Richard has a look at the raunchy puppet movie “The Happytime Murders,” the time-travelling rom com “Little Italy,” the “Papillon” reboot and the gritty crime drama “Crown and Anchor” with the CFRA Morning Rush host Bill Carroll.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Make no mistake, “The Happytime Murders” is not a Muppet movie. Sure, the puppets look like they just wandered in from “Sesame Street,” but the latest Melissa McCarthy film takes place a few blocks away in a much worse part of town.
Set in a Los Angeles where humans and puppets co-exist—imagine “Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s” Toontown with hand puppets—“The Happytime Murders” is an R-rated comedy that sees the felt cast members of ’80s children’s TV show “The Happytime Gang” systematically murdered by a mysterious killer.
Next on the hit list is Jenny (Elizabeth Banks), a burlesque dancer who was the “The Happytime Gang’s” sole human cast member. She’s also the ex-girlfriend of Phil Philips (Bill Barretta), the first puppet to join the LAPD. After a scandal pushed him off the force he became a private investigator but when his older brother and “The Happytime Gang” actor, Larry (Victor Yerrid), is offed, and with Jenny in danger, he teams up with his former partner Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) to find the puppet serial killer. “If it gets crazy,” he says, “I’m going to get crazy.”
Repeat after me, “The Happytime Murders” is not a movie for kids. With the first F- bomb less than thirty seconds in, the tone is set early. By the time we get to the puppet porn shoot and McCarthy snorting ecstasy with down-on their-luck puppets it’s abundantly clear this isn’t your father’s Muppet movie. Trouble is, I’m not sure who it is for. The idea of a raunchy puppet flick isn’t new, “Meet the Feebles,” “Team America” and others have put the ‘R’ in marionette with great success but they did it with wit as well as in-your-face vulgarity. In “The Happytime Murders,” easily the least funny comedy to hit screens this year, the laugh lines mostly get laughs because we’re not used to seeing puppets in… er… ahhh… compromising positions. Watching McCarthy and Maya Rudolph, who plays Phil’s love struck secretary Bubbles, flounder in a sea of felt and unfunny “gags,” is almost as sad as seeing the vaunted Henson name in the opening credits.
You know when someone constantly swears just for the sake of swearing? That’s shock value. “The Happytime Murders” is all shock, very little value.
Imagine “Tango & Cash” with a demonic twist.
In “Deliver Us From Evil” Eric Bana is Sarchie, an NYPD cop partnered with Butler (Joel McHale), his wisecracking sidekick.
Like Messrs. Tango and Cash, they are fearless but somewhat mismatched. Sarchie is a cop with “radar,” a nose for trouble, while Butler is a wisenheimer who, when a disheveled suspect grimaces at him, foaming at the mouth, says, “Do you think she’s single?”
A series of seemingly unrelated 911 calls—a domestic dispute, an incident at a zoo and a possible home invasion—change the story from cop drama to supernatural police procedural. Strange things happen. Holy candles won’t burn in the house of one of the 911 callers. One of the perps speaks Latin and scratches until her fingers bleed.
Skeptical at first Sarchie refuses to blame “invisible fairies” for the strange behavior, but working with a Jesuit Priest, Father Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez), Sarchie and Butler become convinced there is more at play here than just human nature.
The investigation leads them to a trio of men, (Chris Coy, Dorian Missick and Sean Harris) soldiers who returned from Iraq with PTDS (Post Traumatic Demonic Possession.) Piecing together the links becomes a dangerous job for Butler, Sarchie and even the officer’s family (Oliver Munn and daughter played by Lulu Wilson).
“Delivers Us From Evil” relies on jump scares—those “boo” moments that get your heart racing—and while a few of the jumps work, most simply deliver a jolt with nothing behind it, but there is at least one shock cat lovers are going to h-a-t-e.
There is plenty of atmosphere—apparently it rains all the time in the Bronx—and a few creepy moments—was that a snake or an old pipe?—but the truly eerie stuff is underplayed when a movie like this should be really dialing up the action.
It’s all a bit dull. There are no truly memorable moments. We’ve seen the exorcism stuff before—without the head spinning and pea soup—in everything from “The Exorcist” to “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” but the thing that really sinks the movie’s momentum aren’t the stock characters or lack of new thrills but the exposition scenes that explain the obvious. Director Scott Derrickson, who also made the considerably creepier “Sinister,” doesn’t trust the audience to follow the simple story so he has the characters walk us through it almost one line at a time.
“Deliver Us From Evil” doesn’t feel like a summer movie. Usually we look to July and August to deliver us from lame movies but this one has the feel of those horror flicks starring a familiar-but-less-than-household-name that fills up theatres in January and February.
“Blended” reunites “cinematic soul mates” Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Of course, this is a romantic comedy, so even though they hate one another in the first couple of reels, they end up thrown together on an exotic vacation to Africa. From the first time they mention the journey you know it is just a matter of time until they put their acrimonious feelings aside and someone says, “It’s great we came on this trip.”
So how do Sandler and Co. spice up a predictable story? Easy, they add a dash of “The Brady Bunch,” some beautiful scenery and an all monkey show band.
Sandler is Jim, a widower with three girls (Bella Thorne, Emma Fuhrmann and Alyvia Alyn Lind) who manages a sporting goods store when he’s not missing his late wife. He’s a guy’s guy who named one of his daughters after his favorite network, ESPN.
Barrymore is Lauren, a single mom with two rambunctious boys (Braxton Beckham and Kyle Red Silverstein) who miss their deadbeat dad (Joel McHale). She’s the buttoned-down owner of a closet reorganization company called Closet Queens.
A blind date brings them together but is so disastrous it almost keeps them apart forever. That is until circumstances conspire—it’s too “meet cute” to detail here—to place them both at a ritzy African resort for a Blended Family retreat.
“Is this a sick dream?” Jim says when he first sees Lauren. “What is happening here?”
“We’re here for the zero romance package,” she informs anyone who’ll listen.
Feelings of disgust and hate between the two melt away as their kids do cute things and they learn not to rely on first impressions.
“Blended” is one of Sandler’s sweet family comedies. Well, it’s as sweet as a comedy with Tampax gags can be, but it is a step up from the gross out tone of “Jack and Jill” and “That’s My Boy.”
A small step up, but a step nonetheless.
It’s a heartfelt dose of humor with slightly less vulgarity than Sandler’s recent movies. Add in a few wide-eyed kids with mommy and daddy issues and you have a slightly off-kilter version of “With Six You Get Egg Roll” filtered through Sandler’s juvenile sensibility. He’s a bigger kid than the children in the film and never met a bathroom joke he didn’t like, but he has good chemistry with Barrymore and “Wedding Singer” fans—I’m still trying to expel “50 First Dates” out of my memory—will enjoy seeing them reunited.
The usual Sandler crowed also appears. Shaquille O’Neal brings some awkward charm to lines like, “When she gets flappin’, things happen,” and Kevin Nealon does some enjoyable double-speak, but the scene stealer here is Terry Crews as the leader of a singing group who acts as the Greek Chorus at the resort. His performance lends new meaning to the term over-the-top, but his brand of unbridled silliness is an antidote to the sentimentality the movie occasionally finds itself moving toward.
Sandler has been hit-and-miss lately—mostly missing with big laugh-free comedies—but the goodwill he and Barrymore bring to “Blended” puts it a notch above his recent work. Although much of the humor is Sandler boilerplate stuff but a musical montage when Sandler realizes his daughter isn’t just a tomboy anymore is funny and worth a look.
