Grilliam

That could have been really, really boring because the dude isn't particularly likable, the climbing isn't particularly exciting (I guess at best it's stress inducing), and no one really cares to let us in on what the fuck they are talking about (they use so much climbing jargon that I was legitimately confused). I can't really say that it's interesting, but it's a unique enough world we're getting a peak into that I was never bored.

This feels like a random team-up fighting a quickly established villian with animation that seems to constantly be in need of buffering. The story takes forever to get going because they have to introduce all these characters that the average person isn't familiar with (minus Batman) and then it's only got 45 minutes to tell an entire movie's worth of plot, which it does by skipping things like "Why these guys?" and "Who is that guy and why is he doing that?". This doesn't feel like a team and these don't feel like characters. It's like they expect you to already be big fans of all of these people so thag they don't need to really explain to you who Zatanna is. If this was episode 10 of the Justice League Dark show, it would be fine, but I just barely had enough comic book knowledge to not have to keep Wikipedia open (definitely did have to Google Etrigan though) and I still have no idea what was going on in the last half. I think the animation looking like you were watching a flash video with shitty internet may be the worst part though; multiple times it would look like it skipped thirty frames. Justice League Dark tries to do both too much and too little and in the end left me with characters and a story that I cared too little about. I think my favorite part is the first 5 minutes where they introduce the story of the movie, where regular people are seeing other people as monsters and I know it isn't supposed to be funny (it's supposed to be scary and distressing), but i was cracking up. That was the last time the movie made me feel anything other than mildly bored.

The movie is pitched to us as an 80's slasher made today. I guess that is accurate, but it's not a studio slasher from the 80's; Cruel Summer is one of those shot-on-film "movied" that a couple for friends made with their dad's camcorder. All of the acting is absolutely awful, sometimes offensively so (a couple of the actors are trying, but it's just not landing) the story hardly counts as a story (there is essentially no plot. We are told they are going to a secluded house to have a murder mystery party, but the house is right next to a pretty busy road and they never do the murder mystery at all), the kills are fucking terrible (the sound effects are laughably bad and all the effects, both practical and CGI, look like shit), and none of the characters have enough personality to make them cheerable or hateable. The sound! How can I forget the sound? Most of the movie is ADR, but the rest is so inconsistent, that there were multiple times where I wasn't even sure if I was supposed to be able to hear the dialog because the mics are just barely picking it up. Think back to shit like Splatter Farm, that is what Cruel Summer is; like, it's not even good enough for Tubi. I think the only reason this movie exists is that someone wanted to see their friend naked, so they wrote an entire "movie" around that scene (which was way too long and added nothing to the film). I'm sure the crew had fun watching the movie, but I think that was the entire audience for it.

The effects were pretty fucking good for the time, but you can't really do much in 70 minutes and they really didn't even try. It's a lot of some old bitch screaming and an entire town of dumb asses. There are tons of times where they should have been able to catch the titular Invisible Man, but I guess they can't figure out that if he's holding a guy, he's got to physically be there holding him. He grabs one guy by the legs and is pulling him backwards, but these stupid mother fuckers are like "Where is he?". He is holding the guy's feet, so he literally has to be right there where the dude's feet are. Usually with a movie like this, I'd have a list of how's but this one is mostly why's. This entire town is populated with the dumbest people they could find and the fact that they had scientists at all is unexpected. Again, the effects are very good for the time and don't even look too bad by today's standards, but that's really all this movie has going for it.