There’s no easy way to review Scary Movie 4. On one hand it’s a disjointed, plot-lacking film held together with a series of jokes that may or may not be funny depending on your sense of humor. On the other, the jokes are usually pretty damn funny and the spoofs they gravitate towards may not be comedy gems in the eyes of most professional critics, but lose looking for a laugh on a Saturday afternoon, Scary Movie 4 fits the bill.

Returning for her fourth outing is Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) who once again has to deal with a set of unusual circumstances involving an alien plot to invade the earth. Joining her is a cast of many including cameos and holdovers from Scary Movie 3. In fact, the fourth installment in the series does an adequate job of bridging the gap between the two films by showing us where characters are only a few years later.

The main movie being spoofed here is The War of the Worlds in which Tom Ryan (Craig Bierko) takes on the role played by Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s underwhelming original. Complete with kids that hate him, Ryan must save his family from an alien attack after a ‘TriPod’ erupts from the street and begins to vaporize the curious human beings. There really isn’t any need for spoiler warnings, but the puppet from Saw and the dead kid from The Grudge play an important part in moving the story along.

This is really a love-it or hate-it movie, but comedy veterans David Zucker and Jim Abrahams have put together a film that is funny consistently through with enough jokes and gross out moments to keep you chuckling all the way though. Although the belly laughs aren’t as constant as you would imagine, re-watching Scary Movie 3 on cable proved that the series can remain consistently funny even years after their release.

In an auspicious bit of cameo casting Charlie Sheen reprises his role from Scary Movie 3 only to be a tormented man sleeping with three women and wanting to end his life. How he chooses to do this is one of the most awkwardly funny suicides in movie history. We also get a cameo from Carmen Electra in a bowel-moving episode guaranteed to make you vomit a little bit in your mouth. Finally, Leslie Nielson returning as the President is a welcome addition to the cast and his speech to the United Nations is priceless once his clothes are zapped off.

The series still has its edge, even though the fourth installment does show a little bit of aging. Still, with so many movies released every year, there’s plenty of material abound for the creators to pull more material for the series guaranteed fifth installment. With such worthy candidates as The Da Vinci Code, Mission: Impossible III, and X-Men: The Last Stand all opening this summer, the next Scary Movie is one sequel I can’t wait to see.

V for Vendetta is the first great movie of 2006, hands down. Nothing that has been released in the last three and a half months stacks up to the canvas painted by this immersive film which, on the surface, is a hardcore action film, but underneath is a beautiful picture with excellent characters and sharp dialog.

Although the film seemed destined for failure after a delayed release schedule and the lawsuit of graphic novel creator Alan Moore requesting his name be removed from all mention of the film. When a comic book’s co-creator wants out on a project, you can only expect it was a far departure from the source material. This isn’t the case, however, with Vendetta, and even if it does stray too far away, it still stacks up as a great film.

The story centers around a terrorist named V (Hugo Weaving) who has been planning his revenge for the better part of two decades in a totalitarian ruled England which now has a high chancellor in a Hitler like role claiming he is protecting the people after a biological attack kills hundreds of thousands of people. V begins his crusade against this oppressive government when he stumbles upon Evey (Natalie Portman), a young girl working at England’s only TV network. Through the course of the film the plot thickens but the message remains the same, a vendetta needs to be settled.

There’s been some questioning if the film, which is at a political point in today’s world, and its glorification of a terrorist is really something that needs to be released in a world under the thumb of terrorists (or so we are lead to believe). Does the film glorify its main character, who happens to be a terrorist? Yes, but it also shows the consequences of his actions, and it makes ample points as to why he seeks revenge, which boils much deeper than religious intolerance.

After actor James Purefoy left the project after it had begun, director James McTeigue (assistant director on The Matrix trilogy) turned to Hugo Weaving, and he couldn’t have made a better choice. Weaving, even though we never see his face, is perfect for the role with his identifiable voice providing a creepiness with total confidence, especially in his opening monologue after bringing Evey to his underground home.

