Reviews

Even if you didn't know the story of this movie's hellish development, you can FEEL the trouble under the surface of this thing. The animation budget's a little weird, they got Eartha Kitt and don't even have her sing, and the vibe of the story is kind of un-Disney. Extremely "who cares, we're out of time, just put something in theaters."

Being so fast and loose gives Emperor's New Groove a nimble quality that really helps sell the tremendous amount of slapstick that carries almost all of the humor. It loves to blindside you with just the absolute dumbest gags.

My favorite being Patrick Warburton as Kronk, who is conversing with the Angel and Devil on his shoulders. Kronk is unsure of the Devil's evil suggestions, but the Angel looks down, sees the Devil doing one handed push-ups, and admiring his strength goes "No no, he's got a point" in that tone only Patrick Warburton can do.

Nothing short of a small miracle and the sort of accident you can't create on purpose.

It's always kind of hard for me with movies like this. These legendary movies I've heard about basically for my entire life, multiple decades, about being somebody's favorite. They turn into monoliths that the real thing can never match up to. I have a long list of classic movies it took me ages to warm up to for this very reason.

This...

I was charmed by how simple and smarmy it is. The jokes about how homoerotic Iceman and Maverick are is old hat by now, but it borderlines on feeling intentional for how much its played up. It's hard to believe this movie could be taken seriously, but it's excellent popcorn material regardless. Fun beats serious any day.

But let's get real: what Top Gun does have is a lot of very cool footage of jets doing cool jet stuff, a lot of which was shot from inside the cockpit of a real jet. And it's something you only really get in a movie with Top Gun in the title. This movie is from 1986 and there are shots in this thing that still look incredible; like nothing I've ever seen before.

And it's a great movie to make loud. Lots of roaring jet engines, growling motorcycles, and super cheesy 1980's rock.

Textbook blockbuster material.

I've always felt kind of bad about this movie's reputation. It's something I grew up with, though I haven't seen it in a good 20 years -- which leads to that interesting feeling where a part of my brain still has all of the best lines memorized but those memories don't unlock until the moment the character is saying the line.

Okay, sure, yes: it's a textbook case of "Who is this for?" Howard the Duck flips back and forth between kid-friendly humor and more adult situations so hard you're likely to get whiplash. Like in the intro, where Beverly is going through Howard's wallet and finds a credit card for "Bloomingducks" (instead of Bloomingdales) but then also finds that Howard keeps a spare condom tucked away just in case. You just have to get used to its blend of silly and mature humor.

My real issue is that despite being ten minutes shy of two hours, it feels fairly breakneck in its pace. And nothing ever has a chance to develop enough for any of it to make sense. Inside of ten minutes, Howard meets Beverly, his companion for the rest of the movie, and she instantly believes he's an alien from outerspace. No freak out, no convincing, they are just instantly friends and it's the most casual thing in the world for both of them.

I have a feeling Beverly is supposed to be a little harder edge than the movie lets on; her band is pretty punk, they play sets in dive bars in the bad parts of town, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line from Tim Robbins about sex suggests she might be a little easy. But they hired Lea Thompson to play Beverly, who is far too cute and sweet to have the right amount of anything-goes bite the role needed.

It also just doesn't stay focused. There's a long diversion where we learn about Howard's home life, his job, his real talents, and we see him trying to get a job here on Earth while also helping Beverly with her problems. It eats up a good 30 minutes of the movie and doesn't really need to be there. If the point was to show that Howard is "just like us" then there should be far more economical ways to do that while making more space for what really matters (the core story of figuring out why Howard is on earth and how to get him home).

So it's kind of a mess. But maybe this is just childhood nostalgia talking, but it's a mess that I still really like. The last act with the Dark Overlord is still primo weird fun and Jeffrey Jones plays it as wild as he possibly can. I also think the special effects in the last third still look pretty good, in that "unreal reality" sort of way. This was probably the dawn of the last great era for stop motion creatures before Jurassic Park came in and replaced it all with CGI.

