You've just released every monster I ever created! (Goosebumps 2015)

269.

Goosebumps

5.5/10

The A-Z takes a route back to my childhood and I was very fond of reading a Goosebumps book or two. This then moved on to the TV series after school and finally, it just fizzled out for me. Just at random, this movie popped up when typing in the letter 'G' and I decided to give it a go. Not expecting great things, I'm hoping that it will give some nostalgia more than anything else and if there is some enjoyment to be had then we'll chalk that down as a bonus. Now I know that compared to the original TV series which would just base itself on one story, this was bringing as many characters as possible together in one movie. Jack Black being the only face I recognised from seeing the movie poster years ago but we'll find out whether any other faces are ringing a bell. Let's open up the story quickly.

We are going to be following some neighbours, one family of son and mother recently moving into the area an another of daughter and father who are very secretive. The son and daughter from each family have a quick encounter before the father angrily steps in and puts a stop to it. With the kind of movie I can imagine this will become, it won't be long before the kids meet up again and by the end, the father will like the boy. Zach is entering a new school and his mother is the Vice Principal which he isn't too thrilled about but in his first assembly, we meet Champ, another outside and someone who fast becomes our comic relief to the movie. The storyline follows the fact that Hannah the next-door neighbour's Dad has locked Hannah away for meeting up with Zach. He calls the cops as he thinks something worse has happened but when entering the house, the dad says that she hasn't been there for days and the cops believe him. This leads to Zach, along with Champ, breaking into the house for answers. Working their way to the office, they find a bookshelf with a lot of locked books. These books are by R.L. Stine and Champ knows them as Goosebumps books. Each one is locked but one is opened, just as Hannah shows herself with all of the noise going on. The abominable snowman is the first to wreak havoc and Hannah tries her best to get it back into the book until her dad shows up and gets it done. I should have already mentioned but Jack Black is playing the dad and it turns out, is R.L Stine himself in this movie. 

Back at the house, the commotion had sent the other books flying, opened up 'Night of the living dummy', which I remember from childhood and now a ventriloquist dummy is running amuck. He is opening each and every book to punish Stine for locking them away and the story now revolves around getting them all back to their books before the wreck the town.

 Along the way, we find out that Stine explains that when he used a magical typewriter, his stories came to life and he created Hannah and if they get rid of all of the creations, she will go too. They need to use the typewriter once again and end this story once and for all. By the end, Zach finds out that Hannah knew what she was all along and was ready to make the sacrifice play to save the rest. This is exactly what happens but you know that Hannah will end up showing her face once again.

The movie ends as everyone returns to the pages, Stine has been employed within the school as a teacher and Zach is no longer embarrassed to rock up to school with his mother. Walking the corridor with Stine, Zach asks about him missing Hannah but after a quick chat, Stine gives him the nod towards a doorway in which Hannah stands. A new book has been written and Stine instantly burns it so that she can never be returned to it. 

The movie was exactly as to be expected, predictable, carrying a happy ending and aimed towards either a younger audience or fans of the franchise. Although the storyline carries through an air of simplicity and predictability, there is still something that took me by surprise. I would have usually picked up on the twist with Hannah but maybe I was too relaxed in my viewing and missed it altogether. Once this came to the fold though, it was easy to work out the true ending of the movie.

Jack Black was definitely the stand out performance from the cast as his character arch went from a secluded sociopath with a protective nature to a trusting father and friend to the town. I recognised the guy playing Zach but even after an IMDB look, I couldn't put a finger on which role I truly recognised Dylan Minnette from. The acting wasn't great if you have to be over critical but with a movie that would be great fun for kids, who would even notice.

This movie is there to revitalise the imagination that comes from Goosebumps books and the TV show and maybe even bringing in some new fans who can drop back on to the original material. The graphics and special effects were very good and some of the horrors were even a little more mature for the young audience which will maybe whet their appetite for something in the genre when they are older. If there turn back to the older material, I'm hoping they'll find that more enjoyable. For me it was nothing more than a little bit of nostalgia.

