Horror in the 90's Brainscan

Brainscan (1994) 

Directed by John Flynn 

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker 

Starring Edward Furlong, Amy Hargreaves, T. Ryder Smith, Frank Langella 

Release Date April 22nd, 1994 

Published April 29th, 2024 

When I saw that the sci-fi horror movie Brainscan was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, famed screenwriter of David Fincher's Seven and the credited screenwriter on several famous Blacklist screenplays, I got a little excited. Walker is a brilliant, risky, and unpredictable screenwriter with a lurid edge to his work. I went from having exceedingly low expectations to curious and hopeful. Then, I watched Brainscan and my hopes were dashed. It turns out, Andrew Kevin Walker wrote and sold the screenplay seven years before it arrived in theaters as a very, very different movie. 

Brainscan stars Edward Furlong, fresh off his blockbuster role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as horror movie junkie, Michael. Michael's life revolves around horror movies. Alongside his best bud forever, Kyle (Jamie Marsh), Michael runs a horror movie club at school. The club has even attracted Michael's crush, his next door neighbor Kimberly (Amy Hargreaves), who we first meet as Michael is spying on her with a telescope as she undresses in front of her bedroom window, which is completely open. This is so the screenwriters can cheat and have dialogue indicating that Kimberly wants Michael to spy on her. 

See, he's not a creep, it's a weird fetish thing. It's totally okay. Not hard to tell that men wrote and directed Brainscan, is it? Anyway, getting past what a little creep Michael is, let's get back to his horror movie obsession. While reading Fangoria Magazine, in a bid for free coverage from the magazine, yay corporate synergy, am I right, anyway, Michael finds an ad for a new CD-Rom horror game called Brainscan. The game promises an immersive experience as you go inside the perspective of a serial murderer as he carries out a murder. 

As the title and plot indicate, Michael orders the game and sets about playing it while his friend's are having a party next door. Once the game begins, the outside world fades away and Michael finds himself inside a stranger's bedroom. There is a knife in his hand and Michael watches helplessly as the man is stabbed to death. We watch everything from the killer's perspective, as if Michael were the killer and we were in Michael's head. Waking up the next morning after playing the game, Michael is deeply disturbed. 

It turns out, spoiler alert: Michael was the one killing this guy. It turns out that the guy who got murdered is from Michael's neighborhood and the cops, headed up by Detective Hayden (Frank Langella) are crawling all over the place. When Michael runs home, having discovered that he was a killer, he encounters the breakout character of 1994, The Trickster (T. Ryder Smith). The Trickster is the host of Brainscan leading Michael through the four stages of gameplay. First up was the murder. Next, Michael has to play the game again if he wants to destroy the evidence that he's the killer. 

Find my full length review on Vocal's Horror Community 

Movie Review Boy Kills World

Boy Kills World (2024) 

Directed by Moritz Mohr 

Written by Tyler Burton Smith, Arend Remmers 

Starring Bill Skarsgard, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Famke Janssen, Sharlto Copley 

Release Date April 26th, 2024

Published April 29th, 2024 

We are at a tipping point when it comes to ultraviolent revenge thrillers. The John Wick movies created a brief and shiny new genre in movies so violent they border on parody. Films with more bullets than words of dialogue became a fashion after Keanu Reeves killed the people who killed his dogs. Naturally, the results have been a copy of a copy ever since. And the diminishing returns are only now becoming clear. Boy Meets World is one of the movies demonstrating that we may have fully tired of the blood and bullets invincible hero genre. 

Boy Kills World stars Bill Skarsgard as the titular Boy. Rescued as a pre-teen from a fascist group of criminals who were in the process of hanging his family, the Boy is raised in the forest by a crazed Shaman (Yayan Ruhian). The Shaman teaches Boy to become a warrior and trains him specifically to kill the Vander Koye Family, the leaders of the fascist government and the people directly responsible for killing Boy's family. Boy especially wants revenge for the killing of his beloved little sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), who often appears to Boy as an apparition from his own imagination and subconscious. 

After years of training, Boy finally decides to set his revenge in motion. Witnessing a massacre overseen by members of the Vander Koye Family, Glen (Sharlto Copley) and Gideon (Brett Gelman), who bicker like children before directing their top henchwoman, June 27 (Jessica Rothe) to execute anyone resisting them. The Vander Koye's were in the midst of selecting poor people to be executed on live television as part of 'The Culling,' an annual event overseen by the Vander Koye leader, Hilda Vander Koye (Famke Jannssen). Boy especially wants to kill Hilda as she directly oversaw the killing of his family. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Documentary Review Fallen

Fallen (2017) 

Directed by Thomas Marchese 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Michael Chiklis 

Release Date September 1st, 2017

Published August 29th, 2017 

How do I write fairly about a documentary about police officers? It’s harder than it seems. Police officers have become polarizing figures in our culture and writing about them inevitably leads to arguments on all sides. If I don’t write critically of police officers I will be accused of ignoring the terrible traumas that police officers have inflicted upon the innocent and guilty alike. If I write negatively of police officers I am accused of not understanding the difficulty of their job and having some leftist political agenda.

