What makes David Brent the ultimate creation of Ricky Gervais is that we can all relate to him. We have all at one time in our lives been David Brent. All of us want to be liked, and accepted, and appreciated. We all want friends, and family, and some place to call home. We all have something we want to offer the world, and some kind of unfulfilled desire that we wish we could bring out for everyone to see. Ricky Gervais’ “Life on the Road” is a great sequel to the original BBC “The Office” but thankfully it’s not a movie you have to have seen the show to understand. While there are a ton of mentions of the original series, “Life on the Road” is about Gervais’ anti-hero, the man known as David Brent who has spent most of his life chasing the idea of being liked and accepted, but has no idea how to achieve it.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016)
It’s about time Hollywood started admitting that Nia Vardalos is a one trick pony. After her wildly successful vanilla sitcom romantic comedy in 2002, she returns to the original premise fourteen years later. After many more failed cinematic vehicles, and a really embarrassing attempt to turn her movie in to an actual Television sitcom, Vardalos goes back to the well to deliver what feels like a pitch for another sitcom. Or maybe a TV drama comedy, since sitcoms are so passé and old fashioned. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” is a painfully contrived and moronic sequel that takes everything that was likable about these characters and turns them in to shrill and obnoxious plot devices.
Turnabout (2016)
If Richard Linklater and Neil Labute got together to write a movie, you’d pretty much get E.B. Hughes’ stellar drama “Turnabout.” While E.B. Hughes sums up the film quite simplistically in most of the press materials, “Turnabout” will very much surprise anyone going in to it expecting a drama about a suicidal man and his long lost friend. “Turnabout” feels a lot like Linklater’s “Tape” except so much wider in scope, in the end. While director Hughes starts “Turnabout” like something of a man experiencing a revelation, he injects small doses of menace here and there to completely undercut every expectation we have when the film begins.
Black Christmas (1974): Collector’s Edition [Blu-Ray]
It’s about time the world has caught up with “Black Christmas” and (thanks to Shout!) given it the proper treatment it’s always deserved. What is arguably one of the first slasher films ever made was always out of print and hard to find while “Halloween” was granted various editions of VHS, and DVD. While “Halloween” is a masterpiece, “Black Christmas” is far more superior. It works as a slasher film, a mystery, a dark comedy, and is genuinely spine tingling in a movie draped in Christmas ephemera. It’s surprising since the tone for “Black Christmas” is almost the same tone from his other Christmas classic “A Christmas Story.” Yet director Bob Clark really never misses a beat, offering up a very scary tale about an inexplicable maniac wreaking havoc on a small neighborhood during the holidays.
The Devil’s Dolls (2016) [Blu-Ray]
It’s a shame that people still think there’s some horror fodder to be mined from worry dolls, because so far I’m not seeing it. “The Devil’s Dolls” plays out like a gory TV movie, or an extended episode of some supernatural series. There are a lot of bland characters trying to stop what is a pretty convoluted and goofy plot device involving a murderer and evil dolls. Director Padraig Reynolds’ film isn’t a complete misfire as it achieves some level of eeriness in some instances. I really do like how our characters look when they’re possessed by evil worry dolls that turn them in to psychopathic maniacs, but that’s lost in a haze of pretty mediocre melodrama and a hazy sub-plot about voodoo.
Dreamscape (1984): Collector’s Edition [Blu-Ray]
Between Joseph Ruben’s “Dreamscape” and Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” arriving at just about the same time, 1984 had a keen insight in to dreams and transforming it in to compelling entertainment. Whereas the latter film is a dark horror masterpiece, “Dreamscape” is its own kind of cinematic offering. It’s an entertaining and often intelligent look in to dreams that opts more for dark fantasy with a hint of adventure. It also sparks allusions, however coincidental, Craven’s film featuring dream demons and a villain who in one instance conjures up blades from his fingers to attack hero Alex Gardner. Despite the coincidence, it’s fun to imagine these films are kind of working within the same universe.
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) [Blu-Ray/Blu-Ray 3D]
“Metalstorm” is another one of the Not Brand X movies from the eighties where fans of “Mad Max” were treated to a long list of movies that desperately emulated its formula and aesthetic. If you survey most of the late seventies and eighties, you could probably build a whole sub-genre of post-apocalyptic movies that emulate “Mad Max” and “Escape from New York.” There’s a whole library from various studios who aimed to capture the same success and pop culture momentum as the aforementioned. “Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn” is by no means a bad movie. It is a hokey but fun movie, though. It has all the hallmarks with films of this ilk including a desert wasteland, a hot rod driving “road warrior,” and his blonde babe.