Movie Review Out of Exile

Out of Exile (2023) 

Directed by Kyle Kauwika Harris 

Written by Kyle Kauwika Harris 

Starring Adam Hampton, Ryan Merriman, Peter Greene 

Release Date January 20th, 2023 

Published January 19th, 2023 

Out of Exile may not look like much but it's a really solid action movie. Yes, it features a crime story that you've seen before. It's undoubtedly derivative. That said, writer-director Kyle Kauwika Harris infuses the film with a strong personality and perspective. The violence of Out of Exile has a strong purpose. When someone gets shot it means something in this story. A lot of low budget action movies make the mistake of being gratuitous, characters tend to survive gunshot wounds with an almost supernatural level of good luck. That's not so of Out of Exile. 

Out of Exile stars Adam Hampton as Gabriel. Gabriel is fresh out of prison and in need of work. Having come from a long line of criminals, Gabriel's fate is seemingly sealed and a return to crime is almost immediate. With little waiting around, the movie jumps right into a heist that goes wrong very quickly. Gabriel, along with his brother, Wesley (Kyle Jacob Henry), and their partner, Chava (Oliver Rayon), are hitting an armored car. In the midst of the heist the guard carrying the money gets shot and killed. They get away with the money but the killing drives a wedge between the brothers that threatens everything. 

Running parallel to the crime story is the story of Gabriel's estranged daughter, Dawn (Hayley McFarland). Working as a waitress at a diner and not wanting any of her father's money or time, Dawn is attempting to escape an abusive relationship. Naturally, a man of violence such as Gabriel is not going to leave his daughter to such peril. That plot has an important role to play late in Out of Exile and I won't spoil it. Again, it's not something you haven't seen before, it's just well done enough here to make it better than many other, similar movies. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Invaders from Mars

Invaders from Mars (1953)

Directed by William Cameron Menzies 

Written by William Cameron Menzies  

Starring Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz 

Release Date April 9th, 1953 

Published January 20th, 2023 

A young boy awakens the middle of the night to see a bright green flying saucer. It's the kind of thing that has fired the imagination of sci-fi writers and directors for years and it's the opening scene of the 1953 film, Invaders from Mars. Children in movies like this are not to be believed until it is too late. This time, things are a little bit different. Having been shaken by his son's story, George MacLean (Leif Erickson) decides to go and see for himself what his son thinks he saw. When he doesn't return home, George's wife calls the cops. Then the cops disappear. 

The George MacLean that comes back from this brief disappearance is not the same. Gone is the jovial, thoughtful and loving father. Returned is a cruel, abusive, and bitter man. The cops also come back but not the same as they were. They have a conspiratorial conversation with George that unsettles both his wife and his son. Actor Leif Erickson does a wonderful job in this scene of giving us a completely different version of the man we just met. The haunted eyes and desperate shift in nature echoes from his every expression. 

Rather ingeniously given when the movie is made, Invaders from Mars communicates its sci-fi horror story using a very simple visual device, sand. Behind the home of our main character, David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt), is a sandy beach where the aliens he saw have landed and buried their ship. Through visual cues we know that the aliens have made the sand into a trap. The sand captures anyone who gets too close. When they come out of the sand, they are not the same. They have a mark on the back of their necks, a bloody X shape. 

The sparse sets and stock footage and photos of Invaders from Mars are exceptionally well integrated. It's quite clear that writer-director William Cameron Menzie cared about making a good movie despite the limitations of his budget. It's exciting to watch, so many directors of similar 1950s science fiction didn't take nearly as much care in their integration of such things. Shaggy backdrops, shoddy early forms of green screen, and other such things are cheesy hallmarks of the era, charming in their way. That said, it's nice to see a director take such great care in one of these B-pictures. 

