Godzilla II: King of the Monsters is a Disastrous Failure
This is a film about mega-monsters wreaking havoc at a catastrophic scale, but there’s no weight to this thing; it’s limp and incoherent.
Escape Room Brings a Fresh Hook to a Familiar Sub-Genre
Escape Room is like Cube meets Saw meets Hostel …minus the gratuitous gore.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – the Park is Gone, and So is Any Modicum of Intelligence
Perhaps if Fallen Kingdom had nothing to do with Jurassic Park – if it were, say, titled Dinosaur Adventure – I could’ve enjoyed it. At least on the level that you enjoy an incredibly stupid film.
47 Metres Down (2017)
The middle half of the film is genuinely gripping and surprising, surpassing any budgetary constraints.
The Shallows: You Can Be a Hot Surfer Chick and a Hero Doctor. Just Watch Out for Sharks
The Shallows has a simple task: make sharks scary again. And it succeeds admirably, while offering (perhaps unintentionally) interesting commentary on sexualised heroines in horror movies.
Jurassic World (2015)
Like most prepubescent boys (and girls) in the early ‘90s, I was obsessed with Jurassic Park. I can still vividly remember the first time I saw the movie – perhaps my earliest clear memory of a movie theatre – clutching my armrests in fear as an attempt to transport velociraptors went horribly wrong. By the…
Godzilla (2014)
Godzilla is an anti-blockbuster, repurposing and reinventing the grammar of big budget disaster films to produce a film that is aesthetically and ideologically compelling, if inconsistently entertaining. A dense evocation of the tragic scale of environmental and nuclear cataclysms, the film’s steadfast refusal to focus on its human characters, instead contemplating global devastation, is hardly…
Piranha (1978)
Piranha, an undisguised Jaws ripoff from the late ‘70s, is no match for the Spielberg’s blockbuster phenomenon (which makes a cameo appearance as a video game). This Roger Corman creature feature, helmed by Joe Dante (of Gremlins fame) is nonetheless a surprisingly good B-movie. It contains all the B-movie trappings: skinny dipping teenagers, unconvincing special…
