Last Update 12/12/24

Bulldog Jack (1935) 

Aka Alias Bulldog Drummond. This is a spoof of the series. Drummond is injured in an accident and an ambitious fan agrees to take his place and help a young woman – Fay Wray – find her kidnapped grandfather and save the family jewels. He succeeds, of course, despite being incredibly inept. There is a not too bad chase scene at the end but the movie is so silly for so long that it was unable to salvage the effort. 12/12/24

Hammer the Toff (1952)  

I hadn’t realized that John Creasey’s playboy adventurer had been brought to the screen until I stumbled upon this. The Toff has to protect a beautiful woman who is unwittingly in possession of a secret formula wanted by a crimelord known as the Hammer. Except there are two Hammers. One is a kind of Robin  Hood who distributes his booty among the poor. The other is a murderer who uses the confusion to put the police on the wrong trail. There’s not much mystery – mostly adventurer – and the identity of the evil Hammer comes out of nowhere, but it’s lightweight fun. 12/5/24

The Mackintosh Man (1973)

This is the film adaptation of The Freedom Trap by Desmond Bagley. The story involves a man who poses as a criminal so that he can be sent to prison and allowed to escape along with a Soviet spy, exposing the escape organization in the process. Paul Newman plays the protagonist somewhat deadpan. Things go wrong, of  course, and our hero has to escape his supposed friends and then track them down. The story is pretty loyal to the book for the first two thirds, but when they reach Malta with the villains on a yacht, the whole plot is thrown out. The exciting sequences in which they sneak aboard the yacht, and later destroy it, are gone. The sixth column government official has already been exposed so the protagonist doesn't have to do it. In fact, and completely unrealistically, he decides to let the two men go even though they are killers, spies, and both have sensitive information. Fortunately, his female companion summarily executes them both in a startling ending. The original story is immensely better and certainly more plausible. 9/11/24

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Although this wasn't awful, it was very disappointing. I'll try to avoid spoilers here - the movie is basically about a group of people trying to steal items from an abandoned space station that has been infested with aliens. The plot is full of holes and scientific errors - the ring around a planet turns out to be completely solid, not individual pieces floating in the same orbit. There are a lot of quotes taken from the first two movies, which just reinforces the feeling that we've seen all of this before. The characters are sketched in and the android was the only one who seemed to come to life. The plot is all action - so much so that there is no effort to build suspense or tension. The special effects were, I thought, inferior to earlier movies in the series. There is a brief prologue, but unless I missed something, it has no real bearing on the rest of the story. There are lots of questions left unanswered. Wait for the dvd because there is virtually nothing here that benefits from the big screen. 8/16/24

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (2024)

Finally got around to watching this, which has much different tone that the first two. There is still a lot of humor, but there are darker currents and tear jerked moments as well. Rocket Raccoon has been injured and because of a self destruct implant it is impossible to treat his wounds. There is a series of flashbacks to his imprisonment by the High Evolutionary, who experimented on animals to satisfy his curiosity and sate his megalomania, despite his claims to be trying to improve the universe. The rest of the Guardians have to visit various sites and fight several wild battles in order to acquire the bypass codes, and along the way they have to deal with the High Evolutionary himself. Some really great sets help make the improbable seem at least possible, if not likely. A fun movie with its sad moments. 8/3/24

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Marvel takes itself less seriously with this wild adventure story set in the Multiverse. Deadpool is told by a renegade from the organization that monitors the timelines that his home reality will be destroyed because of the death of Wolverine, who is a kind of anchor personality. So Deadpool wanders through multiple universes in search of a replacement. This involves a visit to a kind of trash can reality ruled in part by Cassandra Nova, who is really the chief villain of the story. The Wolverine he finds is consumed with guilt because he let down the X-Men, who were wiped out in his universe. The two trade banter and blows almost interchangeably. The story is full of very un-Marvel sexual innuendo, frequent breaking of the fourth wall, sarcastic comments about Disney, Fox, and Marvel, and inventive insults. There are too many cameos to list here. This was a lot of fun. 7/29/24

Mandalorian Season 3 (2023)

