Reviews

This is the sort of horror film that includes a lot of young attractive female actors who are comfortable about acting naked.

Acting and dialogue and action are occasionally weak, but this is low budget, so this should not get in the way of appreciation for those with a true love of such low budget films.

Some might consider this film as filthy dross, but others might consider the dross to be worthwhile food. .

This is the sort of porn horror that I should be able to return to occasionally. The original Last House On The Left is superior in All respects, but the horror in that is too intense for me.

The nudity is restricted to bedtimes and showering and mealtimes. I vastly prefer it to the nudity in the Kindle porn photo magazines that I read in early 2023.

Viewing on Prime Video, I did not notice the IMDb rating until much later. I liked it enough for a second viewing and afterwards I peaked at the IMDb rating and could not accept 4.1 as a fair rating.

So, a leading character is Dwayne, best friend of hero Virgil. First viewing you might just be amazed at how horrific Dwayne manages to be. Second viewing less so, with me he had become just a character.

Second viewing it was as if I was just discovering one of the better 1980's school movies that I had not seen before. Given that, it was fairly predictable and I consider that as part of the charm. I prefer to rate this as 8.

I personally find this to be the best of the Bring It On series. So far. That could be because the storyline follows Horror genre.

I had not expected an additional film in the series to be worthwhile. I was not surprised when I found Scream 5 to be disappointing. Scream 4 is peak Scream, but that has Wes driving it, Scream is his baby.

I also purchased the video stream of All Cheerleaders Die and I found a lot of that to be Cheer quality too. The flaw with that one, to me, is the soundtrack quality. It felt as if they had mixed a 5.1 to stereo in a way that had the front sound too muted. I need to check that further it might be a playback adjustment that was askew.

Before watching this on Prime, I was watching a film about fostering, with Rose Byrne. I didn't watch much but I strongly remember a comment that kids who are fostered in the USA these days are likely to end up dead after a couple of years in the world. I can really believe that.

Hick has that sort of direction. It is not a comfortable story and it has effective actors to drive it along.

This is a world where one is often expected to be able to stand on ones feet in a way that those around can experience as worthwhile and the main characters don't have the sort of background for that to be practical at all. These need a very different world.

If you like Monster High films, do not be surprised if you like this one. So far so predictable.

If you like YA type novels, then a look to the set of four YA novels by Lisi Harrison should appeal a lot. These also cover Frankie starting school, at Merston High, and the storyline and settings through the four novels is very different to the films.

So, there are also some Monster High stories, so far not about Frankie starting school, that do follow the film storylines but they are more for younger readers, definitely not YA.

Personally I prefer the four YA novels to this film, but that is not unusual and the film is still okay. Good fashion too.

This is a film made about and for the God squad, which is a downer, but it is still amazing and okay.

I first noticed Britt R in The Ghost Club of 2003 and it seemed obvious that this was one of those actors who would be worth watching, a lot of unusually good films likely.

With a few exceptions that has mostly held as true for me. Half of her stuff has not appeared on DVD or Blu, especially the more recent stuff, but there are a lot of really good stories among those on disk.

As an exercise, try making a video playlist equivalent for the 2022 songs that did not make it to the final. I found these to be as good as the songs that made the final. This year has a quality at the level of the Junior Eurovision of 2012.

RED (2010)

Wow.

See the blu-ray and it takes off, an exceptional film.

Then view the commentary and power is added to that, again and again.

Then follow up the hints to get Hopscotch (1980) and amazement follows on with amazement.

RED has a lot going for it.

I wrote my first review in April 2007 after having seen most of the episodes for the first time. It is now a 'few' years later and I have deleted my early review and am trying another from scratch, after having seen all the episodes yet again.

When not watched too often I still rate this as the ultimate series, not to confuse it with series for kids as those have a few contenders for the ultimate. I found that Buffy can be watched too often, to the point that it becomes boring. But a few years wait it can become exceptional again.

I feel that I do not need to say more than that.

I first saw this in the late summer of 1968. A London cinerama, front row, extreme left. Not the most ideal seat and what stood out for me in the early minutes was that the legs of the apes did not seem real to me. After that I could not follow the story too well.

