Streaming Stuff I Watched

Thanks to Covid I haven't gone to a movie theater since 2019 and I can't remember the last time I rented something from a Redbox kiosk.  But I do occasionally stream newer movies that aren't Rifftrax movies.  If you follow me on Facebook I've probably already mentioned these.  I started a little before Halloween and it kept snowballing...

The Selling:  this is an indie horror comedy from 2020 that I watched on Amazon Prime.  A guy trying to flip a house to pay for his mom's cancer treatments finds out it's haunted.  With the help of a female blogger, he tries to exorcise the demons.  Mayhem ensues.  There are some laughs and for a small movie the acting and visuals aren't bad.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  San Francisco Sketchfest founders and Rifftrax contributors Janet Varney and Cole Stratton play real estate agents in the movie and at one point, it shows Vincent Price's House on Haunted Hill, which was an early Rifftrax feature.  And no, I did not know any of that before I put it on.)

Max Reload and the Nether Blasters:  This is an indie action comedy also from 2020 that I also watched on Amazon Prime.  The titular "Max Reload" aka Max Jenkins (the last name being a reference to the infamous Leroy Jenkins video--Google it) works at a video game store with his friends when one night he receives an ancient Colecovision game thought to not exist.  He records himself playing it and inadvertently unleashes a potential apocalypse when the game starts turning everyone into zombies with glowing red eyes.  Max, his friends, and the game's creators have to then save the day.  There's a lesson about teamwork and for the most part it's fun, especially if you're into video games.  It mixes in some animation that's supposed to look like an old 8-bit video game along with more current video game footage.  The main characters are all played by nobodies but the video game's creator is played by Greg Grunberg, aka that guy in every JJ Abrams movie, who looks like if you mashed together Tony Stark and Happy Hogan.  Kevin Smith is super annoying as the boss of the video game store, making you wish he were still playing Silent Bob.  Ubergeek Wil Wheaton has an off-screen cameo narrating a video game documentary.  Not surprisingly there's really only one female main character and she spends most of her time yelling at Max.  There are a couple of cookie scenes that just wrap up a couple of loose ends instead of setting up a sequel while at the end of the credits are some outtakes that go on a little too long.  Still, it's mostly a good time, in some ways better than Spielberg's Ready Player One. (3/5) (Fun Fact: For some reason Greg Grunberg's garage has a huge Robotech poster in it and Robotech is thanked as one of the "brands" in the movie, though it really contributes nothing.)

Max Cloud:  This indie action comedy also from 2020 and also on amazon Prime is not all that similar to Max Reload.  Rather it's more like Jumanji as a girl in 1990 is pulled into a video game about the titular hero, who's a goofy over-the-top hero like The Tick, only without the costume.  Her friend (the second Firestorm in the Arrowverse, I believe) is in control of her as the character in the game.  But she only has one life, so if she dies in the game, she dies for real.  It was fairly amusing, though I'm not sure the Max Cloud game was a great representation of side-scrolling action games in 1990.  The system they use seems more like a Genesis than a Nintendo.  At one point they reference using "R1" for reloading but the original Nintendo did not have an R1; that didn't happen until the Super Nintendo a few years later.  What really made me love this movie was using "Dare" by Stan Bush early on and in the credits.  That was one of two Bush songs in the soundtrack of Transformers The Movie but far more people have heard "The Touch" because it was sung by Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights.  "Dare" has always been my favorite, though.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Max Cloud is played by Scott Adkins, who stars in another movie on this entry.)

Boss Level:  Despite the video game title and references to video games in the movie, this isn't really a video game movie.  This Hulu original is in that subgenre of films since 1992 where you can say, "It's like Groundhog Day, but..."  In this case it's like Groundhog Day, but this former Delta Force guy (Frank Grillo) keeps getting killed by assassins.  Each time he comes back to life to repeat the same day, he gets a little farther along.  Though he's kinda dumb in that it takes him 140 tries to realize he should try opening the gift his ex-wife gave him.  And even more tries to realize they're tracking him.  Director Joe Carnahan uses a lot of his cut-rate Tarantino shtick from Smokin Aces in having all these varied, goofy assassins starting with a guy with a machete, then football star Rob Gronkowski in a helicopter with a Gatling gun, then a soccer mom in a minivan with Hitler's gun, an Asian woman with a sword who always says after a kill her name and "I have done this," and a redneck who uses kind of a harpoon to drag kills behind his truck.  Mel Gibson cashes a paycheck as the villain who really doesn't put up a boss level fight, and Naomi Watts is unrecognizable as the main guy's ex-wife, who's a scientist at the heart of it all.  Michelle Yeoh appears as a sword fighting champion in the most Groundhog Day-like segment where the guy uses her to learn sword fighting, each day getting a little better at it.  Overall it's a fun movie even if not particularly deep or meaningful. (3/5)

