Monkey Movie Reviews

This is a gem of a movie: Son of Rambow tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the school bad-ass and the school religious nerd. The two boys from opposite ends of the spectrum meet and they form an uneasy friendship based on making a movie called Son of Rambow. Along the way they cross paths with a super cool French exchange student, a passel of kids who want to be movie stars, people in an old folks home, and some folks with religion shoved so far up their asses that it comes out their mouths. I know it sounds stupid but believe me it works and it works well.

The two leads in this film are fantastic, especially when you find out that this is the first film either one of them has done. The boy who plays the lad who's being stunted by his religious mother, she's played by a slim and trim Jessica Stevenson who co-starred in Spaced, is a wonder to watch. He just gets it time and time again. He really stands out as the little kid with a big imagination who is picked on by bigger kids and by people in his religious sect. He reminded me of a young me at times in the film, what with his defense mechanism of retreating into his imagination when things got tough. And the kid who plays the school bad ass who befriends him is just as good. He may be in some ways better because he has to be tough and play tender when his world crumbles around him towards the end of the film.

I highly recommend this movie and it's kick ass '80's soundtrack.

On the other hand, I recommend doing just about anything, and that includes doing unecessary exploratory surgery on yourself and or artifically inseminating pigs and other farm animals for fun and profit, instead of watching this movie:
Sweet baby jeebus it's awful. And it's not so awful it's good. It's so awful it's just fucking awful.

It's about seven annoying idiotic self centered people who meet one another at a remote cabin for a weekend of "fun." But instead bringing fun to their gathering, they bring their neuroses, their angst, and their emotional baggage. They decide, about a third of the way into the film, to play a parlor game that brings forth the murderous spirit of a long dead witch. You'd think that the movie would pick up from then on, but you'd be wrong. It just continues the suckage that it started the second that it began.

Well that's not exactly true. The film is good for the first two or three minutes when it opens with long languid shots of Dominique Swain
dressed in a tank top and shorts as she sits in her boyfriend's car that has run out of gas. The camera lingers on her and it shows us all her assets in all their glory. If only they had decided to jettison the script and just show us 100 minutes of Ms. Swain sitting on and around that hot car while she sweats and pouts then this film would have been half way decent. Oh who am I kidding, if they had shot 100 minutes of Dominique Swain sitting in a hot car while she sweats and pouts it would have been the best film ever. But they didn't.
Skip Dead Mary but see Son of Rambow.