Drama – Page 24 – Movie Meister Reviews

November 7, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Stage Mother (2020) – Life Is A Drag

Released: 23rd October
Seen: 2nd November

Drag has been given something of a resurgence lately thanks to the phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race. While Drag has always been around, recently it’s exploded in the mainstream with the hit reality series. Now, not only do we have Drag Race, there’s the horror equivalent in Dragula, a campy queen version on YouTube in Camp Wanakiki and probably a half dozen others for various kinds of queens.

From TV shows like AJ and the Queen (which should’ve had more than one season and I will die mad upon that hill) to movies like Cherry Pop or the Hurricane Bianca series, we’ve seen a huge uptick in entertainment focussed around drag queens. Well, Stage Mother is another one of those, it doesn’t exactly do anything new but I can’t think of a better way to introduce the topic than to point out that this movie probably wouldn’t exist without that explosion in drag.

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November 1, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The Empty Man (2020) – Yep, Empty

Released: 23rd October
Seen: 31st October

The Bye Bye Man
The Snowman
The Slenderman

Movies that begin with The and end in Man in the horror genre have lately filled me with dread lately. With the exception of The Invisible Man, I can’t think of a good film with this combination of words in the title so imagine how I felt seeing the poster for The Empty Man. If you thought I was prepared for a long slow boring film that tried far too hard to be smarter than it was, then you know me far too well… and you also just described the film to a T.

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October 31, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The Craft: Legacy (2020) – Wicked Witchcraft

Released: 28th October
Seen: 29th October

In 1996 there was a low budget horror film called The Craft. The Craft came out early in the horror resurgence of the 90s, as in it was released about 6 months before the monster hit Scream completely revived the genre. It was a story of four social outcasts who bonded over a shared love of magic and how their usage of it for personal gain and revenge ended up backfiring on them horribly. It’s perhaps best remembered for the completely mental and brilliant performance by Fairuza Balk, a performance that’s so iconic it basically defined her entire career from that point onward. The Craft became somewhat of a cult hit, even influencing the monster hit series Charmed (the theme song from that series was used in this movie, plus the writer-director claimed to have pitched the series and had his idea stolen) so it has quite a legacy… enough that 24 years later we’d finally get a sequel, and not a good one.

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October 19, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The Lie (2020) – Pants On Fire

Released: 6th October
Seen: 17th October

One of the many repeated tropes of horror that has worked time and time again is “Someone does a murder, they or someone who loves them helps them lie to cover it up, the secret comes back to haunt them in the end”. This simple concept has led to literary classics like The Tell-Tale Heart, to cinematic classics like Rope and even been used in fun 90s slashers like I Know What You Did Last Summer. When done right, it’s a setup that creates tension right off the bat and the way the characters react to the knowledge of what they’ve done (or how what they’ve done turns them into the ultimate victims) creates the emotional core of the story… when done wrong you get The Lie.

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October 8, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Antebellum (2020) – The Horror Of The Past

Released: 1st October
Seen: 7th October

In my review of Vampires vs The Bronx I opened with a lengthy paragraph about how great Horror is when it’s used as a metaphor for some kind of social issue. Race is one that pops up a lot in horror, the genre has always been a useful way to put that issue into ways that can be understood by all. If you would like to know more about the history of race in horror cinema I suggest you go watch Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror which is easy to find, Shudder put it up for free and I’m linking you to it so go and learn. Go and learn so then you can come back here and sit with me as I try to understand why Antebellum just didn’t work for me as much as it could’ve.

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October 3, 2020 leebutler Uncategorized

The Boys in the Band (2020) – The Band Plays On

Released: 30th September
Seen: 1st October

In 1968 the groundbreaking play The Boys in The Band premiered off-Broadway. Written by the late Mart Crowley (who passed away in March of this year), the play revolves around a group of gay friends coming together for a birthday party which slowly turns into a chaotic night of revelations, bitchiness and a lot of self-loathing. It’s one of the first plays that showed gay men as actual characters with love lives and personalities, it’s so ahead of the curve that it premiered roughly a year before Stonewall putting it right at the start of the gay liberation movement. The 1968 play would later be adapted into a feature length film in 1970. 50 years after the off=Broadway play premiered, in 2018 it was revived on Broadway and now here we are, 2 years later and we have a new film adaptation and it’s just wonderful.

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October 2, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The High Note (2020) – A Little Flat, But OK

Released: 24th September
Seen: 30th September

So, we’re approaching the final quarter of the year. The home stretch. The time when the fat lady starts warming up so she can hit the high note. The point when everyone should have started working on the “Good Fucking Riddance 2020” banners that we will all be hanging up because this year has been, to quote Jake Tapper, a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. This has definitely been reflected in what has been available at the cinema.

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September 30, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Enola Holmes (2020) – Elementary School, My Dear Watson

Released: 23rd September
Seen: 27th September

December 26, 2018. A date that will live in infamy. This is the date when Holmes & Watson was released and, despite the year being almost completely finished, made a case to be called one of the worst movies of the year (a case it won, easily, since it made it on my list with 5 days to go!). It was truly a ghastly nightmare but as since then it looks like it may have done something even more sinister… it may have killed the Sherlock Holmes brand!

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September 29, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Feel The Beat (2020) – The Beat Feels Familiar

Released: 19th June
Seen: 23rd September

Not long ago, I reviewed the Netflix original film Work It which was about a young girl trying to put together a dance troupe in order to get into college. Dance films are a very rare breed because they tend to require actors who can pull off the vastly different skills of acting and dancing. The problem with dance films is that it takes something kind of special to break out into the mainstream, films like Dirty Dancing, Hairspray and Step Up managed to infuse dancing with a plot that people latched onto and have kept in the cultural landscape for years… something tells me Feel the Beat isn’t going to be one of those movies, but it’s fine.

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September 19, 2020July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The Devil All the Time (2020) – The Devil Went Down To Ohio

Released: 11th September
Seen: 18th September

In 2011, the novel The Devil All the Time was released and was instantly showered with awards and praise. Written by Donald Ray Pollock as a follow up to his book Knockemstiff, it was a big enough hit that, inevitably, the rights to the book were bought and a film adaptation was announced way back in 2018. Well, now we are here two years later and what did they make? They made… a film. A film with two great performances that is a film, it’s not much more than that.

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