Man-Thing (2005)

I've not been to Louisiana, but I don't think swamps can be that green!
Lighting aside, locations do their job well enough, they're fun visually and the small town setting has that instantly relatable quality that small towns have.
There's a cheap horror vibe from time to time that doesn't do it any favours. A better option might've been to take itself less seriously, opt instead to accentuate the cheapo charm, kind of like Tremors (1990) did.
It was surprising seeing mutilated corpses and hearing people say "fuck" in a Marvel film. The bad CGI, however, was not unexpected; it turns what could've been a memorable creature into just another tentacle joke.
Even though the story failed to hit the mark a lot of the time, it was still a refreshing change from the company's incessant mega-blockbusters.

2 branches out of 5

DON'T BREATHE [2016]

Fede Alvarez directs Don't Breathe, a home invasion thriller that flips the usual story on it's head and isn't afraid to get really really vicious with it.
Three young thieves wait until dark to break into a blind man's house thinking it's an easy score only to find he's a lot more than what they bargained for.
Despite it's simplicity and thinly written characters, Don't Breathe manages to constantly up the intensity and thrills with clever menace.  There's all sorts of minor themes and ideas thrown around in the background but they never detract from the fact that the film intends you to nervously be gasping for air by the time the credits start rolling.

3½ ladybugs out of 5

WAIT UNTIL DARK [1967]

Olde Tyme 007 director Terence Young enlists Audrey Hepburn in her last film before semi-retirement for the suspenseful thriller Wait Until Dark.
Hepburn portrays a blind woman who's life is invaded by three dangerous crooks searching her home for a doll filled with heroin.
The film is a bit dated and takes it time getting to where it needs to but once it gets going the guessing game it becomes is a gripping delight.  If you're willing to accept that the whole set-up is the definition of an 'Idiot Plot' then it can be pretty fun, especially when you revel in Alan Arkin's nasty piece of work villain that is two steps away from twiddling his mustache.  If not for it's inventively tense climax the film might not be so fairly remembered but it's a great little yarn nevertheless.

3½ ways to defrost a fridge out of 5

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

The House by the Cemetery is the final film in Lucio Fulci's unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy. Besides being filmed only a few years apart, the trio's kindred link is underground evils disrupting the living. In this case it's the mad Doctor Freudstein, an undead and homicidal surgeon bent on immortality. Cemetery is also the weakest of the three; containing a number of plot inconsistencies which render the film near incoherent. It's yet another vehicle for Fulci's penchant for gory mayhem. This seems to be the only component driving the cult status. Albeit the SFX are marginally better. At least the blood is more realistic. It does well maintain a level of suspenseful atmosphere up until the effective climax, but too many unresolved plot threads cast a fog over the entire film. 

2½ Bobs out of 5

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

Desperate to cash-in on the phenomenal success of The Blair Witch Project, the studio decided to leave the original creative team behind in favor of their own vision. In an effort to capture the same aesthetic from the first film, they wrongly chose prolific documentarian Joe Berlinger for director. Their desperation is blatant as they greenlit his idea for a narrative meta-sequel commenting on the dangers of blurring the line between fiction and reality. Inevitably, the studio would fuck with the film anyway to create a more traditional horror film. The eventual product is degenerated into a confusing mess which has almost no ties to the source material. The plot is more of a feeble dead-teenager slasher than any kind of societal meditation. The characters have no depth and are merely generic archetypes. This is arguably an even bigger disappointment than the original. 

1 delusion out of 5

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)

As the story goes, producers commissioned a re-cut version of the first film. What came out of that was this sequel: a slipshod production comprised of 40 minutes of recap with only a few new scenes. SNDN2 is a joke, a slap in the face to the original. Now if you put aside the nauseating recycling of SNDN1, you actually have an entertaining albeit ridiculous movie. The tongue-in-cheek deaths and over-the-top acting lets you laugh at it, unlike the grisly, squirm-in-your-seat original. If there had been a larger budget, I believe a B-movie classic could have emerged. Instead, there's really only half a film here.

1½ garbage days out of 5

Final Girl (2015)

Still photographer Tyler Shields presents his first film with a slick and method style. Infiltrating a pack of young killers, Abigail Breslin offers a sympathetic yet hard fought performance as a young undercover operative. The story is extremely straightforward at first but becomes increasingly far-fetched towards the halfway point. Shields knows how to frame a shot, but inexplicable lighting and continuity issues mar the film as a whole. It's an impressive directorial debut showcasing some young talent, but the compelling premise becomes less and less as it reaches its obvious conclusion.

2½ Anna Belles out of 5

THE LEGEND OF TARZAN [2016]

Director David Yates take a very brief break from the wizarding world of Hogwarts to visit the Lord of the Jungle in The Legend of Tarzan.
After years of living as a domesticated gentleman, Tarzan, along with his wife Jane, head back to the jungle to investigate some shady mining camps where his savage past creeps up on him, loin cloth and all.
It might be a fresh change from the usual summer aliens, robots and superheroes but Yates' film is an uninspired bore.  The characters are dull as dirt, the CGI is laughably artificial and Samuel L. Jackson's soul-brotha enunciation is awkwardly out of place.   Without a whole lot of rousing action sequences the glaring missteps are all the more apparent and hurt the clunky pacing even more.

