"Bottoms" - Review

PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edibiri) are unpopular lesbians in highschool pining for, respectively, popular cheerleaders Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Hannah Rose Liu). After a misunderstanding with their friend Hazel (Ruby Cruz) and Isabel's football captain boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the pair, and Hazel, come up with an idea...

A completely fucking unhinged follow up to the tight anxiety attack that was "Sheva Baby": go in blind, and hope that director and writer Emma Seligman's career continues to be as unpredictable, vivid, wild and mercilessly creative as this.
Alongside "Booksmart" and "Blockers", it is becoming the holy trinity of "Excellent Queer Sex Comedies of One Word Titles Beginning With B".
Outstanding across the board.
Howled with laughter.

"Five Nights At Freddy's" - Review

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is fired from his job as a security guard after beating the shit out of a man in a mistaken case of identity. His career counsellor (Matthew Lillard, always a treat) offers him a gig as a night watchman at "Freddy Fazbear's Pizzaria!". Desperate to look after his sister and look good in an upcoming custody battle, Mike takes the job, and there may be more to this place than meets the eye...

See what I did there? Explaining the plot succinctly and simply?
Fuck you Scott Cawthon. There are a myriad of problems in this capstone to a juggernaut of pop cultural growth, turning more and more benign every single day, but they can be boiled down, in this instance, to this:
I don't think Scott Cawthon can write his own name, let alone a fucking story.
You'd think that this would be easy to achieve (after all: "Willy's Wonderland" is great, and did this with about a tenth of the budget! Watch that movie!): scary robots, old theme park, run for your life. Instead the movie piles lore upon lore upon development upon plot point upon twist: like the backwash of a story outline created by a community of 9 year olds who read the synopses of spooky movies in a foreign language badly translated, force-fed to you by a guy who really knows far too much and gets far too angry about "Star Wars" lore. It's unsfferable.
One moment it's our hero struggling to overcome the trauma of a kidnapping in his youth; then it's an attempt at kitchen sink drama as he tries to make enough money to win custody of his sister (Piper Rubio), undercut by a comically Pantomime villain performance by Mary Stuart Wilson as an evil aunt. Then it's a talentless hack's take on "Doctor Sleep" with dream children, spirit guides, Faustian deals and an evil child murderer demon rabbit man who may be supernatural, but maybe not, but probably is. THEN the it becomes the joys of found family, rediscovering joy and love, and the animatronics are not evil really, only they are, only not really, only they're misunderstood!
It's exhausting.
It's like Scott Cawthon is force feeding you his 90,000 page fan fiction rewrite and lore crossover of "The Funhouse".
Rather fitting for a man with views on bodily autonomy like his...
There is no plot, only lore, and the lore is all terrible.
Then it is delivered like a Mormon comedy night: scenes are best described as awkward, jittering stop start nightmares with broad "comedic" moments and dialogue clearly not written by a person who ahs interacted with a single human being in their life. Thus we get Hutcherson trying his best, but nobody quite knowing how to play the material, and thus all floundering. A particular "standout" is Elizabeth Lail as a frustratingly weird, evasive and off-putting police officer who is almost line for line Deputy Winston from "Cabin Fever", but the spitting image of Elizabeth Holmes. It is genuinely one of the worst performances I have seen in recent memory.
Matthew Lillard, with his 2 scenes, sort of knows how to play it, but again his awkward weird energy never really sticks to anything, like pudding with velcro, and it is surrounded by bizarre intercut top down shots of his coffee mug or Dutch angles.
The movie's genuinely alarming in how terribly it is written, I cannot state this enough. If you sit down and just listen to the words being stated by the characters, and note them down, you'll find fucking beat poetry nonsense.
On top of it all, scenes simply end and judder on without warning or reason, as if rushing to get to the good parts, but forgetting to put them in.
The film is simultaneously anemic and padded: it is a Neutron star of awfulness attempting to collapse in on itself and its inconsistencies and inanity, but instead is kept alive in a harrowing anti-life, its body just a prop for the festering seed of terror growing within it:
much like what Scott Cawthon wants to do to women...
There is no way I can oversell the writing in this. If I attempted to write this poorly on purpose, I would fail. Performance art designed to parody and subvert the ideas of Homer and Joseph Campbell would not capture a tenth of the ludicrousness. It matches "Final Fantasy 13" for how dire its plotting is. Its tone is akin to splicing snippets of "My Cousin Vinny" into the runtime of "Bull".
I have seen toilet graffiti make more sense: "Sharon Sucks Cocks" at least has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and raises questions: whose cocks? Why? To what purpose?
I wish this sucked cocks, then at least it would be less homophobic than its creator.
Instead it sucks so much ass it should begin an irrigation practice.

