Review: The Stepfather (2009)

Director: Nelson McCormick

Starring: Dylan Walsh, Sela Ward, Penn Badgley, Amber Heard

Website: http://www.welcometothefamily.com/

Heh. It's so adorable that this movie thinks it's actually doing a good job at anything. The Stepfather...pfft, honestly, I'd be embarrassed to even admit to watching this piece of shit. But I did watch it, and now I am paying the consequences. Why don't you all join me in my misery as we review this heinous pile of hacked up attempts at a plot and finally put it to rest forever?

The movie begins with a dramatic musical number ominously showing our main character – reasonably assumed to be, well, the Stepfather - …shaving his face and walking downstairs. Not very fitting, guys…at least until we find out, ooh, shocker, that he killed his whole family! Gasp, awe, unbridled terror. Then we get the police talking about the case and we find out that he’s “done it before,” and that he’s “an expert at this,” paying everything in cash and leaving no way to find him.

Well, thanks, movie, for spoiling everything right away!

Actually this is based on a true story of a killer named John Emil List, who did something similar, moving around to different places and marrying women only to kill them. But if that’s the case, why even make a movie fictionalizing the whole thing instead of just making a bona-fide “true life” movie like the ones about Ed Gein and the BTK Killer? Let’s see how they screw it up!

This movie likes to jump around in time and not give us any time to really grow attached to the characters. We see a single mom grocery shopping with her kids. She meets the Stepfather, whose name is David, they hit it off, and…we fast forward six months. Now we have the older son Michael coming home from a military school for “screw ups,” and the movie quickly jumps into a cheery alt rock tune and goes into mini-montage mode, skipping mostly any kind of tension, save for a weird scene where David asks Michael to meet him in the basement of all places to talk, as if that isn’t suspicious. The movie plods along acceptably enough, without any real plot holes or anything yet (those come later), but…it’s just boring. There’s a big difference between building up tension and just being boring dullardry like this movie is so far. It’s not bad, it’s not good…it’s just kind of there. We get a scene where he almost chokes the younger brother kid for playing his video games too loud…but eh, yawn.

Oh, and apparently the neighborhood cat lady comes by the next day and says that she saw an episode of America’s Most Wanted broadcasting the “stepfather killing spree” with a killer who looked just like David! And of course this merits no further discussion from the mom but a callous laugh and a kiss on the lips. I know she’s the crazy cat lady and all but…honestly.

So David and Michael go out to lunch, the movie skips over the entire meal for no reason…seriously, maybe this wouldn’t be so boring if you actually drew scenes out instead of just fluffing them around and ending them before anything interesting happens. And we get a really, really uncomfortable scene where he starts talking about his dead kids right there in the booth. But did they really exist? The way he mixes up her name indicates otherwise. Strange that a guy who seems to be so smooth at hiding his tracks would mess up in front of one of the only people suspicious of him.

He kills the cat lady, and then we get a scene of Michael and his girlfriend having sex to the tune of the movie’s overinflated soundtrack. Seriously, this movie is in love with its soundtrack; it’s like a goddamn music video montage half the time. Lay off it for a bit, will you? I know it’s a petty complaint, but it’s silly, and there isn’t much else in this movie to talk about right now.

Oh, wait! Their old dad, Jay, brings the younger kids back from camp, and he’s mad as hell that David laid a hand on the brother! But mostly nothing happens except for Michael and his real dad making up and hugging outside after. David quits his job at the real estate company when the mom’s friend who got him the job starts asking for personal information, and the only one who doesn’t find it weird is the mom herself! I guess anything goes in this movie if it makes the plot move along. What a fucking load.

