Review: Chicken Run (dir. by Peter Lord & Nick Park)

Posted on September 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“I don’t want to be a pie. I don’t like gravy.” — Babs

Chicken Run is one of those animated films that seems simple at first glance: a bunch of chickens want to escape a farm before they become pies. That basic premise could have easily turned into a lightweight family comedy full of barnyard jokes and little else. Instead, the 2000 DreamWorks and Aardman production, directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, plays like a miniature war movie, prison-break thriller, romance, survival adventure, and pitch-black satire all at once. It is consistently funny, but its comedy works because the stakes feel real. These chickens are not merely trying to get away from an annoying farmer; they are trying to survive an industrial system that sees them as disposable raw material.

The first thing that makes Chicken Run so memorable is how completely it commits to its central influence: John Sturges’s The Great Escape. Ginger, voiced with determined energy by Julia Sawalha, is essentially the Steve McQueen-like mastermind of a prisoner-of-war escape film, only without the motorcycle. She has attempted escape after escape from the Tweedys’ chicken farm, and every failure has made her more experienced, more stubborn, and more isolated from the flock. The farm itself is built and filmed like a prison camp: there are fences, watchtowers, guards, roll calls, surveillance, punishments, and a constant feeling that someone is always being watched. The chickens dig tunnels, build plans, assign tasks, debate leadership, and struggle with morale in a way that directly echoes the Allied prisoners in The Great Escape.

That influence is not just a clever parody. It gives the movie a real sense of structure and urgency. Ginger is not a character who simply wishes for freedom; she is obsessed with earning it. Every failed attempt lands her in the punishment shed, a tiny isolated box that is funny in its exaggerated stop-motion form but also genuinely unpleasant. The sight of Ginger sitting alone in darkness, listening to the rain and realizing that another escape has failed, establishes that the movie is willing to make her suffering count. She is not invincible, and the other chickens do not always believe in her. That gives her eventual success much more weight than it would have had in a more conventional cartoon.

The Tweedys are also far more sinister than the average animated villains. Mr. Tweedy, voiced by Tony Haygarth, is the bumbling half of the pair: nervous, confused, increasingly paranoid, and convinced that “the chickens are organizing.” It is one of the best-running jokes in the movie because he is absolutely right, but his wife refuses to take him seriously. Melisha Tweedy, voiced by Miranda Richardson, is the truly frightening one. She is cold, practical, greedy, and almost entirely without sentiment. When egg production drops, she does not consider improving conditions for the chickens. She decides to turn them into chicken pies.

That is where Chicken Run goes into much darker territory than its cheerful clay-animation style initially suggests. The film’s narrative is built around factory farming, confinement, exploitation, and mass slaughter. The chickens know that when one of them stops laying eggs, she is not being taken somewhere safe. She is taken away to die. The scene involving the elderly hen Edwina is particularly unsettling because it is handled with restraint. The audience never sees explicit violence, but the implication is unmistakable. The sound of the axe, the sudden absence, and the reactions of the other chickens tell the whole story. It is dark material for a family film, but it is never treated as a joke. The humor comes from character behavior and British deadpan timing, not from dismissing the fear these animals feel.

That balance is one of the movie’s greatest achievements. Chicken Run is undeniably an animated comedy, filled with visual gags, eccentric voices, and absurdly specific bits of dialogue, yet its themes remain surprisingly grim. The Tweedys’ new pie machine is not just a goofy invention. It is a huge, mechanized symbol of industrialized cruelty, a machine designed to turn living creatures into products at maximum efficiency. Once it appears, the farm stops feeling merely like a prison camp and starts feeling like something even more horrifying: a production line where the inmates are literally the merchandise. The comedy makes the movie accessible, but the darker ideas give it teeth.

Aardman’s stop-motion animation is essential to that effect. The chickens are expressive in a way that never makes them overly cute or polished. Their handmade look gives them texture and personality. You can see the fingerprints of the animators in the characters’ surfaces, the uneven little details of the farm, and the tangible construction of the machinery. Modern computer animation can create smoother movement and more elaborate spectacle, but Chicken Run has a physical presence that is hard to replicate digitally. The fences feel like real fences. The mud feels like real mud. The pie machine feels enormous and dangerous because it is a real object built in miniature and photographed frame by frame.

The design also helps sell the film’s strange mix of bleakness and whimsy. The Tweedys’ farm is gray, muddy, cramped, and oppressive, a place where every chicken coop resembles a barracks. Beyond the fence is a bright green countryside that feels almost mythic to the trapped flock. Freedom is not some vague emotional idea; it is visible right there, just beyond reach. That visual contrast makes Ginger’s desperation easy to understand. She is not asking for luxury. She wants sunlight, open space, and the ability to live without being counted, confined, or killed for failing to produce enough eggs.

Mel Gibson’s Rocky Rhodes enters the story as the possible answer to Ginger’s problem. He is introduced as a flying American rooster who crashes into the farm like a larger-than-life war hero. His nickname, “the Lone Free Ranger,” and his exaggerated confidence make him feel like a parody of classic American movie masculinity. Rocky is all swagger, charm, and improvised survival instinct, which makes him a good contrast to Ginger’s disciplined, strategic personality. He tells the chickens he can teach them to fly, and the entire farm becomes invested in the idea even when the plan seems impossible.

Rocky works because the film does not make him a flawless hero. He is entertaining and ultimately brave, but he is also a fraud. His supposed ability to fly is part of a circus act, and he has escaped captivity before by using a human-operated catapult rather than his own wings. When the truth comes out, it hurts because the chickens have placed their hope in him. Ginger especially feels betrayed, not only because Rocky lied but because she allowed herself to believe that someone else might finally have the answer. Their relationship has a nice edge to it; it is not a sweeping romance so much as a reluctant partnership between two strong-willed survivors who approach freedom in completely different ways.

The sequences built around the escape plan show how much fun Lord and Park have with action-adventure movie language. While The Great Escape is the most obvious inspiration, certain moments have an energy reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are close calls with traps, rapid-fire improvisation, looming mechanical threats, and escapes that depend on inches of timing. The climax inside and around the pie machine especially has that pulpy serial-adventure tension. Characters are dragged toward blades and conveyor belts, machinery rattles and groans, and plans collapse only for someone to invent another solution at the last possible second.

The final act also brings in a strong resemblance to The Flight of the Phoenix, particularly in the way the chickens turn desperation into engineering. The flock has to build a flying machine out of whatever materials they can gather, and the project depends on cooperation between characters with very different skills. Fowler, the elderly rooster voiced by Benjamin Whitrow, becomes crucial here. At first he seems like a pompous relic, forever talking about his days in the Royal Air Force and resisting Ginger’s modern plans. But his knowledge and experience eventually become useful. He gives the group the language, confidence, and organizational spark needed to turn their makeshift aircraft from a dream into something that might actually leave the ground.

Fowler is also one of the funniest parts of the film because he represents a specific kind of old British pride: stubborn, ceremonial, and deeply attached to the past. His stories about serving under “the old RAF” seem ridiculous until the moment the chickens actually need someone who understands the basic principles of flying. The film never makes him into a conventional action hero, but it allows him to reclaim some dignity. Like many of the supporting characters, he gets a small but satisfying arc.

The rest of the flock is memorable because they are not interchangeable background animals. Babs is sweet, distracted, and constantly knitting, but her innocent manner hides an ability to contribute when it matters. Bunty is blunt, cynical, and always ready to question Ginger’s plans. Mac, with her Scottish accent and technical expertise, is the group’s engineer and probably the person most likely to explain why a wild idea will not work. Fetcher, the rat, is opportunistic and cowardly, but he is useful in the way only a black-market scavenger can be. Even the two dimwitted farm dogs have personality, serving as comic obstacles while still making the farm feel guarded and dangerous.

What makes Chicken Run endure is that it never treats its characters’ freedom as a trivial goal. The story has jokes about eggs, knitting, chicken behavior, British class attitudes, and American bravado, but beneath all of that is a serious belief that a community can refuse to accept the role assigned to it. Ginger’s greatest strength is not that she has the perfect plan. It is that she refuses to surrender when every plan fails. Her determination eventually spreads to the other chickens, who stop seeing themselves as helpless inmates and start acting like participants in their own rescue.

The ending is satisfying because it feels earned. The chickens do not escape through luck alone, and they do not wait for a human to save them. They escape because they organize, take risks, use their talents, forgive one another’s failures, and choose action over resignation. That is a surprisingly powerful message for a film about clay chickens escaping a pie factory.

More than two decades later, Chicken Run still stands as one of the strongest animated films of its era. Its stop-motion craft remains beautiful, its jokes still land, and its references to The Great Escape, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Flight of the Phoenix add an extra layer of fun for viewers familiar with those films. But it is the movie’s willingness to acknowledge fear, exploitation, and death beneath the comedy that makes it more than a clever genre spoof. Chicken Run is funny because it is inventive, but it is memorable because it understands that freedom means the most when it is hardest to achieve.

Review: Flight of the Navigator (dir. by Randal Kleiser)

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Arleigh

“That is my family, but that’s not my home. My home is back in 1978!” — David Freeman

Flight of the Navigator turns a child’s worst possible homecoming into an unexpectedly funny, wistful, and imaginative science-fiction adventure. Released in 1986, it begins as a modest suburban mystery before expanding into a story about time displacement, missing years, alien technology, and the strange loneliness of returning home to a life that has moved on without you. It has the glossy, accessible surface of a Disney adventure, but there is a surprisingly melancholy idea at its center: what would it feel like to lose eight years of your life while everyone you love has had to live through them without you?

