SAMARITAN (2022) ** ½

Years ago, the superhero Samaritan fought his nemesis… uh… Nemesis in a battle to the death.  Now, a young boy named Sam (Javon “Wanna” Walton) becomes convinced that his next-door neighbor (Sylvester Stallone) is the mythic crimefighter.  Meanwhile, a crime lord (Pilou Asbaek) gets his hands on Nemesis’ hammer, the only thing that can kill Samaritan, and begins amassing fanatic followers to take over the city. 

It's bad enough we have all these comic book movies based on actual comic books.  It’s even worse when Hollywood starts making up their own superheroes (which means they don’t have to pay any royalties).  Even though I pretty much knew what to expect from this (especially since it went straight to Prime), I still tried to remain hopeful because of the participation of Sylvester Stallone.  

Fortunately, Samaritan was just a little bit better than I anticipated.  That’s mostly due to Stallone’s performance, which is easily the best thing about the movie.  His character may be cliched as all get out (Old Man With a Secret Who Just Wants to Be LEFT ALONE), but he finds ways to bring a hint of humanity to the film.  

Things get off to a janky start.  The superhero origin, done in a cartoonish style, is really cheesy, and the mythology behind the characters is pretty thin.  (They are brothers who don’t like each other.)  Luckily, the film gets better as it goes along, even though it takes a while to find its footing.  The scenes where Sly teaches the kid to fight have a Rocky Lite vibe to them, and the big twist is moderately effective.  

The biggest problem with Samaritan is that it’s just too low key for its own good.  That’s probably due to budgetary constraints more than any attempt to ground the characters in “the real world”.  Once the film (and the main character) finally embraces what it really is, it actually becomes a lot of fun.  The action in the finale is surprisingly strong, and some of the violence pushes the realms of its PG-13 rating.  (It also makes terrific use of its One-F-Bomb-Per-PG-13-Rating.)  If it had less moping and more rope-a-doping, it might’ve been a contender.  

AKA:  Nemesis.

NIGHTMARE FESTIVAL (1989) ***

Friend of the Video Vacuum, Stuart McPherran has posted a lot of great trailer compilations online in recent years, and I’ve enjoyed every single one of them that he has uploaded.  He let me know about one I missed, and I eagerly checked it out.  Among the highlights are the trailers for Forbidden Planet (which was shown as part of a ‘70s re-release of “MGM Children’s Matinees”), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which parodies The Seventh Seal and The Seven Samurai), Sleeper (in which Woody Allen is interviewed in between snippets of the film), The House That Dripped Blood (which has a great tagline:  “Vampires!  Voodoo!  Vixens!  And VICTIMS!”), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (narrated by the sexy star, Kathryn Grant), and The Gates of Hell (which looks like it was culled from a VHS release).  

Nightmare Festival presents a good mix of trailers that span across the decades and subgenres.  Included are previews from the ‘30s (Rocket Ship), ‘40s (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), ‘50s (The Incredible Shrinking Man), ‘60s (The Fearless Vampire Killers), and ‘70s (Ben).  Because of that, it’s a good primer for fans of horror and sci-fi alike.  There are also plenty of ads for films by notable directors, such as Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Eaten Alive), Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs), William Castle (Macabre and The Tingler), and Robert Wise (The Haunting and The Day the Earth Stood Still), and movies that appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000 are well-represented too (The Leech Woman, It Conquered the World, and The Crawling Hand).  While there are some trailers that will be overly familiar for dyed-in-the-wool trailer compilation aficionados like me (the trailer for the double feature for The Blood Spattered Bride and I Dismember Mama is trotted out yet again), there’s a nice assortment of fun, oddball, and iconic trailers here to please just about everyone.  

The complete list of trailers is as follows:  Forbidden Planet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), The Incredible Shrinking Man, Them!, Raw Meat, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Ben, Sleeper, Race with the Devil, Invaders from Mars, Things to Come, I Married a Witch, Tales from the Crypt, Island at the Top of the World, Scream, Baby, Scream, Rocket Ship, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The Invisible Ray, The Astro-Zombies, The House That Dripped Blood, The War of the Worlds, The Blob, Queen of Outer Space, One Million Years B.C., The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The Gates of Hell, a double feature of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space, Macabre, The Tingler, a double feature of The Blood Spattered Bride and I Dismember Mama, Horrors of the Black Museum, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, The Legend of Hell House, Sugar Hill, The Woman Eater, The Flesh Eaters, The Haunting, Count Yorga, Vampire, Eaten Alive, The Omen, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Dracula:  Prince of Darkness, Carrie, The Leech Woman, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Valley of the Dragons, It Conquered the World, The Crawling Hand, Revenge of the Creature, Children of the Damned, and Freaks (re-release).