The Man Who Killed Hitler & Then the Bigfoot:  From the title this movie wants you to think it's weird and maybe fun.  It's not really either of those things.  I mean it's not early Tim Burton or David Lynch or Richard Kelly weird.  The core of the story is pretty good, even if a lot of it is cribbed from Legends of the Fall, a favorite of my late sister and probably some other movies.  Sam Elliott is an old man who left his sweetheart to join the army in WWII and went undercover to kill Hitler--at least A Hitler; the implication being there were multiples.  Which makes sense when you consider how other despots like Saddam Hussein had a double (or more) to serve as decoys.  By the time he gets back, his sweetheart is dead.  Years later, he's recruited by the governments of the US and Canada to kill a Bigfoot creature that's poisoning all life in an area.  And he does so, obviously.  And then it just kind of peters out.  The Bigfoot part really seems to serve little purpose.  I mean does it redeem him for losing his sweetheart?  No.  (We don't really know how she died let alone whether he could have saved her or anything.)  Does it bring him fame or glory?  No, it's a secret mission.  Does it help him connect with anyone at all?  Not really, though he does later go see his brother.  So other than adding some zing to the title, it doesn't contribute much.  Earlier the young him gets a shave from a mystic Russian, who cuts him with the razor and says he will succeed in his mission (killing Hitler) but will be cursed the rest of his days.  So maybe him not dying and killing Bigfoot was to show how he's cursed or something.  I would have liked something more conclusive. (2.5/5) (To explain my Legends of the Fall reference, in that movie Brad Pitt and his younger brother join the army in WWI and when the younger brother is killed, Brad Pitt slaughters a bunch of Germans and then spends years traveling the world, unable to live with the guilt.  By the time he gets home, the girl he loves has married his older brother, Aidan Quinn.  Some of this was parodied on an episode of Archer with his valet Woodhouse in the Brad Pitt role.)

Infinite:  This was on Paramount+ and for no good reason I decided to watch it.  Mark Wahlberg is a guy who's reincarnated from a guy who's an "Infinite," or people who can remember all their past lives.  Except he can't and gets caught up in a war between two sides.  One side wants to destroy the world so they can't ever reincarnate again.  The other side doesn't.  Marky Mark in his previous life knew the location of a bomb that could destroy the world, aka the MacGuffin.  There's a lot of action set pieces and noise that's not very interesting.  One of those dumb things the supposed writers did was have the female main character in love with someone the bad guys had captured, eliminating any real romantic subplot.  Why do movies shoot themselves in the foot like that?  My question is:  the guy who wants to kill the world, why doesn't he just shoot himself into space or something like that?  Then wouldn't it be impossible for his soul to find a new host?  It's really selfish to kill 7 billion people just because you're tired of living.  I'm just saying this guy probably has more money than Bezos so just make a rocket and fly out to the moon or Mars and die there and save the rest of us the headache. (2/5)

The Tomorrow War:  This is an Amazon original despite that Paramount was also involved.  It stars Chris Pratt as a science teacher/former Army guy who is recruited to go 30 years in the future to fight xenomorph/mini-Cloverfield monsters called the "white spikes" because they shoot white spikes.  A third of the movie is Pratt working with his now-grown daughter to create a virus to kill the monsters.  And when they do that and he goes back to the past, you think it's over, right?  Nope.  He has to team with his dad (buff JK Simmons) to go to Russia and find where the aliens crashed and have been hidden by ice so they can use the virus to kill them.  Except (spoiler alert!) the virus doesn't really work that well, pretty much making that whole third of movie an exercise in futility.  It was all pretty messy with tons of plot holes.  Like why does the world instantly believe the soldiers from the future who show up at a World Cup game to the point they almost instantly start meat grindering people from the present by sending them to the future to get chowed down by white spikes?  Why didn't the soldiers from the future try to make better weapons and defenses in the past so that we could repel the aliens when they showed up?  What kind of lame bullshit is it that the time machine can only go back to one point and keeps moving forward at the same rate as the past?  Like Infinite it's a lot of action and noise but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. (2/5)

