The Forest (2016)

A while ago, YouTube star and professional fuckhead Logan Paul got some flack for taking a web-video in the infamous Aokigahara forest in Japan, which is known as a spot where people go to kill themselves. People reacted strongly and he got ads pulled and he got temporarily banned from YouTube – though in the time it's taken us to do this review, he's now unfortunately back on YouTube and doing whatever he wants again, which proves to me that there is no God.

But did you know that's NOT the only time the suicide forest has been used distastefully in shitty media? Here's a review of the awful horror movie called The Forest.

Director: Jason Zada

Starring: Natalie Dormer, Eoin Macken

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This is just another rock-bottom, dumb-ass horror movie full of cliches. The message is something like 'be afraid of foreign countries.' After all, America is the only normal place. Everywhere else is just a breeding ground for superstitions and myths that turn out to be true. Stay home and turn on your TV and lock the door! Renew that Amazon subscription!

I guess this is about some woman, Sara, played by Game of Thrones and Hunger Games actor Natalie Dormer, who wants to go all the way to Japan to search for her missing sister. Her reasoning is, apparently, that her sister MIGHT HAVE gone into the suicide forest! Why does she think this? Pure speculation. Like yeah, I'm sure whatever you think happened IS what really happened! Because why have any surprises? That's for wimps and weenies.

So she does go, and along the way, as it goes, runs into some extremely weak-ass jump scares – seriously, they're so soft it's like the movie didn't want to wake up mom and dad napping in the other room but still wanted to have a loud screamy jump scare.

Honestly, she wastes a lot of time when she gets there, just sitting in a bar and looking at the forest but not going in. It doesn't seem like she's really all that interested in finding her sister. I guess she goes to some school her sister worked at, where a girl faints and thinks she IS her sister, and nobody tells the girl she's a twin until later – it's just more fun that way, if you can scare a kid. All of this shit just seems like a waste of time. Didn't she know beforehand that she wanted to look at the fucking forest? Why are we wasting time with all of this other nonsense?

Huh? What's that? Oh, it's just been explained to me that the movie is trite hack work and is padding out the runtime so as not to be a short film. Okay. Carry on, then.

She meets a few other silly characters, like a stereotypical elderly Japanese woman who works near the forest and just... shows her some fucking dead suicide bodies for no reason. How nice of her! The hospitality here is just through the roof! Oh, and don't forget that despite everyone speaking perfect English, to throw in “Konnichiwa” every chance you get just as the bare minimum to remind you we're in Japan. But if that wasn't enough to convince you, there's also some Japanese “mysticism” speeches about screaming spirits and other stuff that sounds cool if you're racist against Asian people and think this is all they talk about.

I guess the REAL “meat” of the movie, if you can call this rotting roadkill “meat,” begins when she runs into this random dude at a bar who starts telling her he'd met her sister and can lead her into the suicide forest. Uh, if this is slang in Japan for “I want to sleep with you,” then I guess this dude is being honest. Either that or he's a horrible opportunistic piece of garbage who somehow got REALLY lucky this one time.

They team up with another random dude to go in. Who are these guys with all this free time? They apparently have no obligations or family or anything. I personally would have asked some questions – they spend ALL FUCKING DAY with her in the woods, at the drop of a hat, with no real preparations. I think these guys are probably fucking lazy bums who have no jobs and contribute nothing to society.

They find a random tent in the woods after walking all day (which Sara is SURE is her sister's! And it is!), and then the one random Japanese guy with them wants to turn back and come back tomorrow. Well then how would you ever get anything done??? It took you all goddamn day to get HERE. Are you just trying to waste time? There are better ways to get your cardio in, you know.

After this, I'll be honest, the movie just kind of turns into mush. We get the truly ridiculous story of how her sister apparently thought the forest was “romantic,” and how one time years ago she didn't answer the phone, and so I guess that's enough to deduce that she killed herself. There's also some story about how they once saw their parents die, and because the sister didn't look away, THAT made her adventurous and want to go do weird stuff all the time. Brilliant! Someone call Freud and tell him he's a hack and he's done! We have a new paradigm of modern psychology and it is The Forest! Oh my God!