The movie follows David Freeman, a 12-year-old boy who disappears in 1978 after going into the woods to retrieve his younger brother Jeff. David wakes up in 1986, apparently having been gone only a few hours from his own point of view. The shock is immediate. His parents are older, Jeff is now his taller teenage brother, the family has moved, and David has become a long-unsolved missing-person case. This opening stretch is probably the film’s strongest material because it plays the scenario straight enough to make it genuinely unsettling. David is not simply a kid dropped into a flashy futuristic world; he is a child abruptly disconnected from the only reality he knows.

That emotional hook gives Flight of the Navigator more weight than many similar children’s adventures. David’s confusion is easy to understand, and the film wisely lets the situation breathe before revealing all of its science-fiction machinery. The sight of his family recognizing him after years of grief is touching, but it also comes with discomfort. David wants everything to return to normal, while his parents are overwhelmed by the impossible fact that their vanished son has returned unchanged. The movie does not dig into the full psychological consequences of that situation, because it is still fundamentally a family adventure, but it gives the idea enough attention to make the stakes feel personal.

Once NASA becomes involved, the story shifts into a more conventional but still entertaining sci-fi mode. Doctors discover that David has advanced knowledge in his brain that he cannot consciously explain, and the mystery leads him to a crashed alien spacecraft. The ship, known as the Trimaxion Drone Ship, is the movie’s most iconic element. Its smooth silver form, with no visible seams or conventional cockpit, still looks appealing because it has a simple, alien elegance. It is not overly busy or mechanical in the way many science-fiction vehicles are. Instead, it resembles a floating metallic organism, something sleek and strange that could plausibly have appeared in a child’s dream.

The ship’s computer, MAX, is what really gives the movie its personality. Voiced by Paul Reubens, MAX begins as a calm, efficient artificial intelligence but gradually becomes sillier and more mischievous after downloading human information from David’s era. Reubens’ performance is a major reason the character works. He does not simply do a recognizable Pee-wee Herman routine, although the playful vocal energy is certainly there. MAX’s changing voice and increasingly erratic sense of humor make him feel like an alien intelligence trying to imitate human behavior and getting it only partly right.

There is a fine line between amusing and annoying when a movie lets its comic sidekick become too hyperactive, and Flight of the Navigator occasionally crosses it. MAX can become a little much, especially during the later scenes where he starts cracking jokes, changing his vocal effects, and behaving like an overexcited child with access to interstellar technology. Still, that energy is part of what makes the film feel uniquely of its era. MAX is not as polished or emotionally sophisticated as later animated or CGI companions, but he remains memorable because he is odd. His humor feels less like a studio-tested collection of one-liners and more like a machine that has accidentally discovered cartoons, pop culture, and sarcasm all at once.

Joey Cramer carries much of the movie as David, and he gives the role more sincerity than the material sometimes requires. He is believable as a regular kid who becomes frightened, angry, curious, and eventually exhilarated by what is happening around him. David is not written as a perfect young hero. He can be stubborn and impulsive, especially when he decides he has to take control of his own situation, but that makes sense. Adults have spent much of the story examining him, restraining him, and treating him as a scientific puzzle. His decision to escape with MAX is reckless, yet it also feels like the response of a child who is desperate to reclaim some agency.

The film’s visual effects deserve credit for helping sell its larger ideas. By modern standards, the effects are obviously dated in places, particularly when the ship changes shape or moves at impossible speeds. Yet the movie uses its effects well enough that they remain charming rather than distracting. The morphing sequence in which the ship transforms into its sleeker form was especially impressive for the time, and even now it has an appealing practical-digital hybrid quality. It does not look completely real, but it looks imaginative. The ship has presence, and the movie understands the pleasure of simply watching it fly through clouds, skim across water, or streak through the night sky.

The electronic score by Alan Silvestri is another major part of the film’s identity. Silvestri is often associated with larger, more overtly heroic scores, especially in films such as Back to the Future, but his work here is more synthetic and futuristic. The music helps create a sense of wonder while also grounding the film in the mid-1980s. It can sound very much of its time, with prominent synthesizers and a clean electronic texture, but that is not a weakness. The score fits a movie about an ordinary kid encountering a cold, shiny, unknowable piece of advanced technology.

One of the better things about Flight of the Navigator is that it does not make its protagonist’s adventure entirely consequence-free. David gets to fly an alien ship, travel at incredible speeds, and encounter a universe beyond his suburban life. That is the wish-fulfillment element, and the film delivers it well. At the same time, the adventure exists because something has gone wrong in David’s life. His journey begins with loss. The movie never becomes as emotionally dark as its premise could allow, but it never completely forgets that David has been separated from his family and displaced in time.

The ending is satisfying because it returns the story to that emotional core. David’s ultimate choice is not just about whether he wants to keep flying around with MAX. It is about whether he can go home, even if home is no longer exactly what it was. The resolution is neat and arguably a little too convenient, but it earns its feel-good payoff. This is a family film, after all, and the movie knows that its audience wants the wonder of space travel without being left in despair over the time-travel implications.

In the end, Flight of the Navigator remains a warm, inventive, and slightly strange piece of 1980s science-fiction. It is not a perfect movie. Some of the comedy is broad, the adults at NASA are more functional than memorable, and the story occasionally rushes past ideas that could have been explored more deeply. But its central concept is strong, its spaceship is iconic, its score is distinctive, and its combination of melancholy and fun gives it more staying power than many nostalgia-driven family movies. It captures the feeling of being a kid who wants to escape into the unknown, while also recognizing that the people waiting at home are what make that escape matter.

Review: The Last Starfighter (dir. by Nick Castle)

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Arleigh

“Alex! Alex! You’re walking away from history! History! Did Chris Columbus say he wanted to stay home? No! What if the Wright Brothers thought that only birds should fly?” — Centauri

The Last Starfighter is one of the most purely enjoyable science-fiction adventures of the 1980s: earnest, inventive, occasionally corny, and driven by the kind of wide-eyed imagination that modern blockbusters too often confuse with sheer scale. Directed by Nick Castle, the 1984 film builds an entire intergalactic adventure around a premise that could have been dismissed as a gimmick: an arcade champion discovers that his favorite game is actually a recruitment test for a real war in space. Instead of treating that premise ironically, the film commits to it wholeheartedly, and that sincerity is ultimately what makes it endure.

Lance Guest stars as Alex Rogan, a teenager living in the Starlite Starbrite trailer park with his mother and younger brother, Louis. Alex is smart, resourceful, and visibly restless. He wants to get out of his small-town surroundings, attend college, and build a better future, but financial strain and family responsibility keep making those ambitions seem less realistic. His one reliable escape comes from an arcade machine outside the local store called The Last Starfighter. Alex plays constantly, eventually achieving a record score that attracts the attention of the game’s mysterious creator, Centauri.

Robert Preston’s Centauri is one of the film’s great pleasures. He is an interstellar recruiter who behaves like a flamboyant carnival salesman, arriving in Alex’s life with a strange vehicle, flashy clothes, a rapid-fire sales pitch, and a proposition that sounds completely insane. Centauri reveals that The Last Starfighter is not merely a video game; it is a test designed to identify young people with the reflexes, tactical instincts, and courage needed to become Gunstar pilots for the Rylan Star League. Alex has not just beaten a difficult arcade game. He has qualified to defend an entire civilization from the Kodan Armada.

That central idea remains the movie’s strongest asset. It transforms a familiar adolescent fantasy into something emotionally resonant. Alex is not gifted with a magical sword, superpowers, or an ancient royal lineage. He is selected because he became exceptionally skilled at something the adults around him would probably regard as a waste of time. His ability to master a video game becomes proof that he has discipline, intelligence, hand-eye coordination, and the ability to make decisions under pressure. For anyone who grew up playing arcade games, it is an irresistible fantasy: the thing you are good at for fun might one day turn out to matter more than anyone realizes.

The film understands, however, that being offered a larger life is not the same as being ready for it. Alex initially reacts to the truth with disbelief and fear rather than instant heroism. He wants to return home. He assumes there has been a mistake. That response helps ground the movie, because Alex is not a prepackaged action hero. He is a teenager who has dreamed of escaping his circumstances but has never seriously considered the sacrifices that escape might require. It is easy to want a more exciting future when it is only an idea. It is harder when that future involves leaving your family, crossing the galaxy, and possibly dying in a war you barely understand.

Lance Guest gives Alex enough insecurity and frustration to make his eventual growth satisfying. Alex can be impatient and occasionally self-centered, but he never comes across as unlikable. He feels trapped, and the film makes that frustration understandable. His conflict is not simply whether he can destroy enemy ships; it is whether he can accept that he deserves a larger destiny than the one he has assumed is available to him. By the time he decides to fight, he has moved beyond wanting adventure as an escape. He has chosen to take responsibility for something greater than himself.

