Cobra Kai V – Review

Posted on September 10, 2022 by ashleymanningwriter

Starring: Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, Courtney Henggeler, Xolo Maridueña, Tanner Buchanan, Mary Mouser, Jacob Bertrand, Peyton List, Dallas Dupree Young, Vanessa Rubio, Thomas Ian Griffith, and Martin Kove

Rating: ★★★★½

Cobra Kai is back with it’s fifth season and the stakes have never been higher. It feels like it’s been barely any time at all since the fourth season aired at New Year’s, but there’s never enough Cobra Kai. The new season lives up to everything that’s come before with more of the over-the-top melodrama, 1980s references, and badass karate we’ve come to expect from the Karate Kid follow-up.

This season follows up on the nail-biting season four cliff-hanger, with Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) turning every dojo in the Valley into Cobra Kai, with his eyes set on expanding the brand globally. At the same time Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is forced to shut down Miyagi-Do after losing at the All-Valley Championship in the previous season, and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) is focusing on things beyond karate, by trying to right some wrongs. He heads to Mexico with his son Robbie (Tanner Buchanan) to find Miguel (Xolo Maridueña), who set off in search of his own father.

This season is simply fantastic. Just like before, it mixes everything together so well. The story is even more ridiculous this time, ramping everything up to eleven and it all adds to the crazy fun. All of it works though, as the characters are all really well written. The line between good and bad is still completely blurry, which has always been Cobra Kai’s greatest strength. Silver is a villain, but his pupils are just a victim to his schemes, and you don’t always know who to root for.

Daniel is taken to his limit, having to reckon with his past and trauma. There’s flashbacks to The Karate Kid III, showing that Silver has always been Daniel’s ultimate weakness. Silver knows exactly what buttons to press to get the reaction he wants from, and he brings Daniel to the brink of losing everything here. Thomas Ian Griffith perfectly replaces Martin Kove as the main antagonist this time around, giving a sinister performance as Terry Silver. Kove still has a part to play, but it’s a lot smaller as he’s stuck behind bars after what happened at the end of season four.  

It’s not all fighting and drama, and this is probably the funniest season so far, with a lot of really great jokes. Most of the humour still comes from Johnny not really understanding the modern world as he tries to find a way for himself outside of Karate, but it doesn’t get old. At one point he gets a new phone to make money by delivering food and working as a ride share, which is really funny. William Zabka is absolutely brilliant as Johnny, and is still the heart of the show.

All of the character arcs are really strong in season five, with Samantha’s (Mary Mouser) being an absolute highlight as she struggles to find herself her the loss at the All Valley Championship. Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto) also gets a lot more screen time in this season, which is good to see. His character is developed a lot more and over the course of the season he becomes one of the best of the show. There’s also a couple of familiar faces that reappear from the original films, which is always nice to see.

Family is even more of a focus than before, as Miguel heads off to find his dad, and is left facing the reality of why his mum left in the first place. Johnny is settling down with Carmen (Vanessa Rubio) and at the same time trying to bridge the gap between Miguel and Robbie. Daniel also faces troubles with his family as Silver tries to drive a wedge between them. The common enemy of Silver brings all of the main characters closer together than ever before and it’s great to see so many team-ups. There’s still a few characters switching sides throughout, because it wouldn’t be Cobra Kai without that.  

Everything leads to a very tense finale where it feels like there’s real risk. Terry Silver is a borderline psychopath, manipulating everyone to get what he wants, and it all comes to a head in a non-stop final episode that comes close to matching the epic season two finale. The danger feels real, and after spending five seasons following these characters, it’ll have you on the edge of your seat the entire episode. It even ends with yet another cliff-hanger that promises the next season will be just as great, as long as it gets another renewal.

Cobra Kai has been consistently one of the best shows around, and season five is no exception. If you’re a fan of the series so far, then this is more of the same. It’s an absolute blast to watch, with tense and exciting fights, plenty of laugh out loud moments and a lot of drama to keep you invested. Five seasons deep and Cobra Kai hasn’t let up once.  

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End of the Road – Film Review

Posted on September 9, 2022 by ashleymanningwriter

Director: Millicent Shelton

Writer: David Loughery

Starring: Queen Latifah, Chris Bridges, and Beau Bridges

Rating: ★★

Queen Latifah stars as Brenda in Netflix’s latest disposable thriller End of the Road. After putting herself in debt while caring for her dying husband, Brenda is forced to move with her two children and brother, taking a three-day road trip to get to their new home. Along the way they get tangled up with a killer after witnessing a murder in a motel. Brenda’s brother, Reggie (Chris Bridges) makes things worse by stealing a bag filled with money from the crime scene, seeing it as a way to save his family.

Before the family even reach the motel that kickstarts the main plot, they’re already on a nightmare road trip. There’s a diversion that takes hours out of their day and leads them into the middle of nowhere where they encounter a bunch of racist locals who menaces them on the road, like the truck from Duel. Pretty much everyone the family encounters is racist, evil, or both. Everything that can goes wrong does.

