Last weekend was my girlfriend’s birthday weekend, masterminded by none other than me, and it was quite the awesome weekend. On Friday night, I took her out to Stereo to go dancing. While I still don’t understand (or particularly enjoy) the club scene, she had an absolute blast, so it was well worth it. On Saturday we managed to round up a couple others so we could finally play the Clue game I bought her for Christmas. I’ve never played Clue before, and while it was a lot of fun, it’s way too easy if you’re only playing with three people. We also watched a shitload of movies. That you can pretty much take for granted, because watching movies is the activity we spend the most time on. Right now, I would like to share my opinions on those movies.
The first was her pick from a trip to Blockbuster on Saturday night: Room 6. Personally, I didn’t think much of it. It started well enough, but then degenerated into madness, and not the good kind. Shit just kept happening and nobody ever explained any of it. I watched the cast/crew behind the scenes featurette afterward, and that gave me some answers, but didn’t make me like the movie any more. It was like a boring, confusing version of Jacob’s Ladder. I mean, Jacob’s Ladder left some things ambiguous on purpose, but it at least gave you enough information that you could have fun thinking up and discussing your own theories on what was happening. Room 6 was not as thoughtful. There was a super-creepy little girl though.
We rented three movies at the Blockbuster, and it being her birthday, Steph chose the second one as well. Much more enjoyable than her first pick was Vacancy 2: The First Cut, the prequel to 2007’s Vacancy. It wasn’t a life-changing direct-to-DVD experience, but there were some bright spots, like a man-on-fire. I’ll go easy on pretty much any movie that provides me with a scene where someone is running around on fire. I also give it points because while it’s a prequel, the plot isn’t entirely predictable, and does contain a couple little surprises. For example, I thought it would be the same bad guys and motel as from the first movie. It was not so. The first one was better though. If nothing else, because Frank Whaley’s character was way more entertaining than David Moscow’s.
I got to pick out a movie too, for the sake of fairness, and I think it’s obvious that my choice was my favourite. I was jumping with glee when I saw that Blockbuster was stocking Dead and Breakfast, a movie that I had seen previews for, but had never found while browsing through movies at local stores. I absolutely had to rent it, and I loved it. Dead and Breakfast parades itself around as a zombie movie, but it isn’t really. The monsters are more posessed corpses than zombies, but that leads to much hilarity, like when the leader “zombie” uses the decapitated head of one of his friends as a puppet and frequently talks to it. There’s also a scene where all the “zombies” start dancing. Obviously, it’s the “Thriller” dance, but to an original song. Anyway, it’s hilarious movie, totally over-the-top in many places (especially gore), and I couldn’t recommend it more. I’m actively on the hunt for this one now.
The last movie is one I picked up when we went shopping on Sunday afternoon. I picked up the two pack of Nightwatch and Daywatch because I’d heard good things about them on more than one occasion. We watched Nightwatch that night, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was a really cool movie, and had a fairly interesting plot. I haven’t explained any other plots, so I won’t start here. I will, however, point out that it was a bit confusing. The plot seemed like bits were missing and maybe they spent too much time with subplots than explaining what was going on in the main story. They did a really great job with the subtitles though, as they kind of blended them into the movie to make them less distracting. Overall Nightwatch was neat and original, but not perfect. I’m hoping that the sequel is even better.