'The Wolverine' & 'V/H/S 2' Reviews

The Wolverine is the chrnological follow up to X-Men: Last Stand circumventing entirely the ill fated X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The movie opens on Logan aka Wolverine in the Alaskan wilderness in a self imposed exile. We see through flashbacks Logan saving a young Japanese soldier in WWII, in the present this soldier, now an old man, wants to thank Logan and flies him to Japan. A somewhat convoluted tale of turns and tricks insues.

The movie works because it focuses soley on Wolverine and there is only one other mutant in the story. Powers and special effects don't drive the film- character and action do. We see here a pure form of one of America's favorite heroes. Unvarnished and left to deal with some emotional baggage and circumspect circumstance. Logan has the occational sarcastic punchline and is just as irrasible as ever but in this movie we see Logan as a character not a characticture. The remaining cast almost exclusively Japanese fills out the movie with gravitis and realism rarely scene in a Marvel adaptation.

There are flaws but they are far outweighed by the darkness and richness of the movie. The Wolverine is much closer to Nolan's Batman Trilogy than any other of Marvel's attempts at that style i.e. the uninspired Spider-Man reboot.

After many failed attempts we finally have a movie that does Wolverine justice.

See It.

VHS2 is the horror anthology sequel to the far superior VHS. I'm not a particular fan of horror movies but the original VHS captured my interest with it's low budget restrictions and it's high end results. This incarnation is an exact replica of the first film with different, less successful, vignettes.

There's an empty house with a room full of blank TV's and a pile of VHS tapes. What's on those tapes is evil. The movie has 4 vignettes as opposed to it's predecessors 5 and contains considerably less imagination. The first short film is the only saving grace- a man with an electronic eye begins to see ghosts. The rest are versions of zombie stories which seem to be attempting to capitalize on the current popularity of that particular brand of horror as opposed to be doing something original with it.

An exceeding disappointment after the originality and freshness of the first film. VHS is to VHS2 as The Blair Witch Project is to The Blair Witch Project: Book Of Shadows.

Don't See It.