Stuff I Watched Since A to Z

Need something to watch this weekend?  Here's some Stuff I Watched since the A to Z Challenge began:

Devotion:  This came out in the same year as Top Gun Maverick, features one of the same actors, and also features Navy aviators.  But this is a lot less dumb as it's based on a true story, so of course it flopped.  Starting shortly after WWII, it follows a squadron that starts on the East Coast and learns to fly the newer Corsair fighter.  The squadron has a black aviator (Jonathan Majors, aka Kang in the MCU) named Jesse Brown and of course some of his squadronmates aren't thrilled.  A new lieutenant (the discount Iceman guy in Maverick) goes out of his way to befriend Jesse.  Soon they're sent to the Mediterranean, where on leave in Cannes they meet Liz Taylor.  Then they're sent to Korea as the war begins.  There are a couple of dangerous missions; in one they have to deal with a new MiG-15 jet fighter.  The end is kind of depressing.  Overall it's an entertaining story but when you get to the end, I'm not sure it really did a great job of selling the main point, which was the friendship between the two pilots.  Maybe they needed to trim some of the earlier stuff to focus more on the later stuff summarized in text and pictures. Still, if you want a movie about real naval aviators and not bullshit action movie cliches, it's worth a watch. (3/5)

Dungeons & Dragons:  Honor Among Thieves:  I think I've mentioned before I'm not a big D&D player.  I did play some computer games in the early 90s but that was about it.  So I wasn't all that knowledgeable going in.  But you don't really need to be.  The things you need to know are explained well enough and most of the story is easy enough to understand even if you're not a fan.  It focuses on a "Harper" (a secret order of good guys) named Edgin (Chris Pine) who loses his wife to red wizards and turns thief until an attempt to steal a "Tablet of Resurrection" ends up going bad and he and his friend Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) go to a dungeon prison until they escape a couple of years later.  Then they hatch a plan to reclaim Edgin's daughter and the Tablet from Forge, a con man they used to work with (Hugh Grant).  But to do it they need to recruit a cleric and a shapeshifter.  And they meet a powerful paladin too.  There's a Hellboy-esque scene where they interrogate corpses and a battle with the Jabba the Hutt of red dragons.  It's an epic quest and pretty fun for the most part.  Characters have enough build-up without being too overbearing.  Some of the effects aren't great but for the most part it's an entertaining movie.  Like I said on Facebook, it's basically Guardians of the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings and like the former it even has Bradley Cooper in literally a small role. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  I'm sure there were plenty of Easter eggs.  I recognized a few of the place names like Baldur's Gate from video games.  A rival team in the maze near the end is based on the 80s cartoon.)

The Black Phone:  I missed this on Peacock but then it came to Amazon Prime so I watched it there.  Not really that great of a horror movie.  It's basically a dramatized version of those old PSAs telling kids not to talk to strangers.  In 1978 someone called "The Grabber" is kidnapping boys.  A boy named Finney is the next victim.  He's locked in a basement by a magician (Ethan Hawke) who wears sort of a gargoyle mask and...doesn't really do a lot.  I mean it's R-rated but he doesn't abuse the boy sexually or anything like that.  Ironically the most gruesome scene is a fight between two boys early in the movie and Finney's dad whipping Finney's sister Gwen.  Anyway, the title comes from a black phone that periodically rings so the ghosts of the Grabber's victims can communicate with Finney.  Meanwhile his sister has dreams of the Grabber but because her mother killed herself for having similar dreams, her dad won't listen to her.  The end was OK but it's not particularly scary or thrilling.  It would probably be scary to kids who watch it when they're not supposed to. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  I think this is what Scott Derrickson did after he got himself fired from Doctor Strange 2.  He reteams with Ethan Hawke, who starred in Derrickson's Sinister that landed him the Doctor Strange gig.  The cirrrrrrrcle of life!)