The repeated motifs of Invaders from Mars include blank walls in every interior scene, spotlights, everywhere operated by army men, and stock footage, lots of military stock footage. It's all exceptionally well-integrated however, giving the film a strong verisimilitude for something so seemingly cheap. I adore this. :Lengthy shots of rolling tanks are matched with sound design that make you believe those tanks are in the same viciniy as our main characters. It's so good. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Missing

Missing (2023) 

Directed by Nick Johnson, Will Merrick 

Written by Sev Ohanian, Aneesh Chaganty 

Starring Storm Reid, Nia Long, Ken Leung 

Release Date January 20th, 2023 

Published January 23rd, 2023 

Missing captures our modern true crime obsession in a way that few films ever had. Every true crime fan dreams of doing what the main character of Missing does, diving down a rabbit hole of information on your way to solving a mystery. Of course, the main character of Missing has more motivation than your average true crime fan, but that doesn't change the nature of our excitement, all true crime fans want to investigate leads and follow threads to answers in the way that June (Storm Reid) does in missing, whether it's our family member that is missing or some stranger. 

In Missing, June is a typically self-involved teenager who is constantly mortified by how uncool her mother, Grace (Nia Long), is. Mom is always asking her Siri to make calls for her, even while she's already on a call. Mom and June's relationship is strained as Grace is a working single mom juggling her daughter, work, and a new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung), while planning a vacation to Columbia. June is of little help, she's only thinking of the partying she's going to do while Mom and Kevin are out of town. 

Over the course of five days, Mom checks in rarely, which is unusual, while June parties. Then, when it's time for June to meet Mom and Kevin at the airport, she's left standing there for hours. Mom doesn't come home. Returning to her house, June calls the authorities and falls down a rabbit hole while investigating her mother's whereabouts. In the course of investigating her mother's disappearance from afar, she connects with a man named Javi (Joachim De Almeida), who lives in Columbia and who agrees to investigate on her behalf for a mere $8.00 per request. 

Meanwhile, at home, Grace breaks into Kevin's email and begins to discover things about his past, his criminal record, and the many, many, women in Kevin's past who claim that he's stolen money from them. There's also a woman, referred to only as 'babycakes,' who has recently gone missing after trading messages with Kevin. This can't be a coincidence but the movie has a few more twists and turns in play when it comes to Kevin, some you won't be able to predict so easily. 

Missing doesn't quite have the skillful presentation of its predecessor, Searching. That film used the medium of internet based sleuthing in service of a much better story. The story of Missing isn't bad but it's far more deeply convoluted than that of Searching. Where that movie had a relative clarity to its logical storytelling, Missing falls short. If you start pulling threads on Missing the story frays with far too much ease. The main plot is rather silly with characters making choices that don't make a lot of sense. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Hexed

Hexed (1993) 

Directed by Alan Taylor 

Written by Alan Taylor

Starring Arye Gross, Adrienne Shelly, Claudia Christian 

Release Date January 22nd, 1993

Published January 23rd, 2023 

Hexed is among the strangest and most disjointed films I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of movies in my more than 23 years of writing about movies. Hexed stars Arye Gross as a hotel worker who lies constantly and everyone hates him. Everyone except for the one woman that the script requires to tolerate how awful he is. A cruel and unforgiving universe required in 1993 that a brilliant actress, writer and director attempt to do the impossible and try to make Gross seem likable. Sadly, even the prodigious talent of the much loved late Adrienne Shelly can't work such impossible magic. 

Matt Welsh is such an awful, disgusting, gross human being that when he's bullied by someone ostensibly more obnoxious than him, you kind of feel like he deserves it. That Matt is our designated protagonist is a cruel taunt. The poster has promised comedy but the movie we are trapped inside once we've committed ourselves to watching it, is distinctly unfunny and borders on incomprehensible as it ping pongs this ungodly protagonist from one unfunny bit to the next. 

The plot, such as it is, has ubiquitous supermodel known as Hexina coming to stay at the hotel where Matt is one of the desk clerks. This is a problem for Matt as he has claimed to have not only known Hexina, but dated her. When she arrives and doesn't know who he is, Matt is surely to be humiliated and belittled once more. Matt needs to concoct a plan to save himself and he gets one when a man calls to speak to Hexina and Matt intercepts the phone call. 