Catherine Mary Stewart is also appealing as Maggie Gordon, Alex’s girlfriend. Maggie is not given an enormous amount to do, but she has more personality than the standard passive romantic interest in many 1980s adventure films. She cares deeply about Alex, yet she also has every reason to be hurt and confused when he suddenly disappears and begins acting strangely. Her scenes with Beta Alex, the android duplicate sent to take Alex’s place on Earth, provide some of the movie’s most amusing moments. Beta Alex looks exactly like him, but his behavior is just strange enough to create an entertaining mixture of comedy and unease.

The Beta Alex subplot is one of the film’s cleverest touches because it allows the story to explore Alex’s absence without simply abandoning the Earthbound characters. Beta Alex is a convincing physical duplicate, but he cannot quite replicate the nuances of being human. His overly literal responses, awkward attempts at social interaction, and bizarre behavior around Maggie make him a memorable comic creation. The device also reinforces the contrast between Alex’s old life and the extraordinary new situation he has been pulled into. While the real Alex is in space facing a galactic conflict, the people at home are left trying to make sense of a version of him that seems familiar but fundamentally wrong.

Robert Preston’s performance gives the entire movie energy whenever Centauri appears. He could easily have become an irritating eccentric, but Preston makes him funny, charismatic, and unexpectedly warm. Centauri sees Alex’s potential before Alex sees it himself. Beneath the fast talking and theatrical mannerisms is a real belief in the people he recruits. He does not merely need another pilot; he genuinely wants Alex to become the person he is capable of being. Preston’s presence adds an old-fashioned show-business charm to a film otherwise built around futuristic hardware and computer-generated spacecraft.

Dan O’Herlihy is equally important as Grig, the reptilian alien navigator assigned to work with Alex. Grig initially seems like the typical stern mentor figure, but he gradually becomes one of the movie’s most likable characters. He has experience, discipline, and a personal history with the war that gives the conflict some added seriousness. His partnership with Alex works because they begin from very different places. Grig is a hardened veteran who has seen the cost of battle, while Alex is an overwhelmed rookie who still wants to go home. As they learn to trust each other, their relationship becomes the heart of the space-adventure material.

The villains are broad but effective. Xur and the Kodan Armada are not psychologically complex antagonists, yet the movie does not need them to be. Their purpose is to represent a threat large enough to force Alex into a defining choice. Xur’s willingness to betray the Star League and sacrifice innocent lives for power makes him an appropriately clear villain for this kind of adventure. The conflict is straightforward: a small group of defenders must stand against an overwhelming enemy force, and Alex must decide whether he will be one of those defenders.

The visual effects are perhaps the most historically fascinating part of The Last Starfighter. The film was an early showcase for computer-generated imagery, using digital effects for its spacecraft, alien environments, and space-combat sequences. At the time, this was revolutionary. Seen today, the visual effects are obviously dated. The ships have a smooth, artificial quality, the textures are basic, and the movement lacks the weight and complexity audiences expect from modern computer animation. Yet there is still something charming about them. They represent a major transitional period in science-fiction filmmaking, when filmmakers were beginning to discover what computers could do for cinematic spectacle.

The early CGI gives the movie a distinctive visual identity rather than simply making it look obsolete. The Gunstar fighter, the Kodan fleet, and the distant alien landscapes have the clean, geometric appearance of an advanced arcade game brought to life. That is fitting for a story about a teenager whose gaming skills translate into real combat ability. The computer-generated imagery may not have the tactile realism of the practical miniature work seen in films such as Star Wars or Blade Runner, but it has an important place in the history of visual effects. The movie was imagining a future that the technology of its day could only partially create, and that ambition remains visible in every digital battle.

The Gunstar itself is a memorable piece of science-fiction design. It looks futuristic while still retaining the simplicity of a classic arcade spaceship, and the cockpit scenes effectively sell the sensation of Alex being thrown into something far beyond his experience. The climactic use of the “Death Blossom” maneuver is especially satisfying because the film treats it as a genuine last resort. It is the cinematic equivalent of unleashing a devastating power-up at the exact moment an arcade game seems impossible to win. The sequence is flashy, uncomplicated, and immensely fun.

What makes The Last Starfighter last is not its special effects alone, nor is it just nostalgia for the arcade era. The movie works because it is fundamentally optimistic. It believes that potential can emerge from unlikely places and that someone who feels ignored, trapped, or underestimated may still possess the ability to do something remarkable. Alex is not chosen because he is already fearless. He becomes heroic because he eventually chooses to act despite being afraid.

The film is not perfect. Its dialogue can be cheesy, some characters are thinly developed, and the dated effects may be difficult for viewers accustomed to modern CGI. Even so, those imperfections are part of its charm. The Last Starfighter is colorful, sincere, and unashamedly enthusiastic about its own premise. It remains a lovable science-fiction adventure because it takes the dreams of a video-game-playing teenager seriously. It asks viewers to imagine that the skill everyone dismisses, the hobby that feels like an escape from ordinary life, might actually be the first sign that they are capable of something far greater.

Guilty Pleasure No. 129: Congo (dir. by Frank Marshall)

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Arleigh

Congo is the kind of movie that makes perfect sense as a guilty pleasure because it is always hovering just above the level of complete nonsense, yet it has enough energy and conviction to remain enormously watchable. Directed by Frank Marshall, the 1995 film turns Michael Crichton’s jungle-thriller premise into a sprawling mixture of monster movie, treasure hunt, corporate conspiracy, technological anxiety, and old-fashioned adventure serial. It is loud, messy, often ridiculous, and loaded with moments that should not work at all. But that is the pleasure of Congo: it commits so completely to its bizarre material that the movie becomes difficult to dislike.

The setup is wonderfully overstuffed. A corporate expedition disappears while searching for a legendary diamond mine in the Congo, apparently after encountering some mysterious, deadly force. At the same time, primatologist Peter Elliot is preparing to return Amy, a gorilla he has raised and taught sign language, to the wild. Amy has recurring dreams—or perhaps memories—of a strange jungle city, and she communicates through a glove that translates her signs into a robotic voice. Before long, Peter, Amy, corporate representative Karen Ross, Romanian explorer Herkermer Homolka, and a mercenary guide named Captain Munro Kelly are all headed toward the same lost city, where diamonds, ancient ruins, and murderous white gorillas await.

That synopsis alone explains why Congo has developed such a devoted guilty-pleasure reputation. It is a movie where satellites, laser weapons, genetically engineered guard apes, corporate greed, sign-language research, volcanoes, and ancient African mythology all exist in the same story without anyone pausing to question the sheer overload of it. The movie treats every development with sincere urgency, even when the audience is watching Amy the gorilla say “Amy good gorilla” through a computerized voice device. It is impossible not to admire the confidence. Congo never winks at the audience, never admits that its premise is wild, and never cuts itself down to a more manageable size. It simply keeps adding more adventure-movie ingredients until the whole thing becomes strangely hypnotic.

Laura Linney’s Karen Ross and Dylan Walsh’s Peter Elliot are meant to anchor all of that craziness, but they are also among the film’s blandest elements. Linney is a talented actress, and she brings a professional focus to Karen’s corporate mission, but the character is written in such functional terms that she rarely feels like more than the person carrying the plot’s technological and business-related exposition. Karen is competent, determined, and occasionally vulnerable, but she never develops a particularly distinctive personality. Linney plays her with a seriousness that fits the film’s overall tone, yet that seriousness can make her feel oddly distant. She is there to make sure the satellite plot, the diamond plot, and the rescue plot keep moving, rather than to provide much spark on her own.

Walsh has an even tougher assignment as Peter. He is essentially the emotional center of Amy’s story, and the film needs the audience to believe in his paternal, almost codependent relationship with her. But Peter is such a mild, generic protagonist that he often gets swallowed by the movie’s more eccentric ideas. Walsh is not bad, exactly; he is simply too subdued for a film filled with volcanic eruptions, killer gorillas, and Tim Curry speaking every line as though he is announcing the end of civilization. His performance has a sincere gentleness that helps the scenes with Amy, but it also makes him feel like he wandered in from a quieter, more conventional family adventure. When the movie becomes bigger and stranger, Peter’s personality does not expand with it.

That blandness becomes especially noticeable because Ernie Hudson and Tim Curry are having such an obviously fantastic time in their roles. Hudson plays Captain Munro Kelly with the relaxed confidence of someone who knows he is the coolest person in the room. Munro is a professional guide, a fighter, a pilot, and a survivor, but Hudson does not turn him into a grim action-movie cliché. He gives the character humor, charisma, and a reassuring calm under pressure. Whenever the group faces another disaster—whether it is hostile terrain, dangerous animals, mercenaries, or the increasingly unhinged situation inside the lost city—Hudson makes Munro feel like the one person who might actually know what he is doing.

Hudson’s performance also gives Congo a sense of fun that the central characters sometimes lack. He has an easy screen presence, and he seems to understand that the film works best when it leans into the pleasures of a grand, pulpy adventure. Munro is not a particularly deep character, but Hudson makes him memorable through timing, attitude, and sheer likability. The movie becomes livelier whenever he takes charge, whether he is negotiating with people in the field or calmly reacting to another completely absurd revelation. If Karen and Peter are the story’s functional leads, Munro is the character who gives the audience someone to enjoy following.