M3gan:  Basically it's like if you take that AI movie from Spielberg at the turn of the century and combine it with Child's Play.  A girl's parents die on the way to a ski lodge in Oregon so she's sent to live with her aunt, who's working on advanced robotic toys sort of like more advanced Furbies.  She's also secretly working on a sort of sentient My Buddy doll called M3gan (which is an acronym of some sort).  She decides to basically test M3gan by pairing her with the kid.  Soon they're best friends and M3gan starts to get too protective of the kid and kills a dog, old lady, and little boy she sees as threats to the kid.  When the aunt starts to realize M3gan is going rogue, the android goes on a killing spree.  Mayhem ensues!  A lot of it was pretty predictable and cliché; I predicted one card they'd play during the final battle, but of course it took the characters a little longer to do it.  Overall it's pretty well-made and not bad.  I did watch the "unrated" version on Peacock, though I have no idea what might have been cut out from the theatrical version. (3/5)

Cocaine Bear:  Also on Peacock, this is one of those Snakes on a Plane things where it has a kooky title but the actual movie turns out to be really disappointing.  Based extremely loosely on a true story, it features lame jokes, terrible effects, and plenty of gore.  The CGI black bear looks worse than the black bears in the hunting game I played on my Kindle Fire in 2014.  Maybe they should have just gone the "guy in a suit" route like so many cheesy movies back in the 50s and 60s.  A veteran cast including Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Isaiah Whitlock Jr, and Ray Liotta can't save this turkey. My epic Rifftrax-inspired burn:  this makes me miss the quiet dignity of Grizzly.  That at least had the bear getting shot with a rocket launcher and exploding like it was filled with TNT.  (1/5) (Sad Fact:  This was one of Ray Liotta's final roles.)

Cocaine Bear The Real Story:  After the movie, Peacock jumped to a documentary about the real bear.  True story:  the bear stumbled across some cocaine, ate a few grams, died, and was found a few weeks later.  An autopsy revealed the cocaine it had eaten.  There was no bear going on a killing spree.  Most of this is about the guy who dumped the cocaine, who in the movie is shown dancing around before hitting his head and falling out of the plane.  He really should have a whole movie about himself.  He was from a rich Kentucky family, joined the military during Vietnam, served with distinction, became a crooked cop, and then left to become a drug smuggler before his mysterious death.  His body was found with a "spy watch" that could spray tear gas, pockets full of diamonds and Krugerrands, and wearing fancy paratrooper boots.  But in nonfiction and fiction he's overshadowed by the bear.  I mean, in the movie he doesn't even have a line.  Sucks for him. (3.5/5)

Burn (2019):  I watched this indie thriller on the Roku Channel.  (It's also on Amazon Prime and I don't know where else.)  It was surprisingly good.  There are two attendants at an Ohio gas station:  the prettier sassy blonde Sheila and the really insecure brunette Melinda, who is so obviously desperate for any kind of human contact from how she invites a guy smoking by a pump to smoke by her car and is willing to strike up conversation with just about anyone who shows up.  When a cute young guy robs the place, Melinda volunteers to get money for him and asks to go with him.  He begs off, which ends up creating a standoff.  Melinda increasingly goes off the rails, though she wasn't much on them to begin with.  Melinda's pathetic desperation to be seen and appreciated is so palpable that it made me sad.  You've probably never heard of Tilda Cobham-Hervey but she gives a tremendous performance.  The rest of the cast is pretty decent too considering there's no well-known A-list talent involved.  I am grading on a curve a little because a movie like this obviously doesn't have the kind of budget as Avatar 2 for effects and actors, but it does really well with what it has.  If you can watch it, do so! (5/5) (Fun Fact:  I like how the star of the movie is barely even featured on the poster.)

Corner Gas:  Facebook "friend" Al Sirois recommended this show and so when I found it to watch on Amazon Prime (or the Freevee app) free with ads, I started to watch it.  This Canadian show from about 2002-2009 focuses on the Saskatchewan town of Dog River.  The eponymous gas station is run by Brent, the shlubby, balding creator of the series.  There's a cast of somewhat oddball characters like his slacker friend Hank, know-it-all employee Wanda, foul-mouthed dad Oscar, strong-willed mother Emma, clueless senior cop Davis, his younger/less clueless partner Karen, and then in the first episode a young woman from Toronto named Lacey takes over the café attached to the gas station.  There are a lot of hijinks that are never too vulgar.  There's a little bad language (Oscar's catchphrase is "Jackass!") but not much and no real sex or nudity.  At the end of season 1 there's the inkling that Lacey might have a thing for Brent but it's quickly blown off in season 2 and to the show's credit they never have any of those lame "will they/won't they" romantic plots that ruin so many American sitcoms.  Basically it's like a PG-13 Andy Griffith Show if it were transplanted to 21st Century Saskatchewan.  I would say the only knock is sometimes maybe it's a little too innocuous to the point of being kinda bland.  But most of the time it's pretty fun. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  A lot of Canadian politicians appear in cameos, including the prime minister of the time Stephen Harper, as well as NHL player Travis Moen, comedian Colin Mochrie, singer Jann Arden, "Dog" Chapman of Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Gordon Pinsent who was Fraser's dad in Due South among other things.  There's a meta joke in one episode when Oscar says the show Street Legal sucks when of course he was in that series.  Throughout the series, Brent is usually holding a comic book that's folded over, but from the bits of title available a lot of them are Savage Dragon from Image Comics, which was co-founded by Canadian artist/writer Todd McFarlane.)

