Category: Movie Review

Knock at the Cabin Movie Review

Knock at the Cabin is probably the first Dave Bautista movie I have seen that wasn’t in some way an action movie. I wasn’t really sure what to think going into this but it looked interesting.

M. Night has a way of making 2 types of movies, great and why the hell did I waste my time watching this,and I’m happy to say this one falls into the pretty great category because it doesn’t really force you into making any decisions, while also making you feel for both sides of what should be,and is, a crazy situation.

The movie starts off with a little girl named Wen catching grasshoppers outside of the cabin her family is vacationing in. This is when Leonard (Dave B) makes his entrance and instead of his usual style he is simply shown as a very big man walking in the woods.

He sits down and talks to Wen and quickly we discover this soft spoken giant of a man is here on a mission,one he is not happy to be on. We discover Wen has 2 fathers and when asked how she felt about it she basically tells me she loves her dad’s and it’s only when people try to hard that she becomes uncomfortable with them asking about it. (This is obviously done in little kid language) Leonard quicky tells Wen to remember no matter what happens when his associates arrive, he is her friend above anything else.

Things quickly take a turn when they are forced to break into the cabin and let this family know that one of them must be sacrificed to avoid the apocalypse. The rules are simple. Nobody can leave the cabin, this family must make the choice themselves, and they must also make the sacrifice themselves.

What follows is a weird ride if it is true or isn’t it true, discovering one of these 4 may or may not be the homophobic man that attacked one of the fathers in the bar which is what caused this man’s distrust of people and some tastefully done death scenes.

The movie is very well crafted to make you think instead of trying to catch your interest with blood and gore. At times I even found myself questioning the gay couples motives for not making the choice as it becomes more and more clear this may not be some cult sort of thing.

This brings me to Dave’s performance as Leonard. He was phenomenal and even when I felt he was in the wrong for even being there,I wanted to see him win. This also brings me to what you rarely see in movies. Without giving away the end of the movie, neither side is right or wrong in many ways. I found the whole thing interesting. I definitely recommend checking it out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Beware: Children at Play

For starters this 1989 slasher is niche as niche gets,I had never even heard of it until @torstenvblog told me about it,which is how we spent New Years Eve, watching Beware: Children at Play.

The movie starts off setting up the soon to be story, a Dad and his son just vacationing in the woods, until dad steps on a bear trap and after days in the woods dies in front of his son.

The rest of the movie focuses on a sheriff and a writer trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing kids in the area. Later you will discover that the missing children are actually cannibals eating people.

The movie itself is,well it’s bad. The acting looks like something from a bunch of high school students who were forced to perform a play and had no real interest in theater. The effects even for the 1980’s not only didn’t look good some made no sense,for example a guy being chopped in half with a scythe but there being no blood on the ground or the weapon. Also fair warning, a trigger warning if you will, there is a sex scene that is basically a rape scene.

The dialogue as well is far from even decent. The movie is however greatly entertaining and I will say the ending itself is probably one of the most ballsy I have ever seen in a movie. The good news is tho you can just watch it on YouTube,which I have shared below. So please go and enjoy this abomination,and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

I Still See You Review

I Still See You is a 2018 movie based on a book that starts off with what is truly a terrifying premise to be honest. An accident at a lab, due to a Hadron Collider, causes a massive explosion. This explosion kills a ton of people and leaves behind remnants.

The remnants are basically ghosts that go through these small loops every day at the same time in the same place daily. For example one old lady crosses the same street every morning at the same time in the same way. Now however everyone can see them.

You can’t really interact with them and if you try they sort of vanish and they don’t even know you exist. They are even governed by 3 laws that have held true since the accident.

This is sort of terrifying honestly because imagine this in the real world, a mother or daughter dying and then simply showing up for breakfast daily or having to see a murder over and over again in your home.

This is also where the movie falls to pieces because the entire plot revolves around this premise falling apart magically but only for this girl and her friend while nobody notices and also those laws that have held true for a decade not being laws,but only in this situation.

The acting is fine, Bella Thorn does an admiral job doing what she can to keep this convoluted plot together. And her co-star and love interest Richard Harmon have some good chemistry. I’d like to see them together in a movie that doesn’t fall apart at the half way mark.

