Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022) - Movie Review

2022 seems to be the year where a lot of filmmakers got super-nostalgic and wanted to share that with their audiences. This will mark the fourth film I’ve looked at in the last twelve months involving a director dramatising their childhood, and the fifth involving a director dramatising themselves in general. Except what Richard Linklater has put together here goes further into the fictionalised side of things than his contemporaries, as it starts out with Stanley (Milo Coy) being picked out of the school yard by NASA to be part of their space program, but then reveals itself to be much less fantastical than that would imply.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) - Movie Review

The formula that made Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle work is so brain-crappingly simple, it’s still bizarre to think that the numerous video game-centric films to come before it hadn’t cracked it. It took one of the most common and innocuous aspects of video gaming, the act of playing as a pre-designed character, and used to deliver some of the best body-swap comedy I’ve ever seen. I still can’t get over that it featured Jack Black acting like a Valley Girl, a combination that should’ve soured me from the guy’s work forevermore, and still managed to bring out the belly laughs. And with its sequel, it doubles down on that same formula and manages to do even better.

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: While searching an abandoned house, Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and Sam (Caleel Harris) find a mysterious book with a lock on it that was apparently written by R. L. Stine. When they open it, they discover the ventriloquist dummy Slappy (Mick Wingert) who uses his magical powers to help the boys around the house... at first. It seems that Slappy is up to his old tricks, and he's planning to make this Halloween far scarier than anyone in the town would have expected, and it's up to Sonny, Sam and Sonny's sister Sarah (Madison Iseman) to stop him.

The Polka King (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Polish-born Jan Lewan (Jack Black) is a polka bandleader with quite the following in his home of Pennsylvania. In fact, his fans believe in him so much that they are willing to invest thousands of dollars into his numerous business, not the least of which being his music. However, it seems that his business dealings aren’t entirely on the up-and-up, as he soon finds himself under investigation for financial fraud. Will Jan have to face his actions or will he go on to take the stage once again?

Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) - Movie Review

While How To Train Your Dragon serves as a lot of people’s evidence that Dreamworks is far better than we give them credit for, the Kung Fu Panda films are also an example of the studio at their best. Admittedly, the entire franchise started on a rather ill-fitting note by casting Jack Black as the main character, and sure his mannerisms were quite grating to start out with, but it had a sense of excitement and fun that a lot of other recent family films were lacking. The animation was high-energy and very well-crafted, leading to probably some of the best fight scenes of any film series of the last several years, the acting was top-notch with an all-star cast that contained some real martial arts legends like Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Oh, and the writing took the standard “be yourself” theme of a lot of family-friendly fare and executed it so well that it managed to break the mould of its kind and surpass the genre clichés. You can imagine, with a pedigree like this, that this third film would have some rather high expectations. For reasons I will get into with the review proper, I was really not looking forward to this. But hey, after the weaksauce family offerings of the last long while, I’m still positive that this will be a decent watch. How decent is the question, though.

Goosebumps (2016) - Movie Review

You want to talk nostalgic children’s horror franchises, you can’t get far without encountering something relating to Goosebumps. The house that R.L. Stine built, this over 20-year-old series was responsible for introducing whole generations of kids to the things that go bump in the night, either through the original novellas or the TV series. Well, not to go all Troy Steele here, and I certainly don’t wish to ape that asshole in any way, but I think the world has superglued its nostalgia goggles to its face when it comes to this series. When news first hit that this film was being made, with these people attached to it, people were already screaming “cop out”, “cash grab” and “BE-TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYAL!”. Yeah, god forbid someone ruin the sanctity of stories where prune cookies turn people into senior citizens or the psychotic mayor of a model town that taunts a captive kid with a phantom baseball game.

Don’t get me wrong, I love these stories for their own reasons and I’ll even admit that both the books and the TV show could get legitimately scary at times like with The Haunted Mask and even My Best Friend Is Invisible; hell, the latter was what first convinced me to start up the now-dead Grey Vault review series because it still creeped me out so much. I just don’t think it should be held as this impenetrable bastion of quality in terms of family-friendly entertainment; this isn’t Avatar: The Last Airbender we’re talking about here. So, with all that in mind, let’s take a look at the film several years in the making. Readers beware, you’re in for a scare.