How about next year we stay home? (Fractured 2018)

 268.

Fractured

7/10

I have been meaning to see this movie a while back because the principal looked very interesting to me. Fractured slides in for the letter 'F'. What I know from this movie is that Sam Worthington is going to be playing a Dad on hospital grounds whose Wife and Daughter go through the hospital curtain and aren't seen again. We are about to embark on a psychological thriller which may leave us with some twists and turns and I'm really hoping so.

We are following a family of three making the trip home on Thanksgiving but we are already thrust into trouble as Worthington's character Ray and his wife Joanne, played by Lily Rabe are showing their break down in marriage., Trying to hide it from their young daughter, they pull over at a gas station for some new batteries for the little girl's walkman as well as a toilet break. As Ray is inside, he grabs a few small bottles of alcohol, which he can't afford when it's cash only, so he doesn't even grab the batteries. Heading back to the car, Peri, the daughter claims she has left something in the toilet to Ray stays with her at the car whilst Joanne goes to check. Ray spills his coffee, Peri wonders off a little near a construction hole and when Ray looks back up, a dog is confronting Peri. He tries to throw a stone to scare it off but ends up scaring Peri too, who falls down the hole and with a last-ditch attempt to grab her, Ray goes down too.

 He wakes a little while later to Joanne's screams and Peri coming around with a broken arm. When they arrive at the hospital, Joanne and Peri head through for a CT scan after being seen to by a couple of nurses and a doctor and Ray has to wait in the waiting room until he passes out with exhaustion. Before dropping off he sees a couple of bodies being wheeled in with a cheeky brown envelope being passed from the waiting doctor to the ambulance drivers. 

When he wakes, he asks how long his family will be but shit starts to hit the fan when he is told they were never there. Now my first instinct is that she has left as they were going to break up by the looks of things and she's done a runner to her family's house. Ray was already upset at the staff when they signed in as they wouldn't take his insurance and asked about his ex-wife who died in a car crash. They even asked if he wanted his daughter on the organ donation list. He causes nothing but tension at the hospital until he enlists two police officers to help him. From some history of movies, the police usually tell the character not to worry and that nothing strange is happening but these two seem to be onside. That's until we look at security tapes, which are non-conclusive and only ever show Ray at the desk, other places in the hospital have broken cameras. 

Ray has lost any patience he had left and still thinks something is up at the hospital. They say that the CT scan room is upstairs but even I saw the lift taking his family down. He is taken to the bed that they all sat around when first arriving and Ray finds his daughter's scarf, which only strengthens his case. They bring the doctor down who seen to them when they arrived but he says that Ray was alone, erratic and had a nasty cut on his head. causing these hallucinations.  He is instead invited into a meeting with a counselor at the hospital who believes she can help. She starts with questions about the last time he had a drink, how he feels about his ex-wife as he had brought her name up when he first got to the hospital. She pressures him with questions of the fact he knows what happened to Joanne and Peri but he doesn't want to face it. In the end, she gets the police to take them all to that construction site. The police dogs smell the scarf and heads down to the fall area. They move the snow and there is a shed load of blood. Blood that doesn't come from the cut on Ray's head surely, and nothing that would happen from a simple broken arm. Now I'm thinking what the hell has he done with the bodies? He then sees the dog again but so does everyone else. The shrink knows that it doesn't mean Ray is telling the truth and insists on him telling them where the body is. Instead, he turns in to James Bond, steals a gun and knows how to handle is as he locks them all in the gas station toilet and heads back to the hospital in a cop car.  He steals a lab court, jumps the security guard in the lift and has a key to go down to the basement to find out what is really going on.