There's a lot of screaming and running around in the dark, as the movie is so poorly lit it's near impossible to tell what's happening a lot of the time. She ends up killing herself in a hallucination, and the movie predictably ends with some cops seeing her ghost at the end – ooooOOOOooooh, spooky! I mean, if you're a kid in a shitty haunted house. Who has been sheltered your whole life and never allowed to watch anything besides kids programming.

This is horrible. There's absolutely nothing we liked about it – in fact, it makes what Logan Paul did look like carefully considered, culturally sensitive art-school stuff. I hate this movie and you shouldn't watch it.

The Disappointments Room (2016)

Here we go again, with another ghost story movie that really could've been improved in a number of ways... most of all in this case, if the filmmakers had had any kind of point or plot to anything they were doing. Welcome to The Disappointments Room!

Director: DJ Caruso

Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Mel Raido

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Apparently this movie was made a few years ago, but only released last year after the studio came back from a bankruptcy filing after a bunch of lawsuits and missing loan payments. Would it really have been too much to ask for it to have just STAYED lost?

Also, director DJ Caruso was also responsible for Disturbia, which is... yeah, great, I guess? I dunno. Let's just dig into this crap pile.

This is another ghost story, paranormal type of film, in the mold of Insidious and The Haunting of Connecticut and God knows how many others. It's got a super original premise where a troubled woman, Dana (Kate Beckinsale) and her family are moving to a fancy house in the country to try and get away from their problems – something people in real life do all the time, and something totally relatable to the modern person. Not feeling good about anything? Just do the totally plausible and affordable thing and move to a fancy old house in the country. If you can't do that, YOU DESERVE TO SUFFER.

It's so simple. Just make sure you have access to enough wealth and personal opportunity to move to a place like this at any time you're sad. Then you'll never truly be in the dark.

The movie actually starts with the family singing in the car driving to the place, and it's really quite annoying. The dad is waaaay too into it, he looks like he's doing his best Off Broadway musical voice. Calm the fuck down, dude. I'm pretty sure there are no talent agents out on the road in the woods that will hear you.

I guess one of the first things that happens is a leak in the roof – you know, the best possible way to start off a horror film. I can't count the number of horror films I've seen where it was good but would have been improved with a subplot about a leaky roof. Also, it starts to rain – so this is a really bad movie to watch if you have to pee really bad.

They do some more boring shit like go into town to talk to the weirdest lady the movie could find – she's just super excited about everything, blathering on about how there's a hot carpenter in town who's father is an alcoholic, which is stuff I'd find really interesting if I was wasted off my ass at 3 a.m. and unaware of my surroundings. But I'm not, so this scene just falls flat.

But there's actually SOME creepy shit that starts happening... like, Dana sees a dog in the yard one time. OOOOOoooooOOOOOOOoooo! Scary!

It turns out to just be a wheelbarrow or something. Easy mistake to make, they look exactly identical.

There's also, of course, the weird little room they never heard about when they were looking at the house, up in the attic. It starts to weird Dana out, but she can't open it at all until a separate scene the next day when she finds a key to the place. Wonderful scriptwriting – no way at all that couldn't've happened in the same scene. But I guess the movie had to fill its insanely difficult hour and 15-minute runtime somehow! These guys really know how to write movies.

Then she does get in, and the door mysteriously closes behind her. That's just how houses in the south work – they're super polite, always wanting to make your living experience easier by taking steps out of everything. She tries to get out, but apparently the house doesn't want her to get out. Oh well. It happens. Then I guess she's just a really unmemorable person, because she falls asleep in there for several fucking hours and nobody notices she's gone.

Seriously? Her husband doesn't notice? I guess he WAS busy playing with his kid outside though. This guy is such a weirdly immature character that I'm not sure whose idea it was to do this.

This is actually advance footage of the next Avengers movie. Looks lazy.

The rest of this is just full of nonsense jump scares that we saw in 2004 and some really bad dream sequence scenes that are so obvious you could see them in space... like, yeah, I'm sure she really woke up and found her kid with blood all over him... no way THAT could be a hallucination. These scenes can work, but only if you have a strong story narrative and connection to the characters. This movie doesn't.

The “story” I guess is that this old house used to belong to a family who had a deformed daughter and kept her locked up in the attic. This is relayed extremely calmly to Dana by an old lady in a museum who knew about it before and didn't tell them when they initially talked about buying the house. GEE, THANKS A LOT, LADY!

