Movie Reviews

All in all, House of Wax is a better class of stupid-but-fun horror romps. Characters are dispatched in inventive (and cringe-inducing) ways, and director Jaume Serra doesn’t pretend to be making a landmark suspense film. Rather than bombard you with crappy music that telegraphs every scare, the film uses its score with no small degree of style by randomly giving you silence and music, so that you don’t know what’s going to happen. It worked well enough to make me jump more than once, and that’s no mean feat.

So if you’re feeling the need to see photogenic B-listers taken out in a horrific manner and then dipped in wax, this is the movie for you. House of Wax doesn’t come close to approaching the weirdo-creep factor of the Vincent Price original, but it’s a welcome return to the glorious days of bloody mayhem and forgettable horror.

House of Wax
2 & 1/2 Stars

If there’s one thing Hollywood has done right in the last couple of years it would be knowing that if Paris Hilton is in a movie, she’d better die in a horrible, brutal manner. Thankfully, House of Wax has seen fit to continue this trend.

Artist Rendering of Paris Hilton’s Soul

A remake in only the loosest sense, House of Wax is yet another Dark Castle update of an old horror classic. This time around the unlucky victims are a group of college kids on their way to the Big Game, but soon find themselves stranded in the boonies. Faster than you can say “Crystal Lake”, bad things start happening as the WB All Stars find themselves being stalked by two crazy brothers with some odd ideas on what constitutes a memento.

Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray lead the pack of soon-to-be-forgotten faces this time around, with Jared Padalcki, Jon Abrahams, Robert Ri’chard, and Paris Hilton filling out the ranks. Rather than delve into the details of a horror film plot, we’ll just stick with how things work out.

You’ve got to turn off the dumb meters for any horror film, and this one is no exception. What does set this slasher flick apart from the pack is its early 80’s feel, both in its gorey deaths, and the hallmarks of its characters’ behavior. If you can’t guess who’s going to live or die within the first 15 minutes of this movie, you have no right to call yourself a horror fan. Just like in the halcyon days of 80’s horror, sex means death, characters are too stupid to realize that open doors are pathways to unimaginable horror, and hiding from the baddie never, never works.

All in all, House of Wax is a better class of stupid-but-fun horror romps. Characters are dispatched in inventive (and cringe-inducing) ways, and director Jaume Serra doesn’t pretend to be making a landmark suspense film. Rather than bombard you with crappy music that telegraphs every scare, the film uses its score with no small degree of style by randomly giving you silence and music, so that you don’t know what’s going to happen. It worked well enough to make me jump more than once, and that’s no mean feat.

Sure the plot makes about as much sense as a hobo’s dream diary, but that’s not what you’re there to see. I know what I was there to see, and that was the death of Paris Hilton. Thankfully the film makers seemed to understand that might be a common goal, so they set about doing so in a very satisfying manner. If the crowd doesn’t cheer when she’s finally dispatched, I’d be very afraid of your fellow moviegoers.

My one real nitpick with the film is the casting of teen heartthrob Chad Michael Murray as a rough and tumble thug. I mean c’mon. With his high dollar gym abs and wispy facial hair, Murray looks about as tough as the Snuggles Bear. Seriously. Betty White could take his ass down, but hey: looking for realistic casting in a horror film is like wishing for a pony that flies to the moon.

While we’re talking about the cast, let me take the moment to assure each and every one of you that any fears/hopes you may harbor as to Paris Hilton’s acting ability can surely be put to rest. The titular House of Wax displays more charisma and charm than the giggling socialite, and the only laughs her character generates are the ones that are firmly at the expense of Hilton and her internet sexcapedes.

So if you’re feeling the need to see photogenic B-listers taken out in a horrific manner and then dipped in wax, this is the movie for you. House of Wax doesn’t come close to approaching the weirdo-creep factor of the Vincent Price original, but it’s a welcome return to the glorious days of bloody mayhem and forgettable horror.

