ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA (2023) ** ½

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  Quantumania is definitely the least of the three Ant-Man movies and would land in my Bottom Five MCU films overall.  I’m not saying that it’s bad exactly.  It just felt like they were trying to shoehorn Ant-Man into a mold made for the Guardians of the Galaxy.  If anything, it’s proof that the concept and the character work best on a… ahem… smaller scale.  

This time out, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) looks on as his brilliant daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) opens up a portal to the Quantum Realm.  It doesn’t take long before the both of them, not to mention the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) and her parents (Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas) get sucked into the Realm with no way to return home.  The Quantum Realm is also home to a nefarious villain named Kang the Conqueror (Johnathan Majors) who takes Cassie hostage and coerces Ant-Man into helping him escape so he can go off and rule the galaxy.  

The Quantum Realm looks like a cheesy, overly CGI-ed version of the Cantina scene in Star Wars on steroids.  In fact, every frame of the film that takes place in the Quantum Realm feels like Greenscreen City.  Everything has a loosey-goosey computer animated feel that makes the effects and creatures in Avatar (or heck, even The Phantom Menace) look startlingly realistic in comparison.  That is to say, it looks like a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Heck, even the humor is more in line with the Guardians than Ant-Man (like the little comic relief blobby dude), which is OK, I guess, but I came to see an Ant-Man movie, dammit.

It's telling that the best sequence in the movie comes when Ant-Man must rely on his thieving skills to steal a vital piece of machinery for Kang.  This is the only time the flick really feels like it belongs in the Ant-Man series.  The ensuing “Probability Storm” scene is a lot of fun too.  However, the film really needed two or three more scenes of this caliber to make it a worthy successor to the previous Ant-Man entries.  

The cast is a mixed bag.  The most rewarding dramatic scenes revolve around Rudd and Newton.  Rudd excels at being a likeable goofball, and their scenes together hit the right blend of sweetness and believability.  Their scenes together give the film the only moments of grounded human emotion.  Douglas gets a few laughs, but mostly, he’s just along for the ride.  The biggest laughs come courtesy of M.O.D.O.K. and a special guest star playing a sinister space gangster.  

Pfeiffer gets more screen time here than before, but she’s pretty much wasted as her character is little more than a walking exposition dump.  And for a movie with her character’s name in the title, Lilly isn’t given a whole lot to do.  Majors is a disappointment as the villain too.  He’s much better here than he was in the dreadful Loki series, but he’s a bit of a bore, which is alarming since he’s supposed to be the next Big Bad for this “Phase” of the Marvel franchise.  It doesn’t help that he says all his dialogue in the same disinterested, half-yawning manner.  I guess he was trying to underplay the character’s villainy, but he ultimately winds up not feeling like a genuine threat.  

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

Black Panther:  *** ½ 

The Avengers:  ***

Captain America:  The First Avenger:  ***

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  ***

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:  ***

Thor:  The Dark World:  ***

Iron Man 2:  ***

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

Doctor Strange:  ** ½ 

Black Widow:  ** ½  

Eternals:  * ½  

TUBI CONTINUED… TWITCH: YOU ARE MY TOY (2004) **

Minori (Yumeka Sasaki) is a photographer with a bad habit of getting involved with unavailable, married, and/or attached men.  Her latest assignment has her working alongside a reporter named Shinichi (Mikiya Sanada) on a story about a reclusive manga artist (Fuyu Ooba).  When the interview proves fruitless, their editor (Masahiko Hori) forces Shinichi into forging a fabricated article.  This action sets into motion a chain of romance and heartbreak between the two co-workers.

Twitch:  You are My Toy is certainly an odd title for such a small, forgettable, and if we’re being completely honest, unsexy movie.  Nobody twitches and I don’t remember anybody getting treated like a toy.  It’s a Japanese flick, so maybe something got lost in translation along the way, but I still kinda doubt it.  

