Hot Shots! (1991)

Director: Jim Abrahams

Cast: Charlie Sheen, Cary Elwes, Valeria Golino, Jon Cryer

Have I Seen It Before: Chalk another one up to the “I had cable in the 90s, so I had to have” although I imagine I did seek the film out at some point.

Did I Like It: There’s not a lot of room for creative criticism when it comes to films like this. It all boils down to: Is it closer to Airplane! (1980) or is it closer to the dreary—and thankfully curbed in recent years, after a quick look at Wikipedia—work of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. At least one part of ZAZ is directly—read: not just getting a contractual credit—involved. That’s a big step in the right direction. It was released earlier than 1996. That’s another step in the right direction. So, yes, this is “one of the good ones.” You will laugh more often than you don’t. Whether or not it bothers you if you’re laughing at something occasionally pretty stupid is a question you’re probably not concerned with if you have decided to watch Hot Shots!.

The only thought I think I can add to the discussion is wondering why there has yet to be some discussion, on some level—especially after the unassailable box office success of Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and the reasonable success of The Naked Gun (2025)—of doing a legacy sequel to this. Sure, Sheen may be a little bit harder to get an insurance bond on, but give him the same deal they gave Robert Downey Jr. in the 2000s: Make him put his own bond money up, incentivizing to finish the movie. It could a be a big success for him, and a reasonable amount of money for Disney. Hot Shots!: Topper. The poster sells itself. Get Jeff Bridges to play Lloyd Bridges son…

Why am I not pitching this right now?

The Amazing Mr. X (1948)

Director: Bernard Vorhaus

Cast: Turhan Bey, Lynn Bari, Cathy O’Donnell, Richard Carlson

Have I Seen It Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: It’s so rare that a film noir rolls so slowly in its opening half, only to mostly recover in its second, that I’m tempted to give the film a recommendation on that criteria alone.

When the film is about the glassy-eyed widow (Bari) who hears voices coming in from the coast, the film is so deeply cliché and boring that I was struck only by the behavior of audience members around me. Cell phones went off with impunity. One guy snored like a jackhammer through most of the film. I’d be more mad at him if I was more thoroughly convinced I, too, didn’t fall asleep for a stretch. Scorsese recently complained about movie audiences, and I’m starting to see where he’s coming from.

When Alexis (Bey) really turns on his wares to keep his con going, the film veers into deeply embarrassing territory. I can’t really fathom any sort of optical effects that would still work after nearly eighty years, but I’m also having a bit of a hard time imagining that anyone saw the various phantoms Alexis creates and not laugh at any point in history. Grafting such video effects on to a noir drains a lot of the charm that even the cheaper entries in the genre can offer.

But then the film offers a fairly interesting twist, and does so at exactly the right time. What was a silly trifle for so long becomes an engrossing cat and mouse game that—would this even be a spoiler—results in the shifty participants in the plot getting their just desserts, and just an inch of redemption moments before it would have been too late. The film thankfully doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to get you to believe its more groan-worthy moments, and doesn’t let up on the tension until the end. That may be all I need from noir. Your mileage may vary.

The Omen (1976)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Harvey Spencer Stephens

Have I Seen It Before: I wasn’t on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods when they did it, but there definitely was a moment where the remake was coming out in 2006 and I was resolute in my need to turn my nose up and only watch the original.

Did I Like It: I don’t get a sense that my opinion about the film has changed in those nearly twenty years, though. I’m never not delighted to see David Warner in anything, and the Whovian in me that developed since then was delighted to see Patrick Troughton.

Ultimately, though It’s a bit too arch to be too terribly frightening. I would imagine to audiences in the 1970s, digging in a grave and finding a jackal is frightening, but I’m reasonably sure I’ve laughed at that moment at least twice in the 21st century. Special effects are vivid and often in slow-motion to add dread of the carnage to come. But something tells me that wasn’t really David Warner’s head that got sliced off by that errant pane of glass.

Also, one feels that there are too many characters, most of whom don’t stick around long enough to either unnerve or engender sympathy. I’m consistently shocked—and have occasionally had to remind myself—that the film isn’t based on a novel or any other source material. It always feels as if they were protecting themselves from criticisms of abandoning this phantom source material, and had to give each element its due. Even then, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) abandoned all signs of Tom Bombadil, and The Godfather (1972) never checks in with Lucy Mancini until Part III runs around, at which point it completely ignores what we learned about her in the novel. Which, again, doesn’t absolve this film. It’s just overcrowded for the sake of being overcrowded.

Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)

Director: Tony Randel

Cast: Claire Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Kenneth Cranham, Doug Bradley

Have I Seen It Before: I’m 90% certain that I’ve seen this movie all the way through at some point. I am reasonably certain that I’ve never seen any of the subsequent films in the series.

Did I Like It: I came to a conclusion while recently re-watching Hellraiser (1987) that if this series wasn’t—at it’s very basic core—about fucking, then it might make a pretty good horror movie for kids.

There are odd little creatures all about. It’s about the creaky, unsettling parts of living in a new house. The monsters aren’t irretrievably lethal monsters of the other slasher movies of the era. Often they are willing—if not strangely eager—to negotiate just how much danger you are in. That all is ignoring the fact that the McGuffin that unifies this series*

The fact that the one human trait that gets people in trouble in these movies is hedonism almost makes it more childlike.

Again, as one ignores the fundamental undercurrent of sadomasochism. Which I will admit, is hard to do.

This movie is somehow even more consumed with almost fairy tale qualities. There’s a new character who we can see this world through, a quiet, traumatized girl (Imogen Boorman), Julia (Higgins) is even more of a wicked stepmother than she was before (if that’s possible), and it all centers around this massive labyrinth standing in for hell. Throw in David Bowie and a handful of muppets, and you’d be off to the races.

Did I just come up with the latest Muppet re-make? Everybody’s a puppet, except the mad psychiatrist (Cranham)?

Can something be simultaneously a terrible and great idea?

*At least I think the puzzle box is the unifying factor in the endless series of direct-to-video entries. Judging from some of those posters, it might just be the internet that summons the cenobites. Which, now that I type that, kind of makes sense.

The Naked Gun (2025)

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston

Have I Seen It Before: Nope! Might have seen it in theaters, but time is finite, and certain movies only play at certain theaters. Such is life. Really looked forward to it showing up on Paramount +, though.

Yes, I am ashamed.

Did I Like It: Great comedies surprise you. So, maybe, The Naked Gun isn’t that great. I think any film that dusts off the now ancient joke of lowering a Spirit Halloween sign on a place recently closed is content with somewhat limited ambitions.

Truly awful comedies tend to give you all of their best bits in trailers and clips, hoping that they can paper over deficiencies in hopes of a better-than-expected opening weekend. The OJ joke? It’s there*. The bit with the chili dogs? Check. I even tripped over a clip of an truly odd sequence where Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson) is absolutely inconsolable after Beth (Anderson) accidentally re-connects his TiVo to the internet, thereby expiring a cache of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. I really would have like to come into that bit cold.

And yet, I kind of enjoyed it.

Maybe I was able to be aware that throughout the film I was laughing about as much as I did throughout any of the three Leslie Nielsen-starring original films. Judged by its own standards, this new Naked Gun doesn’t feel like an ill-considered notion, and it entertains plenty. That might have something to do with Neeson in the main role. Like the 1980s rehabilitation of Nielsen from respectable leading-man to the goofiest man who ever lived, bringing the late-stage Neeson action persona into a goofy comedy works. At some point, Ed Helms circled the leading role, and he would have been dreadful, coming originally from comedy as he did. One might yearn for a Jon Hamm, but we already know he’s funny. Let Neeson have his turn.

*Credit where credit is due that they didn’t keep going back to that well, and I might have forgiven them if they had.

Predator 2 (1990)

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Cast: Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Rubén Blades, María Conchita Alonso

Have I Seen It Before: Yeah, but with only the thinnest of memories. As we approach Predator: Badlands I feel that need to run through the series.

Did I Like It: And I’m not entirely sure why. All the films in the series are so pointedly different, only the faintest wisps of a canon is built from entry to entry. We’ll probably never get to this film on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, but for listeners of the show I had to have Kenzi explain to me the rich tapestry of the Yautja that came to a head in Prey (2022), and how most of it happens in the background of this particular film.

And that would pretty much wrap up the “what’s good” section. A xenomorph skull is the kind of thing films are filled with these days, and apparently there’s more. The film certainly makes an attempt to be different than the original Predator (1990), and I can’t imagine spending any more time with Dutch (Schwarzenegger) would feel derivative in any franchise outside of those created by James Cameron*. The rifle at the end is the seed from which the mighty oak of Prey.

That’s about it.