Anyway, sorry not sorry, you will never shake my love of this weird, unusual movie.

When Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Weird Al Yankovic for his biopic, I was skeptical and confused, because to me, I don't see the resemblance. Shame on me for not really giving a guy called Weird Al the benefit of the doubt.

Especially considering... no, actually, yeah, now I see it.

My favorite part is probably how there's almost, like, a momentum of parody to this. It's obvious which parts are being exaggerated for comic effect, but it seems grounded enough that you can tell it's sort of based on real events. But it keeps getting more, and more, and more outrageous, until the movie just takes a flying cannon ball off the deep end -- and it rules. It imagines a world where Weird Al becomes the most famous rock star in the world, and somehow, despite getting completely wild, it still manages to get a few moments of something strangely heartfelt out of it while still remaining very funny.

What an inarguably weird movie. I was cheering over the credits. May he never lose his touch.

This is incredible. Nobody in this movie has a single thought in their heads.

Lina and Naga run across something with a Nuclear Waste "Nothing of honor is stored here" warning message and decide it's in their best interest to help dig it up.

This is nothing but an hour of non-stop collateral damage and people making the most absurd, chaotic decisions possible. Things rarely go according to plan and watching these dopes have to improvise is most of the fun.

And there are so many dopes this time around. Lina and Naga are joined by a whole squad across the hero-villain spectrum who are just as dumb as they are. Everybody gets at least one moment to show off what they can do.

It never takes itself seriously for even a moment. It's just simple, silly fun.

The most fun I had in this movie was Cage's Bogart impression.

I'm generally not sure what this movie is trying to convey. That criminals are bad? That they lie to themselves about doing bad things for good reasons? That, deep down, they're selfish? And make dumb mistakes? But not funny mistakes, just dumb ones.

All throughout I was thinking about the discourse around still being able to tell good stories about bad people and the entire time thinking "Yeah, but I don't think I enjoy this."

At the same time, it's not a movie that necessarily offended the senses. Cage and Dafoe are still Cage and Dafoe, you know? Good actors that turn in good work. But everything around that I was kind of bored and a little annoyed by.

Slayers is one of those things that's been on the list of "something I should probably watch one day" given it was one of those cornerstone 90's anime that all my friends love. The opportunity presented itself for me to watch this today, and I took it, making it the first piece of Slayers media I've ever seen.

And it's fun! But also kind of weird, in the way movies based on series tend to be, where the first half of this movie is basically just all these little vignettes where villains queue up one by one to get destroyed by Lina and Naga in a single hit. It's breezy and it's funny, don't get me wrong, but it does feel like it goes on a little too long for a bunch of dudes that are ultimately inconsequential.

When the movie finally starts moving on its central plot, it almost feels begrudgingly so. But at least it's well-established that Lina and Naga are basically unstoppable, so that when a credible threat emerges, it's that much more impressive.

The glue that holds all of this together is the animation, which is A+ prime 90's anime gold. The monsters, the spell effects, all of it is gorgeous, and there's something about the hand-painted cels on real film stock that makes it feel that much sharper and more colorful than a lot of modern digitally-produced anime. This era of anime at its peak in terms of look and style.

Also, count me among the many who are amazed that Naga, a pretty iconic Slayers character, only ever appears in these movies and is not from the actual Slayers series at all. Weird!

Man, I love a good time travel story.

Is this movie kind of dumb? Sure. Most JCVD movies are. And this is the rare science fiction JCVD movie. But like some of his movies, it's the fun kind of dumb.

My favorite part comes within the first act of the movie: starting in present day 1994, we jump forward ten years to 2004, and suddenly, we're in a world of self-driving cars covered in video screens, voice controlled computers, virtual reality pornography, and home automation. The idea that so much technology evolved so rapidly in just ten years seems outlandish, even by the standards of science fiction.