Portman also shines as Evey Hammond, a seemingly innocent young girl who is tortured (part of the head shaving we’ve heard so much about) and taught more about herself than she could have known. As we learn more and more of her back story you begin to feel the emotion she exhibits during these torturous scenes.

Andy and Larry Wachowski’s screenplay is nothing short of excellent and makes up for the lackluster Reloaded and Revolutions. After seeing the film, I did some research on the limited graphic novel series and found a great many things in common, but, again, not enough to keep Moore on board.

While not the best film ever released, V for Vendetta does make for an engaging time at the movies with a brisk pace, interesting characters, great action, and an ending that really grips you. Just seeing how this film builds up towards its climax is amazing and the money shots, promoted in the trailers, of certain buildings exploding shows that all the pieces came together in a cohesive piece of filmmaking that should live on as a genuine classic and another comic book successfully transferred to the big screen.

Running Scared is one of those movies that really make you question what you, personally, consider to be a good, bad, or average movie. There are so many reasons why the film is nothing special, but then you take a look at it in pieces and you can see why it had all the promise of a cult hit akin to Pulp Fiction but really drops the ball on several important points.

The first hit against the film is leading man Paul Walker’s perception among movie patrons. Some see him as a tool, or a no-talent hack banking on his California good looks to land generic movie rolls abandoned by other actors who are either dead, or close to it. Many, including myself, have a hard time seeing him as anything but that undercover cop in the dialog-challenged Fast and the Furious. Although, after bombs like Timeline, he’s starting to take on rolls that abandon those he’d been known for in the past and take a chance, Running Scared is a good example.

Walker plays Joey Gazelle, who gets the credit for having the worst pun/name in a very long time (see, he’s “running” and his name is “gazelle,” yeah, you get it). Acting as a low level member of the very cliché Italian mob in New Jersey (so gritty, yet, a slight improvement over the real thing), Joey is tasked with disposing of a gun used to kill a dirty cop. Of course, things can’t always be that easy and Joey loses the gun after his son’s friend, Oleg (Cameron Bright), takes it and uses it to shoot his abusive, John Wayne-obsessed father.

Things, as you can imagine, get worse from there. Oleg runs about town with the gun which changes hands more times than the high school whore at an after prom party. The movie takes a few twists and disturbing turns throughout its runtime and, at a few points, really shows promise in its story, but the twists feel contrived more often than not with the ending being the final nail in the cliché coffin.

Written and directed by Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), Running Scared, as mentioned before, missed out on a few opportunities to really shine in a surreal way. The ending credits lend themselves well to the point I think Kramer was trying to make, about the film being a manipulation of a fairy tale, but this isn’t evident throughout the actual film, which steals some of the thunder that could have been generated.

The film is also particularly violent, in two separate instances groups of men are taken down with headshot after headshot until only one or two manage to walk away. Winning the award for “I-don’t-think-so-moment of 2006” so far is a massive gun shoot out between eight or nine men in a 10 by 10 room where a mattress and a dresser are your only cover. The other notable scene is the hockey puck torture that the studio includes in all the trailers and TV spots, and it certainly is as cringe worthy as it looks.

The supporting cast keeps the movie afloat when Walker is off-screen, but there’s nothing really special here. Vera Farmiga as Gazelle’s wife Teresa pulls out a pretty decent performance and delivers some of the best lines of the film when fending off a pair of pedophiles near the apex of the film. Her subsequent actions drew a few mild cheers from the crowd.

As the film winds down you’re left wondering how a movie with guns, violence, and a collection of nude women turned out to only be an average film channeling Kramer’s inner Tarantino and giving us a cliché ending that we saw coming a mile away. The audience won’t be “running scared” from the theater, but they won’t exactly be “running enthusiastically” towards it either.

Final Destination delivers everything you would expect from a horror movie sequel, but this series has a lot more to live up to due to the cleverness of the first two movies in the series and the most inventive deaths this side of Friday the 13^th. Sure, the series hasn’t really broken any new ground, or gone gangbusters at the box office, but Final Destination and its two sequels are guilty pleasures that you watch with a group of friends as you see just how twisted the screenwriters can be towards these characters.