The rest of the film is an action movie for action movie’s sake. Run, run, run. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Who are we running from? Who are we shooting towards? Why does it matter. These are not the kinds of things we can address in a 108 minute runtime, and you wouldn’t be particularly interested in the answers. This is made all the more aggravating when it becomes clear that this Predator film is only fitfully interested in being about the Predator. It’s a hodgepodge of warmed over ingredients from other franchise sequels of the era. I’ll bet all the money in my pocket that Bill Paxton was cast mainly to tap into the energy he brought to Aliens (1986), and nearly every second of this film is consumed with the same lack of amiability that weighed down RoboCop 2 (1990), released only a few months earlier.

*If you do ignore the Terminator films, Arnold really has a lot more restraint about sequels than I think we ever give him credit for.

Camille (1921)

Director: Ray C. Smallwood

Cast: Alla Nazimova, Rudolph Valentino, Rex Cherryman, Arthur Hoyt

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I know I’ve gone to too many Second Saturday Silent Shorts when I a) have seen the film already and b) have already written a review of it.

Did I Like It: I can generally tell if I’m in trouble if I had a way, way better time with the Felix the Cat short than I did with the feature. A week later, and I can’t even remember what the Felix short was about. Something about a cat labor dispute? That sounds right.

It is well known—and our organist pointed out before the movie played—that most silent movies are gone forever. Anthony Slide in Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation* estimates that 75% of the films made before the release of The Jazz Singer (1927) have disappeared, with the thinking being that retaining them would have little financial value. No one to my knowledge has come up with a more authoritative number than that, so I’ll take it as the truth.

So, then I’m left to wonder why any of Charlie Chaplin’s films wound up lost, and somehow this film survived. That might be a cheap shot, one that a kinder reviewer might chalk up to a difference in sensibilities over the course of a century.

But really? This is what passed for romance in the years between World Wars? Armand (Valentino, clearly meant for bigger and better things, or anything really) goes all googly eyed for Marguerite (Nazimova**). They go back and forth for an hour that feels like three, and then she dies.

Maybe dying before consumation was what passed for romantic fantasy before epidurals in childbirth became common. Maybe we really are that different from people 100 years ago.

*Yes, I’ve read it. Just who do you think you’re talking to?

**We were also warned by the organist that Nazimova’s defining characteristic is a fright wig, and I should really learn to take these pre-show warnings more seriously.

Day of the Dead (1985)

Director: George A. Romero

Cast: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty

Have I Seen It Before: Never*.

Did I Like It: I wonder sometimes where I developed my social allergy to the zombie genre. I’m not entirely sure why it’s been such a mystery. Zack Snyder (there he is again) tried to make the genre something palatable to the widest audience possible, and The Walking Dead tried (and, one supposes, is still trying) to make prestige drama out of the material.

At it’s best, it’s neither of those things. Romero understood this. That’s why his movies (still) work. There’s an unflinching, and yet somehow still savagely entertaining quality about Romero’s undead. They may have been fairly tame ghouls in Night of the Living Dead (1968), but by the time he really got cooking with Dawn of the Dead (1978), there’s an equal measure of social commentary on display, and the zombies are truly dead bodies come to life. Organs are sliding out of them. They are wet, and slimy. I don’t want to be around them, and yet I cannot look away. Today’s zombies are just rot moving around. Less interesting.

But what’s more, rot can’t be avoided. We are all headed into the dirt in one form or another, so watching Rick** and company perpetually lose the battle to not rot is just a stone cold bummer. The people in Romero’s films are in an intractable situation, to be sure. But even then, there might be hope. There’s hope of escape by helicopter. There’s somewhere to go on a beachhead. There’s even a solid attempt at living like a human underground while the zombies rule above.

I guess it took this film for me to realize I don’t hate Zombies, I just hate nihilism. Who knew?

*While this does prove to be the 1,001st on the site, since I asked Lora to pinch-hit for me for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2017), this winds up being my 1,000th review. Technically.

**The only character on The Walking Dead whose name I can 100% remember and pick out of a lineup.

Fruitvale Station (2013)

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Kevin Durand, Chad Michael Murray

Have I Seen it Before: Here we are. My 1,000th review. I had a list of potential candidates for this entry, but something became clear when I considered this one. I have long put off watching this film. Clearly, there’s an impulse to wait for a particular kind of mood to watch a film dealing with this subject matter. But I swear, the main reason I’ve delayed watching the film is that something was exciting about perpetually having a new Ryan Coogler film to watch.

