STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951)

Up-and-coming tennis player, Guy, has been courting the daughter of a senator. His future looks to be very promising...except for the fact that he's still married to the town slut from his hometown. While on a train trip back home to discuss his divorce with his estranged wife, Guy bumps into a man, Bruno, and they strike up an uneasy conversation. Eventually the subject turns to "the perfect murder" and while Guy thinks Bruno is just joking, Bruno is actually deadly serious...not to mention highly disturbed. Bruno claims the perfect murder would be for Bruno to murder Guy's wife and for Guy to murder Bruno's father, explaining that since neither of them know their victim the police would never be able to solve the murders.

The train arrives and Guy forgets the whole silly conversation when his wife, sensing a cash cow, backs out on the promised divorce. They get in a heated argument in front of her co-workers. Later on she's at a carnival when Bruno shows up and strangles her to death. Bruno then contacts a horrified Guy and tells him that now it's Guy's turn kill his father.

If I had to rank Hitchcock movies I would place SOAT somewhere in the Top 20. It's an entertaining viewing with some interesting shots and a nice amount of dark humor. On the other hand it's not re-watchable (like PSYCHO or VERTIGO) and the character of Guy is a total idiot. All of his problems would have disappeared if he had just manned up from the beginning, but instead he spent the majority of the movie whimpering like spineless pussy. Worth a rent and that's it.

Hitch cameo.

SUMMER WARS (2009)

From the director of THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME comes the impressively animated but ridiculously plotted story of an high school math genius, Kenji, who is invited by a very cute classmate, Natsuki, to visit her family's estate for her grandmother's 90th birthday celebration and ends up nearly destroying the world. D'oh!

Things go well enough at the beginning, until he receives an mysterious email with a math problem. He replies with the answer. Turns out the email was from an "hacker artificial intelligence" named Love Machine and the answer was the code protecting a massive virtual reality world called OZ. OZ isn't just some bullshit social networking site like Facebook, but an worldwide infrastructure that controls everything from red-light signals to satellites!

That would spell Bad News Bears for most people, but luckily Natsuki's family are descendents from a samurai warriors so they have a real fighting spirit...also Natsuki's uncle is the one who original created Love Machine for the U.S. Army!!!!!!! Talk about a small world. But that's only the beginning of it. Assembled within this small family gathering is the greatest gamer on OZ; the owner of a specialty computer business who sets up a supercomputer in the living room (!!!); a military guy who gets a large radar for them; a rich guy who parks a huge yacht in the koi pond to power the supercomputer plus numerous emergency workers like paramedics and pigs. It's insane...especially when Love Machine points a falling satellite towards a nearby nuclear power plant and Kenji hacks into the satellite's GPS to redirect it while virtually fighting Love Machine in a fist fight!

Normally a story that fantastically ridiculous (and lazy) would turn me completely off, but the animation was impressive enough that I watched the entire thing and rather enjoyed it. I'll never ever watch it again, but it was a nice way to burn a few hours. Too bad the story wasn't better.

TWILIGHT GANGSTERS (2010)

Three down-on-their-luck old ladies have to resort to shoplifting to save up money to purchase tickets for their Hawaii dream vacation. While at a bank depositing their ill-gotten funds the bank is robbed and their money stolen. The three women are heartbroken and decide the only way to get the money is to rob a bank themselves.

TWILIGHT GANGSTERS is an occasionally funny film with three delightful leads, but I wish the filmmakers had made the grannies more sympathetic. I think the audience would have a better connection with them if they were say unjustly kicked out of their home and/or had to rob a bank to get money for a friend's life-saving surgery instead of three shoplifters who just want money to go on a vacation! Anyway, I liked the film and while I never laughed out loud I did find a number of scenes to be humorous.

Worth a watch, but it's nothing life changing. It could have been much better.

Hey, it's ol boy from SEX IS ZERO.

THE CUT (2007)

I never went to college, let alone film school, but if there's any film school professors out there looking for an perfect example of a movie being way, way, way more confusing than it need to be then THE CUT is for you.

I'm going to attempt to explain to you what the film is about (spoilers and all), because honestly it doesn't even matter...this film is garbage: a group of students begin their new Anatomy class where they have to dissect human bodies. For over 30 minutes absolutely nothing happens to the point where I started thinking this was maybe a drama film and not a horror film at all. Finally at 33 minutes, a female student goes to the lab in the middle of the night to do some extra studying, while she's there the lights go out and suddenly dead bodies start moving all over the place. Sounds creepy, but it wasn't at all. I've seen covers of Goosebumps books that were scarier. Anyway, she ends up dead and in the morning the students find her on an autopsy table with her heart removed. This starts a whole series of boring kills where people end up with their hearts removed.

Easy enough so far, even if it's not exciting, but then the main girl takes it upon herself to start investigating the murders (which begs the question: where are the police?). She discovers, with the help of a ghost, that there was once a young deaf/mute woman who was raised by hookers and one night she was stabbed for refusing to fuck a guy and her body dumped off at a hospital. She lived and is taken under the wing of a young doctor who helps her learn sign language. Things are going fine until one day she's kidnapped by rogue doctors and given an illegal heart transplant! Her doctor friend bursts in during the middle of the surgery and is rewarded with a scalpel to the eyehole. The woman dies during the surgery and now her ghost is haunting the daughter of the nurse that helped with the surgery who herself was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors by her husband who later tried to strangle to death the little girl who is now the main medical girl. But the husband wasn't her father because it's actually her present-day professor who is her dad because he knocked up the nurse. He's also the one that did the illegal heart transplant surgery and has kept the deaf/mute girl's dead body in a giant container of formaldehyde in his secret office along with a few hundred human hearts. I think he might have been the one doing the killings, but it also mentions that the main girl is possessed by the ghost...I think. I was yawning too hard to know for sure.

Either way, whoever was doing the killings it doesn't even matter in the least, because all of the deaths were beyond weak. Zero scares outside of loud noises, zero nudity, annoying and gross looking fat guy that eats during an autopsy, crappy looking special effects, unattractive females all around, an almost deserted college campus. There is absolutely nothing going for this film. Even ANATOMY (which I didn't really enjoy) is a better movie.

Skip it with a vengeance and forget that this movie even exists.