The Housemaid (2025)
THE HOUSEMAID is a 2025 thriller from director Paul Feig, the guy who did BRIDESMAIDS, THE HEAT and SPY, but remember he also did A SIMPLE FAVOR. This is in that vein: twisty, a little sexy, a little trashy, all in good fun. A romp.
Sydney Sweeney (THE MARTIAL ARTS KID) stars as Millie Calloway, who applies for a job as live-in maid for rich lady Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried, FIRST REFORMED) in her big ol’ gated estate. Millie lies about her experience, pretends to be overqualified, but narrates to us that she doesn’t know why she even applied, because a background check will reveal she’s a felon on parole. Wrong! She gets the job. Sydney Sweeney is… THE HOUSEMAID.
One red flag about the job is that on day one Nina excitedly welcomes her, saying “It’s gonna be fun, Millie!,” but gives zero explanation for why the house looks completely trashed, like there was a huge party and not one single thing was picked up afterwards. Millie cleans and cooks and gets a triangular attic room that’s decidedly not as nice as any other room in the entire house, but maybe she means it when she politely says “It’s perfect,” because it’s a step up for her. By the way, is it weird that the window doesn’t open and the door only locks from the outside and she has to ask a couple times before she gets the key for it? Eh, it’s probly nothing. Nina is really nice at first and we assume her little girl Cece (Indiana Elle) will warm up to Millie eventually. For now she just pouts and lectures her about fresh-from-the-dishwasher glasses being too dirty. (read the rest of this shit…)
Oscar 2026 preview
Here’s my quick Oscar preview, just because I wanted a place for everyone to share their hopes or predictions and then their thoughts after the show, if they want to.
This year I did manage to see everything in the major categories (picture, director, writing, acting) and reviewed most of them. It’s an exciting year because I loved some of them, didn’t hate any of them, there is some suspense about many of the categories, and some of my favorites seem to be frontrunners. On the other hand there wasn’t that magic of the movie I only watched for homework purposes and ended up really liking. I pretty much meant to see all of them anyway. The only real victory was that I was wise enough to put off watching WICKED: FOR GOOD even though everybody said it would be nominated. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Salute of the Jugger (a.k.a. The Blood of Heroes)
Last time I saw THE SALUTE OF THE JUGGER it was called THE BLOOD OF HEROES. That only version available in the U.S. was about ten minutes shorter, but still kinda legendary as a slept-on gem by some of us. That version was recently put in its proper place as bonus material for the original 104 minute Australian version on a 4K/blu-ray combo from Umbrella Entertainment.
It’s written and directed by David Webb Peoples, his only time directing a feature, but he’d written BLADE RUNNER and went on to write UNFORGIVEN, 12 MONKEYS and SOLDIER. Not a bad run. This one has a bit of the sci-fi and a bit of the western, because its heroes (blood and all) are travelers in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But mostly it’s a sports movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Song Sung Blue (2025)
SONG SUNG BLUE (2025) is a feel good (but also sad) movie about the power of music, based on a 2008 documentary I hadn’t heard of about a Neil Diamond tribute band. There is a family member not mentioned in the movie who says it’s “all lies,” but from what I’ve read the basic outline stays reasonably close to the true events, and that leads to an unusual structure. For a while it hews pretty closely to a familiar underdog musician dramedy formula. Then life, even in its streamlined-for-narrative-purposes form, throws in some curveballs that make the story seem pretty crazy.
I wanted to watch it because it’s written and directed by Craig Brewer, and its first chunk is like a family friendly version of some of what made his breakthrough HUSTLE & FLOW so appealing – this group of regular nobodies coming together and trying to achieve their musical dreams, which are small time by movie standards but huge in their lives and in their hearts. Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman, VAN HELSING) is a singer and guitar player who performs under the name Lightning, wears a lightning bolt insignia on his jacket and medallion, likens it to being a super hero, but mostly he’s just a regular Clark Kent working as a mechanic, going to meetings, trying not to be a terrible father to his teenage daughter Angelina (singer-songwriter King Princess). (read the rest of this shit…)
Manborg
As a fan of writer/director Steven Kostanski’s last three movies, PSYCHO GOREMAN, FRANKIE FREAKO and DEATHSTALKER, I decided it was time to check out one of his older works. MANBORG is his first feature, released in 2011. He had already done several shorts (best title: Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove) while working in the makeup departments of larger productions including CAPOTE and TAMARA.
I would say MANBORG is a tongue-in-cheek movie played with a slightly straighter face than the other three Kostanskis I’ve seen, or at least with fewer straight up jokes. So it’s maybe his purest example of what I think of as a movie in quotes – a feature film that plays more like it’s saying “wouldn’t it be funny if there was a movie like this?” than like it actually is that movie. To enjoy it is to play along and pretend that it is. (And I did enjoy it.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Protector
Last week when I went to see BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS: WIND RISES IN THE DESERT I saw some exciting trailers, including one for a kidnapped daughter action vehicle starring the great Milla Jovovich (THE THREE MUSKETEERS). And it was coming out this week. January came late this year, fellas! I hope this doesn’t mean Milla wants to abdicate her crown as the queen of digital FX horror/fantasy action movie bullshit (RESIDENT EVIL, ULTRAVIOLET, HELLBOY 2019, MONSTER HUNTER, IN THE LOST LANDS, etc.), but I was excited to see her in a straight ahead TAKEN type deal. So you bet I was at the 12:10 pm Friday matinee of PROTECTOR.