"Heh heh heh... fucking with the new people in town is the only way I feel alive anymore."

If you're wondering, like I was, what's going on with that leaky roof thing, then never fear. The movie rushes through all that boring “horror” shit and gets back to that with a scene probably longer than the horror ones – the super handsome construction guy from the town comes to the house and openly flirts with Dana with apparently no shame, and she hashes out a deal for him to work on their house. Wow! WHAT. GRIPPING. CINEMA.

Like, what in the fuck are you doing, movie? There's barely any horror in your horror movie! This thing doesn't even seem like it wanted to be a horror film – it seems much more preoccupied with these scenes of Dana and Hot Carpenter Fuckboy there quasi-flirting. Where's the scares?

Oh – another overly long hallucination dream scene of her kid supposedly getting eaten by a dog. Yeah – not convincing me, movie.

Apparently part of the reason for all this, we find out, is because she accidentally rolled over and suffocated her other child a while back and has been traumatized ever since. This is a horribly tragic thing to have happen. But this movie just isn't doing very well at articulating that. Can't it take a page out of a film like, oh I don't know, Lars von Trier's Antichrist?

Then what? She decides to burn some old paintings in the house for... better interior decorating, I'm guessing.

But who cares about that? What's going on with her and that carpenter guy now?! I guess he finally takes it too far when he offers to sleep over when her husband is away. Ooh, shot down like a U.S. government drone flying over the farm of a devout Luddite with a gun.

Keep in mind, this movie is less than 80 minutes long, and this is what we're focusing on.

How about a scene where the husband is talking to a therapist about his wife's troubles? Is THAT going to be any good?

He is actually talking to just a pair of legs.

What is this movie's fascination with showing us scenes like this that have NOTHING to do with the movie? I get it, character development is good. But they're not developing characters! They're just showing us random bullshit that distracts from the point. It's like if The Shining took a detour to show us Wendy and Jack sitting at the table talking about what color curtain to put in their bathroom at home, no scares or anything else revealed. Just ridiculous.

After finding the grave of the deformed girl in the woods, Carpenter Wonder Boy is then killed by a ghost himself, and hung in a tree where Dana finds him. Later on, it's revealed that apparently he wasn't really in the tree. Even though we see him killed by the ghost from his own point of view, apparently that DIDN'T really happen. These ghosts are up to some super complex Houdini type shit, I'll tell you.

It's extra funny if he really did die though - in that case, apparently they just leave him out there to rot while they have their little family therapy session in the house later. What a bunch of dicks.

I guess there's some sort of a “climax” after that, where she learns through magical unexplained psychic ghost powers that this old guy in the house murdered the disabled girl in the attic. What an awesome revelation that I truly care about.

Then, I guess, the ghost of that guy tells her that her son will die, so she runs to his room with a hammer and attacks a pillow that she thinks is the old man's head trying to attack her son! But really it's just, you know, a pillow, and she scared her kid. Whoops.

Wow, what an imagination she has! She should go into creative writing.

Then she and her husband talk in the kitchen about her grief from letting her baby die, which wasn't her fault, but really kind of was. Her husband says it's cool and they can work on shit, and they hug and then the screen goes to a sunny day with them leaving the house. Because that's all you need to cure emotional trauma! A hug and a 'it'll be okay' and then you're fine. Nothing else necessary! Wow! I never knew it was that easy. Apparently anything is fixable with enough money to move to a nice country house, move out and the support of a loving family. That truly is a great moral, movie. Really learned a lot from this!

This is a lame and awful movie. It didn't even feel like a finished film. But I will give it this – its plot was generic tripe I've seen a thousand times and should've been retired five years ago, but at least this movie didn't spend too much time on it. This one was trying really hard NOT to even be a fucking horror movie, what with all the time spent on the roof fixing plot, that they barely spent any time on the usual cliches I hate.

Speaking of that, what ever did happen with the roof of that place? I guess the family moved out before it could get done, which is the real reason I think this sucks! No resolution to its main plot!

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

The Top 13 Movies of 2016

Well, you knew this list was coming, especially since I did the worst of list a few days ago. And who am I to be overly negative on this blog? Here are the best movies I saw in 2016. I'm sure I missed a couple, and there may be choices you don't agree with, but hey, them's the breaks, right? This is a better list than the Oscars. Yeah, I fucking went there. Read 'em and weep!

