For It Is Man's Number: glenn miller

Showing posts with label glenn miller. Show all posts

Friday, 9 December 2022

Santa Claws (2014)

Here we go. Brace yourselves. Santa Claws is a film that features some poorly-realised talking animals, a major Santa mishap, and the creative talents of the production company known as The Asylum. It has been a while since I watched a film from The Asylum (I have often enjoyed their silly creature features, but their mockbuster fare . . . not so much). And I think it has been even longer since I watched a film with talking animals at the heart of it.

Ezra James Colbert plays young Tommy, a boy who is upset that his mother (Julia, played by Nicola Lambo) has decided he can no longer keep a number of kittens in his care. This leads to Tommy pacing the kittens in a box and leaving them to be collected by Santa. Yes, that’s his plan. Unfortunately, Santa is allergic to cats, which leads to an accident, which then subsequently leads to the kittens taking charge of Santa’s sleigh and trying to save Christmas. Will they succeed? Will Julia rekindle her long-lost Christmas spirit? And will the neighbour, Marcus (Evan Boymel), get the Santa sighting that he has spent many years longing for?

Although I have yet to see any other film written by Anna Rasmussen (and one of those is called Shark Side Of The Moon - why have I not seen that one?), she does what is expected here, in terms of the simple plotting, the focus on the cute animals, and ensuring that characters learn a lesson or two before the end credits roll. It still feels a bit overlong, despite coming in at under the 90-minute mark, but maybe that won’t be noticed by younger viewers, and this is family entertainment squarely aimed at younger viewers.

Director Glenn Miller is someone I know for his Asylum films that feature killer animals (check out his filmography and you can find one or two treats tucked away in there) and he effectively goes through the motions here. It would be easy to view this as a painful debacle, especially during the moments that use poor computer effects to make the mouths of the kittens move while they speak, but it has everything that it needs. There are enough Christmas decorations strewn around, Santa is a decent Santa (played by John P. Fowler). And the mischievous kittens will appeal to anyone who likes cute kittens . . . and what younger viewer will not like cute kittens? It often looks cheap, probably because it is cheap, but it never actually feels as if it has been lazily thrown together without an ounce of care. Some may disagree, but I would point those people to a few films that are much worse than this.

Not that this is good. It just isn’t as bad as a number of Christmas movies made by people who care a lot less than Miller, Rasmussen, and co.

Lambo and Colbert are perfectly fine as the central mother and son, I have already said that Fowler plays his part well, and Boymel is okay as the man desperate to spot Santa, and maybe well-equipped to rescue the furry sleigh stowaways. A variety of actors voice the animals, but they just blur into one mass of “cute” voices as viewers wait to see how the animals will a)save Christmas, and/or b) get home safely.

Is this worth watching? No. Is it worth picking if you have a young child wanting to be entertained? Still no. But if you find it in the TV schedules, and you have a child who REALLY likes kittens, then this won’t be as painful as you expect. And I will end with that glowing recommendation.

3/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Tuesday, 6 July 2021

Aquarium Of The Dead (2021)

Glenn Miller returns to the director's chair for this third in the loosely-connected Zoombies trilogy, working this time from a screenplay by Marc Gottlieb (from a story idea by Michael Varrati), and it ends up being a slight improvement on the two movies that preceded it, thanks to a more overt sense of humour and self-awareness.

All you need to know is that a batch of infected product has not been properly destroyed, which leads to it being used on an octopus residing at an aquarium. The marine life then start to become zombies, and they're out to feed on the few humans unfortunate enough to be stuck in the aquarium, including Miranda Riley (Eva Ceja), Daniel Hanley (D. C. Douglas), Senator Bailey Blackburn (Anthony Jensen), Dr. Karen James (Madeleine Falk), and a young man named Skylar (Brandon Lee W.) who just happened to pick the wrong day to treat himself to a private aquarium tour.

