Monster Summer

Year 18, Day 277 - 10/4/26 - Movie #5,451

BEFORE: Well, based on all the hits I'm not getting, I'm thinking this is kind of an off year for horror films. Maybe other people just aren't ready for Halloween yet, it still feels far away, but really it's not. Maybe not everyone pre-games like I do - I admit that by the time I get to October 31 I'm usually burnt out and ready for ANY other kind of movie, but that's my problem. 

Maybe it's the luck of the draw in films, last year I had high-profile films like "Sinners" and "Nosferatu", and the two "Smile" films, those were all big box-office draws. I had some serious star power, like Russell Crowe in two films and Nicolas Cage in two, Rooney Mara and Nicholas Hoult and there were TWO Marvel films, "Kraven the Hunter" and "Fantastic Four: First Steps". Also I had to pivot when a link failed and there were some tense moments, like was the year-long chain going to break with just two months to go? 

This year, so far I've just had a bad vacation film and a town gone killer crazy, it hasn't exactly been top tier horror stuff, but you know, maybe it's a slow build. There's creepy scary stuff coming, I can see it and feel it. Not expecting too much tonight, but you know, there's 20 more to come as Mason Thames carries over from "The Black Phone".  Still I'm looking at what I'm NOT going to get to this year, like "Weapons" and "Backrooms" and 2 "Pet Sematary" films, "It Follows" and "It Comes at Night", "The Substance" and "Bugonia" and "A Quiet Place: Day One", even "The Slender Man" and "The Babadook", I'll never get to all of those at this rate. So yeah, the biggest fear to be found on the horror list is still FOMO, the fear of missing out. 

THE PLOT: When a mysterious force begins to disrupt their big summer fun, a group of friends team up with a retired police detective to save their island. 

AFTER: Well, we got Mel Gibson tonight, that's some serious star power for a horror film that's just a bit scarier than a "Goosebumps" film. And Lorraine Bracco probably doesn't get called to make a lot of horror films, I wish she could have had a bigger part here but she didn't get cast as the main villain here, that could have really been something, but she just plays a children's book author, maybe she wasn't available for a longer shoot and just wanted a short vacation in Martha's Vineyard as a perk. Then there's Patrick Renna, who's cast as a Little League umpire, and that's clearly a nod to his role in "The Sandlot", which is very clever. He's been in a bunch of TV ads lately, and he does get movie roles, but I think the fact that he still looks just like that kid from the old film is somehow both a blessing and a curse. See also Peter Billingsley from "A Christmas Story". 

Then we've got Kevin James, who has an uncredited role as the editor of the town newspaper, but essentially it's the same role as the mayor in "Jaws", an authority figure who refuses to believe that there's some evil menacing the town, and won't publicize it because of the effect on tourism. It's been over 50 years, and movies are still using the same plot points from "Jaws", we saw this in "The Crazies" too. And what's up with Kevin James, did making all those silly movies like "Paul Blart" just destroy whatever acting credibility he had? Why the need to disappear into a role and not let your name be used in the credits? He could accomplish the same thing by not being in the movie at all. Wasn't there that promotion recently for a film where he pretended to just be a fourth grade art teacher that LOOKED like Kevin James? Dude, we know it's you.

Whatever, man - Kevin James and Mel Gibson both make the year-end countdown tonight by appearing in their third movie this year - Kevin James was also in the Adam Sandler doc and Mel Gibson was in the Sigourney Weaver doc and the Eddie Murphy doc. Hey, if you make the playoffs late in the season, it doesn't exactly matter how you do it - or so I've heard. 

Anyway, a bunch of thematic things carry over from "The Black Phone" along with Mason Thames, like the fact that he plays Little League (or high-school baseball, whichever) in both films. Also, even though we've moved from Denver to Martha's Vineyard and from the 1970s to the 1990s, the town's children are still disappearing. In "The Black Phone" it was a physical disappearance and in this film they're getting mentally erased, like they've checked out of life, or their energy is being drained, but it's still kind of the same idea. And nobody believes the group of kids that sort of knows what's happening but can't really prove it without evidence - the kids who are mentally not there are diagnosed with a form of PTSD, and I can't recall if that was a thing in 1997, like was that a year where parents were more worried about ADD or autism or maybe dyslexia? 

There's a mysterious stranger staying in Noah's house, his mother rented out the top floor for the summer, and naturally it's easy to suspect that the shady lady with the raspy voice who dresses in black is a witch, like maybe she lives in SALEM the rest of the year? Especially when you cast a top actress in that role, and in a lesser movie, sure, the out-of-towner would be the witch, the kids would confront her and she would reveal her true evil self and her penchant for eating children, there would be a showdown and somebody would pour a bucket of water on her and we could all then get back to business, roll the credits. Ah, but I said this was a step ABOVE the normal children-oriented "Goosebumps" type of movie, because all that would be just a bit too easy. And we've seen it before. Thankfully this is a little more complex than that. 

NITPICK POINT: It's a bit confusing to have two main characters with similar names, Eugene and Gene. I know coming up with believable fake names is hard, but why not just change one to avoid any confusion? 

NITPICK POINT #2: Wondering whether a witch counts as a monster is maybe a bit like asking whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich. We've got meat, we've got bread, we've got toppings, it's just not traditionally sandwich-shaped. If an open-faced sandwich counts as a sandwich, then a hot dog IS a sandwich. A fairy-tale witch maybe used to be a human, as in the Salem witch trials, which were all bogus, BTW. In the movies a person can be corrupted into a monster by devilry or witchcraft, though this is different from a "monster" like a troll or a goblin or a kraken. If a werewolf is a monster, then a witch is a monster. 

This is important because it relates to the title of the film, on one level we're promised a monster in the title, and we get a witch. It's fine - but maybe there could have been a better title. "Witch Summer" doesn't really hit the same, maybe "Season of the Witch" or something could have worked better, but that title was already taken. Also, then we would go in expecting a witch movie, and at first the kids here don't know WHAT they're dealing with, is it a demon or a ghost or a sea monster, it puts us on the same level as the kids, so again, it's fine. Ooh, the IMDB says that the original title for this was "The Boys of Summer", which is kind of good, it ties in with the whole baseball thing, but then the nod to being a horror film would be lost. 

It's still kind of a family film, but it's a bit more like "Fright Night" or "The Goonies" than "Goosebumps", which is a good thing overall. And clearly we're all living in a post-"It" and post-"Stranger Things" world, and that's good too.