Shang-Chi Legend of the Ten Rings:  I'm not really into kung-fu fantasy so I wasn't anxious to go watch it.  It was good despite that.  It didn't just regurgitate the Marvel formula like some of their other movies.  Shang-Chi's father makes one of the better villains in the MCU, which is a pretty low bar.  He's basically like Ra's al Guhl only replace the Lazarus Pits with the rings that make him immortal and replace the League of Shadows with the Ten Rings gang.  At the end his daughter is basically Talia al Guhl; maybe she'll get a crush on a Marvel superhero and make a baby with him.  Like people did with Eternals, you have to wonder why he didn't go use the rings to kick Thanos's ass.  It was a little surprising Awkwafina winds up being the love interest but I guess since the other young woman was his sister there was really nowhere else to go.  And who else but the MCU can relegate an Oscar winner like Ben Kingsley to comic relief? (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I mentioned on Facebook that since Michelle Yeoh was in this she's been in the MCU, Star Trek, and James Bond universes so now she needs to get into a Star Wars movie or show.)

Black Widow:  After years and years of dragging its feet, Marvel finally made a Black Widow solo movie (after killing her character off) and Disney finally released it--and then had to pay Scarlett Johannson a settlement for putting it on streaming.  Anyway, it's not a bad movie but what's the point?  Mostly to set up a new Black Widow, her "sister" Yelena.  They have to take down the resurgent group that made them Black Widows with the help of Red Guardian (David Harbour) and their "mother" (Rachel Weisz, still looking good) and defeat the Taskmaster, who's kind of a cyborg and a complete deviation from the actual character in the comics.  It was OK but a six-episode series on Disney+ probably would have been better to flesh out some of the characters and background.  But thankfully it solves that great mystery:  where did that green vest Natasha wore in Infinity War come from?  I mean, wasn't that keeping you up nights too?  (Fun Fact:  in the beginning when they're in Ohio, I didn't realize Natasha was a girl until it mentioned it in the captioning.   Just saying.) (3/5)

Muppet Haunted Mansion:  As I mentioned in another entry, if you like Muppets, you'd like this.  If you don't, then this won't make you a believer.  It's a lot of the dad jokes, gags, and silly songs that people who have watched the Muppets since the 70s have come to expect.  While the story focuses on Gonzo and a jumbo shrimp exploring a haunted mansion, the other familiar characters like Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Fozzy also make appearances.  Mostly I liked it but I was annoyed by how many times Gonzo says, "Cool."  Was the writer's thesaurus missing?  The end was very nice with a lesson for us all thanks to slightly pudgy, florid-faced Will Arnett.  Other celebrities who appear are John Stamos, Yvette Nicole Brown, Danny Trejo, and Ed Asner in what is probably his final credit.  Ironically Asner played a ghost since by the time this aired he had already passed away.  Spooky. (3/5)

Queenpins:  Based on a true story (I guess) it's about two women (one is Kristen Bell) who decide to resell coupons for free stuff.  It's actually pretty easy to get their scam working; they just go to Mexico where an employee at a coupon printer tells them how he can steal some extra coupons the company was just going to throw away and ship them to the two women in America, who use a website to sell the "free" coupons for a little money that soon gives them over $5 million.  A supermarket chain investigator tips to the scheme pretty quick, but it takes a long time before anyone higher up gives a shit, until finally a postal inspector (Vince Vaughn) shows up to aid in the fight.  At about 2 hours it starts to feel long and I have the sense that this was really Hollywood-ized.  By that I mean I'm sure there were a lot of liberties taken with the real events.  But a lot of it is funny to me because my dad was pretty much like these women at the start, only he'd use coupons on shit we'd never even use.  In the pantry at home there might still be some Chicken Tonight from the 90s or C-3PO cereal from the 80s.  Anyway, you can stream it on Paramount+ (2.5/5)

Lansky:  This is a recent movie on Amazon Prime.  As far as recent gangster biopics, it's better than 2018's Gotti with John Travolta or 2020's Capone starring Tom Hardy.  It's not as cheesy as the former or weird as the latter.  It's a pretty straight-ahead story with the familiar framing device of the old Lansky (Harvey Keitel) calling down a reporter (Sam Worthington, that guy who seemed poised for stardom in 2009 but was unknown again by 2012) to tell his life story.  Meanwhile, the reporter has financial/marital troubles and conducts an affair with a woman in his motel. In flashbacks we see Lansky and his friend Ben "Bugsy" Sigel creating a crime syndicate in New York and starting up Las Vegas's casino industry.  He also claims to have helped the government root out German spies in New York in WWII and donated a lot of money to the future government of Israel.  This is one of those movies where I'm not really sure how much you can trust entirely or how fast-and-loose it might be playing with the facts.  Also kind of irritating when you have both Keitel and Worthington taking turns on the narration.  Whose story is this? (2.5/5)