The second time I saw this was December 2021. A newspaper had been mentioning Kubrick's work and I decided to get the Visionary Filmmaker blu-ray Collection. Again, those ape legs did not seem real, but everything else did in the early parts. The invention of tools, described as for a need for defence. Then the same tool as a weapon. Solid but sick? The whole story was clicking now.

These days, I doubt that it is impossible for the film to be recreated with changes just in the early sequences. Those ape legs. I am guessing that Kubrick is unlikely to have seen a need for that, just because this is the best that could be done at that time. Just a guess. At the time this will have been close to perfection.

I found that this was the sort of film that I can watch over and over again.

This is an Emma Roberts and I find most of her stuff to be exceptional. So I do not really like Empire State (2013) and Hotel For Dogs (2009), other stuff very much so.

As an added extra, there is Barbie Sunday of Violet And Daisy (2012) appearing in the background occasionally.

Emma and Barbie Sunday are not central to this film. Emma portrays someone who has managed to keep her sense of good sense. As stories go this is closer to Violet And Daisy than Emma's work.

*

A few days later I am no longer wanting to watch it every day, but I now have the book and have purchased the blu-ray version. This is unusual in that in many ways I prefer the film to the book, typically it is the other way around. I prefer a lot of the content of the book, but the novel has mature storytelling.

In my review of 'Teen Beach Movie' I mentioned that I understand Woody to be a victim of modern day vigilante justice. That having read some comments by Moses Farrow and Dylan Farrow and Ronan Farrow it seems proper for me to side with Woody on this.

Also, there is a pattern of allegations and immediate hostility to the targeted person of vigilante justice, and also job loss. If there was a criminal prosecution and a criminal penalty, the hostility and job loss would continue before and after the criminal penalty had been paid. In this case it goes on after a proper official investigation that dismisses the allegations. This is a right wing world, though this does not just happen in right wing worlds. I consider it to be diseased. Among other things, it reminds me of the later episodes of Angel.

With the UK Blu-ray of A Rainy Day In New York available at a more affordable price than usual, I assume because of this, I was able to follow through and get to know the film. It is typical Woody, a story where everyone is a mess, their world is diseased, yet they mostly manage to get by.

The plus for me is that the 'Woody role' is taken by someone of appropriate physical age rather than Woody pushing second childhood into the real world, not keeping it in a personal fantasy world. There is also a young Woody lookalike.

I personally found that second childhood was really important to go through, just near impossible to do right.

Used to be my favourite Woody was his musical, Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Rainy Day squeezes that into second place.

*

Having just read a review of the HBO series Allen v Farrow I know that it is a series I need to avoid. I interpret the review as showing the series as a powerful media trial by a skilled prosecutor.

Anyone who has come across the written Moses / Dylan / Ronan accounts that I did but coming to the conclusion of Woody's guilt should avoid this series unless they want to become part of a baying lynch mob. The film review tells me that.

Me, I still put my trust in proper formal investigations, rather a lesser distrust, with any trial including more than the official state appointed prosecutor. My experience of being transgendered chaff blowing in the wind also makes me distrust simple interpretations of reality. The answer is not blowing in the wind.

I tried reading a Nancy Drew novel once, just I never got past the first few pages. It was the Emma Roberts feature, Nancy Drew (2007), that made it click.

Nancy Drew And The Hidden Staircase (2019). I had hopes for this, but was surprised by the bad girl aspect of Girl Detective. I read that this was a very early story in the series so I looked around to see if a summary of the novel was available on the net and found that YouTube had a good if low definition copy of a 1933 film version of this. It did not have as scary a Nancy, but was she still suspect. I found that I could like the 1933 better than the 2019, but was accepting that the modern version has some okay aspects too. Absurd that I can find this 2019 to be too scary, but with lots of it as okay.

Soon I was looking for more early NDrew and have now watched the 1939 'Nancy Drew Trouble Shooter' and the 2002 'Disney Nancy Drew acted by Maggie Lawson'. I am finding them really okay and, as an ageing Barbie Movie fan, find them as okay as the earlier Barbie movies.

I have looked for DVD collections of the early Nancy Drew, but have not found much. There is a four film collection and if one has a USA address then these can be had, second hand, for very low prices. From a UK address there is a massive post and packing and tax surcharge, though. I hope to occasionally look for affordable DVD Nancy Drew, but for now I have only found YouTube.

