Three Films Make A Post: Time Flies

The Adam Project (2022): If you ever feel the need to watch a film that’s perfectly neutral, never reaching heights you’d call good but never evoking so much negative emotion anyone could call it bad, this Shawn Levy science fiction/action/comedy joint starring Ryan Reynolds and child actor Walker Scobell, as well as Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldana and Catherine Keener has you covered.

As regular readers know, I’m not at all one to be screeching at blockbusters like this as the End of Cinema™, but this specific one’s as bland as certain critics pretend all movies of this kind are, never doing anything that could get anyone watching too excited or too emotionally involved, yet also never doing anything to annoy a viewer too much. This is the louder movie equivalent of wallpaper: it’s there while you watch it, but it never feels like an actual presence.

The Last Slumber Party (1988): This SOV slasher by Stephen Tyler is quite the thing, or rather, it’s quite the thing for people like me who have developed a tolerance for films/emanations like it. The normal viewer (welcome, stranger!) will most probably be bored out of their minds by it. If, one the other hand, you’re the type to be entertained by a mix of tedium, quotidian weirdness, and a final girl who breaks all the rules by most probably not being a virgin and uttering so many casually homophobically coloured slurs of the kind I alas remember from my youth, too, you might be entertained, diverted, and probably even enjoying yourself, while cringing more than just a little.

It just is that kind of a movie.

The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972): TV lifer Reza Badiyi directs this tale of the titular Charles Sand (Peter Haskell) inheriting The Sight, to be plagued by visions of the dead and the living, and other vaguely defined parapsychological powers. Our hero stumbles into a gaslighting plot full of bad melodramatic acting (oh, the screeching and the eye-bugging) that makes not a lick of sense. Hilarity and a surprising amount of boredom ensue.

There’s alas very little to this one. From time to time, Badiyi stumbles upon a creepy camera angle or directs a halfway mood scene, but mostly, he bets on his actors screeching through a very stupid plot, and they’re really not screeching well enough.