Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 5th, 2006
Synopsis
Anna Faris takes a job as a social worker, moving into a house with the evil presences we know and love from The Grudge. Meanwhile, next door, Craig Bierko is about to deal with The War of the Worlds. And off we go, as the movie riffs one parody of recent films after another.
At the helm is David Zucker, part of the team responsible for the Airplane! and Naked Gun films, and much the same kind of sensibility pervades this film. There’s plenty of fun, but...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 5th, 2006
Something must be drawing Michael Douglas to the upper-crust "man in peril" role. He's been stalked by a woman who likes to boil rabbits, sexually harassed by his sexy boss, and is currently being framed for the assassination of the President in The Sentinel. Douglas plays Peter Garrison, a Secret Service veteran who is also having an affair with the wife of the man he is sworn to protect, First Lady Ballentine (Kim Basinger, still looking good at 53). When Garrison is framed by the assassins (one of who...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 3rd, 2006
Synopsis
Protestors and loggers are in conflict over the cutting of trees on an isolated island. Unbeknownst to both groups, the logging company has been experimenting with something dangerous, and when this substance gets into the blood of an injured logger, he becomes a flesh-eating zombie, quickly spreading the virus. The son of the chairman of the board flies in to see why contact has been lost, and is quickly caught up in the desperate battle for survival.
We have, of course, seen most...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 3rd, 2006
Synopsis
This is the second film starring Lindsay Lohan that I’ve reviewed for Upcomingdiscs, the first being Herbie: Fully Loaded. So I guess you could call me a LoFAN, get it? But in doing an IMDB scan for the credits on Just My Luck, I’ve found that one of the producers is Bruce Willis. Yes, Bruce Willis from Die Hard. So I guess the bigger question is why didn’t Bruce appear in this film? Surely he could have made it a little more entertaining for me to watch.
Written by a...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 2nd, 2006
Synopsis
The jacket copy says it better than I could: “Museum director Dr. Zita Furneaux (Kylie Wyote), empowered by the Egyptian goddess Nephthys (Andrea Smith), regains her lost youth by dispatching a living Mummy to kidnap sexy young women, from whom she steals their ‘kas’ (spiritual twins), turning them into zombie-like love slaves. Reporter Elyse Lam (Christine Nguyen), investigating the case of the missing women, also falls prey to Zita’s lusts. But when Zita defies Nephthys... you’ll have to s...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 31st, 2006
Johnny Depp continues to work hard in both good films and bad. While I didn’t care for this outing, I’m not sure I would call it a bad film… just one that didn’t connect with any of my tastes. Fans of Mr. 21 Jump Street will delight in yet another strong performance. He has the skill and talent to be remembered as one of the true greats. His performance in The Libertine does nothing to diminish that. But at the same time, there’s something dreadfully boring about films like these. Something not even Depp’s un...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 30th, 2006
Written By Jeff Mardo
This is a Parker Posey film, which in itself is enough of a reason for me to check this film out. However, I was surprised to find that Josh Hamilton is here as well. While you may not know the name of Josh Hamilton right away, the two of them worked together in a brilliantly satirical film called The House of Yes; one of my personal favorites. In fact, there are several things that tie these two films together in my mind. While both are very funny and disturbing films, the charm in them both is the tension hi...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 27th, 2006
Synopsis
I wanted to like Annapolis. I really did. I appreciated the intent of the film without having a full awareness of what it was about. I thought it kind of served as a de facto publicity film for the Naval Academy. But as I was watching it, several things started on course for me to dislike the film.
First, the story is tremendously predictable. Huard (James Franco, Spider-Man) is a kid who has been raised on the wrong side of the tracks, and helps to build the ships that the ...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 23rd, 2006
It’s always interesting when works of art (books, plays, films, etc…) are updated from their native settings. Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet took the Bard’s most famous play and set it in modern day California, making it fresh again. Francis Ford Coppola set Conrad’s Heart of Darkness during the Vietnam War, making Apocalypse Now one of the most revered and realistic films of that era. There are several more examples in this trend that deserve to be mentioned, but I must fast-forward to the film a...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 23rd, 2006
Synopsis
Imagine my surprise that there was a miniseries made about the threat of bioterror, and that this cloak and dagger miniseries (that aired at some time on network TV) sported two Oscar winners, neither of them men! Anjelica Huston (Prizzi’s Honor) and Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite) are part of a wide ranging series that is set over several continents, and explores the possibility of a bio-terror attack in the US.
Based on the book by Robert Ludlum, the man responsible for t...
