I didn't grow up watching the "Elm Street" flicks like many of my friends. Although throughout the years I've caught bits of them on TV and figured out pretty quickly that they aren't my kind of movies anyway. In early college I did finally see the first film in the franchise(the only one Wes Craven planned to make at the outset) which I thought was not so bad. My problem with the original franchise is that it failed to remain scary. From the get go, Freddy was a villain who was there to entertain the audience as much as he was there to scare them. Before long, he failed to be scary and turned into a walking bad one-liner machine, breaking the fourth wall to connect with the audience in a way that drains power from any movie monster. This couldn't have been demonstrated much better than in the last Robert Englund Freddy movie, "Freddy Vs. Jason", which I saw in theaters out of morbid curiosity. (And yes, it was about as bad as you're imagi

  Heath Ledger’s last movie seemed to sneak in and out of theaters somewhat quietly, and I missed my chance to see it the first time around. So when it was released on DVD yesterday I jumped at the chance to check out what looked like an imaginative modern fairy tale. Doctor Parnassus made a deal with the devil over 1,000 years ago that grants him immortality. But in exchange, his daughter belongs to the devil on her 16 th birthday. He now has two days to make good on a new deal with the devil that will spare his daughter: Find five souls who will choose good over evil before the devil does. Subjects are put to the test by entering a fantasy world created by the mind of Doctor Parnassus. They are given a choice between something self-serving and something more pure or noble. The race to find five who will make the right choice drives much of the movie, but as is common in Terry Gilliam films, the experience is more about strangeness and spectacle than it is

  Although I’m a huge comic book fan, I never got around to reading the original comic book version of “Kick Ass”, so I can’t review this movie from that perspective, only on its own merits. And this movie merits a ton of praise. The story centers on a shy high school geek who decides that the best way to attract girls and attain meaning for his life is to dress up in a costume and fight street crime as the superhero “Kick-Ass”. The movie starts out feeling like a small, quirky, high school comedy with a healthy dose of realism regarding the practicalities of trying to be a superhero in the real world. But little by little, the movie has more money thrown at it until it becomes a hugely explosive action-fest in the last third of the film. A number of other heroes and villains enter the story and help to flesh out a small but interesting “comic book world”. The movie does not seriously attempt to create a realistic depiction of superheroes in the real world, but co

I do not consider myself a fan of Woody Harrelson. Outside of his character way back when on "Cheers", he seems to play creeps and unlikable types. But in "Defendor" he breaks from this pattern to play the role of a mentally handicapped man who is driven to fight crime on the streets as a superhero. The first thing you should know about this movie is that it is not a comedy. Although it has been marketed as a dark comedy, it is actually a dark drama with a few comedic moments. Arthur Poppington (AKA "Defendor") is possibly mildly retarded, although I lean toward seeing him as autistic or clinically insane given that there are some things he creates for his super-heroics that require high functioning mental capacity. He lives under the delusion that he is a superhero seeking out the arch-villain known as "Captain Industry". His sole purpose is to find and defeat this villain. As the story progresses, we learn more about Arthur and how he

Although the original "Clash Of The Titans" was among my childhood fantasy movie favorites, my memories of it are dim at best. Though I've seen enough clips of it in my adult life to be reminded of what the movie looked like, it's general feel, and the state of special effects. Because of this, I was able to make a few comparisons to the original when I saw the 2010 remake, but not enough that the original, or it's plot was constantly on my mind. I went to see the new "Clash" because I'm a die-hard fan of fantasy sword and sorcery flicks and this looked like it could be one of them. And it was. With both the good and bad that comes with that sort of movie. Despite the sometimes edgier dialogue and advanced special effects, Clash Of The Titans feels much like several fantasy movies of the 70's and 80's. The characters are 2-dimensional with Sam Worthington's Perseus and Liam Neeson's Zeus being the only two with any discernible