Tag: Warner Bros

Jumping the Soapbox: A Banana Splitting Headache and Hanna-Barbera’s Confusing Existence

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Banana Splits is owned by Warner Bros

All other copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

Do any of you even know who The Banana Splits are?  Of course not!  They were on the lower tier of Hanna-Barbera creations and because they were live action characters they never got that extra bump of popularity that many of their other creations did when they started randomly pairing them up on shows like Yogi’s Gang where they flew around in a giant flying ark.  Yeah, Hanna-Barbera is weird like that, but the thing about The Banana Splits is… I actually really like them!  I remember watching a marathon of episode back when you had to actually watch TV on a TV, and I thought it was a fun little slice of sixties nonsense!  A bunch of dudes in animal costumes playing bubblegum pop and doing slapstick?  What’s not to like!?  And guess what?  THEY’RE MAKING A MOVIE ABOUT THEM!!  OH BOY!  It looks like someone has finally realized how groovy these cats (and dogs and monkeys and elephants) are and are giving them the big screen treatment they deserve, right?  RIGHT!?

Sigh…

So it turns out that SOMEONE thought it would be brilliant and edgy to take lovable characters aimed at children… and turn them into monsters in a horror movie; straight up.  I mean yeah, they’re clearly playing up the absurdity of it but it just looks like a miserable experience outside of how senseless its UNIQUE SELLING POINT is.  Actually, even more blatant than the simple “shock” value of taking character aimed at kids and making them creepy (congratulations; you’re where Creepy Pasta was twenty years ago) is that they are only doing this to beat the Five Nights at Freddy movie to the punch.  I mean they weren’t robots in the original series either within the fiction of the show (they were anthropomorphic animals in a band) or the reality of its production which was done by people in costumes which is CLEARLY the case here as well.

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“WHAT IS MY PRIMARY DIRECTIVE!?”     “Okay, try to be like this video game, but NOT like this video game at the same time.”     “DOES NOT COMPUTE!!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Hunted)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Patrick Norris

We’re back with another episode of 3rd Twilight from the Zone, and boy do we have a fun one today!  Where previous episodes were about boring things like death personified, video game DLC, and killing baby Hitler, this time we get to hunt ourselves a MONSTER IN THE WOODS!  The original series had its fair share of fantasy creatures to terrorize the likes of William Shatner, so why not this series as well!?  Can they possibly match the level of quality that Rod Serling delivered with his fantastic creatures, or is hiring a guy in a rubber suit completely outside this series’ budget?  Let’s find out!!

Ahem.  IN THE YEAR NEW-THOUSAND, we see a couple of joggers running in a forest with the utmost of horrifying expressions (that cable TV will allow) etched across their faces as they try to escape from some unseen threat; one that likes to use that Evil Dead vision thing to maximize its victims horror before turning their skulls into another trophy for its collection.  Now given that this is far into the future where we somehow learned to be more civilized towards each other (snark), the Nu-National Guard are being called into the woods to find whatever this creature is and fill it with more hot lead than Murphy at the beginning of RoboCop!  Our main Terrestrial Marine is Jeffrey Freed (Scott Bairstow) which is actually quite lucky for him as he’s got a wife and a newborn child, which means if he WASN’T our protagonist then he’d be first on the chopping block when the squad gets to the forest.  His wife Kelly (Michelle Harrison) doesn’t see it that way however (I guess she hasn’t seen enough movies), and makes sure to give us quite a bit of exposition while making her trepidation known.  It turns out that Jeff is a doctor in his day job which I bet will come in handy later when they need someone to fill out the death certificates, and the monster in question appears to be some sort of creature known as a Kreetor which was a species that got wiped out over fifty years ago.  Now you’d think that with so few of them around that we would have PROTECTED them and put them on the endangered species list, but I guess even THESE jerks are scarier than Lion and Tigers and Panda Bears, especially if they hunt their prey like a freaking Slasher!  The wife also refers to them as “Genetically Mutated Beasts” which is probably what ignorant people fear that GMOs will morph into, and it seems that Jeff’s grandfather was MURDERED by one of them back before they were all wiped out, so he’s got a bit of skin in the game as well.

