One of my all time favorites. This is a movie that knows its place in the world, and sticks to exactly that, action, humor, back and forth dialog, sexual tension, then sticks the landing, the hero rides off into the sunset with a weird monster clinging to his rig.
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that: “Have ya paid your dues, Jack?” “Yessir, the check is in the mail.”
I have not played a Silent Hill game, but am vaguely aware of the storyline for Silent Hill 2, which is what this is taken from. Not enough to pick out differences, though.
I liked the movie, but would not rate it much higher than “kind of recommend”. It’s the worst of the 3 Silent Hill movies and I was drawn to this one because I really like the very first one, which was from the same director.
I will admit, though…that beard near the end was so bad, it should have been re-shot. And a few other effects looked unfinished as well.
It was filmed at the end of 2023, so this one has been in the can for awhile. This January release is reflective of what the studio thought of it. Not much.
Despite all of this, I liked the majority of the movie pretty well. Good mood, tone, some decent monster design, surprisingly good effects when they were finished.
I am hearing they massively changed the Silent Hill 2 story from the game. I bet that was an unpopular decision.
Boring. Bland. Unfunny. I’m reminded slightly of Marty Supreme in that our main character is terrible and I hated him. And the movie doesn’t think we hate him.
I would recommend everyone skip the movie. Not worth your time at all.
I didn’t see it in 2025, but this would be on my worst list.
I just watched it and I guess forgot to post? I liked it quite a bit, but it didn’t rise to the best of what I’ve watched in the last month. Dark and a little weird, which is what I was in the mood for. But obv YMMV based on Mahaloth’s post.
I could go on about so many differences, but I’ll spare you the pain of what they took from us. I don’t like Eddy but if thats all he was going to do in the film why bother…
I think the biggest crime the movie did was take any nuance away from such a great story. Tell don’t show. (James is pyramid head, lets just shove his face in there so the audience knows. I suppose that is showing… ok then the crime is the explicit showing!) The games story was heavily influenced by the novel Crimes and Punishment if that tells you anything. James isn’t a savior.
Thank you for your thoughts on the film. I hate the movie but genuinely gave it 5/5 on letterbox.
Good Boy, a Shudder horror production nominated by Film Independent for editing. The well-delivered conceit is that the story is told almost entirely by reaction shots from the most expressive dog I may have ever seen in a film. It’s only 73 minutes long, and I consider it worth a recommendation. Not super jump-scary, more like Babadook warped narrative psychological premise scary.
Robert Mitchum can do no wrong (well, not a lot wrong anyway, I guess he chews his scenery a bit too vigorously at times). But my lord do I hate Jan-Michael Vincent in everything I have ever seen. I was of age to watch this on TV back during the original broadcast as a teenager and I remember checking out about halfway primarily because he grated on me so much.
No joke, Indy the dog truly gave one of the best performances of the year in that film. I went to a Q&A with the director Ben Leonberg (and Indy!) and how they filmed it was really interesting. The director and his wife filmed for over three years in their own home, just waiting for Indy to have the right reactions and expressions, sometimes only getting seconds of material a day.
I like Airwolf, but the character is hard to like, so he works, more or less.
In Winds of War, he’s annoying, but not the worst character in part one. We’ve learned to speed up the incredible slow pace* of part 1 by FFing whenever Ali McGraw is on. We can’t tell if she’s naive or stupid, and we’ve decided we don’t care. (She’s basically the equally annoying Brenda from Goodbye, Columbus) This has the added benefit of eliminating J-MVs part, too.
The interesting part of part one was Hitler addressing the Reichstag after the invasion of Poland. Other than the fact Hitler is a better speaker and not prone to random word salads, it was like watching trump. The justification for invading Poland sounds eerily current.
On to Part 2. I sure would like to see more of the main character, the one who is on the box. maybe this time!
*There was a wedding scene that seemed to go on longer that the wedding in The Deer Hunter. It didn’t. It just seemed like it did
Can’t much argue with this. Never a big McGraw fan either, though for whatever reason J-MV gets the visceral hate. I’d say it was just pheromones, if not for the fact it is electronic media .
