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Troll (1986)
Ever seen a mushroom blow a raspberry?
This film was an interesting take on the supernatural slasher genre. A troll uses a magic ring to mutate the occupants of an apartment building into multiple fairy creatures. Seriously. For every person that drops over, 4 or 5 creatures hatch from the remnants of the body.
The best thing about the movie is that the creature attacks early and often. The first victim is grabbed in the first five minutes. The concept is also very unique, albeit poorly executed.
While the low effects budget definitely makes its presence known, the true villain of the story is the writing. For example, there's a witch that drops exposition, but she waits until the third act to explain anything even though she clearly knew what was going on from the beginning. Even when she knew people are dropping like flies, all she does is go back to her illustrations and wait. This isn't suspenseful. It's just annoying.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Boring
It's my understanding that Tarantino rewrote this whole thing as a result of some ass leaking the script online. Personally I'd like to read that original script, because this was a dreadful and miserable experience. I can't think of one good scene in the entire film that I would come back to watch. Even Django Unchained has the Buying Hilda scene that DiCaprio owned that I would rewatch over and over, but this film has nothing like that.
One factor that keeps the memory of a movie alive, above all else, from year to year, and generation to generation, is its quotability. People will be quoting Ghostbusters 50 years from now. People will be quoting Pulp Fiction 50 years from now. No one will ever be quoting The Hateful Eight, and if anyone does, they'll have to remind everyone who hears it of where the line came from.
Personally I'd like to see more with Samuel L Jackson and Kurt Russel. Preferably something that wasn't this awful.
Evolution (2001)
A Flawed Attempt to Recapture Ghostbusters
Hollywood has been trying to formulate Ghostbusters for the longest time and recapture and recapitalize on that lightning in a bottle classic. The basic storyline is that scientists of varying involvement and background get involved with unusual phenomena, fight back for a while, get interference from some know-nothing government butthead and they save the world from a silly kaiju, and hopefully, along the way, hijinks ensues.
Hollywood has come close, but never really hit the mark.
Evolution is one of the few that came close to the mark. David Duchovny is a less charming Egon Spengler. Orlando Jones is a less serious Peter Venkman who coaches women's volleyball, and hits on co-eds. Julianne Moore plays a klutzy sidekick to this movie's Walter Peck.
The vast majority of the monsters are cgi and you can tell when they didn't have enough money to show actual interaction between the actors and the creatures, which is kind of necessary for a creature feature and unfortunate given how often it happens.
The biggest issue is that the comedy is incredibly lazy. Mostly because instead of writing funny dialogue, they just have one actor on screen acting like a grand idiot in every single scene. This role gets passed around like a baton in a relay race where everyone is blindfolded.
Then we come to Seann William Scott who plays a less competent version of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Seriously, every time he's on screen, I can't help but feel like this role would have been knocked out of the park by Jim Carrey.
I think this movie could have worked, but I'm not entirely sure how it could be fixed - because, honestly, I can't break Ghostbusters down to a simple working formula either.
Krampus (2015)
Visual and Narrational Gibberish
This movie is a prime example of why you need to define your monsters and their motivations BEFORE you put them in front of the camera.
A good Christmas-themed comedy horror is a exquisite treat with a long-standing history in European culture. It started with the original A Christmas Carol, which has had multiple variations. There's modern classics like Gremlins and lesser known cult films like Santa's Slay. This film truly tries to be that, but fails across the board.
Krampus follows no internal logic, it doesn't explain itself in any scene, it doesn't follow through with any single idea well enough (either because of the pg-13 rating I'm assuming either the effects weren't up to par or things were cut for time), and most of the comedy falls flat... except for Michael Koechner, especially in the gingerbread scene.
This is a miserable lack of cohesion, and there's simply no way for me to know who's to blame for this fiasco.
The Happytime Murders (2018)
Honestly much better than you'd think
There is some interesting world-building going on here and underneath all the pervy puppet stuff, there's a really decent noir film story going on here.
The vision is so bizarre that it's legitimately difficult to argue whether certain concepts in the film weren't conceived well or they weren't described well. For example, McCarthy plays a cop who through an emergency situation had to have a puppet organ transplanted into her body. This gave her a superhuman tolerance to sugar that only puppets can have and it left her vulnerable to sugar addiction which acts like a drug to puppets. So there's this whole addiction thing going on, and it dances over this serious/silly line, but it's not really explained. The audience has to piece it together from a lot of hints.
I think if the clues in the overall murder mystery was as well scattered as the sugar addiction thing was, this movie would have been better received and gotten more respect for what it tried to be.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)
Is it wrong to say we had too much Deus Ex Machina at the end?
Let's start with the Good. The plot was complex and not every attempt of the big bad to establish itself succeeded. In one part, a ghost attempts to grab a device and run off with it, but it gets into a fight and the device gets broken. So it had to go with an alternative plan.