But wait, there’s more: At the same time that’s going on, we see Jay the old dad come back before he leaves for a trip, wanting to say goodbye to the kids and also to check out David, who he is very suspicious of. Good thing David kills him with a glass pot before anything happens. And the kids don’t notice because their video games upstairs are too loud for them to hear any of it. So…let’s get this straight. David was not only relying on the fact that the kids wouldn’t hear him doing this upstairs; that they wouldn’t come down and see what was happening…but he also thought it was a perfectly okay idea to kill the guy in his own house? That’s stupid! That’s so stupid I can’t even handle it!

And he doesn’t even get rid of the dad’s cell phone which will so obviously be a plot point later on…this guy is a fucking idiot! How the hell has he evaded capture for so long? That’s the biggest hole in this whole thing; how the hell has nobody ever caught this guy who blows his cover inside his own house, constantly switches between his charming disguise face and his jittery, not-talking-to-anyone, hiding in the basement working one, and he doesn’t even dispose of the evidence? Well, gee, good thing everyone is so stupid in this movie or else he’d be in trouble! The mother really doesn’t see a problem with him not giving out any personal information, quitting his job even at the mere mention of it? She really believes his excuses for that? How the hell are we, the audience, supposed to believe any of this? God, it’s like a fucking…idiot festival around here.

Blah, blah, Michael keeps getting more and more suspicious, David kills his wife’s friend who was bugging him about the real estate personal information, Michael and his girlfriend sneak into his own house at night and find his real dad’s dead body, David goes on a killing spree, and the whole thing ends up with Michael in a coma for a month while David takes on a new identity and starts to seduce some other woman.

This movie is horrible. How am I supposed to believe for one second that this guy is a serial killer? Everyone in the movie says he’s a professional, and the film suggests that he’s done this multiple times, but the only way that’s feasible is if everyone in this movie has an IQ of about 85. He constantly slips up on his fake identity, leaves behind important evidence in the house he’s supposed to be living in and making a new life in and he just isn’t convincing at all. And the movie is just boring, too. This isn't scary; it's fodder for my insomnia. This is just one more shallow remake that will land money in the studio's pockets because people don't know a good movie when they see one, so they'll end up seeing this instead. Fuck this movie, fuck anyone who endorses it and fuck the studio who pushed it out like the devil baby in the Omen. Terrible...just terrible. And I'm just about done talking about it, from here on out.

Review: Punch Drunk Love (2002)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring:: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman

IMDB Page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272338/

"I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are."

-Barry Egan

Okay, I'm taking a quarter point off for the weird sequences of flashing lights and psychedelic colors that just make no sense.

But otherwise, yes, yes and yes, this is a great movie. Punch Drunk Love features Adam Sandler as a quick tempered businessman with a serious anger problem that he can't control as well as he'd like. He's socially awkward and often lonely, so he ends up in a scandal involving a sex hotline in which they use the personal information they acquired from him to extort money. But on the other side of things, at least he finds a loving, accepting girlfriend courtesy of his seven pushy, uptight sisters. Yes, he has seven sisters. Seven sisters who do nothing but chastise him and remind him of how stupid he is; is it a wonder this guy has anger problems or what?

This is really great. I love how the music seems to channel Sandler's boiling emotional clock throughout the movie - it's realistic, it really is. Watching this movie, when that hellish, cluttered music popped up, I felt like I was with a kindred spirit, and I'm sure you will, too. We don't all break windows and destroy restaurant bathrooms when we're angry, but we all feel our heartbeats going faster when the pressures of our worlds become too much to bear, and that's what this music and the scenes with them brought out. It was cathartic, in a way.

I love the contrasts between the different storylines; every one of them offers something new. It's a story about a bullied and browbeaten man who finds happiness through a pretty woman and an abandoned harmonium left on the sidewalk. I love the offbeat, black-spotted humor that pops up in the dialogue for moments here and there - one especially funny one between Sandler and the "Mattress Man," played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in which they have a rather timid, misguided, obscenity-filled argument that will draw laughs from anyone. Hoffman is just great. Shame he didn't get more screen time.

