Sean at the Movies with Professional Film Critic Sean Patrick Kernan

Movie Review Kandahar

Kandahar (2023)

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh

Written by Mitchell LaFortune

Starring Gerard Butler, Navid Negahban

Release Date May 26th, 2023

Published May 24th, 2023

Is Kandahar a good movie actually? I am not sure. As a film critic, I've seen so many terrible movies starring Gerard Butler and many awful, racist, terrible movies set in the middle east. I am kind of numb to both Butler and the tropes of middle east set thrillers. And yet, I don't feel like I hated Kandahar. The film moves as a terrific pace, the action makes sense, the stereotypes are tempered by a relative even-handedness that criticizes American meddling in the middle east and the necessity American intelligence has to monitor the potential for uprisings that could threaten not just middle eastern security, but world security.

You can argue in the comments about your opinions of American intervention in the middle east, the politics, the greed involved, the corporate interests and so on. The bottom line is, Kandahar seems to give a fair perspective on the matter while telling a compelling story of survival via the tropes of an action movie. The movie pivots on an American mission in Iran that destroys a massive part of Iranian infrastructure related to the Iranian nuclear program. Intelligence regarding who was behind the mission is leaked to other middle eastern countries and it places the CIA Agent at the heart of the mission in great peril.

Gerard Butler stars in Kandahar as Tom Harris. Having posed as a phone company operative, he's actually used access to Iranian infrastructure to plant a bomb. In a tense scene, he narrowly misses blowing his cover through a clever bit of misdirection involving his phone, faster internet, and soccer. This set piece sets a tense tone that will rarely let up throughout the rest of Kandahar. Having narrowly escaped with his life, Tom looks to be headed home where his wife is waiting with divorce papers. He does have a welcome home from his young daughter waiting for him but when a fellow middle eastern operative, played by Travis Fimmel, offers him a mission that could pay for his daughter's college, he delays the trip home.

This is a fateful choice. Just as soon as Harris is on the ground in Kandahar, investigating the disappearance of several female teachers taken hostage by rogue Taliban forces, Harris' cover is blown worldwide. A leak of documents has exposed CIA operations across the middle east, including, and especially, Tom's mission in Iran. Now, Tom, along with his interpreter, played by Navid Negahban, are being hunted by several opposing middle eastern interests, each with their own motivation for wanting to capture and kill the American spy and his interpreter.

The key thing that I was moved by in Kandahar was the relationship that builds slowly between Butler and Negahban. There are elements here that we've seen before but Negahban is a very compelling actor whose presence seems to smooth out some of Butler's meathead tendencies. He's still mostly just a killing machine, but the story brings a bit of unforced nuance to Butler's motivations and his growing connection to Negahban is a strong root for the survival story. Director Ric Roman Waugh, whose work I have never cared for before, smartly builds a couple of dramatic set pieces that genuinely got my pulse racing.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media.

Movie Review Moon Garden

Moon Garden (2023)

Directed by Ryan Stevens Harris

Written by Ryan Stevens Harris

Starring Haven Lee Harris, Augie Duke, Brionne Davis, Maria Olson

Release Date May 19th, 2023

Published May 24th, 2023

A very young little girl falls down the steps of her family home after witnessing a particular nasty argument between her parents. What follows is a stirring, deeply emotional and somewhat magical journey through the child's imagination as she tries to come out of a coma. That's the essential context of Moon Garden, a remarkably artful and moving horror drama that centers its action around the mind of a child in a way that is wildly unexpected, full of surprises, and at times genuinely harrowing and terrifying.

Emma (Haven Lee Harris) cannot be more than 5 or 6 years old. She's lying comfortably in bed late one night when her mother comes in and tells her that they are going to 'chase the sunrise.' Context clues tell us that she's taking her daughter and leaving her husband behind in the middle of the night. The scene is filled with tension but not for Emma who, though tired, is ready for an adventure with her mom. Then, the scene takes a dark turn. Emma's dad hears the garage door opening and stops his wife and daughter from leaving.

