Ursa Guy's Film Reviews

My exact words as I finished lol

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That just broke me. I love tiny budget films because a small number of people worked really hard to get them done and make them good. To see one turn into a commercial with no care about the quality really felt insulting. You're doing nothing and making ten times the money of some fantastic film that I will probably never know about the existence of.

That's really true. Crazy that I tuned into like 3 or 4 talk shows and all had brought up Sharknado 3. That movie has turned into a money magnet.

Yup. This only exists to give a boost to the careers of D list celebrities and sell Comcast merchandise.

This is a long running series of films, most of which I respect for being well made more than I like. A lot of the series has the same problem, namely that they focus too much on the apes. I'm interested in the humans. They are supposed to be our heroes, after all. Depending on the version, the apes can range from unlikable and unsympathetic antagonists to boring costumed animals that I can't tell apart. Either way, the film is tedious if the apes get more screen time than the humans. This is probably my favorite apes film, but that main problem still lingers there.

The apes are all motion capture performances in this, and none other than Caesar talk, but apes are getting more screen time than humans. I understand the artistry in having apes communicate from sign language, and I totally get why people appreciate that, but (other than Caesar) I couldn't tell you a thing about the personality, relation to Caesar, or unique characteristics of literally any of them. If their goal was to allow me to tell them apart, they failed. This large monkey that bangs its chest and asks Caesar for permission to do something is not an interesting character. That's a personal thing, but it will never be an interesting character. Punt it, move on, and make some interesting human characters.

Unfortunately, the humans aren't much better. The small run time is a big part of that. I thought that David Oyelowo taking over James Franco's research would lead to a really interesting subplot, but there's no payoff to it. Oyelowo takes over the research, the scene ends, and the next time you see him he's outside of the lab getting attacked by apes. Franco's love interest is played by Freida Pinto. She acts well, but she's not given much to do. She kisses Franco, gives exposition about monkey biology, distracts cops to let Franco move past them, and is never seen again. Franco's father was an interesting character. He ,but he was good. That's probably why I like the first third the most, because it's a very human story. It's a man caring for an animal and balancing it with his troubled work and even more troubled home lives.

My writing above seems negative, and I guess it is, but the film itself is, as usual, well made. All of the performances are great, especially Andy Serkis as Caesar. The visual effects are all absolutely fantastic. The CGI is stunning. The cinematography and set design are both very pretty. I just wish I felt a greater emotional attachment to what was happening. The third act is basically a huge fight scene on the Golden Gate Bridge, a war between CGI models that I don't care about the fate of and military men who are making their first appearance in the film at the 1:20 mark that I don't care about. I cannot get invested in this, or any of these Apes films, because there are no characters that I really care about. This film came close to getting there with me, but Franco isn't actually in that bridge fight and Caesar gets a few seconds of screen time while the other apes attack military men. The very ending, the last 5 minutes, are a nice rebound. There's finally a payoff scene between Franco and Serkis, which was fun and touching. That's something I care about, and if the last hour had more than 1 scene like that I would rate it a lot higher. Give me more of that stuff movie!

There's also the elephant in the room, that most of this film doesn't actually matter. The 2010s Apes is a rebooted storyline in the franchise, and a disease from the 113 virus is what wipes out most of humanity. The problem with this decent idea is that it all happens off screen. None of the humans in Rise are still there in Dawn, and most of them die offscreen of a virus that was shown to be a bad thing for one scene and one scene only. The most egregious of these is the main character. James Franco is the most interesting person in the franchise, and you killed him off without witness or consequence. He died for nothing. Basically this whole film is irrelevant in the franchise except for giving the origin of the apes, which to beat in a dead horse, is significantly less interesting than giving an origin to human characters that will matter again.

Damn, really? A 0/5... Was it truly that bad?

Oy, not at all. Apparently typing in 2_6 by accident just resets the whole thing to a blank.

Oh thank God. Made me actually want to read the review now...

I didn't agree with very much of the negative things you said, especially about you wanting more humans. Quickly referring to 'Dawn' here, I loved how that was so much about the apes. Your typical blockbuster wouldn't dare do an entire film with so much reliance on CGI mo-cap apes. I would be mad if humans overshined the story of the apes and their evolution.

I 110% understand why people love that so much. If you're willing to accept the premise, these films are very well made, very innovative, and really daring. I am fully capable of admitting that I'm the weird one for not liking it, and I wish that I liked it more than I did, but that can't make me like it more. I think it's just never going to be my thing.

It's cool. We all have those movies that just never clicks with us, even though we can spot the genius, we'll never click with it...

