If you like your apocalyptic fiction compiled a lot of the same old tropes you’ve seen a thousand times, then “Strain 100” might be up your alley. It’s “The Walking Dead” with a convenient dash of “The Last Of Us” thrown in, and none of the real social commentary or rich character focus. For all intents and purposes, “Strain 100” has some good ideas and fun moments of zombie carnage, but it’s bogged down by so many editing and writing problems from the outset. The zombies are pretty much the best aspect of the movie, truth be told.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Kalley’s Last Review (2020)
Man, Julia Bailey Johnson’s short horror film “Kalley’s Last Review” is gruesome. I mean it’s not just gruesome, but it’s also a sharp edged commentary on influencer culture and review channels on youtube. It’s kind of like watching someone just gradually descend in to madness, and while you really want to stop them, you can only just sit and watch them slide further.
Last Call (2022)
There’s a lot of head scratching moments during director Becca Kozak’s horror comedy “Last Call,” and that’s both a good thing and a band thing. Director Kozak definitely relies on not really leaning on expectations, but that leads us down a bizarre narrative that I, frankly, wasn’t too clear on. It’s unpredictable, and weird, which is a plus. But I couldn’t quite understand to what end our villains were working toward.
Super Mario Bros. – The Great Rescue of Princess Peach! (Super Mario Bros.: Peach-hime Kyūshutsu Dai Sakusen!) (1986)
By 1986, the world had only gotten so far as “Super Mario Bros.” on the Nintendo/Famicom, so Masami Hata’s “The Great Rescue of Princess Peach!” as a movie stretches as far as it can on very little source material. With the original NES game, they only gave you so much about the lore, and motivations of the villains, so the anime movie itself relies on a bizarre, anemic plot that, I can assume, is not at all canonical.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
It’s been about thirty years since Nintendo allowed one of their IP’s to be translated in to a feature film, and now that video game movies have upped the ante in substance, the time is right for a return from the Mario Bros. Their mascot Super Mario makes his big screen return in a new animated feature from the studio that gave us the (ugh) Minions. In spite of that fact, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is really quite good, and dare I say one of the best video game movies ever made. As with most IP’s of Mario’s ilk, there was some ballyhoo around casting decisions made for his return, but “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” comes out looking quite shiny.
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
There’s always a point where fiction begins to catch up with reality, and even sometimes forecast it, and we’re at a pivotal point of pop culture where artists are commenting on the class divide. What with the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer, now more than ever the film world is ripe for commentary through various genres. We saw it with “Glass Onion” and we basically see it with “Triangle of Sadness” which wears its social satire on its sleeve, and relishes in its darkness and penchant for spitting on social structures.
Bettie Page Reveals All! (2013)
In tribute to what would have been Bettie Page’s 100th birthday on April 22nd, Music Box Films has re-released “Bettie Page Reveals All!” To this day there’s something about Bettie Page that no one can quite pin down. She’s a Conservative woman with immense charm and sexual allure, and there’s never been anyone who could top it. Even today with so many admirers and imitators, Page remains in a league of her own. She was the idea of sexual liberation in a Conservative society, and to this day she remains a symbol for repressed sexuality and liberation.