Film – Page 7

Last Month in Movies – October 2017

Coherence – I’m not sure about the best way to describe this movie. On one hand, it’s one of those films where if you know what’s going to happen, there’s no point in watching it. On the other hand, it’s really hard to say anything about it without giving away too much. Full-on spoiler mode it is, then!

A group of four couples gathers for a dinner party on the night that a comet passes by the Earth. Phones spontaneously shatter and the power goes out… except for at one house down the street. After a short expedition, our heroes learn that the people in the house down the street is an alternate reality’s version of them, and everything spirals out of control from there. Eventually, the main girl leaves quietly, spurred by the group’s infighting, and travels to many other realities until she finds a version where all her friends are not fighting each other. She knocks out the alternate version of her to assume her place in that timeline, and then… END.

It’s a bit of a heady film, which I do appreciate, but it does drag on at multiple points, which really kills any re-watch potential. What I actually found most interesting is how it was made: there was no budget at all, and the actors were not given a script or even the whole plot, but only vague directions for each day of shooting, in an effort to make their conversations and reactions more genuine. And I think they succeeded! For the most part, the actors seem much more like real people than actors, the improvised dialogue more authentic than written lines, and I think that’s a big plus.

Pod – This movie opens, as so many do, with a man stumbling through the snowy woods, somewhat disoriented, with his gun and his dog. But then the dog gets away from him. We hear barking, barking, barking, WHINE, silence. The man finds a trail of blood that leads to the mangled carcass of the dog. The man starts shooting wildly. Suddenly, he stops. He has seen something. The camera begins to pan and then… black. Cut to opening credits.

Seriously, how many films open with some variation of that? It’s so tired. Be more creative, please. The rest doesn’t fare much better. It’s about a stuffy fella with way too much moustache and his burn-out sister going up to a secluded cabin to visit their mentally unfit, ex-military brother. Who has apparently captured some manner of synthetic government assassin monster. Most of the film is about how Moustache does not believe Crazy Eddie, and Junkie doesn’t know what to believe and just freaks out for about an hour straight.

It all comes to a head, though, when Crazy Eddie slits his own throat, allowing Moustache to go into the basement to see what’s actually down there. Surprise! It really was a monster all along! Moustache battles the monster while Junkie goes to get help. A man named Smith shows up and kills them both, and then the movie ends on the clumsiest jumpscare ever committed to film. I’m thankful that this movie was only an hour and fifteen minutes, because it was very bland. Nearly all of it was the siblings all squabbling between themselves. There was no tension, no mystery, no suspense. You knew exactly what was going to happen at all times. At least since it was very dialogue-heavy, it was an alright movie to have on in the background as I played picross.

Happy Death Day – I had been hyped for this movie for several months before release, and I was sure that nobody I knew would have even the slightest interest in going with me. So this was the maiden voyage of USS Ryan Goes To A Movie Alone. I was happy to see my movie, but it was still a little weird. I don’t know if I’d do it again. Go to a movie alone, I mean. I would definitely watch Happy Death Day again.

If you aren’t aware of the conceit here, Happy Death Day is basically the horror version of Groundhog Day; a stuck-up college girl is forced to relive the same day over an over again, each time ending with her murder at the hands of a masked killer. There’s a quote right in the trailer “this is your chance to solve your own murder” which is pretty well spot-on. It starts out with the usual disbelief of what’s happening, followed by acceptance and a couple montages of failed attempts. You know, exactly what you’d expect.

Where it diverges from the slasher handbook (albeit a little later in the movie that I’d have liked) is that the twists were actually good. And the way that it messes with both main character and the viewer were a lot of fun. I would be remiss to omit the fact that this is a horror comedy. That’s basically what drew me to it in the first place. I knew of the film and had a vague interest, and then I saw the trailer and thought “man that’s probably going to be hilarious.” It’s maybe not quite as satirical as I would have liked, but I got a number of solid chuckles out of it, and that’s really all I ask for.

To recap: I was thoroughly entertained from start to finish, and I believe that this was pretty much a perfect movie. For me. I’m sill confident that everyone I know would just turn their noses up and act like they’re above it. Oh well. That’s just how it goes in my lonely world.

