I didn't like the Divergent movie. I just want to make that clear. I watched and reviewed the original, and it betrayed the very same values it set forth. That's never a good idea when you're dealing with someone who can spot the plot holes, especially someone who's already managed to suspend their disbelief about the ridiculous ideas the movie sets forth in the first place. In that vein, I decided to watch and review the sequel, Insurgent, just to let people know how bad I expected it to be.
Insurgent (2015) picks up the story 5 days after the end of the first movie. If you remember, Janine and her Erudite cronies corrupted the Dauntless class (the warrior caste in a 5-class social system) and tried to take power over the other classes. Because of a few divergents and some loyal dauntless, the plan failed, and Tris Prior (the heroine of the last movie) was presented with a choice. Kill Janine, the Erudite responsible for the power-grab, or run and hide. My biggest problem with the first movie was that Tris, going against all of her Dauntless training (a class she chose to become), chose to run and hide, instead of killing the bad guy, which is what she was trained to do. It's not like it would have been hard to do. She had Janine. She already foiled the plan. She knew Janine would only continue down her chosen path of power-hungry world domination. The Dauntless are trained to protect the class system, and Tris chose to ignore her training and run and hide. Insurgent continues Tris's struggles against Janine's power-grab, this time revolving around a 5-sided "box" that Janine thinks will re-invigorate the class system with a message from the Founders. Problem is, only Tris can open the box...
Okay, let's start with the problems left over from the last movie. Tris and her friends are hiding out, 5 days after the end of the first movie, and talking about how Janine is never going to stop, and they should have killed her. Yes, I knew this at the end of the last movie, thanks for catching up. Could have saved yourself watching the next two movies just by ending it there, but whatever. Apparently, I'm 'Erudite' enough to have figured that shit out ages ago.
Next, we've got the Dauntless class searching for the rebel Divergents with a brand-spanking new handheld detector that can sniff out divergents in the blink of an eye. Yes, at the end of the last movie, 5 days previous, they were barely even a rumor. Now, every last Dauntless has a handy-dandy popup that tells him who to shoot. Pretty rapid technological progress in 5 days, innit?
Then they have this stupid trial in the Candor class that somehow makes Tris alienate her only remaining friend. I really have no idea why they did this. Seemed ridiculously stupid, and doesn't do anything for the plot whatsoever. She could have just told her friend the secret she was hiding, saving her friend the knowledge that she lied to her. Also, there was no particular reason that the information needed to be revealed. Yes, she was under a truth serum at the time, but the question of her friend's name didn't need to be asked. Why was it important? No reason! Just farking with you! Ha ha! Good one, eh? Stupid movie.
After all that, there wasn't even a good fight scene. Just a bunch of CGI stuff that wasn't even real, and I'm not spoiling anything by saying that, because it's part of the plot that's it's not real. I haven't even given away a single spoiler. I'm sure there's other things that would bug me, if I hadn't been drinking during the whole movie.
Well, Shailene woodley showed a little leg at the beginning of this movie, and that's about all the good that I can say about it. Not that she's particularly attractive, but meh. I like my movies with more eye candy. Perhaps it's overly masculine and not politically correct, but I am 45 years old and I was born before Political Correctness was invented. It doesn't apply to me. It's called a 'grandfather clause.' Google that shit.
So, would I watch Insurgent again? Hell, no. I'm sorry I watched it the first time. I didn't watch Divergent after the first time I viewed it again, either. Given the past history of the series contradicting itself, I can't really expect the currently-filming third installment (and the planned fourth? jesus there's 4 movies of this crap? wtf!) to be any better at preserving the continuity. Yea, I think I'm going to stop at number two and call it what it is. Number 2, and I mean that in the excrement sense. Insurgent is playing on HBO this month, if you think you can sit through it yourself, without tossing things at your TV.
In other news, it's the holiday season! Yea, my second favorite time of the year, only approaching Halloween because I get presents in addition to tons of xmas candy. I've already caught 2/3rds of my holiday favorites; the Charlie Brown Xmas thing aired a couple weeks ago, watched that. They'll show it again before the 25th, I am sure. Already watched National Lampoon's Xmas Vacation, my favorite Holiday movie ever. We've seen it so many times, me and my family can quote the lines to each other all month long. Only one that's left is the 1966 cartoon about the Grinch Stealing Xmas, and not that two-hour long crappy live action movie shite. I'm sure I'll catch the original cartoon before Xmas, and if I don't, I still know it by heart, anyway.
I also caught A Very Murray Xmas on Netflix. Bill Murray is a great comedian, and a good actor, but not a very good singer. Still, he does his best to get through singing some holiday favorites with a few guest stars, notably Paul Shafer (from the David Letterman show) on piano, George Clooney (also a favorite of the Letterman crowd) making a guest appearance, and Miley Cyrus belting out some holiday tunes while wearing a rather short Santa outfit. Now, I realize I am probably unique among the male gender in that, I have not actually seen Miley performing in a video before, but she does appear to be able to sing. I know, it sounds like a bit of an understatement, given that she's a hugely popular singer and all, but I'm a bit slow to catch on. Miley did do a good job with Silent Night (one of my personal favorite xmas songs), and was one of the few singers on Bill Murray's "xmas variety hour" that was worth listening to. This may also be an understatement, but Miley is also easy on the eyes, too. Meh, I calls 'em as I sees 'em. Would I watch 'A Very Murray Xmas' again? No, but it wasn't bad the first time. I admit to fast-forwarding through some of the crappier songs, but come on. I watch Bill Murray because he can make me laugh, not because he can sing. If that makes him typecast, so be it.
I may start an annual gaming post about the games that I think are worthy of going under the xmas tree for the gamers in your life. The only problem is, I don't like to review games I haven't played, and since Xmas isn't here yet, I don't have the games to review them. This presents an awkward problem. I can review a couple games I have played, purchased during Steam's Black Friday Sale (there were some huge discounts I couldn't resist).
Counterstrike: Global Offensive is pretty popular right about now, and very cheap. $15 will get you the game off of Steam (a free service offered by Valve that allows you to purchase games directly from the internet, similar to GOG, but much more advanced and prettier, imho), and they may discount the price again once Xmas draws near. Last time I logged on, I think it said something about 300,000+ players online, playing CS:GO at that very time, so you're pretty much not going to have any trouble finding people to play against. There are several things I don't like about the game, but how well you do is mostly based on your skill. The random weapons you get when you respawn are kind of hard to get used to, although I see people with customized weapons killing me all the time, so maybe spawning with custom weapons is something I haven't figured out how to do yet. Also, there doesn't seem to be an 'iron sights' function usually common in other shooters, basically the ability to look down the sights of your weapon to increase your accuracy. You can do this with sniper rifles, looking through the scope with the right mouse button, but for some reason, the right mouse button doesn't do the same with all the other weapons. Seems goofy, but all the right mouse button does with those weapons is change the firing configuration (IF the weapons has another firing mode... if not, it does nothing). It seems ridiculous to me that an armed soldier cannot look down the sights of his own weapon to increase his accuracy, so neglecting to put this feature into the game seems retarded to me. I've looked through the keyboard options and can't seem to find an option to make the right mouse button look through the iron sights, but maybe I'm just missing it somewhere. (shrug) Either way, it seems stupid not to have that as the default right-mouse button option, considering it works exactly that way for sniper rifles.
CS:GO uses the 'bullet circle' option common to most shooters nowadays, simulating how crappy a shot you are by drawing a circle on the screen that marks off where your bullets are going to go, randomly. If your target is within the defined circle, chances are good that you will hit him, but it's not definite. I think this was done to make sniping a more attractive option, but on the tiny maps that CS:GO offers, there's not really much need for the long-distance sniper rifles they are offering. In any case, the only possible way to narrow the bullet circle (and thus improve your accuracy) is to stop and crouch, which, while it sounds ridiculous in a pitched firefight, is apparently what the game's creators think is the only way to make your shots more accurate. Hey, how bout this for making your shots more accurate? STOP DRAWING A BULLET CIRCLE ON THE SCREEN AND LET MY BULLETS GO WHERE THE DAMN CROSS HAIRS ARE. Seriously. I mean, that's how real guns work, right? Look, you've got guys running around, blasting the shit out of each other with shotguns, smg's, pistols, whatever. It's going to be hard enough to put the crosshairs on the enemy while they're hopping and jumping off of buildings like parkour experts while firing shots at me in midair. I don't need the game to decide that I randomly miss a guy with a sawed-off shotgun while he's 5 feet away. That's just stupid, and completely unrealistic, as is expecting every solider to stop running and squat so he can improve his accuracy during a running gun battle. Also, maybe making the CROUCH button something I can find easily would be a good thing, don'tcha think? I still have no idea how to crouch. It's none of the usual keys, so until I find it, my game consists of running at guys with a machine gun, hoping some random bullet in my bullet circle caps the guy in the head before he guns me down. It's an effective strategy (i often come in 5th or 6th place out of 20 some guys), but completely unrealistic.
Other than those nagging little issues, I guess CS:GO isn't a bad buy for $15, but I got it on sale at half price and I'm still wondering if I should have waited til it was cheaper. On the plus side, if there's a pay-to-win feature involved in the game, I haven't found it yet. Oh, I'm sure it's there, but it's probably as hard to find as the CROUCH key, so I can't rage about it yet.
Also, and I hesitate to review a game before it's out of beta, but I've been playing some ARK:Survival Evolved. It's what I call a "dinosaur" game, one of those jurassic-park things that pits armed humans against dinosaurs. In ARK's case, it starts out humans at the neanderthal level of technology, which pretty much tosses humans off the top of the food chain. You start out naked and afraid (well, I was afraid) on a beach on an island dominated by extinct species, and if you don't start constructing some shelter and learning to make weapons pretty quick, you're going to end up T-rex food. Or, raptor food (yes, there are Velociraptors). Or scavenger food (yes, a couple dinos a foot tall will kill you quickly if you try punching them). Or, you'll get trampled by a Triceratops. Or eaten by Megapiranha. Suffice it to say, there's a multitude of ways to die, and that's just single player. In multi-player mode, your fellow humans will kill you before anyone else does, because they hate you more. Raptors may kill and eat you, but humans will kill you just for fun. They're dicks that way.
Still, the game's not un-fun most of the time, and fleeing for my life from a t-rex while turning and chucking spears at it over my shoulder is kind of a blast. Sure, I ended up as food for the T-rex anyway, because he runs really fast, but death isn't necessarily permanent, unless you're playing Hardcore mode. I don't like the fact that you need to "level up" in order to learn to construct additional (more advanced) weapons, but I guess they had to make some sort of method for gaining new weapons and learning to access additional resources. It's far from ideal, but starting out by constructing primitive spears isn't without a certain appeal. I don't think I'll soon forget the first time I threw a spear as hard as I could, sailing it through the air and into the side of a Brontosaurus, who only reacted to the offending poke enough to flick me with its tail (which was on the other side of a hill from me) and send me flying into the ocean, bruised, bleeding, and battered.
ARK is still in development, and things may change (including the half-off price of $17 that I got it for from Steam), but the graphics are good and the gameplay is more fun with a group. Not sure if the final version will be worth the money, and the game has some player-base issues (including chinese hackers), but it might be worth a look for those gamers in your life.
The only other game I am playing this holiday season is Minecraft, and yes, I am still playing it after all these years. I think I've been playing it since 2009 or so? Just a guess. It beat my Starcraft record by 3 years so far, and it's still going. Minecraft is still fun, although I am still waiting for the addition of fish, birds (re-skin a bat already, would you?) and frogs (re-skin a rabbit and lop off the ears!).
That's all for now! If I don't post again before then, Happy Holidays and a Merry New Year! :-D
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
2015 Fall Series Update, Turkey Day Thanks
It's that time of year again, folks! The time of year when I give thanks for all my blessings, or at least, give thanks to all those awesome series I watch on TV that waste my otherwise completely worthless time. So, I'll list which series made the cut (by day of the week), and which didn't, and by cut, I mean, which ones I am still watching, and which ones I gave up on. The networks may have invested in some of these shows, but that has nothing to do with my interest in them. Without further ado, here's the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Fall 2015 TV series.
SUNDAYS:
INTO THE BADLANDS: I gave this one a shot, hoping against hope that it might be good, but it's not. The plot is incoherent and inconsistent. The show only cares about the fight sequences, which are nice, but the rest of the show is just an excuse to showcase the swordplay. The premise of all the survivors of some earth-shattering apocalypse flocking to the local landowners (called Barons) for safety, might have worked out, except for a few details. One, there's still cities out there, because one of the Baron's men travels to one of them to visit somebody. If there are still cities, they would be the logical choices for people to flock to, not some southern-style plantation out in the middle of the woods surrounded by a wall. Two, supposedly, guns are outlawed, but in a land of swordplay, guns would certainly provide an advantage. Who outlawed them? The barons? if this is a land of lawlessness outside of each baron's control, wouldn't that mean only the outlaws would own guns? I mean, even if the penalty for owning a gun was death, wouldn't having a gun be too much an advantage for an outlaw to resist? What possible punishment for owning a gun could stop an outlaw from actually using one? I mean, they're already an outlaw. Death is death. For that matter, how long would it be before a Baron decided to arm their soldiers with guns, just to be able to have that advantage over the other barons? Three, the main sword-swinger runs into a Baroness in the confines of a city, which is one of two things. Either a city is outside the control of the barons, and a place of lawlessness, OR, the city is under the control of the local baron. But this Baroness says "You can't kill me, I'm a baron." Why can't he? I'm pretty sure a good sword cut would have killed her right then and there, and what could she have done about it? Nothing. She's outside the confines of her own barony, which is the limits of what she can hold and control. If she's in another baron's territory, that's trespassing, and she could be killed just for that. What law is there that says the guy can't kill her, in a land of lawlessness? It makes absolutely no sense. Without likable characters, or even any attractive females to drool over, this one has no redeeming features. Final Verdict: UGLY.
LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER: Mr. Oliver continues to tackle a variety of issues, either worldwide or originating in uniquely American idiocy, with varying levels of success. Mr. Oliver tries to do good things with his humorous ability to shed some much-needed light on the otherwise shadowy business-as-usual practices that need some updating in the modern era. He's had some successes, and that's more than I can say for just about anyone else on Late Night TV. Good for you, Mr. Oliver. Carry on. John's off for the holidays, but he'll be back in Feb. Final Verdict: GOOD.
MONDAYS:
SUPERGIRL: I'm usually a big fan of Superheroes, but I can't really stick with Supergirl. Melissa Benoist plays Kara/Supergirl, but she's so mousy as Kara and so, well, mousy as Supergirl that I can't even begin to like her. Nobody else on the show, including the entire supporting cast, is even remotely likable. I don't like her boss (which is probably the whole point of the character, but watching her still isn't a draw), I don't like her colleagues, and I don't like her sister. I guess this show is supposed to be about female role models or something, but it's sort of like a romantic comedy spliced with a bad superhero show. Too much office politics and romance, not enough with the superhero stuff. In short, too girly for me. Supposedly they had the chance to spice up the show with a more revealing costume for Supergirl, but I don't think even that would have kept me watching. It's like watching Clark Kent go about his day, and the only reason people don't know clark kent is superman is because Clark is too goddamn boring to be superman. Kara is just boring, and there's not enough Super in Supergirl to make the rest of the show worth watching. Final Verdict: UGLY.
GOTHAM: I kind of liked this show for a while. There was a lot of mayhem, but James Gordon was there to try and right the wrongs of Gotham long enough for Batman to grow up. Unfortunately, it looks like all the villains are crawling out of the woodwork, and Batman is nothing but a whiny brat that they are dangling around like a carrot on every show. Is he going to find out who killed his parents, or won't he? Of course not. Batman never did, and that's the whole point of why he becomes Batman. Once his vengeance is complete, there's no need to go after anyone else, and that's why they're using every stupid and ridiculous plot device that they can think of to leave Bruce hanging. Which leaves the rest of the city dead at the hands of the leagues of super-villains, or at least, they should be by now. It was one thing when there was that buddy-cop vibe to it, but Gordon's ex-partner is now pretty much doing cameo appearances on the show. Not even Morena Baccarin's flawless beauty is going to make me stick around for season after season of "Well, everyone should be dead by now, but somehow, they're not" until Batman gets around to growing a pair and kicking some ass. Not even the Villains are likable, but a rogue's gallery of whining jerks who you wish had been killed off last season. Perhaps the time was ripe for showing off Gordon's skills as a cop before Batman showed up, but that time has passed. Final Verdict: BAD, like a rotting papaya.
SCORPION: For a bunch of geniuses, you'd think they'd be able to apply their intellects to living their lives with as much skill as they use to solve problems every week. Sure, Walter can figure out a way to save a hospital full of dying people in a matter of minutes, but he can't figure out his feelings for Paige (or whatever her name is) in two seasons' worth of shows? Look, I'm a genius myself, and not even I am that messed up. If the people who wrote this show were as smart as the characters on it are supposed to be, shouldn't they be able to find new and interesting ways to challenge the characters and keep the viewers interested without resorting to the usual mix of sexual tension, drama and bedridden-character-killing-off? You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well, I would. I may keep watching this one a while because I have a thing for Happy, but otherwise it's a total write-off. Final Verdict: BAD.
