Morgan P Salvo

On Prancer… on Donner… on Harold… on Kumar? With Halloween just over and Thanksgiving looming in the wind – bam – we get our first Christmas flick. Here's my advice: prepare for A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas. I think it's genius for the guys who bring stoner humor, lame sex jokes, bodily functions and bad taste to the screen to beat everyone to the holiday punch, and it's in 3-D no less. That said, this movie is amazingly stupid.
I actually liked H&K Go to White Castle, much to my surprise, but I walked out of H&K Escape from Guantanamo because it was that moronic. H&K X-mas isn't as insulting, but ripe with stereotypes; the latest addition to this unlikely franchise boasts an extensive list of bad and unfinished ideas. Many setups fall as flat as a squished pot brownie while others just glide along in wimpiness. Only a few jokes explode with originality. The film seems to be on a visible collision course with mediocrity and predictable Airplane-style humor. I have a hard time relating to comedies where I can see the punch lines coming from a mile away.

With Johnny Depp's history of chameleon acting and his dear late friend Hunter S. Thompson's machine-gun writing style, we should have had a hit on our hands with The Rum Diary. Sadly, this is not the case. Rather, we get something that borders on cute and mediocre. The whole thing is meek and needs more punch, falling flat in telling a hugely interesting and compelling story.
The uninspired plot tells of journalist Paul Kemp (Depp), who in 1960 goes to work a freelance job for a local newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, that has fallen into cahoots with a sleazy planning and development scam. Mostly, though, this is a very loose collection of drug-and-alcohol-fueled mishaps as we watch Kemp struggle with corrupt business dealings, romance and heavy drinking.
In reality, Thompson had unsuccessfully applied to work at the larger English-language daily while in Puerto Rico, befriending many of the writers there and providing the context for The Rum Diary's fictional storyline. It wasn't until he and Depp came upon the novel in an old box that it was published in 1998. I read the book a few years back and found it pretty engaging, with rebellious insight and tons of humor.

Have you ever watched an entire episode of that Ghost Hunters TV show? Neither have I. I've tried, but it just doesn't interest me to watch a bunch of pansy-ass nerds walking around with a bunch of gizmos acting like they're going to piss their pants around every corner. Maybe if they actually pissed their pants we'd have something.
I wish I could say the same about the Paranormal Activity franchise. The third installment is now crushing it at the box office and all I can say is that I miss Saw. At least the Saw franchise is an intricate series and we know that each episode perfectly sets up the next installment. Paranormal 3, however, is just a repetition of the same tricks, only ever so slightly embellishing on the franchise's previous hand-held camera “found footage” scare-fest. But tricks aside, this is still a one-way ticket to Dullsville.

People booed. Some walked out. One guy even cursed at the screen as the credits rolled. I laughed my ass off during The Thing… nothing like a shameless rip-off of an already shameless remake.
Suffice it to say, this is my kind of movie.
I was primed to hate this movie, mostly because I'm so familiar with the material. As a kid I used to watch the original Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks classic every Halloween afternoon on TV, sifting through all the slow-moving technical scientific mumbo jumbo to get the big scary “Thing” payoff at the end. And the 1982 John Carpenter version's over-the-top gore quickly became one of my all-time favorites.
This prequel takes all its cues from the '82 version and fills in the storyline gaps. Down in Antarctica, a Norwegian expedition team finds an entity encased in ice that looks like the Donnie Darko bunny or an evil lobster claw. Soon, the fun starts. The combination of blood spewing, gut churning, high camp and seriousness that so defined Carpenter's version remain intact in this prequel. The “Thing” can enter and hide in any human host and from there wreak havoc, so it's always a cat-and-mouse game of who could be infected. It can only be killed by fire, so obviously, the weapon of choice is the flame thrower. Let the charring begin.

OK, here we go again with another entry into the haunted house genre. You know, the ones with “haunting” and/or “house” in the title that are all but destined to suck. This flick is no exception to the sucking rule, but guess what? It's not a haunted house movie, which now leads me to believe anything with just “house” in the title sucks.
Beginning with scary, angelic music, Dream House introduces the new inhabitants to a strange and creepy house with a shady past. Things creak, squeak, and go bump in the night all in the hopes of making A-list film stars (Daniel Craig, Rachel Weiz, Naomi Watts) crap their pants. But all that changes midway through with a twist from the “is this all real?” Shutter Island school of twists, detouring into ridiculous hallucinations, visions, questionable sanity and, yes, murder.

Without the genius of director Sam Peckinpah, there would be no John Woo or Walter Hill movies. There would never have been The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or Straw Dogs without Peckinpah. Now we have Straw Dogs without Peckinpah. Some may say “homage,” I say “blasphemy.”
Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogs was his most enigmatic, open wound of a movie, complete with commentary on bigotry, racism, social and religious dysfunction, (and if you look deep enough, health care). Peckinpah's hard drinking and hard life influenced his filmmaking style and perpetual “last man standing” theme, be it against the changing time, the protection of one's home or the preservation of self-respect. It wasn't just the stories; it was Sam's vision through cinematic styling that made his films shine with a kind of dignity. He has every right to be spinning in his grave.

New horror movies give me hope and, from the looks of it, Creature had guilty pleasure, drive-in homage stamped into its very existence. At first, it seemed like my prayers had been answered, but to my dismay, this flick proved to be a lame, excruciatingly cheap slasher with no soul and one ridiculous, disjointed scene after another.

We all have to make choices. Like if someone tells you a story and says it really happened, you choose to believe it. And if it's an especially good story, well even better. If it's embellished, all over the map and totally unbelievable, but ultimately makes you laugh, well, then all the better.
If you want to believe, go ahead, but Apollo 18 quickly sheds its “found footage” concept and just digs deep into delivering some excellent horror movie goods. Please note that there are credits to Apollo 18. In other words: this shit ain't for real.

Being on vacation can change the way you think. After being nestled in the tiny comfortable city of Cianciana, Sicily for a week, all calm, relaxed and really hot, a chance to take an hour bus ride to visit the ruins of Agrigento sounded cool. But it was even hotter there so the opportunity to grab a gelato and take in the cinema at the main piazza sounded even better than half-destroyed ancient Greek columns. I was more than willing to watch Horrible Bosses in Italian, if not for the experience, then for the air-conditioned escape from the 110-degree heat wave that was bearing down. Alas, this was not to be. The movie's running time overlapped with the bus ride back. So in anticipation of my next movie review, I rifled through the upcoming shows in an internet café and came upon Fright Night. I fired off a trans-continental missive to my editor and got the green light for the 2011 remake of the 1985 horror flick that seems to run on every other channel in the weeks leading up to Halloween.
Fright Night is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but it has some funny problems and I think that's its point. The easy-to-overlook inconsistencies surrounding this film can be put aside. Just go with the goofy flow of this flick that relies on part cheese, part ridiculous and, well, part fright.