PCP on DVD - Bad movies 6-pack

PCP on DVD reviews:  Bad Movies 6 Pack

Time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have developed about a 60 movie backlog of films to review, of films I’ve watched over the past couple months.  I’ve had enough time to watch the movies and jot down some observations, but not enough time until now to actually write the reviews.  So, I will be doing shorter than normal reviews of these films until I am caught back up, in convenient multi-packs of movies by genre.  Today I’ll be tackling 6 lousy movies I made the mistake of watching recently.  These reviews are going to be super-short, because I don’t want to waste any more time than I have to on these films.

Legion – 2009; Rated R.  100 minutes.  Starring Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, & Adrianne Palicki.  My rating:  4 out of 10.

What this film lacks in subtlety it makes up for in stupidity.  A movie about a coming apocalypse and a war between man and heaven, and it takes places in a diner named “Paradise Falls.”  Wow, could you be any more obvious?  The film is poorly done and looks a lot better in the trailers than it does in full length.

The rest of the awful is after the jump...

PCP on DVD - Horror Movie 6-Pack

Time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have developed about a 50 movie backlog of films to review, of films I’ve watched over the past couple months.  I’ve had enough time to watch the movies and jot down some observations, but not enough time until now to actually write the reviews.  So, I will be doing shorter than normal reviews of these films until I am caught back up, in convenient multi-packs of movies by genre.  Today I’ll be tackling 6 creepy horror/thriller movies I’ve caught on DVD:  The Crazies, A Perfect Getaway, Orphan, The Orphanage, Drag Me to Hell, and Splice.

The Crazies – 2010; Rated R.  101 minutes.  Starring:  Timothy Olyphant; Radha Mitchell; Joe Anderson; Danielle Panabaker.  My rating:  7 out of 10.

The Crazies is a remake of a 70s horror film of the same name.  It’s similar to small town zombie outbreak films, but instead of the infection causing everyone to become the living dead, they instead go completely insane.  It has a couple mid-way decent scares, and some impressive gore sequences and creative violence, but overall it isn’t as scary as it could have been.  It is interesting to see Timothy Olyphant play a normal, noble guy however.  I’m so used to seeing him as a villain or as an anti-hero that to see him playing the true hero was a new experience for me.  I also liked the overall larger conspiracy behind the disease causing the insanity, and the lengths that the conspirators were going to attempt to keep things under wraps.  Not a terrible film, but not as good as it could have been either.

PCP on DVD - The Stepfather

Review:  The Stepfather.  Rating: 2 out of 5 stars. 

The Stepfather is a remake of a 1980s movie of the same name, although given how poor this movie is I’m not certain why they bothered.  This could easily have been a made for TV movie, and considering the cast of the film is all people I’m used to seeing on TV, that would have made more sense.  The movie stars Dylan Walsh (Nip/Tuck) as the title bad guy, who marries into the Harding family consisting of Sela Ward (Sisters, CSI: NY), Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl), Skyler Samuels (The Gates), and Braeden Lemasters (Men of a Certain Age).  The rest of the supporting cast is all familiar faces from TV too, including Sherry Stringfield (ER), Jon Tenney (The Division), and Paige Turco (The Agency).  The only person that is more of a movie actress than a TV one is Amber Heard (Zombieland), who is apparently contractually obligated to be in a bikini for the duration of the film.  Anyways, the reason I am talking about the cast of this film so much is because I spent more time going “where do I know them from?” than actually caring about the plot.  There’s very little suspense to the film, considering that the previews and the opening minute of the film make it crystal clear that Dylan Walsh is no saint.  Also, these are some good actors.  I have watched the shows that most of them are in, and that is why I gave this film a shot, primarily because I loved Dylan Walsh on Nip/Tuck.  Sadly, that was a mistake.  The actors in this film have done some great work on TV, and they deserve a better movie role than this piece of garbage.  Do not waste your time, you’re not missing anything.  The scares are weak, the plot boring, and the thrills and gore are missing.  Skip this movie.  If you don’t, you have no one to blame but yourself.

PCP on DVD - Law Abiding Citizen

It’s time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I will be talking about the film Law Abiding Citizen, which I finally got around to clearing from my Netflix queue.

Review:  Law Abiding Citizen.  Rating:  2.5 out of 5 stars. 

