Category Archives: Doc’s Classic Movies Reviewed

Remembering Gene Wilder (2023)

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January 5th

This documentary covers the life of EYG Hall of Famer Gene Wilder, one of the great comedic actors of all time. Wilder was the star of a multitude of amazing movies including Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Stir Crazy, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory along others.

I love Gene Wilder. Willy Wonka and Young Frankenstein are two of my all time favorite films and so I was interested in seeing this life

The film touches on his youth, but spends most of the time with his career and adult years. The background of the filming of The Producers and the other movie that followed was really great.

We had comments about the different movies and the genius of Gene Wilder from Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., Eric McCormack, Ben Mankiewicz, daughter of Richard Pryor- Rain and Mike Medavoy.

The film spoke about Gene’s love and marriage with Gilda Radner as well as his discovery of his second wife Karen during research for the film See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Karen was a real emotional beat in the last section of the doc. As she was giving her first person POV of Wilder’s Alzheimer’s Disease, it was heartbreaking and I found myself with tears in my eyes.

Gene Wilder was such a kind and loving person and that comes across in this movie. We got much of this doc in Gene Wilder’s own voice. He did much of the narration of the film and it brought us even closer to this icon.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

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January 4th

One of the most well known documentaries of the past 25 years is on the agenda for the Genre-ary DailyView today: the Oscar-winning doc An Inconvenient Truth featuring a presentation by former Vice-President Al Gore.

The term ‘Global Warming’ is no longer used because the opposition forces have jumped on the semantics of the term, pointing to terribly low temperatures that have happened. The term these days is ‘climate change,’ which, as I said, is just semantics.

The science Al Gore presented in this doc is very compelling and hard to argue against. Contrarians might claim this is meant to be a political presentation, but it does not feel that way to me. Gore speaks about misconceptions during the film and how opponents try to build on doubt, and this feels more accurate.

Al Gore is undeniably an engaging speaker on this topic. He has always been presented as being stoic and stuffy, and, while one can see some of that in this doc, he showed himself knowledgeable and effective in providing info on this topic in compelling ways.

I thought the moments where they connected parts of Gore’s life, whether that be his presidential run, his sister’s death to lung cancer or the near death of his son, were very strong parts of the film that were then tied neatly back into the film’s overall narrative.

As a movie, this is a thoroughly entertaining work, but its relevance in the world today is undeniable unless there are motivating circumstances that prevent you from accepting the dangers that climate change can bring. Gore quotes Upton Sinclair in the film who said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I am happy to have finally watched this two-time Oscar winning film (it also won for Best Song) and I wish people would stop looking at this through the spyglass of politics.

The Turnaround (2024)

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January 3

It is a busy day today, so this is the first of the Genre-ary DailyView that will be a documentary short. I found this doc on Netflix, called The Turnaround and it focused on Trea Turner, a player for the Philadelphia Phillies.

Trea Turner signed a contract with the Phillies was 11 years for $300 million. It was a large contract and they expected adding him to a mighty Phillies lineup that would immediately shoot them to the World Series.

However, Turner started off with the Phillies in a terrible way, striking out and committing errors.

The Phillies fans are notorious for being tough on players. However a standing ovation from the fans led to a total turnaround.

This doc looked at one fan in particular named Jon McCann. According to IMDB, McCann was “a Phillies fan from the city’s Bridesburg neighborhood and a content creator known as ‘The Philly Captain’ who helped spearhead the standing ovation.”

“It’s nice to be nice some times,” said McCann in the doc.

The doc showed the depression that McCann was in, to a point where he was hospitalized for the potential of killing himself. The doc brought the two stories together in a very effective manner.

I am a baseball fan, and I loved Trea Turner, who spent some time as a Dodger. This was a really nice documentary short that presents that love of baseball and how the power of positivity can truly make a difference.

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary (2019)

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January 2

Day two of the 2025 Genre-ary brought me to Disney + and a film about a magician by the name of the Amazing Jonathan, a documentary that started off as a story about a magician who was diagnoses with a heart condition that gave him one year to live, but ended up in a much different direction that included a deep internal conflict for the documentarian Ben Berman.

The Amazing Jonathan had been diagnoses with a heart condition and he told an audience that he had one year to live. When Ben Berman approached him, that was three years prior and Amazing Jonathan was going back out for a five-show tour.