Then there is Tim Curry as Herkermer Homolka, who delivers what can only be described as a masterclass in hammy, scenery-chewing entertainment. Curry does not merely play Homolka; he devours the role with a kind of operatic enthusiasm. Every line is delivered in his grand Romanian accent with the force of a proclamation, and every gesture suggests that Homolka believes he is the hero of the greatest expedition in history. Curry appears to be enjoying himself so much that it becomes infectious. He is not interested in realism, restraint, or subtle characterization. He is there to make every scene larger, louder, and more theatrical.

Homolka is already a ridiculous figure on the page: a pompous explorer with a famous family name, an exaggerated ego, and a dramatic flair that makes him seem less like a real adventurer than a flamboyant villain from a lost serial. Curry recognizes that the only correct way to play him is at maximum volume. His performance turns every bit of dialogue into an event. He gives the impression that he has spent years preparing speeches for this exact jungle expedition, waiting for the chance to announce his discoveries to the world. Even when Homolka is making selfish or foolish decisions, Curry makes him too entertaining to hate.

The contrast between Curry and the more restrained leads is one of the reasons Congo feels so odd. Linney and Walsh approach the material with a level of seriousness that suggests they are trying to preserve some emotional credibility. Hudson and Curry, by contrast, seem to recognize that credibility is not really the point. Hudson brings a cool, knowing charm, while Curry turns the movie into a one-man theatrical spectacle whenever he appears. Neither approach is necessarily wrong, but the difference creates a tonal imbalance. The film’s heroes feel flat because its supporting players are so much more alive.

The killer gorillas, of course, are another major source of the film’s guilty-pleasure appeal. These are not normal gorillas defending their territory. They are pale, vicious creatures bred to protect the diamond city of Zinj, and they attack with the exaggerated menace of monsters in a haunted-house ride. The effects have not aged gracefully. The suits and animatronics are visible, the movements can be stiff, and the creatures are often more amusing than frightening. Yet they remain memorable because the movie gives them a distinct, nightmarish look: white fur, glowing eyes, sharp teeth, and sudden appearances from dark corridors or jungle fog.

Frank Marshall directs the action with enough pace and polish to keep Congo from collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. The jungle setting, the ruined city, the expedition equipment, the satellite imagery, and the volcanic finale all give the movie a bigger sense of scale than its reputation might suggest. It feels like a genuine studio blockbuster from a time when Hollywood would spend serious money on an unapologetically strange idea. The film is not elegant, and it is certainly not believable, but it is never boring for long.

As a conventional adventure movie, Congo is uneven. Its African setting is often treated as a vague, dangerous backdrop, and its plot is overloaded with enough corporate jargon and techno-babble to distract from the more entertaining monster-movie material. But as a guilty pleasure, it is hard to beat. The movie is too bizarre to be generic and too sincere to feel cynical. Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh may be stuck playing bland characters at the center of the chaos, but Ernie Hudson and especially Tim Curry make the journey worth taking. Curry’s performance alone is a treasure: a joyous, magnificent display of overacting that turns Congo from a merely strange blockbuster into something genuinely unforgettable.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

The Transformers: The Movie (dir. by Nelson Shin) Review

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Arleigh

“Such heroic nonsense.” — Megatron

The Transformers: The Movie from 1986 was a must-see for me as a 13-year-old boy, but the anticipation of watching it and the actual experience were two entirely different things. The former was filled with excitement, the kind that comes from counting down the days until you finally get to see your favorite characters on the big screen. The latter, however, was something else entirely—a scarring moment that taught me, in the final year before entering high school, that not even afternoon cartoon characters were exempt from onscreen deaths. It was a harsh lesson in the unpredictability of storytelling, and it left an impression that has lasted a lifetime. And I wasn’t alone. The film shocked and scarred millions of children who flocked to theaters or gathered around their VHS players, expecting their beloved Transformers cartoon to simply be bigger and louder on the big screen. Instead, they were met with the brutal, unforgiving reality of watching their favorite characters die in battle, one after another.

The film was released during the height of Transformers mania in the mid-1980s, a time when the toy aisle was dominated by Hasbro’s robotic heroes and villains. But here’s the thing: The Transformers: The Movie wasn’t just about selling toys—it was about replacing them. Hasbro had a new line of Transformers ready to hit the shelves, and the movie served as a way to phase out the older generation of characters. The result? A shockingly brutal narrative that saw many fan-favorite characters meet their end in ways that were far removed from the relatively tame Transformers TV series. This wasn’t just a Saturday morning cartoon stretched to feature length; it was a full-blown sci-fi epic with stakes that felt real, and consequences that were permanent. For kids like me, who grew up watching the TV show, the film was a jarring wake-up call. The deaths of major characters like Ironhide, Prowl, and even Optimus Prime himself were not just unexpected—they were traumatic. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Transformers: The Movie left an entire generation of children with lasting emotional scars, all because it refused to sugarcoat the cost of war.

And yet, that’s exactly why it worked. The film’s willingness to go dark and take risks is what set it apart from so much of the animated fare of the era. The story picks up in the year 2005, with the Autobots and Decepticons still locked in their eternal struggle. The Decepticons, led by the ever-scheming Megatron, launch a full-scale assault on Autobot City on Earth, and the battle that follows is one of the most intense and visually stunning sequences in the film. The animation, while a product of its time, holds up surprisingly well, with vibrant colors and dynamic action that still feels exciting today. But what really sticks with you is the emotional weight of the story. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the cost of war, and the loss of life—even for animated robots—feels genuine. It’s a far cry from the often lighthearted and episodic nature of the TV series, and that contrast is part of what makes the movie so memorable.

At the heart of the film’s emotional impact is Peter Cullen’s iconic performance as Optimus Prime. Cullen’s voice work in the Transformers TV series had already made Optimus Prime a beloved figure, but in the movie, his role takes on an even greater significance. Though his screen time is brief, Cullen’s delivery of Optimus’s final words—“Until that day, ‘till all are one”—is nothing short of legendary. It’s a moment that has been etched into the minds of fans for decades, a testament to Cullen’s ability to convey both strength and vulnerability in a single line. Even now, nearly 40 years later, that scene remains one of the most powerful in the entire Transformers franchise. Cullen’s work helped elevate Optimus Prime from a toy commercial mascot to a genuine hero, and his influence can still be felt in every iteration of the character that has followed.

The film’s legacy is a fascinating study in how a movie can transcend its origins. On paper, The Transformers: The Movie was a 90-minute commercial designed to sell a new wave of toys. But in practice, it became something much more. The bold storytelling choices, the emotional depth, and the sheer audacity of killing off major characters in a children’s animated film ensured that it would be remembered long after the toys it was promoting had been forgotten. For the kids who saw it in theaters or on VHS, the film was often their first exposure to the idea that stories could have real consequences, and that heroes didn’t always make it out alive. It was a formative experience, one that left a lasting impression and helped shape the way a generation of fans engaged with media.

Of course, the film isn’t without its flaws. The pacing can feel uneven at times, and some of the new characters introduced in the movie—like the Dinobots and the Junkions—don’t get as much development as they deserve. The humor, while present, sometimes feels out of place amidst the darker tones of the story. But these quibbles do little to detract from the overall impact of the film. The Transformers: The Movie is a product of its time, but it’s also timeless in the way it handles its themes of sacrifice, leadership, and the cost of war. It’s a film that refuses to be pigeonholed as just a kids’ movie, and that’s part of its enduring appeal.

Today, The Transformers: The Movie holds a special place in the hearts of those who grew up with it. It’s a cult classic, a film that’s celebrated as much for its flaws as for its strengths. For many adults, revisiting the movie is like opening a time capsule, a chance to reconnect with the wide-eyed child they once were, the one who sat in front of the TV or the big screen, completely unprepared for the emotional rollercoaster they were about to experience. The film’s legacy is a testament to the power of storytelling, and to the idea that even something as seemingly commercial as a toy-based animated movie can leave a lasting impact. Whether you’re a lifelong Transformers fan or just someone who appreciates a good underdog story, The Transformers: The Movie is a film that’s well worth revisiting. Just be prepared for a few emotional gut punches along the way.

Review: Legend (dir. by Ridley Scott)

Posted on August 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“What is light without dark? What are you without me? I am a part of you all. You can never defeat me. We are brothers eternal!” — Darkness

Legend is one of those films that feels like it should be a masterpiece even before it begins. It has Ridley Scott behind the camera, an extravagant fantasy premise, elaborate practical effects, striking production design, and a cast that includes a young Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, and Tim Curry. Released in 1985, the film arrived as a dark fantasy event that had been heavily anticipated, especially because Scott had already earned a reputation for visually stunning films. Alien and Blade Runner had established him as a director who could make entire worlds feel tactile, mysterious, and overwhelming. The idea of Scott applying that sensibility to unicorns, goblins, forest sprites, demonic lords, and fairy-tale mythology was exciting on paper. Unfortunately, while Legend is often gorgeous to look at, it becomes an uneven mess that is only saved from becoming a major disappointment by Tim Curry’s performance as Darkness.

