Double Dragon (1994)

I've seen quite a few movies based on video games, and the ones that are actually good are so few and far between that you'd swear they don't exist at all. The truth is that most of them fall into one of three categories: merely adequate, so bad they're good, and so awful that they only exist to show where the bottom of the barrel is. And there have been quite a few of these "bottom of the barrel" movies, too. Just take a look at Mortal Kombat: Annihilation or any of the video game movies directed by Uwe Boll.

Another of these awful movies is Double Dragon. Based on the classic '80s arcade game distributed by the now-defunct Taito Corporation, Double Dragon can actually say it was the second live-action video game movie ever made. But it can also say it had one of the poorest receptions of any video game movie, grossing just barely over two million dollars during its domestic theatrical run. And let me tell you, this movie sucks pretty hard too.

The movie takes place in the far off year of 2007, where the city formerly known as Los Angeles has become a post-apocalyptic hellhole in the wake of a big earthquake that hit seven years earlier. The city became so riddled with crime that the police were forced to reach a compromise, where the gangs would have free reign over the streets once the sun goes down.

Among the city's criminals is Kogo Shuko (Robert Patrick), a would-be crime lord seeking to possess "the Double Dragon," a mysterious medallion said to give immeasurable power to whoever wields it. It was split into two pieces centuries ago, and Shuko has managed to get his hands on one piece. All he needs now is the other half...

...which is in the possession of Satori Imuda (Julia Nickson), the mentor and mother figure of karate experts Billy (Scott Wolf) and Jimmy Lee (Mark Dacascos). Billy and Jimmy are supposed to be brothers, but I just don't see it. Anyway, Satori and the Lees run afoul of a particular gang, who sends word back to Shuko that they have the other half of the medallion. Figuring that there's strength in numbers, Shuko unites the gangs and breaks the truce with the police in order to find his quarry.

He even tracks down and kills Satori, though Billy and Jimmy manage to get away with their half of the medallion. Left with nowhere to turn, Billy and Jimmy seek help from Marian Delario (Alyssa Milano) and the Power Corps, a group of urban youths dedicated to reclaiming the streets from the gangs. Now with their own backup, Billy and Jimmy decide to take the fight to Shuko and claim the complete medallion for themselves.

I'm not going to bother sugarcoating it: Double Dragon sucks. It's such a terrible movie that it makes me pine for such fare as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life or Doom. I'd rather watch a random Uwe Boll movie instead of Double Dragon. That's how awful this movie is. I take that back, I'd rather not watch one of Boll's movies. But that doesn't change the fact that Double Dragon sucks.

It's just so horribly made, from the acting to the writing, right down to the set design and the costumes. It's almost embarrassing to watch. I watched the movie two or three times while writing my notes for this review, and I kinda hate myself a little because of it. Do you know how bad a movie has to be in order to inspire feelings like that? It has to be unbelievably bad. The movie is like Street Fighter, but worse. The direction is sub-generic, the effects are weak, the writing is mind-numbing, and the acting is lousy. This whole thing is one big crap sandwich trying to force itself down your throat. And that just isn't cool. You hear me, Double Dragon? That's not cool!

The man at the helm of this sinking ship is James Yukich, a music video director with no prior movie experience. And considering he's only directed one movie since, I guess he decided to stick with music videos. That's a good thing, because his direction here is the worst kind of generic. There is nothing memorable or exciting to mention. Yukich's lack of filmmaking experience is apparent, as he doesn't get any decent cinematography or any decent performances from the cast. If I'd actually seen this movie theatrically, the only thing Yukich would have directed would have been me towards the nearest exit. That's how flat and uninspiring his work is.

Even the music is bad. Composed by Jay Ferguson, the score is just as unremarkable and forgettable as every other part of the movie. It's like he saw the movie sucked, and decided he just wouldn't bother.

The script is also pretty awful. It's written by Michael Davis and Peter Gould, but the most surprising thing is that Paul Dini gets a "story by" credit. Yeah, the Paul Dini that created the awesome Batman cartoon in the early '90s. It's the same guy. But as to the script, it's dreadful. A trained chimpanzee could have written this movie. It's just one lame joke after another. You get the feeling that the writers were so busy coming up with stupid crap to put in the script that they never got around to putting forth any sort of positive effort.

There's just so much garbage in the script that I can't imagine anyone with an IQ over 75 thinking that it would have made a good movie. But let's break this down into specific complaints. First, there's the villain. Kogo Shuko's main goal is not the usual world domination thing. Instead, he just wants to take over one city. One single, solitary city. Really. And it's not even a city that's worth taking over in the first place! Either Shuko's aiming really low, or taking over a city is the first step in a grander scheme. But one way or another, you'd think that a bad guy would aim a little higher, even if wanting to rule the world is a bad guy cliché.

And then there's the awful, awful dialogue. You know how the dialogue they gave Michelangelo in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon from the '80s is kinda irritating when you look back on it? Imagine more than one character talking like that. Yeah, it's as bad as it sounds. And then there are the cheap little shout-outs to Who's The Boss? and General Hospital. Just because you've cast people who starred on popular television shows doesn't mean that you should use the names of these shows as jokes. At least the General Hospital one was a bit less on-the-nose.

Last on my list are the actors, and what a motley crew they are. I'm pretty sure there's not a single good performance among them. But I guess I should break this one down, too. Our heroes are played by Scott Wolf and Mark Dacascos, who play their roles as a couple of losers whose combined brain power couldn't turn on a light bulb. I don't know whether to blame the piss-poor writing or the actors themselves, but Wolf and Dacascos just plain suck. Their characters are ineffectual idiots for pretty much the entire movie, and their performances don't exactly improve the quality of the material.

