Project Dorothy (2024)

Movie Name/Year: Project Dorothy (2024)
Genre: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Length: 80 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Director: George Henry Horton
Writer: George Henry Horton, Ryan Scaringe
Actors: Danielle Harris, Tim SeZarn, Adam Budron, Olivia Scott
 
Blurb from IMDb: After a botched robbery, two men take refuge in a remote and lifeless scientific facility, inadvertently awakening a monster within.
 

Selina’s Point of View:
I was really into the trailer for Project Dorothy. There’s so much going on with artificial intelligence these days that new movies based on the worst of it make sense to me. I settled in to watch it with hope in my heart.
 
Although the acting of the two main characters was decent, and the concept of Project Dorothy was great, the execution left much to be desired.
 
I hated the way the AI, Dorothy, was portrayed. I don’t know if it was an issue with the writing or Danielle Harris’ (Roadkill, Creepshow, Inoperable) acting, but there was a disconnect somewhere.
 

Part of what makes movies like this scary is just how inhuman artificial intelligence is. Despite sounding, or even looking, human, it can’t be reasoned with or threatened – there are no emotions to appeal to. It’s the uncanny valley. In Project Dorothy, the portrayal of Dorothy is just too human. She laughs, she has normal inflection in her tone, she even gets scared. It broke any tension the very slow first half of the film created. I would have bought it if the twist was that she was just some psychopath behind a curtain pretending to be AI. Might have even made it interesting.
 
I can’t recommend Project Dorothy; it completely missed the point of its own sub-genre.
 

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – None

Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score – 96%
Metascore – None
Metacritic User Score – None
IMDB Score – None
 
Trust the Dice: Selina’s Rating – 2/5
 
Trust-the-Dice’s Parental Advisory Rating: PG-13
 
Movie Trailer:

The SAG-AFTRA and WGA Strikes Are OVER!

The SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are officially over as of Thursday, Nov. 9 (though the WGA was able to end there’s earlier). I can’t tell you just how excited we here at Trust the Dice are to get back to our regularly scheduled reviews and streams – though we may be altering the latter just a bit (we’ll discuss that at a later date).
 
Let’s talk about the strikes, for just a moment longer.
 
It only occurred to me recently that the biggest sticking point for actors and writers wasn’t common knowledge. People thought it just boiled down to royalties. While that was an issue, it was not the biggest among them. In fact, I’d say it was the least important issue they were fighting for overall. There were issues they fought for that affect everyone, even those not in Hollywood.
 
The easiest agreements that fell among the most important of them, involved things like sexual harassment prevention, young actors continuing schooling, and closer monitoring of animal actors to protect everyone on set. There were agreements on those issues made all the way back in July.
 
Then there were issues of inclusion. It came out during the strike that, often, services on sets were only provided for white actors. Things like hair and makeup were rarely provided for other races. I’ve heard a lot of arguments about how the big actors should be able to take on that kind of fee, but even if they could, that kind of exclusion is objectively wrong. For that kind of racism to prevail in this day, is ridiculous. The fact that the AMPTP argued with altering it, for any length of time, is disgusting.
 
Finally, there was one sticking point that made it so that no writer or actor could even think of going back to work without resolving. It’s an item that could have set a Black Mirror-esk precedent for all of us. That issue was artificial intelligence.
 
The AMPTP refused to give an inch during the strikes on anything AI related, but it was such an important issue that no creative would dare think of ending negotiations without resolving it.
 
Writers were fighting for AI to be unusable for writing, or rewriting, their material. This means they were fighting for the right to their own work. The way AI works, any script written by it would be a Frankenstein of other writers’ projects. Any writing used to train AI would be up for grabs in those projects and would have led to rampant plagiarism. The hard work writers created could have been taken and used to form other creations without any compensation or credit.
 
As a writer, I’m glad the guild stuck it out and gave no inch where AI was concerned.
 
Yet, I feel like what actors were fighting for was even more important.
 
The studios wanted to be able to take a scan of actors, pay them a (very low) one-time fee and use their likeness in perpetuity – even after their death. In fact, on some projects they had already begun doing so. There are reports of background actors having been scanned, and then told afterwards that the scans would be used to make digital copies of them for future work. Work they would have no credit or pay for.
 
How many cameras are placed all around us these days? Traffic cameras, doorbell cameras, phones… there’s no doubt that each one of us appears on video many times every single day. Now, the SAG/AFTRA deal doesn’t affect laws, but it does offer precedent as to what people will tolerate. If the actors had quit before securing the right to their own images, it would have told politicians that the line for AI use was hazier than they thought.
 
Given the chance to use the likeness of citizens for free, who knows what could have happened.
 