Cult of Chucky – Speaking of movies that people would turn their noses up at and act like they’re too good for… this is the seventh installment in the Child’s Play series. That’s kinda nuts when you think about it. I never would have thought that this series, of all the 80’s slashers, would be the one to have the longest legs and maintain the highest level of quality. Well, there was that dip with Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky where the series had a bit of an identity crisis, but it shot right back up after those two!

Coming in five years after Curse of Chucky, this one follows the previous protagonist, Nica, who is now locked in an asylum after having been convicted for five murders. They go through the usual rigmarole of group therapy and the “Chucky was never real” business that I’m come to expect. And then, of course, Chucky actually shows up and starts killing off the patients and staff one-by-one, saving Nica for the very end. The first of two big twists here is that this time around, there are multiple Chuckys, explained away by Chucky having found a voodoo spell that allows him to split his soul and possess multiple hosts. This actually solves a lingering issue with the last film’s ending, but also raises the question of why he’s so focused on possessing Good Guy dolls if he can possess anything with “two legs and an arm to stab with.”

There is also a subplot where grown-up Andy Barclay (the protagonist from the first three movies) is trying to exonerate Nica and stop the other Chuckys, but it’s so separated from everything else that it feels like it was forced in. But they had that amazing post-credits scene in Curse and had to do something with it, right? Oh well. The main plot of the movie was perfectly good, and I don’t feel like Andy’s story really detracted from it, per se, it just didn’t feel quite natural. Didn’t flow right, or something like that.

Before watching Cult, I somehow got it in my head that it was going to be a big last hurrah for the series, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The ending doesn’t just have a sequel hook, it slaps you across the face at screams “You’d best be ready for more of these!” And they’ve really opened Pandora’s Box with this one, now that there are at least five Chucky hosts and two Tiffanys on the loose. Personally, I can’t wait for the next one, but I do hope that they scale it back down somehow, because it’s getting uncomfortably close to self-parody again. Chuckys on a Plane might be too far off the rails even for me.

The Babysitter – Netflix original movie that I assumed would suck because Netflix original movies usually suck. It did not suck! Kind of reminded me of Tucker & Dale vs Evil. You know, I want to write more about it, because it’s worth the words, but this post is already stupid long. I spent way too many words on friggin’ Pod. Ah, one paragraph, I guess.

The Babysitter is about a young boy who stays up too late one night and discovers that his babysitter and her friends are a satanic cult, intent on using his blood as a sacrifice. Hilarity ensues. It’s kind of a cross between Home Alone and a slasher parody, with the kid (I cannot be bothered to remember his name) forced to defend himself from the murderous teens/twenty-somethings. As usual, I assume that everyone I know will think it’s bad and stupid, but I thought it was a lot of fun, and it made me laugh out loud quite a few times. Heartily recommended.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter – Obviously not actually the final chapter. There are six more and a reboot and a crossover with Nightmare on Elm Street. No sir, Jason is not done yet.

Anyway, this is a fairly standard entry in the series. Jason comes back to life, kills a house full of sexy teens, and then is taken down just before everyone is dead. I suppose the one twist is that this one features a small child, who is ultimately the one who kills Jason. Otherwise, there’s no gimmick. No Jason fake-outs, no 3D effects, no psychic powers, no trips to the big city, no ridiculous demon slugs. Just… a very paint-by-numbers slasher.

In fact, it may be the most boring entry in the series. So why did I watch this one? It’s got the highest volume of bare tits.

I kid, I kid (though it does have the most nudity in the series). In truth, this is just the one that the Netflix app promoted to me. Turns out that they acquired the whole series like a week before Halloween, but this is the one that they felt was important to make sure that I knew about.

Last Month in Movies – September 2017

I watch horror movies all year long, but it’s only once September rolls around that they really begin to feel on point, you know? So that’s basically how I spent my movie-watching time in September. No room for sci-fi or action or whatever else here!

Los Parecidos – This is a Mexican horror film from 2016 (in English, The Similars), about eight people trapped in a bus station during a wicked crazy rainstorm. The first thing that you notice when you start watching is that it doesn’t look at all like a 2016 movie. It’s got a beautiful old-timey filer and style that make it seem almost like it did actually come out of the 1960’s. That’s a really good way to secure my interest right off the bat.

The plot revolves around said group of strangers, trapped, and as per genre, becoming more and more paranoid and distrusting of each other as time goes on and strange events start to happen. The crux of the strange events being that they begin suffering seizures one-by-one, followed by a facial transformation that results in each person having the same head. Oh and also, they aren’t trapped in the bus station because of the rain, but rather because some invisible force is not permitting them to leave.

