Movie Review – Savior Gaming

John Wick (2014)

John Wick is a movie I somehow failed to sit down and watch all the way through for over a decade. I had always heard it was about a guy going on a killing spree because some dude killed his dog, and I assumed it was hyperbole and that there was more to it than that. Suffice it to say, I am now fully aware that this is just an hour and forty-one minutes of Keanu Reeves killing people because some dude broke into his house to steal his car and killed his dog in the process.

So I enjoyed the movie, it was fun, I won’t go on and on about it, but I do have some questions that maybe the other movies answer, but I don’t know, I haven’t watched them yet. For example, Wick kills a bunch of people in his house and a cop shows up and sees the dead bodies and just says he didn’t know John was back to work. Is killing people just legal for assassins, and did he assume John would file the proper paperwork for these?

Does he receive some sort of pay per person he kills when they get sent after him, or is his payment that he gets to live longer? I only ask because there seems to be some sort of economic system based around assassins in this world. So it seems like killing one might also get you paid.

My final question, the cleaners he pays aren’t also killers, do they have a special place they take these bodies, or are they just dumping them in rivers and unmarked graves? Because it seems like the cops don’t care about what he is doing he could just call the usual coroner. Or is this more of a professional courtesy to not bother the cops? This world seems to have some weird stuff going on. Either way, best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Conjuring: Last Rites

The Conjuring: Last Rights is basically the perfect example of how to not make a AAA horror movie. As I do every year around my birthday, I crashed at @torstenvblog house, ordered pizza, and we watched movies. Nine this year to be exact, and I am sure you will be reading about the rest soon enough from him. This one, however, I insisted on writing about myself.

The movie itself mostly revolves around the Warren family and how Ed and Lorrain had a daughter, Judy. They had stopped their investigations for years by the time the Smurl family haunting had taken place, and they were focusing on Judy’s upcoming wedding.

This obviously has nothing to do with the Smurl house, but they did shoehorn Judy having visions and whatnot into this about the Smurl house and the demon that is haunting the family; they came from a mirror shown earlier in the movie connecting the Warrens and Smurls. This never happened in real life, by the way.

In fact, the entire movie never even bothers to make you care about the Smurl family. You spend very little time with them. The little kids are mostly shown running around, playing. The older kids scream a bit about how they can’t keep living like this, but outside of a few scenes, they never really show what this even is. We do get a couple of great scenes towards the end where one daughter finds a video from her birthday and is chased by a crazy ghost with an axe, and this is the same night we see the father molested by one. This, however, is after she screams about living like this; what was going on before then is very little that is even mentioned.

Even ignoring that I come from the same area as this Smurl house (I’ve literally driven past it more than once in my travels) and shared emails with people who lived there while working on a book and helping a friend with a podcast (decades of people who lived there have denied anything happening there, going all the way back to the 1980s) and even ignoring the fact I personally think the Warrens are probably frauds, the potental for this to be a good movie exist. The first two Conjuring movies are good. This movie, however, does everything wrong, and nobody should ever watch this pile of garbage. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) Review

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), the sequel to Beetlejuice (1988), is a movie I avoided for about a year. See, I have fond memories of the original, having seen it with my parents a long time ago. In fact, it is one of the first movies I remember watching with my dad that wasn’t named Godzilla. Hearing Michael Keaton say “Nice Fucking Model” while kicking over a tree will forever be etched into my head as probably the first time I heard the word in a movie. ( I laughed so hard he rewound the movie for me.)

Now I adore Jenna Ortega. I have always enjoyed her work. But I was skeptical about her playing this role because I wasn’t sure it was a role anyone could play. Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz is such a great character. I didn’t see her having an estranged daughter driving her nuts as something that could feasibly be pulled off. Boy, was I wrong.

There were some problems with making this movie that were pulled off well. For example, how do you have a haunted house while not bringing back the characters that played those ghosts? Well, you give them a happy ending. No, not that kind, you sickos. Lydia found a loophole between movies that let them move on. Have a main cast member who shall remain nameless, convicted of horrible sex crimes? You horribly kill him and make him a running joke of the movie.

I don’t want to go into in-depth with the story; this would bring us deep into spoiler territory. But I enjoy that Lydia and her daughter, Astrid, don’t get along because Astrid quite honestly doesn’t believe in ghosts. She thinks her mother’s life’s work is a scam. Of course, her grandfather and grandmother could confirm it’s true, but Gramps is busy bird watching, and Grandma is a crazy but job artist and nobody would believe her anyway.

This brings me to Delia Deetz, the ever-amazing Cathrine O’Hara. Look, I don’t really know what this woman is on, or not on, but this woman is just fantastic. She plays crazy as well as anyone in the business. Even better, she plays not crazy just as well. I am not even sure Delia is crazy; it might just be an act to sell art. That is the beauty of Cathrine.

