Lee Cronin's The Mummy Review

If anything, writer/director Lee Cronin having his name above the title in "Lee Cronin's The Mummy" makes this one easier to reference, as there's been, by my count, four other films just called "The Mummy." In fact, it's been almost ten years since the last one, the shared universe non-starter starring Tom Cruise that I am probably the only one who enjoyed. This latest attempt narrows the scope to a few locations, no big actors and an emphasis on horror, which makes sense considering Lee's filmography. Problem is, he hasn't made a mummy movie: he's made "The Exorcist" with sand.

The film follows the Cannon family, with parents Charlie (Jack Reynor) and the expecting Larissa (Laia Costa) raising their two kids, Katie (Emily Mitchell & Natalie Grace) and Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams & Shylo Molina) in Egypt. Charlie works as a TV reporter and Larissa a nurse, but the two are hoping that he gets that job in New York. He does, spoiler alert, but while he's on the phone getting the good news, little Katie is being groomed by a cloaked woman (Hayat Kamille). She's apparently been ploying her with candy, but today, she offers her a tangerine, but Katie's apparently never seen "Snow White" and accepts the fruit. An insect hops out, goes into her mouth, and by the time Charlie notices she's not inside, she's gone. Ah yes, the old cliche of showing a kid in danger as a cheap ploy to evoke emotions. Classy.

The woman is able to kidnap her, some plot happens, and now we flash forward eight years. The family now lives in New Mexico with Larissa's mom (Verónica Falcón), the couple now having another child, played by Billie Roy. By the way, her name is Maud- must be big Bea Arthur fans.

Then one day, the family gets a call, their missing daughter has been found. And she's alive! But it is the strangest thing: she was only discovered back in Egypt, found among the wreckage of a plane crash, wrapped up in cloth inside a sarcophagus. She looks, well, exactly how you'd expect. The doctors explain the lack of sun exposure, etc., are the cause behind her wrinkled, twisted appearance. Yes totally, being trapped in a box for almost a decade without food or water, no need to investigate. All her vitals are fine too, which is odd considering tradition insists the brains are removed during the mummification process. This must have been one of those "budget mummifications" I see advertised on late night TV.

The hospital sends her home almost immediately, saying that time with the family is just what the doctor ordered. This infuriated me to no end: there should be everyone from NASA to the scientists at the end of "ET" there, quarantining her and running every test in the book. And here I thought the American healthcare system was crap.

Back at home in the states, things clearly are not right with Katie. At first, the family holds out hope, but then strange things start to happen. She escapes into the walls of the house, crawling like a possessed monster, before eating a scorpion. Then soon after, the mom, trying to clip her toenails, ends up peeling off a strip of her leg skin. She bursts out and is found stabbing the wound with a fireplace poker. And these people still decide to keep her here! Well, the mom does at least: Charlie expresses concern about his newfound daughter, but Larissa takes this as a slight at her ability as a mom, leading us to a mild detour into marriage discord, just what every horror film needs.

Things escalate with possession of the other two kids, wolves that stalk the house outside, something that crawls on the ceiling, floating bodies, VHS found-footage, a cult and at least one person being flung out a window to their death. Lee goes all in with style, overwhelming us with slime but never able to actually scare us. I saw "Lee Cronin's The Mummy" in a mildly populated theater, and I heard one "gasp" one time. The yelp was not from me, who stared at the screen in bored silence on my fully-reclined leather chair. And as I did, I found myself appreciating his technique as a director, but lamenting his inability as a writer.

Thrash Review

It's "Shark Week" this week on "So I Went to the Movies," but sadly Netflix's latest, "Thrash," is a pretty unsatisfying way to kick off summer. Maybe it's because it's still April- yeah that's it, Hollywood is saving the good stuff for when sunscreen season officially begins. Let's forget this one and check back in June. Please?

Oh I couldn't do that to you. So what's "Thrash" about? Picture it, South Carolina, present day. The fictional town of Annieville is besieged by a category five hurricane, and the government orders the entire place to evacuate. The once dry land quickly becomes flooded, bringing along some very hungry hungry sharks. So yeah, it's the exact same premise as 2019's "Crawl," trading violent reptiles for violent fish, as well as some of the minor details, and while I did like that creature feature, "Thrash" suffers from the comparison.