The setup is familiar enough to sound almost deliberately archetypal. In a magical forest, Jack, played by Cruise, is a woodland boy who lives in harmony with nature and has fallen in love with the innocent Princess Lili, played by Sara. The world’s balance is tied to a pair of unicorns, embodiments of purity and light. Darkness, a devil-like ruler who wishes to plunge the world into permanent night, sends his goblin servants to kill the unicorns and take one of their horns. Lili’s fascination with the unicorns sets the tragedy in motion, and once one of the creatures is slain, winter and darkness descend upon the land. Jack must rescue Lili, restore the horn, defeat Darkness, and return light to the world.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a simple fairy-tale plot. In fact, Scott’s strongest instinct in Legend is treating fantasy with a sense of visual seriousness. The forest does not look like a clean studio set built for children; it looks damp, overgrown, foggy, and vaguely dangerous. The trees loom like ancient creatures, shafts of light break through the branches in painterly bursts, and even the beautiful areas of the film carry an eerie quality. Scott and cinematographer Alex Thomson create images that often resemble illustrated storybooks poisoned by a nightmare. The film’s environments are its greatest achievement. Whether it is the glowing forest, the icy wasteland after the unicorn’s death, or Darkness’ fire-lit underworld, Legend makes a serious effort to create a fully realized fantasy space rather than simply dressing actors in costumes and placing them in generic medieval scenery.

That visual commitment is why the film remains so fascinating despite its flaws. You can pause almost anywhere and find something worth admiring: a strange creature in the background, smoke drifting through a cavern, an enormous set textured with roots and stone, or a costume that looks handmade rather than mass-produced. Scott’s eye for atmosphere is undeniable. The film has an unusual physicality, too. Its magic is created through prosthetics, makeup, puppetry, matte work, and elaborate sets, so even when some effects have aged, they retain a handmade charm. Modern fantasy often has the advantage of digital flexibility, but Legend has the kind of tactile design that makes its world feel like it has dirt under its fingernails.

Still, visual beauty cannot completely compensate for a story that never finds a consistent rhythm. Legend often feels less like a fully developed narrative than a collection of spectacular images and half-formed fairy-tale ideas. Characters appear with little introduction, emotional shifts happen abruptly, and major story developments can feel rushed or strangely underexplained. The theatrical cut in particular carries the sense that important connective material has been removed. There are moments when the movie seems to expect emotional investment simply because the images are grand or the music swells, but the script has not done enough to earn that reaction.

Jack is also an unusually bland hero for a film that needs a strong center. Cruise was still early in his career, and there are flashes of the screen presence that would soon make him a major star. He is physically committed and looks believable racing through forests, climbing ruins, and confronting danger. But Jack is written as a generic pure-hearted fantasy protagonist, and Cruise never gets enough material to make him feel specific. He is brave because the story says he is brave, romantic because the story says he loves Lili, and destined to save the world because that is what these stories require. He does not have much inner conflict beyond the expected guilt and determination.

Lili is similarly underwritten, although Mia Sara does bring a dreamy, otherworldly quality to the role. The film wants her to embody innocence, temptation, and romantic idealism, but it does not give her much agency until she becomes corrupted by Darkness’ influence. Her transformation into a dark bride is visually memorable, especially in the elaborate black gown and makeup, but it also highlights the film’s habit of prioritizing imagery over character. The sequence is beautiful, eerie, and loaded with gothic fantasy appeal, yet Lili’s emotional journey into that role feels more decorative than dramatically convincing.

The supporting characters are more colorful but not always more useful. The dwarfs, elves, and forest companions give the story occasional energy, particularly the sarcastic fairy Oona and the armored dwarf Gump. Yet their presence can make the film feel tonally scattered. Sometimes Legend wants to be haunting and mythic; sometimes it wants broad comic relief; sometimes it drifts toward romantic melodrama. Those modes do not always blend. The result is a movie that can move from an ominous demonic ritual to a goofy side-character exchange without establishing a stable tone.

Then there is Tim Curry, who walks into the movie and immediately makes every other problem less important. His Darkness is one of the most iconic fantasy villains ever put on screen, and it is not difficult to understand why. The makeup design alone is astounding: massive horns, red skin, cloven hooves, muscular proportions, and a towering silhouette that makes him look like a medieval illustration of Satan brought to life. But the design would be nothing without Curry’s performance. He does not merely hide beneath the prosthetics; he gives Darkness a voice, posture, and seductive intelligence.

Curry plays Darkness as both monstrous and theatrical. His deep, measured delivery turns lines about night, desire, and evil into something genuinely alluring. He understands that the character should not simply roar or sneer. Darkness is persuasive. He offers Lili beauty, power, and escape from innocence, which makes him more interesting than a villain who only threatens destruction. His scenes with Sara have a strange, almost operatic energy, mixing horror, seduction, and camp in a way that fits the film’s most ambitious visual impulses. Curry makes Darkness feel ancient, vain, cruel, romantic, and weirdly funny all at once. He gives Legend its pulse.

The famous confrontation between Jack and Darkness should be the film’s crowning achievement, and visually it almost is. Darkness’ lair, lit by flames and surrounded by infernal architecture, gives Scott room to indulge his talent for monumental images. Curry’s villain towers over Cruise, making the hero look small and vulnerable. Yet even here, the fight is more memorable for its atmosphere than its dramatic construction. It is a good example of the whole film: rich in aesthetic invention, less persuasive as storytelling.

The music also reflects the movie’s fractured identity. Different versions of Legend are associated with different scores, most notably the Jerry Goldsmith score and the Tangerine Dream soundtrack used in the American theatrical release. The Goldsmith material feels more classically mythic and orchestral, while Tangerine Dream’s electronic music gives the film a distinctly 1980s dream-pop atmosphere. Both have their supporters, and both alter the experience considerably. That split feels appropriate for a movie that has always existed in multiple forms and competing moods. Legend is never quite one thing.

In the end, Legend is a flawed cult fantasy rather than a lost masterpiece. Its reputation rests largely on its imagery, its practical craftsmanship, and Curry’s towering performance, not on the strength of its plot or its emotional depth. Ridley Scott clearly wanted to make a dark fairy tale that felt ancient and sensual, but the finished film too often gets trapped between mythic grandeur, children’s fantasy, gothic romance, and broad adventure comedy. It is an uneven mess, but it is a beautiful one. And every time Tim Curry’s Darkness enters the frame, Legend briefly becomes the extraordinary film it was always trying to be.

Review: The Crow (dir. by Rupert Sanders)

Posted on August 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“When someone you love dies, you will know emptiness… You will never forget, and you will never, ever forgive.” — Eric Draven

The Crow is a remake built around a reasonable idea—returning to James O’Barr’s graphic novel rather than photocopying Alex Proyas’s 1994 cult film—but Rupert Sanders’s 2024 version never discovers why this material matters beyond its tattoos, bruises, and black eyeliner. It arrived dead on arrival with critics and audiences alike, not simply because it was measured against a beloved predecessor, but because it offered so little of its own identity. The film is dour without being haunting, romantic without generating much chemistry, and violent without making its revenge feel especially cathartic.

Sanders’s film stars Bill Skarsgård as Eric and musician FKA twigs as Shelly, lovers brutally murdered after stumbling too close to the secrets of criminal impresario Vincent Roeg, played with sleek, vaguely supernatural menace by Danny Huston. Eric awakens in a liminal afterlife, is granted a path back to the living world, and returns armed with supernatural endurance and a need to avenge Shelly. The fundamentals are familiar: love is destroyed by violence, death cannot sever that love, and vengeance becomes a darkly mythic expression of grief. Yet The Crow continually confuses the bare outline of that story with the emotional force that made it endure.

The production’s troubled history almost feels encoded in the finished movie. A new Crow film spent more than a decade trapped in development hell, cycling through different studios, directors, screenplays, and potential stars. Relativity Pictures held the project for years; Sony eventually became involved; various versions had names such as Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, Jack Huston, and Jason Momoa attached at different stages, alongside filmmakers including Stephen Norrington, F. Javier Gutiérrez, and Corin Hardy. The project repeatedly stalled under changing rights arrangements, creative disagreements, and the general instability that often turns a familiar title into an endlessly recycled pitch deck. A fresh production effort was announced in 2020, but the Sanders version did not actually begin shooting until 2022 in Prague.wikipedia+2

That prolonged development makes the final product feel less like a passionately argued reinterpretation than a compromise that survived by default. Every era of the project seems to have left a trace. There is a prestige-minded desire to make Eric and Shelly psychologically damaged and contemporary. There is a franchise-minded urge to expand the supernatural mythology. There is also a music-video impulse toward body art, club scenes, fashionable misery, and sharply composed violence. None of these ingredients are automatically bad. But Sanders never finds a way to make them cohere into a world as tactile, strange, or emotionally immediate as the one Alex Proyas created in 1994.

The suspicion around the remake was understandable from the beginning. Most people involved in the original film have either expressed mixed feelings or outright disapproval about revisiting the property. The 1994 The Crow is not merely another cult favorite awaiting intellectual-property renewal. It is permanently linked to Brandon Lee, who was killed in an on-set shooting accident during production. The completed film became a memorial as much as a comic-book adaptation, and its emotional impact cannot be separated from the knowledge of what happened to its star.

The strongest objections have come from James O’Barr and Alex Proyas. O’Barr, writer and artist of the original graphic novel, has questioned the need for a remake for years, once calling the idea of remaking a then-15-year-old film “kind of ridiculous.” Proyas, meanwhile, has been even more direct. He argued that The Crow was not simply a movie because Brandon Lee died making it, and that the 1994 film should remain part of Lee’s legacy. When the new film’s reception turned hostile, Proyas called it a “cynical cash-grab” and mocked the lack of financial reward supposedly waiting at the end of it. The tone of those comments may strike some people as harsh, but the remake never makes a convincing counterargument.