Even though this is technically a Japanese “Pink” movie, it feels more like a cheap soap opera with an occasional dash of T & A and softcore sex scenes here and there.  All the characters are vaguely interconnected and have thinly sketched backstories.  The details of their various histories with one another are slowly doled out throughout the film, but it ultimately never comes together in a meaningful way.  Since we only know fragments of where the characters have been and never get a chance to see where they are going (thanks to the abrupt ending), it’s hard to care very much about them.  It winds up feeling like we’ve caught an episode of a soap opera midway through a season and there’s no real way for us to catch up.  The short running time (it’s only forty-seven minutes long) only adds to the TV soap feeling.  

As far as the sex scenes go, they are OK, I guess.  I would’ve like to have seen more of them, but the ones we do get aren’t bad.  However, they’re not nearly steamy enough to compensate for the lackluster melodramatics.  

TUBI CONTINUED… CURSE OF THE REANIMATOR (2022) ** ½

Curse of the Reanimator is the third and final chapter in Full Moon’s Miskatonic U trilogy.  Brilliant college student Crawford Tillinghast (Dane Oliver) makes an uneasy alliance with the evil Dean (Michael Pare) to restart the dangerous Resonator.  Complicating matters is a grieving mother (Kate Hodge) who wants to use the machine to revive her dead son, and a sexy lesbian witch (Amanda Jones) that wants to control it and bring about the end of the world.  Meanwhile, Herbert West (Josh Cole) continues to attempt to perfect his reanimation serum, with deadly results.  

As you could tell by that plot description, Herbert West doesn’t get a lot to do this time out, despite what’s implied by the title.  Although the film is much more of a conclusion to Tillinghast’s story arc, it does leave things open-ended for more West adventures down the road, which is a good thing.  It does seem like a missed opportunity not to intersect Tillinghast and West’s storylines in a meaningful way, but overall, Curse of the Reanimator remains a decent enough flick.  It just doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first two movies in the series.  

Cole is once again the reason to watch it as he injects a shot of adrenaline (in more ways than one) into the film whenever he’s on screen.  If Jeffrey Combs refuses to do any more Re-Animator movies, then I’d say Cole is a fine substitute as he is able to breathe new life into the beloved character.  He captures Combs’ voice and mannerisms quite well, but still puts his own spin on things, which helps make it feel like a separate entity from the original Re-Animator series.  I also liked that they gave him a sex assistant (Christina Braa) this time out.  Too bad they don’t get an opportunity to flesh out their relationship more.  Hopefully, they’ll reunite somewhere down the road for future installments.  

FRANCO FEBRUARY: BLACK BOOTS LEATHER WHIP (1983) ** ½

Robert Foster stars as a washed-up private detective who is about to go on the lam to get away from some pesky loan sharks when he’s hired to by a sexy femme fatale (Lina Romay) to retrieve her purse from a junkyard in exchange for a big payday.  He gets more than he bargained for when he goes to get the bag and is jumped by two goons.  Naturally, he kills them in self-defense, but the cops come looking for him anyway.  He changes his appearance, and eventually gets embroiled in a scheme to rub out his new lover’s enemies.

Jess Franco’s Black Boots Leather Whip starts out like a sexy version of a private eye movie before slowly morphing into a hitman drama.  The film’s best scenes are its early ones where Romay (ideally cast as the femme fatale in a bad blonde wig) is luring Foster into her web of deceit.  The ensuing sequences of Foster setting up Romay’s husband’s underworld associates to be murdered are less effective, although there are some decent moments along the way.  (Like the scene where a dominatrix gets the upper hand on Foster.)

Black Boots Leather Whip is surprisingly progressive for an exploitation movie in 1983.  Romay’s husband in the film is trans, and one of his illicit businesspeople is a blind woman.  That doesn’t necessarily make it “good”, but it makes it memorable.  