As our villain, Robert Patrick is so hammy that there's no way to take him seriously. Patrick obviously realizes that he made a bad decision by agreeing to be in this movie, because you can tell by the way he acts that he just doesn't care. He's so over the top that it almost becomes comedic. And I'm sure Patrick was wondering the same thing I was: How did he end up going from Terminator 2 to Double Dragon?

Bringing up the rear is Alyssa Milano, whose career was in that awkward stage between Who's The Boss? and Charmed. She did an awful lot of crap during that period, and I'm surprised we never heard a story about how she beat her agent to death with a crowbar. Anyway, Milano is at least watchable, in spite of having so much going against her. The script sucks, the wardrobe department made her wear some really goofy costumes, and the hair and makeup department gave her a bleached blonde crew cut. No, seriously. Milano is able to overcome the nonsense for a little while, but it ultimately drags her down into a performance that is mediocre at best.

I will admit that Double Dragon does have something of a goofy charm to it, but that will only get you so far. It doesn't change the fact that the movie is utterly inept. And the odd thing is that, in the pantheon of bad video game movies, Double Dragon has been pretty much forgotten. Everybody always gravitates to Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter or one of the zillion others out there. But nobody ever mentions Double Dragon. It's almost on the level of one of those movies that a friend of a friend has seen, but you've only heard about.

I've actually seen it, and I can tell you that it's a real stinker. It's not so bad that you can't watch the whole thing in one sitting, but it isn't a movie that you'd ever see yourself wanting to watch more than once. So in summation, I'd give Double Dragon one and a half stars on my usual grading scale. But at least it wasn't as bad as BloodRayne.

Final Rating: *½

Watchmen (2009)

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
("Who watches the watchmen?")
—Juvenal, Satire 6.346–348

For the longest time, comic books were considered solely kids stuff, an unsophisticated form of entertainment with no relevance to those who had put away childish things. But as the world began edging ever closer to the twenty-first century, things started changing. Books like Frank Miller's Sin City and The Dark Knight Returns, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and Garth Ennis's Preacher helped to expand comics beyond their regular audiences, and they all have Watchmen to thank.

Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, and published by DC Comics, Watchmen was first foisted upon the world as a twelve-issue series that began in 1986. The series was compiled into a single tome soon after its conclusion, and quickly earned recognition as a benchmark in the comic book industry. Moore and Gibbons's acclaimed murder mystery is, at the time of this writing, the only comic book to have both won a Hugo Award and earn an inclusion in Time's list of the greatest English-language novels published since 1923.

Rumors of a cinematic adaptation surfaced not too long after the beginning of Watchmen's initial monthly publication, but the project languished in developmental hell for over twenty years before any real progress was made. The movie finally entered production at the end of 2007 and saw its theatrical release four months ago, much to the anticipation of devoted comic book readers around the world. But does the Watchmen movie live up to the seminal comic book that serves as its inspiration?

Welcome to the year 1985, a world where Richard Nixon is still in office after successfully repealing the 22nd Amendment, America won the war in Vietnam before making the country the 51st state, and tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are so high that nuclear war is literally weeks away. But none of that is of any concern to Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a masked vigilante who operates in open defiance of legislation that outlawed costumed crimefighters and forced those fancying themselves as "superheroes" into retirement.

While investigating the murder of Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Rorschach discovers that he was secretly "The Comedian," a ruthless, cynical superhero still active as an employee of the government. While Blake's exploits had made him many enemies in the world of politics over the years, Rorschach believes that his death may be part of a broad conspiracy to eliminate various members of what once was the superhero community.

And as it turns out, mounting evidence seems to prove him right. An assassin makes a failed attempt to kill Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), an influential and popular entrepreneur once known as "Ozymandias, the world's smartest man." Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) — whose vast godlike abilities have made him "Doctor Manhattan," the linchpin of the American military's success — exiles himself to Mars after allegations surface that he may be to blame for the terminal cancer that has stricken many of his former associates over the years. Rorschach himself is framed for the murder of an old foe and thrown in prison.

These incidents draw the attention of Daniel Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), a former masked hero who was once the closest thing Rorschach had to a friend. Dreiberg connects the dots and realizes that Rorschach's so-called "mask killer" may somehow be connected to the impending war between America and the Soviet Union. It isn't long before he and Doctor Manhattan's former lover, Laurie Jupiter (Malin Ackerman), find themselves being pulled back into their superhero identities of "Nite Owl" and "Silk Spectre" in their efforts to discover the root of this conspiracy.

Many people have labeled Watchmen as one of the most important comic books ever published. When something earns a description like "the Citizen Kane of comics," you know going in that it'll be pretty big. Watchmen's influence can be felt in numerous properties both in and out of comics. Its fingerprints can even be seen in the family-friendly Disney/Pixar collaboration The Incredibles, as well as in elements of the NBC television series Heroes. But a cinematic adaptation of the book had long been considered impossible, as it was believed that the book was so complex that a movie would never work.

The idea of a Watchmen movie bounced around from studio to studio, from director to director and writer to writer. Even after the movie was actually filmed and began its marketing campaign, its North American release date was threatened by a nasty legal battle between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. over the proper ownership of the movie's distribution rights. But after all that time, we finally arrived upon the film that we're discussing currently. And while there are some glaring differences between the comics and this adaptation, I believe that Zack Snyder and company made the best Watchmen movie they possibly could.

The trailers and posters for Watchmen referred to Snyder as a "visionary director." I don't know if I'd go as far as to call him a visionary, but I will agree that he's a guy who knows what kind of movie he wants to make. His two prior efforts — the Dawn of the Dead remake and 300 — were ultra-flashy affairs that, at the very least, were ultimately more style than substance. And while I don't think Snyder was the first person anyone would have thought of when it came to directing a Watchmen movie, he brings his unique style to the movie and actually does a better job than I would have expected. Though he doesn't gravitate towards a completely literal translation like what Robert Rodriguez did with Sin City, Snyder still manages to create a visually compelling movie that looks and feels just like the world depicted in the comics.