And I love the scenes in Hawaii, especially - must be the romantic in me; time to break out the Die Hard movies again to reassure my manhood. But screw it. This is a raw, beautiful little trip with a ton of things that I could go on for pages about, but I'll keep it short. Jarring, occasionally even nightmareish, but also stunningly beautiful and universally humane, in its own weird way. Romantic, triumphant, heroic and brittle, Punch Drunk Love delivers one hell of a great film experience that I will definitely go back to again.

Review: Jason Goes to Hell (1993)

Director: Adam Marcus

Starring: Kane Hodder, John D. LeMay, Kari Keegan

Website: http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/films/jgth.html

This is Jason Goes to Hell.

…yup, no other explanation needed. Let’s get started. The movie opens with a girl going into a Crystal Lake cabin for no other reason than to…change a lightbulb, take off her clothes and turn on the bath water. Makes sense. Then Jason comes in, so she goes out to the hall to find him and is promptly almost slaughtered by him for the heinous crime of having a naked body underneath her clothes. So she gets thrown off a balcony, chased outside and then stands back as the FBI blow Jason to bits within a few seconds with nukes – yes, they bought nukes, and yes, they definitely couldn't have done this any time in the previous 8 films. They were just...waiting for the right time, I guess.

“Open fire, men! We can’t let him get to outer space to make Jason X!”

So, he’s dead. Movie over, right? No, then we get our title screen, Jason Goes to Hell…which makes me wonder what would happen if they confused this series with the Ernest movies. I mean we already had Jason Goes to Manhattan, what’s next? Jason Goes to Jail? Jason Goes to France? Jason Scared Silly? The credits play out over a black screen interspersed with clips of this guy taking him into the morgue for an autopsy. For some reason they pat him down…to make sure he’s not going to...do what, exactly? What they should have done is make sure JASON was really dead; there’s a cause worth patting someone down for! They even pat down the coroner later, like he’s going to do anything wrong in there…weird.

So after a good five minutes of jumpy orchestrations and drawn out opening credits, we finally have our first real scene involving the orderly guy…eating Jason’s heart. I am dead serious; he just stares at it for a few seconds, picks it up and starts chomping on the fucking thing. And apparently Jason’s heart is some kind of a catalyst for him to possess the body of whoever eats it. Huh. I wonder where that plot point came from. I don’t remember hearing about it in any of the past movies…is this that thing I always refer to as…plot convenience?

Nah, a Friday the 13^th movie would never do that.

So then we get introduced to our next big spectacle in this movie, Creighton Duke. His job, aside from being a bounty hunter, is to spout snarky phrases that would make him look like a real cool guy if his character was more developed – but there is no real substance beyond that. Why do I have a feeling that they were hoping to make an action figure out of this guy? He’s just so quick to spit out “badass” lines that don’t fool the audience or the actual characters in the movie, either, into thinking he’s actually cool. Also, he apparently is about the only one who thinks Jason is still alive, even though most of the country can hear the reports of the string of murders that is making its way back to, surprise surprise, Camp Crystal Lake. Who do they think is doing it, Keyser Soze? I mean really, how is everyone so skeptical about this? Are they even investigating other suspects for the murders to try and validate their suspicion? The only other guy who it could have possibly been is the orderly who they only classify as “missing,” with no other word about him at all! Make some sense, movie, make some sense!

Duke tries to intimidate a middle aged waitress at a diner serving “Hockey Burgers” and “Jason Fingers” to celebrate Jason’s death, and apparently she’s important to the plot somehow…he gets brushed off by some cops protecting her, she tells this skinny guy with glasses to meet her tonight, and then we cut to Jason doing what he does best. He kills some naked teenagers, a blonde chick in a checkered bonnet and then…well, bear with me here. This is honestly one of the strangest and most bizarre scenes in any Friday the 13^th movie as we see him kidnap a fat, mustached cop, strap him naked to a table, shave his mustache off and then we can assume he switches bodies and takes the time to put the guy’s clothes back on, as we see him kill the waitress in the next scene. But my question is…why the hell did he shave the cop’s mustache? I know it’s a mundane thing to bring up, but what the hell? It’s so out of nowhere and just flat out strange that it’s hilarious. He didn’t shave the other guy’s face who he possessed, so what the fuck?