ORPHAN: FIRST KILL (2022) ** ½

Sometimes with prequels, it’s best to wait a few years until you come up with a great reason to justify its existence.  Sometimes, it’s better to strike while the iron is hot.  The makers of Orphan:  First Kill waited thirteen years to tell us the origins of the deranged psycho kid, Esther.  What’s odd is that in 2009, Isabelle Fuhrman, who plays Esther, was nine years old.  Now she’s pushing twenty-three.  If you saw Orphan, you will remember that Esther was revealed to be a thirtysomething dwarf masquerading as a child.  Now instead of having a kid playing an adult playing a kid we have an adult playing an adult playing a kid.  Got that?  I’m not sure why they waited so long, especially since Fuhrman is much too old to play the part, but that at the very least makes it memorable.  

They don’t do a convincing job trying to cover up the fact that Fuhrman is too long in the tooth to play a kid either, which may give the film some shelf life as a camp classic.  The child doubles are obvious, as are the parts where the other actors are clearly standing on apple boxes to make it look like they’re a lot taller than her.  It all seems sloppy and cheesy, which of course, I kind of dug.  

Esther murders her way out of an Estonian psycho ward.  She eventually poses as a missing child and dupes the parents into thinking she is their long-lost daughter.  Before long, she begins manipulating and killing.  

Although it’s a little slow to get going, it gets better/cheesier/weirder as it goes along.  The first film had an insane twist ending, so naturally, you’re wondering if they will even try to top it.  While the twist in this one is appropriately nasty, it falls short of the one from the original.  Julia Stiles, who I hadn’t seen in a while, sinks her teeth into the role of the estranged mother gamely and gets the best line of the movie when she says, “If you think I’m going to let some psycho dwarf destroy what I’ve built… you’re mistaken!”

DAY SHIFT (2022) ***

Jamie Foxx stars as a vampire hunter in the sunny San Fernando Valley.  Unlike most screen vamp slayers, he has modest aims.  He’s not trying to rid the world of bloodsuckers.  He just wants to get enough dough to pay for his kid’s braces.

Day Shift kicks off with a great fight sequence with an old vampire contortionist lady who bends, cracks, and gnarls her body in a variety of ways while attacking Foxx.  From there on, it gets a little spotty in places.  Like most Netflix movies, it’s way too long (almost two hours), but the biggest debit is the weak villain.  As Audrey San Fernando, Karla Souza looks and acts less like a Queen of the Damned and more like a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills.  That or maybe a reject from one of those house-flipping reality shows since her character moonlights… err… daylights as a real estate mogul.  

Fortunately, the rest of the supporting cast is a lot of fun.  There’s Snoop Dogg as a cowboy vampire hunter, Peter Stormare as a sleazy pawnbroker who buys vampire teeth on the black market, and Dave Franco as Foxx’s nerdy by-the-book partner.  The best characters are a pair of badass Russian vampire hunters played by Steve Howey and DTV action legend Scott Adkins.  Their big action sequence where they team up with Foxx to dispose of a nest of vamps is breathless, fun, and inventive.  (I especially dug the stake that can also be used as a nunchuck.)  It’s enough to make you wish that Adkins and Howey get their own spin-off somewhere down the road.

Foxx’s performance helps to tie the loosey-goosey tone together.  He’s very funny and is at his best when he’s ad-libbing insults at the expense of Franco.  He also fares quite well in his everyman family man scenes too, which grounds the film from flying off the rails.  

Overall, Day Shift is more than a tad bit uneven.  It often feels like parts of a couple of different scripts sewed together.  All this barely gels, and if it skates by with a *** rating, it’s thanks to the charm of the cast.  It’s just that it never quite realizes its full potential.  There are times when it flirts with awesomeness (like the stuff with Adkins and Howey), and yet it always feels like it’s holding back.  Ultimately, it delivers just enough to make it all worthwhile, but it kind of leaves you wanting more.

PREY (2022) ** ½

Prey is understandably low key next to its Predator predecessors since it takes place three hundred years before Arnold Schwarzenegger kicked extraterrestrial ass.  Still, it’s lacking a certain quality that makes the franchise so much fun.  (AVP:  Requiem notwithstanding.)  The most noticeable missing ingredient is the camaraderie between a ragtag group that fights the monster.  Here, we just get a Comanche woman named Naru (Amber Midthunder) trying to prove to her tribe she can be as good of a hunter as the men.  While she gives a strong performance, the supporting characters lack substance and pale in comparison to the rogues’ gallery typically found in the series.  

While the last entry, The Predator had definite peaks and valleys, it was at the very least a memorable (if a tad goofy) effort.  This one is more or less “not bad” all the way through.  On one hand, that’s a good thing when you’re watching it as you’re never really bored.  However, I can’t say I’ll be thinking about this one all that much in the near future.  I mean, no one will ever put Predators at the top of their Predator franchise ranking, but it at least had that badass samurai duel.  Prey, on the other hand, is relatively enjoyable.  It's just that it’s sorely lacking a big set piece like that one to put it over the top.  