Ah, well. I’m glad I picked one that I felt some anticipation for as number 1,000.

Did I Like It: Yes.

You probably want more. Okay.

I have a deep, unrelenting suspicion of anyone who can get to the end of this film and not feel palpable anguish. The story unfolded that way in real life, and you can’t escape it, outside of burying yourself in cynicism. Don’t do it. There’s no hope for the world to get any better without confronting the worst parts of the here and now, and the events of January 1, 2009 are very much still the here and now.

But that doesn’t begin to cover Coogler’s calling cards of the skills he has only built upon in the ensuing years. His debut feature is a ruthless machine of character development. In a flash of a runtime, we know, like, and feel for Oscar Grant III (Jordan). There is no knee-jerk impulse on display to artificially graft on a traditional plot to the proceedings. This is Grant’s life. We’re just guests.

But there is a degree of slyness still here. Coogler can’t help it. I run through the entirety of the film and feel like I know where everything is heading. I’m living in the here and now. I know how these stories end, but I didn’t know this story. And yet, I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s a misdirection coming up ahead. Tragedy looms, but is it a tragic end for Oscar? Is it a tragic end for another character? Is it an end at all, and the tragedy will just continue ad infinitum?

There is no misdirection. Somehow, that becomes the greatest misdirect of all. We’re left with an exquisitely crafted portrait of a life, all told in its last day. Had Coogler moved on to diminishing returns, we would still be able to look at the film and see something remarkable.

Thankfully, Coogler was just getting started.

What This Became: On Writing 1,000 Movie Reviews

I’m a lousy writer of journals, if for no other reason than most of the thoughts I’d have any interest in putting down on paper are more often than not at least tangentially about movies. But, after a stint watching—as we all occasionally go on—old episodes of Siskel & Ebert and reading several of Ebert’s books*, I felt like I could create some kind of chronicle of my life by the movies I watched. What else is there, really**?

The mission was simple: write at least 300 words about every movie I watch. If I had already reviewed the film, then I wouldn’t write a new one. At this rate, I probably could have written a review of both Batman (1989) and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) about nineteen times a piece over these years. The moment after the thought flitted through my mind, I watched Sneakers (1992).

And then I never stopped. I have a document of all the reviews I’ve written, and at press time, I’ve written 411,366 words on these reviews. There have been times it’s been a lot of fun. I don’t know why the time I decided Three Men and a Little Lady (1990) was a horror film (it is, just look into Steve Guttenberg’s eyes) comes to mind, but it does. There are other times it was something of a chore. I opted out of writing two reviews of Justice League (2017), because I had nothing more to say about it, regardless of how many times they re-cut it. Generally, it’s been fun to have writing I didn’t feel the need to perfect, and could just exist not only as a view on the film in question, but a picture of where my mind was at that moment. I steadily stopped blogging any other kind of blog, and only make an exception at the end of the year, and the blog you’re reading now.

A funny thing happened towards the end of last year. It wasn’t exactly the kind of year that a lot of funny things happened in, but I realized that I was writing over 100 reviews per year, and I went past 900 before the end of 2024. It was almost guaranteed that I would hit review number 1,000 sometime in 2025. Every time I got ten closer to the magic number, I shared it, and now I’ve hit reviews 991-999:

991. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025)

992. Quicksand (1950)

993. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)

994. Clear and Present Danger (1994)

995. Speedy (1928)

996. Dangerous Animals (2025)

997. One Battle After Another (2025)

998. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

999. Code 3 (2024)

And so now I have come to the question that’s been hanging over my head for most of the year: What movie should I watch for my 1000th review? At first, I thought it should be something I deeply loved. The only problem is that it was going to be tough to come up with a film I already love that I have not watched once in the last seven years.

Despite what Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) said in Ratatouille (2007)***, writing a negative review is not as fun as writing an enthusiastically positive one. So, a movie I’ve always harbored an antipathy for was out. Sorry, Robocop (2014). You’ll have to wait for another day for me to find that the Michael Keaton Rule™**** will only take a film so far.

Ultimately, though, it is more fun than having to come up with at least 300 words on a film that failed to make any impression whatsoever. I couldn’t just leave the 1000th review up to chance. I had to go with a filmmaker who has never missed, and doesn’t look like they will be capable of missing anytime in the near future. I needed my best bet in finding a film that would mean something for the 1000th review.

And it would have to be something that, for one reason or another, I haven’t watched in the last seven years.

And so, without further ado, I offer my 1000th review: Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013).