15 minutes later, our villain travels back to the year 1994, where he's privy to a deal with the microchip manufacturer that "revolutionized the computer sector." Every crazy bit technology we saw in 2004? It traces back to this one deal. Asked and answered.

Not all of it makes sense. A lot of it is sort of hammy. And if you watch enough JCVD movies, you really start to notice things that I think are probably contractually obligated, like making sure the camera focuses on his butt at some point.

But when it's fun, it's fun. And it's fun more often than not.

It's a bit action movie world salad -- a disgraced firefighter (JCVD) is the only man on the inside during the Stanley Cup where terrorists have kidnapped the Vice President. Now he's gotta overcome his fear of failure, save his kids, and kick every ass that gets in his way... while trying to be more than just "Die Hard on Ice."

Sudden Death is one of those movies that really knows what it is. It knows what tropes you want, it knows how borderline silly its premise it is, and it makes sure to goof around a little bit and play with your expectations. Including a notable moment where JCVD fights someone in a mascot costume. It's properly dumb stuff, and that's not even the dumbest thing in this movie.

Doesn't quite stick the landing with the ending, but the rest ended up being just silly and weird enough to be enjoyable.

This dude seems kind of insufferable. This movie is almost selfish in its level of navel-gazing. Our protagonist is "an artist" who is "captivated by the female form." And now, unfortunately, he's been dumped by his girlfriend, and thus falls into despair.

A lot of time is spent on how he's so smart, and special, and interesting, and how everybody around him is a stupid, egotistical meathead only interested in sex or money. But never him, oh no. He's the only one with his head on straight. He's the artist. His appreciation of women is purely artistic. He's our hero. He's such a saint that he has the ability to stop time so he can walk around the supermarket and freely undress women in order to sketch their naked forms.

I refuse to believe it's "artistic" when so much of the movie draws attention to how naughty a lot of this is. And, really, the "he's an artist!" angle barely even factors in -- it's mostly an element to bookend the film, but a lot of it has nothing to do with our protagonist's artistic skills, just who's kissing who.

But it does give us one of the most gratuitous, up-close shots of a woman's genitalia I've ever seen outside of actual pornography. Couch it in as much flowery dialog about artistic awakenings as you want, but where and how long the camera lingers tells us the director's true intentions, and it comes off as more than a little creepy.

It does not feel like a movie about art, it feels like a movie about a dude that sucks and won't stop wallowing in it, that also just happens to contain some art.

The only nice thing I can say about this is that it's been haunting my streaming recommendations for years and now I can finally get rid of it.

If you asked my Mom, this was one of her favorite movies, even though I never personally saw her watch it. We never watched it together, she never watched it on her own, and I hadn't seen it until now.

It's interesting to remember that, at one point, Bill Murray was known for playing "the loser." The fact that he looks greasy, and unshaven, and scummy was kind of the point. He was the screw up. I suppose it was Ghostbusters and Pete Venkman that kind of changed that -- Venkman's supposed to be a loser, but somehow comes off more as the coolest guy in the room. The trajectory of Murray's career was never the same.

This is a strange transitory period, then. Murray's John Winger is a 20-something screw-up trying to get his life together after losing his job, his car, his girlfriend, and his apartment all in the same day. He enlists in the Army hoping that will fix him, but all he does is screw that up, too.

Except that... somehow, despite never taking it seriously and pissing off everyone in his wake, Winger succeeds. He doesn't learn, he doesn't grow, he just coasts through everything on the same cavalier Bugs Bunny attitude and the movie suddenly starts rewarding him for it. It's the prototype for Pete Venkman, but whereas Venkman seemed cool (if problematic), Winger just seems like an idiot stumbling his way through a series of lucky breaks.

That's largely because Stripes shows him fail, we see him get dressed down and punished for his smug attitude, but there's never the sense that it changes him at all. He never "gets it together." He just gets lucky enough not to fail the next time.