While it is a slow-burn kind of mystery, it’s done really well. I was engaged throughout the whole film, constantly unsure (but with some close guesses) as to what was happening. It really comes to a head about halfway through, when the big twist is revealed, and that’s when the cast beings dying off one at a time. What was most notable is that Los Parecidos does a really excellent job of feeling exactly like a really long episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s got a perfectly spooky vibe, and of course a little smattering of the supernatural. Needless to say, I quite liked it. An excellent way to start the (extended) Halloween season.

After – Next up, we look to another random suggestion from Netflix that actually had a moderately interesting summary. It’s the story of two strangers, trapped in an abandoned version of their town, with a black mist quickly closing in on them from all sides.

Did you just say “okay, so they’re dead/in purgatory or whatever”? If you did, you’re almost right. The film opens with a bus crash, the only passengers being our main characters, Ana and Freddy. It’s not long before we get the “big reveal” that they’re both in comas, and the black fog represents the time they have left before Ana is taken off life support. So the plot then becomes about how they try to wake themselves up, rather than the coma being a bad twist ending, and I much prefer it this way.

So you might then wonder, how did these strangers end up in the same coma? That’s never really explained. It makes absolutely no sense, and they do actually address it, but end up just handwaving it away. Basically it’s just for the sake of the story, since we end up being show that the two protagonists have a shared event in their past that neither of them know about. Also it’s an opportunity to sort of blend their backstories together to make something a little richer than if it had been a single person’s dreamscape.

Overall, I’d say it was decent. A little plodding at times. There was a cool GCI monster, but it was sort of unnecessary, the guardian of a key that seemed redundant in light of the ever-present ticking clock. One nice twist is that the film constantly flip-flops who they want you to think the “hero” is going to be, and it ends up being Ana who really saves the day. So there’s that little dash of feminism in there if that’s your jam. I don’t know if I can recommend it in earnest, but it’s certainly in the upper echelon of “movies on Netflix that nobody has ever heard of.”

Spider-Man Homecoming – To set the scene: I am not a big fan of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. I liked them at the time, but in retrospect I find them nigh unwatchable. Mainly I just hate the majority of the cast. Additionally, unlike most people, I really like the Amazing Spider-Man movies. I have tried to, but cannot, understand why they get so much hate.

Homecoming, though? It’s perfect. Or at least as close as you get to perfect. It’s placed perfectly into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by sitting it on the fringes of the larger story; tying into the greater lore, but but not reliant on it. I mean, sort of reliant. The ties to the MCU give Homecoming a richer background and context, but this movie’s charm is all in the character development and the action.

While there is a typical super-hero tale here, the thing they really want to do is give you a Spider-Man origin story without telling the same old Spider-Man origin story. It’s not the story of Peter Parker getting his powers, it’s the story of him truly becoming Spider-Man. Following Captain America: Civil War, Peter Parker has a bit of a swelled head from being recruited by Tony Stark to battle with the Avengers. He gets in too deep, driven by his all-consuming desire to prove that he’s Avengers material, and causes more harm than good, leaving Iron Man forced to step in to clean up Spidey’s mess and take away the fancy-pants suit. Left with nothing but his old DIY getup, Peter has to figure out how to be a superhero and save the day without the benefits of the super-suit.

The line “if you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it” truly epitomizes the appeal of the film. That story of growth and learning to find your inner strength was what really made it click for me. Plus, I really like this set of actors! I’ll never get over the loss of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, but Tom Holland is adorable and we all love RDJ’s Tony Stark. Michael Keaton, of course, was so friggin’ good, and I can’t help but hope that Jacob Batalon gets to come back if there is another MCU Spidey film. And Marisa Tomei? Yes, please.

IT (2017) – Yes, I have seen the 1990 mini-series with Tim Curry. No, I will not be directly comparing the two, because it’s been far too long since I’ve watched the older one and I cannot remember any more than the plot. Also I’ve never read the book, so there’s that.