This is an exceptionally directed sequence. As tension filled as it is, writer-director Ryan Stevens Harris keeps us very specifically connected to Emma and her perspective. From Emma's perspective, two people she loves and trusts are acting strange and she doesn't quite understand it. Later, when she hears a scary noise, Emma goes running to her parents bedroom. Here is where she hears this nasty argument and in her haste to run away, Emma trips and falls down the stairs.

The scene immediately following the accident is fascinating. Emma wakes up in a fantastical world. A place of wonder and of fright, loud noises and a strange, terrifying presence. A DJ booth rises from the ground and a ghostly pale-faced woman cranks up the noise as Emma plays with the buttons on the kit. We can hear dialogue, presumably from EMT's explaining Emma's situation. We can also hear Emma's frantic mother and equally concerned father as they trail behind the EMT's questioning their daughter's condition.

The disorienting sound and visual style are remarkable. Writer-director Harris leaves you entirely unmoored, much like his leading lady. You are fully in Emma's perspective and you can't help but feel both her sense of wonder and her fear that she may never return to her family. Things then take a ghastly turn with the introduction of a villain, known in the credits as 'Teeth.' The villain has a blank, Slenderman-esque face, but most importantly, a terrifyingly large mouth inside of which are sharp monster teeth that we first glimpse sitting by themselves in some rundown corner of this unusual world.

Find my full length review of Moon Garden at Geeks.Media

Horror in the 90s Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror (1993)

Directed by Marina Sargenti

Written by Annette Cascone, Gina Cascone, Marina Sargenti

Starring Rainbow Harvest, Karen Black, Yvonne De Carlo

Release Date August 31st, 1990

Box Office Unknown

There were a mere 6 movies directed by female directors in 1990. One of those films is this oddball horror movie about a haunted Mirror. It was Sargenti's first and only feature film credit. Soon after she moved to television features and picked up TV odds and ends until seeming to leave the business in 1997, at least according to IMDB. Regardless, she's notable for having been one of the few women to get the chance to direct a feature length horror film at a time when women were struggling to find a place behind the camera.

It's a shame the movie isn't more memorable. Mirror Mirror is a shoddy, slapdash and odd film. The plot centers on a haunted mirror which uses some kind of demon magic to invade the mind of people who own it and causing them to kill. The demonic power presents itself as being on the side of the owner, allowing the owner to believe they are wielding some kind of magic power. Then, the killing spree begins and grows out of control until someone finally puts a black curtain over the mirror. Yeah, that's literally how this demon is defeated, that and... a good character making a wish? Maybe? It's a tad bit unclear.

Mirror Mirror features a notable cast of horror convention staples including Karen Black as the mother of our main character, Megan, played by Rainbow Harvest. Alongside Karen Black we have Yvonne DeCarlo of The Munsters-fame. DeCarlo plays an antiques dealer who purchased the mirror only for the mirror to refuse to leave the home. She also takes a bunch of books written by the previous owner of the mirror. DeCarlo acts as a plot convenience/contrivance, someone to do the legwork of researching the mirror's evil for us in the audience and then dying tragically when she was needed most.

Another notable horror staple is character actor William Sanderson who pops up in the role of a pet undertaker. The mirror happens to hate dogs and when the mirror brutally murders Karen Black's dog, Sanderson's uber-creep undertaker shows up and the two wind up hitting it off. She invites this man to dinner and things don't go well as Megan channels the demonic mirror powers to make Sanderson hallucinate that his food is full of creepy crawlies. He leaves and we never see him again.

The co-lead of Mirror Mirror, alongside the memorably named Rainbow Harvest, is Kristen Dattilo as Nikki, a fellow outcast who serves as an early model of the role played by Amanda Seyfried in Jennifer's Body. Each film pits female friends against each other, a common theme in many genres when you think about it. At least they aren't arguing about boys, not the same boy anyway, but yeah, movies tend to want exploit female friendships for drama in a fashion that they tend not do in stories about male friendships.