The one time my mom did try to show me Stripes, it was a single scene, and it's a scene that symbolizes exactly what I'm talking about: the marching scene that kicks off the movie's final act. It's probably supposed to be this moment to show that Winger "has what it takes", but all it shows me is a guy who has never done anything but screw around all movie magically thread the needle and catch another lucky break.

The march itself was what impressed my mom so much, and at the age of 12 or 13, I didn't really see what was so great about it. I kind of got the impression she was also seeing that scene for the first time without rose-tinted memories, too. She did not seem very impressed either, because she was quick to make excuses that we must have been watching "the wrong scene." (It's the only marching scene in the movie.)

Part of the reason I don't think we ever watched the rest of the movie together is because this is also a movie with more than a little nudity, some of it even full-frontal. And it's always presented in that lecherous boys-will-be-boys way, too. Peeking at girls in the shower and things like that. This was the era that brought us Porky's, after all.

Anyway, I expected, as someone who loved Ghostbusters and Blues Brothers, that I'd love this just as much as its reputation would suggest. And... I did not. I've seen worse, but otherwise, I was kind of let down.

Only John Woo could make JCVD look cool with that greasy mullet perm.

This is a properly ridiculous action movie, the kind I really regret not seeing when it was contemporary. I guess it came out right on that edge where I was too young for it -- I would have been about 10 years old, and it's definitely too violent for that age.

But man, what a movie. Lance Hendrikson providing the performance of his career, endlessly bad accents from multiple characters, the french quarter, snake punching, dual pistol roundhouse kicking, an appearance by Wilford Brimley, even a five second cameo by Ted Raimi. And then, of course, John Woo's ever-present hyper-reality: guns that hit like a bomb went off, big fiery explosions, tons of slow motion, and yes, even doves (or pigeons, in this case, but close enough).

The action is so over the top it borderlines on cartoon self-parody, and that's the point. Outrageous as an art form. Though it takes a bit to build momentum, once it does, nobody ever stops firing on every single cylinder they have and it rules.

When I was a kid, I saw this movie going around and thought "Who would ever want to see that?" Critics at the time kind of savaged it, too, as I recall.

Honestly? I don't know why, but the mood struck me, and I ended up watching it. And... actually, I thought it was pretty fun. Sure, it's a little by the numbers. But also... not completely? I had just enough wiggle room that things I figured would be setups for easy jokes actually weren't.

Kurt Russell plays what I would describe as a "natural scumbag." Which is to say the point of the movie is that he's some kind of disgusting horrible monster, and instead he's just... a guy. A little rough around the edges, sure. But I've had uncles and grandpas that were basically this guy.

In that light, it's definitely more that this rich, affluent family from Chicago are more the film's monsters. I'm not exactly digging deep for this read, sure, but when it's becoming clear that they're not just restoring the boat but learning how to sail and take care of themselves, I was actually genuinely rooting for them.

Maybe that's the movie's ultimate failure: the characters aren't pushed far enough. Captain Ron himself isn't enough of a salty alcoholic, and Martin Short's family aren't sheltered enough suburbanites. Everybody's a little too human for this kind of comedy, which is maybe where it starts to feel a little basic. It could stand to be a little punchier.

But... I dunno. It worked for me more than it didn't. Sometimes you bite into the most plain piece of white bread and it totally hits the spot, y'know?

I don't want to call this the perfect Star Trek movie, because it's so disconnected from the typical tone of everything else. Fish out of water/time traveler humor got to be so overplayed, but this works on the strength of these characters and it never beats you over the head with the idea that these people are stupid. It's less "Kirk's crew is baffled by old technology" and more that these guys run roughshod over the then-present of 1986.

It's all played about as straight as it can be, with a few loose little winks around the edges to keep everything feeling friendly and easy going.

Especially with its totally blasé take on time travel. The act of engaging a "time warp" almost seems casual to this crew, and at least one scene ends with a guy asking "Won't this mess up the timeline?" and the other guy shrugging and effectively going "Meh."