The Marksman:  In some ways it's similar to Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho which I haven't seen:  an old white guy gets involved with helping a young Mexican boy and mayhem ensues.  In this case it's Liam Neeson, whose casting in this is probably waving a white flag to Father Time and admitting that he can't kill roomfuls of Albanians or punch wolves anymore.  He plays a rancher about to lose his home because his dead wife's medical bills were so expensive.  Between that and finding a Mexican woman and her son on his land, the movie is ham-handedly front loaded with a lot of social issues that it mostly doesn't deal with.  Anyway, the woman is killed by a cartel and Liam Neeson promises to get her son to Chicago to a relative.  Another movie you could compare this to is Logan as the gruff, retired hero (this case a former Marine instead of a mutant superhero) goes on a road trip with a kid who at first it seems can't speak English but then we find out he can.  And along the way they have to dodge cartel goons and they bond and the fate of Neeson's character is pretty much inevitable.  (If you've seen Logan, you can take a guess.)  What I didn't understand is: what was his relationship to the young woman who works for the Border Patrol?  Since she referred to his dead wife as "her mom" I guess she's his stepdaughter?  It's never really spelled out but at least they never go to bed together. (2.5/5)

Out of Death:  One of those cheap, forgettable action movies starring Bruce Willis.  A woman witnesses a deputy murder a drug dealer and goes on the run in the Georgia woods.  Bruce Willis is a Philly cop staying nearby for some R&R and then he helps her against the corrupt cops.  The technical aspects are fine, but Willis seems bored and definitely mails it in while the lesser-known, lesser-paid actors at least try gamely to make the weak story interesting. (2/5)

Rogue Hostage:  Imagine if you filmed Die Hard in an Ollie's or Big Lots instead of a huge skyscraper?  That's pretty much this movie.  Three rednecks go to a discount store to take a congressman who owns the chain (John Malkovich) hostage.  Tyrese Gibson is a former soldier/Child Protective Services guy who fights the bad guys.  It was pretty meh.  The store looked less real than the supermarket of Supermarket Sweep in the late 80s.  You can tell the people setting it up tried to use the bare minimum of fake merchandise and the signage looked pretty cheap too. (2/5)

A Score To Settle:  One of those straight-to-Redbox/streaming Nic Cage movies from 2019.  It's a typical Death Wish-type revenge movie combined with Insomnia and The Sixth Sense.  Nic Cage is a guy who went to prison for 20 years to cover for a mob boss's murder.  He took a payoff thinking it would just be a few years in the joint but he got double-crossed and sentenced to life, during which time his wife died and son became a junkie.  He finally gets released because he has some issue that makes him unable to sleep.  If he doesn't sleep, he will get hallucinations and ultimately die.  When he gets on the outside, he meets his son and digs up some money to go stay in a fancy hotel that seems weirdly placed in the middle of nowhere (actually in British Columbia) and soon uses the money to buy a suit, Corvette, guns, and a hooker called Simone he becomes smitten with.  Then he starts shaking down and killing mob guys.  SPOILER ALERT:  the Sixth Sense twist is that his son is actually dead and the one he thinks he's hanging out with is a hallucination.  Which when you look back is why the son never eats anything or drives and why his phone number and Facetime weren't on Nic Cage's new phone.  As far as twists go it's OK and the movie itself is pretty watchable even if most of it is cliché.  Despite the premise, Nic Cage doesn't quite go full Nic Cage crazy, which is a little disappointing. (Fun Fact:  At the beginning of the movie, the young Nic Cage is played by Bailey Coppola, his nephew and great nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.  There actually is a pretty strong resemblance to the point I wondered if they did that deepfake stuff like in Civil War with Tony Stark or The Mandalorian with Luke Skywalker.)

Pig:  This was a 2020 Nic Cage offering.  Imagine John Wick if it were really slow and depressing with pretty much no body count, but a lot of going to restaurants and bakeries and talking about food.  Nic is a crazy former chef who retired to the wilds of Oregon to live with his truffle pig.  Then some tweakers steal the pig and he goes to Portland to track it down with the help of a young guy who buys his truffles.  It was mostly OK but not really much fun to watch. (3/5)

