Saw X (2023) - Movie Review

On the 11^th of October, 2014, I made my first blog post for Mahan's Media titled “Why didn’t I start this sooner?” I named it that partly because I originally started Mahan’s Media as a holdover while I kept trying to get my old YouTube videos together, which took way too bloody long because, as anyone who has read anything I’ve written before will tell you, I’m not that great at editing. But also because I had been writing mini-reviews for myself for quite a while before that. They weren’t as detailed as the thousand-word-minimum stuff I used to put up on here, but there were a lot of them, along with their accompanying place on a ranked list for 2012, 2013, and 2014.

That was the policy with their listings on here too, until I finally realised that listing them in that arbitrary order made it far more difficult to actually find specific reviews that it should have been. I still keep those lists on my computer, and use them for reference when drafting the year-end lists, but I figure being user-friendly should come first, so I rearranged them alphabetically by year when I did my four-year-long clean-up of the blog. Of course, since I still list everything by year of Australian release, there’s likely to be some further confusion but hey: At least I’m learning.

And indeed, the nine years that have transpired since that first post have indeed been a learning experience for me. I started out as an Angry Critic clone who was fascinated by the art of riffing, but didn’t have any formal training in such things, and quite frankly, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Hell, I’m still not sure if I know. All these reviews and listicles have been as much about figuring myself out as figuring out any film or other piece of media that I’ve come across, and I genuinely think that writing so damn much on here has helped shape me into the man I am today.

What began as an obsessive hobby has grown to the point where my high school dream of becoming a paid writer actually came true thanks to FilmInk bringing me on-board. I may miss one or two screenings due to bad scheduling on my part, but I pride myself on my consistency otherwise with a same-day turnaround for any screening my editor sends me out to. I cut my teeth on watching four films a day at the cinema, and doing mini-reviews for all of them between screenings; I’ve put in my 10,000 hours and then some, and in my case, I have been rewarded for my efforts.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) - Movie Review

Rambo is one of the most classic action franchises of all time. It is seriously weird thinking about just how influential the first two entries are, setting the tone for a lot of action cinema to come out of post-Vietnam America. The first remains one of the most brutal depictions of PTSD to make it to the big screen, and the second basically set the blueprint for every jungle-set military action-thriller to come after, up to and including the also-highly-influential Predator.

The third film… exists, and even as someone who takes pride in recollecting pop culture minutiae, I can barely remember anything about it. Then there was Rambo ’08, which boosted the gore standard in a way that, given what it was depicting, must’ve hit close to home considering it went on to inspire real-life Burmese freedom fighters. Following any of that up was gonna be a hard ask, and what we get here is… complicated.

Overlord (2018) - Movie Review

 

There was a time when saying that Nazis are bad wouldn’t have been met with so much resistance. There was a time when seeing Captain America punch Hitler in the face wouldn’t have drawn accusations on the artists being SJWs. There was a time when recognising that the Nazis are responsible for some of the greatest atrocities in human history was the least controversial statement a person could make. But it seems that, in an age where white supremacy is a hot-button issue, that time is not now. Many people aren’t exactly happy with this idea, myself included, and that is why this film is such a delightfully demented breath of fresh air.

Cabin Fever (2016) - Movie Review

Aside from making me feel really bloody old knowing that the film is over a decade old by now, Eli Roth’s directorial debut Cabin Fever was the world’s first exposure to Roth’s… interesting approach to filmmaking. Namely, hateful lead characters with sprinklings of batshit insane in the script. It has a handful of scenes that have gone into memetic legend because of their strangeness, none more so than this little beauty and it set a trend for horror writing that has plagued us ever since. It’s another example of the exception of the rule that became the rule, only here that prospect turned out to be far more disastrous than anyone could have foreseen. And then some idiot by the professional name of Travis Z decided he wanted to remake this "classic". I’d call this pointless, except it isn’t even the worst offender in that regard this year alone, so I’m willing to give this film its day in court. This is Cabin Fever.

The Green Inferno (2015) - Movie Review

I’ve talked before about the confounding writing trend in horror films that says that, because most of the characters are going to die anyway, we shouldn’t be made to have any emotional connection to them. As such, the majority of the main cast is written to be hateful by whatever way possible, usually through the exhibition of utterly misanthropic behaviour. Well, the director of today’s film is one of the forefathers of the style in today’s cinema: Eli Roth. He is also supposedly responsible for the almost-hilariously misnamed ‘torture porn’ sub-genre, alongside James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Now, even though his films may contain some of the most loathsome core characters in film, I do not think he is a bad filmmaker; after all, there were parts of Hostel that I could get into and his work with RZA made for a surprisingly entertaining flick with The Man With The Iron Fists. Well, since this is his first time in the director’s chair since he made the Thanksgiving fake trailer for the Grindhouse film project, easily the best work of his career, let’s see if he has grown at all in that time as he creates an homage to the 80’s Amazon Cannibal sub-genre.