Movie Reviews: End July-Late August

So here's some stuff I watched...

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek:  Laplume had mentioned this movie on his 2019 review entry.  Then he referenced it in another one.  So when I saw this on Tubi, I decided to put it on my queue.  It's a small budget movie about a half-dozen militia guys in Texas.  One night there's a shooting at a cop's funeral and the militia guys get together and realize one of them must have done it.  Finding out who's responsible is the task of Gannon (James Badge Dale) who used to be a cop.  Secrets are revealed, including that one of the other guys is an undercover cop.  There's a twist at the end that is somewhat plausible.  It's the kind of twist that could work, though it's easier for it to work in hindsight than for someone to have engineered it in advance.  Overall it was pretty tense and interesting.  Since most of it takes place in the lumber yard they use as a base, the small budget doesn't really matter that much and most of the actors are capable enough given that they aren't huge names with Oscars or anything..  (4/5) (Fun Fact:  Badge Dale is one of those guys you probably hadn't heard of but you've probably seen him since he's been in lots of stuff like 1923, 13 Hours, and The Departed.)

Guardians of the Galaxy 3:  After about a six-year hiatus thanks to the last two Avengers movies, the pandemic, and James Gunn directing The Suicide Squad for DC, the Guardians of the Galaxy are back.  This time it focuses on the origin of Rocket when he's badly injured but the team finds out there's some kind of code that prevents him from being healed.  So they have to track down who created Rocket, which leads them to the "High Evolutionary," a dude who experiments on animals to try to create "perfect" beings.  The scenes with young Rocket, an otter, a rabbit, and a walrus are heart-breaking while of course you have some silliness with Drax and Mantis, so there are some tonal shifts.  The relationship between Peter Quill and Gamora isn't really reignited or even given that much time.  At one point when Quill is floating in space you'd think Gamora would save him as a callback to the first movie, but nope.  Mostly this felt like it was about 5 hours long though it was probably half that.  It's probably because with Gunn moving to DC he wanted to stuff as much as he could into it.  They probably could have done it without Adam Warlock or some of the other stuff but I guess after the cookie scene in the second movie to indicate Warlock's creation, Gunn didn't want to leave that as a loose end.  But there are still things that could be explored later, most likely by a new director. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Besides his brother Sean Gunn, there seem to be a few more members of James Gunn's family in the credits so it was a family affair.  One cookie scene shows the future of the Guardians while another checks in with Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord.)

The Super Mario Bros Movie:  Saying this is better than the 1993 live action movie is like saying Jaws is better than Jaws 4.  It's pretty obvious.  This animated movie takes a lot of pieces from the Mario games and the Donkey Kong Country games.  The story is pretty basic:  Mario and Luigi are plumbers in Brooklyn who find a bunch of weird pipes and get sucked down one into the land of the Mushroom Kingdom, which is coming under siege by the evil Bowser and his Koopa army.  Bowser has an invincibility star he plans to use to blackmail Princess Peach to marry him.  Meanwhile the princess and Mario go to find the Kongs to enlist their help to fight Koopa.  Also meanwhile, Luigi is captured and held with other prisoners until the wedding, where he's to be sacrificed.  Overall it was OK.  It wasn't particularly great or funny or memorable for me.  Some of the stuff like the zombie Koopas might be scarier to younger viewers but there's also not too much for older people like me.  Since I only played Super Mario Bros 1 & 3 and a couple Donkey Kong Country games, there were probably a few references I didn't get.  I mostly enjoyed it but probably not enough I'd want to watch it a bunch of times. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  This movie featured Chris Pratt as the voice of Mario and used the Beastie Boys song "No Sleep Til Brooklyn;" Pratt and that song were both in Guardians of the Galaxy 3 too.  The cookie scene at the end features the birth of Yoshi the dinosaur for a sequel or spinoff movie.  There are of course a lot of Easter eggs.  Besides references to the Mario and Donkey Kong games early on they go to "Punch-Out Pizza," a reference to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and inside someone is playing "Jumpman," the original Japanese version of Donkey Kong.)

