Jurassic Park 3, Jurassic World, How to Become a Cult Leader, Thanksgiving, Kill List

- Jurassic Park 3 [2001] - 73

The third and final entry from the original run of the franchise, Jurassic Park 3 is the second best of the bunch by a pretty decent margin. Yes, it’s largely the least creative of the films and features an ending worthy of laughter rather than cheers, but it also learns from the missteps of Lost World in pretty big ways. Where Lost World made the mistake of creating a comic-book-style villain to drive the story forwards, Jurassic Park 3 returns to ambiguity in terms of the “bad guy”. On top of that [though the Spinosaurus can jump off a cliff], the writers did a genuinely clever thing by killing the franchise’s longtime big-bad in the opening action sequences; thus rewriting the rules on what our characters have to deal with and what we, as the audience, can expect in terms of thrills and danger. JP3 certainly isn’t without goofy nonsense and it doesn’t reach anywhere near as high as the original film, but it’s a much more fun adventure than Lost World and very trim at only 92 minutes long to boot.

- Jurassic World [2015] - 30

Continuing with our dinosaur trend… We couldn’t even suffer through most of 2015’s horrifically cheese reboot, Jurassic World. I’d seen this in theaters and remembered it being “fine” but, on a rewatch, this movie looks awful from a vfx standpoint, sounds awful from an audio mix perspective, and the performances are cringe enough that Spencer’s Gifts literally knocked at my door because it thought I’d stolen all their employees. It’s difficult to come up with enough adjectives or goofy metaphors to describe how absurdly banal and pathetic Jurassic World really is… and it’s sequel is even worse. We won’t be wasting our breath trying that one a second time.

- How to Become a Cult Leader [2023] - 70

This is a fun little documentary series that takes a cheeky approach to a rather serious topic. Cults are no joke and the victims of their self-righteous and over-inflated leaders deserve our care, rather than our ridicule, which is where a lot of the criticism this receives comes from. It’s quirky, it’s goofy, and it presents a series of fairly famous cults, their leaders, and their practices through the guise of creating a handbook of how to do it yourself. It’s a pretty surface-level, Scholastic Book Fair-style treatment of the topic, but it’s certainly fun for a few hours of entertainment and a great way to wet your whistle if this is a subject you’re even vaguely interested in.

- Thanksgiving [2023] - 35

Eli Roth, what is you doin’? This is one of the most boring, should-have-been-made-for-TV droll pieces of garbage that I’ve watched in a long time. Almost everything about this slasher falls flat, goes nowhere, and takes entirely too long to say. Some of the kills are fun and interesting while others are entirely banal, and the connective tissue between them is neither plot-heavy enough to demand attention nor silly enough to generate any sort of entertainment. Thanksgiving is about as “nothing” of a movie as they come and it’s one that I’d genuinely never recommend to anyone — even die-hard slasher fans — because it simply has nothing to offer.

- Kill List [2011] - 35

Kill List is one of those movies that simply has too many ideas and could have made a whole production out of any one of them, instead of splicing them all together to make soup. Part hitman story, part family drama, and part cult mystery; each individual element of the film’s plot is plenty interesting and expandable. The issue is that they’re all entirely meaningless by the end, because they’re all left so shallow and unexplored. I didn’t know this at the time, but this is directed by the same person as 2021’s In the Earth — a film I haven’t talked about here but had almost the exact same things to say about. There’s lots of good ideas on display and plenty of interesting and adroit execution… it’s just that putting them all together into a single narrative made this 95-minute expedition feel like it lasted at least 3-hours longer than it did.

Easy skip.