Find my full length review of Mirror Mirror at Horror.Media

Movie Review Fast X

Fast X (2023)

Directed by Louis Letterier

Written by Dan Mazeau, Justin Lin

Starring Vin Diesel, Jason Mamoa, Tyrese, Charlize Theron, Paget Brewster, John Cena, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Jason Statham, Helen Mirren

Release Date May 19th, 2023

Published May 19th, 2023

What is there to say about Fast X? If you aren't fully onboard with the utter nonsense that is the Fast and Furious franchise at this point, why are you bothering? I happen to be fully on board for this nonsense. I fell in love with the silly, testosterone fueled nonsense in 2001 and have remained in love with this nonsense as it morphed from being about street racers pulling small scale criminal heists -they literally stole DVD players and VCRs out of semis in the original- to today when everyone is basically an immortal superhero.

You have to accept a lot of B.S when you accept the Fast franchise. Take, for instance, where we begin in Fast X. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) begin the film back in L.A, back in what may be their old neighborhood. These are people who still live with a deep, paranoid fear that people are trying to kill them and they are living exactly where anyone trying to find them will find them, very easily, with little to no effort.

The movie openly admits this as the plot kicks off with the person who has hunted them for the past two films, Cypher (Charlize Theron), finds their house and knocks on the door. Cypher is battered and bruised. She's bleeding from some sort of wound to her abdomen. She tells Dom and Letty that she sought them out because the person who did this is even more evil than herself. He's so evil that she wants to join their side to fight him.

That man is Dante Reyes (Jason Mamoa) whose father, Herman Reyes (Joachim De Almeida) was killed during Fast crew's heist of a vault full of cash in Rio De Janeiro, as seen in flashback here and in full in Fast Five. Dante doesn't want to kill Dom, he wants to make him suffer. That means targeting Dom's family and trying to kill anyone who has ever help the Toretto family. Why he doesn't just roll into the L.A suburbs and do his business, I have no idea.

Instead, Dante, being all kinds of extra, decides to blow up the Vatican and frame Dom's crew for the crime. It's as brazen and silly as that sounds. A portion of Vatican City is destroyed but exposition newscaster, one of the unsung heroes of this franchise, tells us that no one was killed. A giant bomb took out a portion of a massive tourist destination and no one was killed. Everyone in the Fast universe is a superhero. I don't know if this 'no one was killed' nonsense extends to the cops chasing Dom and his crew through the streets of Rome but if they didn't die, there is no death in this universe.

This sequence is utterly bonkers and I loved it. I did. I loved it. It's total, non-stop, nonsense but it's so much fun. The bomb is a giant ball that rolls out of the back of a semi-truck and will not stop rolling as if Rome were nothing but a tilted table. At one point, the bomb rolls over a gas pump and the pumps explode. Dom uses his car to shield people on the street from the explosion. The bomb continues to roll but is now on fire as Dom chases it in his super-car. It's gloriously stupid and I love it.

If Fast X lacks, it's due to director Louis Letterier who leans too far into the dour, sourpuss, self-seriousness of Dominic Toretto. Where Justin Lin and F. Gary Gray got how silly this series is and embraced the giddy stupidity, Letterier takes things in the direction that Diesel wants to go, treating the nonsense seriously and threatening to upend the strength of this franchise, how it is embraces its own nuttiness and leans into the criticism of it being the loudest, brainless franchise in Hollywood.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review The Mattechine Family

The Mattachine Family (2023)

Directed by Andy Valentine

Written by Andy Valentine, Danny Valentine

Starring Nico Tortorella, Juan Pablo Di Pace, Heather Matarazzo, Emily Hampshire

Release Date May 12th, 2023 (SIFF)

Published May 12th, 2023

Movies like The Mattachine Family are necessary correctives to the historic record of gay men on screen. This story of a man struggling with a desire to be a father and the strain of a relationship at a breaking point is authentic and relatable human story regardless of whether the lead is gay or straight. One of the things that so often gets lost in the midst of trying to satisfy people's expectations of stories of gay or straight people, are the basic humanity at heart. The Mattachine Family may be about a gay man but it is mainly about a human being with relatable human problems.

