Fear Street Part One: 1994 Review

Nostalgia is a powerhouse today, with all forms of electronic entertainment graverobbing our memories of years past, both the good and the bad. The horror genre in particular is victim to this, due to their usually cheap budgets and lingering eye for the distasteful. Gore and nudity are all cheap thrills, throw in some other clichés and bam, you have a movie. Or at least that's what the folks at Netflix think with their latest streaming experiment, "Fear Street." A trilogy of loosely related films, the digital entertainment platform is releasing one film every week this month, a sort of halfway point between movies and series.

I think it's brilliant: no longer are films something you normally watch in the theaters; now the only thing differentiating the two mediums is their runtime. From Netflix to Hollywood: "checkmate."

This first entry, dubbed appropriately "Part One: 1994," takes place in the haunted town of Shadyside, where a witch mix with a masked killer at a camp, a knife-wielding kid in a skull costume and more. From what I gathered about the next two episodes, they all are based in this sad little city, with grumpy prepubescents, a small police department and a high school rivalry with the neighboring academy. It all makes for a bit too derivative blend of the usual tropes, filled with swearing, bloodshed and yes, even teenage sex. Wouldn't be trash without the sex.

But what saves this initial pic is its consistent acting and the little touches that set it apart from all the "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" knockoffs. Oh sure, there is the obligatory hospital slaying, the friend who always knows what's going on, the skeptic sheriff, among many other standard slasher film stereotypes, but there is also a solid story about accepting who you are, the power of friendship and love. I get it, the genre really has seen a lot of duds since the seventies and eighties, but when I can walk away not feeling like I spent two hours yelling at the screen "... don't go in there," it deserves special mention.

Kiana Madeira plays Deena, your typical hormonal teenager who's mad at the world and especially her ex Sam, played Olivia Scott Welch who's moved to the richer community down the road. Their relationship feels more real than this type of film really demands, two terrific actresses who not only have believable chemistry but also capture that feeling all minors have where the world "doesn't understand them." After some generic hooliganism at a football game, Sam's new boyfriend's car crashes into the burial of the Sarah Fier (scary name, screenwriters), who put a curse on the land just before being executed for witchcraft. A few drops of blood from the wreckage later, and, well, let's just say that the deceased don't like being waken up anymore than a juvenile does on a Monday morning.

That's enough of the plot, nobody puts on a movie called "Fear Street" expecting Oscar-nominee material: you want bare skin and slaughtering, and you want it exploitative and you want it now. In that front, the film delivers the goods. It does shy away from actual nudity, but who knows? Maybe that's what the sequels are for.

The Tomorrow War Review

Chris Pratt brings warmth and charisma to "The Tomorrow War," Amazon Prime's very violent celebration of 4th of July weekend. It's a cocktail of various other movies, most of them better, or at least benefitting from nostalgia, retelling so many familiar elements as one loud, long, and bombastic extravaganza that throws everything it can think of at the screen and hopes something sticks. Whether or not anything sticks depends on if you have any suspension of disbelief or alcohol on hand.

Pratt plays Dan, a former solider turned teacher drafted into a future war with a deadly alien race, where us humans are dying, a lot, and in very unpleasant ways. Take for example when we first see the battlefield in Miami Florida. "You'll drop five to ten feet from the air" claims a lieutenant as we see a batch of fresh recruits being briefed about the situation. But a computer glitch interrupts the loosely defined mechanics of time-travel, and the soldiers are dropped from hundreds of feet in the air, and we watch bodies crash to their doom against the edge of buildings: this is before we see any creature-on-person action!

When the space beasts do come into play, they have all the usual sci-fi trappings, depicted as organized but brainless, who's sole mission in life is to protect the "queen" and to eat. They don't think, and they're not afraid to die, but to the film's credit, they at least don't look that much like the Xenomorph.

Now look, I'm all for a good monster movie. Actually, it doesn't have to be any good, just show me the good stuff, you know blood and the likes, and although the PG-13 rating here doesn't allow for the camera to dwell on such gore, it does tackle some surprisingly heavy issues, like divorce, fate, and the horrors of war.