TUESDAY:
FLASH: Flash seems more like your typical, angst-ridden teenager than one of the founding members of the JLA (Justice League something or other), as I understand the Flash's history from a more accurate cartoon series. I know they're taking poetic license with the series to try and make it more interesting, but it's not really having that effect on me. Sure, maybe they need to constantly have a villainous super-speedster there to keep Flash's super-speed in check, but watching him get his ass kicked every other week (and then whine about it) really isn't making me like him any better as a character. The rest of the cast is basically a bunch of adorkable extras, which is fine for eye-candy, but not if the main plot is constantly going flat-line. Final Verdict: BAD.
MARVEL'S AGENTS OF SHIELD: Agents with super-powers, occasional cameos from more well-known Superheroes, gunplay, hand-to-hand combat, hot-as-hell female leads in tight outfits, and Coulson (Clark Gregg) running the techno-show. What's not to like? They took everything I wanted in a superhero show (minus full female nudity), put it in a blender, and made it into a fruit smoothie. Not only does it taste great going down, but even the burps are awesome. Final Verdict: GOOD.
FRIDAY:
GRIMM: As a horror-movie lover, Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year, and this show manages to make every Friday just like Halloween. There's monsters in masks, only the masks are the human side of the beast, and the line between good monsters and bad monsters gets blurrier and blurrier every season. Who are the good guys? I don't even know anymore, and I don't care. There's beasts and baddies and ghouls and hot chicks like Adelind walking around half naked, and that's more than good enough for me. Toss in the frequent violence, hand-to-hand combat and gunplay, and I was sold two seasons ago. Grimm doesn't try and explain everything that's going on, just what might be going on with the Grimm this week, and that's fine. Keep the mystery alive until you need to explain it. Final Verdict: GOOD.
SATURDAY:
ASH VS EVIL DEAD: As a fan of the first three Evil Dead movies, this one was a no-brainer. Of course I'm watching it. At first I was a little put off by watching an over-the-hill Ash try and clumsily pick off the Deadites in his middle age, but I think that was all a ploy to make me think Ash was weak. The man's a bona-fide slayer of the dark ones, and his ass-kicking days are far from over. Well played, Ash. You had me going for a minute, there. Kill some Deadites for me. Final Verdict: GOOD.
HONORABLE MENTION:
JESSICA JONES: I wanted to wait to post the final fall reviews until I'd actually seen all the fall premieres. Now that Jessica Jones popped up on Netflix a few days ago, I can add it to my review. Obviously, there's no day of the week for any show on netflix, and I've found myself binge-watching it the last couple days. I was a little put off at first, I admit. Jessica Jones isn't exactly centerfold material, and the grittiness of the mean streets doesn't lend itself well to the otherwise shiny Superhero model, but there might be something here. Jessica's surprise at finding another "gifted" individual in the form of Luke Cage was kind of interesting, and Netflix wasn't shy about showing things off. I'm not seeing a lot of nudity (or, well, any, that I recall), but Netflix gets as close as they can get without turning it into hardcore superhero porn. Now, if only the violence would happen more often, the show would really be something awesome. Maybe Luke will run into Iron Fist at some point, and the three of them will team up, but who knows? I'm already looking forward to next season, and I'm not even 4 episodes in. Final Verdict: So UGLY, it's GOOD.
Yea, that's about all the ones I am watching right now. I don't recall all the networks the shows are on, or at what times, or I'd have added them to the reviews. And, I might have got some of the actors' names wrong. If so, it's only because I am too lazy to look up the correct networks and show times, or the right names. Those actors and actresses do a bang-up job out there, bringing these shows to life, and most of them are so talented at their craft that I often find it hard to separate the actor from the role he/she is playing. If I haven't mentioned a show I used to watch (iZombie, anyone?), it's only because I had to make a choice between having any free time, or being a slave to my TV, and the show is not longer in my DVR's must-record list. Hey, I need time to eat and pee. And sleep. Preferably, not all at once.
In other news, it's Thanksgiving week and Turkey Day's on Thursday, which means it's time for the annual list of things I am thankful for! Everything. Yea, pretty much everything. I don't get why my freedom-loving nation wants to deny people of any nationality (mexicans or syrians) entry into this (perhaps formerly) great country, but I'm sure I don't understand the politics involved. I do know, those people we turn away will just go somewhere else, and the otherwise good things that might have come from them will be for the good of some other country, and not ours. Everyone's always worried about the bad things, but nobody ever thinks of all the good that we're going to lose, by becoming just one more country of elitist, snobby pricks who don't want to let anyone else in. Meh, I'm thinking of moving to canada, anyway. Or maybe Mexico. It's warmer there, and if the southward flow of Mexicans is any indication, it's probably nicer there this time of year than most of America. That having been said, America is still one of the most beautiful countries in the world. As long as we don't permanently fuck it up, there's always hope. And that hope may be all we have left, so be thankful for it! Enjoy your turkey (mmmm, turkey!), or whatever. That's all for this week.
SUNDAYS:
INTO THE BADLANDS: I gave this one a shot, hoping against hope that it might be good, but it's not. The plot is incoherent and inconsistent. The show only cares about the fight sequences, which are nice, but the rest of the show is just an excuse to showcase the swordplay. The premise of all the survivors of some earth-shattering apocalypse flocking to the local landowners (called Barons) for safety, might have worked out, except for a few details. One, there's still cities out there, because one of the Baron's men travels to one of them to visit somebody. If there are still cities, they would be the logical choices for people to flock to, not some southern-style plantation out in the middle of the woods surrounded by a wall. Two, supposedly, guns are outlawed, but in a land of swordplay, guns would certainly provide an advantage. Who outlawed them? The barons? if this is a land of lawlessness outside of each baron's control, wouldn't that mean only the outlaws would own guns? I mean, even if the penalty for owning a gun was death, wouldn't having a gun be too much an advantage for an outlaw to resist? What possible punishment for owning a gun could stop an outlaw from actually using one? I mean, they're already an outlaw. Death is death. For that matter, how long would it be before a Baron decided to arm their soldiers with guns, just to be able to have that advantage over the other barons? Three, the main sword-swinger runs into a Baroness in the confines of a city, which is one of two things. Either a city is outside the control of the barons, and a place of lawlessness, OR, the city is under the control of the local baron. But this Baroness says "You can't kill me, I'm a baron." Why can't he? I'm pretty sure a good sword cut would have killed her right then and there, and what could she have done about it? Nothing. She's outside the confines of her own barony, which is the limits of what she can hold and control. If she's in another baron's territory, that's trespassing, and she could be killed just for that. What law is there that says the guy can't kill her, in a land of lawlessness? It makes absolutely no sense. Without likable characters, or even any attractive females to drool over, this one has no redeeming features. Final Verdict: UGLY.
LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER: Mr. Oliver continues to tackle a variety of issues, either worldwide or originating in uniquely American idiocy, with varying levels of success. Mr. Oliver tries to do good things with his humorous ability to shed some much-needed light on the otherwise shadowy business-as-usual practices that need some updating in the modern era. He's had some successes, and that's more than I can say for just about anyone else on Late Night TV. Good for you, Mr. Oliver. Carry on. John's off for the holidays, but he'll be back in Feb. Final Verdict: GOOD.
MONDAYS:
SUPERGIRL: I'm usually a big fan of Superheroes, but I can't really stick with Supergirl. Melissa Benoist plays Kara/Supergirl, but she's so mousy as Kara and so, well, mousy as Supergirl that I can't even begin to like her. Nobody else on the show, including the entire supporting cast, is even remotely likable. I don't like her boss (which is probably the whole point of the character, but watching her still isn't a draw), I don't like her colleagues, and I don't like her sister. I guess this show is supposed to be about female role models or something, but it's sort of like a romantic comedy spliced with a bad superhero show. Too much office politics and romance, not enough with the superhero stuff. In short, too girly for me. Supposedly they had the chance to spice up the show with a more revealing costume for Supergirl, but I don't think even that would have kept me watching. It's like watching Clark Kent go about his day, and the only reason people don't know clark kent is superman is because Clark is too goddamn boring to be superman. Kara is just boring, and there's not enough Super in Supergirl to make the rest of the show worth watching. Final Verdict: UGLY.
GOTHAM: I kind of liked this show for a while. There was a lot of mayhem, but James Gordon was there to try and right the wrongs of Gotham long enough for Batman to grow up. Unfortunately, it looks like all the villains are crawling out of the woodwork, and Batman is nothing but a whiny brat that they are dangling around like a carrot on every show. Is he going to find out who killed his parents, or won't he? Of course not. Batman never did, and that's the whole point of why he becomes Batman. Once his vengeance is complete, there's no need to go after anyone else, and that's why they're using every stupid and ridiculous plot device that they can think of to leave Bruce hanging. Which leaves the rest of the city dead at the hands of the leagues of super-villains, or at least, they should be by now. It was one thing when there was that buddy-cop vibe to it, but Gordon's ex-partner is now pretty much doing cameo appearances on the show. Not even Morena Baccarin's flawless beauty is going to make me stick around for season after season of "Well, everyone should be dead by now, but somehow, they're not" until Batman gets around to growing a pair and kicking some ass. Not even the Villains are likable, but a rogue's gallery of whining jerks who you wish had been killed off last season. Perhaps the time was ripe for showing off Gordon's skills as a cop before Batman showed up, but that time has passed. Final Verdict: BAD, like a rotting papaya.
SCORPION: For a bunch of geniuses, you'd think they'd be able to apply their intellects to living their lives with as much skill as they use to solve problems every week. Sure, Walter can figure out a way to save a hospital full of dying people in a matter of minutes, but he can't figure out his feelings for Paige (or whatever her name is) in two seasons' worth of shows? Look, I'm a genius myself, and not even I am that messed up. If the people who wrote this show were as smart as the characters on it are supposed to be, shouldn't they be able to find new and interesting ways to challenge the characters and keep the viewers interested without resorting to the usual mix of sexual tension, drama and bedridden-character-killing-off? You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well, I would. I may keep watching this one a while because I have a thing for Happy, but otherwise it's a total write-off. Final Verdict: BAD.
TUESDAY:
FLASH: Flash seems more like your typical, angst-ridden teenager than one of the founding members of the JLA (Justice League something or other), as I understand the Flash's history from a more accurate cartoon series. I know they're taking poetic license with the series to try and make it more interesting, but it's not really having that effect on me. Sure, maybe they need to constantly have a villainous super-speedster there to keep Flash's super-speed in check, but watching him get his ass kicked every other week (and then whine about it) really isn't making me like him any better as a character. The rest of the cast is basically a bunch of adorkable extras, which is fine for eye-candy, but not if the main plot is constantly going flat-line. Final Verdict: BAD.
MARVEL'S AGENTS OF SHIELD: Agents with super-powers, occasional cameos from more well-known Superheroes, gunplay, hand-to-hand combat, hot-as-hell female leads in tight outfits, and Coulson (Clark Gregg) running the techno-show. What's not to like? They took everything I wanted in a superhero show (minus full female nudity), put it in a blender, and made it into a fruit smoothie. Not only does it taste great going down, but even the burps are awesome. Final Verdict: GOOD.
FRIDAY:
GRIMM: As a horror-movie lover, Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year, and this show manages to make every Friday just like Halloween. There's monsters in masks, only the masks are the human side of the beast, and the line between good monsters and bad monsters gets blurrier and blurrier every season. Who are the good guys? I don't even know anymore, and I don't care. There's beasts and baddies and ghouls and hot chicks like Adelind walking around half naked, and that's more than good enough for me. Toss in the frequent violence, hand-to-hand combat and gunplay, and I was sold two seasons ago. Grimm doesn't try and explain everything that's going on, just what might be going on with the Grimm this week, and that's fine. Keep the mystery alive until you need to explain it. Final Verdict: GOOD.
SATURDAY:
ASH VS EVIL DEAD: As a fan of the first three Evil Dead movies, this one was a no-brainer. Of course I'm watching it. At first I was a little put off by watching an over-the-hill Ash try and clumsily pick off the Deadites in his middle age, but I think that was all a ploy to make me think Ash was weak. The man's a bona-fide slayer of the dark ones, and his ass-kicking days are far from over. Well played, Ash. You had me going for a minute, there. Kill some Deadites for me. Final Verdict: GOOD.
HONORABLE MENTION:
JESSICA JONES: I wanted to wait to post the final fall reviews until I'd actually seen all the fall premieres. Now that Jessica Jones popped up on Netflix a few days ago, I can add it to my review. Obviously, there's no day of the week for any show on netflix, and I've found myself binge-watching it the last couple days. I was a little put off at first, I admit. Jessica Jones isn't exactly centerfold material, and the grittiness of the mean streets doesn't lend itself well to the otherwise shiny Superhero model, but there might be something here. Jessica's surprise at finding another "gifted" individual in the form of Luke Cage was kind of interesting, and Netflix wasn't shy about showing things off. I'm not seeing a lot of nudity (or, well, any, that I recall), but Netflix gets as close as they can get without turning it into hardcore superhero porn. Now, if only the violence would happen more often, the show would really be something awesome. Maybe Luke will run into Iron Fist at some point, and the three of them will team up, but who knows? I'm already looking forward to next season, and I'm not even 4 episodes in. Final Verdict: So UGLY, it's GOOD.
Yea, that's about all the ones I am watching right now. I don't recall all the networks the shows are on, or at what times, or I'd have added them to the reviews. And, I might have got some of the actors' names wrong. If so, it's only because I am too lazy to look up the correct networks and show times, or the right names. Those actors and actresses do a bang-up job out there, bringing these shows to life, and most of them are so talented at their craft that I often find it hard to separate the actor from the role he/she is playing. If I haven't mentioned a show I used to watch (iZombie, anyone?), it's only because I had to make a choice between having any free time, or being a slave to my TV, and the show is not longer in my DVR's must-record list. Hey, I need time to eat and pee. And sleep. Preferably, not all at once.
In other news, it's Thanksgiving week and Turkey Day's on Thursday, which means it's time for the annual list of things I am thankful for! Everything. Yea, pretty much everything. I don't get why my freedom-loving nation wants to deny people of any nationality (mexicans or syrians) entry into this (perhaps formerly) great country, but I'm sure I don't understand the politics involved. I do know, those people we turn away will just go somewhere else, and the otherwise good things that might have come from them will be for the good of some other country, and not ours. Everyone's always worried about the bad things, but nobody ever thinks of all the good that we're going to lose, by becoming just one more country of elitist, snobby pricks who don't want to let anyone else in. Meh, I'm thinking of moving to canada, anyway. Or maybe Mexico. It's warmer there, and if the southward flow of Mexicans is any indication, it's probably nicer there this time of year than most of America. That having been said, America is still one of the most beautiful countries in the world. As long as we don't permanently fuck it up, there's always hope. And that hope may be all we have left, so be thankful for it! Enjoy your turkey (mmmm, turkey!), or whatever. That's all for this week.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Horror Review #30 - 31: Prophecy 5, Let Us Prey (2014)
I meant to finish this post last night, but I ran out of time in the middle of a horror movie. It's Halloween! Autumn, horror movies, and candy! Does it get any better than that? I think not.
Prophecy: Forsaken (2005) was made around the same time as Prophecy: Uprising. Picking up where Uprising left off, Forsaken continues the story of Allison, Keeper of the One True Bible, the one where God is still dictating the last chapters of Revelations. Needless to say, the rogue angels are still after the book, trying to get ahold of it so they can gain an advantage in the war. The rogue Angels have an assassin working for them this time, and Allison no longer has her brother to back her up. What she does have, is the One True Bible, which is about to reveal the name of the AntiChrist...
Prophecy: Forsaken adds Tony Todd as Stark, the Seraphim after the Bible that Allison guards, Jason Scott Lee as Dylan, the assassin after Allison, and has Kari Wuhrer and John Light returning as Allison and Riegart (aka Satan). The acting is decent, and with such veteran actors, why shouldn't it be? This movie wraps up the short side-plot of the book that has gone on for two movies, which was a departure from the first three movies, that were mostly about Gabriel (played by Christopher Walken, who hasn't showed up since the third movie).
This movie was pretty much focused on the rather rapid demise of Jason Scott Lee's character, who goes from living assassin to decomposing zombie in a matter of about an hour. Still, there was a fair bit of moral ambiguity, especially since, well, we're starting the movie on the premise of angels being the bad guys, so we can only go downhill from there. Lucifer doesn't even do much in this movie, and what he does do only seems to help Allison, and what Allison does only seems to help Lucifer, which is odd, but that's how it goes.
Not too much action, and I wasn't too fond of the end. I thought it could have been better, but it's the last of the Prophecy movies, at any rate. This movie is available on Netflix if you want to see it. I'd say watch it at least once to see how the 5-movie arc ends, then forget about it. I personally would have loved another Kari Wuhrer nude scene, but alas, the best I got was some shadow nipplage seen through one of her sweaters.
Our final horror movie review for the month is Let Us Prey (2014) also on Netflix. I wasn't sure what movie to end the month on, and I was considering watching Idle Hands (with Devon Sawa and Jessica Alba), which is good, but more of a comedy than a horror flick. Option B was Stephen King's A Good Marriage, but I wasn't sure whether that would turn out to be horror, or just a thriller. So, I went with Option C, take the Claw to the face, roll around on the ground, and die. Wait. No, that's Kung Pow. Option C was a total risk, a low-budget movie that had no discernible plot, and it turned out to be not half bad.
Let Us Prey (2014) picks up the story of Rachel Heggie, a new police officer assigned to a remote scottish law enforcement post. Rachel starts her day by arresting the driver of a car that just ran into an old man, but the old man seems to have vanished. When Rachel arrives at her new job with her perp in tow, she's heckled by her new squad-mates, which is probably normal. But things aren't all that they seem in Rachel's new post, and as the jail cells begin to fill up, Rachel can't help but wonder about the old man who was hit by the car...
