Reviews

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2006 – Disney Channel, Salty Pictures, First Street Films Directed by Kenny Ortega Written by Peter Barsocchini NOTE: Comments are closed for the first four parts of this piece, just to keep them together. Please jump ahead to Part 5 if you wish to comment. Thanks! PROLOGUE I suppose that at…

ACT TWO We return to East High the next day, only to find that Sharpay has decided to start her morning by digging her karmic grave even deeper.  She and her brother are still unopposed for the leads in the musical.  Yet she’s brownnosing Ms. Darbus with the gift of a scented candle, as…

ACT THREE We return from our commercial break to find Chad harassing Troy in the library.  Like Coach Bolton before him, he has decided to skip the best point he could possibly make -- that Troy needs to live up to his role as team captain -- and instead blame Gabriella for Troy’s bizarre…

ACT FIVE The next morning, Kelsi is staring glumly at the callback sheet, which has a new announcement to the effect that callbacks have been rescheduled as Sharpay requested.  All our non-Evans main characters walk in a nearby door.  When Troy and Gabriella notice the expression on their petite pianist’s face, they look at…

FIXING IT IN POST Admittedly, High School Musical is not exactly the normal fare round these parts.  If you’re one of Ken’s regular readers, you probably haven’t watched the movie.  But just from the clips scattered throughout this review, you can see it has halfway-decent pr`oduction values -- for TV, anyway -- and some…

[aesop_image imgwidth="800px" img="http://jabootu.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1Evo3Zm.png" align="center" lightbox="on" caption="DEAD ON ARRIVAL would have been a far more apt title." captionposition="center"] I was really unprepared for how lousy this was. Not only as a purported sequel to the two James Coburn films of the 1960s. No, I mean just how bad it is technically. I had known there…