Review: Body Armor (a.k.a. The Protector)

I'll wager there are better, and less offensive (on multiple levels), representatives of the "cheap action film with a stuntman actually given a lead role" genre available on Netflix Instant than Body Armor, an adolescent tale of one man's struggle against a villainous big-pharma-industrialist and his plot to unleash fearsome viruses so he can sell the vaccines. Body Armor is the Netflix/home video title, though in its original made-for-cable state it was called The Protector, and neither title suits it very well. Here, then, are some ideas for better, more medically-themed titles:

The Infector – which would put more emphasis on the one mildly interesting character, the villain.

Blood Vengeance – as in, the action scenes have blood, and he's got a virus in his blood; see what I did there?

Critical Attack – as in, how we might expect film critics to respond.

Lethal Strain – as in, sitting through it is such a strain, I wouldn't recommend trying if you have a heart condition.

Feel free to use all of those, movie. Obviously you don't care what people call you.

Review: Superman Returns

A fan of the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films will find Superman Returns to be a fun, affectionate follow-up. A fan of the other two Christopher Reeve Superman films does not, so far as I am aware, exist—so this will be the last mention of them.

Briefly, the setup is that Superman left Earth to scope out the remnants of his homeworld, which took five years. In the interim, Luthor got out of prison, Lois got a human mate and had a kid, and all the other heroes in the DC universe were apparently also on long space voyages, because bad stuff kept happening. Early in the film, Superman Returns; this naturally entails some adjustment for everyone involved.

One might think this film to have been a general failure, considering that this film came out only seven years before yet another reboot (Man of Steel, which I'll be waiting for home video to see). While it's pretty evident why Superman Returns failed to spawn a franchise, on its own merits, it's actually fairly competent. Some sequences are truly cool, the effects are weak only once or twice, and it lacked a lot of the sorts of cliches we've gotten so used to that we don't even complain about them anymore. (Well, it had one big one: a female lead too young to be believable as her character. When did Lois start working at the Daily Planet? When she was twelve?)

Review: The Mist

Based on a Stephen King novella, The Mist is a skillful and gripping monster/horror flick directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) that you should definitely see if you fall into any of the following categories:

you are familiar with, and enjoy, the "survival horror" genre

you like Stephen King's style (e.g. small town in Maine, every minor character is known by name to every other minor character, families in crisis due to monsters, etc.)

…and especially if

you like a really great fuck-you ending.

I've mentioned the fuck-you ending on this blog before. The fuck-you ending is the wonderful device whereby the filmmakers craft the story such that the audience thinks "Well, they can't POSSIBLY end the movie THAT way," and then they go ahead and do it. Drag Me to Hell had a very apt fuck-you ending in which a major character, well, justifies the movie's title.

Review: Pacific Rim

If you've ever said to yourself, "I enjoy Godzilla movies for their camp value, but why hasn't anyone ever made a more realistic one, with modern special effects?", then you obviously weren't paying attention in 1998 when the execrable Godzilla remake starring Matthew Broderick came out. However, you're in luck, hypothetical monster movie aficionado, because Guillermo del Toro made Pacific Rim just for you, and you'll be satisfied by it. The rest of us will have more mixed feelings.

Pacific Rim is undeniably effective at doing what it sets out to do: make huge robots punch huge monsters and make it look awesome and believable. My giggles of enjoyment occurred during these scenes, which demonstrate skillful design, flawless digital imagery, and imaginative storyboarding. Unfortunately—in this age when special effects are no longer special, but expected—it needed to do more than that to win over that segment of the audience who DOESN'T enjoy Godzilla movies for their camp value, represented by a couple guys we overheard leaving the theater, one of whom said "Well, that was the stupidest movie I've seen in a long time."

Review: Seven Below

Some years ago I watched the late-era Val Kilmer movie Spartan because I'd always been a fan of Kilmer but I'd seen some online scuttlebutt to the effect of "Hey, hurr hurr, how 'bout that washed-up loser Val Kilmer, huh? Look at these complete shit movies he's makin' now," so after I finished Spartan, I thought, "Well, okay, that wasn't GREAT, but it was far from complete shit, and Kilmer was pretty darn good in it; so, Internet haters? What the hell?"

Well, this. This the hell.

The infinitesimal-budget horror flick Seven Below (or 7 Below, as it's known on Netflix Instant, not that I'm advising you to look for it) involves a group of tourists heading into the wilderness of Minnesota but winding up "trapped" by "dangerous" weather in a creepy old house full of booze and ghosts and bad acting. I give it credit for having a cast of characters not comprised entirely of oversexed high-school kids, but the cast we do get nevertheless fails to be interesting. At least they fit in well with the similarly uninteresting story, music, direction, dialogue…