The Mattachine Family stars Nico Tortorella as Thomas, half of a couple in the midst of a wrenching experience. Thomas and his husband, Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace), have lost their son. The child hasn't died but the agony is similar. Thomas and Oscar were acting as foster parents when the boy's mother came back into the picture. The details are hazy but she's capable of being a mother, and a good one, and thus she has successfully petitioned to get her son back. She's grateful to Thomas and Oscar for taking care of her son when she could not but she intends to raise him away from where they are.

As we will learn through the story of The Mattachine Family, the idea of being a father was completely foreign to Thomas before he met and fell in love with Oscar. It's easy to forget that gay marriage and adoption are so new that millennials like Thomas are still taking in the idea that they can be married and be parents. Specific to Thomas however was simply that he never considered parenthood until it happened. Now that it has ended suddenly, Thomas finds that he can't just go back to who he was before.

Oscar, on the other hand, is traumatized but not willing to talk about it. He can't bring himself to be there when his son was returned to his mother, nor is he willing to discuss trying to be a parent again. Oscar is coping by focusing on work. Being a former child television star who lost his career when he came out as gay at a very young age, Oscar now finds himself with a chance to get back in the spotlight. The only complication is, the job is filming somewhere in Michigan, far from his and Thomas's home in Los Angeles.

The escape may be what Oscar needs but not what Thomas needs. Thomas has a circle of friends who provide a support system he really needs, especially now. He loves his husband and is willing to sacrifice for their marriage, but when Oscar completely shuts down the idea of trying to be parents again, it may be the breaking point of their relationship. Most of The Mattachine Family will turn on this particular conflict and it proves to be a very compelling conflict.

The Mattachine Family is a warm, inviting and charming film. It's an achingly human story that deals with serious relationship issues with a maturity and care I really appreciated. It's also a film populated by terrific characters. Thomas is surrounded by wonderful friends played by Emily Hampshire, Garrett Clayton, and Cloie Wyatt Taylor, who form the kind of found family that we should all hope to have. Found family, for me, is as important as blood relations, if not more, and The Mattachine Family captures that beautifully. Found family in the LGBTQ+ community can often prove to be even more important as many come from bigoted or merely unsupportive homes.

The makers of The Mattachine Family are acutely aware of details like that while the film doesn't linger on making important points, the implications are clear and given depth by scenes depicting these friends being together and caring for each other. Another strong detail comes in the film's voiceover where we get lovely insights into Thomas's worldview. I normally have a rather low opinion of voiceover outside of very specific genre conventions but the makers of The Mattachine Family make it feel right for this story.

Thomas tells us a lot of important things in his inner monologue and its mostly character details rather than simply a device to move the plot forward. It does function as a plot mover but not egregiously. No, rather, it smartly reminds those of us who don't share Thomas's background just how much things have changed for gay men in Thomas' merely 30 plus year existence. We certainly have not come to a place of equity for the gay community but Thomas' voiceover reminds us just how many possibilities have opened to men his age, legally speaking, in just the past two decades.

Find my full length review at Pride.Media

Horror in the 90s Nightbreed

Nightbreed (1990)

Directed by Clive Barker

Written by Clive Barker

Starring Craig Scheffer, David Cronenberg, Anne Bobby

Release Date February 16th, 1990

Box Office Gross $16 million dollars

Clive Barker wastes no time; you see his monsters before the credits roll in Nightbreed. In terms of visual storytelling, a wall of cave paintings tells us that the monsters here are ancient, perhaps a pre-cursor to, or a compatriot of, early man. If these cave paintings are telling a story, that's unclear. Holy crap! Again, we waste no time. A mess of monsters are racing about to a classically Danny Elfman score. The scene is very... Andrew Lloyd Webber. The monsters and the choreography of the chase is, at the very least Broadway inspired.

