This blog covers Movies, TV, and other Geeky things...... Movie Reviews (over 3,400 movies rated so far) Countdowns of my top movies by year.... and much more.
I wish I could give Santa Jaws more than a 5 out of 10, because compared to the recent batch of Bad Shark movies I've watched at least it had a concept and plot that made sense from start to finish. It was pretty decent for a direct to TV shark movie that couldn't even afford to have a movie poster.
The story for this flick revolves around an awkward teen that is an aspiring comic book artist. He happens to get a magical pen for Christmas and basically accidentally summons a killer Shark with a Santa Claus hat on it's fin that starts killing off his family members after he wishes to be alone. He and his friends take it upon themselves to try and kill this beast and discover that it is drawn to Christmas items and can only be hurt by Christmas related things as well. There was some limited comedy in this movie concept --but not enough to make it a good movie and not enough of the shark either (I'm sure due to budget).
The best part of the movie was the opening sequence which has a dirty looking Santa that has tied up some guys girlfriend battling until Santa is killed by a shark that acquires his hat. The over puny humor in this opening sequence --which was supposed to represent the comic book was great. If the whole film has kept this over the top tone it would have been better.
Are they even trying anymore? I have to ask that question after watching 6 Headed Shark Attack. Apparently the maximum amount of heads on a Shark to still have a decent Shark Attack movie is about 3 --because that was by far the best of this bad shark movie franchise. They skipped 4 heads for some reason which I will never understand. Maybe they should stop just adding heads to the shark because it looks cool on the posters. Six heads is definitely too many. I don't even get how the stupid shark can swim effectively with that many heads. The extra heads didn come in handy when the shark decided to crawl on land.
The story for this addition to the franchise is that a bunch of couples are at a marriage boot camp on an island. The casting seemed to involve hiring the first 10 random people that showed up to the audition. The screenplay for this movie was god awful and beyond stupid. Many of the decisions the characters make were beyond reason. It is like that commercial where the kids are in a horror movie and one guy suggests -"Let's drive away in that running car" and everyone else decides to hide out in the garage filled with chainsaws instead. It must be difficult to find ways for characters to get back into the water in a bad shark movie, but this movie takes the cake in that department.
They are all safe on land when all of a sudden a major storm is supposedly approaching. One person claims the storm will flood the entire island and suggests swimming out to a couple of pontoons with a tent on them and to rise with the tide. What are you kidding me. No lets all go to the Lighthouse instead. By the way the storm never apparently arrived.... I guess they couldn't afford rain for this movie. It was just so terrible on so many levels and yet never passed into "So Bad it is Good" Territory. At least this movie ties into the previous ones and explains that this is where the shark originated from.
A word of advice: Less heads and more sharks next time. Or maybe actually try and write a script instead of giving the movie the green light based on the cool poster.
The only thing this low budget sequel has in common with the original Deep Blue Sea from 1999 (which was actually one of the only good shark movies after Jaws) was that is had the same basic plot. It was more like a low budget remake than a sequel and didn't reference or seem to connect with the original. The story featured a rich delusional billionaire that is experimenting with shark to try and advance the human brain so that we can deal with the artificial intelligence. Of course making super intelligent sharks is not a good idea and he results are predictable.
A 5 out of 10 rating is probably a little bit generous. The first 45 minutes of the film are all exposition and the fact that this is pretty much a cheap remake makes that exposition unnecessary to this bad shark movie fan. The second half of the movie redeems itself a tiny bit with the underwater base getting partially flooded and the characters having to navigate half filled with water corridors with cool mood lighting. Unfortunately this also limits the shark attacks to the concept new to this particular shark movie of intelligent piranha like baby sharks. A decent concept that comes off less exciting than actual sharks on screen. I guess the only thing that saved this movie for me was some of the really terrible dialogue that made it somewhat entertaining. The awful banter between the characters is luaghable and that helped me stay interested to a certain degree. The movie also had at least one decent shark attack death at near the end of the film and a cool hero shot as two characters take out a leaping shark with flare guns. This would have made a good poster for the film.
All in all it was basically a cheap rip-off of the original actually good shark movie Deep Blue Sea. Kind of a disappointment that they slapped on the Deep Blue Sea title on this low budget films because it gave me false hope for a decent shark flick.
When Alicia Vikander was first announced as the new Lara Croft I thought.... that is an odd choice. She has proved herself as a solid actress in films like Ex Machina in which she was incredible, but she just doesn't look like the character from the classic video game. She is too skinny and has a very slight figure.
I'm sure I will be labeled by the PC crowd as sexist to even say this --but at least they got the characters look right the previous time around with Angelina Jolie. Alicia is a good actress she just doesn't fit the role. And before you label me sexiest for thinking that Lara Croft should have a body type that more resembles the original character think about this for a second because it goes both ways.
Do you think your wife would be as excited for the next Aquaman if instead of Jason Mamoa she got Raj from the Big Bang Theory.