2 adorable cat-ear hoodies out of 5

SHUTTER [2008]

Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai gives a stab at remaking the Thai garden variety ghost story film Shutter for American audiences.
Josh Jackson & Rachael Taylor play young newlyweds who move to Japan to further his career as a fashion photographer and weird things start happening when the ghostly image of Ju-On's Megumi Okina appears in all his work.
Ochiai has never been particularly good at telling a great story but he certainly knows how to set up creepy atmosphere and that's where this film excels compared to the original.  What the film does right it does a great deal better than it's source material and what it gets wrong is worse than wearing grandma's soiled undies.  What your tolerance is for tired retreads of scary Asian ghost girl remakes will depend on how you feel about this lost in the mix film.

2 haunted honeymoons out of 5

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN [2009]

Michael Bay dishes out the "bifs, bams and booms" something fierce for Revenge of the Fallen, the second installment of the seemingly never-ending live action Transformers film series.
Shia LaBeouf is unwillingly dragged back into the war between the Autobots and Decepticons when he starts having visions of ancient symbols connected the rise of an centuries old foe known only as The Fallen.
It's an overly simple story that might have made an entertaining two-part animated cartoon but dragging it out for nearly 2½ hours without any thought-provoking substance is unbearable.  You know the film isn't worth your time when even Michael Bay has gone on record calling it "crap".  The highlights are the hard-to-follow CGI action sequences, insanely cool sound effects and impressive filming locations.

1 enemy scrotum out of 5

The Guns of Fort Petticoat (1957)

A Texas-born Yankee soldier (Murphy) returns home to protect his village from a squad of marauding Comanche Indians. With the men of the village away fighting in the war, the soldier rallies the women to fight.
It's a progressive idea for a western of the era; there are a few romantic scenes but they're much less frequent than I feared, and the only blatant sexist remark was courtesy of a privileged white woman.
The male character being in charge doesn't seem odd because he's the one that's military trained (in real life, too), but the women hold their own - killing and dying is not the preserve of men, after all.
As was often the case, the Indians are mostly of the cookie cutter type in the script, but it at least addresses the atrocities of both sides.

3 skirts tucked out of 5

JAWS [1975]

Director Steven Spielberg successfully scared people out of the water with his man vs nature adventure/thriller Jaws.
A sleepy island town is flipped upside down when a 20 foot long Great White Shark starts making tasty meals out of it's panicked citizens.
Effectively proving that showing more is less, Spielberg raises the b-movie premise into a top-class popcorn blockbuster that's endless nail-biting fun.  Like many of his films of the time it's about obsession and mostly chooses to ignore the potential social class themes floating around but never thoroughly studied.  There's some wonderful camera work made even better with John Williams' ominously simple iconic music and the late great Robert Shaw, who knows exactly what type of film he's in and has great old time playing it up for the camera with delightful exaggeration.

5 scars out of 5

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE [2016]

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber's action/comedy Central Intelligence should win points for it's "Little Hart/Big Johnson" tagline alone.
Kevin Hart & Dwayne Johnson are reunited before their 20 year high school reunion only to find they couldn't anymore different than what they were during their glory days.  And like all good high school reunions there's guns, exploding cars and plenty of hilarious espionage.
The two leads have a wonderful chemistry that gives the film a big ol' warm heart that the script so badly needs.  Without Hart & Johnson it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining as it is.  There's plenty of laughs to be had but it's mostly the goofy performances and ad-libs rather than the ridiculously unbelievable script.  

3 black Will Smiths out of 5

THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE [2015]

Writer/director Perry Blackshear makes his feature-length debut with They Look Like People which is part buddy drama and part psychological horror.
Two old buddies reunite, where it becomes very apparent they both suffer from problems they'd rather keep secret...especially when one thinks Earth is being invaded by evil creatures in the form of human beings.
It's an intense character piece that studies mental illness with both heartfelt thoughtfulness and deeply unsettling dread.  The film's greatest strength lies in the engaging bond between the two friends that makes it all the more heartbreaking and frightening when it needs to be.

4 sock wars out of 5

The Beyond (1981)

aka 7 Doors of Death

Considered by many to be horror maestro Lucio Fulci's masterpiece, Beyond follows the doomed history of a Louisiana mansion said to be built over one of the seven gates of Hell. After inheriting the estate, Lysa (Catriona MacColl) unsuccessfully attempts to revive it into a bed & breakfast, thwarted at every turn by the forces of darkness. Best known for its considerable gore and while there are plenty of shocking and effective sequences, the SFX are obviously limited as, in some cases, the blood flows like Kool-Aid and the skin rips like wax. Despite a lack of budget, the imagery is unmistakably haunting. The film owes much to Fabio Frizzi's beautiful and other-worldly score which speaks to something apocryphal. I found myself humming the melodies far past the end credits, and I would say the film wouldn't be half as great without them. I'll admit The Beyond hasn't aged well, but it still holds up as one of Fulci's greatest horror films.

4 impossible basements out of 5