To say that the twists and turns of Mindhunter’s plot are contrived would be akin to describing a river of lava as mildly tepid, and the film’s ending isn’t so much a twist as it is a final twist of the cinematic shiv Harlin has assaulted your brain with.  Even a sub-par mystery can be redeemed by a good premise and inventive staging, but Mindhunters carries all the mystique and suspense of a circled Where’s Waldo? Comic.  The experience of watching this movie could be no more horrendous had the zombie corpse of Ed Wood risen from the grave to deliver a series of groin kicks directly to your soul.

Mindhunters
Negative Stars

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that a film reviewer’s job is primarily to serve as a cinematic meat shield, taking an endless barrage of Hollywood bullets to protect you, the discerning moviegoer from the theatrical equivalent of a drive by shooting. Needless to say, no amount of Kevlar could protect me from the soul-crushing assault of Renny Harlin’s Mindhunters.

Hate life? This one’s for you!

Posing as the nth variation of locked-room mystery classic 10 Little Indians, Mindhunters attempts to make its mark on the serial killer genre by having the characters/victims be forensic pathologists, those specialized investigators who deal with predicting the behavior of killers. While this might have made for an interesting pitch, the combined cast and crew have delivered yet another unmemorable crime thriller that wouldn’t look out of place in the Clearance DVD bin. If the FBI’s investigators mental prowess were on par with the characters in this clumsy thriller, America would soon be over-run by an army of mass murderers and Rube Goldberg-obsessed maniacs. 

Christian Slater and Val Kilmer ‘headline’ a cast so diverse that it might have been conceived by some C-List Benetton Ad generator as a group of wannabe FBI investigators who must pass a final test of their deductive skills by solving a staged serial killing on a training island. As inevitable as the sun rising in the East, the young Turks of Forensic Science soon find themselves up against a real serial killer, who is systematically thinning their ranks like a needlessly complex Darwin through a series of elaborate timed traps and misdirection. Suspicion and tensions run high, as these supposed bright stars of police work pull their guns more than a heroin-crazed Travis Bickle, on both empty hallways and each other. 

Who among the cookie-cutter stereotypes will live or die, and who is the killer? Who cares? As any movie-goer can tell you, modern thrillers aren’t about logic and suspense, Hollywood having lazily deciding that imaginative death scenes, vomit inducing editing, and crushing rock fuelled montages must surely be decent substitutes for the genre’s basis in airtight logic and intellectual derring-do. 

Slater and Kilmer wisely make early exits from the film, leaving the remaining cast to flounder about among the bloody wreckage of a mystery, of which they do an universally awful job. When LL Cool J is the most convincing member of an elite task force of criminal investigators, one is forced to realize that the remaining film may well be some form of cruel experiment on gullibility and pain tolerance. 

Director Renny Harlin’s handling of this film feels like he’s trying to punish those critics who have lambasted his long career of delivering overblown crap to American cinemas. The editing is haphazard as scenes jump around with no sense of location or reason, and the cinematography relies on film-school level flash and bang, with all the flair of a drunken wedding videographer with delusions of grandeur. In one prolonged sequence, you’ll find yourself wondering if perhaps Mindhunters was meant to be shown in 3-D, only the theater forgot to hand out those nifty glasses. Locked room mysteries rely on a claustrophobic knowledge of the surroundings, yet other than a couple of Michael Bay like helicopter shots, we’re never given any sense of scope or locality, and what could have made for an interesting variation on the hunters being hunted is hopelessly forgotten in lieu of cheap shocks and logic-shattering revelations. 

To say that the twists and turns of Mindhunter’s plot are contrived would be akin to describing a river of lava as mildly tepid, and the film’s ending isn’t so much a twist as it is a final twist of the cinematic shiv Harlin has assaulted your brain with. Even a sub-par mystery can be redeemed by a good premise and inventive staging, but Mindhunters carries all the mystique and suspense of a circled Where’s Waldo? Comic. The experience of watching this movie could be no more horrendous had the zombie corpse of Ed Wood risen from the grave to deliver a series of groin kicks directly to your soul.

Bring a date.

The truth be told, I had a great time watching this film against all expectations. Enough so that it made me wonder how many great performances we’ve missed from Jane Fonda due to her 15 year acting hiatus. If Monster-In-Law is any indication, she’s got more than a handful left in her and I for one hope she’s given the chance to prove it.