Whitney Peak stars as Dakota, a young woman tormented by panic attacks whenever she leaves her house after the offscreen death of her parents. Her uncle Dale (Djimon Hounsou), a marine biologist, because of course he is, promises to pick her up since he knows she can't (and doesn't) skip town to safety. She is content with just chilling in her home, feeling sad for herself, probably trying to think of a way to get out of leaving once her uncle shows up. 

But wait, there's more! Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a single pregnant woman, is driving home from work as she complains to her mom over video call that her boss made everyone come in today. (Vehicular video calls are illegal in SC, the interwebs tell me, but I digress.) But soon she crashes into a tree, trapping her inside with the water slooooooowly rising. She works at the local meat packing plant, and by pure movie-magic coincidence, a tanker truck from her company carrying, um, liquid meat product, is carried away and splits open, leaking blood everywhere. I don't know if that's actually how meat is moved across the country (I hope not), but then again, it's been a long time since I read The Jungle.

Now obviously, the blood will draw sharks, everyone knows that, but why bother having her work at the slaughterhouse? I kept waiting for some type of satire on the corporate exploitation of its workers, but no, the evil mammal flesh place just exists to, ahem, make sure the plot swims along.

Also under fishy assault are a trio of siblings, whose foster parents (Matt Nable and Amy Mathews) also refuse to leave the aquatic salvo. They are a pair of generally unpleasant folks, hicks who swear at the three youngsters while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, hoarding steaks in the basement while feeding the children white bread. I guess the adults don't need bread- you know what I'm thinking too much into this.

And with that, we see the film's biggest failings: we have way too many characters, some of whose stories never intersect, and you don't need to be a genre veteran to tell who was going to be shark food and who was going to live. The characterizations are as shallow as the water the sharks are swimming. Compare Dale to another film marine biologist, Hooper from "Jaws." I'm not implying Richard Dreyfuss is a better actor than Djimon, but the abundance of these kinds of pictures means everyone knows something about sharks. This renders Dale's monologues about the animals boring and unnecessary; anyone who's ever watched a single episode of "Shark Week" knows everything the film knows, and clearly doesn't know, about these ancient animals.

But what about the violence? If a monster movie isn't going to bother much with populating its world with interesting people, then all that's left are the attacks. "Thrash" comes up short here. Some of it comes with the territory: because sharks don't go on land, a lot of the attacks are underwater, so you see some splashes, red water, and yelling. Writer/director Tommy Wirkola does give us one nice kill, where you see a head bit in half, but with a story this stale, you really need some more of that kind of sick creativity.

That's to say nothing of the wonkiness of the special effects. Some shots of the water crashing through the levee look real, but many others look painfully like wet actors standing around in a cold pool. The rest? Like the sharks, clearly CGI. I hate to say it, but "Thrash" is trash.

Pretty Lethal Review

One could be forgiven for assuming Amazon Prime's "Pretty Lethal," an action thriller about ballerinas, is just a late knockoff of last year's "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina," and honestly, it would have been a hell of a lot more enjoyable had it been. At least it would have known what it wanted to be. Instead, this sloppy, messy, idiotic, goofy, silly, bloated, confused and imbecilic flick gives us awkward scenes like Uma Thurman speaking in an awful Hungarian accent, Uma Thurman in a peg-leg and Uma Thurman, face painted white, dressed up like a sugar plum fairy. And she's just a supporting character!

The plot, sure let's call it that: a dance troupe has plane trouble trying to attend a premier ballerina competition in Budapest, and are forced to take a bus. The airline lost their luggage, and like it always happens in the movies, the bus breaks down in the middle of the rainy woods. "But the competition!" the girls whine to their instructor Miss Thorna (Lydia Leonard), so instead of calling for a tow-truck, she decides to have the girls walk to civilization. Clearly, Miss Teacher here has never seen another movie before in her life.

They quickly find themselves at a shady hotel, in the woods of course, with no other buildings in sight, taken in by none other than ex-ballerina Devora (Uma Thurman). She promises to call them a taxi, dry their clothes and feed them, but because plot, gangster son Pasha (Tamás Szabó Sipos) shoots the teacher in the head for rejecting his unwanted sexual advances. Truly, a scene everyone expects in a movie written and directed by women.