If that sounds morbid, it should.

Whereas the first movie focuses on an airplane tragedy, and the second a multi-car pile up on the interstate, the third takes a smaller, although still lethal, approach. This time a rollercoaster is the ride of death and like the previous two movies; one character has the creepy premonition that all the kids looking for fun are going to die.

The series has always been one of my personal favorites simply because it’s a balls-to-the-walls affair when it comes to picking off characters one by one. Sure, the writing outside the deaths isn’t the best, but when you see how much thought it put into some of these sequences, you can’t help but feel a little bit giddy, no matter how disturbed you feel afterwards. If pieces of shrapnel and airbags hadn’t made you weary of just about anything in this world, you’ll want to stay away from forklifts, home improvement stores, giant signs, and tanning beds. It goes without saying that this is one bloody movie.

Director James Wong (Final Destination) doesn’t skimp when it comes to knocking off characters in globs of blood, in fact several characters get sprayed on more than one occasion in a visceral rain shower of bits of brain.

After Final Destination 3 opens with the customary, over-the-top disaster, the movie does sink into a bit of a rut between deaths. The two “main” characters come up with an explanation too fast as to what is going on, presumably by a simple Google search. They also bite on the theory without any doubt in their minds which seems like the death scenes took too much of the writers time and they had to fill in the rest by making the remaining characters hyper-intelligent. Wendy (NAME), the girl who sees this all happen, is prone to crying at just about everything, and seems strangely comfortable with her position of identifying who’s next and how they will die.

Overall the rest of the film is, again, what you would expect for a cheaply made horror movie. The special effects are adequate, as the series has never been known for spending lots of money in this department. The acting is two dimensional for just about everyone as the characters are genre staples like the cool, confident jock, brainless girls, and the angry goth kids. You won’t find anything that breaks the genre barriers here, and by not expecting anything, this sits pretty comfortable with you.

Final Destination 3 is a fun movie to watch, and while it isn’t as good as the first or second films in the series, it still serves the audience well by giving them what they want, cool, innovate, and painful death scenes spliced in-between profanity, nudity, and sexual tension. Really, what more could you ask for on a Friday night at the movies?

King Kong is an amazing achievement in filmmaking, and even with all the buzz surrounding the three hour length of the film, or the questionable casting of some parts, the film still manages to stun the audience in amazement.

Truly, after viewing the original only a week prior to seeing the remake I can say that the 2005 version of the film rivals that of its predecessor in many categories and is a far superior film as far as depth of story and visual effects. This isn’t to say that the original 1933 version is cinema trash, it still holds a special place in the eyes of many film students and film fans as an achievement in special effects and originality.

Director Peter Jackson has taken some creative liberties in the way his King Kong relates to the original (we won’t even mention the 1970’s version). The long lost “spider pit” scene has been restored to the script and turns out to be one of the creepiest and most hopeless scenes in the film as our heroes struggle to survive under the onslaught of dozens of large arachnids and other assorted creatures. The culminating and mouth-dropping scene of an Allisaurus and King Kong locked in battle from the original has been broadened to contain a much longer battle and feature three dinosaurs instead of just one.

The story itself has been infused with a lot more emotion and many more scenes in which you see the true feelings Kong has for Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). Just as the original the girl in distress is scared of the 25-foot beast, but as she comes to understand him more, and he truly begins to fall for her, the story is almost heart-wrenching as you know the ending to the film long before it happens and the impact is still as prevalent as even. I won’t lie, I really wanted to cry at the end of the film as the script by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson really does strike an emotional cord with the movie-goer.

