First Time Watches: April 2016

Prologue: I quickly want to apologize for how late this post is.  I forgot to start writing it until about halfway through May.  With all of the other things I was writing and the fact that I got hooked on Uncharted 2 for about a week and a half, plus home renovations, it took until the end of the month to get this finished.  Then I shelved it because I’m lazy.  Sorry about the wait.  This is actually going to come out right before the post for my May first time watches, so you’ll get two in a row.  How about that?  Onto the post.

This post is coming to you a bit later than I would have hoped.  I meant to be doing these once a month.  It’s always nice to highlight movies and give my brief thoughts.  If you have a taste anywhere near mine, you might be interested to see what I’ve seen or hear my opinions.  It’s a way to share.  But I forgot to do this until a couple nights ago.  I’m sorry.  Let’s get to it then.  Here are the movies that I watched for the first time in April 2016.

The Beast of Bray Road

This was an early era horror flick from The Asylum.  It shied away from their usual mockbuster or shark fare that they are known for.  Instead, it was a werewolf movie where the people of a small town were being killed one by one.  It was low budget and the quality wasn’t great, but it was a promising start for the studio.  It was entertaining, and that’s all I could have asked for.  Though they would later delve into self-aware seriousness, this movie intended to be a solid horror movie.  I appreciate it for that.  It succeeded in that much.

Starve

Keeping people isolated and without food can turn them into animals.  That’s the idea behind Starve.  The main characters were kidnapped and starved until they are willing to fight to the death for the smallest meal.  It’s like a feral version of Mortal Kombat.  The first half worked really well, keeping the villain hidden, and having only his voice.  Once he revealed his face, he felt like less of a threat, but he also felt like more of a character.  It was a weird shift in the good vs. bad dynamic. The movie was still solid the whole way through.  It didn’t strive for greatness.

Young Guns

I had been meaning to watch this for years.  It has a great cast of young 80s actors.  It’s a western based on a real story.  I can’t think of too many westerns from the 1980s.  The movie is well made but I didn’t connect with it in the way that I expected to.  The performances were good, though Emilio Estevez went a little overboard in how crazy he was.  I’m still interested in seeing the sequel.  It was a good movie, just not my thing.

Fatal Deviation

Ireland has produced great movies and filmmakers.  This movie is not one of them.  It’s a no budget action movie with bad acting.  There’s decent martial arts but that’s about it.  I don’t hate the movie at all.  It’s just bad.  The highlight of the movie is a fight club type thing going on in a monastery.  Monks are getting people to fight with each other.  Other than that, it’s an action movie with decent action at best, bad writing, and terrible acting.  Only see this one if you like bad movies.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

I’ve been a fan of Thomas Mann for a few years, based mostly on two movies.  My introduction to him was Fun Size, a teen comedy set on Halloween.  Then I saw him in Project X, a teen comedy about a party escalating out of control.  Now I’ve seen him in this, a sad dramedy about a high school kid who befriends a girl with leukemia.  Though it is seeping with independent dramedy tropes, it works on almost every level.  The ending hits hard and is very emotional.

Mansion of Blood

For what most people would consider a bad movie, this one knew exactly what it was going for and nailed it.  It was campy in all the right ways, blending different aspects of horror with comedy to make for a great experience.  The acting was bad, but it worked perfectly for the tone of the movie.  It was the best experience I had watching a movie in April.  It hit all of my buttons and I’ll be rewatching this one for sure.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

This is the one Zack Snyder movie that I had not seen.  It was on Netflix, so I gave it a shot.  It’s your basic young adult story with great animation and typical Zack Snyder visuals.  This type of story doesn’t always grip me and it didn’t quite grab me this time.  I enjoyed the visuals, and some of the characters, but overall the story was something I had seen many times before done to better effect.  It’s still a good movie.  It was a hoot.

Blended

Every month, I watch an Adam Sandler movie.  It just happens.  Sometimes I get the craving for Happy Madison.  Blended had a decent story.  At its core, it is something that should be fun.  Two single parent families that don’t like each other are forced to spend a vacation together.  They learn that the families actually fit together and should be one big, happy family.  The problem was that it was infused with the typical present day Sandler humour.  There were bad, immature jokes that didn’t quite work.  Adam Sandler was playing the straight man which doesn’t usually work for him.  I would watch it again, but it isn’t a must see movie.

Hush

Home invasion movies are like road trip movies.  Once you see one of them, you’ve basically seen them all.  The beats are always the same.  The difference is how the story is told.  The flourishes that are added make the movies stand on their own.  Hush took the played out home invasion story, where a person or persons play a game of cat and mouse with the person or persons inside, and changed it up by making the victim deaf.  For the most part, it worked.  It added an interesting wrinkle to the derivative idea.  It built tension with the lack of hearing.  Hush is worth seeing.  Don’t expect anything mindblowing, though.

