JoeB131

Brought to you by Rankin/Bass, the producers of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other Christmas classics, this one tried to break into the Halloween market and failed.

Capitalizing on the recent resurgence of popularity of the Universal Horror Movies, a group of classic movie monsters gather on an Island to meet Baron Frankenstein (voiced by Boris Karloff in one of his last roles). Frankenstein plans to retire as the leader of the Monster society, only to find his fellow monsters plotting against his nephew, a nerdy pharmacist done as a bad Jimmy Stewart impersonation.

Speaking of which, all of the males voices save Karloff are done by the same voice actor doing poor impressions of Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, and others.

But where the movie really falls down is the animation of the characters, which is often jerky. While RB Christmas specials usually have a strong storyline and characters, this movie is a literal monster mash of characters someone though should be there, but are given no personality.

I remember seeing this as a kid, and seeing it again as an adult, I was not nearly as impressed.

Another reason why this probably didn't become that Halloween Classic we look forward to every year is some of the elements are problematic. The hero slaps a woman because she is hysterical. Another point a character threatens to "unalive" himself. None of this would fly today. There are also a few adult jokes mixed in.

Worth a view for nostalgia's sake? Maybe.

Spoilers for a 90 year old movie?

The plot is that some archeologists find a mummy and ressurect him by reading an ancient scroll. While this plot seems almost cliche today, this movie did it first.

Unlike every other interpretation, though, instead of the Mummy being a lumbering monster, this one has an agenda to find the soul of his lost love and make her into a mummy like himself.

There are paralells to Dracula, much of them helped by the fact that some of the same actors are used in similar roles. But the guy who steals the show is Boris Karloff, whose eerie presence dominates the film.

Unlike Dracula, the ending is quite dramatic, which makes it worth the watch.

An interesting documentary, the only complaint I would make about it is that it puts too much of the blame for the Satanic Panic on Michelle and her Doctor, when there was a huge cultural underpinning to the craziness that happened in the late 80s and Early 90s.

It wasn't just this book, it was panics about heavy metal music, Dungeons and Dragons, and horror movies that created the illusion that there were a bunch of Satan Worshippers out there. Heck, Geraldo did a whole special on it, and the other Daytime Shows followed suit. (This is when Daytime shows still tried to do serious subjects and not just people fighting and taking paternity tests and fighting over the results of paternitiy tests.)

Still, the story of Michelle and her doctor is horrifying, regardless of if they were scammers or good intentioned people practicing bad psychaitry. But really, where were the people who knew better. Law enforcement went along with this nonsense for years and treated these hucksters like they were real experts.

The plot to this movie is that some stoners break into a mansion to have a wild party before the owners get home. But they find a man chained up in the basement and let him go.

But whoops, it turns out he's a vampire, because of course he is. And he proceeds to pick off the stoners and their friends one by one.

So the dramatic focus is around the character of Ashley, who is turned by the vampire and then struggles with eating her friends.

Overall, this is a pretty good film made with a limited budget. My only complaint is that the cast of stoners aren't likeable enough for you to care about them. They are just monster chow. The plot requires them to make really dumb decisions.

My other problem is that this vampire is awfully careless with his food. Seriously the point is to drink the blood, not paint the walls with it. (Although there is some dialog at the end that kind of explains it.)

So it starts out as this gritty cop drama where Richard Greico is well past his 21 Jump Street Days. A SWAT team arrests a cartel leader the day before aliens invade the planet and start harvesting people for blood.

The rest of the movie follows a bunch of cops as they try to stay one step ahead of the aliens, where you know you are getting closer to the end as you run out of characters.

Some parts of this are competently made. Other parts not so much. The aliens are rendered by a combination of okay practical effects and some really bad CGI.

And boy, does the movie drag in some places.

What I will give it is that it does effectively create tensions, and you kind of care about some of these characters.

Is is worth a watch? Meh, maybe.

I see a lot of people comparing it to "The Terrifier", but since I never saw that movie, I can approach this will less bias.