Lina is sexy as always and is the main draw.  Her best scene comes when she performs in a live sex show and runs Christmas tinsel all over her partner before blowing him.  I think my favorite moment though is when our hero changes his identity so the cops won’t find him, and he goes from looking like Magnum P.I. to a secret agent in a ‘60s spy movie.  I have to wonder since the hero’s appearance and the plot changes so drastically after the first act if this was actually two unfinished movies loosely stitched together.  

Like all the movies featured for Franco February, Black Boots Leather Whip has plenty of scenes where the camera wanders aimlessly around and zooms in on seemingly inconsequential things.  It’s also yet another film where Romay is saddled with a terrible blonde wig.  Of Franco’s usual stock players, Romay and Foster are the two most notable names yet again.

TUBI CONTINUED… BEYOND THE RESONATOR (2022) ***

After college student Crawford Tillinghast (Dane Oliver) and his friends experimented with the “Resonator” at Miskatonic University, they have been having weird dreams and strange hallucinations of a sexy squid woman beckoning to them.  She corrupts one of Crawford’s friends into committing suicide, which spurns him into trying to shut down the Resonator once and for all.  Meanwhile, a new student named Herbert West (Josh Cole) arrives on campus and starts conducting experiments to bring the dead back to life.  

Beyond the Resonator is a solid continuation of the surprisingly enjoyable The Resonator:  Miskatonic U.  It’s basically Charles Band’s MCU-inspired reboot of From Beyond and Re-Animator placed under the umbrella of one cinematic universe.  (In this case, the “MCU” doesn’t stand for “Marvel Cinematic Universe”, but “Miskatonic Cinematic Universe”.)   It’s not a patch on the originals (I mean, you can’t top the classics), but it is nevertheless a fun, breezy good time.  It’s certainly a lot better than the usual Full Moon offerings, that’s for sure.  

Writer/director William (Baby Oopsie) Butler does a good job honoring what came before while at the same time creating something new and giving this series its own distinct identity.  While it never quite attains the madcap fun of From Beyond or Re-Animator, it does feature what I believe to be the screen’s first zombie koala attack.  That alone is enough for me to hold it in high esteem.  

Cole has some pretty big shoes to fill in the Herbert West role, but I’ll be damned if they don’t fit him like a glove.  He does a dead-on Jeffrey Combs impression and is a lot of fun to watch while conducting his unspeakable experiments.  Although no one else in the cast comes close to matching his intensity (the From Beyond segments are noticeably weaker than the Re-Animator stuff), I’d recommend the film based solely on his perfectly pitched performance.  Whenever he’s re-animating, the movie really comes alive.

SINISTER CINEMA CLASSIC SCI-FI TRAILERS VOLUME 1 (199?) ***

After tearing through the Sinister Cinema Classic Horror Trailers compilations a while back, I thought it was finally time for me to start checking out their Classic Sci-Fi Trailers collections.  While Classic Sci-Fi Trailers Volume 1 features a lot of trailers you’ve probably seen elsewhere (particularly in the Something Weird compilations), there’s still a lot to admire here.  It will be just the thing for movie fans looking for a quick fix of sci-fi classics (The Time Machine and Creature from the Black Lagoon), cheesy B-movies (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Horror of Party Beach), and straight-up schlock (Phantom from Space and Night of the Blood Beast).

The first thing you notice is that many of the trailers are shown more or less in chronological order.  That way, you get to see how the various trends came and went throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s.  Films about alien invasions, like those found in Invaders from Mars and Robot Monster give way to the giant atomic monsters of Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Monster That Challenged the World.  Mad scientist movies such as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and The Unearthly are replaced in favor of creatures run amok flicks like The Monster of Piedras Blancas and Revenge of the Creature.  It’s also fun seeing such lowbrow schlock like The Hideous Sun Demon, The Brain Eaters, and Attack of the Giant Leeches, rubbing elbows with big budget studio fare like Barbarella, Planet of the Apes, and 2001:  A Space Odyssey.   

