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Released in time for International Women’s Month, Steven Kammerer’s “Ada” is a wonderful and beautifully acted tale of one of the world’s unsung heroes. Kammerer uses his short format to tell the tale of Ada Lovelace, a well beyond her time genius who envisioned the plans for the first ever computer program in the 1840’s. Her notes were later discovered by Alan Turing used as inspiration for the very first computer.
It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen a return to Richard Donner’s original supernatural series. The original “The Omen,” which was a response to the fame of “The Exorcist” has managed to live on as a horror gem in the ilk of “The Exorcist.” It’s ripe with storytelling potential and shockingly, “The First Omen” takes us back in to this world with near perfect success. If you had told me that “The First Omen” would be a weird, creepy, and memorable horror prequel a year ago, I’d have been as skeptical as ever. I doubted that “The Omen” really had anywhere left, especially after the painfully underrated “The Awakening” in 1991.
But Arkasha Stevenson’s debut is a brutally suspenseful unfolding of the origins of not just Damien, but the plot to conceive of the antichrist.
Dave Wilson’s movie feels like one of those comic book movies made in 2003 when studios made comic book movies but were embarrassed to admit it. So they’d make their movies without giving us what the fans wanted hence a “Punisher” movie without his signature skull shirt. With “Bloodshot” what we’re getting a movie based on the somewhat obscure nineties comic, but a lot of the changes are obviously made from Sony and Vin Diesel to side step the fact he’s in a comic book movie. He looks very little like Bloodshot, doesn’t often don his signature red chest spot, and isn’t even referred to as Bloodshot.
But he’s Bloodshot! Don’t worry, all five people that loved the Valiant comics universe*!
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the pitch meeting for “Giantess Attack vs. Mecha-Fembot!” I imagine that it involved hastily written cocktail napkins stapled together as a script, some cheap martinis, a randomizer that picked names of various porn stars out of some huge list Full Moon has stored in a database. For all intents and purposes, they manage to squeeze by barely on an hour long movie that really isn’t a movie. It’s a movie in the traditional sense, but the whole idea of giant women fighting is a framework for a lot of comedy skits.
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The Soska Sisters hit absolute rock bottom with what is possibly one of the dumbest zombie movies released in the last few years. It’s dumb, and when you think it can’t, it finds new ways to get dumber and dumber. The Soska sisters are usually a very talented pair of directors, but with “Festival of the Living Dead,” everything wreaks of pure amateurism, but exploiting “Night of the Living Dead” for fan appeal, to the painfully stupid script, and just downright terrible acting. To make things worse, the premise and concept takes such leaps and bounds to connect to the universe of “Night of the Living Dead.”
And it’s only “Night of the Living Dead” since that’s the only movie in the series in the public domain.
The main reason to watch “Ghosted” is for Keith Black who is about as funny and uncomfortable as can be for a movie about a man making a desperate plea for a girl after a seemingly good date. Director and star Black creates a small budget but funny and relatable short that finds Keith’s character sitting in a car one day checking in on a date he’d had the previous night. Not willing to really take the hint, he leaves her message after message, all of which are composed of awkward responses, and verbal fumbles that I found entertaining.