As luck would have it, Hexina is set to meet this man who she has never seen before. Matt figures, if he impersonates the unseen man, he can go on a date with Hexina and everyone at the hotel will think that Matt really does know her. His plan works as he's able to steal a car from a hotel patron and pick up the supermodel in full view of his most bitter detractor, Simon (Michael E. Knight). Meanwhile, as awful as Matt is, Hexina is only worse because she is a crazed murderer. 

Hexina has only come to this backwater hotel because someone is blackmailing her. This person wants to trade their blackmail item for sex and Hexina thinks that Matt is this person. After, indeed, having a terrifyingly unfortunate and problematic sex scene with Matt, Hexina tries to kill him. After he explains how he had sex with her under false pretenses, and highly questionable consent, Hexina makes him take her to the man she was intended to meet. Once there, Hexina shoots the man in the head and drafts Matt to be her co-conspirator. 

All of this is intended to be funny. Hexed is a comedy. It's a 'dark comedy,' allegedly, but that is no excuse for all of the ugly, nasty, gross, unfunny nonsense that makes up Hexed. Hexed is a bizarre example of just how weird the early 1990s truly were. The early 1990s were bursting with bizarre sexual politics and a fetishistic dedication to presenting the most masturbatory of male fantasies as movie plotlines. That was the case with Body of Evidence, which released one week prior to Hexed, and that is also the case with Hexed. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Come Find Me

Come Find Me (2023) 

Directed by Daniel Poliner 

Written by Daniel Poliner 

Starring Victoria Cartagena, Sol Miranda, Tovah Feldshuh 

Release Date January 10th, 2023 

Published January 3rd, 2023 

Come Find Me is based off of a short film that writer-director Daniel Poliner had made a few years back. That film starred Sol Miranda, beloved character actress from The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt, among other shows, as a principal at a struggling New York City middle school. Wanting to give Miranda a larger platform to show off her skills, Poliner expanded the original short film by adding in the story of the daughter of his original main character, here played by Victoria Cartegena. 

It's a lovely motivation to want to do something to showcase a talent you respect but the result is a deeply confounding drama that shifts in time and space so often as to completely lose the point and purpose of the story. The characters seem to know what's going but they don't do very well to let those of us in the audience in on what is happening. Come Find Me is filled with what appears to be ideas about mothers and daughters, domestic abuse, confronting death, and other such ideas but none of the ideas make much sense as the movie descends into a series of repeated scenes that I think were shifting in time, maybe? 

Come Find Me opens on Christina (Victoria Cartegena), a lawyer on the verge of making partner but questioning her future. Christina is back home in New York City for a big case involving a bank. Meanwhile, she's also plagued by something happening back in California where a pro-bono client is being stalked by an ex-boyfriend and has just found out that she's pregnant. Victoria is also pregnant and is rather ambivalent about that fact. She's in a new relationship with a fellow lawyer back in California and worried about what being pregnant might do to this new relationship and her future as a lawyer. 

Also, while Victoria is in New York, she's avoiding her mother, Gloria (Miranda). Gloria is a very involved mom, a long-time teacher and now principal who gets very involved in the lives of her students. This, in the past, caused a rift between mother and daughter after Gloria had Christina attend private school instead of the struggling middle school where she worked. Christina would have preferred to be close to her mom during this time. 

As Christina is struggling through a case that could make her career, she's also dealing with her mother's finances, much to her mother's disdain. It's all very dramatic and weighing on Christina's conscience as she's also waiting for word on what is happening with her pregnancy. This all comes to a head at the end of the first act of Come Find Me which then abruptly shifts to two years in the future and becomes a movie about Gloria and not Christina. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Documentary Review Lost Angel The Genius of Judee Sill

Lost Angel The Genius of Judee Sill 

Directed  by Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Judy Sill, David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt. 