Willy's Wonderland:  Another 2020 Nic Cage offering on Hulu.  In this one Nic's Camaro's tires get blown out and he ends up in a small town with no ATMs and no credit card machines.  So he has to clean up the old Willy's Wonderland, which is basically like a Chuck-E-Cheese only they served hot dogs instead of pizza.  The animatronic animals, led by Willy Weasel, are possessed by the spirits of serial killers and the townspeople sacrifice strangers to them.  What's weird (beyond all that) is Nic Cage never says anything and every half-hour or so he stops no matter what--even if there's a fight going--to drink some kind of energy drink and play pinball.  Why?  It's never said.  There's a group of local kids who go inside ostensibly to destroy it, but mostly just to be fodder for the machines.  It's a pretty silly movie but kind of fun if you can suspend disbelief that apparently a small town's whole economy is based on some shitty Chuck-E-Cheese clone. (2.5/5)

Mom & Dad:  I had this Nic Cage masterpiece on my Hulu list for a while but then it was no longer available there.  Unluckily for me, it was free during an XFinity Watchathon-type weekend.  The premise for the movie is that one day parents just start going nuts and trying to murder their kids.  Nic Cage and Selma Blair are two middle-aged parents who try to murder their 17-year-old girl and 9-year-old son.  When the kids take refuge in the basement it becomes kind of like Home Alone as the parents try to get them while the kids set a couple of clever traps.  And then the movie takes things up a notch when the grandparents show up and try to murder the parents!  And then...it just kind of peters out with the kids chaining up their parents in the basement.  I thought maybe there'd be a cookie scene or something, but nope.  So even though it's almost 2 hours long, it feels like only half a movie.  We never get any idea of why this happening or if it's going to stop.  Just an utter lack of resolution. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  One of Tony Laplume's favorite comic book writers, Grant Morrison, has a cameo as a scientist for some reason.)

Ash vs Evil Dead, Season 3:  The only other thing I found to watch during that Watchathon-type weekend was season 3 of Starz's Ash vs Evil Dead.  I had watched the previous two seasons a few years ago but never had the chance to see the third and final season.  So then I did.  After defeating the evil at the end of Season 2, Ash and his buddy Pablo settle in Elk Grove, Michigan (actually New Zealand) to open a hardware/sex toy store.  But of course evil isn't done with Ash as Ruby (Lucy Lawless) targets his illegitimate daughter Brandy.  Meanwhile, Kelly, another of Ash's crew in the previous two seasons, is approached by a guy who looks sort of like one of the dudes from Supernatural who claims to be a "Knight of Sumeria."  They go to help Ash and company.  And then like the previous seasons there's a lot of gross, splattery mayhem mixed with slapstick humor that echoes the movies.  The addition of the daughter, though, allows Ash to grow a little more as a character as he bonds a little with her.  The last couple of episodes play for keeps as a giant monster is summoned to destroy all humanity and only Ash can stop it--in a tank!  SPOILER:  The end that might have been a dream or coma fantasy has Ash waking up in the future by a cyborg Knight of Sumeria.  His old Delta has been tricked out with missiles and machine guns like something from a Mad Max movie and he sets out into a decimated world to fight evil.  Overall it was fun and a good sendoff for the series. (4/5) (Sad Fact:  Recently, Bruce Campbell said he will no longer play Ash because he's too old for the stunts and such.  It's too bad but at least he knows when it's time to hang up the chainsaw--looking at you, Harrison Ford.)

The Debt Collector:  I mentioned this movie once because I was thinking of a story with the same title, only really different.  This is about an MMA instructor (Scott Adkins--see, I told you he was in another movie on this list!) whose gym is failing, so he decides to become a collector for the mob.  He's teamed with a retired boxer called "Sue" (short for Sulinski) and they go to people's houses and or businesses to collect money, which usually leads to the MMA instructor getting punched or kicked or shot at.  Unfortunately then it tries to have a bigger story.  Something about an Irish guy and his kid and some bad guy played by Tony Todd.  And then everyone dies except the Irish guy and kid.  Seriously.  What a shit ending. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  The Sulinski guy looks like he could be a stand-in for Bruce Willis; they probably could have got the real Bruce Willis for about as much money.)

Crossing Swords, Season 2:  I was surprised this Hulu original actually got a second season.  Made by most of the same people who make Robot Chicken, it uses similar stop motion animation, only the characters look more like Fisher Price's Little People.  Set in medieval times, it's about an idealistic young squire named Patrick.  At the end of Season 1 he saved the kingdom after a girl he loved tried to take it over.  As a reward he's tried and sentenced to have his face eaten by rats unless he can find some leprechaun gold.  Which he does, along with a bunch of cursed gems.  After a few miscellaneous episodes, his ex returns to take over the kingdom and again Patrick saves the day.  In the end he's knighted just in time for a massive army to invade, setting the table for a season 3.  It's OK but not really my favorite thing by the RC team.  (2.5/5)