Corner Gas: The Movie:  Five years after the show ended, this feature-length movie was Kickstartered into existence.  As far as TV show movies go, it's actually better than The Simpsons Movie, the South Park movie, or most of the Futurama movies, though maybe not as good as Beavis & Butt-head Do America.  All of the original actors return and they seem to have all the same locations as the show.  The one change they have to make is the actress playing Karen was pregnant so they mention that she has a husband who's overseas, thus we never see him.  The story is that the town is facing bankruptcy after the mayor invested a bunch of money in Detroit real estate. (Slam on Detroit out of nowhere! Boom!) To try to get some money to avoid bankruptcy, Lacey enters Dog River in a quaintness contest. Meanwhile, Brent buys the local bar and tries to keep it running while Wanda turns Davis's rumpus room into a speakeasy. It's all pretty fun and not too far removed from the TV show.  And funny that after avoiding hooking up Brent and Lacey, the movie springs a surprise in the last couple of minutes. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the credits feature footage from "Dog River Days" in Rouleau, Saskatchewan, which was the town used for the real locations in the show.  Sad Fact:  This was the final appearance of Janet Wright as Emma as she died in 2016.)

Corner Gas Animated:  A few years after the movie, Freevee (and probably some service in Canada) brought Corner Gas back as a cartoon.  And really not much changes.  They have a little more freedom since it's animated, especially with some fantasy sequences, but mostly it's the same show.  Except for the deceased Janet Wright, everyone reprises their roles.  I'm not sure how I feel about recasting Emma for the cartoon.  On one hand you can tell it's a different voice and the character maybe even acts different.  On the other hand this isn't the sort of show that could really deal with a death like that.  And if you don't have Emma, who would rein-in Oscar?  So it makes sense but I don't feel great about it.  Otherwise if you like the live action show you'd like this.  Basically I think if you put on a blindfold and watched a random episode of this and random episode of the live action you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart except for Emma's voice. (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  There are more celebrity cameos like Sarah McLachlan, Stephen Page of Barenaked Ladies, comedian Rick Mercer, and Ryan Reynolds.  The animated show seems to pretty much ignore the movie as Karen is single and doesn't have a baby and Brent & Lacey still aren't together.  In an episode about a Pioneer Days festival, one notable pioneer woman was named Jane T Wright as an homage to Janet Wright.)

No Clue:  This low-budget Canadian movie is from that school of movies about an ordinary guy who gets in over his head.  In this case a shlubby middle-aged guy (Brent Butt of the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas who's also the writer/producer) sells "specialty advertising goods" or stuff like mugs and keychains with a corporate logo on it.  One night a woman comes in thinking he's the detective down the hall.  She claims her brother is missing and so he agrees to help her.  But he really has no clue what he's doing.  Though of course he stumbles onto some truths as he finds out about the guy, a designer of a big video game who recently started a new company, and the woman who employed him.  It's fun and light and not too badly made even with the TV movie-quality visuals. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  the most recognizable actor is David Koechner, whom you probably don't know by name but would recognize from movies like Anchorman and Waiting.  Or like me you might confuse him with John Caroll Lynch who was in Fargo and The Drew Carey Show among other things.  They were actually both in the Simon Pegg movie Paul from what I read on IMDB anyway.)

Man With the Screaming Brain:  This is a low-budget TV movie in the tradition of Frankenstein or those Two-Headed Transplant movies of the 70s.  In this case, Bruce Campbell (who writes & directs) is in Bulgaria on business when he's murdered by a Gypsy woman.  A Russian cab driver is also killed and a mad scientist (Stacy Keach) combines their brains in Campbell's body.  Meanwhile, Campbell's wife is also murdered by the Gypsy woman and her brain put by the mad scientist into a primitive android.  It's low-budget, silly fun.  You obviously can't expect a lot from it. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Campbell & Keach had previously appeared together in the even lower-budget action movie Icebreaker I've seen probably a hundred times on the Rifftrax app.  Ted Raimi plays the scientist's henchman and also appeared in most of his brother Sam's movies like the Evil Dead movies along with Campbell.)