I thought this movie was pretty decent. Fair amount of action, unusual plot, well-acted and well-executed. The only recognizable actor was Liam Cunningham (yes, Davos the Onion Knight himself), but the rest of the cast wasn't bad, either. I can't really think of any plot holes that bothered me, making this one of the more solid writing jobs for horror movies out there, and while the idea may not be wholly original (I seem to remember seeing something like this before, but I can't quite recall where), it's certainly different from the norm.
I would say watch Let Us Prey at least once for the originality of it, as it's not your usual horror story, but I don't know if it's up to repeat viewing yet. Pretty much once you've seen it, you kind of know where it's going to go. Let Us Prey is on netflix, if I didn't mention that.
And that's all for my annual Halloween Horror Movie Review-a-Thon! Yet again, I have managed to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days! True Horror movie lovers are out there going "That's an accomplishment? I watch 31 horror movies a day!" And, you're probably right.
Bonus review, Ash vs Evil dead on Starz! wasn't bad. They gave a sneak-preview last night after Showing Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness, and then Bruce Campbell told me that watching all that for the last 7 hours was impressive! Yea, what can I say. Sitting around on my butt is something I am good at.
Hope everyone has a good All Hallow's Eve, Festival of Samhain, or however else you celebrate this time of year! Enjoy your candy! :-D
Prophecy: Forsaken (2005) was made around the same time as Prophecy: Uprising. Picking up where Uprising left off, Forsaken continues the story of Allison, Keeper of the One True Bible, the one where God is still dictating the last chapters of Revelations. Needless to say, the rogue angels are still after the book, trying to get ahold of it so they can gain an advantage in the war. The rogue Angels have an assassin working for them this time, and Allison no longer has her brother to back her up. What she does have, is the One True Bible, which is about to reveal the name of the AntiChrist...
Prophecy: Forsaken adds Tony Todd as Stark, the Seraphim after the Bible that Allison guards, Jason Scott Lee as Dylan, the assassin after Allison, and has Kari Wuhrer and John Light returning as Allison and Riegart (aka Satan). The acting is decent, and with such veteran actors, why shouldn't it be? This movie wraps up the short side-plot of the book that has gone on for two movies, which was a departure from the first three movies, that were mostly about Gabriel (played by Christopher Walken, who hasn't showed up since the third movie).
This movie was pretty much focused on the rather rapid demise of Jason Scott Lee's character, who goes from living assassin to decomposing zombie in a matter of about an hour. Still, there was a fair bit of moral ambiguity, especially since, well, we're starting the movie on the premise of angels being the bad guys, so we can only go downhill from there. Lucifer doesn't even do much in this movie, and what he does do only seems to help Allison, and what Allison does only seems to help Lucifer, which is odd, but that's how it goes.
Not too much action, and I wasn't too fond of the end. I thought it could have been better, but it's the last of the Prophecy movies, at any rate. This movie is available on Netflix if you want to see it. I'd say watch it at least once to see how the 5-movie arc ends, then forget about it. I personally would have loved another Kari Wuhrer nude scene, but alas, the best I got was some shadow nipplage seen through one of her sweaters.
Our final horror movie review for the month is Let Us Prey (2014) also on Netflix. I wasn't sure what movie to end the month on, and I was considering watching Idle Hands (with Devon Sawa and Jessica Alba), which is good, but more of a comedy than a horror flick. Option B was Stephen King's A Good Marriage, but I wasn't sure whether that would turn out to be horror, or just a thriller. So, I went with Option C, take the Claw to the face, roll around on the ground, and die. Wait. No, that's Kung Pow. Option C was a total risk, a low-budget movie that had no discernible plot, and it turned out to be not half bad.
Let Us Prey (2014) picks up the story of Rachel Heggie, a new police officer assigned to a remote scottish law enforcement post. Rachel starts her day by arresting the driver of a car that just ran into an old man, but the old man seems to have vanished. When Rachel arrives at her new job with her perp in tow, she's heckled by her new squad-mates, which is probably normal. But things aren't all that they seem in Rachel's new post, and as the jail cells begin to fill up, Rachel can't help but wonder about the old man who was hit by the car...
I thought this movie was pretty decent. Fair amount of action, unusual plot, well-acted and well-executed. The only recognizable actor was Liam Cunningham (yes, Davos the Onion Knight himself), but the rest of the cast wasn't bad, either. I can't really think of any plot holes that bothered me, making this one of the more solid writing jobs for horror movies out there, and while the idea may not be wholly original (I seem to remember seeing something like this before, but I can't quite recall where), it's certainly different from the norm.
I would say watch Let Us Prey at least once for the originality of it, as it's not your usual horror story, but I don't know if it's up to repeat viewing yet. Pretty much once you've seen it, you kind of know where it's going to go. Let Us Prey is on netflix, if I didn't mention that.
And that's all for my annual Halloween Horror Movie Review-a-Thon! Yet again, I have managed to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days! True Horror movie lovers are out there going "That's an accomplishment? I watch 31 horror movies a day!" And, you're probably right.
Bonus review, Ash vs Evil dead on Starz! wasn't bad. They gave a sneak-preview last night after Showing Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness, and then Bruce Campbell told me that watching all that for the last 7 hours was impressive! Yea, what can I say. Sitting around on my butt is something I am good at.
Hope everyone has a good All Hallow's Eve, Festival of Samhain, or however else you celebrate this time of year! Enjoy your candy! :-D
Friday, October 30, 2015
Horror Reviews #28-29: Prophecy 3 and 4.
Continuing the Prophecy Series of movies I began reviewing yesterday. I know these movies are about angels, and I ask myself (because I have no one else to talk to about these things), why are these movies considered horror? Well, let me tell you, or me, or whatever these voices in my head are. As Gabriel (Christopher Walken) himself said it, in the first Prophecy movie. Whenever God needs someone killed, he sends an angel. Sure, we have this Catholic/Christian image of angels of mercy, beautiful, glowing winged servants of the lord coming down to aid us in our time of need. But really, what did the angels always do in the bible? They brought plagues. They sacrificed the firstborns of families. Were they anything more than winged assassins? Some of the best horror movies feature demons, perhaps rising from the bodies of those they've possessed. But if Angels are the heavenly counterpart to demons, shouldn't they be at least as powerful, and capable of similar acts? If, like Lucifer, all demons were once angels, doesn't that make them as capable of great evil, simply by choosing to work against god, instead of for him? And doesn't that make them just as terrifying, and just as worthy to be the subjects of horror films?
Prophecy 3: The Ascension (2000) picks up where Prophecy 2 left off. Gabriel is human now, wandering the streets, a homeless bum. Danyael has returned, this time as the offspring of Valerie Rosales (played by Jennifer Beals in the last movie). Danyael is Nephilim now, half-human, half-angel, but he's become something of a prophet. Preaching to a crowd of poor and hungry folks, Danyael says that god does not care about the earth, that there is no plan. And Danyael is promptly shot, several times, in the chest, by a blind man. And if Danyael weren't Nephilim, that would be the end of the movie. But Nephilim, as the Coroner relates later, are notoriously hard to kill...
Prophecy 3 marks the last time Christopher Walken reprises his role as Gabriel. The rest of the cast is mostly unknown, but interestingly, there are several returning characters. The coroner from the first movie, who was such good friends with Thomas (the cop/ex-priest from the first movie) returns for a third time (the coroner also popped up in the second movie). Also, the waitress from the diner that Gabriel and Rachel stopped in (in the first movie), returns for a cameo. Mary, the little possessed girl from the first movie (also played by the same actress, now older), also returns for a brief cameo. None of them have much effect on the movie as a whole, really, but they do sort of tie the whole series together. Vincent Spano plays Zophael, a new angel for this movie. Brad Dourif plays the blind guy who shoots Danyael. Danyael's love interest, named Maggie (the actress I have never heard of, before or since), is a cute addition to the cast, and has a rockin' body, as they used to say back in the 80's.
Obviously, the actors you've heard of do a reasonably decent job in their roles, but this movie isn't as good as the first one. Maybe it's on par with the second one, but it feels a bit shorter. In any case, there's a fair bit of combat in this one, and Vincent Spano carries around a wicked looking dagger, so there's always the usual hand-to-hand combat/melee fun of angels trying to rip out each other's hearts. Still, this movie wraps up Gabriel's plot-line, so I'd suggest watching 3 before starting into the last 2 Prophecy movies, as they seem to revolve around a different aspect of the second (or first) war of angels.
Prophecy: Uprising (2005) marks the fourth entry into the Prophecy series. This time, the Angels (and demons) are now looking for a book. The book is the one true copy of the Bible, as it were, in that it acts as a cosmic secretary, scribbling down God's word as if it were taking dictation directly from him. Word on the street is that, whoever possesses the Lexicon (as this unfinished bible is called), has an insurmountable advantage over either side in the second war of the angels, or even the first war, because the Lexicon transcribes the word of god as it is spoken, thus predicting the future as god creates it, or something to that effect. Obviously, this book would be a game-changer in the hands of any demon, angel, devil, or whatnot. The problem is, the Priest who possessed it has passed on, and the book has been stolen! :-o
Prophecy: Uprising introduces one of my favorite actresses of all time into the series, Kari Wuhrer (or Salin, whatever name she's using at the moment). Kari is an actress with B-list acting talent, but A-list looks and perseverance. Probably her best shot at fame was the movie Eight-Legged Freaks, in which she acted beside a young Scarlett Johansen (playing her incredibly hot mom, of all things) and David Arquette. Unfortunately, that movie neither spawned a series of sequels, nor garnered Kari the fame and fortune it should have. In any case, Kari plays Allison in this movie, the unfortunate recipient of the Lexicon, and the focus of much of the ire of the rest of the cast. Sean Pertwee plays a cop with a pivotal connection to the book, who is recruited by an interpol agent named John Riegert (who you just know isn't quite everything he appears to be).
At this point in the Prophecy series, it's getting hard to tell who's an angel, who's a demon, who's following god's plan, and who isn't, and that's all part of the fun, I guess. Hopefully things are going to get all cleared up in the final entry in the prophecy series, but it's too late to start watching it now, so I'll have to hold off til tomorrow. Both these movies, and the final one in the series, are all available on Netflix if you want to watch them.
Ugh, Halloween. So much to do, so little time. Still got to carve out my pumpkin and I don't think I'm going to catch all my favorite Halloween-season movies this year. Oh well, there's always next year. Maybe next October I'll do a month-long series of my favorite horror movies of all time, or maybe I'll shoot for doing all-new movies that I haven't seen yet. Hmmm. Oh well, we'll see what happens!
Just a reminder to Grimm fans, the new season kicks off tomorrow night on NBC, I believe. Also, Ash vs the Evil Dead premieres on Starz! on Halloween night. You know I'll be watching both of those, so don't miss either of them if you're a fan! Or, you know, DVR them if you have Halloween parties to go to. Til tomorrow, Horror movie lovers!
Prophecy 3: The Ascension (2000) picks up where Prophecy 2 left off. Gabriel is human now, wandering the streets, a homeless bum. Danyael has returned, this time as the offspring of Valerie Rosales (played by Jennifer Beals in the last movie). Danyael is Nephilim now, half-human, half-angel, but he's become something of a prophet. Preaching to a crowd of poor and hungry folks, Danyael says that god does not care about the earth, that there is no plan. And Danyael is promptly shot, several times, in the chest, by a blind man. And if Danyael weren't Nephilim, that would be the end of the movie. But Nephilim, as the Coroner relates later, are notoriously hard to kill...
Prophecy 3 marks the last time Christopher Walken reprises his role as Gabriel. The rest of the cast is mostly unknown, but interestingly, there are several returning characters. The coroner from the first movie, who was such good friends with Thomas (the cop/ex-priest from the first movie) returns for a third time (the coroner also popped up in the second movie). Also, the waitress from the diner that Gabriel and Rachel stopped in (in the first movie), returns for a cameo. Mary, the little possessed girl from the first movie (also played by the same actress, now older), also returns for a brief cameo. None of them have much effect on the movie as a whole, really, but they do sort of tie the whole series together. Vincent Spano plays Zophael, a new angel for this movie. Brad Dourif plays the blind guy who shoots Danyael. Danyael's love interest, named Maggie (the actress I have never heard of, before or since), is a cute addition to the cast, and has a rockin' body, as they used to say back in the 80's.
Obviously, the actors you've heard of do a reasonably decent job in their roles, but this movie isn't as good as the first one. Maybe it's on par with the second one, but it feels a bit shorter. In any case, there's a fair bit of combat in this one, and Vincent Spano carries around a wicked looking dagger, so there's always the usual hand-to-hand combat/melee fun of angels trying to rip out each other's hearts. Still, this movie wraps up Gabriel's plot-line, so I'd suggest watching 3 before starting into the last 2 Prophecy movies, as they seem to revolve around a different aspect of the second (or first) war of angels.
Prophecy: Uprising (2005) marks the fourth entry into the Prophecy series. This time, the Angels (and demons) are now looking for a book. The book is the one true copy of the Bible, as it were, in that it acts as a cosmic secretary, scribbling down God's word as if it were taking dictation directly from him. Word on the street is that, whoever possesses the Lexicon (as this unfinished bible is called), has an insurmountable advantage over either side in the second war of the angels, or even the first war, because the Lexicon transcribes the word of god as it is spoken, thus predicting the future as god creates it, or something to that effect. Obviously, this book would be a game-changer in the hands of any demon, angel, devil, or whatnot. The problem is, the Priest who possessed it has passed on, and the book has been stolen! :-o
Prophecy: Uprising introduces one of my favorite actresses of all time into the series, Kari Wuhrer (or Salin, whatever name she's using at the moment). Kari is an actress with B-list acting talent, but A-list looks and perseverance. Probably her best shot at fame was the movie Eight-Legged Freaks, in which she acted beside a young Scarlett Johansen (playing her incredibly hot mom, of all things) and David Arquette. Unfortunately, that movie neither spawned a series of sequels, nor garnered Kari the fame and fortune it should have. In any case, Kari plays Allison in this movie, the unfortunate recipient of the Lexicon, and the focus of much of the ire of the rest of the cast. Sean Pertwee plays a cop with a pivotal connection to the book, who is recruited by an interpol agent named John Riegert (who you just know isn't quite everything he appears to be).
At this point in the Prophecy series, it's getting hard to tell who's an angel, who's a demon, who's following god's plan, and who isn't, and that's all part of the fun, I guess. Hopefully things are going to get all cleared up in the final entry in the prophecy series, but it's too late to start watching it now, so I'll have to hold off til tomorrow. Both these movies, and the final one in the series, are all available on Netflix if you want to watch them.
Ugh, Halloween. So much to do, so little time. Still got to carve out my pumpkin and I don't think I'm going to catch all my favorite Halloween-season movies this year. Oh well, there's always next year. Maybe next October I'll do a month-long series of my favorite horror movies of all time, or maybe I'll shoot for doing all-new movies that I haven't seen yet. Hmmm. Oh well, we'll see what happens!
Just a reminder to Grimm fans, the new season kicks off tomorrow night on NBC, I believe. Also, Ash vs the Evil Dead premieres on Starz! on Halloween night. You know I'll be watching both of those, so don't miss either of them if you're a fan! Or, you know, DVR them if you have Halloween parties to go to. Til tomorrow, Horror movie lovers!
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Horror Reviews #26 - 27: Prophecy (1995), Prophecy 2 (1998)
I can't recall if I have reviewed Prophecy at some point, but it's a fairly decent horror movie, and I need something to review, so I watched Prophecy 1 and 2 on Netflix. I honestly tried watching the Septic Man on hulu.com, but I only got halfway, and I'll briefly tell you why.
First off, for the same price as Netflix ($8 a month) hulu gives you commercials throughout all your movies (unless you want to pay for the commercial-free option, which is $12). Which seems retarded, because HBO and all the rest of the premium channels (as well as Netflix) give you commercial-free movies. Frankly, that seems shady to me. Not only do they collect money from advertisers to spam commercials at you while you're trying to enjoy a movie, but they want money from you, as well? So they're getting paid twice for the same showing? Seems totally crooked to me. Also, most of the commercials I'm seeing throughout the movie are for hulu's commercial-free option, which begs the question... If hulu wasn't interrupting my movie to show me commercials for their commercial-free option... wouldn't my movie be commercial-free? Why, yes. Yes, it would. I was actually considering getting a subscription to hulu, but if they're going to show commercials throughout my $8 worth of movies, and continuously spam commercials for their $12 service while I'm paying for the $8, then screw them. Crooked bastards.
Also, if you get a chance to watch Septic Man, don't. Boring as hell. Seriously. Oh, the first few minutes are disgusting, and you think "Oh geez, this is going to be one of those movies where I shouldn't eat a meal during it." and then... you watch a sewer worker walking and crawling around the sewers for the next 45 minutes. Yea. He's going nowhere, nothing exciting is happening, there's some whackos supposedly living around the sewers but they're so ridiculously uninteresting that one of them files the other's teeth to try and make it more exciting. And no, watching someone file teeth down to points isn't exciting. It's like watching someone floss. So, while nothing is happening to the sewer worker, nothing else is happening anywhere else in the movie, which makes for a whole lot of boring, from a handful of boring characters. Which is, well, boring. Duh. I expected so much more from the guys who made Pontypool. Very disappointing. Between the commercials and general boredom, I had to shut it off, or risk even greater levels of insanity than I already display on a regular basis. And nobody wants that.
