Simon's Movie Reviews

  Alien (1979) is a perfectly executed horror movie with a simple premise that works and a slim cast treating the material seriously. The movie’s one-word title perfectly sums up the story and its deadly antagonist: an unknown alien creature is aboard a spacecraft and is killing the crew one by one. This is a B-movie plot that had been done before plenty of times and has been imitated repeatedly. However, in the highly capable hands of Ridley Scott, this haunted house movie set in space slowly build up to be one of the scariest thrillers ever made with only a few jump scares. It helps that the monster is one of the scariest creatures ever designed in the history of horror.   Two things about me and this movie’s monster: first, when I was a kid, seeing it in a 30-second trailer was enough to scare me. Second, Mel Brooks made it a lot less scary. There is an entire generation of movie-goers who were scared and possibly vomited in their popcorn bags when they first saw the sce...

  Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) is a very well made look at how reporters, back when they still had stable careers, operate in unstable countries. It looks at ethical questions, from the point of view of both the journalists covering the conflicts, and the people who actually live in the country and have to live with the impact of their coverage. One of these people is a photographer played by an award-winning Linda Hunt. Unfortunately, the other major role is played by Mel Gibson, a name now synonymous with controversy, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from seeing the movie. Between Christmas and the start of 2022 like many people I was stuck indoors with a lot of time to kill so I caught up on a few shows and movies. I can’t say I was itching to complete my viewing of Mel Gibson’s filmography, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Linda Hunt have such a prominent role. Certain TV viewers might know her as the boss on NCIS LA , but here we see her early in her...

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a movie can change a person. For me that movie was James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), a movie that made an action icon out of Sigourney Weaver after pitting her against an army of nightmarish creatures and their giant queen. This movie came out the year I was born and while I was growing up it increased in popularity achieving classic stardom as a science fiction, action and horror film. Unfortunately while I was growing up I must admit I was scared of most movie monsters, to the point that just the trailer for an Alien movie would make me nervous. Then I saw Cameron’s film and went to the dark side of the moon. Here’s the setting: it’s 2002 and my parents and I are living in Santiago, Chile. By then I haven’t seen any of the Alien films from beginning to end, but I have a general idea of what they do and how they tend to pop out of people’s chests. One evening I see that Aliens is about to start playing on a movie channel and I decide to tak...

Another year, another instance of reviewing a movie made by a director with a rather dubious personal history. Ever since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke out last year I realize there are plenty of movies on this Greatest Movies list whose crew includes directors, producers, writers or actors who have been accused of sexual misconduct/lewd behaviour/rape/being a complete scumbag. Woody Allen directed Annie Hall (1977), arguably one of his funniest movies of all times, but he was also accused of sexual abuse as far back as the early 90s and kept on working. I am a completionist and Annie Hall is next on my list, so I am going to have press on and try to look back at this movie by separating the artist from the work. This is a little bit tricky with a Woody Allen movie since in most of his movies he likes to write, direct, and be in front of the camera in the lead role. In Annie Hall his character is comedian Alvy Singer, a prototypical New Yorker as in many of Allen’s movies...

Who you gonna call? Since 1984 there is only answer to that question: GHOSTBUSTERS! Now an established part of pop culture, in no small part thanks to Ray Parker Junior’s signature theme song, it was at the time one heck of a gamble. What were the odds that a comedy/horror movie filled with some of the most expensive special effects at the time and starring the wise-cracking comedian from Caddyshack and Stripes , one half of The Blues Brothers, and the heroine from Alien would become a massive hit? With Canadian director Ivan Reitman at the helm and Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis on writing duties, it turns out the odds were pretty good. I didn’t watch Ghostbusters until sometime in the mid 90s when it was playing on TV at my grandma’s house, but before that it was firmly ingrained in my culture. Plenty of kids could hum that earworm of a song, the animated series was doing pretty good, and I had a horn shaped like Slimer on my bicycle. I think I actually ended seeing Ghostbuste...

  I have seen plenty of “end-of-the-world” movies featuring various scenarios of destruction, but Pixar’s “WALL-E” (2008) is one of the few that truly scared me into thinking this could happen. The computer animated film features a small robot left to clean up the mess left by humanity centuries after they abandoned Earth on a spaceship that serves the same purpose as Noah’s ark. Only it was not a flood of water that wrecked the planet, but a mountain of trash that humanity mass-produced since the beginning of the Industrial Revolutions. Zombies don’t exist, aliens have yet to invade us, Global Warming may or may not boil us in the near future, but a massive pile of trash burying the planet? That’s happening right now. Directed by Andrew Stanton, “WALL-E” was part of the great summer movie season of 2008, which featured the return of Indiana Jones, the Academy-Award winning performance of Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight,” and the rebirth of Robert Downey Jr. as Iro...