Murder of a Cat:  This is like if John Wick or Revenge for Jolly were made as a lighthearted comedy.  A nerdy loser who lives with his mom finds his beloved cat Mouser dead one morning with a crossbow bolt stuck in him.  He begins investigating and finds out the cat has been living a double life as "Horatio" with a young woman named Greta.  They team up to try to find out who killed the cat, which leads to Ford's Megastore, a sort of off-brand Walmart founded and run by Greg Kinnear.  Mayhem ensues!  While there's obviously a lot less violence than the movies I mentioned at the start, there is a little violence, but mostly it's light and fun.  While I didn't recognize the leads, besides Kinnear you have Blythe Danner (Gweneth Paltrow's mom) as the loser's mom and JK Simmons as the town sheriff.  It's a pretty fun movie that at least right now is on Amazon Prime. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  The movie is produced by Sam Raimi, which maybe in part explains JK Simmons being in it but also explains why Ted Raimi has a cameo as a deputy at the end.  But no Bruce Campbell or Danny Elfman score like most movies Raimi directs.  Amazon Prime listed the movie as being from 2022 but the copyright says 2013 and IMDB says 2014 so it's pretty obvious Amazon messed up.  Whatever program they used to create the captioning also wasn't very good.  I'm just saying.)

Emergency:  This 2022 Amazon Original seems that at first like it might be a Harold & Kumar or Superbad-type comedy but soon turns a lot less funny with probably too much real world drama.  It's basically like if Jordan Peele had written/directed Superbad.  When two black college students and their Latino friend find a white girl passed out drunk in their house, they decide to take her to the hospital, afraid that if they call the cops they'll get blamed.  But the trip soon becomes an epic journey.  Real-world drama pops up when for instance they stop outside a house with a "Black Lives Matter" sign only for the white people who live there to shoo them away, thinking they're drug dealers.  Then there's the sister of the girl and her friends who are following her with a bike/skateboard and report them to 911.  That brings in cops who point guns at everyone and condescend to the black and Latino students.  There are a few funny moments but probably too much drama to make it enjoyable. (2.5/5)

Redtails:  Tony Laplume's review reminded me I had never actually watched this movie.  Since it's on Disney+ I finally figured I might as well.  It's a decent war movie but never really rises about the cliché.  There's plenty of aerial action but to cram the story into just over 2 hours they cut out a lot of things like the recruitment of the Tuskegee Airmen and their training and being sent overseas.  It just starts in Italy in 1944 with the Tuskegee Airmen flying rickety P-40s against really no targets before they're assigned to help protect an amphibious landing.  From there they get newer P-51 Mustangs and battle against German jets while escorting bombers.  An all-star cast including Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr, and Michael B Jordan stars as the black pilots while Bryan Cranston is a racist colonel and Gerald McRaney is a general who reluctantly allows the Tuskegee Airmen to help his bombers.  It's an important story and an exciting movie, but not particularly great. Since Lucasfilm was behind this there was a lot of nonsensical trying to compare it to Star Wars, but really it's just a typical war movie.  It doesn't even quite rise to the level of Glory in the air.  (3/5)

The Bad Batch, Season 2:  I didn't really love the first season.  Or really hate it either.  It was OK but never really seemed to lean into any concept.  They had the perfect setup for an A-Team style show but never really managed it.  Nor do they in this season either.  There's a little less trying to plug our heroes into Star Wars history and a slightly more focused story.  A lot of it is going into the transition away from clones now that Kamino has been destroyed and it kind of retroactively makes the Emperor's return in Episode IX plausible.  It also adds the "Emperor's storehouse" on Mt. Tantiss in the original Timothy Zahn trilogy back in the early 90s to the canon by making that where the "Advanced Science Division" is experimenting on clones.  The Batch itself is really the least interesting part of the show as they kind of do some random stuff before seeming to find a refuge before of course "one last job" that goes sour with one member seeming to be killed.  I say seeming because it's not like they showed a body and this is the universe where a guy was literally cut in half and survived.  The best episode was probably the one that focuses on Crosshair (the former member of the Batch who joined the Imperials) and a clone attempting to obey ridiculous orders from their Imperial commander.  It was sort of Catch-22 absurdity only not as funny and with a tragic ending.  The cliffhanger ending sets up the start of a season 3, but it still wasn't great. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Wanda Sykes voices a treasure hunter character who becomes an ally of the Batch.  When I wondered online why they seemed to use a cut-rate version of Dr. Aphra from the comics instead of the real one, someone schooled me that she would probably be too young since this is right after Episode III.  And I have to concede the point.  It can be hard to keep track of all this stuff sometimes.)

