Simon's Movie Reviews

What do you get when you mix buckets of fake blood, creative camera operators, the humour of the Three Stooges, and a man with the most recognizable chin in Hollywood? You get Evil Dead II (1987), the horror classic that somehow manages to remake the original in the first 15 minutes and yet feel entirely original. Even though it is mostly set in a cabin in the woods, that staple location in the horror genre, it feels like a roller coaster ride. This is especially true once the film's hero, the scrappy Ash Williams, embraces the madness by arming himself with a sawed-off shotgun and attaching a chainsaw where his hand used to be. "Groovy" indeed. This gore-soaked franchise has had a long run, starting off with one low-budget movie directed by a young Sam Raimi and then growing into two sequels, a remake, comic books and a TV show with three seasons. My starting point was the third entry, Army of Darkness, which moves the action to the Middle Ages with the same ...

An Elvis Presley movie is like an Elvis Presley album: it is reasonable to expect to get a lot of rock’n’roll music. However given the fact no one has ever compared the king of rock’n’roll with Sir Laurence Olivier one might wonder if there would be any good acting in an Elvis movie. I can’t speak for his entire filmography, but I found Jailhouse Rock (1957) to be a surprisingly good piece of acting from both the king and his supporting cast. The music is of course a rocking good time. I found this black and white piece of cinema history on iTunes last week and prior to that the only Elvis Presley movie I had seen was Bubba Ho-Tep , a movie in which Bruce Campbell plays an aging Elvis battling a mummy at an East Texas retirement home. Make of that what you will. My expectations for Jailhouse Rock, directed by Richard Thorpe, were low despite the fact there are plenty of good singers who have had successful acting careers. In a way you could say there is not much acting required...