However, the doc was not as much about Amazing Jonathan as it was about Ben Berman himself and trying to discover exactly was going on. He found out that there were other people working on a documentary about Jonathan, people whom Jonathan had also given permission to. During the doc, we discover three other documentaries in progress besides Berman’s.

As Berman filmed, he began to question what was real and what was being made up by the magician as an illusion or a prank.

Some may say not to turn the camera back on the documentarian, but I feel as if this film does it in a very effective manner. I was more compelled by the story about the making of this documentary than I was about the story of this dying magician. For a good chunk of the film, I saw Amazing Jonathan almost as the antagonist of the doc, which is crazy. I did like how this documentary brought the conflict to a close at the end. It felt like redemption for the film character Amazing Jonathan.

I see some hate for this documentary online, but I thought this was a fascinating tale of the creation of a doc featuring a magician and the documentarian and their intertwining story. I watched this on Disney +, but it was released officially on Hulu.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)

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January 1

It is January 1st, which means that I start the new Genre-ary event at EYG. This year, EYG will be doing the Genre-ary with documentaries. I will watch a new documentary, one that I have never seen before, every day for the whole month.

The first documentary I watched was one I saw on YouTube pundit Dan Murrell’s video of the Best Films of the Year. It was called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin and it sounded like an emotional film. I decided that I would use 2024 documentaries in the Genre-ary instead of waiting on them until the June Swoon.

With the set-up out of the way, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin was truly a beautiful documentary about a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who was able to find friendship, love and hope inside the gaming world of World of Warcraft.

Mats Steen, a young Norwegian boy, was diagnosed with the muscular disorder as a child and had to spend most of his life confined to a wheelchair as the disorder slowly restricted his motor skills.

One of the few things Mats was able to do was be on his computer. He found a community or guild, inside World of Warcraft, called Starlight, where he was able to meet others. Mats did not reveal anything about his condition to the people playing the game with him even after they had formed a close online relationship.

The doc uses the actual online dialogue used in the game to create an animated model of the online game. It uses this animation, in the World of Warcraft style, to show how important Mats, as the avatar called Ibelin, would become to the Starlight guild. The doc also used interviews with other guild members and family members of Mats as well as some home movies to build this picture of the young man.

Mats wrote an online blog near the end of his life that the doc used to illustrate more about the thoughts Mats was having. They had an actor read the blog entries in a voice close to Mats. Mats’ family did not know anything of this blog and, after his death, Mats had left the password to his family. This is where they started to understand how much their son had impacted the world through the video game. They posted on the blog that Mats had died and dozens of people responded to them, one of the more powerful moments for me during this doc.

The doc was not about a man who was slowly dying. This doc showed the power of life, friendship and of connections to others, even if it is not in the typical way. Mats had a short life, but his presence was felt by many different people in extremely powerful ways.

This was available to stream on Netflix. It is well worth your time. You may give a second thought to the viability of those kids spending time on their computers.

The Outsiders (1983)

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At my school, I had a chance to teach The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton this year. I had not taught the book since 1999. After we finished the unit, we watched the movie. So over the last two days I watched the Francis Ford Coppola film three times. I knew that I had not seen this movie in a long time so I figured that I had never reviewed the film. This is the chance.

Honestly, I did not love this. My memory was that the first time I watched this, I thought this was better than I did this time.

According to IMDB, “It is 1961, and Tulsa, Oklahoma is divided in two along social lines. The youths of each side form gangs in line with these two camps: the working class Greasers and the wealthier South Side gang, the Socs. The two sides use any opportunity to niggle each other and whenever they meet, there is friction. Then one night, a gang of Socs attack two Greasers with a knife. This sets off a chain of events“

There were several things that bugged me about this movie. Top of the list was probably the performance from Matt Dillion as Dally Winston, which felt about as over the top as it could possibly be. His overacting really bothered me in most of the scenes he was in.

The second thing I noticed was the horrendous sound mixing. There are several times that I couldn’t understand or hear certain lines of dialogue from characters because of the music or because it was just too messy.

I also feel like they did not do a service to a bunch of the characters from the book. Sure, I understand they wanted to focus on the main characters, but Sodapop was neglected and he should be a more vital part of the story. I do not feel that they did a good job of connecting Johnny to any other character outside of Ponyboy and Dally.