A man kills himself, and his two daughters must overcome their differences to combat the Jester, an entity that haunts them. The relationship between the sisters is interesting, as one was abandoned by the father when she was a child. So it's very psychological in how it approaches characters who aren't entirely sympathetic.

But what works is the Jester itself. It comes off with a high level of creepiness, and you aren't sure what is real and what is not. It reminds us why Clowns are creepy as all get out.

Another point. This movie was made on a budget, and it a lot more effective than movies made for a lot more.

The movie starts out with a retrospective on the career of a talk show host who wanted to suprass Johnny Carson in the ratings. It has a very documentary feel like 1976's "Network", considered a very wry satire of the Television Industry at the time. All of this leads up to the broadcast of his Halloween special, with found footage of behind the scenes parts.

His guests included a psychic, a magician/debunker, and a paranormal investigator. The stakes of the show keep increasing as mystical shennigans ensue. You get the crew members knowing this thing is going off the rails, but continuing to press on with it because they can smell that sweet ratings gold.

Usually, I am critical of "Found Footage" films because I find it hard to beleive anyone would keep filming while horrific things are happening. This is one of the few cases where it would make sense, as the camera operators here are professionals on a live broadcast.

The only part that gets a little goofy is the ending, but in that case, I think they just couldn't think of any other way to end it.

Did you ever wonder what would happen if you mix the Batman Mythos with Japanese Anime? Well, wonder no more, because it's just as crazy as you would expect it to be.

So the plot is that Gorilla Grodd as built a time machine that takes Arkham Asylum back into time into fuedal Japan, were the various members of Batman's Rogues Gallary set themselves up a fuedal lords.

Two-Face, Poison Ivy, the Penguin, and Deathstroke are all there, but they aren't given a lot of character development. So are the various "Robins", including Nightwing, Red Hood, and Red Robin. They don't do a lot, either. Instead, most of the focus is on the Joker and a duel with Batman that lasts way too long.

Apparently, the Japanese dialog was different than the English dialog. I'm not sure how big Batman is in Japan.

Just remember, if you enjoy two different things, they aren't necessarily better if you mix them.

Okay, so you can tell looking at this movie who had a "no nudity" clause in her contract and who didn't. I only point this out for two reasons. 1) They have a lot of topless women in this movie and 2) most of them should have kept their tops on, really.

So the plot is that a daring group of pirates (mostly women) rob a space casino that looks like it was rendered by the worst CGI artist, ever. Except their leader is infected by a vampire virus and the movie consists of them picking off crew members and turning them into vampires. Except the writers never seem sure if they should act live vampires or zombies.

So a lot of flopping and a lot pointless action scenes, before the movie gets to inevitable conclusion. In the meant time, the characters do things that make absolutely not a lick of sense. Like having sex out on the planet they've already established is filled with monsters.

Not worth watching at all.

This has all the halmarks of Corman's work, including recycling FX shots from "Battle Beyond the Stars", and of course, a bunch of scantily clad women overacting and catfighting.

So our plot is that a woman is sent to a space prison for mauling a henchman of the evil Emperor type. She wins the respect of her follow prisoners and eventually defeats the evil folks running the prison ship.

And... um, that's about it. Looks like it was made on the cheap with a lot of recylced FX shots (in addition to BBTS, there was one shot that clearly came from the Buck Rogers TV series.) Most of the performances were hammy but the actresses are easy on the eyes.

A farm couple in Kansas or wherever want a child and then are blessed with a baby they find in an alien spaceship. The child grows up to have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Faster than a Speeding Bullet, more powerful than a locomotive.. you get the idea.

Except instead of being a beacon of Truth, Justice and the American Way, he turns out to be an angsty pubescent teenager. And thus you have the plot for Brighburn.

So once fake-Superboy gets his super powers, he proceeds to torment the people around him like a super-powered Jason Vorhees.

It's not bad. It's maybe one hour of story stretched into a two hour plot. But it isn't bad. Some of the kills are truly gruesome.