Simply put, I think that IT was really great. Certainly the best thing to come out of the 2017 Stephen King adaptation craze. If you aren’t familiar with the plot, it’s about a group of outcast kids who are being hunted by a nightmarish clown from the sewers. Spoiler: said clown is actually an ancient, inter-dimensional evil that feeds on fear. And, uh, the flesh of children, I suppose. Most of that is barely touched on in this film, though, so it’s not the biggest spoiler.

IT wasn’t exactly scary, despite being an actual horror movie. I mean, I can certainly see how Pennywise the Dancing Clown is a terrifying concept, but this film banks a lot on jumpscares. And jumpscares almost never feel earned in movies. On the other hand, the creature effects were amazing. The way Pennywise’s mouth unfolds to reveal layers and layers of teeth was endlessly fascinating to me, and I almost wish they hadn’t pulled that trick out so many times,because by the end of the movie you almost end up being used to it. It’s always more fun when they keep things like that to a bare minimum.

Do I recommend IT? Yeah, absolutely! I already said that I think it’s really great. What else do you need? Maybe there isn’t quite enough time to give a proper backstory to each of the seventy protagonists, but the ones that are meant to be in the spotlight shine ever so brightly. All the kids do a really great job, too. And we all know that I have a soft spot for stories about a group of kids going on a surreal adventure (see The Goonies, Super 8, Stranger Things, etc…). The one thing that surprised me was the ending reveal that this is only IT: Chapter One. In retrospect, that was dumb of me, because Hollywood would never miss the opportunity for an easy sequel. Also there’s no way they could have ever fit the entire story into one film while keeping it cohesive and under three hours long.

Gerald’s Game – A Netflix production, which much to my surprise, is based on a Stephan King novel. I… that was completely by accident. I didn’t mean to watch three Stephen King adaptations (I also watch the Netflix series based on The Mist) all in one month. But I think that the entertainment world must have conspired for them all to release within 30 days of each other.

Anyway, this movie was far inferior to IT. Gerald’s Game is about a couple who go out to a secluded vacation hone to try to save their marriage. But when the husband, Gerald, has a heart attack and dies after handcuffing the wife, Jessie, to the bed, things begin to spiral out of control. Jessie begins hallucinating, having conversations with a more assertive version of herself and the “ghost” of Gerald. Also a stray dog wanders in and begins eating Gerald’s body.

This film is 70 minutes of boring, 5 minutes of horrible agony that I could not watch and almost made me barf when Jessie comes up with a plan to escape the handcuffs, and then 25 minutes of conclusion. Said conclusion also includes a completely irrelevant subplot involving a grave robber/necrophiliac/serial killer who had routinely visited Jessie during her ordeal, but she thought was just a hallucination of Death. I am not happy that I wasted so much of my time with this one, and cannot possibly recommend it to anyone.

Curse of Chucky – This is not new. See previous impressions here. The only thing I need to add to that review is that I was very annoyed by how two characters died instantaneously when they had either a) an eye gouged out or b) a jaw hacked clean off. Those injuries would not kill someone on the spot! Maybe the eye gouge if it went deep enough and at the right angle to skewer the brain. Maaaaybe.

Mercy – Oh my f**k. Another secret Stephen King adaptation. Netflix really needs to add that to their summaries. The differences are that this film was from 2014, and it lands somewhere in between IT and Gerald’s Game in terms of quality. Also, it’s very loosely based on a short story.

This story is about two boys and their mom, who move out to their grandmother’s house to take care of her as she dies. Of course, as to movie goes along, weird things start happening and eventually the boys manage to discover that their grandma has made a pact with some evil force. This is confirmed by a priest, who states the the woman had given away all of her goodness to gain everything she ever wanted. At the climax of the film, there’s an epic showdown between George, the main character, and Grandma’s possessed corpse.

To be honest, I have absolutely no recollection of how it ended. I can tell you pretty much exactly what happened throughout the film up until maybe the last five minutes. Then my mind blanks. I think that’s probably a sign that I was disappointed in the ending, which is too bad because the rest of the movie was alright. It didn’t exactly have me on the edge of my seat, but at least I wasn’t proclaiming “I am so friggin’ bored!” to nobody, as I did while watching Gerald’s Game.

Last Month in Movies – August 2017

I have so many movies sitting on my “want to watch” list that I will likely never make the time for. Because when I watch a movie, it’s usually some terrible horror film that pops up randomly on Netflix. And that’s your explanation of what happened below.

