Reviews

Wildly inventive musical that totally went off the rails for me with the puppet baby/child (which was 2/3rds of the movie).

Totally a "me" problem, I dislike creepy doll children...

The Mael Brothers (Sparks) did a spectacular job on the music, which is no surprise... I'm not sure if the puppet was their choice, and maybe in the end it doesn't really matter. It was a bold choice and understandable since a human baby couldn't do a lot of the "acting" required... but still puppet baby! Yikes.

I'm clearly obsessing/focusing on one element of the film, but it totally took me out of it and negatively affected my ability to watch it objectively.

This movie had a great trailer. Gary Oldman & Emily Mortimer, 2 great actors in a ghost story on a small ship at sea. It looked really good. Unfortunately the movie was tragically flawed because of a clumsy framing device. Not a spoiler since it hits you in the 1st 2 minutes of the film: They start out with the "after it happened" thing with Emily Mortimer on shore after the "tragedy at sea" and being interrogated by the FBI. The movie is then told in flashback. If this was not bad enough, at multiple times in the movie, just as tension is building they CUT BACK TO THE INTERROGATION, effectively killing the suspense. The "payoff" that the interrogation sequence builds up to is completely not worth it. The movie, in my opinion, would be immensely better if they just cut out ALL of the after the fact interrogation stuff and just played it with the straight in the moment stuff. It like if Kubrick opened The Shining with Shelley Duvall being questioned by local Police after the events at the Overlook asking her if she did something to her husband, and then cut back to this every 10 minutes or so throughout the film. We would not be remembering The Shining as a classic of suspense horror today if they had taken this ham-handed route.

The basic plot is a group of teenage girls go diving in a submerged Aztec city only to find it is infested with giant blind cave sharks (note the white eye on the shark on the poster). The sharks must also be deaf because they fail to home in on the noisy teens on multiple occasions. This is basically a "last girl" slasher film with all the jump scares and stupidity, but the slasher is replaced with sharks. They have full face mask scuba gear with radios so we can hear them whimper, cry, and scream throughout the last 2/3rds of the movie. The characters die in a fairly predictable order and nothing particularly surprising happens until near the end when they amp up the crazy stuff in an attempt to add to the tension. The very end was pretty ridiculous.... I almost wish they had ditched the "Hollywood ending" and gone with what would have happened to the characters had the final action events really occurred. Had the filmmakers just taken a step back and decided to not make the movie so formulaic with a bit more attention to not being so unrealistic as to break the suspension of disbelief it would have been a far better movie.

I'm conflicted about this film. It has a great score, some nice original songs, and hits a bunch of the classic Peanuts gags like Charlie Brown flying a kite, playing baseball, going to psychiatrist Lucy, trying to kick that football that Lucy would always pull away at the last second, as well as Snoopy dreaming of flying his doghouse in an aerial battle with the Red Baron and a very surreal animated sequence where Schroeder is playing Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique. I was also amused by Linus' drug-addict like withdrawal symptoms when he is without his blanket for an extended period of time. The kid had a serious flannel addiction. The downside, for me, was based around the nominal plot of the movie outside of hitting the standard tropes, which was Charlie Brown qualifying for and going to the National Spelling Bee. The majority of the words Charlie gets are very negative (failure, fussbudget, etc.) which gets the standard teasing from the kids "Of course he can spell failure", etc. The worst part of it comes down to him winning his class, his school, and going to Nationals where **SPOILER ALERT** He comes in 2nd place, losing on a pretty easy word he totally should have known how to spell (beagle, they kind of dog Snoopy is). At this point, the film falls onto the very American attitude that you can come in 2nd place at the National level and because you didn't come in 1st you are a piece of trash loser. This reinforces his loser-ness and he comes back into town in the dead of night to zero accolades, when he should have rightly been lauded for climbing to 2nd place at the National level...but that would have gone against type for his "affable loser" character. A terrible example for kids though, if you don't win, you suck. Well worth seeing for Peanuts fans & completists who have not seen it before, but it definitely needs to go along with a context setting discussion if you bring a little kids to see it.

I never saw this seminal slasher film before and decided to catch it when it was shown at a local art house theater. I give it a LOT of credit for being a genre defining film setting up tropes we have seen beat into the ground by other movies for over 40 years. As a standalone movie it was not that good, IMO. The acting was poor. The writing was weak (I cannot call it cliche since it really defined what would later be the cliche). This is a movie where a LOT of movies that came after did it better (and a lot just as poorly, without the trendsetting nod). It was one of the earliest "Final Girl" movies, so a trendsetter there. It set up the trope of "Hey, don't go into that creepy house uninvited." Heck, 3 kids get killed because they willingly just walk into Leatherface's house uninvited. I don't think he even committed a crime killing them... this is Texas, can't you kill people who trespass in your house there? I don't think they anticipated the actual method of killing used, but regardless, until he actually chased someone off his property I think he was good with Texas law... And Marilyn Burns as Sally.... OH MY! What an annoying scream. When she was running (in the dark) from Leatherface SCREAMING continually, all I could think was "For God's sake, shut the heck up and he'll never find you in the dark" or alternately "I hope he catches her and shuts her up!" I know several people who absolutely love this movie and watch it over & over, to all you folks: "You do you". I never have to see this again.