I have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this for some time, ever since I first heard about it.  The plot was so unique, so almost unlike anything I’d heard of before, that I couldn’t help but get into the concept.  And today, we’re talking about The Box, which Warner Brothers sent a copy of–a movie that got me excited from its inception.  But will it disappoint?  Let’s find out!

The Box involves a young family in 1976 with a serious problem–they’re having some serious money troubles, and are thus forced to delay a needed surgery.  But the family gets an interesting opportunity in the form of a box.  The box has a button on top, and should the button be pressed, two things will happen: one, someone, somewhere in the world, whom the young couple doesn’t know, will die.  Two, the couple will be paid one million dollars, tax free.

They take the offer.

I know, spoiler, but this is only where things BEGIN, not end.  Because after they press that button, they’re wracked with guilt.  And they set out to find out just who it was who died.  And the seeking reveals a whole lot more than they ever wanted to know.

Clearly, The Box was going for high-brow artsy sort of suspense / thriller–at least I hope that’s what they were going for, because otherwise, I TOTALLY missed the point.  There are even some shades of science fiction thrown in here, that really nasty Pod People kind of science fiction where nothing really makes sense even after they explain it to you a couple times.

Surrealist. Yes, that’s likely the best way to explain The Box.  It’s wildly surrealist, a thriller with notes of science fiction and horror tossed in on the side.  In fact, after about the first hour or so, this thing’s going to wildly off the rails and have virtually no further contact with the land of Making Sense and Being Possible.

Thankfully, though, there will be some recovery, especially if you’ve been paying attention all this time, and the end result is that you too can make some sense out of this gigantic pile of weird.

The Screenhead Ten Scale is hard pressed to pigeonhole this often otherworldly film and thus assigns it a six out of ten.  it’s better than the average, those parts which I understood anyway, but so much of this movie will be lost in a haze of baffling plot elements and be rendered nearly unwatchable.

Mother is a riveting movie. You can tell just by watching the trailer. Hye-ja is a single mom to 27-year-old Do-joon. Although her son is completely grown up, he is naive and dependent on his mother. He is therefore a constant source of anxiety. He behaves in ways that are foolish or simply dangerous. 

Walking home alone one night down a nearly empty city street, he encounters a young girl. He follows her for a while before she disappears into a dark alley. The next morning, she is found dead in an abandoned building. Do-joon is accused of her murder. Thanks to an inefficient lawyer and an apathetic police force, Do-joon’s case is quickly closed.  His mother refuses to let this be the end of the story. Trusting no one, Hye-ja’s maternal instincts kick into overdrive. She sets out to find the girl’s killer and prove her son’s innocence.

If you, like me, can’t help but whistle along with “au soleil, sous la pluie, a midi ou a minuit, … il y a tout ce que vous voulez aux champs-élysées” every time you hear about Paris then you’re going to be in for a treat in the thoroughly French From Paris With Love.

Luc Besson–who may well rank among the top five French exports ever alongside champagne, baguettes and the Marquis de Lafayette–brings us a thoroughly action packed tale of mystery, intrigue, cocaine and psychopathic American spies in this fine little thriller.

Actually, that’s a pretty fair description of the plot, too.  Basically, a strait-laced American spy will be bombing around Paris with a lunatic cokehead who just happens to work for the American government also.  The two will play Odd Couple as they shoot their way through Paris’ seamy underbelly in a bid to defend the world from evil nasty Middle Eastern-type terrorists, in this case, largely Pakistani suicide bomber types.

Seriously, they actually SAY “Pakistani” a few times.

Anyway, watching this movie–watching John Travolta geezer his way through an action movie (so how many stand-ins did we need here?) made me think that the theaters have gone into some kind of “eternal summer” mode.  Oh, sure, there’ll still be those “artsy” pictures, those runs for the gold statuettes, but for the most part it seems that Hollywood’s got a bit more consumer-driven than in the past.

From Paris With Love is going to be most everything you expect from a movie released in, say, July.  Loud, explosive, action packed, long on thrills, short on plot, with a few good laughs to take the edge off. It’s a lot like Taken, but on, once again, a headful of coke.