Do You Believe is what I like to call a Jesus Movie. Jesus Movie is a derogatory nickname that me, my sister, and my friend and lover of bad movies Mike use to refer to a subgenre of the religious film genre. A Jesus Movie is special for a few reasons. Jesus Movies are the most mainstream form of religious movies coming out these days, and they tend to feel like propaganda. The purpose of its existence is to push its political message, not to make a good film that happens to have a message. Most of all, a Jesus Movie is extremely, excruciatingly, nauseatingly heavy handed film. I am agnostic, I guess, but it's more like indifference in reality. I have no kind of bias toward Christian movies, but I really don't like Jesus Movies. This particular movie is made by PureFlix, creators of God's Not Dead, one of the worst movies in any genre ever made, and possibly the definitive example of everything wrong with Jesus Movies. Do You Believe is completely unrelated to that, but it feels like a spiritual successor in a few ways.

First, the storytelling style of having a bunch of interconnected subplots is back. God's Not Dead did this, and I noted it for at least being an interesting way of telling the story, in a Crash style. Do You Believe takes that Crash style, and connects them at the end, in...a car crash. This is Crash. There's no middle ground here, no debates about how they are just using elements or taking influence. They made Crash. Not only did they remake Crash, but they somehow found a way to make it even more heavy handed than it was. I didn't even know that was possible.

Do You Believe also copies a few other notes from God's Not Dead, such as a Christian refusing to help a man near death, and instead forcing him to accept Jesus into his heart and die (And in both cases that Christian is treated as a hero by the film for this action. The filmmakers want the audience to believe that this action is a positive thing. I can't be the only one to find that deplorable), ending the film with a Newsboys song, and making every single antagonist an atheist that gets converted in the third act. The character thing might be my biggest problem. I cannot get interested in your characters when you are only capable of writing 3 of them. There's the super religious person that converts a troubled and lost soul and/or the atheist villain, the ridiculous and over-the-top atheist villain that actively hates God and has no other characteristic (and lets it get in the way of their work all the time), and the Christian that doubts their faith only to be saved by a traumatic event. So who are our characters in this film?

Jesus Movies are generally known for not getting any big actors, but Sean Astin of Lord of the Rings fame plays the one dimensional atheist doctor who is jealous of God because he wants credit for saving lives. He yells at patients for believing in God the way no doctor ever would, gets angry with his assistant for praying, and of course is converted at the end of the film. Other "villains" include the gangster Kriminal (Still more subtle of a name than Josh Wheeton), who learns to follow God after his gunned down friend Pretty Boy (Why yes, these characters are total stereotypes that only speak in language that a 50 year old white man thinks 20 year old black men use) gives him a cross as he dies (I wasn't sure whether to laugh or impale my television when the doctor asked if the first guy's name was Kriminal and he responded with "It was. Not anymore."), and Andrea, the attorney that sues the Christian EMT worker for not saving a man but then feels bad because God saved her in the car crash.

The first two acts feel like a made for TV movie, if the Hallmark Channel had a religious branch. The cinematography, performances, and sets aren't necessarily bad, but they are definitely not good. It's quite boring, as the entire thing hovers around 'okay', never going above and rarely going below. I will credit Alexa PenaVega (She added a surname, but it's the girl from Spy Kids) as giving the best performance as a suicidal teenage girl. It's not great, and it's barely good, but it was something interesting to watch, as opposed to every other subplot in the film, where an older Christian person feels oppressed or deals with first world problems. Granted, the ante is upped quite a bit by putting actual stakes in, like a diseased man near death or a family that can't have children. (God's Not Dead had the exact same structure to fill out its run time, and satisfied these first world problem subplot slots with things like car troubles and having an interview subject refuse to answer questions. A mild step up all around.)

The third act is the part where I have something to talk about. The crash happens, and cars go hurtling out of control. A couple of people die (because in Jesus Movies death is a happy ending because they go to heaven or something), a couple of people get saved, and all of the atheists get redeemed by helping little girls escape through back windows or helping to give live birth. (Yes, I would think that the baby would be dead after a vicious car accident, but it came out looking better than the one in American Sniper.) And while there were plenty of stupid moments where I didn't know whether to laugh or feel insulted, the very ending got me to lean to the latter for sure. An old man named Joe dies. Sean Astin writes the death certificate. 8 minutes pass. Joe comes back to life. Sean Astin looks at his charts, bewildered by the miracle of a man who was dead for 4 times longer than a person can be dead for and still come back to life coming back to life. Joe looks up at him, and uses the ultimate Christian comeback: "The answer is in the Bible." It is the most irrational and lazy ending possible for something like this. It's completely unrealistic, even within the context of the universe of the film (At no point before this does something unexplainable happen without any kind of practical help from a living person). Sean Astin, of course, buys this completely and decides that he should go and pray to a Newsboys song.