Asteroid City:  I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson's movies, though some more than others.  When this came to Peacock I was excited to get a chance to see it.  And then...kind of disappointed.  It feels like a car that's stuck in first gear; it never really gets anywhere.  There's plenty of preciousness but it's not really in service of anything.  It introduces the story-in-the-story and a host of characters (including the host played by Bryan Cranston) and the eponymous town that is so named because of an asteroid that hit it 5000 years earlier.  A whole bunch of people show up to watch an "ellipse" and then an alien shows up to take the asteroid and the town is quarantined and...eventually it just ends.  There's a star-studded cast with Anderson regulars like Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, and Adrien Brody.  And others who have done one or two other Anderson movies like Cranston, Ed Norton, and Wilem Dafoe.  And newcomers like Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, and Margot Robbie. It's too bad they didn't get better material to work with. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  My 2006 novel The Best Light also features a southwest town with a crater, only my story was less funny and more serious.)

Triangle of Sadness:  This black comedy from Sweden or somewhere like that won the Palm d'Or in Cannes in 2022 and my blogger buddy Arion liked it so I decided to give it a try on Hulu.  Mostly at 2 1/2 hours it's about an hour too long.  Basically there's a yacht full of rich people that's attacked by pirates (a fact I didn't really understand until nearly the end) and a group of castaways ends up on a beach.  Suddenly things are topsy-turvy and the "toilet manager" Abigail, a middle-aged Asian woman, is in charge because she knows how to catch fish and make a fire and so on.  The rich people then have to do what she says, which includes one young male model becoming her love slave.  After the new order is sorted out, there's a twist they probably thought was clever but I remembered something very similar--and actually darker comedy--in an episode of American Dad quite a few years ago.  It's not laugh-out-loud funny like Gilligan's Island but not as serious as Lost.  If it had been shorter it would have been ok but my attention began wandering to the point I wasn't sure what happened to some of the characters like the blonde concierge who was initially there but then just seemed to vanish.  Did she die?  I wasn't paying attention.  They really should have cut almost the entire first "chapter" about models Carl & Yaya and focused more on Abigail; if they could have gotten someone like Michelle Yeoh to play her it would have been a step up.  Anyway, it wasn't terrible; maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for it.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Woody Harrelson is the only recognizable name and he's on screen probably a half-hour at most--maybe less.)

Amsterdam:  Like Babylon that came out last year, this was an ensemble dramedy with a lot of stars and a setting in the early 20th Century.  It also starred Margot Robbie.  And it also flopped.  I don't know where it streamed originally but it came to Hulu so I got a chance to watch it recently.  It's kind of slow before it finally gets to the relevant point, which is an American Nazi plot to overthrow the government.  Hmmm, American fascists trying to overthrow the government.  Sounds kinda similar to something recently, doesn't it?  But to get there you have to sit through like 90 minutes of disjointed rambling involving Christian Bale as a doctor who lost an eye and got messed up in WWI and has since opened an office specializing in protheses and homemade medicines.  John David Washington is his best friend and lawyer.  Then a rich woman (Taylor Swift) wants them to do an autopsy on her father, a retired general, but when they go to tell her the results, she's pushed in front of a car.  Then it sorta turns into an investigation.  This is based on a true story and to prove that the movie does a little comparison of Robert deNiro's General Dillingham with the real-life general with another name.  Anyway, the talent well on this is so deep.  Besides Bale, Washington, Robbie, Swift, and deNiro there's Zoe Saldana, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, and more!  David O Russell favorites Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are missing though, unless they were in uncredited bit parts or something.  Like O Russell's Joy, I think this mononym dramedy was in part a victim of poor marketing that didn't really articulate what the movie was about or the relevance it might have to now.  It probably could have used some trimming early on to get to the relevant part sooner. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Among the many stars is Casey Biggs who played Damar on DS9.  Speculation:  Was Chris Rock presenting at the Oscars because he was in this?)