If you love summer movies, then you should definitely enjoy From Paris With Love, but those of you who prefer your plot meatier are going to be very much put off by this insubstantial little confection with all the unlikely plot twists and the massive, gaping plot holes.  For instance, I don’t know where Charlie Wax (John Travolta’s cokehead secret agent) learned to shoot, but he’s got some kind of magic gun where every bullet goes EXACTLY where he wants it.  No one has that kind of marksman skill.

And frankly, the whole “odd couple” thing really IS pretty played out.

But that’s the thing about this movie.  The plot is a catastrophic ball of weak sauce and fail, but there will be loads of gunfire and plenty of explosions, so as long as you keep your suspension of disbelief engines at full capacity, you should be able to at least get visceral thrills out of it.

No one’s going to mistake From Paris With Love for an Oscar winner, but it will be at least passable entertainment. The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this explosive underachiever a six out of ten for showing up and bringing the fun.

Remember when we were getting all cheery happy about the casting details revealed on Burke and Hare?  Well, it turns out we got a fresh new nugget for you–new cast has been added and it’s magnificent.

Not only has the terminally creepy Christopher Lee managed to get a piece of the corpse-stealing action, but no less than PENNYWISE THE DANCING CLOWN has been brought in.  Oh my yes, it’s none other than Tim Curry.

Folks, from a sheer horror standpoint this news could not get much cheerier.  You get a major classic act like Christopher Lee and you put him up alongside one of the most underrated names in horror EVER, well, the end result has to be wild.

This is in addition to Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, so the four of them alone should be indication enough that we’re in for a treat. Who knows who else’ll show up?

What better time to write about a movie that deals with mayhem, murder and fun in the sun than in the depths of a deep, cold, black winter?  No better time, says I, so fill up your coconut with your choice of boat drinks and get on board the U.S.S Zydecoldsmobile for a few changes in latitude.

And if I get another Jimmy Buffett song title in there, I get bonus points.

But A Perfect Getaway won’t be quite so relaxing…at least, after a while.  Two couples–four people total–think they’ve found paradise on earth on a vacation in Hawaii.  But what they don’t know is that they’re being hunted by madmen who have a thing about tourists.  Specifically, they want all tourists dead.

To a certain degree, this is about what you’d expect.  It’s beautiful at first, and then things start getting worse.  It’s strange how the weather almost seems to reflect, on a limited scale, the conditions in which the heroes find themselves.  It doesn’t actually RAIN down there until after the bad stuff gets started.

I don’t know whether to be pleased with or insulted by the Film School 101 stance the movie has been taking, though.  Seriously, they’re talking about “Act Two Twist” and “Red Herring” RIGHT IN THE FILM.  It’s either clever or it’s sanctimonious depending on how you want to look at it.

They do do a magnificent job with building suspense, though, and everything’s a bit straightforward but still lots of fun.  The setting, meanwhile, is absolutely beautiful and yet sufficiently ominous.  There’s horror in the midst of beauty and that not only amplifies the terror but also distracts from it a bit to make the freaky parts all the deeper for a little break.

What will be especially interesting is how, after a certain point, the movie will start to be told in flashback, giving you the second side of things, the what-was-really-going-on, the “rest of the story” to quote Paul Harvey.

A Perfect Getaway will prove to be a little more than you expect it to be, and that by itself is unusual.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves a good surprise like nothing else and thus hands A Perfect Getaway an eight out of ten for being a mystery movie that does a whole lot of strange things and presents plenty of shocks and terror to boot.

Horror comes from all ports these days, folks, and today we’re going to get a look at a little nugget of terror that comes our way from the folks at the Independent Film Channel called The Skeptic.

The Skeptic features a whole bunch of surprising actors, including Wings’ Tim Daly, perennial tragic figure Tom Arnold, and Star Trek’s Zoe Saldana as they discover some baffling things about the paranormal.  When a lawyer’s aunt dies, she leaves the house to her nephew, a fairly bitter, cranky individual who has a serious problem with emotion.  As in, for the most part, he doesn’t have them, and he definitely doesn’t like them.