While not offensive like its PureFlix predecessor, Do You Believe is certainly a step below theatrical quality in terms of production values and has no original bone in its body. What I used as a sort of joke in the beginning of this review really fits in the literal sense. Somehow, some way, somebody watched Crash and said "I can make that preachier". At least Crash preached about good things. Don't be racist, love everybody, don't judge the lifestyles of others. This film counters with racist black characters that only make money through thievery (in a gang of about 7 people with no white characters) and speak exclusively in street, Christians trying to passive-aggressively fight those with different beliefs, and characters whose lifestyle of attending church every Sunday is their only trait. This is a film that gives me absolutely no reason to even think about it again.

I hope people like this one. I didn't plan on it being 1200 words, I just type and let it go for as long as it wants. A lot of people obviously weren't fans of my angry rage last week, so I thought that a comedic rage would be way more entertaining for others while still getting my point across. This is probably the first review I'm really proud of. Sorry for making my best and longest one yet about a movie that none of you have probably seen (and honestly none of you should see. Even in camp/so-bad-its-good value it's a step below average), and for absolutely abusing parenthesis.

This might be the worst movie that I've ever seen in terms of structure. This movie is too long at 75 minutes, because more than half of it is filler. At the same time, it feels a bit too short. It ended right when it was getting started. Most films have a 3 act structure. There is a beginning, where setup happens, a middle, where the plot happens, and the end, where the payoff happens. Some art films can deviate from this effectively, but this is a Blumhouse movie, so the deviation is not intentional. The issue is that there are 2 first acts and a third act, meaning that no real plot happens. It's more like a series of subplots that get introduced, solved in 10 minutes, and cause another conflict. An extreme spoiler warning is in effect in this area, because I need to delve into everything that happens in order to really discuss this.

The first 25 minutes feel like a first act. A crew of 5 medical scientists is working on a Lazarus serum. They use this serum to revive a dog. Once you finish the film, you realize that this entire first 25 minutes could have been cut out and nothing would change. You would lose a couple of jump scares, but it would be the same film if it was 50 minutes long. It's all exposition leading into the buildup. Then their company gets bought out and they lose all of their work. They have to go back into the lab to replicate that work. This plot line is useless because the 5 of them would have returned to the lab to work on their experiment anyways, and the new company is never mentioned again once they get in the lab. They perform the experiment, and Olivia Wilde dies. In a normal film, this would probably be the end of the first act. The second act has the team work to revive her and live with her and realize that she's acting different, as well as resolve some previous subplots, like the buyout or the dog that was experimented on in the beginning. As I said earlier, neither of these things are mentioned or hold relevance after they happen, making the whole thing filler. The third act in this theoretical movie would show Wilde's full treatment from the serum take effect as she plays slasher. Because of the enormous amount of padding prior, that whole process must be fit into 25 minutes. Wilde is brought back to life, acts weird, and goes around killing off the other scientists, while showing her hell, a world where she relives the worst day of her life over and over again. It makes for a really boring beginning and middle and an end too quick to feel anything. The start being boring isn't helped by the trailer and poster showing that undead Olivia Wilde is the villain of the movie. You're basically spending time waiting for her to become undead so things can start happening. Once she becomes undead, there's less than half an hour left, and so a lot of things just don't happen.

That's a lot of story to fit into an hour and 15 minutes. I could be impressed that they pulled it off at at, but it comes at the cost of any humanity it may have had. Not a single character in the film has more than 1 dimension, and Sarah Bolger's new recruit Eva probably has less than that. The story is paced horribly and nonsensical, but that could have been forgiven if I cared about the fate of any of these characters. I don't. In spite of this, the performances are fine. Olivia Wilde was surprisingly okay, and the other four characters are TV actors that give the type of performance that makes you say "it was good for the script they had to work with" instead of being outright good. The above flaws could have also sort of been forgiven if the movie was at least good horror without being a good film, but there's no time to really build any kind of tension or atmosphere in any scene, so every single scary thing is a jump scare.

Other than that third act, where they try to cram 60 minutes worth of story into 25, this didn't feel much like a horror movie at all. There will be things like the dog jolting to life or Donald Glover playing a prank with a mask that get jump scare music, but there's nothing to be afraid of until there's a psychotic zombie killing people. I don't like relying on jump scares in any capacity. I think that the score can be very effective in building tension leading up to a real scare, or that it can accentuate a real scare, but a sound in itself cannot be the scare, and having that sound accompany a random thing popping out at the screen does not make it any scarier. You might succeed in making me jump, especially if I'm watching with headphones on my laptop like I did with this, but you will almost never succeed in scaring me. As much as I don't like jump scares, what I really don't like are false jump scares, when the visual pop is just a friend doing something stupid instead of something that I'm supposed to be afraid of. At the very least, a jump scare where the villain jumps out (Which happens twice in this film) could be built on later (Which doesn't happen at all, invalidating that point, but criticism should be constructive and there's a way this could have been saved).

