LITERAL REMAINS

Set in the snowy colds of New Mexico in the year 1983 (not really a more innocent time, but one devoid of such luxuries as cell phones, the Internet, 2 billion satellite channels,  I-Pads, and I-everything), Let Me In is the tender remake of the very tender, and superior, Swedish film Let the Right One In.  As I [...]

BEWARE:  SPOILERS AHEAD There’s no real way to review this film (much like the book) without giving away spoilers to first and second films in the trilogy.  When we last left Lizbeth Salander she had put an axe in her father’s head after having drug herself from the grave her half-brother had buried her in only [...]

You know what, I enjoyed this movie more than I really expected I would.  Maybe it’s a seasonal thing, I don’t know.  Here I am in Middle Tennessee with a snow storm or winter weather advisory, seemingly, every other day or week, and here is Piranha full of sun and bikinis (and, at times, no [...]

Detective Bowden and his partner are called to the scene of a suicide–a man has jumped from a high-rise building.  The good detective, a recovering alcoholic who suffered the tragedy of his wife and son being killed in a hit and run five years ago, doesn’t think it’s as simple as suicide.  The jumper was holding [...]

It’s New Year’s Eve and 2010 is all but over.  Hard to believe, ain’t it?  But time flies when you’re having fun.  It’s also been said that time goes by quicker the older you get.  Luckily, we just seem to be having a lot of fun. 2010 was a helluva year.  Looking over all the [...]

Mercenary Royce (Adrien Brody) wakes up in a free fall and rightly starts to panic.  He has a parachute strapped to him that he doesn’t know how to open and the jungle below is fast approaching.  Luckily the chute opens by itself, but he still has a rough tumble through the trees to the ground [...]

Lisbeth Salander returns to Stockholm from a year long vacation abroad only to find herself in trouble.  And as happens in her life, she didn’t really seek it out, trouble has a way of finding Lisbeth. The Girl Who Played With Fire picks up after the events of the first installment, The Girl With the Dragon [...]

Norma lives a low-rent trailer park.  Actually, the term “low-rent” doesn’t even describe it.  This place is maybe “no-rent”:  it’s the worst trailer park imaginable.  I’m talking bottom of the barrel.  You had better pray that no trailer park like hers actually exists.  Please, dear God, do not let one this bad exist.  And “bad” [...]

I believe if you’re a horror fan, you already know the gist of A Nightmare On Elm Street, and even if you’re not a horror fan, you probably are familiar with the name Freddy Krueger and his history.  But for any passers-by we may have, let’s get the plot of this remake out of the [...]

If there was ever a monster, it was Albert Fish.  Fish was a serial killer in America in the early part of the 20th Century.  He preyed upon children.  He was a child molester, rapist, cannibal, and sadomasochist.  He was also very, very, insane.  He had a religious mania that infused his psychosis, making him [...]

George A. Romero continues his “Dead” series with the latest entry, Survival of the Dead.  Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for great filmmaker to move on to something else.  Would it be so bad for George Romero to make a new movie that didn’t involve zombies?  Sure, the living dead are what Romero will always [...]

Sometimes you see a movie that makes you go, “What the hell were they thinking?”  The remake of Day of the Dead is just such a movie.  I like all kinds of zombies, be they fast moving, slow moving, shuffling, moaning, smart, or dumb.  This new Day gives us Matrix zombies.  How else can you [...]

A once big shot radio personality, Grant Mazzy, has found himself reading off news, weather, traffic, and local events in Pontypool, Ontario.  His new radio gig is broadcast from the basement of an abandoned church.  The calls from Ken in the ”Sunshine Chopper” concerning the traffic…yeah, there’s no real helicopter, it’s sound effects- Ken sits in his car on a hill overlooking [...]

Former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) is writing his memoirs, and the job is nearly completed when his ghost writer, a former aide, is found washed up on the shore near Lang’s Martha’s Vineyard hideaway.  It is unclear if it was suicide, or death by misadventure, though the toxicology reports indicate that the ghost [...]

To quote from Zombieland:  “You gotta enjoy the little things.”  Keep that in mind when watching Dead Snow.  I had to watch it twice; the first time I kept falling asleep during it- it wasn’t the movie’s fault, I had been to Georgia and back, and I was rather tired.  What I saw of it, [...]