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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom 2023
I’m back catching up with another DC movie in my much smaller backlog, at least if I don’t count all of the animated movies but that’s a topic for another day. I actually remember practically nothing about the advertising for this movie. The only thing I really remember about it was that it was a hero/villain team up a la Blade 2, Thor 2, and plenty of other sequels that I can’t think of right now. I absolutely did not remember anything about Aquaman’s baby which is basically the entire opening. I also remember the walking back of Amber Heard’s role in the movie after the media fallout from her trial, and that was really felt while watching. There was a whole lot of dumb stuff on display, and I thought that Aquaman himself felt a lot more childish than I remembered from the first movie, but what pulled me through was the chemistry between him and Patrick Wilson as his brother slash archnemesis Orm.
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The Crow
The Crow 2024
I was browsing on Threads and I saw a call out for a podcast guest to come on and talk about the recent Crow remake over on the Stew World Order podcast. I’m a big fan of the original Crow and hadn’t gotten around to seeing the new remake just yet so I agreed to watch it and come on the show to talk about it (we recorded a couple days ago as I’m writing this but the episode won’t air until around August 2026). Now in general, I’m perfectly fine with the concept of remakes. I don’t think it diminishes the original and on a rare occasion it can actually improve upon the original. Or at the very least, be its own separate entity so despite all the negativity I had heard about this movie when it first came out, I thought I’d give it a fair shake and see how it stood on its own terms. It went for a very different tone, this is much more of a serious, grimdark interpretation of the Crow story. I didn’t agree with most of the changes, but by the end I was invested in how the story was going to turn out and I enjoyed myself throughout most of the watch. Now, I do think that this is a deeply flawed movie that has several serious issues that have nothing to do with whether or not it’s a remake, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be.
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Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle 2023
I’m back to my superhero movie catch up and since I finished the MCU, I decided it was time to move onto DC going back to 2023 which was a busy year for DC and I missed all 3 movies that came out that year which were also the last Zack Snyder era of DC movies before transitioning to the James Gunn era. I decided to start with Blue Beetle which is the only of the three which isn’t really connected at all to the rest of the Snyderverse aside from a single name drop about Superman. Instead, this is a full blown origin story that reminds me a lot of a much better version of Max Steel though I’m also aware that even this version of Blue Beetle pre-dates that character, let alone the Ted Kord version. The overall tone of the movie felt like it was taking a page out of the Marvel playbook with a similar mix of action, comedy, and a bit of drama. But there’s a reason why that works and it works just as well here. They also get a lot of mileage out of this being a primarily Hispanic story with Jaime’s family all being Hispanic as well as Ted Kord’s daughter Jenny and even the henchmen of basically the lone white person in the movie Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon.
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The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold
The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold 1958
It’s a nice but occasionally weird change of pace to swap back and forth between catching up on some of the newest superhero movies and going back to some of the earliest ones that I have yet to review here on this site. For my latest venture, I looked up the final of two Lone Ranger movies that were made with the stars of the TV series. This is now the fourth Lone Ranger movie that I’ve watched for this site and It’s pretty close to the worst along with the 1980’s movie. I went back and read my review for the first of these Lone Ranger movies and I have to say that this felt less respectful of its representation of indigenous people. But besides that, the movie took forever to really get going as the story really didn’t make any significant progress until the final half hour of the movie. And similar to the first movie, the best part was when the Lone Ranger went undercover, this time as a Southern gentleman bounty hunter. I watched the movie streaming on Plex, but it’s not something that I would easily recommend.
