As dodgy, doomed to fail remakes go, Superfly actually does a pretty good job justifying its own existence. Obviously, the biggest and perhaps only way it ever had to justify its existence was by providing, after 46 years, a new chance to hear Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” and “Pusherman” on the big screen. And in light […]
It is, I think, close to being an outright objective truth that insofar as the 1987 cult object Overboard works, it works entirely because Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have off-the-charts adorable chemistry together, owing in large part to their being a real-life couple. It certainly does not work because of the scenario, which is […]
It’s not like it’s a surprise that Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is dumbfoundingly bad. Hell, it’s actually gratifying: it’s always pleasant when a movie is exactly as good as you hope it will be, and that’s just as true when said hope is for something truly repulsive that you can […]
The multi-media franchise known under the broad name of Power Rangers in the United States (a substantially revised localisation of the even bigger franchise called Super Sentai in Japan) has been through so many iterations and revisions along the way, why not a franchise-starting action movie remake? Albeit one that seems to have pretty securely […]
The list of movies that owe a huge debt to Blade Runner is damn near inexhaustible, but even so, it’s been a real long time since the last film that drew upon that film’s iconic production design so blatantly and desperately as the 2017 version of Ghost in the Shell. More, indeed, than the film […]
Once upon a time, Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Andrew Form co-founded a production company called Platinum Dunes, whose purpose was to remake old horror films, but shinier and worse. I mean, presumably the “worse” part wasn’t in the corporate statement of principles, and it just worked out that way. I think it’s entirely fair […]
I don’t know if I’m confident that The Mummy would be a good film if it lacked any and all references to the “Dark Universe” that Universal badly wants to kick-start, in which all of the studio’s classic monsters (Dracula, the Frankenstein creations, the wolf man, the creature from the Black Lagoon, and yes, the […]
A review requested by Thomas Hartwell, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It makes sense that the late 1960s would bear witness to some of the worst musicals in the history of the English-language cinema. The historical confluence was exactly right for it. On the one hand, you […]
I would ask you, if you please, to consider the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, the crown jewel of the Disney Renaissance. What, pray tell, do you find to be wrong with it? Or let me rather put it this way: is there even one single image in that whole movie that generates the response […]
An older review of this film can be found here When Peter Jackson, somewhat shockingly, used his brand-new Best Director Oscar and all the accumulated clout from having forced the three massive hit films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy into existence to get Universal to sign off on a new iteration of the […]
The 1976 King Kong really is quite magnificent in its badness. It’s not that it’s a unjustified remake of an all-time classic film, those are are all over the damn place, that’s not worthy of attention. Even if this one is especially unjustified (after Psycho and Seven Samurai, I’d be inclined to call the 1933 […]
A third review requested by Sara L, with thanks for contributing three times to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I expect that some of my loyal readers will be surprised to learn that it is only now, in the year 2016, that I’ve finally seen The Ring. There are reasons for this: […]