The remakes story mirrors that of the original in most aspects. Filmmaker Carl Denham’s (Jack Black) latest film is going to be sold off as stock footage, so he rushes his production crew aboard a charted ship headed for Skull Island to use the ruins of a lost civilization as a backdrop. After his leading lady drops out, Denham spies Ann Darrow stealing an apple from a newsstand and saves her in a bind (a nice throwback to the original’s beginning predicament and meeting between Darrow and Denham). Denham enlists the young beauty to star in his film and they quickly rush off to catch the boat where Ann finally gets to meet playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody) whom she has longed to gain an audition with. From there we travel to Skull Island and the fun of traversing through a lost world begins.

The extra hour on the run time compared to the original’s 107 minutes goes towards character development and the fleshing out of some new additions to the cast. For the most part this extra hour is hardly noticed as the bits of humor and action Jackson is able to provide give the audience enough to remain interested until the meat of the film takes over after Kong is introduced about 60 minutes in.

The stunning Naomi Watts seems like the perfect choice to take over the role pioneered by Fay Wray and she pull off the role with flying colors as the conflicted beauty caught between the love of an ape and a man. Brody in the modified role of Jack Driscoll also does an adequate job of pulling off the “action man” who sets out to save Ann from the clutches of the beast. The only real role that seems miscast is that of Carl Denham. Jack Black pulls off the role, there’s no question about that, but the persona that we’ve come to expect from him just seems to throw the audience off. You’re waiting for his sly smirk to turn into a wailing laugh as he breaks out in a musical number about sausage. And while he won’t get as much recognition as he deserves, Andy Serkis once again pulls off an amazing motion capture performance as Kong.

There’s so much to say about King Kong that it’s almost impossible to get to it all in this short of a review. There’s just nothing that can detract from the cinematic masterpiece that is Peter Jackson’s remake of the 1933 classic. Just as he did with The Lord of the Rings, Jackson once again solidifies himself as one of the premiere filmmakers in Hollywood with a knack for both inspiring action and heart felt emotion. Only one viewing of King Kong would be a disservice to the picture as there’s so much to follow and so much to see in the film that it nearly demands repeat viewings only to show you how well it has been constructed. In a year when the box office has continued to tank week after week and sequels and shills seem to be the standard Hollywood fare it’s nice to see that there’s still some emotion in filmmaking.

Chicken Little had a lot riding on it for Disney. After pushing back the planned fall 2005 release of Pixar’s Cars until summer 2006, the season’s only Disney released animated film was this CGI adventure. Unfortunately for the Mouse House, everyone is going to come away disappointed with this rather flat animated feature that fails to deliver the Pixar charm or the DreamWorks comedy. Chicken Little is a mostly harmless film that certainly won’t disappear due to Disney’s trademark over promotion of its films, but it won’t me remembered by many.

The title, in development for years, focuses on the old story of Chicken Little who cried out that the sky was falling. When it turned out to be nothing more than a hoax, the townspeople began to ignore the crazy little chicken’s claims until the one time he was right, and no one listened. The new Disney version mixes things up a bit by adding in space aliens in a War of the World‘s like farce that all boils down to a misunderstanding.

The trademark Disney notions of a dead mother, a misunderstood child, the odd-one out, and a cool character everyone can relate to are all present, but we’ve seen this story done a hundred times, and nearly half of them done better and with more life than this rehashed script. While the story comes up as short as the movie’s namesake character, the voice acting provided by an eclectic mix of stars gives the film its only life. Chicken Little is voiced by Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) and his friends Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack), Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), and Fish out of Water (Dan Molina) all have enough life to make them somewhat memorable.

The big exception here is Fish out of Water, in this creation, a fish with a diver’s helmet filled with water on his head, Disney has once again outdone itself and created a truly memorable character and easily one of their most creative and funny creations in years. Even though the fish never speaks a single line, his actions and personality are the shinning moment in this otherwise dim film.

This isn’t to say there isn’t anything to like about Chicken Little, there’s some comedy, but no where near the level Shrek was able to achieve by putting the classic tales that Disney made a fortune on through the blender. There’s maybe one or two laugh out loud moments in the entire film, but overall, and after some of the hilarious moments The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc. Disney really needs to raise the bar.

