leebutler

April 14, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Love Wedding Repeat (2020) – I Want A Divorce!

Released: 10th April
Seen: 14th April

Love Wedding Repeat is one of the blandest, stupidest and most pathetic attempts at a rom-com that I’ve ever seen. There is no other way to even start this, I don’t feel like trying to find some esoteric tangent that I could go on, the film is bad and pathetic and I do not like it for even a second. You want a film to make you hate the concept of marriage in totality? Have I got a film for you? A pathetic film that sells itself on looking pretty and having attractive actors with British and Italian accents say things that they believe are jokes but under the faux-pretty surface lies one of the ugliest messes I’ve ever laid eyes on.

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April 13, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Cursed Films – Twilight Zone: The Movie

Vic Morrow. Myca Dinh Le. Renee Shin-Yi Chen. These are the names of the people who died on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie. You might not even know that film exists, you might not even remember what happened during the film but you undoubtedly heard about the helicopter crash that changed everything. On the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie a shot of a helicopter flying over a Vietnam village went horribly wrong and those three actors were killed when the helicopter crashed onto the set. It’s an accident that changed how films are shot and effectively ended the era of the 70s auteur director where we were fine with madmen in charge of film sets… and it’s the subject of the finale for Cursed Films, and what a finale it is.

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April 12, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Cursed Films – The Crow

Before I begin this, I’ve already talked about the other episodes in this series before. If you’re curious on my thoughts regarding the Poltergeist and The Omen episodes you can head over to Soda & Telepaths to read them, and then you can go to my review of the episode around The Exorcist. I’ll be dropping my review for the final episode in the next few days but now that I’ve officially seen every episode of this amazing little docuseries and now that I’ve completed the entire thing, I can definitely say that it’s a series that improved dramatically over the course of its run. Its structure got tighter, the middle section became more relevant and they were clearly building it up to the pair of ‘Cursed Films’ that are easily the most emotionally devastating.

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April 11, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Necrologies (2018) – Lots Of Fun

Released: 7th March (DVD release)
Seen: 10th April

One thing I’m noticing about films I am being sent to review is that a lot of people want to try the Anthology film as an early work, and I totally get why. It’s a good way to get a bunch of first-time filmmakers to make little short films and string them together without needing to come up with a 90-minute long plot. You just need a good wrap around and a basic idea of the kind of film you’re making and voila, you’ve got yourself an anthology. It’s really hard to do a great anthology film though, I’d probably say Creepshow and VHS are the gold standards of the genre and over the last few weeks, we’ve stumbled upon some anthology films that would probably just barely make the Bronze ranking… well, today I have an easy Silver medalist of Anthology films, it needs a bit of work to get to gold but it’s still wildly impressive on its own merits.

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April 10, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Horse Girl (2020) – Coming In In All Directions

Released: 7th February
Seen: 9th April

Normally when I write these reviews I do an opening paragraph that is intended to set the scene. Either I talk about the original text that inspired the film or I’ll talk about a cinematic trend or, in one case, talk about paint drying to create a subversive joke that can lead into the bulk of the review. Partially this is for context and it’s also done so that if people are scrolling through my page, the opening paragraph might catch their eye and make them want to read more. So, how does someone write an interesting and appropriate opening paragraph for a movie like Horse Girl, a film about a woman who is slowly being overtaken by her serious mental illness that starts as simple little obsessions and culminates in dressing like a peach-ninja and having imaginary sex with the nerdy guy from Criminal Minds? I sat here and tried to think of such an opening and ended up not having any idea, so that’s why you got that tiny bit of information about how I write this… it’s the most interesting thing I could think of because I do not know how on earth I can begin to explore this one.

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April 9, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The Black Gate (2017) – It’s a very pretty gate

Released: 9th July 2019
Seen: 8th April

I know that I’ve been a little harsh on some lower budget features and I swear it’s not intentional. Lower budget features and first-time films tend to come with some serious drawbacks in terms of just what is actually available for the filmmakers to use. Your first film isn’t going to be some grand epic where you have access to the world’s best lighting and sound equipment or an editing bay with high tech CGI to correct issues you didn’t spot on the day. Let’s be honest, your first film will probably be made with mates, shot on a weekend and edited using a pirated copy of Premiere that you’ve had since you downloaded CS2 back in the early 2000s. Sometimes your first film will not look that good and the sad truth is that it’s a little hard to look past sometimes. I promise you, my problems with these films are never about the things that can be explained away by budget because we’ve all been there. Any film student who had to put together a 5 minute short film on a budget of nothing knows how it feels to try and make that work, I’m judging these films based on things that are fixable at any budget level… which brings me to today’s offering, The Black Gate.

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April 8, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Lost Girls (2020) – Found It

Released: 13th March
Seen: 7th April

Between 1996 and 2010, it’s believed that around 16 women who were either sex workers or closely tied to the sex work industry were murdered by someone who is currently only known as the Long Island Serial Killer. The identity of the killer has never been found and the story of how this case became known was so interesting that in 2013 it was turned into the book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker. The book rights were later optioned for a film that went through some cast changes and went from Amazon to Netflix before being released in March where it promptly got ignored because… I don’t know, we were busy anticipating the new season of the Boss Baby series. All I know is that I saw no discussion around this film whatsoever which is odd because it’s genuinely fascinating.

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April 7, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

Turnabout (2016) – It’s Fair Play

Released: 20th December 2016
Seen: 7th April

Some films are very complicated, with a large cast of wild and various characters who go on some convoluted quest and have to deal with some form of a serious antagonist who stands in their way and causes them a large amount of persistent trouble… then there are the films that feel like we’re just watching an hour in a couple of people’s lives. Sometimes you’re in the mood for something big and grand, sometimes you just need a little bit of character study and considering how we’re not allowed to be near actual people anymore, this seems like the right time to just enjoy a good little character piece since I am becoming that desperate for human contact.

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April 6, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Coffee & Kareem (2020) – I’ll Have Decaf, Thanks

Released: 3rd April
Seen: 6th April

Dear Netflix

Look, I get it. You used to be the king of the mountain with all the films anyone could ever want and then the studios got greedy and realised that they could do it without a middle man and you lost a bunch of content so now you’re desperate to fill the empty space up. Sometimes you get desperate and you need to load up with content. I get it, you need content that they can’t take away from you and so you’re just greenlighting everything but may I suggest you try watching it before you upload it because maybe then you won’t unleash painful garbage like Coffee & Kareem onto the world.

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April 5, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Rutabaga (2018) – Building Up To Something Special

Released: 13th March 2019
Seen: 4th April

In my review of The Platform I mentioned that I had a fair amount of films sent to me for review purposes. These films were supplied by The Movie Agency who have given me a total of 6 films I’ll be going through over the coming weeks. I wanted to pick something light from the selection to begin with, so I picked the shortest one of the bunch because I knew I had less time today than I would normally like to have which is how I ended up reviewing a movie from 2018 called Rutabaga, a film I can genuinely say I enjoyed but probably not for the reasons I was supposed to.

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