Lo, Ink - Movie reviews

Lo, Ink is not the name of a chinese shipping company.

So I have this netflix subscription. And I have 258 movies in my instant queue. Most of them are horror. And I was talking with my nephew and I realized... even at a movie a day, that's most of a year, just before I clear out my instant queue. Not even considering new releases. At first, I was aghast, agog, almost kerfluffled at how I would ever watch them all, or in what order to watch them in. Then my nephew mentioned something even more horrible.

The movies sometimes expire.

WHAT!!!!! My movies can DIE???? Yes, it's true. So I'm browsing the dozen or so pages of my instant queue and I notice... Three movies have expiration dates. Like milk on the cusp of going bad, it's best to drink them down before you've wasted your money. No matter how bad they taste, you have to do it. Just CHUG IT DOWN!!!

Thus... I watched Lo, and then Ink, two, shall we say, "independent" movies for view on netflix. Hell, by the time you read this they probably will have been taken off the instantly viewable list (probably a good thing). I had noticed, even though I know the movie by heart and thus had not needed to put it in my instant queue, that "The Thing" by John Carpenter, which WAS available last October, is no longer up for instant viewing. But then, I've seen that movie so many times I can probably recite it line by line. Should I ever have grand-kids, I will tell them the story of "The Thing" around the campfire, long after the zombie apocalypse, when netflix is but a fondly remembered dream. If I am in a charitable mood, I will even give john carpenter credit for the tale, and not tell my kids that it was, in fact, me who killed the thing, trekked my way north from the south pole during the antarctic winter, and made it back to civilization in time for supper.

But, on to the... uh... "movies." Lo and Ink both seem like they were put together by film students in their spare time. There's a stage quality to them, like they were broadway plays before they were films, and one even had a musical number in it, which just... well. Let's just say if you're watching a lot of films with musical numbers in them, you should have long ago turned in your man card.

Lo is the story about a man who uses a magical book he got from his girlfriend to summon up a Demon named Lo, in order to get his girlfriend back. Apparently, he really misses her, or he was really in love with her, or she knew how to give a really good blow job. In any case, he tasks this demon with finding her and dragging her ass back from hell so he can, oh I don't know, live happily ever after. How does he know she's in hell, you ask? Well, he saw a demon take her. So, being an idiot, he reads the book she told him not to read, casts the spell she told him not to cast, and bargains with the worst demon in all of hell to see her again. Sure, there's a twist. And a musical number. And I saw the twist coming from miles away, but the musical number, okay, that one got me. I didn't see that coming. Sure, the acting was high school level, the effects were something I could have put together with masking tape and crayons, but you never expect to see a musical song and dance routine in the middle of a horror movie. You just don't.

Now, I'm not saying the movie was bad. The premise was good. You don't see a lot of talking in horror movies for the most part. And I'm not even sure this could be called a horror movie, despite the whole summoning a demon thing, which is usually a good indicator that you are watching a horror flick. So basically, what happens is, a guy summons a demon, and they talk a lot. And, The End. So. Would I watch it again? No. Did I fast forward through a lot of the movie to see the end? Yes. Do I wish they'd have skipped the whole musical number thing? Hell yea. Would it have made it a better movie? I think so. You can't really take a horror movie seriously when it has a musical number in it. And don't cite "Little shop of horrors," because that's the exception that proves the rule.

Now "Ink," I thought had a chance for a minute there. There was something about some character kidnapping a little girl, and usually in kidnapping cases, there's no song and dance routine. Usually there's a lot of police chases, car chases, people chases, and some major thumping of bad guys going on. Oh, if only I was so lucky. Again, it had that whole "high school musical" thing going for it, and it played out like it was on a stage, so if you like surrealism, you'd like Ink (and Lo as well). I prefer realism in my surrealism... which, of course, makes it less surreal and more... real... but anyway, you get my point. But let me sum up the plot and maybe you'll see what I mean.

So a mystical dream bad guy kidnaps a ... well, a little girl's dream self, i guess you'd call it. And there's these, I don't know what you'd call them, good dream makers and bad dream makers, I guess? That are fighting for possession of the little girl's uh, dream self. And I guess if the good dream people win, she lives, and if the bad ones win, she dies. So, I think that much of the plot can be figured out. My only problem is... none of the movie makes sense. And I'm going to spoil the ending here, so if you want to try and watch this sometime, skip the next paragraph.

According to the movie... the bad guy who kidnaps the little girl is actually the girl's father. Now, the only way to become a dream bad guy (or good guy) is to die. So, I guess these beings are angels or demons or whatever? I don't know. Too theatrical for me to wonder about. So apparently, he commits suicide, dies, and kidnaps his own daughter to sacrifice to the evil dream people to become one of them. Now, due to his traumatic life/death, he can't remember that it is his daughter, but the good dream people know it. So they are trying to get him to remember who it is to save... him? Her? I'm not really sure. Now, I know the dream people say things like "time works differently here than in the real world." and everything, but here's what I don't get. According to the movie, his dead self kidnaps the girl, which precipitates the good dream people to try and remind him of who he is so he can reunite with her and save them both. So, they cause him to have a car accident in the real world so he can get sent to the hospital where his daughter is to help save her. So... Wait, what? How... how does a dead guy have a car.. accident? I'm all confuzzled. And if he's NOT dead, and only had an accident... how did he kidnap her in the first... place? I don't... (head asplodes) I don't know, maybe i missed some strain of random logic in there somewhere, but if his death causes the whole series of events in the entire movie, and he's not actually dead, doesn't that mean nothing actually happened? And it's not even one of those "everything happened in his mind" things, because... oh screw it, just let it go. Obviously these high school film students have been using too many drugs.

So. Would I watch Ink again? No. Did I fast forward through spots to get to the end? yes. Should I have just deleted it from my instant queue when i realized there was a time limit on it? yes, i should have, like i did with the third movie that had a time limit on it.

Now here's my question... if Lo got an average rating of 3 to 4 stars (out of a possible 5), and Ink got an average rating of 4 stars, then do the people who make the movies go to netflix to pad their own stats? Yes. Hell yes, a thousand times, yes. These movies shouldn't have been on netflix. YouTube, perchance. High school drama class, sure. Netflix? No. No, a thousand times, no.

I think I just drank down some bad milk. And yes, that's a euphemism for having watched some horribly bad movies. I haven't had actual milk since the last time I drank chocolate milk straight out of the chocolate cow. And don't ask me wtf I am talking about, it's probably a hallucination from the bad milk-movies.

Plus, I think they gave me gas. Can a bad movie give you gas? This is too surreal for me.