Judee Sill is one of the great lost legends of music history. Hers is a story of tragedy, overcoming tragedy and returning to tragedy. Is it a typical rock n'roll rise and fall? Certainly not. The new documentary, Lost Angel The Genius of Judee Sill proves that Judee Sill's rise and fall was anything but typical. It's an incredible story of a young woman who fell to drugs and sex work to support her habit. Who then fought her way through to become a beloved and respected writer and musician before tragedy brought her back to Earth. 

The opening moments of Lost Angel The Genius of Judee Sill find the band Fleet Foxes performing Sill's song, The Kiss, in a full stadium of enrapt fans. The lead singer, Robin Pecknold, tells the fans that the band are huge fans of Judee Sill and they can hear why as they perform the song beautifully. As they play we begin to edit toward Judee herself, alone at a piano performing the song, even more lovely and extraordinary. 

It's quite a start to a powerful story and helps to underline the legacy and influence that Judee has had among musicians. Judee Sill's immortality is secured by the way musicians found her, brought her songs forward, played them live and shared them with fans. She only had two records, and one unfinished EP, but her music is simply too lovely and thoughtful to be forgotten. The documentary captures this influence beautifully while continuing to tell a mostly linear story of Judee's life. 

At an early age she lost her loving father and her struggles with her mother and a likely abusive step-father, led to Judee leaving home at 16 where she got into crime. Judee actually made headlines in the mid 1960s as part of a band of teenage thieves. This criminal path led, eventually, to drugs, heroin specifically, and a near death experience. Judee became a sex worker in her late teens and her story could have ended as thousands of others had, had it not been for music. 

Judee Sill had an innate talent for poetry and latent ability to play a number of instruments. In a mostly unlikely development, given her skinny frame and thin fingers, Judee played stand up bass before taking up an acoustic guitar and the piano. She was a fast learner at writing music, starting with turning her poetry into lyrics. The people around her said however, that it was her ambition to be a star that truly drove Judee. 

The narrative developed though not openly discussed in the documentary, is one of a person who wanted to show the world. Judee Sill grew up feeling unloved and unappreciated and wanted the love, the adulation, and the validation that being a recording star could bring. And  her ambition helped her to find success with relative quickness. By 1970, not long after having survived drugs and sex work, Judee Sill was on stage at the famed Troubadour in Los Angeles. 

Soon after she was recording with The Turtles, J.D Souther, and Linda Ronstadt. There was a love triangle with Judee and Souther and Linda Ronstadt that is touched on briefly in the movie. More on that later. She landed a record deal with then rising star executive, David Geffen and joined his roster at Asylum Records that included Souther, Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne among its impressive lineup. Sadly, success on the charts was elusive even as critics and fellow artists adored Judee Sill. 

Find my full length review at Beat.Media 

Movie Review Megan is Missing

Megan is Missing (2011) 

Directed by Michael Goi 

Written by Michael Goi 

Starring Amber Perkins, Rachel Quinn, Dean Waite 

Release Date May 3rd, 2011 

Published January 23rd, 2023 

In 2020 the execrable horror movie, Megan is Missing became a viral sensation when people on Tik Tok began uploading reactions to the movie. The fame didn't last and the movie dropped back into a very deserved obscurity. So why am I talking about it now? It's one of the movies about missing people that we decided to revisit on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast dedicated to movies about Missing people. The movie Missing is, obviously, the inspiration for this. I decided to add Megan is Missing to the show because I was already revolted by its virality in 2020, even without having watched it for myself. 

That's not fair of me though, right? I should see a film if I am going to claim to be revolted by it. So, now I can officially call Megan is Missing revolting. Written and directed by a criminal named Michael Goi, Megan is Missing is a poorly made found footage movie that has all the quality of a Tommy Wiseau directed snuff film. Part Eli Roth at his most woman-hating and part marketing pitch gone horribly wrong, Megan is Missing is an ugly, misogynistic, and deeply gross movie that reflects poorly on everyone involved in its creation. 

