Category Archives: Film Review

I Watched Day of Reckoning (2025, Dir. by Shaun Silva)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

In this modern day western, Billy Zane plays a U.S. Marshal who recruits a down on his luck sheriff (Zach Roerig) to help him capture a banker robber (Scott Adkins).  Zane goes out to Adkins’s ranch and holds Adkins’s wife (Cara Jade Myers) hostage.  Roerig is not okay with this, especially since he thinks that Zane and his men have ulterior motives for wanting to track Adkins.  Eventually, some other yahoos show up, all wanting to join Zane’s posse, setting up a final violent showdown and Roerig having to decide which side he’s on.

Day of Reckoning had the right, dusty look and the acting was decent but it took forever for the action to actually start.  Instead, there were way too many scenes of Roerig bonding with Myers, who spent nearly the entire running time handcuffed in a bathtub.  Scott Adkins is a martial artist who has a huge online following but he didn’t get to show off any of his skills in the movie so I’m not sure what the point of casting him was.  Trace Adkins (no relation to Scott) and Mike Wolfe (from American Pickers) are also in the movie and I’m always happy to see them.  Rapper Yelawolf, who was supposed to be the next big thing 15 years ago, is also in Day of Reckoning.  He plays the imaginatively named Wolf.  I liked Billy Zane’s performance but it was mostly just because he was Billy Zane.  (I even liked him in Titanic because it’s impossible not to like Billy Zane.)  There’s nothing that interesting or surprising about his character.  It’s obvious that he’s going to turn out to be bad from the first moment he shows up.

Once the action does start up, it’s decent.  I just wish there had been more of it and less scenes of everyone standing around giving each other the evil eye.

 

I Watched Catch Me If You Can (1989, Dir. by Stephen Sommers)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

I hated Grind so much that I decided to watch another movie to get it out of my head.  I’m glad I did because, for my second movie, I picked a good one.

Catch Me If You Can takes place in Minnesota.  The school board is planning on closing down Cathedral High School unless the school can raise $200,000.  Class president Melissa (Loryn Locklin) takes charge of the fundraising drive but, even though she pours her heart into all of the car washes and bake sales, she’s only been able to raise $19,000.  Dylan Malone (Matt Lattanzi, who was married to Olivia Newton-John) is the school bad boy, who is always late to class because he’s busy racing other cars on the country roads near the school.  The principal (Geoffrey Lewis) gives Dylan an option.  He can either help Melissa or he can go to detention.  Dylan’s idea of helping is to take the money that Melissa has raised and bet on the illegal races that he’s entering.  At first, it works.  But when the Fat Man (M. Emmet Walsh) challenges Dylan to race his best man and then tells his racer to cheat, Dylan and Melissa lose all the money.  The Fat Man has a proposition.  The Fat Man dares Dylan to enter an impossible, timed race.  If Dylan wins, he’ll make the double the money that he lost and he and Melissa will be able to save the school. Dylan agrees.  Luckily, it turns out that the school’s principal is also the legendary Fast Freddie, the only person to ever win the Fat Man’s race.

It may not be anyone’s idea of great art but Catch Me If You Can is still a delightful and fun 80s teen movie, complete with a nerdy sidekick who turns out to be secretly cool, a bad boy with a heart of gold and a mullet, and a big football game at the end.  The plot doesn’t even make sense but the cast gave it their all and, as someone who took part in way too many car wash fund raisers in high school, I knew exactly what Melissa was going through!  I’ll admit that, towards the end of the film when everyone was counting down how many seconds Dylan had to make it to the finish line, I got a little caught up in the moment and I may have even cheered a little.  Catch Me If You Can is a wonderful slice of 80s goodness.

The New Centurions (1972, directed by Richard Fleischer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Fresh from the police academy, three rookie cops are assigned to a precinct in East L.A.  Gus (Scott Wilson) is a father of three who just wants to do a good job and support his family.  Sergio (Erik Estrada) is a former gang member who saw the police academy as a way to get out of his old neighborhood, and Roy (Stacy Keach) is a new father who is going to law school at night.  Most of the movie centers on Roy, who goes from being an idealistic rookie to being a hardened veteran and who comes to love the job so much that he abandons law school and eventually loses his family.  Roy’s wife (Jane Alexander) comes to realize that Roy will never be able to relate to anyone other than his fellow cops.  Roy’s mentor is Andy Kilvinski (George C. Scott), a tough but warm-hearted survivor who has never been shot once and whose mandatory retirement is approaching.

