Holy crap.

Okay, I was watching the live edition of Movie Fights tonight and they were having a Movie fights Championship match between the challenger Greg Alba of the Reel Rejects and the reigning, defending Movie Fights Champion, Dan Murrell.  It was a great episode with two extremely spirited debaters.  One of the questions was “Most Underrated Movie of All-Time.”  I mean… how do you answer something like that?  Well, Dan Murrell mentioned a movie entitled Wait Until Dark, starring Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, and Richard Crenna, and he made it sound really interesting.

So, after the Movie Fights was over (No Spoilers), I went to YouTube and rented a copy of the movie.  And…holy crap, did I love this movie.

Seriously, it was one of the best films I have seen in a long while.  I can’t believe that I hadn’t heard of it before tonight.

Audrey Hepburn, who was nominated for an Oscar for this film, played Susy Hendrix, a woman recently blinded who was trying to cope with her blindness.  Her husband, played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, wound up unwittingly with a doll that contained something that the psychotic killer, Roat (Alan Arkin), wanted back.  Roat enlisted a pair of criminals, Mike (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston), to help him reclaim this doll.  It meant trying to fool the blind woman in a complex and intricate manner.

This film is as tense and nerve-wracking as you are going to find.  I was on the edge of my seat through the entire film, and the finale was as great of a scene as you are going to find.

Susy Hendrix was nobody’s victim.  Despite her supposed weakness with her blindness, Susy was smart, quick-witted, brave, and yet vulnerable.  She was the most heroic of characters and I loved her completely.  The performance of Audrey Hepburn was off the charts and certainly deserved the Oscar nomination that it earned her.  She could have easily been shown as the victim of this movie, but she was able to see through the criminals’ lies and manipulations through her own brand of intelligence and resourcefulness.  I did not expect to see a female character this strong in a 1960s movie, but there she was.

Alan Arkin was unbelievably good as the evil Roat.  He was as compellingly wicked and menacing as could be.  Arkin was so great here that I had no idea what was going to happen and I was holding my breath as I hoped that Susy could make it through this problem.  Arkin was involved in a jump scare in this movie that scared the living crap out of me.  I literally yelled at the screen when it happened.  Dan Murrell had mentioned it in his argument on Movie Fights Live, but it still did not prepare me for how effective that jump scare was and how much I was actually shaken from it.

As a horror/thriller movie, this was fantastic.  The tension built throughout the film until the final moments, which was as amazing as you are ever going to see.  There may be a few plot holes here and there, but it is a 50+ year old film and it feels as relevant today as ever.  There are moments and scenes here that are obviously influential to other films of this genre moving forward.

Based on a 1966 play of the same name by Frederick Knott, Wait Until Dark has basically one set and all the drama and action takes place in this location.  Even though the below ground apartment is the only location, this film never felt boring or as if it needed more than what was there.  It felt like more than just a play on film (like Fences, a film starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis did).  It created superior suspense and kept me riveted the entire time.

Thanks for the recommendation, Dan.

The last of the Second Chance/First Impression Binge this weekend before the football game is from the creators of Scream.  I Know What You Did Las Summer takes the tropes of the slasher movie and the kids in jeopardy and makes a movie that I saw once and did not remember much about.

I knew that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in it (aka Sarah Michelle Geller) and her future husband Freddie Prinze, Jr.  I found it hard to see Sarah running from this fisherman with a hook character as I kept wanting her to turn to him as Buffy and kick his ass.  Unfortunately, that was not to be.

Four kids, out for a summer night of drinking and sex on the beach, wind up running down a man on their way home.  Instead of calling the police, they decide to dispose of the body and pretend like it never happened.

Of course, that kind of secret has a way of coming back, but not usually in the form of a psychotic fisherman looking for revenge.

There are some big old plot holes in the story and the fisherman sure seemed to be able to be anywhere in a flash of a second.  Plus, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), the football kid and boyfriend of Buffy, was a real dick.  As an entitled rich kid, you almost did not mind the fisherman chopping him up for chum.

The film is pretty fun at times watching these four pretty people suffer for their crime while hoping that, at least some of them, make it out alive.  It overcome most of the problems to give us a poor man’s Scream.

The biggest issue I had was “how did the killer get around, get those bodies out of there so quickly and efficiently, and still be in the right place at the right time?”  It was a major distraction and made the killer seem supernatural even though, spoilers, he wasn’t.

Still, it is not the worst film I have seen in the genre and it provided some dumb fun.

This one is a bit of a palate cleanser.

I needed one after the first four movies in the Second Chance/First Impression Binge this weekend.  The Land of the Lost nearly broke me.  So I found this documentary on Amazon Prime from last year called Perfect Bid: The Contestant That Knew Too Much which focused on the man (or perhaps the man behind the man) who made a perfect, to the dollar, bid on The Price is Right.

Theodore Slauson was a teacher and he was a fan of the television game show The Price is Right.  So much so he started plotting out the prices of prizes shown on the show so that he would know how much something would cost.  It gave him a distinct advantage if he were ever to get on the stage.

He attended multiple tapings and, since the crowd is encouraged to yell out prices to help contestants, Theodore would become a bit of a known commodity.