He and cinematographer Larry Fong treat each shot as if they were works of art, and although Snyder is guilty of a few excesses (the violence being almost too violent and the over-gratuitous Nite Owl/Silk Spectre sex scene, for example), he has ultimately fashioned a movie that he should be proud of. I should also compliment the movie's fantastic score, composed by Tyler Bates. I've liked the music that Bates has done for other movies, and Watchmen is no exception. His music here is quite effective, improving each scene by helping define the mood. I also thought that some of Bates's music sounds like the scores from Blade Runner and The Princess Bride. Maybe it's just me, but I thought it really worked well.

Next on the list is the screenplay. It's credited to David Hayter and Alex Tse, though I'm not sure how much of their work survived the last-minute rewrites by Snyder, Robert Orci, and Alex Kurtzman. Either way, the script is good. It was expected that some elements of the comics would have to be altered, condensed, or outright eliminated, as that happens in pretty much every time a book is adapted into a movie. But I think the writers succeeded without jeopardizing the story's integrity.

There's been a lot of talk among fans, however, about the ending. For the movie, Snyder has changed the villain's master plan from what it was in the comics to something that sets one of the heroes up to be a patsy. A lot of the diehard fans have complained that losing the most obvious element of the original ending is bordering on blasphemy, that the movie would need every single solitary detail about the comic's ending in order to work. But if you ask me, I thought the movie's ending worked fine. Complaining about it would be failing to see the forest for the trees. At the end of the movie, things end up falling into the same places as they did in the comic. So while the little details may have changed, the big picture stays the same.

Last but not least is the cast, the majority of whom I thought did fine work. Patrick Wilson is fantastic as the hopelessly dorky yet quite amiable Daniel Dreiberg. The character is a meek man who only feels strong when he's in his Nite Owl persona, and I felt that Wilson really nailed him, showing all the flaws and imperfections that you'd expect from the character.

However, I found Malin Ackerman to be a bit on the dull side, but that's more to blame on the character than on her acting ability. The problem with Ackerman's character is that Laurie never really seems to stand out. Even in the comics, Laurie ends up being overshadowed by every other character. She's not exactly one of the more memorable characters, and ultimately, Ackerman doesn't really contribute a very memorable performance. To her credit, though, she does remain consistent.

And then there's Matthew Goode. The casting of Goode was a bit controversial among the super-devoted fans prior to the movie's release, since quite a few of them didn't feel he was the right person for the role. But personally, I thought Goode did a great job. Though his switching back and forth between American and German accents depending on the scene can be distracting at times, I thought Goode was effective in portraying Adrian Veidt as the smug narcissist that he is in the comics. He really works well in the role, so in my opinion, hiring him was the right move.

I'll also admit that I was impressed with Billy Crudup as Doctor Manhattan. In other movies, his performance might get lost in the sea of CGI that comprises the visual aspect of the character. But Crudup's work manages to shine through, and he puts forth a respectable performance. He believably conveys the alienation of Doctor Manhattan, a character whose mere existence puts him in the unenviable position of being outside humanity looking in. Crudup's performance might seem cold, perhaps distant, but that only serves the character better.

But perhaps the best performances come from Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley. Their work is so good that you don't see actors playing roles, you just see the characters. Though he only really shows up in flashbacks, Morgan is awesome as the thoroughly amoral Comedian. The character rapes and kills without feeling any sort of remorse, even seeming to enjoy himself at times. Morgan handles this well, playing the role with a certain self-assured cockiness that suits the character perfectly.

And what can I say about Jackie Earle Haley? He knocks it completely out of the park. Rorschach is arguably the most popular Watchmen character, and he makes a seamless transition from the comics to live action. Haley plays Rorschach as menacing as he is in the comic. His performance is riveting, and whenever he's onscreen, you can't look away. Haley practically steals the movie, and if you need one reason to see Watchmen, it should be Haley's performance.

As I said, I'd once heard the Watchmen comic book be described as being to comics what Citizen Kane was to movies. That makes sense to me. Like Citizen Kane, Watchmen's innovations completely changed the industry's landscape. But in regards to the Watchmen movie, I find myself agreeing with Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times. Boucher wrote in his critique of Watchmen that it is, in essence, the superhero movie genre's answer to Fight Club. When David Fincher's adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel was released to theaters in 1999, it was an incredibly polarizing movie. Individual reaction to it was either at one extreme or the other; people either really loved it, or they really hated it. Some got the point, others missed it entirely. It's still like that ten years later. And judging by the reactions to the Watchmen movie, it's in the same boat as Fight Club. Like Fight Club, some will argue that Watchmen is a violent, excessive, and ultimately hollow movie with nothing to say, while others will argue that that the detractors don't "get it."

People unfamiliar with the comic book just weren't ready for a superhero movie like this, though as someone who loves the Watchmen that's on the printed page, I can't say that I was disappointed with the one that's on film. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go try and subtract my intrinsic field. Wish me luck!

Final Rating: ****

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

Back in the summer of 1999, a small independent horror movie captured America's attention. Filmed with a camcorder on an unbelievably meager budget, The Blair Witch Project became a huge cultural phenomenon when it was released. Love it or hate it, the movie was insanely successful and was a pioneer in how movies are promoted on the Internet.

It ended up being so popular that throngs of fans, some of whom were convinced the movie was true via the marketing campaign and the relative newness of the "found footage" concept, flocked to the small Maryland town where the movie purportedly took place. The town found itself flooded with Blair Witch fans roaming the town and its surrounding woods, all of whom were looking to satisfy their own curiosity.

