Category Archives: Leave it

Movies I wish I had skipped. This could be for any number of reasons: the film was made sloppily, the narrative didn’t engage me, or I simply could not connect with the film in any way for whatever reason.

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Carry-On (2024) Movie Review

Carry-On is the dumb-as-rocks holiday crowd pleaser of the year, and many involved in its execution are game for embracing the buffoonery.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra had graduated from low-budget horror and slick low-budget action films to the Hollywood studio big leagues. To be clear, this graduation implies only an elevation in budgetary cushion, as his films for Disney and Warners — Jungle Cruise and Black Adam respectively — gave up propulsive energy for glossy studio sheen. Jungle Cruise is mildly entertaining and pleasant enough, for what it’s worth. But it feels like a lazy river compared to even the lowliest of Liam Neeson thriller. And Black Adam…well, we saw how that turned out.

In returning to the high concept action-thriller in the vein of the airport novel, but doing so under the Netflix banner, Collet-Serra scales back from the Continue reading Carry-On (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Terrifier 3 (2024) Movie Review

I do not own, let alone clutch at, pearls. When done right, bad taste is the best taste.

The problem with Terrifier 3, the latest in the hyper-violent splatter/slasher franchise from Damien Leone, is not the gore. Don’t get me wrong, the warning should be clear: the faint of heart ought to steer clear of this one. The squishy, bloody, extreme to the limits of extreme violence is not what makes the Terrifier films objectionable; no, that is the main draw. It is the reason why a niche audience propelled the third entry to the number one spot at the domestic box office.

The gore of it all is just fine. In fact, it seems integral to Leone’s macabre vision of the modern slasher. Some would argue that the extremes of Continue reading Terrifier 3 (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Documentary, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape — Fantastic Fest 2024

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I have said my piece about the “compilation” film on this website before. In fact, I made some complaints about the format a few months ago when From My Cold Dead Hands played the Fantasia Festival. I’ll be brief about it here. The compilation/mixtape format is, by its design, artistically limiting. In borrowing from existing content, the artistry of the resulting film derives mostly from the edit. Why is this found footage being compiled, organized, and edited in this way? If the answer is, “I don’t know,” then the compilation has not succeeded in properly compiling.

The best of the format will create new meaning out of existing materials, or will resituate the original meaning of the materials in a way that produces new understanding. In short: the compilation film ought to Continue reading Review: Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Steppenwolf — Fantastic Fest 2024

Steppenwolf is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

Steppenwolf is a formally striking piece of grand existential absurdism. Within the confines of a brutal civil war, the characters in the film (in particular, the sociopathic Brajyuk) face death with an ironic distance that would make Camus’ Meursault proud.

The film opens with the violent takeover of a remote police compound where political prisoners are being tortured. When staring down the barrel of a gun, Brajyuk (Berik Aitzhanov), a corrupt police interrogator, tells his rebel captors that Continue reading Review: Steppenwolf — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Apartment 7A — Fantastic Fest 2024

Apartment 7A is screening as part of the 2024 Fantastic Fest, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I’d be lying if I said I’ve read Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby. Although, it sits on my dining room table (because the one bookcase I own overflows). It is a burnt orange hardcover volume, slim, with similarly orange-y paper, as the book is from the original Random House printing. I found it on the side of the road when I was 16, in a box of other very old books ready to be tossed into the back of a garbage truck.

So I haven’t read it. But I thumbed through it after watching Natalie Erika James’ Apartment 7A, because it Continue reading Review: Apartment 7A — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Parvulos — Fantasia Festival 2024

Parvulos is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

I’m going to give Parvulos the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its politics, in that I’m assuming it isn’t trying to have a politics at all. I begin by saying that, because the premise of the film is that a raging, deadly virus out-paced the rollout of vaccine boosters, so the government put out an untested vaccine whose unintended side effect was zombie-ism. The film first poses the question: What if society crumbled because of a deadly virus. Then, as an end-of-first-act twist, it posits instead: What if society crumbled because of that virus’s vaccine?

This first act is a slow-developing world building section in which three brothers, living alone in a home in the country, struggle to Continue reading Review: Parvulos — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Documentary, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Me and My Victim — Fantasia Festival 2024

Me and My Victim is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Me and My Victim begins with co-director Maurane reciting a poem at a party. The poem is about the disparity between pornographic depictions of yoga and massaging and their real-life counterparts. There is a tension felt in the voice of the poem’s speaker, in that she both desires the perversity of the pornographic contexts and is violently averse to the notion of being touched by the men giving the massage and running the yoga class. Within the context of the poem, it is an intriguing tension, and this dichotomy between attraction and disgust (kind of, sort of) defines the narrative of the film.

The bulk of the documentary is a series of recreations of Maurane’s early dates with a romantic partner (the other co-director, Billy Pedlow), dates which are inflected with strange sexual tension. The intent is to expose Continue reading Review: Me and My Victim — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: The Soul Eater — Fantasia Festival 2024

The Soul Eater is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

In the rural town of Roquenoir, France, a series of murders and kidnappings have taken place. One survivor, a young boy, says it is the work of the “Soul Eater,” a creature of urban legend that steals children away into the woods.

Two investigators working under different jurisdictions are tasked with investigating the case. Elisabeth (Virginie Ledoyen) works for the National Police and is focused on the murders. Franck (Paul Hamy), the captain of the National Gendarmerie, is focused on the missing children. The two butt heads as they seek answers about this mysterious series of crimes.

Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, best known for their bloody 2007 film Inside, bring glimpses of the gruesome to this otherwise Continue reading Review: The Soul Eater — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Western

Review: Mash Ville — Fantasia Festival 2024

Mash Ville is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Mash Ville is the type of ensemble crime film that is so jam-packed with plotty incident and odd characters that it feels as though the film is doing a lot and thus must be doing something interesting and new. The film aspires to be something like an acid western, and it may also draw comparisons to Tarantino or the Coens, in that the film attempts to blend slick humor with farce with black comedy.

The problem with an overly plotted black comedy about death and crime is that, if you do too much, it becomes Continue reading Review: Mash Ville — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: The Beast Within — Fantasia Festival 2024

The Beast Within is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

The Beast Within is the least fun werewolf movie I’ve seen.

Alexander J. Farrell, who is normally a documentary filmmaker, brings us this horror-lite werewolf picture starring Kit Harington. Harington, top billed, is more accurately the third lead in a film with only four characters. He doesn’t say a line of dialogue until the 23-minute mark, for one. While his character Noah is the one inflicted with the titular “beast within,” the film is centered around his young daughter Willow (Caoilinn Springall) as she comes to learn about the affliction that plagues her family.

The Beast Within is, ostensibly, a film about a werewolf. But the truer explanation of its premise is that it is a film about lycanthropy as a thin metaphor for Continue reading Review: The Beast Within — Fantasia Festival 2024 →