Horror in the 90s The Unborn

The Unborn (1991) 

Directed by Rodman Flender 

Written by John Brancato, Michael Ferris

Starring Brooke Adams, Jeff Hayenga, K Callan, Kathy Griffin, Lisa Kudrow 

Release Date March 29th, 1991 

Box Office Gross $1.15 million dollars 

The Unborn is part of a special subgenre of 90s horror, the laughable kind. Okay, fine, it's also a movie that wants to tap into the fears inherent in struggling to become a new parent and bring life into the world, but the film is truly laughable in that effort. Goofy special effect babies, over the top, shrill performances, and artless direction render The Unborn part of the Corman Classics, a group of cheap, often quite terrible films that Roger Corman artlessly pumped out of his mass manufactured movie company. While Corman's legend has earned a reappraisal for the careers he helped to launch, we should not forget the huckster Corman was at heart, a salesman crafting and selling faulty products at low, low prices. 

Poor dewy-eyed Brooke Adams has the thankless task of playing the lead role in The Unborn. Adams plays Virginia, a children's book author who has been trying for several years to have a child with her milquetoast hubby, Brad, offering bland support and dodging any blame for their failure to conceive. In a desperate, last-ditch effort, the couple has agreed to see an experimental doctor with a new scientific approach to helping couples conceive. The new method is terrifying and painful involving a dark operating room and large needles. The production design is cheap but the lack of lights, at the very least, does create a sense of the unnatural. 

The special new doctor is Dr. Richard Meyerling (James Karen), a man who has worked miracles for other families, though the nature of these miracles are slowly coming to light. In fact, the family that recommended that Virginia see Dr. Meyerling suffers a tragedy when the daughter born from Dr. Meyerling's experimental procedures begins showing sociopathic tendencies that end with her murdering her little brother while he slept. Other women have ended up before their baby is born and one woman, a new friend of Virgina's, ends up in a coma. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Mayhem

Mayhem (2024) 

Directed by Xavier Gens 

Written by Xavier Gens

Starring Nassim Lyes, Loryn Nounay, Oliver Gourmet 

Release Date January 5th, 2024 

Published January 3rd, 2024 

Mayhem is an ultraviolent revenge thriller out of France. Directed by Xavier Gens, Mayhem follows a Mixed Martial Artist who is just out of jail and hoping to stay out of trouble. Naturally, trouble finds him instead and he ends up going on the wrong after accidentally killing the brother of a drug dealer. He picks up his life in Thailand but as stories like this always go, the past is going to catch up with him leading to a final confrontation and a bloody, bloody end for most of the baddies. 

Mayhem stars champion kickboxer Nassim Lyes as Sam, a reformed bad boy eager to rebuild his life after time in prison. Things are looking up for Sam as he gets out of prison and immediately earns a well paying job on a construction site. It's long hours and hard work but it's also a chance to rebuild his life on the right side of the law. Naturally, if that were allowed to happen then this would not be a bloody revenge action film so don't get used to this status quo. 

In fact, it takes barely a day before Sam's past comes back to haunt him. A drug dealer who wanted Sam back in his employ has sent thugs to kill Sam. As Sam flees through the rugged streets of Paris, he ends up on a construction site where he ends up killing the man chasing and attacking him. This man happens to be the drug dealer's brother. This will force Sam to give up Paris in favor of going on the lam. Leaving behind all that he's known to go to Thailand and try to start over. 

The story then picks up five years down the road. Sam has a wife and has adopted her daughter as his own. They have a baby on the way. They also have plans to buy a home, with money raised by Sam returning to fighting where he throws fights on behalf shady gangster types. Sam's wife may as well have a bulls eye on her forehead, she is not long for this movie. I'm honestly not sure we learned her name. She's here to die and motivate Sam to become the ultimate killing machine. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Bricklayer

The Bricklayer (2024) 

Directed by Renny Harlin 

Written by Hanna Weg, Matt Johnson 

Starring Aaron Eckhardt, Nina Dobrev, Tim Blake Nelson, Clifton Collins Jr. 