Where the movie falls down is that we never get a feeling for Bright-Burns motivations. Is he here to conquor the planet because that's his genetic directive from Not-Krypton. Is he just an angsty kid who realizes that the things that keep real teens under control don't apply to him.

The other problem is the parents just trying to be normal. In the Comics, Ma and Pa Kent realize early on they have a child who is super-powered and spent a lot of time instilling him with the right values. Their parental guidence seems to be "don't look in the barn".

God, that was genuinely awful, wasn't it? I almost think I owe the Prequel Trilogy an apology for laughing at the Plinkett reviews. Disney has done what it does best, ruin something you like by "Disneyfying" it.

The biggest problem is with the protagonist. Boba Fett, the guy who had 25 words of dialog in The Empire Strikes Back before he was taken out like a chump in Return of the Jedi, yet remained an inexplicable fan favorite for decades. So, they come up with a convoluted reason why he wasn't digested by the Sarlac to launch this series where he goes from villain to anti-hero to hero with no plausible explanation. The closest we get to this is he and Ferrec Shand talking about how they are so much smarter than the people who hire them, so they should be in charge. That COULD have been interesting if either of them had been developed as characters.

If you wanted a series about the "Bounty Hunter with A Heart," you had that with the Mandalorian.

The Disney Factor

I am not a fan of Disney. It takes kind of grim stories and tries to give them happy endings. The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Jungle Book come to mind. Victor Hugo and Rudyard Kipling would be horrified by the sweetness. So, they take this character, who was one of the bad guys of the Original Trilogy and turn him into a good guy. One who cares about the cybernetic street urchins of Mos Epsa. Someone who forms a bond with the Tusken Raiders, which even the series heroes saw as sub-human.

Fan Service, fan Service everywhere!!!

A sign this was going too much for fan service, we paid a visit to Tochi Station, the place where Luke wanted to get some power converters to hang out with his friends who ended up on the cutting room floor. Well, heck, we got his friends back, still hanging out at Tochi station three years later, but played by different actors because it's 45 years later. We got all sorts of characters shoehorned in from other SW media. Black Kryshtan, Cad Bane, most of the cast of the Mandalorian.

Temura Morrison can't act- and he's too old. (61 opposed to 36)

Okay, I'm going to go total nerd here. In Attack of the Clones, it was established that Boba was a 10-year-old clone of Jango Fett. The events of Return of the Jedi happen 26 years after the events of Clones. This means that Boba should only be about 36. But the actor playing him is 61, and overweight. I guess we can call him "Boba Fat." I mean, it makes sense to use that actor because he's the actor who played Jango (and all the Clone Troopers). This is a case where continuity is not your friend.

The problem is that Morrison is just not that good of an actor. He's okay to play a minor background character, but less so to lead a series with a complex protagonist. Seriously, I never got a feeling for what he was going through in what could be called a character arc. Why did a ruthless Bounty Hunter become a Benevolent Dictator of the back-end of the galaxy? Well, keep guessing because this series won't tell you.

Ming-Na Wen can act but wasn't well used, and her character made no sense.

Morrison's costar in this show is Ming-Na Wen playing Ferrrec Shand. Wen actually can act, and despite being only three years younger, she's in really great shape. Then they give her a character who makes no sense. Boba saves her life by replacing her vital organs with mechanical parts, and she follows him around like a loyal puppy. You think she'd be upset that he made her life a living hell. I mean, she has pistons where her intestines should be, and it just looks painful.

She seems to be the one with a clear plan, makes sound decisions and takes decisive action, so why isn't she the leader of this benevolent crime organization?

Lack of a clear villain

Star Wars is famous for its villains! Heck, it's Space Wizards vs. Space Nazis. How could that not be awesome? Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are cultural icons, and many other antagonists are just as well known... Darth Maul, Count Dooku, Grand Moff Tarkin, Kylo Ren, and Boba Fett himself.