I didn’t hate this movie, it was a pretty average experience. I’d actually watch it again if my friend threw it on. I simply hated that what started out as a great idea that could have been terrifying so easily decided to simply reverse course and say everything they spent time establishing as true was a lie and did it in such a lazy way.

I won’t spoil the movie for you, as always I do hope you will watch it and make your own decision and come back and let me know. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

Cocaine Bear is a 2023 movie that is yes, legitimately based on a true story, with quite a few liberties taken. For example the part about someone tossing massive amounts of coke out of a plane and a bear getting into it is absolutely true, there is even a museum in Lexington Kentucky where you can go see the bear they found in the woods that ate about 15 million dollars in that beautiful white stuff.

Now on to the movie, which quite honestly is a big old pile of what the fuck did Elizabeth Banks just make. I mean that in the best way possible. This movie is gory, it is funny it has some great acting for a movie that does absolutely nothing to take itself seriously. The bear also looks pretty good for a pretty low budget movie.

The story itself is actually very simple, a plane is going down so a man tosses duffle bags of coke off the plane. He dies when his parachute doesn’t open so a cop that knows what is going on rushed to find the drugs. The cartel that owns the drugs also wants to find the millions in drugs. Unfortunately a young girl and her male friend also skip school to go paint a waterfall after the mother breaks a promise to go paint the before mentioned waterfall.

As the name of the movie implies,a bear eats bags of coke and becomes all coked up and decides to kill everyone in his way of, you guessed it, eating more coke that it is now addicted too.

Small things you get to enjoy is a bear doing a line of coke off a severed leg if you pay attention. A drug dealer constantly complaining about his favorite jersey getting messed up (but not his missing fingers) and possibly the last movie appearance of the late great Ray Liotta. (He did finish filming numerous projects before his death but not all were movies)

The movie is a ton of fun,I won’t say it is a good movie, but God damn it was one of the most fun movies I have seen in years.

Pearl (2022)

Pearl is the prequel to X and basically tells the story of how Pearl ended up on the farm with her husband. If you recall Mia Goth played both the main characters Maxine and Pearl in X and in this one also plays Pearl once more as a young lady.

Pearl has a much different time than X, taking place during the Spanish Flu of 1918 while most of the men are away during the first Great War it starts out quite happy as Pearl dreams of escaping the family farm for a life of dancing like the girls in her films.

We quickly find that her father is confined to a wheel chair and has very little know of what is going on and needs constant care and her mother, Ruth, an older German woman is quite the uncaring woman. She is constantly speaking down to Pearl and her dreams and simply wanting things done because that is what is best. One example of this was when Pearl rode her bike to town for more medicine she stopped for a show and didn’t bring back 8 cents. Ruth noticed this forbid Pearl from eating dinner and she was only allowed to eat this for breakfast the next day to make up for the money she spent.

This is where we see the madness in Pearl go from subtle to more and more pronounced as she desperately wants to leave this farm and her family behind.

The movie is great and makes an excellent edition to the series of films and there is more to come. It perfectly captures the feeling of the early 1900’s without resorting to using far outdated technology or anything silly like that. This one is definitely worth checking out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Hellraiser (2022)

This movie gets a lot of hell (pun intended) and honestly I don’t think it deserves it. I will go on the record and say it is probably the 2nd,if not 3rd best of the series. First off,it’s one of the few movies that still did practical effects in this day and age,so huge shout out to that. Jamie Clayton did a great job playing a difficult role, and unlike the most recent movies in the series this one had a plot and script that actually made some sense.

This time around we basically got to see what would happen if a very rich man got bored and collected the puzzle, had someone solve it and watched them die. Yes he was a very sick man, but at the same time who wouldn’t want to know what that thing did?

Obviously the story builds from there as we meet our main character Riley who’s brother has disappeared and she believes this insane puzzle is responsible,one that she now thinks may be after her (spoiler alert,it is) I truly wish I could get more into the story without absolutely destroying the movie for you all,but it completely would.

What I can say is the practical effects in this movie show why more movies need to go back to using them. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Free Guy (Review)

Free guy is of course a Ryan Reynolds movie, and I am a sucker for his movies. Shawn Levy as a director was great and with co-stars Jodie Comer and Joe Keery this was bound to be a great movie. Add to that a simple yet intriguing concept of what would happen if the NPC’s in the games we love could just go and decide to do whatever they wanted, and you get a recipe for, well something.