I think I picked pretty well. So, where do I go from here? There was a moment when I considered that 1,000 may be enough. Maybe I will finally break down, get actually active on my Letterboxd account, and remain content with a quick line and a star rating before moving on with the rest of my life. There wasn’t likely to be another huge milestone like this. If I were to keep up my average rate of reviewing, I wouldn’t hit the 10,000th review until sometime after my 106th birthday. And we all know I’m only really interested in living long enough to see the works of Ayn Rand enter the public domain. Everything after 2052—when you might be reading my 3737th review—is extra credit in my book.

But something was alluring about doing the review, and not just the fact that I could keep blogging without having to constantly think of topics to fill such a thing. So I’ll remain a movie review guy, so I think for the moment, I’ll just plug right along. I’d talk more, but there are already reviews number 1001-1004 pending on my to-do list. They won’t write themselves!

*Just as it did then, it boggles my mind a bit that Siskel never wrote a book while he was alive, even though he was just as prolific—if not more so—than his partner during those years they were together.

**I’m kidding. Kind of.

***It’s only as I type this reference that it occurs to me that Ratatouille should have at least been considered for number 1000. My bad.

****Wherein a film is automatically 15% better than it otherwise would be, owing simply to the presence of Michael Keaton. It is why Multiplicity (1996) manages to score 102%.

Code 3 (2024)

Director: Christopher Leone

Cast: Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, Aimee Carrero, Rob Riggle

Have I Seen it Before: That’s an interesting question. In all truth, I got to watch a screener of the film over a year ago as part of my duties on the screening committee of a film festival*. I don’t write reviews of those screeners. I’ve got any number of reasons for that. Some are so amateurish that one doesn’t want to kick someone when they haven’t yet realized they’re down. Others are perfectly fine, but for any number of reasons, will never see the light of day. Others are painfully average and yet destined to show up on your Netflix feed either way.

Code 3 was different. I’ll get to the details in a minute, but it is the only screener I have named as one of my five best films of the year. I loved it then.

Did I love it now?

Did I Like It: Yes, yes, I did. While Howery may at times be playing a slight riff on his TSA character from Get Out (2017), there is not one ounce of Dwight Schrute in Wilson’s performance. The fact that Wilson is not likely to get any awards attention—it’s a comedy, after all, and an independent one, at that—for this is something I object to in the strongest terms.

But nobody’s listening to me.

The film is funny throughout. More than enough recent comedies are content to be joke machines built around set pieces, but every ounce of humor in this film is character-based. There is a terrific pathos here, where these people with a thoroughly thankless and abusive job. I said just a moment ago that Howery is playing a variation on material he has done before, but there are oceans of more depth here. Watch this man try to calm down someone with a mental illness while the police are champing at the bit to escalate the situation. It’s beautiful, and heart-rending, and better than anything of which studio comedies could conceive.

But there’s something so much more here. Roger Ebert once complained that films were steadily becoming less and less about people at work. Fantasy—it has its place—displaces seeing authentic depictions of people trying to live and make a living. He made the observation in the 90s, and it only got worse, and got even worse still after Ebert’s passing. This film, however, is a perfect picture of what it is to have a job in the 2020s. Failure. Success. The deep-seated belief that some other job will be the solution to all your problems, but also the knowledge that will never be the case. I’ve never been a paramedic, but in this film, I felt seen and saw myself in those people.

When I first saw the film, I expected nothing, and it was a revelation. It hit the same way the second time.

Is there nothing better to find in a movie?

*I won’t mention what film festival here, as it might invite someone somewhere to try and curry favor over my admittedly negligible influence, but if you go looking, you might be able to figure it out. You might need a couple of guesses, though.

Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)

Director: Jack Arnold

Cast: Richard Carlso, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno

Have I Seen It Before: Yes… I absolutely had to, having marched through all the discs on my Universal Monsters box set. But I will admit I have stronger memories of Revenge of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955), owing to its frequent runs on TV, up to and including it being featured in the first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I ever watched…

That doesn’t even cover the Clint of it all.

Did I Like It: There’s a part of me that wants to be a little bit down on the film. This is so far removed from the submlime, high era of Universal Monster pictures, and even seems removed from the occasionally schlocky monster mashups* of the late 1940s. There’s a certain degree of retrograde Spielbergian restraint—waiting until the last possible moment to show as the Gill-man in all of his splendor**—on display here working in its favor, but after everything is said and done, this isn’t all that much more than a typical monster movie…

But then I remember that it is the progenitor of what some (me, just now) might call typical monster movies. I can’t fully deny the charms of a film which is disinterested in imitating other films, and proceeds to be imitated by other films.