Okay, moving on. So Jason/Cop-Without-Mustache kills the waitress just as that guy with the glasses from earlier comes in and tries to stop him. He gets arrested under suspicion of the murder and put into a cell next to Creighton Duke, who has more snarky witticisms to offer. Just what we needed. Apparently he was arrested for just…existing. He asks the glasses-guy to make a commitment to helping him fight Jason, and then promptly breaks his finger through the bars of their cells. Nice going, asshole, you just made it harder for him to help you fight. Truly you’re a battle strategist at heart.

Oh, wait, were we supposed to think that scene was badass? I’m sorry.

No, seriously, who the hell is this Creighton Duke and how does he magically have all the answers? Was there just…no other way you could possibly write this story without a fucking oracle of wisdom for you? So what, the only one who can kill Jason is the one who can destroy his heart, and that is the daughter of that waitress, who is conveniently also the ex-lover of the glasses-guy, who had her child…are you following this? I mean, it’s better than the shit they gave us in Halloween 6, but it’s still pretty out there. So Duke keeps breaking glasses-boy’s fingers to incapacitate him even further from actually doing anything to help, while telling him how to stop Jason all the while. And the glasses-boy just believes every word he says, without question, because of course the best person to trust on these life-and-death matters is a black guy in a prison cell who breaks your fingers before he tells you anything. The logic in this movie just astounds me.

So basically the waitress, her daughter Jessica and Jessica’s baby are somehow connected to the Voorhees bloodline, and they have the power to either kill him or make him reborn. Okay. Fine. I can live with that. Where does the movie go next? Well, Sir Brokenfingers breaks out of jail and goes to complete the insane mission that Duke gave him. He hides in the Voorhees house as Jessica’s new TV star boyfriend comes in for some reason talking on the phone about his plan to make their TV ratings go up by hiding the body of Jessica’s mom the dead waitress in the Voorhees house and having the police discover it on camera. What a douche. Fortunately he’s killed in about a second as the Cop-Without-Mustache shows up and possesses him now! Joyous. I’m so glad to see that Jessica left Sir Brokenfingers for this guy. It clearly shows how intelligent she is and how high standards she has.

By the way…have you noticed that we haven’t even gotten more than five lines of dialogue from Jessica herself, who is supposed to be this important plot point? That seems a little skewed; we should at least be able to care about her by this point, but frankly I care more about seeing Creighton Duke get killed than our supposed lead girl. But wait, we get a scene of her in the shower next, crying presumably about the fact that she’s in this movie, when the lights go off. She gets attacked by her Jason-Boyfriend, and then Sir Brokenfingers saves her. Like any sane person, she doesn’t believe a word he says, and runs to her daddy the police chief, who sends one of his guys after him, and he brings him in after a pretty funny scene where they point guns at each other.

And then we start The Big Chase as Jason in the body of that TV show guy kills everybody besides the two main characters and the baby. Oh, and Duke comes back, too, because I just really needed to see him again. Ugh. It’s revealed that apparently Jason can also use a DEAD VOORHEES to reincarnate himself! Meaning Jessica's mom whose dead body her TV boyfriend hid in the house as a prank. I’d let that sink in if we had more time, but frankly this review is WAAAY too long already, and it’s not worth getting angry over anymore. So, he couldn't have just knocked these fuckers down right after he killed her AT THE BEGINNING OF THE DAMN MOVIE and reincarnated himself THEN? It’s a shitty twist for a shitty plot, but at least it gets Jason back to how he should be, and the final climax isn’t actually that bad. The ending epilogue scene is pretty decent, even if it is too little, too late.

