Movie Review The Blackening

The Blackening (2023) 

Directed by Tim Story 

Written by Tracy Oliver, Dewayne Perkins 

Starring Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Sinqua Walls 

Release Date June 16th, 2023 

Published June 19th, 2023 

The Blackening is a very funny and refreshing take on horror comedy. From the clever mind of director Tim Story and star/co-screenwriter Dewayne Perks and Tracy Oliver, The Blackening takes on numerous horror tropes and puts a new, exciting and often very funny twist on them. This is more than just because the cast is black, it's because the treatment of those well-worn tropes is inventive and really funny. The characters are unique and yet familiar, falling in line with classic horror tropes while upending the tropes with smart dialogue and clever sequences. 

The Blackening opens on a cabin the woods. Morgan (Yvonne Orji), and her boyfriend, Shawn (Jay Pharoah), engage in a series of meta-jokes as they come face to face with a bizarre and deeply problematic board game called The Blackening. Forced to play the game by some unseen bystander, the couple engage in the game and fail almost immediately when neither can name a black character who survived a well-known horror movie. The meta of the moment comes when Orji theorizes that Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett were killed off first in Scream 2 because they were big names that the production could not afford. Orji and Pharoah being, arguably, the best-known members of this cast, deliver this dialogue with a terrific comic knowingness. 

The rest of their party arrives soon after, though Morgan and Shawn are nowhere to be found. Arriving first are the threesome of Allison (Grace Byers), Lisa (Antoinette Robinson), and Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins). They have come for what is supposed to be a weekend of drugs, alcohol and college debauchery in honor of a 10-year college reunion. Lisa, however, has a secret motive. She's reconnected with her college boyfriend, Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), much to the aggravation of Dewayne who recalls the number of times that Nnamdi cheated on his best friend. 

Later arriving is King (Melvin Gregg), a former thug, according to the dialogue, not my interpretation, King is now a man of peace and zen who makes a point of mentioning that he's married to a white woman. That will become kind of important in one of the film's standout comic horror moments. The final guests arriving are Shanika (X May0), the absolute scene stealer of The Blackening, and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), someone who may or may not have actually been invited to this reunion. He claims he was invited by Morgan but since she's MIA, there is no way to prove that. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review The Crush

The Crush (1993) 

Directed by Alan Shapiro 

Written by Alan Shapiro 

Starring Alicia Silverstone, Cary Elwes, Jennifer Rubin, Kurtwood Smith

Release Date April 2nd 1993 

Published June 17th, 2023 

According to writer-director Alan Shapiro, The Crush, is based on a real life experience he had in which a teenage girl developed a fixation on him that became obsessive. This was an exaggeration to say the least. The original film, as shot and scripted by Shapiro even used the real name of the teenager, he claimed inspired the film. Naturally, because she is portrayed as a murderous nutjob in the movie, the real-life teenager sued Shapiro for Defamation of Character. The studio responded by clumsily changing the name of the main character via a comically bad piece of over-dubbing. 

It's doubtful that Shapiro's story actually happened as he characterized it. The reality appears to be that creepy studio executives were eager to make a thriller based on sexualizing a teenage girl and found Shapiro's very silly, self-aggrandizing script in a pile and saw potential dollar signs from the always lucrative creep market. The production of the film seems to back up that assertion as Silverstone had to dodge the attempts by executives to get her to do nude scenes and sexual scenes beyond what is in the final film. 

So insistent on a nude scene was one particular executive that a compromise was made. A body double stripped down for a scene showing off her backside in place of Silverstone's. Bear in mind, Silverstone was 16 at the time she made The Crush and the character in the movie is slightly younger than that. A mere 30 years ago, a Hollywood executive felt comfortable enough to ask a teenage actress to do a nude scene in a movie and became so insistent on the baring of teenage flesh in the movie that they had to compromise with an adult body double. That's just some of the super creepy backstory of 1993's The Crush. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Horror in the 90s The Guardian

The Guardian (1990)

Directed by William Friedkin

Written by Stephen Volk, William Friedkin

Starring Dwier Brown, Carey Lowell, Jenny Seagrove

Release Date April 27th, 1990

Box Office $17,000,000

The Guardian stars Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell as Phil and Kate Sterling. Phil and Kate have just moved to Los Angeles and have just found out they are having their first baby. Exciting times continue as their two jobs afford them a lovely suburban home and the ability to hire a nanny to care for their baby. The nanny they end up with is Camilla, played by Jenny Seagrove. Camilla got the job after the woman they initially wanted disappeared.