*I’m excluding you from that blanket statement, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). You’re perfect, you’re better than we deserve, and I love you.

**What I am enjoying this week, as this is a Beyond the Cabin in the Woods episode, is reading Mallory O’Meara’s The Lady From the Black Lagoon about the long-erased credit for Milicent Patrick in designing the Creature. In all honesty, the Gill-man in this film looks fine when he is within the water, but strains belief a bit whenever he elects to emerge and embrace his rubbery reality. Perhaps if she had been given her due, and even the ability to continue working, he may have improved.

One Battle After Another (2025)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti

Have I Seen It Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Clearly, One Battle After Another is one of the best films of the year. It is entertaining, visually interesting, well-acted, and probably most importantly, pointedly timely*. DiCaprio may be giving his best performance here, leaning into his aging persona without feeling the need to make it a punchline, as he occasionally did in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019). Some of the villains are a little over-wrought. Penn chews scenery regularly, but the masters he serves are funny, although I’ll admit just how amusing they are diminishes as time goes on.

And that’s the only real complaint I have about the film. At times, it feels too long. Themes are visited and re-visited perhaps one too many times. Points are perhaps belabored, distracting from the whole.

But let’s be candid: I’m not going to be the first person to say that this film runs a bit long in places. I’m not going to be the first person to say that Anderson’s films tend to run too long. Not by a long-shot. It may be his signature. What’s more, I can’t imagine that this complaint hasn’t gotten back to him. He’s been making films that felt long for his entire career. We can forgive this when James Cameron does it. We can forgive Martin Scorsese when he does it. We can’t just walk into a Paul Thomas Anderson film, accept that he is going to do it, and then enjoy it despite there being breaks throughout the film where our attention is free to wander? Of course we can do it, and judging by the responses, most people are.

*Good rule of thumb: if the conservative internet ecosphere complains about a film, it is probably worth seeing. If they are focused on one element of a film, doubly so. If the film wasn’t worth watching, they probably wouldn’t cover it in the first place. At the very least, their coverage wouldn’t find its way into your social media feeds.

Dangerous Animals (2025)

Director: Sean Byrne

Cast: Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Rob Carlton, Jai Courtney

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I was completely unaware of the film, until it was a last-minute replacement on our Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule. We were going to watch Him, and then decided against it after the film has already disappeared from our collective consciousness.

Thank goodness for last minute additions to this show. Without them, I might have missed both this and Sinners this year.

Did I Like It: It is not exceptional praise to say this is the best Shark film since Jaws (1975). There has literally never been a good shark film since then. So what I will say is that the film is a masterclass in horror movie pacing. At least five separate times, I thought I had a handle on where the film was going*—and being a little bored with that series of events—only to have the film send me in a completely different and thrilling direction.

One begins the movie thinking that I’m going to have to deal with Just Another Shark Movie™, and it suddenly—as one of these events would likely come to pass, were it to really happen—becomes an encounter with a deranged human killer. Then it becomes a credible rehash of Split (2016) or The Black Phone (2022). Then it’s Dead Calm (1985) for a good long stretch. Finally, Manhunter (1986) and Red Dragon (2002) get their due course. All of this before it circles back around to being the first credible shark movie since Spielberg swore off returning to the water for the rest of eternity.

*Often these occasional doldrums surrounded Tucker’s (Courtney) travails with trying to keep VHS and minimal apparent extra lighting as a valid means of documenting his crimes.

Speedy (1928)

Director: Ted Wilde

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff, Babe Ruth

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Lloyd’s final silent film—and by natural extension, his final film to succeed at the level he previously enjoyed—is a startlingly modern movie, and that’s only partially because it’s copyright was so up-to-date that the film comes complete with a New Line Cinema vanity card*.

It’s not entirely a good thing, though. Lloyd is still able to flail and fling with the best of his contemporaries, but being ahead of its time could bring it into something less desirable. In this instance, lowers the entire film from being in that upper pantheon of silent comedies, and limits it to being something a mark more pedestrian.

