Last night I watched "Resident Evil: Degeneration". I played the first one and a half games using cheat codes because I suck at these kinds of games, but love the atmosphere. So I'm not a hard core Resident Evil/Bio Hazard fan. But I do love a good zombie flick and sci-fi action rocks, so I knew I'd have to check this one out. It had a few good things going for it, but not enough to make it a purchase. Some great visual designs and creature stuff provided nifty eye candy and a few of the action sequences scratched the itch for me. Where the movie falls short is, like so many of its kind, in the motion capture. Now, I have to say very quickly and with great stress, this is not the fault of the mo-cap actors. I emphasize that because after watching the credits I discovered that the mo-cap actor for Claire Redfield was played by one of my and my wife's friends. I felt her performance was solid and one of the strong points of the film. Even before discoverin...

Last night, for the first time, I sat down and watched "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and today I went out to see the remake. The film has a suitable dark tone and while Keanu Reeves doesn't offer anything terribly new, his performance style fit the role of alien visitor "Klaatu" well enough. Jennifer Connelly plays a microbiologist recruited by the US military to help them understand what they are dealing with in Klaatu. Times have certainly changed and this movie is a constant reminder. The re-imagining of the deadly protector, Gort, draws heavily from the original film, but leaves behind the clunky "man in a suit" in favor of a streamlined massive CGI creature. Gort is a silent, powerful and eerie presence through most of the film and goes through an interesting change late in the film that is a departure from the original movie. In general the special effects work well, although they are unremarkable. This is true of the movie as a w...

Producers set out to create a Punisher movie with a "hard R" rating, and they succeeded. But did they do much better this time in overall movie making? Depends on what you buy your ticket for. Although I'm a huge comic book geek, I've never followed the Punisher. I know the basic concept. A man sees his family killed and so dedicates his life to revenge, utilizing lots and lots of guns. In a sense, the Punisher is a lethal take on the Batman concept, but without the theatrics. His psychology is more straight-forward than Bruce Wayne's, although my understanding is that Frank Castle has some religious background (specifically catholic, I believe) that makes for some interesting potential. My review of this movie is not from the perspective of a "Punisher fan" but from a comic book geek with limited knowledge of the source material. I can't compare it to the comics, but I can decide on whether or not I thought it was a good movie. Ray Steve...