Posts by Brent Lorentson

On first glance, the idea for a comedy about two best friends who are failing security system installers isn’t exactly the film I’d find myself excited to watch.  It was a title I went into with no expectations, and by the time it was over I found myself realizing I had had myself a good time with this title.  Armed Response is what happens when a clever and unique script comes along with the right cast to fill in the parts.  This isn’t a film trying to become a classic in the heist genre, but instead it just wants to be an entertaining viewing experience, and it excels at doing just that.

The horror western is the genre mash-up that just hasn’t seemed to translate to the big screen.  Jonah Hex was a big-budget attempt that simply fell flat.  There was the little indie-film gem The Burrowers (2008) that managed to be a fun little film but just never grabbed the audience on a larger scale.  But it seems the public is still craving television and film filled with zombies, and since we’ve seen just about every other iteration of the zombie genre, it was inevitable we would see them taking on the Wild West.  Revelation Trail doesn’t just dip its toe into zombie western horror; it dives right into this massacre of the undead.

Writer and director Steven R. Monroe has made a decent career in genre filmmaking and since his remake of I Spit on Your Grave gained some moderate success.  Monroe is one of those directors that I feel has a great film in him but the right project just hasn’t crossed his path.  Though many of his creative efforts have been on more meager budgets, Monroe still manages to pull together tight little films.  Unfortunately with Monika he may have bit off a little more than he should have with his new supernatural revenge film.

Love can have a strange effect on people and cause them to do things that range from the spectacular to the deranged.  The loss of a loved one can not only break a person’s spirit but send them to the depths of depression and despair from which they will never be able to recover, though most people tend to avoid the melodrama and just wallow in their heartbreak with a couple of beers or a pint of their favorite ice cream.  But what is one supposed to do when the one that they love and cherish is taken from them and they become the number one suspect in the murder of the one they love?

Shout Factory has yet another Transformers animated series to unleash upon the legions of fans who must not be able to get enough of their robots in disguise.  Beast Machines takes place on Cybertron after the Beast Wars.  Beast Wars is yet another series about the Transformers that somehow has gotten past me while reviewing the other series.  The fact that Beast Wars precedes the events in Beast Machines caused a brief moment of confusion.  Thankfully with the target audience being under the age of ten, catching up wasn’t all too difficult.

What would you do if you had access to a computer that was capable of giving you information that could prevent a crime from happening?  One step further, what if this machine could locate any person with only a few keystrokes?  This “God” like machine is the basis for what Person of Interest revolves around.  For two seasons we’ve watched as Harold Finch (Michael Emerson) and ex-CIA agent John Reese (Jim Caviezel) used the machine to protect those whom the machine feels are in danger.