CuriosityKilledShawn

When I was a kid I watch Police Academy 4 and 5 a zillion times. I rented them so often I might as well have bought the tapes. I only rented the sixth movie once and I hated it. I have never bothered to check out the first movies until now and I can't say I'm impressed. The crazy characters are as adorable as ever, but there's just nothing much for them to do.

Police Academy is more of a raunchy frat-house pic and not the lovable family comedy that the later movies became. There's barely any plot to speak of and the scenes come across as a bunch of awkward vignettes with terrible comic timing and pauses for laughs that I didn't make. It's strung together very loosely and gets boring after a while. The Blue Oyster bar jokes, however dated, still make me giggle though.

Despite their, somewhat deserved, bad reputation as low-brow trash, some of these movies were much more fun than the original, especially the cartoon show that followed (and a live-action one too). Police Academy is ripe for a reboot and I'd love to hear that happy theme tune again.

I'm not sure what led to Black Rock's inception, but it seems that writer/director/star Katie Aselton found herself with a budget and whipped together a paper thin story of three girls and a fight for survival that was supposed to be "empowering" or whatnot but is just laughably uncomfortable and embarrassing.

So Kate Bosworth (remember her?) and Lake Bell are off to spend the weekend on a lonely New England island and bring their estranged friend with them. There is tension for a moment, but it goes away until they arrive at the island and start arguing about...men. Yup, because even a female writer cannot write depth or originality into this. You'll hear better dialogue in real life when listening to drunk girls arguing in the street.

Once on the island they encounter a trio of men who are obviously a bunch of awkward creeps and sit around the campfire with them. Katie Aselton (are their character names even important?) flirts with one of them in an uncomfortable, overbearing way, which makes even the dude himself feel weird. She lures him into the forest alone and invites sex, but then, for absolutely no reason other than to make more "plot" happen, decides she doesn't want him and caves his head in with a rock when he doesn't stop. It's like they are deliberately teasing us with a ludicrously exaggerated "no means no" scenario that we are supposed to still find justified. Believe wahmen and all that. This is such poor writing.

The girls are now hunted by the other two creeps and there's zero atmosphere, very little action, terrible photography, no sense of place or space, loads more cringeworthy dialogue, and even gratituous nudity when they have to take their clothes off after emerging from freezing water. And yes, they spend the next short while completely naked. In any other movie that would be considered completely inappropriate but since it's a female calling the shots behind the camera it's...not?

Black Rock, is cheap and flat, and look like sub-par TV waste. Even the tagline of "Hunt or Be Hunted" is agonizingly overdone and cliched, and it doesn't even apply to what occurs in this "movie". It's 79 minutes of untalented people trying to stretch geriatric tropes to feature length, ending with a "shocking" cut-to-black that is nothing more than a welcome relief for everyone desperate for it to be over.

Oh, and they have landing strips, btw.