In all seriousness, this was a super great year for movies. I had a hard time narrowing this list down. I hope you enjoy it.

13. A Monster Calls

A unique and atmospheric film about grief through the eyes of a child. This would have been an almost claustrophobically sad movie if not for the vivid, imaginative and colorful scenes from the monster voiced by Liam Neeson telling the kid a series of parable-like stories relating to his real life. This is a layered and somber film that explores human emotions in a nuanced manner – that's what I liked about this and why it's on this list.

12. Jackie

Striking, unflinching period piece on Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of JFK's assassination. Natalie Portman acts her ass off, and the story about power at that level and how humans emotionally deal with it is dizzying, especially in this polarizing time. Great soundtrack and visuals add a huge atmosphere and weight to everything that happens here. This was a hypnotic, entrancing and gripping piece.

11. Captain Fantastic

Kick ass family drama/comedy about an unorthodox family led by Viggo Mortensen living out in nature and then they have to come back to civilization for a personal tragedy. This had a lot of fun scenes, some great drama and a lot to say about parenting, nature versus nurture and the ways family affects children. Lots of good acting in this and an overall fun, propulsive pace that made it a joy to behold.

10. Imperium

Really important film in our current political climate, for how it talks about white supremacy and terror groups and how one is radicalized. Daniel Radcliffe does a great job in this, but the real meat of it is the complex morals of the film – the way it portrays some of these young neo-Nazis as lost, disenfranchised, angry kids in need of a group to join is a lot more insight than most films approaching these subjects ever get. I found this exciting and provocative and timely.

9. Don't Think Twice

This is a really fun, enjoyable film, with great character dialogues that are funny and heartwarming. But it's also a thoughtful work about art and ambition, and what pursuing those things can do to friendships. This movie asks some hard questions about things and isn't afraid to tackle a story that so easily could've been cliché with levity and realism. Director Mike Birbiglia did a great job here and it lends credence to the idea that comedians are the modern philosophers.

8. The Witch

This is how you do a fucking horror movie. This has to be one of the most evil movies I've ever seen, with its story of a complete perversion of the Puritanical religious values. But it's also an empowering feminist tale of a young girl finding her way in that wretched, oppressive time. This has a lot of great visuals, tension thick enough to cut with a knife and building suspense. One of the best horror films of recent years.

7. Arrival

Denis Villenueve is my favorite modern director, and this movie is just more of why – his feel for gripping, epic, slow-burning stories of a multitude of genres is unmatched. This one is a great alien flick with twists abound and a good sense for epic cinematography and scenery. A visual pleasure and also a striking, individual story.

6. The Killing Joke

I've loved Batman since I was a kid, especially the old 90s Animated Series, so this was a treat – pairing Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill with the old creators of that series for an adaptation of one of the most audacious Batman comics ever made. This is a bizarre, provocative and polarizing story, but it's told with a visual artistry that makes it endlessly captivating. I liked the stuff they added that wasn't in the comics, too, adding shading and depth to these characters.

5. Moonlight

A lyrical, poetic film about a young gay black guy growing up in Florida. It's got a lot to say about masculinity and homosexuality, and how our culture views those things – especially through the lens of a black guy. This was just a feast on all senses. The scenery and cinematography were gorgeous and the story was raw and simple but layered at the same time. It's snappy, smart and powerful filmmaking – addictive and entrancing stuff.

4. Hell Or High Water

I haven't had this much fun at the cinema in ages. This is a neo-Western crime flick that just seems to go down the list of what makes a good film and check them all off with ease. Great characters, fun dialogue, a fast pace, great action and a lot of cool, gritty violence. It's a pure joy. I can't get enough.

3. Nocturnal Animals

I didn't see anything else this weird, unique or opaque all year. This is a strikingly individual film unique not in what it says but what it doesn't say, playing with your expectations of action in film by having most everything that happens be a fantasy, a flashback or something else. Yet, through that, it creates a layered, complex and dark story of lost love and missed chances. I was totally enthralled by this movie.

2. Swiss Army Man

This is maybe one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen, but it's also one of the best of the year. A deeply funny and strange film that becomes touching through really clever writing. This is full of a lot of juvenile (but funny) fart and dick jokes, and Daniel Radcliffe hams it up as a talking corpse leading Paul Dano through the woods. But through those things, it tells a wonderful sort of coming-of-age tale. It's a bizarre way to go about that, but you can't argue with results, right?

