Hey everybody, I'm back with four more reviews. If all goes according to plan, and it almost always does around here, I should be back on or before the July 4th weekend with about four more again! Today, I bring you a couple of older movies that have been out on video for a while and one that's still hitting the top ten in the box office, for some reason. The third installment of X-Men is disappointing to say the least. Not Brothers Grimm disappointing, but still. As a little companion, I figured I'd review another mutant movie in the form of the 1984 Wings Hauser piece, Mutant, also known as Night Shadows. It turns out to not be so much about mutants. Oh well. Just another reminder that we will review anything and everything around here, whether you like it or not. Without further ado, enjoy.


X-Men: The Last Stand
Review by Jon Waterman

*

At large society, and especially the government, is still at odds with mutants. Mutants are seen as menaces and scourges, whether they battle for good and harmony or for world domination and destruction. The government may have found a way to deal with the problem. It appears that they’ve developed an elixir that will convert mutants to their ordinary human form. It has been dubbed “the cure.” Good and evil alike are against this injection, but for vastly different reasons. But leave it to the bad guys to try to take drastic measures. Can the X-Men stop the villains while encouraging a wide-spread tolerance for mutants?

What could possibly be so bad about a movie directed by the man behind “Rush Hour 2” (Brett Ratner) and the writers of “xXx: State of the Union” (Simon Kinberg) and “Elektra” (Zak Penn)? Did you just vomit a little in your mouth, too? It probably could have been worse, but it definitely could have been a lot better. Here’s a simple, yet effective way to make the main plot much more involving and interesting. What if Magneto and Professor X rounded up their freak show troupes and joined forces to combat the evil that is the mandatory cure shot.
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+++++++++


Mutant (1984)
Review by Jon Waterman

**1/2

Josh takes his younger brother Mike away from the city to get away from all the problems he’s recently been having. He hopes that getting out to the countryside and living life at a slower pace will do them both some good. Things go astray quickly, however, as Josh’s car is run off the road by some country bumpkin bullies. They find their way to the nearest small town and do everything they can to just get their car fixed and leave. It turns out that’s not so easy, either. Because the mechanic/gas station owner has caught the same bug most of the rest of the town has come down with. To make matters worse, there’s been an unusually high amount of dead bodies turning up in the town recently. Who or what is killing these rural citizens? Can the brothers make it out alive?

Don’t let the title fool you. This is essentially a zombie movie, and a slow revealing one at that. Granted, the zombies actually aren’t dead before they start hunting for human blood, but the same basic feel is there. And there definitely is not just one mutant, although it may seem that way at first. It all goes sour when the doctor’s assistant claims to be sick, and then twenty seconds later becomes one of the zombies. It all snowballs from there, picking up convention after convention. And that’s sort of too bad. I think one of this movie’s strengths is in its slow brooding uneasiness. Once they start to go full steam with the horror aspect, they fall victim to all the normal conventions and appear to borrow heavily from other similar zombie films of the past (most notably, George Romero’s “Dead” series). It’s tough to not go down that road, but they were doing a pretty good job of it for the first two-thirds.
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++++++++


The Jacket
Review by Jon Waterman

1/2 star

Jack Starks is a Persian Gulf veteran who has made his way home. One day, while hitchhiking, he is knocked unconscious and wakes up to find a police officer shot to death across the road. Jack is convicted and sent to a mental institution. Not believing he’s capable of doing such a thing, he begins to search for answers and hopes to remember anything about that horrible day. The doctors, thinking he’s guilty go to extreme measures to rehabilitate him. They place Jack into an empty morgue cabinet at length on several different occasions. It is inside there, that Jack finds himself slowly piecing together more pieces of the puzzle of the murder. However, he’s not sure how much he can trust, because it appears that while inside that cabinet, he can travel through time and gather clues from the future. Maybe he needs the jacket after all.

Well, he might not, but someone certainly deserves it. Massy Tadjedin, the writer, deserves to be locked up for thinking this was acceptable, watchable cinema. The director John Maybury and cinematographer Peter Deming are certifiable as well for believing that style and flashy camera work equals substance. Budding star power and reasonably good acting will not carry a film. Maybe if they would have put on the urine stained looney bin jacket and slid into the morgue cabinet themselves, they would have gone to the future and seen how poorly the movie turned out and could have found clues as to how to make it better.
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++++++++++


Eros
Review by Jon Waterman

*1/2

In Greek mythology, Eros is the God of Love. In film history, “Eros” is the collaboration of three top directors as they take on the broad themes of love, sex and relationships. Each director brings to the table their own unique style and flair as well as a story completely unrelated to the other two. All of it is loosely taped together through the use of digitally slowed down shots (why?) of a Kama Sutra looking book with uninteresting music behind it. Get ready to test your patience for pretentiousness and art house masturbation.

“The Hand” starts us off and tries to turn us on. Kar Wai Wong (writer/director “2046” “In the Mood for Love”) once again proves that I just may be the dumbest film critic out there (aside from Harry Knowles, of course). I just can not figure out his motivations. The cinematography (by Christopher Doyle) always tends to linger on shots that no one else in their right mind would even think to take. But they are always beautifully done, brilliantly lit, and surprisingly effective. However, even this film, with one-third the length, feels drawn out. I think we’re seeing just about the same amount of story, too. You can expect a lot of spots without dialogue and a timeline as straight as Liberace. “The Hand” gets you excited for a little while, but ultimately can’t provide a happy ending.
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