The Movie Masochist
The Movie Masochist is an emotionally wounded cinephile who lives in the United States. He watches bad movies so you don't have to.
Latest Reviews
Arthur (2011)
You're back in your hometown after a long time, maybe years. The main streets look different - more crowded with chain restaurants, strip malls and office parks. You worry you might even get lost trying to find your old house. You find your old street and discover all the houses have been razed. The road itself is wider and sits under a permanent cloud of exhaust fumes. The park where you once played has morphed grotesquely into a Super Wal-Mart flanked by Home Depot and an Old Navy store. The final injury occurs when you arrive at the place where your childhood home once stood. It's now a Hooters. That's same feeling you get watching the remake of "Arthur" if you remember and like the original 1981 comedy. Read more...
Beastly (2011)
If you feel overburdened by the ability to think and believe movies should be enjoyed simply as shifting displays of color and shadow, then a cinematic breakthrough is at hand. The fairy tale-cum-teen movie "Beastly" is a real oddity because it's probably one of the few movies in existence that requires absolutely no cognition from viewers. The story adheres to the centuries-old "Beauty and the Beast" template while offering no surprises, allowing you, the viewer, to shut off your brain the way you turned off your cell phone before the movie began. It's as challenging as watching water evaporate on a hot sidewalk. Read more...
Red Riding Hood (2011)
Some stories are redone and overworked so much they have as much flavor as day-old chewing gum. Take Little Red Riding Hood, the famous children's story that originated at least 400 years ago. In recent decades it's been refitted to contemporary genres such as horror, suspense, and comedy and - God help us - even the musical. Read more...
The Roommate (2011)
Movies regularly imitate past successes, but "The Roommate" mimics "Single White Female" to such a degree that it could be accused of Single White Femaling the earlier film. If one day the Blu Ray editions of both movies end up on the same store shelf, the cover for "The Roommate" might, over time, begin to look eerily similar to that for "Single White Female." At least "The Roommate" is set on a college campus rather than a big city, although it still feels like "Single White Female: The College Edition." Read more...
The Rite (2011)
Any horror film that claims to be grounded in truth deserves suspicion. When the titles "Based on a True Story" appear, what you're going to see is true story if you define "true story" as something that is truly a story because it has a plot, characters and events that build toward a dramatic climax. Read more...
I Am Number Four (2011)
Bad movies seem to cling together like Rice Krispies in the bowl - they often have the same opening weekend, as if critics would be less likely to insult them if they traveled in pairs. Read more...
Season of the Witch (2011)
History tells us that tens of thousands of people - mostly women - were executed for supposedly practicing witchcraft in Europe during a period stretching from the plague years of the 14th century until the mid-17th century. Since reasonable people now agree witchcraft is bunk, those executions mean that a lot of innocent people died in remarkably horrible ways, some after enduring torture at the hands of church inquisitors. Now here comes "Season of the Witch," a movie that suggests "Maybe those deeply cruel religious nuts were right, at least once in a while," a notion that remains offensive even though the executions are in the distant past. Read more...
Gulliver's Travels (2010)
For some inexplicable reason Hollywood producers think the best way to use talented comedians is to remake them into inoffensive family-film stars. This strange tendency has steered the careers of numerous comics - Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Billy Murray, to name just a few- into bland territory, where the very qualities that made them funny are quickly leached away. Read more...
Skyline (2010)
If aliens came to Earth, what would they want? The movie "Skyline" answers the question in a simple and amazingly simple-minded way: brains. Read more...
Burlesque (2010)
Christina Aguilera is a pop star, but she's not a movie star yet. Someone in Hollywood decided to try to change that, to let Aguilera showcase her strengths in a vehicle that's obviously been as carefully tailored as a wedding dress. Read more...