While doing some editing at home (stuck inside by the snowstorm), I watched Fantasia 2000, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Guns of Navarone, three of my favorites. I think Fantasia 2000 is criminally underappreciated. Especially the Saint Saens Carnival of the Animals piece
(James Earl Jones introducing it: The Disney artists asked the age-old question “What is Man’s place in the…” (interrupted and corrected, starts again) The age-old question “What would happen in you gave a yo-yo to a flock of flamingoes?” (Off: Who wrote this?))
Oh, yeah, I forgot – also watched the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad. This was, I think, the first major British fantasy film in full color, and the colors are eye-popping. This is the one that everyone seems to love, but I much prefer the 1924 silent version. A lot of reviews say that the only real difference is that they split the parts of the thief and the suitor, but it actually goes far deeper than that – they’re completely different plots, and the 1940 makes less sense. It does, however, give us a Genie in a bottle and the great Conrad Veidt as the evil vizier Jafar. That, like a lot of others things, were plucked from this movie and used in Disney’s Aladdin half a century later.
As far as I can tell, this film is the source of the “evil vizier who takes over the kingdom” trope, which was used in a lot of other flicks – Mr. Magoo’s 1001 Arabian Nights, Nasruddin/The Thief and the Cobbler, the next twoThief of Bagdad remakes, The Golden Blade…(There was no Evil Vizier in the 1924 version – the Bad Guy there was the Prince of the Mongols).
But the real Jafar, as portrayed in the original 1001 Nights was the faithful vizier of Harun al Rashid. He’s based on the real-lifeJa’far ibn Yahya, of whom Wikipedia writes:
I kind of watched Splitsville, but found it so silly that I eventually started skimming it so I could finish out the Editing category before voting. It’s a comedy about two couples and their sexual and personal shenanigans, mostly actors you haven’t heard of. A lot of one-liners, interspersed with touching interpersonal moments and epiphanies.
My only real takeaway was that Dakota Johnson does a fine acting job in this kind of role, so maybe she can avoid the Madame Webs and stick to roles like this.
I spend a fortune on streaming services each month but lately I just find myself watching free movies on Tubi. Now that I’ve caught up on the titles that were expiring soon, I decided to give some cheapo found footage titles a shot.
I do love found footage as a genre, but wow are the bad ones terrible. Unfortunately, the three I watched were bad ones, so consider this a warning to avoid the following…
Last Radio Call (2022) on Tubi
The best of this bunch but still not very good, at least it’s short. 73 minutes of film followed by 2 minutes of credits. The credits list a dozen or so names in the cast, and then every single member of the crew is one of those same dozen names. Production quality reflects that. Basically, people go explore a creepy abandoned asylum. Pretty good location in that it is somewhat creepy, but there is little else to recommend this. Kudos to them for trying to do practical effects for the monster at the end, but wow did it not work at all.
Butterfly Kisses (2018) on Tubi
This got a staggering 5.9 rating on IMDb but I don’t see it. I haven’t disliked a protagonist so thoroughly since Dashcam (where I hated the main character way more), and this essentially ruined the film for me. A unique monster concept sullied by a ridiculous method of summoning it; it’s sort of Slender Man-esque. Maybe if the main protagonist wasn’t such a flaming asshole to every single other person in the film I would have liked it better.
Evil Things (2009) on Tubi
This was terrible, but at least it was another short one at 75 minutes. The first 15 minutes were sort of interesting as our group of 20-somethings get mysteriously followed during a road trip, but only just barely thanks to the terrible writing and acting. Then they get to their vacation destination and absolutely nothing interesting happens for 40 minutes. I mean, technically stuff happens, but none of it is relevant or interesting. Then the last 20 minutes, where we witness their fate, is moderately interesting at best. This film is so bad that only one person in the cast actually has a picture on IMDb. Everyone else only has this as their single credit.
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