Think Like a Man Too

I watched the first in the franchise a few months ago.  I enjoyed the way that the actors played off of each other.  The ensemble oozed with chemistry.  The sequel had the same qualities.  Although the story was weaker, it was still fun to watch this cast together.  They’re entertaining, humorous and fun to be around.  I’d surely enjoy a third movie if they made one.

The Single Moms Club

Can you believe that this is only the second movie I’ve seen that was directed by Tyler Perry?  That’s crazy, isn’t it?  This is not a good movie.  It was heavy handed in its themes and the overall story wasn’t that great.  There were moments forced in to create drama where it didn’t need to be.  The acting was all over the place.  But there is one reason to watch the movie.  There is one scene that lasts about three minutes that is nothing but double entendres.  That scene is worth watching this movie for.  Though, you could just watch it on YouTube.

Z for Zachariah

This movie was on Netflix Canada and I thought I’d watch it based on the cast.  All three actors were good, but it didn’t really capture me.  It’s still a good movie and I had a good time with it.  It just didn’t meet my high expectations.  That’s my own fault.  The post-apocalyptic setting worked and the small scale story was a rather interesting take on the material.  Not many post-apocalyptic stories are as minor as this one.

Tabloid Vivant

Very rarely do movies look at a negative side to art.  They usually show how great art is, since movies are art.  Tabloid Vivant highlighted the negatives with a couple becoming obsessed with art to the point of harming themselves.  The movie wasn’t that great but the story helped to elevate it.  It made the experience of watching the movie worth the time invested in it.  The acting and direction were okay.  The story was the strength.

Horns

Piranha 3D was one of my favourite movies of 2010.  When I heard that Alexandre Aja’s next movie was going to be an adaptation of the Joe Hill novel Horns (which I admittedly never read), I was excited.  The movie ended up in that weird grey area in between good and bad.  I loved exactly 50% of it and thought the other 50% was terrible.  I would still say it is worth watching.  The highs of the movie are great moments.

Sleeping with Other People

The cast got me into this movie.  Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie as the leads in a comedy that is all about sex is something I wanted to see.  And it was worth it.  The two of them were great and the movie ended up being an unconventional yet conventional romantic comedy.  It’s not the best but it entertained me.  Plus, Jason Mantzoukas was in it and you can never go wrong with that guy.  He’s always the best.

Homefront

I tend to watch a Jason Statham movie every month or two.  I had never seen Homefront, so I checked it out on Netflix.  It’s a solid action movie.  What really worked was James Franco.  He played the right kind of bad guy.  He took it over the top in some moments, but he made the movie more enjoyable.  Of course, there was also Statham kicking butt.  It was a good movie but it’s not one I’ll be rushing to see again.  There are better movies from everyone involved, including writer Sylvester Stallone.

The Horde

This is an independent kick/punch movie.  The lead actor was the writer, making sure his martial arts skills were prominent.  He’s not the best fighter, though.  He’s entertaining and takes down a lot of bad guys, but he’s nothing special.  The movie was about a group of nature photographers getting kidnapped by cannibal criminals who cook meth and the one man who must save them.  It’s not a terrible movie.  I enjoyed it.  It’s worth checking out if you’re drinking with a few friends.

The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)

It’s hard to describe the third Human Centipede movie.  There’s a loose story in there.  The movie was about a prison warden trying to keep his job by doing increasingly insane things to the prisoners.  It escalated to all of the prisoners being sewn together ass to mouth.  But that’s not the crazy thing.  Was the crazy thing that Tom Six played himself and that the first two movies exist as movies in the universe of the third?  Nope.  That’s not it either.  The second movie already tread that ground with the first movie being a movie and one of the lead actresses playing herself.  No, the craziest thing was Dieter Laser.  Tom Six let Laser off the leash to do whatever crazy shit he wanted with his performance.  It is one of the most insane performances in cinema.  Eric Roberts was in the movie too.  Laser is the reason to watch the third installment.  Roberts is the cherry on top.

That brings April 2016 to a close.  It took me a long time to get this post out.  I’m very sorry about that.  Between the stuff happening in my life, and laziness, it took longer than it should have.  This should have been ready for you guys within the first week of May and it wasn’t.  That’s my fault.  But it’s out.  There is now a permanent record of how I felt about these movies.

Next month, I’ll try to get it up sooner.  As a sneak preview of what you’ll get to see, the next First Time Watch post will include movies like Spotlight, Kindergarten Cop 2, Funky Forest: The First Contact, and The Do-Over.  It should be good.  That’s a wide variety.  Come on back next month and see what I have to say about the movies I watched in May 2016.