This is a dream sequence which explains the highly theatrical production and the stage-setting for the action. Our lead character, Aaron Boone (Craig Scheffer) has awakened from a dream of these fantastical monsters and the way in which Cliver Barker self-inserts himself into the story is hard to miss here. Having his handsome main character dreaming up these fantastical monsters is a very obvious corollary to the writer-director-author who has, in fact, created these monsters for this movie.

Nightbreed is based on the novel 'Cabal' by Clive Barker. Barker adapted the book into a screenplay and directed the film based on that screenplay from his own book. So, yeah, this is a Clive Barker joint through and through. I imagine having himself inserted as the main character, stopping just short of calling the character Clive and having him be a multi-hyphenate artist, won't be the last time we see parallels between Aaron, AKA Cabal, and his creator.

Seemingly out of the blue we get a sequence of slasher horror that is among the best of the decade. Barker takes us to a random suburban home. A loving wife and her husband are laughing together and playful. They have a young son and he gives us the first sign of something unseemly occurring. The boy tells his mother that he's afraid and claims that he was kept awake by a 'bad man.' This bad man turns out to be the real deal, a slasher killer who makes an incredible first impression.

Employing a a horror filmmaking trope, Barker has the mother open the freezer door in the kitchen. This serves to block a portion of empty space next to her. Naturally, the trained film watcher knows that when mom closes the freezer door, someone, or something, will be there and this scene will move jarringly from the suburban mundane to the terrifying. Here, since he's employing a familiar trope, Barker has to deliver something big. Something shocking. And boy does he deliver.

A killer in one of the most terrifying masks we will see in 90s horror, is behind that freezer door. He immediately slashes mom to death with what is surely an incredibly sharp knife. The movement is swift and horrifying and your breath catches when you see it. The visual of the blood on the ground and the sight of apples that the mother was near or carrying covered in blood as the roll across the floor is a sublime horror visual. The gurgling of the mother character, having been slashed across the face and throat, and the seemingly realistic amount of blood, only serves to amplify the terror.

Dad is next. The killer, wearing this incredibly scary mask and a long black trench coat, a look that evokes a much more frightening take on Claude Rains' The Invisible Man, enters the living room and shuts off the lights. In just a brief moment that superbly heightens the awfulness of what is to come, dad smiles to himself, assuming that his lovely wife has returned for more intimacy. He's wrong, of course, and that we know it and he doesn't adds another layer of deep dismay. Once dad is dead, the scene heightens again.

Our mind flashes to that little boy at the top of the stairs. Knowing this, and taking remarkable advantage of our empathetic rooting interest, Barker chooses to move the camera to the child's perspective, looking down the stairs at the killer. Here, Barker masterfully pauses, giving us the brief hope that maybe the killer won't look for the boy, maybe the child will merely bea witnes to this terror. That hope is snuffed out as the killer's sickening gaze, through what looks like buttons where his eyes should be. The mask evokes another, much less well-known influence, 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a Charles B. Pierce directed film, and also a movie about a serial murderer in a mask.

Does the child die? We don't know. in the moment but but it certainly did not appear that he had much chance of survival. I can't stress how great this scene is. In only his second feature film, following the less than stellar but entirely memorable, Hellraiser, Barker demonstrates masterful control over his camera, the patience of Hitchcock in letting his scene build while adding details to amp the moment, and an ingenious notion of how to end a scene thick with dread and intrigue. It's remarkable and I am shocked I've not heard about this scene before.