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Invisible Avenger
Invisible Avenger 1958
Now that I’ve caught up with the MCU movies, I decided that I wanted to watch something a little more random before catching up with either the Sony Marvel movies or the DC movies so I went back to the beginning of my giant, chronological list of superhero and comic book movies and wanted to watch the Missing Lady, but when searching on where to watch it, nothing that came up was a free streamer, so I went down to the next one which was available to watch for free on Tubi, and it was only a 60 minute movie which was a plus. Like many Marvel movies in the 70’s and 80’s, this was actually created as two pilot episodes for a Shadow TV series before editing them together to form a movie. And as far as I can tell, this was produced during a dry spell for Shadow content as the Radio drama ended in 1954, the comic strip in 1949, and the last film was back in 1946. This is notable for including his ability to become a literal shadow as taken from the radio drama which makes this the first Shadow movie to be much closer to a superhero movie. As for the actual content of the film, it feels like a typical low budget noir drama with nothing too complicated in terms of plot and fight scenes that consist of a couple weak punches, there were a couple killings though one was off camera and none of them had any blood.
Read the rest of this entryCatman in Lethal Track
US Catman: Lethal Track 1990
Over this past weekend I tried my hand at a twelve hour superhero movie marathon. But not just any superhero movies, I chose some of the worst that I happened to still own having bought them to review right here on this site. While I didn’t quite make it twelve hours, we did manage to watch seven movies going nearly eleven hours. And as luck would have it, the first movie that we watched was this one. This is a movie that I’ve had on my big superhero movie list since nearly the beginning despite still knowing next to nothing about it over ten years later. And yet, when I was browsing some used DVDs and I saw it within the past several months, I just had to pick it up. And technically, it is a superhero movie, or at least 1/3 of it is. The movie cuts back and forth between two completely unrelated story lines. One of them is the Catman story, and I’m guessing that the other is the Lethal Track story. There is zero intersection between the two and the cuts are completely arbitrary. It’s an extremely low budget martial arts film that I’m guessing was filmed in Taiwan or Hong Kong and has a bad English dub that includes a swear word in practically every sentence. But in the context of watching it for a streaming marathon, it was a blast.
Read the rest of this entryWakanda Forever
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever 2022
I’m honestly a little bit surprised that I have continued my return to writing for this site after having written only 5 reviews in 3 years and now this is my fifth review in just over 1 month. I’m actually quite happy getting back into the rhythm and hope to continue where my aim is to not go more than 2 weeks without a review. Though that may be questionable once I catch up with all the heavy hitters from Marvel and DC. I still have 2 more MCU films to catch up with, a few Sony Marvel films, and many DC films though I imagine I’ll mix in an ultra low budget film here and there though the next 2 will definitely be Brave New World and Thunderbolts*. But getting back to the topic at hand, I’ve finally managed to catch up with Wakanda Forever from back in 2022. At the time I chose to watch and review Black Adam and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special instead which in hindsight, was likely a mistake. I did enjoy Black Adam more than most, but Wakanda Forever is a much better film overall, with a touching tribute to Chadwick Boseman both at the beginning and the end of the film. It’s also a celebration of culture with almost zero time spent with white American characters, and besides the African culture represented through the Wakandan lens, there’s also the South American Mayan culture influenced in the Talokan underwater race along with a little bit of time spent in Haiti.
Read the rest of this entryGuardians of the Galaxy vol 3
Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 2023
I’m honestly pretty happy with the way this blog is going again this year. Less than a month into the year and I’m already 4 movies back in the game with 2 more MCU films to go to finish catching up, plus plenty of DC and other movies that have been released along the way. But since I’ve been sticking to my MCU catch up, I figured I’d go with the one that didn’t require any further homework as I’ve seen all the preceding movies that the Guardians have been in, but have not watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier which feels like it should be required viewing to help fill out the gaps for both Brave New World and Thunderbolts*. Whether or not I actually do the homework is yet to be decided. But anyway, I was excited to finally get around to finishing this Guardians trilogy, and with James Gunn having left to head DC, it’s likely the final end for the Guardians as a whole though at least some of the characters may still return. I feel like I saw nothing but warnings about this film if you happen to be an animal lover so I assumed it involved the fate of Rocket’s friends in his flashback scenes, it was still a sad moment but it helped that I was prepared. It did a lot of work to give a sense of finality to these characters and it worked well to flesh out Rocket’s overall journey.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 