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season 15:  When this series started on FX it had 13 episodes per season.  When it moved to FXX it got cut down to 10.  Now like Archer it's down to just 8 episodes and for whatever reason they aired two per week so the whole season aired in a month.  The first couple of episodes addressed 2020 and the Lethal Weapon 5 & 6 blackface controversy; to me they felt like someone's rejected South Park scripts repurposed for Always Sunny.  Then there was a flashback episode that's one of those things like American Dad does a lot where it only works if you forget everything that's been established the last 14 years.  The last half of the season has the gang go to Ireland when Dee gets a small part in an Irish movie or TV show, though for such a small part I doubt they'd pay to fly someone all the way to Ireland.  Dennis goes nuts from Covid (much, much too soon for that to be funny) while Charlie finds his father (Colm Meaney, ie O'Brien from DS9!) and Mac struggles with finding out he's Dutch.  Overall it wasn't really good.  The best part was actually a dramatic part where Charlie laments his father not being in his life.  Considering "the gang" is in its mid-40s if not pushing 50 by now, it's probably time to just quit, but then nothing else the cast except Danny DeVito has done outside of this has really succeeded, AP Bio being recently canned by NBC, so I doubt that will happen. (2/5)

Fatman:  I probably could have watched this last year on Amazon Prime, but this year it's free with commercials on Peacock.  If you're a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld the premise is similar to his holiday novel Hogfather in that an assassin is hired to kill Santa.  But in this case it's more of a straight-ahead action movie instead of a clever light drama.  A rich boy who got a lump of coal in his stocking calls up the hitman he has on speed dial to hire him to kill Santa.  Like in Hogfather, the assassin has actually been toying with this idea and is willing to take a crack at it for real.  In this case he drives to Alaska to track down the old fat man--Mel Gibson--who to stay afloat has leased his elves to the government to make parts for a fictitious jet fighter. (In today's world, making drones would probably be more appropriate.)  And so then there's a showdown and all that.  It was amusing even if Pratchett's version is better. (3/5)

I'll Be Home for Christmas:  After inexplicably becoming a teen heartthrob on Home Improvement in the 90s, this Disney movie is Jonathan Taylor Thomas attempting to pivot to a slightly more mature role.  He's a cut-rate Ferris Bueller at a California college whose father bribes him to come home to New York by offering his vintage Porsche as a prize if he shows up for XMas Eve dinner.  But then some unsatisfied customers of a scam to cheat on a test knock him out and leave him in the desert in a Santa costume.  So he has to make his way home with no money or other resources.  The real problem is unlike Trains, Planes, & Automobiles or even John Hughes's other holiday road trip movie Dutch, JTT doesn't have a wingman to serve as a comic foil.  That's what makes movies like this work, so really this never reaches its full potential.  It probably would have worked better to have his dad (Gary Cole) show up in California and the two of them travel together, bonding along the way.  But it's not completely terrible.  And his girlfriend is a young Jessica Biel--though being a Disney movie of course she's not getting naked. (2/5)

Copper Mountain:  I don't usually bother putting Rifftrax movies in these because I know y'all will never watch them, but this one was pretty special.  It's a 1983 "movie" that stars a young Jim Carrey and pre-Growing Pains Alan Thicke as two guys who go to the eponymous Club Med ski resort for...reasons.  The story is paper thin and padded with concert numbers by some 70s adult contemporary and country singers.  Carrey does some really lame impressions of Sammy Davis Jr, Steve Martin, and Charles Bronson while Thicke is a dick who goes on and on about how fat this bartender who's not really fat is when they're supposed to race for a spot in a skiing pro am.  As the Riffers wonder, who the hell was this made for?  Was Club Med planning to use this to advertise their resort somehow?    Anyway, it was pretty terrible but you might want to check it out for the secret origin of Jim Carrey; you'll immediately wonder how fifteen years later that guy could be the highest paid actor in Hollywood. (Fun Fact:  For Rifftrax fans, the movie was "written" and directed by the same people who seven years later would write and direct the Jesse "The Body" Ventura vehicle Abraxas Guardian of the Universe.)