The Clone Wars (2D):  Before the beloved CGI show, Cartoon Network originally aired a bunch of short episodes of a 2D Clone Wars show.  Disney+ gathered them together into two "episodes" of about an hour apiece.  Since I hadn't watched them, I decided to watch it on May 4th.  Even before I saw the credits, I could tell it was done by Genndy Tartakovsky, who did Samurai Jack and Primal, because it's kind of that same style.  I haven't watched either of those shows, so I don't know if they have the same shifts in tone from serious (albeit bloodless) depictions of war to fairly goofy stuff, mostly with C3PO.  While not as good as the CGI series, you can see some of the same aspects and the origin of characters like Ventress and Luminara's apprentice.  It also explains some things not seen in the movies or CGI show like Anakin becoming a Jedi Knight, 3PO getting his gold plating, and why Grievous is coughing so much in Episode III--because Mace Windu crushed his chest with the Force during Palpatine's kidnapping.  Because these episodes are shorter, it's not really as good as the CGI show and it really would have been nice if Disney had separated them a little more with some title cards or something because they just run into each other at breakneck speed and you might get whiplash from how quickly it jumps from one story to another.  The clones don't get as much development as they do in the CGI show and there's no Ahsoka, but if you're a fan of the CGI show or just the prequels, then it's a good way to fill in some blanks.  Also, there's no Jar-Jar in it. Woo hoo! (3/5)

The Legend of Vox Machina, Season 2:  In season 1, a band of hapless heroes managed to save the kingdom of Whitehall from evil vampires.  At the start of the season they're being hailed as heroes by the king of Tal'Dorei when dragons suddenly appear and kill or enslave most everyone.  Our heroes then go on a quest to find "vestiges" of ancient powers to use against the dragons.  But while a lot happens in the season, not a lot is solved in the end.  I mean, I don't think they even find half the vestiges and there are still at least 3 dragons--and the hint more are going to hatch.  So it feels kinda hollow in the end.  There are also some questions left unresolved, like who is this "Ripley" person helping the dragons who seems to have a history with Vex and Vax?  And what about the main dragon's "heart" that Vex and Vax seemed to know something about?  I think this season did do more into developing the various characters and getting into their backstories more than the first season.  I guess I just hoped it'd accomplish more. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  I don't think there are a lot of celebrity cameos, but the Fonz, Henry Winkler, voices an elderly gnome.  So sit on that.)

Animal Control:  I mentioned this last time I did an entry but I had only watched a few episodes.  Having watched the whole season for the most part I liked it.  I really liked Joel McHale's grizzled animal control officer who's sort of the Hawkeye (M*A*S*H Hawkeye) of their unit and I really liked the lesbian Kiwi lady.  The Indian-American family guy was pretty good too.  Unfortunately they waste time in the last few episodes with a love triangle between the young black woman running the office, the former head of the office who had an ear bitten off by a mink, and a former snowboarder nicknamed Shred who has a thing for the black woman but she's going out with the other guy and blah blah blah.  I don't care.  It was like Superstore only with less hateable characters in the love triangle.  If there's a season 2, I wish they'd just drop that.  Those plots are always death. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  In the first few episodes there was a chubby redheaded office manager but after an episode where she sleeps with Joel McHale, she disappears for a few episodes to the point I wondered if it was one of those older brother on Happy Days/middle child on Family Matters things where a character just vanishes but she turns up for very brief appearances in the last couple of episodes.)

Beavis & Butt-Head (2022):  After the fairly lame movie last year to bring the two dimwits into the present, there comes this soft reboot series on Paramount+.  I watched the first 4 episodes and was pretty disappointed.  While the original quickly gained fame and infamy for its crude teenage leads, this is just pretty tepid garbage.  Literally most of these 4 episodes is just them getting stuck in/on something:  on a roof, in a box, on a raft, and whatever.  If you're going to transport your main characters 25 years into the present, maybe you have something to say about 1990s culture versus 2020s culture?  Nah, just have the two idiots get stuck in/on something.  Huh-huh.  It makes me angry how badly Mike Judge mails this in and yet still gets a second season because Paramount is so desperate for non-Trek IPs to mine.  It really doesn't give me any hope for a King of the Hill reboot if Judge is going to put so little effort into it. (1/5)

