Saturday, December 2, 2023

Three Films Make A Post: Now You Will Believe…

Night Skies (2007): Like Manchester, The X-Files have so much to answer for. To wit, this alien abduction thing about an RV full of unlikeable twats getting molested by aliens while the Phoenix Lights are doing their little dance. Jason Connery also pops in as an ex-marine trucker, because why not.

The script is sluggish and dumb, the characters unlikeable but not interesting, and director Roy Knyrim directs like someone who started their career with an Insane Clown Posse video. Admittedly, the big – theoretically gory - abduction and probing sequence is pretty funny, but digging through this much crap to reach that tiny nugget of comedy gold would be cruel and unusual.

Satanic Hispanics (2022): This anthology movie by Hispanic horror directors starts strong with a wonderfully strange piece by Demián Rugna, but after that it continues through tales of boring competence and ill-timed attempts at doing comedy that want to be Sam Raimi but only ever reach the effect of a bad third generation carbon copy. It’s a particular shame because most of these directors – apart from Rugna, Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, and Eduardo Sánchez – have made much superior films.

The Equalizer 3 (2023): But hey, it’s not as if the third Equalizer were any better – it just cost much more money to make. The third movie returns to the unexamined sadism of the first one, the unwillingness to take a long, good look at its hypocritical and self-pitying protagonist, and Antoine Fuqua’s all too typical inability to make a stylistically coherent movie.

Not making any of this any better are showy but uncreative action sequences without flow, weight or a sense of fun, so there’s very little to recommend. Even Denzel Washington is letting the side down with a performance so vain and filled with ill-advised actor business (just take a good look at his use of a teabag during one dialogue scenes), this only needed more shots of pointless and heroic poses to reach Tom Cruise levels of embarrassment.

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