I suppose I should mention the troupe themselves- to summarize, they're walking cliches. (Or is that dancing?) We have Bones (Maddie Ziegler), a poor girl whose talent landed her a solo in their group performance. She butts heads with the jealous Princess (Lana Condor), a rich girl who's daddy gets her everything except better films to star in. Then we have Avantika playing the Jesus-loving Grace, whose name is the only clever thing about her. And finally, because no teen-drama would be complete without siblings, we have the sisters: the over-protective Zoe (Iris Apatow) and the deaf Chloe (Millicent Simmonds). The classmates never really feel like people who would be together accidentally, let alone go on a trip for a common interest, but what do I know about tutus?

But back to the story. The death leaves Devora in a bit of a situation, since she's been paying off a debt to Pasha's dad since taking over the hotel from her dad. So, instead of sympathizing with the dancers, calling the police or having a reaction even remotely human, she decides hide the girls in the basement, and then call "The Doktor" (Gábor Nagypál), to kill and then remove any form of identification on the bodies. It's a pretty lousy way of mass-murdering, since they escape and begin killing the patrons off one-by-one, sometimes even two-by-two. For some reason, they're all able to use knives, guns, hammers, etc., to take down henchmen like grunts in a video game. It helps that, despite severely outnumbering the dancers, the pawns in the hotel all attack slowly, without coordination and with a conspicuous lack of guns. I wouldn't mind this (these? I can't remember) relatively major lapse in logic if the action scenes were exciting, but they're not. I know none of heroines are really slicing a man's throat with a razor attached to their pointe shoes, but the camera angles are never able to cover up the fact that blade and skin aren't really connecting. These kills have no thrills.

Yet I can't get over the plot: Why did the bus drive through the lonely forest? And how come the hotel is in the woods, either? Why would anyone drive miles outside the city just to have a drink at the bar or book a room? And it's packed, dozens of nameless goons chain smoking their drinks down in the background as the action unfolds. I had fun thinking about what kind of world this flick occupies, one where everyone in a foreign country is immediately nefarious; one where Hungarians sometimes speak in English to each other despite it clearly being their second, or even third language. Not a good sign when poking holes in the movie is more enjoyable then the movie itself.

It helps that the whole production is so icky, this under current of misogyny masquerading as female empowerment running rampant throughout: I mean, can't Hollywood tolerate having women headline an action film if there wasn't at least one scene of attempted sexual assault? For some reason, we have two of those here. 

There is an ambitious film hidden inside "Pretty Lethal," unburdened by expectations and conventions, but it is not what's ultimately onscreen. Instead, it heavy-headily settles on the message that women need to stick together to make it in a world of xenophobia and sleaze, or else they'll be name-called, abused, drugged, raped or killed. Or all of them, depending on if the attacker has the time.

War Machine Review

Netflix's latest release "War Machine," a 2026 science fiction war action film, is unrelated to the streaming service's other "War Machine," which was a 2017 satirical war film. I don't get it either, I just felt inclined to get it out of the way.

This new one has a plot ripped straight out of a low-rent aisle of an 80's Blockbuster- a giant robot attacks a group of Army Ranger trainees during a simulated mission. Its characters don't even have names, with Alan Ritchson taking the starring role as 81. See, every potential recruit is given a number in place of their identity, so we have a cast consisting of 7 (Stephan James), 44 (Alex King) and 15 (Blake Richardson), among others. Must be easier on the screenwriters than coming up with first and last names, or, gasp, middle ones!

As the film opens, we see 81, a Staff Sergeant, and his brother (Jai Courtney in a glorified cameo) get ambushed in Afghanistan. But right before the attack, the two decide to join RASP, which the interwebs tells me stands for "Ranger Assessment and Selection Program." His brother is killed from wounds sustained from the assault, so, stricken with guilt, enlists despite a knee injury. The man is a tank, passing every challenge thrown his way, remaining icy cold to his team but eluding any and all attempts to make him team leader. Then on the final week, those remaining embark on a fictitious mission, but right before they strap into their helicopters, his superior (Dennis Quaid) appoints him lead. Good luck dodging that, number 81!

They need to make it deep in the forest, locate and destroy a plane, pick up a P.O.W. and then make it back within twenty or so hours. When they find the plane, it doesn't look like any they've ever seen, but the group shrugs their collective shoulders and tries to blow it up anyway. That's bad news for them, because the aircraft isn't an aircraft, it's some sort of monster robot that quickly kills much of the troop. Those who weren't exploded by lasers swiftly scatter, but the giant hunk of murderous metal stalks them, blasting the survivors down a cliff. They soon find themselves at a raging riverside, they try crossing with ropes, but not before Mr. Deathbot finds them, sending the party down the angry waters and over a waterfall. Bet that wasn't in the recruitment brochure.

