Arena Wars (2024)

Available on VOD June 25th from Gravitas Ventures.

While Edgar Wright and Glen Powell are currently in the process of crafting their remake of “Running Man,” Brandon Slagle jumps to the front of the line to get his hits in first. “Arena Wars” looks great and has a classic idea from the Stephen King novel. In fact, it’s pretty much just a small budget remake of the classic film with convicts, and a game show and psychos, etc. The problem with “Arena Wars” is that is it pretty much a ton of filler with only some semblance of narrative in sparse moments. If “Arena Wars” were a bag of chips it’d only have a small hand full of chips and a ton of smelly air puffing it up.

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The Watchers (2024)

The Original novel from A.M. Shine is now available.

Now Exclusively in Theaters.

With the debut of Ishina Night Shyamalan I was hopeful that we would get a bold new voice for the genre film. Instead, she offers up a lukewarm, barely edible movie that fails as cinema, and failed as a movie you cam just use it as a means of killing time on a boring Sunday. You won’t kill time, but you might just doze off every now and then, thanks to its almost pride in tedium and dullness. For almost a ninety minutes movie, Shyamalan’s movie is painfully uneven in tone and pacing slowing down big time in various moments as a means to stage her clunky symbolism.

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Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

Now Exclusively in Theaters.

I’ve had my problems with the “Bad Boys” series in the past, but unlike the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, it’s been one of the most consistent series of action films ever released. The vision for “Bad Boys” has remained very precise and direct without adding too much or taking too much away. The stakes get higher with every film, and through it all we’ve stayed with Marcus and Mike only without adding on so much excess characters like “Lethal Weapon” fell victim to. “Bad Boys” has mainly been a vehicle for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, sure, but at least it knows what it is and tries to deliver on more complex ideas and bigger stakes.

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You Have to See This! No Contest (1995)

Now Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video, The Roku Channel

The nineties were an interesting time for action movies. You had your A tier action flicks hitting the box office, and then you had your C and D tier on home video filling shelves. Among them there was “No Contest.” If you were a premium cable subscriber in the nineties, you probably know what “No Contest” is. This movie fulfilled two big purposes in that it gave the studio their very own “Die Hard” wannabe, and it pushed their star Shannon Tweed to the forefront in her long effort to become a mainstream movie star.

Shannon Tweed was a gorgeous and sexy woman and former Playboy model in the eighties who got in to feature films in the nineties and worked hard to become a big screen actress.

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