I do think that C. Thomas Howell was excellent as Ponyboy, and I loved Ralph Macchio as Johnny. I thought Macchio was really consistently good for the scenes that he was in. I will say though, one of the moments of the church fire, Johnny moved through just like Daniel LaRusso moved through the storm in Karate Kid II. That was funny to me. Anyway, Macchio was really good as the doomed Johnny.

Patrick Swayze had some good scenes, but could have used more time. Tom Cruise was in the film, but he was basically a background guy. Emilio Estevez was in the film as Two-Bit and, again, was just a shadow of the character of the book. I understand there is just not enough time for every character to be illuminated, but I do think we should have a bit more from these major characters.

It felt too melodramatic for my tastes. It was still a decent movie, but I found it to be nowhere as effective as the first time I watched it years ago.

Hate* [*A Comedy] (1999)

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So it is Black Friday and I went to Comic World in Dubuque to partake in the sale on back issues. I started talking with Ben, the owner, who was working the front of the store. We were discussing some of the movies I had watched recently, and i came around to talking about Rumours, which was totally crazy, a black comedy with some of the craziest stuff in it I had seen in a long time.

This led Ben to bring up a short that he called a ‘college’ short film, giving me a quick synopsis of the film. He mentioned a chicken moving next door to a guy. It certainly fit in with the weird films we were talking about (yes, we even mentioned Beau is Afraid).

Ben told me that it was available in full on YouTube, so I decided that I was curious to see what this comedy was and how I felt about it.

The film centered around a man named Paul Wilson (Paul Hungerford) who had a chicken move next door to him, and the chicken began tormenting him. Calling him Moriarty, the chicken, named Pembroke Arbaghast (voiced by Brian Carr), was trying not so subtle things to kill his new neighbor… or at least so Paul thought.

When his poker friends died from poisoned chimichangas, Paul decided that he had to do something to stop the chicken’s crazed spree.

This was hilarious. I loved this short. It was so funny and well presented. The key to something like this is to present it in all seriousness, despite it being totally ridiculous. Paul was really scared and bothered by the foul creature and so the silliness of the situation became funny instead of stupid.

It seemed as if every time the chicken was shown, I was laughing, because of its look, and yet, I found a lot of this to be fairly sinister. The puppeteers did a wonderful job making this chicken believable with its playing poker, driving or sending threatening emails.

The final confrontation between man and bird was excellent too. This was a lot of fun and definitely worth the time. The twist at the end was funny too.

The acting was very solid. In particular, Paul Hungerford delivers a strong performance. You are convinced that he is scared of this chicken and that he legitimately is afraid for his life.

This goes to show you how a creative mind can take even the weirdest of concepts and turn it into an entertaining film. Hate* [* A Comedy] was well worth the 22-minutes it took to watch it, available on YouTube, but do not forget the asterisk when searching.

Mad God (2021)

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The October 13 of 13

What a trip.

I went searching for a film to wrap up the October 13, which to be fair has been a touch underwhelming so far. I was really hoping to find something epic to end out the thirteen.

Well, I found something original for sure.

On AMC + on Prime, I found a stop-motion film called Mad God and it looked interesting. That would be an understatement for this.

According to IMDB, “Equipped with a gas mask and a crumbling map, the Assassin, an iron-clad humanoid, descends into a rusty, peril-laden underworld of grime, blood, and unsettling monstrosities. As the stealthy invader meanders through the labyrinthine post-apocalyptic wasteland on a mysterious mission, going deeper and deeper in the nightmarish realm, the Assassin gradually reaches his final destination: the heart of this grotesque tower of torture. But what cruel, vindictive deity allows fear and suffering to take its most complete creation further and further into despair? Only a Mad God would revel in humankind’s ordeal.”

That synopsis from IMDB is well done, but to be honest, the story is not anywhere near as straightforward as that description. I would venture to say that this film has a very limited narrative structure. The story seems secondary to the goals of this film.

Mad God has amazing, masterful stop-motion animation that creates an atmosphere unlike few movies that I have ever seen. It is frightening at times, disturbing at others. It imbues this nightmare realm with such darkness and alarming imagery that you can help but be taken aback from the visual daze.

The sound effects and score are very effective keeping you uneasy as the images build a surreal experience of monstrous creatures and violent despair.

Written and directed by stop-motion guru Phil Tippett, this passion project takes you deep into the mind of the director. And what a bizarre and warped experience it was. I usually prefer more of a story, and that is just short here, but this is an experience that I would not have passed on. I am conflicted on how I feel after watching this, which, I suppose, is a desired result.

