Jimmy P's House of Movies

The Experiment is a remake of a German movie that I have no plan on seeing. Not that I don't like German cinema. It's just that I have no faith in this material. If the original is anything like this movie then I have to ask what people saw in it.

This version stars Adrian Brody and Forrest Whitaker as two strangers who are among a bigger group of strangers who decide to answer an ad they saw in the newspaper. The ad is for an experiment that offers the people who participate two weeks of work for $1000 a day. I would have answered this ad too.

I hate the subtitle to this movie. Of course money never sleeps. Money is something that is constantly moving, whether we can see it or not. We know this. So why use the subtitle that they used? I mean, they could have come up with something better like "Burstin' Bubbles" or something like that. Or they could have just put a two on it and left the subtitle off. The subtitle is the first thing I hated about this movie.

This is, of course, the sequel to the 1987 hit Wall Street. That movie is remembered for winning Michael Douglas an Oscar and giving the 80's its own catchphrase, Greed is Good. That movie was pretty good. The sequel is not.

Every so often I will be doing reviews of my favorite dvds and blu-rays. I have been a dvd collector for over ten years and have been a blu-ray supporter for three years. I am an avid collector and feel this is the best way to spotlight the movies that I love, along with their dvd or blu-ray counterpart.

Release Date: June 1st, 2010
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1, 1080p
Runtime: 1hr 28min
Discs: 1

I missed out on the first Jackass when it hit theaters in 2002. I thought the whole idea of watching people hurt themselves and others in the name of entertainment was a pretty stupid idea. I know that we have shows like America's Funniest Home Videos and World's Wildest Police Chases, but the people in those videos are supposedly not getting hurt on purpose. I guess that is why the show and the movies are called Jackass.

When Jackass: The Movie was released on dvd in the spring of 2003 I decided to take a chance and I rented it. What followed was 90 minutes of the funniest and most obscene things I have ever seen. I laughed throughout the entire movie and my wife did too. At the end I told my wife that if they make anymore movies, I do not want to miss them in the theater.

Here is the teaser trailer for the new Transformers movie, which hits theaters on July 1st, 2011. Now we all know that the subtitle for this movie, Dark of the Moon, is probably the worst subtitle for a movie ever, but this teaser is pretty bad as well. Now, I actually liked the first two movies and am looking forward to seeing this one, but I have one question: Is Michael Bay making a Transformers movie or a NASA movie? Take a look for yourself:

You know how whenever a thriller hits the screens at least one critic will refer to the movie as "Hitchcockian"? And you also know how more than half of those so called "Hitchcockian" thrillers are nowhere near being able to claim such an honor? Well, I am here to tell you that, not only is Buried "Hitchcockian", but I believe that this is a movie that Hitchcock would have made if he were still alive.

I remember seeing Angus when I was in high school and really enjoying it. Of course it didn't speak to me in the way that it did to others, but I saw a lot of myself in the title character. I wasn't fat or even that smart but I was in a similar minority: I was, and still am, a film geek.

When you are a film geek in high school you have to do through many of the trial and tribulations that our hero Angus had to go through in this movie. He's a science geek and pours over his project to get into Jefferson, which I guess is a school for the really smart.

Got a slew of new trailers for you today.

The first one being The Beaver. This is the movie that Mel Gibson made right before he revealed all of his ugliness to the world. The movie looks pretty good and I am glad that Summit is going to take a chance on this movie and not send it to direct to video hell.


Next up we have Ip Man 2. This is getting a release in February here in the states, but has been available in Hong Kong for a while now. The movie is spectacular and a worthy sequel to the first Ip Man


To add to the martial arts genre I give you the new trailer for Ong Bak 3. I have yet to see this movie, but when I get my hands on it I will give you a review. This is being released next year.


And finally, what is sure to be one of the worst movies of 2011, Beastly. This movie looks like Beauty and the Beast only set in modern times and with the beast being allowed to go places.

Remaking a movie is a tough thing to pull off. If you do it right then you get a movie like The Departed (which is a remake of Infernal Affairs from Hong Kong), but if you do it wrong you get a movie like Psycho (the Gus Van Sant remake). Luckily, with Halloween, we get the former.

The story pretty much follows the original. You get Michael Myers killing his sister when he is only a kid. You get the babysitters being killed off one by one on halloween. And you get the open ending, leaving room for the inevitable sequel. But with this movie writer-director Rob Zombie has given us a back story as to why Myers is the way he is.