Directed by David Henrie (last seen in "Walt Before Mickey" and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2")

Also starring Mel Gibson (last seen in "Film Geek"), Julian Lerner (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Abby James Witherspoon (last seen in "Secret Headquarters"), Noah Cottrell (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Nora Zehetner (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Lorraine Bracco (last seen in "The Union"), Emma Fasano, Spencer Fitzgerald (also last seen in "The Black Phone"), Patrick Renna (last seen in "You Gotta Believe"), Ashley Rae Trisler, Gavin Bedell, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Bobbi Baker, Kelly Collins Lintz (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Nico Tirozzi, Lilah Pate, Abrielle Josephine Cincotti, Kevin James (last seen in "Playdate"), Barbara Goodson (last heard in "I Lost My Body"), Violet Berlus, Stacey Stewart and the voice of Lara Fontes.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Red Sox pennants on the attic wall (hang in there, guys, you only have to wait 7 more years...)

The Black Phone

Year 18, Day 276 - 10/3/26 - Movie #5,450

BEFORE: Well, it took a couple days to get rolling, but I think some scary things are looming here, nothing's given me nightmares yet, which is good, but this would be the season for it. I got my one bag of Halloween candy which should suffice, if we get no trick-or-treaters and we have to eat the candy ourselves, well, I made sure to get only fun-size candy bars that we like. There's Halloween decorations in the Dollar Store, but also Thanksgiving table decorations and Christmas stuff. Why not buy all three and just decorate the house once, for All Hallows' Thanks Christmas Eve? OK, I'm still workshopping the name. HalloThanksMas? 

I'm on Movie 250 for the year, this is really the last numerical stop-over before the end, so this Movie Year will be over in just 50 movies, we're much closer to the end than to the beginning, and it will be over before you know it. Just like life at my age. E. Roger Mitchell carries over from "The Crazies". This one's been sitting on the watchlist for a couple years, so I'm going to take the opportunity to get to it, as it's already got a sequel on the Netflix. 

THE PLOT: After being abducted and locked in a basement, a boy starts receiving calls on a disconnected phone from the killer's previous victims. 

AFTER: All right, we're finally on a horror movie that's ABOUT something, not just a bad vacation or a town full of chaos. We've got a child predator on the loose in Denver in the 1970's, his name is the Grabber, and he seems to be inspired by that Child Catcher character in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", or maybe that's just me. When I was a kid and saw that happy little Dick van Dyke movie about the flying car, I was pretty darn scared of the Child Catcher. You mean there's are people out there who dress in black and walk around with giant nets and catch kids? What the hell? I mean, I guess there are people like that out there, just not sponsored by the government, and where they put those kids and what they do to them, well, you're probably better off not knowing. 

But the timeline is right, the 1970's is about when there started to be a lot of kids going missing, starting in 1984 they were putting their pictures and names on milk cartons, because that's what you want to read about in the morning while you're eating your Froot Loops, that some kid from your class has gone missing and is currently in someone's basement, if they're lucky. More likely they're already buried somewhere and their body will never be found. (The milk carton thing lasted until the mid 1990s when somebody invented AMBER alerts.). How many "Grabbers" were there in real life that were never caught? I guess we'll never know. 

Back then, there was nothing you could really DO when somebody disappeared, sure the police were working on it, but gone is gone. You couldn't search every house, and if there wasn't any evidence to go on, what next? So there was probably a feeling of helplessness and disappointment in addition to the loss. Finney Blake here has lost both a close friend and a rival on a Little League team, but he's also got an abusive father who's drunk most of the time, and no way to track down The Grabber - oh, don't worry, he'll come and find YOU. Finney's sister, Gwen, has had a dream about a black van and black balloons, and suddenly the police want to talk to her, because they did find evidence of black balloons, and that information was not released to the press. This leads to the police questioning their father, who then beats Gwen for apparently having psychic dreams, an ability her mother had, and those dreams drove her to suicide. 

One day Finney encounters an amateur magician with a black van and black balloons (uh-oh) and I'm not sure if he fell for the Grabber's diversions, or if he went willingly to find out what happened to his friend. Either way, he wakes up in a basement room and the masked Grabber brings him food on a tray, informing him that the basement is soundproofed and there's no way out. But he MIGHT let Finney out if he follows the rules...yeah, I kind of don't think this guy is very trustworthy, call me crazy. There is, for some reason, a black rotary phone on the wall, which is disconnected and useless. So, umm, why is it there, then? 

Ah, at some point the phone DOES ring, which is confusing at first. But the call is from another victim, somehow, only that caller is confused about who they are and also where they are. Finney knows enough about the missing boys to determine that this is one of the Grabber's previous victims, and he's got some information about what's to come, and possibly a way to escape. A second call from Bruce, the baseball player, has advice to dig a tunnel, which turns out not to work, however the advice was still helpful in the long run for another reason. There's a pattern here, which is quite clever, because individually each previous victim was unable to escape, so it makes sense that their advice is insufficient, but perhaps with enough phone calls Finney could try different things, and put together something that can work. 

Meanwhile, Gwen is trying harder than ever to have one of those psychic dreams, so she can determine the location of her missing brother and relay that information to the police. Eventually the psychic energy in town (or whatever) allows her into the backstory of one of the victims, and there are enough clues within that kid's story for her to ride around the town and look for a house with a certain look and a certain house number. But, can she figure it out in time, and will the police believe her? 

This feels like "Stephen King Lite", it's a little bit of "It" and a little bit of "The Shining" and maybe a whole lot of "Stranger Things" mixed together. Well, the Duffer Brothers probably stole a bunch of things from Stephen King, too. Aha, this is based on a short story written by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son, really that explains a LOT about it. The director apparently added a bunch of things from his own childhood, growing up in Denver in the 1970's, so that gives it a particular focus and a certain feel. It's fine, I mean I'm not quite sure how they managed to justify a sequel, but I guess I'll find out in a couple days. That's right, I've got to work another film in first, sorry. Not sorry. 