Revivals (aka old stuff I watched again):

Hocus Pocus:  they're making a sequel after 30 years and it's become a cult favorite of people like my sister and one of her friends, so I watched it on Disney+ for the first time pretty much since it came out on VHS in the 90s.  And...meh.  It's the kind of thing without nostalgia to prop it up, there's just not much there.  Three dimwitted witches get brought back to life by a teenage boy (because he's a virgin) and mild mayhem and hilarity ensues.  At the time Bette Midler was really the only one with name recognition, but when you watch it in 2021 you see that her sisters were played by Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex and the City) and Kathy Najimy (King of the Hill) and the teenage boy's sister was played by Thora Birch, the hot girl in American Beauty and the zombie guy is played by Doug Jones (Shape of Water, Star Trek Discovery) so there's so much talent to make a movie that's just OK. (2.5/5)

Mr. Boogedy:  This was one of those TV movies when Disney used to do that on ABC in the 80s.  The story is that familiar Poltergeist-type thing where a family moves into a house that's haunted.  In this case by a gross-faced Puritan guy called "Mr. Boogedy."  Obviously there's not a lot of real scares or terror to be had.  It's kind of amusing, in part when you realize two of the kids are Bud Bundy and the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (2.5/5)

Bride of Boogedy:  People liked the first movie so of course they rushed to throw together a sequel--and it shows.  The plot is slow and lame.  The "bride" doesn't show up until almost the end and then it's just a possessed version of the mom in the family of main characters.  And as often happens in sequels, Kelly Swanson was replaced by a brunette girl, because I guess it was really hard to find a blonde in Hollywood. [eye roll] But Bud Bundy was still there! And Eugene Levy as a jerk who owns a rival shop--despite that in the first movie they said there were no joke shops in town.  So that's something.  (1/5)

(I really wish they'd add the sci-fi miniseries Earthstar Voyager that like the Boogedy movies was made by Disney to show on ABC in the 80s.)

It's A Wonderful Life:  To be honest, I've never really liked this movie.  I've said before that for me it's kind of reverse-catharsis because it makes me feel worse about myself.  I did buy the special Rifftrax version because at least it would have funny commentary.  The problem, as I noted on Facebook, is to avoid royalties they had to cut out the best part, ie the entire alternate universe sequence.  WTF?!  Without that it highlights just how boring and tedious this movie is.  That Dr. Rick guy on those Progressive commercials would be appalled because the entire movie is about Jimmy Stewart turning into his father and ending up being rewarded for it.  Without the alternate universe part the movie is still an hour 40 minutes, mostly giving us Jimmy Stewart's whole life story that frankly isn't that interesting or special.  He grows up, takes over his dad's bank, keeps it afloat through the Depression and WWII, and meets a girl, marries her, and has kids.  Big whoop.  Merry freaking Christmas.  (1/5)

Jingle All the Way:  Thanks to the Fox merger with Disney some Fox movies are free on Disney+.  Unfortunately this was one of them.  A lot of lame, unfunny gags and you have to wonder what about this made George Lucas think Jake Lloyd should be the young Darth Vader.  Ironically there is a lot of Marvel product placement. (1/5)

Deck the Halls:  I guess this was too peppery for Disney+ so they put it on Hulu.  Maybe it's the gratuitous hot twin girls giving Matthew Broderick's 10-year-old son his first dirty thoughts?  Anyway, like Jingle All the Way it's a lot of lame, unfunny gags as Danny DeVito tries to get his house bright enough to see from space.  But I did like the Brendan Shanahan Red Wings jersey he wears for the ice skating race. (1/5)

The Santa Clause 2:  It takes a while to get the story going so that the love affair seems a bit rushed.  Then there's the contrasting cheesiness of the evil Santa. But I did pilfer this for the core concept of Transformed for Christmas 4:  The Missus Clause.  (2/5) (Fun Fact:  As I noted on Facebook, Lucy, the daughter of Judge Reinhold and Tim Allen's ex-wife is played by Twilight Zone and Babylon 5 alum Bill Mumy's daughter Liliana.)

The Santa Clause 3:  The idea of using sort of a It's A Wonderful Life device was interesting but done really, really poorly.  It takes forever to get going and then it's so weak that it's lame.  And a Disney movie complaining about a theme park commercializing Christmas?  Hey, pot, meet the kettle. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  As I noted on Facebook, Curtis the elf is played by Abigail Breslin's brother and she appears in this one during the framing device scenes.  Alan Arkin is also in this and he and Abigail Breslin were also in Little Miss Sunshine that year--a much, much better movie.)