Coming ten years after the "king of the killer dog movies", Cujo, was released, Man's Best Friend came to us with the promise of being a newer, hipper Cujo. In some ways it succeeds and in others it fails.

The movie stars Ally Sheedy as a reporter who needs a hit story. She decides to break into a research facility known as Emax and expose the company for testing chemicals on animals. While at Emax, she finds a dog named Max and saves him from the facility. Max is not your ordinary dog. Dr. Jarret (Lance Henriksen) has spliced the DNA of a variety of different animals to make Max into a superior guard dog. But time is running out as Jarret tries to get his dog back before he becomes unstable.

So there is a new animated Superman movie hitting dvd and blu-ray in February. I, for one, am not really all that excited. The DC Universe movies have been hit or miss for me and I think that this one will be a miss. I wish that DCU would focus on other characters. I know that Superman is their cash cow, but they do have other characters.

What can be said about the original Halloween that hasn't already been said? John Carpenter took a basic story line, about babysitters being stalked by a faceless madman and turned it into something truly terrifying.

In this day and age, the movie is viewed as "boring" and "slow" and while this may be true to the regular person, to someone who has never seen the movie before is in for a real treat.

The beauty of Halloween is in it's pacing. While today's horror movies are edited like music videos, due to the attention span of most people being reduced, Halloween takes it's time, setting everything up before finally getting to "the good part"

In anticipation of Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 hitting blu-ray this Tuesday, I thought it would be nice to post the theatrical trailers for both movies. Both movies are classics and Disney has done the movies justice on blu-ray.

Christophe Gans is not that well known here in the States. He has directed one english language film, Silent Hill, that over the past few years has gained a lot of fans. Brotherhood of the Wolf was the second of Gans' films that I saw, the first being Crying Freeman, but still think that this is his best movie.

Seven, or as it is called Se7en, is the reason that we saw a rise in serial killer movies in the mid to late 90's. Its not the movie's or the filmmakers fault. They made a damn fine movie that still holds a punch fifteen years after its release. It is the fault of the studios, who saw an opportunity to cash in a Seven's success.

Hollywood has always been a place where, if an idea is a hit, that idea is run into the ground by all of the other people trying to cash in on that movies success. Just look at some of the movies that we have gotten over the years.

Kevin Smith should be ashamed of himself. Here is a writer/director who has put out some of the best comedies of the last twenty years and now he is slumming it with this piece of shit? I know that he wanted to do a Bruce Willis movie, but he should have picked something else because Cop Out is a terrible movie. The idea of having Bruce Willis in a send-up of the types of movies he is used to making is a great idea, but this movie just doesn't work.

The blame, at least at the scripting stage, is not Smith's fault. The two writers who wrote this pile of trash think that they wrote a love letter of a movie to all of the buddy cop movies of the 80's, but what they have given us is a very lame excuse for a movie let alone a send-up.

I remember seeing this movie back in the early 90's and after watching it I became a Troma fan for life. Take a peek at today's trailer and tell me what you think.

Today's trailer is for Reign of Assassins, the new John Woo movie. Woo has been over in Hong Kong making movies for the last few years now. His previous movie, Red Cliff, was last year's best movie. Reign of Assassins looks to be another hit from Woo.

Holy crap. That is what I first thought when I walked out of the theater after a recent screening of Dinner for Schmucks. This has to be one of the worst comedies I have seen in recent memory. Its not as bad as MacGruber or that supposed spoof of the Apatow movies, but it is pretty bad.

The movie stars Paul Rudd, who is usually very funny, as a financial analyst who wants to get a promotion. Before he can have his promotion he must attend a dinner called The Dinner for Winners, where each of the big moneymakers has to bring an idiot for the other big moneymakers to make fun of. The one voted the biggest idiot gets a trophy.

Universal has released teaser trailer for their new animated movie "Hop" which hits theaters on April 1st, 2011. I hate teaser trailers like this one because they give you nothing. We have no idea what this movie is. They just show us a  rabbit playing the drums. Is he in a band? Who knows.

I don't know about you but I am getting really tired of the term "grindhouse". It seems that every genre movie that is coming out these days owes something to the "grindhouse" movement. I call it a movement because that's what it seems to be. Any genre movie that has come out since 2007 seems to owe something to this movement.