The villain was good. Completely original of other ghostbusters media. When I heard it mentioned in the trailer that it was using fear to freeze people to death, I thought it was going to pull a good emotions vs bad emotions thing reminiscent of Ghostbusters 2 and I was very happy this was not the case. The big bad is also a lethal threat. It would have been nice if it had killed more people, but we got one off-screen death. So, progress.
The movie gave decent reasons to bring back most of the supporting characters from Afterlife. This can be a challenge for many sequels, but they showed they put some thought into it. The mom is a ghostbuster now, which doesn't make much sense, but it can be overlooked because she's not useless as a ghostbuster. She's really just there to be a nagging mother.
The Bad:
A lot of the humor is really cringe and awkwardly placed. The "Firemaster" takes a full minute to slide down the fire pole, DURING the final battle and for no reason at all, the villain waits, when he could have picked him up and chucked him out of the battle. Also could the filmmakers please stop quoting the original theme song, it's really not clever.
They establish that the Big Bad is vulnerable to brass and fire. This part is fine. You rarely see brass be an issue to monsters. They also establish that the proton packs as they are, are useless. Also fine. At one point, Spengler Girl (this is a family film and they almost NEVER use anyone's first name - except the "step-teacher", Gary) melts down chunks of brass, BEFORE the final battle, including parts of the fire pole (now re-read the last paragraph), to dip a part of her particle accelerator into it. The science is silly, but it looks cool, so we can ignore that. The big question becomes why didn't they make multiple brass packs, instead of just one?
There's a moment where the mother helps stabilize Spengler Girl's experimental brass proton pack. Its a family film, that's fine. What isn't though is how this stabilization thing turns into a family group hug, again for NO reason. This is minor, but at least the group hug in 1999's Mystery Men had a purpose.
The final trapping of the Big Bad required Ray to turn the broken containment unit in the basement into a trap. Sounds complicated, right? The answer? Push the three buttons and pull the lever and the evil god of blue balls get sucked into the trap. A near literal deus ex machina moment.
Honestly everything up until the final battle is decent to really good. Its just the ending where the structural integrity weakens significantly.
There's also a (heavily implied) lesbian ghost girl who literally plays every Dragon Lady character ever, except she's not Asian. How inclusive. Also Walter Peck is back. Also meh.
Prey for the Bride (2024)
Crumbles to dust in the final scene
This is fairly mediocre for a revenge slasher film. It's pretty tropey for the first 60-70 minutes - coeds off to a secluded region, slasher takes the group apart one at a time, all cell service is gone (because they can't just cut the wires anymore), a secret unifying the main group starts to unravel, a potential mislead is introduced and then dispatched quickly and everyone left is gathered for a final confrontation. If you've watched more than half-a-dozen revenge killer films, you've got this noise figured out by the time the 3rd co-ed drops dead from poison.
And this is where the movie falls apart.
The real true weak link of this film is the character of, our final girl, Dorit. I'm not going to say she's useless. She's just too convenient. For the most of the movie she's there to be the odd one out (the only black character - get it?) and used to spit out exposition. In the end, despite not being a target (the killer only kills the guilty... except for the two innocent people that were killed), she's there to keep the killer from getting what the big bad wants and I can't help but feel that if Dorit wasn't in the movie at all, the film would have been so much better for it and the ending much more satisfying.
Ghosted (2017)
Garbage
Please replace everyone except Craig Robinson and Amber Stevens West with people who can actually talk like real people instead of obnoxious cringey cut-outs. Then and only then this show might have a chance because right now its worse than Special Unit 2 - at least Special Unit 2 had characters instead of caricatures.
Adam Scott acts like a Big Bang reject who doesn't understand the difference between nerdy personality and total, disgusting losers who talk about getting boners with their aunt because they have nothing better to talk about. Why dont the writers make him a pedophile while they're at it? Would that finally be disgustingly cringey enough for the American public?
I'm suppose to believe Ally Walker's character is somewhere between Amanda Walker and Prof Broom. The writing's not nearly good enough to make me see that and the flatness of her delivery makes her appear less human and more of a teleprompter with high heels.
Then there's Adeel Akhtar's character. The most anyone can say is that he isn't a stereotype. Which might be fine if they weren't so afraid to make him appear as any kind of character that they instead have him say the most pointless and random nonsense to distract people from anything that might make him appear like he belongs to a secret organization of alleged professionals.
The plotlines are abysmal. Its fairly obvious they wanted an hour show but had to shorten it to fit a 30 minute time frame because every moment is rushed and there is no time for any legitimate suspense to build. People are introduced and victimized within minutes making it impossible to care about any situation the "good guys" are supposed to be fighting or the people they're trying to help There's no mythology established so whatever the aliens/monsters do on screen has to be taken at immediate face value which is a problem for any show that expects itself to be taken more seriously than the average Animaniacs episode.
At the very least they don't show any ridiculous jump scares.