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“My grandfather was SLAUGHTED by one of these creatures!  Was he lost in the woods or did he get hurt when the Kreetor was looking for food?”     “No, the monster poisoned his morning coffee!”     Oh.  Um… who told you this story?”     “My grandma.  She also told that to the police.”     “Uh… huh.”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Sensuous Cindy)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by John Kretchmer

We’re back with another episode of The Zone Who Twilighted Me as our journey through the least popular reboot of this series continues to mildly amusing and mostly bewildering!  Of course the last episode was mostly the latter in the sense that it had no idea what it wanted to do, but hey!  That’s what you get when you try to make a show as experimental as this; or at least trying to live up to a much BETTER experimental show.  Does this episode get things back on track to Fun-ville, or are we stuck at Tedious Junction for the foreseeable future?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins like a mediocre porno with cheesy synth music and piano jams as we fade in on a couple in bed.  What ISN’T like a mediocre porn film (and not in the sense of an IMPROVEMENT) is that the couple in question do NOT have sex; rather the guy wants a bit of morning fun but is rebuffed by his fiancé who reminds him that they agreed not to have sex until the wedding which is SIX MONTHS AWAY!  Okay, so… I have thoughts.  Probably not great thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless.  Is it any of my business what they want to do (or not do) in the bedroom?  No.  What DOES seem a bit concerning here is just how out of sync the two are in regards to this as the guy Ben (Greg Germann) seems to only be doing it because his fiancé Samantha (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight) is making him, and while I get the frustration of him making moves on her in the morning after making this arrangement, she leaps straight to questioning his commitment to marriage because of it.  I mean it’s STILL not really my business, but I think this is a plan that IS working, just not in the way she anticipated.  If this kind of arrangement is her barrier for commitment then more power to her, but it seems clear even in the first three minutes of knowing these two that he’s not gonna clear it by a country mile and that even if he’s putting up a brave face now it’ll only last for so long before he finds a… creative solution to what he perceives to be a problem.  Case in point, Ben goes to work with balls bluer than Dr. Manhattan and since he’s a photo editor working at what I assume is a modeling magazine, he ends up running into a bunch of beautiful women just standing around the lobby which causes his tongue to hang out like a thirsty dog.  Are we sure she doesn’t just want to break up with him and is looking for the most roundabout way to do it?

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“Hi, I’m here for the interview-”     “I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND!!”     “That’s… nice.  So about the interview-”     “BE GONE, TEMPTRESS!!”

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Cinema Dispatch: Godzilla: King of the Monsters

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Godzilla: King of the Monsters and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Pictures and Toho

Directed by Michael Dougherty

I may have been a bit cold about the first Godzilla film (no not the one from 1954 and no not the FIRST Hollywood version) which had a tendency to favor human drama over monster punching action, but with Kong: Skull Island being a phenomenal bit of bloody adventure action and the trailers for this film looking absolutely gorgeous, it looks like things may finally be kicking into high gear for the once and future king!  Shoot, they managed to get MOTHRA in this!  What more could you possibly ask for!?  Does the latest Godzilla movie live up to its title as King of the Monsters, or is this further evidence that the big green guy’s day in the spotlight has come to an end?  Well probably not the latter since Shin Godzilla was pretty awesome and Toho isn’t about to give up this cash cow anytime soon, but let’s find out!!

