A married Hollywood agent receives a mysterious letter for an anonymous sexual encounter and becomes ensnared in a sinister world of lying, murder and infidelity.
Jim Cummings once again shows how much fun he has while directing and acting with his films. The Beta Test is a very interesting little movie that criticizes Hollywood agents and it definitely delivers quite well, first off Jim Cummings absolutely steals the show in the leading role. His performance is energetic and quite hilarious as well, the movie itself is a very interesting blend of humor, suspense and drama each of which compliment each other quite well and build every scene. What makes this movie stronger is Jim Cummings’s style, he takes his traditional style that’s in a lot of his films also with the help of PJ McCabe who’s also in the movie, they both create something different from what Cummings’s usually does and it 100% works. A very strong social commentary that actually does bring something new to the conversation, go into this one knowing as little as possible!
After meeting her perfect match on a dating app, an L.A. writer learns she’s been catfished when she flies 3,000 miles to surprise him for Christmas.
Netflix and Christmas movies aren’t a good match, with the exception of a few (Klaus was fantastic and The Dolly Parton one was a lot of fun) but I really have to say Love Hard is actually quite decent. Is it predictable and filled to the brim of cliches? Oh absolutely but that doesn’t stop the movie from being enjoyable and the characters actually being likable, Nina Dobrev and Jimmy O. Young did a really solid job in their roles, there’s even a few jokes in the movie that actually land pretty well. The rest of the cast does pretty well Harry Shum Jr. looks like he’s having a blast while being in this movie, the music is also pretty great as well! As I said Love Hard does have a lot of cliches and it ends exactly how you think it’s going to, however what separates this movie from most of the other Netflix Christmas movies is that it’s at least entertaining, where as a lot of the others are uninteresting and feel like they should be on the Hallmark channel rather than Netflix (although Love Hard does feel like a Hallmark movie at times) overall Love Hard is fun, if you know what your getting into give this one a watch!
Screaming through the Nevada desert in a bullet-ridden car, wily con artist Teddy Murretto hatches a plan to hide out from lethal assassin Bob Viddick. He punches rookie officer Valerie Young to get himself arrested and locked up in a small-town police station. However, jail can’t protect Murretto for long as Viddick schemes his own way into detention, biding his time in a nearby cell until he can complete his mission.
Joe Carnahan’s second movie this year (first being Boss Level) and like Boss Level Copshop is a very straightforward action movie that’s a ton of fun. Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo both do a pretty solid job in their roles, the action scenes are solid and are quite rewarding as well. Plus it makes it more interesting that all this action is within a confined space of the police station, sure the movie does have it’s action movie cliches but at least the movie itself is very entertaining, it’s most certainly a genre film that I definitely think fans will enjoy!
Copshop is now available on all VOD Platforms!
6/10 C+
A frustrated suburban housewife and her best friend hatch an illegal coupon-club scheme that scams millions from corporations and delivers deals to legions of fellow coupon clippers. Hot on their trail is an unlikely duo — a hapless loss-prevention officer and a determined U.S. postal inspector — both looking to end their criminal enterprise.
Queenpins is unfortunately a missed opportunity, it has some jokes in it that are solid enough but it has a lot of others that completely miss. The cast does a fine enough job with what they are given, but it’s not enough to save this movie from being very below average. What seals this movie’s fate is the running time and the pacing, it feels like it goes on for far too long and at the same time not really adding anything new to the genre. The end result ends up being a very typical comedy that’s definitely not bad but very forgettable.
Hoping to get closer as a family, Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the Addams clan embark on an adventurous road trip in a hideous and humongous camper.
