I am no stranger to animated movies and no stranger to time travel movies but I had no idea what to expect from Seven Psychopaths. Easily the most lukewarm of the movies I’ve set myself up to review, Seven Psychopaths is a surprisingly intense and bloody tale of a man who becomes involved with gangsters and murder and gore and…the bottom line is that this is a very dark movie. That much I can say I expected. But it comes across almost like a Tarantino flick. The movie was extremely funny with a twisted sense of humor and every character was an overall thrill to watch. There is a tenseness to the movie that you cannot deny. I will say that, for me, the ending was…a bit much and it was REALLY gory. There weren’t many scenes where there was no blood on the screen. The ending was incredibly bittersweet for me and because of that, I do dock it a few points. On an overall, I’d give it a score even with the amount of psychopaths in the title. 7 out of 10.

Looper was hardly as lukewarm. I’ll say that, for personal reasons, I don’t really like this movie but I will not deny that it was well made, well executed, and did its job well. The Time Travel contrivances weren’t made a big deal of and the atmosphere was very cleverly designed. The acting was all top notch and the movie had a quirky sense of humor. This one is another one where the ending kind of ruined it for me. But I understand that not everyone shares my philosophy on endings so I won’t dock it points on that even though the ending does very heavily unhinge the movie even looking at it through someone else’s eyes but blame that on the time travel. I greatly enjoyed the flick until the ending so I’ll leave out my bias and give it an 8 out of 10. My reasoning for docking the extra point is because you’ll learn that people have this sort of psychic ability and it does play heavily into the plot but I feel like they didn’t go in depth with it as much as they should and that took away from me. But, then again, if you give someone a superpower, I’m just naturally going to want them to be front and center so that could just be my problem. What do I know?

Hotel Transylvania and Wreck-It Ralph are, by far, my two favorites of this bundle and for very different reasons. They share a score but I’ll get to that.

Hotel Transylvania first. I’ll grant that the storyline itself is pretty cliche but I don’t really care about cliches as long as they’re still executed well. The big fuss over cliches eludes me. I will also say that I actually really enjoyed the sense of humor given to this movie and I found that the animation, CG or not, was superb. The movie honestly does feel like a cartoon made by the man himself, Genndy Tartakovsky. The movie was a lot of fun and the sense of humor is much more adult than the former. The little references here and there are funny and there is one scene in this movie where anyone fed up with the Twilight Hype will most assuredly LOVE.

Wreck-It Ralph was a more original movie to me and came across as having a better movie execution. It had heart and the characters were fun. The story was well written and the voice acting was all surprisingly superb. The sense of humor wasn’t as adult and there are some notably ridiculous scene that I felt went a bit too far but it’s solid. The animation is wonderful and the resolution is terrific. This one definitely had a great climax in my eyes and you really get to see how Ralph, as a character, grows. Another fun thing is that the references to videogame culture are all really fun to try and find (the ones that aren’t obvious, anyway). The movie feels much more triumphant and to me it was just as enjoyable as Hotel Transylvania was, just for different reasons.

Both movies scrape out a triumphant 9 out of 10 from me. Let’s see what the rest of this year’s movies hold. Let’s hold our breath and hope Rise of the Guardians is, in fact, the animation powerhouse that it looks like it’ll end up being? That’s all, folks!