Tag Archives: Horror

Stranger Things (Season 2) review

04 Saturday Nov 2017

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This time the danger’s amped up to… twelve?

by Thom Yee

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Stranger Things 2 images courtesy of Netflix

The first time I fully realized that nostalgia was a real and powerful thing and, more importantly, a definite consumer force was in the early 2000s when my mind started drifting back to childhood, I first started to remember how cool the Transformers were, and I went out to buy an anniversary edition of Optimus Prime, a toy I never owned in my youth.  Of course, I’m a little too young to have been there for the beginning of The Transformers, missing out on the show during its original TV run and not seeing (Naziing?) the 1986 movie until the early ‘90s, but I definitely felt its presence in each of its Saturday morning cartoon/toy/commercial successors, from M.A.S.K. to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to COPS.  Remember COPS?  The Central Organization of Police Specialists?  Every cop had some cybernetic gimmick?  “It’s Crime Fighting Time?”  No? Continue reading →

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IT (2017) review

16 Saturday Sep 2017

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When the hell did kid actors get this good?

by Thom Yee

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IT images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I was terrified.  And I was terrified most of the time too.  I was terrified of looking stupid, I was terrified of not knowing the answer, I was terrified of letting people down, I was terrified of never having control of the situations I was in, but most of all I was terrified of the future.  I was terrified of growing up.  When I was a kid, growing up seemed less to me about gaining new knowledge and abilities and taking fate into my own hands and more a series of tests, crucibles almost, whether it was finding new friends in transitioning from elementary to junior high/junior high to high school, getting through puberty without any deep scarring, passing my driver’s license exams (with the notable hindrance of being a Chinese driver), or getting into the right university and then picking the right career path.  It felt like my passing or failing of each of those tests would become the building blocks that would make up who I was, cemented and irreversible whether I wanted to be that person or not.  And I just never felt ready for any of it Continue reading →

The Mummy (2017) review

17 Saturday Jun 2017

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Shouldn’t somebody be saying “There’s a storm coming”?

by Thom Yee

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The Mummy (2017) images courtesy of Universal Pictures

The odds are you’re never going to talk to Tom Cruise.  I mean, that’s pretty obvious from the perspective of logic and reason and cosmological significance — the odds are you’re never going to talk to a lot of people, important or otherwise.  Even you and I are probably never going to meet or have a conversation (and you come here to read our reviews all the time, don’t you?). What I mean when I say you’re never going to talk to Tom Cruise is that you’re never going to get to know Tom Cruise.  You’re never really going to meet him.  Maybe you’ll be allowed to ask him a question if you’re lucky and get chosen out of a crowd at a press junket, maybe you’ll hear what seems like a personal anecdote about him from someone you know who works in Hollywood, but Tom Cruise, a world-famous actor, a franchise unto himself and an icon who’s likely to spend the rest of his life in the public eye and leave a body of movie work behind that will be watched, loved, and even studied for generations after?  That’s not someone you’ll ever have a personal conversation with or learn a lot about even if you do somehow find yourself in a position to say something to him. Continue reading →

Kong: Skull Island review

18 Saturday Mar 2017

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‘Twas beauty killed the—what’s that. He’s still alive? Oh… well never mind then.

by Thom Yee

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Kong: Skull Island images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

So, I’ve never actually seen the original King Kong, not all the way through or all in one sitting at least. That’s not something I regret either despite being ‘the movie guy’ in my group of friends and despite being a person who prides himself on his knowledge of movie history. It may ultimately be a failing on my part, but I just don’t have a great deal of patience when it comes to the classics, and, as has been the case with Citizen Kane, The Graduate, or Scarface, I doubt that I’m going to see the original King Kong anytime soon. I’ve seen parts of it of course, the same way we’ve all watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory, pressed the wrong floor in a cramped elevator, or eaten at Subway, but there was never any intentionality behind those viewings, so while I have a pretty good idea of what the movie was about, I don’t really know what people see in it. But I have seen the 2014 Godzilla. Continue reading →

Get Out review

04 Saturday Mar 2017

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You cool like dat? I’m cool like that.

by Thom Yee

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Get Out images courtesy of Universal Pictures

One of the most cogent and convincing arguments I’ve ever heard in my life was about cheating:

“If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it’s your duty … to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift, or the Jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well I say, ‘Cheating is the gift man gives himself.'”

Eugenics isn’t explicit in that statement, but I think it is implicit, and eugenics, or at least the idea of pre-determining a preferred path based on your beliefs on superior genetic traits, is an idea at the core of Get Out. Continue reading →

Split review

28 Saturday Jan 2017

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They say this one has a surprise ending

by Thom Yee

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Split images courtesy of Universal Pictures

I’ve been a big fan of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan ever since his first movie. Well, actually, that’s not true, I’ve never seen Wide Awake, the Rosie-O’Donnel-led comedy he wrote and directed from 1998, nor did I even know about his 1992-released Praying with Anger until I bothered to look up his film credits. No, the M. Night Shyamalan I’m speaking of, the one we’re probably all thinking of when we dig into the rosier side of our movie memories, is the storyteller, the wunderkind, “The Next Spielberg”, the man who brought us The Sixth Sense. And… actually, I never saw The Sixth Sense either. ‘Cause somebody told me how it ends. I still look back on those early Shyamalan movies fondly, however, because even if I was never able to experience what it was like to sit in one of those theatres in 1999 — without any expectations as I beheld a gritty, suspenseful, unexpectedly well-told movie about seeing dead people with a monumental twist ending that would change everything — I had a pretty similar experience when I did see his follow-up, Unbreakable, the year after. Without anyone spoiling it. Continue reading →

Green Room review

10 Saturday Sep 2016

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What a bunch of jackasses

by Thom Yee

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Green Room images courtesy of A24

I’m a pretty critical person, both in real life (of hypocrisy, bureaucracy, “the man”) and in writing (with movies, TV… y’know, all the easier stuff we discuss on this website), but one thing I’ve usually stayed away from and we’ve generally steered clear of here on GOO Reviews is music criticism. There’s just something about the culture of music (a lot of things actually) that makes an honest, heartfelt analysis of it a really difficult thing to do for anyone who’s written for this website (at least so far), and it’s just something we’ve largely been able to avoid to this point. Until now, until I watched Green Room, a movie in many ways about music.

So here it goes. Continue reading →

Fear the Walking Dead — Grotesque recap

22 Monday Aug 2016

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Why I’m Dropping… Fear the Walking Dead season 2

by Thom Yee

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Fear the Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

Truth be told, I’d been thinking about it for a while. Or more precisely, I’d thought about dropping Fear the Walking Dead once before and then once again now, and those two passing thoughts were easily enough to convince me to drop the show, because, really, who’s thinking that much about Fear the Walking Dead anyway? To be honest, even I, someone who’s reviewed every episode of the show since it debuted late last summer, had almost completely forgotten about it and was actually kind of taken off guard when I saw that it was coming back to finish the back half of its second season this past weekend. Continue reading →