Killer Charm

Xmas movie that isn't as deep as it thinks it is. In 1970 New England at a snooty-as-hell boarding school one teenager is stuck on campus over the holidays. The whole place is deserted except for one teacher and the school cook, a grieving mother who just lost her son to the war. Each of them is broken. She lost her son, the only black student in the school. The teacher looks down on most from his ivory tower and the boy hates the world. He's the traditional angry young man who is reacting to the latest kick-in-the-butt the world has dealt him in the form of his mother's new marriage. She'd rather honeymoon than allow him home for the holidays. The boy begs. The teacher loses no love for the student body and especially for this kid who makes him have to deal with someone over his curmudgeon holiday plans. There are some sweet insights and the occasional levity but this isn't going on my xmas list.

A beautifully well-made horror movie with genuine fear, the kind to watch for. A strange family has tragedy after tragedy to deal with until finally all is clear, and scary. First the grandma dies, then the strange tween girl is tragically hit, then things really get going. Toni Collete, magnificent as always, will sweep you up with her emotional rollercoaster until your eyes are too opened.

This is a nowhere fast flick. We meet a small Danish family of a mom, pop, and daughter. They meet another small family, a Dutch family, in Italy on vacay. The new family invited them to visit and they take them up on it. Once they arrive in the Netherlands for their visit the Danes realize they don't want to stay for the rest of the planned visit. For one thing the Dutch little boy has no tongue. He supposedly has problems but it looks as if his problems could all stem from his abusive father's treatment of him. It was difficult to watch how little the visiting family thought about their own daughter. I would never let my child sleep in that boy's room. They acted as if they were uneasy with that arrangement but allowed it to happen so that they wouldn't upset their hosts. And then to agree to the babysitter when they were expecting to bring their child to dinner, a babysitter they don't know at all. They just walk right into danger so as not to raise a stink. It becomes tedium to watch them throw caution to the wind for a moment of camaraderie.

Biopic about Linda Lovelace, the biggest porn star of her time. She was married to Chuck Traynor, who did the same thing for his wife after Linda, Marilyn Chambers, star of Behind the Green Door. Linda Lovelace starred in Deep Throat, the movie that made her, and porn, for that matter. This movie is about her marriage to Chuck and how he treated her, which was none too well. He stopped the caring act the moment they married. According to the movie (and her book) he took to beating her immediately, pimped her out, cut her out of the money from her own movie, among other evils.

A nonlinear tale of a killer on the rampage that really does need to be a nonlinear story. The twist serves all kinds of purpose but would be impossible without the time jumps, or at least the whole story wouldn't be so crisp. A couple have a wild night of sex in a motel room. Around this long and intricate romp we watch a cat-and-mouse chase between the two and it's lethal. The chase is ruthless and gruesome. They're both cunning, both think ahead. In the midst of all this f*cking and fighting (so modern) we meet the two sweetest hippies ever in the persons of Ed Begley Jr. And Barbara Hershey.

This is a an engrossing space alien horror that grabs you and holds on. There's no dialog and you don't miss dialog. The aliens are great but it is the sound design that takes the cake in this flick. The aliens' movements and speech sounds and patterns are the ticket in this flick. A solitary young woman who is shunned by her townsfolk spends her time alone, thinking of her dead mother and sister. One night she is terrified to find space aliens in her house, they are rummaging around like they own the joint and have powers. The ending is lovely in that you can interpret it three ways and each of them is satisfying. Great movie.

A sweet flick that brings a smile when I think of it. It has a stellar cast made of a seemingly endless parade of those stars. In 1920s England a young woman loses both her parents rendering her an orphan, but not without relatives. She moves in with one of the families who invite her; they live on a backward filthy farm and she's not having it.

Basic b-flat horror flick about an entity that needs its host to commit suicide, with a witness. The witness must be traumatized by the suicide, only then can the entity invade that witness's body. It goes from one host to the next, killing and traumatizing willy-nilly. Sounds scary, doesn't it? It should be scary because it doesn't offer much else. Unfortunately, except for the occasional scary smile, which thankfully the smile in question appears more than once and is indeed scary, as I say, except for that smile there isn't much meat here. There's too much reliance on hallucinations, after the fact we learn what we just saw was an hallucination, a cheap trick. Not good enough.

This gojira movie is not the best of them. The flick itself ain't all that, but the gojira is pretty cool. He's got a temper as powerful as he is. We are reminded that godzilla is a god/monster in the Japanese tradition of this monster. He is half monster and half vengeful god, who is here to set Japan into the red after WWII brought the country to zero - minus one. The story is the usual gojira storyline since 1954: Tokyo is under attack by a big bad kaiju – a monster from the sea – and nobody can fight it properly. People are getting smashed and killed helter skelter. A deserter, Koichi, is going to bring this big bad kaiju down and redeem his deserting self.

In this delightful fairy tale three sharp-as-tac orphaned siblings dodge their odious uncle who has been given custody until the oldest turns 18. Until that day the odious uncle, played to a turn by Jim Carrey, tries to off them in colorful ways. He turns up in disguise, thus affording us the chance to see Jim Carrey play different characters. He's a joy to watch. The movie has a great style; the clothes and sets create a world both modern and steam punk, floating between "real" and fairy-tale worlds. Each time the unctuous uncle shows up again the kids see straight through his disguise but, alas, they are the only ones who can. The adults are blind to Uncle Olaf's shenanigans.