 Hiding in a dark room, he looks into the hallway to see doctors carting about trays with boxes labeled organs. He breaks into a surgical room just as a team of doctors, including the one who said he had never seen him before is about to operate on his daughter. He sees his wife drugged up in a wheelchair, picks his daughter up and wheels them both out, shooting the doctors on the way. Now I'm wondering whether this is some actual hillbilly backward shit hospital. Finally making it to the car, he puts them in the back and makes a break for it before the police arrive. The camera pans to Ray's panicked face and you can just tell there's a little something more to come. I'm expecting the bodies to have been taken from the morgue or something and the family is dead in the back, but no, maybe the police would have told him that they found them. Instead, it's just a random young lad in the back who he has stolen mid-surgery and we are finally going to get some answers.

We flashback to the moment it all happened and Peri wondering off is the final straw for Ray and he loses his mind, throwing the stone at her and as she falls and he misses the grab, the impact on the ground kills her. Joanne finds them both and he pushes her, causing her to fall and impale against a metal rod, also killing her. This causes him to create a reality that convinces him they are both still alive when in truth, he has stashed them both in his boot and the movie ends as the camera pans over the boot, showing the bodies. Crazy fool. 

This was an enjoyable one-time watch of a movie. I say one-time watch because once you know the ending, it'll be rare that you would want to go back and watch it again without the enjoyment of the twists and turns. The storyline kept me guessing and questioning my reasonings which would only be a good sign to a movie that is intended to draw you in. Not at any point did I lose interest and not at any point was I sure that I had figured it all out, even up to the closing scene. 

The cast wasn't a massive thing for me in this movie. I've seen Sam Worthington in many things and after bingeing American Horror Story I recognise the cast member playing Joanne as Lily Rabe through that series. It is hard to claim that there are any more main characters rather than Ray because everyone comes on the screen at moments with Ray as the central role. That doesn't mean that they didn't give a good account for themselves though, each was good in their roles but the main man that we were following was very good. Sam's character's descent into madness was very very well portrayed. He had me convinced for a little while that there was seriously something up with the hospital but slowly you saw him slip into madness and his lie.

For me, it was enjoyable at the time but with some downers of course. The movie did look a little grainy, dark and plain but I wouldn't complain if this was simply to add to the mood of the movie, but that would be just to  As already mentioned, it would be a little hard to go back and watch this with the same level of enjoyment but maybe watching it with someone who hasn't seen this would add a new sense of enjoyment to find out if they would work out what is happening. If you fancy some sort of a thriller that'll get you thinking, go and get Fractured. I wonder if he would end up getting caught. At least this Netflix movie came with some more answers for the ending. 

You drown not by falling into the river, but by staying submerged in it (Extraction 2020)

267.

Extraction

6.5/10

Some time off work is going to give me time to fly through some movies. My next stop is the letter E and we shall be watching Chris Hemsworth take on something completely different from some Marvel villains. I have seen his act as something else other than Thor but that was Men in Black and it was bloody terrible. What I am hoping is that this is action-packed and at least has a decent sort of story to it. I do worry at times because the other 'straight to Netflix' movies that I have picked up so far have left me wanting more. Not in the way that I expected more, but there were too many unanswered questions by the time the credits rolled. You can expect something half decent if it's produced by the Russo brothers surely? They've been in charge of the highest ever grossing movies so maybe we can get some enjoyment.

This movie will be following Hemsworth playing a black ops merc but we don't get to see him in his glory straight away. We seeing him kill a couple of people but he looks like he has been through hell and back until he sits next to an abandoned car. Then the scene cuts. We are following a young kid and his friends from school, hanging out and finally getting home where he has a little telling off by one of his father's associates. Now, I'm already wondering where the father is to do the job but the house is massive so he might be a dodgy fella himself. The kid, Ovi, sneaks out that night to meet his friends at a night club and whilst out back smoking, the police catch them with drugs, shoot his mate in the forehead and kidnap Ovi. The guy from home that gave him the bollocking has to break the news to his dad. Saju used to be Special Forces and is tasked with breaking the news to this Indian Drug lord. His own family is threatened if he doesn't get Ovi back as he was responsible for looking after his every move. 