Prophecy (1995) is about an archangel, Gabriel, who comes to Earth to tip the scales in an angel-on-angel war, and I'm not talking about the one against Lucifer. Only it's not really an angel on angel war, because Gabriel is actually pissed off that god likes humans better than angels, so Gabriel is looking to gain an advantage in order to destroy all humans. In Prophecy, Gabriel seeks the soul of a colonel who served in the Vietnam war, a particularly vile sort who enjoyed vicious fighting and supposedly sacrificed children to drive fear into the hearts of his enemies. The colonel has only recently died, and another angel, one loyal to god, has hidden the soul from Gabriel. It's up to an ex-priest and a schoolteacher to prevent Gabriel from finding it.
Gabriel is played by Christopher Walken, who is creepy enough to scare Lucifer (who is actually played by Viggo Mortensen in this movie) out of hell, so he makes a perfect evil angel for this movie. Elias Koteas and Virginia Madsen play the ex-priest and schoolteacher, and Eric Stoltz and Amanda Plummer round out the supporting cast. Obviously these are all talented actors, and the plot is like something out of the Exorcist, so you have a decent movie on your hands. Could have done with a bit more action, but still, twasn't bad. I've seen it before, and I'll probably see it again, so repeat viewings are fine on this one. Solid start to a whole series of movies.
Prophecy 2 (1998) picks up with Gabriel again. This time, he's after a woman who has been impregnated by an angel. The offspring of an angel and a human is called a Nephilim. Supposedly, they have the power of an angel with the free will of a human (though Gabriel seems to have a lot of free will to do evil in these movies, so I'm a little confused about that), and Gabriel can't stand that idea. Of course, all the angels who are still loyal to god are going to be standing in his way.
Christopher Walken reprises his role as Gabriel in Prophecy 2, with Eric Roberts doing a short bit as the Archangel Michael. Jennifer Beals plays the pregnant woman, but I really don't recognize anyone else in the movie except for Gabriel's undead henchman, uh, hench-woman, that is, played by the late Brittany Murphy. Acting and plot aren't as good as the first movie, though the added benefit of a short nude scene by Jennifer Beals ups the excitement level by a fraction, for a fraction of a second.
Prophecy 2 wasn't as good as the first one, so if you only have time for one, watch the first one. Prophecy 2 may or may not add anything to the series. I'll have to let you know since I am watching the other Prophecy movies tomorrow.
That's all for now. Til next time!
First off, for the same price as Netflix ($8 a month) hulu gives you commercials throughout all your movies (unless you want to pay for the commercial-free option, which is $12). Which seems retarded, because HBO and all the rest of the premium channels (as well as Netflix) give you commercial-free movies. Frankly, that seems shady to me. Not only do they collect money from advertisers to spam commercials at you while you're trying to enjoy a movie, but they want money from you, as well? So they're getting paid twice for the same showing? Seems totally crooked to me. Also, most of the commercials I'm seeing throughout the movie are for hulu's commercial-free option, which begs the question... If hulu wasn't interrupting my movie to show me commercials for their commercial-free option... wouldn't my movie be commercial-free? Why, yes. Yes, it would. I was actually considering getting a subscription to hulu, but if they're going to show commercials throughout my $8 worth of movies, and continuously spam commercials for their $12 service while I'm paying for the $8, then screw them. Crooked bastards.
Also, if you get a chance to watch Septic Man, don't. Boring as hell. Seriously. Oh, the first few minutes are disgusting, and you think "Oh geez, this is going to be one of those movies where I shouldn't eat a meal during it." and then... you watch a sewer worker walking and crawling around the sewers for the next 45 minutes. Yea. He's going nowhere, nothing exciting is happening, there's some whackos supposedly living around the sewers but they're so ridiculously uninteresting that one of them files the other's teeth to try and make it more exciting. And no, watching someone file teeth down to points isn't exciting. It's like watching someone floss. So, while nothing is happening to the sewer worker, nothing else is happening anywhere else in the movie, which makes for a whole lot of boring, from a handful of boring characters. Which is, well, boring. Duh. I expected so much more from the guys who made Pontypool. Very disappointing. Between the commercials and general boredom, I had to shut it off, or risk even greater levels of insanity than I already display on a regular basis. And nobody wants that.
Prophecy (1995) is about an archangel, Gabriel, who comes to Earth to tip the scales in an angel-on-angel war, and I'm not talking about the one against Lucifer. Only it's not really an angel on angel war, because Gabriel is actually pissed off that god likes humans better than angels, so Gabriel is looking to gain an advantage in order to destroy all humans. In Prophecy, Gabriel seeks the soul of a colonel who served in the Vietnam war, a particularly vile sort who enjoyed vicious fighting and supposedly sacrificed children to drive fear into the hearts of his enemies. The colonel has only recently died, and another angel, one loyal to god, has hidden the soul from Gabriel. It's up to an ex-priest and a schoolteacher to prevent Gabriel from finding it.
Gabriel is played by Christopher Walken, who is creepy enough to scare Lucifer (who is actually played by Viggo Mortensen in this movie) out of hell, so he makes a perfect evil angel for this movie. Elias Koteas and Virginia Madsen play the ex-priest and schoolteacher, and Eric Stoltz and Amanda Plummer round out the supporting cast. Obviously these are all talented actors, and the plot is like something out of the Exorcist, so you have a decent movie on your hands. Could have done with a bit more action, but still, twasn't bad. I've seen it before, and I'll probably see it again, so repeat viewings are fine on this one. Solid start to a whole series of movies.
Prophecy 2 (1998) picks up with Gabriel again. This time, he's after a woman who has been impregnated by an angel. The offspring of an angel and a human is called a Nephilim. Supposedly, they have the power of an angel with the free will of a human (though Gabriel seems to have a lot of free will to do evil in these movies, so I'm a little confused about that), and Gabriel can't stand that idea. Of course, all the angels who are still loyal to god are going to be standing in his way.
Christopher Walken reprises his role as Gabriel in Prophecy 2, with Eric Roberts doing a short bit as the Archangel Michael. Jennifer Beals plays the pregnant woman, but I really don't recognize anyone else in the movie except for Gabriel's undead henchman, uh, hench-woman, that is, played by the late Brittany Murphy. Acting and plot aren't as good as the first movie, though the added benefit of a short nude scene by Jennifer Beals ups the excitement level by a fraction, for a fraction of a second.
Prophecy 2 wasn't as good as the first one, so if you only have time for one, watch the first one. Prophecy 2 may or may not add anything to the series. I'll have to let you know since I am watching the other Prophecy movies tomorrow.
That's all for now. Til next time!
Monday, October 26, 2015
Horror Review #24 - 25: The Hollow (2015), Twixt (2011)
Double feature tonight, to catch up! Again! Yea. I know. I'm a total slacker. That's just me. :-) Tonight's movies are completely unrelated to each other, as much as I'd like to unite them with a common theme, so let's just get to the reviews.
The Hollow (2015) is so new that it doesn't even have an IMDB.com entry yet, as far as I can tell. Basically, three girls are heading to an island to visit their Aunt Cora when they hear about an old legend, one that says 6 young girls were accused of Witchcraft on the island, and put to death. As they died, the girls summoned up a fierce storm and half the people on the island died on Halloween, 1915. They also vowed that, 100 years later, they would return and seek vengeance on anyone staying on the island. Turns out, just as these three girls are visiting their Aunt Cora, it's 100 years later, and a fierce storm is a-brewing up on the island that will cut it off from the mainland...
I think this is a case of my review actually being better than the movie again. The backstory was good enough, the tale of the 6 girls killed 100 years back, but here's my problem. At the beginning of the movie, the townsfolk are getting all freaked out because there's a storm coming, and they're scared of being on the island because "the last time a storm hit the island, half the people on it died!" Okay, look, this is 2015. No story that's 100 years old would even be considered to be real anymore. It's too far removed from the public memory to incite fear in the local populace. Two, there are people living on the island. You're telling me that, in the last 100 years, there has NEVER been a storm on the island? Because if "the last time there was a storm on the island, half the people died!" Storms occur in most places fairly often. Wouldn't the last time have been, at best, a few weeks back? I mean, if half the people had died then, and during every storm for the last 100 years, I could see where the townsfolk would be a little upset. Plus, there wouldn't be anyone living on the island at all at that point, would there? No. No there wouldn't.
So then we get to the basic nuts and bolts of the movie. There's this creature made of twigs and sparks, is I guess the best way I can describe it, and it's hunting, well, everyone, as it's supposed to. Apparently, this is the form of vengeance the spirits of those 6 girls took. Okay, I'm with you so far. So. Where exactly is this storm they keep mentioning? They said there was going to be one, and... There wasn't, not til the very end. Nothing all day and throughout most of the night. What we end up with is a few strokes of lightning and poof, movie over. That was it? That was the big storm that was scaring everyone away from the island? Really? No rain, no wind, no fog, no hurricane, just poof? Wtf?
The basic story was easy enough to follow, and matched the usual SyFy movie of the week pattern (which is where I saw this one, on Syfy). Creature chases victims, victims die one by one, creature seems unstoppable, finally creature is defeated. Not giving anything away in case you want to watch this drivel on Syfy at some point. The creature effects were computer generated, but they weren't bad. The girls were cute, but their parents died recently and I'm a little confused as to how the older sister got temporary custody of her two younger sisters, or how the youngest sisters weren't already in the custody of their aunt cora to begin with, since she seems to be the sole surviving relative? Meh. Just a little confusing. Also confusing is how, in an underground bunker where one of the girls needs a lighter just to see, there's still the flicker of lighting that somehow shows through not only the steel superstructure of the underground place where they are, but through the ground as well. That's some impressive lightning.
Meh, I don't think The Hollow is worth a watch at all, honestly. Syfy may play it again if you really must see it. Acting was passably okay and some of the actors looked familiar. There was some blood and gore, and the creature made frequent appearances, so, there's that. On to the next one.
Twixt (2011) is the story of ... well, I guess it's a story of how a writer came up with his next novel, and solved a murder in the meantime. Apparently, some guy named Hall Baltimore is a novelist, and is having a hard time writing his next book due to his daughter's recent death. While on a book signing tour (the bane of every novelist, apparently), Hall is approached by the local Sheriff of a rinky-dink little town to co-write a novel about vampires. The Sheriff lays out the beginning of the tale, involving the unidentified corpse of a murdered girl in the town's morgue, and Hall tries to run with it, only to run into his usual difficulties, that of alcoholism and writer's block. Can Hall get an outline to his editor before ending up another body in the morgue? Only time will tell!
Okay, this movie was just confusing. Val Kilmer plays Hall baltimore, the "bargain basement Stephen King" of this tale, and Bruce Dern is effective and engaging as the sheriff. Elle Fanning does an equitable turn as V, the murder victim. Special effects were okay, but as to what actually happened, well, who knows. Supposedly, there were some murder victims, staked in the way that one would kill a vampire, and these formed the basis of the novel that eventually went to Hall's editor. There were a lot of murdered kids buried somewhere that Edgar Allen Poe once spent the night, and Hall spent a lot of time chatting with Poe in his alcohol-induced dreams. And then...! And then Hall is handing his finished novel to his editor, or publisher, or whatever, who assures him the novel is bulletproof. Whatever that means.
What did I just watch? Was it a horror movie? I can't tell. No wonder it did poorly at the theaters. It's on netflix (netflix calls it a thriller) if you want to try your hand at figuring it out, but it disappears from their streaming service on Nov 1. Honestly, I'd say give it a pass. Too confusing to figure out, and nothing interesting to keep your attention. And wtf was up with the clock tower? They spend all this time mentioning it and nothing of any note happens there. What was the damn point? So confusing.
So, don't watch either of the films that I just suffered through! For your sake. I hope you guys appreciate my sacrifice. That's almost 3 hours of my life that I spent watching crap, so you don't have to. That's right, I took one for the team. The horror-movie-enthusiast team. Actually, I took two for the team. So go watch something better! Don't make my sacrifice meaningless! Save yourselves!
Til next time.
The Hollow (2015) is so new that it doesn't even have an IMDB.com entry yet, as far as I can tell. Basically, three girls are heading to an island to visit their Aunt Cora when they hear about an old legend, one that says 6 young girls were accused of Witchcraft on the island, and put to death. As they died, the girls summoned up a fierce storm and half the people on the island died on Halloween, 1915. They also vowed that, 100 years later, they would return and seek vengeance on anyone staying on the island. Turns out, just as these three girls are visiting their Aunt Cora, it's 100 years later, and a fierce storm is a-brewing up on the island that will cut it off from the mainland...
I think this is a case of my review actually being better than the movie again. The backstory was good enough, the tale of the 6 girls killed 100 years back, but here's my problem. At the beginning of the movie, the townsfolk are getting all freaked out because there's a storm coming, and they're scared of being on the island because "the last time a storm hit the island, half the people on it died!" Okay, look, this is 2015. No story that's 100 years old would even be considered to be real anymore. It's too far removed from the public memory to incite fear in the local populace. Two, there are people living on the island. You're telling me that, in the last 100 years, there has NEVER been a storm on the island? Because if "the last time there was a storm on the island, half the people died!" Storms occur in most places fairly often. Wouldn't the last time have been, at best, a few weeks back? I mean, if half the people had died then, and during every storm for the last 100 years, I could see where the townsfolk would be a little upset. Plus, there wouldn't be anyone living on the island at all at that point, would there? No. No there wouldn't.
So then we get to the basic nuts and bolts of the movie. There's this creature made of twigs and sparks, is I guess the best way I can describe it, and it's hunting, well, everyone, as it's supposed to. Apparently, this is the form of vengeance the spirits of those 6 girls took. Okay, I'm with you so far. So. Where exactly is this storm they keep mentioning? They said there was going to be one, and... There wasn't, not til the very end. Nothing all day and throughout most of the night. What we end up with is a few strokes of lightning and poof, movie over. That was it? That was the big storm that was scaring everyone away from the island? Really? No rain, no wind, no fog, no hurricane, just poof? Wtf?
The basic story was easy enough to follow, and matched the usual SyFy movie of the week pattern (which is where I saw this one, on Syfy). Creature chases victims, victims die one by one, creature seems unstoppable, finally creature is defeated. Not giving anything away in case you want to watch this drivel on Syfy at some point. The creature effects were computer generated, but they weren't bad. The girls were cute, but their parents died recently and I'm a little confused as to how the older sister got temporary custody of her two younger sisters, or how the youngest sisters weren't already in the custody of their aunt cora to begin with, since she seems to be the sole surviving relative? Meh. Just a little confusing. Also confusing is how, in an underground bunker where one of the girls needs a lighter just to see, there's still the flicker of lighting that somehow shows through not only the steel superstructure of the underground place where they are, but through the ground as well. That's some impressive lightning.
Meh, I don't think The Hollow is worth a watch at all, honestly. Syfy may play it again if you really must see it. Acting was passably okay and some of the actors looked familiar. There was some blood and gore, and the creature made frequent appearances, so, there's that. On to the next one.
Twixt (2011) is the story of ... well, I guess it's a story of how a writer came up with his next novel, and solved a murder in the meantime. Apparently, some guy named Hall Baltimore is a novelist, and is having a hard time writing his next book due to his daughter's recent death. While on a book signing tour (the bane of every novelist, apparently), Hall is approached by the local Sheriff of a rinky-dink little town to co-write a novel about vampires. The Sheriff lays out the beginning of the tale, involving the unidentified corpse of a murdered girl in the town's morgue, and Hall tries to run with it, only to run into his usual difficulties, that of alcoholism and writer's block. Can Hall get an outline to his editor before ending up another body in the morgue? Only time will tell!
Okay, this movie was just confusing. Val Kilmer plays Hall baltimore, the "bargain basement Stephen King" of this tale, and Bruce Dern is effective and engaging as the sheriff. Elle Fanning does an equitable turn as V, the murder victim. Special effects were okay, but as to what actually happened, well, who knows. Supposedly, there were some murder victims, staked in the way that one would kill a vampire, and these formed the basis of the novel that eventually went to Hall's editor. There were a lot of murdered kids buried somewhere that Edgar Allen Poe once spent the night, and Hall spent a lot of time chatting with Poe in his alcohol-induced dreams. And then...! And then Hall is handing his finished novel to his editor, or publisher, or whatever, who assures him the novel is bulletproof. Whatever that means.
What did I just watch? Was it a horror movie? I can't tell. No wonder it did poorly at the theaters. It's on netflix (netflix calls it a thriller) if you want to try your hand at figuring it out, but it disappears from their streaming service on Nov 1. Honestly, I'd say give it a pass. Too confusing to figure out, and nothing interesting to keep your attention. And wtf was up with the clock tower? They spend all this time mentioning it and nothing of any note happens there. What was the damn point? So confusing.
So, don't watch either of the films that I just suffered through! For your sake. I hope you guys appreciate my sacrifice. That's almost 3 hours of my life that I spent watching crap, so you don't have to. That's right, I took one for the team. The horror-movie-enthusiast team. Actually, I took two for the team. So go watch something better! Don't make my sacrifice meaningless! Save yourselves!
Til next time.