As well as those mentioned, Vivica A. Fox is probably the biggest name in the cast, playing a head of security who ends up trying to guide others to safety from her own, relatively secure, position. Although she's acting far below what she's capable of, Fox is still a welcome presence, and it has to be said that the rest of the leads do a better job than I expected, helped by the humour of the script. They all play things just right, acknowledging how silly things are while also sometimes being forced into some heroics.

Gottlieb has to hit all the usual beats, and he does so, but he also knows how to fully embrace the potential fun of the variety of marine animals you could find in an aquarium, from the large octopus to crabs, from sharks to starfish, and even a deadly walrus. The film avoids becoming tiresome as quickly as the previous films did because of the way in which Gottlieb mines the situation for infectious chuckles.

Miller doesn't do too much different from his direction of the first two movies, which is understandable. He kept being hired, despite an uninspiring and fairly flat approach to the material. But he manages to not ruin the script too much, which is a positive. Still over-reliant on CGI that isn't up to the task, and without any major set-pieces that make any strong impression, things are easier to accept and enjoy here, especially when you get to the scene that shows starfish attacking everyone.

Those who don't have my compulsion to watch a movie series in order will be happy to know, if this is the kind of thing you can tolerate, that you can watch this without having watched the other movies in this zombie animal series. The one main connection is established in one of the earliest scenes, but it could easily play out as a standalone movie. I still wouldn't really call it good, but it at least aims to be fun from start to finish. Some better CGI, or some (easy?) practical FX work, would have helped it succeed.

5/10

Thursday, 1 July 2021

Zoombies 2 (2019)

I have ended up watching a film that, yet again, makes me wonder why I do these things to myself. I watched Zoombies a few years ago and didn't bother with the sequel. Why would I? I hadn't enjoyed Zoombies. But then I saw the trailer for the upcoming Aquarium Of The Dead, a film I discovered was the third instalment of what has now become a loose trilogy of zombie animal movies. That trailer sold me on the potential of the daffy premise, so I knew I had to watch Zoombies 2, if only to satisfy my own OCD movie-viewing habits.

All you need to know about this film is that it is very similar to the first film, with the main difference this time around being that the animals affected are in a large wildlife park. The main characters are a bunch of poachers and a ranger, Brooke Sullivan (played by Erica Sturdefant). As things start to look bleak for everyone involved, it becomes vital to figure out a cure for the zombiefication and stop the epidemic spreading throughout the rest of the world.

Writer Scotty Mullen and director Glenn Miller both return to deliver another load of animal mayhem, having obviously kept everyone happy enough with their work in the first film. Well, they must have kept everyone behind the camera happy, but I doubt many other viewers actually enjoyed the end result much more than I did. Anyway, they did what was asked of them, and they repeat the formula here, with the same level of quality present in the final product.

Things start well enough. There's a zombie porcupine that I thought was signifying a much more enjoyable movie, one with more humour throughout it. That wasn't to be, however, and things soon become a tiresome sequence of dull conversations between main characters and horrible CGI depicting animals on the rampage. Those animals may be eclectic enough to stave off boredom for a while - that porcupine, a meerkat, a crocodile, a tiger, a hippopotamus, some rhinos, etc - but the special effects are so clumsy and awful that any animal attack sequences become more of a pain than a simple pleasure.

I'm not going to be as harsh on the cast as I am on the script, special effects, and uninspired direction. Sturdefant is okay in her role, and she has a number of scenes working well with the equally-capable Terra Lyons (one of the main poachers, and someone who has maybe inadvertently started an animal apocalypse). Nobody else makes much of an impression, with Jonathon Buckley and Jarrid Masse both playing very similar males who are ready to battle the wildlife, and Jumarcus Mason, Caleb Thomas, Peter Stickles, and others all looking ready to become food at any moment.

In a way, the fault ends up lying with me. I should not have expected any big step up in quality here, and the film-makers all do enough to maintain a consistent standard between the previous movie and this one. It's just that their standard falls far below mine, and that is really saying something when you consider the wide variety of cinema that I enjoy.

3/10