Saju knows that the Drug Lord no longer has the money for the ransom so he heads to the black market to hire Tyler Rake and his team. The first time we see Tyler, he's simply sunbathing before chucking himself off a cliff in front of his astonished companions before sitting below the water he lands in until he nearly drowns, bringing some blurred images of holding a child's hand. It doesn't take a rocket scientist in his first year of study to realise that this guy is remembering his dead child or at least a child he doesn't see any longer. After getting briefed, he meets the kidnappers, gets shown the hostage and then gets told to tell the father to pay. As he is lead out, we see the machine that is the killer they hired. Wiping out the gang, he takes the kids and tries to exit the city.

 Instantly, the now lead drug lord and rival of this kid's old man finds out and demands that the police, which he owns, lock down the city. This is all whilst he is watching some kids get chucked off a roof. He likes one kid though, a little ballsy fella with a decent scar on his chops takes his eye and he wants him to have a gun, sticks him on the street and just as easy as the rest of the movie is to follow so far, this kid will have a role to play. As Tyler makes it to the escape boat, his colleagues on board are killed and the one keeping watch is also shot. As the office side of the team was waiting for the bank transaction to come through, which never happens, we know something is up. Saju the sneaky bastard has decided to doublecross the team. He got them to do the lift and the hard work and then he moved in for the kill so that he didn't have to pay. No Tyler has a problem, the kid knows Saju and wants to go with him but Tyler knows that if he lets this happen, he has pretty much killed himself.

 A car chase, high rise chase and plenty of explosion and gunshots in between as the police move in leaves us with a battered Tyler hiding out trying to focus on his next move. Just as my cogs are turning, I think Tyler and Saju are going to have to come together by the end of this. He has only turned on the plan to save his own family but this is a hard task for all involved. They think the night will help them but that little shit with the scar has turned up with his gang of kids. This is quite funny to watch as Tyler slaps them down to the ground and doesn't pull his punches on the leader, once again giving them some time to escape as the police movie in with helicopters due to the ruckus. They find their way to the sewers and Tyler has to call in a favour from another ex merc. Hang about, the ruffian looks like David Harbour? Yep, it's Harbour and he is hiding the guys out in his flat. Problem is that he also works for the police general now and he is about to give up the duo. Tyler and he get into a fight and Tyler is only saved by Ovi picking up a gun and killing him. Harbour wasn't in the movie for long but it was good to see another familiar face. Tyler's team that is left in the office makes a new plan. They have to get the kid out view a bridge that crosses a border of the city and they can wait on the other side. For Tyler, there is only one person that he can bring on board to help out and that's Saju. Called it. Just before the call comes, we see a battered Saju calling home and promising his son that he will be home. That is never a good sign. The trio meets up and Tyler drops the kid off with Saju to use the plan. Tyler is off elsewhere to create a distraction so that the forces think the kid is still with him and bring hellfire down on his location. Saju and Ovi as disguised crossing the bridge but are finally stopped as a guard noticed the battered face of Saju and as he asks Ovi to take off his hat, he knows this is the kid they are looking for. All hell breaks loose on the bridge but from a rooftop, the drug lord is looking at the explosions on Tyler's location until he is made aware and sends two teams to the bridge. Saju gets in touch with Tyler to let him know they are sussed and now it is a race to get this kid across. The leader of the forces takes a vantage point with a sniper and begins picking off the team waiting at the other side of the bridge whilst a helicopter makes it to the location and starts spraying at Saju as the kid hides on a bus. This is beginning to get to the opening scene as Tyler fights his way on to the bridge. Saju is taken down by a bullet to the skull as the sniper takes aim and now it is up to Tyler to get this kid moving and give him cover. Ovi runs for his life as Tyler takes and receives and the Sniper takes aim again, downing him. The lead female on our team takes her own sniper, picks him out and ends the offence. Tyler gets back to his feet but pretty much knows he is done. He lets the kid get to safety and turns around with every hope of covering the escape of his team and Ovi. He picks off the last of the police and turns to the female and Ovi to give a little smirk but is cut short as that little tosser with the scar has shown up again. Fire is returned from the safe end of the bridge and he scampers off like a little rat but the job is done. This is the clearest flashback of Tyler holding hands with the little boy that we see. Ovi realises what has happened and tries to make it to his new friend but is stopped as Tyler, seeing Ovi is safe, falls backward into the river.

