Hansel and Gretel: Witch Huntersis a spin on the Grimm’s fairytale. Hansel and Gretel are woken up by their mother and father in the middle of the night. Their father takes them out to the woods for a unknown reason where they are separated. They kids stumble upon a house made of candy where they get trapped by a witch with some serious ill intent. But the kids fight back and kill the witch, which starts their career as which bounty hunters!

Jump forward many years and the brother and sister are really good at what they do. They have custom weapons, they’ve become knows as the go to people for village witch problems. The next hour or so of the movie is a romp to stop a devious witch plan to sacrifice 12 children so that they can become immune to fire, making these witches even more dangerous.

It’s a cool monster movie. These are some vicious witches, they each have their own unique design and are dispatched in different ways, The weapons Hansel and Gretel have a really cool, the fights are creative and mostly well done (a lot of fast editing), the effects are very good too (the emphasis on making explosions extra shrapnel-y for the 3D is tiresome and gross though). Edward the Troll is one of my favorite movie creatures now. It’s actually like the witch version of Blade; comic book fantasy.

Good cast and story that’s set up nicely for a sequel. It’s rated R for violence and language, both of which seemed to be in there to try and make it edgy. The gore fits considering what’s going on and there are good moments in there (decapitations, quartering, full body explosions) the cursing always felt out of place to me. Great rental for a rainy day.

The To Do Listis in the high school coming of age genre. Here, it’s 1993 and Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) is the class valedictorian and feels pressure to become more sexually experienced before college starts. She takes it on like it’s an AP course. She writes a To Do list with different colored markers, looking up terms that she doesn’t know. It seems like everyone she knows is more experienced than her, so she turns to her two friends, her older sister and even her mother to get advise on how to make her love life blossom.

It’s a funny movie that is way more raunchy than I thought it was going to be. Some of the stuff you see Aubrey do stands right next to the most notorious stuff that the American Pie movies did. The cast is great, I really liked the 90’s setting and it felt like an honest view of sexuality from a girl’s perspective. Sure things are ramped up to set up and follow through on jokes, but I really enjoyed it. I can’t really think of anything I didn’t like (actually, the last joke wasn’t necessary). It was really well made. Perfect run time, good editing and direction, lots of references and homages. This movie snuck out, I don’t think many people know about it. I think it’ll catch a big audience when it’s released to home viewership.