Secret Invasion:  Like Black Widow, for some reason Marvel waited until the character of Nick Fury had pretty much lost all relevance before they decided to make a 6-episode series for Disney+.  Most of it spins out of Captain Marvel, which I watched but it isn't one of those I really cared about all that much.  Since for...reasons Marvel set that movie in 1995, this series has to deal with the unintended (or maybe intended?) consequences where the shape-shifting Skrull are on Earth and getting impatient for the home Fury promised them after the rival Kree destroyed theirs.  So the Skrull are planning to start World War III and wipe out humanity.  And only Nick Fury can stop them...somehow.  For...reasons.  I mean, why doesn't he contact Carol Danvers or the heroes on Earth?  Because that would cost too much money.

There are some revelations that should feel important, but don't.  Fury has a Skrull wife!  The criminally underused Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill is killed!  Rhodey is a Skrull!  So was Everett Ross, since...when?  Who knows?  Or cares.  None of it feels that important to the overall story because most of this was just retconned into existence four years ago and Nick Fury hasn't been relevant since Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014--more unintended (or maybe intended?) consequences.

While you could make the case that Loki wasn't all that relevant when his show came out, that at least was fun and introduced the next major villain of the MCU.  This has none of that.  It's mostly slow and dreary from the theme song during the AI-produced credits right on to the end.  And I really don't know how the Skrulls might be used in future movies.  Unless you're an MCU completist there's really no reason to watch it. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  the closest to any big Marvel cameos are when the "Super Skrulls" use bits of Captain Marvel, Drax, or Groot.  Without all the Mother of Dragons trappings, Emilia Clarke looks really tiny.  Serious Thought:  The argument between Talos and Gravik about the path to Skrull acceptance mirrors that of Charles Xavier and Magneto in the X-Men comics/movies, which in itself mirrors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X in real life.  Talos, like Xavier or MLKJ, believes in using peaceful means while Gravik, like Magneto or Malcolm X, believes in using violence if necessary.  But very little is made of these parallels and in the end, Fury stopping Gravik's plan just makes things worse for the Skrulls.)

Ms. Marvel:  About 8 years ago I read the first volume of G Willow Wilson's rebooted Ms. Marvel and was not really that impressed.  Other than Kamala Khan being a Pakistani-American Muslim girl it's a pretty vanilla origin story with not really any big league superhero fights or anything.  While the Disney+ series changes her powers from stretching to more like a Green Lantern by being able to create things with "hard light," it's not terribly different.  And like I said about the comic book, it's pretty vanilla if you look past the character's race/religion.  In this case it's basically a CW superhero show like The Flash or Stargirl only with slightly better production values.  Or Spider-Man Homecoming with lesser production values.

Still, it's a pretty fun show.  It would have been better if the bad guys had been defined a little better and if we got to see more of "the Veil" or what's beyond it or whatever.  The implication is there's this whole other universe where she gets her power from but we don't see a lot of it.  The characters beyond Kamala are mostly defined by archetypes:  strict but caring parents, nerdy best friend, dorky older brother, and cute guy who's kind of a bad boy.  Iman Vellani does a good job as Kamala, being plucky and cute but at times vulnerable.  "Adorkable" might pretty well cover it.  It works pretty well overall even without a lot of huge fights or any big cameos until the cookie scene of the final episode, which is supposed to set up The Marvels in November.  And in the last episode you really have to admire how quickly they Home Alone Kamala's school.  I don't think Kevin McCallister could have set up those traps so quickly.  (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  For the episodes in "Karachi" it's actually Thailand.  That's kinda close, I guess?  Closer than Georgia--the American one.  Maybe not the former Soviet one.  In the comics, Kamala was an Inhuman who gained her power from a "Terragon mist" or something like that.  They recently killed her off and Iman Vellani is actually writing a comic to bring Kamala back as a mutant to line up better with the MCU version.)