Free Guy Sees Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer) attempts to find the code her and Keys (Joe Keery) made and later sold to Antwan (Taika Waititi) and prove he illegally used it to create his game. At the same time, Guy (Ryan Reynolds) a simple Bank teller decides there has to be more to his life than getting robbed and saying his catchphrase “don’t have a good day, have a great day” One day after seeing the in-game avatar of Molotov girl he decides he wants to be the hero and confronts the bank robber, who also happens to be a real-life player of this open world game.

This will set off a chain reaction that leads to self-discovery and love for Guy, who people don’t realize isn’t a player character that has hacked an NPC skin. He is also the person that levels up the fastest in the history of this game, and he does so by being the good guy. In a world filled with crime he attempts to prevent it but stopping bank robberies, wanton murders, and destruction, and the gaming gods know what else.

Added to this the movie is full of great cameos I won’t spoil for you, just keep an eye out for not only people you know, listen to voices. There was at least one I wasn’t sure of until I wrote this and looked it up. The movie is far from perfect, but it’s the perfect amount of fun. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Cocaine Bear Movie Trailer

There isn’t a lot to say about this movie trailer besides, yes it is based on a true story. The story however is nowhere near as fun and exciting as the movie. The real story is simply a man named Andrew Thornton dropped a bunch of coke out of a plane, it was found by a bear, and said bear injected a bunch of it and died of an overdose. The bear’s body is actually on display in a museum in Lexington Kentucky. Enjoy the trailer, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Also as always if you want to help support Savior Gaming consider buying my book, it would be greatly appreciated.

Troll (Netflix 2022)

Troll from Netflix is one of those movies you watch and leaves you wanting more and at the same time asking yourself what the person who made this thing was drinking. I mean that as a compliment by the way.

This thing starts off with a father and daughter climbing a mountain, a daughter that probably shouldn’t be doing this by the way. Once they get to the top they sit there having a discussion about myths and poems etc and she sees the faces of the trolls that drank too much and turned to stone with the sunlight.

We fast forward about 20 years and this girl is now on a dinosaur dig desperately trying to find some bones before their funding is gone and during a speech about having to have faith and deliver she finds a T-Rex skull. While all this is going on there is some digging and blasting elsewhere and a troll is awakened and gets a bit pissed and kills some people.

Of course in the small country of Norway the government tracks down a bunch of doctors,hacks a cellphone from one of those crushed people and manages to find footage and still nobody believes it’s a troll.

Like most monster movies it takes awhile before anyone will believe this thing is real, and when the big reveal comes the troll actually doesn’t look too bad. It’s about 130 feet tall for some reason and while not as fancy as the newer Godzilla vs Kong movie it looks better than many monsters we have been treated too.

This is one of the closest movies I have seen in a long time to a classic Kaiju film. It’s got a solid story,a giant monster destroying stuff and it looks good while doing it. The movie isn’t by any means fantastic,but damn if it isn’t fun. Check it out,and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Candyman 2021

If you never saw the original Candyman, it isn’t essential to understand or enjoy this one. Jordan Peele is a master of his craft. If you do however this movie is so much more than meets the eye initially. From how small parts of the original story are told wrong to0 misunderstood because of the time that has passed all the way to the realization to the people in the story that certain myths aren’t actually myths.

That isn’t to say the movie is perfect, many times it tries a little too hard to be deep than does silly things like the main character doesn’t bother going to the hospital for a bug bite that is engulfing his entire hand over the course of days and his obsessive girlfriend that dotes on him doesn’t seem to even notice he needs medical help. She does keep bringing up his obsessive behavior over his artwork. I found it hard to take it seriously with that going on. It would also make comments about things like gentrification, and have another character comment that the black main character complaining about gentrification is now living in the very buildings that gentrification built making those same characters uncomfortable. Small things like this are nice to see in a movie even though they aren’t put in there for me.

This is where the movie is strongest, Jordan Peele manages to make a horror movie that appeals to everyone without alienating anyone. It manages to have an impressive kill count while making you think about what is going on. It doesn’t insult your intelligence, but it isn’t trying to be an art film. It also has possibly the best cameo I have ever seen, and I won’t spoil it. So definitely enjoy Candyman as much as I did. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory and tell everyone.