The family are clearly not welcome anywhere they travel, but they stick together. There’s some good banter between them, especially Reggie with his nephew and niece. They feel like a real family, and it gives the film a lot of heart and makes it enjoyable. It’s just a shame that everything else about the film is completely stupid.

The characters just act really dumb. Reggie takes the money from a crime scene, and it causes most of the trouble. Then instead of listening to the voice on the phone demanding the money back, Brenda takes control and tells them she will give it back on her terms and leaves it in a cupboard in a different motel room. Reggie then pretty much has a tantrum saying that Brenda is stopping him from living his dreams by taking the money back. Are we supposed to feel sorry for the man that’s put his family in harm’s way due to pure greed?

While the money is in the motel room, unsurprisingly it is intercepted by someone else, and that leads to the most ridiculous and funniest scene of the film. After chasing down the girl who stole the money from the motel Brenda ends up being captured by a group of Neo-Nazis and manages to not only get free but does a decent job of fighting them off, stealing a gun, and getting the money back from them. It’s completely unbelievable but is still entertaining to watch.

Then we get to the final act, which starts with one of the most obvious twists possible. There’s absolutely no surprise when it happens, to the point that you’d hope the film wouldn’t go there because it’s so obvious, but it does. The final action set piece is pretty good though, and the villain’s getting their comeuppance is funny to watch.  

End of the Road is a throwaway film. If you’ve got nothing else to watch then it will pass ninety minutes, but it won’t do much more than that.

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Pinocchio – Film Review

Posted on September 8, 2022 by ashleymanningwriter

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: Robert Zemeckis and Chris Weitz

Starring: Tom Hanks, Benhamin Evan Ainsworth, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Keegan-Michael Key, Cynthia Erivo, and Luke Evans

Rating: ★★½ 

For some reason Disney has felt the need to remake some of their most beloved animated classics into live action over the last few years, with very mixed results. The Lion King felt like a carbon copy, that shouldn’t have been made in the first place, Dumbo was just a complete mess, and Aladdin was surprisingly quite fun. The one thing all of the remakes have in common, though, is that they don’t live up to the originals, and Pinocchio, the latest Disney classic to receive the live action treatment, continues this trend.

Robert Zemeckis co-writes and directs Pinocchio, a remake that no one was really asking for and one that is faithful to the source material.  If you’ve seen the original Disney’s Pinocchio, then you know pretty much what to expect from this adaptation. The same story, told mostly in the same way, with very little deviation from the original story. Geppetto (Tom Hanks) wishes life into his newly built puppet, Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who in turn has to be brave, truthful and selfless to become a real boy.

While there’s no major changes to the story, there are a few new additions that. One of the better new plot points is Geppetto being given a tragic backstory, where he longs for a boy, due to losing his own child years earlier. It’s a small moment, but it gives more weight to the story and wish that brings life to Pinocchio. Tom Hanks is good in the role, bringing all the charisma that you’d expect from him. Still, this is the weakest collaboration between Hanks and Zemeckis, who previously worked together on Cast Away, The Polar Express and obviously Forrest Gump.

Zemeckis also makes good use of CGI here, with some cute animals mixed in with the live action humans. It’s a little jarring when it first starts, but they blend well together by the time that Pinocchio first becomes alive. Geppetto’s cat Figaro looks a little too unreal, but the fox ‘Honest’ John, and his cat partner, both look great. Pinocchio also looks great, and there’s only a couple of moments when you’re really aware you’re looking at CGI, sadly that’s most notable when he’s upset towards the end, which completely undermines the moment.  

While the film starts off quite charming, especially with the assortment of fun Disney themed cuckoo clocks in Geppetto’s workshop, the further you get into the story the more it feels like it’s just going through the emotions. For the most part this is a straight remake of the 1940s cartoon, and the embellishments aren’t great additions to the story. The charm definitely runs thin as the story just goes through the motions.

The 2022 live-action remake of Pinocchio is passable, but as it’s on Disney Plus you may as well just watch the far superior 1940 animated classic. Like so many of the Disney remakes of the last few years, this just doesn’t seem necessary, but at least it’s not as bad as Tim Burton’s Dumbo.

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Jason X – Film Review

Posted on September 7, 2022 by ashleymanningwriter

Director: Jim Isaac

Writer: Todd Farmer

Starring: Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell, Melyssa Ade, Peter Mensah, Melody Johnson, and David Cronenberg

Rating: ★★★

With Freddy vs. Jason stuck in development hell and several years since Jason Goes to Hell being released, producer Sean s. Cunningham wanted to bring back interest to the Friday the 13th franchise, and Jason X was conceived to do exactly this.  The idea was to take Jason into space as it was somewhere new for Jason to stalk some victims.

Even though the premise is completely stupid at first thought, it actually really works. Jason’s back, after being dragged to hell since the last film. In fact, this one takes place after Freddy vs. Jason, so it does feel like you’re missing a bit of the story in the opening scene. Since there’s no way to kill Jason (Kane Hodder), the plan is to cryogenically freeze him. That goes wrong slightly, and Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig) ends up frozen along with him. Over four centuries later, when the Earth is no longer habitable an expedition finds the pair frozen and take them back to their ship, where Jason wakes up and starts to kill the ship’s crew. Essentially, it’s a slasher on a spaceship.