That last one is the most interesting thing here; the occasionally witty script from Zach Dean and a fun performances from Sam Richardson as Charlie and J.K. Simmons as Dan's dad poke holes at the plot's center of military pride. It unfortunately steers clear of satire, but its presence give "The Tomorrow War" an off-kilter sense of humor that elevates it from what could have been an excessively stylized exercise in how to spend millions of dollars on special effects (I'm looking at you, "Army of the Dead"). In fact, the whole endeavor feels more like something closer to the work of Roland Emmerich, like a long-lost bastard-child of 1996's "Independence Day," with "The Thing," "Aliens," "Starship Troopers," "Back to the Future," and oh so many others thrown in for a little color.

To its credit, the action is kinetic and easy to see, and Chris Pratt continues to look good onscreen. And the pacing strings you up and down; I counted no less than three times where I thought "OK this is the end," only for more to happen.

Not to its credit however, all this includes a lot of dumb things, like how the film partly takes place in 2022 but looks exactly like 2021. Why bother? Here's another one: a point is made to show that no single army anymore but all the nation's combined, so then why does everyone speak English? Let's keep going... why do all the soldiers have weapons that barely pierce the enemy's skin? Why can a character bring back things to the past, to change the future, without creating some sort of paradox? These are questions the film doesn't answer but it never even bothers to ask, instead settling for a bunch of things that explode "real good." And on my paltry home-theater set up, I can confirm that yes, they did explode real good.

Dynasty Warriors (film) Review

Kids have it easy when it comes to entertainment; they don't challenge what's happening onscreen, question character motivations and are more than satisfied with the incompetent. And if an adult can somehow channel that mindset for just two hours, then they'll have one helluva time with "Dynasty Warriors," based on the popular video game. I know I did.

... But I didn't start out that way. For the first, oh I dunno, fifteen minutes or so, I paid attention. I tried to remember the names of people and places as they were spoken and appeared in localized subtitles. Then something happened, something came over me. It was my childhood. This innocence allowed my normally critical eye to succumb it its exaggerated excess, where people in elaborate costumes and makeup leap dozens of feet in the air while battling with preposterous swords. Where every important character rides horses and trees can be chopped down by lightning summoned from the evil Lu Bu (Louis Koo). Somehow though this gets even more ridiculous, but I won't spoil it for you. I sat on my couch with pure wonder and awe, sucked in perhaps by my subconscious lust for my own youth.

Or maybe it's the film's pacing, which is rarely boring. Or was it the decorated set pieces, with not an extra out of place. Or was it its unflinching dedication to style, where thousands of (probably CGI) armies clash with the occasional spurt of blood as the camera pans left, only to suddenly swoop right, then cut to a bizarre angle, then its back to battle. No wait, that's not it at all.

Where "Dynasty Warriors" succeeds is that it's fun, plain and simple. It's simultaneously complicated and not, a common war tale of royalty, revenge, and devotion, but also one filled with betrayal, corruption and fate. Just don't think that much about it. Nuance is forsaken, any substance beneath its polished exterior of violence ignored in favor of professional purity. It's a sense of enjoyment in its most basic form, filmmaking distilled into uncontaminated amusement for all your eyes and ears, just not your brain. The flick not only expects but demands that you put blinders on to logic and just hang on for the ride.

Its actual plot is inconsequential- I mean, how could they summarize a franchise with nine mainline entries (eight if you live in Japan, it's... complicated), not to mention all the spinoffs, which have their own sequels. At least, that is if my cursory knowledge of the brand isn't failing me, but I digress. 

But how can I recommend this movie; three and a half stars, what's happening?! But then again why can't I? At the end of the day (or er, well film), I knew I had spent my time wisely. I chortled at the chubby Zhang Fei (Justin Cheung), who's paunch never got in the way of his blade. And during during a climatic moment where he, alongside his friends Liu Bei (Tony Yang) and Guan Yu (Han Geng) combat their aforementioned antagonist down a river, I caught myself mesmerized in the awful special effects, the moment where I let go of any remaining hesitation I had, to fully commit myself to living in its world of absolute absurdity.