The director is Adrian Grünberg (GET THE GRINGO). Fortunately it doesn’t have all the problems of his movie RAMBO: LAST BLOOD, but it has a similar brain-fried-by-Facebook world view. An even-more-heavy-handed-than-the-rest-of-the-movie intro tells us that while American soldiers were being sent overseas a war was being fought at home against human trafficking. I’m not sure who or what that refers to though because our story is about one of the people who is overseas who will later begin a one-woman war against said criminal activity. (read the rest of this shit…)
Kick or Die
There is a movie that was released by American International Pictures in 1987 that’s still only available on VHS, and the name of the movie is KICK OR DIE. If you need any more information than that, please enjoy this review.
KICK OR DIE is a particular type of ‘80s b-movie that I have a soft spot for because it’s very serious but has a deranged view of human behavior, and every once in a while the drum machine and the synthesizers kick in and people start fighting. It’s far from the best of this sort, but it’s novel because it lumps together a couple different popular movie types of the era that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to overlap: 1) night stalker whodunit 2) karate movie 3) lady trying to make it as a singer.
That first one might understandably keep some people from watching it. A serial rapist has been attacking women on a college campus. The scenes of the attacks are over quick, but obviously unpleasant to sit through. In the daylight the campus is swarmed with media and protesters as the board of directors or whatever meet about what to do. The football coach says “I say we hire a karate expert to come and teach the girls how to kick his god damn balls in!” (read the rest of this shit…)
Trancers II: The Return of Jack Deth
TRANCERS II: THE RETURN OF JACK DETH is a DTV sequel that came out in 1991, six years after the original TRANCERS, and four years after the at-that-time-unreleased anthology short TRANCERS: CITY OF LOST ANGELS. The cop from the future was now starting to be a relic of the past, like he’d always dreamed.
A new screenwriter, Jackson Barr (BODY CHEMISTRY, SUBSPECIES, ROBOT WARS, MANDROID) joins director Charles Band (PARASITE), but otherwise everybody is back. Tim Thomerson (between an episode of The Flash and an episode of Baywatch) is Jack Deth, the time traveling future cop now well established as an old-timey private eye in 1991 Los Angeles. Despite the subtitle he’s not returning from anywhere, he’s just sticking around in the same place. (And he beat BATMAN RETURNS to it by a year.) He’s married to Lena (Helen Hunt, a year before starting Mad About You) and they live in a mansion with Hap Ashby (Biff Manard, DESERT KICKBOXER), the former MLB player they saved from homelessness. In the intervening years Hap “made a pile of money” on “commodities speculation” and now collects firetrucks (?!).
The biggest tension in Jack and Lena’s relationship is that Lena wants them to buy their own house to settle down and have a kid in. Gone are her punk rock days. She wears bland ‘90s jeans and has regular-colored hair. She looks like Helen Hunt, actually. (read the rest of this shit…)
Blades of the Guardians
BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS is the new movie that’s gonna make me even more confused when I’m trying to remember which OF THE GUARDIANS movie is the owl one and which is the Jack Frost/Easter Bunny one. But I’m willing to face that challenge in exchange for a new movie directed by the now 80-year-old legend of martial arts choreography Yuen Woo-ping. (Holy shit, MASTER Z: THE IP MAN LEGACY was almost 8 years ago?)
(Note: the full on screen title is BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS: WIND RISES IN THE DESERT. Man, I love movies!)
Wu Jing (LEGENDARY ASSASSIN, KILL ZONE 2, WOLF WARRIOR 2) stars as Dao Ma, a bounty hunter and bodyguard for hire who’s also the second most wanted fugitive in the empire. I actually didn’t recognize him for a second because he has long hair and looks a little older and smaller than I think of him as. In a good way, though. He kinda looks like Vampire Hunter D with his all black outfit and wide brimmed hat. He travels with his young nephew Xiao Qi, but it’s not like LONE WOLF AND CUB because he tries to cover the kid’s eyes when there’s violence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Your Monster
YOUR MONSTER is a 2024 romantic comedy with a fantastical genre concept. Laura (Melissa Barrera, ABIGAIL) is a theater actor who gets dumped by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan, CIVIL WAR) while she’s in the hospital getting cancer treatments. She lived with him, so when she gets discharged she goes to stay at her wealthy but absent mother’s house to try to put herself back together. But she doesn’t really get around to that. She mostly eats pies that her mom sends and cries so much that she starts getting regular Kleenex shipments from Amazon.
Then one day she’s startled by a monster (Tommy Dewey, STEP UP REVOLUTION) in the closet. He’s not that fancy of a monster, just kinda like Ron Perlman’s Beast on Beauty and the Beast – gnarly brow, lion-like nose, long hair and beard, hairy hands. He is a monster, but he wears t-shirts and just talks like a dude. When she wakes up from fainting he’s kinda offended she doesn’t remember him. He reminds her she saw him under her bed when she was a kid. And he chased off some dork who tried to kiss her and tried to shame her for not wanting to. I think she remembers.
Anyway, he says the house is his now and she needs to get the fuck out. She cries for a while, so he gives her two weeks. (read the rest of this shit…)
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