This movie sucks. I won’t waste too much more of your time with this, so let’s just skim over it – a shitty, hole-ridden plot, terrible characters, gore that is more disgusting than entertaining and a lack of any kind of human logic. This was the only Friday movie to feature such an elaborate plot, and if this is all they have, I say keep it, and give us back the Friday where all he does is kill dumbass, slutty teenagers at camp. That’s the better way to go.

Review: American Psycho II: All American Girl (2002)

Director: Someone who likes to inflict pain.

Starring: A bunch of hacks who will hopefully never work again.

And here's the IMDB. View at your own peril.

Larry Griffin admitted to mental hospital after viewing of American Psycho II: All American Girl. Condition listed as critical, and symptoms as foaming at the mouth, ranting and raving incoherently and often blacking out entirely. Had to be restrained and locked in solitary for several weeks before his thoughts could be extracted and posted on the Internet for viewing. Here is what we have collected:

I know this is going to sound cliche, but where do I start? No, seriously, where the fuck do I even start with this? I have no idea how to sum up a movie like this. It's so bad that it put me in solitary in a correctional facility. It's so bad that it could probably singlehandedly cause the mass infertility like in Children of Men - and justifiably so, for this is the end of the line, and I think it'd be worth eradicating all human life if we were never plagued with movies like this again. This movie is so horribly wrong and so unholy and sinful that I wouldn't be surprised to discover that it was the antichrist itself in cinematic form! It is so wretched that...okay, okay. I need to calm down, lest they put me back in solitary again.

But GODDAMN. What a fucking mess! This is the sequel to the highly acclaimed American Psycho, which was rightfully praised, as it was a great movie. It had subtlety and the wit was just sharp as a razor. It was hilarious and also depressing and dark, all at the same time. But I guess it just wasn't hip enough, so some numbnuts decided to make a direct to video sequel to it! And this one stars Mila Kunis as a female serial killer for no other reason than because she has boobs. That's right, they're using the old 'take a male idea and turn it female to gain a wider audience.' Except Kunis and all of her female co-stars set back womens' rights a good two hundred years or so, and no one with the right amount of chromosomes would ever find this movie appealing, so I guess that backfired on them, didn't it?

American Psycho II: All American Girl starts off with Patrick Bateman, played by an actor who is definitely NOT Christian Bale, getting killed off by a little girl who somehow untied herself from the binds he placed her and her babysitter in. Yes, the first few minutes of this movie completely shit all over the first one and completely destroy everything about it that was good. Nice work. Assholes.

Then we get our first dose of the absolutely ear-raping narration from our harlot from hell, Mila Kunis, who has grown up quite a bit from her role as a little orphan girl in Santa With Muscles. It takes up about the first five or ten minutes (and reoccurs throughout the film), and her obnoxious voice and the terrible writing make it about as endearing as a rusty nail through the foot. It makes the narration in The Spirit sound good in comparison. Seriously, SHE NEVER SHUTS UP. It's like having someone scrape their nails on a chalkboard, it's just painful. And with a stifling sense of pretentious self indulgence to boot. Puerile. If you can survive it, watch the scenes where she talks to her psychiatrist played by that crazy guy from Cube II: Hypercube. Just try it. It's really unbelievable how annoying it is to listen to these yahoos yammer on about nothing. It's so bad that I found myself pausing it every few seconds just to get a breath of fresh air from the bullshit being layered on. And that's pretty much the entire movie. Nothing but obnoxiously pretentious dialogue and even worse narration delivered in the smarmiest of the smarmy ways possible by horrible actors who were aided by horrible writers. Isn't this just so wonderful? And I'm just getting started.

How about the characters? Their sole motivation is to get good words in with their teacher, played by William Shatner, in order to become his teaching assistant in a college course on catching criminals, and get into the FBI. One of the girls constantly talks about sleeping with him and...I'm done with the characters. Let's move on.