Bottom line is this movie is as good as the original, and I hope we get a third, and it better be called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022) Review

Christmas Bloody Christmas by writer/director Joe Begos, is a very odd slasher flick for me. It has all the staples of a slasher movie you would want: gory kills, campy acting that isn’t over the top, and a story that makes just enough sense to suspend disbelief but isn’t so far out there to make me just want to turn it off.

The story goes like this: a music store owner named Tori, played by the talented Riley Dandy, is convinced by her long-time employee, Robbie (the equally gifted Sam Delich), to blow off a Tinder date to drink and hang out with him instead. After a quick stop at the local toy store to visit some friends who have decided to stay late for a drunken sex filled night after hours at the store, they are off to the bar. The thing is, the toy store is where they are shown a somewhat creepy electronic Santa that is very popular because it does all the stuff a normal store Santa does, except it isn’t a real person. Personally, I took this as a shot at unfettered capitalism and how companies would rather get rid of an employee and use (quite literally in this case) repurposed military equipment to save money than hire an old man to play Santa.

At the bar, you can hear on the TV that there has been a recall on these Santas because some of them have been reverting back to their original programming. This obviously can’t mean anything bad for our drunk sex fiend friends back at the store, right? Yeah, they are about to get killed mid-coiatis. Tori and Robbie are leaving the bar around this time on their way back to Tori’s house, and assume they are just having a great time.

This, of course, leads to the eventual sex between our main characters, and this is where I need to give a shout-out to Joe. Movies like this tend to take sex scenes and turn them into an excuse to just show a ton of nudity for the sake of having nudity, and this is done quite well. Very little actual nudity ( and this is assuming you consider a thong nudity)

My only real issue comes down to the massive amount of false finishes with the villain. They start at around halfway through the movie, and I completely understand the concept of building suspense and building to a climax and building hope, etc. There does come a point when you are no longer building anything, and you are simply killing momentum for an audience.

I can only watch Mecha Santa get hit by so many cars or take so many shotgun blasts that “kill him” so many times before I don’t care if he gets up or not, and by the time Tori actually kills him, I didn’t care who died as long as the movie ended. I went from rooting for Tori to rooting for the movie to just end. I started out enjoying the movie, but by the end, I simply didn’t care. It isn’t the acting or even the story; it is simply a matter of how they chose to play it out. More deaths and fewer false deaths for Santa would have gone a long way. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Cobweb (2023) Review

Cobweb (2023) is one of those movies where I love pretty much every person in the movie. Lizzy Caplan has been great in every movie I have ever seen her in, and Antony Starr speaks for himself. The young Woody Norman is their son, Peter, who does his best as their awkward homebody son, but none of this can save the film.

Let’s rewind a bit first. Lizzy playsCarol, a neurotic and overprotective mother of Peter, and who can blame her. It is almost Halloween, and they live in a town where, right down the street, a young girl went missing. never to be found. Antony plays Mark, a seemingly normal, loving man just doing what is best for his family.

Peter is their 8-year-old son who just wants to go trick-or-treating like every other kid in school, in hopes that maybe he will stop being a social outcast and maybe get the other kids to stop picking on him. This isn’t gonna happen though, since his parents aren’t fans of the holiday. They do oddly have a massive crop of pumpkins in the backyard.

Yes, there’s a body buried here somewhere.

If you think there is a body buried somewhere in the pumpkin patch, you are right. The movie tells you that for free with no guesswork involved. See, Peter quickly starts hearing a weird tapping in the wall that his parents quickly tell him isn’t real. Mark later tells him it must be rats, so they set out some rat poison. I am aware this makes no real sense; it’s just foreshadowing for the sake of a plot point later. Usually, this sort of thing serves a purpose and is hinted at, like there would be some sign of rats. Maybe they would have been eating the pumpkins, but no, they have their own issue. Rot, so they bury some.

This is the kind of writing that detracts from what should have been a great movie. Don’t get me wrong, the movie isn’t a dumpster fire; it’s enjoyable and fun for a quick watch. But what should be a movie we talk about as a movie that proves we can rehash concepts and still make quality, amazing movies, instead comes across as lazy. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Dogma, The Theater Experience

As many of you may know, I have always been a fan of the Kevin Smith movies. I won’t exactly be reviewing Dogma, it’s a great movie, and it is 25 years old. I feel like if you cared to see it by now, you probably would have. What I wanted to talk about was the movie experience as a whole.

I don’t go to the movies often these days, but damn has it gotten expenive. My buddy picked up a large soda and a medium popcorn; these combined cost over $20. This was about the same as a movie ticket. The Regal theater we visited was very basic, and it is one we have been to in the past. Gone were the days of there being movie decorations everywhere. It almost felt like a tomb or a labyrinth where you walk in and can buy some food, then get ushered through some dark paths to a movie screen.

When people discuss the movie industry and the movie experience dying, this theater really showed me why. Going with my friends, and most movies i have gone to see, I go see with @torstenvblog, so it wasn’t who I was with, it has been the same great experience. This time, while the company was great, and the movie was fantastic, the experience itself just felt off. I leave you with this thought: movies and theaters have changed. Do not accept that if you have options, where you live. We have other great theaters near me, but Regal is not one of them.

Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

He’s All That (2021)

For Fans of 90’s movies She’s All That (1999) told the story the resident heart throb in high school whose popularity took a small hit when him and his girlfriend broke up. So he makes a bet that he could in fact turn anyone into the prom queen with the right outfit and right boyfriend.

Fast forward to He’s All That (2021) Which tells the story of the High School hotty whose popularity and social media standing took a hit when her boyfriend cheated on her during a surprise live stream.

Normally I am not a fan of these movies that are just gender swapped retellings of earlier movies because they always try to just be shot for shot remakes. That isn’t what happened here. While there are some similarities, both our Male and Female popular kids make bets with their friends involving an antisocial loser for example that both turn out to be attractive after a male over and both are artists,one a painter the other a photographer.

They are all vastly different characters in their own rights. now critically He’s all that wasn’t very well received and I can understand why. It isn’t a great movie,but it is a fun movie that gives you a feel good ending and that’s all I really ask for from movies like this. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Drive Thru (2007) Movie Review

Drive Thru, starring Leighton Meester as Mackenzie Carpenter, is not a good movie. It is, however, a competent slasher movie. They didn’t bother getting the simple Spanish right for the town name, though. Blanca Carne, meaning white meat, which should be Carne Blanca, is home to Hella Burger fast food. Their mascot, Horny the Clown, is about to go on a killing spree.

The story is quite simple. Mackenzie’s friends start dying just after her graduation party, and it is up to her to figure out why. She soon discovers, much like in The Nightmare on Elm Street movies, that her parents did some messed up stuff and now the killer is after her and her friends.

The two things this movie does have going for it are the great acting. Larry Joe Cambell playing Detective Crocker is fantastic alongside the star of the film. Larry is a guy you know, even if you don’t know him by name.

Second, and this is important for a slasher horror film, it has some great death scenes. This is honestly all I wanted, and I got it. So feel safe to check this one out if all you want is solid acting and some cool deaths. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Grinch That Stole B*tches (2024)

I like to keep my reviews positive, anyone that’s followed for any real amount of time knows that. I don’t really like shitting on peoples hard work, especially work I don’t or can’t do myself. You can tell the director and writer Malik Marcell and fellow writer Ulrick Hopkins put time and love into this movie. And stars Otis Mcintosh and Christianne Jones enjoyed working on this and worked well together. Honestly, I would love to see them in more movies. Navv Green showing up in what is clearly a movie made friends wanting to get something done was cool to see, and I respect that.

But damn this movie hurt to watch at times. The premise is essentially this: The Grinch (Otis), fresh out of jail after basically being set up by Santa (Navv) wants to continue his work to destroy Christmas. This has been an ongoing thing for all time. It’s hinted that Santa is a title passed down from father to son and that The Grinch is similarly a title passed from person to person, which I like.

The goal? Rob Santa of all his toys so he can’t deliver them, people won’t belive in santa, chirsmas will go away. During the break-in, which involves a drug addict and a dwarf, they run into a very unhappy Mrs. Clause. (Ms. Jones) who decides she’s gonna sleep with the Grinch and go back to his place to get back at Santa for ignoring her. Since she is gorgeous, the Grinch agrees.

Discovering his plan to ruin Santa, the wife decides that since the Grinch is great in the sack, they will get all the lonely moms to come back to his place. This will somehow ruin Christmas. I think the plan was to make the kids misbehave or something. This results in the best scene in the movie: all these women sign up to be “kidnapped” in a fun and playful way and get tossed into the back of a car, bags packed. Husbands are mad as hell, women are laughing, the Grinch, his pet crack head and dwarf are having a great time.

I won’t ruin the ending of this hour long movie for you in case you want to see the twist ending for yourself. The movie isn’t good, and it really doesn’t paint the black community in a good light. I think it may be the worst thing done to the black community since slavery, Jim Crow laws, and P. Diddy parties. Watch it at your own risk. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Graveyard Shark

The other day a friend of mine shot me a message and said hey, you need to watch Graveyard Shark on Tubi and he refused to explain why. He does this occasionally and I am never disappointed. The movie is always either a complete train wreck,or a masterpiece,but they are always enjoyable.

This time,the movie manages to be both. You can guess by the name what this movie is about, a sort of man shark is buried in a cemetery after it is thought to be killed by a fisherman. It turns out it isn’t dead,and now it is killing people in this graveyard.

This is a rubber suit. And I don’t know why it’s a spiked leather jacket

Now there are some twists and turns and things I absolutely refuse to spoil, but at no point I’m this movie did I know what was going to happen next. The entire plot of the movie from where the shark came from,to how they get rid of it and everything ok between was a rollercoaster ride of what the hell is going on.

I mean all of this in the best way possible, I never wanted to know for example how a mermaid has sex or that Bigfoot was a bottom. I do however know both of these things now. So go,learn these things,and may the gaming gods bring you glory.