Film

Bottoms (as in butts) up!

The other night I watched a movie called Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead. I don’t think another movie has ever had a title that is so descriptive of its quality.

For real, I don’t even want to type out a full-on review for this one it was so bad. Here’s a synopsis: Mutant tapeworms are turning people into zombies. But before you turn, you suffer from really intense gas. For some reason there’s a focus on poop. The main character’s big trauma is that she’s afraid to fart in front of other people, and then at the end of the movie, she is able to fly around and battle the queen tapeworm using her farts as jet propulsion.

It may have been the absolute stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. If only I’d heeded the trailer’s advice not to watch it in the first place!

The funny thing is, after watching it, I couldn’t bring myself to give it a thumbs-down rating on Tubi, because I’m fairly sure that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do. It’s not trying to be a legitimate film. It’s not even trying to be a good horror comedy. I’m convinced that the director (Noboru Iguchi) had the goal of making the stupidest movie of all time.

The other funny thing is that I’ve actually watched a couple of the director’s other movies, The Machine Girl and Robo-Geisha. Now, I watched those well over a decade ago, so my memory is hazy at best, but I don’t recall hating them. I no longer have the DVDs, so they clearly weren’t good enough to keep. And that was the era of my life were I was deeply into the cheesiest movies going, so they may have also been terrible and that was just my taste at the time. But we’ll never know!

On a more positive note, I also watched a movie called Monster Island on Shudder recently. Sadly, it is not based on the David Wellington novel of the same name, because I love that novel and would like nothing more than to see it be made into a (good) movie. It’s really more of a re-imagining of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I liked it! The problem is, there’s just not that much to it. It felt like it was over just as it was getting started. So I don’t think there’s all that much for me say about it, other than I really liked how it’s a 2024 movie but the creature was a dude in a rubber suit. Felt so comfy. I would for sure recommend this one.

Hi, I’m here

I haven’t written anything this month. I’ve been very distracted.

Much of that distraction has been video games, as you’ll see in a couple days on the MEVGWU. But a other stuff is going on too.

Like, for instance, I saw Fantastic Four: First Steps last weekend. It’s good. Not really fantastic, but it was enjoyable enough that I didn’t fall asleep. I just didn’t really feel very strongly about it in any way. A perfectly average film.

The best part was that it takes place in an alternate universe, and as such it was allowed to have its very own, very excellent-looking, retro-futuristic visual identity. It’s too bad that it’s going to get absorbed into the rest of the increasingly bland MCU.

The worst part is when they send an eight-months-pregnant woman into space. I don’t care if she’s a super hero. There’s just no way. And then they spend the rest of the movie protecting the baby at literally all costs. It’s… I mean, a lot of things happen in this movie just so the plot can move forward, but that was the least believable.

It was fun to see on the big screen, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Also the tickets were just shy of $25, which is way out of control. I’d like to go see more movies in the theatre, but when it costs just as much as it does to buy them? Hard to justify.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Maybe I’ll write more in August. Maybe I won’t!

Coffee Table Bloodbath

A few weeks ago, I watched a movie called The Coffee Table. It’s a 2022 Spanish-language film available on Shudder (and maybe elsewhere) that had randomly caught my attention and sat on my watch list for weeks before I finally pulled the trigger on it.

This movie is about a couple who have recently had their first child, and they buy this gaudy-looking coffee table. The first 20-ish minutes are all build-up, then there is an incident wherein the baby receives a rather severe head-related injury from the coffee table. From that point, the movie is basically 100% building tension until it all comes to a head in the last five minutes. I don’t think I would ever recommend this movie, mostly because I don’t think that anyone I know would enjoy it, but I liked it.

So I watched this movie, and the very next day, I kid you not, I get a text telling me that my one-year-old nephew bashed his head open on the edge of a coffee table. Tears and blood everywhere, an all-around horrifying situation. Though I make it sound worse than it was; the poor little guy had to get four (I think) stitches, and as I record this he’s still got a pretty wicked scar where an eyebrow used to be, but as far as I’m aware he’s doing just fine. Had a rough time in the moment, but was happy and smiling just a couple hours later.