And who was the main antagonist in this series? The Pikes? They were boring. Cad Bane? He didn't show up until the end, and if you didn't watch the clone wars series, you'd have no idea who he was. (It really didn't help is that he still looked like a cartoon character).

I was watching the Book of Boba Fett, and Mando broke out.

This kind of annoyed me. About Episode V, we suddenly got Season 2.5 of The Mandalorian. And he brought back all the characters from that show... the Marshall, the Mechanic Lady, Deep Fake Luke, and of course, their most marketable character, Baby Yoda. ("Merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made!!!")

If you wanted to make Season3 of Mando, do that. Sticking it in the middle of this makes no sense. Did we really need 10 minutes of Mando checking his luggage at the spaceport?

"If there's a bright spot in the universe, you are on the planet it's farthest from" - Luke Skywalker,

I can't just fault BOBF for this, as the entire franchise places too much importance on the planet Tatooine. It gets visited in 6 of the 11 movies. That said, in terms of stakes, "who gets to be the crime boss of Tatooine" just doesn't seem to be that important as part of your multi-generational, galaxy-spanning epic.

On a related note, where are our heroes from the Original Trilogy? You think that if word got back to the New Republic that Boba Fett was alive and well and trying to establish a crime empire, they'd send someone to do something about that. Maybe some dashing rogue who remembers when this jerk froze him in carbonite. Then he's teaming up with a notorious assassin who also has a bounty on her head?

And then the finale.

Then we get to the finale, which just brought to mind one image. A five-year-old on a sugar rush, banging his action figures together. "And then Boba Fett comes out riding a Rancor, and it breaks the Droideka! Bash, Bash, Bash!" (His nerd parents look on in horror as any resale value is lost!)

I am reminded of the great admonition of Russian author Anton Chekhov, who said that if you introduce a Rancor in your third episode, someone better be riding it in your last episode. Or something like that.

Me, I just have so many questions, like did Boba have this Rancor hidden somewhere, or did he go all the way back to Jabba's Castle to get it and then get back really fast.

But after the mind-numbing action, we get to the Disney Happy Ending™.

I imagine the people who made this saw Blair Witch Project and said, "Yeah, let's make something like that."

So- Some mystery from the past to look into? Check.

A bunch of young idiots get lost in the woods? Check Ending that does not make a lick of sense? Check.

What BWP effectively did that this movie didn't was actually give you characters you care about. First, they had too many. Second, the movie goes south very quickly when the characters just start killing each other for no good reason other than they were as tired of this movie as the audience.

The movie has some eerie elements, like the vintage music that keeps coming from an unknown source. But frankly, the backstory was more interesting than the story. I'd rather watch a movie about the 1940's people who walked into the woods than these people.

Well, watching the opening credites, Bruce Timm, great, he worked on the excelent Batman Animated Series in the 1990's. Then JJ Abrams, the guy who destroyed Star Trek AND Star Wars.

So the good- The animation looks great, the feeling fo Film Noir of the 1940s with no anachronisms like computers and cell phones. (Although it did have the anachronism of racial equality in the 1940's) The stories were engaging, they kept my interest.

The bad. Race and Gender swapping characters. The Penguin is now a (really ugly) woman, Harley Quinn is now Asian and Gay (and has no ties to the Joker, who is mostly absent from this series). Commissioner Gordon and Batgirl are black. Some of the female character design looks like they were drawn by students in an Intersectional Feminism Course.

Okay, I kind of get it, these characters were mostly devised in the 1940's, were diversity wasn't a thing.

This Batman is kind of a jerk. He's actually abusive to poor Alfred (although he lightens up in the last few episodes) The late, great Kevin Conroy played a Batman who was intense, but he had a basic humanity this one lacks. (I blame the writer more than the voice actor).

Other characters are worse than their TAS counterparts. Bullock is outright corrupt, Harvey Dent (before he becomes Two-Face) is morally compromised.

I went into this show with a hopeful attitude. The first few episodes were promising, but the wheels soon fell off the wagon.