The Lazarus Effect isn't a horrible film, but it is really boring. It drags way more than a 75 minute run time has any right to. There are no good scares and no interesting characters. While there wasn't anything really bad in it, it is a bad movie because it lacks any good. That puts it a notch above other recent Blumhouse horror movies like The Gallows, but that's kind of like saying that I would rather eat food from my floor than from my trash can. Unless you find predictable jump scares especially frightening, there is really no reason to watch this film.

(This review will be spoiler heavy. If you're interested in this film and you haven't already seen it, it's on iTunes now. If you're not, just read along and have more fun than watching the movie.)

Unfriended is another entry in a long line of Blumhouse horror movies made for less than a million dollars that was sold on a gimmick. I could say that, but I think it would be unfair to the film. There's a long and convoluted origin to the creation of Unfriended. In 2013, Blumhouse productions created a film called Cybernatural. It was about 95 minutes long, featured 7 characters in a Skype chat getting picked off by a ghost, Adam got offed by a car, and the audio of the Skype chat was at full volume during the entire movie. Cybernatural premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2014, and was picked up by Universal to distribution. Universal changed the title to Unfriended, cut the movie to 83 minutes, featured 6 characters in a Skype chat (Hard not to feel bad for Matthew Bohrer, who is still credited as cast in most published reviews but does not appear in the movie), made Adam get offed by a gun, and drained the audio of the Skype chat every time our main character, Blaire, went to text somebody. If you watch the trailer directly before or after watching the movie, you can tell that more than half of the shots are taken from Cybernatural and didn't translate to Unfreinded. Cybernatural received very positive reviews at the festival, while Unfriended received mixed reviews. I think that most of the studio's changes were for the worse. I haven't actually seen Cybernatural, but it sounds like it was a significantly better movie than Unfriended.

My biggest problem would not change in either version, and that is that every character is irredeemably unlikable. That might be the point, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to sit through. There is a set of high school character archetypes: the generic but relatable protagonist, the nerd, the slut, the cool jock, the black kid, the fat one, etc. These tropes are annoying no matter what, but if they can work it's because they balance each other out. 4 of the 6 characters in this movie are the vapid slut that cannot carry an intelligent conversation if their life depended on it, which it does. They do nothing but talk about sex and parties and having sex at parties and it's draining to listen to because a majority of the cast has this limited scope of life experience. I wish the main character was Mitch, the main character's boyfriend. He was the closest to likable, which still doesn't mean I actually like him, but seeing as he was a mildly nice person that has computer knowledge and first typed the ghost theory, this film was basically about him already except that every dead teenager movie these days needs to star a female.

The true nature of just how annoying and unbearable these characters are comes from a game of Never Have I Ever, an unpleasant 15 minute segment where absolutely nothing happens except for teenagers yelling at each other for sleeping/drugging their best friend/boyfriend. This film had some momentum going up to that point, and the worst thing I can say about the first 40 minutes is that it was kind of boring and littered with continuity errors. Not to rant in the middle, but the continuity is just awful. The timestamps on texts get changed every time the window opens up, and some messages disappear only to reappear (Never disappearing is the tab at the top of your television screen for star Shelly Hennig's MTV series Teen Wolf). The Never Have I Ever segment kills off Adam, but more importantly it kills off any enjoyment that I was getting out of the film. It goes out of it's way to be obnoxious, which it does far too well for its own good.

The scares in the film are mostly jump scares, but at least they have a build up and tension, except for the last one. It gives the scares poor payoff, but it would be too harsh to call it poor horror. There are a few good, creepy moments in here. My favorite was the death of Val, the vain slut that the other vain sluts come to a consensus of hating. You see her face frozen with a bottle of bleach in the background and her dogs barking. You assume, like the characters, that the audio is picking up but not the visuals. When somebody calls her, you hear the phone ring, and then see it vibrate across the table into the shot. That's how you build atmosphere. I really wanted to give this movie credit, because that is a level of horror construction that no found footage movie goes to. Unfortunately, Val then falls to the ground in a jump scare and I realize that I won't miss Val in the slightest.