Up to recently I would have quoted second childhood as my centre of interest in this, but after 20 years of lingering second childhood I am finding that I just prefer some Family and YA fiction.

I have to rate this high, as one of the ultimate, alongside such as Juno and Scream. 'The best film of all time' is a category that educated critics are qualified to give, all I can say is that to me these have balls.

I found it because of a newspaper mentioning the gymnastics film Stick It (2004). Searching for a DVD of that showed pointers to the DVD of Whip It. I find Stick It to be almost as good as this and assume that anyone into gymnastics already knows it and puts it on a pinnacle too. Gym-nast-ics and gym-nice-tics. Most of the sport scenes are as good as the sport scenes in Whip It.

From this I needed to take things further, and that is where the catch arose.

The novel by script writer Shauna Cross as an obvious step. I am used to books being better that the film, even with good films, but here they are more on the same level. I find the treatment of Bliss's parents as much less scary in the film, on this I prefer the film. Other things the stories are very close, just the book adding extra detail that explains the story better. Glad it is often so easy these days to get quality second hand novels (and video disks) from second hand bookshops around the world.

*

What arrived even before the novel arrived was the biographical history of the resurgence of Roller Derby. 'Roller Girl, Totally True Stories From The Track, by Melissa 'Melicious' Joulwan.'

This gives some early history of a USA sport, leading to a fan form of it being started in Austin TX, a semi independent start also happening in Arizona. The TX group splitting after some really disastrous mistakes by management, with a 'flat track' league forming with more of a skater based ownership and management. The Texas Rollergirls, leading to the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, WFTDA, of which the Rollergirls are a founder member. The remaining original TX group soon changing its name from BGGW to Texas Roller Derby Lone Star Rollergirls, surprise, some fans get them confused, but mostly them using a banked track. Banked track as with the historic, professional, roller derby, but way expensive for a fan form of the sport to consider.

The catch: By now in my background reading I see the flat track teams as the good guys, but Whip It is from the banked track side. After a painful few days I assumed that with the time gap between the formation of The Texas Rollergirls there is a good chance that the old management of BGGW changed. Hopefully for the better.

*

Melicious writes a lot of extra detail and I hope to get to know some of the films that she mentions.

Searching for video I found that WFTDA has a channel on YouTube and I have looked at stuff from 2016 and 2018. I am used to whatever sport I look for there, which I do not do often, to be too low an apparent resolution to be interesting to me. A big example was the women's football (soccer) world cup; just what is women's football like?, I ended up watching a few minutes and then giving up. An early 2020 Netball international was way better so things might be looking up. In this case, the WFTDA I saw of both 2016 and 2018 were okay, these were flat track derby at international level and the video quality was really okay. It was possible to watch these.

The big thing that this video showed me is that WFTDA faces a big challenge. Drew's film showed an exciting and fast moving sport but the current rules and skills needed to win put that on hold. Defence is now for blockers to move backwards on the whistle, for the jammer to be face to face with three blockers as soon as the second whistle goes. The matches showed jammers occasionally getting past this block, the final score of matches capable of being very high despite the defence, but the entertainment value is not what I hoped. The rules are evolving and 2016-18 are not the best years for me.

*

Carefully not mentioned in this: Violence in sport. Health risks in sport. Those 2016 2018 did seem much cleaner than the film.

*

An update, having seen the 2016 International final on WFTDA channel: WFTDA Roller Derby HD - 2016 D1 Championships_ Rose City vs. Gotham Girls Roller Derby. A lot closer to what I had expected, a hint that the defence does not always get in the way of interest.

Real Horror. After.Life (2009) is exceptional, like Last House On The Left or Drowning Mona. Not that Drowning Mona is actually experienced as horror.

This is not my favourite Ricci, just one I respect a lot. For favourite I look to fun Ricci: Penelope, Sleepy Hollow. Or some of the earliest Ricci I have seen, Now And Then, parts of Bear Mountain, Casper. Last House On The Left is not my favourite Craven, either, too much like real horror. Drowning Mona, that I do like to re-watch occasionally, especially since I purchased a 1.85 screen version.

