MIRACLE MILE (1988)

Los Angeles, California.  Anthony Edwards is suppose to pick up his waitress girlfriend, Mare Winningham, after she gets off work at the diner at midnight. The power goes out, so he oversleeps and by the time he gets to the diner she's long gone. He calls her from a payphone and leaves a message. The phone rings and he answers it, except it's not his gf, but instead some dude who's raving like a maniac and screaming in code about nuclear war. Anthony is really disturbed by the phone call and goes back inside the diner. As fate would have it, a government worker is inside and when she hears about the phone call she freaks out and starts making frantic phone calls on her gigantic mobile phone. Is it just a prank call or is it real? Either way, it sets off a snowballing chain of events that's fairly exciting.

The story idea is fantastic, but unfortunately the budget looked to be pretty low, the 1980's special effects are extremely dated, the casting was weak, there's hardly any violence and the tension was zero.  Interesting movie that's still worth watching if you've into nuclear war stories.  I think with a bigger budget, the right director and a much darker script MIRACLE MILE could be remade into a blockbuster thriller or a limited series on HBO.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981)

The filmmakers should thank the person who came up with that poster concept/art for every dollar this film made.

The coolest kids at school, "The Top Ten", are disappearing one-by-one. What could it be? Aliens? Wookalars? Zombie hummingbirds pecked out their eyes and now they can't find their way to school?  Maybe they're just falling asleep due to the boring script?  Nope, it's some butthole killing them because of some dumb reason. Honestly, it doesn't matter, because by the time you get to the end you'll be 99 and 44/100% asleep. Not because it's a horrible movie, just a long-winded one that has zero idea what a slasher movie audience wants. A slasher audience wants insane violence, hot nudity, blood, gore, a fun story and a badass killer. HBTM has none of those things. There's very little violence, the killer is weak, zero nudity, only a handful of blood, weak gore and the story is overly complicated.

Not a bad watch, but nothing to get excited about either. As far as early 80's slashers go, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME is watchable and fun to laugh at, but average.

He bet somebody $20 he could make that jump. Totally worth it.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER (2010)

[Update 04/11/2022: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

*Sigh* Another year, another by-the-numbers Woody Allen movie. It's all here: the three or four main characters; the intertwining of their lives and secrets; a few slightly clever plot twists and the safe ending. No ups, no surprises, no reason to stay awake and pretty much zero resemblance to the vitality and cleverness of Allen's earlier films all the way up to THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION.

The main character is Naomi Watts. She's married to struggling writer Josh Brolin who has a crush on the neighbor, Freida Pinto. Naomi's father, Anthony Hopkins, has divorced her mother, Gemma Jones, and is now married to a prostitute, Lucy Punch. Oh yea, Naomi has the hots for her boss, Antonio Banderas. All the stuff you would expect to happen does and while I did enjoy the film, it was just dead in the water from the very beginning.

Allen hasn't gone completely in the shitter like say Metallica, but he's not helping his legacy by steadily cranking out these lifeless snoozers.

According to Box Office Mojo the budget for this film was $22 million!!! I cannot even fathom why this movie would cost that. The majority of that must have been spent on the actors, cause it's definitely not up on the screen.

BEFORE THE FALL (2008)

At the beginning of the film it's announced to the world that we have 82 hours until a gigantic meteor is going to hit the Earth and kill everybody.  In real life this kind of news would make the population of Rape-Murder City to instantly jump to around 7 billion, but not here.  Pretty much the only thing that happens the entire movie is this dude locks his family up in a secluded house and tries to protect them from a local child murderer.  That's all that happens the entire movie!!!  They could have had the same tension by simply have the phone not work.

With a proper script and a good director this film could have been extremely exciting. Unfortunately, none of that was present here. Skip it and watch MIRACLE MILE instead.