Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge (Review)

September 26, 2018ByTars Tarkas

Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge

2018
Written and directed by Doug Campbell

When you are stalked by yourself but yourself is also a doctor

After waiting far too long, Dr. Albert Beck is back again as the doctor who just loved love so much he would kill anyone who got in the way of his demented fantasies. Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge not only brings back Dr. Beck, it also brings back the Green family from the first movie. Sophie Green (Brianna Joy Chomer) and her mother Adrienne (Deborah Zoe) are back, along with the ever-useless father, Jim (Jon Briddell). Sophie has returned in Goth Form, dark hair, full of nightmares about her time with Beck. But Beck is a free man (thanks to seducing a juror!) and has even gotten a teaching job at a university in Arizona. Sophie decides that it is time to be proactive and enrolls in the school as well with the express goal of forcing Beck out.

Driving while goth

It’s a revenge movie, but this time the victim is someone who is actually bad. But in Lifetime fashion, Beck has some tricks of his own for getting revenge on the revenger. And he may have just found the young lady love of his life! Lifetime really went all out here, hats off to Eric Roberts and Doug Campbell for this amazing gift of a movie. Not only is Dr. Beck still having his obsessions and fantasies, but the fantasies have spilled into his reality. Beck spends part of the film arguing with a more sensible version of himself, who in true Dr. Beck style is always drinking and dressed like he’s on a tropical vacation. The fun in the film is so much is fantasy mixed with reality it’s often a guessing game as to whether things are real or going off the rails in Beck’s fantasy mind. Not knowing makes it so much more fun and more crazy as they can get away with goofy stuff, you’ll just think it’s fantasy until it isn’t, or isn’t until it is. Patient’s Revenge is not above trying to quadruple mindfreak you.

Perfectly sane, this happens all the time

InMovie Reviews

Stalked by My Doctor: The Return (Review)

September 24, 2018ByTars Tarkas

Stalked by My Doctor: The Return

2016
Written and directed by Doug Campbell

When last we left Dr. Beck, he was fleeing from unjust prosecution just because he kidnapped and faked the death of a teenager in order to rape her as part of an obsessed stalking spree. A simple misunderstanding, for sure, but for now he’s hiding out in Acapulco, Mexico under the name Dr. Victor Slauson and getting rejected by the visiting ladies his own age, as his lame pickup lines don’t work on them. Fate intervenes again and Dr. Beck is on the beach when an young girl almost drowns, and due to his doctor skills he is able to save her life. He also begins a new obsession, and we’re back on the Lifetime train!

Stalked By My Doctor was great lifetime fun that was full of twists and turns, punctuated by the amazing Eric Roberts bringing to life a character with obvious issues that becomes deadly obsessed with younger women. The fact that Roberts can make such a reprehensible character charismatic to the point where you feel sorry for him is a testament to the man’s acting chops and to the writing and directing from Doug Campbell.

InMovie Reviews

Animal World (Review)

July 7, 2018ByTars Tarkas

Animal World

aka 动物世界 aka Dongwu Shijie

2018
Based on the manga by Nobuyuki Fukumoto
Written and directed by Han Yan

The trailer for Animal World featured a murder clown slicing and dicing his way through subway cars full of rejected alien designs from the Star Wars prequels. Also Michael Douglas was randomly in it. These things meant that of course I was going to go watch it if I got a chance, and thanks to the magic of it actually getting a release in America and MoviePass, I snagged me a seat as soon as humanly possible. It also meant that I saw two separate Michael Douglas movies in theaters in one week, as Ant-Man and the Wasp also dropped. This is what we call synchronicity, and further solidified the goal of seeing Animal World in theaters. While the trailers were almost entirely murder clown-focused, Animal World is actually a movie about high-stakes gambling, as in you play Rock/Paper/Scissors on a ship in international waters, and if you lose, you get experimented on until you die! Don’t worry, it’s even more weird than it sounds, yet I can’t say I was disappointed.

Zheng Kaisi (Li Yifeng) is your typical young guy with problems, in that his parents were brutally assaulted as a child, leaving his dad dead, his mom in a coma, and Kaisi imprinted with a cartoon of a murder clown that was playing on the television during the attack. Now, whenever he is stressed, he will start seeing images of the monsters and believes he is transforming into the murder clown himself and striking them down. While this leads to some ridiculous imagery, it doesn’t lead to a healthy mental life, which is why he’s working as a clown in an arcade and perpetually broke. He can’t even afford to marry his girl Liu Qing (Zhou Dongyu – This Is Not What I Expected), who works at a nurse at the facility his mom is kept at. This changes when his former childhood friend Li Jun (Cao Bingkun) reappears with a can’t miss opportunity to make money. We all know this will miss spectacularly, and now Kaisi is in massive debt. Big enough debt goons are following him. Goons working for Michael Douglas, who plays a bored bankster who has resorted to organizing death sports among people who have gigantic debts. I guess it’s more profitable than them dying in bankruptcy?