The last jump scare, and by far the worst, was one that completely breaks the logic that the film had going. Blaire is the last person standing, and it's revealed that she was the one who shot the video of Laura Barnes (the girl that becomes the ghost) that caused her to commit suicide. The video, with her face in front of the camera, is uploaded to Facebook, and a bunch of people comment that Blaire is a horrible person and that she killed Laura. Laura's profile sends her a message that says "Now you have to live with this." Boom. Perfect. End the movie. The ghost got her ultimate revenge. A person who kills themselves does it because death is preferable to life. In Laura's case, dying was better than being bullied. Horror formula says that Blaire should die, but in a tragic and yet ironic twist, Laura forces her to live the way she did because it's the most cruel ending possible. It's smart and deep, more thoughtful than it had any business being. I would give it a pass if it ended here. It was flawed, definitely, but it didn't suck too bad. Of course, the movie doesn't end. *JUMP SCARE MUSIC*, the laptop shuts, Blaire screams, a few seconds of pause, *JUMP SCARE MUSIC*, the ghost comes out from behind her and kills her. It's a bad ending for being cliched, cheap, and not scary, but it's especially awful because it directly contradicts one of the best horror endings ever. They had a chance to make an interesting and poetic statement about bullying and high school suicides, something really powerful that delves into the psyche of bullying victims, something to grab the attention of its audience and intelligently push their moral, and they piss it away for slasher tropes.

Missed opportunities are the name of the game for Unfriended. It's essentially an unoriginal and unpleasant dead teenager slasher film that dates itself immediately, dressed up in an original gimmick, but it came close to being really original. Something like The Gallows is embarrassingly unambitious, but this is almost worse because people flirted with the idea of being clever and then decided against it because conforming to horror cliches is profitable. It made over 30 times its budget and is getting a sequel in 2016, so they weren't wrong, but it would have been nice to not waste potential and artistic integrity in the process. Realistically this is a 2/5 in quality, but I feel a need to knock it down a peg because a few small and easy fixes could have made it really good.

I wish that the Lazarus Effect was better. Had some people I like in it, but really didn't expect much more.

The important thing to know before you watch this, much more important than knowing the quality of Creep, is to know the genre. Creep is a dark comedy that plays as a satire of found footage horror films. I read a few comments on IMDB because I knew this was divisive, and a lot of people are complaining about plot holes and moronic actions by the main character. That's the joke. You can think that joke isn't funny, but do not watch Creep expecting a dark and tense horror film and then complain that it was stupid and the plot was contrived. A satire plays things up to their extremes in order to make fun of them. Horror has plenty of subgenres, maybe more so than any other genre of film. Found footage is probably my least favorite, but my favorite is the Scream (or more recently Cabin In The Woods) style of trope-subverting horror comedies. Those 2 examples get to have their cake and eat it, too. They function both as funny and smart satires of horror and tense and scary horror. Creep isn't quite that ambitious. It has no interest in actually being scary. That's not such a bad thing, but you need to have your expectations in line. The first time I watched it, I was really disappointed. On second viewing, knowing what it was, I enjoyed it a lot more, so go into your first viewing looking for a twisted comedy.

Creep is a personal project between two people. Mark Duplass is the writer, producer, and star of the movie, and Patrick Brice is all of those things plus the director. Brice plays Aaron, a poor man who gets a job as a cameraman for Duplass' character Josef. Josef wants Aaron to film his life to show to his baby because he will die of cancer in 2 months. These are the only 2 actors that appear in the movie, so it's very important that they do a great job. Brice does fine, but Duplass really excels. Part of that is that he had a much more interesting character to play and was in front of the camera for a longer time, but Duplass really nails it. I won't give away the real motivation or character of Josef, but he isn't what he seems. He's a really creepy and disturbing guy that's hiding his real reasoning for wanting Aaron around. He not only has a wolf mask, but has a name for it (Peachfuzz). No sane person does that, and Duplass is not entirely sane, but the interesting thing is that he's not entirely insane, either.

Unfortunately, the shortcoming of the found footage genre rears its ugly head. No matter how good or bad the film is, and no matter how intentional or lazy the camera work is, the cinematography still looks like garbage. The lighting is poor, there's no shot variety, and the frame has a ridiculous amount of dead space. The movie tells you when a scare is coming, so the time it takes to find it becomes dreadfully boring. It's 30 seconds of waving the camera around, and the audience sees absolutely nothing of relevance. It's just looking at a moving picture of trees or the hallways of a house before the thing jumps out.

The film is short at 80 minutes, and it struggles to fill even that time. Josef doesn't make an appearance until about 10 minutes into the movie. You could just hit the delete button on that entire segment in the editing room and nobody would be worse off for it. It's just Brice giving out lazy exposition while the camera shows nature through the window of a car. This segment is especially useless because all of this exposition is slowly revealed to us anyways. Every single line is either pointless or is used again once Josef enters.

This is a hard film to talk about, because a lot of the enjoyment to be had from it comes in the last 10 minutes, when everything gets pieced together. I don't want to give away that part, which means I can't talk about a lot of the good stuff, but I can say that the bad points I've mentioned are really small and don't make the movie significantly worse. Basically every scene in the third act has some kind of twist, and the absurdity keeps on building while simultaneously giving the plot interesting developments. Unfortunately, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. The jokes are subtle, the type that are more clever than funny. I don't want to sound snobby and say that some people won't get it, but you need to have seen a fair share of horror movies to pick up on everything. A decent portion of the humor isn't even dialogue, it's playing with trope formulas. Not being familiar with those formulas probably makes it a boring way to kill an hour. If you think you might like it, you will. If not, you might want to check it out, but ultimately its only as funny as you let it be.