If you’re one of the people out there who thought these strikes were just about making the rich richer, I hope you don’t think that anymore. I hope you see how important these strikes were to all of us.
 
Congrats to the WGA and SAG/AFTRA on their new contracts! I’m so very excited to get back to promoting your films.

M3GAN (2023)

 

Streaming Service: Peacock

Movie Name/Year: M3GAN (2023)

Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller, Horror

Length: 1h 42min

Rating: Unrated

Production/Distribution: Atomic Monster, Blumhouse Productions, Divide/Conquer, Universal Pictures, New Zealand Film Commission, Peacock, Studio Distribution Services (SDS), Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (UPHE), Universal Pictures International (UPI)

Director: Gerard Johnstone

Writers: Akela Cooper, James Wan

Actors: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Amy Usherwood, Arlo Green, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jack Cassidy, Jen Van Epps, Jenna Davis, Kira Josephson, Lori Dungey, Michael Saccente, Millen Baird, Natasha Kojic, Ronny Chieng, Stephane Garneau

 

IMDb Blurb: A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.

 

Selina’s Point of View:

I figured M3GAN would be a bit on the corny side, but still a fun watch. I was dead-on with my expectations.

M3GAN followed just about every killer-AI trope there is out there. I’d be hard-pressed to call much of it original, but it did feel like the tropes were well used. It would have been very easy for M3GAN to just start cramming as much as it could into the story without rhyme or reason. Instead, it worked. Mostly.

 

 

It may seem a little strange to say, but I didn’t get as much of that uncanny valley feel from the robot as I thought I would. In fact, I got more from Paul Dano’s (Knight and Day, Swiss Army Man, The Fabelmans) Riddler in The Batman. Without that feeling, there were parts of the flick that didn’t hit as hard as they could have. It made things feel more silly than serious.

I did appreciate a bit of the psychological aspect that was thrown in. It was an interesting perspective, especially in the context of grief.

I enjoyed M3GAN, but I was hoping for something a little more serious than I got. It’s still something fun to watch with friends and a six-pack, though.

 

 

Cat’s Point of View:

The prospect of watching M3GAN made my inner sci-fi geeky heart happy. I’m generally down to watch any production that explores AI and robotics and their future interactions with humankind. For now they may be fiction, but I don’t anticipate that lasting much longer. Lets get those cautionary tales out there and prevent Skynet, right? 

All in all, I generally enjoyed my experience with M3GAN. 

The doll was seriously creepy and gave me futuristic, if only slightly less homicidal, Chucky vibes. I really appreciated how they kept the face of the android companion just somewhere uncomfortably between a real human’s and that of your typical porcelain doll. It made the moments interacting with people who didn’t know what M3GAN was more believable. 

 

I enjoyed the cast’s performances and how M3GAN embraced its own camp and meta nature. Everything was a bit predictable - but really, for this sort of movie there’s not a lot that it could have done that wouldn’t have been so. Still, there was something missing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. As a horror movie that blended comedy along with the psychology of grief into a story about a murderous toy, it delivered where it counted. 

I do have to give the production team credit for the avenues they took with the story to leave it open for sequel potential. In fact, Blumhouse announced in January, shortly after this film’s release, that there will be a M3GAN 2.0 - which is, at this time, the current working title of the next movie. 

 

I actually ended up watching M3GAN twice. I hadn’t realized initially that it released as an unrated version when it hit streaming in addition to the PG-13 film that was in theaters. My 19-year-old daughter and I viewed it as soon as it became available on Xfinity On-Demand, and it turned out to be the PG-13 version. I watched the unrated one in preparation for this review today. I was rather surprised that there wasn’t a lot of difference between them. I actually preferred the PG-13 cut better. 

For those wondering why, the PG-13 cut was more refined and the horror was more effective with slightly less gore, or some actions happening off-camera. The body count, all general plot points, and set pieces all remained the same. If there had been a more expansive difference between the versions, I would understand the unrated release better. As it stands, I’m just scratching my head in confusion - because the “extras” the lack of rating allowed didn’t make that cut any better. I digress.

My daughter and I did enjoy our trippy romp through the cut-throat toy industry. My advice would be to just not expect or assume too much from the outset. The toy developers here were obviously not following Isaac Asimov’s (1920-1992) laws of robotics. 

 

 

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – 93%

Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score –78%

Metascore – 72%

Metacritic User Score – 6.8/10

IMDB Score – 6.4/10

 

Trust the Dice: Selina’s Rating – 3.5/5

Trust the Dice: Cat’s Rating – 3.5/5

 

Trust the Dice: Parental Guidance Rating: There are 2 versions of this movie. The Unrated version is closer to R and there is also an MPAA rated PG-13 version.

 

Movie Trailer: