fat sidekick who will get on your nerves and wear on them from the moment he appears on screen. 

I love Die Hard rip-offs as much as the next guy.  Even as a fan of the subgenre and Michael Jai White, I have to say this belongs on the lowest rungs of their respective ladders.  In short, Welcome to Sudden Death is dead on arrival.