It doesn’t help that the Predator design is piss-poor.  I’m not sure who came up with the idea to have his face look like an asshole, but it’s not intimidating or scary in the least.  Another debit is some of the shoddy CGI, especially for the animals.  There’s a scene where the Predator fights a bear that should’ve been a real crowd-pleaser, but it feels rushed and is hampered by crummy computer effects that make the bear look cheesy.  Give me the Lou Ferrigno/bear fight from Hercules any day.  

Still, as a stripped-down, three-chords, down-n’-dirty Predator flick, it almost, but not quite, gets the job done.  A lot of the stuff you’ve come to expect from the franchise is here (minus the machine guns, obviously) and done competently enough.  Midthunder carries the movie admirably and she clearly has what it takes to become a bona fide action star.  Maybe next time they can build a better movie around her.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021) *** ½

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is a nifty little change of pace for the director.  He trades in his typical comedic approach for a highly stylized horror-thriller that has echoes of many of the old masters.  There were moments here that reminded me of Argento, De Palma, Craven, Polanski, and even Kubrick, but they all feel like an organic aspect of the movie than a mere pastiche of inspirations.

A shy girl named Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) moves from her small English town to London to attend fashion school.  Longing to get away from her annoying roommate, she strikes out on her own and rents an apartment.  Soon, she begins dreaming of the beautiful tenant (Anya Taylor-Joy) who lived there in the ‘60s.  

To go into any more detail would be a disservice to potential viewers.  What makes the film so much fun is how Wright puts our heroine AND the audience squarely in Taylor-Joy’s shoes.  The way he subtly turns the screws to his characters (and us) is masterfully done, and eventually, we feel like we are in the grips of a nightmare we can’t wake from.

Wright slathers on the style too, which helps make the flashback scenes crackle.  The sequences where McKenzie follows Taylor-Joy down a rabbit hole of increasingly seedy predicaments are exhilarating and intoxicating.  He also gives us a gnarly murder sequence that would make any of the aforementioned filmmakers envious.  Wright’s use of nicely timed needle drops of ‘60s tunes also helps heighten the atmosphere.

McKenzie does a great job as the curious bystander who quickly gets thrown in the driver’s seat of terror.  She does some of the best terrified acting I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s Taylor-Joy though who steals the movie with her longing, hypnotic gazes at the camera.  She’s so mysterious and alluring that you can’t blame McKenzie for chasing after her, even after she knows it’s all leading to a tragic end.  

At a few minutes shy of two hours, Last Night in Soho is overlong to a fault.  Wright’s overreliance on CGI specters furthers hinders things.  I know there’s a “reason” why they look the way they do, but their appearances aren’t particularly effective.  These quibbles are relatively minor in the long run and don’t detract too much from the overall mood though.  For when Wright is cooking, the movie really sizzles.  It is certainly a Night to remember. 

GAME NIGHT (2018) ***

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Game Night recently, and as an avid boardgame fanatic, I figured I would roll the dice and check it out for myself.  It also helped that I was a big fan of directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s previous flick, Vacation.  While it’s not quite on the level of that classic, it’s still a lot of fun.  

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams star as a couple who live for game night with their friends.  Bateman’s ultra-successful big brother (Kyle Chandler) crashes the festivities and tries to one-up his sibling’s quaint evening of fun by staging an elaborate murder-mystery dinner party-style game.  The premise is that one of the guests will be “abducted” and the rest of the party has to find them.  Naturally, Bateman’s brother gets kidnapped for real, which leads to several complications.  

Game Night is sort of like a reworking of The Man Who Knew Too Little as our heroes think they are taking part in an elaborate game, but they are actually in danger every step of the way.  Unlike that flick, the main characters here catch on to that the scenario is all too real about halfway in, which kind of takes some of the fun out of it.  There are also one or two totally unnecessary plot twists in the final reel, although nothing that threatens to derail the film’s momentum.  Despite those quibbles, Daley and Goldstein deliver plenty of memorable moments and funny sequences (like when McAdams is forced to perform an impromptu back-alley surgery on Bateman’s bullet wound) to make it worthwhile.  

It helps that the cast is strong all the way around.  Bateman is still playing yet another variation on his usual shtick, but he is nevertheless very funny.  His chemistry with McAdams is winning too, and if there isn’t a sequel in the cards (heh), then I hope they are at least paired together again real soon.  I also liked Jeffrey Wright’s intense bit as the hardboiled “detective” in the game as well as the cameo by the “big bad” in the finale.  It’s Jesse Plemons though who steals scene after scene as Bateman’s nosy cop neighbor.