We know that that woman, played in a cameo by the wonderful Teresa Randle, has been badly injured, or possibly killed in a bike accident. We see this but it’s never clear if Phil and Kate are aware of what happened. Regardless, they appear quite pleased with hiring Camilla who appears to be warm and caring and has good references that they choose not to look into because she appears so sweet and sincere. What Phil and Kate don’t know however, is that a baby Camilla cared for in her last job, went missing under suspicious circumstances.

This sounds vaguely like the plot of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, doesn’t it. Indeed, The Guardian, at one point, was envisioned as a thriller along that line, one taking advantage of the fears of young parents. Then, at another point, The Guardian was envisioned as a broad horror comedy to be directed by Sam Raimi about a mystical being that cares for an ancient tree by providing the tree with the blood of babies. When Raimi left the project and was replaced by directing legend William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist apparently decided to mash these two disparate premises together.

Thus we have The Guardian a horror-thriller about an evil enchanted tree protector who steals babies from unsuspecting couples to feed her evil enchanted tree. This sounds comic but it is not intended to be funny in any way. It is however, just as sloppy, slipshod, and silly, as such a mash-up of movies would inevitably be. Friedkin choosing to keep both movies that The Guardian used to be and trying to awkwardly weld them together ends up delivering a desperately confused and unintentionally funny horror mess.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media

Movie Review Kidnap

Kidnap (2017) 

Directed by Luis Prieto

Written by Knate Lee 

Starring Halle Berry, Lew Temple

Release Date August 4th, 2017

Halle Berry has been on an astonishing losing streak at the box office since she won the Academy Award for her starring role in Monster’s Ball. Ever since the night she won people’s hearts with her teary and historic Oscar acceptance speech, Berry has made one wrong turn after another whether making bad big budget comic book movies, all X-Men sequels or spinoffs, or bad low budget thrillers, Perfect Stranger, Gothika, The Call, or head-scratching, defiantly awful fare such as Movie 43, Cloud Atlas and Catwoman, Berry seemed bent on full career sabotage.

This brings us to Kidnap which by default, Things We Lost in the Fire wasn’t bad, may be the best movie Berry has made in well over a decade. The story of a mother attempting to retrieve her stolen child, Kidnap may be a super low budget, cheapie thriller, but Berry gives the role all she’s got, even if she is occasionally out shined by her magical car-chase minivan.

In Kidnap Berry portrays Karla Dyson, a waitress who somehow can afford a brand-new Ford minivan on a salary of tips and minimum wage. Karla is amid a divorce and a custody battle when she takes her son Frankie (Sage Correa) to a carnival at a local park. When her divorce attorney calls, Karla takes her eye off her son for a moment and doesn’t see him again until she spies a large woman wrestling the boy into a beat up old Mustang.

After attempting to wrestle the Mustang to a stop with her momma bear determination, Karla loads into her minivan to give chase and Kidnap becomes an almost non-stop car chase thriller. I will say this for director Luis Prieto, he keeps up a quick pace. Kidnap comes and goes in just over 80 minutes and there is very little fat on the narrative. The film’s camera work and editing can be a tad too chaotic but that’s likely a function of the setting, a New Orleans highway system, and the film’s very tight budget.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower (2017) 

Directed by Nikolaj Arcel

Written by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, Nikolaj Arcel

Starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Jackie Earl Haley

Release Date August 4th, 2017 

To whomever said that Stephen King’s epic novel The Dark Tower was un-adaptable to the big screen, we owe you a Coke. The supremely silly movie sequel to King’s dense Dark Tower book series is an embarrassment to all involved from King to director Nicolaj Arcel to Academy Award winning star Matthew McConaughey and Academy Award nominated producer Ron Howard, who for some reason passed on directing The Dark Tower himself; golly, I can’t imagine why?

The work of the prolific Mr. King seems to resist adaptation in the same way a country might resist an invading army. Don’t misunderstand, some have managed to pull off the trick; Stanley Kubrick made The Shining, though Stephen King hated his adaptation; Frank Darabont did okay with The Green Mile but again, King hated that one as well and even The Shawshank Redemption wasn’t beloved by the creator even as audiences loved it. Of the 50 or so King properties made into television or feature films, only a handful have turned out watchable and The Dark Tower is not one of those movies.

Idris Elba is the star of The Dark Tower as Roland the Eld, a Gunslinger living on a Middle Earth where everything has been lost to some sort of apocalypse started by the evil Walter (Matthew McConaughey), a sorcerer(?) bent on destroying the Dark Tower which stands in the middle of a dozen or so galaxies and protects from the ultimate evil beyond the stars. Standing alongside Roland is teenager Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) whose visionary nightmares brought him to this middle earth, not the Lord of the Rings one, a Stephen King one, where he hopes to prevent the apocalypse on his version of Earth(?). (The movie is such a mess it's impossible to say whether Walter is a sorcerer or what Jake's motivations truly are, hence all the question marks.)