Release Date January 5th, 2023 

Published January 4th, 2023 

The Bricklayer is a remarkably banal and completely terrible movie. The film stars Aaron Eckhardt as the titular bricklayer. Naturally, he's not bricklayer, not really anyway. He does lay bricks and even builds a small wall early in the movie, but his tragic backstory is soon revealed. The Bricklayer, aka Vail, lost his family when they were slaughtered by his former friend, played by Clifton Collins Jr. This caused Vail to abandon the life of a CIA spy in favor of bricks. He believes that he had killed his former friend but now he's found out that he's wrong. 

Collins' terrorist character is back and is now murdering international journalists and framing the CIA for the kills. The CIA needs Vail to come out of retirement and finish the job of killing the terrorist. Naturally, the only person the CIA could possibly team him with is an inexperienced tech wiz who can find information that the rest of the CIA can't because their lazy and jaded and she's young and beautiful. Nina Dobrev is the whippersnapper CIA agent who will pose as Vail's wife as they snoop their way inside the high society of Greece where the most recent murdered journalist was staying. 

The cliches of The Bricklayer move fast and furious. Literally, some of these were made cliche by the Fast and Furious movies. Aside from a hero who enjoys the trade of bricklaying, there is nothing remotely original about The Bricklayer. I mean everything, right down to star Aaron Eckhardt's raspy tough guy speaking voice. In one of the first scenes in the movie, Eckhardt is shot by one of those bad guys who rarely hits anything while firing a needless number of bullets. So, Eckhardt duct tapes his gunshot would shut, and engages in a hand-to-hand fight that would put most MMA fights to shame. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom

Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom (2023) 

Directed by James Wan 

Written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Will Beall

Starring Jason Mamoa, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Amber Heard, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II 

Release Date December 21st, 2023 

Published December 29th, 2023 

Wow! Aquaman 2 The Lost Kingdom is quite bad. I truly did not care for this DCEU sequel to what wasn't a bad first film. The sequel is lazy and dimwitted, ponderous and often quite ugly to look at. It's everything we've come to dislike about modern comic book blockbusters. The worst element is the CGI, a rubbery mess of indecipherable visuals and some of the worst fight scenes since Michael Bay assaulted our senses in the Transformers franchise. The biggest disappointment, however, is director James Wan, a supremely talented director who appears to be on complete autopilot in this lazy sequel. 

The film begins with a hacky sitcom monologue which sets up the new dynamic of the Aquaman movie universe. Aquaman, AKA, Arthur Curry (Jason Samoa), delivers a monologue that appears to break the fourth wall except that it is couched as a dialogue with his new baby, Arthur Jr. He's bringing the baby up to speed on where we stand now with Arthur as the King of Atlantis, hating the restrictions of being King and finding ways to be the Arthur of old, a superhero who fights evil and protects the good. His wife, Hera (Amber Heard), is also around... somewhere. 

Much of the early portion of the film is Arthur with his baby and sharing beers with his dad, Tom (Temeura Morrison). That is until, David Kane, AKA, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) makes his presence felt. He's somewhere in Antarctica searching for The Lost Kingdom. With the aid of a genius scientist, Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park), and the effects of Global Warming, he does find something, an ancient weapon called The Black Trident. The possessed weapon begins to infect Black Manta's mind, using his hatred for Aquaman to drive him to free the Lost Kingdom from a centuries long curse. 

In order to find Black Manta, Arthur must do the unthinkable, break his brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), out of a desert prison where he's been held since the end of the last movie. Thanks to the power of lazy screenwriting, Orm knows where to find Black Manta, or the Star Wars cantina where someone else knows where Manta is. It is one of the most boring prison breaks in movie history. It's remarkably by the numbers, hampered by bad CGI, and wildly underwhelming villains guarding Orm. Same can be said for the visit to a pirate bar featuring rejected Star Wars aliens. 