But when the house turns out to have some serious problems, well…things are only going to get stranger. But the question remains–do the strange events ha

The Skeptic is a movie that has a lot of interesting twists and turns to it, and presents plenty of interesting principles to play off of.  Zoe Saldana is wonderfully creepy and Tim Daly is just unbelievablyThe performances are also terrific–frankly, I hadn’t expected Tom Arnold to actually turn in a good performance.  But he did…in fact, he even managed to scare me once.

How often is it that you get a good quality jump scare out of the guy who once played Stanley Stupid?

It’s a little old fashioned in its setup–they use musical cues to full effect, making you jump with a crashing piano chord.

Perhaps the only real problem with the movie is its ending.  It’s actually something of a letdown, all things considered.  They had this fantastic buildup that they just didn’t manage to use to its freaky, scary fullest.  They punked out, for lack of a better term.  Sure, the ending they had was actually kind of heartwarming, but still…it could have been a wild frenzy of creepy excess on a truly epic scale.

But still, The Skeptic did pack the creepy, at least for the first, oh, five sixths or so, and that’s reason enough for the Screenhead Ten Scale to hand this creepy little package an eight out of ten.  Fantastic stuff, this.

Say what you will about Crazy Mel–and you can say most anything–but the man is a good actor, no matter what you put him in.  Though he does always seem to wind up in cop dramas, and that’s exactly what he’ll be hitting today with Edge of Darkness.

Detective Tom Craven is a doting father and a dedicated police officer who lives by a handful of very simple rules.  Do the best you can by your family, speak your mind, go to work every day, and never take anything from the bad guys–this is Tom’s guiding light.  So when his daughter comes home for a visit, he’s pretty happy about the whole thing until she’s shot on his front porch. Now, Tom’s left with nothing to lose and a whole lot of unanswered questions, and will show us the lengths one angry cop will go to when he’s sufficiently provoked.

This is actually based on a BBC series, so chances are it’ll be completely new to most everybody.  The good part about this, of course, is that it won’t matter, because the movie will stand on its own merits.

Frankly, I think the biggest thing this movie can do is not to serve as a wakeup call for corrupt corporate interests but rather as a wakeup call to change the grading system on Rotten Tomatoes.  A six out of ten, which is what this movie’s averaging over there, shouldn’t be considered “bad” (or in their words, rotten).  It should be considered “pretty good”, which is exactly what Edge of Darkness is.

Sure, there are some plot points in here that feel downright tacked on like the whole nuclear arms thing, and there are some parts that feel rather pointless, like Tom’s hallucinations.  And there are some parts that just plain old don’t make any sense at all, like how Jedburgh’s hallucinations figure into ANYTHING that’s going on here.

But what we have is a marginally effective noirish thriller that does a pretty fair job of exhibiting Gibson’s far from inconsiderable talent and even throws in a few good shocks.

There’s absolutely no reason to see this in a theater, though–it WILL make a nice popcorn flick for your home theater, however, so bear that in mind.

The Screenhead Ten Scale agrees on a limited level with Rotten Tomatoes and would give it a 5.8 out of ten if it could, but instead prefers to deal with round numbers.  Thus, it gives Edge of Darkness a six out of ten for being slightly better than the average but still having a few problems that keep this from being really worth seeing.

With the remake poised to hit theaters within the next couple weeks, and the Blu-ray release less than a month away, I figured it’d be a good time to bust open the classics locker and drag out a movie that both ranks as one of my personal favorites AND is extremely relevant, George Romero’s classic film, The Crazies.

In The Crazies, a supervirus developed by the government and given the almost comically innocuous name of Trixie is accidentally set loose on the populace following a plane crash near the small Pennsylvania town of Evans City.  Trixie renders its victims irreparably insane on contact, and now, Trixie has found its way into Evans City’s water supply.  With the town collapsing, the government tries desperately to contain the outbreak.  But if they can’t fix the problem, the highest echelons of government have another idea in mind–the total nuclear annihilation of Evans City and surroundings.  Can a solution to the Trixie problem be found in time?  Or will Evans City go up in a mushroom cloud?

Dead series fans will remember Evans City mentioned in the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, giving us a great touchstone between films.