Based on an autobiographical novel by real-life policeman Joseph Wambaugh, The New Centurion’s episodic structure allows the film to touch on all the issues, good and bad, that come with police work.  Gus is shaken after he accidentally shoots a civilian.  Sergio feels the burden of patrolling the streets on which he grew up.  Roy becomes a good cop but at the cost of everything else in his life and he deals with the stress by drinking.  There are moments of humor and moments of seriousness and then a tragic ending.  Just as Wambaugh’s book was acclaimed for its insight and its realistic portrayal of the pressures of being a policeman, the movie could have been one of the definitive portraits of being a street cop, except that it was directed in a workmanlike fashion by Richard Fleischer.  Instead of being the ultimate cop movie, The New Centurions feels more like an especially good episode of Police Story or Hill Street Blues.  (The New Centurions and Hill Street Blues both feature James B. Sikking as a pipe-smoking, martinet commander.)

George C. Scott, though.  What a great actor!  Scott only has a supporting role but he’s so good as Kilvinski that you miss him when he’s not around and, when he leaves, the movie gets a lot less interesting.  Scott makes Kilvinski the ultimate beat cop and he delivers the closest thing that The New Centurions has to a cohesive message.  A cop can leave the beat but the beat is never going to leave him.

Brad reviews MEN & CHICKEN (2015), starring Mads Mikkelsen!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

MEN & CHICKEN (2015) is the story of two estranged, and flat out strange, brothers, Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Mads Mikkelsen), who find out a family secret when their father passes away. It turns out that their “dad” is not their biological father, so the two brothers head out to find their real one. They know he’s a reclusive scientist named Evelio Thanatos, and that he lives on a remote island. When they arrive on his island, they meet their three half-brothers Josef (Nicolas Bro), Gregor (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Franz (Soren Malling), who are some real weirdos, and who are prone to violently beat visitors in the head with heavy cookware and stuffed beavers. After taking a couple of beatings from their brothers, Gabriel and Elias are able to work their way into their family’s dilapidated mansion where they find that it is filled with chickens, pigs and a bull named Isak. This is a strange group, with each brother exhibiting certain physical abnormalities and odd behaviors. There’s something dark going on here… and why won’t their new brothers let Gabriel and Elias meet their dad, who apparently sleeps all day in an upstairs room? The remainder of the film deals with the brothers getting to know each other and discovering their family’s deep, dark, animalistic secrets!

I’ve presented a plot summary of MEN & CHICKEN above, but no summary can really do this film justice. It’s a film that has to be seen to be believed. The first thing I really noted about the film is its complete commitment to its weird tone and a twisted sense of humor. We meet Mikkelsen’s character Elias on the most awkward date ever, which he follows up by going to the bathroom and immediately masturbating. We soon learn that masturbating is just something he always has to do. The way his brother accepts the behavior as if it’s no different than him tying his shoes is odd and funny at the same time. There’s also a sight gag early in the film where Gabriel is watching from afar as his brother is being beaten repeatedly in the head by kitchen pots the size of bathtubs that made me laugh out loud. Of course, it’s meant to be funny, but the film’s visuals are also realistic enough that when we see Elias up close his face is a bloody mess! I haven’t watched a lot of Danish films in my life, but I’m starting to get a sense of just how twisted their senses of humor can get! Director and writer Anders Thomas Jensen is somehow able to balance the dark comedy of his setup, the strange nature of the characters he’s created, and the grotesque, horrific visuals that we see inside their family home in a way that’s both absurd and increasingly poignant as the film continues on. I’m so used to movies that follow the same plot points and formulas, but Jensen’s films are wildly unpredictable. You truly never know what you’re about to see next, to both good and bad effect, but it’s definitely not boring!

