Velvet Crowe
Celluloid Junkie
Member Since: 03 Jun 2010
Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Age: 33
Bio: Former journalist, invested in humanities, fitness, and consuming garbage. Probably one of the few Criticker users who actually read comics and plays competitive video games. Subtlety is overrated. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/176986912-drew https://twitter.com/DrewStr56396515
Recent Ratings
Check out Velvet Crowe's...
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - Rated 21 Aug 2025
"I come at this more with the mindset that it's a strong cinematic spectacle than something with high narrative resonance. But I do think the film drenches itself in such a cool, depraved image of Americana that makes it uniquely enticing as a horror film which is further elevated by how grounded it makes everything. I think it's overly meandering around the middle but I think it's captivating otherwise and the final 20 minutes have some of the coolest imagery I've ever seen in a horror film."
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"I don't like any of the deviations this does to the original chapter. The source material was limited as is but this was moreso because it was playing up the grander narrative of Dracula's return to Britain. Here he's portrayed as a Nosferatu which I think makes this narrative a lot less interesting given that Dracula is more interesting when his human side hides his monstrous nature. I might have been more lenient on that if this movie wasn't such a by the numbers horror film in every way."
Carrie (1976) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"The film is clumsy about how it handles everything and my god does it meander. It's more interested in painting virtually everyone in Carrie's life as one extreme or the other and it's hard to take it seriously. The side characters get too much screentime on their own when they're only ever interesting in relation to Carrie yet what these scenes convey about them is so painfully superficial. I think it gets carried by its style and leads performance, especially the climax, but this was drudgery."
The Insult (2017) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"What I like about this is that it's drawing two sides of identity politics and clashing them together. It's a movie that asserts that emotional outbursts and prejudices are tied to life experiences, that often these conflicts stem from our solipsism on personal suffering. I do think it's tacky the way it resolves itself in that I don't buy into someone necessarily becoming sympathetic after hearing of someone else's suffering, but it carries itself with enough flair and nuance to not be moronic."
Robot Carnival (1987) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"Most of the shorts are cheeseball montages that are technically and stylistically executed well, but the narrative it plays into isn't engaging. When it gets experimental with Cloud is when I think this movie becomes its most enjoyable, but I do think Presence had stronger emotional resonance. Meiji Machine is a fun novelty that I wish had been expanded into its own series. The rest I felt ambivalent about. Sometimes the music and certain stills were cool, but it was more vibes than anything."
Blue Beetle (2023) - Rated 14 Aug 2025
"I think it lands on a decent spot for its foundation. I like that Jaime's family are central to the plot and get involved with the superhero stuff and Xolo is such a perfect fit for this character. But I also feel like it's uninspired, doing the usual superhero movie structure and writing tropes that made me roll my eyes sometimes, especially when the comic made far better use of its concepts. it's not egregiously bad at anything but it's so narratively hollow I struggled to care."
Primal Fear (1996) - Rated 14 Aug 2025
"I think this is cool in terms of how it flips on the conventions of mystery stories. Wherein it subverts the leads ability to detect actual guilt from the vibes of their client and put's Gere on the spot for falling for the deception. But I also feel this is a hyperbolic Hollywood depiction of that, which can come off as excessively tacky. But I do think it lands on being entertaining at least, I actually think the banter between Gere and Linney was more engaging than Norton's character."
Okja (2017) - Rated 14 Aug 2025
"I think Joon-Ho's thematic bluntness works in this movie's favor. When you're making a story about the exploitation of animals by corporations, it does well to be unsubtle about their horrific conditions as possible. But I also feel that the figures surrounding it were more interesting than the lead. The lead is a good hook for the narrative framing but when her character is so one note her motivation is a much less compelling thing than the CEO trying to clean up her image but doing so poorly."
Threads (1984) - Rated 14 Aug 2025
"What makes this movie so biting is that it's not tying itself to any conventional narrative on any individual or group as much as it is functioning as a pseudo-documentary. It's a pure world building story, but does so with as little exposition as possible. But what sells it is how unrelentingly raw it is, that the consequences of nuclear war is not presented with any grandiose or flavorful fantasy we see in most post-apocalyptic works but as a dire indictment of how tragically humanity falls."
Brother Future (1991) - Rated 12 Aug 2025
"What lands about this film is that it creates a connection between past and present that has long been disconnected. It's somewhat didactic in how it approaches its history but narratively that achieves a feeling of disconnect from his surroundings, which culminates into strong emotional resonance on the philosophy being preached. It gets cheesy at times with its tropes but I think it grounds itself enough to land on its emotional resonance and its ending is a damn solid way to go out."