And that’s my latest story of an absolutely wild coincidence. I watched a movie called The Demon Disorder the following weekend and wondered to myself if I ought to send out a warning to keep my nephew away from anything that might possess him, but figured “eh, what are the chances of that?”

Just for the record, he was not possessed by anything the next day.

He (always comes) back

So the teaser trailer for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 happened last week. Just thought you should know.

Am I excited? Absolutely! I liked the first movie a lot… the first time I watched it. Second time around the cracks were a little more obvious. But I’m still looking forward to the sequel! We’ve just gotta keep motoring along until we get a Sister Location movie. That’s what I’m really waiting for.

Words and Such

I haven’t really been in the writing mood too much as of late. I know, not a great business model for a blogger, but also… I do this for fun, not for glory.

In an effort to post something, here’s a point-form list of things that I maybe would have written more about in another timeline and that may be of moderate interest. I may still write about some of them at length, but probably not.

I’ve been playing the new Ys game in short bursts since it released a couple weeks ago. As you may know, I’m a big, big fan of the Ys series, and Ys X: Nordics is not disappointing so far. The first few chapters were a bit slow, but it’s taking off now, and I really like the two-member party system. It’s very unique, if a bit limited in options.
Work has been kind of insanely busy lately. Which is a good thing, because it helps to keep me on task. Also, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me how well-respected (and maybe even well-liked) I am within the organization. As someone who’s had low self-esteem for basically his whole life, it’s really quite nice to feel confident and dependable.
I bought a stupidly expensive alarm clock from Nintendo recently, and I don’t regret a penny of it. I never expected such a weird thing could bring me such joy. Will likely do more words about this at some point.
Went to see Venom: The Last Dance recently. I’m still not sure exactly how I feel about it or why (I haven’t given it all that much consideration), but I may have been kinda bored for most of the runtime? Definitely the least enjoyable of the trilogy, in my opinion, even though the climax and epilogue were satisfying.
After years of sleeping on the couch with the TV on just about every night, I’ve been sleeping in my bed like a normal-ass person over the last week. I’m not really sleeping much better (still waking up at least once a night), but I am feeling a little more well-rested, and my back is definitely thanking me.
A couple of co-workers have been singing the praises of the roguelike poker game, Balatro, so I decided to give it a whirl on their recommendations. I’m trying my best, but I don’t know if it’s right for me. Even the tutorial felt overwhelming. And here I was thinking that I was getting over my fear of roguelikes.
I was going to put a link to a relevant post in the paragraph above, but it turns out that I never published it. I guess that’s something I probably should do, seems silly to have written out a full 2000-plus-word post that’s just sitting in limbo. Actually, there are at least two of those…
Taking a more proactive role in managing both my eating and exercise regimens throughout the year has done wonders for my health, both physical and mental. It’s been a long road, but I’ve far surpassed my weight loss goal and I’ve been feeling fantastic. It would be nice to have someone, you know, notice, but oh well! External validation is for chumps, anyway.
I went on a short vacation with my family at the end of September. I don’t think I wrote a single word about it, but it was awesome. Nothing terribly exciting, but it was great to simply get away and be somewhere different for a while. And also to have that QT with the people who are closest to me, of course. That’s always good.

Shudder Film Review Double Feature

More movies have been watched. As Halloween season is rapidly approaching, I feel even more like I need to be writing about them. Both of the films reviewed below are Shudder originals, as you can plainly see on the posters. Preamble complete.

~ Deadstream ~

This one is about a livestreamer who goes to spend a night in a “haunted house” as something of a stunt to entertain his following. This premise is absolutely as cringey as it sounds, at least until about 15 minutes in and you realize that it’s actually a comedy. Kind of like Evil Dead 2 but with a modern twist.

That said, I had to watch Deadstream in two sessions, because it scared the absolute crap out of me the first time around. Early on in the film, our “hero” Shawn enters the house and starts recounting the tales of why it’s haunted, and he tells a story about a ghost called the Corner Man. If you weren’t already aware, I have a strong irrational fear of ghosts. Having all the lights turned off and watching movies about ghosts alone never ends well for me. I tried my best to remain rational, but I very quickly had to turn off the movie and turn on the lights, because my brain immediately started thinking it was seeing things in my peripheral vision. There aren’t a lot of things that genuinely terrify me, but my overactive imagination is definitely high on the list.