Mads Mikkelsen is incredible as brother Elias. This role could not possibly be farther away from his repressed badass in Jensen’s RIDERS OF JUSTICE, but you can’t take your eyes off of him. As odd and repulsive as his character can be, the actor’s instincts for absurd comedy are perfectly on display and he’s incredible. I also liked actor David Dencik as his brother Gabriel. His more “normal” character grounds the film as all sorts of craziness is going on around him. They complement each other well. I also recognized Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Nicolas Bro as two of the odd brothers, who were also in RIDERS OF JUSTICE. It’s fun seeing Jensen’s stock players in such unique and versatile performances.

After having now watched Jensen’s films MEN & CHICKEN and RIDERS OF JUSTICE, one of the things I’m picking up on is his ability to create an endearing “family” out of almost any kind of circumstances. These are some of the most strange and troubled people that you will ever see on screen, but beneath the perversity of it all, a theme emerges on the power and acceptance that can be experienced inside of a family, and, ultimately, on the nature of humanity itself. It may not be altogether realistic, but there’s an idealism and hope that resonates with me. 

As I wrap this up, let me just say that MEN & CHICKEN is not for everyone, so I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly. It goes to some deep, dark places in both its humor and the revelation of their dad’s disturbing scientific experiments. However, adventurous viewers with a perverse sense of humor and a willingness to follow a story wherever it may lead will be rewarded by this wholly unique film. A 25 year old me would have probably not been a fan, but 50+ year old me thinks it’s great!!

So, I Watched Grind (2003, Dir. by Casey La Scala)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Grind is about four annoying skaters who are obsessed with bodily functions and who want to get sponsored so they travel across the country and try to con their way into competing in events.  Adam Brody plays the skater who lets them use his college fund to pay for their road trip, which was really stupid of him to do.  They got sponsored but not because they’re any good.  They just happen to meet a skater named Jamie (Jennifer Morrison) who knows their hero (Jason London) and helps them out because she’s nice.  I’m nice too but I wouldn’t have helped out those chuckleheads.  I guess the lesson here is that you should just stand around and eventually, someone will give you some money.

When I started Grind, I thought it seemed familiar but I could have sworn that I have never seen it before.  Then Matt (Vince Vieluf), one of the most disgusting character to ever appear in a movie, told a woman that he was a representative of the “Release Them Twins Foundation,” and I remembered that, when this movie came out, MTV used to show the commercial for it a hundred times a day. I remembered thinking, at the time, that it looked like the dumbest movie ever made and it turns out I was right.

If I had to choose between rewatching Grind or watching two hours of projectile vomit, it wouldn’t be a choice because they’re pretty much the same thing.

Lifetime Film Review: My Amish Double Life (dir by Cooper Harrington)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2025’s My Amish Double Life, Lexi Minetree plays Emma, a young Amish woman who suspects that her father was murdered and who starts sneaking into the city so that she can see for herself what life is like amongst the English.

While hanging out at the club with her friend Rebecca (Rebecca Coopes), Emma meets the handsome and charming Heath (Ty Trumbo).  When Emma, much like Cinderella at midnight, announces that she has to go home, Heath asks her to meet with him the next day.  He says he really likes her.  Even though it goes against her way of life, Emma does so.  In fact, Emma even ends up at Heath’s large and beautiful home.  Unfortunately, when another woman is murdered by a scythe-wielding assailant, Emma finds herself trapped in a web of deception and danger!

Oh, the Amish!  I feel kind of bad for them.  For the most part, they just want to be left alone but, over the past few years, Lifetime and Hallmark have become obsessed with them.  As a result, we’ve gotten several movies about life amongst the Amish.  On Hallmark, Amish men and woman are falling in love with the English.  On Lifetime, young Amish women are having to solve murders and stand up to condescending male elders.  For the most part, most of these films present the Amish as just being a bunch of people who wear old timey clothes and work on farms.  And certainly, I imagine that the farms and the clothes are an important part of Amish life but it’s still hard not to feel that most of these movies are simplifying things a bit.  If nothing else, they tend to ignore the huge role that both religion and pacifism play in the Amish community.  There’s also a tendency to assume that every Amish person secretly yearns to sneak off to the big city.  In the movies, the Amish obsess about life amongst “the English.”  In reality, it seems to be the other way around.