Ironically, when Theodore made it to the stage himself, the Wheel round knocked him out of contention.

It wasn’t until years later that Theodore returned to help Terry Kniess, the contestant who bid the exact amount on the show’s Showcase Showdown.  Kniess has never admitted that he had any sort of help from Theodore for the bid.

However, most of the documentary focuses on Theodore and his years in the audience of the show.  We get interviews with Bob Barker, long time show producer Roger Dobkowitz, Drew Carey and others to help punctuate the moment, but the scandal of the perfect bid is really not the main aspect of the film.

In fact, it is downplayed as a scandal at all.  It just indicates that Theodore is excellent at his homework on the show, going as far as to show his chart of prize costs.  There is a bunch of clips from the game show revealing Theodore yelling out exact price numbers to other contestants.

This documentary is fine, but it does not feel to have much weight to it.  To define the perfect bid itself as a scandal is stretching somewhat.  It was an enjoyable watch, and I am grateful for the cleansing of the palate that I needed for the other bad films that I have been binging this weekend.

The Second Chance/First Impression Binge continue this morning with an adaptation of a late 1970s, early 1980s kid show from Sid and Marty Krofft called Land of the Lost.  The film starred Will Farrell.

I have seen parts of the film before and did not like it at all, so second chance certainly fits here.  I watched the Land of the Lost TV show as a youth and always enjoyed it.  Then, when it came out on DVD, I purchased the entire series as a lark.  It was nostalgia, but I discovered something surprising.  The TV series was way better than I remembered.  In fact, I would go on and say that Land of the Lost was one of the best science fiction series of all time, certainly ahead of its time.  Of course, the biggest issue it faced was the budget and having dinosaurs and other such looked cheap.  That lack of ability to create the proper look caused Land of the Lost to not be taken as seriously as it could have been.  However, go back and watch the show for the stories, they are outstanding.

Unfortunately, whoever made the movie did not have the same love of the show as I did because they made a travesty, taking some of the best parts of the show and warping it into something unrecognizable and downright insulting.

I am not a Will Farrell fan, but the first five minutes or so of the movie gave me some hope.  I enjoyed the weird interaction with Matt Lauer and saw potential in the way they were setting up the story.  Then, Will Farrell and his idiotic comedy took over and the film took a nose dive into T-Rex poop.

Anna Friel played Holly and Danny McBride played Will, taking both of those characters in a completely different direction than the show.  There was no connection between them and Rick Marshall (Farrell). The way they entered the Land of the Lost was silly and everything afterwards was inconsistent and just a waste of a great concept.

The movie lost the heart that the series had and never found anything even close to it.  It took the characters and settings of the show and warped them into an unrecognizable mess that was simple a name of a character.

This is the third out of four movies during this binge that is terrible and I may be rethinking the theme of Second Chance/First Impression Binge.

Well, the snow has ended.

So the Winter Storm part of the weekend binge-a-thon is done too.  Now, we are just down to the Second Chance/First Impression Binge and this is the first second chance we have to offer.

Mars Attacks! was a comedy alien invasion spoof film from the mind of Tim Burton that came during the mid 90s and I disliked it quite a bit the first and only time that I saw it on VHS.  Finding it now on Amazon Prime, I decided that this would be the next installment in the binge.

And I did find it more entertaining than I did on the first viewing.

There are a ton of actors appearing in here and most of the big names do not last for too long.  There are a bunch of storylines that really make little to no sense.  It is just a fun movie where a bunch of little green jerks from Mars came to the planet earth and tried to take it over.

Jack Nicholson was the President of the United States (and a weird second role of a Vegas businessman that really had no reason).  Glenn Close was the vapid FLOTUS.  A group of actors (Michael J. Fox, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jack Black) are here basically to see how the Martians kill them.

The main heroes of the piece is Jim Brown, Tom Jones (playing himself), Lukas Haas and Sylvia Sidney.  Not exactly the group of names when matched up with the other actors in this movie.

That was probably the idea here and Mars Attacks! made these deaths funny a lot of the time.  The Martians themselves were fairly ridiculous too.

Certainly, one of the standout performances was Lisa Marie as “Martian Girl” who is able to infiltrate the White House with horny chief of staff Martin Short.  Her weird way of moving created the most memorable of all the characters involved.

While this is nothing unbelievable, I found it more entertaining this time around and the first film of this binge that is going to receive a positive review.  One out of three so far.

Getting out this afternoon for Glass.  Binge will continue later this weekend.

Well, the snow is still falling.

And I am 0-2.

The Second Chance/First Impression Winter Storm Binge continued with Terminator Salvation.  A 2009 movie that I had never seen and has been called the worst film of the Terminator franchise.

Unfortunately, that may not be too far from the truth.

This was so boring.  It seemed that all this movie had was explosions, machine gunfire, another explosion, and surprisingly poor CGI.

Oh, and a weird voice from Christian Bale.

There was a great cast starting with Bale and following with Sam Worthington, Helena Bonham Carter, Anton Yelchin, Common, and Bryce Dallas Howard.  Yet, it felt like the film was full of people who could not act at all.

