Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Moana

Disney made a name for itself in animation, where softened fairy tales gave young girls figures to look up to. That tradition continued through the 1950s before being supplanted by adventures that had cross-gender appeal, but as the fortunes of the animation division faltered, it revitalized itself in the late 1980s with its princess movies redeveloped. Moana is the latest in a long tradition of stories with female-empowerment angles. As modern tastes have improved, so too have the strength of their characters.

Moana, which follows the story of a young island girl who longs to be at sea, answering the siren’s call, while her father fights to keep her land-bound to protect their people. As their island’s fortunes diminish, and through the goading of her paternal grandmother, Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) sets sail across the ocean to locate the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), with whom she must locate his magical fishhook, and return the Heart of Te Fiti, the creator goddess, and save the world.

Cravalho is a treasure. Her vocal talents are immense and while Johnson more than carries his own, it’s Cravalho who dominates. The animation is beautiful, which is par for Disney’s course. What isn’t, though, is a song score that has some nice moments, but is ultimately filled with minor tunes that aren’t nearly as hummable or memorable as those of animated films past. There are bright spots, but they are tempered with their own frustrating elements: “I Am Moana” features a soaring vocal, but ends abruptly; “You’re Welcome” is catchy, but overstays its welcome; “We Know the Way,” is catchy, but was overused in the trailers, making it feel stale within the film itself; and “Shiny” is a humorous villain number, but it is also cut short unnecessarily.

There’s plenty to love about Moana, but it doesn’t feel as strong as Frozen, nor as inventive as The Princess and the Frog or Wreck-It Ralph. The best comparison is probably Tangled, which was entertaining to a fault, but ultimately not one of the most memorable of Disney’s animated efforts.

Open Grave

This post-apocalyptic horror flick never got the chance at the U.S. box office it probably deserved. Starring Shalto Copley (District 9), as an amnesiac trying to uncover the truth about who he was and why he woke up in a large pit filled with corpses.

By his side are a group of four others who’ve lost their memories and the mute who has all the answers, but cannot understand English or communicate in any other meaningful way. As they struggle to figure out what’s happened to them, they begin to discover that their relationship to one another may have more to do with what’s going on in the world around them than what’s happened between them.

The acting is meager, ranging from questionable to mediocre with no one excelling in particular. What is clear that the unraveling mystery at the backbone of the film is a fascinating one. As the characters slowly understand who they are and what’s happened to them, the audience picks up the clues simultaneously, understanding what’s going on at a slightly more advanced pace than those at the center of it.

When looking for inventive or original genre pics, Open Grave is worth the effort of locating and giving a go. It is far from perfect, but it’s engaging in spite of that.

Sausage Party

Stoner comedies have been quite popular, so it was only a matter of time that the minds behind films like This Is the End and Superbad found their way into the animation milieu and everything you’ve come to expect from those oddball comedies makes a core part of the Sausage Party success.

What if the food we ate, the packaged and manufactured food we buy in the grocery store, were sentient? What if those same groceries were oblivious to the truth that they will face once they are purchased by humans, those they see as gods. Sausage Party attempts to answer that question in this crass, corny, sexually explicit animated comedy that wants to find the same degree of success that South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and Team America: World Police had several years ago, and that Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s myriad recent entries have had.

Make no mistake, this is not a film for youngsters. These sausages, buns, liquor bottles, and more are rude, crude, and totally adult-oriented. That doesn’t make them palatable to the adult community either. What makes the film work is that it is a heavy-handed commentary on civilization. It discusses religion in blunt and forward language, but shows a lot of common sense in terms of narrative focus.

That straight-shooting angle is a bit off-putting at times, supplemented by overly condescending commentary, and an excessive amount of drug references, sexual innuendo, and actual lewd activities. Each scene makes sense within the framework of the narrative, but it is so excessive at times that it forces the audience to lose focus on the greater philosophical questions being put forward, however bluntly.

Trolls

What feels like a script rejected by the folks at Laika and made by DreamWorks animators hoping to save their studio from the slow downward trend of quality being exhibited. Trolls tells the story of a community of bright-haired critters whose lives are in danger thanks to their status as a delicacy of the horrendous bergen, troll-like creatures who had to be renamed to avoid confusion.