(I should mention that there’s a fascinating documentary called Devil’s Playground, which follows a group of Amish teenagers on Rumspringa.  I recommend it for anyone who is curious about the Amish.)

But what about My Amish Double Life?  Is it an entertaining film?  Heck yeah, it’s an entertaining film.  I mean, let’s set aside the question of accuracy.  This is a Lifetime film.  You’re not watching it for accuracy.  You’re watching it for the melodrama.  You’re watching it for the mystery.  You’re watching it for the clothes and the houses.  That’s why we watch Lifetime films.  My Amish Double Life had a good mystery, one that features several viable suspects.  Clothes?  Not only did we get old timey Amish clothes but we also got sneaking off to the club in the middle of the night clothes!  Houses?  Heath lives in a mansion and the Amish farmhouses were pretty cozy too!  And melodrama?  This film totally embraced the melodrama!  Lexi Minetree was a sympathetic lead, Lesa Wilson did a good job as her overprotective mother, and Rachel Coopes was a force of chaos as the Amish girl who liked to break the rules.  It was an entertaining film, which is the main thing that a Lifetime film should be.

Seriously, though — if you’re in Pennsylvania and you see a horse-drawn buggy on the road, be polite when you pass and don’t gawk.  The Amish are just living their lives.

The Films of 2025: The Surfer (dir by Lorcan Finnegan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Surfer (Nicolas Cage) is an American who has returned to the Australian beach where his dad used to surf.  He wants to buy a home overlooking the ocean.  Even more importantly, he wants to surf with his teenage son (Finn Little).  As the Surfer and his son walk towards the water, they are confronted by three men.  The leader of the men goes by the name of Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand).

“Don’t live here,” Pitbull says, “don’t surf here.”

The Surfer assures Pitbull that his son is an amazing surfer.  (The Surfer’s son looks embarrassed.)

“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” Pitbull replies.

Pitbull is a member of a cult of local surfers, all of whom follow Scally (Julian McMahon), a self-appointed guru who recites his rules with a ruthless but charismatic intensity.  Scally brands his followers, burning their flesh in a ritual to announce that they are now a part of his family.  “Before you can surf, you must suffer,” Scally says.

Now, to be honest, I would just go to a different beach.  I’m not a surfer.  I’m not even that much of a swimmer.  I do, however, enjoy laying out on a nice beach or by a big swimming pool.  One thing that I’ve learned is that, when the cult arrives, you leave.  Seriously, there’s always somewhere better to go.  Any place that does not have a cult will be infinitely better than a place that does.

The Surfer’s son agrees with me and suggests just going to another beach but that’s not an option for the Surfer.  The Surfer is obsessed with Scally’s beach and he’s determined to surf it.  It was on that beach where the Surfer made his best childhood memories.  It was on that beach where his father died.  The Surfer sends his son back home and then the Surfer literally moves into his Lexus.  He sleeps in the parking lot and he keeps an obsessive eye on the beach.

People come and go.  The Surfer meets the Bum (Nic Cassim), who claims that Scally is responsible for the death of both his dog and his son.  A local cop comes by and is quickly revealed to be a member of Scally’s cult.  The Surfer become more and more disheveled.  He loses his money.  He loses his car.  He runs into his real estate agent (Rahel Romahn) but the agent says that he’s never seen the Surfer before.  The Surfer starts to hallucinate and can no longer keep straight who is who.  What at first seemed like an intense midlife crisis and a desire to reclaim one’s youth starts to seem like something much more troubling and potentially psychotic.  Everyone tells The Surfer to leave.  Everyone tells him that he’s never going to get his house and he’s never going to surfer the beach.  But, like the Bum, the Surfer is a man obsessed.

The Surfer is an intriguing film.  At first, it seems like it’s going to be another Nicolas Cage revenge film.  Then, it becomes a surreal head trip, one that leaves you wondering just who exactly Cage’s surfer actually is.  Unfortunately, the film loses it’s way during its final third and instead becomes a rather mundane thriller.  That said, the cinematography is gorgeous and, if you’re a fan of Cage’s unique style (as I am), this film allows him a chance to get totally unhinged.  I wish the film had stuck with its surreal implications rather than chickening out during the final third but still, The Surfer and Nicolas Cage held my interest.