"War Machine" is a big, loud, dumb movie, and for almost the entire runtime, I was rooting alongside it. The action is frequent, well-staged and generally exciting, coming up with all sorts of different places for our band of nameless heroes to be turned into human stew. Sure, the characters are practically devoid of any personality outside of cliches (15 is a jokester, etc.,), but so what? Isn't the whole idea behind government armies conformity? Actually don't answer that.

But then there's the ending, the movie having somehow kept my interest right up until the last ten or so minutes. As I sat in my comfy couch, I enjoyed the mystery of wondering what this mayhem making mech could be, where it came from and why it was so good at blowing people up into little chunks of red flesh. I was thinking about the film on its own terms, instead of poking holes at its silly premise. But then writers Patrick Hughes (who also directed) and James Beaufort decided to give us an answer. Any answer would have been stupid, in fact. However, the one they went for is so hokey, so obviously trying to be a modern-day piece of feel-good military propaganda that it took me straight out of its goofy world of pulpy, commercial entertainment and into the real world. And that is a scary place to be.

The Bluff Review

Ah the swashbuckler film. It's hard to believe it was once a common sight in theaters, bit today, not so much. The last big one was probably 2017's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales," and be honest, do you remember even one scene from it? I know I don't.

But Amazon Prime's "The Bluff" is more "Pirates of the John Wick" than "of the Caribbean," with our heroine moving faster with guns and swords than any swashbuckler I've ever seen.

Priyanka Chopra stars as Ercell, who's husband, T.H. (played by Ismael Cruz Córdova) is at sea searching for a cure for the legs of their physically disabled son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo). She stays behind to bake him a coconut cake for his birthday (wonder if he wished for his legs to work?), alongside her sister-in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green) on a quiet coast of the Cayman Brac. Lizzy, as she's called, plans to run away with a boy, but the night of, Ercell awakens to men outside her quaint house. It's, gasp, pirates! 

Little does she know, T.H.'s ship was commandeered by none other than the infamous Captain Connor, and wouldn't you know it, him and Ercell have a bit of a history. He kidnapped her at a young age and turned her into a fellow buccaneer, until one day she stabbed him in the back (er, well, chest) and took off with his money. He's been looking for her ever since, and considering his luck finally finding her, you'd think it was his birthday.

He's played by Karl Urban with a calm intensity that verges on overacting, but that's just the kind a dumb movie like this demands. He knows what kind of picture he's in, whereas everyone else takes their dialogue so seriously as if Francis Ford Coppola was behind the camera instead of Frank E. Flowers.

But back to the plot: Ercell first tries to play dumb when a few greasy men hold a sword to her, but like any modern woman, she makes quick work of them using knifes, chairs, frying pans and her bare fists. Freshly freed, she has Isaac head to light the signal fire to alert the British with Pastor Bradley (David Field), while she tries to locate Lizzy. Most of the island holds up in the local church, while the villains try to find Ercell. And the gold, wouldn't be a pirate movie if there wasn't a gold bounty.

It never explains how Ercell here knows this style of fighting, mind you: oh sure, we're told she's previously a seafaring criminal, but I must have missed the day at school where we learned pirates knew "gun fu."

The fighting is bloody and frequent, but it rarely thrills. It's also way too dark, which is especially a problem during the back-half of the runtime with a bulk of the action taking place in a murky, dingy cave. I had all my blinds down and I still struggled. And the problem wasn't my TV, it was obviously a stylistic choice- some scenes are draped in total blackness, the only light coming from the barrel of the gun. When I could see what was going on, it was fine, I guess, I just don't know why the filmmakers didn't want me to see more of it.

The "John Wick" movies, the obvious inspiration here, had almost a sense of humor to them, as if they acknowledged the inherent silliness of killing a man with a book through his mouth. But "The Bluff" fails to find such giddy pleasure with its mayhem, it's just violent to justify its "R" rating. It adds little new to the action thriller genre outside what costumes everyone wears and the occasional use of cannons.

Scream 7 Review

You either die a satire of dumb slasher films, or live long enough to become one. And unfortunately that is what "Scream 7" is. This is a lame movie, filled with too many characters, too many callbacks, too many conveniences and a chronic lack of intelligence.  

