#Alive– This is a Korean movie about a lone survivor in an apartment complex from a rapidly spreading infection. The infected act just like those from the 28 Days Later franchise, so they are not your classic zombie. Very fast and aggressive, so the “rage” moniker fits. This could easily be seen as an offshoot of those movies.

I liked this a lot. While the carnage gets pretty big, the locations are kept at a minimum. Oh, our hero, starts the movie in his family’s apartment and remains there for most of the film. He sees the outbreak first spread from his balcony and on the TV news. The infection spreads so fast (people get bit with nary a hesitation) that Oh becomes trapped. These kinds of stories are hard to pull off well, pacing and suspense are crucial to get right and I think #Alive does both really well. You get a sense of danger right away. Oh quickly gets threatened inside his apartment and that kicks off his fight for survival. Oh never does anything really stupid, which helps. He takes risks for sure but they are all for good reasons and he prepares. Kim, a woman who is trapped in her apartment on the other side of the courtyard, is also introduced at just the right time. She’s a solid character and offers a new dimension to Oh’s fight for survival.

This movie is well made in all regards. Well acted, some great direction with fun action scenes that break up the quite character development. Special effects are great too making this a believable take on the genre. I even liked the end.

Hubie Halloween– This a stupid Adam Sandler joint. That’s all you need to know about this movie as it explains everything you can expect and you immediately know if you are in or out. This is a spiritual successor to The Water Boy. Hubie Dubois sounds and acts almost exactly the same as Bobby Boucher. He’s just older, moved to a different town, has a bicycle and he carries a Swiss army knife thermos (Inspector Gadget would be jealous) instead of a giant Gatorade dispenser.

The story checks all the boxes for a goofy Adam Sandler movie. The main character is an awkward but morally outstanding person who gets crapped on by everyone but his mother. There are more cameos than you can count. Jokes crammed in as fast as possible no matter how stupid and terrible they may be. Sometimes they do land! Throw in some slapstick to get the most basic laughs and cook for 90 minutes.

Hubie Halloween doesn’t take itself seriously and knows exactly what it’s doing. I found it to be pretty welcoming and refreshing because of that. Come take a break and let the dumb wash over you, you might be surprised at how much you needed it.

Scoob!– I was hoping this was going to be more Halloween-centric, but I still got a cute story with Scooby Do. The movie starts with how Shaggy and Scooby first meet and you better believe it’s adorable and sweet. Then they meet Fred, Velma, and Daphne on Halloween and stumble upon a criminal who they thwart. Now we have the genesis of Mystery Inc.

Years go by and the gang gets involved in a plot by Dirk Dastardly. He wants to open up a portal that can only be opened by Scooby. Much of the movie has Shaggy and Scooby separated from the rest and the bulk of the story is a test of the gang’s friendship. It’s very much a ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ vibe.

It’s a good story! The animation is very good, the plot moves along as you’d expect and hits all the major notes for the franchise. There are some surprises here and there and it was nice to watch another movie that keeps its heart on its sleeve. Great for the kids.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House– A really creepy movie that I’m not sure what to make of. It’s slow and subtle to the point where my attention wandered off a few times. A ghost/haunting story that I had a hard time caring about.

Lily is a nurse that comes to live with an elderly author named Iris Blum. She wrote many horror books and lives in this house by herself. She needs to be cared for as she has dementia and it seems simple enough. Subtle oddities happen, each brings a new layer of foreboding. Lily soon finds out that the house is believed to be haunted and Iris always refers to her as “Polly.” Iris’s estate manager explains to her that Polly is the name of the character from Iris’s book “The Lady in the Walls.” This sends Lily onto a discover path that Polly might not be a fictional character and that Iris and Lily are not alone in the house.

The best part of this movie is the atmosphere. There is a thick sense of dread and darkness lurking about from the cinematography. The entire movie takes place in the house, you never leave the interior. The sound design is fantastic as well, further selling the house as a character. The creepy bits are great too. Mold on the wall that looks like it’s starting to take over the house and the challenge to get someone to the house to take care of it (the estate manager is the only other person you see enter the house). The corner of the rug that she repeatedly finds flipped up when she’s the only one walking around in the house and Lily is sure she’s not doing it. She’d know, she’d remember. The gag with the phone is perfect and scary. It’s the simple things done right.

Aside from that, everything else is forgettable and dull. There are bits that grabbed me but the movie as a whole couldn’t keep me engaged. It’s a strange feeling which makes me come to the conclusion that I think it would be better as a short instead of feature length film. I didn’t like the end either. It came off as a ‘that’s it?’ moment to me.

