Tag: Betty Gabriel

REVIEW: Upgrade [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Permission granted. Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) was having a good day. An old school mechanic living in a high-tech world, his latest commission is roaring like a lion and ready to be handed off to its owner. Knowing his wife (Melanie Vallejo‘s Asha) would be interested to meet his benefactor being that she runs a robotics firm and he (Harrison Gilbertson‘s Eron Keen) practically is her main (and objectively better) competition, Grey takes her along in the muscle car with their automated vehicle in tow to return them home. A…

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REVIEW: Get Out [2017]

Jared Mobarak

“Magic isn’t real” If you ever watched “Key & Peele” you’d know the line between comedy and horror is very fine. Their sketches would often devolve into a horrific situation that you’d have to cry about if you weren’t already laughing. I think of “Aerobics Meltdown” where there’s this hilarious conceit of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele going over-the-top, 1980s-era Richard Simmons—it’s absurd, campy, and frivolous. But then they inject a sense of fear and helplessness through a stagehand explaining how one of their wives was in a terrible accident,…

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REVIEW: The Purge: Election Year [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Is murder our new religion?” The escalation of terror has dialed up a few more notches as writer/director James DeMonaco takes us further down the hole of first world genocide in The Purge: Election Year. What began behind fortified walls and a false sense of modest superiority to show how no one was safe when bloodlust, greed, and jealousy ruled mankind soon entered the outdoors to find the government blatantly enforcing its own thinly veiled mantra of “kill the poor” when the public stopped doing it for them. The only…

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