Directed by Scott Derrickson (director of "Doctor Strange" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still")

Also starring Mason Thames (last seen in "Incoming"), Madeleine McGraw (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Maudie"), Jeremy Davies (last seen in "The House that Jack Built"), Troy Rudeseal, James Ransone (last seen in "Empire State"), Miguel Cazarez Mora, Rebecca Clarke, J. Gaven Wilde, Spencer Fitzgerald, Jordan Isaiah White, Brady Ryan, Tristan Pravong, Jacob Moran, Brady Hepner (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Banks Repeta (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Parrish Stikeleather, Kristina Arjona, Sheila O'Rear (last seen in "Iron Man 3"), Rocco Poveromo, Kellen Rhude (last seen in "The Killer"), Nina Repeta (last seen in "Radioland Murders"), Lukas Colagross, Mark Riccardi, Megan Petersen, Robert Fortunato, Gina Jun (last seen in "The Good Nurse")

RATING: 6 out of 10 issues of Starlog magazine

The Crazies

Year 18, Day 275 - 10/2/26 - Movie #5,449

BEFORE: OK, day 2 of the Shock Block, here's hoping for some real horror, not just a day-to-day killer thriller. I couldn't work in "The Ruins" to go with "A Perfect Getaway", but I noticed that if I had gotten to that film on October 1 somehow, today's film would still be today's film, because Joe Anderson would carry over from "The Ruins" to here. Some things are just inevitable, I guess. 

There were two films last October that were kind of like this, with people going crazy and becoming mindless killers, there was "Cooties" which had kids in an elementary school turned into zombies by eating contaminated chicken, and "Mom and Dad" which had adults turned into killers, they were kind of like two sides of the same coin. Now we've got "The Crazies", which I think I put on the list about the same time as "Cooties", I think this one is older but I just got to that one first. That's how the horror cookie crumbles...

Timothy Olyphant carries over from "A Perfect Getaway".

THE PLOT: After a strange plane crash, an unusual toxic virus enters a quaint farming town. A young couple are quarantined, but they fight for survival with help from a couple friends. 

AFTER: My instincts were correct, this film was released a few years before "Cooties", that film with a similar (?) theme. This one's much more serious, that one was more of a comedy, a zom-com. This one came out in 2010, which is nine years before the COVID pandemic, but I think now that the big shut-down is in the rear-view, I think we can definitely see some similarities. There's a big government take-over in this small town in Iowa where the plane went down (it was in the middle of the night, landed in a lake and apparently nobody even noticed. But, you'd think there would be something in the news about any plane crash, or a missing plane, right? So what does that tell you, that it's all being kept hush-hush? 

Here the transmitted virus or whatever was made as a biological weapon, perhaps if we have films like this, that's one reason people were willing to believe that COVID-19 was made in a lab and didn't come from a Chinese wild animal market in Yuhan. But we had other strains of COVID before, like COVID-17 and COVID-18, so it seems logical that once that's out there, it's going to mutate over time and turn into different strains, like the flu does. If you get your flu shot every year (which you should) you're getting the vaccine for what scientists THINK the most common flu strain this winter is going to be. There's no way to know for sure, another strain may develop and become more prominent, which means your shot was a waste of time, but still, you should probably get it. 

I remember the first COVID vaccines coming out in December of 2020, the news has reminded us that Dolly Parton helped fund the early vaccines. My wife and I were NOT in the first group of people vaccinated, I think we got our shots in February 2021, because I remember spending Valentine's Day on the phone trying to book appointments at the Aqueduct Racetrack here in Queens, NY. And I did get through on the phone, twice, and we both had medical conditions that allowed us to get our shots in an earlier group of senior citizens, even though we weren't THAT old at the time. I think we were very lucky to get the shots so early, and I remember there was snow on the ground when we took the subway to the racetrack - I went four times, twice for my shots and I went with my wife for hers as moral support. 

Anyway, somehow somebody in 2010 had a glimpse of the future, and imagined a small town in Iowa with a biological weapon of some kind in its water supply, something not directly deadly, only it tended to eat away at an infected person's brain until only the kill-or-be-killed lizard mode remained. People would retain their knowledge of using weapons, and their rage levels would be bumped up to the max, which equates to a recipe for disaster. The humanity of the person is gone, their ability to reason and resolve conflicts peacefully, putting them in constant "Mortal Kombat" fight mode. Since the first few people affected were older white men, one with a known drinking problem, it took a while for anyone to realize there was a pattern - it could have just been a form of dementia or substance abuse side effects, until they learned how widespread it really was. 

We see most of the disaster from the POV of David, the town sheriff, and his wife, Judy, who is a doctor. He's got the police training to deal with the violence and she's got the medical knowledge to maybe figure out what's going wrong with these people. David tries to convince the mayor to turn off the town's water supply, because so far the infected people were all close to the town's water source, but the mayor got his training from watching "Jaws", apparently, because since this is a farming community, the water supply is most vital. David goes to the town morgue to check in on the body of the pilot that was found in the river, only to find that the coroner is now infected and attackes him with a bone saw. 

When the government swoops in and offers to relocate all of the town's citizens, they separate David and his wife because she has an elevated temperature - but it's because she's pregnant, not infected. A bunch of similarly feverish women are taken to a facility and strapped to gurneys for everyone's protection, however this also leaves them defenseless when an infected person attacks the compound. Thankfully David has tracked down his deputy, one of the few people who avoided being relocated, and they arrive in time to save Judy and her assistant, Becca. Attempts to get Becca's boyfriend and head out of town are thwarted by more military personnel, who by now are just shooting civilians on sight, just to be on the safe side. Their commandeered car is followed by a helicopter that tries to blow them up, they seek refuge in a car wash which is also populated by infected people, and since the car is being automatically guided through the car wash at a slow speed, the people inside are like sitting ducks. The car wash employees are very angry, I suppose over time they've been overworked and underpaid. 

Taking out a black SUV with a spike strip puts the group in contact with a government employee who reveals what's really going on here, the plane carrying the biological weapon was transporting it to Texas so it could be destroyed. Russell, the deputy, is starting to show signs of being infected, so David and Judy have to make some harsh decisions about whether they can travel any further with him, and at a truck stop, the couple decides (after taking out a few more Crazies) to head for Cedar Rapids, as the government is planning to destroy the entire town, again, just to be on the safe side. The news media informs the public that the disaster in this small town was the result of an industrial accident, to prevent further panic. Sure, because who can tell the difference between a factory fire and a nuclear bomb? 

I mean, if you watch a lot of true crime stuff you hear every so often about someone killing their spouse, or a mother killing her kids and we can't always wrap our heads around the "why" of it, and then here comes a film that says maybe sometimes there is no "why", it's just that sometimes people could lose their rationale and be turned into killing machines. I'm not going to say that's comforting, but the alternative is to believe that humans just somehow snap from time to time or are so stressed out that they lose control. I saw a news report a couple days ago about a man who was stabbed five times on the subway, and I had to stay tuned just to see if the assailant was the same guy who punched me in a subway station a couple of months ago. Part of the reason I did not fight back was because I wasn't sure if that guy had a knife or a gun on him, so I didn't want to escalate the situation. 

