COMIC BOOK CATCH-UP: WEREWOLF BY NIGHT (2022) *** ½

I wasn’t originally going to review this and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special because they’re only an hour long and not exactly “real” movies.  Then again, I’ve been watching Tubi movies half that length, and I’ve counted them as “real” movies, so I figured why not?  Werewolf by Night was made as a Halloween special for Disney+ and it’s fairly fun for horror fans and those looking for something a little different from the Marvel brand. 

A group of hunters are gathered in a mansion for a monster hunt.  The victor will be awarded the “Bloodstone” and be named supreme monster slayer.  Little do they realize another monster has secretly joined the hunt. 

The aesthetic is right up my alley as it’s basically a tribute to the old Universal horror movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s.  Not only is it in black and white, but the title sequence is very reminiscent of the old films.  Heck, there are even cigarette burns at every reel change.  After seeing so many Grindhouse-inspired flicks over the last few years, this felt like a breath of fresh air. 

As a fan of the old Werewolf by Night comics, there’s a side of me that wishes it was a bit more of a traditional adaptation, but that’s just me being nerdy.  (What can I say?  I missed Wolfie’s green pants.)  Oh well, there’s at least one fun cameo that placated my nerdiness.  The truth is, this is one of the most fun Marvel movies I’ve seen in a while, and it’s almost a shame they didn’t make it into a theatrically released feature. 

Werewolf by Night was the directing debut of longtime composer Michal Giacchino.  He does a fine job balancing the horror elements with the more typical Marvel-style fight scenes.  Hopefully, he’ll get another crack at one of these sooner than later because he sure delivered the goods with plenty of style to spare. 

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:  ***

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:  ***

Thor:  The Dark World:  ***

Iron Man 2:  ***

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

Doctor Strange:  ** ½ 

Black Widow:  ** ½  

Black Panther:  Wakanda Forever:  **

Eternals:  * ½  

TUBI CONTINUED… HALLUCINATIONS (1986) ***

John (co-director John Polonia) and Mark (co-director Mark Polonia) are two brothers whose friend Tood (co-director Todd Michael Smith) comes to their house for a sleepover.  Before long, they are having strange dreams and hallucinations.  Are these hallucinations real, or are they merely figments of their imaginations?

Because of the hallucinatory nature of the film, that means the filmmakers can get away with a lot of weirdness for weirdness’ sake.  We also get a lot of grossness for grossness’ sake, too.  The hallucinations include people puking blood, vomit to the face, machete to the neck, torture via a guy with a pillowcase over his head, a demon baby attack, a giant slug in the shower, and a killer wearing Freddy Krueger inspired make-up.  (I could’ve done without the scene where a chainsaw takes on a life of its own and chops up the family cat though.)  The best scene finds a Christmas elf decoration coming to life and… well… I won’t spoil it. 

Yes, this is yet another Polonia Brothers Shot-on-Video flick.  (This was their second in a long line of low budget features).  As someone who has watched a lot of bad Polonia Brothers movies this year, it gives me great pleasure to find one that’s a surprising amount of fun.  It’s only an hour long, and there’s no shortage of gore or DIY scenes of horror here.  Actually, by all the scenes of them clearing their driveway, it looks like something that a bunch of friends would make at home on a snow day, which of course, is part of the charm.   Plus, the occasional static and tape rolls help recreate the feel of watching it on VHS, which is nice.  If on the off chance you do get bored before the end, you can have fun trying to figure out what happened to one of the brothers’ mustaches in the third act.  

COMIC BOOK CATCH-UP: BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER (2022) **

You know, when you devote an entire year to watching movies on Tubi, you inevitably miss out on other cinemagoing ventures.  As the Tubi Continued… column draws to a close, I’m going to try to catch up on some of the comic book movies I’ve missed in the last year or so.  First up is Black Panther:  Wakanda Forever.  

Grief is a slippery devil.  Just when you think you’re over something, grief comes back on you twofold.  The most interesting thing about Black Panther:  Wakanda Forever is that the characters are allowed to grieve like human beings, even though they inhabit a superhero movie. 

Really, the actors and filmmakers are getting an opportunity to grieve loss of the beloved Chadwick Boseman, who passed away shortly after cementing himself as a strong leading man in the first Black Panther.  The opening moments that pay tribute to Boseman are nicely done.  Sadly, his absence resonates throughout the film, and it’s a burden the movie can’t quite overcome. 

