Tiny Toon Adventures (1990)

Tiny Toon Adventures (1990)

Back in the eighties and nineties, many companies sought out to “youthify” their most popular properties and, presumably for the same reason, Warner Bros. gave their Looney Tunes brand a fresh new series… which made no sense considering one of the best shows on the ABC Saturday Morning Line Up for years was The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show. That said, rather than featuring just younger versions of the Looney Tunes the creators of Tiny Toon Adventures opted instead to present us with a line up of brand new, hip, “extreme” versions of the original characters.

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Red Riding Hood (2011)

It’s hard to imagine but Hollywood just never seems to be short of attempts to re-think and re-imagine “Red Riding Hood. And surely enough they never seem to think of an interesting enough idea for a franchise of any kind. I wish they’d stop by now. “Red Riding Hood” is Catherine Hardwicke’s efforts to transform “Red Riding Hood” in to this Puritanical, Stephanie Meyer tinted romance horror film that never works as well as it wants to.

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The Hobbit (1977)

Although not as good or edgy as Ralph Bakshi’s more adult interpretations of the “Lord of the Rings” novels, Rankin Bass’s “The Hobbit” is a very good animated movie that gets about as dark and edgy as possible. The movie is a nice and swiftly paced seventy seven minutes, allowing for this single adventure to go from point A to point B without ever missing a step. Unlike the bloated trilogy we saw from Peter Jackson, “The Hobbit” gets the job done significantly better, even if the pacing is particularly rushed.

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Little Vampire (Petit Vampire) (2020)

Based on the Children’s book series The Little Vampire, from German writer Angela Sommer-Bodenburg, the story from the author has been adapted before, most notably in the 2000 live action kid’s film. This version is directed by Joann Sfar with about as much competence as is humanly possible, and it’s sadly hindered by the poor American dub that sadly almost seems exclusively available. I wonder if there is a version with the original voice track, but sadly the movie isn’t so good that I will necessarily go and seek it out.

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The Elderly (Viejos) (2023)

Raúl Cerezo, and Fernando González Gómez’s horror thriller may not be the most entertaining genre film, but it certainly is one of the most depressing movies about aging I’ve ever seen. With movies like “The Elderly,” although there is almost certainly another horror element waiting around the corner, the pair of directors are keen on depicting aging and being elderly as perhaps the most horrific circumstance to ever find ones self in. “The Elderly” is a lot about this inexplicable series of events involving the local elderly population, many of whom are becoming violent toward their family and toward themselves.

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All Fun and Games (2023)

It’s really too bad that directors Eren Celeboglu, and Ari Costa’s supernatural horror movie virtually came and went without much of a trace in 2023. It’s not by any metric a complete masterpiece, but it sure is a fun little horror film packed with a lot of mythos that I wanted to learn a lot more about. “All Fun and Games” is primarily about the fragility of the family unit and how this family known as the Fletchers are thrown in to disarray and pure chaos at the drop of a hat.

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Monster Family (2017)

You could be forgiven for mistaking “Monster Family” as a part of the “Hotel Transylvania” movie universe, but I don’t think that’s unintentional. “Monster Family” bases itself on a lot of other better films for what amounts to such a flat affair. Despite its lively animation, everything about “Monster Family” is a messy, convoluted, and bizarre affair that never makes much sense, despite its attempts to bring itself down to Earth as a tale about family unity. Holger Tappe delivers what is just a sloppy, derivative mash-up of “Hotel Transylvania,” “The Incredibles” and “The Munsters.” And it’s never as fun as either of the aforementioned, even at its best.

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