Author Archives: Bubbawheat
Hellboy
Hellboy 2019
Reboots are often a dirty word in today’s movie community. Except in rare cases, they’re often seen as a cash grab in order to make money off a known property rather than give a chance to a new property. This is especially true when the original is beloved by many fans as is the case with Hellboy. While the first two movies didn’t garner huge box office numbers, they remain a well loved pair of films with plenty of support given to director Guillermo del Toro’s unique vision of the comic book world and the great cast. This time around the director is not nearly as much of a visionary and turns the interesting world of Hellboy into a world full of gore and swearing more akin to Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters than what you might expect from a Hellboy movie. And while I wasn’t expecting a whole lot considering the lack of early reviews and those that came out days before release were pretty awful, I still gave it a chance and while the movie as a whole failed, at least the heroes were characters that I could get behind and I still had fun with the movie. And as usual with new movies, this review contains spoilers so read on if you’ve already seen the movie, or don’t care.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights is on Patreon
If you listen to podcasts, you’re likely to be aware of Patreon, it’s a platform for creators to have paid subscriptions to help support their creative endeavors. And just the other day, I decided to branch out into the world of Patreon myself. As of right now, there are just two tiers. The first tier – Vigilante – will allow you to participate in a monthly poll to help me decide one of the movies that I watch and review for that month. The second tier – Hero – will allow you to more directly encourage me to watch a specific movie and review it here on this site. The reason I’m doing this is to allow me to watch and collect more of the movies that aren’t as easily accessible to watch. I will be 100% transparent as to the costs and revenue that I make through Patreon. If you’re someone who enjoys reading what I do here on this site and would like me to continue, please consider contributing even just a single dollar a month to help cover digital rental fees and possible online purchases in the future for the more obscure movies. There is a link in the sidebar, or you can visit https://www.patreon.com/FlightsTightsAndMovieNights to become a patron. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Jailbait
Jailbait 2014
This is another movie that I just happened to come across randomly where I saw the movie poster in a Facebook group and noticed the magic words along the top of it “Based on the graphic novel”. From the looks of it, it seemed like a modern version of the old women in prison exploitation genre, and while it took a little while to get there, that’s exactly what it was. I don’t have a whole lot of experience in that genre so if it was any sort of send up or honest to the genre I wouldn’t know it. And as for the graphic novel connection, I didn’t look up the info until after I watched it and it seems like The Asylum made a graphic novel tie-in to the movie and released it a few months before the movie came out. It’s difficult to determine for certain if the movie was actually based on the graphic novel or vice versa, but since the poster does have the magic words, I’ll stick with it. As far as the actual quality of the movie, the main character was uninteresting and it was overblown, overdramatic, and shifted gears on a dime. It was just too much and too little all at the same time.
Aquaman
Aquaman 2006
As I continue my trial period for DC Universe, I noticed that they had the Aquaman pilot pseudo-spinoff from Smallville available to watch on there. And I also realized that even though it wasn’t a double length pilot movie, it does pass the 40+ minutes for my feature length requirement. And considering I recently watched the new Aquaman, I figured that I’d give it a shot. I was a fan of Smallville and watched it regularly through the first 7 or 8 seasons before dropping off just before the end. I remember hearing about this pilot when it was in the works but I never looked it up until just now. It has a surprisingly good cast in some of the minor roles and it also has someone who seems to be superhero pilot bad luck as Adrianne Palicki was in this failed pilot, the Wonder Woman failed pilot, and the Marvel’s Most Wanted Mockingbird failed pilot spinoff of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. As far as the actual Aquaman pilot goes, it’s a fairly standard origin setup for a monster-of-the-week first season. It doesn’t really do anything special or interesting. It’s just the same old format with an underwater theme to it.
Superhero Inbetweeners
Over the last couple weeks or so I’ve caught a few superhero bits here and there that don’t quite fit my criteria for a superhero movie one way or another. So instead of just letting it all go by the wayside, I thought I’d collect my thoughts on them in a single post here while also including why I don’t quite consider them to be superhero movie material. Though a couple of them are pretty obvious as to why. And I should be catching up on a couple more movies in the near future.