I've almost watched Creep a few times. Like you said, it seems divisive as I've read so many varying opinions on it. I'll probably see it.

Is the pun too obvious? I'll go for it. Unfinished Business feels unfinished. At the very least, the script could have been looked over a few more times. This is a comedy through and through. Every second of it is a comedy and nothing more. There is nothing in the way of a story or characters. The plot only exists to take Vince Vaughn and friends to their next joke. I'm not sure that these types of comedies are inherently worse than films that are an interesting movie with comedic elements, but it does put a lot more pressure on the jokes. If you don't think Ghostbusters is funny, you can still enjoy the creative premise, good effects, and interesting characters. If you don't think Unfinished Business is funny, there is absolutely nothing else it has to offer. While comedy is completely subjective, so your mileage will vary, I'm taking the side of 89% of Rotten Tomatoes critics.

The ironic thing to say following that opener is that the worst parts of the movie are the parts without comedy. It tries and fails to put in an anti-bullying message. Vince Vaughn is bullied by an ex-boss, and his son is bullied by other kids at school. The loose premise is that Vaughn needs to secure a business deal to send his son to private school. The bullying scenes feel really forced, almost as if they were added by the studio after filming finished. It doesn't help that the business trip scenes and father-son scenes are mutually exclusive. The movie just takes a break from telling its story for a few minutes so Vaughn's son can give backstory about the family and a heavy handed moral. It reminded me of a bad television show with a large cast, like the lesser episodes of Modern Family, where the A and B plots have nothing to do with each other except for a cliche voiceover to explain that they had a similar purpose in the last 30 seconds.

It was really lazy to have the location change so often. They fly out to Maine, then to Germany, then they have to fight through a riot, and then fly back home to St. Louis. All of these happen only because the plot says so. The reasoning for every single one of them is the same. The businessman they need to deal with (more or less a MacGuffin) was thought to be at point A when in fact he's really at point B. Our main characters, Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, and Dave Franco, go on a wild goose chase around the world. None of the actors are good, but I don't want to call them bad because all three of them can act and the material is bad. Wilkinson only gets one note to play: He's an old man that's into dirty things. Literally every joke made by or about his character ties into that one concept. Franco gets a really annoying stutter and accent to play, and his last name is Pancake. That's a juvenile joke that gets revisited often.

The jokes in the movie, surprisingly, weren't totally awful. Most of the time I didn't laugh, but there was nothing offensive or wrong with any of it, and there were some funny bits. The greatest sin is that the jokes go on for too long. My favorite gag was when Vaughn had to live in a museum exhibit because every hotel in Germany was booked. Kind of dumb and totally implausible, but I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed it less when 10 minutes later you see a crowd gather around his exhibit, and I was sick of it 10 minutes after that when he got evicted. If you use the same joke 3 times in half an hour, it will be less funny the third time. By far the worst case of this was the wheelbarrow running joke. Apparently it's an unusual sexual position. You probably hear it said about 5 times early on. "You gotta try the wheelbarrow." "My wife refuses to give me the wheelbarrow." Unlike the above example, I didn't think a single one of these jokes was funny. They hardly felt like jokes. It was a reference without a punchline. The payoff is that Tom Wilkinson has sex in the wheelbarrow. And then Dave Franco has sex in the wheelbarrow. Twice. The joke dragged on and on.

No scenes stand out for being good, but one does stand out for being bad, and that happens when the trio goes to a gay bar to talk some numbers. The humor being more of a reference than an actual joke isn't very common throughout Unfinished Business, but it happens often in this scene. I'm not going to laugh just because you said the phrase "glory hole". Say something about it. Write a conclusion to that setup. Like way too many scenes, poor editing causes this to just end without getting a joke. It's like the filmmakers included all of the filler lines to contextualize the punchlines in this scene and then abruptly took the funny parts out at the last second. The writer is Steven Conrad, which is really odd. He's clearly not suite for comedy. His most notable screenplays include The Pursuit of Happyness and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, two sugarcoated family dramas about a man wanting more with his life, which he at least writes competently. Unfinished Business really has no business existing. At its core, it is a 20 minute standup routine looped to 90 minutes with a flimsy excuse to keep changing it up. The clever lines get wasted through redundant repetition, the plot is flimsy, and nobody looked like they gave their best effort on this.

