Category: Movie Review

Super Recaps: Halo Season 2 – Episode 8

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

Halo the series is owned by Paramount Plus

Directed by Dennie Gordon

It’s all come down to this. We’ve been on a wild ride with a lot of ups and downs to be sure, but this is the moment that fans wanted to see since the show was announced all those years ago. The Halo show finally gets to Halo, and lo, did the fanboys rejoice! Well, maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t; it’s going to be interesting to see how the fandom reacts now that we’ve gotten to where a lot of them felt we should have started, but we’re here to look at the episode itself and not the endless Reddit threads this is sure to produce! Is this a great finale for both fans of the show and fans of the game, or does trying to bring these two worlds together leave nobody happy? Let’s find out!!

With everyone converging on the Halo ring like a violent space version of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, Chief (Pablo Schreiber) has the lead on everyone and can practically taste the perfectly preserved dirt on the planet’s surface when he realizes that he can’t just leave everyone else to die and so turns back around to join the battle; leaving Makee and The Arbiter (Charlie Murphy and Viktor Åkerblom) to call dibs on the ring shaped space station. What he doesn’t know, however, is that the artifact Miranda and Halsey (Olive Gray and Natascha McElhone) brought back from the secret alien laboratory is carrying something far more sinister than a mere fleet of Covenant starships. A long extinct spore known as The Flood has woken up and is hungry for meat which it finds readily on this human outpost, and so Kwan Ha and Soren (Yerin Ha and Bokeem Woodbine) need to find Kessler and Laera (Tylan Bailey and Fiona O’Shaughnessy) before they get caught in this grotesque outbreak that Kwan seems to have some sort of connection with even if she doesn’t quite understand it herself. With Chief trying to help the Spartan IIIs being led by Kai (Kate Kennedy), Makee fighting with Cortana (Jen Taylor and Christina Bennington) as they barrel ahead towards the ultimate weapon, and the rest of our heroes fighting off Space Zombies, will this be humanity’s last stand as they valiantly fight against impossible odds? What’s waiting for everyone if they do make it to the Halo ring, and will they have enough strength left to stop Makee? It’s taken us two seasons to get to the darn thing, so was the wait ultimately worth it!?

“Maybe the REAL Halo was the friends we made along the way.”     “What, like Makee?”     “Shut up, Cortana.”
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Cinema Dispatch: Uncharted

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

Uncharted and all the images you see in this review are owned by Sony Pictures Releasing

Directed by Ruben Fleischer

The quest for the truly great video game movie has felt like a moot point for years now; especially since people are rediscovering some of those old nineties films and realizing that they were actually pretty good. Mortal Kombat is well regarded for its fun action and interesting aesthetic (certainly more so than its 2021 counterpart) and I still maintain that the Super Mario Bros movie is an unsung classic of the dystopian sci-fi genre. Heck, even with the more recent films like Detective Pikachu, a good chunk of the Resident Evil movies, and arguably Sonic the Hedgehog, it’s hard to say with a straight face that we’re still waiting for someone to “get it right” when there are plenty of examples we can point to that are more than watchable. Now it’s time for Sony’s big cinematic money maker for the PlayStation to try and prove that it can be a good movie in its own right instead of just mimicking big-budget adventure films. Will it be another feather in the game industry’s cap as far as film adaptations, or will this be as quickly forgotten as that Tomb Raider movie from a few years ago? Let’s find out!!

Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is a lovable crook in the heart of New York as he steals his way through a meager life because how else are you going to afford rent there? He has aspirations of… I guess being Indiana Jones at one point, but it’s not until some shady guy named Sully (Mark Wahlberg) offers him a job that his career as an adventurer finally gets off the ground. With promises of an impossibly large treasure as well as clues to what happened to his missing brother Sam, Nathan jet sets around the world to solve the mystery of Magellan’s lost gold! With the help of an associate of Sully’s named Chloe (Sophia Ali), can this unlikely team manage to find the treasure before ruthless businessman Santiago (Antonio Banderas) and his crew of even more ruthless mercenaries led by Jo (Tati Gabrielle) can take it for themselves? Who is this Sully guy anyway, and is he being forthright with everything he knows about Sam? Does Nathan have any idea what he set himself up for? I mean there are at least four games I could have shown him to give him a clue before he agreed to this ridiculous adventure.

“We’re falling to our deaths AND everything is on fire!?”
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WW-DE-cember: Santa’s Little Helper

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Santa’s Little Helper and all the images you see in this review are owned by WWE Studios and    20th Century Fox

Directed by Gil Junger

We’re back with another Christmas Tale brought to us by the WWE and oddly enough it not only stars The Miz once again but has the same director from Christmas Bounty!  Apparently someone saw that first movie and thought that these two should ABSOLUTELY work together again which is certainly not the call that I would have made (mine would have involved an iron maiden to start with), but I guess that’s why I’m not making creative decisions for everyone’s favorite supporter of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family!  Will they be able to pull off something halfway decent this time around, or was Christmas Bounty just the warning shot for something even far worse to come!?  Let’s find out!!