Click here for my full length review. 

Movie Review The Two Faces of January

The Two Faces of January (2014) 

Directed by Hossein Amini 

Written by Hossein Amini 

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, Kirsten Dunst 

Release Date August 28th, 2014 

Published November 17th 2014

I feel as if I missed something essential in “The Two Faces of January.” For the life of me, I don’t know why the film is called “The Two Faces of January.” I feel the film must have introduced this information at some point but I don’t recall it. I could speculate that the two faces are those of stars Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac as they seem to be counter-weighted to each other throughout the film but what was the ‘January’ bit? It’s not a reference to the month, it’s a not a name, unless that’s what I missed. It nags at me that I missed this or if I didn’t miss it and am puzzling over something that doesn’t matter.

“The Two Faces of January” is an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. Thus, it is set in Europe, in this case Greece, among beautiful, vacationing Americans. Oscar Isaac is Rydal Keener, an ex-pat con man and tour guide with aspirations to be rich. For now, he’ll settle for not being at home at his father’s funeral. Rydal’s con is to find fellow Americans who don’t speak the language and don’t understand foreign currency. It’s an almost victimless crime as his victims have plenty to spare and he’s really only skimming off the top.

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst are Chester and Colette MacFarlane. At first, we’re to wonder if they are set to be Rydal’s next meal ticket. Director and screenwriter Hossein Amini however, has something more sinister in mind. Like Rydal, Chester is something of a conman, an American stock swindler. On the run with Colette in Europe he has conned his young wife into a game of pretend; pretending they’re going to go home and he isn’t going to be sent to prison or worse.

The game ends when an American private eye finds Chester and Colette and sets about a shakedown for the missing money of one of his clients. The detective dies and when Rydal arrives at the wrong moment to return a lost bracelet, he’s roped into a life-changing plot. Using his connections as a conman Rydal will attempt to get his new friends out of Greece without their passports. Phony documents take time however and with Grecian police acting efficiently to ferret out the plot, a road trip is undertaken to remain under the radar.

That’s the crux of the plot. What’s left is spoiler filled so consider yourself warned.

Ok, fine, I decided to look up the title of the movie to see what I missed. It turns out that it is a reference to the Roman God Janus which is said to have had to faces, one to see the future and one to see the past. Janus was the God of beginnings and transitions. That, naturally, is quite fitting for this story as the past plagues the future of all three characters. Janus by the way was eventually honored by the first month of the year, as January.

Throughout the introductory portion of “The Two Faces of January” we come to see Rydal admire both Chester and Colette. We can see his envy for Chester but also a deep respect for his station. We can sense a desire to usurp Chester even as Chester becomes a father figure. Yes, it’s all very Freudian and Shakespearean with the son who wishes to replace the father at the side of the mother. Yada, yada, yada. Here however, is where our director smartens up. By removing Colette via the film’s second accidental murder the dynamic shifts and what was beginning to be a draggy psychological thriller shifts gears to become a noir thriller.

Having failed to also kill Rydal in the wake of his murder of Colette, Chester finds himself chained to his new ‘friend’ as he attempts to leave the country. Each man has it out for the other but the game playing brings them together, as does the revenge each seeks on the other. Rydal is driven to avenge Colette and his having been framed for her murder. Chester, on the other hand is seeking escape but also to redeem the manhood he lost in his cuckolding.

That’s the psychological motivation for the action of the the final act of the film. Mr. Amini however, has by this point, as much as we have, has lost interest in psychology. The final act  of “The Two Faces of January” is instead played almost entirely in the language of film noir camerawork and staging.

