B_D

I'm not the type of person to walk out of a movie - in fact, I've never done it - but Adventureland made it a challenge to stay in the theater in a way that few films do.

Let me preface this by saying that I hadn't seen any previews or heard much about Adventureland, so I wasn't expecting a Superbad-esquire romp like many other reviewers apparently did. I didn't know whether I was going for a comedy, a drama, a coming-of-age flick, or what. I had an open mind, willing to accept whatever I saw, and yet I was incredibly disappointed and confused by the end of it.

Adventureland suffers from having an incredibly cliché plot, the standard awkward boy meets troubled girl fare that we've all seen hundreds of times before. From early on in the movie, I was able to figure out exactly where it was going, and at no point was I thrown for a loop. Everything proceeds according to genre conventions. There is nothing new or unexpected here. Additionally, there is a strange fatalistic tone that pervades the movie that manages to be overly serious and depressing without being at all deep.

None of the main characters are in any way likable or believable. A large portion of the plot revolves around the difficulty that Jesse Eisenberg's character (James) has expressing his affection for Kristen Stewart's character (Em) and attempting to make the relationship work. I guess this was supposed to be a meaningful story about two misunderstood college kids trying to reach out to each other and looking for love in all the wrong place, blah blah blah. Instead, James comes off as a boring, awkward guy who becomes infatuated with the first girl who gives him any attention; Em never rises above our first impression of her as a cookie-cutter troubled teen who keeps James around for his good weed connection. Because of this, I couldn't bring myself to care about what happened to either of them.

Too much of this movie seems to be an attempt by the forty-something director Greg Mottola to prove that he can still seem cool to today's youth. The characters are constantly smoking weed (okay, we get it, they're cool, introspective kids!) and dropping stereotypical lines to bring attention to it: "This is some GREAT WEED James" or "Man I am SO HIGH." For some reason this is set in the 1980s, I guess for some sort of faux-cool retro feeling, or maybe just so people can namedrop Lou Reed every ten seconds. Unfortunately, the setting was terribly executed: half of the characters are wearing trendy American Apparel fashion, and Yo La Tengo's recognizably modern score is jarring when juxtaposed with famous 80's tunes.

Overall, Adventureland fails on almost every level. The comedy? Terrible. The drama? Played out. The characters? Boring. The acting? Meh. The setting? Poorly executed. Avoid this movie, I don't know how it is getting such good reviews.

My friend and I picked up Killer Rats from the bargain bin in the hopes that it would be one of my favorite kind of movies: the so-bad-that-it's-good trash fest. Unfortunately, Killer Rats entirely fails to deliver. It's bad, but not bad enough to laugh at, and ends up coming off as just boring.

Let's start with what the movie does right. The acting, sets, and special effects in Killer Rats are surprisingly good for a movie of its caliber. Don't get me wrong, they're all pretty lame, but they're a few steps up from rock bottom. This is about the best compliment I could give the movie. Ironically, this makes the movie less entertaining; the production values never quite reach the "laughably bad" level - instead they hover somewhere between "mediocre" and "lame."

Killer Rats does a whole lot of things wrong. The biggest problem is that it's just really boring. Every time it looks like a plot is about to develop, it stalls out. The first 75 minutes of the movie are dull and plodding, and the movie never really manages to go anywhere. It's pretty much just a bunch of mundane incidents in a rehab facility with a few halfway-decent death scenes thrown in for good measure. There is never any interesting/funny/witty dialogue. The final 15 minutes get a little more interesting, but the final fight is still pretty boring.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what Ron Perlman is doing in Killer Rats. I bought this movie in large part because he's in it, but the script gives him NOTHING to work with. He plays an uninteresting, buttoned-down doctor, the sort that a movie with an even lower budget might have given to a random geriatric actor. I kept expecting him to relive some old war memories or become a badass, but he never did. At one point it looks like there is some tension developing in his character, but then it goes nowhere. If you see this movie hoping to get some cheesy-yet-satisfying Ron Perlman action, you WILL be disappointed.

The Bottom Line: Killer Rats is not anywhere near good enough to stand on its own merits, and never gets truly bad enough for the so-bad-that-it's-good vibe. Boring, not worth seeing.

I went into the theater not knowing what to expect, not having seen the trailer, and two hours later I felt I had seen a decent movie, quite funny at times, but I couldn't figure out what everyone was making such a big deal about. Compared to a lot of what passes for comedy in the cinema these days, Knocked Up is great, but it's hardly the "instant classic" that I've seen it called in many professional and IMDb reviews. It's certainly worth seeing, but maybe at a discount matinée instead of a full-price evening show.

