Hercules

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Tyler

Big surprise, Brett Ratner made a really boring Hercules film. This is a debugging-the-myth telling, so no awesome creatures, no gods, none of the actual myths. None of the actual fun stuff. No, this is the "truth behind the legend" and if it really was the truth no one would be talking about Hercules today because it's actually just a really average sword and sandles battle movie only there's The Rock in the middle of it.

He's got his group of stock characters, and they follow the usual call to arms, training montages, fighting action sequences and double crossings. He's got your basic tortured backstory and gets his revenge and frees the land. It's all really obviously laid out and at no point did I care about any of it.

And somehow, despite all the sets and action and costumes and the fun cast that have nothing to work with, it all felt really cheap. Using the standard Herculean font for their supers seems really tacky, I wonder if they were trying to be funny?

I didn't actually know that Ratner directed this going in but I was surprised it wasn't getting much of an advertising push. But seeing his name at the end, it suddenly made sense why it was all such mediocre fluff. These poor actors struggle to stay afloat in this one. Probably won't be seeing this again.

The Haunting

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Tyler

Robert Wise seemed to have a go at every genre. I like this one for how simple and effective it is with its haunting. It's really the classic haunted house movie. Some beautiful cinematography and everything scry is conveyed with angles, editing and some sound, relying on the performances of the actors to really sell it and get us worked up with them.

I do find Julie Harris really annoying now though. 

I grew up with the remake and only later discovered the vastly superior original. Now when I think about it it seems like they completely missed the point of how and why this works and just take the scary elements and made them as bombastic as possible. I liked it because of all the then brand new CG effects. The original doesn't need any of that to work and is far more effective. 

It's a great creepy old film though, definitely a must see. 

Deliver Us from Evil

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Beau

Jerry Bruckheimer has made his first horror movie! Well, if you can call it that. It's more of a police procedural but then there's an exorcism at the end. Director Scott Derrickson gives it a few good jump scares but unlike Sinister, or even The Exorcism of Emily Rose this film fails to tell an actual compelling story so I just never really cared. Perhaps just a problem when telling uncinematic true stories, even Exorcism of Emily Rose was like that at parts. But at least that was about something. This just feels like some things that happened one time. 

The cast do what they can. It's just really hard to see Joel McHale in this role. Olivia Munn suffers greatly playing the underwritten wife who's supposed to add some kind of emotional beats to the story but just comes off as nagging and then has to be rescued at the end.

You know how there's some stock sound effects that you hear in a billion movies? And when you hear them it immediately destroys your suspension of disbelief. It's one thing to use that old door creek sound. Unfortunately our main character hears children laughing and playing right before something scary happens. And the sound effect they used for that is one of my all time most hated sounds. So right before anything scary I was immediately frustrated and taken out of the film. Suffice to say, besides the two or three obligatory jump scares nothing here worked for me. 

But it looked pretty. Some nice make up.