Every bit of the dialogue here is just oozing with a slimy, disgustingly arrogant sense of self worth underlined humorously by the fact that none of it is even one bit intelligent or insightful. Ooh, you've got quirky dialogue, so what? This is a movie that tries to be a social satire (...I think...), but has nothing to say, at all. The dialogue is reminiscent of the stark, satiric tone of the first movie, except the writers here don't understand how to write anything satirically. In a satire, you write big, edgy lines that sometimes make the characters out to be unlikable, rude or insufferable, but it works because it underlines a point about society, the world or some other norm that the writers find necessary to poke fun at. When you remove any kind of relevance to anything, any kind of point, you're just left with characters who are unlikable, rude and insufferable, which I am sure this movie did not mean to do - merely a victim of supreme ineptitude. This movie quite astonishingly manages to have a script with lines that sound like they were meant to be satirical, but are very blatantly not actually satirical of anything, and so it just really blows. Tough, I guess.

And she keeps going on about killing people like it's something to look forward to. She attends a class on serial killers. I'm not even mad that she is trying to get into the FBI to stop serial killers by killing everyone who is in her way to becoming her professor's new assisant - this movie is too far gone for me to care about plot holes and logical idiocy at this point - but it's like they're taking the first movie literally! They really think it was a movie about serial killers killing people! They think that scenes like the one where Christian Bale chases a hooker down a hallway naked with a chainsaw...is supposed to be taken literally.

Holy mother of fuck. I think my brain is breaking in half. Did you...did you guys even watch the original movie or read the original book? IT'S NOT ABOUT SERIAL KILLERS, YOU MORONS. Get it straight! It's not that hard!

And if you thought it couldn't get any worse, watch the ending sequence in which the Cube II guy sermonizes to a college class about how Kunis' character was really 'one in a million,' and that she was so much 'better' than people like Bundy, Dahmer and even the original Patrick Bateman, as if inciting names that terrifying will make us believe any bit of this movie any more. In context, this is the equivalent to being endorsed by a child murderer, or perhaps a Nazi sympathizer. The fact that this movie would even suggest such a thing is perhaps both the funniest and most pathetic facet about it - I don't know about you, but I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the fact that a team of adults wrote this slop and thought any of it could possibly be taken seriously long enough for this ending sequence to incite a reaction.

And ooh, she's not really dead at the end, what a shock! They choose to end the film on a generic plot twist that you could find in any dime-a-dozen direct to video horror film at Blockbuster. Well, at least now I know their priorities. It's kind of hilarious, actually; like they just said, okay, we're done raping the fabric of space and time, annoying the hell out of the audience and pissing all over the original source material. Just give them a regular shitty ending twist as opposed to an astronomically horrible one.

How do I end a review of the worst of the worst, the absolute nadir of cinema? It's pretty tough. The story is all over the place, the characters are headache-inducingly awful, the acting is a load of incomprehensibly retarded slop, the direction is complete amateurish shit, the soundtrack is a joke and the whole thing is just insulting beyond belief. Nothing about this movie is humane or sanitary; it is detrimental to the health of all who partake in its festival of horrors. American Psycho II is a film that is not merely bad, not just horrendous, but actually pathologically destructive, as if deliberately trying to destroy any kind of affection one had for the original film and novel. It is, in no uncertain terms, completely unwatchable.

Afterwords, he quickly lapsed into incoherent babbling, and did not recover for many more months.

Review: A Troll in Central Park (1994)

Director: Don Bluth

Starring: Mostly trolls and little kids.

IMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108395/

Okay, I know what you're thinking: "Reviewing a kids' movie? Truly, that won't yield the right results because you don't have the right mindset to enjoy it! You're going to be too harsh on it if you criticize it at all, since it was made for kids and kids will eat up anything you throw at them."

