Ghosts on the Loose. William Beaudine. 1943.

Some movies you see for kinda pedantic reasons? This is the final unseen DVD of a seven DVD box set, so if I see this I can pack the box set away. See, eh? S See? You mug!

This is a B-movie starring The East Side Kids. These movies were churned out on an assembly line and whatever enjoyment you get from these depend of how amusing you find it to watch a bunch of mooks running around causing catastrophes.

So I had very low expectations going in, and this one put all my expectations to shame. I mean, the opposite of shame. Pride? Anyway, this movie is weak weak stuff. It’s not completely charmless, though, but eminently missable.

I bailed after half an hour.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Bob Persichetti. 2018.

Wowzers. I did not expect this movie to be this good. It’s an animated movie, but aren’t all super-hero movies, really?

It’s fascinating how they were able to dial up the “cartoon” level on the animation here and make it possible to do all kinds of comic-book effects without things turning cheesy. (Viz. the Batman TV series from the 60s.) But these cartoons are real expressive, so you get the best of both worlds, and I’ve never seen that before. It’s a triumph of animation.

And it’s pretty funny and moves along at an insane pace. Is this how all super-hero movies should have been done?

There’s a lot to like here. I love how they’ve used Bill Sienkiewicz’ design for Kingpin, for instance. It’s not something that could work in a live-action movie, but it makes perfect sense here.

It’s just about a perfect super-hero movie. Like all of them, it’s a bit too long, but less than most.

Venom. Ruben Fleischer. 2018.

This movie is kinda famous for being critically panned but well-liked by the audience, so I was curies as to what this was going to be like.

This is, of course, a spin-off of Spider-Man, so it’s a Marvel super-hero movie not done by Disney, which is a rare thing these days.

I’m at the 15 minute mark as I’m typing this, and I’m bored silly. The actors are basically a bunch of Hawkeyes, and the cinematography is… there…, the editing makes every take slightly too long, and the plot is super-tedious. The protagonist works as a journalist who is, of course, fired by his boss for being too good at his job, and it’s all OH WHY.

Perhaps it’ll get better once the symbiote shows up.

OK, half hour in, and still nothing entertaining has happened. It’s just like bad, on a scene-by-scene and a line-by-line basis.

Hardy is trying his best at making this funnier, by being over-the top and all nervous and stuff, but the rest of the cast gives him nothing to work with.

It does pick up once the symbiote symbiotes with Hardy. There’s some fun action scenes and they’ve got a Not Very Odd Couple schtick going between the symbiote and Our Hero. The storyline seems oddly abrupt once it gets going: Perhaps it had been better if they’d cut the first 45 minutes and then expanded the fight scene part of the movie with 15 minutes.

It’s disappointing that they’ve gone for the cheap CGI solution of doing the action scenes in the dark so you can’t see whether the CGI Venom is any good or not. Yes, we all understand why fight scenes take place in the dark: It’s because it’s cheaper.