They always say to get the bad news out of the way first. Well, before I reveal my top 5 most anticipated movies of early autumn, I figured I'd list the ones that you'll least likely catch me watching. So here they are in all their dull, rusty glory.
5. The Transporter: Refueled
Even ignoring the fact that Jason Statham is not starring in this, I honestly do not see the hype for this. Nobody I know is talking about it, and after seeing the trailer, I can understand why. It just looks like a run-of-the mill action movie with girls, cars, fights and explosions. Everything looks pretty much par for the course for an action movie and nothing really stands out.
4. Hotel Transylvania 2.
Hotel Transylvania was pretty much the best thing Adam Sandler was involved with in the past decade. It wasn't perfect, and did suffer from a few bad jokes, but I found it to be thoroughly enjoyable due to it's often snappy screenplay and its flawless direction by Genndy Tartakovsky (creator of Dexter's Laboratory). While Tartakovsky did return to direct the sequel, there are still some major red flags that may keep me from seeing Hotel Transylvania 2.
First of all, Adam Sandler is officially on the writing team. In the past few years, Sandler has written such films as Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star, Jack & Jill and Grown Ups 2. All of these films emphasize crude and cringe-worthy jokes that serve no purpose to the plot except to make the teenagers in the audience giggle. He does have his talents as an actor, but he is pretty much unbearable as a writer. This is in addition to the backstage issues involving co-writer Robert Smigel giving Tartakovsky a hard time and micromanaging the film's production. Even with Genndy directing, Sandler and the demanding Smigel may have had too much of an influence on the film for it to be as good as the first.
3. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
Just when you thought the Paranormal Activity series was dead and buried, in comes the sixth film in the series to make you say: "nah...I'm not seeing that." Ever since the success of the original Paranormal activity, the found footage genre has been milked to death and dragged through the mud. Films like The Devil Inside, Devil's Due and The Gallows showed that the genre had pretty much run its course. With the new Paranormal Activity film, you'd think that Hollywood would know this and add something new to the aging series. Unfortunately, what they added only makes the newest installment even less appealing
Where the earlier Paranormal Activity movies focused more on subtlety than cheap scares and special effects, the newer installments seem to be focusing on the latter. With Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, any hope of clever scares or atmospheric tension is dashed with the addition of dark cgi blobs added into the film to represent the titular ghosts. Audiences who constantly complain about horror movies "not showing enough of the monster" will likely be won over, but everyone else is just out of luck here. Expect to sleep well after seeing this installment (if you don't already fall asleep while watching it that is).
2. Goosebumps.
After something like Pixels, who would have any faith in Sony to make a good movie to honor a childhood pastime? Pixels took the video games that its intended audience grew up playing and enjoying and drowning them in a bucket of awful jokes and insufferable characters. Goosebumps, to no surprise, looks to do the same thing.
The film's trailer revealed that R.L. Stein (played by Jack Black) is not actually the main character of the film. Instead, it stars the cliched good-hearted teenager with a single parent who just moved in from another town. He is joined by an equally cliched annoying goofball friend and obligatory female love interest. As if the cliched characters weren't bad enough, the dialogue looks shrill and unfunny, and the plot is just another "Sealed Evil in a Can" story that has been done too many times to count. Perhaps if there was more of a horror element in the trailer, it might have looked more appealing. Unfortunately, the film just looks like yet another goofball comedy fueled by shallow nostalgia like Pixels.
1. Jem and the Holograms
This film, along with Ouija, is proof that Hasbro's film division is incredibly pointless. Where Ouija was a generic jump-scare fest with high school students getting killed off one by one, Jem and the Holograms is a generic rags-to-riches story where the lead singer gets into a conflict with the rest of the band. Besides Jem and the Holograms having a shallow and dull plot, the movie doesn't even seem to stay remotely true to its source material.
The original series was based on a flashy 80's rock band. The characters played 80s pop music, dressed up in flashy outfits, and infused their hair with plenty of hairspray and mousse. On the contrary, the film adaptation takes place in modern times. As seen in the trailer, things like YouTube and Photoshop are mentioned, making it clear that the studio wanted to modernize something whose fans fondly remember it as being a piece of 80's nostalgia. What's the point on banking on 80's nostalgia if you are going to take everything remotely 80's out of it? Even if it was faithful to the source material, would you really want to see the 80's equivalent of Hannah Montana on the big screen?
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