Little Evil (2017)

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The October 12 of 13

Who would have guessed that one of the better films I saw during the October 13 this year would be a Netflix film from 2017?

Gary (Adam Scott) recently married Sam (Evangeline Lilly), who has had several failed marriages. The biggest reason? Her son Lucas (Owen Atlas) is the Anti-Christ and he has a tendency to bury them alive.

Gary does not know what to do. Does he try and connect with the six-year old or does he kill the boy?

This is a surprisingly funny film with some excellent horror elements to it. The old evil child has been done countless times in movies, but this has a different flavor to it. It is the Omen mixed with This is the End.

Adam Scott does a great job of providing the anchor to this ridiculous story. You never feel that this is over-the-top because he grounds it for us with his performance. Even when you think that there is no reasonable person who would stick this out, Scott is believable.

There is a unexpectedly deep cast here too with Evangeline Lilly as Lucas’s mother and we get appearances from Clancy Brown, Sally Field, Donald Faison, Tyler Labine, and Brad Williams.

The final act of the film does go a bit off the rails, but I had already been charmed by the film, particularly by Adam Scott and the weaker end did not hurt the film much.

This is a fun film for families during the spooky season even though some of the religious iconography may be too much at times.

The Changeling (1980)

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The October 11 of 13

So The October 13 has been a little lower of quality than I would have preferred this year. However, we came across a good one today. The Changeling, starring George C. Scott, is one of the best haunted house movies I have seen.

The film grabs your attention immediately as it sets up the tragedy for George C. Scott’s character, composer John Russell. His wife and daughter are killed in a tragic accident and this sends him spiraling out of control. Renting a house in Seattle, John goes to hopefully work on his music.

However, once in the house, strange sounds and events started happening, leading John to investigate what had happened in the house’s past.

Honestly, the seance scene was one of the scariest seance scenes I have ever seen. The way that the psychic approached the actual execution of the seance was great. I had never seen a seance handled in this manner before and it really set the stage for the rest of the mystery that would be at the heart of the film.

There is also a horrifying scene with a young boy and a bathtub that I will not go into further description of because it is unsettling.

George C. Scott is a tremendous actor and his very presence in the film give it a credibility that a lot of these haunted house movies lack.

I am happy that this film made the October 13 list this year and I am happy that it has helped put the list back on track.

Kill List

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The October 10 of 13

After a poor stretch of films in The October 13, I was hoping for a really great one to balance out the list. I had been watching The Breakroom, which is a YouTube show from the New Rockstars and they gave a list of horror movies to watch before you die. One of the panelists brought up Kill List and I had never heard of it, so I hoped that it would break the unfortunate run I had been on.

It did. It was good. It was not great, but I found it a good time.

According to IMDB, “Nearly a year after a botched job, a hitman takes a new assignment with the promise of a big payoff for three killings. What starts off as an easy task soon unravels, sending the killer into the heart of darkness.“

This is a British psychological horror film directed by Ben Wheatley. It was a real slow burn, so slow that after the first act, I was afraid that this would be just another failure in the October 13. However, the film absolutely picked up and wound up with a batshit ending that tied the whole film together in a tragic tapestry.

Neil Maskell played Jay and Michael Smiley played Gal, out two lead protagonists in the film. They were partners in this hired killers job that led to them getting involved in this story. MyAnna Buring played Shel, Jay’s wife and the mother of his son Sam (Harry Simpson).

Throughout the first two parts of the film, you can see the mental instability of Jay as the killings he was hired to do became all the more brutal as they progressed. You would begin to think that the horror would come from inside Jay’s mind, but then things got considerably more real.

Hit List was not what I expected when it started, but it morphed into a wild ride that kept the tension to the final moments and a dramatic final scene.

I Was a Teenage Zombie (1987)

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The October 9 of 13

I found this on HBO Max and, because of that, I mistakenly believed, this movie would be a good one to include for The October 13, or at least was a real movie. It was five minutes into it when I discovered that this was the most amateurish, ridiculously bad film I have seen in a long time.

When the sound quality of a film does not reach the quality level of Birdemic: Shock and Terror, you know there is something wrong.