It’s obsession with baseball leading up to a supporting role for Babe Ruth and a cameo from Lou Gehrig almost puts the entirety of the film at home with an average sitcom. Average may even be something of a strong word to use there. Filling a current series with celebrity cameos can certainly be a sign that the creative direction has veered off course, but a plot line taking the characters on vacation and being a travelogue for some giant tourist attraction is absolute death. So it is that I’m a little underwhelmed to report that my big takeaway from the film is that Coney Island in the 1920s is a perfectly splendid way to spend a Sunday. You might even get a loyal dog out of the deal.

Looking into the film a bit, apparently a slightly augmented sound version of the film was released less than a year after the initial release, but something tells me that version of the film is less the perfect silent-sound fusion/peak of the silent form that was Modern Times (1936) and more just something to play in the theaters that were upgraded for synchronized sound.

*It did eventually fall into public domain last year, otherwise I can’t imagine I would ever end up seeing it in the theater.

Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Director: Phillip Noyce

Cast: Harrison Ford, Willem Dafoe, Anne Archer, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: I’ve sometimes compared a film that doesn’t quite work as well as it should to a casserole dish filled with uncooked ingredients. Everything good is there, but the total is less than the sum of its parts. Clear and Present Danger is something different. It is entertaining enough. It certainly clings to the ethos that permeates throughout the Jack Ryan series of films that eschews Clancy’s later instinct to believe his own press*. Ford has yet to start his prolonged period of of sleepwalking through entire films. It’s all good.

And yet…

Something still doesn’t add up. Ford and Noyce are doing better work in Patriot Games (1992). Greer (Jones)—just about the only constant throughout this series—is dispatched in what feels like the kind of thing meant to propel Ryan (Ford) through the third act of the story. Willem Dafoe is always nice to see, especially in a film released before we really knew what we had with him, but he also feels just a tad miscast*. I even prefer Henry Czerny playing essentially the same role in Mission: Impossible (1996), and again in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025). Ultimately, the story is more than a little too self-conscious for its own good. I almost wish the film would have hued closer to what I was imagine was in John Milius’ original screenplay. I mean, he was the only who has been able to do anything with Conan, so his bite might just have been the right ingredient for this.

All of it is almost right, and the sum total of the movie is pretty good. As such, it is less of an uncooked casserole, and more of a fully cooked casserole made up of a cacophony of leftovers.

I did not think this review of a Tom Clancy movie would have quite so many uses of the word “casserole.”

*A big reason why the film series has struggled to get its act together after this film, despite two or three attempts.

**If I remember correctly, Clancy would have preferred Tom Selleck in the row, and not to be caught on the record agreeing with late Mr. Clancy, but I can see it.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)

Director: Kogonada

Cast: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Might have missed it, too, if it hadn’t been for a more-charming-than-average trailer, I might have missed it altogether.

Did I Like It: To paraphrase Bart Simpson*, after he saw Naked Lunch (1991), “I can think of at least four things wrong with that title.”

Unfortunately, whatever charm the film had at its disposal was spent in that aforementioned trailer. Even in the context of the full film, the one moment where a character says the misplaced-in-time Sarah (Robbie) looks like she’s forty, plays less funny and more like a line meant for a different actress.

Robbie and Farrell seem to be vaguely embarrassed by the film happening around them, as if they both understand they have to allow for a down project after their recent highs in Barbie (2023) and The Penguin and act for our patience while the rest of their career calibrates in front of our eyes.

A bland rebound project might register on the mind as a tepid non-event, if it weren't for the fact that the supporting cast is utterly wasted. Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline can each single-handedly raise films beyond where they might have otherwise been. Here, they just show up and have a mildly quirky air about them, while unfortunately neglecting to have anything funny to say or do. There’s a different cut of this film somewhere that is probably just as uneven in pacing and tone, and is ultimately still a small, tepid, reasonably photographed circular trip, but it would at least have been a bit funnier.

*I thought I may have gone to this well before in a review, and searching the reviews, I apparently did it in a recent review for Night Editor (1946). In retrospect, I mean it far more here than I did then. Ah, well. There is at least some risk of repeating oneself over nearly 1000 reviews.

Quicksand (1950)

Director: Irving Pichel

Cast: Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Barbara Bates, Peter Lorre

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: For the longest stretch of its runtime, Quicksand begins to resemble the platonic ideal of film noir. A man (Rooney) has eyes on a blonde (Cagney) that any reasonable person would decide is more trouble than she’s worth. One seemingly harmless scheme feeds into a series of increasingly complex and risky schemes, until eventually every cop in town is looking for the man, and the net slowly shrinks until there’s no other possible ending than something violent, tragic, and vaguely akin to poetic justice.