1. The Family Fang

I thought long and hard about this one, but frankly, nothing else I saw this year captivated me like The Family Fang did. This is a soulful and personal movie that weaves a tale of what havoc parents can wreak on their children and also asks some open-ended, thought provoking questions about art and its purity and what it can be used for. Layered performances from director-star Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman and a funny, down-to-Earth script make this an accessible film with a lot more under the surface. It's a great flick and I hope people see it. The best I saw this year.

Runners-Up

Here are some other movies I really liked but thought it would be a bit too long to put in the main list. So I am putting them here.

Manchester By the Sea

A tragic drama, but with enough humor and levity that it doesn't become grotesque. Casey Affleck really delivers here.

Edge of Seventeen

A fun, funny and insightful teenage dramedy with a great performance by lead girl Hailee Steinfield. Pretty much all of this was compulsively watchable and entertaining.

Green Room

Savage, punk-rock horror/action from up-and-comer director Jeremy Saulnier. This is a nonstop blitzkrieg ride of violence and fuck-you's to Naziism. Great music, too.

Doctor Strange

Marvel Studios' best film in a couple of years now. Visually fun and action packed with a surprisingly emotive performance from Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Nice Guys

A fun detective comedy with great performances from Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling – and the '70s aesthetic does a lot to give this its own flavor. Very enjoyable.

Images copyright their original owners, we own none of them.

Hush (2016)

Let's talk about Mike Flanagan. He's one of horror's best new directors – probably THE best in my estimation, even if only for the film Absentia, which is still one of my favorites of any era of horror. He followed it up a few years later with Oculus, which was also good if not as good, perhaps a bit less layered and character-driven, but still one-upping most contemporaries at the supernatural horror genre. Now he's come out with the Netflix exclusive Hush, which, if nothing else, does show us here at Cinema Freaks that the best way to survive a home invasion is to be deaf.

There are also SPOILERS in this review, so tread with caution!

Director: Mike Flanagan

Starring: Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr.

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Up front: We both think this is a really cool movie. It's very inventive and has a lot of cool, subtle touches that raise it above the average thriller in this genre. I'm not even very big on the home invasion stuff – I think a lot of it is pretty trite trash. But this one is good.

So, then. Let's talk about why.

The film starts off pretty quaintly – a deaf woman, Maddie, is cooking dinner and still sort of conflicted over her old boyfriend, which is a plot never quite elaborated on and I'm glad the film didn't spend much time on it. She gets a visit from her friend, who talks to Maddie about her book, which the friend apparently loved. Maddie says she gets the ideas for her stories from a voice in her head, which, while interesting, could also have much in common with schizophrenia.

Not to imply that writers would ever be anything less than sane.

It does set up the main undertone of the story, though, which is Maddie's talent for seeing all sorts of different endings. She has seven for her book on her computer, as we see later – and she's frustrated because none of them are working out right. Her friend leaves after a mishap with the food she's cooking. Little did she know Maddie wanted everything to be burnt to a crisp – it's that special kind of cuisine.

Later on we get some more shading and backstory – apparently Maddie moved out to the country to be alone. Her sister and family think it would be better if she moved back into the city, but she doesn't want to. And this guy who she used to date, I guess, keeps calling her incessantly after she starts to call him and then stops. Stop creeping on her, asshole! And, while this is all going on, a guy has broken into her home and has killed her best friend outside!

I wonder if the killer doesn't know she's deaf. Maybe he's thinking "wow, this girl must really hate her best friend to not even LOOK over here when I am killing her." I wonder if that makes him mad, like a spoiled kid whose parents won't even pay him mind. I hope it does.

Oh, wait. That isn't backstory. It's actually just the regular, real and very tense plot.

I do like how the killer just pops up with no warning. Like a fucking Jack in the Box. That's badass. He comes like a force of nature and there's zero explanation for his appearance. He doesn't get some sort of secret connection, some soap-opera shit where you find out he's Maddie's long lost cousin who she once killed his pet hamster, or something like that. No, this guy is just some random psycho, stalking the house with a crossbow.