This eventually served as the basis for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a sequel rushed out to theaters by the now-defunct Artisan Entertainment just fifteen months after the release of the original movie. But unfortunately, the sequel was nowhere near as well-received as its predecessor. While it managed to triple its budget when you consider the international box office numbers, it was dismissed and ultimately forgotten. Could that have been due to the unanimously negative reviews and audiences feeling a touch of Blair Witch burnout? Or could it have the Blair Witch herself have been involved? (I'm gonna say it was because the movie's unbelievably lame. That's my guess.)

As the movie begins, Blair Witch hysteria is in full swing. Legions of fans have descended upon the small Maryland town of Burkittsville, much to the chagrin of the town's grizzled sheriff, Ronald Cravens (Lanny Flaherty). But while Sheriff Cravens and a number of Burkittsville's citizens don't really like all the annoying tourists roaming the woods and the cemetery with their camcorders, others have no problem enjoying the town's fifteen minutes of fame. Some of them even strike out to make a buck or two off the whole thing while they're at it.

One would-be entrepreneur is Jeff Patterson (Jeff Donovan), a Burkittsville resident recently released from a mental hospital. Inspired by the movie's popularity, he opened up his own online store, selling hats and T-shirts, rocks and dirt from the woods, and even homemade versions of the movie's iconic stick figures. When we meet him, he's branched out into giving tours of the forest, a business he's named "The Blair Witch Hunt."

Joining him on the maiden voyage of the Blair Witch Hunt are four clients: Stephen Parker (Stephen Barker Turner) and Tristen Ryler (Tristen Skyler), a couple researching the Blair Witch for the book they're writing; Erica Geerson (Erica Leerhsen), a practicing Wiccan worried that the movie may give people the wrong idea about her religion; and Kim Diamond (Kim Director), a psychic Goth chick who's along for the ride simply because she "thought the movie was cool."

Our unlikely heroes head out into the woods and set up camp for the night, only to awaken the next morning with no memory of what happened during the previous evening. All of their gear has been trashed, but considering that they were drinking way too much alcohol and smoking way too much marijuana, blacking out and leaving a mess to clean up are probably to be expected. But then they're hit with the news that the murdered bodies of a competing tour group have been found out in the woods. They're able to salvage the videotapes that had been left recording all night, and they retreat to Jeff's house in order to piece things together. But as they get closer to discovering what happened during their mass blackout, their collective sanity is quickly pushed to the breaking point. So just what exactly happened to them after all?

I don't think anyone will argue that Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was anything more than just a lame attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the first movie. I mean, is there any other reason for its existence? I can't fault Artisan Entertainment for wanting to strike while The Blair Witch Project was still fresh in everyone's minds. But was it a movie that absolutely needed to be made?

It doesn't really help anything that the movie feels rushed, sloppily put together, and generally unnecessary. And by now, I think most people have forgotten that The Blair Witch Project even had a sequel at all. So not only is Blair Witch 2 a subpar effort of the most disappointing kind, but it's forgettable too. That's already two strikes against it.

Let's start this critique with the direction from Joe Berlinger. This is the first (and thus far, only) "traditional" movie directed by Berlinger, a documentary filmmaker known mainly for covering the West Memphis Three in his two Paradise Lost movies and following the lives of Metallica in Some Kind of Monster. For Berlinger's first venture into making a regular movie, his work isn't too bad, but I can't blame him for sticking with documentaries after this. It's not that Berlinger is a bad director or anything, but he doesn't do anything particularly memorable either. Outside of the occasional neat camerawork from cinematographer Nancy Schreiber, everything looks so... uninteresting. The lighting is dull, the set design is drab, the editing is choppy, and everything else just feels flat.

In his commentary track on the movie's DVD, Berlinger notes that he was a victim of unwanted studio interference during production. He says that he wanted the movie to be more ambiguous; the scenes of the characters being interrogated by the cops were supposed to be part of a longer montage at the finale instead of being sprinkled throughout the movie, and the brief inserts of graphic violence were added by the studio at the last minute. Berlinger himself states that he felt these had a negative effect on the movie, and I have to agree. They work against the movie, and you're pretty much left believing that these kids are guilty by the end. There's no "did they or didn't they?" vibe, which could have made things creepier. Instead, we just end up with something that's more weird and less scary. It's a shame, really.

Berlinger does, however, manage to get a very good musical score from composer Carter Burwell. His music is really creepy and atmospheric, but it's unfortunately overshadowed by all the invasive heavy metal that's been cranked up to eleven. Watch the movie with your sound system turned too high, and you'll feel like you're sitting next to the speakers at Ozzfest. It's one thing to do the hard sell for the soundtrack album, but sometimes you just need to cut the viewer's ears some slack.

Next on my list is the screenplay, written by Berlinger and Dick Beebe. While I won't fault Berlinger and Beebe for wanting to try something different, they could have handled this a lot better. The script seems muddled and confused, like it wants to be something bigger yet doesn't know how to get there. It doesn't help anything that the characters are poorly done stereotypes that are really hard to like. The characters are so badly written that you almost feel insulted by their presence by the end of the movie.

Take, for example, the character played by Erica Leerhsen. She's essentially some aloof, Earth-loving hippie flower child who spends the whole movie spouting off about how witches aren't evil. And by the end of the movie, she turns out to be evil after all, thus defeating her own purpose. Then there's Kim Director's Goth character, who seems to exist only to be especially surly, drop a few choice F-bombs, and wear so much black that she looks like the album cover for Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove. And let's not forget the citizens of Burkittsville, who are depicted as being ignorant hillbillies. If I were a Wiccan, a Goth, or from Burkittsville, I'd have been righteously pissed off at Berlinger and Beebe.