Following the events of Godzilla 2014 (and technically Kong: Skull Island as well), the world is now hyper aware of Kaiju being a “thing” they just have to deal with now, and ever since Godzilla kicked those monsters’ butts the last time more and more seem to be popping up all over the place.  Fortunately Monarch, the secret organization that studies Kajiu, has been keeping them either asleep or in cages so as not to cause further catastrophe, though I do wonder exactly where they get their funding if the government is constantly calling them in for hearings to tell them how bad they are at their job.  Ah, it probably doesn’t matter!  What DOES matter is that one of the Monarch scientist Dr. Russell (Vera Farmiga) and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) have been KIDNAPPED by… anti-Kaiju terrorists I guess (led by Charles Dance) and are planning something NEFARIOUS with her research which involves communicating with Kaiju.  Good thing she’s got a self-pitying ex-husband named Mark (Kyle Chandler) who’s off somewhere still brooding about his son who died during the first movie, and Monarch calls him in to… help I guess.  I mean they’ve already got Dr. Serizawa from the last film (Ken Watanabe) as well as Dr. Chen and Dr. Chen (Zhang Ziyi) who are Kaiju experts, Dr. Stanton (Bradley Whitford) who cracks jokes and does science stuff, and even a couple of army people including Jackson Barnes (O’Shea Jackson Jr) who cracks jokes as well, so why are they throwing in a guy who explicitly wants all the Kaiju killed into the pro-Kaiju organization?  I guess to try and figure out how those kidnapping Kaiju-haters think?  So now this rag tag group of scientists and random dudes are off to stop the anti-Kaiju terrorists from waking up all the monsters which I guess will show people that the monsters are bad… or something.  Hey, isn’t Godzilla supposed to be in this movie at some point?

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“I’m only here for one day, so make it count!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (To Protect and Serve)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Joe Chappelle

We’re back with another episode of The Twilight Groan, and boy do we have a rough one here today!  So last time around we got a GOOD example of the show taking a chance on darker subject matter and I definitely appreciate the show’s attempt to put a bit of edge back into the series.  Today’s episode however is NOT a good example of them using dark subject matter, at least in my opinion, and it’s not even in a particularly compelling way as so much of it is just a total downer.  But we’re not here to feel sorry for ourselves and lament the difficulty of recapping something so unabashedly sad, now are we!?  We are here to show appreciation for a series that passed a lot of people over and make a few cheap jokes along the way, so let’s get started!!

The episode begins on a rather dark note for such a lightweight series, but whatever tension is built here is somewhat undercut by just how cheesy it all is.  Okay, watching a dude emotionally berate and physically threaten a woman isn’t a breeze to sit through, but the dude doing the threatening is the most clichéd pimp imaginable with a leather duster, a crushed velvet shirt, and a spring loaded knife to intimidate his top earner with.  The guy playing him (Dione Johnstone) is doing a darn fine job and looks almost EXACTLY like Denzel Washington which is fun in its own right, but there’s a bit of a disparity here in terms of tone.  Luckily this tension is cut, not with a knife, but with HOT LEAD as super cop Eric Boggs (Usher; yes THAT Usher) comes onto the scene and shoots A Pimp Named Throwback right in the heart; proving that his proclamations of being The Power, The Glory, The Darkness, The Hyperbolic, were perhaps somewhat overstated.  OR WERE THEY!?  In the aftermath, while the EMTs are carting the body away, Office Boggs gets a call from The Pimp mocking him for not finishing the job and promising a swift return from the land of the dead!  TWILIGHT SHOCK!!

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“SEVEN DAYS, SUCKA!!”     “Until what, you blow hot air while I fill you full of buckshot?”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Chosen)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Winrich Kolbe

We’re back with another episode of The Milquetoast Zone!  Now as much as I enjoy this series for all its goofy early 2000s charm, the big problem with this iteration, and perhaps why it doesn’t stick in the public consciousness, is that it feels rather sanitized with most episodes lacking a lot of bite.  Unintentionally stumbling into problematic territory?  Absurd premises with just as absurd resolutions?  Sure, but aside from Azoth and perhaps One Night at Mercy, none of the episodes I’ve covered so far have had a strong point to make or Rod Serling’s righteous fury behind it.  That’s about to change however as for the first time in this series we are getting something genuinely dark with an ending that does justice to the original series’ sense of cosmic justice!  I’m certainly excited to see it again, so let’s not waste anymore time and dive right in!