Maddie finally realizes something is wrong and tries to escape in vain. This starts the meat of the movie – the long, darkly-lit cat-and-mouse thrill sequence where Maddie tries to survive the torments of the man outside, who proves to be very sadistic. I mean, I know that's a hell of an accusation. But look at this – he uses her dead friend as this sick puppet and knocks her hand on the window. Over and over, he does this. I'm not one to judge by first appearances. But I think this guy is probably a fucking whack job.

Hey, we all have issues and we all deal with them in different ways.

Fortunately, Maddie is no slouch herself. She maneuvers all kinds of shit during this movie. She's able to stay alive with gusto, even. Like a female, deaf John McClain, which is really what I think John McClain was all the time inside. A deaf woman. That's what every action hero is inside – a kick ass deaf woman.

The film goes along quite swimmingly, with not a whole lot to pick apart or criticize – it's just a very solid, tense home invasion flick, and the scenes are well constructed and engaging. The film is good because it doesn't insult your intelligence. There are no dumb scenes of Maddie trying to talk and reason with the killer – well, for obvious reasons, actually. And there's no implausible torture-traps or twists of fate where it makes the killer look to have superpowers, a la The Collector. It just gives you good, lean, mean suspense and thrills. Which really should not be some sort of revolutionary thing – but there you go; that's the state of this genre.

One scene I liked that also bucked cliché was when that dead girl's boyfriend shows up later on and distracts the killer. The killer does pretend he's a cop, which is a bit silly. But it never goes the way I expected it to – they do NOT have the killer immediately overpower the guy, tricking him like he's some sort of omnipotent force. The guy almost gets the drop on the killer, actually. The only reason he doesn't is because Maddie distracts him from far away, not being able to tell that he had the upper hand. That's a really cruel fucking twist of fate, and works macabrely in the movie's favor. The killer does kill the guy and it's much closer than it is in other films.

Another great scene: Maddie makes a break for it running outside. The killer catches her immediately with a rock to the head, then straddles her and smashes her head in with another rock.

Cut to her back in the house, having imagined the whole thing. It's her “writer brain” from earlier kicking in – she's a better strategist than most main characters, it appears, being able to judge bad ideas before actually trying to do them.

Instead, what ends up happening is a more closed-in fight scene inside the house, in which she blinds him with bug spray to the eyes and then deafens him with her super loud fire alarm device. Then she ends up stabbing him with a wine opener that appeared earlier in the movie. The old Chekhov's Wine Opener plot device. I know it well...

This is just a solid as fuck horror film. I think this is well done for its tense atmosphere, its clearly defined and exciting series of events and the main character, Maddie, who is very capable, badass and interesting to watch, not to mention actually likable and sympathetic – not always a given with horror movies.

But there are also a few other subtle things I really like about this. For one, the use of sound – the movie's name, Hush, isn't an accident. The film does well to point out and play around with Maddie's deafness as a sort of aesthetic device. The moments in the film where she's alone and then a sound appears to the viewer, piercing the silence in that way that we know she can't hear, are interesting and different, and they're very small, mostly cropping up in the beginning before all the action starts – but it's little, subtle touches like this, very well woven into the film, that establish her character, set the tone for the film and add a detail that the film would've been a bit worse without.

And I like that she's deaf – that she can survive while being a deaf woman trapped in this situation. Those little moments I mentioned? Those are kind of like the butterfly flapping its wings before a storm happens – Butterfly Effect type shit. She figures out new, inventive ways to escape the killer and holds her own, and thus, her deafness is actually what sets this whole movie apart from its parent 'home invasion' genre. It's very fresh in that way.

I also enjoyed the minor theme running through of Maddie's writing career. The 'writer brain' concept is very cool, and developed subtly but well over the film's course. She starts out the film unable to finish her book, leaving a computer full of half-finished notes and a lot of frustration as her attacker then traps her in the house, cuts off the power and kills everyone she knows. But she's able to survive the ordeal, at least in part, because she's adapted so well to being deaf. Kind of a “other senses amplified” sort of deal. But she actually survives because of what she can do that others can't – her disability forces her to be more crafty than someone who could hear might be, but it's her writing talent and creative mind that helps her actually come out on top.

That's pretty fucking cool. Go see Hush. It's on Netflix so you have no excuse if you've got that. Otherwise, I guess you have plenty of excuses.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.

