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I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu (2019) – This Reminds Me Of Something… Something Awful

Released: 23rd April
Seen: 29th April

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In 1978, the film I Spit On Your Grave was unleashed onto an unsuspecting public. Directed by first time director Meir Zarchi, the film was soon branded as one of the most shocking pieces of exploitation cinema to ever be released. While I Spit On Your Grave might not be the first film in the exploitation subgenre known as the Rape-Revenge film, it’s certainly the most infamous due to its brutality and the rawness of the lead performance. It’s not a great film by any means but it does earn its place in history as a piece of exploitation cinema, the likes of which we had never seen before. It was even remade in 2010 with a proper budget and filming equipment… and then Meir Zarchi decided he wanted to pick up a camera again and, since nobody tackled him to the ground while screaming ‘NO!’ loudly as they could, we ended up being saddled with I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu. Buckle up, this is going to hurt.

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Avengers: Endgame (2019) – No Spoiler Zone

Released: 24th April
Seen: 24th April

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On the 25th of April 2018, celebrating a decade as a cinematic universe, Marvel released Avengers: Infinity War. A true box office smash, the film broke records and defied expectations and at the 2-hour 5-minute and 41-second mark, Thanos snapped his fingers and eradicated half of the MCU in a sequence that was instantly one of the most iconic things in modern cinema. It was meme’d into oblivion; it was a moment of cultural shock that is easily the ballsiest thing that a movie studio has done in a long time. They made us love every single character, and then they killed them in front of us in a 3 minute sequence that was designed intentionally to destroy the audience… and then they said “Come back in a year, we’re not done tearing you apart yet” and sure enough, they came back and they were not even close to done tearing us apart.

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Long Shot (2019) – Exactly What It Says On The Tin

Released: 2nd May
Seen: 23rd April (Preview screening)

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Just scroll back up a little and look at the poster again, I’ll wait. Do you notice that it’s basically the exact poster you expect it to be for almost any rom-com? Seriously, picture the standard rom-com about an awkward guy who’s a little rough around the edges (or even just completely made of edges) who falls for a woman who is so far out of his league that it’s almost funny. Sitcoms thrive on this, King of Queens, The Simpsons and Married with Children just to name a few. It’s also a big trend in movies, Adam Sandler basically made a career out of it until Seth Rogen came out and played the everyman stoner who falls for the insanely attractive woman and they fall for each other. Do you enjoy those kinds of movies? Great, then you’ll like this one and no longer need to hear my lengthy diatribe on why I also enjoy this movie… but please keep reading anyway, page views give me validation.

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The Upside (2019) – There Is No Upside

Released: 19th April
Seen: 21st April

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In 2011, the film The Intouchables was released. A French film based upon real events, it told the story of a wealthy quadriplegic and a poor black man who come together and change each other for the better. The movie was a box office smash, netting 400 million worldwide and gaining enough critical acclaim and love from the audience that, at the time of writing, it ranks 39 on the IMDB list of top rated films of all time. It is a film that has resonated with its audience… but it’s in a language other than English so by the laws of Hollywood, they have to remake the film for audiences who don’t want to bother reading subtitles and in the process make a film that… exists?

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The Curse Of The Weeping Woman (2019) – Big Ghosts Don’t Cry

Released: 18th April
Seen: 19th April

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The Conjuring universe is one of the strangest cinematic universes that we’ve had in recent years. While other cinematic universes, like the one that Marvel has basically defined over the last decade, will have several standalone films that build up to a major event picture, the Conjuring Universe does things a little differently. It has the main central series which follows Ed and Lorraine Warren in their paranormal haunts (while never actually addressing the legitimate criticism that the Warren’s are basically doing an elaborate carnival act and preying on people’s fears) and then they put a creepy monster of some kind in those Conjuring movies and that monster will spin off into its own origin movie. Those origin movies tend to be painful to watch, with Annabelle being a snoozefest with no logic and even less thought put into it that basically relied on the movie Annabelle: Creation to salvage the concept while The Nun was basically average if I was being kind and if I were to re-review that film today I’d probably put it at 2.5/5 instead of a 3/5 but hey, that’s the fun thing about seeing every movie you can. The more you see the more you look back and have different opinions on different films. I have a distinct feeling though that when I look back on this film I’m going to still think it was basically a waste of time while also being a horrific waste of potential.