Another example of Barker's growth as a director is his choice to follow this scene by letting off some steam. He needs to place his characters on a map for the story to proceed. Thus, Aaron is at work and his girlfriend, Lori (Anne Bobbi), drops in for a visit. She explains that she's going to be at a nightclub that night, performing as a singer. The dialogue is all exposition but it's not tedious as Aaron and Lori are making out almost the whole time, breaking for dialogue and an occasional breath. Scheffer and Bobbi have tremendous sexual chemistry so the making out is a good choice but we now also know where the characters are going to be and why. What looks like a superfluous scene then, is thus now a scene that has set the table for what is to come and established the couple even further as young lovers we want to see together again.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media

Movie Review Carnosaur

Carnosaur (1993)

Directed by Adam Simon

Written by Adam Simon

Starring Raphael Sbarge, Diane Ladd, Jennifer Runyon, Clint Howard

Release Date May 14th, 1993

Published May 15th, 1993

Carnosaur is a bizarre, incomprehensible mess of a movie. Ostensibly created to capitalize on Jurassic Park, Carnosaur was actually released a month prior to the release of the Steven Spielberg all time classic. Legend tells that Executive Producer Roger Corman heard that Steven Spielberg's next movie was a dinosaur film based on a Michael Crichton bestseller. So, ever the huckster carny, Corman scoured the bestseller list for another book with dinosaurs.

That's when he discovered Carnosaur by John Brosnan and snapped it up. Now, Corman had no intention of actually adapting the book, he just needed it for the optics of making his movie look like Jurassic Park. This extended to the casting of Carnosaur. When it became known that Laura Dern was in the cast of Jurassic Park, Corman wrote a check to get Dern's mother, Diane Ladd in Carnosaur. By this point, he'd chosen a director he was sure could hack up the book and come up with a semblance of a movie.

Enter writer-director Adam Simon. The man who partnered with Corman's wife, Julie Corman, to make 1990's Brain Dead, was just the man to slap together a dinosaur movie where the only goal was to release it before Jurassic Park came out. Mission accomplished. Simon slapped, cut, and pasted Carnosaur into something similar to an actual movie in a remarkable 18 days of principal photography. Diane Ladd was on hand for 5 of those days.

Yes, the behind the scenes story is way more interesting than anything on the screen. Carnosaur is what would happen if you dropped random pages of a dinosaur novel into an A.I generator and asked it to turn that book into a horror movie. It has no inflection points, major motivations are missing, and several plot strands arrive and depart seemingly at random. Scenes exist but they often leave you wondering why they exist.

I'm going to attempt to unpack this plot, if that's at all possible. Carnosaur stars Diane Ladd as Dr. Jane Tiptree, a famed weapons designer now working on designer eggs. What most don't know is that Dr. Tiptree is a mad scientist bent on the destruction of the human race. Dr. Tiptree believes that the Earth belongs to the dinosaur and her goal is to restore the dinosaur in place of man. To do that, she has genetically engineered chickens to give birth to dinosaurs.

But, that's not all. Dr. Tiptree has also created a virus that infects people and causes them to give birth to dinosaur eggs. Well, women give birth to dinosaur eggs, its left highly unclear what the virus does to men despite the director going out of his way to show men being super-gross and spreading the dino-virus to each other by coughing on each other or on the food they are serving to others. Despite that, we only see women giving birth to dinosaur eggs and then dying.

Well, except for Dr. Tiptree who, when her time comes, gives birth to a fully formed tiny T-Rex, rathen than just a gross egg. This scene is so sad. Having done her best to preserve her dignity in this movie, when it is clear that Ladd is laying out a blanket for herself to give birth on, I cried out, NO! Not Diane Ladd! Corman, you monster! Ladd had made it to the end of the movie barely acting a moment in this awful film and when she finally sacrifices her dignity to give birth to a dinosaur, it's the only time Carnosaur achieves any kind of horror. It's mortification, an empathetic sadness on our part on behalf of Diane Ladd, but it does elicit a response.

Diane Ladd is the villain of Carnosaur, I haven't even introduced our 'hero.' Raphael Sbarge stars as Doc, a former doctor turned drunken security guard at a quarry... I think. He has a medical degree on the wall.... I think. Everyone calls him Doc and he seems to know what to do when a woman goes into labor but, it is incredibly unclear what the nature of his character is. We know that his mortal enemy are hippies. Hippy protestors are trying to stop the quarry from digging... something.