As each man evades capture by police the cobblestone streets of Crete are alive with moonlight. Narrow corridors like those out of Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” shimmer with moonlight illuminating a path toward inexhaustible death. That Chester is to die is not in question here but the style with which his death arrives is classically crafted and elevates the film. We also get a very unusual and soulful moment as the dying father figure gives back to his son his life with a helpful confession of his crimes.

Much like the God Janus looking forward and backward at once, “The Two Faces of January” looks to be two movies at once. One movie is a pop-psych thriller with a little Shakespeare for flavor. The other is a tribute to the noir mysteries of the 40’s and 50’s complete with the mistaken identities, the wrongly accused man and the wet, reflective streets that always seemed to await a chase and a death.

That is the film’s beauty and its curse. It is two movies in one and neither is enough to satisfy in full. I loved the ending but the pop-psych stuff plods and the chemistry of the stars never bring it to life. The ending is almost good enough for me to recommend the movie but I wonder how many of you will last that long once the film is available on home video and you can simply stop and do other things.

Movie Review Ouija

Ouija (2014) 

Directed by Stiles White 

Written by Juliet Snowden, Stiles White 

Starring Olivia Cooke, Darren Kagasoff, Bianca Santos 

Release Date October 24th, 2014 

Published October 25th, 2014 

Ouija, based on the Hasbro board game about contacting the dead, is one of the laziest movies I have ever seen. There is not a single original moment in the entire barely feature length of the film. The only redeeming thing about Ouija is it's potential role in a new game I created in my head while watching it called Horror Movie Cliché Bingo. Each time you see a Horror Movie Cliché that matches a cliché on your card, mark it off. When you have five in a row on your card, stand up in the theater and yell Bingo. I had Bingo about 45 minutes into the movie.

Movie Review The Other Woman

The Other Woman (2014) 

Directed by Nick Cassavetes 

Written by Melissa Stack 

Starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Upton, Leslie Mann, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau 

Release Date April 25th, 2014 

Published January 2nd, 2024 

Cameron Diaz is back in theaters this weekend with "The Other Woman," a comedy that casts her as the the unknowing mistress of Nikolaj Coster Waldau who falls into an unlikely friendship with with his wife played by Leslie Mann and his other mistress played by supermodel Kate Upton. "The Other Woman" doesn't look like much from its trailer but the movie is quite good featuring a strong central performance from Diaz and a scene-stealing comic performance from Leslie Mann who's best known for her work in husband Judd Apatow's comedies. 

Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz, and Kate Upton, have one thing in common, Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster Waldau, in the movie, The Other Woman. All three are the 'other woman' in their relationship with Waldau. Leslie Mann plays the wife, Cameron Diaz is mistress number one, and Kate Upton is the youngest and hottest of the the trio of woman whose lives revolve around this one narcissistic man fooling around on all of them. 

Once our trio of hero ladies come together, The Other Woman takes on a comic revenge plot as the trio takes revenge on Waldau's ladies man. It's a lot more fun than that description sounds. Leslie Mann, for one is having a ball as the wronged wife who meets and bonds with her husband's mistresses. In a rare leading role, outside of the work of her comic legend husband, Mann is a treat in The Other Woman, throwing herself headlong into physical comedy and into this comic revenge plot. 

Cameron Diaz is in the role of the straight man. Diaz reacts to Mann's craziness and Upton's hotness all while grounding the movie in a recognizable reality. It's certainly farfetched that any man could be with three woman as attractive as Mann, Diaz, and Upton in a single lifetime, but Diaz manages to make this unbelievable scenario work. She's such a pro and, when called upon, she can be just as funny as Mann and hotter than even Upton, once named the sexiest woman on the planet. 

The Other Woman is much sharper than the plot would indicate. This trio of female stars has such incredible chemistry that it doesn't matter how seemingly impossible it would be for one man to have bedded down with these three women in one lifetime. Nick Cassavetes' direction is breezy and the tone always remains fun and funny. The jokes are good and Leslie Mann earns some of the biggest laughs of her career in a career best performance.