Today I'm going to tell the world why the Roger Corman version of The Fantastic Four is my favorite. I don't want to disregard people of other opinions, but I think most people that absolutely hate this Fantastic Four movie have never seen another B movie. That's what this is. Obviously the effects and video quality aren't good enough for theaters. It's unfair to judge it for cheesy visuals or stock sound effects, because it never had the chance to be more. There are a lot of things that make a film good, and while I'm not even sure if this is a good film, it has a better story, it stays more true to the characters, and it is way more fun than either of the 2000s Fantastic Four movies.

Given the context, it's not horribly made. CGI in the early 1990s wasn't very good. There are a few classics like Jurassic Park or Terminator 2, but they are exceptions to the rule. The scale of the project was always minor. It was a rights grab. It was made for $1,500,000. Objectively, the production quality is better in newer versions, but that doesn't inherently make it better. While Corman is the name that always gets tossed around when discussing this, the actual director was Oley Sassone, who specializes in B movies that seem campy 20 years later but have a lot of heart and are entertaining. I've only seen one of his other works, the prison/kung fu movie Bloodfist 3, which I really enjoyed. These are fun people making fun movies, which I will always take over brooding people making dark and gritty movies for the sake of being dark and gritty.

The film opens with Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom working on an experiment in college. This is important. Doom isn't just a greedy businessman who becomes power hungry when he sees the Four's abilities, he is a friend of Reed. The two are good buddies, and frequently help each other out. When Victor gets scarred and is presumed dead from the experiment, I felt emotion. I also felt emotion when Reed was somberly reminiscing about his lost friend. It goes a long way to humanizing Victor, as well as giving a more direct tie to the Four and Doom. It's development. It's way more heart than we get in the 2005 version, where Doom is a 1 dimensional corporation man who wants money and wants to kill things that stop him from getting money. It's not just Doom that gets a better character, either. Ben's 2005 arc was that nobody liked him because The Thing looked ugly. He wanted to change back to normal, he does, and then he goes back on that out of obligation to help the others. Here, Ben's love interest is blind, so she loves him the whole way through. There's nothing corny done with it, like a climatic scene where she feels his skin. She just accepts him at face value. Because Ben has a sense of belonging before the third act starts, he feels inspired to come and help the other Four, because he sees love in the world and wants to help his family.

Susan and Johnny Storm aren't given very much to do, but they have a good dynamic that helps the Four feel like a family. These are people that actually love each other in that family way. There's nothing corny about it like the sitcom montage in the 2005 version, and there's nothing unnecessarily mean spirited about it like a lot of bad modern superhero movies. I also couldn't finish this review without mentioning the amazing score from David and Eric Wurst. It's light and fun or dark and deep depending on the scene, and both sides are great. The main theme is good, and there are a lot of really stellar piano instrumentals in the first act.

There are a few big negatives to name off. The biggest and baddest of the bunch is the subplot of diamond thieves. This character with no back story that I don't know or care about with nameless and faceless henchman is dumb and boring. It takes up way too much screen time, and the movie grinds to a halt anytime he's on screen. He steals a diamond essential to the space mission of the Four that Doom just steals from him anyway. They steal Ben's love interest, who Ben has to steal back in the only minute out of 20 where the diamond thieves felt like they were in the same movie. It's related to nothing, it's not entertaining, and it shouldn't exist. Doom's mask gives him a different voice, one that's hard to hear dialogue in a lot of the time. I didn't like that Susan had basically nothing to do in the third act except for getting married, and the catchphrases are really forced and annoying. The acting is definitely not good, but honestly it's not as bad as Jessica Alba was.

It's certainly flawed as a movie, but it's optimistic and fun, embodying everything that a pre-2000s superhero movie should be. It respects its characters and tells their origin efficiently without including dumb sex jokes or goofy sitcom cliches. The diamond thieve stuff is bad, but both other versions also had stupid side quests that completely derailed the second act. This isn't a masterpiece, but it is probably one of the better non-theatrical action movies available. Accept that you're getting something more like The Toxic Avenger than Marvel's The Avengers, look past that, and you can find a lot to enjoy.

If there's one thing you can't accuse The Gallows of being, it's dumb. This film raises a lot of questions, like: Why does the cameraman film inside of a locker room during a changing period, or in the middle of a class? Why would the school put on the same play that had previously caused a death? Why would somebody build functional gallows for a high school play? Why does Reese not know that his father was the star that backed out of the play, even though we see a conversation between them about the play and obviously this major incident is still remembered by the father and should be explained to the son? Why is it suggested to the main character that he should have taken cooking for drama if drama was a mandatory course? Why does the cameraman criticize extras for taking drama if he takes drama? Why is this film so bad? Why does he willingly take video footage of an illegal act from him and his friends? Why would the film violate Chekov's gun by telling the audience that the janitor would be working late and then never show him doing this when it's late? Why did every single member of the original play cast have kids before they turned 21 (They were 18 in 1993, and have 18 year old kids in 2013, meaning they got pregnant sometime in 1994 when they were 19 years old.)? Oh wait, every single one of those questions can only be answered with "because the plot says so." This movie is stupid. It is also poorly written, poorly acted, poorly shot, poorly edited, poorly directed, poorly marketed, and a poor excuse for anything. I try to find positives in every film that I watch, and I can usually succeed, but there is nothing positive to hold onto in The Gallows. I gave negative reviews to Unfriended and The Lazarus Effect, but those reviews came out more positive than they would have after the first watch. The reason why is that after watching The Gallows, I knew that embarrassing and cheap horror could get so much worse. I was consciously thinking that I needed to balance it more because some things really are that bad. I will be making a list of the X best and worst movies of this year, and it will take a really impressive failure to not let The Gallows sit at #1.