But then there’s that last act. I’m resolutely a non-fan of noir—or thrillers in general—allowing its characters to walk away from their escalating problems* as the number one way for me to feel cheated by the proceedings. Fargo (1996)—that pinnacle of the post-modern noir—wouldn’t have let William H. Macy just tell everybody what his scheme was before the woodchipper met Steve Buscemi. And so, I don’t think Rooney should have gotten off light here.

Even that I could forgive, if the near-miss at the end of the character’s story flows naturally from the plot that precedes it. No such luck here, unfortunately. Everything gets tied up in a nice, neat bow because our hero’s last fit of fleeing takes the form of carjacking someone who just happens to be a skilled and experienced criminal attorney. He explains that it’s somewhat less than a guarantee that Rooney’s victim actually died in the attack**, and that if he makes good with the police now, he may only have to go away for a few years, after which he can move on to a happy life with the brunette he was clearly supposed to be with from the beginning.

And—after a brief shootout—that’s exactly what Rooney does. Yawn.

*Yes, I would count getting a few years prison sentence and barely missing a murder charge or a watery grave as walking away from problems.

**I’ll admit enjoying that small revelation, as I’m always bothered by the efficiency of death in these movies, when it seems like the human body is at least slightly more resilient than expiring immediately after getting the wind knocked out of it.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner

Have I Seen It Before: Hmm… Tricky question. Obviously the film is brand new, so…

Let’s just get into it.

Did I Like It: I always say that the the most disappointing* thing that a documentary can be is feel like a DVD special feature. I’m not even saying that I necessarily dislike a DVD special feature. Occasionally they can be entertaining. Occasionally they can have some insight. Often, it feels a little antiseptic, so as to be so careful not to overshadow the film its built to support.

I laughed at several points in the film, but I didn’t have that vaguely, but pleasurably unsettled feeling that this is a work of deeply demented people who have honed their eccentricities into one of the most finely tuned comedies ever made. Exploring the fine line between clever and stupid, if you will.

Expecting that much from a sequel 40-plus years after the original is likely unfair, but the comparison is tricky if not impossible to avoid. The over-under on Reiner and the cast is 80, and the notion that someone can still revolutionize their form seems absurd as I type it.

And yet, this could have been something more, other than an above-average item on the special features menu of a 40th Anniversary Blu Ray**. It could have had fewer celebrity cameos. The thing is chock-a-block with them. Paul McCartney is practically a fourth member of the band, and what little third act the film has is tied to how much time they were willing to get from Elton John. It could have fewer callbacks to the first film. Yes, Stonehenge makes an appearance. They try to make it different than the last time, but it’s entirely too self-conscious to work on its own.

*Not the worst thing, mind you. We leave the worst to Leni Riefenstahl. Let’s just be clear about that.

**Yeah, I get it. It needs to be 4K. I’ll get there eventually. Just not today.

US Marshals (1998)

Director: Stuart Baird

Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Robert Downey Jr., Joe Pantoliano

Have I Seen it Before: I strangely remember seeing this in the theater during its original run. It seemed like such a densely plotted Rube Goldberg machine that me and my buddy immediately decided we should have that kind of ambition and launched into an attempt to write the kind of movie where government agents pursue other government agents, and no one is ever entirely certain where true loyalties lie.

We lasted about half an hour.

Did I Like It: Not a great sign that a bunch of thirteen-year-olds see the movie and think that the kind of storytelling on display is within their own grasp. Gone is the tense believability of The Fugitive (1998) and in its place is an over-written mess. Gone is the eminently smart but still grounded Dr. Richard Kimble as played by Harrison Ford and in its place we have Wesley Snipes playing a Wesley Snipes character who—even if he had his reasons—did the murder in question. Gone even is the implacable modern day Javert of Jones’ Gerard, and in his place is a man on quest for revenge that could have been any other character in any other action movie. There’s a reason Gerard and his ragtag group of agents didn’t continue with a new adventure every couple of years.

I’m proud that I was able to go this whole review without damning director Stuart Baird—he of the ignominious Star Trek Nemesis (2002)—on spec, and generally finding beef with the idea that a skilled editor—which Baird clearly is—can be rewarded for bailing out a troubled film by getting the opportunity to direct a movie nobody could have possibly cared about.

Oops. There I go again.

But I suppose it could have all been worse. This could have been a more direct-sequel to The Fugitive and would have groaned through the better part of ninety minutes to put Harrison Ford back in prison clothes. We got off light.