The final season was a mixed bag for me. There were several good touches - the droid bar for one. The plot mostly involves the Mandalorians trying to set aside their old rivalries in order to make a concerted effort to reclaim their devastated planet. It turns out not everyone there is dead after all - which is a bit of a contradiction. It actually has been turned into a secret base for one of the surviving imperial warlords, who wants to wipe out the culture completely. There is an epic battle at the end and Baby Yoda pulls out a few more dei ex machina to help the good guys win. Not a great show - some of the dialogue and a few plot points are really really corny. The acting is indifferent. Christopher Lloyd and Jack Black make cameo appearances in one episode. 7/21/24

Longlegs (2024)

I'll try not to provide any spoilers talking about this supernatural serial killer movie. The protagonist is a young woman who felt like Stephen King's Holly superimposed on Clarice from Silence of the Lambs. She's a young FBI agent with occasional psychic insights into a killer who targets entire families and seems to be able to turn each father into a psycho killer. There is clearly no way this could be non-supernatural right from the outset, so that's not a surprise revelation. But she has other connections to the killer as well. The nature of the story means that the viewer is going to be confused a good deal of the time, and a few bits never really get explained. There was also one plot point I did not understand - the agent's reluctance to tell her boss of one crucial incident. Good but not great. 7/18/24

Godzilla Minus One (2024)

This was not what I expected from a Godzilla movie. Godzilla is in it - the story revolves around him - but the real focus is two people struggling to put their lives back together in the aftermath of World War II Japan. The man is haunted by the fact that he did not get to perform his kamikaze attack and somehow failed in his duty, and also once witnessed a relatively small Godzilla attacking a military outpost. Now the atomic tests have made Godzilla into a creature capable of destroying entire cities, and he does trample Tokyo, though briefly. This is the original evil Godzilla, not the one who protects Earth from multi-headed aliens and smog monsters. The special effects were adequate though not spectacular, but since they were not the central issue, it wasn't a problem. 6/2/24

The Marvels (2023)

This did not do well at the box office and this will almost certainly be blamed on the predominantly female cast. I don't think that's the real reason. Marvel's space movies have, generally, not been as good as those grounded on Earth - Guardians of the Galaxy excepted. And this has some plot problems. There were several occasions early in the movie when I was not sure what was going on. The story is also a bit too frantic. Most of the early Marvel superhero movies took time to introduce the characters and get us to like them. This one does not, although Ms. Marvel shows considerable promise. I also have problems with Captain Marvel - she is sometimes too powerful. She defeated the Kree earlier all by herself. In this one, she has trouble handling one Kree even with the help of two other superheroes. Her powers are also too nebulous. The visual effects are excellent. The fight scenes are okay. The story leaves unanswered questions. I think Marvel needs to take a step back from its ever expansive threats to the universe. I was certainly entertained, but I was also disappointed. 5/15/24

The Beekeeper (2024)

Jason Statham is a kind of semi-retired government hitman who goes on the warpath when a neighbor commits suicide after being scammed out of all of her money. He first targets the call center involved, and then follows the trail back to really high places before he is done. This is a superhero movie. His ability to kill or disable literally scores of armed professionals without a scratch is completely over the top. The villains are a bit too villainous to really come across as people. It is not clear where he is getting the information he needs to proceed. This was like watching someone else play a first person shooter computer game with exceptionally good graphics, but essentially no back story at all. 5/8/24

The Retirement Plan (2024)

A not entirely serious action movie starring Nicholas Cage as a retired assassin who has to come to the aid of his daughter's family when they run into trouble with some powerful criminals. Gage eliminates the killers fairly easily as they arrive piecemeal and is eventually responsible for the destruction of the entire organization, with some help from the FBI and a schism within the gang. He's not really a vigilante and all of the deaths are of obvious bad guys, but there are a lot of them before the movie is over. The movie is stolen by the young girl kidnapped by gangster Ron Perlman and the subsequent interactions between them. Not a great movie but fun. 5/7/24

Day of the Triffids (1962)

The movie version of the John Wyndham novel turns the clever monsters of the books into rather less interesting creatures, much like walking Venus Flytraps. But it's otherwise not that far away from the actual plot. This isn't a totally awful film but I would love to see this story done with a really big budget. The potential - killer trees preying on a population that has largely gone blind - is frankly one of the creepiest I have encountered.. Howard Keel is a merchant sailor rather than a triffid herder, as he is in the book. The movie hints at the chaos but it  is much more effective in the novel, which also really reveals the utter chaos that would result. Special effects are sorely lacking, although sometimes effective. Most of the plot of the novel is scuttled after that and the triffids are introduced rather haphazardly and without explanation. Would love to see a new, adequate budget version. 4/27/24