Usually I can credit small horror items. A single scare or tense scene that really worked, or at least a creepy atmosphere. There is none of that in here. Every scare is a jump scare, which is lazy to type again but no less lazy to watch. They're all cheap. It's not the type where there is some form of setup, just dark screens where things pop out to loud noises. Every character is unlikable, especially Ryan Shoos, the guy holding the camera. He spends the entire movie being that douche that you hated in high school. He's a football player who makes fun of theater geeks and thinks his friend having a crush is the most interesting thing ever, so obviously he is obligated to put them into awkward situations. Yes, I know, that's the point of the character, but an R rated audience is intelligent enough to understand that after 10 minutes of him handing out mean spirited insults. There was no need to make it 25. Pfeifer Brown gives an awful turn as Pfeifer, who, for lack of a better phrase, makes it too obvious that she's trying to act. She is never conveying a real emotion or being a real person, she is just pretending to do those things. She has a phony acting voice, which I get comes into play later, but it was obnoxious to listen to. Reese Mishler is okay floundering around a dark building, until the script asks him to give a real performance, where he really struggles.

The plot is ridiculously dumb. I think that Peter Sobczynski of rogerebert.com handled this better than I could, describing the first 30 minutes of story and ending every sentence with "for reasons that are never adequately explained". I opened with a bunch of rhetorical questions, but because the plot says so wasn't a punchline. None of those questions are ever given a reasonable answer, and in order for the movie to function and progress most of them need one. Some are nitpicks, some are wasted opportunities that could have led to something good, but some, like why the gallows worked like real gallows or why Reese didn't know about his father, are plot holes that would have destroyed this movies' credibility if there was any of it to attack.

Found footage movies are never good visually, even in movies that I actually like such as Chronicle, but it's a special kind of bad in The Gallows. There are 3 kinds of shots in the entire movies. There's the character looking directly into the camera the way nobody would ever do in a realistic found footage scenario, the back of a character's head, and the hand of the character behind the camera poking stuff around. Most of the shots use a red (or green, depending on which of the 2 cameras is being used) 'night vision' tint, so about 30% has actual lighting. I guess it wasn't in the $100,000 budget to light scenes.

And yet, despite all of these complaints, the movie still gets worse at the ending. I'm not even calling this a spoiler. If I'm saying something that makes you less likely to watch The Gallows all the way through, it should be called a public service warning. Pfeifer is revealed to have been intentionally trying to kill Reese the whole time, working with the ghost. That's all fine and good, but like Unfriended, the movie takes a perfectly decent ending and pisses it away so we can get a twist that breaks the logic of the movie and a jump scare. We find out that Pfeifer is actually the daughter of Charlie, the boy who died during the play. Somehow. Remember when I went through the timeline earlier? I'm still not really sure how a person that died in October of 1993 was able to give birth to a child in the 1994-1995 school year, and I've been sitting on this review for weeks to not put all of my Blumhouses in a row. That pregnancy cycle would have to have lasted at least 11 months. Other than a freak incident where the baby lasted over a year that made headlines, the longest recorded pregnancy cycle of a human was 10 and a half months. This seems minor, and it probably is, but I think it proves that nobody working on this script cared if it made sense. A pair of cops go to Pfeifer's house to investigate, and they do that stupid found footage thing where the person holding the camera doesn't notice something that is clearly in his field of vision until he moves the camera towards it. Charlie's ghost jumps out at him and says boo, and the movie ends. So, what did we learn today? Besides that any movie, no matter how awful, can make 350 times its production budget with a crappy gimmick? Absolutely nothing. There is no value or reason to think about this movie after you turn it off. Pfeifer being evil is the closest thing you get to character development. I cannot think of a single positive thing to say about this. I tried to make this review both informative and entertaining, because there is nothing entertaining or salvageable about its subject. I'm only giving it half a bucket instead of 0 because people might think that I forgot to put in a rating at all. This is the lowest of lowbrow film. If your friends want you to watch it with them, you need to find some new ones.