I never played this videogame so I can’t make comparisons. I like mindless action at times and this had plenty of action with minimal mind. Lots of borrowings from (homages to?) other action films. If you want to feed your eyes while your brain idles in neutral, you could do worse.

FF=1

Jack Black plays R.L. Stine in this horror comedy geared for kids. The plot releases a horde of Stine’s monsters on the town [the lawn gnomes, the Blob that ate Everyone, the Mummy, Slappy (of course), and many more] and the kids and Stine have to return them to the printed page. After a slow opening it starts rolling and is a lot of fun. Watch for R.L. himself in a cameo near the end.

FF=2

I’m going to have to post a *spoiler* alert here, but really, when that first hallucination hits, you’ll see the whole film laid out like a Chinese buffet. Before you reach that point, however, you have to make so many leaps (let’s make them pole vaults) of faith and suspensions of your disbelief by the cajones, that you might not get that far. The first hurdle is transferring the consciousness of one person into the body of another; a hoary SF concept that I accept because of its seniority. But for the Kingsley character to accept that the handsome, fully-developed, well-muscled body destined to be his new home was somehow grown just for him exceeds the tensile strength of my credibility. After that, it becomes a decent action thriller. Not many films present their characters with a moral dilemma of this magnitude, but there’s never any real doubt that we’ll have a Hollywood ending. And I won’t even mention the deus-ex availability of a flamethrower for the climactic scene (oh, wait…I just did)
FF=0 (It had one nice twist and I kept waiting for more)

An excellent Bobby Fischer biopic that’s wrenching as we watch his descent into total paranoia. Somehow he pulls it all together to beat Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship. Game 6 of the tournament is supposedly the greatest chess game ever played. At its finish Spassky stands and leads the audience in applause for his opponent’s skill. It’s a tragic story of a brilliant mind and blinding potential destroyed by delusions of persecution by godless communists and predatory Zionists (even though Fischer was Jewish and part Russian). He died an ex-pat in Iceland in his mid-sixties. It’s amazing how much suspense a skillful script and cast can build into a chess match.

FF=0