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Horror Reviews #21-23: Mimic, Mimic 2, Mimic 3
Friday night triple feature! Can I pull it off? Can I, in one fell swoop, catch up on all the reviews I am behind? Probably not! But I'm going for it! Plus, I don't think I've ever reviewed the Mimic series before, which sucks, because the movie are actually pretty good. Mimic (1997) starts the series off with Mira Sorvino in the lead role, then Mimic 2 (2001) follows it up with, well, mostly a cast of unknowns (as far as I can tell) and Mimic 3: Sentinel (2003) finishes off the series with Lance Henriksen, Amanda Plummer and Alexis Dziena! Let's start with the first and work our way up!
Mimic (1997) kicks off the series with, of course, the origin story. A plague is making the children of New York City terribly ill, so ill that the lucky ones are probably the ones who die. No cure can be found, no means of prevention will work. If the virus has one weakness, it lies with the host. Cockroaches. But how do you eradicate an entire city's worth of cockroaches, when just killing one of them can be difficult? Enter Dr. Susan Tyler, entomologist extraordinaire. The Indiana Jones of the bug world, Dr. Tyler bio-engineers a strain of insect she calls the 'Judas breed.' Designed solely to attract roaches and inseminate them with a viral exterminator, the Judas Breed accomplishes its task, and the children of the city are saved. Not unaware of the dangers of toying with mother nature, Dr. Tyler even ensures the Judas Breed is sterile, so that it cannot replicate itself. Once it has killed all the roaches, the Judas Bug will naturally die out. Fast forward three years later, and Dr. Tyler, the hero of the city, finds out the Judas Breed is still around. Somehow, it has not only survived, but it is thriving...
Mimic 2 (2001) continues the tale, picking up with Remy, Dr. Tyler's colleague from the first movie. Remy is teaching in the city now, but all her ex-boyfriends seem to be disappearing, or ending up dead. Enter the police in the form of Detective Klaski, who is beginning to think Remy is a psycho serial killer. The only reason Klaski hasn't arrested Remy yet is because he can't figure out how a 112-pound schoolteacher could toss the 200+ pound body of her ex-stalker over a lamppost. Turns out it isn't Remy doing all the killing, but the last surviving fertile male of the Judas Breed, who has somehow selected Remy to be his procreative mate. Can Remy use her scientific knowledge of the Judas Breed to save herself and her students?
Mimic 3: Sentinel (2003) focuses on one of the sick kids who had 'Strickler's Syndrome' (the disease that was borne by the cockroaches in the first movie). Now an adult, Marvin spends most of his time in his room in his family's apartment, taking surreptitious photos of his neighbors. Marvin's hobby turns up a few interesting tidbits about his neighbors, such as the fact that Marvin's sister is close friends with her drug dealer, and one of the children across the alley has disappeared. Marvin isn't in much of a position to help any of his neighbors as they start to run into trouble, and the policeman he calls for help, ends up being more interested in Marvin's mother than investigating Marvin's story. Can Marvin and his drug-addled sister figure out what is going on, before it's too late?
I'm honestly surprised they haven't made another Mimic movie. Granted, the third movie probably didn't make much money, but it's basically a movie series about killer cockroaches growing to human size and mimicking our appearance so they can kill us easier. Seems like a fairly original concept, if barred from true greatness by longer running times and ample female nudity. Or at least, that's what I would do to improve the movies, anyway. And honestly, wouldn't that just make every movie better? I think so.
Acting is pretty decent, special effects are well used for what little screen time they actually get, and there's a token gunfight and explosion sequence in pretty much every movie. Charles S. Dutton, F. Murray Abraham and Giancarlo Giannini round out the cast in the first movie with Mira Sorvino as Dr. Tyler. In the third movie, Lance Henriksen and John Kapelos show up to support Alexis Dziena, Karl geary and Amanda Plummer. I don't really know anybody in the second movie, but, uh... It passed an hour and a half without making my eyes bleed? I'm not sure what else to tell you.
All three movies are basically the same formula, but not to say the movies are formulaic. Each movie picks up the tale of a normal man or woman who has some inside knowledge about the Mimics being tasked with stopping them from spreading. I like that none of the heroes or heroines are particularly hardy, in fact, the male lead in the third film spends most of the movie sucking oxygen out of a mobile tank. In every case, the mimics begin the attack before the main characters even have any idea what's going on, and the action sequences that follow aren't even about the leads trying to play catch-up, but just trying to live through the night. Which, is why I refer to them as action-horror.
All three movies are on netflix if you want to watch them. Each of the movies are worth a viewing on their own merits, but taken as a whole, you get a good sense of what the Mimics are trying to accomplish and how feeble our efforts to stop them actually are. Plus, Mira Sorvino and Alexis Dziena are actually quite easy on the eyes, and even the mousy-looking teacher from the second movie strips down to her bra and panties in an effort to foil the Mimics keen sense of smell. Yea, I know, I don't get out much. Your point?
That's all for tonight. Caught up for now. As long as I don't fall behind again, only 8 more movies to go for 2015's horror movie review-a-thon! :-D
Mimic (1997) kicks off the series with, of course, the origin story. A plague is making the children of New York City terribly ill, so ill that the lucky ones are probably the ones who die. No cure can be found, no means of prevention will work. If the virus has one weakness, it lies with the host. Cockroaches. But how do you eradicate an entire city's worth of cockroaches, when just killing one of them can be difficult? Enter Dr. Susan Tyler, entomologist extraordinaire. The Indiana Jones of the bug world, Dr. Tyler bio-engineers a strain of insect she calls the 'Judas breed.' Designed solely to attract roaches and inseminate them with a viral exterminator, the Judas Breed accomplishes its task, and the children of the city are saved. Not unaware of the dangers of toying with mother nature, Dr. Tyler even ensures the Judas Breed is sterile, so that it cannot replicate itself. Once it has killed all the roaches, the Judas Bug will naturally die out. Fast forward three years later, and Dr. Tyler, the hero of the city, finds out the Judas Breed is still around. Somehow, it has not only survived, but it is thriving...
Mimic 2 (2001) continues the tale, picking up with Remy, Dr. Tyler's colleague from the first movie. Remy is teaching in the city now, but all her ex-boyfriends seem to be disappearing, or ending up dead. Enter the police in the form of Detective Klaski, who is beginning to think Remy is a psycho serial killer. The only reason Klaski hasn't arrested Remy yet is because he can't figure out how a 112-pound schoolteacher could toss the 200+ pound body of her ex-stalker over a lamppost. Turns out it isn't Remy doing all the killing, but the last surviving fertile male of the Judas Breed, who has somehow selected Remy to be his procreative mate. Can Remy use her scientific knowledge of the Judas Breed to save herself and her students?
Mimic 3: Sentinel (2003) focuses on one of the sick kids who had 'Strickler's Syndrome' (the disease that was borne by the cockroaches in the first movie). Now an adult, Marvin spends most of his time in his room in his family's apartment, taking surreptitious photos of his neighbors. Marvin's hobby turns up a few interesting tidbits about his neighbors, such as the fact that Marvin's sister is close friends with her drug dealer, and one of the children across the alley has disappeared. Marvin isn't in much of a position to help any of his neighbors as they start to run into trouble, and the policeman he calls for help, ends up being more interested in Marvin's mother than investigating Marvin's story. Can Marvin and his drug-addled sister figure out what is going on, before it's too late?
I'm honestly surprised they haven't made another Mimic movie. Granted, the third movie probably didn't make much money, but it's basically a movie series about killer cockroaches growing to human size and mimicking our appearance so they can kill us easier. Seems like a fairly original concept, if barred from true greatness by longer running times and ample female nudity. Or at least, that's what I would do to improve the movies, anyway. And honestly, wouldn't that just make every movie better? I think so.
Acting is pretty decent, special effects are well used for what little screen time they actually get, and there's a token gunfight and explosion sequence in pretty much every movie. Charles S. Dutton, F. Murray Abraham and Giancarlo Giannini round out the cast in the first movie with Mira Sorvino as Dr. Tyler. In the third movie, Lance Henriksen and John Kapelos show up to support Alexis Dziena, Karl geary and Amanda Plummer. I don't really know anybody in the second movie, but, uh... It passed an hour and a half without making my eyes bleed? I'm not sure what else to tell you.
All three movies are basically the same formula, but not to say the movies are formulaic. Each movie picks up the tale of a normal man or woman who has some inside knowledge about the Mimics being tasked with stopping them from spreading. I like that none of the heroes or heroines are particularly hardy, in fact, the male lead in the third film spends most of the movie sucking oxygen out of a mobile tank. In every case, the mimics begin the attack before the main characters even have any idea what's going on, and the action sequences that follow aren't even about the leads trying to play catch-up, but just trying to live through the night. Which, is why I refer to them as action-horror.
All three movies are on netflix if you want to watch them. Each of the movies are worth a viewing on their own merits, but taken as a whole, you get a good sense of what the Mimics are trying to accomplish and how feeble our efforts to stop them actually are. Plus, Mira Sorvino and Alexis Dziena are actually quite easy on the eyes, and even the mousy-looking teacher from the second movie strips down to her bra and panties in an effort to foil the Mimics keen sense of smell. Yea, I know, I don't get out much. Your point?
That's all for tonight. Caught up for now. As long as I don't fall behind again, only 8 more movies to go for 2015's horror movie review-a-thon! :-D
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Horror Reviews #19 - #20, Superstition (1982), Night of the Demons (1988)
Throwback Thursday double feature tonight! Aren't you just the luckiest sons-of-bitches that ever walked the earth? Yes, you are!
Superstition (1982) is a movie that doesn't start out slow. A couple is out necking at a notorious make-out spot, an old abandoned property owned by the local church, when a couple pranksters scare the bejeesus out of them. They tear out of there, and the pranksters have a good laugh. The pranksters are about to leave the property when they meet an untimely death. Suspicion falls on the mentally disadvantaged caretaker of the property, but his mother tells police that the boy is just "serving his Mistress." Who is this mysterious Mistress, and where is the boy? The police and the local clergy must find the answers to these questions, even as a new family moves onto the property...
Superstition is an older movie. There's not a lot of special effects nor any nudity, but what special effects are used are done fairly well. The new clergyman and his family have a pair of fairly attractive daughters, who do don some swimsuits to take a dip in the local pond. I find it funny that for the entire length of the movie, one of the daughters never changes her outfit, while the other daughter changed her outfit several times, one even from one terror-filled scene to the next.
Strangely, the only actor I recognized was the young son, who turned out to be one of the actors in Just One of the Guys, another 80's movie that actually wasn't a horror movie. The acting wasn't bad, but not terribly effective. The story isn't particular new, but it's a decent premise. A witch (Witch is also an alternate title of this movie) who was drowned around the time of the Salem witch trials has returned from the dead and is wreaking havoc on anyone near the pond. I caught this movie on one of the Cinemax channels if you want to check it out. I can't say it was worth more than one viewing, but it was semi-enjoyable the first time around.
Tonight's second feature is Night of the Demons (1988), a fun-filled frolic in a possessed old house called Hull House. Hull House used to be a funeral parlor, and a girl named Angela and her sister Suzanne are throwing an impromptu party there on Halloween night. The trouble is, Hull House isn't just haunted, it's possessed. As Angela explains it, the difference between the two is simple. Haunted houses are inhabited by the spirits of the dead, whereas possessed houses are inhabited by the spirits of those who have never been alive... Or, in other words, Demons.
Night of the Demons may be old and low-budget, but it is eminently entertaining. There's nudity, and demonic makeup and decent special effects, and all of it contribute to a pretty wild atmosphere of insane horror. There's a few scenes to establish just what each character is like before things get hairy, and then all hell pretty much breaks loose. Which, is what you'd expect from a movie called Night of the Demons, right? Right.
Linnea Quigley, the only recognizable actress, has an awesome scene where she's applying her make-up in a unique fashion. Horror movie fans may recall Linnea from her turn as Trash in Return of the Living Dead, a cult classic that I try to catch at least once every October. The rest of the cast do their acting jobs adequately enough, and the body count gets pretty high, with each cast member meeting his or her ultimate fate in a unique way. Lots of scares, and this is probably the half-dozenth time I've seen it, so re-watchability is high. This movie is playing on Encore Suspense this month if you want to catch it.
That's it for tonight! Still a couple reviews behind, but if I can keep these double feature things up and I'll catch up in no time! Hope everyone is enjoying Halloween Horror month as much as I am! :-D
Superstition (1982) is a movie that doesn't start out slow. A couple is out necking at a notorious make-out spot, an old abandoned property owned by the local church, when a couple pranksters scare the bejeesus out of them. They tear out of there, and the pranksters have a good laugh. The pranksters are about to leave the property when they meet an untimely death. Suspicion falls on the mentally disadvantaged caretaker of the property, but his mother tells police that the boy is just "serving his Mistress." Who is this mysterious Mistress, and where is the boy? The police and the local clergy must find the answers to these questions, even as a new family moves onto the property...
Superstition is an older movie. There's not a lot of special effects nor any nudity, but what special effects are used are done fairly well. The new clergyman and his family have a pair of fairly attractive daughters, who do don some swimsuits to take a dip in the local pond. I find it funny that for the entire length of the movie, one of the daughters never changes her outfit, while the other daughter changed her outfit several times, one even from one terror-filled scene to the next.
Strangely, the only actor I recognized was the young son, who turned out to be one of the actors in Just One of the Guys, another 80's movie that actually wasn't a horror movie. The acting wasn't bad, but not terribly effective. The story isn't particular new, but it's a decent premise. A witch (Witch is also an alternate title of this movie) who was drowned around the time of the Salem witch trials has returned from the dead and is wreaking havoc on anyone near the pond. I caught this movie on one of the Cinemax channels if you want to check it out. I can't say it was worth more than one viewing, but it was semi-enjoyable the first time around.
Tonight's second feature is Night of the Demons (1988), a fun-filled frolic in a possessed old house called Hull House. Hull House used to be a funeral parlor, and a girl named Angela and her sister Suzanne are throwing an impromptu party there on Halloween night. The trouble is, Hull House isn't just haunted, it's possessed. As Angela explains it, the difference between the two is simple. Haunted houses are inhabited by the spirits of the dead, whereas possessed houses are inhabited by the spirits of those who have never been alive... Or, in other words, Demons.
Night of the Demons may be old and low-budget, but it is eminently entertaining. There's nudity, and demonic makeup and decent special effects, and all of it contribute to a pretty wild atmosphere of insane horror. There's a few scenes to establish just what each character is like before things get hairy, and then all hell pretty much breaks loose. Which, is what you'd expect from a movie called Night of the Demons, right? Right.
Linnea Quigley, the only recognizable actress, has an awesome scene where she's applying her make-up in a unique fashion. Horror movie fans may recall Linnea from her turn as Trash in Return of the Living Dead, a cult classic that I try to catch at least once every October. The rest of the cast do their acting jobs adequately enough, and the body count gets pretty high, with each cast member meeting his or her ultimate fate in a unique way. Lots of scares, and this is probably the half-dozenth time I've seen it, so re-watchability is high. This movie is playing on Encore Suspense this month if you want to catch it.
That's it for tonight! Still a couple reviews behind, but if I can keep these double feature things up and I'll catch up in no time! Hope everyone is enjoying Halloween Horror month as much as I am! :-D
Horror Review #18 - Out of the Dark (2014)
We've got a two-for-one special on Darkness this week! Last time it was "Dark was the Night" and this time it's Out of the Dark! So, either things are looking up, or darkness is just coming out of the woodwork around here. Hmmm. Think I'll take option A.
Out of the Dark (2014) starts with a cryptic episode. A doctor is burning files in an expansive jungle villa when he hears something. Tossing some files into a dumb waiter to hide them, and closing the doors, the doctor arms himself with a scalpel and steps out onto the balcony. There's someone one on the balcony with him, but before we can see who or what is threatening the man, he falls off the balcony and dies. Fast-forward twenty years, and a family is arriving in Colombia to go to their new home, and look, it's the very place where the doctor died twenty years ago! This can't be good, can it?
Out of the Dark stars Stephen Rea, Scott Speedman and Julia Stiles in the lead roles, and is your basic horror story about creepy children. It's a pretty common theme in horror nowadays, probably beginning with the Exorcist back so many years ago. This particular story is decently well acted, though the special effects are minimal. There's a lot of the traditional jump scares, and they space them out so there's a general level of tension throughout the film. It adds to the overall atmosphere, but there's nothing exceptionally scary about this movie. I think the little girl managed to bring it all together, her english accent seemed so out of place at first, but I think it added a level of personality to the movie that it might have otherwise lacked.
Nothing particularly new or exciting in this one, though. Maybe worth a watch on Netflix if you have nothing better to do, but no sense in watching it twice. Fairly predictable, as well, so don't expect a major plot twist, but semi-enjoyable if the little girl's english accent doesn't throw you out of the immersion.
That's all for tonight, I hope to start catching up on my review pretty soon.
Out of the Dark (2014) starts with a cryptic episode. A doctor is burning files in an expansive jungle villa when he hears something. Tossing some files into a dumb waiter to hide them, and closing the doors, the doctor arms himself with a scalpel and steps out onto the balcony. There's someone one on the balcony with him, but before we can see who or what is threatening the man, he falls off the balcony and dies. Fast-forward twenty years, and a family is arriving in Colombia to go to their new home, and look, it's the very place where the doctor died twenty years ago! This can't be good, can it?