Neve Campbell returns as Sidney, who's living a quiet life in a small Indiana town with her daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and her husband Mark (Joel McHale), the chief of police. She runs a coffee shop (like all mass-murderer survivors naturally do), when she gets a phone call claiming to be from Stu (Matthew Lillard), who fans might recognize as the deceased killer from the first film way back in 1996. (And if you think that's a spoiler, then you clearly haven't checked out the film's IMDB page, but I digress.) Then he video calls her, claiming to be at her daughter's school where she's at theater rehearsal. Good thing she's married to a cop, who sends over all available units, her rushing over as well, but apparently this little town is soooo big that Ghostface is able to kill two students before anyone shows up before disappearing. That rascal.

Tatum is distraught that she just lost a friend, and the cops question everyone who was there. This leads to the only clever line of dialogue, spoken by Tim Simons as the theater director: "she didn't even have an understudy!" But please, one cinematic issue at a time.

Sidney immediately suspects everyone, but especially Tatum's boyfriend (Sam Rechner), for no reason other than he's a boy who has an interest in her daughter. Well, that's not entirely true: he's good with computers, and they can't rule out Stu's call being a deepfake. There's a lot of talk of AI in the script, which, instead of being used to seriously discuss its inherit dangers, or do anything interesting with it, just sounds like it wrote the damn thing. I mean, just think of the possibilities: maybe they could have falsified a video of someone killing someone else, or maybe have the good guys use it to confuse the killers? And that's just off the top of my head, and I'm not even a screenwriter!

A lot has been said about Neve Campbell returning to the role of Sidney, which she famously bowed out of the previous picture over a pay dispute. I'm glad they gave her a butt-load of money, but was this dismal entry worth hurting her legacy? At least when Jamie Lee Curtis returned for the seventh "Halloween" entry, "Halloween H20," the film ended up decent. Not here.

Series veteran Kevin Williamson returns as co-writer (alongside Guy Busick) and graduates to director for the first time for the franchise, but boy howdy is the directing shoddy. The camera flailing around during the many attacks so you never have a clear idea what's happening, the only indication that Ghostface plunged the knife into someone being the subsequent shot of him peering over a corpse. 

And for a film filled to the brim with murders, only one showcased any inspiration; I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say, I'll never drink beer from the tap again without thinking of it. But the setup is unfocused, and the execution is sloppy, the actual "kill" looking obviously like a dummy. It's not even a good shot, just a good kill. The only good shot happens early and involves a stage play, but that is just one scene in an entire film.

That's to say nothing of the fact that the daughter is in a play to begin with playing a dog, even. Actually, all her and her friends are, despite everyone wearing cool clothes, having perfect hair and skin. I mean, sure, maybe that would happen, but back in my day, those were the kids everyone else made fun of.

And then there is the writing, which relies on nostalgia instead of pushing the medium forward. Old characters are introduced to get a paltry few claps from a certain audience, but man are they running out of legacy cast members to bring back. The first film had characters who were relatively smart, at least intelligent enough to have seen a few horror movies before and learn from them. But fond memories are all he has, unable to drum up any suspense, relying on ye olde trope of having people go where they shouldn't, never calling the cops and never sticking together as a group. You'd think they'd be able to learn from their own damn movies! (You would also think, after so many murders happen, that cops would be crawling all over the place, but nope, nothing to see here, officer. )

I'll give and example: later on, after a few slicing and dicing, Sidney cries over the phone to her daughter, under attack from the masked villain, yelling she needs to "shoot him in the head." Great advice, something I often think characters should do when I watch these kinds of movies, but because it'd all be over too soon, we need to have Tatum hesitate, gun literally in-hand, so that the killing spree can go on just a wee bit longer. It's just all so laughable, the franchise edging dangerously close to toppling over into parody; you could have easily called this "Scary Movie 6." At least I wouldn't feel bad chuckling at it.

And then there's the ending, where the killer's (or killers, I'll never tell!) motives are revealed. This is the franchise's famous trick, and while I admit I did not predict it, it also made absolutely no sense. I sat thinking to myself "who's that again" and then "wait that's the reason?!" The whole thing reeks of rewrites, reshoots and reedits, which of course probably happened given its infamously troubled production history, but you'd think with so many cooks in the kitchen that they'd come up with something tasty, even if accidentally.