Right off the bat, this movie is LEAGUES better than Christmas Bounty, and not just because they have a slightly improved font!  First, The Miz is the star and not playing a supporting part which means we get to see him right away and all throughout the movie.  Second, he is ACTUALLY really good in the role here which is basically yet another riff on the Scrooge archetype and fits in perfectly with his in-ring persona as a guy so smug you want to punch him in the face.  He’s some dude who I GUESS works at a mortgage company and is working on this Rec Center the company wants to foreclose on for… reasons.   Apparently the director of the Rec Center ran off with all their money and The Miz, who is called Dax Hardwick in this, is personally visiting the place to rub it in everyone’s faces that they’re gonna take it out from under them and bulldoze it to the ground!  Damn!  We’re up to Grinch levels of evil already!

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“There’s certainly no termites in THAT smile!

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WW-DE-cember: Christmas Bounty

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Christmas Bounty and all the images you see in this review are owned by WWE Studios and Warner Bros Television

Directed by Gil Junger

What, you thought I was gonna stop talking about WWE movies in October!  Oh HECK no!  Their film studio pumps out PLENTY of stuff including two Christmas movies which we’ll be looking at this December and, oddly enough, both star one of the GREATEST wrestlers in their stable; Mike THE MIZ Mizanin!  The dude is one of the best heels WWE has working for them who knows how to work the ring and also has some phenominal mic skills.  Too often heels can fall into the trap of either being too good to root against or too bad to be taken seriously.  Mike finds the perfect balance where he can back up his cockiness and with a strong show of genuine skill while also seeming petty and goofy which lets us keep hating him for being a jerk; though I still like him either way.  What can I say?  He’s a charming guy!  Will he be able to translate those skills to a made for TV Christmas film?  Let’s find out!!

Things start off less than ideal as the movie begins with a terrible Christmas pop song and some pretty cheap looking titles.  If you’re post production work is something that I of all people could plausibly pull off, then you MIGHT want to throw an extra few bucks at the editor; at least to get some original fonts!

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Papyrus!  When Arial and Times New Roman are a little TOO obvious!

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HalloWWEen: See No Evil

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

WWESEENOEVIL0

See No Evil and all the images you see in this review are owned by Lionsgate Films and WWE Studios

Directed by Gregory Dark

We’re back with another SPOOKY movie that only exists because of Vince McMahon’s absurd little empire, and in this case the connection is much more direct than with DOOM.  See, even though DOOM starred Dwayne “We’re still only crediting him as The Rock” Johnson it TECHNICALLY wasn’t a WWE film as that particular offshoot of the brand had barely come into existence at the time having only been second or third tier production house on bigger studio’s films and Big Boy Vince didn’t even have a hand in producing it.  DOOM was a Hollywood movie through and through, but the landscape was about to change as the very next year WWE Studios (then known as WWE Films) were set to release their first three feature films under their banner with this being one of them.  Seems like a simple enough premise to be sure, stick one of your monster men in a slasher film, and they certainly knew what the hell they were doing when they made The Marine the same year which is one of the most gloriously over the top action films ever made, so will this be an underrated gem in the genre or are we in for the cinematic equivalent of Halloween Havoc 1998; i.e. one long string of mediocrity followed by a jaw dropping botched shit show at the end!?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with a prologue where two cops enter a rundown house presumably on some sort of tip or a report of a disturbance.  Needless to say that what they find inside is more than just a mere disturbance as the place has clearly been modeled after the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they find a woman who is still alive, but has had her eyeballs plucked out.  The mother plucker by the way is in the other room and manages to take out one of the cops but can only manage to take an arm off the cop who kind of looks like Aaron Eckhart.  Like Chris Hemseworth, our rather inefficient slasher learns that you should REALLY go for the head as the cop manages to pop off a shot at HIS head with his good arm.

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“The Undertaker sends his regards.”     *BANG*

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HalloWWEen: DOOM

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

WWEDOOM0

DOOM and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

Welcome one and all to this most SPOOKY time of the year!  For this Halloween, I’ll be reviewing horror movies as I’ve been known to do on occasion, only this time we’ll be doing something a LITTLE bit different!  With my recent fascination in the WWE and wrestling in general, I thought it’d be interesting to check out a few horror movies from some of the company’s most iconic stars, starting with the often maligned DOOM movie from 2005!  DOOM was one of the biggest attempts to bring a video game to the big screen but ended up bombing at the box office which kind of put the whole idea of adaptation these properties on hold for a while there; leaving the genre to be dominated by Resident Evil sequels and Uwe Boll until around 2016 when studios started getting confident once again and movies OTHER than Resident Evil could start making money.  Is it as bad people say it is, or is this Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson vehicle just a diamond in the rough looking for the right critic to give it the polish it needs?  Let’s find out!!

Before the opening credits we get a bit of narration which tells us that humans discovered a portal on Earth that led to Mars, and now that I think about it… isn’t that the plot of John Carter of Mars?  Why haven’t they run with that yet!?  Maybe that’s the surprise twist in DOOM: Eternal.  Now obviously with this being a DOOM movie, nothing can go well once you get your ass to Mars which these unlucky scientists are currently learning as the prologue picks up right as things are going to hell; literally I’m sure.  They are RUNNING their asses off to try and get away from some unseen (presumably demonic) threat, and the situation is SO critical that the fastest sprinter locks the sliding doors behind him; leaving the slower ones to die in very gory fashion!

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This is what happens when you don’t hold the elevator door.

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