Our hero this time around is Vince played by Jake Busey (yes, son of Gary and he does indeed looks distressingly like his father) is… THAT GUY.  We all know a THAT GUY.  Dude who’s in his late twenties or early thirties who never really grew up, always has a chip on his shoulder, and whose plight MIGHT be sympathetic if he wasn’t such a raging a-hole about everything.  Nowadays we see this kind of guy on Reddit and Incel forums, but back before THE INTERNET was what it is today, they just hung around the neighborhood and you always avoided eye contact when they came by.  While raging on the phone about his credit card being cut off, Vince gets a visit from two people wearing dorky leather jackets (Kim Hawthorne and Andrew Moxham) and telling him that he’s been chosen for some very vague form of salvation and that there’s still good within him that makes him worthy of a second chance at life.  Now we know that in The Twilight Zone there’s more to it than just some hucksters selling happiness in exchange for bank account numbers, but Vince is sadly lacking that knowledge and naturally tells them to get off his yard.  They agree to leave but offer him a free gift, and since Vince is not one to pass up such a sweet bargain, he takes it and rushes back inside.  The gift turns out to be a DVD with his name printed on it which he decides to put in on a lark and some dude with a bad haircut (Ken Tremblett) and even worse production values reminds Vince of how much his life sucks and how his girlfriend left him, but that there’s hope if he just opens himself up to it.

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“Be your better you, with the power of Shrim!”     “Huh.  Kinda sounds like Shrimp.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Pokémon Detective Pikachu

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Pokémon Detective Pikachu and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros. Pictures, Toho, and The Pokémon Company

Directed by Rob Letterman

I know you all are just on PINS AND NEEDLES waiting to find out if this movie is good… unless you’ve already seen it. Seriously, I need to get somewhere that’ll show these things like two days before release date because APPARENTLY EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD GETS TO DO THAT! Sigh… anyway, so Pokémon is no doubt one of the cornerstones of nineties nostalgia which means that we are officially getting too old, but it’s also one of those franchises that has remained popular in all that time, unlike say Transformers which always had a fan-base but one that certainly waned past the eighties. Because of that this has a chance to appeal to not just the adults in the audience who grew up on Red and Blue, but also the kids who enjoyed whatever the heck those Pokémon Mystery Dungeon things were, and not only that but probably the first video game movie to really capture the spirit of the material outside the rather awesome Resident Evil movies. And the DOOM movie; don’t at me! Is this the greatest movie of all time that will span the generational divide and bring us all together in such turbulent times, or perhaps are we a bit TOO overexcited about seeing the cuddly creatures on the big screen? Let’s find out!!

Tim Goodman (Justice Smith) is basically the opposite of your average man child in the Pokémon universe. Instead of going out and exploring the world at the age of ten, he went to school and got a real job at an insurance company. I mean say what you will about getting a nine to five, at least you don’t have to survive off fight money and live in a tent! Yes, Tim is happy with his boring life which is free of Pokémon for… reasons, but then his idyllic life in a small town comes crashing down when he gets a letter in the mail informing him that his father died in a mysterious car crash. Not only that, he was a cop in Ryme City which is unique for letting Pokémon just walk around instead of being confined to balls, and I THINK it was founded by Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy) who owns Clifford Enterprises which is a… company that does business stuff I guess. Anyway, Tim gets to town, goes to his father’s apartment who rather strangely has a children’s bedroom set up for his twenty-one year old son who hasn’t visited in YEARS, and he tries to figure out the fastest way to deal with all this before he goes back to his normal life. Sadly things are not about to go his way as a rouge Pikachu with amnesia in a Stantler stalker cap (Ryan Reynolds) has broken into his place and is certain that his father is still alive. With much hesitation and after one terrifying Pokémon attack, Tim finally agrees to help Pikachu solve whatever mystery is underway; enlisting the help of investigative journalist slash intern Lucy (Kathryn Newton) and her awesome Psyduck! Will Tim discover the truth behind his father’s disappearance and will he reunite with him once again? Where did this talking Pikachu come from, and what connection does he have to all of this? Is this gonna be the very best that no movie ever was, or should you be… preparing for trouble!?