The show is set 100 years before the Prequels, where a murder mystery unravels when someone is killing Jedi who were involved in an incident involving a coven of witches. As the mystery plays out (although the audience can figure it out, which is never a good sign in a mystery), the actions of the characters make absolutely no sense.

There were some interesting concepts. Such as, are the Jedi morally questionable when they find force-sensitive kids and recruit them into this Order before they can make decisions. But the Space Witches aren't much better, in that they created these kids to fulfill a role in their religion.

It doesn't help that the main actress who plays twins can't act, and the lead Jedi is using English as a second language.

This movie has a lot in common with "The Thing with two heads" Starring Ray Milland and Rosie Greer. And while the latter movie had some ham-fisted commentary about race relations in 1970's America, it was far better than this trainwreck.

The cast includes Bruce Dern, Pat Preist and Casey Kasem... not really a-list actors, put people you may have actually heard of. None of them play the monster in question, which might be part of the problem, because the most important character in the movie is played by non-entities.

So Dern plays a sciencist who is attaching heads onto animals for, um, reasons, and decides to attach the head of an escape psychopath onto a mentally challenged giant, because.. um.. SCIENCE!!!

The evil head takes control and proceeds to go around murdering people, as one does, until the movies exciting climax.

We can also talk about the cinematography, where characters are out of frame during key scenes, and the fight choreography looks awful. Then there's the bad day-for-night. I could go on listing this film's flaws, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So we have 60 minutes of white women playing Pacific Islanders, all wearing strategically placed leis so that we don't see any nipples (even though one or two managed to slip past!)

Of course, this movie is pure exploitation, and if you go into it with that in mind, you can ignore some of the more problematic elements.

The movie is told in flashback, which takes away a lot of the tension, as you know who is going to live and who is going to die.

So a man washes up on an island with only women on it, who are going to sacrifice one of their number to the Sea God. Of course, that's the one our "Hero" falls in love with. After he saves the Island Girls from another tribe of natives (played by black men who are all gunned down, because it's 1961!) He is accepted by the tribe.

He eventually comes up with a plan to beat the sacrifice! Will it work? Well, no, because they already spoiled it in the beginning!

Oh, I have no idea why people liked this movie. It's pacing was slow, the characters were unlikeable.

So this couple goes out to the woods, where the man plans to pop the question out in nature. Instead, they get lost and are stalked by a bear. The man is a supposed experienced camper, but makes a bunch of mistakes, like not taking a map, not taking his phone, you know, very basic stuff good campers know to do.

So we get to watch their relationship call apart, then patch itself up, and then the bear attacks. You don't actually SEE The bear until the third act of the movie. (Imagine if Jaws did this!) and the first two thirds are squabbling.

Also, the sound wasn't very good and I struggled to hear what they were saying.

Ah, the sad state of Sony's Spiderverse. Spiderman went back to the Disney MCU, so they just have the ancillary characters like Morbius, Venom, and Madam Web that only the hard core Comic Nerds know or care about.

So you have Jared Leto, who apparently annoyed his crew by acting like he had a disability between takes Leto's performance was dull and boring, almost like he downed a bottle of Nyquil before each take.

Contrasting that is Matt Smith, bring the same kind of manic energy that he brought to Doctor Who. Frankly, the only watchable parts of the movie involve Smith.

So spoilers, Leto and Smith suffer from a crippling blood disease, with Morbius being the brilliant scientist and Milo being the investor in his whacky cure that involves vampire bats. Keep in mind, these people live in the Marvel Universe, so everyone should see why this is a terrible idea.

So of course, they both gain super powers, but must drink blood to keep them.

The real problem is that the FX look awful and are over the top, while the actors deadpan their performances (except Smith).

Set in a Pre-Vatican 2 Catholic neighborhood, a little girl is suspected of murdering her little sister during her first communion. The girl is really pretty creepy, so of course, you fall for all the false flags they set for you implicating her.

