Crapshoot 2018: Where Things Get Weird (Finale Part 1)

Every once in a while, the film industry will produce duds for which there simply seems to be no rational explanation.

Crapshoot 2018: Potholes on Jump Street

No Hollywood. CHIP only happens when you allow it to.

Crapshoot 2018: Bad Fantasy

There's a disturbing lack of magic of any sort in these.

Minor Delay on "Crapshoot"

As most of you always know, my readers, the word delay is one that I despise having to ever type. Unfortunately, Influenza doesn't care about productivity, only stripping away the weekend of extensive editing I had planned in favor of shivering and passing in and out of lucidity, while hacking up my entire lung.

So yeah, unfortunately the last couple of hours has been the first time in almost 3 days I've had the strength to even hold my head up. Fortunately I seem to be slowly moving through the worst of it.

While the next installment of "Crapshoot 2018" was supposed to hit Monday, I'll be bumping that date to Wednesday for now. After that however, a regular schedule of Monday, Wednesday, Friday, releases to completion should maintain course.

Thank you once more for your understanding. Now if you don't mind, I'll be going right back to passing out.

"Black Panther" review

I'll be filing my imigration papers to Wakanda  momentarily.

Crapshoot 2018 Movie Review Special: Fifty Shades Finished

The only successful tool in the arsenal of abstinence.

Crapshoot 2018: Cream of an Awful Cinematic Crop

Hey Hollywood, there's a reason why few are crying over your lost pirated money.

2017 had quite a number of damn good movies that helped provide audiences with a solid escape from the woes of the world. Genre flicks mixing things up, minorities of society got many a chance to shine, and franchises not only found new creative life but even gave dignified sendoffs.

Sadly it also saw trends overstaying their welcome, reboot fatigue achieve climax, and the success of weaker products on platforms so perfectly designed to spare consumer expense that the theater experience has come into question even harder than ever before.

For many, these films exist for their annual worst of the year lists. For me, somebody that finds failure worth exploring to grasp where we are but not celebrated with the best of the year for a task involving exposure to vast amounts of dangerous material in a season widely considered to be crunch time for critics, there’s Crapshoot.

For those, new to Crit. Hit, Welcome! Thanks for stopping by, hope you enjoy your stay, and Crapshoot is my annual look back at the worst films of the year.

If you wish to be reminded of the cinematic happenings that you completely missed or would rather forget, join me across the month of February as I take a look at the very best of 2017’s very worst movies in a nonsensical and unintentional effort to drown out the fact that I’ll be watching and more than likely enjoying “Black Panther” in less than 4 days.

But Crapshoot is about new experiences of badness so before looking at my newly exposed wounds, let’s take a gander at some of the cinematic crimes against humanity that won’t be explicitly looked at. 

Transformers: The Last Knight

Details on this one will be relatively sparse as many of my better articulated thoughts on the movies lack of care and focus along with its cynical efforts to retroactively prepackage its sloppy and passion free narrative into branching mega-franchise will be the focus of my series analyzing cinematic universes, "Universal Monstrosities."

What I can say as a lifelong fan that's gone numb to the bastardization of this franchise suffered at the hands of Michael Bay is that mustering the passion necessary to fire the venom at this thing that it properly deserves is a chore when it's becoming blatantly evident how little the filmmakers themselves care about the product they're working on, much less the potential of the material they're working with.

It's too explicit and crass to work for kids, too surreal in its nonsensical plotting for mainstream adult crowds, and the compositing on its trademark special effects undermines the excessive budget that went into its production.

The only good thing about "Transformers: The Last Knight" is the very thing that made me break my pact to stay away from it following my befuddled exposure to its previous installment; its unexpected financial underperformance sets a hopeful new precedence for Hollywood's future.

Flatliners

I had to research this movie for almost 5 minutes straight just to remember that this movie even existed.

Not Remember what happened, remember that I actually watched the movie, period.

Ordinarily that level of forgettability spares movies from special recognition of badness but as the PTSD-esque memory flashes of confusion and hilarity ensue over how little a film about hospital work seems to care about actual medical conduct for a film so cheap and lazily inept you ask why anybody bothered to even show up to work, "Flatliners" is a cinematic experience that I will be looking forward to forgetting once more as soon as possible.

The Dark Tower

Strike 1: An adaptation of the western genre skinned metatextual nexus of a barely cohesive, Easter egg driven mythology constructed by plot essential locale traversals, side stories, flashbacks, dimension hopping, and time travel independent of the story's plot itself by a an industry that rarely gets straight forward Stephen King adaptations right.

Strike 2: Boiling said tale down to a bland, unimpressive, inconsequential Young Adult coming of age narrative for an audience not even in the story's demographic crosshairs. And it would have sucked on that level too.

Strike 3: Sony. Just, Sony.

The Snowman

The "Fantastic 4 (2015)" of 2017.

Jo Nesbo's cinematic and gripping Harry Hole novels may seem like a perfect fit for a film franchise but a mishandled production helmed by a director whose vision may not have been the most ideal reading of the material have led to a movie that's not only blatantly muddled and nonsensical but flat out unfinished.

"The Snowman" is the cinematic equivalent of watching a scratched DVD that skips entire sequences, with no hope of repair.

The Emoji Movie

*sigh* Do I even have to bother?

Lightning Round: January in Review

The franchise people forgot about, a mediocre army recruiting movie, and a late December 2017 release. Oh January, how I never miss thee.

"The Cloverfield Paradox" review

Well here's a review I didn't expect to be doing today.