The film was dark, literally, and that made it difficult to watch.  It was hard to tell many times exactly what was going on in many of the action scenes.  The film wanted me to connect with the human characters, but I did not.

This is the last film before I go to bed tonight and hopefully two things will happen.  One, the Winter Storm will be over when I start the next film and two, maybe I will find a film that I do not dislike so much.  Maybe it is time to search for a second chance film.

Cool poster though….

We are currently in a snow storm which should be going for at least tomorrow some time.  So I decided that this would be a good time to do another of the EYG Binge-a-thons.  I have been planning the next binge.  This time, the concept is Second Chance/First Impression Winter Storm Binge.  The idea is that I am going to choose from two types of films.  Either films that I saw once before and did not like or movies that I have not seen because I have heard others say negative things.

I mean, the only time I ever watched Se7en was in the theater and I did not like it much, but when I rewatched it last year, I found it much better. The same could be said for Sicario.  You never know how your opinions or tastes may change over the years.

I started compiling possible lists when I came across this movie.  With Glass coming out this weekend (and me yet having to see it, despite some negative reviews I have heard), I thought this would be the perfect film with which to kick off the Second Chance/First Impression Winter Storm Binge.  M. Night Shyamalan’s notoriously bad movie starring Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel called The Happening.

“What? Noooooooooooo”

I just saw some discussion of this on Movie Fights Live this past Thursday, where they had a whole Shyamalan-themed episode.  It also shares a lot of ideas with the recent Netflix hit Bird Box.  What better to do for a First Impression (as I have never seen this).

My first impression… this is crap.

I was not angry watching this like I was during Movie 43 or Holmes and Watson.  This was more like watching Birdemic: Shock and Terror or Manos: Hands of Fate.  You know that at some point, the RiffTrax Live guys will get there hands on this and it will be hilarious.  Heck, there were parts of this movie that were damn funny as it was (even though that was not what was intended).

Mark Wahlberg has had some bad movies before (Transformers: The Last Knight, Planet of the Apes, Collateral) but this one is right near the top of stinkers.  He is terrible as a science teacher named Elliot Moore.  He seemed void of any real emotional reactions and his acting is wooden as can be.

Yes, the trees and the wind were trying to kill them, and, after watching the film and their acting, how could you honestly blame them.

The dialogue was ridiculous.  The story was horrendous.  There was no sense being made and M. Night tried to bash you over the head with a message.

I laughed more here than anything else.  There were no tension or scares.  I can’t imagine why they made some of the choices that they made.

This one did not get the Second Chance/First Impression Winter Storm Binge off to a good start.  I hope I can find some diamonds in the rough during this binge or I might have to move over to the Punisher.

*Please let Glass be better than this*

Fathom Events today provided two DC Animated movies that showed that it is possible to make a compelling and interesting film focusing on Superman.

The Death of Superman was a direct-to-DVD from last year and told the story from the iconic DC Comics comic book from 1993, Superman #75.  This was one of the comics that Batman v. Superman took and crammed together for their story arc.  This is evidence proving that the choice to rush through the storyline in the live action films was a huge mistake.  At the end of the animated version, when Superman sacrificed his life to save Lois Lane from the rampaging Doomsday, I was feeling the emotions.  There were some tears in my eyes whereas I felt nothing during the whole BvS mess.

They followed this up with a new release of Reign of the Supermen, which continued the storyline from the comics where a group of “new” Supermen (a clone Superboy, The Eradicator, Steel and Cyborg Superman) stepped forward in the absence of Kal-El to stand in his stead.

Quick takes on these two animated films.  I thought The Death of Superman was fantastic from start to finish.  Loved just about everything about it.  Reign of the Supermen dragged a bit for me at the start, but the last half of the film was just excellent.

Once again, as I stated with my review of Justice League: Gods and Monsters, maybe it is time that Warner Brothers divvy up some cash so these DC Animated movies can get some better animation.  There is no doubt that the animation on these films are below average, if not downright cheap looking and that is a damn shame because the storytelling is top-notch.  WB should take some of that Aquaman moolah and see if they couldn’t come up with the next Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse-style film using the wealth of wonderful characters that DC has.

Back to the double feature, I found the pay off to be strongly done once again.  Not only did we get the best representation of Superman we have gotten since Christopher Reeve (or maybe Superman: The Animated Series), but we got the Justice League cameos as well.  Both Flash (Christopher Gorham) and Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) stole the show.  Rosario Dawson’s Wonder Woman was another highlight.

The voice cast was solid.  Jerry O’Connell as Superman.  Rebecca Romojn as Lois Lane.  Rainn Wilson as Lex Luthor.  All three stood out as great castings.

Being able to watch the two films together in one event was an awesome treat and it really helped the second film.  I feel that if it hadn’t had that strong intro, the relatively weaker beginning of the second film would have stood out more.  As it is, it just felt like a slower bit necessary in the story.

This is what the DCEU should have worked toward instead of throwing away Superman’s death as a moment in a movie that did not need it.  This is so much more compelling and emotional than the Superman death in BvS that it showed what could have been.

The Death of Superman is…

While Reign of the Supermen is…