Insidious: Chapter 3 – I really loved the first Insidious movie for totally playing with my expectations of what a “possession” movie could be. Plus, it had a certain video-gameyness to it that really spoke to me. Insidious 2 was almost more of a whodunit mystery than anything else, and while it didn’t hit the same sweet spots, I liked it well enough to shout at the folks who were chatting in the theatre while the movie was playing.

The third film in the trilogy is…. ehhhhh. It goes back in time to a previous case of the medium from the first two chapters. This one is about how a young girl accidentally calls forth an evil spirit when trying to communicate with her deceased mom. After our heroine gets hit by a car and briefly dies on the operating table, said spirit begins to appear to her in the real world, and all the usual wacky ghost stuff stars happening. There is a neat little twist to how it goes down, but it’s nothing especially exciting.

Continue reading Last Month in Movies – August 2017

Book-reading

I read another novel last weekend. That makes two weekends in a row in which I have read an entire novel. What is happening to me?

The most recent was Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, which is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. I fully intend to read the next two over the next two weekends. I don’t remember the context, exactly, but I purchased the trilogy because Matt Peckham said something about it on the now-defunct GameLife podcast that clearly affected me on some level.

As a strange twist, I have previously read another book by VanderMeer: Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy through Essays. Which is not a novel, but rather a collection of essays about cryptids and other fantastical animals. This is a twist because my choices of literature are so impulsive that I haven’t ever felt the need to explore a particular writer’s greater oeuvre.

Although, to be fair, a significant portion of the books I’ve read in the past decade have come in trilogies. So there’s that.

Back to Annihilation! It was just excellent. I don’t want to say too much about it because the mystery and suspense are key tenets of the novel, but it was wholly unlike anything I’ve read before. I highly recommend checking it out, and I feel certain that the next two Southern Reach books will be equally, if not more, enjoyable.

I think that the only thing that I had a problem with is that I had a very hard time picturing the events in my head. This issue lies not with the writing, which is perfectly good at building a scene and describing events, but rather with my brain, which has a certain lack of focus. It makes reading a bit of a chore, as my mind will often drift off and I’ll find myself having to re-read up to an entire page. But as far as visualization goes, I often found myself wishing for a film adaptation, simply because I would love to actually see this world (although parts of it will be literally impossible to recreate on film). I can’t help it, I’m very much a visual kind of guy. Ask anyone who has ever tried to teach me anything without flashcards.

Oh, guess what, there’s a film adaptation coming out next February. Hooray! I’ve missed out on a lot of movies that I’ve wanted to see over the last couple years, but this will definitely be one that I see on opening night.

As an aside, the fact that this is all lining up so nicely makes me a bit salty, because the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has apparently gone through the film version of development hell and has got me wondering if it’ll ever be real. Oh well. Win some, lose some.

Last Month in Movies – July 2017

I don’t know if this is going to become a regular thing or not, but I’m trying out something new. Well, a new spin on something I’ve been doing for years, anyhow. You know that Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up post that you ignore every month? Well, there’s one for movies now.

On the upside, I watch very few movies, so at least this should be a fairly light feature.

Power Rangers – The reboot that came out earlier this year, that I really wanted to see, but nobody I know gives a flip about Power Rangers. This is probably more on me, because I barely know any people at all. Anyway, I finally watched it, now that it’s available on home video.

Anyhow, I went in expecting the worst, and I was… well, it exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed it overall, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The Power Rangers are now straight-up superheroes, which is fine, Jason has a sword-arm, which is awesome, and Alpha 5 was somewhere between terrible and hilarious. I also liked the characterizations of the new rangers, how they all come from vastly different backgrounds and have actual depth instead of being one-note stereotypes. My biggest question about the movie is how in the heck did they land Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Banks?

So what was wrong with it? It’s the worst kind of origin story. The kind of origin story that runs over two hours (yes, really), but all the action is crammed into the last ten minutes. The Megazord looked too much like a Michael Bay Transformer, and for some reason the Mastodon Zord had eight legs. Also, during those final moments, Angel Grove suffers destruction relative to how badly Metropolis got torn apart in Man of Steel. Not quite razed to the ground, but for a smallish town, you wonder if the residents are even going to bother trying to rebuild.

Three-Headed Shark Attack – Many years ago, I watched a film called Two-Headed Shark Attack, and I remember absolutely nothing about it, other than Carmen Electra was in it literally just to be eye candy. Unlike Sharknado, it left no impression on me, so I wavered a bit before deciding to watch the sequel.

But then I did anyway, and it’s one of those sequels that has nothing in common with the previous movie except for a vague theme. Or specific theme? Mutant sharks. I guess that’s not especially vague. This movie is about a bunch of environmental researchers and hippies working near a massive island of garbage off some unmentioned coast. Turns out the pollution is mutating local animals, the biggest of which is our title monster: the three-headed shark.

The shark somehow destroys the research facility and then attacks a booze cruise that happens to be passing by. The research station survivors desperately try to save the ship, but pretty much everyone dies. Danny Trejo shows up and lops a head off the shark, seemingly killing it. Then it’s discovered that the shark will regrow two heads for every one that it loses, like the mythical hydra. Eventually the shark defeats itself when the many heads end up fighting for food and bite each other to death. Somehow.

Guys, don’t ever watch this. Unless you’re doing a bad movie podcast or something.

Wonder Woman – It’s great. It’s just great. Excellent. I never gave a damn about Wonder Woman, because I’m not really into anything DC outside of Batman, but holy cow I sure do care about the Wonder Woman cinematic universe now.

For one, it gets everything right that Power Rangers flubbed. It’s an origin story, but it’s gripping the whole time and you don’t have to wait until the very end to actually see the hero in action. There’s a bit too long of a lead-in with the background lore, but there’s still a huge battle within the first 15 minutes. And then a journey to collect a ragtag group of mercenaries to stop a foe that may or may not even be real.

I should mention that both Gal Gadot and Chris Pine are superb in their roles, and I really just want to go on more hilarious adventures with them. That’s not to take away from any of the supporting characters, though! Everyone was great and the whole movie was just about perfect. The one thing that I need to gripe about is the fact that the lasso effects did not look very good in combat. But that’s it! that’s literally the only thing I disliked about this movie! Crazy!

Satanic – And so with all that gushing about how great Wonder Woman is, we come to our last film of the month, which was unfortunately pretty bad. Of course, like all the bad movies I watch these days, this was a Netflix recommendation that missed the mark.

In this one, we follow a foursome of young people out on a road trip, who stop in LA to check out some historic Satanist sites or whatever. Along the way, they “rescue” a young lady from a Satanist cult. However, it turns out that the cult wanted her out because she was too crazy, and the young lady curses the group just before slitting her own throat. And so our heroes are stalked by an unseen force that traps them in a nightmare world and kills them one by one.

I feel like there might have been potential here, but every character is unlikable and the acting is terrible, so you want to see them die. But all the kills are off-screen, and the movie ends with the main girl trapped in an empty, black cube, her mouth sewn shut and her limbs amputated. There is no precedent for this. It makes no sense. It’s just there as a weird, shocking thing to end on. Super lame. Also, it’s another one of those movies that just spends so much time building up that all the “action” at the very end, only there’s no real payoff. None of it means anything. Blech.

Two halves for the price of one

I just realized that I never did my weekend movie review for this week! This is what happens when you give me a Monday off!

First, I watched The Darkness. It was a pretty bad Poltergeist rip-off with Kevin Bacon. I mean, I don’t think it was intentionally trying to be like Poltergeist, but all the story beats fell somewhere between “suspiciously similar” and “bang on.” I guess the big difference is that it tried to touch on each individual family member’s personal issue(s). The most disturbing of the bunch was the teenage daughter, who was suffering from bulimia. Alone, that’s not so bad. I’ve dealt with bulimia IRL before. What took it to the next level was that she was barfing into containers and keeping them all under her bed. Bleeeecch.

I was so disappointed with The Darkness that I also went ahead and watched The Great Muppet Caper immediately afterward. Which was much better! The songs were fun, the gags were hilarious, and the fourth wall was thoroughly destroyed. I quite enjoyed -and was somewhat shocked by- how far they cranked up Gonzo’s “daredevil” personality, which was to the point where every second line was him fetishizing pain in some way or another. If I had one gripe, it’s that Miss Piggy’s synchronized swimming scene/song seemed to drag on for way longer than it needed to. Otherwise, a stellar follow-up to The Muppet Movie. Bravo, Jim Henson! Bravo!

And that’s it for this week’s rushed and generally thoughtless movie reviews. Until next time!