But I guess maybe the lesson to be learned here is to stick to bottled water if there's ever any doubt about what's going on in your town. 

Directed by Breck Eisner (director of "Sahara")

Also starring Radha Mitchell (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Joe Anderson (last seen in "Hangman"), Danielle Panabaker (last seen in "Yours, Mine & Ours"), Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West"), Preston Bailey (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), John Aylward (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Joe Reegan, Glenn Morshower (last seen in "The Little Things"), Larry Cedar (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Gregory Sporleder (last seen in "The Grifters"), Mike Hickman (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Lisa K. Wyatt (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Justin Welborn, Chet Grissom (last seen in "Nobody Walks"), Tahmus Rounds (last seen in "Copycat"), Brett Wagner (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Alex Van (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Jay Pearson (ditto), Tony Winters (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Frank Hoyt Taylor (last seen in "Poms"), Justin Miles (last seen in "Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues"), Marian Green (last seen in "Jackpot!"), E. Roger Mitchell (last seen in "Daddy's Little Girls"), Michael H. Cole (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Lynn Lowry (last seen in "Eating Raoul"), Chris Carnel (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Jimmy Waitman, Kathryn Kim (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Adam Dingeman, Megan Hensley, Lori Beth Sikes (last seen in "Two Weeks"), Ann Roth (last seen in "Barbie"), Mickey Cole Jr. (last seen in "The Internship"), Elizabeth Barrett, Rachel Storey, Bruce Aune, Jacqueline Sherrard, Mary Lynn Owen (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Pierce Gagnon (last heard in "Scoob!"), Matt Lintz (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Wilbur Fitzgerald (last seen in "Life as We Know It"), Lexie Behr,

RATING: 6 out of 10 burning cars

A Perfect Getaway

Year 18, Day 274 - 10/1/26 - Movie #5,448

It's finally here, the October Shock Block, we all got here in one piece - but... how many of us will survive? Mwah hah hah... I really could not have asked for a better lead in than a couple of films about a mythical Spider Woman and a few giant snakes, none of those were on my horror radar. Let me explain...

I keep the horror films on a separate list, there WERE about 186 films that covered the whole gamut of horror, from simple classic monster movies to body horror to the zombie movies and some of the future dystopia stuff, alien invasions too - there's now about 184 films because I watched "Opus" and "Prey", they didn't really link to other horror movies, but I saw a way to work them into the September line-up. That's still WAY more horror movies than I can watch in a month, it's more than about six years worth. But that's how many I need to have in order to assemble a workable chain that will cover 25 to 30 days. And I keep them in a very rough possible chain order, which of course has to be flexible, so it's color-coded, any actor that appears in multiple movies is highlighted in green, so if I need to move things around, that will give me a quick glance at what I'm able to do, what connects with what. This also gives me an even rougher idea about what films might start or end chains, so I have a target to aim for in late September. 

The longest horror chain I had was 29 movies, that was a bit too much for this year, I'm going to be out of town for a week - so I took the second longest chain of 14 movies, and kind of Frankensteined on 10 movies out of that 29, creating a chain of 24, which fits perfectly. And IT'S ALIVE! ALIVE, I TELL YOU! THEY SAID IT COULD NOT BE DONE, BUT IT LIVES! Umm, yeah, sorry about that. I've carefully chosen these 24 movies, which will leave me with 160 not watched, and I took that remainder chain of 19 movies, tacked on 2, and maybe that chain of 21 films will come in handy next year, who knows, it's too soon to say, new horror films are being added to the chain all the time and I don't want to think about next October's films until at least summer. But many horror films don't link up with the others, so they need your help, won't you donate now and help link horror chains for 2027 and beyond? Anyway, here are the links that should get me to Halloween, and I'm going to knock off TWO high-profile horror franchises this month: 

Steve Zahn carries over from "Anaconda" (2025) and then Timothy Olyphant, E. Roger Mitchell, Mason Thames, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Bacon, Sophie Thatcher, Harvey Guillen, Rob Riggle, Mark Steger, Devon Sawa, Tony Todd, Anthony Michael Frederick, Stephanie Honore, and Tony Todd again. Tony Todd's going to be around a lot, which might clue you in about those two big franchises. I've probably said too much. 

THE PLOT: Two pairs of lovers on a Hawaiian vacation discover that psychopaths are stalking and murdering tourists on the islands. 

AFTER: My first thought while watching this was, damn, this isn't a horror movie. Not in the sense of ghosts and monsters and such, and my fear was that I put it on a DVD with "The Ruins" (if memory serves) which IS a proper horror movie, I think, and this one kind of fell backwards on to the horror list, and it doesn't really belong there. But then I remember that I have made allowances for serial killer films in the past, that kind of counts as a form of horror movie, so sure, why not, it's a way to kind of ease in to the horror genre, not that there IS any easy way in, or out, for that matter, but you know, it's just where we find ourselves. I've never felt any strong urge to watch the "Resident Evil" films, but most are available on streaming now, so I should probably add them in time for next October, and this would have made a decent lead-in. But I can't save films for possible links, I have to link movies NOW and work with what I have, and live for today because we're here for a scary time, and maybe not for a long time. 

Anyway, serial killers, they walk among us, and they could be anybody - I bet you have that friend who's too lazy to get a costume for Halloween, or too cool or too affected, whichever - so he just dresses in normal clothes and tells everyone he's dressed as a serial killer. Ha ha, that would be very funny if you didn't pull the same stunt last year and the year before that. But the point is that they COULD be anybody, especially if they're the kind who gain their prey's trust before killing them, and then assume their identities. Most killers just kill, not all of them devote the time to really KNOW their victims, connect with them on a deeper level, find out their hopes and dreams before they leave them in a hotel room after cutting off their fingers and removing their teeth. Well, you want to give the coroners a real challenge, yeah, I get it. 

So we have three couples here enjoying the BEAUTIFUL scenery of Hawaii, we have the honeymooning newlyweds, Cliff and Cydney, we have the talkative Cleo and the muscular dirtbag Kale, and we have special ops agent (maybe) Nick and his girlfriend Gina. Once the news breaks that a pair of dead bodies has been found in Honolulu, and the killers are believed to be a man and a woman, well, sure, these three couples who never knew each other before this vacation have every right to suspect each other of being serial killers. It's not like there are hundreds or even thousands of couples visiting Hawaii at any given moment, right? I mean, when all you know about the pair of murderers is that they are human, they breathe oxygen and eat food, sure, it's probably the shady couple that you just met and copped an attitude for no reason when you offered them a ride. Or maybe the killer is the guy who claims to be ex-military, says he has a metal plate in his head whose girlfriend seems a little TOO good at butchering a wild goat that he hunted. 