Out of the Dark stars Stephen Rea, Scott Speedman and Julia Stiles in the lead roles, and is your basic horror story about creepy children. It's a pretty common theme in horror nowadays, probably beginning with the Exorcist back so many years ago. This particular story is decently well acted, though the special effects are minimal. There's a lot of the traditional jump scares, and they space them out so there's a general level of tension throughout the film. It adds to the overall atmosphere, but there's nothing exceptionally scary about this movie. I think the little girl managed to bring it all together, her english accent seemed so out of place at first, but I think it added a level of personality to the movie that it might have otherwise lacked.
Nothing particularly new or exciting in this one, though. Maybe worth a watch on Netflix if you have nothing better to do, but no sense in watching it twice. Fairly predictable, as well, so don't expect a major plot twist, but semi-enjoyable if the little girl's english accent doesn't throw you out of the immersion.
That's all for tonight, I hope to start catching up on my review pretty soon.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Horror Review #17 - Dark was the Night (2014)
Yep, I know, still behind, but feeling a bit better. Only 3 reviews to make up before I catch up. Expect a busy week of posting unless I go see some fall colors somewhere. Halloween horror season! Kicking back, watching horror movies, why? Because I like them! Fun stuff. :-D
Dark Was The Night (2014) begins with a logging camp cutting through some old timber in a far-away portion of the forest. Jesse's crew of lumberjacks seems to be running late, and it's starting to snow. The foreman is getting pissed, and it looks like he'll hav to head on over to where Jesse's crew is doing their lumberjack thing to see what the fark is going on. Only, looks like the only thing left of Jesse is his good right arm. Well. Coroner will conclude it was an accidental death. Axe mishap. Yea. When you and I both know.... uh huh. It's coming. wait for it... not yet.... nooootttttt yeeetttt.... yep! All hell has broken loose.
Dark was the Night was kind of a surprise to me. First, it's got Kevin Durand, from the Strain, and so many other roles that I am surprised I had no idea who he was, playing a bereaved sheriff. His new partner, Donny (played by Lukas Haas), is from New York, was recently shot, and seems to be looking for some quieter pastures. I guess since we're in a horror movie, Donny picked the wrong town to live the quiet life in. None of the rest of the cast looked to be well-known, but the action revolved around these two veteran actors, so the supporting cast is basically just a bunch of extras you're sure are about to be slaughtered.
This movie was a little on the low-budget side, with special effects on the level of your average Syfy movie, but used to much better effect. The build-up and tension created some awesome atmospheric suspense. You know something is out there, and you know it's killing, but you don't hardly ever get to see the damn thing. As the title of the movie tells you in advance, the night is pretty goddamn dark out there, and you'll be lucky if you see the thing before it kills you. Between the palpable sense that this thing is stalking the residents of the town, and the (minor spoiler) running gun battle with the thing at the end, the movie does a good job of evoking some creepy fear because you just have no idea what the hell is out there til the end. End minor spoilers.
I caught this one on Netflix, and it's definitely worth a watch, for the atmosphere and suspense alone. Might even be worth some repeat viewing. Maybe aspiring film-makers could use this horror flick as a basis for what to do with a low budget and good actors. And it's not short, either, at an hour and 38 minutes it's just over an hour and a half worth of action, sprinkled with intermittent bits of cheesy goodness, mushy stuff, and character development. In short, I liked it, but the special effect at the end could have been better done, I think.
That's all for tonight. Hopefully I can find better things to watch tomorrow and start catching up. Til then, enjoy yourself some horror movies... Pretty soon it'll be all about Xmas!
Dark Was The Night (2014) begins with a logging camp cutting through some old timber in a far-away portion of the forest. Jesse's crew of lumberjacks seems to be running late, and it's starting to snow. The foreman is getting pissed, and it looks like he'll hav to head on over to where Jesse's crew is doing their lumberjack thing to see what the fark is going on. Only, looks like the only thing left of Jesse is his good right arm. Well. Coroner will conclude it was an accidental death. Axe mishap. Yea. When you and I both know.... uh huh. It's coming. wait for it... not yet.... nooootttttt yeeetttt.... yep! All hell has broken loose.
Dark was the Night was kind of a surprise to me. First, it's got Kevin Durand, from the Strain, and so many other roles that I am surprised I had no idea who he was, playing a bereaved sheriff. His new partner, Donny (played by Lukas Haas), is from New York, was recently shot, and seems to be looking for some quieter pastures. I guess since we're in a horror movie, Donny picked the wrong town to live the quiet life in. None of the rest of the cast looked to be well-known, but the action revolved around these two veteran actors, so the supporting cast is basically just a bunch of extras you're sure are about to be slaughtered.
This movie was a little on the low-budget side, with special effects on the level of your average Syfy movie, but used to much better effect. The build-up and tension created some awesome atmospheric suspense. You know something is out there, and you know it's killing, but you don't hardly ever get to see the damn thing. As the title of the movie tells you in advance, the night is pretty goddamn dark out there, and you'll be lucky if you see the thing before it kills you. Between the palpable sense that this thing is stalking the residents of the town, and the (minor spoiler) running gun battle with the thing at the end, the movie does a good job of evoking some creepy fear because you just have no idea what the hell is out there til the end. End minor spoilers.
I caught this one on Netflix, and it's definitely worth a watch, for the atmosphere and suspense alone. Might even be worth some repeat viewing. Maybe aspiring film-makers could use this horror flick as a basis for what to do with a low budget and good actors. And it's not short, either, at an hour and 38 minutes it's just over an hour and a half worth of action, sprinkled with intermittent bits of cheesy goodness, mushy stuff, and character development. In short, I liked it, but the special effect at the end could have been better done, I think.
That's all for tonight. Hopefully I can find better things to watch tomorrow and start catching up. Til then, enjoy yourself some horror movies... Pretty soon it'll be all about Xmas!
Monday, October 19, 2015
Horror Review #16 - The Lazarus Effect (2015)
Yea, I know, I'm a few reviews behind for the month. No big deal, I'll make them up like I made up my labs back in college. All at once! But for now, just one review, because I have a headache.
The Lazarus Effect (2015) or just "Lazarus" as they refer to it on NetFlix (where I saw it) is a movie about resurrection. Not Jesus, or Lazarus, but a dog. At least, at first. A team of college (I think it was college) researchers are looking into ways of extending the time a human can be left deceased before being reanimated, so that doctors can repair the damage done to the body. After a potential breakthrough, they hire a camera operator to go ahead and record the experiment for posterity. Success! They successfully resurrect a dog that had been dead for some time. The dog seems completely healthy (which is odd, because it was dead) and they take it home to keep an eye on it. The next day, the dog is acting strangely aggressive. While the team of researchers is deciding what to do, their lab is shut down by the college review board, and all their research is repossessed by some parent company. Frustrated and angry, the team knows that their discovery is about to be snatched away by some huge corporation. The only way to protect themselves is to properly document the experiment, but all their records have been taken. To document the experiment, they have to sneak back into the laboratory, and repeat their success, only this time... Yea. All hell breaks loose.
This was kind of a short movie at only an hour and 15 minutes long (excluding the credits), but not entirely un-enjoyable. There's little lead-in and no character development, and only a tiny smidgen of back-story. Maybe a lot of the back story was edited out as being unimportant (if you're feeling generous), or maybe it was never filmed, because there's a few minor plot-holes floating around like stale doughnut holes left in an old box in the break room. I don't think any of what I'm about to tell you counts as a spoiler, but let's start with just what I have in the plot summary, above.
First, I'm not sure a college laboratory has to satisfy a review board every few months to keep their grant, if indeed, it was a college lab. Two, if it was a college lab, why did everything revert back to some corporation? Wouldn't ownership revert back to the college? Three, the whole evil corporation coming in and taking everything had huge potential, but was totally unexplored, and seemed only to give the characters a reason to go back and film the experiment a second time. They even had an awesome actor come in to give the whole evil corporation a face (I think it was an awesome actor, because i recognized his face as being familiar, but I forget who it was). And that's just about the corporation.
Couple of other plot holes exist in the fact that, why the hell don't they bother to ground an electrical switch? Seriously, wtf? Two, would wearing a ring really cause that much of a problem? Granted it's 11,000 volts, but it's the amperage that kills you, not the voltage, and any electrician will tell you that. And then, there's the damn dog. First the dog acts all freakin weird, and you're wondering wtf is up, and then, when you expect the dog to be all happy, it's not. And that's odd, because you'd think it would be, in that particular instance, and if you see the movie, you'll understand what I mean. And one final question, what exactly happened to the dog? I mean, honestly? I know it's sort of implied, but it's a lab. There's only so many places to hide the body of a large dog, you know?
Three, and here's something I don't get (minor plot spoiler here), but they actually bring up the fact that the release of DMT (have no idea what that stands for but supposedly it's highly hallucinogenic) apparently opens the portal and ushers your soul on to the afterlife when you die. So then they say, maybe (um, so-and-so, so I don't give away too much of the plot) is actually stuck because the portal never opened, when the alternative would probably be more true and OH-so much scarier... That the portal is open, and stuck that way. Yea. That would make my juevos crawl back up inside me and hide, let me tell you. But no, they say the portal never opened, which makes absolutely no freaking sense, given what was happening around them at the time. Just made me look at the screen like the characters were confused morons, which, may not be unusual for a horror flick, but these are supposed to be scientists. Meh, bad writing, I guess. End Spoilers.
So Olivia Wilde is in it, and there's no nude scenes that I recall, much as I would have enjoyed one from Ms. Wilde, but meh. The movie sort of sucked, acting wasn't that great, but at least it was short and sweet and to the point of attempting to scare the bejeesus out of you as quickly as possible. No real suspense here, nor atmosphere, but more of an action-horror piece. No creepy horror, multiple attempts at jump scares that failed because, well, you pretty much knew they were coming. Special effects were pretty decent, at least, for the few times they were actually required. Maybe watch it once for the kooky plot, and to see if you can figure out a way to plug all the plot holes? Nothing terribly new here, that's for sure. If you miss it, you aren't really missing anything terribly exciting, or original.
Okay, that's all for this evening. I'm going to try and catch up over the next few days. Supposed to be almost at #20 by now, and I'm only at review #16. Sigh. Hard to find good stuff to watch, too. Til next time!
The Lazarus Effect (2015) or just "Lazarus" as they refer to it on NetFlix (where I saw it) is a movie about resurrection. Not Jesus, or Lazarus, but a dog. At least, at first. A team of college (I think it was college) researchers are looking into ways of extending the time a human can be left deceased before being reanimated, so that doctors can repair the damage done to the body. After a potential breakthrough, they hire a camera operator to go ahead and record the experiment for posterity. Success! They successfully resurrect a dog that had been dead for some time. The dog seems completely healthy (which is odd, because it was dead) and they take it home to keep an eye on it. The next day, the dog is acting strangely aggressive. While the team of researchers is deciding what to do, their lab is shut down by the college review board, and all their research is repossessed by some parent company. Frustrated and angry, the team knows that their discovery is about to be snatched away by some huge corporation. The only way to protect themselves is to properly document the experiment, but all their records have been taken. To document the experiment, they have to sneak back into the laboratory, and repeat their success, only this time... Yea. All hell breaks loose.
This was kind of a short movie at only an hour and 15 minutes long (excluding the credits), but not entirely un-enjoyable. There's little lead-in and no character development, and only a tiny smidgen of back-story. Maybe a lot of the back story was edited out as being unimportant (if you're feeling generous), or maybe it was never filmed, because there's a few minor plot-holes floating around like stale doughnut holes left in an old box in the break room. I don't think any of what I'm about to tell you counts as a spoiler, but let's start with just what I have in the plot summary, above.
First, I'm not sure a college laboratory has to satisfy a review board every few months to keep their grant, if indeed, it was a college lab. Two, if it was a college lab, why did everything revert back to some corporation? Wouldn't ownership revert back to the college? Three, the whole evil corporation coming in and taking everything had huge potential, but was totally unexplored, and seemed only to give the characters a reason to go back and film the experiment a second time. They even had an awesome actor come in to give the whole evil corporation a face (I think it was an awesome actor, because i recognized his face as being familiar, but I forget who it was). And that's just about the corporation.
Couple of other plot holes exist in the fact that, why the hell don't they bother to ground an electrical switch? Seriously, wtf? Two, would wearing a ring really cause that much of a problem? Granted it's 11,000 volts, but it's the amperage that kills you, not the voltage, and any electrician will tell you that. And then, there's the damn dog. First the dog acts all freakin weird, and you're wondering wtf is up, and then, when you expect the dog to be all happy, it's not. And that's odd, because you'd think it would be, in that particular instance, and if you see the movie, you'll understand what I mean. And one final question, what exactly happened to the dog? I mean, honestly? I know it's sort of implied, but it's a lab. There's only so many places to hide the body of a large dog, you know?
Three, and here's something I don't get (minor plot spoiler here), but they actually bring up the fact that the release of DMT (have no idea what that stands for but supposedly it's highly hallucinogenic) apparently opens the portal and ushers your soul on to the afterlife when you die. So then they say, maybe (um, so-and-so, so I don't give away too much of the plot) is actually stuck because the portal never opened, when the alternative would probably be more true and OH-so much scarier... That the portal is open, and stuck that way. Yea. That would make my juevos crawl back up inside me and hide, let me tell you. But no, they say the portal never opened, which makes absolutely no freaking sense, given what was happening around them at the time. Just made me look at the screen like the characters were confused morons, which, may not be unusual for a horror flick, but these are supposed to be scientists. Meh, bad writing, I guess. End Spoilers.
So Olivia Wilde is in it, and there's no nude scenes that I recall, much as I would have enjoyed one from Ms. Wilde, but meh. The movie sort of sucked, acting wasn't that great, but at least it was short and sweet and to the point of attempting to scare the bejeesus out of you as quickly as possible. No real suspense here, nor atmosphere, but more of an action-horror piece. No creepy horror, multiple attempts at jump scares that failed because, well, you pretty much knew they were coming. Special effects were pretty decent, at least, for the few times they were actually required. Maybe watch it once for the kooky plot, and to see if you can figure out a way to plug all the plot holes? Nothing terribly new here, that's for sure. If you miss it, you aren't really missing anything terribly exciting, or original.
Okay, that's all for this evening. I'm going to try and catch up over the next few days. Supposed to be almost at #20 by now, and I'm only at review #16. Sigh. Hard to find good stuff to watch, too. Til next time!
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Horror Review #15 - Maniac Cop (1988)
In honor of Throwback Thursday, a horror movie that came out when I was 18, that I had still not seen until tonight (although I have seen a couple of the sequels). Throwback Thursday is a little new to me, because until recently, I was still living in the 80's. I mean, what's to recommend sleazing one's way through the 90's or 00's? Not much anything of note happened then, and I've only been semi-conscious since the late 80's, anyway. 1988 was the year I graduated high school, and started college. It may have felt like Miskatonic University at the time, but I managed to get through it without being sucked into a dismal hell-plane. Unless of course, you count the rest of my life since college, in which case, I probably was.
Maniac Cop (1988) is the story of, well, a maniac cop. The action begins pretty much right away, with a woman fleeing a pair of purse-snatchers and possible rapists. Managing to get free after their initial assault on her, the woman flees to a police officer at the edge of a park. She runs up to him, only to have the impassively large form of the policeman grab her by the throat, lift her bodily into the air, and savagely snap her neck. The pursuing criminals, who turn and flee the scene after witnessing the woman's murder, are left alone. Enter Detective Frank McCrae, who happens to know the dead woman, and is lead detective on the case as the slew of murders by the Maniac Cop continues. McCrae wants to start looking into police officers who might be on the edge, anyone capable of murdering innocents, but then his superiors start the cover-up. Apparently, having people walking around scared of police officers is bad for business.
Maniac Cop was actually a pretty good horror flick for the late 80's. Frank McCrae is played by Tom Atkins, who was in a slew of horror flicks back then, everything from Halloween 3 to Night of the Creeps (one of his, and one of my, favorite horror flicks) to The Fog. Bruce Campbell, of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness fame (who also has a new series premiering on Halloween on Starz!), plays the prime suspect in the string of grisly murders. The late Robert Z'Dar, who is pretty much only famous because of the entire manic cop series and who sadly just passed away earlier this year, actually plays the title character of the Maniac Cop. But that's not a spoiler, since it's patently obvious to anyone watching the movie that Bruce Campbell's character is being framed. There's some familiar faces in the rest of the cast, but not anyone who spends a lot of time on-screen.
I'm surprised I hadn't managed to catch this movie before tonight. Apparently, it's not played on TV very often, and I'm not really sure why. The special effects aren't terribly great, I mean, it's basically just some fake blood and prosthetic scar tissue, but they work fine considering there's no horrific explosions or weird-looking aliens in this movie. Meh, I guess it's just one of those decent 80's movies that they just never seem to show anymore, but it's still definitely worth a watch, if only to find out exactly how the Maniac Cop got his start. I caught this movie for free on hulu.com, and apparently, there is a remake that's going to start filming next spring. I found it fun just to see something starring Bruce Campbell that didn't have the Necronomicon in it.
Woohoo! Finally caught up. Review #15 on the 15th of October! Now all I have to do is find and review another 16 horror movies in the next two weeks and two days, while still enjoying the plethora of other horror movies on TV and the internet that I've already reviewed in the last six years of blogging, AND managing to catch the slew of fall colors before autumn dips into the seven months of winter coming up. Not even mentioning that November is national Novel Writing Month, and I'm STILL trying to start and finish a novel in 30 days time (which I've been trying and failing to do for the past 6 years), and I have to prepare for that as well. Wheee! Stress can be so much fun when you self-medicate with alcohol! :-D
That's all for tonight. Going to relax with a drink and a horror movie. Til tomorrow's horror movie review, then.