After the death of King T’Challa, his mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) claims the throne to Wakanda, and his sister Shuri (Letita Wright) throws herself into her sci-fi tech wizardry work.  Other nations test Wakanda’s resolve by coming after their most precious commodity, Vibranium.  The country eventually butts heads with Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), the king of the fishes who is prepared to go to war over their Vibranium resources. 

Wakanda Forever has the handicap of being a superhero movie without a central superhero.  Boseman was the heart of the original, and frankly the film lacks anyone with his chops to carry it on their shoulders.  Several try to pick up the mantle. Ramonda, Shuri, Okoye (Danai Gurira), and Iron Heart (Dominique Thorne) give the flick a sense of girl power, but it lacks a central figure to keep everything together. 

The stuff with Namor is especially disappointing given how he’s such a fun character in the comics.  On the page, he was brash, arrogant, and bold.  None of that shows through with this iteration of the character.  Nothing against Meija, who tries, but he’s much too petulant and bland to really register as either a “Big Bad” or as the heir to the superhero throne.  Plus, it doesn’t help that they just basically gave his soldiers a bad Avatar blue dye job.  Or that it looks really goofy when he flies around by his ankle wings.  Or that the action scenes just feel like reheated leftovers from Aquaman. 

There are some neat touches here and there.  For example, Namor’s explosives emit water, not fire.  It’s a shame that the action for the most part, is a washout, and the climax is middling.  Add to that, the nearly three-hour running time, which certainly doesn’t help either.  Wakanda Forever?  It sure felt like it. 

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:  ***

The Marvels:  ***

Thor:  The Dark World:  ***

Iron Man 2:  ***

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

Doctor Strange:  ** ½ 

Black Widow:  ** ½  

Black Panther:  Wakanda Forever:  **

Eternals:  * ½  

TUBI CONTINUED… KARPENTER (2017) ***

An axe murderer named Karpenter (Tim Nydell) escapes from a mental institution the night before Halloween.  He then strolls into a small town and begins hacking women up with his trusty axe.  Afterwards, he sets his sights on a Halloween party that offers up plenty of axe fodder. 

If you can’t already tell by the title and premise, this is pretty much a tribute to John Carpenter’s immortal classic Halloween.  Director Christian Ackerman has definitely studied Carpenter’s playbook, but also sprinkles in a couple of unique touches as well.  Most of the kills occur offscreen, but we do get a couple of pretty good decapitations, a fire poker in the eye, and a face gets ripped off.  It’s all fairly standard stuff, and yet it remains a thoroughly entertaining exercise all in all. 

Look, I’m not going to go out on a limb and say it’s perfect.  The filmmakers kind of overdo it with all the drone shots (a trend that crops up more and more in these low budget slashers) and there’s too much unnecessary slow motion.  On the plus side, it’s only an hour long (actually, it’s closer to forty-five minutes if you don’t count the extended closing credits complete with outtakes and bloopers) and has no qualms about getting right down to business. 

The thing that really elevates this from the glut of similar slashers clogging up my algorithm on Tubi is its sense of humor.  Some of the comedic moments work surprisingly well.  The best sequence is a clever subversion on the old standby, the shower scene.  I don’t want to spoil it for you because it results in the biggest laugh of the movie, but definitely keep an eye out for it.  (The constant merengue music on the soundtrack just adds to the WTF factor.)  Touches like that make Karpenter a cut above the rest.

TUBI CONTINUED… DEMONOIDS FROM HELL (2023) **

A bunch of friends sneak into a haunted house amusement after hours and make fun of all the cheesy props.  They then perform a black magic incantation and awaken a bunch of cheap hand puppets… I mean… monsters.  Flash forward ten years later.  Two gal pals move into an apartment together and invite their boyfriends over for a party.  It’s not long before the Demonoids crash the party and chomp their way through the guest list.  From there, they set their sights on terrorizing a dimwitted security guard. 