The Strangers - Chapter 3

"The Strangers - Chapter 3" is not so-bad-it's-good. It's not so-bad-it's-bad either. There's a chance, no matter how slight, that I could have enjoyed it that way. Instead, it's so-bad-it's-boring, barely able to register as a movie only because it features what are supposed to be actors doing what is supposed to be acting in front of a camera. I would love to tell you I sat in my reclining leather chair fuming with frustration, or a smile crept onto my face at its overall absurdity, but no. My body refused to give up even a single emotion, this doesn't deserve any.

This is just an unpleasant cinematic experience, but I couldn't bare give this zero stars, simply because it didn't earn the notoriety that comes with such a rating. So as to congratulate the actual onscreen bloodshed, as uninspired as it is, you get one half instead. Movie, I hope you're happy with yourself.

Madelaine Petsch returns as Maya, fresh off of the events from "Chapter 2," after one of the three masked assailants was killed in a car crash. She watches on from behind a tree in the misty woods as the other two examine her body, pick it up and haul it away in their beat-up pickup. She quickly runs in the opposite direction and finds herself at an empty church. In true horror-movie stupidity, she leaves the door open behind her and, I kid you not, begins to play the organ until one of the killers arrives unmasked (Gregory, played awkwardly by Gabriel Basso). It, apparently, never occurred to her to hide or look for weapons or, gasp here's an idea, look for help before his arrival. Gregory isn't there to attack her, I can only assume because it is a place of worship, but that implies a set of rules the film isn't interested in establishing. They share a shot of alcohol and tells her to leave. What. The. Hell..

She almost immediately runs into the creepy sheriff (Richard Brake) in his SUV, who she suspects is "in" on the murders. She tricks him to exit the vehicle, with it running I might add, and speeds off. He looks on wearily, as if he expected this. Now, I imagine anyone in this situation would drive off to another town for help, but not our Maya. She decides, while driving at night and pumped full of adrenaline, to take her eyes off the winding road, rummaging through the passenger-side for, something. So, of course, she crashes into a tree, and a hooded Gregory almost instantly appears and kidnaps her, again. Why don't they just kill her and end the collective audience's misery? Maya actually does this so many times, where she could easily escape but doesn't, that the only possible explanation is that she must like the thrill of the hunt. Stockholm syndrome, maybe? Ha, like this film would even know how to spell either of those words.

But I know the answer: Gregory, alongside the surviving serial killer woman, are hoping she'll go to their side and become their new "third" person in their murder party. This other woman, portrayed by Ella Bruccoleri, the internet tells me is named Jasmine, but I can't recall it actually ever being spoken, but I digress. Maya, for absolutely no reason, doesn't fight back here, at least not until Greg uncomfortably forces the deceased killer's mask on her and begins to simulate a kiss through their facewear. He storms off and slams the door when she rejects his advances, and the next thing we know, all three are in the truck, searching for new victims. All three have their masks on, but why Maya doesn't like, I dunno, yell or scream or do something to attract attention to her unfortunate situation, isn't in the cards for Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland's screenplay. Director Renny Harlin didn't seem to mind, either.

In fact, the only time something resembling an actual plot occurs is when Maya's sister Debbie, her husband and their I think hired bodyguard show up to town and confront the locals at the diner. (Rachel Shenton, George Young and Miles Yekinni, respectively.) No one is freely giving up much, and here is the only time the narrative picks up any momentum. A missing girl, suspect cops and shady townspeople could, at the hands of literally any other collection of filmmakers, make for an intriguing film. Sadly, the threat of resembling competency forces the three out-of-towners to almost immediately be led out into the dark of night, in the middle of nowhere to be attacked and killed off. What was the point of even writing them in?

But now, I know what you're thinking: this movie is bonkers! Just in proofreading my own review I couldn't help but think this was a more interesting motion picture than it really is. But trust me, not only is it more monotonous than it sounds, it will no doubt drag your opinion of what a truly "bad" movie is.

Just by pure coincidence, I happened to watch his 1993 film "Cliffhanger." One of many "Die Hard" clones from decades ago, I sat there today struck at just how decent a director he can be when someone, an actor, writer, producer- anyone, cares even the slightest about the job at hand. I get he hasn't made a decent movie since the 90's, but man, as the director of this entire trilogy, he is such a hack. I can only hope once the cameras stopped rolling this time, he takes time to reflect back on his career, and then swap it.

Inexplicably committed to the lowest common denominator with a story featuring all the dramatic heft of an episode of Degrassi, "The Strangers - Chapter 3" is less interesting than reading the dictionary. At least then I might come across a dirty word.