The Mandalorian Season 2 (2020) 

The second season was somewhat more formulaic. The Mandalorian must get involved with someone else’s fight in order to get something he needs in return. He runs into a lone Jedi and helps her defeat an evil dictator. The individual episodes aren’t bad but they feel too repetitive watched close together. Toward the end of the season, the evil Empire holdover manages to kidnap baby Yoda who gets rescued at the end, after a ridiculously skillful Jedi annihilates dozens of killer droids, and the story arc seems to have come to a conclusion. The Mandalorian unmasks in the final two episodes, but doesn't seem to go through the religious trauma that was suggested in earlier episodes. The sword as the symbol of the ruler of Mandalor plot that arises at the end is horribly contrived. 4/17/24

Fallout (2024)

This is based on my favorite PC game series - life 200 years after a nuclear war which took place in an alternate 1950 with some very different technology. This, presumably, first season draws upon Fallout 3 and 4, plus the Far Harbor expansion. It is set in California, mostly, and alternates between life among the vault dwellers - which is not a significant element in the game - and the quest by a young woman to find her father, who was kidnapped by raiders. This leads to her joining the competition to possess a particular human head, the importance of which is not explained yet. Her rivals include the Brotherhood of Steel - armor suited bigots for the most part although the main one involved so far is a minor figure who breaks a lot of the rules - and a ghoul, acutally a very mutated human being who relies on drugs to keep himself from going feral, i.e., mindless. There is a passing reference to the Enclave, a villainous organization from Fallout 3, but no reference to the Institute from Fallout 4, or the synths - robots - that they have created. Fans may be disappointed at the absence of most of the critters - we don't see mole rats, deathclaws, stingwings, supermutants, radscorpions, bloodworms, anglers, or mirelurks. The flashbacks to before the war are mostly filler. The acting is quite good, the sets pretty good, the special effects good, and the ambience very good. I hope we'll see more in a follow up season, or seasons. 4/13/24

The Mandalorian Season 1 (2019) 

The first season is pretty good overall. The title character is a member of an elite group of warriors who has been working as a bounty hunter, sometimes for shady characters. His latest assignment is to find baby Yoda and take him in for experimentation. He has second thoughts, double crosses his employer, enrages the bounty hunting guild, and goes on the run to meet other characters and creatures on other planets, some familiar, some new in the series. There are a few minor plot holes – mostly of the “Why would he do that?” type. Great effects. The acting is frankly just okay. Looking forward to Season 2. 4/5/24

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

I have no idea why they decided to claim this was based on Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party. It is not, not even remotely. It's set in 1947 Venice instead of 1960 rural England. It involves people trapped in a supposedly haunted house while someone murders people to protect a guilty secret while the novel was about two people who murder a companion so that they could substitute a forged will for the real one. Poirot is invited in after the murder in the book - but he's there to expose a fake medium in the movie. She isn't in the book. Some of the character names are preserved. A thirteen year old drowned in a tub of water becomes a forty year old Asian medium recently released from prison. A completely new Poirot story could be good, however, but this one is not. The motivations are unclear. The blackmailer is unlikely. Some of the events seem overtly supernatural. We are told this is because the guests have been given a hallucinogenic form of honey, but this doesn't work either. The people all see the same "illusions." There is a kind of staccato pacing that is essentially a long series of small jump scares. Very disappointing. 3/19/24

Terrifier 2 (2022) 

There is not a whole lot of plot to this story of a maniacal clown that is clearly not a human being. He/it kills a few people but is particularly focused on a brother and sister. Most of what follows is, broadly described, horribly predictable. What made this movie worth watching for me was the actor playing the clown, whose pantomimes were actually very effective and creepy. I’ve never seen the first in the series but I will be watching for a copy. 2/29/24

Murder Mystery 2 (2023)

Mystery comedies rise and fall in popularity. I found this one to be more silly than most. A married couple who have decided to become detectives become involved when a maharajah is kidnapped from his own wedding. His sister, business partners, friends, and even a bodyguard are all suspects. There are a couple of good twists - more than one party is interested in the ransom money - but the jokes were generally predictable and not very funny. The climax on the Eiffel Tower was considerably better than the rest of the movie. 1/2/24

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