(Controversial thought:  As a middle-aged white guy who's not religious the only thing that actually bugged me was when they talk about "the Partition" that spun off what we know today as Pakistan.  They make it sound like it was just some wacky idea the British had before they left.  But if for instance you watch Gandhi or really know anything about history, you'd realize that with the British leaving, the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and other religious factions were all vying for control.  As terrible as the Partition was, the alternative would probably have been decades of civil war and chaos.  Not that the region is entirely stable now, but it's probably better than it would be otherwise.  It's one of those "necessary evils" like the "3/5 rule" and other compromises made in early America that preserved slavery but also postponed a civil war.  It's easy to look at those things now and say how terrible they were, but you have to think in terms of the alternative; a young nation like India in 1948 or America in 1788 would not likely survive if people had stuck to their guns to do the "right" thing.)

She-Hulk:  Attorney at Law:  The final Disney+ Marvel show I hadn't watched yet.  This one is actually even more fun than Ms. Marvel.  It's an unabashed comedy with 4th wall breaking that gets a little too silly in the final episode, but otherwise is great fun.  One of the best gags was when they recreated the Incredible Hulk TV show opening only with She-Hulk; Jennifer even gets to deliver Bill Bixby's most famous line of the series.  Kind of a needed show as an antidote for how overly serious "the MCU" takes itself.  Tatiana Maslany is brilliant as Jen Walters; like Iman Vellani she does a good job of being plucky and cute but also vulnerable.  If you do take the MCU seriously there are cameos by Wong, Tim Roth's Abomination, Charlie Cox's Daredevil, and of course Mark Ruffalo's Hulk.  There's even one of the infamous "hallway fights" that became a sort of hallmark for the Netflix Marvel shows.

Like I said, the last episode maybe takes things too far with her pretty much literally breaking the 4th wall to confront the writers and "K.E.V.I.N" but otherwise it's a fun ride that's not really stupid in how she wins some of the cases, like parading a bunch of bad dates before the court to win a trademark case.  If you want a lot of smashing and superhero fights there's not a ton of that, which is kind of the subject of the last episode. My biggest complaint is the CGI for the She-Hulk kinda sucks; maybe they should have spray-painted a female bodybuilder instead.  (3.5/5) (Fun Facts:  The Dan Slott run of She-Hulk comics I read on Amazon Prime before this featured a big law firm hiring Jen Walters but wanting her not to be She-Hulk, whereas this does the opposite where they hire her and want her to be She-Hulk instead of Jen Walters.  Zeb Wells, a frequent Robot Chicken contributor, is a writer and "supervising producer" on the series; he's also written for Marvel comics.  Jen's father is played by Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers, but unfortunately Balki doesn't make an appearance as far as I know.)

Cold in July:  This low-budget thriller from 2014 is based off a book by Joe Lansdale, the author of the Hap & Leonard series that was made into a series on IFC or AMC or somewhere I don't have a subscription to.  I haven't really read Lansdale's work but I think he's sort of a more mainstream Cormac McCarthy.  And this movie plays like that.  

In Texas (ironically actually New York state) in 1989, Dane (Michael C Hall, who looks like a discount Matt Damon with mullet and mustache) wakes up one night and shoots an intruder.  The cops are really quick to close the case and peg it on a guy named Freddy Russell.  Freddy's dad Ben (Sam Shepard) gets out of jail and starts stalking Dane.  So you think it's going to be a whole Cape Fear thing, right?  Wrong!

Instead, we find out that the guy Dane shot isn't Freddy and the cops were just using that to hide Freddy's identity.  So Dane, Ben, and a detective/pig farmer friend of Ben's (Don Johnson) go to find the real Freddy.  Overall it's got some decent twists; if you've seen 8mm with Nic Cage you can get an idea of what one is.  Though it feels a little murky for a while why they're so intent to find Freddy--especially Dane, who really has no need to find Freddy and benefits in no way.  I liked it but I wish it'd had a bigger budget.  It's not super low budget but for instance when they go to a video store, you can't see any real movie posters or cases because it'd probably cost money to license them. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Besides writing the book, Lansdale is also a producer of the movie.  When the Feds put Freddy Russell in witness protection, they give him the name "Frank Miller," like the author of The Dark Knight Returns, 300, and Sin City.  Though it is a fairly common name, it makes me wonder if Lansdale and Miller might have some connection.)

