This scroll continues for 90 seconds while a guy reads it out loud (presumably for people who can’t read).

Oooh, production value!

I’m not sure how I came to buy this bluray — perhaps it just popped up on a list of “New Sci-Fi In 2K” or something? It’s from the mid-90s, and I’ve never heard of it before.

Hey… this doesn’t look bad. It’s not upscaled VHS or anything…

But that makeup job was not done with high resolution in mind, so was this straight to video thing?

Lemme pause while I google.

Nope:

It premiered at the 1995 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 1995. It was released in the United States on January 26, 1996, by Columbia Pictures.

[…]

The film earned about $5.7 million in the United States and Canada, on a $20 million budget. It was moderately popular in France, Japan, and the Netherlands. Worldwide box office was approximately $7 million.

OK, so that’s why I haven’t heard of it — it was a massive flop (but on a decent budget).

This looks pretty good, actually.

OK, that’s bad green-screen.

Gnarly!

Subtle!

Hey! It’s Robocop!

That guy looks familiar!

Must have seen him in Caroline in the City, I guess?

That’s some nice source code.

This is a very odd movie. They’ve basically got all the plot for a standard corporate-soldiers-on-an-alien-planet-that-the-company-might-be-trying-to-kill-off movie — and that’s a good plot, which is why it’s used so much — but it’s got no rhythm. The patter between the action stuff just sounds off? It’s like they haven’t actually heard any Humans talk before when they wrote the lines?

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

It’s a relief to know that they still have plenty of hair gel in the future.

Nice tats.

It’s a Buenos Aires standoff!

OK, this movie is kinda boring, even if it has a 29% tomatometer.

Sponge bath time!

This film was originally in 1.85:1, but for this bluray transfer they cut it down to 1.77:1, so we’re missing bits to the left and right. Whenever I put on a bluray and it’s 16:9 I immediately go NOOO HOW DID THEY CUT THIS TIME, because no real movies are 16:9. (Well, some Netflix movies are, but even there it’s not the norm.)

I’m still kinda sure that the twist I was expecting ever since they started talking about various types of robots is still going to happen, but I guess they’re saving it for the very last scene?

Nice.

(And the twist I was expecting didn’t happen. Kudos.)

But it’s still a really boring movie, and it really seems like a movie where they didn’t really have a real script, so it’s kinda choppy.

Watching the documentary now… Robocop wanted to get involved with doing rewrites, and the director is saying that Weller is so smart etc, but you can see his frustrations.

Screamers. Christian Duguay. 1995. ⚁

Hey! Isn’t that the guy who played Bob Hope’s man in Nothing But the Truth? Hm… Yes it is! It’s Willie Best! Well, that movie was from 1941, and this is from 1940, and both are from Paramount, so perhaps he wasn’t so much specialising in playing Bob Hope manservants as being on a contract.

He did 124 films:

Mitchell Leisen, who directed Willie Best in Suddenly It’s Spring, described him as “the most natural actor I’ve ever seen.” Comedian Bob Hope similarly acclaimed him as “the best actor I know”, while the two were working together in 1940 on The Ghost Breakers.

Oh, that Bob Hope. He’s so punny.

State of the art special effects.

Hope and Best make a good comedy pairing. The get the repartee going — they’re playing very similar characters.

Heh. Just like in Nothing But the Truth, the Willie Best character saves the day.

OOPS SPOILERS

This is so likeable — it’s such an enjoyable film. It zips along, never letting the fun stuff grow stale, with good performances and very Studio cinematography etc. However, there could have been more jokes? And better jokes? I smiled the entire time I watched this, but I didn’t laugh out loud once. So I guess I should go with ⚃, but let’s do this instead:

The Ghost Breakers. George Marshall. 1940. ⚄

Wow. They start this off with six minutes of leaden exposition, all of which seems totally superfluous: They’re saying there’s a McGuffin and a hero waiting.

Yee-haw

Man, that was a bad CGI fight scene. It was like nothing had any mass. Even if they used the old “have no lighting” trick to have less visible things to animate, it still looked bad.

They’re the Justice Society? Is this Earth-2, then? Perhaps that was just in the olden dayes…

I’m not hating this. I mean, as super-hero movies go, I’ve seen a lot worse.

Sad Rock.

It’s very on the nose.

But I guess Black Adam is gonna fight Justice Society for a bit and then become buddies? What does that do to global stability?

This is pretty entertaining. It’s a kinda confused movie — it doesn’t seem to have much rhythm or throughline, but it’s occasionally charming. And there was one scene that had me laughing out loud, which is more than most super-hero movies.

And the CGI really isn’t that bad. The fight scenes are 97% CGI, which makes them boring to look at (who wants to watch a video game run through?), but they look better than Marvel CGI, for instance.

This was like a ⚂ until the last third, and then things become crushingly boring. There were kinda sorta slightly interesting bits — nothing big or clevery but at least something — and then the last third is just one big, mostly humourless fight scene.

So let’s go with:

Black Adam. Jaume Collet-Serra. 2022. ⚁