To be fair, Sanders does not ask Skarsgård to imitate Lee. That is one of the film’s better instincts. Skarsgård’s Eric is physically slight, heavily tattooed, insecure, and visibly wrecked by the life he has lived before death. He is not a supernatural rock-and-roll avenger in the same way Lee was. Instead, he resembles a wounded, emotionally arrested young man forced into a mythic role he does not fully understand. It is a potentially interesting angle, especially for a story about grief turning someone into a monster.

But the screenplay, credited to Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, does not give that approach enough shape. Eric is vulnerable, then dreamy, then brutally efficient, then mournful again, depending on what the scene needs. The film treats emotional instability as character depth, but those are not the same thing. A character can be fractured, contradictory, and self-destructive while still possessing a recognizable inner life. Skarsgård does what he can with the material, bringing real physical discomfort and sadness to Eric, yet the movie seems more interested in how his pain photographs than what it reveals.

The same issue affects Shelly. FKA twigs has an immediately magnetic screen presence, and the film wisely spends much more time on Eric and Shelly before their deaths than the 1994 film did. In theory, that should be a major advantage. If the viewer sees the relationship develop, then Eric’s return from death should carry more emotional force. Instead, the early sections feel like a montage stretched into an act: rehab, drugs, late-night intimacy, mutual confessions, music, dancing, sex, and shared trauma. The movie repeatedly tells us that these two are soulmates, but it rarely gives them the specific dialogue, humor, disagreements, or small gestures that make a romance believable.

Their relationship becomes a collection of poses. The camera understands that they are beautiful, sad, damaged people; the script never quite proves they are deeply connected individuals. That is fatal in The Crow, because Eric’s entire mission depends on the audience accepting that Shelly is not merely the woman he loved but the person who made life worth returning to. The movie substitutes trauma bonding for intimacy, assuming that shared wounds automatically equal love.

Huston’s Vincent Roeg is similarly underwritten. Roeg is introduced as an elegant criminal figure with occult powers, someone who preys on young women and sustains himself through a diabolical bargain. It is a significant departure from the relatively grounded gangland evil of the 1994 film, and it could have opened the door to something genuinely grotesque. Instead, the mythology grows more complicated while the villain becomes less interesting. Roeg speaks in the familiar language of immortal bad guys who are convinced that cruelty makes them profound. He lacks the memorable theatricality of the original film’s antagonists and the unnerving specificity that a character like this needs.

The remake’s expanded mythology is perhaps its biggest miscalculation. O’Barr’s original premise has always been powerful because it is so direct: a murdered man is allowed to return, guided by a crow, because love has been violently cut short. It is gothic, but it is simple. Sanders’s version adds a network of afterlife rules, soul exchanges, purgatorial spaces, and supernatural transactions. The more the film explains, the less mythical it feels. Grief does not become larger through lore. In this case, it becomes bogged down in mechanics.

Visually, Sanders has moments of genuine flair. The film’s strongest sequence comes late, when Eric tears through an opera house during a lavish performance. White costumes are stained red, the setting’s exaggerated grandeur clashes with Eric’s raw violence, and the action is staged with a sense of grotesque spectacle. It is the one scene where Sanders’s instincts as a visual stylist really connect with the source material’s heightened pulp melodrama. The sequence is bloody, theatrical, and almost absurd enough to become exhilarating.

Yet it arrives too late and feels disconnected from much of what precedes it. For large stretches, The Crow is subdued to the point of visual anonymity. Its darkness looks digitally smoothed rather than dreamlike. Its city does not have a personality. Its criminal underworld feels interchangeable with any number of slick streaming thrillers. The 1994 film’s Detroit-like nightmare city was impossible to separate from its mood: rain-slicked streets, scorched interiors, industrial rot, grotesque criminals, and an unforgettable goth-grunge soundtrack all fused into one singular aesthetic. Sanders’s movie has better technology but far less texture.

The soundtrack, in particular, exposes the remake’s uncertainty. The 1994 Crow became inseparable from its music, which drew together alternative rock, industrial, metal, and goth influences into an extension of Eric’s world. The 2024 version clearly wants to speak to a newer generation through contemporary pop, electronic, and melancholy club sensibilities. There is nothing wrong with modernizing the musical language, but the choices do not build a coherent subculture around the film. They play as individual selections rather than part of a living, breathing atmosphere.

This is why the remake’s negative response was so predictable. It was not doomed merely because it remade a movie people love, nor because any new Eric Draven would inevitably be compared to Brandon Lee. A remake could have justified itself by drawing more deeply from O’Barr’s graphic novel, creating a truly different visual language, or foregrounding the grief at the center of the story with more honesty. Sanders instead gives us a film that is constantly signaling pain while remaining emotionally remote.

There are fragments of a better Crow scattered throughout: Skarsgård’s willingness to play Eric as fragile and unglamorous, twigs’s spectral intensity, and the opera-house massacre’s gleefully excessive bloodshed. But those fragments never combine into a whole. The Crow has the eyeliner, the tattoos, the wounds, and the bird, but it never finds the heart beneath them. The original film endured because it turned loss into a piece of feverish gothic pulp. This remake turns loss into an aesthetic, and that is not nearly enough.

Review: The Crow (dir. by Alex Proyas)

Posted on August 24, 2026 by Arleigh

“If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” — Sarah Mohr

The Crow is one of those films whose reputation has become inseparable from the tragedy surrounding it, yet reducing it to that tragedy misses why it has endured so powerfully. Alex Proyas’s 1994 adaptation of James O’Barr’s graphic novel is a revenge story, a gothic romance, a comic-book nightmare, and an MTV-era industrial-rock mood piece fused into something singular. It is not flawless, and its storytelling is often more archetypal than psychologically deep, but that directness helps its emotional force. The movie does not ask viewers to untangle a complicated moral puzzle. It asks them to feel the enormity of a love violently interrupted, and then to watch that grief return from the grave with black feathers, white face paint, and a very personal sense of justice.

The premise is almost mythically simple. On the night before their wedding, musician Eric Draven and his fiancée Shelly Webster are murdered by a gang of thugs who break into their Detroit apartment. A year later, on Devil’s Night—the annual pre-Halloween ritual of fires and chaos that hangs over the film’s ruined cityscape—Eric rises from his grave, guided by a crow, to hunt down every person responsible. The classic revenge-movie structure is there: identify the killers, stalk them, punish them, move closer to the figure at the top. But The Crow distinguishes itself by making revenge feel less like triumphant macho fantasy and more like an extension of mourning. Eric does not become a cool killer because pain has made him stronger. He becomes an avenging specter because he cannot accept a world in which Shelly’s final moments are left unanswered.

Proyas directs the film like a fever dream built from wet asphalt, broken glass, empty tenements, and perpetual night. The Detroit of The Crow barely operates as a realistic city, but realism is not the point. It is an expressionist landscape, a metropolis that seems permanently trapped between a crime scene and a graveyard. The production design gives the movie its extraordinary visual identity: towering shadows, alleyways lit by flame, apartments that look like mausoleums, and a skyline that appears to have been abandoned by daylight itself. This is Gothic cinema filtered through comic-book panels, German Expressionism, punk fashion, and the darkly romantic visual language of early-1990s alternative music videos. It has been imitated constantly, sometimes lovingly and sometimes clumsily, but the original still feels unusually tactile. The grime, rain, fire, and shattered architecture have physical weight.

That sense of atmosphere is helped enormously by the soundtrack, which operates as more than a collection of era-specific needle drops. Songs by The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Pantera, and others create a sonic environment around Eric’s grief. The music gives the movie a pulse that is melancholy, furious, and seductive all at once. For many viewers, The Crow became a gateway text for a specific kind of 1990s gothic-alt identity: black clothing, industrial textures, romantic despair, and the conviction that heartbreak could be transformed into style without becoming trivial. Its aesthetic influence is obvious, but it worked because it was attached to an actual emotional core rather than simply a pile of cool images.

Brandon Lee is the center of that emotional core. His Eric Draven is handsome and charismatic, obviously, but the performance’s real strength lies in its shifts of tone. Lee can play Eric as tender and playful in the brief memories of his life with Shelly, then turn him into a creature of eerie stillness and explosive violence. He delivers some of the film’s most famous lines with a theatrical flair that could have become silly in another actor’s hands, but he never entirely loses the sense that Eric is broken underneath the black leather and corpse-like makeup. When he says, “It can’t rain all the time,” it does not land merely as a quotable gothic slogan. It is a declaration of faith from someone trying to recover one small piece of warmth from an overwhelmingly cruel world.

Lee’s death during production makes that performance almost unbearably charged. He was accidentally shot on set during the filming of a scene involving a prop firearm and died at age 28. The production had to regroup, rewrite and restructure parts of the film, and use a combination of body doubles, careful editing, visual effects, and previously filmed material to complete Eric’s story. That practical disruption is visible only in limited ways in the finished product; remarkably, The Crow generally feels cohesive rather than patched together. Still, the tragedy affected more than the logistics of production. It fundamentally changed the public’s relationship to the film. Eric’s resurrection, his grief over a stolen future, and the repeated imagery of a dead young man returning to finish unfinished business all acquired a terrible real-world resonance.