Demonoids from Hell is, of course, Dustin (Stale Popcorn and Sticky Floors) Ferguson’s riff on the ‘80s cult classic, Ghoulies.  There’s even a Demonoid in the toilet scene.  Unfortunately, unlike Ghoulies, the Demonoids talk and crack jokes and frankly, none of it is very funny.  (Maybe that was a tip of the hat to Ghoulies 4?)  The attack scenes are weak too and the gore, aside from a scene where some fingers are chomped off, is lightweight. 

The good news is it’s less than an hour long.  Even then, there’s still padding in the form of a horror movie hostess (Malovia’s Movie Matinee) popping up for intros and intermission breaks, pointless news report scenes, and an obscenely long end credits sequence.  

The fractured narrative is probably the oddest thing about it.  The opening sequence looks like it was actually filmed ten years prior, and the stuff with the coeds feels like it should’ve been much longer.  Also, the security guard’s stuff feels like scenes from a prospective sequel.  Like most of Ferguson’s movies, it comes off feeling like it was cobbled together.  At least this time, the flick has some charm, and it moves at a reasonable clip.  You can say a lot about Demonoids from Hell, but I’ve certainly seen worse Ferguson films this year, that’s for sure. 

TUBI CONTINUED… THE LIONESS (2019) * ½

Megan (Lacey Hartselle) is a stripper who lives in an apartment with a bunch of other strippers who mostly just sit around and complain about their lives to one another.  When they’re not doing that, the ladies think up new stripper names, have flashbacks to their crummy past, and try to figure out how they’re going to support their families.  At the club, some money goes missing and soon, everyone is a suspect.  We eventually learn Goldie (Gabriele Orebaugh) is the culprit and she brings down a world of shit on the other girls seeing as the money belonged to the Mob and all.  She and Megan then make a run for it, but can they trust one another? 

The constant breaking of the fourth wall sort of makes this feel like a stage play adaptation, and for all I know, it probably is.  However, the strippers don’t have anything substantial to say to the camera as their monologues are amateurishly written and painfully performed.  It certainly does little to endear them to the audience.

Speaking of underwhelming audience experiences, it's also frustrating that the stripping scenes feature no nudity.  Heck, the strippers don’t even really dance.  They just pout and slowly circle around the pole.  Even worse is the fact that the stage is just a stripper pole in front of a tinsel curtain.  What can you say about a movie about strippers that can’t even afford to film in a real strip club?  I know they were going for a theatrical feel with all the monologues and shit, but that strip club set wouldn’t cut it in an Off-Off-Off Broadway play.  

Even though the fourth-wall breaks are kind of annoying, that storytelling device is still somewhat novel in something like this.  Once the plot focuses on the missing money and the girls going on the lam, it becomes rote and boringly predictable.  All in all, The Lioness has very little bite.

TUBI CONTINUED… INVISIBLE ENEMIES (1997) **

Invisible Enemies begins in 2024 (hey, that’s just a few days away!) with Jackson (played in the future by Jan Van Sickle) relating a flashback to his son.  You see, back in his college days, Jackson (played in his youth by Jason Guess) stumbled upon an old pair of glasses while walking around campus.  When he put the glasses on, he found he could see into other people’s lives (he mostly just sees them arguing and generally acting shitty to other people).  Eventually, he learned the glasses belonged to none other than the Devil himself (who talks in a Freddy Krueger voice).  Naturally, the Devil goes after his hard-partying sister and it’s up to Jackson to save her. 

This isn’t great by any stretch of the imagination, but I liked the ‘90s aesthetic.  The sight of ladies wearing combat boots with sundresses and black choker necklaces just does something to me, I guess.  Even though the set-up is promising, things get real Jesus-y, real quick.  Not that it matters much.  I mean, you’re talking to the guy who watched the whole Thief in the Night tetralogy a few months ago for this column.  

The opening is solid, but Invisible Enemies ultimately winds up feeling like something you’d be forced to watch at a church youth group lock-in.  Fortunately, it’s short (thirty-seven minutes), moves at an acceptable pace, and doesn’t wear out its welcome.  (It almost feels like a pilot for a Christian horror TV series that didn’t get picked up.)  At least the scenes of the translucent Devil tormenting the sister at a rave are good for a laugh. 

Van Sickle gets the best line of the movie when he describes his life as a “Slow-motion swan dive into the toilet”.  That doesn’t exactly describe the movie, thankfully.  Just don’t expect anything close to being “good” though.