So, how do I write about the new documentary Fallen and serve both the masters of being truthful and being respectful. Just by saying there are two sides to this I’m already in trouble with one side or the other so maybe whatever I write here doesn’t matter. Those of you who believe the police are corrupt bullies and those of you who believe police are being persecuted likely stopped reading this to argue after the first paragraph.

That’s a shame because the new documentary Fallen is one of those that deserves to be seen by anyone with a beating heart and not just those for whom it fulfills a side of an argument. Narrated by Michael Chiklis, Fallen takes us to the homes and families of police officers who were killed in the line of duty. The documentary aims to humanize the loss of a life, not just the death of a police officer, and it is a powerful and moving message about grief and loss.

Directed by former LAPD officer Thomas Marchese, Fallen tells five specific stories, including Thomas’s own brush with death which enters the narrative just as the film is being made. Fallen contains some very disturbing footage of actual encounters where police officers are shot or otherwise assaulted and had their lives threatened or taken. The footage is shocking for its visceral, Faces of Death level violence and its complete, uncompromising reality.

The shock footage thankfully is only a portion of Fallen, though a necessary one. The bulk of the film takes us to the hometowns of officers who’ve been killed to talk about the human and specific impact of these people’s deaths, from a pair of police officers murdered in a coffee shop while doing paperwork to the stunning story of a motorcycle cop who simply stopped to aid what he thought was a broken down motorist and wound up being shot and killed.

Read my full length review at Serve.Media 

Classic Movie Review Hamburger Hill

Hamburger Hill (1987) 

Directed by John Irvin 

Written by James Carabatsos

Starring Michael Boatman, Don Cheadle, Dylan McDermott, Courtney B. Vance 

Release Date August 28th, 1987 

Published August 29th 2017 

There are those who claim that Hamburger Hill is the least remembered of 80s Vietnam movies, a niche genre all its own in that decade, because it was a right wing, reactionary movie intended to defend soldiers. Time has a way of changing perceptions and now that Hamburger Hill is turning 30 years old, it’s interesting to look back on the film and talk about the perceptions of the film and how they’ve evolved over the years and the ways in which guilt, shame and history have altered the way many view Vietnam.

Hamburger Hill tells the story of one company in the midst of a battalion ordered to take a single hill from the North Vietnamese. The hill would come to be called Hamburger Hill because meat may be all that’s left of a soldier after he gets blown away while climbing this ungodly, muddy, and eventually blood-soaked hill. It’s grisly and part of the film’s reputation comes from what the title implies, a gruesomeness that put audiences off just from the title.

The film is gruesome as director John Irvin doesn’t hold back on the blood and guts but where the film’s reputation is somewhat misguided is the notion that that is all Hamburger Hill was, just blood and guts. The film actually takes time to build toward the blood guts. Hamburger Hill has a slow build where you take the time to get used to the young faces and personalities preparing to die on the hill. It’s not until the film’s remarkable third act that the gruesomeness moves to the foreground.

Until the third act the film is relatively tame in terms of violence. Instead we get a warts and all look at these soldiers whom we watch become more and more detached from life back at home and unmoored from the reality around them because death seems so close. The film shines a harsh light on the reality of Vietnam, the way the soldiers were mistreated to the point where us against the world was the only mentality that made any sense.

While people back home accused these soldiers of being bloodthirsty killers, the reality was so much more complicated than that. These were men who were abandoned in Vietnam. Whereas people like Patton, McArthur, and Eisenhower had the weight and experience to give soldiers courage and purpose, the soldiers of Vietnam are rudderless, tools of the government abandoned by a society crumbling from the optimism of the 50s into the greed infested era to come where the divide between rich and poor was often defined by those who went to Vietnam and those rich enough not to have to.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Tulip Fever

Tulip Fever (2017) 

Directed by Justin Chadwick 

Written by Deborah Moggach, Tom Stoppard

Starring Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O'Connell, Tom Hollander, Christoph Waltz 

Release Date September 1st, 2017 

Published August 31st, 2017

Tulip Fever tells the story of an orphan girl named Sophia who is plucked from a Dutch orphanage to become the wife/concubine of a rich trader named Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz). Sophia’s life is a relatively dull routine but nothing she really notices as, aside from the orphanage, it’s all she’s ever known. Sophia’s worldview changes when the outside world comes crashing into her secluded domesticity in the form of a lusty painter named Jan Van Loos (Dane Dehaan) who awakens the kind of desire within Sophia that her arranged marriage could never possibly create.

Not a bad story? So why is Tulip Fever such silly nonsense? It’s illogical. Director Justin Chadwick covered similar period drama lustiness in The Other Boleyn Girl to fine effect and Tom Stoppard won an Academy Award for writing Shakespeare in Love and also wrote Brazil and Empire of the Sun. Add to this the rising star Alicia Vikander, two time Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz and the ingredients are here for an incredible film. Tulip Fever even has Academy Award winner Judi Dench and it’s still a miserable sit.