"It Lives Inside" - Review

Samidha (Megan Suri) is an Indian-American girl living with her devout mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) and her regular, Giancarlo-Esposito lookalike dad Inesh (Vik Sahay). The other Indian-American girl at her school Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), a former friend of Samidha, is acting strangely. And after an argument between the two, something is unleashed and Tamira disappears...

The debut feature of Indian director Bishal Dutta is an odd affair. Essentially an extended metaphorical journey of a character rediscovering her identity and reconciling both aspects of her culture together, as Samidha (or "Sam" as she insists on being called) is asked to say things in "Hindu" for her friend's amusement, skips out on culutural ceremonies and fesitvals her family have participated in for years, and is asked if she is friends with Inesh because they're both Indian. It's a refreshing thing to see in a horror film, and somethine relatively new (I highly recommend "War Pony" on a similar theme this year).
So far so good. It even comes together in a celebration of Indian culture, pays off the little hints throughout, and wraps up nicely.
It has Betty Gabriel in it too, always welcome after her string of horror movies ("The Purge: Election Year", "Get Out" and "Upgrade" being the good ones, among many many more), and I liked the performances of Bajwa and Suri.
Again, alright.
All it needs now is to be scary and we have a winner!
Ah well, better luck next time.
Yeah, despite a strong central theme, the film doesn't remember to do what horror movies need to do: create atmosphere and dread, or spring good scares on the audience. It feels like it is in a rush to get to the monster, and otherwise falls into a staid conga-line of things we've seen before. There's a good attempt with a swing, and a nice use of eyes and the colour orange, but maybe I've been spoiled by other better horror movies: it's just never scary.
Still, I am intrigued to see the next efforts of its director.

"Expend4bles" - Review

The eponymous team go on a mission to "Gaddafi's Old Bunker" (actual title card) and it goes South, losing them one of their own. Vowing vengeance, Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) is booted off the team regardless for his mistakes. As the team assemble, they do so under the new leadership of ex CIA operative Gina (Megan Fox) and consist of: demolitions expert and recurring member Toll Road (Randy Couture), hyperactive sex fuelled Spaniard and son of previous member Galgo, Galan (Jacob Scipio); new replacement black guy "Easy Day" (50 Cent); tattooed chain wielding new girl Lash (Levy Tran) and the now sober and aging Gunnar Jensen (Dolph Lundgren); they do so in order to take revenge on their newest enemy Rahmat (Iko Uwais) and help CIA agent Marsh (Andy Garcia) prevent World War 3.