Aquaman
Aquaman 2018
I’ve finally gotten around to the last big movie from last year that I hadn’t watched yet. The only ones I have left are some foreign, some indies, and still a few of the lesser marketed DC Animated movies. I wanted to see this one in theaters but it just didn’t quite work out for me. Despite that, I had high hopes for this as it has become the highest grossing DC movie ever, and from the word of mouth, I heard it was a lot of fun. It brought the color and humor back to the forefront of the DC movies. It’s also interesting as it’s more or less an origin story, but we’ve already seen this character in two different movies beforehand, one where he played a significant role. I had a lot of fun with it and I’m glad that I finally got around to watching it.
Legends of the Superheroes
Legends of the Superheroes 1979
Batman’s 80th anniversary just passed yesterday and in celebration I finally gave in and signed up for DC Universe’s new streaming app with their 80 cents for the first month sale. The main reason why I wanted to get the app was to watch this DC oddity that I had heard about but never got around to watching until now. It’s not quite a movie, not quite a miniseries, but it’s a two-part TV special that honestly feels like DC’s answer to the Star Wars Holiday Special. It’s ultra-low budget, it feels like a sketch comedy show with superheroes, and it’s difficult to tell what they really wanted to do with this property. It’s one of the very few Hanna Barbera live action properties and was tied into the Superfriends cartoon, but they couldn’t use Superman or Wonder Woman due to their rights being tied up in other places at the time. It’s pretty much one of those so-bad-it’s-good, but it did catch a couple genuine laughs out of me.
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Inspector Gadget 2
Inspector Gadget 2 2003
This is one of those movies that’s been sitting in my Netflix queue for well over a year and I’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on it because I knew it was going to be pretty bad. But me being me, I was in the mood for a bad movie so I finally watched this one. Now, I was a big fan of the cartoon series when it was on Nickelodeon, but I never watched the first live action movie because I also suspected that it was kids movie trash. And while I did initially have some slight reservations on whether to actually consider this a superhero movie, I figured that there is a direct line from Cyborg to Robocop to Inspector Gadget. The best argument I heard against is that he is typically more of a spy than a superhero crimefighter, but at least in this movie, he’s a straight up cop. With super powers. So I think he’s just barely over the line. As for the actual quality of the movie? It’s straight to DVD Disney sequel trash that never got a laugh out of me and barely resembled the cartoon it was based on.
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SuperLopez
SuperLopez 2018
In topics few people reading this site really care about, I decided to switch from Netflix to Hulu as my streaming site of choice for a while. And as I have just under a month left of Netflix before my membership runs out, I decided it was time to try and watch some of the movies that have been sitting in my queue for months. But instead of that, I watched this film which I had just heard about coming onto Netflix a few days ago. It’s a Spanish superhero parody movie, but it’s actually quite similar to Mystery Men as it’s not just a movie parody of Superman, but the original comic was a comic strip parody of Superman and this is an adaptation of that comic. As for the actual movie itself, it was pretty slow, but it did have a few good laughs mixed in between a lot of nothing.
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Constantine: City of Demons: The Movie
Constantine: City of Demons: The Movie 2018
I’m still playing catch up with the past couple years of superhero movies and this is the third webseries turned movie that debuted on CW Seed after Vixen and Freedom Fighters: The Ray, the latter of which I still have yet to watch. I liked the Keanu Reeves version of Constantine but I really loved the Matt Ryan version despite the fact that it only lasted a single season and I’m glad that he’s been able to continue the role in the animated movies and Legends of Tomorrow. And while this doesn’t completely fall in line with the live action series, it still has the same feeling to it. The movie falls right in line with the spirit of the TV series version but it dials up the gore several notches to some pretty extreme levels. And what this really does is make the importance of the decisions that Constantine has to make that much more impactful.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 