The Addams Family 2 somehow ends up being worse than the first movie, if you don’t recall the major problem I had with the first movie was the jokes and it just being an unremarkable movie all together. Addams Family 2 takes all of that and does nothing to improve on the first movie, the jokes this time around are FAR worse. We have a Billie Eilish joke, “Squad Goals” “I’ve always been socially distancing” and much more along those lines. Which that right there is clear to me that the writers have very little understanding about The Addams Family, I get they want to market this to a younger audience and that’s perfectly acceptable. But don’t dumb it down kids are much smarter than that, you don’t need to shove in a bunch of jokes that you only put in hoping to get a “they said it” reaction, the cast like last time is the only good part about this movie. They all try their best with what they are given but it’s not nearly enough to save this movie from being a dumpster fire, as for the plot it’s another one of those “family members have a road trip hoping to bring one of their family members closer” sort of plots. Which at this point has been done to death, but I wouldn’t mind it as much if they tried something new with it….this movie does not do that. It plays exactly how you think it will and that’s the end of it. I will give the movie this…there is this one part with Lurch singing “I Will Survive” that was actually not badly done. It’s sort of random and comes out of nowhere but it’s still a nice scene. That’s really all I have to say about The Addams Family 2 it’s a very unremarkable sequel that had very little point to it, how it ended up being worse than the first movie I will never know. This could have been the chance to improve but instead it went backwards.
The Addams Family 2 is now available on all VOD Platforms!
In the barrio of Oak Springs live a strong and stubborn group of elderly friends who refuse to be gentrified. Their leader, Lupita, keeps them together as a community and family. However, their beloved bingo hall is about to be sold to a much more powerful force than money itself.
So Welcome To The Blumhouse has returned from last year, which was overall pretty decent (with the exception of The Lie that was terrible). Bingo Hell is not a good start however, Adriana Barraza was pretty solid as the lead, she had some genuinely great moments that really made her standout. Richard Brake as the villain was very enjoyable, it seemed like he had a lot of fun which actually really helps here. I also do like that the movie is centered around senior citizens something we don’t often see in a lot of horror movies, so I give the movie credit for trying something different. However the rest of the movie ends up being a whole lot of nothing, the writing is really not that good, it’s clearly trying to go for this B-movie feel to it which at some points it works and other times it doesn’t. There are times when Bingo Hell takes itself seriously which is very strange considering the premise especially towards the end. That’s when things truly turn into a giant mess, it feels like the writers just threw several ideas in at once and couldn’t decide on what ideas should be used. I will say the gore is pretty neat! Overall Bingo Hell is very forgettable, if you take away the main focus on senior citizens and the premise, you are left with a very typical straight to VOD horror movie that you might put on in the background. Give this one a skip.
Bingo Hell is now available on Amazon Prime Video!
3/10 D-
A teenage girl with self-esteem issues finds confidence in the most unlikely way, by spending her summer battling vampires that prey on New Orleans’ disenfranchised with the help of her best friend, the boy she’s always pined for, and a peculiar rich girl.
Black as Night is the other “Welcome To The Blumhouse” movie that released this past weekend and it’s worse than Bingo Hell. While Bingo Hell wasn’t good at the very least it tried something different even if it wasn’t successful. Black as Night just feels like a clone of Vampires Vs The Bronx which came out last year. Plus it throws in a bunch of plot elements we have seen in far better Vampire films and calls it a day. The acting is at least overall not too bad but the major problem is the writing, it’s very weak and has absolutely nothing going for it. There’s no attempt of trying to do something interesting or new, it’s basically copying off of what made other vampire films so successful and calls it a day. It’s a shame too because this could had been something decent if they tried to change the plot up and focus on trying to do something new. Overall there really isn’t much to say about Black as Night it’s a bad vampire movie that offers nothing new and just sort of exists.
Black As Night is now available on Amazon Prime Video!
A bank teller discovers that he’s actually an NPC inside a brutal, open world video game.