That connection could easily have overwhelmed the movie, turning it into a morbid curiosity. Instead, it made the film feel elegiac. Audiences did not merely see a fictional tragic hero; they saw Lee’s final completed role, an image of an actor whose life had ended before the public had a chance to see where his career might go. The contrast is particularly painful because Lee’s work here suggests enormous range and movie-star potential. He is not just doing martial-arts action or inheriting the legacy of his father, Bruce Lee. He is creating an icon of romantic anguish and dark humor. The public reception of The Crow therefore carried an unusual mixture of admiration, grief, and protectiveness. Its cult status was built partly on its style, soundtrack, and comic-book mythology, but also on the feeling that viewers were witnessing a final gift from an artist taken much too soon.

The supporting cast gives the film much of its flavor, especially because Proyas treats its villains as grotesque figures in a corrupted fairy tale. David Patrick Kelly’s T-Bird is nervy and cruel, Michael Massee’s Funboy has a sleazy unpredictability, and Angel David’s Skank brings a wild, cartoonish energy to the gang. Rochelle Davis, playing Sarah, provides something vital in the opposite direction. She is not merely a child sidekick; she represents the lingering human connection between Eric’s former life and his revenant existence. Her scenes with Eric remind us that he is not simply a supernatural executioner. He is still someone capable of care, humor, and memory.

But Michael Wincott’s Top Dollar is the film’s true villainous masterstroke. Wincott has one of cinema’s most instantly recognizable voices: smoky, velvety, sardonic, and faintly predatory. As Top Dollar, he makes every line sound like it has been exhaled through cigarette smoke in a cathedral. He is not a conventional crime boss in the realistic, procedural sense. He is a decadent king of the city’s underworld, a man who appears to have converted criminal power into a private religion of violence, ritual, and spectacle. His lair, his manner, and his relationship with his half-sister Myca all push him beyond ordinary gangster territory into something operatic and mythic.

What makes Wincott mesmerizing is that he does not overplay Top Dollar’s eccentricities. The character has plenty of theatrical material to work with—occult touches, ominous speeches, a penthouse filled with weaponry and strange décor—but Wincott approaches him with a serene confidence. He rarely seems rushed or rattled, even as Eric systematically destroys his organization. That calm makes him more intimidating. Top Dollar understands the city as a machine of corruption, and he sees himself as the person with his hands on the controls. Wincott’s performance gives the villain intelligence, sensuality, and a distinctly sinister elegance. He is evil, certainly, but he is never bland. In a movie full of striking images, his voice alone becomes part of the visual texture.

The action in The Crow is effective precisely because it avoids pretending that Eric’s vengeance is a balanced fight. For much of the movie, he is invulnerable, and the violence plays like supernatural punishment. The standout set pieces—Eric’s assault on the gang’s hideout, his confrontation with T-Bird, and the final tower sequence—have the heightened, almost ritualistic quality of comic-book action rather than the grounded impact of a crime thriller. That can make some of the antagonists feel less like people than targets, but again, the film is working in the language of myth. Eric is a ghost walking through the consequences of someone else’s cruelty.

If The Crow has a weakness, it is that the love story depends heavily on fragments. Shelly is more an emotional presence than a fully developed character, preserved in Eric’s memories as warmth, laughter, music, and suffering. Yet the film understands that grief often works that way. We do not always remember a person as a complete biography when they are gone; sometimes we cling to specific gestures, rooms, jokes, songs, and images. The flashes of Eric and Shelly together are deliberately idealized because they are being recalled by a man who has lost everything. The movie’s romanticism may be blunt, but it is sincere.

More than three decades later, The Crow still works because it is a film of conviction. It believes in the visual poetry of rain and ruins, in the melodrama of eternal love, in the power of a memorable face framed in black-and-white makeup, and in the possibility that a soundtrack can become part of a movie’s mythology. Brandon Lee’s death will always remain a heartbreaking part of its history, and it is impossible to watch the film without feeling that absence hovering around it. But The Crow is not remembered simply because of what happened behind the scenes. It is remembered because Proyas, Lee, Wincott, and the rest of the cast made a pulpy revenge tale feel like a dark romantic elegy—one that still takes flight every time the crow returns to the skyline.

Review: For a Few Dollars More (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Posted on August 18, 2026 by Arleigh

“When two hunters go after the same prey, they usually end up shooting each other in the back. And we don’t want to shoot each other in the back.” — Col. Douglas Mortimer

For a Few Dollars More is the moment Sergio Leone’s western style starts to feel fully formed: larger, stranger, more emotionally bruised, and far more confident in its ability to turn silence into suspense. Released in 1965, it serves as the second leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It shares the earlier film’s basic ingredients—dusty towns, morally compromised gunmen, crooked institutions, and Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable music—but it is not simply a bigger repeat. Leone takes the stripped-down revenge-and-gold framework of the first movie and gives it a darker emotional center. This is a western about obsession, damaged masculinity, and a world in which violence does not restore order so much as expose how little order existed in the first place.

Clint Eastwood returns as the Man with No Name, although he is called Manco here, and he is still the same lean, poncho-wearing opportunist viewers met in A Fistful of Dollars. He moves through the film with that familiar mixture of cocky calm and barely concealed menace. Manco is a bounty hunter, collecting rewards for dead criminals with an efficiency that makes his work feel almost casual. There is comedy in his early scenes, especially in the way he manages an absurdly large number of wanted men, but the humor has a sharp edge. Manco is not a conventional hero. He is charming because he is capable, because he has style, and because Eastwood knows exactly how little effort the role needs. A squint, a pause, or a hand resting near a gun does more than most full pages of dialogue.

The major difference is that this time Eastwood is not alone at the center of the story. Lee Van Cleef enters as Colonel Douglas Mortimer, another bounty hunter, and his presence gives the film its real dramatic charge. Mortimer is older, more formal, and more openly haunted than Manco. Where Manco seems motivated largely by money and survival, Mortimer carries himself like a man pursuing something much more personal. Their relationship begins as a rivalry, with both men circling the same targets and testing one another’s abilities. Leone gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast: Eastwood is loose and youthful, Van Cleef is rigid and calculating; one looks like he has wandered in from the wilderness, while the other has the manner of a retired officer who never truly left the battlefield.

Their eventual partnership is what makes For a Few Dollars More so satisfying. It is a buddy movie in the least sentimental sense possible. Neither man becomes especially warm or expressive, and their bond is built less on trust than on mutual respect for professional competence. They know the other is dangerous. They also know that the other may be necessary. Leone stages their alliance with a kind of deadpan amusement, particularly when Manco and Mortimer try to outdo each other with increasingly elaborate shooting demonstrations. Those sequences are entertaining because they are absurdly masculine, but the film never lets the spectacle become completely weightless. In this world, skill with a gun is not a sport; it is a qualification for survival.

The villain, Gian Maria Volonté’s El Indio, pushes the film decisively into darker territory than A Fistful of Dollars. Volonté had already played a memorable antagonist in Leone’s previous film, but El Indio is far more unsettling than Ramón Rojo. He is not merely greedy or power-hungry. He is psychologically ruined, driven by trauma and by a sadistic need to revisit it. His recurring pocket-watch motif, paired with Morricone’s chiming melody, becomes one of the film’s great inventions. The tune begins almost innocently, but Leone gradually turns it into a signal of dread. Every time El Indio opens the watch, it feels as though time itself has stopped and everyone nearby has been sentenced to wait for death.

The backstory tied to El Indio is where the movie reveals just how much more disturbing its narrative ambitions are. Leone and his screenwriters introduce subjects that are much uglier than the genre’s usual tales of outlaws and frontier justice: rape, suicide, and the lingering horror of sexual violence. The film does not handle these ideas with contemporary sensitivity, and it is not interested in exploring their victims with the depth they deserve. Still, their presence changes the atmosphere. El Indio’s trauma is not abstract; it is tied to a violent violation and the suicide that follows it. That history does not humanize him in any easy way, nor does it excuse him. Instead, it explains the repetitive, self-destructive pattern of his cruelty. He is obsessed with an event he cannot undo, and he converts that obsession into violence against everyone around him.

That theme of obsession runs through nearly every important character. Mortimer’s pursuit of El Indio turns out to be rooted in a personal wound that has shaped his entire life. His bounty-hunting career, disciplined exterior, and almost mechanical precision are revealed as part of a long-delayed act of vengeance. Manco, meanwhile, is obsessed in a different and less tragic way: with winning, with money, and with proving that he cannot be manipulated. Even the gang’s massive bank robbery has an obsessive quality. It is overcomplicated, theatrical, and clearly more about El Indio demonstrating power over his men than about securing wealth. Leone’s characters do not simply want things. They become imprisoned by them.

The plot itself is fairly direct, though Leone fills it with enough betrayal and shifting alliances to keep it lively. El Indio and his gang target the bank in El Paso, using a jailbreak as part of a larger scheme. Manco and Mortimer separately infiltrate the group, both pursuing the reward on El Indio’s head while working toward their own goals. From there, the film becomes a tense contest of patience. Leone is never in a rush to deliver a payoff. He lets scenes breathe, often lingering on faces, boots, hands, doorways, and empty spaces. In another director’s hands, this could feel slow. Here, it feels like the movie is daring the audience to notice every tiny movement before the gunfire begins.