The first three minutes of the movie are presented as a fictional documentary about the Blair Witch phenomenon, before transitioning into a more traditional style of film. Personally, I would have liked seeing what kind of movie Berlinger and Beebe could have crafted had they stuck with the mockumentary style. Berlinger was already an established documentarian, so the directorial aspect would have been taken care of. All he and Beebe would have needed to do was put together a script that would have worked. But since we're pretty much a decade too late to do anything about it, I don't think there's any real sense in complaining about what could have been.

And I do applaud Berlinger and Beebe for coming up with a rather novel concept. But unfortunately, it all ends up being bogged down with the mind-numbing silliness that ended up making it into the movie. Berlinger and Beebe could have written a horror movie that was analogous to the West Memphis Three, the trio of convicted murderers that were the focus of Berlinger's Paradise Lost documentaries. After all, Blair Witch 2 features a group, three of whom are a Goth, a witch, and a former mental patient, that have run afoul of a close-minded sheriff who doesn't hide his dissatisfaction with the group being in town. There's a lot of potential here. But all that potential goes to waste thanks to the poor writing.

Last up to bat is the cast. Let's start with Jeff Donovan, who you may recognize from the USA Network's Burn Notice or the Angelina Jolie movie Changeling. The character he plays is a kooky smartass who's a few letters short of a game of Scrabble, and Donovan manages to hit the right notes. He makes the character charming while sleazy and slightly irritating, which I found worked really well.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel that Donovan got a whole lot of his help from the rest of the cast, which ultimately makes him look bad and drags the movie as a whole further into the mire. And really, practically all of the characters are terrible thanks to the piss-poor script, so I can't say I'm all that surprised if it caused all of the actors to have trouble. Take Erica Leerhsen, for example. Leerhsen is obviously trying very hard, but her performance is hindered by a role that is dreadfully written, along with her own apparent inability to elevate the material and work with it.

The same can be said for Kim Director, who's stuck playing a badly-written caricature of how most people probably view Goths. The character is skeptical, abrasive, and generally annoying, and Director does nothing to make this flat character feel like a real person. Her performance ends up being just as hollow as the character.

Continuing the streak of bad acting, Tristen Skyler's work feels hollow as well. Her character seems to be the bipolar version of Judith O'Dea's character from Night of the Living Dead; the experience has caused her to go nuts, only with bouts of mania instead of O'Dea's shell shock. The only problem is that Skyler's performance tends to be silly at times and laughable at others. It's just way too hard to take her seriously.

Stephen Barker Turner brings up the rear in this review, and his acting is so over the top that by the end of the movie, it was way too hard to keep from laughing at the absurdity of his performance. I don't know whether it was Turner's intent or not, but he ends up making the character so utterly unlikable that I'm flabbergasted even thinking about it. It's just... wow.

Word is that Dan Myrick and Ed Sanchez, the creators of the original Blair Witch Project, wanted to wait before doing a sequel, feeling that doing it right away wouldn't give them the time to really flesh it out. Unfortunately, the distributors just couldn't hold their horses and went ahead without them, cranking out this big ol' sack of lame in no time flat. Blair Witch 2 is a movie that could have built upon the franchise's mythology and made the original movie better because of it. Instead, it does the opposite, making me almost totally resent the first movie for having spawned this.

Anyone who has seen Blair Witch 2 can attest to the fact that, by all appearances, it was only made as a way to swindle money away from fans who were willing to consume anything with the Blair Witch brand name on it. It took what could have been an interesting concept and cranked out this sub-mediocre crap. And thus, I'm going to give Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 two stars. Let this movie stand as proof of what happens when what seems like a good idea is sent flying at ninety miles an hour straight into a brick wall of stupidity. 

Final Rating: **

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

The 1960s were a tumultuous time in American history. It was a time of both peace and war, of social and sexual revolution. It was also the decade that saw Marvel Comics rise to prominence. It was perhaps their most creative period to date, seeing the births of classic characters like Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. But as the '60s transitioned into the '70s, America continued changing, and Marvel and DC began to reflect these changes.

Both companies published stories about the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse, while minorities found themselves with greater representation in the superhero community. Horror and fantasy comics also grew in popularity, as did vigilantes like the Punisher. The decade also saw the creation of one of the industry's most popular characters: Wolverine.

The brainchild of Len Wein and John Romita Sr., the clawed mutant made his first appearance in 1974 as an opponent for the Incredible Hulk before eventually joining the X-Men and arguably becoming the group's most famous member. And beyond that, he would go on to become one of Marvel's most popular and recognized characters. He's appeared in video games and cartoons, on T-shirts and toy store shelves, and Wizard Magazine even ranked him as the greatest comic book character of all time.

Wolverine finally hit the big screen in 2000 with the release of the X-Men movie, which spawned two sequels and earned a combined one billion dollars at the box office. With the superhero movie genre on a roll, Twentieth Century Fox chose to develop spin-offs detailing the history of certain X-Men characters, under the banner of "X-Men Origins." And naturally, the first movie to be made would be Wolverine. But just how does it hold up?

Welcome to the Northwest Territories of Canada, circa 1845. It is here that we are introduced to James Logan (Troye Sivan), a sickly young boy whose only friend is another local kid, Victor Creed (Michael James Olsen). On one fateful night, James sees his father die at the hands of Victor's father. The trauma prompts bone claws to grow from his knuckles, and in a fit of rage, he uses these claws to kill his father's murderer.