We like to have fun here, folks. It may not be perfect, but it is my ideal Star Trek story.

I find it difficult not to feel inspired by this movie. Rudy Ray Moore never let anyone tell him no and he made a name for himself out of all the doors slammed in his face. You gotta respect that.

Great performances all around and it's pretty clear why Eddie Murphy would have interest in Rudy and Dolemite. Always nice to see Wesley Snipes in a movie these days, too.

It does make me wonder how much the truth is stretched, though. The movie makes it clear Rudy is a man of confidence that knows how to sell his abilities even when he doesn't have them yet. But I suppose all biopics embellish their legends, right? And for what it's worth, the story presented here defied at least some of my expectations -- knowing how biopic movies can go, and knowing nothing else about Rudy Ray Moore, there are troubles I expected him to face that do not return to haunt him.

It doesn't really matter. It's just a good time. It presents Rudy Ray Moore as exactly the right kind of dude who deserves to fail upwards and you can't help but applaud every time he turns lemons into lemonade.

The worst thing I can say about this movie is that we're fully back in Star Trek TV series territory. Cheaper effects, WAY cheaper sets, a baffling premise, and Kirk getting into a fist fight with an alien. There are episodes of The Next Generation with higher production values than this movie.

But there's still plenty of good moments to be had regardless. Glimpses at civilian life, Kirk stealing the Enterprise, the reveal of the Klingon Bird of Prey, and Kirk's tactical way of handling his enemy. That's all great stuff, even if you can tell Christopher Lloyd is trying not to throw William Shatner against the styrofoam rocks too hard.

I suppose the ending is a bit of a weak point. Over this movie and the last, Kirk has been through absolute hell, having lost a lot of what he holds most dear. And after all is said and done, as we round the final corners of uncertainty, he looks as confident and blasé here as ever.

But hey, for what's supposed to be "one of the bad ones", this still ended up being pretty enjoyable.

It's funny just how much the first Star Trek movie feels like this overly-self-serious hardcore scifi adaptation of Star Trek, and then we get to Star Trek 2 here, and it's basically just an extended, high budget episode of the original TV series. It's even a direct continuation of a plot line from the show. In the 22nd episode, Captain Kirk banishes the rebellious Khan to a harsh alien planet in order to teach him a lesson. Now, over 15 years later, Khan wants to return the favor.

When I saw this movie originally, I don't think I had the respect for the series to judge it on its merits. I remember being kind of bored by it. For whatever reason, I connected with it a lot better this time. The back and forth of Khan and Kirk trying to outwit each other is incredibly fun. Khan makes a terrific foil and they play off each other well.

At the same time, though, also an incredibly weird movie. It leans into contemporary 1980's scifi a lot more, making everything look charmingly dated. Combined with how much of this movie is about Kirk coming to terms with his age, and how old everyone around him already looks, you get the vibe that this is a movie that would never, ever get greenlit today.

A super special effects heavy science fiction movie that continues a nearly 20 year old television series, where all the cast is getting wrinkly and grey? That would be studio poison by modern standards. And yet it's often kind of cute here.

Except, well... Khan's costume, man. Grandpa's got his boobs out and the silver hair mullet is just too much for me. I know, I know -- Ricardo Montalbán is an icon. A legend. But again, it's just... wild to think there was a climate where this became one of the greatest Star Trek movies of all time and it's a bunch of old guys proving they've still got it against the Geriatric Thirst Trap.

I really appreciate how much they beat the drum of these Starships being so functionally similar to submarines. Kirk is basically never not sweaty for the entire length of this film, because of course he would be. Everybody is. They're flying through space in an overgrown sardine can. It's kind of dark, and cramped, and the Enterprise lumbers more than it maneuvers.

Great ending, too. Would have been the perfect closure to Star Trek overall if they hadn't, y'know, made like 11 more of these movies.

