Movie Reviews

In the Dark is a  pretty tame thriller about a woman  [Elizabeth Rohm] who becomes the target of the man originally hired to aid her after she is blinded in a car accident. It isn't awful, and Rohm is gorgeous,

 but no one’s going to win any Oscars/Golden Globes/Good Effort Medals for this one.  It also looks to be filmed digitally, which to me always makes the film seem . . . off.

Ooga Booga is awful – quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen. There’s a drunk clown named Hambo that wears a pig nose and fondles himself. There’s a n African-American medical student who is, inexplicably, his greatest fan.  Said student  is killed by a racist cop named – wait for it – White, and his soul is deposited into a two foot high caricature of an African warrior Hambo created, complete with doobie dangling from his mouth. Every white person spotted after the initial ten minutes is a bigot and then killed by Ooga Booga, except for one cop spared only because he has a black spouse.

It is an awful movie, and aside from that virulently racist against Caucasians. If you reverse the color of the characters, this would be decried as Klan propaganda. So why is it ok as is?

The Last Ride is a movie about Hank Williams Sr, played by ET’s Henry Thomas, who in the last days of his life travels across the South on his way to a concert he’ll never get to play. It’s a quiet but entertaining film, somewhat spoiled by the notion that no one ever seems to pick up on who the passenger is, not even the driver that serves as his sole companion on the ride.

Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman, is a better than average sci-fi flick that  places Cruise in the role of a glorified janitor on an abandoned Earth, repairing drones damaged by alien insurgents.  There’s a big twist in the plot that’s worth waiting for, but even before that I was drawn into the world and its characters. I liked it.