Monster-In-Law
3 Stars

Let’s be honest here: Putting Jennifer Lopez’s name on a poster is almost a sure-fire way to kill my interest. I haven’t enjoyed a single thing she’s done since Out of Sight, and I can assure you that my love of that film has nothing to do with J-Lo. That being said, I was fairly uneasy about seeing Monster-In-Law, the new comedy starring the aforementioned Lopez. Obviously I survived the viewing, but how much damage was done?

In Theaters May 13th

Monster-In-Law must have been a perfect pitch to studio execs, coming as it did on the heels of Meet the Fockers (one of the highest grossing comedies of all time). “Hey, what about a ‘Meet The Parents’, but just for the ladies!” Great heaping bags of cash were soon doled out, I can assure you. The paper-thin premise is that Jennifer Lopez plays a struggling fashion designer (subtle plug or casting serendipity, you decide!) who gets by with a series of temp jobs. She soon meets the man of her dreams (Michael Vartan), but her life of bliss is soon interrupted upon meeting her man’s mom Viola (Jane Fonda), a former TV journalist who’s recovering from a recent nervous breakdown. Sparks fly and tensions flare, and before you know it it’s an all out war of attrition between the two possessive ladies.

Going off of the premise and the trailers I expected the very worst, but I failed to take into account one thing: Jane Fonda. It’s been 15 years since Fonda has appeared on screen (her last film was the 1990 DeNiro sap-fest Stanley & Iris), and a good 25 years since she’s done an all-out comedy (Nine To Five), but seeing her on the screen in Monster-In-Law, you’d swear she hasn’t missed a day since. Quite frankly, she is perfect as the domineering power-mom out to drive her soon-to-be-daughter in law out of her mind, and out of her son’s life. One moment she’s cool sophistication and the next she’s a barely contained train-wreck of neurosis, but every second she’s on-screen is just great. Fonda’s sass-filled exchanges with Wanda Sykes (playing the sassy assistant of course) deliver most of the solid laughs, and indeed lift the movie up from the pitfalls of it’s premise.

Not to say that Jennifer Lopez disappears in this film, as she does manage to stand her ground (if not actually hold her own) against Fonda, but her giggling free-spirit character is a mite hard to swallow from such a notorious glamour queen as herself. Lopez gets into the rhythm of the film as her character escalates her personal war, and outside of the obligatory sap (and slap) fest of the finale, I actually warmed up to her performance.

A stellar supporting cast is mostly wasted as Will Arnett (from Arrested Development) and Adam Scott deliver some great lines, but make infrequent and all too brief appearances in the film. Though in the end, Monster-In-Law is firmly about two divas going head to head, and there’s no room for the rest of the world. Outside of Michael Vartan, who is given absolutely nothing to do here but look dreamy and desirable, it’s a top-notch casting job, with the right amount of choice lines given to the auxiliary characters.

It’s not as if I can weigh Monster-In-Law to some high standard of film-making, but I will say that I was impressed with the lack of scatological or low-brow jokes that seem so ubiquitous in modern comedies. There’s no need to go for the gross-out when you’ve got a leading lady like Jane Fonda, and the humor is fitting for an actress of her caliber. To be sure, the courtship of Lopez and Vartan’s characters might require some viewers to reach for their insulin, but the sap factor is quickly demolished as Lopez and Fonda continually escalate the hostility and passive-aggressive battles to a level just shy of The War of the Roses mean-spirited bleakness. This is a battle that could only have sprung from the mind of two vengeful women, as each calculated maneuver so perfectly chips away at each other’s confidence while steeling their respective reserves.