Why 2007? Because that is when the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino megabomb Grindhouse was released. This movie started a new trend in film making, marketing, and the way that critics describe a movie. Over the last three years we have been bombarded with dvd releases that carry a banner along the lines of "the grindhouse classic" or some shit like that. Movies have been marketed as grindhouse-type films and critics have referred to more than one movie as a "throwback to the old grindhouse movies."

I love movie trailers. I think that we all do. Trailers are the first thing that we usually see for a movie and its the thing that gets us pumped up to see said movie. A great trailer can make a shit movie look great and a terrible trailer can make a great movie look like shit. So, for the first trailer I post, I decided to post the trailer to my favorite movie of all time: Hard Boiled. Enjoy.

It has been a long time since I have seen a thriller that actually thrilled me. Hollywood has been producing all of these cookie-cutter thrillers. The type of thriller where you know who lives or dies based on who is on the poster and who isn't. (Common knowledge dictates that if an actor has their name above the title yet does not appear on the poster or dvd artwork, then they are the killer.) With this in mind I went into Salt with pretty low expectations. Boy was I surprised when Salt turned out to be a great thrill ride.

This is the type of movie that Hollywood used to make. You don't see the twists and turns coming so you are actually surprised when they happen. Sure the movie has plot holes that you can drive a truck through, but you aren't thinking of that when you are watching the movie. The story and action scenes take the place of logic as you watch the movie. However, when the movie is over, you begin to think and even debate with others the finer points of the movie.

I have just bought the Batman Anthology 1989-1997 on blu-ray, so I decided to give them all a spin. Now, before any of you jump on me for my comments about these movies, let me give you some background.

I was one of the first kids on my block to see the 1989 Batman when it came out. Of course, everyone was excited about this movie as it was the first true Batman movie to hit the big screen. (There was a movie based on that crappy series from the 60's, but notice that I used the word "true".) This was it. This was the movie that die hard Batman fans had been waiting for, and at the time, it did not disappoint.

Troll 2 is considered one of the worst movies ever made and like any movie that carries that torch it has a world of followers. These followers are pretty loyal. They have parties and viewings every year and the attendance to these functions seems to grow every year. There are screenings held throughout the country at "art house" theaters, usually at midnight and the audiences know the movie by heart.

This is all chronicled in Best Worst Movie and, despite the title, is one of the best movies of 2010. As we know, 2010 has not been a good year for movies. The year did not get off to a good start like we have seen in the past, and the summer season, save for a few movies, has downright sucked. We have seen more "cookie cutter" movies this year than we have seen in the past and even the ones that have promised us a good time have been few and very far between.

Christopher Nolan has made a name for himself with his high concept, big budget movies. He gained attention back in 2001 with his told backwards movie Memento. He then moved on to remaking a Swedish movie called Insomnia. He then brought the real Batman to the screen twice with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Following the huge success of The Dark Knight, Nolan has brought us the very high concept movie Inception. This is a movie that deals with dreams, but more importantly, how we precieve dreams and reality.

Tekken has finally made the long journey to the big screen and let me tell you that they should have waited longer. This is a movie that is so devoid of anything resembling entertainment that I started to feel bad for the people who are in it. This movie is one of the worst video game adaptations ever made. I would say that it is a tad bit better than Double Dragon and is worse than Street Fighter.

The movie gets the names right. Some of our favorite characters such as Yoshimistu and Bryan Fury are present, but they are given almost nothing to do. In fact, Yoshimitsu has exactly one scene, where he fights our hero Jin. We think that he is killed, but they say later that it was a ruse. Does he make a comeback at the end of the movie to help our hero? Nope. He is forgotten about after they tell us he is still alive. Why would the filmmakers do this? Yoshimitsu is one of the most beloved characters in the game and he is written off after a very unspectacular fight.

Oliver Stone is one of the greatest living directors. He has given us the horrors of war with Platoon, along with the aftermath of war with Born on the Fourth of July. He has given us conspiracy theories with JFK and his take on the media with Natural Born Killers. Sure he has stumbled with movies like U-Turn and Alexander, but every director has had a miss or two so we can't really hold it against him.

In 1999 he gave us his take on football and all the bullshit that comes with it in Any Given Sunday, a movie that seems more prevalent now than it did when the movie came out. Since the movie's release the curtain has been pulled back on not only football, but sports in general. We have had many sports stars being accused of doing everything from taking steroids to running dog fighting rings. Its no wonder why the NFL wouldn't allow Stone to anything affiliated with the NFL in this movie.