Moving right along

This weekend’s movie was The Muppet Movie. The original one, for anyone who might be a little confused. Much to my own surprise, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it before. Up until this point, I had just assumed that Muppets Take Manhattan was the first, because it was the oldest one I’d ever seen. Then I learned that Manhattan is actually the third movie.

The most important thing to take away from this whole experience is that I know nothing about The Muppets. I’m a terrible person.

The Muppet Movie, as I am now aware, is the story of how the Muppets all got together. It’s a heartwarming tale about a frog who just wants to make people happy, and meets a bunch of other like-minded puppets on his way to Hollywood.

While it has a happy-go-lucky feel for the most part, it is a little more adult-oriented than I expect a children’s movie to be (Then again, the Muppets were never strictly for kids). For example, the first place Kermit visits on his journey is a dive bar full of ruffians. Later on, Kermit and Rowlf have a heart-to-heart about how difficult women can be. And the whole second half of the movie has the villain threatening to straight-up murder Kermit.

What I took away from this movie, more than anything, was admiration for the sheer beauty and creativity of the practical effects on display. Even in the first five minutes, there are two mind-bending shots. The slow zoom-in on Kermit playing his banjo in the swamp, where Jim Henson was stuffed into a small tank under the water, a scene which took five days to film. And then there’s the scene of Kermit riding his bicycle down the street, which I would never ever be able to guess how they did if I didn’t already know. I’ve always had a great appreciation for puppetry and practical effects, and they’re even more impressive in retrospect, when you consider how many of the special effects in most modern movies are done by some joker at a computer. Lame.

Oh, and the giant Animal at the end of the film? They actually made a massive Animal head for that. There’s no computer trickery involved. There is a little use of green-screen in the movie, but how else are you going to have Kermit and Fozzie dance on stage convincingly?

I am a little bit surprised at how much The Muppets (the 2011 film) takes from the original movie. The road trip to collect the group, meeting Fozzie at a bar, Gonzo’s career as a plumber, Animal’s grand entrance during the climax. It’s a wonderful homage to a movie that remains funny, heartfelt, and just all-around excellent nearly 40 years later. I guess that actually wraps this up, then. Totally going to pick up The Great Muppet Caper next and see if Muppets Most Wanted references is quite as strongly.

(Usually) Weekly Movie Post

Last weekend, as has become something of a tradition, I watched a movie. This time around, it was a pull from my way-too-long Netflix queue (and people complain that there isn’t enough on Netflix). It was called As Above, So Below and was sold to me as a spooky adventure into the tunnels of Hell. Or something like that. Here’s the Netflix synopsis:

A beautiful tomb raider and her crew hunt for treasure in the catacombs of Paris and find themselves in a hellish underworld.

First off: the “tomb raider” isn’t beautiful. She’s cute, sure, but not like, stop-and-stare gorgeous.

Secondly, the movie was kinda boring. It was one of those movies where the main character keeps doing stuff while people are constantly telling her not to, because it’s either illegal or everyone else who has tried has either disappeared or wound up dead. Which is fine in an adventure movie or a comedy, but in a horror film like this, you just don’t sympathize when horrible things start to happen. It’s impossible to feel bad for over-entitled millennials.

It’s also a POV film. Not “found footage” necessarily, because (spoiler) several characters survive. But it’s still all shot from a combination of a handicam and GoPros. The question of how the footage was recovered from some of said GoPros when they were visibly destroyed, we’ll just have to handwave away. Regardless, I’m not really into the whole POV thing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes (like this time) it’s just annoying.

The plot follows Ms Not-Lara Croft in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. Yes. Despite having like seventeen degrees, she’s a firm believer in alchemy. So she assembles a rag-tag group of friends and French spelunkers, and they begin their journey down into the catacombs of France. On the way, they pass a cult of topless women chanting what are surely completely innocent incantations. You might think that this is an important plot point while viewing the film, but these busty ladies never make another appearance.

One thing the film did very well was evoke a sense of claustrophobia. It does this well in general by being set in tight underground tunnels, but there is one very long and very excruciating scene where a character is briefly stuck in a tight passage and starts freaking out. It was very difficult to watch, and had me squirming in my seat the whole time. I’m not exactly claustrophobic myself, but I definitely have some degree of cleithrophobia, as I have had nightmares of getting trapped in tight places for as long as I can remember.