A slacked off on my horror movie run last October and my goal is to get back on track for Halloween 2020.

Vampires vs the Bronx– This movie popped up in the new releases on Netflix and I decided to watch it on a whim. A pleasant surprise, it’s a lot of fun. A PG-13 comedy/horror movie that is good to watch for a lot of people. The only reason it’s PG-13 is for some cursing. Violence is at a minimum and I can’t remember any gore. The most intense effects are vampires turning to ash.

A really cute movie of a couple of kids protecting their home town from vampires. The vampires are moving into the Bronx using gentrification as a cover. Their human familiar is buying up property all over the Bronx and turning those spaces into nests. Miguel Rodriguez is the first to discover that vampires exist and when he brings his friends into it the investigation, the discover the insidious plot and take charge in protecting their home. It’s got some funny parts, is well paced and at about 80 minutes long, just the right runtime.

The Invisible Man (2020)- This turned out way better than I thought it would. Smart modern twist, great cast, and excellent tension building scenes.

The movie starts with Cecilia (Elizabeth Moss) escaping her abusive husband, Adrian. She hides at a friend’s house and only her sister knows she’s there. Cecilia planned each step of her escape, paranoid Adrian will find her. Not long after, he commits suicide and leaves her a large part of his estate. Cecilia is suspicious as Adrian was a control freak so suicide doesn’t make any sense and she quickly becomes paranoid that she’s being watch and Adrian faked his death. Suspicious events suddenly turn violent and Cecilia is forced to prove on her own that Adrian is invisibly hunting her.

There is some fantastic direction in this movie, especially at the start. The special effect is that someone is invisible so they could be anywhere. The camera moves around like it’s as suspicious as Cecilia is, that someone else is somewhere in the room with us. You look down hallways, into corners, at furniture and rugs for the indication of the weight of a person. This movie nails paranoia, which is one effective scary emotion. The escalation of danger and intensity is also fantastic. I really like the pacing as it ratchets up at just the right time and just the right way. I was engaged the entire time and surprised more than once (in terms of scares and plot). Great special effects make it believable too. There are two scenes of intense gore, the rest is pretty tame.

The Devil All the Time– I’m cheating on putting this one in the list as technically it isn’t a horror movie. It’s a messed up crime/thriller that will throw you into a pit of yuck.

Essentially, Arvin has a terrible childhood to teenage years that’s affected by a serial killer and doesn’t know it. He crosses paths with the killer years later in some kind of macabre twist of fate. Arvin grows up extremely poor with a father that is bent on some serious levels of faith belief. When his mother dies of cancer, his father spirals out of control and he goes to live with family members who are also taking care of his cousin whose mother disappeared.

This is a bleak movie where the main character struggles to live a happy life because of incredibly sinister people. With so much pain to deal with, Arvin becomes a protector. One of the things he learns from his father is to pick your battles. And when you do, you make sure it’s clear that you won the battle. This becomes his core survival technique.

I found this to be a pretty enthralling movie with engrossing stories of people being manipulated with faith, trust, and sometimes basic politeness. Throw in some police corruption and you have three stories that start in different places and times that all come together. The boy who plays Arvin at age 9 is fantastic and older Arvin is played by Tom Holland who keeps impressing me with every role he does. Props to Robert Pattinson for bringing to life uber creep Rev. Preston Teagardin. With a lot of memorable characters that travel in extremes, this one stuck with me.

The Babysitter: Killer Queen– I liked The Babysitter (2017) a lot when it came out. A good send up to 80s horror movies, with its mix of horror and comedy. While it’s not a surprise that this movie could get a sequel, I was surprised that it was made and it turned out this way. The weird scenario takes away a lot of the potential making this feel cheaper and forced.

After surviving the cult of the first movie, Cole is now in high school. To say he’s been traumatized is an understatement and no one believes him about what happened because all of the proof of the cult disappeared. So he’s the ultra weird kid in high school and that doesn’t help with his recovery. He’s invited to go to a big party at a lake which he reluctantly goes to. Low and behold, the cult is ready and waiting for him.

The Babysitter took place almost exclusively in Cole’s house. A small scale horror movie that put all of its money into wild SFX. Terrific action and death scenes, perfect for the genre. Killer Queen expands the mythology of the cult and adds locations to make the story bigger. But it doesn’t work too well. Most of the movie takes place in/around a lake that’s surrounded by nothing but dirt and rocks. At the start of the party, it looks like there are a lot of kids and in a matter of seconds, everyone is gone. The story goes from the interior of a boat to a chase away from the lake. It’s very isolating so it doesn’t add anything to the scale of the movie. Plus, every outdoor scene looks like a phony set because there is no way to light the scene realistically with where they are. You can see the giant lights they had to set up. The locations also limited what could be done for deaths so a few of those feel weak as well.

