Category Archives: 10’s movies
LEGO DC SuperHero Girls: Brain Drain
LEGO DC SuperHero Girls: Brain Drain 2017
Even though I had just complained about the difficulty in reviewing these DC SuperHero Girls movies because they are so similar in nature, I still decided to watch and review another one back to back. At least this time I was pleasantly surprised by the return of the LEGO style humor that was laced throughout the movie that helped keep my interest up more than several of the previous iterations. There were a handful of fun little callbacks to the history of DC superheroes, but there were still issues with too much stuff going on and an overreliance on newly introduced supervillain Lena Luthor. Of the four of these SuperHero Girls movies that I’ve watched, I would say that this has been my favorite so far, but they’re all right around the same level of mediocre, but good for young girl superhero fans.
DC SuperHero Girls: Intergalactic Games
DC SuperHero Girls: Intergalactic Games 2017
One thing that I realized while watching this movie is that it is going to be increasingly difficult to review more movies in this series without getting too repetitive. I’m going to try my best, but this is only the third of these movies that I’ve watched and I feel like I’ve already said everything that needs to be said in the previous two reviews. And there’s three more of these that have already come out left for me to watch and review. But while these aren’t the greatest in cinematic creation, they aren’t completely insufferable and they generally clock in at the standard for DC animated films being just an hour and fifteen minutes. The one thing that I am slightly curious about is if there is any continuity between the movies going forward, especially as they switch from regular animation in this movie to LEGO animation for the next several.
Accident Man
Accident Man 2018
It feels like it’s going to take forever for me to catch up with the previous year and a half of superhero movies that I missed out on, but I’m continuing to inch my way through them. I had vaguely heard about this movie before going on hiatus but didn’t know anything besides the fact that it was an action movie based on a comic book before going into it, which is honestly always a treat. What I found was a stunt-oriented revenge movie involving hitmen that reminded me a lot of the movie Payback which I really love. The plot is honestly a relatively standard guy working his way up the chain of command with a bit of dark humor laced throughout since there’s plenty of killing going on. Not only that, but the director was Jesse V Johnson who directed a great action oriented Wonder Woman concept trailer way back in 2013.
Guardians
Zashchitniki aka Guardians 2017
This is only the second Russian superhero movie that I’ve reviewed here on this site after the bizarrely mediocre flying car Spider-Man rip off that has nothing to do with the current CW show Black Lightning. I remember seeing the previews for it a while back and the visuals looked kind of insane. Now that I’ve finally seen it, I still think the overall visuals look great, but it really suffered from a lack of interesting characters or an interesting plot. It’s a really generic government created superpowered experiments that goes wrong and creates a supervillain intent on ruling the world. It’s a weird mix of X-Men’s Weapon X program but it’s just not interesting once you look past the special effects.
Graphic Horror: Bad Kids of Crestview Academy
Bad Kids of Crestview Academy 2017
This was one of the last movies that I tried to watch before I went on my hiatus and I even tried a couple times. And while it’s not a great movie, it wasn’t exactly the quality of the film that kept me from finishing it, it was just other things going on at the time. I’ve seen the previous movie and while it had a few good moments, I wasn’t a fan of that one either so I didn’t have very high hopes. This is a horror/comedy/mystery/etc that really feels like a retread of the first movie with only a few slight differences here and there. It’s another group of kids in a weekend detention that get massacred over the course of the movie with a little extra mystery going on in the background. Some of the comedy hit me a bit better this time around, but I just felt like this was another mediocre go around that didn’t learn anything from the first movie and as it hints at a third movie, I just hope that it goes in a different direction if it gets made.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2018
It’s been a long year and while I have been to the movie theaters a few times to see movies that I would have normally reviewed for this site, only the first couple actually worked out that way. But I had heard such great things about this movie that I just had to see it. And everything I heard was true and more. The visual style of this film is gorgeous and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen before. The sheer amount of Easter Eggs and references that only a major comic book nerd could fully catch was astounding, and the way it opened up the Spider-Verse to someone only knowledgeable via movies and TV series was fantastic. And to top it all off, it had a great story, great action, hilarious comedy, and fully formed characters with interesting and believable choices. Just a great way to round out 2018. And since this is a very recent movie, I always discuss the movie in full so this is your spoiler warning.
LEGO DC Superhero Girls: Super-Villain High
LEGO DC Superhero Girls: Super-Villain High 2018
I’m still working my way through the movies of the past couple years including the many DC animated features and this one seems like a sub-genre within a sub-genre as there have been a few Superhero Girls webseries and movies and there have been a few LEGO DC movies and this combines the two into something else. I also felt like I was missing a little something having not seen the previous Brain Drain. But it wasn’t exactly too difficult to follow. And when I compare it to the previous similar properties, it falls right in line with the other LEGO DC movies and it’s on the higher side of the previous Superhero Girls that I’ve watched. It’s fun, it’s somewhat self-aware, and it’s important just to exist as a superhero property with a significant amount of positive female characters.
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight 2018
I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Jack the Ripper, generally the most I know of him are when various TV shows that I watch have the random episode where they go back in time or something along those lines to have a Jack the Ripper episode. Aside from that, there’s also the mediocre comic book movie From Hell. And on top of that, I actually went into this movie knowing nothing about the background of the comic aside from the fact that it’s basically Batman if he existed in the early 1900’s. It is actually the first Elseworlds style story that even pre-dated the Elseworlds title. It basically comes from the question “what if Batman tried to solve the Jack the Ripper case?” only instead of random people asking the question, it’s asked by comic book writer Brian Augustyn and drawn by Mike Mignola. I thought it was pretty entertaining but I wasn’t fond of the final reveal, which I will be discussing so here’s your spoiler warning.
Thor: Ragnarok
Thor: Ragnarok 2017
Surprisingly, as much as I enjoy the MCU, over the past year and a half I hadn’t been keeping up with every release like I might have expected to despite all the rave reviews I had heard for this one as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp. The MCU has always been about making action comedies, though most of them have been heavy on the action and light on the comedy. This time director Taika Waititi turns things on its head and gives practically a full blown comedy with some action elements. It might initially seem like an odd choice for Thor to be the property to transition from a more Shakespearean action/fantasy to an action comedy, but it really works. Especially with Chris Hemsworth’s charisma and the addition of Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster. The more dramatic stuff still works, but through and through it’s a comedy with plenty of laugh out loud moments.
Batman and Harley Quinn
Batman and Harley Quinn 2017
When this movie was first announced, I was actually quite excited for it. I would consider Harley Quinn to be my favorite comic book character. I love her aesthetic and her unpredictability, but when the first trailer came out I sensed trouble despite the fact that it was clearly modeled after the designs of the 90’s Batman the Animated Series. And while the animation style and several of the voice actors are from that series the tone and content of the movie is much more adult than the original series ever was. Unfortunately the idea of more adult is just plenty of jokes and references to sex and some blood including a character death. It just felt completely out of place and while a few of the jokes did make me laugh quite a bit, it never really felt right and never came together as a whole.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 