Amateur Hour:  I'll have to double-check but I don't think I watched this movie before I watched it on Amazon in April.  Jason Biggs (aka the pie fucker) has lost his job and his wife is about to give birth.  To get money to keep their insurance, he takes a job on Craigslist to drive three prostitutes to a party in LA.  Mayhem ensues!  There are some funny parts and some sexy parts.  It's not really as good as those wacky urban quests like Adventures in Babysitting and Trojan War, but it's not bad either.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Like Cocaine Bear, this insists it was inspired by real events.  The credits leave exactly how much is true up to interpretation.)

Breakout:  In this 2013 movie on the Roku Channel, a chubby Brendan Fraser with two different bad hairpieces is a convict in Canada who has to save his kids from two Americans, Dominic Purcell and a mentally handicapped Ethan Suplee who keeps calling Brendan Fraser's wife with their daughter's cell phone thinking it's his mother.  It's a serviceable action movie, especially considering writer/director Damian Lee made such Rifftrax fodder as Copper Mountain, Street Law, and Abraxas Guardian of the Universe. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the movie was shot outside Sault St. Marie, Ontario, which is across the Soo Locks from Michigan.)

Standoff (2016):  This is one of those movies that has a pretty simple setup with not a lot of actors or sets so it could basically be a play.  A little girl goes to visit her parents' graves when an assassin (Lawrence "don't call me Larry" Fishburne) shoots some lady and her bodyguard at another grave.  The girl catches the assassin's face on camera and so he chases her to a farmhouse where Thomas Jane is an ex-soldier planning to kill himself after his son died in a stupid accident.  He and the girl go upstairs with a shotgun while Fishburne is downstairs in the house with a handgun.  From there it's a standoff.  I was glad the movie answered the question I quickly thought of:  why the fuck doesn't the assassin just burn the fucking house down?  As insurance, Thomas Jane puts the film from the camera in a bag in the toilet tank so if the house burns down, the evidence might survive.  From there it does a pretty good job of creating tension.  A bumbling rookie deputy is not used particularly well, the wife isn't that great of an actress (probably because they didn't need her much and blew the budget on the stars), and the little boy's accident was kinda silly, but that's small potatoes stuff.  Definitely not a bad way to entertain yourself for about 100 minutes. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  This movie was also filmed in Sault St. Marie, Ontario.  Among the producers is Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christensen!  Probably because it was made and financed in Canada.  He does not appear in the movie, which is too bad--or is it?  Though if you put a Jedi and Sith in these roles it'd be good for one of those Visions shorts they've done on Disney+ the last two years.)

24 Hours to Live:  This 2017 movie I watched on the Roku Channel is like if you crossed The Hitman's Bodyguard with Kevin Costner's 3 Days to Kill.  Ethan Hawke is an assassin who goes on "one last job" to kill a guy who worked for "Red Mountain," a shady mercenary company.  The guy is going to testify against Red Mountain with the help of an Interpol agent (who's a Chinese woman so they could secure Chinese financing for the movie).  When things inevitably go south, Ethan Hawke is killed by the Interpol agent and brought back to life with an experimental procedure that brings him back--but only for 24 hours--see what they did there?  So he joins with the Interpol agent to get the memory card of the guy's testimony to the proper authorities.  It's one of those cheap but not really cheap action movies that's not as good as the ones I mentioned.  It's entertaining enough for 90 minutes or so and not completely stupid, so that's fine. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Rutger Hauer cashes a paycheck as Hawke's father-in-law and Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones cashes a paycheck as the evil head of Red Mountain.)

The Job:  I was expecting this to be more of a caper movie, but it's a caper within a long con that reminded me of Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men.  Based on a play, this 2008 movie is about some guy who's lost his job and pretty much broke when he meets a cowboy (Ron Perlman) who gives him a business card for some place that at first seems like a job agency.  Which it kinda is--only for assassins!  The guy is offered $200,000 to strangle a rich guy who needs to die in a "robbery" for insurance and to keep the cops from investigating too hard.  Everything is all arranged so he only need to go in and strangle the guy and steal some shit so it'll look like a robbery.  But while he really wants the money for himself and his girlfriend with a big forehead who's a waitress but was maybe on some kind of soap opera at one point, he can't bring himself to do it, so he asks Ron Perlman to help and split the money.  But then of course things go sideways and the con starts to be revealed.  For fans of Star Wars, think of it this way:  what if Obi-Wan and Padme were agents of Palpatine to turn Anakin to the dark side?  That's basically the con here.  For a fairly low budget movie it was fun and you wouldn't really see the twists coming.  (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Joe Pantoliano plays the head of the job agency with really fake bushy eyebrows.  While they never really say where the movie takes place, it was filmed in Detroit and surrounding areas back before Rick Snyder ruined that like he ruined Flint's water; the LLC for the production was actually called "The Detroit Job."  To tie the two fun facts together, Pantoliano's character is named Mr. Perriman and in the 90s, Brett Perriman was a receiver for the Detroit Lions--who played in Pontiac, but still.) 