A couple night later, my fears had receded, and I decided to push through. This time with the lights on. As it turns out, after that singular scene, the movie’s tone changes dramatically, and it goes from horror-comedy to pretty much just straight comedy.

Three Fun-Size Film Reviews

Some movies, I can very easily ramble on and on about. Others don’t capture my attention/imagination quite as strongly, and I find it difficult to write about them. The following three films are of the latter variety.

~ Arcadian ~

It kind of seems like this one was marketed as whatever the movie equivalent of a “killer app” is for Shudder. I got a lot of emails promoting it! Although, it is a Shudder original, so maybe they just pushed it harder because it’s theirs. Anyway, it’s somewhat similar to A Quiet Place but with Nic Cage. Also, it’s not stupid due to major plot holes and braindead characters, but rather because stupid is just kind of the vibe it’s going for, which I can appreciate.

Plot is as such: About fifteen years after humanity falls to… something, Nic Cage lives on a farm with his two teenage sons. Every night, they maintain a stoic vigil to protect their home from attempted invasions. Obviously, the sons are polar opposites: one a hot-blooded tough guy, the other a quiet inventor. Their inability to reconcile their desires (girls vs learning) ends up ruining the balance that they’ve maintained for years and puts everyone’s life in danger. Because of course it does. Teenagers, am I right?

Hunter Hunter: A TE Film Review

After the big win that was Loop Track, I was ready for another good random horror movie, and let me tell you that I struck gold. A little bit of searching around on Google and Reddit for recommendations of similar films yielded the most perfect result I could have asked for: Hunter Hunter.

Just by the name alone I was intrigued. Hunter Hunter, eh? So it’s going to be a movie about a hunter becoming the hunted, in some way or another. But then the very vague description given, “a thriller that goes full-on horror in the last 10 minutes” sounded like precisely what I was in the mood for. So I plugged in my Apple TV for the first time in months and watched a movie on Shudder for the first time since I initially subscribed to it three years ago. I’m good at money :p

Now, I’ll be honest here, I’ve been struggling with trying to figure out exactly what I want to write about this film. I have been thinking about it almost non-stop since I watched it, and I just can’t get a good mental picture of what I want to put in this review. That’s why I don’t do this professionally. So I’m just writing. I guess we’ll just do the synopsis thing and see where it goes.

Hunter Hunter is (at least at the beginning) about a fur trapper named Joe, his wife Anne, and their teenage daughter Renee. They live in the wilderness outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba (I, uh… I like this setting) and lead a very simple life. Joe is the kind of man who is set in his ways and is training Renee to follow in his footsteps, but Anne is starting to notice that their way of life is becoming unsustainable and wants to move into a town so that she can get a job and Renee can go to school.

Loop Track: A TE Film Review

I happened to catch a glimpse of a very distressing illustration while clearing my Facebook notifications the other day. But like, distressing in a good way. In the way that, when I learned that said image was inspired by a film called Loop Track, I immediately looked up the most convenient way to watch it (Tubi). And then I proceeded to watch it that very same evening.

Loop Track is a horror/suspense movie about a weird, little guy that goes on a hike through a New Zealand forest. New Zealish? New Zealandian? I don’t know. It’s irrelevant and this bit works better in VO. Anyway, off the bat, we learn that this guy is very on edge and isn’t terribly interested in any sort of human interaction. He’s also poorly equipped for the expedition: he starts off the hike in a sweatshirt and jeans, and is visibly winded once he reaches the first trail marker, which is only 10 minutes from the parking lot. In fairness, he does at least have a big ol’ pack of supplies with him and apparently the nights get very cold, but still… I can’t help but think that you’d be so much better off without that sweatshirt, man.

After barely managing to avoid coming into contact with a couple other hikers on the trail twice, our hero is accosted by an excessively friendly man named Nicky. Nicky seems like a nice enough dude, but completely fails to catch the hint that our main character would rather hike alone and insists that they continue on together. At this point, about 20 minutes in, we finally learn that the main character’s name is Ian.