With his final breath, the elder Creed tells James that he is his real father. James flees, with Victor tagging along to keep him company. As the years pass, the adult James (Hugh Jackman) and Victor (Liev Schreiber) stick together, fighting side by side in the American Civil War, both World Wars, and the Vietnam War. But after Victor kills a superior officer in Vietnam and James gets involved in the ensuing fracas, they're both sentenced to death via firing squad. Their mutant healing abilities allow them to survive their executions, so they're imprisoned until it can be decided what to do with them.

During their stay in prison, the brothers are visited by Colonel William Stryker (Danny Huston), who offers them membership in his elite mutant task force. They agree to join, and are promptly introduced to the other members of the team: the invulnerable Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand), teleporter John Wraith (will.i.am), electricity manipulator Chris Bradley (Dominic Monaghan), martial artist Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), and expert marksman Agent Zero (Daniel Henney).

Their first mission takes them to Nigeria, where they're to retrieve the pieces of a meteorite containing a virtually indestructible metal called "adamantium." They retrieve one hunk of meteorite from the headquarters of a diamond trafficking operation, and then raid a nearby village to find more. James, disgusted by the willingness of his teammates to kill the innocent villagers, abandons the group.

Six years pass, and James — now going by just his last name — is a lumberjack living a simple life with his girlfriend, Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Things get complicated, however, when Colonel Stryker finds Logan and tells him that someone is killing members of their now-disbanded task force. He asks Logan to rejoin him, but gets shot down. It is soon thereafter, though, that Kayla ends up falling victim to the team's murderer: Victor. An enraged Logan hunts down Victor, but ultimately loses a fight to him. When Stryker contacts him again the next day, he agrees to work with him. Stryker takes Logan to a laboratory, where he has Logan's skeleton reinforced with the adamantium they found in Nigeria. But when he overhears Stryker mention he wants to experiment with Logan's abilities, Logan flees.

Logan briefly makes contact with Dukes and Wraith, who inform him that Victor's murders were made at the behest of Stryker, who is having mutants either kidnapped or killed so that he can perform experiments on them at a mysterious facility known as "The Island." The rumor goes that only one mutant, a New Orleans card shark named Remy "Gambit" LeBeau (Taylor Kitsch), has ever managed to escape the Island, and would thus know its location. Logan tracks Gambit down, and after a fight caused by something of a misunderstanding, he agrees to take Logan to Stryker's laboratory. This sets the stage for an epic showdown, where Logan will seek revenge against the enemies that want him dead.

I'm going to come right out and say it: I do not know why X-Men Origins: Wolverine had to be made. Outside of Twentieth Century Fox needing to make an X-Men movie every so often so they can hang onto the rights, I fail to see any point for this movie's existence. Wolverine was already the star of the three movies that came before, at the expense of every other character. So outside of the fact that this is a prequel, there is really no difference at all between the previous team efforts and this so-called "solo movie."

And although I can understand doing a movie focused solely on Wolverine, since he's the franchise's most popular character, but why make it an origin story? If you paid attention during X2, you pretty much learned everything important. Somebody did experiments on him to make him a weapon, so now he's an amnesic with metal bones. It isn't much more complicated than that. It's not like he's Batman or anything. And any other important details could have been done via flashbacks in another sequel, instead of this. The version of Wolverine's origin depicted in direct-to-video animated movie Hulk vs. Wolverine took all of three minutes and thirty seconds, and it accomplished pretty much everything it needed to. It was simple yet sufficient. All this movie does is demystify a character whose franchise was already on a downward slope thanks to the relative disappointment of X-Men: The Last Stand.

But what could have caused the Wolverine movie to turn out this way? Could it have been the work of director Gavin Hood? This is only the second Hollywood movie made by the South African filmmaker, who won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005 for Tsotsi. It's also his first big-budget action movie, as well. And while I will confess that I've never seen any of Hood's earlier work and thus cannot make comparisons, I found his direction here to be competent yet underwhelming. It comes across as being simply adequate. But even though he's inexperienced when making this kind of movie, Hood does put together some well-made action sequences. Hood's direction, however, is boosted by the fantastic score composed by Harry Gregson-Williams. Gregson-Williams's music is almost too good to be in this movie. It's exciting, engaging, and actually makes the movie feel better than it is.

The only drawback to this aspect of the production is the special effects. You'd think that a huge movie studio would try and make sure that a big summer blockbuster whose special effects are an integral part of the movie would be released with special effects that don't totally suck. So how does Fox let Wolverine hit theaters with effects that look so poor? When that bootlegged workprint landed on the Internet at the end of March, Fox's damage control team went into overdrive, saying that people shouldn't judge the finished movie based on the workprint due to its unfinished special effects and sound editing. And judging by the final product that was released, they must not have done a whole lot of work between the workprint and the finished movie. There are quite a few scenes where the CGI and green screen effects look cheap and unconvincing.

Take, for example, a scene at the end where a certain familiar character makes a cameo in order to help save a group of kidnapped mutants. The green screen effects in that scene look so bad that they're laughable. And then there's the climactic fight scene, and the bit where Wolverine first examines his new adamantium-coated claws... sigh. Were they in such a rush to be done in time before the movie's release date that they started half-assing the special effects? The effects are, as I said, an integral part of movies like this, and when they're bad, it can drag down the whole production.

But in some cases, the acting can help viewers overlook some of a movie's other flaws. Is that the case with Wolverine? Not really, as sad as that is to say. The acting is really a mixed bag. Some of it is good, the rest of it isn't. First of all, Hugh Jackman returns to the role for a fourth time, and though this Wolverine isn't the mysterious amnesic he was in the previous movies, Jackman feels like he's gotten the hang of it. But while this isn't the best of his four appearances as Wolverine, he still puts forth a fine performance. Jackman plays the character as someone who's tough and has the potential to be a violent animal, but simply wants to be a good guy. He's definitely trying hard, and that goes a long way.