Free Guy was one of those movies that I got a lot of requests to review or was asked when I was going to watch it. The ultimate reason why it took so long to get around to watching it is because I really didn’t rush to watch it, something about just really seemed off to me. Free Guy does have it’s positives such as some of the acting, although Ryan Reynolds once again feels like he’s playing the exact same character as he does in a lot of his other movies he’s still pretty okay here. The rest of the cast isn’t too bad either Taika Waititi probably being the best, I also liked the premise of the movie. There were times where the movie actually takes advantage of the premise and uses it in some clever ways. The writing is where things fall apart unfortunately starting with the jokes while there were a few jokes that I found pretty okay, a majority of them suffer from either just not being funny or land terribly. There is one scene in particularly that really just destroys the whole mood SPOILER AHEAD it’s the scene near the end where Chris Evans (and the Captain America shield), Hulks hand, a lightsaber and a bunch of streamers make a cameo appearance. While it may sound harmless in itself it’s the script that ultimately makes this painful, I’m sorry but shouting “that’s a lightsaber” not once but twice is not funny. And for a movie that is all about being original resorting to a scene to show off IPs is extremely hypocritical SPOILER ENDS. Overall Free Guy did not do it for me, I can understand why someone would enjoy this movie and if you did more power to you! This just wasn’t for me.
Free Guy is available on all VOD Platforms September 28th!
The movie involves Scooby-Doo and his friends finding a strange object in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, the backwoods hometown of Courage and his owners, Eustace and Muriel Bagge.
Growing up Courage The Cowardly Dog was one of my favorite cartoons, it was a very smart and horror filled show that was quite fantastic. So when I saw that a Scooby-Doo and Courage crossover was happening I was pretty excited, this is something that should have happened years ago! The end result is quite great, I do wish John Dilworth came back as the director but that’s perfectly okay. The movie does a good job of combining the two really well, it keeps the characters as they were several years ago. Both properties fit very well together and it really shows here, I do wish the movie used some darker imagery that Courage The Cowardly Dog is known for. The jokes are actually not too bad, there are some that don’t land particularly well but a lot of it does remain faithful to both properties. It plays out how you would expect, it takes elements from both properties and blends them into one. There are things that I do wish this movie improved on such as the villains which were bugs, part of what made Courage really interesting as a show was the creatures and villains. Using bugs sort of seems like they took a very uninteresting path, despite that though I had a lot of fun with this movie. If you are a Courage The Cowardly Dog fan you will absolutely love this. It’s not anywhere near as fantastic as the show was but it’s a nice throwback that I do hope we see more of Courage in the near future.
Scooby-Doo Meets Courage The Cowardly Dog is now available on all VOD Platforms!
A modern movie musical with a bold take on the classic fairy tale. Our ambitious heroine has big dreams and with the help of her fab Godmother, she perseveres to make them come true.
Cinderella (2021) did manage to do one thing…unite all sides or Twitter to absolutely destroy it, that aside this new adaption of Cinderella truly feels like a complete waste of time. Billy Porter (who is barely in the movie) and Idina Menzel (at times) are the only two positives I can give this movie, the rest of it is a huge mess. First off Camila Cabello’s performance is one of the most nothing special about it performances I’ve seen so far this year, I just didn’t buy Camila as Cinderella had this been some other performance than maybe. Almost all of the songs were covers….bad covers, trying to combine songs like Rhythm Nation into a Cinderella story just feels way too out of place and completely takes you out of the movie. Don’t even get me started on the jokes, if I have to hear James Corden talking about how proud he is of his “front tail” ever again I swear I’m going to quit reviewing films. The jokes in this movie are some of the most unfunny and painful I’ve listened to in recent memory, which only shocks me because Kay Cannon who directed Blockers is the director. While I’m not one of those people who found Blockers hysterical i at least found it to be one of the better modern comedies. Then there’s the whole look of the movie, it feels very cheaply made (the CGI on the mice look like they are from a very early PS2 game). I appreciate at times the movie was trying to do something a little bit different but the problem is the movie fails at that as well, this version of Cinderella also tries to shoehorn this whole “girlboss” narrative into it but that falls flat as well. There’s no build up, no character development or any really growth. Overall Cinderella (2021) completely misses it fails as an adaption of Cinderella (can we please stop with Cinderella adaptions?) and it fails at being an actual decent movie. You are better off watching any other Cinderella story that came before this one.
