Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on July 13th, 2018
No adults? Well, that must be every kid’s and teenager’s dream. No one to tell them what they can and can’t do, what to wear, or how late to stay out. Then again, I suppose if all the adults were transformed into mindless, violent zombies, that might put a damper on the festivities. I know it did for the group from Don’t Grow Up. For this group of juvenile delinquents, they are the last to know that the world as they know it has changed. One minute they are living it up, and the next they are fighting for their lives. Granted, production value is not of the highest caliber. The film more than makes up for it in an engaging story and not shying away from gore in this post-apocalyptic tale.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 12th, 2018
You might call me jaded, but I am pretty disappointed by the state of horror movies. It's not just the last few years. The truth is I haven't seen 10 really good horror movies in over a decade. Now that I've had a chance to see A Quiet Place, that number isn't going up. A Quiet Place is not a really good horror movie. It ends up making a lot of the same mistakes that filmmakers think define a horror film in the modern age. It relies too heavily on jump scares and characters who do some of the most idiotic things, thus placing them in a somewhat self-created dangerous situation. But I will make the argument that A Quiet Place is still a pretty good horror film because
Posted in: Tuesday Round Up by J C on July 10th, 2018
Shhhhhh…don’t make a sound. No, you didn’t wander into a library, but we are trying to keep things down this week at Upcomingdiscs HQ in honor of a certain surprise horror blockbuster. Paramount made a lot of noise with A Quiet Place in theaters, and we’ll soon have a review of the film in 4K. Elsewhere, Magnolia comes back to haunt us with Ismael’s Ghosts. There's also a pair of theatrical releases we'll be reviewing later in the week: Dwayne Johnson goes to great heights to entertain us in Skyscraper, while Sundance breakout Sorry to Bother You finds its voice.
One last reminder before signing off for the week: if you’re shopping for anything on Amazon and you do it through one of our links, it’ll help keep the lights on here at UpcomingDiscs. See ya next week!
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 9th, 2018
"The Secretary is dead. The President has invoked Ghost Protocol. We're shut down. No satellite, safe house, support, or extraction. The four of us and the contents of this car are all that remains of the IMF."
The fourth Mission: Impossible entry exchanges digits for a subtitle, and brings in Brad Bird to direct his first live-action feature. So the man whose The Incredibles made fun of the sort of thing that is the bread-and-butter of the M:I franchise is brought in to revitalize said franchise. Result? Job done. Gotcha. You thought I was going to say, “Mission accomplished,” didn’t you?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 8th, 2018
"You can tell a lot about a person's character by how they treat people they don't have to treat well."
It had been a decade since Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible hit theatres to box office success, established a new blockbuster franchise, and added ‘action hero’ to Tom Cruise’s resume, and six years since John Woo’s highly stylized follow-up raised the franchise to new box office heights. In 2006 the long-awaited third installment arrived amidst controversy about Tom Cruise’s crazy off-screen antics. It was feared that the happenings of Cruise’s personal life would somehow bring down this movie
Posted in: The Reel World by J C on July 6th, 2018
Earlier this summer, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was turned upside down in a snap. Avengers: Infinity War was the culmination of 10 years worth of origin stories and world-building. That blockbuster featured (almost) every MCU hero in the galaxy, universe-spanning stakes, and an unforgettable cliffhanger. So you can excuse Marvel for scaling things back (waaaaay back) with its next entry. Of course, any superhero flick that came immediately after Infinity War was going to feel small by comparison, so who better to take on that task than the tiniest hero of them all?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 5th, 2018
"This is not Mission: Difficult, Mr. Hunt. It's Mission: Impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you."
After four years and nearly $200 million at the box office, it was only a matter of time before Paramount and Tom Cruise would partner again for a new Mission Impossible film. This time the move would be completely toward the action and stunts and farther away from the television series. The hiring of John Woo to direct the second film put quite a punctuation mark on that move.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on July 5th, 2018
“Welcome to North Dakota, the least visited state in America.”
Yeah, that’s what you want to hear when you go to visit a place. I mean, according to Frat Pack, entertainment is so scarce that you have to kidnap a person as a first impression. Well, then again, as first impression goes, I can’t imagine a better one to set up the kind of movie you are watching. Frat Pack is a story in the vein of Animal House. Let me be clear, I am not putting it in the same league as Animal House, just merely pointing out their similar genres.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on July 5th, 2018
“Every time a black woman gets mad, she's a stereotype.”
Taraji P. Henson has been a very good and versatile actress for a long time, but she didn’t become a star until she started getting very angry on screen. Her breakout role came in 2015 courtesy of Fox’s Empire, in which Henson’s Cookie Lyon has been known to get into some scraps. So it made sense for Henson to bring her talent for tantrums to the big screen with the help of a filmmaker who once directed a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Writer/director/producer Tyler Perry seems to be going for “trashy fun”…unfortunately, he only gets halfway there.
Posted in: The Reel World by J C on July 4th, 2018
“This is the greatest s--- show on Earth!”
The First Purge arrives in theaters a little more than five years after the (lowercase) first Purge rampaged into moviegoers’ consciousness as a nasty bit of R-rated, summer blockbuster counterprogramming. The movies are obviously quite popular, but I’ve never felt that any of them fully lived up to the killer concept at the center of this franchise. Unfortunately, that still holds true for The First Purge, which had a chance to deviate from the established formula in a variety of interesting ways, but ends up playing a lot like The First Three Purges.
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