You know in that famous episode of The Simpsons, where Ralph falls in love with Lisa, and Bart shows her a recording of their date, saying, "look, you can see the exact moment his heart breaks."

I can tell you the exact moment this movie won me over: when Holga returns to her boyfriend's home and every single moment of that entire scene is played earnestly, including the aftermath. Up to that moment, Holga, like most characters in this movie, is a source of comic relief. A woman of few words, who has more strength than smarts. Even the reveal of her boyfriend is played for a bit of comedy. And yet, when it counts, this movie has a warm heart for her and uses it as a moment to elevate her character beyond being a big dumb barbarian lady.

That's just good storytelling right there. And this is a great movie.

Remember the days where a full third of your movie could just be slow pans around somebody's sick miniatures? There are scenes of this movie that are basically Star Trek Music Videos, where we ogle starships for multiple minutes at a time.

I love me some good cosmic-unknown science fiction and it's great to see the reunited Star Trek crew deal with their time away and maybe the strangest alien life force they've ever faced. The balance of what can be best described as Kirk's mid-life crisis, the hesitancy of crew members to work with him again, and the movie's loving adoration of these characters... it's great stuff, honestly.

There are so many shots and scenes that are clearly supposed to be about filling out other parts of the Enterprise the TV series never got to show, or never got to show in such budget or detail. There's almost this sense of triumph for everybody to be back in the saddle doing Star Trek again. It's really remarkable.

Okay, sure, yes. Parts of this movie are a little slow. But that's kind of what you want from this sort of science fiction, right? I enjoyed the heck out of it.

The main problem with this movie is just how much it meanders. It takes almost a third of the runtime before Leatherface shows up, and another third before you reach the rest of the family. It takes a really long time getting all of its ducks in a row, to the point where I was wondering if the state of Texas itself was meant to be the villain. But no, it's going somewhere, it just takes its sweet time getting there.

And where it ends up is just... another generic horror movie with a bunch of people running around the woods at night. It was so dark I couldn't even tell what was going on in the movie's climax fight -- you hear the chainsaw, you hear screaming, but what is happening to who is a complete mystery, and it only gets dumber from there.

"It's too dark to see what's going on" also fits with the theme of this movie being weirdly shy about its violence. The first TCM has a reputation for being the most shocking horror movie of its era, but this cuts away or obscures most of its worst. There's some rubber body parts, a handful of squibs, and couple cups of red corn syrup, but it's nothing extreme. To be clear, I've said it in my other reviews, but I get squeamish about gore. This feels like I braced for the worst and got hit with a feather.

It's just... dull, and kind of directionless, and not even very scary or gross. The cinematic equivalent of chewing on styrofoam.

Somehow after watching Ginger Snaps I saw one of the actresses (Katherine Isabelle) was in some Halloween kids movie trash and thought, "Yeah, sure, I can probably tolerate that."

Folks, the struggle was real. Somehow they roped Ben Kingsley into this toilet water. He plays a disgraced magician named Zamboni who falls into deep depression after accidentally making his wife disappear for real.

This is one of those kids movies that feels like it was made with the idea that the viewer is probably going to be playing with toys or video games or something while it's on, because it's mostly long stretches of nothing happening punctuated by scenes where kids run around screaming.

It's also one of those factory-made movies where it feels like it was made up on the spot. Yeah, sure, our protagonist team of kids just has a goat for some reason, and the local bullies decide they just need to steal it. They tie the goat to a tree, but the goat gets loose, and it just happens to wander into a graveyard, and the graveyard just so happens to be on Zamboni's property. Whatever.

A whole movie of somebody asking "And then what happened?" and whoever was writing the script had to think it up right then and there. Practically Mad Libs. Just over 90 minutes, but it feels like it's four hours long.

I'm way too old for this movie. At least Ben Kingsley seems to be having fun.

Between Puppet Master 4 and 5, you'd have one full movie's worth of plot. Maybe.

