Chronicle is pretty rad-tastic.  It doesn’t smell.  It does, however, fizzle out.  But it does quite a bit well before it gets there. If you’ve seen the trailer to Chronicle, you’ve seen the majority of the plot points in the movie.  Thankfully, screenwriter Max Landis (yes, related to another Landis) and director Josh Trank seem to understand that knowing the plot of a movie is only half of the picture sometimes.  Getting there can be the most important part…

BUT TO YOU, THE WORDS IN THIS LINK ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT PART

Set Up is appallingly bad.  Worse than I expected.  Worse than a lot of movies I’ve seen, and as all of us bad movie watchers like to say: I’VE SEEN A LOT OF BAD MOVIES.  I’d like to believe ol’ Pudding Top (i.e. 50 “I’ll never call you Curtis Jackson” Cent) can act, but beyond having a good stoic face his line delivery and body movements and facial expressions (besides stoic face, which he ends up using for a lot of emotions) are all rank.  Which starts the movie out as rank, since it’s his voice we hear in voiceover, attempting to set up some intrigue for the viewer…

OH BRUCE WILLIS, WHERE ART THOU

Hot Damn, Gremlins 2.  How is it that you exist? Maybe I saw Gremlins as a kid.  But it’s the sequel that I always remembered.  It was the sequel I watched and re-watched on TV, and it was the sequel that I bought on VHS and then DVD and then IT’S COMING OUT ON BLURAY SOON.  The movie blew my mind with its 4th-wall breaking insanity –  which, yeah, you had your Ferris Bueller-esque ‘character talks to view’ movies, but Gremlins 2, after a certain point, is all out wacky.  It breaks rules in the same unclassifiable way that ‘Rubber’ would do a million years later.  That is to say – it ain’t ‘Funny Games,’ it’s not about something, so it’s freed to just go banana-boat nutso on you and hit you in the gut in whichever way it pleases ya’…

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

This is my third time through Puppet Master.  Third attempted time.  Because I always fall asleep.  But it should be interesting – scary toys are always a win, and your main characters are a group of psychics, and we got a score from Richard  Band, who made one of my favorite themes for Re-Animator… And yet, I wouldn’t say I liked Puppet Master.  And it is boring, against all odds…

AGAINST EVERY SINGLE ODD THERE IS

I’m a Miike follower.  I want to watch anything Miike’s got, but admittedly, my experience in the realm of yakuza flicks and tokusatsu is limited. That rating states that this film is average, or slightly above.  Which is valid, but ‘Zebraman’ is still a more unique experience than you’ll commonly get in film, and this is true for a large chunk of Miike’s work, regardless of the film as a whole being good or not…

MORE POORLY WORDED SENTENCES THISAWAY

It should be noted that I’m not automatically laughing when I see Will Ferrell in a movie.  He doesn’t annoy me, and I find his brand of humor, generally, funny, but the mood of his films are hit or miss for me – if I’m not on board for the first laugh, then I’m stuck in a chuckle for the majority of the movie.  But ‘Elf’ is still cute, which is all it aims to be, I think…

AND ME?  AM I… AM I STILL CUTE?

‘From Within’ is one of those horror movies that falls flat on its face at some point and just never recovers.  It didn’t even have a far distance to fall: while the setup is adequate enough for After Dark horror fare, there’s something overly plodding and silly from the outset that makes it difficult to build any tension…

I ONLY HOPE SOMEONE WILL DESCRIBE ME AS OVERLY PLODDING SOME DAY