Unfortunately, Jackman ends up being almost completely overshadowed by Liev Schreiber. While Schreiber being cast creates something of a plot hole for the franchise (how does Sabretooth go from looking like Liev Schreiber to looking like Tyler Mane in the first X-Men movie?), his work here is fantastic. He gives off a certain sense of cocky menace, as if he were playing the exact opposite of Wolverine. It's like he knows he's evil and doesn't care because he's having so much fun. The "I'm bad, and that makes me cool" kind of villain can be really stupid in the wrong hands, but Schreiber manages to pull it off well.

Meanwhile, Danny Huston was okay as Colonel Stryker, I guess. But his work here really makes me wish they'd brought back Brian Cox from X2 and used makeup and special effects to de-age him. I also thought will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame did an acceptable job, considering he's primarily a singer instead of an actor. And Ryan Reynolds was beyond awesome as Wade Wilson. Though Reynolds has only about three minutes of screen time, he makes an impression that really makes me want to see his character's eventual spinoff movie. Unfortunately, I can't say I have high hopes for that spinoff after seeing the character's ultimate fate in the movie's climax.

The rest of the cast, however, doesn't make that much of an impression, if they make an impression at all. Lynn Collins is unremarkable as Kayla Silverfox, doing nothing to really stand out among the flotsam of this movie. Her only real purpose at all is to provide a setup for how Logan comes up with the "Wolverine" name. I guess the script might be partly to blame for that, but her acting was a bit on the flat side as well.

Taylor Kitsch shows up as Gambit, a character just as mistreated as Deadpool. A very vocal segment of the X-Men faithful have been begging for Gambit to appear in a movie since the franchise began, and Fox finally decided to add him to one. Unfortunately, the character has only a bit part and appears in only a tiny handful of scenes. Kitsch's performance isn't really all that memorable either, and it doesn't help that he keeps slipping in and out of his Cajun accent. You'd think that somebody would have made him spend all the time he wasn't in the movie working on his accent with a dialect coach. Other than that, I thought the rest of the cast was just kinda there. They aren't really anything to write home about.

The movie's most enormous flaw, however, is that awful script written by David Benioff and Skip Woods. How could the producers read this script and think it would actually work? There are plot holes you could drive a truck through, a severe absence of logic or common sense, a dreadful lack of real character development, and a sense that Benioff and Woods were just flinging things at the wall and used what stuck.

As I said, there's not a lot that separates this from the three prior movies. It's basically just Wolverine along with as many comics from the characters they could cram in there. I mean, was there any point for Cyclops or Emma Frost to show up? Did Gambit ultimately serve any sufficient purpose, other than to finally give in to the fanbase that had been requesting him since they started making X-Men movies? And just what the hell were they thinking when they started screwing around with Deadpool? Ryan Reynolds has a few great scenes as the character, but the writers had to go and him into Baraka from Mortal Kombat by the end of the movie! It's one thing to alter certain things about a character for the benefit of the story, but to completely change everything about the character is stupid.

And let's talk about one of those huge plot holes while we're at it. Remember how I said I wasn't sure how anyone could believe Liev Schreiber and Tyler Mane were supposed to be playing the same character? Benioff and Wood's writing doesn't help that either. So we're supposed to believe that the violent, sarcastic, animalistic Sabretooth seen in this movie is supposed to evolve into the Sabretooth that was in the first X-Men movie back in 2000? He goes from being Wolverine's sadistic, murderous adversary to being a mute, utterly useless background character that, outside of the fight scene on the Statue of Liberty's head, never acknowledges Wolverine at all? I realize that Sabretooth has an important part in the Wolverine mythos, but couldn't they change the character just for the sake of continuity? Yeah, they could always explain that in the inevitable sequel, but that's just lazy, lazy, lazy.

So who is to blame for X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Was it a director that may have been out of his element? Was it a mediocre cast? Was it a lousy script? Was it the studio? It could be one or all of these things, I'm not sure. But I do know that the person to blame is someone who just plain didn't give a damn. I mean, how do you justify awesome movies like Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008, then a mediocre one like this in 2009? It's like somebody decided, "Why are they making good Marvel movies when we can do them on the level of Elektra instead?" Seriously, at this point, the X-Men movie franchise has degenerated into a series of movies meant to turn Wolverine into the superhero equivalent of Poochie from The Simpsons.

I'm officially sick of the X-Men movies, sick of Wolverine, and sick of comic book movies where nobody bothers to try or even care. If I were Marvel Comics, I'd be trying to get my characters away from Fox as soon as possible. It's just too much sometimes, you know? I'm not sure what else there is to say about this movie. Hopefully 20th Century Fox knows to make some improvements the next time they return to the X-Men.

Final Rating: **½

Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD (1998)

Not every comic book hero has to wear a fancy costume or have superpowers. Others can get by just by being themselves. One of these characters is Nick Fury. Created by industry legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fury first appeared in 1963 as the leader of the Howling Commandos, an elite unit of Army Rangers fighting in World War II.

The book was a solid seller, but Marvel Comics saw the popularity of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the James Bond villains known as SPECTRE and couldn't help but capitalize upon it. Fury was reimagined in 1965 as a super-spy in charge of the government-endorsed espionage agency SHIELD. Fury and SHIELD have been mainstays within the company ever since, often having an influence on many of the characters within Marvel's fictional universe.

Though Fury's headlining books have rarely lasted long, he's been such a stalwart supporting character that he even got to star in his own motion picture. Okay, so it wasn't a huge movie. It didn't even go direct-to-video. Instead, the movie aired on the Fox Network on May 26, 1998, as the pilot episode of a potential television series that never materialized. One of the most obscure movies to be based on Marvel's characters, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD is really one of those flicks that earned its obscurity.