PM5 here picks up almost exactly where PM4 ends, to the point where it kinda feels more like the next episode of a television series. It's a lot of the same actors, a lot of the same sets even, and an extended (we're talking like 5-10 minute) recap of the previous movie.

Unfortunately this makes it less of a movie than even the last one. I was shocked to look down at the runtime and see 25 minutes remaining even though basically nothing had happened yet. It spins and spins and spins its wheels, retreading a lot of the action of the previous movie, but with fewer puppet scenes and less effects.

So while I was willing to forgive Puppet Master 4 as simple "dumb fun", Puppet Master 5 isn't nearly as charming or as weird. It's just kind of tiresome.

This is a really good, really powerful movie that unfortunately suffers from a couple of small nitpicks.

One is Nimona herself. She's like a punk-rock version of the Genie from Disney's Aladdin -- fast talking, wise cracking, and never able to sit still. The problem being that they don't always ride that line between quirky and annoying. There were a few scenes where I kind of wished Nimona would just shut up and get on with it, but she's too busy ping-ponging around the room reveling in her own chaos. I know some of that is just her character, but she's often dialed up to 12 or 13 when an 11 would have sufficed.

Two is the animation. I'm split two ways about this one. There are a lot of times where Nimona looks really, really good, but there's this certain air of budget looming over the whole production that I also can't shake. I think it's just the cel-shaded CGI overall. Characters animate very well, the design of the world is very strong, but so many elements around those two things feel very cheap. This was a theatrical movie that Disney killed when they bought Fox, so I wonder how much of that can be blamed on Netflix giving them the bare minimum to finish it up.

The rest of the movie is wonderful, though. In particular, I absolutely love the theme of embracing becoming the monster society thinks you are and whether or not there's a path back from that. There's some truly big brain ideas in this movie. It deserves to shake the foundations in the same way that first Shrek movie did back in 2001, but I wonder if the speed bumps it suffered to see release will hold it back or not.

But this is real "the voice of a generation" kind of stuff.

This is such a paper thin movie you can practically see through it. In short: a Power Rangers monster hassles a robotics company on the verge of a break through in sentient artificial intelligence, thanks to the work of 1993 Logan Paul.

Beyond that, there's barely any story, and despite being a horror movie, barely any blood, either. Despite somehow still getting an R rating, you can tell they were absolutely holding back in acknowledgement their target audience was probably in the range of 14-16 years old. As someone who doesn't always love tons of gore, that's not a complaint.

But you know what? Despite being an awful movie, it's got a silly, weird, campy vibe where it just kind of goes with the flow. Something you'd describe as "Stupid, but in a good way." For a movie of this type, it's very heavy on the practical effects, with fun puppet work, animatronics, and some stop motion animation.

And, as always, the puppet creatures themselves are just cool to look at. These guys were practically made for merchandising. It's just entertaining to see a little toy guy run around sometimes. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

This movie is over-produced, trying too hard to be whimsical, and relies way too much on fuzzy nostalgia for the 1971 movie.

And yet... I cannot deny I was charmed by it anyway.

I suppose the secret is its portrayal of Wonka himself. The 1971 movie treated Willy Wonka basically as a God. Weird, but untouchable. Infallible. This movie doesn't quite dress him down, but it's not afraid to give him flaws.

And, for a movie supposedly about Wonka's "origins", it does not get bogged down in explaining the source of his magic or mystery. There's still a bit of mystique about him, even if it does sometimes feel more unearned than not.

It's precious about the "Willy Wonka Lore" (a weird concept to write down), but it doesn't forget to be itself, either. There's plenty of fun to be had around all the nostalgia and forced whimsy. It got me to laugh out loud more than a few times.

Is it a worthy successor to the timeless 1971 classic? That's a tall order. Nearly impossible. And I don't know if this movie does it.

But neither does that make this a bad movie. I quite enjoyed it.