It has been twenty years since we have gotten a real Predator movie. The AVP movies don't count as they are not true Predator movies. Since Predator 2's release in 1990, we have seen the original and the sequel got multiple video releases, including the much debated second blu-ray release, but we have not gotten a true Predator sequel. Well the time has come and the sequel is good.

Earth's top killers are drop into the jungle without knowing how they got their. Eventually there are eight of them, including Adrian Brody, Danny Trejo, Topher Grace, and the guy with big teeth from The Shield. They figure out that they are on a different planet and that they are being hunted.

What do you get when you take Enter the Dragon, take out anything that is remotely cool or even interesting and replace it with some of the dumbest ideas to come out of Hollywood? Well, you would get Gymkata, a movie that so desperately wants to be a good movie that they just copied other movies in hope of striking gold. Too bad they took all of the bad parts of those movies.

Editor's Note: This review was originally posted over at my horror blog, Horror in Retrospect.  I have posted it here in it's original form. No modifying allowed here.

I am proud to introduce a new segment here at Horror in Retrospect: Guilty Pleasures. These are my favorite types of horror movies because they are so fun to watch. The movie may be bad, but you have a great time watching it. Today's focus is going to on Q: The Winged Serpent, a movie that I had heard about for a long time, but up until a few years ago, had never seen.

Monster movies are one of my favorite sub-genres. Many of them are the most ridiculous movies you have ever seen, but they hold a special place for many, including myself. I remember when I was a kid, there was a channel that would show monster movies on saturday nights. So every saturday, I would be home by 10:30 to enjoy the current movie. I saw everything from the original King Kong to many of the Godzilla movies.

Back when Live Free or Die Hard (which I will refer to as LFoDH) was released there was a lot of shit flung at the movie and the studio releasing it. The studio had announced that they were releasing the movie with a PG-13 rating instead of an R rating like the previous movies had gotten. This cause a lot of outrage among film fans because they felt that the movie was going to be too toned down and therefore would not feel like a Die Hard movie at all.

But a funny thing happened when the movie was released. Despite having a PG-13 rating, the movie was actually good. In fact it was great. The movie held true to what a Die Hard movie should be, just minus the f-word and graphic violence. The movie was still as hardcore and badass that it could be.

This time around McClane has to face off against cyber-terrorists who plan to shut the United States down via computers. This of course would have a terrible impact on the way we live because we rely too much on computers.

I was not looking forward to viewing Percy Jackson. The trailers made the movie seem like it was a Harry Potter rip-off and in some ways I guess it could be viewed that way. But what I saw in the movie was a grand adventure and a nice spin on Greek mythology.

Percy Jackson is just your ordinary teenage who finds out that he is the son of Poseidon. He doesn't really find this too weird because he can hold his breath underwater for an absurd amount of time. He discovers his heritage when he is at a museum and is attacked by his substitute teacher. Right off the bat we know that this is not going to be a "kiddie" movie. I mean, this movie is more for older teenagers and adults.

Has there ever been a more badass movie that The Expendables? I honestly can not think of one off of the top of my head. This movie is packed to the brim with one-liners, over the top action scenes, and almost every character gets a true blue badass moment.

Stallone knew what he was doing when he cast this movie. Not only is he here but so is Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Gary Daniels, Eric Roberts, and Mickey Rourke. We also get cameos from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. This is a dream team of players that will probably never be seen of the screen together again (unless they make a sequel.)

The movie is about a team of five guys (you are going to have to guess which ones they are.), who call themselves The Expendables (catchy, right?). They are mercenaries for hire. They don't really have any type of lives outside of the group (except for Statham, no one has a wife or a girlfriend or even a pet of some type.). These guys live and breathe the group.

I love jail movies. I don't know why, but it is a sub-genre that I really enjoy. I can watch almost any prison movie and be entertained, but the ones that I like the most are the breakin' out kind. Like a good heist movie, a breakin' out of jail movie offers a lot of thrills in one package. While The Escapist isn't one of the best I have seen, it is a pretty good movie.

The movie star Brian Cox, one of the best charcter actors working today, as a man who has been in prison for at least fourteen years (they never specify how many years he has been in there, but it they do say things like "nine years ago this happened"). He really misses his daughter and constantly writes to her, but his letters keep coming back "return to sender." One day he gets a letter telling him that his daughter has become a junkie and may not be long for this world. So naturally, he decides to break out of prison to see her before she ends up becoming another dead junkie.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (or DH3 as I will refer to it) is a strange Die Hard movie. It starts out as a cat and mouse game between Willis, along with Samuel L. Jackson, and Jeremy Irons, and ends in true Die Hard fashion. So what do I think of the movie? I like it, but with a few hesitations.