Colonel Nick Fury (David Hasselhoff) is retired, having left SHIELD five years earlier for a solitary existence in a remote location in the Yukon. He'd really rather be left alone, but he just might have to come out of retirement. His old enemies, the terrorist agency known as HYDRA, have surfaced once again. Leading this new incarnation of HYDRA are Andrea von Strucker (Sandra Hess) and her brother Werner (Scott Heindl), who have acquired the cryogenically frozen body of their villainous father, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (Campbell Lane). Their intent: to use their father's DNA to create a sample of the lethal Death's Head Virus.

Despite his initial hesitation to return to active duty, Colonel Fury is prompted to rejoin SHIELD after the Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) passes along the information that the von Strucker siblings killed one of his closest friends when he attempted to thwart the theft of their father's body. Kill one of Nick Fury's friends, and he's gonna get pissed.

SHIELD has deduced that Andrea, now answering to the codename "Viper," has packed the Death's Head Virus into four missiles pointed at Manhattan. And unless HYDRA recieves one billion dollars, those missiles will be launched. The only person alive who could possibly give SHIELD the cure is Arnim Zola (Peter Haworth), a Nazi scientist who helped Baron von Strucker develop the virus in the first place.

But just their luck, Viper has planted herself within SHIELD as a spy, using their information to find Zola and take him into HYDRA's custody. It also presents her with the opportunity to infect Colonel Fury with a poison that will kill him within 48 hours. SHIELD is now stuck in a race against time to not only locate HYDRA's missiles, but find a way to save Colonel Fury's life. 

Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD is a movie made during a really weird time. Its first airing back in 1998 came just three months before Blade completely revolutionized the way Marvel Comics properties were approached. It still bears resemblances to the cheesy, forgettable Marvel movies that came before it. However, perhaps it is unfair to judge it as a legitimate motion picture. After all, as I noted in the opening paragraph, it is actually the pilot episode of a television series that was never picked up. And when looking at it from that angle... yeah, it's still not all that great. If it actually had become a full-blown series, I doubt it would have lasted more than a handful of episodes, let alone a full season. It probably would have ended up going the way of other action shows like Thunder in Paradise, running for so many episodes before fading into complete obscurity following its cancellation.

The man in charge is veteran television director Rod Hardy, whose work here is competent yet somewhat underwhelming. He does the best he possibly can, but Hardy seems hampered by his apparently meager budget. This leads to sets and studio backlots that look second rate, the occasional lackluster costume, and special effects that could have used a little improvement. With a larger budget, the effects would surely have looked more impressive. But instead, you can tell what's green-screen work and what isn't. None of it is 100% convincing, but for the most part, it's at least forgivable. Hardy does, though, manage to keep things rolling at a steady pace, and he also gets some ambitious cinematography from James Bartle and a good musical score from Kevin Kiner. All in all, Hardy's direction turned out better than it should have been.

Handling the script is David Goyer, the same guy who wrote the Blade trilogy and Chris Nolan's Batman movies. No, I'm not joking. Goyer's script is where the movie really starts to become flawed. Outside of Fury, Vallegra, and Viper, the characters all seem to blend together and become forgettable. Granted, this is most likely due to the movie being a pilot for a TV show, thus necessitating the need to really emphasize the primary characters. But still, you'd think Goyer would have tried to do something to make the supporting characters indistinguishable from one another.

However, he does at least try to overcome this with some particularly good moments, like one funny scene where Fury uses his pistol to handle a troublesome elevator control panel. But these scenes end up becoming fewer and far between as the movie progresses, and unfortunately starts rendering the script kinda dull. The whole thing is really inconsistent, which ultimately brings the movie down.

Last on my list is the cast. David Hasselhoff stars in the lead role, and I think he was only hired due to his name. He'd had something of a career resurgence a few years earlier thanks to the initial popularity of Baywatch, and I guess the producers felt that if they could get him, they'd be set. The problem is that he seems to have decided to do his best impersonation of Kurt Russell's "Snake Plisskin" character for the entire movie. That is, if Snake Plisskin was more prone to make the occasional corny pun or witty quip. Don't get me wrong, he doesn't do a completely horrible job, but "The Hoff" doesn't really seem like he's on his A-game. His whole gruff, macho thing ends up becoming silly after a whole.

And then there's our villain, as played by Sandra Hess. She apparently couldn't get a handle on the German accent she took on for the character. Sometimes it's barely there, and at other times, it's so thick you can practically see it. Even when overlooking the flaws in her accent, Hess's acting is really hammy. The character is written as if it were hearkening back to the goofy spy movie villains of the '60s, and Hess goes out of her way to give a performance to match. She's over the top, but it's unfortunately not in the fun "Frank Gorshin as Riddler" kind of way. Her performance is just "bleh" if you ask me.

Rounding out the hat trick of important characters, Lisa Rinna was okay. I must admit that I almost didn't recognize her, as Botox, collagen injections, and plastic surgery have made her look more than a little bit different between 1998 and now. But looks aside, Rinna's performance isn't bad. She's likable in the role, but the bad part is she's kinda forgettable.

That's really the problem with the entire movie: it's forgettable. I just watched the thing and I don't remember half of what happened. As I said earlier, I doubt a Nick Fury TV show would have lasted very long had it become more than just this movie. It's not as bad as the earlier Marvel movies, but it's not that great either. I think if I was absolutely forced to give it a standard star rating like I usually do, I'd give Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD two stars out of the usual five. It's a rare movie to find, but unless you're an absolutely devoted fan of Nick Fury or Marvel Comics, it's really not worth the effort to find it. 

Final Rating: **