Oh, bullshit. A Troll in Central Park is a deeply mediocre and forgettable little venture that I don't find very well made at all. It's about this troll who gets kicked out of...troll-land...for...being too nice and loving flowers...and then he meets a little boy who is selfish like most kids are at his age, and a little girl who is as sweet and innocent like most kids are at her age. The movie rambles along for 40 minutes without furthering the plot at all while the troll and the kids...just do stuff, I guess. There is a ton of stuff about following dreams and believing you can do anything, and a whole lot of stuff that is well meaning enough, but also completely idealistic and not at all rooted in reality. It's all pleasant to watch, but what would I have gained from it if I were 5 years old and watching it? That no matter what happens, it'll be okay as long as I wish hard enough for the right thing to happen? That isn't exactly the right message.

And this movie doesn't even really make me believe it. It spends a lot of time singing deliriously about such matters, but little time elaborating or explaining anything else. I know I have to expect a certain level of...well, childishness...in a kids' movie, but that doesn't mean there doesn't have to be any substance at all. So we're supposed to believe that if we wish hard enough, our dreams will come true. And? The movie says little else beyond that. If a kid were to try and actually follow these directions, he'd have very little knowledge of what to do after the initial "believing."

But let's just pretend that that doesn't matter, being that it is a kids' movie. Is it good then? Well, maybe if you didn't have the annoying songs, the lack of any real plot, the creepy, weird singing flowers, the completely shit final battle that amounts to a very confusing, directionless fumble with a thumb-war somewhere in there...

Yeah, it sucks. The Nostalgia Critic is reviewing this next week, and I will be eagerly awaiting what he has to say about it. For those of you who aren't, I don't think this should be on your list of movies to show your kids.

Review: Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)

Director: Victor Salva

Starring: Ray Wise, Eric Nenninger, Nicki Aycox, Jonathon Breck

IMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301470/

Here is the impression I get from this movie: MAKE A FRANCHISE OUT OF ME! DO IT NOW!

But otherwise...yeah, it's actually not too shabby. I've been told time and time again that this movie is a horrible piece of garbage, but what I see when I watch this is a pretty decent, enjoyable horror flick. A sequel to the first Jeepers Creepers movie, which told us a charming fable about two kids whose curiosity and morality gets the better of them, so an ancient monster ripped their eyes out, this movie asks many important questions. Like, is the kid in the denim jacket really gay? How can you make heavy artillery weapons to fight off said ancient monster in less than 24 hours? Is the kid in the denim jacket really gay? What is the story behind the strange weapons that appear to be made out of human flesh? And is the kid in the denim jacket really gay?

Yes, this movie is certainly easy to make fun of. I mean, how can you not; it's a horror movie with dumb kids on a school bus, of course it's going to be easy to poke fun at. The basic story is that it's nearing the end of the Creeper's month-long reign of terror, and he'll soon be gone again for another 23 years. He's getting pretty desperate, and we see him steal away the small son of a local farmer, and then the chaperones of a school football trip before the action kicks up. The first hole is almost immediately noticeable as we see the farmer and his older son put together an arsenal of cannons and weapons in less than 24 hours to fight off the monster, who they seem very sure that they can take.

Now, I do admit that it's a plot device that never gets old; the woebegone father out for revenge, and I like the bleak outlook as the movie actually had the nads to kill off a little kid. But that hole...is just too big to ignore. You're telling me they made all that shit and figured out exactly what to do with that weird tribal looking weapon thing they found in that short of a time? You could argue that they already had the weapon put together but...why the fuck would a small country farmer family like this have such destructive weapons then? That goes beyond silly and into actually horrifying.

Other things I like about this movie: The setting. Just like the first movie, this desolate, cornfield-stricken country road setting is just fucking awesome, and I would love to see more horror movies utilize them. The acting, like the first movie, is pretty decent, and I never have trouble believing that these people are who they say they are.