I have watched many spoofs in my time here on this earth. I have seen classics like Airplane! and Naked Gun. I have also seen the movies that don't even deserve the money that got them made. Movies like Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Disaster Movie are the reason that movie spoofs have gone down the drain.

I love Die Hard 2. I may be in a minority here, but I think that it does exactly what it sets out to do: Take the Die Hard formula, because now it has become a formula, and make it bigger and badder. It does both of these things very well.

I am a child of the 80's so I got to grow up in arguably the best decade for action movies. The 80's produced some of the best action movies of all time and created stars out of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Among all of these muscle bound actors was an unlikely candidate for action star of the decade: Bruce Willis. Willis came from a tv sitcom background when the first Die Hard was released and it seemed unlikely that he would be able to carry a big Hollywood action movie.

As you may have heard, Mel Gibson supposedly threatened his ex-girlfriend by telling her that he hoped that she was raped by a bunch of "n-words". I use the term "n-word" because I am white and us whites are not allowed to say it. Not that I would want to anyway. I am just making it clear to some of the people who might not get what an "n-word" is. Anyway, so Gibson supposedly said this and other disparaging remarks to his ex-girlfriend. The reasons I bring this up are many, but I will only highlight a few.

This review contains spoilers. If you do not want to know about certain things that happen in this movie then do not read this review.

The Crazies is a remake of the cult classic of the same name. The original was directed by George A. Romero. This one is directed by Breck Eisner, who did that movie Sahara with Mathew whatshisname. I have no idea how this movie stacks up to the original because I haven't seen it. I have been meaning to watch it but other things have gotten in the way.

Every year we get a few movies that are destined to become cult movies. They aren't necessarily horror, sci-fi, or action movies. Cult movies come in all shapes and sizes. Hot Tub Time Machine is a movie that desperately wants to be a cult movie but doesn't have the convictions to follow through with the premise.

What has happened to the Shrek franchise? The first two Shrek movies were great entertainment. Shrek the Third was not as good as the first two, but it had it's charms. You could tell that the filmmakers were running out of ideas with Shrek the Third. Now, we know for a fact that the filmmakers have no fresh ideas with this movie.

When the first Iron Man came out in 2008 everyone was afraid that the movie was going to be a series of mindless action sequences with no character. What we got was a well thought out origin story with well written characters. The action scenes didn't come at the expense of the characters. The same can not be said about Iron Man 2. This is the movie that everyone feared Iron Man would be.

Every summer audiences look forward to the big event movies that Hollywood has in store for them. We usually get the mindless action movies and the big animated movies that compete for the Oscar the following year. In past summers we have seen the likes of Batman, Spider-man, Shrek, and the likes that have graced the screen. We have had bonafied classics like The Dark Knight and Wall-E and bombs like Gigli and The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

I love post-apocalyptic movies. I find them to be very entertaining in the way that they see how the world would be if there was a nuclear blast. The one problem lies in the fact that they mostly have the same outcome. Everything is reduced to desert and life goes back to a time that is a mix of western times and cavemen times.

There were many badass movies that came out in the 80's. Lethal Weapon, Predator, Die Hard, The Thing, They Live were are products of the 80's, but the movie that lead the way was a smaller movie. That movie was Escape from New York. Escape also gave one of the greatest badass characters in the form of Snake Plissken. This movie lead that way for all of the 80's action movies.

Remaking a movie that came out within the last few years really isn't a good idea, but the makers of Death at a Funeral will argue differently. They will argue that there is comedy to be had. I will rebut with "No there isn't"

The big screen version of the 1980's hit show The A-Team is an assembly line kind of movie. There is nothing original or exciting to be found here. Just standard issue parts with no customized detail.

I have not seen the original Karate Kid in years, but I know all the beats. This remake of the 1984 classic follows all of these beats to the letter. The fact that the movie is really long winded at 140 minutes shouldn't stop you from enjoying the movie.

I'll have to admit that I am not the biggest Scoresse fan out there. There are people who love his work and consider him one of the best filmmakers alive. I just happen to not be one of them. I find his work to range from great (Goodfellas, Casino, Taxi Driver, The Departed) to not very good (Kundun, Gangs of New York, After Hours). I think that given the right material he can make great things out of it. I can say this: He has never made a movie that was not well made.