Standoff (2016)

Standoff is a movie about angry, shouting men trapped in a house together. If that sounds good to you, well, you'll like the film. If you're thinking there could be subtleties and more depth to it than that, well, get ready to be disappointed!

Director: Adam Alleca

Starring: Thomas Jane, Laurence Fishburne

IMDB

Co-written with Tony.

Apparently this got mostly negative reviews, according to Wikipedia, which really is the only source for movie ratings. Fuck Rotten Tomatoes. I'm a purist and only read the "reception" tab on Wikipedia to tell me whether to get a movie or not. And I'm glad to add my critical voice, so esteemed by my peers, into that foray!

This movie begins with Thomas Jane, who I like to think of in this movie as Better Keanu Reeves, as he has long hair and a similarly angry, stoic demeanor, but he can at least try to act, so that's something. Him and his wife are mourning because their kid dies, and she leaves him, apparently not really needing that big Thomas Jane acting gold too badly.

That's way too nice of a shot for this movie. Kind of a waste...

Meanwhile, a little girl with a camera, called Bird, is going to a funeral with her stepfather, Rob Zombie movie extra:

Straight from the set of '31' probably.

They get there and it's pretty much as cliché as a funeral scene can get – like, the fact that they filmed this at all without falling asleep is amazing. I bet they just watched a funeral scene in any other generic Z-grade thriller like this and copy-pasted the entire script. But they can't even finish the funeral without a hitman showing up and killing everyone there. D'oh! Foiled again! Better try to have that funeral again at a later time. It's going to require a do-over.

He actually always only kills people at funerals, just because he is a lazy fuck.

The little girl sees him doing it and takes a photo of him with his mask off – it's Laurence Fishburne, by the way. He sees her and then immediately decides he has to devote the rest of his day to killing her. He cancels all his other appointments, including the one to curl his hair and the one to get his nails done. He chases her through this big field to the house of Better Keanu Reeves, who opens the door and is surprised to see her there. But he's even more surprised when Fishburne shoots him in the foot immediately, without even attempting to reason with him.

This begins the main conflict of the story – Jane's character and the little girl, Bird, stuck upstairs in Jane's house while the increasingly deranged Fishburne stomps around downstairs threatening them. It's the least suspenseful cat and mouse thing ever. There should be multiple ways out of this, but for some reason, this is dragged out for a whole damn movie. It's also revealed somewhere in this mess that Jane's character is a soldier. This has importance because, well, they couldn't think of any other way to shoehorn in him being such a badass. Still better than John Wick, though, which is why Jane's character retains the nickname Better Keanu Reeves.

Especially ludicrous is the way Fishburne constantly blathers on about how he's the best hitman ever and he's the biggest challenger Jane will ever face. But he proves himself wrong instantly, as he's constantly over-emotional, flying off the handle at every little insult Jane throws his way. You know, like a good hitman would be. He also gets really, really drunk to ease the pain of when Jane shoots him, too – I'm sure being drunk just makes him a better hitman.

Drinking on the job is actually the way to be good at anything. If you're a bus driver for instance, drinking on the job will just make you even better than you were. I'm telling the truth obviously, as this is in a caption on a picture on a movie blog.

Not to mention the elephant in the room – he's doing all of this just to kill one little girl, and he can't even do that right! How good of a hitman can this guy be? Were all his previous marks catatonic patients in hospital beds? Fuck, this is a dumb ass movie.

The movie pretty much proceeds like this for the entirety of its runtime:

FISHBURNE: Who the hell do you think you are? I'm going to laugh at you from down here!

JANE: FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKER! I'LL TEAR YOU APART!

Or sometimes, when the movie really starts taking risks, they reverse that conversation so it's Fishburne screaming his head off at Jane being condescending. Ooh, now we're really getting brave!

I just don't know. Most of the movie is just a dull slog. They really, really stretch this out, to the point where the stretch marks would look more like World War II bayonet battle scars. Jesus, this is boring. I guess a few times, they move around and make it seem like something interesting is going to happen – like, at one point, Fishburne goes outside and climbs upstairs using a ladder, I guess. Even then it doesn't get any more interesting. Having the only two characters involved in the fight be crippled from wounds and one of them very drunk doesn't exactly make for good suspense. What's next – a movie about two geriatric wheelchair-bound old farts screaming at each other across a nursing home? Check that out next summer, from the makers of Standoff!