Maniac Cop (1988) is the story of, well, a maniac cop. The action begins pretty much right away, with a woman fleeing a pair of purse-snatchers and possible rapists. Managing to get free after their initial assault on her, the woman flees to a police officer at the edge of a park. She runs up to him, only to have the impassively large form of the policeman grab her by the throat, lift her bodily into the air, and savagely snap her neck. The pursuing criminals, who turn and flee the scene after witnessing the woman's murder, are left alone. Enter Detective Frank McCrae, who happens to know the dead woman, and is lead detective on the case as the slew of murders by the Maniac Cop continues. McCrae wants to start looking into police officers who might be on the edge, anyone capable of murdering innocents, but then his superiors start the cover-up. Apparently, having people walking around scared of police officers is bad for business.
Maniac Cop was actually a pretty good horror flick for the late 80's. Frank McCrae is played by Tom Atkins, who was in a slew of horror flicks back then, everything from Halloween 3 to Night of the Creeps (one of his, and one of my, favorite horror flicks) to The Fog. Bruce Campbell, of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness fame (who also has a new series premiering on Halloween on Starz!), plays the prime suspect in the string of grisly murders. The late Robert Z'Dar, who is pretty much only famous because of the entire manic cop series and who sadly just passed away earlier this year, actually plays the title character of the Maniac Cop. But that's not a spoiler, since it's patently obvious to anyone watching the movie that Bruce Campbell's character is being framed. There's some familiar faces in the rest of the cast, but not anyone who spends a lot of time on-screen.
I'm surprised I hadn't managed to catch this movie before tonight. Apparently, it's not played on TV very often, and I'm not really sure why. The special effects aren't terribly great, I mean, it's basically just some fake blood and prosthetic scar tissue, but they work fine considering there's no horrific explosions or weird-looking aliens in this movie. Meh, I guess it's just one of those decent 80's movies that they just never seem to show anymore, but it's still definitely worth a watch, if only to find out exactly how the Maniac Cop got his start. I caught this movie for free on hulu.com, and apparently, there is a remake that's going to start filming next spring. I found it fun just to see something starring Bruce Campbell that didn't have the Necronomicon in it.
Woohoo! Finally caught up. Review #15 on the 15th of October! Now all I have to do is find and review another 16 horror movies in the next two weeks and two days, while still enjoying the plethora of other horror movies on TV and the internet that I've already reviewed in the last six years of blogging, AND managing to catch the slew of fall colors before autumn dips into the seven months of winter coming up. Not even mentioning that November is national Novel Writing Month, and I'm STILL trying to start and finish a novel in 30 days time (which I've been trying and failing to do for the past 6 years), and I have to prepare for that as well. Wheee! Stress can be so much fun when you self-medicate with alcohol! :-D
That's all for tonight. Going to relax with a drink and a horror movie. Til tomorrow's horror movie review, then.
Horror Review #14 - The Thing on the Doorstep (2014)
I admit, I don't know much about H.P. Lovecraft. My first experience with his work was probably 1985's Re-Animator, which I loved, mostly for the nudity (hey, I was 15 when it came out). IMDB.com lists him as a writer who lived from 1890 to 1937, and has influenced such writers as Stephen King and some few other people I have read. Coincidentally, I have never read any of H. P. Lovecraft's actual works except "The Thing on the Doorstep," which I ran across on the internet one day and read in its entirety in the course of an afternoon.
The Thing On the Doorstep (2014) is a fairly faithful retelling of H. P. Lovecraft's original work, as far as I can recall. A guy named Daniel (and his wife, which is apparently an addition of this particular retelling) has a friend named Edward. Edward is a bit odd, a delver in the dark arts, who tends to go off on wild excursions at the whims of fancy. Edward runs into a woman named Asenath at a party, who seems to bewitch Edward to an extreme extent, and Daniel begins to worry about his friend's sanity, as well as his physical well-being. Those of you who follow H. P. Lovecraft's work will be glad to know that, in this story at least, all Hell does NOT break loose.
This particular movie had an extremely cheap budget, and the acting wasn't particularly great, but it wasn't too bad, either. Overuse of Lovecraft's original flowery language with a modren-day setting seemed odd. Especially confusing to me was the way the narrator of the tale, Daniel himself, was clacking away on an old typewriter in his retelling of the events that he had witnessed. It was especially confusing because they show him sitting in front of an actual computer earlier in the tale, and since he's apparently still with his wife and child, I'm not sure why he would be typing away on an old typewriter instead of his computer. Or, even where he might have foundan old typewriter to clack away on.
The original story is quite good. I mean, they don't call H. P. Lovecraft the father of modern horror for nothing. This retelling is marred by a lack of poor special effects, mediocre acting, and an abysmally low budget, but might be worth watching once if you've never read the original tale. No nudity, the actors are not very easy on the eyes, and the sets aren't very enticing or much to look at. There are a lot of references to Asenath's "inhumanity" and the "fishy" looks of her servants, but this movie didn't take any effort to display them as such. This movie is available for free on hulu.com, where I saw it, but I can't recommend watching it unless you haven't already read the original tale by H. P. Lovecraft. Interestingly, IMDB.com says there are a slew of movies still coming out based on H.P. Lovecraft's works, some 80 years after his death. If that doesn't tell you what a good horror writer he was, I'm not sure what would.
Keeping things short because I am still one horror movie review behind, and trying to catch up. :-)
The Thing On the Doorstep (2014) is a fairly faithful retelling of H. P. Lovecraft's original work, as far as I can recall. A guy named Daniel (and his wife, which is apparently an addition of this particular retelling) has a friend named Edward. Edward is a bit odd, a delver in the dark arts, who tends to go off on wild excursions at the whims of fancy. Edward runs into a woman named Asenath at a party, who seems to bewitch Edward to an extreme extent, and Daniel begins to worry about his friend's sanity, as well as his physical well-being. Those of you who follow H. P. Lovecraft's work will be glad to know that, in this story at least, all Hell does NOT break loose.
This particular movie had an extremely cheap budget, and the acting wasn't particularly great, but it wasn't too bad, either. Overuse of Lovecraft's original flowery language with a modren-day setting seemed odd. Especially confusing to me was the way the narrator of the tale, Daniel himself, was clacking away on an old typewriter in his retelling of the events that he had witnessed. It was especially confusing because they show him sitting in front of an actual computer earlier in the tale, and since he's apparently still with his wife and child, I'm not sure why he would be typing away on an old typewriter instead of his computer. Or, even where he might have foundan old typewriter to clack away on.
The original story is quite good. I mean, they don't call H. P. Lovecraft the father of modern horror for nothing. This retelling is marred by a lack of poor special effects, mediocre acting, and an abysmally low budget, but might be worth watching once if you've never read the original tale. No nudity, the actors are not very easy on the eyes, and the sets aren't very enticing or much to look at. There are a lot of references to Asenath's "inhumanity" and the "fishy" looks of her servants, but this movie didn't take any effort to display them as such. This movie is available for free on hulu.com, where I saw it, but I can't recommend watching it unless you haven't already read the original tale by H. P. Lovecraft. Interestingly, IMDB.com says there are a slew of movies still coming out based on H.P. Lovecraft's works, some 80 years after his death. If that doesn't tell you what a good horror writer he was, I'm not sure what would.
Keeping things short because I am still one horror movie review behind, and trying to catch up. :-)
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Horror Review #13 - Tremors 5 (2015)
It's not too common for sequels to be anywhere near as good as the original movie, usually because the original cast members, writer, and budget are notably missing by the time a sequel comes around. There are some exceptions, like the Friday the 13th series of movies, where the sequels were actually better than the original.
Tremors 5 (2015) begins with Burt Gummer (Michael Gross, from the original Tremors), working on his own survival reality show. Burt is in the middle of switching camera men when he is contacted by a representative from the South African government. Apparently, Graboids (the worms prevalent through all of the Tremors series) are starting to show up in South Africa. Gummer is hired to capture one, though he repeatedly assures anyone who's willing to listen that capturing them isn't really an option. As is usual for Burt, there's a few things that people have missed informing him about the new Graboids. I would say, when he starts in on the hunt, that all hell breaks loose, but that's kind of redundant at this point, isn't it? Yea.
I thought Tremors 5 was pretty good. Sure, the acting talent was slightly less well known, but when the hell are Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward going to be around to do repeat appearances in the sequels? Exactly. So here we have Jamie Kennedy playing Gummer's new camera man, and Gummer pretty much leading a cast of total unknowns. That doesn't mean they aren't good actors, however. There was a big guy I was actually starting to like before... Well, I won't give anything away, but the various cast members seem to be a little more hardy than they appear.
A fun watch, no nudity, but the female cast members were very easy on the eyes, and not just pretty faces, either. Lots of action in this movie, explosions, and full of characters, to boot. The part where Burt spends a few hours in a cage is freakin hilarious, but this isn't really a comedy. Still funny in parts, I could probably watch this one more than once. Tremors 5 is new on Netflix if you want to watch it.
Keeping this review short because I have yet another movie to review this evening, if I can find one to watch, that is...
Horror Review #12: Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005)
Yea, I know this review is a couple days late. I have been extremely busy the last couple days, going on trips to see the fall color and taking my vehicle into the shop for some repairs. God, you're such a nag! Get off my back already! Not, not you, the voices in my head. Yea, yea, the review, I'm getting to that. Sheesh. Cut a guy some slack.
Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005) is a slightly better movie than the previous one. The story picks up where Necropolis left off, with "Uncle Charlie" heading down a dark road with a barrel of Tryoxin 5 in the back of a pickup truck. Uncle Charlie meets up with a couple russians (at least, they sound like russians), who want to buy the Tryoxin from him. There's only one small detail... they want to test it first. Uncle Charlie obliges them, and dies in the ensuing Zombie struggle. Julian (the sole male survivor of Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis) is now attending college, and is notified of his Uncle Charlie's death. With him are, uh, the "survivors" of the last movie (all the same actors, now playing different characters, which is funny considering some of them died). Julian investigates his Uncle's house after his death, and finds a hidden room in the attic containing two more barrels of Tryoxin 5. Not having a clue what the barrel is (apparently, he wasn't in the know during the entirety of the last movie), he takes it to his chemist-buddy to try and figure it out. His chemist buddy (a bit of a party animal) analyzes the gooey green slime issuing from the barrel, and notices the similarities to Ecstasy. One of Julian's other friends (even more of a party animal) immediately tastes the green goo to determine its ability to induce a "high." When he comes back from his Tryoxin-induced Zombie-high, he immediately names it "Z." The chemist and his buddies immediately start churning out Z capsules by the hundreds, and selling them to everyone heading to the local Halloween party, called "Rave to the Grave." Yea, you know what happens there, don't you? Yea. All hell breaks loose.
Rave to the Grave was actually better than Necropolis, which I didn't particularly expect. There was nudity, and not so much lead-in to the action, and the plot was actually slightly better. Uncle Charlie, the dickhead from Necropolis (and by dickhead, I mean the character who was played to villainous excellence by Peter Coyote), dies within the first ten minutes, leaving Julian and his cronies to survive a Zombie outbreak of their own making. Since Z starts going out even before the Halloween Rave, there's zombies all over the college campus. Sadly, there's no collegiate women's shower scene, which is always a bonus in every horror movie, and would have made this movie even better, but, oh well.
Aside from the whole same cast, different movie deal, the movie was pretty watchable. Special effects and acting are consistent with the rest of the series, and they at least kept to the Zombie-headshot rule this time, in that most of the zombies died by head shots. This one might not be worth watching over and over again, but it was at least fun to watch once. Also, since the rave actually occurs around Halloween, this movie qualifies as a Halloween movie! :-D Always good to watch a horror movie that's actually based around Halloween, like, oh, the Halloween series. And Trick R' Treat. And... uh... Yea. I think that's it. Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave is available on Crackle.com.
Keeping this review short since I have two more reviews to write today if I want to catch up. Be posting again shortly.
Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005) is a slightly better movie than the previous one. The story picks up where Necropolis left off, with "Uncle Charlie" heading down a dark road with a barrel of Tryoxin 5 in the back of a pickup truck. Uncle Charlie meets up with a couple russians (at least, they sound like russians), who want to buy the Tryoxin from him. There's only one small detail... they want to test it first. Uncle Charlie obliges them, and dies in the ensuing Zombie struggle. Julian (the sole male survivor of Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis) is now attending college, and is notified of his Uncle Charlie's death. With him are, uh, the "survivors" of the last movie (all the same actors, now playing different characters, which is funny considering some of them died). Julian investigates his Uncle's house after his death, and finds a hidden room in the attic containing two more barrels of Tryoxin 5. Not having a clue what the barrel is (apparently, he wasn't in the know during the entirety of the last movie), he takes it to his chemist-buddy to try and figure it out. His chemist buddy (a bit of a party animal) analyzes the gooey green slime issuing from the barrel, and notices the similarities to Ecstasy. One of Julian's other friends (even more of a party animal) immediately tastes the green goo to determine its ability to induce a "high." When he comes back from his Tryoxin-induced Zombie-high, he immediately names it "Z." The chemist and his buddies immediately start churning out Z capsules by the hundreds, and selling them to everyone heading to the local Halloween party, called "Rave to the Grave." Yea, you know what happens there, don't you? Yea. All hell breaks loose.
Rave to the Grave was actually better than Necropolis, which I didn't particularly expect. There was nudity, and not so much lead-in to the action, and the plot was actually slightly better. Uncle Charlie, the dickhead from Necropolis (and by dickhead, I mean the character who was played to villainous excellence by Peter Coyote), dies within the first ten minutes, leaving Julian and his cronies to survive a Zombie outbreak of their own making. Since Z starts going out even before the Halloween Rave, there's zombies all over the college campus. Sadly, there's no collegiate women's shower scene, which is always a bonus in every horror movie, and would have made this movie even better, but, oh well.
Aside from the whole same cast, different movie deal, the movie was pretty watchable. Special effects and acting are consistent with the rest of the series, and they at least kept to the Zombie-headshot rule this time, in that most of the zombies died by head shots. This one might not be worth watching over and over again, but it was at least fun to watch once. Also, since the rave actually occurs around Halloween, this movie qualifies as a Halloween movie! :-D Always good to watch a horror movie that's actually based around Halloween, like, oh, the Halloween series. And Trick R' Treat. And... uh... Yea. I think that's it. Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave is available on Crackle.com.
Keeping this review short since I have two more reviews to write today if I want to catch up. Be posting again shortly.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Horror Review #11 - Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005)
There was a long break between Return of the Living Dead 3 (which I reviewed last night), and Necropolis. Twelve years, in fact. In that time, I think what happened was, SyFy channel got ahold of the rights to Return of the Living Dead, and started making sequels.
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005) starts out with a few guys heading into Chernobyl to fetch some barrels of Tryoxin 5 (which doesn't seem to be the same as 2-4-5 Trioxin, but seems to have the same effects on the dead) that had been stored there. There's some nice shots of what I guess is that deserted town near Chernobyl, the one that was just opening an amusement park, that had to be evacuated. It's been shown in a couple movies I've seen already, and the scenery looked familiar. I think the intro sequence was actually filmed there, which is cool. The guys have the inevitable zombie accident, but one guy survives to retrieve the barrels, and returns them to Hybra-Tech. By this time, zombie outbreaks happen about as frequently as natural disasters, and Hybra-Tech is the go-to clean-up company in charge of containing and cleaning up the zombie mess. Fast forward a bit, and we see a teenager named Julian getting ready to go to school. Julian and his little brother, Pyro, seems to be wards of a guy they call "Uncle Charlie," after the death of their parents. Uncle Charlie (played by Peter Coyote) turns out to be that surviving guy from the Chernobyl thing at the beginning of the movie. Fast forward again to where Julian is riding around on motorbikes with his friends, and one of them (named Zeke) falls and has a head injury. They take Zeke to the hospital, but the hospital lists Zeke's condition as deceased and transfers Zeke to Hybra-Tech for research purposes. Apparently, Hybra-Tech owns not only the hospital, but the ambulances as well, so it seems they've been doing a little "live specimen" collecting on the side. A friend of Julian's, Katie, works at Hybra-Tech and sees them bringing an unconscious Zeke in for testing, so Katie contacts Julian and they decide to get him out of there. Of course, during their attempted jailbreak, all hell breaks loose.
I know, kind of a long intro, isn't it? Well, the lead-up to the action in this movie seemed to take forever. Slow starter, indeed. I had never seen this movie before tonight, so I had no idea it would take so long to get there. But hey, it's a zombie movie, I guess we need some reason to get a bunch of teenagers into a research lab to let the zombies loose, right? Right. One long, convoluted reason, but whatevs.
