Movie Scum

If you ever wondered if the 'found footage' genre would graduate from horror into loftier pursuits (Chronicle notwithstanding), End of Watch might be the film for you. At least, sort of. I was sold on a gritty cop film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña with the aforementioned style but the end result was less than impressive. Imagine COPS: The Movie with attractive actors, love interests, and a big bad in the form of a very shallow drug kingpin and you have the idea.  Gyllenhaal and Pena are two almost-rogue LA cops who manage to get entangled into more shootouts and busts than Riggs and Murtaugh with even more chatty banter but less characterization. As a result of them sticking their noses into a drug war, the two are (eventually) drawn into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles that permeates almost every other film by David Ayer . Like the "found footage" angle that is more easily explained by having an invisible cameraman, the film suffers from havin...

Even though Paranormal Activity 4 has the same goals and hits the same notes as its predecessors, it is the weakest entry in the series by far. As another year passes and the already thin concept is stretched more transparent, the filmmakers stubbornly refuse to jettison the established storyline even though the weighty backstory is a hindrance. The main focus this time is teenaged Alex and her family who experience weird happenings after a young boy comes to stay with them. Alex convinces her boyfriend to set up the family’s endless supply of Macbooks to record everything even though that footage is more for our benefit than Alex’s. While I have enjoyed the series up until now to varying degrees, PA4 offers nothing new and worse, it is rather boring. There are a handful of decent jump scares and one extended uneasy scene but the rest is simply filler while we wait for those. The lengthy buildup to shocks and scares doesn’t work this time around since we know what to expect and t...

Honestly, I don't think I even know of this film before it came out in theaters a few weeks ago and I certainly had no desire to see it. Strangely though, Chronicle received so many positive reviews (85% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.6 on IMDb) that I thought I would be remiss without seeing it, especially as I had a free movie ticket burning a hole in my pocket. If all you know about it is "superhero found footage film" then stop now and go see it. I can almost guarantee you won't be disappointed. I suppose this was somewhat covered in X-Men: First Class (though honestly I don't remember how much), but the film's main angle is 'what would you do if you had super powers?' For Andrew ( Dane DeHaan ), Matt ( Alex Russell ), and Steve ( Michael B. Jordan ), the first answer is to fool around with it, all for fun and games of course. After their chance encounter with an odd foreign object, the trio develops the power of telekinesis and quickly use it to beam...

At this point, the Paranormal Activity series is almost critic-proof since it is dirt-cheap to produce, brings in fists full of dollars and is generally well-received by audiences. With the departure of the Saw franchise last year, October needed another big, R-rated series to take its place to win over the hard earned cash of horror-loving moviegoers. I said in the review of PA2: “It is pretty safe to say that if you liked the first PA, you will probably like this one too.” Amend that to say the first two PA films and you have my excerpt for Parnormal Activity 3 . That isn’t a bad thing … unless you really hated the preceding films. The formula for these stories are pretty simple: a family experiences some traumatic experience leading to the dominant male of the household placing a camera, or cameras, around the house to document something or another. This film sets up the loving family of Julie, mother of Katie and Kristi, and her boyfriend Dennis who conveniently is a wedding p...

After the original was released and grossed roughly 7000x its budget at the ticket counters alone, it didn’t take long for a sequel to be greenlit. Now with the Saw series allegedly over, Paramount has positioned Paranormal Activity to take the crown for late October horror franchises that are likely to get beaten into the ground. It is pretty safe to say that if you liked the first PA, you will probably like this one too. But that is mostly because it is the same exact movie as the first with different choices in how it is shot and more characters. And a dog. And a monster robot pool cleaner. While I didn’t dislike Paranormal Activity 2 , I cannot really see where it can go from here for the already planned part three or beyond. The first worked well because it was different, not so much in plot or execution, but from what we were seeing at the time. The gimmick though is gone and it is almost as if the producers decided to remake the first movie to throw the audience off. After ...

Also contained within is a quasi-review of Quarantine . For all intents and purposes, I have seen [ REC ] before by way of its almost shot-for-shot and beat-by-beat remake Quarantine which was in production before [REC] was even released. Apparently, the producers used a shooting script for the basis of Quarantine so many of the scenes, reveals, and mayhem all run in conjunction if you were to play the two films at the same time. Having not seen the remake of Psycho , I cannot say how this approach worked before but I would imagine that experience was as bizarre and fraught with deja vu as watching the original film to one I had seen before. Even with it being almost two years since seeing the Americanized-remake, many scenes, shots, and even scares were predictable but still some were not. Largely though, this did not hinder my enjoyment of the film one bit. The film carries with a frenetic, cinéma vérité-style in the same vain as The Blair Witch Project , Cloverfield , and its...

Hollywood is a funny animal. Film studios are willing to drop millions of dollars on movies with horrible movies starring big actors, big gambles that may or may not pay off, and run of the mill sequels that have little redeeming cinematic value but are a sure win at the box office. Yet a movie like Paranormal Activity comes along and flounders for years on the festival circuit (hence the 2007 production year) before finally being picked up and begrudgingly released to theaters throughout the country. If you follow movies at all, you know the gist of the story. Our couple, Micah and Katie, have been noticing some strange activity in their home. Tech geek Micah decides to get a camera to not only annoy the hell out of Katie in the bathroom but to capture any evidence of the strange occurrences. As the entire film takes place inside the house, mostly with just Micah and Katie, we are confined with them as the incidents occur more frequently and more violently leading to many scene...