The Movie Guy

“Life” is a creature-feature that’s entirely watchable, thanks to effective CGI effects and a script that follows a foolproof recipe. While the film may have all the depth of a long “Twilight Zone” episode and thumb its nose at conventional science, it does serve its primary purpose: introduce a cool-looking monster and watch it systematically kill off people to survive. Continue reading →

At 84 years old, did King Kong really need to be resuscitated? Of course he did, it’s a cinematic tradition- classic movie monsters are immortal.

Given their signature film entrances, all the classic monsters wind up dying, only to be brought back to fight each other or cause more mayhem in a new time period. Ask any of the Universal monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein or the Wolf Man who, in their debut films were respectively staked, burned and shot only to be resurrected in future films because any supernatural being can find his way around a DNR if movie audiences want them back badly enough. And so it is with Kong, whose bullet-ridden body and fall from the Empire State Building in 1933 would only lead to his fighting fellow mutant monsters like Godzilla and the robot MechaKong in Japan in the 1960’s. Continue reading →