According to IMDB, “Six high school buddies accidentally kill a drug pusher and dump his body in toxic waters. When the pusher returns as a zombie and goes on a killing spree, their only recourse is to dump the body of one of their own recently dead, and have him return as a “good” zombie to face off with the “bad” one.“

I have seen this referred to as a cult classic, but if this is a classic in any form, I have to question the choices of the viewer. I know film is subjective, but I don’t think anything should be that subjective.

The budget of this movie must have been $25 dollars and a box of donuts.

I take that back, they did have some real music involved in the film, with a soundtrack involving real bands and musicians. At times the music was played so you could not hear what was being said. Best part of the film.

I seen better acting on SNL, you know when the host clearly has not learned any lines and is just reading off the cue cards off screen.

How bad was the dialogue? I don’t know, you could barely hear it.

This was not fun. There was a time or two where I laughed at the movie. Not because it was funny, but because it was so embarrassing that the only thing you could do was laugh.

The zombie make-up was more like blackface. Or eventually green face.

Then there was a zombie rape scene. I’m not kidding. Offensive as it could be.

The quality of the movies in this year’s October 13 has been really down. With Piranha, Sorry About the Demon, and this film, I really need to find a good film for #10.

Piranha (1978)

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The October 8 of 13

Piranha, a movie directed by Joe Dante, was a film that I never had any interest in seeing. Those type of B-movies were never in my taste. However, for the October 13, I decided to watch the original Piranha on Prime to see if it was more enjoyable than I thought.

It was pretty much what I expected.

According to IMDB, “An insurance investigator and her local guide search the Lost River Lake area to find too missing teenagers. When stumbling on an abandoned military facility, they release by accident in the river some flesh-eating piranhas that were bred to use in the Vietnam war. The piranhas are heading straight to a nearby summer resort’s lake and its guests.“

A Jaws rip-off, Piranha is a low-budget film that had some terrible special effects and the story about as simple as you could get. The acting was not very good either, especially with the secondary characters. The dialogue was atrocious for most of the film.

I have seen reviews of Piranha saying that it is a parody of Jaws or that the film was tongue-in-cheek humor. I didn’t think much of any of this film was funny, and the time when the film tried to add humor, it fell flat.

I can see why this may have become a cult classic, because there is so much awful about this that you can look at it an laugh… not with it but at it.

This would be a perfect film for Rifftrax Live as there is so much comedy to mine around what is on this screen. It was actually worse than I had thought and proved that I was right for avoiding it all these years.

Psycho II (1983)

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The October 7 of 13

One of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock films of all time was 1960’s Psycho. Twenty three years later, there was a sequel to the film featuring the return of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates.

Of course, I have been watching Bates Motel for the last several months, which is not necessarily canon in the Psycho universe. It gave me the opportunity to start to love the character of Norma Bates. So with this October 13, I thought it would be a good thing to watch the sequel to Psycho.

While this is nowhere near the level of the iconic original, Psycho II was not bad. Anthony Perkins was wonderful in his return to the role of Norman Bates. You could never be sure whether or not Norman had actually regained his sanity. I wasn’t sure until the very end, which was nice.

The story had an impressive twist to start off that I did not see coming. I am not sure it worked all the way through, but when we found out the surprise, it worked for most of the middle of the story.

It did feel like it went a little too long and I am not sure I loved the resolution of the film… at least part of it. No spoilers from me, but I did like the very end of the film… just not what led to it.

This was better than I expected it to be, but if you were to only watch one Psycho movie, make it the original Hitchcock classic.

Messiah of Evil (1974)

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The October 6 of 13

This supernatural horror film from 1973 is the next film in the October 13. Messiah of Evil is a wild film, nightmarish-like with zombies and a “Dark Stranger.”

According to IMDB, “After losing contact with her artist father, Arletty (Marianna Hill) travels to the west coast. Though she doesn’t find him, she meets Thom (Michael Greer), an odd wealthy man who’s travelling with 2 lovers, Toni (Joy Bang) and Laura (Anitra Ford), to meet her father. She reads his diary and realizes there’s something strange with the residents of this California town.“

I will say that the story of the film is convoluted and fairly messy, but that seems to work with the tone that the film is setting. The dreamlike state of the film adds to the overall confusion of the situation and it helps keep the audience off-balance.

The “Dark Stranger” is an intriguing concept that the film does not go into much specifics about. This feels like it could have been an opening chapter of a film franchise. The whole Dark Stranger idea feels very Stephen King-esce. I would have liked more about that character.

The film took definite inspiration from the other zombie films of the time, specifically those by George Romero.