There are times when "Expend4bles" almost works as a macho, over the top 80s gory throwback. There is blood (unfortunately CGI, cheapening and ruining the effect) and an occasional line where the characters attempt to give each other shit, and this banter feels good on some (Lundgren and Statham mostly) but incredibly weak on others (why Couture keeps getting more lines was a mystery to me, until I saw what it was like when Fiddy attempted to deliver some); and there is one piece of macho bullshit which works and got a chuckle out of me: Dolph Lundgren keeps missing his shots at the start of the film (planting), and tries to stay sober, then in the final gunfight at the end her misses again - he winces, downs a hip flask of whiskey, lands 7 headshots in a row, kills 8 more people with a grenade and goes (practically to the camera) "It's good to be back!" (Payoff!). It's one of the few times when tone works, and when it reaches those heights of greasy dumpster fire trash and over the top carnage it wants.
Unfortunately Scott Waugh is a talentless hack, squandering his budget on CGI and cutting his movie to ribbons, and when the cartoonish backdrops (they CGI a BAR FOR PEOPLE TO CHAT IN!) are not done any favours by the dingy "Call of Duty knockoff" lighting, they are on full vibrant horrible display in "Avengers TV movie" lighting. There are no in betweens.
The editing and shooting is so bad that it makes me wonder if Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa can actually fight, it gets that bad. Andy Garcia delivers a performance so terrible I am convinced it had to be a directing issue, all done in a short time frame on as few takes as possible - all flat intonation and half-flubbed lines. It's genuinely startling to see a performance this bad, this rushed: it's something akin to Steven Seagal reading for "Hamlet" whilst fleeing an impending SA conviction. I swear, the man is half drunk and doesn't know where he is.
The script does no favours to anybody.
The script doesn't need to be intricate or excellent, it needs to do the job, and it stumbles out of the block and falls flat on its face. It's not hard: you come to this movie for the promise of old school action from old school action stars, so just have our ragtag team of thinly sketched characters go on a rampage, kick some ass in an exotic locale and massacre the equivalent of the population of Morocco, and ride into the sunset smoking cigars, knocking back whiskey and fondling the asses of women half their age whilst a mansion detonates behind them, cleansing the area in the fires of their virility.
Instead we get the central cast written out of the movie, with the exception of Statham, and stiff, weak, limp action movie scenes which seem to be struggling to find their purpose, and the movie still has the gall to pad itself with scenes like Statham finding work as a bodyguard for an obnoxious social media influencer.
I wish I could tell you how the performances of the oft-maligned Megan Fox and newcomer Levy Tran are, but again they are given nothing to do. Fox is fine, and Tran belongs in a "John Wick" movie with her myriad of tattoos and use of a bladed chain whip which threatens to make the movie fun, moreseo than Statham Tokyo-drifting a cruiser or flipping a machine-gun mounted motorbike 8 times in the air.
By the time those things happen, I'd clocked out.
All you need to know is this:
Dolph Lundgren credits "The Expendables" with saving his career, turning him from desperate direct to video movies and reminding Hollywood that he was still around and kind of cool. He experienced something of a career Rennaissance: "Creed 2", "Hail Caesar!", "Aquaman", better direct to video fare ("Castle Falls", which is fun and he takes directing duties on; "Universal Soldier: Regeneration"; and the bloody good time "Don't Kill It" which is both mine and his favourite roles ever and a fucking awesome premise and rip roaring good time I recommend whole-heartedly); and him effectively turning his life around: he's the patron of a human-trafficking charity, reconnected with his children, got sober and has really been in his best place for years now. He is a credit to himself, the first movie, Hollywood as a whole, and an icon of non-toxic masculinity.
He has also been suffering from kidney cancer since 2015.
The movie introduces him with 50 Cent mocking him for having a bad wig, and telling him it looks bad.
Fuck this movie.
Please just watch Dolph Lundgren movies and his TED Talk instead.

"Past Lives" - Review

Nora (Greta Lee), formerly Na Young, is a Korean woman who has a crush on a boy in her class called Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). They have a date as children and seem to hit it off. But then Nora moves to America when her parents emigrate there. Now adults, Hae Sung gets in touch with Nora and hopes to catch up, and the two of them seem to hit it off...

A devastating, emotionally mature film about longing and things never quite being as simple as they want to be. It's rich, wonderfully shot, and a fully immersive, endearing three hander (John Magaro shows up and is bloody brilliant, getting my favourite, gut wrenching, quietly devastating scenes) with electrifying chemistry not seen since Hawke and Delpy. The final shots got me crying.
Highly recommended.

"Assassin Club" - Review

Morgan (Henry Golding, I had to look up his character's name) is an assassin. With the aid of his British handler Caldwell (Sam Neill) he embarks on missions to assassinate people across the globe. He is assigned a selection of targets who have all been assigned to kill him...

We did it! We found the worst film of 2023!
A sloppily edited "John Wick" wannabe, with a protagonist who teleports if only to escape the many blades of the cutting room floor and the ever-vibrating shaky cam. Daniela Melchior, always welcome, is given the thankless task of "Wife", "Damsel in Distress" and "Deserves Better"; whilst Noomi Rapace is given the task of "Generic Villain", because writing more than one woman is hard, guys.
It has no ambitions other than being a straight to DVD "John Wick" knockoff crossed with Bond, but has the budget of a 2000s era Van Damme, half of the charm, and the film making talent of current era Steven Seagal.
Highlight is Sam Neill bobble-heading his performance.