The CGI animation is top-notch, really the only part of the film that goes above and beyond what we’ve seen before in animated films. With most of the character’s being animals it leaves the animators and software designers to create lots of fur which moves pretty damn realistically in the lush environment. Another aspect which has a true touch of style is the character design and the world itself. The characters are over proportion in many aspects with big bodies and little legs. Chicken Little is ridiculously small whereas Runt is huge in comparison. The designs for vehicles are also distorted in the very same way and look somewhat akin to Rocko’s Modern Life.

Try as you might, there just isn’t a lot to get excited about Chicken Little. If it were 1995 again and Toy Story had just come out, and the closest other CGI movie ever released was Tron, the film would be something special and would more than likely be a hit merely for its technical achievements. But, like Disney’s ill-fated technical show Dinosaur, Chicken Little earns the dubious stripes of being better than Howard the Duck but no where near the quality we’ve come to expect from studios like DreamWorks Animation and Steve Job-headed Pixar Animation Studios.

After the reviews and box office results, Disney would be wise to give in to Pixar’s demands. If anything, at least they know they will be getting their name out on award winning material instead of digging up shallowly written stories and trying to adapt them for the 21^st century.

What if you were forced to relive a single hour of your life over and over again? What if your actions in life would have no long lasting consequences on the world, what would you do? Would you choose the life of a hero, leading the life of good, or would you indulge in the darker side of your mind, and throw morals out the window? These are the types of questions I believe writer/director Thomas Ikimi wants you to think about after you view his independent film LIMBO. The film, shot in contrasting black and white, is a tale of one man thrown into a moral quagmire when he enters the nothingness of limbo, a state between heaven and hell which provides no absolutes for anyone.

Adam Moses (Christopher Russo) is an attorney looking to make a difference in the world. He’s in the middle of a huge case which seems to bring out the true colors of everyone around him. Adam is summoned to a suspicious meeting about the case on a roof top where here’s gunned down by a hitman, only Adam doesn’t die. He enters limbo, and as he soon learns, he is forced to repeat the same hour of his life over and over again, almost as though the entire universe resets every 60 minutes. Adam believes that the hitman who killed him may hold the truth behind his stay in this state and seeks this Ouroboros out to find some answers. Along the way he meets the beautiful, yet mysterious, Rebecca (Etya Dudko) and a collective mix of other characters in his search for the truth. Most of the film is told via a flashback as Adam tells his story to Vaughn (Eric Christie), whom he saved from committing suicide, at least for the next 60 minutes.

Being shot in black and white, with the provided voice over, and nice, static camera angles the film has a great noirish look to it, almost a tone similar to the video game Max Payne. The use of light in the film adds a high level on contrast to the whites while the blacks offer the possible dark reaches of the human condition. All of this is captured eloquently be director of photography Jon Miller. Adam’s turmoil in limbo makes him question his own morality after repeating the same hour 2000 times he begins to lose his direction, and sanity. Through a brutal beating of a homeless man and the rape of a prostitute we see the two facets of Adam after saving Vaughn from his own hand. With the slate being whipped clean after every cycle, the question that presents itself is simple, are you doing anything wrong if no one gets hurt, at least in the long run?

As we’ve seen with previous independent films, like Kevin Smith’s Clerks, the use of black and white truly makes the audience focus on the characters rather than the set and everything else on camera. Like Clerks, Ikimi’s decision pays off with LIMBO as the character of Adam becomes the primary focus of the film as we journey with him through his never-ending life.

The use of handhelds in the film is very well done, for the most part. Handhelds, open up the possibilities of a director to devise new, unique shots due to the smaller size of the cameras, as opposed to full size recording devices. The only time when the use of a handheld seems over done in LIMBO is the montage near the end of the film as we move through the city to most of the movie’s principle locations. The film is sped up here as well and the constant bobbing of the camera leaves the audience disoriented as to what exactly is going on, or what Ikimi may be trying to get across to us as we reach the film’s climax.

