Movie Reviews

Every year for 20 years I asked for Electronic Battleship for my birthday. I never got it, and instead made due with the standard, analog iteration that didn't have cool sound effects. Flash foward: I'm 41, and I still don't have Electronic Battleship, but I did get to watch the cinematic disaster movie based on the game of the same name.

My 9-year-old self never saw that one coming.

Back when the Blackrazor Guild still played D&D, we had a list of standard battle tactics. They were things like "spring the ambush then fight your way out", "lightning bolt in a short corridor", "fireball at your feet" and the classic "stake out a cow to lure the monster into the open".

Lake Placid is our kind of movie. Set in Maine, the movie involves a monster taking up residence in a lake. The creature starts killing people, including Fish & Game agents counting beavers, which leads an eccentric band of monster hunters to descend on the lake. They consist of Fish & Game agents led by Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), Sheriff's offices led by Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson), a palentologist from New York City named Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) and Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt) rich-but-crazy mythology professor who loves to swim with giant reptiles.

In 1998 director Roland Emmerich released a remake of Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick and featured a monster heavily inspired by the designer Patrick Tatopoulos' pet iguana attacking New York City. It failed on multiple fronts, starting with uninspiring Godzilla design, continuing with the half-assed Siskel and Ebert knockoffs as government antagonists, and ending with a surprise twist that no one wanted.

It was a bad movie. Cloverfield is what happens when J.J. Abrams looks at Godzilla and asks ... how can we make this not suck?

Deep Rising is one of my favorite monster movies, and there's one reason why -- it's the perfect RPG adventure. We've got our hardcore mercenaries hired to hit a cruise ship, a ragtag team of freelancers in over their heads, and a tentacled deep sea horror that intends to devour them all.

Far better than the twin late-1980s deep see flicks Deep Star Six and Leviathan, this film takes place above the ocean, but has similar nautical challenges. To begin, the setting is a huge, ultra-modern cruise ship packed with monster snacks, err, passangers. When our heroes arrive they find all but a handful of people (including the ship's owner, the captain, and a beautiful thief in a red dress).

Predator starts off as a standard 1980s-style military adventure film, not unlike Swartzenager's own Commando. It's got the bad-ass elite soliders (led by Arnold's own Dutch), a bombastic soundtrack, and a pitched firefight with guerillas.

But in between the bouts of testosterone, there's tension. Our troops realize something isn't quite right -- but is it in the mission (fouled by their CIA contact) or something else?

Of course, we know it's something else ... something extraterrestrial, given that an alien spacecraft was dropped to earth by an alien starship just before the opening credits. But as to the nature of their alien adversary, that's a mystery that's revealed ever so slowly.

Some days, all you want is a good ol'fashioned monster movie, one in which the critters are from outer space, the townspeople are unsuspecting, and the slime flows like an insidious, revolting river. Slither provides all this and more, combining the B movie horrors of the 1980s with a sense of humor seldom found in its gory predecessors.

The movie opens with the prerequisite rock from outer space crashing to Earth in the woods outside of Wheelsy, South Carolina. Keeping with the horror theme that the sexually frustrated (be they virgins or not) are the first to die, Slithers sees its soon-to-be villain Grant crawling bars after his wife decides she'd rather sleep than fool around. He finds an old flame willing to become a new one, and together they head off into the woods, where Grant has an attack of conscious and breaks off his would-be fling. Unfortunately for him, he stumbles across a pulsating organic orb along the forest path, and as he pokes it with a stick, it pokes back, shooting a barb deep into his chest.

Jaws is the definitive monster movie of the modern era. While there were all manner of creature features before it, Jaws did what films about vampires, werewolves and other supernatural spawn couldn't: it made millions afraid of the water.

It was the first modern blockbuster, and established a pattern for releasing summer movies that Hollywood held to for decades. For geeks, it did something more important: it established the rules of the genre.

The Dark Knight is brilliant. It’s intellectually challenging. It’s psychologically terrifying. And there’s a damn good chance it’ll scare the living daylights out of your 13-year-old.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who saw Batman Begins. The movie hews close to the comic books, which have run to the dark side ever since 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Miller’s re-imagined Batman lived in a brutal, gritty world in which hope was a distant dream rarely realized. It’s a tradition that continued in some of the best Batman stories since then, such as Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween.

Don’t watch The Mist. You may think you know how things go, having read Stephen King’s short story of the same name. You might like horror and think, "tentacled monstrosities from beyond the edge of time? I can deal with that."

But trust me. If you’re a geek dad or mom, and the kind of person who’d fight to the very end to protect your family, you don’t want to watch this movie. Hell, I watched it, and I wish I could unwatch it.

Yeah, it’s that disturbing.