The action and plot in this movie is a little sub-par, even for the return of the living dead series. They go a long way to explaining the reasons for getting a bunch of teens into the research lab, and frankly, spend way too much time on the teens' back-stories. Do I really need to know that Katie used to date Zeke, is now dating Julian, and they're hiding it from Zeke because he's something of an asshole? Not really. Did I need to know one of the other girls was a gymnast? Nope. Doesn't seem to have any bearing on the movie whatsoever, so why mention it all? I have no idea. I guess they needed some lines of dialogue while they were getting the special effects ready. (shrug)
Let me toss a few more plot holes at you. Minor spoilers. The kids zoom off on their bikes to infiltrate Hybra-Tech in order to rescue Zeke, where the zombie outbreak is already happening. One of the teens (named Carlos, I think), happens to bring along a gun. A couple of hobo-zombies attack them, and carlos shoots them, only to find out you need to shoot them in the head to kill them. Carlos shoots them in the head. Two zombies down, outbreak suddenly contained, though nobody knows it but me. Fast-forward a bit. Teens continue into the facility, and accidentally let loose a shit-ton of other zombies. Guards unload shotguns into the bodies of the dead, which... kills them? Wait, what? I thought you needed a head shot, to... I guess not. Yep, suddenly, for the rest of the movie, bullet wounds to the body suddenly kill zombies. Then, in another completely unrelated plot hole, Pyro, Julian's little brother, is in the air vents where the teens are. How the frig did he get there? No explanation. Just bam, there he is. Awesome.
Necropolis is a pretty dismal entry into the series. Judged on what few merits it possesses, I can't really say there's much to recommend here. The actual running zombie-fight at Hybra-Tech isn't bad, but it doesn't last too long. There's a few explosions, a lot of shooting, and some fist-fights with teens, who somehow manage to beat the crap out of some zombies who tore a guard's head off not five minutes earlier in the movie. Meh, I guess the plot holes are kind of obvious, and just knocked me right out of enjoying this movie.
No redeeming nudity, not even a shower scene. The only recognizable actor was Peter Coyote, who looked angry just for having to show up in such a crappy zombie flick. Acting was hard to gauge since most of the scenes involved running and riding around on dirt bikes. I think the zombies probably did a better job of acting, and they were dead. This one is available on Crackle.com if you want to check it out, but I can't really recommend it. The beginning wasn't very good, the middle sucked, and the ending was worse. It doesn't seem to have anything of interest or note within it, unless you want to check out the scenes around Chernobyl at the very beginning, out of curiosity.
That's all for tonight. I'm going to review Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005, also on Crackle.com) tomorrow night, completing the Return of the Living-Dead trifecta, for extra bonus points. Extra bonus points? What am I talking about? I don't know! See you guys then.
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005) starts out with a few guys heading into Chernobyl to fetch some barrels of Tryoxin 5 (which doesn't seem to be the same as 2-4-5 Trioxin, but seems to have the same effects on the dead) that had been stored there. There's some nice shots of what I guess is that deserted town near Chernobyl, the one that was just opening an amusement park, that had to be evacuated. It's been shown in a couple movies I've seen already, and the scenery looked familiar. I think the intro sequence was actually filmed there, which is cool. The guys have the inevitable zombie accident, but one guy survives to retrieve the barrels, and returns them to Hybra-Tech. By this time, zombie outbreaks happen about as frequently as natural disasters, and Hybra-Tech is the go-to clean-up company in charge of containing and cleaning up the zombie mess. Fast forward a bit, and we see a teenager named Julian getting ready to go to school. Julian and his little brother, Pyro, seems to be wards of a guy they call "Uncle Charlie," after the death of their parents. Uncle Charlie (played by Peter Coyote) turns out to be that surviving guy from the Chernobyl thing at the beginning of the movie. Fast forward again to where Julian is riding around on motorbikes with his friends, and one of them (named Zeke) falls and has a head injury. They take Zeke to the hospital, but the hospital lists Zeke's condition as deceased and transfers Zeke to Hybra-Tech for research purposes. Apparently, Hybra-Tech owns not only the hospital, but the ambulances as well, so it seems they've been doing a little "live specimen" collecting on the side. A friend of Julian's, Katie, works at Hybra-Tech and sees them bringing an unconscious Zeke in for testing, so Katie contacts Julian and they decide to get him out of there. Of course, during their attempted jailbreak, all hell breaks loose.
I know, kind of a long intro, isn't it? Well, the lead-up to the action in this movie seemed to take forever. Slow starter, indeed. I had never seen this movie before tonight, so I had no idea it would take so long to get there. But hey, it's a zombie movie, I guess we need some reason to get a bunch of teenagers into a research lab to let the zombies loose, right? Right. One long, convoluted reason, but whatevs.
The action and plot in this movie is a little sub-par, even for the return of the living dead series. They go a long way to explaining the reasons for getting a bunch of teens into the research lab, and frankly, spend way too much time on the teens' back-stories. Do I really need to know that Katie used to date Zeke, is now dating Julian, and they're hiding it from Zeke because he's something of an asshole? Not really. Did I need to know one of the other girls was a gymnast? Nope. Doesn't seem to have any bearing on the movie whatsoever, so why mention it all? I have no idea. I guess they needed some lines of dialogue while they were getting the special effects ready. (shrug)
Let me toss a few more plot holes at you. Minor spoilers. The kids zoom off on their bikes to infiltrate Hybra-Tech in order to rescue Zeke, where the zombie outbreak is already happening. One of the teens (named Carlos, I think), happens to bring along a gun. A couple of hobo-zombies attack them, and carlos shoots them, only to find out you need to shoot them in the head to kill them. Carlos shoots them in the head. Two zombies down, outbreak suddenly contained, though nobody knows it but me. Fast-forward a bit. Teens continue into the facility, and accidentally let loose a shit-ton of other zombies. Guards unload shotguns into the bodies of the dead, which... kills them? Wait, what? I thought you needed a head shot, to... I guess not. Yep, suddenly, for the rest of the movie, bullet wounds to the body suddenly kill zombies. Then, in another completely unrelated plot hole, Pyro, Julian's little brother, is in the air vents where the teens are. How the frig did he get there? No explanation. Just bam, there he is. Awesome.
Necropolis is a pretty dismal entry into the series. Judged on what few merits it possesses, I can't really say there's much to recommend here. The actual running zombie-fight at Hybra-Tech isn't bad, but it doesn't last too long. There's a few explosions, a lot of shooting, and some fist-fights with teens, who somehow manage to beat the crap out of some zombies who tore a guard's head off not five minutes earlier in the movie. Meh, I guess the plot holes are kind of obvious, and just knocked me right out of enjoying this movie.
No redeeming nudity, not even a shower scene. The only recognizable actor was Peter Coyote, who looked angry just for having to show up in such a crappy zombie flick. Acting was hard to gauge since most of the scenes involved running and riding around on dirt bikes. I think the zombies probably did a better job of acting, and they were dead. This one is available on Crackle.com if you want to check it out, but I can't really recommend it. The beginning wasn't very good, the middle sucked, and the ending was worse. It doesn't seem to have anything of interest or note within it, unless you want to check out the scenes around Chernobyl at the very beginning, out of curiosity.
That's all for tonight. I'm going to review Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005, also on Crackle.com) tomorrow night, completing the Return of the Living-Dead trifecta, for extra bonus points. Extra bonus points? What am I talking about? I don't know! See you guys then.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Horror Review #10 - Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)
Not many good things came out of the 1990's. Come to think of it, I can't think of a one. Give me a minute. Oh, there was... No. Hmmmm. No. Oh, how about... Nope. No, I got nothin. Nothing except the greatest Zombie Love Story Ever Told. And, yes, that includes Warm Bodies.
Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) is just that. The Greatest Zombie Love Story Ever Told. But let me sum up. Curt Reynolds is the teenage son of Colonel Reynolds, a military research scientist involved in the experimentation and containment of 2-4-5 Trioxin. Any of you who have seen the cult classic Return of the Living Dead (1985) or any of the sequels, know that 2-4-5 Trioxin is the stuff that the military was looking for in the first moxie. Trioxin (for short) is the gas that, quite simply, reanimates the dead. Colonel Reynolds is in the midst of an experiment in controlling the reanimated dead when his son Curt and his girlfriend Julie sneak in and find out about the effects of Trioxin on the bodies of the deceased. Unfortunately, the experiment goes horribly wrong, and ... yea. All hell breaks loose.
Let's start with what I love about this movie. Melinda Clarke's boobs. Yea, I said it. It's out there. Curt's girlfriend Julie (Melinda Clarke) is what we probably think of as a 'Cutter' now. Basically confusing pain with pleasure, Julie spends her spare time hurting herself, when she's not getting half-naked with Curt. To say Julie is a little unbalanced is probably understating things, but this is usually the type of girl who I meet in bars and hit it off with, so who am I to judge? Everyone's special in their own way, and actresses who aren't afraid to get naked in horror movies are a very special breed.
So, minor spoiler, when Julie has a little accident while riding on the back of Curt's bike, is it any surprise that the ever-devoted Curt uses Trioxin gas to bring her back to life? No, it really isn't, so that's probably not even much of a spoiler is it? Shit, if she were my girlfriend, I'd have brought her back to life, too. What is a surprise, is how hard Julie works to stop herself from eating Curt's brains. From hurting herself worse than she ever did in life, to denying her own unceasing hunger for brains, Julie repeatedly stops herself from eating Curt. And for a brain-hungry zombie, that's nothing short of miraculous.
Is it any wonder that I call this the Greatest Zombie Love Story Ever Told? No. No it isn't. Sure, Warm Bodies (2013) came a close second, but I chose Warm Bodies second for several reasons. One, it's not really a Zombie love story. The male lead in Warm Bodies eventually becomes alive again, so technically, he's not a Zombie. Nor is his girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) a zombie, though she is incredibly hot. Teresa's IMDB.com page says she's often mistaken for Kristin Stewart, which I just don't get. Kristen Stewart is kind of nice looking in a girl-next-door way, whereas Teresa is hot in a Jesus-Christ-I-think-I-just-orgasmed-in-my-jeans way. Sure, Melinda Clarke may not be as out-and-out pretty as Teresa Palmer, but she makes up for it with undead sensuality. So Warm Bodies really isn't a Zombie love story, but essentially a romance movie that happens to start post-mortem for one of the two involved. In Return of the Living Dead 3, I'm pretty sure Curt starts becoming a zombie the minute he turns Julie into one, due to over-exposure to Trioxin. Also, given such close contact with Julie, I'm almost absolutely certain he would've infected himself in other ways as well.
Now here's one thing that confuses me in Return of the Living Dead 3. Shooting a zombie in the head is always a universal cure for ending their undeath. Come to think of it, that's pretty much a universal cure for anything. Yet, here's Curt and Julie, escaping in a van, and the shopkeeper that's riding in the back of their van is accidentally shot in the head by the police. Then Julie, feeling a little peckish by this point, feeds on the corpse of the shopkeeper. Here's where things get confusing. Despite not being exposed to Trioxin at all, and not having much of a brain left, the shopkeeper is brought back to life by Julie's munching on his brain matter. How, exactly? His brains, pretty much splattered out of his head, are the only thing Julie munched on. If Trioxin (or the Z-virus, or whatever) is transferred by bite, which I think is also pretty much a standard tenet of all zombie flicks, then wouldn't it need a working brain to go ahead and revive the dead tissue? Sure, this series has reanimated limbs and such, but weren't those limbs reanimated by direct exposure to Trioxin gas? Well, despite the confusion involved in the reanimation of the shopkeeper, I'm pretty sure the rest of the movie is all good.
To sum up, decent acting for the 90's, though most of the cast is kind of unknown. I loved Sarah Douglas in the role of bossy Colonel Sinclair, sent to clean up Colonel Reynold's mess and using the opportunity to put forth her own agenda. Don't mistake the relative anonymity of the cast for a lack of acting skill, because the supporting actors are all veterans of numerous films. Even Melinda Clarke went on to appear in a number of other TV series and movies, though nothing as remotely popular as Return of the Living Dead 3 (which admittedly, isn't that popular). This movie is on Crackle.com if you want to watch it. I've seen it several times, and it hasn't lost any thrill for me over the years.
Bonus Review of Ominous (2015), which was on Syfy tonight. Ominous is a tale of a bereaved pair of parents who agree to have their son revived from the dead by a mysterious stranger (played by Mark Lindsay Chapman, the only actor I recognize), only to find that their son isn't quite the same as he was when he was alive. Ominous is your standard anti-christ tale, only so dumbed down with mediocre special effects and bad acting by most of the unknown cast, that it plays like a bad lifetime movie of the week. I don't know who made it, but if Asylum was responsible (the ones who make most of syfy's flicks), then this is one of their worst efforts yet. I don't recommend watching it the first time, let alone watching it again. There's nothing new here, and nothing even remotely interesting. Ultimately forgettable.
That's all for tonight! Catch you guys next time.
Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) is just that. The Greatest Zombie Love Story Ever Told. But let me sum up. Curt Reynolds is the teenage son of Colonel Reynolds, a military research scientist involved in the experimentation and containment of 2-4-5 Trioxin. Any of you who have seen the cult classic Return of the Living Dead (1985) or any of the sequels, know that 2-4-5 Trioxin is the stuff that the military was looking for in the first moxie. Trioxin (for short) is the gas that, quite simply, reanimates the dead. Colonel Reynolds is in the midst of an experiment in controlling the reanimated dead when his son Curt and his girlfriend Julie sneak in and find out about the effects of Trioxin on the bodies of the deceased. Unfortunately, the experiment goes horribly wrong, and ... yea. All hell breaks loose.
Let's start with what I love about this movie. Melinda Clarke's boobs. Yea, I said it. It's out there. Curt's girlfriend Julie (Melinda Clarke) is what we probably think of as a 'Cutter' now. Basically confusing pain with pleasure, Julie spends her spare time hurting herself, when she's not getting half-naked with Curt. To say Julie is a little unbalanced is probably understating things, but this is usually the type of girl who I meet in bars and hit it off with, so who am I to judge? Everyone's special in their own way, and actresses who aren't afraid to get naked in horror movies are a very special breed.
So, minor spoiler, when Julie has a little accident while riding on the back of Curt's bike, is it any surprise that the ever-devoted Curt uses Trioxin gas to bring her back to life? No, it really isn't, so that's probably not even much of a spoiler is it? Shit, if she were my girlfriend, I'd have brought her back to life, too. What is a surprise, is how hard Julie works to stop herself from eating Curt's brains. From hurting herself worse than she ever did in life, to denying her own unceasing hunger for brains, Julie repeatedly stops herself from eating Curt. And for a brain-hungry zombie, that's nothing short of miraculous.
Is it any wonder that I call this the Greatest Zombie Love Story Ever Told? No. No it isn't. Sure, Warm Bodies (2013) came a close second, but I chose Warm Bodies second for several reasons. One, it's not really a Zombie love story. The male lead in Warm Bodies eventually becomes alive again, so technically, he's not a Zombie. Nor is his girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) a zombie, though she is incredibly hot. Teresa's IMDB.com page says she's often mistaken for Kristin Stewart, which I just don't get. Kristen Stewart is kind of nice looking in a girl-next-door way, whereas Teresa is hot in a Jesus-Christ-I-think-I-just-orgasmed-in-my-jeans way. Sure, Melinda Clarke may not be as out-and-out pretty as Teresa Palmer, but she makes up for it with undead sensuality. So Warm Bodies really isn't a Zombie love story, but essentially a romance movie that happens to start post-mortem for one of the two involved. In Return of the Living Dead 3, I'm pretty sure Curt starts becoming a zombie the minute he turns Julie into one, due to over-exposure to Trioxin. Also, given such close contact with Julie, I'm almost absolutely certain he would've infected himself in other ways as well.
Now here's one thing that confuses me in Return of the Living Dead 3. Shooting a zombie in the head is always a universal cure for ending their undeath. Come to think of it, that's pretty much a universal cure for anything. Yet, here's Curt and Julie, escaping in a van, and the shopkeeper that's riding in the back of their van is accidentally shot in the head by the police. Then Julie, feeling a little peckish by this point, feeds on the corpse of the shopkeeper. Here's where things get confusing. Despite not being exposed to Trioxin at all, and not having much of a brain left, the shopkeeper is brought back to life by Julie's munching on his brain matter. How, exactly? His brains, pretty much splattered out of his head, are the only thing Julie munched on. If Trioxin (or the Z-virus, or whatever) is transferred by bite, which I think is also pretty much a standard tenet of all zombie flicks, then wouldn't it need a working brain to go ahead and revive the dead tissue? Sure, this series has reanimated limbs and such, but weren't those limbs reanimated by direct exposure to Trioxin gas? Well, despite the confusion involved in the reanimation of the shopkeeper, I'm pretty sure the rest of the movie is all good.
To sum up, decent acting for the 90's, though most of the cast is kind of unknown. I loved Sarah Douglas in the role of bossy Colonel Sinclair, sent to clean up Colonel Reynold's mess and using the opportunity to put forth her own agenda. Don't mistake the relative anonymity of the cast for a lack of acting skill, because the supporting actors are all veterans of numerous films. Even Melinda Clarke went on to appear in a number of other TV series and movies, though nothing as remotely popular as Return of the Living Dead 3 (which admittedly, isn't that popular). This movie is on Crackle.com if you want to watch it. I've seen it several times, and it hasn't lost any thrill for me over the years.
Bonus Review of Ominous (2015), which was on Syfy tonight. Ominous is a tale of a bereaved pair of parents who agree to have their son revived from the dead by a mysterious stranger (played by Mark Lindsay Chapman, the only actor I recognize), only to find that their son isn't quite the same as he was when he was alive. Ominous is your standard anti-christ tale, only so dumbed down with mediocre special effects and bad acting by most of the unknown cast, that it plays like a bad lifetime movie of the week. I don't know who made it, but if Asylum was responsible (the ones who make most of syfy's flicks), then this is one of their worst efforts yet. I don't recommend watching it the first time, let alone watching it again. There's nothing new here, and nothing even remotely interesting. Ultimately forgettable.
That's all for tonight! Catch you guys next time.
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