Well, whichever one it is, you'll probably never guess it, unless you guess the most unlikely of the bunch, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion. Maybe if you've seen a ton of movies then you'll guess it right away because you can out-think the screenwriter like the Sicilian in "The Princess Bride". Now, if I'm a writer do I make the killers the ones that you would never suspect, or would you suspect me to make the killers the ones you would never suspect, therefore they are the most obvious ones? Anyway, go nuts, try and guess who the killers are, I just felt very tricked by this movie because it seemed to be one thing and then suddenly it was another. So I guess when you least suspect it, suspect it. If that's possible. 

I don't quite understand the bit with the wedding video, why certain people had to dub voices over and mess with the video, what was the point of all that? I guess I missed something somewhere along the way. Anyway, the film is kind of at odds with itself because as one character says, "Nothing bad ever happens in Hawaii", and then of course it goes on to show something very bad happening in Hawaii. But the place where everyone has a criminal record and nobody is who they're pretending to be, sorry, but that's Alaska. Some screenwriter must have gotten them confused. 

Directed by David Twohy (director of "Riddick" and "The Chronicles of Riddick")

Also starring Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "The Girl Next Door"), Milla Jovovich (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Kiele Sanchez (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Marley Shelton (last seen in "Scream" (2022)), Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Spiderhead"), Anthony Ruivivar (last seen in "The Adjustment Bureau"), Dale Dickey (last seen in "Flag Day"), Wendy Braun (last seen in "The Clapper"), Peter Navy Tuiasosopo (last seen in "Speed Racer"), Jim Cruz (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Angela Sun (last seen in "Street Kings"), Leandra Gillis, Carlos Alberto Lopez (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Katie Chonacas (last seen in "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Natalie Garza, Lindsay Halladay, Mercedes Leggett (last seen in "Mother!"), Tory Kittles (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Brandon Ray Olive (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Ryan Gesell, Evelyn Lopez, John T. Cogan, Katelin Chesna (last seen in "The Electric State"), Andy Hoff (last seen in "King Richard"), Travis Willingham (last heard in "Lego Batman: The Movie - DC Super Heroes Unite"), Webster Williams, Cristina Soler, D. Grigsby Poland, Grace Connelly, and the voice of Gugun Deep Singh (last seen in "Knox Goes Away"), 

RATING: 3 out of 10 cliffside hiking trails

Anaconda (2025)

Year 18, Day 273 - 9/30/26 - Movie #5,447

BEFORE: This might be the first time I've watched two films with the exact same title back to back - I'm not 100% sure, I'd have to check - but I think the closest I've come to that was watching two films titled "Havoc" last year (or maybe the year before last) with just one film in between, because the two films didn't share any actors. But Netflix is currently showing both the original 1997 "Anaconda" film and the comedy spoof (?) of it, so why not take advantage of that, since two cast members from the original make cameos. 

Jennifer Lopez carries over one last time from "Anaconda" (1997). That's it, no more J. Lo movies this year, I've got bigger snakes to fry. She's closing this Movie Year with 8 appearances, which is more than enough. This ties her with people like Chevy Chase and John Belushi, but still nowhere near Steve Martin or Bill Murray. Ha, she wishes...if I had to watch 4 more J. Lo movies right now - forget it, I just couldn't do it. I'd find another way. 

It's the last day of September, I've grown back my fall facial hair, so here's the format breakdown for the last month, in case you want to know how to track down this month's features. October's horror chain linking will be posted tomorrow. 

SEPTEMBER

14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): City Island, At Middleton, Gasoline Alley, Hart's War, Sabotage, Lyle Lyle Crocodile, Smurfs (2025), The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Happily N'ever After 2, Opus, Novocaine, Margaret, Now You See Me: Now You Don't, An Unfinished Life

8 watched on Netflix: Broke, Tears of the Sun, Metal Lords, GOAT, Swapped, Home, Anaconda (1997), Anaconda (2025)

2 watched on Amazon Prime: The Wrecking Crew, Unstoppable
3 watched on Hulu: Boy Kills World, Prey, Kiss of the Spider Woman

1 watched on Disney+: Hoppers

1 watched on Peacock: Megamind vs. the Doom Syndicate

1 watched in theaters: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

30 TOTAL

THE PLOT: A group of friends going through a mid-life crisis decide to remake a favorite movie from their youth but encounter unexpected events when they enter the jungle. 

AFTER: We live in a very bizarre time - I've been on Instagram as myself for a year now (before that, I was running someone else's account as part of my job) and really, what we've got out there in the world now is everybody giving their opinion on everything, whether other people wan to hear it or not. And then after THOSE people express their opinions, other people jump in with the comments to explain why that person is misguided or just plain wrong. I mean, it all started with restaurants, which one has the best pizza, or sandwiches - innocent enough, I mean we already have Yelp for that, but that's full of conflicting opinions, too. So now I've seen a zillion videos about NY pizza and NY delis, everyone saying basically the same thing, but about different places. There are so many reviews out there that now people are starting to review the reviewers, you've seen how people just replay other peoples videos and weigh in on their lack of cooking skills, or how dumb they are about whatever. Inevitably, this is going to lead to people commenting on the commenters, reviewing the reviewers, and I hate to think what comes after that. 

In much the same way, we have movie reviewers and movie fans, and that means some fans say they're bigger fans than the other fans, I realize "Star Wars" might be the cause of this, because before that nobody cared how MUCH of a fan you were, or felt the need to prove this about themselves. So it reached a point where some people made tribute movies, "fan films", starting with Star Trek and Star Wars, but then there was the group of teens that re-shot "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and some other teen did that with "Rambo", too. Movies are holding up a mirror to society, but then some people began holding up a mirror to THAT mirror, and you know what happens when you put two mirrors together, you can kind of look into infinity. 

Then we had films ABOUT film fans, like "Trekkies" and such, now THAT trend is starting to trickle down to even low-level but campy movies like "Anaconda". I'm sorry, but does "Anaconda" have its own fan conventions, like Star Wars and Star Trek do? Is there a "Fanaconda-Con" that I'm not aware of? I've never met anyone who says that THAT is their favorite movie, I mean, if you know somebody who says that, please, get them some help, there must be a program somewhere you can enroll them in. I mean, sure, this is all done in the name of comedy here, so I think I'm correct in saying that the fan-base for this film only goes so far, and not very deep. 

