Can Richard Crouse review three movies in just thirty seconds? Have a look as he races against the clock to tell you about the surreal thriller “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, tick… BOOM!” and the documentary “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins Jim Richards and Jay Michaels of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today they play a round of Did Richard Crouse Like These Movies? We review the Ron Perlman flick “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, Tick… Boom” and the documentary “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road” and, for the booze portion, we talk about the William Faulkner’s favourite drink.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins CP24 to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including Ron Perlman in “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, Tick… Boom,” the documentary “Brian Wilson, Long Promised Road” and the arthouse sequel “The Souvenir Part II.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Angie Seth to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the wild Ron Perlman flick “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, Tick… Boom,” the documentary “Brian Wilson, Long Promised Road” and the arthouse sequel “The Souvenir Part II.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres, VOD and streaming services including the bizzaro-land Ron Perlman flick “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, Tick… Boom” and the documentary “Brian Wilson, Long Promised Road.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins NewsTalk 1010 guest host David Cooper on the coast-to-coast-to-coast late night “Showgram” to play the game “Did Richard Crouse like these movies?” This week we talk about the surreal Ron Perlman flick “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, Tick… Boom” and the documentary “Brian Wilson, Long Promised Road.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
“This Game’s Called Murder,” the wild new Ron Perlman movie on VOD, is a very dark comedy about consumer culture, romance and murder that feels like a cult movie in waiting.
Written and directed by Adam Sherman, the movie is a lurid, surreal story that doesn’t play by the rules. Perlman is Mr. Wallendorf, designer of women’s luxury footwear. Known for his iconic blood red stilettos, he is a fashion icon, but behind his fame is murder, greed, and betrayal.
His wife, Mrs Wallendorf (Natasha Henstridge), is as shrewd as she is brutal, as witnessed by a scene where she shoots a business rival in the forehead and then offers to dance naked for him as he lay bleeding to death.
His daughter Jennifer (Vanessa Marano) is an alcoholic social media influencer whose on-line habits confound her father. “Why do you insist on having the entire world see you in your underwear,” he asks. “My fans love me,” she says.
Their lives are, to put it mildly, complicated. Things become more complex, and deadly, when Jennifer sabotages her father’s business as he tries to maintain a happy public face.
Ripe with violence and sex, “This Game’s Called Murder” has a kind of dream logic to its plotting. The story is jumps around from character to character, plot point to plot point, creating an absurdist whole that aims to make a statement on social ills, using violence and very dark humour.
Greed, on-line influencers, alienation and consumerism are all ripe for social satire, but director Sherman’s (who also wrote the script) scattergun approach muddies the messages. The film’s twists and turns are often eccentrically entertaining but, in the second half, become tiresome.
Strange for the sake of being strange will only get you so far, and Sherman extends the weird stuff so far it feels like it might snap like an overstretched elastic band.
The movie’s visual style catches the eye, and Perlman is always a welcome presence, but as enjoyable as “This Game’s Called Murder” can be in its individual elements, it favours edge at the expense of the storytelling.
Sci-fi and horror rarely mix, but when they do it can result in classics like Alien, a near perfect fusion of scientific fiction and terror. Or, when the blend isn’t right, you get flops like The Mole People.
Dark Skies tries to hit the right balance with a story about a suburban couple, an ET disguised as a human and some good old-fashioned alien abduction.
Dark Skies did OK at the box office, but horror stories about outer space creatures have succeeded in the past.
The premise of Species is pure sci-fi. Scientists discover that alien and human DNA can be combined. Of course nothing bad will happen when you create a human with alien traits, right? A-listers like Ben Kingsley added some cache, but it was the horror of the H.R. Giger-designed alien and Natasha Henstridge’s flicking frog-like tongue that made the movie memorable.
Years before Peter Jackson hit it big with Lord of the Rings, he made a film that mixed sci-fi, horror and a big helping of humour. Bad Taste sees a small town taken over by aliens who harvest humans as ingredients for their fast-food restaurants. Über low-budget, the movie was called a “deranged, bloodthirsty heir to the Marx Brothers’ slapstick kingdom” by a BBC film reviewer. Its best joke may be on the DVD cover. The film title’s font looks like the logo of the U.S. takeout restaurant Fatburger.
It Came from Outer Space (one of the first alien invasion films), The Blob and giant ant movie Them! all combine the best elements of sci-fi and horror, but not all movies are as successful. The title Robot Monster promises some futuristic scares, but earned the title “Baddest of the B-Movies” in Michael Sauter’s book The Worst Movies of All Time mainly because the robot was actually just an actor dressed in a gorilla suit topped with a diving helmet.
The name Bela Lugosi conjures up images of horror to anyone familiar with his portrayal of Dracula, so a sci-fi movie with the genre legend should be both speculative and spooky, right? Wrong. The Golden Turkey Awards dubbed Plan 9 from Outer Space “The Worst Film Ever,” but it wasn’t Bela’s fault. He died before the movie was actually shot, but director Ed Wood Jr. used test footage of the actor in the finished film; hence the video box tagline, “Almost starring Bela Lugosi.”