Anna Kendrick stars as Poppy, a chipper, scrapbooking troll who want everyone to be as happy as she is, and wants to throw a major party to celebrate their awesomeness. Rejecting the troll society in general, Justin Timberlake plays Branch, a mirthless, colorless worry wart who perpetually warns his fellow creatures that the bergen are sure to hear them and come and eat them all. When his dire warnings come to fruition, he teams up with Poppy to traverse the wide world of theirs in the hopes of rescuing those who’ve been captured and save them from being little more than a delicacy.

The story is a bit more expansive than this, but the film plays entirely like a piece of syrupy children’s entertainment that may have some pessimistic moments, but the utter cheerfulness of the trolls is both frustrating and heartening in equal measure. Kendrick does great vocal work a Poppy and Timberlake is a fine second. The rest of the cast performs admirably, but there’s little development of most of the other characters, allowing the narrative to contrast Poppy and Branch with Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) and Prince Gristle Jr. (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as potential bergen romantic interests.

The musical selection is top notch, matching the events almost perfectly, with the highlight being the “True Colors” number near the film’s end. The animatino is solid, but everything feels so impossibly pristine that even the garish and drab bergen city is strikingly well constructed. Overall, the story is a predictable and corny one. There’s little about the film that won’t appeal to children, but it’s so simplistic that you long for what Laika or Disney or Pixar could have done with the material given the chance.

Rules Don’t Apply

Warren Beatty’s ode to Old Hollywood is a glossy look at the legacy of film mogul and aviator Howard Hughes (Beatty) late in his life and career. Painted against this backdrop is a fictional love story between one of his myriad contract actresses (Lily Collins) waiting for their screen test and one of his company’s starlet drivers (Alden Ehrenreich).

Collins and Ehrenreich are destined to be together and while their trip to unity is one that’s atypical for a Hollywood love story, their organic affair adds to the scope of the film. Both actors are solid, but they just don’t have the kind of material worth their talents. Beatty is appropriately daft as Hughes while Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Megan Hilty, Annette Bening, Taissa Farmiga, Martin Sheen, Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, and Paul Schneider providing adequate support.

Beatty’s Hollywood environment is lovingly recreated and his appreciation for the period is evident. The screenplay, also written by Beatty (he produces, directs, writes, and acts in the film), is a meandering mess filled with faux sentiment that is both testament to and exemplification of all that was great and awful about that period. Too often, Beatty allows himself to become the center of the story, sidelining both Collins and Ehrenreich, making them feel more like bystanders to the production than key figures. This is reason enough to suggest that Beatty needs to have someone else write his scripts rather than allowing all the problems with his own to shine through.

The Collector

The slasher genre hasn’t had sufficient representation in recent years, having been relegated to the back-burner in favor of supernatural or religious horror flicks like Paranormal Activity or The Conjuring. The need for a new type of serial slaughterer of young innocents is palpable, but the end result of The Collector is a villain with creativity, but no depth.

The Collector sets elaborate traps in the houses he infiltrates, taking prisoner the owners of the home and putting through gruesome and grotesque tortures. Head encased in a leather hood, the Collector isn’t given any backstory or motives for his horrific pursuits. It makes for a villain that we don’t care much about, unlike the similarly crafty antagonist of the Saw films. The hero of the story (Josh Stewart) is an ex-con hoping to boost an expensive gem from the house he’s been casing and must accelerate the timeline to save his ex-wife from a dangerous fate. Once he discovers that there is no way out, he must pit his wits against the evil Collector in order to secure escape for himself and the little girl who lives in the house.

A strange, bloody horror flick, The Collector is built on the worst tropes of the genre and frequently fails to enliven the material enough to engage the audience. The graphic nature of the film is emboldened at times by quick cuts and spurts of blood to cover up the sometimes cheesy effects. At times, the effects are as bad as those one might have seen in the campiest ’80s horror flicks, but thirty-years removed offers too many options to revive such antiquated techniques.

For horror fans hoping to find a new slasher to engage with, The Collector is not likely the answer. There are some interesting traps on display and the ending is frustrating, but engaging in how it turns genre conclusions on their heads, but the question is whether subsequent films (and there already is a sequel to this film) will be able to take the premise in a new and more compelling direction or if it will continue down the dark, cruel, and unimpressive track it’s so far taken.