I cant pretend that I havent seen the original Korean version of OLD BOY, the one that blew away an international audience and earned cult status. Yet, even knowing the twist, nicely rearranged for this remake by screenwriter Mark Protosevich, is not enough reason to dismiss this flick. Despite Josh Brolins committed performance as a… Read More »
RING TWO
Sometimes a film offers up an emblematic moment, one that crystallizes what is at the heart of the action and in RING TWO, that moment can be summed up in two words. Angry deer. They appear after Rachel (Naomi Watts returning after what may be the result of a lost bar bet) and her continually… Read More »
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
You’d think that in 86 minutes of screen time that the makers of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR’s 2005 incarnation could come up with at least one genuinely scary moment. Even if it’s just by accident aided and abetted by the law of averages. Alas, this dreary Z-grade schlock-fest is capable of producing only titters and yawns… Read More »
SKELETON KEY
There is one perfect moment in SKELETON KEY, which is remarkable more for the fact that it’s the only good moment in the entire film than for its own innate effectiveness. In it, a character picks up a cigarette, lights it with the torpid evil inherent in supernatural films set in the swamps of Louisiana,… Read More »
SILENT HILL
I’m going to do something that I usually try very hard to avoid in a review. I’m going to plop a spoiler into it. Not only that, I’m going to do it in the very first paragraph. I’m going to do it for two reasons. One, it’s integral to the bitch slap I’m about to… Read More »
PREMONITION
Blithely unfettered by internal logic, exhibiting the pacing of a banana slug, and boasting a heroine who makes Betty Crocker seem like a radical feminist, PREMONITION is exactly the reason that the Razzie Awards exist. Dishonoring the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”, it stars Sandra Bullock as Linda, a woman who comes unstuck in time.… Read More »
THE NUMBER 23
It’s one thing when a film is bad from the very start. There is an honesty about it, a candor that is, in its own small way, praiseworthy. The same cannot be said about THE NUMBER 23. Instead of breaking one’s heart merely by being bad, it commits the far more heinous offense of offering… Read More »