Based on the smash sleeper hit children’s series written by J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is about a baby who is dropped off at the footstep of his only living relatives (or “Muggles” as they are called by magical people) house by two strangers. He is now ten and is an outcast by his uncle and aunt who spoil their fat son. Soon, strange things begin to happen and Potter begins to wonder why. Soon enough, he is confronted by a huge man who claims Potter is a master magician who must attend the “Hogwarts school of magic and wizardry”. There, he meets Ronald Weasly and Hermoine Granger; two precocious and rambunctious wizard’s in training who instantly become Potter’s friends.
K-Pax (2001)
In the movie, Kevin Spacey plays Prot, a man who appears at a train station one day without explanation and is eventually taken into the mental institution where a prominent doctor Mark Powell played by Jeff Bridges analyzes Prot who claims he is an alien from a planet called K-Pax. Doctor Powell who is having problems with his family, delves deeper and deeper into the mans psyche and begins to discover whether or not this man is a true alien or just a troubled genius of a man. What’s there to say about this movie?
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Ever since I was a kid I’ve always heard about “Monty Python”, but I never knew what they were famous for. Then I became older and learned about them from my uncle. Later on, I decided to try them out, so I bought “Monty Python and The Holy Grail”, my uncle told me that if I wanted to be introduced to “Monty Python”, this movie would be the perfect place to start. Monty Python is definitely not for folks used to the conventional and humdrum. They’re bold, and often gutsy in their skill sets to arouse laughter from audiences.
Summer Catch (2001)
In the movie, we meet Ryan Dunne, a young baseball hopeful who, along with many others, are hoping to be discovered on the Cape Cod baseball league. While doing that, He is courting the local rich girl Tenley Parrish played by Jessica Biel. But her father will stop at nothing to stand in the way of their love. This is a simple dumb summer film, ergo the title, which is a pretty fun movie to watch….. that’s all. Ahoy, we have another stinker from the depths of teenage heartthrob/ terrible actor Freddie Prinze Jr.
John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001)
Now then, I’ll get straight to the main aspect of the movie that had my attention. The soundtrack. John Carpenter just has a knack for making innovative and creepy original soundtracks to these films. This soundtrack is kind of a hard rock guitar riff sound. The characters aren’t too shabby. The one that caught my attention most of the time was Natasha Henstridge who is s-o-o-o hot in this flick, especially when she’s kicking ass. Rapper Ice Cube is just great as the hardcore bull talking “Desolation” Williams, a sole prisoner who knows all about the aliens. He’s quick with the gun and manages to hold his own within this cast.
Vanilla Sky (2001)
Unfortunately, this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. One can find that hard to believe when you have a power packed cast like Tom Cruise, Kurt Russell, and Cameron Diaz along with director Cameron Crowe at the helm. To tell you what I thought of this movie while watching would be too graphic to display, but this is a painful movie to watch.
Campfire Stories (2001)
I love anthology movies and I’m usually open to low budget horror movies because you never know when you might come across a gem, so I checked this one out unbiased. Boy, was I in for something. First, the movie begins with a badly computer animated flaming skull (how original) who speaks in a deep voice talking about creepy tales and something else. In this atrocity, we meet two hapless guys on the road in the middle of the woods driving to a “Middle of the woods” party. They get a flat tire after nearly running over a young woman named Natalie (Jamie Lynn Sigler) and she begs them to give her a ride.
They have to await a tow truck and run into a park ranger (Dave Johansen) who begins telling them three tales. (It gives them an excuse to be in the setting) and they meet Natalie in the middle of the road (They’re a bit suspicious but never ask where her car is or where she’s going) and they meet Ranger Bill who invites them in the forest to tell the stories. The first story is hilarious as we see badly edited scenes of a dentist torturing a patient in a mental asylum. He then breaks free from his restraints made out of rope (Why? Who knows) and jams a scalpel into his head. Four years later he’s now a janitor who gets bullied by four football players. These guys are boneheaded jocks who blurt out insults like “He’s such a penile implant.”
They chase him into the forest to kill him and he begins knocking them off one by one. The second one has these three boneheaded obnoxious bikers who drive a car who see a Native American buy coffee in the restaurant. He carries around a magical sack which no one asks about and he leaves after they insult him. They follow him home and watch as he smokes some killer weed. He begins hallucinating in a badly animated sequence as snakes wrap around him and he sees wolves. They strangle him to death and decide to take his drugs. They soon begin hallucinating and discover he’s not exactly dead. I found this story to be so bad it was painful. The third one is least terrible but is still very annoying as we have this whiny girl and her boyfriend kissing in a car and the girl, for some reason, begins telling of how her insane grandmother lived in their house until she died.
So they decide not to do the funky monkey and she goes home to her friend. She decides she wants to invite them back and play a joke on them. So, the boyfriends come over they drink and talk for a long time and they blindfold the boyfriends leading them around the house. One by one the guys get killed by an unknown person and the friend gets killed. The entire trilogy of idiocy ends with a hilarious and annoying final scene that left me dumbstruck. I usually love anthology movies but this one is utterly unwatchable.