Overall, a disappointment. A stretch to make a sequel, no suspense whatsoever…I think the only thing I liked was the end which was rather touching. It would be best to leave this franchise here.

An American Pickle– When Herschel Greenbaum immigrates to the United States and starts a family, he gets a job at a pickle business (plant?) and accidentally falls into a brine vat. He’s perfectly preserved in the juice and wakes up 100 years later in modern Brooklyn, NY.

In this new world Herschel discovers that his wife died several decades ago but his son went on to have a family. He meets Ben, his great-great-grandson and they begin to live together while Herschel starts his life over (he’s basically the same age as Ben).

Seth Rogen plays both Herschel and Ben, doing a fantastic job as both. It’s a cute story that, I think, works better as a drama than a comedy. It got a few chuckles out of me and there is some really absurd things going on (besides the whole premise). The best is the relationship between the distant relatives. First Ben teaching him about modern life, them finding things they have in common and then Ben becoming jealous of Herschel’s surprising successes. The fish out of water story is an ages old one, but I found Pickle to use it well for family and social commentary. It’s a creative and fun story (based on a short story by the great Simon Rich) that’s worth watching.

Project Power– I wanted to like this way more than I did. The problem is it doesn’t do much that’s new or that interesting.

On the streets of New Orleans, a pill that gives the user superpowers for 5 minutes suddenly appears. The superpower given is different for everyone–and it could be deadly. It might make you explode right away or give you an ability that is so strong (and dangerous to anyone around you) the body can’t handle it and you more or less fall apart.

There are three main characters navigating this situation and their paths all cross, leading them to uncover where the Power pills are coming from and why they’ve hit the streets on New Orleans (the most interesting part of the story, in my opinion).

Frank the cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Art the ex-soldier(Jamie Foxx), and Robin the teenage Power dealer (Dominique Fishback). The cast is great, no complaints there. They do their best with what they are given. The problem is that each character is the textbook cliche of each description. They aren’t interesting, at all. If you’ve seen a movie in this genre that’s been made in the past 40 years or so, you’ll be able to guess each character’s background stories just by the first sentence of this paragraph. So it becomes a waiting game for them to come together as a 3 piece and see what the fallout and twist of the story are if any. I did like the ending so that’s a plus.

The standout parts of the movie are the special effects. There are some wild transformations on display that are done really well. That makes the action fun to watch and punches up the interest. Basically what kept me from turning the movie off and moving on to something else. It felt like this script was just a set up for a larger universe. A message of “I know, you just have to sit through this so I can set this up for a better sequel. Please stick with me.” That’s not a good message.

Guns Akimbo– If you’re in the mood for anarchist hyper-violence, take a long trip to crazy town with Miles when he gets forced into playing the real-life death match game, Skizm.

If you understood that sentence than you are probably in a certain age bracket that this movie caters to. When it comes to making an action movie, you need a hook. As you read above, Project Power didn’t work well for me. Guns Akimbo approach is to throw everything into the wind a try to film all of it at once as the debris falls all over the place. I wanted to see this because Daniel Radcliffe stars in it. He always does his best when doing an American accent and it always sounds weird. I find that charming–what can I say I’m a fan.

So Dan’s my entry point in this video game scenario put to film. Miles talks trash online and one time he does so to the organizer of a viral online gladiator show called Skizm where two people literally fight to the death. The guy bolts handguns to Miles’ hands and forces him to fight the current reining Skizm champion, Nix. He has 100 bullets and 24 hours to do it, or he’ll be killed. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

So Miles is well un-equipped for this. He’s far from a fighter and having guns bolted to your hands is insane and makes for many everyday problems. The whole movie is Miles running around the city trying to survive and find a way out of this mess.

Everything about this movie is absurd. The set up, the characters, the action, the violence. It’s a video game made with people instead of pixels (there’s some really great stylized animation integrated too, think Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). When the guns start firing the camera takes off with it. Kinetic direction is what I would call it.

While I appreciate what the movie does and the attempt at social commentary (GTFO the internet, it desensitizes you) it gets exhausting to watch. Blood and bodies and cursing all over the place. It’s sensory overload after sensory overload (which the John Wick series runs up to but pulls off with stunning style and reservation) that in the end doesn’t mean much. The desensitization of violence warning of the script is on full display with the final product of the movie. Not a bad movie per say but a one and done experience for me.