Merry Freaking Christmas:  This was on Amazon Prime and is a decent little movie about a dad (Joel McHale) who goes on a late night road trip from rural Wisconsin to Chicago to get his son's gift.  His grumpy, formerly alcoholic father is played by Robin Williams in one of his last roles.  It's fun without being stupid and there are valuable lessons learned by everyone.  At 84 minutes it really could have been longer. (3.5/5)

All is Bright:  This is another indie-type movie on Amazon Prime.  Paul Giamatti is an ex-con who comes home to a small town in Quebec to find his ex is going to marry Paul Rudd (huge upgrade).  He convinces Rudd to let him come to New York City to sell Christmas trees.  There he meets a Russian housesitter played by The Shape of Water's Sally Hawkins.  For a holiday movie it's kind of depressing but in the end Giamatti manages to steal a piano for his daughter, though it's probably too big to fit in their house. (2.5/5)

Surviving Christmas:  This movie was released in October of 2004 or so and didn't even make it to the Christmas season that year.  But I don't think it's really that bad.  There are some lame gags but mostly it's a fun story and I empathized with Ben Affleck's single guy desperately trying to capture Christmas nostalgia.  Besides Affleck there's a great cast including James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara (the mom in the Home Alone movies and Schitt's Creek), and Christina Applegate who in her hatred of Affleck's character got to reheat some of her Married With Children zingers.  I think mostly the problem was it came out when Affleck backlash (version 1.0) was still in full swing. Give it a chance sometime. (2.5/5)

Reindeer Games:  The first Affleck Christmas movie!  This late 90s movie was shot in Canada but is supposed to take place in Upper Michigan as Affleck is mistaken for his cellmate and is forced to help a group of truckers rob a casino.  Besides Charlize Theron (who doesn't really have any great nudity) Gary Sinise, Danny Trejo, and Dennis Farina make up a decent cast for an OK action movie/heist.  Give it a chance! (2.5/5)

The Long Kiss Goodnight:  Like I've said on Facebook, if you consider Die Hard a Christmas movie then you have to consider this a Christmas movie too.  The core concept is sort of like The Bourne Identity as it's about a secret agent type (Geena Davis) who loses her memory.  Only in this case she buys into a cover story of being a normal woman in a small town who becomes a teacher and raises her daughter with some dude.  Samuel L Jackson is a cut-rate PI who stumbles across some old stuff of hers and when they go to check it out they wind up becoming the target of government assassins.  It's not exactly "cinema"--there are a couple of plot contrivances for instance--but a capable action movie that's fun to watch.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Brian Cox plays Geena Davis's former handler and 5 years later he would star in the first two Bourne movies.)

Trapped in Paradise:  This 1994 movie stars Nic Cage and SNL alums Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz as three brothers from New York who rob a small-town bank in Pennsylvania but get stuck in town by the weather and like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day start to love the town and have a change of heart.  It's not a great movie but it's not terrible.  There are a few funny bits and some lamer gags, but it's pretty fun. I found it free on Tubi last year.  (2.5/5)

The Ice Harvest:  This has a similar plot to Trapped in Paradise though it came out about 10 years later.  John Cusack is a Wichita Falls mob lawyer who steals $2 million from his boss with the help of pornographer Billy Bob Thornton.  They're planning to leave town early on Christmas morning, but the weather and some complications make it increasingly difficult.  Unlike Trapped in Paradise this is more of a neo-noir with some black comedy.  It's not the greatest movie but it's a nice change of pace from schmaltzy movies or even Die Hard. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was written by Pulitzer-winning author Richard Russo and Robert Benton, who directed the excellent adaptation of Russo's Nobody's Fool about 10 years earlier.)

Scrooged:  An 80s twist on A Christmas Carol starring Bill Murray.  I guess since only 4 years earlier he had starred in Ghostbusters, who better than to be visited by ghosts on Christmas Eve?  It's kind of the prototype for Groundhog Day with Murray being a jerk until he learns a lesson and gets the girl.  Like the previous two it's not my favorite but it has some fun bits. (3/5)

Miracle on 34th Street (1994):  Like A Christmas Carol, people will swear by one version or another of this.  Most would pick the original 1947 version just because it's traditional.  I like the John Hughes 1994 version.  Not only is it in actual color (not colorized later, which always looks weird) but I think the way the lawyer gets Kris Kringle off is a lot better.  It is still pretty corny and it seems like most everyone still dresses like it's the 40s even when it's the 90s.  And take it from me, creating goodwill by telling people where to find something for cheap (or free) will not make people shop at your store; it will just make them want more cheap or free shit.  I'm just saying. (3/5)

All I Want for Christmas (1990ish):  A sentimental favorite.  This is basically a Christmas version of The Parent Trap as two kids (Ethan Randall who starred in Dutch and Thora Birch who starred in Hocus Pocus, see above entries) concoct a scheme to get their divorced parents back together on Christmas Eve.  There are some gags and shit that like Home Alone would either get someone killed or someone put in juvenile hall, but it's a fun movie.  And like I said a sentimental favorite. (3/5)

That's basically it for now.  Huzzah!