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Elsewhere(V)

“A killer that blind men could identify, and finally, not even the slightest hint of terror or immediacy on the screen. Mix, shake, stir and then dump it down the drain.”

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You don’t have to tell me the internet is a dangerous place–full of flame wars galore and attention-deficit inducing social networking sites–it’s enough to make a sane man stupid. Also, I hope it goes without saying that cruisin’ the web for teenage hook-ups was a bad idea long before Chris Hansen made it seem like as good a way as any to get on a TV show. In fact, if Dateline had just set up a simple sting operation in the town of Goshen, Indiana, then I wouldn’t have had to spend the better part of 2 hours trudging through this weeks latest teen thriller.

Elsewhere is about a bad girl (or was that a dirtygurrl) named Jillian (Tania Raymonde) who sets up a online profile replete with half-naked pictures of herself as some sort of power-trip-self-stroking-ego-booster designed to give the town slut some power over her out of control movie-of-the-week existence. Her best friend is the pure-as-the-driven-snow good girl Sarah (Twilight’s Anna Kendrick). Sarah can’t control Jillian any more than her nasty trailer park mother can. So, when Jillian disappears everyone just assumes that she ran away–everyone except Sarah. Now, Sarah is desperate to find out what happened to her friend and all she has to go on is a terrifying cell phone message, Jillian’s journal and the hundreds of online suspects that Jillian was flirting with.

Talk about your message movies. This film is like a parents worst fear of online predators (assuming they haven’t seen Strangeland yet.) They hit every cliché in the book on the way toward pumping this story out. So busy that it’s ducks were in a row and it’s red herrings were on the line that Elsewhere completely forgets that it needs to actually be interesting to be effective. And the second biggest problem–after the by-the-book plot points is the atrocious dialogue and abysmal performances by the cast members. Tania Raymonde is fine as Ben’s Daughter on the ABC hit show Lost, but here, she’s reduced to textbook-typical “What do you got” rebellion. Sure her home life sucks but…whatever…get over it. Oh, and Sarah–the perfect one–has hardships too. Her rich lawyer Mommy is never home—too busy making all the green to be seen. This is breaking my heart (if I had a heart). Sarah has to buy chicken dinners since Mommy doesn’t have the time to cook a meal. Sarah is also hamstrung by the ditzy-dull performance from Anna Kendrick. It’s hard to believe this characters future is so bright considering how dim she seems to be at all times. Chalk that one up to the script as well.

In fact, every kid in this film seems to come from a broken home…what’s up with that? I’m not sure that Writer/Director Nathan Hope has a message in this movie about how parents ignoring their children in a world as open and invasive as the one that exists in today’s age is a recipe for disaster. But he does manage to concoct a fine debacle of his own. It goes like this. One part done to death storyline. Two actresses that deliver far below sub-standard performances. A killer that blind men could identify, and finally, not even the slightest hint of terror or immediacy on the screen. Mix, shake, stir and then dump it down the drain.

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Dev Patel’s ‘Monkey Man’ Is Now Available to Watch at Home!

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monkey man

After pulling in $28 million at the worldwide box office this month, director (and star) Dev Patel’s critically acclaimed action-thriller Monkey Man is now available to watch at home.

You can rent Monkey Man for $19.99 or digitally purchase the film for $24.99!

Monkey Man is currently 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with Bloody Disgusting’s head critic Meagan Navarro awarding the film 4.5/5 stars in her review out of SXSW back in March.

Meagan raves, “While the violence onscreen is palpable and painful, it’s not just the exquisite fight choreography and thrilling action set pieces that set Monkey Man apart but also its political consciousness, unique narrative structure, and myth-making scale.”

“While Monkey Man pays tribute to all of the action genre’s greats, from the Indonesian action classics to Korean revenge cinema and even a John Wick joke or two, Dev Patel’s cultural spin and unique narrative structure leave behind all influences in the dust for new terrain,” Meagan’s review continues.

She adds, “Monkey Man presents Dev Patel as a new action hero, a tenacious underdog with a penetrating stare who bites, bludgeons, and stabs his way through bodies to gloriously bloody excess. More excitingly, the film introduces Patel as a strong visionary right out of the gate.”

Inspired by the legend of Hanuman, Monkey Man stars Patel as Kid, an anonymous young man who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for cash. After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.

Monkey Man is produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.

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