So, what do we watch horror movies for? The kills, of course. They’re… kinda blah here. The first girl to go gets her face bashed in by a possessed mole-man. Another guy falls down a well and goes splat. Then the head French-guy gets sucked into a burning car which promptly implodes and somehow leaves him buried underground with just his feet sticking out. And that was it. The other three characters survive. Though one of them gets his jugular torn out by a gargoyle demon, he is saved by the healing powers of a magic kiss.

What did I tell you already? This movie isn’t very good.

And that’s really too bad, because it seems like a decent premise and the build-up is interesting enough. But in the end it was a bit of a let down. Not “Gah! I’ve wasted my time!” bad, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. If you want to see some good spelunking-gone-wrong movies, try The Descent or… I can’t think of any others. What about Sanctum? Was Sanctum good? I can’t remember anything about it, so probably not.

The gory details

I’ve been watching the first season of Ash vs Evil Dead lately (which is SO GOOD), so when the question of “what movie am I going to watch?” came up last weekend, I immediately went to Evil Dead. To be more specific, it came up while I was browsing Netflix and then I immediately put it on.

Let it also be known that I’m talking about the 2013 Evil Dead here. Not the original. Though I may binge the original trilogy next weekend, because man am I ever in an Evil Dead kind of mood.

The thing that boggles my mind the most is that somehow, this is supposed to be both a reboot of and a sequel to the original films. Which was perfectly fine until Ash vs Evil Dead came along and sort of invalidated it as a canonical entry in the series. I guess Evil Dead 2013 could have a different Necronomicon and cabin, but that’s… you know what? That’s fine. I’m fine with that.

Anyway, ED2013 is a fine movie in its own right, but is very different from its older siblings. I don’t think there’s a single joke in this movie, and I don’t find any of it unintentionally funny either. This version of the tale is played completely straight, and pulls absolutely no punches.

This story focuses on Mia, a recovering drug addict, who is out at a cabin in the middle of nowhere with her friends in an effort to quit cold turkey. Of course, eventually they find the Necronomicon, someone reads a passage that unleashes an ancient evil, and they all start getting killed and/or possessed. Only instead of being goofy, these Deadites are dead serious.

ED2013 is brutal and is so excessively gory that even I have a tough time stomaching it. That scene with Natalie and the carving knife makes my stomach churn in a way that movie gore hasn’t been able to do in many years. And then there’s the grand finale where literally everything is covered in blood. More blood than Evil Dead 2. If you can believe it. It also contains one of the most amazing chainsaw scenes ever committed to film, and it’s absolutely worth watching the entire movie for those two minutes.

Overall? It’s not really what I wanted in an Evil Dead sequel (that’s what Ash vs Evil Dead is for), and I don’t usually enjoy movies that exist simply to torture their characters for two hours. But the supernatural bent saves it and I do like how it reimagines the original story. I mean, I’ve seen it like five times now, so yeah, I obviously like the flick. Do I recommend it? That’s tougher. But I feel like there’s enough information in this short post for you to make that call on your own.

I feel sick just thinking about what she’s going to do with that knife…

From the desk of Raunchy Ryan

I watched The Garbage Pail Kids Movie on the weekend, and I have to say that literally anything else would have been a better way to spend a Sunday morning. Like, I would have been better off going to church.

But seriously, folks, this is a bad movie. It’s not the kind of movie that anyone would even like ironically, and I don’t think you could really get much out of it by watching and riffing on it with friends. This is one of those movies that How Did This Get Made? wouldn’t touch.

So why did I watch it in the first place? Because it was mentioned on an episode of The Purple Stuff Podcast a while ago and I was curious. That’s all. I never collected Garbage Pail Kids cards or whatever as a child, so there’s not even any nostalgia value for me there.

All you really need to know is don’t watch it.

However, one thing that really stood out to me was the ending. Over the course of the movie, our main character gets in good with an older girl that he’s got a crush on, and then she double-crosses him. When she returns at the end to apologize, she asks if they can still be friends, but the kid shoots her down and says “I don’t think you’re pretty any more.” Wow! Not only does he not mend fences, he burns her but good. Good on you, kid. Way to stand up for yourself. Way to not go for the cliché ending.

So yeah, I thought that was alright. But the rest? Nah. Not even worth writing up a whole thing about.