The simple fact is that the simple plot I described has been done to death. Stoppard’s own Shakespeare in Love is little more than a less haughty and more prestigious version of this same story. To attempt to escape the notion that the film is a poor copy of previous period movies, Tulip Fever adds two more characters and convoluted plot about faked pregnancy and a faked death and while the plot wheels spin in desperate effort to avoid repeating period cliché we in the audience grow ever more weary of the whirring, blurring silliness of the plot.

Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger play Willem and Maria. Maria is Sophia’s servant and Willem is the local fish-monger. They’ve fallen madly and love and Willem has a plan for them to escape servitude. Willem is entering the high stakes trade of Tulips which have become the hottest commodity in all of Denmark at this time. When Willem comes into luck, growing a rare Tulip that could get he and Maria out of their poverty only the lame contrivance of the plot can intervene and boy does it.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Lust for Life

Lust for Life (1956) 

Directed by Vincente Minnelli 

Written by Norman Corwin 

Starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn

Release Date September 17th, 1956 

Published September 5th, 2017 

Our classic this week on the Everyone is a Critic movie review podcast is Kirk Douglas and director Vincent Minnelli’s portrayal of the life of troubled artist Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life. If the film illustrates one thing more than anything else it is that acting has changed a great deal since 1956. While Douglas and co-star Anthony Quinn, as fellow painting legend Paul Gaugin rage at each other, it’s not hard to see why the directors of the next generation began to strive for something more natural and genuine from their actors. Lust for Life seems to me to be among the last films for which theatrically trained actors were the vanguard of the cinema.

Lust for Life picks up the life of Vincent Van Gogh as he is first rejected for a position as a priest. After pleading with a church leader that he must be allowed to minister and preach the word of God he is finally given an assignment. Van Gogh travels to a small mining town where he fails to connect with the mineworkers and their families with his scripted sermons. It isn’t until a parishioner takes Van Gogh into the mines that he begins to see that he must not hold himself above his flock.

The church is horrified by Van Gogh’s choice to live without the garish accoutrements his church salary should have allowed him. Their theory is that living a life of privilege away from the common people is to live as an example of what the poor should strive for. What they don’t understand and what Van Gogh completely understands is hopelessness, the way it seeps into the bones of people who’ve never known anything but toil and suffering.

While it is unspoken in the film, my interpretation was that Van Gogh was so moved by what he saw in the mines that he lost his faith in God and began searching for the meaning of life in his paint, a search that consumed him so deeply that his life ended at the age of 38 with suicide. Lust for Life hints that Van Gogh's suicide is part madness and part his belief that he was unable to capture the meaning and beauty of life on his canvas, even though today he is recognized as genius for capturing and enhancing the beauty of humanity and nature in his work.

When Van Gogh is dismissed from the church he begins dedicating himself to painting, specifically attempting to create art that respects a good hard day’s work. He wants to capture life on canvas but his restless mind robs him of the faculties necessary for managing the rest of his life. What little money Van Gogh received from his more successful and stable brother Theo, Van Gogh spends on more paint and canvases, even after he briefly marries a woman who has a small child.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review A Boy Called Po

A Boy Called Po (2017) 

Directed by John Asher 

Written by Colin Goldman 

Starring Christopher Gorham, Julian Felder, Kaitlin Doubleday 

Release Date April 23rd, 2016 

Published August 31st, 2017 

I must be getting soft as I get older because movies like A Boy Called Po never used to get passed my ironic armor. As a younger critic, a movie like A Boy Called Po with a premise that reads like a Lifetime Movie and a cast lacking star power would have been one I would dismiss without a glance. Admittedly, I used to be kind of arrogant and quite snobbish. It could be I have become more evolved and mature or it could be that director John Asher’s inspired by true events movie is actually so good that I had no need for my emotional armor.

A Boy Called Po stars 12-year-old Julian Feder as Patrick, or Po, as his father David (Christopher Gorham) calls him. Po is autistic and his father is struggling to care for him in the wake of the death of Po’s mother from a battle with cancer. On top of being a single father to an autistic son, David has a high-pressure job as an engineer for an airplane company and is attempting to craft a brand new, more environmentally friendly airplane.

At school, Po is being bullied by a much larger boy in his class and the bullying plus the absence of his mother is causing him to "drift." Drifting is when an Autistic person, most often a child, begins losing touch with reality for long stretches of time. This concept is explained by Amy (Caitlin Doubleday), Po’s physical therapist and David’s appointed love interest. Here is where director Asher and screenwriter Colin Goldman take a big risk. No, not the stock romance, the presentation of Po’s "drift."

A Boy Called Po attempts to demonstrate where Po goes when he drifts. Their idea is that he is becoming lost in a fantasy world where he has a pair of friends played by Andrew Bowen and Caitlin Carmichael. Bowen and Carmichael give lovely, graceful performances with just the right amount of whimsy and empathy. These are not easy roles to play as portraying an autistic boy’s fantasy friends is not a casual notion. Some people with experience with autistic children may find this portrayal a little iffy. I found it to be sweet, if a little uncomfortable.

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media