Immaculate: A TE Film Review

I went to see Immaculate with my mom, brother, and sister-in-law yesterday afternoon. I wasn’t terribly interested in it, but they invited me along and I figured I might as well. I hadn’t watched any movies in probably about a month – it was time.

For a movie that I was expecting to be less than enthused by, I ended up enjoying it somewhat. Not that I think it’s a great film or anything, but it was perfectly watchable. I was never bored and it moved along at a good clip – I was more than a little surprised at how quick it seemed to go by.

Immaculate is the story of a young American nun who joins a convent in Italy. Some odd/spooky things happen, and then she mysteriously ends up pregnant despite being a virgin. That’s really as much as I can say without spoiling the rest of the plot, though it’s not particularly shocking. There’s some very clear foreshadowing, and I can think of at least a couple other movies with quite similar denouements. I’m not accusing Immaculate of being derivative, it’s just that a lot of movies exist and wholly original plots might not even be possible anymore. Well, I say that, but also Poor Things exists, so… I don’t know.

If it wasn’t already clear, this is a horror movie. But what sold it for me was that a couple cursory Google results told me that it’s actually an art film with horror elements. Which is not especially true, but Immaculate is a little bit above your typical horror schlock. A little bit. In some ways. That is to say, it’s more suspenseful than stabby. I guess. Look, it’s been a while since I’ve written something, okay?

I want to say that there were two main things that I disliked about Immaculate. Firstly, a woman dies by falling off a second-story roof at one point. This scene bothered me because we get to see the post-impact body and it is smashed all the way to Hell. There’s simply no way that such a short fall would cause anywhere near that much damage. I honestly only buy that she died because she fell head-first. The second problem was that there are a couple of really cheap jumpscares, which felt out of place in this movie and were probably only there because… that’s how you make modern horror movies? The most egregious one is when the main character is telling the story of how she nearly drowned in a frozen river, and there’s this smash cut to a frame of her under the ice, backed by an ear-piercing scream. It was maybe one full second long, and came in the middle of an otherwise quiet conversation. It felt so artificial, forced, paint-by-numbers… Just didn’t need to be there at all.

Oh, I thought of probably the worst part of the movie: the characters are all super flat. I think they all max out at about two personality traits. Even the main character! Who we’re supposed to be empathizing with! But I literally could not tell you anything about her other than she almost died and then because a nun because she believed that it was God who saved her. Otherwise, she’s kinda boring and just does what the plot needs her to do. But I guess you could generally say that about nuns? At least the stereotypical nun. I’m sure there are plenty of real-life nuns out there who have lived rich and interesting lives.

So one of the things that I did like about the movie is the score! I’m not a big movie score kind of person, but I liked a lot of when there was actual music set to a scene. The spookier scenes generally had by-the-book horror ambiance, but the actual music was surprisingly good. Good enough that I really paid attention to it, which I almost never do.

I’d like to pretend for a moment that I’m a person who actually knows anything about filmmaking and criticism, but I’m just not that good at bullshitting. I think that despite the flat characters, the acting was generally quite good. Sydney Sweeney really gave it her all, and I found Alvaro Morte to be quite charming even at his most sinister. I like to think that the camerawork was also quite good – there were a lot of shots that I felt were interesting, at least. Something about framing and symmetry? I don’t know. I know absolutely nothing about cinematography except for words that I’ve heard actual film critics say.

The violence in Immaculate was also quite notable! For one, it was much gorier than I had expected, with some really gnarly shots. What really really surprised me, though, was the number of scenes that I had to avert my eyes from. I’ve watched a heck of a lot of horror movies in my time; I’ve seen it all and am highly desensitized to violence. So you’ve gotta hurt a character in a very specific way to turn my stomach, and Immaculate managed to accomplish that three times. I’m impressed!

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’d ever really recommend Immaculate. If it sounds like something that you would appreciate, then by all means, give it a shot! But it’s not particularly special in any way. It was fun, and I did really appreciate how brisk it felt, but it didn’t leave a mark. I’m going to forget it completely by the end of the week. I certainly don’t regret the time I invested into this movie, but if you wanted my opinion, there are a lot of better ways to spend those 89 minutes.