At one point, a cop shows up and hears gunshots coming from the direction of the house. Showing that the old 'dumb cops dies' trope is still fresh to some misguided individuals, he doesn't even call in that he heard gunshots. He's about to, but instead of telling the rest of the sheriff's office there was gunshots, he just goes it alone. You go for it, Rambo!

He actually does call in, but then changes his mind and doesn't even tell them he heard gunshots. Either he has a death wish, or the movie is just terrible at writing cop characters. What motivation does he have to go off rogue-style on his own? He doesn't know what's out there. He could be walking into a gunfight between two redneck assholes. He doesn't know if this is going to be anything that will like, skyrocket his fucking career and make him a hero. I don't get how a character can be this dumb...oh, wait, it's because the script needs a convenient idiot.

So Fishburne ties up the cop and tortures him for a while, all to get Jane to send Bird downstairs. He doesn't, so instead we just get a pretty lame, try-hard torture scene shoved into the movie. Ya know, in case you weren't convinced already that this movie is out of ideas and pandering to horror cliches that no one wants to see in the first place.

Did you want a torture scene with cuts so quick you can't even see any gore? Do you also want a porn movie with only shots of the girl's feet through the whole thing?

I just don't get the whole premise of this story. Fishburne's character wanted to kill Bird because she saw him without his mask on. But he CHOSE to take his mask off in front of the woman he came to the cemetery to kill in the first place. That was in broad daylight. Unless he had extremely accurate, prescient future-vision, there's no way he couldn't have known that some other random pedestrian(s) wouldn't have walked by. So really, it's his own fault for taking his dumb mask off and assuming no one in broad fucking daylight would ever see him. Kinda a self-fulfilling prophecy. Numbnuts.

And now he wants to kill Bird – a girl who can't be older than eight. She would have nothing to talk about if you hadn't taken your mask off. So really, all this is your own fault. It's especially insane and maddening because he constantly talks about how he's the greatest hitman in the world. Uh, maybe if by greatest you mean worst. Maybe that would be accurate.

The movie ends with a lot more huffing and puffing from these two assholes – Jane does the cliché thing for these movies and asks why Fishburne ended up the way he did, and Fishburne tells some dumb story about how he started killing more and more people and it helped him sleep. Snooooooore. Wake me up when you learn to write a real character!

The movie's characters are so thinly and shallowly written. They have no depth and they just scream and the movie thinks that's a way of conveying who they are. It's hack bullshit. It sucks.

Then, as if this whole thing couldn't possibly get any dumber, it's revealed Fishburne has lured Jane's wife to the house, by telling her he was drinking too heavily, and she believed him despite never having heard his voice before. Yeah, I'm sure the guy who you've never met or heard of, claiming he's your husband's friend and telling you to come back to the house but not letting you speak to or hear your husband, is telling the truth! I also have a Nigerian prince who needs some money. Open up that check account, bitch!

So he kidnaps her and threatens to kill her if Jane doesn't give up Bird. Seeing as he would probably kill them both anyway after they gave him Bird – why wouldn't he? – the whole thing is just dumb. This guy has left a bigger trail of bodies by now than most serial killers. He killed a fucking cop. You think you'll be able to really get away with this? He constantly goes on about how his employer will kill him if he leaves any witnesses. Well, I doubt your employer will look kindly on this Appalachian Trail of bodies you just left in broad daylight and go, oh yeah, this was the job I wanted done.

But it's OK, because Jane attacks Fishburne and stabs him multiple times in the neck, killing him – so glad this whole thing was solved in the non-violent way as my Sunday school teachers always used to tell me. Then we get a ridiculous ending of Jane and his wife and Bird huddling together, set to the worst and most inappropriately sappy music they could find. As if to say 'look at what an important story just happened.' Honestly, I'd rather set this music over a video of me taking a shit.

What a happy ending and how much we've learned. Oh wait, except for that cop who died, whose body is still rotting in your house. Have fun cleaning that up. And I'm sure his family really appreciates the sappy music montage you're playing right now! Ah well. He isn't a real person anyway. He's a fictional character.

This is a load of crap, honestly. I've had more fun locking myself out of the house, in terms of things tangentially related to what happens in this movie. In fact, what did happen in this movie again? I can't remember. Oh well.

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