Shaun of the Dead (2004)

★½
When the Italian rip-offs of Dawn of the Dead littered the marketplace in the late '70s and early '80s, they took the basic premise of George Romero's masterpiece and added more gore while stripping away any sense of cohesion from the story; their plots often collapsed like a demolished building. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have done the same thing. Shaun of the Dead is a parody of Romero's zombie films, and it's an ineffective one. The movie tries to be funny by telegraphing most of its funny scenes, without letting the humor come naturally. It's like the guy in high school who came up to you and announced that he had a joke to tell, and he's going to tell you whether you want to hear it or not.

Virus (1999)

★★

For a long time, Jamie Lee Curtis had apparently given up on indie horror to work in the mainstream. After her debut in Halloween in 1978, she starred in four more horror films: The Fog (1980), Prom Night (1980), Terror Train (1980) and Halloween 2 (1981). She returned to the genre in 1998 for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. It's strange that Curtis would snub all horror appearances for so long, then suddenly appear in two in a row. Virus is the latest film about a team that finds itself trapped by a monster. It's not an original idea, but films like this are usually fast-paced and offer impressive special effects. Of course, special effects alone can't save a movie (with a few exceptions), and that's why this movie ultimately fails as a satisfying trip to the movies.

The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

½ star
Despicably pointless and stupid, The Strangers: Prey at Night is not only a complete rehash of the first movie, but it is a maddening decent into the absolute pits of horror screenwriting. The script features everything from moody teens to poor decision-making to ridiculous exhibitions of pop music, which are presented to us in a manner that suggests a complete ignorance of basic human behavior, both in front of and behind the camera. That this mess was directed by Johannes Roberts, who made the superior 47 Meters Down, is mystifying. Perhaps the real culprit here is co-writer Bryan Bertino, the writer and director of the original. His narrative structure and idiotic plotting indicate that he simply had no more good or creative ideas for telling this story yet proceeded anyway due to the low budget and high likelihood for profit.

Rebound (2005)

★½

Rebound looks every bit like a way to receive a fast influx of cash. If you're a screenwriter and need to pay your debts right now, lest the loan sharks break your legs, then all you have to do is write a kiddie sports movie about a weak underdog team that improves under the leadership of a new coach, preferably one that doesn't really want to be there. Just about any studio is willing to give this kind of story the green light, because it features a flawed hero who can do a quick turnaround and give the false impression that he grew up. Hire a name actor to play him, and then populate the rest of the cast with unknowns.

Days of Being Wild (1991)

★★★

Wong Kar-Wai loves his characters, so much so that he would rather watch them grow and develop rather than insert them into actions scenes or other fantastical situations. He writes his characters with a complex set of emotions and sees where that leads them. He doesn’t betray them. He charts their course, and the destination may or may not be desirable. We can see this in Chungking Express, or his American production My Blueberry Nights. They can be deeply flawed, passionate, lonely, funny, optimistic and/or cruel. In Days of Being Wild, one of Wong’s breakout films, his characters possess the less desirable of these traits. Even with characters who are disagreeable or contemptible, there is something about them that yearns for goodness, a recognition of these flaws and an attempt to purge them, or at least tame them. Success is not guaranteed in a Wong Kar-Wai film.