Jason slowly makes his way through the crew on the ship, while the professor wants to keep him alive in order to sell him as Jason has quite a reputation after around two hundred kills. This attitude leads to more people who die because of selfishness. It takes some tropes of sci-fi and blends them in with the slasher genre. There’s a holodeck that the heroes use to trick Jason, he finds his equal in a robot and even turns into a cyborg at one point. On top of that there’s the stuff you’d expect from a Friday the 13th film, some humour, many deaths and pointless nudity. The whole thing comes together and it’s really fun to switch your brain off and watch.

The actual ship looks like something out of a mid-2000s TV series like Stargate: Atlantis or Firefly. It doesn’t look great, but it does the job. There are some dodgy CGI effects, especially the ant things that repair people when they’re healed. On the other hand, the gore looks great, with some of the best kills of the series. At one point Jason freezes someone’s face in liquid nitrogen and then smashes it on the table, and it’s pure slasher awesomeness.

Jason X is all out fun. It doesn’t take itself seriously at all and while it’s still the same film as what’s come before, it’s a hell of a lot better than most of the other entries. It doesn’t quite hold a candle to Part VI or Jason Goes to Hell, but it’s more than just formulaic trash like most of the series. 

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Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

Posted on September 6, 2022 by ashleymanningwriter

Director: Adam Marcus

Writer: Jay Huguley and Dean Lorey

Starring: John D. LeMay, Kari Keegan, Allison Smith, Steven Culp, Billy Bush, Kane Hodder, Erin Gray

Rating: ★★★½

After the abysmal Part VIII to the Friday the 13th series it took four years for Jason to make it back to the big screen, which was the biggest gap between films in the series up to that point. During that time the rights reverted to the financiers of the original film, who then sold it on to New Line Cinema (who were making the A Nightmare on Elm Street series), in order for original director Sean S. Cunningham to make Freddy vs. Jason. Production on that film didn’t start straight away and in that time Wes Craven started working on New Nightmare, delaying the intended crossover even further. Due to this Cunningham started working on a film that would set up Freddy vs. Jason in order to bend the studio’s arm to make the actual film.

Ironically the disappointing box office of both Jason Goes to Hell and New Nightmare delayed the crossover even further and it would be another ten years before the pair would meet fully, although the ending to Jason Goes to Hell does tease Freddy’s arrival. Another interesting thing to note about the rights moving to New Line from Paramount is that New Line only acquired the rights to Jason the character, the name Friday the 13th was kept by Paramount, which is why part IX is called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and the sequel would be called Jason X. It’s strange that it happened that way, but eventually Paramount reclaimed the rights to make the remake in 2009.

Now that some backstory is out of the way, it’s time to actually write about Jason Goes to Hell. In all honesty this is one of the best, if not the actual best, entry to the Friday the 13th series. Up to this point the series was running on fumes and the God-awful Part VIII had really run the series into the ground. Moving the series into new hands, the Cunningham coming back as a producer, and a different take on the Jason story really breathed new life into the series. It’s actually engaging, tense and fun to watch.

It starts off in a standard fashion, Jason’s back again with no explanation and he’s back in Crystal Lake. We follow a lone woman who has a shower, because what’s a Friday the 13th film without pointless nudity (and this scene is especially pointless with what’s coming). Jason attacks her and then she runs out of the house, escaping the masked killer. It turns out that she is actually an FBI agent who is luring Jason to his doom. Attacked from all sides Jason is killed, all before the opening credits appear on screen. It’s during his autopsy that things get interesting when the coroner Phil (Richard Gant) is processed by the spirit of Jason, after being mesmerised by his still beating heart and eating it. Jason, using the body of Phil, travels back to Crystal Lake in order to be fully resurrected.

Instead of Jason just murdering a group of teenagers, due to an old grudge that somehow was the driving force for seven sequels at this point, he has an actual motive for what he’s doing. The body that he’s possessing won’t last long, and he needs to go back to his home town to find a permanent way to survive. Just having an actual goal makes this film a lot more engaging than most entries to the series. As Jason is just in another human’s body he’s scarier. People feel safe around him, they don’t know who they can trust. And most importantly when he attacks, the other characters are able to fight back without immediately dying and that ramps up the tension, which had been missing massively in the series. 

Yes, there is the usual high body count, but a lot of the kills are a lot more memorable and entertaining. It’s also great to have actual characters as the heroes instead of walking targets for Jason to attack. They’re likable and you actually want them to survive. This is the first time since Alice faces Pamela Vorhees back in the original, that it feels like there’s actual stakes. That it’s not just bland characters being hacked down.  

It may not be as funny as Part VI, but it’s a really decent slasher film that’s actually enjoyable and entertaining to watch. By far the strongest sequel in the series, and arguably even tops the original. It took nine films for an original idea to be introduced into the series, but it really works. Jason as a spirit possessing others is worth the wait.

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