Stoker

I don't think there was innocence to
begin with.

"Innocence Ends"

Welcome to Tuesday at the Tagline! Grasping after a movie to review, I sought out some new movies to take in. I ended up through a series of events settling on Stoker, a film directed by Park Chan-wook, a Korean director I was already familiar with from his earlier movie Old Boy (a movie I can heartily recommend you watch if you like dark dramas) Stoker stars Mia Wasikowska (who I previously enjoyed in the most recent rendition of Jane Eyre) as India Stoker, a moody, creepy girl whose father has just died as the film begins. At the same time, her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode, probably you know his as Ozymandias from Watchmen), whom she did not know existed, comes to live with her and her eccentric mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). Immediately it is apparent that Charlie is a not okay guy, India is a not okay girl, and her mother is also... well not okay. I wasn't sure what exactly was going on at first , but it was clear that something very strange was occurring. Murder was clearly in the offing, but I couldn't be sure who was doing all that murdering.

Street Fighter

English as a second language never
made bad lines sound so... bad I guess.

Well, I threatened to do it, and I like to think if nothing else I'm as good as my awful words, so here it is, a full length review of Street Fighter. Released in 1994, this film was a monument to bad script, poor acting, ridiculous plotting, lame effects, and other general tom-foolery. Jean-Claude Van Damme, renowned around the world for being in stupid action movies where he acts poorly, plays Colonel William Guile, who is heading a task force of Allied Nation soldiers as they attempt to wrest control of the fictional, and EXTREMELY stupid sounding Shadaloo (which granted is Capcom's fault but whatever it's still contributing to the dumb) from the grip of drug lord turned dictator M. Bison (Raul Julia, best known to the current generation as Gomez Addams) who has kidnapped AN relief workers in the hopes of extorting an insane amount of money out of them. Guile has a personal vendetta against Bison, as does news anchor/actually a secret ninja Chun-Li (Ming Na) Also there are like a million other characters from the street fighter franchise, thrown in for good measure and serving only a passing purpose in the film's plot, which outside of the central Bison vs. most everyone else, doesn't make much of anything remotely resembling sense.

Abduction

I'm not even sure what's happening here,
like, is he hanging there like Spider-Man?
This does not happen.

Hey everyone, it's Monday night, soon to be Tuesday, and I decided that I wanted to hurt myself last night, so I did it the best way I knew how, by watching Abduction. For those not familiar, while Taylor Lautner had some free time between Twilight movies, and so thought that he would be in another movie. Taylor had made perhaps the understandable mistake of believing that he was a real actor, what with the money he was doubtless receiving for his just FANTASTIC work as abusive boyfriend numero dos for Bella (If you've somehow evaded all knowledge of Twilight, Taylor Lautner plays Jacob in the Twilight movies). So Abduction was made, a film he stars as Nathan, a sort of bro-ish dope who lives in upper-middle class suburbia, and has a crush on a girl with just...wild eyebrows. Like whoa (more on that later). One day, while doing a project with her, they find a picture on a missing persons site that looks just like him, as a little kid. They contact the person running the site, and then people come to murder his parents. He flees with his almost girlfriend (her name is Karen, she's played by Lily Collins) and tries to figure out why men with guns are chasing him, and also the CIA apparently. While he does that, I try to figure out why I possibly give a shit.

Vampire in Brooklyn

A cocktail of humor, love, and BLOOD.

"A comic tale of horror and seduction."

Hello everyone! Welcome back to The Tagline, and to the second part of my expose on shitty movies laid like dead birds at the front step of Wes Craven. Today, I will explore a movie he actually WAS responsible for, at least in par:, the intensely bizarre Vampire in Brooklyn. Made in 1995, Vampire in Brooklyn was an attempt to do... something, I'm not really sure exactly what. Eddie Murphy's career had cooled somewhat by 95, and perhaps in an attempt to reassert himself, Eddie Murphy embarked on this strange endeavor. To clarify, Wes Craven directed, and had some other creative input, while Eddie Murphy and his brother Charlie wrote the story and screenplay. Together, these forces conspired to create Vampire in Brooklyn, a film that was apparently supposed to be part comedy, part romance, and part horror. What it actually accomplished was being a confused mess of a movie that succeeds at being none of the three things it tried to be. As a quick rundown, Eddie Murphy portrays Maximilian, the last of a race of vampires, who has traveled to Brooklyn in order to find the one woman who can be his mate. This woman is a police detective, Rita, portrayed by Angela Bassett. Max seems to be operating on a fairly strict timeline, and so enlists the help of some low-life, turning him into a ghoul to help while Max is confined to his coffin during the day.

