Scott Terra
Occupation
Actor
The Perfect Nanny Review
OK
Never mind the knife: The hot number on the cover of The Perfect Nanny DVD is the perfect nanny.Alas, I don't know who that chick is, but it sure ain't Tracy Nelson, who stars as a mental hospital escapee who subsequently masquerades as a nanny. And poor widower Bruce Boxleitner is totally clueless about our nanny's ultraviolent streak, even after body #5 turns up. Why all the rage? Nelson's nanny is obsessed with cheesy romance novels, and she's looking for an idyllic life like the ones found in those pages. Of course, she's a bit off-kilter, so her plan to marry the rich doctor falls apart in relatively short order.
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Eight Legged Freaks Review
OK
A truck carrying radioactive waste, a sleepy driver, a rabbit in the middle of the road and a subsequent crash near a dilapidated roadside attraction called Taft's Exotic Spider Farm are all it takes to make the opening scene of "Eight Legged Freaks" feel packed with comedy-horror promise.
For the most part, this tongue-in-cheek homage to 1950s monster-bug movies lives up to that promise, bringing hordes of giant mutant spiders to the screen to prey on B-list stars like David Arquette ("Scream," etc.) Kari Wuhrer ("Anaconda"), Scarlett Johansson ("Ghost World") and Doug E. Doug ("Operation Dumbo Drop") -- all of whom happily exhibit their best B-movie bombast.
Long on cheese, refreshingly short on gore (spiders don't bleed, they ooze green goop), "Freaks" maintains a balance between creepy scares that startle, silly scares that get a laugh and moments that make you go, "Ewww!" The movie never aspires to anything more than eventually getting the entire (surviving) population of a Southwestern small town into their run-down shopping mall, where they try to beat down enormous arachnids with sporting goods and mannequins.
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Daredevil Review
Weak
An unremarkably routine superhero movie based on the cult-favorite comic book about a satanically-costumed blind vigilante, "Daredevil" plays like a C-grade grad project for a night school course called Superhero Filmmaking 101.
Faithful to his inspiration -- the era of "Daredevil" issues written by "Batman" revitalizer Frank Miller and comic-crazy film director Kevin Smith -- in several important details, writer-director Mark Steven Johnson's one stroke of true genius comes in the pulses of fluid, misty, ghostly imagery he uses to depict the sightless crime fighter's enhanced ability to "see" through sound waves and smells.
But most of the picture apes its action style -- and many whole fight scenes -- from last year's "Spider-Man." It has the same ineffectual opening voice-over, the same unconvincingly CGI-assisted rooftop leaping and building-swinging (Daredevil uses a grappling-hook-modified walking cane instead of spider-webbing) and its hero has the same slow-mo back-flip method of dodging weapons thrown by villains.
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