Megan is Missing stars Amber Perkins as unpopular High School girl, Amy Herman. Amy's life would be non-stop torment at school if she weren't friends with the most popular girl in school, Megan (Rachel Quinn). The two girls have been friends most of their lives despite their very different paths through life. Amy is portrayed as a goody two shoes that everyone hates for not drinking, smoking and sexing at all times like the rest of them. Megan, on the other hand, seems to find all the time in the world for bad decisions. 

Apparently, whenever Megan isn't with Amy, she's having sex, drinking and using drugs. Oh, and the two girls are supposedly 14 years old. So that's a fun detail. The plot kicks in, after an interminable amount of time spent watching adults try and figure out how the kids of the early 2000s talk, and failing, when Megan meets a man named Josh through an online chat. Josh claims to be kid from another nearby High School and that his webcam doesn't work, hence why Megan can't see him. The two begin a flirtation that ends when he invites Megan to meet him behind a local diner. She's never seen again. 

Heartbroken by the disappearance of her closest, only, friend, Amy begins talking to Josh in an attempt to find Megan. At first, he's trying to flirt with her before he becomes confrontational and then threatening. She cuts off contact but, while she's out recording her personal video diary, we see someone, we assume 'Josh,' stalking her. Then, Amy is taken and the final act of Megan is Missing is us watching a canonically 14 year old girl be tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered by suffocation after being buried alive. SPOILER ALERT. 

Megan is Missing doesn't have any discretion about its storytelling so it doesn't deserve my discretion in my plot description. Why did anyone think this was ever okay to put on film? Of course, sexual assault, rape, it's brutally violent and it can happen to anyone. We all know that, we don't need a horror movie to show us that even a seemingly average 14 year old girl can be the victim of a sex crime. Making a movie of this sex crime is just exploitation, nothing more. 

Megan is Missing is not a cautionary tale, it's a product intended to be sold. It's a product that includes the worst crimes imaginable as a marketing hook. Director, and I use that term loosely, he's not talented enough to be a real 'director, but it's what we have to work with her, Michael is a creepy pervert who hides behind the idea that he's done a service to society by showing us how young girls can be targeted online by strangers, assaulted and murdered. As if that's something that is unknown. 

Michael Goi acts if he's doing us a favor with Megan is Missing. The reality is, he's just some pervert whose put his particularly disturbing imagination on the big screen. Michael Goi isn't a director, he's a guy who shouldn't be allowed within 100 yards of a school. The sexual assault and murder of 14 year old girls is not the subject for your sick fantasies and financial gain Michael. Michael Goi and whatever studio backed this god-awful movie should be ashamed of themselves. 

The moment of Megan is Missing that went viral was a moment in the movie referred to as Photo #1. It's a photo of the kidnapped Megan in her underwear, her hands and head suspended in a board. On her head is a device that holds her eyes and mouth open. It's a shocking visual, there's no doubt about that, but why was it created? What does this add to your movie? If it's just for shock value then you have proved my point about how truly ugly and disturbed this movie is. 

Megan is Missing is the only feature film that Michael Goi has directed in his career and there is a good reason for that, it's terrible. It's not just morally indefensible as an exploitation of teen girls, it's just simply not well crafted. The acting is stilted and false, not merely for coming from amateur, non-actors but for coming from a director who doesn't appear to know how to properly direct actors. Much of the dialogue appears improvised, poorly, and shots appear composed haphazardly to evoke other, similar, found footage movies. 

The lasting memory of Megan is Missing is knowing that people dedicated time and effort to letting Michael Goi explore his ugly fetishes disguised as a feature film. That Goi has been a successful television director for many years might appear to defy my notion of him as a filmmaker but, realistically, television is a far more controlled environment than low budget filmmaking. Layers of people have to approve of something before it appears on a television project. Goi had only a handful of people to answer to on Megan is Missing and you can see the result. There's a reason he's no longer a feature filmmaker, Megan is Missing is a thesis statement on why he needs the oversight of a heavy handed television production.