The movie cuts to 8 months later and the team had escaped to Mumbai so I'm not sure if that's where Ovi is now but we see him in a school, pretty quiet and heading to the diving board. He jumps and settles on the floor of the pool, just as Tyler did, collecting his thoughts and heading back for air. As he turns to the to look around the camera focuses on Ovi but the background is a blur and a guy is standing there looking on, who is very much in the shape of Tyler Rake. Netflix you bastards, you don't have like leaving me with a question I'll never get the answer to. 

I put up a status on Facebook to say that I was about to begin watching this and the response was, 'don't get your hopes up' and so on. This didn't fill me with confidence but as in the past this lowers my expectations and I can go ahead and enjoy a movie for what it is, an escape from the real world. The storyline was incredibly simple and predictive although I still would like to know if Tyler survived somehow. I'm pretty happy with myself for working out that Saju was going to come good as his intentions were always to protect his own family from a threat so you could understand why he took the actions that he did.  The story for Tyler started in water as well as ending in water and as he was losing his life, the picture of his son would get clearer, showing him and his son running through water.

The cast was very well done also. It was nice to see Hemsworth in a more serious acting role. The first Thor movie was a little serious, a tiny bit of humour, the second the same but the third and the later Avengers movies came with a lot more humour, from him. The Men in Black installment isn't worth speaking about but they tried to draw out the same humour between two cast members from the third Thor installment. This time we got action and plenty of it. I had heard a rumour that there was a lot of action like a John Wick movie and I dislike those series. Thankfully this movie wasn't as full of non-sensical violence and I enjoyed it a lot more. The rest of the cast, although I may never see them in something else after this, helped to install the decently run movie. 

Thankfully, as already mentioned, I went into this with thinking it would be nothing more than a popcorn movie and from the three Netflix exclusive movies so far, they all had the same feeling. I would have been disappointed if I rocked up to a cinema for a ticket I had paid for but watching from the comfort of my own home to kill a couple of hours was enjoyable thankfully. I'm still here wondering if it was Tyler standing at the side of the pool at the end of the movie. In Netflix tradition, we will never know I suppose.  

After you've been in war, you understand it never really ends (Da 5 Bloods 2020)

 266.

Da 5 Bloods

5/10

Finally getting around to film 4 out of 26 and we come across Da 5 Bloods. I hadn't heard much about this movie at all but seen it advertised when it first came on to Netflix. At the time I was knee-deep in some series but now I have the time to watch this 154-minute movie. When a movie is that long, it is always a worry as to whether it will feel like its a trial or will it fly by. Having a small read about the plot on Netflix, we are about to watch four African American vets return to Vietnam to seek the remains of their fallen squad leader whilst also on the trail for the gold fortune that he helped them hide. 

As the movie started, I saw that it is going to be directed by Spike Lee. The only other movie I had seen from him was BlacKkKlansman, which was very enjoyable but came with a learning aspect also and some real footage to shock at the end. This movie began with that kind of footage. It also continued through the first third of the film.