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Sunshine Blogger Award

Introduction

 

Sometimes you wake up and find out that, as you slept, you got nominated for something big and important like a Nobel Peace Prize… othertimes you wake up to see you’ve been nominated for the Sunshine Blogger award, which is actually latin for “Fun silly listicle where half the work was done for you by the person who nominated you” which in this case was by the amazing The Blog Complainer who is just generally a great reviewer who you probably already follow, or at least you should. Go on, go over there and click the Follow button, I’ll wait.

 

So basically this is one of those “Do a thing and then get 11 others to do a thing” lists which in general I have avoided in life but… well, it’s free content, this one looked like enough fun that I could enjoy it and I get to come up with a bunch of questions at the end so let’s see how this goes.

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Little (2019) – Not So Big

Released: 11th April
Seen: 15th April

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In comedy, there is a storyline you see pop up again and again that could be described as ‘The Body Swap Film’ where one person is thrown into the body of someone completely different in order to learn a valuable lesson about who they are as people. They can also suddenly wake up in a body that’s of a very different age to what they were previously. This has given us such films as 1976’s Freaky Friday, Big, 1995’s Freaky Friday, The Hot Chick, 2005’s Freaky Friday, 17 Again and 2018’s Freaky Friday (which was also a musical, why the hell have we allowed four remakes of Freaky Friday to exist in this timeline?). It’s a very simple and standard story to tell. The main character is a bad person, someone magically turns them into someone different, they have serious emotional growth, they turn back into the person they were before only now they’re nicer. It’s sweet, it’s simple, it’s a framework that usually allows actors a chance to show off their comedic skills and Little is no different than others like it, in that it relies heavily on the lead performers to get through because it’s sure not going to be relying on the script.

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Missing Link (2019) – Proof Of Happiness

Released: 11th April
Seen: 13th April

Missing Link

Stop Motion animation is probably the most difficult kind of animation there is. Building scale models and animating them in the physical world, moving just a tiny portion of the models for every single frame and slowly creating movement by hand, something where a small accident could ruin days of work. If a model dries up then that could destroy a film. For the longest time the big name in the field of stop motion animation was Aardman Animation, the people who made Chicken Run (which I just found out is getting a sequel, which is awesome), and now the new people claiming the throne of stop motion animation is Laika who has been fairly consistent in releasing great films, and their latest film is no exception.

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Hellboy (2019) – Aww, Hell!

Released: 11th April
Seen: 11th April

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In 1993 the comic book artist Mike Mignola created the character of Hellboy for Dark Horse comics. A demon-human hybrid, the character became a big enough hit with readers to get an adaptation in 2004 with the movie Hellboy that was written and directed by Guillermo del Toro who managed to turn it into a minor box office hit, pulling in almost 100 million worldwide on a 66 million budget. It got enough critical praise and a cult following to get Universal to shell out for a sequel with the same cast and same creative team, 4 years later letting out Hellboy 2: The Golden Army which fared even better, netting almost 160 million on an 85 million budget and (at least as far as I’m concerned) was just a better movie all around. Now it’s a decade later and rebooting old franchises is all the rage, and Guillermo Del Toro is coming off of two Oscar wins for his beloved film The Shape of Water so now would be the perfect time to get him to come back, drag Ron Perlman with him to don the red latex again and knock everyone out with an amazing Hellboy movie… or you could just get a bunch of completely different people to try and make money off the name alone and hope to god no one actually cares about being entertained, that’s a valid option.

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DC Did What Marvel Didn’t

For the last decade, Marvel has basically owned the cinema landscape. Since the release of Iron Man, they have never left the top 10 highest grossing films list of each year, the only exception being in 2009 when they didn’t release a film (remember when there was a year that didn’t have a Marvel film? Memories). In all that time they have proven to dominate the cultural conversation around movies, and recently they even added an Oscar to the collection of things they pulled off. But there is one thing that they didn’t pull off yet, that their competitor DC just pulled off with Shazam! and I’m in the mood to talk about that. The catch is, in order to talk about it I have to spoil a few things so if you haven’t seen Shazam! then be warned, I’m spoiling a lot of major moments that you’re going to want to see so this is where you abandon this editorial discussion and go see the film, then come back because I require validation.

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