The Quarry:  This 2020 movie I watched on Tubi is based on a 1995 novel of the same name.  It's about a drifter (Shea Whigham) who is picked up by an alcoholic priest traveling to a small town in Texas (actually Louisiana) near the border where he's supposed to be the new preacher.  He makes the mistake of stopping in a quarry and haranguing the drifter about confessing his crimes so the drifter accidentally kills him.  The priest's name was David Martin (with probably an accent on the 'i') so even though the priest was Latino, the drifter can assume his identity.  But then a couple of brothers steal the stuff from the priest's van.  The police chief (Michael Shannon) arrests the brothers.  Meanwhile, the drifter is finding it surprisingly easy to be the new priest; the small congregation actually likes him better than previous ones, maybe because he's not always haranguing them.  So then you wonder if the brothers are going to go to jail and if the drifter is going to get away with it.  Spoiler:  no one really gets a happy ending.  This is one of those thrillers that's more of a slow boil without car chases or gun fights or any of that.  For a movie with a small cast and probably small budget it's pretty decent. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  there was a similar premise in a show called Impastor on Nickelodeon's TV Land, only that was a comedy that I think only had one season.  For the first third or so of the movie I thought the drifter guy was Michael Shannon only maybe he'd lost some weight or they deepfaked him to look a little more emaciated, but then it turned out to be a whole different guy!  This is another movie like The Ghostwriter, Layer Cake, or The Virtuoso where the main character's real name is never given so in the credits he's referred to only as "The Man.")

The Wire Room:  No, I have not watched every single cheesy 2010s-2020s action movie starring Bruce Willis yet, but I'm getting there.  This one on Tubi actually has Kevin Dillon (the lesser of the Dillons) doing most of the work.  He's an FBI agent assigned to a "wire room" which is just a room to record and monitor a suspect, who in this case is an Irish arms dealer selling to the "Baja" cartel.  When armed dudes show up to kill the arms dealer, Kevin Dillon helps to save the guy, but then the armed dudes turn on him.  Willis bookends again, showing up in the beginning and end.  By the low standards of these movies it was not terrible. Cheap but not too poorly-made. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  This is another of those where apparently Georgia was too expensive so they filmed in neighboring Alabama.  The wire room is supposed to be this impenetrable fortress but it looks as penetrable as any hotel conference room.)

Hot Seat:  Kevin Dillon returns!  But not as the same guy.  This was sort of an old school throwback combining a mid-90s sinister bomb game thing like Speed or Blown Away with Swordfish.  Dillon is a hacker gone straight who becomes stuck to the chair in his office.  If he gets up or moves the chair too far from his desk, it'll blow.  A bad guy hiding in the building and using a voice synthesizer so he sounds like Kylo Ren wants him to break into some banks or something.  Meanwhile, Mel Gibson stands in for Bruce Willis as the grizzled bomb squad guy who spouts chess puns.  It was OK for the kind of cheap action movie it was though I figured out the bad guy's identity pretty early.  An unrecognizable Shannen Doherty plays a police chief as well.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The seat bomb thing was like the toilet bomb in Lethal Weapon 2, which starred Mel Gibson, only it was Danny Glover on the seat then.  However long Kevin Dillon was working they never really got into what he'd do if he had to piss or shit.  I guess soil himself.)

Dangerous:  Mel Gibson returns!  But doesn't do a whole lot.  He's the shrink of the main character called "D" (Scott Eastwood) who used to be a psychotic murderer but is out on parole and on medication.  Then his brother dies and he goes to an island off the coast of British Columbia Washington for the funeral.  Some bad guys show up to find some money the brother supposedly was hiding.  So D starts taking them out, which he's pretty good at when he's not on his medication.  It was OK for a low-budget straight-to-streaming movie.  Besides Mel Gibson, there's also Tyrese Gibson (no relation) and Famke Janssen who really don't do much.  In the end, I'm not sure how happy we're supposed to be that the psychotic murderer prevails and is on the loose.  It's one of those "no matter who wins, we lose" things. (2.5/5)