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“A talking Meowth? That is SO 1999.” “Well at least more than one person can hear him.” “BUT DOES HE HAVE A HAT!?”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Upgrade)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Joe Chappelle

We’re back with another episode of Whitaker Explains it All, though at least in this case he doesn’t do it all that well.  I’ll be honest with you right up front.  This isn’t a particularly good episode and is probably the kind of safe, carbon copy, mindless filler that you were probably expecting when you first heard they remade The Twilight Zone during the Bush administration.  BUT, at least we can try to get a few cheap laughs out of it!  Let’s get started!!

The episode begins with Annie (Susanna Thompson) and her family moving into their dream home which will hopefully be a fresh start for all of them.  Then again, her two kids are teenager who fight constantly so it’s unlikely that a change of scenery is gonna do much about that, and their dog Czonka pees on the floor almost immediately so I guess that New House Smell is already out the window.  Sigh… you know, it’s frustrating when everyone around you is complaining or not being careful with their living spaces… it’s almost as if it’d be nice if they were to… change?  Uh oh!  Well SOMETHING certainly heard that little wish, and not an hour after they move into their new house her dog has been replaced with an entirely different breed that’s much less prone to pee unless it’s in the backyard.  You just HAD to have very reasonable complaints, didn’t you? Just HAD to say that you didn’t like pee stains everywhere!  LOOK AT WHAT TERROR YOU HAVE WROUGHT!!

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“This is not my beautiful house!  This is not my beautiful dog!  How did I get here!?”     “Oh!  I know the answer!  It starts with a T and ends in Zone!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Azoth the Avenger Is a Friend of Mine)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Brad Turner

We’re back with another episode of the Old New Twilight Zone!  Yes, before Jordan Peele reimagined the series for the modern age, THIS was the most up to date version; and yet it still manages to feel much more dated than the one from the fifties.  Go figure.  Anyway!  We’ve got an odd one today which is certainly saying something considering the last few episodes has been glories bits of sci-fi cheese, but you’ll see what I’m talking about soon enough!  Let’s get started!!

The episode begins with a setup we’ve seen in many movies that Dan Olson has a strong fascination with; namely a young kid dealing with a bad situation through childlike whimsy and a severely uneven tone.  More specifically, Craig (Rory Culkin) is a young boy who has a comically abusive father (Peter LaCroix) and in order to escape and deal with his trauma, he reads Conan knock offs and paints figurines.  Said Conan knock off is the titular Azoth who would be a MUCH better dad than the one Craig is stuck with, but it’s not like he’s gonna leap off of the pages and be his best friend, right!?  What do you think, Forest Whitaker?

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“Get a job, nerd!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (The Pool Guy)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Paul Shapiro and Brad Turner

We’re back with another episode of The Twilight Zone, and not the one you were searching for on Google!  While the last episode seemed to have been ripping off or was heavily inspired by a recently released movie, this one has a bit of an older influence to it at first glance; bringing to mind the cyber punk oddities of the early to mid-nineties more than anything else.  Sure, it doesn’t have the budget of Johnny Mnemonic or The Lawnmower Man (the latter almost certainly being an influence down to the title of the episode), but can they still capture the essence of that weird and stretch of sci-fi film making into a solid twenty minute fable? Let’s find out!!

Ritchie (Lou Diamond Phillips; no seriously) is some dude who cleans pools for a living which is kind of sad considering said living has been going on for two decades now, but then again in a just economic system he’d be making a living wage instead of merely scraping by so I guess the sad part is once again a product of Capitalism.  Sadly that’s not the focus of the episode, but things do get off to a strange start as Some GuyTM straight out of a Hitchcock movie starts chatting him up about how awesome it is being a pool guy.  Getting out in the sun, visiting awesome houses, banging the lonely housewives!  Seems like an odd thing to start with when “hi” and “my name is so and so, what’s yours?” is right there on the table, but maybe he’s going somewhere with this!

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“These chicks are just WAITING for you to make a move!”     “Yeah… I’m trying to balance the Ph here…”     “Dude, you gotta start worrying about your Dh!!”     “Is that…?  You know what; I choose not to get it.”

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