The Lords of Flatbush (1974, directed by Stephen F. Verona and Martin Davidson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1958 and four Brooklyn teenagers, all members of a largely non-violent street gang called The Lords of Flatbush, have enough grease in their hair to start a city-wide kitchen fire.  It’s their senior year of high school.  Chico (Perry King) tries to hook up with a new, blonde transfer student (Susan Blakely).  Butchey (Henry Winkler) makes everyone laugh and hides the fact that he’s secretly really smart.  Stanley (Sylvester Stallone) deals with his impending marriage to Frannie (Maria Smith).  Everyone has to grow up eventually but at least the Lords of Flatbush will always have their memories and probably their leather jackets.

Nostalgia films that were extremely popular in the 70s, as the baby boomers were already starting to mythologize their youth.  Lords of Flatbush is very much about that nostalgia, leading to a film that feels sincere but which is also pretty predictable.  With its coming-of-age storylines and its mix of drama and comedy, Lords of Flatbush owes an obvious debt to American Graffiti.  The movie, like its characters, is likable but not exactly memorable.  Today, it’s really only known because it featured early performances from Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler.  Winkler got his signature role as the Fonz on Happy Days largely based on his performance as Butchey, though Butchey is nowhere near as cool as the Fonz.  Pre-Rocky, this movie was Stallone’s calling card in Hollywood and he rewrote enough of his own lines that he got an additional dialogue credit.  Stallone actually gives a pretty good performance, even if he is obviously closer to 30 than 18.

Stallone’s best scene is when Stanley is trying to buy an engagement ring and Frannie insists that he buy one that costs $1,600.  For the first time, Stanley realizes that getting married means committing to something other than hanging out with his friends and working on his car.  Stanley buys the ring but threatens the jewelry store owner afterwards, telling him to never show Frannie a $1,600 ring again.

The Lords of Flatbush is a film about the past but it’s mostly interesting due to the future of its stars.

Brad reviews RIDERS OF JUSTICE (2020), starring Mads Mikkelsen!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

RIDERS OF JUSTICE (2020) is the genre-bending story of Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), a badass soldier who returns to his home in Denmark after his wife dies in a train accident. His daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), who survived the accident that took her mother’s life, needs her dad to help her through this difficult time, but he has no idea how to process what happened and is failing miserably. Enter Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a data analyst and another survivor of the train crash. Otto tells Markus that his mathematical analysis indicates that the “accident” was actually the staged assassination of a person on the train by a group of criminals who go by the name “Riders of Justice,” and that his wife was an innocent casualty of that attack. Otto also brings along his eccentric, intelligent and emotionally troubled friends Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro) to help convince Markus of their findings. Markus accepts their premise, mainly because he wants someone to blame and take vengeance upon. Soon, the badass and the unlikely trio of nerds set out to kick ass, compute probabilities, hack computers, and get in touch with their innermost feelings. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride, with both blood and tears flowing like raging rivers!

I must admit that prior to sitting down with a group of friends and watching RIDERS OF JUSTICE this weekend, I had never heard of the film. It came out during the COVID lockdown periods of 2020 and 2021 and somehow flew completely under my radar. I’m so glad my friend Stewart chose the film for us to watch because it’s filled with awesome action sequences, absurdist comedy, and real human emotions. I also give it bonus points for being a Christmas movie, as it begins and ends with musical renditions of “The Little Drummer Boy,” even featuring Mads Mikkelsen wearing an ugly Christmas sweater!

