Review: Woyzeck

Meet Franz Woyzeck.

You think YOU've got it bad? Try being Woyzeck for a day. He's a grunt in an indeterminate mid-1800s European army—I assume German, but he could be German-French in the same sense that most movie Romans are British-Roman. He's being cuckolded by his young wife (who looks like Jewel Staite with a crushed spirit) and the high-school-quarterback-like drum major. He's also a human guinea pig for an ambitious scientist who's been feeding him nothing but peas, and who rewards him with much-needed cash every time he behaves crazily.

Naturally, therefore, Woyzeck's descending into insanity, and just as naturally, there's no going back…since this is a Werner Herzog film.

Review: Gator King

Gator King is a Rhino direct-to-video release that, of the nearly 90 movies I've reviewed for this blog (which includes scores of titles I knew would be terrible going in), is without a doubt the dullest.

Imagine Time Chasers if its plot entailed not time travel but alligator smuggling, if its cast had far less investment in what they were doing, if the chase scenes were even more cheap and stupid, and if it induced Z-grade celebrity actors to somehow embarrass themselves—in this case, Michael Berryman (Captain Rixx from the TNG episode "Conspiracy"), Antonio Fargas (TV's Huggy Bear), and Joe Estevez, who of course is reason I watched this.

Review: The Lego Movie

One cannot fully evaluate the merits of The Lego Movie—a movie as fun for both kids and adults as the titular brick toys themselves—without taking into consideration the film to which it owes its existence, Toy Story. No studio on the planet would have greenlit this wacky, hyperactive, often-subversive, and really pretty weird movie had Toy Story not demonstrated to the hyperconservative Hollywood system that movies with all-toy casts can be successful. (Now we need a similar revelation for female-character-heavy casts, which The Lego Movie itself proves the absence of).

The success of The Lego Movie—following as it does the Toy Story franchise and the similar Wreck-It Ralph—introduces the distressing possibility that all the best kid's movies from now on will revolve only around toys. Whether that grim harbinger of things to come proves accurate or not, at the very least we'll have a curious little "golden age" of quirky kid fare.

I suppose it would not be the best use of my time in this review to tell you that "Everything Is Awesome!!!" about this movie; you likely already know that most of it is. Therefore, I will focus on expectation-management: what are the places where The Lego Movie falls a little short, so that those of you who haven't seen it don't get your hopes up?

Review: Road House

Ah, Road House. I'd avoided experiencing this bleak bit of cinema history until recently, more or less on purpose. As is so often the case, the factor that made me finally get around to it was its impending departure from Netflix Instant. (It's gone now, so don't bother looking for it. There's a reason I waited to post this review.) The only reason I didn't just let it expire was because people talk about this movie a lot, and the strange things I'd heard…well, I just sort of wanted to understand.

My goal in this review is, as much as possible, to make you understand so you don't have to see it. Because whatever else can be said of this movie, it has a certain uniqueness, and unfortunately that can be attractive sometimes.

Be assured that Road House is in fact repellent from start to finish.