Accident Man:  Last time I reviewed a couple of Joe Carnahan movies and mentioned how most of his career he's been an imitation Tarantino or Guy Ritchie.  What's worse than that?  Being the imitation Joe Carnahan.  The eponymous "Accident Man" is no superhero; he's an assassin (Scott Adkins, the guy you hire when Jason Statham's agent won't return your calls) who specializes in making kills look like accidents.  There's a bar called "the Oasis" where a bunch of other assassins hang out, sort of like the bar in Deadpool.  Then someone tries to kill him and does kill his ex-girlfriend, who was pregnant with his child.  As he looks into her death, his fellow assassins are hired to kill him and he has to stop them.  The one who uses poisons was really squandered.  Seemed like it would have been pretty easy for him to poison a drink or something in the guy's apartment.  Instead he tries to attack the Accident Man with a syringe and is quickly disposed of.  Overall, like any knockoff of a knockoff, it was not that great.  There's plenty of action and fight scenes, but it was hard to really care. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  Some of the other assassins are played by Michael Jai White (Bronze Tiger in Arrow), Ray Stevenson (the third live-action Punisher after Dolph Lundgren and Thomas Jane), and a chubby Ray Park, aka Darth Maul and Snake-Eyes in the first two crappy GI Joe movies.  One assassin has a scheme to use "plasters," which is the British slang for Band-Aids.  The plasters he uses are "Adkins" brand.  You know, like the lead actor's name?  Ha.)

Accident Man:  Hitman's Holiday:  This sequel 4 years later is a bit more fun though also a bit more shallow.  After the business in London, the titular Accident Man (still Scott Adkins) goes to Malta, last seen in Final Justice starring Joe Don Baker on MST3K and Rifftrax.  The title is a little bit of a misnomer as he isn't really on a holiday so much as living there.  The nerdy Fred from the previous movie (the guy with the "plasters" scheme) shows up and starts working with Accident Man.  But then an Italian gangster (there was also one of those in Final Justice!) takes Fred and forces Accident Man to guard her idiot son from colorful assassins including a "vampire," an "angel of death," a douchebag ninja, and a killer clown.  And there's also his old mentor (Ray Stevenson).  As I said, this was a bit more fun than the first one since there's no pregnant ex-girlfriend being murdered or anything.  The end was pretty nice in how they manage to resolve both conflicts to their satisfaction, though like Now You See Me 2 it was a little disappointing in a way that they have to have a bad guy from the first movie patch things up with the hero.  If you like plenty of kung-fu fights with colorful characters this would be your jam.  Me, not as much, but not terrible. (3/5)

One Shot:  Scott Adkins returns--as the knockoff GI Joe figure you could buy from the dollar store.  Mostly this movie feels like the director decided to film a game of Call of Duty--one of the modern ones--with real people.  A lot of it is shot over the shoulders of soldiers and terrorists as they run around some black site prison in the Black Sea--actually Suffolk in the UK.  A "terrorist" who's like Ben Kingsley's stand-in knows the location of a dirty bomb and so Adkins and his SEAL team escort a CIA analyst to the prison to find out, but this top secret government prison apparently never imagined terrorists might show up in a half-ton truck with machine guns and grenades.  Adkins has to crawl through an oversized air duct to fix the radio and keep Ben Kingsley's stand-in alive, which is basically the kind of stuff you'd get in a video game.  If you like those video games this would probably be pretty good as a live action knockoff.  For me it wasn't really that interesting. (2/5)

Assassin's Bullet:  This 2011 movie was shot in Bulgaria and involves an assassin, a teacher, and a belly dancer who are all the same woman.  I suppose that's a spoiler but it was obvious the assassin and teacher were the same person; the dancer came as more of a surprise.  Christian Slater is an FBI agent who lost his family to gunmen in New York and instead of becoming the Punisher works in Bulgaria and falls in love with the dancer.  Donald Sutherland is an ambassador or something who has a role.  It was all kind of boring and unlike some of these later straight-to-streamers felt amateurish.  Like a Cormac McCarthy novel they also don't subtitle the people speaking Bulgarian or whatever it is so you don't know what they're saying.  Overall it might have been better with some better actors beyond the two Hollywood ones. (2/5)