This started as a reboot for the franchise (I guess there was an "Anaconda 2" that nobody cared about, plus some TV movies) but morphed into a meta-reboot, in other words it's kind of self-aware and therefore also not meant to be taken seriously, at all, and also can't really be considered part of the franchise. If I made a sequel to "Gone With the Wind" and ended up telling the story of the people making that sequel and how difficult that was to do, forgetting about concentrating on the story and just making that the film-within-the-film, well, that's not a real sequel, then, is it? The "Anaconda" fandom here is really just a vehicle to sell us another mostly-mindless Jack Black movie, just like that "Minecraft" movie a couple years ago. 

A lot of the comedy here comes from this habit that the anacondas supposedly have for regurgitating their prey and eating it several times. This was used in the original 1997 film when the crazy snake expert got eaten by the snake, then it spit him out again because it wanted to eat more people, and the guy was mostly dead but also kind of all digested and melty, it wasn't a good look. Since this is a comedy, this device is used several times to make us think certain characters are dead, but no, they're just in a snake-induced coma or something, which I'm not sure is a thing. Why wouldn't the snake swallow someone and digest them, slither off and just live quietly off their body meat for a week or so?  I know owls tend to regurgitate the mice that they eat, I'm just not sold on this happening with giant snakes. 

So here I am, being the reviewer, pointing out that (according to Google, anyway) there are no documented cases of an anaconda eating a person - it's all just a movie convention. Look, piranhas don't eat people either, that's another movie myth, you might get a little bite from one but they don't gang up on giant prey and devour it like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, that all came from a visit that Teddy Roosevelt made to Brazil one time, some Brazilians blocked off piranhas in a lagoon and starved them for a while so they'd attack a cow for his entertainment, but it's just not natural piranha behavior. In a similar fashion, an anaconda (of normal size, at least) would not be able to eat a person because their jaw structure would not allow their mouth to open wide enough to get past a person's shoulders. Whew, what a relief. So they don't seek out people for food, and they prefer to hunt fish, deer, delicious capybaras and wild pigs in their natural habitats. 

This is a NITPICK POINT from yesterday, but what zoo would even take a 40-foot anaconda? What zoo would be able to handle a snake that size, and if it were a man-eating snake, what zoo would be willing to take that risk? It's bad enough there are (supposedly) alligators in the sewers, do you want to bring a giant snake into an urban area? If it's as strong and crafty as the one in the movie, it's going to get loose for sure, and then start eating people. Then spitting them out and eating them again, I suppose. 

I just also Googled whether anacondas regurgitate their food, and they do - but not for the reasons in the film, so they can have a second kill. They will throw up their food if they need to escape danger, because a full stomach will slow them down. It could also regurgitate due to stress, or if it is too hot or too cold, it can apparently only digest food within a certain temperature range. Also if it eats food that is spoiled, it could vomit, just like most people (not me, I've got a cast-iron stomach, and I have not vomited since January 1, 1996. Don't ask me how I know that date.)

There are, naturally, many twists and turns along the way as these four adults, former childhood friends, get together and decide to film an "Anaconda" reboot. There are problems renting the boat, illegal gold miners to deal with, and oh yeah, there's that giant snake that finds them. And it's animated much better than the one in the 1997 film. They also encounter a crew from Sony that is ALSO filming a reboot of "Anaconda", because of course Hollywood has no new ideas. But this leads to questions about whether they have the actual rights to make a reboot or not. Ha ha, what a funny joke, we all wasted our time and a lot of money. Yes, it's a feeling we all know much too well, especially if you paid to see this in the theaters when it came out on Netflix just a few weeks later. 

Directed by Tom Gormican (director of "That Awkward Moment" and "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent")

Also starring Jack Black (last heard in "Borderlands"), Paul Rudd (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Steve Zahn (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Thandiwe Newton (last heard in "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget"), Daniela Melchior (last seen in "Marlowe"), Selton Mello, Ice Cube (also carrying over from "Anaconda" (1997)), Rui Ricardo Diaz, John Billingsley (last seen in "The Last Word"), Sebastian Sero, Diego Arnary, Dan Silveira (last seen in "Elvis"), Anna Francesca Armenia, Jarred Blakiston, John Voce, Lisa Kay (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Diary"), Ron Smyck (last seen in "Spiderhead"), Ben Lawson (last seen in "Bombshell"), Renee Herbert, Romeo Ellard, Reagan George, Aimee Bah, Jack Waters, Yasmin Kassim, Gabriel Jose, Jankester Ayala, Cheree Cassidy, Paulo Borges,

RATING: 4 out of 10 humdrum wedding videos

Anaconda (1997)

Year 18, Day 272 - 9/29/26 - Movie #5,446

BEFORE: Well, this wasn't part of my original plan - but as I say very often, this will make some more sense tomorrow. This does feel a bit like a classic film, even though a lot of people make fun of it and hardly anyone takes it seriously these days. It's also kind of horror-ish, so it's a good lead-in perhaps as September comes to a close and we get ready for the annual Shock Block. 

Yup, Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "The Kiss of the Spider Woman". Eventually I can say I've seen every film with her in it, and I won't have to watch any more. I think I'm close. 

THE PLOT: A "National Geographic" film crew is take hostage by an insane hunter, who forces them along on his quest to capture the world's largest and deadliest snake. 

AFTER: I'm so glad I watched that documentary about the making of "Jaws" back in July, because essentially this IS a rip-off of (or homage to) "Jaws". You just have to replace "shark" with "anaconda" and "holiday weekend in a New England coastal town" with "documentary film crew on the Amazon River to film a lost tribe". Oh, and instead of Robert Shaw as the crazy shark hunter, we have Jon Voight as the crazy snake hunter. See, it's basically the same movie!

While I don't know as many details about the making of "Anaconda", I've already read on IMDB that they had mechanical problems with the animatronic snake - because we're not LEARNING, people, we're just making the same mistakes over and over again! I think they did add a fair amount of CGI to make the snake appear to move around, that was just not an option back in the days of "Jaws" - but as a result, the snake doesn't appear very realistic here in some shots, and sometimes it's downright ridiculous. Can a giant snake really move THAT fast? Like in the "King Kong" and "Godzilla" movies they tended to slow down the footage (aka shoot at high speed, then play back regular) to make the gigantic monsters appear more gigantic-er, as they have to move their giant limbs through more space to walk around, that therefore takes longer. But no, OK, giant snake very fast in this one, almost too fast. 