Echo Boomers:  This was a "Roku Channel Original" that's not extremely original.  Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger) has graduated college but can't find a job.  His cousin Jack says he has a job in Chicago, so Lance goes there only to find the "job" is breaking into rich people's houses and stealing shit.  It's a pretty lucrative business and so he goes along with it.  Other than the notion that the thieves are all Millennials looking to get back at the Boomers, there's not much new about this.  It copies the "rules" thing of Zombieland and rips off the girl overdosing and being dumped at the hospital from Pulp Fiction--only without the best part, the syringe of adrenaline being plunged into her heart.  Like some others on this list it's an OK way to divert yourself for 90 minutes but not really that great. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  Michael Shannon cashes a paycheck as "Mel," the crew's fence who initially also supplies them with jobs.  While the movie is supposed to be in Chicago, it was actually filmed in Michael Offutt's backyard in Salt Lake City; I'm sure he would have liked to be on the set with all the hunky young guys.)

Exposure (2016):  This could be the secret origin of Ana de Armas or the movie that got her the role in No Time to Die.  I'm not really sure.  What I am sure of is this movie was lame.  The plot could have been a gritty crime thriller that was pretty straight-forward.  Instead, the writers decide to throw a bunch of fake supernatural shit into it to make it seem fancier than it is.  The basic plot is thus:  de Armas is Isabel, whose brother-in-law is being watched by a cop whose partner is Keanu Reeves.  Isabel goes to the subway to get on a train, the cop follows her, rapes her on the platform, and then she kills him.   Reeves investigates his partner's death and finds he was a real piece of shit while the cop's wife (Mira Sorvino) starts coming on to him.  Meanwhile Isabel gets pregnant but since her husband was in Iraq (and then killed) everyone thinks she's a slut and doesn't believe her when she says it's an immaculate conception--which it's not.  But that's not how it's actually presented.  Instead, we don't see the rape until later and Isabel imagines seeing some albino guy floating over the tracks and later some weird white-skinned woman who escaped from a Guillermo del Toro movie.  She also imagines a little girl named Elisa who is actually herself as a child who was molested by her father, whom she murders at the end.  Now here's the kicker:  de Armas and Reeves share 0 seconds on screen together.  So if you're going into this thinking how neat it'll be to see that lady from the last Bond movie with John Wick, don't bother.  Basically this is like if the guy who made Donnie Darko tried to adapt a Dennis Lehane book like Mystic River.  de Armas is really good while Reeves is just sorta around and Christopher MacDonald cashes a paycheck as the not-angry police captain. (2/5)

King of New York:  This 1990 movie I saw on the Roku Channel stars Christopher Walken as Frank White, a drug lord who gets out of prison and almost immediately gets up to his old tricks...I guess.  I mean, isn't that what put him in prison?  I'm not really sure and the movie isn't that interested in telling us.  What's interesting is how much then-not-really-known talent appears in the movie.  Frank's main henchman is Lawrence "Larry" Fishburne and Steve Buscemi is a guy who tests the drugs they buy for purity.  Giancarlo Esposito is appropriately Frank's accountant.  Opposing him are cops played by David Caruso (foreshadowing his gig on NYPD Blue) and Wesley Snipes.  That's a pretty deep bench for a movie I have never heard of.  It's just too bad the movie never really comes together.  There's some noise about Frank wanting to fund a hospital in the Bronx but not much comes of it because the movie can't decide whether it wants to be a Robin Hood story or Scarface.  There's a female lawyer working with Frank but nothing really comes together there either.  If they had decided what kind of movie they wanted to make, it probably would have been better.  But if you can watch it for free, maybe do so just for the gratuitous terrible Walken dancing scenes. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  The head cop in the movie is played by Victor Argo; about a year later in McBain, Argo plays the evil Colombian president and Walken plays the titular hero so it's like they basically switch roles.  Near the end there's a scene taking place in the "Silvercup" building that was also prominently featured in the original Highlander movie.)