After.Life is a puzzle, too. The details do not fit unless you see the fuller picture, until then it can appear to be badly scripted. Thankfully there are plenty of clues at the IMDb pages. The commentary suggests that it says something about your world view.

Scooby Doo Moon Monster Madness (2015). This should be really okay, if only because it is part of the Scooby series. Except that it occasionally feels amateurish. Rather than saying 'foul', I need to wonder why.

The main symptom I notice is poor delivery. Partly it feels like a parody of the parodies of the slow delivery in Twilight. Except that in this case it gets in the way; done well, as in Twilight or the spaghetti westerns, it is very okay.

Re-edited, with occasional dialogue smoothed out, I think that I might like this a lot. As is I rate this as 3, but it should be 7.

My first reaction to this was amazing, wow.

My first reaction to The Runaways (2010) was also amazing wow. After a while I got to keep liking the music, but not so much the story. I wait to see how I fare with this.

I found my DVD because of a newspaper article, TNE #140, 11th April 2019, The First Women Of Punk. I was a classical fan, but in the late 1970's I used to listen to a BBC Saturday afternoon rock show and it started to play The Slits. Scary songs with music so powerful that I had to disregard the scary. I now understand those to have been the John Peel recordings. The Slits as a pop equivalent of Rite Of Spring. If I had known that they played punk I would have become a punk fan.

Later I found their LP, surprised that it was so much less scary than their radio stuff, yet still having energy, and I assumed that it was the record label playing politics. This film and Viv Albertine's book do put that into perspective. I am disappointed that the film does not cover the radio recordings, but the book does. With the influence of the band managers not getting much of a look in, I wondered how much of the muting of their energy in Cut came from him, particularly Palmolive getting ditched just before the Cut recording. Viv's book clarifies that, Paloma going through a period of not much interest in attending rehearsals.

After the first watching of this film, then re-watching slowly, I now read the scenario as: 0 Paloma moves from, for her, a very repressive Spain, to an arty squat part of 1970's London and is among the people involved with the start of a punk approach to music, whatever that is ... 1 Paloma starts The Slits. She had a big say in what was written and how it was performed, though they all contributed, Ari more and more. 2 The BBC recordings told me of music that was likely to be scary for typical males, while having a Pistols like quality that set it on a pedestal. 3 The girls decide to ditch Paloma. The feel and direction of the music changes as a result. 4 The Cut recording session soon after that was all of the songs that Paloma had helped form, but without them having that distinctive quality that set them, for me, high above the rest. 5 Their later studio albums, Return Of The Giant Slits and Trapped Animal, made the sound more high brow, less immediate, and looking to international music influences, though I still find parts of them interesting and Earthbeat even keeps some of the Cut quality.

I could be wrong in feeling a bond with the early Slits. I came from an authoritarian background and mid teens it did give variations of the behavioural scars they have.

When I discovered Cut I was switched off from most everything so I did not notice The Slits again until the 2019 newspaper article. I was too busy being a walking zombie. I am glad of the opportunity to rediscover them. Gratitude to the film.

I found some videos on You Tube. Post Cut, some are charming and some are lost and one documentary re Viv's book explained McLaren's understanding of punk. Are the Peel recordings the only ones that I should understand to be Punk? Maybe, maybe not. The film suggests that The Slits consider Punk to be wide ranging enough to cover it all, they have a different understanding to McLaren. The Cut version of Typical Girls in the end credits and at the signing with Island, that has real power, to me. That clothed in mud cover and loin cloth pic now reads as an appropriate symbol of how I understand their likely state and that McLaren definition of Punk would increase the mud?

Teen Beach series is nearly as good as HSM and better than Lemonade Mouth. None of these are 10 out of ten, but they are definitely not a waste of time. To me, anyway.

I can like a movie for all sorts of reasons, some not much to do with the movie at all. This shows me how complicated liking something can get, a very individual thing. Controversial, too. To say why I like this so much, how long will the comment stand before it is deleted after complaints?

The stopwatch starts. There is a lookalike to Selena Gomez in one of the lead roles.

The difficult part is that it reminds me of Selena Gomez and Woody Allen and A Rainy Day In New York and Me Too finger pointing, not that I object to everything about Me Too, it is needed, or something is.