They

I feel like the German version makes the
poster at least suck a little less.

"The fear is real."

Hello everyone! Exciting news, over the course of last week, around Tuesday's post, The Tagline crested 50,000 lifetime hits! How exciting is that? Also exciting is that this Friday, The Tagline will be celebrating its one year birthday (since I re-started posting in earnest at least). To celebrate this momentous occasion, I'm going to post two reviews of two horror movies by Wes Craven, only one of them isn't really a horror movie, and the other isn't really by Wes Craven in any way. Today I'll be reviewing that one, the delightfully titled Wes Craven presents They. Normally when a movie is 'presented' by some well known director, they are at least an executive producer or something, but Wes Craven has literally nothing to do with this movie. He is credited on IMDB as the presenter, which I'm pretty sure is a made up thing.

So now that we've established that Wes Craven is presenting this the way a horse might present its ass to you, we can talk about the atrocious title. They. They. When I try and talk about this movie (which I seldom do), generally people get really confused, thinking that I'm starting a sentence, when really I'm just saying "have you seen they?" "have I seen that they what?" "who?" Like I get it, it's what everyone says in the movie "They will get me" "They are coming" but you couldn't call it Them? Or any of a number of other names that sound less stupid. I'm getting carried away about the name though, what about the actual movie itself?

Just Friends

Low brow comedy at its lowest.

"He loves her. She loves him not."

Welcome back to The Tagline everyone! So sometimes when no particular movie recommends itself, I dig through my DVDs to try and find something acceptable. Now anyone who buys lots of DVDs probably has more than a couple entries that are... less than great movies. Chances are you have at least one or two that are downright shitty, probably bought for you as gag gifts (I know I have Fly Boys because of that, a movie so terrible that it's embarrassing even to have it as a joke. I haven't even watched it, maybe I will some day for you folks). There are other movies though that you have because you like them... but they aren't so good. One such entry in my collection is Just Friends, what would be called a romantic comedy I guess, starring Ryan Reynolds and Amy Smart. I purchased this DVD during the the span of time when I would walk to the Blockbuster by my heart late at night and just buy whatever movie I found that seemed sort of entertaining and cost under ten dollars. That's the story of how I came to own this, but what's it about?

Shaft

They say that cat Shaft is one baaad mutha

It's his duty, to please that booty.

Hey guys welcome back to The Tagline! I was thinking, that as a legitimate and respected reviewer of fine cinema, it's important sometimes to take some time out and review a movie that really maintains my reputation. So that put me between two movies, I was on the fence between SWAT and Shaft. I knew I wanted Samuel L. to be in it at least. In the end, SWAT once again narrowly avoided review (I'll do it some day when another crisis of faith springs up) and went with Shaft, a fine film with Busta Rhymes in it if ever there was one. Samuel L. basically stars as himself, a no bullshit ass-kicking cop who quits the force after some racist weasel rich kid beats a guy to death in a bar and gets away with it. Only in this scenario that rich snot is Christian Bale somehow, which in the present Batman age is very confusing for us all, but try and stay with me here folks. Let me give you a quick crash-course in Shaft. In the 1970s (1971 was when the original Shaft was made to be precise) there was this cat named Shaft, portrayed by Richard Roundtree (who actually is also in THIS Shaft movie, as his character Shaft, I'll explain more in a bit) who was a private detective in a Blaxploitation movie successful and indicative of the times enough that it was preserved by in the National Film Registry in 2000. The Shaft I am talking about was made that same year incidentally (2000) and stars Sam Jackson as the ORIGINAL John Shaft's nephew, who was named for him, and so also is John Shaft. He takes a fast and loose approach to law enforcement, so it's no surprise that he ends up leaving so that he can pursue street justice. By which I mean a lot of people get gun-murdered.