For its time, The Crazies was an extraordinarily brave film, but you’ll find that many of the references to military incompetence aren’t all that far off today.  Scheduling errors, logistical failings, and a massive dose of Murphy throw themselves into an already volatile mix.  It’s downright amazing to watch how this operation slowly falls apart under the massive strain brought about by Trixie’s depradations.  Indeed, if only a handful of things had been changed, the final outcome might well have been altered as well.

It’s a chilling little title that’s made even more unnerving by the sheer plausibility of it all.  And though there are plenty of things that could have been improved–some awkward dialogue and truly low-budget effects among them–there’s still plenty of joy left in this title.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands down a final rating of eight out of ten for this one, and frankly, if the remake turns out even HALF this compelling, we’re all in for a real treat.

I have to admit, when the folks out at The Asylum sent me a copy of their Sherlock Holmes mockbuster, first I wondered how they ever got permission from the Doyle estate to do this in the first place.  I then looked at the cover and noticed the giant squid, T-rex and fire-breathing dragon attacking London Bridge and I realized that the Doyle estate probably didn’t give a rat’s ass anyway because if it weren’t for the names this would bear about as much resemblance to actual Sherlock Holmes as a Buick does to a banana.

But interestingly enough, this doesn’t make it BAD.

This time, Dr. Watson is telling the last story of Sherlock Holmes that he’ll ever tell, a complex narrative involving betrayal, treason, and a plot to kill the Queen with a bomb hidden inside a mechanical woman.

Many of The Asylum’s earlier efforts have proven somewhat, well, unpleasant, but this time around we’ve actually got something downright entertaining.  Sure, it’s a bit far fetched–okay, it’s a LOT far fetched–but it’s still got a genuine spark of entertainment to it.  In fact, this might be one of the The Asylum’s better movies.  There were some strange twists here, and even I was surprised by how coherent the whole actually turned out to be, despite the fact that the box art was promising sheer lunacy.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this one a six out of ten for being clever, but utterly mad.

Okay, maybe not so strangely familiar.

Today we’re talking about The Final Destination, latest and possibly last in the series of Final Destination titles, and oddly enough, almost exactly the same movie as the three that preceded it.

See, once again, we’re back with a group of what I’m guessing are college students who are out for a good time.  Suddenly, for absolutely no explained reason AT ALL, one of them has a vision of a whole bunch of people getting killed, and takes advantage of this vision to get him and his buddies to safety.

This of course torques Death to no end because he was clearly behind in his quota and thus decided to engineer the demise of fully several hundred people at a stock car / possibly NASCAR race.

Thus, Death’s got to finish the job not by a heart attack or brain embolism or by even something as simple as choking on a piece of food, but by engineering a series of complex, Rube Goldberg style situations in which the tiniest thing builds into a horrendous demise for everybody in sight, including stuff that makes no sense, like explosions started off by light making contact with dirt.

Look, I’m familiar with the physics behind a dust explosion, but I SERIOUSLY doubt the sun through a pair of glasses making contact with dirt is sufficient to IGNITE BENZENE.

And this kind of strange logic lapse will show up all through the movie, including one particularly awesome sequence that features tire squealing that sounds like a dolphin.

The logic isn’t just the only puzzle here–the puzzle is how they can make the same movie basically four times over and not have anyone notice that they’re watching, basically, the SAME MOVIE FOUR TIMES OVER.  I have seen all three prior to this one, and I am truly hard-pressed to determine where anything NEW is in The Final Destination as compared to any of the prior three, aside from different characters and locations.

That having been said, to death, it’s not as though The Final Destination is a bad movie.  It’s actually kind of entertaining in its way, to see the whole “death’s design” thing play out in front of you.  Sure, the plot is a complete joke and logic is about as welcome here as a cop at a high school kegger, but it’s still a fun movie with lots of explosions and bright colors, so it’s not all bad.

Of course, by “not all bad”, I mean, “having virtually no redeeming feature whatsoever.”

The Screenhead Ten Scale, thusly, gives this sad little logic bomb a four out of ten for insulting me with its insistence that I sit through the same movie I already saw back in 2000.