The Dark Tower was director by Nicolaj Arcel who seems entirely over-matched by this material. Arcel’s previous effort was the studious period piece A Royal Affair and it showed he could wrangle a sweet period piece romance but I am not sure what producer Ron Howard saw in that film that led them to believe Arcel could marshal the silliness of The Dark Tower into anything other than another abominable Stephen King adaptation.

Poor Matthew McConaughey takes it on the chin for the cast of The Dark Tower. While Taylor has youth as an excuse and while Elba can fall back on the cool Gunslinger persona, McConaughey is adrift as the ultimate evil, Walter. Sure, he’s also referred to as The Man in Black but even then, his costume includes a long coat with shoulder pads that make him look more 80s Dynasty diva than ultimate evil. Why they decided that the ultimate evil, worse than the Devil, Roland claims, should be called Walter is one of several bizarre decisions made by the creators of The Dark Tower. Sure, that could be something from King's book but even then, they could have written that part out of the movie considering how this is a follow-up to the books and not a straight adaptation.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Masters of the Universe

Masters of the Universe (1987) 

Directed by Gary Goddard

Written by David Odell 

Starring Dolph Lundgren, Courtney Cox, Frank Langella

Release Date August 7th, 1987 

The legendary John Waters once defined camp, on an episode of The Simpsons, as “The tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic.” The 1987 movie Masters of the Universe pre-dates that definition of camp by more than a decade but nevertheless defines it perfectly. Masters of the Universe is a tragically ludicrous idea undermined by greed, hubris and the outright silly notion that just because something catches on with child audiences it can be translated to film in anything other than a pathetic attempt at pandering.

There are several famous Hollywood stories from the behind the scenes creation of Masters of the Universe but few capture the essence of this horrible idea for a movie in the way that this one does. One day, Dolph Lundgren’s Rocky 4 co-star Sylvester Stallone visited the set of Masters of the Universe and seeing his former co-star exchanging dialogue with co-star Courtney Cox, Stallone expressed his apoplexy by asking an executive on set “You gave that guy dialogue?”

Indeed, Dolph Lundgren is given dialogue and through his remarkably thick accent even the simple catchphrase “I HAVE THE POWER” comes off like The Simpsons' hilarious Schwarzenegger parody, Rainier Wolfcastle, attempting a similar line from that shows' movie within a show about the fake comic book hero Radioactive Man. Undoubtedly, The Simpsons writers must have been huge ironic fans of Masters of the Universe.

Masters of the Universe was a compromised product from its very conception but that could not be clearer to fans of He-Man than in the film’s first scenes. The very first thing that happens in Masters of the Universe is that the villain Skeletor (Frank Langella, poor, misguided Frank Langella), has accomplished his long-time cartoon goal of taking over the fictional planet of Eternia. Fans can be forgiven for being floored by this as the cartoon series had been built around the battle to protect Castle Greyskull and its universe conquering powers from Skeletor and he’s just accomplished his greatest goal off-screen.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Legend of Ben Hall

The Legend of Ben Hall (2017)

Directed by Matthew Holmes

Written by Matthew Holmes

Starring Jack Martin, Jamie Coffa 

Release Date August 1st, 2017

We have a tendency in America to believe that our pop culture is the only culture to embrace our anti-heroes, those rugged criminals whose lives we romanticize into fantasy for reasons we can’t quite rationalize with what these men did. But rhapsodizing about the criminal as pseudo-hero is a truly worldwide phenomenon. The latest example of the worldwide nature of the celebration of anti-heroes comes from Australia with the story of criminal icon Ben Hall, the subject of the Bushranger epic The Legend of Ben Hall which is now available on DVD and On-Demand services in America.

Ben Hall (Jack Martin) was the quintessential Bushranger, a criminal but a criminal with a personal ethic. In the years since Ben Hall has been robbing stagecoaches with his band of criminal brothers, he never took a life. Ben may not exactly be noble, he is an unquestionably dangerous man committing real crimes, but his no murder stance, at the very least, render a criminal with scruples. Ben is haunted by the way in which his wife Biddy (Joanne Dobbin) left him for another man and took their child and he intends to take the boy back once he steals enough money for safe travel to America.

Joining Jack is the far more dangerous outlaw, John Gilbert (Jamie Coffa), whose best quality is his loyalty to Ben; it’s the only thing that keeps Gilbert from becoming an outright psychopath. Together, Ben and John recruit Jon Dunn (William Lee) and they begin a reign of terror on Australian banks that led the banks and the government to extreme measures to fight back. Those extreme measures eventually led to a moment of reckoning for a bloodthirsty army of thug law enforcers and the Australian military which compromised their ethics eventually to put an end to Ben Hall and his gang.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media