At nearly two hours, it does feel a little on the long side.  Fortunately, the inclusion of vintage concession stand ads and drive-in snipes helps prevent things from feeling stale.  I kind of wish there were more of them (they pretty much dry up in the second half), but the ones we do get are pretty great.  I can’t wait to check out further volumes in the series (of which there are many).

The complete trailer round-up is as follows:  Flight to Mars, Invaders from Mars, Phantom from Space, It Came from Outer Space, Robot Monster, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Killers from Space, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Man Who Turned to Stone, The Monster That Challenged the World, The Vampire, Return of the Fly, The Colossus of New York, Monster on the Campus, Terror from the Year 5000, Night of the Blood Beast, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, The Time Machine, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Beyond the Time Barrier, The Leech Woman, Crack in the World, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, a double feature of Die Monster Die! and Planet of the Vampires, Planet of the Vampires, Fantastic Voyage, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Them!, Revenge of the Creature, This Island Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea, The 27th Day, a double feature of The Crawling Eye and Cosmic Monsters, The Land Unknown, Enemy from Space, The Giant Claw, The Cyclops, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Unearthly, 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Brain Eaters, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Hideous Sun Demon, Satellite In the Sky, Gorgo, Valley of the Dragons, Mysterious Island, The Horror of Party Beach, Barbarella, Thunderbirds Are Go, Five Million Years to Earth, Planet of the Apes, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY (2023) *

Soon after A.A. Milne’s beloved Winnie-the-Pooh lapsed into the public domain, this horror movie based on the character was announced.  I have to admit, it was a pretty great idea.  Unfortunately, that’s about all writer/director Rhys (Firenado) Frake-Waterfield had:  An idea.  He just never bothered to build a movie around the idea that was worthy of the initial inspiration.  

The opening animated segment held a lot of promise.  Christopher Robin finds, feeds, and nurtures a group of anthropomorphic animals hiding out in the Hundred Acre Wood.  When Christopher grows up and takes off for college, he leaves the animals to fend for themselves.  They turn feral and cannibalistic, and wind up eating poor old Eeyore.  The shot of Eeyore’s tail attached to his tombstone billowing in the breeze gave me a hearty chuckle.  Once it switches over to live-action, it’s all downhill from there.  

Christopher (Nikolai Leon) returns to the Wood years later with his new bride (Paula Coiz) in tow.  Of course, he doesn’t realize the animals have become cannibal killers, and is shocked when they kill his wife and take him prisoner.  Meanwhile, a group of friends gather in the woods nearby for a girls’ weekend and they are eventually menaced by the deranged Pooh and Piglet.  

Frake-Waterfield may have started out with an ingenious idea, but he seems to have little understanding how films in general work.  Scenes just sort of happen at random and peter out with little consequence.  Scenes that in most movies would’ve been short and sweet, seem to go on forever here.  Scenes that in other pictures would’ve been allowed to breathe in order to flesh out the characters or mount suspense end abruptly or are awkwardly edited.  

Likewise, the horror sequences lack build-up, momentum, or even a satisfying payoff.  Take for instance the scene where one of the women takes selfies in the hot tub.  You would think Pooh and Piglet would either use the pool to their advantage and drown her, or maybe even use the phone as a weapon of death to make a commentary on today’s overreliance on technology.  What do they do?  Tie her up and run her over with a car!  I mean, I didn’t know Pooh had his driver’s license (or even a learner’s permit), but okay.  

While there is some gore here, it’s poorly lit, and the effects are inconsistent.  I suspect they blew must their budget making the Pooh and Piglet (who has a set of humorous looking tusks protruding out of his maw) costumes and there wasn’t much left for anything else.  That might explain why there’s no Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, or even Tigger.  (Unless they are saving them for the sequel.)  

Oh, don’t bother with this steaming pile of Pooh.