 What I have seen so far is four older gents making their wat to Vietnam and meeting up with their tour guide. I only recognise one gent and that's Delroy Lindo. I didn't exactly know him by name but more by his face in some mediocre movies. The storyline for me comes in two main parts. We have the build-up to the gents setting up a plan to extract the gold out of the country whilst also being introduced to side characters that we think may come in to play later. These are the shady lot that are going to help with the gold and others we meet are in the country to help rid the areas of landmines. We follow this gang on their travel through to coordinates that they had locked away but flip back and fore with flashbacks of how they landed in the war, the killing of their leader and I suddenly see a face a definitely recognise. The now late Chadwick Boseman is the man to play their leader. Back at the present day, we discover each characteristic of the gang as one's son also tags along looking to blackmail his estranged father. One of the guys was always portrayed as a well off businessman, the others enjoying their life but the one who's son has come, is already a little bit of a loose cannon. 

We get to the site of the body and shit is starting to hit the fan, the businessman reveals that he has actually lost all of his money and as for the loose cannon Paul, he's waving a gun about as they gang bumps into those landmine removers. Eddie, the businessman is trying to keep the scabbling to a low but as he walks around with a gold bar, he steps on a landmine and loses his lower half before eventually dying. This is when Paul's reality really breaks down/ He thinks everyone is after him and he's not far from the truth. His friends want to take the gun off him but the guy that they had planned on getting the gold out of the country has also turned on them. After a shoot out, Paul's son gets shot on the leg but Paul decides it's a man down and is happy to leave him there. He is left to go alone as the other men stick with the young man and adapt to another plan. Paul meets his match as he quickly descends into madness, seeing the ghost of his former superior before being shot to shit by a resurgence of the local Vietnamese mercenaries who are after the gold for their employer, who our gents thought they had working alongside themselves. Now as for the others, the tour guide and the remaining mine disposal experts, they have made their way to some old ruins as a final stand. All hell breaks loose and we are only left with a few survivors. These include the tag along son and a female disposal expert that he was fond of in the bar before they left on this journey and has fallen for in only a matter of days. Being left with most of the gold, they use the tour guide's contacts to get it out of the country, for a share of course. The remaining is split to help the mine expert's charity and the wounded son, who is a teacher, makes sure the families receive some and the rest is donated to the Black Lives Matter movement. We end there.

I'm trying to think where to begin. The movie felt the whole 2 hours and 34 minutes that you were promised but that isn't a good thing. It was split in half with the first being the setting up and interaction giving us a tiny bit of background to each character but at the same time, overflowing certain aspects that we didn't need. The second half of the movie was pretty much carnage on the screen and there wasn't much information to take in but at least there were a lot more entertaining aspects taking place. The storyline wasn't a confusing one to follow by any means, we knew the mission, we knew each man and could guess the demise of certain characters. Without trying to sound prejudice, at times the movie sounded very preachy when it overdone some of the real-life stories and photos at the wrong time of the story. 

No-one really stood out for me character-wise, they were all OK but I wouldn't say I was made to support anyone and their choices, that's what made most of this easily forgettable to me. At times it was like a gang of squabbling teenagers with one of them trying to take the lead but the rest not really following suit, including the son. 

The technical aspects of the movie are the moments that will stick with me more than anything else. As we got our flashbacks, we would see the gang fighting in the war. The camera would narrow as if an older style of film was being watched. The fighting scenes were made to look extremely cheap, the guns had flashes like a cheap straight to DVD movie with the villains shooting like Stormtroopers but our main characters picking headshots, even if it was the first gun that had ever picked up. It was an interesting style but was a little bit laughable. 

There are much better films out there and I really enjoyed BlacKkKlansman so I had some high hopes for this one and it fell way short. The film was a bit of a mess and as I already mentioned, you couldn't invest in any of the characters, leaving you with no sense of satisfaction if they were going to succeed and no care if they were going to lose. The flashbacks hardly made our characters younger along with a lot of tiny flaws that group together as a mishmash of mistakes. Does this truly do justice to the 'Bloods' that lost their lives? For me, there may have been too many political overtones and stereotypes to give us a movie that we could stand attention to but also enjoy.