InMovie Reviews

Batman Ninja (Review)

June 25, 2018ByTars Tarkas

Batman Ninja

aka ニンジャバットマン

2018
Written by Kazuki Nakashima
English version written by Leo Chu and Eric S. Garcia
Directed by Junpei Mizusaki

Batman Ninja, what the heck? You could have been so good, but you are just a beautiful mess that spends too much time being boring before getting to the good stuff. We are now in the reality where a film involving Batman villains piloting a giant combining mech is boring. This is truly the darkest timeline! Batman Ninja has two versions, one in Japanese with English subtitles, and one with an English dub. The English version has a bunch of extra dialogue not in the Japanese version (but since the original subtitles are just a transcript of the English version, there are subtitles that display when no character is speaking, and when they do talk some of what they say is different!) Most of the extra dialogue is just expository and explains things that are readily obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention.

Noted Batman villain Gorilla Grodd (wait, what???) builds a time machine device at Arkham Asylum and suddenly all the criminals of Gotham City are blasted to the past of ancient Japan. Batman soon pops up there as well, but what was seconds between jumps in his time turns out to be two years after the rest of the criminals arrived, and now Joker is a lord who controls a stable of samurai who wear his visage as masks. The rest of the criminals have also ran wild. It’s the warring states period and we get a bit of a history lesson as Catwoman explains to Batman which criminals are in charge of which states in their quests to unify Japan. Don’t worry, Alfred and the Batmobile are also back in time (okay, at this point things are so bonkers why didn’t they just make this an Elseworlds-style story set in Japan instead of this time travel stuff? At least with that we could get right to the story and have less setup!)

InMovie Reviews

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (Review)

June 18, 2018ByTars Tarkas

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight

2018
Written by Jim Krieg
Based on the graphic novel Gotham by Gaslight written by Brian Augustyn
Directed by Sam Liu

Jack the Ripper stalks the streets of 1880s Gotham City. As the murders pile up, the police are helpless to stop them. But there is a Batman in this world…

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is based on one of the original alternate reality tales that would eventually become the Elseworlds brand at DC, though the story has been altered to better reflect the animated movie format and some modern sensibilities. Overall, we get something that feels closer to what would be produced from the 90s animated series than what some of the recent DC animated films have come out with. That’s a good thing, as the series is a high-water mark that all too often these films are unable to attain, despite some notable exceptions.

Gotham is easily transformed in style to a 19th century British city, it is sort of interesting how easily the pieces slide together. Bruce Wayne is still a rich playboy, but he also has connection to his orphan roots via Sister Leslie and her orphanage. This gives him another connection to the victims of the killer, as they are largely poorer women, some of which have gone through the same orphanage. Public outcry is muted because the victims are largely lower class women (mostly prostitutes), but actress Selina Kyle’s voice is one of the loudest to try to get the police to do anything. They are limited by the investigative tools of the time and by distractions of a World’s Fair preparation. An element not really used from historical accounts is the press whipping this up into a frenzy, besides deserted streets there is often nothing really indicating people are afraid (and the deserted streets might just be saving some animation budget!) The police presence is also lacking until it factors into the plot, at which point there are more police than grains of sand on the beach.

InMovie Reviews

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay (Review)

June 11, 2018ByTars Tarkas

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay

2018
Written by Alan Burnett
Directed by Sam Liu

Hot off the heels of the fantastic animated Batman: Assault on Arkham and the uneven but ultimately okay live action Suicide Squad, we got ourselves a new entry in the franchise with Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay! DC animated movies are notoriously hit or miss, but this time we got a relatively good one, buffed up by a core crew that has to deal with multiple parties interested in a magical card. Though not as superior as the original animated version, it is still good enough to deserve a watch.

Amanda Waller is still using task Force X to take care of dirty deeds and for her own personal projects, this time on a very personal mission. Deadshot (Christian Slater) is back, along with Harley Quinn (Tara Strong, naturally!) and Captain Boomerang (Liam McIntyre). They are joined by the freezing-powered Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), ethical martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), and body-modification enthusiast Copperhead (Gideon Emery) on their off the books mission where they are only given a name to track The mission is so off-books they have to drive around in a run down RV, though that does allow the characters to interact more and have conversations in a confined space.

Harley Quinn still gets many of the good lines, correctly toning her down as the stakes get raised. The down point is she’s basically a supporting character there to add flavor to the overall story, and doesn’t seem to have any sort of story arc. Captain Boomerang and Deadshot still hate each other, but have developed a working relationship by this point that doesn’t mean they won’t still insult each other. Boomerang at least gets to throw a bunch of boomerangs this time! The big wrench is Bronze Tiger, who aligns strongly on the side of morality (even though that’s just because he doesn’t want to kill innocent people!) and thus forces the other members of the team to stay on mission, sometimes by punching them until they comply. The film opens with a group lead by Deadshot and containing a few characters I had to look up (what can I say, I grew up on Marvel!) Count Vertigo, Punch, and Jewelee, all but Deadshot failing to come out of that one alive. Sorry, Punch and Jewelee fans, maybe next movie…

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