I wanted to love this movie.  It stars Jamie Foxx, who is awesome in most everything he does, and Gerard Butler who used to be awesome.  He was King Leonidas in 300 for crying out loud, but lately he's been choosing some pretty bad movies (this, Gamer, the Ugly Truth, and the Bounty Hunter).  Filling out the rest of the cast are some familiar faces including Colm Meaney (O’Brien on Star Trek: TNG & DS9) as a detective involved in the case, Bruce McGill (Collateral, Runaway Jury, My Cousin Vinny) as the district attorney that Jamie Foxx works under, and Leslie Bibb (Iron Man 1 and 2) as the required eye candy for a movie like this to have, but their characters are rather two-dimensional and not really any focus of the plot at all.  The plot is pretty conventional - guy's family gets killed, guy goes for revenge, and the system is so messed up he has to take justice into his own hands.  Only been done 100 times before.  They try something new, to make it a mystery as to how he's still killing people on the outside, while locked up in jail.  I don't want to blow the ending yet, but basically it is somewhat lame and filled with the mother of all plot holes.  Although there were a few good creative kills in this movie, ultimately this movie could have been so much better than it was, and because it was disappointing, it only gets an average score.  Watch it if you've got nothing better to do, but pass it up if there's anything else on.

SPOILER ALERT:  only keep reading past here if you've already seen the movie, as I will now discuss the ending.  Again, SPOILER ALERT- as reading past this point will tell you the ending of the movie so you've been warned.

PCP - Top 10 Worst Movies Ever Made

NOTE - originally posted by me on my friend's blog back on 9/27/10

Time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’m gonna give you a taste of the worst movies ever made.

In my time watching movies, I have watched a number of awful movies.  Some I watched because there was absolutely nothing else on TV, some I watched because all new movies in a theater need to be screened before tickets can be sold for them, in order to make sure they were assembled properly.  One of these I even watched on a dare, but thankfully other than my time wasted and brain cells killed, I never paid to see any of these.  These 10 movies are so bad, they make Gigli look like an Oscar winner.  In order from bad to worst, these are the 10 most awful pieces of garbage I have ever wasted time watching.

10.  Bloodrayne. Never have so many good actors made such an awful piece of garbage.  Clearly they were all here for the paychecks and nothing else.  Directed by the extraordinarily awful Uwe Boll (he’s got 3 movies on this list), the videogame adaptation starred Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) as the title character.  The supporting cast was deep, including appearances by Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Meat Loaf (Fight Club), Billy Zane (Titanic), Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar), and Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) hamming it up as the villian.  Not even Kristanna Loken topless could save this movie.

9.  Teenage Caveman.  This straight to video disaster is completely and utterly awful.  It’s so bad it’s good, in a train wreck sort of way.  My then girlfriend (now wife) and I caught this on cable in college and we laughed our asses off at how awful this movie was.  You know you’re watching a bad movie when there is a scene that has one character stating that she knows she’ll die if she has sex with another character, due to his superhuman strength, but then she goes for it anyways because she wants him so bad.

Read more after the jump!

PCP on DVD - Year One

Note - this post was originally posted by me on my friend's blog on 10/24/10

Review:  Year One.  Rating 1.5 out of 5 stars.

For a movie with this deep of a talented comedic cast, this movie was not funny at all.  It was so bad that not even the outtakes at the end of the movie were funny.  This movie had a huge cast, including Jack Black (Tropic Thunder, Kung Fu Panda) and Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno) as the stars, and appearances by Oliver Platt, David Cross, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Vinnie Jones, Hank Azaria, Olivia Wilde, Xander Berkeley, Horatio Sanz, Bill Hader, and Paul Rudd.  It was written and directed by Harold Ramis, the writer ofCaddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbusters.  You’d think with a cast like that, this movie would be a riot.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t even come close.  It barely generates any chuckles and absolutely no laugh out loud moments.  Michael Cera plays the same wimpy nerd he plays in every movie he is in, and Jack Black is playing a raging idiot, like many of his movies.  It is the same characters they always play, just in a biblical setting that doesn’t even come close to being in the right time period – having the story of Abraham and Isaac taking place at the same time as the story of Cain and Abel, while they were many generations apart in the bible.  The only bright spot in the film is the fact that it has Olivia Wilde in it in a small role.  She’s smoking hot in anything she’s in, and she’s the reason this movie wasn’t scored even lower.  However, this movie is just flat out bad.  There’s a reason it bombed at the box office.  Don’t bother wasting your time because this one is totally not worth it.

Reminder:  if you want to see my rating history (1-10 scale) of every movie I’ve ever seen, you can see it here:  http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=1099042