Night Train:  This movie was too low budget to afford Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Kevin Dillon, or even Scott Adkins.   Instead there's Joe Lando from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman!  Who played...I don't really know.  Basically this was like someone who watched the Fast & Furious movies and Breaking Bad and decided to combine them into a low budget movie.  A woman who works as a Teamster on commercials and movies has a little boy who needs some kind of medicine.  So she buys it from a white guy in Mexico.  When a drunk PTSD-ed FBI agent shuts down the drug dealer's smuggling operation, the Teamster agrees to take the drugs in her souped-up pick-up truck called "Night Train" to Las Vegas and a gangster played by Abe Benrubi of ER so we have two 90s TV shows represented!  There are some OK twists and turns as the FBI agent gets on the Teamster's trail.  If it had more of a budget for better actors it would have been better but it wasn't bad. (2.5/5)

Hunter Hunter:  This movie was good...until the last 10 minutes.  Since no one will read this or care, I will post spoilers.  It's really the only way to understand why I hated this.  Joe (Devon Sawa of other cheap action movies), his wife, and young daughter live in the wilderness of Manitoba.  They eke out a living the 18th Century way by trapping game.  Recently there's been a wolf killing some game so you think it'll be like that Liam Neeson wolf-punching movie, right?  Wrong!  Joe goes missing and the woman and daughter are terrorized by a wolf.  Then the woman finds a guy (Nick Stahl) in the woods and brings him into their cabin.

Meanwhile a local wildlife cop finds a car by the road and then a couple of women in the woods before he gets trapped in a couple of bear traps.  The woman and daughter nurse the guy in their cabin back to life...and then wish they didn't.  The woman soon realizes that the guy is a killer and he killed Joe!

[Spoilers!]  Where it takes a turn is where the guy is strangling the woman and the daughter walks in.  You'd think she'd shoot him with a rifle or hit him with something and woman and daughter live happily-ish ever after.  Nope!  The woman wakes up to find the guy about to rape her.  She manages to knock him out.  Then apparently she finds the daughter dead.  It doesn't show it but we are left to assume.  Did he rape her too?  Ugh, maybe.  The woman takes the guy to the shed where Joe would cut up their game and she skins him alive.

Like I said, it was all a decent movie until that last 10 minutes where it decides to turn into Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  I kept shouting at the screen, "What the hell is wrong with you?  Why would you do that?"  I'm not sure if it was the ending the producers wanted or if writer/director Shawn Linden is just a sick fucking bastard.  I mean sure there had been some animals killed and a couple of dead bodies found, but killing a kid?  Really?  Fuck you, movie. (3/5 for the first 80 minutes and 0/5 for the last 10 minutes)

The Minute You Wake Up Dead:  This cheap straight-to-streamer includes Morgan Freeman and Cole Hauser (son of Wings) but mostly focuses on Jaimie Alexander (who like Cobie Smulders, Emily van Camp, Hayley Atwell, and even a lesser extent Scarlett Johansson had the misfortune of being part of the MCU before they decided female characters could make money, though at least she got that Blind Spot gig for a couple of years) as the femme fatale in a small Mississippi town.  They kind of fake you out making you think Cole Hauser is the main character as a trader who lost a lot of people's money when a merger went bad, but then he gets taken out after taking out Freeman as the small town's sheriff.  The last half-hour or so is just Alexander trying to wrap up the loose ends to her scheme to bilk an insurance company out of a half-million.  Despite the attempted twists and turns it really isn't that interesting, mostly because it is cheap and once you get past the three main actors the talent well is pretty shallow. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  the title is something a radio preacher says and someone calls Cole Hauser to say it to him a few times.  The idea I guess is that if you don't live right you'll "wake up dead" in Hell.)