The other main plot point here is the kids on the bus. They're mostly sports jocks, with the main guy being this muscular blonde jock named Scotty. Scotty is mad because he only got to play for twelve minutes in the final game. Stop the presses! He's basically a huge dick to everyone, but somehow his character is just kind of enjoyable to watch, because we all know someone a little bit like this. Although I do have to wonder about his conflict with the black guy. Isn't "Don't you want to call me something else?" about twenty years old as a point of contempt these days? I mean it's not even like most of the bus is white, anyway. Try getting with the times, writers!

But at least they represent every race and minority here - from the black female to the psychically sensitive to the Philipino-Hispanic-Asian-whatever-it's-supposed-to-be guy to even Izzy, who everyone thinks is gay. I'm glad a low budget horror movie that most people won't ever see is being politically correct! Because...you know. That's just so important when you're being chased by a winged hellion who wants to eat you alive.

So the movie explodes into a cauldron of fast moving survival horror as they try to put their heads together and find a way to beat the monster. It's pretty fun, if not exactly stirring cinema, and I don't see much to really hate here. Although I do have to take issue with the fact that Izzy thinks it's a good idea to flip over the car and turn it into a hunk of burning rubble like it's some natural instinct. There's some Darwinian natural selection for you. And since it's been like 7 years without another Jeepers Creepers movie, I think we can say the same for this would-be franchise, too.

Review: City by the Sea (2002)

Director: Michael Caton-Jones

Starring: Robert De Niro, James Franco, Frances McDormand, Eliza Dushku, William Forsythe

Website: http://citybythesea.warnerbros.com/

I love a good drama, and thankfully, this is one of them. It's a 'based on a true story' type thing starring Robert DeNiro and James Franco, both of whom really go all out and give captivating performances in a story of a weathered cop who has to go after his own son in a murder case. Really this movie just looked cool; I had never really heard anything about it, but it looked cool. And surprise, it is.

The mood here is one of oppressive, suffocating urbania. A gritty, smog-streaked backdrop and some whitewashed sands and faded-looking oceans make up the setting of City by the Sea. I really like settings like this, so it's no surprise that the movie had me from the very beginning with its abandoned, torn up old buildings and grey skies.

Now, this is a very cinematic thing. It's based on a true story, but it's blown up to a level where you'd probably have to be a coma patient not to sit up and take notice. It's strange because this isn't an action movie or something that you'd have to suspend your brain animation to enjoy; it's a dark and serious drama, but it's played big and loud and in your face, like it's a new Bruce Willis action flick. Where there would normally be explosions and high speed chases, here there are long strings of dramatic tension, exposition and all around bad things that happen to our hero. It never seems to stop. His partner dies, he's saddled with a grandkid he didn't even know existed, his girlfriend breaks up with him...

But it managed to entertain me enough. The plot is fast and gripping, the acting is good and the story is very well written. Eliza Dushku gives a good performance as Gina, the down-on-her-luck teenage mother who Joey impregnated and made a mother, and De Niro as Vincent LaMarca is just spellbindingly awesome. Great performance, and different for him, too. James Franco as a druggie and a young father is very believable and his conversations with his father are some of the better parts of the movie. And William Forsythe appears as another ruthless bad guy killing machine. Joy. My only real problem with it is that it does lay on the drama a bit thick at times and comes off as heavy handed. And that might drive off a few people, but I don't think it really hinders the experience too much. It's hard not to get wrapped up in this one, honestly.

One of the best things about this is the lesson - it's a moral question that is buried just to the point where you can pick it out without too much work. The theme is one of growing up and parental guidance. De Niro's character, in the midst of his conflict with his son, constantly says to everyone around him that people make their own choices and that they follow whatever path they themselves create. Nobody else is responsible. But is that really true, or do the parents have more of an influence than he wants to admit? Is a person defined by his upbringing or does everything he do come solely from his or her own ability to make decisions? The film doesn't really provide the answers for us, and neither will I, but the fact that it poses these questions makes it interesting and worth watching and thinking about. Check out City by the Sea for a very spirited and intelligent cop drama that you won't want to miss if you are a fan of the genre.