Unhuman:  This Blumhouse movie made for ePix takes a bunch of horror movie cliches and then throws in a pretty ridiculous twist that is in no way possible.  A bunch of high school kids are on a bus that seems to come under attack from zombies and as some kids seem to be turned into zombies, others take shelter in some kind of building.  Of course there's a jock bully and a nerd and a fat kid and a slut and a popular girl and whatever cliches.  It's just lame and boring and then turns really dumb when we find out that two boys have staged this whole thing to make themselves heroes and shame the bullies.  To do this they have to recruit the bus driver and a guy to play the zombie and use some kind of drug that's bright green and makes people act like zombies.  As if just about any of that is possible.  I mean if you want to be heroes, why not have someone stage a school shooting?  Then they could have just stepped in and stopped the shooter and been heroes.  Sadly a lot more plausible.  Or if you want to use the bus scenario, have the guy get in a Bigfoot costume or something like that.  It would have been a lot easier to just have the fake Sasquatch grab people and stash them then the whole dumb drug thing. I'm sure this was pitched as "Scream only with zombie movies" and yet it never rises to that level.  In part because meta-horror has been done to figurative death and in part they don't really do a good job of packing in zombie movie references except a couple of vague ones.  They do rip off Jamie Lee Curtis's dialogue from the original Halloween, so that's something.  Anyway, as if it can't get worse, the mid-credits scene threatens us with a possible sequel.  Ugh.  No thanks.  Something particularly stupid is during the bus crash there's all this stuff sort of flying at the screen despite that this was produced for a cable channel, thus there was like a 1% chance of people watching it in 3D where that kind of thing would work better.  I guess at least this wasn't as boring as Blumhouse's Halloween movies. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  the movie is written and directed by the guys who wrote Feast in 2005 for Project Greenlight.)

Amazon on the left & Movie House on the right

Cowboy & Indiana:  I had literally put this on the Movie House app about 200 times without once ever actually watching it just because it's the longest movie on the app.  Then early one morning I stayed up to watch it for no reason at all.  I wasn't really missing much.  It's really just a bunch of cliches that's all really predictable.  The eponymous "Cowboy" is an alcoholic/drug addict named Tulsa whose friend is killed by a bull.  When he's busted for drugs, Tulsa is forced to mentor Indiana, the son of a bull rider who went to jail.  Then Tulsa helps train Indiana's father to ride a bull for a million dollar prize.  You'll never guess what happens next!  Oh, wait, you totally could guess what happens.  It's pretty obvious.  But there is a funny part where they let a bull loose in a gangbanger's house--ironic considering the bull that kills the guy at the beginning was named Gangbanger for...reasons.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the version on the Movie House has the aspect ratio on the movie messed up so it's kind of stretched on both of my TVs.  Freevee/Amazon's version looks better.  Question I don't think they answer:  why didn't they put Gangbanger down after he kills the guy at the beginning?  Isn't that traditionally what happens to animals that kill humans?)

Like A Country Song:  I hadn't put this on the Movie House app quite as many times as Cowboy & Indiana but I had put it on a bunch and never watched it.  I finally decided to sit and watch the whole thing.  And similarly it wasn't that interesting.  Mostly a lot of clichés and since it's from "Risen Media" you know in the end everyone's going to find God and live Happily Ever After.  So no matter how much drama they try to throw into the proceedings, I never really felt any tension.  The story is that a young country singer and his estranged dad (Billy Ray Cyrus) are both alcoholics and struggling until they find each other and Jesus.  There's a musician who keeps popping up who could be an angel or God or something.  Besides Billy Ray Cyrus, there's no one notable involved unless maybe you're really familiar with Nashville in 2014. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  I was near Nashville in December 2014 but other than getting lunch at a Red Robin south of the city I didn't really stop anywhere there.  So it's unlikely I saw anyone or anything from this movie then.)

Foxfur:  One Sunday I figured I was going to bed in just about an hour and nothing good was on so I put on a random shorter movie on the Movie House app so at least I'd get a point or two.  As I said on Facebook, this is like if Ed Wood had made Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.  There's a lot of blather about multiverses and aliens but the acting and effects are all really, really terrible.  In case you're wondering, Foxfur is a woman at the center of...whatever the hell is supposed to be happening. (1/5)