For this week’s edition of “Shorts Round Up of the Week” we view the apocalypse through two lenses, dissect nature through the killer whale, and look at the cycle of life through animation.
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With the end of Batman: the Animated Series, the DC Comics/Warner Bros. animation golden boy of the 90s, Bruce Timm, was called upon once again to create another hit Saturday morning series. This time it would a series geared to a much younger audience, full of futuristic technology and action packed, and it would be called Batman Beyond. The show wasn’t a pandering, youth-oriented take with no substance (I’m looking at you Spider-Man Unlimited) either; it was a dark, complex, and very unique spin on the Batman lore.
Hal Barwood’s “Warning Sign” is the example of a movie with a great concept and idea, but with almost no really good delivery of said concept. “Warning Sign” is a surprising pre-cursor to films like “28 Days Later” and “Resident Evil” but never quite manages to reach the level of tension as the aforementioned titles. Instead “Warning Sign” garners a great cast with a fairly uneven and sometimes goofy delivery of a premise that could have been wrought with terror and themes about science gone awry.
I love “Critters,” I should say that first and foremost. I love the movie series, the first two are childhood favorites, and when it comes down to it, I prefer the Crites over the Gremlins. Come at me I don’t care. So when news came that we were getting a limited series based on the eighties movie series, I was excited to say the least. The trailer looked amazing and I was so ready for it. I’m not one to adhere to conspiracy theories, but the only reason I can rationalize the utterly terrible “Critters: A New Binge” is that it was once a movie that was split up in to a “series” for the sake of views.
Jordan Peele has managed to become a strong voice of horror for a new generation, not only delivering chills and thrills for fans alike, but he’s also come to offer us cinema that sets itself apart from typical genre fare. After his brilliant debut “Get Out,” Peele proves he’s here to stay with “Us,” a horror film that can be described as a masterpiece. It’s a movie that’ll be discussed for decades and promises to be one of the most widely debated horror movies of the modern era. “Us” is a scathing indictment on modern society, the idea of how trauma can affect us, and how ghosts of the past can rise to the surface, no matter how hard we try to brush them under the rug.
While comic book movies are almost always a guaranteed money maker, it’s quite a shock to many that one of the highest grossing comic book movies of all time is a movie about Aquaman. After spending decades being a basic punch line for all of pop culture, Aquaman swoops in and basically has changed the course of how we think of the character and DC’s Comic book movies. All it took was a skilled director like James Wan, and the undeniable charisma of Jason Momoa.
I didn’t discover “The Last Starfighter” until I was thirteen years old. It was 1996, and I was looking for any and all movies that peaked my interest, and “The Last Starfighter” seemed like a good time to me. For some reason “The Last Starfighter” managed to skate right by me when I was a kid, and I watched every movie. I watched everything from “Willow” and “Legend” right down to “Warriors of Virtue,” but I never actually knew there was such a thing as “The Last Starfighter.”