Family Switch (2023)

Family Switch is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. You’d think Jennifer Garner would have already had enough of this shit, but as Yes Day proved a couple of years ago, her tolerance for contrived saccharine fare is unusually high. As it turns out, this movie is (among other, painfully obvious things) an ill-considered hybrid...

The Price We Pay (2022) for The Secrets We Keep (2020)

The Price We Pay is a hybrid knockoff of From Dusk Till Dawn and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (complete with its very own Lady Leatherface. First the Cenobitches, now this. What's next? Fredericka Krueger?). And even though the filmmakers are ripping off two other movies, they still can’t help botching theirs. In From Dusk Till...

Manhunter/Red Dragon

Red Dragon opens with a prologue that it doesn’t need, but which Manhunter could have certainly used. Red Dragon doesn’t need it because this wasn’t Anthony Hopkins’s Dr. Lecter’s first rodeo —well, it was, chronologically speaking, but thanks to The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal we knew full well 1) what the good doctor...

Maneater/Piranha 3D

I came to Maneater for Branscombe Richmond (I loves me some Bobby Sixkiller) and stayed for Trace Adkins’s PETA/ASPCA-unfriendly dialogue ("My daughter was eaten alive by a fucking fish;" "fuck Animal Rights;" "I'm gonna have to go out there and remind that goddamn fish exactly where he is on the fucking food chain"). Now, real-life...

The Bad and the Beautiful/Contempt

The Bad and the Beautiful is a sort of Rashomon by way of Old Hollywood. Three characters appear before a fourth to tell a story about a fifth; the three stories are different but interrelated, and the moral of each is the same: studio chief Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is an uber-asshole and to know...

Freaks – You’re One of Us (2020)

Freaks - You're One of Us steals its subtitle from the Tod Browning classic, but what we have here is actually a reverse Project Power. In that movie, a pill unlocks people's superpowers; in this one, people take pills to suppress their superpowers. Wendy (Cornelia Gröschel) and Elmar (Tim Oliver Schultz) stop taking the medications...