Cinderella is now available on Amazon Prime Video!
A couple meets up with another couple while on vacation in Mexico, but their friendship takes an awkward turn when they get back home.
Vacation Friends is likely one of the fastest comedies where it goes from genuinely hilarious to not funny at all. The first 30 minutes or so are quite great, the cast is pretty solid together Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, John Cena and Meredith Hagner all have great chemistry and are hands down the highlights of the movie. The rest of the movie however suffers from a very generic script that doesn’t offer anything new to the table and feels more less the same as other comedies. The direction also feels like it’s nonexistent at all, especially towards the second half of the movie where it feels like the writers threw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what sticks. However the movie itself isn’t horrible, it doesn’t do anything horribly wrong but it also doesn’t do anything that stands out other than the cast giving solid performances.
A teenage girl sets out to give a nebbish classmate the ultimate high school makeover.
I’m not going to go on about this movie for too long, but I do feel there’s a lot to be said about how much of a trainwreck this movie is. He’s All That is a gender swap remake of She’s All That which was released in 1999, She’s All That was one of the very early teen romantic comedies that was actually quite effective of what it was sent out to do, I didn’t watch it growing up as a lot of other people that I know had but I still find it to be a fun little movie. Mark Water’s He’s All That however is not that, instead we get another terrible teen comedy that just so happens to be a remake that I’m pretty sure nobody was demanding. The acting is straight up terrible besides Rachel Leigh Cook and Matthew Lillard who are actually pretty entertaining whenever they appear on screen the rest of the cast are just not good at all. Which is sad because I do like Madison Pettis it just feels like the writers had no idea what they were doing and completely missed the point of the original. What the selling point for this movie was however was that it has TikTok star Addison Rae as the leading role, now I do believe that some influencers can successfully transfer from being influencers to actors and actresses…however time and time again that hasn’t happened and that is still the case here. Addison Rae’s acting is terrible there’s no other way to put it, there’s very little emotion and it strangely feels like she’s phoning it in at times. Maybe if this were a Disney Channel Original Movie her acting could get a pass, but this is a Netflix release so there has to be a level of quality here. It’s really getting tiring of studios thinking just because someone is a influencer that means they can act, look what happened with The Smosh movie, The Fred movie trilogy, The Fine Brothers “F The Prom” and Shane Dawson in Not Cool. If you took Addison Rae away from this movie I’m positive that this movie wouldn’t have anywhere near the attention it has currently. The writing is what to be expected from these garbage Netflix teen movies a lot of unlikable characters, poor dialogue and has a bunch of lines that you wouldn’t catch a teenager ever saying. The humor is also a huge miss, like I said earlier it feels like this was written by people who have no idea how teenagers talk and the humor proves that pretty well. Mark Water’s direction isn’t great at all here either, it’s baffling you can go from Mean Girls and Freaky Friday (2003) to this. However Water’s career has been slowly falling apart over the years and He’s All That doesn’t show a sign of it being turned around, Water’s gives the same dull direction that has been present in a lot of his other work over the past several years in fact this was a DOWNGRADE from his last movie Magic Camp (2020). Lastly for whatever reason there’s product placement KFC and Pizza Hut to be exact. Overall He’s All That is soulless, it’s the type of remake where there was no love put into it at all and just takes advantage of the fact it has a famous TikTok star, it feels more like a “hey you know this famous influencer right?!? Well they are in this movie!” If your going to put an Influencer in this case Addison Rae into a movie don’t make it a remake especially when you don’t bother to understand what made the original enjoyable. Hands down one of the worst movies of the year..
Jerome Reviews... 