Then they kind of forget about her halfway through, and focus on the drama in the Catholic neighborhood with the divorcee who has an unhealthy relationship with the priest, the creepy gay-coded landlord, and the rather nasty aunt.

None of the characters are likeable. The pacing is pretty much like a TV movie, with some gaps in the movie where the commercials probably would have went. Also in here is Brook Sheilds in a child role.

I liked this one better than I liked the first part, even though it took more departures from the book. It definitely dragged in places, especially the scenes in the desert. (Although almost all interpretations do, maybe it's just the psychological effect of a desert.)

So, where they really depart from previous versions is main characters have serious doubt about what they are doing. While this is hinted at in the book, it is much more overt here. (It isn't until the second Book that Paul really starts to realize what a mess he's made of things.)

The Character of Chani is a departure. While she is totally devoted to Paul in the book, here she's the one screaming that this is wrong (even though they are aiming for the same goal.)

The character of Feyd Ruatha was really good as a villian, for anyone still traumatized by the image of Sting in metal speedos in the 84 version, this is so much better. He's a psychopath and it's obvious.

The battle scene at the end is quite impressive, but utlimately forgettable. But this is the curse of modern movies, I guess.

Worth a watch? If you've already seen part one and liked the books, definitely.

So we have another Zombie movie, because clearly we haven't made nearly enough of those. Except these are French Zombies.

A jerk goes to his ex-girlfriends house to get some tapes and makes a scene in front of all her other guests. While he sleeps it off in the other room, the Zombie Apocolypse breaks out overnight and everyone in the world except him is turned into a Zombie.

He somehow secures the rest of the apartment building, except for a Zombie family he traps in an apartment and another Zombie he traps in an elevator. These are by the way, the dumbest zombies I have seen in this genre. Proper Romero Zombies would have eaten this fool in the first 20 minutes.

Most of his actions seem to involve engaging in rather pointless activity. For some reason, the power and gas are still running in this apocolypse, so he's not sitting in the dark.

The movie is supposed to imply that he is slowly going mad. Like a lot of Zombie movies, the number of Zombies outside is often plot dependent. Need the character to feel trapped? Have a whole hoard. Need him to try to rescue a cat, just have a few.

So this is an adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau, so loose that they had to change the names of the characters. So your typical, not violating someone else's copyright mad scientist is trying to advance evolution through surgery. Unlike the other versions, the doctor only can afford one abomination of nature instead of dozens.

Also doesn't have a love story with a panther girl shoe-horned in. Instead, it has an affair with the mad scientist's unhappy wife.

Where the movie really falls down is the monster, as they hid it until the last possible minute, and it just doesn't look that impressive. Unlike the classic 1933 version or the off the rails 1996 version (Which is so bad it's good), the scientist is just boring.

The 1980s were the Silver Age of horror, with some of the greatest icons emerging. They also did a lot of atmospheric films like this one.

A small town sheriff is puzzled by a series of mysterious murders, and begins to suspect the local mortician, played by Grandpa Joe.

As he begins to unravel the mystery, he realizes that everyone in the town is a zombie, resurrected through voodoo and mortuary wax.

A solid cast, including James Farentino, Eddie Jack Albertson, Melody Anderson, and blink you might miss it, Robert Englund in a pre-Freddy role.

The ending is a bit predictable, event though they try to play it as a twist, you can see it coming a mile away.

The plot is that an eccentric billionaire loses a billion dollars to three competitors, due to a court case handled badly by his law firm. His response is to turn his lawyer into a racist doll, which he has already done to the judge and prosecutor in the case.

But that's not all, he keeps a girl band locked in a cage, whom he shocks into performing musical numbers for, um, reasons. His butler wears clown makeup and his head is shrunken. It's like they took all the weird ideas that weren't good enough to get into Band's other films and just dumped them here.

The dolls are soon dispatched to start killing his enemies. Not sure how this is supposed to get him money back for him OR why these dolls, who I assume miss their human existence, are doing his bidding.

This movie has little point and is just weird, and not in a fun way.