The truth be told, I had a great time watching this film against all expectations. Enough so that it made me wonder how many great performances we’ve missed from Jane Fonda due to her 15 year acting hiatus. If Monster-In-Law is any indication, she’s got more than a handful left in her and I for one hope she’s given the chance to prove it

Since audiences have shown Hollywood that even the most ridiculously inept drivel can pass as quality action fare, there’s no doubt that this cinematic train wreck will probably spawn yet another sequel of equally diminished return. Fans of incessantly awful cinema might find a timeless gem here, but only after a copious amount of heavy, heavy drinking and several swift punches to the skull.

xXx: State of the Union
Negative Stars

Lest it be thought that the following review is the work of some unabashedly elitist movie snob, let me say this: I absolutely adore action flicks. Bullets, grim heroes, and very large explosions tickle my fancy in ways even the greatest of dramatic works can’t achieve. Give me a beer, some popcorn, and some needlessly violent gunplay and I am one very happy monkey indeed. Hell, I even enjoyed The Rundown, and that starred Seann William Scott, an actor I would happily see brought before the International Court for crimes against humanity.

Oh, there but for the Grace of Vin Diesel go thee

The original xXx was made in a fairly callous attempt to kick the spy genre firmly away from its tuxedo-clad and upscale roots. Trading upper class education and high society for eXtreme sports and Hollywood envisioned street smarts, Vin Diesel’s growly charisma managed to give the film enough charm to keep it from being just a moronic 2 hour exercise in blowing stuff up.

Since the original film was a fairly successful endeavor, it is safe to say that the only thing that would have prevented this sequel from being made would have been the utter destruction of our universe, and even then it’d have a 50/50 chance of release. Hollywood proved long ago that it’s capable of existing in an airless vacuum.

Sadly, trading in Vin Diesel’s diminishing star power for the long-past faded Ice Cube is akin to trading your RC Cola for a Shasta, but in a move that should surprise only the most mind-bogglingly naïve moviegoer, that’s exactly what the makers of xXx: State of the Union have done for this incomprehensibly stupid action sequel.

This time around Ice Cube plays a former Navy Seal who is tapped to take the coveted title of xXx when a NSA facility in Virginia is attacked by unknown assailants. A returning Samuel L. Jackson, who must have some serious investments in the telecom industry, phones in his trademark performance as the gruff and wise intelligence operative who taps the incarcerated Cube to save the current slate of old, white men. Nona Gaye and Xzibit play the shady characters from Ice Cube’s mean streets past, while Michael Roof plays the tragically unhip Q to Cube’s Bond. Rounding out this sorry lot is a partially effective Scott Speedman and Willem “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this” Defoe.

Though the film is supposed to be a race-against-time action film about stopping a political coup (and settling an old score), the film takes so many ridiculous turns that it’s akin to reading Mad Libs submitted by local sanitarium patients. Plot and logic holes large enough to drive a jacked up and armored Ford Truck through take a film that could be dumb to a level of medical retardation. Remove the budget and big special effects, and replace Ice Cube with Lorenzo Lamas and xXx: State of the Union would be completely at home alongside the slew of arrestingly stupid action films that peppered cable movie channels throughout the late 80s and early 90s.  Rest asssured, those of you unwilling to pay 9 bucks to see it on the big screen will inevitably find it sandwiched between Coors and Axe ads on Spike TV.

If nothing else, perhaps film historians will one day look back and recognize State of the Union as the film that single-handedly set back race relations in America a good 15 years, as its characters are uniformly do-gooder thugs and back stabbing blue-bloods (An important lesson learned in the film is “don’t trust rich white chicks”). The filmmakers attempt a couple of clumsy stabs at showcasing the economic and social gap of Washington elites and the lower-class citizens who provide their basic services, but such moments are played for easy laughs rather than insightful commentary. Although on the surface a pro-American film, this mindless action film treads a pretty uneven political line. Chock full of class-warfare and sniping, what starts out as a PCP addled liberal conspiracy freak’s cautionary tale feels more like a Reagan era shoot-‘em-up with it’s main character’s motivation rooted more in vengeance than any sense of civic duty. Though conservative filmgoers will probably be a bit put off by the U.S. Army being portrayed as about an effective military force as Darth Vader’s Imperial Stormtroopers (who by all rights must surely be the Washington Generals of the cinematic military canon.)

Since audiences have shown Hollywood that even the most ridiculously inept drivel can pass as quality action fare, there’s no doubt that this cinematic train wreck will probably spawn yet another sequel of equally diminished return. Fans of incessantly awful cinema might find a timeless gem here, but only after a copious amount of heavy, heavy drinking and several swift punches to the skull.