Before this I was really hoping that Amazon would find a way to release a blu-ray of Rainy Day soon. Because it is a Selena, no other reason. Now that hope is rained off. Now I am glad that Woody is suing his backer.

Selena has only had small roles in her recent films that I have seen, so I had had hopes for Rainy Day. That such hopes should crash and I would prefer a lookalike instead, maybe better than not even a lookalike. Her political approach to working with Woody, the large donation to ? Charity?, did make me to look to try to find out more of what that was about. I found understandings by Moses Farrow and Dylan Farrow and Ronan Farrow. Allegations by Dylan that had been looked into by the police and dismissed. The interpretation of Moses seems real, to me, but not that of his brother Ronan. To me, from the little that I know. It seems to be attacks to crush someone because of an allegation alone. If the allegation had led to Woody found guilty, then after paying the legal penalty he would still have been crushed, straight out of a Woody movie? A justice that allows no forgiveness even after paying the legal penalty. Unless Woody was an ultra right wing high court judge? It sounds a bit like Richelle Mead's The Fiery Heart. Of the few Woody films that I have seen I do not really like most, Everyone Says I Love You as the big like, but I do not like it that he or anyone else is attacked for iffy reasons. Selena has her own understanding, which seems to be vomit, to me. It is absurd that I rebound to a lookalike, though. But I have done.

Back to Teen Beach 1 and 2. Okay music. An unreal but tolerable comparison of 1962 v the modern world. Fun escapist fantasy. Nothing like as deep as a Woody, but deep is not always the important thing.

I am finding these stories to be getting better and better. If the 1982 is a good 7, then the 1995 is a good 8 and the 2014 is more like a 10.

I noticed some user reviews that objected to this not following the original play. I hope that to many that will seem like missing the point, and not just because of the original being a long running newspaper cartoon series.

I find the music to sing. The familiarity of the old music and the new music, too. The only real flaw of the 1995, for me after seeing this, is that it included music when it would have been better without.

Armchair tourism. Most stories have elements that are not too clear. North of 96th Street, yes. Try to follow the final chase with Rough Guide and Google Maps, I could not understand it too well. Two bad guys drive to a bridge in New Jersey via the Henry Hudson Parkway, then the George Washington Bridge, then south to Liberty State Park and then to the bridge. Why not the Holland Tunnel? I assume that a New Yorker would know.

Search for recent films with Selena Gomez and one finds such as this. She is only in them for a minute, a disappointingly short time, but in this the appearance is okay. She plays herself trying to explain one of the mechanisms behind the 2008 USA and worldwide financial disaster, and the setting for that example is the betting games at Las Vegas.

While that financial crash was happening I was too tied up by the UK Blair Witch period to be able to access news, so I only knew about the crash by prices starting to rise and supermarkets starting to move stuff around a lot, which as a way to put off supermarket customers seems effective, just I assume that it is done to advertise their stock range and to try to get more income? When UK Tory politicians blamed the crash on the previous Labour government I had no basis, other than suspicion, for questioning that.

The Big Short tells me things about the recent world and communicates better than a serious technical work would have done. I needed this.

'Citizenfour' (2014), does does the same about a period when I was starting to be able to access the news. It adds more detail about how the modern world works.

Look to the 2017 UK world, Brexit, these both help me to understand and appreciate that, though it would need additional features to give an explanation of how the left and right have gotten tied up by their equivalents of Blair Witch.

News in September 2015 of unusually high UK levels of unsecured debt due to poverty and Brexit suggesting that a financial crash might be imminent in the UK, it is The Big Short that supplies the alarm bells for that.

I found this by searching for features by Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone was a big additional plus. A fun, watchable zombie story.

The story also set me to searching for Twinkies, a piece of USA culture that occurs frequently in stories and discovering that they are vegetarian and at my local supermarket allowed me to find out that they are something that I personally prefer to avoid. That also led me to wondering about Fat Cakes as in iCarly and the real world equivalents I found were totally brilliant, until I discovered that some were not vegetarian, but some are.

The Abigail character rates 'Hannah Montana' a lot, so I followed that through but did not find the series as watch-able. Miley Cyrus features are better and I rate 'So Undercover' (2012)

Other zombie stuff I have seen recently includes Warm Bodies, very different but equally memorable.