Nobody sets out to make a BAD film (except John Waters maybe) I think most everyone tries to make a GOOD film, it's just that not everyone succeeds. And so we have technical level SPFX bad, and campy ridiculous bad and poorly-written bad, and then there's bad acting bad. Well, it's a whole smorgasbord of those things here, take your pick. It's a KFC chicken, mashed potatoes and corn bowl, namely a bunch of sad items in a failure pile. OK, so there's a lot of action, if you like action that's like the gravy poured on top of the bowl of things. Gravy is almost always good, it can hide a lot of disappointing elements and at least your taste buds will be semi-satisfied here. If you're a fan of the Razzie Awards and the kind of films they tend to honor, then you maybe hit the jackpot here. 

The film starts off with a poacher, played by Danny Trejo, who is threatened by an unseen creature (psst, it's a snake...) and once he's got nowhere else to turn, he commits suicide with his revolver. It's a smart move, getting out of the film early, for sure. The rest of the cast isn't so lucky, although Eric Stoltz plays an anthropologist who gets poisoned by a giant wasp and spends most of the movie recovering from the poison and the tracheotomy they had to perform so he could breathe. Really, another smart move, it's probably worth the effects of the poison if it means you can be unconscious half of the movie. 

The horror movie part kicks in after the snake attacks, and we lose most of the cast, one by one, as if the snake is the masked serial killer in the forest and people who go off and have sex in the jungle are more vulnerable than the others. Commanding everyone to stay on the boat at night doesn't help much, it just means the snake is going to crush and devour anyone who falls off the boat or jumps off the boat for any reason. Hey, this is nature, just like in "Hoppers" if it's your turn to be food for a snake, that's just the way it goes, who are we to mess with the natural order of things? 

Once the anthropologist is sidelined and the boat driver is eaten, it appears that the crazy snake expert is in charge. Excuse me, why isn't the film director in charge, just because she's a woman? That's sexist, and also the man is a poacher and insane, however since he's tempted a few of the crew with the promise of a $1 million payday for catching a giant anaconda alive, he's gotten enough people on his side, majority rules, and this kind of reminds me of how Trump won two elections.  

The crew's boat gets jammed on the riverbed right by a waterfall - this might not have happened if the driver were still alive. But this forces a showdown with both the snake and the man trying to catch the snake, who gets a tranquilizer dart in his back and falls into the river. Well, since there's no body there's probably a 100% chance we'll see him again in a bit. The snake is shot several times in the head and dies, but you know, there's always the chance of a BIGGER snake appearing also.  Then there's proof of how shoddily this film was made, because when the boat gets loose from the riverbed, there's a shot of the boat moving away which is JUST the shot of it getting stuck, but played in reverse. I say this because the waterfall was moving in the wrong direcion, and I'm fairly sure water doesn't flow UP.

The boat moves on to an abandoned sawmill, and surprise, the snake expert is there and second surprise, so is a bigger snake. SO there's another "final" showdown, with really the same solution that "Jaws" used - when in doubt, just blow stuff up. Tried and true, it always works.

Directed by Luis Llosa (director of "The Specialist")

Also starring Ice Cube (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Film Geek"), Eric Stoltz (last seen in "The House of Mirth"), Jonathan Hyde (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "Haunted Mansion" (2023)), Kari Wuhrer (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Vincent Castellanos (last seen in "Eulogy"), Danny Trejo (last heard in Zootopia 2") and the voice of Frank Welker (last heard in "Deep Blue Sea"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 buckets of monkey blood (look, I have no idea if snakes are attracted to it. does it really matter?)

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025)

Year 18, Day 271 - 9/28/26 - Movie #5,445

BEFORE: Just two days and two films left in September after this - man, that felt like a quick month. It almost feels like there's a new month every 30 days or so, that's how fast time feels like it's moving. Of course, this is a remake of a film from 1985, which I watched in 2012 as part of my "World Tour" of movies, which was a virtual trip around the world in under 80 days. Through movies, I went around the world TWICE in just 64 days - I say twice because the last film of the year was "Around the World in 80 Days" as sort of a victory lap. 

The film "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was watched on Day 56, which was also Halloween, and I'd started in San Francisco ("They Call Me Mister Tibbs!"), gone across the U.S. to New York and New England, then set sail for Europe, down to Africa and worked my way across Asia and Australia, then over to South America to work my way back up through Mexico for San Francisco again with "The Lady from Shanghai". It was a huge undertaking and very difficult to plan, I kept track of my virtual mileage, and of course I'll never do that again. Thankfully I don't have to, I later fell into this "whatever links by actor" format that I'm comfortable with. 

Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "Unstoppable". Hey, I got from "Spider-Man" to "Spider Woman" in only 6 days, I probably could have done that in four but I didn't think of it, plus I had a different order in mind for some reason. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985) (Movie #1,292)

THE PLOT: Valentin, a political prisoner, shares a cell with Molina, convicted for public indecencly. An unlikely bond forms as Molina recounts an old Hollywood musical plot starring Ingrid Luna. 

AFTER: Honestly, I watched the original "Kiss of the Spider Woman so long ago (13 years!) that I don't remember very much about it. Of course, it's a classic film and it's been on and off of a lost of "Best Movies of All-Time" lists since then. Side note, did anyone ever find out what happened to the publisher of that book "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die"? I used to keep an updated record of how many of those 1,001 I'd seen, and I was up to 440 of them seen, and then after 2021, I don't think another edition of the book was published. I guess they kept dropping a couple classic movies every year to make room for newer ones, and that alienated the olds, plus they never had enough space for ALL of the best recent films, and that alienated the young people? Anyway...

I suppose any movie can use a remake every 40 or so years, we have much better production values than we had in 1985, and there's HD streaming now, and 70mm IMAX Infinity Laser screens, whatever that means. So movies are bigger than they ever were, except you're probably just going to watch them on your tiny phone, aren't you? I prefer to at least watch movies on my computer screen if they're streaming, and my giant TV screen if they're on cable. I had to go with the computer screen today because this film is on Hulu, and we all know what that means, the film might be good, but it ain't gonna be great. I'm stereotyping, sure, but doing that saves a lot of time, especially if there's some truth in what you're saying. I've got a giant list of films that are or were on Hulu, and I've barely made a dent in getting those films added to my someday/maybe list, because it's a huge job, and I've decided to cap off that list at 350 films, which means after going through the September IMDB "What's New in September on Streaming" lists, I can only add 10 more right now, I'm almost at capacity. Finding more movies to add is never the problem, but guessing at which ones I will most likely enjoy, that's much tougher. A bunch of films are also leaving cable/on demand in September, and well, they have priority over the ones that will still be on demand a year from now. 