Much of what is wrong with Knocked Up is simply an over-reliance on Seth Rogen to deliver the laughs. To be sure, Rogen is a funny guy - he handled the jump from second-tier supporting actor (a la 40 Year Old Virgin) to leading man surprisingly well, appearing confident and charismatic. The problem is that as the film goes on, he just doesn't get a whole lot to work with from his supporting cast. Rogen doesn't have enough in him at this point to carry an entire film on his shoulders, but often he is forced into that role, providing the only humor in many scenes (especially in the second half of the movie). At times it almost seems as if Rogen has landed in the wrong film, delivering clever quips and laughs while the barely-likable characters around him remain too serious. Paul Rudd manages to break this up, taking some of the burden off Rogen, but Katherine Heigl and Leslie Mann's unfunny and quasi-sympathetic characters drag them down.

To be sure, the first half of Knocked Up is great, but by the second half the script becomes mired in slow, cliché drama. Marital dissatisfaction and the loss of youth are interesting themes to explore, but in doing so, Knocked Up fails to establish a consistent tone. As the film trudges past the 90-minute mark, it is sometimes humorous, sometimes dour, often clichéd, all resulting in an awkward mix of styles.

Overall, Knocked Up was a good effort, but a little more editing of the script would have helped a lot. I don't mind long movies at all, but 20 minutes could have been trimmed from this film to good effect.

Alien Apocalypse falls into that deadly and dull middle ground between those films that take themselves seriously and those that do not. It's clear from the acting, plot (or lack thereof), special effects, and so on that it's not a serious movie, but it never lets loose and embraces its cheesiness. Instead, it falls somewhere in the middle and just looks poorly executed and lame.

Unfortunately, Bruce Campbell fails to save the movie. I'm a big fan of his, but he wasn't given anything to work with in terms of a script. His humor and charm don't come through as much as they should; the part might as well have been played by any other Sci-Fi Channel stalwart, like Antonio Sabato Jr.

Basically, I'd only recommend this to die hard Bruce Campbell fans who feel the need to see every one of his movies, even ones that (like Alien Apocalypse) aren't very entertaining.

There is really no reason to see this movie. I picked it up online for about 5 bucks and decided to watch it with some friends; we're into watching the sort of horrible movie that's pathetically entertaining. Sadly for us, and anyone who should have the misfortune to see this junk, Alien 51 is just bad. I want to stress the fact that it's not entertainingly bad, because often when I see a movie reviewed here as "awful" or "the worst movie ever," I'll get stoked and go rent it, hoping to be able to laugh at it. Alien 51 has very little going for it.

The plot revolves around a creature which has escaped from Area 51 and is on the loose in the desert. It might not actually be an alien, but the back story is never fully explained, so I don't know. Cleo, a woman who played some part in the creation of the creature, is brought in to deal with it. She runs into trouble when a traveling freak show has its own designs on the monster. Various scenes of gore ensue.

The only good thing about Alien 51 is that the music was actually pretty good. It was poorly arranged, often drowning out the actors or totally inappropriate for the mood of the scene, but the tunes themselves were decent. Everything else was trash. The camera-work is amateurish at best and fails to follow some basic tenets of photography (like not shooting directly into a light source). The editing is confusing. The acting is terrible, but the actors weren't given much to work with - the script is an abomination. Many of the characters are downright annoying. To top it all off, the movie has an ending that is completely nonsensical and entirely unsatisfying. I won't ruin it for you, but if I did, you wouldn't be missing much.

The bottom line: don't see this. Alien 51 is dull, poorly done, and not entertaining.

Surprisingly enough, there are actually some decent performances given in "Spiders 2," and the character development in the first half or so isn't too shabby. If the pace during this time had been a little faster, the plot a little less predictable, it could have been pretty entertaining.

Unfortunately, the movie changes from a decent mystery/thriller flick to a gore-fest all too quickly when the spiders finally get loose. The interesting characters (most notably the captain and the wife) take a back seat to sub-par special effects and the overacting doctor as the film loses any semblance of entertainment value.

The bottom line: watch it if you're in a mood for a movie a notch above the usual Sci-Fi Channel fare, but don't spend money on it.

I rented this today assuming it would fall into the "so bad that it's good" category (a personal favorite of mine). After having watched it, I can tell you that it doesn't fall anywhere near it; Deadly Species is just bad.

After laughing at the amateurish acting gets old, the movie loses what little bit of entertainment value it may have once held. The plodding pace, predictable twists, and lack of anything in particular happening most of the time will leave you yawning as you wait for Deadly Species to finally, mercifully end. After a lame pseudo-cliffhanger finale which seems tacked on at the last moment, you'll scarcely believe that it was a mere 88 minutes.

The bottom line is that whether you're watching this because you want to see something worthwhile or whether you're looking for some B-grade trash to have a good laugh at, Deadly Species will disappoint.