Ratings Central - Movies

  The Invitation was a movie that kinda' came out of left-field for me. I had heard nothing about it, seen nothing about it, which is semi-unusual for a film with a theatrical release at least. None-the-less, tickets were discounted, so my fiancé and I went to see it. I love horror, this was apparently a horror/thriller. Could be good. From here on, spoilers. Photo by University of Maine The movie by its-self wasn't actually terrible; I've easily seen much worse. Having said that, if it wasn't discounted, I would not have gone to the theatre for it. Easily could have been a direct-to-home release. The main issue the movie had in my opinion, was that it was distinctively cut into three sections, and not like beginning, middle and end. What I mean is the first half hour of the movie is dedicated to learning the characters and presenting what appears to be a ghost story of sorts. I like haunting movies and stories, so I was interested. The second-third of the movie was thi

I love the MCU. I love how integrated the stories are. Having been a comic book collector and lover of that media, I don't always care for the things Marvel or Disney change. Still, I do understand most of these changes based on making something that the general audience will not only understand but actually like as well. I didn't care for Black Widow, The Eternals, or Shang-chi so for me, I wanted, no I needed a film to bring me back to the MCU. We're a few films into phase 4 now, and there doesn't seem to be any real build-up to a "big bad" like Thanos. We've had teasers of big enemies in some of the Marvel shows but nothing concrete yet. Surely we'll see something in the Multiverse of Madness right! Right? Right. About that. Photo via The Direct Let's go ahead and say I enjoyed the film, but I didn't love it. I wasn't in awe of the imagery of the Multiverse. I wasn't shocked or taken aback by most of the moments or events within the

To say the very least, I'm a bit of a horror fan. Jason, Michael and Fred are my main guys like most horror fans, but Ghostface was never far behind them. I still remember when Scream was released back in the '90s and it was such a fiasco. Yeah, we'd all seen slasher films in the past, but none of them had been as creative as Scream yet. Scream was really the first non-comedy/horror to push the Meta of horror movies right into the viewers' faces. A "Whodunnit" plot mixed with a new iconic killing machine and the saga was born. The original trilogy followed all the steps you would expect from a trilogy. Ironically, these steps were even told directly to the audience during the 3rd film.  Photo by Variety Then, the hiatus. Scream was one of the "big" horror franchises to actually pump the breaks after the 3rd film. A bold move to say the least. Nowadays, this would never happen. Production companies are way too greedy to let something simmer like Screa

Let's get the easy stuff out of the way; see what I did there? Anyways, I love the whole trilogy of Matrix movies. In fact, I believe Matrix: Reloaded is the best film of the original trilogy, and yes, I also realize that my views here are far from universal. Having said that, let's also get out of the way immediately that if you thought this was a movie that would "Reboot" the franchise by pretending like Reloaded and Revolutions did not exist, you will be mistaken. Instead, Resurrections embraces everything that the previous three films had established. Needless to say though, that if you did not like Reloaded or Revolutions, you may not like this movie. Image by Engadget However, I did like the movie. As with all movies, there are some issues, and glaring ones at that, but overall, I loved how the film re-invented the franchise but specifically remembered its roots. As the previous films did, Resurrections is almost a biopic about how our society is as a whole, giv

Those that know me well, will know that I'm into comics. Maybe not as much as I used to be, I've always loved Marvel comics specifically, and Spiderman is my guy. I used to read as many different iterations as I could from Spectacular Spiderman, Amazing Spiderman, Web of Spiderman, Ultimate, the list goes on and on. Like most of us, I needed to know where the story goes now that Mysterio was killed and made public Spidey as Peter Parker. I will not spoil anything from the movie that was not already presented in a trailer of some-sort. If you haven't even seen a trailer, well, then maybe stop here.  Let's get my initial impression out of the way. Yes, I loved it. Past Spiderman movies have done multiple villains and failed miserably, but this one does a pretty good job of giving each of them their own respective screen time and a real reason to be there. There's lots of action and, surprisingly to me, lots of emotion. I cried three times just as an example (Yeah I

Like many, I grew up in the 80's. I grew up with He-man, G.I.Joe, M.A.S.K, Transformers and, yup, you guessed it, The Ghostbusters. I remember the first time Dad let me watch the VHS (For those of you playing at home, a VHS was the version of streaming movies, but in physical form, similar to DVD's but I know some of you don't even remember those) for the first time and I was terrified of a few scenes in the first movie. The librarian and especially when Dana gets grabbed by arms in the chair and dragged into the kitchen. As a five or six year old, yeah, that's pretty scary. I fell in love with those movies, and shortly thereafter with the animated series 'The Real Ghostbusters'. I'm not sure which was based on each other  the show or the movies, but there were definitely  some interesting ideas in the cartoon. But, my childhood is not why you're here reading. You want to know how Ghostbusters: Afterlife ( GBA )  held up to the original series. I'm g

Let's start this off right. If you haven't watched the Black Widow and expect to, then turn away now as this review will easily have spoilers. Scroll down if you're ready to read. Was that enough time? Ok good. So right out of the gate, this was the first Marvel movie I really had no interest in seeing. And being that this is the first Marvel film since Endgame, there actually was some pressure to perform. For me, I already knew who Black Widow was. I knew her story and worse off, I knew her ending in the MCU. For me this really hurt the film before it even began; I knew she would be ok because the film takes place after Civil War but before Infinity War. Being that she's in the movie post Infinity War, needless to say, she's going to live. Because of this, the stakes weren't really high. It was hard to get emotionally involved worrying about the character, unlike Endgame where I cried when she died.  Photo from Polygon All that aside, the movie started off grea