That visual patience is one of Leone’s greatest strengths. For a Few Dollars More is full of faces that feel weathered by the landscape around them. The film’s close-ups are almost confrontational, catching sweat, stubble, suspicious glances, and flashes of fear. Leone makes the human face as important as the wide-open Spanish locations standing in for the American West. He also understands that scale works best through contrast. A showdown can begin with an extreme close-up of a man’s eyes, then pull back to reveal two tiny figures facing each other in a vast, empty space. The result is both operatic and intimate.

Morricone’s score deserves equal credit for making the movie feel larger than life. The music is less a background element than another character in the story. Whistles, bells, guitar, percussion, and that eerie watch melody give the film a sound unlike the traditional Hollywood western. It is playful in some moments and nightmarish in others. Most importantly, it makes the climactic duel feel like the culmination of everything the film has been building toward. The final confrontation is not just about who draws first. It is about memory, guilt, revenge, and whether a person can ever truly escape the worst moment of their life.

If A Fistful of Dollars was Leone proving that he could reinvent the western with attitude, For a Few Dollars More is him demonstrating that the formula could carry genuine darkness. It is still stylish, funny, and gleefully exaggerated. It still has impossible gunplay, swaggering antiheroes, and scenes designed purely to make the audience grin. But beneath all that is a colder film. Its violence is tied to trauma. Its men are defined by grudges they cannot release. Its most memorable villain is terrifying not because he is invincible, but because he is already spiritually broken.

Eastwood remains iconic, but Van Cleef is arguably the film’s emotional anchor. His performance gives the story weight without ever becoming melodramatic. Volonté, meanwhile, creates one of the great spaghetti-western villains: volatile, wounded, cruel, and unforgettable whenever that pocket watch begins to play. Leone would go even bigger and more ambitious with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but For a Few Dollars More may be the trilogy’s most focused character piece. It takes the sparse coolness of its predecessor and adds scars, grief, and a genuinely haunted sense of purpose.

Guilty Pleasure No. 126: Alligator (dir. by Lewis Teague)

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Arleigh

Lewis Teague’s Alligator is exactly the sort of movie that sounds like a bad joke until you sit down with it and realize it is having a much better time than most “serious” creature features. The premise is pure drive-in delirium: a baby alligator is flushed down a toilet, survives in the sewer system beneath St. Louis, Missouri, feeds on discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones, and eventually becomes a gigantic, people-eating urban nightmare. It is absurd from the start, but that absurdity is the movie’s best asset. Alligator is not a good film in the polished, tightly controlled sense. It is too clunky, too broad, and too openly ridiculous for that. But it is never boring, and it understands that a movie about a giant alligator stalking the sewer tunnels under St. Louis should be grimy, nasty, funny, and just a little bit stupid.

The film arrives in that sweet spot between the straightforward animal-attack movies of the 1970s and the increasingly self-aware horror comedies of the 1980s. It has some of the structure of a Jaws knockoff, of course: authorities dismiss warnings, a difficult investigator takes the danger seriously, and a creature grows into an outsized public threat before the final confrontation. But Alligator does not have the resources, atmosphere, or aquatic terror of Spielberg’s film, and to its credit, it does not really pretend to. Instead, it leans into the cheapness of its materials. The alligator is mostly an oversized practical effect, sometimes convincing enough to be threatening and sometimes looking like the kind of thing that should be knocking over miniature buildings in a 1950s monster movie. The difference is that Teague knows how to frame the thing. He keeps the creature partly hidden when that helps, lets the sewer setting do much of the atmospheric heavy lifting, and saves the full ridiculousness of the monster for when ridiculousness is exactly what the audience wants.

There is an immediately appealing trashy logic to the story. The alligator is not simply an animal that wandered into the wrong place; it is a product of environmental carelessness, corporate experimentation, and the city’s tendency to throw its problems underground. The movie opens with a young girl’s pet alligator being flushed away after it bites someone, a cruelly comic act that functions as the film’s entire moral universe in miniature. Humans dispose of an inconvenient creature, neglect the consequences, and then act shocked when the creature becomes a gigantic murderous problem. The idea is broadly ecological and vaguely anti-corporate, but Alligator never becomes preachy. It keeps those elements in the background as an excuse for gore, sewer crawling, and a steadily escalating body count.

Robert Forster plays David Madison, a St. Louis cop with the permanently tired demeanor of someone who has been forced to listen to too many witnesses describe impossible things. Forster is a major reason the movie works as well as it does. He does not play the material like a joke, but he also does not strain to elevate it into prestige horror. His performance is dry, irritated, and completely appropriate for a man investigating missing-person cases that increasingly point toward a subterranean reptile large enough to eat a car. Madison is not a particularly complicated protagonist, but Forster gives him enough weary professionalism that the audience can follow him through the nonsense. His deadpan approach also makes the film funnier without turning it into outright parody.

The supporting cast is a strange, entertaining mixture of familiar character-actor energy and exploitation-movie weirdness. Robin Riker plays Marisa, a reptile expert and Madison’s eventual love interest, and she is better than the role strictly requires. She has a brisk, practical presence, which is useful in a movie where most characters either refuse to believe the obvious or exist to become alligator food. The romance between her and Madison is thin, but it is handled with enough low-key charm that it does not stop the movie cold. It feels like a necessary B-movie ingredient rather than a desperate attempt to convince viewers that they are watching something emotionally profound.

Then there is Henry Silva. Honestly, the presence of Henry Silva alone tells you what kind of movie Alligator is trying to be. Silva plays Colonel Brockman, a professional hunter hired by the evil pharmaceutical company to find and kill Ramon, the giant gator created by its illegal growth-hormone dumping. He is not the mastermind behind the scientific mess; he is the company’s hired cleanup crew, brought in once the whole operation has become too big and too toothy to bury. Silva approaches the role with exactly the degree of swaggering, oily menace it needs. He is here to be Henry Silva in a monster movie, which means glaring, sneering, and acting as though the chance to hunt a massive sewer reptile is simply another profitable afternoon at work. Every time he shows up, the movie gets a little more fun.

The screenplay comes from John Sayles, which is almost comically overqualified on paper, though it makes more sense once the dialogue starts landing. Sayles gives the movie flashes of wit and an edge of social satire that keep it from being totally disposable. There are jokes about cops, politicians, wealthy elites, and corporate corruption, and while none of them are especially subtle, they have the right bite for a film this grubby. The story’s best satirical impulse is its refusal to make the rich and powerful merely unlucky victims of the monster. The alligator’s rampage eventually collides with a wealthy social gathering, and the movie takes obvious pleasure in turning a fancy event into a feeding ground. It is not exactly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in its class consciousness, but it does understand that watching an enormous reptile crash through the polished facade of upper-class respectability is satisfying.

Teague directs with the workmanlike confidence of someone who knows that the material only needs to get from one entertaining set piece to another. The sewer scenes are the film’s strongest visual material. They are damp, shadowy, cluttered, and full of the sort of industrial grime that exploitation cinema loves. The setting is inherently creepy because it is both unreal and plausible: everyone knows a city like St. Louis has tunnels, pipes, forgotten chambers, and places where things can disappear, even if nobody really believes a giant alligator lives down there. The movie uses that unease effectively. When characters descend into the darkness, the tension is simple but real. You know something huge is moving nearby, and you know the special effects are not going to hold up to close inspection, but the atmosphere carries you through.

The attacks are uneven, but that is part of the charm. Some are genuinely nasty, particularly when the movie lets the creature strike suddenly from the shadows. Others are so exaggerated that they become funny in ways the filmmakers likely anticipated. There is a particularly memorable moment involving a child and a swimming pool that has the gleefully tasteless punch of old-school grindhouse horror. Alligator is never as graphic as the nastier exploitation films of its era, but it has enough blood, torn bodies, and monstrous chomping to satisfy an audience looking for low-rent carnage. It knows the basic rule of this kind of movie: if you are going to ask viewers to accept a mutant sewer alligator, you had better let it eat some people.

What makes Alligator last beyond its premise is that it does not seem embarrassed by what it is. There are many creature features that feel apologetic, as if the filmmakers know they are making junk and are waiting for the audience to laugh at them. Teague’s film is junk, absolutely, but it is crafted junk. It has actual pacing, committed actors, useful atmosphere, and a screenplay that occasionally has more on its mind than the average monster-on-the-loose picture. It is bad enough that its flaws become part of the entertainment, especially whenever the huge reptile lumbers into view or the plot makes a leap that only makes sense if nobody involved pauses to think for ten seconds. Yet it is not so bad that it becomes a chore. That is the crucial distinction.

By the time Alligator reaches its climax, it has delivered nearly everything its title promises: sewers, corrupt businessmen, cops with guns, practical monster effects, socialites getting their comeuppance, and Henry Silva looking like he would gladly accept a corporate paycheck to hunt an enormous mutant reptile. It is the kind of film best watched with an appreciation for grime, excess, and the noble tradition of exploitation cinema turning a ridiculous idea into a perfectly decent Saturday-night monster movie. Alligator will not make anyone forget the great creature features, but it earns its place as a scrappy, trashy, oddly lovable B-movie. It is not awful. It is not even truly bad. It is just delightfully cheap, mean, and goofy enough to remind you why bad movies can sometimes be more fun than good ones.

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