I’ll start my discussion of the film with Mads Mikkelsen, an actor I’ve always appreciated, as the emotionally repressed and extremely lethal soldier, Markus. Usually a film like this would star someone like Jason Statham or Liam Neeson and focus solely on his quest for vengeance and not detour too much from those goals. This movie leaves us with no doubt of Markus’ killing abilities, but it also forces him to deal with his daughter’s feelings, as well as her sensitive boyfriend’s attempts to help him heal. Men who try to push Markus into revealing his feelings usually end up with a black eye or broken nose. But to his credit, he usually does feel bad about it afterwards. Next we have Otto, the nerd whose math calculations convince Markus that the riders of justice need to die. Otto is a sweet guy who truly wants to help Markus and Mathilde, but we find out over the course of the film that beneath his pleasant personality is a life fueled by guilt and shame. And then there’s Otto’s nerdy friends Lennart and Emmenthaler. I won’t go into all of the details of their lives, but these guys are also revealed to be thoughtful, kind, angry, funny, and extremely damaged depending on the time and the circumstances. On a funny side note, Emmenthaler’s unexpected ability to assemble a weapon is second to none. RIDERS OF JUSTICE pulls off the genuinely surprising feat of creating a “family” out of this mismatched group, and we see how they come to help each other and depend on each other. This makes the stakes so much higher when they inevitably must battle the evil riders of justice. The movie is funny, dramatic, and badass in equal measures and somehow it all works! 

RIDERS OF JUSTICE was written and directed by a Danish filmmaker named Anders Thomas Jensen. I’m going to be emotionally vulnerable here and admit that I was completely unaware of Jensen, and that he and Mikkelson have an ongoing director / star, filmmaking collaboration that extends back to 2000 and currently includes six movies, with their latest, THE LAST VIKING (AKA BACK TO REALITY), set to be released in the fall of 2025. This collaboration also includes the actors Nicolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro and, with increasing frequency, Lars Brygmann. Based on my appreciation of RIDERS OF JUSTICE, I will be going back in time and watching some of their previous films to see how they stack up, and I’ll be looking forward with great anticipation to the release of their most recent work later this year. One of the great joys of cinema is the discovery of something new and special. I feel like this may have just happened for me again with a late night viewing of RIDERS OF JUSTICE!

Funny Farm (1988, directed by George Roy Hill)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Andy Farmer (Chevy Chase) is a New York sports writer who leaves the city and moves to the small town of Rosebud, Vermont so that he can work on his novel.  He and his wife, Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith), struggle to adjust to living in a small town.  The delivery of their furniture is delayed by the collapse of a covered bridge.  When they try to make a phone call from inside their own house, the local operator tells them to deposit ten cents.  They were expecting a Norman Rockwell-type town and instead, they find themselves having to pay for the funeral of a man who was buried on their property long before they moved in.  When Elizabeth makes more progress writing a children’s book than Andy does with his heist novel, their marriage starts to feel the strain.

Chevy Chase is now so much better known for the stories of his unprofessional and diva-like behavior on film and television sets that it’s easy to forget that he was, at his peak, a very funny actor.  Chase may be playing a variation of his put-upon everyman but, compared to the first two Vacation movies, most of the humor in Funny Farm is very mild.  George Roy Hill was a classy director who had been making movies since the 50s and Funny Farm feels like a throwback to the type of family-friendly comedies that Disney would make in the 60s.  That I laughed as much as I did was largely due to Chase’s performance.  Whether he was tripping over a Dutch door, reacting to his wife’s dislike of the first few chapters of his new novel, or offering to pay the townspeople $50 to pretend to be nice for a weekend, Chase was consistently funny and even likable.  I don’t know if this is the type of performance that Chevy Chase could give today.  There’s a bitterness that’s now integral to screen persona and it’s made him into someone who audience want to laugh at instead of with.  It’s too bad because Funny Farm is a reminder of the type of comedic actor that Chevy Chase used to be and who he probably still could be if not for the failed talk show and the infamous Friar’s Club roast.

As for Funny Farm, it’s an amusing and likable comedy and it still holds up well today.  Chase is the key to the film’s success but he’s not the only reason that the film works.  I liked the scene where Mike Starr and Glenn Plummer, as the two movers, watch as the bridge they tried to drive over collapses.  I even liked the running joke about the two ducks who refused to leave the Farmers’s property.  Funny Farm may not have been a hit when it was first released but it’s since built up a cult following.  There will always be a place for a funny comedy that leaves you in a good mood.