And sure, this film is bigger, more colorful and flashier than the original version, all around. Perhaps this is because it's adapted from the Broadway musical, which in turn was adapted from the original film (which might have been adapted from a play, I can't recall...). Oddly, this is the second film this Movie Year that followed that Pokemon-style evolution, the newer "Matilda" film was also based on the stage musical that was based on the non-musical original film. This is the trend, these days, just keep working the same story into different versions, get a novelization out on the shelves, get a "making of" documentary made, get a coloring book made for the true fans to buy/collect. I haven't seen a lot of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" merch out there, like no hats or t-shirts or NASCAR sponsorships, so that means somebody is not doing their job. 

Unfortunately, some of those tired old sterotypes from the 1980's came along for the ride, especially where homosexuality is concerned. The old theories were that some men were gay because of how they were raised, either they were coddled by their mother or their father was absent, or both, and this theory should have gone the way of the dinosaur by now. I'd like to see the numbers on how many gay men in America were raised without fathers, I don't think the data will support the "theory". Also, it's another trope that gay men want to "be women", sure this might be true for some, but I'll bet there are plenty of gay men who are content with just being gay men. I don't want to over-simplify this, because it could be more complicated than I think it is, however it's very rude to even have these theories at all and make generalizations across the board. Yes, of course there are trans people, and if this desire to be a woman and not a man is here to represent trans people, then I suppose it's fine - but I suspect it's that old stereotype carrying over from the 1985 film. 

Gay men love musicals - well, sure, we think this is a truism but it's another generalization, can I say that 100% of gay men enjoy musical theater and musical films? Again, I don't have the data handy, who does? And then we have the stereotype that men turn gay in prison, because there are no women around and they have to have sex with someone. Again, what are the numbers on this, can you prove this with data or are you just making more generalizations? Even if you know someone who was 100% straight before prison and gay or bi afterward, that's just one person, you can't say it happens to everyone. Come on, we're supposed to be better than this now and not just fall back on what society has been supposing for decades. 

There's still the parts where Molina entertains Valentin at night in their cell by telling him about this old Hollywood movie. Sure, this still feels like 1985 because how many people these days are watching the really old movies, like the musicals with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney? The people who watch movie marathons on TCM are few and far between, I think most of them are in nursing homes by now. Sorry, I mean senior living. Me, I still watch the channel but I'm probably on the younger end of their demographic, and I only really am interested in the films they run from the 1980's and 1990's, like I think the last movie I taped off of TCM was "Withnail and I". Still, I keep an eye on their programming every week, because there's a long list of films that I've seen but I don't have copies on DVD, they also just ran a couple Bergman movies like "Hour of the Wolf" and "Through a Glass Darkly", I was happy to add those to my collection and cross them off. 

The film-within-the-film, which is the story of an old film that Molina remembers and re-tells, is bigger and bolder than I remember, and thanks to movie magic the actors get to perform double-duty as the cellmates in the real world and as characters in the film. Valentin appears in the imaginary film as Armando, the photographer, who travels back to his home village in South America along with Aurora, the successful fashion magazine editor. Molina is re-imagined within the film as Kendall, Aurora's gay assistant and best friend. When they all go back to the village they are threatened by the gangster Johnny Desiderio. However, the bigger threat to the village is the Spider Woman (who, like Aurora, is played by Jennifer Lopez, so at times there are TWO J. Lo's in the film, interacting with each other.). The Spider Woman demands a sacrifice every so often, and it must be a native woman's lover - it's a bit unclear, though, how this helps protect the village. 

When the jealous Kendall gives up Armando to the gangster, Armando and Aurora escape into the jungle, where Armando plans to sacrifice himself to keep the village safe. Since Aurora had gotten the advice of a gypsy who told her not only that she was going to find true love but also lose it, she's also prepared (somewhat) to sacrifice Armando. But Kendall steps in and pretends to be Aurora's lover and he sacrifices himself to the Spider Woman so she can continue to live on and love Armando. It's fine, except for a few things, since Kendall was not really her lover you'd think that the Spider Woman wouldn't accept his sacrifice, like can't she tell she's being hoodwinked here? Also, we never see the Spider Woman take out the gangster, so how, exactly, does her killing a local work toward protecting the village? And if the overall lesson is that death is necessary for life to exist, I mean, that's nice on paper but still, that doesn't mean we should go around killing people for the sake of society, I mean, there's still a lot of room and resources on the planet, we're not quite at "Logan's Run" levels of conservation just yet. 

Of course, back in the real world, Molina had been sent to share a cell with Valentin so that he could spy on him, and report whatever he learned back to the warden, who might then have enough information about Valentin to threaten his lover or his family in order to get him to turn on his fellow insurgents. So this is classic "Odd Couple" stuff, can two men with different worldviews share a cell without driving each other crazy? (And do we need to remake "The Odd Couple" again where Oscar eventually falls in love with Felix and things get weird?). Molina is actually offered early release here, in exchange for spying on Valentin, so once outside the prison, Molina gets back in touch with his ex-lover, who wants nothing more to do with him. Then Molina makes contact with Valentin's cohorts, however the warden had him followed in the hopes he would lead them to the other revolutionaries and, well, it doesn't end well. Except that in 1983 the military junta got toppled, and all the political prisoners were released. How about that, at least somebody made it out alive. 

Directed by Bill Condon (director of "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn" and "The Good Liar")

Also starring Diego Luna (last seen in "Fade to Black"), Tonatiuh (last seen in "Carry-On"), Bruno Bichir (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Josefina Scaglione, Aline Mayagoitia, Driton Dovolani (last seen in "Shall We Dance?"), Lucila Gandolfo, Federico Repetto, Lucas Barreiro, Graciela Daniele, Fabio Aste, Sebastian Slepovich, Sebastian Silver, Noemi Frankel, David Turner (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Eduardo Ramos (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Michael Winther (last seen in "Jumper"), Linda Mugleston, Mark Pettograsso, Thomas Canestraro (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Kevin Michael Brennan

RATING: 4 out of 10 songs that got cut from the Broadway version (because they're sung in the real world scenes, not the fantasy ones)