Andrew David Daniels’ score fits in perfectly with the rest of this film as its high quality only adds to a great atmosphere. Filming on location, rather than blatant sets, also brings the audience into the film just like Broken‘s use of an actual location aided that film in setting the tone for the viewers.

The script itself is more cerebral that your standard Hollywood-fare, but the dialog is choppy in some spots. And some viewers may be a bit perplexed as to the ending of the film, or lack of an ending, for that matter, but I believe Ikimi wanted to leave the possibilities open and have the movie-goer decide the character’s ultimate fates.

Like the previously mentioned Broken, LIMBO is a thinking-man’s movie which is more focused on delivering a compelling story with an overall question for the audience to answer for themselves. LIMBO is another shinning example that maybe Hollywood is in such a slump because they think we are content with the same-old, same-old when we really want something new that presents to us new types of stories, stories with an IQ.

For anyone who gets a chance to experience LIMBO, jump at it, as the film comes highly recommended.

For more information on LIMBO, including production notes and trailers, visit the film’s official website at www.limbomovie.com.

Sequels in this day and age are lucky to have half the inspiration that made their predecessors worth a movie-goers time. Good sequels have always been few and far between, but over the last few years we’ve been cursed with atrocious sequels, let alone horror film sequels, that bring nothing to the table other than a way for the movie studios to make money.

Imagine my surprise when Saw II actually managed to be a good movie which only accentuated the fact that it was a good horror movie sequel.

Make no mistakes about it, Saw II was made to cash in on the success of the original, but never before have you seen a movie purely made for the money turn out so well in the end. Made on the cheap, just like the original, the film should make back its entire production and marketing budget in its opening week of release.

Saw II picks up right where the first film left off, well, some time has passed, but Jigsaw, the serial killer who never actually kills, is still building engineering marvels used to split skulls and disembody his victims. The film opens up with a Jigsaw related murder in the old-school, awe-inspiring type of death we used to see in the inventive 80’s. Jigsaw leaves a clue this time for Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Walhberg) to find him, which he does. What Matthews only comes to realize, after finding Jigsaw, is that several people have been locked into a house and a deadly nerve agent is floating in the air. They have two hours to live, but some of them won’t make it that long.

Writers Darren Lynn Bousman and Leigh Whannell have really outdone themselves with this smart sequel by topping the killing games of the original. Whereas Saw featured two men chained inside a decrepit bathroom and told of the history of the killer via Danny Glover’s character, Saw II puts us right in the middle of the “games.” The cast is composed of mostly throwaway characters who will only serve as canon fodder throughout the film. We aren’t introduced to many of them, and for good reason, within an hour most of them are dead.

Aside from the no-name cast, sans Franky G (Johnny Zero, The Italian Job) and Beverly Mitchell (7^th Heaven), Saw II suffers badly from horribly-cliché-ridden dialog and awful delivery. The character’s aren’t anything but standard 2D cut-outs of other seen in many movies over the year, but it’s the over-arching story and a perplexingly smart killer that gives Saw II its edge.

Much has been said about Saw II‘s ending and how some believe it to be contrived only to further the series as a money-making option for Lion’s Gate and others, such as myself, thought it was very well done, but on the border of being cringe worthy. You certainly don’t see it coming, but if anything, the film leaves you guessing like a good episode of 24, always thinking that no everyone is what they seem and there’s more to the picture than what you can see.

Where The Ring Two felt it necessary to merely tread water on the familiar ground of the series, Saw II seems to be very content with reinventing itself in each subsequent sequel. Hopefully though, unlike Friday the 13^th before it, this series doesn’t approach things too outlandishly to the point where you drive away your core audience (anyone remember the “thrilling” climax of Jason Takes Manhattan?).

Sure it was made for the money and had some lofty shoes to live up to, but Saw II may be one of the most surprising hits of the year because it had virtually nothing going for it other than the installed base of the horror genre and managed to surprise a lot of people, myself included.

Is it a spectacular horror film? No, but it sure is a darn good time at the movies, and a Halloween weekend well spent, plus, based on its early success, we have Saw III to look forward to next year, even if it is only for the money.