Or if instead of casting Chris Hemsworth as Thor you got David Spade . I don't think so?
All I'm saying is cast someone who fits the character. People want to see buff Chris Evans as Captain America and not skinny Steve Rogers before the serum.
On a different note they even got the character wrong. Lara Croft is a total badass in the games. Instead she is portrayed quite differently in this film. The character with two guns from the original game seems more of a survivalist in this film instead of a fearless explorer. At times she seems very capable and at others like a victim struggling to just survive. It was almost as if they didn't know how the character should be played.
That aside the movie itself was a total dud. It was like the creators had never seen or played the video games before. A huge pet peeve of mine is when Hollywood tries to reboot a franchise and wastes half the movie giving us an origin story for the character we already know. If you are going to see Tomb Raider you know who Lara Croft is. The film wastes time showing her training as a kick boxer and riding a bicycle through the city in some race to earn extra money. She finally excepts her inheritance from her father who has been missing for 7 years and discovers his secret chamber in his castle estate. She watches a video of him instructing her to destroy his research instead she goes in search of him.
The film takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes to get to anything resembling Tomb Raider after wasting time with her character getting robbed by street thugs in Asia and then hiring the son of the guy that took her father to a mysterious island that I half expected to find King Kong on. Then after falling off a waterfall she runs into her dad who looks like the crazy character from Treasure Island or Professor Oxyley from Crystal Skull. There is a straight out of Last Crusade where he states at least she destroyed his research like he asked. Not so much..... she actually brought the "Grail Diary" with her.
By the time it does get to Tomb Raider worthy story it is instead just a bad rip off of end of The Last Crusade. Unfortunately I had already checked out of the film by this point and was checking how much time was left on the DVD. Everything that could be considered good in this film was taken from other films.
Like Father was a surprisingly charming straight to Netflix film starring Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer. Kristen Bell's character gets walked out on at her wedding after she is delayed walking down the aisle because she is too obsessed with her phone and work even walk down the aisle on time. Her father who walked out on her when she was still a kid shows up to the wedding and after talking her out for a drink they both end totally hammered and on her honeymoon cruise.
The film does a great job of exploring this broken relationship with the cruise as a backdrop. It has a few funny moments --but for the most part it is a drama grounded in the reality of their broken relationship. What makes this movie work so well is the talent of its main to stars. I pretty much love Kristen Bell in everything and Kelsey Grammer was a part of two of my favorite TV shows (Cheers and Frasier). The two great actors play off each other really well and made what I figured would just be a throw away movie a lot more fun, especially the sequence where they compete in a on ship game show together.
If you don't go into this movie expecting big laughs and just enjoy the experience you may find this film as enjoyable as I did.
The true story that this movie is based on features 10 friends from high school that have been playing the same game of tag for over 30 plus year. I recall seeing a feature on the actual story years ago on ESPN and thought it was amazing. Every year during a certain month the group which is now dispersed across the country plays an elaborate game of tag as a way of keeping contected. They pull out all the stops including disguises like a guy that dressed up as the mascot from a sports team to tag one of the friends at a baseball game.
It was just a matter of time until Hollywood turned this story into a movie. They assembled a great cast that includes Jake Johnson, Ed Helms, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner and Hannibal Buress and created a fun Hollywoodized over the top version of the story. The movie was an enjoyable adventure and had some funny sequences. The group teams up to try and tag the one untaggable member of the team at his wedding weekend. It was almost a little too over the top and I guess I blame that on the fact that I know it was based and an amazing true story.
I enjoyed the first Deadpool movie, but felt it was a little bit over hyped. Deadpool 2 on the other hand lived up to the hype. Ryan Reynolds is tailor made to play this 4th wall breaking smart ass character. It was such a waste the first time the character was miss used in the one Wolverine movie he appeared in.
The movie starts out with a great montage of Deadpool in some great brutal action sequences where he takes out a bunch of bad guys to the 9 to 5 theme song by Dolly Parton. Then surprisingly the love of his life is taken from him and he tries to kill himself. He ends up being helped out by his X-Men friends from the first film and gets involved in an X-Men assignment that goes terribly wrong. He takes matters into his own hands and lands himself in jail with the Mutant kid who they were sent to stop. A solider from the future named Cable (played by Josh Brolin) shows up and tries to kills the kid and Deadpool gets involved.
The movie had some great sequences. The action pieces in the movie were well choreographed throughout the film. The section of the movie where Deadpool auditions people to create his own group of super-heroes called X-Force and then ill-advisedly takes them on a mission to rescue the kid was amazing. Let's just say things don't go so great with this mission. Peter (the guy with the mustache) was great shines.
One of the best scenes was in the in the end credits when Deadpool uses Cable's time travel device to fix somethings. One of the things he fixed was a great reference to Wolervine movie that originally featured Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool (without the wisecracks), in which the real Deadpool kills that version off.
The plot of the movie was simple and just okay, but the wise cracking antics of Deadpool makes up for the plot issues and delivers a fun comic book ride.
